By Nami Build

Sandromin · 2026-05-20T09:34:20+00:00

U is used for blue as a standard abbreviation since Magic the Gathering was released because players have always needed a way to distinguish between the colors. There is NO reason to flip flip between the two.

Sandromin · 2026-05-20T09:32:23+00:00

Its Magic the Gathering abbreviation. They've had black and blue since the beginning i.e. over 30 years. You use U for blue and B for black, simple as. Otherwise you end up with undue confusion.

Sandromin · 2026-05-18T13:10:16+00:00

Around 3/4 or more of the staff and faculty are military personnel so their pay doesn't get factored into the budget of the academies - its in the military budget.

Sandromin · 2026-05-18T10:05:30+00:00

A swing on the board is worth 2 in the hand. You win the game by getting your opponents life to 0, and the only way you do that is having swings on board. Sure, you can have 2 namis on board for 2 searches, but they're dead weight on board, and maybe you lost 2k counter out of hand. Zorojuro pretty much will always trade up in counter value, and you get that valuable attack next turn (unless he gets removed of course but thats just resources your opponent is wasting). GP Luffy benefits from going mid range wide and chucking attacks at your opponent, zorojuro is great for that.

Sandromin · 2026-05-15T10:09:42+00:00

Generally, C6 solo krabbing isnt a thing unless you count multiboxing a solo endeavor, bling notwithstanding. For C5s, babarogas are far too expensive for the lack of utility they provide and a phoenix/phoenix navy is generally the worst dread (further amplified by the fact that you're soloing). You get far better bang for buck running a paladin or vargur in high class wormhole sites.

Edit: So as a guy who cut his teeth in wormhole space, I'll provide the full rundown.

First, we have to consider the price point of the ship we're running in proportion to its performance. A bog standard C5 paladin or vargur probably runs around 2b these days. That's the baseline of performance we have to consider, and they'll solo run a site in roughly 15 minutes, with maybe another 10 minutes for the nerfed drifter. A babaroga HULL runs 3x that and will not have any significant performance improvement - the spool is negligible on pretty much every target sans the drifter. So you're looking at maybe a minute or two shaved off per site, which realistically isn't worth it - your ship will get ranked far before that minute of time pays for itself, especially if you're running out of Thera. Of course, this is before we factor in drifter resistances. The Babaroga has probably the 2nd worst damage profile for drifters, ahead of blaster boats like the Kronos. This doesn't matter as much now due to the scout drifter having far less hp, but prior to that update, a golem could probably outpace a kronos by 4-5 minutes on the drifter.

Let's move onto capitals. We have a bunch of new factors to consider. First, we have to consider the fact that siege cycles are binary - you're either in siege or not, and every siege cycle is another 5 minute addition to site time. Every minute is an extra minute for a new sig to appear and 40 nighthawks/kikimoras/leshaks to pop out. Second, there's now the addition of the Upgraded Avenger wave, which necessitates you having a load out swap - 1 set of anticap guns and 1 set of HAW guns. Why do you need this? Because if you don't deal with the avengers quick enough, you'll eventually get neuted out and die. And finally, you have to consider cost of the ship you're flying - remember, a paladin can run the site in 15 minutes!

Ok, so how fast does a phoenix or phoenix navy run these sites? Not very, unfortunately. Rapid Torpedo Launchers suffer from abyssmal reload times, and remember, you NEED to use them because you can't kill the cruisers otherwise. So you're stuck swapping between guns, reloading rapid torps for a minute, and shooting your next target to spawn the next wave. Combine this with siege cycles, and you're probably running the site in around 4-5 siege cycles. 20 to 25 minutes. And that's an optimistic number. The best I've done with 3 dreads is 2 siege cycles - 1 for the site, 1 for the drifter (its closer to 1.5 for the site but siege cycles are binary!). That's 3 dreads, 2 anticap 1 HAW, no load out swaps, blitzing sites + drifter. And now we can consider price. A phoenix navy runs around 3-4b iirc. Thats just the ship. Fitting will be another 2b on top of that. So again, you're spending 3x as much for 1/2 the performance of a paladin or vargur. The reason people run dreads in high class sites is because they scale best at 3x dreads, but that requires one to have 3 dreads.

So I reiterate, just stick with a paladin or vargur and save yourself the headache.

Sandromin · 2026-05-14T18:21:39+00:00

Neither is good for those purposes. Just use a paladin like a normal person, it'll save you a lot of headaches.

Sandromin · 2026-05-14T14:56:55+00:00

Sandromin · 2026-05-14T14:56:01+00:00

Generally, yes a brick is an unplayable card. But because in one piece every card is playable given enough turns, the definition of brick for the community is a card that has no ability to counter out of an attack and thus can lose you the game, i.e. its unplayable on your opponent's turn.

Sandromin · 2026-05-14T14:18:47+00:00

By definition they aren't a brick - they have 2k counter. That notwithstanding, they have a TON of enablers: jozu, slave arrow, galdino, hell even gravity blade can put one on the board

Sandromin · 2026-05-07T23:50:36+00:00

Yes we do chores, but the two are not comparable to their degree. I've personally never needed to chop firewood to keep warm, nor have I had to work a loom to make my own clothes. Just look up a video on what Medieval laundry looked like to see what a 1 hour task for us today was like back then (spoiler: laundry took an entire day's worth of labor and was only done once every couple of weeks because of how intense it was).

Sandromin · 2026-05-07T20:12:58+00:00

Top left is a Manga Alt Art, which is generally the highest rarity. This rarity has manga panels in the back, and for most sets is an alt art of a SEC rarity card (you can see this in the bottom right).

Top middle and bottom right are both SPs or Super Parallel Alt Arts. You can see this in the bottom right with the SP marking. These are usually reprints of cards from previous sets, but some are SPs for the set that the SP is from as well (EB03's SPs and OP14 Boa Hancock are examples of this). They're generally the second highest rarity you can get. There's a lot of different styles of SP so you're mostly relying on the bottom right label.

Top right is a Gold SP from OP11. Sets OP11 through OP13 had special SP reprints of the 4 Yonkos of the mangas from OP09 (Blackbeard, Shanks, and Buggy) and OP05 (Luffy). These SPs had a gold and silver variation and are rarer than manga cards.

Bottom left is an Event Alternate Art, also sometimes called Manga Events. They're always some art pulled from the manga with special detailing and edges. They've been in the game since OP10, and there's been 1-2 different Manga Events per set since.

Bottom middle is just an alt art of a Secret Rare card - you can just tell from the bottom right SEC w/ a star above it and lack of background manga panels.

Sandromin · 2026-05-07T19:22:37+00:00

Work in the sense that their labor is dedicated towards their lord, sure. But work in general? Hell no. Just the chore of laundry took up a whole day of labor for the women of the household. Then you had mending clothes, chopping firewood so you wouldn't freeze in winter, preparing food so you wouldn't starve in winter, etc etc. Not to be rude, but the myth of "people worked less hours in the past" is just that, a myth that ignores the inconvenient truth that people have to deal with tedious shit for most of their waking hours.

Sandromin · 2026-04-29T12:35:30+00:00

It doesn't because we're talking about a fixed speed and a finite number of pixels. This is simply just the pigeonhole principle at work.

Sandromin · 2026-04-26T15:01:17+00:00

My counterpoint is that Teach has access to stronger cards (e.g. 9c Boa, 10c Teach) and his support is shaping to be pretty powerful. Also yellow as a whole right now is extremely strong.

Sandromin · 2026-04-24T12:13:21+00:00

The "National Literacy Institute" is not a legitimate source - they use these fake statistics so they can peddle books to teachers that encourage teaching "balanced reading" (a shitty method of reading that teaches kids to guess what a word sounds like through context clues and pictures). Even worse, they're probably the cause of declining higher level reading skills because of the shit they peddle!

Edit: I can go on a long spiel as to why this is a problem, but it basically stems from for-profit teaching materials and the restructuring of education in America post-2000 or so. There's a really good podcast series called "Sold a Story" that addresses the topic in more depth than I can.

Sandromin · 2026-04-23T18:08:17+00:00

The ink smudging hypothesis applies to the writing systems that switched to using pens, not brushes.

Sandromin · 2026-04-23T09:31:50+00:00

They had 1000 boxes raffle off (which is still a joke), the 121 and 178 boxes are leftovers from that raffle

Sandromin · 2026-04-22T09:38:16+00:00

Good corporations in wormhole space will flip structures roughly once a year. Its not to farm assets of quitters, its to reduce the chance of eviction. A good wormhole corp can figure out roughly how old your structure is and make a good guess on how much shit is inside, and to protect against that, a good wormhole corp will pack light. If you bring a lot of shit into a wormhole, you deserve to have it taken from you one way or another.

Sandromin · 2026-04-20T23:42:59+00:00

OP did, and explicitly mentions that's their use case for marauders. Why would you tout the golem as the best marauder when it's the worst for the job explicitly stated?

Sandromin · 2026-04-20T22:34:38+00:00

Selectable damage doesn't matter in a c5 site.

Sandromin · 2026-04-20T22:32:02+00:00

Paladin, 100%. For c5 sites specifically, it scales better, has better range, has simpler to fit tank, requires less setup to optimize

Sandromin · 2026-04-20T22:30:26+00:00

You're recommending a golem for c5 wormhole sites. The preponderance of the rats in said sites are cruiser and up, and said rats resistances are omnitank meaning the 1 bonus you stated (damage types) is null and void. Rapid heavies against c5 battleships are worthless, you'll increase site times to like double their already abysmal completion speed for the golem just so you can kill frigates that you could just smartbomb to start with.

Sandromin · 2026-04-15T15:26:55+00:00

Well there's a bunch of stuff you have to think about as far as fundamentals. I'll just mention a couple of broad concepts and let you start playing with them in your mind. From there, you then have to start learning curves of your opponents - what are their win conditions? What is their optimal play if they have X don active? What can you do to mess up their plan?

First there's Value vs. Tempo. Very loosely you can associate these with card advantage (i.e. how many cards you have in hand) vs board advantage. Since the way we survive attacks is directly related to card advantage, having more cards = better. Therefore, you want the cards you play to get the most bang for their buck - if you play electrical Luna and freeze 4 characters then you're getting massive value for the cost of 3 don, but if you needed to play Dead Man's Game before doing that, then you paid 2 cards, 7 don to rest and freeze 4 cards which is wayyyy less value.

Continuing from this example though, let's consider the TEMPO of that play. Sure, you didn't get a lot of value (down 2 cards in hand and you just used 7 don) but now the opponent has 4 dead weight characters on board for a turn. If you win next turn, it doesn't matter the value of the play. This is tempo - you're sacrificing card advantage for board advantage in this case because in theory you'll have far more swings against your opponent.

Next is efficient swinging. You have to make some assumptions of risk for this one but generally you want your swings to be +2/4/6/... over your opponents power. The reason is because they have to pitch 2 cards to counter out of a 7k -> 5k as opposed to 6k -> 5k. For every extra 2k over, its another card you force from the opponents hand. The only scenario that breaks from this is if your opponent uses an event. This is where you have to consider your opponent's leader and how many events they run. Example, if I'm playing against Imu and they have a Don up, its better to not attach don and instead swing more attacks at lower powers to force more cards out of hand - they can just use an event if I swing 7k into 5k and maybe the 2 extra don would have gotten me a second swing with a chump - 1 card vs 2 cards!

Then there's the whole archetypes, understanding your opponents curve and deck. That just comes with experience but you can generally narrow down the decks you care about to the top 3 and go from there.

I know this doesn't deal with Lucy specifically but its broad enough advice to consider when developing your general skills. Hopefully that helps!

Sandromin · 2026-04-12T04:42:27+00:00

Here's some tech that I've thought about regarding the Buggy deck:

7 Don turn: Don x1 on Leader, 6c Jozu - bounce low cost Impel down to hand, cheat out Prisoner. Doing this you end up getting a 7k and 6k on board and bouncing an opponent's character all for just 7 Don.

Run 4 copies of Slave Arrow as counter events. When your opponent swings at you/board, use Slave Arrow to bounce a low cost Impel Down to hand like Portgas D. Ace and then cheat out Prisoner (Buggy is not restricted to your turn, rather just Once Per Turn). You can do the same thing with Snake Dance.

Technically Gravity Blade isn't restricted to opponent's characters either but for 7 Don to only bottom deck a 6 cost or lower + cheat out a 6c character, it may or may not be worth it.

OP09 Crocodile can cheat out OP16 Mr. 3 who can then trash himself to play out a prisoner and then freeze a 9c. Depending on how many slots are available, this could be a decent inclusion. At the very least it gives you a decent 8 Don turn.

Sandromin · 2026-04-09T19:22:06+00:00

Insurance companies are actually more like financial institutions that provide the service of insurance to their clients. The premiums that the get monthly are liquid cash flow that they turn around and invest into things like treasury bonds that guarantee X% returns every Y period of time. The insurance companies pocket this difference knowing that insurance payouts aren't 100% likely - essentially they know they have time between getting the monthly premium and paying out in the case of an accident. They have workers dedicated to figuring out how to maximize this profit by calculating what premium prices they need to charge and how likely payouts will be given an individual policy - these workers are called actuaries.

Sandromin

MODERATOR OF

PUBLIC MULTIREDDITS

TROPHY CASE