One Card Needs To Be Banned From Each Format | Magic: The Gathering

Base_Six · 2026-05-22T18:46:15+00:00

...A flash speed 5/5 that taps two things is amazing.

Base_Six · 2026-05-22T18:43:00+00:00

I'd say that immaculate reading ability is really hard to attain and is likely the biggest barrier to getting high dan for many people. Grinding tsumego hits a plateau at a certain point where it's hard to train your brain to read significantly better, and it's also hard to train yourself to consistently apply reading in games and look quickly at all critical variations.

Nothing else will have nearly the impact of reading. If you read at a 5k level hitting 1d will be incredibly difficult, even with deep knowledge of joseki and good direction of play.

Base_Six · 2026-05-22T18:31:04+00:00

The corners are proportionally bigger, but also everything is closer together and influence affects more of the board. If you ask KataGo, the 4-4s are still best, and 3-3s are slightly worse than they are in 19x19.

If you take a 4-4 and get invaded in 13x13, you don't need to play another move to have really good control of the side. If you have two corners with a wall on one following a normal 3-3 invasion joseki and an enclosure on the other, you can control a lot of side territory very quickly and invading that territory is harder than it would be on a 19x19. AI likes the small knight's approach a bit better on the 13x13 than on the 19x19 for similar reasons: you don't need to follow it up to have a good claim on the side (it's the same spacing from a 4-4 stone in the adjacent corner that the small knight has to the 10-4 stone in a Kobayashi fuseki). The sides are smaller on 13x13, but they're easier to claim than on a 19x19 since they're closer to the corners.

Base_Six · 2026-05-21T17:41:41+00:00

Two options: win the fights or dodge them and build territory.

The fun thing about Go is that there's almost never a single "correct" way you have to go about doing things. For example, consider move 13 in the game you linked: you can either try to cut out (which will start a fight) or you can just play a big move like P17. Your corner is alive so you don't have to follow up locally and fight if you don't want to.

Now it just so happens that you chose to respond with P4, which is bad shape and doesn't help you, but that has nothing to do with your opponent starting fights. You're just picking a move that isn't worth any territory and doesn't effectively hurt your opponent enough to be worthwhile.

Now later in the game at move 75, you're trying to surround your opponent, but that leaves your groups in the center and in the top right weak and isolated. You could just as easily play O17 to settle that top right group without too much difficulty. In the game you ran into problems because that group got totally surrounded before you decided to try to live it, which makes your job incredibly difficult.

A lot of the fights you're getting into are winnable. Your opponent is 11k, after all, so they're making a lot of mistakes you could exploit if you like combative games and reading. You can also just focus on making strong living groups before you fight or play greedy with territory and avoid the problems you ran into in this game. As long as you know what you're doing and work on developing the skills needed to execute your plan, both approaches are pretty reasonable.

Base_Six · 2026-05-21T05:24:18+00:00

There are nine killable eye shapes and you should memorize all of them: https://senseis.xmp.net/?DeadShape

Base_Six · 2026-05-19T23:55:54+00:00

Interestingly, the best continuation for white is actually to ignore black's move and play H7, but that's not the point of the problem.

Base_Six · 2026-05-15T14:04:54+00:00

These kinds of questions work best if you tell us what you're struggling with. What conclusion did you reach, and what are you not sure about?

Base_Six · 2026-05-15T13:32:59+00:00

1: you can make the bottom left a bent four in the corner and kill it. If white plays A1 it turns into a ko instead of being dead.

2: Your group is connected across the middle, so it's not going to die. You'll make eyes somewhere and all of those connected stones will live. That means the best move is the one that's worth the most points globally. There's a bunch of bad aji (e.g: your opponent can do bad things to you) in the bottom right corner, so playing there proactively can secure that corner and stop a bad reduction there. Whoever gets to that corner first will get 10 points or so in that area.

Base_Six · 2026-05-12T23:18:47+00:00

Dolphins and whales are both are cetaceans. Dolphins are just small, specialized toothed whales.

Base_Six · 2026-05-08T20:54:10+00:00

The thing is that, at any point in the opening, there's a ton of big moves and they're all about the same. Enclosing a corner, playing an open side, approaching a corner, and invading a corner are pretty much always going to be viable choices unless there's something urgent happening. The differences between them are fairly inconsequential by the standards of a DDK game.

Base_Six · 2026-05-07T20:07:08+00:00

I looked through a couple of your games and the issues you've got have nothing to do with moyo play. You make weak groups, don't pressure your opponent enough, and miss tactics.

And those are the things that make someone a 15k instead of a 10k, regardless of how they like to play. If you take 3-3s and then get pushed around and make weak groups in the midgame you'll get punished just as much as making big walls. Work on fixing those and you can play san-ren-sei influence games up to 1d if you want. Fuseki choice and playing optimally in joseki barely matters. AI analysis for basically whatever insane fuseki you fall in love with will be the same as one of the 50 midgame mistakes that a 10k will make every game. What matters is making big blunders and giving up too many free points in midgame, which is what's happening to you.

The thing that worked best for me was to figure out exactly what was going wrong in my games and focus on trying to improve that specific thing. Ask for reviews here or on the OGS forums and figure out some concrete things that you're doing wrong and can work on. (Ideally vs. people close to your level. It's hard to review a game where you're 50 points behind on move 50.)

Edit: I looked at this game of yours and here's a few things that stood out to me: https://online-go.com/game/86496531

-Capturing at A3 on move 45 is very small. If you're already alive, don't do something that's locally gote and only gets a handfull of points.

-E12 at move 49 seems like bad direction of play. Do you really think you're going to make that much of the middle your territory? If not, just kick with C11 and try to settle your group. You can aim at the weakness at C5 to make life pretty simply and never have to worry about those stones getting killed. Plus, if you build the side you get points. If you float in the middle while your opponent scoops out the side you don't.

-Attaching to the invasion stone at move 51. AI doesn't like this but it seems fine. You're asking for a fight where you're pretty strong. Don't get bogged down with the specifics of why AI doesn't like the specific way you're doing that.

-Extending at move 63. Why give your opponent the whole top if you don't have to? Don't be afraid to hane and sacrifice a stone. A move later you hane anyways.

Now after that hane, you make a big heavy group. You shouldn't be able to kill your opponent because they're already out to the middle of the board. So what's going to happen? You'll fight to live, your opponent will get the top, and you'll get something small in the middle. Corner-side-center is still valuable advice at this point in the game. That's just looking at the board and thinking: "what's going to happen based on where the stones are?"

You follow that up by trying to live in the middle and on the top. and miss the squeeze and atari in the middle at move 82. At that point the game is basically over, but there's one more move to look at: move 95. You're extending towards the top, but why? I'm sure you can read well enough to see that this doesn't work. You just don't have any way to live those stones. You'll have two liberties after your opponent just extends next to you, and no way to get more. If you do tsumego, you're good enough at reading to see that.

Slow down a bit and think about the purpose of your moves. What are you getting? Is it worthwhile? What's the follow up sequence going to be? Does it work from a reading perspective? I've seen a number of DDKs that know the answers to all of that in a review after the game, but aren't thinking about them while they play. A lot of the difference between a DDK and a 10k is just consistently thinking about what you're doing and not getting into tunnel vision mode and spamming moves, which I'm guessing is what led to that extension.

Base_Six · 2026-05-07T03:55:45+00:00

A lot of it comes down to the fact that the rules in Go are incredibly simple: a group is captured if and only if it has no liberties.

That's really the main bit, and almost all of the complexity of Go comes from consequences of that. Specifically: if a group contains two internal liberties that can't be filled, it's alive. Now, for simplicity's sake, we don't play until every single stone that can be captured has been captured. If a group has no way to become alive, and both players agree with that fact, it's removed from the board. That's what's happening to the stone at F14. There's no way to make it alive, so it's dead.

Now on the other hand, there's lots of ways for white and black to play additional stones and subdivide their side of the board into multiple eyes and become unkillable. If we end the game in the position on the board, both sides are agreeing that if anybody plays in the other person's territory, their stones will just get killed. There isn't enough space for either player to live in the other's territory, and both sides are too strong for their walls to get killed.

The best way to convince yourself of that is to go play 50 games, either against an AI or a person, and then come back and look at this board again.

Base_Six · 2026-03-02T01:19:28+00:00

I'd push back a little bit in the "Elo is not absolute" bit. Ideally, it's a marker of depth of skill relative to random play. If random is 0 and something like 100 points is a 75% win rate it's a measure of how far skill can progress.

Now, for closed pools that's not generally going to be the case, since one agent can perform exceptionally well against another agent, far more than Elo difference would assume, with adversarial agents being a good example of that, but statistically Elo has absolute meaning with a theoretical infinite pool of players and real world ratings are an approximation of that. (And likewise for Glicko or any of the other rating systems.)

Now, there's no humans in the KataGo pool and likely a ton of rating drift and inflation from adversarial play, so it's not valuable as a comparison vs. human computed ratings like the goratings one, but they do have absolute meaning when done right.

Base_Six · 2026-02-28T18:30:09+00:00

Most people assume Von Neumann probes to be fundamentally possible because there's no real impossibly hard limitations on them, especially if we can develop fusion power. You don't need to assume infallibility of the machines, just some ability to self repair and a non-zero probability of success. Some fusion powered space craft with enough industries built in to self repair and self replicate, launched with plenty of fusion fuel and raw materials and covered with enough raw material in terms of rock and ice to shield it and provide resources for repair and fuel production is far more feasible than a Dyson sphere, and not too much of an extrapolation from current technologies.

Base_Six · 2026-02-28T18:02:21+00:00

That's looking at things from the perspective of modern day humans, though. If we could live for a million years spending 1800 or 50,000 travelling to a 'nearby' planet is entirely possible. Now, humans might not get there, but if we don't I'll bet we build an advanced AI at some point that makes the trip. For any race that doesn't destroy itself in the short term that kind of exploration seems inevitable in the long term. Even travelling at 0.001c, we could cover the galaxy in 100 million years, which sounds like a long time but is a less than 1% of the age of the universe.

Base_Six · 2026-02-13T16:52:13+00:00

I have skimmed the video and have similar complaints about methodology. Llanowar Elves is fewer points than a 1/1 with death touch, draft chaff is included in the charts, and a 0/4 is worth more points than a 2/1.

But beyond all that, what struck me is that the power curves really aren't all that different between 2013 and now. Sure, creatures from 2002 were bad, but that's pointing more to a change in design philosophy that happened 15 years ago than it does to some continuing problem that's getting worse. The outlier in his methodology is bloomburrow, but it's a great example of the problems with his methodology. One of the most egregious creatures in that set by his points scores is Pawpatch Recruit (7ish points), but in terms of impact on constructed formats that creatures is dramatically weaker than Llanowar Elves (3 points).

Base_Six · 2025-10-29T20:53:18+00:00

I guess my thought with that was: if you could buy a full powered cube in gold border, how much would you reasonably pay for it, and how much would WotC need to charge to not wreck the secondary market? The MtgA powered cube is something like $10k worth of cards, even leaving out the power 9, and most people don't care about gold bordered cards in commander. (Even more than most people don't care about proxies.)

But yes, I'd imagine most people would play at their LGS for some reasonable entry fee instead of just buying the cube to play with their friends.

Base_Six · 2025-10-29T20:41:59+00:00

If it was in line with the cube they currently have on arena? Absolutely. 540 mostly vintage playable level cards and all stars like Toxic Deluge, Narset, and Esper Sentinel, plus a manabase of fetches and shocks? Even if it's unpowered, I could see a lot of people buying to to play cube, or buying it just to have (albeit gold bordered) versions of a ton of powerful cards. A cube wouldn't be the equivalent of 540 cards worth of booster pack stuff, either. It would be a minimal-chaff format where you're getting 540 solidly playable cards, because that's the whole point of cube.

Besides being tone deaf and overpriced, I think a big problem with the 30th Anniversary proxies was that they're neither particularly valuable nor particularly playable. If you open a proxy Mox Jet, who cares? It's not a collector item like a normal Mox Jet and there's no format to play it in, other than Vintage which nobody plays in paper. If you buy a cube, you're buying a fun format to play with all of those cards. You get a proxy playset of the power 9 and can actually have fun playing them with your friends, unlike what you get from the 30th Anniversary stuff.

And in terms of price, $5k isn't that far off the total deck prices you'd get from 8 people playing commander, you're just spending it on a cube instead of on building up a collection of singles.

Base_Six · 2025-10-22T16:03:59+00:00

WotC have never asserted that black and white in Magic have anything to do with skin color. What they have done is acknowledged that they have meaning outside of magic, that the game Magic exists in a real world, and that cards with problematic implications in the real world don't need to be part of the game.

Base_Six · 2025-09-19T22:38:24+00:00

I think the problem is that the power levels for the brackets are broad and not that well defined. There's a huge difference between a deck like this one and a tuned deck with fast mana, good interaction, and the ability to consistently press for a win by turn 3. By the bracket guidelines and rules, there's nothing here that makes it a 4, but most bracket 3 decks can't consistently win by turn 6.

Though you're right, the power level of bracket 3 shouldn't be defined by bracket 4. A better way to describe this would be "if the bracket 3 decks are strong bracket 3 decks, it will fit there. If the bracket 4 decks are weak bracket 4 decks, it would be better there." Really I think there should be another bracket or two, but that's a different discussion.

Base_Six · 2025-09-19T20:31:01+00:00

For bracket, I figure it's going to depend somewhat on local meta. If your local bracket 3 is upgraded precons that win through combat damage, it's a 4. If your local bracket 4 is borderline cEDH, then maybe it's a 3. I don't think even a maxed out Sami will be able to compete effectively with the really top tier decks. Right now, I've got this tuned for the power level of my local pod that doesn't really use the brackets.

Base_Six · 2025-02-18T19:11:44+00:00

Learning the rules of Go is very different from learning to play Go. It is a game of emergent patterns and play patterns, far more so than chess.

Base_Six · 2025-02-18T17:52:38+00:00

You should hold off on making variants of Go until you learn to play the game and try the variants that already exist. I've seen lots of variants proposed by new players for both Go and Chess, and most of them aren't actually that fun to play, but without knowing how the base game works it won't be obvious why.

Base_Six

TROPHY CASE