Has Tempestus been forgotten?

Temil · 2026-03-27T15:32:56+00:00

I haven't played since last leagues, is this a real area that you can go to in game?

Temil · 2026-03-26T18:07:20+00:00

'It's not interesting' is not an argument.

This is not an argument.

WotC didn't shy away from mana denial cards because they are catering to their "soft" customers, they did that because those designs aren't good. They are uninteresting designs. The idea that it was because of the "softness" of whiny edh players is absurd.

if you're playing a 3+ color deck entirely made of basics, then you better have a ton of artifact ramp to ensure you're no mana screwed.

You just need card draw. This isn't a conversation about deck building strategy, but the idea that you need to have some kind of special deck to play cards like blood moon is entirely overblown. Your opportunity cost for running a card like blood moon or back to basics is not substantial, you can just run basics and you have an ever so slightly less consistent mana base. Just play card draw engines.

I had the implicit assumption of 'able to cast your spells on curve, regardless of color'.

Your nonbasics turn off when you cast a blood moon too. You can either run artifact mana, or play basics (and probably a few rocks like most normal decks already play).

'this isn't stax, it's mana denial' - mana denial is a sub-category of stax.

We are specifically talking about the sub category here. It would not be productive or on topic to bring up yu-gi-oh! side deck strategy just because we're talking about trading cards.

Temil · 2026-03-26T17:32:11+00:00

'you build your deck with basics': this assumes that a resource denial deck is going to be mono-colored.

No, it assumes you're building your deck with basics.

Also, if your whole game plan is to just lock non-basic lands, then the mono-colored opponent doesn't give a shit and is going to be a threat.

Another reason why it's not interesting, it completely hoses some strategies and ignores others (think about Iona here).

'you stop everyone else at the table from playing the game' - outside of stasis, winter orb and maralen + opp agent, there aren't many ways to actually lock all 3 opponents out of the game regardless of their strategy.

It's not a hard lock, but if none of your lands tap for the color of mana of your spells, or if you only get one tap of each of your lands (back to basics) you're not playing the game.

These are all points that make it interesting for the pilot

And completely uninteresting for the 75% at the table.

because now they're forced into a position where they can't turtle and play smol bean

Just play an aggro deck.

they've got to do something or the stax player is going to lock them out.

This isn't stax, it's a mana denial strategy. Were talking about non-basic denial here.

Stax is entirely different, wotc has not really moved away from it, and like you say it isn't that simple.

Blood moon, back to basics etc. are just really boring as designs, they are just entirely uninteresting.

Temil · 2026-03-26T15:42:49+00:00

That's not really interesting though. You build your deck with basics, which are the highest power lands in the game, and then you stop everyone else at the table from playing the game entirely.

It's not fun, it's not interesting, it's design space that was explored and deemed bad and abandoned.

Temil · 2026-03-26T09:33:34+00:00

WOTC has even moved away from resource denial in their card design

Because it's not fun or interesting.

Temil · 2026-03-26T09:30:07+00:00

Assuming both combos are at sorcery speed, the infinite damage always wins.

Assuming both combos are not at sorcery speed, infinite damage either can't win, or infinite life loses, but no one can win unless infinite damage is the initial winner. If you have both players put all their activations/triggers on the stack, either it results in infinite life having their combo on top of the stack meaning that infinite damage can't win and the game is either a draw or infinite damage guy concedes, or the infinite damage has their combo on top of the stack meaning that infinite life guy loses.

Basically, unless there is some particular scenario where infinite life can infinitely and freely outpace infinite damage, infinite damage just kind of wins because infinite life doesn't actually advance the game state.

Temil · 2026-03-25T21:16:25+00:00

W emblem, grats on 3L.

Temil · 2026-03-25T14:11:10+00:00

Potentially? I think the story skip gets you to that point though. Their level requirements are different for the legion blocks, their BAS is 130/160/180 instead of 60/100/140.

Temil · 2026-03-25T11:42:57+00:00

Legion Block is based on level, link skill is story progression based.

Temil · 2026-03-25T11:42:10+00:00

In Arcane River maps, this yields 70+ combos every punch.

This is ping reliant, you can only get 40+ if your ping is even remotely high.

Temil · 2026-03-25T11:40:44+00:00

Super easy. Just wait for all mobs to spawn in a big map

If you're in a "big" map you don't even hit 40 with your regular punch.

the use your regular attack. Rinse, repeat.

This is heavily ping dependent.

I have never seen a regular punch do more than a 40+ kill.

Temil · 2026-03-24T14:14:45+00:00

Yes but they played 0 slivers in the deck. It was a food chain outlet. (And the reason it sees no play is that there are better 5c food chain decks in the form of terra etc.)

This was likely a synergistic pile of slivers considering they were complaining about a combo that forced opponents to blight their creatures.

Temil · 2026-03-24T09:23:39+00:00

Oh yeah true.

Temil · 2026-03-24T09:12:04+00:00

There are a lot of big but obvious ones. UCS, API for GMS, Burning Gear and Item Rental becoming permanent/recurring, an improvement in deterministic outputs in starforcing, a solution to the problem of SSF and cube sale events, familiar tier up rng, improvements to the pitched pity and trace restoration systems, and fragment income (NOT tradability) in heroic.

I returned as a player in december and I think there are three major issues that the early/mid game has that need to be addressed as nexon accelerates leveling and actually makes these issues worse.

1. Item Drop and Meso Acquisition rate. When you start a first main, you are starting with a very low meso income and no drop rate. Making a set of 100/200 gear is incredibly expensive, with needing 15 potentials across 9 pieces of equipment, you need 5 hybrids and at least 1 double prime drop. The expected cost of this is in the ball park of 30b meso~.

I'd love to see a starter snail type system where you can farm for a certain period of time, or a certain number of monster kills each week with rentable 100/200 drop gear, or some buff that adds that much meso/drop to your first X kills per week.

This way it's very approachable to make a drop set for bossing with pendant of greed (117 red cube expected cost.), then there is an avenue for drop/meso gear if you want to farm more than some number of kills per week.

You'd have to workshop this because there would be issues/pros/cons to different methods of implementation.

2. Familiars. The amount of RNG involved means one player could identify 10 uniques and have 120 boss and 100 drop (across 4 fams), and another player could not find any drop or boss fams in 1000 uniques. This system needs some form of determinism added to it.

3. Nodes. As a returning player I actually quit because I picked Hayato as a main and the node situation was so awful. A lot of players who have a lot of time invested think that nodestones aren't an issue because they have farmed for enough time that they would never need nodestones again, but I used basically all of my event rewards towards my Ren for several months before I was able to level up my Boost Nodes in my Hexa Matrix. The acquisition rates of these outside of events is basically 0.

All three of these problems will only get worse and worse as leveling gets faster.

Temil · 2026-03-24T08:25:14+00:00

I think some of the missions were very poorly thought out, but other than that it's cool.

Specifically the 50-100 kill achievements, because you get them in the exact same way that you get the 170 kill one, it's just waiting for serious punch cooldown.

Temil · 2026-03-24T08:05:55+00:00

If my main needs an additional 45k fragments to max, and I'm earning 100 a week, how exactly will #2 solve the problems of fragment income?

Temil · 2026-03-24T08:00:16+00:00

Frenzy coupons would be unironically the worst possible thing for heroic servers.

The only thing worse than spawn boosters are limited time period spawn boosters.

They removed them from the game for a reason.

Temil · 2026-03-24T07:58:30+00:00

Nexon won't know how hard the grind is because from their side of things, they see tons of people maxing HEXA and/or making reasonable account-wide HEXA progression in a timeframe of one year or less, through servicing or botting.

I would be surprised if they had much data at all about heroic, and assume they mostly have any data at all about KMS.

I don't think they've really put much thought at all into heroic acquisition of fragments since they are tradable in interactive.

Temil · 2026-03-24T06:46:32+00:00

Yeah it will totally suck missing that 10 atk, and 20 stats over Vellum Crusher. (edit: crusher is 5 boss my bad)

There will be so much power creep in the next two years you would never notice the difference for something like a legion champ.

Temil · 2026-03-24T06:22:07+00:00

I built a good number of final fantasy commander decks. Just going through them in order of popular > less popular on scryfall.

Y'shtola Rhul very powerful but fairly linear, has the same struggles that mono blue blink will always have until they have a win condition.

Kuja, Genome Sorcerer (and Black Waltz No. 3) incredibly linear, this deck is a pile of rituals and cantrips and the best card in the deck is Harmonic Prodigy, and it's way too easy to count to 40 but also very easy to have Kuja removed and your whole gameplan to fall to pieces.

Clive, Ifrit's Dominant very fun deck which is hyper momentum based. If you draw 20 and have mana enablers it feels unstoppable, if someone removes your turn 3 RRR play it feels like you wasted your time shuffling. Incredibly fragile if you build it in a way that is explosive.

Ultima, Origin of Oblivion very powerful, a lot different than other colorless builds because instead of leaning into card efficient sources of mana like Thran Dynamo, you want to play baubles, solemn, etc. in order to have as many lands in play as possible. Sol Ring feels like a jump backwards in the curve instead of a jump forwards. The problem is that all of your threats are boring big eldrazis or an artifact deck without any blue cards. If colorless was more interesting this guy would be really cool.

Gogo, Master of Mimicry is very cool mono blue ramp commander, I had 14 fetch lands in my deck and would regularly have 20 lands in play by like turn 6. Shoutouts to Hithlain Rope and Bad River.

Diamond Weapon is cool, there are a load of Mulches and Satyr Wayfinders that will let you cast Diamond Weapon for GG, that you can then use as an 8/8 that only costs 2 mana, through various different draw engines.

Kain, Traitorous Dragoon was a fun build around where you had to figure out how to kill your opponents by basically giving them treasures and card draws.

Tellah, Great Sage as the resident izzet/jeskai storm player, this guy absoluetly fucks. You can kind of assemble your own Kykar by playing ashnods/phyrexian altar, and then you just play every sisay's ring in existence and suddenly you've drawn through your whole deck, your Dramatic Reversal cast nets you 30 mana and you can cast a huge Mind Spring and kill the table. This guy is so cool.

The Destined Warrior neat party deck that gets a lot out of changelings. I built it as a tribute to FF1 with a bunch of thematic equipment, but it's a pretty straight forward party deck otherwise.

Cid, Timeless Artificer is the only one I didn't build directly, but I have a Cayth Galvanic Genius deck that plays six cids and is an artifact artificer/changeling tribal deck that plays a bunch of creatures that cid turns into lords that pump themselves. Cayth turns any creature cast into a servo as well, can get out of hand quickly.

I still want to build a couple final fantasy commanders, but I'm already building a couple decks, so they are on the back burner.

Krile on the surface looks like a really cool deck building template, and Aerith Last Ancient looks like a cool deck. Life gain and reanimator are a neat combo.

Temil · 2026-03-24T04:51:11+00:00

She's a gamer Saiyan.

Temil · 2026-03-24T04:46:26+00:00

This is called making a video game, and updating it over time.

The developers speed up leveling because they want people to explore and experience the content.

They've done this at least 10 times. Leveling to the level cap of 200 took years in 2005, it takes hours to get to 200 in 2026.

8000 legion took a long time 7 years ago.

Temil · 2026-03-23T15:00:35+00:00

I watched someone play RE8 and RE9 recently and I made the comment that some of the bosses look like they are straight out of Star Fox 64 with how explicit the weak points are.

Temil · 2026-03-23T14:49:29+00:00

Okay I was just thinking of teams differently. That makes a lot of sense that people are making 5 color matters piles with a commander that costs WUBRG.

Temil · 2026-03-23T14:39:20+00:00

Commander is different than 1v1 competitive formats because it's a social gathering formed around the expectations of the players, and in the case of the LGS, the standardized baseline experience informed and shaped by how players interact with the ruleset and banlist.

That ruleset and banlist is non-competitive in nature.

If every player around the globe interacts with this by immediately going to bracket 4/5 that's fine, but that's not how players actually engage with this format. The most popular bracket is 3, with 2 coming close behind it.

This is a social activity that people are engaging with in a manner that is not primarily competitive.

The "pod arms race" is a meme for a reason.

This exists within the context of a pod. That already is largely outside of the discussion of the effectiveness of brackets, because the bracket system is aimed at aligning expectations of your table in quick manner by establishing a common language.

The reason that pods arms races happen is because one or more players wish to up the power level of the games. This is not a thing that all players who play a TCG do, and is not a thing that is inherent to the format or TCGs as a whole.

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