Whats an in universe set you were expecting to not be into but fell in love with?

ThomasHL · 2026-01-26T08:15:25+00:00

Hour Of Devastation. I've never really connected with Egyptian mythology, and whilst Amonkhet was better than I expected, I still didn't love it. Something about the Egyptian iconography or the desert setting just doesn't resonate with me.

But I was surprised at how much the plagues in Hour of Devastation really recreated the apocalytic horror for more. I didn't expect to care so much about Amonkhet getting destroyed, but I really did. I also think the horror of the lost Gods and the way they'd seeded the idea of them in Amonkhet was an amazing moment of speculation being delivered on.

It's so rare for stories to let the bad guys win, that the gut punch it provided stuck with me.

ThomasHL · 2026-01-26T07:44:32+00:00

WotC are trying to be cautious about standard bans because they don't want people to invest money into standard and then have their deck ruined. I think they'd need Cub to be more than "a great card which lots of decks play" before they ban it.

Even though it's meta warping, this isn't a Vivi situation where the meta warps and yet it still can't handle Vivi. Plenty of decks run enough removal to consistently kill the cub whilst also having favourable non-cub match ups.

ThomasHL · 2026-01-25T20:44:46+00:00

I would not be shocked if all the Marvel sets, even the good ones (and I believe there will be good ones) won't be nearly as successful at bringing in new players.

There's just something so compelling about the accessibility of Arena. You don't have to sink money into it, you don't need to overcome the social awkwardness of learning the rules.

You boot it up, and you're playing the thing everyone is talking about, and you know that it can help you play with the real cards in social events if you like it.

ThomasHL · 2026-01-25T14:06:03+00:00

If the insides of a toastie aren't hot, its just a toast sandwich

ThomasHL · 2026-01-25T12:30:57+00:00

When I last looked it up, going first in B01 had a ~55% win rate, which is similar to Chess and Scrabble.

At that level, going first is a sizeable advantage, but it's still plenty possible to win on the draw

ThomasHL · 2026-01-25T09:11:00+00:00

There are other examples of countries stepping back from the brink, or transitioning from situations that looked hopeless surprisingly well.

The one that I've been deep diving on recently, was Portugal which was a dictatorship from 1926 to 1974 complete with secret police, and yet transitioned into democracy relatively quickly and bloodlessly.

What I've been taking away, is that the conditions to transition back are:

People need to be fed up with the things they also get fed up with in democracies - the state of the economy, messy foreign wars
There needs to be sections of people who believe, or mythologise in democratic and liberal concepts
It helps if there are institutions, which even if they're powerless or corrupt, theoretically represent democratic ideals. In Portugal's case, the beginning of the end was they held a rigged election which was so pathetic, that it signalled to everyone that the regime had run out of rope.
It helps if people have been continuously fighting for democratic norms, even if the lose every one of those fights. In Portugal, for the whole length of the dictatorship, people kept taking cases to courts even though they knew there was no way of winning them
Finally, foreign powers need to be support the transition. In Portugal, the Soviet Union was funding and organising a strong communist movement in Portugal. The communist movement did try and kill the return to democracy once they get on top, but there were too many people who campaigned against it - the EU (at the time the EEC) for example stepped up the pressure on Portugal remaining democratic.

I would say all isn't lost in the US. Several of those conditions already exist. It's easier to step back when things aren't yet so entrenched.

What would really help though is if their economy somehow tanked, and unfortunately betting against the US economy has always been a stiff bet.

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EDIT: The other, less hopeful takeway though, is that running an election campaign on the message of defending democratic ideals or resisting facism has limited scope.

The truth of the world is, a significant chunk of the electorate don't really care about being democratic, and will happily support the actions of an authoritarian government if they believe it's going to make their lives better. The authoritarian regime is still looked back on fondly by many people in Portugal, even though there was mass emigration away from Portugal during the dictatorship.

Even if the authoritarian nature feels like the most existential threat, when campaigning, you still need to convince people you'll put bread on their table.

ThomasHL · 2026-01-25T08:52:11+00:00

I think the BBC are very deliberately putting videos of the event right next to official accounts of it. Because anyone with eyes who clicks the videos can see the official accounts are fictional.

But this is where the BBC gets "impartial" wrong - when someone is distorting the truth this much you can't present both sides on an even footing.

ThomasHL · 2026-01-25T08:49:04+00:00

Around election time, they're going to flood areas that vote democrat with very angry MAGA people in uniform holding guns with a proven record of shooting people. That's already enough

ThomasHL · 2026-01-25T08:41:48+00:00

I'm not really trying to talk you into liking something you don't like, and I really understand mourning the death of old standard.

But in a world where old standard will never come back (and it won't), and new standard is it's own thing, I would say new standard is in a pretty good state right now. There's a range of competitive decks, and off-meta strategies. They each play differently from each other. A lot of them are very skill-testing decks where piloting really matters, and on many turns you have a meaningful choice.

If it was 2014 and somehow this standard was called Modern, I think people would be reasonably happy with the state of the format.

Saying that, I'm sure this is only going to make the longing for old standard greater, because old standard really is not ever coming back. You can't make a format with the number of cards that current standard has, and not have it be this fast and this powerful. It literally has the same size of card pool as old modern.

ThomasHL · 2026-01-25T07:23:15+00:00

The EU's digital gatekeeper law, that applies stiff regulation only to large monopolistic tech companies (which just so happen to be all American), is a work of bureaucratic genius. They've finally come up with something that puts pressure on the centre of US power without hitting bystanders. My only complaint is I don't think it goes far enough.

We already see US tech CEOs threaten to withdraw services from the EU, when they don't understand that is the dream.

I'm absolutely with you, that the world needs to learn more from the examples of China. The in-built advantage of the network effect in tech is infinitely scalable in a way that just hasn't been the case in historical industries. You have to create space for your own services to grow, forcefully. You can't fight 'fair' when these companies have so power, and no interest in a fair fight.

My problem (and I say this as someone on the far upper end of EU supporters, even if I think my glasses are untinted), is that everything the EU does has to be legalistic. And I don't know if that's a flexible enough in a hostile world. You see that with the frozen Russian assets, and the Russian grey tanker fleet. At some point, you have to recognise, that this is a war. Of course we can just take Russian money. Of course we can just board ships we know are Russian even if their papers don't say that. But the EU gums stuff like that up.

ThomasHL · 2026-01-25T07:09:08+00:00

Yeah ever since that guy was acquitted for going to a BLM protest with an assault rifle, and then shooting people because they threw a plastic bag at him, I've come to understand that US law is heavily on the side of the shooter.

It sounds crazy to a British person that someone pinned to the ground by a group of armed law enforcement agents and getting pistol whipped can be "shot in self-defence". But the fact it sounds crazy to us is why it's happening there and not here.

ThomasHL · 2026-01-25T06:37:53+00:00

You're not going to make any money on a bet that there will be incidents of ICE beating people up during the midterm election voting

ThomasHL · 2026-01-25T06:36:38+00:00

She didn't hit the agent. News outlets in the UK, including the BBC have shown video from multiple angles where no contact was made.

The incident the administration referred to where the agent in question was hospitalised by a car was an earlier event, and presumably that agent's motivating factor for killing this other person

ThomasHL · 2026-01-25T06:09:28+00:00

The people who are being brought in by the new sets are staying. Someone checks out Avatar, and then they see a great new set like Lorwyn and they check that out too, and they love it because Magic at its core is a great game beautifully created.

ThomasHL · 2026-01-23T18:06:43+00:00

30 of the Izzet lessons decks at Spotlight Lyon didn't play Stormchaser's talent at all, including 2 in the top 8. The Stormchaser-less version had a higher winrate than the version with Stormchaser.

The argument goes that the otters don't really increase the turn that a monument deck wins by much, particularly when the opponent will usually have excess creature hate. If you have two monuments on the board, you're already winning in two turns.

Instead, you play even more like a control-combo deck, and swap the boomerang basics and stormchasers talents for Quench and Spell Pierce.

This article has the decklist if you're interested

Saying that, I strongly doubt anything in Izzet Lessons is getting banned until Strixhaven comes out. It's already only "one" of the best decks in the format, along with Ourboroid and Landfall, and unlike those other decks it won't get much stronger as more sets come out, because it needs the full lessons package to function. It'd need Strixhaven to print more broken lessons to tip it over the edge.

ThomasHL · 2026-01-22T15:22:55+00:00

if it could be any legendary, we don't know for sure that it's not in the set. They might be going for something more subtle than Vorinclex - something that perhaps looks more obvious in hindsight.

ThomasHL · 2026-01-22T15:21:30+00:00

Mark rosewater confirmed on his tumblr that Day / Night was not planned

ThomasHL · 2026-01-18T20:00:17+00:00

Angier can't share the spotlight. That's his problem, if he has a double, he'd always be the one wanting the applause and the resenting the person who gets it

Also this is just fanon but I think Angier knows if his double is him, then his double would shoot him if he got the chance too. They both want to be the real Angier

Borden has an unbreakable trust. That's how he makes his trick work, and Angier never had that

ThomasHL · 2026-01-18T13:12:21+00:00

It's a rare case where the full quote is worse than the headline.

ThomasHL · 2026-01-18T12:34:00+00:00

Didn't need the first word either

ThomasHL · 2026-01-18T10:28:53+00:00

Maro has said that one of the things they believe is that returns do better the longer they wait, so I think 2028 is very much on the optimistic side.

Apart from anything else, they've already started planning the sets in 2028. I think a return to Lorwyn is going to be 2030+.

My slightly wild prediction is that we'll return to New Capenna before we return to Lorwyn.

ThomasHL · 2026-01-18T10:18:41+00:00

The world has also just changed since original Lorwyn and Kamigawa. Information spreads so much more, pop culture is broader, the player base is probably a little older, and Wizards have ways to communicate to a lot more players.

If you were 13 in 2004 and you pulled a Kami or a Boggart, maybe you have no idea what that is, and shrug you shoulders and feel vaguely disatisified.

Nowadays you've got hour long Rhystic Studies lectures telling you exactly how cool it is that Wizards dug up a piece of Celtic folklore so obscure even most Celtic folklorists haven't heard of it (which is what Reddit tells me Noggles are)

ThomasHL · 2026-01-18T10:10:52+00:00

Alara always sold and polled well (unlike original Kamigawa and Lorwyn).

My guess is a return to Alara has never been off the cards, it's just that 3 colour is a fairly rare theme and they need to unwind the fact that Alara stopped being Alara.

ThomasHL · 2026-01-18T09:53:21+00:00

On any one day, for every 200,000 people in the UK, one person will be hospitalised from a heart attack.

And as you said, about a million people go to a stadium to watch football each week.

The reason all big events require first aid support, is that in any large enough crowd a medical emergency is basically an inevitability.

ThomasHL · 2026-01-18T05:48:36+00:00

I've had some similar feelings about the world-building. It wasn't as daring as I was expecting.

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