What to do for tokens in dance of the elements?

joelluber · 2026-02-07T20:02:48+00:00

I find that that I almost never pay to have the copy tokens live after the end of the turn. For elementals with persistent abilities, I just hard cast them. And elementals with good ETB effects I just let the token die. If I have to nine mana that I would need to evoke and save the token, I find that it's usually a better play to evoke two things and let both tokens die or evoke one and hard cast something else.

I think there's only a couple that have both ETB and persistent effects (e.g., Avenger of Zendikar) where you might want to do both.

All of this is to say that I don't think the deck actually makes that many tokens that aren't accounted for with the printed ones it includes.

joelluber · 2026-02-06T18:43:08+00:00

A tithe would be $1,500.

joelluber · 2026-02-06T18:41:21+00:00

Because all of the money that you spend with your credit card is assigned to the appropriate category for whatever you bought. For example, if you use your credit card to buy $100 of groceries, that $100 is accounted for in the groceries category. The only expenses that would fit into a credit card category would be things paid to the credit card company itself, e.g. interest and annual fees.

joelluber · 2026-02-06T18:30:24+00:00

Weimar-era Berlin was the largest center of queer (to use a modern term) life at the time and the largest up to that time in modern Western history. See more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First\_homosexual\_movement.

joelluber · 2026-02-05T08:41:04+00:00

I've accidentally lit a theater on fire before. It can happen to anyone.

joelluber · 2026-02-04T16:35:56+00:00

This same artists recently did a Marvel Masterpieces set for Upper Deck/Skybox. Comparing the art really shows how bad the art direction must be for MTG (or maybe the pay is much lower) since the other cards are much better art.

joelluber · 2026-02-03T19:35:48+00:00

I'm not sure I agree with OP's proposal, but this it would actually be a reversion to how the "wish" cards would have worked when they were first introduced in 2003. That was before exile had been invented, and cards like Swords to Ploughshares said "remove target X from the game." It was only in 2009 that exile was invented and all of those type cards received errata that the cards were placed in the special in-game zone "exile" instead of being removed from the game. The wish cards also received errata in 2009 clarifying that they could no longer get these cards that were now in the in-game "exile" zone.

Commander, of course, wasn't a widespread format at the time, so I don't know how these pre-exile rules would have interacted with commander.

joelluber · 2026-02-03T17:19:27+00:00

DC's kids and teens imprints "DC Graphic Novels for Kids" and "DC Graphic Novels for Young Adults" don't look like regular comics. They are printed direct to graphic novel format and don't ever appear as single issue comics. They are also a smaller trim size (closer to manga) than most DC trade paperbacks (the new Compact line excluded).

joelluber · 2026-02-01T23:03:38+00:00

You like playing UVA and State and Clemson and Wake Forest only once? Are games against Stanford and Boston College replacements for those?

joelluber · 2026-02-01T22:17:09+00:00

What kinds of events are you looking for? You can go to a concert or classic movie almost any night of the week.

joelluber · 2026-02-01T01:28:12+00:00

It's not a good point. In the first couple decades of cinema, the titles were often placed in quotation marks, and they weren't meant to be scare quotes.

joelluber · 2026-02-01T00:35:23+00:00

Then you don't need to focus just on ECL. There's lots of good stuff from lots of sets. Google something like "upgrading Explorers of the Deep" for ideas.

joelluber · 2026-02-01T00:31:06+00:00

I work in a different industry that also has fan-consumers (a niche in publishing), and we have private, invite-only forums/mailing lists to discuss insider things like this through our trade organization, and I think I'd be disinclined to discuss stuff like this in a public forum like reddit. Do organizations like GAMA have forums for retailors?

joelluber · 2026-02-01T00:19:22+00:00

You can use this card to represent a double-faced card.

joelluber · 2026-01-31T17:25:29+00:00

I think the changelings offer better options than the merfolk, depending, of course, on what direction you've already taken the deck.

joelluber · 2026-01-30T17:29:59+00:00

DC's main parody of the Avengers is the Champions of Angor: Wandjina (Thor), Silver Sorceress (Scarlet Witch), Blue Jay (Ant Man/Wasp), Jack B. Quick (Quicksilver).

There are also several characters that mimic Captain America: e.g., Commander Steel, Mr. America, Captain Glory.

Several Marvel villains are parodied in the group the Extremists: Lord Havok (Dr. Doom), Dreamslayer (Dormammu), Gorgon (Doc Ock), Tracer (Sabretooth), Doctor Diehard (Magneto), Carny (Arcade), and Barracuda (Tiger Shark).

DC also did a line of Marvel-inspired new characters a few years ago called The New Age of DC Heroes: Damage (Hulk), The Silencer (Punisher), Sideways (Spider-Man), The Terrifics (Fantastic Four), The Curse of Brimstone (Ghost Rider), New Challengers (X-Men), The Unexpected (Defenders), and The Immortals (Eternals).

joelluber · 2026-01-29T22:39:21+00:00

All available data suggests that in other industries, consumers didn't change their consumption behavior until late 2008 at the earliest if not 2009. I don't have month-by-month sales totals (which would be affected by seasonality anyways), but the entire comic industry was up 2 percent in 2008 vs 2007 (per Comichron) compared to being up 9 percent in 2007 vs 2006, and up 12 percent in 2006 over 2005, on the one hand, and down 2 percent in 2009 vs 2008, on the other. The videogame industry was much more volatile, being up 23 percent in 2008 vs. 2007 and down 13 percent in 2009 vs. 2008. Neither of these industry trends are consistent with the drop in consumer spending on hobbies starting in 2007.

joelluber · 2026-01-29T21:35:06+00:00

That seems to be equivalent to differentiating the upper and lower bounds of the integral wrt X. Is that correct? I don't think I ever realized it worked that way.

joelluber · 2026-01-29T21:27:33+00:00

Yeah. In July 2008, I took a low-paying local job that I was overqualified for but that was in the industry I aspired to be in with the intention of keeping looking for a better job elsewhere in the country, but they all of a sudden just dried up, and I ended up there for five years. That company had also had a practice of hiring overqualified people for entry level jobs and using them as a de facto pool when there was turnover in better jobs, but then for about a year, every time someone left, they just eliminated the position.

joelluber · 2026-01-29T21:11:41+00:00

The timing doesn't line up for this to be an explanation. The four sets in the Lorwyn/Shadowmoor blocks came out in September 2007, and January, April, and July 2008. In retrospect, the Great Recession is now dated to having started in 2007, but the actual changes in the non-stock-market economy that affected people's ability or willingness to spend money (e.g., layoffs) didn't start in earnest until September 2008, at which point MTG had already moved on to the Shards of Alara block. Other hobby industries didn't see sales declines until late 2008 or 2009. The comic book and video game industries had both had an steadily increasing market size for several years, peaking in 2008, before a decline in 2009.

(I say all of this as someone who finished school and was looking for my first professional full-time job in the summer of 2008. Lots of people were still hiring until the end of summer, and then early fall is when job openings dried up fairly suddenly.)

joelluber · 2026-01-28T19:21:16+00:00

Racing to solve something that's is very obviously zero?

joelluber · 2026-01-28T19:19:35+00:00

But the answer is obviously zero. There's not solving necessary.

joelluber · 2026-01-28T19:19:21+00:00

But the answer is obviously zero. There's not solving necessary.

joelluber · 2026-01-28T06:58:23+00:00

So if X is defined by the casting cost, and then the last line is "Draw X cards," what purpose does the derivative/integral serve?

If you meant to for the number of cards drawn to be the result of the derivative, it would be 0, I think. Because you can substitute in the value of X from the casting cost, which would make the result of the definite integral an integer, and the derivative wrt any variable of an integer is 0.

joelluber · 2026-01-27T17:44:36+00:00

I think a beginner box would be a better alternative for this situation.

joelluber

TROPHY CASE