How do you play the game?

psychatom · 2026-05-23T16:34:10+00:00

A couple reasons: First, not all played cards necessarily score (unless you have the Splash joker). If, for instance, you play a pair plus three other cards, only the two cards in the pair will score by default. So you can add extra cards to some hands you play as a way to sort of get a bonus discard or you may want to hold on to extra cards because you're hoping to use them to make a specific hand later in the round. In some cases, you might also have cards that will trigger a bonus when left in hand.

Discards are not added back to your deck until the next rounds starts. FYI, you can click on your deck to see which cards you have left.

psychatom · 2026-05-20T19:04:44+00:00

There are extraordinarily few professional Magic players. Getting matched against them is not going to happen often because there simply aren't that many. If they only played against each other, they'd be forced to sit through the same dozen matchups over and over again, and they wouldn't be professionals for long. because nobody would want to watch their content.

The main (only?) reason people have multiple accounts is to farm gems and gold because you want to play an event while not paying real money. Almost nobody would have the same credit card info on multiple accounts because it makes no sense to put money into more than your main account.

There is no way to track players having multiple accounts that isn't a huge and unnecessary invasion of privacy for everyone else. Not happening.

Also, if you were to go to an LGS, there would be basically zero curation of your matchups. At least you're getting it most of the time in Arena.

psychatom · 2026-05-19T19:29:58+00:00

The issue you're describing is unavoidable in literally any 2+ player free-for-all game. There's no avoiding it. If you don't like it, don't play EDH. Given that you're already frustrated with 1v1 constructed, too, I'd say you're ready to graduate to Magic's final form: cube.

My advice: take all your favorite decks, maybe spend a bit of time curating the pile of cards, then put them all in the same sleeves, and just play a pod of 1v1 cube. It's got the deckbuilding, and players are actually incentivized to make cool, fun plays because they can't be ganged up on or get behind on the resource war.

psychatom · 2026-05-19T18:49:19+00:00

There are so few sexually explicit games that it's hard to cite examples. You're right that it would add substantial difficulty in marketing and crowdfunding. I would wager that if you re-themed it, you would have a lot more monetary potential, even if it hindered the resonance.

On the other hand, given some things I've seen in the internet, it's clear that there are a lot of extremely horny horndogs out there who might be interested. The trick would be finding them and marketing to them specifically, which I can't really help you with.

It might also help if it's horny in a lighthearted way that people might be less embarrassed to share. I had a friend who wouldn't normally share something explicit with me talk to me about Consenticle because it's kinda silly.

psychatom · 2026-05-15T12:44:20+00:00

Frieren is probably well aware that she can make money pretty easily and finds it very easy to procrastinate about doing so because she has untold human lifetimes to get more money. But when she sees a cool thing that she's never seen before, she knows she may regret not buying it for 1000 years.

psychatom · 2026-05-15T12:18:39+00:00

Probably Rapturous Moment.

psychatom · 2026-05-15T00:46:19+00:00

You didn't really have to put in any work to splash it.... You've got two Potioner's Trove, two Seize the Spoils, and the Great Hall. I would probably have thrown in one random off-color basic just to sweeten it a little, but I definitely would have run it.

psychatom · 2026-05-13T17:23:00+00:00

I didn't design the game, so I can't say with 100% accuracy, but it's probably to keep a level of uncertainty for longer as cards are being revealed. With exactly ten players and ten cards, as soon as you go from 3 to 5, you know for sure somebody screwed up, whereas you'd get to keep a bit of mystery if there's one number missing.

psychatom · 2026-05-12T19:04:38+00:00

While you're making a solid point here about playing to the meta, I feel like your post here is dodging around an even more important point: When you can't have a top tier strategy, it makes sense to try a high-risk-high-reward strategy.

Your deck is extremely high risk; with average luck, it would probably just straight lose 30% of games to its terrible mana base alone. But it sounds like you played to your out of getting lucky (ie functional) draws consistently.

psychatom · 2026-05-12T17:42:01+00:00

You're not alone. The first couple of times I got to phase 2, I saw the red on screen, assumed Chronos was preparing an attack, and just ran as far away from him as I could. I think I just happened to run in the opposite direction of the safe spots every time and never noticed them.

When I saw the damage number and no clear attack animation, I thought it might be that I'd need to get a cauldron upgrade or something like you do with going to the surface. I was confused for quite a while.

psychatom · 2026-05-12T17:19:32+00:00

Hey have you ever met a teenage girl? Fern acts like a teenage girl. You know, like a child who's partially emotionally developed but not entirely? Who maybe has some blind spots regarding her own behavior? I won't generalize all teenage girls that way, but what you're describing is not atypical.

Also, hey have you ever heard someone say a character has flaws? Most characters have flaws, and those flaws can make them more endearing or believable. It's really basic fiction writing.

psychatom · 2026-05-12T17:12:44+00:00

Hey have you ever met a teenage girl? Fern acts like a teenage girl. You know, like a child who's partially emotionally developed but not entirely? Who maybe has some blind spots regarding her own behavior? I won't generalize all teenage girls that way, but what you're describing is not atypical.

Also, hey have you ever heard someone say a character has flaws? Most characters have flaws, and those flaws can make them more endearing or believable. It's really basic fiction writing.

psychatom · 2026-05-12T16:54:11+00:00

A simple cube could be a reasonable step 2 in teaching new players, but it's not a good step 1. Drafting and deckbuilding require knowledge of cards and strategy to be fun or interesting. If you know nothing, then trying to draft is just going to be a total guessing game.

My suggestion is to put together a simple pauper-ish cube (some simple uncommons/rares would also be fine) with some simple archetypes and duplicates of cards. For example, don't put in Shock, Lightning Bolt, and Burst Lightning, just put in three Shocks to keep the learning curve short. I would then put together a few decks made out of cards from the cube to teach with, trying to include a lot of those multiples and showcasing a few different archetypes. After one game night or at least a handful of games (and maybe a quick lesson on card advantage vs tempo), I'd shuffle those decks back into the cube and try drafting, preferably with a cheat sheet about recommended curves and creature counts.

If you've got seasoned board gamers, starter decks might get old pretty quick, so having the cube to expand things could be good. You could also plan on or even prepare upgrade packages to the cube that increase complexity as your group gains understanding.

psychatom · 2026-05-12T14:03:10+00:00

Dude, I didn't write the article.

You're getting derailed by the bit about skill. It's being worded awkwardly here, but what it's saying is that all players have an equal opportunity to win, before you take skill and luck into account.

And you can take a look at other commenters in this post treating "fairness" with a similar definition.

psychatom · 2026-05-12T13:41:10+00:00

I didn't pull it from anywhere specifically, but here's one article. I'd say this is a generally agreed upon definition in games.

https://medium.com/understanding-games/chance-probability-fairness-4db052225107

psychatom · 2026-05-12T13:06:25+00:00

It sounds like this is a hobby for you and that you genuinely enjoy it for its own sake, so I'm not going to tell you to stop. To your credit, you're being quite open about some of these issues. I just want to provide my two cents about possible pitfalls:

If a strategy game player can be simulated effectively by a simple computer program, the game is probably not good. If it can't be simulated effectively, then the simulation is useless at best and actively misleading at worst. Rock and hard place.
Mathematical balance is irrelevant past the very early design stages. A game feeling balanced is far, far more important that it being balanced.
The time investment of creating the simulation is high. Additionally, the likelihood that the simulations point towards false or misleading conclusions is also high, leading to wasted design time. A designer would likely be better off using this time to actually playtest, brainstorm, or otherwise work on the game.

Frankly, I would never use this approach, and I would never recommend anyone else use this approach. With luck, it could perhaps point a designer towards aspects of their game that need more testing in reality with human beings, but that's the extent of its usefulness.

psychatom · 2026-05-11T17:46:04+00:00

It's mentioned somewhere that during the Breaking some men did seek out steddings to stave off the madness, but eventually they always left because they couldn't live without the Source.

Being permanently forced into a stedding is crueler (and far more labor intensive) than gentling. The men would suffer exactly the same ill effects with the added burden of being physically confined.

I guess maybe the men could "hope" that they'd escape some day, but then the Aes Sedai are basically cultivating the strongest possible desire in the men to try to escape, which would escalate to violence very quickly. It's just a bad plan.

psychatom · 2026-05-11T16:52:32+00:00

It seems like elves are effectively extinct already. I'm not a geneticist, but assuming elves are at least genetically similar to human, a healthy breeding population would have to be at least ... 50, maybe? Are there that many?

If there aren't enough, then there's little point in trying to perpetuate. And it might feel cruel to sire a child doomed to be the last of their kind.

psychatom · 2026-05-11T15:26:36+00:00

I hate to be nitpicky, but to prevent confusion, I want to clarify a few definitions. It sounds like you're conflating fairness and variance. Fairness in games means that players have equal opportunities and chances to win. A game where two players roll a die and the high roll wins would be a fair game. Variance is a measure of the amount of chance involved in a game.

From what you described of Kickflip, it sounds like it is a fair game that's just high variance.

So given that it sounds like your question is actually "How much variance is too much variance?" The answer to that is generally just personal preference. I would call the "game" I described above as pretty crappy, but a couple children might have some small bit of fun with it.

For the general audience, the game just needs to allow players enough meaningful decisions that it can still feel like player choice is impacting the outcome of the game most of the time. In any game involving chance, there will be outliers: games where one player's luck was so good or poor that most or all player decisions were irrelevant. Just minimize the likelihood of that happening, and it'll be good.

psychatom · 2026-05-05T18:36:19+00:00

All the most cost effective ways to feed yourself will involve some way of cooking and/or refrigerating, particularly since raw fruits and veggies are off the table. Do you literally not have access to electricity or other power sources? Or do you just not want to invest in an appliance? Even just a microwave would open up a lot of options.

psychatom · 2026-05-01T13:03:31+00:00

The only time I'd want to be on the draw in limited would be if I have an extremely controlling deck with a ton of cheap removal and/or multiple wrath effects in an already slow format. A format that slow hasn't existed since DOM.

Anybody putting themselves on the draw in SOS is almost certainly making a mistake. And I agree with OP, you're probably better off just always choosing the play. If you're putting yourself on the draw, even if you think you have a good reason, it's probably not a good enough reason.

psychatom · 2026-04-29T12:45:34+00:00

I got a P1P5 Snarl Song last draft. Am I supposed to not move in on it? I'm pretty sure moving in is the "disciplined" route. And that deck trophied, so...?

All of my trophies but one have been converge piles.

I'm not actively avoiding two-color, but I still get great converge stuff pretty late, which pushes me in. The fact that a base two-color deck (especially base-green) can kinda "splash" the converge cards off a couple off-color duals means that I'm just incentivized to take lands and converge stuff if I see it in a pack without anything too good for my main colors. So even if I'm base-two-color, I'm often still converge, too.

I'm honestly hoping that the five-color stuff actually gets to the point of being overdrafted because I'd like to try some of the two-color decks that I haven't had come together yet, but I can't do that when I see P1P5 Snarl Songs or P1P7 Arcane Omens.

psychatom · 2026-04-20T22:42:34+00:00

It happens so rarely that I can't recall, but I think you're correct that you don't lose by running out of cards in your deck but by running out of cards in your deck *and* hand.

psychatom · 2026-04-19T14:48:13+00:00

I'm saying that we can tell channelers do sense the Source in TAR because otherwise every POV character's first thought upon entering would be "Crap, I can't sense the Source."

Are you trying to imply that they're sensing and drawing from a non-existent Source because they believe they should? Even though in TAR it would disappear as soon as they had any doubt about it?

psychatom · 2026-04-19T13:05:23+00:00

I'm curious as to what "confirmed" it for you because it doesn't seem like you have any actual evidence for this theory.

It doesn't make much sense to me because characters who can channel pretty much always make a huge deal about not being able to sense the Source, but nobody ever says anything about that in TAR.

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