That... actually sounds like an interesting form for a nightmare to take. Just how would that translate into a dream?
Last night I had a non-nightmare about being on/observing a boat being chased by a shark with a mouth on both ends. We picked up somebody from an amphibious car, one guy had some sort of board game that mirrored the goings-on in the dream and which he was reluctant to part with. Another guy seemed rather unshocked and uncooperative. I rationalized the character's presence on the boat as him being aware that they were stuck in a time loop. That guy could've probably would've been the key to solving everything, but could never get every one to coordinate due to race/class reasons. So they're just going to keep dying over and over again because they can't trust the black guy (who escapes his traditional horror flick role). I woke up convinced that this was a very powerful metaphor and Hollywood were fools not to have something with this concept in the works.
I bring this up for no reason at all.

It looks like a creepy pasta of a Thwomp knocking on your door in the middle of the night trying to sell thin mints. Then another one body slams you as soon as you take a step outside to hand over the cash. Wake up at 2 AM, proceed to vomit, clean it up, then go play DK Tropical Freeze bc **** sleeping the rest of the evening.

Curiosity sated?

Yep. I had that one before. 3/10 would not dream again.

Some time back I had a dream about a monster rising out of the water at me. At first it was like the creature from the Black Lagoon, just sort of coming from a pond but after fleeing in a car it was a big thing, like house size, rising out of a lake with its floppy arms. So I got on a plane to escape and it was right behind, rising out of the sea, godzilla-sized. So I moved to space and then looked and there it was rising out of the planet in the exact same way. At this point my brain realized it must be a dream (still not lucid, which is more normal for me) and just sort of watched as it kept "rising out of the water at me" like Lancelot running the same bit over and over again in Holy Grail, with the same floppy arm swats every time, and Mike and the Bots pointed out you could see the zipper on the space-elevator-sized monster's costume.

When I was 5, I had a dream in which the dead rose and began tearing apart the world. The interior of my house was no different, but in escaping, I discovered that the exterior had stretched miles away and I sought refuge in the grocery store as the monsters smashed their way in.

Then the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles showed up and began fighting the zombies.

I should know better by now, but it always comes as a shock to me when hardcore MTG players just don’t get Pot of Greed.

It doesn’t matter that it’s a different game. Y’all banned Gitaxian Probe, Ponder, and Faithless Looting in modern. I should not have to explain why a 0 cmc colorless and costless Divination is banned. But I have to keep having this conversation with friends bc they refuse to understand that a free +1 in card and hand advantage should not exist in any card game where players are supposed to be able to run out of cards.

To be fair I didn't get it into the least until I watched a Lets Player doing a Yugioh game (which included shock and awe that Pot of Greed was in-game and merely restricted rather than banned, along with Graceful Charity and the one that took me the longest to understand, Upstart Goblin). Yeah, colorless and costless you say, but EVERYTHING in YGO is basically colorless-costless since it doesn't have a resource system. YGO's Wrath of God is colorless and Costless. Hell, its Plague Wind equivalent (Mirror Force) is colorless and costless. So at first the idea that a colorless costless Divination is obscene when those aren't seems kind of strange (especially to an EDH player, who doesn't have nearly the trauma about Git Probe and Faithless). It comes down to the fact that YGO isn't really "No resource system" so much as a go-tall "Cards are your currency" system with a heavy focus on combo play. It's a game that wants you to thin and tutor as much as humanly possible, and provides a lot of tools to do so, but few if any that are positive CA just for you. That I saw, Pot and a couple forking tutors with VERY specific targeting (Fetch two/any number of THIS EXACT CARD), which makes Pot fairly unique. Accessing new cards from your deck is much more potent in that game than it is in MtG, FoW, Casters, basically anything I've actually played. This is a game where Winds of Change is strong, rather than garbage.

It also doesn't help that Pot's meme status means the only explanation ever given, to someone who hadn't the faintest concept of how YGO plays, was "It allows you to draw two more cards". So, okay? The economy of the game is not obvious from that if you've never read the rules, watched a game or two, or otherwise interfaced with the game. You don't know how hard it is to play or what two cards are worth.

I sort of disagree? Not entirely but partially.

First, unrelated to your post, the people who inspired the mini rant are repeat offenders I have already explained this too; and they just refuse to process it. So they have zero excuses. Once I’ve explained the economy, you should be able to grasp “free draw 2 is bad”.

But in response to your post: Pot of Greed and Graceful Charity are banned; Mirage of Nightmares is banned; Chicken Game is bsnned; and Upstart Goblin, Into the Void, and Cards of Demise are limited to 1 sometimes banworthy.

Once you know Pot of Greed is banned; I would expect someone who wants to know why to do a quick skim of other similar spells on thr banlist, see all the generic draw banned/limited, and be able to infer/understand something about the game’s economy without ever having to see it played. Especially if they heavily play another tcg or ccg where card advantage is important like MTG.

I understand that some people would rather just ask anyways. That’s fine. Not much wrong with that. But you can kind of see where I’m coming from with my (above average? at MTG) friends. Maybe actually below average and just lucky netdeckers at this point.

Edit:
Disclaimer... I am currently very salty because of New Super Mario Bros U. I think Nintendo just hasn’t ever learned anything about 2D Mario since SMW, which is imo the superior game.

You’d think 20 years would would be enough to learn not to spam homing projectiles that move faster than the player in water levels with clunky controls that don’t support precision bullet hell.

But nope. Nintendo doesn’t have the capacity to learn that lesson. No excuses for being a remaster bc they fixed a lot of similar bs in other hd remasters.

Super Special Bonus Points for never including a save system in all these years. They’ve obviously worked around the complete lack of non-fortress and non castle-saves so its not like they weren’t aware of the issue.

Being able to infer that the body that controls the rules considers draw broken is worlds away from understanding why, in context, it is broken, I feel. And, especially, it takes a different amount of mental retooling from M:tG to get why Pot of Greed is banned/broken and Mirror Force isn't, when it's usually a big X-for-1, which was something I would have asked if seeing what I did with a human who could answer questions, rather than having to work it out by watching.

I restate that most of my frustration is probably to do with the repeated conversation and thst I held it today while playing 2d water mario.

Btw, I promise to make a purely positive hsppy post once i am done with this water world for good. The rest of the game has been really good. And the save feature os only really unacceptable on my friends Wii U. On my switch it is more of just a facepalm lol Nintendo moment I can live with.

Speaking of, can i get an F in the chat for world 1 Fortress Boom Boom? He didn’t ask for any of this, but he’s the easiest hard save point so he’s repeatedly getting his level speed-ran.

But while I’m still trying to 100% it, lets examine the water levels so far:

- precision underwater level without bloopers
- precision underwater level with bloopers
- precision underwater ghost house
- above water precision fish bridge
- underwater level with homing sea serpent that is faster than you and really long. It’s a lot of waiting... waiting... waiting..... And if u die its even more waiting... waiting.... waiting.... It’s aldo pretty tough to get the star coins on.
- underwater level where you are trying to manipulate exploding homing torpedo teds into hitting other things despite the water move controls in no way supporting that

The entire time Mario controls like a jittery bus in most of the above, which is mostly precision endmy/obstacle spam tbh. I don’t get how the rest of the game can be so good and yet we still have bloopers underwater in tight 2d spaces.

—-

Does anyone here genuinely like underwater bloopers in tight 2d d
spaces? If so how did you acquire this acquired taste lol?

—————_-_—————-


The flip dide id I love water levels in 64, Galaxy, Galaxy 2, Sundhine, and Odyssey. Can’t get enough of them. Could write a post to dwarf the last few on how good they are. But the common thread is they trnd not to be claustrophobic death traps.

Edit: I don’t always enjoy playing video games with tons of claustrophobic death traps. But when I do it’s usually a 2D or 3D souls like where I’m in that kind of very specific mood.

The Mushroom Kingdom is generally not intended to be Lordran or Hallownest.

Bloopers are among the worst enemies in Mario, sharing with Hammer Bros the trait of having a (semi) random pattern rather than predictable behavior. I'm one of the crazy people who thinks there can be good water levels (I don't recall anything that outrageous in NSMB Wii), but Bloopers, especially spammed and especially in tight spaces, are a sign that it's not the level you're playing.

This is New Supe Wii U. Essentially New Supe 2.0; this one is all about coins! As a shiny object enthusiast, I approve.

The worst part with the bloopers is essentially two dozen cheep cheeps, one of which is a different color and thus tracks you, in a diagonal corridor with two bloopers. At the end is the exit pipe ON THE CEILING that one of the two bloopers spawns directly under.

This was particularly frustrating because it was at the end of the level soon after the 3rd star coin; and I couldn’t find a way to get the 3rd star coin without damage boosting twice. So I got to go through a very frustrating section with no extra hits.

The rest of the level was also a water level with some level of precision; but that was by far the worst part of it.

—————

I have both played and designed good 2D water levels in SMM2. The most important rule honestly seems to be the claustrophobia thing. Very fee people want to be actively uncomfortable the entire time they are playing bc of how high tension thd whole level is. Thus power ups, breathing room, and mini break areas are a must.

A sub rule of this by necessity is to essentially never use more than one Blooper at a time. And if you do risk using a blooper, treat it like the miniboss enemy it is and don’t put it in the middle of other things going on simultaneously. They are just genuinely hard to deal with.

Hammer bros in the newer games (starting on DS) have been nerfed; but the og ones are definitely quite bad. And the unofficial politeness rule in smm is still two max without other obstacles lol. Maybe one with a platforming challenge added. But again trest it like a miniboss.

Edit: While we are naming frustrating enemies that should be used very sparingly especially in smm, my boy Magikoopa also deserves an honorable mention imo. It’s all fun and games until there’s three of them, you are small Mario, and one of them stole the damn axe. This is also one of those enemies that can get very claustrophobic very fast.

This is actually good advice for me because I've been stagnating on crafting a water level trying to figure out what makes them tick but having shockingly low luck getting notes

As of the moment, I'm 10 levels in, but I feel like I need to make another sweep soon.


This depends entirely on how much room you're giving the player to operate in.

Edit: please note the below is just me getting excited and thus long post. This is just what i like. There is nothing wrong w ignoring me and doing what u like. It’s game for fun not the olympics. /edit

It is my personal opinion that if you don’t intend for the player to be worried about the arcing hammers, then you aren’t making good use of a hammer brother and could potentially have a better level by using a different obstacle in that spot. But that is definitely my opinion not hard fact.

Two brothers 3 rows is the “classic” example, but a single hammer brother on a horizontal plane with some platforming is also often decent. I usually prefer one of those.

I don’t like to make levels that are too random, and hammer bros in smm seem to move horizontally much more than I‘m used to in the main games, so I get very worried about unintended hammer bros in unintended places being too hard of an obstacle if I place too many. I also have noticed a lot of my players can’t handle more than two at once, so if I’m not trying to be mean that is my limit for a 20 block space horizontally.

Once you space them out enough that roaming hammer bros is not a problem; they are basically different obstacles so I would not count it as breaking my no more than 2 self limit.

Note: The one time I wanted to be really mean with hammer bros I ended up using Fire Bros instead. This was to troll a friend irl.

————————-

Another couple random notes on my personal style in smm water levels:

I really like the jellyfish spikes in SMB3 theme.

I also really like the aesthetic of making the floor out of munchers instead of just having s normal pit, assuming I have room in the entity limit.

Some of my best water levels have been fast rising and lowering water in the forest theme. Fish and spinies are personal favorites in this kind of thing.

My most popular water level ever was fixed water level in forest with wet and dry sections. The major obstacles were fish, fire spitting piranha plants, and fire bars. I think it’s too hard and an early mistake, byt that describes a lot of my saved smn2 levels tbh and people really like it for some reason.

^ i tend to mostly make and then delete levels for friends to play. I only have 61 levels saved despite making over 300; and ill probably delete a bunch next time I am on lol.

Yugioh has managed to create a format where a 60 card deck is more consistent than a 40 card deck. This is the second time ever they’ve done this; and it’s the first time they did this without any card in the deck caring about deck size. The previous incident was due to a card colloquially known as grass that gave you more card advantage the bigger the relative difference between remaining deck sizes.

Would y’all be interested in a more in depth explanation?

I kinda would. I don't know much about YGO and don't intend to pick it up, but I find it kind of interesting.

Could pay back with information about The Caster Chronicles, a TCG I don't think many people know, but it would be more basic than competitive meta information.

I just want to take this opportunity to say I love you all again. Things seem to be getting real down here, and while I've taken a small left turn in my mindset lately that means I'm much less of a nervous wreck, I've got other friends who aren't and it's just really ****' nice to have somewhere to come to where I'm just accepted, you know?

To speak more directly, my meatspace friends are seemingly a generation a part from me despite only being a few years younger, and they're so "plugged in" that they social pressure our friendship into an obligation for me, expecting me to do things like always have Discord open or something. I know it's the stress of this whole situation getting to them, but the core disagreement we have about our usage of social media has been there for a long time, and on top of that with all the alone-time I've gotten recently I've been reminded of just how much less social interaction I need than most people I've met.

Which is why I love all of you here. Sure, it may be quiet most days, but I'm always sure you'll be around at some point to talk to when I need it and share my interests and such. I love you all, and I wish I did more around here. I honestly need to dig out my external hard drive and upload more of our old Archives here.

--------

To change the subject, I've apparently started speedrunning Celeste. I just found myself starting a new file and trying to get to the end without going 100% about a week and a half ago. I found out after a while that I press on the Switch's tiny buttons too hard, though, because I make my thumb sore if I play it too much. If I can get just a bit better than I am now, I'd like to try getting on the leaderboards, but for that I need a different physical setup, which I'm hoping I could solve by just getting that new computer I mentioned ages ago.

I started looking into how to do that again recently, but I don't really know what I need -- or rather, I don't even know what features I want. I've got a lot of the internal components decided on, but I don't know what size of a case I should get because I may need to rearrange furniture even if I get what's considered a "normal" sized case.

--------

I could share a bit of information about the current edition of Legend of the Five Rings LCG, if we're all sharing card game design ideas. It's the only game I've ever touched the competitive side of, but I can share similar stories of "this card gives you way too much advantage for its cost" and such.

I've actually enjoyed a fair few card games when I was much younger. I think I may have started with the Pokémon TCG at some point, but lost all my cards somewhere along the line. I have vague memories of both a Digimon and Dragon Ball Z card game, but I don't think I ever owned any cards myself. I started playing Yu-Gi-Oh entirely because of the anime, but with no-one to play with I grew tired of the card game after a while and looked for something else. I remember learning the rules of a few CCGs that were out at the time, including the Naruto CCG, but I settled on and started collecting Duel Masters for a time (this is when it was new and before it was re-branded as Kaijudo!). I ran into the same issue of having no one to play with, so I eventually "graduated" to Magic, which is a long history in and of itself, though I finally stopped even the pretense of collecting Magic cards a few years ago now. I still get a heavy deckbuilding itch, and due to a Matthew Colville video, ended up getting in on the ground floor of L5R, though I've neglected it for about a year now. I feel it's also worth noting that I caved into my impulses and bought the first two box sets of the Transformers CCG that came out recently despite never playing and hardly even remembering how it works.

If we expand the topic of discussion just a bit, after I discovered the world of modern board games a few years ago, I discovered a decent selection of card games such as deckbuilders with multiple sets or single-box card games, not to mention a few random used or discontinued decks of card games I've never heard of (mostly anime-related), and even a few digital card games in some form or another.

I can't share the same kind of game-design talk that you'd get into when talking competitively about most of these games, but I absolutely love card games and so have experimented with a lot of them. I'd love to join in that discussion.

Yugioh actually has two decks. You have your 40-60 (almost always go with 40) card main deck; and you have a 15 card extra deck. The extra deck is always available and it’s where you keep fusion, synchro, xyz, and link monsters. You can summon anything from your extra deck as long as you meet the conditions. Except for some fusion monsters, this essentially just means tributing a number of monsters that fit certain conditions on your side of the board.

Because they are always available, extra deck monsters that are easily summonable need much closer banlist monitoring. A generic Entomb effect is currently banned for example bc its on a rank 4 extra deck monster.

Link monsters are the extra deck monsters that are the particular culprit in our ftk. To summon a link monster you just tribute satisfactory monsters equal to the link rating. The problem cards in particular ate Link 1 monsters that only require you to send one level 4 or lower dragon. The mtg equivalent would be a cmc 3 or lower goblin. Not at all hard, and dragons are one of the most supported types ever.

So what is happening is that i can summon any level 4 or lower dragon; and that plus one discard fodder is all I need to go off. So the opponent basically needs 1-3 cards equivalent to Force of Will to stop the combo. Because the combo starter is so generic, and everything else you need to do the ftk burn combo is entirely housed in the extra deck or will be tutored out of the main deck for free as part of the combo.

And since the combo is so generic, and you can easily run 36+ good cards to start the combo, the main way to lose going first, other than to FoW, is to draw the few combo pieces you are running in your main deck that you don’t want to draw naturally. The combo starters and your opening hand don’t matter otherwise, so people are runninv thd max deck size with 20 extra combo starters to reduce their chance of bricking in this way as much as possible.

Or essentially, the deck cares much more about not drawing certain cards than what it actually will draw.

This is completely and absolutely degenerate and will certainly get banned in September on the next ban list. The main problem with the deck is Link 1’s providing too much flexibility; so most of those being used here will probably be considered for a ban.


———————————————-

The other time yugioh was reslly into max deck size, a card named Grass said “Mill yourself until your deck has cards in it less thsn or equal to the number of cards in your opponent’s deck.”

A 20 card self mill was too good; and the knly way to counter it wax to also run 60, so that format was just busted. Card got banned on the next list

For perspective, grass is the only meta in the history of the game where Left Arm Offering saw play. “If you have at least two other cards in your hand, banish your entire hand to tutor one spell card.” Grass is literally the only card ever good enough to be fully worth this lol.

Sorry to hear you've been having a stressful situation like that, Luna. If I had meatspace friends (I only really have my in-laws) I'd probably be in a similar situation -- I've often said that nothing urgent has ever been said by text message, am fairly unconnected to real name social media (no facebook, no twitter), and otherwise communicate at the rate of a letter-writer more often than not.

Which means, I know I've sometimes dropped the ball on PM conversations here. An apology to anyone who didn't get a reply.

~~~

My personal history with CCGs started with Magic. A few other kids in my elementary school started playing, and I followed suit. Portal (the Portal 1 starter set) was the first product I bought, though I spent most of my allowance purchases on older sets that were still cheap and easy to get: Fallen Empires, Ice Age, and Homelands. That, along with the new ones that came out shortly after, Tempest and the Rath block on. Mirage is a weird dead-zone for me.

And for the longest time, I was ONLY into Magic. I briefly experimented with WotC's short-lived Hecatomb with its pentagonal plastic cards, and still have an almost complete set of the entire game to create a fixed set of "pre constructed" decks from when I finally feel like building storage to turn it into a "board game".

In recent years, I've branched out, wanting something lighter on the collection cost to scratch that itch, along with deckbuilding, and in which I could compete fairly with my family (we've found I have an overwhelming advantage in Magic). The first game I tried out from that is one called Force of Will. A little introduction with pictures.

Force of Will is a CCG of Japanese origin that's basically designed to be M:tG 2.0; it plays mostly the same as Magic, but with some changes that could only be made because it was a new thing from the ground up (like overhauling the mana system). It even has five elements that are essentially the five M:tG colors (Light/White; Water/Blue; Darkness/Black; Fire/Red; Wind/Green) though the color pie is somewhat different (Much of Blue's stuff belongs to Wind in FoW, including Countermagic).


Force of Will's, um... Force of Will. Free Countermagic is borderline broken in just about any game.

Perhaps the most critical difference between FoW and MtG, however, is the mana system, and Ruler cards in FoW.

In FoW, you do not put the basic mana (will) generators, Magic Stones, in your main deck: they go in a (minimum size 10) special deck just for them, which is shuffled just like the main deck. This will be relevant later. Your main deck, meanwhile, has all your standard cards and can be between 40 and 60 cards (almost always run 40, like 60 in MtG). A couple mechanics let you have an "Extra deck" of some description, but those are locked to particular Rulers. Speaking of which...

You also have a special card with no analog in magic, the Ruler. The Ruler begins the game accessible to you, in its own zone, and may or may not have abilities that work somewhat like a commander with Eminence in M:tG does. One of the most common Ruler abilities is "Judgment", which is an activated ability, for cost, that causes the Ruler to enter the battlefield as a creature-like entity. It's a "J-Ruler" not a creature (Resonator) for the purposes of things that specifically target Resonators, but otherwise battles like one. Further, Rulers that do Judgment are double-faced cards: The J-Ruler is the other side, and may have entirely different abilities! Some Ruler/J-Ruler cards even have the same Ruler face paired with different J-Ruler faces, and which one you're using is not public information. Which is fun. Almost all Rulers work this way, though both one of my personal favorites and one of the perennial eternal format powerhouses don't have judgment. If a J-Ruler dies, it goes back to being its basic Ruler form, but is usually rendered "Astral", meaning it can't Judgment again, unlike EDH Commanders who can come out time and time again.


I find Malefic Verdant Tree one of the most interesting rulers. No Judgment, but entirely changes how you play the entire game. Also, Malefic Tree decks should always run 60 cards, for obvious reasons.

Now, how about tying that in with the mana system? The basic way to get Will is Magic Stones, and the basic way that Magic Stones come into play is that each turn, with sorcery timing, you may tap (rest) your ruler or J-Ruler, whatever form or zone its in, in order to call a stone (take the top card of your stone deck and put it into play). The thing is, as opposed to systems that just automatically give you escalation, there can be hard choices. First of all, you usually don't want to call stone if you have your J-Ruler since that means it won't be attacking and is more vulnerable to being killed. Second, you will have to give up your stone call to do Judgment (which the vast majority of Rulers want to do) because you can't Judge a rested ruler and can't call a magic with a summoning-sick J-Ruler. So even though you can guarantee your mana quantity (if not color; greedy bases can still be hard to run, especially outside the eternal formats that have all the dual stones ever printed, since you don't get to choose WHICH stone you get), you don't always want to. You have to decide if ramping or playing with your J-Ruler is more important. And of course, some Rulers have Rest abilities on their Ruler sides, which are exclusive with calling a magic stone.


The Dual Stones, unlike M:tG Dual Lands, are fairly accessible with many reprints.

Because Rulers are so important, FoW sets are designed very differently from M:tG sets: Typically, each set will contain cards specifically designed to support one or more archetypes for particular rulers. In older sets, new Rulers were printed in every set, and a significant number of the cards of that Ruler's colors would be dedicated to supporting that ruler (not that you can't also branch out from your Ruler's color identity to make a broader or even different deck. The ruler "Grimm, the Fairy-tale Prince" is technically a Light card, but I play him as mono-green). For instance, the set Return of the Dragon Emperor has the ruler Kaguya, Tears of the Moon // Kaguya, Millennium Princess. She's blue-green, and many of the blue, green, and blue-green cards in Return of the Dragon Emperor are specifically tailored for Kaguya. They can be good in the decks of other Rulers (many are) and other cards can be great in Kaguya decks (You'll need them), but it's clear that many of them really are meant to be Kaguya cards.


Naturally, that includes printing cards with the "Treasury Item" subtype, which is just flavor except for cards like Kaguya that call it out. She's also very strange in that her Judgment side is not, by default, able to battle or be battled. And if you're wondering about the numbers, life in FoW starts at 4k, so 100 in FoW is about equal to half a life in Magic.

Later sets have experimented with how to distribute Rulers to make the game more accessible, including placing all of a block's rulers in Precon starters and supporting them over the block, and making rulers an automatic buy-a-box combined with smaller, cheaper buy-in boxes. There have also been a number of interesting fixes for Limited to work out with Rulers being necessary to play.

The other big difference is combat. In Force of Will, Combat is something you can pretty much just do on your main phase. You pick one untapped (recovered) Resonator or J-Ruler (J/Resonator) to attack with, resting it, and an opponent or opponent's rested J/Resonator to attack, and the opponent can block with a recovered J/Resonator they control (resting the blocker in the process). Once combat is resolved (Like in Magic, damage stays until EoT and Trample needs to be an explicit ability to take place) your main phase continues and you can combat or do other stuff as pleases you. This has a few interactions. First, there is only ever one-on-one combat, and creatures are vulnerable to direct combat, which makes FoW value going tall more than magic (which has gang blocks and invincible creatures favoring width). But, because blocking still works and blockers are one use per round (normally) there's still some value to going wide, even arbitrarily wide. And because only rested J/Resonators can be attacked (though there is a keyword that allows things that have it to attack recovered ones), you can still protect important little critters with abilities. This also has the side-effect that once a creature has blocked, if it's still alive, it's rested and able to be attacked itself, probably to finish it. Order of attacks ends up being tactically important, as is choosing when to block. For instance, you might be able to sneak in some scratch damage with little creatures if your opponent holds back their fatty to block your fatty, and then not attack with your fatty and get it killed. And if you have the ability to recover something during your main phase, it's not limited to one attack per creature per round, you can just swing again.

Another difference, the last I want to talk about, is a fairly small but surprisingly relevant pair of rules differences. First, summoning sickness wears off at the start of the next turn after something comes in, not YOUR next turn. So if you bring out a Sacred Elf on your turn, you can rest it for Will on your opponent's turn. Second, the beginning of the turn in FoW, rather than being Untap-Upkeep-Draw, is Draw-Untap-Upkeep. And like in magic, you can do things on your Draw step. It basically formalizes the "End of turn" last-minute timing to a place on your turn, and lets you see your new card before you recover all your things. So if you're topdecking and draw a card with Quickcast (Flash) you can cast it with what you had left over from last turn. Or, you could "Double tap" abilities by using one on your draw and then the same one again after recovery.


If you want to use Guinevere twice in one turn, you can! Activate her ability on your draw step, then a second time after you recover, giving one Resonator +800/+800 (or two the +400/+400) for its one hit. She's kind of bonkers, BTW, though more for the first ability than the second. Also, FoW has gone through a few card frames by now...

I wondered what FoW was, as I drive past a video/card-game shop decently often, and I admit I had underestimated its complexity. Nevertheless, it's not something I'm likely to play because A. It's physical and B. Japanese card design aesthetic tend to make my eyes water, especially full art cards, which is both annoying when I begin playing and borderline painful whenever I need to visually memorize a new set of cards. I did play Shadowverse, which has B in force but is digital, and I had to win a certain resistance to do so.

Despite a little scorn from a few irl friends, I keep playing Legends of Runeterra for a number of reasons.
1. It's digital, and as such if there's a **** up meta it will get adjusted within a month. For the same reason, it can get away with mechanics physical games simply can't without tracking issues, like buffing cards in the deck and generating cards mid-game.
2. It's free to play, and in Riot custom the main things you can spend irl money on are cosmetics. Daily/weekly rewards are more than reasonable. (Example: I've been playing regularly for a few months and now I have ALL cards in two out of four rarities and have most of the rest without putting a dime in the game)
3. Has 6 (5 at beta, and this number will steadily increase in the foreseeable future) factions and each deck can have up to 2, opening a ton of card combinations for a faction-based card game. It also has a card per faction who directly encourages a heavy deck presence of its own faction, creating some tension in the deckbuilding.
4. I had an already decent grasp of the LoL lore and the cards have delightful flavor; art style is consistent and every card, even the ones who can only exist by being generated by others, has flavor text. Cards have voice lines, adding even more flavor and lore, and some will call out each other.
5. Creature buffs have the equivalent of split second and hard removals are highly priced, making creature interaction more important and not relegating a whole portion of creature CMCs to trash-tier by default.
6. It strikes a balance between favoring attack and defense in combat that I find great: it has first strike (which only works offensively) and trample as abilities and you can't multi-block, but the defending player still gets to choose the blockers. There are still ways to disrupt combat pairings, as stunning (in addition to plain killing) make creatures unable to attack or block even in mid-combat (though chumpblocking is still a thing, even with stuns) and there is both provoke and ways to make creatures provoke-able by any creature.
7. You take turn playing cards (except Burst spells which have split second and don't yield priority after being cast), and attacking is just another way to spend your priority. This means that the order with which creatures are played and attack timing are vital, adding depth to the game.