#ManaScrew

[jones-friend]

Gencon Thots

Now that I’ve mostly recovered from the Backstreet Boys Reunion Tour I wanted to post some thots I had regarding games I discovered at gencon!

So I used to collect pokemon cards. Im a longtime mtg player. When I heard Disney was asking Ravensburger to make a tcg I was curious. To do the equivalent of sticking my head around the corner I entered a Lorcana learn to play.

Good god was this game popping off at gencon. Every game was full and every morning the booth sold out. There’s a ton of speculative hype surrounding the game right now.

In Lorcana we are illumineers painting Characters with Ink who will generate Lore. The first player to generate 20 Lore wins. Characters have a power, health, and amount of lore they generate as stats with an Ink cost, whether or not the card can be played as Ink, and any abilities the card may have.

On your turn you may reveal a card with that gold swirl around the cost and play face down as Ink (lands). There is no colors, Ink is Ink, and a deck can contain no more than 2 colors of Ink at a time.

Characters cannot Exert (tap) the turn you play them, “the paint has to dry”. Once the paint dries you can Exert your Character. They can Exert to generate Lore equal to the pen pips on the right of the text box (Tinkerbell here makes 1 lore). You can also Exert a Character to Challenge an Exerted Character (you cannot Challenge an unExerted Character). Challenge is fighting, each Character deals damage equal to their power. Damage does not wear off, meaning you can’t unendingly use one beater to stomp thru your opponent’s deck.

There are also Songs. Songs are special Actions that can be played using our already played Characters. So timing my plays right I could play a Character with a cost of 5. On my next turn I could Exert them to play Let it Go for free, play an Ink, and play a 6 cost Character playing 11 Ink worth of stuff for 6. Its a really neat idea.

I feel Lorcana has a lot of good ideas and takes away a lot of what feels bad about mtg. In doing so I think it also takes away some of what people like.

The ink system is great. Manascrew isnt really a thing in this game. That your cards (and not all of them) can be played as Ink or for its cost is fascinating. I bounced my opponent’s smaller Character and he played it as Ink to play his larger cost Character. You end up making more decisions about who to use as Ink and who to play, and it opens up deckbuilding to more fun options.

Not being able to touch your opponent’s stuff (for the most part) is also a polarizing thing. I like that I know I can use my dudes before they get picked. Some people might hate that they have to wait.

I like that its a race to generate Lore rather than having another slugfest. It makes the game feel unique and Lore generation as a stat adds more dimension to what cards can do.

One of the biggest, most polarizing points of the game for players will be that there are no Instants. There is no play-response system in this game. The only time you interact with your opponent’s turn is if they trigger your ability during their turn. Otherwise you do not interact with your opponent’s turn.

I did not enjoy the starter decks. I steamrolled my opponent every game. My buddy got steamrolled every game. Thats 4 decks with 4 games and 2 were clearly stronger than the other 2. I don’t feel the starter decks did a good job balancing the different colors and showcasing what they do. My opponent had gray and yellow, idk what they do bc I dunked on every dude he tossed out. Then what I played he couldn’t touch. It was a hot mess and I think they did a poor job constructing entry level lists meant to be played against each other in a paid event.

Otherwise I felt the game was fine enough. Unique enough not to just be a mtg clone, has some mechanics that make my brain go brrr, but I feel its a tcg with bumpers on it. Its very safe in the experience it delivers and bc of this you can often forecast the next 2-3 turns and you can tell you’ve lost and just have to wait for the loss to take place. Its not a game I’m interested in buying myself but if my bud wanted to go to an event or play with decks they made I’d def be down as a friend activity.

[neotula]

finished a magic game today by doing 142 damage in one turn. more testing required to see if I’ve fixed the ratios in the deck, as I either flatten everyone in sight or spend half the game manascrewed.

I finally went through and sleeved everything and that seemed to fix my. Uh. Shuffling issue. Because that might have been causing my mana problem. More tests will tell!

[insane-bad-idea-person]

just had a dream:

i was playing magic and one person was playing gremlin tribal and another had hellscube cards (unsleeved) and i was manascrewed

one of the cards played asked us to physically change a picture—that picture being the thing i remember most clearly, because:

it had a fucking mechanical slideshow, and if you swiped the canvas up or down it would change

it only displayed those old-fashioned oil paintings, but all the people are the heisters from payday, except,

if you don't look at it head on it tries to fucking jumpscare you with pictures of freaky archangels and little girls in sanitariums,

and nobody took it even remotely seriously

real line from the dream, said after looking at the painting: "I think that was Leyley from tcoal in a padded room. Nope, wrong eye color. Nevermind."

what the hell is this supposed to say about my psyche

[manascrwd]

Last FNM of the year

I haven't posted here in a while and a lot has happened since. The greatest change is that I'm not playing in Brussels or Leuven anymore but in Ghent now that I live there. There is more Modern and less Legacy. I don't like it as much but it's alright.

My last modern FNM was with Asmo-blast, an aggressive 8-blast deck with the asmo package. This time it went pretty bad. The deck really did not kick off and I found it not that great.

I also sleeved a fun deck for legacy FNM but it was quite a mistake. I really wanted to have a feel for the 40K miracles deck that popped up on MTGTOP8. All the other players where on a degenerate combo deck of some sort and my deck was really just cute. I won 1 game against lands when I got an "early" monarch drawing me many more cards than my opponent. But otherwise the deck was just too slow for modern day legacy when any fire card is just super powerful!

I went to the M3 mol with my trusty Cephalid Breakfast deck to a really disapointing 1-3-drop. I was a little bit greedy on my mana. I won the first game with a bang but lost all the others mostly to mana issues. Either by not playing around wasteland enough or by just being manascrewed, bummer!

I went to the last FNM of the year. It was actually modern but a few legacy players were there so we played amongst us. I had a fun turbo smog brew that beat doomsday but I was unable to win agains 5 matches of sultai. The deck is really explosive but **Bowmasters** are a beating. I'm also always jamming and it's maybe not a good idea against wastelands and dazes as I really 2 or 3-4-1 myself in those situations. I'm more fan of the Nic fit variants but I could see myself trying this deck again!

I also played a premodern game with my Oath-still deck. I won the 2nd of 3 matches against Aluren. The games were really close but I did quite a few misplays, especially in game 1! Cabal Therapy was a banger against me.

So all in all it was a really fun evening and I was happy to close the year with some fun games and the chain of smog combo!

[sdyuteiaok]

Haven't drafted in a while, but noticed I've dipped below the gemcount for the Battle Pass for the first time since its inception, so that means I have to win 3 in a row to have enough for the pass--tons of progress totally ditched if I beef it. The last two drafts just completely manascrewed me out of wins with solid decks--I even had the 5/3 mythic flyer that No Mercys--never drew it and it was literally my last card when I got milled out for an 0-3, so it's by no means guaranteed to win three in a row in platinum, but fortunately rank reset will happen a few days before the format change, so I should have at least two shots to 3-x at gold or so. Fingers crossed--huge waste if I can't pull it off. And of course, massively embarrassing if I can't 3-x at such a low level.

[geekhombre]

See it takes time to forge your connection to the

The new Cardboard Crack book is available here. Please check it out!

[dragongirltitties]

On the one hand I'm happy I got to see my gf on the other hand I'm upset the the whole day was burned doing virtually nothing.

[bace-jeleren]

Ngl I'm curious about the "very specific monoblack commander deck" you mentioned in the last ask.

It's a Erebos, God of the Dead deck that focuses on a lot if different things. You'd think it would, logically, be a devotion deck, but there's a little bit of everything in it right now, a lot of monoblack staples. Despite that, everything is pretty much designed to feed into one another- it's not a very high-ranking deck by any means, but it's definitely the kind where, once one thing pops off, it unleashes a domino effect that makes the whole deck extremely difficult to stop.

It's also cursed. It's such an evil, sinister bastard of a deck that I've been cursed simply for building it. No matter how much mana fixing I put in, I almost always get manascrewed- ask anyone I've played with, it's legitimately sad.

[razieltwelve]

Are you playing green?

I am playing RG. I have 23 lands and 5 MDFC lands.

Edit: I cannot understand how it is possible to be manascrewed this much when almost half the deck is land. FFS. Even worse is that when I do get land, so far it’s been all of one type. It makes me question the shuffler.

[dimestoretajic]

when the win ain't pretty but it's a win

[mtgelks]

So we might of found a title for the podcast as :mana screwed and I really like it what do you guys think

[gul-dukat-cc]

PT Barcelona Report

Shoutouts to Detective Dhaliwal/David Rood for lending me a bunch of cards for the PT, and to Callum Smith for lending me Seasoned Pyromancer on Magic Online. Notes on my modern decklist / choice : I felt with open decklists + london mulligan you had to know your deck inside and out to fully use those systems, you had to know what the mus were about as you had so much agency so I chose UR Phx, I played seasoned pyromancer to work with my leylines vs hoogak so I could mull to 4/5/6 and not die to random bloodghasts which is a real issue as thing/arclight are very weak on very low cards. pryomancer is just very good with leyline. I played gut shot over surgical main because my sb had almost no removal and my deck just wouldn’t sb smoothly without gut shot. plus gut shot is fine vs hoogak stops them convoking and fine in mirrror kills thing. I tried desperate ritual/noxious with aria so I could goldfish turn ¾ vs hoogak but gave up on this cause lazy. I tried dreadhorde arcanist main so I could keep more hands but I found the effect is kinda weak, without open decklists I value cards like flame slash/sinkhole pretty low sine I am mulling to goldfish but with opendecklists I can value these powerful but narrow effects properly, basically like having sb cards main. I played 2 aria main 1 side since I found it is tough to split payoff/enablers, but I felt 3 aria was a bit too much and I would draw aria too much when trying to go off, and it made more hands mulls with the red finale and it being clunky but it was a close call. I also thought about set adrift cause hits hoogak/chalice/aria but My experience in the best with it was not great. I tried titanshift but 0-2d a league vs neoform and mirror, I tried burn but it felt kinda weak to me 3-2d a league lost to uw with timely and rug where they force of negation to blow out my searing blaze on their goyf when I swung with spearo.

I did ~280/300 matches of MH1 Limited in prep for the pt including a trip to GP Seattle where I was granted a nice 12-3 finish (1 bye). I am a newer limited player having only begun really playing it about last year, but since then I have mostly been playing limited as I feel I have a lot more agency in the games and prefer the format. However, since I am relatively new to limited I don’t feel I was able to truly process the amount of information I was receiving as most of what I was learning about in my games, is just what drafting a “master” set is about, and how to handle combat and complex boards in this type of limited environment, so a lot of my attention was drawn away from the actual evaluation of cards and trying to understand how to maximize my value in the game in-game decisions. My plan going into the PT was to soft force black, I wouldn’t just force it if it clearly wasn’t open, but I wouldn’t be shocked if your win rate would be higher taking any black uncommon, or even common over the best green rares and blue mythics p1p1. I found the black decks had so much more synergy and power than the other colors, (I felt the snow decks could trainwreck quite easily and just wasn’t very impressed by springbloom druid) Br and Bu being premium whilst the other black decks were about the same as any other archetype, I wasn’t sure about my read on the format since I am not a limited master and I saw players had different evaluations, but in a practice draft the day before Max Mick agreed this strategy seemed fine, and Malavi/Lars Dam had hit a 2030 elo drafting black every single time. I just found I would win a lot more with black decks and they felt much better, with my previous experience I felt soft forcing black was a reasonable approach. First Draft I get a pretty good BR deck, p1p1 raredraft w6, p1p2 Bogardan Dragonheart p2p3 feaster of fools, black and red cards kept flowing and I didn’t pick up any particular signal except ninjas might be open, pack two I got a pick 4 pashalik mons, but at the end of the draft I probably could have a had a simliar power level ninjas deck but I prefer BR slightly. Round 1 vs Van Vaals, Michael (1966) Michael was in the same Canadian Group chat as me, I was not happy to be paired vs him as in the draft I felt too many good cards were going late and it implied to me the pod mostly consisted of primarily constructed players. Luckily for me he got a bit manascrewed g2 and g3 so I was able to win, he had a BR deck splashing blue for the uncommon ninja and keranos, he also had two hoogaks, indicative of my weekend to come. Round 2 Verdiani, Luca (1869) Versus a UW Flicker deck, not much happened just curved out and stomped. g3 we both mulled to 5, I also played really poorly g2… wake up call for me to not be a doofus. Round 3 Rask, Love (2008) Michael told me there was some insane snow rare deck in the pod his opponent told him about, filled to the brim with rares, I looked at my legion of putrid goblins and they didn’t look too happy, but I trusted in that feaster of fools. My opponent cast a turn 2 bladeback sliver and i’m not feeling afraid anymore, later he curves out hermit druid + dead of winter and I won pretty easily, so I was feeling pretty confident for g3. I had passed a dead of winter in the pod so I messed up a bit g1, it was a bit of a complex line of basically using my Munitions Expert on myself to grow my Scavenger past Dead of Winter, but it could also have backfired in some cases to so it was reasonably hard. After the match my opponent says my deck is insane and his deck is garbage nice.. iirc feels good man. 3-0 Round 4 Maynard, Pascal (1967) Open decklists cool, I see a hoogak deck and look quickly at the manabase and removal spells, g1 Pascal mulls to 5 and I am luckily to kill him on turn 3 or 4 with arclights at 1 life, lucky lucky. G2 my hand was just obscene, looting + 2 arclight + leyline… think there might have even been a force, Pascal just had pretty weak hands so I was able to win. Round 5 Busson, Etienne (2006) Recognized this as the Mono Red player, I was sitting at table 4 and feeling if I win another game or two I could get a feature match maybe so was happy, but wasn’t happy to see this mu. g1 I mulled to 5, game was kinda close, coulda made some slightly different decisions maybe, if I was a bit luckier and hit an extra arclight could have won. g2 turn 1 critter into turn 2 eidolon, coulda maybe ignored the first creature but killed it, interesting choice perhaps, needed to hit an extra arclight or two to win, game was super weird and I tanked the most here, basically opp had an eidolon and I had 2 arclights and I had to decide how to attack and block with the arclights, for example when opp was at 20 life and Iwas at 12 I just attacked with 2 arclights as I felt that was my best chance tow in, was pretty hard, think I made the correct choice, opp agreed game was pretty tricky after. Round 6 Futamata, Yojiro (1798) Open decklists opp is on Hollow Gaak, kinda scared and would prefer a normal Gaak list so I don’t sb poorly or whatever, a bunch of cryptbreakers main and even push. g1 I can’t remember exactly but I think my opp might have mulled once or twice, I had a thing in the ice but opp had push so we move on. g2 I kept with a leyline, opp mulls to 5 I believe, my hand was pretty good, 5 or 6 can’t remember exactly, however as the game progresses I feel I run a bit poorly not being able to trigger arclights or flip my thing for a while,  my opp casts a cryptbreaker and just make zombies and I just whiff and whiff but they mulled to 5 and my hand was good so it runs even plus doesn’t matter to my decisions, coulda made some slightly different decisions in relation to fetching to thin which I normally do aggressively, but not sure felt I played fine at worst, in the end I need to dodge either fatal push or bloodghast for one turn to untap and win but opp topdecks the ghast for exactsies feels bad man but feel I played fine. Round 7 Luong, Marcus (2019) Hoogak Dredge, g1 I needed opp to whiff on their last dredge, they had bloodghast conflag and creeping chill as outs, sadly for me they hit and I died. g2 I kept a 5 or 6 with rav trap and the card just sucks vs hoogak so I fire it off a bit early to not get gaaked and die horrible. maybe Rav Trap gamed me as I kept hands assuming it would do stuff and then it just makes me die. Round 8 Nass, Matthew (2015) Table 69, I tell Matt we have the nicest table in the room, I think he agrees. He is also on Gaak, I lose g1 pretty quickly, g2 I keep a hand of like thing + force of negation, maybe was too weak, I tried to bluff I had a leyline by having 1 card I was about to slam in play. Matt keeps a hand with a lot of removal and floods out pretty hard so I am able to win a game I felt I got pretty lucky to win. but idk. g3 I just have 2 leyline + seasoned pyromancer. Feels bad to go 4-0 into 5-3 but I feel I played fine in my losses, didn’t play perfect but I mostly play magic online and find it hard to process information irl and didn’t feel I made too many savage punts. DAY TWO My draft pod has Javier Dominguez, Raph Levy and various other pros. I am sitting next to vidi, p1p1 I take urza over mob mostly due to being 50$, p1p2 I slam a manowar, rp1p3 there is goblin war party lightning skelelemental and ninja removal spell entwine. I think wow br seems open. I remember the lr advice, I can take one of these nut br cards and get passed an a+ br deck potentially or stay on ninjas and get a maybe b ish deck on average. I took skelelemental but some of my friends who are better said first of all there aren’t many rare blue cards better than manowar so manowar is a light blue signal, second of all they said skelemental isn’t that good and they said thirdly the two blue cards are too good so they’d try really hard to play it. Might have messed up my draft as RB was very very not open, I continued taking UB cards but Vidi was also in UB, p2p1 I took a fallen shinobi and didn’t feel black was being cut til mid pack 2 but was too late then, still I feltmy deck could win games. Round 9 Wijaya, Vidianto (2013) We play a Ninja Mirror, I just wait til he taps out both games and use fallen shinobi, I accidentally stole one of his lands and when I return it to him later he says fucking fallen shinobi. Round 10 Levy, Raphael (2112) g1 was pretty close, I had a choking tethers and every turn just needed him to have 1 less spell to get lethal, he had a marit lage enchantment and kept playing snow lands every turn, I Had 2 strings so I wasn’t too scared but cascade sliver + lots of removal was enough to kill me in a close game. g2 I had 18 lands due to 3 cycling ones, I side out a talisman for a spell snuff since talisman is in my deck to ramp into cards liek pondering mage/urza/first sphere/other nonsense vs more aggresive decks where I need to get on the board, here I want to be aggresive but those cards aren’t that aggresive and I felt spell snuff would be good. I keep a 2 lander with choking tethers as the hand is just good with an urza in it but sadly I get stuck on 2 lands and draw both spell snuffs, i’d sb the same again but felt kinda bad. Round 11 Matsumoto, Yuki (2000) vs BR, g1 my opp casts a silumar scavenger I spell snuff and untap, my board is urza + 5/6 lands with talisman and 2/2 token, my opp has like 4ish cards in hand and board of changelign outcast + bladeback sliver + 5 lands, my hand is like fallen shinobi + strings, can’t remember exactly what else I had in hand, I believe I also might have had a preordain in my graveyard. My deck doesn’t have much removal really outside of 2 strings and choking tethers so I try to be aggresive and close game quickly, I bounce the bladeback with strings and fallen shinobi the urza, Ken Yukihiro sitting next to us laughs,I hit a land and volatile claws *fuck* and pass. opp hardcasts an igneous elemental killing my 2/2 token, I can’t attack with shinobi so I cast urza and pass, they now goatnap shinobi I chump with token they cast dragonheart and suddenly i’m way far behind and feeling terrible, I feel I prob messed up this game somewhere, I just saw an insane line and went for it, coulda thought more but honestly likely would have came to same conclusion, g2 is pretty close but pretty much my opp casts a bunch of big creatures and removal and I die since my deck is just very medium and leaning on fallen shinobi or smoke shroud to win. Feeling pretty bad since my winrate in MH draft is muuuuchh higher than modern but I felt I just need to learn more for next time, feels bad but here we are. I felt my choices were mostly reasonable even if they might not have been the best I tried. Round 12 Vorel, Andrew (1847) VS Hoogak, can’t remember much, just leyline g2 and g3. puts me to 3-2 vs hoogak and I was doing well vs it on modo idk close mu. feels good to win Round 13 Jones, Derrick (1817) Izzet Phoenix Mirror, g1 I go turn 2 thought scour myself mill phx I scried on top, gut shot + bolt your thing in the ice and end up winning by goldfishing better I suppose. g2 my opp has to surgical random things to protect his thing from my flame slash but I am able to have a nuttier hand and win. feels good to be winning in modern atleast today. Round 14 Prosek, Dominik (1969) We get into a disagreement late into g2 whether a card was in my hand or graveyard, I believe I went to cast bolt and grab dice for aria and when I looked again my bolt was in my graveyard and I didn’t say I cast it, but it is possible I just messed up somehow, we end up with like 7 judge calls and with diminishing time extensions get a draw in a g3 I felt very far ahead in (two arias on 5 on turn 5 of time) but opp didn’t slowplay as they also believed they would have won close game, my first really fun game of teh weekend as g2 and g3 were just extremely grindy both players slamming haymakers, mostly said my favorite cause I was just winning a long game. Round 15 Wijaya, Vidianto (2005) I get pretty lucky and win a PHX mirror, I make a small misplay maybe g1, drew my 1 of rav trap g2 and draw pretty nutty, but that’s what I signed up for. Round 16 Stihle, Julien (2008) For 750$, I didn’t know at the time but I sure did after, g1 and g3 I mull to 5 vs UW, still kinda close, feels pretty bad wish I would have shuffled more idk, think I played the games fine,g2  felt pretty good though as I get to use the gy ability of two seasoned pyros and win a drawn out game. kinda bummed at myself for getting a draw in round 14, but I think I played fine, got slightly sloppy when time approached but that is fine by me considering the circumstances, I shouldn’t have spammed the judge calls so much but I don’t play much irl so I learned my lesson. a painful one. also I felt kinda dumb about the second draft but I still liked my decisions based on my previous experience even if I got a 1-2 record. happy with 9-6-1, felt I played ok but I feel next time if I can queue I will be able to focus a lot more. PT was overall more fun than I expected, the venue was a lot nicer than a GP one, you also get to spend a lot of time around die hard mtg players whereas at a GP I feel more like an outcast since I play way too much mtg, here I felt most players also do so. You get lots of cool stuff and etc. Also drafting is fun and you don’t even need to day 2 sealed to do so.

[indigodice]

APPARENTLY 5E IS KILLING MTG

And to prove a point CrimsonDice bought all the commander precons. Fun was had.

CrimsonDice piloted Mystic Intellect

I piloted Merciless Rage

meanwhile Third piloted Primal Genesis

Third supposed that Primal Genesis and Mystic Intellect were the better decks since their commanders seemed less narrow than Faceless Menace or Merciless Rage. I favored Merciless Rage since, although narrow, Anje seemed like a very fast commander to me. And I’ve always thought agression like Ghired’s was not ideal for commander. Ghired’s aggression was very cool though, and populate on a commander lets you do a lot of tricky things. Fortunately red also lets you do very cool things with tokens, unfortunately not a whole lot of cool tricks seemed to be in the deck.

We played mostly blind. And these precons seemed admirable compared to the previous precons. I remember playing with the first set and a few of the sets in the middle with eminence abilities.

Or it could be me looking at MTG with rose tinted glasses.

For the first game Third and I piloted with the faces of the deck Ghirad and Anje respectively, while CrimsonDice used Pramikon.

I closed out the first game quickly by not missing land drops and dropping several beaters on the board. It didn’t demonstrate the speed of Anje, but it was interesting to have my turn at the end of other players’ turns. Playing Anje felt like playing a kind of draw-go control deck.

Meanwhile Pramikon seems to draw hate like no other. Ghired managed to create an army of rhinos, but the deck couldn’t deal with the flier I sent overhead.

During the second game, Third chose the Atla Palani. I switched over to Greven since I wanted to be convinced he was any good. CrimsonDice switched over to Elsha. Elsha managed to not miss land drops and keep a full hand and graveyard most of the game. I managed to get several hits on both players with Greven and ran out of gas. Meanwhile Third was manascrewed and didn’t draw much aggro. In the middle of this game Forth arrives and brings his Xenagod deck.

In the third game I switch back to Anje, Third keeps with Palani since he didn’t get to use her much, CrimsonDice switches back to Pramikon, and of course Forth is on Xenagos. I had a choice to use my own Scarab God deck, but decided against it since Forth was excited to play. He was likely to win against precons. Even though I had this thought process I still resented losing to Xenagod when it inevitably happened which I guess is just human nature.

Pramikon hit the board relatively early and set Crimson to catch Palani aggression and me to catch Xenagod’s aggression. Xenagos and Anje conspired to destroy Pramikon and eventually did, meanwhile Palani kept back and built up a board. Unfortunately our boards couldn’t keep up with then Xenagod’s, and he eventually comboed out after drawing thirteen cards through a Garruk.

Palani and Pramikon seem like they have interesting deckbuilding potential. Meanwhile Anje seems narrow but physically fun because of all the movement and speed in her hitting the board. I’d like to expore those decks here. But since this is getting long I feel like ending here. One day I’ll have interesting blog posts.

[baeddel]

The nice thing abt the Naru Meha deck is that, if you’re manascrewed but have the combo pieces, copying a finale and getting 2 ceatures out is still a huge turn

[worldwake]

So I made a third commander deck, Tishana, and I just playtested it against my Rhys deck for the first time and really enjoyed it! I intended it to be a deck that's super easy to pilot so I can use it to teach my friends how to play, and it's definitely easy to pilot without being too overwhelmingly weak (it held its own! Through being manascrewed! Through Divine Visitation and Beastmaster's Ascension!). I'm really really happy with it if I'm to be honest :^)