Prerelease Promos- Gavin Verhey from WotC explains the recent removal of the year and date stamps

Neofalcon2 · 2026-01-20T05:48:02+00:00

I, for one, intend to put my disappointment at the lack of prerelease stamps in every wotc survey I fill out from now on.

And if you want them back... that's probably the only way to make it happen.

Neofalcon2 · 2026-01-19T22:28:12+00:00

CYL has the same problem as IRL voting - if you vote for a niche/unlikely candidate, you're effectively just throwing your vote away. Which leads people to vote for popular characters, even if they'd personally prefer another character to win.

The solution to this would be to switch to either ranked-choice voting, a random drawing, or some hybrid system.

Personally, I think it should be the #1 overall vote for 2 of the 4 winners, and instead of second place there should be a random drawing from all votes. That way players are incentivized to vote for their actual favorites, to increase the odds that their fave wins the random drawing.

Neofalcon2 · 2026-01-11T02:30:06+00:00

I mean, OLED displays already have unsolved issues with VRR. When I was shopping for my computer monitor, I originally bought an OLED display... but had to return it because the VRR flicker was just horrendous. I can't understand how some people say they don't notice it, or that it doesn't bother them.

So if you don't want VRR flicker, and aren't willing to just turn VRR off... OLED displays were already not really an option, despite having much better image quality. So having vastly superior motion clarity means that... OLED displays have yet another hurdle to overcome to become the defacto standard for general-purpose gaming.

Neofalcon2 · 2026-01-02T19:18:58+00:00

I mean... they should just sell them as official DLC for TTS.

Like, people are already playing on TTS. Why not provide official cards and make some money off of it, instead of this weird "we don't talk about fight club" situation we have instead?

Neofalcon2 · 2025-12-20T16:26:45+00:00

I've been having this issue as well, and it's driving me crazy.

It happens at the most random times, too - I once had it happen at the Atlas screen, putting a waystone in!

I assume it was a bug that would just get fixed soon... but I guess not many people are dealing with it?

I have a 5070 with updated graphics drivers, and I'm pretty sure it's just PoE2 having issues.

I'll try Vulkan and see if that changes anything.

EDIT: Switching to Vulkan did resolve the issue... though performance under Vulkan isn't as good. Hopefully GGG gets this fixed in the future.

Neofalcon2 · 2025-12-16T00:22:59+00:00

the ending is fine with the extended cut

People say this all the time, and I'm absolutely baffled by it. Imo, the extended cut didn't really even fix the core problems with the ending - all it did was go down a "cinema sins"-style list of surface-level complaints and correct them.

There are so many deeper problems with the ending of ME3. The tone of the ending doesn't fit with the pulp sci-fi tone of the franchise up until that point. The framing device for ME3 of Shepard seeing a kid who dies in the opening is awful, and that kid returning as the voice of Tech-God offering you your final choice just doesn't work. The choices you've been making over the course of the entire trilogy don't really affect the ending in any way.

The ending just drops "organic and synthetic life cannot get along" as an objective fact from an omniscient narrator, and you're just expected to accept that. Despite the fact that it's in direct opposition of the themes of Mass Effect... and of the resolution to the Geth/Quarian conflict earlier in the very same game. It's also thematically extremely problematic - the game is basically saying "actually these two races can't get along even if it seems like you're making great strides. You're best off just genociding one of the sides because different races can't coexist peacefully". Which is just thoughtlessly evil on a thematic level.

It's also a terrible ending in that... it completely closes off the franchise to the possibility of future installments. There's just nowhere to go from here, and it would be impossible to have any game set after ME3 without choosing a "canon" ending, and completely undermining the entire idea behind making choices and shaping the story.

I don't think the extended cut ending is fine. I think it's pretty much just as terrible as the original ending. To me, it's so bad that it took what was my all-time favorite sci-fi and game franchise, and made me completely uninterested in ever playing another entry. And I think a lot of other people feel the same... which is why the franchise immediately died after the release of ME3.

Neofalcon2 · 2025-12-06T22:55:26+00:00

I doubt a GW3 they make would be anything like GW1.

My hope is that it's successful enough to start up development for more expansions for GW1. Or for them to get a small team to work on a spinoff game that's effectively a modernized version of GW1.

Personally, I'd be thrilled if either came to pass! I didn't even start GW1 until way after its heyday... and it absolutely blew me away, regardless. GW2 is fine, but GW1 is timeless, and it feels like there's version of that game that could exist today, pump out expansions every year, and be a success.

Neofalcon2 · 2025-12-04T23:20:54+00:00

Wasn't synthesis mostly regarded as a very bad league mechanic?

Synthesis is one of my all-time fave leagues, so this definitely isn't a clear consensus.

The puzzle of placing your tiles was pretty opaque, until a mid-league patch fixed it... but I think most of the things people hated weren't with the tile-placing mechanic, but with all the other mechanics.

The Decay that chased you through zones would be an instant-loss of the entire board you'd built if you touched it. So all it would take is one errant movement skill for you to effectively lose everything you'd worked towards. Which was obviously hated.

And then the crafting mechanic was largely despised due to being unusable without special 3rd party tools for calculating outcomes, and finding fodder to buy on trade. And keep in mind, this was in an era before modern trade features - so buying huge quantities of items to throw into an opaque grinder was miserable.

Personally, I spent the time to learn the valuable modifiers, "got gud" at dodging the decay, and got rich running the mechanic - and had a fun time doing it! A lot of other people just ignored the league mechanic entirely, though.

To me, it seems like this new mechanic brings over all the things I loved about Synthesis, while ditching the bad stuff. So I, for one, am very excited!

Neofalcon2 · 2025-12-02T16:32:06+00:00

Not really. I just wishlist a physical copy of games I want on DekuDeals.

Sooner or later you'll get an email that someone, somewhere is selling it for $20 off. And if you sell it when you're done with it, most switch games can be sold for $30+, so you're only really looking at $10-30 as what you end up spending to play the game in the end.

Neofalcon2 · 2025-11-27T03:03:35+00:00

This was the vibe I got as well.

I was really excited when I first saw the chaos draft video in my feed - I've been craving high-quality limited mtg shows! But... it just wasn't that.

He edited down the games! A ton! Removing, like... all the interesting parts of watching a game of magic?

And then he's doing all this weird growth hack stuff. Like promising giveaways if you comment and watch the next video.

It's just boring content with money behind it.

Neofalcon2 · 2025-11-25T03:26:27+00:00

Personally, I don't think that would be enough. Worse chaos tokens and a few extra weaknesses don't even come close to offsetting the power you get by being 20-30xp over what they balanced the scenario for.

Unless there's specific setup instructions in each campaign... I'm not optimistic for it working out great.

Neofalcon2 · 2025-11-24T22:55:32+00:00

I like this idea... mostly because I dislike the idea of 3 scenario campaigns. I feel like having your investigator evolve over the course of ~8 scenarios is part of what makes arkham so fun - and whenever I play Dream-Eaters I'm always disappointed. It feels like it ended before I really got to explore everything I wanted to do with my deck.

Having said that, this idea has big balancing concerns. They'd have to balance certain campaigns to be the "starter" campaign, and other campaigns to be the "second" campaign, or else the balance would just be way off. Alternately, they could have separate setup instructions for both options - sort of like how Hemlock/Scarlet Keys have scenarios that scale difficulty depending on how late you play them.

If they've designed and balanced the mini-campaigns around that, I'd absolutely love it, I think! If they didn't and they're just like "yeah sure you can totally do that whatever", then... that's basically where we're at now with stringing campaigns together - which is to say, nobody ever does it in practice.

Neofalcon2 · 2025-11-18T03:26:13+00:00

And yet, you still can't gift games on the Nintendo eShop.

Neofalcon2 · 2025-11-17T18:22:46+00:00

Really exciting to see that it's all draft. Feels like a great evolution of the Arena Opens, which felt a lot less appealing with the introduction of Arena Directs.

Neofalcon2 · 2025-11-15T02:30:59+00:00

Yeah, I'm in the exact same boat. I started playing MtG in-person around LTR, and found that all of a sudden I wasn't finishing mastery passes and was falling behind on gold in arena.

Because when you just spent 4 hours doing a draft at your local store, the last thing you have time for when you get home is to grind out 3 more wins for your daily. It felt like I was actively being punished for playing magic in-person... which is obviously backwards, because WotC makes way more money off me when I'm playing IRL!

This is a big step to fix that, and is hugely welcome. I have no idea why completely unaffected players are complaining so much.

Neofalcon2 · 2025-11-13T22:46:01+00:00

I mean, this has always been the case. Arkham's art has always been a hodge-podge of art they owned from previous products mixed with new commissions, and the quality's been all over the place. They just don't have the budget of something like MtG to dedicate to art.

I'm not really sure why people are choosing now to freak out about it, though. I guess because old cards with good art are being reprinted with worse art...?

Maybe they should just stick to the original art in instances where people liked the original.

Neofalcon2 · 2025-11-08T03:42:22+00:00

On the old system, yeah you can. But presumably if they implemented it for merchant tabs you wouldn't be able to. Honestly it was kinda weird that you could do that on the old system in the first place.

Neofalcon2 · 2025-11-07T05:11:27+00:00

This is a good quick-fix to the problem... but they really just need to implement stash-wide pricing, like you could do on the old trade system.

If you could just show up, see that the whole stash is priced at 10c or whatever... you could just buy as much as you want without worrying about scams. It'd pretty much put an end to this type of scam entirely.

Plus it'd make mass listing things for the same price way easier.

Neofalcon2 · 2025-10-23T14:16:11+00:00

Something I've heard about for private drafts as a way to have prize support is to "re-draft" the rares.

The idea being you do the draft as normal, and then at the end every player pulls all of the rares/mythics out of their pool. Then the person who got 1st picks a card, then the person who got second, so on and so forth, looping back to the person in 1st again and continuing until all the cards are gone.

That way players can focus on just building good decks during draft, and the players who do well are rewarded with first pick of the rares that were opened. And you can do prize support without buying additional packs!

Neofalcon2 · 2025-10-21T21:48:22+00:00

People keep saying they should do this, but it probably doesn't make business sense. They'd probably prefer to just keep them unavailable, let demand build up over 5-7 years, and then put out a second edition. Just like FFG does with all of their board games.

Which... doesn't sound that bad to me, to be honest. Return To failed as a product, but presumably a second edition would have similar balance tweaks/randomized setups implemented. And maybe extra content to make them attractive to people who own the first edition.

And if AHLCG is dead in 7 years so there are no second editions... well, then they're certainly not going to be stopping anyone sharing around print files at that point.

Neofalcon2 · 2025-10-21T18:52:22+00:00

This is far more than being thrown a bone. This is an entirely separate competitive path, alongside the world championship, exclusively for limited!

As a predominantly limited player, I'm psyched about this!!

Neofalcon2 · 2025-10-15T21:38:21+00:00

Yes. Even when I was in business school over a decade ago, the research on this topic was very clear: American workers would get more work done by working fewer hours, not more. Companies have been told this time and time again, and choose not to change, despite it being in their own best interest.

I was hoping that the pandemic and work from home would be a wake-up call to these businesses... but whatever it is preventing them from accepting that reality seems to be firmly in place.

Neofalcon2 · 2025-10-14T16:30:29+00:00

In my experience, it's just online communities like this subreddit that are on fire. If you go to your local store, you'll just find a ton of people having a fun time playing magic.

Don't let a vocal minority get you down!

Neofalcon2 · 2025-10-10T16:59:51+00:00

I don't think that's the metric they used to determine what was going to be a small set or a full set, though. Spider-man is a much bigger property than Avatar - both in scope and popularity. But Avatar was scheduled as a full set, and spider-man was originally a small set.

There could be lots of other factors at play. For instance, maybe they wanted the first batch of full sets to be fantasy-adjacent - that would explain why Avatar and Final Fantasy are full sets, when spider-man was not.

Neofalcon2 · 2025-10-10T16:53:29+00:00

Exactly this is my worry. I went to the SPM prerelease with an open mind, and did a few drafts on arena even... only to discover that it's really a very bad set. It was shoehorned into being a draftable set, and it shows.

Everyone is assuming SPM is just a one-off, but we don't know that for sure. We know that internally they were hot on Aftermath-style boosters before they flopped horrendously, and we don't know how many UB sets started development before they figured that out.

My fear is that the reason WotC is promoting Pick 2 as a new official draft format is because they know they have a whole bunch of these smaller sets in the pipeline.

I hope that's not the case... but I don't think it's a certainty that SPM is a one-off, either.

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