u/Kiekoes

EDIT: Looks like the pictures I uploaded got downsized and compressed, so uploaded them again to imgur: https://imgur.com/a/QBX7jOp

I finished foiling out my second foil 2015 Modern deck! In case you missed it, I recently foiled out my Mono White Hatebear deck, which I posted here.

This time I finished my Merfolk deck. I have been a Modern Merfolk player for many years, continously updating my foil deck with the latest cards. After becoming disillusioned with the current Modern metagame and the way the format seems to be going, I ended up downgrading the deck to its 2015 counterpart. This meant that I had to replace almost every card, or downgrade them to their 2015-era version. The only cards this version of the deck shares with my current Modern version are the Masters of the Pearl Trident, the Aether Vias, the Chalices and Dismembers. I had to purchase all other cards... again! Haha.

If you haven't checked out 2015 Modern yet, you're missing out! You should check out the subreddit: r/2015modern

As most of you saw, yesterday MangaDex implemented a change where you need to log in to read more than 10 chapters on their site. This was under the guise of "too many scrapers are abusing the site, causing outages and other problems." Okay, fair enough, right?

Well, no. Since the entire thing was client side. The popup you got when reading more than 10 chapters without logging in was just a static popup that you could block with an ad blocker. Once removed, there were no restrictions anymore. There were also no changes to the API. All reading apps like Mihon/Tachiyomi forks had no issues with pulling the pages. I did some tests yesterday scraping ~20k pages, and didn't hit any kind of limit whatsoever.

If they really wanted to block scrapers and bad actors from impacting the site's functionality, you'd think they'd make changes to how their API works, i.e. putting in restrictions there. Since that wasn't the case, their entire reason falls flat. Many people speculate they did this to harvest more user data to sell, or prop up their userbase numbers to pitch to investors, but so far the staff hasn't come forward with the actual reason.

Funnily enough, they already reverted the change because "too many people signing up overloaded the server." Who'd have thought?

75/75 - 2015 Modern Merfolk