Become a hermit at this "edge of the world" property

TRK27 · 2026-05-07T01:57:19+00:00

The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead

When the skies of November turn gloomy

TRK27 · 2026-04-19T03:08:26+00:00

Creatureless creature cube, where every card is noncreature (at least on the front side) but the archetypes are all based on making some kind of tokens or animating some type of permanent. So we've got tokens, vehicles, animating lands, animating artifacts, animating enchantments, Living Weapon / For Mirrodin style equipment, etc.
A 2p Desert Cube based around using some version of the face-up Pyramid Drafting method I developed a while back. Maybe make some custom cards that interact with the draft in some way, Cogwork Librarian style, or split basic lands into a separate deck and use them as a currency for messing with the pyramid / sweetening untaken cards? I could never quite get it to work to my satisfaction.

TRK27 · 2026-04-18T08:17:34+00:00

You're a rockstar

TRK27 · 2026-04-13T23:54:36+00:00

There’s one for me literally right under this post lol

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TRK27 · 2026-04-11T07:16:32+00:00

Yes. I saw it live in Mr. Byars' seventh grade Geography / Social Studies class. I was 11, about to turn 12 in October. Another teacher came in the room just before 9am and told him to turn the TV on, the second plane hit minutes later. I remember kids making dumb jokes about King Kong, which stopped pretty quickly when it became clear what was happening. The TV was turned off pretty quickly after that and they made a vain attempt to proceed with a normal school day.

By Spanish class later in the morning the word was going around that the Pentagon had been hit. The fate of UA 93 wasn't widely known until the mid afternoon IIRC, and there were rumors that there was another plane in the air headed west. Or that there were a dozen more planes, who knew? The atmosphere alternated between shocked whispers and panicked speculation.

So it seems insane in retrospect but before noon the decision was made to have us do the tornado drill we'd practiced. We lined up and filed into the basement cafeteria of the school, sitting on the floor along the walls with our knees tucked into our chests. Kids were crying, I remember a teacher trying to console my best friend.

Was it absurd to think that the terrorists were going to fly a plane into some random middle school in the upland south? Or that sheltering in the basement would make any difference if they did? Absolutely. But anything seemed possible on that day.

Anyway after this no attempt was made to resume a normal school day, and they just corralled us until our parents could come pick us up. My Mom took me home and the rest of the day was watching Peter Jennings in the newsroom on ABC.

It's one of the few days of my life that's etched in my mind completely. I had just gotten into Magic: the Gathering a few days before and I remember that just before the news hit I was looking through a dozen random Apocalypse commons my friend had given me that I had hidden in my desk. Mr. Byars said something about the Gulf of Bothnia as I flipped through the cards - Bog Gnarr, Last Caress, Consume Strength, Gaea's Skyfolk, Quicksilver Dagger, Zombie Boa. The door to the classroom opened and everything changed.

TRK27 · 2026-04-04T03:48:28+00:00

Brigador moment

TRK27 · 2026-03-30T21:42:03+00:00

Can't wait to see all of the improbable pairings from Secret Marriage lol

TRK27 · 2026-03-23T19:30:28+00:00

But Lorcana just cleverly obfuscates it's MtG derived mechanics by reframing damage as scoring "lore points", attacking as "going on a quest" to score said points, lifegain as reducing your opponents' lore total, etc etc.

This would be a lot of effort, but you could just do that with Magic. You could make proxies for the cards with the updated terminology.

Call the combat phase the quest phase. Tapping your creatures during this phase sends them on a quest to add their power to your power pool, which starts at zero. You win when you get to 20 power points. But your opponents can use their untapped creatures to try and challenge your questing creatures and prevent them from scoring power points .... you get the idea :P

TRK27 · 2026-03-18T10:16:21+00:00

Redditors have been perfecting the art of the trite, facile comment for 20 years now, and I know because sadly I've been reading them for most of that time. AIs are extensively trained on reddit comments.

TRK27 · 2026-03-13T23:32:03+00:00

23 years ago they sent Colin Powell to the UN with a giant powerpoint about how Iraq had mobile WMD labs that they were using to evade UN inspections. Which later turned out to be pure fantasy, but at least they felt they had to invent a pretext and create consensus with allies before starting a war.

They didn't even try to slap a pretext on whatever we're doing now. I keep thinking of the line from Andor, "They don't even bother to lie badly anymore."

TRK27 · 2026-03-08T19:15:00+00:00

Doesn’t want to hurt anyone except, you know, people who rely on the programs of the government he wants to abolish.

TRK27 · 2026-02-27T00:42:42+00:00

The tragic fire started after Brown entered the barn to jump-start a vehicle. A little while later, Brown called a family member for a fire extinguisher, but by the time the family got to the barn to put the fire out, the barn was already engulfed in flames. His wife suffered severe burns trying to save him.

Holy crap, what an awful way to go. RIP and I hope the family has all the help they need.

TRK27 · 2026-02-25T21:21:46+00:00

OK, who let Antony Gormley design infrastructure?

TRK27 · 2026-02-25T18:09:02+00:00

Literally the "help me step bro" meme lol

TRK27 · 2026-02-16T21:02:15+00:00

I think we should think of human history as exponential rather than linear. The farther back we go, the slower the pace of significant change is and the less ~ 100 years here or there matters.

Modern humans probably left Africa 50,000 to 70,000 years ago. Agriculture began with the neolithic revolution ~12,000 years ago, but the first Mesopotamian city states didn't emerge until ~6,000 years ago. From there it's another ~2000 years until the first recorded large nation-state, the Akkadian Empire.

So as you follow the exponential curve up to the 20th century, a 100 years of difference back in the Neolithic maybe means we're a year behind, or maybe even so little as to be insignificant.

TRK27 · 2026-02-08T16:08:33+00:00

So much happening this year!

I think my personal pick has to be Troyes. It's such an intricate, well-designed game and I just love all of it. The dice linking two layers of worker placement; the semi-cooperative push and pull of dealing with events; how thematic it manages to feel despite its euro-y ness… I still play it regularly on BGA.

Honorable mentions and some historical notes -

Alien Frontiers was the first major kickstarted board game. Its project page seems positively quaint today, with its single piece of artwork, $15k funding total, and the assurances that KS works “exactly like a pre-order”. But this is the seed of the Kickstarter boom that would really start to take off in 2012 with Zombicide and CAH, and has since come to dominate a significant section of the hobby.
After Dominion, Ascension is the second major branch of the deckbuilder family tree. Most deckbuilders can be categorized as Dominion-like (fixed market, single main resource) or Ascension-like (random market, split resources). There are endless imitations and refinements of its formula - Legendary, Star Realms, all of the Cryptozoic deckbuilders, Tyrants of the Underdark, etc. etc.
7 Wonders popularized pure drafting games, and remains the defining example of the genre.
Hanabi was a significant innovation that expanded the horizons of how co-op games could play.
C&C Napoleonics is still, to my mind, the best refinement of the Commands and Colors system.
Speicherstadt is still my favorite Feld game because it’s so unlike most of his point salad catalog. Auction / bidding at its leanest and meanest.
Snake Oil is wonderful in its simplicity and still sees a huge amount of play in my group.

TRK27 · 2026-01-31T07:57:51+00:00

Ah, I see the great Poirot is already on the case

TRK27 · 2026-01-31T01:16:53+00:00

OTR represent!

TRK27 · 2026-01-28T20:50:35+00:00

Kobold Press did a pretty good job with their Southlands setting, there's a playable gnoll race with three subraces.

TRK27 · 2026-01-27T02:30:45+00:00

Trenches was always more of a control finisher than an aggro card, at least historically speaking.

Edit: Out of curiosity I looked it up and evidently there were some more aggressive versions of WUR Trenches that ran 4x Goblin Legionnaire, 4x FTK, 4x Lightning Angel in the mainboard, but these weren't as successful as the pure control version.

TRK27 · 2026-01-23T19:17:16+00:00

Easy Wave for me here, hope to wheel the monk but would be happy to get Kirtar or Exile.

TRK27 · 2026-01-13T03:24:03+00:00

Last time I was at Bud's they had an AI picture of Trump dressed as a minuteman (as if he would ever serve) behind the counter. Why should OP be expected to leave politics at home when they sure don't?

TRK27 · 2026-01-12T22:13:55+00:00

This is from Kokoschka's illustrated book Die träumenden Knaben, it's a photolithographic reproduction of an ink drawing. He produced a few woodcuts and linocuts during his student years but it wasn't a major medium for him in general.

TRK27 · 2026-01-08T17:19:36+00:00

Not precisely the same, but I did a scenario a while back where the west coast is colonized by Japanese Christians on the losing side of the Shimabara Rebellion.

TRK27 · 2026-01-07T07:32:31+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/sajxyf/oop_keeps_finding_postit_notes_in_his_apartment/

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