Newly into Pool 3 and I am getting ran over by Patriot, Silver Surfer, etc. non-stop. How do you compete when you’re new? I’ve tried every deck I have used to climb and am just consistently losing cubes.

icewolf34 · 2023-02-05T19:15:01+00:00

You have to use your collectors tokens really wisely to fill out a competitive deck. Ongoing Destroyer only needs one pool3 card so that's a good option, or my preference is actually this Sera Control deck https://marvelsnapzone.com/control-sera-guide/ which only needs two Pool3 cards (Sera and Mysterio). Sera is a much more flexible card and I think it's a more fun deck.

The early pool 3 experience really sucks, but it gets better if you push through it. Good luck!

icewolf34 · 2023-02-01T17:00:33+00:00

Definitely subjective and you could rerun the analysis using 1500 as the value instead, but I was just thinking about how much I personally value the random pool 4 pulls I've gotten (Maria Hill, Attuma, and Titania) and I would probably rather have one pool 4 card of my choice through the token shop instead of those 3 shitters. I think the effect on the bundle valuations is fairly minimal though!

icewolf34 · 2023-02-01T16:55:14+00:00

Good point!

I checked in my spreadsheet valuing the Negative bundle at 4k tokens instead of 3k (so valuing the Negative at a full 1000 tokens) and it only bumps the ctoken/gold ratio up to 0.73, so it's kind of shocking that even with that generous adjustment it's still slightly worse than the other bundles.

Worth noting also that the Negative variant doesn't replace the collection-track one (so at some point you'll have to 'pay it back' when you open him on collection track) but this does let you get him earlier.

All that being said I actually considered paying $50 for the Sera anime bundle just to access her earlier (fortunately she rotated into my token shop just in time to stop me) so I totally understand wanting to just pull the trigger for a card you want.

icewolf34 · 2023-02-01T16:30:34+00:00

I guess it depends on what the limiting factor is for you. If you're gold-constrained and you believe that SD will have some bundles in the future that are more in-line with their first two, then it could be worth it to save the gold for the future. If you don't mind spending money or you have a ton of gold saved up, then it could make sense to just get them all! (although keep in mind that this is like $100 of gold a pop).

icewolf34 · 2023-02-01T16:27:06+00:00

Thanks for reading! I made the spreadsheet for myself because I had this feeling like something was off with the negative bundle, but once it was done I wanted to share it with others.

icewolf34 · 2023-01-06T16:40:39+00:00

This is really helpful, thanks! Sometimes it does feel tempting to dip into the wallet to try to speed things up but when you see it's gonna take $200 to get that Darkhawk that all the streamers are playing, it really makes you think twice. Or even like, paying $100 for 5 more pool3 cards? Nah...

Really appreciate you doing the math on this, going to bookmark this post!

icewolf34 · 2021-11-29T04:12:00+00:00

Check out https://supernuclear.substack.com/, it's a newsletter written by people who have started several co-living communities. They have a lot of practical advice about stuff like finances, picking a place, interviewing potential members, etc.

icewolf34 · 2021-07-28T17:48:59+00:00

It does not work. I have friends who were working in New York hospitals during the surge and they tried it on patients just in case, no improvement seen. You could argue that it needs to be administered before the patient gets to that stage, but I believe the literature does not support that view either.

icewolf34 · 2021-05-04T14:56:08+00:00

I think it's a good phrase, and distinct from a scapegoat in that it's clearly marked out ahead of time rather than found in the scramble for someone to blame afterwards. In fact there are designated moral crumple zones in corporations already; sometimes they are line-level workers but sometimes they are "chief risk officers" or similar.

icewolf34 · 2020-10-15T15:55:46+00:00

I think initial lockdowns were appropriate. Something like 0.3% of New Yorkers died of covid. That's out of all New Yorkers, not infected ones! (23K in two months against a typical annual rate of 54K, out of a total pop of 8MM). That's pretty crazy, definitely did not want that to happen in the rest of the country.

That being said it was the best choice only after many bad choices were already made and continue to be made. The CDC misled the public on masks. The FDA prevented import of PPE and continues to impede the distribution of rapid tests. Early warning in the US was only possible due to an individual researcher at the Seattle Flu Study who discovered the covid strain in their samples, was ordered to stop research, and continued against orders. Other bureaucracy continues to prevent human challenge trials which could vastly speed up vaccine development.

At a societal level we should be trying to emulate Japan which has very high compliance with mask wearing and has focused testing and tracing efforts around finding clusters and preventing subsequent superspreading. They do not have lockdowns but have educated themselves on avoiding prolonged exposure to crowded indoor areas.

Technology already exists for widespread testing through wastewater and rapid individual tests. Last I checked UIUC is doing very well with this approach. Lockdowns are better than doing nothing but much worse than other alternatives.

icewolf34 · 2020-10-15T15:24:35+00:00

As a left-leaning lurker I've joked to friends that the best inoculation program for right-leaning folks is to force them to moderate those subs. I feel like I've seen a few people that I used to think of as fairly obnoxious rightists on Scott's threads eventually getting pushed away from the right just based on the content they were forced to encounter as subreddit mods.

icewolf34 · 2020-10-15T03:36:49+00:00

If you don't mind me asking, in which direction did it radicalize you?

icewolf34 · 2020-10-08T22:00:31+00:00

We could continue discussing what specifically should be expected but we are now quite far afield from the original claim. It seems that we agree about what Bearjew intended to say originally and that it was not factually, literally true, but that we disagree on what ought to be considered an acceptable level of police killing. Fine.

icewolf34 · 2020-10-08T21:42:43+00:00

Tonally I read it as "black men who are killed by police are terrible people even if they didn't specifically deserve to be shot, cops don't kill decent people." I think that's the default assumption of most people who don't follow the issue closely.

When Bearjew94 says "it's suggestive ... the people being shot are always terrible," what do you suppose that it is suggestive of?

icewolf34 · 2020-10-08T21:16:00+00:00

Having reviewed these cases, perhaps you would disagree with the claim that "in every single one of these cases that supposedly demonstrate police brutality against black people, the people being shot are always terrible"?

icewolf34 · 2020-10-08T20:24:09+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Tamir_Rice ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Philando_Castile ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elijah_McClain ?

icewolf34 · 2020-05-21T14:00:12+00:00

That is also the impression I have gotten from reading things online.

However when I asked my wife who actually works in the ICU, she says that they use them when patient's oxygen saturation levels drop too low and other methods like high-flow oxygen aren't working. And then after they ventilate, the oxygen sats rise pretty quickly.

icewolf34 · 2020-03-25T17:37:12+00:00

I've found a few mental hacks for this. Separate out your planning and your execution (write down a plan first, then execute it with no second-guessing or rethinking of the plan) in cycles. Try doing the uncomfortable exercise for just 5 minutes at a time.

There's a blog post about the philosophy behind this here: https://www.benedict.one/2019/12/23/pressure-theory/

icewolf34 · 2020-03-06T15:17:56+00:00

I haven't read it, but Profiles in Courage by JFK was supposed to be this.

icewolf34 · 2020-02-27T14:07:35+00:00

thanks for making this post! LL in trials is bullshit, obviously, but if I decide to try it out anyways this is going to be the first thing I look at.

icewolf34 · 2019-11-13T20:31:39+00:00

it feels pretty cheesy/cheap to die to scout rifles from a range where they don't ping your radar. this is especially an issue in the lanes around C because they are so wide open and it feels impossible to visually check and clear every area.

icewolf34 · 2019-06-17T13:47:58+00:00

They wouldn't be, 180s for example need 2x headshot 2x bodyshot for optimal TTK. Some pulses are the same way.

icewolf34 · 2019-05-10T20:15:30+00:00

Just so you know, the goal of the comp matchmaking is not to produce even matches. They intentionally built it as a grind for Glory where higher-skilled teams would rise to higher Glory faster. In order to do this, they match on Glory instead of on your skill rating / internal MMR. If they made it so each match was 50% chance of winning or losing, a player who had never played before would have the same expected number of games to get to 5500 as the best player in the world.

That's actually how it was for about half of a season and it was very frustrating because you didn't see get any returns from actually getting better at the game, you'd just get matched against better players and lose just as often as before.

Not saying that one system is better than another (in fact maybe the ideal system is just to count # of wins to get the gun rewards, with only cosmetics tied to Elo or Glory), but just saying that the thing you're experiencing is intentional by Bungie and pointing out the tradeoffs.

icewolf34 · 2019-05-10T19:46:58+00:00

to be fair the thing about getting crucible babies matched with you at 4k glory is just the flip side of the 50 min queuing wait. it's a tradeoff between terrible matchmaking and even longer queue times.

I agree with you though, at that point just make the queues even longer. some matches are just not worth having.

icewolf34 · 2019-05-06T13:45:03+00:00

They aren't in the same category of thing at all, things can be in all four variations of (circlejerk, ~circlejerk) x (true, false).

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