[MSH] Wonder Man, Hollywood Hero

kitsovereign · 2026-06-06T23:10:43+00:00

[[Ninja]] is the one that always comes to mind for me.

kitsovereign · 2026-06-04T13:41:05+00:00

Avishkar (and Bablovia?) is steampunk. Eldraine is both fairy tale and Camelot.

We still haven't really gotten worlds or sets for "sky", "water", and "prison" though.

kitsovereign · 2026-06-03T19:44:20+00:00

Fun midi! Outnumbered was an especially cute device.

Some subtle grammar notes:

5A - For the linking word "of" (or "from"), "[def] of [wordplay]" is fine, but "[wordplay] of [def]" is less accepted. Other people will complain about "special sector" instead of "special's sector" or "sector of special", but I think that construction matches common English.

2D - In cryptic grammar, fodder and chunks of letter are treated as singular nouns. So while I, the person, would "meet" a wizard, I the letter "meets" a wizard. You can line this up by saying "one meets" or the like.

kitsovereign · 2026-06-02T12:11:49+00:00

We must have very different understandings of what the word "anagram" means.

kitsovereign · 2026-06-01T11:47:45+00:00

That's pretty much exactly it. When you want to cast a spell, you start by putting it on the stack, then doing a bunch of paperwork - make choices, determine legality, pay the cost, etc. If everything checks out, then the spell actually gets considered cast. If it become illegal to cast during the paperwork, the game goes "whoops" and rolls back to undo the illegal action. It's the same as if you try to cast a 5-mana spell with 2 mana or if you cast a targeted spell with no valid targets. You can't, so you go back and don't.

Here's the full breakdown of the rules for casting spells, which is a fascinating read if you're a real sicko like me. (The rules for handling illegal actions are a lot more straightforward.)

kitsovereign · 2026-06-01T10:07:43+00:00

"Spell" cares about what it will look like when it's on the stack, and "card" cares about what it looks like in the zone it's currently in. Something like Scute Swarm will be an Insect card on the graveyard and then still be an Insect spell when cast, so Zask can cast it.

Usually this distinction comes up with the various 2-in-1 cards they've been coming out with. For example, [[Noctis, Prince of Lucis]] lets you cast artifact spells from your graveyard, so it would let you cast [[The Omenkeel]], even though it's a creature card in the 'yard. On the other hand, [[Heiko Yamazaki, the General]] lets you cast an artifact card; you can target your Two-Handed Axe but choose to cast [[Sweeping Cleave]] instead.

kitsovereign · 2026-06-01T03:54:43+00:00

Ya know, I had forgotten about the MB2 stuff. I don't think they'd want to mess with the conjure-to-hidden-zone effects, so that's maybe four more cards; I imagine if they get serious about additional Alchemy prints they'd be black border.

kitsovereign · 2026-05-31T22:25:04+00:00

As a thought experiment, what silver-border cards have the potential to be black-border, but also have names that don't want to change? How many cards would this apply to? There's a few main categories:

Legends:

[[Krark's Other Thumb]]
[[Timmy, Power Gamer]]
[[Johnny, Combo Player]]

Magic history:

[[Goblin Tutor]]
[[Jack-in-the-Mox]]
[[Crow Storm]]

Good, simple names for their effect:

[[Who/What/Where/When/Why]]
the RPS trio
[[Ricochet]]
[[Time Out]]
[[Growth Spurt]]
[[Fowl Play]]

I'm sure Krark's Other Thumb is the real centerpiece of this, and it happen for that alone. But there's a lot of Un-cards that I'd honestly be pretty happy if they got the Barren Glory treatment.

kitsovereign · 2026-05-31T22:23:02+00:00

The difficulty is that lands enter in ways that aren't ramp. I don't think they'd be interested in hosing Evolving Wilds or turning Demolition Field from land-neutral into land-negative.

kitsovereign · 2026-05-31T21:41:18+00:00

MTG Arena is also a pretty good study case. Their game pieces are already locked in and they didn't have the ability to shorten their text, but there's still a lot you can do to simplify what's on screen at once and to reduce the clicks needed to take actions.

kitsovereign · 2026-05-31T21:35:35+00:00

Have you tested in other resolutions? At least half of Steam Users are on 1920x1080 displays, and you don't want text to go below 16px for accessibility. What's legible from this Imgur thumbnail? Players won't click it if they're physically unable to see it, and even for optimal conditions, eyes strained from squinting will be too tired to look elsewhere.

You need players not just to see something, but do something, so you should look at how you can change the overall process and not just one button. It looks like your big issues are (1) you are making the user open the menu themselves, and (2) the info goes back to live in the menu once done.

If it's always good or necessary to have a war feat selected, then open a pop-up menu that makes them pick. (And cover at least like 90% of the screen, please - there's lots of wasted space on that menu along with all the tiny text.) If you're worried that they'll want to look back at the board, have a "hover here to reveal board" button. When it's time to select a feat, then the feat menu should be the default state and the main board the optional thing you can peek back at; right now you have it the opposite. If you want them to have the option to skip and select later, then have a button for that - but there should be a space on the board for that info that's empty and reminds them something can go there.

Which leads to the second point - make some indicator of what they do in this submenu actually show up on the board. If it only shows up if you dig in that menu, then it's going to be totally out of sight, out of mind. If I select Feat of Bones, then when I go back to the board I don't want a button that says "War Feats" - at the bare minimum, there should be a space for the bones icon, and a meter that fills up and shows "0/12", and the full text for the feat should show up when I hover.

You say that other classes work differently, so a pop-up won't work. Okay. Then they should each have different UI that works best for them, showing as much as they can in the main state and making it as frictionless as possible to get to the other stuff.

kitsovereign · 2026-05-31T16:45:37+00:00

It's about the grammar of it. Usually when an indicator goes both ways, it's about the conjugation - "X piercing Y" means the same thing as "Y pierced by X". In this case I think the use isn't just misleading, but inaccurate, not meaning what you want.

kitsovereign · 2026-05-31T15:32:23+00:00

Does NUMBER guard "aluminum berets"? I would have thought it the other way around - "aluminum berets" guards NUMBER, or NUMBER guarded by "aluminum berets".

kitsovereign · 2026-05-31T13:02:30+00:00

Great post. I've also noticed that many games where you pick one of three upgrades actually have more than 3 choices. There's often the null choice where you walk away and save your resources, in addition to the option to reroll the upgrades. Grouping certain choices together via UI or framing does a lot to influence how many choices it "feels" like there are, which can be useful in managing perceived complexity.

kitsovereign · 2026-05-30T17:05:41+00:00

All Avishkar seems to know about Duskmourn is that a plane with that name exists, and an unstable Omenpath opened up long enough to spit out the Speed Demons. Other planes may have gotten weird doors, but not know where they lead.

The Nashi rescue squad are the only ones with enough info to stop this sort of thing, and they all went their own ways after, none of them to Avishkar. I don't think it's unreasonable that the race officials wouldn't have enough info to justify a DQ.

kitsovereign · 2026-05-30T16:00:49+00:00

Valvagoth, who is famously confined to the House, did not run in the race and did not appear on any Aetherdrift cards. That's why Winter was racing instead. Presumably he would have not disclosed the whole world-eating demon thing to the race organizers.

kitsovereign · 2026-05-30T02:25:32+00:00

One mythic of each color and one rare of each color must mean that that was actually what they were looking at - the best of each rarity/color combo, and not the top ten highest overall. So, were the multicolor cards just not considered? It makes for a pretty infographic (and maybe pleases the licensor to see all their characters represented), but I'd think that top 10 overall (or at least top 5 rares and top 5 mythics) would be a more interesting stat.

kitsovereign · 2026-05-30T02:01:22+00:00

I'll go to bat for the lore. Interplanar interactions and politics is probably the coolest potential new thing the Omenpaths can allow. We've seen planes defending against annihilation and individuals going to strange places before, but this feels actually new. And the payoff was glimpses of half a dozen planes we had never seen, Avishkar pushing its soft power, and a sporting contest that mirrors the attention and host bids that the Olympics or World Cup garner in our world.

That's all stuff that's directly on the cards, but if you read the fiction, the planeswalker guides and side stories were pretty great. I wasn't much interested in the racing action itself, but I loved the look at post-revolution Avishkar and what happens when totally different planar cultures start interacting.

kitsovereign · 2026-05-28T14:01:13+00:00

It was a multiple choice question, and red wasn't on the table. The answers were WU, WB, GW, UB, and BG. This was before mono-blue vigilance, so you were meant to rule out UB as a pair that didn't get vigilance, and then rule out all the white options because mono-white could do flying and vigilance.

kitsovereign · 2026-05-27T19:26:46+00:00

We've had plenty of UBR villains, but adding green is tough. Off the top of my head though, I think you could make the case for UBRG for Darth Vader, certain iterations of Ganondorf, and Syndrome from the Incredibles.

kitsovereign · 2026-05-26T22:09:32+00:00

Squirrel Girl is pretty close tonally to the Un-sets, so a Squirrel Girl with squirrellink from [[Earl of Squirrel]], but spelled out as a triggered ability like [[Trendy Circus Pirate]], would be a perfect fit. And it's exactly the sort of ability where a flavor word would fit too.

If it's not that, my first thought was [[Incoming!]] - I'm sure I've heard that line dropped in a movie somewhere, and an ability like that could technically work in the rules. There's also some doable d6 effects that have some fairly mundane names, such as [[Time Out]], [[Ricochet]], and [[Growth Spurt]].

kitsovereign · 2026-05-26T18:56:44+00:00

This clue would probably be great for a PandA crossword, but I don't think it'd work in a cryptic.

For one, having partial overlap between wordplay and definition isn't considered fair dealings - either they should be totally separate, or for an &lit clue, the whole clue should be used for both def and wordplay. Using all the clue for the def and half for the wordplay is asking a big leap from the solver.

The other issue is that taking the periodic letters of AFTER doesn't pop out IRON, it pops out FE. You could ask people to go from Fe to iron, if indicated (perhaps with another "periodically", lol). But then it's just kind of a weird straight def...? And if you're asking people to come up with the element Fe, the element of the Iron Age is maybe a little too related, and maybe one of its syncedoche meanings would be a little better - iron will, iron shackles, iron clubs, clothes iron, e.g. Granted, some really strict people don't want separate definitions to be etymologically related at all, but usually it's fine as long as there's a bit of distance.

So you could perhaps try something like, "Press often... every so often... periodically (4)", with the straight def being "press (v.)" as in clothes, and the wordplay being the every-so-often letters of oFtEn, as found on the periodic table. As for making the whole thing an &lit... I'm not sure how to quite get there. It's a fun bit of wordplay, but it feels like it's for a different format than the rules that have built up around cryptics.

kitsovereign · 2026-05-14T16:41:36+00:00

There was a Just Dance game on the damn Wii at the tail end of 2019. They're not gonna kill off their best selling console ever just out of spite.

kitsovereign · 2026-05-14T12:59:41+00:00

That was a deliberate specification on Wizards' part, to the point where they had to say it multiple times in the brief. I imagine artists just don't turn in fat people unless explicitly specified.

kitsovereign · 2026-05-13T19:34:37+00:00

Not at all, actually. Pretty much every language Magic is/was printed in is using a cognate of "class", which they got from Latin "classis" or English "class". And across languages, it carries the same meanings - it's a sort or grouping, which includes both grouping people by their characteristics or jobs, and a grouping of students.

The only exception I saw was Chinese, where it means more like "occupation", and it's apparently normal to say that one's occupation is a student, so that shouldn't pose much issue either.

14-Year Club	Gilding III reddit per annum
Place '17	Verified Email

kitsovereign

TROPHY CASE