Rmoval

Yeah, the bitterness and sadness are starting to seep in. Nice. Anyway, taking it easy with just some quick games in the last session of this Slow Constructed MWM. Of course the guy with the 250-card deck is somehow making it competitive. Certainly cuz I misclicked on a crucial turn, which shoulda shut him out, but of course allowed him to continue developing his position. I was trying to counter his spell and clone my Anchovy & Mushroom Pizza with Three Steps Ahead, which woulda totally shut him down, but my mouse has been acting up, so it looks like it musta registered a double-click on the clone option, deselecting it, and I just countered and drew, allowing his Dimir hybrid Spider to continue attacking and Bolas's Citadelling unnecessarily. We beat him eventually, but it was way, way, way closer than it had to be, especially cuz we'd already pinched him pretty hard with some early discard spells, leaving him with extremely limited options, yet of course he wriggled out of that as we misclicked our way to letting him get some breathing room. But we also got some of the Spider achievement done, which will be the toughest part of the Marvel achievement suite, for sure, cuz our TinyB was happily plucking Spiders out of my opponent's Spider theme deck, so we got at least a few down. I missequenced these, though, as I shoulda played them in the opposite order as there were some tribal bonuses I shoulda grabbed, but as I was unfamiliar with these cards, I just played them in whatever order--and of course on a 50-50 flip, I happen to play them in the suboptimal order. Another highlight was grabbing a bunch of Hero-centric cards from my opponent who had a Hero theme deck, and we ended up killing with Avengers Assemble juicing "my" Agents of SHIELD--the exalted one, which clocked in, drew cards, and basically solod my opponent. Also got to draw a bunch of cards off my Ancestral Recall Emeritus. Always a joy playing that one. Anyway, some nice games to kinda take your mind off of things, and then a rare Jack Smith interview to cap it all off.

Just taking it easy with MWM today--it's Slow Constructed--and got to play my The Mul the Burier deck, outfitted with my new JP-art Muldrotha, which is pretty cool--I almost got to cast it, even, but I won by then, which is the issue with six-drops, in general these days--they're either winning the game on the spot or you've already won by that point. But we had some nice, relatively easy games and thankfully it wasn't tedious or annoying like the last Standard-ish MWM, where it was just the same, dumb decks over and over. I like this deck of mine in particular cuz you get to play a bunch of oddball cards, including playing that Ancestral Recall Emeritus--I got to cast Ancestral on the "flashback" even, which is always a cool feeling--including through a Kiora trigger, which they fixed: previously it'd stack the triggers so it'd exile before you could resolve Kiora, which then de-activates hers, but now it stacks it more sensibly, so you get both the 8/8 and the Ancestral, which I pulled off successfully. Such a neat card. Anyway, trying to get our next illustration done, and we made some good progress yesterday on a noodley bit--speaking of tedious--but there's still a lot left to do, but if we just keep chopping away at it, we should have it by this weekend, at least the lines, that is. Also learned I didn't get a certain thing and fortunately it's been mainly just a numb acceptance of this fact rather than an enraged bitterness, but I can certainly feel a touch of that settling in now. Everything is quite pointless. This was the closest I've gotten to crawling out of this hole, and it didn't pan out. Who knows when the next chance will be here. I don't know if I blew it or if they just had other options...it's funny, I was just listening to an FF7 cast panel and like right at that moment, they were talking about how you have to have mental fortitude to work in that industry, cuz it's 90% rejection, but, I mean...these guys--well, minus one notable exception, I guess--work regularly...they book a bunch of stuff...they have presence. I'm sure they struggle in various ways, but for the most part, they've made it. They're known, people want what they have, sure they have to fight for their roles and stuff, I'm sure, but I am confident they don't have to claw for everything now when nobody knew who they were or what they could do. It's just no longer terribly inspirational, but more deflating--artists' tales of trials and triumph. When I was younger, it was like--that could be me some day. Now it's like...why hasn't that been me? They always say stuff like, just stick with it and something will click...dude...when is it going to click? Don't give me that Morgan Freeman inspirational story stuff, either...I don't want to "make it" when I'm a geezer...I'm not doing this for fun...it's the only thing I can do. It's all I got, man. That's what makes it so easy to be bitter...it's like...I've put in the hours...if you were to compile all the hours alone working, training, drawing...how many months or even years of my life have just gone into nothing? It's a bit frightening to think of.

Dude, such a weird one today, we were like Wubrg, splashing for Storm in green, which won us a match by shutting down that stupid 5/5 indestructible guy--though we had a couple exile answers--sidenote, exile is absolutely crucial in this format, particularly cuz it beats Take Up the Shield, which is a format-defining card, but exile also beats a few of these must-answers. But I also splashed red for the 3/4 RW Muldaya Hero, which, again, got me a ton of extra cards--that one game where I was grinding out my opponent, who was surely sitting on a Take Up the Shield, meaning I could only attack just so--and not with Storm, who'd get eaten by a reach creature--I just chump attacked a few combats to clear or access the top of my deck, and we got down to two cards in deck before he finally scooped. But as I suspected the 3/2 vigilance grows if second-draw is like a Sahagin or Textbook Tabulator--a solid creature that can grow into a serious threat if you build around it. So one of the key interactions with this deck was getting our The Mind Stone, or whatever, the white one--and then we could start flickering our HERBIEs or connive landcycler to keep drawing cards and pumping our two 3/2 vigilance guys. I've now had the Saga that surveils and lets you freecast a Hero, then pumps your team, and I'm not impressed with it. Getting the free guy is nice, as is refining your draws, but it just feels like the collection of abilities is weak enough that it's probably better just playing something that itself is threatening, especially since the freecast isn't even necessarily that valuable--it's a cheap creature you probably could afford anyway. If you had a ton of tokens, then it might be worth it, but so far, it's just been kinda okay. It definitely plays like an uncommon rather than a rare. Anyway, we also had a black splash for the 3/2 menace/first strike loner, which was outstanding as always in letting guys punch through, plus the Winter Soldier, which was as mediocre as you'd expect. Though being able to respawn untapped is pretty cool. I did throw in an equipment to give him at least the hope of doing something--the untapper blue equipment--but they never lined up, not that it was that spectacular of a combo to being with. But I also had Shuri to clone artifacts, but that also never came up cuz we just didn't have a whole lot of artifacts, but I did strive to include some, including the 3/3 Bird surveil, which, again, I've been reasonably satisfied with as a solid uncommon--and it's a fine blink target, too, if you don't have one of your drawers online.. The mondo combo of course is cloning one of your artifact creatures into The Mind Stone, so it's indestructible, but, again, the Saheeli clone effect never came up. And we also had the exile teamwork black spell, which was great. There were always guys hanging around to crew it to take out something big and tricky to deal with. Another sweet, sweet combo I hit upon was the 3/3 tap something when you cast a noncreature when you cast the exile a tapped creature enchantment--you don't need any targets to cast the enchantment: when you cast it, this taps something so by the time it enters, you have your target ready. And speaking of tap shenanigans, we owned this one guy who kept shutting down my 5/5 indestructible token by using that janky equipment to untap our guy after it had been targeted by his tapper guy--after I responded to the initial tap ability by crewing my 3/3 mana Vehicle. We had a ton of lands, including the rare BR one, which wasn't that great...it becomes colorless...plus a Hero land and a Grotto land, so we were well covered in this absolutely ridiculous soup deck. Pretty neat that we were able to get to four wins with it...I was definitely expecting a quick 0-3 after our 0-2 start, and even before, but this is looking like a forgiving format, in that you have time to stumble around a bit, and a ton of taplands isn't a bye against you. Plus with the generous fixing, you can get back to soupy "monocolor" domain decks and stuff. Pretty neat.

Definitely had a weirdo one this time--Uwbg. I was almost evenly split on my color commitments, aside from the green splash for Killmonger, but my core seemed to be blue...and we're kinda splashing black and white. We had excellent mana with two UG duals for Killmonger, plus the Shimmering Grotto land, plus a Forest to fetch in a pinch off of the U and W land cyclers. And to cover our other bases, we had two BW lands and the Hero-finder land, so we could handle pretty much anything, but I blew it playing for the trophy cuz I land cycled for an Island when I already had a blue source in play and desperately needed a Swamp to unlock our hand. That definitely woulda made the difference cuz we were just to clunk in deploying our guys afterward, and of course were choked on black mana for most of the game, when we coulda been double spelling by the time I naturally drew my first Swamp. Anyway, we had plentiful removal so we could play a controlling game until our guys got it together. I of course woulda liked at least a second of the connive topbot, as it pairs incredibly well with our Kamala card, I found, which I got passed pretty late if I recall, but we also had an incredible core of BW cards, namely the hand/board exiler and the loner menace/first striker, which allowed our guys to steadily chip in, and when the creature has deathtouch, that's basically unblockable. We made a couple idiotic misplays, but at least we got in striking range of a trophy, but I am almost certain that final game shoulda been ours had I not totally blown it by fetching the wrong land. Really neat synergies, though, like the 3/4 Captain America untapping our guys, so while we plinked away with the loner menace first striked up creature, it could untap and threaten on defense, too, or we could kick our spells for free cuz the creature would untap. We did have some potential power in the 2/2 Iron Man that can reveal artifacts, but we only had two in our deck by the time we made our final cuts in deckbuilding--and the other artifact was the 3/3 Restoration Angel style Vehicle, which I only cast once, maybe...that thing was allergic to showing up. Anyway, this kind of deck, I'm finding is the key--just apply pressure early and often and ram through the slower decks. And those articles of disruption are absolutely crucial. You need a way to make sure your smaller guys can punch through, and that's definitely with the connive topbot, but also some solid removal in the Ice aura or the range of exiler effects, though, you gotta watch out for that one that hits three mana value or less--I thought you could kick it to hit anything, but it looks like that's just for gaining life...I'm not sure. The -2/-2 one happened to be useful at just the right time, so I'm not sure if it's that great, cuz it only chanced into being exactly what we were looking for, which means it mighta just been lucky for an otherwise unremarkable card. I like the UW core, still, but B or even just Killmonger for the splash have been quite nice.

Another 3-3 with UW Heroes, I dunno, just couldn't draw our cheaper stuff to keep up the pressure. Unlike last time, rather than a ton of four-drops, weirdly, we had a ton of 3-drops. My curve topped at 4, so I probably coulda cut a land, but we had a lot of power up and slightly expensive equip costs and stuff, so I kept it at 17. I'm not sure if that was the right call. This was our second of two drafts with the Iron Man equipment--and I even missed lethal cuz I clicked through my main phase one, when I shoulda sent one of my ground guys to the skies to attack with my 3/3 Robot flyer (which I've been quite content with), but fortunately I wasn't punished with my opponent's free extra turn. They're saying this isn't a terribly aggro format, and that there's time to breathe, but this is definitely a deck that can and should get on board fast and just keep up the pressure from the get-go. We just, for whatever reason, couldn't draw a density of our cheap guys consistently. But I'm quite impressed with the Connive topbot card, I've been taking it over hard removal, and that seems to be correct, cuz just costing your opponent a turn, but crucially also the mana is quite valuable, forget about also juicing one of your guys. But we lost to that Agent Coulson card just making everything my opponent played into a must-kill--even if we were effectively trading off one-for-one, he just had a new creature every turn that threatened to get out of control if we didn't trade off immediately. This feels like Mutanimals from Toitles, just gross and almost unbeatable given any time to develop. I also lost to an opponent who, again, didn't have a lightning fast start, but had his tricks online before I could deal with them--so it's like I'm finding you want to get a cheap guy or mini-squad deployed and then just keep applying pressure while backing them up with tricks and stuff. So his guys weren't terribly impressive, but he could back them up in combat, whereas I was playing from behind and couldn't match what he was doing, so I couldn't afford to play around his tricks. One guy also just had the perfect answer to our own threats, too. I feel like I coulda played around some stuff, and I did correctly read him on the 2-4 damage teamwork combatant instant, but he just also had two Take up the Shield, too, and there's just no getting around that--I certainly shoulda used one as a pure lifelink tempo swinger, which is a classic play you'd sometimes have to pull in Dominaria, and which I did deploy in a game this run, too. But like, that was another example of stuff just not lining up--he'd have removal that my Shield wouldn't cover, like exile effects, which was pretty annoying. Anyway, the format is feeling pleasant enough, and we're now through our tokens and on to actual resources now, but we should have enough gold for another draft, and hopefully this will get us to a gem draft train, as we're at least good for the battle pass now.

Okay, our first Marvel Super Sloppos draft is in the books. A minimally satisfactory 3-3. I crammed some Limited Level Ups as well as Paul Cheon and LSV drafts to study up and it looks like UW is the way to go, and fortunately these were quite open this draft, so we scooped those up quite easily, and it was indeed looking like BR was particularly not great--and fortunately two of my first opponents were all in on that pair, but I also noticed a couple soup players. Anyway, our deck was okay but not great, for sure, though I did have the mythic Iron Man equipment that can self-animate, which actually did come up once, which was an excellent combo with the investigate lone ranger creature, which churned out clues while I pecked in early with the 2/1 ability wiper flyer, but we had a decent air force to work with, so once our lone ranger attacking was no longer necessary, we could swoop in with our forces, including the Iron Man equipment and the Falcon wings equipment granting flying to any of our smaller guys who then become serious, flying threats. There was a slight tension, as I expected between getting solid creatures and not bunching up with duplicates when they're all legends, and maybe I shoulda just erred on the side of they'll die in combat, cuz I passed on a second copy of the 4/4 that can flash in if your opponent plays something, just cuz it's a little expensive, we were already heavy on fours as it is and weren't really looking for another five on top of that, and I was just worried of this thing doubly clunking up my hand if it's a legend that is pretty sturdy. I dunno if that was the right call, but I am pretty sure I shoulda just gone with anything--including chancing that second copy, over the 7-drop double-bounce make a token spell, which I never cast, and actually just connived away. I was definitely impressed with the 4-drop topbotdeck connive spell, and sorely wished we had more than just the one copy, but it frequently messed up the opponent's rallying, and even let us plan around whatever troublesome thing we ship with our two We Say Thee Nay, which were almost always good. Anyway, we lacked any singular punch and just relied on chipping in over the course of many turns, though the Iron Man equipment can crunch in if you have a bunch of tokens laying around, which isn't too easy to do if you don't get the investigate loner early. But I am pretty sure I threw one game cuz I was pinched on lands and just dumped all my equipment on my 2/1 Wasp ability robber lady rather than just distribute my threats over the course of a few turns. I found I kept lacking either blue or white, based on what was in my hand, which was annoying--I did have a Fantastic Four land, but never got to activate it, and we had just enough non-creature spells that the land was a slight hindrance, and in fact, we only had seven heroes for that same reason. Anyway, this was a pretty solid start, and we can only tighten it up from here, so I'm eager to see where this goes. The format is indeed looking a little on the slower side, so you have time to find your feet and set up, which is neat. And that also probably means rewarding careful moves and tight play, too, which is also pretty exciting and a little intimidating.

Yeah, just trying to take it easy so we can get on to other things, so just some quick Brawl games, and indeed, some days it's running uphill, others, it's just impossible to lose. Fortunately we flipped to the good side of the coin today, but one guy was just stalling on everything--I even Griefed his last card and after roping out, I discarded his Lightning Bolt, which coulda been fired off on his last open land. What a jerk. I heard the system auto-mods people it perceives as ropers, so I don't believe there is need to report these people, so hopefully this guy gets penalized for such unsporting play. I don't normally emote spam, but when they start roping like that, you gotta hit 'em with the crying hedron guy. There are so many emotes they really ought to put into the system, though. One of the most glaring omissions is some kind of "sorry, I disconnected, but I'm back" or a "sorry, outside distraction, brb" thing either for dogs going crazy at the door or a sudden call you have to take or of course, most pressingly--bathroom break! These seem like such helpful emotes, but the closest we have is like the glitchy Tamiyo for the DC'd expression. There's twenty million for thinking or raging at some development, but, like, given how limited our communication abilities are in-game, we might as well get some "core" functionality out of these things. Also, "Good Game" should only become available after clicking concede--like it asks, would you like to offer your opponent a GG before conceding? And that's that. Also there should be an honors option, where you can offer some kind of small commendation to your opponent if they played well or sportingly or at least weren't a jerk. And if you get enough dings from this, then they ought to look at your conduct in game and ban/suspend appropriately if you're being toxic. Otherwise you just accrue little rewards, either a few gold here and there, or just meaningless politeness clout. Or something--just a way to make it so there's even less incentive to be a jerk on this platform. If it reduces these horrifically tedious games to just 1 in 20 rather than the 1 in 10 or whatever, then that's gotta be worth it--plus it's just easier for them to spot problematic players...if someone's consistently getting slops rather than props or nothing, then that person's probably being a jerk. I dunno. I'd just like some practical emotes, like the DC one especially, but also the Bathroom Break or Sudden Interruption ones.

See, like I was saying, today, just couldn't buy a win. A little pressed for time, so I planned to grab some wins in the the MWM brawl event, but it's like I could never draw my burn when I needed it, or my counters when I needed them, etc. Really annoying, especially as we just crushed it yesterday. But anyway, that's all taken care of and we can move on to other stuff.

Wow, finally finished this study resource. It feels like we've been chipping away at it for a while--it's that somewhat famous animation of a knee bending, and then it deconstructs the the knee into these triangular shapes. So we just took it frame by frame--and I even started studying this maybe last year, but just tabbed it and only recently got back to it in earnest. Nice to have gotten this thing fully studied. That means I'm an excellent artist now, right? Anyway, nice and easy Brawl games in today's MWM--like I said, it's just on some days and off others...just tore through people today...they never had it, I always did, and easy four wins.

Dang, dude, just wanted to get some quick brawl games in to get moving, but I couldn't buy a win all session. I wonder why that is: some days you just carve through everyone, other days, it's like you can never catch a break--like right after you play a sweeper, they dump everything off of some kind of ETB put your deck into play card. Multiple games, they were dead the very next turn, but this turn is when they draw Bolas's Citadel and fire off everything, or the haste spell to make their guy connect for lethal out of nowhere as their last card. Or they're just dead if I can pull a specific card from my graveyard, but of course they have a single, repeatable graveyard hate artifact that I of course can never draw my twenty million Naturalizes to deal with. Just so extremely frustrating. I did make some swaps--I have the BG class from Strixhaven Alchemy and this thing really helps our self mill over Scavenger's Talent, and then I also swapped out something for the Prepare Reanimate guy. So far, haven't really had a chance to get that guy rolling, but he does eat removal and gravewipe spells, so at least he takes the heat of our more important things. Anyway I'm still keeping an eye on how these swaps are shaping up...they seem good, but still unclear. I notice the ultimate on the class has yet to come up--there's just always more pressing things to be doing by the time you have that much mana available, but the threat of it is quite nice. I just plain haven't had much experience with the prepare guy, though. The one time I got to cast him, he died instantly unprepared, and otherwise he's eaten discard spells and stuff, so I never actually got to cast him, but he really does seem promising. And they both help us mill, which has been a little tricky to do, I've found, though I find I'm always one mana short on whatever I'm trying to do--another extremely frustrating part of these losses: like, precisely one more mana woulda won the game, but of course it's an ETBT land or something. Anyway, these two cards, particularly the class have been impressive, but I do wonder if it only feels like it's doing stuff--it's made my grave creatures huge, but I rarely have ways to get them back...it's like the enchantment jinxes you--you finally get a stocked graveyard, but no way to get anything back. So we'll have giant stuff in the graveyard but for all the triggers, if you can't get these guys back, it's purely aesthetic. But the dream has been making a giant Kogla and fighting down anything. It also does make it a little tricky to discern what's been modified how, since this makes all my creatures purple, so it's harder to tell what's been modified in other ways, particularly cost reduction, at a glance, though that is a smaller concern in the grand scheme. MWM was brawl, too, but I switched to my Hadouken!! deck just for a nice change of pace. Enjoyable just sitting back and slinging spells.

Just taking it easy with some brawl games to wrap the Strixhaven run. I am a little short on time, so I didn't have time to open our actual SOS packs, but we have our Battle Pass purchased and a bunch of packs await. And indeed this was quite a haul--we have something like 115 packs, plus 38 from Alchemy, and so far, without opening our SOS packs, we've already singleton collected the commons and most of the uncommons--and mythics and rares for that matter, so we're making excellent progress. And we'll have a token plus a gold draft ready to get the next set rolling, too. I've been checking out the Paul Cheon, Reid Duke, and LSV drafts, and it's looking a bit intimidating in terms of complexity, so I expect a bit of a learning curve, but also, maybe I've leveled up from Lorwyn Eclipsed and Strixhaven, with two pretty successful sets, I feel like I've generally gotten better...but we'll see if any of these skills transfer over. I know watching the pros draft, I'm already getting a bit of an intuition on what they're doing in game or picking in draft, so maybe that speaks to a better understanding of the game that I've acquired, to be able to have a sound opinion so early into a format. Anyway, we'll see how it goes. I am finding that basically every creature being legendary kind of annoying and cheapening, though I guess that's a little more aesthetic than anything, though it does come up in limited with lower rarity creatures, of course. Anyway, we'll see how things go this weekend, as we try to avoid drafting day-one, of course, since it's usually bugapalooza.

Well, closing out our Strixhaven drafting with a mediocre one, as always, but at least it wasn't a shutout. It was another fine Prismari converge deck, though I was definitely missing at least one recursion element--again, I had passed a XXU returner this draft as well, but it was for a Trove, which I feel is absolutely essential. I also got two or three Channelers, which I was pleased to table cuz I've been taking them highly, but have readjusted to the reality that nobody really likes these, so you can get them later, and that's proven an accurate assessment. Anyway, we had Jadzi, Arcane Omens, and Snarl Song plus two Visionary's Dance, plus a bunch of removal and counters, but we were just kinda running on the hopes that that is enough, since we had no way of getting our spells back, which is a little frightening with how long some of the games can go. I also do wish we had slightly better lands, but I had three RW lands, for instance, to enable a free splash of the 5 damage and discount if graveleave, plus Repel Calamity--and of course I never drew a white source when I desperately needed it to remove his one creature, who was gigantic and slugging in every turn. Nor could I draw my bouncers to get rid of this huge token, either, of course. I found I just couldn't get my colors out, though, routinely, and I wonder if I shoulda just cut a Mountain for an off-color. The blue was crucial to get my Channelers, and thus the rest of my deck rolling, but realistically, we probably didn't need our red as abundantly, though we did have Prismari Charm and Vibrant Outburst we might want early. But like, we never cast Snarl Song, for instance, for want of a green source--so many of our lands were not helpful in hitting our main Izzet colors, so like we had a BG land to help cast Omens and Song, but only one UG land. But also emblematic of this format, beyond the Prismari "soup" aspect, was that I was also short playables in this draft--I've never had so many sub-40 drafts in recent sets, but in these recent drafts of this format, I've found I've come in under our minimum. I wonder what that's about. But I ended up running our old sleeper fave, Page, and that was fine, it's just we couldn't get our colors right to unleash our big spells--the mana source count was fine, we just couldn't get specifically green for Snarl Song, or our duals couldn't even surveil cuz we were missing its partner color. And adding to the difficulty, they chose this draft to dump all the mythic drafters--with the draft title no less--on me one after another! I was over the moon to have beaten one of them, again with an emblematic play: Arcane Omens for four, scoop! What a thrill. Anyway, we're pretty much out of resources at this point, so we'll just chill this last day of the format, but it's pack day, anyway, so we've got plenty of packs to open. I wonder how many we managed to nab this set...I can't imagine it's less than a hundred packs...maybe even 100 of the main set--I know we have a bunch of Alchemy packs to slug through, and that, as it tends to, usually eats into our main-set count. But regardless, it should be an excellent haul this set.

Ugh...just disgusting, can never have a nice ending to a format. We had a pretty solid RW deck, including the white Paradigm card, but of course we flood out, or are never able to hit the seventh mana source, and 0-3. Without fail, the last drafts of a format are the absolute worst and you are left with a hideous, bitter taste in your mouth as you send off a format, but since we're so up on gems, I just went straight into an extremely rare second draft in one day, and 1-3d that with a pretty solid Prismari deck, which also would flood out and just never line up with whatever my opponent was casting--like the classic Essence Scatters when he's casting tokens. We were also lacking converge payoffs despite our Lute and plentiful lands, but I did have an oddball splash in the BW kill/revive 4, which I never cast, but could have. I considered just running a 3/3 surveil instant over it, but figured the upside was worth it. But maybe even a second Textbook Tabulator mighta been what we wanted to make sure we could get to the late game and provide pressure and/or defense in the meantime. We had a fine deck, but certainly blew it either in deckbuilding or gameplay--like the last game, I just clung to my Flow State since I didn't want to just run it out without being maxed out, but maybe I shoulda just gone for it to keep up with the threats presented--I had two Stress Dreams, even, but we were missing like the modal wrath 3RR or something, and I passed on the XXU returner and just settled for a Lorecaster, but that just felt underwhelming. It was so disappointing how my plentiful burn and counters never seemed to line up ideally with my opponents' distribution of creatures...that's just pure bad luck, like five-point damage when they happen to cast their 6/6, and then of course we draw an Essence Scatter the next turn. Supremely annoying, but at least we made a quick run into platinum in Timeless afterward, and right under a 500 gold quest, too. But now all our gems are gone, apart from our budget for the battle pass, but I'll gold up one more final draft tomorrow, and hopefully that replenishes us a bit. Hideous runs today, though, can't wait to get that stink off in a better draft. This can't end on a sad note.

Man, caught the Obama Center opening event, such lovely speeches, but the clip packages and especially the musical performances were just incredible. It really felt joyous for the first time since, like right after Joe won, and I can feel we're on the cusp of a general period of joy soon--it's going to be here. I see how generally joyful people in New York are right now, celebrating their sports team all together, enjoying how their local government is striving to improve things tangibly and as quickly as possible...we can have that nationally, and it starts this November...we're almost there. So many of these horrific, clogging villains, impeding our progress and national--and international--happiness will be tossed out soon enough and we can return to a trajectory of peace and prosperity and cooperation and unity. I can see it, I can feel it. We just need people to follow through--register, rally, and vote. Whining online isn't worth anything. You need to talk to neighbors and put in some actual effort. If we all pitch in just a little, it will make a world--a galaxy--of difference and we can begin the healing process and start setting things right. Couldn't sleep, so I just rolled into today and just rattled off some surprisingly tough and vexing Brawl matches. Can't really do much else...quite exhausted...

All right, wrapped up some games in the last hours of the SOS Sealed MWM event. It felt like I lost a lot more than I actually did--but I just barely eked out a winning record. The deck just felt underpowered despited the suite of mythics. Like Ral often does nothing. Discarding is fine, but I find he's just terribly vulnerable and there is a lot of card flow, so any single discard doesn't do a whole lot, and then he has no way of removing threats, which is a real throwback to the first era of PWs, where many of them didn't come with a built-in method to protect themselves, and were thus not worth it. So the ideal situation is clearing the board or inducing a stalemate before letting this guy plink away. His revive ability is good, but you are only getting little guys back, so you're kinda just fogging an attack. I dunno. It's probably wiser to include another creature over this guy. And funnily enough, our splashed BG PW was more important and relevant than our in-school PW for our Silverquill deck. But anyway, definitely feeling the absence of just one more removal spell or something. Glad to get a chance to play with these cards in the twilight of the format, though. And also nice to feel reassured that Ral isn't that great, though I guess we're looking at one or two more drafts of the format, so it's not like we can use this knowledge too much, but who knows. Also, I noticed all the Spider-Man and Marvel cards are online now, and while a few of them are indeed cool looking, I'm just sticking with the Magic versions. The notable exceptions were the Humberto Ramos one for sentimental reasons and the Moebius Ponder, as that has long been one of my favorite illustrations ever. Those Alex Ross pieces also look pretty cool--imagine making the Hulk look cool. But I don't believe I'll go out of my way to acquire the ones I'm missing. I already picked up all the ones with exclusive Magic art, so they wouldn't be locked away when they switched into styles, but I did make an exception for some of the most horrendous art that I didn't mind losing out on, which meant only about two I didn't craft. But it looks like they switched over the default skin to the Marvel ones, so now I've got to go through and switch back all the ones I want--which is most of them--by hand. Stunningly annoying update, as always. Why can't we have an update that isn't bundled with just absolutely annoying changes...I don't think we've ever had a purely upside update in recent memory. Even long before, you automatically got your depth styles implemented and you could toggle them off, but now for those, you have to activate each one, which is annoying, but also impractical when drafting, cuz you often miss out on the first run you get with a new style cuz it didn't get implemented and you gotta hunt it down before your next run. And when you get a random style from MWM or a random award and you're in the middle of a run or something, you could well forget what you got and you'll just not have that style up--this literally happened yesterday, where I was trying to finish my MWM run to four wins, but I got one of those negative space Tarkir styles, and all I could remember was that it was a green creature(?), put a little pin in that, and then later had to hunt through my entire collection to find what it was--it was indeed the creepy Hydra, so I was glad to get non-creepy art for it. Anyway, just wish they'd implement smooth updates and test it out to eliminate any annoyance factors. Is that so hard?

It was a phantom sealed SOS event in this week's MWM, so I just did that. We could have a pretty lean Silverquill deck, but since it's for no stakes and there's no elimination, I decided to have a Timmy moment and splash for the BG PW just cuz it's funny to have that and my Ral Zareck PW in play at the same time, which happens regularly. In fact, I've had mono-mythic boards, with both of my Emeritus of Woe and both of my PWs holding it down. The deck is still missing a little something, like some more formidable creatures, card flow, or removal, but it's pretty solid all around, just not oustanding, and we kinda count on the nature of PWs to be overwhelming and conducive of scoops, but they themselves aren't too threatening. They're both pretty fragile and certainly die pretty easily after marginal impact on the board that any other similarly costed card could have achieved, but Ral has been pretty stunningly unimpressive...he just kinda is just there. He once ate up like four cards from the opponent, but this was the one guy where every card was a draw two, so that only did so much, and then he landed his Opus mill guy, got one 5-spell off, and that was enough to decide the game several turns down the road--he was down to two or three cards against my four or so, and had no way to break through, so he was looking to deck first after all that, but he had also managed one more minimill before I killed his miller, and that was enough to bring me to beneath his card count. If I'd managed my PWs differently, I'm pretty sure I coulda had my BG PW ready to kill his guy immediately rather than provide him with two turns of it active. Anyway. A pretty sweet deck, though, again, it is undeniably just lacking some oomph. PWs filtering or drawing cards isn't that valuable when you aren't drawing into much else. But because it's so low stakes, it's a fine change of pace. I don't normally play sealed, and I don't believe I've ever played Abzan this format, and certainly haven't played Witherbloom ever since the deceptively strong Jump-In preview MWM event in the opening days of the format, so it was nice to be able to have another light chance to play that color combo that seemed so strong initially. I might have one or two more drafts on deck, though, and I'm just fine playing these out, cuz checking my WR this set, it's at 58%, which is pretty great, and I feel I could Inifinitivo any given draft, with a real chance to trophy it, which doesn't happen too often, where I feel so comfortable drafting a format.

Okay, back to our Prismari comfort zone, and we certainly got to cast some grindy spells, capped off with Wisdom of the Ancients, which is always a treat--my record this run was "drawing" seven, I believe. But unfortunately we only scraped out four wins, which is quite fine, and the minimum I hope for each run. But we were lacking some token makers. We had three Troves, which were great at stabilizing our life and negating any landed creatures plinking away at us, and we had plenty of burn, but we needed at least one of the Visionary's Dance we saw floating around, but there was always something a little higher priority we had to pick whenever those came up, and we ended up missing out on all of them. We did have a slightly higher creature count in this build, including some cards that I rarely get to play, namely the 4/5 reach haste, but I knew he was just what we were looking for since we didn't get any token makers. But because we had such good mana, we were able to make some quite wacky splashes, headlined by the double splash in the discard put two pumpC on a creature. And because we had more creatures than usual, often this would have a body to boost. But it was many a super expensive Duress, and I even won a game by knocking the sole removal from my hand and then casting and swinging with, you guessed it, haste reach 4/5. We lost some absolutely close ones, though, and arguably preventably so. I had thought about, for example, tapping my Channeler to pay for a Stock up or whatever in the hopes of ripping my discard spell just so I could trigger both my Troves, but I foolishly dismissed this path and tapped one of my Swamps (the only other black spell, which I'd already cast was Wander Off) rather than my Channeler, and sure enough, I drew the discard spell and no way to cast it without the aid of one of my Troves, meaning I couldn't gain the full four life, as I was planning--often I was ripping through my deck looking for a spell simply to trigger the lifegain. The extra two life made all the difference, as they woulda added another turn, thus another draw to my clock, meaning it would be that much more likely I could start chaining spells and gaining life every turn cycle, or at least finding my plentiful removal to alleviate my opponent's pressure so I could more comfortably draw into actual long-term solutions. But because I didn't tap ideally, I lost out on that extremely necessary two life. We didn't have super impressive spells, but our strength was just the relentless nature of them, with Wisdom of the Ancients starting the madness all over again. We did have Flow State and Stock Up plus Stress Dream, plus Quick Study (didn't run the second) so our card flow was great, and we frequently had time to set up, though one frustrating game stranded me on two of my seventeen lands, and I wasn't able to bounce back in time, though, again the Troves do an excellent job at helping you rebuild. Certainly wish we had at least a 3/3 surveil 2 or a sweeper, but four wins is just fine. There was definitely a RW deck floating around, too, and I almost abandoned ship for it--and I woulda gotten rewarded with ye olde RW 2/1 Owl that always seems to come around when I'm RW, but I'm satisfied with our decision to go Big Prismari here--Zealous Lorecaster for Wisdom of the Ancients next turn was a super sweet play, even playing around Send in the Pests by holding back a land; we had so much mana available, I had the luxury of being able to hold back lands.