The Queue: Let it snow?

Now, I’m not usually one for the laws of attraction or manifestation or whatever, but it always feels like a wasted opportunity to me if it’s really cold out and it doesn’t snow. So.

This is The Queue, where you ask us questions and we’ll give you answers while we’re bundled up under a couple blankets with a mug of cocoa.

As someone who likes to play more control-style ramp decks as opposed to decks which reward interactions mid-round, I hate SI Sefin with the fire of a thousand suns. You’re telling me I juggled Quilboar for the past 15 minutes and all that work gets undone by a single stabby boi?

However, at the same time I have to acknowledge three things. One, just because it rocks my personal style doesn’t mean the mechanic is bad or unfair. Two, just because a particular deck or style of play is objectively more active or trickier on the part of the player to pull off doesn’t mean it’s any more or less deserving of a win — they’re cards, not moral imperatives. And third, a new balance patch is always around the corner.

And I hope that new balance patch lets me rip open SI Sefin and wear it like a frickin sock.

That’s bizarrely hard to answer qualitatively, because across the history of video games, up until the past couple years we’ve largely filled in the blanks in our own imaginations. I remember having a big crush on Squall Lionheart the first time I played Final Fantasy VIII, and it turns out he probably wasn’t the best looking guy at the ball in hindsight.

But I gotta go with Bayonetta. It’s so over the top it circles back again.

For me, two things really help. One is mindset. While people are there to see you and what you say has value to them, at the same time unless you literally pee your pants your presentation isn’t going to be memorable for them in the same way you think it might be. I also think to myself that I’m a strong, confident public speaker and I will absolutely crush this. Thinking about how nervous you are and how hard it’ll be will only make you more nervous and make it harder.

The other is repetition. Not only is public speaking a learned skill, so over time those little ums and ahs and weird repeated words (why do I start off with “so” like, every time?) will get eased out as you practice, but also the more times you do it the more all the times kind of ease themselves into a flat memory. For instance, think of the thousands of times you’ve run WoW dungeons. Do you remember, specifically, the 6th time you ran Shadowmoon Burial Grounds in Warlords? Did you die? Did you stand in something bad? Was the tank in a DPS spec? Was it a PUG or guild group? Even if you completely screwed up and got kicked, you probably don’t really remember. Public speaking is kinda like that over time. If you only publicly speak a couple times, your projector difficulties or your weird cough will stick in your memory, but if you keep doing it only the really egregious stuff will stand out — and even those times won’t be as egregious the more you do it.

The plot throughout both the zones and the overarching story in Legion hinged closely on characters we were already close to, so the ‘cool quotient’ was absurdly high, and we didn’t have to have the stakes explained to us at all.

We chased Gul’dan and palled around with Khadgar before, and the Burning Legion has been an ever present threat since the RTS days, which continued as a background plot thread throughout the expansion. Azuna featured Azshara as part of its central story, Val’sharah featured the Emerald Dream, Malfurion, Xavius, Tyrande, and Ysera, Highmountain wound its way around to Wrathion and Deathwing, Stormheim featured Sylvanas and Genn Greymane. Suramar was the only zone with a story that was mostly fully new beyond the Legion, and it was also unique, with us having to earn the favor of the people we were questing for, and we slowly unlocked the hubs bit by bit, giving us a degree of ownership over both the zone and its fate. The Order Halls were all packed with fun cameos, and flavor already familiar from just playing our classes. We got super cool weapons that were either already known to us (Doomhammer) or given rich backstories pulling from themes and characters we were already familiar with (shut up, Ban Lu), and they also followed the rule of cool because they could be OP with wild mechanics since we were ditching them after this expansion.

By contrast, in Shadowlands, while the overarching story is about Sylvanas and saving Anduin, the Jailer and the story through the zones is completely new — and in fact, it kicked off by destroying one of the most iconic characters of Warcraft in The Lich King. Even in cases where we see older characters, they tend to be characters whose stories we thought were already completed, even if their ends were untimely, and mostly characters we haven’t really kicked it with in the past — Uther and Draka were both already axed before WoW started. There were also some new characters in Legion we could still kind of look at through a lens of nostalgia, like the Rangers in the Hunter Class Hall, or the Defias in the Rogue Hall. Hanging out with Lady Moonberry or attending Theotar’s parties is fun, but it feels very fleeting.

In other words, Legion had a really close tie to things we were already familiar with and felt important to both our world and the expansion, while Shadowlands seems both completely removed from the familiar and utterly inconsequential even while we’re here because we know we’re moving on when the expansion is over. And that’s super weird, because it’s where all our faves and foes go after we’re done with them, so it should feel very important. But meh.

Sometimes. Having to go through my dad’s garage after he died helped me a lot with that, though. My parents were both always the “we can use this for a project” type, so we always had a lot of stuff that was worn out but still kinda good floating around the house. But Dad had packed the entirety of his freestanding garage to the rafters, with barely enough space to open the door. We literally found enough parts to build an entire car and then some, from interiors to suspension to hubcaps. Of course, because they were all piled under heaps of old clothes and tools and furniture and scraps of wood and mugs and picture frames, all of which was probably kinda still good when he put it in there, but everything was rusty or molded or just plain broken under the mass of it all.

And honestly, that was how I felt looking at the whole thing — broken under the weight of all that stuff.

So, while I do have a tendency to Doom Box, I’m also acutely aware that all this half-good, might-use-one-day junk is really just getting in the way of the stuff that’s actually beneficial to me living my life. I’m well aware that there’s a good amount of privilege at play here, that I can afford to just throw out that one USB cable that doesn’t really work unless I prop up the phone on its side and then put a small weight on the cable and Mercury is in retrograde and buy a new one — but I already did buy a new one, and now I’m hanging on to the crummy one just in case, when in reality, in that case I’m just going to buy a new new one.

Also, I’m good enough all on my own to use the good lotion or good pens or good lipstick or good preserves or good chocolate. I don’t have to keep it in my bags for a special occasion like it’s a Mega Health Potion and I might totally need it more later. I alone am the special occasion. Besides, do you know how big a stack of 99 of those things would actually be in real life? Because I do, and it’s in my parents’ garage.