[Off-Topic] Community Chat Thread

[TheAmericanSpirit]

Oh, well I guess I was upset for nothing then. MTGN is no place to be stirring up trouble, even though a few of us (myself included) occasionally get the red text treatment. We all gotta engage in good faith if this site is to remain a refuge from the slimier sections of the greater mtg community.

On another note, @kirkusjones how did the short story contest pan out/where may I read it (if available)?

[toctheyounger]

He got banned from here, he brings up on sally saying he was canceled for speaking the truth. Really highlights these two sites handle stuff since he would copy and paste the same stuff between the two sites.

He was active on my Nissa thread for a little while, which was fine to sometimes troubling. Honestly, seemed like the guy just needed more company and more support mid pandemic than he was getting, but hey I'm no therapist. There could be more to it. Anyway I did wonder where he went, and that explains it.

Its telling that this was the first username that occurred to me when dirk mentioned that type of discussion though.

[Hermes_]

Isn't Card Slinger J here already? He just doesn't post much.

Wasn't he the one who kept saying how WotC was going belly up due to MTG or something like that?

[kirkusjones]

Oh, well I guess I was upset for nothing then. MTGN is no place to be stirring up trouble, even though a few of us (myself included) occasionally get the red text treatment. We all gotta engage in good faith if this site is to remain a refuge from the slimier sections of the greater mtg community.

On another note, @kirkusjones how did the short story contest pan out/where may I read it (if available)?

I won't hear until April, there were 2000+ entrants. Happy to share a link tot the story, though. The way the contest is structured, you get a genre/character/theme topic assignment and then have a week and 2500 words to write a story. Cutting down to 2500 was tough and there were definitely some things I would have done differently in hindsight.

My group's round one assignment was "fairytale/envy/shipowner".

Last year I had "drama/vacation/podiatrist".

I feel like the worlds of both stories are worth exploring in longer pieces.

[BeneTleilax]

Its telling that this was the first username that occurred to me when dirk mentioned that type of discussion though.

It actually wasn't him. It's not a real conspiracy theory, it's even better. It's someone making moon-truther type claims about supposed hints at future magic sets.

[Guardman]

I have to say, I miss the good old glory days of Sally. The funniest part is that I was never all that active on the magic part of the forum. I mostly hung out in the Mafia, Clans, and various non-magic sections. It was just a lot of fun. And I certainly do miss hanging out with all my friends that I made there, like kpaca, Seppel, Iso, Az, and the rest. It's kind of sad seeing what has become of the forum. I just checked, and I've actually been a member for over 15 years now. Probably twelve of those were me being really active, playing Mafia, hanging out, chewing the fat. Now... I only ever visit for the spoilers.

[DirkGently]

It actually wasn't him. It's not a real conspiracy theory, it's even better. It's someone making moon-truther type claims about supposed hints at future magic sets.

I was talking about the thread about whether edh is too dependent on online resources, which most people assumed would be another "decks are too homogenous these days" rant but ended up being about {spoiler alert} the imminent global internet shutdown. Because of course if the internet vanishes my first thought is going to be "dammit, now I can't build decks as efficiently!" not "how am I going to pay my bills and talk to my loved ones". (Also you can easily get apps that download the card database and provide search functions)

What's this thread you're talking about?

[toctheyounger]

It actually wasn't him. It's not a real conspiracy theory, it's even better. It's someone making moon-truther type claims about supposed hints at future magic sets.

I was talking about the thread about whether edh is too dependent on online resources, which most people assumed would be another "decks are too homogenous these days" rant but ended up being about {spoiler alert} the imminent global internet shutdown. Because of course if the internet vanishes my first thought is going to be "dammit, now I can't build decks as efficiently!" not "how am I going to pay my bills and talk to my loved ones". (Also you can easily get apps that download the card database and provide search functions)

What's this thread you're talking about?

Dirk - *gets popcorn ready for the eventual answer*

It is a bit sad Sally stagnating like it is. What can you do though, the user base should never care more than the owner does. Its part of what makes our new home here so great, this being Feyd's baby and all.

[BeneTleilax]

What's this thread you're talking about?

I was talking about the person claiming Kayaking, the set codename, was actually a coded reference to a verse in 2nd Kings, and that she'd fully translated Phyrexian by looking at Ogham and Greek.

MTGSalvation is something else.

[plushpenguin]

I sometimes wonder if my primer thread or my moxfield list gets more attention these days.

I also had an interesting situation where someone plagiarized it. Not only did this person not do it well, but it was also posted in an area where I'm a respected advisor. On top of that, I'm also a teacher.

This person got called out so hard.

[wildfire393]

Also, I have to ask to those of you still active here; How active is MTGNexus? whenever I search MTG related questions I always get directed to MTGSalvation, but I've heard they're in some weird state where they should've been shut down, but they're somehow still operating? I'm completely new here so I'm kinda out of the loop haha.

As a former MTGS member, I can speak to this. So here's the gist: a few years back, the owners of MTGS sold the site to Curse, who did nothing with it for a few years. 2 years ago, Curse announced it was shutting down MTGS. Cryogen, Feyd Ruin, and others built this site to avoid the dissolution of the community when MTGS went belly up. However, there was an 11th hour bid and curse sold the site to someone else, and they have continued the trend of letting the site sit without improvement or renovation. Rather than stay on a sinking ship with hot potato ownership, most of the mtgs commander forum migrated here where the site's custody is obvious and trusted.

This is mostly correct but missing a few details.

Salvation's original owner sold to Curse a while back, like 2013 or so? Curse used Salvation as a testing bay for their new Cobalt forum software, and they built us trading posts, a deckbuilder, etc but chronically underesourced us (basically no bug/feature support for the deckbuilder after release) and took their lessons learned to build and improve on sites like Hearthpwn.

Around five years ago, Twitch bought Curse, because they wanted the Discord voice chat tools that Curse had built. But Curse came with more than just that (including us) and Twitch felt the rest was mostly dead weight. So ~2.5 years ago Twitch sold off the Curse Media branch of their sites to Fandom. This included us, several other forums like D&D Beyond and Hearthpwn, plus the Gamepedia wikis. Fandom, which runs one of the biggest competitors to Gamepedia, happily folded those into its wikis. D&D Beyond was also very profitable for them but the rest of the sites were not nearly so (apparently it made as much in a month as the rest of the Curse Media sites made in a year, combined), so they decided to shut the rest down.

Not wanting to lose the community we'd built for over a decade, we (Cryo, Kaburi, Airi, myself, and Feyd, the admin team at the time) initially looked into taking over or purchasing the site from Fandom, but we were refused on the grounds that it was built in Cobalt and undocumented, Cobalt is proprietary and nobody outside of a handful of current and former Curse employees knew the first thing about operating it. I'm not sure why that meant our money was no good, but that was the rationale. So we post that MTGS is shutting down, and we start working on putting Nexus together.

Then, at the eleventh hour, Fandom tells us that another company has put in a bid to buy MTGS (and Hearthpwn and a few others I think) and was accepted. That company was comprised primarily of former Curse employees, so they had the Cobalt expertise and therefore there was no issue with the sale. We'd already put a bunch of work into getting Nexus set up at that point, and decided we were better off trying to forge our own fates with full control than sticking around in what would amount to the same situation Salvation had been in since the initial Curse sale.

The Commander community jumped ship with us, which we are eternally grateful for, as this is definitely the largest and most active section of the site.

[tstorm823]

We'd already put a bunch of work into getting Nexus set up at that point, and decided we were better off trying to forge our own fates with full control than sticking around in what would amount to the same situation Salvation had been in since the initial Curse sale.

The same situation, but not the same condition as it had been since the initial sale, as the bugginess compounded over time, making things worse including at least one major period of complete downtime, iirc.

[wildfire393]

We'd already put a bunch of work into getting Nexus set up at that point, and decided we were better off trying to forge our own fates with full control than sticking around in what would amount to the same situation Salvation had been in since the initial Curse sale.

The same situation, but not the same condition as it had been since the initial sale, as the bugginess compounded over time, making things worse including at least one major period of complete downtime, iirc.

Yeah, TBH I'm not sure why they raised a big fuss about us not having the know-how to upkeep Cobalt when the people who actually bought it don't seem to have put any work into actually upkeeping or updating it anyways, but here we are.

[Guardman]

So my first sealed pool for Neon Dynasty was probably the most ridiculous sealed pool I've ever had. Four out of my six rares were straight-up bombs capable of taking over the game (Hidetsugu, Devouring Chaos, Goro-Goro, Disciple of Ryusei, Kyodai, Soul of Kamigawa, and Eater of Virtue) and the other two were strong role-players (Eiganjo, Seat of the Empire and Sokenzan, Crucible of Defiance). I ended up playing all six. Plus two Selfless Samurai to protect them (and a way to regorw them with Imperial Recovery Unit).

I also had both in colored Shrines (Go-Shintai of Ancient Wars & Go-Shintai of Shared Purpose) and got one win thanks to playing them back to back on turns three and four. Them being creatures actually makes the Shrines feel better than the non-creatures in limited at least. Despite the higher chance to be removed, it feels great to get something on the board.

Ended up going 7-2. The first loss was I just didn't draw any of my bombs. The second was down to mana screw.

Also Banishing Slash really over preformed. I think its a card that a lot of people are sleeping on due to it being a sorcery, under valuing its floor case, and over-estimating how hard it will be to get an artifact and enchantment. It's floor is it exiles an artifact, enchantment, or tapped creature for two mana. It's ceiling is it throws in a 2/2 with viligilance. It's hard to find better value or versatility at that price.

Screen Captures of the deck and sealed pool

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[RxPhantom]

The only thing I do on Arena is Historic Brawl, if only because it's the closest analog to Commander. I mainly play a version of my paper Goreclaw, Terror of Qal Sisma deck. I've got some draft tokens saved up and I really like Neon Dynasty, so I might give its Limited a try. @Guardman, that looks like a lean and mean build!

My favorite LGS closed last year, and I was really saddened by that. I've started going to another one, but their Commander meta is an odd mix of new players, who put 25 lands and no ramp in their decks, and vets with hyper-tuned value engines. It's still an okay place, but I miss my old friends.

I also haven't been posting here much lately because prior to Neon Dynasty, I haven't been that excited about MtG's output for about a year. I really love this place though, and encourage everyone to participate in the forums as much as they can and consider becoming a Patron.

[Guardman]

The only thing I do on Arena is Historic Brawl, if only because it's the closest analog to Commander. I mainly play a version of my paper Goreclaw, Terror of Qal Sisma deck. I've got some draft tokens saved up and I really like Neon Dynasty, so I might give its Limited a try. @Guardman, that looks like a lean and mean build!

I had to do a double take when I saw those rares. Then I saw the cards I had, with my white being amazing and red being good, while the rest of my colors either being ok (Green), too thin (Black), or just bad (Blue), and the deck practically built itself.

While I haven't yet given Neon draft a go yet (and I might be biased since I love limited), it looks to be a fun draft format. Plus it appears more pauper than prince, unlike Crimson Vow where most games were defined by what rares each player had.

As a side note. For anyone looking to really improve their magic fundamentals, I strongly believe the best way to do that is by learning to draft. I wouldn't be half the player I am today if I didn't draft. It really forces you to learn how to evaluate cards, how to build decks, a variety of playstyles, and how to adapt.

[DirkGently]

Me earlier today: you know, I haven't anyone running top in commander in a while. I wonder why that is….oh right, because I get to play hardly any commander these days

[pokken]

Me earlier today: you know, I haven't anyone running top in commander in a while. I wonder why that is….oh right, because I get to play hardly any commander these days

I feel like I am the last holdout for top in my community personally because games end so fast there's no time to top

Not that I am playing much either.

[DirkGently]

As excellent as the lyrics to "ram ranch" are, and as funny as it is to play aggressively at truckers, I don't think I can get over the singing style. Talking style? Idk, I wish I liked it more. I was imagining a much more listenable song when I read the lyrics in news articles.

Btw they're extremely NSFW in case you weren't aware.

[BeneTleilax]

As excellent as the lyrics to "ram ranch" are, and as funny as it is to play aggressively at truckers, I don't think I can get over the singing style. Talking style? Idk, I wish I liked it more. I was imagining a much more listenable song when I read the lyrics in news articles.

It's a comedy sketch, not a song. What's-his-name who made it, is basically an earlier version of Chuck Tingle. If you want gay cowboy songs that are actually, you know, music, check out Orville Peck.

[DirkGently]

Why can't comedy music also be good music though? Tim Minchin's songs slap. And the instrumentals seemed fine.

[tstorm823]

Why can't comedy music also be good music though? Tim Minchin's songs slap. And the instrumentals seemed fine.

Flight of the Conchords?

[Guardman]

Why can't comedy music also be good music though? Tim Minchin's songs slap. And the instrumentals seemed fine.

Weird Al Yankovic exists, and he's great.

Also this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0u4M6v ... I&index=27

[pokken]

Anyone upgraded to win11 yet? Kinda iffy about the idea of having to reinstall everything and deal with all that crap especially if it might go south.

[Guardman]

Anyone upgraded to win11 yet? Kinda iffy about the idea of having to reinstall everything and deal with all that crap especially if it might go south.

I've been holding off myself. Honestly, unless it suddenly gets an update that blows 10 out of the water, I am planning to ride the 10 for as long as I can.