MTG Salvation

Quote from Blinking Spirit »

Quote from slipknot72102 »

This type of belief in god is known as deism and most of the "founding fathers" of the united states were deist.

I would not equate Spinozanism with the deism of Jefferson and Adams. (I would also not so swiftly dismiss the rest of the Founding Fathers who were not expressly deist.) The deists imagined a "watchmaker God", who created the universe then stood back to let it run along according to the laws he set down. For Spinoza, there's some controversy about how to interpret him, but he seems to have instead equated God and the universe: the universe is not a creation of God's, but is God, or exists within God as a part of God. This is called pantheism (all-is-God) or panentheism (all-is-in-God). The watchmaker God exercised his will in designing the universe to achieve his intentions, but the Spinozan God does not have free will, designs, or intentions, instead acting at all times according to his own perfect nature. To the deist, the laws of reality are like a blueprint, but to Spinoza, they're more like a heartbeat. Big difference.


Panentheism and deism are sorta cousins. They just see spirituality slightly different. My wording wasn't quite clear instead of "type" I should have used "another belief in a similar vain of no person god."

Quote from Highroller »

Quote from Callahan09 »

but, doesn't it strike anyone else as rather petty and arbitrary that God requires people to "accept"/"believe in" him, or else they are damned?

This thought most certainly has struck other people besides you. You are correct, if God damns people who do not believe in him, then God has behaved monstrously.

As Blinking pointed out, you're ignoring a lot of Congregationalists and Presbyterians in making that statement.

The majority of the big names. Washinton, Jefferson, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison could all be described as deist. The only typical protestant of the big names is the much less know john jay who wanted to keep Catholics from holding office because he viewed them as the enemy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deism#Deism_in_the_United_States

Quote from el_pato »

Yes I've noticed this before, and I think it's a good example of one of the core differences between liberals and conservatives. Liberals tend to believe that people's nature can be changed and controlled while conservatives tend to believe that people's nature can't be changed and should be worked around some other way.

wtf.gif

Liberals aren't trying to change anyone. Calling SJWs liberal is a joke. Lets just call insanity what it is here and not attach incorrect political agendas to each one. It detracts away from the work many of us are trying to do in society. Also the conservatives aren't trying to work around anything. They take the let them die approach.

The SJWs are just a circle jerk group dedicated to feminism and making themselves feel better about their bodies by posting incorrect memes depicting themselves as curvy instead of apple shaped. I will admit I am an overweight male, but I am not making an excuses and not ashamed of that fact in such a way that I try to shape my own reality.

You are equating SJWs with those of us who fight for the equality of all men, women, and children despite race, gender, religion(or lack thereof), etc. SJWs are just feminazis who are anti-man, anti-white, and anti-telling someone the truth about their weight issues.

Yeah luckily I had the supplier hookup so I got a discount on mine. So I should at least get my moneys worth at least. Here is hoping I win the goyf lottery.

Quote from DankConfidant »

Am I the only one happy with modern masters 2015? I think people are forgetting that a lot of the value in the first MM at rare was comprised of overpriced (at the time)fringe commander playables that tanked a week after the set came out, not actual format staples.

The problem is the value density of this set is much lower than the price they set. The boxes are like $260(usd) after tax and the average value of cards is going to be somewhere in the $220 range. They should have kept the same price point as the last MM and honestly most people(i would) would be happy.

I am regretting the box I ordered now. probably won't draft either. To me if you don't get a good mythic, cryptic command, or remand the pack is useless. You can justify that for a $4 pack, but not for a $10 pack.

Actually from my play test mono-red isn't all that bad. Game 1 is about 30%, but the other games are at worst 60%. I have played probably 30 matches against it and won 20 of them. Generally the only thing I lose to is ***** like ensoul artifact on a citadel turn 2 two games in a row. I am probably going to slide two utter ends into my board and call it good.

I feel like I never wanted utter end in my main. 4 mana is really slow for a card that 1 for 1s. It does help deal with enchantments which have essentially been the bane of my deck thus far.(running a mostly standard dragons list) I am probably going to move up to 3x bile blight in my main because 2 cost answers are needed heavily with all of the EBT lands.

Quote from Callahan09 »

Sorry to intrude on this conversion, I'm jumping in late, and as someone who was not raised in an Abrahamic religion, I may not entirely know what I'm talking about... but, doesn't it strike anyone else as rather petty and arbitrary that God requires people to "accept"/"believe in" him, or else they are damned? Why would he even care? Why does it matter? It just seems kind of arrogant to me, I guess.

Bingo. (to me not attempting to be mean or anything)Abrahamic religions are so full of logical fallacies and holes that it is impossible to believe them as being true and have any sort of an open mind. Its all gods plan and god loves us yet we suffer and constantly pray for things.(very frivolous things)If I was god and someone prayed to me for something I would smite that ******** because he is questioning the divine plan I have had for ******* centuries because for whatever reason I only care about joe somebody if he is going to my church and spends time on his knees for me instead of actually living. God is all knowing and has a plan all figured out yet you wear seatbelts and look both ways before crossing the road? If you where truly faithful you would jump into a woodchipper and if it was gods plan you would live.

If god does exist and isn't some intangible thing like mother nature it doesn't care about us in the least. It would be like us looking at a microbial mat saying a protozoa is going to hell for eating a bacteria. I think Einstein says it best

I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings. (Albert Einstein)

This type of belief in god is known as deism and most of the "founding fathers" of the united states were deist.

2 seems fine depending on the meta. In the end I think it will be a meta call. If your local meta is all fast aggro then you are better off with more removal IMO.

Quote from GreatNateMTG »

Quote from Aegraen »

Anticipate lets you keep a lot of hands you'd otherwise have to mulligan. Real real good. It also saved my bacon against my friends UWR Geist deck in Round 4, after he cliqued away my Verdict, I shuffled with a fetch and then anticipated into it after I had all ready killed one geist with snapcaster block. It also lets you play a more diverse SB imho.

I am Aegraen's friend that was playing UWR Geist. As an opponent to a control deck utilizing Anticipae, the spell seemed very very good. Everytime the spell was cast I felt like he was able to begin sculpting a hand that ha everything he needed to win, which he ultimately did.

I have also been casting Anticiate in various builds of UWR Control and Esper Control and I am convinced the spell has a home as a 4 of in both builds. Both decks have had ways to gain card advantage, but they lacked efficient instant speed selection. There has been many times that I have anticipated into 2 lands and another Anticipate which I was then able to cast and go down an additional 3 cards. When digging for an answer, I'm very glad to be able to skip past the dead land draws and find what I need.

I haven't been around the format much lately, but I have used anticipate in standard quite a bit. From my experience it is a great card, but is kinda slow against faster matchups. It would be great against twin to find hate cards in games 2 and 3, but will take up valuable turns early against junk. For this reason I would max out at two in the main deck and maybe run 1 in the board if you have an open slot.

Pearl-Lake Ancient is the BEST control finisher hands down against basically any strategy. That’s why imo, it’s totally unnecessary to be running things like random Dragons/Ugin/Ashiok etc etc.

Again this is an old habit from playing against things like extirpate that can easily shut down decks that use one threat. I don't know the current card pool well enough(been on hiatus for a long time and I am just starting to catch back up) to know if it actually matters now. The random dragon is something I have seen a lot of decks doing. I kinda like it for the two cards I have in the list that it matters to since often times your threats will be stranded in your hand until you want to/can play them.(also the synergy with the dragon land is a really good way to potentially add an additional threat to your deck while not taking up any room) I really like the single Ugin because it is an additional(and repeatable) board clear that can deal with enchantments that slip through the cracks. I am really not a fan of ashiok, but included in the board because it should good in the control mirror. It will probably be cut unless I feel I need something else to finish in control mirrors if they are prevalent.

So are the random Dragons. As long as Pearl-Lake is played optimally (tap out for him appropriately against specific decks and at the right time) the other finishers are totally unnecessary and the slots that those finishers take up can easily be substituted for better/cheaper disruption.

I am not going to run one real way to win the game. One thoughtseize or counterspell and you would essentially lose the game. I like to take up as little room as possible for cards that aren't answers, but it isn't worth the risk of just losing to one card IMO.

Also, in my opinion Anticipate doesn't have a home in straight up UB Control. If you look at your list ^^ you're cutting down your copies of your best removal (BB/Downfall) and taking out one of your best raw card advantage cards (Jace's Ingenuity to squeeze them in. Ingenuity is one of the best draw engines available because usually if you can resolve it on your opponent's end step on an empty board you will be super far ahead and your opponent can't win. Anticipate only effectively draws you one card and you lose cheap removal by going up to 4 copies of Anticipate. In the early game, I would much rather, end step remove a threat then Anticipate - hopefully find a relevant card and then have to wait to cast it later.

With the amount of removal we run it should about be the same percentage of getting removal as running hard copies of said removal. I haven't ran the numbers on how it actually effects draws(just yet) but in the end I figure it will be close enough, and it has other uses.(potentially sifting out late game cards early on, edging out the chances of mana screw/flood) All of that being said if I feel like I want a bit more early removal Anticipate isn't even currently at the top of my list to replace. Still needs more testing IMO, but the fact that the 30 or so list I have looked on from tournaments and MTGO have all ran 4 of them gives me the impression that it is pretty good. I loved cards like ponder years ago. Jace's Ingenuity is one of my favorite cards right now and has been since it was first printed(although I really wanted something better at the time lol) but I am not really sure how much I need it. If it is ran in the list I looked at it is a two of without Dragonlord's Prerogative being ran. In my testing if I run out of gas often I will probably cut something for one. I chose this way because most of the more recent list cut the pair for a single prerogative which I am not really sure about as a card. 6 mana was quite a lot in the past, but this meta seems much slower than when I played so I am going to give it a try.

Thanks for the reply.

To me I still see tons of faults. 9/11 did force our hand as a nation to deal with terror more so than we had, but I feel that we didn't think of the consequences and make the proper preparations prior to taking action. Wars against terrorist cells are always going to be messy because you are dealing with psychopaths who don't value human life and live based off of beliefs and ideologies. Not to mention they aren't tied down to a specific land/country or populace. This makes invading and ground wars pretty complex and very inefficient. Terrorism isn't a concrete enemy either. You can continually fight terror with war, but you will never kill the ideology or the beliefs. You gotta delve into the underlying causes of terrorism which tends to be hardship, unbalanced power, and lack of education to actually put a dent into it. Thus I feel that even in the Afghan war we royally screwed up.

WE SHOULD NEVER HAVE INVADED IRAQ.

We had zero justification to actually go into Iraq. Hussain was a bastard(one that the CIA help put into power by forcing a coup of a democratically elected president) but Iraq was pretty stable. The cost in money and human lives was immense not to mention the damage to some of our diplomatic relations around the world. We all now know that the instability we caused led to ISIS coming to power which again our fault and completely unnecessary.

The NSA

Most of us on here will probably agree the NSA is out of control not only prying into our lives and into our civil liberties, but is costing our country an insane amount of money for almost no benefit. There is some amount of power they should probably have, but when they are building massive data centers to collect information on all US citizens it is beyond the scope of itself which the patriot act enabled.

The Economy

We have still yet to recover from the damage done when from the wars, the popping of the housing bubble, and the default of some of the largest banks because of predatory loans. US conservative monetary policies(typically know as trick-down economics or Reaganomics) which he touted have led to the largest disparity in wealth distribution since the great depression.

Other Stuff

Education policies that he had some hand in implementing were a joke and further widened the gap between the wealthy and the rest of us. I can't think of anything else atm but left this section vague so I could add more later.


TL;DR

While the president isn't all powerful like many of Obama's critics seem to thing because the president obviously doesn't control law making everything that Bush stepped in turned to crap and overall we are much worse off now than we were prior to his tenure. Every president has plenty of opportunity to lead our country into a more modern and intelligent direction based off of science and data. Some choose to do very little, but bush chose to destroy much of the work we had done not only in our country but also in the world.

Hey guys. I am getting back into MTG after a few year hiatus and I had a few questions and a very raw list to post for feedback.

First off what are the best and worst matchups? Are any of them 40/60 or worse? I have only done very minimal testing and played mostly against RW/R aggro which I knew was going to be pretty hard. Is there any reason to run fetch lands other than polluted delta? Most list I saw ran 6 fetch lands, but I don't see why unless they are needed as extra fodder for delve.

Here is my current very raw list. I don't know enough about the meta to tune things quite right so I sorta mixed and matched the best cards.




I did have 2 jace's ingenuity but I cut them to save space and replaced them with one Dragonlord's Prerogative to save space. Still tinkering with the win cons nothing really takes the top spot for me so I am going with one of each.(played against extirpate too much in the past lol so I got into this habit) The sideboard has a few silver bullets but is mostly junk that I wanted to run but couldn't or cards to diversify my answers in against certain matchups that I thought looked potentially difficult.

"Blue-Red Delver decks, playing efficient creatures, card drawers, burn, and some permission spells have been the most successful."

Ban the card draw it is totally the issue......... I mean delver is the namesake of the deck for a goddamn reason. Like mental misstep treasure cruise is only super powerful because you can pair it with hyper-efficient creatures. Cards like these may be good in control or combo decks, but they are no where near broken in such decks. WOTC is so afraid to ban creatures to weaken decks that they go way out of their way to ban cards that are no where near overpowered. And here I was going to get back into MtG after a nearly two year hiatus......Same BS another year it seems.

As an atheist this makes little sense to me. If god is in fact infallible and his will is inevitable then why pray? If anything it might piss him off that you are questioning his decisions. Furthermore why look both ways when you cross a street when you're going to "go" when it is your time anyways?

Quote from DTG99

I just came across this video in response to Pascal's wager and was hoping it could catalyze a conversation. For anyone unfamiliar with Pascal's wager, it essentially states or argues that since the existence of God is possible, the rational person should operate under the assumption that such a proposition is true. Not accepting God yields an infinite loss if wrong and pays no dividends if correct. This is an argument based on probability theory.

Anyway, I only wish I could string my thoughts together as eloquently as this guy did in this video. His conclusion, of accepting infinite hell fire for his beliefs (or disbelief) because he couldn't stomach the fact of spending an eternity with a being whose "empathy would be so easily trumped by his vanity", pretty much sums up my thoughts exactly.

The issue with Pascal's wager is which god do I submit too? If I say ok christian god blah blah blah I may piss of Zeus if he is the real god. I mean the history of our species we have like 4000 gods. if i pray to the wrong one then I might just piss off the real one if it did in fact exist.