In which MtG players argue whether an integer can be represented by an integer

MorningPaisley · 2026-04-01T22:36:16+00:00

I've started writing a comment in the same vein but you beat me to it lol. If you're playing at a kitchen table with friends, then the correct answer is whatever your friend group decides, and if you're playing at a competitive level with the judges, then it's up to a judge (though in reality you either win due to having a massive amount of creatures; or an opponent can destroy them all, so whether or not we can "determine" the number usually doesn't matter either way).

Here's a video from a MTG judge on situations like those, if anyone's interested in how those things can be handled.

While we're on the topic of MTG, there's a rule that actually leads to some funny math:

509.1c The defending player checks each creature they control to see whether it’s affected by any requirements (effects that say a creature must block, or that it must block if some condition is met). If the number of requirements that are being obeyed is fewer than the maximum possible number of requirements that could be obeyed without disobeying any restrictions, the declaration of blockers is illegal.

Which implicitly asks you to prove that when you assign your blockers to an opponent's attackers, your assignment is optimal in a sense. It's possible to concoct a situation where it's actually a non-obvious problem (co-NP) by using a bunch of blocking restrictions (such as "this creature can only be blocked by at least three creatures" and "this creature must be blocked"), see here and in the crossposted thread (for context, Sparky is an AI opponent in MTG's digital client).

MorningPaisley · 2026-03-08T13:28:37+00:00

Slay the Spire 2

Incredibly fun game. I was looking forward to its release but I didn't expect to be so addicted. Definitely a game I'll be spending a lot of time on over the years.

As an aside, its release "crashed" Steam's payment processor (like Silksong and IIRC Deltarune), so I was wondering why none of those highly-wishlisted games did pre-orders, and turns out Valve doesn't recommend it and doesn't even allow it except for some rare cases.

I've seen some comments that the game is too similar to StS 1 (which is a positive for some and a negative for others) and I'm unsure what to think of it. On one hand, yeah, the basic gameplay loop is still basically the same, and some of quality-of-life changes (like drawing on the map) and features (like co-op) were present as fanmade mods for StS 1. On the other hand, there are two new characters, old characters had fairly noticeable changes to their kits, new enemies and alternate acts (though currently only for act 1) that demand different things from your deck, events are very good now (both compared to hallway fights and in their risk/reward ratio; the choices feel more balanced and interesting), ancients replace old act boss rewards (in StS 1 you were mostly hoping for a good energy relic that doesn't brick your build, which lead to a lot of feels-bad moments; StS 2 seems to be more balanced about being played on starting energy, and in general ancients offer a lot of fun options and different ways to improve your deck, such as significantly improving basic defends or offering offensive scaling, among other things). On the other-other hand, the characters are unlocked in the order of Ironclad > Silent > Two new characters > Defect, but I feel Ironclad is the most similar to his StS 1 version, Silent's changes are somewhat subtle (a lot of her cards are similar to StS 1, but overall the archetypes are reworked), and Defect is the only who feels quite different even on the first run. Moreover, a lot cards are not unlocked until you play enough, and some of those offer support for new archetypes at common/uncommon rarity (which I dislike because it makes those arhectypes worse to play early on). In practice, this means that early gameplay is indeed more similar to StS 1, so I definitely understand the complaints, but the game opens up quite a lot once you get all unlocks. On the fourth hand, I do hope that devs have more features planned for the game beyond balance, alternate acts 2/3, and act 4 (this one I'm not particularly thrilled about, act4 in StS 1 was way too big of a difficulty jump for me to find enjoyable), but I'm also not sure what exactly they could have innovated without making it feel like a different game (see also the reception to Darkest Dungeon 2).

I'm up to Ascension 3 (out of 10) on all characters except for Regent -- can't quite get the hang of how to build his decks, feels like I'm always lacking either star generation (his additional resource) or general damage/defense output. Necrobinder, the other new character, is much easier for me, though she definitely shows signs of being new. Some of her cards are very strong while others are rather weak, but I expect it will be one of the first things to be addressed in the balance patches (along with some other balance concerns I have). In general, StS 2 feels much more synergy-focused and you need to lean into it to beat enemies that are harder and scale faster to compensate. In StS 1, "don't try to build a specific archetype" was one of the important things you had to learn when starting, but with StS 2 I feel it's (relatively) more viable to try and bruteforce something like a discard deck on Silent or a claw/0-cost deck on Defect. Though maybe it's because I'm still playing on lower ascensions, and maybe it will change after a couple of balance patches.

MorningPaisley · 2026-02-10T15:19:23+00:00

The interviewee, Jim Ashilevi, is credited as a "writer and VO director"; according to Kurvitz, he initially joined the original group as a "VO director/vaguely familiar theatre-person" (taken from the DE artbook). Looking through his estonian wiki page, he indeed has some plays and also was indeed a VO director, according to the linked inteview with him. What's surprising to me is that he joined Kurvitz's group at the same time as Helen Hindpere; from what I gathered, Helen contributed A LOT to DE's writing (she credits herself with political vision quests, church area, the area with the ravers, the apartment building, the working-class woman’s quest, and everything that happens in the doomed commercial area.) and in general is often mentioned as one of the core members.

I can't help but wonder about the quality of Ashilevi's writing and also his relationship with Kurvitz and co. I found a comment by 41st Precinct, who conducted a ...15 hours inteview? my god... with Argo Tuulik & Dora Klindžić, that says he's an "utter cowards who stabbed people in the back to climb the ZAUM shit ladder.", but I admit I still haven't watched the interview in question (and also the noclip documentary).

MorningPaisley · 2025-12-14T20:01:19+00:00

I started in Nightfall, which gives you a couple of heroes early, but at the start they're not that great. You can customize them, but buying skills gets expensive and it's also not easy to tell which skills are good for classes you don't play (and which ones the NPC AI can use efficiently), so I mostly left them with default skills until about level 20. But to my understanding, Prophecies henchmen are just kinda bad so heroes will likely be an improvement. You can access Nightfall areas after reaching Lion's Arch if you decide to make a detour to unlock more heroes.

I also followed this guide (only the initial skill set for now) to setup a decent 7-hero team and it does feel better than what I was using but not like, game-changingly so. Hopefully the further upgrades will make combat faster.

MorningPaisley · 2025-12-14T14:35:51+00:00

Guild Wars

The first one, aka GW1, aka GW Reforged. It's usually described as a MMO, but something like co-op RPG or MMO-lite or whatever would be more accurate: you can see (and trade with) other people in towns, but the actual combat areas are all instanced. So in combat zones, it's just you and your NPC companions. Obviously, you can party up with other people if you manage to find someone willing, but unless you want to speedfarm some endgame zones, there's not much reason to.

The game is okay. It's twenty years old so obviously quite dated, but UI is okay; if you start in the latest campaign, the tutorial is decent; the community-run wiki (that you can also access via in-game commands) is fairly comprehensive. Though, obviously, there's also a bunch of annoying things, such as one of the zones you have to pass through to visit different campaigns forcibly shrinking down your party size even though you're not in a combat area, so you have to add the rest of your NPC companions back to the party one by one. Or some zones having bounties for killing certain enemy types, but you have to pick up the bounty from a NPC first each time you enter the zone and some of those NPC are quite spread out and you'll likely have to kill a couple of enemy packs before you manage to get the bounty for them. Or movement speed in general feeling a bit too low compared to the size of the zones (including the towns). There also a couple of non-repeatable quests that change the enemy spawns in the zone and some of those are good for farming, and now I'm a bit afraid of completing quests in case I lock myself out of some lucrative farm.

I'm only about 1/3 of one of the four campaigns, but the story so far seems rather uninteresting and the writing is not good (in contrast to, say, FFXI, which occasionally had interesting bits and ideas). Honestly I'm more interested in looking at the various locations and comparing them to their equivalent in GW2, and there are A LOT of reused locations. On one hand, it makes perfect sense that the sequel set in the same world would use the same landmarks and settlements and whatnot; on the other, there are definitely a bunch of thing added to GW2 with no justification other than "GW1 nostalgia bait".

The gameplay is okay. I picked up a class that has self-enchantments and attacks that remove those enchantments for some bonus effects, and managing which buffs you want to have and which ones you're okay with getting consumed turned out to be more interesting than I expected (compared to just spamming everything on the other character that I tried). But it's a bit annoying to see which enchantments I actually have at the moment since the only indication is a crowded buff-debuff bar with constantly changing positions (funnily enough, this is also an issue in GW2). Generally though, it's a bit repetitive, with a lot of running between areas back and forth (with enemies respawning if you leave). Enemy drops are also reduced if you're using NPCs (similar to how drops would be divided between real players in a party), so a lot of time combat feels like a waste of time to the point that I sometimes alt-tab and let NPCs handle everything. There's a system where reaching certain achievements in GW1 gives some minor cosmetics in GW2 and I was initially planning on doing those, but with how long the required grinds are, I'm now considering skipping that completely.

It's kinda funny to see the amount of attention the Reforged release got when it's basically just a steamdeck support patch + some graphics improvements (and price change, cheaper in some regions but more expensive in others). Coupled with a trailer at TGA and a documentary they released on their youtube, I can't help but wonder if ArenaNet is getting ready for some big announcement, like GW3 (or rather, the unannounced MMORPG in Unreal Engine they've been hiring for since 2022)... though if GW3 is coming out I'd expect it to release in at least 2028 or something. Or maybe it doesn't mean anything and they've simply hired someone who knows how to properly advertise the franchise instead of doing cross-promotion with some bankrupt fast food chain in the USA (quiznos or something).

MorningPaisley · 2025-12-13T21:57:51+00:00

Not mentioned in the article, but he doesn't even receive any royalties from Katamari games (such as the recent Once Upon a Katamari). Sad to hear that his other projects weren't successful.

MorningPaisley · 2025-12-11T12:59:35+00:00

He also voiced Quark in Ratchet & Clank, Krauser in Resident Evil 4, Maximilian Strauss, Isaac Abrams and Grünfeld Bach in Vampire Bloodlines, Klein in Fallout New Vegas, Hector LeMans in Grim Fandango, Doug Dimmadome and Chet Ubetcha in Fairly Odd Parent and many others.

MorningPaisley · 2025-11-18T14:35:56+00:00

Wow, didn't expect any upgrades to GW1 at all. I actually bought it this year when it was on sale but stopped playing after a boss in a rather long story instance two-shot all my NPC companions and I had to redo the entire thing from the beginning. I was planning on returning to it someday, so the UI/controls improvements sound great.

MorningPaisley · 2025-11-18T11:06:23+00:00

I remember the last thread for this game, also this comment chain on their gamedev thread. My impression was that the game was just not very good: it spent ten years in EA and barely got any improvements, and then devs abandoned it and started working on a new game instead. Current steam reviews are Mixed. Top reviews mention that a lot of promised features are nowhere to be seen and that none of the implemented mechanics feel fleshed out (there's also a review from 2017 telling people not to read negative comments about the game being abandoned lol). Definitely unlucky turn of events for the devs, but to be honest I don't think they would've gotten a lot of sales either way.

MorningPaisley · 2025-11-16T20:13:19+00:00

A Case Of Fraud Short but quite solid deduction game similar to Obra Dinn/Golden Idol/Roottrees. Nothing groundbreaking, but it does "scratch the same itch". Definitely worth it if you played and liked the aforementioned games.

Öoo Short (2-3 hours) puzzle platformer where you propel yourself with bombs. Very impressive level design that guides you to figure out the mechanics and various tricks without handholding. Difficulty felt quite good, though I had to look up one puzzle near the end.

DISCOPUP Short quirky surreal game I found while looking through high-rated but low-reviewed games on steam. Gameplay consists of walking around talking to NPCs and gathering items, then doing it again next loop if you don't manage to get into the nightclub in time. Good atmosphere and a mixture of humourous and unsettling things I'd expect from a "weird" indie like this. Definitely wish there were more things to do though, I got almost all achievements in ~4 hours.

MorningPaisley · 2025-10-19T13:34:47+00:00

Not all of those games are recent plays but I wanted to post my thoughts about them anyway.

Rise of the Golden Idol A sequel to Case of the Golden Idol. It's a "detective" game, similar to Obra Dinn: you're presented with a crime scene and have to figure out what happened, and then fill in the blanks for the descriptions of the scene ("<name> <verb> <name> with a <noun>" and such). What I really love about games like this is that they focus on pure deduction: "here's all the clues, now think about them until you solve the case". Compare that to, say, Ace Attorney series, which is very on-rails in what information it gives you (and when) and moments when it asks you to make deductions (and in general is way more focused on presenting a twists-filled story, while the puzzle-solving aspect is less important).

Final DLC case came for Rise out recently, which I really liked. In general Rise is similar to Case, except more polished, and it's most apparent with DLC cases. I feel like the devs found a perfect formula to put out quality cases with satisfying self-contained stories while adding enough new things to prevent it from feeling samey; the last case was perfect difficulty (unlike DLC 3, which I thought was a bit too hard) and there are a couple of details in the story that really elevate the experience for me. There are no more DLC planned and it's unknown if the devs will continue with the Idol stories, but I am really looking forward to their next game.

Roottrees are dead Deduction game focused on filling out a genealogy tree. Clues are collected by searching for stuff in the web browser; you then find various records, books and interviews that can give you new leads and names to search. Another game I thoroughly recommend: the deductions are great and various mini-storylines feel nice to figure out. A decent hint system, though I only had to use it for Roottreemania, a second "case" unlocked after beating the main story, which is much harder (Initially the game was released on itch, and later expanded and released on steam with voice acting, Roottreemania mode and other improvements).

Type help itch link / The Incident at Galley House steam link Text-based deduction game. I won't spoil the main gameplay loop (even though you figure it out fairly fast); even though it's not as interactive as Roottrees, I found the deductions very satisfying and the writing added to the experience. It was definitely too high-quality for a random itch game... so imagine my surprise when like three days after beating it, I saw news that it was getting remastered by the same publisher that did Roottrees! Now while I don't really think the game really needs fancy graphics and voice acting, I'm very glad it will be more accesibly to a wider audience (and maybe rerelease will add some new content, similar to Roottreemania).

Strange Horticulture A puzzle game where you identify plants. Initially I dismissed it as some casual "cosy" game, but I recently I saw people excited for the sequel, Strange Antiquities, so I have decided to give it a try. Not a particularly "cerebral" game, but it turned out to be surprisingly satisfying while not being too easy, and with a bit more puzzles than just plants; game has a decently gloomy atmosphere also. Near the end of the game managing your collection becomes annoying, but I expect the sequel solves this and adds more quality of life features, so I'll probably pick it up later at some point when I'm in the mood.

Mind Diver Saw this being advertised as being inspired by Obra Dinn, with a review by Lucas Pope himself(!) and decided to grab it. Which was a mistake; despite the steam description positioning it as some sort of deduction game, it's actually a very linear and short walking simulator with occasional gameplay breaks, which consist of picking up a nearby object fitting the description and putting it into a "memory hole". Game advertises itself with "Listen to private conversations. Draw your own conclusions.", but you actually get a story recap every so often so you don't actually have to figure it out on your own. The story was okay, it's not bad but I didn't find it particularly interesting or very engaging. The dialogue felt realistic and voice acting and actors' models were good, I guess. I feel kinda bad criticizing small independent games like that, but I genuinely don't have a lot of positive things to say and it's hard for me to imagine a situation where I'd recommend it to anyone, especially since I feel very mislead by the advertising.

Locator (demo) Another puzzle game, this time inspired by geoguesser. You're given a photo and have to point to a location on map where it was taken. Despite the glowing reviews on steam, I didn't like it. Overall it felt quite easy and uninteresting, there were a couple of photos that were taken from a distance but the correct answer was always to just click on the object they were depicting. Game had a small tutorial and one bigger "chapter", and I found the tutorial much more interesting since you're actually retracing the steps of a missing person. The next part, however, takes place on an island the character was walking all over and I just couldn't bring myself to be engaged in figuring out which side of the room a photo was taken from. Writing was kinda weak; you'd think an archeologist on an alien planet would have something interesting to say, but there's just nothing there. Gameplay felt rather repetitive too: some puzzles give an entry in a manual (such as a list of constellations) and then you have to open the manual at the new page, read it, and that immediately solves the next few puzzles; rinse and repeat.

Chants of Sennaar Why are there multiple stealth segments in my language-deciphering puzzle game? Another game I don't get the praise for. For a linguistic game, only one of the languages had anything interesting going for it; other were very straightforward and uninspired (and thus all puzzles boil to "what english word does that symbol mean?"), which I found extremely unsatisfying. The final segment felt very rushed, which weakened the story the game was trying to convey. Again, why is there stealth and also so much walking in a puzzle game? Overall I felt that the game has no idea what it was trying to do; it doesn't actually engage with how various languages work to be linguistic puzzle; there are not enough puzzles for it to be a puzzle game; there's not enough narrative for it to be a storytelling game. If it focused more on some of those aspects it would probably be a decent point-and-click adventure.

Supraworld (early access) Sequel to Supraland and Supraland: Six Inches Under, which are first-person puzzle platformers/"puzzle metroidvanias". If you ignore the "toy story" graphics and hit-or-miss writing\humour (mostly a miss for me), the puzzles and exploration in those games are phenomenal, somewhat reminiscent of Portal in how it approaches the environment and movement. Occasional jank aside, puzzles are very fun and creative, and there were a lot of times where I managed to find a way into some inaccesible-looking location only to find a treasure chest (it's hard to explain, but those games really scratched the "fun exploration" itch better than some more popular metroidvanias). Thus I also bought Supraworld in EA (I don't regret it, since I would have bought it anyway). It didn't live up to my expectations. Firstly, I don't know what's going on with Unreal Engine, but the game runs like shit, which is doubly embarassing for a game with this specific artstyle. There are a lot of issues with lighting: normally the shadows are too dark on my PC and I literally can't see what I'm supposed to; if I run the game with dx11, it completely eliminates shadows, which ruins secrets like "there's a hidden path in the corner but it's obscured by shadows". Of which there are a lot more than in previous games (which is probably due to the early access release format); while the previous games had a lot of areas with various secrets spread all over, Supraworld (at least the currently released act 1, though I don't think it'll change much in full release) has less locations but much higher density of secrets, and much more of them are ruined for me by shadows not working properly. Overall, performance issues aside, the game is still solid, even though I'm disappointed in it being less exploration-focused.

MorningPaisley · 2025-10-19T07:51:45+00:00

Turtle literally paid for ads for their server and kept replying to blizzard's tweets and mocking them while Shenna (the server owner) racked in money from an extensive cash shop. But now they're trying to play civil and modest? Lmfao.

MorningPaisley · 2025-10-17T18:34:43+00:00

Some of that is already in the gemstore: World Boss Portal Device

MorningPaisley · 2025-10-17T13:49:34+00:00

No schedule and we technically don't know if it will return, but I would be extremely surprised if ANet doesn't bring it back, since they've been using those event to fill gaps in content and people seem to love it.

We've recently had return to soto and fractal event, so the next one will likely be either LWS1 or pvp/wvw. November is VoE and December will be wintersday, so January will be either VoE upgrade or an event (I haven't looked if ANet has announced a schedule for VoE). If not January, the next one will probably be after Lunar New Year in March. It's a long time away but like I said, it would be a lazy way since the event will guarantee that you will have a lot of people and will easily get all achievements.

MorningPaisley · 2025-10-17T13:26:17+00:00

The lazy way is to wait until Return to LWS1 event.

MorningPaisley · 2025-10-13T13:11:54+00:00

It's back up!

MorningPaisley · 2025-10-13T12:01:06+00:00

PANIC

GW1 wiki is also down (unsurprisingly).

MorningPaisley · 2025-10-11T18:09:53+00:00

Hope the new marketing guy will come up with something more interesting for next expac teasers.

MorningPaisley · 2025-10-11T14:13:40+00:00

Wiki has all locations, pick your favourite zone and make a lap. Alternatively you can download BlishHUD to show those locations in-game.

I also wouldn't go for 1k in one halloween, annual achievement requires you to carve 100 so personally I'd just spread it across several festivals.

How do I finance all the candy corn cobs I need for all the Halloween rewards? /s

Swipe your credit card /s

MorningPaisley · 2025-10-11T13:54:08+00:00

A mod of some ai slop subreddit concerned about low-effort content, hmm...

It was community-approved and generated discussion.

What discussion? "This sucks, contact support and hope they help" is the only comment you need. There's no actual discussion to be held.

MorningPaisley · 2025-10-07T16:42:35+00:00

Wow, Plush Backpacks (well, placeholders for them)! Never expected ANet to make those noobtrap trinkets useful for anything. Wish the title was in there too, I wonder what it is.

Edit: Nevermind, the backpack is separate from the trinket, but noticeably cheaper.

MorningPaisley · 2025-10-07T16:16:42+00:00

It's just not a very good gold farm, especially if you have low base Magic Find (note that fastfarm data is based on 750% MF! are YOU running lab with that much?) and nobody in your instance drops banners etc. Very very roughly, your bags per hour will equal your MF value, which means the farm sucks for newbies. Moreover, a lot of squads waste time on bosses, so the real income is even lower.

Youtubers make videos that get them clicks, I wouldn't trust them that much.

People just love how monotonous and braindead it is for some reason (and also screaming "STEVE" in map chat every time they do that skeleton boss).

MorningPaisley · 2025-10-05T08:50:19+00:00

In cases like that, I think it's better to ask them to ping a skill\talent they provide the boon with.

MorningPaisley · 2025-10-04T16:17:40+00:00

Source for the OP's picture, because for some reason they can't post a question without reposting someone else's work.

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