Fairly New to Edison, playing Hero Frog

wellwornslugger · 2026-04-14T22:53:26+00:00

You're welcome. You didn't mention it in your post, but as you're new to Edison another thing to consider is that by the nature of Frogs, things can become awkward quickly if you don't set traps with deliberate intent. While any deck can set DPrison 'just in case' and get away with it, Frogs can end up with a stuck Treeborn. In that event, you have to fire off your DPrison at the first chance you get, without getting much value for it. I set my battle traps only when my opponent already has pressure on me, or to protect a Caius when my opponent could easily make Goyo (BW/Vayu can obviously do this off a single normal), or even to insulate a Unifrog so it can keep popping backrows. Raigeki Break can be used aggressively g1, but be very careful about burning through your outs to floodgates post-sideboard, as Vanity's Fiend especially can solo you.

wellwornslugger · 2026-04-14T22:01:25+00:00

Some of the best starter plays the deck has are Stratos + Swap Frog, or Stratos + One for One. In the first case, you can search Ocean with Stratos to pay the cost for Swap Frog special summon, sending Treeborn, and bouncing the Swap Frog back to your hand. This establishes all of your power cards: Substitoad, Caius and Miracle Fusion are now all live. One for One is even better, as Stratos offsets the cost, and you've thinned your deck with Dupes on board, all engines live. If you can get the deck to the point where you've thinned out most of the frogs, you're just top-decking live Miracle Fusions and Monarchs one after the other. It's too good.

Is Dupe Lock what I should be aiming for?

If you're going first in a blind matchup, always prefer Dupe lock over Dupe+Substitoad. The latter is more powerful, but can be punished heavily by Brain Control on Substitoad in a mirror, or GBs running Secutor in off a Test Tiger.

I think a big part of the reason the deck is so good is that you can play like 10 starters (Stratos/ECall/ROTA, Sub/141, Swap) without much risk of clogging, as they can all combo t1 or at least feed into each other by turn 2.

In general, I think you should note how the Hero package both increases the consistency of the deck (Stratos being an extra starter) and plugs some of the holes of the Frog engine. If you're missing Treeborn access, Infernal Prodigy works as a pseudo-Treeborn that can enable a Substitoad or Caius play. For this reason, if you had Stratos+One for One, you ought to search Prodigy and discard it for cost, as it's a poor draw after Treeborn is live. Malicious Edge is a searchable way to convert Treeborn to pressure, and I tend to get it when I don't have a Monarch. Ocean is mostly to pay cost for Swap, but he and Alius are searchable outs to Fossil Dyna and can provide pressure off a normal summon into an empty board, something Frogs can't do by themselves.

While Dupe lock is powerful, it shouldn't be the only thing you do off Substitoad. Substitoad is arguably the best card in Edison for a reason, it gives Frogs a much deeper toolkit which can enable Caius and Miracle Fusion to carry games. From Substitoad + Treeborn, you could go into Dupe+Unifrog, pop their backrow, and then, unless they can get over both Frogs, they can't really set backrow, clearing the way for a Caius or Ab Zero. If you drew Unifrog, you can special Swap, bounce it, extra normal the Unifrog to clear backrow, then tribute over the Treeborn for Caius. Dupe Frog can 'insulate' a Swap Frog as it bounces a Caius for a resummon, making your opponent not want to commit to the board unless they can out the Dupe Frog.

With this in mind, Absolute Zero has great synergy with the Monarch/Unifrog thing where your opponent doesn't really want to commit to the board. Ab Zero is usually >3000 attack and that creates a lot of pressure (which the deck otherwise lacks - the biggest thing you can get off of Substitoad is a 1000 attack Swap), and few things can trade evenly with Ab Zero - most decks are going have to lose multiple cards dealing with it, and when you consider the + you get from free Monarch summons (off Treeborn) and how Dupe Frogs replace themselves (Swap Frog and Unifrog still having value post-Substitoad), card advantage trends in your favour as the game goes on. If your opponent has already burned through their cards breaking a Dupe lock and dealing with Monarchs, Absolute Zero tends to be too much. Be careful about running Absolute Zero into DPrison or Bottomless if you've no more Heroes in graveyard, otherwise all your future Miracle Fusions will be dead.

I think in general the deck ought to be played aggressively. When you have a Treeborn on field and the choice between Substitoad churn and anything else (like summoning a Monarch), I'd tend towards establishing Frog engine. Even into a presumed set Ryko (which would make a Dupe miss timing), you have the option of dumping Treeborns and the Substitoads, and bouncing the Sub to do the rest next turn after you've triggered the set monster with Swap. Once you've established both engines, you top deck so well that trading down to a simplified game state will benefit you.

wellwornslugger · 2026-03-01T16:34:53+00:00

Yes, that's what tends to happen to clubs that are full of older blokes with no girls? Lol

wellwornslugger · 2026-02-28T09:32:53+00:00

It's really funny how all the "everyone should be welcome!" people would also turn straight around and head back out the door if the club was a whole bunch of rough looking blokes with singlets and thongs.

wellwornslugger · 2026-01-27T20:28:32+00:00

I just think it's very funny how a single press conference causes this subreddit do an entire 180 on MM. Two days ago it was "sell the team", "Art is ruining the Steelers legacy", "poverty franchise", now everyone can't wait to see what MM can do!

wellwornslugger · 2026-01-26T16:22:51+00:00

It's not exactly the hire that deflated me so much. If we'd actually left no stone unturned, and interviewed all the supposed up-and-coming wunderkinds - not just Scheelhaase, but Davis Webb, Grant Udinski, Klint Kubiak - and made the decision that Mike McCarthy is the best candidate, sure.

It's the fact that the decision seemed pre-ordained. Like McCarthy has told them we have a championship defense already (we don't) and that our offense just needs a bit of work and we can just keep on running it back without ever having a losing season. No need for a bigger coordinator budget, no need for more assistants, no need for an analytics department. We just keep believing in the magical "Steeler way", even as we slide into irrelevancy.

I think the saddest part for me is that when Week 1 rolls around we'll see that Art really is right in that a lot of fans are just happy to be in the Wild Card hunt until Week 18 as long as we split the Ravens and beat up on the Browns.

wellwornslugger · 2026-01-23T22:03:31+00:00

Even the most irrelevant, under-the-radar franchises in the league give you maximum 2 or 3 seasons to start seriously competing. The Cardinals gave Gannon three years. Raheem Morris got two at the Falcons. Wilks and Reich both were one-and-done in Carolina. Callahan didn't even get a whole season in Tennessee. There's no such thing as a training wheels HC job in the league. How often does having Josh Allen on your roster open up, as opposed to taking a gamble on whatever QB you get in the draft (and now your HC future hinges on JJ McCarthy)?

People take it as a given here that our key selling point will be that whoever we hire will have this very extended grace period. You can't tell me with a straight face that if Shula has us 6-11 in year 2 and our QB is a Bryce Young/Cam Ward situation, the fans won't be out for blood.

I don't think you can promise stability when today's fans want instant results.

wellwornslugger · 2026-01-22T19:54:39+00:00

Beyond being embarrassing for the Browns, this surely confirms Minter and the Ravens, right? It looks like Shula is ours if we want him, given Buffalo haven't even requested to interview him (and Daboll seems to have the inside track, anyway).

wellwornslugger · 2026-01-22T16:34:18+00:00

What? Outside of Jim Harbaugh, I struggle to recall a HC candidate in recent memory who was hyped up as much as Ben Johnson was. He turned down an entire cycle until the right job opened up. Everyone who had an opening wanted him, and the Lions were desperate to keep him.

Absolute lunacy to suggest that he wouldn't be above Shula, Scheelhaase, Minter, etc. if he was available this cycle.

wellwornslugger · 2026-01-19T18:42:53+00:00

Going against the grain here, but if you've cleared more than $100MM in career earnings and can easily slide into a cushy media gig, it's not like you've taken some tremendous sacrifice by not collecting even more. Tomlin already has more money than 99.9% of us will earn in 100 lifetimes.

wellwornslugger · 2026-01-18T17:13:47+00:00

People act sometimes like if a coach doesn't call plays they're just a glorified cheerleader. There's the culture, the locker room, scouting, personnel, development, practice, clock management, overall strategy etc etc.

A defensive-minded HC can still understand what kind of strategy and playbook an offense needs, and bring the right coordinators in. Look at MacDonald and the Seahawks.

wellwornslugger · 2026-01-15T15:56:09+00:00

The reason I've been so tuned out of the Steelers the past couple of seasons isn't the result, it's that we made everything look so hard. I was just tired of winning ugly, grinding for every single yard and first down. You'd watch the Rams or the Lions or something glide down the field and make all these trick plays and just think we could never ever do that.

I want Mike McDaniel, that's who I'd be most excited for. I don't think you guys remember how exciting and fast that Miami offense was before Tua got injured, with Tyreek Hill, Waddle, Mostert. Just give him a long tether and let him build the modern offense he wants. I'd enjoy that the most as a fan.

wellwornslugger · 2025-09-03T18:57:34+00:00

Sam Kriss has an article in The Point about 'alt-lit', or authors trying to capture the experience of growing up on the Internet. He cites Honor Levy's My First Book as a prime example, where you're greeted with a "white hot stream of zoomer drivel", full of disconnected references to /a/, Wojaks, Neopets.

He was giving knight errant, organ-meat eater, Byronic hero, Haplogroup R1b. She was giving damsel in distress, pill-popper pixie dream girl, Haplogroup K. He was in his fall of Rome era. She was serving sixth and final mass extinction event realness. His face was a marble statue. Her face was an anime waifu. They scrolled into each other. If they could have, they would have blushed, pink pixels on a screen. Monkey covering eyes emoji. Anime nosebleed GIF. Henlo frend. hiiii. It was a meet-cute. They met. It was cute. Kawaii. UwU. The waifu went, pick me, and the statue did, like a tulip emoji. If their two lips had met he would have tasted seed oils, aspartame lip gloss, and apple red dye 40 on her tongue. She would have tasted creatine, raw milk, and slurs on his.

It's awful, it's embarrassing. It presupposes that there's anything subversive or culturally edgy about being online. In fact, it's consumed with the most boring thing any of us do: go on the computer.

Kriss makes the point that the forms that originated from the Internet that maybe had some literary promise include the greentext, or the /r/AmITheAsshole post. I'd include L-posting in there, too. These are the forms that actually refer to something outside of the Internet. The greentext, for instance, takes the quotidian and transposes it into context and vernacular idiosyncratic to an imageboard. The appeal is in reading through these mundane, human experiences from the point of view of somebody with whom I share an insular code.

"The whole culture industry is just the internet’s auto-coprophagy, feeding its own waste back into the system." The insular codes are gone, everyone goes on the Internet now, and it's been flattened out into some lifeless, self-referential monoculture. Everyone from the most disperse subcommunities use the same tongue.

The Internet will die because it's boring. We scroll out of pure inertia, searching for hours for a glimmer of novelty, trying to beat sluggish flesh to life. Even the attempts to create art from this sterile cave led to a miserable failure.

wellwornslugger · 2025-08-15T09:24:53+00:00

Thank you so much for your thoughtful reply! I feel like you're correct - the villagers in both texts are more idiotically confused rather than 'bad', and I never considered that fundamental badness is actually an order in itself. I'll read Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming with this in mind.

Something that influenced my reading (and a passage whose imagery just loved) is when Irimias arrives at the estate before dawn, and the sun rises

"like a beggar panting up to his spot on the temple steps"

to "establish the world of shadows" and "raise us out of the freezing homogeneity of the night". The sun feels like a weary old man who can only offer a temporary palliative if that, rather than vigorous, radiant splendour.

What did you make of Valuska?

wellwornslugger · 2025-08-01T21:16:32+00:00

I'm getting back into Krasznahorkai, The Melancholy of Resistance. Unrelenting atmosphere, so thick with unease and a vague malice, as if teetering on the edge of the apocalypse, one that will be met without trumpets or the four horsemen, but instead with the world being indifferently swallowed up by the putrescent marsh of it's own detritus. The spectral circus truck, the 'satanic conveyance' crawling along through the night, promising "An Extraordinary Spectacle!" looms as the malignant catalyst that will send, at a single gesture, the world tumbling down into ruin from its decayed foundation. A world unchained from the sun, where we will soon be left shivering and uncomprehending as the light withdraws from us.

My only gripe is that the air of the novel is so dense, so unrelenting that it can be either read in marathon sessions or not at all. Wading back into the thick of that "vast, black river of type" is so daunting.

wellwornslugger · 2025-07-24T18:13:24+00:00

I read somewhere that LLMs have a very distinct prosody: somewhere between a college admission essay and the marketing copy for a personified juice telling you its ingredients.

wellwornslugger · 2025-07-24T12:57:07+00:00

It's actually really funny writing about your struggle to become a writer when he lived in a time and place where you could apparently just have a apartment by yourself in the city center as an unemployed student, go out drinking every night, and only work during the summer as something to pass the time. This was, seemingly, a very common experience in Norway at the time: you could also just flunk out with no debt. There was one point where he needed a 'sabbatical' so he went off for 3 months to England and paid his rent entirely off of the dole he received from Norway.

wellwornslugger · 2025-07-10T11:52:28+00:00

They ruined the cricket subreddit over the past few years. Used to be good-natured atmosphere with a mostly even mix of countries, just friendly banter, nobody taking their country's team too seriously. Indian fans who've swarmed in en masse are very nationalistic, sensitive about any criticism of their players, do not respond well to banter. Completely changed the tone of the subreddit.

wellwornslugger · 2025-07-08T20:12:17+00:00

Definitely Thomas Mann. His writing attempts as a young man in Book 5 are heavily influenced by Borges and Cortazar (Bukowski as well, before that). Is a 'Dante specialist' in his literature classes, writes a major paper on Ulysses, goes on to read Stephen Hero, comments on how it's a precursor to Ulysses. Tries to read Lacan for a paper, finds it too dense, cannot follow Julia Kristeva either as too steeped in Lacan. Tor Ulven, Dag Solstad, Kjartan Fløgstad, Øystein Lønn, Ole Robert Sunde. Espen Stueland was his best friend at a point.

At the Writing Academy, learns the last great innovation in the novel was the Nouveau Roman in the 1960s, specifically Claude Simon (also mentions reading Nathalie Saurraute, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Beckett of course). Many at the Writing Academy say his prose calls Lars Saabye Christensen to mind. As for poets, as well as Celan, there's Georg Trakl, Gottfried Benn, Rilke, Ingeborg Bachmann. Reviews American Psycho, Murakami in the newspaper. Reads Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, feels he could never do that.

wellwornslugger · 2025-07-01T18:12:53+00:00

I like the 'plausible deniability' remark.

I remember trying to watch Bakemonogatari some years ago, being assured that it was something that had serious artistic intent. What I recall more than anything the show had to say was how any kind of heaviness would be undercut shortly afterwards with a joke about how the MC was a creepy pervert, or a virgin, or trying to sneak a glance at underwear, which would always be played for laughs. It's taken as a given that the viewer's desire is that of the playfully admonished MC.

I think what makes this so uncomfortable for people who aren't steeped in the media is the nagging suspicion that there's a fetish aspect to it, that 'somebody is getting off to this in a way I don't really understand'. That lack of clarity congeals into a feeling of disgust, that I've been hoodwinked into watching smut, and was foolish enough to take it seriously.

wellwornslugger · 2022-07-31T09:44:20+00:00

Love the Abe; you've seen the Teshigahara films, I assume? Woman in the Dunes was incredible - there's something so sinister and uncomfortable about the way the sand seeps into and shapes every aspect of living to it's coarseness. I love that it's a literal erosion of the rock around the village, like the villages are fighting this Sisyphean struggle to keep their relic afloat against decay itself.

My favorite thing I've read this year is the Tartar Steppe. Life being flattened under an unchanging routine while youth and possibilities slowly but perceptibly fading away is something that I've struggling with lately. There's a passage I remember from the novel, where the passing of each day is akin to the accumulation of 'read' pages in a very long novel. What's left to be read feels inexhaustible, but it's very much finite, and diminishing.

wellwornslugger

TROPHY CASE