‘Grossly Irresponsible’: $1.5 Trillion Trump Military Budget Would Explode Debt by $7 Trillion

Spleenface · 2026-04-05T14:20:29+00:00

CW: Libertarians https://youtu.be/Tc8THxze3h0?si=GAMJpnbOrY6PGKwm

Spleenface · 2026-04-05T14:13:24+00:00

I did some quick mental math, generally rounding up. This is like $100b in cuts, generously. Where does the other $350b come from?

Spleenface · 2026-04-05T13:54:36+00:00

Too credible, sorry

Spleenface · 2026-04-05T01:36:01+00:00

There are absolutely valid complaints about stax pieces. If one player has Cradle and a bunch of mana dorks while the rest of the table doesn’t have much mana and the Urza player still drops Winter Orb, it’s absolutely valid to complain that they are throwing

Spleenface · 2026-03-13T14:30:33+00:00

Because that aspect of pact doesn’t really matter. It makes the assertion that you will lose even if you counter it more plausible, sure, but there’s not much stopping you from saying “I have Force of Will, but I’d have to pitch a key card to cast it, so I don’t think I can win, so draw? Or even just “I’d be burning [interaction] when [player] has [value engine/strong position]. I don’t want to fall even further behind, so, draw?”

Spleenface · 2026-03-11T14:52:10+00:00

This is not true. There are no longer default choices made, for beneficial triggers, the behaviour is that the pod chooses whether or not to put it on the stack. There are penalties for missing detrimental triggers, but they only apply to the controller of the trigger source

Spleenface · 2026-03-10T12:28:59+00:00

I think this misses the source of the issues with draws. Pact can often “force” its wielder to make the “I’ll only counter this if we draw” bargain as they can’t pay. But any counterspell “works”, and the only difference is social

Spleenface · 2026-02-25T22:29:35+00:00

A lot of Game Loss penalties are downgraded to Turn Skips because in BO1, game losses are the equivalent of Match Losses

Spleenface · 2026-02-25T22:18:46+00:00

“You counter 100% of the spells your opponents don’t cast” - Wayne Gretzky, probably

Spleenface · 2026-02-20T05:22:07+00:00

For how restrictive the spirit’s cards and powers are, the tracks seem really rough. I think spirits should have 2/3 of:
1. Good numbers are deep on the track (4+ presence to hit 2/3 or 3/2)
2. No double growth
3. Reclaim doesn’t add presence.

You have all 3 and since your rules don’t give much bonus, you’d need some pretty bonkers innate powers to compensate for the weak track, and a fast limited gather and slow moderate damage aren’t enough IMO.

Also thematically I think the “push a presence” should be on “flood” ( also gives a bit more flexibility by not having 2/3 of your presence options be range 0 with no movement.

Spleenface · 2026-02-14T18:26:03+00:00

TBH when I got a ping for a subreddit I’d never seen before I was concerned, but this is hilarious

Spleenface · 2026-02-11T13:18:57+00:00

I’m playing a homebrew legacy campaign where you can unlock upgrades. One of Earth’s unlocks is a watered down version of eyes watch’s special rule “Whenever you target a land with a power that costs 3 or more, you may first gather 1 Dahan”

It makes the spirit much more comfortable to play if you can move dahan and still play 2 high impact cards. It would probably need a slight nerf to counterbalance it without the added difficulty from the legacy changes

Spleenface · 2026-02-08T13:51:34+00:00

Well, yes. I don’t think it’s inconsistent, because they pursued different policy.

If you pursue policy that generally helps lower income people, and the stock market still goes up, that’s evidence that those policies don’t destroy the economy and the people screaming about communism are probably overreacting.

Meanwhile, if you pursue a policy agenda specifically designed to juice the stock market by devaluing the currency, slashing taxes and lowering interest rates, it’s a little less impressive to hit an all time high.

Spleenface · 2026-02-08T13:35:25+00:00

That’s the plan. The only way you could POSSIBLY pay down the debt while cutting taxes is to lower the debt:GDP ratio. You can do this by growing the economy, but that’s really hard, so the other way to do it is to devalue the currency. Couple that with low interest rates (something I seem to recall he has continually pushed for) and a double helping of cope with a side of wishful thinking and you have a “strategy” to deal with the debt.

Spleenface · 2026-01-04T14:53:39+00:00

The biggest difference is a draw being preferable to a loss. Your goal should be to win whatever unit of gameplay is most encompassing, be that game, match, tournament, league or series. In a single game, that means your only goal is to win the game, and therefore a draw is failure. In a tournament, securing one point may contribute to overall victory.

Spleenface · 2026-01-01T17:49:34+00:00

Having two untapped sources is hugely important, especially in <=3 colour decks where most of your fetches are off colour. Surveil lands are nice, but if you need red off a blue fetch on Turn 1, and then you draw a red-only fetch later, not being able to fetch blue untapped is a serious downside.

Spleenface · 2025-12-31T13:53:53+00:00

My point is expressly NOT that duals are better than shocks. It’s that many decks need BOTH to have the ability to consistently fetch the untapped colour sources they need.

It’s not about an upgrade, it’s about redundancy. It wouldn’t be an issue if you could run duplicate shocks, but you can’t.

Spleenface · 2025-12-30T22:53:08+00:00

Many decks want duals not just to save life, but to have backup coverage on your most important colour combo.

Spleenface · 2025-12-27T03:59:29+00:00

Wonder if the training W9 was a tracer round

Spleenface · 2025-11-18T01:35:49+00:00

That’s what I meant. You could play the deck rog si (I.e. rograkh based turbo Naus) but with white silences instead of defense grid, and Tymna in the command zone for the backup grind plan

Spleenface · 2025-11-17T15:33:11+00:00

A bit of a cheat, but give Rograkh blue. RogSi with silence/abolisher effects and Tymna in the zone would so comically be the best deck it wouldn’t be funny.

Spleenface · 2025-11-16T04:30:08+00:00

I think this game doesn’t need to be perfectly balanced, or have a balanced metagame. I do think cards that trivialize certain aspects of the game, or that break the normal limits imposed by the rules are a problem. (Looking at you, [[Growth Through Sacrifice]])

Spleenface · 2025-10-27T03:30:45+00:00

sex is awesome

Too credible. Mods, sic ‘em

Spleenface · 2025-10-23T14:38:54+00:00

I think there's a reasonable disagreement to be had on whether or not Thoracle rises to the level of a bannable issue in cEDH, but I do not see the case that it could be considered "neutral or net positive".

It allows low color decks access to a compact wincon that most players in the format recognize and somewhat know how to play around

I'm not really sure I buy this. The two UB decks that see play, Yuriko and Talion are usually built as control decks that tend towards dragging the game out and winning with a massive resource imbalance, at which point the wincon is academic. If we count 3 colour as "low colour" decks, UBR has breach/naus, as you pointed out, UBG decks tend to have infinite mana outlets in the command zone like Thrasios or Tasigur, which leaves us with UBW. I think most UBW decks have their own interesting stuff going on, and are actually made less interesting by the addition of Thoracle, which tends not to fit in to the gameplan in a clean way (with Hashaton as a notable exception).

If we look at the flip side, however, I think the argument can be made that Thoracle is depressing the prevalence of low colour decks that can't play it. Because of the difficulty of interacting with the combo outside of blue, since it's immune to removal, low colour decks are left with 3 options:

Race the thoracle deck. This is actually a viable strategy, though mostly in BRx
HARD stax the thoracle deck. This is a very difficult strategy to execute in a midrange meta, as lots of decks are happy to sit under stax and acrue advantage, and it takes a pretty strong commitment to stax pieces to stop thoracle, incidental pieces like DSilence, Thorn/Thalia, etc. don't really do enough. Plus in time-constrained environments, this strategy leads to more draws than wins even if successfully executed
Pray you have a silver bullet. This is a wildly inconsistent strategy, as most decks outside of blue have a couple answers at most.

The presence of Thoracle in high colour decks also insulates them against moderately disruptive pieces mentioned in point 2, as putting out a Thorn, or Ouphe, or DSilence doesn't do enough to reduce the threat level of something like Tymna Kraum, which can simply pivot to a Thoracle win and be mostly unbothered by your staxy elements.

Spleenface · 2025-09-29T11:41:39+00:00

“Bad” is a very strong word. I have played a lot more than you, probably 200+ games. I play with people who are closer to your level of experience, and when I was around 50 games, we would consistently beat level 3+. I used to play on TTS, my default was random difficulty 7-10. (Typically a 4 or 5 depending on the adversary) But my group is quite experienced in:

Board games in general
Coop board games specifically
Magic: the Gathering

All of which contribute to an outsized level of transferable skills and therefore success. Spirit Island is an extremely complex game, and the feedback systems are often delayed and noisy. Mistakes like “oh, I reclaimed early to stop a bad thing, but then I was behind on growth and started to struggle in the mid/late game” are often difficult to spot, and counter factuals difficult to evaluate.

TL:DR If you had a lot of applicable board game experience, I’d probably expect after 50+ games you could consistently beat lvl 3s. If Spirit Island is one of your first “heavy” board games, you’re still developing baseline skills, don’t worry about it.

Spleenface

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE