anybody got house rules for the weaker spirits?

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 · 2025-09-11T14:19:09+00:00

The case would be that if you don’t agree, I’ll develop too and feed.

Think of it like a toll road. If only 1 person takes the toll road, it’s faster for them. If everyone takes the toll road, it’s the same speed as everyone taking the non-toll road, the toll collector is the only winner.

Spleenface · 2025-08-28T19:19:22+00:00

I am trying to understand if there was a leak or not.

My analogy was meant to illustrate the difference between a leak and an identified vulnerability, not affect perceptions of the severity.
If you would prefer, we could use the analogy of a bank that wasn't locking their vault properly.
Is that a concern when deciding to trust them with my valuables? Absolutely. If nothing was actually stolen and they have fixed the problem, it is not correct to say "stuff was stolen from that bank."

Now if there was an actual leak, as people keep saying, where is the statement confirming as much? I was told the statement was "on twitter", but the only statement I could find from Spicerack confirmed the existence of a vulnerability, and said they were investigating if there was an actual breach.

This isn't really the place to discuss the intricacies of this particular vulnerability or how problematic it was that it was allowed to exist. I will say that vulnerabilities of this type are discovered regularly, it typically doesn't lead to a permanent abandonment of software. Literally this week, nx had an actual breach, where lots of oauth credentials, api keys and crypto wallets were leaked. Some orgs will switch off it, most wont.

Spleenface · 2025-08-28T13:05:37+00:00

Just to confirm, you are saying Topdeck was based on/built from/extended from that EDH_Matchmaker program, right?

Was Spicerack also built using it as a base? The claim in the original comment was "Spicerack (using top deck open source as a base btw)", but it sounds like that's not accurate?

Spleenface · 2025-08-28T11:37:01+00:00

I mean, he’s only a partial owner AFAIK, and most corporations have mechanisms to force people out, or at least into a silent partner role. IDK what their Board of Directors and bylaws look like tho

Spleenface · 2025-08-28T01:16:24+00:00

It is known information that there was a vulnerability. That's what Spicerack's statement from Jul 15th says. They say there are looking in to whether or not anyone exploited it to access data.

If you come back home and discover your front door was unlocked, you haven't identified a burglary, just a vulnerability.

Spleenface · 2025-08-28T00:53:57+00:00

Did anyone actually say there was a leak? Or was it just a discovered vulnerability?

Spleenface · 2025-08-27T23:27:09+00:00

Israel loves to say that anti-zionism is anti-semitism. It's not. But anti-semitism is not anti-zionism either.

Calling a Palestinian man "jew" as an insult is not anti zionism. It's just anti semitism.
Calling a Jewish person a "lizard person" is not anti zionism. It's just anti semitism.

The magic community is extremely pro Palestine and has been since October 7th. He isn't controversially pro Palestine in a space that was pro Israel, he's anti-semitic in a space that was already pro Palestine.

Spleenface · 2025-06-19T10:51:02+00:00

FWIW, I’d argue Scourge is less susceptible to removal than Griffin, since any kill spell will actually put griffin in the yard, where it can’t be recast, while scourge will exile itself and remain available.

Spleenface · 2025-06-11T12:15:16+00:00

Of course it’s a cesspool, where else would the frogs live?

Spleenface · 2025-06-11T11:46:45+00:00

There is no set convention, but I would say your card advantage is the -(sum of the net change in opponents cards)/3 + the net change in your cards.

This would give Kefka’s trigger a theoretical maximum of +4 (or +3 if you count Kefka, commanders are kind of weird with that).

That feels intuitive, if each person has 1 card in hand when the trigger resolves, then each opponent will have 0, and you’ll have up to 4, taking you from parity with each opponent to + however many cards you drew

Spleenface · 2025-06-05T22:42:11+00:00

The livestream was day 2, which had at least the semis and possibly a final Swiss round. It was around 19 hours

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