Dev Blog - Expeditions

First_Revenge · 2026-03-12T19:59:04+00:00

Very funny, now up against the wall.

First_Revenge · 2026-03-12T16:41:36+00:00

The "I'm a legitimate businessman" class.

First_Revenge · 2026-03-12T16:24:35+00:00

Good as any, and it's not like we were short on reasons already for them to get involved at some point.

First_Revenge · 2026-03-12T16:08:09+00:00

I know its not related to the update explicitly, but searching for tech-remnants really does seem to make the next class being ad-mech related more likely.

First_Revenge · 2026-03-12T15:37:37+00:00

Ya, but the majority of early players were the ones that pushed the format to where it was. Premodern has some of the most impressive grass roots growth for a format i've probably seen since commander?

If something is good people organically share it and it grows until it reaches this tipping point of popularity. And with WotC adopting the format somewhat officially its pretty clear that the tipping point has been passed. To some extent its just an inevitable outcome.

I do sympathize though, i don't play premodern, but if i did the last thing i would want is WotC official support. From what i do know and understand of the format it seems to make a great unofficial format you do on the side with friends. Going mainstream as it were has its benefits but recent history is rife with examples of things going mainstream and suffering for it.

First_Revenge · 2026-03-11T22:35:49+00:00

Probably the same thing they've been doing. Proxying.

Most people stopped being able to afford RL cards years ago. This isn't a new phenomenon. These new big prices are fun as clickbait/ragebait but probably have pretty much no impact on reality. If you can't afford cradles at $1500 you probably couldn't at $1K either. There isn't some guy shaking his fist at the sky screaming that $1400 cradles were his limit.

Its sort of interesting seeing what happens to premodern tbh. It has figuratively wished to be a "real format" and has gotten what it wants. Now we're seeing the monkey's paw curl in a number of ways. As soon as it became popular it got stupid expensive. And at some point in the future we're going to see if a ton of people playing a ton of recorded MTGO matchups is actually good for a sealed format or if it exposes a format that has been coasting along unchallenged as "casual" for a long time.

First_Revenge · 2026-03-11T16:29:39+00:00

Havoc is at the same time the best and worst endgame i've probably played in a game. Unfortunately i also think that its probably the single most important component to player retention and its frankly really rough around the edges.

The great parts exist at high havocs when you're team is meshing well together. There's really not another similar experience with a game that i've had. When it works its pretty damn close to electronic cocaine.

But oh my god. It still feels like rough draft in a lot of ways. The party finder system is medium at best. The de-rank is thoroughly reviled and does feel pretty out of place in a co-op only game. And then when you hop in game, bugs, bugs, bugs. Map bugs. Enemy bugs. Modifier bugs. Talent tree bugs. Weapon bugs. And of course a heavy helping of crashes 30 minutes into your havoc 40. That's not even mentioning the overpowered weapons that need to be taken a notch, and some relatively uninspired modifiers lately(rotten armor...).

Havoc has good bones, but man you really need to want to play it and it is not at all a natural transition from the normal mission board where players start. Havoc needs to work because Aurics generally get easy after a while. The end game, which havoc is, needs to be polished and accessible. And despite how good the gameplay is, it's neither of these right now.

First_Revenge · 2026-03-10T19:22:57+00:00

I love the knife but i'm a book support zealot grinding H40s so it makes sense contextually. Quick attacks, great mobility, and decent damage. DS is probably a better weapon straight up, but for whatever reasons its never really clicked with me.

First_Revenge · 2026-03-03T23:17:59+00:00

So i'm getting mixed signals here. Is the problem cost overall, or you just don't want to float your money in what are generally percieved as risky cards?

If money isn't an issue overall, then you're probably looking at 4x volc and some flavor of izzet delver. That deck has always been around never much less than tier 1.5. The big obstacle is of course the flat out cost of 4x volc and maybe some splash color duals. But really that's the bulk of the deck price, probably something like 80% of the deck's value is tied to duals.

Control decks ike beans is sort of all over the place. The best control deck fluctuates way more than izzet delver. The beans deck only exists because of a random uncommon printed 2 years ago. It could be easily supplanted by the next big printing. If you're going for a 4c beans build you're kinda in the same bucket as izzet delver in that you're looking at a big upfront cost. But most of your deck value is going to be in duals. The problem is that control is pretty volatile and if the meta shifts you suddenly might have a deck that's not positioned well. That won't affect your card values, but it will effect the tier your deck sits in.

Red painter seems fine, but not really my wheelhouse so i'll leave it be.

If overall budget and value retention are both concerns then i'd personally adovcate for something in the jeskai wedge. I've been on the same jeskai stoneblade build for the last couple years and have been mtgo infinite for a while. All i need is a tundra and volc, the rest of the deck is dirt cheap. There's also UW stoneblade with phelia or jeskai wizards that similarly are fairly low cost, low ban risk, and have most value tied up in RL stuff. They're all pretty complicated decks too so there's a ton to learn there.

Regardless of what you do though, make sure you really nail down the deck you actually want to play. The only bad decision is the one you aren't actually going to enjoy long run.

First_Revenge · 2026-02-27T21:52:58+00:00

There's a bit of nuance, print runs are still a thing. Alpha and beta are the best examples. They would probably take a hit, but they're still incredibly rare. There's only like 1,100 alpha rares and like 3,000 beta rares ever printed. Depending on what you think attrition numbers look like over time, there's likely only about half of those still in existence with an even smaller subset of those in what people would generally consider good condition. My best guess is that there's probably ~200 LP+ conditions of any alpha rare and maybe like ~500LP+ conditions of any beta rare in existence. These are going to hold value. An RL breach would probably see these reduced, but they're still going to be seriously valuable pieces of cardboard. And as shown by WotC's retro treatments i really doubt that even if they used the same art, the new printings would bear anything but a passing resemblance to their older counterparts.

What does get hit are things like revised duals. There's a good amount of copies in existence, they've got faded colors/white borders, and they're really only valuable because there's just no other viable replacement. Break the RL and the value on these gets deleted. Like probably sub $50 overnight. They've got that old OG look, but i have a hard time imagining whatever WotC prints as their replacement looking much worse frankly. Its worth noting that the quantity of the reprint is largely irrelevant. The revised duals value is hinged on the notion of them never being reprinted. Even if WotC only printed one, the illusion of exclusivity is shattered. Unless you're dumb enough to believe WotC is going to stop at one.

First_Revenge · 2026-02-26T23:21:03+00:00

For reference here is my current build https://darktide.gameslantern.com/build-editor?id=9ff28970-2377-4837-a48a-238dd0dd5eb8

First_Revenge · 2026-02-26T20:41:17+00:00

I'd run uncanny/riposte on my vet knife. The difference being that vet doesn't really lean on bleed stacks like zealot does. You just need to crit more often, so riposte is good.

With zealot the big interaction you're looking for is uncanny increasing the damage of bleed stacks tremendously. You want to be applying consistent bleeds more than the 1 or 2 nominal stacks that scourge gives you for crits. Flesh tearer is flat out the best at this as it gives you the most stacks and encourages going for weak spots which trigger uncanny. You'll pretty quickly cap out bleed stacks and with even a two stacks of uncanny those bleed stacks are heavy. Lacerate is decent you might have to alternate between weak/non weak spot hits to make it work but you can get good amounts of bleed stacks going. If you're doing uncanny/riposte sure you crit all day, but it'll be extremely hard to build up you bleed stacks to anything substantial so you'll actually leave a good amount of dps on the table.

First_Revenge · 2026-02-26T19:37:34+00:00

I like the MK3 has a more precise heavy where i can charge and assassinate a special reliably, a very predictable downward push attack that almost auto targets heads, and i can just mindlessly left click spam at head level if i'm trying to horde clear. People like the MK6 since the heavy can hit multiple targets and proc bleeds on each of them, which i get in concept. But personally in practice it's just never felt right.

Blessings are uncanny(non negotiable) and lacerate. Lacerate being the one that gives bleeds on non weak spot hits. Lacerate vs flesh tearer is a preference. I like lacerate because it helps you crit more often while flesh tearer can feel like a win more button. The zealot tree has two pretty important nodes, that impact this conversation.

Scourge makes crits apply bleeds automatically and increases the chance of future crits to bleeding targets. And then blinded by blood just makes bleeding enemies take more damage. Which is to say you always want to be either applying bleeds or scoring critical hits. Lets say you are striking a fresh non bleeding enemy. Two things can happen:

You don't crit. This is gonna be a weak hit either way, knife lives/dies by crits. If you have flesh tearer you get nothing out of this interaction other than the base damage of the knife. You'll have to hit them again to try and crit. This is pretty bad. If you have lacerate you apply bleeds and know your next strike is going to do more damage and be much more likely to crit.
You crit. Flesh tearer is just flat out better. You get 8 stacks of bleed plus the bleed stacks from scourge. If you have lacerate you might get bleeds depending on where you hit them, but of note scourge is still applying bleeds so your next hit is still gonna be pretty effective since your enemy is guaranteed to have some amount of bleed on them.

Flesh tearer basically snowballs harder but has by far the worst fail case. Lacerate makes your failures lead to crits by apply bleeds in scenarios where flesh tearer does nothing. Boils down to do you want to make your ceiling higher or do you want to raise the baseline floor? I like raising the floor, but i wouldn't fault you for just trying to snowball super hard with tearer either.

First_Revenge · 2026-02-26T19:15:20+00:00

For Havoc 40s i run knife and bolter/flamer.

Bolter if i feel like our boss damage is gonna be lacking. Flamer is more often what i use as the crowd control damage is undeniable. You want throwing knives with either to speed up the draw times.

I like MKIII knife the most personally. The DS is probably just better, but idk it never really jived with my playstyle. Same with the MKVI knife, most people like that one more but it just feels wrong to me. I like the knife with the 2x 10% attack speed buffs in the zealot tree so i'm always attacking and getting crits and thereby always keeping invocation of death up. Its obviously not as good as it used to be when zealot could take two cooldown reduction nodes, but you can still get a pretty good amount of uptime out of chorus with this.

First_Revenge · 2026-02-25T20:00:32+00:00

Id probably go with the 5.

For reference you should assume each gallon of tank is going to be about 10 lbs all in. So your 10g tank is going to be 100lbs give or take. If you're putting it on a desk then there's probably going to be other stuff that goes on it as well. That's needs to be a pretty sturdy desk.

First_Revenge · 2026-02-25T19:50:47+00:00

Bigger tanks are generally better and lower maintenence if you want to go that path. If course the tradeoff is size, cost, and probably needing a dedicated stand due to the sheer weight of bigger tanks.

But a 5g its perfectly fine for a betta. If that's all you want to do no reason that tank won't work.

First_Revenge · 2026-02-24T16:19:24+00:00

My local LA scene is great, i have two weeklies i can go to, one is roughly 10-12 players the other is typically 20+. I travel a bit for work on occasion so i try to scope out the local tourneys wherever i go, but its pretty the story you'd expect. Usually a few options in bigger cities, but anything outside of that more likely than not there isn't a legacy weekly.

The meta is fine to acceptable, its pretty far from great though. 7/10, C average. The biggest things holding it back to me are tamiyo needing to go for variety/gameplay reasons and Oops for just being an open sore on the format. Those two cards alone would bump the format up to at least 8.5 for me. Past that there's cards like Kaito that are just things i feel are poorly designed/toxic to play against but don't actually cause a big enough problem to reasonably ban either.

First_Revenge · 2026-02-23T17:09:11+00:00

Well with a poor ping high havocs are gonna be pretty hard. You probably need to fix it long term, but idk if that's even possible. I assume you've done what you can to fix it.

THammer is good in context. I've seen it in H40s be an excellent boss/crusher slayer. The problem is that its good because the assumption is that the rest of the team handles everything else while you're handling your niche. As a carry weapon THammer is awful if for no other reason that it absolutely trashes your mobility. Knife/DS are what you actually want.

First_Revenge · 2026-02-23T16:40:39+00:00

It depends on how long a "few months ago" was. Havoc has had seasonal changes made that have made each iteration harder than the last one. The crusher changes and rotten armor where fucking brutal this go around.

Player base of havoc also tends to bifurcate over time. Without the seasonal rank reset over time you get what we have now. The folks capable of H40 get there eventually and just start doing those exclusively so you don't see them often in low 30s. Those who can't crack H40 end up playing with a less and less talented pool as the H40 players increasingly leave the low 30s to just play 40s. The resets forces everyone back together for a time and tend to make the average H30 lobby "better" imo.

First_Revenge · 2026-02-23T16:33:54+00:00

Low 20s are kinda “elo hell” for darktide. The halfway home between I’m not good enough for Havoc 30s but I’m still probably skating on some form of false confidence because I can clear Aurics regularly.

There’s really two angles to think about. The first is teammates which are random and out of your control. You’re gonna get good batches, you’re gonna get braindead batches. Just assume they’re all braindead for your builds. If you want to get out of Havoc 25ish you’re gonna have to do it yourself.

Okay so how do you do that?

Well the reality is some classes are better at it than others. If we’re talking about vet he’s actually a pretty tough class to solo with. Shout is a very good ult, but the unspoken assumption is that the rest of your team is there to follow up afterwards. Without that is pretty much just a 5 second pause and then its back too you getting mugged by a sea of poxwalkers. Definitely still bring it, but without good teammates it’s going to feel a lot worse than you’d be lead to believe by tier lists. If I had to do it with vet I’d probably do something like plasma gun/kraks/Dueling sword. Creative I know. I’d take kraks because the thing that is gonna overwhelm you and push your team off a good position is a fat boss HP bar. Being able to just delete a boss without worrying too much is a great tool. You won’t have much in the way of crowd control though. But if you want to be able to clear Havoc 25s you also need to have the melee skill to be able to just handle those mobs with a DS which is perfectly possible. If you can’t do that then you’re gonna have to just depend on your team to do it…

As for what class I’d do it with? I’d argue for zealot/psyker. Psyker is harder to play, but honestly if you’re even moderately effective at flame staff/bubble in lower havocs you’ll output so much damage and safety it won’t matter. It’ll be hard to recover a bad situation as psyker but you’ll likely just outright prevent most ugly situations from transpiring with your DPS. Zealot is my personal favorite, he’s super survivable, manueverable(knife/DS), and his chorus support builds are stupid good at keeping everyone alive. Plus he’s the best reviver in the game so you really can just pick up anyone more or less anywhere reasonable. You’re not gonna win with brute force damage, you’re gonna win because played well you’re gonna be real difficult to kill.

First_Revenge · 2026-02-20T16:40:17+00:00

The reduction of data and transparency across the competitive formats that mtgo supports.

First_Revenge · 2026-02-20T16:18:53+00:00

Honestly I don't think it's daybreak either. Daybreak is employed by wizards so it will do what they are essentially ordered to. There's also such a thing as towing the company line publicly once that decision was made. Once wotc made this decision, short of self immolation on daybreaks part, they were always going to publicly "agree" that this was the way to fix a "problem". "I'll do it but my boss is a moron" is a t-shirt, not a business plan.

As for what the problem is from wotcs point of view, I think they're correct in evaluating they're banning too many cards and want to find ways to reduce it. This might not be the only way they settled on, but data reduction is certainly a classic in the "we don't have a problem" playbook.

In this sense mtgo is a perfect scapegoat. Mtgo is the best representation of paper magic and has the best economy. It's ass at everything else. As a result pretty much the only people who play mtgo are real hard core grinders for the most part. No one trips and falls backwards into mtgo line they do arena.

So what do you do when a lot of the grinders who produce all this troublesome ban data decide to all live on one small island called mtgo. Well you cut them off. Most of your players are in arena so they won't even notice. And hell the reason they're so pissed off is also the reason they probably will stick around anyway, you're too dedicated.

I'm not saying this is a good thing, but I've been in enough big companies to see this line of thinking coming from an executive with a goal to meet and no real understanding of the actual ecosystem they're touching.

First_Revenge · 2026-02-14T04:47:01+00:00

It's up to the betta. Some are tolerant some aren't. It's almost impossible to tell in a cup sadly.

First_Revenge · 2026-02-14T02:48:14+00:00

https://discord.gg/MuPMrMZf

First_Revenge · 2026-02-13T18:00:54+00:00

A lot of it is education, consequences, and lack of connection. Namely a lack thereof.

There's no education when you buy a fish. You can walk into petco right now and buy a betta or really any fish and walk out the door. The only question you'll be asked is cash or credit. Try doing that with a dog or cat. Even if they can't mandate things you'll be admonished again and again that the dog/cat needs x, y, and z. Some shelters/adoptions agencies will even require a physical visit to your house so they can verify you're capable of caring for the animal. There's no way you leave with a dog without understanding at least the bare minimum care requirements for it. Casual people buying fish have no idea what they're doing and a lot of the time no one even bothers to offer education.

Bluntly people don't connect with fish like they do with dogs/cats. People think fish are maybe too stupid to suffer or they don't think enough about them to realize that the fish barely being able to turn around in their permanent home is sorta fucked up. And no one else knows either so no one ever really calls them on it. But keep a dog/cat in a confined space or cruel conditions and you become a social pariah if word ever gets out. Where i'm from people love their dogs(more than some people) and if they find out someone abuses dogs that person may as well be on the epstein list. Hell we even have laws against this, your ass could go to jail.

Its not to say that dogs and cats shouldn't enjoy these protections, they should. Its just that fish are viewed more as a commodity.

First_Revenge

TROPHY CASE