Greed Island Cards

[Amlux]

READ THIS EVEN IF YOU AREN'T AN ANIME PERSON OR HAVE NEVER SEEN HUNTER X HUNTER, IT'S AN INTERESTING QUESTION EITHER WAY I PROMISE

Hunter X Hunter is one of the best shounen anime ever made (I say as a general non-shounen viewer). One of the arcs is about an island called Greed Island which is converted into a kind of VR game (not really but details are too fine and potentially spoiler-y to get into here... if you've seen the anime you know what it's about). Well, the game is kind of an open-world FFA MMoRPG of sorts and the reward for winning the game is that you get to take three of 100 "Specified Slot Cards" into the real world with you. These are rare cards that offer interesting powers and abilities. Togashi (the mangaka) put a ton of time into designing these and coming up with interesting ideas for them.

Full list of 100 Specified Slot Cards and descriptions

Some examples:

Ruler's Blessing:
A castle given as a prize for winning the contest, a town with a population of 10,000 included. Its residents will live according to whatever laws and commands you issue.

Pregnancy Stones:
Carry a stone (weighing 7 lb. each) for one month, and you will get pregnant, even if you're male. You may choose the sex of the baby by the female or male stone.

Universal Survey:
Write various questions about yourself and give them to someone, and he will answer all questions honestly. Reusable.

3-D Camera:
Pictures taken with this will be developed as 3-D objects, with all textures reproduced. Make enlargements as needed.

Night Jade:
A jewel "blessed" by the Devil. When danger is about to befall its owner, it will deflect it to someone else.

And 95 more of these.

So my question: Let's assume you've just won Greed Island. What three cards are you taking with you? Read through the list and have a look. I would take these:

Fickle Genie:
This genie will grant you three wishes, but you need to suggest 1000 potential, significantly different wishes and he will choose three from among them. (No cheating by asking for different increments of money.)

It would take a while to think of 1000 different wishes I would be happy for, but I'm sure I could think of enough to have three awesome wishes granted.

Night Shift Dwarves:
They can do any work you can, and they will work as long as you are asleep. They cannot do anything beyond your abilities.

The dwarves can do a job for me while I sleep and I can NEET like a king and have all the time for what I want to do! An alternative, interesting choice, is "Sleeping Girl," where you can have a girl sleep in exchange for you and never have to sleep so you have all the time you want for your hobbies and interests. But I like sleeping and dreaming, so I wouldn't choose it.

Sage's Aquamarine:
Its owner will have many intelligent friends and keep those friendships for their entire lives.

Straightforward! Then again, this forum is hopefully fulfilling this goal in a lot of ways.

[ccloverclub]

i can't choose between "Poltergeist Pillow" and "Book of V.I.P Passes". my main goal is to be able to stalk and look into the lives of whoever i want. i've always hated when i travel somewhere, i can't have a true, unbiased look into to the life of that country. here are the pros and cons of these two wishes for my goal:

Poltergeist Pillow:
Sleep on this pillow, and your astral form will be able to wander at will, but you will turn into a real ghost if you do not return to your body within 24 hours.

Pros:
- can enter houses and private areas
- invisible to others
- unlimited uses
Cons:
- time limit
- can only visit present time

Book of V.I.P Passes:
You can go anywhere with these passes. Book of 1000.

Pros:
- Can go literally ANYWHERE (time travel)
- no time limit
Cons:
- limited uses
- i'm still visible to others in the area. they could just kick me out or even kill me for entering

overall i'm choosing Poltergeist Pillow. I'm OK with being unable to time-travel and only having 24 hours if i'm able to go inside private areas. also flying around and being a ghost sounds awesome

Favor Cushion:
Seat someone on this cushion, and he will do one thing for you, so long as it is within his capabilities.

all I have to do is convince them to sit down, not bad! my first thought when thinking about what to do with this wish was to force all my teachers to give me full marks on work i don't wanna do LOL

Panda Maid:
An endangered species. Very neat and loves to cook, each has a hobby such as sewing or gardening. They are excellent at taking care of human children.

i've looked at every wish on this list and i don't really want any of them. Ruler's Blessing seems cool, who wouldn't want 10,000 people who love and adore you and do your bidding? but that wouldn't be good for me. i'd become a cult leader and form a harem with every man in the kingdom. i'd be happy with panda maid! a cute animal friend who will take care of me and feed me good food, who could want more?

[Amlux]

i can't choose between "Poltergeist Pillow" and "Book of V.I.P Passes". my main goal is to be able to stalk and look into the lives of whoever i want. i've always hated when i travel somewhere, i can't have a true, unbiased look into to the life of that country.

Interesting idea, and I share your voyeuristic tendencies to some degree.
That said, the reason I probably wouldn't use these is that I somehow feel like it isn't quite possible to ever have an "unbiased" view of an area. That is, even if I look at someone else's life, I'm always getting a "skewed" perspective some way or another (What time of day am I looking it? How old is this person? What can I judge without asking the person some questions of my own?). So I fear that I would have the illusion of having an "unbiased" perspective that really isn't. I guess I just accept that a lot about it is fundamentally untranslatable, and that's okay!

But Favor Cushion does seem very OP as well. I could think of some pretty good, sociopathic uses for it (begging a boss to make my job into playing video games and somehow convincing him that it's a good use of company resources).

[ccloverclub]

But Favor Cushion does seem very OP as well. I could think of some pretty good, sociopathic uses for it (begging a boss to make my job into playing video games and somehow convincing him that it's a good use of company resources).

you don't need to convince your boss at all if he's being forced by a magic cushion LOL

if it's not a spoiler, what cards were the most useful to the characters in hunter x hunter? what cards did the winner of the game choose? maybe it'll make me change my decision.

[Zil]

Golden Scales:
When faced with a two-option choice, these scales will tell you which is better for your future.

This one is totally overpowered, right? Almost anything can be simplified to a yes / no decision. It's basically giving you precognition about everything you could possibly do. At the very least I think I should be able to invest and / or gamble my way to infinite wealth. Lots of other things come to mind as well, like using it on a dating app to decide who I should talk to, finding the best place in the world to live ("should I move there, or stay here?") etc. I guess there can be some unexpected disparity between "what I want" and "what's better for my future" but if that does happen I guess I'm better off for it anyway.

Fickle Genie:
This genie will grant you three wishes, but you need to suggest 1000 potential, significantly different wishes and he will choose three from among them. (No cheating by asking for different increments of money.)

Hard to say no to this one. That fact that you get three wishes, as opposed to just one, I think makes it incredible, though it does depend a bit on how extreme and detailed these wishes can be, and just how distinct they have to be from each other. And I say it's hard to say no because, I'm sure if I didn't choose this, I'd forever be wondering what I could have had if I did take it. Also, if I can use the scales while coming up with the wishes, that would be primo.

Poltergeist Pillow:
Sleep on this pillow, and your astral form will be able to wander at will, but you will turn into a real ghost if you do not return to your body within 24 hours.

First thing about this, which is maybe not the most apparent benefit, is you basically don't have to sleep. You get to be conscious all the time (if you want). Compared to the card that just does explicitly that (sleeping girl) you'll have the disadvantage of being intangible (presumably) and not able to interact with anything. Not to say you can't get anything done, though. You could, for instance, watch videos that you set to play beforehand, read a bunch of texts laid out on a table, things like that.

But then the other, much greater appeal is just being able to fly around as a ghost-thing and explore anywhere. I'm assuming you can fly anyway, and move pretty fast. I think more than anything, I'd just want to fly around in the night sky, over mountains and forests and cities. But going into abandoned buildings, or just spying on people like a creep is also appealing of course.

And finally, if you were so inclined, there's probably a lot of creative / underhanded ways you can use this for personal benefit via scamming people, pretending to be clairvoyant, etc.

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There are some other tempting combinations, particularly if I wanted to just be totally evil and take over the world. I think Capricious Remote and Golden Scales makes that quite doable (also Favor Cushion, Ruler's Blessing, Hypothetical T.V.), but I don't really want to have brainwashing people on my conscience. Also, there's a pretty good chance that whatever I get from the genie will make world domination seem boring in comparison.

By the way, I'm a little surprised by the absence of certain things from the set of 100. For instance, "turn into a really hot girl and stay that way" doesn't seem to be available, at least not in a straightforward way. And weirdly a lot of things like "change your voice", "change your sex" etc. are limited in use, while some totally OP cards are unlimited.

[Amlux]

First thing about this, which is maybe not the most apparent benefit, is you basically don't have to sleep. You get to be conscious all the time (if you want). Compared to the card that just does explicitly that (sleeping girl) you'll have the disadvantage of being intangible (presumably) and not able to interact with anything. Not to say you can't get anything done, though. You could, for instance, watch videos that you set to play beforehand, read a bunch of texts laid out on a table, things like that.

But then the other, much greater appeal is just being able to fly around as a ghost-thing and explore anywhere. I'm assuming you can fly anyway, and move pretty fast. I think more than anything, I'd just want to fly around in the night sky, over mountains and forests and cities. But going into abandoned buildings, or just spying on people like a creep is also appealing of course.

Never considered the first use for the Poltergeist Pillow, but it does seem potentially OP when you put it like that. Though I think that it would be a lot of work to set up things to auto-play if you can't touch anything. If you're reading a book, it would take a lot of work to set up a device that automatically turned the pages! I guess I can't think of many things I'd want to do like that where I wouldn't want to have access to my body for the purpose of turning pages, writing notes, pausing and reloading episodes, etc.

I understand the appeal of flying around and exploring, but at the same time it's not quite clear if you can move at a super accelerated rate. So you might be pretty limited to staying around your region. Which would still give you the opportunity for some cool trips. But I just get paranoid reading about the 24 hour limit and feel like there's some way I would fuck it up and get stuck as a ghost.

Golden Scales was definitely up there in my choices too and when you put it that way it certainly seems OP. I think Hypothetical T.V. would be another potentially useful choice that you could use in a similar way. You can also record the results, which could have nice uses (hypothetically visit a hooker, record the encounter, and have pr0nz of yourself you could enjoy without going through with the deed, lmao). 3-D Camera would be epic to collect stuff like anime figures with: Just take pictures of the boxes in the store and no one will be the wiser that you're basically pirating it but without the work of using a 3-D printer.

[Zil]

I'm imagining being able to go anywhere on earth, maybe even some outer space or the moon. I guess when I think of astral projection, it's usually something with a lot of freedom, though the description really doesn't say anything about travel speed. If you can't actually move very fast, then that ability would be pretty lame, yes. Or worse yet, maybe as soon as you use it, the earth itself, or the whole solar system, just starts drifting away from you faster than you can pursue it and you're instantly fucked.

And regarding the TV, I had a similar thought that you could basically use it to make porn, lol. "Hypothetically, if all the women in the world turned into catgirls, and were madly in love with me..." But actually, I've been thinking more about that one, and I think it's also a lot more powerful than I realized. If you're clever about how you ask the questions, it's pretty much just total omniscience. In particular, I think making hypotheticals that involve the TV itself lets you force it to summarize any number of 'hypothetical hypotheticals' in a single documentary, and you can basically pull any information you can imagine out of it. For instance, "What if I were to were to watch documentaries on this TV for a billion years, with the goal of figuring out how to cure cancer, and then summarized everything I learned with the intent of making it comprehensible to modern scientists?" Surely, it's just gonna give you a cure for cancer at that point, right? If it can do that, it would almost seem irresponsible not to choose the TV, though having that kind of thing at your fingertips would be really unnerving imo.
But I suppose I'm overthinking things now.