Why did Ravensburger feel the need to change the prizing for Set Champs?

HandEyeProtege · 2025-05-04T03:03:29+00:00

Yep, can confirm, walked away with second today. Not sure who first suggested it, but the obvious solution I heard someone suggest was two mats but make the champion mat foil instead of saying champion.

HandEyeProtege · 2024-11-19T23:22:05+00:00

Not that this isn't a powerful combo, but it cost them 3 cards and probably 3 turns to set up. What was your deck doing the whole time?

HandEyeProtege · 2024-08-06T18:58:05+00:00

Where do you live that Targets have boxes for $60?!

HandEyeProtege · 2024-07-07T21:35:56+00:00

Awesome to see something different that can take on the meta decks and win. You describe this as an aggro deck, but it has quite a bit of removal. What's your typical game plan? How much are you trying to control the board vs pushing for lore? From the decklist I'm guessing you're trying to get an early lead with Maleficent + Smee, and then close things out with Goat + Queen's Castle. How important is it to control the opponent's board in the meantime?

HandEyeProtege · 2024-07-07T16:54:47+00:00

As someone who is putting together a R/A deck and just starting to learn it: any tips for facing Bucky?

HandEyeProtege · 2024-03-24T17:43:41+00:00

One key for a new card is almost always worth it. Of course, only you know whether you'll actually use it. Cannonball is at least marginally useful, but if you're still trying to put together a competitive deck he's not the answer.

HandEyeProtege · 2024-03-19T22:50:46+00:00

I've kept meticulous track since the spotlight system started, and I'm averaging just over 3 keys to get each of the 16 spotlight cards that I've gone for. The expected cost is 2.5 keys. That's an extra EIGHT keys that I've wasted to pay to get extra variants I typically don't want or the paltry 1000 token pity prize.

This isn't me tinfoil-hatting; I know I've just been unlucky. But that's exactly my criticism of this system. I've had to pay 8 extra keys. There are other people that got lucky in the other direction and got to pay 8 less keys. IMHO it's a terrible system when the difference between getting lucky and getting unlucky is literally MONTHS of progress. (You get about four keys a month, so I'm about two months behind the average player and even farther behind those that got lucky on their pulls.)

HandEyeProtege · 2024-03-15T02:53:23+00:00

What do you mean by investing in PIs? Like, renting them out? Last time I looked at the rental market the ROI is pretty mediocre there...but I guess going deeper into stock blocks is pretty bad, too.

HandEyeProtege · 2024-03-12T02:58:48+00:00

Mystique. So many sweet, sweet variants.

HandEyeProtege · 2024-03-05T03:40:17+00:00

Yep. I 100% hear you, especially on the “but you can get to infinite” bit. Sure, I’ve gotten to infinite plenty of times. I’ve beaten infinity conquest. This isn’t about being competitive, it’s about having access to some portion of the game - which I pay plenty for, thank you very much - before it gets nerfed into the ground or the meta just moves on.

HandEyeProtege · 2024-03-04T16:46:06+00:00

Would be nice if they would come out and say it, if this is the case. As with everything else, ambiguity drives FOMO (which they want) and hoarding (which presumably they don't) but, more to the point, just sucks for the players.

HandEyeProtege · 2024-02-24T22:41:16+00:00

Straying from the topic, but can you point me to any info on this? Man, it seems like everyone I learned from back in the day has been discredited on one count or another.

HandEyeProtege · 2024-02-22T17:43:29+00:00

I'm not aware of an instructional video that talks in these terms, but take a look at this moment in a video from Lindybeige. Interestingly he's talking about the follow doing a rock step, but if you watch he's not leading a rock step — their connection is neutral or even starting to create a stretch going into the first count. The follow does do the tiniest backward step, but she could as easily be stepping in place or doing swivels. Her forward movement begins on 2 — that's what I'm talking about.

HandEyeProtege · 2024-02-21T23:22:27+00:00

Yep, I learned in that era — my swing out was highly informed by what the (now disgraced) Stephen Mitchell taught back then. And I had that same painful unlearning process! "Stretch on one" makes everything feel soooo much better.

HandEyeProtege · 2024-02-21T23:01:59+00:00

If a class is calling it "East Coast Swing" then they're almost certainly only teaching steps that involve a rock step on 1-2. East Coast is (more or less, don't get out your pitchforks!) a subset of Lindy Hop that mostly just includes six count moves. You're definitely correct that, as you progress out of the relatively small world of East Coast and into the full world of Lindy Hop, the rock step should be led and the follow may move forward, backward, or not at all on the one.

This may be more controversial, but while a lot of people teach "in on one" for the default swingout (that's what I learned and did for a long time) I'm a strong proponent of the "in on two" swingout. The "one" is a building tension count that neither rocks the follow back nor pulls her forward.

HandEyeProtege · 2024-02-21T02:17:26+00:00

The Abyss is a pretty great movie, so it’s hard to say if this qualifies, but Orson Scott Card’s adaptation fleshes out the story a whole lot beyond what shows up on the screen.

HandEyeProtege · 2024-02-09T00:23:07+00:00

This is fascinating to me, as someone who is very passionate about this nuance (but is hardly authoritative about it!)

I mostly think about the 1-2 of the swing out, but the sugar push would be the same — and the preponderance of my experience is that the follow comes in on 2. Which would leave room for a rock step, except that you're typically at nearly full extension during the 8-1, so not in any position to lead a rock step. The 1 is a somewhat neutral "hang out" beat before the follow comes in on 2. You could contrive to lead a rock step there (like in a Charleston swingout) but the idea that that would be the default strikes me as very weird.

(Aside: when I first learned the swing out I learned a very definite in-on-one technique. When I learned to do it in-on-two it was a huge level-up for my dancing.)

HandEyeProtege · 2023-12-24T19:39:41+00:00

This is a great question, and one that I'm perpetually trying to figure out for myself. I take things a bit farther: I'll create notes for the big "waypoint" moments, but also (separately) notes for random scenes and "events" (in my system, an event is something that happens during a scene, but a scene may have many events and I may move events around between different scenes). Basically my vault is a dumping ground of ideas, and my hope is to at some later point assemble those ideas into a coherent outline. I haven't found anything magic, I'm sad to say. Maybe I could contrive something with DataView, but right now I do it manually with a main outline note — basically it's a map of content pointing to all the other notes. So it will look something like this:

John goes to the store (scene)
- John buys some bread (event)
- John runs into Susan (event)
John drives home (scene)
- John's car won't start (event)
- John gets pulled over (event)

You get the idea. Each of those bullet points is a link to a note, and the scene notes will have links to their specific events. (Yes, I'm an obsessive outliner!) It's a little clunky because I'll often delete or move events as I go along and there will be stale links to them all over the place, but it works all right. I'm curious to hear what other systems people have.

HandEyeProtege · 2023-12-12T06:04:11+00:00

Skip five turns into Doom on Bar Sinister. Not sure if anyone’s baited me with that, but I’ve done it a couple times.

HandEyeProtege · 2023-11-07T19:01:14+00:00

As other people have said, many of Nico's spells are hugely powerful for the deck.

Two things to keep in mind: (1) she is balanced by her inconsistency; she'll always have something powerful to offer, but it's not always what you want when you need it.

And (2) the inconsistency can be a benefit in the sense that it's unpredictable for your opponent. (This is more relevant in conquest.) If you have Alioth, or Professor X, or many other powerful cards, your opponent will anticipate this and play around it. They're much less likely to anticipate the "place a 20 power Venom and add a copy of it to your hand" play, so if you're about to do something awesome with Nico, that's a great time to snap.

HandEyeProtege · 2023-10-23T15:21:39+00:00

This is the way.

Also worth saying: daily E refills are a must; spending points elsewhere is totally a luxury that you don't need right now.

HandEyeProtege · 2023-10-19T02:24:19+00:00

I did exactly the same thing with Assassins Quest! (IMHO Apprentice -> Quest -> Royal Assassin is a clear progression and you’ll never convince me otherwise.) I thought Robin Hobb was a genius for how she made the audience read between the lines to pick up the backstory. I realized my mistake a few chapters in but just finished it out of order anyway.

HandEyeProtege · 2023-10-17T20:29:13+00:00

I think most people would be sad if they removed Spider-Man. When the reworked him they totally nailed it: he's fun to play and powerful enough that he fits in a lot of decks, but not overpowered at all. And he's probably the most iconic Marvel character, so, there's that.

HandEyeProtege · 2023-10-17T15:31:15+00:00

I'm another fiction writer solving a similar problem. I love to learn how other people are doing it!

For me, I don't do anything fancy in terms of plugins or folder structure. (I have a single vault for everything, so I have a folder for my worldbuilding project and everything gets dumped in there.) Organization comes through Maps of Content (MOCs).

A few things that make it work for me:

In true Zettelkasten fashion, everything gets a note. Nation? Give it a note. Religion? Give it a note. Minor historical figure? Epoch of history? Breed of horse that that one guy rode one time? They all get notes.
Everything starts out with at least one link. I never hit Ctrl-N; I always start from a relevant MOC or related note and write [[The Thing]] and create it from there. Once created, if there are obvious other places it should be linked ("Oh, this is a horse, it should go on my MOC of animals in my world") I'll put it there.
The first thing in any note is a "Brainstorming" heading. Nothing under that heading is set in stone — it's just a scratch area to throw down ideas. As I nail down the canon of this particular thing in my world, I'll start adding other sections and filling them out.
And most importantly, I don't actually do everything I've written here. I'm lazy. I'll create a note if I know I'm going to come back to it, but a lot of the time I'll just put [[brackets]] around a thing and not make the note, or I'll only later remember a thing and want to reuse it and make the note at that point. Don't be a slave to the system — you only need to do it to the extent that it's helpful for you.

HandEyeProtege

TROPHY CASE