The Other Worlds Shrine

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  • Destroy all humans, they can't be resurrected

  • Your favorite band sucks, and you have terrible taste in movies.
Your favorite band sucks, and you have terrible taste in movies.
 #171678  by Don
 Sun Dec 15, 2019 2:02 pm
I normally don't comment on bad manga unless there's something spectacularly wrong with it but this is one of the few that broke through. Ever since the success of High Score Girl, there's a decent number of copycats that goes the same vain of kids in school social bonding through games. So Destroy all humans is about kids playing Magic the Gathering (title is a play on Wrath of God's description: Destroy all creatures, they cannot be regenerated since it takes place near Nostradmus's prediction). Now overall the manga isn't terrible and maybe even sort of good. But High Score Girl would be completely worthless despite its brilliance if it got its Street Fighter balance wrong since the whole story still hinges on the character's aptitude in Street Fighter 2, so a manga about MTG is pretty much worthless if it gets the MTG balance wrong.

From the start we know that the characters are pretty much casual MTG players that play MTG after school with a few friends. None of the character can even afford to meet the 4-of max card requirement and basically play with whatever cards they managed to get out of the packs and trading with their own circle. Yakumo was pretty much the ceiling of the MTG aptitude when she appeared, being a rich girl and also someone who actually knows advanced deck building concepts. The previously strongest MTG player doesn't even know what Yakumo was talking about when she was mulling about whether she should've mulligan her hand. So now suddenly one of the guys who didn't even play much comes with a fully decked out Tolarian Academy deck. This is a card that was way overpowered and banned in pretty much every format for being overpowered. You don't just play like that against people who are supposed to be your casual friends. It's like agreeing to 'no rush for 10 minutes' and then 4-pool someone. If you're playing party games with friends there are certain things you're not supposed to do. In High Score Girl, Koharu literally resolved to sell her soul to the devil when she picked Akuma against Akira since she knows this is totally taboo amongst friends and stuff, and here at least Akira is at least a magnitude stronger than the strongest actual human in Street Fighter 2 so it makes sense why Koharu felt desperate enough to do that (she lost anyway).

I played MTG quite a bit and there were guys who had the power 9 and even if you were playing power 9 against some guy with a goblin deck, you're obviously not supposed to run broken stuff unless you don't want to have friends anymore. Sure, if there's an official event it's all bets are off but that's clearly not what's happening here. Of course let's not get into how guys who can't afford 4-of a card suddenly stumbled upon one of the most broken decks in history. Ironically, Yakumo always plays with jank decks when not in a competitive setting since otherwise it'd just be total beatdown given she's the only person who can afford a good deck in the group, even though she's actually a pro-level MTG player.

When reading sports manga like Captain Tsubasa I always wondered if the author actually knows anything about the sports. I'm getting the same vibe for Destroy all humans. Well, I'm sure the author knows what MTG is, but I suspect he never actually played it in a casual setting amongst friends.