You can buy a very convincing Black Lotus for $6 on aliexpress. I’ve thought about getting one and mounting it on the wall in a picture frame for fun.
I played Lorcana for a bit then realized you can get cards that look identical under a jewelers loupe for 1/10 of the price and I got out of it. A few months later the market price for all the cards cratered. I wonder why?
For many people not paying the artists is less fun, for nearly everyone paying 10x the price is not fun. Obviously a brillian game might overcome this but it can easily cause someone to move on.
This is a false dichotomy. You don't need to acquire the expensive cards to play the game. I enjoyed Star Wars: CCG back at the turn of the millennium even though I didn't have any Yoda, Vader, Luke, etc. cards. I think I had a Chewbacca, maybe? Yeah, I traded with a neighborhood kid for it, and later his mom called my mom to try to take back the trade.
right? Net Runner specifically allows proxy cards at events and even give you pdfs to print you own cards. Owning random expensive cards is no way to play a fair game.
I have a three Gaea's Cradles, been thinking about selling them and playing with proxies. Do you think now is the time? Especially with a possible recession/lay-offs?
A couple years back one of the original Pokemon TCG designers was outright printing off fakes of pre-release cards and peddling them with the help of a western company, and people only found out because they decoded printer patterns and found out they were printed with a recent printer.
A lot of the really expensive cards are also foils, which for the card stock they use for English cards ends up warping quite a bit over time. I knew multiple people who refused to buy foils ever because of this.
I used to be deep into the competitive MTG scene. It goes deeper than this. Everyone knew that foils caused warping, which would lead to different theories of the “best way” to foil your deck to get an edge, while also being plausibly deniable that you were essentially marking your deck with foils if someone called a judge on you.
At the high level MTG is as much about rules lawyering as it is about actual skilled play, if you’re curious to learn more about this aspect of the game go learn about the 1997 pro tour with Mike Long, who infamously took the win by mind games and causing his opponent to concede when Long had no path to victory.
I've only played at the lowest possible levels (at local card shops), so my experience is probably not super representative of the competitive scene. Pretty much everyone I played with was more concerned about keeping their cards in good condition than trying to angle-shoot their way to a free win (getting a few more bucks of store credit isn't enough motivation to ruin one's standing in what was essentially a social community).
I'm a bit more familiar with rules lawyering mostly because incidents where people got wins from it are somewhat common topics that people would bring up for fun. Someone might play a Griselbrand deck, and someone else would ask if they knew about the Borborygmos incident that led to the rule where naming a card doesn't require literally knowing the exact name, etc.
Happens to other collectibles too. There are some Games Workshop miniatures that are made in resin, and you can tell the clones appart because they use far better resin, which bends less. For some old plastic molds it's the same thing: You get much better cast out of bootlegs.
You can get plastic NFC cards. I bet there are companies that will print and program them.
It must be possible to have flexible paper-like cards because my city has one-time tickets with NFC. Game would be nicer with card stock and not rigid plastic.
Altered attempted something similar. QR codes that add a digital copy to your digital collection. The physical card is just a proxy of the digital one. To enter tournaments or trade a card you have to own/trade the digital one. There was an official print service to order physical copies of the digital cards.
Fakes don't actually hurt the game. Just print out whatever cards you want and play with them, nobody is hurt and you don't pay usury prices to a company literaly printing money.
The idea is more for collecters, get something hard to clone that supports public key crypto like the more recent NXT miifare cards. Program them with a unique number and key each and you could do remote verification that someone holds the card in question. Registries of card location etc. hell if you are clever you could invent a little database and state machine to load on the card to store it's values and logic in electronic access form.
Is hardware safe? I mean the circuit has to be correct to work kind of thing. I know embedded people do use AI to reverse engineer things/go through a lot of logs. I have also heard about AI designed chips but seems you have more regulations to go through for selling the resulting hardware.
Ah yes, my first love. I remember creating a quiz game based on greek mythology, and a little RPG where I realized the power of exponential functions by wrecking my power curve.
I don't agree with everything this piece concludes, but I do admire getting to read through a whole HN article without feeling the sheen of AI co-authorship.
It’s funny you say that as about halfway through I was beginning to wonder if this was at least Claude-edited. Absolutely no shade to the author meant, I think it’s a thoughtful article, but I _did_ feel the sheen of AI co-authorship.
It raises the question of how much text I have read that I did not realise was LLM-generated. I think I have a decent nose for it but I’m not perfect, there must be false negatives (and false positives, as it certainly might be with this article). What will it mean when I can no longer tell the difference?
Edit: thinking on it a little more, I hope the author doesn’t feel insulted by my comment given the subject matter of the article at hand. Sorry, it’s early morning! I’m sure I am wrong about my assessment. Which now really makes me wonder about the above
Hey! I'm not insulted at all. My position is that of a Luddite: I think technology is neutral, but deployment is not. My critique is structural, and I don't blame people in or out of tech for adopting AI to be able to survive.
No AIs were harmed in the writing of this post, either physically or by the sharing of earlier (cringe) drafts.
> What will it mean when I can no longer tell the difference?
It just means that you will have to evaluate prose on its own merits (aesthetic, logical, etc).
The main problem with LLM-assisted writing is that effort-to-write is now much lower than effort-to-read -- the LLM-prose-style is simply an imperfection that can sometimes help the reader bail on a piece (and there might be false-positives).
Most people are already biased against reading long pieces, and seem to skim them more often than not. These people are _probably_ a little worse off than before, but they are not paying full-price for being hoodwinked. The people who end up paying full-price are probably going to become more sophisticated in how they choose what to read. I can't tell if this will be good/bad for publishers and/or advertisers.
Believe me or not, that's good news for me. I actually really enjoyed your writing, and I'm glad that feeling wasn't misplaced. I'm sorry if my remarks came across as mean-spirited...
I'm absolutely tired at work on how many people are writing with em-dashes with obvious AI prose. I feel a little bit insulted but then I remember we all participate in this charade.
I actually realized last night that everything that got me excited about the internet circa 2013 is actually way easier now, fun little one-off websites are far more doable, but we've lost the zeitgeist perhaps. It makes me wanna move back to NYC and go to BrooklynJS again.
I started doing this a few years ago, it works a treat with non-junior engineers. With the right testing in place, review becomes more about communicating the ideas clearly rather than gatekeeping.
I really miss the old way of doing things. I know it was a maintenance nightmare, but I only really value having an iphone app with native notifications that lets me see exactly the same stuff I would see on my laptop. I don't manage a ton of agents, I typically have one main task I am focusing on and possibly another smaller task on the back burner.
While refrigerated transport came with great benefits - everyday families who previously had meat only 1 or 2 nights a week could have it daily! - but I don't think we've yet realized the impact of only consuming food that has been dead and stored for several days.
when you have an "unlimited" access to food, you have to have self imposed scarcity to eat the diet that our bodies are designed to intake. It doesn't help that there is weaponized fat, salt, and corn in colorful bags everywhere you look.
By your own logic, anything that can be done 'for women' would equally benefit you. You are in a woman's societal role, and being marginalized to the point of invisibility comes with the territory.
reply