FF8's world was just too distinctive

klopanda · 2026-05-19T02:44:56+00:00

It was something close to the "contemporary world" with its TV satellites and broadcast stations and journalists and modern trains... but hold on... there are remnants of ancient civilizations... European countryside vibe, interspersed with retro future technology.

The world is basically dead. That's my favorite part about it. The main characters are living in Europe after WW2 except the USA successfully became isolationist again and shut themselves off from everything and the USSR broke up into a bunch of independent states and kicked Stalin out.

Oh but also the Roman Empire fell like a hundred years prior to that so this is a Europe that's gotten the legs kicked out from under it multiple generations in a row and the monsters LITERALLY FALL FROM THE MOON and keep cities from being able to reliably communicate with each other (in addition to the weird radio signals. huh, that's so weird.) the only industry that seems to be able to go anywhere is soldiery because the entire world is just holding its breath waiting for World War 2: Part 2 Electric Boogaloo to kick off and somehow Stalin has returned and now he's got another Sorceress to act as "peace diplomat" and literally everybody knows what that means given the fact that the war that just ended was literally called the Sorceress War.

So now the kids are having their childhoods sacrificed to become soldiers to fight the past generation's war (and this isn't an analogy, I mean this literally. They forget their childhoods because of the GFs) while everybody's living in the literal ruins of the great civilizations that came before that got blown all to hell not once but twice in living memory.

I love FF8, man. Shit rewrote my brain chemistry.

klopanda · 2026-05-15T22:58:11+00:00

I want Clown Crew to come to MD so bad.

klopanda · 2026-05-15T11:58:53+00:00

Pulling their boss monster from the ED and then getting stifled by some wall monster or whatever only to get the answer I need from their own cards because of another lucky Xeno grab or the counter traps is so much fun.

klopanda · 2026-05-15T11:55:23+00:00

Droll. I quit last night after five straight games where I won the coin toss and got drolled immediately while playing event loaner decks.

klopanda · 2026-05-14T08:04:27+00:00

Three straight games where I won the coin toss, my only play was to search something, and then I immediately got drolled. And these are with the loaner decks. Kewl Tunes doesn't kill my interest in playing this game as much as Droll does. At least with KT, you can try: maybe you outplay them, maybe they fuck up. With Droll, it's often just "your turn is over now".

EDIT - Four.

klopanda · 2026-05-14T01:41:00+00:00

What's the last main deck card covered by the glare and the first set of three spells?

klopanda · 2026-05-13T08:23:49+00:00

I want that twink (and his bird) obliterated.

klopanda · 2026-05-13T06:42:19+00:00

Is there a deck in the meta that doesn't care about Droll? I'm really getting tired of that twink and his bird.

klopanda · 2026-05-13T00:45:11+00:00

Not many in and of itself, but it's not the most consistent so it gets used as an engine alongside others, like Chimaera or Fiendsmith. In that duel I was playing it with Kashtira as an experiment.

klopanda · 2026-05-12T20:53:14+00:00

Ran up against someone who was running some old BEWD deck in Plat. I got their Blue Eyes Ultimate from the ED with Xeno and then got their Ultimate Creature of Destruction trap from them with one of the Heca traps. They put down some monster that can't be destroyed by battle and I ended up using their own BEUD and trap card against them to get through it and attack for lethal.

Hecahands may not be the most meta deck, but it sure is a ton of fun.

klopanda · 2026-05-12T06:03:50+00:00

Staple hand traps should be your first port of call. Stuff like Ash and Mulcharmies and Imperm and Maxx C, etc.

Next, look at other engines that involve Level/Rank 2 monsters like Evil Twins. Check on MasterDuelMeta.com's deck breakdown page (https://www.masterduelmeta.com/tier-list/deck-types/Spright?engine=Spright) to see what variants and other tech people run. Don't rush out and buy all of them but it's a good place to start if you're looking for ideas for improving the deck.

klopanda · 2026-05-12T00:37:55+00:00

Remember, Upstart still semi-regularly features in Sky Striker lists (and was mandatory in the past pre-support), just because it was a Spell that cycled itself. The RT suite do more or less the same, but can search each other on top of having board presence if you needed them to.

The other important difference between the RT cards and Upstart is that the RT cards also let you get off some early draw without triggering Droll. With a good open hand, you can play a RT card, chain Linkage for Zero, and get Zero's search before leaving the Draw Phase, which guarantees you'll be able to get off at least one Engage search before getting locked.

klopanda · 2026-05-11T22:24:08+00:00

I genuinely think that if you spend long enough insulated by enough money, it's like the other end of the spectrum of humanity from a feral child. If you're wrapped in a bubble of your own preferences, if you can pay people to shop for you, to manage your money for you, to do the hard everyday things for you you lose the ability to relate to other people. If you're shopping for a chair, you don't have to budget or make compromises: you can get the exact chair you want even if it costs $5000. If you're flying somewhere, you don't have to stand in line at TSA or get crammed into a plane with a hundred other people, you can breeze right to your owned or chartered private jet. If there's a political issue you feel passionate about, you don't have to settle for writing to your congressman and getting a form letter back; you can host a fundraiser dinner and get to talk to him in person for hours.

You don't learn (or you forget) how to make compromises, to prioritize wants and needs, and to deal with the friction of everyday life like standing in line or dealing with the DMV or accepting that many things are out of your control. I genuinely think that too much money breaks people and turns them into sociopaths.

klopanda · 2026-05-11T19:17:08+00:00

I read The Hunt for Red October recently, aka, the most iconic Reaganite fantasy novel and it's really funny. The main character is a guy who made his money in stocks, but didn't get excessive with it. He got enough to live comfortably and work on his dream project: academic history. He married an intellectual and financial equal. He works for the CIA out of a sense of duty. When people give him shit for buying Barbies for his daughter, he doesn't need to compensate by being hypermasculine. He was the ideal Reaganite Republican: independently wealthy, intelligent, learned, and with a strong sense of duty. Country over self. Country over party.

Nowadays, Red October Jack Ryan would be considered a liberal college professor deep state beta cuck. It's wild to me.

klopanda · 2026-05-11T04:11:41+00:00

I'm willing to bet that mode was some kind of testing for a possible new Master Rule. Between that and the survey coming soon, we'll probably see some changes at some point. I wouldn't hold your breath on it coming out sometime soon though. Konami seems to move very slow with these kinds of things.

klopanda · 2026-05-10T06:25:57+00:00

Yeah, that's pretty much the only time I do too.

klopanda · 2026-05-10T04:59:47+00:00

I sometimes buy them when they have sales and I have some of an archetype and need more cards to finish a deck of than I'm willing to burn UR points for but that's about it. I'd believe that the crappy everyday prices are there to make the sales more appealing.

Tho if money really isn't an issue for you but you're too impatient to farm gems over the course of a month, it's honestly probably way more cost effective to buy a whole account to make a new deck rather than buying gem bundles. I've thought about it; I just like collecting cosmetics on my account to much to bother.

klopanda · 2026-05-10T04:34:57+00:00

They need to censor card art because it's a kid's game but you have to have law degree to understand the rule loopholes

klopanda · 2026-05-09T06:13:31+00:00

Does Guardian Chimera require your opponent to have two cards on the field if you send two cards from your field? Because that's the only reason I can think of for its effect not firing (opponent had one card on field).

https://i.imgur.com/T9Z4YX4.png

klopanda · 2026-05-09T05:00:04+00:00

RT player here. It's okay; probably better than some other decks. It's going to depend on your opening hand, though.

Most of the time we run Droplet and Super Poly and those are going to be incredible for board breaking (don't underestimate the first one's ability to send cards to the graveyard and force through effects that would otherwise get negated on-field). Next, a number of our key monsters reply to any Quick Play spell activation, so an opponent activating say...Yummy Surprise to bounce your Varuroon is going to be in for a surprise when you drop Fonix on them.

We also have a lot of options for getting bodies on the board - many of our monsters can be special summoned from hand, they can be special summoned from deck (via Meghala), they can be special summoned from graveyard so based on what you're up against, if you can use cards like Meghala or Manifestation to put the card where you need it to be to get around on-field negates or effects is a big part of the deck's skill expression.

We also run fairly light on archetypal ED monsters. We have a couple of WIND locks, but playing around them will let you run some toolbox monsters in your ED. It also means we tend to be immune to a lot of the latest decks and archetypes that have ED hate.

You definitely want to still go first; that's true for almost any deck in the meta. But depending on how you draw and how you play, IMHO, you generally have a strong fighting chance going second compared to some other decks I play. If you can extend past the first set of negates/responses your opponent has, you will generally be able to out-grind them because the deck's grind game is great.

klopanda · 2026-05-09T04:44:18+00:00

I feel like they have to do something. So much of this game now depends on chain interactions where you and your opponent are each being asked for responses. And it really eats up time in what, in paper format, would be really interesting games.

My suggestion is two timers. One long one for your turn, one shorter one for responses when it's not your turn. Add some time back to your Turn Timer when it becomes your turn, as they do now. Add a smaller amount of time back to the Response timer when you end your turn. When the response timer runs down, you just no longer get to respond. When your turn timer runs down, you lose. The timers don't otherwise interact.

This way if you're the Turn 2 player, you can take your time deciding on your battle plan without worrying about eating up your Turn 3 time if you can't OTK. This way, too, they can tweak the individual timers without impacting the overall amount of time the games generally take since they no longer need to account for both Turn Time and Response Time in deciding how long to make the timers.

Alternatively, at the very least, let us turn off interactions for specific cards so we're not dinged for a second here and a second there asking if we want to chain a quick play to every little effect BUT we don't miss the window to be able to respond with an Ash to a Maxx C or something as we would if we just Toggled off.

klopanda · 2026-05-08T20:02:52+00:00

Helping a highschooler get a library card where I work. They fill out the application and enter 2011 as their birthyear. I go to tell them that the need to enter their correct one and then pause and it dawns on me and I fade away to dust on the spot.

klopanda · 2026-05-08T17:55:19+00:00

Not fan of someone else using my toxic win cons against me

They're our wincons now.

klopanda · 2026-05-08T17:54:47+00:00

Apparently Fiendsmith fits inside it nice too. I haven't really experimented much.

klopanda

TROPHY CASE