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Quote from lookingupanddown »Our last card off The Big Score is a Manascape Refractor that traded in mana washing for its possible abilities, for the chance to copy artifact abilities.
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Quote from sleeper agent 2.0 »Yeah sure, but (1) would you call this story relevant?
...and (2) it just feels a bit like a betrayal of the character to have him just, I don't know, walking around a saloon and being a part of a bigger (in current story terms) villain's posse.
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A multiplanar gold rush is happening, and you'd think Marchesa wouldn't want to grab some land for herself? She's here for the same reason most of them are: free real estate means more money.Quote from Ciliatus89 »The card itself looks good - but what I hate about this set is how random they throw known characters into it.
Why the F should the Queen of an entire plane come into the middle of nowhere and play cards? Why should she do that? It totally doesn't make any sense. Same for a lot of other characters in this set.
I know, that this plane wasn't poulated before the Omenpaths, so there can't be a local legendary creature. But the whole mass of random characters is what i dislike so far.
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Quote from sleeper agent 2.0 »Who’s running Fiora while she’s cosplaying here?
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And with any new character name, it might have been okay. But this is Marchesa. the woman who schemed and murdered and became queen. So, yes, it is lame.Quote from Ryperior74 »Quote from FunkyDragon »Worst Marchesa yet. The Black Rose was great at an aggressive reanimator deck and a theft strategy that could turn temporary theft into permanent theft. The Queen was a successful regicidal assassin that had claimed the monarchy and could spawn out deathtouchy assassins. This... this is worse than "Marchesa at home." This is lame (to use sleeper agent's term) cosplay Marchesa, just some lame wanna-be hanging out in a saloon.
oh I’m shooting you down with that claim that this is the worst one (no pun intended since this is a cowboy set.)
1. That’s not a once per turn tigger
2. It’s only 1 mana more for targeting something opponent related
3. Which is the biggest … YOUR DRAWING ONE SURVEILLING THE OTHER!
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Quote from Mergatroid_Jones »Seems like some generic looking cowboy.
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Welcome to every goofy gates deck, Omenpath Journey.
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The aversion to guns and like the use of weird halo 2 looking energy sword plasma rifle contraptions in this is goofy looking as hell. I'm not talking about Kellan's "not a halo two sword" daggers but like the annie flash thing and the one on crack shot and some other art.
Love the cactus folks.
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God forbid this set sells well or else we're getting one or two of them a year.
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Hey I can answer this one. The word "totem" is an anglicized form of the Ojibwe word referring specifically to their belief in a sacred object/spirit that represents a specific tribe or lineage or so on. It's sort of a word that both means clan, and also the symbols of that clan, as they are basically one and the same. A totem pole is a physical representation thereof.
Early anthropologists (the super duper racist ones) flipped their lid about this ("Look! They have Heralds just like us normal humans!") and decided to use the phrase to describe a whole lot of broadly similar practices all around the world under the term "totemism." A good century of internal and external criticisms (the associations are flimsy and several generations of anthropologists have been complaining, plus other indigenous peoples objected to a word from a tribe halfway around the world being used to describe their beliefs. The Ojibwe aren't super stoked about it either.) has lead to a declining use of the term.
Just in general like a lot of these big broad words we use for generalized indigenous concepts are done in a way that flattens cultural distinctions. You say, "hey you here yanomami snuffing yakoana, you are the same as these here !Kung chewing a psychotropic root and running through a fire." Which, like, sure on a surface level is fine but referring to both of them as shaman (a Russian word originally used for Siberian indigenous healers) and referring to their beliefs as "shamanism" as a third party is what they call these days linguistic colonialism. The colonizing part really comes in when you start noticing that despite the traditions in, for instance, pentecostalism or catholicism being virtually the same (entheogens have always been a huge part of catholicism, for instance) those practices are considered "religious" and not "shamanic." We take for granted that our shamanism is a real and valid thing and the silly little practices of those barbaric savages is "the beginnings of civilized thought."
It's, uh, no mistake that all of these terms were invented in like British Empire/ French colonialism days.
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Yeah it's the same reason in english-speaking folks stopped using "Mankind" to refer to all humans, or defaulting to -man suffixes for jobs that are also done by women. Or avoiding using "He" as the default pronoun and instead using "he or she" or "his or her" which was the woke thing to do back in the 90s when magic came out and implied that women exist and might also play the card game.
And it's controversial for the same reasons by the same folks too.
I'm not sure it's about "integrating into the american system" as much as "the american system explicitly exists because europeans moved to this continent, where people were already living with their own various iroquois or seminole or cree or hopi or taino systems, forcibly displaced them, and then subjected their children to christian indoctrination and outlawed their language and cultures" sort of thing.
But aside from that americans also broadly believe that native americans are all roughly the same group of people and don't really recognize tribal differences and using the word tribe to describe all members of a certain group rather than, you know, a designated subset of those people united by tradition and/or lineage is just flatly the wrong use for the word. You could build a case for it being "all these folks are a subset of Creature" but that's kind of flimsy and just doesn't quite fit how we use the word tribe in english.
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You know the direct sources we have for the idea that the savages of the aztec empire were barbaric and bloodthirsty animals were the spainards invading them? And a lot of that was informed by the relationships of convenience that the spainish formed with rival political groups who were lobbying to get the spanish to displace the mexica bc they thought they could ride the wave to the top. They would tell the spanish these awful stories about how mean the mexica were bc frankly the mexica were still pretty fresh off a lil conquering war and had many dissidents. Google Tlaxcaltec sometime.
It's like when you get into the stories about indigenous cannibalism and you find out that there was no actual evidence of cannibalism, just hearsay from various tribes who would be like "yeah we're cool and we don't eat people, but those dudes over that ridge eat babies." Like at best you had some weird ritual stuff done with the heart of yer slain enemies whomst you were killing for non-food reasons but now you have something like 70 years of american cultural shorthand that the natives are gonna shrink your head and eat you or whatever.
Also someone upthread said all the aztecs are dead. Emphatically not true.
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Yes, the creature has the ability so the cost reduction does apply.
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