Gyokuyoutama

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?

Posting videos in vogue is just slacktivism. It doesn't change anything, it just lets you pat yourself on the back about how much "awareness" you raised. Except in the case of Net Neutrality everyone is already as aware as they can be on the issue because people haven't been able to shut up about it for years. But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe we can do a lot of good by posting youtube videos to low-traffic forums. Let me try:

That was a close call. If you hadn't have posted that video, the internet wouldn't have been saved.

Shadowverse has reached the point where half the ranked games use the exact same deck. 55% winrate, 60% winrate going first. Nearly every deck (except the top one) is around 40% winrate if it goes second. (EDIT: All of this is at the top rank. At lower ranks things are more lopsided.) Reminds me of that joke about Urza's meta in magic: the early game is the coinflip, midgame is the mulligan, and late game is the first turn.

My favorite genre is Touhou Remixes but actually its a heavy metal cover: Apologies to Iron Maiden, Dream Theater, Racer X and Deep Purple. (There's a lot more examples than those four.)

It'll be released shortly after Gordon R. Dickson releases the historical novel segment of the Childe cycle and Cordwainer Smith finally reveals to us the common destiny of humanity and underpeople.

You could get ad revenue for your server even if it was shit.

What seems to have happened is that Valve has delayed updating for so long (due to procrastination, putting resources on other projects, or troubles with the updates they are working on) that they know that the community won't be happy with a normal "large" update, no mater how good it is (and due to the aforementioned reasons there's a good chance that it wouldn't be more than an average update at best). I suspect that they had something that they could have released a couple of months ago but held off on it because they knew it wouldn't be "worth the wait." Since then they have been desperately trying to pool together all possible update ideas with the hope that the sheer size of the update, together with the the threat of no more updates if this megaupdate doesn't go perfectly, will distract the community from its problems and extremely long series of delays. What this means is that it's probably the last major update either way. If the community doesn't like it, they have an excuse to pack up their things to work on games that they care more about at this point (or just work on Steam itself, I guess). If it does go well, on the other hand, they've set up a precedent that they can't possibly repeat on a reliable basis. They're throwing everything they have into this update, so that when it launches they probably have nothing left over in plans for future updates. To even get enough together for a normal size update will take too long in the eyes of the community, and they can't pull this same stunt twice in a row.

I had a dream that Valve somehow accidentally put SPUF back up. Then Gabe Newell posted a thread where he linked to a video of Valve staff laughing at the fact that people thought that the Pyro update was going to come out which he closed by saying "I know that everyone here will say that they'll stop supporting us because of this, but honestly you idiots will keep giving us money no matter what." Then the forums suddenly redirected to steam discussions again.

I forgot that most of Serious Sam 1's music was from an actual band:

This just in: triple spawn of the abyss is the dumbest thing ever. Literally at least 22 damage that there's no way in the entire game to avoid. And thanks to Baphomet, this can all start turn 6 (while his tutoring greatly improves the reliability of it). The only way to counter this strategy is to kill the opponent by turn 6 at the latest. As if the meta wasn't already biased enough towards aggro. (And the spawn strategy, incidentally, works perfectly well in an aggro deck on top of that.) EDIT: Wow, sites are literally inventing new tiers to describe how good this deck is.

I decided to update Eador: New Horizons, since I remembered it having a lot of good ideas but having some truly AI experience problems. Turns out the most recent version is very polished with the new mechanics being seamlessly integrated into the game. Unlike the previous version I played, you'd never guess that the new units, spells, etc. weren't there from the beginning. On the flip side the AI leveling issues are even worse. Seriously, played a game where I intentionally set the AI to the easiest just in case this happened, and they had level 30 heroes when my top hero was level 7. Based on previous experience with base Eador I wasn't leveling slowly, and in fact I'm not sure that it's even possible within the game mechanics to get to level 30 that fast. Seeing as how you not only get major ability boosts every 10 levels, but your level also determines how many troops you can field and how many spells you can cast, it made the game pretty much unwinnable. Go to the forums, looks like they're aware of this and don't care to fix it because they just play against other people. But Eador is way too slow of game for me to play against randoms online, so I guess the mod is off the table for me.

I'll pick it up on disc after it gets over. It's not like I have any open slots in my viewing schedule at the moment anyway. I hope that the revival means that either Deadly Premonition will get a new game (especially as the computer version implied that Francis Morgan would be doing another case as an old man) or D4 will get another two episode "season."

It's literally the day after the expansion came out, and every deck I'm facing is playing Goblin Leader and multiple copies of Alice. This is why "neutral matters" is a really stupid theme.

Finally got a rogue aggro runecraft strategy that seems to work in A. Magic Girl Melvie is really, really, good in aggro.

Using rockets against kleer is just good strategy for much of the game. Early on the combat shotgun will do okay if you have distance, and the double barreled shotgun is perfect for a few up close, but with later brawls both are too slow and you'll got mobbed. The perfect weapon against them was the grenade launcher, but that doesn't appear in 3. The devastator is a decent substitute, but ammo is a bit more limited for it.

When is Epic Games going to release ZZT 2?

Richard Garfield knew that recall was the best of the bunch, he just thought that having random high powered cards would make the game more interesting since you'd have things you'd want to get in the ante.

Started looking into Yu-Gi-Oh, saw the effect on Pot of Greed, had to quit for a while until my brain could process how anyone considered putting an effect like that into a card game for free.

The gap between comics has been significantly longer every time, and the last one took over a year to come out. What's more it seems that Jay Pinkerton and Eric Wolfpaw left Valve, so there's no one left who has any history with developing the story. That by itself probably is going to delay the release by at least six months. So expect the comic to come out early 2019.

I really doubt that this is the pyro update. Nothing in the blog suggests that it is, and in fact there's another update that they did mention recently: the Jungle update. You know, that update that was going to be nearly completely community developed and which was announced back in November? It's at least as likely that these will simply be bundled with that, to give the illusion that the update is meaningful. I think they've gotten to the point where they're just kind of hoping that we forgot about the pyro update.

List of legendaries in shadowverse that are complete bullshit: Daria, Dimensional Witch; Albert, Levin Saber; Ouroboros; Demon Lord Eachtar; Heavenly Aegis.