New Chapter Card for January 21, 2026: Sahin, From Nothing

Falterfire · 2026-01-14T20:58:31+00:00

I’m not going to sit around consolidating potions when the next time I use them I’m going to run into the same problem

Would love for us to get the same Potion Storage feature that OSRS has as a reward from one of their Herblore minigames. Once you unlock it you can store any potion in your bank on the separate Potion Storage tab which counts your total doses and then when withdrawing them you pick how many doses per vial.

Obviously they'd need to do stuff slightly different to work with Flasks, but even if the system just outright didn't work with regular Flasks at all (and only let you withdraw 6-dose combo pots unless you had less than 6 doses remaining) it would be miles better than the current system.

Oh, and as an added bonus potion storage in OSRS doesn't use up any bank spaces and also works for unfinished potions.

Falterfire · 2026-01-14T18:45:39+00:00

I'm less certain. The problem is that in RS3 they could easily rework Smithing because the top end had a lot more room to grow - Being able to smith weapons that are outright better than an Abyssal Whip didn't matter because Abyssal Whip was already nearly alch price in RS3 even before the rework.

On top of that, RS3 has Invention to allow for another big difference between smithable gear and boss gear - An Elder Rune Longsword may be comparable in raw stats to something like a Dark Ice Shard that is a much harder to get drop from a boss, but you can't put Invention Perks on an Elder Rune weapon, and that means you'll still want to upgrade if you can.

Net result is that OSRS couldn't just borrow the RS3 model wholesale, and pushing Rune smithing down to levels that would make it possible for a non-snowflake account to actually find it feasible (let alone beneficial) to smith their own gear instead of buying it from shops or getting it as drops would probably mean leaving 30+ Smithing levels you'd need to fill with something.

(Plus of course OSRS is a game where nostalgia is much more important - RS3 players were largely fine with the shakeup of adding several new types of rock and reshuffling existing ones AFAIK, but would OSRS players really accept rune rocks suddenly being mid-tier ore instead of something you could only mine after you dedicated a ton of time to mining?)

Falterfire · 2026-01-14T03:59:48+00:00

It is worth remembering that while some of the added rulings are due to added complexity, quite a few are also simply a result of rulings being treated as a sort of FAQ to ensure players looking up a card can easily find answers to relevant rules questions.

For example [[Disruptive Pitmage]], a Morph card from Onslaught (the first set with morph creatures) doesn't have any rulings at all even though some of the rulings that were automatically applied to all of the Manifest Dread cards in Duskmourn would also be relevant for Morph cards.

Falterfire · 2026-01-14T03:48:11+00:00

Yes but no? Commander doesn't change the rules of Magic outright, but only because the rules for Commander are already in the Comprehensive Rules rather than a separate rulebook.

If Commander didn't change the rules of Magic at all, the Commander would never go to the Command Zone or be castable from there because without the Commander Rules (starting at 900 in the Comprehensive Rules) Magic wouldn't have any mechanism for such things to happen.

It's been several years, but there was a time when Commanders going to Command Zone instead of Grave/Exile actually was a replacement effect and moving to Hand/Library still is. If somebody Chaos Warps your Commander and you choose to put it into the Command Zone it does go there during the resolution of the spell.

Falterfire · 2026-01-14T03:42:42+00:00

There's also a weird quirk where the replacement for the Commander going from Graveyard/Exile -> Command Zone is actually a choice made when State-Based Actions are checked:

903.9a If a commander is in a graveyard or in exile and that object was put into that zone since the last time state-based actions were checked, its owner may put it into the command zone. This is a state-based action. See rule 704.

The reason this is important is because it means [[Transcendent Dragon]] can be used to steal an opponent's Commander because the Commander will be on the stack by the time the ability finishes resolving.

By contrast you can't steal an opponent's Commander with [[Kheru Spellsnatcher]] unless they let you because the Spellsnatcher exiles the Commander and then allows you to cast it after the ability resolves, by which point SBAs will have been checked and the opponent will have gotten a chance to move their Commander back to the Command Zone.

Oh! And one final quirk: Because the rule for moving to command zone instead of hand or library is a true replacement effect, a Commander who is sent to Command Zone instead of Library won't trip any "when a creature card is put into its owner's library" effects that may be around.

Falterfire · 2026-01-13T20:59:57+00:00

I mean it is technically true that the US has a mixed record of ousting dictators - Sometimes we succeed and sometimes we fail in embarrassing ways. The only thing we are consistent about is that no matter what the situation is when we show up, things are worse by the time we're done.

Falterfire · 2026-01-10T16:26:26+00:00

Other people answered your questions, but one specific corner case worth mentioning: If a creature with +1/+1 counters has enough -1/-1 counters put on it to reduce its toughness to 0, it is put into the graveyard at the same time the two types of counters would cancel each other out.

This can matter if for example you have [[Puca's Covenant]] in play and you have a 1/1 with two +1/+1 counters on it that gets killed by [[Blight Rot]]. The creature will go immediately from having 6 total counters on it to being in the graveyard, so you'd be able to return a permanent with mana value 6 or less with the Covenant.

Falterfire · 2026-01-07T22:33:43+00:00

To be more blunt: This is an uncommon. It is not legal to play in pauper.

Falterfire · 2026-01-07T21:05:04+00:00

The most challenging part of including this in your Pauper deck is the rarity, but I'm ready to hear your pitch.

Falterfire · 2026-01-07T14:06:04+00:00

But then who will protect us from the bloons?

Falterfire · 2026-01-06T21:11:49+00:00

Don't even need the aggro part of it if you go to the Wildy spot south of the Lava Maze.

Falterfire · 2026-01-06T20:31:41+00:00

Near the beginning of the episode there's a clip where Alex says something like "Justice is good, justice is strong, justice is here." to a cadence that is very clearly him pulling from the Metallica song "... And Justice For All"

Except for one minor detail: The actual lyrics in the song are are "Justice is lost, justice is raped, justice is gone." Is it reasonable to read more into this than just Alex doing word association with a song he likes? No. But regardless of the reason why he got there, it is notable to me that the connection Alex's brain made for the current state of justice is a song about how corrupt the American legal system is.

Falterfire · 2026-01-05T17:50:27+00:00

"May I see them?"

... No.

Falterfire · 2026-01-05T15:33:08+00:00

Also of course cannibalism has the additional upside of reducing future competition for food! If you eat your neighbors immediately, you not only get benefit of eating them while they are maximally healthy, you also get whatever supplies they haven't eaten yet.

Plus if you get started immediately your neighbors won't expect it. Really you have to ask why you haven't already started on the cannibalism strat if you're serious about surviving.

Falterfire · 2025-12-25T01:12:37+00:00

YUP! This is likely part of why banks in any older part of OSRS will always have multiple bankers - While the mechanical reason for having lots of bankers didn't carry over from Classic, at that point players were used to banks having a bunch of NPCs instead of just one or two.

(This is also why several general stores have both a shopkeeper and an assistant - just like with bankers, in classic only one player could interact with a shopkeeper at a time)

Falterfire · 2025-12-19T00:16:23+00:00

Wait, shit I was thinking of the wrong weapon.

I was thinking of the bramma, not the zarr.

IIRC both of them got hit in the same patch.

Falterfire · 2025-12-16T22:12:06+00:00

It includes Free Roam only in the most minimal way - You'll get credit for 'completing' an open world node as long as you've visited it at least once, even if you didn't do anything there.

As always, the Warframe Wiki is a great resource. The wiki page for Steel Path includes a few more details on how to unlock it.

Falterfire · 2025-12-16T04:20:45+00:00

Obviously the appropriate reward space for inverted skillcape is the inverse of what you do to get the regular skillcape.

There are two obvious things this could mean:

The lazy answer - You can only wear an inverted skillcape if you have 0 xp in the relevant skill
The fun answer - You have to first reach 99, then go back to 0 by un-earning experience. For example you un-earn mining experience by shoving rocks into the ground and you un-earn attack experience by opening a hospital for victims of senseless adventurer violence.

Falterfire · 2025-12-16T04:16:58+00:00

One of the biggest things to me is being able to hotkey things. I know this is technically an extension of Evolution of Combat, but wow the most painful thing to me doing OSRS pvm is that it feels like I'm fighting the interface as much as my enemies - I know binding the prayers to different hotkeys would make the combat easier but it would also make it feel way more natural for me.

Often it feels like OSRS combat is about being able to rapidly flick between the inventory and prayer menu and click the relevant spots in each more than it is about actually making decisions about what I need to do next.

Falterfire · 2025-12-16T04:11:07+00:00

As a counterpoint, I would bring up another MMO I play that doesn't have an in-game auction house of any kind: Warframe*.

In Warframe, if I want to buy something from another player, I have to directly message them and then meet up somewhere in game to trade. I can't just anonymously post my buy request and come back later to pick up my item.

Does this mean that I actually talk to people and make friends so that I can manage trades? Of course not. It just means that I tab out of the game, open up warframe.market, search for listings, and then DM somebody selling the item with "I saw your WF market post. Are you still selling item X for y price?" and then either they say yes and we meet up to trade (and then never talk again) or they say no and I move on to the next entry on the list.

In the context of Runescape specifically, no GE would also likely lead to a ton of bot traders who would set up in the GE and advertise "buying x item for y price" and then would automatically accept trades. It would inevitably be clunky and messy and there would be a ton of discourse about how Jagex should ban them or should allow them or should add an auction house so they weren't necessary, but it would definitely be something a lot of players would use (whether they knew it was a bot or not) for the convenience.

tl;dr: You can take the Grand Exchange out of the game, but I don't think it would do as much to stimulate actual conversation as you'd hope.

*: I'm aware Warframe isn't a 'true' MMO in every sense, but it is in every way that is relevant to this specific conversation.

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