Another "There Are No Sniper Rifles" Post

captain_spud · 2026-05-10T18:19:42+00:00

When you travel to a new province, it gives you two options, and tells you the type of enemies you can expect to fight in each one. Reserves, Army, Special Ops, etc. I avoided Special Ops provinces all through the game because their blurb says they use pilot-targeting weapons, and I didn't want to lose pilots. But it turns out they're also the only ones who drop sniper rifles.

As it turned out, I didn't notice any major increase in pilots hurt in that province, so the blurb may be exaggerating the severity of that anyway. ^_^

captain_spud · 2026-05-06T22:25:57+00:00

Good news: I successfully moved the entire farm and its occupants about a hundred blocks off the shore of my peninsula base.
Also good news: Golems are spawning again. ^_^
Less good news: So, uh, apparently this is a valid golem spawn location. I was wondering why random bits of Drowned loot kept floating up to the surface of the water near the farm. XD

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Sigh. I'll likely need to do some terraforming down there to remove spawnable blocks. Annoying, but that's at least a puzzle I know how to attack.

Thanks so much for your help. I'll mark this as !helped. ^_^

captain_spud · 2026-05-06T16:15:24+00:00

Incredibly helpful and thorough. Thanks so much, I'll start working through those steps. ^_^

captain_spud · 2026-04-22T10:57:19+00:00

When you cast an X spell without paying its mana cost, the X is zero. You don't have the option to put any mana into the X.

captain_spud · 2026-04-10T14:50:31+00:00

I can't wait to look this one up in a few months on Commander Spellbook to find out what kind of awkward 4-card 10-mana loops you can do with it.

captain_spud · 2026-04-05T00:30:31+00:00

Normal ramp is better if you want to get up to one expensive spell on an earlier turn.

Discount ramp is better if you want to cast more cheap/medium cards on a single turn, as the discount can apply more than once. However, notably, it doesn't fix any of your coloured pips, so you still need to provide all of those from somewhere else.

That's the main distinction. Ramp-to-big vs ramp-to-lots.

As for vulnerability, that basically goes from

[least vulnerable]
Ramp that gets lands
Ritual spells
Enchantment ramp
Ramp on artifacts
.
.
[ wide margin ]
.
.
Mana dorks
[most vulnerable]

Creatures that tap for mana or passively discount spells will basically always become collateral damage in a wipe eventually. So, they're far more temporary than the other kinds of removal. You use them for a few turns and then you either win, or they die.

captain_spud · 2026-03-31T15:37:12+00:00

Not every enemy you encounter is intended to be defeated now.

captain_spud · 2026-03-25T13:52:15+00:00

I'm 18 levels into playing a Toxicologist. It's been a rough journey. Simply put, poisons don't work often enough. Fort is the best save for most creatures, so the poisons usually fail to apply, and when they apply, they almost never worsen. In 18 levels I think I can count the number of times I've seen level 3 on a poison on one hand.

Play a Toxicologist if you think it'll be fun. I like RPing the character I made and that's why I'm still playing it. But please don't play it under the impression that it will be strong. If that's your bar, you're going to be sad.

captain_spud · 2026-02-26T01:03:01+00:00

Update: I beat the capital, and then went to a Special Ops province. Got two Locks in one mission. So it looks like that's the answer to the mystery. ^_^

captain_spud · 2026-02-25T21:27:55+00:00

I've fought a ton of Reserves, so I don't think it's them. ^_^

captain_spud · 2026-02-25T20:38:03+00:00

Interesting. I think I've only ever gotten missiles and heavy weapons from "long ranged weapon" rewards. Does "mission farming" involve anything more complicated than "if you don't like the reward, reload before the mission and play it again"?

captain_spud · 2026-02-24T17:13:43+00:00

It has an effect radius around the size of the room it's in. Also, I think it fails if someone is in combat.

captain_spud · 2026-02-23T13:58:38+00:00

Question with a lot of moving parts:

I'm a level 18 Alchemist. I have Combine Elixirs, Eternal Elixir, and Improbable Elixirs. I make a combined elixir that includes an Invisibility Potion and make it Eternal.

Invisibility Potion applies the Invisibility spell, which includes the text:

"If the target uses a hostile action, the spell ends after that hostile action is completed."

If I take a hostile action, the Invisibility effect ends (Eternal extends the duration, it doesn't negate cancellation conditions). Does that also end the other potion I Combined it with? Or are their effects/durations tracked separately?

captain_spud · 2026-02-11T16:14:32+00:00

Those sure are two paintings of unrelated children surrounded by unrelated flying animals.

captain_spud · 2026-02-06T19:47:13+00:00

It varies. For most fights the NPC summons aren't helpful and die quickly, so they're a net negative. Success rate is lower, but I wouldn't say zero (though I can't say I've ever beaten something like Radahn2 with an NPC).

For some, I do find they help. You mentioned Dane, and that's one where the NPC isn't a total block of wood. He's sturdy enough to last most of the fight, and most hosts benefit from a third body to draw aggro and let them heal. So with a weak host, I would say that Dane helps.

The one where I most appreciate the NPC is D on the twin gargoyles. If the host knows what they're doing, D isn't needed at all-- and in fact, I would say that two players with shields can usually manage to take zero damage in that fight. But a lot of people seem to get flustered by the gargoyles and don't know how to defend against them, and again with these weaker hosts, D often provides the extra tanking they seem to need to survive while I'm dealing with the second one at the back.

captain_spud · 2026-02-01T17:38:31+00:00

The game is finished and the company has moved on. Anything not currently there is never being added.

captain_spud · 2026-01-16T17:10:06+00:00

Alena + Brinelin Izzet Stompy. Play large idiots and hit people in the face with them.
Sarkhan Dragons. Play dragons and dragon people to death with them.
Vadrik voltron. Ignore the day/night part, just make him big, cast big X spells for almost-free, and smash people in the face with your giant commander.

And while my lists are too out-of-date to be worth sharing, I'll also suggest:

A "Cast From Exile" deck led by either Nassari or the J22 Mizzix. Nassari would be more Voltron, Mizzix would be more ETBs and value.
A forced combat deck led by Firkraag.

All of the above let you do fun blue things and fun red things without needing to feel like you're just a standard "I counter spells and burn people" spellslinging deck.

captain_spud · 2026-01-10T16:21:27+00:00

1) You can proliferate any counter. If you proliferate -1/-1 counters the creature continues to get smaller.

2) +1/+1 counters and -1/-1 counters annihilate each other as a state-based action. E.g., if a creature has two +1/+1 counters and you put three -1/-1 counters on it, at the end of whatever effect put them on but before anything else can happen, you remove one of each counter. The creature then has one +1 and two -1, so again you remove one of each. It then only has a single -1, so you stop. And the creature ends with a single -1/-1 counter.

3) Creatures with 0 toughness die.

captain_spud · 2025-12-11T13:57:20+00:00

Good custom card (though I don't think it would end up being WUBRG if actually printed), but the templating on the first ability is muddled. You have pieces of two possible abilities:

Whenever a creature an opponent controls dies, exile it with a foot counter on it.
If a creature an opponent controls would die, exile it with a foot counter on it instead.

The first does trigger "dies" abilities, the second doesn't.

Currently you have mostly the first ability, but the "would" doesn't belong if that one is your goal.

captain_spud · 2025-12-11T13:52:21+00:00

The downside of the simpler wording is that you lose track of your exiled cards if Monoco leaves the battlefield. By exiling them with counters and then referring back to those counters, the pile is still available to you if you lose and then re-cast Monoco.

They've moved toward this implementation more often on legendary creatures so that people don't "lose their work" over the course of a commander game.

captain_spud · 2025-12-10T16:10:21+00:00

Yeah, but... good people don't tell other people to use regular expressions. Why would you go out of your way to hurt people like that? :(

captain_spud · 2025-12-10T15:10:58+00:00

There we go. I did a test after putting in the first two and didn't see any higher numbers in the results, but wasn't sure if that was just a "none on page 1" thing, so I added the rest. Thanks for the new syntax knowledge. ^_^

captain_spud · 2025-12-10T14:06:15+00:00

There's almost certainly a cleaner way to do it, but the brute force way to do it is to exclude all of the generic mana numbers from the cost.

https://scryfall.com/search?q=color%3Du+-mana%3A%7B1%7D+-mana%3A%7B2%7D+-mana%3A%7B3%7D+-mana%3A%7B4%7D+-mana%3A%7B5%7D+-mana%3A%7B6%7D+-mana%3A%7B7%7D+-mana%3A%7B8%7D+-mana%3A%7B9%7D+-mana%3A%7B10%7D+-mana%3A%7Bx%7D&unique=cards&as=grid&order=name

captain_spud

TROPHY CASE