edit: thanks for the awards. I'd be a dick to take credit. Go check out the one-man-band who actually wrote it---I've been reading for a couple months, good stuff https://bestinterest.blog/explain-the-big-short/
(Best Interest) This post will explain the Big Short and the 2008 subprime mortgage collapse in simple terms.
This post is a little longer than usual–maybe give yourself 20 minutes to sift through it. But I promise you’ll leave feeling like you can tranche (that’s a verb, right?!) the whole financial system!
Key Players
First, I want to introduce the players in the financial crisis, as they might not make sense at first blush. One of the worst parts about the financial industry is how they use deliberately obtuse language to explain relatively simple ideas. Their financial acronyms are hard to keep track of. In order to explain the Big Short, these players–and their roles–are key.
Individuals, a.k.a. regular people who take out mortgages to buy houses; for example, you and me!
Mortgage lenders, like a local bank or a mortgage lending specialty shop, who give out mortgages to individuals. Either way, they’re probably local people that the individual home-buyer would meet in person.
Big banks, such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, who buy lots of mortgages from lenders. After this transaction, the homeowner would owe money to the big bank instead of the lender.
Collateralized debt obligations (CDOs)—deep breath!—who take mortgages from big banks and bundle them all together into a bond (see below). And just like before, this step means that the home-buyer now owes money to the CDO. Why is this done?! I’ll explain, I promise.
Ratings agencies, whose job is to determine the risk of a CDO—is it filled with safe mortgages, or risky mortgages?
Investors, who buy part of a CDO and get repaid as the individual homeowners start paying back their mortgage.
Feel lost already? I’m going to be a good jungle guide and get you through this. Stick with me.
Quick definition: Bonds
A bond can be thought of as a loan. When you buy a bond, you are loaning your money. The issuer of the bond is borrowing your money. In exchange for borrowing your money, the issuer promises to pay you back, plus interest, in a certain amount of time. Sometimes, the borrower cannot pay the investor back, and the bond defaults, or fails. Defaults are not good for the investor.
The CDO—which is a bond—could hold thousands of mortgages in it. It’s a mortgage-backed bond, and therefore a type of mortgage-backed security. If you bought 1% of a CDO, you were loaning money equivalent to 1% of all the mortgage principal, with the hope of collecting 1% of the principal plus interest as the mortgages got repaid.
There’s one more key player, but I’ll wait to introduce it. First…
The Whys, Explained
Why does an individual take out a mortgage? Because they want a home. Can you blame them?! A healthy housing market involves people buying and selling houses.
How about the lender; why do they lend? It used to be so they would slowly make interest money as the mortgage got repaid. But nowadays, the lender takes a fee (from the homeowner) for creating (or originating) the mortgage, and then immediately sells to mortgage to…
A big bank. Why do they buy mortgages from lenders? Starting in the 1970s, Wall St. started buying up groups of loans, tying them all together into one bond—the CDO—and selling slices of that collection to investors. When people buy and sell those slices, the big banks get a cut of the action—a commission.
Why would an investor want a slice of a mortgage CDO? Because, like any other investment, the big banks promised that the investor would make their money back plus interest once the homeowners began repaying their mortgages.
You can almost trace the flow of money and risk from player to player.
At the end of the day, the investor needs to get repaid, and that money comes from homeowners.
CDOs are empty buckets
Homeowners and mortgage lenders are easy to understand. But a big question mark swirls around Wall Street’s CDOs.
I like to think of the CDO as a football field full of empty buckets—one bucket per mortgage. As an investor, you don’t purchase one single bucket, or one mortgage. Instead, you purchase a thin horizontal slice across all the buckets—say, a half-inch slice right around the 1-gallon mark.
As the mortgages are repaid, it starts raining. The repayments—or rain—from Mortgage A doesn’t go solely into Bucket A, but rather is distributed across all the buckets, and all the buckets slowly get re-filled.
As long as your horizontal slice of the bucket is eventually surpassed, you get your money back plus interest. You don’t need every mortgage to be repaid. You just need enough mortgages to get to your slice.
It makes sense, then, that the tippy top of the bucket—which gets filled up last—is the highest risk. If too many of the mortgages in the CDO fail and aren’t repaid, then the tippy top of the bucket will never get filled up, and those investors won’t get their money back.
These horizontal slices are called tranches, which might sound familiar if you’ve read the book or watched the movie.
So far, there’s nothing too wrong about this practice. It’s simply moving the risk from the mortgage lender to other investors. Sure, the middle-men (banks, lenders, CDOs) are all taking a cut out of all the buy and sell transactions. But that’s no different than buying lettuce at grocery store prices vs. buying straight from the farmer. Middle-men take a cut. It happens.
But now, our final player enters the stage…
Credit Default Swaps: The Lynchpin of the Big Short
Screw you, Wall Street nomenclature! A credit default swap sounds complicated, but it’s just insurance. Very simple, but they have a key role to explain the Big Short.
Investors thought, “Well, since I’m buying this risky tranche of a CDO, I might want to hedge my bets a bit and buy insurance in case it fails.” That’s what a credit default swap did. It’s insurance against something failing. But, there is a vital difference between a credit default swap and normal insurance.
I can’t buy an insurance policy on your house, on your car, or on your life. Only you can buy those policies. But, I could buy insurance on a CDO mortgage bond, even if I didn’t own that bond!
Not only that, but I could buy billions of dollars of insurance on a CDO that only contained millions of dollars of mortgages.
It’s like taking out a $1 million auto policy on a Honda Civic. No insurance company would allow you to do this, but it was happening all over Wall Street before 2008. This scenario essentially is “the big short” (see below)—making huge insurance bets that CDOs will fail—and many of the big banks were on the wrong side of this bet!
Credit default swaps involved the largest amounts of money in the subprime mortgage crisis. This is where the big Wall Street bets were taking place.
Quick definition: Short
A short is a bet that something will fail, get worse, or go down. When most people invest, they buy long (“I want this stock price to go up!”). A short is the opposite of that.
Certain individuals—like main characters Steve Eisman (aka Mark Baum in the movie, played by Steve Carrell) and Michael Burry (played by Christian Bale) in the 2015 Oscar-nominated film The Big Short—realized that tons of mortgages were being made to people who would never be able to pay them back.
If enough mortgages failed, then tranches of CDOs start to fail—no mortgage repayment means no rain, and no rain means the buckets stay empty. If CDOs fail, then the credit default swap insurance gets paid out. So what to do? Buy credit default swaps! That’s the quick and dirty way to explain the Big Short.
Why buy Dog Shit?
Wait a second. Why did people originally invest in these CDO bonds if they were full of “dog shit mortgages” (direct quote from the book) in the first place? Since The Big Short protagonists knew what was happening, shouldn’t the investors also have realized that the buckets would never get refilled?
For one, the prospectus—a fancy word for “owner’s manual”—of a CDO was very difficult to parse through. It was hard to understand exactly which mortgages were in the CDO. This is a skeevy big bank/CDO practice. And even if you knew which mortgages were in a CDO, it was nearly impossible to realize that many of those mortgages were made fraudulently.
The mortgage lenders were knowingly creating bad mortgages*.* They were giving loans to people with no hopes of repaying them. Why? Because the lenders knew they could immediately sell that mortgage—that risk—to a big bank, which would then securitize the mortgage into a CDO, and then sell that CDO to investors. Any risk that the lender took by creating a bad mortgage was quickly transferred to the investor.
So…because you can’t decipher the prospectus to tell which mortgages are in a CDO, it was easier to rely on the CDO’s rating than to evaluate each of the underlying mortgages. It’s the same reason why you don’t have to understand how engines work when you buy a car; you just look at Car & Driver or Consumer Reports for their opinions, their ratings.
The Ratings Agencies
Investors often relied on ratings to determine which bonds to buy. The two most well-known ratings agencies from 2008 were Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s (heard of the S&P 500?). The ratings agency’s job was to look at a CDO that a big bank created, understand the underlying assets (in this case, the mortgages), and give the CDO a rating to determine how safe it was. A good rating is “AAA”—so nice, it got ‘A’ thrice.
So, were the ratings agencies doing their jobs? No! There are a few explanations for this:

1. Even they—the experts in charge of grading the bonds—didn’t understand what was going on inside a CDO. The owner’s manual descriptions (prospectuses) were too complicated. In fact, ratings agencies often relied on big banks to teach seminars about how to rate CDOs, which is like a teacher learning how to grade tests from Timmy, who still pees his pants. Timmy just wants an A.
2. Ratings agencies are profit-driven companies. When they give a rating, they charge a fee. But if the agency hands out too many bad grades, then their customers—the big banks—will take their requests elsewhere in hopes of higher grades. The ratings agencies weren’t objective, but instead were biased by their need for profits.
3. Remember those fraudulent mortgages that the lenders were making? Unless you did some boots-on-the-ground research, it was tough to uncover this fact. It’s hard to blame the ratings agencies for not catching this.

Who’s to blame?
Everyone? Let’s play devil’s advocate…
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• Individuals: some people point the finger at homeowners, saying, “You should know better than to buy a $1 million house on a teacher’s salary.” I find this hard to swallow. These people, surrounded by the American home-ownership dream, were sold the idea that they would be fine. The mortgage lender had no incentive to sell a good mortgage, they only had an incentive to sell a mortgage. So, it’s hard for me to put too much blame on the homeowners.
• Mortgage lenders: someone knew. I’m not saying that all the mortgage lenders were fully aware of the implications of their actions, but some people knew that fraudulent loans were being made, and chose to ignore that fact. For example, check out whistleblower Eileen Foster.
• Big banks: Yes sir! There’s certainly blame here. Rather than get into all of the various money-grubbing, I want to call out one specific anecdote. Back in 2010, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein testified in front of Congress. Here it is:

To explain further, there are two things going on here.
First, Goldman Sachs bankers were selling CDOs to investors. They wanted to make a commission on the sale.
At the same time, other bankers ALSO AT GOLDMAN SACHS were buying credit default swaps, a.k.a. betting against the same CDOs that the first Goldman Sachs bankers were selling.
This is like selling someone a racehorse with cancer, and then immediately going to the track to bet against that horse. Blankfein’s defense in this video is, “But the horse seller and the bettor weren’t the same people!” And the Congressmen responds, “But they worked for the same stable, and collected the same paychecks!”
So do the big banks deserve blame? You tell me.
Inspecting Goldman Sachs
One reason Goldman Sachs survived 2008 is that they began buying credit default swaps (insurance) just in time before the housing market crashed. They were still on the bad side of some bets, but mostly on the good side. They were net profitable.
Unfortunately for them, the banks that owed Goldman money were going bankrupt from their own debt, and then Goldman never would have been able to collect on their insurance. Goldman would’ve had to payout on their “bad” bets, while not collecting on their “good” bets. In their own words, they were “toast.”
This is significant. Even banks in “good” positions would’ve gone bankrupt, because the people who owed the most money weren’t able to repay all their debts. Imagine a chain; Bank A owes money to Bank B, and B owes money to Bank C. If Bank A fails, then B can’t collect their debt, and B can’t pay C. Bank C made “good” bets, but aren’t able to collect on them, and then they go out of business.
These failures would’ve rippled throughout the world. This explains why the US government felt it necessary to bail-out the banks. That federal money allowed banks in “good” positions to collect their profits and “stop the ripple” from tearing apart the world economy. While CDOs and credit default swap explain the Big Short starting, this ripple of failure is the mechanism that affected the entire world.
Betting more than you have
But if someone made a bad bet—sold bad insurance—why didn’t they have money to cover that bet? It all depends on risk. If you sell a $100 million insurance policy, and you think there’s a 1% chance of paying out that policy, what’s your exposure? It’s the potential loss multiplied by the probability = 1% times $100 million, or $1 million.
These banks sold billions of dollars of insurance under the assumption that there was a 5%, or 3%, or 1% chance of the housing market failing. So they had 20x, or 30x, or 100x less money on hand then they needed to cover these bets.
Turns out, there was a 100% chance that the market would fail…oops!
Blame, expounded
Ratings agencies—they should be unbiased. But they sold themselves off for profit. They invited the wolves—big banks—into their homes to teach them how to grade CDOs. Maybe they should read a blog to explain the Big Short to them. Of course they deserve blame. Here’s another anecdote of terrible judgment from the ratings agencies:
Think back to my analogy of the buckets and the rain. Sometimes, a ratings agency would look at a CDO and say, “You’re never going to fill up these buckets all the way. Those final tranches—the ones that won’t get filled—they’re really risky. So we’re going to give them a bad grade.” There were “Dog Shit” tranches, and Dog Shit gets a bad grade.
But then the CDO managers would go back to their offices and cut off the top of the buckets. And they’d do this for all their CDOs—cutting off all the bucket-top rings from all the different CDO buckets. And then they’d super-glue the bucket-top rings together to create a field full of Frankenstein buckets, officially called a CDO squared. Because the Frankenstein buckets were originally part of other CDOs, the Frankenstein buckets could only start filling up once the original buckets (which now had the tops cut off) were filled. In other words, the CDO managers decided to concentrate all their Dog Shit in one place, and super glue it together.
A reasonable person would look at the Frankenstein Dog Shit field of buckets and say, “That’s turrible, Kenny.”
BUT THE RATINGS AGENCIES GAVE CDO-SQUAREDs HIGH GRADES!!! Oh I’m sorry, was I yelling?!
“It’s diversified,” they would claim, as if Poodle shit mixed with Labrador shit is better than pure Poodle shit.
Again, you tell me. Do the ratings agencies deserve blame?!
Does the government deserve blame?
Yes and no.
For example, part of the Housing and Community Development Act of 1992 mandated that the government mortgage finance firms (Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae) purchase a certain number of sub-prime mortgages.
On its surface, this seems like a good thing: it’s giving money to potential home-buyers who wouldn’t otherwise qualify for a mortgage. It’s providing the American Dream.
But as we’ve already covered today, it does nobody any good to provide a bad mortgage to someone who can’t repay it. That’s what caused this whole calamity. Freddie and Fannie and HUD were pumping money into the machine, helping to enable it. Good intentions, but they weren’t paying attention to the unintended outcomes.
And what about the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC), the watchdogs of Wall Street. Do they have a role to explain the Big Short? Shouldn’t they have been aware of the Big Banks, the CDOs, the ratings agencies?
Yes, they deserve blame too. They’re supposed to do things like ensure that Big Banks have enough money on hand to cover their risky bets. This is called proper “risk management,” and it was severely lacking. The SEC also had the power to dig into the CDOs and ferret out the fraudulent mortgages that were creating them. Why didn’t they do that?
Perhaps the issue is that the SEC was/is simply too close to Wall Street, similar to the ratings agencies getting advice from the big banks. Watchdogs shouldn’t get treats from those they’re watching. Or maybe it’s that the CDOs and credit default swaps were too hard for the SEC to understand.
Either way, the SEC doesn’t have a good excuse. If you’re in bed with the people you’re regulating, then you’re doing a bad job. If you’re rubber stamping things you don’t understand, then you’re doing a bad job.
Explain the Big Short, shortly
You’re about 2500 words into my “short summary.” But the important things to remember:
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• Financial acronyms suck.
• Money flowed from the investors down to the mortgage lenders, and the risk flowed from the mortgage lenders up to the investors. In between, the big banks and CDOs acted as middle men and intermediaries.
• When someone feels like their actions have no risk, or no consequences, they’ll behave poorly (big banks, mortgage lenders)When someone is given what seems like an amazing deal, they’ll take it (individual home owners).
• CDOs are like empty buckets. Mortgage payments are like rain, filling the buckets. Investors buy tranches, or slices, across all the buckets. If mortgages fail, then the buckets might not fill up, and the investors won’t get their money back.
• CDOs are intentionally complex. So complex, that not even the people grading them understood what was going on (ratings agencies).
• Buying insurance on something your do not own is a behavior with potential for abuse (big banks)
• Buying insurance on something for more than it’s worth is a behavior with potential for abuse (big banks). This is where most of the money in the financial crisis switched hands.

And with that, I’d like to announce the opening of the Best Interest CDO. Rather than invest in mortgages, I’ll be investing in race horses. Don’t ask my why, but the current top stallion is named ‘Dog Shit.’ He’ll take Wall Street by storm.
If you don’t mind my cussing but you do like this content, consider subscribing to the email list to get these articles (and nothing more) sent to your inbox every week.
I hope this post helped if you were looking for someone to explain the Big Short. Thanks for reading the Best Interest.
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Source: https://bestinterest.blog/explain-the-big-short/

Main account to D2
Second account to D1

Preface

I'm just an average dude with average aim and average scores. This isn't a pro guide, just a compilation of tips and observations I made for myself that can help regular players with very average skills such as myself. You can skip the history part if you're not interested.

History

I've never really been great at FPS in general. I never played any cs, but I played lots of BF4, BF1 and Apex. I played a little Overwatch and some COD Warzone as well but all these games seemed to lack something. That something, I found in Valorant. When I got in the Beta, I was super excited until I realized... I sucked.
I started out as Iron 1 and it took me a month to get out of Iron. I then somehow quickly made it all the way to gold 1 before the end of beta. I then flopped around between gold 1 and plat 1 all throughout Act I. During this act, I started climbing more and more consistently, from gold 1 at the start, to diamond 2 currently (with my act rank as D1 currently).
Also, I should mention I used to always play with my friends, most of the time duo queuing but also stacking up to five regularly. Out of all my friends, I was never the best, they were always the ones top-fragging and popping off more than I ever did BUT I also rarely bottom fragged. About a month ago, I stopped playing with them and only ever solo queued from then on. After that, I noticed a significant improvement in my gameplay and my rank followed along as I went from gold 2 to diamond 2 which is like going from the 55th percentile to the 95th percentile.
Finally, I made a "smurf" account in Act I for when I wanted to play alone. That account has been exactly the same rank as my main since the start of Act II even though it has 10x fewer games. I also kept playing on my "smurf" after ditching my friends but only when I was feeling like I was having an off-day and didn't want to sink my rank on my main but somehow both my ranks evolved at the same pace and both hit diamond within 4 days from one another.
Anyway, here's what I learned:

General advice

1. Try to solo queue. Every player has habits, and this often causes people who duo regularly to get used to each other's playstyle, which leads them to cater to each other's habits. This locks you down in a certain playstyle and very often prevents you from trying new strats or simply developing new skills which makes you less flexible and causes you to get absolutely smashed when someone figures you out. By solo queuing you'll be forced to play along with more different types of players without having the option to rely on your friend for whatever reason.
2. Don't think you have to carry every game. This is the reason I included both my screenshots. You can clearly see that I VERY RARELY top frag, yet manage to win very consistently. I'll talk about it in the macromechanics section because a part of this success is in how I play, and the other part of it is in the mindset. This is all about the attitude. We've all had moments where we get absolutely shit on for 5 straight rounds and it feels like we've excreted our will to live but this is not a reason to give up or start trying to play funky games. Keep trying. Legit close your eyes for 15 seconds during the buy phase, take deep breaths and let go of your attachment to the outcome. Which leads me to my next point:
3. Stop paying attention to the scoreboard. I personally do this, and I know a lot of people also do this. You'll look at the scoreboard and see yourself sitting at 0-6 and tilt, or you'll see yourself at 6-0 while your sentinel is on 1-7 and tilt. Stop. Don't. Your score, or someone else's score, isn't an indication of how useful you/they are. Even if you're "playing like shit" because you're not hitting your headshots, doesn't mean you can't be useful.
4. Don't be toxic. I know right? Like that needed to be said! Well, I think it needs to be said. Too many of you are toxic without realizing it. That's because you don't go nuclear, but instead just sneak in passive-aggressive remarks that intoxicate your teammates and make them tilt. There's no need to sarcastically congratulate your teammate for finally getting their first kill on 7th round. They know more than you what went wrong and you pointing it out only antagonizes them, it distracts them (as they think of what snarky comment they can make next time you die) and makes them spectate you every time they die (so like, every round) just looking for what mistakes you can make that they can burn you for. It's always better to say something positive and reassuring like "good job, don't worry about the early game, we got this" than something inflammatory. This makes a huge difference in your odds of winning. Playing 5v5 is a whole lot easier than 4v5.
5. Communicate. Pass the info along, let your team know what you see, tell them your intention. Way too many times do people stay silent and say things like "look at your minimap, are you blind?". This isn't a moba with a low TTK like LoL, here, you often have to hold angles where if you even get your eyes off your crosshair for just a quarter of a second, you're dead. In a tactical shooter like this, for equal skill, the team with the better coms will win 99% of the time. The more useful information your team has, the better their decision-making is going to be.
6. Dodge. I know this one is going to be controversial but it has to be said. Don't be afraid to dodge lobbies that don't feel quite right. The quickest dodge? 4-stacks with large rank disparities. They are not a good bet, ever. First of all, because they're highly likely to be on discord just talking with each other and not sharing info with you. Secondly, because they're unavoidably going to be toxic towards you the minute something goes wrong. And finally, because (as far as I know) the system assumes that 4 stacks are supposed to be more coordinated, it'll place you against a better team of solos overall. But 4-stacks suck. They're not coordinated, they're just friends that decided to play together and who are kind of just doing their own thing anyways.The other times I dodge is when I'm alone at three divisions above everyone else. These are usually kill-race duels between you and the other team's highest rank, just competitions of who can carry the hardest. Also, and this isn't confirmed info but pretty much all elo systems in the world work like that: being the highest rank means you're a candidate for lesser elo gains on a win and greater elo losses in defeat. It's a high-risk, low-reward situation, it's boring and I'm so glad that they announced that they will restrain the rank division gap that people can queue with in ranked because I cannot stand another Diamond 1 player telling me "it's ok bro, trust me he's gold 1 but he's really good for his rank".
7. Get the right mindset. You're not better than your rank shows, winning doesn't mean you played well and ranking up doesn't mean you're better overall. Assume you can improve and focus on improving - not winning. Caring more about the outcome than about the process won't get you anywhere.

Macromechanics

1. Pay attention to the scoreboard. I know I literally just told you the opposite, but this time it's for different reasons.A) Look at the money and make sure to manage your team's econ (e.g. if someone is about to bust the 9k limit, have them buy for a teammate with low money). This probably seems obvious to most of you, but managing your econ is something I've seen diamonds do much better at than golds. Even plat players will sometimes be selfish and not say anything even if they should offer to drop someone. This isn't a major game-changer, but it definitely helps and it's super easy to implement.B) Look at the enemy team's econ. You can eventually predict who's gonna have a shotgun, when Jett's gonna ult, which opponent has util, etc. This will help your decision making down the road and can easily win you rounds.
2. Don't think you have to carry every game part 2. As shown above, I rarely top frag, yet consistently win. This is because I always play for the round, not the frags. I do my best to look for plays that give my teams opportunities, space, time or info. You can do things such as splitting up the opposing team with util, forcing someone to watch the flank, creating distractions, scouting, flanking, etc. Each of those techniques probably could have their own youtube tutorial and I'm sure there are a bunch out there, but I mostly learned these from watching pros and asking myself why they do what they do.The one thing all these techniques have in common is they require you to stay alive. If you're trying to flank and aggressively challenge enemies and go for kills and die, you're giving the opposing team opportunities to win. If you see a hard push coming to your site and decide to stand your ground and die without being traded, it's bad even if you get a kill. It's (almost) always better to retreat and use util to delay the push until someone can support you. I won't go through every situation, but the general idea is STAY ALIVE and give your team a chance to support you or at least trade you/utilize your death.
3. Play for the round, not the frags. I mean as a duelist, enter on site first and create space for your team, even if that means dying. As a sentinel or controller, make sure to follow your duelists, support them and place yourself in situations where you can trade them when they go in.Stop trying to get free kills on the rotation while your team is trying to take a site, all it does is pad your kda and boost your ego. It doesn't mean you can't look for rotation kills or flanks while your team fakes a site, but if they commit to a site you need to stop sitting in a corner trying to get a free kill from across the map. Especially if you're the duelist or breach that the team needs in order to enter on site.
4. Learn how to play for retake with your specific character. Very often, you can secure half the site for your team, which creates space for your team to retake the site after a plant. For example, if you're Brimstone on bind A site, smoking off u-hall and mollying the entrance as the opposing team commits to site almost guarantees that you can keep control of it while they plant, which significantly reduces the number of angles your team has to check before going for the defuse. Similar plays are available for a lot of champions, the key is staying alive and holding the amount of ground you can. It's very often better than to peek, maybe get a kill and then die and force your team to retake blindly while having to check every angle possible.

Micromechanics

There's a million small things like don't run after faking the defuse because it'll tell your opponents that you didn't stick it, or don't slow peak around key corners, or don't not hit your shots, etc. But honestly, I suck. I'm not good at micromechanics.
The one thing I started actively practicing which has significantly improved my results is crosshair placement. This is something that I feel is the biggest most significant improvement most people can make in a very short amount of time that will net them a lot more kills. Just put your crosshair where you think the adversary is going to be before you peek around a corner instead of slowly turning around the corner. When holding an angle, put your crosshair where you think the adversary's head is going to be when he peeks out of a corner. You'd be surprised how many more kills you get just by using pure reflex instead of having to actually aim.
Anyway! I hope this helps someone!
Edit: Woah that's a whole lot of awards! Thank you guys, I didn't expect that!
Something else I should mention that I forgot: Don't overplay. I rarely do more than 3 games a day and I take at least 5-10 mins between games. This is a rhythm that works for me, maybe it's more or less for you, but chaining back-to-back games for hours on end never yielded great results for me. Just getting up and getting the blood moving a little bit helps a lot.

Building a PC is actually more entertaining than you think. However if you don't like to do research about a part's specs, then you might not find this helpful. This is how you will truly value your PC, this way you will look at your PC and know its worth, instead of looking at a box shape with some lights.
This guide is useful when building from scratch, since it will go through all parts one by one in the best possible order to greatly reduce the amount of times you have to go back and change parts. (You might not even have to go back and change parts at all).
If you need to upgrade and/or still looking for parts, skip to the respective section for the part, you will profit aswell from reading this guide.
"The most important part is to HAVE FUN!" -Waffler11
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Before we start, there are a some things that you have to be clear about:

1. This guide will not Build the PC for you. This is a guide for you to know what to look for and which parts are most suitable for your build.
2. Read every single thing you don't know about each part's specs, obviously you don't have to go crazy with all things. I will be mentioning things that YOU NEED to look for, but the more curious you are the better.
3. This will help you easily determine most incompatibilities and help you build everything part by part so you don't have to go back to a specific part and change it over and over.

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Organization

1. Google for your preferred web page for building PCs. I don't want to seem like promoting a Webpage in particular, but PcPartPicker worked great for me and they give you warnings regarding incompatibility. (Other websites might do the same).
2. Ask yourself: "For what am I building this PC". To run a game in particular? perhaps to have the best of the best? who knows? Only you. It is based on this that you will build your PC and estimate a budget (notice how I said estimate a budget, because it will vary as you learn more about PC parts).
3. Once you know what you want your PC for, you will have to preplan. This is having an idea of what GPU you need to run certain games, and is actually the most notorious part of a PC, so think of one, but might not be the definitive GPU (you might even want to change GPU brands).
4. What if you want to choose the Monitor first? No problem at all, you can also choose your desired GPU based on the Resolution and Refresh Rates you wish to play. In this case if you want to know which monitor will be the best for you, scroll down to the "Monitor" part of the Guide. (Keep in mind that prioritizing the Monitor means you have to try to keep the GPU that can run at the desired Resolution and Refresh Rates while also keeping in mind any bottleneck from both GPU and CPU)

Notice: Some RGB counterparts will be more expensive, so if you want a lot of RGB on your PC, you know what to expect on that budget. More on this as the guide goes on.
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First Part: CPU
Forget about that beautiful case you saw somewhere or those cool shaped RAMs or the flashy Motherboard, CHOOSE A CPU FIRST.
How To Choose A CPU For Your Needs

1. First of all, know your options, Intel and AMD are both very good, check out for those 2.
2. Please take your time to read about the CPU specs. Things to look for are Cores, Threads, Base Clock, Boost Clock and their general performance in your trusted benchmark webpage. All these specs differ from Generation and Model.
3. You don't have to worry between AMD, Intel and Nvidia CPUs and GPUs not working properly together or being incompatible, they will work smoothly in any combination.
4. Consider for the future about Single, Dual and Quad Channel. This is for the RAM, I suggest you read about these now and choose a CPU which supports these Channels. Having more than Single Channel will increase the RAMs brandwidth, leading to increased Memory Read, Write, Copy and Brandwidth.
5. Stock coolers usually comes with a stick thermal paste already applied as well as some coolers from other brands that you but some may not have the paste applied, so its good that you read if they will have it already applied or not.
6. Thermal Paste: Keep in mind that eventually you will need to reapply paste if you move the cooler, if you notice an unusual increase in your temps or after a few years. In which case you can get a good Thermal Paste, they are are relatively cheap, make a big impact on your CPU temperatures and are easy to apply. So there is no harm getting a Thermal Paste, just make sure you get a quality thermal paste. And yes, some reduce temperatures better than others but also the way you apply it and the amount you apply helps reducing temperatures, look for the best way and quantity.

Notice: You don't necessarily have to prioritize the GPU over the CPU, this is just in case you plan on only playing less demanding popular games like, CS:GO, LoL, Valorant, etc. they don't require the best of GPUs out there so you can go for a better CPU.
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Second Part: Case
Cases comes in many sizes, the 3 most popular ones are: Full Tower, Mid Tower and Mini-ITX. Check out each of these case's sizes and spacing. Some cases of the same size category will vary in sizes, and some times not fit the motherboard of the specific size category. For Ex: An ATX case might be smaller than most ATX cases and an ATX motherboard might not fit properly, so also checking the cases's dimensions where the motherboard will be placed, it is important to be aware of these scenarios.

1. Keep in mind the size of your GPU (since it takes a lot of space) to make sure it fits on your case. New Gen GPUs are being manufactured in a bigger size.
2. It's time to choose the manufacturer, they will mostly vary in Aesthetics however keep in mind, you should probably want to make sure the case has good "Airflow", the name itself tells you what it is, but look it up if you are not sure. Best way to make sure the case has good airflow is to check reviews... multiple reviews, and good ones where they will specify what room temp they had during the test so you get an idea.
3. Make sure you get a modern case, you won't regret it but you might want a modern case so you can use all of the motherboard's ports and not waste a single penny also when upgrading the motherboard, since you are more likely to change the motherboard before the case (this is another reason why the case is the second part).
4. Check what's in the box for the case you want to choose, it might not come in with enough fans than you expected, or maybe it won't come with some of the things you see in some pictures.

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Third Part: GPU
You probably did not expected this but, there is nothing complicated about GPUs.

1. Look for features about each GPU brand and model, there are brands and model with their own features that is why I can't list them to you, depends on what brand you choose.
2. You have already chose a Brand because you knew which one would run the game you want to play, or maybe you changed brands and models. Either way, now it's time for you to look about the specifications: Base Clock, Boost Clock & Memory Size. (I want you to look at this because they vary depending on Brand, Model and Series and they give you an idea on which you would rather choose)
3. Now you most likely already decided your Brand, Model and Series for the GPU, check out the Display Connectors and keep that in mind, we will need this for the monitor.

Notice: The more Memory Capacity the GPU has does not mean better performance.
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Fourth Part: Motherboard
Ah yes, the motherboard, remember the CPU you chose? and the case you chose? here is where you will be limited to your motherboard choosing. (choosing the right motherboard might take awhile specially with all the features one motherboard can have and all the different variations). Also you might come across SLI (for Nvidia) and/or CrossFire (for Radeon). Before you get hyped, games need to be SLI/CrossFire compatible and not to mention that sometimes it will not work with different GPUs Architecture. So instead of spending money for this feature in a motherboard and for 1 extra GPU, your best choice is for a single high-end GPU. (Also with the amount of power and performance on the new gen GPUs, SLI and CrossFire are less worth.
*IMPORTANT: Please read motherboard specs and features, literally anything you don't know, look up what it is, this is critical for building a PC. Looking for everything will also let you easily identify incompatibilities. Some motherboards does not include Sound Card and/or Wi-Fi cards.

1. First, and I mean it, first you must make sure that your motherboard fits the case, motherboards commonly come in mini ITX and ATX, look those up in google and make sure which size is the one for your case (obviously you will realize a mini ITX motherboard can actually be used on a mid tower or bigger).
2. Now you will choose a motherboard with the right Socket depending on the CPU you chose.
3. Now make sure that the motherboard's BIOS is up to date with the CPU you chose, or you will get firetrucked up yours. Pro Tip: google "Best motherboards for [CPU of your choosing]".
4. Another important thing to consider for a motherboard, if it supports Dual Channel & Quad Channel.
5. Great, with all those 4 filters, you can freely look for a nice looking Motherboard for your PC build and read the specs, yes please read them you won't regret it. Specially since I almost bought a motherboard dedicated for custom water cooling, I was about to pay extra for nothing.
6. Some other important things to look for in a motherboard are the amount of VRM and their quality. The amount of Memory Type and also how much Memory Speed is supported, the storage drives slots available. Another lesser thing to look for in a motherboard, is that each motherboard brand offers their unique features, check them out if you feel like and see which one you like the most.

Notice: Wi-Fi Cards are not mandatory, they are more of an option.
​
Fifth Part: RAM
There is more to look for a RAM than you might think, don't just look for a RAM based on the amount of GBs it has. RAM comes in different Memory Type and have different Memory Speed and CAS Latency, check out what role both of these terms play in a PC to choose your preferred one.

1. You can buy individually RAM usually comes in pair, properly named as "RAM Kit", which some are 8GB (2x4) or 16GB (2x8) or 32GB (4x8) or 32GB (2x16) etc. If you still haven't figured it out, let me explain: Ex. we have 16GB (2x8). The "16GB" is the total memory capacity, this total memory capacity is divided into 2 different RAM sticks, each one with 8GB capacity. (Think carefully which kit you choose, since your Motherboard has limited RAM slots).
2. Which RAM to choose? one that does not exceeds the Motherboard's max Memory Capacity and that is the right Memory Type for your motherboard while also making sure the RAM can run with the CPU. Another pro-tip: google "best ram for [CPU of your choosing]".
3. Remember about Single, Dual and Quad Channel. Be sure to check if both the motherboard and CPU are compatible with Dual Channel and/or Quad Channel.
4. Once you have chosen a RAM brand, and want to increase your RAM Memory Capacity, you have buy the same brand of RAM and RAM Model.
5. You can freely choose the RAM's Aesthetics you like the most (also, RAM can be more expensive just because they have RGB). There is a catch though, look up if any Brand's RAM model has any known issue with certain motherboards or CPUs. Since looks might be deceiving.

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Sixth Part: Storage
Probably the simplest part, SSD is a lot more faster and expensive than the HDD, so much faster that if you have an SSD and you don't install windows on the SSD you must really enjoy looking at your OS booting up.

1. SSD is faster for gaming, yes, game loading times is not mainly determined by GPU, its by storage drives. But SSD gets expensive as you get more Storage capacity, so you can have SSDs and HDDs both in the same motherboard, if your motherboard has the designated storage slots for the drives.
2. Look for these terms: Form Factors for Storage Drives, SSD, HDD, Write/Read speed, Random write/read IOPS.
3. Check special features for each individual storage drive from each brand.

​
Seventh Part: Cooler
This will be long because of all the different things to cover.
First of all, Search what OverClocking a CPU is. You don't need to know how to OverClock yet, as it also depends on which CPU you chose, but if you are interested in OverClocking, I recommend you learn how a CPU Clocks and Voltages works together, then you learn how to OverClock.
Answer these questions:

		Does your CPU comes with a stock cooler?
	Yes		No
	Do you plan on OverClocking your CPU?		You must buy a Cooler
Yes		No
Highly recommended to buy a Cooler		You don't need to buy a Cooler

(If you are reading from mobile, there is a table that won't properly show. The table determines whether you should buy or not a cooler based on your plans)
*If you don't want/need to buy a cooler you can skip to the next part*
There are Air Cooler and Water Cooler (AIO). AIOs are water coolers already built that will only require screwing to mount and do not take up much space, perfect for RGB builds. However, AIOs might not fit your Case and some Air Coolers are not compatible with your motherboard.

1. First choose if you are going with Air Cooling or AIO, both are good ways to cool the hottest of CPUs, so don't think Water is worthless or Air is worthless.
2. Check out which cooler you like the most and take these into consideration: How much they can cool the CPU during load and idle times while considering how much noise (dBA) they produce the harder they have to work to cool the CPU. (The amount of noise is personal preference, if you want a quieter place or don't mind the little noise)
3. After choosing one, make sure it fits your case and/or it is compatible with your motherboard. Best way to check this is looking for Reviews, Youtube videos for the specific case and cooler or asking on Reddit or the Cooler's webpage might provide that information. (Yes, if you know the measurements of the case and the Coolers it should fit, but there could be some exceptions or a little piece from the inside which will block the cooler, best bet is the 3 previous suggestions).

Notice: I do not talk about custom water cooling, there is no specific way to install it so you would have to carefully measure and get the individual parts. Also installing such cooler is a lot harder very expensive and you would have to really enjoy working hard to give it maintenance. I would suggest you stick with traditional coolers.
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Eighth Part: Power Supply Unit
Hopefully the webpage you chose to build your PC is able to estimate your fully built PC's Watts consumption, from this estimate you will choose a proper PSU. Before we go on, forget anything you read about PSUs, this part has a lot of mixed "opinions". Once you read more and more about PSU you can have your own opinion about PSUs.

1. Look what are the differences between a Fully Modular, Semi Modular and Non Modular PSU. (Fully Modular becomes more expensive, but opens up for more compatibility and any future parts upgrade, this is a very important thing to consider, however you might not need a Fully nor a Semi Modular PSU).
2. It is important to check the PSUs Certification. Any Certified PSU is a safe choice, you might want to read why PSU are certified and what each type of certification means.
3. Now like any other part, PSUs also comes in with different features depending on the brand and their different models. Also keep in mind the most important things to look in a PSU is the amount of output pin slots and the size of the PSU will fit your case.

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Monitor
You sure have one in mind, but listen carefully, read about every terms in a monitor, know what those 1ms Response Time and 144hz Refresh Rate you often see on the specifications mean.

1. Be mindful when choosing a Monitor Size, a 27" 1080p monitor looks like it has less Resolution than a 24" 1080p monitor, and this is because of the PPI. Look up what that is and then you can have an idea of what would be the ideal Monitor Size and Resolution.
2. There are 3 different panels for monitors: IPS, VA, & TN. Each of this panels offer different functionality. It is something important to take into consideration.
3. Now, if your GPU has an HDMI 2.0, to fully take advantage of your GPU, get a Monitor with an HDMI 2.0, maybe your GPU has DisplayPort 1.4, which offers more bandwidth than HDMI 2.0, then you would want to consider buying a monitor with DisplayPort 1.4. Look all about the different Video Connectivity Protocols. Keep in mind that you don't need to have the exact same protocol on both ends, for Ex.: You can connect the DisplayPort cable, from the 1.4 on your GPU into the 1.2 into your Monitor and work fine.
4. Again, each Brand and their models have different features and design, look around which one you like the most.

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That is all about the crucial parts of a PC, you can then add another GPU, or another case fan, or a toy, even a toy, like an anime figurine or whatever, seems to be trendy now a day.
Hopefully you found this useful in any way possible, and I would be a very proud to know you read everything just to build your PC, your "Baby" if you will.
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I'll leave these useful web pages that I personally think you should know about while building a PC.
CPU-world.com - Use this to check out all information about a certain CPU. (Don't let the weird names and numbers scare you)
Pangoly.com - A website to Build your PCs and is also very good when you want to compare different part options.
Obviously you can also use YouTube and Reddit for reviews and/or specific questions, comparisons and statistics.
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Please consider leaving any kind of feedback, if there is something that should be reviewed/changed on this guide, do let me know so I can work on it ensure this guide as flawless as possible. Other than that comment anything you did like, as always following this subreddit's rules, I will be more than happy to read all comments/questions. I would also appreciate anyone else answering other users questions as you would be helping me out while I am busy on something else.
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Message for this post: Some may have felt let down by the guide, most of you appreciated it and I did not expect this guide to blow up like this. I personally made this from my own experience and my goal was to encourage people to research everything themselves when building a PC. when I did it myself, I enjoyed it very much. The title seems misleading yes, it is a lot of "google this and that" and less of a glossary for you to know what each thing is. But I am not going to leave it like this. Thanks to all the feedbacks I have been getting in the comments, all the incorrect points and other points I missed, I will fix them and soon enough this guide should be good for anyone reading this. I ask you to not stop commenting out these important details, let us together finish this guide, after all I started to grow fond of the buildapc subreddit and I want the best for everyone here. Thank you all for the support and critics.

Hello friends!
Firstly, I hope you're all doing well, I hope you're all happy, healthy and ready to watch a monumental event.
This has been a very fun card to talk about. It may not be as star stacked as the last card was, but it's stacked in terms of raw talent alone. But... I will state this now because it's pretty important. There are very controversial decisions in this prediction post, I'm sure you'll spot it. and with that warning said, please bet at your own discretion, it's a very hard card to predict.
With all the formalities said and done, lets get dirty.
(c) - Champ
(D) - Debut
FLS - Fight Lose Streak
FWS - Fight Win Streak
NS - No Streak
(#x) - Rank in Division
Lets go!
Prelims
Light Heavyweight
Khadis Ibragimov (8-3-0, 3 FLS) v Danilo Marquez (D) (9-2-0, 2 FWS) - I’m not sure if i’m keen on this, but I suppose any Light Heavyweight bout could be explosive. Ibragimov is on a pretty severe losing streak so far, and considering he hasn’t won any fight in the UFC in his 3 fights, he seems to be on the brink of being kicked off the roster, which is a shame really because he kinda just started. Ibragimov seems somewhat well rounded, he is an adequate grappler and has serious power behind his punches, but at the end of the fight he just seems to be outdone, so i’m a little skeptic about his future performances. Marquez is coming off the regional circuit as a fairly strong finisher who only has one decision win in his professional career. One relatively large issue that I see straight off the bat is his inactiveness, he hasn’t had a fight in over two and a half years, so I feel like there might be some ring rust, and well, it’s hard to tell what he’s gonna bring to the fight. I’m not sure who is gonna win this one, but judging from how active versus how inactive each fighter has been, I feel like Ibragimov has this one.
Ibragimov via KO R2
Heavyweight
Jeff Hughes (10-3-0, 2 FLS) v Juan “Cejudo but bigger” Espino (9-1-0, 7 FWS) - Well, that’s a name I did not expect to see. Hughes seems to be one of those heavyweights that made it through to the UFC on power alone. He’s a big dude that swings and if this was the early 2000’s that would be fine, but considering he lost to two much more well rounded fighters, I strongly hope that he finds a quick turn around because he’s still young and no doubt hungry for victory. In his last fight against Pessoa, Hughes was incredibly patient and didn’t take any unnecessary risks because Pessoa is fairly explosive, he was methodical with his approach and even though he lost the fight, we saw that he didn’t always have a one dimensional approach to fighting. Now, the interesting fighter in this bout is Espino. Now, you might be wondering where you heard that name from, well, he’s the winner of TUF 26 (Heavy Hitters), and at the ripe old age of 37 he won in quite dominant fashion against fellow contestant Justin Frazier. For two years now, I have always asked, where the hell is he? Here he is, his announcement must have completely flew under my radar because I had to blink twice to see if I was dreaming. Espino is an excellent submission artist who has a relatively large background in grappling and submission competition and he has absolutely dominated the scene. Expect the fight to go to the ground early, because that is where Hughes doesn’t want to be, and where Espino needs to be. The tricky part about Espino is how will he look after a 22 month layoff? I’m not sure but i’m pretty excited to see him come back. I got Espino on this one.
Espino via Sub R2
Light Heavyweight
William Knight (#1 US Northeast) (D) (8-1-0, 2 FWS) v Aleksa Camur (6-0-0, 6 FWS) - Knight has been at the forefront of hype during this season of DWCS, he is built like an absolute Abrams and he has insane punching power. Now, whether or not he’s a clean fighter with just insane Usman-esque genes or if he’s best friends with Jon Jones, but either way, he’s a dangerous opponent. We have only seen almost 3 minutes of him beating up his opponent so there’s not too much analysis, but just know that when he lands, he lands extremely hard. The best way for Camur to deal with him, is to avoid him for the first round, gauge the explosiveness, read his setups and then counter. Camur is the longer fighter in terms of range, he can counter jab any aggressive movement that Knight makes. Now, this at the moment is all pure speculation because we’ve only seen a little bit of Knight and Camur, but judging from each fighter's style, if Camur can survive the onslaught from Knight then he’s got it. It’s a tough one to call though, but I might go with the hype train for now, I could be wrong so please don’t bet based on this prediction.
Knight via KO R1
Featherweight
Shane Young (13-4-0, 2 FWS) v L’udovit Klein (D) (#2 Europe Eastern) (16-2-0, 7 FWS) - That’s one hell of a debutant right there and in my opinion an underrated matchup. Young is an excellent kickboxer who throws excellent and slick combo’s efficiently and with such speed. He has often outstruck his opponents and he’s always throwing and always in his opponents face, the pressure is insane and if Klein can’t handle that then he’s in trouble. Klein has an extensive knockout record and at a young age of 25, the fact that he’s knocked out veterans of the sport with relative ease, shows how dangerous he really is. These european guys don’t mess around and we’re seeing more and more talent from that part of the world dominate the scene, and this man is no exception. 7 knockouts, 8 submissions, all action. I don’t like betting against my fellow Aussie/NZ fighters but all of my eyes (I only have two) are on Klein on this one. Such an insanely fun matchup.
Klein via KO R2
Welterweight
Diego Sanchez (30-12-0, NS) v Jake Matthews (16-4-0, 2 FWS) - I love how much of a big favourite Matthews is even though he’s facing a legend in Diego Sanchez, someones probably going to make a whole lot of money. Sanchez might be the strangest fighter both personality wise and his antics in the octagon, but he is no doubt one of the most experienced fighters on the roster. He’s exceptionally well rounded and he gets the job done in many cases. The big question here is whether or not Sanchez will be all there, he’s been knocked out and to many people out there he seems to be a shell of his former self. Now, my man Matthews has one hell of a mountain to climb this coming Sunday, it’s a large step up in competition considering his last fight was against Meek (who at the time of the fight, was 1-2 in the UFC). So to say that Matthews has an opportunity of a lifetime to pull a significant win and get his name in the spotlight is to put it pretty lightly. Matthews is very well rounded with a heavy focus on ground control to major tom. His grappling is excellent, and his relatively large frame allows him to smother his opponents and control everything that his opponent does. Now, will Sanchez be able to avoid the ground? Sure, he’s done it before, but each fight is different. This is a very interesting fight and I wonder how the stress/anxiety of Matthews will be handled, he’s been known to shrug off pressure and get to work without any forethought, but I feel like Sanchez has this one, very controversial I know, you can yell at me in the comments below, so feel free to bet against this, the reasoning why I think Sanchez wins this one is simply experience and knowledge. I just hope that Sanchez doesn’t somehow trip on DMT as he enters the Octagon.
Sanchez via Sub R2
Lightweight
Brad Riddell (8-1-0, 5 FWS) v Alex Da Silva (21-2-0, NS) - The more I watch RiddellThe more that I realize his style is very similar to Volkanovski, with a wide variety of feints which gives his opponent a false sense of varied attacks incoming, when in reality, it's just setting up a strong right hand. It’s exactly how he managed to knock down Mustafaev earlier this year, he started off with many different looks, then amongst the confusion, and the anticipation of something, Mustafaev got hit with the right hand. Riddell is a very good kickboxer, he’s extremely loose on the feet and has great defensive movements. The only thing he really needs to work on is his ground game, in both of his fights in the UFC, his opponents have taken him down numerous times, and whilst Riddell did manage to stand back up and power through, it wasn’t a very technical stand up. That’s pretty dangerous territory if you’re coming up against a submission specialist in Da Silva. Now, Da Silva isn’t only just a submission specialist, he has 13 knockouts as well so its clear that he’s got phenomenal power in his hands. He’s a high level finisher and I’m so glad the UFC picked him up at such a young age. He only has two losses, that’s pretty nuts. This is a very good fight, and I feel like if Riddell has an advantage here, it’s in the striking, it’s very advanced and the fact that he has a heavy focus on feints and different looks he gives off to his opponents, he’s going to be trouble for Da Silva whilst the fight stays on the feet, although i’m quite curious to see if he has upped his ground game and grappling defence a bit. Very interesting match up.
Riddell via UD
Main Card
Featherweight
Hakeem Dawodu (11-1-1, 4 FWS) v Zubaira Tukhugov (19-4-1, NS) - This is lowkey a banger. Dawodu is a solid kickboxer who has a solid background in Muay Thai (42-5-0), a prodigy in combat sports is what I feel Dawodu is. Dawodu has such great consistency with his accuracy and variety of techniques, his kicks are fast, his punches and combos are fast, he’s powerful and he’s always moving. If you watch him closely, no matter what he throws, he has his defence up ready for a counter from his opponent. Do not sleep on Dawodu. I don’t care if your house is on fire, shit it’s probably on fire coz it senses Dawodu on the screen. Tukhugov is well known for his escapades after the Khabib v Conor fight, and he probably boasts about his ability to punch an already defeated McGregor, but all that stuff aside, Tukhugov has very fast and powerful hands, but his most advantageous style over Dawodu is the grappling and Sando style that typically comes from being a cousin of a Nurmagomedov. I highly doubt Tukhugov will exchange with Dawodu. I clearly have Dawodu on this one, very confident with this pick, I just hope Dawodu can avoid the takedowns of Tukhugov.
Dawodu via KO R2
Women’s Bantamweight
Ketlen Vieira (#5) (10-1-0, NS) v Sijara Eubanks (#14) (6-4-0, 2 FWS) - This is a pretty interesting fight because Eubanks was in a fight fairly recently and whilst her being active is great and the opportunity to stack up wins is certainly there, I personally don’t think it’s safe nor smart to get back to back fights considering her history with rough weight cuts and weight misses. All that aside… Vieira is a dominant grappler and BJJ based fighter who drives for a takedown or a trip, she’s very much a ground based fighter and she’s going to be looking to get close and personal, get into a clinch situation and then take Eubanks down because Eubanks has strong striking, and not necessarily clean striking at that. Her only loss was against Aldana who is now headlining the next card after this one, so really that’s a pretty rough loss but it was against a dangerous opponent. Expect the fight to go to the ground during this fight, because Vieira will be looking for it consistently. Eubanks is, as I said before, coming off a decision win over Avila, and what that tells me is that she is going to be cutting weight twice within a month so that’s no doubt going to be detrimental to her health in the long run, but i’m not sure how much it will affect her performance, but i guess we’ll see how she looks at the weigh ins. Safe bet? Vieira, she’s got a great set of techniques that can take Eubanks to the ground and has the experience to keep her there.
Vieira via UD
Co-Main Event
Kai Kara-France (#8) (21-8-0, NS) v Brandon Royval (#12) (11-4-0, 3 FWS) - Now, before you scratch your head and say “Slayer, this isn’t the co-main”. Hear me out, I always do this with multi-championship bouts, and I firmly believe that Reyes v Blachowicz deserves more praise than “Co-Main”. Back to this fight. Kara-France is a very well rounded kickboxer coming out of City Kickboxing (which, I mean, doesn’t surprise me, it seems whenever Izzy is fighting, his whole team is, it’s one hell of a thing to see). Kara-France is a majestic fighter to watch, the way he moves and gets in and out of range, the way he switches stance to launch an attack then switches back almost instantaneously, his footwork is truly something to marvel at, and it’s the main reason why it’s been so successful. It’s just so hard for his opponents to keep track of. It seems to be the core technique of City Kickboxing to have excellent feints and well timed strikes from those feints, because every fighter coming from that camp does it exceptionally well. Kara-France is no different, he doesn’t rush for a finish, he sets a plan and executes it. Royval is still very new to the UFC and has one very good submission win over Tim Elliott, he’s clearly comfortable on the ground and with his relatively dominant time in LFA, it’s clear that the UFC is his next stage of evolution as a fighter. He’s got a very tough challenge ahead of him in Kara-France, but if he can take the fight to the ground I'm fairly confident he can make Kara-France struggle because he’s so fast on the ground. Not only is he fast, he’s significantly taller than Kara-France and longer, so it could be easier to maintain position or to slip in a choke. Either way, This feels like your typical striker v grappler fight and I have a feeling Kara-France has this one.
Kara-France via UD
Light Heavyweight Championship bout
Dominick Reyes (#1) (12-1-0, NS) v Jan Blachowicz (#2) (26-8-0, 3 FWS) - This is a fucking phenomenal fight. You have no idea how loudly I said “holy fucking shit” when I saw that these two were fighting. Reyes went 5 rounds and arguably won his fight against Jon Jones, we haven’t seen Jones in trouble like that in a long time and that’s why I firmly believe that Reyes has the toolset and athleticism to become the champion. Reyes’s background in American Football is pretty beneficial when it comes to MMA if you think about it, explosiveness and cardio are two of the main things for that particular sport and when transferred to MMA you get Reyes. Reyes has what seems like the perfect amount of power and speed, and we saw how much he can adjust in a championship fight against Jones and he exceeded everyone's expectations. The variety of strikes and targets he attacks is incredible and just shows how much he has implemented into his style so early on in his career. Blachowicz has some serious Fuck You power. The way he shut down Corey Anderson in the very first round with a powerful right hook just shows how dangerous he is. Blachowicz has an extensive record and with that record comes devastating knockouts and slick submissions. We have seen him dominate opponents on the ground, in that Jared Cannonier fight he managed to just smash and smother him the whole fight. I do honestly feel that Reyes in this case, having experienced Jones and his ability to survive and thrive, has no doubt added a substantial amount of experience to his fight game. I have Reyes on this, I’m very confident that Reyes has this, it doesn’t need to be a flashy fight, he can avoid the power of Blachowicz and just put on a striking clinic from a distance. This is an insane fight.
Reyes via KO R4
Main Event
Middleweight Championship Bout
Israel Adesanya (c) (19-0-0, 19 FWS) v Paulo Costa (#3) (13-0-0, 13 FWS) - Now, this is the fight I feel like all of us have been waiting for. This is going to be long. Adesanya is one of the biggest names in combat sports at the moment, his extensive kickboxing record has left a mark on that sport, and his introduction to the UFC has shaken the world of MMA. Adesanya has consistently proven to us that he can get it done, it doesn’t have to be a fancy or explosive finish, because at the end of the day, he still wins, and he’s going to win this time… or is he? Adesanya has every technique in the books covered, he has mastered the sport of striking, he has been capable of setting up submissions (See Gastelum fight), he is evasive, but he does have one glaring issue, and that’s the fact that Costa is fighting him. See, Adesanya has fought some big motherfuckers in his time, he has knocked out some huge fighters, and he has survived an onslaught. But everyone slips up, and as the promos about this fight say, someone's 0 has got to go, and we saw some openings in his fight against Gastelum where he suffers, and that’s his inside defence, he’s exceptional at evading and dodging attacks from a distance, but with Gastelums ability to hop into range and land a clean strike, we saw where Adesanya's defences lack, and that’s the movement. Now, before you scratch your head, look at where Adesanya has always been in trouble, against the cage. Costa has this remarkable ability to just constantly be in the face of his opponent and throw hooks, and hooks are dangerous for fighters who evade using lateral movement, it cuts off routes of escape, and I can see Costa cutting off the Octagon and landing solid strikes on Adesanya. Now, what Adesanya does best is counter, if he can counter the oncoming attack from Costa, and change angle to get out of the way, he’s got a very solid chance, and well, his range advantage (8 inches) will play an important role in this bout. Costa on the other hand is all offense. His fight against Romero? Evident that he has the power and weaponry to knock out Adesanya, but he needs to cover that distance first, and by the time Costa goes from his position in the Octagon, to where Izzy is, Izzy is to Costa's left, or right, way out of danger. Costa needs to find an opening, catch a body kick, do something to get into that range where he can land some solid hooks, but this fight is that hard to predict, that anything can happen. Costa is the definition of power. Whether it's Costa winning by KO R1 through 5, or Izzy winning via KO or UD in any round, this is one of those fights that is near impossible to predict. In my honest opinion, I feel like Izzy will simply outstrike Costa, and perhaps knock him out in the championship rounds, so here’s the official prediction.
Adesanya via KO R4
There we go!
See, a few controversial picks, so please implement your own bets into this, i doubt i'll get all of these correct, some ballsy picks haha.
If you would like to follow me on twitter, you can find me @Slayer_Tip or if you want, add me on discord and we can have a super friendly chat about all things MMA: Slayertip#7013
With all of that said and done, I hope to see you guys in the comments down below, it's an amazing event, and I wouldn't pick a better community to share my thoughts and have a discussion with than you fine people.
Much love and happiness to all.
o/

I wrote a post a few months ago (What will it take for Spacex to send humans to mars in 2024?) which did rather well. However I focused only on Starship itself, not on any of the other pieces that are just as important to achieve Spacex’s mars-sized ambitions, so let’s take a look at everything but the big shiny rocket. To be clear (like before), this is less me predicting the future and more me looking to start a discussion based on the data we have and a whole bunch of assumptions, speculations and wishes.
Let's start off by making the mother of all Big Falcon assumptions:
Starship works as intended
This is a MASSIVE leap of faith to take. While SN5’s (and now SN6’s) flight(s) did alleviate some concerns regarding Starship’s ascent, and Superheavy doesn’t really worry me with all the falcon 9 first stages Spacex has to draw experience from, there’s no guarantee that Spacex’s re-entry, descent and landing systems will work as well as they want and expect them to, since those all fall somewhere between unusual and revolutionary. Nor is the rapid and reliable reuse guaranteed to work as well as we all want it to.
Although I will say people need to cool it with claiming Starship is years and years away from orbit; the raptor works and the tanks, plumbing and command & control system are up to standards, as SN5&6 showed. If Spacex wanted to (and had enough engines) they could bolt together a Superheavy booster, stick a Starship on it and fly both expendable to put 100-200 tons in orbit right now if they had a launch pad and a humongous crane. Big waste of money and engines but they could do it. Once Superheavy hops (successfully) you can seriously argue that Starship is closer to reaching orbit than SLS, despite the latter’s development being started a decade earlier. It’s just that reaching orbit isn’t Starships main goal; getting to orbit and back down cheaply and reliably is, which is another thing entirely. To me, SN8’s 20 km flight will be the big thing to watch: if that works, Starship is ready for orbit. If not, Spacex has a nasty problem or two to solve. For the record, I will say that I think the launch, ascent and descent of SN8 will go fine, but that the flip-down has a high chance of going very, very wrong the first few times.
Just to reiterate: this is not me saying what will happen, this is me speculating what Elon plans/wants to make happen in order to put humans on the red planet basically 4 years from now, to give people something to ponder on and give their own take. Personally I doubt that humans will really depart for mars in 2024, but given Elon’s repeated statements that 2024 is still the goal, and the fact that at least at tesla his timelines are getting a little more accurate recently, I have crammed the insane amount of progress needed into the next 3-4 years to make it fit. My timeline should not be taken as a prediction but as my best guess to somehow get all the needed pieces into place given the insane objectives.
So, if we make the admittedly stomach-churning assumption that Starship works and is flying reliably and reusable sometime (early) next year, what else should SpaceX be working on? To me, it seems they need four other pieces to realize their mars ambitions:
getting Starship to mars -> orbital refueling
getting Starship back from mars -> fuel production on mars
getting the humans inside Starship to mars -> life support in space
keeping the humans inside Starship alive on the surface of mars -> life support on mars
I will go through them in order from what I consider to be least to most difficult (no part is “easy” if you ask me):
Orbital refueling:
This one I’ve made a U-turn on. I used to think it was a major obstacle but recently have concluded that it won’t slow down Spacex at all. Why? Because in their Artemis bid, Spacex announced that they plan to use not just tankers, but fuel depots. This simplifies the whole operation massively. Spacex can launch a few custom Starships that consist of nothing but a giant empty fuel tank, something which they can probably build today. No heat shield, no fins, no payload bay, no life support, to maximize the fuel capacity. Only some batteries, a solar panel, rcs and a way to dock. Heck with the recent raptor improvements they might be able to stretch this type of Starship to have even more internal volume for fuel.
Now these most likely will have to be painted pitch black to prevent an angry mob of astronomers marching on boca chica with pitchforks, but that’s probably not a bad idea regardless. The fuel boil off in LEO will be a lot less than Starship will have to deal with on its way to mars due to a noticeable lack of shade during the transfer, so subjecting the LEO fuelers to as high a temperature as possible seems like a useful safety margin when designing for that.
The current Starship can hold 1200 tons of propellant with a large amount of its volume turned over for cargo. Given that a Superheavy can hold 3300 tons of propellant, let’s say that a fuel depot Starship can hold between 2000 and 3000 tons depending on how much it’s stretched, with the lower estimate being more likely. Edit: elon recently stated that they are pushing for Starship being able to hold up to 2000 tons of fuel, supporting my hunch that Starship’s length will increase.
Some back-of-the-envelope calculations show that a 250 ton Starship (100 ton dry mass, 150 ton payload) with 750 tons of fuel and an isp of 380 will have just over 5 km/s of delta V. Going from earth to mars using a hohmann transfer takes just over 4 km/s, while a much faster 3-month transfer takes around 4.8 km/s. This fits well with Elon’s step-by-step strategy. For the first flights having an extra 1000 m/s will most likely be invaluable, allowing on-route course corrections, meaningful maneuvers in martian orbit, as well as an easier landing, both due to being able to start the landing burn higher up and the fact that more fuel means more mass at the bottom of the Starship making it more stable during the flip and upon touching down. Later flights, after Spacex has a high enough confidence in their navigation, aerodynamic controls and landing system, can then start to burn more fuel to incrementally shorten that transfer time until they reach Elon’s goal of a three month transfer for humans.
Now what would this mean? If Spacex launches say three of these fuel depot Starships early next year (and they totally will have the means to build and launch these by then, all they need is a working Superheavy), they now have something to use their insane launch cadence for that is both useful and dirt-cheap. Each one of these fully fueled will provide the propellant for three mars-bound or two lunar-surface-bound Starships to reach their destinations.
Since the tankers will be able to carry between 100 and 150 tons to LEO depending on how far along the vacuum raptor engine is, this is 60 to 90 flights right here for Starship. If I’m Elon/SpaceX, all I’m doing in 2021 is flying Starship tankers DOZENS of times to bring fuel up to these depots for use in 2022. Now I know people are excited about a Starship launch putting 400 Starlink satellites into orbit in one go, but let’s remember that those still cost $300.000 a piece to make, and that’s after achieving an impressive economy of scale (120 a month). One failure on ascent and there goes over a hundred million dollars. At least for the first dozen launches, Spacex would be wise to start with fuel only imho, and move to include Starlink launches after a few months of successful fuel flights. It will give Starship a simple cheap payload to fly over and over again with minimal impact if it suffers a catastrophic failure on ascent. Simply learn and move on; nothing of significant value was lost.
While the engineers focus on decreasing the turn-around time and fixing whatever unexpected problems arise due to Starships re-entering multiple times (which there definitely will be, don’t tell yourself otherwise), the designers can spend 2021 seriously working on life support and ISRU systems, with both available to support the other should they need to. As an additional bonus, all these launches will greatly boost the confidence in Starship from both nasa and the commercial sector, paving the way for Starship’s utter domination of the commercial launch market from 2022 onward. Finally, maybe the realization that voting for Artemis meant voting for orbital fuel depots will give Shelby a well-earned heart attack (one can dream). /s
If Spacex can get 10 to 20 Starship tankers to orbit in 2021 (they can all be the same ship, they can be 3 different ships or they can be 10 different ships depending on how successful they are in their re-use objectives by then), it will give them a much easier time in 2022; “simply” fly the mars-bound or moon-bound Starship to LEO, dock with the depot and perform a single large fuel transfer. This way Spacex won’t have to worry about keeping a dozen Starship tankers in orbit at a time.
As for orbital refueling itself (wow, went a little bit of topic there), I don't see any major hurdles: if Starship’s fuel lines can handle the pressures of being fueled on the pad through the Superheavy booster as is currently the plan, than all Spacex needs to do is not exceed those pressures during on-orbit fuel transfers, which really should not be hard so long as they take their time with them.
Life support on mars
This might surprise some, but I actually think keeping humans alive on the martian surface will be much easier than keeping them alive in space due to the zero-g and radiation concerns that the latter will have to deal with. Consequently, if I were to suggest only one thing to Spacex from my very comfortable armchair, it would be to split the two: one type of Starship designed to act as a permanently inhabitable martian base that is basically an office tower with a big empty drained fuel tank and some engines at the bottom, and one designed for crewed use in zero-g as well as ascent and descent on both mars and earth. Trying to make a Starship do both is asking for trouble if you ask me, as well as greatly complicating the design (“the best part is no part”). Yes this would mean that these “base” Starships will not return to earth, but that is not that big a loss given the production rates Spacex is already achieving, plus having a few extra raptors on mars that can be cannibalised for parts or simply swapped with a malfunctioning raptor of another Starship sounds to me like good redundancy. Furthermore this split would have three enormous upsides:
1: The base ones are easier to design and build due to only being operated and inhabited under gravity after landing.
Let’s remind ourselves that if Spacex wants to send people to mars in 2024, it will be much easier to find support from nasa and the like if there already is a habitable structure waiting on the martian surface for them, which will have to be sent there in 2022. The easier base ones can be the focus of design in 2021 before being built and launched in 2022. Meanwhile the manned zero-g Starship will be granted another year to prove itself as now it won’t be needed until 2023, which is probably a good thing anyway. Even if Spacex can build these next year there is no guarantee that any agency would have enough confidence in Starship by then to provide them with astronauts. Taking another year to really prove Starship’s reliability as a launch and landing system might be enough (remember this means dozens of launches since we’re assuming Starship works) for a Starship to take on crew in LEO at the end of 2022/early 2023, probably at first using a dragon capsule to go to and from orbit as Tim Dodd and others have suggested.
2: It’s simply much safer.
Living and working in a separate Starship from the one that you land and launch in will probably be a whole lot more comfortable for the crew on mars. Sleeping well might be a bit harder if every morning the giant fuel tank a few dozen meters below you is a little bit fuller with highly combustible propellant than the day before. Compared to if the tank beneath you is completely drained while the Starship you will return in sits a few miles away being steadily refueled with you only returning to it a few hours/days before launch. Good back-up in terms of life support systems too; if something is really vitally needed you can take it with you from the landelauncher upon arrival or from the base/habitat upon leaving, as only one at a time will be housing crew. I’m sure nasa would be much more comfortable with this system too.
3: This base/habitat Starship would be perfect for nasa’s Artemis program:
While I don’t agree with Zubrin on a lot of things (seriously, he needs to stop with the whole mini-starship idea, it’s not gonna happen), he is right when he says that starship as a lunar ascent vehicle makes very little sense imo. It would be a huge investment of fuel and time for no real gain besides funding and nasa support, the latter of which is all but assured if Starship works. If instead Spacex offered Starship as a lunar base and suggested that nasa use the landers from the other two companies to go to and from the lunar surface, there’s no way nasa would say no. Imagine the offer:
“So here’s the deal: we will build a Starship interior to your specifications and wishes. Once built we will launch it, refuel it in orbit and fly it out to whatever lunar crater you want us to. Once landed, we fill drain every drop of fuel out of the tanks, lower the staircase/elevator and wait for your crew to arrive on one of those landers. It will have a thousand cubic meters of interior volume, aka more than the ISS, and you can have it on the moon in 2023 since we want to send one or two to mars in 2022 anyway. We’d like you to give us a billion dollars and a promise for martian astronauts in 2024 once we’ve landed it in exchange. Deal?”. Obviously Spacex won’t be that blunt, but I don’t believe that nasa wouldn’t fall over themselves to take an offer like that.
So what would this designed-for-gravity Starship need? Honestly, nothing fancy, which is why I suggested splitting them. Starship will have the unique luxury to simply, as musk has stated, throw mass at a problem until it is solved. As an example, let us say that a mars crew would number an impressive 12 people (one mission commandetest pilot, 4 scientists, 3 engineers, 2 botanists and 2 doctors). We know that they will be staying on mars for at least two years, but for safety let’s design it for 4 years. If they all eat like the most wasteful people on earth (cough, americans, cough...) they will consume 10 tons of food per year, with half of that being the recommended healthy amount. So.... let’s just put 40 tons of food on board. Done. 4 to 8 years of food just like that.
This is what using mass as a solution looks like. All Spacex needs is a way to store and preserve that food by either drying or freezing it for up to 5+ years, at which point that problem is solved. I’m no food expert but surely that technology exists?
Same story with water. 12 people will drink less than 10 tons of water a year, but here recycling is a well-understood and “easy” thing to implement. We’re able to reach 90+% efficiency on the ISS I think (if I’m wrong feel free to correct me), so if Spacex gets anywhere close to that (anything over 50% will do) they can put 20 or 30 tons of water on board Starship and for all intents and purposes have an unlimited supply. Recycling CO2 back into O2 is a solved problem that basically only requires power which Starship will have plenty of.
Also keep in mind that the above figures don’t assume food production or recycling, higher efficiency or using martian resources like water ice, any one of which would make surviving on mars for a few years a non-issue.
So… is that it? Well... yeah, pretty much. Spacex will need to design some ways to control temperature, humidity and (human) waste disposal as well as provide communication and spacesuits for the astronauts, but these are by no means show stoppers, especially with help from nasa and all the lessons learned from dragon. As for spare parts they can either take a 3D-printer or simply a literal ton worth of the more important components, or both if they want to.
None of the above is easy, but none of it is something that Spacex cannot obtain or build in a year (that year being 2021).
I have a design in my head for how this thing would look like on the inside but I’m a pretty bad programmemodeller. If someone who is good at that wants to model and render it and read my far too detailed description feel free to ask. Just be prepared for a very long response comment.
Life support in space
This is where things start to get “actually” difficult even if Starship works. Keeping astronauts alive during the 6+ month trip to mars will be easy. Keeping them healthy and in good condition will be very hard. Like I said with the mars base Starship, food, water and air won’t be a problem. Even basic water recycling and CO2 scrubbers will keep the crew alive just fine. Put 10 tons of food and 10 tons of water on board and there’s your problem solved. Even if they have to abort the martian landing on-route for some reason and slingshot back to earth they will be fine as they will have 1 to 2 years or more of food, water and air. No, the two big problems will be radiation and weightlessness. On mars neither of these factors are a show stopper: The gravity most likely will be fine and mars and its atmosphere will shield you from some/much of the cosmic rays, while putting the radiation shelter right below your 40 tons of food with your 20-30 tons of water surrounding it will protect you reasonably well from solar storms. None of these “easy fixes” is available in interplanetary space, as there is no planet to create gravity or block radiation (shocking I know), nor will these ones be as full of food and water to use as shielding since they will be carrying much more cargo and scientific instruments. No reason not to if there is already a base Starship full of food and water waiting on mars.
The simplest way to solve the radiation problem is some sort of physical shielding material in the walls (maybe hydrogen-rich foam?) and a solar storm shelter which is surrounded by all of the food and water on board. Whatever Spacex comes up with, this is something that I hope they work very closely with nasa on. The main problem is that they will not have much time to test this theoretical solution with humans on board until probably 2023. At the earliest Starship will be flying with crew on board in 2022, and even that’s jaw-droppingly aggressive. It would probably require Starship to reach falcon 9’s current amount of launches (a 100 basically) in less than two years (aka, one orbital launch every week on average) with little to no failures before nasa would trust Starship to launch and land safely, since I don’t see any sign of Spacex adding a launch abort system or changing the landing sequence. For the first few flights they can use a dragon to shuttle between a Starship in LEO and earth’s surface, but they can only do that a few times before the costs in both money and disposed falcon 9 second stages start adding up. No humans have ever gone beyond the earth-moon system, and no human has gone beyond earth’s magnetic shield since 1972, so this part very much has a possibility of providing some unwelcome unknown unknowns.
There is another big thing though that I think too many people ignore: weightlessness. The first flights to mars will take at least 6 months. Even with exercise, I think it’s fair to say that astronauts currently do not have the muscle and bone strength to stand up and walk by themselves after returning from a 6 month mission on the ISS without help. Mars’ lower gravity might help them recuperate faster, but this too is a complete unknown that neither nasa nor Spacex will or should count on imho. So far I’ve seen only two solutions suggested: lots of exercise on-route combined with simply letting the crew recover slowly once they land on mars, or tethering two starships together and spinning them. I don’t think either one will be an option. The first one is probably not enough, and the second one is too risky. Nasa would almost certainly go pale with that amount of inhabited mass under constant loads and stresses from circular acceleration, even if Spacex can make it work mechanically.
The only alternative I can come up with is this (and since I don’t believe for a second that I’m smarter than the teams at Spacex I’d very much appreciate someone more knowledgeable to explain to me where my thinking is flawed): You place a ring inside the pressurised part of Starship 8 meters in diameter and 3 meters in height, connected to a central pole that is bolted to the floors above and below but is free to spin. You put the sleeping accommodations on the inside of this ring with your head facing towards the centre. At the start of the sleeping shift, you spin the ring up to a lateral speed where you feel your back being pushed into the wall at a force of one g. Since your entire body is experiencing the same acceleration at every part, as the radius between your head and the pole and your feet and the pole is constant, it shouldn’t be nauseating. If there are walls on all sides of you (and one door) so that you don’t see the rotation, and your “bed” is slanted slightly to account for the coriolis effect, would it not feel just like regular gravity? Big bonus: you can start at one g and slowly move to 0.38 g over the course of several months to acclimate to mars. Small bonus: if you’re willing to pay the power cost, putting some big scoops or buckets on the outside of this ring might help with circulating the air around the ship since it will be spinning quite fast. Finally you could also spin it faster to do exercises like push-ups (basically any effort where your body remains more or less fixed to the floor could work), meaning you could compensate for being in zero g most of the day by sleeping under gravity and performing some exercises while under higher gravity [insert goku joke here].
I’m sure I have overlooked something, but it seems to me like this would work and be a reasonably effective and practical solution. Feel free to explain to me why I’m wrong.
In short, Spacex needs to find a solution to the zero-g and radiation problems by the end of 2022 at the latest. Firstly because dearmoon is scheduled for 2023 and I can’t see nasa (much less the US congress) stomach letting private civilians being the first humans to return to the moon’s vicinity since Apollo instead of nasa astronauts. If a Starship capable of sustaining humans is flying successfully in 2022 and dearmoon is set for mid-to-late 2023, I’d bet on there being effectively an order from congress for Spacex and nasa to fly american astronauts on Starship around the moon before dearmoon takes place, regardless of the state of either SLS or Artemis. And before you say that that would be massive hypocrisy, remember that these are US politicians we’re talking about.
Secondly because they really need to perform a 6 month trial run at the L2 earth-moon lagrange point to confirm that their life support, radiation protection and zero-g mitigation solutions work as intended. (This is why my money is still on humans to mars in 2026 because I can’t make myself believe that everything will work right the first time they try it). If they want to send people to mars in 2024 they will need to have this test done to satisfy nasa (or whomever is providing them with astronauts) by the end of 2023.
So my reasoning/guess is that Spacex will want the design of this version of Starship finished in early 2022, build and launch one that summer, and maybe bring some crew on board with a dragon to prove out its life support systems by the end of the year. The big year for this piece of the puzzle will be 2023, as this is the Starship type that they will most likely use for dearmoon as well as perform any major test runs in the earth-moon system, before the big launch of the first crew to mars in 2024.
Refueling starships on mars
So why do I think this is the biggest hurdle? Isn’t the sabatier process a well-understood and quite simple chemical reaction? Yes it is, and the problem as I see it isn’t with the chemistry, but with the scale, the schedule and the industrial processes that are needed.
Spacex will have to design, test and build a full-on fuel production system… and have it ready for launch roughly 18 months from now. Why so soon? Because there is no way, repeat NO WAY that Spacex will be allowed to send astronauts to mars, on a rocket that cannot get back to earth without being refueled, if there is no fuel production on mars at the time of launch. I know Elon has often said that there is a real chance that the first crew sent to mars will die, but I can’t imagine he actually believes that he can get professional astronauts and nasa support if he doesn’t take every precaution possible to ensure that they can get back home safely.
Just to be clear: I don’t mean that there needs to be a fully fuelled Starship sitting on mars when the first crew lands, but there absolutely, 100% needs to be a Starship on mars producing fuel by the time the first crew leaves earth. And this is not as easy to pull off as it might seem.
Getting the CO2 is a non-issue: mars’ atmosphere is so rich with it that you might not even need to filter the incoming air. Also as long as the crane/elevator on Starship works, setting up a large solar field won’t be that difficult provided Spacex has made the panels reasonably easy to unload and deploy (safe assumption if you ask me), and if the surrounding surface is flat. Given that Spacex has chosen a landing/base site in the northern plains (IIRC) this should also not give any major problems.
The main difficulty will be getting enough water to produce enough fuel. If Elon is serious with his recent comment about “~2 tons/day” of fuel, which I have to assume he is, that means many tons of water ice have to be excavated, moved, filtered of other materials, melted and separated into H2 and O2, per day, for over two years, with no one around to fix something if it breaks. This is orders of magnitude more intense than what we’ve done on mars before. To be blunt, we are talking nothing less than autonomous bulldozers, that weigh several tons and make Perseverance look like a toy. Scooping up and gathering a truckload of ice and rocks daily and dumping them into whatever device Spacex comes up with to separate out the ice, melt it and split it into hydrogen and oxygen (of which the former probably must be combined with CO2 and turned into methane immediately given its habit of not liking being stored and subsequently floating away), and not break down thanks to the martian dust getting anywhere crucial.
Even setting aside the fact that this operation will make the planetary protection crowd pull their hair out, the chances of it working as designed the first time are not high if you ask me. There is every chance that something wears out faster than expected, stops working due to some unknown unknown, or gets wrecked by a malfunctioning autonomous vehicle glitching out and driving into/over it. Once there are actual humans on mars, keeping these machines operational won’t be all that hard, but basic safety standards (and nasa) are going to require that the fuel farm works reliably on its own, for as long as it takes to make enough propellant for the first crew to return home safely in case of an emergency, before the go-ahead is given for that first crewed mars mission to leave earth.
I would not be shocked if Spacex manages to design, test and build a system that they think will work in 2021 and launch, refuel, transfer to and land it on mars in 2022, only to find out that some crucial part doesn’t work as designed under the martian conditions, leaving a fully habitable base Starship and an empty propellant plant Starship sitting on mars with all the accompanying parts needed to start a base (pressurised cybertruck rover, unpressurised cybertruck rover, water ice gatherebulldozer, fuel transporter, solar farm and guidance & landing beacon) present, but no way to make fuel. It will be the most infuriating and cathartic thing ever at the same time. Such a situation will almost certainly set the Spacex timetable back the full two years, as I just can’t see nasa allowing astronauts to get in a Starship and blasting off to mars if there is no way for them to get back yet. I don’t think the argument “Well once they are there they can fix the fuel farm instantly!” will hold much weight, since if something important has broken, what’s to say that something else will not go wrong unexpectedly that the crew can’t fix, leaving them stranded?
My basic reasoning is this: the other three parts can be tested in LEO or on earth with the results being representative of their supposed tasks, but this one cannot. The environment on mars is simply too different from the one on earth (especially the atmosphere), and the scale and ambition of Spacex’s plan means that the rovers currently on mars are not much of a reference either. There is no way for us to know outside computer models what a five-ton vehicle driving around on mars for years hauling several tons of regolith and ice around daily would go through in terms of wear and tear, creating a massive potential for unknown unknowns to appear where we don’t expect them. To put Spacex’s project in perspective: the first fully loaded Starship upon touchdown will probably consist of 99% of all the mass humanity has ever landed on the surface of mars. Let that sink in...
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So that’s my take on Spacex’s mars ambitions. If Starship works (big if, but it seems to be getting more believable by the day), I am reasonably confident about orbital refueling and a martian habitat being ready on time, but have reservations about the human-rated Starships and am outright concerned regarding the autonomous propellant plant working as designed. As I’ve mentioned, my money if SN8’s 20 km flight goes well is on Spacex getting a Starship to mars in 2022, but not sending humans until 2026, either due to the 2022 starships not performing as well as intended (or not performing at all if they crash) or due to Starship not yet being declared safe for human flight in 2024.
Now before I go ahead and request the longest-reddit-thread-of-the-year award (I genuinely think this post is twice as long as my previous one), I’m curious as to your response to the three questions that in my opinion sum up the whole thing:
1, Did I miss something important besides the four areas I covered?
2, If you agree that these are the major roadblocks for Spacex and Starship, do you agree with my take on them? Did I badly underestimate something that is much harder than I gave it credit for? Or are certain things that I considered difficult much easier than I made them out to be?
3, Regardless of whether or not you agree with my list, ranking and reasoning, what do you think Spacex’s biggest obstacle will be to sending humans to mars in 2024, assuming Starship itself works?
Looking forward to your responses, opinions and rebuttals.

Today i have a confession to make: i'm a little bit of a minmaxer. And honestly, i think that's a pretty desirable trait in a DM. The minmaxer knows the rules, and exploits them to maximum efficiency.
"But wait, what does that have to do with spell use in society?" - someone, probably.
Well, the thing is that humans are absolutely all about minmaxing. There's a rule in the universe that reads "gas expands when hot", and suddenly we have steam engines (or something like that, i'm a political scientist not an engineer). A rule says 1+1 = 2, and suddenly we have calculus, computers and all kinds of digital stuff that runs on math. Sound is energy? Let's convert that shit into electricity, run it through a wire and turn it back into sound on the other side.
Bruh. Science is just minmaxing the laws of nature. Humanity in real life is just a big bunch of munchkins, and it should be no different in your setting.
And that is why minmaxing magic usage is something societies as a whole would do, specially with some notable spells. Today i will go in depth on how and why each of these notable mentions has a huge impact on a fantasy society.
We'll go from lowest level to highest, keeping in mind that the lower level a spell the more common it should be to find someone who has it, so often a level 2-3 spell will have more impact than a level 9 spell.
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Mending (cantrip).
Repair anything in one minute. Your axe lost its edge? Tore your shirt? Just have someone Mend it.
Someone out there is crying "but wait! Not every village has a wizard!" and while that is true, keep in mind any High Elf knows a cantrip, as can any Variant Human.
A single "mender" could replace a lot of the work a smith, woodworker or seamstress does, freeing their time to only work on making new things rather than repair old ones.
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Prestidigitation (cantrip).
Clean anything in six seconds. Committed axe murders until the axe got blunt, and now there's blood everywhere? Dog shit on your pillow out of spite? Someone walked all over the living room with muddy boots? Just Prestidigitate it away.
This may look like a small thing, but its actually huge when you apply it to laundry. Before washing machines were a thing housewives had to spend several hours a week washing them manually, and with Prestidigitation you can just hire someone to get it done in a few minutes.
A single "magic cleaner" can attend to several dozen homes, if not hundreds, thus freeing several hours of the time of dozens of women.
Fun fact: there's an interesting theory that says feminism only existed because of laundry machines and similar devices. Women found themselves having more free time, which they used to read and socialize. Educated women with more contacts made for easy organization of political movements, and the fact men were now able to do "the women's work" by pushing a button meant men were less opposed to losing their housewives' labor. Having specialized menders and magic cleaners could cause a comparable revolution in a fantasy setting, and help explain why women have a similar standing to men even in combat occupations such as adventuring.
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Healing in general (1st-2nd level).
This one is fairly obvious. A commoner has 4 hit points, that means just about any spell is a full heal to the average person. That means most cuts, stab wounds, etc. can be solved by the resident cleric. Even broken bones that would leave you in bed for months can be solved in a matter of seconds as soon as the holy man arrives.
But that's nothing compared to the ability to cure diseases. While the only spell that can cure diseases is Lesser Restoration, which is second level, a paladin can do it much more easily with just a Lay on Hands. This means if one or two people catch a disease it can just be eradicated with a touch.
However doing that comes with a cost. If everyone is instantly expunged of illness, the populace does not build up their immune systems. Regular disease becomes less common, sure, but whenever it is reintroduced (by, say, immigrants or contact with less civilized humanoids) it can spread like wildfire, afflicting people so fast that no amount of healers will have the magic juice to deal with it.
Diseases become rare, plagues become common.
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Continual Flame (2nd).
Ok, this one is a topic i love and could easily be its own post.
There's an article called "Why the Falling Cost of Light Matters", which goes in detail about how man went from chopping wood for fire, to using animal fat for candles, then other oils, whale oil, kerosene, then finally incandescent light bulbs, and more recently LED lights. Each of these leaps is orders of grandeur more efficient than the previous one, to the point that the cost of light today is about 500,000 times cheaper than it was for for a caveman. And until the early 1900s the only way mankind knew of making light was to set things on fire.
Continual Flame on the other hand allows you to turn 50gp worth of rubies and a 2nd level spell slot into a torch that burns forever. In a society that spends 60 hours of labor to be able to generate 140 minutes of light, this is a huge game changer.
This single spell, which i am 99% sure was just created as an excuse for why the dungeon is lit despite going for centuries without maintenance, allows you to have things like public lighting. Even if you only add a new "torchpost" every other week or month sooner or later you'll be left with a neatly lit city, specially if the city has had thousands of years in which to gather the rubies and light them up.
And because the demand of rubies becomes so important, consider how governments would react. Lighting the streets is a public service, if its strategically relevant to make the city safer at night, would that not warrant some restrictions on ruby sales? Perhaps even banning the use of rubies in jewelry?
Trivia: John D. Rockefeller, the richest man in history, gained his wealth selling kerosene. Kerosene at the time was used to light lamps. Gasoline was invented much later, when Rockefeller tasked a bunch of scientists to come up with a use for some byproducts of the kerosene production. This illustrates how much money is to be had in the lighting industry, and you could even have your own Rockefeller ruby baron in your game. I shall call him... Dohn J. Stonebreaker. Perfect name for a mining entrepreneur.
Whether the ruby trade ends up a monopoly under the direct supervision of the king or a free market, do keep in mind that Continual Flame is by far the most efficient way of creating light.
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Gentle Repose (2nd).
Cast it on a corpse, and it stays preserved for 10 days.
This has many potential uses, from preserving foodstuffs (hey, some rare meats are expensive enough to warrant it) to keeping the bodies of old rulers preserved. Even if a ruler died of old age and cannot be resurrected, the body could be kept "fresh" out of respect/ceremony. Besides, it keeps the corpse from becoming undead.
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Skywrite (2nd).
Ok, this one is mostly a gag. While the spell can be used by officials to make official announcements to the populace, such as new laws or important news, i like to just use it for spam. I mean, its a ritual spell that writes a message on the sky; what else would people use it for?
Imagine you show up in a city, and there's half a dozen clouds reading "buy at X, we have what you need", "get your farming supplies over at Joe's store" or "vote Y for the city council".
The possibilities are endless, and there's no way the players can expect it. Just keep in mind that by RAW the spell can only do words, meaning no images. No Patrick, "8===D" is not a word.
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Zone of Truth (2nd).
This one is too obvious. Put all suspects of a crime into a ZoT, wait a couple minutes to make sure they fail the save, then ask each one if he did it. Sure its not a perfect system, things like the Ring of Mind Shielding still exist, but it's got a better chance of getting the right guy than most medieval justice systems. And probably more than a few contemporary ones. All while taking only a fraction of the time.
More importantly, with all the average crimes being handled instantly, the guards and investigators have more time to properly investigate the more unusual crimes that might actually involve a Thought Shield, Ring of Mind Shielding or a level 17 Mastermind.
There is a human rights argument against messing with people's minds in any way, which is why this may not be practiced in every kingdom. But there are definitely some more lawful societies that would use ZoT on just about every crime.
Why swear to speak the truth and nothing but the truth when you can just stand in a zone of truth?
Another interesting use for ZoT is oaths. When someone is appointed into an office, gets to a high rank in the military or a guild, just put them in a ZoT while they make their oath to stand for the organization's values and yadda yadda. Of course they can be corrupted later on, but at least you make sure they're honest when they are sworn in.
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Sending (3rd).
Sending is busted in so many ways.
The more "vanilla" use of it is to just communicate over long distances. We all know that information is important, and that sometimes getting information a whole day ahead can lead to a 40% return on a massive two-year investment. Being able to know of invasions, monsters, disasters, etc. without waiting days or weeks for a courier can be vital for the survival of a nation. Another notable example is that one dude who ran super fast for a while to be the first to tell his side of a recent event.
But the real broken thing here is... Sending can Send to any creature, on any plane; the only restriction being "with which you are familiar". In D&D dead people just get sent to one of the afterlife planes, meaning that talking to your dead grandfather would be as simple as Sending to him. Settling inheritance disputes was never easier!
Before moving on to the next point let me ask you something: Is a cleric familiar with his god? Is a warlock familiar with his patron?
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Speak With Dead (3rd).
Much like Sending, this lets you easily settle disputes. Is the senate/council arguing over a controversial topic? Just ask the beloved hero or ruler from 200 years ago what he thinks on the subject. As long his skeleton still has a jaw (or if he has been kept in Gentle Repose), he can answer.
This can also be used to ask people who killed them, except murderers also know this. Plan on killing someone? Accidentally killed someone? Make sure to inutilize the jaw. Its either that, being so stealthy the victim can't identify you, or being caught.
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Note on spell availability.
Oh boy. No world-altering 4th level spells for some reason, and suddenly we're playing with the big boys now.
Spells up to 3rd level are what I'd consider "somewhat accessible", and can be arranged for a fee even for regular citizens. For instance the vanilla Priest statblock (MM348) is a 5th level cleric, and the standard vanilla Druid (MM346) a 4th level druid.
Spells of 5th level onward will be considered something only the top 1% is able to afford, or large organizations such as guilds, temples or government.
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Dream (5th).
I was originally going to put Dream along with Sending and Telepathy as "long range communication", but decided against it due to each of them having unique uses.
And when it comes to Dream, it has the unique ability of allowing you to put your 8 hours of sleep to good use. A tutor could hire someone to cast Dream on him, thus allowing him to teach his student for 8 hours at any distance. This is a way you could even access hermits that live in the middle of nowhere or in secluded monasteries. Very wealthy families or rulers would be willing to pay a good amount of money to make sure their heirs get that extra bit of education.
Its like online classes, but while you sleep!
Another interesting use is for cheating. Know a princess or queen you like? She likes you back? Her dad put 400 trained soldiers between you? No problemo! Just find a 9th level Bard, Warlock or Wizard, but who am i kidding, of course it'll be a bard. And that bard is probably you. Now you have 8 hours to do whatever you want, and no physical evidence will be left.
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Raise Dead (5th).
Few things matter more in life than death. And the ability to resurrect people has a huge impact on society. The impact is so huge that this topic needs topics of its own.
First, diamond monopoly. Remember what i said about how Continual Flame would lead to controlled ruby sales due to its strategic value? This is the same principle, but a hundred times stronger. Resurrection is a huge strategic resource. It makes assassinations harder, can be used to bring back your officials or highest level soldiers over and over during a war, etc. This means more authoritarian regimes would do everything within their power to control the supply and stock of diamonds. Which in turn means if anyone wants to have someone resurrected, even in times of peace, they'll need to call in a favor, do a quest, grease some hands...
Second, resurrection insurance. People hate risks. That's why insurance is such a huge industry, taking up about 15% of the US GDP. People insure their cars, houses... even their lives. Resurrection just means "life insurance" is taken more literally. This makes even more sense when you consider how expensive resurrection is: nobody can afford it in one go, but if you pay a little every month or year you can save up enough to have it done when the need arises.
This is generally incompatible with the idea of a State-run monopoly over diamonds, but that just means different countries within a setting can take different approaches.
To make things easier, i even used some microeconomics to make a sheet in my personal random generators to calculate the price of such a service. Just head to the "Insurance" tab and fill in the information relative to your setting.
With actual life insurance resurrection can cost as little as 5gp a year for humans or 8sp a year for elves, making resurrection way more affordable than it looks.
Also, do you know why pirates wore a single gold earring? It was so that if your body washes up on the shore whoever finds it can use the money to arrange a proper burial. Sure there's a risk of the finder taking it and walking away, but the pirates did it anyway. With resurrection in play, might as well just wear a diamond earring instead and hope the finder is nice enough to bring you back.
I got so carried away with the whole insurance thing i almost forgot: the possibility of resurrection also changes how murders are committed.
If you want someone dead but resurrection exists, you have to remove the vital organs. Decapitation would be far more common. Sure resurrection is still possible, but it requires higher level spells or Reincarnate, which has... quirks.
As a result it should be very obvious when someone was killed by accident or an overreaction, and when someone was specifically out to kill the victim.
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Scrying (5th).
This one is somewhat obvious, in that everyone and their mother knows it helps finding people. But who needs finding? Well, that would be those who are hiding.
The main use i see for this spell, by far, is locating escaped criminals. Just collect a sample of hair or blood when arresting someone (or shipping them to hard labor which is way smarter), and if they escape you'll be almost guaranteed to successfully scry on them.
A similar concept to this is seen in the Dragon Age series. If you're a mage the paladins keep a sample of your blood in something called a phylactery, and that can be used to track you down. There's even a quest or two about mages trying to destroy their phylacteries before escaping.
Similarly, if you plan a jailbreak it would be highly beneficial to destroy the blood/hair sample first. As a matter of fact i can even see a thieves guild hiring a low level party to take out the sample while the professional infiltrators get the prisoner out. Keep in mind both events must be done at the same time, otherwise the guards will just collect a new sample or would have already taken it to the wizard.
But guards aren't the only ones with resources. A loan shark could keep blood samples of his debtors, a mobster can keep one of those who owe him favors, etc. And the blood is ceremoniously returned only when the debt is fully paid.
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Teleportation Circle (5th), Transport Via Plants (6th).
In other words, long range teleportation. This is such a huge thing that it is hard to properly explain how important it is.
Teleportation Circle creates a 10ft. circle, and everyone has one round to get in and appear on the target location. Assuming 30ft. movement that means you can get 192 people through, which is a lot of potential merchants going across any distance. Or 672 people dashing.
Math note: A 30ft radius square around a 10ft. diameter square, minus the 4 original squares. Or [(6*2+2)^2]-4 squares of 5ft. each. Hence 192 people.
Getting hundreds of merchants, workers, soldiers, etc. across any distance is nothing to scoff at. In fact, it could help explain why PHB item prices are so standardized: Arbitrage is so easy and cheap that price differences across multiple markets become negligible. Unless of course countries start setting up tax collectors outside of the permanent teleportation circles in order to charge tariffs.
Transport Via Plants does something very similar but it requires 5ft of movement to go through, which means less people can be teleported. On the other hand it doesn't burn 50gp and can take you to any tree the druid is familiar with, making it nearly impossible for tax collectors to be waiting on the other side. Unfortunately druids tend to be a lot less willing to aid smugglers, so your best bet might be a bard using spells that don't belong to his list.
With these methods of long range teleportation not only does trade get easier, but it also becomes possible to colonize or inhabit far away places. For instance if someone finds a gold mine in the antarctic you could set up a mine and bring food and other supplies via teleportation.
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Major Image (6th level slot).
Major Image is a 3rd level spell that creates an illusion over a 20ft cube, complete with image, sound, smell and temperature. When cast with a 6th level slot or higher, it lasts indefinitely.
That my friends, is a huge spell. Why get the world's best painter to decorate the ceiling of your cathedral when you can just get an illusion made in six seconds?
The uses for decorating large buildings is already good, but remember: we're not restricted to sight.
Cast this on a room and it'll always be cool and smell nice. Inns would love that, as would anyone who always sleeps or works in the same room. Desert cities have never been so chill.
You can even use an illusion to make the front of your shop seem flashier, while hollering on loop to bring customers in.
The only limit to this spell is your imagination, though I'm pretty sure it was originally made just to hide secret passages.
Trivia: the ki-rin (VGM163) can cast Major Image as a 6th level spell, at will. It's probably meant to give them fabulous lairs yet all it takes is someone doing the holy horsey a big favor, and it could enchant the whole city in a few hours. Shiniest city on the planet, always at a nice temperature and with a fragrance of lilac, gooseberries or whatever you want.
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Simulacrum (7th).
Spend 12 hours and 1500gp worth of ruby dust, and get a clone of yourself. Notably, each caster can only have one simulacrum, regardless of who the person he cloned is.
How this changes the world? By allowing the rich and powerful to be in two places at once. Kings now have a perfect impersonator who thinks just like them. A wealthy banker can run two branches of his company. Etc.
This makes life much easier, but also competes with Continual Flame over resources.
It also gives "go fuck yourself" a whole new meaning, making the sentence a valid Suggestion.
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Clone (8th).
If there's one spell i despise, its Clone.
Wizard-only preemptive resurrection. Touch spell, costs 1.000gp worth of diamonds each time, takes 120 days to come into effect, and creates a copy of the creature that the soul occupies if the original dies. Oh, and the copy can be made younger.
Why is it so despicable? Because it makes people effectively immortal. Accidents and assassinations just get you sent to the clone, and old age can be forever delayed because you keep going back to younger versions of yourself. Being a touch spell means the wizard can cast it on anyone he wants.
In other words: high level wizards, and only wizards, get to make anyone immortal.
That means wizards will inevitably rule any world in which this spell exists.
Think about it. Rulers want to live forever. Wizards can make you live forever. Wizards want other stuff, which you must give them if you want to continue being Cloned. Rulers who refuse this deal eventually die, rulers who accept stick around forever. Natural selection makes it so that eventually the only rulers left are those who sold their soul to wizards. Figuratively, i hope.
The fact that there are only a handful of wizards out there who are high enough level to cast the spell means its easier for them organize and/or form a cartel or union (cartels/unions are easier to maintain the fewer suppliers are involved).
This leads to a dystopian scenario where mages rule, kings are authoritarian pawns and nobody else has a say in anything. Honestly it would make for a fun campaign in and of itself, but unless that's specifically what you're going for it'll just derail everything else.
Oh, and Clone also means any and all liches are absolute idiots. Liches are people who turned themselves into undead abominations in order to gain eternal life at the cost of having to feed on souls. They're all able to cast 9th level wizard spells, so why not just cast an 8th level one and keep undeath away? Saves you the trouble of going after souls, and you keep the ability to enjoy food or a day in the sun.
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Demiplane (8th).
Your own 30ft. room of nothingness. Perfect place for storage and a DM's nightmare given how once players have access to it they'll just start looting furniture and such. Oh the horror.
But alas, infinite storage is not the reason this is a broken spell. No sir.
Remember: you can access someone else's demiplane. That means a caster in city 1 can put things into a demiplane, and a caster in city 2 can pull them out of any surface.
But wait, there's more! There's nothing anywhere saying you can't have two doors to the same demiplane open at once. Now you're effectively opening a portal between two places, which stays open for a whole hour.
But wait, there's even more! Anyone from any plane can open a door to your neat little demiplane. Now we can get multiple casters from multiple planes connecting all of those places, for one hour. Sure this is a very expensive thing to do since you're having to coordinate multiple high level individuals in different planes, but the payoff is just as high. We're talking about potential integration between the most varied markets imaginable, few things in the multiverse are more valuable or profitable. Its a do-it-yourself Sigil.
One little plot hook i like about demiplanes is abandoned/inactive ones. Old wizard/warlock died, and nobody knows how to access his demiplanes. Because he's at least level 15 you just know there's some good stuff in there, but nobody can get to it. Now the players have to find a journal, diary, stored memory or any other way of knowing enough about the demiplane to access it.
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True Polymorph (9th).
True Polymorph. The spell that can turn any race into any other race, or object. And vice-versa. You can go full fairy godmother and turn mice into horses. For a spell that can change anything about one's body it would not be an unusual ruling to say it can change one's sex. At the very least it can turn a man into a chair, and the chair into a woman (or vice-versa of course).
But honestly, that's just the tip of the True Polymorph iceberg. Just read this more carefully:
> You transform the creature into a different creature, the creature into a nonmagical object, or the object into a creature
This means you can turn a rock or twig into a human. A fully functional human with, as far as the rules go, a soul. You can create life.
But wait, there's more! Nothing there says you have to turn the target into a known creature on an existing creature. The narcissist bard wants to create a whole race of people who look like him? True Polymorph. A player wants to play a weird ass homebrew race and you have no idea how it would fit into the setting? True Polymorph. Wizard needs a way to quickly populate a kingdom and doesn't want to wait decades for the subjects to grow up? True Polymorph. Warlock must provide his patron 100 souls in order to free his own? True Polymorph. The sorcerer wants to do something cool? Fuck that guy, sorcerers don't get any of the fun high level spells; True Poly is available to literally every arcane caster but the sorcerer.
Note: what good is Twinned Spell if all the high level twinnable spells have been specifically made unavailable to sorcerers?
Do keep in mind however that this brings a whole new discussion on human rights. Does a table have rights? Does it have rights after being turned into a living thing? If it had an owner, is it now a slave? Your country will need so many new laws, just to deal with this one spell.
People often say that high level wizards are deities for all intents and purposes. This is the utmost proof of that. Clerics don't get to create life out of thin air, wizards do. The cleric worships a deity, the wizard is the deity.
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Conclusion.
Intelligent creatures not only can game the system, but it is entirely in character for them to do so. I'll even argue that if humanoids don't use magic to improve their lives when it's available, you're pushing the suspension of disbelief.
With this post i hope to have helped you make more complex and realistic societies, as well as provide a few interesting and unusual plot hooks
Lastly, as much as i hate comment begging i must admit i am eager to see what spells other players think can completely change the world. Because at the end of the day we all know that extra d6 damage is not what causes empires to rise and fall, its the utility spells that make the best stories.
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Edit: Added spell level to all spells, and would like to thank u/kaul_field for helping with finishing touches and being overall a great mod.

So this morning I woke up to this response to an ask on the Blogatog blog. And just like that Maro manages to put into words a problem that I didn't even notice I had.
There is a laundry list of problems with the current Secret Lair going on. I don't need to add to them and I'm sure very few of you want to hear them repeated. That being said though a lot of these are compounded because of how all of this stuff was handled so I want to focus on one thing that honestly might be the most relevant because it's something that we know will come up when the Dungeons & Dragons crossover comes out but might fly under the radar as it’s less of a dumpster fire than everything else getting attention. That thing being how IPs are handled even when Hasbro isn't looking to take every last cent you worked hard to earn (as rare as that seems).
Every character in Magic, regardless of card type, has both a mechanical and a story identity. Both of them are extremely important because without the former there's no reason to have cards for them and without the latter there's no reason to care about them. One of my favorite Drive to Work podcasts in recent memory is when Rosewater just goes over each and every planeswalker and describes a little bit of their story and a lot about how R&D represents the magic they use in that story in the cards depicting them (Link). Sometimes these identities are in step with each other and sometimes they are at odds but together they make up the Magic characters we know and love (or sometimes tolerate). While some characters start as a story idea and become cards and some characters start as card ideas and become stories, eventually the two have to meet. I honestly think the best representation of this is in the Shadows over Innistrad block with its depictions of Nahiri and Tamiyo (This has nothing to do with my opinions about the block because I wasn't even playing Magic during that specific time period, I just think these specific cards help prove my point).
Both of these cards introduce a brand new color into the color identity of the planeswalker they represent but they do it for precisely the opposite reasons. Nahiri is red-white here as opposed to mono-white like before because it represents how the actions she's taking during this block are volatile, short-sighted, and driven almost entirely by passion and rage. It is a mechanical reflection of an in-story reality. Tamiyo is the exact opposite though. She was put in the story already because she filled a specific role but she wasn't going to get a card because the set was already at its limit for planeswalkers and there were bigger players to represent. The reason she got through is because design realized there was mechanical space for another planeswalker as long as it had a tri-color identity, and then worked with the story department to see what added colors best fit Tamiyo (Source). The card was the primary concern and the reason why Tamiyo as we know her today has the potential to be Bant instead of just Simic or plain mono-blue is because it fit the needs of the set. These two examples demonstrate a simple truth about characters in Magic: no one card or even collection of cards will represent the entirety of a character and nor does it even attempt to. A card only represents a character in that specific instance and that is all it is ever trying to do, anymore and it would be hypothesizing about a truth that is uncertain.
This I believe is actually a wonderful boon of Magic. It creates a kind of feedback loop. The mechanical flexibility of a character allows them to appear in more sets, which allows more cards that can depict more aspects of them, which means we are more endeared to them because they are more familiar and more explored, which leads to them being put in more stories, which requires more cards and more mechanically diverse cards to explore each facet of that character. It's a blessing in disguise that allows us to get a more full picture of what a character is like. That planeswalker podcast I mentioned has multiple moments where Rosewater discusses characters that have never explored a color that he believes they definitely are and it just hasn’t been shown because of the limitations of the cards printed for them up until that point. Two examples being the fact that he believes both Tibalt and Ob Nixilis are black-red even though ironically one has only ever had red cards and one has only ever had black cards. For two planeswalkers that are decently popular (whether it be for good or bad reasons), they have literally never explored more than half of the potential color identity.
So how does this relate to the ask above or external IPs in general? Well, it's simple: crossovers are by their nature temporary. They have to be because if they weren't it wouldn't be a crossover, it would be the status quo. That means they do not have the flexibility every other legendary creature or planeswalker is provided. They can't do the Omnath thing of slowly acquiring colors as the plot and the sets demand it. They can't be like Teferi where in the story he is consistently white-blue but has just as many mono-blue cards that explore his long history as a mage. Every card has to be treated as a one-off because there's no expectation of a follow-up. The cards have to be static. Is Glenn a white-blue character? Sure, I don't know, I didn't watch the show because statistically it seems highly improbable that the kind of person who likes a fantasy trading card game where you duel as a wizard would also like a gritty gory live-action zombie show well past its prime. But his card definitely isn't. And in a Magic set it probably wouldn't be. Because he's a legendary creature they would know they can afford making a card that doesn't fully explore him because later down the line they can make another card that truly does his Azorius parts justice. And if they couldn't they'd make a card that is truly Azorius or scrap the idea the character is a white-blue character. They could always just make a new card or even character for that design if they really like it after all.
You can't do that in a crossover. You have to provide a color identity that not only correctly explores the character but also appeases the IP holders. And you can’t make a new character to fit new design space since every character belongs to an IP you don’t own. Color identity is no longer one part mechanical truth, one part snapshot of the character's current existence, but instead just a fun little pop philosophy question. No different than a Hogwarts house, character alignment, or any of the million other "pick a side" ticket drivers pop culture has.
To a certain extent, it's always been that way. But at the very least there was a mechanical backbone to it and it was fluid enough that if you disagreed with that specific reading of a character it wasn't permanent. Heck, at this point Sarkhan Vol has been in literally every color but white and four different color combinations to boot. Even Garruk eventually moved back to mono-green. And because it was fluid the card would have to have a mechanical throughline to justify the change or it wouldn't have been made. I personally do not understand right now why Nissa is Golgari. I won't pretend that I understand it or that I agree with it but I also won't pretend that I think it's a bad decision from a game design standpoint, a color break, a character betrayal or an immutable constant. It honestly makes more sense to me than when she was Simic, both looking at her character as a whole and the current state she was in then and now. But even if I never come to understand it, the card feels Golgari and if it turns up in Modern a couple years down the line after it's rotated out I won't think it's forced because even if I don't understand or remember the context for why Nissa became black-green, the card only represents a facet of her at a specific point in time so I'm not going to think it says anything about any of the dozen or so other Nissa cards that exist and represent other facets of her at other points in time. The card wasn't forced to be mono-green because "it's Nissa, Nissa is mono-green" and it definitely wasn't given purely mono-green mechanics and made Golgari because "this character is black-green right now, this is a card that has to be black-green regardless of what it does."
This is all without even considering the other hand Wizard has to balance. The key reason why new properties are even coming into Magic is to attract people who otherwise do not care about the game enough to buy into it with a product that they will do so for. That's why Adventures in the Forgotten Realms is replacing a Core Set. It will obviously be around the same level of mechanical simplicity and newcomer friendliness. It's to get people who wouldn't jump into Magic at that point to do so. And since gold cards are innately more complex to design than single color cards, and since that complexity directly correlates to more nuance which is important to mapping what complex characters, both in real life and fiction, feel and do, it is likely we are going to get more Glenns. More multicolored cards because of character backgrounds and philosophies, but with mono-color mechanics to create simplicity that allows new players to pick up and play. For the good cards they will mash together one mechanic of each color but for many cards they won't have the space because it will take a bunch of reminder text and we'll be stuck with a blue card that is clearly blue that has white not even because it has a life gain rider but because of a book, movie, or comic you didn't read since it isn't relevant to Magic.
In summary, the concerning thing here is that even when Wizards isn't trying to put less-than-scrupulous principles ahead of its players they're still somewhat failing the game. For crossover IPs color is no longer a reflection of what the character is doing, believing, and experiencing at the moment that they are being represented in by the card, but a summation of all of their experiences, actions, and philosophies. Color is doing a lot more than it was ever expected to do and it's doing it for cards that are going to be simplified to entice newcomers so at a time when color is leaning to be as multicolored as possible to reflect as much as possible, it is going to have mechanics that are likely to be very mono-colored in nature. At the best of times we're going to get keywords shared by the colors represented but often we're probably just going to get cards that don't deserve the colors they have, and don't even use hybrid because that can be confusing and we sure don’t want that. Also, I splurged about how I realized how much I really like that the mechanical space and the thematic space of legendary cards, especially planeswalkers, actually empower and embolden one another and how that's kinda ruined by the broad strokes crossover cards have to paint those they represent with (Probably should have used less planeswalkers now that I think about it but they're the easiest characters to search and categorize on scryfall; if I ever make a follow-up you bet your ass that Niz-Mizzet Reborn is getting used as an example). Basically, remember how Urza, Headmaster just kind of slapped WUBRG on it because he's a very old character that could fit in many different color combinations and the mechanics of the card were so complex that they literally couldn't fit on a single card (or really collection of cards)? Well picture that but it's black-border, the card isn't as fun but just generically good, and the complexity isn't even that worth it.
Thank you for reading.