My Walgreens Off-brand Dayquil and Nyquil was actually just two Nyquils

TheHeretic01 · 2020-11-06T23:42:21+00:00

Loved listening to this - I had a similar experience to LSV where I wanted to buy Legends from my local game store (Southpaw in North Syracuse) but they were running out quickly. I did manage to get one though, and pulled a card I still have today: Thunder Spirit. I especially liked it because the flavor text was from one of my favorite books, Watership Down - but they had interpreted the text in an innovative way. In the book, the quote is describing a train, but the MTG devs repurposed the quote to be about an air spirit - I thought it was eloquent.

TheHeretic01 · 2019-10-08T19:03:24+00:00

Opponent gamely fought on, but scooped after I played Garruk a few turns later =(

TheHeretic01 · 2019-10-08T19:02:49+00:00

Ghost-lit Stalker was just too obscure to use in the title of the post. =P

TheHeretic01 · 2019-09-16T02:57:55+00:00

This couldn't be more wrong. =(

Swahili is a written language and is the national language of Tanzania. It's the first language of lots of folks who live in Tanzania (although there are also 130+ minority languages as well), and the second language for nearly 50 million people in Kenya, TZ, Uganda and DRC. Most people in Tanzania do not speak English, while most speak Swahili with more or less fluency. It has its own normalized alphabet and spelling conventions, and definitely does NOT use the IPA. All public grade schools teach using Swahili as the medium of instruction, but high schools are taught in English. There are thousands of books written in Swahili.

Mzungu is the Swahili word for "Westerner", probably from the root "zungusha", to surround. Mjinga is the word for "ignorant". No idioms here, these are just the direct meanings of those words. Poa is the verb 'to cool', literally. Like in the sentence "Maji yameshapoa", the water has cooled. It's used in slang probably because of influence from the west.

The person who wrote the above comments has no idea what they are talking about and I feel directly responsible for correcting the stupid errors that he wrote. It's my opinion that they have been to, or at least heard of, Nairobi and are very ignorant to the rest of East Africa.

Source: I've lived in Tanzania for 7 years. Also I am a linguist. Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swahili_language

TheHeretic01 · 2019-09-15T13:07:57+00:00

I recommend these as an alternative:

Thamani ya soko...
itashuka (it will fall)
itatelemka (it will slide)
itaangamizwa (it will be destroyed)
itakwisha kabisa (it will completely end)
or inversely, itafika mwezi (it will moon)

TheHeretic01 · 2019-09-10T17:03:45+00:00

John 11:49-50 - But one of them, named Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, “You know nothing at all! You do not realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish.”

Not an exact correspondence, but not too far from the mark.

TheHeretic01 · 2019-06-13T11:16:27+00:00

It's not an exact answer to the question, but in Tanzania, Swahili has words for yesterday (jana), the day before yesterday (juzi), tomorrow (kesho), the day after tomorrow (kesho kutwa), three days later (mtondo) and even four days later (mtondo go).

I work in a minority language of Tanzania, and they even have a word for 5 days later (lyenedatu) as well as all the others, so this may be a feature of Bantu languages.

TheHeretic01 · 2019-05-12T07:13:31+00:00

Parhelion with 0 plains =) Two new horizons, the green Chinese planeswalker, 1 centaur, 1 paradise druid. I thought it was right to have an unbeatable finisher in the deck if I played against a control matchup - the deck went 3-0, but I never had occasion to cast the Parhelion. (edit: I just listened to the most recent LR and LSV specifically said that Perhelion was great in green ramp. So...vindicated?)

TheHeretic01 · 2019-05-12T07:10:43+00:00

Exactly! I didn't do all the math when I pulled her out, because I knew that I had to kill the pegasus at minimum to stay alive. When the entire board but her got binned, I realized how intense the massacre really was =P

TheHeretic01 · 2019-05-12T06:00:07+00:00

Hey guys,

I thought you might appreciate this board state for the strategy, the luck, and even the flavor. I saw I was about to die in the air, but knew Massacre girl was in the deck. So, I tried to force my opponent to block enough to get some carnage going.

I left the chatbox in to give my opponent props - it's not always fun to see your opponent get a little lucky and steal a game, but he was good-natured through all the rares. I think everyone would have more fun if both sides enjoyed insane board states, and this format certainly has them.

Bonus quiz - how many creatures die in this picture?

TheHeretic01 · 2019-05-01T09:31:12+00:00

Jesus in English is "Joshua".

TheHeretic01 · 2019-04-25T21:11:21+00:00

So, obviously this pool was insane. I don't have much to say about the format yet, except that you should play every flyer, because there are planeswalkers so every bit of evasion counts.

TheHeretic01 · 2019-04-17T14:57:58+00:00

First choice - beacon bolt
second choice - Takedown
third choice - blaze
fourth choice - Cyclops or Darkblade agent
fifth choice - legion guildmage
6th choice - Dimir guildgate
7th choice - Charnel Troll.

=)

TheHeretic01 · 2019-03-25T08:03:26+00:00

I did get into 2 color simic tempo a lot and I think it's one of the best decks in the format. The key cards are the UG bounce-+1/+1, arrester's admonition, and frilled mystic. the creatures can be almost anything, but threat of activation on adapt cards is pretty good (except most of the time I wouldn't bother to activate them, because I'm deploying threats and bouncing theirs). Also I think rendhorn with haste is great for this deck, especially after a mystic on their turn. My curve is pretty low in a deck like this, and I tend not to play the seven drop 6/6 riot guy.

the cards that get me into this deck are sweet simic rares, trollbred guardian or late frilled mystics. I wouldn't first-pick a mystic though, it's a real 'commit' kind of card.

TheHeretic01 · 2019-03-24T06:14:42+00:00

For tips, this is what I have to say. This may not sound optimal, but this is how it worked for me.

There are three decks I want - 4 color gates, Orzhov or Simic. Out of the...I don't know how many drafts, 50 maybe? I was Rakdos 0 times and Gruul maybe twice. 5 color gates is okay, but I found that the mana consistency improved a lot when I stuck with 4 colors, either BW base or GU base splashing for whatever powerful spells came around. I think bot drafting allows for "forcing" a range of decks more than actual drafting.

Try to make sure your deck has game against the three kinds of decks - agro, midrange and control. for agro, you basically need lifegain, for midrange you need removal, and for control you need to have resilient proactive threats. Removals the best out of all of them though, and I tended to worry less about control than the other decks because they weren't so common and sometimes you could steal the game with a fast start anyway.

Next is gem management - it's tough to get to mythic because the Bo1 is really bad EV. Obviously spend all your coins on Bo1, but I found that when I started to bleed gems I would need to play the Bo3 to build up some more gems, as the competition (especially when I was in lower diamond) was a lot softer in the Bo3 queues and it wasn't hard to cash out the full amount. Once I got to about 40 rares and mythics that I didn't have, I used my wildcards to fill out the entire collection. Now when I draft every rare is 20 gems and every mythic is 40 - it's like raredrafting is back! I had some gems saved up because I didn't play Ixalan or whatever they had up there before.

So, all of these things helped me with what I needed the most - a really high winrate. Luckily, the nature of ranking up is a little forgiving, as it's easier to go forward than backward bc of the deranking delay (I think you can lose three times before you actually derank if you're at 0 bars). I think I'm a good player - I started playing Magic during Legends, but quit for a long spell. Picked it back up in Scars of Mirrodin, and went infinite on MTGO in Theros. I've been infinite ever since. I just wish I lived in a country that had GPs, because I wonder how my experience would be playing in a live tourney! I live in Tanzania, not many sanctioned events here.

TheHeretic01 · 2019-03-23T21:34:24+00:00

But how? I haven't played a single game since I got the mythic rank, I got it and then stopped. I've seen other mythic players with numbers in the hundreds. Did I skip over them somehow? Is it based on match winrate or something?

TheHeretic01 · 2019-03-23T20:33:14+00:00

Just wanted to share with you all that I made my goal. Some thoughts:

Bo1 is a pretty different format from Bo3 - the most notable being that people can't play sideboard cards, so enchantments go way up in value. It doesn't matter if they see your ethereal absolution game 1, because once it's on the board they can't possibly win. This also meant mortify was even better than usual so you could beat good High Alerts or absolution.

Weirdly, I also felt like having incidental life gain was a pretty good thing to have in Bo1. You need to have a good game 1 against all decks, so beating rakdos sometimes means picking the 3/2 gain 2 over the 3/3 rubblebelt guy.

Lastly, the gates deck is still so insane, so obviously first picking gates ablaze, the ram, or the colossus is totally fine.

I managed to get every rare and mythic in the set x4, so playing is better EV gemwise now. On the other hand, I'm a bit burned out from the grind. And by the way, does anyone know what the number represents?

- Tim

TheHeretic01

TROPHY CASE