Cantrips are powerful and fun. "Mystery Box" ones are merely reasonable, but we do have some of those in the form of cycling cards. Ones that let you choose the card, like ponder, are extremely dangerous. In general though, we've kept most of the card draw in our auction block at moderate power level - or require jumping through hoops (like Ordeal of Thassa). This is because we like to mostly have control over the auction, so that each player has a chance to buy the game-winning cards. With a lot of card draw, you get fun surprises that can feel awesome - but you lose control over the skill-based experience.
That said, we love the card draw effects and always try to snap them up. It just depends on the experience you're looking for. I have a hunch we'll be making a second auction block that plays very differently from the one in the article too.
As for going to 0, yes - it's super dangerous. You can afford to do it when bidding on a creature (because the auction ends after a creature is purchased and you'll get 3 gold at the start of the next turn, before the next auction) but if you do it while it's not your turn and bidding on a non-creature, your opponent can pick free cards off the top of the deck. If you do it while it's your turn, they only have to pay 1 gold per card (because they still have to raise your bid of zero). It's an added layer of risk/reward strategy.
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May 6, 2015Stairc posted a message on High Stakes Magic - A New Way to Play15% means that answers are rather rare. You usually only get 1 or 2 each game. Our auction block is built around that, with few creatures being must-kill targets. If you run a higher power block, or just one with higher variance of power (more must-kill creatures compared to the other ones in the block), 25% could absolutely be the correct number.Posted in: Articles
Also, yes, if you run out of cards in the auction block you shuffle both graveyards in and use them as the new pile. -
May 6, 2015Stairc posted a message on High Stakes Magic - A New Way to PlayWhy don'y you give it a try and let us know how it goes? I'd be interested to find out.Posted in: Articles
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May 5, 2015Stairc posted a message on High Stakes Magic - A New Way to PlayYou're correct. I'll see if I can get an editor to change it.Posted in: Articles
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May 4, 2015Stairc posted a message on High Stakes Magic - A New Way to PlayAbsolutely, there are lots of great things to discuss here.Posted in: Articles
The situation where all players have 0 gold while the auction is continuing has not ever showed up in testing but it does need an answer. The reason it almost never happens is because when one player is at 0 gold, the other player only has to spend 1 gold to buy each card that shows up. The auction is probably going to end before one player runs out of gold.
The current rules about neither player bidding, which say to auction again, are designed as a safety valve so that if a designer includes a useless card in his block - players have an inbuilt way to say "let's not play with this card". However, it does create problems when both players have 0 gold. I'd either suggest either immediately ending the auction if both players are at 0 gold, or change the rules so that bidding "0" is a legitimate first bid - and that if no one raises the bid the player that bid "0" gold gets the card for free. Both would solve the problem, though the second is more elegant (since it just tweaks an existing rule rather than adds a brand new rule).
For constructing an auction block, there are no limits whatsoever. You can build a block however you like. You can build it singleton, like Commander, or you can put in 10 copies of a card you like. You can also shuffle several booster packs together and try playing with their contents. The only limits are what you think will make the best experience for your players. - To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
However, the rest of the economy which is VASTLY more prevalent should be produced by the person who can do so at the highest quality for the lowest cost. It just makes sense.
I don't like blind faith at all, but I don't think ignoring religion is going to make it go away. We should teach our children about religions and introduce them to the multiple faiths around the globe as they examine such varied cultures. We should explain the monumental accomplishments of such religions and their horrendous attrocities. Moreover, we should encourage children to approach religion skeptically - as we do with all propoganda. In this way the maximum value of religion as culture will be attained while preventing any, "brainwashing" of children.
Would things be easier if we had everything we need right in our own country? Absolutely! But throughout history the countries that became the wealthiest were those that had huge trade influence with others.
Besides, trade helps stop wars - not encourage them. If countries are willing to trade in mutually benefical transactions then everyone gets richer without needing to conquer people. In times of prosperity, war is a lot less likely.
If we're using logic here, which we should be as this is a debate forum, only logic is allowed. No opinions about, "me personally believing god exists" are valid. You need a reason and must be willing to consider other arguments - else you have no business posing in a debate thread. So let's have no more of that, "it's my opinion and I don't want to explain why because it's too personal and you won't understand" stuff =).
Religion is a theory of how the world works. It just is. It's someone explaining who gets punished, how things came to be, why burning a bull will get you into heaven and what happens if you die. It must be treated as a theory. It doesn't get a free pass into unchallengeable belief just because it's pretty old.
I personally want to discuss whether religion is beneficial but if we MUST debate the existance of a divine being (something impossible to disprove by the way) then here goes.
The most common argument for god existing is that someone had to create the universe - since a universe can't just exist by itself. But then, who created god? The big bang just suggests that a bunch of matter appeared. While hard to comprehend, that's a lot easier than a fully formed intelligent being with magical powers.
And Highroller, answer Icecream's questions in his first post on page 62.
The gold standard was flawed. Not only flawed, it doesn't make sense. Limiting a money supply is fine, but an assortment of a relatively useless metal isn't automatically the best amount for currency.
Also, the problem with the GOld Standard was that people like Gould could try to buy an amount of circulatory gold while bribing others to refrain from selling and thus get an absurd amount of control over America's currency. Taking us off the gold standard stopped this crisis when it was on the verge of happening.
Additionally, the war spending made our economy unstable. Though the numbers of what we earned were up the actual standard of living wasn'tt hat great. Imposed shortages of every commodity and the entire coastal industry was pushed to military goods that became much less useful after WW2 - resulting in an industrial collapse after government support was withdrawn.
I think the main reason you got so many negative comments is because of your title. The first thing I thought clicking on the article was that this would be an intensely Spike, uber-competitive article. The introduction also seemed to hint at this, just spike building in an unusual manner. Then the article veers off where it always wanted to go, into casual and theoretical territory for people without deep pockets or huge collections that need to find a substitute for bitterblossom or evaluate a new card no one's ever thought of.
When this happened, it seemed to throw a lot of us for a loop and prompted all those, "not getting the point of the article" comments.
All in all, cool job. Glad your writing here =)
Additionally, some people feel they need to have slaves in order to function.
Isn't it nice that the bible provides both?
If people need a purpose, they're more than welcome to browse their local library for ideas - flipping through all kinds of books until they find one they like.
But when said purpose is killing all the Blacks and Jews... Not cool. People need to evaluate these ideas with logic and NOT accept them on faith. I've trolled through tons of religious material - not for their faith but for their insights into the world. Admittedly, these were few and far between but were incredibly precious when I found them. However, since I did not take the bible as the literal word of god, I was able to reap the wisdom without surrendering my mind or morality.
The bible is a book. It's a good book. But it's not the only book.
Religion is faith. Faith is believing something to be right or true without proof. If you take the faith out of religion your left with everything good about it and none of the bad! You get the community, the support that Panda has cited time and time again and I wholeheartedly embrace, the direction, the history and the pearls of insight and wisdom. Then you use a filter of logic to not stone your kids to death =).
It seems like most of the discussion is on how much OBama is spending and how ridiculous that is.
But why is it ridiculous? Why is it bad to run up huge defecits?
Because it will hurt our economy in the future.
So why is he doing this? Why doesn't he just trim corners of the budgets, run a few small bills through the house and ride a wave of fiscally responsible public popularity?
The thing is, he isn't spending all that extra money on education or on highways or on the military or even healthcare. We could easily argue that a huge future deficit isn't worth a short-term gain like this. But he isn't spending it on luxuries.
He's spending it on fire extinguishers.
The economy is on fire. Nearly all money flows through the banking industry at some point an their bottomless pits right now - a giant cess-pool in the middle of our economy. This is a big problem, and needs to be dealt with. If your house is on fire you don't start quibbling about how much the water costs to pump - for the value of your house is more than the value of the water. Even if putting out the fire costs... say... a couple trillion dollars - if the house itself is worth a hundred trillion then it's a VERY good idea to grab that hose!
Obama isn't going on a shopping spree. He's doing what he thinks needs to be done to plug the holes in our economy. They say you need to spend money to make money, likewise you must sometimes spend money to stop from loosing it. Maybe the current methods aren't the best, I'm in a thread right now discussing that, but I don't think the size of the deficit should worry us in of itself.
We need to figure out if what Obama is investing in the economy is greater than the price of not acting. If it is, then we're in trouble. Otherwise, it makes sense. After all, the huge amount of inflation only makes it more important to act now before currency devalues further.
Religion doesn't make moral judgements. Relgion is concerned only with transcribing the nature of the universe, usually expressed through the word of god(s). While it may seem like a religion says something is moral or immoral, that's only because god(s) reward(s) you or punishes you for that... But then that makes the GOD good or bad! The actions themselves don't make things themselves moral or immoral. The priests assigned evil actions to evil gods, or watched the gods actions (if you believe that) and decided whether they were moral or immoral and worshipped accordingly - unless it was out of fear.
Religion doesn't make moral judgements. People do. Then that gets worked into religion. Along with music. People make music. It's used in religion, but it doesn't COME from religion.
Same with morals.
And that is what I think KurCE meant.
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And bocephus... Population would not decrease - imported labor would be a temporary substitute for our economy until we rean out of countries to outsource to. Then everyone would get replaced by machines.
Will this make some of humanity incapable of holding a job? Maybe. But the benefits, even if we supported these people fully out of taxes, would far outweigh the costs as every single human being who could dream up new ideas to better humanity WOULD dream up new dieas to better humanity. This would drastically increase our standard of living - even if we had to support a lot of, "dense" people.
Remember, King's in the old days were trillionaires by modern standards. They owned entire countries. The queen of England still technically owns all marine life in the waters around her country. That's a lot of stuff to own. They had jewels galore and castles in droves.
And yet they couldn't watch a movie. Or live past 40.
Though they had all the money in the wqorld there was nothing to turn that money into. If I was the only person on an empty world I could own the planet but still be living in poverty. Even most of the poorest people in America today are far better off than medieval royalty.
That's why the evolution of society is about creating wealthy by harnessing knowledge, not retarding technology in the terror of people loosing jobs.[
Also, there's a fairness issue. If poor kids need to stay home and work the farm - never getting to go to colelge - a potential genius can be destroyed by circumstance; a tragedy for her and the rest of the world.
But one thing I don't buy is that we need to manufacture things to make money. In fact, it's fundamentally not true. Imagine the following - every person in America is an engineer (leverage sector). No products are made in America any more. However, the engineers are all employed by companies to design new products which are then manufactured in other countries.
Is this a trade defecit?
Not a bit.
People in America are making an incredibly good wage for their ideas. These wages allow them to buy things. Some of the things they buy are the goods manufactured by the companies they work for. Value is traded for value and everyone gets richer. No one runs out of money because the company's proceeds from selling manufactured products go directly into the pockets of their engineers who design new products to beat the competition. This isn't a trade deficit, it's an incredibly healthy and mutually beneficial relaitonship. It would be better yet if machines did allt he grunt work.
And yes, not everyone is going to move to the leverage sector overnight. The shift from agriculture to manufacturing is easy ebcause its mindless grunt work. The shift to the service industry is harder because it requires people to have skills and the shift to the Leverage Sector is hardest of all because it requires people to dream up new ideas.
Hard? Yes. Worth it? Most definitely. The peoples' lives get better and the rest of society enjoys their contributions. After all, economists say that some unemployment is essential to a nation so that new businesses can hire workers. There's a reason that nearly half of all human scientific progress has happened in the last century - because we finally started widening the gap between the amount of people who need to do grunt work and the people who have time to think and dream.
I'm all for debating the first part, about a constant desire for more than you have... But the second part can't apply. Constant desire is a fine topic for moral discussion - but if you apply a socipathic lack of ethics to the desire then it's not really worth arguing.
Whatever the dictionary definition is, I think the msot productive discussion here would be based on, "the constant desire for more than you have". Anything more or less kind of taints the question.
The ways societies advance is when people can devote time to thinking up ways to improve their lives (usually technology).
When 100% of the people in a society have to spend all their time growing food there's no one left to make the medicine.
Cultures that advance are ones who specialize, having 93% grow the food while the rest sew clothes or invent cool things like plows and wheels, further reducing the percentage of the population taking care of essentials.
This is why we call technology that does the jobs of many men progress.
After farming is taken care of the next rung on the ladder is manufacturing. Farmers work for the industry, making things. However, these people are pumping the bellows of society and aren't exactly contributing to its advancement. While they enable it's advancement they aren't actively contributing to breakingt he new frontier.
Once these jobs are taken up where do people go? After the agricultural industry and industrial industried people move to the service industry, using their skills to provide value unlike unthinking labor. We're a predominantly service economy now. Where do people go after this?
The Leverage Sector.
People in the leverage sector are programmers, scientists and the like. They actively create inventions that have value on their own. A lawyer is in the service industry, the results he puts out are dependent on his time. He can only consult so many clients in a day. A programmer on the other hand can make a new application that generates a thousand dollars an hour in revenue even if the programmer is asleep. Then he can maek another program and another program and another program and another program...
This is why google can pay their employees so much money.
And the leverage sector is what pushes society ahead.
We need to get rid of the lower rung jobs with machines and outsourcing to countries that can benefit from it (No exploiting allowed! Only mutually beneficial outsourcing!). The leverage sector pays a lot better and does a lot more.
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Oh, and the rich aren't in a seperate economy. If the top 10% controls 90% of the wealth and the economy looses half it's value... Who do you think is going to loose more money in proportion?
Okay, that argument is extremely over-simplified but this post is allready long enough as it is =).