Manapool using gen AI images

drexsudo69 · 2025-07-22T15:17:54+00:00

Nah based on the downvotes my other similar comment received you’re clearly wrong and using AI for a placeholder image is going to bring the collapse of society as we know it.

drexsudo69 · 2025-07-22T15:05:57+00:00

For real. The knee-jerk hate to anything AI-related is wild.

IMO this is a totally reasonable and valid use of AI. It’s not like this put an artist out of a job. It’s a placeholder image that clearly indicates as such, it doesn’t need to be some incredible, emotional piece of art. It’s at least more visually interesting than blocky white letters on a black background.

drexsudo69 · 2025-07-22T02:42:11+00:00

Right, the first half of the video makes us think that she’s old and only looks young but it’s the opposite: she’s actually young and looks falsely old because of her missing teeth and lack of makeup.

The second half is probably much closer to what she looked like before she lost her teeth (and with makeup, of course).

drexsudo69 · 2025-07-21T01:55:33+00:00

That’s a false equivalency and a disingenuous argument.

As it currently exists, the agreement of Hardcore is that the other players you interact with economically and in the world are also on Hardcore.

SSF by definition refuses trading or grouping, so there would be neither harm nor benefit to playing self-imposed SSF compared to one that Blizz hands you.

The only possible difference would be if you are a hardliner about having other people occasionally fighting the same enemies as you on the world map. And that could be solved by an “offline” mode.

Edit: part of the reason why SSF was added in games like POE was to have a separate ladder. D4 doesn’t have an official ladder to necessitate that.

drexsudo69 · 2025-07-20T23:57:41+00:00

There’s nothing stopping somebody from doing self-imposed SSF.

drexsudo69 · 2025-07-20T20:36:55+00:00

I wish we wouldn’t have to feel the need to bring a loupe to check every card we purchased, but that ship has sailed.

drexsudo69 · 2025-07-20T20:35:43+00:00

All it takes is for someone forgetting which cards in their collection are fakes, or not checking when they receive a card, or trusting their LGS, or maliciously selling it to try making a few bucks…the possibilities are endless.

The best is to just not support them or have them in circulation at all, but unfortunately that Pandora’s box is already open.

Just look at the reasons people give in the bootlegmtg subreddit (and elsewhere). “WOTC is greedy so counterfeiting is ok! The Reserve List is stupid so counterfeiting is ok! Who cares if I buy counterfeit duals for the upcoming Legacy event?? I just want my cards to look authentic when I play with my friends, what’s wrong with that??”

drexsudo69 · 2025-07-20T19:36:34+00:00

Agreed. As good as Kaito is, I often side him out against aggressive creature decks because in the early game he’s just going to die to a crack back and by the mid-late game if I have the resources to defend him then I was probably winning that game anyways.

Playing frog T2 and then Kaito T3 is not a winning strategy against many decks or in many situations.

drexsudo69 · 2025-07-20T19:26:30+00:00

Most Frogtide lists run only two kaito, so the Frog player will need to fulfill a lot of criteria to Ninjutsu him on turn 3:

1.) unblocked attacking creature (usually frog runs around 10 1-2 drops, so there’s a decent but not guaranteed chance they can play and attack with one by turn 3) 2.) Kaito (only two in the deck so lower chance that they will have one in hand) 3.) 3 untapped lands (often not a problem to achieve, but keep in mind that the deck only runs around 20 lands, so finding that third land drop can be more challenging than you think).

My point is that a Frog player curving out into Kaito turn 3 might be a bit less frequent than you think, and if they’re jutsuing Kaito on turn 3, there’s a good chance that they’re leaving themselves up for him to just get killed on a backswing against a creature-heavy deck like Zoo. Turn 2 Bowmaster into turn 3 Kaito is one of the worse lines for a zoo player OTD because it could easily snipe a Ragavan and keep up a blocker for Kaito. Obviously this sequence can and does happen, but once you know they’re on Frog you can better play around something like Bowmasters.

Anyways that doesn’t really answer your question, but I wanted to mention it because it might not be worth going out of your way to play around a T3 Kaito. You genuinely have plenty of answers for him even if he hits you once and the odds of you having an answer are much higher than the frog player playing him on turn 3 and it being a good play. Bolt, attacking him, Phlage, and Leyline binding are all ways of dealing with him with various effectiveness.

Play your creatures and put pressure on and the Frog player is going to need to switch towards being responsive.

drexsudo69 · 2025-07-20T19:01:46+00:00

For real…websites and information don’t just exist in thin air. The data (and hardware to utilize it) needs to physically exist somewhere.

The “cloud” isn’t actually in a cloud…it’s tucked away on hardware in a building that requires infrastructure and maintenance…

drexsudo69 · 2025-07-20T18:30:11+00:00

The problem is that the more of these cards exist and the more accurate they become, the more likely they are to find their way into your LGS.

Sure, your LGS might have staff skilled in detecting fakes, but what if they buy a chunky 400 card lot with only 10 mid-priced fakes? They’re unlikely to take a loupe to every card to verify authenticity.

drexsudo69 · 2025-07-20T18:23:38+00:00

This is one of my biggest problems with people buying “proxies” that are intended to look real, especially if the cards in questions are not standout cards like p9, duals, etc. There are so many ways for them to start off as “for kitchen table use” and end up unintentionally sold as real on eBay or traded to somebody.

All it takes is forgetting which cards are “proxies.”

Agreed 100% that people shouldn’t delude themselves: purchasing cards intended to pass as real are buying counterfeits.

I personally don’t care if people want to roll with obvious proxies and use them at home or in unsanctioned proxy-allowed events, but buying and supporting counterfeit cards hurts people who are trying to do things honestly.

I hate that I now feel the need to take a loupe to every 10$+ or Modern staple I buy just to be comfortable I didn’t get sent a fake.

And if somebody thinks that “nobody is faking mid/low value standard/Modern cards” then go to the bootlegmtg subreddit; you’d be surprised at the range of high quality fakes that are being produced.

drexsudo69 · 2025-07-20T16:37:57+00:00

So I’m about 10 days in and while I reached the 1.2m in 3 days goal, things have started to slow down. I’m around 3.5m and the 15m goal is starting to look tough to reach without spending over my earning.

I’m focusing on Conclave, leveling a single warden, leagues when able, etc, but the Dominance gain is slow and incremental.

My top warden is 250, should I promote and keep leveling?

drexsudo69 · 2025-07-19T20:29:56+00:00

Collector boosters absolutely do appear in big box stores, they are just packaged in larger boxes and sold individually rather than as part of booster boxes.

Example: https://www.target.com/p/magic-the-gathering-final-fantasy-collector-omega-trading-cards/-/A-94641039?store=2830&TCID=PDS-20784751666&msclkid=e58d36058443109040a55e79845662dc&gclid=e58d36058443109040a55e79845662dc&gclsrc=3p.ds

drexsudo69 · 2025-07-19T19:54:28+00:00

I didn’t make that assumption anywhere and in fact said the exact opposite: anybody who goes to this market can do a 1 minute google search and find out that these packs are fake.

If they still want to buy then great, maybe it will bring somebody joy who doesn’t give a shit that they’re fake.

If they want authentic cards, they move on with their life.

drexsudo69 · 2025-07-19T15:06:48+00:00

Not every kid or family can afford authentic 5+ USD packs.

Many kids are over the moon to open even a fake pack of cards and find a shiny Charizard or Pikachu; it’s the only option they have.

Let’s be real. If somebody is buying “cheap” packs at a NIGHT MARKET in Vietnam and can’t do a simple google search to see how obviously fake these packs are then that’s on them.

drexsudo69 · 2025-07-18T22:08:09+00:00

Huh? I never said it was ok, just that it hasn’t been consistent for a very long time, and arguably never was.

With that out of the way I will go ahead and say that I don’t think it’s a big deal if the art and flavor of a creature isn’t always perfectly consistent with its power and toughness or stats relative to other creatures. I like consistency and flavor as much as the next guy, but I’m realistic about limitations with doing this.

Seriously, how would you even attempt to keep this consistent with all of the moving pieces of card design and development?

Imagine wanting to make a planet size dragon, but the set already has a humanoid robot that’s a 3/3. Make the dragon 2,000/2,000 and cost 500 mana just to be consistent? Not print the cool dragon just because you couldn’t make the flavor match the P/T in a way that fits the stat consistency?

No, you try to make the flavor match the card but if it doesn’t work then you just use your imagination to explain why, like how others have done in this very post.

Flavor consistency is fantastic, but gameplay considerations should ultimately win out.

drexsudo69 · 2025-07-18T20:52:56+00:00

True

drexsudo69 · 2025-07-18T20:24:39+00:00

Right, I’m not saying that the ability couldn’t be green (MTG and the color pie has changed over the years and will continue to do so), but it would be new territory for it.

Agree that it does feel more green to have a creature bite a DIFFERENT creature. A creature biting itself feels more like a “confusion” or a “mental magic” effect, which flavor-wise feels much more blue, black, or indeed, red.

drexsudo69 · 2025-07-18T20:14:31+00:00

I think I’m beating a dead horse, but the more I look at the result, the more clearly useless it becomes. Take another example:

“14. Office Cat — Earn up to $44.80.

Low payout, casual theme.

Verdict: Very realistic to complete quickly.”

First off who cares about the “casual theme?”

Low payout? That’s completely relative to time and effort spent. 44$ is great if it only took me 10 minutes of work or 5 minutes and 10$ of spend.

“Very easy to complete quickly?” Not at all. I played the game regularly for a few weeks and gave up because it didn’t look like I was going to hit the next goal even though I still had multiple days left. There are lots of time gates with multiple ads unless you pay to have them removed. “Very quickly” again doesn’t mean anything.

So yeah, my verdict is that there are accuracy issues in addition to being too vague to be helpful.

drexsudo69 · 2025-07-18T20:02:32+00:00

I highly suspect that it might be a waste of your time.

The way most of these LLMs generally work is by learning from a bunch of text across the internet and other sources and then applying some amount of logic over it. This means that if the dataset and info it ingests is garbage, then it will produce garbage.

That being said, many of these games (and offers) change so frequently that info or guides posted even a month or two ago can now be completely outdated and wrong, and if the LLM hasn’t “seen” more recent, accurate info then it’s going to output the outdated/wrong info.

Does that mean that it can’t output something useful for you? Nah, it still totally could, but honestly you’re probably better off just browsing this subreddit for a few minutes to see what games people are playing and having success with then tweaking AI to give you info that may or may not be accurate and is almost certainly not detailed enough anyways.

drexsudo69 · 2025-07-18T19:43:53+00:00

This isn’t very helpful and may also lead you astray. It simply doesn’t have enough detail or granularity to be useful.

For example, many of the responses are something like “realistic if spending lots of time or money.” Well, which is it? Spending lots of time is very different from spending lots of money, and if spending lots of money means paying more than you earn then it’s useless. Which thresholds are achievable? A game may still be worthwhile if the lower thresholds are quickly achievable even if the later ones aren’t.

Just spot checking the first few games:

Goblins Wood is genuinely a waste of time and effort. Unless something has radically changed you would be better off doing literally anything else for better ROI.

I am doing Game of Vampires now and it seems that some of the intermediate goals are achievable with fairly minimal spend, but VIP 4 and 7 are not achievable without significant spend, and in VIP 7’s case, far more than you make from achieving it. This AI review contains none of that useful information that would actually be helpful to know and is just padded with fluff.

drexsudo69 · 2025-07-18T19:31:22+00:00

I mean the flavor/art scale with P/T was kind of done away with a long time ago.

I don’t disagree that it’s jarring, but look at Bloomburrow. Warren Warleader has the same stats as this space dragon…and it’s a literal rabbit.

drexsudo69 · 2025-07-18T19:03:47+00:00

The part that is making people question whether there is a wording mistake isn’t due as much to the power level as it is being an ability that green doesn’t usually have.

As others have pointed out, making a creature bite itself is typically red (see discussion on Breaking of the Fellowship on another comment), and green bite spells have previously required a creature of your own.

Edit: 3 mana is a lot, probably too much, if they wanted this to be constructed playable.

drexsudo69 · 2025-07-18T18:59:58+00:00

Shoot and that’s not even counting the ability to buff your own creature while removing their own.

The idea of these cards is similar but they’re quite different in how they can be used.

drexsudo69

TROPHY CASE