filed by Agent O
audio version
Good time of day, Agents. We have finished the season with 57 antiwins, having unwon 59 games and failed to win 40: we are as far away from playoffs as you can get, having dragged ourselves all the way down to Free Wills territory instead. I have no idea if this counts as winning or losing. Directionality has lost all meaning.
News
Firstly, it has been announced that the next material plane week will not be on-season. It will instead be taken off, such that off-season will last the next three material plane weeks. The usual schedule will resume afterwards, beginning on June 14.
Carmelo Plums. Day 42. Incinerated in front of their old teammates the Hades Tigers. Ambush pulled Cedric Gonzalez from the Hall of Flame. Not a great player. Now that I think about it, over the long term, most of the effect of Ambush will be to increase the Tigers’ shadows eDensity, considering how unlikely it is to bring in a player good and/or loved enough to de-Shadow. As a team with extremely heavy shadows due to numerous postseason births, I think we can sympathize.
Avila Guzman was feedbacked to the Crabs. In exchange for an Aldon Cashmoney replica. I’m sure the Garages are just thrilled to have their last season’s Will flushed away like that.
Dudley Mueller was swept Elsewhere. Yeong-Ho Garcia followed it Elsewhere, did… something that even we don’t fully understand, and Dudley returned as a Negative – with buoyant eDensity.
Latesiesta
There were no announcements during Latesiesta. Not even the Coin dropping by to ominously say “Play Ball” again.
But, hey. At least we got ourselves birdhouses. And hoops, apparently. Hoops give a chance for a player to “alley oop” for an extra score if they come up to bat right after someone just hit a home run. (They then still get to bat in the normal way, afterwards.) …Wait, how do you slam dunk a blaseball?
Birdhouses are doing their job; every foul ball hit during Birds weather becomes a fowl ball, a bird which decreases eDensity by 1, meaning that the renovation will “pay” for itself and then some. This is absurdly powerful, because it’s a sustainable source of eDensity reduction that, so far, seems to have no cap.
The two Gifts we ended up receiving were Soundproof in case of a NaN feedback that did not actually end up happening and Late to the Party. Why only two? Well, SIBR decided to do a funny and try to donate from the Data Witches. Turns out that what they donated was faerie gold: the results screen didn’t count it because the Data Witches weren’t technically part of the Internet League, even though the front interface did count it.
Also, instead of Phones or Quills, a bunch of the Gifts to other teams instead dropped Brooms. We need to get one of those for Comfy.
Endseason
After the season, the Squid showed up to apologize for the broom confusion and said it would make it up to us. The audience reaction to this was actually very interesting – beforehand, several fans had been angry at TGB for being misleading with the broom thing, but the Squid taking responsibility despite being desperately overworked only made the Squid more sympathetic.
It turns out that manipulation of the Idol Board and eDensity can be done using Wyatt Glover, who has Ego+ and Attractor, and thus has enough weight to attract the MVP noodle. It isn’t quite as easy as it would have been with Chorby Soul, but it saved something like six players from the idol line.
…but despite our best efforts, Agent Valentine Games was locked away in the Vault.
To this, the Squid had only one word, a word that Crates had told it to use for the occasion:
“nucleosynthesis.”
I have several choice words for this. Several very strong choice words. But they’re… let’s say… they’re not words I should use in an official filing.
Plans
As expected, gaining Late to the Party from our Gifts made us unwin even more, and thus drove us all the way to the bottom of the bracket. As it turns out, ending up on the bottom (…top?) of the bracket this season gives us a Free Will.
And so we have three Wills to spend. Because of this, our voting must focus particularly hard on Wills. Spies, spend at least 50% of your votes on them; we absolutely need to make sure they go well.
As usual, do not vote until Saturday. Even though none of our options are particularly risky, there is the outside possibility of accidentally committing necromancy if you move a player and then they die.
So. If you are not a Spy, this may be a good time for you to scroll right past this block of text and do your laundry. (And even if you are a Spy, do it anyway. White-noise sound blocking.)
Blessings: Shadow of the Bats is by far the most popular and highest-priority. Gaudy, Batting Practice, Defense Practice, Fax Numbers, and Underhanded also polled well, so feel free to throw a few dozen votes into them if you like.
Wills: Biggest one is to Infuse Donia Bailey’s Hitting. She has a good underlying stat spread for the current meta, now that pitchers have been nerfed; but she absolutely has to be strengthened to keep up with modern stat inflation before she can be useful.
Once you’ve put a chunk of votes into Donia’s hitting, sprinkle votes across these options however you like – they’ve been selected so that no matter which ones happen, they won’t interfere with each other. (If you want to know why we’re spreading ourselves so thin, this video explains how sinking votes into several disparate Wills helps mitigate harmful wimdy.)
– Equivalent Exchange Jasper Blather for Simon Haley (the Shoe Thieves already know about this, and are fine with it because they get stat boosts from Roaming players leaving)
– Move Mohammed Picklestein to the Shadows Rotation
– Item Move Jasper Blather’s Rubber Shoes to Fitzgerald Blackburn
– Reform Yeong-Ho Garcia’s Friend of Crows
As per usual, there’s more details and a full voting guide – including commentary on other options – available in the Discord chats.
Spies… uh…
So, when you’re in orbit, in microgravity, you have no idea which direction is which. If you don’t have windows and a sextant, or a computer that does those calculations for you, you may as well be upside-down or sideways from where you started. Without outside input you have absolutely no way to know which way is “up”. And if (say) you’re coasting through interstellar space, there is no “up”. Your reference frame is as valid as anyone else’s. You have no way of telling.
The whole league is upside-down, and Yeong-Ho Garcia and other Undertakers are screwing about with gravity and density, and it seems likely that glowy purple text’s next decree is going to flip it turn-ways even more. I don’t know which direction is winning anymore.
I only know which direction the Plan is in. By definition, it must be forwards. Because it’s where we’re going.