#should play with her more often

[chillisreal]

FIRST ONE

me and my sister played some 3D world earlier, and I was thinking a lot about it while listening to a song called you and me and i just, yeah

Mario n luigi, the brothers ever.

[scoriarose]

She came up with a new activity

[feelingtheaster99]

I LOVE the scene of Fig giving Riz a “thinking of you” card to Riz, giving the credit to Gorgug and THEN Gorgug giving Riz such a personal and heartfelt gift and tried to figure out what it was that Riz was talking about

[ariadne-mouse]

I mentioned in this post that I thought it would take a life or death choice about Imogen for Liliana to flip, situationally, as opposed to the party being able to convince her to change her ideology (cult juice is strong), and it seems we may have gotten an element of that in Liliana flying to Imogen's aid against Otohan. I'd be very curious what Liliana would have done if she'd gotten there in time to fight, but we'll never know, so we have to digest the moment we got. I also think FCG's death adds another dimension both in-game and above the table. Since we dropped out literally mid-scene after her arrival this post may get stale immediately after the first few minutes of next week's episode, but for now I think it's safe to say that at least for the time Liliana spends with the party right now she will not be an active antagonist. Her daughter called for help and she answered, and her first act was trying to comfort her. Matt also wouldn't hit the players with another big battle fresh off the first (and with that outcome), so if they do have to face Liliana as an enemy it would be later under evolved circumstances.

To be clear I don't think FCG dying means Matt nerfs the threat of Liliana or that this situation means she has flipped permanently, but rather, it neatly interrupts the established dynamic between Liliana and Imogen thus far and creates a chance for new dialogue that doesn't just repeat all the same things as before. Imogen hasn't needed her mother - not really - and maybe still doesn't, but she called for help and is grieving now and the conversation doesn't necessarily have to be the same old "Liliana renounce your cause" but rather "help your daughter here and now" and to connect with her through that emotion. This is probably the best opportunity they'll ever get to flip Liliana in a more than "last ditch in a crisis moment" kind of way or lay the groundwork for that happening later. Now, the party - and Imogen in particular - may rightly be angry with Liliana as an ally of Otohan, and that FCG died because of the cause Liliana supports. Liliana may want to comfort her daughter while also believing that FCG's death was unfortunate but not ultimately a reason to doubt the cause or escape what she sees as inevitable. It's messy! But it's a very interesting situation and FCG's death is such a visible wound on Imogen that it may elicit Liliana to do or consider things she wouldn't, otherwise.

[queenlua]

hey lua what decks do phoenix aceattorney and miles aceattorney play in magic

PHOENIX WRIGHT

once upon a time, a friend bullied me into going to a Pro Tour Qualifier, which was probably the largest Magic tournament i’d ever been to at that time, right?

i was happy to be bullied, to be clear, but the problem was… i hadn’t played standard-format Magic competitively in about 2-3 years.  so my knowledge of the current metagame, what deck archetypes were popular, and what the current cards even were, was staggeringly limited.

“it will be fine,” said my friend.  “here, take this spare deck i built.  it’s super-straightforward and easy,” he lied.

he said this to me approx. 8 seconds before the first round began, so uhhhhh, i sure was playing a game of magical cards without ever having even looked at the damn deck before!

so, lo, literally in the course of playing the deck, i was learning how this shit was supposed to work.  “oh!” i’d exclaim with delight, halfway through my turn.  “THAT’S how those two cards are supposed to interact.  oh that’s super clever.  what a neat combo.”  and then i’d proceed to shiftily look at my opponent over my cards, riffle those cards a lil bit, and then say “pass” with as much of an enigmatic vibe as i could muster.

meanwhile, my opponent was Actually Prepared, and they were Trying To Win, and they were pissed.  they threatened to call Slow Play on me because i was taking so fucking long reading all the cards.  as in, he literally called a judge over, who stood there watching me the whole time, in order to determine if i was being Criminally Bad At Magic versus just A Regular Amount Of Bad At Magic, and i was sweating bullets the whole time because i didn’t know this deck or their deck or any of those cards and AHHHH why is the judge staring at me!!!

….which only served to make it EXTRA-humiliating for this poor fuck when i proceeded to eviscerate them 2-0.  hahahah get dunked onnnnnnnn nerd!!!

and then i also proceeded to eviscerate my next opponent???

sheer dumb luck.  i cannot overstate how ill-prepared i was for this tournament.  i absolutely did not deserve these wins.

meanwhile the friend who gave me the deck was having a much worse time with their deck, and they were like “what the fuck. you weren’t supposed to win. how are you winning with that shit, my deck’s so much better than yours”

anyway.  i think that’s the kind of scenario Phoenix would get into if he were an MtG player.  dude Gets Himself Into Situations And Then Uses Cleverness + Bullshit + Luck To Get Out Again.

(AA4-era Phoenix seems like he’s doing the same thing… but, in reality, he’s actually been meticulously crafting his deck in secret for the past six months.  he’s not even aiming to win the tournament, he’s just exploiting a known weakness in the opponent-matching system that lets him know with certainty who he’s going to get matched up against (spoiler: first round is Kristoph), and he’s hyper-optimizing his deck to beat Literally Only Those People.  meanwhile, Apollo, who built a tryhard hyper-optimized variant of Red Deck Wins, is lowkey annoyed that Phoenix's seemingly-random pile keeps vaulting him just one table above him in the standings, because Apollo knows his deck is better. he knows it!!!! just let him go 1v1 and prove it aaaaughhhh!!!)

((also, in case you want Actual Concrete Cards And Colors And Stuff: in general i think Phoenix prefers limited play (draft, sealed, "anything where you open booster packs on the spot & throw a deck together") to constructed play, because he doesn't like being tied down to any one game plan. when he does play constructed, i think he's less attached to a specific colors and more attached to specific mechanics. in particular: he's not a combo player exactly, but he likes mechanics that feel like bullshit. dude saw Madness for the first time & his eyes lit up & he was in LOVE, "you mean i'm discarding the card but then i can cast it for free??? hell YES." he absolutely ran a poison counter deck during New Phyrexia. ah fuck i just realized he was probably a huge stan for noted awful expansion Battle for Zendikar, i think i gotta cancel him now, sorry))

((and i think Phoenix also has a touch of Timmy in him! like, i went to a huge state tournament once with a bunch of really skilled players, and there was this one dude in our car who had a really solid deck, clearly adhered to a lot of the trends in the meta at the time... but his win condition was a Shivan Dragon. which wasn't a bad card at the time, it was a reasonable win condition, but it was... slightly suboptimal? not at all the obvious pick? sort of random? and multiple people asked him "why is that your win condition" & he shrugged and said "i like dragons." so the dragon stayed & that dude ended up getting second place in the whole tournament so FUCK optimal play, bring a dragon. i think Phoenix would sneak in a dragon now and again. just 'cause))

MILES EDGEWORTH

this one is trickier!!!

young!Miles is just going to play Whatever The Meta Deems To Be The Best Deck, right. the von Karma perfection thing and all. it's all very boring & micro-optimized to be the Best Deck Of Its Kind & he pours over the results of the big name tournaments week after week & does some math or whatever to hyper-optimize his own build of the Obviously Correct Deck. there is no soul in any of this, purely Executing On A Formula.

...but then he experiences Character Growth & has his big gay crisis & now he has to pick up the game again. he opens the latest tournament results... clicks around some win % stats for various cards in a desultory kinda way, and... his heart's just not in it, right?

enter 2-4 era Miles. 2-4 era Miles is playing some utterly unhinged Five Color Good Stuff thing. there's a lot of Planar Chaos cards in there, because that whole set was about Weird Shit & cards doing Stuff You're Familiar With (But In The Utterly Wrong Color!!!) & all that is resonating with Miles more than he'd care to admit. he cannot possibly talk about his unnecessary feelings but he can make a weird noise rock album about them. and by noise rock album i mean this fucking Magic deck.

and he's playing this deck with a 100% straight face, as though this is the exact same behavior that won him the Junior Super Series five years in a row & not a desperate cry for help from a madman. everyone else is like Miles... are you playing fucking singletons... in a fucking standard deck... you know your deck will be more consistent with four-ofs right... and then he gives a cool fish-eyed stare & taps out to cast some arcane bullshit legendary creature & gives a single rap of his knuckles against the table to indicate that he's passing the turn.

and it works, is the thing! all those years of training to be the Spikiest Spike Ever have paid off; this Five Color Good Stuff thing relies on some pretty clever insights to make the mana base work, and parts of what he's doing eventually get adopted by the larger metagame to become an Actual Serious Deck. but, like. it's still a monstrosity. any skilled players watching are still definitely wondering Are You Okay, Dude.

after 2-4, i think Miles settles back into playing something more normal. he still cares about winning, but he's going to do it with a touch of class. he wants a game that involves dialogue, some actual back-and-forth, because just trying to combo off is lame coward behavior.

aw yeah baby we're talking counterspells!!!

he's a blue player at heart & he's happiest when he's updating the autopsy report shutting down whatever his opponent's plan is. he'll splash other colors as the occasion calls for it, but he'd be happy running mono-blue the rest of his life. like, i ran a pretty fun Legacy deck back in the day which consisted of:

every kind of counterspell i could get my hands on,

propaganda because FUCK creatures,

thieving magpies for the card draw,

and a few silver wyverns to, y'know, actually win the game

...and i think Miles would appreciate that deck. just play counterspells until the opponent runs out of steam & then cruise your way to victory with a couple birds. simple. elegant. classic. doesn't involve any of this modern Planeswalker bullshit (Miles regards most developments that happened to MtG post-Time Spiral block or so as affronts to game design).

(i do think Miles has a secret fondness for sagas as a card type, however. they remind him of all that Character Growth, but in an abstract/subconscious/nonthreatening way. too bad most of them are a bit of poor match for the kinds of decks he likes to play)

FINALLY: i think Miles hates playing Commander with every fiber of his being & Phoenix loves it & this is a pretty serious point of contention in their relationship. poor dudes

[rayplaysif]

Congrats to Dai for winning the RO popularity contest for @throneofblood-if !!

[scarlethoodi]

When Briana confronted the regents about the truth, the reality of how and why she’s the Scion of Arthur. Said that at least Davis had the decency to be openly racist to her face instead of playing mind games and beating around the bush.

No one is seeing her.

Each and every time she, the story itself, calls it out and puts the truth right in front of all these white people’s faces I feel a rush. It’s such a traumatic reality and it’s tied to her lineage in every aspect.

[jontaro-kun]

Whoops I tripped and my hand slipped and all of a sudden this Sonamy art just kinda spawned outta nowhere haha that's crazy

I'm not gonna sugarcoat it this is almost entirely inspired by a specific Slowed & Reverbed rendition of Ariana Grande's "Into You" and 90% of it just came from the gif they used for the chorus vdsbfvjhkbfdv

I saw it and thought "Okay how can I make this about Sonic. Hm. This song feels Sonamy-coded, and Sonic feels like the type of guy to give a girl a motorcycle ride but like romantically. Oh but he doesn't have a motorcycle. That's, like, Shadow's thing. He has a hoverboard though. And letting someone else ride with him on a hoverboard would arguably be even more dangerous than on a motorcycle...so it's right up his alley." all in the span of like 2 seconds.

Of course this also meant I needed to finally design my own Amy, usually when other artists draw her they choose one of 3 options: they draw her normally, they give her long hair, or they give her Sonic's hair; as you can see I couldn't make that choice

So why am I yapping so much about all this? Idk I just think it's neat hdbfsvjhbhvbd

[vulpinesaint]

really winning at childcare lately (telling my elementary schoolers the plots of shakespearean tragedies)

[indeliblemarking]

abuse / trauma obviously isn’t an excuse for behavior and we see that notion applied (rightfully so most of the time) in fandom but i feel like in catra’s case you really can’t remove her suffering when analyzing why her redemption is written the way it is. she’s abused interpersonally and systematically as a child soldier from toddler age and it warps her perception of every relationship in her life to the point where she isolates herself to extreme degrees to the point that she’s consistently on the brink of a mental breakdown. yes she treats people like garbage yes she makes horrible decisions but her case is like…very extreme. and that’s not to necessarily play trauma olympics with characters in other pieces of media but i feel like people kind of downplay how that factors into her reasoning and also sort of forget how young she is throughout her entire story, flashbacks and all. so obviously the show is gonna have the good guys extend sympathy and not have her prove her worth. (which is one of the main ideas that messed her up in the first place) her arc needed more time but I think it’s unnecessary to devalue it just because the characters aren’t mad at her for as long as you want them to be, they offer her love and support as she exists but still don’t excuse or enable poor behavior and don’t allow her to be in their lives and make morally corrupt decisions. anyway ik it’s 2024 but that’s something I’ve thought for a while

[rohirric-hunter]

I also want to make a post appreciating the culling in Umbar. It's an extremely big, extremely ambitious city, and although it is kinda laggy, it functions really well. While playing normally I've had moments where I would whip my camera around fast enough to just barely see something load in, so I knew they were doing a lot of culling to make it work, but it wasn't until I saw the city from above that I realized just how extensive it is and how well the illusion works. I wish I had taken some screenshots to show just how much of the city is not loaded in at any given time to demonstrate it. But it's overall really effective use of the tool to build the illusion of a really big city.

[yeehawitsjakee]

Current durge appreciation post!!!

Gonna be so sad when I finish Bethan's run 😔

[zdechlyryba]

ester on the brainnnnnn (he/she for the character!!)

[hero-of-the-wolf]

👋🏼 I need you to know that your TotK comments give me so much joy!

What's been your favorite part of the game so far?

-pebbles

I'm so glad you've been enjoying them :D

I've really loved running around the map and seeing how things have changed from BOTW! It's been so cool to go !!! I remember this person, and to see what they're up to now. Like the couple you help get together at Lover's Pond?? They have a daughter now 😭 absolutely insane, I love it sm

I've also really enjoyed the boss fights (esp Colgera and Queen Gibdo) and TULIN and all the music and the way the main quest is just "Find Zelda" like yeah sure you should probably stop the living (ish) embodiment of all evil, but that's more of a side thing. The priority is finding Zelda and it's very sweet 🥺

ALSO THE LIGHT DRAGON I LOVE HER SM

[watermelpm]

Fav Kinich Photos I've taken :3

(I needed something to post...)