Lurker > trdl23

Lopen posted...

Akroma Angel of Wrath (include Angel of Fury/lore stuff here too don't mean just the one card)

82/100

No rest. No mercy. No matter what.

One would be forgiven for wondering why I love Akroma so much when it has a keyword soup long before Questing Beast was even a concept. First off... she's eight mana with three white pips. If you cast her, you earned those keywords.

The story of Onslaught block is one of the low points in Magic lore, best described as "yo what the fuck." Akroma's writing isn't very good (but is still among the best of the era, somehow). However, the concept is amazing. An illusionist wizard, Ixidor, who loses his wife in a gladiatorial battle to an abomination is left marooned in a desert afterward, and the bad juju artifact of the land, the Mirari, decides its next monkey-paw wish will give the dude the ability to create reality and not just illusons. The very first thing Ixidor does? Give up his arm to reimagine his beloved wife as an alabaster angel and tell her to do anything he can to avenge the real one. Somewhere, Edward Elric is coping and seething.

Months and months of holy war later... well, then I'd have to talk about the Scourge novel. I won't because even thinking about it would drop my IQ. Still, the concept and artistic execution behind Akroma kick ass. Magic has the best angelic art of any fantasy medium, and even compared to that, Akroma is built different.

With so many legendary creatures getting spewed out every year to feed the Commander meat grinder, it saddens me that I doubt any of them will become icons on the level of Akroma. I don't think we'll be seeing "Alquist Proft's Memorial" granting your creatures the ability to crack clues to Sphinx's Rev. Akroma broke ground in design and backed it up with her aesthetic and conceptual execution, even if her actual author sucked, and she deserves the acclaim all these years later.

At least I got kind of internet famous when this video came out of me beating someone with boomer cards and got over 340K views

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbCeo5Pfv5U

Kenri posted...

Legends (the set)

82/100

I don't know if Legends has aged well or poorly for most people. So many of the titular Legends are wack in design, in mana cost, and color identity. As the very first set after Revised, there still wasn't much knowledge on card design, and it showed. You could look at two cards with the same mana cost and rarity with bewilderment. For some reason, Albert fuckin Einstein was on a white enchantment.

For me though? It's aged so well. Look how many kickass, iconic cards came from Legends. The Elder Dragons, who would be part of Magic lore for decades to come. Tetsuo Umezawa, the building block from which all of OG Kamigawa's story came (Toshiro is Tetsuo's distant ancestor). Famous enchantments like Moat and The Abyss still used to denote modern cards. Some of the jank was fun jank, too -- I loved playing Hazezon Tamar in EDH and abusing the fact that I don't get the tokens immediately. The whole set is packed full of wild, cool designs that just wouldn't be possible now.

We won't get another Legends, and that's probably a good thing. I'm so glad we got one, though. One was enough.

Anagram posted...

Yu Gi Oh TCG

Takahashi did explicitly base Duel Monsters on Magic, so this gets a pass.

Anyway, 14/100

I jammed silly games of Magic with my buddies in boy scouts, but yugioh is where early-teen Trdl cut his teeth competitively. Early yugioh was a blast: There was a beautiful flow and simplicity to the gameplay, there was room for brewing and interaction, and combat actually mattered. Young me didn't have the vocabulary for that, though; I was just glad I couldn't get mana screwed. (Yes I appreciate the irony in me saying this after claiming the land system is OK)

That game is not modern yugioh.

Master Duel did encourage me to try it out, and every meme you've heard is probably accurate. The game is slammed full of force-fed "archetypes" that leaves precious little room to breathe. Games regularly end with one player only getting two turns max. Every card is a tutor for another card. Turns take longer than Zero combos in MvC3 and have 5% of the skill expression.

Say what you will about the state of Magic, but aberrations like Dredge aside, Magic still plays by its fundamental rules. The fundamental rules of Yugioh are irrelevant. "Special" summons aren't special if everyone does 6 a turn. The fact that you can "destroy" cards from hand or deck, which is different from discarding, which is different from "sending," just so you can get distinct triggers? Atrocious design to get around Konami's own stupid errors.

Worse than the game is yugioh culture. I have never seen as much theft and violence as when yugioh cards are involved, and I can't tell you why. Konami's judge program is a joke (and outright offensive to me as a long-time Magic judge), where judges often get carte-blanche to make weird rulings that set some kind of common law precedent because Konami can't be bothered to make comprehensive rules and tournament rules documents held together by things sturdier than chewing gum and twine. A high-level player got a suspension for deliberately having a token in his deck box that his deck couldn't actually make -- in Magic, we call that, "your opponent played themselves." On the opposite end, if you have a card that, say, names a card and makes your opponent discard it if they have it in hand, they apparently can refuse to show you their hand and just say "trust me bro it ain't there." You can call a judge to have them confirm, but given how low their QC is for judging...

There's plenty more asinine design and cultural aspects to the game, but I can feel my blood pressure rising.

I will still occasionally play Master Duel. Sometimes I just get a sadistic urge to inflict pain on someone. I break out a deck designed to play like a Jund deck in mtg and smile with a glint in my eye as players squirm under the bizarre circumstance of my deck actually playing to interact.

Okay by "tomorrow" I meant tomorrow from now

I played Duel Masters a bit, but I didn't like the surrounding mechanics enough for the resource system even to "click" in how quality (or not) it was. Didn't try Kaijudo because I heard it's just Duel Masters again.

Lorcana takes a couple elements of it, but it's really more like Keyforge than anything -- which is good, since Keyforge had some great ideas (e.g. being a "race" game instead of a "knockout" game) but the execution was a bit of a mess.

Anyway more tomorrow

Are there actual unicorns

Lopen posted...

There was another game by Wizards of the Coast called Duel Masters that had a really cool mana system where there was no land and every card in the game was overloaded to be able to be played as mana if you chose to play them upside down as your one mana play a turn. For instance you could instead of playing Lightning Bolt that does 3 damage to anything as an instant you could play it upside down and have it function as a mountain.

This is what Lorcana does (and does quite well), though some cards can't be played for mana/"ink." I'm excited to see how that game develops. It has super strong roots.

KanzarisKelshen posted...

Scorching hot take: Cardgames are better when the resource you fight over is literal board positioning over mana. The game Duelyst died because of mismanagement, but its idea of grid-based combat was a brilliant way of controlling ramp in a consistent resource environment by limiting the amount of ways an opponent could leverage it with smart positioning.

Man I wish you'd been around for Android Netrunner. It's still the greatest card game I've ever played (yes, above mtg) and right up your alley, but the LCG model is just unviable.

Rest in Peace, king

Xtlm posted...

Stronghold Overseer

50/100

One of the cards of all time. Having flying and shadow is pretty funny -- good fuckin luck blocking it

greengravy294 posted...

jace the mind sculptor

85/100

One of the ACTUAL cards of all time. It's kind of incredible how this guy, once one of THE most amazing cards in the game, has become completely "eh" now. Nigh-unplayable in Modern thanks to the Horizons sets fucking everything up and The One Ring just doing his job better at an easier cost. He's only a mid-level pick in Cube now, too.

Still, I want to honor his legacy with this rating. He really was fun to play with, especially in Eternal formats with both better answers to him and support for him. My Jace is signed by Luis Scott-Vargas, and I'll always keep it.

azuarc posted...

Land

85/100

To hijack a quote from Winston Churchill: Magic has the worst resource system of any card game except for all the others that have been tried.

That's not entirely true; Netrunner's freedom and agency in its systems were beautiful, and I still mourn for that game. Still, as much as getting mana-screwed / flooded leads to frustrating non-games, getting guaranteed perfect curves has its own issues, as seen in games like Hearthstone where it makes ramp even more busted. The color system also forces constraints in deckbuilding and makes decks adhere to philosophies without going force-fed cookie-cutter like Yugioh archetypes. The game also gives you plenty of agency on what to do with lands should you so desire, with abilities like Landfall, stuff like Seismic Assault letting you weaponize them, creaturelands letting you actually use excess mana to give you a hidden threat late-game...

You come around on lands once you've played other games. At least I did.

Mobilezoid posted...

Jumpstart

??/100

I never really interacted with it in any capacity so I can't really rate it. I've heard it's good.

Raka_Putra posted...

Destroy All Humankind. They Can't Be Regenerated.

77/100

It's been a while since I saw bits and pieces of it, so that's the only thing I can draw from, but iirc it's a nice wholesome manga despite the name. Plus it's by a mangaka who clearly was around for old-school Magic. Apparently it's still going? I'll need to put it along with everything else in my backlog.

pyresword posted...

The Tolarian Community College Youtube channel

88/100

I've gotten kind of exhausted with the channel by now, especially because he focuses so heavily on Commander now. I can't blame him, that is the biggest format in the game now, no matter how much I dislike it. You see one Booster Box Game, you've seen them all; same with Secret Lair reviews.

He still puts out the best product reviews, and he isn't afraid to call out terrible products or choices by HotC, yet he avoids delving into the siren song of cynicism. Even though I only check a few of his videos anymore, it's still the first Youtube channel I recommend any Magic player watch.

redrocket posted...

Magic: The Gathering Arena

71/100

It's f2p Magic. It has the same predatory freemium business model as any other online card game, the wildcard economy sucks ass, and the focus on best-of-one matches is incredibly obnoxious -- especially with the game deliberately smoothing your opening hands in Bo1.

At the same time... it's f2p Magic. I go on Arena almost every day to do my quests. I get to practice drafting for free before I go and spend money to do it IRL. I won a Festival in a Box a few months ago without spending a dime. I get to test out standard decks whenever I want to. The interface largely works (auto-tapper aside, but that's something entirely in the player's hands to use it or not). It looks nice, and it feels nice. If I use it and appreciate it so often, I can't really go too low on my score.

redrocket posted...

Wait. So were the Rakdos not pure evil in OG Ravnica?

They absolutely were, sorry that I implied otherwise. They just weren't the "bad guys" that drove the plot and caused the Decamillennial crisis.

More tomorrow

Isquen posted...

Everyone Lives! from the Dr. Who set.

84/100

One of the coolest designs I've seen in a while and a great interpretation of one of Who's best moments. Still suffers a bit from being a Doctor Who card and the art making absolutely no sense if you haven't seen the corresponding episode.

Emeraldegg posted...

Secret lairs being limited run instead of print to order

15/100

Trading terrible lead times for mega-FOMO. Secret Lairs suck.

TomNook posted...

Earthbind

69/100

Nice

hylianknight3 posted...

Shandalar

82/100

I never got to play it myself, and it would probably be lower if I had. As an observer, seeing Magic with its wonky AI, 90s CRPG jank exploration mechanics, ante rules, and other stuff... it's not a great game but it's an incredibly charming one. Not to mention the delightful tutorial FMV stuff.

Eddv posted...

The Murders that occured at Karlov manor

40/100

Cool premise, cool set, but the actual story beats grow more wack as I think about them. Teysa's death should have been 5D-chessed to be something she saw coming and could leverage in her favor because 5D-chessing misfortune is Teysa's entire thing. Zegana deserved better too. And Aurelia should've gotten got so that Feather could take her rightful place as Boros guildmaster.

Tirofog posted...

Secret Lairs

15/100

I enjoyed a couple of the early Secret Lairs despite the Walking Dead fiasco, but now they're just cancerous. They completely cut out retailers that keep the game thriving and instead just want your money directly for cards that would previously be parts of collections like From the Vault -- which you could buy locally.

Quality issues abound now, especially with foils, and many of their "drops" have atrocious EV and even more atrocious art. I'm all for art experimentation, but I do want my Magic cards to look like, well, Magic cards. All the time and development they invest on this crap would be better served on making cooler art for the normal releases, or at least not burning reprint equity on this.

Don't buy Secret Lairs. Don't give WotC your money. They don't need your money. Local game stores need your money.

GANON1025 posted...

Brian Kibler

80/100

Cool dude as far as I know. Met him once before I knew he was a legend, super chill guy. I think he was glad to have a Magic player not know who he was for once. It's too bad he stopped playing in favor of Hearthstone and even too-er badd-er he ended up as part of the 30th anni fiasco, but I'm not going to hold it against him too much... even if I probably should. Ah well.

Bitto posted...

Timmy, Johnny, and Spike

75/100

These psychographics are really useful from a game design perspective, but like anything resembling pop psychology, they end up being labels players attach to themselves without any nuance nor context. We all have some level of each of these in us, and it can fluctuate day-to-day and format-to-format. Identifying yourself or someone else as a single one of them (especially Spike since it almost always gets used with negative connotation) misses the point.

DireKrow posted...

Niv-Mizzet

100/100.

Is he executed perfectly? Absolutely not. I don't care. Niv is one of the coolest ever takes on an ancient badass dragon. He also has probably the most pants-shittingly terrifying statblock in D&D 5e.

I was in grad school when it came out, and by the time I started playing again, it had already been banned. Having seen it in Cube though... yeesh.

Anyway, more later

Oh right, FIRE design was a pushback against the intentional depowering of Standard that happened in Battle for Zendikar and Kaladesh. It deliberately pushed for more powerful and exciting cards instead, especially at common and uncommon. Unfortunately, it also pushed more and more complexity into higher-rarity cards, resulting in design abominations like Questing Beast and Bonecrusher Giant. Throne of Eldraine gets its bad reputation because it was the first set to explicitly use FIRE design and created multiple obnoxious cards as a result, but FIRE's legacy remains with the ever-heightening power and complexity creeps.

Emeraldegg posted...

I protest dimir being purely evil as they were one of the few unambiguously good guilds to help fight off bolas, and were in fact hte main reason ravnica knew bolas was coming

Also what does FIRE mean

The Dimir in the original block were purely evil. They got more nuanced in the future blocks under Lazav's leadership, much like the Rakdos.

Kenri posted...

I regret to inform you that the imp is actually 1/1 for 3. I mainly just like it for the cute art :3

Fuck. I'd drop it by 10 more points, but upon review the art is in fact cute, so it gets to stay where it is.

NFUN posted...

my friend Andy who plays too much Magic

95/100

As critical as I have been and will be, I do still love this game. For all its faults, it's one of the best games ever made. There's a reason I keep bouncing off every alternative I try and come back to Magic. It sounds like Andy's in a similar boat.

TeamRocketElite posted...

Blacker Lotus

48/100

I used to be bigger on this card, but adding to scarcity of a low-printed set has soured for me in the face of the reserved list in the modern era. It doesn't even have the memetic history of its fellow tear-me-up card from Unglued, Chaos Confetti.

Sceptilesolar posted...

Asmoranomardicadaistinaculdacar

95/100

There's a 0% chance you typed that without looking it up, and that alone makes me love this character. Her story is hilarious, all the flavor text associated with her even moreso -- especially when it's divorced from context of how and why she was compelled to make such bizarre dishes. In that sense I kind of wish I didn't know her story, which is why I can't give her a perfect score. Still, this is the charming goofiness I hope we can find more of in the future. Truly suffering from success.

pjbasis posted...

questing beast

30/100

Go ahead. See if you can recite all of Questing Beast's rules text from memory. I'll wait.

A perfect encapsulation of the problems with FIRE design, even moreso than Oko (who was actually the product of a similar fuckup to Umezawa's Jitte, where they made a supposedly minor change late in development that they didn't get to test well). Plus, it's not even called "THE Questing Beast," leading to damn near everyone to forget it's both Legendary and a major player in Eldraine's culture. Once you parse it, it's not that complex nowadays as more and more abilities get slapped on cards for the purposes of slobbering over Commander, but it was still just a chore to see, read, and play against.

Hbthebattle posted...

Eight Fucking Bears

88/88

holy shit

MarkS2222222222 posted...

Dakkon Blackblade

65/100

Really cool card, cool visual design, unique idea. Why is an exclusively lands-matter card in WUB? Because Legends was a weird era, man. The callback with Blackblade Reforged retroactively made him cooler.

Mobilezoid posted...

Thromok the Insatiable

78/100

Clean, simple, yet fun design focused entirely around making a giant idiot. Makes me nostalgic for a time when this was okay for a legendary creature.

Dedf1sh posted...

Nantuko (the race/creature type)

90/100

Nantuko are so goddamn cool. Insect people are usually seen as swarming, gross, brutal masses, and that can be compelling, but seeing them as wise sages of nature who could still chomp on someone's dumb ass makes for a unique visual and flavorful design. One of the big Ws from Odyssey block's design.

Kenri posted...

Teferi's Imp

27/100

Why does Teferi, the wisest man of Jamuraa, have an imp? Why is it in mono-blue? Why was phasing a mechanic, and why would I include such a shitty downside mechanic for incredibly slow looting? At least a 2/2 flyer for 3 was a good rate back then, but come on.

BlackMageJawa posted...

Any of these videos about trying to play Magic with cards designed by AI
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLHPZ4KRrrKuyPuiAumJ-aO0x8fP_0Y43

90/100

Largely because Cardmarket content is just wonderful. I'm helping advise a store looking to get into content, and I hold Cardmarket as the gold standard of "fun stuff" unrelated to specific formats.

If you haven't seen Robo Rosewater on Twitter spitting out AI cards, it's a treat -- and somehow better than what you'll see from many "custom MTG" designers.

KanzarisKelshen posted...

Ravnica block (ideally all three parts separately, but an overall rating is cool too)

93/100

You're not getting all three parts separately because I don't feel like writing an analysis the size of a goddamn book.

Original Ravnica is a masterpiece. The best example of bottom-up design creating a world so compelling that modern-day Ravnica is going full Sigil and officially taking Dominaria's place as the "central hub of the multiverse." We describe almost every two-color deck by its guild name. Many characters (or at least their successors) are well known even to fresh players because of how iconic they have become. Hybriid mana was a brilliant fresh piece of design that allowed for lore conveyance, accessibility, and multicolor payoffs even when mana issues would occur. The Ravnica trilogy of novels were fantastic pieces told episodically that blended into a fantastic payoff as the dissolution of the Guildpact welcomed all of the guilds' scheming for power to be brought into the light, while our protagonist Agrus Kos is increasingly disgruntled at having to prevent one madman after another from trying to subvert and/or conquer the city-world. Each guild was portrayed to have both wonderful and terrible qualities to them (except the Dimir, you need some thoroughly bad guys after all). I've DM'd a D&D campaign set in Ravnica where I drew upon both the novels and the cards themselves to generate experiences my players still talk about 5 years later.

Why do I dock 7 points from it, then? Because most of the actual guild mechanics lowkey suck.

-The Selesnyan mechanic, Convoke, was brilliant and deserves its place as getting rerun throughout other sets, even getting color-shifted multiple times. It is still best as a green-white mechanic, though. The rest? Well...
-The Boros mechanic, Radiance, played incredibly poorly in such a multicolor and hybrid-rich environment. You were often going to hit your own guys with bad effects and/or pump your opponents' guys with good effects, and while I miss symmetry in modern card design, this was egregiously awkward.
-The Dimir mechanic, Transmute, turned mediocre spells into hyper-specific tutors. This just didn't agree with their focus on milling (which itself was really cool for the time). It has enabled some combo ridiculousness though since Transmute dodges counterspells.
-The Golgari mechanic, Dredge, snapped the game in half.
-The Orzhov mechanic, Haunt, was extremely awkward to make work because it meant way too many conditions were needed to get a second, often lackluster payoff. The "good" haunt cards were generally just good ETB effects with the Haunt portion being ignorable.
-The Gruul mechanic, Bloodthirst, played pretty well and gave Red-Green a new focus to get aggressive early in order to make the big threats the combo is most known for.
-The Izzet mechanic, Replicate, was pretty cool, but it made it incredibly difficult to counter spells for the same reason as Storm cards: You can only counter one instance of it. I know it's hard to feel bad for counterspells, but it's the main way to interact with the instants and sorceries UR now leans on.
-The Azorius mechanic, Forecast, made absolutely no goddamn sense by making you tap mana on your upkeep in a color combo that largely wants to play Draw-Go.
-The Simic mechanic, Graft, had cool ideas but required you to play incredibly mediocre cards to compensate for supposed versatility that really wasn't there.
-The Rakdos mechanic, Hellbent, was perfect in terms of flavor, but having no cards in hand is pretty bad, and the payoffs for going Hellbent did not justify the inherently bad position you put yourself into. Strangely enough it would play far better nowadays, since Red's card-advantage mechanic of exiling cards to play in a limited time window gives a player options while still being Hellbent.

So yeah, three out of ten mechanics hitting isn't a great track record, which is why I can't give the most beloved block in MTG history a perfect score. I dock one point per mechanical failure. The rest is wonderful.

Hasbro; in the same way that Blizzard is just Activision now, WotC is just Hasbro now

More tomorrow

pyresword posted...

Dryad Arbor

80/100

I love wacky designs like Dryad Arbor. It's a cool juxtaposition of two basic concepts with the upsides and downsides of both. I love traditional creaturelands, so I'm all aboard with a Land-owar Elf.

"But it can be fetched or Green Sun'd!"

That ain't Dryad Arbor's problem! I think being able to fetch a 1/1 is actually kinda sick. Green Sun's Zenith was a major problem, but that's all on Green Sun's design. Dryad Arbor is just being a neat card that showed the best of Future Sight.

Now, the people who would hide Dryad Arbor in their lands and try to "gotcha" players who couldn't discern it from the rest of the land stack? Fuck those assholes. I'm glad they changed the MTR to stop that shit.

xenosaga posted...

The Reserve List

20/100

Oh boy. Here we go.

I get it. The Reserved List was necessary for the game. Chronicles was an S-tier fuckup that spooked the secondary market that TCGs need in order to thrive, and Magic was the pioneer of this territory. It was the only way to keep retailers invested. An evil, certainly, but an evil to preserve everything else.

God, I am sick of players today paying for that fuckup over two decades ago. I am sick of seeing Eternal formats that feature fantastic and unique gameplay get abandoned. I am sick of #MTGFinance bros.

I don't think it can ever go away. We've seen retailers disinvest from Magic because of the constant glut of product releases now; repealing the list now will just cause the same issue that started it since HotC's goodwill to retails is in the trash.

ChaosTonyV4 posted...

Commander Precons

35/100

Fair warning: I am an EDH fossil. My mind of "what the format should be" is still a bunch of us Judges jamming our shitty Invasion-era legends the night before an SCG Open that we loved from the Weatherlight Saga, and the goal wasn't winning as much as "Can you play an obscure enough card to make the greybeards at the table need to read it, yet it makes sense in your deck?" When the first Commander precons came out, I got super excited.

If only I knew what they had been harbingers of.

Commander precons pre-pandemic were poisoning the format. Not only were they fucking up Eternal formats (not that HotC gives a shit about those anymore), they were also teaching new players, either to the format or to Magic in general, that Commander was designed to be competitive solitaire. Experience counters and Eminence are design atrocities that discourage or outright punish interaction and push for linearity. They've also constantly included Sol Ring, which I've come to recognize as antithetical to the fun of any given game where it gets played early -- and because it's in every single precon, it can never be banned.

Post-pandemic, I just haven't paid attention. The well's tainted. I rarely see a Commander game that ends with more than half the table being glad they played. I genuinely believe the awful design of most early precons are to blame for a lot of it.

Lopen posted...

The original Kamigawa block

75/100

I'm glad people have largely come around on OG Kamigawa. It had the unfortunate fate of being placed between Magic's most obnoxiously broken block since Urza (Mirrodin) and Magic's most beloved block (Ravnica). So many of the mechanics just didn't work: The hand-size stuff was too finnicky, Arcane was parasitic as hell, Soulshift was too insular and required you to play overcosted cards in order to get back other overcosted cards, and Bushido did nothing but discourage blocking in general. Legends-matter was neat in theory, but the iteration of the Legend Rule at that time made it awkward as hell. Jitte broke the game. Ninjutsu remains one of the coolest mechanics ever designed, but it's a diamond in a heap of trash.

But the world, the general design, the genuine effort they took to make it as Shinto as a game company based in Seattle could do, and many of the individual cards? C'est magnifique.

It was also the first time I'd gotten invested in Magic's lore. I'd enjoyed some of the Weatherlight saga but was too young to really "get it." The actual prose of the Kamigawa novel trilogy hasn't held up compared to when 13-year-old Trdl read it, but the story beats are a fantastic picaresque adventure with a self-described scoundrel protagonist who lies, cheats, and steals his way to begrudging heroism. Having a black-aligned protagonist and white-aligned antagonist was executed brilliantly.

I was too young for it at the time, but some of my fellow greybeards have told me that Kamigawa-Ravnica was the peak of Standard, and I believe it. There was enough spice in individual card designs that mixed well with the unique stuff Ravnica brought us.

I'm so glad Neon Dynasty was good. Kamigawa deserved to have another moment in the limelight.

redrocket posted...

Banding

62/100

I know it's a meme, and it was way too complex for Magic's infancy. It's honestly a cool mechanic that isn't too hard to wrap your head around once it's explained to you in plain English, and since Magic's combat system is inherently defender-favored (one of the best parts of it), a mechanic that shakes up combat math so much is a neat treat. If we can track Mutate, clearly we can do Banding in 2024. The main problem is that modern rules wording makes the mechanic read like a nightmare.

VintageGin posted...

Universes Beyond

52/100

Ever since Lord of the Rings and Doctor Who, it's grown on me. I still dislike Doctor Who being in Magic, but as a guy who used to really be into Who, I have to recognize that the actual card designs were absolutely brilliant.

My main issue besides "Does this UB fit Magic" (LotR is the only one so far that does, though Final Fantasy might work too. 40K is borderline.) is "how relevant is this IP in Current Year." The Walking Dead will always get clowned on not just because it was handled so sloppily but also because who gave a shit about the Walking Dead in 2019? That's what I'm wondering with the current slather of incoming UB. Fallout's relevance has been pissed away after 4 was the Mid to end all Mids, and Bethesda's goodwill has gone down the drain. Assassin's Creed also remains a joke since it's stagnated as badly as FIFA and Madden games. Any collab with Marvel in 2024 is firmly in shark-jumping territory.

LotR proved that UB works well as a dessert to a hearty meal of good standard sets. Hasbro, unfortunately, would prefer to cram as many calories into its diet as possible despite the inevitable diabetes in a few years.

pyresword posted...

MTG 30th Anniversary Edition

2/100

The only good thing about it is that it was so widely repudiated in both PR and sales that it actually made Hasbro of the Coast take an L

It's been a while, B8. I need to start a new project I'll abandon halfway through.

Ratings will be out of 100 because I know I'd use decimals in a 10-point system anyway.

Please don't post again until I get your first post rated

Ratings will continue until I abandon it

Train

Hardy

storm that is approaching

So it turns out I'm actually just sick lol

I think there actually is Korean market nearby! I'll look at that tomorrow.

TomNook7 posted...

What game?

Magic. Local store is getting into content and had a $1000 tournament yesterday. This was the first one they've had commentary for and we got 35 viewers at peak -- I know it doesn't sound impressive, but it's by far the best they've ever done so I'm proud. I got PMs from locals who watched and want to come out and play in the future too.

HaRRicH posted...

Vitamin C is your friend. Honey can be good too.

Sometimes gargling can help, but don't do it with salt water like some people do because they'll hurt the vocal cords more. Warm water is probably better than cold water.

Try not to be breathless before speaking, try to breathe through your diaphragm, try not to yell, try to massage your neck muscles before beginning...just odds-enhancers, I know being an announcer means it's hard not to ever yell as a reaction to something hype. Hope this helps!

Thanks a bunch. I'll avoid salt water, and honey does sound nice.

I can also post the VOD if people want to see. I'd love feedback on presentation since we're still new at it (obviously I don't expect you to watch all 9 hours).

Until yesterday.

I woke up this morning feeling like I'd taken sandpaper to my throat. Anyone do this as a hobby and have tips to make next time easier? I was guzzling water and using the bathroom frequently so it wasn't dehydration.