Dunkum

finally finished going through World of Ice and Fire, and have moved on to a coupel books by Guy Gavriel Kay. finished The Last Light of the Sun and am currently going through The Lions of Al-Rassan. highly recommend both, as well as Tigana by him.

Shared Animosity is a good one. I haven't been paying a whole lot of attention to the new set. I pretty much hated every Eldrazi card when they came out, and Annihilator is a ridiculously overpowered ability, so I had little interest in a return to that particular set/plane. That said, I never much liked the land to creatures mechanics, so I am not really liking awaken at all. generally I find it just makes it much easier to get rid of your lands, and they don't tend to do much that couldn't be done better with an actual creature. looking at the awaken ability for sheer drop, it is an extra 2 mana to get a 3/3. that's slightly cheaper than average, but not gratuitously so, and not really worth the costs, to my mind. occasionally it could be useful to increase your creature count in a last ditch attack, or to suddenly have a defender when your opponent thought your creatures were tapped out, but those effects could be temporary and work just fine. no need to let you opponent remove one of your lands for one mana with lightning bolt, instead of 3 with stone rain. your other points about it are spot on as well. devoid is...fine. no problem, but not especially excited about it. agree with your points on ingest. maybe if you could do more with the card (play it as though it were in your hand for a turn?), or if it milled more of them, or almost any reasonable second part would improve that ability.

coat of arms is another fun one. great for tokens, but it affects all creatures, regardless of who owns/controls them, so if your opponent is using a creature based deck, especially a tribal one, then you might help him as much as if not more than yourself.

yea, I already have Avacyn, Platinum angel and a few good ones that aren't in that set (Gisela is the commander for one of my commander decks) so no particular need to pick up any of those. plus angels tend toward the expensive side, mana-wise, so I don't use too many of them anyway

there have been a couple book series where this happened to me. for one of them, it was only 3 books long, so I went ahead and finished it (it actually succeeded in getting worse and worse in the later books). the other was substantially longer and I just stopped midway through the third book. would have finished that book, at least, but my copy happened to have a misprint, where it was missing a good 60 pages. at that point I just decide that it wasn't worth pursuing further. Mat and Perrin got me through that series. I basically couldn't stand anything Rand did past about book 2, but Mat was always fun, and while I agree that Perrin just needed to get over it, I still mostly enjoyed his character. interestingly, one of the characters I liked most at the end was Egwene. I found her boring at first, and annoying most of the way through, but in the last few books she gets much, much better. Thom helps too, but he is very rarely a viewpoint character, so his help is mostly on the side.

agreed. doubling season is more versatile, but you don't always need that much versatility. and parallel lives is cheaper, both in actual dollars and in mana cost, so if you only need the token duplication it is the better choice. personally, I want both, and maybe primal vigor as well, but that's because I have extra uses for the counter duplication, and I want it for a commander deck, so only one of each card allowed.

must not be white bordered I meant. gold bordered? the ones that are pre-made tournament winner decks that aren't legal in tournament play.

door of destinies should work in any deck based around a single creature type. it isn't the name of the creature you are lookign at it is the subtype (the bit where ti should say creature - minotaur). as to the eternal magic, I don't tend to go to tournaments and stuff, so when I am playing with friends, anything goes. i dont think anyone I know has any of the power 9, but I don't think any of us would complain if one of them were played. so basically, other than white border cards, and unglued/unhinged cards, anything goes.

we only recently moved to Win 7, and I'm pretty sure the only reason people in our office aren't complaining about the updates is that our IT department did somethign to make them stop. we do still get updates form IT that they send through, but that is pretty much the only way anything on the computer gets changed. if you need new software, you go to IT and they do it, due to licensing and security issues. your computer needs updating, IT handles it. a software update has come in that needs to be installed, IT looks it over, then sends it out when they are sure it isn't going to be a priblem

that is a point. but the easy way to adjust the rules to get around that would be to make the actual enchanting a triggered ability that happens when the aura comes into play. something along the lines of what I said before where the rule text for "Enchant <thing>" would be something like "when this card comes into play, attach it to target <thing>. if there is no valid target, put this card into the graveyard" there maybe would have to be a couple extra lines or something to cover weird eventualities, but I think that would deal with most of it. this would also have some weird effects on other cards that have "when an enchantment comes into play" or "wehn an enchantment is put into the graveyard from play" type triggered abilities, but overall I'm not sure that is actually a problem. alternatively, they could probably find ways to get around that too, if they really wanted basically, I just really don't like that you can attach an aura to something without targeting it, just something about that seems really weird to me, and I think it should be changed. You clearly are fine with it, so we will have to agree to disagree there. my only other point is that I think they could pretty easily fix my objections if they really wanted to. @Paradox Spren - I don't know what colors you plan to make this deck, but there are a fair amount of cards that do "x damage split among any number of target creatures" where you can hit up to x creatures. these usually have some kind of X cost though, often mana, sometimes life or sacrifice.

there are plenty of ways to counter hexproof. using non-targeting spells, or spells that target the player, not the creature, or countering it as it is played. really the key is that they need to avoid making too many or too overpowered hexproof creatures. the workaround you describe seems like it would be pretty rare, anyway, so not really considered a viable/standard way around those mechanisms. whereas right now the rule makes a distinction that I don't think is necessary. pretty much any spell that hits a single creature (or player or planeswalker, r other permanent) is targeting. to have aura's be different, even just in this one weird bringing it back from the grave instance, is bizarre

well, perhaps a better phrasing is needed, but my point is simply that the aura should have to target something when it comes into play/is attached, which means that hexproof or shroud should block it being attached(though obviously the rules now don't work that way). put another way, I think the rule should be something along the lines of "when the aura comes into play (or should that say as it is being put onto the battlefield?) attach it to target permanent" with some language about valid targets and so on. makes perfect sense to me that it should be allowed to remain if the hexproof/shroud effect is granted after it is attached. also, auras do have some amount of continual checking. if you have an artifact or enchanment that can temporarily become a creature, then you could enchant them with an "enchant creature" aura while they are a creature, but it would fall off once they revert back to an invalid type (I am 100% sure of this, as I actually looked it up once). I believe the same applies to equipment. likewise, I believe if a permanent is granted Protection from the aura's color (or anything else that might cause it to be invalid), then the aura falls off, though I am less sure of this. not claiming any of this should cause an aura to fall off if a creature gained shroud in the interim, since that just blocks the initial target, while these effects make the actual enchanting invalid.

that workaround is absurd, and really shouldnt be allowed to work. there's no reason they couldnt specify in the rules that the aura has to have a valid target or whatever.

Not 100% sure. Apparently they did some upgrades to it in the 2000s some time (wikipedia lists one in 2014 apparently), but I think at this point it has mostly been superseded by C and its descendents.

after her bit in book 3, I decided the second book would be a lot better if all of quentin's chapters were replaced with whatever Janet was doing at the time. but yes, the ending to book 3 was a bit less depressing

ours are. Assembly is the most common language they use, followed by COBOL, which I think just got upgraded to COBOL 85. I'm not sure how long ago we stopped storing the big files on magnetic tapes...

A lot more Narnia than Harry Potter, honestly, especially the later books, but yes, pretty dark. also, some of the characters, including the main character, can be annoying.

Where I work, most of the programming is currently done in Assembly and COBOL.

Use a reverse lashing to cheat at paintball by pulling the paintballs towards nearby objects, and not your body. for bonus points, use a reverse lashing to pull the paintballs toward a teammate, who you then use as a human shield.

I would recommend looking into "The Slow Regard for Silent Things" a bit before buying it. I loved it, but navybrandt hated it, and it definitely is weird enough that I wouldn't recommend it to everyone.

I have, I thought it was pretty good. A day in the life of Bast, essentially.

In addition to that, the school is likely spending a lot of time to teach you the theory behind some of the engineering stuff, which means it needs to teach you the math behind that. Newton had to invent Calculus in order to do all the physics he needed, so it shouldn't exactly be surprising that you need a lot of math.

I have a friend who used to swear by a ration of more like 3/10. he put 18 lands in each of his 60 card decks, and regularly beat me. he also tended to play cheaper cards (mana wise) than I did, though, which probably helped.

my honest recommendation on the lore is not to bother. the stuff that comes with the fatpacks is interesting enough, but havign read a few of the old novels, they tended to be pretty bad.

there is a prebuilt commander deck that comes with primal vigor, plus presumably some other good stuff. not sure on the price, its been years since I bought a prebuilt.