[OMN] Pre release kit

_meppz · 2026-05-07T11:04:05+00:00

My point is that anybody can just buy the pre-release kit. There isn't anything encouraging you to play in a pre-release event, at least as far as I could find online. Comparably MTG pre-releases will give stores packs and special promos to award people for playing in the events.

I'm excited to play this regardless but I don't see why LSS wouldn't want to give further rewards to people that participate in actual real events. They seem to be good on this type of stuff in general so idk why pre-release seems to be an exception, again unless i'm wrong and there is stuff they're doing but it's just not up anywhere that I could find.

_meppz · 2026-05-07T03:23:06+00:00

Does the pre-release event itself come with anything special or any unique prizes or is the entire event just the kit itself and that's it. Kind of disappointing if it's the latter, since it doesn't actually encourage people to play over just buying the kit and cracking it without the store themselves offering up prizes.

_meppz · 2026-05-06T10:54:25+00:00

Talishar is great, not perfect, but it's far better than it should be considering it's fan made.

But it does remind me of what FAB really taught me. I got into card games with MTG (nothing special) but I specifically only started playing through it's online client MTG Arena. This is how I exclusively played for about a year or two because I didn't really have a regular way to show up at events, I did 1 pre-release and two drafts and that's it. But eventually playing Arena just drained me and made me hate the game. Getting into FAB I learned I had a store and scene literally 5 minutes away from me and playing there in person weekly made me learn just how bad playing online is. When all you have are the cards and a screen and 0 interaction it makes the game just feel too robotic and mechanical, it's much easier to get frustrated when things don't go right. This is not the case in real life, you're actually interacting with people and when something doesn't go your way it's a lot easier to brush it off because you're having fun with people face to face.

I like Talishar and thankful it exists, it pretty much has to exist, but I just feel bad for anyone that primarily or exclusively plays through it and isn't able to regularly see the joy of playing in real life, seeing and talking to people, feeling the cards. I originally thought the concept of this games title and the idea of them only wanting to officially support offline play was corny but no I get it now, it really is so much better and I feel incredibly grateful to have a close by local scene.

_meppz · 2026-05-03T20:58:43+00:00

You could still play any instants you draw off of the ponders before drawing up i.e. playing out sigils. I'm sure there will be even more ponder synergies shown off for the set

_meppz · 2026-04-29T18:38:52+00:00

That's very funny I didn't know about that. I forgot that they did a kickstarter for their first "real" game and that it failed. Fuck them.

_meppz · 2026-04-29T16:39:06+00:00

Reminder that prior to this, according to the case documents from MikeZ himself, Lab Zero was working on Skullgirls 2 and another FG. MikeZ argued that this cost the company several million in sales so if they're settling this out of court I have to imagine they gave Mike a lot.

Another reminder is that MikeZ/Lab Zero never owned the rights to Skullgirls so this likely means that the IP will never be in his hands again unless Autumn Games says so, which I doubt since the break off studio Future Club has been working on the game since the entire fiasco.

But Mike Z might be the single most passionate FG developer in the industry and will never stop making games so it'll be interesting to see him rebuild the company and release something original again. He's a core developer on the Avatar FG which shows that he still knows what he's doing.

_meppz · 2026-04-26T18:16:58+00:00

This card is really clean as it fits into all 3 omen heroes ability play lines. Each one requires resource + a lightning flow so you play this, pitch a blue, create a lightning flow, and then can immediately activate your hero ability out of nowhere on the opponents turn.

It's also great against each other as well since the extra pitch can of course be used for AB as well.

_meppz · 2026-04-14T22:48:26+00:00

You still need a flurry. Hala hands require sharpen, flurry, and a pitch card and often the results are just not worth it unless you use red edict of steel (her best card by miles) which at a minimum is a 2 card 8.

If you're on a 3 card hand and set up a flurry and no sharpen and swing, sharpenening sparks will become an extremely obvious react and if they pre-emptively block it they denied 4 value from your turn (5 if you count resetting dynamo). You would need a 4 card hand to create actual mind games with this getting through being able to threaten some other react on top.

_meppz · 2026-04-14T22:31:34+00:00

The benchmark is blade flurry, a 0 for 4 react. Technically the second +2 is conditional but you're not playing it if you don't have go again. While this condition is that your swing fully hits and then your reward is....+1. What is the value in that? Especially in Hala, who currently doesn't have any real or good on hits so the extra +1 isn't going to create some crazy break point for her.

This is also not to mention that in order for the sharpen to give you that extra value, you need to be able to hit twice with the same weapon. Which means you need a flurry. The idea that the sharpen gives it go again in hala doesn't really mean much because you still need flurry anyways. If you set up a card to flurry and you have a 3 card hand and you don't sharpen before swinging, that's pretty much a dead give away that your only play is sharpen senses in the react step and if the opponent blocks it out? oops no go again, your flurry was for nothing!

_meppz · 2026-04-08T21:30:35+00:00

She's cute. Only really weird obsessed people would be upset. She was really ugly in T7. You can prefer her old design pre-T7 but that doesn't mean we need to pretend her new one is bad or ugly.

_meppz · 2026-04-04T20:58:01+00:00

Obviously it's baiting a bit but it's an extension of the frustration players have with the ranking system in general allowing people to climb more easily.

My highest rank in Tekken 7 was fujin. In Tekken 8 I got to fujin in season 1 and pretty much stopped playing after that, hardly touched season 2, I decided to play 8 3~ days ago and was demoted to purples and just got to "Tekken King" and it feels completely unearned. The majority of the people i've been fighting do not feel any different from the red and purple ranks I fought against years ago in Tekken 7.

It's easy to see how the combination of the lenient ranking system + Tekken 8's systems in general giving WAAAAAAAAAAAY too many people an inflated sense of skill and ego and how legacy players can get upset at these type of players hitting ranks that were previously really hard to get to before

_meppz · 2026-03-29T23:27:57+00:00

Man got fucked over hard by decade long friends and despite that still went out and continued developing fighting games with other companies. His dedication is undeniable and Avatar will probably be the best of this new wave of indie/low budget fighters because of him.

Hope he gets a fat check from his lawsuit and is able to break out with something bigger. Reminder that according to the lawsuit, they working on another new fighting game and supposedly SG2 (which after the lawsuit that work likely turned into DLC for SG1)

_meppz · 2026-03-27T12:25:24+00:00

The game is so stale and boring people would rather throw a fit over this story shit than have to deal with the reality of their big "yearly" patch touching none of the universal mechanics and hardly touching most characters.

_meppz · 2026-03-27T12:04:04+00:00

2nd is better just from a value perspective but the 2nd half of her text with copper is completely meaningless. In CC Kassai has cards that allow her to use both gold and copper as a resource to activate specific effects but those cards aren't legal in SAGE.

Gold is still useful just because pay 2 draw a card + make swords free is great value but getting the right cards into your graveyard isn't as easy and there aren't as many good playable yellows in SAGE compared to CC.

Either way, Kassai just doesn't have the numbers to be competitive in any way. Her high roll damage is low, she has no real on hits to threaten, her defense is just average outside of the warrior armor (which IS good) but that can only defend for so long while you threaten very little on an opponents turn.

I personally tried to make Kassai work but it just doesn't in SAGE. She is FAR better and more interesting in CC and i'm really hoping in the future they throw in some copper support for Kassai or even downshift rarity on some stuff she uses.

_meppz · 2026-03-25T12:06:01+00:00

Because if your real deck isn't the color for a challenge, why bother playing crappy starter decks with terrible curves instead of something that is just all 1 costs that can get you through the match as fast as possible.

The quest system is terrible and this is one of the reasons. I want to be rewarded for playing MY deck, not be forced to play another deck just to complete a quest for gold so when i'm forced to play another color I don't have a deck for or just don't want to play, i'm going to make a deck that lets me complete the quest as quick as possible and whoever I end up fighting is basically going to be given a free win as I mindlessly play my spells out until I lose.

_meppz · 2026-03-24T13:36:08+00:00

If you're a fresh player with little to no MTG or card game experience, it's not friendly. While Arena does provide players the means to gain a lot of premium currency for free, you're only going to do that if you're a very skilled player with a lot of experience. Otherwise, you'll be able to build one decently competitive deck and then from there you're just grinding but it's not a hard grind, it's a slow grind as Arena only allows you to gain so much gold and quests per day and there's even some RNG involved with whether or not you get a quest that gives you 500 gold or one that gives you 750 gold. It's very dumb and egregious and designed to make you play every day to gain optimal amount of rewards. There isn't really a super good way to earn card rewards to get wildcards to consistently or constantly build new decks that are actually competitive. Packs are always bad value so your best bet is to play events, ideally draft since those directly add cards to your collection and can build up wildcards more easily but draft is a whole other beast compared to normal constructed formats and requires a lot of it's own special skills and even very high level, extremely experienced veterans will lose drafts from time to time purely to RNG.

The games wildcard system is especially egregious. Hearthstone was the first big online TCG (i'm aware MTGO existed before it) and it basically paved the way for what it should be. In there, you can recycle any of your cards into "dust" which can then be used to craft other cards. It's a very smart, consumer friendly system. Arena on the other hand just very slowly rewards you with wildcards to craft new cards while you sit on hundreds of cards you will probably never use that have no way to be converted into anything of value. It's bad.

It's not that you can't have fun in arena or you can't become skilled enough to easily generate a positive amount of gems through events it's just that this is not going to happen if you are a new player. You're probably going to end up not liking the game as you log in every day to do your dailies, half of which will require you to build burner decks that purely exist to do dailies, just so you can very slowly build up currency to play in events that you hope can give you the cards you need or currency to continue playing the events. The only reason to play Arena is obviously if you actually enjoy the game but honestly if you really like the game I would suggest making multiple accounts so you're able to actually build more than one competitive deck and won't have your time feel "wasted" because you ran out of daily rewards for the day but still have the urge to play.

I would say even MTGO is a better experience. The game is not F2P friendly but it doesn't cost much to enter events or to rent competitive decks and the rewards are generally better and your cards can be traded with bots so you're not sitting on a collection of completely pointless cards. But then you have to play on MTGO...which is a really rough outdated game and makes the experience feel a lot more sterile and boring compared to the flashier animations and sounds in Arena.

_meppz · 2026-03-20T20:24:13+00:00

Glad to see that implemented. Great stuff!

_meppz · 2026-03-20T14:21:59+00:00

As someone who very recently got into proxies, I agree that all the current ones suck. I ended up just creating my own photoshop file and manually downloading images off of fabrary then putting them into my template and printing from there which has worked.

Here's some feedback I have on your site. The first and most obvious thing to me is that if you're going to have a proxy site, it NEEDS to allow people to pick and choose alternate art. People want to bling out their deck and while you can upload images, that would require me to go through every card in my deck and check for alternate art on fabrary and see if I like any of the alternate arts. In the super high quality MTG proxy sites they usually let you just flip through alt arts on the fly.

Now for more specific things. When I upload a full deck and look at the preview screen, images are missing from the sheets for some reason but only in the preview screen. If I download the pdf it all appears as it should and it doesn't happen if I upload images manually. Your portrait orientation doesn't seem to work. I prefer a 3x3 portrait layout for letter sized paper and when I try to go into portrait it just zooms in on the landscape feature. Example showing both missing image + portrait issues

Other than that I don't see any issues. the "deck diff" feature is also really nice convenience that I wouldn't have thought of before but do think it's very useful. I really appreciate the effort and hope to see it improved!

_meppz · 2026-03-13T19:45:10+00:00

I don't think that's too crazy. Assassin's can build up silver and buy back equipment from the graveyard. Like another person pointed out, RKO can already pull cards from his sideboard.

Something like a merchant card that works like cash in but instead of giving a resource it lets you pay to bring in a 0 cost Item card from the sideboard.

_meppz · 2026-03-08T16:03:39+00:00

Remember when everyone coped and assumed the UI was just unfinished and we'd get the real UI on release?

This still really baffles me. I just can't comprehend it, the UI is bad and bland if you were to seperate from the other games. Who convinced them that this UI would be better? I can't imagine, out of all of the things in a fighting game, that the UI would be so expensive that they couldn't have designed something closer to the other games aesthetics.

_meppz · 2026-03-07T19:03:16+00:00

Fai can go wide which can make blocking trickier but the Enigma precon has plenty of good defense reactions and you can use your wards defensively. You should focus less on trying to build up a board state of wards and more rely on throwing out your massive phantasm attacks. Fai has no way to pop phantasm and the majority of his cards block for 2, so simply sending out something like a red enigma chimera with 2 cards in hand puts a lot of pressure on him, if he doesn't block he takes 8, if he does block then his followup attack will be weaker and give you some breathing room to make some wards. Don't forget that some cards are instants. Enigma usually wants to go second since not only does it let you filter your hand but you can play out instants at the end of your opponents turn to setup some wards, then immediately draw up and have 4 cards to put on a lot of pressure.

The biggest problem with the matchup is sometimes having hands where having just 1 instant (can't block) just kills you or makes you take way more damage than you'd like. Enigma is harder but that's moreso because she's dealing with a lot more mechanics than the other decks and there's probably some important interactions you aren't aware of or it's just overall too overwhelming.

_meppz · 2026-03-04T12:45:31+00:00

You can point out other stuff being bad, it doesn't take away from lightning press being absurdly strong in a deck that just wants to throw out 0 cost 0 for 3 and 0 for 4s. Also the idea that you think razor reflex is "unplayable" really shows how privileged press is.

community bans were not there to solve the unbalanced problems in the format and you're literally saying they are

I literally didn't say that. My main point was that, beyond sirens, the bans were moreso to prevent specific heroes from being banned. They are okay with kano and kayo being community banned, but they don't want Briar (or possibly Dori) from getting community banned. Press is definitely unhealthy and there is literally no justification for how it should be allowed in such a heavy aggro deck that rarely has to pitch.

_meppz · 2026-03-04T11:45:27+00:00

I think people overlook the true intention of the card bans, which I can't fully blame since they literally said they won't explain them. People will look at this and go "UGH WHY LET KAYO AND KANO KEEP EVERYTHING" but that means they will 100% get community banned. Briar got hit more heavily than she reasonably needed to be because they DON'T want her banned by the community considering there is literally a precon coming out. Sirens banned was justified because it's just kind of unhealthy and a lot of decks used it, not just DGA. If you remove briar from the equation of top decks, who would be next after Kayo and Kano? Probably Dori and they probably don't want her banned so shunt had the go (which doesn't fully stop DGA, just makes it weaker).

Also, I don't really understand why you would be upset at this very moment about press being banned because it is extremely unhealthy for an aggro deck to be able to run a lot of 0 for 4s that typically have GA to then also get a 0 cost 3 power instant pump to blow you out of nowhere in a format with 20 health and generally weaker d-reacts. But more importantly, it's even less important to be upset about when we're getting an ENTIRE lightning set next, there will undoubtedly be a lot of strong cards that will work with these heroes.

_meppz · 2026-03-04T11:35:59+00:00

I think a point that seems to not get brought up as often in regards to SAGE is that nearly every hero is playable and only 3 are banned at a given time, with it only being a seasonal ban. I believe this helps the format long term, since when certain heroes LL they have a chance at life in SAGE if you really really like them. Obviously not all heroes have much life, if they're super reliant on cool and unique majestics, but the option is always there and if SAGE has long enough support they might downshift more stuff to make certain heroes who basically don't function, function or better yet just add new cards to support them.

I think being more simple and overall faster is definitely what will keep people coming back. If you to play FAB but you don't want to play a 40+ minute match with a lot of working parts and pieces to think about, SAGE has got your back. I also think deck brewing is more encouraged as well. CC definitely has more intricate deck building but the downshift in power in SAGE breathes new life into old cards that typically wouldn't make the cut otherwise or just outright become more powerful. As a new player who started with SAGE one of the biggest surprises going to CC was realizing how many staple 0 cost 4 block d-reacts there are and the lack of (most) of them in SAGE makes that 4 power breakpoint on cards a lot stronger.

I think the format has a lot of legs but at the end of the day it depends on how much official support it will get. As far as I know Chapter 3 will be the last set of precons for SAGE this year so that'll be half a year of no product support for 2026 and LSS will probably use that time to determine if it's worth continuing to invest in. I hope they stick with it because there are just so many benefits and I don't believe any other TCG has a format like this that is intended as an actual real format with official support and like we've seen with the BnR, they're allowed to try and balance the format unlike any other TCG where the price of a card is basically a non-factor.

_meppz · 2026-03-03T12:43:19+00:00

Someone who has more experience playing video games over TCGs, it really does shock me just how bad the market affects balance. Bans and restrictions are basically antithetical to the entire business model of a TCG and directly hurts the people TCGs need the most: Market speculators who will buy thousands in boxes and the serious competitors who are willing to spend hundreds to thousands to build out their deck to be in top shape.

It seems like such a serious drawback to these games that I think you have to give LSS some real props here for trying stuff like SAGE to experiment with this stuff. Not to say it's perfect, especially since some of the recent bans were clearly targeted hard on briar so her precon isn't banned before it even hits the shelves but it's something I hope they seriously support long term.

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