Limited Resources 868 - Current State of Limited and What Makes a Great Limited Set

Foreign. What is up, everybody? Welcome to another episode of Limited resources. This episode, number 868. My name is Marshall. I'm one of your limited resources. And joining me in the line all the way from Denver, Colorado, it's Luis, Scott Vargas. Luis, you ready to talk big picture limited stuff today? I am and I'm actually excited to talk about some of the great sets. Not even from history, from, you know, we'll get to it as we get to the topic, but we're going to talk about sets in the last five years only. So it's not even. We don't even have to dig too far back. That's right. Yu-Gi-Oh We're going to talk about what makes a great set. We're also going to talk about the state of limited, the current state of limited in general, and of course we're going to do a hobbit, crack a package, etc. Okay. First things first though, we want to say thank you to everybody who supports us over on Patreon. That's where you can support the show directly. It's patreon.com limitedresources if you'd like to do so. We also want to say thank you to Ultimate Guard who we're actually streaming right now on the Ultimate Guard channel. Once a month we do our show kind of behind the scenes style on Ultimate Guard's Twitch channel and we are doing that right now. So thanks everybody in the chat for hanging out with us for our pre show. And now that we're into the meat of the topic, it's great to have you along as well. If you need stuff to protect your cards, your decks, or your collection and or your collection, I should say Ultimate Guard is the place to go. They have this really great combination of premium materials and really well thought out design that come together to make an excellent product. It's really important to protect your cards. They're valuable. You want to make sure that they last a long time and that if you want to sell them or trade them or whatever, that they stay in really good shape. And Ultimate Guard is the place to do it. If you want to see their full line of products, they got branded stuff. They have just solid colors. It's kind of something for everybody. You can go to ultimate guard.com and you can pick up their products from your favorite local game store or online retailer. Thank you, Ultimate Guard. We do appreciate it. Let's see if I can fire off a Patreon question of the week because even though we had all that time, Louise, I didn't actually copy one over here's. Yu-Gi-Oh great stuff. This one comes from Hemophiliac who says, hi, Marshall. Luis, I've recently come back to the game last summer and have been shocked to learn that Limited in paper is not as popular as it once was. I've been trying to get people more interested in Limited but with little success. I've even gone as far as incentivizing a draft by providing boosters for a free draft of the local game store. And I didn't even get eight people. How do I get more people interested in playing Limited in paper? Thanks for your time. You know, I don't, I don't know where you're from Hemophiliac, but that is a regional thing. You know, I was over. I mentioned it before. I was at. At Mach's boarding house here in Seattle and when I was just about to leave is when they were firing their F and M draft and there was people like a lot of people. So I don't know. Luis, do you have a sense for that? I mean, neither you nor I are out in the local game stores very often playing these days. You know, most of my Blue Ice online at this point. Well, I don't. I can't really say as to like how much more popular is it than it used to be or anything like that. I did go to a paper pre list for Marvel superheroes and it was pretty full. It was like 40 people or something like that at a local brewery. I think what matters a lot more than how Limited is doing overall is how is Limited doing in your area when you want to play Limited. And if listener here is struggling, then they're struggling. It doesn't really help them if there's a robust scene in Seattle or whatever. Yu-Gi-Oh I guess I'm just saying they're applying it in broad stroke saying that Limited isn't doing well. It may just not be doing well where you're at. I know that this is one of those things that it must be curated and effort must be placed on it. If you assume that drafts will happen at local game stores, you are often mistaken. The incentives that you are putting into place, he may feel like are a great place to start. Whenever I see local game stores try to make sure that they keep their draft group together, you can tell how important it is to them. You know, that weekly draft, that bi weekly draft, those really do add up for the game store and they're an important thing. And there is a problem with critical mass. Right. If you've only got five People, you can't really draft. If you can get to six, you can make it work. And you know, eight is kind of the sweet spot for those. But Yu-Gi-Oh I have definitely seen game stores that took it for granted that they happen to have a good draft group come in and then that draft group didn't come in anymore and all of a sudden, poof, it's gone because they didn't put any effort into it. And so I think you're hitting on an important topic, which is don't take it for granted. It is difficult to get eight people in a room for a few hours to do something like this these days. There are many, many different things pulling for your attention and your money and your time and all that kind of stuff too. So I am not surprised to see that. But it does sound like a bummer. Chat says draft still happens near me. Standard is dying and Commander is booming. That is. That is definitely the standard I know is dying because Standard, you know, is they. They just haven't made it fun in years and it's such a. It's so hard to keep up with the collections to, you know, on top of that. So that doesn't surprise me at all. Yu-Gi-Oh totally. And. And of course Commander, you know, is booming. I mean, that is booming. Yu-Gi-Oh And you know, that is part. One of the reasons is, is the overhead smaller. Like to get a Commander game together, technically only need two people. Most of them are four, but four is so much more attainable than six or eight. And then also. And no entry fees or anything like that. The money has been spent. Exactly. It's not. It's not like you have to buy it over and over and over again. And even though Commander is a experience than booster draft, you know, it's really fun and it's something that people really, really love to do. So it's hard to blame them for it. One thing that we're going to talk about with our current state of limited as well is, you know, the small sets are. Have been designed with pick two draft in mind and pick two draft is designed for Commander players. It is aimed at getting Commander players, four players sitting around a table to decide that they're going to do a draft together in a quicker fashion and without needing all the extra people. Although I would be curious to hear from people who play routinely in local game stores where Commander is also going on, if people actually do it. Because I've never seen anybody do a pick two draft. So, no, I haven't either. I assume it's not a Thing, but I don't know. Great question. Thanks for that, Hemophiliac. Hopefully you get your. Your draft numbers back up again and get back to that critical mass. It's. It's obviously worth it when it does come. Okay. The Hobbit. Not a whole lot has changed. They took down, rather abruptly, they took down the arena direct that was going for the collector boosters. I was just playing my little heart out, and I think it was when we were doing the podcast last week, and I thought, after we're done with this, I'll get to jam a few more of these runs and try to see if I can't get another collector box. And you mentioned. Oh, no, it's. It's down now. And the common logic in the community is that they had some number of collector booster boxes, and when they hit that number of boxes, one, then they shut it down, and that's what happened. That makes sense. I don't know that that's true, but it does make sense. Yu-Gi-Oh I mean, that seems like a reasonable explanation. Go ahead. Oh, say. I don't really know what. What happened, but I had a number of people talk to tell me, like, oh, what just kind of disappeared out of nowhere? Yu-Gi-Oh it. Normally they put up a little clock that will tell you, okay, you've got this much more time, but it does make sense. You know, I know that I want a few boxes from one of the recent collector ones, and I got an email saying, sorry, you're gonna get one box of that, and we're gonna substitute in a different box for the other two that you one-of-one And I'm. My first reaction was, oh, no, you aren't. You know, and then I looked up and the ones that they were substituting were worth quite a bit more monetarily than the others. And I'm like, yes, you are, actually, you are. Bring those in here. So. And they're not dumb. I mean, they. They know that they can't really get away with that, that there's an awkward dance that's happening. Right. Because, you know, ostensibly we're playing just for the retail price of a collector booster box. Right. But we know that some collector booster boxes are worth more than others. And that does inform how many times I'm willing to enter, how much money I'm willing to put up over the course of the time that that event is up and how much of my time I'm willing to allocate towards it. And this is, you know, one of those things. But, Yu-Gi-Oh as a format, you know, it's really pretty straightforward and not a whole lot's changed. The only thing that I notice is there's another ticker up for the next arena direct. This is for the Playbooster vers and it looks like that's coming up this weekend. So Yu-Gi-Oh With that in mind, we will do a crackpack though for the Hobbit. Our first card out is Smaug the Great Calamity. This is the one that can be a five mana removal spell or a seven mana dragon. Ended up being it. It ends up being relevant. We'll call it in sealed and playable in draft but kind of mid in draft and decent ish in in sealed mainly because it is a very good card in an attrition mirror. And since so many of the good sealed decks are black red and end up being really removal heavy where you're kind of slugging it out to see who's going to end up with the last last threat standing. Smog can definitely contribute to that. Next is Iron Hill stalwart. That's the four in a red four or five reach trample. And when ETVs you can pick up an equipment. Nope. This. This checks the box on five mana Easily replaceable. There's four drops that just do this. one-of-one Next is Magnificent end four and a white instant. That does five damage to a creature and it costs three less to cast if the creature happens to be tapped. So either attacking or tap through some other means. Yep. Checkbox good white removal and would be my pick here so far. Next up is Dwarven Short Sword. This is the three in a white equipment. When it enters you get a two if and you attach this thing to it that this equipment gives plus 1 plus 2 and its equip cost is 2. So for the red white deck it's a dwarf and an equipment and that deck has a lot of payoffs for both. So this can be a playable four drop. But even then it just kind of checks the box on playability. It isn't. It's never exciting. Long bodied Gray Dog. I love that name. It's really funny card does not see a lot of play. 3 mana 22 flash with reach and when it enters you get a tapped treasure token. You would think that a colorless card like this would be doing enough but it doesn't quite. Next is Patient instructor. This is two in a blue white hybrid for a two two vigilance and when the ETBs you recruit. Very solid checkbox. Yes. This is the type of card that you do want to have in that deck, it's not the great payoff, it's not the great enabler, but it's a good one. And it gets you potentially a 22 and a 11 on the battlefield. And in a world where crude blade is kind of dominating, having extra random one ones around is a significant advantage. Next is Guardian of the halls. This is one in a green for 822 trample elf and you can pay seven manage, put three plus one plus one counters on it. It rarely comes up, but you can just keep doing that. That, that is not a one time thing. So if you somehow find yourself with a preposterous amount of extra mana and just absolutely nothing else to do, you can just start pounding a bunch of counters on your Guardian of the Halls. But overall the elf stack has been bad. And this card has been bad as well. Next is Warg Tactics. This is the one in a green instant. Choose one destroy creature with flying or put a plus one plus one counter charge creature you control and it gains trample and hexproof until in a turn. I've been playing this in my one of these in my green decks and sealed. You know, countering a smaug with this is just pretty devastating. There's a lot of removal out there and there are cards and creatures worth protecting and work. Tactics does a decent job. And then every once in a while you use the distort creature with flying side. And usually when you do that, you're getting really, really good mana value. You know, exchange, you're paying 2 mana instant speed. And a lot of times you're killing a 3, 4, 5. You can kill smog with it after they cast it. If you draw it later, that's seven mana that they dumped into this thing. That's pretty good. This one is controversial. I. I don't know where it sits. It's giants boulder. This again, I'm thinking in terms of seal deck. It's one mana for an artifact. When the ETBs you scry to, you can pay one mana, tap it to add a mana of any color, or 7 mana tap and sack it to destroy a permanent. This does actually see quite a bit of play in sealed. I am undecided on whether I think that's appropriate or not. It the the turn one scry two can make sure that you hit your lands and get where you need to go in a pinch. If you're splashing, it can help you cast your, you know, mid four mana, five mana, whatever splash card. And then when you get to the late game it does blow something up. That is a. That is enough, you know, to say, okay, that isn't an embarrassing card, but is it really the type of thing that you need to be doing in sealed? I found a few use cases where I felt like it was fine, but I do feel like I see it on the battlefield more than I play it. So either I'm a little behind the curve and should be playing a giant's boulder more often, or my opponents are overvaluing it a little bit since it's not really good at any of the things that it does. Here's the kind of card that people are. Does appeal to people. Things that cheap things that do a lot of things people tend to like pretty they do even at their own peril sometimes. Uncommons Troll negotiations. Two green green Sorcery. Put two plus and plus encounters and target creature you control. Then it fights target creature and opponent controls. This is a true fight, not a bite. But two plus one plus one counters goes a long way. And I. I'd never cut a troll negotiations for my green deck. Next is Sylvan Reveler. This is the 2 green blue, 32 elf. And when it ETBs, you draw a card, then discard a card if it was a land card that you discarded, it goes onto the battlefield, tapped, and then it's this annoying recurs, Recursive threat. It has landfall. You can pay one blue green to bring it from your graveyard back to your hand. So you play it, hopefully get a ramp off of it, trade it off for something, and then buy it back when you have mana later on. I love cards like this. I think this one's interesting. I think it's powerful. I think it's well designed. I don't think it's done that well in the format. I think it's a casualty of the elves deck primarily. Also there. It's also a lot worse than just drawing a card. I played with this. This one I. I had in one of my decks that I played with a decent amount, and it was like, a little disappointing, especially given the context of, hey, this is. This format's fast and it's really punishing. Totally. There's also enough exile removal at the common and uncommon slots that you don't always get to do the thing with Sylvan Reveler where you're, you know, re recasting it later in the game because it would be a pretty interesting tool against black, black, red, because, you know, they kind of can't ever get rid of it, but they actually can you know, Pinecone Strike gets it out of there and you're not getting it back. And then the uncommon one bb minus 5 minus 5 does too. So it disappears forever a little too often for my liking. Next is Bilbo Luck Wearer. This is a really interesting one. This is the one in a blue one one unblockable. And when it does combat damage to a player, you loot. But it also has Burglars plot which is 4 and a blue sorcery for its adventure. And it says exchange control of two target nonland permanents that share a card type. And it's really interesting if you have this in your opening hand because that ability late in the game can be really, really good. And Blue Ice often paired with white and often has like random 1 ones together. And when you swap a 1:1 recruit token for their bomb, it feels completely busted. It's much better than killing it and you feel like you're really getting away with something. And then you can even cast Bilbo Luckware to start looting away any extra lands that maybe you kept in your hand or you played on turn two. And it's excellent in that case too. But I always really do try to wait to see if I can get Burglar's plot going because it's kind of a unique effect in the format and it is really powerful if you build towards it, if you, you know, make sure that your board state supports it. Our rare is Riddles in the Dark. This is the Tuna Blue Instant. Look at the top four cards of your library and separate them into a face down pile and a face up pile. An opponent chooses one of the piles. You put that one in your hand and the other one goes in your graveyard. And we, Luis and I both love cards like this and I like Riddles in the dark as well, especially at instant speed. It's very interesting. I think I would probably take Bilbo Luckwear here. Oh, really? Yes. I mean, you know more than I do, but that wouldn't have been my guess. What would you take? I don't know. I don't know what I would take, but I did not expect. It seemed like Blue hasn't done all that well. Blue's kind of in the middle. Yu-Gi-Oh it's not great, but it's not. I mean, I would have expected a patient instructor to maybe just be a little bit more on board, but. But Yu-Gi-Oh I, I'm certainly deferring to your, to your, your decision here. But Yu-Gi-Oh Bilbo in that deck is, is kind of Insane. Like, you play it on two and then you play any payoff and just start swinging with him. And you're just recruiting and doing all this great stuff. I am. I don't know. Maybe I'm overvaluing Bilbo. I don't know. But. But I do like that card and that's what I would take here. Okay, so. So let's talk. Oh, before we get into the big, big picture stuff, I wanted to get an update from you on the Lotus Lounge tournament that we talked about last week. Is it. It's underway, right? Yu-Gi-Oh So, first of all, I want to thank the LR listeners because after the show went up, we got a bunch of signups and I'm sure a lot of people heard that and went and signed up. We ended up with 40 teams. I thought this was going to be like 12 teams or something. You know, I thought it was going to be the folks drafting on the server. That's incredible. It turns out it's all the folks who like to draft on the server, plus a ton of other people. And I gotta. I gotta say, it's actually been running great. I mean, the downside for me is that my team lost Round one. We lost week one. We. It was. It was a crushing victory. I ended up with one of the worst decks I've ever drafted, and so did Martel and I. I did manage to go 2:1. Martell at 1:2. Mac went 1:2. He ran so bad. His deck was so good. But that is kind of what can happen. It is unlikely to happen when you spread it out over three players. Right? I mean, that's. You guys are like, Yu-Gi-Oh Yu-Gi-Oh Yu-Gi-Oh We had to have been pretty solid favorites, I would imagine. I mean, our opponents were good. You know, they drafted good decks, they played well, but, you know, we just have a ton more experience cubing. And both me and Tom have like one pro tour. So, like, I would imagine, you know, it's not insulting to say that we were favorites, but, you know, they. They did take us down and that's part of the fun of the tournament, right? Anyone can one-of-one And so we, We've. We've got our work cut out for us, but honestly, I'm just happy that the tournament's going well. We haven't really had any issues. People are having fun. It's just been incredible. I've certainly looking to do more stuff in this space because this is just like, oh, people want to do this, so we'll see what that looks like. But I've been really happy with it now, when it comes to kind of keeping up with the tournament, people can look forward to videos on your YouTube channel with your matches. Is that kind of. I am going to try and record all my matches. I imagine I will likely do. Otherwise, I, we don't, we don't have like, we have standings. If you go into the, the Lotus Lounge Discord, which again, we linked last time, probably can just link again, you can check it out and then we have a standings channel that'll like kind of show you what's going on in the tournament. But. All right, well, we'll give you a coverage page. Exactly. This is version 1.0. Right, right, right. Exactly. Exactly. Okay. Well, that's really cool, man. Congrats. That is, that is an insanely great turnout for the tournament. Please start winning. Like, what are you doing? Quit losing. Tell blame Martel or something. But like let's, let's, let's get the wins rolling here for. Wait, do you guys have team names? We're just team cfb. Everyone could put a team name. But I, I, I, I told, I said I just went with Jennifer. Went old school. Okay. Yu-Gi-Oh that makes sense. Okay, let's talk. Luis. Big picture. I, I just. We've touched on a lot of these topics periodically throughout the show and these are things that I see people making videos about on YouTube or podcast episodes or whatever. But I wanted us to give our take on our little corner of the world, of the magic world here, which is the current state of limited. I have just a variety of topics that I wanted to hit with you and kind of get your take, my take, and where we stand with this stuff right now and then what we want to see going forward, that type of thing. Small sets, so apparently they're not going to be doing them anymore is the news around town. We'll see. But that's what I heard and I think that the responses just haven't been great to these flop for the most part. I don't know. Monetarily, I can't speak to any of that behind the scenes stuff. Maybe they made a ton of money for them and so it would be really hard to call it a flop if that were the case. But from our perspective from limited, mostly a flop. Right. I think the Hobbit and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles both check the box and Spider Man's probably the worst that we've ever interacted with since we started doing the show. Spiderman was really bad. Yu-Gi-Oh So, you know, that is not a glowing review. That is not. Hey, I like These small sets, I wonder what they're gonna do for the next one. That's kind of like Yu-Gi-Oh but it sounds like, you know, they're not going to be doing them anymore. And you know, we have to give them credit. They did get them to a place where they were serviceable. Both TMNT and the Hobbit have been totally serviceable. But I just don't think that you can make a fully fleshed out, interesting draft format when you limit the number of cards that bad. It's just, it just harms long term viability so that it's not really reparable. So then you go, well then what would be good about them? And there's a couple of things, but again, I'm not sure if they've actually landed the plane. One of them is pick two draft. I mentioned it just a few minutes ago. You know, this is an idea for picture 4 commanders players sitting around getting ready to play and they go, hey, let's do a quick draft. Just fire off a little draft here. Well, you don't need to go get four more or two more people. You can just open up these small sets. You don't have to spend as much time learning them because there's only five viable archetypes one-of-one And then you pick two cards at once so that the draft goes really, really quickly, just for four players. And then maybe we get a bunch of Commander players because remember, you know, Commander players, you know, are the fastest growing and also biggest portion of the magic audience now. And any of them that might be interested in draft or unlimited, we want them to, you know, check it out. I mean, Luis and I, you know, feel pretty strongly that limited is the, the best way to enjoy like a fully fleshed out experience with magic where you don't even know what cards you have at the beginning, all the way through selecting cards, building a deck, and then playing out the matches, that kind of gives you a microcosm of the full magic experience. And you get to do it over and over and over. It's a lot different from Commander as well, which I think is, is something good because they might want to try something that is completely different than what they're already doing. That said, I've never actually seen anybody do a pick two draft and I don't know if that's really. I'm pretty sure it hasn't landed, that there's a whole bunch of commander groups just firing pick two drafts. I don't think that's a thing. Have you ever. That would be my assumption. As well. I've never. Look, when we say I've never, you really have to take it with a grain of salt because we're not out there, you know, hitting the pavement. But. Right. I. I'm friends with a lot of Magic players and in varying levels of, like, investment in terms of, like, you know, I'm friends with people who just play Commander and friends with people who don't play in tournaments at all and friends. People who love drafting but have. Don't have never signed up for an event. Like, I have not heard a single soul talk about pick two drafts. So same. My guess is it's not going to be, like, one of the big things that they're hanging their hat on. I think so too. Yu-Gi-Oh I. I think that's fine. I mean, this. It was a relatively low, you know, effort push. Like, they. They had to, like, move around a few things, but it kind of fit with the small formats one-of-one And then they just kind of said, well, you could do it this way. And, you know, there's nothing wrong with throwing that against the wall. And, you know, I am out at the Magicon, so I am very much in the Commander space. Right. Like, I. I mean, dude, you would be. I. I can't wait for you to come back because it's a little different now. If you go. LobbyCon is just all Commander. You know, the. Every Zebra tabletop space is taken up by people playing Commander. Now it's just literally everywhere. But. But. Yu-Gi-Oh but. But pick two draft is not. So I don't think that's gonna stick, which is a shame. I. I would like some entry point for Commander players to not have to dive in the full deep end of the. Of. I've never done a booster draft. Here I go. That is, you know, understandably, a pretty deep dive. Dovetailing off of small sets they were added on to, you know, what would be a normal release schedule in some ways bringing us to seven sets this year. And I want your take on this, Luis, because we are most of the way through. We've still got a few more sets to go, but this was, you know, we have definitely got the vibe for the cadence of seven sets coming out in a year. And what that actually feels like. My take on it is that it is overwhelming on the negative side. It also feels like the average set quality is down as a result. Again, I am pinning a lot of that on the small sets, but I can't even imagine what it would look like if these were all big sets. Like the. Now I. I Just cannot imagine Wizards design team being able to keep up with that. That is just an Absolute absurd amount of work. But maybe it's just a scalable thing and I don't know. The upside, though, and there is some upside here, is that, you know, if there's a format that you don't really like, like you're a month and a half or something from a new set most of the time, which helps with novelty. Right? There's always something around the corner. It, it is hard to get bored for too long in a set because there's always something coming up, up. And if it's just a mediocre set, like, you know, Luis, you're not really engaging with the Hobbit that much this time around. Well, there's another set coming up. You know, we'll, we'll start to see the previews coming our way before we know it and, and the Hobbit will be behind us, you know, it brings up questions, though. Is fatigue an issue? You know, learning a brand new drafted environment, this often can be a pretty big lift, especially for players who draft like once a week or something like that, but not as much as, as us and our listeners do. What have, what have been your big picture thoughts now that we're, you know, a good chunk of the way through the seven set year? Yu-Gi-Oh it's interesting. So on the one hand, Yu-Gi-Oh they're going to move away from small sets, and that sounds great, I don't want to see more of those. But on the other hand, it's like, Yu-Gi-Oh seven sets, seven big sets. Sounds crazy. They're in the spot where they're, I mean, they're trying to support all the things they're doing right. And, and the way to do that is if you're like making tons of money, which they are, the magic year over year is making more money than it's ever made. They want to do more sets, right. They want to sell more cars. It all makes sense. You have to expand your design team, which they have. They have stated that it's not that their designers have to make an extra set each year, it's that they just hire more people. Well, that still has an impact on quality. Going from 30 designers to 60 designers. You're usually not going to have the same level of quality on the last 30 as of the first 30. I'm not saying it's linear. It's not like everyone afterwards is bad. You can sometimes pick up some awesome people. But expanding your team that much, I mean, it is just difficult to do and still maintain level quality, which is a challenge. If you want to do that, you have to either take a longer time, be more selective, you have to maybe offer more money. And I don't really know what's going on with their hiring or any other things. I'm just saying, from my experience, if you want to grow your team by a large margin, which they do, if they want to make seven big sets a year, however many tons of products, right, their magic is just popping off. They're going to need to either take longer to do it, offer more money to get people, or more incentives to get people. Whatever it is, let's just assume they do all that. I don't know that I want to see seven big sets a year either. I mean, I like. I like the faster cadence. We're living in a world where we expect more faster. That's not always good, but it is where we're where we are. Do I think Magic is doing that well? I think that the smaller sets have been really bad. Would they have been better if they were bigger? Yu-Gi-Oh probably. There's definitely some gains to be had there. It's possible they still would have been bad. They make bad big sets too. And I would like to see. I mean, I'd hope that the quality of sets, you know, I would say stays high because I'm still going to give them that. But they've had some misses, you know, and to your point of. There's a lot of competition. There is more competition. I remember back in the Stone Ages when you had a Magic set every three months, three, four sets a year, one core set that wasn't even the most exciting. Well, you would play it was out and the next, and you'd look forward to the next and it'd come out and you'd play it. Well. It's not that there weren't other games and stuff then, but there was a lot less competition in this space. And even with Magic, Magic's competing with itself right now. I. I have the option to cube draft at any point, which I know, I know everyone here knows, but it's true. Because if. If you end up in a spot where you don't like the set, like, say, the Hobbit, which I'm not really loving right now. Well, it's pretty hard to justify. Not like playing that instead of just going to cube. Heck Yu-Gi-Oh Especially with your precious free time. I mean, you've got such a busy family and professional life that you're not going to talk yourself into drafting a mediocre set over cube drafting if it's available. No way. Why would you. And so you end up in a spot. I think that is pretty. There's more pressure on each set. There is somewhat less in the sense that. That the sets rotate quickly. That does relieve pressure. But there's a lot of pressure on each set and there's a lot of alternatives up to and including other commander as another one. Other forms of magic just sitting there waiting for you. Yu-Gi-Oh So on the one hand, Yu-Gi-Oh it is kind of nice that I. I don't feel that punished by skipping the Hobbit. And. And to be clear, I really don't plan on skipping very many sets. The only two sets I've basically completely skipped over the last couple of years, they're Spider man and the Hobbit. And I didn't do much. Ninja Turtles. Guess what all those are? They're all small and I would argue bad sets. Ninja Turtles better than the other two, in fact, Ninja Turtles better than the Hobbit, the Hobbit better than Spider Man. But, you know, just because the piece of poop I found on the ground is less disgusting than the previous piece of poop I found on the ground, not really plan on eating either of them. Right. Totally. Let me ask you a question about the. About the cadence thing. If I told you that they're all big sets and they're all like B pluses, at least, let's say, what would be your ideal number of sets in a year for you? Probably like probably 6 if they could get it. If they could get it to that rate, you know, so you get one every two months. Yu-Gi-Oh every two months a new set comes out. And even if, you know there's a banger, you're like, well, that's okay, I'll go to the next one. But. But it kind of spreads out that risk a little bit. Yu-Gi-Oh that makes sense. Any last thoughts on the number of sets per year before I move to our next. I mean, Yu-Gi-Oh I would honestly rather five good sets than six medium ones. And I'd certainly rather six medium well, medium to good. I don't want to cut off the top end, but I would certainly rather that than like the seven with multiple slop sets a year. But we don't control that. We can only react to it. And I do believe that the people at Wizards want to make good sets and don't like making bad sets, even if the money rolls in, no matter. Matter what. Yu-Gi-Oh So I think that they're going to find. They'll find Their footing here up to an including. They're already starting to say that they're not going to do the small sets. The next thing I wanted to talk about, big picture, of course, is Universes beyond, which we've talked about a bit on the show. But this is probably the most contentious thing Magic's done since, like, the reserve list or something. It's, it's. It. This gets talked about more than basically anything I've ever seen in the community. And this is from a group of people who can find any. Any little tiny thing to go completely nuts about. And U versus beyond has been the thing for quite a while. Upside to Universes beyond, there's a lot of sets, and some of them will hit on an IP that's important to you. You might enjoy it a bit more, you know, than. Than a regular Magic set. The downside is that it does feel overwhelming and it does feel like it's coming. At the risk of WOTC ignoring their own ip, maybe at their peril. Right. I mean, this is a legitimate question of is there a world, well, where they run out of the big universes beyond IPs. You know, they've done. They kind of done all the big checkboxes. I know a lot of people who would be happy for the answer to be yes. Yu-Gi-Oh I do too. And, and. And then they maybe don't have as much to fall back on. That's the problem. I mean, right now, there's a movie and a TV show for magic in the works. Two separate things. Yet the current lineup of stuff that we've had this year has been Marvel, Spider Man, Hobbit, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Star Trek. Like, these are not things that are coming out. These are not going to be part of the, you know, the Marvel, excuse me, the magic, bigger universe. They're going to have to lean back on whatever they want. Planeswalkers, Phyrexians, I don't know. But it does feel like the. The two vibe that if. If I'm talking about negatives, the two negative vibes that I get from Universes beyond are, one, it feels like a sellout, Right? It just feels like you're just sort of slapping different IPs on your game because your game's really popular, and then. And. And just cashing in or cashing out, as it were. And the other one is, is that it does feel like there is only so much focus that an organization can have. And if they take their focus off of their own IP and put it onto other people's ip, when Other people's IP is gone or, you know, used up, for lack of a better term. Then does the original IP suffer? And it kind of has to, right? I mean, just the fact that we're not interacting with it for long periods of time, that makes it suffer, let alone any type of character building, world building, storyline stuff. That said, I feel all that stuff, but for me, I have not mine. I don't really mind Universes beyond, actually, as a primarily limited player. They've. Yu-Gi-Oh there's been a few things that made me feel like, oh, this is a little bit corny. But honestly, they did that in some of the, you know, outlaws of Thunder Junction felt that way to me. And that wasn't Universes beyond, but it was like there was a bunch of stuff. The. It was a Duskmourne, you know, the. The kind of stranger things. Was that Duskborne. Yu-Gi-Oh Yu-Gi-Oh Yu-Gi-Oh Duskbourne was. Yu-Gi-Oh they have like, 80s stuff in there, like flashlights and walkie talkies and tape players and stuff, which, by the way, that's aimed directly at me. Those were all things that were around when I was a kid and I'm supposed to be feeling nostalgia for. And I didn't. And I just felt like, that's kind of corny. I don't really want that in magic where, like, when the hobbit comes out, I'm like, this is what I want. Like, I like this. I like goblins, I like trolls, I like wizards. Like, this stuff's cool and it fits the vibe for it. So it isn't even exclusive to Universes Beyond. But that being said, I actually haven't minded it. I really thought that I wasn't gonna like it that much. And I was kind of making fun in my mind of, I'm gonna be at the pro tour being like, all right, well, this guy's gonna attack with Spider man and he's gonna block with spongebob or whatever. And we're like, not that far off from that and was fine. It actually didn't ruin it for me. It didn't make it terrible. Honestly, just having like 70 versions of every card is more annoying than any of the stuff from Universes Beyond. To me, it always comes down to the quality, right? I loved Final Fantasy, and I am not a Final Fantasy person. Like, I've played a few of the games when I was young, but I Goldin name you before the set came out. Hardly any of the characters or anything. And I love that set set, right? And then, like, Luis got me into the last Airbender And I watched that show while I was playing it, and I was like, this is freaking awesome. Like, there's so many cool things and all the little call outs and all the little characters and all the stuff that they did, and I was like, this is awesome. They really nailed it. And that kind of turned me on to Universes Beyond. So I actually go against the grain a little bit. And at least as a limited player, I'm totally fine with the Universes beyond as long as they keep the quality, quality up. Yu-Gi-Oh I, I mean, I, I, I'm exactly where you're at pretty much just entirely because I think that Avatar was awesome. I think Final Fantasy was awesome, Lord of the Rings was awesome. I don't think that, I think that Ninja Turtles and Spider man were not. But honestly, the Universe is Beyond. If, if it's done well, I'm happy with it. I don't, I'm not intrinsically against it. Yu-Gi-Oh And, you know, I would say that small sets are constricted enough design wise that I think that they're kind of doomed. So I would really look at the Universe's beyond sets that are big and say, okay, how do these stack up gameplay wise, cohesive wise, all that kind of stuff? And for the most part, they have. The ones that have been disappointed are the ones that they've shoehorned into that smaller frame. The next thing I wanted to talk about, and it's another thing that I think everybody feels in the community is like a money squeeze. It's obvious, it's like painfully obvious that Wizards of the coast is under pressure from Hasbro, its parent company, to be the breadwinner for the entire subset of companies that Hasbro owns. And they are. If you look, I mean, all you have to do is look at the quarterly reports. You can read them, listen to them, or just look at the numbers. And it's like a bunch of either failing or mediocre performing ips and then Wizards of the coast, which is just crushing it. I mean, if you don't keep up on this stuff, I totally don't blame you. It's kind of boring. But at this point, and for years now, Wizards of the coast is Hasbro. Like, you could just cut out all the other stuff and just make more money if it was just Wizards of the Coast. It's just that Wizards of the coast is part of a bigger thing. And it's not trivial to cut out other things or to put wizards on its own or whatever. This is a publicly held subset of companies under the Umbrella of Hasbro and Wizards of the coast is absolutely the Goldin child. The problem is, at least from the outside, it feels like Hasbro's saying, okay, Goldin Goose, keep those eggs coming because our viability as a publicly held company relies on it. And the other, they're like, hey, Goldin Goose, you got any more in there? Let me cut you open and find. Yu-Gi-Oh exactly. Yu-Gi-Oh And then they're like, can we make a. How the tail goes? Yu-Gi-Oh Can we make a pillow out of these feathers while we're at it? Because, like, they are really, you know, shearing the sheep, as it were, or skinning it, as they were, as it were. At least that's how it feels. You know, this is high level stuff or, Yu-Gi-Oh big picture stuff that you can catch if you watch these meetings and the quarterly stuff from publicly held companies. But we don't really know the details. But it does feel like there's so much pressure on Wizards of the coast to continually deliver more and more and more money that they are turning up those taps. And the question is, has that gone too far? You know, as a limited player, do we. Do we feel the same fatigue that the broader player base feels with regards to product releases and frequency? I kind of think so. Maybe not quite as much. Like, I don't care about secret layers, for example. And I know a lot of, you know, more mainstream magic fans, like, not limited, specific people do care about that type of stuff. The Commander products, the extra stuff that kind of misses me. I'm like, kind of whatever, but dude, I don't. I mean, seven sets coming out with a few of these small sets. It. You do feel it on this side, do you not? The pressure of it? The, the taps maybe have been opened a little too far. I mean, it feels like it. Like I. It's hard not to. I mean, look, this is the stuff people always say about products because often this life cycle is true. As you know, the, the. The classic one people complain about is actually like when private equity buys your beloved chain and they sloppify it, right? And that does happen. You see it all the time. You see it happen with your dentist's office, with the local bur. Burger joint, whatever it is, you know, that's not to say that people investing in businesses is always bad. It's not. That's a lot of how things work. But in this particular case, it's like, Yu-Gi-Oh of course Hasbro doesn't care about magic. Corporations don't care about anything really, except the, you know, them succeeding. Like, when I say Corporations. I mean, the entity as a whole, its goal is to increase its share price. That's about it. Like that. That. That. That encapsulates almost all of its behavior. And. And look, do I believe that Mark Rosewater cares about magic? Yu-Gi-Oh Mark probably loves magic more than basically anything. But his family, that's what he's devoted his life to do. I think that the CEO of Wizards cares about magic, whoever it may be at any given time. Yu-Gi-Oh a lot of the times I think they do. I think that it is good to care about the thing you work on and you're in control over. Can't obviously speak to it. Exactly. But do. But as a whole, Hasbro does not care about magic. It wants to extract the most resources from Wizards of the coast because it has to, especially with other parts of the company doing poorly. And, Yu-Gi-Oh we would, of course, be right to be concerned about that and what the implication is. Yu-Gi-Oh Because to me, I look at it from a limited player perspective, and it's cool to have arena directs for, like, half the time the sets out. It's kind of cool to have that option, but it feels like that number gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And at some point, it's a little bit hard to not feel like a rat in a cage. Right. Where I'm just, like, begging for my sugar cube or whatever, and, you know, hitting the button until the thing comes out. Because it. It. You definitely feel it being on the other side of it, that that knob is being turned up. And then they go, well, it. The money's still coming, so let's turn it up again. And they do it again. It will. The money's still coming. Okay, turn it up. There's more money here. Turn it up again. More, more, more, more, more. And of course, it's eroded trust with Wizards. I mean, there's no doubt about that. You know, they've said on multiple occasions, in fact, the two big ones over the last. Whatever it is, 10, 12 years or whatever have been secret layers in the universe is beyond where when they first did them, they made very clear claims. Well, we'll never do that for this. That will never be. They'll never be made main sets. They'll never. And they've gone back on all of it once it proved to be a huge money maker. I think the interesting thing about this is, from a business perspective is if there's a spectrum between not getting enough money out, meaning you could have gotten more and kept your player base happy and everybody's healthy and everything's Good, then you would want to meet to that level. Then there's this big middle section of getting profits from your player base, but also making them happy and giving them something that they're willing to pay for and happy to pay for. And then there's the, we're pushing this too far. You know, the engines in the red. How far can it go? What are we giving up long term to make this happen? And you know, you can see that the examples that you gave is really good. Luis. The private equity, you know, this is when a, a group of investors whose, whose aim in life is to take something that's functional and kind of wring it out for all that it's worth, even if it comes at the cost of that thing. But they get to write it for five or 10 years where they're cutting costs, cutting corners, riding off of the momentum that it has, the customers trust in the company or their habits or whatever, until finally people go, you know, this kind of sucks now. And they don't go there anymore. Versus I think the other end of the spectrum are some of the most respected and well run companies in the world are often actually privately held, not private equity, privately owned. The one that I think about the most in that way, Luis, is actually In N Out Burger, right? If you've ever been to the west coast, you know, California and gone to In N Out Burger, it's just like every single one of those is always full all the time. They have just a ferociously loyal base of customers and they're unbelievably profitable. They pay their employees more than any other place. They have like actual careers there. And the food quality is higher than any other fast food place. Basically, somehow they're able to do all the things. And you ask yourself, well, why don't other companies do that? And the answer is, is because you have to invest for the long term. You have to be patient. You have to be willing to not take every dollar that's put in front of you to make sure that this goes for the long term. And then you can do that. A good example is they're not in. They just opened their first in and out in Washington, where I live, and it's way down by Oregon. It's like, you know, two and a half, three hours from me, right? They easily, you know, I got a Shake Shack. I got one two blocks from me and another one a few miles away. Those started in New York and all of a sudden they were here. They've been here for five, six years. We still don't have in and out. Right. And we. And that started in California, just two states down from me. And, you know, the reason is, is because they don't expand unless they know that they can keep the quality consistent and high. And so now they're finally just dipped their toe into Washington. And I assume within 10 years, I'll get one, you know, up here when they can build out their infrastructure and get it the way that they actually want it to be. When you're a publicly held company, it's like the total opposite. Right. You are just trying to get that next quarterly number up. And that's what we're seeing here from. From Hasbro. And to me, I look at it and I go, there has to be a cost to this. Because I think you can make a good argument, Luis, that Wizards of the coast, before this big push, maybe wasn't pushing it quite hard enough. Right. Like, there clearly was so much. That's likely true. Yu-Gi-Oh Yu-Gi-Oh So maybe they needed to. To up it a little bit. But now, I mean, it's, you know, it feels like the Titanic and they're just like, Yu-Gi-Oh fire up the next set of boilers and let's go. And, you know, and this thing's never going to sink. And, you know, it starts to get a little bit concerning, I would say, emotionally, from my side. I feel it, but it doesn't hurt. I'm. I'm definitely noticing that there's a lot more things like this, but I really am a big advocate for voting with your wallet. And, you know, Yu-Gi-Oh if. Luis, if I'm not gonna lie. Part. Part of my fatigue with these small sets is that. Or like, part of how I'm reacting to them is like, I did not like Spider man at all. I didn't really like Ninja Turtles and Hobbit. I'm willing to say that it's better than Spider man and people are enjoying it a bit more or whatever. I'm just sick of it. I don't want to support it, really. I don't like them. They're like a uncanny valley. They're a thing. I love drafting magic sets, but they're not really. They're like a skinwalker. And it's like. Exactly. So I think that to me, when I see arena directs up for a week and a half, and on one hand I'm like, that seems like a bit much. On the other hand, I'm like, like, join and I play them. Right. But, like, they're going to come out with the one for the play boosters, which are much, much worse value. I one-of-one I'll probably play a few of them, but I one-of-one play nearly as many as I did the others. And that's just me voting with my wallet, you know, and, you know, we did that with Spider Man Said. We were just so unimpressed with it. We both, we both just opted Whatnot, you know, when you have junkies like us opting out, that's kind of a big deal. The last thing I wanted to talk about was more of a high note out with State of Limited as it stands right now, which is that we are very much in a Goldin era of high level competitive play for Limited. I mean, I've never seen anything like this since I've been back involved with magic again. That's definitely true. It's good to. It's good to keep that in mind and be grateful for how many opportunities we have to play Limited. Whether it's Cube arena directs the Limited Championship. Like at all levels of competition, from your house, literally your couch, to the local store, to the biggest stages, we are actually doing really well there. We really are. You know, we have the $2,000 tournaments, the qualifier things, we have the ones that qualify you for the Arena Championship. We have the Limited Championship next year. I just got done in Amsterdam commentating top eight draft at a pro tour. Like, I didn't think I would ever get to do that. Now I get to do it there. I get to do it again. Like, absolutely incredible. Arena directs Cube on all the platforms, you know, and we can play for stakes. This is really the best time to be a limited player who cares about high level competitive play and being able to do it both from at home and also out on the road if you want to travel for some tournaments. So, Yu-Gi-Oh that is something I'm really grateful for. And I think that I don't want to overlook that with these more headliney stuff. We've got some really great stuff happening with that now with that. We've done a lot of talking here about sets that we don't like or maybe if we don't like them, they've just sort of barely scratched the itch or check the box or whatever. And we're like, Yu-Gi-Oh that's fine. What about the sets that are great? What makes a great set great is the question that we want to answer here. Yu-Gi-Oh and like I mentioned in the preamble, I didn't want to look at like Cons of Tarkir, which is a great set, because I think we can just look at more recent ones, because I think that's also going to be a little bit more relevant to the folks who are playing now. So, like, some of the great sets that I'm looking at the last couple of years, Final Fantasy, Duskborn, Modern Horizons 3, March of the Machine, Kamigawa, Neon Dynasty. I think Brothers War was also awesome. But, like, I think that the overall contents on that was not quite as strong. But I think that people generally. I'm not literally talking about just what me and you like, that we did like all of these. I think that you can really make a good argument for any of these sets as just having solid A's, you know, a level appeal across, like, a lot of the limited player base. So what are the characteristics that these sets share? I'm curious. Like, besides, of course, not being small sets. That's kind of implied. Yu-Gi-Oh Well, one is that there's 10 supported color pairs, and that seems like a pretty big deal as well. Small sets naturally don't have this. Big sets naturally tend to. They don't always. It's not the highest bar, but the reason that this is so important is you just have more redundancy and more points of Fleer that you. Or more points where you can fail or it's safe to fail. So what I mean by that is look at your average set with 10 color pairs, right. Most of the time, like, one or two of them is pretty much undraftable, and maybe one or two more is just not that good. Yep. And it's pretty nice to be able to absorb that without really hurting your draft prospects. So when you have 7 out of 10 color pairs work in a big set, that's awesome. That works out really, really well. You don't feel pinched when it comes to drafting. You don't. Unless. What could happen sometimes is when, like, let's say three of the four white archetypes don't work. That is a problem. You know that. That's a lot less good. But assuming that that's not what's going on most of the time, you can just open a card and you're not thinking, okay, I shouldn't take a white card, because white doesn't work in this set. That's just not really how it's going down. And then you still have plenty of options and plenty of color pairs to draft. If three out of five work, that's a lot fewer options. If two out of five work, that's, like, disastrous. And that's just more often going to happen when you have five versus 10. So big sets, you know, with the exception of like the Ravnic or Strixhaven builds will just have 10 by default. That is typically how it goes. Yu-Gi-Oh One thing that, that it's also worth noting is that the big sets that have five color pairs still can be really good. Original Strixhaven was still great. It's just more likely to have problems than the. Than ones with 10 color. Yu-Gi-Oh I mean you have more space to explore and more place for the format to adjust itself to. If something gets out of whack, you give up both of those things when you cut the number of color pairs in half. Another thing that happens when you have 10 color pairs is all your three color pairings have more overlap too. So like imagine if you have a set that has just the five allied color pairs. Well, if you're red, green, white, then you get red, green and green white. That's great. But if you're black, white, green, you only get one of those if you have all 10 pairs. Every three color combination has three different pairings that are all supported. So you get all the gold cards and such from that. So I think 10 supported color pairs is a pretty big game. It doesn't mean that that's necessarily going to make your set good, but we're talking about the kinds of things that tend to typically make the sets better. Number two is the themes generally worked, especially the new themes. So for some examples like, like Convoke and and Knights worked out great. In March of the Machines Delirium, they pulled it off in Duskmourne. That's awesome. Enchantments worked out really well too. Like the Remember to blue white deck. Final Fantasy, the wizard pinging set was really good. There was some like landfall stuff you could do. Final Fantasy actually didn't score as highly on this metric. But generally if the things in the set work, like that's a. That's what you, what you want. That's exciting because you don't want it to be traps. Where the worst is feeling is you open like an uncommon with the set mechanic on it. One that's clearly a build around. Yu-Gi-Oh And then you just either take it and it doesn't work or you already know at this point in the format it doesn't work. It's not supported. It just. They didn't put enough cards in that make it work. Hate that feeling. Especially when it's a cool design. When you're like, this would have been really cool. Yu-Gi-Oh And like that. That can be such a bummer. You have things like Eldrazian Energy and MH3 definitely worked. And when you have a flagship mechanic, if it's not working, that can be pretty tough for both your draft prospects and how things play out. It's just disappointing even when you know and when you don't know, you get Tribute That also doesn't feel that good. So having the themes of your set work is a really big part, I think of a set being good. And again, just to be clear, it isn't like you check these boxes, your set's good. The last bullet point is going to, is going to deal with that a little bit. But it's like what are the things that we commonly see as characteristics of the sets that are good? And I think the, the major draft themes working is a pretty big one. Kind of sim, you know, similar but not exactly overlapping is a lot of build arounds. And one of the cool things about build arounds is every build around, especially at like uncommon level. That's the sweet spot that makes a new deck just adds more, more room in the draft format and more things to explore. So a great example is when you have Lurrus in a format like an Ikoria to not use one of these sets. So I thought Akoria was an interesting set. That one very polarizing. The 1 Mana cycling deck was something else. When you have a, when you have a set like Ikoria where Lurrus was was present in the set, sometimes you would just open a Lurrus and get to draft a black white deck with all two drops. And that was just a completely new archetype powered entirely by Lurrus. So cool. It was awesome. And you would end up in a spot where that one card spawned an entire deck. And build arounds are just Zebra important for that reason. If you look at sets that are good, they also tend to have a lot of like a high quantity build around. And this goes back to kind of like the color pair thing where it's like well, we don't need every color pair to work. The more we have, the more likely it is that a bunch of them are going to work. And in the case of build arounds it's similar similar where it's like you don't need every build around to work and in fact they one-of-one all work. But if you have 15 build arounds and five don't work, you still have 10 that work. Yu-Gi-Oh the sets where none of them work or they only put in like 10 cool build arounds and eight of them don't work. Like that's Just that just does not play out well. Yu-Gi-Oh The best builder rounds also are the ones that bring up cards that don't otherwise see that much play. Definitely. A great example of that is in Modern Horizons 3 Marionette Apprentice. The 1, 2 black creature that either came into Blue Ice a 2, 3 or made a 1, 1 and 1. One of your artifacts or creatures died. It drained them for one. That card was very good. It made this black sacrifice deck work. It made black work, which was not the most popular color. And you would end up in a spot where the presence of that card and cards that supported it made a bunch of bad cards really good. And that's like one of the most fun things about limited magic is making your bad cards good, good. It's just winning with bad cards. It feels so good. And not even just bad cards. Having cards vary in value based on the context of what's going on, that's all we want. So that is what we want. That is clutch. Yu-Gi-Oh So besides Marinette Apprentice and MH3, you had like Ether Revolt and MH3. That was the big energy rare build around though again, uncommons are generally better for this corruption of like Tawashi and March on the machines that would like pay you off for transforming your things. Gremlin Tamer and Duskmourne for the Enchantment deck or Marshal of Zir and Marshall of the machines. These are just examples of build arounds that work some that overlap even with set themes. All of these things overlap. At the end of the day, you do need skilled designers to make it all work. But we can still look at the outputs and think like, okay, these are things that are important. Again, similar vein. It's all very connected. Bonus sheets and one off like quest cards I think are huge. A quest card and a build run are very similar. But. But here's an example. Magitech infantry in Final Fantasy the one mana one one, really a two one that you could spend three mana to get another copy of out of your deck into play. That card was awesome. The card was Zebra fun. And it was the sort of thing where once you got one, you just tried to get two, then three, then four and it would just by itself added a lot of texture to the draft format. Totally. You had, you know, cards. I already mentioned Lurrus, but Lurrus and March of the Machines even was its own thing that was on the bonus sheet and that that could spawn a new deck. Or Kenrith and March of the Machines to have this like incentive to be 4 or 5 colors Urza in Final Fantasy bonus sheet was like, now there's an artifact deck kind of out of nowhere, even though there was some support for it and other things. And to go back to your point before, it recontextualizes all these cards, some cards get a lot better when you have an Urza in play, you know, shocker. But it is cool that when you find those cards out. So I think that bonus sheets, when done well, can be, be, can be really, really nice. And you know, there's, you know, there's, there's examples of it going well and, and going a little less well. Like, we've had some sets where all the bonus sheets, the cards weren't that exciting or didn't really work that well. But I would say that March the Machines and Final Fantasy both had very strong bonus sheets. In fact, my favorite bonus sheet of all time was Brothers War because it had all these trinkety artifacts that made the cards in the main set work so much better. Yu-Gi-Oh I didn't think Brothers War was quite an A, at least for most people, so I didn't put it on the list. But I, I do love that set. I, I, that, that's a great example of a really, really well done bonus sheet. Those, I don't know, it feels like when they're done right, they add a ton. Yu-Gi-Oh And they, they, they just add a lot of extra flavor. They add a lot of extra decks to draft. They had a lot of extra stuff that's cool. And, and I think that, Yu-Gi-Oh and I think that that is important. You know, that's the sort of thing that can, that can make this, make, make the formats play out much better and work much better. Another thing that going on that they, you know, the presence of which is a negative is these sets are typically not dominated by one strategy or color. It doesn't mean that there isn't a best one and best is fine. It doesn't mean that there isn't like stuff that maybe is a little obnoxious to, you saw too much of. But, but we don't have like things like Red Black in the Hobbit or Blue White and Marvel. Like, that was pretty, that was pretty intense. Like, that, that is not going to work out great most of the time. Like it's, it doesn't doom a set, but it is a negative when you play against the same cards all the time. It's a negative when you, when you feel like, okay, I didn't draft Blue White in Marvel and I'm going to play against Blue, white, three out of my seven rounds rounds. And their decks are going to be better than mine. Yu-Gi-Oh that. That's demotivating. You know, riding chrysalis and MH3 was too good. Definitely. Yu-Gi-Oh Yu-Gi-Oh But that set was. Had enough positives on the other side that it kind of survived that. And it turned out there was other things you could draft. It wasn't. It wasn't monotone Eldrazi. It was too good. If you could go back and make the Eldrazi a little bit worse, you definitely would. Yes. But it also. So again, going back to when your earlier points MH3 self corrected a bit, you know, if you had three people fighting for Eldrazi, it did even it out a bit. Yu-Gi-Oh Week one, if somebody had four writhing Chrysalis, you weren't ever going to one-of-one But that became a rarity later on and you basically, if there's too much of this stuff, it doesn't tend to work out quite as well. And then the last point, this is the one that really kind of encapsulates all of it. The gameplay was good. Yu-Gi-Oh And that's hard to define. You know, in fact, very hard to define and hard to figure out. That's the job though. The job is figuring that out. And honestly, the gameplay being good, it just. This is what makes these sets fun. And a lot of these sets, like, they just had really good gameplay. And you one-of-one really know that till you get your hands on it, but you can certainly. You can see it's a little bit like obscenity. Right, Right. I can't define it, but I'll know it when I see it. That's right. What pulls these sets together? What makes it more fun than say, you know, like a set that. I'm sure we could name a set that had a lot of these characteristics. That is a bad set because the gameplay is bad. Or I can name a set like Foundations, which doesn't have a lot of these. Yu-Gi-Oh some of them, but doesn't have a lot of them. And I think that set is really fun because the gameplay was good. The gameplay was good. Yu-Gi-Oh It's interesting. I think for me, the shortcuts that I used, like all of the things that you just talked about feed into how these come to be. But the shortcuts that I would use is if I'm a pick or two or three picks into a draft and I still don't know what my deck's going to look like, that's where I want to be. That's Where I want the format to be, I don't want to know, have it all on Rails. And if we go over to the gameplay, if there's either varied gameplay, meaning not every game is fast, not every game is slow. Like there's slow decks, there's medium decks, there's fast, fast decks. And they're all represented with some level of power that helps a lot. And also a key component to gameplay for me is if there is the ability to come back, if I can fall behind and do a few things that aren't just sweepers or whatever to get me back in the game and make it a game again. That is a hallmark of a really interesting and good gameplay. Because the ones that don't have this are the ones where you're incentivized to just, just dump everything you can onto the battlefield as quickly as possible. There's fewer decisions and the games end in exactly the way that they look like they will at any given snapshot of the game. That is what I want to avoid. I want it to be like, Yu-Gi-Oh I was way behind, but then I did this, this and this and all of a sudden I come, I came back and that's, you know, a hallmark again of really great gameplay. At the end of the day, like, it's hard to look at a set list. I mean, look at our set reviews. We get things all the time. Like, it's hard to even judge how good the cards are, much less how fun will this set be, how will it play out overall. But as it turns out, you know, there's a lot of things that these sets have in common that are, that you can look at and you can think like, oh, okay, this actually is, is going to work out pretty well. Like, and the, the more of these things that the sets have, the, the more often that they are going to be successful, at least in my experience. Yu-Gi-Oh same same here. And by the way, you know, you can shortcut some of this stuff up front. Like if it's a small set, it's going to be really hard to hit any of these milestones. Just going to be really, really hard. And you know, that's a shortcut way of, of figuring out why those don't. Didn't really work for us Zebra well. It is. You really do need to draft and play with the sets to, to really understand those at the end of the day, whether it meets these requirements. Great stuff, Luis. I a little bit of a zoom out moment for us to kind of take, take stock of what's been going on around us in the bigger game of magic as well as our world of limited competitive play. That type of stuff over here too. And it's an interesting place to be. Overall, I think it's actually pretty good. You know, I, I really like that Wizards of the coast has put effort into high level, limited stuff. And I have continued to view any efforts that they make to try to squeeze extra money as options for the player base that they are more than welcome to turn down if they decide that it's too much or they don't want it. I don't hold any ill regard for a company trying to see if they can make more money. I think that the, the, it depends how they do it. Yu-Gi-Oh But I mean I, I believe that for the most part things come out of the wash and intrinsically companies get to, get to try to maximize their profits. Yu-Gi-Oh And I think if they do it unethically, then they don't last very long, you know, and I don't like that, that they, that they tried that. But you know, it doesn't. I think everything that Wizards has done has been perfectly above board. It's just more of a, you know, are you overwhelmed? Well, then you should probably back off a little bit. Is this, you know, too much stuff on the plate? Well, then don't buy all of it. That's, that's how I see it. And if I see a product that even I think maybe is aimed for me and I don't like it, then I one-of-one do it. And if I do, then I will. And I mean, I think it is important to vote with your wallet. That's part of the reason, like I said, I don't play the small sets because if we, if we, if we reject them, it does matter. Like yes, you can argue about whether they should listen to profits. They're going to. We know that you can make an impact, not you individually, that big, but if everyone makes the same choice and they're like, Yu-Gi-Oh people really didn't like the Hobbit. We shouldn't, you know, and they didn't like Spiderman. They like Ninja Trolls. They've already done this. Like they're going to move away from those things and you have a little bit of power, a little bit of control over that or at least a little bit of influence. That's right. Great stuff, Luis. Let's call it a show there. If you want to find us on social media, Marshall Underscore LR and Luis's lsv, pretty much everywhere. You can find everything related to the podcast over@lrcast.com I mentioned last week, but it's redesigned on the following page. It's called. You can Find link Luis's YouTube channel where you can see him drafting Cube. A little bit of Hobbit in there. I think you got one of them in. And then a whole bunch of other cool stuff, including your rotisserie stuff, including, I assume, coming up soon, some stuff from the. What do you call it? The Lotus Lounge Tournament. The. It's the. Right now, it's the Lotus Lounge Draft league. We're probably gonna vational or something. I don't know about all that. We're probably gonna figure out something. Yu-Gi-Oh But one-of-one great stuff over at Luis's YouTube. Make sure you check that out. I want to say thank you to our Patreon supporters as well as Ultimate Guard for their support of the show and to everybody in the Ultimate Guard Twitch stream who has been hanging out with us for this episode of the show. And again, we do that once a month over on Ultimate Guard live on Twitch as well. That's going to do it for this one. We'll see you next week. You know, speaking of private equity, I just had that exact experience today where the, you know, plumbing and H vac company we've used a bunch and generally been happy with did get new ownership about a year and some ago, and they come in for their, like, yearly inspection, which we're okay with. We want them to inspect. They don't charge us for it. But guess what the incentive is. Can you. Can you guess? I can guess. It's finding a bunch of problems, which, yes, we do want them to find the actual problems. We don't want them to find the not actual problems. And they're like, well, you know, when your furnace was installed and this is new, it was about four years old. They. They left these bolts in that they're supposed to take out. They've been in the whole time and are like, they're like, you know, it could cause some wear and tear. And we have some concerns. We think, you know, it might be safest to replace the furnace. And I was thinking in my head thinking like, oh, well, they're like, because of, you know, this and this. And they're like explaining some things, but it's not even like, usually they do this, so. And sometimes it sounds legit, sometimes it doesn't. And this didn't even sound legit at all. And it was like, okay, buddy. So I was just like, okay, Yu-Gi-Oh can you give me the Your write out, your write up with all the as much detail as you can put in. I'm gonna get a second opinion. This, you know, we're talking five, $10,000. Like, it's just, you know, it'd be responsible to do that. And of course they're fine with that. And if they got offended, I also wouldn't care. It turns out after, you know, looking into it, it's like, yes, maybe this could at some point cause a problem. There's no evidence that it has. And it's at the most, charitably, they're exaggerating the problem. You know, they're being overly conservative when they're saying they're about that. So my advice to you is when, when you have someone saying like, hey, you need this work done, like, Yu-Gi-Oh you, you really do want to try to do, do your due diligence. When we're, if we're talking, if they're like, hey, there's this problem, it's going to cost us $75 to fix. I would have probably said, like, Yu-Gi-Oh that sounds fine, do it. Sure. When it's $5,000. Like, I am going to talk to someone else. Like, that is. And do not let social awkwardness deter you from doing this. This is sales tax 101. I basically have a policy when I have these repair folks in My House, unless it's like my pipe burst, I need to call you to fix it. When I don't agree to anything while they're there. You want all of them like, hey, hey, I'm gonna, I'll give you guys a call. They one-of-one fix this. If I call them and say, hey, I want you to fix it, they'll be right back in 20 minutes, you know, or whatever. Maybe I have to make an appointment. It'll take an hour or two. But I just don't agree to it. Just go, go, go talk to another professional. You know, go talk to someone if you know someone who knows stuff about this, you know, look it up online. Like it's easy enough to do that. Like it. There really is no reason to agree to this when the incentives are such that they should push you to get extra work done that you don't one time. Are, are you going to use that company going forward? I actually might not. This was egregious. This was like way worse than in the past. I think, I think that would be the third strike for me. Yu-Gi-Oh Yu-Gi-Oh Sat.