I had a few of the cards, enough to make a really bad deck, but never had anyone to play with. Later in university I made a friend who’d played but had given up his cards, and we couldn’t really get cards at that point, so we mostly stuck to the Lord of the Rings TCG and Magic.

The complete lack of any negative aspect to the ring tempting you is just too much of a flavour fail. Maro says that players would not have wanted to use the temptation mechanic if it came with a downside, then they really should have scrapped it and tried something else. Even including some punisher cards that thematically could have introduced a lose condition from being excessively tempted would have been something. But honestly, given how baked in the concept of “undercosted spells or abilities with a downside” are to Magic, I refuse to believe that a free effect of the ring tempting you and giving you a benefit but also a malus would have been unused. There’s whole deck archetypes built around that…

The problem I have with this is that the whole concept of the ring is that it’s fundamentally a corruptive force. Without the ring having some kind of outcome where you fall to its corruption, it’s not The One Ring, it’s just another gimmicky mechanic.

The One Ring should give you bonuses. That’s fine - its power is what tempts. But if the ring in the books worked like it does in the game, Frodo should have just power walked into Mordor, slam dunked the ring into Mount Doom, and moonwalked back to the shire, flipping Sauron the bird the whole way home.

You can also play 1v1 commander with unmodified commander decks, but you need to go into it knowing that some things will be pretty broken while some others just won’t work at all. I do this pretty regularly with my fiancee when we just want to jam a few games or if I want to test a deck.

If you want to get a taste of standard, it’s sort of the default format on Arena. If you download the client you get a couple of starter decks with it to begin and you can run a few games.

Man, I spent so much time playing Birth of the Federation, and that was kind of a buggy disaster of a game. I really hope this turns out good

I mean, the fundamental problem with “Dear Doctor” is that it completely misunderstands every point that it’s meaning to make. Phlox may as well have said he was refusing to treat the Valakians because God told him not to. Evolution doesn’t have a will. It didn’t “want” the Menk to take over the planet any more than it “wanted” the dodo to go extinct. While this might have been what happened if Enterprise had never come by, if it’s right to help save the Valakians if there had been no one else to replace them, then it’s also right to save them as they live alongside the Menk.

Ro Laren and Elizabeth Shelby have entered the chat.

I’m just kinda thrilled to see Canada in the Star Trek universe. Obviously they’ve been doing a bunch of filming out of Toronto so technically we have seen it, but it’s nice for them to sidestep the fact that 99% of the time they get thrown into Earth’s past and they end up in California. Kirk “recognizing” the city as New York was a cute touch given how often Toronto doubles for it. Also technically I guess this means that the greatest tyrant in Earth’s history technically is canonically Canadian too.

Kirk being a chess hustler was cute too, explaining how he’s able to keep up when playing Spock in TOS.

Aside from that, the episode was fine. I like seeing La’an getting some development, and seeing her spar with M’Benga (and getting beaten) was nice since it justifies him being actually kind of a badass, and makes the fight scenes in the first episode of the season more reasonable. Also a bit more behind the curtain of Pelia.

A lot of the episode was just goofy “man out of time” stuff, which is cute in its own right but doesn’t really add a ton. But it was entertaining and fun, and worth watching again, so I’m still calling it a winner.

I, for one, appreciate Wizards’ efforts to make sure I keep my money in my wallet…

The only one whose art even slightly interests me is the Ralph Bakshi one, and the cards there are so pathetically worthless, both for cash value and usability in any of my decks that is a really easy pass. Last one was the same. Feels like they went hard early in the SL runs with good, interesting lairs to get people on board, and they’re already scraping the bottom of the barrel.