Trash Truck (But Buffer)

Alright, here's the more muscular version of Trash Truck:

2 Sheoldred, the Apocalypse

3 Magus of the Wheel
2 Tourach, Dread Cantor
3 Glint-Horn Buccaneer
4 Orcish Bowmasters
2 Dauthi Voidwalker

2 Waste Not

3 Dream Salvage
4 Sudden Edict
2 Sheoldred's Edict

4 Mountain
4 Swamp
2 Bojuka Bog
4 Bloodstained Mire
4 Blood Crypt
4 Badlands

3 Liliana of the Veil

4 Reforge the Soul
4 Burning Inquiry

 15 Sideboard
SB: 3 Blood Moon
SB: 4 Leyline of the Void

SB: 4 Pyroblast

SB: 4 Meltdown

I am still unsure about the Sideboard: Pyroblast vs Defense Grid is the dilemma. Pyroblast can interact on the stack and remove troublesome permanents but my goldfishing with Trash Truck has suggested that the mana is tight. Would it just be better to try and insulate my turns? 

Somewhere along the line, I realized that Bojuka Bog and Daluthi Voidwalker would be great proactive answers to filling someone's graveyard and they were maindeckable, so here we are. This could mean that I'm going too hard on Leyline of the Void in the Sideboard, and that might mean there's more room for something else? Most likely Plague Engineer. 

Trash Truck

 I'm going to have two versions of this deck, the first is the one I will revert back to:

2 Elixir of Immortality

2 Sheoldred, the Apocalypse
3 Magus of the Wheel
2 Shocker
2 Tourach, Dread Cantor
3 Glint-Horn Buccaneer
3 Orcish Bowmasters

2 Waste Not

3 Dream Salvage
4 Terminate

10 Mountain
8 Swamp
4 Blackcleave Cliffs
1 Rakdos Carnarium 

3 Liliana of the Veil

4 Reforge the Soul
4 Burning Inquiry

This is the fun take on the deck. The manabase isn't set for a tournament build, Shocker is clearly not up to snuff when it comes to power, Elixir of Immortality is me trying to hedge against decking, a situation that is 99% unlikely to happen, and Terminate, as great of a card as it is, needs to be a stronger removal spell. These are just a few of the small details that I'll want to change to shift this from my kitchen table deck to one for an event.

But hopefully you can see the core of the deck, using Tourach, Dread Cantor, Glint-Horn Buccaneer and Waste Not to give me rewards for discarding, while Orcish Bowmasters and Sheoldred the Apocalypse provides rewards for the drawing portion of Burning Inquiry, Reforge the Soul and Magus of the Wheel.

Is this some jank? Hell yes. But it's synergistic jank. 

The second take on Trash Truck is what I'm taking to the Mox events starting on the 28th, and I'll go over the changes to the deck, along with a Sideboard, on Thursday.

The Illusion of Choice (or: Enshittification Via Many Roads)

So, Marvel Snap got a new way of acquiring cards. Sort of. Which almost nobody likes. 

It's lead me to think about what's going on here and I think I've got it worked out. 

Basically, it's Enshittification, but disguised as giving players 'more options' and being better for new players. Like most enshittification efforts, there's a half truth there.

The first part: Spotlight Caches. The initial notion is neat: let's mark the crates on the ladder that will give you a character (or an alternate art)! Players now know what they are working towards. Visualized goals help motivate players. 

Plus, looking at my own track, the Spotlight Caches really are just a new color: the rate at which I was getting new characters/alternative art is the same rate as before! I can just see my goal and I think that's a positive.

However with this came other changes: First, the Spotlight Caches would only offer you a chance at one of three cards, with a fourth opportunity to get kicked in the junk.

Each week: three cards are offered-the new hot card, and two other rare cards, with a fourth random alternative art card. If you already have one of the cards shown and that's what you open up, you get an alternative art version of that card. 

So, the more cards you have, the more likely it is that you're going to get an alternative art card. Or; kicked in the junk. To ensure that you get the card you want, you need to have four Spotlight Caches available to open that week. 

What this system means is that if you don't have cards, you're more likely to be rewarded with a new card, even if it is one you don't want. But if you do have a lot of cards, you're more likely to get a random art card-and because tastes vary wildly, that new art might be great, it might suck ass. Just depends on the tastes of the individual. 

And if you get a duplicate card? Well that's just tough: it seems there isn't any duplicate protection.

And this might be fine, except the time it takes to get Spotlight Caches means that you are either playing Marvel Snap as a full time job, or you are waiting a long time* to get four of them to open in one week AND waiting for a week when a card (but hopefully two or three) you want is available, oooooooooooor you're paying them money. *By a long time, I mean that it will take me, someone who has plenty of free time to play, plus gives them $10 a month, at least two months to get enough Spotlight Caches to ensure I get the thing I want. It will take longer for someone who doesn't have my luxuries. 

The point is; this punishes entrenched players and doesn't reward new players nearly quickly enough. Things were better when you didn't have a choice and just got what you got. We didn't know what we were getting but hey, maybe it's cool, maybe it's just an alt-art but, interestingly, not having a choice made us feel better about the results.

One reason for that is because one could earn tokens via gameplay and with enough tokens, players could simply purchase a card from a rotating collection on offer. The new card was up for a week, and the other two options, a rare alt-art card and another card, rotated every eight hours. 

If you just played the game, it was possible to earn enough tokens to acquire one card per month, and you got to pick the one you wanted. If you gave them $10 a month, you'd get a card for that, too, along with a boost of rewards to make it easier to acquire a second (or maybe even a third!) card. 

Which meant that players DID have a choice for what card they want for the month and could work towards it. Once again: an achievable goal that players could visualize, and options for those goals that players had control over.

However, this leads to the second change made: the one that took away our ability to earn tokens that allow us to purchase things. Gold (which let us buy tokens-F2P games are pernicious in their currency manipulations) was removed from the ladder, so you can only earn paltry amounts via gameplay oooooooooooor you're paying them money. 

Then they cut the amount of tokens we might earn on ladder from 200-500 to 50. Once again: you can earn enough tokens to buy a card but the method has now been cut from once a month to once every two or three months! Maybe more-I haven't really parsed it out but the point remains: they are leveraging players' FOMO about being left behind in a changing metagame against their wallets. 

Which sucks. Our choices have been nerfed and the community is pretty unhappy about this situation. The fixes seem pretty easy: offer duplicate protection and restore the gold and tokens rewards on the ladder. Apparently "the data" is going to guide the developer's decisions, but in the meantime the community is unhappy.  

An unhappy community leaves & where there's nobody to play your game, your game withers. 

But it was inevitable, because the shareholders must be appeased. 

Two Philosophies

I've been theorycrafting a couple decks recently:

First, one based on the recent uptick of Red's wheel effects. 

2 Elixir of Immortality

2 Sheoldred, the Apocalypse
3 Magus of the Wheel
4 Shocker
3 Tourach, Dread Cantor
1 Glint-Horn Buccaneer

4 Waste Not

4 Dream Salvage
4 Infernal Grasp
1 Sudden Edict

11 Mountain
11 Swamp

2 Liliana of the Veil

4 Reforge the Soul
4 Burning Inquiry

This is clearly unfinished: I've got the most basic manabase for now, because I'm not sure how/if it will be interesting. There were also four Sheoldred, the Apocalypse in the initial build, but that card is $55+ and I can play Liliana of the Veil for $13. But after seeing someone play a Wheel deck on Youtube, I thought: but what if it had Tourach, Dread Cantor?

And here we are.

The second started as a G/W 'spells' build and changed to B/W because of my love of Agent of the Fates. 

4 Phalanx Leader
4 Mavinda, Students' Advocate
4 Leonin Lightscribe
4 Agent of the Fates
3 Tormented Hero
3 Sedgemoor Witch

4 Loran's Escape
3 Blessed Alliance
4 Guided Strike
2 Reverent Mantra

11 Plains
11 Swamp

3 Read the Bones

I really like Mavinda and definitely want to do something with this card. The switch from Green to Black came simply because of Agent of the Fates providing me more to do than anything Green had, which could effectively be described as "I'm big now". 

Big doesn't let you win games though; big and (something else) does, where the something else is trample or haste or 'fuck yo' stuff'. Having a vanilla 9/9 doesn't cut it. However, it is likely true that Green offers me more in the spells category. 

It was while playtesting both these decks, and Matt's reaction to them (he liked the first one more) I realized that there's two design philosophies at play here: one that proactively does stuff to your opponent, as with Red's discard continually disrupting their plan, and one that proactively does stuff just to you as with the B/W deck's plan. There really isn't an axis of interaction with the opponent, which puts it in the realm of a combo deck.

But combo decks need to vomit all their cards out by turn 3 and just win, otherwise the opponent gets to do things, and combo decks cannot allow that!

The other thing is that I have a deck that's doing something like what the B/W is doing, so maybe let's work on the R/B one...

But I'm out of town this weekend, so no new post until Thursday, July 20th!

The Retired: The Hollows

 Sigh. 

This one was harder to put down, because I liked the central idea. I did a lot of work on it. But I just never wanted to play the damn thing. Something that seemed cooler in concept than it was in execution, I suppose. 

3 Lightning Greaves

4 Flametongue Kavu
3 Dimir House Guard
3 Viashino Sandscout
2 Grave Titan
4 Mardu Strike Leader
1 Flamerush Rider
2 Bane of the Living

4 Death Match

6 Mountain
4 Sulfurous Springs
1 Ebon Stronghold
1 Ghitu Encampment
1 Spawning Pool
7 Swamp
2 Urborg Volcano
1 Rakdos Carnarium
2 Bloodfell Caves

3 Void
1 Torrent of Souls
4 Lab Rats
2 Goblin Offensive

I am proud of the fact that I recognized I needed a lot of land to do what I wanted to do. I still like the basic idea around using Death Match to keep the field clear of creatures, while my creatures were much harder to get rid of. However, this deck has a common problem with many other decks: it's signature card doesn't do anything the turn you play it. 

The Hollows needs me to be in a reasonable position by turn 4 so that I can take a turn off from interacting with the game and cast Death Match, then on turn 5 I can get back to it. Which sounds nice but opponents don't just decide to sit out a turn because you want to do a cool thing. Truth be told, I'm a surprised by this as you are but it's still true.

Which meant that the compulsion to play this deck and do something cool with it just never arrived. Time to let this one go, and invest in an idea that has me interested. 

Late To The Party: Deathloop

Deathloop came from the makers of Prey and Dishonored, both games I liked quite a bit. So I had a some high expectations for this one!

It was also well reviewed on launch so I had some high hopes!

Those hopes were...sort of met? 

There was a lot that was very entertaining about Deathloop. They did a good job of making the central concept-the Groundhog Day 'play the same thing over and over'- pretty compelling and changing up the areas just a little bit, depending on when you visit. 

There was also a great deal of freedom involving how one might approach play, with powers that accent melee builds or ones that would help with long distance or sneaking. 

I really liked the protagonist, too: Cole is a fun badass to listen to and hear his interactions. All the characters were well written, actually and I got an excellent sense of the place I was gaming in.

However. Because there are some howevers here. 

First, this game did the thing were you could die in a locked room and then just not get back into that room until the game reset. Which is a problem because as with many modern games, if I die in a spot, all my currency stays with the body. This feels cheap and it happened more than once. If I can't get my treasure back because I screwed up that's fine but when the game locks me out of it, that's not fine. 

Second, there didn't seem to be a lot of reward for changing things up or exploring. For example, once I found out that as part of winning the game it was always best to go to the area of Karl's Bay first, that's just what I always did. I wasn't rewarded for exploring another area, unless it was part of a quest. Since areas change depending on the time of day you visit-certain doors are only open at certain times of day-there were avenues of Deathloop that I never looked into. I never ventured into Karl's Bay at night.

Why should I? There was no piece of candy for me to acquire. 

Third; sometimes brute attrition > puzzle solving. One boss in particular had a tell I was supposed to use to pull them from a crowd at a party. 

Why do that? Just murder everyone. There's no penalty for just murdering all the people. Eventually, the alert will trigger telling me I got the right character and I can skip out. 

Fourth, the ending. So stop here if you don't want spoilers for it. 

Cole wants to break the loop. He wants a life again, one that has meaning and matters. 

Julianna wants the loop to continue. She...is looking to save something? I actually don't know why she wants to protect the loop, beyond wanting to do that. Cole is just the asshole who is fucking up her day-a day she would happily return to, if he'd quit breaking things. 

These positions are constant: Cole doesn't have any self doubt about what he's doing. Julianna doesn't have any sympathy for him. It's hinted at that the world outside has a problem but we're never shown anything that suggests this is the case. 

When the final confrontation comes to Cole and Julianna, the player suddenly gets to make a choice about how the end will play out-will Cole continue on the path he's been at all game or not? Except that moment wasn't clear to me-it came right after a cutscene where I did not have control and without the HUD that suggests that I have agency. 

So I didn't make a choice and the moment to do so passed, the game accepting my "input". 

But that wasn't what I wanted! It certainly didn't seem to be what Cole wanted. Which means I got an ending I didn't ask for. 

That sucked. 

Which was a big letdown, because a great deal of what I was doing was fun. 

So while I enjoyed Deathloop, I also came away from the game feeling disappointed in it.

It's Been Found

There it is, people: The One One Ring has been found. 

Now, there are two reasons I'm glad it has been found: first, we can all stop talking about finding it. The conversation wasn't ever that interesting to begin with. 

Two: some rando found it. Not Post-Malone, or a streamer, or someone who just doesn't need the publicity or money. I think that's great. This random person has just been set for life if they so choose and fuck it. Life is hard enough. If someone can golden ticket themselves into stability, good.

For me, however, there is a larger question that comes up regarding Magic the game. 

WotC is, ostensibly, in the business of making a game, and game pieces. The cards they produce, while valuable, are supposed to be shuffled up in a deck and played. 

This One One Ring was never that. It will never be sleeved up, it will never be part of a deck, no one will ogle it and marvel at how cool it is. 

It'll get put in a private museum of some sort, a status symbol representing nothing but money. Not hard work, not the legacy of a game that is over thirty years old, not someone's championship run, not the community. 

It will be held by someone with money, to show off how much money they have. And WotC knew that. Oh, they will insist about how their product is out of their hands once it's released into the world (the argument will sound remarkably similar to what Smith & Wesson would say) and they just have no control!

I just want to refute that argument as utter nonsense. They made this object, they sold it as being unique in a way that is unlike any other unique card they have made (WotC has made unique cards for important people in the company for things like weddings or the birth of a child but these cards weren't ever meant to be part of the larger ecosystem of Magic-i.e. making the company money/played in a game) and they aren't fucking stupid.

"Fucking stupid" is the only phrase I can think of to apply to the notion that WotC didn't know what they were doing. This was about the hype machine and the longer the card wasn't found, the more dollar signs appeared in their eyes.

So what I want to know is: how much longer is WotC going to be in the business of making game pieces? Or are they just going to transition into this mega-lottery system? 

How much is the lottery system going to start to impact how they make (and how we play) the game?