Congrats. I'm nearing 70 pity. I did not get any beginner's luck. But I did get Qingque of the beginner banner. Her and Guinaifen were two of the characters I wanted.

EDIT: She finally joined at 82 pity. I love all the Stellar Jade they throw at you in the beginning.

Yeah I'm really not a fan of the site remake, but I could probably live with it. I'm just insanely disappointed by the removal of digital platforms, it doesn't make sense to me, especially when I see so many people taking advantage of those filters right now! Anyways, yes I'm reorganizing a bunch of platforms (especially my old Virtual Console stuff) so that it will be easier to manage after the site migration.

I started Star Rail. I was going to wait until I got a PS5, buuuuut I really want Robin.

The PS3 PSN Store has a lot of great games! So far I made sure to pick up most of the Sonic downloads (CD, Adventure, Adventure 2, the Fighters) and Okami HD, but still want to get a few other gems, like Quantum Conundrum. They aren't closing it yet, but I can already forsee it happening in a few years time, so I'm starting my collection now to get ahead of that.

I see you've been playing Fallout 76! How are you liking 76 over its ancestors?

That's kinda shocking since I don't think I've heard anyone speak too kindly about 76 Glad to hear you're enjoying it though!

How'd the birthday celebrations go? Sorry it's been a while since we've caught up

Ideally what you want as a beginner if you still don't know what archetype you wanna build is to get 3 of one of the better structure decks. Structure decks cannot be dismantled, but they're really cheap and some of them have stuff that you may want for other decks, so they're not a total waste if you're interested in some UR in one of them (like cybet mining if you plan on building a cyberse deck, or black luster soldier which is a pretty good filler link card when you have high level monsters). The newer stuff is actually pretty decent (although rogue tier), they're basically just lacking staples but you have to build that for every deck anyway.

After that, you get the discounted 10 packs that come with 1 copy of staples in bundle deals, all of them are good and you get a bunch of cards faster. Then you start building staples. You basically need 3 maxx "c", ash blossom, and then it's a mix of infinite impermanence, called by the grave, crossout designator, nibiru, your pots, harpie's feather duster, dark ruler no more, etc. etc. depending on your deck and the meta.

As a rule of thumb, you usually want to stay at 40 cards. It just gives you better chances at drawing what you need, 60 cards are usually meme tier or for decks that love to mill to play with RNG. Of these 40 cards, 10 are going to be staples for a good ratio; you always want to start with at least 1 handtrap so you can respond to your opponent if you go second, so 10 is roughly the number you want to go for a healthy mix. These are expensive (all of them are UR except Droll & Lock Bird iirc), but they'll be in every deck you use.

Also look into link and xyz in general, it makes your extra deck a really cool toolbox that's always with you, and there are a lot of searchers, extenders, and just really cool cards that will make you brick way less.

Master Duel is, unfortunately, both the best and the worst Yu-Gi-Oh! game out there. As a simulator I really have very few complaints, and the solo mode is great with all the lore stuff (even if most loaner decks are absolute horseshit), but the ranked ladder has to be one of the most awful things in any TCG. In short, the banlist is awful in ygo, so the powercreep between ""tier 1"" and the rest is just that bad. It's a shame because there are so many cool decks out there but it's really hard to have fun when you're fighting against the same 3 netdecked decks over and over and over again, especially when they're not even playing it well but you still lose because they're that bullshit. Heck, I usually won most of them with my rogue deck and even then I still didn't have fun.

I was basically in the same position as you when it released and it was a blast learning all the stuff (I really just stopped playing the game around yugioh GX, and never even played it for real, just with a friend), but once tearlaments was released the game basically entered the worst meta environment the ocg/tcg had, and it really hasn't changed that much since then. Kitkallos being legal is a fucking mystery, everyone thought it would get banned super fast because it is banned in both TCG and OCG but here we are.

yeah... I'm not at all happy with a lot of the newer mechanics of those... I do tend to try the newer games but between the inability to get cards I want for my deck and the new mechanics making all my old strategies useless... it hurts.