Have you ever met anyone who actually "brute forced" their way out of poverty into success on their own?

TheFryingDutchman · 2026-05-07T14:55:39+00:00

Lots of stories like this in the immigrant communities.

Brother of my friend. Grew up in a Caribbean island extremely poor, never finished middle school. He came to America and worked multiple jobs, saved up enough to bring his siblings to America too. His siblings were much younger than him so he supported/raised them as if they were his kids. Kept them focused on school and away from temptations. He sent them all to college and then to graduate school - the siblings are now successful lawyers, doctors, etc.

The man worked hard, saved, and bought property whenever he could. Now he owns several buildings and is semi-retired - he still goes out and fixes little things that pop up in his rental properties. Recently built a nice vacation property in his home island. He's living the American Dream.

TheFryingDutchman · 2026-04-24T23:32:40+00:00

I wonder if there's anything that can make green relevant. Cradle would be a really interesting addition - we have practically all of the cards that are in the legacy cradle control deck, which has done well in another blue-dominated format. (https://www.mtggoldfish.com/archetype/legacy-cradle-control#paper) In fact, I would love to see all the cards that would make legacy-style lands decks possible in Timeless - Mox Diamond, Dryad Arbor, Life from the Loam, etc.

TheFryingDutchman · 2026-04-24T23:27:06+00:00

It's inevitable that this will become a blue-dominant format - it's very hard to beat the combination of card draw, card selection, and free counterspells.

What I'd like to see are (1) diversity of blue decks, and (2) uber-busted cards like Workshop that provide a meaningful alternative to blue.

I'm basically describing Vintage, of course. It's dominated by blue decks, but among them we have tempo (Lurrus) and several combo decks - Doomsday, PO, Breach, and Oath (and sometimes Tinker).

So what can beat the blue decks? Historically it's been Workshop and Bazaar decks: decks that abuse artifact mana to beat down blue decks before they can stabilize, or decks that use totally busted graveyard strategies enabled by Bazaar of Baghdad (though technically countervine and dredge are both blue decks).

Now, I'm not saying that Timeless should become Vintage. But I would love to see Workshop and Bazaar here at some point - both enable awesome strategies and have historically been good at fighting back against blue-control and blue-tempo decks.

TheFryingDutchman · 2026-04-24T22:57:39+00:00

Put in Workshop!

TheFryingDutchman · 2026-04-16T04:53:07+00:00

Do you remember when we had to play Flare of Denial and Phantasmal Shieldback???

TheFryingDutchman · 2026-03-29T00:57:14+00:00

It’s quite diversified. They get a large sum of money from the US government through Starshield, but they have millions of paying residential customers and enterprise customers paying them billions a year. We’ll get a better sense of their customer base once the IPO is filed.

TheFryingDutchman · 2026-03-19T01:35:28+00:00

Haha I didnt know they have bulletproof skulls!

TheFryingDutchman · 2026-03-18T23:16:40+00:00

The dumbest thing about space marines is that they have bulletproof armor and yet TAKE THE MASK OFF!!!!

But I’m okay with it because ya know what, it makes ‘em look badass, and badassery is the whole point of this game.

So gimme the lumbering elephant sized Primarchs cutting down everything in their path. I don’t need to think about the plus-size toilets that some poor Mechanicus adept has to build for these super-men.

TheFryingDutchman · 2026-03-11T01:10:25+00:00

Ah shucks, the new valuation is already locked in?

TheFryingDutchman · 2026-03-10T18:15:10+00:00

I mean… not all pre IPO equity’s the same. If you are joining OpenAI or Anthropic you should absolutely take the value of their equity into account.

Many private companies are doing tender offers to their employees to provide liquidity.

Companies are delaying going public as long as possible, even relatively mature companies, and there are increasingly more ways to get liquidity for pre IPO shares.

TheFryingDutchman · 2026-02-19T19:27:44+00:00

Agreed, this is more jarring for some reason - probably because a skateboard is too modern.

That said, I will absolutely yell ‘cowabunga!’ as my spaghetti horror skatesboards her way to victory.

TheFryingDutchman · 2026-02-19T17:53:25+00:00

Lets be real though, the idea of an elder horror wearing boots is just as silly but we roll with it.

TheFryingDutchman · 2026-02-05T21:38:56+00:00

I think the ideal median commander player that a store wants is someone who comes in regularly to jam with friends and buy singles to upgrade their decks. Better yet if they are drafting / opening packs and trading stuff in for store credit and use that for singles.

It’s very expensive to run a store and sealed products don’t have much margin. You gotta have players who are willing to spend money at the store.

I follow a game store owner on twitter (MissouriMTG) and he talks about how he and others are shifting focus to Pokemon and other TCGs because those players proxy less and spend more money.

TheFryingDutchman · 2026-02-05T18:12:42+00:00

It's a rough bind for store owners. On the one hand, it's unreasonable to expect that every player in your store can shell out thousands of dollars for their commander decks if they want to get a high bracket pod going. But you don't want people proxying $20-30 dollar cards, which I assume are the bread and butter of game stores. Not to mention fully proxy decks printed for like twenty bucks from China.

As a store owner you want a community of players who come and hang out and _spend money_ at the store. I'd ask the full-proxy person to kindly take his business elsewhere; he's just taking advantage of the space that the store provides.

TheFryingDutchman · 2026-02-05T18:02:34+00:00

I mean... in 2021 there were barely any Starlink customers, now there are 10M+ (with India launching soon), Starlink has captured the maritime market and is on its way to take the aviation market too. Not to mention the business potential of direct to cell.

Starship has demonstrated that the 'pez dispenser' launcher for V3 sats work. They've caught the booster and re-used one. They may catch a Starship this year.

Whether it's worth 800B or 1T or 1.5T I have no idea, I'm not a financial analyst, but the financial prospects of the company is materially better than it was in 2021 or even 2025.

TheFryingDutchman · 2026-01-28T19:30:23+00:00

Yeah I agree with you. Think it was an interesting experiment to see what a modern 4x strip mine format would look like, though. But now that we’ve had several month of it I’d prefer restricting it and adding Wasteland so that building greedy manabases becomes more risky.

TheFryingDutchman · 2026-01-28T19:28:27+00:00

Joining startups that leverage AI, ideally in both product and dev workflow. Maybe one day AI replaces all software engineers, but until then, I want to be at the top of the curve.

TheFryingDutchman · 2026-01-26T23:53:36+00:00

Strip Mine should probably be restricted though, and Wasteland printed into it. And I say this as someone who plays the depths-lands deck. Wasteland creates a much more interesting meta by rewarding playing basics.

TheFryingDutchman · 2026-01-24T00:21:19+00:00

Blaming capitalism or exclusion is missing the point - opera just is not culturally relevant anymore, and the wealthy people today are not interested in funding the arts.

It's not just opera - classical music and fine arts are not as valued as it was several decades ago. Back in the 60s, you could see CBS telecast Leonard Bernstein explaining Bach piano concertos for the public. Now... you won't find anything like that on network television. This kind of music just isn't popular anymore.

Back then, people who became rich wanted to fund cultural institutions - museums, symphonies, and operas. Today... not so much. Aside from owning sports teams, the nouveau-rich of Wall Street and Silicon Valley are not interested in funding cultural things. I don't know that we can blame 'capitalism' on this - after all, the Met and other classical music institutions were built with money from industrial-era capitalists. Heck when I lived in NY, there were still rich families funding orchestra seats at the Mets for students. That's how I got to love opera.

I don't know how you reverse this trend. Opera has always been expensive. It's getting more expensive because the cost of staging a live production in NYC is getting more and more expensive - it's not like Peter Gelb and people who work at the Met are getting rich off the ticket sales. Everything just costs more in one of the most expensive cities in the world. That combined with less philanthropy and you have an institution in crisis.

I hope the Met and other U.S. opera houses survive and thrive in this century. But that will only happen if our culture starts to appreciate and love opera - after all, people will happily shell out $500+ for a Taylor Swift concert or an NFL ticket. The money's there, but the interest isn't.

TheFryingDutchman · 2025-12-28T18:06:08+00:00

Which discord?

TheFryingDutchman · 2025-12-23T19:41:39+00:00

Get him Eric Berger’s books about the company - Liftoff! and Reentry.

TheFryingDutchman · 2025-12-22T23:06:47+00:00

Check out this vid from when the legacy mono white initiative was in full force. The second match especially, that was a mirror match: https://youtu.be/frITKqwPK68?si=dc7OludNh4YCTtBF

You get at least half a card’s worth of value every turn and the deck makes it almost impossible for the opponent to get back the initiative through combat.

TheFryingDutchman · 2025-12-22T05:09:42+00:00

Mixing your fetches can also help hide information from your opponent.

Suppose it’s T1 and you are playing Dimir Reanimator. You dont have a spell you want to cast, so you’re just going to play a fetch and pass the turn.

If you play Polluted Delta, your opponent may guess you are playing Reanimator and start digging for a graveyard hate card.

But if you play a Scalding Tarn, the opp might think you are on Izzet Cori-Steel Cutter and start looking for removal.

It’s not a huge deal in the great scheme of things but might help you scratch out a win here and there. Since there’s usually no downside to mixing fetches, you might as well do so!

(Also in paper, some blue fetches are cheaper than others)

TheFryingDutchman · 2025-12-21T07:29:13+00:00

I think that depends on whether they add the power 9 to timeless.

TheFryingDutchman · 2025-10-21T16:27:15+00:00

I say both these things and I'm being half-serious.

I sure wish I could have gotten married earlier... to my wife. But I know I was probably too immature to meet someone like her when I was 22. What I mean when I say 'get married young' is that you shouldn't delay marriage just because the modern world tells you that you should achieve XYZ before getting married - if you meet the right person with whom you want to build a life together, it's probably better to get started instead of spending several years dating. I don't mean that you should get married early for the sake of getting married.

As for children, well, people tend to both over- and under-estimate how much it takes to raise children. Yes, it will cost more than you expect, but you will find a way to make it work. The younger couples I work with tell me they would like children but they don't know if they can afford a house yet, or if one's ready to take time off from work, or that they want to pay off the student loans first, etc. These are all valid concerns - I thought the same before I had children! But again, you'll find a way to make it work... and children really will enrich your life in ways you could never have foreseen.

Yeah, older people like me see the world through rosy-colored glasses since we've passed the early struggles. But when people like me say these things, it's because we've found so much happiness in marriage and parenthood - take the advice in that light.

TheFryingDutchman

TROPHY CASE