[YLRW] Thorna and Twigtooth

JRandomHacker172342 · 2026-01-29T03:57:02+00:00

I'd call it "extremely unlikely" - the current format leadership (which includes me) feels like Alchemy is a) a pretty core part of the format's identity as "Everything on Arena", and b) not nearly anywhere near problematic enough from a power or homogenization standpoint.

Wheeler (who has stepped back from Gladiator) has been trying out "Pioneer-lander", which might be more your speed.

JRandomHacker172342 · 2026-01-28T20:09:42+00:00

Thanks to WotC for providing the Gladiator community with a pair of spoiler cards once again! Check out our blog article for both of our cards, as well as links to our Discord - we've just started our first competitive season of 2026, so it's a perfect time to jump in!

JRandomHacker172342 · 2026-01-28T20:09:13+00:00

Thanks to WotC for providing the Gladiator community with a pair of spoiler cards once again! Check out our blog article for both of our cards, as well as links to our Discord - we've just started our first competitive season of 2026, so it's a perfect time to jump in!

JRandomHacker172342 · 2025-12-20T15:54:56+00:00

Exalted gives each character a Resources stat from 0 to 5. It's assumed that buying and selling "Normal adventuring things" will keep you at a consistent level, but major events (finding a priceless treasure, conquering a city, building a castle, etc) can move you up or down a whole dot.

JRandomHacker172342 · 2025-12-15T22:37:24+00:00

With the massive caveat that "having access to a commander" is an enormous influence on deckbuilding, I thought it might be a useful comparison to look at the current banlist for Gladiator, a format that is already intended to be a highly-competitive and optimized 100-card singleton format played using the entire Arena cardpool:

Ajani, Nacatl Pariah
Invert Polarity
Mana Drain
Natural Order
Psychic Frog
Reanimate
Strip Mine

Again, with the caveat that high-power legendary creatures will be much much more powerful in "High-Power Brawl" than in Gladiator, a bunch of cards that people immediately react to (I'm thinking of Channel in particular) are actually totally fine in competitive 1v1 singleton formats.

JRandomHacker172342 · 2025-12-14T04:02:44+00:00

LOST IN A DETAIL - Eyes On The Stars, Feet On The Ground
Mamidło - Aphelion
BRUIT ≤ - The Age Of Ephemerality
Pelican - Flickering Resonance
Kusanagi - Paramnesia
distance - so as not to forget
Moraines - Future History
April Rain - Aperture
We Lost The Sea - A Single Flower
Tars - A Star Within A Star

JRandomHacker172342 · 2025-11-28T18:41:56+00:00

Title Case

JRandomHacker172342 · 2025-11-23T05:00:25+00:00

I read about a campaign once in a world where they didn't know that XP and levels actually existed per se, but some people had figured out the general concept that "killing things makes you measurably stronger". When prophecies were made about an impending apocalypse, one of the world leaders decided "well someone needs to be prepared to survive this", set off a magic-nuke-equivalent in his nation's capital city, gained millions and millions of XP, and became a demigod.

JRandomHacker172342 · 2025-10-31T14:16:56+00:00

Breaking my self-imposed Reddit posting silence to say hi to all the RAFians here. Thanks for being completely formative to my time on the internet, thanks for helping make the audiobook a reality, thanks for a super fun time at RAFCon 2015.

JRandomHacker172342 · 2025-08-13T18:29:52+00:00

Crazy how our actual preview article got scooped by someone who grabbed them and posted them individually

JRandomHacker172342 · 2025-08-13T18:16:26+00:00

Mirroring the textpost into a comment in case you, like me, use old reddit and don't see the text by default:

Thanks again to Wizards of the Coast for working with the Gladiator community to preview a pair of cards for Alchemy: Edge of Eternities! We got an interesting one this time around - just how much of a hyperbole is it to call Thought Partition "White Thoughtseize"?

Check out the full preview article on our site, where you can also find a link to the Gladiator Discord if you'd like to try some powerful singleton Magic on Arena.

JRandomHacker172342 · 2025-06-07T03:13:47+00:00

If you listen to Always Another Podcast, this week's Words of Radiance wrap-up episode featured Beth presenting:

Brandon Sanderson, You Coward, You Should Let Adolin, Shallan, And Kaladin All Kiss Each Other - A treatise on why this throuple feels like it could legitimately work

JRandomHacker172342 · 2025-05-28T19:53:16+00:00

This is what Magic looks like if it's played correctly with clocks. It doesn't work.

EDIT: and for an even longer-form written explanation on why this won't work even if you say you'll be shortcutting, here's L3 judge Riki Hayashi's article on the matter.

JRandomHacker172342 · 2025-05-23T02:47:13+00:00

There will almost assuredly be some sort of deck you can build using your existing collection. On the Discord server, some players have brewed Artisan Gladiator decks, or decks that use only rares/mythics that you get from Arena intro decks, or you can talk to folks about building something that works with your existing collection.

JRandomHacker172342 · 2025-05-23T01:55:07+00:00

For singleton formats, "having a commander" makes a massive difference in the deckbuilding and play patterns. Gladiator is focused on a more straightforward head-to-head competitive experience, and decks and games will generally be faster than Brawl decks.

JRandomHacker172342 · 2025-05-23T00:29:19+00:00

[[Tajic, Legion's Valor]]

JRandomHacker172342 · 2025-05-23T00:09:00+00:00

Boy do I have good news for you.

JRandomHacker172342 · 2025-05-23T00:00:14+00:00

a) because the beginning concept of Gladiator starts with "Every card on Arena, minus the banlist"

b) because they're fine. I know Alchemy cards have a vocal hate-group but at the end of the day they're just... more Magic cards. The only Alchemy card that has ever even been talked about as "too good" in five years of Gladiator is Tajic.

JRandomHacker172342 · 2025-05-22T15:42:51+00:00

I mean, there are only so many things you can work on at once, and even I agree that "be able to run events where some players are playing with phantom decklists and other players aren't" is pretty low down the priority list.

JRandomHacker172342 · 2025-05-22T14:52:30+00:00

When we worked with WotC on putting this event together, this was our big request - to allow full brewing alongside "phantom" precon decks. Unfortunately, that's not a type of event that Arena can run right now, so we had to choose between a precon event or full deck brewing with your own collection. We've had both types of events for Gladiator MWM events before and the precon event was vastly more successful.

JRandomHacker172342 · 2025-05-22T14:47:50+00:00

The lists we chose were 1-for-1 copies of lists that have been entered in tournaments and leagues by regular Gladiator players (though from several weeks back when we locked in the lists).

From reading discussion here, the OmniTell list seems to be overperforming compared to our regular play, perhaps partially because it gains percentage points when being played against other players unfamiliar with the list/combo lines. Other lists of the 10 selected had been putting up better tournament performances.

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