It’s pretty powerful... like, it essentially cancels out trample if you (the defender) wish it to. I always kind of assumed trample damage carried over automatically as soon as there was lethal on the blocking creature, like that kinda seemed to be an inherent quality of trample. But i guess if the attacking player wanted to, they could just assign all or nearly all of the damage to the creature instead of trampling over. Normally there’d be no reason for that, but it seems to be the way it works!! And banding puts this damage distribution in the hands of the defending player. Banding creatures don’t even need to do anything special either, just block.

Kinda makes me want to use my Baton of Morale to make Fog Bank an even better blocker... As its weakness tends to end up being its low toughness does almost nothing to stop trample. And Fortified Area in wall tribal is more powerful than i’d realized, too. Nothing’s getting through that unless it’s unblockable.

World Anthropology Day: Grokking as a Geek Anthropologist

In honor of World Anthropology Day 2017, we’re sharing the text from an AnthroTalk presentation on what it means to do geek anthropology, given at George Washington University in October 2016.  I was a geek long before I was an anthropologist. I grew up on a steady diet of Ray Bradbury, anime and vampire lore—the science fiction, fantasy, dystopian, weird and speculative worlds I gravitated…

Grokking and Going Native: Rayna’s Response

This post is part of the series Anthropology in Outerspace which examines representations of anthropology in science-fiction. To read previous installments in this series, consult the related contents section at the end of this post or select the series in the ”Our Series” menu in the right sidebar. 

Emma wrote a very creative piece linking the idea of “grokking” with sci-fi examples. A perfect,…