Elon’s response to the world saying they saw a Nazi salute at the presidential inauguration. Not quite an “oops, I didn’t mean it that way”

Oh, WOW! Glad I asked. Will happily add this to a conversation with a ‘skeptical’ friend.

Honestly, I found some genuinely funny and actually laughed. But I would never share stuff like that in public, if at all, certainly not in a position like Musk, especially not after that salute. Guess he’s testing the waters or normalizing.

Anyways, thanks a lot for the info with screenshot! Once more, reality trumps satire. When asking the question, I thought it might be about some hints here and there requiring interpretation. I did not expect something so blatant.

What are the Holocaust Jokes referenced in the title? Didn’t find an explanation in the article.

For context, I’m a German missing out on many news and stories, for sanity reasons. But I’d like to know more about this.

Sometimes deals can be arranged with countries of origin (or nearby), even if it takes time and diplomatic effort (and probably some compensation to the receiver).

If that fails, and anyways until that succeeds (if ever), you still have to treat these people as humans with dignity and rights.

If they are criminals, they serve their time like anyone else.

But first and foremost, if only for pragmatic reasons, society should look for ways to integrate these individuals in a way which benefits everyone; as a productive member. Most people don’t strive to live in misery, and they probably came to your country in hopes of a better future. Help them build that, and everybody might win.

The alternative is to become a monster yourself and still have no answers.

Surround yourself with Yes-men, piss off your allies, cuddle with dictators. Great strategy.

Maybe MAGA actually stands for Make America Gone Again. Is that acceptable English? Not a native speaker.

Jesus (fucking) Christ!

For sure, a less reliable partner is a less valuable partner. That’s one way to lose your geopolitical influence.

Glorious.

The question is wether there was sexual violence.

The claim from your screenshot answers that with a ‘no’: “It was all fabricated”.

Though what you provide to support that claim (I did not open the link) does not support it. On the contrary, it even provides accounts of sexual violence.

There is a 2nd, different claim muddled within: Wether sexual violence can be proven in court.

Of course, that can be difficult for a number of reasons related to sexual violence (“victims were murdered”, “not prepared to reveal”). But failure to prove an offense does by no means conclude that the accusations were “all fabricated”.

Maybe this is related to people confusing proof and evidence. Evidence (even numerous and strong) can exist although a proof is not possible.

Feel free to clear things up if I missed your point. At the moment, it is not understandable how that guy jumps from “there is evidence, but we will have trouble proving in court” to “it was all fabricated”. If you can add something which closes this gap, that would help your point.

It is frequently discussed to ban far-right parties. Decades ago, the NPD could have been banned but it was turned down because they were too insignificant (only getting a few percent in elections, if at all).

With the AfD, it’s a different story. They are rather too significant (getting double digit percents). Politicians are worried that if a ban fails, it could give them even more fuel. Some subconscious thought nags me that this wasn’t the actual reason, but it’s the best I can do right now.

Makes me happy to hear this important feature is about to become reality! <3

Yeah, basically the US can decide who gets how much of an advantage in this war by simply dialing up or down their military aid.

Ukraine not willing to negotiate? Dial it down. Russia not willing? Dial it up.

So they can end this war if they are willing to invest accordingly. But not this conflict. Will that lead to a stable peace, or just another war in the near future? Without satisfying answers to these questions, Ukraine is probably better off to keep fighting, even without any US aid, which repeals the first sentence of this paragraph.

legitimizing Russian aggression and undermining Western alliances

Yup, sounds like Trump; that russian asset.

So Ukraine needs to get nukes to deter a 3rd invasion in a few years? Just great.

I think the most important insight is that you can achieve the same result with far less effort if you stay on Earth.

On Mars, you’re basically building survival shelters with no trade network to rely on in a hostile downright deadly environment. In a place where we don’t even know how to get there, and how to bring all the stuff we need, and many more unknowns.

It might just be that the same effort can achieve more on Earth. And no matter how bad Earth becomes in terms of climate, toxicity, heck even if atmosphere AND oceans fully turn into dead zones, it’s still far more suitable than Mars (you mentioned two important factors), and the transport problem is nonexistent or already solved.

[Edit, emphasis: Even assuming decades of nuclear winter after WW3, it’s still far more practical to build a bunker shielded against radioactivity on Earth. On Mars, you’d had to do a similar thing.

Interestingly, this argument becomes stronger the more Earth is made uninhabitable. Because any Mars colony would heavily depend on reliable supplies from Earth for decades, if not longer. Which becomes increasingly harder / more unreliable the worse the situation on Earth becomes. At some point on the scale of how bad things can become, we cannot sustain space travel any longer.]

I hope we colonize Mars some day, but it makes zero sense as a means to escape an ecological catastrophe, since Mars is orders of magnitude worse and orders of magnitude harder.

This extremely high entry barrier might possibly seem as a good thing for people who are super rich and afraid of other humans, since it makes it practically impossible for all the poor and desperate to attempt to raid their luxury bunker. Best moat ever. But again, for the same budget you can easily get an automated army of killer machines which rivals most nations, if you simply stay on Earth.

Ahh, I knew that proc must have some neat potential! That’s incredible lol, definitely have to mess with it more.

I had the same thoughts when I first encountered it (and I think it was the only time I saw it). I guess that explains why it’s so rare. The potential is not too obvious. And maybe I have to add, not too easily unlocked. At least my approach resulted in a rather complicated deck with many points of failure. But I guess when you run so many copy spells yourself, you know these situations when you draw only copy spells but nothing to copy :D

For that reason, I currently run only 3 Estrid and only 2 Wingbright. I had Mirrormade in for a while - thought it would be neat to copy opponent enchantments with it, to further replicate them with Estrid, even after Mirrormade has been removed. But after a while I realized I never had a good opportunity to use it.

It’s really really amusing with oddball cards like Haphazard Bombardment

Man, that sounds good! That’s 7 mana, right? And you get one of those for free in each upkeep, distributing aim markers on everything ^^

I guess you need to be more careful with the expiration, since that is harder to predict here than with sagas.

Haphazard Bombardment is too far from my current approach, so I won’t try myself. But if you do, I’d love to hear about it!

Given how much noise exit parties, or generally anti EU sentiments can cause, I’d also prefer a higher bar. Be welcomed if you join, but please be sure about it.

in any ranked modes, winning is the point, so I feel like there isn’t really any room to complain about fast and efficient decks in ranked play.

I slightly disagree. I mean, mostly you’re obviously right; playing to win is foremost at home in ranked. But I think other legit points exist simultaneously.

I want interesting matches. I want the matchmaking to give me an opponent which is neither too hard nor too easy. That’s my main reason for playing ranked historic.

I want to test the deck I built, see how it fares against mature decks. I play unranked to check if I got the basics right (like land composition), and ranked to find out how viable certain ideas actually are in the current meta.

But sure, it is perfectly fine to play ranked to win (lol), and I don’t blame those who do. I just feel we can and should expect more challenge required and less luck. I lose so often with only having played 1 land, that’s just ridiculous. My deck has answers to all these threats, but asking wether I have the fitting solution against an unknown opponent in my first 8 cards puts a lot more weight on luck than on skill.

There’s another thought, not sure how to put it. Maybe it’s less about the individual match and more about different strategies competing in a shared environment. From that perspective, it’s perfectly fine to have deck A which wins versus B, but loses against C and D. Then, player skill sits at the judgement how much B we currently have, and what exactly A is. However, the current client heavily emphasizes looking at individual matches (that’s where you see that big VICTORY / DEFEATED), and I think you need 3rd party tools to get any information how good you’re doing against certain types of opponents.

< cash spending >

Aw, that sounds horrible! I had no idea, I don’t spend any money on this. WotC got enough from me back when I bought paper cards, and somehow I got along fine in Arena without money.

But I remember having a similar problem when we still played with paper cards. You’re forced to keep spending to keep playing with your friends, or drop out at some point. For inhouse paper, at least we could “print” proxies.

Would be nice if they considered how much each player has spent on their current deck for the matchmaking. Like high spenders have to face other high spenders, and budget players are grouped with themselves.

Though of course, in both cases, the economic incentive for WotC is to create unfair situations.

< play patterns >

I don’t know what words like Timeless, Standard or Pioneer mean, but yeah, seems we feel the same. Especially this sounds exactly like me: I like puzzles and board state and cards that do pretty much one thing, where through the combination of one-things you can create a complex game.

Take Glissa Sunslayer for example, a black/green creature for 3 mana with first strike and death touch (which alone makes it one of the best blockers imo), it has 3 additional abilities from which you can choose one on impact. Like, what, why? This would be totally playable without these extra abilities. FS DT in itself is an extremely powerful combo, and I think there is currently no other card which has that out of the box. It can even create nasty combos by repeatedly resetting Sagas. Binding of the old Gods for example, destroy one permanent each round for the sole cost of dealing player damage. Though strangely, I don’t see it being played too often, so it seems to be fine.

I think the game would be more fun if the overall power level would be toned down a bit, but don’t expect that to happen.

Fun fact, I just conceded to a Peddler before my 2nd turn. I tried my luck a dozen times or so against that deck, which rarely succeeded and was never enjoyable. Yeah, skip.

< brawl unplayable >

Yes, Nadu is shameless. Though it has little impact on my matches, I rarely see it. I suffer much more from Persist Reanimators, and Goblin Bombardment with Ajani. Or this silly deck which mills itself, with creatures automagically returning to the battlefield.

Baral … can lead to hopeless situations, agreed. But I see Baral even less than Nadu. Could it be that counter decks came out of fashion, because aggro got too fast? Many players seem to play almost exclusively cards for 1 or max 2 mana.

Like I just lost after my first round to a Fireblade Charger with Sigarda’s Aid and a Colossus Hammer. Arena asked me afterwards wether I had fun. Mhm. Next match: Scholar of the Lost Trove gets Persist in round 3. Cool. After that: Elves swinging lethal in round 3.

Can you elaborate on Rusko, Clockmaker? Admittedly, I’ve been playing 2 or 3 Ruskos for a year or more. Before, I liked using Underrealm Lich with this frog monster which lets you draw a card whenever a land is put into your graveyard. I like recycling decks and fear Ashiok, guess I’m loss averse.

Imagine managing a popular game where tons of your playerbase hates aspects of it so much that they just concede to take a loss when they see a set of cards you design to be fun. This is the opposite of fun to me, and again I think it non-trivially contributes to negative player mental health.

Well put, I agree. I heard something when learning about game design: A mechanic, which gives something in your game a new ability, should be fun for the player using it, and for the players trying to counter it. Like maybe your warrior can raise his shield to block attacks, bot others have their abilities to penetrate shields, hit your feet or whatever. We should not just make the warrior invulnerable, with no counterplay possible. It might be fun for one player, but you want both to enjoy your game.

this mostly just seems like complaints about Magic itself

You’re right, I strayed from the title. Arena is where I experience MTG, I guess that’s how both got mashed together from my view.

What I still could have mentioned: Ropers, and generally unsportsmanlike behaviour. Like being a dick with emotes, being quick when you win but sluggish when you lose, abusing ‘Your Go’, spamming ‘Good Game’ when I still have or might draw a solution. I’ve also done all that, so I try not to judge too hard. Sometimes I think the whole experience is an exercise in emotion regulation.

decks that are too fast and decks that are too slow simultaneously

What I meant with fast: Decks which can kill in the first few rounds (regardless of how much time has passed

What I meant with slow: Players who physically take a long time to play (like roping on every step)

It can be both, which is the worst. Like a player scaling up his Scurry Oak in one of the first few turns to 100+ counters, while frequently taking breaks to clown around with emotes or whatever. I can’t really leave my desk, but also don’t want to surrender since I might draw a solution. Though this could be in 5 seconds or 10 minutes, who knows. Sometimes I feel this just isn’t worth my nerves and surrender anyway, even with a solution in hand.

I heard about the slow wildcard economy, so I guess you’re right. I have the opposite experience, but seen this point numerous times before; seems legit. I’ve been playing this game for many years (10?), sometimes almost all day. After some start phase, I could make whatever I needed from wildcards, without ever spending any real money. Currently, I have around 15 rare/mythic wildcards, which is a low count for me, since I just made another deck (with an accompanying post in this community). I guess it helps that I usually only play one deck, which rarely sees changes once it’s settled. Only vaguely I remember grinding for missing cards, an adventure which I did occasionally miss since then.

Seen the card many times, but never appreciated the art. So thanks for highlighting it.

Would be hell to see it as a meter-wide sprayed street art in a punky hood, or a dark club. 🤘😈

I also hate whenever it comes up in matches. I hate when red players make any move. It kind of burns.

Opponent played Ocelot Pride, which boosted my Doppelgang to the moon. Match ended in a draw, too many triggers to compute.

At this point, I could make infinite mana and infinite copies of any permanent on the battlefield, and create flash copies of any card in my graveyard, all at instant speed. Doppelgang on Nashi, Illusion Gadgeteer breaks the game.

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