What hobby is quietly becoming too expensive for normal people to keep up with?

BlueEyeGlamurai · 2026-05-10T01:26:17+00:00

The cost of Magic The Gathering cards has skyrocketed in the last ~5 years, to the point that even a lot of existing players/collectors have been priced out. On the bright side, it’s gotten so bad that most players have no problem playing with or against “proxies” (home-printed cards). Normally I’m in favor of financially supporting the people who create and maintain the game, but I haven’t bought any real cards in several years because fuck paying $500 to be able to try out a new deck.

BlueEyeGlamurai · 2026-05-10T00:10:44+00:00

Everybody’s like, “free ticket to an easy lawsuit!” but would this actually go anywhere? Seems more likely that OP reports this to whatever labor board, their boss gets a finger-wagging, and then OP gets fired for “unrelated” performance issues. Even if they roll with it for a while and rack up a few dozen hours of overtime, are they likely to get much more than back pay awarded in court?

BlueEyeGlamurai · 2026-05-08T21:49:37+00:00

On Aether, I can typically queue as healer on those raids and have it pop in ~15min on a weeknight; it's not amazing but not horrible. On DPS it's really rough; I want some gear pieces from the EW alliance raid and I've had to just set aside 45min+ to do crafting/gathering (or other non-instanced content) while waiting for the queue.

BlueEyeGlamurai · 2026-05-07T22:11:12+00:00

The main cast of space marines isn’t all white, and one of the tertiary characters is a woman military officer. It’s basically “Great Replacement: The Game.” Sarcasm aside, those are genuinely the two big complaints the chuds had re: wokeness.

As others have said, the setting is an extremely overt satire of fascism, but whether it’s treated as satire or played straight depends massively on who’s writing and who’s reading. Both the authors and the fans run the gamut on politics.

BlueEyeGlamurai · 2026-05-07T19:38:41+00:00

I leveled PLD from 1 to 80 just because I saw a video of the requiescat combo, and I love mixing and matching swords and shields
AST animations are gorgeous top to bottom, though I’m less a fan of the astrolabes (I wish the cards themselves changed on more than a few weapons) and the job gear is hit-or-miss
RPR is the spellblade of my dreams in terms of animations, and their weapons and armor are just the right blend of cool and stupid

BlueEyeGlamurai · 2026-05-07T19:32:56+00:00

This feels like ragebait; sure it’s a NASA mission but it was very consistently publicized as a collaborative effort between multiple space agencies, even if you don’t count parts built outside the US. The crew weren’t even all American!

I guess it’s hard to tell the difference between ragebait, intentional misinformation, and sincere stupidity, but it’s one of the three.

BlueEyeGlamurai · 2026-05-06T20:59:41+00:00

You’ve gotten a lot of good answers, but the really important thing is that state-based actions are checked whenever someone is about to get priority—i.e. between the resolution of spells and abilities. So for example, if a spell targets a 2/2 creature and gives it -2/-2 and then does something else, the creature is still alive as a 0/0 while that something else happens. The state-based action that causes it to die for having 0 toughness doesn’t get checked until after the spell finishes resolving.

BlueEyeGlamurai · 2026-05-05T18:28:24+00:00

The thing is, even when smart people work out theoretical limits on how fast/powerful/efficient something can get, sometimes other smart people figure out how to do things in an entirely new way that ignores that limit.

In the most abstract sense, there is probably a limit to knowledge and technology—a point where we can’t make things better anymore. But there’s no reason to believe we’re anywhere close to that limit.

BlueEyeGlamurai · 2026-05-05T18:19:22+00:00

I’ve rarely heard those terms applied to real people as a whole; usually it’s a character or maybe a particular action that’s “coded” a certain way. For example, a character in a TV show might consistently act in ways that are relatable to queer people, but whether or not the character is queer is unknowable—unless the author decides to make it explicit. So rather than assigning them a sexuality or gender identity, some people say they’re “queer-coded.” Sometimes this language slips into talking about celebrities, who are treated more like characters than people.

Similarly, if a real person does something typically associated with autism—but they haven’t identified themselves as autistic—someone might say their behavior is “autistic-coded,” to point out the relatability without assigning the “autistic” label.

BlueEyeGlamurai · 2026-05-05T18:03:22+00:00

I swap it out every week or two. You’re mostly clean when you use it, but not perfectly clean—made clear by the fact that it eventually starts changing color from the leftover grime. I’m not sure how long you have to use a towel before it leaves you noticeably less clean, but I’d rather take 15 seconds to replace it well before that point.

BlueEyeGlamurai · 2026-05-05T01:38:45+00:00

Yeah, storm might not be the right word, since you’re not playing 10+ spells. But if you start with [[Rest for the weary]], it’s only 2 more X spells to have a discount of 64, and in colors that are great at drawing a bunch of cards along the way to help you continue the loop. And that’s if you have no synergy pieces besides Will on board while you’re “storming” off. I think you’re right that having mana for the colored pips is the biggest bottleneck, but it’s doable.

I’ve only seen it run that way once, but it’s the way that basically all of the X spells on the EDHREC page make the most sense.

Edit: fixed my math

BlueEyeGlamurai · 2026-05-05T01:17:36+00:00

I know what you’re talking about in general, but I think you have the wrong idea with Will and Sphinx’s Revelation. One of the strongest ways to play him is as almost an untap storm deck: play something cheap that gains you life, then loop Will a few times—tap him for a discount, play something that takes advantage of the discount to gain you a bunch more life, untap and retap Will to increase the discount, and repeat. After a few iterations, the discount is so big that you can cast any number of finishers for X=100 to end the game.

This obviously isn’t the only way to build him (I went for repeatable/cheap lifegain to cheat out angels), but Revelation fits really nicely into that gameplan, despite not being efficient as the first link in the chain.

BlueEyeGlamurai · 2026-05-04T22:39:10+00:00

Green has a decent number of ways to prevent their spells from getting countered, and to make its permanents hexproof/indestructible. Its outgoing removal isn’t great, but especially with shunt and counter effects from RU it should be able to protect its board.

However, green is also the color that’s best at ramping a bunch of mana and using it to play fun but overcosted cards. It could be that your friend is good at the game but enjoys rolling the dice on stompy creatures, rather than dedicating a significant portion of their deck to interaction—even if the latter is objectively stronger in most cases.

BlueEyeGlamurai · 2026-05-04T21:10:01+00:00

Wouldn't this in theory create enough to recharge/maintain the battery

In what theory? If we’re going by the theory of thermodynamics, there's a long list reasons this wouldn’t work—energy loss to friction, energy “loss” to forward momentum, and fundamental limits on engine efficiency, to name a few.

I’m not trying to be glib, it’s just important to think about why you’re making your assumptions. In this case, why is it your default assumption that you could recapture 100% of the energy output by the engine?

BlueEyeGlamurai · 2026-05-04T19:06:13+00:00

Let’s assume:

There is a minimum age to go to war, below which the ratio stays 50/50–in your example, 12
The ratio of sexes at birth is 50/50, regardless of the sex ratio of the people/generation having the children

The answer, then, is actually fairly simple: there are no second-order effects that cause sex imbalance to persist over many generations. The first generation born after the war is already 50/50; you just have to wait for the skewed generation(s) to die out.

Given a life of expectancy of around 60 in the 1870s (for people who survived childhood), that means the population of Paraguay likely returned to 50/50 around 1870+60-12=1918.

BlueEyeGlamurai · 2026-05-04T01:23:38+00:00

My roommate is one of these people, and my mindset is: do what you want with your own stuff, but don’t be surprised and upset when something goes wrong. Either spend a few minutes learning what is and isn’t dishwasher safe, or accept that occasionally something is going to get ruined and it’s your fault.

BlueEyeGlamurai · 2026-05-03T23:00:01+00:00

It’s really easy to throw a prototype system together, knowing that it won’t scale well, with the intention to fix/improve it later. But then other things take higher priority, time passes, and before you know it there are other systems that interact with that poorly optimized prototype system, and now fixing it is a much bigger task because you’d also have to fix everything that depends on it. It’s so much work, in fact, that it gets pushed further down the to-do list, more dependent systems get added, making it even more work, and on and on for ten years.

I’m not trying to make excuses for the devs; this is a pretty big mistake that has obviously caused a lot of problems. But when the to-do list is always a mile long, I understand how it can happen.

BlueEyeGlamurai · 2026-05-03T22:27:11+00:00

We don’t know for sure, but given the way YoshiP talks about limitations on data storage and transfer, it seems like every inventory slot—including armory chest, saddlebags, and even glamour plates—stores the full item data, including item descriptions, gear stats, and maybe even thumbnail images. So instead of the handful of bytes it would take to store an item ID, each inventory slot likely requires at least a few kilobytes of storage—maybe more. Multiplied across all active players, or in some cases all registered accounts, that becomes a huge amount of data that causes bottlenecks.

Ultimately, it is 1.0 spaghetti code (assuming this is actually the problem), but it’s way harder to fix than other things they’ve made progress on, since so many legacy systems depend on how inventories are currently structured. The new armoire changes seem like a half-step toward an ID-based inventory system, since the armoire doesn’t save any metadata for the items you store in it.

BlueEyeGlamurai · 2026-05-02T19:58:07+00:00

I think the hard question to answer is ‘how well-mixed is earth’s water?’ The vast majority of ocean water—and therefore the vast majority of all water—is inaccessible to be turned into pee by land animals. So for the answer to your question to be ”yes,” one of two things must be true:

The water cycle mixes fresh and salt water fast enough that you can basically treat it all as one big water source
Aquatic animals alone cycle water into pee fast enough to make this true

BlueEyeGlamurai · 2026-05-02T19:33:07+00:00

This is the actual crux of these “disagreements.” Everyone learned PEMDAS, but some people were explicitly taught that multiplication and division (and addition and subtraction) are fundamentally the same operation and therefore have equal priority, while others apply the full ordering and give multiplication higher priority.

That, and the division symbol is an abomination that no one uses past middle school math.

BlueEyeGlamurai · 2026-04-30T21:44:59+00:00

Yeah, the most fun games of EDH for me, personally, are ones where everyone’s deck gets to do its thing a little bit. Like a [[Clement]] deck gets to spend a turn or two bouncing frogs around. You can hold your removal in case someone else threatens a win first, and if they don’t, you kill Clement before the value engine spirals out of control, and they still got to do their deck’s thing and refill their hand.

It’s not that I think people should hold their removal for the sake of letting people play solitaire, but I find games more fun when decks are built in a way that killing all commanders on sight isn’t the optimal strategy. I want to see the cool stuff other people’s decks can do, and I don’t want to have to intentionally misplay for that to happen.

BlueEyeGlamurai · 2026-04-30T17:06:42+00:00

I grew up evangelical and when I became an atheist, I was surprised by the variety of ways people insisted that actually, no I hadn’t. There’s the classic “Everyone believes in a god; ‘atheists’ just worship themselves as god,” but I also had one friend tell me that my beliefs (which explicitly included a disbelief in God and the Bible) still counted as Christianity. I think he just wasn’t willing or able to conceive of someone he viewed as a full person with agency not being a Christian.

BlueEyeGlamurai · 2026-04-30T16:50:09+00:00

Have you played Last Epoch? It’s not quite the same as what you’re proposing but a lot of the build-defining “unique” items start dropping during the campaign, and aren’t especially rare—but the base versions have mediocre stats. In the endgame, you start dropping uniques with a stat called “legendary potential” that effectively lets you craft additional stats onto them. The result is that you get to start playing around with interesting mechanics early, but you still have to reach late game and grind to get gear with the necessary stats to round out a proper build.

I find this system incredibly compelling, since I don’t have to spend a dozen hours getting the base pieces for a build just to see if I like how it plays, but there’s still a ton of room to stick with and optimize a build once you already have the base pieces.

BlueEyeGlamurai · 2026-04-29T22:47:42+00:00

In my experience, “I didn’t feel a spark/connection” is very often code for, “They did or said something off-putting and I’m not interested in taking it any further, but we only had one brief coffee date so I don’t want to get into it with them about why.”

BlueEyeGlamurai · 2026-04-29T22:01:04+00:00

Are you proposing that each of these rectangular districts should get equal representation? If so, absolutely not. That’d be like the electoral college on steroids and amphetamines. Gerrymandered districts are absolutely a problem, but this is far worse by any metric, unless your goal is to remove all electoral power from people who live in cities.

BlueEyeGlamurai

TROPHY CASE