I’m choking this is the funniest tumblr apocalypse post I’ve seen so far stjitdtiseyarhtgsr
How does the clean-up step work if I had to discard a card and had Archfiend of Ifnir and Generous Patron on the battlefield? Would I keep drawing and discarding until my opponents didn't have any creatures left?
Players don’t get priority in the cleanup step unless an ability triggers because of something that happens in the cleanup step, such as Archfiend of Ifnir triggering. When something triggers in the cleanup step, that trigger will go on the stack and players will get priority as normal. There will then be another cleanup step after the first cleanup step. The turn won’t end until there’s a cleanup step in which nothing triggers and players don’t get priority.
In the scenario you describe, Archfiend of Ifnir will trigger for each card you discard. Those triggers will go on the stack and resolve one by one. Generous Patron will trigger for each creature that gets a counter from Archfiend’s trigger, causing you to draw that many cards. When the new cleanup step starts, you’ll have to discard to hand size again, which will trigger Archfiend again, which will trigger Patron again, etc. This process will continue until either your opponent has no creatures left that can get -1/-1 counters or you lose from drawing your whole deck.
I spent a lot of time this morning on my ride to work thinking about archives.
While my tumblr is only 6 years old, my digital history goes back to 2004. That’s nearly 15 continuous years of me writing and drawing, exploring fandoms, making statements, forming theories, being wrong, learning, being hurt, hurting others, doing dumb things, making friends… growing up. I would be mortified to be forever judged by something I said while I was 15 (or even something said 5 years ago). And yet, we do it all the time.
The archives of the Imperial Library go back as far as 1998 for some developer posts. I believe deeply in preserving information, in giving people the tools to do their own learning with as much detail and fidelity as possible. Some answers are found only in obscure interviews, some clarity gained only through some post on a long-lost forum. I save only the TES related things, but, even then, I question sometimes if I’m going too far. I’m enabling people to forever hold people to things said ten or even twenty years ago - for thoughts had in entirely different times in both Tamriel and on Earth - for opinions long since changed and wording long since regretted.
Nothing said is said in isolation. This quote, for example, is from July 2000. This post is old enough to drive, to vote, and to drink in Europe. Many of you reading this now were not yet born. Cutting edge graphics in 2000 looked like this:
The interview originally took place on IRC (a chat client). IRC does not save logs by itself (so someone joining a channel later cannot see what was said), instead, logs could kept by individuals on their own computers. It was an impermanent medium. The interview was then archived on the Morrowind Summit forums, where it was buried by newer posts and eventually lost when Planet Elder Scrolls shut down in 2013. I found it many years later through archive.org, and backed it up to the UESP. I thought it was a fascinating look at what game development and community used to be, a fun reminder of simpler times when the likes of Todd Howard would hang out with fans in chatrooms. It made me smile.
But that context is lost on the eve of 2019. Looking at it today, one is likely to see an indictment of Bethesda, regardless of whether Todd still “likes pretty pictures” or not. Same thing goes for any archived post. Whether through understandable ignorance or deliberate omission context is lost. Dates are not preserved, questions and subsequent answers aren’t achieved, the text is cut up into smaller chunks, we forget what was happening in the world then, we view the quote in light of modern sensibilities and things the author said or did later. I see it again and again and again. And I wonder: do we, by clinging to history, not give people (and things, and ideas) room to grow? Would it be better to let these archives fall away, so that we can think about what’s said today, not ten years ago?
Like I said above, I believe that we have a lot to learn from old information, both in terms of facts and of the circumstances that spawned them. But to be better at this, to allow people and ideas to evolve away from things long ago, we have to remember to both preserve context and to consider it when reading archives. To do otherwise - to cut and frame things as if the person is speaking today, to pretend that time and circumstance doesn’t matter - is doing the community a disservice.
