I can kinda see the “too fast” complaint with stuff like Brawl or other unranked modes, but in any ranked modes, winning is the point, so I feel like there isn’t really any room to complain about fast and efficient decks in ranked play. Idk which modes you tend to play, so that may or may not be relevant. At the very least, fast decks let you get on to the next match sooner.

Agreed on ropers, of course, though I don’t see a whole lot of intentional roping that often. However, I usually play Brawl, and otherwise have only have one janky ranked Historic deck that usually hangs out in silver, so I don’t know if it’s worse in higher rank tiers. More often I see people who just seem to have trouble making decisions quickly, or don’t seem to notice that they have priority until the rope starts. It’s mildly frustrating, but it usually doesn’t appear to be intentional so I try not to get too mad about it.

On wilds, I actually got into the Arena alpha test back in the day, but I’ve taken a few multi-year breaks from it since release. I’ve found that if you play consistently across the lifetime of a set, you can end up filling out a lot of it, but actually catching up on sets that you’ve missed, especially if there are years’ worth of them, is a nightmare. I’m probably going to have to wait for another rotation before I can really think about trying to get into Standard. I can’t imagine how bad it is for brand-new players…

Which is why it failed.

Other than the pets and to some extent the triggers, this mostly just seems like complaints about Magic itself. It also strikes me as odd to complain about decks that are too fast and decks that are too slow simultaneously…

At any rate, my main problems with Arena are the horrifically slow wildcard economy and the lack of multiplayer Brawl.

Not as familiar with WordPress, but if that’s the case, yeah, I don’t have high hopes for this going well…

Not as drastic as the headline makes it out to be, or at least so they claim.

“We acquired Tumblr to benefit from its differences and strengths, not to water it down. We love Tumblr’s streamlined posting experience and its current product direction,” the post explained. “We’re not changing that. We’re talking about running Tumblr’s backend on WordPress. You won’t even notice a difference from the outside,” it noted.

We’ll see how that actually works out. Tumblr’s backend has always seemed rather… makeshift, so I’m curious to see how they manage to do that. Given Tumblr’s technical eccentricities, a backend migration could probably do a lot of good for the functionality of the site, if done properly. I have my doubts that WordPress’ engineers will be given the time and resources to do a full overhaul/refactor though, so I’m fully expecting even more janky, barely functional code stapling the two systems together.

Is it just an alternate version, or will all copies of this card in Mystery Boosters be white-bordered?

The picture of the physical card in Gavin’s tweet is also in white border, for some reason?

They’re changing references to “precombat main phase” and “postcombat main phase” to “first main phase” and “second main phase,” respectively.

This would’ve inadvertently nerfed a few cards that otherwise were able to take advantage of taking extra main phases via extra combat step cards to trigger their effects multiple times in a turn, like Neheb, the Eternal. Now they’re keeping the old wording on that group of cards so it doesn’t result in any functional changes.

Is the 4x10 really worth the extra day off? Tbh I’m not sure it would work very well for me… I find just one 10-hour day to be kinda draining, so doing that 4 times a week every week feels like it might just cancel out any benefits of the extra day off.

Don’t most indemnity clauses have exceptions for gross negligence? Pushing out an update this destructive without it getting caught by any quality control checks sure seems grossly negligent.

Reading into the updates some more… I’m starting to think this might just destroy CloudStrike as a company altogether. Between the mountain of lawsuits almost certainly incoming and the total destruction of any public trust in the company, I don’t see how they survive this. Just absolutely catastrophic on all fronts.

Huh. I guess this explains why the monitor outside of my flight gate tonight started BSoD looping. And may also explain why my flight was delayed by an additional hour and a half…

Fair enough

Yeah, I guess “black tea” is a bit of a misnomer. It’s probably just simpler to share the terminology with coffee though

Coffee is just too bitter for me unless I overload it with way more cream and sugar than is healthy. At that point all the caffeine and sugar makes me way too jittery. On the other hand, I enjoy drinking tea black, so tea it is.

Good point, I’ll have to keep that in mind. I would think that after the initial temperature equalization, it shouldn’t be an issue as long as the temp remains relatively stable afterward, so in theory, if the rate of the initial equalization is gradual enough, I would think it wouldn’t cause any long-term issues.

Though that does depend on how exactly any possible solutions would work, and how controlled they could be. I might just re-evaluate after I get the insulation work done.

It seems to happen to me a lot that when I hear about something that greatly interests me as soon as it’s announced, the actual release of that thing seems to vanish.

The MtG show, Elder Scrolls 6, the KOTOR remake… Maybe I’m imagining things, but it seems like if it’s a property that I both greatly care about and hear about as soon as it’s announced, it feels like there’s a high likelihood that the project will just vanish for years in production hell.

I feel you there… Although it was already fairly apparent that Nielsen wasn’t a great person by the time I really became aware of her, for quite a while, I considered Noah Bradley to be my favorite MtG artist. After that story broke, I vividly remember saying to myself, “Well, at least there’s still Seb McKinnon…”

And, well, yeah…

I guess my favorite artist after that would be John Avon, even if he only occasionally does new MtG pieces these days. At least he seems like a pretty wholesome guy, but then again, I thought the same about Bradley…

Creatures do count as existing when their ETBs resolve. Generous Patron and similar triggers do count themselves. They count as having entered even before the ETB goes on the stack - see [[Aether Adept]]'s ruling - it can target itself, and targets for abilities are chosen before an ability is put on the stack.

Triggered abilities always go on the stack anyway - even if Generous Patron didn’t count as existing when the ability was triggered (which it does), resolving the next action on the stack requires the current stack action to finish resolving, so it would have to be fully on the battlefield for any abilities triggered by it to be processed.

I think it would need a “Can’t block” rider to prevent it from being a self-sustaining board stall, but yeah, I could definitely see it being fun in an Aristocrats shell.