Friendship is Card Games: Hurricane Fluttershy · 12:14pm Aug 2nd, 2015
Ah yes, the episode whose title works equally well for the plot of “Putting Your Hoof Down.” Let’s take a look.
The Ponyville mule is actually a pretty chill guy. Of course, when you work for the local dark lord, not much can phase you.
Apparently, Dash knows exactly how many pegasi live in Ponyville. That, or she was just looking for Fluttershy.
And then film was canon in Equestria. The concept of tornado power is very fitting for pegasi, going by Dash as the exemplar of the tribe: dramatic, spectacular, awesome in every sense of the word, horribly dangerous, and probably kind of inefficient.
Also, we get a hint at Cloudsdale’s mobile capabilities prior to “Tanks for the Memories.” After all, it makes it a lot easier for the supplying town if the cloud factory can move closer to the reservoir.
Also also, wingpower. An interesting concept. How is one unit of wingpower defined? How much is muscle and how much is magic? Dash’s speech makes it sound like wingpower, despite the name, is actually a measure of velocity, either of the pegasus or of the slipstream. The anemometer would suggest that that’s the case as well, but that may just be a convenient shorthand for the magical output of a pegasus.
Finally, it’s nice to see Dash being inspirational.
Ah, the first appearance of Bulk Biceps, nee Snowflake, nee Big McLargeHooves. He’s a gag character, yes, but he’s still a lovable slab of meat.
Huh. Silverspeed, the last mentioned pegasus in the “a little too much flexibility, Blossomforth,” commentary, has gone almost completely unnoticed by the fandom. Curious, that.
I do enjoy how much Dizzy Twister appears in this episode. (I seem to have a thing for background pegasi, don’t I?) I still think she’s the perfect candidate for Scootaloo’s mother.
Yes, Derpy too. Do I even need to say it?
The flashback shows that Fluttershy did, in fact, go back to Cloudsdale after getting her cutie mark. Given the teasing and unsympathetic culture, I can’t imagine she stayed for a second longer than she needed to.
Poor Twilight. Having such fun with her new toy scientific apparatus that she forgot to take the questioner’s vocabulary into account. I do like how ponies apparently know to ask Spike for clarification when this kind of thing happens.
You know, by the time Thunderlane got a reputation for constant coughing, maybe quarantining him might have been a good idea. Alas, Dash’s desire to impress Spitfire outweighed biohazard protocols. And, of course, by then the infection was already spreading.
10.0 wingpower per capita with a record of 910 wingpower to beat implies that there are at least ninety-one pegasi in Ponyville, probably putting the total population of the town somewhere around four hundred-ish. Sounds about right.
Fluttershy’s panic attacks get the best visuals.
It’s very interesting to consider Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash’s motivations. Dash wants to excel for the sake of glory, bringing renown to herself and those she commands through something she’s passionate about. At the very least, she strives to avoid shame. That kind of motivation just doesn’t work for Fluttershy. She doesn’t care about fame. Heck, after the modeling debacle, she’s somewhat opposed to it.
Fluttershy doesn’t do her best out of want, but out of need. Specifically, the needs of others. Whether critters in danger or pegasi just short of the wingpower threshold, she acts according to the needs of something greater than her. This leads to an interesting paradox with her low self-esteem: Once she accepts that she can be of help (or reacts before she can doubt herself) she’ll come to the aid of almost anything.
Here we see Angel Bunny at his best. Dang it, Angel, why can’t you be like this more often?
Poor Fluttershy. Even after a 360% improvement, she’s just not designed for high-impact flight. She’s a stealth model, which is unfortunate when you need to make an impact. And, of course, she sees this through the lens of her insecurities rather than how she’s prioritized her life and how her magic works. After all, when approaching skittish critters, it’s best not to disturb even a dandelion.
Spitfire makes the commute from Cloudsdale to Ponyville in seconds. Makes sense; she has gravity on her side and the city’s in position to receive the water, so it’s pretty much just a controlled dive to get to the reservoir.
Okay, let’s check the math here. Dash was hoping for 1,000 wingpower. The record was 910. Removing eight pegasi means the vortex tops out at 795. Assuming a full roster would have just enough to break the record, that means that those eight had at least 116 wingpower between them, for an average of 14.25 wingpower each. If a kilowing actually was within the team’s reach, the average becomes at least 25.625, almost ten units above Dash’s reading before the training began. Dang. That was some effective training… or Murphy struck down the top performers. Or bad math. Or there’s a synergistic effect I hadn’t considered that results in the total wingpower literally being greater than the sum of its parts. Or wingpower levels are bulls
t.
Twilight, Dash’s eyes just went through a tree. She is not okay. Well, she wouldn’t be if she didn’t hang out with Pinkie Pie so often. Or if pegasi have a natural crash resistance, which is highly probable. It would certainly explain how Dash can brush off as many bad landings as she does.
So what’s up with Spike and the flute? I have to assume he had a whole suite of instruments prepared for this day.
I’ve almost certainly surpassed 800 cardpower. Let’s see how much more I can add today:
Cloud Cushion W
Instant
Prevent all damage that would be dealt to and dealt by target creature this turn.
Pegasi are naturally crash-resistant, but they still appreciate the abundance of soft surfaces in the sky.
Tornado Trainee 1W
Creature — Pegasus Citizen
Flying, double strike
”By the time I’m through with you, you’re going to be almost as awesome as me.”
—Rainbow Dash, Bearer of Loyalty
0/2
Flitter and Cloudchaser 3W
Legendary Creature — Pegasus Citizen
Flying
Whenever Flitter and Cloudchaser or another creature with flying enters the battlefield under your control, you may destroy target enchantment.
Rainbow Dash isn’t the only reason Ponyville’s weather team is one of the best.
2/2
Public Humiliation 3WW
Sorcery
Convoke (Your creatures can help cast this spell. Each creature you tap while casting this spell pays for 1 or one mana of that creature’s color.)
Exile target creature.
Impenetrable Terminology 2U
Instant
Counter target spell without reminder text. (Reminder text is any italicized text in parentheses that explains rules you already know.)
“Twilight doesn’t mean to do it. She just forgets her audience sometimes.”
—Spike
Anemometric Analysis 2UU
Enchantment
Whenever a creature with flying attacks, you may pay 2. If you do, draw a card.
With the right instruments, it’s possible to learn from anything.
Tangled Limbs 3U
Enchantment — Aura
Flash
Enchant creature
Enchanted creature doesn’t untap during its controller’s untap step.
"Sorry, Blossomforth's all tied up at the moment."
Tornado Duty 5U
Instant
Convoke
Return up to two target nonland permanents to their owners’ hands.
When Rainbow Dash tells you to “suck it up,” make sure you know what she means.
Early Trauma B
Sorcery
Each player discards a card.
Early Trauma has rebound if you cast it during your first, second, or third turns of the game. (If you cast it from your hand, exile it as it resolves. At the beginning of your next upkeep, you may cast this card from exile without paying its mana cost.)
Surge of Confidence R
Instant
Target creature gets +3/+0 until end of turn. Damage that would be dealt by that creature this turn can’t be prevented.
Heroes are made in a single moment, when all doubts are quieted and all barriers are broken.
Public Acclaim 1G
Instant
Convoke
Target creature gets +1/+1 until end of turn for each creature you control.
Everypony loves a winner.
Fluttershy’s Herald 2G
Creature — Squirrel
When Fluttershy’s Herald enters the battlefield, if you cast it from your hand, search your library for a legendary creature card, reveal it, and put it into your hand. Then shuffle your library.
On those rare occasions when Fluttershy wants to make an entrance, she always does it memorably.
1/1
Unflappable Mule 2G
Creature — Pony Donkey Citizen
Hexproof
”Ponies can snicker behind my tail all they like. Mom and Dad loved each other, and that’s all that matters to me.”
3/2
Flight Goggles 1
Artifact — Equipment
Equipped creature has hexproof as long as it’s attacking.
Equip 1
”Yeah, they keep stuff out of your eyes, but most days, they’re just there to look cool.”
—Rainbow Dash, Bearer of Loyalty
Antimicrobial Spray 2
Artifact
T: Target creature loses deathtouch and infect until end of turn.
T, Sacrifice Antimicrobial Spray: You lose a poison counter.
Equestria’s capacity for alchemy and manufacturing vastly exceeded that of Mirrodin.
Arboreal Armor 3
Artifact — Equipment
Protection from green (This artifact can’t be targeted or enchanted by anything green. This doesn’t protect equipped creature.)
Equipped creature gets +1/+3 and is a Plant in addition to its other types.
Equip 2
Signal Horn 3
Artifact
3, T: Untap all creatures you control.
Its booming note can be heard over everything short of the end of the world.
Feather Flu BG
Enchantment — Aura
Enchant creature
Enchanted creature gets -2/-2 and loses flying.
Pony diseases are just magical and flashy as ponies themselves.
Training Montage GW
Sorcery
Put a +1/+1 counter on each creature you control.
"If you're going to make yourself stronger, make sure you've got the right soundtrack. Speaking from experience, it's probably not polka."
—Pinkie Pie, Bearer of Laughter
Saving Swoop 2(wu)
Instant
Return target permanent you own to your hand.
Draw a card.
Fluttershy’s greatest feats are performed only when someone else needs them.
Highland Reservoir
Land
T: Add 1 to your mana pool.
1, T: Put a storage counter on Highland Reservoir.
1, Remove X storage counters from Highland Reservoir: Add X mana in any combination of U and/or R to your mana pool.
Tangled Limbs already exists in Champions of Kamigawa, except it costs 2UU. It's probably the best removal in the set.
This is one of my favorite episodes. I've rewatched to the point where I began to pay close attention to the background music, which it usually never occurs to me to do. The bgm when Rainbow Dash visits faux feather flu Flutttershy just makes me grin and giggle like a madman.
You'd really think the weather factory would have tornado engineers whose job it is to funnel up that water. In fact, mandating that the citizens of whichever town is chosen do it themselves with Wonderbolt oversight... is this an Equestrian army draft thing?
It has struck me though that the idea of breaking the record for a cumulative rating... doesn't make much sense. Seems like the athletic ability of each flier is much less important for their purposes than just maximizing the number of fliers. In real life, at least, building muscle power is a matter of long-term marginal improvement: just how long was their training period? Fluttershy's skyrocketing numbers suggests that muscle power was never the issue in the first place, and taking the contagious disease into account Rainbow's entire training regimen probably did more harm than good for their prospects
The idea that wingpower builds in a gestalt sort of way actually makes a kind of sense to me. I am sure there is a perfectly good, logical reason why, but it's 9 a.m. and I am really tired.
3288792
Completely forgot about Mystic Restraints. Well, I was bound to hit a preexisting design eventually. I've made a small adjustment.
3288795
I suppose that adding more pegasi reaches a point where they start getting in one another's way... maybe. Theoretically, they could just stack themselves at different altitudes.
As for the weather factory hiring vortex engineers, given that tornadoes only seem necessary when resupplying the cloud generators, it may be cheaper to outsource the task to local weather teams. Of course, that means conscripting the local pegasi, but they understand the importance of the task. Not sure whether or not they actually got paid. Maybe their only reward was the satisfaction of a job well done...
Nah, Pinkie probably threw an epic party, with Fluttershy as the guest of honor.
And the training regimen was probably more to build magic than muscle. Or magical muscle. Or muscular magic. Pegasus magic seems so heavily focused on physical activity that it's hard to separate the two.
Antimicrobial Spray and its flavor text are the best things ever.
Spike belonging in a musical profession would be pretty interesting to read I think.
I can definitely confirm that you've gone past 800. I've not been keeping up lately on putting your cards into Magic Set Editor 2 (I think I stopped not long before season five started?), but even then I have over 1100 cards in my "Fan of Most Everything's Cards" collection.
By the by, since I happen to be (intermittently) reading it, I think you might find Jed A. Blue's post-modern analysis work to be interesting, since its commentary sounds somewhat similar to yours.
I'd think wingpower would be measuring *momentum*, not velocity. Even if a child could fly fast she wouldn't contribute as much as an adult.
When doing the math, you forgot to account for the other possibility: That Dash's expectations for the team's performance just plain did not match up with the reality of their performance. She's probably used to being able to tell herself "Yeah, you think that's what you can do, but if you pretend you can go 10% faster I bet you'll do it"; that might not have worked so well with everyday, non-competitive ponies.
---
Tornado Trainee: I like this creature concept. It's a neon sign saying "Stick your enchantments and equipment here, people."
Flitter and Cloudchaser: Run with Enchanted Evening if you want to no longer be friends with whoever you were playing with.
Public Humiliation: Very creative concept. I like the flavor.
Early Trauma: Amusingly, if you draw it too late you can just wait until it's the last thing in your hand and not lose card advantage. Or, you know, madness.
Public Acclaim: I like the synergy here; the creatures you tap are still contributing to the buff!
Flight Goggles: Are Lightning Greaves and Swiftfoot Boots overpowered, or is this underpowered? I'm pretty sure the answer is "both". (Given the limited effect, and equip cost of 0 would be fair I think).
Arboreal Armor: An artifact with protection from green? Interesting. Also, love the tree-form (though it makes sense that they're a plant and not a treefolk, since the disguise is for a normal tree).
Feather Flu: Flavor text should say "just as magical".
I was going to say it's a shame that Impenetrable Terminology can't counter itself, but on further consideration, that seems entirely in keeping with its theme. Get two academics together and you'll have to pull them apart to stop the exchange of jargon.
I'm of the mind-set that all of the forms of (pony) magic on Equrestia operate under a sort of compound additive system based on how much camaraderie there is in the group.
So say you have five pegasi, for this discussion we will say all have 10 wing-power (WP).
Case 1: All five pegasi have never seen each other before and work against each other, all trying to be "the best", without direct sabotage, and as a result they produce a wimpy 25 WP ((10*5)+((-5*5)))
Case 2: All five pegasi have never seen each other before and work together on the task. As a result they produce a slightly more than expected WP of 55 ((10*5)+((1*5)))
Case 3: Two of the pegasi are brothers, of close enough age that they are the sorts of brothers who actually like each other. The brothers do not know any of the other three and none of the other three have ever meet each other before. The brothers work together excellently and the group as a whole works together well enough, as a result they produce a total of 59 WP ((10*5)+((1*5)+(2*2)))
Case 4: All five pegasi are life long friends, the sort of friend that would help you hide a body and work together like a well-oiled machine, as a result they produce a whopping 100 WP ((10*5)+((5*5)+(5*5)))
The math is ((BASE)+((HARMONY*GROUP1)+(BONDS*GROUP2)));
BASE being the base WP of each pegasus, so straight number for each one.
HARMONY is how well the lot as a whole works together, base being 1, with a group that just does its job and going up the better they work together as a whole. GROUP1 is how many of the whole work together that well, you can have varying set of (HARMONY*GROUP1) in the math, some positive some negative, based on the make up of the group.
BONDS is used to show how strong of a connection the group has with one another, with GROUP1 being how many have that strong of a bond. Again you can have multiple (BONDS*GROUP2).
This math works for all sorts of Pony-Power (PP) related needs, be it wing-power (WP), hoof-power (HP) or aether-power (AP).
So the closer the team working on a problem is the more power they have to do that task.
I kinda just wanted to share my head canon on this matter... .
Tagging 3288834 here so he can see the above.
As for the above, I'm sure someone much better at maths than me could work up something better.
Now, onto the cards.
I feel that both Flitter and Cloudchaser are getting gypped by not having their own individual cards. I understand, with them being sisters and all, and the fact that there is president for it, it still hurts a bit for them not to have their own cards.
But Impenetrable Terminology what if I DON'T know the rules of the card? Does it still count as reminder text if I don't know the rules the italicized text tells me?
Reading that made me chuckle. While looking up a better way of explaining reminder text I got reminded of Duh so... yeah... Moving on!
I like Early Trauma. I want to see more cards that use the turn count on them. Serra Avenger used it as a "time as a cost" mechanic, this one is a "time as a bonus".
Though I'm not sure if it should go up to turn three for the rebound. Not really a big deal but just how does one determine what is "early" in a game?
As someone who loves poison counters I'll state that I actually like Antimicrobial Spray. As much as I love the things there really should be a way of removing them. If slash when they do print such a thing I expect it to be primary in artifact, secondary in white and green, tertiary in red and MAYBE tertiary in black and even more maybe blue.
When I first read the name Feather Flu I thought "This will be 'contagious'" then I read the card and it wasn't 'contagious'.
I then spent waaaaaaay too long looking up example cards for what I meant. I didn't remember any of the names and just a vague recollection of proper rules text so you can probably understand why it took me a while.
I found Kudzu first, which I really should have remembered since the stuff is everywhere around here. Then I found Necrotic Plague which was the original one I was thinking of, as well as Nettlevine Blight. I also found Steam Vines, which I didn't know about before.
I say make it 'contagious';
Saving Swoop feels like it is coasted a bit much to me, even though it is a more expensive Saving Grasp on top of being a cantrip.
I can see Saving Grasp NOT cantripping because of Flashback but at the same time I don't think this effect should cantrip at all. Being able to save something important AND reuse an ETB trigger can be a big game changer.
I say drop it down to 1(W/B) and remove the draw.
Reading 3289099 's reply I'm going to have to agree with him somewhat on Flight Goggles. When I first read it I thought it was rather balanced, but it does seem a little underpowered. However I would suggest making it a 0 cost 1 equip, instead of the other way around.
This, I should think, is sort of a reminder that Faust's original plans for tribal assignments might have been a good idea after all. Fluttershy clearly makes more sense as an Earth pony while Pinkie Pie would make a fairly good Pegasus.
I think Feather Flu needs the reusability of a card like Kudzu, given how quickly it spread.
Rebound's reminder text is a little different from what you put on Early Trauma. (If you cast this spell from your hand, exile it as it resolves. At the beginning of your next upkeep, you may cast this card from exile without paying its mana cost.)
3288792 If you consider the entire block, I'd give the best removal title (best anything, really) to Umezawa's Jitte.
I guess Zenkai could explain how Dash got so fast. She just crashed into trees all day.
Huh I always thought I was the only one who sees Dizzy Twister as Scootaloo's mother good to see others do.
So... "0/2" is intentional?
3920367
Yup. Much like Force of Savagery, Tornado Trainee is a challenge presented to the player. On its own, it's almost useless. When used properly, it's devastating.
Silver-bordered: Impenetrable Terminology (reminder text).
Fluttershy's Herald probably ought to end with “…put it into your hand, then shuffle your library.”
That way, it's clearer that you don't shuffle your library if you didn't cast it from your hand.
Should Saving Swoop perhaps have the return as a cost?