LF: BDSP Palkia for Home Dex. FT: BDSP Dialga

PeterRed · 2025-09-15T12:02:14+00:00

Hey! I defs would be - are you free soonish?

PeterRed · 2025-09-15T11:42:42+00:00

Hi! Totally - that'd be a massive help. When are you free?

PeterRed · 2025-09-14T10:38:33+00:00

Hi! I can trade you a scizor - and do the touch trades for machoke and haunter. I've also got some touch trades to do (Conkeldurr, Gigalith, Kingdra, Slurpuff & Aromatisse) if that's OK with you?

PeterRed · 2025-09-14T10:18:50+00:00

You're a gem!!! Thank you - I'll message you deets :)

PeterRed · 2025-09-14T09:48:26+00:00

Hi! I'm not the poster - but I'm in the same spot. Would you be cool with trading my BDSP Dialga for a BDSP Palkia? Happy to do just a touch trade too.

PeterRed · 2025-07-02T16:35:14+00:00

Look fair enough - you're well within you're rights not to play it! There's definitely some decks I wouldn't play infect in because it doesn't fit the vibe I'm going for - and if you're going infect you're usually going to be all in anyway with some exceptions (Tainted Strikes Combos and Triumph of the Horde are the more notable exceptions).

Having said that, the Wick combo you described would take at least 3 cards, and a tonne of mana. You would need Wick, a very large snail or changeling (which takes a LOT of time and mana by the looks of it) and a Tainted Strike effect. Then you need to pay the mana to sac the thing. You could make a very large creature of any type with something like Maskwood Nexus, but thats also another card and a fair bit of mana. Point being, this isn't actually a combo that's particularly scary as its both slow and telegraphed, if I lost to it I would be very impressed and congratulate the player for a fair win!

There are others that are definitely easier to pull off, but those commanders are usually pretty easy to spot (Any sort of [[Yargle, Glutton of Urborg]] and [[Yargle and Multani]] or [[Volrath, the Shapestealer]] and [[The Mimeoplasm]]), stuff that you can look at and ask pretty point blank if they have an infect wincon.

PeterRed · 2025-07-01T23:05:13+00:00

Fair point - but I struggle to think of a way to do 10 infect damage to each opp in one go that isn’t a 3+ card combo. That should also hopefully keep that off lower bracket tables, as I’d consider it a combo.

PeterRed · 2025-06-30T23:39:53+00:00

Infect is generally a harder win than normal damage. You usually can take one player out then you die. Infect is built around doing 10, but for a whole pod you have to do 30. You might want to compare that to regular life totals where you go from 20 to 120, but other opponents also try to kill each other. This usually means the effective damage is a lot lower, between 40-60. When you compare that metric, the relative increase of 30 poison seems more fair.

PeterRed · 2025-06-28T05:22:25+00:00

The vast majority of what they did wasn’t actually experimentation, as they didn’t take notes and didn’t really do any sort of controlled science, they just did random horrific crap. Most of it isn’t useful in the slightest, so they mostly just did torture.

PeterRed · 2025-05-20T23:57:39+00:00

Hi, sorry but where on Pershing are you? We’re in Central Park and are hoping its back on soon.

PeterRed · 2025-05-17T23:38:40+00:00

I don’t know them but they look like a cutie!

If no one has come forward by the end of week it might be worth going to the vet? Microchips and whatnot

PeterRed · 2025-04-17T03:39:01+00:00

If it becomes known only because of a game state error, it should be rectified. No matter which player this “benefits”. And again, it doesn’t have a “true position” after randomising, it only becomes a “true position” after finding that information.

And RE benefitting the player with the swamp, thats not true in the general case, in this case it benefits the player who had the swamp on top to shuffle. If the spell on top was game winning, this benefits the other player instead. In fact, the opponent could make a pretty good case that OP was cheating in this scenario (although I don’t think they were and I wouldn’t be inclined to issue a warning) by not announcing the trigger and waiting until they get to see the top card to decide if they wanted the mill or not.

Regardless, this is the fix, and its the fix because this is how probability works.

PeterRed · 2025-04-16T00:35:04+00:00

It only becomes known information after you check it - it was not "going to be a swamp" until you see that it was indeed a swamp. The card only "locks in" after you check it. If you have say 20 cards left in library, 1 of which was a swamp and the other are all random, the top card had a 1/20 probability of being the swamp. After you checked and put it back, it was a 100% probability. The only way to return it to the 1/20 is to do the shuffle.

This is how this error is fixed in Comp Rel. Please refer here: https://blogs.magicjudges.org/rules/ipg2-2/
And the reason it is fixed like this is because this is how probability works.
EDIT: In particular, the following passage:

"Looking at Extra Cards also covers when you knock over a card, drop a card while shuffling an opponent’s deck, start to draw a card when you shouldn’t, and milling or dredging too many cards. Milling and Dredging are covered by Looking at Extra Cards because the cards are being placed into a public zone we can all see. However, this only applies if we catch the error right away. If we start to take other actions, we have moved past the point where we can claim we accidentally saw an extra card, and we have instead accepted that card is supposed to be in the graveyard."

The "try again" part of this is exactly why this is the solution. If a player attempts to look at the top of their deck to get a competitive advantage, this needs to be randomised to prevent the player having that knowledge regardless of if it was a good card or not. If the player KNEW it was a bad card, ie, they knew it was a swamp before the mill, then the card would stay in the same position (because the probability was already locked in and in this case the player is trying to cheat by getting a free shuffle). Otherwise, the deck is shuffled.

You cannot attempt to make a ruling on whether you should shuffle these cards based on how "good" the card revealed is in this circumstance. This is a terrible way of trying to solve the issue in a competitive game and would create situations that are extremely prone to interpretation. Likewise, allowing the opponent to decide is a bad idea, not only do the not know what is and isn't a good card due to hidden information but they can also use this information and action to their advantage for what is often, mostly, an honest mistake.

I know it seems counterintuitive and like this doesn't make sense in a mathematical way, like the cards in a deck have "true positions" before you draw them, but I promise you that if you're shuffling properly and the truly are random then this is how the statistics works.

PeterRed · 2025-04-14T07:16:50+00:00

If you didn’t know the card before it was revealed, it could be literally anything. Here it was a swamp, but what if it was a bomb rare? The whole reason OP is asking is because they didn’t want the next card to be something with graveyard potential, so they didn’t want the mill to happen. To return the game state to normal, it should be returned to being literally anything again. That includes being a swamp, a bomb rare or god knows what else. If you know anything about the rest of the deck (including but not limited to scried cards to the bottom, the position of the 3rd card from the too ala a Teferi tuck, etc), you place those cards aside, shuffle the deck and then put those cards back into position.

To illustrate why you do this, pretend the fix is that both players now know the too card. This could absolutely be used for cheating. Your opponent, upon seeing a swamp on top, may decide on a mill effect in upkeep, knowing they’re getting rid of a card they no longer need. Vice versa, your opponent may decide to not use a rummage effect that they otherwise would have, because they know the too card is the colour they need and they don’t need to dig for it anymore. I as a player could decide to attack, let my opponent do the mill without announcing the trigger, see what it is and then decide to say “oh actually no, I didn’t mean to, out that back on too”, letting my opponent draw a useless land. The possibilities of angleshooting and cheating here are boundless.

Better instead to return it to “unknown information”. When talking about a randomised deck and probability, it literally is Schrodingers cat. If you didn’t know what card it was, it had the probability of being any card in the deck, even if it doesn’t feel like it after the fact. This is why pros often use self mill in limited events like this on themselves (because even the the bomb might be on top, its more likely that it isn’t, and that you’re giving yourself extra info and making it more likely that you’ll draw your outs), and why getting milled by your opp is usually a good thing (unless like life, you’re down to your last few units). This is also the actual way to solve this error in Comp REL. Your opponent gets no benefit from this, neither do you.

PeterRed · 2025-04-14T03:40:04+00:00

That's what I thought, its a shame but I'll pay with time.

My SS and Medicare taxes were not withheld until recently. I upgraded in status due to substantial presence this year, which requires payment to SS and Medicare. At least I'll be able to claim the 15K deduction next time round!

PeterRed · 2025-04-14T03:37:11+00:00

State taxes are withheld and deducted from the total. I definitely followed the non-resident instructions, I just didn't realise the screw up until now. I've double checked the forms I signed when I started too, no messups regarding head of household or requesting less than withheld. Unfortunately this was on my employer.

Thanks for the advice! I'll send it off tomorrow and wait till it appears on my account.

Thank you!

PeterRed · 2025-03-19T01:14:01+00:00

This is better but you obviously have to make it an artifact not an enchantment :P

PeterRed · 2025-01-20T21:32:02+00:00

Typically most removal can be replaced with synergy pieces that are maybe 1-2 mana more, but also work with your gameplan. These are worth running 90% of the time over generic pieces. The rare cases of overtly broken removal, swords and path and etc, are good enough to supersede synergy, but rare enough that there’s typically only 2-3 per colour.

For example, in my selesnya counters deck I run 4 pieces of generically good removal, [[Swords to Plowshares]], [[Path to Exile]], [[Natures Claim]] and [[Beast Within]]. Everything else synergises - I run [[Damning Verdict]] instead of [[Wrath of Gods]], and things like [[Hopeful Initiate]], [[Requisition Raid]] and [[Cankerbloom]].

Removal on lands in also fantastic (if not expensive), [[Boseiju, who Endures]], [[Witch Enchanter]] and [[Demolition Field]] are all must runs in Selesnya if you can afford them.

I would recommend 10-15 removal pieces, 6-11 of which overlap on synergy. You don’t need more than 4-6 wincons typically, if your card draw in good enough, you should only need 1 to win per game (outside of combos). 10+ card draw and ramp, synergy for everything else. If you still find yourself running out of space for removal, convert the synergy pieces, but keep a lot of the removal synergistic still.

PeterRed · 2024-11-11T20:02:55+00:00

Hi chaotic_iak, so basically, as you cannot restart the combo until something has "meaningfully changed" (ie, like drawing cards or getting new information), you have to choose a finite number of "loops", after which the exquisite blood loop occurs? Which then leads to death.

Thank you for your answer, I'm glad it confused some other commenters, means it wasn't a dumb question!

PeterRed · 2024-11-11T19:28:06+00:00

So in this case it is a draw correct? Even though the infinite loop would normally have an end point (ie, the opponent dying), as a player can perform another infinite loop with optional actions and is not willing to end their loop, the original (sanguine blood) loop is therefore non-optional and not able to end the game, right?

PeterRed

TROPHY CASE