u/Fun-Cook-5309

The whale pet quest increases it, and can be a fine goal to pursue early because that quest takes a long time, but in general, it is better to use resources to get to those kinds of breakpoints rather than stalling your progress in hopes of a better payoff later.

The sooner you unlock later resources, the sooner you can capitalize on them. Likewise, using chaos totems and blue cows as you get them early on to speed progress is very reasonable.

There are some exceptions for very rare resources like any buttery lobsters you may get from gifts. There is an ultra stonks proc mission later that is, by all accounts, Hell.

Blood Artist is not an irrelevant effect, but fact of the matter is it mostly sees play in ill-considered aristocrats deck that do not properly appreciate the power of “each,” and run Blood Artist off of the idea that it is a “good aristocrats card.” We have so many better Blood Artist effects for aristocrats that modern aristocrats should not run Blood Artist.

Blood Artist should be more a card of consideration for control, not aristocrats, and there it is much more tenuous.

Also, keep in mind criticism of a card does not mean anyone thinks this should never see play anywhere. It’s asterisks and limitations on play.

Nah, it's literally the Blood Artist effect until you get seven quest counters. And Blood Artist is the Nth best version of itself after all the versions that say each opponent but only see your own creatures.

That comes at the cost of the word "each."

In EDH, every deck should be built to consistently play a game.

Nongames because someone's mana base failed suck from both sides of the table.

Deliberately shooting your mana base in the foot makes the game worse.

Saru, Discoverer of Puberty.

[[Rukarumel]].

Yeah, no.

You're flat lying, and you know exactly why.

You moved across a fucking language barrier, then refused to translate across the fucking language barrier. That is as much a nonsensical lie as, "If you said that in France, you wouldn't be able to play because they speak French, not English."

If we move across the language barrier, then that sentence becomes, "I don't want to deal with Annihilator today."

Let's move the other way across the language barrier. Your response is to turn them and say, "Get the fuck out of the shop, shit stain."

And no, that is neither unfair nor a misrepresentation. You're talking about kicking someone out of the store for discussing a reasonable boundary, and calling them a "crybaby" for it. No, there is not a substantive difference between your, "If someone has problems with that, they can go outside, breathe some fresh air, touch some grass and either come back in and play or go home and cry because the mean 16 year old bullied them in a card game," and, "Get the fuck out of the shop." (Hell, I'd say your version is more extreme than, "Get the fuck out of the shop," even ignoring casual swearing.) There is not a substantive difference between calling them a "crybaby" versus "shit stain."

You're saying shit like "touch some grass and socialize," while saying shit like this is a PROFOUNDLY fucked way to fail at socializing. Seriously, you get on my case for casual swearing, and this is how you choose to talk? I'd be a Hell of a lot more concerned with kids learning to mistreat people the way you espouse here than about them learning to use the fuck word as a comma.

Also, it ain't your call.

There are four people at the table.

If one doesn't want to deal with Annihilator today, two are fine with not dealing with Annihilator today, and you refuse to give an inch, then maybe it's you who should find a different table.

The point of the pregame conversation is to get on the same page, to set terms, and yes, to negotiate boundaries.

You talk about "socialize," but that doesn't work when you go into a conversation about boundaries and try to kick people out of the shop for having them. If your reaction to hearing the word, "No," is that extreme, then that is deeply concerning for reasons that have nothing to do with card games, and only becomes more so if it is normal for you to play in environments full of children.

But let's talk about the specific boundary in question!

ANNIHILATOR!

A keyword WotC has straight up admitted is a design failure, in large part because it eats lands and, as a result, puts people in this fucked irrecoverable death spiral where, even if they're staring at the board wipe in hand, it will never be possible to cast it because their land base is being devoured.

Brackets 2 and 3 have a no-MLD rule, which everyone knows before even showing up to the table.

Is Annihilator MLD?

One [[Pathrazer of Ulamog]] in the stompy deck's 99 that they're not planning on cloning? Probably not.

[[Ulamog the Defiler]], who reasonably enters with Annihilator 7-10 under its own power and can go up from there? Yeah. Yeah, that can very reasonably be MLD, and if you swing it at the low-permanent spells deck once, they probably don't have a functioning mana base ever again.

Everything in between, which is where most things fall? That's a conversation, with a lot of gray and a lot of opinion. Not for you to decide unilaterally on behalf of the table. It's also a conversation that can become very litigious, which people may not be up for in the moment, and can reasonably say, "Can we just not deal with this today?"

Can we?

You're really sleazy about that one, bud.

You catastrophize about how people don't have thirty decks? Okay. Most people have a couple decks if they've been playing for a while.

You concern troll about people who only have a precon? Okay. A precon is way less likely to run afoul of common hot buttons than most decks. The two precons that have prominent Annihilator are Ulalek and Zhuladok. Ulalek came out two and a half years ago. Zhuladok came out over three years ago. They both sold out basically immediately, and cost a lot of money because they had a bunch of Eldrazi reprints and support. A new player with one precon as their only deck is almost certainly holding exactly one of those two decks.

And the catastrophizing is a bad faith argument anyways. "What if they X, what if they Y?" What if they don't? When you sit down with four people at a table, you're dealing with those four people and what everyone is bringing to the table today. That's who you're talking to, what you're dealing with, and frequently simple accommodations are easy.

This is also a known, common hot button. An experienced player whose only deck is "bracket 3" Annihilator turbo is doing something deeply sus and so bizarre it doesn't even bear mention, and should not be surprised if people don't want to play with them, especially when the MLD question comes into the mix.

Neither?

Islandfall: Draw 3 and Swampfall: Produce BBB are effects so absurd that they cannot reasonably be balanced. Once they're online, they're obscene, so we're entering in the realm of prerequisites that are, "Nah, that'll never happen."

Like... they've never printed Landfall: Draw 2, even at extreme mana values, and the scarce few Landfall: Draw 1 effects are notable, even at their high CMCs. Even the much more conditional ones, like Landfall: Investigate and now Landfall: Empower Jace 2 or the once per turn ones are notable.

Making, "Play an Island, draw 3," would ask for a prerequisite so insane that it's not worth discussing.

In bracket 3, don't put the draw engine in the command zone.

Put [[Control Win Condition]].

[[Lord of the Nazgul]], [[Vren, The Relentless]], [[Alela, Cunning Conqueror]], [[G'raha Tia, Scion Reborn]].

If you put the draw engine in the command zone, it will eat shit and die immediately and repeatedly because you always kill the control player's card advantage, and you need to assemble a win condition from your 99.

And no, Laboratory Maniac / Demonic Consultation is EXTREMELY not allowed in bracket 3. That's why you want control win condition in the command zone. Dense, efficient combos that draw control commanders like are verboten.

If you put your card advantage in the command zone, you need that shit online ASAP, and if it's removed you're choking to death because you NEED card advantage.

If you put your wincon in the command zone, you can sandbag that shit until the stage is set and you have some protection ready, and if it gets answers, you're still a fully functional control deck that can stall until you can try again.

A commander is often about what you DON'T have to put in your 99.

A draw commander still needs a lot of draw in the 99 for redundancy.

A control wincon commander's 99 can literally just be mana, card draw, and interaction, with a lot of that card draw being harder-to-answer instants, sorceries, and enchantments.

When he told Sasuke about the coup in the first place. He was a small part of it, but he was still a part of it.

Chapter 400, I believe. That conversation went origins of the clan/village, Uchiha/Senju rivalry, the roots of Uchiha resentment, then went to the planning of the coup and Itachi's placement as a spy, and Fugaku's role in the whole thing.

You can't have a flashback to the present. As much as the anime has tried.

The flashbacks are often over people talking about what happened.

Madara telling the story of the Uchiha clan massacre is talking about, among other things, Fugaku. The flashback is for our benefit, but Fugaku appearing in the flashback only exists because Madara is talking about Fugaku.

I mean... some of the flashbacks were people telling stories, so yeah, some of our flashbacks to the Uchiha massacre were people mentioning Fugaku.

You accuse people of being "crybabies" in the same breath that you say your shop cannot handle profanity and that you cannot handle extending the slightest bit of consideration.

Yeah.

But in the realm of intervention, rather than execution.

Out and up both "increase" tokens.

Quantity is not the only direction to increase tokens.

Whether you grab a second potato or a larger potato, you've increased potato either way.

Buddy, this is so firmly within green's wheelhouse that you'd need a definition of "bend" so broad that it becomes useless and covers every vaguely creative effect.

However, green is primary in "increasing counters/tokens."

This card increases your token.

Its job is to make more tokens. Not in the form of quantity, but in the form of heft.

This is a thing green is primary in.

Why?

We see its effects.

It is intoxicating. It changes his cognition.

He sticks by his decisions later, but we're not talking about later. We're talking about the Sasuke retrieval arc and Konoha's available information to assess how to respond to him.

Regardless of what he settles on later, yeah, he is high through most of the arc.

And no, recognizing that pretty clearly established fact does not mean he does not have any agency.

I'm not stripping him of agency.

However, his judgment WAS impaired.

Alcohol does not change the fact you are the one making the decisions, but it does alter your decision-making.

You were being an asshole, bud. People getting prickly in response to your being an asshole is your failure, not theirs.

You blatantly ignored the entire point being made to say, "Just evaluate it as if removal doesn't exist in EDH," which is nonsense.

The fact it is a 5 mana do nothing that demands followup is a Big Deal.

The fact that it can easily be popped before doing anything is a Big Deal for such a high investment permanent, and exists in contrast to cheaper things that demand followup, or large spells that see their return either in a more self-contained way or with more immediacy.

While yes, people generally should run "more removal" in EDH, fact of the matter is of the top 60 spells in EDH (about what an normal deck runs), about 18 of them are removal. People ARE running removal, in significant quantities.

"Run more land" and "run more removal" are very frequently the same criticism- incremental margins, not "run these in the first place." 38 lands instead of 24, 18 pieces of interaction instead of 14. Running negligible amounts of interaction is something anyone remotely competent grows out of very quickly.

Evaluating cards on the assumption that everyone around you is completely incompetent and isn't bothering to address problems will naturally lead to you evaluating cards incompetently.

No, it does not read like that.

If that's what you saw, you did not read.

"It has issues A, B, C, and D," is talking about all of those issues in composite, as a stack on one another, with varying weight and relevance.

Singling out point D as if that's all that was said is not reading like it's indestructible or bust. It's you not reading the comment in the first place.

If you actually read what was said with good sense, the primary concern is that it's a five mana do-nothing that demands followup.

Five mana do-nothings that demand followup dying to removal is, in fact, very relevant. Much more so than a two mana do-nothing that demands followup, a five mana spell that is self-contained, or a five mana spell that reliably sees its payoff immediately.

Because the details are not written until after the outcome.

There were a metric shit ton of obvious options available to those involved that they did not elect to take.

The bracket system is primarily a tool for facilitating pregame conversations.

If you have that pregame conversation and it leads to someone saying, "Fuck Annihilator in the ass with a rusty spoon," that is a very clear and successful pregame conversation, and it would take an asshole to try and force Annihilator past that point.

Also, Worn Powerstone is not any reasonable definition of "bad."

There is no coherent argument for it being a bend.

It's one of the two premier token colors doing a token thing.

You're expending a resource to make a 3/3. That is very green.

Making tokens to beat you up is an extremely green thing.

Clemency is an option in most legal systems.