Welcome again to everybody. Make yourselves at home. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.
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i wanna get into MTG but it always overwhelmed me, and am getting into more reading lately. i get dopamine hit when i finish a chonky book with a satisfying ending
MtG is vast and the jargon alone can be pretty confusing (I still don’t know it all and can’t recognize a lot of cards that experts name drop).
What I recommend to newer players is to find a legendary card that speaks to them and build a deck around that using online tools like EDHRec and EDHWiki which can directly tell you the best combos and cards that synergize well with it. If you like greek mythology for example you could start with the Theros sets which are inspired by greek myth.
There are also tons of pre-constructed decks which you can upgrade and experiment with which is basically how I learned to make decks from scratch. It’s thankfully never been easier to play the game with comrades totally for free using Moxfield and screensharing; you can theoretically use any card ever printed (including the infamous One Ring printing) and use Spelltable to host the game.
Trying to get back into fantasy novels.
I need fun.
You should try Baru Cormorant, it’s a fantasy thriller with heavy economic elements. I’m like a quarter of the way through and really digging it. It’s basically about this young woman who is tasked by the empire to audit one of it’s corrupt colonies.
Does it deal with class?
The problem with A Song of Ice and Fire is that nearly all the main characters are nobles or born nobles.
It’s annoying. I don’t think I like ASOIAF anymore. Partly, it’s due to the Orientalism and other racist depictions of the analogues of real-life cultures (since it clearly has analogues inspired by such cultures). The depictions of certain characters, especially female characters, is something I don’t like as well. The setting is even a bit reformist, in a sense; yes, the nobles clearly oppress the commoners but certain characters of noble lineage are essentially the only ones trying to change things. There is no agency with regards to the commoners within the setting or barely any at all.
The worst part is that the fanbase will harangue GRRM for certain things but not for the transphobia displayed in the setting (such as in Book 5 in particular), never mind the sexual assault within the series as well (by other main or sympathetic characters, mind you, at least in the case of Tyrion in Book 5 around the mid-point of the novel). Good grief, the fanbase is literally quite transphobic as well, at least in the case of Westeros.org Forums (the two people that mainly started the site are friends of GRRM and are in contact with him; they also are quite explicitly transphobic and many queer and trans folks have been banned from that forum).
When I read the series, particularly the second novel, A Clash of Kings, it was a bit of a revelation seeing an Autistic rep character in the setting (Stannis Baratheon in this case) but, honestly, he will likely do something stupid or bad or evil or whatever and then he will probably die tragically or painfully in the end, idk. I don’t think I care now.
Honestly, it sucks that Autistic characters are written by allistics most of the time within the sphere of speculative fiction. I don’t mind input from allistics sometimes, I think it’s okay for them to write outside the allistic point-of-view, but there do not seem to be many good Autistic reps within fiction nowadays. Brandon Sanderson’s depiction of Autistic folks is atrocious, imho (don’t even get me started on the enby or non-binary folks within his main setting of stories).
I want good fantasy (though obviously not just fantasy). I even got a well-received fantasy novel but left it at home before I left for Zaragoza (might get somebody to send it here). I just don’t know what to read in terms of novels now.