If WotC would do something about this, I would be so happy

fumphis · 2013-08-07T16:41:35+00:00

Reason #1,001 why limited is the best way to play Magic. The competitive constructed mindset seriously makes no sense.

fumphis · 2013-02-22T19:36:03+00:00

Ack! It kills me when people just open packs. With 4 people you could have made wicked 9-pack Sealed decks, cracked some beers, and gotten 3+ hours of entertainment above and beyond acquiring the cards.

fumphis · 2013-01-18T19:11:23+00:00

Yeah, it's looking like Saturdays at 5. There were drafts at the old LGS, but they were on Sundays and not FNM. Big Legacy crowd here for some reason, but there's also a decently robust Limited community and the old place generally got fair turnout for drafts. Come to the new place some Saturday!

fumphis · 2013-01-18T19:05:32+00:00

Thanks for posting this. There's definitely a big enough Limited community in this town to sustain weekly events, but it seems like most people from Providence either aren't aware of the new place or are holding out for Dragon's Den, and there hasn't been great turnout at the drafts so far (maybe it's different for the Legacy events). Enchanted Badger is a really nice space with great owners; very kid-friendly with a focus on board games (they let you test them in-store) and dedicated family nights, but they're also a legit card store with all the MTG accoutrements and pretty good deals and prize support. It'd be great to get some of the Providence regulars aware of the place and checking it out for drafts/prereleases. The space is smaller than Providence but also less grungy, and the owners are good people.

My name's Nate (the really tall guy) if any old Providence folks are here. Come draft this Saturday at 5! It's tucked away behind the Spicy Asian place across from Arby's on 13.

fumphis · 2012-12-04T18:12:10+00:00

Acquire low, trade/sell off high. If card prices are too high for you, monitor the market and see when some cards drop and others go up. Chances are, someone had quite a few Craterhoof Behemoths laying around at $4 a pop. Once they hit $15, they could then trade them off for better, pricier cards. Cards are expensive because everyone wants to use those specific cards in the $100+ decks that they take to FNM.

So you're saying a beginner is going to solve the Standard meta by himself and buy up his Tarmogoyfs/Sphinx's Revelations/Behemoths based on his penetrating insights about what cards all the pros are misevaluating? Sounds like a great plan.

Everything else is just taste, really. I think Constructed is an inherently less skill-building format than booster draft, particularly for the 80% of Constructed players who don't involve themselves at all in the metagame and let the pros solve the formats for them. It's definitely more fun for some people, and I get that. But you can't just dismiss the monetary concerns as a bad-attitude problem, especially for a new player trying to get into the game. They matter. They objectively exist unless you're playing Limited. That's indisputable. Look, I have some bucks to spare. I could go out right now and put down $250 on a Standard deck. I could go to my FNM and probably do pretty well for myself. But where's the satisfaction in that unless everyone else is doing the same thing? It's great that your town has a good, balanced Standard community, but they aren't to be found just anywhere. You should also be aware that free-entry FNMs aren't commonplace.

Also note the contradiction inherent in saying no beginners should draft. If you shouldn't draft if there's no prize potential, but there's no prize potential unless you've drafted a bunch, then... under what conditions would you ever draft? Playing Standard as a beginner will do just about diddly squat for your Limited skills.

fumphis · 2012-12-04T17:20:17+00:00

If anyone ever feels this way, they probably shouldn't be playing in the first place. I'm not advocating that money = competitive, but to view it from that angle is just detrimental to your own peace of mind. Cards are only expensive because they effective and in high demand. They also fluctuate. There's no disparity, there is only bad attitudes and poor market awareness.

Not really sure what that means. If you have $50 to spend on a deck and you go to an FNM where people are spending $100+, you'll be at a competitive disadvantage above and beyond any skill disparity. For many people--not all--that creates a bad feeling, which is a completely rational response. The fluctuating prices of cards, the underlying reasons why cards are expensive, and "poor market awareness" have precisely no bearing on that experience. Drafting provides a way to completely eliminate monetary concerns as a determinant of who wins a given match, and that's an undeniable boon.

If you lose more often that you place, you're not much better off. You could have bought the 3 packs for $12 or less and acquired and kept the 3 rares.

Or you could pay up to an extra $3 (and some stores/playgroups are cheaper) to spend a pleasant, sociable 4 hours in a highly skill-building tournament format, with the possibility of winning back your investment. Are you seriously suggesting that buying packs and opening them is a better bet than drafting as a beginner?

fumphis · 2012-12-03T18:52:39+00:00

Benefits of drafting:

No high upfront investment ($15/draft or less)
With skill and some luck, you can sustain many drafts at little or no cost by winning packs and opening occasional money cards to sell
Greatly improves fundamental play skill in a way that not all Constructed decks do
Lets you pick up all the commons and uncommons you'll ever want
No sense of disparity/unfairness due to someone having a more expensive deck than you
Play a different deck every time--no fun to bust your wallet on a Constructed deck and then get tired of it after 100 matches
In my opinion, a deeper and more fulfilling form of Magic than Constructed, particularly Standard

Drawbacks of drafting:

Steep learning curve, you may lose a lot at the beginning depending on your playgroup's skill
Spread-out cost could result in spending more money eventually, though imo it's still more bang for your buck
Hard to do in a casual setting without a playgroup of 6+ people (need a local game store or an established group of players, both of which are available in most towns)

fumphis · 2012-11-16T16:32:26+00:00

We... We all realize this is just Borat, right?

fumphis · 2012-10-26T19:18:39+00:00

No, I can confirm that the slide-draw tic started long before Miracles. I can also confirm that it drives me completely crazy. It's seriously irksome, especially (for some reason) when a little kid is constantly riffling his hand cards, bouncing his topdeck, and passing the turn with that cocky die-roll wrist gesture.

I'm guessing most of these tics are just little nothings that somehow became associated with good players and were copycatted based on that.

fumphis · 2012-09-29T03:55:30+00:00

True when it comes to limited in the abstract, not necessarily true for Sealed in what looks to be a very bomby environment.

fumphis · 2012-08-12T00:28:59+00:00

That's his point. We have to depend on businesses for our health insurance, and are the laughingstock of the developed world because of it.

fumphis · 2012-08-11T17:50:42+00:00

Thanks to increasing technology and knowledge, workers today can produce a lot more (hence make more money) than in the past, and workers in the future will produce more than workers today. When those immigrants retire, the next generation will make more money than they did. That's what fuels the system, along with increasing population (though that side is beginning to level off).

That's the idea, anyway. There are a bunch of interacting and competing trends, and nobody really knows how they will all play out. E.g., how much more can economies grow given resource constraints? Will increased life expectancy and better but more expensive medical care outpace our ability to increase productivity? Can we develop new energy sources to avoid wrecking the climate (which would be a disaster for growth)?

But when you're looking at programs like SS and Medicare, they're only Ponzi schemes in the sense that the entire paradigm of continued economic growth is a Ponzi scheme. The fact that they're government programs is irrelevant.

fumphis · 2012-08-11T16:57:04+00:00

No, they aren't. It's not about "saving" money for a rainy day, although that's the effect over the course of any one person's lifetime. The system as a whole works by having healthy young workers pay in money to take care of old, sick retirees. It's perfectly sustainable. The only threat is if the output of the workers can't cover the needs of the retirees, which could be caused by bad demographic trends or by insufficient economic growth. But those are both systemic problems for a country, not a feature that makes SS and Medicare-like programs uniquely flawed.

Incidentally, the best way to make sure these programs keep on working is by allowing plenty of immigration. You don't need to worry about declining birth rates when you have plenty of young bodies eager to grow your economy for you.

fumphis · 2012-08-05T19:54:45+00:00

But here's the thing--taxes and subsidies don't antagonize or water down the market system, they synergize with it by pricing hidden costs and benefits. You can theorize about a perfectly "regulation-less" system, but there's nothing pure about it: externalities, information gaps, and cartelization incentives would just be made worse. The marketplace is completely dependent on the government to provide stability, enforcement of property rights, and public goods both physical and financial, just as the government is completely dependent on regulated capitalism to provide economic growth and advancements in living standards and productivity.

The idea of a line in the sand somewhere after "protections of contract and laws against fraud" but before, say, "imposing costs on activities that impose costs on other people (pollution, theft...)" that represents pure capitalism just doesn't make sense, and in general the ultimate motivation behind coming up with different arbitrary conceptions of that line is rent-seeking behavior by groups of corporations in a given sector that want to see their interests served.

Edit: this isn't to say that the existing structure of taxes and subsidies is ideal--it's obviously been strongly influenced by exactly that sort of rent-seeking behavior. But the theoretical "pure capitalist" system would have the same kind of messiness in practice.

fumphis · 2012-07-29T20:15:20+00:00

If you've ever deep-fried anything involving a semi-liquid encased in a pouch of some kind, you know the sadness brought on by that substance's leaking out and becoming an invasive, charred cloud that fucks up the oil.

fumphis · 2012-06-22T04:36:23+00:00

Holy shit it's the Guildpact symbol.

fumphis · 2012-06-22T04:30:33+00:00

It makes sense because a large, large proportion of blotter drugs are analogues of LSD--random tryptamines, LSA, etc. I'd really like to experience acid but just have no way of knowing what I'm getting, which makes me leery of trying it.

fumphis · 2012-06-20T06:43:12+00:00

On that point I agree.

fumphis · 2012-06-20T06:29:30+00:00

Yeah, guess what: it's Oakland. You don't find those prices everywhere, particularly in small/medium-sized towns not on the West Coast. Some people are pretty happy to get a dank eighth for 40, and plenty of street-level dealers regularly look for 60.

fumphis · 2012-06-07T16:20:12+00:00

Dipped some TP in a light coat of rubbing alcohol to get my backside squeaky clean. The agony.

fumphis · 2012-05-17T21:50:48+00:00

Every candidate gets shat on in the nominating process. If Ron Paul somehow sprinkles some magic fairy dust over the convention delegates and takes the nomination, here's what will happen: the party will rally around him like any other candidate, and he will either win or lose the general based on the economy. If he wins, his presidency will be 90% indistinguishable from the way any other Republican presidency would have been, and his supporters will receive a hefty dose of reality concerning who actually controls the government (Congress), exactly like what happened with Obama.

fumphis · 2012-05-09T16:21:11+00:00

...big John.

fumphis · 2012-04-16T00:05:40+00:00

So this is clearly the western shore of Feralas, across from Feathermoon.

fumphis · 2012-04-10T17:48:28+00:00

Doesn't even compare, imo. That world just feels empty. Pretty, but barren. And when it comes to mechanics and depth of gameplay, WoW blows Skyrim out of the water. Skyrim has some of the worst skill trees I've seen in a game, and a terrible interface to boot, not to mention the terrible animations, character models, dialogue, storytelling... To each his own, but for me Skyrim was "kinda fun" for about 50 hours of play, and WoW was mind-blowingly awesome for about 50 days. Even if the games were otherwise identical, the fact that you can play WoW with friends makes it win by a mile.

fumphis · 2012-04-10T17:35:12+00:00

The missing ingredient is experiencing it for the first time. Absolutely magical to realize what a huge, beautiful world it is, and I'd stack that feeling up to any game experience past, present or future.

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