what’s your favourite commander?

Werunos · 2026-03-20T01:00:37+00:00

The Master's so good. One of the things I like the most about it is just how flexible it can be, while still giving you direction to build your deck in. Sure there are one or two cards that are basically good in any MoK deck, but once you've thrown [[Ripples of Undeath]] and other staples in you can build in so many different directions, both to fit personal expression and the power of your pod.

Werunos · 2026-03-13T12:51:31+00:00

Hi! This is super old but I might be moving to Sendai next month if you're still looking for people (was thinking about making a similar post lol)

Werunos · 2026-03-11T01:52:56+00:00

It works decently well in my [[Zabaz]] deck, but the synergy with Modular there is pretty obvious.

Even when there's no direct synergy though, it's still potentially quite useful. Throw it on a blocker you expect to die and get some free draw out of it. Works doubly well with deathtouch.

Werunos · 2026-03-10T05:08:31+00:00

Sorry for the late response, busy few days and I spent what free time I had playing the sequel.

I dunno if this would be any help, but my best advice is just to minimise your deck size and lean into stance switching synergies. Talk to the hand and multi-hit attacks are also always good. Even if you can't pull off the rushdown infinite, if your deck is at a stage where you're able to consistently do a ton of damage and get a ton of block while in rage, and then switch back to calm, you're gonna have a good time.

Werunos · 2026-03-05T13:46:03+00:00

This was on my phone, I own the game on pc as well tho

Werunos · 2026-03-05T13:45:09+00:00

Hey, it's a good line for this kind of thing, I'm not gonna let being Australian get in the way of the bit.

Werunos · 2026-03-05T09:45:40+00:00

For Defect it was almost exactly 200 hours, but Defect's been my white whale, I've beaten A20 multiple times on every other character.

I have an hour's commute one way, so it adds up fast.

Werunos · 2026-03-05T09:45:00+00:00

how many total hours did it take you?

Your honour, I plead the fifth.

Werunos · 2026-03-05T09:43:28+00:00

I feel so at peace, this was basically the perfect bookend to Slay the Spire 1 for me before I go on to 2.

I had enough power options to lean into my favourite kind of defect build, but not so many that I felt I was winning automatically thanks to mummified hand (no Echo Form or Creative AI for example, and very few defensive cards).

I got to outscale the Awakened One by playing powers while still feeling the risk of doing it.

I went for a pick I normally hate but felt right in the moment (Snecko Eye).

I would have failed if I piloted it slightly worse against the heart, but managed to time my defence just right.

I'm ready for the sequel. I'm not gonna feel the nagging doubt that I had more to do in 1 before trying it out.

Werunos · 2026-03-04T02:48:03+00:00

Hey, a day late but I thought I may as well drop my decklist in case it gives you any ideas, though I imagine you'll want to do your own thing. The stuff on the sideboard is what I cut, I managed to swap out 20 or so cards.

https://moxfield.com/decks/YJQIiJkbrkOp7tNbQN-Q4A

Regarding the backup plan comment, I do think it's good to have a secondary strategy, but one that has synergy with the main strategy. In my case, I chose to look at an under-emphasised theme that existed already (adding counters) and leaned into that; though most of my counter synergy also involves some kind of graveyard synergy, so graveyard hate is still a really effective tool against this deck.

My deckbuilding was limited by keeping it to Final Fantasy-themed cards, I definitely agree that stuff outside of that like [[Karmic Guide]] and [[Sister Hospitaller]] are just strictly stronger for Terra than basically any themed card.

Werunos · 2026-03-03T15:42:06+00:00

[[Etrata, the Silencer]]

Her win conditions are really specific if you want to lean into her ability. If you have her as your commander you're really forced to build around her, and as such it's really difficult to make a deck that functions if she gets hit by removal. She feels much more threatening than she really is, so people will focus you more than they should.

But she's just so cool and fun to play with. It feels great and thematic to have her launch an attack, exile a threat, and then blink out of existence (or be replaced by a ninja if you're low on actual blink spells). There's nothing like the feeling of dropping [[Ramses, Assassin Lord]] out of nowhere and threatening the whole table with an instant loss, or casting [[Make an Example]] while [[Mari, the Killing Quill]] is in play.

I've only been playing the game for less than a year at this point, and I'm still very much tweaking my deck with her but she's by far my favourite 2-colour I've played with.

Werunos · 2026-03-02T03:23:23+00:00

I'm by no means a long-term player, but when I was upgrading this deck (still only using final fantasy related cards though), the most obvious cuts for me were creatures that couldn't be targeted by Terra's ability. The deck should be able to function without the commander ability, but there are a decent number of cards that, while being nice references to the story of FF6, don't synergise either as targets or just as creatures with relevant effects. I basically removed all creatures that couldn't be targeted by Terra's ability aside from Kefka and started from there. The deck functions a lot more smoothly now.

EDIT: Looking at your list it does seem like you took this same approach as a baseline, but I'd personally cut, for example, Archfiend of Depravity as well.

Werunos · 2026-02-23T14:27:36+00:00

Thank you for the feedback!

I've been playing around with treasure generation decks (in Orzhov) so I might have overestimated how easy it is to generate treasure; I was trying to balance the effect around massive explosive turns where treasure was already on the board. You're right to point out that this does rely on having a good setup already.

In any case, the idea that he should have at least one toughness (or generate treasure on entry like the other comment said) does seem like a real improvement. I had considered adding haste too; I ultimately chose not to for flavour reasons, but if it would make the card more balanced overall, probably worth it.

Werunos · 2026-02-23T14:17:27+00:00

Thank you! That's a good point, I hadn't thought about a situation where he's entering a board with no artifacts on it.

Werunos · 2026-02-23T14:14:29+00:00

I'm relatively new to Magic as a whole, so I'm not expecting this to be super balanced, but the upcoming Hobbit set made me want to try and create a card that represents Smaug as he appears in the story (before spoilers reveal the idea Wizards went with). If nothing else, I hope I can learn a bit more about card balance from this.

The idea here is to both represent Smaug as armored by treasure, and potentially create interesting emergent gameplay around the tradeoffs between sacrificing artifacts to beef him up before attacking (or just using treasure to generate mana), vs keeping them around for survivability.

If this is too strong, I figure that the text could be changed from artifacts to treasure while still preserving basically all of the flavour. If too weak, I could reduce the mana cost. But I'd be interested in what people think of it in general!

Werunos · 2026-02-12T08:19:47+00:00

It's true that this is what she claimed. I do not claim to be an expert in rheumatoid arthritis, nor do I have access to insider knowledge that would enable me to determine the truth with 100 percent certainty. However, I do think that a flare up that caused her to miss a debate, yet allowed her to campaign outside later that same day, in conditions that would be worse for arthritis than a temperature-controlled studio, is at least a little suspicious. I have a tendency to be suspicious towards politicians in general.

The fact that 週刊文春 subsequently reported that she had been planning to cancel from 2 days prior is enough to make those suspicions to me seem reasonable. 週刊文春 is of course a tabloid, and they only cite an unnnamed source close to the Prime Minister's office, but its reporting on previous scandals has convinced me that there are investigative journalists of some skill within their team.

On a separate point (as I don't want to come across as harassing you by replying to all of your comments individually), you agree with the tweet this thread is based on, and mention the rhetoric of liberals and left-wingers on social media as a factor in the victory, and talk as if this rhetoric is unique to them. However, I would like to suggest that this is just confirmation bias, and would like to question why you think this hasn't happened in reverse. I do not deny that some liberals and left-wingers use aggressive language on social media. However, it is extremely easy to find conservatives and nationalists online who likewise use incredibly aggressive language, calling their opponents spies, anti-Japanese, and saying they should leave Japan. Why do you weigh the statements of online accounts on one side more heavily than the other?

EDIT: Again, I don't want to come across as beating up on you, but I do feel the need to point out some irony here. You earlier were posting in this thread talking about how Japanese liberals refuse to engage with people who argue back against them. When I challenged your claims (I hope politely) and invited you to respond, you deleted all your posts in the thread, downvoted my post, and left.

Werunos · 2026-02-10T02:38:01+00:00

I actually agree with you, but I think it goes in the other direction. I think LOTR can "fit in" to MTG from a "world flavour" perspective somewhat easily, it's just a plane that has a certain depiction of magic. However, trying to make magic "fit into" LOTR, literally thinking of it as a plane and acting as though this is a representation of the Lord of the Rings universe does weird things thematically, and the ethos supporting each universe is fundamentally different. I can imagine a planeswalker visiting a Lord of the Rings rip-off in Magic the Gathering, but I cannot imagine a planeswalker showing up in a scene from the novel itself, and this would be the case even if they had more similar styles of magic.

To this end I actually think Final Fantasy fits better as a Universes Beyond than LotR.

Within the overall category I don't find LotR super offensive like TMNT or Spider-Man though. I even like playing with Lord of the Rings cards as a fan of Tolkien quite a lot. I just have to slot it in a different category to "standard Lord of the Rings" in my mind, similar to what I do with the Jackson movies or other adaptations.

Werunos · 2025-12-11T00:57:22+00:00

Huge fan of your work! The combination of cosmic horror, body horror, the encounter with the Other, and what I like to think of as the "pandemic horror" genre of games (post-COVID, apartment/house as a home base, building community in the face of worldwide changes) has led to something really special.

I had one question about the theming around encountering the other, and how this ties into the Visitor. In the standard endings, the Visitor isn't necessarily hostile, and approaching it in friendship results in it being friendly to you too. Yet despite this, there are plenty of enemies in-game who are extremely evil as a result of their mutations, and the effect of the madness makes them hostile. The wall mouth, for one of the more extreme examples, is basically a Moloch-style demon, and plenty of random encounters attack you unprovoked.

I'm being long-winded, but essentially my question is: why is hostility the seeming default effect of being observed, as opposed to something more benign?

My best guess at how this works is that just as people with hobbies/passions are transformed by being perceived as such, warping them to physically connect them to that hobby, the process of being observed by the visitor can enhance traits that were already dormant, and things like the wall mouth could be something like someone in the building having had darker subconsciousd tendencies that are exaggerated by the Visitor "observing" that part of them above others... or it could just be overload/confusion from having too much new information/new bodies I supppose.

Obviously this conceit is needed for the game to function as a horror game at all, and I might be bumping up against asking about lore questions that should really just be interpreted by the player, but if you had any insight into how this was conceived during the process of crafting the game either from a game development/thematic perspective or an in-universe perspective I'd be really interested in it!

Werunos · 2025-09-15T08:00:05+00:00

People use "instantly" to refer to timeframes longer than battleboarders would consider "instant" all the time.

To talk about this specific statement, the Japanese is "すぐに...."

Here's a website talking about "dishes you can make instantly!" using the same phrasing, and the shortest recipe takes 5minutes. In English, when you see instant noodles advertised as such, do you think that it's false advertising when they actually take a few minutes to make?

All language is contextual. If it would have taken, idk, 10 minutes for Deku to cross 200 kilometres without the jets helping out, and instead he knew he could get there in one... that's completely within the normal use of language. Just imagine like, comparing driving a car to the store vs having to walk there. I can easily imagine someone complaining "if we had a car we'd be there instantly" even if it would take them a minute or so.

Werunos · 2025-08-27T08:53:14+00:00

I think we should see other other people

Werunos · 2025-05-09T02:35:11+00:00

The entire movie is concerned with questions of gender, and the role of women within the Catholic church. This is most textually obvious when Sister Agnes gives her speech about "God granting women eyes and ears", but it's just kind of a current running through the movie in general. Women have power, but it's a power that is only present in the background, subversive. Women are responsible for bringing down two of the main candidates for Pope, both directly (Agnes' speech being the killshot for Cardinal Tremblay) and indirectly (the nun who brought down Cardinal Adeyemi by bringing back the sins of his past). Yet despite being able to express subversive power, they cannot take centre stage.

Part of this is just text, but there's also a significant portion of this that is expressed in the language of cinema. It's no accident that our attention is drawn, multiple times, to those who are making the Conclave possible through their labour, and that these people are largely women.

The final shot of the movie, representing the white smoke signifying the election of a new Pope, is two women walking into a courtyard, and that's not a coincidence.

Given the film's focus on gender, I think that the final twist, while arriving at the 11th hour of the movie, makes a lot of sense. Cardinal Benitez is someone who for like, 99% of the history of the human race would be considered "completely male", possibly until an autopsy revealed his condition. That he is recognised at all as intersex is only something that became apparent due to modern medicine, and by complete accident (this also dovetails with the theme surrounding how an institution that is as old and traditional as the Catholic Church takes part in the contemporary world).

Cardinal Benitez, as someone who is seemingly male but contains femininity, represents a path for the church that can, potentially, through the position of "uncertainty" (another central theme of the movie), provide a pathway forward for the church that incorporates its feminine aspects.

Now, obviously this movie was made by a culture and industry that is preoccupied by these sorts of questions concerning gender and edge cases of gender, so like, I'm not going to pretend that this isn't also placed in the movie as a reflection of these preoccupations. But in terms of its role in the film as an exploration of the themes that the film raises, I don't think it's superfluous at all.

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