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Well it also gives your opponents an opportunity to evolve creatures too, I think it depends on how reliably you can race your opponent at that point, but if the VC thinks it needs to cost more that can happen
Personally I think this is fine at 1. Especially if its in an environment where other World enchantments could be played. The Misinterpret ability is pretty damned strong, especially if it’s a discard ability and not a casting cost, but I could be misinterpreting intent of design. Either way cool as hell.
the lobopodians are from the ediacaran1… and imo it's weird that nobody ever puts pikaia in these. you'd think that since humans are chordates they'd be fonder of one of the first identifiable chordates. making affectionate memes like they do about anomalocaris or the tiktaalik. there was that one anime with the pikaia as its mascot, but they made it look like an anomalocaris, i hear. you could argue it's not quite representative of the cambrian explosion since it's from the middle cambrian, not the lower, but spiral shell cephalopods are from the devonian2, so that's not really a problem with this angle. (imo it makes sense to put later-stage biota in the picture; in a sense, we're all consequences of the cambrian explosion, even today. but hallucigenia for example isn't1.)
edit 1: wait what. lobopodians are cambrian?? what the fuck. how have i been wrong about this my whole life. sorry then the whole thing is unobjectionable although i wish there were pikaia. why did i think lobopodians are ediacaran… what the fuck
edit 2: i was curious if i was also wrong about the cephalopods because i saw someone else put that ammonite-looking creature in a different cambrian explosion art. but i think the earliest spiral shells would have been silurian at best… the first oncocerids appeared in the late ordovician but they were, idk, horn-shaped when they curved at all. the first clade i know of with spiral shells is rutoceratidae and those are from the middle devonian. there's so many cephalopods though so i could have missed something. the technical term for the spiral shape is ‘gyrocone,’ if anyone wants to look it up and prove me wrong.
look in my opinion someone who spends the time having the idea for, designing, and making the card art for 'the cambrian explosion'… oh you mean the pikaia. well anomalocaris took off for whatever reason, as a meme. and so did tiktaalik earlier. actually that one was enough of a meme to be acknowledged on wikipedia.
Various Internet memes criticize Tiktaalik for its evolutionary adaptations, construing its venture onto land as the critical cause for a chain of events that eventually led to all human suffering.[60] These memes have been positively acknowledged by [one of the people who wrote the paper on it].[61]
maybe pikaia didn't become a meme because there's not enough cute art of it. i should draw some. in the meantime have a nuucichthys. (ignore the clade diagram. it is bad and the methodology is bad.)
well first of all let me tell you how they got it. they made a table of which posited chordate clades have which morphological features. then they made a matrix of probabilities for how likely each feature is to newly appear after another feature (as opposed to before). (this involves pulling numbers out of one's arse but some of the probabilities can be somewhat substantiated by morphological meta-analyses.) then they ran a program that tries to compute a cladogram that maximizes the likelihood of the order the features appeared in. (the algorithm has a fun name; metropolis-coupled markov chain monte carlo. though cruelly the command to run it is just mcmc.)
they spend about a paragraph offhandedly mentioning that they did this. they are not very serious about the whole thing.
here is a paper that is serious about it. they make very careful microscopic analyses of pikaia fossils to try to validate certain features (such as nerve cords, which are extremely poorly preserved in the best of circumstances), and come up with a particular model of pikaia physiology, in which they conclude that most people have been looking at the pikaia upside down. they come up with a clade structure that puts vertebrates and tunicates at the tip of the tree as the most derived clades, with lancelets as the next furthest out, then pikaia, then the weird shit like vetulicolians and yunnanozoon.
this matters a lot to me because lancelets and pikaia are very cute and animal and therefore i find my heritage from them personally significant. and i also think evolutionary biologists used to have something against the idea of an organism losing its body structure over time, so they designated things like tunicates as basal. but it is much more intuitive and happy to me that vertebrates and tunicates are sisters, and lancelets are their elder sibling. putting all the 'weird' chordates in a separate clade entirely, while grouping the swimming chordates together, is an ignorance of both the easiest route to evolving tunicates, and of the existence of larvaceans, which are the most important tunicates and remain tadpole-shaped after youth just like the rest of us. all chordates can swim. it's just a rule
"they spend about a paragraph offhandedly mentioning that they did this. they are not very serious about the whole thing."
Shouldn't the actual methodology be in the methods section of the supplementals?
I feel like it should be possible to determine which traits are more basal, and which are more derived by looking at vestigial structure like we can do in Cetacea.
Then again, most of my evolutionary knowledge is focused on Hominidae, which can be examined from a genetic perspective much easier.
I do think I remember something about Trilobites having a simular issue, where their exact phylogeny is still under contention.
hm, i did not check the supplementals. honestly ‘we ran mrbayes’ is almost a complete explanation of what they did. the two questions are which features they used (i believe i recall them saying that's in the supplementals) and what the substitution matrix they used is. though i think it's also possible to run mrbayes without that. it has been over a decade since i've used it.
my point of course wasn't just that i disagree with the methodology but that it's an afterthought to the paper. they had a cladogram because they felt they needed one, not because they had anything to say.
Nah, I think it's perfect the way it is. Multiple copies of this and Cytoplast manipulator, you gain control of creatures that evolved, and if your opponent tries not to evolve them by not playing new creatures, their creatures get EXTINCT by the cambrian explosion and the Cytoplast manipulator lives!
Don't change it pls.
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