[Off-Topic] Community Chat Thread

[Dragonlover]

The table took 18 in one swing from Yuriko triggers in a deck where she was just in the 99 last night. I can well believe that as a commander she's oppressive.

Dragonlover

[duducrash]

I had one of the worst mtg experiences ever yesterday.

So I barely play competitive formats, but my LGS made a pioneer night with a precon as prize and I was literally there to buy a precon so I went home and grabbed a pioneer mess Im building. I was 3-0 win and getting the deck and messed up a bit and we had a judge call.

I had Courser of Kruphix out and had the top card revealed, during their turn the opponent killed it and I left the card revealed because I forgot, and when I drew my next card I also revealed because I made a mistake, like I forgot it was dead. I noticed this and called a judge, there was no judge so it was just store employee. He went to (I assume) google and came back with a match loss. Even my opponent was "WTF?" From what I know a whole match loss is one of the most severe punishments out there. I never received a match loss before, I dont remember ever seeing one handed out. Store owner, who is a judge has travelled for Christmas and I didnt want to bother him, I even went to the mtg judges chat to ask them, because if I were to bother him I wanted to make sure I was right, but the server kept disconnecting on mobile.

My opponent felt bad for me and asked me if I wanted to pick some of the cards of the precon to share but I was just too bummed about the whole thing and didn't even want that

[TheGildedGoose]

I get how you feel as well. Sometimes I look at social media, and the news, and politics, and I see the hatred and corruption, greed and misery, and it makes me furious and saddened about the state of the world. I know things have gotten grim. I know it doesn't seem like anything will ever change.

Alternative theory: the world is amazing, society is amazing, life is amazing, nothing has gotten grimmer other than the outlooks of those in this era who think it's exceptionally cool and avant-garde to resent everything. And even those debbie downers are having their own idea of fun.

Must be nice living in your own little universe.

[pokken]

Alternative theory: the world is amazing, society is amazing, life is amazing, nothing has gotten grimmer other than the outlooks of those in this era who think it's exceptionally cool and avant-garde to resent everything. And even those debbie downers are having their own idea of fun.

Eh, I mean, not so much if you ever want to own a house or retire. The world is definitely backsliding in that respect.

[Lifeless]

ps: looking at the new EDHREC salt scores, I don't get why Yuriko's up there... most of the other hundred notables say things like "opponent stops playing" or "annihilator 5" or "somehow you win because yr library fell off" but Yuriko is more of a figurehead for a cool blue black aggro archetype, surely? is she just that powerful?

As someone who killed that table last night with 45 damage from Yuriko triggers on turn 5 I wouldn't know.

[pokken]

I don't get why Yuriko's up there

My problem with Yuriko is philosophical. Because it doesn't pay commander tax, the play patterns are such that you need very specialized removal to do anything at all about it, and that removal is *extremely* unfun for everyone else (Gilded Drake Oubliette type stuff).

It really only takes a handful of 1 drops to start putting massive pressure on the board and you can't really stop it most of the time.

If you've ever played against modern hexproof decks, that's kinda what it's like. You can go watch a few Bogles matches and see how they just play their own solitaire game.

[materpillar]

I'll take living in this century over any other century of human history. It isn't even particularly close.

ps: looking at the new EDHREC salt scores, I don't get why Yuriko's up there... most of the other hundred notables say things like "opponent stops playing" or "annihilator 5" or "somehow you win because yr library fell off" but Yuriko is more of a figurehead for a cool blue black aggro archetype, surely? is she just that powerful?

It's the commander ninjutsu part of her dodging commander tax. Keeping her off the table just feels impossible. Then, she'll randomly flip an eldrazi and do insane damage.

[WizardMN]

I had one of the worst mtg experiences ever yesterday.

So I barely play competitive formats, but my LGS made a pioneer night with a precon as prize and I was literally there to buy a precon so I went home and grabbed a pioneer mess Im building. I was 3-0 win and getting the deck and messed up a bit and we had a judge call.

I had Courser of Kruphix out and had the top card revealed, during their turn the opponent killed it and I left the card revealed because I forgot, and when I drew my next card I also revealed because I made a mistake, like I forgot it was dead. I noticed this and called a judge, there was no judge so it was just store employee. He went to (I assume) google and came back with a match loss. Even my opponent was "WTF?" From what I know a whole match loss is one of the most severe punishments out there. I never received a match loss before, I dont remember ever seeing one handed out. Store owner, who is a judge has travelled for Christmas and I didnt want to bother him, I even went to the mtg judges chat to ask them, because if I were to bother him I wanted to make sure I was right, but the server kept disconnecting on mobile.

My opponent felt bad for me and asked me if I wanted to pick some of the cards of the precon to share but I was just too bummed about the whole thing and didn't even want that

In case you actually care (not that it does you any good anymore), this is covered under IPG 2.2:

https://blogs.magicjudges.org/rules/ipg2-2/

The result of that judge call is pretty asinine. It takes a pretty huge leap to determine that looking at an extra card deserves a match loss considering it is one of the things that can happen all the time. And it is generally a pretty easy fix that there is no reason to severely punish players for it. Just shuffle it back in, and put any cards you are supposed to know the locations of (due to scrying for example) back where they were and keep playing. I am surprised that any research they did would have led them to believing a Match Loss was the correct call.

It is also worth mentioning that at Regular REL (not sure if this was Comp or Regular REL but it seems like Regular) that Match and Game losses aren't generally a thing. Nor are Warnings. Typically speaking, a tournament held at Regular is meant to be a lighter affair and, again, not overly aggressive on adhering to strict tournament policies. Normally fixes occur and players are told to play more carefully and that's that. If something needs to be upgraded it will get to a DQ for the player if something is really egregious but most Match and Game loss upgrades don't come up in Regular.

It definitely sucks that you experienced a bad judge which then not only cost you the top prize you were there for but also soured the experience of competitive Magic as a whole.

[Hermes_]

One of the guys in my group had/has (?) Yuriko deck he called "the worst ninja ever" because he put it in orange sleeves and was making fun of something I don't remember what.

I wish I had gotten a hold of the precon

[Lifeless]

Yeah I guess I can understand her getting that Derevi hate for not playing by the rules.

[tstorm823]

Eh, I mean, not so much if you ever want to own a house or retire. The world is definitely backsliding in that respect.

100 years ago both those concepts were complete fantasy to most people on earth. Now they are expectations, and people are upset they aren't guaranteed.

[Jemolk]

Eh, I mean, not so much if you ever want to own a house or retire. The world is definitely backsliding in that respect.

100 years ago both those concepts were complete fantasy to most people on earth. Now they are expectations, and people are upset they aren't guaranteed.

A hundred years ago was the Roaring Twenties, so sure. That was not a good time for basically anyone except the very richest people in the world. Seventy years ago, though? Depends on where you live. Compared to the present, it could have been better, or it could have been worse. Four hundred years ago? Ditto. Progress is not linear, and we've got our own suite of problems right now. Many of them are pretty overwhelming, too. Also plenty of benefits and possibilities, as well, of course, but that doesn't cancel out the problems. We may be better off than 100 years ago, but quite frankly, that's only because of what exactly was going on precisely 100 years ago. If you consider 50 years ago, or 150 years ago, it's not necessarily so clear. Might have even been better several thousand years ago, prior to the Bronze Age Collapse. Depends on what you look at, and also when you look at.

The present is also not great for you if, for example, your skills are very useful but not for making saleable products. Or if you don't deal well with excessive amounts of stress. Or if you live somewhere that's projected to be underwater within the next decade or two due to climate change. Or if you just care too much about other people to step on them to get yours. Under such conditions, there are various historical periods that would be preferable. And that's to say nothing of historical periods that were better for particular peoples on account of not having been ground under the boot of global capitalism and imperialism at the time.

Sorry to get all ranty on you. This line of reasoning just tends to really annoy me.

[duducrash]

@WizardMN yeah, ive never seen a match loss before. The harshest punishment ive ever seen on a lgs was a player asked an audience member for advice and the owner was like " dude, you gotta drop out". Im still lowkey upset to be honest.


I personally dont get the "in the past it was worse" argument. From 500 years ago to last century europeans were travelling to every continent on earth and flat out of raping whoever they want, now sex tourism is frowned uppon, if it happens I should think we are blessed because the was worse?

We will slave with no need to do so, every morr anr more jobs are automatized which could leave more time for our lives outside career, but yet im working more and more with no end in sight while C Level take bonding retreats on resorts. Should I be ok with exploration because they had it worse before?

[Dunadain]

Nothing new under the sun, humanity has had it worse, humanity has had it better.

What's that Gandalf quote? Something like "what's left to us is to decide how to use the time we are given."

Idk, I know it sounds like an empty platitude, but history is full of people talking about the end of the world (or inversely, how they are going to construct the perfect utopia) and yet here we are, still chugging along, one day at a time.

[Hermes_]

so, I came close to killing a player with Curse of Wizardry (name blue) he got to 1 life before another player killed him but it did a total of like 14 damage by itself

[tstorm823]

Depends on what you look at, and also when you look at..

I don't think that's true. Things have gotten better and are getting better all the time. Even climate change, something I'm sure you think is the impending doom of humanity, is opportunity with the right perspective. On a geological scale, human history has existed within a brief reprieve of glacial periods in the middle of an ice age, and without people the world would be overdue for another glacial movement wiping out half the life on earth. Instead, we are leaving the ice age behind because of what people did, man-made climate change, on accident. And we are learning to master that climate change deliberately. You're witnessing baby's first steps of global climate stewardship, you can approach that with hope and wonder rather than fear and loathing.

[TheAmericanSpirit]

Depends on what you look at, and also when you look at..

I don't think that's true. Things have gotten better and are getting better all the time. Even climate change, something I'm sure you think is the impending doom of humanity, is opportunity with the right perspective. On a geological scale, human history has existed within a brief reprieve of glacial periods in the middle of an ice age, and without people the world would be overdue for another glacial movement wiping out half the life on earth. Instead, we are leaving the ice age behind because of what people did, man-made climate change, on accident. And we are learning to master that climate change deliberately. You're witnessing baby's first steps of global climate stewardship, you can approach that with hope and wonder rather than fear and loathing.

Riiiiight. I'm so sure technology will save us from ourselves. Like technology saved my uncle in Vietnam! No wait, he got cancer from Agent Orange exposure and suffered lifelong consequences.... But what about the animals? Surely technology is helping the animals! Oh, it actually seems we're undergoing an artficially induced mass extinction due to human activity. Hmmm....

Look, you can espouse optimism all you want, man. Wishful thinking won't save a %$#%$#% thing. QOL standards for people rising is not an acceptable or sustainable trade for all the ecosystems we pave over for suburbs, the chemicals we dump in the waters, or the vast tracks of land under which we bury nuclear waste. What's humanity's big plan for that, huh?

If you have even a shred of evidence that humans have been good stewards of the planet or will be in the future, I'd love to see it. But you can't provide it because your optimism is fundamentally speculative. The world is getting hot and dirty because of us and things are dying. That's a fact. It's not actually much of a debate, is it?

[TheGildedGoose]

No, no, the fire in the house is a feature!

EDIT: To be clear, I don't share @TheAmericanSpirit's fatalism about things, but burying your head in the sand isn't exactly a viable option either.

[tstorm823]

Look, you can espouse optimism all you want, man. Wishful thinking won't save a %$#%$#% thing. QOL standards for people rising is not an acceptable or sustainable trade for all the ecosystems we pave over for suburbs, the chemicals we dump in the waters, or the vast tracks of land under which we bury nuclear waste. What's humanity's big plan for that, huh?

If you have even a shred of evidence that humans have been good stewards of the planet or will be in the future, I'd love to see it. But you can't provide it because your optimism is fundamentally speculative. The world is getting hot and dirty because of us and things are dying. That's a fact. It's not actually much of a debate, is it?

Not if you don't want it to be. I can't make a debate happen if you're not interested, nor force you to believe something you don't want to believe. I can provide the alternative, and it's entirely up to you to consider it or not.

But when you say I'm speculating and you're talking facts, that is incorrect. It is all speculative. You say things are dying, but in comparison to what? That comment relies on the speculation that things wouldn't be dying without us, but they likely would. Its not as though the world was static before people, species have come and gone for as long as life has existed. Like, some things may die as the climate changes, others will flourish. The world is actively getting greener right now. Other than the Amazon, forests are net expanding. Places that were recently desert are being cultivated. Lifeless frozen areas are having animals migrate to them. Fossil fuels exist because the world used to be hotter and life thrived in it. Death Valley was once an inland sea filled with dinosaurs. The idea that things are going to die more than live with global warming is pure speculation, and runs counter to what we know about the past.

[Jemolk]

Depends on what you look at, and also when you look at..

I don't think that's true. Things have gotten better and are getting better all the time. Even climate change, something I'm sure you think is the impending doom of humanity, is opportunity with the right perspective. On a geological scale, human history has existed within a brief reprieve of glacial periods in the middle of an ice age, and without people the world would be overdue for another glacial movement wiping out half the life on earth. Instead, we are leaving the ice age behind because of what people did, man-made climate change, on accident. And we are learning to master that climate change deliberately. You're witnessing baby's first steps of global climate stewardship, you can approach that with hope and wonder rather than fear and loathing.

I certainly think climate change is a dire threat to humanity, and all other large animals as well. It might in theory be like you describe, except right now we're running headlong into precisely the opposite problem, which is threatening to cause rather than prevent a mass extinction event, and enormous numbers of powerful people just don't give a damn because to them, more money for them personally right now is more important than the current ecosystem still existing in 100 years. Catastrophe can become opportunity, sure, but only if people are willing to learn from it, and to change. And right now? Right now, the systems that are in place are deliberately inflexible, and the people in positions of power are fighting to defeat systemic change, rather than climate change. The ecosystem cannot sustain this rate of warming, nor can life of any notable size adapt quickly enough. Cockroaches will probably survive even if we make no attempt to slow the rate of warming, but humans? That seems rather unlikely. Human civilization? Oh hell no, that's not going to last without some pretty drastic measures at this point.

Also, just for the record, once again, progress is not linear. Prior to the Bronze Age Collapse, people had running water. That technology was then lost for thousands of years and recreated only recently. The Romans had concrete; same deal. Another technology that was lost and then rediscovered. The Incas had such precise stoneworking skill that they could make perfectly fitting stone blocks that they used for building, without any mortar or anything, and we still cannot recreate that with modern tools. And that's just a handful of examples of technology. There have been plenty of other losses of a more social nature. For a particularly straightforward example, LGBT acceptance got set back, very deliberately, by the Nazis. You know that famous book burning picture? That's them setting the research from the Magnus Hirschfeld Institute on fire. And now, we're facing backlash against trans people existing, again, and the people who would rather they didn't exist are pointing to things like not having much detailed research -- which is because it was burned. By literal WWII-era German Nazis. There's also a very strong argument to be made that the witch hunts that took place ~300 years ago had as part of their motivation the repression of women's informal power that they had previously held, but that would probably require a book to do it justice. Specifically, Caliban and the Witch, by Silvia Federici. Hence why I went with my other example.

Point is, history is by no means a steady progression from bad to good, and good to better. There is no guarantee that things will continue to get better, save for the guarantee that we enforce by making them get better. Things are not guaranteed to get worse, either, but right now, all we need to do to cause them to get worse is nothing, and comments like yours, at least to me, read as endorsements of complacency. Complacency will ensure things get worse, and quite frankly, I'd rather they didn't.

[pokken]

I'll take living in this century over any other century of human history. It isn't even particularly close.

I think if you include marginalized groups who got rights between the 1980s and the 2020s this makes some sense, but if you think about the general quality of life I think it's been going downhill since the 1970s--home ownership and housing costs make up higher and higher percentages of our income, productivity is up and wages are stagnant, most people have almost no prospects for a decent retirement.

There're a lot of ways in which quality of life is up -- we have more stuff, more access to stuff, more video games and TV to entertain us. Personally I think all that entertainment stuff we do nowadays is, for the most part, bread and circuses. We entertain ourselves to death doing inactive, isolated things and interacting with our tribes on the internet.

Cell phones and the internet are amazing. And the ability to find a tribe of people based on deep shared interests or deep ideological alignment is really cool in some ways. I know it helped me growing up as an introverted loner to find people online I had stuff in common with. But if a bunch of them hadn't moved to Phoenix I'm not sure I would have ever had a social circle in real life, I might have just lived my whole life online like a lot of people are doing nowadays.

I'm not sure it's necessarily better all the time though? It feels to me like most people are spending a lot more time watching TV and playing video games and less time with other people. Sometimes the video game playing is social but a lot of times it isn't.

I don't have any data points to back this all up or anything, I just watch what people I know do. Especially in the younger generation, people don't have many prospects and spend almost all of their money living day to day. Retirement savings are like a joke. People can't afford to own homes or travel. Your normal young adult these days spends like half their money on rent.

When I was a kid, I could expect to make around $10/hour with basic office skills or doing anything above fast food, and with that money I'd make enough money after taxes to pay rent on a $500 apartment. Nowadays that same apartment is $1000, I have a cell phone bill, all my bills are twice what they were, and now I make $13/hour for the same job. It's really rough out there if you don't have some kinda technical, science or business skill that gets you a real payday, and it feels like those opportunities are fewer and farther between.

I make a great living and we're very comfortable, so this is not me speaking from a place of poor me, it's just what I see. I used to hang out at the magic shop a lot and I've befriended a lot of the 20-somethings who hang out there, and most of them laugh at the idea of owning a house that they don't inherit from their parents. They talk about life as a grind. It's sad.

----

I dont' want to come across as a doomer, but I think we are currently on a downward trend after a previous long uphill trend post-WW2, and something's got to give. My hopeful take is it'll be tied to the move away from fossil fuels toward something that can't be controlled as tightly But who knows.

[TheAmericanSpirit]

Damn, @Jemolk. You're so %$#% articulate it makes me wanna cry for my relative rhetorical inadequacy. Damn, damn, double damn.

[pokken]

Cockroaches will probably survive even if we make no attempt to slow the rate of warming, but humans? That seems rather unlikely. Human civilization? Oh hell no, that's not going to last without some pretty drastic measures at this point.

I think this is quite a bit too far to the doom side personally. Humanity has developed so much power to control our environment that I think it's inevitable we will last forever in some form. If women stopped having babies tomorrow, we'd have the technology to oven bake them ffs. They are quite literally planning to terraform the earth right now with aerosols or giant mirrors or whatever to cool the planet if it gets too hot.

(this isn't politics, this isn't politics...it's related, but it's not. this is objectively true) The problem I think is that the super elite are setting it up so they're the ones who survive in their super compounds or space ships or whatever, and they'll replace poor people with robots. That's the part that really terrifies me.

Right now there's still the idea that we need growth in population to support the workers of today, but I think some of the ruling class are coming around to the idea that falling population is fine since feeding poor people is a lot of trouble. We're seeing a branch in life expectancy that is so severe based on income that it's terrifying. Like a world where the poor jump off a waterfall at 45 but the rich live as long as they want. Some politicians are starting to say the quiet part out loud about "well, okay, if you're poor who cares if you die?" type %$#%.

I might have read too much science fiction but you can see this starting in charts like this:
http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/health/

(Mabye my outlook is even doomier than yours though because it's starting to imply that the elite are heading down a path of only growing as many babies as they need for slaves, which is...darker than extinction But I think it can be averted)

[TheGildedGoose]

Humanity has developed so much power to control our environment that I think it's inevitable we will last forever in some form.

The stones on this species. Damn.

[RxPhantom]

Ummm...wow. I just wanted @TheAmericanSpirit to stop smoking so his life could get demonstrably better. And we have arrived at a philosophical debate about the future of existence, humanity's toll on the planet, and technology-induced isolation. Sounds like us.

I do fear for my daughter and the world she and successive generations stand to inherit. The question seems to be not if we can save the world, but rather, will we?