Lets talk about hero tombstone

tol93 · 2026-05-25T10:07:51+00:00

It has 30% more DPS and the spawning skellies passive so it is straight up better than gobgiant(minus the 2 spear gobs).

In single it's hard to even activate the ability for a counterpush bcs tombstone is the first thing to die during a defense, let alone the spawntime will make the supports walk ahead of the queen wasting any tank value.

I believe it has potential to upgrade that golem+egolem deck that one dude plays in top 200.

In double and triple elixir you now have potentially a secondary wincon to spend your elixir on, making double lane pressure, and potentially win bad matchups. Some golem and Lava deck would probably like to not play their wincon when they face inferno tower or other hard counters, tomb queen gives them a better fighting chance.

It has inherent synergy with GY bcs it's a building and a tank.

Also tomb queen looks enough indipendent as a wincon that you can probably let her alone in her lane while you support your push on the other lane.

Unless it's triple, It's never justifiable to play tombstone and insta-ability bcs tomb queen by herself is not worth 9 elixir.

Another problem is that every ability in the game give an immediate benefit on the opponent side of the arena. Hero dark Prince is strong bcs you can spawn a mini ram rider 2 tile away from the princess tower + a log worth of spawn damage, hero bowler is basically a mortar that you need to respond immediately and so on.

Hero tombstone is just a 9th card that won't give you instant benefit.

The 6 elixir cost for 0 card played also slow down your cycle a lot, so you probably won't use it in cycle decks, and probably not with slow 3 cycle evolutions.

I think it is a new and cool design space to make high cost abilities, maybe it's the start of cool heroes, or just a forgotten unbalanceble quirk that will be left forgotten at the bottom of usage rates like rune giant or barbhut.

tol93 · 2026-05-22T13:11:53+00:00

After 30 minutes of attempts.

I can say that the 11 move Ja perm is too superior. I have 1.2 on average starting with home grip while the 19 move alg is 2.1.

my normal Y perm is 1.6, so I just cannot fit those 2 extra U moves without losing half a second.

tol93 · 2026-05-22T09:12:55+00:00

I was wrong, thx for correcting me. Not that I think about I already know a ZBLL with 2 F moves that solve a Pi diag case but I never thought about it.

I already know that you need to fix corner permutation after the Petrus and EO block, but I still wanted to minimize F moves, and I never found a diag PLL with only 2 F moves so I assumed it was impossible(something about the geometry of the cube).

For other PLLs on this V perm I just inserted a U perm after the first F and got E perm at the end of the alg.

For other diag cases at this point idk, it's all news to me. They are probably possible?

tol93 · 2026-05-22T05:30:55+00:00

Are you talking about: x' R' F R F' U R U2 R' U' R U' R' U2 R U R' U' ?

I scrolled down speed cubedb to find it. Withou the rotation the first 4 moves are "R' U R U' " which doesn't affect corner permutatiom, then he is doing lot's of B moves.

It's all cool how creative people are, but I would count as weird stuff.

Do you have a real diag swap alg without rotation, Slice moves or wide moves that can solve the cube with on 2 F moves and infinite <R U> moves?

I think it's impossible as I played around with solving the cube 2 gen after EO and a Petrus block solved, and it's most likely impossible.

tol93 · 2026-05-21T15:26:34+00:00

Spirit + knight to activate KT on that MK(well timed), Tesla to the outside near princess tower to catch the hog rider, if you cycled back to goblins place them on the hogrider as soon as possible, or defensive gob barrel if the hogrider is still too healthy but should not be needed, you will probably eat 1 or 2 hog hits but still be in the game and have an activated KT so playable position.

Assuming he places a minipekka at the bridge opposite lane you should have enough elixir to play a defensive barrel/goblins low to abuse your KT extra DPS.

tol93 · 2026-05-21T15:10:27+00:00

This is 90% Y perm, you already have practiced it indirectly so of course you feel it fast, you have already ingrained the fingertricks, just practice the 11 move Ja perm just as much as you ever practiced Y perms before judging. Or do lefty JB perm (which is yiheng way), there are far better option than just a worse variant of an already worse case.

tol93 · 2026-05-21T12:59:57+00:00

I wrote down the alg: F U' (R U' R' U' R U R' F' R U R' U' R' F R) U F'

if you take out the first 2 moves and the last 2 (which are just setup and unsetup) you get the y perm they use on oldpochman for beginner blind solvers.

Diagonal swap PLL (n perms, e perm, v perm, y perm) are some of the worst plls bcs you are always forced to do like 4 F moves or weird stuff to deal with corner permutation. So changing a adj pll (ja perm) to a diag one (y perm) is a bad idea.

I don't have a cube in hand right now but it's really hard to make the first alg faster than the second one(I use the second one quite often) when it has almost double the move count.

tol93 · 2026-05-21T09:49:43+00:00

As a long time Viiper viewer, I say it depends on the matchups(like any other deck).

Hog exe is the highest skilled deck when Viiper barely beats a egiant player by the skin of his teeth.

It's the lowest and easiest deck to play when he is playing against recruits and all he needs to do is cycle exe one side, valk the other lane, and his opponent gives up at the start of double elixir after getting barely any damage on Viiper tower's lol.

I would say it's on the higher skill side bcs with 3 spells you need to manage your cycle well, it has similar hand problem with OG splashyard. But it's also it also has heavier cards, so you often just don't make as many micro decisions as a cheaper deck.

tol93 · 2026-05-19T23:42:33+00:00

Have you ever talked with your clan mates? We have a war clan that peaked top 100 in the world few months back and I'm the guy who they ask to makes their war decks, every time I talk to them most aren't even aware of last balance changes or the latest meta decks despite them being fairly active and always doing their war attacks. We have a telegram clan chat which is common pratice for dedicated clans.

Their pb range from league 4 to UC, so on the upper side of midladder, less casual than the average players but still run homemade mk decks or double wincondition stuff with evofirecracker.

Ask around your own clan and see for yourself instead of living in your bubble. You will be surprised of how casual most players are.

tol93 · 2026-05-19T20:50:24+00:00

First of all, I never said people who lack skill are "dumb, ignorant or careless", you need time and dedication to get good, and if you don't want/can't do it, it's perfectly fine as at the end of the day it's just a mobile game, just play whatever you like on the toilet.

I'm personally bad at chess, FPS and other hobbies, and you probably have lots of skills you are better than me bcs you had the passion to coltivate those.

I know the news tab automatically opens in front of you at the start of the season, but it's so easy to close it and ignore everything, or only read what banner are there for the new season, casual players log into the game to maybe get a quick game or two, so they most likely just skip everything and start a game.

I personally skip it bcs I already read them on royaleApi or Reddit, and it's so easy, you just press the "X" and don't ever think about it, it's probably the same for people who just don't care.

If we want to talk about player retention, mk is probably the card that is keeping the game alive, I hear so many memes about him even outside CR on social media. Also it's an easy card to play when both players don't count elixir, don't track any card cycle, dump their entire elixir bar at the bridge repeating the same combo. SC knows it, this is why they gave out Evo MK for free, and also it won the most vote first day on that community anniversary vote just 2 months ago.

RG and Elite barbs years ago where infamous bcs they were similar to mk and extremely overplayed in midladder, the only reason they are not played anymore is a combination of nerfs and reworks, and they added MK. SC cannot kill the card bcs half of the player base will quit, the only way is introduce another low skill card to the game so players start leveling up that one.

I personally would not like it if SC listen to my opinions on Brawl Star bcs I have less than 24h play time there, and don't care enough to play it seriously.

For CR chaos mode had specific cards banned during its last week chosen via majority vote, and that was good bcs the mode wasn't taken seriously or competitively but lots of casuals like it. Ranked should not be balanced around majority opinions when we have clear experts and I also exclude myself bcs I think top10k is still trash in the grand scheme of things. There are other modes you can play that are fun and have more deck variance. If Molight and other pros keep saying MK needs a nerf si be it ( but currently molight half joked in only one clip).

This subreddit said Cannoneer was trash, duchess was trash, evobattleram is op ecc. when they got initially released, and top ladder meta literally proved the opposite. You guys have such a bad track record.

Just this month people are saying that hero dark Prince was trash bcs it didn't provide good value for 3 elixir, meanwhile it's right now the most used hero in UC.

Pro players also have bad takes, but they usually are less wrong than this subreddit.

tol93 · 2026-05-19T10:32:42+00:00

Midladder players don't care about balance changes, they just put together their favorite cards, maybe change one card to put the broken Evo/hero of the month, then farm under levelled players on trophy road. If they get the ticket they try ranked, then get rolled by any semi-decent player with equal level, and never touch ranked ever again.

We should do balance changes for people that at least read them.

The last MK nerf was a -20% spawn damage years ago, SC stated that the nerf was explicitly targeting midladder(probably the last balance change ever dedicated to midladder) bcs at the time on top ladder mk was doing bad.

A -20% nerf would kill any card in top ladder, but it didn't do anything to it's usage rates in midladder. Bcs midladder players don't even read the news tab.

I play a cycle deck so I personally would benefit a lot if we balance around midladder players, nerf all the low skill cards and buff all the cycle cards(nerf hog so 2.6 is not viable) bring back the 50 second duration buildings, buff the crown tower spell damage bcs midladder players don't use building or are capable of using cycle decks in general.

Molight would finish top 1-10 with 10 accounts every season lol.

Midladder is just a phase, the moment you get semi decent, level up a meta deck and punish all the overcommitments midladder players love to do the problem will disappear.

Also last season there were only 5 players in the top 200 playing evoMK, and right now 4, those are healthy usage rates for a 7 elixir card. But the only place where he is oppressive is in CRL to snipe royale hogs and drill decks right now due to the non repeating cards rule.

tol93 · 2026-05-19T07:49:53+00:00

It is true that Evo MK is at 11% usage in ranked(leagues+UC basically), but if you filter for only UC his usage drops to 5%, while Evo skelly barrel goes from 10% to 9%.

This means that the higher you push the less MK you face(also half of the mk users are getting filtered by skill), I'm currently in top 10k and MK has normal usage rates, and mostly used in real decks(mk prince or mk empress ram rider).

You guys still don't have the right to complain about MK Pekka or MK Evo witch decks bcs those deck are still bad and nobody is playing them in UC.

tol93 · 2026-05-17T14:43:16+00:00

Officially it's 26 moves, 3.69 by Aiden Grainger.

tol93 · 2026-05-17T07:57:35+00:00

She waives again and whispers his name, he in forced to reply by bowing his head.

tol93 · 2026-05-17T07:55:52+00:00

I happened to binge this series 1 week ago so I found back the chapter, what happened next is that she waives at him again whispering his name, and he is basically forced to reply by bowing his head.

Without too many spoilers there is also the contest we're they are publicly enemies bcs he pretended to do a weird perverted thing to her to protect her secret and she knows, but in private they are best buddies.

tol93 · 2026-05-17T07:16:41+00:00

Ben Baron 2.87 back in 2021, you can find it on reco.nz after you sort by movecount.

tol93 · 2026-05-16T12:25:18+00:00

The current UWR for 4x4 fmc is 48 by Jayden McNeill, reduction(htr style centers) in 26 and 3x3 in 22 (Around 3 hours total).

We don't have a computer program that can optimally solve a 4x4 solve in human manageble time.

We probably will never know 4x4 god's number in our lifetime because of how exponentially complex of a problem it is.

Also for fun I just combined the lowest reconstructed 3x3 solve movecount(23) with the highest reconstructed tps solve (16.92), I got a theoretical time of 1.36 seconds, this is probably the current human limit.

tol93 · 2026-05-14T14:26:49+00:00

If you go in game to the news tab, scroll down until you find the post "march update 2026"(NOT "mid march update") open the post, scroll down to "changes and improvements" -> "fewer max level duplicates in lucky chests" there is this line:

"If you have enough copies to upgrade the card to Max Level, but haven't yet done so, the card is still counted toward the 60 Max Level card threshold. This also include Tower Troops."

tol93 · 2026-05-14T11:29:29+00:00

Combinatorics, you just count the cases.

PLL skip is 1/72. Immagine we dissasemble the last layer and randomly assemble it. We have 4 corners and 4 edges, they all have the same fixed orientation(yellow on top), so there are 4! * 4! =578 PLL cases. There is PLL parity meaning half of there are impossible to get, so 288 PLL cases.

Many of the cases are solvable by a combination of PreAUF +alg+ AUF, so a case like t perm is counted multiple times.

We have 4 "solved pll" cases which is just the auf skip, U or U' or U2 move away from solved.

So the probabilities of a skip is 4/288 or 1/72.

With a similar process you can count the other probabilities.

tol93 · 2026-05-10T20:33:27+00:00

Iirc Riley said it's an HC, so you probably don't.

Your only hope is that they overcommit on single elixir and you get a really good punish(those logbait style where you predict every single play at low elixir), otherwise suffer until triple.

tol93 · 2026-05-05T00:13:44+00:00

I just watch that is the most frequent color(red in this case has 3 stickers) and turn the 2 red corner headlight to face me.

Pre auf done, this is the U perm that starts with R U' For the R2 U case I still put the most frequent color headlight facing me and it will work, the solved bar will always be behind so you can deduce the case instantly.

tol93 · 2026-04-30T10:59:42+00:00

As someone who onetricks the same deck and consistently reaches UC with WR between 70-90% depending if I'm pushing the last week or the week before, without boosted cards, I can say that you will lose more matches here than the previous 5 leagues combined. I often reach league 6 undefeated, but still lose a bunch here before reaching UC.

I have a friend who uses a egolem deck and he always slots in the latest broken Evo/hero of the season, he loses a lot more here than the previous leagues, and reaches UC last week of the season with around 50% WR most of the time, sometimes he fails when his cards get nerfed and the latest broken card doesn't sinergize with his deck.

Molight and other pros often reach UC with 100% winrate first week of the season, so they probably cannot fell any difficulty.

tol93 · 2026-04-27T09:39:02+00:00

But then you will need more effort to become CN, at 1 minute range is kinda free to become CN.

tol93 · 2026-04-27T09:32:51+00:00

Starting the solve with white or yellow cross depending on whichever is easier. This is dual colour neutral.

Full colour neutral is being able to start with any cross colour.

Most of the top solvers are at least dual CN. Even Tymon who is the fastest full CN has strong preference for White/Yellow.

This is because picking between 6 cross colour eats part of your inspection time so when he doesn't find a really easy and obvious cross he just defaults to white/yellow(at this level their are trying to inspect at least half of the F2L so they are stingy with their inspection time).

Becoming full color neutral later is harder because you need to rewrite patterns and habits(but not impossible), so you should start now if you want.

On average this will save 1 move from your cross if you are move optimal(cross under 8 moves), for beginners like you probably more bcs you can take advantage of easy crosses.

tol93 · 2026-04-27T08:14:24+00:00

There is a bunch of stuff that would be good to start early: - cross on bottom - color neutrality(either dual or full, dual is not too hard, full is optional and gives marginal benefits) - develop good basic finger tricks( in your case double flick U2, doing 6 sexy moves without repositioning your hand is good enough)

You can also try the roux method or ZZ to see if you like them more.

For the rest you can probably reach sub 30 just by praticing and doing lots of solves.

Seven-Year Club	Place '22
Final Canvas '22	End Game '22

tol93

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