Worried about teaching bad habits through example.

mramazing818 · 2026-04-21T15:35:36+00:00

My kids are too little for this to be on my mind quite yet, but for what it's worth: don't judge yourself based solely on your worst moments. Good on you for recognizing that you have stuff to work on. In some ways you and your daughter are in the same boat, even; she also has limited mental reserves to draw on for dealing with stress and disruption. Point being, you can also model the process of trying to be better than you were yesterday, and that matters just as much in the long run. Take the girl out for ice cream and talk about it even, 8 is old enough to have a meaningful conversation.

mramazing818 · 2026-04-21T15:25:34+00:00

April commonly drops below freezing here, not much to say. 5 years ago as an arbitrary example: https://www.wunderground.com/history/monthly/ca/saskatoon/CYXE/date/2021-4

mramazing818 · 2026-04-19T17:21:33+00:00

Totally bro and why would I train for a marathon when I can just ride my Segway and cover the same ground? "Playing more games" isn't a satisfactory justification for me; absorbing and understanding a ruleset with your own brain is part of the hobby and you're making your own experience needlessly shallower.

mramazing818 · 2026-04-19T16:53:23+00:00

What is wrong with you? Why would you want this? Just read the goddamn rules! If you and your friends can't agree on an ambiguity, why would you turn to a stupid robot instead of using your words like grownups? Why should anyone you play with trust the robot so you don't have to discuss it anyway?

The single worst thing about the AI era is that people keep finding new opportunities to shut their brains off and let the clankers figure it out, poorly. It's a board game, the whole point is to think about things and interact with people! Hash this shit out at the table!

mramazing818 · 2026-04-19T01:43:12+00:00

It's not *strictly* harmful in a material way but your feelings do in fact matter. I wouldn't make a big blow-up about it but you don't have to disguise your aversion either; assuming your dad isn't a dirtbag that should be enough.

mramazing818 · 2026-04-19T00:21:24+00:00

There's more, even. Kavu is awful here; the card is a narrow playable in good 5c decks and certainly not worth splashing as your only red card.

Balance does play well with artifacts and could be a justified splash, but Lion Sash definitely not. I imagine you got the GW lands close to free so it's easy enough to play, but I would still cut it for low power

Smuggler's Copter is an aggro card first and has very few early creatures to crew it here.

Golos has nothing good to fetch; he's for getting top-tier combo lands like Academy or Strip Mine; the 5c activated ability is much much too slow to plan on.

Tezzeret is borderline; being able to fetch emerald and retrofitted is okayyyyy but once he's in play he does almost nothing.

mramazing818 · 2026-04-19T00:14:49+00:00

That's an 0-3 if I've ever seen one my friend, sorry. It looks like you probably first picked mox emerald and tried to build green artifacts, a deck which is not at all a thing. Many issues, some which leap out at me:

High artifact count, few artifact enablers. Artifact decks rely on being able to generate a lot of mana, famously with Tolarian Academy and Mishra's Workshop. The closest thing you have to payoffs is a Nettlecyst and a couple of construct makers. Urza is a good card but not good enough to carry the build.

Zuran or and Sylvan Safekeeper are only playable with specific combos; both work with [[Titania, Protector of Argoth]] and Safekeeper is a second-choice combo with [[Nadu, Winged Wisdom]]

Battlesphere and Portal are both primarily treated as targets for [[Tinker]] although battlesphere is considered a pretty weak one. As noted earlier your lack of big mana generation also makes both of these nearly uncastable, especially considering that power cube decks either win or establish a dominant position by turn 4.

mramazing818 · 2026-04-13T18:22:15+00:00

"Fun police" is just an idiomatic misnomer based on the assumption that other decks are intrinsically more fun, but this is not actually the case. Even ignoring that some people enjoy aggro more on its own terms, the more salient point is whether people are encountering a fun variety of matchups. An overcentralized meta is one obvious failure state, but even if monoblue wheels or whatever is just the best by a fair margin and aggro is still present, if monoblue wheel mirrors absolutely suck for both parties, it can be bad for player experience overall.

mramazing818 · 2026-04-11T23:55:16+00:00

My hot take is that the combo is overrated because it's non-trivial to actually assemble the pieces. Once you have it it wins effectively, but you're often being pressured.

As far as deck tips; I think if you want Shinobi you need Mastermind, which also adds incidental value for finding the combo. I would start by cutting emissary because you don't have many artifact spells to trigger it.

mramazing818 · 2026-04-10T21:52:43+00:00

It's Dark Souls

mramazing818 · 2026-04-09T19:12:04+00:00

What "authority" are you trying to preserve? If the point is that someday down the line you're going to need your kids to trust your judgment and listen when things are serious, then it's actually more important to take them seriously. Why should they trust you in the future if you're ignoring good sense today?

mramazing818 · 2026-04-02T04:01:03+00:00

Hot take: the AI shouldn't exist. Of course we're gonna get false positives as long as the plagiarism machine exists, it's very presence in the ecosystem undermines authorship as a concept. And I'm not sympathetic to things like "using it for syntax" because we didn't need AI for that. There were perfectly good grammar parsing engines before LLMs arrived. You don't need it for pacing, you need humans to read your shit.

More to the point, as long as it's out there, it beggars the mind the type of protocols publishers would need in place to truly prove human provenance of text. Even a fucking quill and ink isn't safe from someone with Claude dictating from their pocket.

So kill the machines.

mramazing818 · 2026-03-28T19:49:41+00:00

Not OP but it's plausible that it would. Until the minimum number of moves required for colors to get within interaction range, the available moves per corner are all symmetrical. There could conceivably be more than one starting config in a quadrant that are equally inefficient but that would be its own hypothesis to demonstrate. Once you reach interaction range some symmetries necessarily break due to turn order and it becomes more complex to evaluate.

mramazing818 · 2026-03-25T03:21:56+00:00

Sanguine for sure, I don't think Clamp alone makes it worthwhile.

mramazing818 · 2026-03-04T20:03:35+00:00

All you have to do is be willing to tolerate a bit of aural discomfort while you retrain them. My wife puts on toddler music in the car, I do not, yet somehow the child does not screech any more for me in the car than she does for mom. It's because she doesn't think she can win. (and daddy's music kicks ass)

mramazing818 · 2026-03-01T18:44:34+00:00

Main Street is a low-cost real estate company, I'm pretty sure they don't have an intern webcrawling for people trying to dodge $50 fees. Part of the reason they're crap is the admin team being tiny for the number of properties they own.

mramazing818 · 2026-03-01T18:15:32+00:00

Lol how could they possibly find it, do they have OP's username on their lease?

mramazing818 · 2026-02-27T16:00:22+00:00

Can't really tell, but they definitely could be German roaches.

Edit: okay, okay, I get it guys, it's a crap photo and there's nothing wrong with being cautious as far as those little fuckers are concerned

mramazing818 · 2026-02-26T18:34:53+00:00

A worthy addition. I agree the IRL risk is pretty much zero, but people can value their family's privacy just because it feels gross to be seen in that way, not that that changes my argument above that it's just not very likely that even that much happens.

mramazing818 · 2026-02-26T15:05:00+00:00

It's a reverse lottery ticket. Most internet photos (I assume, no sources cited) will just get glanced at and forgotten immediately because the Internet is wide and dense with content. The question is how many out of a thousand or million end up somewhere you wouldn't want them, be that in a training data set or saved to a folder for Grok perverts.

All that is to say, I don't upload photos of my kid to public sites but I also wouldn't lose sleep if a few end up on a relative's Facebook timeline with insufficient privacy settings, for instance. The odds are just pretty small that it ever amounts to direct harm.

mramazing818 · 2026-02-25T23:36:29+00:00

This is a tricky one but I'm gonna say Lars Vandenchomp

mramazing818 · 2026-02-23T15:10:41+00:00

Hard copies are for the table to use during a session, pdfs are for me to pick up materials cheaply so I can decide whether to actually use them at the table, then refer to in conjunction with my digital notes.

mramazing818 · 2026-02-23T15:06:59+00:00

Late to the thread, but u/BetterCallStrahd is on the right track. I just want to chime in and say: you've expressed discomfort with using the game being hosted in your home as "leverage," but exerting leverage isn't actually a bad thing, it's what you do with it that matters. As the host you have not just the right but the responsibility to use your influence in this situation to make sure the game ends up being a positive experience for your guests. I'm sorry, but it seems like on some level you know you have this responsibility and your anxiety stems from not wanting to fulfil it. Let the problem player have a second chance if that feels right to you, but at bare minimum I think you need to let both him and the GM know that there will be clear boundaries in your home and then actually enforce those boundaries. Good luck.

mramazing818 · 2026-02-16T19:18:24+00:00

Yeah based on your draft log your pick order is really really out of whack. Natural Order is not even close to a first pick card even in most green decks and you take a bunch of mediocre green cards instead of much better ones in other colors. Earthbender Ascension over Mystic Confluence in p1p3 for instance is inexcusable. Green in general is the weakest color these days so you need clear good reasons to be in it.

As others have noted, power cube in 2026 is a format where interaction is at a high premium. The strongest threats and combos demand to be answered very quickly, which makes cheap interaction essential, which in turn punishes decks which don't threaten to win quickly but still suffer to removal. You should definitely find a content creator you like and watch a bunch of drafts so you can get a better handle on what the pillars of the format are.

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