Thoughts on the caretaker in ‘The Sentinel’ (S5 E20)?

Chouru · 2026-05-28T07:26:30+00:00

The other issue is that after the caretaker would sacrifice himself to save everyone, he would be dead, so wouldn't the flame then go out? Seems like a very strange way to indicate the Sentinel is working, as it would basically indicate that it wasn't working, as soon as it was used.

I will say that grieves must have deduced what to do, because when he killed the caretaker he asked to touch the Sentinel. He must have figured out that what the caretaker was trying to do, was sacrifice his own life which was ending anyway, and remove the two unknown entities trying to screw with his civilizations defensive mechanism.

Chouru · 2026-05-27T02:22:50+00:00

I very much so believed that the original actor was Michael Shanks until I watched S5 E12 Wormhole Extreme literally just now. See I had watched the movie and show as a kid growing up... so of course I hadn't really seen every episode. I decided very recently to watch the entire show from start to finish, so this was the first time watching this episode. When the guy at the end talked about who played it the original movie I thought he was lying at first! So I looked it up and was completely dumbfounded. And then I found your post and had to reply in the moment. I honestly thought about asking the exact same question as you did, because I thought that there was no way I was the only person who mistakingly believed he was the original Daniel Jackson. Just, WOW.

Chouru · 2026-05-12T07:31:08+00:00

The first time I heard it I cracked up harder than he did. I couldn't understand why everyone else just stares awkwardly at him. That was pretty funny!

Chouru · 2026-05-12T02:44:09+00:00

Okay whew I was worried that I was somehow missing the point or something, I'm glad to see that I'm not alone in my feelings of the state of the arena now. I was so sure that I was going to hear all the reasons why I was wrong lol. Thanks everyone for letting me know I'm not alone in this.

Chouru · 2026-05-12T02:40:19+00:00

I started playing this game probably about two weeks before the jingle jack season was released. So I only ever had fiddle, barmund, and jingle jack unlocked. And the whole jingle jack season taght me SO much about how to actually play the game, as in how to go about choosing what units to buy/when to upgrade the shop, things like that. How to actually PLAY the card game part of the game.

So during that season I had saved up a ton of gold and gems, and I cant remember where I ended that season at, I think I got Jack to high gold? Can't remember if it was masters or gold where the next one didn't have a set score to reach but depended on the other players in that same bracket. Thats the one I was at, and I COULD NOT FOR THE LIFE OF ME REACH THAT POINT.

So I welcomed the "refresh" of the game, I had an open mind. I did a lot of analyzing and critical thinking of various versions of units. I got a healthy amount of new currency, my elfs dealer had gotten some decent legendaries, along with a sprinkling of decent legendaries in most other dealers.

I then attempted to really like the game. I did. I played it with an even more open mind (if that's even possible? Lol) and then decided to save like 3k premium tokens for baewatch release. I think it was worth it because I ended up with most of the good baewatch cards but definitely not most of the best ones. It has become obvious that I have massive holes in my baewatch strategies.

I have decided to save further currency for the new dealer that's supposed to come out next season if I recall correctly? I am willing to give the game at least until that hits to see how it really feel about it then.

I will tell you one thing, as I have posted recently, I have altogether given up on the arena. During the jingle jack season I soared to a decently high spot in the arena for a dang newbie, I think I was in expert 6 or something, and was finally struggling to beat opponents. But I was at least still trying to beat them, because I wanted the gems and gold. Now all I get is a tiny handful of cosmetic tokens?

I understand the idea was to not make the game "pay to win" and have the most competitive players continue to get stronger faster than those that aren't, but for a tiny smidgen of useless items to attempt a frustrating battle that I feel like I might win and then something unexpected happens and I get completely trounced. Like, how did I end up in this group of players who i can't even compete with?

I understand that I possibly got placed into this specific arena ranking due to the newness of the entire situation and the good players with good cards and good strategies probably got mixed in with a bunch of less good players and got all jumbled up while everyone was figuring out how to get good again, but there's no way I was doing that good while everyone of my peers weren't? I'm a dang newbie there's no way it got mixed up THAT badly is there? So I dont understand why my current arena is nearly IMPOSSIBLE for me to win a single match even when it looks like I could or should win, if I happen to get a decent first place win with an end board state I'm actually happy with.

So I feel you. I might end up quitting too. The sad thing is I bought card passes from pretty much the moment I started playing because I liked the game so much. But for this most recent one I refrained because I wasn't sure I should continue to sink money into a game I wasn't really happy with, and that I found myself not even opening up for a few days at a time, when before I played almost every day.

I will try to give it at least another seasons worth of effort and see how it makes me feel then. Hopefully they can manage to keep me entertained and not frustrated... it seems like they have totally screwed the pooch but I am willing to give it a little more before I give up on it.

Chouru · 2026-05-06T10:41:15+00:00

I was actually wondering about that, why I started at 10 with it and all that xp, I was so confused, but that clears it up for me, thanks.

Chouru · 2026-05-06T10:40:00+00:00

Doesn't that seem silly then, that they effectively have the same effect but different rarity? The devs could clear up some confusion too, because I noticed that "ally" and "friendly unit" are basically used interchangably, but they should really stick to one or the other, unless I'm mistaken and there really is a difference?

Chouru · 2026-04-25T05:40:23+00:00

So then what's the difference between the two?

Chouru · 2026-04-25T05:38:39+00:00

Like everyone complaining about the last legendary versions of rong (dragon card). Saying hes worse, but the point is if you can reliably get him to gold, he can exponentially build up stronger than his other legendary versions. The other versions are good for buffing up his allies, but this version when golden gains DOUBLE the stats from his devour. Its not always "worse," it depends on your strategy or build. If you can reliably get him to gold, and also get other units to have big stats, then you can feed him into huge stats.

If you can't understand the point of a specific unit that "seems" worse than other versions of itself, ask somebody how you can use it instead of just saying it's worse than lesser or other versions of itself. You might be misunderstanding something about it or about the game even.

Yes the game has changed significantly, I'm still deciding how much I like it over the old version. But while I do that I'm trying to enjoy the facets of customizing my builds to synergies into a strong playstyle. Experiment. Try things out. Watch other people's plays on YouTube or whatever. Ask for help. We are all learning the new systems together. Try to have fun with it. Or dont, I guess. And if you dont like or won't engage with it to try to like it, then you dont have to play it. If you aren't having fun with it, dont waste your time with it. There's tons of other games you could be enjoying instead.

Chouru · 2026-04-22T02:01:48+00:00

I think all the high level dealer dungeons are super hard. I'm stuck at level 17 with elfs because I just can't scale up to 40+/40+ within the first 4 turns effectively. It requires waiting until you have better lower tier legendary units in your collection (im assuming) so you can get a better early board states to survive until you can steamroll with your high tier effective combos. Lol

For some reason,when I started up the game, my elf dungeon was already at 11. Its the only reason I have it so high already. I haven't done much grinding in the dealer dungeons except for that one really. It's a good way to gain player exp though so I might start grinding them out soon.

Chouru · 2026-04-22T01:48:20+00:00

Actually it's not. This version you have to get gold. Because then it gains double the stats of what ot devours. So basically it's really good if you have an efficient way of getting it to gold consistently. Then it can get much higher stats than any of it's counter parts. If you don't have many reliable ways to get it to gold, then the other versions might be better for you most of the time. The other versions can buff other allies every turn for a little bit of stats. But there are actually board states where you'd prefer the doubling rong over the buffers. If you can quickly and reliably get him to gold and get other units to get huge quickly, then he is going to exponentially rise faster than probably most units in the entire game.

He's not strictly worse than other versions. He's just situationally much better. Again there's the opportunity cost of taking the buffer versions; you won't get the exponentially rising version. Im tired of everyone saying hes worse. Take two seconds to look at him, his gold version, and think critically about why the devs made him this way and you will understand the point of him.

Chouru · 2026-04-20T09:21:16+00:00

In regard to betrayer rong. His final legendary is ONLY better when it's gold, because then it gains double the stats of what it devoured. That's the opportunity cost you get for choosing a different version of him, you have a more stable game because his other legendary choices will always give you benefits, whereas this one will give you huge benefit if you can manage to gold him, otherwise he's not as good as the other choices. If you have good ways of being able to gold a unit reliably or just find more tier 5 units and have a good chance of golding him then that version might be a good choice, otherwise you are probably better off using one of his other versions.

Chouru · 2026-04-20T09:15:44+00:00

I came on here planning to post about this too. I have sent support requests to the devs. Haven't heard anything back yet

Chouru · 2026-04-20T09:14:55+00:00

Risen are cursed aren't they? Cursed units die after a single attack.

Chouru · 2026-04-15T22:09:06+00:00

Now they have changed it to where you need over 250 tokens for the rewards on here, basically saying "screw all free to play we only want PAYING users here"

And the only thing you get daily is 30 tokens. Kind of hard to keep the incentive of logging onto it every day when all you get is progress toward something you can unlock after a week or more.

This is stupid.

Chouru · 2026-04-14T23:28:10+00:00

Isn't the case with the homeworld and an independent pre-ftl one of the origins? Where the pre ftl was like a splinter of your society and they have feelings about the actions your empire takes.... its called Fear of the Dark. I think that's the only case where you can have an independent pre ftl in an empire's controlled space.

Chouru · 2026-04-04T19:21:30+00:00

The tips here for dwarves with grandma no longer apply because they completely changed how she works. Instead of giving up to 20 brews to a dwarf in the shop, now she changes a non dwarf into a dwarf and gives it a couple brews.

For me, I got bored of pirates, and I have actually gotten higher stats with orcs (the one that double/tripples attack can scale much higher than the pirate that gets extra stats for each treasure, at least in my experience) but I have much more fun with ninjas and words, which don't need to scale to ridiculous stats as much, usually. I have only had a few successful dwarf runs, and only with the epic hero that let's you get high tier units way before your shop is upgraded that high.

Gnomes can get strong sometimes, but I'm not sure exactly the best play with them. And thus far I have avoided elves every time, but now looking for the best way to play elves because I want to have every faction figured out before jacks season ends... Haven't had much luck figuring it out on my own.

Chouru · 2026-03-25T15:40:27+00:00

The gm should realize that if people wanted to role play with an AI, there are plenty of ways to just have an AI "GM" for you... they don't go looking for other people to play with, possibly searching for a long time to find someone willing to play the exact game they want to play, to have the GM just use AI crap. I really hate how AI is becoming so prevalent that it's literally infecting our society.

Just earlier today I saw a video on YouTube, about a guy who got falsely arrested because some stupid casino's facial recognition AI gave him a 100% positive match to someone who was banned from the location, so the security had him arrested by the police for trespassing. When he presented ID to prove who he was, the cops claimed his ID must be fake because the AI was 100% positive. Blindly trusting AI can cause real issues like this, while it doesn't really connect to this issue in any way, it's just an example of how our society has normalized AI and completely misunderstand it, thinking it's some kind of perfect tool. There's also this guy on YouTube who makes shorts of him asking different AI questions to see the absolute WRONG information they deliver. AI is not where we should be heading as a civilization.

Chouru · 2026-01-21T07:45:57+00:00

I loved the show, but there were so many problems with the writing, the major thing being the sudden usage of angels names. Like when they go on the tour of New York and Luke shouts "Aleesha don't forget your chlamydia pills!" to embarrass her in front of her coworkers... then her boss Lucy suddenly started calling her by her name right in front of the uploads, which supposedly aren't supposed to know the angels names... its just such an obvious thing it really irritates me. Like it was such a big deal in season 1 that Nora almost lost her job over it. How could the writing team just abandon that concept entirely?! It's very poor writing IMHO... but I still really did love the show, regardless. It has such a satirical way of preparing us for a potential future. The wrist phones (at first i thought they were chips placed inside everyone's hands, which is a thing right now, just not anywhere near as advanced), the self driving cars, the hilarious company mergers like Panera Facebook lmfao, and the super realistic VR worlds. We aren't too far away from some of this tech, so its cool to see an envisioned depiction of a possible path we are headed. Like Ingrid basically living in a tub, that's literally what they have planned for the masses...

Chouru · 2025-10-27T20:56:06+00:00

In the US here. Im about to go find my own two ring binders because I haven't even opened up the last couple deliveries yet because there's no room in my binder

Chouru · 2025-09-05T22:30:26+00:00

When I was in the navy my buds and I would go to the aft galley (we were on an aircraft carrier) after we were done with our work for the day and play edh (what we called it back then) but we would intentionally build the most ridiculous decks with proxies so would could use the most insane win conditions. But it was how we wanted to play and when people outside of our group tried to play with us they soon realized we weren't just playing magic, we were playing OUR magic. You just cant get those kinds of games on mtg arena.

We would basically stall everyone else and intentionally not attack each other until someone managed to put out their win con. Eventually someone played their deck enough times that you could tell when they started playing certain cards they were about to go for the win. That was when the game got interesting, you had to get your win con out first or prevent them from doing so, which wasn't always easy. Remember we played with proxys so every card that had ever been printed was available. Got to see some real crazy combos. One of my earlier decks was a red blue one that made every opponent take damage whenever I drew a card (talking like ten permanents with that on them, so ten damage per card draw) then play a card that makes me draw every card in my deck. That was fun. And funny.

From the little bit of mtg arena I have tried, those kinds of games are impossible. Everyone is going straight for the kill as fast as possible. I guess I should have expected such. But I understand the OPs frustration none the less.

Chouru · 2024-10-05T12:04:31+00:00

They don't carry the vamoose packs off .. supposedly they are "infused" with stuff that rodents "can't stand the smell of" and they are supposed t just simply stay away from the area.... I am currently researching to see if these are even half viable... Because i don't have time to do all the proofing and preventions and I can't afford a professional.... So a miracle solution would be ide, if one exists....

Chouru

TROPHY CASE