This week we're talking banned lotuses, bachelor speculations, and Big Urners.
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Magic: The Gathering’s got a Commander problem
One of Magic: The Gathering’s most popular competitive formats, Commander, has been in turmoil over the past few weeks. Volunteer organizations have dissolved, market prices for select cards have experienced wild fluctuations, and public figures in the MTG community have faced vicious harassment from disgruntled players. Here’s a timeline:
- Fans invented the Commander format in the late ‘90s, and it persists today as one of the most popular formats for casual play
- Wizards of the Coast launched a commercial version of the format in 2011, but they allowed a volunteer committee of community members named the Commander Rules Committee (CRC) to maintain the rules and issue bans
- On September 23rd, 2024, the CRC announced that they would be adding four cards to their official banlist, a dramatic change that stirred an uproar in the playerbase and caused the cards’ secondary market prices to plummet [link]
- In the week that followed, members of both the CRC and its affiliate organization, the Commander Advisory Group, reported receiving threats of violence from players who were unhappy with the decision
- This past Monday, the CRC announced that it would be dissolving itself and handing control of the format over to Wizards of the Coast, while some CRC members might act as internal advisors [link]
What’s especially sad about this whole debacle is that Commander is, by principle, a playful format that encourages experimentation and rule-bending. However, competitive stability is difficult to balance against an economy measured in reprints and rarity, and major bans are sure to upset vendors who have a lot to lose.
Deadlock is in extremely active development
On its menu screen, Valve’s Deadlock is still marked as an “early development build.” But in the age of pre-release stress test weekends and demos labeled “betas,” that statement might not prepare you for how charmingly in-development Deadlock really is. Some of the MOBA’s heroes still have mismatched skins taken from other canceled games, and they keep talking about characters who haven’t been added yet. Patch notes are released on a bare xenForo forum by the pseudonymous dev account “Yoshi.” The game itself gets updated several times a day, often in US prime time, kicking everyone out of matchmaking until you restart. Occasionally everything breaks and spell effects start turning into clouds of red placeholder X’s.
But this open-kitchen development approach is clearly better than the alternatives — daily downtimes, or keeping the whole thing out of sight until it’s fully cooked. For now it’s refreshing to log in and have no idea what might’ve changed that day: the map might be bigger, there could be new dialogue, your character’s hair might have disappeared. The same scrappiness has translated to the game’s pro scene, which is already holding tournaments on the half-finished field, with old Apex Legends and Overwatch pros competing under softball team names like “Big Urners.”
Pathologic fans are freaking out over this image
— Ice-Pick Lodge (@IcePickLodge) October 4, 2024
The Russian studio Ice-Pick Lodge posted an image with the date “07/X/24” at its center yesterday, activating sleeper cells of Pathologic 2 fans across the internet. Pathologic 2 is an in-progress reimagining of the first Pathologic, a surreal survival game that developed a cult following after its release in 2005. When Pathologic 2 initially released in 2019, it only included one of the original’s three playable protagonists (The Haruspex). When the teaser dropped yesterday, fans immediately began to speculate that the date will mark the release of The Bachelor, a highly anticipated addition to the game that was announced back in 2020.
People with the patience to scour Pathologic’s depths tend to become devoted fans; others are put off by the series’ abstruse presentation. Pathologic and its successor are best-known for their complex narrative structures, stowing hidden meanings behind repeated playthroughs. The Bachelor’s route effectively makes up a third of the game’s overall experience, introducing a contrasting perspective on the game’s events and themes — so it makes sense for fans of the series to be excited. It’s just that there’s something refreshing about seeing Pathologic players react to a simple date in the same way that people who stan pop stars might react to a single-word album teaser.
Chum Box
AI
- British newspaper The Evening Standard is preparing to conduct AI necromancy on art critic Brian Sewell [link]
Games
- The satirical DOOM WAD Thatcher's Techbase returns with a passive-aggressive "politics-free" version after getting banned from Bethesda's mod browser [link]
- TikTokers are rapidly developing advanced techniques of Minecraft Steve torture [link]
- A whole lot of pickles [link]
Screens
- Drag Me To Hell's Alison Lohman has gotten a lot of mileage out of that one scene [link]
- The account that Photoshops Paddington Bear into everything posted their greatest work yet [link]
The Internet
- A fruitful genre of celebrity mashup images [link]
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One Last Thing
Jigsaw's actions so far are highly immoral [link]