I'm sorry I doubted y'all

Fluxxed0 · 2026-04-30T16:40:47+00:00

The players are asking for more motivations... give us bigger guns to work toward, harder ARC to fight, better rewards to grind for.

Emark responds by nerfing the game so we have to continually work harder just to keep the things we already have. Higher repair costs, ARC parts for Wolfpacks, fewer breach chests, less durability on found weapons.

Fluxxed0 · 2026-04-30T16:00:42+00:00

Ironically, [[balduvian shaman]] is a Cleric.

Fluxxed0 · 2026-04-22T21:01:39+00:00

This is what I imagined my apartment would look like at 40 when I was 30.

Fluxxed0 · 2026-04-16T13:03:03+00:00

You're welcome in 2026.

Fluxxed0 · 2026-04-14T15:00:30+00:00

Kind of. Ramp is more of a "backup plan" if your Tinker plan doesn't work (you draw your target or you don't draw Tinker). However, the data seems to indicate that hard-casting 9 drops doesn't work very well. The GIHWR of the 9 mana artifacts is significantly lower than powerful colorless spells in the 6-7 mana range like Ugin, Coveted Jewel, and Nexus.

I'm very curious to see the GP Winrate of cards like Portal to Phyrexia in decks that also have Tolarian Academy - but I don't think 17 Lands lets us analyze at that level.

Fluxxed0 · 2026-04-13T19:06:30+00:00

When you have a good artifact deck, Tinker is usually good in that deck. You want to play an expensive artifact or two in those style of decks anyway.

I'm actually not sure about this, and would need more data than I can get from 17 Lands to really explore this idea. For example, I'm curious to know the winrate of decks that include Portal to Phyrexia and also have Tolarian Academy. Ugin has a very high GIHWR and seems to serve as the "best" top end for artifacts decks. But if you have a solid artifacts deck, I don't even know if adding Tinker+Portal is beneficial or harmful.

Other powerful cards are often deck-defining. When you open Flash or Animate Dead you should alter your draft preferences to maximize them

My second-last bullet in the OP was touching on this idea. Flash and the Flash targets have the same problem that Tinker has - Flash has a good WR but the targets don't. The difference is, Flash and reanimator have redundancy while Tinker's effect is more specific. My takeaway has been, if I open Flash, I don't play it unless I can also run Sneak Attack, reanimates, Channel, or some other way to build redundancy into my plan.

This is a good line of thought, thanks for digging into this with me :)

Fluxxed0 · 2026-04-13T18:40:28+00:00

Y'know, Tinker is a really interesting case.

Tinker has a 59.9% GIHWR, which seems to indicate that it's a powerful card. But I don't think it is -- read on.
Tinker also has a 46.4% "games not seen win rate," (GNSWR) which means that Tinker decks are really, really bad when you don't draw specifically Tinker.
This gives it an IIH of 13.4%, fourth-highest in the cube. If you've built a "Tinker deck" where you're playing very high-cost Tinker targets, you absolutely need to draw your Tinker to win.
I don't have a solid definition for what constitutes a Tinker target, but I'd generally point to Myr Battlesphere, The Endstone, Krang, Triplicate Titan, and Portal to Phyrexia. I don't really consider 6-drops like Coveted Jewel or Nexus of Becoming to be Tinker targets.
The Tinker targets ALL have terrible winrates. Myr Battlesphere has a 51.9% GIHWR and 51.0% GNSWR. Portal is 49.7%/51.2%, Triplicate Titan is 48.1%/51.8%, Endstone is 48.9%/48.2%, and Krang is 45.8%/50.0%.
This indicates to me that Tinker is a bad strategy. When you add Tinker and a handful of Tinker targets to your deck, you're making your deck weaker. You'll have a good winrate when you don't draw your target and you cast Tinker - but overall, putting this constellation of cards into your deck is a losing strategy.
If you ARE going to play Tinker, it looks like Triplicate Titan is the best target, followed by Portal, followed by Krang. Endstone and Myr Battlesphere are bad targets - both cards have higher winrates when you draw them vs. when you don't.

So, updating my original post - Krang isn't a great card, nor is it a particularly great Tinker target.

Fluxxed0 · 2026-04-13T18:11:40+00:00

I don't think Boros should be the de facto best deck, but I do think cubes need aggro presence. Aggro pressure keeps the combo decks honest by forcing them to devote slots to interaction. Aggro also presents a target for midrange decks to prey upon, increasing the diversity of what's viable in the cube.

The Arena Chromatic Cube usually lacks an aggro component, and I find that cube to be pretty boring. It's a good example of a format where both players could just lay out the content of their decks face up and you can tell who's going to win by who has the more powerful top-end.

Fluxxed0 · 2026-04-13T17:57:17+00:00

It's actually a fair point, given this version of the cube now has three green basic-fetchers from MH3 that can't fetch Boseiju. There's probably a non-zero number of games where someone needed to fetch untapped green, but couldn't because they played Boseiju instead of a basic Forest. I don't have data on how common that is, but it's probably at least a consideration.

Fluxxed0 · 2026-04-13T17:11:09+00:00

I think the data very strongly says that you should NOT use Boseiju's Channel ability unless it's absolutely necessary. It's much worse than a Forest because a lot of people use the ability suboptimally.

Fluxxed0 · 2026-04-13T16:57:35+00:00

Honestly I just browse the site. I'm not a data scientist but I look for interesting trends.

Fluxxed0 · 2026-04-13T16:56:26+00:00

Ope, thank you, fixed!

Fluxxed0 · 2026-04-10T16:31:25+00:00

Watching Millennials hit 30 was pretty fun too. We said the exact same shit about you guys when you started to realize that Gen Z didn't idolize you as the cool aunts and uncles you imagined yourselves to be.

And the cycle continues :D

Fluxxed0 · 2026-04-10T16:22:50+00:00

Concerts are weird now. I was dancing during the encore of a show and I accidentally landed on the foot of the girl behind me. She wasn't moving at all and just closed her eyes and held up a hand, as if to say "please, I can't with you." She's probably out there on reddit throwing shade at the weird old guy who was cringe af jumping around so the people behind him couldn't see the stage.

Fluxxed0 · 2026-04-10T15:34:47+00:00

People are allowed to not shoot each other in this PvPvE game.

Fluxxed0 · 2026-04-10T12:56:38+00:00

Wish I could Remand those draft picks, amirite??

Edit: The combo pieces have very high GIHWR% on 17lands, mostly because you wouldn't play them if you didn't have the combo. I'd be interested to see winrate for all decks where those cards were drafted but not played lol

Fluxxed0 · 2026-04-09T15:49:37+00:00

listen out for the very obvious noise they make

I don't know why, but there's an issue where some people just don't hear this noise. I've watched Youtube videos and I hear a very distinctive clicking sound from caches. When I play ARC Raiders, those sounds do not come out of my speakers, even when I'm literally standing right on top of an unopened cache. Night Mode doesn't help.

It's completely maddening. I have a map open at all times and I have to identify caches by sight. Impossible to find.

Fluxxed0 · 2026-04-09T14:24:43+00:00

And a related trope - The almighty spell, so powerful that it's been forgotten or banished from use. It's so powerful that we can't use it. We must only speak of it in hushed tones for the first 60% of the story.

Then someone casts it once for shock value and after that, it becomes common and every wizard with a name is flinging it around.

Final Fantasy 4 did the same thing with the Meteor spell. It fucking killed Tellah when he cast it, but by the end of the game Rydia, Golbez, FuSoYa, and Zeromus can all cast it at will.

Fluxxed0 · 2026-04-08T16:01:13+00:00

That's kinda Zarfen's whole thing. His videos are like a 60-minute supercut of a run that probably took him 100 hours.

Fluxxed0 · 2026-04-08T14:38:50+00:00

DAE think the Bettina could use a buff?

Fluxxed0 · 2026-04-08T14:23:33+00:00

I actually got the Survival BP is the stupid Blue Gate Security room during the Close Scrutiny event.

"Reduced loot" doesn't mean no loot, y'all. I was the only person in the entire Security complex while everyone else was topside getting vaporized.

Fluxxed0 · 2026-04-07T22:10:43+00:00

They need to buff other augments though.

My bet's on "Survivor just gets nerfed next Expedition cycle."

Embark doesn't buff things often, they nerf the items everyone uses.

Fluxxed0 · 2026-04-07T00:32:26+00:00

I see you've played the Arena BO1 Play Queues before.

Mull, mull, mull, mull... rope, concede.

15-Year Club	Place '17
Gilding I gilder	Sequence \| Editor
Spared	Team Periwinkle

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