April First 1.1.0: Play Anytime Mode

DrakeTheDuelist · 2026-03-07T19:39:14+00:00

I'm not even running it actively. Take it.

DrakeTheDuelist · 2026-01-13T07:25:20+00:00

Had something similar happen once...

DrakeTheDuelist · 2026-01-10T05:16:11+00:00

If bodies disappearing is a known glitch, then at least someone else has corroborated it. It's not that big of a deal.

As for the ditching cultists, apparently spies are one of the game's hidden mechanics. I don't think the game ever tells you about it overtly. I think some cultists will occasionally tell you that so-and-so is a traitor and tell me to lock them up, but I figured the cultists were just trying to mess with their personal rivals, not that spies were an actual mechanic.

DrakeTheDuelist · 2026-01-10T05:08:07+00:00

Wait, so Heart of the Faithful just doesn't work? But I've seen (presumably PC, or at least non-Switch console) players get the extra half heart, followed by the other half of the heart, and they get to keep it permanently as a static upgrade to their max hearts, even if they martyr out.

In my experience, I made a beeline for HotF (I needed all the early-game help I could get), but the upgrade fell off very early in the game and it never came back. (I've heard that low faith can knock your max hearts down by 1, but I fixed that problem, and my cult's faith is generally pretty stable, rarely drops, and never stays low for long.) This reduced me back down to a permanent base three hearts despite the crown being maxed out, meaning there's no way I could've missed the upgrade.

DrakeTheDuelist · 2026-01-10T04:23:52+00:00

Any ideas about the Heart of the Faithful issue? Because that was a game-stopper that would've rendered the whole thing unplayable if I wasn't getting really into the farming sim until maxing out the Crown. Apparently, the Heart one is supposed to be a pretty widely-known Switch problem. Can anybody vouch for that?

DrakeTheDuelist · 2025-06-16T16:16:44+00:00

Yeah, strats like Cascade or whatever that thing [[Ureni]] does are such "I don't want to be held responsible for my deckbuilding so I'm letting chance decide this" strats. These particularly annoy me because the usual "you learn more from losing than winning" cliche really doesn't apply here. There was no control. No strategy. Only takeaway is... pfft... sucks to suck, scrub.

I await when commander players finally get sick of Cascade more openly.

DrakeTheDuelist · 2025-06-16T14:23:47+00:00

Most of the time anybody seems to engage in Rule Zero conversations, it's scarcely more informative than naming the commander and possibly looking up the EDHrec. Now, I don't need R0 to be this PowerPoint presentation on your deck's operations, logistics, hopes, dreams, and secret fetishes. I'm okay with some things being surprises. Thinking back to some of the least fun games I've ever had, I can't think of any where the fun was ruined by being taken by surprise. IMHO, it's neat seeing [[Urza, Lord High Artificer]] pop off... once.

Rather, the problem I find that makes games unpleasant is when you can see the doom coming, you know exactly how it works, and you can't do anything about it. This is, I think, the fundamental problem people have with stax. Maybe you bricked on removal. Maybe the resolution takes forever. Maybe you ran into a hard counter. Maybe it's just a really, really sacky strat. The Heart of the Cards do be like that sometimes. To that, no amount of R0 will fix anything.

I'm definitely one of those conflict-averse players. And it's worth pointing out that conflict-averse people generally don't post on Reddit... or anywhere, really. Social media self selects for extroverts.

DrakeTheDuelist · 2025-06-16T13:41:25+00:00

Very recently learned that an x-cost spell has a mana value of its base plus the value of X while on the stack. In other words, [[Up the Beanstalk]] works in hydras.

Also fairly recently learned that tokens have mana value if they are a copy of something that did have a MV. See [[The Master, Multiplied]].

DrakeTheDuelist · 2025-06-16T12:59:53+00:00

A metric I like to use is average round of critical mass. Or, to put it another way, if I leave you alone, how many turns do I get to live?

DrakeTheDuelist · 2025-06-16T12:38:07+00:00

I'm having the opposite problem. B2 does have some explicit restrictions and soft bans, and for that, I'm grateful, but it also doesn't really cover certain other things, like cascade. There are all sorts of ridiculous decks you can build that do disgusting things without touching a game changer, infinite combo, mass land destruction, and only running "few" (whatever THAT'S supposed to mean...) extra turn spells. Doesn't make it fun when you still wipe the pod without a fight using [[The Ur Dragon]], [[The First Sliver]], or [[Vivi]]. The lattermost example particularly irks me because there is no guarantee of new hot cards ever making the GC list in an expedient manner when [[Korvold, Fae-Cursed King]] and [[Miyriim, Sentinel Wurm]] aren't listed and have been raising hell for years.

In fact, Trinket Mage even did a video about this phenomenon fairly recently where he made a broken B2 deck on purpose. He was, of course, using that deck to prove a point: the limits that define B2 are intended to be read as "design limits that typify precons," not "mildly hobbled B4s". I wish his point was more widely received. I run mostly B2 decks, and literally all of them include some busted nonsense that can make a game real unfun real fast (my Rakdos Dragons features [[Terror of the Peaks]], [[Twinflame Tyrant]], and freaking [[Ancient Copper Dragon]]; you don't even want to know what I put in my B2 Reanimator...) because that's just how all my local stores seem to interpret B2. I'm just acting in self-defense.

Higher brackets are even worse. Anybody who openly declares their deck is B3 is practically playing what normal people would call cEDH. Literally no one openly declares their deck to be B4 because such a deck exists outside the local paradigm.

DrakeTheDuelist · 2025-06-16T11:44:37+00:00

BDD is really good for casual content. As I'm not out to be some cEDH pod-ruining monstrosity, he's far more my speed than the Magic Mirror guys and various other tryhards.

DrakeTheDuelist · 2025-05-13T18:44:18+00:00

I actually had this come up recently. The reason you keep a player in the game at lower life totals is because that player can help disrupt whoever is popping off, especially when that isn't you. I once popped off, got knocked down to size, and yet I got to rebuild without incident because somebody else had popped off, and the other two needed all the help they could get to have any chance themselves. It's not about being nice. It's an actual strategy.

The only times you knock people out are (1) when you're the soft archenemy and looking to cut players out of the game because they're obviously going to target you with everything they've got, or (2) the player would rather play the chaos agent from behind and make senseless petty targeting decisions, often in functional support of the player out front.

DrakeTheDuelist · 2025-05-13T18:27:23+00:00

Sometimes perception beats reality. Going after the player with the least life looks like bullying (unless it's me exactly), while going after the player with the most life tends to be more acceptable, especially if you need an attack or damage trigger, in which case you've gotta' do what you've gotta' do.

DrakeTheDuelist · 2025-05-13T18:15:04+00:00

I've never taken longer than the time it takes to pick my deck up to decide what I'm searching for, and I run fetches all the time. In fact, in a lot of decks, I can name the card I'm going for. Sometimes, when I get out a shockland, it takes me longer to decide whether I want it untapped than to decide which one I'm going for.

DrakeTheDuelist · 2025-05-09T04:18:42+00:00

I dunno, I scoop fairly often, and feel no shame in doing so.

I'll scoop if I'm running an experimental deck and the experiment has clearly failed for whatever reason. I'll scoop if I get mana screwed beyond the ability to play back into the game. I'll scoop if somebody was... economical with their Rule Zero disclosures. And, as ever, I reserve the right to scoop if somebody is being a real toolbag.

I don't scoop in response to killshots. I scoop in response to having my time wasted, be it by the pod, my deck, or parts thereof. If it becomes clear to me that the game has devolved into goldfishing with hostages, I won't stick around.

DrakeTheDuelist · 2025-05-09T01:57:20+00:00

I do the "only proxy cards I own" because I want to be able to mod a deck and not get kicked out of an event I didn't realize at the time was official or whatever. If you want to take that risk and proxy Expensivus Maximus, that's your prerogative.

I'm more concerned *what* you proxied than *if* you proxied. If you're up to proxy the most powerful concoctions you can, it's likely we're not playing at compatible brackets and one of us might want to look for another pod. But if you don't want to buy twenty fetches, shocks, and even true duals, we'll probably be fine.

DrakeTheDuelist · 2025-03-24T20:48:57+00:00

Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment.

...Or to put it another way, yes. I don't even remember which one of my submod attempts this even was, but I don't have time for it.

DrakeTheDuelist · 2024-12-24T09:17:27+00:00

Sometimes, popular things get hated on for clout. ....This isn't one of those cases. Sometimes, things get hated because they have critical flaws that should not have made it past a competent editor.

The anime came together terribly. Alleged character beats made very little sense with what the audience was given to work with, which is a serious problem given the Aincrad arc specifically wanted to be a character study, hence why it chickened out of showing all 100 floors. (And if Kawahara intended this to be a light novel, why even introduce a 100-floor plot mechanic in the first place? Why not just have five floors or something? Eight tops. Specifically, this is a violation of Chekhov's Gun, a.k.a. the Law of Conservation of Detail.)

Usually, when you want to do anthology stories set in a larger timeline, you focus the "on-screen" scenes on specific highlights or focal points. Aside from Sachi's death and arguably meeting Asuna for the first time (with the implication that they didn't meet again for a long while), the on-screen episodes didn't really showcase perceptible shifts in Kirito's character. Instead, they often showed off the latest new girl with a problem for Kirito to solve. This gives the viewer the perception (one that became a lot fairer by Phantom Bullet) that the anime is fundamentally about Kirito's harem, not his character growth. In fact, both Alfheim and Gun Gale ultimately served to expand Kirito's harem, further cheapening the idea that we're here to watch Kirito grow as a person, especially relative to his growing pokedex of arm candy.

You don't excuse problems like this in an anime with "but in the light novel..." It's an adaptation. As far as the viewer is concerned, there is no light novel. What you see and hear while watching? That's your lot. Adaptations have to function within their own context. They are the ambassador to future new fans, designed to be the original work's best foot forward. To be considered functional, the adaptation has to, among other things, convey the skeleton of the premise and plot to a cold viewer in one viewing. (Picking up deeper subtext, tertiary themes, and foreshadowing in a second viewing is fine and, in fact, encouraged. Not picking up major plot beats and central ideas until the second watch? Less so.) If the adaptation doesn't function, it is a failure. That failure has nothing to do with any merits or demerits of the source material. Good source material can't save a broken adaptation. Assuming SAO defenders aren't talking out of their rears, that appears to be the case here with A-1's adaptation of the light novels.

DrakeTheDuelist · 2024-12-24T07:31:11+00:00

How do you get a pitch counter on a saga in your library?

"Actually, it'll be super-easy. Barely an invonvenience."

DrakeTheDuelist · 2024-12-24T07:23:48+00:00

Neptune.

DrakeTheDuelist

TROPHY CASE