The Definitive Guide to and Defense of Mono Black Ponza in Pauper in 2024

    Land destruction is good, actually. In a game based around having excellent resource management and outpacing your opponents’ resources, you’d think destroying your opponents’ lands wouldn’t just be fair game, it’d be encouraged. But no, land destruction’s fallen out of favor as a means to control the board due to the (incredibly infantilizing) “feels bad” moments it creates that WotC is oh-so-frightened of producing. God forbid somebody wins this game now and then. 

    I’ve begun terrorizing the only format where you can pull off a semi-competitive land destruction deck. I’m providing you this guide out of the goodness of my heart, in the hopes you, too, will become a terror at your LGS.

What’s Wrong With You? Why Would You Do This? 

    As any longtime MTG player can attest to, the burnout is real. After 15+ years of serious playing and collecting, plus another five at a card store where I had a very generous discount, a lot of the magic in Magic has been lost on me. I pined for a time when I actually felt like a planeswalker thematically linked to my deck, and not a guy with a disposable income and 15 Commander decks.

    I landed on a land destruction deck for pauper when I found the semi-cycle of three-mana land destruction spells in Choking Sands, Icequake, and Rancid Earth. Immediately, I thought about how brutal it’d be to open up a match with a Dark Ritual into an Icequake, and the rest is history. 

    This deck is incredibly brutal to run, and has some insanely punishing play patterns. Unfortunately, this is what I found compelling about it. I’ve never felt like a more nefarious and evil planeswalker than I do when I pilot this deck. 

Ultimately, this is what rekindled my love for Constructed - I’d found a deck that I felt truly emulated the flavor of being a mono-black planeswalker who’s traveled the multiverse in search of only the most oppressive and destructive spells he could get his hands on. 

    You should play mono black ponza if you’re also disenchanted and disenfranchised from the larger Magic sphere, if you’re searching for a deck with an oppressive and classic-feeling game plan, and you don’t care about the meta. Ponza is for players who want to punish and bully their opponents. 

    I want to be clear that this deck won’t 5-0 a league consistently, but it will go to game three nearly every time. 

Mono Black Ponza 2024

Decklist

Land Destruction

    The basis of this deck is the four copies each of Choking Sands, Rancid Earth, Icequake, and Befoul. Befoul, while costing an additional mana, is still essential to this deck by virtue of being optional creature removal in a pinch, plus bringing us up to 16 total sources of land destruction. We need to see at least one LD spell in our opening hand, but the Befouls will admittedly be the first cards we drop when sideboarding. 

    Playsets of both Dark Ritual and Cabal Ritual are the other essential cards. We’ll need to see at least one of these in our opening hands as well, and it’s usually beneficial to mulligan down to five to dig for one alongside an LD spell.

Creatures

    Where my list differs from some other lists is the creature base: it’s pretty rude to play all this land destruction without an actual out to end the game, so we’re stapling a traditionally valuable two card combo to our low-end in the form of Exhume-ing a swampcycling Troll of Khazad-dun. 

    Sign in Blood and Dusk Legion Zealot provide gas and a body to put our landless foes on some sort of clock. Finally, Gurmag is some extra 5/5 damage. 

    Note that Gloomfang Mauler is absent from this list - in my playtests, leaning into a more spellslinger base helps guarantee we hit land destruction spells in the first few turns and then shift focus to sticking a Troll. This might boil down to a personal taste - I very much enjoy the consistent bullying blowing lands to smithereens brings; maybe a bit too much for my deck’s own good.

    In a pseudo-Mono Black Control manner, we’re also running a playset of Chittering Rats. These little bastards are the sand you kick in the face of your opponents after you’ve pushed them to the ground. The possibly most sinister feeling in the world is watching your opponent dig for lands when you’ve locked them down to one (or even zero) mana, then running out the Rats and locking them out of drawing into a land. It’s insanely brutal and I never feel more like a villainous planeswalker than when I land this. 

    In a similar vein, Crypt Rats acts as both removal versus Goblins, elves, and other creature-heavy decks, or as an additional wincon if we can dump a Cabal Ritual into it in the late game.

Control, Removal

    The prevalence of other Trolls of Khazad-dun in the format makes Exhuming our Troll risky; they can always respond to our Exhume by cycling their own Troll, which will then swing in before our Troll and outpace us to victory. Our best defense for this is the Nihil Spellbombs, Tormod’s Crypts, and Bojuka Bogs. It’s very hard for us to deal with an Exhumable threat, which is why we only ever want to use our Divests to toss those pesky indestructible artifact duals, unless we have a Tormod’s or Spellbomb ready to go.

Besides this, four Snuff Outs are just about the best removal in the format, but I’m playing with the idea of running Spinning Darkness instead to help stabilize when we’ve taken a few hits, or Sign in Blood’d a few too many times.

Card Advantage

    Since we’re more often than not starting out the game with a two-for-one when we Dark Ritual into a Choking Sands, and then another two-for-one when we Exhume our Troll, we run the risk of running out of gas really quick. To counteract this, we’ve got four copies of Sign in Blood as well as two Dusk Legion Zealots. 

Two Thorn of the Black Rose round out our draw. Thorn of the Black Rose is so good in Pauper, and one of the best cards in this deck. It’s usually worth it to Ritual into a Black Rose on turn two if we can stand it - so long as there aren’t a ton of fliers coming our way, we’ll be able to keep pace with our opponent even if we have to keep dropping Rituals to hit their lands.

Mana Base

    Playing Pauper these days can start to feel like Modern with the near-ubiquity of the Lord of the Rings basic landcyclers. We’ve seen the average number of lands sink in Pauper decks since then, and this deck is no exception, especially with all eight of our Rituals.

    Here, we’re running just 16 lands, and that’s as low as I dare to go. Four Peat Bogs are essential pulls for our opening hand, letting us get an LD in on turn two at the latest. The single Bojuka Bog and Barren Moor come into play more than you’d expect - despite our limited draw power, we tend to see a lot of our deck each game due to the aggressively slow pace we drag the game to when we destroy lands. 

How To Play Mono Black Ponza

Opening Hands

    Land destruction in pauper sounds like it shouldn’t work. Pauper is a turn two format - meaning most decks’ turn two plays will set the pace for how that game will shake out. However, we’ve got several very strong turn one plays that can ruin our opponents’ turn two - namely Dark Ritual into any Land Destruction. You’ll see this is a theme.

    There are several very strong opening hands in this Mono Black Ponza list, but you’ll have to mulligan fairly aggressively for them, or else assume you’ll have a turn or two to set up (versus Faeries, for instance, which tends to run a lot of Dimir Aqueducts, our favorite target for Choking Sands). Our opening hands are also heavily influenced by whether we’re on the play or draw.

    The best hand you can keep has the spells and mana to destroy a land on turns one, two, and three. This looks like at least one Ritual, usually a Peat Bog, and at least two LD spells, plus a Troll or draw spell if we can spare it. On the play, we can safely drop a Peat Bog turn one and use it turn two to either Cabal or Dark Ritual into a Choking Sands, using the extra mana to fetch a swamp with the Troll. Turn three sees us untapping with three mana, which we use to blow up another land. Depending on what we’ve drawn into, our options should start to open up: we’ve got five cards in our ‘yard already, almost enough to meet Threshold on Cabal Ritual in case we want to hard cast a Troll, or we can dig for our Exhumes and just get that Troll back while also banking mana for more LD. 

    Openers with multiple LD spells and swamps to cast them might look like keepers, but we really can’t afford to wait until turn three to start blowing up lands. If we don’t see a ritual or a Peat Bog, it’s a mulligan.

    Our second great starting hand is anyway to get the Troll in your graveyard and on the field in the same turn, preferably an early one. If you see a Dark Ritual, Troll, and Exhume in your hand, you’re looking at a turn one 6/5 mega-menacer on the field.

    Depending on matchup and the play/draw dichotomy, these hands get better or worse. We’ll cover that in the Sideboarding section.

Strategy

    If you’ve made it this far I shouldn’t have to repeat to you that our goal here is to destroy our opponents’ lands, denying the resources they need in the early game while we stick a Troll or Gurmag and start unloading. 

    Hitting an LD spell on turns one, two, and three is paramount to our success. Usually this is enough to set any other meta deck back enough that they won’t have an opportunity to catch up, even if our only “threats” are Dusk Legion Zealot and Thorn of the Black Rose.

    The key to piloting this deck is understanding we are not a traditional control deck. Really, we’re in an amorphous middle ground where we can play an aggro game early on by sticking a Troll, or play the long game with consistent land destruction and never letting our opponents cast a spell. Lock their draws down with Chittering Rats and remove their graveyards with Nihil Spellbombs, Snuff Out any creature they play, and just wallop them with our 6/5. 

Sideboarding by Matchup

    The best part about bringing Mono Black Ponza to your local Pauper night is watching your opponents struggle to sideboard against you. With such a rarely seen deck (at least in Paper), you’re almost guaranteed to have the upper hand in games two and three. Where we have answers to the meta decks, they’ll have nothing to bring except more counterspells, more or less.

    Generally, versus creature decks, you’ll want more removal and more graveyard hate. This means bringing in our Tormod’s Crypts and Nihil Spellbombs to clear their graveyard of creatures before we Exhume our Troll.

  There’s this odd sensation I have where it feels like it might be optimal to choose to go on the draw in some matches. I don’t have enough data to back this up, but it’s almost a better option to be on the draw versus decks without turn one plays - you’ll still lock them out of casting anything, but you won’t burn a turn playing a swamp and now Ritualing into any land destruction.

    Note that Modern Horizons 3 just hit the field, and we’re still reeling from the Broodscale combo deck hitting the scene, as well as learning to deal with Sneaky Snackers and more. 

Versus Affinity

    Bringing the Divests into the mainboard is our best hope versus top-of-the-meta Grixis Affinity, and we can usually afford to cut our two insurance Anglers out for Chittering Rats and Snuff Out. Snuffing Out the Myr Enforcers and Divesting the artifact duals out of their hand should be our priority.

Versus Terror

    UB Terror also demands we bring our Divests in to deal with that stupid Kraken before they can cast it for cheap. They’ll undoubtedly be filling their graveyard with cheap Mental Notes, and we’ll have to keep an eye out for the Sneaky Snacker. Swap out the Snuff Outs and Befouls for Crypt Rats, Chittering Rats, and the Spellbomb to clear their graveyard before we try to stick a Troll.

Versus Synthesizer

    Divests are once again the answer. Your opponent absolutely cannot stick red mana - once they hit a Synthesizer we’ll have a hell of a lot of trouble stopping their land plays. A single Thraben Inspector hitting the field early shouldn’t bother us - if we’re playing well, an Exhumed Troll will roll right past them with its triple-menace. We can board out our graveyard hate in this matchup and bring in Snuff Outs and a Befoul if we think it’ll help, too. We’re not so concerned about them getting a Kor Skyfisher at the same time that we’re getting a Troll.

Versus Gardens

    This is one of our hardest matchups, just because they’re also usually running a playset of Trolls. The worst response to our perfect start of a turn one Dark Ritual -> cycle the Troll -> Exhume the Troll can be painfully interrupted by your opponent cycling their own Troll, then sticking it to the field and swinging in first. We can’t fire off our own Exhume combo without a Tormod’s Crypt or Nihil Spellbomb in play to shore up their graveyard, either. Finally, we absolutely cannot let them stick Avenging Hunter - that spells the end for our deck, since we can’t just remove their lands to stop them from advancing through the Undercity and generating advantage.

Versus Burn

    Another tough match up, Burn is mostly one-mana spells, meaning our usual Ponza strategy won’t lock them out nearly as well as we hope. We can switch gears to play a more control-y game by bringing in our Crypt Rats and Pestilence to deal with their board of creatures and our Chittering Rats to punish them for only running 17 lands on average. 

    This matchup is when Rancid Earth’s threshold effect is most useful. Even though Burn typically runs at least two two-toughness creatures in the form of Goblin Blast-Runner and Goblin Tomb Raider, we can wipe the board of Bushwhackers and Epicures if we land a Rancid Earth. 

Versus Faeries

    The cool thing about playing into Faeries is they have no answer to our Trolls besides their Edicts. To combat this, we’ll sideboard in more Rats (of both kinds) so we always have something to chump instead of our Troll, trading out our Anglers and Befouls. Snuff Outs can stay in the mainboard versus Faeries to deal with the Murmuring Mystics and Ninja of the Deep Hours.

Versus Gruul Ponza

    This is kind of a wild matchup, and also the one I’ve played the least of. Normally, I’d say to be afraid of the Generous Ents being cycled into the graveyard, but more often than not Gruul Ponza wants to stick an Arbor Elf, Utopia Sprawl, or Wild Growth on turn one. Punish them for that by blowing up the land, two-for-twoing an enchanted land or rendering their elf useless. This is one matchup where we’ll actually use our Befouls after game one - our number one priority is keeping them off five mana so they can never cast Avenging Hunter, or Boarding Party, or Annoyed Altisaur. 

Versus Caw-gates

    This is a free win. They have no indestructible lands, and their key cards are all lands we can blow up. Heap Gate and Basilisk Gate are the two main targets, but really we’ll just need to keep them off of white mana so they cannot stick those cheap Squadron Hawks and Sacred Cats. 

Versus Tron

    This is actually a great match up for us, but not a free win. Tron needs to assemble the Urza lands as quickly as possible with their Expedition Maps and Crop Rotations, which makes it hard to consistently deny their mana base. That said, pay attention to what colors they have access to; you’ll need to carefully remove their filter lands, and Energy Refractors with LDs and Divests, respectively, to keep them off of blue and green mana. This should help us stick our Troll and guarantee the damage gets through when they can’t cast their Moment’s Peace. Side in the Tormod’s Crypts as well to keep their graveyard free from Mulldrifters when we Exhume.

Good Game

    While playing this deck, my mind’s often drawn subconsciously to John Prine’s “Paradise”; a song about the strip mining and destruction of the town of Paradise, Kentucky during the coal rush in the 60s. It’s a song about the complete and total leveling of the town for the alleged progress of man - the ever-grinding machine that is fossil fuel consumption uprooting and destroying the histories of hundreds of Appalachian residents. Magic: the Gathering wasn’t around when Prine wrote this song, but if it had been, I’m sure he would’ve included some references to Choking Sands and Sinkhole. 

Weenies, Kor Equipment, and Sideboarding

Kitchen Table League Master List

Decklist

Last time we talked about the Rakdos Hellbent deck I’ve built for my kitchen table league. It’s a little slower than an aggro deck should be, in fact slotting into a more midrange-y archetype. Today I want to talk about possibly the most aggressive deck of the bunch, and how it ended up like that. 

In 2009 I purchased a Kor Equipment themed intro deck, probably from Target, to dive into the recently released Zendikar set. I loved Zendikar, with its floating rocks and Burning Crusade-esque aesthetics, and I loved a creature type rooted in white that wasn’t Humans or Kithkin. This deck played way better than the green-red Allies deck intro deck I also purchased at the time, but both were fairly weak for a time when Jace, the Mind Sculptor was dominating the actual Standard environment.

In my quest to recapture that old feeling of a younger Magic, one of the last battle decks I built before bouncing from my online card retailer job was an expanded Kor Equipment list based on the original 40 card intro deck. Once again, I tried to keep the total cost for the deck under $20 and use cards from my chaff box whenever I could. 

See the decklist above. It only runs about $6 to build, and hits in this format like a freight train. The play patterns are just too valuable for the other decks to keep up; anything that doesn’t spend the first two turns removing Kor Duelists and Armament Masters ends up drowning under a swarm of 3/3s+. The deck’s turn one, two, and three plays are almost always small threats that grow into big threats, usually with evasion, and it’s only bad match up is against the mono-red goblins deck, which can trade boards and recover so fast that it doesn’t care about the Kor board.

This genuinely surprised me. It really shouldn’t have; white weenies have been a staple archetype in most formats since Magic’s creation. The 1996 World Champion deck was probably the first instance of a competitive weenies deck, and it was created completely by accident. Because Tom Chanpheng forgot to register the 4 Adarkar Wastes, judges ruled he would have to use basic Plains instead. This rendered his single copy of Sleight of Mind useless, but that wouldn’t stop him from dominating the competition. This indirectly spawned the concept of “dead card handicap” when playtesting decks. When using the dead card handicap, decks are built with 6-12 “Dead cards” that do nothing in their build, and playtested against various other meta decks. When the handicapped deck can beat the meta decks with the dead cards, actual tech is swapped in to focus in on blind spots and off-meta matchups. 

This WW deck doesn’t need all that, though. Playtests have revealed that nothing can stand against this deck without some serious sideboarding. Which actually brings us to our first big plateau in our KTL: How do we decide on the sideboards for each of these decks? With 10+ in the meta, spread across 10 slightly different builds and archetypes, how can we hope to construct a 15 card sideboard that gives each deck a chance against the other?

The best way to go about this is taking the strongest deck in the meta, Kor Weenies, defining its weaknesses, and searching out the cards in the maybeboards and considerings that make sense for the meta. 

The best way to stop the Kor deck is to just destroy its permanents. Targeted creature removal is the best for this, and our format already has some killers for the Kor: none of them survive a Lightning Bolt unaided, and the discard outlets running around in both the Rakdos Hellbent deck and Dihada pseudo-control (more on this later) mean Terminal Agony is hard to cast for more than two.

But what about the Mono Blue Suspend deck and Mono Green Elves? The Ovinizes in the Suspend deck don’t completely neutralize an equipped Kor, and Reality Acid is too slow. Pongify just makes things worse. The real play here is to go up to four copies of Delay, and probably add some Counterspells just to be safe (it bums me out to run something so generically themed as Counterspell in these decks, but it's also the weathervane by which all other spells should be measured, and thus a necessary evil, the same as Lightning Bolt). 

The Elves have a harder time of it. Generally (like the Goblins), they just want to outpace the Kor deck by going wider than the Kor can go tall. 

What’s really funny is how bad the B/W Exalted deck plays against Kor Equipment. The Exalted deck used to be the king of the pile. Having access to both Knight of Glory and Knight of Infamy makes this deck really hard to remove and run built-in evasion. Unfortunately, the Kor deck outpaces it in terms of damage per turn in most instances, until at least the Exalted deck gets the mana to regenerate Duty-Bound Dead over and over. Turn one Kor Duelist into a Trusty Machete and an Armament Master is just too much damage on the field that early.

Board cards for the Exalted deck are looking like Duress and Oblivion Rings, which can hopefully neuter the artifacts before they become a huge problem. 

Now that we’ve got an idea for how to sideboard against Kor Weenies, we can play some test games and see what the Weenies deck needs to win against anti-weenie tech. 

Echoing Decay sees play in Pauper right now, here it hits every Kor in the deck before they can pick up any equipment, and still hits the Kor Duelists after they pick up a Bone Saw. Slotting it into the Dihada deck feels both flavorful and mechanically right, considering that deck runs a lot of one- and three-mana spells but sort of peters out on turn two. 

Kitchen Table League: Master List

I realized I wrote up but never posted several more blogs about the Kitchen Table League, I'm gonna do some months-belated catching up. I'll do my best to update it with links to each deck's page when I can.

My Kitchen Table League of cheaply constructed battle decks has swollen to somewhere near a dozen decks, so I thought I’d better make a list and give a brief overview of each one in the meta, how it plays, and what inspired it. Most of these decks were built from leftover draft chaff, but more than a few are based around Duel Decks, Theme Decks, and Intro Decks from Magic’s past that I remember playing with. 

Duel Decks: Dihada

Duel Decks: Dihada is an idea I’ve had buzzing around ever since they printed Geyadrone Dihada. I’ve drafted MH3 so many times I’ve lost count, but it’s at least enough times to draft four copies of Dihada. 

The general idea behind Duel Decks: Dihada was to build a Grixis control/tempo deck that used Dragon’s Rage Channelers and lots of looting to fill the graveyard and drop a Tombstalker for nearly free. The only problem is the actual Dihada planeswalker card - it kinda sucks. In most games, it frequently hits the field and proceeds to do nothing. Even in this creature-heavy meta, there aren’t really enough big things to steal or corrupt that you’ll be doing anything besides her +1 ability. Which isn’t so bad, except this deck would prefer opponents swing at its planeswalker instead of its own life while it's trying to land a Tombstalker. I’d hate to shift the entire meta around just to justify the Dihada deck, so it's currently in a limbo state while we work out the rest of the meta.

Boros Sunforger/Radiance

Boros Sunforger came out of the original Boros theme deck from Ravnica: City of Guilds. One of the first theme decks I remember purchasing, this deck permanently altered the chemicals in my brain when I saw Sunforger and Lightning Helix for the first time.

One of the first goals I set for myself when I started building the KTL meta was to find a way to make old, bad mechanics playable. Radiance has mostly been forgotten by players these days, thanks to its symmetrical effect making it an unreliable mechanic in mirror matches, but I think there are a few bangers hidden amongst the junk. Bathe in Light, in particular, is a board-wide protection spell in this deck, basically Braven The Elements-ing everything you own for just one more generic mana. Rally the Righteous is another fun trick, especially when you fetch it from your library with Sunforger. 

I remember the strategy insert for the Boros theme deck instructed you to “... play one creature on turn one, two creatures on turn two, three creatures on turn three…” and so on, and that’s really stuck with me as far as deck building in red goes.

Rakdos Hellbent

In a similar story to the Boros deck, I also have a strong memory of purchasing the Rakdos Hellbent theme deck from a Target back in the Bush era. Similar to the Boros deck, I wanted to take the bad Hellbent mechanic and see if I couldn’t use the newest Modern Horizons cards to kick it up a notch. The results have actually been spectacular.

Rakdos Headliner is just the two-drop a red/black aggro deck needed, and when followed up by a Rotting Regisaur it’s a really hard-to-answer play. Using the madness costs of Terminal Agony, Blazing Rootwalla and others makes sure you don’t just throw away cards without value, and once you can stick being Hellbent on your turn your whole deck becomes nothing but threats. Notably I really like running Bottled Cloister in this deck, since it’ll both enable Hellbent and draw you extra cards, and defend from the odd Duress-equivalent someone tries to throw at you. Not that they’d really do that, typically when playing against the Hellbent deck you want to keep as many cards in its hand as possible.

Mono Black Vampires

Another aggro deck, the Mono Black Vampires deck is basically a carbon copy of the 2012 Vampire Onslaught Event deck. It’s a powerhouse aggro deck with four copies of Vampire Lacerator, four copies of Gatekeeper of Malakir, four copies of Bloodthrone Vampire, and a single Bloodghast. I’ve removed the Skinrenders and Dismembers for power level reasons, but I’m considering returning the Dismembers. 

This deck is simple and sweet. It's here to play creatures and turn ‘em sideways. Ironically, this deck plays more like that Boros deck’s strategy guide suggests than the actual Boros deck.

Duel Decks: Elves

Duel Decks: Elves was one of the first Magic the Gathering products I remember purchasing. I played the hell out of it with my younger brother. It has gone through numerous reworks and rebuilds over the years, most notably as the basis for a Pauper Elves deck I ran in 2019. The deck got disassembled and reassembled during the pandemic since there were no live Pauper events to attend, and since remained the janky Lorwyn-era elves deck we’ve all come to know and love. 

Orzhov Exalted

Back in 2013 every dude I knew in high school who played Magic pooled our cash and set up our own tournament in my homie’s parents’ basement and played our own FNM with prize packs on the line. I built black/white exalted and just slammed all the exalted creatures from the 2013 Core Set in and topped it off with Oblivion Rings and Duress. It was unstoppable. Protection from White and Black on my two main two-drops made me champion. Here, the deck is presented with Gerrard’s Verdicts as an alternative to power it up a bit.

Orzhov Clerics Combo

Ten years ago, despite nobody in my play group of high school friends showing the slightest interest in playing some low-power legacy, I constructed an Orzhov clerics deck built around the Conspiracy combo deck from ten years before then. It’s a dinky deck that uses Conspiracy and Rotlung Reanimator to get a Cleric Zombie token for every cleric that dies, more if you can land another Rotlung. Or, it can get you infinite life by using that Kor cleric with the 0-mana activated ability. This deck’s existence is how I know I’m meant for this. 

Kor Equipment Weenies

See full post here

Bemoaning the loss of useful media

    I don't know if it's my recent viewing of Lonesome Crowded West, the pitchfork Modest Mouse documentary, or just the general malaise I've been living with since quitting my last job in search of a career change and realizing the skills I have are more or less 30 years too late to be employable, but I've been really stuck on lamenting the loss of so much weird niche media due to the nature of the internet. 

    Let me back this up. I spend a lot of time doing research into classic Magic: the Gathering sets for retrospective freelance stuff, and my primary source for a lot of this is the mtgwiki. While the information available on the wiki is mostly correct, almost all of the official sources and references on those pages link back to dead posts from the official Wizards of the Coast blog. You get this awesome 404 message with a lol so cute! Fblthp whenever you try to follow one of these links back to an "Ask Wizards" column from 2004 or really anything besides a link to MaRo's tumblr. 

This sucks, I hate this stupid little asshole

    Sure, there are links that have been updated with the use of the Internet Archive's wayback machine, but these are few and far between. Most captures of the Magic news and articles from anytime before 2015 are basically gone, alongside any remnant of WotC's short lived online-only version of Dragon magazine (Dragon+). Countless articles full of insight into Magic's design philosophy and competitive play are just permanently erased from existence. 

    I was an avid reader of the MTG blog articles back in the day. Unfettered computer access but a child's sense of how to operate the web led me to sticking to the official pages for most of the niche interests I dove into online (I'd spend a lot of time on 40k forums, but that's a different post). I remember reading just about every post between the release of Ravnica and Guildpact. These weren't just great resources for the fresh young planeswalker, they were important discourse created by people who were passionate, knowledgeable, and, most of all, paid to do it.

    I think this might be the crux of my issue: as a unemployed man with a journalism degree and a passion for gaming and also self-pity, I find myself thinking often about how the writers that made Duelist, Dragon, early White Dwarf and other dork-adjacent magazines were basically living my idealized career path. A career path that, at the risk of sounding like a "born in the wrong generation" whiner, hasn't existed in 20 years. 

    The noble games-magazine contributor has shrunken from society, due mainly to the rise of the internet and subsequent decimation of the physical magazine industry, and then shortly followed by the rise of the Youtuber and subsequent decimation of the written word online almost entirely. Seriously, when was the last time you could search up something TCG or RPG related and the top three hits weren't from Tolarian Community College?

    No, instead now we must suffer the inane engagement-baiting hokum from afficionados with an clicks-based revenue stream where inflammatory and often outright wrong statements are the norm; cluttering up any actually productive discourse with white noise. 

    Before the capitalist drive to generate monetary value from every single little thing you did took over the RPG/TCG space and even the internet more broadly, writers were given steady employment through these magazines and afforded an outlet to generate discussion and positive narratives about their games. I've been subscribed to Chris Korczak, Bookseller at rpgrpgrpg.com for about a year now, receiving two vintage RPG mags every other month, and I've gotta say: the writing in these corny $5 magazines is genuinely the most useful gaming work I've ever read. 

    We'll take my copy of Dragon #261 as an example. Surprisingly, this July 1997 issue hasn't been uploaded as a PDF to the Internet Archive yet (I should probably take the initiative). The table of contents lists three different feature articles, a short fiction, twelve different regular columns, plus another seven articles ranging from topics on how to construct a better jungle wilderness for your players to statting up Dark Phoenix from the Marvel Superheroes TTRPG. This is all in addition to the letters to the editor and advice columns. This is a staggering amount of content to produce at such a high quality every single month. Compared to the quick turnaround and constant battering of 2024 "content," these articles might as well be peer-reviewed academic endeavors as far as the actual substance of each piece is considered. The content in just one of these articles outweighs most new hardcover 5th Edition D&D books. 

     Ray Winninger's Dungeoncraft column starts on page 20, and is a continuation of the previous month's topic of designing a base of operations for the PCs in an AD&D campaign. Over the next five pages, Winninger goes into essential concepts to introduce in the players' hometown; a rumor mill, interesting NPCs, and "secrets" to use as adventure hooks or motivations for the NPCs. Five pages might not seem like enough to cover these in detail, but Winninger's succinctness doesn't diminish the value of his column. In two paragraphs Winninger sets the base for what makes an NPC memorable, and then spits out two townsfolk to populate his AD&D village Ironoak. I'm not going to run down the entire Dungeoncraft article, suffice to say it contains the kind of insight you don't get from a quick turnaround Youtube video with a title like "Top 10 Ways You're Building NPCs Wrong!" or whatever.

    Letters to the editor are another form of communication we've lost to the surging annals of time and capital. In the pre-forums days, this was just about the only get in on the larger community discussions and either share your opinion or ask for help. One of my favorite examples of this comes from Dragon #210, published in October of 1994. 

Yeah, me too man

    Clint Hooper writes in to Dragon to bemoan the obsession his AD&D players have developed with Magic: The Gathering. The editor's response is mostly benign, sort of a "Heh, yeah we're having this problem, too." This would be about 3 years before WotC purchased TSR (and Dragon magazine), so they're understandably neutral on MTG's popularity, but that's not the point, here. What makes this letter so memorable is the snapshot of 1994 gaming spaces it gives us. Never before had a card game been so popular that it might dethrone the almighty Dungeons and Dragons from its seat at the head of the table of game night. 

    These sorts of laments are now the dominion of r/DND posts, possibly the worst space on the internet for anyone looking for discussions about the actual game of D&D and not just cries for help with social issues from the socially repressed. The ease of sending this communication online has drastically dropped the average quality of communication, and social media sites tend to favor posts that are either already generally accepted by the group at large (like Reddit), or posts with purposefully bad takes and misinformation (like Twitter). 

    Overall, without the curation of a skilled editor, we're left sifting through an endless sea of takes and opinions that expire mere hours after they're sent out into the ether, devoid of any actual content or lasting concepts. They're made to be ingested and quickly forgotten about; there's no real thought or intention behind most of the noise surrounding communication in these spaces besides a drive to generate clicks and views and revenue. At least in Hooper's letter, the choice to publish it was made with intention, and now it survives as a first hand historical document of gamers' opinions and lives at the time.

    I guess where I'm going with all this is we've seen a drastic drop in quality of discussion and communication in the online spaces, and I've found a lot of solace in vintage written work. I guess solace implies I'm no longer upset that these jobs just don't exist anymore. Let me be clear: I'm still mad about it. I know this profession has more or less morphed into Substack and personal blog pages, and while I'm a regular reader of several blogs, I can't shake the bad taste of capitalism and clickbait from my mouth. 

The Bloodstone Lands

Based on the illustration by Larry Elmore 

Part One

    Feldrinnal’s horse snuffed at the winter air, puffing clouds of vapor from its nostrils as their troop marched across the snowy wastes. No one spoke. The fresh powder from the previous night muted the sound of snow crunched under foot, hoof and sled as Feldrinnal and his party made their way through the valley between the Icehorn mountains. The air bit at the exposed skin on the hand gripping the reins to his mount, while the other nearly froze and stuck to the haft of his spear. Feldrinnal did not care. His prize was nearly in his grasp.

    The events of the previous days had been strange, even for one who’s lived as strangely as Feldrinnal. When the frost giant had appeared at the gates to his great hall and proposed a trade to Feldrinnal, he couldn’t refuse, no matter how his court had advised him against trusting the monster.

    “Great Thane Feldrinnal,” the giant had said, its deep voice rumbling like an ice storm against the walls of his great hall, “You have sent many foes screaming to their gods. You have faced beasts and horrors un-faced by any for centuries. You have scoured the southern lands in search of glory for many years. Yet you have not journeyed into the Bloodstone Lands. I ask you: why?”

    Feldrinnal knew why, and he knew the giant knew why. Every servant, farmer, drunkard, knight, scholar, and priest in the keep knew why. Feldrinnal didn’t appreciate the coyness of the question, but still made an effort to respect his twenty-foot tall guest. 

    “The Bloodstone Lands are forbidden to my people by our gods,” he answered, coldly.

    “How did that come about?” More coyness. 

    “Surely one as long-lived as you has heard the tale, giant?”

    Beneath his massive hood, the giant’s expression did not change. Nothing but a frown was visible in the dim torchlight.

    Feldrinnal sighed, his chin coming to rest on his massive fist, and decided to humor his guest.

    “Centuries ago, the forefathers of the Icehold people ruled the plains north of the mountains. They commanded unquestioned authority from the peaks to the northern seas and beyond. They ruled with an iron fist, before the giants came and showed them the true meaning of tyranny. 

    “From their mountain stronghold, the lords of my people made futile war on the giants, but what was an army of mortal men against the children of the gods? Even the lowliest giant was more than a match for ten fighting men. It was less of a war and more of a genocide.

    “All but one warlord remained in the Bloodstone Lands. While the rest fought to the death, consumed with honor and motivated by divine zeal, Feldrin the Red, my great-grandfather, retreated with his men back through the mountain before settling safely on the far side of the range. There, he entered into a divine covenant with Yord, the warrior god. Beseeching Yord for the strength to defend his people from the giants, Feldrin’s lineage was blessed with the blood of the giants, guaranteeing a line of royal Thanes that could defend their new homeland.”

    Feldrinnal paused to sip from his goblet. The giant looked on expectantly. 

    “Go on, please. Why did the warrior-men never return to the Bloodstone Lands?”

    After a moment, Feldrinnal said, “Feldrin the Red found his newfound strength intoxicating. Defeating the giants would complete our pact with Yord, and Feldrin feared the loss of the gift granted us by Yord.”

    “And you, great Thane? Do you fear the loss of your gifts, should you choose to reclaim your people’s homeland?”

    Feldrinnal did not know what he felt. He feared no living thing. He had crushed his fear beneath his divinely granted strength and combat prowess his entire life, just as his father had, and his father before him, and his father before him.

    “I fear nothing, giant, save the erasure of my people from the land.”

    Seemingly satisfied, the giant approached Feldrinnal’s throne, crossing the room in three great steps. He dropped to one knee, though Feldrinnal was unsure whether it was a sign of obeisance or simply to stare him in the eye. It was then that he got his first good look at his visitor; deep green eyes slashed across the room, set in pale blue skin criss-crossed with tribal scarification. A beard of matted white hairs as thick as strong rope hung loosely from under the giant’s nose, alternatively braided in complex knots or clumping together in a disheveled manner. He felt icy cold breath escape the giant’s nostrils and run across the ground, disturbing dust particulates with every exhale. 

    “There is a way, Feldrin the Youngest, to save your people’s homeland without sealing your covenant forever,” the giant began. “Your gods and warlocks have lied to you about the source of your power. It comes not from the mighty deity Yord that you love so dearly. Nay, it comes from the very Bloodstone of the mountains you’ve fled!”

    This was an affront. “Heresy!” spouted the nearest man to Feldrinnal. His advisors had gathered alongside him during the meeting, but had remained frozen in silent terror until this moment. “Heretic! He blasphemes against our patron! He must be sent away, great Thane!” 

    Feldrinnal held his hand up for quiet. His high priest began to protest again, but a malicious sideways glance silenced him again. 

    “You make great claims, giant. You’d best have some proof of your heresy, lest I cleave your head from shoulders here and now. I’ve already been more than gracious by allowing you to explain yourself. 

    Feldrinnal caught a nearly imperceptible smile cross the giant’s face, and a twinkle of amusement in his eye, before he spoke again. 

    “I can prove it, of course.” Producing a pouch the size of a full barrel from his belt, the giant reached in and produced a single black stone. The onyx-colored rock was of a fair size, but looked miniscule in the giant’s huge fingers. The edges seemed to glow red, faint light-lines peeking out from behind its silhouette no matter how the room’s illumination touched it.

    “A great vein of Bloodstone,” the giant had said. “An ore planted in the earth in the times before men. Deep beneath the ancient mountain strongholds of your people, warrior-king.” 

    The giant extended the blood stone to Feldrinnal. He took the stone and turned it over in his hand. The dark red light seemed to seep from its edges, but as he stared into it he saw only the plain black surface. 

    The road through the tundra was a dangerous one, even outside of the wintertime. No man had laid claim to this area as his home in generations, and in man’s absence abominations had migrated from the far north to take up residence in the drifts and amongst the ruins of Feldrin’s ancestors. Tales told of malicious tribes of orcs and goblins that picked through the snow-dusted fortresses and keeps that marked the land, detailing the boundaries to kingdoms long forgotten. 

    It was as early as the first night that Feldrinnal’s excursion encountered foes. They gathered in a loose circle around a campfire, setting the sleigh as a buffer between themselves and the treeline before the last light of day plunged them into darkness. The horses were tethered to the sleigh with a bit of slack, and then left to rest. Men took it in shifts watching the treeline and the fields around them, shivering from the cold in their positions far from the fire. 

    They sat silently. Feldrinnal and his men sat picking at tough bread and jerky while the giant, who had given his name as Anders, sat apart from them, opposite the sleigh, motionless against the backdrop of tundra. Feldrinnal couldn’t tell whether he was conscious or not. He didn’t even seem to breathe. 

    Anders had led them up the tundra between the two mountain ranges that struck out into the frozen north. The giant's loping steps had set a fast pace for Feldrinnal and his men, and he knew Anders must’ve had to adjust his stride to not leave them behind. 

    Feldrinnal had ridden most of the way, only dismounting where the fresh snow was too soft and too deep to risk the combined weight of a man and horse. In these stretches, waist-deep snow could stretch on for miles, leaving a man half-frozen before he could find solid ground again. Feldrinnal was soaked from the belly and down, more or less, and was grateful they hadn’t yet found a reason to extinguish the fires. As Thane, it was Feldrinnal’s right to take the first watch, and soon he found himself staring out into the treeline as the rest of his company lay on their cots. 

    It was Gerig, on the second watch, who woke Feldrinnal. First the gentle pressure of a hand on his shoulder, and then opening his eyes to stare into Gerig’s wrinkled face, mere inches above him. Gerig’s finger was pressed to his lips to indicate silence. He stood up slowly, careful not to crunch too loudly in the snow, before motioning for Feldrinnal to get up and follow him.

    Gerig had been housecarl to Feldrinnal’s father, and though the man was aged, he was no less the warrior for it. Countless campaigns into the southern lands had made Gerig strong, and years at court had kept his mind sharp, even in his late years. One mean scar cut across Gerig’s face from the edge of his hairline down past his eye and into his cheekbone. He wore it like the battle honor it was. 

    Gerig carefully led Feldrinnal to the edge of the camp, kneeling beside the sleigh and poking his head around the corner. When he turned back, all he said was, “Look.”

    There, 150 feet from the sleigh and about equidistant to the treeline, four lumbering man-like silhouettes came slowly towards the camp. In the darkness, Feldrinnal could not make out any details, save that they must’ve been ten feet tall to a man, with arms that hung the entire lengths of their bodies with knuckles that dragged at the snow as they walked. 

    “Your sharp eyes have served us well, Gerig. Ice trolls are nearly impossible to detect when moving through open country. Wake the others, we’ll prepare ourselves and be ready.”

    Even as he finished and turned to begin waking the others, a shadow fell across him, blocking out the light from the campfire. Feldrinnal found himself face to belly with a disgustingly wrought imitation of a human. The thing’s long, greasy hair fell in thin strands over a distended face dominated by a mouth of razor teeth. It’s snot-colored skin was patched with blood-matted fur that betrayed a torso both emaciated and muscular at the same time. Cold breath struck Feldrinnal’s face and made him gag. 

    The funerary pyre had been a grand conflagration, grand enough to match the measure of the man that now burned atop it. Feldrinnal had observed the traditional death rites of his people, yet the honor they showed his father in death had left him with a hollow feeling within.

    The night air had cooled the fire to sputtering embers before Feldrinnal looked away. The hours had seen every other mourner depart, save one. Standing a respectful distance behind Feldrinnal, Gerig waited at attention. His stoney face betrayed no emotion, but Feldrinnal knew he felt the loss of the Thane deeper than any of the simple warriors under his command. 

    There, as the orange light waved across his countenance, Gerig had comforted Feldrinnal in the only way two men of their stature could. A moment after the young Thane’s backward glance, Gerig was behind him, his hand resting on Feldrinnal’s shoulder. Another moment, and then Gerig spoke.

    “He was a great man, Feldrinnal, he will be remembered.”

    “His passing held no honor, Gerig. A consumptive illness is no way for a warrior such as my father to perish,” Feldrinnal said, and then, “What is the use of our bloodline’s great power if it cannot stop the simplest death? We meter out destruction on our foes with reckless abandon, knowing our divine strength will never falter, but a man cannot face disease in battle. What a cruel joke played by our gods.”

    Gerig knew the melancholy that now gripped the new Thane well - he had seen three generations of this kingly sorrow come over his lieges in nearly a century as housecarl. Gerig suppressed a sigh as best he could; he’d had a lot of practice in the art of consoling young nobles throughout the years, and was beginning to get pretty good at it.

    “The divinity granted to your blood through the gods is not always so literal, young Thane. Tell me, what makes a man divine?”

“To arms!” he shouted. “To arms! Trolls!” 

    Feldrinnal immediately ducked, anticipating the troll’s wild swipe at him. The beast’s claws flew overhead and struck the side of the sleigh, causing it to rise up on one blade briefly before smashing back down. This sent the horses into a frenzy, and Feldrinnal saw Gerig cut them loose before he, too, rolled away. 

    The camp was alive with violence in second. Once clear of the troll, Feldrinnal was sprinting towards cot and the sword lying next to it. In that same second, the sleigh was rocked back it’s side as the trolls approaching from the forest charged at the camp, choosing to collide with the sleigh rather than redirect their sprint and lose momentum. The sleigh, caught between the immense force of the troll’s inertia and the unyielding snowpack, splintered and burst, sending shrapnel raining across the camp.

    By the time Feldrinnal had drawn his sword and spun about, Anders was already threatening the first troll. Standing head and shoulders above the twisted creature, he threw a wide punch into the thing’s skull and knocked it off its feet. Four more of the trolls closed around the giant as men grabbed at spears and shields and struggled to their feet. Anders swung around in a full circle, backhanding another troll and knocking its drooling jaw out of alignment with the rest of its head. 

    Men cut and stabbed at the beasts, flanking them in pairs or trios and jabbing with longspears to keep out of the creatures’ long reach. Feldrinnal watched as the man next to Gerig struck a troll through the chest with a spear, only to have the thing break the haft off in its body before seizing the man in two monstrous claws. The troll raised him, screaming, into the air before lowering his head into its mouth and clamping its jaw shut, silencing his screams. 

    Gerig used the beast’s gluttony to his advantage, stepping around its sight. He stabbed up into its ribcage, then brought the blade free in a horizontal slash that left ruined entrails spilling from the wound. If the troll felt the strike, it made no indication. Before Gerig’s eyes, the flesh around its gut had already begun to knit and reform, the thing’s intestines retreating into its torso before the skin sewed itself shut. 

    Feldrinnal couldn’t let him have all the fun. Summoning the strength of his ancestors, Feldrinnal felt his muscles tighten and his heart rate relax as his years of battle prowess mingled with the ancient magic of his bloodline. With a wordless cry, he raised his sword above his head and charged back into the fray. 

    The blade, reacting to his fiery zeal, began to burn white-hot. Feldrinnal felt the surge of holy energy flow through his body and vowed to slay these frozen hellspawn just as his ancestors had. Feldrinnal stepped to the troll now facing Gerig, and slashed at its legs with a wild abandon. His blade left two sizzling wounds on the back of the troll’s knees, and it fell to a kneel. Gerig finished it off with several heavy chops to its throat, taking two or three attempts to completely decapitate it. Ichor fountained from the headless body as the thing’s blackened heart continued to pump foul blood through the air, showering Feldrinnal and Gerig with gore.

    A fist the size of a boulder smashed Feldrinnal from his feet with the force of a chariot at full-tilt. He careened several feet through the air before crashing into the snow, dragging an impact mark along the ground. He touched his hand to his temple, where the beast had struck him, and saw through spinning vision first the blood soaking his fingers, and then the troll beyond charging to finish him off. He brought his sword up in a horizontal parry just as the troll’s fists arced down towards his skull. The blade, still burning with the fire of Yord, deflected the blow, shattering at the hilt with an explosion of blinding light and sending the troll’s crushing attack into the snow beside him. Before he could jump to his feet, a backhanded swipe to his chest sent Feldrinnal rolling through the drift again. 

    “What is it that makes a god divine?” Anders had asked. 

    The thought had never crossed Feldrinnal’s mind. Now, the question posed to him at the head of his great hall, Feldrinnal did not want to appear un-philosophical. 

    “The gods are granted divinity by virtue of being the first created. They were formed from the primordial elements of chaos, before time began. Their essence is the very stuff reality is made of.” Feldrinnal surprised himself with his own answer. Perhaps he was a philosopher.

    “Does being old always grant one the right to rule?” Anders had followed up. 

    “Not always, but wisdom comes from experience, and many of our kind revere their elders, if that’s what you’re asking.”

    Anders seemed to ignore the answer. “If what you say is true, then could not another god come from the primordial chaos and into being? Would this god be any more or less divine than the others?”

    Feldrinnal was beginning to become fed-up with this teasing game of question-and-answer. “Out with it, giant. What is your point to this? How does this concern me, or your magic rock?” He asked, with more than a bit of obvious irritation.

    Anders let the question hang a moment before answering.

    “The great powers of this world are not always what they seem, Great Thane. The stories we tell ourselves about our origins are, more often than, not fantasies we’ve created. We weave tales to make ourselves and our choices more important than we actually are. True divinity is acquired from belief, in stories and in people.

    “This is the stark truth of your people, Thane: No covenant with the gods granted you your strength and the power to rule. For generations, your ancestors drew power from the deep magic of the minerals in the mountain. No magical divinity was gifted to you; instead, you are emboldened by the mundane energies contained within the Bloodstone veins of the mountains. And you must return.”

    Several ribs cracked as he stood, and Feldrinnal still felt the ringing in his forearm from his clash with the troll. With some distance between and the closest foe, he had a moment to observe the field of battle. Four trolls continued to terrorize his warriors, the two he had disengaged with turning to battle Anders as his four remaining soldiers prodded at another pair to keep them at spear-length. Feldrinnal could not make out Gerig anywhere. 

    Anders wielded no weapon, but was more than a match for the two trolls. His ancient fists pounded at their bodies, striking them one the chest and sending it reeling just as it had to Feldrinnal. The other came in with a wild strike to Anders’ side, which he caught mid-swing in one giant fist. Bringing his other arm around to brace against the thing’s torso, he gave a mighty rip and tore the appendage from the troll’s body. It let out a bestial howl that forced Feldrinnal to cover his ears. Anders silenced it with a follow up strike to the skull.

    Already, the downed troll had begun to recover. Feldrinnal could hear its bones working beneath its leathery hide, reknitting themselves. Scooping a spear from the ground nearby, he charged, crossing the thirty feet to the troll in seconds. He leapt, brought the spear above his head, and lanced down at the troll. The spear bent in a brief moment of resistance before piercing the troll’s skull and driving all the way through to emerge beneath its jaw. His feet firmly planted in the creature’s rotting hide, he rode the troll down to the ground as it bent at the knees, and then collapsed under its own dead weight.

    An exciting kill, to be sure, but he had no time to admire his work. He heard the heavy breath behind him before he spun and saw yet another monster, this one wielding a dislodged tree stump, aiming a strike at his head. In that instant, he considered his options. Weaponless, he had no way to deflect the blow before it fell, and diving to the left or right would leave him open to the follow-up swing. Every thought crossing his mind in that half-second saw him crushed beneath this troll’s primitive savagery. Out of some bizarrely ingrained sense of honor, Feldrinnal saw no use in diving away. He simply stood and prepared to die on his feet, like a warrior king should. 

    Mid-swing, the troll stopped suddenly, dropping the stump, its face contorted into an inhuman mix of confusion and pain. It was Gerig’s scowling face emerging from above the troll’s shoulder that shocked Feldrinnal at that moment, and then he saw his blade rise up and dive back into the troll’s back, anchoring Gerig to the creature as he drew and stabbed his sword time after time into its body. Blood sloshed out and onto the ground with each withdrawal, and the beast reeled backwards and clawed at its back with its long, misshapen arms. One hand closed around Gerig’s body, and with the last bits of its malice-fueled strength, the troll hurled him hard across the campsite, colliding with the destroyed sleigh. Gerig did not cry out as his body came to rest, and he did not struggle to stand.

    That was more than enough distraction. Feldrinnal closed with the troll even as it swung wildly to remove Gerig from its back. He reached for Gerig’s sword, still embedded in the flesh of the troll, and used it as a handle to climb atop the beast and finish the job. He drew the sword from its troll-shaped sheath and drove it back down into the thing’s skull. 

    Across the way, one troll was downed as three men launched at it simultaneously with spears, skewering it in place and unable to draw itself closer to any of the warriors. A fourth man approached from its flank and hacked at the beast’s neck until it died there. In the wild melee, Feldrinnal hadn’t even seen the last troll drop, but a gorey mess on the ground nearby spoke of its fate. 

    Feldrinnal crossed the camp to the wreckage of the sled. There, he found Gerig’s body, broken and lifeless, his neck mostly snapped when he came into contact with the wooden frame. It was no way for a warrior to die, perishing in a fight against lowly beasts of chaos. Feldrinnal remained there for several minutes, standing quietly above his dead friend and mentor.

    In the quiet after the fight, Anders appeared beside him. He looked down on the crushed body of Gerig.

    “I’m sorry,” he said. Then, after a moment, “He gave his life to buy you precious seconds, Great Thane. He did not die dishonored.”

    “His story will be passed down to my sons, and my sons’ sons, until my blood no longer walks the land," Feldrinnal said.

    “He was a great man. He will be remembered.”