In short, I do not believe that I'm close minded if I mock those who think the planet is 6,000 years old, or those who consume god flesh and drink god blood every Sunday, or those who believe in infinite punishment for finite sin, or those who would condone the rape of children, or those who would die for their magical sky-god for any reason...
Either way you look at it, my comments run the gamut from moderates to extremists. They're all stone cold **** nuts as far as I'm concerned. It's all a matter of the degree of nuts.
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- jethier
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Member for 15 years, 3 months, and 28 days
Last active Sun, Nov, 4 2012 10:59:49
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A patent is (perhaps was is the better qualifier) designed to protect an idea such that the designer has sufficient time to market their idea and make profit from it.
A patent can generally be awarded if it's novel and is not obvious to an EXPERT in the relevant field(s). There is no (true) restriction on how trivial the patent can be. This is a good thing, since there are ideas that are very trivial, yet they are exceedingly novel and very much non-obvious. The best example of such a scenario is one that exploits what 100% of the experts would have previously agreed is a negative phenomena (i.e. multi-path communications environments, and hence MIMO was an excellent patentable idea).
To me, and what should have been apparent to the patent clerk who allowed this patent to proceed, is the shift from paper to digital cards is a fairly obvious transition, especially considering it was awarded in 2001. If this were awarded in 1985, when things were incredibly fresh and new regarding the Internet, I can see a case. But the patent would be expired by now...
I think a major problem with modern patents is three-fold:
(1) uber-generic patents that are designed such that they can sue basically anyone working in the field. To deal with this, there must be patent reform.
(2) non-novel patents (e.g. apple's rounded corners) need to be banned (by the rules of patent law, they should never exist anyway!)
(3) the Internet is not an emerging field and hence patenting "digital" versions of things should be considered "trivial" or simply have prior art of the non digital variety. This goes for things such as aspects of Siri (as an example) having sufficient prior art to invalidate the patent.
One thing that definitely needs to occur is requiring the patent holder to prove they have marketed / made sufficient sales within a certain time frame (e.g. 5 years), otherwise the patent should be deemed expired (this would deal with patent trolls).
That being said, I think it's ridiculous to even think of quitting over something like this (I'm not saying that you are, but simply stating in general). I absolutely hated the new card face and still dislike it immensely. It has not grown on me at all, but it definitely is palatable just like the DFCs will be. WotC can't satisfy everyone, I mean I can't stand "dies" and "fights" - it feels like Pokemon or something, but it won't make me quit. What makes me quit is living in a city where every competitive MTG player is a douchebag! I swear, every time I go to Montreal, Toronto or Kingston, it's like a breath of fresh air (MTG wise anyway, the air quality is actually terrible!)
I was under the impression that UW is ghosts and we don't know the GW tribe yet....
I think the cleric idea works in the horror genre because much like modern religious folk who mean well, do far more harm than good. They become part of the horror despite good intentions. I suppose one must wrestle with the fact that GW is typically the "good" color pair so how can "good" still work into the horror setting? I see clerics that go on inquisitions, witch hunts, holier-than-thou attitudes, elitism, and the like fitting very well into the horror genre. To quote a brilliant physicist: bad people will do bad things, good people will do good things, but for good people to do bad things it takes religion.
I think the GW tribe will be clerics, there will be a legendary GW Van Helsing character and the focus will be cards like Undead Slayer and blazing torch
Edit: my money is on Clerics and that we'll get a GW Van Helsing type legendary creature. Maybe even a reprint of Undead Slayer
That being said, I don't think the Liliana art is crafted purely to evoke lust. It's successful in showing both her seductiveness, sexuality and raw power. Let's be honest here, evil women use their sexuality to their advantage (I mean, even good honest women do too!)
I always prefer hand drawn art with real paint /medium and not this photoshop-based art, but a balance in MTG sets is perfectly fine with me.
Genju is fantastic on Darksteel Citadel. I've never used Genju as a general, only as a support card, but I will definitely have to give that a try.
We've had 5-player games where each player uses a unique Nephilim as their general. Very diverse games. It's better than our all 5-color general games because the 5-color generals tend to be very narrow (Cromat notwithstanding). Horde of Notions is pretty good for diversity too, but it's hard not to abuse the recursion.
I appreciate your kind words. You must be a pleasure to be around.
Black lotus is in every single in vintage deck as is time walk - your comparison is rather poor given that I'm using unplayable tournament cards as an example. I'm not trying to nerf the Nephilim at all. I'm trying to suggest an easy errata to allow for more fun casual games. In the end, I take back my suggestion, but not because of your arrogant response, but rather because it being a casual format one can simply use these guys as generals. It's just nice to have it "official".
Personally, I think they should simply errata the Nephilim to be Legendary and reprint them as-is including the errata in the new block. I haven't read the books, but do they qualify as legendary? Or are there more than one of each Nephilim in existence?
Cultivate is an EDH staple, so I'll be grabbing a few of them wherever possible.
1. The singleton rule makes it much cheaper to obtain cards.
Why I stay:
1. It's an eternal format.
2. The singleton rule also makes it unnecessary to obtain things like dual lands when a shock land (or even tap land) will do just as well since it's a very slow format.
3. It's the most interactive casual format.
4. I was able to build dozens of EDH decks from my Legacy/Extended/Standard stock through trading/selling/buying.
5. Deck maintenance and updating is very cheap.
6. A very large card collection of singletons allows you to build thousands of variants. It's very expensive to maintain a playset of all relevant cards for any other constructed formats.
I'm looking to put together a deck that maximizes the following three phenomena in magic:
- coin flips
- random effects (randomly choose mainly, not necessarily random discard)
- sweepers that effect the entire board in a non-destructive manner
secondary effects I'm interested in include
- other weird effects like "donating" permanents
- bizarre but fun win conditions (often tied to the previous effect)
- sweeping effects that suddenly put everyone in equal footing but in a fun way (i.e. not obliterate)
The obvious colour to begin with is Red, which probably has a complete domination of these effects. However, I don't want to make a mono-colour deck to maintain a large diversity of game play.
So basically, the first question I'm looking to answer is what is the best commander to start with for this idea? The two new RWU commanders seem decent, but still not quite what I'm looking for, though Zedruu is close.
Any suggestions/comments are welcome! Thanks.