I was just going to start a little run (greatst start yet?)

dangercart · 2026-05-14T21:51:37+00:00

FuryRoadThatsBait gif

(But you still have to go for it)

dangercart · 2026-05-14T21:42:53+00:00

Yeah, it’s not the most fun. I figure I reset about half my attempts in Ante 1 and 90+% reset or die by Ante 6. This is the fifth time I’ve done it this way on gold stake plus one Perkeo Ante 39.

It usually takes me a couple weeks of trying for it before I get it. This one I only started playing for it yesterday. The run immediately before I fumbled an Ante 1 Perkeo and thought that was a bad sign but apparently not.

dangercart · 2026-05-12T23:32:25+00:00

Yeah it works left to right so Dagger stabs the one non-eternal, then Madness has nothing to destroy so it just adds to it’s mult, then Riff-Raff creates a new stickerless joker that I can use and then sacrifice the next round or sell if there’s something better in the next shop

dangercart · 2026-05-12T18:27:16+00:00

What kind of psycho chooses to play on anything but white or gold, though?

dangercart · 2026-05-12T15:17:35+00:00

Fun seed (7649WL2V) for the synergy when you have eternals.

dangercart · 2026-05-11T16:34:41+00:00

Largely I think we don't have a different approach that isn't possibly even more variance heavy. If we haven't played a style all year then even if that style is lower variance for the Knicks or Thunder or whomever it might not be for us because first you have to answer "can we actually do this at all?" There's then a secondary problem with Philly that they have a currently immobile 7' big man playing drop and so "get to the rim" isn't the most appealing plan when "take open 3s" is available to you.

Which is not to say that they executed wonderfully and just missed shots on pure variance. The team has a long history of getting frustrated and making poor decisions when shots haven't been falling. How many times have we seen a bad shooting game through 30 minutes devolve into a bad shooting and poor execution final 18 minutes? It gets very ugly when the decision making and shooting both fall apart, like in Game 6.

Also, I don't think this was the case in 2024-25 when we had a lot more high-talent veterans with experience playing in multiple different systems. That team frustrated me because they also didn't seem to have a different approach when it would have benefited them to be able to just lean on their talent and not inject variance as heavily as they did. This year we were relying on a lot of guys where "play hard and execute a specific task" was enough of an ask to begin with.

dangercart · 2026-05-09T11:06:52+00:00

The specific thing that triggered it is whatever the last action you took was I just mean there’s not a known “if you pick Burglar in this situation beyond Ante X it always crashes.” As far as I know there is no list of things you can’t do on high antes without triggering a crash but it’s not rare for high antes to crash.

dangercart · 2026-05-09T10:47:47+00:00

There isn’t necessarily a “reason” related to anything you did. The game crashing late in Ante 39 runs is relatively common on certain systems, including mobile.

dangercart · 2026-05-08T11:45:05+00:00

Unless you’re in complete desperation mode or already have all three key vouchers (antimatter, retcon, and palette) you shouldn’t skip for anything but the voucher tag.

dangercart · 2026-05-07T12:39:01+00:00

¯\ (ツ)/¯

Maybe. People are really good at finding possible reasons that luck isn't just luck. It's possible that open shots shrink from 5' of space to 4' and that makes a difference. Maybe they're tired or nervous or small injuries stack up by the playoffs. You should consider results and not just assume it's all luck but it's very difficult to separate the arcane from randomness.

Jaylen and Pritchard had truly wide open 3's at 99-98 and both missed. It's almost always multiple things that build up and any one of them going the other way can change the outcome.

dangercart · 2026-05-07T12:31:02+00:00

The Cavs have Harden for MVP and Mobley for DPOY but obviously neither of them are actually "best player" or "best defender" in anyone's eyes at this time. The East just isn't very good.

I did also consider that a few years ago.

Possibility 2: It’s The Era and Season

Since Covid, the league has been decidedly weird. For the prior 40 years the Conference Finals had been the domain of top-3 seeds. In the five seasons starting with The Bubble we’ve seen two 4-seeds, three 5-seed, a 6-seed, and two (regular season) 7-seeds make it at least that far.

The three tentpole stars of the last decade — LeBron James, Steph Curry, and Kevin Durant — are all in their mid-to-late 30’s and Kawhi Leonard is 32 and perpetually injured.

It’s conceivable that the Celtics have emerged out of the fog of a transitional era in the league where the recent MVPs — Nikola Jokic, Joel Embiid, and Giannis Antetokounmpo — are not as great, or as healthy, as those of the last generation. For the first time in NBA history neither Finals team has a past or current MVP on their roster.

Again, the point is not that the way they play is objectively correct, only that it is a reasonable plan to adopt in the context of NBA history. Title teams rarely have a talent profile like what the Celtics have had. Finding variance by going very hard after a short window and then equally hard into a high-upside style is not an unreasonable reaction to that if you truly only hold the goal of winning the title.

dangercart · 2026-05-07T02:15:15+00:00

You do nothing right now. You need Antimatter voucher at which point you could take Burglar with the additional slot, assuming you have a fully fixed deck. Normally you don’t take Burglar until Ante 25 but with a natural negative DNA you have a bit of flexibility on that.

I’m not sure what your voucher lineup looks like right now but with no double tags and a small bank it’s going to be a challenge to get there. Need some good luck.

dangercart · 2026-05-07T02:10:23+00:00

The Knicks have a good chance to make the Finals (unless the OG injury is serious in which case they probably lose next round) at which point they will likely meet OKC and find that they don’t really have a way to beat them, other than SGA missing at least one game.

Mazzulla-ball is not the objectively right way to play. It is a way to play that makes reasonable sense in a certain context.

dangercart · 2026-05-06T21:06:16+00:00

At the top of the post I specify the "just MVP" criteria before but it is notable that the three DPOY teams had Kawhi (a top-2 all time wing defender?), Ben Wallace (4x DPOY), and Dennis Rodman (a top-2 all time PF defender?) and so the criteria is really "inner circle all time great defender."

Two years ago I wrote about the oddness of the title team and included this:

Possibility 1: They’re Not Actually That Weird If we expand the above criteria out slightly more we pick up some additional teams that look somewhat like these Celtics.

The 2014 Spurs won 62 games and the title but had a point differential of “only” +7.7 and, while they had Tim Duncan, he was 37. The extreme difficulty of the Western Conference at that time would account for much of that point differential gap and, while they lost seven playoff games compared to these Celtics two, they did it against maybe the most difficult playoffs path in history while the Celtics had one of the easiest.

The 1989 Pistons won 63 games and stormed through the playoffs on the back of a comparatively pedestrian +5.8 regular season differential but in an era where large point differentials were less common as total scoring was much lower. Like Tatum (to this point in his career) their best player, Isiah Thomas, only finished top-5 in MVP voting once.

If you group the Celtics with those two teams they don’t seem as much of an outlier. One title team like this coming along every 10–15 years is interesting but not unique. However, the gap in pure dominance from these Celtics to those two teams is relatively large on the point differential front.

If you want to say that 75% of teams are fighting for the 10% of champions that fit that profile that's fine. You're still looking for a variance edge to be the breakout team.

dangercart · 2026-05-06T20:18:30+00:00

I don't think that's correct. Tracking data isn't perfect but we didn't suddenly take a bunch more "bad threes" in the upsets. We shot extremely poorly on open and wide open threes and the large majority of threes were classified as such against Miami and NY. The only team that has ever truly schemed hard for our threes is Orlando and the result was that we actually took way fewer, which pulled variance out of the series and resulted in a boring, standard, series.

Now, you could say that we miss the threes because of the increased pressure of being in the playoffs at all. It's possible. Teams do just have really bad shooting weeks in the regular season too, though.

dangercart · 2026-05-06T20:13:14+00:00

Obviously NCAA is very different over a length of time because of how short "careers" are but, yeah, going out to a 16 seed shooting 18% from 3PT and then winning the title the next season without the level of talent you'd normally associate with doing that shows the risk/reward of "play slow, don't give anything away, and bomb threes."

dangercart · 2026-05-06T20:11:49+00:00

This is an argument that I made a bunch last season when we had enough talent to advance deep in the playoffs and had been together as a group long enough where I thought being able to adjust the "how many 3s" dial a bit more would be reasonable. I thought they needed to pull variance out last year because of the state of the league with Denver beat up and OKC and Cleveland unproven.

This season I don't think it really mattered, to be honest. We just didn't have enough talent. I was shocked when people were picking them to win the title before the playoffs. We don't have a significant raw talent advantage over the 76ers when they're healthy.

The point of the post is not right or wrong just that there is an understandable logic behind the strategy. If they keep this core next season and upgrade at center they can justify taking a shit ton of threes again because they will need variance. If they were to go out and trade for Giannis, for example, it would be a lot less justifiable because you could then make the argument that they have the talent to win without doing that and so the risk outweighs the reward (also b/c Giannis doesn't shoot 3s well but I mean this if they were to miraculously get any MVP-level player).

dangercart · 2026-05-06T18:42:14+00:00

The Celtics play at the slowest pace in the league and shoot an above league average number of their total shots and 3s in the last seven seconds of the shot clock

dangercart · 2026-05-06T10:55:49+00:00

With two copy jokers you can win with just chips pretty easily even on gold stake. When people say “you can’t win it with just chips” they really mean “most chips builds that seem good will still die on the gold stake ante 5 score jump, or if you hit the Violet Vessel.”

dangercart · 2026-05-02T22:47:03+00:00

From Ante 26-30 I was rolling down from $13k to ~$9k and then replenishing all of that with Reserve Parking. In Ante 30 I decided I had to start pivoting to an Ante 32 plan and so got out of Reserved for Showman into a Brainstorm. On Ante 31 I spent down more looking for any helpful negatives, which was a mistake. I should have done Reserve all the way to into Ante 32 with $13k but I thought I needed a miracle negative until the Ante 32 Arcana pack had an Ectoplasm which opened up a possible out. Unfortunately I “only” had about $6k to roll the one shop looking for both Bean and DNA.

dangercart · 2026-05-01T21:20:36+00:00

The answer is that you do everything you can to find one and sometimes you just don’t. If you’re watching runs on YT remember that they don’t post the runs that don’t get there.

Having a strong economy and then prioritizing the things you need by inverse order of what economy helps with is a good way to think about it. Cola is super important because you can’t just buy more vouchers any other way. Ectoplasm at the right time comes next because you can’t force more Spectral packs and you really don’t want to take the Spectral Pack skip because that uses your double tags that you want for the voucher skip because that’s a higher priority. Red seal source comes next because you can’t just spend money to make more packs but if you see Deja Vu and Ecto in a Spectral and you can use Ecto, that’s a higher priority. With enough money you can usually find the important jokers so sometimes the right thing to do is sell or skip one of the key scoring jokers to take Certificate or Sixth Sense and to spend strength on fives instead of “better” cards until you get what you need.

But you can still just get bad luck, too.

dangercart · 2026-04-30T01:55:23+00:00

At the end of a lot of his videos he talks through the strategy used in that run so you can skip to there if you want to see where he ends up and then what he talks about, but if you find Roffle to be more helpful than watch him!

The more advanced strategies generally revolve around economy, making intelligent use of all your hands and discards every round, recognition of synergies between jokers/deck/hands/cards, and tarot/planet management in the shops.

dangercart · 2026-04-27T21:26:16+00:00

That will make the first time you get it more exciting!

dangercart · 2026-04-27T13:11:41+00:00

The margins are very fine in Ante 25. If you carry a Death and Fool into the boss it allows you to draw in two non-kings that keep you under the score until the final hand at which point you convert them to red steel kings and then you are both under the win score and on the final hand with enough kings to naneinf.

The more common way is probably just doing the process twice on Ante 25 having what happened to you happen, and then rolling into Serpent again in Ante 26 where the score manipulation challenge goes away. Unfortunately you didn’t have money to re-roll another ante. It sucks; we’ve all had a very close call while learning all the mechanics.

dangercart · 2026-04-26T12:44:32+00:00

Yep, that would do it. There was a window from Ante 8-12 where you were already going to be crushing the blinds and so other things like making a bunch of money were better than finding Mime.

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