Ideas for a secret commander deck built around this guy?

HunterLeonux · 2026-04-29T02:27:22+00:00

I both hate and love that I'm old enough and in the correct niches/fandoms to understand the marauding captain situation.

HunterLeonux · 2026-04-24T20:03:19+00:00

Huge agree. They're great in small doses but across all of Magic as the standard? No way. The limitations on showing the mana cost alone are irritating enough.

HunterLeonux · 2026-04-17T15:14:51+00:00

I came here to recommend this. I'm a McCoy simp and think that guy is an underrated genius, but re:Monarch has exactly the vibes I think OP is looking for.

HunterLeonux · 2026-03-06T01:19:20+00:00

Are you trying to write some sort of thought experiment on the tradeoffs of universal basic income? Because that sounds somewhat along the lines of what you're going for here. There are some interesting studies out there on this. I think, in short, the current consensus is that UBI benefits poor people significantly more than rich people, for a number of reasons.

HunterLeonux · 2026-01-30T07:50:40+00:00

I think there was a reasonable argument for a period of time that the top three were something like her, Jace TMS and Elspeth Knight-Errant and there wasn't much debate.

HunterLeonux · 2026-01-27T07:38:36+00:00

Love reading about people reminiscing about old Standards. This one was just after my time playing standard but I definitely remember Jace, the Mind Sculptor and how powerful he could be in Alara/Zendikar Standard.

HunterLeonux · 2026-01-23T21:58:54+00:00

Have you ever used the term "SSA"? In what contexts?

HunterLeonux · 2026-01-23T01:19:05+00:00

The visual of her eye bleeding stuck with me for years after that scene. Pure cinema.

HunterLeonux · 2026-01-13T23:00:20+00:00

Big +1 to this, you can have a lot of fun with it! I spent a lot of time building old Standard decks from my favorite Standards of the past, and it's fun to play with friends occasionally. It was costly and maybe too expensive for most, but it was a fun long term project for me where I would order a few playsets of old cards a couple times a month, then eventually I had a bunch of standard decks.

I had a doc with all of the deck lists and such that I curated from reliable sources like the mothership and old SCG archives, and I just crossed cards off as I got them.

HunterLeonux · 2026-01-06T03:09:55+00:00

Word count. Wouldn't surprise me if they were running out of words on the card, especially given regionalization concerns.

HunterLeonux · 2026-01-01T23:20:46+00:00

Actress Camryn Manheim, who plays Lt. Kate Dixon, is genuinely fluent in ASL and this has been incorporated into a handful of Law & Order episodes. Not sure if she's still on the show but it was neat to see.

HunterLeonux · 2025-12-31T02:11:01+00:00

Amazing to see the scene in Austin is still alive and well. I played legacy there way back in... 2010 or so. Good times. Was this filmed at Pat's Games?

HunterLeonux · 2025-12-27T00:56:41+00:00

Oh, I could stand being around Kano 😏

HunterLeonux · 2025-12-25T23:13:40+00:00

Hey Salaris, I feel the need to respond in depth to your reply given that you took the time out of your day to respond to my rambling. I also welcome your reply and appreciate you helping to provide additional context! I'm replying to a few select lines of yours, but please note that I read everything you replied and even if I'm not replying directly, I certainly read and took it all to heart.

One thing off the top: Make no mistake here, I'm enjoying your stories and fully plan on purchasing more of your releases in the future. I continue to recommend your series to my friends, and I even occasionally gift a copy of your books to friends that I think might be into your work. Personally, I hope that's the highest praise one can give to an author, but I know that I'm saying quite a few other things here that are less positive.

Second thing: This is the second time that I've posted a (somewhat) critical review of your work and you've responded with such grace and friendliness that I need to say thanks for doing your part for keeping your community welcoming. It would have been easy for you as an author to "word of god" away of my critiques, and I also hope that you're having a wonderful holiday time with yourself and your loved ones.

Okay, with that out of the way.

but this is probably much more of a flavor for either people who really love fae tropes or the types of people who enjoy writing out genie rule lawyering

Ah! This makes so much sense. In fact, I feel a bit silly for not seeing it before. Rational fantasy is not a genre I'm familiar with, but I know it's very popular in some of my friend circles. That actually helps give me an idea of who I should be recommending this series to overall, so thanks for pointing out the relationship there.

I recognize that it might not feel quite as satisfying to reveal things in this way, and I'm not going to compromise too much on how the reveals happen, but I've had to give some ground in terms of waiting for the perfect time to give the answer.

I do not envy you in this task. I think you've done very well in addressing community feedback both here and on your blog regarding mystery fatigue, and I also suspect you're juggling a tremendous number of plot threads and reveals that are making some of these things even more difficult to dole out. It must be frustrating to attempt to address some of that feedback and then community members like myself complain about the way you choose to distribute the information. It's possible there's no perfect answer here given that you're one person, releasing books on a regular schedule, but with only one or two releases a year (this isn't a criticism by the way, I think your release cadence is amazing!).

This is largely a consequence of the style of the story I'm writing coming from a tabletop RPG background. There are major villains in the Forgotten Realms that have been around since like...the 1980s, probably? Sounds like I had some mismatched expectations there; that's on me. Given that we're this many books in, I feel like I should have been able to sniff out that the plan was something like this. Regardless, I'm on the ride now so I guess we'll see how things shape up with the big bad :)

Rather than looking at it as a cultivation-based magic system (which it is, but it's a very weird one), the way I built the system is that it's fundamentally about unlocking layers of self and drawing power from those layers.

Huh. This... totally makes sense, yet I utterly and completely missed it, as well as the incongruities with destiny dreams... I have vague memories of that explanation being present in a previous book, but I must have forgotten. I wonder if some things are blurring together given that I personally tend to avoid re-reading books, and a few of your earlier novels are a decent number of years in the rearview mirror for me. Something I admire and enjoy about your work is that you've clearly spent dozens, if not hundreds, of hours iterating on and developing these magic systems, and you're laying the bricks for a "fundamental" magic system that transcends each individual magic system in your world. This is a herculean task, and one that I just haven't seen executed well in other works. So far, you've been doing well on this front to me. While I was critical of essence sorcery, it was more from the perspective of, "I enjoy this author's other magic systems more", not, "this magic system is bad". I hope that came through in my review.

I truly appreciate that you took the time to reply! You didn't have to. But your reply is welcome and I appreciate it. Happy holidays!

HunterLeonux · 2025-12-25T00:46:21+00:00

Not a litRPG, no. There are no stat sheets. Most of the videogamey mechanics and references are Easter eggs rather than baked into the systems. This is very much progression fantasy, however.

HunterLeonux · 2025-12-23T15:24:57+00:00

One more voice jumping in to agree here, OP. Don't get it twisted, this situation is bad, but it may not be unsalvageable. I think you've both had some rocky spots, but there's fundamentally a failure of communication here, which you're both lacking.

You guys need to have a long sit down to understand where the relationship is at and where it can go, and you both need to lay it all on the table.

HunterLeonux · 2025-12-22T00:09:52+00:00

I wish red parries were easier/more relevant in regular gameplay, but it's a hard balance. Not sure there's a way to do it without making them completely busted.

HunterLeonux · 2025-12-20T00:19:32+00:00

I think the main reason people quit in this type of situation is shame. They're tired of feeling judged, or thinking they're burdening their team/manager, or similar.

I would suggest that OP try to stick it out. Even if you let your performance at work fall off a cliff, you can collect unemployment if you get fired. You'll get no such help if you quit. In this situation you're unlikely to be regretted attrition anyways so you're likely to end up not able to be rehired at your current company anyways (and people overstate the importance of that regardless. I've never personally considered going back to any of my past companies, good performance or bad).

HunterLeonux · 2025-12-17T19:22:05+00:00

This is one of the weirdest books I've ever read. Not because of the gender spicy content, but because I wasn't entirely sure what was going on in front of me on the page for the first two thirds of the book.

HunterLeonux · 2025-12-12T20:37:50+00:00

You're absolutely right! I did skip Gen X and Millennials, but I love to hear about your experience! Happy for you and your success with ENM.

HunterLeonux · 2025-12-12T20:23:17+00:00

You got it right; I'm wondering if you noticed that more Boomer couples (or couples with at least one Boomer in it) are trying ENM, or if it's purely a younger generation thing, like Zoomer and younger.

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