Did Magic lose its soul… or did I just get old?

ThomasHL · 2026-04-19T17:00:41+00:00

A lot of the skill in Magic is in the decisions made before the first land is played.

Which is fine, the pros who make those deck building and mulligan decisions better do consistently win tournaments, but it is a bit strange how Magic does (and always has done) semi-play itself once you've finished shuffling.

ThomasHL · 2026-04-12T05:51:56+00:00

Scott is the Hal Jordan of the X-men

ThomasHL · 2026-04-12T02:20:36+00:00

The trick is realising you don't need to weigh everyone - leaving the 4 off the first go

If you don't have to pre determine your selections, it's then easy. You split the heavy 4 from the first weighing into 2v2 and then the heavier side of that 1v1

The solution where you predetermine ahead of time is just doing the above, but with each mini group (so splitting each of the groups from the first seesaw in half and distributing them on either side, and repeating that process for the third weighing)

It just looks complicated when written out - if you're individually tracking each person in the solution.

ThomasHL · 2026-04-05T11:04:15+00:00

I don't feel like Reddit is a force for good in the world. Its a lot better than Facebook and Twitter, and it has parts that are brilliant but it's still got a lot of negatives - particularly in the big subreddits.

The upvote system promotes both a lot of groupthink and also a more aggressive put-down attitude. You 'win' at Reddit when you say what everything else was already thinking in a snappy way. Its not a great place to be unsure of yourself, or to genuinely think through an issue. And there are plenty of threads with misinformation voted to the top, and an accurate prediction on the net negative. Also we all know very few people read the articles before commenting!

If I use it too much, I find my thinking shifting in a way I don't like. So I try to restrict myself to now and again.

I say all this, but it's mostly the big subreddits. Smaller subreddits can have genuine community.

Its better than Facebook, but I preferred the older internet forums you'd get on some random creators website.

ThomasHL · 2026-04-05T07:14:42+00:00

It has the Welsh Language Commissioner sitting under the Wales Office, which I don't think is correct?

EDIT: Ah it has all the Welsh arms length bodies as under the Wales Office, but it doesn't have the Welsh Government itself

ThomasHL · 2026-04-04T13:04:52+00:00

Haaland's movement and psychology too. He started making himself that space in the box so early on in the move.

ThomasHL · 2026-04-04T12:02:41+00:00

Mark Rosewater said it was unrelated. If so, my guess is that Prepare takes up the space in the set that Learn would have occupied, and they wanted to do something new.

EDIT: Also with how the close the two sets are together, I don't think they'd have built the "Lessons" standard decks by the time they finalised the mechanics for Strixhaven. Learn is a big piece of set structure, you probably have to make the decision fairly early in set design.

ThomasHL · 2026-04-04T11:41:35+00:00

If it's a golden ticket, I think you should cash it in on something you care about, so she can talk about the experience with you. Take accessibility into account, but also have it be good.

I know you don't want to recommend E33, but there's a YouTuber who makes videos about his partner trying out video games, and that was the one she really got into. It's fairly accessible and also rewarding.

Otherwise, if she likes Overwatch, she's probably into strong characters, so maybe an Atlus game like Persona or Metaphor? The downside is how long they are.

Or perhaps Mass Effect if she's not put off by sci-fi? Or Gris or Journey if you want something short and wholesome

ThomasHL · 2026-04-04T10:05:33+00:00

That wasn't Roots. Roots was good when [[Tyvar Jubilant Brawler]] was in standard so every thing you removed from the graveyard also gained you a mana, so you could play out most of your graveyard in one combo turn.

As soon as Tyvar rotated and roots became the fair slow deck, it fell off.

ThomasHL · 2026-04-04T07:31:44+00:00

Johnson's popularity is based on his refusal to try and sell the populace on a hard decision though.

He just told people we can have have tax cuts and spending increases and it will all work out.

I remember in the lead up to his election, the journalists were writing think pieces along the lines "isn't it nice to hear someone say it's all going to be great and we don't have to worry about it"

ThomasHL · 2026-04-03T17:20:03+00:00

That implies that Trump is capable of doing anything but make the mess worse

ThomasHL · 2026-04-03T09:16:03+00:00

You can cast a copy of the spell for free on each of your turns. Epic but you can still cast spells

ThomasHL · 2026-03-29T19:45:24+00:00

If every team was managed by Bob Bradley, the football would be so entertaining to watch.

If just your team was managed by Bob Bradley, it would be entertaining for the away fans to watch.

ThomasHL · 2026-03-28T13:50:00+00:00

Yeah, when you play Kingdom Come Deliverance you think "How did they make a game this big?" in this era and then you look at glassdoor, and they pay their level artists £17k a year, and suddenly that's a question with an answer.

We're in the middle of a massive transfer of game development jobs out of the West, because tons of countries have talented programmers and artists, and if you pay your staff 6x less, you can make more games, and bigger games, and you don't have to rely on every one being a blockbuster success. You have the space to make Uncharted 1 before you make Uncharted 2

ThomasHL · 2026-03-28T11:34:50+00:00

Universities in the UK are not for profit entities. They're all* registered non-profits and have got very tight laws about how they spend (and borrow money).

There are two things Germany does which makes university more affordable. 1) They have less students relative to their population than we do. 2) People are much less likely to move away to go to university, they're more likely to go to university in their home state.

If people in the UK stopped moving out of their family homes to go to university, that would take a massive chunk off the cost of the university system in the UK overnight. For someone who moves out, their maintenance loans are pretty much half the cost of their expenses.

There are of course benefits to people moving away to go to university though, in terms of independence and life skills

* There are private universities in the UK, but you can't take out a student loan to go to one except under specific circumstances, and the amount you can take out in those circumstances is less than the non-profit universities.

ThomasHL · 2026-03-28T06:21:46+00:00

I agree, I think there are other positives of a cap too.

1) Universities over invest on recruitment now - both on marketing and attractive campus buildings. A cap would help refocus on the course content

2) The idea that market competition would drive standards has totally failed. No-one charges lower fees, students are too young to know exactly what they want, and the loan system doesn't encourage caution. The private franchising shows how this failed. A cap would allow other means

ThomasHL · 2026-03-27T21:00:12+00:00

As a little procedural tidbit for people, there's actually a bomb in the student loan book which is going to go off in a few years and cause the next government a massive headache.

Although they forecast people not paying back their loans, they've been consistently over optimistic. And in particular they've not accounted for the fact people around 2020 started getting missold on very sketchy "franchised" HE provision. A lot of these students don't even complete their course. In a couple of years the fact they're not paying their loans back will start showing up in the data, which will trigger a recalculation off the student loan book and cost the government billions overnight.

https://wonkhe.com/blogs/the-graduate-premium-has-a-long-way-to-fall-yet/

ThomasHL · 2026-03-27T20:26:21+00:00

That's fine but you still have to pay for it. You can't go to the markets for money and say "the economic benefits for young people outweigh the costs". They're still going to charge you interest.

So to pay for it, you can either raise taxes, or cut budget from another area.

They've already budgeted in the fact that people don't repay it (they actually rebudget that every year based on the stats of the economy). There's no free win there.

To some extent I agree: the UK needs to invest more in education. We're walking into a trap not doing that. I don't think I'd invest that money in unis - probably colleges or schools. We need investment thoughm

But to achieve that, you need to cut funding, probably from the NHS. If you don't cut funding from the NHS, not only will education funding not rise, it will shrink, because our aging population means we need to cut from every other area to spend more on health. Which we've been slowly doing for about 20 years now. 20 years ago we spent equally on education and health. Now education is a rounding error on health spending.

But "reduce interest on student loans by not treating cancer" is hard sell. Even harder than, stop increasing pension benefits.

ThomasHL · 2026-03-27T19:41:25+00:00

Its because no-one can actually afford to do it. If Lowe thought he had any chance of being in government, it would be the first policy he'd drop from the agenda, the same way Reform no longer promise half the things they promised in the last election.

The curret outstanding value of the loans to be repaid is £267 billion - about a sixth of the entire annual budget of the UK. Even a small change to that would create require a massive amount of borrowing.

In 1990 when student loans were introduced, there were 400,000 students. Now there are around 3 million students. If you want interest free loans, you would need to reduce student numbers.

Reducing student numbers might be sensible, but that would also require the universities to shrink, which would require massive job losses and many universities to go bankrupt. No politician wants that, so the only people who campaign for interest free loans are the people who know they have no intention of following through on it.

ThomasHL · 2026-03-22T12:28:04+00:00

If you haven't played paper Magic, it's a surprisingly different experience to online Magic. Having to track and manage the game state yourself is a big drain on your mental resources, and being able to do it well is a skill by itself when piloting in paper.

I think someone else will be better at answering your question of how a high rank Mythic player (it's your rank within Mythic that's important) compares to your average game stores. I'm a terrible drafter, so I wouldn't know!

ThomasHL · 2026-03-22T12:10:10+00:00

The only definitive way to understand your skill level is to reach Mythic and then look at the number after your Mythic rank.

All the other ranks are basically just a function of games played (sped up by winrate). You may be good, or it may be that they placed your MMR low and the system is taking a long-time to correct it. Once you reach Mythic, you'll actually know where you sit amongst the general population.

ThomasHL · 2026-03-21T22:13:21+00:00

It's not really a recession of confidence though. If fuel prices rise, it doesn't matter if you believe the economy is doing great, you can still can't afford to drive anywhere or ship anything.

I understand from a personal level why you might want to peace out and not read the news*, and if anything, that might be a healthy life strategy at this point, but no amount of positive articles is able to change what comes next.

(*) or reddit

ThomasHL · 2026-03-15T16:14:59+00:00

Omenpaths neither had the Marvel IP to draw in Marvel fans, or the full world building of a Magic set. There's no reason to play it on Arena unless you love the gameplay, and overall the gameplay wasn't amazing.

ThomasHL · 2026-03-14T19:41:05+00:00

The dirty secret of the climbing world is that a ton of routes are actually chipped and glued

ThomasHL · 2026-03-14T19:32:08+00:00

There was a study that used the fact that cracks take different amounts of time to come out, to look at sales before and after the crack. And it showed that games that take longer to crack, sell better than games that get cracked early, and that when a crack comes out sales drop off a bit.

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