#additional costs

[magicjudge]

What happens if my Goblin Test Pilot ends up targeting my opponent’s Kopala?

When you activate Goblin Test Pilot's ability, you choose from among legal targets for its ability during the activating process. If that target happens to be Kopala or anothehr Merfolk controlled by that player, then an additional cost of 2 is imposed on the costs of the ability. You're then free to pay it (and in fact must if you have 2+ mana in your mana pool), but if you don't have the mana in your mana pool, you're not forced to generate it.

Since you then can't pay the costs to activate the ability, the entire activation is undone. You're then free to try activating the Test Pilot again. You're free to do this until the Test Pilot targets a non-Merfolk target if you like, but if you go around abusing this interaction, expect to get some sour looks from the other players in your game.

Note that this only works because Kopala actually imposes an additional cost on the ability. Something like Ward is just a triggered ability and doesn't allow these sorts of shenanigans.

[gibbearish]

love when ppl defend the aggressive monetization of the internet with "what, do you just expect it to be free and them not make a profit???" like. yeah that would be really nice actually i would love that:)! thanks for asking

[leastrife]

Don’t think I’ll ever get over the fact that Kaz Brekker nearly shifted the economy of Ketterdam

Like if the crows managed to ruin all of Van Eck’s silos and taken out a large huge amount of the sugar supply. That’s not something that will go down anytime soon it would take years for sugar to go back to the price it was to match up with supply and demand.

This 17 year old kid who likes dogs and can never figure out how to talk to his crush. Kaz “I protect my investments” Brekker almost caused a complete disruption in the stock market and with how strongly Ketterdam is built on their economic system-

Please I need someone else who think economy is a really cool topic to understand just how much that’s insane. A 17 YEAR OLD NEARLY CAUSED A SHORTAGE OF A HIGH DEMNAD COMMODITY ITEM.

Kaz would go insane in America

[majimassqueaktoy]

Wait is it legit that you're supposed to get the deluxe addition to have access to new game plus ??

[guzhufuren]

Kaleidoscope of Death costs 28$ but with shipping to Kazakhstan it would be 63$. sigh

[mukuharakazui]

the bg3 fanbase is funny as fuck in a bad way for primarily shipping gale, who is the most garrulous man you can imagine, with astarion, whom gale goes "uh 😐 not really looking to talk with you man" at when prompted for conversation, and not with wyll, whose party admission gets a "gale approves" and then they proceed to compliment each other 24/7.

update: i think ship wars are stupid as fuck + this is about something very different. a very notable problem not just among the general bg3 and d&d fan circles but among certain fans of this sort of fantasy genre as a whole.

[oidheadh-con-culainn]

money doesn't buy happiness or mental stability but it is true that anxiety about concrete things is a lot easier to solve if you have money because the worst-case scenario is just... not as bad

take travelling: one time i was travelling and it turned out my accommodation booking had got lost so i arrived at the hotel to find it was booked out. an event in town meant there was no affordable accommodation nearby. if i had been alone, i don't know what i would have done, because i definitely couldn't afford to stump up the money that would be needed to find last-minute accommodation in that city. but the person i was with had a company credit card, and found me a hotel room. the larger your budget, the smaller the chances there will be nowhere you can stay

another time my flight was delayed, causing me to miss the last bus from the airport. i didn't have enough money to pay for a taxi the whole way to my destination, and my phone wasn't working well enough to let me call my accommodation and let them know i would be arriving after the normal check-in time, either. in the end my family had to transfer me extra money so i could pay for the taxi, and call the accommodation from their phone to pass on the message. if they hadn't been able to do that, i'd have been stuck in shannon airport forever (or at least until someone took pity on me) -- not great

a missed bus or a lost accommodation booking or a delayed flight or a suitcase going astray is a lot easier to deal with if the worst-case scenario is "I have to pay a bunch of money about this" vs "i am stranded with no way of getting to my destination/sleeping alone on the floor of the train station in an unfamiliar city/wearing the same clothes for a week straight with no access to my meds"

now sometimes there is no amount of money that will get you from one location to another because there simply isn't any transport and there is no amount of money that can buy things which aren't available to buy, which is why rural travel requires substantially more planning. however. it can still usually make it less miserable being stuck wherever you ended up / increase your options in general

(also, wow travel emergencies have got so much easier to deal with since roaming data, google maps, + mobile banking became a thing... so much less likely to find yourself lost and penniless, unless travelling somewhere super remote, in which case you've got bigger problems anyway)

[mylittleredgirl]

my meds are ready at the pharmacy!!!! now i just have to. make it there. always one more step

[magicjudge]

If I cast a spell without paying it's mana cost, can I cast it for alternate or additional costs? This is for a Vadrok deck if the manner in which the spell is cast matters. I just want to overload Cyclonic rift from my graveyard every turn.

Alternate costs? No.

Additional costs? Yes.

When you cast a spell without paying its mana cost, you're already paying an alternate cost of 0. Any time you're casting a spell and not paying the printed cost, that's an alternate cost and you can only ever pay one alternate cost to cast a spell.

So why can't you choose to overload Cyclonic Rift rather than casting it for free with Vadrok? That's because Vadrok's ability is what's allowing you to cast the spell at all, so you have to pay the alternate cost it dictates if you want to cast it.

Additional costs such as Kicker costs are different, however, since you can always choose to pay an additional cost for a spell no matter what cost or alternate cost you're using to cast it in the first place. You still need to pay the mana for these costs, however. For example, if you cast Jilt off of Vadrok's trigger, you can pay 1R to get the kicker effect, but you can't get it for free.

[melonymint753]

hades 2 hot take that's gonna get me probably excommunicated (underworld end boss spoilers)

the people who complain about the pause disabling feature before even finding out that an in-game way to disable it exists, hit me on the same annoyed bone spot as those who complain about the new dash 3 days into the game. They see an obstacle and the knee jerk reaction is to protest Right Now instead of framing it as a thing that might have a workaround later, either as something mechanically provided, or something they can learn over time.

I'm getting behind the request that pause enabling shouldn't be locked behind winning, but there's enough people wanting it straight up gone that I want to scream.

Accessibility should mean better availability of solutions, not removing the problem.

[metanarrates]

What do you think about how most people summarize orv's themes as love. I saw one of your reblogs about how it's too simplified for other works?

my general opinion is that saying "x is about love" is usually too damn vague as an analysis. while love is not a universal emotion (shoutout to loveless aros,) it's a common enough human experience that I really think that you need to specify what ABOUT love is being explored. is this a work about the depths of love? is it about the transformative potential of love? there are a thousand different ways love can manifest, and about a billion different ways a story can offer insight on the nature of love. I think it doesn't do justice to a story if you're not specifying what exactly it has to say about love.

all that out of the way, yes. many of orv's major themes are about love. specifically, it relates the love a reader has for a story to the love that a person can have for another human being. a story, like a person, can contain depths unknown to both author and reader - it is impossible to ever reach a complete understanding. there is always some element that will be impossible to communicate. something left hidden behind a wall.

but you can love that story, that person, anyway. you can offer your own interpretations, and try to understand as best you can. and the love and effort you put in matters deeply. the way that you can affect other human beings, specifically, matters deeply. even if it seems like your efforts will never reach that person, even if they are justifiably hurt by your efforts, even if your interpretations are wrong, even if you are the sole reader of a story. it matters that you were there and tried to love it as best you could.

orv also has a lot to say about love, self-sacrifice, and salvation. kim dokja's love of the story and his companions is a major motivator to why he destroys himself over and over. it's paralleled to his own mother, who sacrificed herself for his sake, and who he resented all his life and yet can't stop making the same choice when it comes to the safety of others. that sort of love and salvation hurts as much as it saves. it's as selfish as it is selfless. it's the same choice his companions make in order to get him back. they love him. they would be able to live with his resentment and guilt if it meant he would survive.

kim dokja's love for yoo joonghyuk, specifically, is both selfish and selfless. it is his love for yoo joonghyuk that was (unintentionally) responsible for much of yoo joonghyuk's suffering. the choices kim dokja makes out of love are what mitigate yoo joonghyuk's suffering, and eventually are what allows him to free himself from his eternal cycle. again, it is the love a reader has for a story, and the way that a reader both craves conflict and craves for the characters they love to overcome it.

it is the same love that drives yoo joonghyuk and han sooyoung to repeat the cycle again, as a choice this time. selfishly and selflessly. han sooyoung damns the world to apocalypse because she wished to save kim dokja's life. yoo joonghyuk chooses both regressions and his time in space to grasp at the chance to keep kim dokja alive. neither of their choices is guaranteed to save him. they know that. love alone isn't enough to save someone. but they make this choice because they love him, knowing that he would hate the choice. they create the story together because they want their sole reader to be understood by it.

and that's the end theme of orv's meditations on love and the nature of stories. if you love a story enough that it saves you... well, perhaps it's possible that the story, too, loves you back.

none of this is easy to describe in a sentence. I agree that it's probably easier to just say "orv is about love?" but I wish more people identified it further beyond that, since that usually is where the discussion just stops. I find orv's discussions on love to be some of the most compelling presentations on the topic that I've ever seen in fiction, and I like discussing it! i want to treat it with the complexity that it deserves.

[sunrisesnowfall]

i don’t love whatever the fuck cmac is doing right now but i understand that we’re struggling with the cap space bc of v*l and honestly im too relieved abt jo to really get upset rn

[iniziare]

Kafka crossed my thoughts tonight at random, and so I wanted to re-post a little something here, with some minor edits thrown in. I just think it's often overlooked how... many human elements they've tied into her. A hungering sense of curiosity, the inherent sense of longing that clings to her being like a fever, and how she's caught (very humanly so) between the belief of we are tied to fate and thus it shall be, and the insistence on choice and how the Trailblazer seems to be inherently representative of its existence. And then I think of what being 'human' entails, and one could argue that it represents the experience of life, before one's end by the hand of destiny/fate. Is that... why she's so enthralled by all these human concepts? Because she's so firmly tied to fate? Yes, I still linger in the thought that she bears strong connections to fate, there are too many hints at the Moirai to me to ignore. But it's not even that, it's her Spirit Whisper, it's that her wanted poster made by the Devils that she used to hunt on her home of Pteruges-V, had to describe the ability and what it does— which tells ms that it's not native to there. But— I'm getting sidetracked, this isn't about any kind of potential nature that is far from humanity, it's about the evidence, even if she may turn out not to be inherently human at some point in the future of HSR, that she is drawn to, portrays and in some form, lives, very human concepts. And one of the ways I tried to make that clear before, was by talking about her in relation to her violin— or more specifically: the presence of its absence, the latter being which I will always firmly believe to be the eternal overarching narrative of Kafka's character. Any way, onto the babble:

I'll forever remember looking into the notes of someone's playthrough of HSR's first scenes, which is just something I like to do because you never know what kind of little treasures you might find. And there was a violinist tucked away in there, who I'd also seen in the notes of her main trailer, commenting on the intense accuracy of the movement of her fingers. And then on top of that, how they've usually been let down by the details when other games have tried to simulate it as well, but it was more so done to iterate how intentional this must've been for Hoyo to have focused on its accuracy so much.

So in that sense, I think it's close to a given that she knows how to play it, similarly to how I believe that she is someone who also plays or has played the piano. Where I differ however, is that I don't believe that she actually owns a violin at present, nor is she seeking to obtain one by her own means. Moreover, what and where I think the 'mimicking' comes from, actually, is from her memories and the emotional attachment that she once held for these instruments in them. Kafka's character, to me, revolves around and thrives within two concepts, that of intimate longing and that of loss (the pearl earring, the broken winged butterfly pin, and Blade's character story to name some) which plays intricately into the former. Now for me, her connection to the violin and the piano (primarily the former) play wonderfully into representing both of these, and thus can be drawn into these prevalent topics across the board for her incredibly easily. In simple terms, I think that there is a sense of longing to play them. Now, I feel confident in noting that Kafka does not come across as one who, if she had access to (in this case) a violin of her own, that she would crave to play it so intensely all the time, that when drawn from it for even the briefest of time, that she would enact the part of playing one during her separation from it. No, I think she's actively choosing not to obtain one, for one reason or another. Perhaps it's a memory that plays into the loss that her character seems to stray towards, or perhaps it's a lack of something else; I don't quite yet dare say. But there's something oddly wistful about it, if you look past the surface. All in all, I think her little moments of mimicking and humming, makes for an incredibly interesting "little" tidbit to me. It reminds me of something I wrote in an older post last year:

(...) And yet, and yet, I actively think if she were to find herself in a hotel room, even on her own, and there would be a piano right there— I can see her fingers tracing over the keys so very clearly, even as if she were touching the keys to play and yet she would never press down.

I still stand by this to this day. It's the ache to do something again, and yet for one reason or another, you can't bring yourself to do it. Whether it feels wrong, or there's something missing, something or someone; it doesn't matter, it's a longing of some kind. It really is the overarching topic and/or concept that I see in her character, and the fact that she's tied to such an inherently fragile instrument, only further solidifies it in my brain. But in that, I also feel a deep sense of melancholy when I think of her and that violin. And it plays into all of this, of course, but also the fact that I genuinely see no evidence in canon at present that tells me that she has one, and we know she could obtain one if she so wanted to,but she doesn't. Which tells me, on some level, that she doesn't want one. Which then has me entertain the concept of... if one were gifted to her, would that be different? Would that offer the person who gifted it to her a glimpse that no one else could ever get? The answer is a very likely yes, but I can't see it being gifted by most by any means; it'd need to be by someone who could come to grasp the significance of one, put in the appropriate research, who would know where to go, who to speak to, where to find the significance. And that, isn't most people.

[tmntkiseki]

240k gold well spent

[peppermint-moss]

Warrior cat oc design commissions from May!

commission info || tip jar

[ardri-na-bpiteog]

It's wild how Kamala Harris's "crazy left-wing" down-payment support for first time buyers policy is literally existing government policy here in Ireland, brought in by our centre-right neoliberal political party. I've said it many times, but a lot of mainstream Democrats would be well at home in Fine Gael and that's not a compliment.