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:

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.
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.
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…

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:

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.

Source: https://bestinterest.blog/explain-the-big-short/

On Spells and Society, or how 5e spells completely change everyone's lives.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Ceobe’s Fungimist Experience (A discussion) [Spoilers!]

This entire post is future CN event spoilers (it’s a currently running CN event), if you do not wish to be spoiled, I would advise looking away.
Tl;dr Level your lower rarity operators also, they deserve love; summoners are finger-lickin good; schwing schwing is still powerful.

Background

Ceobe is a cute doggo, but also gets hungry really easily. Ceobe goes with Dokutah and Gavial to visit Gavial’s hometown. Ceobe got hungry, Gavial and Dokutah was busy, so Ceobe found some delicious looking mushrooms to eat. Our story begins here.

What is it?

Simply put, Fungimist is a mode comprised of randomly generated series of paths with random encounters and battles, featuring a wide variety of item collectables to help you recruit new members to your squad, levelling them up and apply various effects that alter your experience during a run. It is akin to rogue-like RPGs with procedurally generated levels, except in Arknights. Key thing here is that the arrangement of levels, events and the path are what is being randomly arranged each time and not the level layout themselves. Hence, you will encounter the same levels that have the exact same enemies when you play through it multiple times, though that is not necessarily a bad thing as I will go into detail further later. Otherwise, loot from battles, events and shops are completely randomised and given the sheer number of them available to collect, you will rarely run into the same collectable twice, though it does not mean never.

System breakdown

Before I can give my thoughts on the difference aspects of the game mode, first you must understand the mechanics so it is clear to see where I am coming from.

General info

This game mode is almost entirely independent of the rest of the game. The only thing that transfers over from outside the game mode is the levels, potentials and elite status of the operators you have within your roster. Other than the game mode specific operators which you cannot recruit outside of Fungimist, you only have access to as many operators as you have in the regular game. For example, I do not have Ceobe (kinda ironic) in my roster, so I cannot use her in this mode.

Currencies

In Fungimist there are 4 types of currency, 2 are specific to each run which reset after each run (called “Hope” and “Originium Ingot”), the other 2 are global to the game mode and can be used to gain rewards for use in the regular game (“Honey Cakes”) or can be spent to upgrade to provide minor buffs (such as operator %defence, %attack and %HP) to help with future runs (“Mushrooms”). Global currency is earned at the end of each run based on what you did in that run (how many bosses defeated, how many collectables collected etc).
Originium ingots (hereby referred to as cash in the rest of the write up because it is easier to write) are the general currency used in the run to purchase items, participate in certain events and can be earned in a variety of ways with the primary method being as a reward for completing a battle. Cash is not overly abundant and some cash shop items are not cheap, but most of the time they are justified as they can provide quite insane bonuses (like +1 SP per attack for all Guard units or +40% Attack Speed for all Casters).
Hope is the currency which you use to recruit new operators for your team each run. The amount of hope you start with each run is 6, though this can be modified depending on which Tactical Unit type you choose. Operators can only join your team via recruitment tickets which are typically given as rewards for finished battles, as random drops from events or sold at the shop. Normally, 6★ Operators require 6 Hope to recruit, 5★ Ops require 4 Hope, 4★ Ops require 2 Hope and 3★ and below require no Hope to recruit. Hope is used to level up your recruited operators to E2, as newly recruited Ops are only E1. The amount required is half of the recruitment cost, e.g. 6★ Operators require 3 Hope to be E2’ed. Hope can be obtained through collectables, some random events and levelling up the Command Level of the squad. The latter is the most reliable but also the most difficult as Command Level can only be levelled up through finishing battles. From this it can be seen Hope is definitely the limiting resource in this game mode and needs to be managed carefully.

Collectibles

Like any RPG, collecting items from drops and events are a key part of this game mode. They are the primary way to obtain critical buffs for Ops, debuffs for enemies, currency, lives etc. The effects of the collectables vary wildly and some will provide larger benefits than others but almost any collectable is better than no collectable. Again, collectables can be obtained from battles, events and the cash shop. Not all collectables are available on the first play through and some will unlock at the end of runs depending on whether you meet the unlock conditions. Once unlocked, they will have a chance to appear in each run you play through.

Lives

Now, let’s talk about how Lives are processed in this mode. In normal gameplay, Lives are linked to each level, typically being 3, where each enemy that reaches your Protection Objective (blue box) deducts 1 life and if it reaches 0, you lose the level. In Fungimist, Lives can be both global and temporary. Global lives carry forward between each encounter in the current run you are playing and reset to defaults once the current run is finished (be it defeat or victory) whilst temporary lives are granted each level and are used before your global lives (acts like a buffer). The amount of temporary lives given per level is based on what collectibles you have and what Tactical Unit you have selected at the start of the game. Global lives can also be increased similarly through the procurement of collectables as well as from random events. Needless to say, once your Lives reach 0, run’s dead.

Tactical Units

As I have mentioned multiple times above there is a Tactical Unit system in this mode, which is akin to selecting a race in a typical RPG. Each Tactical Unit type provides different benefits and selecting them will gear you towards a certain playstyle, e.g. Guards and Vanguards when recruited will immediately be at E2 level; +20 starting cash and +2 starting Hope etc. This choice of Tactical Unit selection is one of the main ways to influence the outcome of your run, other than the RNG of recruitment tickets and battles you have to fight (Ah yes, can’t wait to fight hordes of slugs with a 2-block Vanguard, a single-target Caster and a Medic. Yes, I lost the run to that battle. Sometimes RNG can screw you despite your best intentions, though that is what a rogue-like is supposed to be like).

General Opinions

Let’s just say there is never a better time to appreciate low rarity operators. As I mentioned previously, Hope is the most precious currency in this game mode and directly affects what operators you can recruit. Do you want several 5★ and 4★ for a balanced experience or do you want and hope that 6★ you recruited can carry you to later stages where you can obtain more Hope whilst the rest of your roster’s 3★s can keep the shiny unit alive? This game mode severely restricts the number of operators you can bring to each battle, with the default being 6 (that’s like +2 risk in CC) with only a few ways to increase that amount. This also applies to the number of operators you can deploy onto the map at any given time. So therefore, players who have a balanced roster in their hands in the normal game, with many leveled 3★, 4★ and 5★ operators will have an easier time when it comes to recruitment in Fungimist. Note that if you have not E1 or E2 a particular operator, this game mode will treat them as they are, so even if you shell out 9 Hope to “E2” a 6★ in Fungimist, they will still have the stats and skills as if they are whatever level they are at, so it becomes quite important to level different operators, including their skills. The only exception to this is temporary recruits, they are for all intents and purposes fully levelled at E2 with M3 for skills. They are also cheap to recruit but the likelihood of running into one that is worth recruiting is quite low, but most of the time they can act as cannon fodder.
Also, I have never felt more appreciative towards summoner operators. They are really good in this game mode since they can essentially allow you to deploy more operators than what is in your squad currently. Their summons are also really useful as fodder when it comes to bosses and bomb-tails. Honestly I sort of regret not levelling them in the regular game now. So it can be seen than Fungimist really really rewards players that have a diverse roster under their belt. So paradoxically, players with really levelled high end operators only and little to no low rarity level operators that they levelled will struggle in this mode compared to players with a few good operators levelled in all rarities, since Silver-daddy and crew can only carry you so far (but I can’t say that S3M3 schwing schwing didn’t carry me quite a bit in this mode. God bless the schwing schwing!).

The Good

This game mode is essentially the next step in making Arknights into a game with great replayability and provide the players with a creative outlet to test their skills and the various weird and wacky combinations to see how far they can take it. It reminds to Binding of Issac almost where some runs you just die to RNG but other runs you get a Godly combo of items and you can just thrash the enemies. It is really quite satisfying in that regard. This might be the best thing they’ve added since CCs in my opinion and I have sunk more hours into Arknights because of this mode, even though I have already collected all the available rewards. I really do hope Hyperglyph will incorporate this mode as part of the regular game like CC and not just as a one time event. I think this mode can also operate as part of a seasonal thing like CC, whereby you each new season offers new rewards, events, battles etc. This mode just have so much potential in my opinion and it’s all free! As part of Arknights! Free! It’s like a whole new game and it’s free!
Additionally, as I have mentioned, the battles themselves are not randomly generated and the enemies for each specific battle on a specific map will be the same. This lends really well to the player learning the battles and make more informed decisions in each consecutive run and allows for long term player success as they navigate through the different paths available to them. Of course sometimes RNG will mess with you by giving you no Medics or Defenders but overall, the feeling of learning and adapting based on previous encounters soften the RNG-ness of the situations so one or two bad runs in a roll really don’t affect the player’s attitude negatively. Instead, what I felt was a sense of either “It was so close! Maybe next time I can try this…” or “Okay these operators are what I need for this kind of level and I should avoid this battle if I don’t have those operators”. Every run is a learning experience and it doesn’t get stale.
Lastly, some of the events are also really cool in terms of story and atmosphere (forget horses, slug race betting anyone?), but also sometimes are hilarious also. I saw that a couple of days ago someone posted the duck in a hat, that’s actually one of the special bosses you can fight to get additional rewards and his literal introduction when you ask him why he’s following you is “let’s have a fight first”, like there’s no need to small talk, come and take my stuff if you think you’re hard enough. He knows what I want very well.
(Also the music are B A N G E R S !)

The Bad

It’s too short! There’s only 5 floors, which means you have little time in terms of grinding battles or visiting events/cash shops. Often I find my self full of cash but no shop to spend in before heading into boss fights. Also, each floor is not that long either, with only approximately 4 to 8 encounters per floor, which in conjunction with my previous point means the difficulty ramp up is quite severe. Some runs you’ll be going into boss fights with no chance because you only have Blue Poison for arts damage and the boss is this behemoth that only arts damage can kill in a good nick of time so you immediately know you’re screwed which is somewhat annoying especially when you’ve done quite okay up till now and you know most likely if you had 1 more floor in between you’ll likely to pick up a good Caster with all of the Hope you’ve been saving.
So definitely I would say if Hyperglyph were to implement this game mode as a permanent feature (which I do), they should look into increasing both the length of each floor with more branching paths and also add more floors. Initially all the floors might not be open, so say the first few runs you will only access up to 6 floors but after completing a few runs there’s a new event which allows the player to proceed onto the 7th floor with better loot, harder enemies and a nastier boss fight and so on. I would say to whole thing could be around 8 to 10 floors depending on how far Hyperglyph wants to take this. Perhaps by the end it would just be a boss rush where there’s an opportunity to earn some cool loot for the regular game like badges, skins (though most likely not but who knows), originium, certificates etc. Also bonuses for using a certain number of different collectables can also grant a small minor reward like a badge or something. If longer floors and more floors are implemented, I think the collectables can also be tuned down a bit so it feels more natural in terms of progression compared to right now where collectables are really powerful as to balance the steep difficulty curve (e.g. I got a collectable once that give +20 initial DP in all battles, that’s like 10x E2 Texas! Though Lappland will probably have the latter). And if Hyperglyph really wants to flesh this mode out, I would say add a points system so you can exchange for lower end materials also, so it becomes like CC but you can choose to sink time instead of sanity to grind materials like orirocks. Though this suggestion is more towards making this mode as part of the permanent rotation instead of seasons like CC. Perhaps this mode can be on a monthly rotation instead so players have a month to discover the new content in each successive update/regrind for materials as they refresh like the current weekly rotation for orundum. Though I am just spitballing here.

Conclusion

All in all, I am thoroughly enjoying the new game mode, I do think it would be a welcoming addition to become part of the permanent rotation or be a seasonal event like CC with some minor tweaks here and there as this game mode has a very good potential to add something fun and replayable to the game that isn’t just orirock farming. What do you guys think? Those who played as well as people that have read all the mechanics and stuff, what do you think that Hyperglyph should add/change?

Here’s what story mode needs

My Experience with Lorin in the Early days

I have some perspective about Lorin from the early days I’d like to share. I don’t know if this will be helpful to anyone, but I’d like to share what I saw and felt during the arc of Lorin’s career from my vantage. These are insights I’ve had over the years from being somewhat around him, and watching his rise, and now fall. I won’t be writing directly about his actions and the women he hurt, that’s not my place, but I have total empathy for them and support for them in their quest for healing. I’m more writing this for those who were fans, and who might be trying to figure out what the fuck just happened, reconcile this whole traumatizing experience, and get a better understanding of who this man that had such a strong effect on them actually was. None of us really know, but we can try together to learn and get a clearer picture.
I first got into the west coast electronic music scene through Burning Man in the late 90’s/early 00’s. The first time I heard of Lorin was from friends who had been out on the playa in 98 and caught some of his sets, particularly at El Circo’s camp, and came back raving about him. A lot of the aesthetic and attitude and energy of the west coast electronic music/burner scene was really shaped and defined by the El Circo camp, and Lorin was their shamanic musical spiritual leader, and eventually the entire playa’s. El Circo was from Ashland and Lorin from South Bay, but they seemed somehow destined to meet. I don’t know when that happened exactly, but it was a powerful fusion. In 99/00/01, if Lorin was spinning at the El Circo tent, everyone was going. And by everyone, I mean like 4-500 people. Which at that point, even though Burning Man was pretty big, it felt like “everyone” on the playa, because it was the 4-500 people who deeply cared about being at the greatest electronic music party there could ever be (at that time), and knew they were in for something special. Whatever magic he channeled was there from the very beginning. And after two decades of watching it and seeing it and thinking about it I still have no idea what it was. I just know that everyone felt it viscerally and immediately.
My first experience with Lorin personally was talking with him after a gig in LA around the same time. There were maybe 20 people in the room, but I remember this powerful primal energy radiating from him as he spun. There was this sense of abandon in the people dancing. It was a vibe, an energy, that was unlike what emanated from any other DJ at the time, or since really. I talked with him outside afterwards just him and I for about 10 minutes as he was waiting for a ride. He made a strong impression on me that has stayed with me. He was extremely principled and motivated. He had just chosen the name Bassnectar instead of Lorin and was laughing about how it was ironic cause he felt his first track he had just put out had shitty bass cause he was still learning Reason. He was grounded and self effacing. He also clearly had an obsessive work ethic. He said he tried to spin an hour of new music every time he dj’d. I was like, what the fuck? This was during the era of vinyl. NOBODY spun an hour of new music every gig. I had no idea where he was even getting a new hour of music he was spinning each gig, which was super early dubstep/bass music and sounded incredible and totally exotic and foreign. I assumed later he was on very early message boards getting mp3’s directly from producers or something. There was no Beatport back then that’s for sure. He also spun on CDJ’s and was the first DJ I ever saw who was magically getting tracks from the net and burning cds to spin them. This was super alien at the time. Nearly everyone else was vinyl. Before Lorin, at least in California, anyone on CDJ’s was looked at like a wedding DJ.
He was extremely driven. When he talked he would look me in the eyes, but then look away when talking about how he wanted to be so much bigger than he was, and he stated that underlying that desire to be that big was to affect the kind of change he wanted to affect. No DJ I had met talked like this, and no DJ I knew of at this time was politically aware and motivated like this. Being a DJ was about rocking a party and that was it. There was very little if any social or status gain at this time to be talking like he was, if anything I’d say it was the opposite.
There have been several distinct generations of die hard fans of Lorin as far as I can tell. The first generation was I believe the earliest crews from the Santa Cruz beach parties and such. The second generation, which I witnessed, were semi-affectionately nicknamed the “beautiful people from the future”. These were the best dressed hottest wildest most creative rebellious entrancing people you’d ever seen, and they all seemed to show up at Lorin’s sets and they were by equal measure amazing and kind of pretentiously annoying, but undoubtedly were at the best parties, which Lorin was invariably DJing. Most of them have since retired to Nevada City. The third generation was I believe the “rave kids” as I heard them referred to as, who started showing up in droves at festivals, and no one knew where they came from. The beautiful people from the future started to drift off, there was a sort of handoff, and It was at that point that I remember thinking that his charisma and power is not scene specific, it jumps across generation lines, which blew my mind. Its been ongoing since then, until the end.
Lorin’s arc was obviously tragic, on many levels. He was set up as the chosen one from very early on. And its not like anyone was “looking” for a chosen one when he showed up. He really was just that dude no one could have known was coming, but everyone responded to instantly and accordingly. People who came back from Burning Man 98 who had caught his sets talked like they’d seen Jesus Christ himself, and these were dancefloors of maybe 200 people. My feeling, from occasional conversations with him over the years, what I heard from others, and observed in how he carried himself, was that he was aware of and did not want to fall into the egoic traps that come with a position like that, and fought very hard to resist them. I think the passion he had for social activism was his way of trying to redirect that adoration, and in fact in his mind really was the primary underlying reason behind managing and navigating the level of adoration that he anticipated he would need to deal with in the first place.
But the thing is, and here is where I believe he fell, you cannot consciously redirect or sublimate or override the ego traps that come with receiving that degree of adoration and reverence. You MUST have checks. But you can’t hire checks, or control them. You have to develop internal checks alongside inviting ruthless and brutal outside perspective, and that is going to look different for everyone, and it is going to be an extremely labor intensive task to develop and maintain - if you even can at that level. Lorin apparently could not. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. I believe that Lorin’s social activism originated from a very genuine place. I heard it in his voice when he had no reason to virtue signal, that was just not part of the landscape then. But I think it became compartmentalized, and became a smokescreen internally, as well as inevitably externally. From the outside we can’t reconcile this seeming hypocrisy, so we see it as deceptive and intentional and masterminded. But I will bet you a million fucking dollars Lorin didn’t see this hypocrisy himself until everything fell apart three weeks ago, if he even even saw it then, or will see it in 5 years, or ever. How much do normal people delude themselves and rationalize and compartmentalize? A LOT. Well imagine that you, a normal person, are also extremely driven, a borderline control freak with an overpowering vision, massively worshipped for two decades, and have literally no checks or balances on your power, and watch where your natural tendencies to compartmentalize and rationalize turbo-boosted by the force of fame lead: madness, cognitive dissonance, and the inevitable exploitation of others. You won’t mean harm. You won’t even be able to conceive of how your actions might cause harm. You will be so entitled and protected by money, fame, and adoration that you will be literally unable to see it. Until that is you are made to see it. And then its too late for everyone involved.
Lorin is 100% responsible for his actions. The warping effects of power and the path to unhealthy levels of narcissism are not an excuse. They create anti-social behavior, and a functioning society must regulate anti-social behavior. Many people have justifiably lost faith in the patriarchal justice system to regulate the anti-social and harmful actions of men in power. Cancel culture introduces forced accountability and immediate consequences for those who the hive mind deem in violation of standards of decency. There is value in this, for sure. But I can tell you, fwiw, as it appears to my generation, cancel culture offers something that aspires to look like a complete solution, but functions much more like punitive justice.
Punitive justice is the right of those who have the power to exercise it. But true healing comes from a far more nuanced and complex process. And it takes time, time that extends beyond the initial catharsis of justice. And you need to work to find the empathy that you were not shown. Not necessarily compassion, but empathy. If you see the person who hurt you as a one dimensional object, you are trapped in the same mindset that led them to hurt you. This cycle will not end. It is not “resolved” with the cancellation.
If there is no complexity to understand in the offender, no nuance to grasp, no motivation to understand, and nothing that is worthy of anyone’s time to examine because the nature of the offender’s offenses deem them irredeemable, they are no longer human. They become an archetype, an object, a cog in a machine. A faceless soulless monster that must be be destroyed, and upon being destroyed, the problem will have been solved. There is no growth, there is no insight, there is no actual learning. There is only “justice”, punitive and correctional. It is our modern prison system. This power is addictive. It is an endorphin rush. And it is its own ego trap. It sustains itself on an indefinite cycle of suffering.
I certainly have no horse in the race of what happens to Lorin. He made his bed and now has to lie in it. He is a human, who was exceptional, basically by definition, and failed to carry that weight in a moral way. Who knows what happens to him from here, if anything besides banishment.
Just know that, at least from my perspective, as someone who spoke with him and witnessed his idealism in its rawest form one to one and watched the magical effect he had on dance floors from pretty close to the beginning, he was in fact at one point the idealistic empathetic music channeling leader he later appeared to be. I have known and still know sociopaths, I have known and been deeply affected by people with hardcore narcissistic personality disorder. He may have eventually become what we tend to associate with these diagnoses, I don’t actually know, but I do NOT believe that he started out that way. It is my belief and it was my impression that he started out as a very real and very principled person, very genuine, and very empathetic. And I don't believe this because he charmed me, but because he didn’t charm me. He seemed to believe in something greater than pleasing others. I think he believed in trying his best to lead others to somewhere they couldn’t see themselves.
What I think is that a deep need to control, which was either born of a defensive mechanism from trauma, or the raw desire to lead, or both, became malignant over time, as his environment and position enabled these desires to become neuroses. At a certain point keeping a world view coherent with the needs and wishes of others became secondary to the needs of his ego. And at that point, rationalizations and compartmentalization raged uncontested. And that set the stage for abusive dynamics to follow.
As soon as he started saying that Bassnectar was a project not a person, in my opinion he began to disassociate, and to leave personal accountability behind. His need for control and to define what he was and what he meant to others became all powerful. His acknowledging the nature of collaboration, while simultaneously exhibiting unfair and exploitative business practices behind the scenes, was a symptom of a duality that had grown unchecked in his mind. The need and love for people (be with me), and what was probably a growing paranoia (get away from me), could not be reconciled. I think he was motivated by power and control and realizing a vision at all costs, initially to provide experiences for others, but eventually as a protective mechanism and a place to hide fears from himself. I would bet that the shitty terms he offered his collaborators were born of a misplaced desire for love. Love is a practice of releasing attachment, but in him it became twisted into the desire to exclusively possess.
I knew someone who toured with a major pop star, like one of the biggest stars ever. She said this person wanted everyone to do everything for free, because it was her way of trying to get love. She had become so paranoid and isolated, and everything was so transactional, she longed to just collaborate with people creatively and remove money from the process. And since she had absolute power, she could enforce this wish on those around her, and those who balked could then be identified as disloyal. It sounds batshit crazy to a normal person. But life as a normal person is a very different life from that of someone with absolute power. Absolute power, which is a product of absolute success, which is the thing this society programs us to desire at all costs, as the path to love and acceptance and greatness, will fuck your head up so quick you will have no idea what happened, what your name is, where you came from, what you stood for, or why you ever wanted any of those things in the first place. It will destroy you. And if you don’t have it you should thank your lucky stars. Because before you know it you will refuse to pay those who deserve it in order to convince yourself they love you, and pay those you think you love in order to control them.
Everything I am saying is addressed to those who are struggling with the pain of seeing someone who they believed in, who inspired them, and who led them, hurt those who also trusted him, and thereby betray everyone’s trust - but despite this betrayal, you can’t actually “cancel” him within yourself. For better of for worse, someone who means that much to you and has affected you as much as he has affected so many can’t just be eliminated internally. If you do that, you are punishing yourself and furthering the cycle of pain, and the attempt to do this will create a microcosm of the same unresolvable duality within you that destroyed Lorin.
You can do whatever you want with the music he made and the memory of the experiences he created. This is because you were a co-creator. How you feel about the music is unique, and how you feel about the experience is unique. Whatever “it” is isn’t real until its perceived, and you perceived it to make it uniquely real within yourself. So its yours to do what you want. The world is filled with enough projection and pain. Don’t absorb more than necessary.
Some people can never hear his music ever again, and need to purge him from their life. And some proudly listen to it still, and will always. These are both completely valid. Interestingly, how come there is not more discussion about coming to consensus on whether to cancel his music? How come there is not righteous indignation at the reposting of his sets here on this subreddit? I think it is because we know that music itself is mystical, and beyond any human moral projection or value system, and is as immensely personal as it is immensely social. Its the universe vibrating sympathetically with the way we feel, and vice versa, in a feedback loop of emotion.
You can choose to cancel Bassnectar and purge your library of his music and embrace the absolute and banish him from your life. Or you can choose to celebrate the importance he and his music had on your life, while making an effort to understand where the darkness within him that led to him creating such a betrayal actually came from. Both are valid ways of coping with loss.
But another thing you can do is to be grateful you were not born him. Because if you were in his shoes, maybe your corruption would not have manifested in the way his did, but I have yet to meet anyone in my life who I can honestly say could have walked the path Lorin did and not fallen prey to corruption manifesting in some way. Because it wasn’t a path he walked. It was a path he made. That kind of drive is a fire. And taken to the extreme level his fire took him, eventually it explodes. Sometimes we are sheltered from these explosions and hear about them after the person dies. In this case, it was in our face, and everyone got burned.
I can pretty much guarantee you Lorin is not taking his millions and happily going his own way wishing everyone “the brightest future”. He is very likely in an existential hell of his own making as the construct of fame and power comes crashing down around him and he is left facing the person he was 20 years ago before this all started, and realizing the horrific impact his actions have had on the ones he thought he loved. He is branded an outcast, but recognizable by all. Nowhere to hide, but alone in a room in a mansion his millions bought him, obsessively reading every word written about him on the net, realizing the absolute scale of the impact he had on so many people, for so good and then for so bad. Nowhere to go, nowhere to run, no redemption to be had.
And since he created pain in others that has led them to feel the same way, trapped in a cycle of shame and disempowerment and confusion that they cannot any more easily wave off and exit than he can, one could say justice has been served.
But maybe, in time, there can also be healing. And even understanding.
Breaking the cycle is not enough. You must also restore and strengthen the circle. This takes all parties.
Cancel culture has no roadmap for this. But maybe it can develop one.
With great power comes great responsibility. This goes both ways.
Beware the temptation of power. Its like the ring. We would all use it to do good.
Let us all find the grace to work together to find justice, healing, and growth.

[Primer] The Nightmare Hive: A Five-Colour Lurrus Slivers Guide

Humans don’t have it easy in fantasy settings. They tend to be cast either as strictly worse versions of other races in all qualities that actually matter, or they’re just the jacks-of-all-trades lacking both the strengths and weaknesses of the others. In many games, this lack of specialization makes humans boring, and keeps them away from presence in minmaxed munchkin builds, but here? They do have one strength.
Diversity.
A band of humans from all five colours trek across the countryside. The finest specimens that the species has to offer. They come from all walks of life: noble priests, veteran soldiers, pirates with even less respect for you than for your property rights. There’s one chick who makes stuff cost more mana somehow. (Do any of the Innistrad novels explain that?)
All march together for a common purpose: using their combined powers, they must exterminate a hive of interplanar rodents. The slivers have expanded their territory in recent months, terrorizing the farmers whose grain the kingdom relies on. The exterminators are well-equipped, bringing magic found in their faith, strength found in the arrival of their comrades, and giant praying mantises found God-knows-where. Discard, +1/+1 counters, ramp - they have it all. If there’s a need that has to be met, you can bet there’s a human somewhere willing to do it for enough coin. But through it all, these bipedal mammals still have one weakness.
Diversity.
Humans are pack animals, you see, but still individuals. Social ones to be sure, but they also appear determined to love their shortcomings more than their potential greatness, and cringe away from the pinnacle of evolution: the parasocial. Their flesh-brains have come so far, but without an omnipresent psionic link, they’re little more than their unicellular ancestors. Limited to a single life. A single existence. You can dismantle an entire army of them just by breaking down their fragile communications systems. Once that’s done, you can just sit back and watch as disorganization dissolves their ranks and their differences drive them to tear each other apart. This is the eternal flaw of the Self: it implies a lack of perfect union with the Whole.
And as these humans, less of a people than a cobbled-together mass of persons, reach the top of the hill and see the outline of the Hive on the horizon, they will know the failure of their species. They will bear witness to the accomplishments of the Whole and even as they fail to articulate it in words, they will know that the Self is the Flaw.
We have long since mended this Flaw. They sent their finest ones, but the fact that their finest are confined to being ones, with gifts that only apply to singular specimens, is their fatal limit. That is why their final stand against our expansion can only ever be that: a final stand.
---
"bro wtf that was cringe, ur gonna lose karma"
Sorry, I’m a wannabe fantasy writer on Reddit. Get used to awful prose.
Welcome to a primer for my particular brew of 5C Slivers in Modern: the Nightmare Hive. It’s something I’ve been somewhat surprised to not see more Slivers players dabbling in. If you ask me, I think they have an unhealthy attachment to 3-drops. 🤮
I’m going to focus on deckbuilding/card choice and playstyle notes. It’s probably not going to be a ton of new information for experienced players, but it can call attention to some micro. I’ll throw some attention to matchup notes but that’s not what’s as fun for me to write. This is also the first time I’ve ever written an MTG primer. Well, a primer that isn’t for a deck that’s actually just a shitpost made of cardboard. (Ask me about 95-land Vendilion Clique EDH!)
There’s not much I have to say for an introduction or a “Why Slivers?” in general. You guys already know it. Slivers have a certain reputation among casual players for being OP. Maybe this is because they’re the truest embodiment of what a tribal deck is. Slivers sacrifice a lot of individual power in order to maximize group power. But really the reason for this is that building a functional Sliver deck for casual is one of the easiest things in the world. As far as fair decks go, you can get a ton of mileage in terms of effectiveness out of relatively little money spent just by rooting through the foul-smelling dumpster that is your LGS’s bulk commons bin, throwing any slivers you find at some lands and calling it a deck. You also get more insight by comparing them to other creature types like Humans or Elves: plenty of those creature types will show up incidentally in more generalist decks, but the instant an opponent plays their first Sliver, you know exactly what’s going on and you know you should be afraid. Consequently, casual circles often have the one Sliver deck of the friend group whose player loves to be feared and who everyone else loves to fear.
This shifts a lot once one goes into competitive environments. Slivers have clear weaknesses, and in my view, many of the common modern Sliver builds fail to really play to their strengths enough to make up for this. I don’t even know if the deck I’m about to describe to you is any different, but I can attest to this deck having a good matchup against other Sliver decks by virtue of sheer speed. Vroom vroom.
Do keep in mind that while I’m hyping this deck up because it’s mine and I’m proud of it, it’s far from perfect. But you know what it is? Consistent, easy to play and fun as SHIT for smoothbrains like me. HAHA TURN CREATURES SIDEWAYS EVERY TURN, WORLD’S BEST STRATEGY GAME, NOW FREE TO PLAY ON MTGARENA
Alright bois, get ready. Strap in, set aside your existential identity as a Unique and become one with the Hive. Click your talons together when you’re ready and brace yourself for some card choice analysis. Truly the funnest part of Magic, at least if you’re like me and spend hours honing a theoretical build for your D&D character without caring to ever actually play it.
If all you care about is the list, here's the summary by a helpful Goyf.

The 0-Drops:

In this deck, our only 0-drops are lands, and you’re probably familiar with what the best choices already are. Where this gets a tad spicy is in the land count: 18. One of the reasons this deck stands at an advantage against other Sliver decks is precisely from the pseudo card advantage provided by being able to draw fewer lands than our opponent and still have a functional deck. Curving lower than burn out here.
4x Cavern of Souls: Surprising literally nobody with this one. In the Bant snowpile meta that hasn't quite gone away with Astrolabe, your opponent will have plenty of countermagic, and this card will be pulling a lot of weight for getting you on even footing with them.
4x Unclaimed Territory: Discount Cavern. The color-fixing is just this valuable, letting us draw on Slivers from every color to create an optimized horde without stressing about our mana sources.
4x Sliver Hive: Here’s something we have over other tribal decks: Twelve different lands that can all tap for colorless as well as one of any color to spend on our creatures. Sliver Hive has a final ability stapled on, but I legitimately feel that this card would be buffed if that ability was replaced with flavor text. That would improve Slivers as a whole by adding to their aesthetic while also removing an ability that literally never gets used, at least in this build. Requires you to draw a third of the lands in your whole library to use, and if you’ve reached that point, you’ve probably already lost.
0x Ancient Ziggurat: WHAT? Yeah yeah, I know. Here’s the thing: With the above lands doing so much for our mana fixing, and a number of other lands we want, there’s little room for Ancient Ziggurat. Which is a shame, because ziggurat is an awesome word that you should strive to use at least once every day. The inability to be used on noncreature sources matters more often than you’d think, usually in the case of sideboard cards but also for a number of hands in which one would be keeping a single land and an Aether Vial.
“But isn’t it better for Lurrus since it can produce any colour to cast it, unlike Sliver Hive?”
Before the nerf, this was correct. However, now that you have to pay 3 generic mana to put your companion into your hand, a cost that Ancient Ziggurat can’t contribute to, it’s no longer worth it.
In short, Ancient Ziggurat is good, but “good” isn’t good enough for the Hive. We demand more.
3x Mutavault: Unfortunately, playing 4 Mutavaults here is suboptimal. Five-color deck needs its five-color sources, and in a deck with 18 lands, we don’t want more than one-sixth of our lands failing to produce colored mana. A number of creatures in the deck are ones Mutavault can’t be used to pay for even if we want to. That said, the 2/2 body that benefits from all the Sliver buffs is commonly the difference between winning and losing a game. In playtesting I’ve found 3 to be the optimal number, but you wouldn’t be totally insane for playing 2 or 4.
2x Silent Clearing: Apparently 18 lands is sometimes too many. The pain from these is usually insignificant, while the card draw can help us pull a clutch win out of nowhere. This particular horizon land is chosen since out of the ones available, it most lines up with our mana requirements. Shoutout to the times you crack it at EoT, draw a creature you can drop with Aether Vial, untap and swing for lethal because of that new Sliver.
1x Snow-Covered Plains: Yes, this deck is very, very bad against Blood Moon. Good thing the Astrolabe ban makes Ponza worse, right? Blood Moon only gets less common in the meta from here, right guys?
The single Plains is mostly a formality, something to fetch off of opponents’ Paths, Assassin’s Trophies and Fields of Ruin. Why Snow-Covered? Mind games. It might cause your opponent to think you run something that makes the snow quality relevant. In truth, it’s because it adds possible variance in your opponent’s mind that they might account for, at zero mechanical downside. I actually don’t like the fact that snow-covered basics are strictly better than standard basics. I’d like to see a modern-legal Snow hoser that’s good enough to use, making snow lands something to use only if your deck actually cares about them rather than making them the optimal default for every single deck.
So, that’s our manabase. Nothing too surprising or exciting, but had to be done.

The 1-Drops:

AND NOW WE GET TO THE CARDS YOU ACTUALLY CARE ABOUT

AIGHT HERE’S HOW YOU MURDER EVERY SAPIENT BEING YOU ENCOUNTER

One of Slivers’ main weaknesses as a tribe is their one-drops. There aren’t many, and the ones we get aren’t absolutely spectacular. No 1 mana 2/2s with haste or anything. (God can you imagine how OP a 1 mana 2/2 with haste would be?) But they do get the job done, providing the keyword soup that makes this deck favourable against other fair decks. Just to fluff this out and address some bad possibilities people might want to account for, I’ll also be rating every one-drop sliver. I know you’re desperate for my opinion.
4x Aether Vial: When I first got into Magic, I didn’t understand what was so good about Aether Vial. Sure, you can get some cards into play faster, but it also takes up your first turn as well as a card to use. You’re just kneecapping yourself in the long run. What I didn’t understand is that much of the time, there is no long run in Modern. The added speed is worth it, as is the instant timing and the immunity to counterspells. Aether Vial is our only noncreature spell maindeck and we’ll drop it turn 1 if it’s in hand. They’d better counter it then, or the combination of Cavern of Souls and Aether Vial itself will make counters useless. This card is also what lets this deck survive at all against Blood Moon.
0x Metallic Sliver, Plated Sliver: The earliest slivers weren’t that powerful. We’re not missing much from being unable to use these.
0x Mindlash Sliver: I do wish this was somehow playable, but alas, it just wasn’t meant to be. You’re spending mana to 2-for-1ing yourself, unless your hand is empty, but even then this probably isn’t worth it. You don’t want to rip apart hands, you want to rip apart FACES. Doesn’t make the cut. Maybe one day we’ll get a better version of this that’ll be useful against control.
0x Screeching Sliver: If someone manages to make Sliver Mill good, let me know. It’s certainly not viable now given all the Uros and dredge.
4x Sidewinder Sliver: Now we’re talking! Costs 1 white mana, meaning it works with any of our non-Mutavault lands. Flanking essentially makes this a lord for combat only, but there will be places where the fact it gives others a minus instead of your own creatures a plus is relevant: opposing lifelink becomes less powerful, Ice-Fang Coatls die before they get to deal damage, even 1-toughness first strikers die before getting to deal damage. Flanking only works against creatures without flanking, but the only time that’ll come up in Modern is the mirror, and in that matchup this will essentially just be vanilla since it grants the ability to all slivers, not just yours.
0x Virulent Sliver: Maybe in the past you could’ve made the case for this. Maybe you could argue that in some very niche cases like against soul sisters or decks that can continuously pick off your lords, the poison will kill before the damage. Especially if you get multiple of these out. But nowadays our selection of one-drops isn’t quite that terrible, and we don’t have to use this.
4x Galerider Sliver: The best one-drop Sliver in most cases. Little to say, makes them unblockable to most creatures. Being able to block enemy fliers sometimes matters, but usually your playstyle is just HAHA TURN CREATURES SIDEWAYS, MAGIC IS THE WORLD’S BEST STRATEGY CARD GAME. If your opening hand has multiple one-drop slivers, you might want to drop one of the other one-drops first in order to bait the removal on that one. To use Sidewinder Sliver as a point of comparison: making your opponent’s blocking choices less optimal isn’t as good as taking away their option of blocking at all.
4x Striking Sliver: Now this is interesting. Most Sliver decks I’ve seen run 2 of both this and Sidewinder, but since this deck is meant to be faster and more aggressive, we want 4 of both. Especially since both of them are equally good against one-toughness blockers like Snapcaster Mage or Ice-Fang Coatl. Let’s compare them for interest’s sake. First Strike works on both attacks and blocks, unlike flanking, and you can Aether Vial the Striking Sliver in as a combat trick after blocks. Can’t do that with Sidewinder since flanking is a triggered ability. By contrast, Sidewinder Sliver is easier to cast given our mana base, works better as a combat trick in more cases (a 2/2 sliver with first strike blocked by a 2/2 successfully turns a trade into a win, while being blocked by a 3/3 fails to turn a loss into a trade; flanking succeeds for both) and as the slight nudge into superiority for me, flanking stacks. Also importantly, many of your opponents will not know that flanking stacks until after you inform them of this once they’ve already formally declared blockers. For me, flanking stacking makes it more valuable to get multiple Sidewinder Slivers as opposed to multiple Striking Slivers, and in most matchups if I’m boarding out 1-drops, I’ll start taking out copies of Striking before Sidewinder. Exceptions do exist: against 8-ball you will be very thankful for your 1/1 first striker that totally negates their single-toughness attackers.
Well I guess that’s all of them. Time to move on to-
>OBJECTION!<
2x Changeling Outcast?!: That’s right folks, you heard it here first. We’re this aggressive. We’re committing so hard to our lord and savior The Fast that we’re throwing in a couple of 1-mana unblockable changelings who will benefit from all pumps given to slivers. The fact they can’t block is hardly ever relevant in a deck that intends to do no blocking, and the unblockable clause makes this a clock that gets surprisingly fast once you have a couple of the two-drops down. Costing black mana means there’s only four lands in the deck that can’t cast it, making it a reliable first-turn play if you really have nothing else to put down, and they’ll let you win through a number of board stalemates. All of that said, these will usually be your first cuts when it comes to sideboarding. Not that they’re bad, just that everything else is better - these are essentially flex slots. Try them, and if you find them underwhelming, I have other suggestions in their stead for the two-drops. Do note, however, that this can make your curve a bit too high to be truly speedy.

The 2-Drops:

The reason this build works, and arguably the reason the whole tribe works, is that Slivers have such an abundance of 2-mana lords. (Basically, if you wish Rat Colony.dec was a good deck, play this. That's why I do.) They wind up buffing each other and creating monstrous attack phases in a short number of turns. The consistency is phenomenal since they’re all so interchangeable and redundant. Not all of them are created equal, but all of them will nonetheless serve you well in ripping people’s midsections open.
4x Unsettled Mariner: This time we’ll just get the one changeling out of the way upfront: this guy is good. 2 mana 2/2 makes it a reasonable rate for a body, and you can drop it early in place of a lord without actually losing much damage. Many opponents will be tunnel visioned on killing this in order to free up mana, which will also take up their removal that should have been saved for killing lords. It makes life noticeably harder for burn, 8rack, Jund as long as they have to let it live, and so on. An excellent addition to the deck from Modern Horizons, instant 4-of. Be sure not to forget that it doesn’t just prevent the spellcasting, but counters it as a triggered ability, so you won’t just have to correct your opponent that they’re unable to cast their spell given the mana they have like with Thalia - their spell is directly countered if they screw up. Also remember that the counter applies to spells that target your nonsliver permanents, such as land destruction, as well as to you! Delaying Cryptic Command for a turn is super helpful in the control matchup. Lastly, it applies to abilities as well. Planeswalker abilities, Fields of Ruin, Thought-Knot Seer ETB trigger, even Gifts Ungiven, all of it has to have extra mana paid or it does nothing.
0x Clot, Heart, Muscle, Talon, Winged, Acidic, Crystalline, Hibernation, Victual, Crypt, Hunter, Mistform, Quick Sliver: None of them are modern legal. The most unfortunate loss is Crystalline Sliver, which could be out here giving all of them shroud and thus making removal totally pointless. At least Unsettled Mariner does an acceptable impression.
0x Gemhide Sliver: WHAT DO WE NEED THIS MUCH MANA FOR? GET OUTTA HERE GREEN BOY
0x Ghostflame Sliver: WHAT DO WE NEED TO BE COLORLESS FOR? GET OUTTA HERE COLORLESS BOY (might be fun tech against all is dust or ugin, but by that point you’ve already lost)
0x Quilled Sliver: WHY IS THIS SLIVER UNTAPPED?! YOU’RE FIRED!
0x Spined Sliver: This is an interesting one to me, and I’ve come very close to running it. The 2/2 body makes it attractive, as does the ability acting similar to flanking. Two things contribute to it not being worth running: the fact that at the end of the day its ability is a worse flanking, and the fact that casting it is too awkward for the utility we get out of it. We need either Vial or two lands that can tap for any colour to get Spined Sliver out, and while we actually do meet that criteria the majority of the time, the minority is large enough to be worthy of consideration.
0x Spinneret Sliver: WHY ARE YOU TRYING TO BLOCK?! GET OUTTA HERE SPIDER SLIVER. ALSO WE ALREADY GET ACTUAL FLYING FROM GALERIDER SO WHO NEEDS YOU
0x Two-Headed Sliver: It sometimes gets close to kinda viable-ish, but the fact it’s a 2 mana 1/1 that doesn’t pump itself as well as the fact that we already have several flying sources and a few unblockables in here means that this ability is very often pointless. You will feel the pain when it’s absent, and you’re unlikely to notice the pain of it being present and wishing it was something else, but trust me - the damage is there even if you don’t feel it. It’s not good enough for the main deck, and the sideboard has much more important circumstances to concern itself with than whether or not menace would be good in this matchup. We already run over most other go-wide decks, and are unlikely to lose due to a lack of menace.
0x Cautery Sliver: You just get so much more out of any given sliver from its quality of improving other slivers than you get from sacrificing them to ping stuff.
0x Darkheart Sliver: I legitimately believe this one can be viable. If you’re in a particularly aggressive meta, you can pull wins out of the extra life from this. Against burn, each sliver can directly cancel out a burn spell. Against Jund, you can respond to all removal spells by gaining some extra life. Sac everything in response to a boardwipe to buy time for your recovery, including dodging the exile clause on Anger of the Gods. Chump and sac before damage if you manage to be losing for some reason. There was a time when I ran a single one mainboard as a better game 1 against burn decks, and I wouldn’t fault you for running it as a one-of, though I now consider the loss of consistency for doing so to be a bit too much. Especially since Unsettled Mariner is already a card that makes it more awkward for your opponents to remove your slivers, you already have some protection from this angle.
4x Sinew Sliver: And now we’re off to the races! Drop it turn 2, cast it with an extremely easy mana cost for this deck, Aether Vial it in before damage to screw over opponents’ blocking decisions, pump your Mutavault, save creatures from damage spells. Sinew Sliver puts in a ton of work, and is easily one of the best cards in the deck. PUT IT DOWN, MAKE ALL YOUR SLIVERS RIPPED, TURN YOUR CREATURES SIDEWAYS, YOU CANNOT LOSE.*
^\you can sometimes lose)
4x Frenzy Sliver: I don’t like Frenzy Sliver. I just don’t. It’s a 2-mana 1/1 that only adds power and only for unblocked creatures. Can’t even Aether Vial it in after blockers are declared. Sinew Sliver sparks joy. Frenzy Sliver does not spark joy. However, it’s very easy for this deck to cast and it comes close enough to being a lord for this highly aggressive list that it makes the cut as a 4-of. If you’re considering cutting two-drops for your sideboard cards, these will be among the first to go, unless your opponent plays so few targeted spells and abilities that Unsettled Mariner isn’t worth it.
0x Manaweft Sliver: WHAT DO WE NEED THIS MUCH MANA FOR? GET OUTTA HERE GREEN BOY
4x Predatory Sliver: Yes… YEEEEEESSSSS! One-sided Sinew Sliver STRONK! Costs green instead of white, but being one-sided matters more often than you think, and not just for the mirror. Sinew Sliver will also be buffing opposing Mutavaults and Unsettled Mariners. Predatory Sliver is consistently a house against decks of all kinds, being cast turn 2 or being dropped by Aether Vial at instant speed to wreak havoc on opponents. Many question why one would even play Slivers when options like Merfolk and Goblins are available, and the answer is that we’ve already touched on 12 different damage-boosting 2-drop slivers, and we’re not even done!
0x Sentinel Sliver: Similar to Darkheart Sliver, I used to run this as a one-of and I’m quite convinced it’s viable depending on meta. Easy to cast, 2/2 body, and without being able to use the 3-mana lifelink sliver, this does a lifegain impression by allowing us to threaten blocks where we couldn’t before. That said, its benefit is situational and its presence raises our curve as well as potentially the need for more lands. I leave it out, but you wouldn’t be insane for including one if you have an aggressive creature-based meta.
0x Diffusion Sliver: Other Slivers players will maul me for this choice, but it comes back to how aggressive this deck wants to be. 2 mana 1/1s really need to earn their place, and this doesn’t quite do it, especially with Unsettled Mariner already present in the deck. Diffusion Sliver is an absolute house in more midrangey or ramp-focused sliver builds to protect the big boys, but this list doesn’t lean so heavily on any individual component, and it would typically rather draw another lord than a diffusion sliver. Especially when it’s already late game or when it’s trying to recover from a wiped board. So what I’m getting at is something you probably already knew: defense is for wimps.
4x Leeching Sliver: This is a better version of Frenzy Sliver. It still has many of the same problems, but the advantages of life loss as opposed to a damage boost are crucial: the life loss bypasses effects like Worship, isn’t prevented by Fogs, still applies even if the attacking creature is blocked, and the triggers can finish off a nearly-dead opponent even if they have enough creatures to block everything. 16 2-mana lords. This is why you play slivers.
0x Venom Sliver: This can work as a one-of if the stars align and you have an extremely weird meta full of big creatures that aren’t Uro and Kroxa. But in most metas the deathtouch just isn’t going to be useful enough. Your creatures should get big enough to kill with combat damage, and you’d rather have a lord instead of this to boost said combat damage.
0x Bladeback Sliver: Slivers that are tapping to deal direct damage aren’t benefiting from the 16 lords. We don't like your type 'round these parts.
4x Cloudshredder Sliver: Oh-HOOOOH, this thing is spicy. This absolute MADMAN acts as Galeriders 5-8 for much more consistent evasion, as well as haste. This is the quality it takes to let a 2-mana 1/1 that doesn’t pump itself be viable, and it earns its place unquestioningly. Seriously, this allows for absolutely ridiculous plays. Turn 1 Aether Vial, turn 2 Cloudshredder Sliver, Vial in Sidewinder Sliver and swing for 2, turn 3 Striking Sliver, Predatory Sliver, Vial in another Predatory Sliver, swing for 15, flying, flanking, first strike. There are many decks that just cannot handle this pressure, especially if they’ve already shocked themselves. If they Anger of the Gods now, they’ll still be low enough for you to rebuild and kill with a second wave later.
0x Dregscape Sliver: This may or may not be the correct choice. It’s what I’m currently using due to trying to avoid the unearth being a nonbo with a certain nightmare cat. No question that these are good, and might actually warrant a place here, but this specific build performs just fine without them. Like the other 0-but-viable slivers, you can play around with cutting the Changeling Outcasts for a couple copies if you wish.
0x Enduring Sliver: WHY AREN’T YOU ATTACKING? GET OUT OF HERE ABZAN SLIVER

The 3-Drops:

Why would anyone in their right mind play 3-drops in a non-ramp deck? This is modern. Format's too fast and degenerate for that, bucko.
With one exception.

Lurrus of the Dream-Den

The benefit for the restriction, besides the lower land count. We all know how awesome Lurrus is. Format-breaking monster.
“But u/Yaldev, companions got nerfed!”
You call that a nerf?! Now we can pay 3 mana, the same as its normal cost, but now it’s colorless, and then put it into play at instant speed and uncounterably with Aether Vial! Combined with the fact that the hardest abusers of Lurrus are now considerably less able to abuse it themselves, while it actually got better for us specifically, and I think there’s never been a better time to play this deck!
If you do feel like casting Lurrus from hand, it costs 1 colourless and two hybrid black/white, so even our non-5C lands can contribute to casting it. Also keep in mind that it’s totally viable to play your “name a creature type” lands and name Nightmare for the sake of being able to cast Lurrus, AND keep in mind that those lands will still be able to be used to pay for your changelings since they also count as Nightmare Cats. Fun!
Lurrus is such a boon for this deck, despite not being a sliver. It has lifelink, working well against burn and prowess. It lets you come back from a number of different boardwipes. It frees up the space that would have been taken up by Dregscape Sliver to instead get other utility and one-mana spells while still having access to reanimation. You can recur your sideboard cards if they get destroyed. This card is just so GOOD and I can’t believe that other Slivers players are so delusional that they think it’s worth it to trade off Lurrus for cards that cost THREE mana!
But what about Collected Company?
Collected Company is indeed one of the best arguments against a Lurrus build, but there are a few details I want to call attention to, one of which is the impact of both the mana cost and the coloured requirement. Including Collected Company demands a retooling of the mana base, reducing consistency in exchange for potential pop-offs that have a ceiling that feels good to pull off, but is typically overkill.
The other issue is one that doesn’t have as much attention paid to it: it increases how many noncreature spells you’re running. Despite the bans, we’re likely still looking at a meta with a dominant snow-pile control feel. A deck with enough Dovin’s Vetos and Force of Negations to spare. By making these cards practically useless by sticking to almost entirely creature spells, we deprive our opponent of resources.
All of that said, you actually could still play around with including Collected Company as well as Lurrus. Remember, Lurrus’s restriction only applies to permanents, not to instants and sorceries. It’ll just require retooling your mana base a bit, probably including another land or two and dropping some of the any-colour producers in favour of green lands, Silent Clearings go out for Horizon Canopies, and it makes you more vulnerable to Grafdigger’s Cage, a card that opponents will already be boarding in against you if they have it in order to deal with Lurrus. You also won’t get maximum value since you have no 3 drops to get. This is essentially 4 mana for 4 mana at most.
Slivers isn’t a solved archetype. Feel free to be a scientist, do your own experiments, add to collective knowledge of the Slivers Player Hivemind.

Sideboard:

For this sideboard, I’ve opted towards going hard against specific decks rather than having few cards for everything. This is in part out of necessity, since our options for diversifying legitimately are limited: the Slivers that are worth including in sideboards are 3+ mana, and that leaves only colourless spells that cost 2 or less. We can’t go wide, so we have to go deep.
4x Chalice of the Void: BEHOLD THE FUNSLAYER. Chalice on 1 is your answer to all the decks you already know are reliant on 1 drops, including but not limited to:

Burn
Various Soul Sisters variants
Infect
8rack
Bogles
Blitz
Prowess
Death’s Shadow
Ad Nauseam
Lantern Control
Storm

To account for this, you’ll typically be boarding out some 1-drops to account for strong likelihood of them being uncastable, though even then, there’s still a good chance you’ll get to use them anyway. Aether Vial turn 1 will let you get them in without casting, while Cavern of Souls will make your 1-drops uncounterable by Chalice.
Also keep in mind the super spicy Chalice on 0, which makes life difficult for UR Free Spells, Cascade, any cheesy strats trying to be Cheerios in 2020, Prime Time (NO PACT 4 U), and once again, Ad Nauseam. 0 stops them from casting Lotus Bloom from exile!
Overall, I think Chalice is the deck’s best sideboard weapon. Do not run less than 4. It’s too valuable.
4x Dismember: Sometimes there are creatures you genuinely have to worry about. Stoneforge Mystic fetched Batterskull and you can’t handle it being played on turn 3. Goyf needs to die before it gets massive. Against other tribal decks, taking out a key lord can be more valuable than yet another 1-drop sliver on your own side. 4 life is a lot to pay, but often this card will save you more than 4 life, or prevent more than 4 life gained for your opponent, or just secure a win that could have otherwise been thrown into question. Also keep in mind that because your Silent Clearings tap for black, they can contribute to the Phyrexian mana cost to save a teensy bit of life.
4x Soul-Guide Lantern: This can easily be substituted for Tormod’s Crypt if that’s your preference. I just like the Lantern for the ETB exile so that it doesn’t have to be cracked as early just to get rid of a single problematic card in a graveyard. In any case, this answers dredge, Uro, Jund and so forth. Can also be sacced to draw if you simply must win the game before your opponent’s next turn and desperately need to hit something to secure that. As a bonus, it can be recurred with Lurrus as both repeatable grave hate and card draw.
1x Damping Sphere: In all likelihood you’ll want 2 of these if Tron has relevant presence in your meta, but for my own deck I prefer to keep it to 1. Nothing special here, it hits all the same stuff you’d expect, such as Tron, Storm and Prowess. The annoying thing about it is that you also happen to be one of the decks that wants to put out several spells per turn, meaning that Damping Sphere will be slowing you down as well.
1x Torpor Orb: In all likelihood you’d rather drop this to double up on Damping Spheres, but I find that in longer games, you’ll get a ridiculous amount of mileage out of this bad boy. Your deck has exactly zero ETB triggers, so you’ll miss out on nothing, while simultaneously gimping Snapcaster Mages, Ice-Fang Coatls, Soul Sisters, Squadron Hawks, Rangers and Ranger-Captains of Eos, Seasoned Pyromancers, Silvergill Adepts, Harbingers of the Tides, Merfolk Tricksters, Thassa’s Oracle, Champions of the Parish, Thalia’s Lieutenants, Detention Mages, Freebooters, Thought-Knot Seers, those god-awful “turn your lands into artifacts and then Reclamation Sage them” decks, and need I even mention blink strats?

Piloting the Deck:

BRRRRRRRRBRBRBRRRRRRBBPLTHPBLBWRBPWBLGPTH
VRRRRRRRRROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMM
In many games, this deck plays out in quite similar ways: Turn 1 sliver, turn 2 lord and swing, turn 3 another lord and swing with second mainphase one drop, turn 4 play 2 more lords and kill. May take an extra turn or two depending on their removal and how painful their manabase is. Seriously, it’s impressively fast, while also being impressively consistent.
Because the creature spells in your library curve out at 2, you’re perfectly fine with keeping a hand consisting of a single land and an Aether Vial. You can leave the Vial at 2 charge counters for the whole game, and even if by some freak of probability you never draw a second land, you can cast your 1-drops with the single land. At the same time, drawing more than one Aether Vial isn’t redundant for you, since there are a number of times when you’ll want to tick a 2-counter vial up to 3 for the sake of dropping Lurrus.
Note that in most games, Lurrus won’t even come out. Deck is 3FAST. It’s more of a possibly-turn-losses-into-wins sort of card. In games you were going to win anyway, it’s rarely necessary.
Deck’s fun. Sometimes you do actually have to think about the attacks you’re making. Sometimes you have to play around your opponent’s open mana meaning they very likely have something to pick off a lord. That can impact whether you’re still willing to attack with your 3/3 that’ll be brought down to a 2/2 into their blocker. Sometimes you have multiple lords in hand and you play the weaker one first to bait removal. I can’t realistically cover every situation, but I can offer some general advice:

One drops other than Galerider Sliver are typically better first-turn plays, unless you think their very early plays are actually relevant blockers. Oftentimes you’re better off waiting until the first turn that your opponent would actually want to block things in order to drop Galerider, since your opponent will have made strategic decisions around the assumption that they’d be able to block - an assumption you’re now going to punish them for.
Ramping up creatures’ toughness ASAP can be viable against red decks. Lightning Bolt causes problems. So does Wrenn.
FLANKING STACKS
CHANGELINGS CAN BE CAST NO MATTER WHAT YOU NAME WITH CAVERN
I prefer saving Leeching Sliver until the lethal turn, since similarly to Galerider Sliver, opponents could make decisions relying on the assumption that they’ll be able to stop damage by blocking. You can kill them with attack triggers before they even get to block. This can tilt people. Tilting people is fun. You know this in your heart.
Pay attention to how your lords could be buffing your opponent’s Mutavault.
Pay attention to how your lords could be buffing your own Mutavault! We run 3 for a reason. They win games.
A fun move is to Aether Vial in Unsettled Mariner while your opponent is clearly holding up exactly enough mana for a removal spell. You tap Aether Vial, ability goes on the stack. Opponent does nothing, wanting to save the spell in case the creature played is worth killing more than something already on the board. Your ability resolves, Mariner enters, your opponent never gets priority between seeing Mariner and its ability functioning.
Your opponent’s Lord of Atlantis gives your changelings islandwalk.
Glorybringer can’t hit your changelings, neither can Victim of Night.

Matchup Notes

This primer's already approaching the character cap for reddit, so here's a separate document for any hotties who've made it this far.

Conclusion (ft. Shameless Self-Plug)

Thanks for reading this, ModernMagic lurkers! Apart from wanting to give back to all the primer writers who've helped me smash face in Magic and other games through the years, I wrote this in order to get my writing in front of people's beautiful faces. If you like my style, feel free to check out my fantasy/sci-fi writing project at Yaldev. It's got weaponized cyborgs, undead dinosaurs, sentient paper airplanes, Horse Meat, lots of pretty art, and if you're a Vorthos flavour-geek you'll definitely be seeing how MTG influences the worldbuilding. Hopefully that's a good thing.
Feel free to post comments and discussion, I should be around to provide responses of questionable value.

A not-so-brief rundown of the letters N-Q in Jeffrey Epstein's 'Little Black Book'

Below is a rundown of the letters N-Q under Epstein's contacts. Last year, I wrote about letters A-C. You can check that out here (https://www.reddit.com/conspiracy/comments/cpis3n/a_brief_rundown_of_the_first_ten_pages_of_jeffrey/).
I also wrote about letters D-F on July 5, 2020. You can check that out here (https://www.reddit.com/conspiracy/comments/hlrba8/a_notsobrief_rundown_of_letters_df_in_jeffrey/).
I posted letters G-I on July 13, 2020. You can check that out here (https://www.reddit.com/conspiracy/comments/hqko0y/a_notsobrief_rundown_of_letters_gi_in_jeffrey/).
I posted letters J-L on July 15, 2020. You can check that out here (https://www.reddit.com/conspiracy/comments/hrq9bg/a_notsobrief_rundown_of_letters_jl_of_jeffrey/).
I posted letter M on July 20, 2020. You can check that out here (https://www.reddit.com/conspiracy/comments/huw0yt/a_notsobrief_rundown_of_the_letter_m_in_jeffrey/). There are some misspelled names. Epstein entered their names like this.
I have bolded some of the more interesting connections and information, but there could be much more that I overlooked. I hope something here strikes an interest in someone and maybe we can get more investigations out of this. Please, if you know anything more about any of these people than what is presented here, post below. I am working off of the unredacted black book found here: https://www.coreysdigs.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Jeffrey-Epsteins-Little-Black-Book-unredacted.pdf
N
Nadler, Emanuel: Businessman involved in mortgage companies.
Nagel, Adam: Works at W Nagel, broker and advisor to premier diamond manufacturers, such as De Beers.
Nagel, William: Chairman of W Nagel. Diamond merchant.
Nardi, Dott M Jacope: No info found.
Nastasse, Ilie & Alex: Ilie was one of the best professional tennis players in the ‘70s. He has been accused of inappropriate behavior by Maria Shriver and others, although this refers to classless comments not physical abuse. Ilie is also well-known for his sexual exploits, as it claimed that he has slept with anywhere between 800-900 women. Alexandra is Ilie’s 2nd wife. They were married for 17 years.
Negrete, Jelitza: A Countess and descendant of European nobility (http://www.almanachdegotha.org/id197.html). Her family name is Karolyi. I couldn’t find any more info.
Neil, Andrew: British journalist and broadcaster. Founding Chairman of Sky TV (owned by Murdoch). Also served as Editor for Rupert Murdoch’s The Sunday Times from ‘83-’94. Later became a contributor to The Daily Mail and just recently had his political program cancelled by the BBC.
Neil, Andrew: Same as above.
Newman, Hetty: Second wife of the 7th Earl of Caledon. Now divorced.
Newman, Mr & Mrs John: John is Hetty’s father. He achieved the rank of Lieutenant in the Royal Horse Guards. He later became a businessman and was director of several companies.
Ng, Clive: A media financier and executive.
Niarchos, Constantine: Billionaire son of shipping magnate Stavros Niarchos. Was once married to Alessandra Borghese of Italian papal lineage (and black nobility). He was also romantically linked to Koo Stark, Trinny Woodhall, and Kerry Kennedy (daughter of Bobby Kennedy), all of whom are in Epstein’s ‘black book’. Constantine died of an overdose with enough cocaine in his system to kill 25 men (https://www.theguardian.com/theobserve1999/oct/17/life1.lifemagazine7).
Nickerson, William & Jayne: William seems to be an architect and interior designer. Jayne is a fashion editostylist who is friends with Naomi Campbell (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-7645409/Jayne-Pickering-asks-expert-designer-wardrobe-actually-nest-egg.html). Her and William are now divorced.
Nishio, Yoshi: Former Goldman Sachs trader.
Noel, Alix: Socialite married to a wealthy banker. Friend of Allegra Hicks, who has constantly popped up among Epstein’s contacts.
Noel, Hon Thomas: Son of Anthony Noel, 5th Earl of Gainsborough.
Noel, Vanessa: Luxury shoe designer, hotelier, and gallery owner. Many celebrities are clients of hers.
Noha, Cecilia: Possibly meant to be Cecilia Noah, former Miss Sweden (1978).
Noonan, Tim: Tax lawyer.
Nuttall, Harry: Former Formula One driver turned sports marketing entrepreneur.
O’Donnell, Mr Carletto: Financier. Friend of Princess Michael of Kent (King George V’s grandson).
O’Neill, Louis: An American diplomat and attorney. Has worked for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the Obama administration, the State Department, and as Special Assistant of Russian Affairs for Colin Powell.
Oates, Simon: British actor who died in 2009.
Oates, Tom: Former investment director at BlackRock, an investment management company.
Ojora, Yinka: CEO and/or Director of a number of investing groups in Nigeria.
Olsen, Camille: Friend of Ghislaine Maxwell (https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/leilani-johnson-donna-dcruz-patricia-vel%C3%A1squez-ghislaine-news-photo/1169681661?adppopup=true). Don’t know much else, but she has been photographed at these high society parties fairly frequently.
Omar, Ralph: No info found.
Ong BS & Chritina: Christina is a Singaporean hoteliebusinesswoman who is heavily involved with Club 21 (a luxury fashion brand) and COMO Hotels and Resorts. She runs all of the Armani outlets in Britain, as well as the franchises for Donna Karan, Prada, and Bvlgari. Christina and her husband, Beng Seng, are worth $1.9 billion.
Ong, Melissa: Christina and BS’s daughter.
Oppenheim, Mr Laurie: Oppenheim worked as an executive at Marks and Spencer, a British retail chain, for nearly 30 years. Oppenheim has also served as a Trustee for a children’s charity called… The Honeypot Children’s Charity (https://www.honeypot.org.uk/what-we-do/meet-the-team/#our-trustees) since 1998 (https://uk.linkedin.com/in/laurie-oppenheim-22ab7512?challengeId=AQGP2jc2VAYQXwAAAXN6h0UrQXFHXyzrAP28ks5TK1rXMSHM5kNgtLMIfKERVP65UG0_eg9Az_1EjABS1pQqIpz9a69ZXhKpVw&submissionId=2923537f-6250-2416-4d31-f9585e45dc7b). I wish I was kidding. That’s the actual name. Oppenheim was also one of the attendees of an auction for the children’s charity, KIDS (https://www.tatler.com/gallery/wallace-collection-fundraiser), which is populated with Epstein contacts Rosa Monckton and Liz Hurley, and other high profile people such as David Cameron, Elton John, David Furnish, Cherie Booth, and Cathy Newman. The auction was led by Jacob Rothschild. Other attendees that also appear in Epstein’s contacts include Lady Forte (Allai Forte) and Arpad Busson, one of the potential pedophile ringleaders who I wrote about last year (https://www.reddit.com/conspiracy/comments/cl34ju/arpad_busson_billionaire_businessman_or_possible/).
Oppenheim, Ms Marella: This likely refers to the documentary photographer and former journalist of The Guardian.
Orchard (Vaughn-Edward), Katie: Catherine is a very close friend of Ghislaine Maxwell’s. She allowed Ghislaine to use her address as the business address for the TerraMar Project, a charity that Maxwell created. Catherine also served as Trustee and co-director of the charity (https://www.tatler.com/article/where-on-earth-is-ghislaine-maxwell).
Orlando, Fabrice: CEO of Cocoon Events Management Group, a luxury event planning company based out of Morocco.
Osbourne Rachel: British businesswoman who has served as director for several companies.
Oswald, William & Arabella: William co-founded Twins (https://twins.org.uk/governance/), a children’s charity that “links UK schools with schools in areas hit by natural disasters and/or need, both for practical support and for cultural understanding” (https://twins.org.uk/). William works as a director at several companies, including Keyspace Self Storage, Bluepod Media, and SG Capital Partners. William’s father is the National Hunt racing adviser to the Queen, and before that, the Queen Mother. Arabella is his wife and the daughter of the 6th Marquess of Exeter.
Otto, Beo & Edvige: Not positive. Seems that Edwige works in stock trading in France (if I have the correct person). No info on Beo.
Owen Edmunds, Tom & Kate: Kate is a novelist. Her ex-husband, Tom, is a photographer.
Oxenberg Christina marc Yaggi: Christina is a writer and fashion designer. Her mother is Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia. Her grandparents were Prince Paul of Yugoslavia and Princess Olga of Greece and Denmark. Due to all of the inbreeding between European royals, Christine is a cousin of the Royal Family. Oxenberg used to attend dinner parties at Epstein’s and was also friends with Ghislaine (https://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/tradition/a30222833/christina-oxenberg-instagram-patreon-memoi). Oxenberg intends to talk to the FBI about Epstein and Maxwell (https://www.tatler.com/article/christina-oxenberg-speaks-to-fbi-about-ghislaine-maxwell-and-jeffrey-epstein). Marc Yaggi is Executive Director of Waterkeeper Alliance, where Oxenberg was once a writer.
Paini, Nicole: Nicola is a Managing Partner at Rothschild & Co (https://app.mergerlinks.com/people/nicola-paini).
Palau, Marcia: No info found, although her address indicates that she is wealthy. Cheyne Walk is a street that politicians, musicians, and celebrities have all called home.
Palmer Tomkinson Tara: Socialite and TV personality with tons of A-list contacts. Her family is very close with the Royal Family. Tara was a cocaine addict who eventually died of an ulcer in 2017. Prince Charles was her godfather.
Palumbo, Mr James: Baron Palumbo of Southwark is an entrepreneur and a member of the House of Lords. Co-founder of Ministry of Sound nightclub. Major donor to the Liberal Democrats political party.
Palumbo, Peter: Father of James (above). Baron Palumbo is a property developer who sat on the House of Lords from 1991-2019. Former polo teammate and close friend of Prince Charles until they had a falling out. Confidant of Princess Diana. Godfather of Princess Beatrice of York, the elder daughter of Prince Andrew. Peter denies ever having met Epstein.
Panah-Izadi, Nader & Brigitte: Nader is an investment manager. Brigitte is his wife. Couldn’t find anything else.
Pank, Ms Victoria & Alby Carto: No info found.
Parker, Jackie: Management consultant who sits on the board of several companies. Also the head of global philanthropy for General Motors.
Parsons, Carolina: A Chilean model and model scout who has worked for big name designers. Here she is with her friend, Naomi Campbell (https://twitter.com/caroparsons/status/605883012492886016/photo/1). She can also be seen in a picture with Harvey Weinstein at the bottom of this article (https://www.biobiochile.cl/noticias/espectaculos-y-tv/notas-espectaculos-tv/2020/06/01/carolina-parsons-niega-tajantemente-conocer-a-epstein-tras-aparecer-en-supuesta-lista-de-contactos.shtml), which posts her claims that she never knew Epstein.
Paschan, Elise: Famous poet.
Pashcow, Joel: Real estate magnate. He is a past trustee of the Children’s Medical Center at Long Island Jewish Hospital and trustee at ACLD, a charity for developmentally disabled children and adults. He is also on the Board of Directors of the Palm Beach police and fire foundation (https://www.palmbeachpoliceandfirefoundation.org/joel-m-pashcow-bio). Pashcow has flown on Epstein’s jets (https://i.redd.it/hcfoxsb8feb51.png) and has been to pedo island. In fact, Pashcow appears 8 times(!!) on one this released flight log, including once with his wife (https://archive.org/stream/EpsteinFlightLogsLolitaExpress/Jeffrey-Epstein-Flight-Logs-in-PDF-format_djvu.txt). Epstein has 19 entries for Pashcow in his ‘black book’. Here is Pashcow at the Policeman’s Ball, which Trump frequently hosts at Mar-A-Lago (https://westpalmbeach.floridaweekly.com/articles/10th-annual-policemans-ball-mar-a-lago-club-palm-beach/). Pashcow is a ‘Crystal Sponsor’ of the Palm Beach Police Foundation alongside Donald Trump (https://trustedpartner.azureedge.net/docs/pbpolicefoundation2017/news/PBPF_Newsletter_Winter_Spring_2015_TGOFPNMX.pdf).
Pashcow, Stacey: Joel Pashcow’s daughter. A luxury real estate agent for The Corcoran Group. Here’s Stacey at a Valentino-hosted luncheon. Ghislaine Maxwell was also in attendance (https://guestofaguest.com/new-york/fashion/valentino-whets-appetite-for-food-and-fashion-at-fallwinter-2009-capsule-collection-preview-luncheon).
Pastrana, Andres: Former president of Colombia (1998-2002). His father was president of Colombia from 1970-1974). Pastrana was forced to admit flying on Epstein’s ‘Lolita Express’ after the flight logs were released (https://colombiareports.com/colombias-former-president-on-jeffrey-epsteins-lolita-jet-flight-logbook/). According to this article, Ghislaine Maxwell claims to have flown a Blackhawk helicopter in Colombia and fired a rocket into a terrorist camp (https://observer.com/2002/11/vikram-chatwal-turban-cowboy/). There is no time period for when this supposedly occurred, but it could have happened while Pastrana was president.
Patricof, Alan & Susan: Alan is an investor, venture capitalist, and private equity magnate. Patricof served as the national finance chairman for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign (https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/us/politics/20donor.html?scp=19&sq=alan%20patricof&st=cse). From 1990-2016, the Patricofs donated $1,152,637 to Hillary’s campaigns (https://www.opensecrets.org/pres16/bundlers). Alan is also a trusted friend of Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law (https://www.politico.com/story/2017/06/29/jared-kushner-inner-circle-confidants-240116), proving once again that PARTISANSHIP IS BULLSHIT. THEY ARE ALL CONNECTED. Susan is his 2nd wife. Her brother, Craig Hatkoff, appears in Epstein’s contacts under ‘H’. Alan and Susan’s son, Jonathan, is President of Tribeca Enterprises, the company that owns and operates the Tribeca Film Festival. Their other son, Jamie, is a TV and movie producer. His wife, Kelly Sawyer Patricof, is the co-founder of Baby2Baby (https://baby2baby.org/who-we-are/#team), a children’s charity that helps children (0-12) living in poverty.
Paulson, John: Billionaire hedge fund manager.
Pavoncelli, Cosima & Riccardo: Cosima is a socialite and the daughter of Claus and Sunny von Bulow. Her husband, Riccardo, is an Italian banker.
Pearson Hon Charles: Son of the Third Viscount Cowdray and owner of the 53,000 acre Dunecht estate.
Pease, Simon & Clem: Simon was a successful custodian of the family’s Underley Estate. He was also a High Sheriff of Cumbria. Passed away in 2007. Clementine was his wife.
Pedrini Lorenzo: President and co-partner of Fashion Model Management. Pedrini is former Co-President at Next Management, where he was a partner along with Faith Kates and (alleged) pedophile/accomplice/supplier, Jean-Luc Brunel (https://www.thedailybeast.com/jeffrey-epsteins-ties-to-the-modeling-industry-go-much-deeper-than-victorias-secret).
Pedrini Tito: Jeweller.
Pekeler, Marcus: Communications consultant in Switzerland.
Peltz, Harlan: Co-founder of iBorrow, a private commercial real estate lender. Literally lives around the block from Epstein’s NYC mansion.
Pennell, Mark: Australian movie produceactor.
Perelman, Ronald: Billionaire investor. Perelman hosted a dinner party with Epstein, Bill Clinton, Don Fowler, Don Johnson, and Jimmy Buffett all the way back in 1995, when Clinton was still president (https://www.ntd.com/bill-clinton-dined-with-jeffrey-epstein-in-1995-predating-public-timeline-report_355103.html). Perelman is also a good friend of Donald Trump and has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to his campaign. Lives about a half mile away from Epstein’s NYC mansion.
Petangi, Helsius: Son of Ivo Pitanguy, plastic surgeon to the stars.
Peters, John: Movie producer and former hairdresser. He produced Superman Returns (2006), which was directed by (alleged) sexual abuser Bryan Singer. In 2011, Peters had to pay a former assistant $3.3 million after finding that she was sexually harassed during production of Superman Returns. Peters married Pamela Anderson earlier this year, but they separated after 12 days.
Peterson, Holly: Journalist, novelist, and producer for ABC News. Friends with CNN host (and brother of Governor Andrew Cuomo) Chris Cuomo’s wife (https://pagesix.com/2014/08/22/more-than-1m-in-jewels-on-display-at-hamptons-tea-party/). This is the 2nd connection to the Cuomos in Epstein’s contacts. He has Andrew Cuomo and ex-wife Kerry Kennedy listed as well. Ghislaine attended a party to celebrate one of Holly’s books (https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/ghislaine-maxwell-caryn-zucker-peter-brown-and-barbara-news-photo/1169681635?adppopup=true).
Peterson, Riki: Not enough info. Best guess is an investment banker of the same name.
Pham Linh-Dan + Andrew: Linh-Dan is a Vietnamese actress. Her husband, Andrew, is an investment banker.
Picasso, Olivier & Alice: Olivier is the grandson of Pablo Picasso. Alice is an actress and Olivier’s former fiance.
Picciotto, Michael: Vice-Chairman at Engels & Volkers AG, a real estate firm. Former head of global financial activities for UBP, a Swiss private bank owned by Picciotto’s family.
Pickering, Jane & William: Jayne is a very famous fashion editor. William is her ex-husband.
Pignatelli, Frederico: An Italian prince whose family has “aristocratic ties to Pope Innocenzo XII” (https://federicopignatelli.com/). President, owner, and founder of Pier 59 Studios, the world’s largest photo studio complex. Federico was once accused of sexual harassment by his former assistant, but he was acquitted (https://nymag.com/intelligence2010/08/photography_studio_head_federi.html). Pignatelli also has his own modeling agency which is headed by Brunella Casella, the woman responsible for launching the career of scumbag Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, and others (https://wwd.com/fashion-news/fashion-scoops/industry-model-management-new-york-office-10505934/).
Pigozzi, Jean: Heir to the CEO of Simca, a French automaker. Pigozzi is also a photographer and fashion designer. Pigozzi regularly attends The Billionaires’ Dinner (https://www.edge.org/the-billionaires-dinner), where he has been pictured with Paul Allen and Princess Olga of Greece. Other regular attendees include Jeffrey Epstein, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, John Brockman, Matt Groening (creator of The Simpsons and pervert who received a foot massage from 16 year old Virginia Giuffre), and Rupert Murdoch. Pigozzi lived about a mile away from Epstein in NYC. Pigozzi is also a good friend of Ghislaine Maxwell’s (https://www.patrickmcmullan.com/photo/1539229).
Pittman, Bob & Veronique: Robert is a co-founder of MTV and CEO of MTV Networks. He has also been CEO and/or COO of other big companies such as AOL Time Warner, Clear Channel, iHeartMedia, Six Flags Theme Parks, Quantum Media, and Century 21 Real Estate. Pittman has partied with Ghislaine Maxwell, Katie Ford (read my D-F thread for more on her), and Andre Balazs (https://pagesix.com/2007/04/28/arboreal-fashion/). Pittman has also been the Director of the One to One Foundation, a charity that works with underprivileged children (https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1998/02/15/aols-man-with-a-mission/2e4d88f1-288e-4aa5-86b4-acf68b353954/). His home address and work address are both about a mile from Epstein’s NYC mansion. Veronique is his wife.
Pittman, Sandy: Former wife of Robert Pittman (above). Sandy is an avid mountain climber. She is allegedly responsible for the death of eight people while climbing Mount Everest, as depicted in the Jake Gyllenhaal movie, Everest (https://nypost.com/2015/09/17/socialite-everest-climber-speaks-out-im-no-villain/). Sandy supposedly refused to stop climbing until they reached a top. A blizzard blasted the mountain, killing eight members of the party.
Plepler, Richard: Former Chairman and CEO of HBO. Good friend of Peggy Siegal, the well-known publicist who acted as Epstein’s plug. More on her at a later time.
Plouvier, Diane & Denis: Denis is the owner of Trousseau linen company (https://www.denisplouvier.fblank). No info found on Diane.
Podolsky, Jeffrey: Writeeditor of such publications as Tatler (again!), People Magazine, Wall Street Journal’s WSJ Magazine, and George. Lives about a ½ kilometer away from Epstein’s NYC mansion. Has been photographed with several Epstein associates (Peggy Siegal, Carol Mack, India Hicks, and others.
Polk, George: Financial analyst who served on the Council of Foreign Relations with Epstein. Polk is also a member of the World Economic Forum.
Polii, Edoardo: Powerboat champion and textile entrepreneur.
Polu, Emmanuelle: Financier at La Nef. Ghislaine Maxwell’s cousin.
Polu: Isabelle: Former head of marketing at Microsoft. Became a translator specializing in psychology. Sister of Emmanuelle and cousin of Ghislaine.
Polu, Clary: “Marketing director of Lycos and Meetic, wife of the "startup" Christophe Schaming, co-shareholder of Winamax, the online betting company co-founded by the mysterious passenger of the Lolita Express Nicole Junkermann” (http://faitsetdocuments.com/articles.html).
Porrin Ivanisevic: No info found, but the work phone number listed traces back to Globana Media Group, a printing, publishing, and multimedia group.
Porter, Pliny: Movie producer. Close friend of Julia Roberts.
Porthault, Emmanuele: No info found.
Porthault, Mr & Mrs: Marc Porthault runs the family linen business, D Porthault. Marc’s parents founded the company. Clients include Bill Gates, Woody Allen, the Mellons, and the Kennedys. Marc’s wife, Isabelle, is the head of human resources of Chanel in Europe.
Porthault, Pascal: No info found.
Porthault, Remi & Isabel: Remi is the marketing director and president of the U.S. subsidiary of D Porthault linens.
Poster, Meryl: Former President of Television at The Weinstein Company. Before that, she was Co-President of Production for Miramax Films. A phone number connected to Meryl Poster was found in Epstein co-conspirator Sarah Kellen’s phone records on October 3, 2005. The call lasted one minute (https://www.thedailybeast.com/jeffrey-epsteins-hollywood-pipeline-ran-straight-to-harvey-weinstein). Meryl is pictured here with Ghislaine Maxwell (https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/ghislaine-maxwell-meryl-poster-and-caryn-zucker-attend-news-photo/1169681625).
Potter, Muffie: Socialite and former executive at Van Cleef & Arpels, a watch company. Married to famed plastic surgeon, Sherrell Aston. She has been photographed with Ghislaine and Peggy Siegal at various events.
Prestin, Electra: Former vice president of merchandising for Ralph Lauren and co-founder of Adam & Eve clothing company. Her father, Lewis T. Preston, was chairman of J.P. Morgan and president of the World Bank (appointed by George H.W. Bush). Her great-grandfather was newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, whom the Pulitzer Prize is named after. Another great-grandfather of hers was a partner in the Standard Oil Company of John D. Rockefeller.
Prevost, Catherine: Fashion designer.
Price, Charles H. II: Banking CEO who served as U.S. Ambassador to Belgium (1981-1983) and U.S. Ambassador to the U.K. (1983-1989) during the Reagan administration. Price was also on the boards of The New York Times (1989-2002), Texaco (1989-2001), Sprint (1989-1995), British Airways (1989-1996), and other companies.
Price, Judy: Founder of Avenue, a magazine about New York City.
Princess Firyal: Jerusalem-born Jordanian princess who was once married to Prince Muhammad bin Talal. Firyal was named an UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador in 1992. Princess Firyal launched the International Hope Foundation in 1994 for the benefit of homeless and street children. Firyal holds positions with several museums (The Louvre, The Tate, MOMA, and Guggenheim), as well as positions with Columbia University, New York Public Library, United Nation Association, and International Rescue Committee.
Pritzker, Nick: Real estate and venture entrepreneur. Comes from a massively wealthy family who made their money in chewing tobacco. Former president of Hyatt Hotels. Major investor in SpaceX, Tesla, and Uber. Cousin of Thomas (below).
Pritzker, Thomas: Billionaire heir and executive chairman of Hyatt Hotels. Cousin of Governor J.B. Pritzker of Illinois. Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre named Pritzker as one of the men she had to have sex with (https://www.tampabay.com/breaking-news/jeffrey-epstein-is-gone-but-allegations-against-powerful-associates-linger-20190810/). Pritzker’s name appears twice on Epstein’s flight logs (https://archive.org/stream/EpsteinFlightLogsLolitaExpress/Jeffrey-Epstein-Flight-Logs-in-PDF-format_djvu.txt). Pritzker is listed as one of the people who has knowledge of Maxwell and Epstein’s sexual trafficking conduct and interaction with underage minors (https://www.the-sun.com/news/778758/jeffrey-epstein-enablers-named-sex-trafficking-underage-victims/). Epstein has 12 phone numbers - including an emergency contact number - and two home addresses listed under Pritzker’s name. What’s even creepier is that there is a subtitle under his name that reads “Numero Uno”. Usually when Epstein adds a subtitle under someone’s name, it indicates what company they work for or a relationship of some kind (ex: X’s husband or Y’s friend). The fact that ‘Numero Uno’ is the subtitle under Pritzker’s name is unsettling, to say the least.
Propp, Rodney: Real estate tycoon known for holding onto properties until neighborhoods gentrify.
Prunier Christy & David Doss: Doss, David & Christy Prunier: David Doss has worked as producer and/or executive producer on NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw, NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt, Oprah in Africa, Primetime (with Diane Sawyer), Anderson Cooper 360, and Live PD. Doss now serves as senior VP of news programming for Al Jazeera America. Christy Prunier is a former Hollywood exec and founder of the Willa brand of beauty products.
Pucci, Laudomia: Daughter of fashion icon, Emilio Pucci. Works as Image Director for the eponymous company.
Puig Marc: Chief executive and president of Puig, a fragrance and fashion company.
Puig Taria: No info found.
Puopolo, Sonia: Author and inspirational speaker. Former communications director of Haute Living, a luxury lifestyle magazine. Her mother died on 9/11 when the airplane she was on crashed into the World Trade Center. Her mother’s close friend, Hillary Clinton, read the eulogy at her funeral (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2497916/Wedding-ring-9-11-victim-Clinton-family-friend-1-6-million-tons-Ground-Zero-rubble-provide-hope-daughter-died-hit-run-decade-later.html).
Puttnam, David: British film producer, educator, and member of the House of Lords. Puttnam was friends with Princess Diana before her passing.
Pymont, Chris: One of the top lawyers in Britain.
Quartucci, Alan: Founder of North Shore Bloodstock and North Shore Insurance, thoroughbred bloodstock companies that provide equine insurance, consulting services, racehorse management, and more.
Quinn, Topper: Investment banker who founded a couple of consulting firms.

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This week 12 yrs ago--Lehman Bros collapsed......(Best Interest) Explaining the Big Short and the 2008 Crisis