4. juniper order meetup ii, january 10, 2026

It's a bad look. I finally started the Juniper Order Library and it's been more than a month since our last meetup and almost two months since I've written anything. We've got a meetup planned for tomorrow, so I'm just going to stream of consciousness this post to catch up.

On Minneapolis

Fuck ICE.

I live in Minneapolis, our house is not that far from the site of Renee Good's killing, a little bit farther from Alex Pretti's killing. I've been living with a simmering rage since these fucking cosplay fascist assholes started running around my fucking city. Evil, corrupt, weak-ass, lame-ass, cringe-as-fuck shitbags, all of them, all the way up the chain of command.

It's hard, you know, to think about how we're winning and they're losing, when it just doesn't feel like it, when there's no accountability, they're flouting the law at every fucking turn. But I have to keep telling myself that they're deeply fucking unpopular, they're stupid sacks of shit, and they're only doing this stuff because they know they're losers.

An elder Jewish friend of mine told me that the Nazi's appeared on the world stage in the early 1930's and they were a bad memory by 1946.

We also have this romanticized view of revolution. Dressing up in cool clothes and wearing colors and throwing molotov cocktails, and that's just not how real revolution looks. Real revolution is millions of people doing small shit. When they say "the revolution won't be televised," I'm realizing that it's not because the media is suppressing dissent, it's because all this shit is hyper-local and invisible.

They don't have enough people. They can't even stop a neighborhood of organized normies from rolling up to their kidnappings with whistles and cell phones, and that's just like 20 people in a neighborhood.

We need to vote, but we can't vote our way out of this shit. It's step 1, but there's steps 2 through 15 after that. And I'll tell you what, the Democrats aren't our saviors, they're fascists in nicer suits. Voting is like rolling up to the Street Fighter arcade cabinet and telling your opponent which character to pick.

Can we just be pro-immigrant already?

Also, do you ever notice that all these douchebags preaching masculinity are always the least fucking masculine presenting people you've ever seen? Steven Miller is like 5'2" or whatever. JD Vance is a weenie. All these billionaires are the loser Saturday morning cartoon villains, not like the ones from the cartoons that you've been following for years, but the shows that get cancelled after one season and can't sell any toys. It is so funny to watch Elon try to be cool. Peter Thiel ripping off the Tolkien Estate constantly is some C-Tier hack-job fan-fiction nonsense.

Juniper Order Meetup II

At the first Juniper Order Meetup, I ended up winning but abdicated my winner's choice to our second place finisher, winter, who chose Bloomburrow booster draft.

As a little background, I had been wanting to put together a Jumpstart kit for Bloomburrow as a cute-beginner friendly option for the Order. I bought a booster box of Bloomburrow a few months back and kept it so we could draft first. I love opening packs, but it just seems wrong if you're not also doing some kind of gaming with them.

We only had four attendees. Myself (nickelbolt), winter, tallbeard, and twatts1500. I'm not a huge believer in "pick-2" draft, so I suggested that we draft 5 packs instead of 3, only draft 9 cards and burn the rest of the pack. More first picks, less chaff.

I know the format is relatively quick, very creature centered, and blue tends to be the worst color. So clearly I'm going to build a slow, creature light blue control deck. The siren's call of Portent of Calamity... times two! I knew full-well I would get run-over by any fast decks, but a wise man once told me that the only thing better than going 3-0 is going 3-0 with ten rares. It's just free value. So I choose to believe that drafting a sweet deck is worth it!

winter ended up with a pretty bog-standard black-green Forage deck, and unfortunately he was cutting black from me in the draft. tallbeard had the aggro deck at the table, a red-heavy Boros deck with a light green splash that leaned on Forage. twatts1500, still a relative beginner, ended up with blue-red-green cards.

Round 1 I played tallbeard and he promptly destroyed me in game 1. I did some heavy sideboarding to try to stem the bleeding, and it almost worked, but I couldn't compete with the depth of his Expend synergies. tallbeard takes the match, 2-0.

In the other match, winter takes a 2-0 against twatts1500.

Round 2 put me up against twatts1500, and I got the 2-0. twatts1500 is still a newbie, he has an intuition for good cards, but its just going to take some time for him to get there.

In the other match, winter gutted out a 2-1 against tallbeard. This match looked like the classic "slightly bigger, slightly slower" deck having the advantage, but it was pretty close.

Round 3 was myself against winter, and I was looking forward to grinding this one out. The first game he just blistered me with the fastest start his deck could produce, a 1-drop, 2-drop, 3-drop plus removal on the play that I'm just going to struggle against. The next two games were just scraping and clawing and trying to control the game and out-play a skilled player. I ended up winning the match 2 games to 1. I would later find out that winter told their partner after our meetup, "he's always been good, but he's gotten so much better, he might be unbeatable."

The final standings had tallbeard, winter, and myself all tied at 2-1, with twatts1500 sitting at 0-3. The tiebreaker of opponent match win percentage also had the three of us in a tie, so the second breaker of game win percentage crowned tallbeard as the winner of the Juniper Order Meetup II!

I encourage the juniper order to create tokens to commemorate their experiences. I made this Bluey-themed Thundertrap Trainer token since I had Thundertrap Trainer in my deck and it's also in the vintage cube!

For the next meetup, tallbeard has chosen to draft my Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty (almost) foil set cube!

On winter

I'd planned to write a little bit at the end here about winter, but I realized as I was writing this that the game I just wrote about is the last game that winter and I will ever play. Unfortunately, winter passed away unexpectedly on January 24th.

winter has been my best friend since 5th grade, something like 30 or 35 years. We texted daily. They had been working on moving back to Minnesota, something that I'd been lobbying for ever since they started talking about needing a change.

I'm struggling with this loss. It's been several weeks, their funeral was a week ago, and it doesn't feel real. I have several long boxes full of Middle Earth cards on the floor of my home office, they had probably more Middle Earth cards than I have Magic cards, which is a wild statement. I don't even own The One Ring in Magic, the Gathering, but I think winter had several The One Rings in Middle Earth, and I think those versions might be more expensive! They will forever have a home on my shelves, but I'm gonna buy some decent boxes and binders and give them a comfortable home.

Anyway, it's just so unreal that I'm never going to see them again. It's fucking unfair.

...

Now that I'm thinking about it, I might try to use one of winter's Middle Earth The One Rings as a proxy in my Vintage Cube.

As I wrote that I just started sobbing.

I'm an only child, so I can only imagine this is what it feels like to lose a brother.

To my friend winter, I want to choose to believe you've transcended humanity and become a ghost on the internet. I love you, I miss you, and I hope that it's not "goodbye" but it's just "see you later, space cowboy."