I remember feeling kind of like you some years back and thinking surely this is just drama from terminally online people right? But then I finally did look into it and consider it and I did conclude that the woman really is a huge asshole.

Reminded me of this: https://youtu.be/y8O3LbP_r9A

Warning: mildly disturbing puppet

I have done this before. Not at this stage of life but when I was young it worked well for me.

I like being around people too much.

Now if I could convince my 100 favorite people to come with me… now we’re talking.

Yeah upper Midwest has great summer weather. Too bad about the mosquitoes though.

Even San Francisco is freezing much of the time. And Alaska is quite cooler than that.

Do you do that? If so, pretty damn cool!

It’s all relative. I consider Alaska to be quite cold even if it’s technically temperate.

I live in California and our subtropical winters are about as chilly as I would like to experience, personally.

Yeah, it’s really inconvenient for y’all when people have a word to accurately summarize the fatal flaw in your ideology isn’t it?

Chlorophyllum sp. maybe? Although I usually see them in grass so maybe not…

Colder than Canada??? Not many options there lol.

I would consider Canada if it wasn’t for the winters… Maybe Vancouver would be tolerable but even that’s pushing it. If I have to put on a jacket that’s a sign that human beings were not meant to live here.

I hate cold weather lol. And where I live now already gets hotter than most of Australia. Or at least the parts where people live.

NZ could also be nice but I heard it’s hard to immigrate there.

Nordic countries or the Netherlands seem pretty cool. Although the winters would be a bit brutal being so far north.

Realistically I’ve thought about Australia since it has a nice climate, decent politics, and no language barrier.

Personally I would not leave the USA voluntarily since I mostly like the people I know here but if the fascists succeed in taking over then I might have to go somewhere else. Still hoping they can be beaten though.

Lemmy was started by authoritarian communists (often called tankies) who got banned from Reddit, so they are generally more abundant here. They have their own alternate version of reality where the USSR was the most perfect society to ever exist and the west is the source of all evil in the world.

There are a few instances (aka servers) they tend to congregate on, but the main one is Lemmy.ml. It was the first server made so despite its extreme ideological slant, it still has a lot of subscribers. Just avoid any communities on Lemmy.ml and this shouldn’t happen anymore.

Don’t really have a fave but here are some I enjoy:

Muse - Knights of Cydonia

C2C - Delta

Miike Snow - My Trigger

Childish Gambino - This is America

Michael Jackson - Thriller

Well a lot of us do think the gambling aspect is problematic, which is why I mentioned it in my initial comment. I just think it’s a fun game but I can think that while also wishing certain aspects were different.

Ah I’m in California so no dice! Let me know if you find any of those expensive cards I mentioned so I can have some vicarious excitement. It’s probably not super likely since they were only sold to very early adopters in I think 1993. But you never know!

I edited it just now so check out the parts I added. If you were near me I’d offer to help go through it. Looking through old collections is fun. Kinda like gold panning!

I don’t have any direct experience selling collections but there’s a few ways you can go about it. The simplest is to go into a local card shop and see what they offer. You might want to read reviews because there is a risk they could low-ball you since it doesn’t sound like you have a clear idea of the value. It might be a good idea to visit a few different shops and see what they offer, but if you have thousands of cards and don’t know which are valuable, they won’t be able to give you a precise value since they’re not going to spend hours sorting until after they buy the collection. With old cards they can be worth anywhere from ten cents to hundreds or even thousands of dollars. So if the valuable cards are hiding amongst the worthless ones, it’s hard to accurately assess value without doing that sorting.

If you have cards from the earliest editions, you may want to at least go through and look for some of the most valuable cards to exist, which are the power 9, and dual lands. You can find a list online, these are 19 cards that are extremely valuable due to their rarity and power. If you have any of these they can be worth more than the rest of the cards combined, so pulling them out and selling them separately would definitely be worthwhile.

If you have more time and the number of cards isn’t too overwhelming you can also go through and enter them all into a collection manager: I use https://archidekt.com/ but there are many options. Then it will tell you which ones are worth money. Most of the value is typically in a small number of cards, and the rest can be sold as “bulk” for basically pennies. Once you have an inventory you can check with online collection buyers to see what offers you can get.

Keep in mind that when you look at prices online or in a collection manager, you’ll see what cards sell for, but you won’t necessarily get that price as a seller. They offer you lower prices so they can make a profit, but if it seems too low you can shop around.

It definitely can be pay to win although I don’t spend much on it and have good success. But I’ve been playing for decades and consider myself a pretty skilled player. I also use proxies, basically printed out images in place of real cards, especially for new decks where I’m not sure I want to spend money on them yet.

That said, your friend didn’t give you a good introduction. Your friend should have done more to help you build a solid deck and to match the power level of his deck to yours. I have many decks of different power levels for this reason, and I think good etiquette is to bring a deck that’s near the power level of your opponent’s, especially if they’re new.

Also, buying packs isn’t the best way to start out. Probably best to have a friend build you a deck or if that’s not an option or to buy a precon. Most of the cards you get in packs are bad and no one really plays with them, so if you put those in your deck, you aren’t going to have much success.

Or, just decide the game isn’t for you. That’s also valid!

Proxying is the way to go if you have concerns about cost, for sure.