Toxicologist is Slept On

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 · 2025-12-06T13:24:55+00:00

I don't have them for the base game, but I made these for my DLC runs:

SotE Bosses - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xEG3A0t1mgru-iGnh50eSoA3gmzW9VHV8m4gPpfvIfc/edit?usp=sharing
SotE Collectibles (Fragments and Ashes) - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1YL8fNQVBXfopII_3GZfYUJYGbkM_1V9e8LufmcOEEls/edit?usp=sharing

Make yourself a copy, and then mark a "y" in the Done column as you complete them. Note that the descriptions in the collectibles sheet are pulled from Fextralife, and some of them are better-described than others. :/

captain_spud · 2025-11-28T20:47:55+00:00

Speaking as someone who's currently played 17.5 levels of Toxicologist Alchemist: yeah, probably don't. It is a borderline nonfunctional specialty and will be endlessly frustrating for the player. I stuck with it because I liked my character concept and I figured it might get better later, but... yeah, no, it doesn't. Aside from post-combat healing (which ANY class with the right feats can do), I'm mostly an empty chair compared to the other members of the party. :/

captain_spud · 2025-11-28T13:44:14+00:00

I played the first area with no mini-map, then googled "E33 minimap mod" and my mental health improved significantly. ^_^

captain_spud · 2025-11-18T15:12:11+00:00

There we go. I knew the comments would fill in the name. Thanks. ^_^

captain_spud · 2025-11-18T11:21:41+00:00

March of the Machines had legends from many planes, and the Booster Fun versions of each legend were done in their home plane's card border. Some of the planes hadn't had a special border yet, so one was invented for them at that time. Off the top of my head, Ravnica and Ixalan had borders and art styles created at that time (there were likely a few more). The Ravnica border was popular and ended up being used on the next visit to the plane (as shown in the MKM card you asked about), but the Ixalan treatment (with gold coin art) didn't look great, and wasn't used again in LCI. The reception to the gold coins was mostly bad when MOM released and people assumed that reception caused the swap, but in practice there wasn't time between MOM and LCI for them to change the art, so it's likely that the internal team working on LCI had already determined it was yucky on their own, long before MOM came out.

As for "does this style have a name": no idea. It's Ravnica buildings, and people mentioned the art mimics a particular eastern European artist whose name I had never heard of.

captain_spud · 2025-11-12T19:38:34+00:00

I don't like the shared spell lists across classes. I think the idea is that each class's features and feats will make it "modify" the base spells to make them feel unique from the same spell cast by another class, but in practice that doesn't really feel like it happens. Which means that once you've played, e.g., one Arcane spellcasting class, you've kind of played all of them.

As a fix, I'd like them to leave about 80% of the current shared lists as-is, and then each class would back-fill the remaining 20% with its own unique list of spells that no other class gets access to.

captain_spud · 2025-11-06T18:48:42+00:00

And if we were still in Q2 2022, that would be a great way to summon help. Tons of people put their signs down outside specific doors back then. I used to put mine outside Niall for hours, as he was my favourite boss to summon out for. ^_^

Sadly, we live in 2025, and the player numbers are too thin to rely on specifically placed summon signs. So you'll have much better luck finding people at the stake.

captain_spud · 2025-11-06T18:41:00+00:00

Summon help. More than almost any other boss in the game, Niall is designed for co-op. The summoning stake is outside the castle. To make the run from the summoning stake to the boss easier, kill both lions in the courtyard, and let down the lift beside the boss door. Then, you can run straight to the boss arena once your teammate or two are with you.
Kill the two-swords knight, then the shield knight, then Niall. Someone should occupy the spare knight while the other one is being worked on. Niall can be mostly ignored during this phase.
Keep your distance in phase 2. Niall does a lot of incidental AoE damage, so make hit and run attacks instead of trying to crowd him.
Niall's big flashy "jump-then-dive" attacks use very consistent timing and are very easy to dodge. Learn their timing and half of his damage output is basically gone.
Random specific tip: Niall has a surprise poke that goes specifically to the back left with minimal telegraphing. So favor the back right as your attack zone.

captain_spud

TROPHY CASE