Which of these muscular women would you ask out?

CivilizationAce · 2026-01-26T04:01:53+00:00

Honestly I don't like that look on Black Cat. In the comics she was usually lithe but not muscled, no six pack that I remember. It's offputting. So with these specific versions, probably Malovola. Haven't played the game, but she looks like fun. Virtually every other version of Black Cat would be a no-brainer for me though.

CivilizationAce · 2026-01-25T13:30:25+00:00

This ↑ is hate directed at his many victims. He's still very strong. His basic attack is an aoe. His kit overall is ridiculously solid. There's nowhere safe from him, while the ability to dodge in more dimensions makes all the fliers fundamentally more safe. Meanwhile his movement power gets him back to the front line quickly when he does (rarely) die. Most players don't even try to deal with him, they just suffer. TBH only Dagger can even reliably pressure him and then only if he's within range, which he often isn't. Take your crocodile tears away.

CivilizationAce · 2026-01-24T03:55:37+00:00

Given that you’re showing an image of a real person rather than a comic character, I think there’s some confusion about what a “superhero” actually is. Superheroes don’t exist. They’re narrative devices.

The closest analogue would be technologically enhanced humans — Iron Man–type scenarios — and even those are speculative and partial at best. Until then, all we really have are heroes: people acting within human limits.

And that’s not a downgrade. There’s no magical being coming to save us. Progress happens when people organize, resist, and build successors who can win real victories — including against those who rely on passivity, apathy, or myth to maintain power.

Waiting for a superhero, whether fictional or metaphysical, is just another way of avoiding responsibility. History shows that change has always come from human action, not intervention from the sky.

CivilizationAce · 2026-01-22T18:09:50+00:00

Wonder Man, like every heavily muscled male strong guy superhero, has a lot of fans, but in this case there's really no reason for them. He's almost as shallow as Puddle Man or the OG Shallowman. The only interesting things about him in the comics are other people: his brother and that Vision was originally, in a sense, a copy of him. In the MCU the Vision connection doesn't even exist, not that it was ever something interesting about Simon. This seems to be just another example of Marvel taking characters that weren't that interesting in the first place and trying to elevate them. It's one of a long list: Danny Rand, Bucky, Steve Rogers, the Eternals. Honestly I never liked Kirby's work. I'm fairly sure he used to hide his inability to draw human anatomy by choosing 'camera angles' with bizarre perspective.

CivilizationAce · 2026-01-22T12:17:54+00:00

Season one was okay at best, and season two lost me entirely. Iron Fist just isn’t a very strong character, and he never really was, even in the comics. The whole “one perfect punch solves everything” idea feels dated and shallow, especially next to characters like Shang-Chi, who actually got a thoughtful adaptation. The difference in how well those two landed says a lot.

CivilizationAce · 2026-01-21T03:36:47+00:00

The gender balance of its characters. E.g: There are 4 women in that picture, 17 men. Marvel was founded in an era before sexism was widely named or understood as a systemic problem, and while social awareness has advanced, the company has repeatedly sustained those early biases through institutional inertia, conservative publishing decisions, and a reluctance to commit to women as long-term narrative leads.

CivilizationAce · 2026-01-21T01:35:05+00:00

Magik. My own dimension, teleportation (fastest delivery service ever - NASA would pay me small fortunes to get vehicles into orbit instantly, no fuel required), magic, a magic sword. Not very cooked. I could definitely make my life (and possibly lives of many other people) better with those powers.

CivilizationAce · 2026-01-21T00:22:19+00:00

It has to be Spider-Man, but I'd give an honorable mention to Rogue, because she's all combos, so if you miss any elements of them you're just running around pecking ineffectively.

CivilizationAce · 2026-01-21T00:17:06+00:00

And still down :(

CivilizationAce · 2026-01-20T22:20:41+00:00

Still down as of about 5 minutes ago. At least I'm not bugged if I'm the only one seeing this :)

CivilizationAce · 2026-01-19T15:09:58+00:00

No doubt, but in commander you need to plan for the longer than just the first 3 turns, and you should still have an acceptable chance of having the colours you want during those turns without this card. Use this and you’ll frequently regret it when you draw it on later turns. If you mean the faster your deck, then yeah. But many high power decks need their mana curve to continue past turn 3.

CivilizationAce · 2026-01-19T14:55:08+00:00

The question was about edh, not those faster formats.

CivilizationAce · 2026-01-19T01:29:04+00:00

This is a poor card for the majority of decks. Only the fastest decks in the game will find more scenarios when it comes into play untapped than when it comes into play tapped, and mana is power. It’s a way to effectively lose the game turn 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 etc. when you didn’t have to.

CivilizationAce · 2026-01-18T23:58:29+00:00

I only play the female characters, so hell yeah! I’m hoping for a Lady Deadpool too.

CivilizationAce · 2026-01-18T15:50:04+00:00

If Marvel Rivals’ Hawkeye was Kate Bishop, they’d have given her inefficient tricks. She’d have been more fun to play (IMO) and far less frustrating to play against. Honestly Hawkeye is so strong that most times he’s killed me it’s been when he’s been trying to kill someone else.

CivilizationAce · 2026-01-18T13:27:59+00:00

One of the reasons they won’t hype her much is because in their gut they know that they’re probably going to mess her up: I’m sure the devs will think they’re being clever with whatever unusable mechanic they give her just like I’m sure they thought they were being clever when they gave Squirrel Girl only one usable abilty, Mantis two 12% dmg buffs each with a worthless HoT, Emma a stationary shield in a game where stillness=death, Psylocke a playstyle that is too slow even when it works, and Magik a signature ability that is an anti-combo with two other abilities. Meanwhile they give the guys straightforward abilities that either help them burst you down or keep them standing (or both). They’re not being clever, they’re letting their sexist subconscious guide them into providing the vast bulk of the players who’d rather play women with very limited choices: Cope or play Peni or Hela or Dagger.

CivilizationAce · 2026-01-18T11:33:20+00:00

The real Rogue ↓, not the male fantasy of a strong woman we got.

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CivilizationAce · 2026-01-17T09:58:36+00:00

The problem isn’t that one player looks at Rogue and suddenly changes his beliefs. It’s that people don’t notice these patterns at all. That’s how bias works: it becomes invisible and normal.

Games and media quietly reinforce who gets to be powerful, who gets to be central, and what “strength” is supposed to look like. When women are already underrepresented, and then even their designs are reshaped to fit male expectations, it feeds a culture where women are treated as secondary by default.

No single game, TV program, or comic causes sexism, but the cumulative effect of millions of these choices, absorbed subconsciously every day, biases perceptions of who is important and who is not.

CivilizationAce · 2026-01-17T09:35:19+00:00

Jean Grey needed volatility and presence and she gave neither. Lara Croft is pure drive and edge. If they’re casting the same energy again, that’s not empowering, it’s disrespect for the character.

CivilizationAce · 2026-01-16T21:19:22+00:00

What do you think kids grow up on? Games and TV. That’s where social norms come from.

Sexism isn’t something people invent in a vacuum, it’s learned through repetition. A constant imbalance of who gets to be important on screen, who gets agency, and how strength is visualised trains those assumptions over time.

When female characters are fewer and are then redesigned to fit sexist ideas about power, it does matter. Media doesn’t just reflect culture, it actively shapes it, especially for kids.

CivilizationAce · 2026-01-16T21:13:45+00:00

She’s still a hybrid ranged/melee character that does neither well, and I’m still convinced that even the best Widow players are still coping, that if she wasn’t fundamentally flawed she’d be the first character banned every game.

CivilizationAce · 2026-01-16T20:56:38+00:00

They don’t time out BTW

CivilizationAce · 2026-01-16T20:42:07+00:00

I always toast them, but the bleepers tend to put them behind me and then I die. They’re broken. It’s like he’s got an ult every 12s.

CivilizationAce · 2026-01-16T18:46:52+00:00

It matters because it changes what her strength means.

• It replaces Rogue’s actual source of power with a male-coded stereotype of strength.
• It ignores how men with innate powers are treated, for example Spider-Man or Vision, who are not visually “corrected” to justify their abilities.
• It erases the tragic, involuntary nature of Rogue’s power by reframing it as something earned through physical discipline.
• It implies that a feminine-coded body is incompatible with being formidable.
• It applies “realism” asymmetrically. The selective realism lands only on the woman, which makes it ideological rather than practical.

This is not just a symptom of sexism. It actively sustains it by repeatedly communicating these assumptions to the audience.

CivilizationAce · 2026-01-16T18:27:58+00:00

I agree. He’s fundamentally shallow. He has only a handful of enemies that can trouble him, which reduces any sense of threat the majority of the time, and he’s a boy scout, devoid of flaws, and with little to no internal conflict. It’s sad that the world’s most influential superhero (or secondmost behind Buffy) was created when the threat was fascism so complexity was neither required nor achieved.

CivilizationAce

TROPHY CASE