#please game do not reset my face tweaks

[renasy]

DRAGON AGE VEILGUARD | Random focus on my Rook 1/x

"You've got a knack, kid. For what? Finding a way through the wildest shit I've ever seen"

[jeremy-ken-anderson]

Making it Worth

There are times - frequent times - when I am forced to admit I simply wasted a bunch of my time on a meaningless frivolity that didn’t even succeed at pleasing me or relaxing/recharging me.

Not Today. We are going to analyze the gaming experience I had last night until we get actual value out of it. I’ll warn now that this may get long.

First of all, what was I playing and why didn’t it provide immediate value?

Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms is the game. It’d been on my radar a while but my OS made it temporarily unplayable. It popped up as playable, so I got it (like many idlers the core game is free) and got going.

In some ways ICFR (as I’ll call it) is a hands-off rogue-like. You put together a group, you level them up, and they push through nastier and nastier baddies. The reset mechanic here (most idlers have one) is ending an adventure, restarting your characters at level 1 but with better blessings (which give a gold % bonus). You see how this is also kind of rogue-like? You’re restarting the same plot - there are variants, forcing you to approach the same core plot with different tactics - and eventually you complete the quest and cash out. The big non-roguelike bit is that death doesn’t mean anything. If the party’s defeated they hop back a level or two and grind gold to raise their DPS, and you manually decide when to hop back in and try the boss fight again.

Some missions you recognize you won’t win within a useful timeframe and you drop out early. That’s the closest there is to dying. Like, I had an event mission where your objective is to beat level 175 (that is, run through the entire plot of the local quest 3 and a half times, with ever-increasing monster difficulty). Around level 60 I stopped making meaningful progress. Now, I could have continued the quest. I could have ground out gold on level 60 until I could beat 61, and so on, until I got to 175. Might have taken months, but it could be done. I bet the devs even let you cash out rewards on event missions post-event, as long as you started them when the event was still running. But I decided to drop the whole thing, get the blessings I’d earned from running to 60, and use them to get through other quests I could complete in closer to an hour.

So. Developer hat on. What feels good in-game, and what feels bad?

The game keeps gathering cash for you whether you’re looking at it or not. That’s kind of standard. It lets you buy level-ups for your heroes in stacks of 1, 10, 25, 100, or “Until the next upgrade,” which is the one I use because the amount of time it takes for one of those buttons to light up feels right, and it also kind of sets the characters back on even footing with each other. Ah; Found one of the things that feels bad.

Mushy Numbers is a phenomenon in a lot of idlers where the value of a given decision is - sometimes intentionally - made hard to gauge. Like, if Bruenor can gain a level by spending 10 gp and Minsc can gain a level by spending 10,000 gp but one level causes Minsc to improve your DPS by over a thousand times as much but there are faster diminishing returns on- The numbers, they are mushy. One can’t comprehend them and one can’t get a method for comprehending them without perhaps getting really obsessive and charting out a spreadsheet of some kind and doing a bunch of statistical analysis, and the game has specific break points where the values get flipped, for instance at certain levels many characters will just say “My bonus this level is that now everyone in your party deals +100% damage.” So even if all the levels up to there were being outvalued by levels you could give to other characters, that one level is worth more. These kinds of break points are in there to intentionally confound attempts to “solve the game.” In reality they don’t confound such attempts; technically they aren’t making it not a math problem; they’re merely making the math problem harder to solve.

Let’s talk a second about why Mushy Numbers feel bad.

There’s a saying bandied about in game dev that fun is measurable as “interesting choices per minute.” This is true often enough that it deserves to be bandied about as a saying, in my opinion. Though admittedly the word “interesting” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.

Mushy Numbers denies you information about the decisions you’re making. Without information you can comprehend, the decisions feel random, like shots in the dark. This in turn renders them no more “decisions” than the issue which a developer invoking Mushy Numbers seeks to avoid: where there’s a clear “right answer” and the player just does that all the time, every game.

Being unable to work out a mathematical solution as a player, what I settled on was that the “Until Next Upgrade” button had me clicking each of the heroes for upgrades at roughly the same pace, and that feels right. Of course, it also ends up being what “the player does all the time every game...”

And this isn’t some new problem. Idlers are trying to extend into the infinite using finite programming resources. Obviously there’ll be a LOT of repetition.

At their best, idlers make the old content feel new by having your stat growth recontextualize the same experience (usually by having you blow by something that previously seemed impossible, which itself feels good).

At their worst, idlers have you spinning your wheels on the exact same problems without being able to see how anything is even pretending to have changed.

Design Time

So looking at all of this, what do I take forward? I’m trying to make an idler that’s actually fun to play.

1) Have monsters with clearly defined strategies. This makes it so counterplay is easy to invent but takes a little more thought than “It’s a grass type, use fire type moves.”

2) I don’t need to invoke Mushy Numbers for my game. What I have instead, to produce a similar level of variety in player interaction, is remixable enemies. That is, as you’re going through a dungeon you’ll face multiple enemies with different strategies. You can create one deck for every enemy if you want and swap them out whenever the enemy changes, but then every time you get a new card you’ll have an opportunity to improve all those decks - to make a tweak that renders your strategy superior to what it was. By the time you have all the cards maxed out and can truly “solve the game” for every monster I’ve made, maybe there’ll be an expansion with more cards and monsters, or maybe you’ll have been having fun with the game for 80+ hours and having it solved will be an acceptable outcome.

3) It’s worth noting that this is abnormal for an idler. Because the name of the game in idlers is generally simplicity and scaling, the idea of creating individual monsters with legitimately different attack patterns is - comparatively - a lot of work. But I think it’ll be worth it.

[pauperpedia]

Tuesday Brewsday 12: Royal Mardu

Throughout the years Pauper has seen many Boros decks rise to prominence and evolve around the metagame. First there was Kuldotha Boros, a heavy artifact synergistic deck that utilized the Glint Hawk/Kor Skyfisher engine combined with Prophetic Prism and Ichor Wellspring. The idea was that you could control the board with removal from Lightning Bolt, Galvanic Blast, and Journey to Nowhere, then hit em hard with your arsenal of creatures which included the 3 goblins Kuldotha Rebirth created when you sacrificed Ichor Wellspring or another artifact. Then WOTC dropped a huge bomb that would forever change the format when they introduced the Monarch mechanic with Palace Sentinels. This permanent monarch token that can only be exchanged through combat damage, made Boros Monarch the premier midrange deck. It went away with the aggressive Kuldotha Rebirth for more of a grind you out style of approach. It added Prismatic Strands and Alchemist Vial as a way to keep the Monarch allowing you to oppress your peasant opponent through card advantage. Not long after that Deluxeicoff tweaked the build to better fight Delver decks and thus Boros Bully was born. This deck went back to its aggressive roots by adding in Battle Screech, Seeker of the Way, a recurrent threat in Sacred Cat, and Rally the Peasants. Instead of the typical Glint Hawk/Kor Skyfisher draw engine, the deck relied on Faithless Looting to further its graveyard based synergies. Lately however, Tron has risen to prominence as the boogeyman deck to beat. From this we’ve seen the typical Boros Monarch shell evolve to incorporate black spells. Okiba-Gang Shinobi, Castigate, and Bojuka Bog are all great weapons to have as a midrange deck to help beat Tron. I’ve taken a close look at the deck and added my own unnecessary twists, fallen in love with a new Theros Beyond Death card, and have come up with my go to competitive deck for the future.

2 Bojuka Bog

4 Boros Garrison

4 Ash Barrens

8 Snow-Covered Plains

3 Snow-Covered Mountain

1 Snow-Covered Swamp

4 Thraben Inspector

4 Kor Skyfisher

3 Aven Riftwatcher

2 Okiba-Gang Shinobi

2 Palace Sentinels

1 Battle Screech

1 Custodi Squire

4 Lightning Bolt

3 Skred

2 Journey to Nowhere

2 Prismatic Strands

3 Golden Egg

4 Prophetic Prism

1 Omen of the Dead

2 Castigate

This time out I want to talk about the manabase I’ve come up with first. Boros decks have relied on Artifact lands in the past so they could use Galvanic Blast as a way to deal four damage to any target. However, against burn or any deck running Gorilla Shaman, this would really set you back if you started to get your lands blown up and you miss a key land drop. Now that I’ve added black to the deck, I thought it would be better to move away from the artifact lands so that I could run Ash Barrens and smooth out the three color manabase as best I can. I’m also able to run Snow-Covered lands which make it possible to run Skred, which can be just as good as Galvanic Blast when it comes to instant speed removal.

I’m running two copies of Bojuka Bog as an uncounterable way to exile the opponent’s graveyard. With Kor Skyfisher and Boros Garrison, you can repeatedly do this throughout the game, wreaking havoc on graveyard based decks. Boros Garrison is beautiful in this deck as it allows you to not only buyback Bojuka Bog, but plays nicely with Ash Barrens and effectively gives you more lands than 22 the deck runs. Since most of our spells are white, I found running eight Snow-Covered Plains to be a good number. This gives us 16 potential white sources for mana not including the filtering you get from Prophetic Prism. Playing three Snow-Covered mountains gives us 11 sources making it so that when we need red mana for removal, it’s almost always available. Finally we have one Snow-Covered Swamp which brings our black mana sources to a total potential of seven, which isn’t bad for a splash color.

Kor Skyfisher is the cornerstone of the deck. The clause forcing you to return a permanent to your hand was designed to be a bad thing. This is clearly evident by the 2/3 stat line along with flying for a creature that only costs two mana. However, if you combine it with value cards with decent enters the battlefield effects, Skyfisher becomes one of the best flying creatures in the game. Bouncing Thraben Inspector will give you another clue, Aven Riftwatcher will grant you two life and an additional two life when you replay it, Golden Egg & Prophetic Prism will draw you a card, Omen of the Dead will return a creature from your graveyard to your hand, and Palace Sentinels will reset the monarch.

Speaking of Palace Sentinels, this is another key creature. When Sentinels enters the battlefield, you become the monarch. This mechanic gives legs to midrange decks allowing that sweet card advantage at no cost to quicken their gameplan to end the game. With a solid 2/4 body, Palace Sentinels is a good blocker against aggressive decks as well.

The rest of the creatures are all value based. Thraben Inspector is a great one drop that can draw you a card whenever you pay two generic mana to sacrifice the clue token it leaves behind. Aven Riftwatcher is a 2/3 flyer for three mana that gains you two life when it enters and leaves the battlefield. Custodi Squire is a great late game creature that effectively returns another creature, enchantment, or artifact from your graveyard to your hand. Sometimes if you’re lucky, due to MTGO’s poor interface, your opponent will pick a different card in your graveyard from the one you picked and you’ll get both. Lastly, the crème de la crème Okiba-Gang Shinobi can return all of those creatures to your hand if they attack in unblocked and you use its Ninjitsu ability. When this 3/2 creature deals combat damage to your opponent they discard two cards. If you’re able to slam this card and pave the road for its attacks, your opponent will be hard pressed to recover especially if you’re the monarch too.

Lightning Bolt is the best Instant spell in the deck. For one red mana you can deal three damage to anything, but most of the time I’ve found it common to be used as creature removal. Skred is the other instant speed removal spell, dealing damage equal to the amount of Snow-Covered permanents (11 total) we control. Journey to Nowhere pulls mop up duty for creatures outside the scope of Lightning Bolt and Skred. This enchantment exiles target creature for as long as it stays on the battlefield. Castigate is a great reason to splash black. This nuisance of a card exiles a spell of your choice from your opponent’s hand. If you’re able to nab a piece from any flicker loop based decks, it makes it a lot harder on them to beat you. Lastly, you have Prismatic Strands which not only prevents damage from a color of your choice till the end of turn, but can be used as your best removal spell if played right. The flashback ability on this card makes it broken and prevents players from attacking in when they see it in your graveyard.

Rounding out the rest of the spells are our utility spells. Omen of the Dead is a card I absolutely fell in love with when I saw the new Theros Beyond Death cards. A raise dead effect that not only can scry two cards later on, but can be repeatedly replayed by Kor Skyfisher or Custodi Squire is amazing, and I’m confident this is a great home for it. Golden Egg, another recent card from the previous set, draw us a card when it enters the battlefield. Then we can sacrifice it for one generic mana to filter any color we want, or pay two generic mana and gain three life. Prophetic Prism also draws a card when it enters the battlefield, but this one filters mana without having to be sacrificed. Then there is the one of Battle Screech. This card can turn the tide of battle by creating four 1/1 flying bird tokens which can help you hold onto the monarch, or push through the final damage you need to close out the game.

2 Electrickery

2 Gorilla Shaman

3 Pyroblast

2 Red Elemental Blast

2 Relic of Progenitus

2 Standard Bearer

1 Okiba-Gang Shinobi

1 Patrician's Scorn

As a midrange deck, you will almost always fold up shop to Tron. Some go about this by completely ignoring the match up and strengthen their sideboard for even matchups even more, others like me decide to fight and dedicate probably more than they should. To fight the Tron nemesis I bring in Okiba-Gang Shinobi, all the Pyroblast & Red Elemental Blasts, and the Relics. Even with all that, it’s still an uphill battle if your opponent has the nuts and is on the play.

Patrician’s Scorn is there for Hexproof and Heroic. Pair it with the Standard Bearers and you have a fighting chance.

Against Affinity and other Monarch decks that rely on artifact lands, Gorilla Shaman gives you a major edge in winning the game.

Lastly, against Burn and Stompy you’ll want to bring in Standard Bearers. You’ll also want to bring in Electrickery when facing Stompy, Elves, or any go wide strategy.

We shall see if this deck really does bring me closer to Pauper Royalty over the next couple of months. I’m going to start grinding leagues and Sunday challenges, so wish me luck. If you have any brews you’d like me to write about, please email them to pauperpedia@gmail.com. As always, I play the decks in the free tournaments hosted by gatherling every Tuesday night, and do a quick report on how the deck fared the following day on my Pauperpedia Facebook page. Till next time folks, have a happy Brewsday!

[bublp0pr]

I get these ideas for stories that sound great in my head but would take ages to make properly. *shrug* let’s just dump one here with every else and see what happens.

One of my fav His Theme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XI3T3G9GJRw

So Frisk gets to listen to the same soundtrack we do when they enter fights right? Let’s say that the reason they keep resetting is so that they can hear the songs because let’s face it, they’re awesome. But it’s not enough for them. Having to go through hours of gameplay for the particular song they feel like is frustrating. They’re stuck in this loop where they don’t want the nostalgia to end - ever.

One day they’re having the date with Undyne and they notice her piano. They know that she plays, but they had never really asked her more than that. It’s such a pretty looking instrument. So they get her to play for them. And she looks a little startled like, why would they want to listen to her play?

So she sits on the stool and starts fingering a bit of His Theme casually, first with one or two fingers, looking up at Frisk  and then slowly easing into proper form. “I heard this playing from a statue one day, coming back from Alphys’ lab.” She says distantly, becoming lost in the sound. The music is flowing quite prettily and peacefully i’m imagining. It’s not complicated, just a very simple piece, but she slowly builds it with harmony.

Tears fall down Frisk’s face. Undyne stops mid-note when she hears the quiet sobs and looks up. Frisk is smiling through the small drops and tells them to continue. She pauses though, a little awkward.

“Uhhh. How about i play a different one?” Then she turns back and suddenly starts playing the powerhouse of Ngahhhh! When all else fails, Undyne always falls back on her passion haha. The atmosphere changes again. It’s a wonder the keys aren’t flying off the piano with how hard she presses them.

Rubbing away their tears Frisk thinks about the implications of this. Being able to play the songs from battles whenever they like, however they want.  After the song is done, they silently ask “Can you teach me?”

^Woah that sounds like a really poetic place to end it. But i’ve still got more to the story... sigh. I don’t have any sense of story writing lol

Undyne sees this as her chance to reach Papyrus’ challenge and become besties with Frisk. So she starts teaching them. And when she stops and starts making pasta instead, Frisk waits out the timeline until she sets fire to the house (and that poor grand piano) then reloads. They repeat the process, tweaking variables to get to the piano teaching faster. (There’s a similar thing that happens in Groundhog day which is where i got the idea from lol)

But learning piano isn’t enough. Once they get the hang of it they need to figure out playing by ear. They become obsessive over it, playing keys again and again until sound can instinctively be translated into the language of music. They figure out the timeline that gives them the most access to Undyne’s piano and play anything and everything they can recall hearing from the surface. 

Then it’s finally time to learn the music of the Underground. Each soundtrack becomes it’s own project. One by one Frisk chooses a battle to learn and then repeats this process:  saving next to Undyne’s house, walking all the way to the encounter and then quitting halfway through the battle to practice the section of music until they can play the whole thing through. Then they play the song over and over again until it becomes long term memory (because sheet music doesn’t last between timelines) and the method is repeated with another monster. 

Once they finish all the pacifist music they of course have to complete genocide. In my headcanon this Frisk did genocide, refused to delete the world and doesn’t trust themselves to be able to make the same choice twice and fight off Chara. So instead they always quit just after judgement hall (I mean, there isn’t much music after that point anyway). The good thing about genocide is that no one gets suspicious of you going to Undyne’s house and playing her piano for hours on end because they’re all dead haha. 

--- --- ---

So finally they do it. They learn every song in the game, and they’re so proud of themselves. A sentimental part of them drives them to go through a true pacifist run and go back to the date with Undyne.

They walk up to the piano slowly, a small smile on their face and press the old familiar keys of His Theme once again. It starts so softly, it takes Undyne a few seconds to recognise the tune, the memory returning like an old friend. Once she realises what it is she walks up to the kid but whatever she has to say gets trapped in her tongue when she looks at them. Their eyes are closed, with this absolute look of peace on their face as they play. Without a word from either of them, she takes a seat next to Frisk and joins the sound, forming a duet. 

With Undyne taking over the main melody, Frisk slowly starts adding in the other monsters’ themes, naturally melding them into the flow of chords. This confuses Undyne at first, she lifts up her head, but when she hears soft bonetrousle and spears of justice, she realises what they’re doing and just goes with it. The whole song becomes this epic medley summarising everything that still means something to Frisk about their journey- all their friends, all their memories, all the things that even after hundreds of resets are still precious to them 

and... and... ahhhhh it’s all just so beautiful! I don’t know what to write! Even now i think i’m being too flowery v.v

this is where i’d end it if i wanted to be nice, Frisk and Undyne in this unbroken melody of beautifulness... but of course i have extra because i don’t know when to stop lol

Without even thinking about it, at one point Frisk shifts into Battle Against a True Hero. The presence next to them stiffens and suddenly the lower parts of Undyne fade out. They keep playing for a bit after, not realising at first. It gets slower the more confused they become and they look up. Undyne is staring at the piano trembling, gripping the piano seat. 

“Where... where did you hear that punk?” they whisper. Frisk looks back down at the piano in silence. The lack of noise in the room becomes palpable. In a pathetic attempt to ease the tension, Frisk lightly fingers Dating Tension to give their hands something to do. 

“Frisk.” This makes them look up. No one ever says their name. There is a sharpness to Undyne’s tone, it makes them nervous. She starts talking louder a quiver in her voice. “I-I have never played that song in front of anyone ever.” 

“Just, just who are you?” There’s small tears in her eyes that she’s trying very hard to blink away. 

... 

“WHY WON’T YOU ANSWER ME!” Undyne is standing up now, clenching her fists. Frisk looks scrunches their eyes shut. Glowing flashes of spears light up their memory. Echoes of Undyne’s voice, the anger, the sorrow, the desperation, the conviction. Her figure slowly melting in front of them burns behind their eye lids. Undyne can’t take this... this... flat face from the human any longer. “LOOK AT ME!” The words are screeched with emotion. Frisk too starts trembling. She can’t hold the tough act anymore, it’s becoming too much. The next words are s plea. “Kid... please... look at me.” 

Frisk lifts up their head in one sharp motion, looking directly at Undyne. The look on their face says a thousand words. Guilt. Sadness. Pity. Emptiness. Rage. Fear. Desperation. Shame. Resignation. They look like someone that has accepted they are, in the true sick human interpretation of the word that insults this race, a monster.

It’s enough to deter even Undyne from her focus. She forgets for a moment what she was even going to say, looking at that face in fear, disgust, shock, horror... whatever word you could think of she was looking at Frisk with it.

aaaand that’s all i’ve got. Bet you were expecting resolution? Pfft hahah nope. If i could come up with that this’d be a proper fanfic. Maybe one day i will figure that out. Then i’d upload it to AO3 [insert self promo to my fics, bubbLp0ppR :P]

[yahoo-puck-daddy-blog]

Jake Allen has made us all look stupid in the Stanley Cup Playoffs

In full disclosure, I picked the Minnesota Wild to defeat the St. Louis Blues. In full disclosure, I did this because I trusted Jake Allen as a winning postseason goaltender about as much as I trust my willpower with a Taco Bell drive-thru in my peripheral vision at 2 a.m.

I was aware Allen had been exceptionally better under coach Mike Yeo than he was under Ken Hitchcock, which is to say he couldn’t have been any worse. I was aware that (St. Louis Blues legend) Martin Brodeur was now his goaltending coach, but didn’t buy the osmosis that had apparently occurred between the two. But I was also aware that Allen had a minus-2.17 goals-saved above replacement in the 2015 playoffs, and that the Blues needed Brian Elliott to rush in for the save when Allen flopped in last postseason’s spotlight.

My lack of confidence in Allen was, legitimately, the primary motivating factor in picking against the Blues. In consuming many Stanley Cup Playoff predictions, I know I wasn’t alone. In discussing the team with many Blues fans, I know that curiosity about Allen in the playoffs wasn’t exactly an unspoken fear, no matter how good his regular season finished.

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Then Jake Allen became Martin Brodeur reincarnate, and three games later we all look like idiots.

The pundits. The doubters.

And above all else, the Minnesota Wild.

***

Bruce Boudreau was red-faced after Game 3. It was more frustration than embarrassment, although being down 0-3 no doubt filled him with the latter, too.

He knows the Wild are essentially doing what needs to be done, to the tune of a 66.6 to 43.5 Adjusted-Corsi-For-per-60-minutes advantage at even strength through three games. That Blues’ Corsi-For, in contrast, is the lowest in the playoffs, and it’s not even really close. When the Wild are trailing, the advantage balloons to a 73.53 to 41.75 advantage for Minnesota. They’re carrying the play.

“I don’t think we’re playing that bad,” said Boudreau. “The one thing I’m not going to criticize is their effort.”

The Wild have had their bouts of bad luck – posts, whiffs, that Zach Parise stick that prevented a goal in Game 1 – but that’s not why they’re losing. They’re losing because of Jake Allen.

Allen has stopped 114 of 117 shots in the series, to the tune of a .974 save percentage. His positioning has been flawless. He’s big in the net. He’s been as poised as he’s been leaky in previous postseasons. And he’s given up one goal at even strength in three games against a team that averaged 3.21 of them per game, second best in the NHL regular season.

Like Brodeur in his legendary career, Allen hasn’t done it alone. He’s a playoff-caliber goalie getting playoff-caliber defense played in front of him.

When Ken Hitchcock was fired, it was because the Blues couldn’t keep the puck out of their net if they cemented over the front and dug a moat of quicksand around the crease. Their defense was porous, their goaltending was terrible, with the worst save percentage in the NHL.

Yeo’s promotion, at the very least, seemed to address that primary deficiency. We knew the goaltending would improve, not only because hockey is cyclical like that but because Yeo’s system insulates them.

During his time in Minnesota from 2011-2016, the Wild were ninth in the NHL in goals-against at 5-on-5, right behind the Montreal Canadiens, who had Carey Price while Yeo … didn’t. That the Blues recaptured their structure and saw their season turn around defensively under Yeo was expected. That Allen was that damn good within that system wasn’t: 1.85 goals against and a .938 save percentage under Yeo.

In the playoffs, we’ve seen a continuation of that regular-season success, even though the Blues are suddenly giving away more shots than a Daytona Beach bar at spring break: 28.4 shots per game in the regular season, 39.0 in the playoffs through three games.

What they’re doing, though, is limiting those shots to low-danger chances.

“It’s not rocket science. We’ve got to be better…better chances to the net,” said Wild defenseman Ryan Suter.

Low-danger and high-danger shots are metrics cooked up by Corsica to show how much heavy lifting a goalie’s doing. Through three games, Allen’s faced more low-danger chances at 5-on-5 (53) than any other goalie in the playoffs. That’s obviously a byproduct of the Blues giving up bushels of shots to the Wild, but let’s not take this for granted: ‘Twas a time this season when Jake Allen couldn’t stop a low-danger shot if the puck had a flashing neon sign on it that read “SHOT APPROACHING, STICK DOWN PLEASE.”

And then Ken Hitchock was fired, Yeo was promoted and Martin Brodeur became Allen’s sensei.

***

Yeo was asked what he’s saying to Allen these days, as the young goalie stops everything thrown at him in the playoffs.

“I say ‘hi’ and ‘good morning’ and ‘good job.’ That’s about it right now,” he said, dead-panning. “I don’t want to mess anything up.”

Yeo actually talks to his goalie with some frequency, which is a welcome change from earlier this season. The relationship between Allen and Hitchcock had, for various reasons, deteriorated. Like when Allen was pulled after giving up three goals on 15 shots against the Los Angeles Kings, and Hitchcock – sensing the end was near, no doubt – told the media that Allen had to “man up and get better.”

“He’s in a position where he’s the guy that has to really take charge here. He’s got to man-up and get better and we’ve got to get better in front of him,” said Hitchcock, although no one really paid attention to that last part.

“I didn’t have a lot of communication with Hitch,” said Allen, via CBC Sports. “I think you need to communicate. I like to know if [the coach] has a problem [with my play]. If you [want to] change something, come talk to me. It’s the easiest solution.”

Goaltending is a mental trial. Success or failure, it’s on you. Focus during a game, it’s on you. It’s a solitary task, comparatively, to the rest of the team. You have your fellow goalies on the roster and the goaltending coaching staff, but they’re the only ones that truly understand you. It’s like being a place-kicker in the NFL, except you’re as important as the starting quarterback.

But for Allen, there was added pressure. He was The Goalie Of The Future, crushed by the weight of a four-year, $17.4 million contract extension he signed last summer. He was the guy who inherited the mantle after the Blues traded away his safety net, and last season’s playoff hero, Brian Elliott to the Calgary Flames.

Then he became the guy with an .898 save percentage in November and December; the guy who had the fourth-worst save percentage on low-danger chances, after having the 12th-best in 2015-16; the guy not vibing with his coach; and the guy whose status with the franchise had to be reaffirmed by his general manager and others

He didn’t want to be that guy.

So changes were made on Feb. 1. Hitchcock was fired. Jim Corsi, who had been Allen’s goaltending coach, was fired. Yeo, who had been hired as Hitchcock’s replacement for 2017-18 but was serving as an understudy on his bench, took over. Brodeur and former Blues goalie Ty Conklin were tasked with figuring out the team’s goaltenders.

Brodeur was always in Allen’s corner since joining the Blues’ front office, unwavering in his belief that Allen could be a franchise goalie for the team. What he saw from Allen this season was a young player that had to get out of his own head, and make some fundamental tweaks to his game.

So the Blues started building Allen back up. It actually began on Hitchcock’s watch, when the team sent Allen home on Jan. 20 to try and unlock his head. “Jake’s struggling right now and I made a decision last night that I think taking a day away, and getting a total reset, he could get a reset traveling with the team, but I wanted a complete reset,” said Armstrong.

Said Allen, in hindsight: “I was lost in the net and had to work my way out of a funk. I took a couple of days and practiced, took a day off and waited for my next start. It was nice to spend time with family and not worry about hockey or anything.”

It was right after that break when Allen found inspiration in an odd place: a five-year-old boy with a letter of encouragement, shared over social media:

@34jallen @StLouisBlues from one of your biggest fans…..#letsgoblues pic.twitter.com/KjekT3aWZK

— Scott (@11CoachG) January 31, 2017

Allen actually met Mason Gilbert a few weeks later. And in those few weeks, he had made the boy proud, and his critics look, well, stupid.

Allen had a .933 save percentage in February, followed by a .953 save percentage in March. His confidence had grown. The system around him had coalesced, thanks to Yeo, who saw the maturation before his eyes in Allen.

“He’s a steady guy. I remember earlier when he got pulled, things aren’t going well, and I remember saying to him that this is going to make you a much better player,” he said.

Allen’s reply? “He just nodded,” said Yeo.

More than anything, Brodeur’s coaching and communication had given him little things to improve on. Being in the flow of the game, and tracking the puck. Getting set early, with his stick on the ice, no matter the inherent “danger” of the chance. Little things that have made a big difference.

But there’s something else about Brodeur, too. Maybe sage advice from one of the best goalies of all-time resonates more than that from a career coach. Maybe the charismatic, optimistic disposition that defined Brodeur as a player was the tone Allen needed in his darkest time.

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Maybe Brodeur, you know, understood him, as a young goalie with the weight of the world on his shoulders.

“Everybody thinks that goalies are quirky, so when things are not going well, they leave you alone, they don’t even talk to you. And that’s when it becomes a little harder, when things are snowballing, because you feel that you’re really by yourself,” said Brodeur, via STLToday.com.

“When you’re going through it, it’s a hard time, because (Allen) is the one stopping the puck or not stopping the puck. So that becomes a game that he has to beat himself to get back to where he needs to be for us to have any kind of success.”

***

Jake Allen’s made me look stupid.

It’s not hard, mind you, because roughly 85-percent of my actions on a given day make me look stupid, especially if they involve social media. But in this instance, I simply didn’t trust what was as plain as the Blue Note on his chest: Allen was a different player after Feb. 1, and wasn’t about to revert back to his sieve-like existence. I had him pegged as Marc-Andre Fleury – great regular season numbers for stretches, mentally incapable of putting together a playoff series win on his own – and it turns out he might not be that at all.

And you know what? That’s fine.

We all want to be smarty-pants prognosticators – by the way I was the only one to pick the Predators – but we’re all basically rooting for the best stories.

Bruce Boudreau finally winning a conference title would have been one. Jake Allen’s transformation under enormous pressure and the tutelage of the most successful goalie in history would be another. Combine that with the agonizing history of the Blues in the playoffs, and the current state of St. Louis sports, and you have yourself a tidy narrative and, frankly, a feel-good story for an amazing hockey town.

Jake Allen’s made me look stupid. I couldn’t be happier about it.

—

Greg Wyshynski is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Contact him at puckdaddyblog@yahoo.com or find him on Twitter. His book, TAKE YOUR EYE OFF THE PUCK, is available on Amazon and wherever books are sold.

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