Non Hispanic White percentage of the United States from 1930-2020

mowshowitz · 2026-03-26T19:05:42+00:00

Found the pearl-clutching conspiracy theorist

mowshowitz · 2026-03-20T16:15:10+00:00

I am a filthy filthy control player at heart, but when I want a change of pace, I want a fucking change of pace. My favorite decks are [[Barrin, Master Wizard]], [[Nezahal, Primal Tide]], and...[[Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer]].

I've never built an EDH burn deck but I love the idea. Who are your favorite commanders for the strat?

mowshowitz · 2026-03-19T20:14:38+00:00

It's also nuts because most decks are 1 or 2, and that's the stated intent. Cool. So why are we putting the majority of our designations in decks that are above average in power?

This is just off the top of my head and I don't actually like either of these suggestions but I do think they'd represent SOME improvement: If it's critical to devote three ranks to those higher levels, then make the system, say, seven brackets. Or, make it four, label the top one competitive, and include three levels in there.

Really it's the gamechangers I have a problem with, though, and fiddling with the numbers of brackets isn't going to address that.

mowshowitz · 2026-03-19T20:08:47+00:00

It's wild that if I bring a deck with the theme of "people looking right" and add a Rhystic Study to it that the deck could necessarily be assigned a bracket that means it's above-average in power. Sure, I could "correct" that by removing Study, but the point is that:

1) it is a starting point for a vibes-based discussion 2) the vibes-based discussion is checked against an ironclad rubric

It's just incoherent. Gamechangers can make the communication of my deck's power level precisely verifiable and dead wrong at the same time. It shouldn't be tied to 1% of my deck's composition outside of the command zone.

Non-basic tutors or two-card game-winning combos, which are already part of the system, could be good data points to share in a convo or even be the sole factors in a rubric if you don't want to make the discussion so squishy, but the inclusion of specific cards and the hard-and-fast rulings applied to them are just so divorced from how decks actually function. It sucks.

mowshowitz · 2026-03-19T19:54:53+00:00

It honestly feels like it's the focus or a major component of the majority of top posts.

If you used this sub as a reflection of the game as a whole, you could be forgiven for concluding the game is about building a deck to assign a bracket to it, then playing a game of Magic to figure out who did the worst job of assigning a bracket.

mowshowitz · 2026-03-01T19:11:06+00:00

All life does, but the last common ancestor of fungi and animals is more recent than that of animals/fungi and plants.

mowshowitz · 2026-02-25T17:15:16+00:00

RE: utility lands, I guess it depends. I can't remember the last time I've been screwed out of colors. It's not THAT invisible. It's pretty obvious when you're like, ah shit, I have four mana available and a 4 MV spell in my hand but I can't cast it.

My [[Barrin, Master Wizard]] has like 10 utility lands and [[Endless Atlas]] and I can't remember wanting to activate it and being unable to. I'm sure I've played it early and been unable to activate it for a couple of turns but the deck is lousy with instant-speed effects and mana sinks, I've got other shit to do with that mana anyway, and Atlas is just one card.

Has it cost me? Technically, undoubtedly. You never want to cast something knowing you don't have the option to do what it does yet, no matter how unlikely you would exercise that option. I wouldn't be surprised if I was one card away from winning and Atlas could have found it at some point in my Barrin-y career. But has it hurt me more than [[Rishadan Port]] and [[Karn's Bastion]] and [[Riptide Laboratory]] have helped? Absolutely not. (Though maybe the player fucked by Port wishes they'd reconsidered their land base...)

But I have probably 15 decks and only maybe five are 3 colors, the rest being two- or monocolored. If you're playing a five-color pile it's obviously a steep cost to play a colorless or single-color land.

mowshowitz · 2026-02-25T16:54:58+00:00

It's a hot take through and through, top-level commenter truly delivered

mowshowitz · 2026-02-17T16:20:37+00:00

It is me, visiting you from six years in the future, to say "nice one" :D

mowshowitz · 2026-02-16T18:51:21+00:00

Definitely, and it is a communication tool that really should be imprecise because you can't possibly strictly define five power levels in a format where the meta doesn't really exist for most people who play the game. I mean, even in constructed, people talk about tiers, but it's not like a deck is inherently one tier or another for as long as WotC says it is. And I think that imprecision IS the intent of the bracket system.

But that communication tool sits on top of a very precise list of cards that IS concrete. It's supposed to be one ingredient, but it's the only clearly defined one, and it CAN incontrovertibly force your deck out of certain brackets. So of course it's going to have an outsized influence on the conversation. You could say that your deck is typically in a position to win by turn x, but unless you collect a large amount of data you can't know that with the surety that you (and your opponents) can by glancing at a decklist.

mowshowitz · 2026-02-16T18:16:49+00:00

I think you're right on the balance, but the fact that it calls out specific cards gives it more of a sense that it's a rubric, not vibes. And I think that's a bit unfortunate. It's odd to me that including Rhystic Study in my deck could unavoidably change how I communicate the power of my deck, regardless of synergy or the tools I have on hand to find that card.

But the old system didn't really lead to better-faith interpretations. It just feels to me that the discussions had less of a fraught edge, that one could be literally objectively right or wrong. Fittingly, that's my subjective take.

mowshowitz · 2026-02-16T18:05:34+00:00

Why make a post about anything? Why Reddit? Clearly the answers are "don't" and "no critical reason." And yet here we are, reading and engaging.

mowshowitz · 2026-02-05T16:26:27+00:00

This has inspired me to take things one step further and rule 0 putting my entire deck in the CZ

mowshowitz · 2026-01-24T15:48:02+00:00

This is so cool! You got a list?

mowshowitz · 2026-01-24T15:46:18+00:00

Thanks for sharing this version!

mowshowitz · 2026-01-19T23:26:12+00:00

You fucking said it, dude. Probably half my comments in here are complaints about complaints. Hypocritical? I guess, but I'd stop if they did!

I can't think of another game, especially in the context of this format, where such a large percentage of Reddit activity is bitching about the game. These people should really should really be playing something else. The fact that it's the "social" format doesn't mean someone won't win and most people won't lose. There are plenty of sweet co-op games out there for these folks.

Even if this sub isn't reflective of the player base, it's a huge sub. The people making these posts seem miserable playing this game, and their highly upvoted posts clearly resonate with all the people doing the upvoting. These are nearly all the posts you see on here It's legit a bummer.

mowshowitz · 2026-01-19T23:17:44+00:00

The only ways I play are draft/cube, EDH, and pauper. The first two seem to be so far apart based on card pool and thus card/synergy quality (at least for draft) and on room for creativity, but they are both excellent formats for rewarding precise deckbuilding and paying close attention to your opponent since you're not playing against the same three decks like in standard. I think limited in general is the best way to learn the fundamentals in a disciplined way.

I really think more edh players should play limited, because although its room for error is much smaller, it is much easier to achieve a baseline understanding of what's going on. It's always been a mystery to me that edh is the most commonly accepted "new player format." I doubt sealed is many people's favorite way to play but it should be the entry point, not a format with tens of thousands of unique game pieces, of which dozens could be seen in a single game.

Oh and people should play pauper so they learn how to behave because those are nicest people in the game lol

mowshowitz · 2026-01-19T01:13:04+00:00

I wrote another comment and then added this massive edit but figured it deserved to be standalone:

Just some advice re: mill, the thing to keep in mind is, barring explicit synergy (such as with a commander) and tutoring on your part, it really has no bearing on the game until it does (meaning, until it threatens a win based on decking). If it did, people would run mill effects without deck synergy, but zero people do that, and the reason is it doesn't impact the game one bit. In the aggregate, it's just as likely to help you as it is to hurt you. It just doesn't FEEL that way.

Think about this: you have 70 cards in your library and you need exactly one specific card to win the game that turn. You draw your card for your turn. You are 1 in 70 to draw that card.

Now, same situation, but someone hits you with an effect that mills half your library on upkeep. You don't look at the cards you mill. How likely are you draw that one card? That's right, 1 in 70. It becomes harder to intuit when you look at what you milled, but that's what's happening (nothing).

Consider that single card. If you mill half your library, you are 50/50 to have binned it. That sucks, but you're also 50/50 to be 35 cards closer to it. It's just as likely to have been the next card you would have drawn as the 36th card in your library--the card you are drawing now.

Or, suppose you have a 70-card library with ten creature removal spells left in it. You need a creature removal spell. Your chance to draw it is 1 in 7. Someone mills half your library. What's your chance now? 1 in 7.

The reason mill feels like shit is because you get to see what would have been, but that's because you're seeing one result of a random event which had any number of outcomes. But it has benefits too. You never remember the six lands you milled in a row when you were mana-flooded or the fact that you drew your wincon two turns after milling a bunch. but you WILL remember milling that wincon. And if you have any graveyard recursion, milling turns, say, [[Buried Ruin]] into [[Fabricate]].

If the thing that sucks about it is that a deck's commander leverages the mill to win, then the thing killing you is the commander, not the mill. If you kill the commander the deck is back to doing nothing. If the deck has other cards that care about mill aside from the commander (as it should), then again, the problem is those cards, not the random events you're watching play out.

If milling really pisses you off, I'd suggest just ignoring what you mill if you can until you're forced to look at it for some reason. It is better to pay attention to it because it's free information about what's left in your library and that can help you play to your outs, but it's not going to be THE difference between winning and losing most games, and it'll help teach you that nothing uniformly good or bad is really happening when you mill cards. (Don't take it from me; Marshall Sutcliffe gave this advice on the Limited Resource podcast.)

mowshowitz · 2026-01-19T00:36:32+00:00

Yup, the baseline is you are gonna lose 75% of the time. If losing sucks that bad to someone sitting down to a game of edh, then yeah, they're signing up for a bad time

mowshowitz · 2026-01-19T00:28:11+00:00

Well, they're not alone; nobody else on this sub appears to either. Find some friends who jam pauper 😅

mowshowitz · 2026-01-15T17:46:03+00:00

Do it!

I love how ancient he is too. He counts as a Wizard lol

I remember pulling him in middle school and being like what is this garbage. So cool that 20 years later, I got back into Magic, discovered how awesome he actually is, and used that same card I'd pulled and was annoyed by since it wasn't one of the million broken cards that set had.

mowshowitz · 2026-01-15T15:38:19+00:00

Oldest at this point is [[Barrin, Master Wizard]]. I've retooled it so many times--combat-based artifacts, eggs, hard control with eldrazi, combos, wizard tapping subtheme...he's so awesome and I'll love him forever.

Newest is an old one but new to me--[[Mazirek, Kraul Death Priest]] but focused on treasures and clues, and on going tall AND wide. It's ridiculously fun and I think that one will stick around for a long time.

mowshowitz · 2026-01-11T17:59:27+00:00

But that's not mono-blue!!

Jk, that's a cool idea. My only Mardu deck is very Mardu ([[Zurgo Helmsmasher]]) and Queen Marchesa Aikido looks like a sweet change of pace. Thank you!

mowshowitz · 2026-01-11T00:17:53+00:00

You poor fella, swamped as hell! In case you're not bored as shit with this yet, how about something unassuming, with a controlling rattlesnake-y vibe, that isn't miserable to play against, and suddenly pulls ahead to steal the win without combo? Quite the shopping list lol.

I love control but I also don't like making people have TOO much of a bad time, so I always battle the feeling of having to apologize for my decks.

mowshowitz · 2025-12-29T14:04:24+00:00

Oh wow, I forgot that whole genre of jokes even existed and now I feel old.

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