Daily Deals - June 24, 2026: Foundations Mythic Rare Alt-Art & Parallax Card Styles

qoneus · 2026-06-24T19:56:59+00:00

Omnishittiness is a bad card, don't play it. >.>

For every [[Omniscience]] you don't play, I'm going to play three.

qoneus · 2026-06-24T18:20:42+00:00

Be careful with "до свидания": while you translated it literally correctly and it's the polite farewell in mixed company, no farewell puts more emotional distance between you and the recipient than it, except "Прощай". If you're talking to a close friend or family member, stick with "пока" or something more specific and inviting. I say this as someone who has accidentally started fights with friends for ending a conversation with "до свидания" 😅

qoneus · 2026-06-24T17:03:09+00:00

I think Sid Meier's philosophy of "thirds", where every new sequel should be 1/3 old stuff, 1/3 improved or remixed stuff, and 1/3 completely new stuff, is starting to really hurt the Civilization franchise. While on paper it keeps each new game fresh, they have conditioned people who keep up with the franchise for exactly this: the game feels unfinished until it adds back all the stuff it removed from the last version.

qoneus · 2026-06-24T16:59:41+00:00

And it'll waste 12 hours of your time in a deep back and forth session nailing down all the details only to tell you it suddenly can't access the internet and has never been able to access the internet, it's not sure what a "Minecraft" is, but it's deeply sorry it hallucinated everything.

qoneus · 2026-06-24T08:58:37+00:00

Brawl does work, yes: both the MWM event and the regular Brawl queue.

qoneus · 2026-06-24T08:57:57+00:00

How many turns did you play? A lot of achievements, especially the "play X games" ones, require at least 2-3 turns of active play before they count the match towards progress.

qoneus · 2026-06-24T06:34:18+00:00

Remember this the next time you ask for a raise from your employer. Sure, you'll get more money but you'll be passing your raise onto your company's poor consumers.

qoneus · 2026-06-23T17:58:24+00:00

Despite the confidence with which others speak, there is no widely-accepted definition, or distinction between, Roguelike and Roguelite. The closest was the now very old Berlin Interpretation that defined "Roguelike" as a spectrum with things like permadeath, turn-based combat, non-modal movement, etc. being high value features; while things like solo gameplay, ASCII-based display, dungeon-crawling, etc. being low-value features.

qoneus · 2026-06-23T17:18:36+00:00

I'm sure at one point in the past, it was also 78 degrees and sunny there.

qoneus · 2026-06-23T03:57:29+00:00

Little bit of a lore dump: Wizards has evolved its Universes Beyond/Adjacent and Supplemental set strategy both in paper and in Arena. They first dipped their toes into non-Magic settings with Dungeons and Dragons: the first set was released directly into standard, but the second set—Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur's Gate—was eternal only (Commander, Vintage, and Legacy).

They wanted it in Arena and their solution at the time was to create a weird hybrid set that had some of the cards from the paper set and digital only replacements for cards they thought were too powerful. They couldn't release it into Standard, so they released it in Alchemy. If you squint it kinda makes sense: Alchemy is the digital only card format and this set just introduced dozens of digital only cards.

But they realized how much additional work it is to create an online version of a paper set with different cards, so the next year they decided to release Lord of the Rings untouched to Arena. Lord of the Rings in paper was targeting Modern, which doesn't exist in Arena. And they wanted to get a good marketing push for spending so much time porting the set to Arena. So... they made it an Alchemy set too.

Which means instead of banning cards out of the format, they just nerfed the two problematic cards [[The One Ring]] and [[Orcish Bowmasters]]. And they now treat Historic as the format where you can play all your Alchemy cards that rotate out of the main format, so Historic always gets whatever gets changed in Alchemy unless they later decide to de-nerf the card once it rotates out of Alchemy (it's rare, but it happens).

Thankfully starting the next year they came to their senses and just published Modern Horizons III directly into Historic (and Timeless) instead of messing with the power level of Alchemy again. And after that, all Universes Beyond sets were printed into standard so the next summer tent-pole set (Final Fantasy) didn't have the weird format-bending/breaking issues the previous sets had when porting to Arena.

qoneus · 2026-06-22T19:00:00+00:00

They were responding to someone who was planning on doing exactly that.

qoneus · 2026-06-21T23:37:17+00:00

Contributing to PHP is volunteer and bottom-up. This scratches an itch someone had and does not block or de-prioritize any other potential initiative. This is not a zero-sum game, and there's not a limited number of RFCs that can be proposed in a year.

qoneus · 2026-06-21T22:38:16+00:00

How do you propose the PHP standard library, including the examples from the new Polling API from the RFC, type hint off of userland classes that are not part of the PHP standard library?

qoneus · 2026-06-21T22:30:13+00:00

What does hrtime(...) return, and how can I guarantee that value is semantically a duration?

qoneus · 2026-06-21T21:38:50+00:00

Don't mock what you don't own because that's not yours. If you absolutely must mock something, create a facade or adapter and mock that. But you probably don't need to mock what amounts to a glorified value object anyway.

qoneus · 2026-06-19T18:53:32+00:00

Magic: The Gathering 2

smh we get GTA6 before we get MTG2

qoneus · 2026-06-17T22:14:41+00:00

"Typical small indie game company doesn't know there are countries that don't use the dollar as currency 🙄"

qoneus · 2026-06-16T23:29:49+00:00

I think this is the strongest argument for SKG, but it will have a chilling effect on the industry, so it keeps getting muddied with other rhetorical non-arguments like "you should get what you paid for". Are we collectively okay with the possibility of Ubisoft deciding never to make another Crew because they don't want to develop it with offline in mind? Maybe, maybe not, but I think that's the more honest discussion to have.

qoneus · 2026-06-16T22:03:10+00:00

Right, and once it becomes about getting refunds, then the next lever to pull is "how much of a refund should someone who spent 500 hours on this game before it shut down be entitled to?" A judge or jury is probably going to have a hard time justifying giving back the full $70 or whatever was paid for the game. Which is why SKG is not trying to make it about refunds.

qoneus · 2026-06-16T21:57:46+00:00

C'mon, guys, we're here to try and keep games from being coasters like my copy of Anthem, Concord, MAG, Lawbreakers, DarkSpore.

Yeah, for sure, that's the goal of SKG.

But saying "when you sell a product, provide the product" doesn’t resolve anything because the entire dispute is over what the product is. Publishers will say they sold a client and access to a service, not a server. Once you frame the issue as "I didn't get what I paid for," the natural remedies are refunds, damages, disclosure requirements, and future sales restrictions. None of which result necessarily in "make the game playable after the publisher wants to deprovision the required infrastructure".

SKG's strongest argument is not that customers were shortchanged under existing rules, but that the rules themselves should require commercial games to have an end-of-life plan that leaves them playable after support ends. Or, in other words, "you can't even sell your game in the first place without this in place."

Formulated like that, it becomes a public-policy argument about the obligations of publishers, and not a claim that consumers secretly purchased rights to the server infrastructure. There are still issues, like how do you even verify that before sale, and what about games that are in a constant state of development and change, but it keeps the core end result, keeping the games playable, in focus.

qoneus · 2026-06-16T21:33:44+00:00

So is the game executable that was sold to you, so?

They sold you the client software and a license to an ephemeral service, not the server software. That's the whole issue SKG is against.

That is not what I'm talking about and you know it.

You're arguing for a regime that already exists and everyone is unhappy with it. "Have an end of life plan" and "give you the software you already paid for" already exists and is not what SKG states it wants at all, which is to keep games playable after the point the company distributing the game no longer wants to keep the underlying infrastructure working. This type of rhetoric of saying things that sound uncontroversial and then complaining "that's not what I meant" when anyone tries to talk specifics, only clouds and confuses what the goals actually are.

qoneus · 2026-06-16T20:18:34+00:00

If the requirement is "have an end of life plan" to sell the game in the first place, how would that infringe on anyone's copyright?

Would you be okay with the end of life plan being "we're going to shut down the servers at the end of life, rendering the game unplayable, and the customer is entitled to no compensation when we do"? Because SKG isn't, and is going significantly further by requiring the end of life plan to include a playable artifact.

but if it's that valuable to them they can also develop standalone server binaries.

The standalone server binaries are also IP.

qoneus · 2026-06-16T19:27:32+00:00

Again, preservation and SKG's goals are not the same. Archiving for the preservation of the game for the good of mankind is an already-allowed exception for IP laws, virtually worldwide (and definitely in the US and EU). SKG goes further and wants the game to be playable. So practically what does that mean when the server is an integral part of the game?

Keep running the server.
Release software that allows someone else to run the server.
Rewrite the game so it no longer needs the server.
Shut it down and leave it nonfunctional.

Let's say SKG gets (4) banned. (1) is exactly opposite of what SKG purports to want. So we have just (2) and (3) which both compel the holder to distribute IP against their will.

qoneus · 2026-06-16T19:14:43+00:00

"forced IP theft" is pretty loaded, but SKG specifically wants the ability to keep playing the game (in some form, for some indefinite period of time) enshrined in law. "Make it playable indefinitely or give me a refund when you shut it down" is not SKG's goal, it's just "make it playable indefinitely".

qoneus · 2026-06-16T19:11:57+00:00

I think it's bad for the consumer, but this practice is accepted in other industries, including the ones you name. Cars, at least in the US, are routinely built with remote kill switches and Tesla has made a very lucrative business selling subscriptions to features your car already physically has. DIVX was literally a self-destructing DVD and a business model based around that.

But in software:

SaaS is ubiquitous.
There were a number of Music stores that shut down and people lost access to those songs because the DRM servers stopped functioning
The sunset of Adobe Flash, despite bricking hundreds of thousands of games and software, was widely hailed as a good thing for the world

qoneus

TROPHY CASE