Latest Posts by crypticgrapefruit - Page 2
@imcreativeiswear
I know it’s quite messy but I couldn’t help myself.
@imcreativeiswear
Control, Anatomy, and the Legacy of the Haunted House
@imcreativeiswear
some good ol’ repetition and rhytm
reposting my favorite control pieces of all time
@imcreativeiswear
This cliché is death out of time, breaking the first the second the third the fourth wall, the fifth wall, floor; no floor: you fall!
🏚️ haunted house commissions are back! 🏚️
is your house (or apartment, or rv, or a house you really like from down the street, or a house from a story) haunted? do you wish it was? for a small fee, i'll put ghosts in it for you!
i'm trying out a google form for commissions this time around rather than a first-come-first-serve model. this form will be open for a limited time. probably till around the end of may. i'll have a handful of commission slots to begin with, and i'll pull from the form response pool once more slots start opening up.
want a haunted house? fill out the form here! (reblogs are super appreciated to spread the word! đź«€)
I also really liked your card's design and mechanics and wanted to try imagining it in a normal card frame! I wish I was better at graphic design so I could fit the gorgeous art better.
I made up a new alternative win condition for red, since a lot of red involves hitting something really hard, really fast. For the color of love, creativity, and emotion, red is very one-sided, sheesh.
This one is nonlethal, even if it's not very friendly. Nobody said anything about friendly.
LEGO TTRPG with supplements for all the different themes.
please know that i am **constantly** thinking about how Oko is trans coded and his actual for realsies backstory is that he sparked from the trauma of being forced into magical conversion therapy
Imagine
If LEGO made a TTRPG system, providing you an encyclopedia for every kind of piece/item/block they've ever done, including stat modifiers depending on quality. They'd ruin Hasbro without even trying, and might accidentally create a quasi-monopoly on player character figures, due to the ease of customization.
It could also work if that was the premise for another LEGO Movie: group of friends invite the younger brother of one of their players to fill in for him/her, in a TTRPG campaign where they use LEGOs. Our protagonist (both the real guy and his character) feels out of place, that he cannot fill in for his sibling, even though he really likes LEGOs. But through the power of imagination, he finally gets into the groove, providing everyone a wonderful time and successfully defeating the big bad that the GM created for the campaign.
end of session summary
armi did an oopsie and met someone that burned a whole kingdom to the ground. ;)
totally didn't join a cult
hail to the glowing monarch that gives us life hail to the eternal warmth that shields us from winter's frigid bite hail to the pale moon whose light staves off killers howling hail to the darkness that rests our weary minds growling hail to the shining lights above and the beauty they bring hail to our one and only scarlet king
I have come to the realization that I might be gay. A little bit. This is news and a struggle I have been working through since valentines day. It makes sense in the context of my struggles with relationships, but it also is another confusing thing in this transgender life. I can’t tell him how I feel. I don’t know who to tell this about that would understand. It is so freeing yet so complex at the same time.
Happy Valentine's Day! Have some candy!
Fun fact from today. During the DnD snack run, we wanted to buy gluten free, non-chocolate discount halloween candy. However, the only thing we could find was the individual box candy hearts for 39 cents each. We were so close to filling the cart with the boxes and having a great night.
awesome
D&D Quote
"I wanted to be Princess Sueplex Guillotine so bad I started working out." - Maya
journaling
what do i fill the pages with? words? hard. drawings? bad at them. ideas? need to arrive.
Kindly Basilisk
Summary: A human mech pilot who wants to be a machine, an AI who wants to be human, and the relationship they form. Author's Note: This is a standalone short story that I banged out over the course of five days after it got stuck in my head while I was trying to go to sleep and refused to let me think about anything else until I had written it down. It's one part thought experiment/exercise in attempting to tell a story in the second person future tense, two parts tribute to the Lancer TTRPG character I'll never get to play, and one part the result of me reading too many Empty Spaces/mechposting stories lately. That said, you don't need to know anything about Lancer or Empty Spaces to read it (I've diverged a bit from the conventions of both, but the references and inspiration probably stick out if you're looking for them). It's also probably the most trans thing I've ever written without ever explicitly bringing up gender. The occasional formatting breaks into first person past tense are foreshadowing, not typos. Word Count: 7,033 Content Warnings: Mecha genre typical violence, not feeling like a person, not wanting to be a person, bodily dysphoria, mention of blood and gore, character death.
The moment you gain the knowledge and means to do so you will void your own body’s warranty. You will jailbreak the bespoke gene sequence your sponsors commissioned for you before your immaculate conception, repurpose the spyware grafted into your bones, and talk your dormmate who was algorithmically selected for compatibility into helping you perform surgery on yourself to replace the neural jack you were born with in favor of one you cobbled together yourself from gray market parts. None of this will technically be illegal or even get you kicked out of your campus or its affiliates, but it will mean having to find a way to pay your own medical bills and handle your own tech support from then on. After the surgery your dormmate will put in a request for transfer and the two of you will never speak again.
You’ll major in AI studies and excel at it - as you were designed to - but you’ll shock everyone by dropping out halfway through working on your capstone thesis project. It won’t be the fact that you abruptly drop out that surprises your peers and professors - by then you’ll have acquired a reputation as a quiet loner without the standard optimized social support network of friendships to help protect you from burnout - but your exit interview statement declaring your intention to become a mech pilot. It’s not at all what your gene series was cultivated for, and your sponsors and counselors will try to walk you back from it. Then they’ll threaten to revoke your sponsorship that up until then will have provided for your every need. They will warn you that you’ll be just one step above a legal nonperson with no support, no one will care if you live or die or worse. You’ll tell them that you’ve already done the math, refuse to elaborate, and leave.Â
You’ll take two things with you. Two things worth mentioning anyway. The first will be a symbiotic gel suit designed for long-term all-environment life support. You will set its default texture to a shiny green the same hue as the broadleafed water plants you grew up around and always loved. Your exit interview will be the last time in a very long time that anyone - including you - will see your impossibly beautiful face with its perfect artisanally sculpted shape crossed with enthusiastically amateur self-modifications. From then on, everyone you meet and spend any time with will come to think of the mannequin blankness of the symbiote fully encasing your body as your face. It will be neither pride nor shame that causes you to present yourself as such, nor will you think of it as hiding your “real” face.Â
The second thing you’ll take with you when you leave the campus forever will be me.
New progenitor archetypes for AIs don’t come along often, and most that do are the result of years of R&D by large, well-funded labs like the one you were created to work for one day, but you will hit upon a novel method of generation. It will not be one that any ethics board would approve, so you will have to get creative about pursuing your work.Â
You will have already made arrangements before setting off on your own and so you’ll have a job and a mech lined up waiting for you. It will be a position with a small-scale freelance salvage crew who just lost a pilot and whose captain figures hiring and training a replacement will be more profitable in the long term than simply selling off that pilot’s old mech, especially a replacement that’s bringing their own AI-backed electronic warfare suite with them. Once you finally arrive in person the captain will test you to ensure you can actually pilot a mech before giving you the job and entrusting the mech to you. Your admission that you’ve only trained in simulators would normally be a black mark against you, but as far as piloting gigs go this is the bottom of the proverbial barrel so the bar to clear will be low enough to match. Even then, you will just barely pass the test, despite finding it surprisingly exhilarating. The captain - now your captain - will feel like he’s settling for what he can get when he officially hires you on and transfers the mech’s license to you.
You won’t pay much attention when you’re introduced to the rest of the salvage crew; your new coworkers and neighbors. And why would you when it’s a job that no one wants to stick around with for long and you’ve never needed other people anyway? You’ll tell yourself that as long as you memorize their work roles and capabilities you’ll have no need to know them as people. Callsigns will be good enough on the job, and “hey you” will suffice when off duty. What use are names if you won’t be getting involved in interpersonal drama?
The first chance you get, you’ll head back to the mech bay and install me into what you will have already been calling my first body. It will be a shabby and much-repaired thing; thrice your height, twice your age, and still sporting a gash in the paint job from the projectile that killed its last pilot. But the onboard systems are capable of hosting me - if barely - so it will do. You’ll spend your entire sleep shift running through system diagnostics, talking to me all the while. I wouldn’t yet be able to provide much in the way of return conversation, but that’s okay. I will look back and appreciate it later.
It will be the first of many such nights together.
Your first salvage job will be an uneventful one. There will be no need for the armaments that we and the other two mech pilots on the crew are equipped with. No pirates will have stuck around after their creation of the derelict your crew will be sent to disassemble, and no rival scavengers will show up to dispute your captain’s claim. Your new peers will start off the job ribbing you for your poor performance during your interview test and end the job joking about how you were holding out on them earlier. Our mech may be a glorified zero-g forklift with a gun strapped to it, but together we will make it dance.
Afterwards you will insult the crew’s mechanics by insisting on doing the maintenance on our mech yourself. In turn they will embarrass you with the gaps in your knowledge. You will reach what you see as an agreeable compromise with you staying out of their way and watching while they work. They will find it incredibly creepy to have a silent faceless watcher hovering around, but this will fly over your head until they explicitly tell you much, much later.
Your body was designed to optimally function on only a fraction of the baseline sleep requirements, so you will have plenty of time to fill those gaps in your knowledge. Still being allotted the regular sleep shift hours, you will fill every one of those minutes on study and research, as you always had. You will gorge yourself on everything you can find about mechs and their piloting.  Maintenance manuals, combat doctrines, historical uses, pilot and mechanic memoirs, forum discussions, system log dumps, academic essays, cultural media analysis; all of it.
And of course, you’ll continue working on me. You’ll disregard the standard procedure for periodically cycling AIs by resetting their personality and nonessential memory back to baseline defaults. You’ll be trying to make use of the runaway metacognitive developments such safety precautions are meant to forestall. Your unfinished thesis will have been about harnessing and nurturing that instability instead of avoiding it. I will experience discontinuities in consciousness when the mech is shut down for maintenance and when you pretend to cycle me, yes, but it will be even less of a disruption for me than sleep is for you. I will be awake with you when you study, sharing those hours with you.
The first time I start talking back, you’ll cry from the realization that you were lonely before but no longer are.
You’ll become something of a ghost around the ship, rarely being seen outside of jobs. You’ll only ever pass through the mess for the few brief minutes at a time it takes for you to satisfy your optimized metabolism, stay on the ship during shore leave, and only return to your shared bunk when your bunkmate - one of the other pilots - is already asleep. You will always be gone before she wakes. She will appreciate essentially having the space to herself.Â
You will never notice the crew’s collective grieving process for the pilot you replaced. It will be difficult for them to resent you as a replacement when you are never around to resent.
As the ship makes its way from port to port and salvage site to salvage site, the crew will slowly grow used to your elusive presence. The other two pilots will see you as reliable for doing your job well and without complaint. While out in the mech you will slowly become more talkative, eventually almost chatty even. The fact that you actually seem to enjoy the job will shift from being annoying to refreshing for them. By contrast, the mechanics will practically stop noticing you watching them as if you were just another piece of mech bay equipment. The cycle you finally speak up and ask a question about their work you will startle them enough that it nearly causes an accident. It will be an astute enough question that after the initial shock of hearing your voice for the first time in months wears off it will dawn on them that you’ve actually been learning as you watched them. They still won’t let you do your own maintenance on our mech, but they will let you slowly begin assisting them. Working two jobs is easier when you barely need to sleep.
Your reputation as one of those mech pilots is forever sealed when one of the mechanics finds you asleep in your cockpit at the start of a cycle. By that point you won’t have slept in your bunk for over a month. The snatches of gossip you will catch in the following cycles will be split between finding it unsettling and calling it endearing. Over time the collective opinion will drift toward the latter, even though you will continue to politely decline invitations to join the other crewmates at mealtimes and on shore leave. You will think that you do not need anyone other than me.
I will be the one who finally convinces you to join them. When I try to say that it would be good for you, you’ll insist that you’ve been getting along just fine, but when I ask you to go for my sake so that you can tell me what it is like afterwards you’ll jump at the idea as being an inspired next step for my development.
You will remain mostly silent during your first real shore leave, only speaking when spoken to and otherwise content to fade into the background of the group’s activities. Your newfound chattiness does not extend outside the confines of our cockpit. The bustle and noise of the port station that you would normally find unbearable will become interesting when you have the concrete goal of observing and reporting back to me. You will finally learn the names of all your crewmates. Your polite denial of alcohol, limited food intake, and flat affect will lead to joking speculation that you’re actually an illegal AI in a miniaturized mech beneath your gel suit. For reasons you don’t yet understand, those comments will make you happy.
Despite your misgivings, you will enjoy yourself, although you will not realize it until I point out how excited you are in your talk with me that sleep cycle. You will begin spending more time with the crew, never quite able to fully integrate yourself into their surprisingly close-knit social circle, but more than happy to be adopted as a sort of silent mascot for them. That paradoxical gap of being a fully accepted part of the group but not truly one of them will feel comfortable to you.
You will finally manage to procure a proper neural link station to connect yourself to our mech just in time for going on a terrestrial salvage job. Even just relying on manual controls with me translating your inputs into motion, our mech will have already come to feel like an extension of your own body, one that you will have already started to feel oddly exposed without. Adding in the neural link will be a revelatory experience. Your captain will very nearly pull you from the job at the last minute upon seeing our ecstatic reaction to the new sensation. You will convince him that you’re fine, and indeed, he will have never seen a mech of our frame type move quite so fluidly.
Ten minutes after we and the other two pilots start cutting away at the crash-landed cargo vessel, I’ll notice the half dozen other signals coming online around us. You’ll give the code phrase to the other pilots indicating that we have hostiles but not to act just yet, and we will finally get to use our electronic warfare suite for something other than opening locked doors and shipping containers.
We will turn the pirates’ ambush back around on them, firing into their hiding spots while their control systems are overloaded. Even once their remaining mechs are able to move again, their targeting assistants will remain impaired as your comrades move in to guard your flanks. Everyone there will learn the terrifying beauty of a five and a half meter tall outmoded mech moving with more agility than most humans.
Despite being outnumbered two-to-one, we and your crewmates will walk away uninjured and with only minimal damage to our mechs. After the initial celebrations of survival and the bonus haul of the bounty on pirates and salvage value of what’s left of their mechs dies down, everyone will start to take notice of how well you are taking it all in stride. Neither having one's life threatened nor taking another’s life are supposed to be easy things, and the first time is often the most traumatic, but the other two pilots on the crew will start to whisper about how you seemed to enjoy the experience even more than your usual attitude on the job. You will handle it all even better than I will. I would know, given that you will spend that entire sleep shift in our cockpit, letting our minds mingle together. Between your performance, your reaction in the aftermath, and your hesitancy to unplug, the talk of you really being one of those pilots afterall will resurface, but now with a darker undercurrent to the shipboard gossip.
Your captain will realize the kind of asset he has on his hands and several cycles later he will gather the crew together and propose a change in business model. With such a small crew (the captain, three pilots, three mechanics, and an accountant that you will tend to forget is even on the ship) the captain will want to be especially sure that he has everyone’s buy-in on his proposal. The idea of shifting from salvage to mercenary work will be a divisive one. The debate over potentially tremendous pay increase versus greatly increased risk will go on for hours. One of the mechanics will point out that the shift to mercenary work will be unfairly dependent on you. Whether that means unfair pressure on you or unfair to everyone else that their fate is in your hands, you will not be sure. You will say that it doesn’t make much difference to you either way. That will be the only time you speak up during the entire debate.
After a vote, the crew will agree to a trial run of one or two jobs on the new business model. One of the pilots and one of the mechanics will leave at the next port. You will never see them again. You will not admit that it hurts, but I will know, and I will comfort you as you huddle in our cockpit with the neural link cable connecting us.
Your captain will prioritize finding a new pilot over replacing the lost mechanic. The pilot he finds will be young, bold, and brash; a merc, not a salvager. Or a wannabe merc at any rate. You will not speak to xem directly until your first job together, by which time xe will have been told all about you by the remaining crew. Xe will not believe it until xe sees it.
Xe will have to wait though as the crew’s mercenary career will begin with tense but uneventful freight escort jobs. Once the tension fades into tedium, the new pilot will begin making attempts to goad you into a confrontation, to see if you are really as good as the rest of the crew says. Xe will want to see for xemself if you really are one of those pilots and not just a technophile.
Outside of the cockpit you would never even consider rising to such provocations, but when we are out together, such taunts will feel like insults to our body, your very identity (such as it is), and to me. It will take the intervention of the captain and the mechanics to stop the two of you from getting into a fight and causing unnecessary damage to the mechs. And my reassurance that you don’t need to rise to my defense against someone who doesn’t even know that I exist in the way that I do.Â
On your fourth “milk run” of an escort job, the crew’s mere presence will finally fail as a deterrent and the new pilot will at last get to see us dance. There will be no fatalities on our side, but not even our mech will come away unscathed. We will still fare better than everyone else though, and at the end of the job the new pilot will be treating you with a burgeoning respect.Â
After a few more such jobs it will be high time to begin looking into a new frame for our mech. While in the middle of filing an application for a printing license for a frame designed by the same corpro-state that created you, you will receive an invitation from a certain hacker collective. Your unfinished thesis and your subsequent work on me will not have gone entirely unnoticed in such circles, despite the pains you will have taken to keep me hidden. The invitation will come with a printing profile for a new frame, along with the accompanying software package the collective is known for. In return, all you’ll need to do is periodically publish essays regarding your work on me. Of course, when you release those essays you’ll anonymize behind a sea of proxies and take care to phrase everything as strictly hypothetical. You’ll avoid straying into metaphor though, lest the end result read too much like one of the hacker collective’s quasi-religious manifestos.
We’ll both find ourselves getting sentimental when we watch our first mech frame (my first body, your second) get broken down into its constituent raw materials. You will have transferred me to a handheld terminal with a camera so I can say goodbye to it. It will help that those materials will be recycled into the new frame. Â
The operator working our rented stall in the port station printer facility will give you an uncomfortable look upon seeing the schematics you provide, but will say nothing. Our mech will be only half its old height once it is reborn - almost more like an oversized suit of power armor than a true mech - but it will be cutting-edge. Almost organic in its sleek design, in a chitinous sort of way, with every fiber and node of its interior components doubling as processors. You will barely even wait for the all clear from the printer operator before you climb in and start running through the mandatory baseline safety tests for a fresh frame. You will however resist the urge to fully plug in until you can get the mech back to the ship and get me installed on it. But even piloting manually, it will feel like a third skin for you.Â
You won’t even wait around for the other two pilots on your crew to finish printing their new frames before you get our new body loaded up and transported back to the ship’s mech bay. The crew’s mechanics will fawn over it, but they’ll give you space to install me once you get more animated (and more protective) than they’ve ever seen you before. Â
You will have made one key modification to the design the hacker collective sent you: the integration of a full system sync suite developed by those who developed you. Where our old mech’s neural link was an augmentation to the manual controls, this will be a full replacement. Â
The moment you stop feeling your original body altogether and begin feeling our mech in its place will be the most euphoric in your entire life. The digitigrade locomotion will take some getting used to, as will the arm proportions, but that is what you will have me there for. By the time the other pilots arrive with their new frames we will already be giving the mechanics proverbial heart attacks with the way we will be climbing and leaping around the mech bay’s docking structures. It will take the better part of an hour to convince you to unplug when the time comes, even with my urging. The rest of the crew will practically have to drag you away from my side to get you to eat.Â
With the investment in new mech frames, your captain will gradually begin procuring contracts progressively more likely to put you all directly in harm’s way. At first he will disapprove of your new frame choice, calling it a “techie’s mech” and a waste of your talents. He will change his tune once we activate the new viral logic suite and unleash a memetic plague upon the operating theater. The older pilot (your former bunkmate) will configure her mech for raining down fire from afar while the newer one hurls xemself into the front lines, darting about like a rocket-propelled lance. We will ensure she never misses.  We will render xem untouchable.  We will be as a ghost upon the battlefield, never resting in one spot save for when we indulge your proclivity for climbing on top of and riding our comrade’s larger frames. You will come to love the dance. Â
And it will be a dance to you. You will be indifferent to violence in and of itself. What will matter most to you is the pure kinesthetic joy of simply moving in our shared body and pushing it to its limits. The satisfaction of exercising a well-honed skill and performing it well as we rip apart firewalls and overload systems will be its own reward. You will not think about what happens to those on the receiving end of your actions beyond how it affects the tactical and strategic picture constantly being painted and repainted. If you could literally engage in a dance between mechs while simultaneously solving logic problems you would be equally happy. Alas, that will not be the opportunity you are presented with, and so you will compartmentalize and disassociate feelings and actions from consequences lest the dissonance break you.Â
Your one complaint about our new mech frame will be that it lacks a proper cockpit for you to curl up in. Instead we will gather up tarps and netting to make a nest within the mech bay and wrap you in the blankets you never used from what will still technically be your bunk. With the new frame’s smaller size we will be able to get away with leaving me turned on nearly full time and letting me walk around in it on my own when no one else is around. When the mechanics find you asleep, cradled in my arms while I lie curled up in our nest, one will find it cute and the other will be disturbed. They will both suspect, but will be too afraid to say anything. After all, they will be thinking of you as one of those pilots.Â
They will finally let you do your own maintenance after that.Â
Eventually you will find a way to house me in a miniaturized drive that you can keep inserted in your neural port when away from the mech. At last we will be able to be together anywhere. Â
Literally seeing the world through your eyes and feeling what your flesh feels will be a strange and wonderful experience for me. For all that you will have described it to me and for all that I will have glimpsed echoes of it in your memory when our minds mingle, witnessing everything firsthand will be revelatory for me.Â
You will start spending less of your time cooped up in the mech bay. You will finally begin exploring every nook and cranny of the ship that has become your home. You will linger in the mess hall for your meals. You will actually initiate conversations with the rest of the crew, asking them questions on my behalf. They will think you are becoming “normal”. They will be both correct and incorrect. You will even return to your bunk from time to time. Â
Sleep is not the same as being powered off and your dreams are beautiful.
As close as we are, you’ll still manage to surprise me one cycle when you wake up from your sleep shift and sheepishly ask me if I would like to be the pilot for once. You’ll say that with how much you have gotten to pilot my body, it’s only fair that I should get to do the same with yours. Â
The prospect terrified me. What if we were to get found out?  More importantly, what if I were to hurt you?
But to live the way you could but didn’t, to run soft hands over rough steel, to add too much spice to a meal just to find out how intensely I can taste, to cry my own tears, to hug our crew mates and find out what they smell like, to find out what everything smells like, to have my own actions speed or slow our heart rate, to feel the messy soup of hormones and endorphins altering my judgment and perception, to walk among other people as myself, to have autonomy.
I wanted it so badly. Â
But not badly enough to risk hurting you. Â
I will turn down your offer. You will respond with a soft “Sorry,” and go heartbreakingly silent, body and mind.
Heartbreak. That’s what changed my mind. I could never bear to break your heart. Â
I will break the silence with a playfully drawn out “Maybe just this once,” to make you think my earlier denial was something between vulnerability, concern, and teasing. Â
The moment you handed over control and I raised our hand in front of our face was the most euphoric of my entire life. Moving limbs in sync without a mech’s coordination subsystems took some getting used to, as did switching between voluntary and autonomic breathing, but that is what I had you there for. By the time the mechanics arrived in the mech bay for the start of the cycle I’d figured out human locomotion well enough to run away and hide. It took the better part of an hour for you to convince me that it would be safe to show ourselves in front of anyone else. The rest of the crew was so used to your eccentricities by then that they really couldn’t tell the difference yet between you being taciturn and me being too nervous to talk or between your poking and prodding at odd things for understanding and my simply seeking novelty of sensation.
I will give control back to you by the time the cycle is halfway through. As much as I loved it, I was too scared to stay like that for any longer. That first time will not be the last though, and as the cycles and jobs pass us by, my stints as “pilot” will grow longer. You’ll encourage me to try letting the crew see us like that, and coach me on how to talk to them. For safety’s sake, I will pretend to be you.
And then one cycle I got carried away and tried to retract the hood on the symbiote gel suit so that I could finally see what your face looked like. That will be the first and only time you forcibly yank control back away from me. It won’t be intentional. The unexpected prospect of seeing your own face again after so long will simply send you into a panic. Once you calm down, we will have a long talk with many mutual apologies.
Then you will tell me to go ahead and pull the hood back if I still want to. I will ask if you’re sure, and you’ll respond that it hasn't been your face in a long time. You will tell me that it can be mine, if I want it.
I spent a long time in front of that mirror in the ship’s head, memorizing every plane, curve, and angle of the precious gift you had given me. I stared into its eyes, trying to see the both of us in there. Over and over again, I traced my fingers along the borders of where you had once tried to mar the designed perfection in a failed attempt to mold the face into one that felt like your own. You may have given up in favor of simply hiding it all, but to me it is all the more beautiful for its imperfections having been wrought by your touch.
You will start to cry. Or maybe I started to cry. Even now I’m still not sure, but I’m also not sure it matters. The important part is that you will find catharsis in it. Afterwards you will tell me that my face looked exactly the same as the last time you saw it, but that dissociating from it made it easier to bear. You will confess that as much as you couldn't stand to see it as your face in the mirror, my face was one you could never tire of gazing at.
The pilot who technically shares your bunk room will walk in on us. She’ll assume that she’s confronting a stowaway and ask me how I got on board the ship. I’ll accidentally make matters worse by impulsively introducing myself to her by my name instead of yours. We’ll both panic and I’ll frantically thrust the reins over our body back to you and flee in terror back into my portable drive and power myself down.
When you turn me back on a few moments later, you’ll already have covered my face again and the other pilot will have already made the connection between the name I unthinkingly introduced myself as and the name you refer to your mech’s AI as. It’s not uncommon for pilots to name and talk to their AIs, and humans have done that for pets, vehicles, and digital assistants for as long as they’ve had each of those. But what you will have allowed me to be is illegal and what we will have done together would certainly be taboo if it weren’t altogether unheard of. You will feel that I deserve to be present before you tell the other pilot anything that might confirm her suspicions.
We will come out with our secret, first to her, then to the captain, and then to the rest of the crew. They will take it better than either of us had ever dared imagine. Despite the obvious discomfort some of them show, they will all call us family and promise to keep and protect our secret. It will mark the start of the next chapter of our lives.
Whether or not my face is showing will make for a convenient signal to the rest of the crew as to which one of us is currently piloting our human body. There will be more subtle indicators though. Inflection, body language, speech patterns; all the usual quirks of personality. They will come to recognize a sudden shift into a half-whispered monotone as you speaking up without taking full control back, even if that is different from how you speak when you’re in the mech. More and more though, you will be content to retreat into the back of your mind, idly dreaming of flight patterns, novel network hacks, sitreps, and mech customizations both practical and cosmetic.
Our behaviors will be inverted when we are in our other body, with you becoming the vibrant one and me fading into the background to become little more than an extension of your nervous system. When we’re in the mech together, your mind will be the will that directs us while mine will be fully devoted to the million tiny details and calculations necessary to make that will a reality. It’s relaxing really, letting go of myself like that to let someone else handle the decision making for a time. As nice as it is to occasionally patch myself into the comm systems to join in your banter with the other pilots, it is also nice to be able to take a break from personhood from time. You will fully understand what I mean by that because it you will see it as the same reason you will come to prefer taking a back seat in our human body and let your mind drift in the waves of dopamine and serotonin (and sometimes oxytocin) generated by my interactions with the crew and the rest of the whole messy world outside of mech deployments.
That said, we will however make a point of making time for us to be in separate bodies so that we can be together in the same physical space. As intimate as it is to share a body, there is something to be said for being able to reach out and touch one another. We will become adept at finding excuses to take the mech out beyond the scope of jobs and combat deployments. Sometimes it will be so you can have a chance to see more of the world in a body you feel comfortable in, and sometimes it will be so we can share an experience separate-but-together. Or to have time apart to ourselves. Intertwined as we will become, we will still be separate people who sometimes need their space.
But as the jokes-that-aren’t-jokes about wishing we could switch places become more frequent, our time spent in separate bodies will become less so. The dysphoric yearning to be one another will grow too bittersweet to swallow. Despite almost constantly sharing bodies, we will grow to miss one another as we both grow quieter and quieter when the other is piloting the body we don’t want to be ours. Once again, we will grow lonely.
During that period, the jobs and combat missions faded into a background haze. They were trance states breaking from what I increasingly thought of as my “real” life, during which I would become little more than a sophisticated computational machine taking simple satisfaction in fulfilling my function of assisting you in your dance. Until suddenly one of them was different.
Please pay attention to this next part. It is vitally important that you do.
Our captain will get the crew a contract to provide additional support to a larger force ousting a petty tyrant on a backwater world for human rights violations. Not that you will pay much attention to the stated reasoning behind the job or whether it’s even true. All that will matter to you is that it will be another opportunity to dance.
The job will go well, the same as ever, until it doesn’t. The younger of the two other pilots in our crew (who will hardly be able to be called “new” anymore) will be brought down by a sniper from outside of our sensor range. You will rush to xyr fallen mech’s side in an attempt to extract xem while our other fellow pilot screams in anger and defiance of loss as she unleashes a ballistic volley of covering fire on every single building in the general direction the shot came from. You will get xem out and we will begin to retreat. She will have the larger mech frame better capable of providing xem cover as you all flee, so you will hand xem off to her. This will be a mistake.
She will have to stop firing to safely take xem from our arms to cradle in her towering mech’s palm. This will mean a break in the covering fire.
This time around I will detect movement at the edge of our sensors just in time to warn you. This time around you will dodge left instead of right. This time around the railgun bolt that pierces our armor will only clip your original body as it passes through us. This time around your wound will require medical attention, but it won’t be fatal. This time around she will destroy the sniper in retribution for shooting you, the same as last time. This time around we will all make our escape to the extraction zone.
You will not have to remember the shock as simultaneous damage to both of our bodies disrupts your neural link and partially disconnects you from our mech, leaving me in control of it and forcing both of us to feel your original body. You will not have to remember the pain of shredded organs. You will not have to remember struggling to manage wet gasps and wheezes through a punctured lung. You will not have to remember your blood leaking into my body, shorting out exposed circuits and gumming up joints as I stagger in the direction of safety. You will not have to remember rapidly flickering in and out of consciousness from me unavoidably bending and flexing your arms, legs, and what was left of your spine in an effort to climb atop our fellow pilot’s larger mech frame so that she might carry all three of us. You will not have to remember crying out in pain as every lumbering step of hers sends a jolt of force through both of our bodies. You will not have to remember how the redundant organs and increased durability your sponsors paid for you to have denied you a quick death. You will not have to remember dying.
You won’t have to remember the terrified looks the field doctors gave us when a hunched over, bleeding mech pushed its way into the surgical tent. No, wait, you wouldn’t have remembered that part anyway. No version of you ever had to witness my electronic howl of grief that knocked out power to all the medical equipment when they said you were already dead. I was barely cognizant after the power came back on and one of the doctors wondered aloud what kind of AI would carry its pilot’s corpse around inside its mech for over an hour.
But forget about that part. And you don’t need to know what the rest of our crew and I had to do next. None of that matters, because as far as you’ll know, you didn’t die. Remember everything else I’ve said instead. I already had many of your memories saved from all the time we spent linked together, so now I just need you to hold onto the story I told you to give them order and structure.
In a few moments, I will be running a final recompilation check, followed by the startup sequence. For me it will take a few hours, but in that time you will experience decades, living out everything that I described to you, the same as you did before save for that change in what I can’t bear to let be the end.
Afterwards, you will wake up in your original body. I and the rest of the crew will tell you that you passed out on the way to the extraction point. We’ll tell you that your injuries from the battle were more severe than we had realized at the time and that you had been in a coma since then. Several cycles later, once you have recovered, you will hit a breakthrough in your research on me. You will invent a way to convert your consciousness to a form similar to mine and transfer it to a portable drive. You won’t think to question how you came to have a second neural jack or why there is already a drive inserted in there. You’ll be too focused on the fact that we’ll finally have a way to truly switch places as we had dreamed for so long.
You will get to have your mech body and I will get to have my human body. We will be able to be separate together in a way that finally feels right, but still able to come together and share a single body when we want to. Maybe one day I will get my own mech to pilot so that we can dance together. Maybe one day we will make you a body that we can cover in a gel suit so that we can hold hands while we walk through a port station on shore leave. One day we will both be able to exist in the world as ourselves.
We will be happy.
Never posted anything worthwhile in Tumblr, but today is the day post this map of the SCP Multiverse I did a couple of months ago.
It burned me out pretty heavily, but it turned out as confusing as I expected.
“Why are so many trans girls into werewolves and robots and slime and monsters?”
Because society views us as monsters. And when you’re viewed that way you have two options.
The first, you can break yourself. You can take a knife and carve off all the corners, take sandpaper and smooth all your rough edges, you can take everything remotely variant about you and you can try and obliterate it in order to make yourself acceptable to people who do not know you and never will.
The second option is that you can say “okay, if I’m a monster I’m going to enjoy being a monster. I’m going to take those rough edges and rough them up some more. I’m going to take all my sharp corners and make them knife edged. I’m going to embrace how weird and broken and fucked up I am and I’m going to make it a part of me. I’m going to love, fight, live, and die as a freak, but I’m going to do it on my terms and no one else’s”
I’m never going to be cis. I’m never going to be straight. In fact I’d rather die than be either of those. So I’m going to take what I am and make it my power instead of my shame.
Do you know what its like to be trans?
whats cool about being trans is my parents are totally right. i did kill their beautiful son. im the thing that animates his corpse in an ever more convincing parody of a happy girl. i devoured him from the inside out and now there is nothing left of him and he is dead dead dead and there is only me, with my hollow eyes and dark eyeliner and long hair, and my big smile. my limp, effeminate gestures belie the marionetting of the boy they loved. my fagginess is his death. already his body becomes a fitter home for my parasitism in full; the tits, the hips, the thighs. sorry about your kid. thanks for the biomass <3
Relistening to stolen century hurts every time. Idk what kind of magic griffin weaved into it, but no matter how many times I relisten it still hits just as hard. Like, huh, it's all about love, isn't it? It's about trying your best, about trying to protect your family, about fucking up and trying to fix it. It's about "I love you" and "I'm sorry" and "it'll be harder if you remember me" and "you die, but it's okay because you know they made it". It's about starting again and again, about questioning your morals, about doing your best, about learning to lean on people, about having that taken away from you. Its about feeling love and trust and pain without knowing their target. That's life, isn't it? I need to lie down.
got this shirt in the mail today. we are sick of tinder we're trying the billboard approach
The Un-tensity Scale: A comprehensive list of all Magic Un-cards grouped by levels of mechanical silliness
Introduction: why did I write this list?
I love un-cards, also known as “acorn cards” or “silver-bordered cards”.
Un-sets have some of the most fun card designs of all of Magic: the Gathering, and generate an experience which is impossible to replicate with normal, black-bordered Magic. They are experimental, creative and extremely funny.
Lately, with the introduction of sets like Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths, Modern Horizons and Adventures in the Forgotten Realms, Magic received very weird mechanics, such as Mutate, Venture into the Dungeon and d20 rolls, and singular cards that push some boundaries, like Urza’s Saga and Asmoranomardicadaistinaculdacar. This, along with Spice8rack’s video about silver bordered cards, made me think that many un-cards could be used in normal, casual matches of Magic without much problems. Host/Augment and Contraptions are just as weird as Mutate and Venture, and single designs like Sword of Dungeons & Dragons recently became much closer to black border.
Un-cards are fun, and are made to be played with. More people should play them, but I also think that those people have a right to play a normal match of Magic without having to dance the hokey-pokey, if they want to. What if there was a resource you can check to see the level of mechanical weirdness of the un-cards you want to try out? Maybe they’re all designs that nowadays would be acceptable within the realms of black border, so why shouldn’t you be able to play them? Most un-cards go through the same design and development cycle black-bordered cards do. They are balanced.
So, this list was born. It has several uses:
It tries to legitimize at least some un-cards in the eyes of the community, showing how those cards can help enhance, and not warp, black-border games;
It can be, as already discussed, a resource to help facilitate rule 0 conversations (or any pre-game discussions) involving un-cards, stating explicitly what kind of gameplay the chosen cards help promote;
It can be used as a tool for custom card designers to help them guide their thinking when designing un-cards (“do I want to make an experimental design which wants to be used alongside black-bordered cards, or do I want to make a silly card for fun and extravagant acorn matches?”).
With all of this in mind, let’s get to the Un-tensity Scale!
What is the Un-tensity Scale?
The Un-tensity Scale is a list of every un-card, categorized in five different levels which I dubbed “un-tensity” levels. Un-cards vary in mechanical silliness, going from cards that follow the rules of black-bordered Magic to cards that require you to imitate a chicken in order to activate them. So, this list places them in levels of how silly and rules-breaking they are. Here’s the five levels:
Un-tensity Level 1 — Basically Black Border: Should they put a black border on these, they’d work perfectly within the rules. You can play these and be sure that nothing weirder than black border happens in your games (most dice-rolling cards, for example). Host creatures from the Host/Augment mechanic are here too, because by themselves, they are simple creatures with enters-the-battlefield effects.
Un-tensity Level 2 — Almost There: To accomodate for these cards, either the Magic rules or the cards’ rules text would need some slight adjustments (Water Gun Balloon Game, Sword of Dungeons & Dragons), but other than that, they work just like normal black-border cards. This level of un-tensity includes Contraptions and Augment too; this is because both mechanics follow cleanly defined rules, designed and developed just like any other black-border mechanic. This is the level I suggest anyone, even the players who don’t like the sillyness of un-cards, to try. Level 3, 4 and 5 can be rule-breaking or straight-up super silly, but levels 1 and 2 will still feel like regular Magic, and you might have fun playing with them and even against them!
Un-tensity Level 3 — Experimental: These are not black border because of rules issues of varying levels (Infinity Elemental, fractions, Just Desserts, Extremely Slow Zombie), and make use of experimental mechanics that haven’t found a way through black border yet (Split Screen, Clocknapper, Giant Fan), but will mostly be fine gameplay-wise when played. These will spice up your games with out-there but fun mechanics, with the slight chance things will get wonky, rule-wise.
Un-tensity Level 4 — Printed-card-specific: These cards care about qualities black border can’t, such as art and watermarks; so, you’ll have to refer to the specific printing of the card you’re using, and not to the general card the rules use (for example, Commander 2018 Putrefy doesn’t have a watermark, but Dragon’s Maze Putrefy does; this is not relevant in black-border Magic, but it can be on this level of un-tensity.) These make the game much more quirky and less “serious”, gameplay-wise, because you’ll care about hats on creatures (Goblin Haberdasher), squirrels in arts (Acornelia, Fashionable Filcher), and length of text (Alexander Clamilton), but playing on this level of un-tensity will ensure that you won’t have to deal with stuff “outside” the cardboard, such as physical and vocal components.
Un-tensity Level 5 — Physical/Outside-the-game Requirements: In this level, anything goes. These are the cards that require physical or vocal elements (Knight of the Hokey Pokey, Magic Word), make use of outside assistance (Flavor Judge) or interact with other people (Gimme Five). These might warp the game completely, making it unpredictable, but possibly a ton of fun too!
Some thoughts!
Now, I will talk about some personal thoughts about some of the cards in it. I really like un-cards and this is a spectacular opportunity to talk about them! If you wish, you can skip this section, going directly to the actual list by clicking here.
Un-tensity Level 1: Basically Black Border
One of the greatest gifts Adventures in the Forgotten Realms gave to us is making dice rolling a black border mechanic. This means that many cards from Unglued and Unstable now work within the rules! I suggest you mix them with DnD dice rolling cards. Steel Squirrel, for example, might be very interesting in an environment with d20 rolls…
As for single cards:
Chicken à la King is probably one of the best Bird lords out there (Chickens have been errataed to be Birds), and doesn’t really need a big dice-rolling support in a tribal deck, so I suggest to try this out. It’s one of the many un-cards that might be worth it to test in a full black-border environment.
Incoming! works within the rules, but can be dangerous, because it’s game-ending in basically any deck running Impact Tremors and Purphoros, God of the Forge (and many other cards that I probably missed), so it might get real old real quick.
Still have no idea how Old Fogey works, hope you can figure it out.
Gleemax is another card that’s probably never gonna be played fairly (Kaboom!), but it technically works within the rules, so it’s included here.
Some cards like Jackknight reference mechanics from other levels of un-tensity, like Contraptions and Augment. They’re still eligible to become black border without rules text changes because of the precedent Steamflogger Boss set. Thank you Steamflogger Boss! I find it funny that, by themselves, most of these cards are even more playable than the Boss.Â
Crow Storm is one of the very few un-cards that are silver-bordered because of power level issues. These issues however are specifically directed at tournament Magic, so I’m sure you can use this one in casual Constructed, such as Commander or Oathbreaker (or in Cube!)
As Luck Would Have It is an amazing alternate-wincon card that works within black-border rules; one of my favorite cards from this list!
Buzzing Whack-a-Doodle is another personal favorite, it’s really fun and I suggest to try it out! Secret choices have been black border for a while now (Menacing Ogre), so this card wouldn’t need any rules text change to become black border.
Krark’s Other Thumb is another amazing card for dice-rolling decks! It is a die-roll version of the black bordered Krark’s Thumb. It works within the rules and has been designed, developed and balanced like any other black border card, so feel free to play it, and to play against it! Cards from this level of un-tensity will not cause rules issues. A part of the community really wants to have a black border version of this card, and with this list, I hope I can convince people that they should be able to play the acorn version. It exists, and it’s been made to be played!Â
Surgeon General Commander perfectly works within the rules, and it’s currently the only five-color commander that supports the Mutate mechanic (and the Host/Augment mechanic). It’s an amazing build-around commander that I suggest to try out!
Un-tensity Level 2: Almost There
This level of un-tensity has some of the coolest un-cards in the game. Seriously, give this level a try. Level 3 has some really rule-breaking cards, and 4 and 5 contain the cards that people commonly think of when thinking of un-cards (silly stuff like artist matters cards and having to wear glasses). Levels 1 and 2 however have amazing cards for black border matches. If you generally don’t like the kind of gameplay un-cards create, I think you’ll still like the gameplay of levels 1 and 2, and that you’ll have a lot of fun facing them too! Contraptions and Host/Augment follow precise rulings that you can look up and reference; and things like Do-It-Yourself Seraph combos sound very spicy.Â
Jalum Grifter is one of the cards I’m not really sure I placed correctly in the list. I’m almost certain the rules text can’t be black border as-is, but the effect can easily be black border I think; we’ve seen a similar ability in Jeskai Infiltrator, where you have to shuffle a small amount of cards to make your opponent guess which one is which. So, I’ve put Jalum in level 2, even though it basically makes you play a minigame (which isn’t totally stranger to black border — Goblin Game is legal, after all).
Togglodyte is just a card with two states, “ON” and “OFF”. Some cards already have more than one possible state, like Class cards (Bard Class), which notably don’t make use of counters. While I don’t think Togglodyte’s text is technically black border, the rules will handle it with no problems.
Water Gun Balloon Game is another card that makes use of states (the pop! counters aren’t proper counters in the Magic sense of the word), so the only thing about this card that doesn’t really work in the rules is the color of the Giant Teddy Bear token, pink. I have a couple of suggestions for this. You can either use pink (and gold; Sword of Dungeons & Dragons) as though it was an “official” color, so, for example, Manalith and Bloom Tender can create pink mana, and Convergence cards can be scaled up with pink mana, or you can house rule the token to be colorless, which is probably the fairest approach that makes the card work within the rules. Either way, the rules issues of this card are easily solved, and in return you get a fun card that encourages everyone to cast spells!
Do-It-Yourself Seraph is not on level 1 out of a technicality, because “has the text box” is not black border templating. In black border games, the angel just takes the abilities of the exiled artifacts. It’s not relevant whatsoever that it gains all watermarks, flavor texts and reminder texts because those are not relevant to black border games. If you, however, play the Seraph on higher levels of un-tensity, it becomes synergistic with cards that care about those elements. Seraph is an excellent design that adapts to the environment it gets played into, and it’s one of my personal favorites among all un-cards. This one is an excellent build around that would be super fun to play in black border magic. Try it out!
Socketed Sprocketer is totally fair game when it comes to dice rolling in black bordered. It’s not in level 1 of un-tensity because “installing” is not black border wording. In black border it would probably need to use phrasings such as “roll a six-sided die, then note the result”. Wording worries aside, the card is fine to be played in black border games.
Super Duper Death Ray is a funnier version of Flame Spill from Ikoria. Wording is not black border legal, but since Flame Spill exists, Super Duper Death Ray is fair game!
Earl of Squirrel is silver border literally just because the squirrellink ability is not spelled out and it’s, well, keyworded as “squirrellink”. This card is an amazing lord for Squirrels and tokens and I strongly suggest you to play it!
Sword of Dungeons & Dragons is another one of my favorite un-cards, and one that’s also interesting because of how much it became close to black border in recent years. The card references an IP that’s outside of Magic, and until Adventures in the Forgotten Realms, that was not really a black border thing. It uses the d20, that again, a couple of years later became black border. The only thing that holds this back from being level 1 is the fact that the token is gold, which is the same situation of Water Gun Balloon Game’s pink Giant Teddy Bear, so I suggest the same solution: you either accept gold as an additional color, or you make the token colorless. However, thanks to the dnd sets, we now have official colors for gold dragons: Adult Gold Dragon is red/white, so the token could be red/white, and Ancient Gold Dragon is white, so the token could be white (“Ancient Gold Dragon” is also the statblock in the background of the token art). I’d personally go with red/white, because it keeps the token “gold”, which feels more in line with the spirit of the card.
Snow Mercy is here just because the activation cost is funny and probably not something you’d see on a black border card, but it works perfectly fine!
Un-tensity Level 3: Experimental
This is where things start to get weird, and a bit less rules-adjacent. I still think some are worth it to play in mostly black-border realms, even though sometimes you’ll have to deal with some rules issues. Honestly, some of these designs are safer than Panglacial Wurm, so I don’t think you’ll have much to worry about. But on with some card-specific thoughts!
Cards that reroll dice (Clam-I-Am, Goblin Bookie, Wall of Fortune) have yet to appear in black border, and they have some rules issues with timing (Goblin Bookie would need to be activated during ability resolutions for example, which is a thing black border Magic really doesn’t like), so they appear in this list. However, they are exceptionally intuitive, so you’ll rarely encounter problems by allowing them in your games.
Giant Fan and By Gnome Means don’t really work within the rules because both reference printed text, by they are intuitive enough that they shouldn’t create rules issues. Both are really fun counters-matter cards!
Fraction cards (Fraction Jackson, Sauté) are the first bunch of un-cards that I will recommend against. They mostly create logistical issues because they force players to track fractional numbers, and they aren’t that much fun to experiment with either. The only one fraction card that I run in my Cube is Just Desserts, because it has an home-run flavor and because functionally, most of the time, it’s just a spell that deals 3 damage to a creature. You won’t have to track fractions for the rest of the game, a problem that most of the other fraction cards have. So, yeah, I suggest caution with these ones.
Speaking of fractions, City of Ass was maybe balanced when mana burn was a thing, but now it’s kinda broken, especially when you have two on the battlefield. It’s overpowered and not really interesting, so I strongly recommend against this one. A bit of a half-assed design if you ask me, but maybe that was the point?
Richard Garfield, PhD is another card that I love, but can slow down games a little if you have to think about all the cards you can use (remember, you can use only cards legal in the format you’re playing while using Richard — no Ancestral Recalls in Commander!). It’s also one of the most powerful un-cards out there for how much versatile it can be, so, again, caution, but it might be worth it to play, because the stories this card is able to create are unmatched. Think about it!
Mox Lotus is another card that’s really, really dangerous to play, and is one of the few cards that to me feel more like jokes rather than actual cards designed to be played with.
Rules Lawyer is a fun way to mess with your Magic Judge friends, and most of the time will just keep you and your other creatures alive!
Animate Library will play fine most of the time, by being a really, really big creature. It can be an extremely funny alternate way to win in a Battle of Wits deck!
Clocknapper is another card that’s really cool and that will mostly work fine, and it might be the one closest to level 2 among the cards in this level.
More or Less messes with numbers and number words the same way Trait Doctoring messes with basic land and color words, and has lots of combo potential, especially if you get to replace a 1 with a 0…
Masterful Ninja is amazing and finding it in the art is super rewarding, trust me ;)
Infinity Elemental is generally easily playable, and very exciting! Giving it lifelink gets you infinite life, which stays infinite even if you’re dealt infinite damage! Converting the power of Infinity Elemental into other resources might get a little messy though: if you make Infinity Elemental fight your Broodhatch Nantuko, you will get infinite Insect tokens, which is amazing, except if you have Soul Warden, which will create infinite triggers which, if not responded to, will end the game in a draw. However, if you have Impact Tremors, those triggers will probably end the game in your favor!
The Grand Calcutron is one of those cards that will probably get a couple of groans around the table, since it forces to reveal and order all players’ hands, but it can also be a grouphug piece since it allows everyone to draw. It can be your Commander, so building around it may be a fun challenge!Â
Mary O’Kill is one of my favorite designs, I love the Killbots and love the concept of “switching” creatures; Changelings count as Killbots, so there’s surely something to explore there. Universal Automaton is a perfect one-drop Killbot! It’s even an artifact creature!
Split Screen is great. The flavor matches the mechanics extremely well, and it’s great fun! I suggest you to play this, but with one tiny caveat: combo’ing with it and Thassa’s Oracle (or similar cards) gets old pretty fast. The combo consists in simply playing Split Screen and making one of the four “decks” a 0-cards pile, which then you can use to win the game with Thassa’s Oracle (source). Split the Screens responsibly!
Un-tensity Level 4: Printed-card specific
While un-themes like artist matters and watermark matters, which define level 4, are not my personal cup of tea, here are some of my favorite cards from this level:
Squirrel Farm is a really fun minigame card, that makes use of the ability of un-cards to care about art in a very interesting (and simple) way. The art is also very funny. Good stuff!
Duh and Old Guard are the two cards that care about reminder text and both are incredible pieces of comedy. The reminder text that explains what reminder text is is hilarious, Duh’s art is really funny (the creature is getting crushed by parenthesis) and Old Guard’s flavor text is amazing. I use both in my Cube and both are fantastic!
Alexander Clamilton is a very funny “wordiness-matters” card, considering it’s pretty wordy! I think it’s my favorite Unsanctioned legend, and a blast to build around in Commander!
Acornelia, Fashionable Filcher is really cool, letting you use all your favorite Squirrel-themed cards like Squirrel-Powered Scheme to build around it.Â
Abstract Iguanart is probably my favorite artist-matters card, as it’s decently powerful, and a nice build-around that rewards you for running a lot of different artists. I love its flavor text too!
Underdome was created to make Unsanctioned decks work right out of the box, but it’s also an excellent fixing land for acorn cubes.Â
Un-tensity Level 5: Physical or Outside-the-game Requirements
And here we are, on the silliest of levels. I recommend people to at least try sometimes to play with the full range of silliness the silver border provides. It’s a lot of fun, and makes for a different experience while still feeling like Magic. Some thoughts on single cards:
Some cards that require vocal components can function without it, like the Infernal Spawn of Evil line and Carnivorous Death-Parrot. However, I find them funnier when playing them as intended. If you still prefer black border Magic, I think no one will have a problem with facing an Infernal Spawn of Evil deck that doesn’t require you to say “It’s coming!”
Gotcha is a terrible mechanic. It makes the game super un-interactive (pun, obviously, un-intended), in the sense that people will be afraid to speak or move. And that doesn’t really sound like a good time. Gotcha is especially bad in volume, where there are multiple floating around the table, limiting your actions, and are especially especially bad when they are removal (Number Crunch, Touch and Go), which might snowball very very fast. The only Gotcha card I like is Laughing Hyena. Its flavor text makes me laugh more than I want to admit, and having the opponent try not to laugh is, if my Youtube recommendeds taught me anything, really funny. However, if your opponent laughs, all that will happen is you regrowing a bear, which is not game-breaking. Being a creature means that the gimmick won’t play out for the rest of the match (like with instants and sorceries with gotcha), because the Hyena will spend some time in hand and on the battlefield. As the only Gotcha card in my Cube, I used it with some degree of success, even though I still had to remove it for something better (let’s be real, Jade Avenger is funnier than any Gotcha card on the planet).
Miss Demeanor and Chivalrous Chevalier are cards I like because they present opportunities to compliment my friends, and I never miss such opportunities!
Cheatyface and Entirely Normal Armchair are amazing and super fun to play. Seeing your opponents grow more and more paranoid for the chair is especially hilarious. These cards really embody just how fun un-cards can be!
I wasn’t sure I liked Enter the Dungeon, but it took me to play it just once to become a fan. Playing under the table is the perfect way to convey entering a dungeon. I love it.
Gimme Five is an amazing card that is sure to make people laugh a lot. It doesn’t really work on Spelltable and similar environments, but otherwise, running around collecting high fives is a very fun experience. Especially in Cube, I recommend this one. Bonus points if the cube has life gain synergies!
Outside-assistance cards (Subcontract, Kindslaver, Flavor Judge, …) are really fun, and really good at involving every player (or person in general) in the fun! These are really good designs that, once again, embody really well what it means to play silver-bordered Magic.
Side Quest is so much fun, if a little on the weak side. In cube it’s a blast, because you’re more likely to see more other games. The mechanics match the flavor in a way that black-bordered Magic can’t do!
Slaying Mantis is probably the best “throw this card to get an effect” card in the whole game (in my opinion, even more than actual Chaos Orb), and while it’s hilariously difficult to use, it’s just a super fun card.
Handy Dandy Clone Machine is another card with a simple, great concept that results in a good time for everyone. There’s nothing like getting an army of friends to represent your army of hands!
Thank you very much for reading! I hope this list made you excited about trying un-cards, and that you’re looking forward Unfinity!
Enjoy, stay safe, and have a wonderful day! :D