#It’s such a hyper specific and SUPER POTENT turn off for me like

[thelegendofchocolate]

my number one fandom batfam ick really is the “Jason was Tim’s Robin” thing, ughhhhhhhh. pls stop with the most bizarre Dick Grayson erasure ive ever seen…pls! On my hands and knees!!! Begging!! please!!!

[acreaturecalledgreed]

Could you please talk about sto?

I tried to search for him in the tags but maybe they're not working for me and I'd like to know more about the man (🪱 worm🪱)

What does he like to do.... His dreams.... If he has friends...

okay so i had to do some nonsense to type this out b/c its too much to type on the phone but also tumblr desktop is still super fucking borked for me in terms of asks and i dont know why

sto is a member of a sapient alien species of giant ice worms! they are extremely solitary and would be considered violent by most standards though they tend not to view themselves as such. their langue is almost entire compromised of "writing" in the form of how the tunnels they burrow through are made, arranged, textured, and their depth, as well as supplemented by various deep subsonic sounds

they exist in a very stream-of-conciousness sort of way, as they literally "write" as they move; in the strange way, they're sort of constantly narrating their own existence

their planet is largely comprised of ice and water but has large swathes of mineral deposites scatter through- some make islands, some are just deposits on the "seabed" (majority is frozen; water really only happens in certain parts during the hottest part of their planetary cycle)

most of the fauna and flora on the planet have to be extremely hardy, as nuritent sources are not the most prominent (they're there! but its not easy), and the planet only has one or two carnivorous species (of which the worms are one of them)

they are cannibalistic as well as feeding off of other species, but dont need to eat exceptionally often as their bodies have this sort of hyper efficiency thing going on

i also have uuhh plotted out a lot of how their ahem reproductive lives work but we can get into that another time

sto's species is considered EXTREMELY dangerous for any offworld travelors as their very sensitive to sound and movement on the surface of the planet and they do Not turn up a chance at easy prey; they also were not believed to be more than just large animals (sto is so far the first the only evidence that their species is not only sapient, but Extremely intelligent, but most dont know about him)

b/c of how their communication works they have a sort of culture that highly empasizes the individual as an aspect of religion (they sort of consider themselves their own gods?) and an emphasis on the endless pursuit of knowledge, as basically most of what they do is write and think

people still come to this planet, however, as its the only known source of an extremely bizarre, highly radioactive mineral that is highly sought after for ~~weaponry~~ RESEARCH purposes, as it's basically so potent it can rip you apart at the molecular level, while also being strangely easy to manipulate and channel

as a result the planet is sort of infamous as a massive death planet where you either get eaten or freeze to death, and mostly only hired hands go there for samples Or ppl who are weird and want to research that planet Specifically (put a pin in this)

so sto HAS seen humans (and other sapient species from off planet) before, and he's eaten his fair share, but mostly hes just extremely curious about them and spent a lot of time "watching" them (the worms have eyes but their sight is Not Great)

and he like. wow he thinks hands are so cool. hands and arms. its so easy to manipulate things!!! if he wants to do that he has to use his tongues. thats so cool he wants hands.

anyway (fake science babble) over the course of like a century this weird little piss has made a device utilizing aforementioned mineral to blast himself apart at a molecular level and reconstruct it as he has pre-programmed it to- resulting in him being able to be _shaped_ into a humanoid form (this is important- he does not know how humans Work inside. he had to guess a lot of things and he largely only managed to look kind of human on a surface level; his bone structure is almost entiely guesswork b/c he knows humans have SOMETHING inside them because they are crunchy, etc. he's mostly worm once you get past the skin. even the skin isnt quite right, because he had not Yet learned what human skin even feels like. he just defaulted to a sort of velvet-soft flesh not unlike what the worms have on spots where theyre not as heavily furred)

eventually he encounters a merc ship and the ppl on board are like "hey what the shitting fucking hell is that thats a guy but thats not a guy what the Fuck"

he can't talk, he doesnt emote, he seems to barely be able to walk, to them he's like a newborn, almost

this is where his "present" story begins to kick off- because on board this ship is a xenobiologist who has gotten free access onboard in exchange for functioning as a ship medic

this is delilah. she is a devout bapist from whatever deep south america there still is on future earth. she loves xenobiology. she ESPECIALLY loves "efficient" xeno-animals. shes here because she Fucking Loves These Worms. These Worms Are Her Favourite. shes also completely fucking insane. whatever you are picturing she looks like you are probably wrong.

shes like hey. that weird guy might die out there hes like. naked. even if hes a ken doll. and theyre like yeah youre right. its cold. theres worms. why is he even fucking here what is going on.

so they drag him on board and internally he's like ": }"

anyway with a lot of poking prodding and meet-cute delilah eventually comes to a Realization of what this dude is even if she doesnt get How this dude is and she promptly loses her whole fucking brain because this is the bestest and coolest thing that has ever happened to her

this is also the most terrifying thing that has ever happened to her shipmates, because theres a fucking death worm on the ship and they left planet side hours ago

so (hand waves a lot of deal making deliberation discussion) evnetually sto is just sort of adopted as a member of the crew, more or less, even if most of the crew is Very Uncomfortable

he and delilah get slowly better at communicating, because they are both very smart and both trying Extremely hard to meet eachother halfway

eventually they become and item and its cute and horrifying and bizarre and delilah gets to fuck her special interest its Amazing and sto has barely any understanding of a _partner_ but he _has_ had brief mates before and he understands that humans tend to stay with their mates and also not mutilate or attempt to eat their mates and he is a Very Good At Human Good Boy and he will Not hurt delilah he loves her very much in his little worm hearts (not that delilah would mind getting murdered by her worm boyfriend, she is, in fact, bonkers)

"sto" is called "sto" b/c thats what the crew started calling him. depending on who you ask its short for either "stoic" or "stowaway"

sto is a "man" because delilah roughly explained the cocnept of gender to him and he was like "oh okay That One" but he doesnt really give a shit about pronouns, he barely understnads what pronouns are

he is delilah's boyfriend/research assistant/research subject and totgethor Adventures happen idk

his humanoid appearance i have not yet made decent art of but you can get an idea by knowing that hes White (like, literally stark white. like snow. not like white as in how some humans are white) and aesthetically largely based on the anime mad scientist trope bc i love it

see also this post

[legendaryedhplays]

Oppressive Wills, Part II

Hello everyone and welcome to another exciting Shattered Perceptions. This week we are continuing on last week, with the history of Commander and the perceived problem children of different eras. If you happened to miss out on last week’s article, I would go back and read that when you have the chance.

I will reiterate that the intent of these articles is not to highlight or demonize players but to look back and educate people on the history of Commander through the lens of boogeymen. While some of my examples may focus on more personal metagames, I want to try to look over the entire format where I can. I don’t think the existence of a best deck is not bad or that a player should be unwelcome in the format, just that boogeymen have and do exist. My intention this week is to run through the generals that have either been printed in sets following Commander 2013 or got a second life through the discovery of a degenerate strategy coming to light. In fact, that’s exactly where I’d like to start.

Glissa, the Tyrant

I previously talked about how in some cases, the generals in question were not complete metagame defining problems—see Prossh, Skyraider of Kher. These generals were more issues that caused the metagame to shift for a brief period and possibly never went viral in the Commander Community. Glissa, the Traitor was one of these decks in one of my shops.

While I don’t know the exact point where Glissa had been identified as the go-to general to helm a Stax style deck, I know that she crashed into my metagame in early 2014. I might point to Braids, Cabal Minion still being legal as a piece of your other 99, or it might have been Vraska the Unseen being printed as a versatile removal spell that turned into a victory condition if left unchecked. Regardless, the deck was strong, especially against the unprepared. It used cards like Tangle Wire, Winter Orb, and Mana Web to awkwardly minimize the table’s choices and strip them of resources.

Since most of the hard/soft locks are through artifacts, Glissa was the ideal general since anything lost can be brought back again. The deck was a miserable to play against—an hour and half to two hours of being mana screwed and waiting for a win condition to manifest or just have Glissa commander damage out the table. I would usually drop as soon as another game opened up.

Glissa blew in and out of my metagame in a matter of weeks, since it was run by one player running a deck in the mold of this and over time players simply refused to game against him. And honestly, that’s probably the right tack. If a playgroup doesn’t want to play decks that become hyper dominant in lieu of more casual games, they should be able to do that. In the right metagame, I can see where this deck could be accepted when all players come to fight on the same awkward axes.

Narset, Oops… All Turns

Khans of Tarkir and the continued block were pretty great for Commander as a whole. We got a huge influx of wedge commanders and spells, a healthy amount of modal spells that felt powerful even if they disappeared off the grid in the coming years, and it all ended with Dragons! The one bookmarked card I saw become an issue throughout the Commander community, however, was Narset, Enlightened Master. The rise and fall of Narset was a slow burn, unlike Glissa who made for horribly long and boring games. Narset might take over and end the game within five minutes of hitting the board by stringing together spells like Time Warp and Beacon of Tomorrows, along with Seize the Day and Waves of Aggression to quickly win through combat.

The general consensus among players in the shops I had frequented was that the Narset deck could be stopped with the right tech—Kismet or Arcane Laboratory come to mind—and that lengthened the life of the deck’s community tolerance. The real issue became that with the right set-up—say Sneak Attack or Lightning Greaves—and counter back-up the deck could go off all the sudden. Once again, ending underdeveloped games. While Narset never went extinct, the deck ran its paces and the high volume of them settled down to the point where I don’t hear a lot of complaining about her existence anymore.

Must Have Experience

“Commander 2015,” he sighed as he started the next paragraph.

Almost a year later, Commander players received Commander 2015, a two-color themed series of preconstructed decks that introduced experience counters which players accrued—but never lost—by playing with the marquee generals for each deck. I wish I could say that only one of these was an issue; but as I see it, three of the marquee generals were turbulent to varying degrees.

The most benign of the three was Ezuri, Claw of Progress simply for how he warped the politics of games he entered. The gimmick being that to collect more experience counters you would play very small creatures didn’t read as especially problematic, as green loves big creatures and blue is creature-light. The problem was that Ezuri converted your experience counter into +1/+1 counters every turn. What resulted after a few turns was that the Ezuri player would ascend to the status of an impromptu Archenemy. By all accounts, the compleated elf’s popularity waned and he has become very forgettable.

Depending on your experience, runner-up status goes to Mizzix of the Izmagnus, though some may debate that it outclasses my number one. By utilizing your mana curve effectively after casting Mizzix, she generally enabled a very potent Storm archetype that felt like the return of Narset but with noticeably less attack steps. Thank god they didn’t have Paradox Engine yet. This had an abrupt big swing on the format as answers like Arcane Laboratory and Rule of Law became important staples for control decks to stem the bleeding. Mizzix’s reign eventually  ended and calm returned.

Finally, Meren of Clan Nel Toth. This deck still stays on my radar and might be the only deck spotlighted today that I keep in mind as I construct decks. Green/Black is pretty good about getting creatures into the graveyard if it will benefit them, so Meren plays right into that niche. For fear of endless reanimation cycles, the community had to start packing more graveyard hate—something we’d forgotten after years of not being abused by graveyards—and be prepared to protect against any silver bullets the Meren pilot might have slotted into fight the hate. This deck was and is still powerful.

One takeaway: notice that I wasn’t specific about what each of these decks ran. That’s because the variety of what worked for each deck was diverse. From a game theory perspective, these generals created an interesting new metagame at the height of their popularity, one where you had to choose which kinds of decks you wanted to be strong or weak to. I believe that experience counters were not bad, but what magnified the problems was the flexibility that each general allowed for.

Indomitable Popularity

Dear Atraxa players,

You’re not a problem, there are just so many of you.

The last stop on the timeline is extremely recent and frankly is a different kind of infamy, Atraxa, Praetors’ Voice. Coming out of Commander 2016 we got our four-color generals and while they were not especially oppressive, they are all wildly popular and still everywhere I look when I get into various shops and look around the tables. Atraxa is the most popular general on EDHrec by a very wide margin. Three decks exist in my main group, and countless exist on MTGO.

Any issues I have with Atraxa have very little to do with the deck being too powerful, but simply being too “solved” and ultimately amounting to being either Four Color Infect or Super Friends. I saw it too when she was previewed—if you think it’s clever, it’s not. This is probably my “get off my lawn” moment, but I am a little annoyed by the lack of innovation coming out of the deck and I never feel especially impressed with the small changes I see.

Is creativity and innovation the purpose of the format? No, having fun is. But I just wish this popular general was popular for versatility and not two gimmicks.

Future Sight

To me, Commander will always be a successful and popular format as long as people enjoy playing games with each other. To briefly look to the future, the potential problem generals I foresee are The Ur-Dragon, Mairsil, the Pretender, and Captain Sisay.

The Ur-Dragon is powerful general capable of winning the game in any number of ways once it hits play. This is not to discount it’s passive Eminence ability—removing one mana from the cost of all your dragons does more work than it lets on. If Game of Thrones has taught us anything, the person with dragons has power.

Mairsil, the Pretender is the kind of general that already has a powerful two- or three-card interactions just waiting to be uncovered, but may take some time to develop like Glissa, the Traitor. If Mairsil proves to be powerful, I think the decks could thrive in great variety, but enough consistency and they will be a force to reckon with.

Lastly, with the new changes to the Legendary Rule by way of Planeswalkers now being included in the pool of legendary permanents, I think the stock on Captain Sisay will rise. With the ability to now feed a Green/White Super Friends deck, I worry that she has the potential to overstay her welcome. This may fall more into the Atraxa level of commonality instead of the oppressiveness of a Glissa or Narset, but I forecast a few salty tears nonetheless.

If you’ve made it through both halves, I feel eternally blessed, but that’s my time for the week. As always, you can find my on Twitter to berate me on my inaccurate history of these generals. I love discussion and feedback is the lifeblood of content creation, so I hope this can stir another conversation up. Until next time, thank you.

[omcik-blog]

New Post has been published on OmCik

New Post has been published on http://omcik.com/espn-in-the-crosshairs/

ESPN in the crosshairs

At ESPN it is officially time to cue up Martha and the Vandellas: “Nowhere to run to, baby; nowhere to hide.”

For a network that unabashedly labels itself the “Worldwide Leader in Sports,” this week provided the ultimate welcome to No-Man’s Land in the war between media and politics, circa 2017:  The White House made a public statement calling for ESPN host Jemele Hill to be fired from her (non-federal) job for the offense of harshly criticizing the President of the United States.

Then the President himself decided to fire away, tweeting Friday morning that ESPN needed to “apologize for the untruth” of Hill’s tweet.

In truth, ESPN has been caught in the ferocious cross-fire of partisan politics even before the outspoken Hill kicked up this latest nasty skirmish with a Tweet accusing President Trump of being a white supremacist, not qualified to be President.

But when the White House spokesperson, Sarah Sanders, called Hill’s Tweet a “fire-able offense” (usually a category decided upon by employers, not outside agitators), ESPN ascended to a new place of dishonor on the growing roster of media bete noires for the conservative/Trump movement.

Related: Trump attacks ESPN after anchor calls him a white supremacist

And when the network (apparently) compelled Hill to acknowledge the criticism by offering a tweet regretting putting the network in an “unfair light,” ESPN executed a perfect media double axel:

One spin: Hill’s defenders were offended by what they labeled as kowtowing to the right instead of standing up for a valued employee. (Response from Al Sharpton: If ESPN were to decide to fire Hill “many of us in the civil rights community will stand up and take ESPN off our service.”)  The other spin:  Hill’s critics were offended by ESPN’s decision not to dismiss her for an offense they saw as parallel to those committed by previously fired ESPN voices from right, like Curt Schilling. (Response from Fox Sports host Clay Travis: ESPN “hates you if you vote Republican.”)

And sports used to be labeled the fun-and-games section of journalism.

To be fair, ESPN, for business and company-policy reasons, and the fact of simply existing in a polarized USA, has been moving away from pure, unvarnished coverage of sports events and figures for more than a decade. On some occasions, developments forced management’s hand, as when in 2003, Rush Limbaugh was quickly gone from his position commenting on the NFL after his analysis of Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb (overrated, he said, because “the media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well”) was widely denounced as racist.

Other political (and often racial) incidents have pinballed the network all over the media landscape: “Monday Night Football” crooner Hank Williams, fired for comparing President Obama to Hitler (rehired this season); host Bill Simmons, let go for daring to criticize Roger Goodell, the Commissioner of the NFL, with whom ESPN has a massive financial commitment; Schilling, first suspended for saying Hillary Clinton should be buried under a jail, then fired for a Facebook post decrying laws that permit transgendered individuals to use bathrooms of their choice; an ESPN golf tournament moved from a Trump-owned course; a college football announcer reassigned from a game at the University of Virginia, fresh off the Charlottesville racial violence, because his name is Robert Lee.

The reaction to ESPN’s often hyper-protective coverage of business partners like the NFL has been harsh from the left, but nothing like the furor from the right driven by accusations that ESPN has become an overtly left-wing network. Many analysts point to the coverage of the former Missouri University linebacker, Michael Sam, the first openly gay player in the NFL draft, as a watershed moment.

Conservative critics were outraged over ESPN’s heavy focus on the marginally talented Sam, (including capturing how he celebrated being drafted by kissing his boyfriend), saying that it reflected a growing liberal agenda at the network. Of course, not a peep was made from the same quarters when ESPN devoted even more lavish attention to the — as it turned out — marginally talented Tim Tebow, a conservative darling for his advocacy of his Christian faith.

Objections came from many sides when the 2015 Arthur Ashe Courage award went to Caitlyn Jenner. Conservatives berated ESPN for shameless pandering to liberal support for LGBQT rights; one objective sports analyst, Bob Costas, labeled it a “tabloid play,” noting Jenner had not been a sports figure in a generation.

The controversies have swirled at the same time ESPN is facing a brutal financial retrenchment, losing tens of millions of subscribers to cord-cutting. Predictably, the conservative critics — many of whom also don’t like ESPN’s parent company, Disney — have attributed the technologically based diminishment of ESPN to political stances that have alienated viewers on the right, who are supposedly quitting the networks in droves as a protest. 

That was the centerpiece of Trump’s frontal assault tweet: that ESPN is being crippled by the ideologically inspired defections of alienated conservative subscribers.‎ (As though football fans of, say, Alabama — where Trump got 62 per cent of the vote — would avoid the network when the Tide was rolling.)

James Andrew Miller, co-author of the oral history of ESPN, “Those Guys Have All the Fun,” also pointed out the lunacy of the idea that ESPN is being punished for its views through mass cord-cutting. “The cord-cutters would be eliminating everything on cable, including Fox News,” Miller told me.

Miller argued that the politically based attacks on ESPN generally lack necessary context. “It is beyond tricky to try to make sense of what’s happening at ESPN in a political context.”

But something is happening, as even ESPN management has publicly acknowledged. It might better fit the definitive of socially progressive than politically liberal. John Skipper, the ESPN president, told the company’s public editor, Jim Brady, in December:

“It is accurate that the Walt Disney Company and ESPN are committed to diversity and inclusion. These are long-standing values that drive fundamental fairness while providing us with the widest possible pool of talent to create the smartest and most creative staff. We do not view this as a political stance but as a human stance. We do not think tolerance is the domain of a particular political philosophy.”

It is also true that, as the best moments of any game have become instantly available all over social media, the network has made a major shift away from pure highlight shows toward debate-style shows, where the hosts are encouraged to mix it up and be outspoken. That certainly describes Hill, who has won wide praise for her potent presence on her daily SportsCenter show. Even before the current run-in with the Trump Administration, Hill has been an avowed critic of his positions on social media—and elsewhere.

In Brady’s examination of the politicizing of ESPN back in December, Hill told him: “This time, you’ve got one candidate who is so polarizing, and, because of the racist and xenophobic views associated with him, it’s made it difficult to stay quiet about it.” Those words are not appreciably different from her tweet.

Miller said ESPN had made clear that even though Hill did not use the platform of her show to make her Trump comments, it viewed her Twitter presence as part of her professional profile, and thus it was not somewhere such pointed comments could be made. (One report Thursday night suggested ESPN tried to have Hill sit out at least one night on her show after the White House denunciation, and that she was backed up in her refusal by other black anchors at the network who would serve as replacements for her. ESPN vociferously denied that report.) 

Miller noted that Hill was hired specifically for her strong views and the way in which she argues them — at least when it comes to sports. “She is valued because of her opinions. She’s a keen observer and can use language like a sword.” The paradox, he added, is that “The President can decry political correctness and go after people. But apparently nobody else can.”

And apparently nobody can really expect to watch sports the way they did before the unremitting intrusion of partisan politics entered our lives. In the past, people went to games at the ballpark or watched the Super Bowl at a party with friends, utterly unaware of anything except which team they were rooting for.

 Now it seems to matter just as much which tribe you belong to.

CNNMoney (New York) First published September 15, 2017: 11:53 AM ET