#i don't even care if this becomes a meme template

[bridoesotherjunk]

going to fuckimng get you

[eclipsemeteor]

Commander Is Subjective

Magic's becoming a monster of a game, franchise, and corporate beast that's growing and changing beyond comprehension. And further within that scope, Commander is always a contentious hot button topic due to its more lofty, somewhat ambiguous, and vibes focused goals.

Opinions both online and offline span across the entirety of the format and game, and while you can find amicable discussions among friends and collaborators, you'll find the sheer difference from an enfranchised player vs a disconnected one to be head-spinning. Thus, people look for some sort of structure that's concrete and easy to follow to make this disconnect less disorienting. But what else can you do beyond the format's mission statements and ban list?

My name's Cole, I'm a host of the Hero's Blade Vibe Check Podcast and the former host of Uncommon Commander. Playing commander since 2012 or so has given me a lot of perspective and opinions on Magic, but mostly (exclusively) on Commander.

(Of course, this means you should take my opinions as a player and consumer with a grain of salt, but also keep an open mind because what I'm gonna talk about is not based on cold hard facts and statistics, it's solely vibes and feels based. It's how I operate.)

(Thanks Mark Rosewater for this lovely meme template. We will now run with it)

Commander/EDH exists everywhere: Gameplay videos, podcasts, written articles, tweets, Tiktoks and actual games you experience. In most situations, you're always gonna hear or have an opinion on an individual card, a commander, a strategy, a color/color combination, or even on a person, while also hearing about someone's opinion on something you enjoy.

Commander at its core is about creative expression via deck building, how you bling out or customize your decks visual appearance and socialization! With 27,349 unique cards as of this posting (and excluding the ban list), there are many different permutations for self-expression.

(for example, I'm a big believer in Odric Blood-Cursed, and this is the deck that I've been tuning for 2 years. I've had a lot of fun with it, and have made heads turn)

With that many different ways to build a deck, you're bound to run into things you don't like, and sometimes they're not quantifiable.

The reason for this article, and no doubt others have discussed this at length and much better than I, is that Commander is first and foremost a social experience. It's meant for multiplayer, it's Singleton, and the only stakes are what you make. You start adding quantifiable or monetary incentives, you take away the spirit of Commander. If you make a narrower or broader ban list, you take away from the spirit of Commander. You try to enforce or advocate for a separate ban list, rules committee, etc?

You're right, you take away from the spirit of Commander.

What you make Commander is up to you, but it can't be what it's been for people since its inception without participating with other players. You can goldfish all day, but Magic doesn't exist without the Gathering. That means compromise, healthy discussion, an open mind and heart, and a line in the sand to say when an experience isn't for you. We can sit and discuss how social bans make no sense, so why doesn't the Rules Committee ban mass land destruction? Why does Sol Ring get a pass while Mana Vault doesn't?

At the end of the day, despite how we may socially desire structure, hard enforcement of rules might make this beloved format lose its luster. Looking at it with a finite perspective will deny you opportunities for growth and expansion. Looking at Universes Beyond as only a cash grab will deny you the ridiculousness of having a table consisting of Optimus Prime, Gandalf, Chun-Li and Cloud Strife, but also the well designed cards made with care by people.

None of this would exist without people making the cards, illustrating these stories, characters and landscapes. People who made the rules, people who made this format, and the people who sit down and play this format.

People, like you or I, who are flawed, and have expectations and choices that are different than what we want as individuals. They may be people you respect, you admire. They might be people you love, hate, or feel indifferent about. But they are still people who make this game work.

To like everyone you encounter would be a ridiculous ask, but I ask that you give people a chance when you can allow yourself, and know it's ok if you don't. But I think most people are a lot cooler than you think, if given the chance.

Whether you're as enfranchised as I am, or more or less so, what you owe yourself and the others you play with is a genuine enthusiasm for playing and engaging the format. Take chances where you can engage with new people, be patient as new cards enter your view, and try to find and foster friendships so that the next time, the games are even better when you learn about this game better through the lens of friendship and the Gathering.

Keep an open mind! Be excellent to each other.

[nardaviel]

I've been wanting to do this for ages but I was too lazy to turn on my computer. I got the template here! Only like three of these characters are any degree of well-known, and I think I might actually be one of the only people on Tumblr who knows of two of them... Under the cut I talk a little about how each of them has inspired Sora.

Ibushi Arima: The Original inspiration. The reason Sora exists. The mold that Sora was shaped to fit. Essentially, I needed an OC to fill some holes in my backstory for Ibushi, so I made Sora. He has many things in common with Ibushi for that reason (rich background, unhappy childhood, deeply devoted to a small number of people). He has some key differences, as well, because he needed to have them (less conflict-averse, more ambitious).

Light Yagami: Sora is incredibly, blindingly smart (though not to the degree we're meant to believe Light is, because I'm pretty sure no actual human is as smart as Light is meant to be), and gorgeous, and charismatic, and well-off, but feels a profound disconnect between himself and most others. It takes him in a different direction than Light, however, with more loneliness and self-loathing. Essentially, Sora, like Light, is a guy who seems to have it all, but his internal life is dark and dysfunctional and broken. One of my fav tropes!

Diora di'Marano: She is one of the characters who I might be alone in knowing, which is such a shame, because she's one of my favorite characters in all of media. She's smart as fuck, subtle and patient, good at manipulating people, and overall incredibly skilled at maneuvering through her society to become powerful despite some not inconsiderable barriers. Most importantly for this post, she's motivated by love for a few people, and she doesn't care about much else, including herself. All that cunning and subtlety, and she uses it to protect people, then avenge them, then to protect new people, all the while using herself as a tool like any other. She and Sora would get along, I think.

Haruka and Michiru: Specifically I'm talking about the 90s anime version of these characters. I never watched the anime all the way through, but I remember being drawn to their pragmatism, which influenced the way Sora thinks. The inner senshi don't want anyone to die, and neither do Haruka and Michiru, really, but they recognize that in order to save the most people, they have to commit to causing a few deaths. Sora would do the same calculations.

Amarais Handernesse ATerafin: She is another beautifully pragmatic character. She has more principles than Sora, but she's clear-eyed about what she wants, and she's willing to do literally anything to achieve it; it's simply that some of the things she wants are to never resort to assassination, to leave a positive legacy, to uplift the most vulnerable instead of crushing them under her heel, etc., which rule out some methods of taking and holding power. (Sora does not share these admirable principles; where they are similar is that he, like Amarais, knows what he won't do because he's considered and analyzed it already and decided that it won't produce an acceptable result.) Amarais is also an unapproachable character, aware of her position and expecting others to be aware of it as well, but isolated and made incredibly lonely by that distance. Sora can be very much like that. Lastly, like Sora, she wants power. She wants to get to the top, and she's not sorry about it or ashamed of it, and she's not portrayed as evil for that.

Daemon Sadi: (Look, is he from a Problematic series? Yes. Do I recommend it? Absolutely not. But I read it when I was young, it changed me forever, and now I'm stuck like this.) (Also, he doesn't even have book cover art I could use for this meme; I used @/veliseraptor's fancast of Sendhil Ramamurthy.) Daemon is The Most Powerful Guy To Ever Exist in his canon, which I think freed me early on from the fear of making characters OP. If there's magic or innate superpowers in an AU, and if Sora has them, he's going to be very innately strong, simply because it fits his has-everything-except-happiness-and-love concept and because I want him to be. Daemon is also a rich, beautiful, clever character, subtle and deadly, who lives through a youth full of abuse that follows him for the rest of his life and informs all the close relationships he ever has. Like Sora, he is deeply scarred by his early life and not nearly as stable as his smooth, charismatic facade suggests. His Diora-esque self-sacrificial depth of devotion to his closest loved ones is something else that's really stuck with me, and you can find it in Sora.

Josephine Montilyet: Josie is a diplomat. In a game where you, the PC, are a fighter, and your closest companions are people who fight with you, and two of your three advisors are a soldier and a spy-assassin type, Josephine stands out as the advisor whose skills lie in negotiation, manipulation of social circumstances, pulling strings, and destroying people without ever lifting a weapon. Sora, likewise, is very much a paperwork and private conferences kind of guy. Like Amarais, Josie is more of an idealist than Sora, but also like Amarais, she pursues her goals with Soralike ruthlessness.

[embarressment-erradicated]

oh my fucking god I hate chat gpt sludge appearing on ao3 SO SO FUCKING MUCH, just shut up, don't post this, if you want to explore an idea write it. don't outsource your creativity to the lowest common denominator murder bot,

"oh I just had an rp with character.ai and it was fun so I decided to post it" stop, stop right there, rping with chat bots is akin to rping with a wall. go and find people to roleplay with, they are fucking everywhere, and many people are down to atleast try it out with you "but what if I'm awake and no one else is" write something. and wait. you can do that you know, you don't have to use an ai service which drags you further from reality, and most importantly other godsdamned people

and if you feel which you aren't that creative? your lying to yourself, I swear, and even if that is true, you know what is a great way to be more creative? actually think about shit. write whatever comes to mind, take inspiration from other people, rework it to your liking, and importantly when you do that, say it don't lie and say it was entirely your idea, link to that person.

tracing isn't bad because it's stealing, tracing isn't bad because it's lazy. it's a good tool, whether in pen or or paint, however, it becomes bad when you brush the fact you took inspiration from other people off, like it's nothing, however, when you let people know what you took from, and link to it, or atleast tell people where to find it if that isn't an option for one reason or another.

but ai is lazy, it's stealing from everyone, and it's sources are jumbled up and can't be traced, it's like going on pintrest, finding a random meme, and claiming it as your own, just cause.

not only that, it's built to disenfranchise artists whether or not built specifically to do so, it's doing as such.

memes are actually a great example of a pre ai version of jumbling up sources, where is that favorite meme you like from, who made it, do they even know it's popular, did someone take it? can you know for certain, is this an edit, or the og, is know your meme reliable for this? why is this person claiming to tell you about this meme, and yet says they don't know who made it?

some people wish to remain anonymous, yes, however alot of people who made those meme templates (often small artists who can't catch a fucking break from getting their stuff stolen) would probably like it if people knew that, yes they made the funny image, or scene, or drawing or whatever. but you know what happens?

someone crops out the watermark. simply because they don't want to appear related to the person who made the thing they took from or some reason or another.

and then? a meme "curator" channel takes it and reads it in tts, or it ends up one reddit, and someone reads it in that sexy voice which doesn't even link to the posts shown, and barely shows who made the post.

memes are fun, memes are important, memes are a resource for enjoyment, messages, and ideas. but the second you make one you'll never hear about what happened to it 90% of the time, and someone else, who posts exclusively other people's stuff, is getting attention from just reposts.

and don't even get me started on ai memes, the fuck is that shit? gone are the days when people actually worked hard to make a funny parody poster? and we just accept that. NO, screw that, learn photo editing, go past the hurdle of gimp and other tools as such. have fun, fuck around and find out, make those dumb ideas, but do it with your own style and blood. if you use ai in anyway other than just screwing around with free stuff for 15 minutes and leaving (we've all done that, it's mildly humorous until you realize it's just bland) you are limiting yourself, your ideas, and your effect on the world, no one is going to care about you or your 'work' ever, simply because they can find the same exact thing elsewhere.

post scrip: [15 MT unfathoma bucks]

no economic value, redeemable in your dreams

post script:

I went on for to long, actually no I didn't all can cope, who cares if none shall read this, atleast I wrote it.

I hope you have an amazing day, and a life without the confines of latestage capitalism, even if it may not come in our lifetime, may we hope for reincarnation so we can kill that which kills our souls next time.

I think the worst part is how many book sites (royal road comes to mind) have to face the fact that either they ban ai, and allow it to run rampant, or they regulate it, even if it's not even writing at this point. that blog post I linked I think actually is a really fucking good policy right now, as ai text is nigh undetectable sometimes, and may just appear to be bland, but by giving them a corner to run around in, without poisoning the rest of the sight, you atleast heavily mitigate it, is it perfect? no of course not, will they (they being people using ai) still lie just to get some credibility? of course, but atleast it does something.

I don't want ai anywhere near my plain of existence but if stuff like this helps sort out the sludge from the rest of the internet, then that something. also every company which uses it's data to train ai can burn, die, and most importantly perish.

but hey look at these radishes which were ai generated because someone couldn't take the fucking time to draw this themselves, or even just edit a picture together cause fuck it lets just not put any effort into it at all, and just leave out any room for creative freedom. fuck it we ball I guess???

I just want to leave this planet, become a von neuman probe hivemind or something and make weird abstract art in outer space.

cya.

post script script:

oh right using ai ever for anything immediately voids all credibility your work ever has, I hope I don't need to explain why, but I thought of this while writing the tags

I hate you AI, I hate you sites making deals with souless corporations that think creativity can be replicated by an unthinking machine, I hate you money-hungry investors and ceos, I hate you opt-out models, I hate you tech bros, I hate you having to spend precious free time having to scramble our art in a desperate attempt not to getting stolen from, I hate you minimization of the hard work we put into our craft, I hate ''''machine learning''''' being compared to a very human person putting in the hours to better themselves, I hate you commodification of the very core of human's expression, I hate you scams being helped along by uber plagiarism, I hate you AI, I hate you AI, I hate you AI, I HATE YOU AI

[pacificlupineangel]

Who are the OCs?

Honestly it started as a joke- I made doll outfits, and I was inspired by the song Madame Guillotine to make the image of well... The Guillotine. That hasn't quite come to pass yet since I'm tryna keep my hustle going and sell things but, Madame Guillotine has become an OC in her own right. I used to RP as personified countries so, the next bit isn't really that suprising for me.

I started giving her an actual backstory, which ended up in me creating Paris and Versailles... and the backstory grew a little more and Tuileries and Fontainebleau came about.

I don't know if I'd ever RP them on here, for the most part its just been me making memes and art and giggling like a dumbass with my fiance.

But, a little bit of explanation-

Paris has tired single dad energy since France is AWOL and he has to deal with these things on his own. Looks like one of the people, a doctor or a lawyer perhaps, and serves as a deputy to the National Convention. None of them know who he really is though.

Versailles is the awful decadent twink. Face painted, fake moles, silks, feathers, all of it. Very "i have it worse than you" energy. To be fair, this has come about as being the Sun King's favorite and the seat of government for a hot minute, he's never known anything but decadence and during the Revolution is more than a bit spoiled.

Tuileries is just... he's tired. Let him nap. He was almost abandoned and not well cared for and suddenly he's the seat of government AND the home of the royal family and he's just so tired guys. Just so tired.

Fontainebleau is minding her own business during the Revolution- mostly. She's sheltering Versailles after the king's family was taken to the Tuileries, and she keeps him from causing too much trouble. She likes the finer things, there's no secret to that, shes very much an aristocratic woman, but very smart and knows how to play her cards right. She offers support to Paris, and he sees her as one of the very few close "siblings" he has, if they can be called that, along with Tuileries.

Guillotine was the oops child no one saw coming. I visualize personifications coming about once someone gives a spirit to a thing, like calling a country the Motherland or like, calling ships "she" or the Russians having General Winter etc. It's touch and go with wether or not they'll actually gain a spirit, it depends on how well ingrained they are in someone's mind. And Madame Guillotine is very well ingrained in the minds of the world as the Razor Nationale. So she came about while the king was still in power, and it surprised even her siblings, who didn't see the guillotine as anything more thab an instrument. She lived in Versailles the first few years of her life, which, he hated her- but that's another story.

There's a lot more to them i won't bore you about but here's some memes (made with their Faceclaims etc) and more meme templates are appreciated

[bluecrusadearcade]

Mrunmayee didn't know that her picture would be taken at the hospital for her I.D. card. She sometimes really wonders if she DID in-fact learn medicine in the woods. So she'd previously contacted the help desk and submitted a passport size photo of her for the I.D. Hence the picture.

Even though she would argue that she looks like the "Champak-est of all champaks" Ethan would of-course disagree and say she looked like "every bit of the colossal pain in his ass she is."

She still keeps her first I.D. badge in a 'prized possessions' box in her closet. The box might contain a torn piece of paper from the first page of a journal called 'Diagnostics principles'. It may or may not have Dr. E.J. Ramsey's scribbled handwriting on it. 👀👀👀👀👀 [ '' You really think I would've let Landrat get away with that?"]

Mrunmayee chose to stay at Edenbrook, but denied the offer of leading the Diagnostics team, instead choosing to work under Ethan as a part of the team. Simultaneously, she completed a three year fellowship and one year of research in Cardiovascular diseases. Later she went on to become a Medical director, making changes in patient care, taking steps to prevent the domino effect on EHR Product Development, Physician Burnout(medical training) and Nurse-to-patient ratios (Hospital staffing).

After Marriage, she chose to not change her surname, or even hyphenate [ "My name already consists of 22 letters, I don't want people to have a race against time to just 'say' my name.''] She does love it when Ethan calls her Mrs. Ramsey though. Her heart still skips a beat all these years later.

Her attending photo was taken originally as a magazine cover she was featured on. She loved it so much that she used it e v e r y w h e r e. Bryce recalls that she was 🤏🏼 this close to becoming the Spiderman meme. [see image below]

Bonus :

26 year old Ethan Ramsey was every bit of the heartthrob everyone described him to be. Even though He likes to say he did not believe in his own hype, Harper disagrees and concludes that he was, with all due respect, a hoe.

Alan took that picture of him on his graduation day and has it framed in the living room of his house with a copy of 'Diagnostics Principles by Dr. E.J. Ramsey displayed on the side table. What can you say? He's a proud dad.

The current picture was taken by Mrunmayee before a medical conference they were attending. She is very pleased that his style has evolved through the years. Once she saw him wear purple tie with onion ring like yellow shapes on it and hasn't known peace since.

In my Ophcu, I headcannon that Ethan did accept the position of chief but then decided to step down and lead the diagnostics team as he deemed himself unsuitable for the position of Chief. [love a man with self-reflection abilities]

I love this MC Monday so much! Thankyou @jamespotterthefirst for the templates of the I.D. cards !<33

MC MONDAY: Part VII

Hi everyone! Week 7 of a reblog game all about your MCs!  Anyone can join in. Just have fun!

Then vs. Now: Reblog with your MC’s Year 1 ID badge and their current one! 

(Template under the cut)

Keep reading