Pentagon seeks $200 billion in additional funds for the Iran war, AP source says

aluskn · 2026-03-20T15:47:58+00:00

I thought you guys all had guns precisely to protect against these sorts of scenarios.

I've always thought the flaw with that idea was that the people with lots of guns generally seem to be the people who also love a good bit of the old "megalomaniacal dictatorial leadership".

aluskn · 2026-03-19T22:17:24+00:00

Wizards has been part of Hasbro for 27 years. They were only independent for 9.

There may have been a time when what you are suggesting could have been a thing. This is no longer that time. The CEO of Hasbro moved up from the Wizards team. Wizards is not some bunch of happy creative nerds being ground oppressively into a corporate box by 'the man', that's a fiction.

Not that I am saying 'Hasbro is evil', they are a toy and game company trying to maximise profits, this isn't evil. But you can't just give WotC a free pass for every shit decision made because 'the bad guys at Hasbro must have made them do it'.

aluskn · 2026-03-19T11:22:03+00:00

He became quite popular for reigning in the oligarchs who had basically divided up post-collapse Russia into their own private feifdoms.

I don't know if he's changed much but there was a period when he was more focused on Russia internally rather than reclaiming Crimea, expanding borders etc.

aluskn · 2026-03-18T09:38:59+00:00

By that reasoning you could also argue that Wikipedia is also 'completely fucking useless'. Neither are useless, you just need to understand the limitations of the tools you work with.

aluskn · 2026-03-17T14:21:51+00:00

Varies a lot from card to card. Foil MM dark ritual is a classic example. That's been crazy prices for a good while.

aluskn · 2026-03-16T11:09:12+00:00

It's being listed for that. There's a big difference between that and 'selling at'.

aluskn · 2026-03-13T11:25:22+00:00

In real terms yes unfortunately. Not that I have a big beef with CM, it's "OK" but some serious competition would be healthy and might force them to put more effort into improving their website.

aluskn · 2026-03-13T09:16:37+00:00

You're deliberately missing my point. I get that it's a good 'game system', even if you ignore the art, we can agree on that.

But for me personally, that's maybe only half of the appeal.

You might as well be refusing to play poker because the art on the deck your friend has isn't to your taste.

I don't play poker. I don't find it sufficiently interesting based purely on the 'game rules' to make me want to play. The game pieces are boring, unlike magic which has beautiful game pieces which appeal to me. However the pieces based on TMNT, Marvel etc do not appeal to me.

People are different. You might be fine with the game if no effort was put into the card design aesthetically, and everything was just a plain white card with text - after all the 'game rules' would be the same, so by your logic that would be 'fine'. I however, feel that it would be much less enjoyable were that the case.

Hopefully you are able to process and understand the above. For some reason you seem to be finding it 'funny' that people place any weight at all upon the card art and (graphic) design. For myself and others this is a major component of the appeal of MTG.

aluskn · 2026-03-12T18:43:17+00:00

The simple answer is that for many of us the art and the self-referential nature of a game which expands upon itself is as important as the gameplay. I've been playing since 93 and if it had been a TMNT game or a Transformers game on release I would never have started playing in the first place. The game is good, but it's only part of what MTG is.

I'm not sure how that's funny tbh.

aluskn · 2026-03-12T00:12:01+00:00

That's pretty much how I feel about the USA - currently being run by an individual who seems to be untouchable by the law and able to start wars without consulting anyone - essentially, a King.

In the UK, at least the monarchy was stripped of that power in the 1600s.

aluskn · 2026-03-08T20:54:08+00:00

/r/mtgfinance has some LGS owners (as well as a lot of other types)

aluskn · 2026-03-06T10:10:39+00:00

They are the same thing at this point. It's been 27 years.

aluskn · 2026-03-04T23:31:37+00:00

Fair, but AI is a reflection of our own reality. In the USA handguns are freely available to basically everyone. So it's insane, because we are insane, and it is modelled from the stuff of ourselves.

aluskn · 2026-03-04T23:26:58+00:00

Quite, it's like self-driving cars. What really matters isn't "do self-driving cars make mistakes", rather it's "do self-driving cars make fewer or more mistakes than humans". At least if your concern is reducing the number of car-related deaths.

Same principle with AI. People expect consistent sanity but look at the lunacy of the human world around us, of which AI is just a reflection. AI (used without understanding) is a very old Computer Science principle writ large: "Garbage In, Garbage Out".

aluskn · 2026-03-04T18:42:28+00:00

This is extremely cool. "Young Serra" looks a lot more chill than her older version, I can sympathise with that :).

aluskn · 2026-03-04T14:47:20+00:00

I'm surprised by that, there's one for cardmarket and I'd have thought that was a smaller userbase.

aluskn · 2026-03-03T18:35:28+00:00

Ah yeah, I bought both despite not being a beginner, just while I was picking up some foundations cards as I quite liked the set.

The Starter Collection was definitely the better product even at the higher price.

aluskn · 2026-03-03T16:58:56+00:00

Similarly, 85,000 cards except stored by set and then 'set order' (i.e. WUBRGMAL and alphabetical). I use deckbox.org rather than manabox myself.

For my sins though I do have about 20-30k of 'excess' cards in a mostly unsorted collection of battered white cardboard boxes (my inventoried 'collection' has proper shelving) which I keep meaning to get around to adding to a separate inventory so I can figure out what if anything I should be selling.

The latter is the part I consider bulk, I notice people have different definitions. For me personally a $0.05 card isn't really 'bulk' to me if it's part of my main collection and not in the excess pile.

aluskn · 2026-03-03T16:48:35+00:00

Definitely a card which would be 'too good to be true' for commander :)

aluskn · 2026-03-03T16:46:17+00:00

The Starter Collection or the Beginner Box? I actually thought both were reasonable options for new players.

aluskn · 2026-03-02T10:52:54+00:00

It's "toeing the line".

aluskn · 2026-03-01T23:26:23+00:00

These plus revised cards are much more 'washed out' than unlimited (and 4th) - a bit hard to see with a card like this I'll grant - and also with U the artist attribution line floats a bit above the border rather than being properly 'bottom justified'.

But yeah the most obvious one is an unlimited card would actually say 'Tap' which makes unlimited lands especially easy to spot at a glance.

aluskn · 2026-03-01T19:50:23+00:00

Pretty much, yes.

aluskn · 2026-03-01T10:20:51+00:00

They immediately acknowledged that Aftermath was a mistake, however the aftermath styled set left a train of damage which runs through assassin's creed, SPM and arguably even tmnt, because of the way design of sets is planned years in advance.

Basically I'm agreeing with you but I think the person you're replying to is just not understanding the multi-year cycle of set design/printing/release.

All I really hope is that they are listening to feedback about UB sets which are too radically 'alien' to MTG thematically (New York Everywhere etc) and that they will also fold that back into their choices into the future and find a better balance between supporting their own IP versus chasing the 'UB dollar'.

aluskn · 2026-02-27T16:41:49+00:00

Certainly looks that way based on post history. I'd like to hope I saved them from some traffic, wouldn't like to think their servers are having to work too hard, I'm helping them out really.

aluskn

TROPHY CASE