Grifter
3181
<3 Sunshine, one of Danny Boyle’s best and the international cast was mind-blowing! He has a new film out, Trance, playing at the Little and Pittsford. (Movie + cheesecake setups.)
Skipped Oblivion so far but I’m sure it’s a worthy A/V experience w/o much soul like Tron from what everyone says, I’d like to catch it in Imax.
Action?
In my opinion, it felt like Top Gun, but for the Navy instead of the Air Force.
It’s like, if you took Top Gun, and changed the bad guys to aliens. . .and the jets to ships. . .I don’t think the tone of the film is that much different.
You should read the books! Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, while kind of a whiny guy, wrote Holmes as a crazier crack addict misogynist asshole badass than any adaptation has done justice; Guy Ritchie comes close, but still doesn’t quite get there.
damus
3185
I have some news… we will he doing monthly events … which means dustbowl bowl will no longer be every couple of months… we will be holding them once to twice a years to keep it special. . Its upstates regional … and its going to be huge
Witu your help and support we can do anything 
So I will need a name for the monthly ??
I was going to do may early may but idk when Toryuken is
You know. . .
Looking through these deck-building strategies for the different tournament types for Magic. . .I’ve come across some cards that are so OP, they practically break the game.
Most of those cards, though, came out a long ass time ago and you don’t find shit like that in the newer sets. . .but it just makes me wonder: At that time what the hell were they thinking when they made those cards? It’s like they were trying, intentionally, to break their own game. . .
Kitsuji
3191
My friend had a stupid-broken-mindless standstill deck that he would always use. Pretty much nulls everything you do whenever he gets that card out. He only had a handful of creatures too and they were always low-ranked creatures. He would always say "This match has come to a… STANDSTILL every. time. he. would. play. it… Yeah, that just goes to show you that you can make some mindless deck and win the game because of gimmicks… That’s what Magic was… “Magic: The Gathering of Gimmicks”
Also, doesn’t help that I also had a pretty mindless sliver deck as well.
Also bear in mind that stuff like Black Lotus and Ancestral Recall came out when it was just Garfield and his friends fucking around in his basement or something; I don’t think they had the same sort of rigorous testing that they do now.
The number of obscenely broken cards in the Urza saga, though, that was definitely a pretty massive fuckup on the part of the testing team. I remember reading an article a few years back that talked about how the designers for that set got called into the main office and chewed out for a few hours over how badly they had fucked up the balance of the game.
http://www.dacardworld.com/itemimages/Magic-US-Smokestack-UP.jpg
. . .Seriously? Are you fucking kidding me with this card? You can build a whole deck around just 4 of these and if the opponents deck doesn’t have four destroy artifact/permanent cards. . .then it just sits there and basically wipes out the table in 2 turns.
. . .Just to reiterate: This is a card that destroys 2 permanents every goddamn turn. . .land, enchantments, creatures, artifacts. . .what the fuck were they thinking?
Oh and also. . .if you don’t have enough permanents to destroy for each soot counter on there. . .then whatever you have is destroyed.
And I actually misread this card. . .it’s even MORE ridiculous than I thought because it says nothing about removing soot counters for each permanent destroyed. . .so in effect it gets worse and worse as the game moves on.
fuck this shit.
That activates for each player, dude. So the guy who owns it has to somehow finish off his opponents with his constantly dwindling resources; if he puts too many soot counters on it, then he’ll have to sacrifice it himself. You can certainly lock down your opponents with it, but it requires a little more subtlety than your initial reading. It basically resets the entire board after a few turns of soot counters, which certainly sucks but isn’t an insurmountable obstacle.
And from the gears on the card, that’s part of the Urza saga. Somebody got yelled at for that card, don’t worry.
Gotta love the ambiguous wording of the old cards. Wasn’t how I interpreted it.
Still some serious bullshit though. . .pump 4 of these into your deck. . .throw in some Undying creatures. . .Instants that deal direct damage. . .and that’s it.
This Urza stuff. . .smh.
It’s not that ambiguous; there’s really only one way to interpret “On each player’s upkeep, that player must [x]”. If it said “On each player’s upkeep, that player gains colourless mana equal to the number of soot counters”, would you think that it only gave mana to your opponents? [sidenote: I think a card that generates colourless mana during each player’s upkeep would actually be really interesting; you’d have to draw a bunch of cards or keep mana sinks on the table, and your opponents would manaburn themselves to death].
I’m not familiar with the undying mechanic; I was only casually following magic when the Urza saga was in standard, but I’m pretty sure that this card and Undying cards were never in Standard together. That’s part of why Standard constantly rotates through the most recent sets; it means that in order to balance for tournament play, you only have to consider card interactions between the three most recent sets. It’s a way more tractable problem than trying to balance every card interaction with every other card in the entire canon of the game.
Instants that deal direct damage are useful, but only when you’re not sacrificing the land that generates the mana to spend them. Again, a deck built around four of those would require some subtlety. I’d try and pair it with an Urza’s workshop or something; churn out 2/2 creature tokens and sacrifice them to the soot counters while the opponents get whittled down.
Yannick
3198
It’s all about that Cardfight Vanguard now, ladies.
I guess I got thrown off by ‘That player’, I misinterpreted it to mean ‘Target player’. . .until I realized that ‘That player’ and ‘Target player’ aren’t the same things. So that’s my bad.
And yeah, this isn’t a problem in Standard. . .but I’m not a fan of Standard. . .it’s too restrictive. . .Modern is more what I’m going for which also doesn’t have to worry about this junk.
The problem comes in Vintage and Legacy formats where all sets/blocks are allowed because then you can combine this stuff with things that have new abilities like Undying (Basically, instead of a creature going to graveyard, it comes back with less power/toughness a second time), and I could see things getting way out of hand.
As to the Instants and sacrificing land, well usually undying creatures are low-cost/low-power. . .get them onto the field fast. . .load up counters. . .sacrifice creatures. . .opponents shit gets wiped out. . .yours come back into play for less power. . .so you would’nt have to sacrifice lands and in between you can still cast low-cost 2-3 damage instants.
Shoutouts to Winter Orb, Icy Manipulator and Stasis.
