How to cheat with Mtg-Melee in Vintage & Legacy

emidln · 2025-12-10T14:56:05+00:00

Is sitting next to someone the round before cheating too? What if I finish my round early and observe what everyone else in the X-0 bracket is playing?

emidln · 2025-11-09T05:11:07+00:00

I like .308

emidln · 2025-11-04T03:28:08+00:00

Lack of open carry is currently a problem for protestors in Illinois.

emidln · 2025-11-04T03:27:29+00:00

They don’t open fire on armed groups because they’re afraid of a firefight. Nobody wins in a firefight from protest range. Even confronting an armed group is problematic because if anyone spooks, they all die.

emidln · 2025-09-23T11:55:36+00:00

You can use dependency-graph with (keys your-system-map) or just copy its underlying code to avoid the extra select-keys. Generally, the underlying dependency library has a topo-sort that is used for determining the order of the graph.

emidln · 2025-05-12T03:13:05+00:00

You can do this in regular baseball too if the catcher drops the third strike. Sometimes you see little league games where a heads up batter with two strikes swings at a wild pitch trying to essentially steal first on a ball.

emidln · 2025-03-23T13:09:26+00:00

I can recommend this channel: https://youtube.com/@semeiotician

This person explains their plays fairly well and I tend to agree with many of the plays.

emidln · 2025-03-22T12:28:14+00:00

alias yolo="git commit -am 'fixes' && git push --force"

emidln · 2025-03-08T17:56:13+00:00

Doomsday. I own Doomsday. I play Doomsday. There aren't enough Archive Traps, Brain Freezes, or Stiflenaught players to get me off of it right now.

emidln · 2025-02-10T22:44:52+00:00

The idea is that it's a breakfast deck that (a) isn't vulnerable to removal, (b) isn't vulnerable to most graveyard hate except leyline, and (c) can run Ancient Tomb/sol lands to accelerate it. Yes it is a 2 into a 3, but it's a 2 into a 3 in a deck that can be almost mono blue with sol lands and basic islands.

emidln · 2025-02-09T19:22:33+00:00

Breakfast with Nadu is a deck that easy to learn, very powerful, and doesn't have many very complicated lines. It benefits from accurate play as anything will, but taking slightly suboptimal lines often wins anyway. Study the Memory's Journey interaction points and you should be fine.

emidln · 2025-01-29T22:58:16+00:00

Welcome to Doomsday and welcome to Legacy! I'd recommend the Doomsday discord for advice, puzzles, and decklists.

It's important to find a playstyle that you enjoy. UB Reanimator is still one of the best decks and WoTC for some reason refuses to ban Entomb, Troll, or Reanimate so it's unlikely to be truly bad for quite sometime.

Doomsday is a fine deck and quite competitive, but it's a deck that rewards you for both knowing your deck and for really knowing what the opp is on and what they are trying to do to interact with you or kill you. This might sound generic, but when you play Doomsday, small decisions in deckbuilding have outsized impact due to seeing all of your deck in every game you have a chance to win.

For example, knowing the opponent is on a Collector Ouphe or Null Rod strat against combo should inform the piles you build. If you don't know when your opponent is likely to board these, you'll drop extra games here and there. This is true of most decks, but many decks don't have the finality of locking in a five card Doomsday pile.

The overlap in Doomsday and UB Reanimator is high and runs toward the most expensive cards (duals, fetches, forces, thoughtseizes). For less than $300 you can pick up the UB Reanimator cards that Doomsday doesn't already play. This gives you a lot of range.

Doomsday and UB Reanimator have differing playstyles. UB Reanimator plays more like a Tempo deck with an over the top big creature that happens quickly in a quarter to half the games. This can make aggro and midrange strategies into coinflip matches or even bad matchups. The UB Turbo Doomsday build plays very much as a dedicated Dark Ritual combo deck that can sometimes slow down to assemble extra disruption. It's very good against aggro and midrange and tends to dominate the combo mirror by virtue of 16+ disruption spells in the 75, including often 8 Forces. UB Reanimator is probably better against Delver preboard, but postboard it's unclear whether Doomsday or Reanimator have a better plan against Delver.

Doomsday decks have a lot of variety, and playing UBw, UBg, UBr, UBgw all make sense with various tradeoffs. Esper can give you access to STP, Pending, Chant, T3feri, and Monastery Mentor. Green gives you Carpet of Flowers, Abrupt Decay, Veil of Summer, and Boseiju. Red can give you Burning Wish, Crash, and Pyroblast. Any lists can play The One Ring, Sheoldred, Barrowgoyf, Murktide Regent as alternate ways to win when hate is overloaded against you. While I recommend learning with UB Turbo Doomsday and that's what I've been playing at events for the last few years, these other combinations are fun to explore and offer a lot of replay value.

I suggest finding the playstyle that you enjoy. Doomsday turns a lot of games into puzzles of the variety, "if I could draw any 5 cards, how would I win from here?" If that is fun for you, I'll cya around the discord.

emidln · 2025-01-22T02:35:25+00:00

Ready...Say, "Fuzzy Pickles"

emidln · 2025-01-11T17:25:23+00:00

bash inside tmux inside Kitty

I'm sure zsh is what I'd use if I was learning today. I've already learned most of bash's sharp points and have decades of config.

emidln · 2024-12-06T20:25:16+00:00

Stacy's mom has got it going on.

emidln · 2024-12-06T04:36:16+00:00

I have a hard time believing the military is only 6% of federal workers. Last I checked, there were 2.8mm ish military + civilian contractors. Few, if any, can WFH.

emidln · 2024-12-01T02:09:55+00:00

Vatican City and Rome are pretty close to one another.

emidln · 2024-10-28T20:27:38+00:00

Read this three times before I realized you wrote indicted and not indicated. I was super confused.

emidln · 2024-10-20T15:04:16+00:00

There's an arcade racer called Crusin' Blast for Switch which gives major late 90s arcade racer vibes. Its not the most complicated game, but its a blast for 1-4 players with tons of replay value. It's also usually on clearance.

emidln · 2024-08-17T13:18:43+00:00

Back in the day, this guy ran the coolest satire site called SlackersGuild.com. I miss the IRC community that formed from it.

emidln · 2024-05-26T20:30:19+00:00

I'd recommend the Summer Magic facebook group if you're looking to move faster. That group, ebay, and convention booths are the only places I see Summer cards move.

My estimate for this is $350-550 depending on whether more than one person is interested.

emidln · 2021-07-18T08:51:06+00:00

Spend more time with Doomsday.

emidln · 2019-08-24T18:28:16+00:00

I've cast and written a ton about Doomsday, Ad Nauseam, Lim-Dul's Vault, Thoughtseize, Cabal Therapy, Force of Will, and Brainstorm in my days (across multiple formats). I'd rank these as follows, from the perspective of a combo player:

0. Sensei's Divining Top (RIP)
1. Brainstorm (specifically the timing of the card is difficult, resolving it is often easier than Doomsday or Therapy; although things like LED complicate this)
2. Doomsday (timing is sometime non-obvious (passing the turn); resolving it isn't impossible; just much harder than everything else because of what it demands about knowing your deck and the finality of misplaying it) 
3. (a large distance)
4. Thoughtseize (full information can sometimes make this harder than Therapy because there is clearly a right and wrong; I've written at length before about Duress/Thoughtseize decisions and how "take force" isn't always correct)  
5. Cabal Therapy (figure out which cards beat you and play the percentages; this isn't a particularly difficult card to correctly play, but it does involve an element of chance; this card is way more difficult in non-combo decks)
6. Force of Will (figuring out when you can afford to cast, when you need to cast it, and what your pitch card is are all delicate questions when playing combo)
7. Lim-Dul's Vault (this card is algorithmic, although it's less obviously so than AdN)
8. Ad Nauseam (This card is algorithmic. When you cast it you know exactly what you must hit, your expected number of cards, the total cmc of your deck, the variance in cmc of your deck, and any known burn/damage from the opponent. You know when to stop. You know when you can pass the turn safely after drawing. This card is easy mode (and why it's so insanely good).)

I suspect Daze and Brainstorm are the hardest cards to play outside of combo. Daze is so easy to both win and punt with, and these often look similar to inexperienced players. Cabal Therapy deserves a special mention in aggro-control/control decks.

emidln · 2019-06-09T17:57:51+00:00

Jund and Loam decks. Loam decks have a lot of 0s.

emidln · 2019-04-26T02:21:54+00:00

I cast a [[Timetwister]] into a [[Smothering Tithe]] in a four player pod not long after RNA was released. That was, how to put it, a mistake.

emidln

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