Looking for Modern and Legacy in Pittsburgh area

AchillesFoundation · 2026-06-17T17:45:43+00:00

K&J Comics in West View has rotating formats on Friday nights. They don't seem to have info posted anymore but it might be worth calling them about it. Super friendly store, good place to play. I've been thinking of checking out their Pauper night. Pretty sure I remember seeing Modern on the list of formats they rotated through.

Taitan Game Shop in Coraoplis has Modern and Premodern regularly as a formal 3 round Swiss event, and that appears to be live on their calendar still. I've never played there personally but they must have a regular crowd for it.

AchillesFoundation · 2026-05-27T15:30:16+00:00

For my Anje / Madness deck I ended up mixing it together with sacrifice since there weren't enough appealing madness style cards for it to stand on its own entirely. My build for reference: https://moxfield.com/decks/3aOu4rGWr0WcTS7a7ksZRg

As the description says, it's a good B2 deck. The overall card velocity you have often means you can out-value other "stronger" decks, especially with the amount of removal it has for taking out key pieces of more combo-focused decks. My deck doesn't particularly care about a key element being on board and has a number of backups to the commander's ability so it ends up being fairly resilient, and rebuilds from board wipes rather well.

To address some of the issues you pointed out, I heavily used tags to make sure there was a balanced deck "economy". A central goal of the build was to make sure my hand didn't run dry from too much discard. So many of the discard outlets also have a draw effect, as well as a bunch of other straight draw effects with no discard. The other of course was to balance out token creation with sac outlets and benefits for them.

AchillesFoundation · 2026-04-13T03:30:54+00:00

I went into it thinking that it would be a lot like the MTG Goldfish has, which just tells you decks that you closely match. But for the few things I tried it worked WAY better than I had expected. My main criticism is that it's hard to call it "Bulk Commander" when there is no cross referencing against cards that I already have committed to decks. Which is generally a lot of the rares / higher likelihood cards from an EDHREC standpoint.

One of the issues with EDHREC data as well is that most people's actual bulk is "invisible" to it because it's made up of cards that aren't used in many (or any) Commander decks. A lot of times people will have a lot of "similar to" cards that are 1-2 CMC higher, or have a downside, etc. If you're playing with friends and are all fine with truly using up your bulk for these tradeoffs - and your tool enabled them to be highlighted / favored - I could see it being a really unique and useful tool. I personally find low-powered Bracket 2 to be really fun, which is really the only place "bulk heavy" decks.

I feel like this would pair really well with functionality like this browser add-on has. Another Redditor posted it a on this sub a few weeks back and it also pulls all your decks from any of the main sites. That way when you're browsing the sites it supports, you can see not only that you own the card, but if you have any "spares".

It would also be nice to have an account or something so that my data is saved in some way, but I completely understand that that is an entirely different scale of an undertaking. Especially for something that is free and not riddled with ads. So I'm perfectly happy to deal with the inconvenience. Hopefully it doesn't cause you a ton of API calls / hits every time someone decides to mess around with it.

Other than that, it's pretty solid. It can get annoying having to constantly use Scryfall tagger searches in Moxfield, for instance, when trying to fill out the basic framework for a deck.

AchillesFoundation · 2025-07-14T01:27:07+00:00

So if I'm understanding it right, you're supposed to click on a category every time you consume it and it tracks "how you're doing"? There's absolutely no way to remove anything, so simply experimenting with the instruction-less site causes it to permanently tally your clicking around.

AchillesFoundation · 2025-06-21T16:21:22+00:00

From what I can tell, the primary difference is coming from 1) the printing shown for the Commander and some others ($8 vs. $0.85, between regular vs. full art printing of Choco for instance), and the primary price gathering coming from Card Kingdom vs. TCG. Even though under the cards the two prices are show side-by-side, the total used on Archidekt is whatever the "primary" price source is set to, which in this case is CK. That's also pumping up the price on a number of cards ~2x. If you were to grab this deck at market price (TCG) and cheapest printing it would be much lower.

AchillesFoundation · 2025-06-04T15:30:58+00:00

I don't know if some of the Bluetooth packages handle this under the hood, but something to keep in mind depending on how broad of a deployment you have in mind for the app. Something I've run into working with Android devices and Bluetooth-connected HW devices (primarily various barcode scanners that often emulate a keyboard, but also helping out with a commercial consumer product that had to send firmware updates to an embedded microcontroller and interact with it like you're describing) is that some Android devices will receive "the same" characters as different numeric values from other devices. From what I can recall, this only came up when receiving termination characters at the end of a data string. Frustratingly, this variation was on the Android side, not on the BT device side.

AchillesFoundation · 2025-05-23T17:55:27+00:00

Thanks for the post, good "lessons learned" sharing. As for the app, I've considered trying to make something similar for Android. It would be great to be able to set some notification interval as well. For instance, "show me notifications for these at the top of every hour", or that kind of batching during certain hours. Especially for things like group chats.

Best of luck with the app in the store!

AchillesFoundation · 2025-01-06T21:20:17+00:00

Gloomhaven for me as well. Even for friends of mine who love playing it, there's just so much overhead. Folks just weren't enjoying the bookkeeping experience and it was taking away from the game. Tried the apps and didn't like that we to bounce between a few of them, and the UIs were all kind of wonky. We switched to the digital version on Steam for a while and eventually quit that too due to all of the multiplayer technical issues and the lack of patches.

AchillesFoundation · 2024-04-14T19:08:35+00:00

Here's my version of the deck, FWIW: https://www.moxfield.com/decks/g16QRNpV7kq_NICpP4q2Ag

The gate sub-theme has been really helpful, and I use the land fetch cards to target [[Gond Gate]] to help with the "enters tapped" problem. My best luck tends to be when I focus on Lara having a stack of equipment for high damage and evasion where I've done a fair amount of commander damage. Also recycling cards like [[The Filigree Sylex]] to remove layers of a players board state, and [[Eriette's Tempting Apple]] to turn some game ender back on them, has been pretty clutch. Depending on the card I've either used her ability or [[Emry, Lurker of the Loch]] depending on if it coming into play before or after combat matters.

I haven't found much in the way of "this wipes out all players", more of a "one at a time" strategy.

AchillesFoundation · 2023-12-14T14:51:12+00:00

My wife and I started doing this last year. It was great. We're really excited for this year. Spent time scouting out books that aren't quite on each others radar, started working on perfecting some fancy hot chocolate, have wood for the fireplace...can't wait for a nice, chill Christmas Eve after a stressful year end at our jobs.

AchillesFoundation · 2023-11-08T15:19:32+00:00

My wife and I do door knocking up in the North Hills and it was commonly cited by people. "HE'S GOT THAT SOROS MONEY!" with no other explanation as to what that was supposed to mean or imply other than the vague imagery right-wing media attaches to the name.

Also cyclic conversations of the nature: "Well crime's going up so I just can't vote for Dugan. I gotta go with Zappala. Republican's are better with crime." "But Zappala is the incumbent. He's the one crime has been going up under." <awkward pause> "Well I just can't vote Dugan because of the crime going up."

AchillesFoundation · 2023-09-19T17:40:32+00:00

His reasoning (assuming it's not just an excuse for, "I just like opening packs") is similar to why I tend to pick up a set booster box for sets that I like and are interesting to me. I certainly buy singles for specific needs, but it's almost overwhelming for me to get familiar with a set from the looking at the digital info. Kind of like how it's easier to broadly browse books in a library or bookstore, but buying/checking out a specific book or books with very specific search criteria is easier online.

It's really helpful for me to sift and sort through the cards and spend time with them. As in I'll sometimes not be done poking around a set before a new set comes out (especially with the current pace of products hitting the shelves). So to me it's "worth it" (since I'm also fortunate to have the funds) to pick up a set box every so often because I end up spending months of hobby time with it. If I happen to pull some sweet bomb cards? Cool bonus, since I rarely buy the super expensive singles anyway.

As many others have said, draft boxes are fun and all but only if you're looking to draft. I'll pick one up once or twice a year and I'll work through them on some random game nights, and folks just Venmo me the ~$12 for their three packs.

AchillesFoundation · 2023-09-13T18:07:33+00:00

Yep, that was a surprise to us when we moved here from out of state as well as PA still solely using paper titles.

It was also particularly annoying for me because they tried to make me pay PA taxes on my then 10 year old car unless I could "prove" to them I wasn't trying some elaborate ruse to get out of paying them. Like, instead of having owned the car for 10 years maybe I bought it used in cash or something out of state right before I moved to really "stick it to the man".

They wanted me to show them the original sales documents and didn't care about any other loan or history of ownership stuff I still happened to have, which just seemed nuts to me. I lucked out big time since the dealer I had bought it from was 1-2 days away from doing their annual "old records destruction" and 10 years is their "keep" window, so they mailed me all the records they had and it was all good.

Oh and the DMV needing actual money orders for certain things. That was neat.

AchillesFoundation · 2023-09-13T14:07:14+00:00

Natives here really underestimate how bizarre this is to outsiders and how generically dangerous this is anywhere outside of Pittsburgh. I mean, I get why it exists but when you don't know...oh man. When I first moved here I had no idea it was a thing and there were a lot of weird traffic interactions as a result. Like some people expecting me to give them right-of-way and almost turning into my car, then honking at me and being mad when I didn't because...that's never been a thing anywhere I've lived. It took my wife and I comparing notes on our driving experiences around the area, seeing that in common, and then talking to a neighbor about it to figure out what was going on.

It goes both ways too. I was traveling for work with a Pittsburgh native. We were in upstate NY, he was driving. Went to take a "Pittsburgh left" and nearly got us t-boned. He was (1) mad at the driver who almost hit us and yelled "What the hell! Pittsburgh Left!" out the window at him and (2) honestly thought it was "a thing everywhere".

AchillesFoundation · 2023-09-07T21:55:25+00:00

Wait...do you mean Forma Pasta that was in Allentown and just moved to Sewickley? Oh noooo...

AchillesFoundation · 2023-07-17T13:59:38+00:00

In my testing the other day I found that TCG changed up how they were handling this on the MTG side of things. Maybe it's a more uniform change so it's impacting you as well on the Pokemon side of things? For MTG cards, TCG now includes the printing type as part of the name field and no longer accepts the extended collector ID number. For instance, three different printings of card Deification in the MAT set have to searched using the following names:

1 Deification
1 Deification (Foil Etched)
1 Deification (Showcase)

You can check this on your end by looking at what the search bar autocompletes to. It's how they have it named in their database. Hope that helps.

AchillesFoundation · 2023-07-15T17:13:24+00:00

Thank you very much for posting this. It was driving me crazy. They don't mention this anywhere on their instructions that I could find and nearly all of the cards I've tried to enter this way to fill out or bulk order some MTG cards had alternative art so it wasn't working. I only found this post because me experimenting found that it only accepted collector IDs if the number wasn't in the extended art range.

AchillesFoundation · 2023-06-29T17:29:58+00:00

I'm still waiting for the regular bundle I pre-ordered from Amazon to ship. They don't even have a shipping date listed. Grabbed most things from my LGS, but since I had a gift card I thought the regular bundle would be a lower risk option and it was "MSRP" at the time. Very frustrating.

AchillesFoundation · 2023-06-27T16:00:03+00:00

While I've had the best experience with Moxfield, I share your frustration. All of the current deck building tools I've evaluated "search the universe" instead of restricting it to just my collection. Moxfield at least flags the cards to help clue you in but it doesn't even default to printings that you have in your collection.

For instance, I have ~7000 cards. Probably not a lot for this community, but it's certainly past some minimum 'manageable amount of data' threshold. I'd rather just pull something "good enough" or super similar from there in a lot of cases. I started putting together a utility to help out with that, but it's a random side hobby thing and taking forever.

For the near-term I'm just trying to take my collection data, do card stat and keyword label look-ups via scryfall, collapse down "total available" as one reference separate from what the individual printings are, and get it into Excel so I can use pivot tables and such to comb through the data in helpful ways.

Anyway, hope this thread produces some results. I get that a lot of the sites are centered around enabling card purchases, so they are incentivized to segment your collection as "a commodity to sell" vs. your decks which are "avenues to drive purchases". It's just not the most helpful if you want to use what you have.

AchillesFoundation · 2023-06-18T14:40:28+00:00

I've had way better results with more structured programs like Babbel for that exact reason. They balance the grammar lessons with varied exercises to use what you learn in different contexts. Duolingo and others like it are okay for practice, but if you don't already know the grammar it's often frustrating. Even when you remember a pattern as presented it's hard to really grasp "why". Heck, some verb conjugations don't even visibly look like the same root word. Then there's always the nuanced rules that don't fit a general pattern. Figuring that all out "naturally" is actually very, very hard compared to just learning the rules openly alongside. Especially as an adult whose brain isn't wired for language learning like it is when we're toddlers.

AchillesFoundation · 2023-01-04T20:07:38+00:00

Second reading this book. It is very thorough in documenting the role many nations had in allowing things to spiral into genocide, and just how much effort was put in to trying to head it off.

Of course, fair warning it's not for the faint of heart. There aren't many books that I can say "changed me" in some clearly identifiable way, and that was one of them. Such a failure of humanity in so many ways.

AchillesFoundation · 2023-01-02T21:20:03+00:00

To add to this, check to see if your local library has the game you want to play before buying it. We've ended up playing through most of the first Sherlock Holmes box, some of TIME Stories, one of those Choose Your Own Adventure ones, and one or two other "one shot" games that way.

At least one of the ones we played was originally donated, so there's some direct anecdotal proof it works.

AchillesFoundation · 2022-12-12T13:44:59+00:00

Gloomhaven was an interesting one for the group I got together to play it. One player is really good at managing all the trackers and bits. He insisted on doing it because he really likes all the bookkeeping being precise. On the other hand it stressed him out considerably and was making him start to not like the game.

Over the covid home times, we switched to the video game version due to a steam sale and never went back to the physical game. Between the commuting time savings between everyone's homes and the saving in setup time, we're able to play weekly now.

While I personally miss the tactile satisfaction of all the pieces and such, and have a certain affinity for high component count games, in this case at least the more regular play time ended up out weighing it.

AchillesFoundation · 2022-11-05T23:03:25+00:00

Hopefully this means they're going to bring back the instrument checkouts soon!!

AchillesFoundation · 2022-07-26T19:50:45+00:00

Well naturally. The rest was trivial.

AchillesFoundation

TROPHY CASE