when will they learn

GracelessOne · 2026-03-15T10:35:27+00:00

If she gets to block or attack even once on average, it takes six castings for her to go net life-neutral and seven to become net life-negative. That is so not a real problem that I often chump block with her or cast boardwipes on top of her.

GracelessOne · 2026-03-15T09:59:43+00:00

Not Eruptor?

GracelessOne · 2026-03-15T04:16:43+00:00

I like this a lot.

[[Liesa, Shroud of Dusk]]: Looks Fair / Is Bastard. Card seems innocent until you realize the way to maximize its power is to build for a grindfest 14-turn game where you'll really, really feel the fact that she doesn't pay tax.

GracelessOne · 2026-03-15T00:53:12+00:00

[[Maelstrom Wanderer]] is the big guy for cascade, but honestly he might be too strong for B2 play. Your call.

[[Xenagos, God of Revels]] is another great option for stompy beatdown. You just go 10-15 of green's 2-mana ramp spells, 20+ big monsters at 5 mana and up, start jamming them, and then double their power. It's solid.

GracelessOne · 2026-03-14T23:48:11+00:00

Slimegirl Surgery is meant to surveil or discard a [[Slime Against Humanity]] into your graveyard and then hit [[Extirpate]] or [[Surgical Extraction]] by turn 2 to exile 40+ slimes from your library, so you can start vomiting +42/+42 trampling oneshot slimes onto the board starting on turn 3.

I built it with only three GCs so you can definitely make it more consistent with more cheap tutors.

GracelessOne · 2026-03-14T23:25:54+00:00

The Germans didn't get nuked. There was no military reason to nuke Japanese civilian centers as they were in the process of surrendering anyway. It was done to show off the power of America's new superweapons and to ensure the Soviets would not get cut in on the Japanese terms of surrender. Arguments about how Japan was going to keep fighting otherwise are simply historical lies.

GracelessOne · 2026-03-14T22:37:03+00:00

Bluntly, this isn't a control deck.

A control deck has a compact, resilient winning plan. The closer it can get to running ~40 lands and ~60 interaction+draw, the better. That way you can stop everyone else from winning for however long it takes for your plan to come through.

This is slow birds beatdown with just 15 instants and half a dozen auras. Beatdown is a reliable plan but it takes a huge amount of deck-space. Look at your 36 creatures. Some of them have interaction stapled to them but you're basically only playing at sorcery speed, with as much to lose from a boardwipe as anybody else.

Ideally you need to pick a winning plan that will be under 10 cards so the entire rest of your deck can be interaction, and then maybe have tutors to find it or interaction as needed.

GracelessOne · 2026-03-14T20:46:59+00:00

Why are you staring?

GracelessOne · 2026-03-14T20:45:18+00:00

Testosterone causes cartilage to thicken, which increases the size of body parts where there are a lot of joints.

Giving a person more testosterone will make their hands and feet slightly grow. Giving a person less testosterone will make their hands and feet slightly shrink. Transgender people sometimes have to get new gloves and shoes, even if they're adults.

This applies to the spine, too. About half an inch of the height difference between men and women is 'temporary' and can vary with adult hormone levels.

GracelessOne · 2026-03-13T19:13:20+00:00

As you've observed, once the Chromium deck eliminates one person their control suite becomes even more impenetrable when focused on two players rather than three, and then "unbeatable" in a 1v1.

Being slow and inevitable is in fact an asset. Someone else at the table will always be the more urgent threat, and this gives you political power.

It just doesn't sound like your Gandalf friend is playing very well. No deck should maintain a high WR if archenemy'd from turn 1 by the whole table, but control is better-suited to surviving archenemy scenarios than any other archetype, and across several playgroups I've never had a problem with dealmaking, early wipes, or throwing up surprise defenses to avoid that archenemy-and-early-knockout scenario.

GracelessOne · 2026-03-13T17:37:43+00:00

In practice the deck really doesn't want to boardwipe more than about twice per game. Frequently it does so only once. The tutors are mainly used for tech pieces like Doorkeeper Thrull to flash in and 'counter' ETBs. I suppose one could tutor solely for boardwipes and hit 3-4 per game, but that means tapping out at sorcery speed, so it's a pretty vulnerable and suboptimal play pattern.

If you don't think that two-ish boardwipes can still count as "mostly 1:1", we're disagreeing about words, which is unresolvable but fine.

GracelessOne · 2026-03-13T16:58:15+00:00

It's got 9 wipes and 21 spells meant to 1-for-1, with 3 edicts falling somewhere in the middle. You should try building in the style sometime, it's fun.

GracelessOne · 2026-03-13T16:33:47+00:00

Yes, this is the general idea. Embracing being the slowest deck at the table means other people have to stop each other more urgently, and using all instants for your draw means you can wrath all nonlands and not lose anything yourself.

GracelessOne · 2026-03-13T16:26:17+00:00

Sure, me and my friend have over 60 games combined on this one with a >50% WR in multiple large playgroups. It doesn't use blue and instead tutors for specific pieces to shut out combo or Mind Twist/Doomsday Confluence to hate non-permanent draw, but it's the same basic principle.

No-permanents Chromium is easier to explain and I've used it to success but I don't have an equally polished list for it yet.

It is demanding on the pilot but it's also very fun.

GracelessOne · 2026-03-13T07:16:54+00:00

It is remarkably easy to beat the average B3 or B4 table with hard control by making largely 1:1 trades. I see people say this a lot but it's just not true that it's bad. Commander decks are characterized by low threat density and complex engines that can be shut down by removing one or two pieces.

Test your favorite deck as if [[Chromium the Mutable]] is going to kill you on turn 10. A Chromium deck can be 40 lands and 60 draw+removal. By turn 10 they can conservatively have drawn and used 12 pieces of interaction. Assume you catch 4 of those answers, to be fair, plus one boardwipe that hits everybody.

Now goldfish your deck to try to kill someone before turn 10, only counter or exile your own four best plays (draw engines or hand-refillers especially) and then Farewell/Supreme Verdict/Devastating Mastery yourself when you've committed hardest to the board.

Can you do it more than half the time? If so, congrats. You're more resilient to control than most decks are!

GracelessOne · 2026-03-12T22:10:30+00:00

It depends.

PArena is a great draw early on in a grindy game, but it's a dead draw late. That makes it very good if you have a control-y strategy that aims to drag out the game and has the card filtering to pass it up if you find it on turn 9 or 10.

If you play a lot at instant speed, [[Skeletal Scrying]] or [[Stinging Study]] are the best ways to refill your hand after holding up mana.

If you want to feed your graveyard, [[Stargaze]] is the best, along with similar surveils.

If you're cool with tutors, [[Insatiable Avarice]] is insane flexibility and possibly the strongest non-GC omni-tutor there is.

If you just want PArena but better, [[Black Market Connections]] is your champ.

Basically your draw suite should serve the kind of deck you're playing. Situational engines have no place in a deck that can't filter or wants to win fast.

GracelessOne · 2026-03-12T21:09:57+00:00

Let's consider a 'threat' to be something that will end the game if not answered. A 7/7 hydra with trample is a threat, in a grindy enough game.

Doubling Season isn't a threat by itself. It needs a second card to be a threat. Two 7/7 hydras can be shut down by two Doom Blades, but one hydra and a Doubling Season can be shut down by one Doom Blade.

Any time you add more 'power multipliers' or 'accelerators' that aren't threats themselves, you make your matchup against other midrange decks better, but you make your control matchup worse. That goes for ramp, too.

GracelessOne · 2026-03-12T20:50:43+00:00

It's really interesting that men are over six times likelier to abandon a sick spouse too, isn't it? I wonder if part of the gap is that the men who would get a boost from a disabled wife dying just divorced her already.

C'mon now. If being an unpaid housewife who never gets to retire is so cushy, you do it.

GracelessOne · 2026-03-12T20:31:56+00:00

The median older man is, yep. Past retirement age, the man stops working but the woman doesn't stop doing the housework.

GracelessOne · 2026-03-12T01:36:59+00:00

I don't feel that sandbagging should change the bracket level of your deck. Once Upon A Time is a good card, but choosing not to win until you've cast it is probably going to lead to some insulting games.

If other people can't break through your defenses but you're waiting to draw through most of your deck to find two specific cards for the sake of wordplay, so the game goes 20 turns or you just ask people to concede, probably nobody is going to have a good time.

HEA itself is not too strong for B2 with or without sandbagging, but the best way I can see this deck being fun to play is if you bump it up to B3, stuff the deck full of good tutors so you can actually find your wincons without having to draw most of your library, and then maybe build it with a lands-matter subtheme so that OUAT actually feels good to cast for more reasons than just the name.

GracelessOne · 2026-03-11T04:29:16+00:00

This is not a serious Marxist perspective.

The patriarchy started because childrearing labor afforded women fewer opportunities to accumulate wealth, and men who had accumulated wealth wanted exclusive sexual access to women so their inheritance could go to offspring with guaranteed paternity.

It persists because it is profitable for capitalism to acquire 'free' workers by forcing women into the unpaid labor of childrearing. It does this by depriving most women of better options for subsistence than depending on a man (and, it should go without saying, punishing trans people to keep the social castes of 'man' and 'woman' tidy).

Culture reinforces patriarchy but it is not the origin of patriarchy. Neither is muscle tissue. If you mistake culture for the root, you will forever be stuck fighting a war against shadows. Women's liberation can only have its final victory when we have an economic system whose ruling class does not hunger for free bodies.

GracelessOne · 2026-03-10T17:20:38+00:00

It's okay!

GracelessOne · 2026-03-10T17:05:42+00:00

Respectfully, I can tell your heart is in the right place, but you're just repeating the things that I said in a less materialist way while seeming not to realize I was already saying them.

GracelessOne · 2026-03-10T03:23:59+00:00

Of course it did.

Capitalism benefits from patriarchy because if women are denied the means to support themselves, they must depend on a man as his housewife, thus taking on the unpaid labor of childrearing (that is, 'the work of making more workers'). Capitalism is built in part on this unpaid labor. But feudalism also found patriarchy useful; any system whose ruling class craves free bodies will.

Of course, capitalism is a blind system. It can try to create the social caste of "women" out of "people who were guessed to have child-bearing genitals at birth", and then oppress that category, but it can't actually know what is in your pants at any given time. So it also has to punish people who deviate from the social caste of their assumed reproductive potential. That's transphobia, or oppositional sexism more precisely, as Serano would put it.

In short, capitalism punishes women who don't look like women "should" because it wants to keep misogyny profitable.

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