I like the characterization of a healthy metagame as one where you have to think of what's currently being played in your area and adjust your build or sideboard for it. It can be very telling if an archetype or deck is so strong that you never have to think of what cards you're bringing to deal with threats.

From what I've played and heard, it's a bit of a "reset" after the highs of Endwalker, and the story takes a while to get started. It takes 20 quests to even reach the first new dungeon, which will take at least an hour+ of gameplay and cutscenes. I'm still looking forward to getting through it, but I understand the muted responses.

This is one of those games that I never played, but heard years later that there was a cult following for it.

A friend of mine apparently played it during childhood, and it's one of their core games of that era. The variety of gameplay with the bright yet grim style just spoke to them deeply.

I'm excited for Foundations, mostly for Llanowar Elves returning. But Day of Judgement, being a reliable 4-mana sweeper, is also going to be rough. Current sweepers in Standard include:

3 mana:

• Path of Peril (6 mana for full sweep)
• Brotherhood's End
• Corpse Explosion
• Temporary Lockdown

4 Mana:

• Depopulate
• Ill-Timed Explosion
• No Witnesses

5 Mana:

• Deadly Cover-Up
• Gix's Command
• Burn Down the House
• Unstable Glyphbridge
• Sunfall

Super Mario Sunshine

Apparently 3 is a prequel to 1 and 2, though you can obviously play it 312 or 123, whichever you prefer.

If it can destroy someone's land and just really ruin their amount of mana available that turn (which means it can be done on someone else's turn), it will usually make the incoming land enter untapped.

Think Demolition Field and Field of Ruin, or NEO Boseiju.

Krenko's Buzzcrusher has the land enter tapped, but it's usually being played at sorcery speed.

To really twister it up, we should lean on the alliteration and remove the excess words.

Book on book bans banned by board.

It is hard to stay afloat as a comic book store.

It depends on what I'm trying to maximize.

If I just want the happiness spike ASAP, then I would just buy $15 worth of Magic cards, or maybe a booster pack or three, depending on the set.

If I'm trying to maximize my overall happiness over any amount of time, I think spending $15 on something reusable, like a nice pair of socks or a hat would work out for me.

If I want to maximize happiness in general, then spending it on someone else I care about does double duty. It makes someone else happy, and I get happiness from being involved in the process.

Whoa, 2 guest characters! Kinda sucks that it's going to be literally half the content for the next year, but Terry and Mai are great choices.

Still missing my girl Laura, though.

Mine is mostly a machine for travel. It's a godsend on flights, or for keeping up with an MMO like FFXIV when I'm gone for a week or longer. It's also handy for group things when we have a TV (Jackbox for family, or Moonrakers: Luminor for my board game group).

New Affinity is going to be an absolute beater here.

I've thrown together a Golgari Gardens list, and I'm hoping the new sac a creature, draw cards spell can fit in there, but it looks like the archetype struggled in the recent challenge event. I'm guessing with All That Glitters gone, its strong removal is a little less important in the face of wider threats and combos.

I learned knots growing up, and I find myself using two half hitches and a taut line hitch fairly often. Slip knots are great for quick releases. A clove hitch doesn't do too much on its own, but is great for starting a lashing, or wrapping around one post, as long as the other end will be tensioned with a taut line hitch or similar.

I meet weekly with 5 other guys to sit around a table, speak thoughts into actions, and roll dice to determine the future, so... Yeah.

It's not breaking, but Monster Hunter's sharpness system works really well.

Every melee weapon (even the hammer and hunting horn) has a sharpness bar, broken up into smaller colored bars. It goes from the most sharp (purple), all the way down to red sharpness. Every attack that hits a monster will dull the weapon a bit. Higher sharpness will have a higher damage multiplier attached, while lower sharpness will penalize you. If an attack is too weak, or your weapon is too dull and is hitting a tougher part of a monster, then you'll "bounce" off of it, interrupting your combo or attack flow and leaving you vulnerable to attacks. During a break on the right, you can use a whetstone for 4-ish seconds to sharpen your weapon again.

I like it because as you're crafting and upgrading weapons, the sharpness is a factor to consider. Do you want a weapon with a ton of green sharpness, or one that has a sliver of blue and then a little green, but it quickly drops to yellow? It also affects your armor choices, because there are armor skills that allow for faster sharpening, or reduced dulling, or increased overall sharpness, or the ability to never bounce no matter how still your weapon gets. And in a fight, you have to pick and choose your targets a little more carefully, and know when to back off to sharpen and come back hitting harder.

Dang. Spread across 3 different pitchers, so it's not like they just left a struggling pitcher in longer than they needed to. Just brutal.

This is supposed to be more in-universe, and related to the fun video they released last week of the Bebop OP but with MtG characters/iconography. It's pretty neat, and some of the small details are really funny.

This is real. I saw news about it maybe 1-2 months ago or so. Catan has largely rotated out of my group's play pool, but I still remember it as the game that kinda got us into resource-based games 20 years ago.

I don't know about you, but in Pioneer I play Gruul Vehicles and I wouldn't pick this over Esika or Skysovereign.