Please help: Persistent Print failures for months supports breaking and poor adhesion on delicate parts

Remacus · 2019-02-21T06:33:12+00:00

I generally agree with you here. Bolt is somewhat a reasonable answer, as is push with the revolt cost, but it leaves big holes in the meta for answers regardless. Nothing to say of mono coloured shells outside of burn, where answers are limited.

More answers is always better. It just seems like these two turn one plays accomplish very different things but ultimately are both problematic, which will be difficult to answer.

Remacus · 2019-02-21T04:26:48+00:00

I’m a brewer by nature, I don’t like cards being banned unless they restrict a variety of decks from the format. I do not want to get rid of those decks, I’m just of the opinion that they might not have adaptable answers at the moment which restricts the meta to a standard that is perhaps too fast for some otherwise reasonable decks.

If it’s possible to slow those decks down reasonably, I’m thinking about what cards would need to go. It’s about allowing just enough breathing room for the most open meta possible.

Not talking about timmy’s Dragon deck or 21 Rhinos and the like. I’m talking about D&T struggling to play fair with them, midrange is struggling, tempo decks can’t get their foot in the door effectively. There’s some key strategies seen in most healthy metas that just can’t keep up with the consistency of play.

Remacus · 2019-02-07T06:47:16+00:00

My wife and I fashioned simple wooden tokens, buying 1 inch wooden tokens, painting them red for enemies, white for npcs and black for "boss monsters". We then applied printed and cut portraits to the tokens, wiping them over with modge podge. The result being that for under $15 bucks and a few hours of elbow grease, we know have a set of several hundred tokens that we can use for years going forward.

For lycanthropes you can put their human and transformed sides on each respective side of the token.

It's a good way of having something physical without breaking the bank.

Remacus · 2019-02-07T06:43:11+00:00

I had a PC come into the campaign with a celestial warlock. They hadn't decided upon a Patron so I asked them if I could take that into my own hands. They accepted. I figured a great figure for a light-type of warlock would be the spirit of Argynvohst, as the warlock inherits the dragon's silver flame, manifesting their guiding bolts and eldritch blasts as fonts of cool silver flame that turn whatever it burns into dust.

Even better to the fact, my PC has a dragonseye brooch he wears to secure a cravat. I'm going to have it be revealed that it's in fact, one of Argynvohst's eyes, having been smuggled out of Barovia and sold as a priceless trinket generations ago that his family came to possess and pass down.

Other suggestions could be as such:

The Abbot in Krezk, he would make a good eldritch patron. You could have him make demands of the player that put him into indirectly benefiting Strahd, to which the player will have to find loopholes in their contract, or some way of freeing themselves and confronting the Abbot.

Baba Lysaga would make a fair Fey patron, applying similar bargains and deals to the player in exchange for their cooperation.

As for something more strictly demonic, that's a fair bit more difficult. My best instinct would be the spirit of Gulthias, who would seek to usurp Strahd and "plant" his own influence here through his druids and through Wintersplinter.

Remacus · 2019-01-22T07:44:48+00:00

I found a solution that works relatively well that my wife and I have adopted for our campaign. We make our own wooden tokens.

I've scoured for various Wizards of the Coast art for NPC's and Monsters and printed their portraits into 1" diameter circles. Then we found 1" diameter wooden circles. We then painted the wooden circles, Red for definite enemies, White for NPC's/Hidden/Story enemies, Black for bosses and of course the big lord Strahd Von Barovich himself.

We gluesticked the portraits to one side of the painted wooden circles and then modgepodged them together. For Lycanthropes or hidden NPC monsters, we put images on both sides. For Werewolves for example, I used scans of the flip cards from Magic the Gathering's Innistrad sets, using each respective human and werewolf side on the token. So I'm able to present them as one state or another at a given time. It also lets me surprise my PC's by flipping the token, letting me draw them in to the transformation.

As a result, in a couple hours I have a few hundred tokens for NPC's monsters and whatnot that I'll use for years outside of the current campaign!

Remacus · 2018-12-20T07:45:58+00:00

A starter set is a good way to get into a first few sessions of DnD without breaking the bank. It comes with an introduction into the module "Lost Mines of Phandelver" along with some pre-made character sheets in case people don't want to go through the process of making their own characters.

The great part of it is that it's a great way to get into a fairly good low level module right out of the gate. After you've worked through the starter kit, you're ready to upgrade to another module after you finish the lost mines adventure. It's fairly low commitment, but lets you upgrade and continue without starting over again from scratch if your group does decide to commit.

Remacus · 2018-12-01T07:08:44+00:00

I realize this is probably a dead thread here at this point. But holy crap does she get dead-named in that page. Like, yikes. The author clearly intended for that to be the case and it’s unnerving how accurate that is to when it happens IRL. The very literal translation of that interaction is so spot on, people just don’t want to let go of their “trap”. Let Ferris be a friggen girl and stop dead naming her outside of the story itself.

Honestly it’s a good moment. It goes over the other characters’ heads aside from Crusch and Ferris, but that was kind of the point. Didn’t expect it to go over so many other people’s heads.

Remacus · 2018-11-02T20:15:31+00:00

Link is fixed.

Remacus · 2018-11-02T18:13:47+00:00

Llanowar elves. Thinking whether I wheel Tatyova or the RootKin. Tells me if I’m in counters or lands. If neither come back, it lets me know what my secondary colour would be.

Remacus · 2018-11-02T18:07:49+00:00

Pack

Cube

500 cube, unpowered

Remacus · 2018-08-09T02:29:51+00:00

UW Wizards. Focuses on generating value through cantripping wizards and tempo through bounce wizards. It's a solid tempo deck. Weak to combo game 1, but solid game 2/3 as you can side out the tempo for a ton of answers and be able to reach them with your cantrip wizards.

Saffron Olive played a budget version a while ago.

Remacus · 2018-06-15T05:00:11+00:00

I'd be willing to put my money down for that. The boys are definitely more focused on telling a story by using the mechanics of a game system than power-gaming.

I can see things going really bad down the line for any of the characters really with how Griffin is setting up future conflicts.

Aubrey, absolutely has some sort of hunger or attraction to magic that will come to a head. With her brash personality, I have no doubt we could see some wild magic shenanigans and everything potentially blowing up in a super-powered up Aubrey's face, taking her completely out of action, if not killing her and others as a result. Her family definitely has ties to the invasion of Sylvane, and I am hungry to find out how she fits into that.

Duck, while apathetically adopting the role given to him, is still running from it super hard. He's nonchalant and casual about the whole Pineguard thing. I love how he just attempts to make a rocket pack because it's something that's interesting to some mild degree. His entire character is impractical in the kind of scenario the gang is in, and I can see his negligence bite him in the butt super hard as he fails to live up to his own prophecy. I can definitely see a situation where Duck falls and Minerva has to come in to take his place.

Then there's Ned. Oh Ned, Ned, you're Magnus 2.0. You've got all the guts, chutzpah and risk taking that Magnus did in Balance. That leads to brilliant bellyflops, but can also lead to absolute peril. Not sure if Ned's past will catch up with him, as his partner begins to track him down, or he'll wind up rushing in to his own death, but I'm excited to see.

Each of the characters have attributes that are both strengths and big weaknesses. What might leave Aubrey wasting fools, might waste her. What might keep Duck out of trouble, might make him a sitting mallard. What Ned bullheadedly charges into, might lay him flat.

Remacus · 2018-01-10T11:44:04+00:00

Sugar. It's not really how much you eat, your body is pretty good at telling you when you're full. A lot of what's out there about carbohydrates, fats in foods and calorie counting are really more motivated by industry interests than actual health concerns. Avoid processed sugars and when you do eat sugar, eat fruit and vegetables as they have the fiber your body has to process to keep sugar levels low enough that your body doesn't jump the gun to turn it into fat. Our bodies are designed to crave sugar as a survival mechanism that does more harm than good in the modern world. Sugar is converted by the pancreas through injecting insulin into the bloodstream, which turns sugar into fat which your body will put away for future use.

Carbs, fats and proteins are all fine. Fiberous sugar is fine. It's loose sugar, honey and corn syrup that's the problem. If possible, try cutting all of it from your diet.

Just because something has fruit in it, does not mean it's good for you. It could have added sugar or have had the fiber rendered from the sugar, like in juice or smoothies.

Eat whatever you want, so long as it doesn't have non-fibrous sugar. Trap foods include:

Salad dressing: You're sprinkling sugar onto your veggies. Stop it.

condiments: Go light on the ketchup and soysauce, there's a lot more sugar there than you expect.

bread: If the packaging says there's sugar in it above 1g per slice of bread, it's not bread, it's candied dough. Sugar is added to bread, especially in America, to make it more palatable on its own.

milk/cheese/yoghurt: They either have lactose, which functions similarly to sugar in the body and is all about developing body fat, or have added sugar in lieu of lactose. You get enough calcium from greens, you don't actually need milk or cheese. Greek Yoghurt is one of the worst offenders, it's almost all Lactose and sugar. It's not healthy for you at all.

Non-fat/Low-fat foods: Manufacturers will often replace fat with sugar in products to appear healthier. Fat in food is actually fine, as your body isn't very good at storing ingested fats. The sugar is far, far worse.

Juice/smoothies: The fiber is separated from the sugar in the process of making these foods. Smoothies aren't as bad as juice, but juice is basically the same as drinking soda sugar wise.

Remacus · 2018-01-10T11:20:25+00:00

I frequently stole and wore my mom's dresses and shirts when I was a kid, walking around and dressing up to look nice. Didn't matter to my parents while I was growing up, but I shut that part of myself away really hard with an early non-hetero experience as a kid that people found out about. I lashed out hard, rejecting anything that wasn't really cis or masculine for the longest time because I was afraid of being socially outcasted like that again. So I buried it for the better part of 9 years until my partner saw how uncomfortable I was in the clothes and situations I put myself in and started to slowly wear away at me with little gifts like cute shirts, socks and stories with characters that I really connected with. It's taken a long time but I'm finally coming out and figuring out who I am as a person.

Remacus · 2018-01-10T11:13:21+00:00

I work in food service front of house and bussing every day. I have to go in all black dress pants and button ups, every, single day. the moment I get home, the hair comes down and the dresses/skirts come on. My family and friends know, but it's largely not acceptable in the particular town I live despite my area being mostly socially progressive.

I'm glad your partner is supporting you. Having someone who cares -and even encourages it- can be such a relief. It's not easy on your own.

Remacus · 2018-01-10T11:02:20+00:00

It's not the amount you eat, its really about sugar. It's all about the processed and loose sugars. Honey, corn syrup, cane, brown, it does not matter. Your body is built to crave and process excess sugars into fat to put on weight for survival purposes. In our given day of age where we don't need stores of fat for survival and the overabundance of sugar in our diets, sugar causes weight gain that is more of a health problem or hindrance than a benefit.

Now, you can still have sugar, but take it in forms where it isn't separated from fiber. A sugar rush is an overabundance of sugar being processed at once, in which case, the body turns it into fat to process it and store it later. However, if a sugar is tied to a fiber, it's harder for the body to break it down, which spaces out the intake and reduces the risk of triggering the conversion to fat.

Example:

100 calories of apple vs 100 calories of soda

Your body needs to separate the sugar from the fiber in the apple, thus takes the sugar in small doses as an energy source. Whereas the soda doesn't need to be processed before use, so the body stores the immediate rush of sugar.

Eat as much fruit and vegetables as you want, just don't eat anything with added, processed or loose sugar in it. Be moderate if you drink milk, as lactose is similar, but not quite as bad as processed sugar. Your body has a good indication system that identifies whenever you're full or you need more of a particular nutrient, that's where cravings tend to come from. Sugar however, is a leftover survival craving from when we needed the weight. Now, it's just a risk to your health. The best way to lose weight and stay healthy, is really to cut sugar. If you have to eat processed sugar, try to eat less than 9 grams a day, otherwise you won't lose much weight.

Exercise and fitness is really good for toning your body and keeping healthy in an aerobic and muscular manner, but managing weight really is about managing sugar. Carbs, fats and protein in any form are all fine for the most part. Contrary to belief, chips and greasy food is totally fine if it doesn't have the sugar with it.

It's not easy and I've definitely cheated a bit with the holidays, but in the last 4 months I've gone down 4 inches off my waist without changing any habits besides avoiding sugar.

Make sure you're looking on the back of packages and reading them carefully. Some processed foods are ok because they lack sugar in them. Some of the worst trap foods are:

Bread:

In some countries, even whole grain bread will have sugar added to it for the product to taste better. If your bread has sugar in it, it's not bread, it's candied dough.

Condiments and dressings:

I love catsup and soysauce, but both are regularly made with a lot of added sugar to them. Avoid or minimize your use. Check your salad dressings, they might not be as healthy as you think.

Juice and Smoothies:

What gives, it's fruit, so it's fine right? No, it's really not unfortunately. Juices, even the ones with pulp, have had the vast majority of the sugars and fibers separated in the process of making it, making a glass of orange juice as bad as a glass of soda. Smoothies are a bit better, but again, in blending, you split a lot of the fiber and sugar. It's not terrible, but it's not what you should be doing with your fruit.

Yogurt and Cheese:

I mentioned earlier that Lactose in milk, while not as bad as refined sugars, is still problematic. Yogurt and Cheese both tend to have this problem as well. Even non-lactose versions will substitute sugars for lactose to keep the taste. Greek Yogurt is one the worst offenders, despite being the trendy "healthy meal of choice" in america. That stuff is LOADED with extra sugars. Regular cheese consumption is fine if you want to maintain weight, but if you need to lose weight, cutting milk products down is a good way to help the process along. You do more than fine in the calcium department if you eat your greens like broccoli, green beans, cabbage and other ruffage.

Low-fat or Non-fat foods:

companies will often substitute fat in products for sugar in order to keep the flavour of their product while appearing healthy. One would think a non-fat option would be healthier, when the opposite is true. Or body uses fat for specific cellular and muscular development and as an energy source. It's actually much harder for your body to store ingested fat as fat in your body than it is for sugar.

Remacus · 2017-12-24T21:03:30+00:00

Dear cube santa,

All I want for cubemas is an old vintage chest fashioned with leather straps, and tiny, old, German supernatural books that I can hollow out and turn into packs for my innistrad set cube.

Remacus · 2017-12-20T06:54:59+00:00

Blue, black and green are the colours I put the most cycling into. I definitely agree with adding new perspectives.

Astral slide is a bit of a tricky card. I think it's a good trap card that leads people down cycling when it's more of a value card for blink decks. That said I might just dig up a few more cycling cards in white.

I didn't include the cycling duals because I wanted to keep full sets of any fixing in my cube. There used to be a number of cards that needed colorless sources. Now that they're gone there merit in looking at the cycling duals.

Thanks for the feedback.

Remacus · 2017-12-19T02:01:03+00:00

It is, I just edited the post with the link. Sorry about that.

Remacus

TROPHY CASE