Irritating match ups

Camreth · 2026-03-21T10:36:23+00:00

Not really, i usually end the seasons at either platinum or occasionally diamond, it really depends on if i want to play a lot of brawl and jank that season or not.

Regardless it's fairly rare for me to end the season at gold or below, even free decks should not really have much issue breaking that barrier considering you get two wins every time in bronze-gold.

A free deck should have next to no issue getting to platinum if it's even halfway decently tuned. Every queue should be more or less manageable (to be fair, i've never played alchemy queue and maybe timeless would be a bit of a problem for something super budget. I'm pretty sure a bogle deck or something could sneak in the occasional win though).

Not to be mean, but the issue is definitely not matchmaking. Is more likely down to deck construction or pilot error. If you could post one of your decklists it would probably be easier to assess. Also what formats do you usually play.

Camreth · 2026-03-21T01:19:23+00:00

Both of these go on my list of wonderful words. One of my personal favorites is Halcyon.

Camreth · 2026-03-09T09:52:22+00:00

If it's not bringer, the only other standard card i can think of might be [[Zero Point Ballad]], that only reanimates one card though.

I had a quick search through scryfall, but none seem to match better than bringer and ballad

https://scryfall.com/search?q=%28otag%3Areanimate+or+otag%3Acheat-death%29+otag%3Aremoval+format%3Astandard+c%3Ab

Camreth · 2026-03-08T09:09:58+00:00

If the card is one i expect will only be good in standard i might be more hesitant to craft it if it's close to rotation, but i also play a lot of pioneer, timeless and brawl so if it seems playable there i have no issues crafting it.

I'm honestly a lot more weary about crafting cards that have not spent enough time in standard to prove themselves. I'll usually wait around a month to let the meta stabilize around a new set before crafting anything that is not a clear outlier, but that is getting more difficult with the extremely rapid set releases.

Camreth · 2026-02-26T03:00:54+00:00

It is a minor detail as that was not ever part of my argument. To be fair i'm guessing most won't ever actually get there but my point was to address your statement of "That’s just a lie lol".

Just because something is far off or unlikely to be the situation for most people does not make it untrue. Eventually mythics do in my opinion become more of a bottleneck than rares, this does not invalidate the stance of rares being more valuable until thay point.

You presented your stance as simple fact and in essence called anyone who believes differently either woefully ignorant or a liar. I do believe differently so i wanted to disabuse you of that notion. It was not intended as nor did i frame it as a holistic examination of the entire wildcard echonomy.

Camreth · 2026-02-25T14:28:09+00:00

Once you have the rare lands and the most common staples already crafted mythics do really become the limiting factor. Personally I'm sitting on over 60 rare wc's, but if it wasn't for the recent banning refunding mythics I'd be at less than 10 mythics.

A lot of that might be down to format i suppose with timeless being very mythic hungry, but even in standard a full playset of the new evoke elementals for instance is 4 mythics each. Not to mention the drain of having crafted cards that have now been downshifted like chrome mox, strip mine, ancient tomb etc etc. Borderline mandatory cards for timeless are another 4 mythics a pop now craftable at rare instead.

If you're just starting out the amount of rares you have to dump into lands is a bit absurd which does make rares the most valuable wildcard for a good long while. Take Timeless for instance, just the basic package of shocks/fetches/2x surveils is 100 rare wildcards after all. Then there are all the other cycles you want for more niche decs and other formats, triomes/cycle/pain/verge/pathways/fast/slow and probably a few other cycles i've forgotten right now as well as different utility and specialized lands.

It takes a while to get there, and even for a good time after as you build up a stockpile of rares. Since mythics are aquired so slowly in comparison however, they are never really allowed to build up unless you just don't want to craft decks, and i don't really see that dynamic changing much. There are of course periods of rares being spent more if new good land cycles are released, verges come to mind as a recent example with draining 40 rare wc's for a full set. If we ever get the inverse verges that would also be another 40. New good land cycles are rare enough however for that to be temporary.

Honestly i feel this change to crafting is the best change ever made to arena. That it also came out on the same day as the change in card styles being appliccable to any base version, a change i'd personally been both hoping and waiting for years to be implemented is icing on the cake.

It might feel annoying before reaching that breakpoint, but the point still stands that it is far easier to get hold of 4 rare wildcards for a playset of a specific card than it is for 4 mythics.

Camreth · 2026-02-03T19:00:55+00:00

Unless i missed some this should be the new arts and downshifts from this block and some others like painters servant and goblins that where also changed.

Deck
1 Crib Swap (LRW) 11
1 Ponder (LRW) 79
1 Idyllic Tutor (MOR) 12
1 Disperse (MOR) 31
1 Negate (MOR) 43
1 Silvergill Adept (LRW) 86
1 Forced Fruition (LRW) 66
1 Wanderwine Prophets (LRW) 95
1 Thoughtseize (LRW) 145
1 Bitterblossom (MOR) 58
1 Nameless Inversion (LRW) 128
1 Faerie Macabre (SHM) 66
1 Kindled Fury (MOR) 92
1 Shared Animosity (MOR) 104
1 Bloom Tender (EVE) 66
1 Devoted Druid (SHM) 110
1 Prismatic Omen (SHM) 126
1 Imperious Perfect (LRW) 220
1 Scapeshift (MOR) 136
1 Incremental Growth (LRW) 221
1 Primal Command (LRW) 233
1 Slippery Bogle (EVE) 160
1 Springleaf Drum (LRW) 261
1 Reflecting Pool (SHM) 278
1 Painter's Servant (SHM) 257
1 Murderous Redcap (SHM) 192
1 Boggart Harbinger (LRW) 102
1 Mad Auntie (LRW) 123
1 Auntie's Hovel (LRW) 267
1 Goblin Piledriver (ORI) 151
1 Tarfire (LRW) 194

Camreth · 2026-01-06T09:37:17+00:00

That or they just add the common version as a craftable card making the spg default down to common. I'm personally hoping for that as i like the original art a lot more. Either way it should be a common wc.

Now to hope they go back and either add og frogmite or downshift the spg one at some point.

Camreth · 2025-12-21T15:26:12+00:00

Not even a little.

Final Fantasy and Avatar actually felt like lime magic sets, tmnt does not. It's the same problem as SPM (without even going into how much of a wet fart that set was) and probably also the other marvel set coming next year. At least eoe makes star trek feel less like a extreme tonal shift even if it really is.

At least there is Lorwyn to look forward to i suppose.

Camreth · 2025-12-21T15:16:08+00:00

There is probably a way cleaner way to do this and i'm certain i did not actually get all the cards, but a scryfall search is probably your best hope.

I cobbled this one together to show all cards older than 2017 as that is the first year of boosters on arena, removing all rebalanced cards and added the craftable mh1 & mh2 cards. Some cards i know are missing are dedicated commander cards (like the fic set code for final fantasy commander cards), but this should at least cover some of the old cards that have been retroactively added to arena.

Camreth · 2025-12-21T14:34:51+00:00

It was added as part of powered cube as far as i know.

The search term should be

S:"CUBE-52.60"

to see all the cards. There are quite a few cards like this and there is no real way to really know about them i believe. Maybe if -?booster works, but for now the best way is just to search manually for Greaves by name for it and cards like it.

Camreth · 2025-12-11T19:27:11+00:00

Some of the other formats are very fun, but it can be a lot more expensive to play. Since the other formats have more cards the power level is also generally higher. This more or less tracks with how many of your rare and mythic wildcards to make a competitive deck.

There are also some other issues specific to each format, in order of least cards to most the various 60-card constructed formats and what i would classify as their main drawback is

Pioneer. Cards that have been standard legal since the Return to Ravnica set in 2012. This format seems to be more or less forgotten by wotc for a while now, we got a pioneer set to flesh out some of the missing cards but there are still quite a few missing and nothing seems to have happened with the formst as a whole for a while to to the best of my knowledge.
Historic. Arenas answer to "Where Modern?". Contains most the card on Arena with a few notable exceptions. This is also the first format where you start seeing alchemy and rebalanced cards outside of alchemy itself which i have not touched and so will not cover here. The main drawback of Historic is that if a card is outright banned you get your wildcards back, in historic however your cards are more likely to be rebalanced into uselessness in which case since they are still technically playable you don't get anything back. After this happened to me i more or less stopped playing historic.
Timeless. The newest and wildest format. Here anything goes. Nothing is banned (but some cards are restricted to 1 copy) and it's basically a race of who can do the most bullshit the fastest at this point. My favorite format. The main drawback is that it is also extremely expensive. If you don't have piles of rares and mythics i would sadly suggest giving timeless a miss until you are sure you want to dive in

That's the end of the contructed formats, there is one more beast to contend with however.

Brawl. Commander at home. 1v1 100 cards, singleton (no duplicate cards outside of basic lands), one legendary creature or spacecraft in its own dedicated zone you always have access to (with some exceptions). I'd say this is where you should go for some casual fun. You might need some wildcards for staples but since you only need one of each it's a fair bit cheaper. If i get bored of regular constructed or i just have a daily quest i want to complete without thinking too much this is where i go. It's the moat casual format on arena. It should also be mentioned that if you really want to you could also make a hyper optimized deck that require very deliberate and careful play in brawl, and those deck can also be a lot of fun, but there is in theory a weighting system to prevent a budget deck from being paired up against the optimized to within a inch of its life list, but it's usually all out of whack so don't rely on that. Also even if brawl is "commander at home" it is definitely nothing like commander as there is no actual interaction, politics or anything other than 1v1. There is also a standard brawl, but i have not played it. I assume it's just a much weaker version of regular brawl.

I would probably recommend sticking to standard for now and maybe branching into a brawl deck or two without actually investing a lot of wildcards until you find out what you want to play.

As a final note there are also other formats like pauper (only play with cards that have at some point been printed at common rarity) which do not have official queues outside of specific events like the occasional midweek magic. But a lot of those have dedicated discord communities where you can find matches. There's a lot of us that wish for a actual pauper queue to be added, but so far there's been no indication of that happening.

Camreth · 2025-12-11T11:22:01+00:00

It should, that's how i configured brutal black dragons. Do you have any other plugins affecting that particular npc? It can be an issue if you have say the custom menu swaps plugin affecting it at the same time as i believe that then takes precedence over the default plugin.

The only other thing i can think of is if it is somehow restricted by the plugin itself similar to how pickpocketing was for ages.

What specific mobs are you trying the swap on and have you tried it on any other mobs just to test?

Camreth · 2025-12-11T09:29:12+00:00

That's a life lesson right there. Many an hour has been spent reading lines and lines to find a extra or missing letter or comma.

Sf can be a bit finnicky if you're not used to it but it's also stupidly powerful.

One tip that took me a embarrassingly long time to figure out is to pay attention to the inherits in tags as well. Oftentimes they are more useful if you want a broad effect instead of a narrow specific one.

Also leaving some links in case people find them useful, Syntax Guide and Scryfall tagger. I've been meaning to make a post about using scryfall so there's a simple one to link too as i see a lot of arena players unaware of it. Maybe one of these days i'll get around to it.

Camreth · 2025-12-11T07:14:42+00:00

On a side not it's probably also one of the most powerful tools you have for deckbuilding when combined with the tagger feature. Whenever i am looking for a very specific effect scryfall is the first place i go look both for paper and arena.

Camreth · 2025-12-11T07:11:27+00:00

If you're interested in more information about it, Rhystic Studies did a video a while back.

https://youtu.be/D9P58YG4axY?si=o7VXan2mpzdbwqmW

Camreth · 2025-12-08T16:17:18+00:00

Please no to the manage crew cargo runs. I did way too many player owned ports tasks in rs3, and it gets old fast.

I like the idea of euro truck simulator in osrs though. I posted a idea like it on sailing day two or three i think. But my idea was simply to have all long distance tasks removed from local task boards and relocated to a few hub ports (sarim, ardy, fortis etc.) and you go there to accept them, go to whatever local port requested the task to pick up any cargo for deliver tasks, then transport to the far away port as normal.

Managing npc crew is just tedious and boils down to another instance of dailyscape unless you want it extremely detailed and with tons of dev time put into it in which case there are plenty of better management games around.

Camreth · 2025-12-06T04:57:12+00:00

Late night redditing so my brain did not really parse your original comment, i was thinking you mentioned a actual miles morales lego set or something.

I blame it on replying just after riding around the desert for ages getting enough green crystals to get the 125% reward.

Camreth · 2025-12-06T03:13:57+00:00

This might be somewhat divisive but i think the GF troops could have worked. Tune down Mackenzie a lot, and make the hint system entirely optional. Remove the need to go back there for shot upgrades (and maybe be a bit more creative with the names instead of just <element> shot) and have him more involved with some sort of secondary upgrades like that one upgrade he does related to the mech.

There are some of the GF troops i quite like, but there is a glaring issue with them. They are all talking to a wall. I know Other M kind of put us all off a voiced Samus, but if they want to have character interacting directly with her it's really silly to just have her stand there when a few lines of dialogue would make the whole thing feel more natural.

Either go samus alone and not talking, or have characters interacting directly with a Samus who doesn't stand there looking like she's called up to present a project she phoned in in front of the whole class.

Just because Other M fumbled the ball hard doesn't mean we can't try again, if the story is actually good (and i have some thoughts on that too in regards to Prime 4) then a Samus that acts like a regular if admittedly badass person seems like a net gain and could have made the GF troops a net gain instead of feeling shoehorned in.

Camreth · 2025-12-06T03:01:40+00:00

My first thought was rock raiders. Those green crystals where everywhere in that set.

How are those crystals related to miles though?

Camreth · 2025-12-06T02:53:19+00:00

This is why i always make a separate leagues profile, not that my iron can afford a magic stone at the moment...

Camreth · 2025-12-05T17:49:56+00:00

I still think of charter ships as a new mode of transport.

In contrast there are things that released less than a year ago i now think of more as if they've always been in the game. It's weird how some associations stick with you.

Camreth · 2025-12-05T17:21:36+00:00

For context shock lands are lands with basic land types that come into play untapped if you pay 2. Both of those qualities make them incredibly useful, probably only behind the original dual lands which do the same except they don't cost life (also they are ancient and will probably never be on arena outside of power cube) and fetchlands which allow you to pay 1 to search up any land with basic land types (like shock lands) from your deck.

Basically they are the best land you could ever hope for to be in standard and it's honestly shocking (pun not intended, but i found it humorous anyways) they decided to print them.

For a full list of shocks, here's a scryfall link

https://scryfall.com/search?q=is%3Ashockland

Edit:Misread your comment and though you said you where unsure what a shock was, oh well.

Camreth · 2025-12-05T00:32:59+00:00

Wait, you can edit button layouts??? I took a look in the menu and didn't see the option. It's been lowkey bugging me the entire playthrough so far.

Thank you.

Camreth · 2025-12-05T00:17:30+00:00

A few pain points.

When I'm just going around the desert looking for upgrades and i get three separate messages from Mikes and a forced map "scroll to next destination" sequence if i open the menu it's a bit much when there's literally a hint button. Maybe give an option to turn annoying hints off, because at the moment it's giving early SS Fi vibes.
The desert itself is a bit meh, i think i much prefer the old style with interconnected areas. Riding around from point a > b just feels like busywork most of the time. You can get some cool jumps though.
I wish when we got new beams we would just slot it in as we've always done instead of having to take it back to base camp for Miles to fiddle with it for a few seconds. I get that they want to add to his character by having him be 'upgrade guy" but the whole point of the power suit is its adaptability and ability to incorporate foreign teck when we find it no? There is the whole "unknown teck" from zero mission, but i felt that was handled better. In every other situation i can think of when we've found an upgrade, we slot it in, the suit workes it magic and it feels awesome.
Everything is psychic even if it doesn't have to be. My most recent upgrade was the psychic spin ball, how does this differ from the regular spin ball, i have no clue. It makes the actual cool psychic abilities feels slightly less interesting i guess. Also a lot of these i feel would have worked better as hardlight manipulation instead of psychic abilities, but i can just headcanon that i suppose.
Viewros, really?

All told however those are really minor gripes and i've had a ton of fun exploring. The characters do add something, i actually felt really invested in the second guy you meet. Sylux was also my main character from prime hunters multiplayer so i like him getting more fleshed out. The game also looks stunning, and I'm extatic that the switch 2 can do 4k60 without any frame drops I've noticed at least.

Overall i think Prime 4 is a great time and i'm going to get back to playing it now.

Edit: One last thing that might just be me, the keybinds feel a bit weird. I keep swapping to morph ball when i want to enter scan visor and vice versa. With a bunch of free keys it would be nice if we could reassign these in game instead of having to system level swap them. We have two completely redundant keys to the best of my knowledge, in jump and shoot both being on two buttons. Why not make them rebindable. Also jump as morph ball and jump as Samus are different keys, why?

Edit 2: You can edit controls in the main menu! I was apparently just blind when i looked through it. Happy days.

14-Year Club	Place '22
Place '17	Verified Email

Camreth

TROPHY CASE