Gyokuyoutama

I think I'm going to start paying attention to baseball again once the nightmare that is Joe Mauer's 8 year contract finally ends.

Does anyone in SPUF not have black circles perpetually under their eyes? Is that why we got associated with raccoons?

Only now do I realize how hard the Phantasmagoria games rip off Twinkle Star Sprites.

This is obviously a lie. I've seen you win at 100% orange juice.

Didn't realize that A Centaur's Life/Worries got an anime. I, for one, am eager to see the increase in debates as to whether the extreme anti-discrimination laws are meant to be satirical or not.

The real tragedy of WWII is that the Nazis didn't introduce raccoons to more locations.

All my raccoon stories are "I was walking around late at night, then I saw some sudden movement and was momentarily nervous until I saw it was a raccoon." The only really variation is whether the raccoon came from under something or from within a trash can.

I wouldn't be surprised if Steam Support is still linking people to the old SPUF address.

How the hell did this show up in my recommendations: "Lift enthusiast" bravely goes on a quest to not pay for a hotel room.

Actually the fact that there's even a debate is kind of silly, since ZUN says in the music room notes that Necrophantasia was meant to be an arrangement of Necrofantasy. Even without that you encounter Ran first ingame so her theme wins that way. It mainly comes up when people want to do remixes with a character focus. A remix of either is going to sound pretty similar, since the main theme is shared by both, and remixes often include the remaining themes and sometimes Charming Domination anyway, so you can't easily do a nice remix of just one or the other. But if the song is meant to be focused on Ran you'll have a lot of people obnoxiously insisting that you can't have a Ran song that's a remix of Yukari's theme. Yukari has her own theme from the fighting games anyway.

Is Ran's theme a remix of Yukari's theme or is Yukari's theme a remix of Ran's theme? The world may never know.

I mean granted, he doesn't seem to be wondering why there's nothing going down there.

It seems to me you could live your life a lot better than I think you are.

But where's Guilty Gear.

Isn't the 13th doctor the last one?

We were this close to finally ending F2P.

That + thing was something that Hecatomb did. + or - before the number meant to add or subtract, + or - after a number might more than or less than. Thus you could get statements like "when this abomination is size 3- it gets power +3." It worked there, but in Hecatomb due to the card layout text space was at an incredible premium for minion abilities. It's also why the game had far more keywords in its base set than most card games did.

Here's a pretty representative decklist. Some people run more of an early game and drop Alucard, some people run Phantom Cat instead of him, but it's all pretty similar. Basic mechanics are like Hearthstone (and so somewhat like magic as well): you get 1 mana a turn, followers can't attack the turn you play them, you can choose to attack enemy followers or the enemy leader if they don't have a ward follower (i.e. the defender doesn't choose blocks). Two major differences from Hearthstone is that you start at 20 life, and there is the evolve mechanic. 1st player gets 2 evolve points and can use 1 a turn starting turn 5, 2nd player gets 3 evolve points and can use 1 a turn starting turn 4. Generally evolving gives a follower +2/+2 and give it rush (which allows it to attack the turn it comes into play, but not the enemy leader). Some followers have additional abilities; the old standard was that if you get a non-conditional ability it would only get +1/+1 on evolve and if the ability was really good it wouldn't get pumped at all but that standard has went out the window since two expansions ago; there's plenty of followers with good abilities that still get +2/+2 on evolve, three of which are in this deck (Lyria, Feria and Spawn). The key cards are Tove, Alice, Bare Knuckle Bodyguard, Baphomet and Spawn from the Abyss. Tove is a 3/3 for 2 which is as good as it sounds. He has the downside of not being able to attack if you don't play a neutral follower (basically the analogue to artifact creatures; can go in any deck), but this as actually more of an upside because they decided that he also gets rush if you play a neutral follower. Thus you can play him turn 2 and go to face on turn 3, or you can play him later and then drop a neutral and take out one of their guys with Tove. So he's both some aggresive power early and he also allows you to trade midgame without spending an evolution point, which is huge. Alice is a 3/4 for 4, which are more than reasonable vanilla stats in this game, which gives all of your neutral followers in play and in your hand +1/+1. This allows for some explosive turn 4 plays where, if you went first, you can get the opponent down to 6-9 life, which puts them in finishing range on turn 5, especially if you have another Alice. It's quite notable that up until this point this type of mass pump in the game either was a spell, came down turn 6, or didn't pump defense (which is pretty huge since a lot of cheap removal is of the shock variety, and a lot of cheap mass removal is of the pyroclasm variety, so 3 defense can put followers out of reach). Between Alice, Tove, and the other cheap neutral cards in the deck you can easily run over a deck for a turn 5 kill if they don't get the right answers. What is especially notable is that Alice always drops on a turn beffore the opponent could evolve, regardless of whether you were going first or second, so even if they knew that you were going to pump all your neutral weenies the other player might not have been able to do much about it, due to summoning sickness. Bare Knuckle Bodyguard is another 3/4 for 4, again perfectly fair vanilla stats, which kills an enemy follower with 3 or less defense. Oh, and it does 2 damage to you if you have more than 10 life, as if that ever mattered. This is a great removal and a good body all in one, and lets you trade turn 4 if you aren't steamrolling without spending an evolution point. What's most notable about BKB is that the closest card before him was Priest of the Cudgel, another 3/4 for 4 that could get rid of enemy followers with 3 or less defense, but he only did his ability on evolve and only evolved as a 4/5. If you do need to evolve BKB he evolves as a 5/6, allowing you to do a much better job at trading. (Incidentally, Priest of the Cudgel has always been considered a pretty good card). The most infamous card in the deck is Spawn of the Abyss. It has ambush, which prevents it from being attacked or targeted until it attacks. When it attacks, if it had ambush, it deals 6 damage to the enemy leader's face. If you somehow kill it when it has ambush (say by the Wrath of God analogue or by using one of Havencraft's amulets which destroy a random follower), you still take 6 damage to the face. If it's evolved, both of those go up to 8. The most common one turn kill is to drop a spawn, and then next turn drop another spawn, evolve the new spawn to attack any ward the opponent has, or just whatever follower is around doing 8 damage to the opponents face, then send the old spawn to the opponent's face for 6 damage from his ability plus another 6 from his attack. 6+6+8 = 20, and you can't raise your life above 20 in this game. This creates the agonizing scenario where you don't want to play followers, to avoid the 8 damage from the evolve, but if you don't have ward followers they just attack your face next turn. You can get around this via the means I mentioned earlier (in which case you still take damage, thus setting yourself up for a kill in a later turn), but you have to get the timing perfect, while the Spawn player can be late a turn or to and still one turn kill you. There is one decent counter in the game, Mutagenic bolt in runecraft which transforms every enemy follower into a 1/1 and thus neither targets nor triggers graveyard effects, but Runecraft has trouble with other parts of the deck (generally you'll take a bunch of hits in the aggro phase so that you probably can't afford to take 8 to the face, but you can't prevent that unless you have no followers on the board since they can play and evolve in the same turn, but if you aren't playing followers you're almost certainly dead from the aggro package in the deck). Now, all of this might be manageable if they frequently failed to draw a Spawn, so that you didn't need to have your own answers so consistently, which leads us to : Baphomet. He's a 2/1 for 2 which tutors a follower with at least 5 attack. If you scan through the deck you'll notice that the only follower in the deck with 5 attack is Spawn, so here he just straight up tutors for a spawn. Worse, you can play Baphomet for 5 and he'll reduce the cost of the card you tutored by 3. Thus they can play Baphomet turn 5, and play a spawn turn 6. Now keep in mind that every mass destruction effect which can hit Baphomet costs 6.... You basically have two options to avoid the Spawn. You can avoid having any followers turn 5, so they can't evolve and attack them turn 6, and make sure that you have your 6 cost answer on turn 6 (because if you don't, you're taking 16 to the face on turn 7), or you can do so much damage to the deck that they're either dead by turn 6, or are close enough to dead that they can't afford to spend turn 5 playing a 2/1. The second strategy is more reliable, hence why the meta has become incredibly aggro (also, keep in mind that Alice and everything she pumps are neutral and can go in any deck), but the truth is that the deck that can pump through the aggro damage the best is also Bloodcraft. Some decks drop spawn and replace him with phantom cat while focusing a bit more on the early game, a 5/5 for 6 that draws you two cards and deals 2 damage to the enemy for each neutral that you draw, and this seems to be the best way to punish spawn decks. The phantom cat version is a little less reliable against non-blood decks, since you don't have the reliability of a spawn kill. Thus if no changes are made the meta will stabilize to two decks: spawn blood, which is good against every non-bloodcraft deck, and phantom cat blood, which is good against bloodcraft decks. When blood gets a bit too dominant more people will play phantom cat, which in turn will allow some people to try other classes But when the other classes start winning games people will just play spawn blood again and thus the cycle continues.

The more I think about it, the more fascinating this Spawn/Alice deck is. It may be the perfect card game deck in any card game. The thing about it is that it has strong threats to play in the early game, midgame and endgame. In the early game it just throws an aggro package at you which is as fast as anything else in the game. In the midgame it uses high impact cards that will nearly always 2 for 1 if not 3 for 1 (without the use of evolution points in many cases) thus allowing them to continue the assault without falling behind in tempo or cards. And after the midgame they have a one turn kill that punches through pretty much every defensive measure the game has to offer. It really shows the value in that maxim: "there are wrong answers but there are no wrong threats." You can certainly make a counter deck for the aggro portion, or the midgame trading, or the one turn kill. But if you do that, you'll get beaten in the other two phases and lose anyway. If you try to counter all three phases, you are highly likely to draw the answers for the wrong phase, and thus not really answer anything. It turns out that there is one counter though: a deck which is almost identical but which has a better midgame aggro component and thus kills the main deck before they get to the one turn kill. The way that things are developing, since there are no other possible counters, without nerfs the meta will become two decks that only differ by 1 or 2 cards.

Am I crazy or is this the same voice synthesizer used for the Lain title cards?