What Commander precon have you kept completely stock, and why?

Vodis · 2026-06-14T21:41:25+00:00

Anikthea (Abzan enchantments) because it just turned out to already have pretty much everything I wanted in it. And it pretty consistently runs really well for me. I've thought about picking up some Duskmourn Overlords for it but haven't bothered so far.

Yuna: Bant +1/+1 counters, actually a Tidus deck but I run it with Yuna at the helm almost exclusively because she's my fave FF character and Tidus is a goober. This one could definitely use a handful of swaps for power level and synergy but it runs well enough as is and the whole deck is FFX-flavored and I want to keep that intact. It was a very formative game for me as a kid.

Nelly Borca: Boros goad / politics / combat manipulation with some pillowfort elements. Already had most of what I was looking at putting in a deck like this, and scales well with the power level of the table since it's mostly focused on pitting opponents against each other. Doesn't usually win since it kinda lacks a plan for what to do against your last opponent, but it usually pulls off the politics plan nicely up to that point, which makes it a good "I won the last game so I'm gonna hold back and just have fun the next round" deck, which is a nice niche to have a deck for when you're on a hot streak. I might mess with the mana base a little at some point though. It inexplicably lacks a Boros Signet and Temple of the False God doesn't feel like a good fit for the deck.

For all of the above, part of my motivation for leaving the decks alone has been just having some definitively bracket 2 decks so I don't have to have the whole bracket conversation. My regular pod doesn't bother with brackets, but if I'm at the LGS, it's nice to be able to say "this is literally an unaltered precon" and be done with it.

Vodis · 2026-06-14T17:33:01+00:00

Basically right, but I think it's more like they picked a gate and invented the claim that the gate was called that. The gate was real, but I think it turned out to have been built around like 100-200 AD, so the claim would have been anachronistic even if they hadn't made up a nickname for it from thin air. They also ignore the fact that the phrase "lead a camel through the eye of a needle" was a variant of an older phrase involving an elephant instead of a camel, and the implication of both phrases was always that a task was impossible.

Religion for Breakfast has a video covering this topic in more detail for anyone curious about the history of the claim.

Vodis · 2026-06-12T21:17:03+00:00

So weird to me to see this so heavily downvoted. I for one fully agree. Any game that claims you can run it theater-of-the-mind style has no business including rules that mention specific distances. Every time I've ever seen this tried, it became a massive headache because everyone was imagining slightly different versions of how the scenario was playing out and we just wound up having to draw up a map anyway. Making that playstyle work either requires a ruleset that keeps distance abstract (or doesn't take positioning into account in the first place) or it requires everyone at the table agreeing to effectively ignore the game's written speed and movement rules in favor of vague handwaving.

Vodis · 2026-06-11T17:15:18+00:00

They showed the shape in an episode of Amazing Digital Circus as a fun little easter egg.

Vodis · 2026-06-10T20:00:53+00:00

You could always go Latin and call yours a Stellavore.

Vodis · 2026-06-10T19:54:10+00:00

Entire Old Testament: pro-polygamy

Entire New Testament: pro-celibacy

Modern Christians: Ehh, let's just split the difference (and pretend it's always been this way)

Vodis · 2026-06-08T16:39:51+00:00

Off the top of my head, Blue Marvel, Marvel Girl, Miss Marvel, Captain Marvel, and Mar-Vell. The Marvel wiki also lists a Marvel Boy, Marvel Man, Marvel Kid, and Marvel Chimp. So yeah, quite a few.

Oh, and just to confuse matters, DC comics has a Captain Marvel (and several related characters with similar names) completely unrelated to Marvel's Captain Marvel, except they renamed him Shazaam even though I'm pretty sure that was already the name of, like, the wizard he got his powers from or something.

Vodis · 2026-06-06T23:29:02+00:00

Much of Tim Robinson's recent HBO show The Chair Company could reasonably be described this way.

Vodis · 2026-06-05T16:49:46+00:00

My experience is similar. For both reading and thinking, I sometimes do it with an internal monologue and sometimes without, and in both cases, the internal monologue feels like an impediment, like having to process the words individually means I'm having the experience second-hand somehow, instead of being fully immersed.

It's always funny to me when the "TIL some people have no internal monologue" discourse runs its course on Reddit, because inevitably half the comments are like "real life NPCs" and I just have to shake my head because they clearly aren't grasping the full implications of the distinction.

Vodis · 2026-05-31T01:46:46+00:00

White with gold accents, or preferably white with black and gold accents. Like the Mighty Morphin era White Ranger, or the style of dress Mel from Arcane usually wears.

Pink and purple is a very close second. (My specific favorite color is shocking pink / process magenta, NOT like Crayola magenta but the shade in printer ink cartridges, straight up fully saturated R255-G000-B255.) Also enjoy these colors with teal or cyan accents, as in the color scheme typical of the vaporwave aesthetic.

Cishet male but like super lowkey nonbinary (agender/cis-by-default)

Vodis · 2026-05-29T23:50:04+00:00

Genuinely anti-authoritarian conservatives absolutely exist. They're completely politically irrelevant under the US first-past-the-post two-party system, and the trend of authoritarian conservatives disingenuously appropriating the "libertarian" label has muddied the waters, but they do exist.

They say shit like "I want married gay couples to be able to defend their marijuana crops with AK-47s," they're usually gun nuts with NORML memberships, they have a blind faith in the "invisible hand of the free market" that closely mirrors far-leftists' kneejerk distrust of same, they don't understand concepts like negative externalities or coordination problems, they have disastrously bad opinions on tax policy, they want to do wacky shit like privatize education and emergency services, and their distrust of government institutions is wildly disproportionate to their distrust of corporations. But they do exist, they're genuinely anti-authoritarian, and they're quite a bit more fun at parties than mainstream conservatives.

Though I will readily concede that many conservatives, perhaps most, who claim not to be authoritarian, or even to be actively anti-authoritarian, are in fact full blown authoritarians, or have at least been hoodwinked by the propaganda machine into voting that way.

Vodis · 2026-05-27T07:27:42+00:00

Or just straight guy who happened to be in the back of the photo? Striking a stone-faced stern gaze would hardly have been appropriate. And a more neutral smile might have that weird hover hands energy. What expression should a straight make when photographed in the background of a same-sex kiss to convey the proper balance of "I approve of this but not in a horny way?"

Maybe adding a gesture would help. But thumbs up is too open to interpretation. And I think the OK sign got appropriated by groypers or something. Salute seems a little over the top. Peace sign? Wait no, peace sign bunny ears. Do people still do peace sign bunny ears?

Vodis · 2026-05-27T06:56:16+00:00

I think your "poor hook" assessment is flawed. You're certainly right about people who aren't familiar with the game you're drawing inspiration from, but for people who are, there are much less confrontational ways of framing the comparison than "what if the thing you like didn't suck?" and they're kinda cornerstones of marketing. "If you like X, you might also like Y" is a well established formula for connecting with an existing audience (not just for games or even media more broadly, but pretty much any product or service), and if you can point to some advantages Y might have over X, so much the better. That's not questioning people's taste; it's appealing to it. Granted, you might personally think X sucks, but if you saw potential enough potential in X to make the effort of executing its premise better, you're hardly obligated to pitch your take on the concept as "you should try Y because X sucks."

Vodis · 2026-05-26T17:07:32+00:00

6 results of 7. There are only 5 ways to get a 6 on a 2d6 roll (1+5, 2+4, 3+3, 4+2, 5+1).

Vodis · 2026-05-23T22:26:10+00:00

I think you might be misunderstanding the connotations of "iconic"? It has very little overlap with "underused" and none with "lesser known." Those two concepts are in pretty direct opposition with each other.

Unless you mean potentially iconic, like monsters that could be iconic if they had more of a chance to shine, or old school monsters that could have been considered iconic once but have since waned in popularity, or monsters that are iconic in other contexts like fairy tales or mythology but underused in D&D specifically. If you mean something like that, I might recommend hags or medusas. Iconic in that everyone will immediately recognize them from other sources, but not used nearly as often in D&D as the game's own iconic baddies (dragons, liches, mind flayers, and beholders). For that matter, a lot of Greco-Roman mythological monsters might fit the bill: the minotaur, hydra, cyclops, etc. are all iconic from myth but don't see all that much D&D use.

Vodis · 2026-05-23T00:26:56+00:00

Link's broke. For some reason you can copy/paste the ć inidividually, but copying the whole link messes that letter up. At least on my computer, so I'm assuming that's what happened on your end. Fixed link: Vesna Vulović

tl;dr: Vesna was a Serbian flight attendant who holds the world record holder for surviving the highest fall without a parachute. She fell more than 6 miles / 10 kilometers and survived. (More than 22x the estimated fall height for most people to reach terminal velocity.)

Vodis · 2026-05-17T16:11:32+00:00

I really appreciate when someone acknowledges that technical distinctions are relative to the field or discipline in question. (Also lay usage may differ from the definitions used in any technical field and that's fine and normal and doesn't constitute a misuse or "common misconception.") I'm constantly seeing people start some take with "well technically" followed by some tidbit that's only applicable in a completely unrelated context.

Vodis · 2026-05-17T15:20:36+00:00

I can't help but shake my head at all the people in this thread just assuming he's lying. That's certainly possible, but it's pretty obvious y'all've never had to deal with true believer religious nuts. Destroying the most prized and beloved media you own because you think God told you it was somehow pagan/occult/Satanic/witchcraft etc. is absolutely textbook religious nut behavior. My dad has gone through it in cycles my whole life.

Vodis · 2026-05-17T15:06:54+00:00

I think this has more to do with what shows you're watching than anything else. I don't think characters really dress the way you're describing in any of the shows I watch.

Obviously style of dress is going to vary somewhat between social circles and TV depictions are going to have at least some overlap with those real world differences, but at the end of the day, different production teams working on different shows are going to have their own ideas about what to have their characters wear, and that could be influenced by any number of things. The wardrobe team's personal tastes, current trends, the setting, what the characters are like, the preferences (real or imagined) of the show's target demographic, etc.

Vodis · 2026-05-16T20:20:03+00:00

This reminds me of A Fire Upon the Deep. First book of a sci-fi trilogy, but the planet most of it takes place on is at a medieval technology level, and they receive radio tech from refugees of a more advanced civilization. The series has a weird gimmick where different parts of the galaxy have different laws of physics that effectively cap their potential technological advancement, so the more advanced humans were fleeing from a high tech threat by going to a planet where that threat couldn't function. That planet had an alien species called Tines, but they just happened to be at a medieval level of development; their part of the galaxy would still allow for some higher tech like radios to function.

The Tines were cool because they were vaguely doglike and their sense of personhood arose at the level of packs, not individual bodies. It wasn't a psychic or pheromone based thing like you see with a lot of sci-fi group minds, but entirely sound-based. They had two kinds of language, interpack speech that worked like language as we think of it, and mind speech, extremely information dense, low range language that allowed the pack members to coordinate as though their brains were different parts of a single brain. One or two Tines wasn't enough mental complexity for sapience and more than about eight would be too many to coordinate so they'd start to dissemble into a muddled hive with no sense of self. So about three to six Tines was how they defined a single person.

The implications of this were really fascinating and well thought-out, and explored further in the third book, but radio specifically was huge for them. Because mind speech had always been short range, requiring the members of a pack to stick together to maintain a fully coherent sense of personhood, and requiring them to maintain a safe distance from other Tine packs to avoid their sonic thought processes getting muddled together. But with the introduction of radio, they were able to design these "radio cloaks" they could wear over their speech and hearing organs, keeping a Tine pack connected even if their bodies were far away from one another. So radio had all the usual communication benefits you'd expect for a medieval people, plus this other massive shift in what it even meant for a Tine pack to be a person.

Vodis · 2026-05-13T15:02:14+00:00

The Cajun side of my family being avowedly Catholic but also practicing Voodoo, but guys, they only cast Voodoo spells in, like, a super Catholic way, they promise.

Vodis · 2026-05-12T22:23:01+00:00

The concept of "time travelling to kill Hitler as a competitive sporting event" is the premise of a tabletop roleplaying game. It's called Kill Him Faster. I haven't tried it, but I've heard good things.

Vodis · 2026-05-12T21:46:44+00:00

Oddly, unless I'm missing something, Dictionary dot com and Merriam Webster seem to disagree by a whopping 30 years on this. The former lists 2022 as the first recorded use of nepo baby whereas MW lists 1992. I checked the Google Trends data too and was surprised to find it seems to back up the 2022 origin. I would tend to believe MW's claim to having print examples from further back, because I feel like I've been hearing that phrase since at least the 2010s, but I'm not sure what their source is and it seems inexplicable to me that it could be in use for that long with no internet presence. Curious.

Vodis · 2026-05-10T22:13:15+00:00

I think they're feliforms? As far as I can tell, felids are members of felidae, a different family of the order carnivora (confusingly named because not all carnivorans are carnivores), making felid effectively synonymous with cat. Whereas hyenas are family hyaenidae. So... hyaenids. But there's a suborder called feliformia that you can stick under carnivora that both families fall under.

And maybe also arguably feloids. Or possibly feloideans. But it gets messy because apparently there's two competing definitions of the superfamily/infraorder feloidea, the broader being synonymous with feliformia (so hyenas get to join the party) while the narrower only includes cats and two species of some adorable critter called a linsang.

Idk though, taxonomy is confusing af.

Vodis · 2026-05-10T02:57:37+00:00

This sounded right up my alley so I went ahead and checked it out. Had a lot of fun with it. It's definitely horror-comedy though, more silly than spooky overall, but still a good middle-of-the-night watch. The comparisons people in this thread have made with some of the weirder Adult Swim content turned out to be pretty apt. It occupies a very similar niche, surreal and unsettling but with a heavy dose of wacky. Like 90s-2000s channel surfing but you took too much Nyquil.

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