Hero: The Elevator Pitch
.Three incredibly skillful assassins give up their lives in this dramatic paean to centralized state power.
Three incredibly skillful assassins give up their lives in this dramatic paean to centralized state power.
I wrote this during a meeting in work today:
This one comparison stood out:
The most startling fact about 2002 is that the combined profits for the ten drug companies in the Fortune 500 ($35.9 billion) were more than the profits for all the other 490 businesses put together ($33.7 billion).
That’s truly amazing. Taken from this article, which talks about how the pharmaceutical industry when from pretty big in 1980 to incredibly huge now.
This happened a couple of weeks ago, but seems worth mentioning. My brother and I were channel-surfing one night and encountered The Best Damn Sports Show Period, which we would normally have sailed right by. It’s on Fox SportsNet and is essentially a talkshow format with a bunch of (ex-/wannabe) jocks sitting around talking about sports. Not the most in-depth kind of thing (unlike Baseball Tonight or other ESPN fare). Usually lots of lame jokes, hype, and product tie-ins. Oh, and Tom Arnold is one of the hosts.
However, what made us stop is that Michael Moore was on it.
And stayed on it for at least fifteen minutes. He was promoted as a reason to return after an ad break. They talked to him about politics for most of the segment. I know that most US sports coverage is more analytical than most US political coverage, but this was ridiculous. And it’s a Fox network!
The audience seemed to give him a very good reaction, and some of the hosts were clearly supporters. I don’t know exactly what this appearance means, but I found it profoundly surprising. And, maybe, it’s a sign that things aren’t quite as bad as they seem.
I got these from Cursor, a daily stop for me. The first one is about spectators being barred from the Olympic Games if they’re carrying the wrong brand of food, drink or merchandise:
http://www.halifaxherald.com/stories/2004/08/08/f202.raw.html
The other is about Republicans not letting people into their rallies without loyalty pledges (!), which fits with their general mindset but is pretty amazing nonetheless:
Something about infomercials fascinates me. In a sick way. I can get stuck watching them for quite a while, unable to tear my eyes away, wondering how it is that such things are actually, really, it’s-no-joke on TV.
They don’t have to be in English, either. I was entranced by a Spanish-speaking infomercial for what I think was “Ingles Entretenido” yesterday. FIVE DVDs, FIVE CDs, a FREE DVD player and a FREE portable CD player—all for not $2000, not $1500, not $1000, but under $200. Being able to speak English is very important if you’re in an accident, if you need to talk to a doctor, or a police officer, or for dealing with anyone in authority.
The incredibly cheesy graphics (five DVDs in their cases zooming out of the background every time they’re mentioned), the amazingly obvious bluescreening, the hearty host (who, incidentally, appears to continue speaking non-stop for an impressive amount of time), the constant repetition—all these things somehow mesmerize me. It did lack some of the classic ingredients, though: testimonials and the amazing benefits that will surely accrue once you buy the product. In that sense, it rates as one of the more honest infomercials
N.B.: I don’t speak Spanish.
When I first got back from the PTQ on Saturday night, what I built was this:
Essentially, what I wanted was to add Night’s Whisper as a way of getting closer to the Cloud when I needed to. I hadn’t been impressed with Guardian Idol as a two-of, and I figured I could lose a Shatter and an Echoing Decay. Now, though, I wonder if I couldn’t put Wrench Mind in there as an additional disruption card instead. If I did that, would I need Red at all? I could try something like this:
It certainly looks a lot more consistent than the old list. It doesn’t have any defense against annoying artifacts, however. That’s definitely a disadvantage when I encounter things like Crystal Shard, Oblivion Stone, and Mindslaver.
So I think that I’ve made a mistake in trying to straddle two different kinds of control, the tempo-control of the Standard B/R RatCloud deck and a more traditional card-advantage-based control approach forced on me by the absence of both Stone Rain and Ravenous Rats in the MD5 environment. That being the case, I need to find a deck that is focused and able to exploit the current metagame.
The typical Black Control deck approach might actually provide a number of answers here, if I don’t get too caught up in trying to make Death Cloud work as the be-all and end-all.
Obviously, the deck is much, much weaker against Affinity here. Also, I begin to wonder if Promise of Power should come into it at all. But I don’t know where I’d put that, and it is a little risky against Big Red. I don’t think the deck can support both Promise of Power and Night’s Whisper.
The PTQ didn’t go so well, and I’m really wondering about the deck at this point. I had too many mulligans, and too many games where I thought things were in hand and they just didn’t work out. So now I’m trying to make it more consistent, and the first step is adding Night’s Whisper. But that isn’t proving amazing so far, and I’m trying to see if a fairly radical shift could make it better:
I’m also really tempted to see if replacing Chittering Rats with Conjurer’s Bauble in this build would be any good. That’s almost heretical, but hey.
I’m playing in a Mirrodin/Darksteel/Fifth Dawn PTQ tomorrow, and as a test of how this handles HTML formatting, here’s a decklist:
The Standard version of this deck is definitely stronger, but if I encounter more anti-Affinity decks than Affinity decks, I have a pretty good chance. Except for Crystal Witness, which might be a beating. Sadly, I don’t know for sure, because my testing of the Block version has been minimal. I am, essentially, petdecking.
My sideboarding plan is below:
Against Affinity:
Against Big Red:
Against monoGreen
Against Tooth & Nail, no Witness
Against Tooth & Nail, with Witness
Against Tooth & Nail, with Blue (and Witness)
Against Tooth & Nail, with Mindslaver
Against Tooth & Nail, with Shards and Stones
(not sure about the Emissaries going out for the Harvesters here)
Against Crystal Witness
Against DC Green
Against U/W Pristine Angel
Against U/W Cog weenie
Against U/W Cog Angel
Against U/W March of the Machines
Against KCI
Against Pristine Green