#strip mine

[mtg-cards-hourly]

Strip Mine

Artist: Adam Paquette TCG Player Link Scryfall Link EDHREC Link

[ahedderick]

Boys will be, etc.

photo credit www.instagram.com/the_lucky_alexander/

One way the mid-appalachian area can exist is almost completely forested. Another, earlier existence was mostly tree-covered, with large, low-lying open areas kept treeless by indigenous people using fire. Right now, an area is usually only treeless if it is kept mowed, or in pasture. This mountaintop area, though, is a retired strip mine.

As ecologically horrible as that is, what is left behind many years later is . . . interesting. The soil is too thin and 'sour' for trees to grow here. Instead, though, there is a flourishing community of very tough plants that love the open space and thin, mineral-y soil. Massive moss clumps. Small, scrappy shrubs. I'm not enough of a botanist to identify all the plants we saw up here during the summer, but I could certainly tell there were many different species and a lot of them were things I'd never seen before anywhere else, or only rarely. Also, this is where we found the millions of blueberries last summer. A smashing spot to view the sunset, for sure!

[fzzr]

The most iconic Magic: The Gathering cards.

What does it mean to be iconic? I think it's pretty simple - it's whatever you think of first. This is to be independent of any particular format - so for example Sol Ring's overwhelming popularity in Commander doesn't make it an automatic winner. These will not be controversial opinions, I just want to talk about them.

White: Wrath of God

White is the color of fairness, and what's more fair than the equality of the grave? The transition from regeneration to "indestructible until end of turn" as protection against board wipes has robbed Wrath of God of some of its power, but it's still the standard for mass destruction effects.

Runner up: Swords to Plowshares - Pinpoint removal, with due compensation paid to the owner of the removed creature. Fairness in a different form, even if it's too efficient to be printed today.

Blue: Counterspell

"Counter target spell." Or, even more succinctly: "No". Blue is the color of magic itself, and no spell demonstrates that more than Counterspell. As with Wrath of God and board wipes, Counterspell is the standard against which all countermagic is judged. Nearly every set gets a Cancel - "Counter target spell" plus some set-specific upside, costing one and two blue. When it comes to simplicity and efficiency (and ignoring the broken Mana Drain) Counterspell is the go-to way to make your objections known.

Runner up: Ancestral Recall. Blue is the color of knowledge, and Ancestral Recall is what happens when that is taken too far.

Black: Vampiric Tutor

Black is the color that can get anything it want... for a price. Every color has some ability to search the library for one mana, but only Black can get anything it wants and be guaranteed to keep it. In exchange, it costs more than mana - you also pay in life. Between the functionality and the flavor, nothing so simply demonstrates the essence of Black.

Runner up: Necropotence. When you discard the simplicty of Vampiric Tutor, this is what you get: As much life as you wish to spend, for as many cards as you need - and one of the most busted cards in all of Magic.

Red: Lightning Bolt

"Lightning Bolt deals 3 damage to any target." One sentence, eight words, infinite possibility. What could represent Red better than mana for damage? As of March of the Machine, there are four things Lightning Bolt can target: Creatures, Planeswalkers, Battles, and Players. Anyone who thinks Red is all about chaos and smashing rocks together is invited to consider the subtleties of Lightning Bolt. Turn one, bolt their Birds of Paradise - it puts back their whole strategy. You chump blocked their 7/4 - it has one damage marked on it - finish it off with a bolt. Lightning Bolt to the face when they have 20 life - a waste. The same thing at 3 - that's the game. Do they have a huge field of blockers, but you want to take down some 'walkers or battles? Bolt! Did you block something that would die, but they pumped with Giant Growth? Bolt in response! Lightning Bolt might be the best-designed spell in Magic, and the better you get at the game the more you can do with it.

A note on the flavor text: For a long time, Wizards stopped reprinting Lightning Bolt due to concerns that it was too powerful. When it did return, they gave it the flavor text you can see above in reference to that delay. Today it is considered too powerful for Standard, but does show up in supplemental sets.

Runner up: Wheel of Fortune: OK but red *is* still about chaos.

Green: Llanowar Elves

Green is the color of creatures. Green is the color of growth. Elf is the characteristic creature type of Green. Llanowar Elves is an Elf creature that makes your mana grow. It's really that simple! Llanowar Elves is so fundamentally Green that they printed two functionally identical cards (Elvish Mystic and Fyndhorn Elves) due to needing the effect with different flavor.

Runner up: Giant Growth. This was very close. Giant Growth or some variation of it is printed in virtually every magic set. It represents the essence of Green in a different way, by making a statement that for one green mana, my creatures will beat yours.

Colorless: Skullclamp

This was tricky. Colorless, by definition, doesn't really have an identity of its own. An artifact can do almost anything, but shouldn't do things too efficiently or it would be able to undermine the weaknesses of the colors. Skullclamp was first printed in the Mirrodin block, while design was using Equipment for the first time. They looked at a card for one mana that was making a creature stronger and decided no, that's too good. Let's make it a tradeoff by reducing toughness. As a result, if you equip Skullclamp to a one toughness creature it dies instantly and you draw two cards. Oops, we created one of the most efficient card advantage pieces in the game's history and made it available to every color. By any standard, Skullclamp is a design mistake, but it represents exactly why and how artifacts and colorless cards in general can be so powerful, and so dangerous.

Runner up: Black Lotus. It's probably the most iconic Magic card, but one doesn't necessarily think of it in the same category as other colorless cards. It sorta exists in a category of its own. I put it here anyway, to recognize its overall impact.

Land (without a basic land type): Strip Mine

I decided to specify lands without basic land types because otherwise the answer would be the basic lands and if it was just nonbasic lands the answer would be the ABU duals. That's boring, so let's look at utility lands.

The only true identity lands have is "produce mana" (there are a few lands that don't produce mana on their own, but they don't print new ones). Strip Mine is one of the first utility lands ever printed and it stands as a symbol of just how powerful and important lands actually are. Lands don't cost mana, and you almost always get at least one a turn. Strip Mine's lesson is just how scary that "almost" is. No format allows for more than one in your deck, because if you could play more than one it would allow you to lock down any opponent with more expensive cards than you, by effectively unplaying their land from the previous turn. The land that hates land is a lesson about why land, and Magic's mana system in general, is so precious.

Runner Up: Mana Confluence - When looking at lands without basic land types that just produce mana, nothing hits quite like Mana Confluence. Legal in nearly every format, generically good but not broken - this is the true neutral of nonbasic lands, and arguably a baseline against which all others can be judged.

Conclusion

So, what do these iconic cards have in common? For starters, they're often very old - several were printed in Alpha. Indeed, between the main list and the runners-up, three of the five original boons (one mana for three of something) are represented. They're all powerful, probably because bad cards don't see play often enough to become iconic. They're usually cheap to cast - though this tracks with power, because low cost and high efficiency is a classic way to make a powerful card. Most of them are simple - often one or two lines. This leads to them being the baseline (or the ceiling) for what the color can do.

[eopederson]

After the Strip Mine Closed, West Virginia, 1969.

Not sure exactly where this was but somewhere near the Pennsylvania boundary, my first serious introduction to the horrors of strip mining.

[michael-massa-micon]

Tailings And Overburden - May 2023 As you approach Ajo, Arizona, from the south on Highway 85, you will see a long, white, stripe across the landscape. As you get closer and closer to the town it becomes apparent that the stripe is not natural but is instead a man-made pile. That man-made pile and the darker, but larger, piles on the other side of the highway took 66 years to create and are tailings and overburden from the New Cornelia Open Pit Copper Mine which operated from 1917 to 1984. The New Cornelia Mine was the first open pit copper mine in Arizona and possibly would have been the first open pit copper mine in the US if the investors hadn’t been so sidetracked by experimentation in totally unworkable copper smelting techniques. The first mine was the Bingham Canyon Mine in Utah which began operations in 1906. The long white pile in these images is tailings (debris left after the refining process) and the darker pile built up around the open pit are overburden (rock that had to be removed to get to the ore layer.) MWM

[thatsleepymermaid]

On Friday, the Georgia EPD granted permits to Twin Pines to strip-mine three miles from Okefenokee Swamp. This will be a "demonstration mine" of 600 acres digging out titanium dioxide, staurolite, and zircon. I cannot state how disappointed I am in my own state's environmental department to approve something so damaging to our natural wetland. The Okefenokee is the largest blackwater swamp in North America and one of the most endangered rivers in America. Hopefully, John Ossoff will block it again as he did back in 2022.

If you are looking for ways to help go ahead and check out 100miles.org and Georgia River Network.

[oil2]

I am fundraising for Mosa to receive medical treatment and refugee assistance through the Rafah crossing on GoFundMe. He is a 25 year old law student at Gaza University. He is currently suffering from an untreated respiratory infection, starvation, and a shrapnel injury to his leg preventing his mobility. We urgently need him to get preventive care before his condition deteriorates. I worry with the overcrowding he will become vulnerable to contracting diseases as time passes. He will use the funds to put his name on the border crossing list, obtain a passport, asylum to a neighboring country, rent for housing if possible, food, and necessities. Please make a generous donation and share the campaign so he can receive the treatment he needs. 

[lustingfood]

Tandoori Chicken Strips (x)

[sidedoodlez]

Whose dream was it to have the babies look like that…?

[hakusins]

cw // suggestive

worshipped route for whitney the faithful (or fallen?) where he's preparing the sacrifice pc for weekly prayers~

whitney the faithful/swap au idea belongs to @just-dol-headshots

[blossomdapple]

Hello, everyone. I hope you're doing well

I know I'm just one Tumblr blog with less than 300 followers, the vast majority of which aren't active. But I really hope this post reaches many people, so there'll be one last tragedy in Palestine. I'll repost this many times if I have to

Mohamed Abdul Hamid is a Palestinian currently living with his family in the Gaza Strip. He created a fundraiser on March 11th, 2024, intending to raise $40k to flee (NOTE: The goal is listed as €25k, but the description states that $40k is needed for a family of 8 to flee to Egypt)

As of writing this, €5,836 has been raised. While any amount helps, it's frustrating to see fundraisers like this one earn much less money than the one for AO3, which had a bigger goal that was reached and even surpassed in a much shorter time

Even if you can only donate the equivalent of €5 and think it's a meaningless amount, it isn't for people in need. This is the thank you note I got for donating €5 (the equivalent of 7.34 CAD) to Mohamed's fundraiser:

I put this note here to remind you all that any amount of money helps. *Any* amount

And if you aren't in a position to donate for any reason, remember that sharing really does help and can go a long way. So please, reblog this post if you won't be donating. Alternatively, share it on Twitter if you have an account, since posts there tend to get more attention

ALSO, if you are or know a person from a country in the European Union who can act as a beneficiary, reach out to Mohamed through Instagram (listed in his April 26th update)

REBLOGS >>>> LIKES

[sasukeless]

there’s just something so utterly gratifying in sasuke killing orochimaru and making it known the reason he doesn’t apply his “no kill” rule for him is because sasuke views him with a disgust and dislike that he almost only reserves for itachi.

itachi and orochimaru while differ in they want from sasuke, both are perpetrators of some sort in sasuke’s life. trying to manipulate him through lies and coercion, and of course on top of it they have committed crimes beyond redemption. so it’s greatly satisfactory that sasuke, as a victim, gets to kill them both with the same level of merciless.

of course, this all gets kinda dimmed when both return, and act all goody goody. though it is nice both of them aren’t anymore in a position where they have power over sasuke, in fact it’s sasuke who has it now. itachi is so ashamed he can’t even meet sasuke for himself until sasuke presses and he’s forced to finally tell him the truth. and orochimaru is basically in debt acting as sasuke’s follower

[leslielumarie]

This is your reminder to change your pen tip.

∠( ᐛ 」∠)＿

[koiwynn]

short analysis of the tragedy of fang runin because she’s scratching at the walls of my brain like usual.

fang runin is probably the most tragic character i’ve ever read about. she left tikany to escape drugs, poverty and abuse, and then had to suffer tremendously by those factors again and again. she fought whole-heartedly to build a world free from corruption and oppression, even if her methods were… less than ethical on some occasions. hell, she refused to even sit on the throne because she deemed that there’s where her corrupt predecessors sat. that’s how badly she wanted to separate herself from the evil of nikara.

rin so desperately wanted to give her people the childhood and life she and the people she loved never got. and then only for her at the very end to realise that war and oppression won’t end and that her country could never be free. her country is broken beyond repair, and the only way for nikara to survive is for colonialism to put it the broken scraps together, the one thing rin fought all her life to defeat.

[softsoftmoonwitch]

Pooky gets washed 🧸💕