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pumpinglemma posted:This approach seems like it could create a lot of ill will if they tried it post-beta, though. Imagine how you'd feel if you just bought a playset of a powerful card and then not only was it nerfed in tournament play, but the card itself actually changed so it couldn't be used in casual.
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May 25, 2013 03:27
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Think I'll be picking up at Raid Leader tier. For PVE purposes, it seems like a no-brainer as loot is based on how long it takes you to complete the content. Just sad I didn't get in at the pro-player tier. Such retarded value. Having to go up to the 2500$ tier to get neverending free drafts is a bit much.
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May 25, 2013 03:35
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pumpinglemma posted:This approach seems like it could create a lot of ill will if they tried it post-beta, though. Imagine how you'd feel if you just bought a playset of a powerful card and then not only was it nerfed in tournament play, but the card itself actually changed so it couldn't be used in casual. I recall a few cards getting tweaked in other online CCG's, and yeah there's usually some uproar, but the changes tend to be minor like a point increase/decrease in cost instead of re-working the entire card and I don't recall them doing it with anything super rare. But really, this is what beta testing is for and I'd hope we won't run into major must-have power cards. It's an interesting balance they'll have to get with some items changing how other cards work, but I find it's PvP stuff that people will whine over more for MMO's.
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May 25, 2013 03:39
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A word of warning: in the gam(bl)ing world, this is very often a sign of a company with less in the bank than it needs to cover obligations. When a company is unscrupulous and in trouble, player funds take a backseat to affiliates, marketing, and day to day operating costs, all of which get more players in the door at the cost of 'merely' making a few existing ones unhappy. It's happened many times and the pattern always looks like this. That does not mean these guys will be broke two years from now or even that that is what is happening here. But don't count on making serious money from this particular videogame too heavily.
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May 25, 2013 13:25
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Adar posted:A word of warning: in the gam(bl)ing world, this is very often a sign of a company with less in the bank than it needs to cover obligations. When a company is unscrupulous and in trouble, player funds take a backseat to affiliates, marketing, and day to day operating costs, all of which get more players in the door at the cost of 'merely' making a few existing ones unhappy. It's happened many times and the pattern always looks like this. Thanks for posting that, appreciate the warning. Looking over the thread the later few pages seem to have a lot of posts from people finally getting paid, though; the original poster seems to have been paid, etc. It might just be squeaky wheels or they may be catching up. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 13:52 on May 25, 2013 |
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May 25, 2013 13:42
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Thanks for posting that, appreciate the warning. Looking over the thread the later few pages seem to have a lot of posts from people finally getting paid, though, so they may be catching up. Yeah, it looks like in January they had a 15 month backlog in some cases and they've now worked it down to 9 months. I'm not sure what Adar's getting at about player funds taking a back seat to marketing, though. The Magic Player Programme (which covers everything from FNM prizes to Pro Tour cashes) is funded from the marketing budget.
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May 25, 2013 13:51
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He probably means spending directly on advertisements, awesome promotional kickstarter videos, etc.
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May 25, 2013 14:02
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Jedit posted:Yeah, it looks like in January they had a 15 month backlog in some cases and they've now worked it down to 9 months. Hieronymous Alloy posted:He probably means spending directly on advertisements, awesome promotional kickstarter videos, etc. This. Ads bring in thousands of players. Not paying one guy pisses off that one guy and possibly some others if he makes a thread about it months later. I'm not saying that they are underfunded, but in my industry, this is what underfunded companies act like. That said, whether or not they are healthy, the backlog will be coming down in any case because they just cleared well more than their KS was budgeted for and cannot afford negative publicity now. If their game is a hit, even if they had problems before, the backlog will clear and that'll be all we hear for a while. Even if it's not a hit, the slow paying could have some other cause as well. Just don't make plans based on making auction house bux.
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May 25, 2013 15:26
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I guess part of the benefit of this online format is that they can avoid that situation in the first place. Rather than pay out cash, they can credit the players' account with Platinum if they ever do a "money" tournament. I doubt that would happen in the first place though. Seems to me most tournaments will pay out in packs anyway. Again, those have absolutely no overhead whatsoever and can be generated on the fly. There's a reason everyone says that MTGO prints money, and the fact that the company isn't losing any of what gets paid in to printing, shipping, and retailer overhead means every pack and piece of in-game currency sold is pure profit. (They still have development, server, and admin overhead, but that's small change compared to the ones they avoid.) If this game becomes big, Cryptozoic will be set financially for a looooong time. Zonekeeper fucked around with this message at 17:22 on May 25, 2013 |
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May 25, 2013 17:16
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This game is looking awesome so far, especially with the Twitch video with Midrange Humans v. Mono- I'm only getting in at the Knight tier, though, since I'm not in any position to invest more in this than I would any other video game. But I feel like this is still a pretty good deal, especially if I only want to put two decks together at the moment. All Nines fucked around with this message at 03:18 on May 26, 2013 |
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May 25, 2013 17:46
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All Nines posted:This game is looking awesome so far, especially with the Twitch video with Midrange Humans v. Mono- Is there any way to watch those twitch videos? Didn't see an archive.
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May 25, 2013 17:46
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Is there any way to watch those twitch videos? Didn't see an archive. I think these might be mostly/all the same video, but they're here. There's some sort of sound-tech mishap at the beginning in the most popular video, but once you've skipped past that, the games should just about be starting, and one of the other videos cut that part out.
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May 25, 2013 17:57
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So, they released the Elf Update today. Apparently Elf Clerics are half-furry satyrs.
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May 25, 2013 19:44
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That black vs. humans stream was kind of painful to watch when the narrator kept getting screwed by the graveyard card not working correctly. If I'm calculating it right he would have won the 3rd game if it had done its job. You expect some stuff like that in a pre-alpha but it still made me cringe.
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May 25, 2013 19:55
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The Moon Monster posted:That black vs. humans stream was kind of painful to watch when the narrator kept getting screwed by the graveyard card not working correctly. If I'm calculating it right he would have won the 3rd game if it had done its job. You expect some stuff like that in a pre-alpha but it still made me cringe. I'm watching that stream right now. Play-testing, whee!
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May 25, 2013 20:00
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He also got severely mana screwed in the first game, which is kind of interesting. I actually expect it to be a bit harder to get totally mana-screwed in a multi-color deck because of how resources and thresholds work compared to Magic, but that still doesn't help if you've only drawn 2 resources by the 10th turn. The charge mechanic also means mana flooding shouldn't be quite as awful, too, if still not ideal. I'm actually interested to see what the default resource percentage for competitive decks will end up being.
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May 25, 2013 20:01
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Zurai posted:He also got severely mana screwed in the first game, which is kind of interesting. I actually expect it to be a bit harder to get totally mana-screwed in a multi-color deck because of how resources and thresholds work compared to Magic, but that still doesn't help if you've only drawn 2 resources by the 10th turn. The charge mechanic also means mana flooding shouldn't be quite as awful, too, if still not ideal. I'm actually interested to see what the default resource percentage for competitive decks will end up being. I think this will really depend on what you're planning on casting. If you need to be casting Extinction on turn 5 or 6, you'll probably want 25 or 26 resources and a Champion that has a pretty cheap and useful charge power. The free uses of Pact of Pain would be pretty good for that. If there are artifacts that can produce energy, those could help, but you'll still need actual resources because of Threshold. What I really like about the Threshold and Energy mechanics is that the need for dual lands is drastically reduced. However, I wouldn't object to a couple of cycles of non-basic resources that give you two different Thresholds.
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May 25, 2013 20:11
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In one of the Kickstarter images there's a rare Resource which appears to be dual-threshold related. It's called Ascendant Brilliance, gives 1/1 Resources, and has text giving you an ability if you have either [DIAMOND] or [SAPPHIRE]. The entire card face hasn't been revealed (it's shown behind another card) so it's not clear if it grants thresholds itself, though. So, they're certainly making rare Resource cards which in some way facilitate multi-color decks, but it's not yet clear entirely in which manner.
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May 25, 2013 20:26
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That makes me a little said, as the insane price of manabases is a big reason that I'm not more competitive in Magic. Hopefully there will be enough product in circulation that these rare resources won't be too hard to find.
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May 25, 2013 20:29
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Some Numbers posted:That makes me a little said, as the insane price of manabases is a big reason that I'm not more competitive in Magic. Hopefully there will be enough product in circulation that these rare resources won't be too hard to find. I wouldn't worry too much. In print dual lands are usually cheap on MTGO, and if a Hex analog exists, I'd expect them to be even cheaper.
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May 25, 2013 20:30
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Well, if it doesn't actually grant any thresholds, I can see it being very non-essential. That'd basically be like a land which only grants colorless mana when tapped in Magic (not quite the same thing but close enough for comparison). Useful if it has a good secondary ability, but not dual-land essential.
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May 25, 2013 20:31
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BenRGamer posted:So, they released the Elf Update today. Apparently Elf Clerics are half-furry satyrs. Considering there are rabbit people, coyote people and cat ninjas... the Elf Cleric with hooves and horns didn't even set off my furry alarm. I can't decide if I want to add a King to my GK pledge. I'd like to have a set of the PVE/PVP cards, but I don't know if it would be cheaper to get it over with by getting the additional King tier or trying to get everything off the AH at release. I know there are plenty of people who aren't going to care about the PVE stuff. Really i'd like to add a collector to have a set of the alt cards but that's just more than i'm willing to spend.
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May 25, 2013 21:12
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None of the animal people have giant boobs, so I'm not really reading them as furries at the moment.
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May 25, 2013 21:39
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From what I understand, Set 1 focuses on 4 races, 2 on each "faction:" Shin'hare, Dwarves, Humans and Orcs, but I'm not entirely sure if that's true. After all, we did see a legendary Coyotle card and several necrotic troops.
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May 25, 2013 21:48
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Since Set 1 is the core set, I expect it will have plenty of stuff for all 8 major races. The smaller sets will likely focus more on specific concepts/races, but there's room in a 350 card base set for everything.
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May 25, 2013 21:54
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Does anyone know how the abilities on cards like Ninja Training and Moment of Glory work? Is that spending your Thresholds or simply "you must have this many Thresholds?"
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May 25, 2013 21:59
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You never spend thresholds, as I understand it. The word is used literally.
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May 25, 2013 22:21
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Some Numbers posted:Does anyone know how the abilities on cards like Ninja Training and Moment of Glory work? Is that spending your Thresholds or simply "you must have this many Thresholds?" It must be "if you have these Thresholds", because Midnight Shepherd requires one of each Threshold to activate then says in its ability text that you lose a Threshold.
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May 25, 2013 22:24
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The Elf art looks cooler than I expected it to.
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May 26, 2013 00:31
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Hey everyone. Sorry, long time no talk. I forgot last weekend was Pro Tour weekend in San Diego so I spent all weekend there. For those of you who don't know, I'm an associate producer at Cryptozoic managing the art. I'm also the one posting daily on the Kickstarter. 1 - For Ninja Training and Moment of Glory, you must simply have those thresholds. 2 - Set 1 is the core set. It features every race, but some more prominent than others. You'll see the others carve out their own piece of the story across the next set or two. 3 - Regarding the "mana screw" in game 1 of the Twitch feed (which now has the bad audio cut, and you can see the fresh version at http://www.twitch.tv/hextcg/b/407910948), the interesting thing was that if he had drawn a ruby shard, he could've played both Ragefires in hand and taken control of the game. Also, there's a different champion that deck would ideally play that would've helped in that situation, but our last build broke his scripting so we couldn't use him. The Twitch videos are important, but getting the game ready for beta release on time is more important to the community. Overall, champions do a lot to help both flood and screw. As far as cards not working, that's just going to happen occasionally in a game that's pre-alpha. I assume that HEX is the most complete game that has ever come to Kickstarter. 4 - In terms of revenue, what the online model allows us to do is put a ton back into prizes. WoWTCG has an incredibly robust OP program when compared to its playerbase size. We won't have to regularly rent venue space, pay tens of thousands of dollars for on-site ISDN lines at hotels (which is the biggest crock of poo poo in terms of running tournaments). ANd players won't have to pay for travel. We can put a lot more into prizing and support into the game. That's what we've always done, and that's what we'll continue to do. 5 - As far as homogeneous decks, I'll speak personally about this. This opinion does not reflect the company. No Cryptozoic zone starts... now: I don't believe WoW ever reached the critical mass point where there were enough deckbuilders in the game. A lot of winning decklists were months behind in terms of set releases (Spiders for a NACC a few years ago being an example of this). The community was also so close and got along so well where people just ended up sharing tech, sharing opinions, and playing the same decks (and chasing the same epics, driving up the price of them) in a self-fulfilling prophecy way. With online tournaments and 24/7 tournaments and all the data everyone can glean from a digital product, I don't think this will be the case. And you'll see a lot more movement in the secondary market. Ok, back to Cryptozoic zone. Anyway, I'll check back later over the long weekend and try to answer more questions. Thanks for backing, everyone.
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May 26, 2013 01:10
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One thing I was curious, we have mostly seen positive decks (Card advantage, Spam creatures that kind of thing) What sort of presence is counter magic and interference going to have, for example with colourless mana (in essence) I am curious if we can can we attack opponent's thresholds with certain cards.
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May 26, 2013 01:34
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Stormgale posted:One thing I was curious, we have mostly seen positive decks (Card advantage, Spam creatures that kind of thing) What sort of presence is counter magic and interference going to have, for example with colourless mana (in essence) I am curious if we can can we attack opponent's thresholds with certain cards. As an outsider to the R&D team, I can say that the general feeling is that there is always going to be a place for counter magic, but you probably won't see a lot of general "stop whatever your opponent is doing" and you'll see more targeted stuff. As far as removing a player's threshold, maybe, but that's a pretty big "feel bad" moment for anybody on the receiving end of it. There are a lot more interactive ways to prevent your opponent from doing something and stuff like that is pretty dangerous in any number because of the negative play pattern of stopping your opponent from, say, "playing any card in their hand." I'll try to source an R&D member later to better explain this to me so I can respond more in-depth if you'd like.
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May 26, 2013 02:04
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I wonder how the Auction House is going to play out, as this is a Trading Card Game I wonder if you will be able to put up actual trades or if you will need to sell your cards for Gold and then use that to buy other cards? Also I really need to stop myself from going up to the $2,500 tier - this is the worst (best?) case of Kickstarter fever I've ever had, wish I had paid attention to this one sooner
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May 26, 2013 02:22
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If it isn't too much trouble I am just curious, I mean considering buff's can be permanent now it kind of takes a pin out of control's cap, harder to get value when the buff stays even if it is bounced or destroyed etc I am curious what options they have. Yeah I would agree nuking threshold would suck, I am just curious if there is a way to stop an opponent ramping into big value apart from murdering them (As I play Junk Re-animator in Magic right now I am part of that very problem I will admit) and it can feel very bad, I was just curious how it was presented as I am not very familiar with what if any the WoWTCG has in that regard. If you are doing the posts blinkman do you also handle responding to messages on Kickstarter? Also will there be options to just draft with my friends/other goons I mean with the abundance of packs from the Kickstarter (as I am in for Grand King) can we setup a goon only draft if we have the product/tickets? I mean I plan to drop some of my 30 pack "Gifts" on just throwing them for goon drafts to get us playing the game and such if that is possible.
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May 26, 2013 02:24
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I have a few questions that are nagging me. 1) How many copies of a card in a deck? 2) Multiple Threshold resources? Can't say? 3) Any idea when the contents of the starter decks will be released or are they random? 4) This is a longshot and probably way closer to blatant copying, but I wonder if it would be possible for there to be Champion that's similar to MTGO's Momir avatar.
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May 26, 2013 02:41
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Blinkman987 posted:As an outsider to the R&D team, I can say that the general feeling is that there is always going to be a place for counter magic, but you probably won't see a lot of general "stop whatever your opponent is doing" and you'll see more targeted stuff. As far as removing a player's threshold, maybe, but that's a pretty big "feel bad" moment for anybody on the receiving end of it. There are a lot more interactive ways to prevent your opponent from doing something and stuff like that is pretty dangerous in any number because of the negative play pattern of stopping your opponent from, say, "playing any card in their hand." Awesome to have you in the thread. My question is a bit different, but as someone who is more familiar with the game than any of us, is there anything you'd like to see in the OP that would better represent the game?
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May 26, 2013 02:43
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Some Numbers posted:1) How many copies of a card in a deck? I'm pretty sure this is 4. One of the pieces of equipment they've shown allows you to put a fifth copy of a particular card (the shock analogue I think) in your deck.
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May 26, 2013 03:01
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JerryLee posted:Is anybody really talking so far about the graphic design of the card faces? I don't know about anyone else, and I'm sure it will depend on what size they end up being displayed in the client, but in places like this card gallery they're displayed at about the same size on my monitor as paper Magic cards but seem far less easy on the eyes. At the very least they seem significantly harder to read or make sense of than the classic Magic cardface, and given how much bellyaching there seems to be about that every time it comes up, I'm surprised there isn't more critique about this aspect of the design. This concerns me as well. There's something about their cards that just makes them rather hard to read. I think it's something about the aliasing on the letters or the contrast that bothers me. I think in general there's way too much contrast between the text, borders, and various other elements of the card frame.
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May 26, 2013 03:08
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White letters on a dark background is supposed to cause less eye strain when reading text on a monitor. Contrast is a good thing when legibility is an issue, so that's not it. I usually have to zoom in to read a card when playing DOTP, so it's not limited to Hex's card design. It's just an issue that comes with a DOTP-style UI - things are shrunk down and displayed at an angle, so they're going to be hard to read regardless.
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May 26, 2013 03:18
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Yeah, I've had a hard time reading details on some of the twitch streams but I've assumed that was an issue with the resolution on the stream more than anything else. Otherwise all the card images have been plenty clear.
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May 26, 2013 03:24
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