So I've been in and out of modern for a while and don't closely follow the meta, and I've noticed that almost everyone thinks KCI is a reasonable ban target. Could someone explain to me why anyone would ever want to ban a deck that's 5% of the meta? I get all the drivel about win percentages and all that, but if the deck really is that good then there's no reason why spikes wouldn't be picking it up in much larger numbers than 5% to increase their own success, and that's not happening right now.
I've been playing BW Eldrazi and Taxes at the FNM level for a while now, and I noticed that Bridgevine is the hot new thing after the pro tour. RIP seems to be way too slow to really hate out the deck, and I am way too poor to afford a set of Leyline of the Void after the spike. My question is, would cards like Relic of Progenitus and Ravenous trap be effective (if not as powerful) substitutes for Leyline until it gets reprinted or goes down?
I don't care what anyone says, this deck needs to be banned. It's faster and more consistent than Dredge and doesn't care about RiP, and Dredge already made non-aggro magic almost impossible in its heyday. If you like playing KCI, Bridgevine, or Affinity, this meta will be great for you, but until then i'm playing commander.
So I ordered a card off of eBay, but now that I've paid the seller is trying to get me to buy more of his stuff outside of eBay and it's setting off my alarm bells. I don't have experience detecting fake cards at all, so I've attached the pictures of the card on eBay. Is there anything about these pictures which screams 'obviously fake'?
I am aware that this isn't a lot of information to go off of, so if you need me to send additional pictures once the card arrives in the mail I can do that. However,that will be in about a week.
What exactly are you afraid they'll do? Make you use a really long annoying word to refer to them? This isn't just a word; it's their identity, and any person has the right to decide their own identity. Saying someone can't choose pronouns isn't far off from saying they can't trust themselves to determine their identity.
It's a little trickier than that. Some people are narcissistic or delusional. The guy who thinks he's Napoleon Bonaparte? He doesn't need us to trust him; he needs us to help him. Drawing the line between "legitimate" identities and "pathological" ones can be a challenge.
Not just that, but I'd like to reiterate, it's a dangerous precedent to the concept of free thought and free speech to set to allow other people to dictate to you how you are allowed to speak to them. Why do your feelings about pronoun usage trump my feelings about submitting my freedom of expression to you? There's not even a clear limit to what identities you are going to consider valid, and thus no clear limit to how you want to restrict a person's speech in this regard. Why is the otherkin wolf's identity not given the same legal protection as the transgender person's identity? There are some people that believe in 30+ forms of human gender identity, let alone all the more crazy non-human ones. How exactly are you going to decide which ones deserve legal protection and which ones don't? And let's pretend that by some miracle, you figured out an objective way to make all these determinations; given that social norms progress much faster than the law does, isn't it inevitable that whatever definition of identity you come up with will become outdated by social interaction relatively quickly?
I will concede the point that the line between legitimate and pathological is challenging and fuzzy. However, I think it's fair to say that in cases like that of Napoleon Bonaparte, where a person's identity is impossible due to contradicting known scientific laws of nature, we need not and should not abide by those identities, since they are observably provable as impossible and insane. There is a definite grey area, and it's not as simple as I may have implied, but outside of these corner cases, subjective identity applies.
However, that has little bearing on free speech. You don't have to use their pronouns: You just can't use the wrong pronouns. If you wish, debate and speak out against these identities, or refrain from using any pronouns to refer to certain people. But intentionally misgendering people is needlessly offensive, and doesn't communicate your ideas in a civil way. It's much like using the N-word: its use does communicate an idea, but it's absolutely immoral to say it in a racially charged way.
In short: Free speech can and should protect the communication of any ideas, but there is no reason it should protect needlessly offensive methods of communication.
What exactly are you afraid they'll do? Make you use a really long annoying word to refer to them? This isn't just a word; it's their identity, and any person has the right to decide their own identity. Saying someone can't choose pronouns isn't far off from saying they can't trust themselves to determine their identity.
Everyone should have their right to choose whatever pronouns they wish to be referred to as and to ask others to use those pronouns. I don't think everyone has the right to have others be forced to refer to them as such.
Pronouns aren't simply vehicles for the acceptance of identities, they can have all sorts of implications and associations for people to object to. People should have the right to live by such opinions, as long as it doesn't mean being inconsiderate of people with preferred pronouns they object to.
I don't think a set of pronouns is automatically valid and useful just because some people have chosen it as their preferred pronouns.
What exactly are you afraid they'll do? Make you use a really long annoying word to refer to them? This isn't just a word; it's their identity, and any person has the right to decide their own identity. Saying someone can't choose pronouns isn't far off from saying they can't trust themselves to determine their identity.
For the sake of the argument, let's assume that people do have the right to decide their own identity (For the record, I am ambivalent on this).
Now, why does this mean that anyone else has to accept whatever identity that person chose?
See my above response. You don't have to accept their identity, and you don't have to use their pronouns: You just can't misgender them. If you wish, debate with them, or use no pronouns at all. The right to 'live by your opinions' is not universal; a radical religious terrorist may believe that acts of terror are right, but if they commit them they are justly punished by law.
The question of legislating acceptance is a fascinating and complex issue, and I won't pretend to be able to answer that definitively. However, there is a more fundamental (and infuriating) mistake being made in this debate - the idea that pronouns represent some sort of political or scientific 'ideology'.
The problem with this issue is that gender identity is purely subjective experience. To someone who has never reconsidered or thought about their gender, the difference between gender and sex is utterly immaterial in their experiences. Thus, When someone like Peterson hears someone say 'I'm a femmeboi and my pronouns are they/them/their', that makes no sense to him because gender identity is so subjective. But to the femmeboi person, this difference is a defining attribute about them, and to call that ideology is like calling someone's skin color or family tree 'ideology'.
One might say, however, 'You can't say that without scientific proof'. But in order to prove this, we'd have to peer into people's consciousness, which is only possible if consciousness is observable and thus material; this conclusion, while very possible, is by no means certain. If it were, philosophy would be light-years ahead of where it is and we'd probably be resolving the religion question before the end of the year. But we can't do that, and thus we don't know if consciousness is material (and thus scientifically observable) or fundamentally dualist/immaterial (and thus inaccessible by science). Thus, bringing science into the equation will, at least until we answer the question of consciousness, drag this argument further away from its own resolution.
In light of this inherent subjectivity, and in light of the fact that there is an entire section of psychology dealing with gender identity and many thousands of people discussing it in academic and social contexts every day, for someone like Peterson to go around saying that 'using the correct pronouns represents a political ideology' is utterly arrogant. To use the wrong pronouns is to say 'I don't recognize or accept your identity/subjective experience' and at the end of the day, how are we supposed to debate that? The debate devolves, every time, into people saying 'this is my experience' and others saying 'your experience is wrong' and that's an unwinnable debate. For Peterson to act like he can peer into a transgender person's head and dictate how 'correct' their identity is arrogant and offensive on so many levels - and I'm 100% cis.
The problem isn't what is the correct pronoun, it's that certain groups of people get to decide what correct means in any given context and force you to abide by it. That's not a power that should be taken lightly.
What exactly are you afraid they'll do? Make you use a really long annoying word to refer to them? This isn't just a word; it's their identity, and any person has the right to decide their own identity. Saying someone can't choose pronouns isn't far off from saying they can't trust themselves to determine their identity.
The question of legislating acceptance is a fascinating and complex issue, and I won't pretend to be able to answer that definitively. However, there is a more fundamental (and infuriating) mistake being made in this debate - the idea that pronouns represent some sort of political or scientific 'ideology'.
The problem with this issue is that gender identity is purely subjective experience. To someone who has never reconsidered or thought about their gender, the difference between gender and sex is utterly immaterial in their experiences. Thus, When someone like Peterson hears someone say 'I'm a femmeboi and my pronouns are they/them/their', that makes no sense to him because gender identity is so subjective. But to the femmeboi person, this difference is a defining attribute about them, and to call that ideology is like calling someone's skin color or family tree 'ideology'.
One might say, however, 'You can't say that without scientific proof'. But in order to prove this, we'd have to peer into people's consciousness, which is only possible if consciousness is observable and thus material; this conclusion, while very possible, is by no means certain. If it were, philosophy would be light-years ahead of where it is and we'd probably be resolving the religion question before the end of the year. But we can't do that, and thus we don't know if consciousness is material (and thus scientifically observable) or fundamentally dualist/immaterial (and thus inaccessible by science). Thus, bringing science into the equation will, at least until we answer the question of consciousness, drag this argument further away from its own resolution.
In light of this inherent subjectivity, and in light of the fact that there is an entire section of psychology dealing with gender identity and many thousands of people discussing it in academic and social contexts every day, for someone like Peterson to go around saying that 'using the correct pronouns represents a political ideology' is utterly arrogant. To use the wrong pronouns is to say 'I don't recognize or accept your identity/subjective experience' and at the end of the day, how are we supposed to debate that? The debate devolves, every time, into people saying 'this is my experience' and others saying 'your experience is wrong' and that's an unwinnable debate. For Peterson to act like he can peer into a transgender person's head and dictate how 'correct' their identity is arrogant and offensive on so many levels - and I'm 100% cis.
Gender identity is not always defined as such a loose, subjective, and open ended thing. If it were just thought of as that, Peterson's objections would be different (he has referenced this conflict between gender identity as something more biological versus this cultural sort of thing).
Also, something being a subjective thing of the mind does not mean we cannot test it- we have a whole discipline of psychology to play with here. It only limits our ability to test it, it doesn't mean we have no way of knowing.
In most current fields of science; gender most likely isn't a biological thing. The APA defines it as 'socially constructed roles... that society deems appropriate', and even among biologists,The notion that gender is a binary is under question. And in addition to these studies, we have the subjective of thousands of people online and on campuses and in the world, who tell us that they don't identify with that binary. Peterson isn't discussing an ideology, but instead he's forcing these people to somehow prove the validity of their own identity to other people.
You do make a good point about psychology, but the problem is that psychology, like all sciences operating under the scientific method, can only document observable things and must infer the causes. To prove the existence of gender identity, psychology would have to link the gender spectrum to some observable behavior and infer that it is not only a possible cause, but the only cause. For someone who can't comprehend the notion of gender identity at all, this kind of proof will probably never be accepted. Even if it is possible, the wait is far too long to continue denying people's identity until some sort of definite proof is found.
The question of legislating acceptance is a fascinating and complex issue, and I won't pretend to be able to answer that definitively. However, there is a more fundamental (and infuriating) mistake being made in this debate - the idea that pronouns represent some sort of political or scientific 'ideology'.
The problem with this issue is that gender identity is purely subjective experience. To someone who has never reconsidered or thought about their gender, the difference between gender and sex is utterly immaterial in their experiences. Thus, When someone like Peterson hears someone say 'I'm a femmeboi and my pronouns are they/them/their', that makes no sense to him because gender identity is so subjective. But to the femmeboi person, this difference is a defining attribute about them, and to call that ideology is like calling someone's skin color or family tree 'ideology'.
One might say, however, 'You can't say that without scientific proof'. But in order to prove this, we'd have to peer into people's consciousness, which is only possible if consciousness is observable and thus material; this conclusion, while very possible, is by no means certain. If it were, philosophy would be light-years ahead of where it is and we'd probably be resolving the religion question before the end of the year. But we can't do that, and thus we don't know if consciousness is material (and thus scientifically observable) or fundamentally dualist/immaterial (and thus inaccessible by science). Thus, bringing science into the equation will, at least until we answer the question of consciousness, drag this argument further away from its own resolution.
In light of this inherent subjectivity, and in light of the fact that there is an entire section of psychology dealing with gender identity and many thousands of people discussing it in academic and social contexts every day, for someone like Peterson to go around saying that 'using the correct pronouns represents a political ideology' is utterly arrogant. To use the wrong pronouns is to say 'I don't recognize or accept your identity/subjective experience' and at the end of the day, how are we supposed to debate that? The debate devolves, every time, into people saying 'this is my experience' and others saying 'your experience is wrong' and that's an unwinnable debate. For Peterson to act like he can peer into a transgender person's head and dictate how 'correct' their identity is arrogant and offensive on so many levels - and I'm 100% cis.
At last, this thread has been made! Here's my 2 cents.
I think there's a lot of good things happening right now in Modern that people miss. The sheer openness of deck diversity, while it has some detrimental side effects, really make this format one of a kind; I used to love watching legacy because it was this way, but the meta closed up after Inn/RTR and results all look similar now. And on the local/classic level, there are lots of fun games to be had; you only have to face a subset of all the decks in Modern, so you can bring fair grindy decks and actually win tournaments, and the games are fun. The linear decks people hate so much can create some interesting decisions.
That said, when you get to the open/GP level, Modern has serious issues with the sheer number of angles of attack and the lack of answers. These problems are quite infuriating, not because they are large but because they are so small and easily fixable. Blue is very close to doing well, and I think that either Preordain or Counterspell could push it over the edge, but WotC hasn't even considered either of these options - or anything else for that matter. I love this format and probably won't give it up, but I'd really prefer that WotC do at least 1 thing in the next few months, whether it be print new stuff in MM17, unban preordain, reprint counterspell (not likely after the recent Standard Pro tour results), or whatever.
Cavern of souls is the sad case of an unbannable card that does horrible things to the format. It sucks, it makes the format it's in worse, but it's not oppressive at all and there's nothing we can do.
Nothing will change until wizards a) unbans preordain or b) prints more solid, versatile, and truly impactful answers. Collective Brutality is a step in the right direction, but Modern's problems are bigger than that.
Well, at least there wasn't a become immense ban. I was hoping for a preordain unban but I was likely not being realistic at all. Now we must pray that cathartic reunion doesn't break dredge in half.
I'm not too sure about pyrokinesis; it doesn't just push out linear decks, but pushes out pretty much all non-aggro creature decks. Against decks like hatebears and merfolk and tribal brews, that card is a huge tempo swing for what is often card parity.
Counterspell on the other hand is something I heavily endorse.
Honestly, a Become Immense or Mutagenic Growth ban is WotC throwing Modern off the deep end. The format will implode in on itself.
Bant Eldrazi is the best deck right now IMO since it crushes every interactive deck that isn't itself (other than the now-tier-2-and-falling Company) while being okay against linear decks, but it isn't broken good because of its bad matchups against affinity and Infect. If Infect was put in Tier 2 through bannings, Bant Eldrazi would lose its chief predator. When decks populate 15% of an open AND lose their chief predator, things hit the fan real fast.
I've been playing BW Eldrazi and Taxes at the FNM level for a while now, and I noticed that Bridgevine is the hot new thing after the pro tour. RIP seems to be way too slow to really hate out the deck, and I am way too poor to afford a set of Leyline of the Void after the spike. My question is, would cards like Relic of Progenitus and Ravenous trap be effective (if not as powerful) substitutes for Leyline until it gets reprinted or goes down?
I am aware that this isn't a lot of information to go off of, so if you need me to send additional pictures once the card arrives in the mail I can do that. However,that will be in about a week.
I will concede the point that the line between legitimate and pathological is challenging and fuzzy. However, I think it's fair to say that in cases like that of Napoleon Bonaparte, where a person's identity is impossible due to contradicting known scientific laws of nature, we need not and should not abide by those identities, since they are observably provable as impossible and insane. There is a definite grey area, and it's not as simple as I may have implied, but outside of these corner cases, subjective identity applies.
However, that has little bearing on free speech. You don't have to use their pronouns: You just can't use the wrong pronouns. If you wish, debate and speak out against these identities, or refrain from using any pronouns to refer to certain people. But intentionally misgendering people is needlessly offensive, and doesn't communicate your ideas in a civil way. It's much like using the N-word: its use does communicate an idea, but it's absolutely immoral to say it in a racially charged way.
In short: Free speech can and should protect the communication of any ideas, but there is no reason it should protect needlessly offensive methods of communication.
See my above response. You don't have to accept their identity, and you don't have to use their pronouns: You just can't misgender them. If you wish, debate with them, or use no pronouns at all. The right to 'live by your opinions' is not universal; a radical religious terrorist may believe that acts of terror are right, but if they commit them they are justly punished by law.
What exactly are you afraid they'll do? Make you use a really long annoying word to refer to them? This isn't just a word; it's their identity, and any person has the right to decide their own identity. Saying someone can't choose pronouns isn't far off from saying they can't trust themselves to determine their identity.
In most current fields of science; gender most likely isn't a biological thing. The APA defines it as 'socially constructed roles... that society deems appropriate', and even among biologists,The notion that gender is a binary is under question. And in addition to these studies, we have the subjective of thousands of people online and on campuses and in the world, who tell us that they don't identify with that binary. Peterson isn't discussing an ideology, but instead he's forcing these people to somehow prove the validity of their own identity to other people.
You do make a good point about psychology, but the problem is that psychology, like all sciences operating under the scientific method, can only document observable things and must infer the causes. To prove the existence of gender identity, psychology would have to link the gender spectrum to some observable behavior and infer that it is not only a possible cause, but the only cause. For someone who can't comprehend the notion of gender identity at all, this kind of proof will probably never be accepted. Even if it is possible, the wait is far too long to continue denying people's identity until some sort of definite proof is found.
The problem with this issue is that gender identity is purely subjective experience. To someone who has never reconsidered or thought about their gender, the difference between gender and sex is utterly immaterial in their experiences. Thus, When someone like Peterson hears someone say 'I'm a femmeboi and my pronouns are they/them/their', that makes no sense to him because gender identity is so subjective. But to the femmeboi person, this difference is a defining attribute about them, and to call that ideology is like calling someone's skin color or family tree 'ideology'.
One might say, however, 'You can't say that without scientific proof'. But in order to prove this, we'd have to peer into people's consciousness, which is only possible if consciousness is observable and thus material; this conclusion, while very possible, is by no means certain. If it were, philosophy would be light-years ahead of where it is and we'd probably be resolving the religion question before the end of the year. But we can't do that, and thus we don't know if consciousness is material (and thus scientifically observable) or fundamentally dualist/immaterial (and thus inaccessible by science). Thus, bringing science into the equation will, at least until we answer the question of consciousness, drag this argument further away from its own resolution.
In light of this inherent subjectivity, and in light of the fact that there is an entire section of psychology dealing with gender identity and many thousands of people discussing it in academic and social contexts every day, for someone like Peterson to go around saying that 'using the correct pronouns represents a political ideology' is utterly arrogant. To use the wrong pronouns is to say 'I don't recognize or accept your identity/subjective experience' and at the end of the day, how are we supposed to debate that? The debate devolves, every time, into people saying 'this is my experience' and others saying 'your experience is wrong' and that's an unwinnable debate. For Peterson to act like he can peer into a transgender person's head and dictate how 'correct' their identity is arrogant and offensive on so many levels - and I'm 100% cis.
I think there's a lot of good things happening right now in Modern that people miss. The sheer openness of deck diversity, while it has some detrimental side effects, really make this format one of a kind; I used to love watching legacy because it was this way, but the meta closed up after Inn/RTR and results all look similar now. And on the local/classic level, there are lots of fun games to be had; you only have to face a subset of all the decks in Modern, so you can bring fair grindy decks and actually win tournaments, and the games are fun. The linear decks people hate so much can create some interesting decisions.
That said, when you get to the open/GP level, Modern has serious issues with the sheer number of angles of attack and the lack of answers. These problems are quite infuriating, not because they are large but because they are so small and easily fixable. Blue is very close to doing well, and I think that either Preordain or Counterspell could push it over the edge, but WotC hasn't even considered either of these options - or anything else for that matter. I love this format and probably won't give it up, but I'd really prefer that WotC do at least 1 thing in the next few months, whether it be print new stuff in MM17, unban preordain, reprint counterspell (not likely after the recent Standard Pro tour results), or whatever.
Nothing will change until wizards a) unbans preordain or b) prints more solid, versatile, and truly impactful answers. Collective Brutality is a step in the right direction, but Modern's problems are bigger than that.
I guess we gotta make a new thread!
Counterspell on the other hand is something I heavily endorse.
Bant Eldrazi is the best deck right now IMO since it crushes every interactive deck that isn't itself (other than the now-tier-2-and-falling Company) while being okay against linear decks, but it isn't broken good because of its bad matchups against affinity and Infect. If Infect was put in Tier 2 through bannings, Bant Eldrazi would lose its chief predator. When decks populate 15% of an open AND lose their chief predator, things hit the fan real fast.