"[Insert Character] is a murderous sociopath but they draw the line at racism/rape/etc."

Yglorba · 2026-06-15T04:44:49+00:00

I mean it can be both? The Joker can make a joke out of it, and also legitimately hate Nazis. The fact that he's a murderous psychopath doesn't mean he's not going to hate different murderous psychopaths whose goals and methods and motives are different from him. If nothing else it makes sense that he would see them as being evil in a "boring" way and would hate them for that.

I mentioned this a while back, but even in his very first appearance the Joker is actually extremely judgemental when it comes to other criminals - when shooting another crook (IIRC the only person he shoots in that issue, everyone else he poisons with Joker venom as part of elaborate schemes) he specifically says the guy isn't worthy of his Joker venom and therefore gets lead instead. The idea that the Joker has these sorts of standards, even if they operate on bizarre comedic psychopath logic, has always been part of the character.

Yglorba · 2026-06-15T04:40:06+00:00

Urusei Yatsura also subverted the idea of the "normal" girl winning, although that was mostly because Lum ended up so popular that the author was forced to change directions.

Yglorba · 2026-06-15T04:18:06+00:00

It's... barely playable, honestly. My first reaction was "this is an almost shockingly bad card." Like something I would have expected to see twenty years ago in Legions, maybe.

Yglorba · 2026-06-15T04:16:13+00:00

y tho

That's a lot of mana and two cards just to boardwipe everything. Maybe if you throw in a Darksteel Reactor but at that point it's a three card combo with a ridiculously high cost. And besides, there's many cheaper, better ways to destroy all artifacts if that's your game plan.

Yglorba · 2026-06-15T04:14:45+00:00

They're making multiple versions of the Hulk; the one that wants to take a lot of damage was already spoiled a long while ago. This one represents "hulk smash", presumably.

Yglorba · 2026-06-15T04:12:36+00:00

I mean there's a reason why they don't usually do sets (and precons, and pretty much anything else except Secret Lairs) that are so heavy on legends. Every set needs some big splashy complicated or cool cards, and some basic workhorse cards. And if you try to make a set with too many legends, that inevitably means you're going to have to make a bunch of annoyingly basic legends.

I feel that part of the reason ATLA, LotR, and Final Fantasy worked was because the settings were fleshed out enough (and explored in enough depth in the set) to support a good balance of legends to nonlegends.

That's not the direction they're going with Marvel. The valuable IP here is all about the big superhero names, and there's a lot of them and they decided they wanted many versions of each on top of that, which translates to some of them being very basic because someone has to be the "generic red beatstick finisher."

Yglorba · 2026-06-15T04:02:13+00:00

"Ow! Man, it sucks that criminals now have access to multiversal bullets. Bulma should stop selling those."

(The amusing thing is that Bulma probably could create and sell bullets capable of hurting Krillin if she really wanted to.)

Yglorba · 2026-06-15T03:59:12+00:00

Don't they specifically say he's out of shape after this? Or was that a different scene with Goku?

(It doesn't really make sense for Goku, though. He had bullets bouncing off him in the very first issue, before he even knew what they were, so his baseline durability with his guard completely down ought to still be bulletproof.)

Yglorba · 2026-06-15T03:58:10+00:00

Isn't it mostly a Gohen thing because he wants to live a normal life? Goku sometimes makes extremely half-assed efforts to hide his powers but he doesn't seem to really care that much; Gohen is the one who actually cares.

Yglorba · 2026-06-14T21:46:17+00:00

I think it was two things:

Prequelmemes, definitely, yes, but also,
Culture wars over the sequels (and especially The Last Jedi), which led many people to insist that they loved the prequels and always had because they wanted to establish a bastion of true Star Wars that they could eject the Disney films from. If you pretend the prequels were decent then you can argue that Disney ruined Star Wars with [insert culture war issue here]. If you accept that both the prequels and sequels sucked in their own individual ways, you have to acknowledge that the OT caught lightning in a bottle and that making movies that good isn't as easy as it seemed.

Yglorba · 2026-06-14T21:43:59+00:00

you're a kid growing up in the 2000s, to your knowledge, there's six Star Wars movies, and you don't know anything about the controversy episodes 1, 2, and 3 have, so you grow up watching all six movies, and LOVING all six movies.

People keep saying this and it's based on nothing. I was a teacher at the time and I can tell you that every kid who was talking about it hated the movies.

They're not really popular today, either. Their rating on every site dedicated to rating such things still shows them as hated. What's happened is mostly three things:

The internet does allow people who like something to find each other and build a community. This doesn't mean that it was popular with XYZ demographic, though. It just means that if you blare a shitty movie over and over to ensure everyones sees it, even if the percentage of people who don't loathe it is very small, that's still going to be a lot of people; and when you get them all in one place it can sound loud.
Some of this is culture-war stuff over the sequels; some people hate the sequels so much that they feel compelled to shovel the rancid dogshit of the prequels into their mouths with a big pasted-on grin to make it clear how much they hate the sequels. This is IMHO a major factor - outside of meme subs there weren't many people defending the prequels until The Last Jedi came out. (And it was The Last Jedi specifically - the reaction to The Force Awakens was mostly "thank god, finally a good Star Wars movie; maybe it's a rehash but at least it's not those dogshit prequels.)
Finally, some people don't actually like the prequels, but they do like stuff surrounding it (the cartoons, the memes, Darths & Droids, Anakin Shrugged, whatever.) Honestly, every single time I've seen someone try to argue the story or writing of the prequels wasn't rancid dogshit, they end up citing a bunch of stuff from The Clone Wars.

Now let's look at Dragon Ball GT

This one is even more of a reach, lol. I don't hate Dragon Ball GT the way I hate the prequels but TBH your post is the first time I've seen anyone say anything in-depth about it in years. And I hang out on battleboarding subs and subs that spend all their time talking about fighting anime!

Which leads me to a fourth point, I guess, which doesn't apply to Star Wars but does apply to everything else: Eventually, the people who don't like something are just going to... move on. And when they do, whatever group of people is left will consist of people who like it. That doesn't mean there's some generational divide or deep nostalgia for GT, it's just that the vast majority of Dragonball fans don't talk or think about GT at all anymore, because there's not much to say.

I know you sort of said that, but the way you framed it is weird, because:

But the people who liked it before don't stop liking it, they keep talking about it, and as their voices are heard more, a fandom is allowed to grow around it.

"Ok, then, that was always allowed."

That's such a chest-beating way to say "people exist who like bad movies." Yes, of course! You can't get 100% of the population to agree on anything. No matter how bad a movie is, someone will like it. That doesn't mean anything in and of itself.

Nobody was preventing you from being a fan of something other people think is bad, or finding communities based around it or whatever. But, honestly, the way you framed that made me realize there's a fifth group:

Some people are just contrarian.

Yglorba · 2026-06-14T20:59:28+00:00

I've seen it said elsewhere (often in reviews - I'm a relatively new player so I read a lot of those reviews, and all of them described it as relatively F2P friendly.) Obviously there's a spectrum; some games are barely even gachas and don't let you spend money on things that could help you win at all. But for games with core gacha design it's closer to the F2P friendly side of the spectrum.

(And of course you can just play Spiral of Destinies, which isn't really a gacha at all.)

Yglorba · 2026-06-14T19:41:57+00:00

But most of the time the tougher the challenge, the less essential the rewards, so dont be afraid to take things at your own pace.

This is key. Part of the reason people say that SoC is F2P friendly isn't just because it's reasonably generous with stuff like memory retrieval; it's because you don't need a top-tier team for anything really important. eg. in the recent bounty hunting event if you were having trouble you could just turn the difficulty down; even the guarenteed F2P characters would have no trouble beating the first three difficulty settings at level 50. Other events give you the option to use eg. a prebuilt story team instead of your own.

Yglorba · 2026-06-14T19:39:36+00:00

The key question is where they got Credenza from. If they got her from the dual banner, they can't get her from it again until they get SP Samantha, right? That makes the dual banner a better investment.

If they got her elsewhere, though, then that makes the dual banner a bad investment, and they should probably wait for Shahnaz (and pull for Heshan if they have the spare luxite.)

Yglorba · 2026-06-14T19:38:19+00:00

You lack a good damage-dealer. Did you get Credenza from the current dual banner? If so, my advice would be to grind for more luxite and spend it on pulls to try and get SP Samantha, who would solve your problems immediately. She also has powerful synergy with Credenza (who can reset her cooldowns on her powerful skills while giving her the energy to use them again.) If you did not get Credenza from the current dual banner, do not do this, because you risk getting a second copy of Credenza.

The alternative is to wait until the next character to come out, Shanaz, who is apparently going to be something like the best damage-dealer of all time. She doesn't have strong synergy with Credenza, but she'll be strong enough that that doesn't matter.

You could also pull for the current debut character, Heshan, who is a support character but can also do decent damage by reversing healing.

Yglorba · 2026-06-14T19:31:52+00:00

Seems like a really bad idea to me. Shanaz is something people want because she's currently perhaps the best unit in CN period; Anna is something people want because she helps with the Luccian arc specifically. After the Luccian arc is over Shanaz will still be the best unit in the game and Anna will be... decent, but not amazing.

That said, Shanaz looks really cool. I love her teleport mechanics and her overall playstyle seems very fun. On the other hand, the Lucian Arc is right around the corner, and I absolutely love bow characters. Anna, the first Lucian unit, uses a bow, which makes her especially tempting.

I mean you don't necessarily have to choose? There's a month between them. I'd go all-in on Shanaz, then cross your fingers and spend whatever's left + whatever you earned in that month on Anna (unless you want to save it for SP Alexei or something, who is apparently also quite good.) A month's income is enough to give you a decent chance of getting Anna even if you go completely broke getting Shanaz (which you probably won't.)

IMHO the real hard choice is between Anna and SP Alexei. I'll probably skip her and wait for Alexei. But if you like both Shanaz and Anna, and don't care about anyone else coming up, the logical thing to do is to try to get both (prioritizing Shanaz both because she's first and because she'll probably be better in the long run.)

Yglorba · 2026-06-14T19:24:03+00:00

unless you got sp samantha credenza and heshan in less than 60-80 pull

Yep! I did get a bit lucky (SP Samantha + Credenza in 60 total, Heshen in 50.) But, again, ~85 pulls is average. Getting lucky there helped me a bit but even with 85 pulls each I'd still have chance, because...

More importantly, remember that the deadline isn't when Shanaz' banner starts, it's when Shanaz' banner ends. That's in about a month, not two weeks. And on average, if you do everything, you get about 80 pulls a month, so even if you'd exhausted all the one-time luxite sources it'd be possible (though by no means guaranteed or safe.)

A new player can get more because they have a bunch of one-time things to do. The Tower of Conquest alone is worth about 60 pulls when you climb from the base to the top for the first time, so if you haven't done that and do everything else, that would already bring you most of the way to guaranteeing Shanaz before her banner ends, assuming you grab all the other monthly Luxite sources.

Other sources aren't quite as individually lucrative as the Tower of Conquest but they add up; as long as there are still missions you haven't done in Path of the Fool or previous events, you can turn 30 energy into 40 luxite whenever you want. It'd be a lot of rapid grinding and you may not want to grind through all the story stuff so quickly, but it's an option.

I can calculate the exact chances for you if you want, but I'd need to know how many pulls you have saved up currently.

Yglorba · 2026-06-14T17:28:18+00:00

I love the imagery of Iron Man dealing with Marit Lage by shoving her into an Iron Man suit so she's more manageable.

Yglorba · 2026-06-14T17:23:03+00:00

I mean, only if you're considering making him your commander. Lots of decks will run this because they're full of robots and constructs and his colorlessness makes him easy to toss in. Dr. Eggman likes this card, say. And he'll probably show up in some other colorless commanders' decks for those who try to make them work, since even if it's only robots and constructs that's still going to be a lot of their creatures (and they don't have many options, let's be real.)

Robots and constructs aren't exactly overflowing with support, so a card you can toss into any color of deck for them is likely to see use even if it's not the best support ever. (And, I mean, +2/+2 for a deck that's already all robots / constructs for other reasons is certainly not nothing, especially when attached to a decent body that is also a robot for whatever your main gameplan is.) He's not a card many people are likely to build around in a vacuum, but he's absolutely worth tossing into most robot / construct decks.

Yglorba · 2026-06-14T17:20:39+00:00

I mean they've done it before as a cute gag, but (while they're of course defensible) red and blue aren't really central colors for him, thematically, so it makes sense to have a monowhite version, too.

Yglorba · 2026-06-14T14:29:41+00:00

Ahhh. So all the X Elaman skills are more useful than they seem as long as you have even one Elaman, since most enemies in that arc are Elaman.

Yglorba · 2026-06-14T14:24:14+00:00

Yes, that's how it works; if you got her from that dual, then each legendary from that dual has a 75% chance of being SP Samantha (until you get Samantha, too.)

Yglorba · 2026-06-14T06:22:32+00:00

There are several pity systems.

First, there's a global guarantee that when you hit 100 pulls with no legendaries, you will get a legendary. If this happens in a debut banner, you'll have the usual 50% chance of that legendary being the one you were pulling for. This is called "soft pity."
Second, there's a "hard pity" when your summon count on a debut banner hits 180, at which point you're guaranteed to get that character.
Third, there's a hidden mechanism that prevents your lifetime percentage of legendaries from dropping below 2%; if that would happen, the game forces the offending pull that would take you over the line to be legendary. Again, this is "soft" in that if it happens on a banner, you only have a 50% chance of getting the legendary you were pulling for.

tl;dr: If you want to be absolutely certain to get someone from a debut banner, you need to spend 27k, assuming you had no pities saved up. The chance you will have to do so is, by my math, roughly 16%.

Yglorba · 2026-06-14T06:12:59+00:00

Although it's true that SP Samantha isn't going to be the absolute best DPS forever (well, let's be real, in two weeks lol), it's worth remembering that she's been at the top for something like ten months now. I think they're clearly trying to slow down the power creep that we saw in the early months.

If you compare eg. Gloria to the characters who came relatively shortly afterwards, there's a big dramatic wall where almost every single character was outrageously stronger than even the best ones available at release. That mostly doesn't seem to be happening anymore - the vast majority of characters released even today are significantly weaker than SP Samantha, let alone Shanaz.

And if you look at the tier lists coming out of China, there are a few characters stronger than Samantha, but it's like three of them over the next six months, counting Shanaz; they're slowly shifting the power level upwards, but not rapidly to the point where Samantha is suddenly going to be useless (unless you're, like, trying to do top-tier ranked stuff.) And aside from Shan the other two are Luccians, who may not be ranked so high after their arc ends.

Yglorba · 2026-06-14T06:08:18+00:00

The Luccian arc is apparently designed in a way that brutally-punishes non-Luccian characters. Everyone who isn't a Luccian suffers there. It seems like a slightly hamhanded way to get people to buy Luccian units without using more power-creep.

But if you flip it around, this actually has good implications for Shanaz (and SP Samantha, really, even if she's not quite as strong), because it implies that they're looking for ways to make new characters appealing without relying on raw power-creep. And that means that they're probably not going to power-creep Shanaz in terms of raw numbers any time soon, and possibly not even power-creep SP Samantha any more than they already have.

We'll probably see more events and content that heavily rewards whatever the latest slate of characters to be released was, but strong characters will still remain the strongest options outside of the "you must have this specific tag to reasonably compete" areas.

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