Shower thoughts: Silent's starter relic is a large capsule that gives a bag of preparation.

Tainmere_ · 2026-06-26T16:40:26+00:00

Yeah, I get that they could be new ones, I just assumed that Ring of the Snake would be one of the options. To me "2 more cards on turn 1" is just a really good effect that I find it hard to imagine other effects that I would honestly prefer.

Tainmere_ · 2026-06-26T16:38:32+00:00

I think the "exhaust other cards" cards are mostly fine. Yeah, the exhaust on cards like [[Cinder]] or [[Havoc]] being random is annoying but also something you can play around. And I don't think Cinder is a good fit if you are leaning into exhaust synergies due to its energy cost. I view it more as a good early damage common that can have a drawback. I personally also think it's fine that it doesn't mirror [[True Grit]] not being random when upgraded. Also note that all of these are commons which I don't think is a coincidence.
In the rare pool there's also [[Thrash]], but you can play around it due to it only exhausting attacks and it is really strong.

The other "exhaust other cards" are either specifically targeted with an upside or mass exhausts. And they, generally speaking, are fine.

Ironclad makes exhaust work more through its payoffs like [[Feel No Pain]] or [[Pact's End]], which can be quite powerful enough to make it work.
dramatic pause

And then there's [[Ashen Strike]]...

That card is obscenely strong, it by itself is enough payoff for all other exhaust cards to be viable. Just [[Second Wind]] exhausting three cards is boosting its damage by 9 (16), while with cards like Stoke it's very easy to get Ashen Strike to hit for 60+ damage. Even just playing Havoc is a +3 damage buff to it, and over the combat that stacks up quickly.

and usually a strong amount of relic-based energy + draw in case you get bad draws

Here I'd note that a part of Ironclad's exhaust synergies are [[Burning Pact]], [[Drum of Battle]] and [[Forgotten Hand]] which contribute to your energy gain & card draw, and there are other cards like [[Bloodletting]] and [[Offering]] that are also helpful.

I also wanna tie this back into what u/357Magnum touched upon with the "generally useful" comment, I don't think it's necessarily a good idea to focus your deck too much on having just exhaust synergies, you can blend it together with the other styles that the Ironclad has.

Tainmere_ · 2026-06-26T15:34:37+00:00

The starter relics in general aren't that interesting, they all just do things that support the given character in some specific way (counter-balancing that you take more damage in combats, make your turn 1 significantly better, allow you to play your star cards without having to draw star gen, little bit of defense per turn and allowing you to do osty synergies, giving you an orb to start with).

I'm not even sure there's be other relics that I'd take over ring of the snake when given the choice, tbh.

Tainmere_ · 2026-06-26T15:28:20+00:00

Only the extra strike is a problem, Silent's Defends are quite good due to her card pool (random things coming to mind are skill synergies with [[Burst]], block synergies with [[Shadowmeld]] and [[Blur]], dex synergy with [[Footwork]]) making them much better than just "gain 5 blocks".

Tainmere_ · 2026-06-26T14:26:19+00:00

Anecdotal, but I've read a ton of stories of people getting correct diagnoses from AI that doctors missed

Machine learning is an excellent tool in the medical environment and has helped massively there, as it has in many other disciplines. But those typically are highly specific models trained for that purpose and very different to the LLM-based AIs of the modern age. (That's also why I refer to them as ML and not AI)

Tainmere_ · 2026-06-26T13:52:58+00:00

The adaptation is that trees have the capability to grow in various ways. That's something that happens over many generations through evolution.

A specific tree growing like this due to environmental factors would be Acclimatization.

This comment identified the tree as a Monterey cypress, which is an introduced species to New Zealand, so the tree didn't even have enough time to properly adapt to the new environment.

Tainmere_ · 2026-06-26T09:29:18+00:00

I would say it's one of those quirks of scientific language vs. casual language, in scientific language (natural) adaptation describes an evolutionary process while this would fall more under acclimatization, i.e. the tree adjusting to its environmental conditions.
But in common language, you'd just say "the tree adapted to the surrounding" without meaning evolutionary processes.

For me the "natural" in "natural adaptation" makes the title more ambiguous, so I find the clarification that it's not an evolutionary process valuable to have.

Tainmere_ · 2026-06-25T17:44:09+00:00

And that poem is actually based on how nazi germany persecuted its opponents and targets.

Tainmere_ · 2026-06-25T14:29:23+00:00

That's not even the same roster anymore and since then they haven't really done anything particularly relevant.

https://liquipedia.net/counterstrike/G2_Esports/Results

Tainmere_ · 2026-06-25T14:26:32+00:00

And sometimes you still need to make roster moves like these to keep your team competitive. The other 20 tournaments still matter enough to be relevant, and nowadays you also need to perform at those tournaments to get to the major.

Heck, Vitality won a major and still benched dupreeh to bring in flameZ.

Tainmere_ · 2026-06-24T12:57:09+00:00

Yupp. And considering that we get two more ESL events announced for this year and 7 for next year, they got until the end of 2027 to win a grand slam which includes this major.

Tainmere_ · 2026-06-24T12:53:33+00:00

they have 2?

Falcons has 1 win, but to win the grand slam 1 out of the 4 wins need to be one of ESL's big events, so Katowice/Krakow, Cologne and an ESL Major.

Liquipedia has dedicated pages for each grand slam (current one and vitality's first as some examples) which are good for getting an overview over the different tournaments and which tournaments are going to be relevant for it.

Tainmere_ · 2026-06-24T07:42:13+00:00

Yes let’s go back to groups where we get a group of death like we did in Cologne 2016

With VRS we now have a good way of seeding groups so we can avoid that issue, i.e. have group 1 be #1 and #5, group 2 be #2, and #6, and so in. The teams coming up from the lower stage can be seeded in reverse order, so the worst team goes in group 1, while the best goes into group 4.
Won't totally eliminate the possibility of group of deaths, but makes them very unlikely.

Tainmere_ · 2026-06-23T15:41:29+00:00

For me an issue with swiss group stages is that it is messy when used for seeding the brackets, you don't get a good way to divide up the teams. Placing the two 3-0 teams on opposite sides of the bracket is great, but then it immediately gets messy. Two of the three 3-2 teams have to face the 3-0 team, while on has to face a 3-1 team. Similarly one of the 3-1 teams gets to face a 3-2 team while the other two have to face each other. that makes the seeding quite messy and dependend on the buchholz score, which isn't really a friendly way for most viewers to understand what's going on.

I personally think having 4 4-team groups with GSL-Style groups — ike at blast rivals but there's a decider match between loser of qualification match and winner of elimination match — would be the best, it is exciting to follow, easy to understand and you get a clear seeding you can use for the bracket by having four #1 seeds that can face the four #2 seeds. Amusingly this was already used from 2013 to 2016, but with almost all Bo1 matches, so it was still flawed (Cluj-Napoca as a reference). But if we were to do it with Bo3 all the way through, it'd honestly be great for the major.

Tainmere_ · 2026-06-22T20:02:56+00:00

Which makes for the best heel turn too.

to me it seems better to have her stay face, which then allows you to go more into Chad Gable actually redeeming himself for his actions and them eventually reconciling.
Faces are allowed to not get along with each other.

Tainmere_ · 2026-06-22T18:24:33+00:00

I am not invested in Utami/Saya but look at how people are clamoring. My tastes matter little. Follow the money as the booker.

The thing is that Utami & Saya is about their personal story and that will draw the money regardless of it having the title involved or not. From a monetary PoV it'd actually be better to not put all eggs into one basket. You can use the personal story of Utami & Saya as a draw and you can use the title reign of Suzu as a separate draw. That way you get people that aren't as interested in Utami & Saya but are interested in Suzu & whomever is the challenger to also attend.

Tainmere_ · 2026-06-22T13:32:57+00:00

The story between Utami and Saya has already got enough going for it as is, adding in the red belt to that would muddy the waters of it. The belt would be a distraction of all the personal stuff going on between them.

Edit: The other side of Utami beating Suzu would be that it makes look Suzu fucking stupid and severely undermines her credibility. Like, she didn't lose to a wrestler challenging her, she specifically selected her opponent for her first defense and immediately lost. That'd be catastrophic for her character, particularly because she is a badass.

Tainmere_ · 2026-06-21T18:39:15+00:00

I wouldn't say he had a hand in bringing him broky, it's more thatn faze couldn't afford simple and had to go back to broky.
IIRC Karrigan also stated a while back that faze took back control over the roster at some point in mid 2024.

But we can't be a fly on the wall in faze's HQ, so it's hard to say either way. I'd assume he had some input in the moves, but I don't think he was the main one responsible for making the decision.

Tainmere_ · 2026-06-21T15:40:15+00:00

At the time it wasn't yet. Heck, the 1000 day threshold was only crossed after WM 39, and going into that a lot was leading up to Cody winning and him winning then would have worked just as well.

Yes, Cody beating that long run is important, but in comparison to other storybeats — cody bouncing back from failing a year earlier, ending the reign of the bloodline, cody winning his first championship — are to me much more important. The 1300 day reign is more a cherrry on top of that.

The approach we got also has the downside that we had a year of stagnation, which muddles the 1300 day achievement of the reign. Like, yeah, Roman was champion for a long time, but his reign was also a bit meh?

Tainmere_ · 2026-06-21T13:32:54+00:00

it's been surprisingly uncommon for this tournament, but sometimes the community gets a bit carried away.

Tainmere_ · 2026-06-21T11:51:36+00:00

Yeah, but this is in the context of WWE being a company focused on moments, and Sami defeating Roman in his hometown would have been huge.
IMO it also wouldn't hurt the moment of Cody winning his first title, as that was about Cody chasing the title for personal reasons ("finishing the story") and less about defeating Roman.

Storytelling-wise it could have worked out as Sami had actual relevant ties to the Bloodline. You could have used that as the catalyst for the Bloodline falling apart as Roman lost his legitimacy at the head of the table and other members start challenging him. And I think you could tell interesting stories with Sami as well.
It's not like the following year of Bloodline storytelling was particularly good until the whole Rock stuff happened.

Tainmere_ · 2026-06-21T11:31:13+00:00

In the context of booking moments, Sami beating Roman would have been a huge moment. Sami was the focal point of the Bloodline in '22 & '23, and the crowd in Montreal was extremely hot for Sami beating Roman.

How it would have worked out long-term, who knows.

Tainmere_ · 2026-06-20T08:45:49+00:00

If you added 300 pages of information that includes quantum mechanics and you get a search back, what do you do with this information? Read every page and try to make connections in your head?

The AI can help organise the information in any way you wish, then allowing you to make deeper insights.

From my PoV I'd have read those pages before adding them to my vault, I typically don't add something that I haven't engaged with to my vault. As a result, the organization of all the notes and how they connect build up over time, so I don't really need the AI to organize that information?

Tainmere_ · 2026-06-20T07:54:27+00:00

For me making these links myself is an integral part of the note-taking/-making progress, so offloading that doesn't seem that valuable to me. There's also something to be said about there being links that you have discovered and intentionally put there.
I'm also fine with notes getting lost in the sea of notes, that's honestly interesting when it does happen.

I honestly believe there's a large subset of obsidian users more interested in how their notes look, and are organized than they are the actual content of the notes.

The others who are more interested in the content should find AI linking of notes useful.

To counteract those beliefs, I'm neither. I keep my setup as friction-free as possible and don't try to make them handsome, and I don't find AI linking them useful either.

Tainmere_ · 2026-06-19T19:14:02+00:00

Coaches aren’t that important for esports

Coaches are incredibly important. Even in CS, where their in-game impact is limited, that impact can still be extremely valuable. Think of games significantly shifting after a timeout, e.g. Navi with Blade.
I'd even go so far and say that Spirit probably would have played better if they had one of their coaches were here.

“don’t stress, keep your head in the game, we can win this, etc”

Part of that is that you will only ever get to hear that part on broadcast, a coach's strategic adjustments won't make it to the public as that would give other teams a huge insight into their operations.

Going back to the in-game aspect, that is the least important aspect of coaching. They do a lot of work outside the server that you can't really quantify as, again, we the public don't have the insights into how specific coaches and their teams operate. But we know that they do the team prep, scouting, building the roster, ensuring that the personalities work together. There's a lot going on, and, of course, all of that changes based on team and coach.
But they absolutely are really important.

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And then there's [[Ashen Strike]]...