I think “mandatory physical versions” kinda misses the point of the issue, tbh. It’s bad digital rights laws that are the cause of the problems that you’ve mentioned, not a lack of physical media. DRM has been around a lot longer than digital downloads of games, and shutting down a game’s online services affects purchasers of physical disks just as much as digital downloaders.

Besides, mass-producing physical media is expensive, and I’d rather not give publishers another excuse to make games even more expensive than they already are.

I think the implication is that an anxious person would be so worried about the other person’s model of them that it takes up all of the space in their brain.

Insert image of guy in hot dog suit here

Well, I guess “making your country such a shithole that no one wants to come here” is technically one way to stop immigration…

Could they have made the headline any more misleading??

“I am the saber-toothed seal” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, though…

I can kinda see the “too fast” complaint with stuff like Brawl or other unranked modes, but in any ranked modes, winning is the point, so I feel like there isn’t really any room to complain about fast and efficient decks in ranked play. Idk which modes you tend to play, so that may or may not be relevant. At the very least, fast decks let you get on to the next match sooner.

Agreed on ropers, of course, though I don’t see a whole lot of intentional roping that often. However, I usually play Brawl, and otherwise have only have one janky ranked Historic deck that usually hangs out in silver, so I don’t know if it’s worse in higher rank tiers. More often I see people who just seem to have trouble making decisions quickly, or don’t seem to notice that they have priority until the rope starts. It’s mildly frustrating, but it usually doesn’t appear to be intentional so I try not to get too mad about it.

On wilds, I actually got into the Arena alpha test back in the day, but I’ve taken a few multi-year breaks from it since release. I’ve found that if you play consistently across the lifetime of a set, you can end up filling out a lot of it, but actually catching up on sets that you’ve missed, especially if there are years’ worth of them, is a nightmare. I’m probably going to have to wait for another rotation before I can really think about trying to get into Standard. I can’t imagine how bad it is for brand-new players…

Which is why it failed.

Other than the pets and to some extent the triggers, this mostly just seems like complaints about Magic itself. It also strikes me as odd to complain about decks that are too fast and decks that are too slow simultaneously…

At any rate, my main problems with Arena are the horrifically slow wildcard economy and the lack of multiplayer Brawl.

A lot of the far-right chuds that would take Putin up on this offer are well above combat age. Now, using these people to make up the labor shortfall caused by the Ukraine war? I can absolutely see that one.

Either that, or he’d just pamper them in exchange for utilizing them as propaganda mouthpieces for his regime.

“Any target” would be excessive IMO, but letting it hit Planeswalkers could be reasonable. On the other hand, being able to clear out everyone’s creatures makes it easier to swing in on walkers as it is.

Just block it, damn

Is it just an alternate version, or will all copies of this card in Mystery Boosters be white-bordered?

The picture of the physical card in Gavin’s tweet is also in white border, for some reason?

It was uploaded 9 years ago. What sort of AI model was good enough to generate realistic video in 2015? Not to mention it was uploaded by Weird Al’s official YouTube channel.

Oh goddammit, I just got the joke. Well-played.

They’re changing references to “precombat main phase” and “postcombat main phase” to “first main phase” and “second main phase,” respectively.

This would’ve inadvertently nerfed a few cards that otherwise were able to take advantage of taking extra main phases via extra combat step cards to trigger their effects multiple times in a turn, like Neheb, the Eternal. Now they’re keeping the old wording on that group of cards so it doesn’t result in any functional changes.

If it weren’t for the political realities of how voting works under first-past-the-post, the progressive wing of the Democratic party could have easily split off into a separate party whose younger leadership and willingness to push for actually-meaningful change could probably have run circles around the Dems at this point.

…Man, I really wish I could vote for a presidential candidate that I actually believed in, instead of this “vote for the status-quo neoliberal or democracy dies” bullshit.

Jesus fucking CHRIST

It seems to happen to me a lot that when I hear about something that greatly interests me as soon as it’s announced, the actual release of that thing seems to vanish.

The MtG show, Elder Scrolls 6, the KOTOR remake… Maybe I’m imagining things, but it seems like if it’s a property that I both greatly care about and hear about as soon as it’s announced, it feels like there’s a high likelihood that the project will just vanish for years in production hell.

I feel you there… Although it was already fairly apparent that Nielsen wasn’t a great person by the time I really became aware of her, for quite a while, I considered Noah Bradley to be my favorite MtG artist. After that story broke, I vividly remember saying to myself, “Well, at least there’s still Seb McKinnon…”

And, well, yeah…

I guess my favorite artist after that would be John Avon, even if he only occasionally does new MtG pieces these days. At least he seems like a pretty wholesome guy, but then again, I thought the same about Bradley…