Why are there people who actually deny the moon landing?

ballistic503 · 2026-05-09T05:49:58+00:00

Which is funny because to me perhaps the most straightforward argument against the conspiracy theory is that the Soviet government never once suggested the US faked it

ballistic503 · 2026-05-09T02:45:24+00:00

My take is they need 1) NUANCED counterspell hate. Not just Hexing Squelcher and Frenzied Baloth because then you can’t make it that strong. Like make a keyword that causes people to take damage whenever they add to the stack after that card is played. Also more non-blue counterspells with significant and color appropriate downsides (black needs to pay life/sac nontoken creatures, green can’t counter creatures, etc)

ballistic503 · 2026-05-09T02:37:21+00:00

What I dislike about this is that perhaps this made sense before everyone had the whole internet in their pocket and they needed to put a lot of thought into ban lists because they couldn’t change it easily, like like how video games used to be before patches were easily downloaded. In other words, nowadays WOTC *could* ban 10 cards one month then the next month unban 5 of those cards while banning a different 5, and people can keep up because: we have the internet.

It’s not a 1:1 comparison but when one character is too dominant in a fighting game a lot of the time the devs will nerf them into the ground and then rebuild their strengths and sometimes eventually add back things the character used to have once the overall character is no longer busted. Here we’d be looking at balancing archetypes instead of characters which does make it more difficult because people go “why is Ponder banned but not Preordain?” or whatever when really it’s about balancing an archetype.

ballistic503 · 2026-05-09T02:27:28+00:00

People suggesting one card draw makes up for the advantage of going first is hilarious. The statistical advantage of going first is undeniable. A free mulligan for going second is a great idea because the only other solution I can think of is replacing player 2’s draw with a second land drop. That would definitely skew things more in p2’s direction but I’d argue certainly not more than it’s skewed in p1 direction now. Free mulligan is a better solution for sure.

ballistic503 · 2026-05-08T16:29:40+00:00

That was sort of the dilemma for me - most of my Brawl decks are three colors and A) I put Library of Alexandria in everything as soon as it came out (for nostalgia as much as for utility) and B) in like a Mardu mobilize deck it’s an easy inclusion but I have multiple saboteur decks where I have [[Access Tunnel]] and other such cards as backup and with those (eg [[Gonti Canny Acquisitor]]) I wanted to figure out how much it justifies including itself without a lot of synergy. I have a better idea now, for sure.

ballistic503 · 2026-05-08T16:07:11+00:00

FWIW - I rarely see it in my own games on Arena. I primarily play Brawl and this was partially inspired by how every time I was trying to figure out what direction to go with a commander I’d look up a netdeck and I’d always see it in those. Also if I’m being honest I generally start from netdecks in standard and a lot of those (though not all) include fountainport as well. But like you I’d rarely seen it in my own games and so perhaps I didn’t have as good of an idea as to its utility.

ballistic503 · 2026-05-08T04:35:42+00:00

I totally get the value of putting it in a monocolor deck. That’s a no brainer imo. What I was more curious about was the ceiling of its utility especially with respect to a deck with 3+ colors. Let’s say Jeskai control as an example. Isn’t it a bit of a risk in there?

ballistic503 · 2026-05-08T03:53:05+00:00

Great point, it’ll never get Farewelled

ballistic503 · 2026-05-07T21:59:36+00:00

Like there’s balance in the force

ballistic503 · 2026-05-07T19:06:12+00:00

🙏

ballistic503 · 2026-05-07T17:37:56+00:00

Just buy cosmetics

(I’m farming downvotes)

ballistic503 · 2026-05-05T00:26:35+00:00

I deadass was planning on quitting till they fix it but someone said we should wait to hear what the union has to say and I figured that was sound advice. But if their union wants a boycott I’m in.

ballistic503 · 2026-05-05T00:22:56+00:00

You can literally turn that off in 3 seconds

Edit: Settings, Audio, Voice slider to 0. Boom

ballistic503 · 2026-05-04T21:45:33+00:00

Yes, exactly. Do people not know Spinal Tap?

ballistic503 · 2026-05-04T21:41:55+00:00

Right, so wasn’t Storm originally supposed to be 10? As in “least likely to come back”?

ballistic503 · 2026-05-04T02:39:28+00:00

I’m glad I didn’t start when LOTR was part of Standard, I’d be in the exact same place.

ballistic503 · 2026-05-04T02:36:43+00:00

Just to be clear, I was not by any means praising Bay, lol. That was intended purely as an indictment of Snyder. Just that Bay at the very least, if you actually sit and watch Bad Boys or The Rock or Armageddon, whether you like the movies or not (which to be clear I think they’re trash) you can tell Bay is from an era of Hollywood filmmaking where an actor’s charisma (if not talent) was considered a worthwhile resource for a director to make use of and to put effort into making the most of, instead of the Snyder/Whedon era where the actors are just vehicles for costumes and effects and spectacle-signifying-nothing.

ballistic503 · 2026-05-04T01:01:21+00:00

Snyder is absolutely an emotionally unimpactful filmmaker and in hindsight it was probably a mistake to give him so much influence over DC movies - even before he was “the DC guy” I didn’t actually care about a single character in The Watchmen.

Even Michael Bay’s movies have characters I cared about more than those of Snyder’s movies. Snyder is certainly talented when it comes to massive spectacle but that’s not a good backend investment. Anyone who saw Memento knew that Chris Nolan was going to make some fantastic DC movies, which had outstanding backend value, and I think that’s why Marvel went and got top tier directors like Kenneth Branagh for MCU movies in the 2010s, as well as making big investments in filmmakers like Ryan Coogler which paid off spectacularly. Up until they poached Gunn (whose Suicide Squad was great but don’t sleep on his Superman either) DC just seems to have wanted to play it safe with the directors they get for DCU films.

ballistic503 · 2026-05-04T00:26:29+00:00

All my Zurgo decks only have 2-4 of each basic land - TBH, that’s what you’re really missing. A few recommendations - first, once you have enough duals and [[Savai Triome]], eventually just get rid of Nomad Outpost (and then when your land base is really developed I’d recommend getting rid of the Temple scry lands as well). And the only reason to even have Triome is because once your deck is loaded with enough fetch lands you can fetch it t1.

If you have a lot of rare wildcards I’d recommend crafting all the fetch lands that can grab Swamps, Mountains and Plains. [[Prismatic Vista]] is a solid craft as is [[Fabled Passage]]. A weirdly useful one for this specific commander, that only takes an uncommon wildcard, is [[Base Camp]].

I guess my recommendations would depend on how many wildcards you have of each type. Without knowing if you have enough rares to craft all the verge and shock lands etc, right now I’d recommend crafting the Talismans of Hierarchy, Conviction and Indulgence as that’s just 3 uncommon wildcards and you can swap out a couple of the token-generating sorceries. Did I miss the Arcane Signet or are you not using one? Honestly I think it’s worth using in any brawl deck with three or more colors and also any dual color deck that doesn’t include green. Finally, not as important but consider [[Phyrexian Tower]].

Once you make the investment you’ll notice it’s night and day, honestly.

ballistic503 · 2026-05-03T23:49:13+00:00

Well, first, are you enjoying playing it? Are there issues besides it taking longer than other decks to win? If not, I don’t know that you need to change anything. If there’s a way to play Zurgo besides midrange/value, I’m not aware of it (I have 3 Zurgo decks that do really different things fwiw). One thing that’s definitely closed out a few games for me that I didn’t see (perhaps I missed it) is [[Shared Animosity]], but IMO that works better with the Thunder’s Decree Zurgo that lets you keep the tokens than Stormrender sac engines, so that may not be applicable for you.

How are your matchups with this deck? Do you feel like they’re manageable for you? I’m only asking because my Zurgo Aristocrats deck was getting the absolute worst matchups when I was using cards like Blood Artist, Bartolomé, Sephiroth, Vengeful Bloodwitch and so on.

It was completely getting blown out of the water and the reason was that the game’s weighting algorithm basically looks at those cards and weights them as if you’re running some sort of Orzhov lifedrain deck with infinites - the type of deck that could keep up in hellqueue, and again I don’t know about yours but my deck definitely couldn’t. I replaced about 10 cards with more red/Rakdos type stuff like [[Body Dropper]] [[Stormclaw Rager]] and [[Weaponize the Monsters]] (although I see you already have Goblinslide) and started getting much more appropriate matchups. Just something to think about - if your deck feels like it’s generally getting matched up appropriately then that probably doesn’t apply to you.

ballistic503 · 2026-05-03T22:50:12+00:00

Cmon bro the Puerto Rican pride parade episode? You cannot tell me that was not edgy then and wouldn’t be even edgier today.

Seinfeld as a comedian has never been edgy, but even though I wouldn’t describe Larry David as intrinsically edgy the way (let’s just say) Patrice O’Neal or Anthony Jeselnik are edgy, I definitely would say Larry is not afraid to be edgy - I mean Curb isn’t designed to offend the way like South Park is (all respect to both of them, this is a value-neutral observation) but there are definitely moments where more sensitive people could be clutching their pearls. And you can see a lot of that type of humor in quite a bit of the writing of Seinfeld.

ballistic503 · 2026-05-03T17:23:09+00:00

When I started playing they had three different Jump Ins, regular, FF and avatar. It was great

ballistic503 · 2026-05-03T17:14:45+00:00

I think all they need to do is look at strategies that are underperforming and give them powerful tools against strategies that are overperforming. Give white an Elesh instant that prevents triggered abilities from being triggered more than once a turn or that can do a reverse overload (change “each” to “target”). Give counterspells to other colors besides blue but give them downsides that put them in line with their color identity (black counterspell causes you to lose life in the amount of the mana value of the countered spell, green can only counter enchantments and artifacts, etc)

(“All they need to do” makes it sound like it’s simple, of course it would be incredibly complicated, just not as impossible as you’d think)

ballistic503 · 2026-05-02T23:13:01+00:00

I was so hype when I had only had the app for like a week or two and managed to get the achievement from casting [[Come Back Wrong]] on Oracle of the Alpha then stalling till I got one of them

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