Limited Resources 856 - Vintage Cube Updates and New Archetypes!

Foreign. What is up, everybody? Welcome to another episode of Limited Resources. This episode, number 856. My name is Marshall. I'm one of your limited resources. And joining me on the line all the way from Denver, Colorado, it's Luis Scott Vargas. Luis, we get to talk Cube this week. Yeah, it's the best. I love the Cube and you know, they brought an arena Cube back and it's. And it's very sweet. That's right. Ever since arena came out with the Power Cube, we've really felt kind of more unleashed because interestingly, Cube has become the evergreen format for us limited players because it is now the consistent through line with regards to our play pattern. New set comes out, we do set reviews, we get used to it, we dive in, we play it, we enjoy it. And right when it's kind of hitting the end of its Runway, or maybe we're starting to look around for something else, Boom. Arena powered Cube plus Magic Online Cubes are up. And then we cube for a while and then we repeat the process. But the thing that keeps happening over and over again is Cube. And as huge Cube fans anyway, both Luis and I feel that it is the kind of pinnacle of limited play and in many ways it's a pinnacle of ways to enjoy magic in general. We're really happy and we're going to be diving into the arena powered Cube changes. They do continue to aggressively make changes to the arena powered Cube and we're going to talk about them as well as some of the bigger picture topics associated with it on the show this week. Before we do, we wanted to say thank you to everybody who supports us on Patreon. It's patreon.com LimitedResources if you'd like to support us there. We also want to say thank you to Ultimate Guard for their support of the show. Ultimate Guard makes amazing products. They really do. It's one of those rare companies that seems to have been able to put together the two difficult things in a product, which is the materials that you use to make it and the design that you use, you know, to actually use those materials properly. And they've done a great job with that. I really appreciate that about them. You know, product first type company where it's like they kind of understand that if their stuff isn't good, nothing else really matters. You can spend as much money on marketing and all that kind of stuff as you want, but if your product stinks, it's not going to matter. And they get it. Their stuff's really great. If you need to protect your cards, your decks, your collection, you will find stuff to do so@ultimate guard.com and if you want to buy something, you can pick it up from your favorite online retailer or local game store. Thank you, Ultimate Guard. We really do appreciate it. Dang it. I was supposed to get a Patreon Question of the Week question, but I didn't. I. I know what I'll do. Luis. There's like a little. There's like a quiz. Well, we'll put it a little later in the show, but I'm going to be asking you questions. It's only four questions, but it was part of the article that Zach Barish put up. He. Remember, we had him on. He's on the show, the curator, Right. Of the Arena Powered Cube. And much of what we're going to be talking about on the show today comes from an article that he wrote about this iteration of the Powered Cube. I'll put a link to it in the show notes as well for people that want to read it for themselves. But I will ask you some of the questions from that. But we'll wait till we get into the show a little bit for that. Now let's do a crack a pack, Louise. Let's do it. Because that is one way to dive right in. There are many changes, by the way. Zach is pretty aggressive. You know, I think in the past, the expectation for changes on the arena or. And. Or magic, I should just say the magic online vintage Cube was. It felt like it was a little bit more. Let's get in a few of the new cards and let's be very selective about specific cards that we feel that we want to try out or cut from the Cube. And so it didn't feel like it shifted that much. That is not true with Arena Powered Cube. Zach is. He's kind of ready to rumble and he will make big changes. There are, I believe I counted 84 cards changed out in this version, including some cards that you would not generally expect to see change. For example, a Parallax Wave. That's the big one. That's the headliner that I can guarantee you for a lot of the Cube's existence. No one would have, like, really considered cutting Parallax Wave. Yeah. Especially in the last few years where it's really come into its own. Right. Parallax Wave is like, super respected now and. And a really great performer, really, in any deck that can cast it. So anyway, lots of big changes. We're going to be talking about all those on the show. But the Cracka pack's a good way to kind of dive in, so let's do that. Our first card up is. And this is a card that's freshly back in the cube, and it's indicative of a whole grouping of cards. It's Seething Song two in a red instant that adds five red. But it really is a harbinger of combos. Right. Yeah. There. There is now, like, more support for both red and black combos with, like, Seating Song, Pyretic Ritual. The. The. My favorite card that. That returned, of course, Bulls's Citadel. Citadel being back is awesome. I. I am very, very happy to see that. And we'll. We'll, you know, we'll see how that goes. But that is why Seething Song is in the pack. Yeah. And Seething Song is probably one of the worst examples of cards for that. But of that grouping of cards. Next up, where are you at on Lingering Souls these days, Louise? I love the Lingering Souls. Honestly. I. I think Lingering Souls is fantastic. I. I end up. I end up taking Lingering Souls a lot of the time, especially if I'm like, in like a Luris deck, for example. So I. I think I wouldn't second pick it. I'm looking to, like, wheel it, that sort of thing. But I think Lingering Souls is very, very good. Are you looking to discarded or get it into your graveyard for value and just flash it back, or are you a cast the front end, Cast the back end, back end type of player? I rarely have it in decks that can't ultimately do both. Okay. But I. I think that there's a lot of different ways to use it. You can use it in a deck where, yeah, you're discarding it to, like, a currency converter or a psychic frog Reanimator deck with, like, faithless looting will often want to splash Lingering Souls. Like, what you can do is the kind of like, sketchy Lingering Souls splash where you have maybe a couple ways to cast the front end, but you're mostly red black, and you're just aiming to discard it. Or you can have the opposite, which is like your white blue, and you have a couple black sources to flash it back is all. Okay. But you're aiming for. I'd like to be touching both of those. Next up. Man, I almost never play this card. Maybe you do. Enlighten tutor. The only time Enlightened tutor makes it into my decks is when I have Time Vault, which isn't even in this cube. Yeah. So it's. No, it's not. Not a card. I'm I'm, I'll, I'll say though, Luis, there is another combo that, that is searchable for actually either halves of it with Enlightened Tutor that they just put back in. The cube hasn't been in there forever. Painter Grindstone. Yeah. So this is an interesting one. So Painter Grindstone, Painter Servants 2, Mana 1, 3 and you, you choose a color and then everything is that color. All cards and decks, cards and hands, cards and play, whatever. And then Grindstone's a one man artifact three tap mill the opponent for two. But if the two cards share a color, do it again. And of course with Painter Servant out, you just mill their whole deck. I like two card combos. I think this is a perfectly appropriate one to add. I've been debating adding this to my cube and I think that there is definitely, there's definitely something cool about having these kinds of two card combos. Yeah. And I, I, we, and we'll talk about that a little bit more. But enlightened tutor for it. I mean, it does get either half right. If you're good at doing it, then, yeah. Nothing wrong with Enlightened tutor, but you're certainly not taking it till much, much later. Right, right, right. Next card is one. I know. I'll catch your eyes. Verdant catacombs. Yeah, Verdant catacombs is great. Starting with a Fetchland is kind of like I, the, the best equivalent I, I can say is like, you know how in a normal draft, like a normal format draft, whatever, like the best common or one of the best commons was. That's what feeling like starting with a Fetchland in cube is. You're not taking a bomb and not taking a piece of power. You're not taking a broadside bombardiers, swords to Plowshares, Minsc and Boo. You know, you're not taking that level of card, but you're also taking just a really good card that's going to make your deck better and you're going to be pretty happy to put in your deck. So it's kind of an interesting spot. It is, yeah. That's a, that's a safe backup plan. Next up is Wastewood Verge, which is the green black verge. So we'll obviously take Verdant over that. Next up is Concealed Courtyard, which again, Verdant catacombs is just kind of, there's no land that primarily just produces mana. You know, there's, you know, there's other things like Clarity Academy or Saga or Caracas, but there's, there's no land that produces the mana producing land. That's better than a Fetch land this early later in the draft. Like let's say you're blue black and you just really need your underground sea because you have a Lorian revealed in a burden Catacombs. Sure. But pick one, pack one. I would never take any like tundra, volcanic island, Katria Triumph, undercity sewers, any of those over any Fetchland. Fetchlands are, are better. Next up is Grim Lava Mancer, AKA the Lava Man. I. I like that this came back. I think that Grim Lava Maner is a cool card. It's just like a nice little value card. Also they, you know what, as artifact tokens is more supported. You know, you little, little creatures are things you can kind of deal with. Like Grim Lava Manor is good at doing that. Yeah. It overperforms on board. It's like not a high pick, but when you actually have it out, it's actually quite annoying. Next up is Caustic Bronco. This really seems to have carved out a place in the. In the cube. Is it here to stay? Yeah, I think so. I mean it's, it's equivalent to Dark Confidant and I think, don't think Dark Confidant's like in a hurry to leave. I would say Caustic Broncos. On balance, slightly worse than Dark Confidant, but it's really not by a whole lot. Yeah. And having a little redundancy is kind of cool. Next up is Astrologians Planisphere. This is a solid card. If you have a reason to play it, then then I don't, I don't mind. It's not a card. I'm generally like gonna go out of my way to go get like it's good in like if you care about artifacts, it's good if you have a lot of spells and card draw. Like, you know, I've had blue white decks that are like blue black decks, like templish decks that wouldn't mind playing this. But it's definitely not a card you need to be prioritizing. Here's your curve into Lingering Souls. Staff of the Storyteller. I love Staff of the Storyteller. I'm actually a huge fan of this card. I just think, I think it's just very strong. Yeah, it by itself, it's, it's not quite two men. It's kind of three mana total for a one one plus a card. But you can spend that other mana later. And then when you start getting other cards, you know, you start making other tokens. Then like the Staff keeps repeating. Like, cards like Staff of the Storyteller are why Boros win so much, because it's not just that they're a fast beatdown deck, it's that they can also be casting cards like Staff of the Storyteller and just kind of crushing the opponent, you know? Totally. Yeah. That's the kind of card that can just sort of quietly run away with the game. Next up is Mana. Tithe Manitide is a fine card. It's. It's not one that I'm. I'm actively pursuing generally, but it's. It's a card I'm happy to play. Not a very Scott Vargasian card there. Oh, this next one's a. A bomb. It's Crocus. You mentioned it earlier. Oh, yeah. I mean, barring a piece of power, I think that you're going to end up taking Caracas. Crocus is just broken, like. And it keeps getting better. It gets better and better and better because they keep printing more Legends. More of the creatures are Legends. Yeah. There aren't that many cards that invoke quite as much despair as a Caracas. When you're just looking at your hand of like, I've got a questing beast, you know, I've got, like, Adeline, I've got Inti, I've got Layla. Just like, there's just a million Legends. You play Turn two, Jace Brin's Prodigy, and they just go, caracas, bounce your thing. And it's just like, oh, my God, are you serious? Like, yeah. And, you know, this is also an effect of how Cube has changed over the years, right? Mainly with the advent of, hey, let's let in a bunch of cards from. Not Core Product. Core Product has, in fact had a lot more Legends put into it as well. But if you go outside of that realm to Spider man Set with 15,000 legends, it's just like, okay, like, that's crazy. But then if you go outside of the core products and you look at cards like, or sets, especially for Commander, they are just. I mean, think about many, many of the really great additions to the Cube that aren't in a core product. And tons of the creatures are actually legendary. So Karakas is just on a rocket ship. It was already good enough because the floor was so high. It just asked actually nothing of you. And then it just keeps getting better and better and better. I mean, I've played against Karakas and had a Legend in playing three or two more in my hand, and I'm like, this is just insane. Like, all my Creatures are legendary, right? Because in Cube, it doesn't matter. Like, you know, legendary. You know, just in the same way that karakas is legendary, it doesn't matter. In Cube, there's only one of them next up. Well, there it is. We got the Grindstone, which, you know, Luis mentioned earlier about how it works. One thing I did want to ask you though, Luis is on. We don't have many of these, especially in the arena Cube, just strictly two card combos like Grindstone technically can mill your opponent or mill yourself, but it's just too slow unless you're actually doing like, it just doesn't have any utility. Right. Unless you're, you're actually doing the combo. So where and how do you approach taking such a narrow combo? I mean, it's literally two cards. You have to get both of them and if you don't, either of them is basically useless. So like taking an early pick on it, it's kind of a disaster. So how do you, how do you approach? Depends a bit on what the combo is. But in the case of Painter's Grindstone, yeah, neither half is very good. It's a little bit like Thassa's Oracle Demonic consultation where like you can technically Hail Mary Dem Consultation. You don't win those games very often, of course. Do Oracle, you could technically play as a blocker. Doesn't do a whole lot. Or Time Vault with Key, where the key sometimes does something and the Time Vault sometimes does something, but most of the time it doesn't do anything. My experience with these combos and Cube is that if you're good at tutoring, it's not so bad. If another thing is, can these cards help advance your game plan a little bit, even if they're not great? And what I mean by that is imagine Painter Servant Grindstone in like an Academy deck. Well, a one minute artifact, it's not that bad. In an Academy deck, sometimes it's. Sometimes it's fine, you know, and that, that can help there. Like imagine, you know, if you play to this theme and you have Arcbound Ravager in your deck, any, any artifact in play does something with a Ravager. So it's not like they're straight up zeros, but even if they're straight up zeros, the way I look at this combo is you can play Grindstone and it's usually like pretty safe. And then you want to go Painter Servant milieu in one spell swoop. And that's five mana, six mana. If you, if you're trying to save the Grindstone for the. The same turn. You can also just run out painter and then hope they can't kill it, which sometimes will be okay too. Overall, if you don't have any tutors, this combo is not very good. It's a little bit like actually thopter sword thought, you know, Thopter Foundry Sword of the Meek is probably a better comparison. Where technically the thopter founder is a little bit and the sword does like, a little bit. But most of the time, you just don't play this, this combination of cards unless you have a couple ways to kind of pick it up, because otherwise you're going to end up in a spot where it's just not doing that much for you. And then would you. As far as when to pick it goes, do you approach it similar to how you do the other narrow combos where, like, if you see a grindstone, pick six or seven or eight or something like that, and you're like, well, there's nothing. You know, maybe there's some random dual land or whatever, but not a good one. And you're like, I'll just pick up the grindstone and keep my eye out for the painter. Is. Is that the approach you. The kind of hedging style? Yeah. Like, if you're. If, if you've got a reasonable, like, pack where it's just. Or like a pack that doesn't have anything that you really care about, then yeah, it's totally fine to hedge and just take half of these combos. I will often do that. Yeah. Next up, we've only got two more cards left, but they're gonna have to be better than a Caracas to get us off of that. Natural or not that many cards do. Yeah. Natural order is not one of them. No, natural order I is a card that I think has seen slightly better days. It's. It's definitely got some potential. But yeah, for the most part, I think natural order is not really where you want to be. And then the last one is Winds of Abandon. Winds of Abandoned is an okay card. I. I don't actually find myself playing with the card that often because. Because I, I just. If that it's best in these, like, assertive decks with a bunch of creatures, which I. Not. Which is like offensive sensibilities. Yeah, well, I don't know if I'd say that, but. But yes, but I, I think that Wins is a good card. I just certainly wouldn't take it over Caracas. There's just no way. Yeah, yeah, we're gonna take the Caracas here every Single time. Okay. So we windmill Caracas and we move on with our life. And as such. So let's talk about some of the. The big picture changes that we've got coming in here. As I mentioned before, you know, we had Zach on the show, and he is not shy about changing out big chunks. 84 cards here. Here's some of the bigger picture notes on what happened. And then we'll talk to Luis about some of the takeaways, how that actually affects us sitting down to draft. And again, I'll put the link to Zach's article in our show notes as well. And then also, Luis, you did a video, right? You. You did a reaction video. Mm. So I'll put a link to that as well. What. What is the video about? It was basically looking at all the cards going out and all the cards going in and just kind of talking through all the changes. Oh, that's awesome. So, yeah, no, I thought it came out pretty well. Good, good. So they'll. I'll watch that right after we're done. And there's also. There'll be a link to that in the show notes as well, if you'd like to watch it. So a couple of the big picture changes. Secrets of Strixhaven is here. They decided to try out a whole bunch of cards because there's actually kind of a bunch of cards that do fit in the cube. They put in all of the Emeritus cards, you know, which are kind of funny because they have a lot of the cards that are in the cube anyway attached to them. So those are going to be in their lead Interceptor. They're trying out Erode. They're trying out both Wild Growth and Magma Blood Archaics, which is kind of interesting, especially given how free the mana bases can feel. They're also doing. I don't really get the Archaics, to be honest. We'll have to see how they play out. They're. They are at least somewhat strong. So, like, I. I could see it working out. Yeah. I'm a little skeptical. Yeah. They're doing a grouping, we'll talk about in a minute, of more assertive green creatures, which is kind of interesting. And then from the bonus I do too, they brought in Sylvan Library and also Armageddon, which are making their debut on Arena. So the Green Lands theme that Zach actually talked about when he was on a show, it's been reduced a little bit in favor of this more assertive green creature package, which, again, we'll talk about in a minute. The prior version also had a slew of black creatures that they wanted to try out. And it's kind of funny, you can read about the details, but basically it didn't make a change in win percentage. It didn't seem like super popular. And so they're going to go away from it for now. I. I think that one you just kind of call a checkbox like it wasn't a loss, it wasn't a win, but they just decided we can use these spots for something different. And in fact they're clearing those up to go for the combo slots that are coming back. One of the biggest changes are assertive artifacts, they're calling it. So these are more aggressively themed. I mean, arcbound Ravagers back in here, etc. And I've actually played against this deck a couple of times and it's a little scary. I'm like, wow. There was sort of a secret under line support for this type of archetype already with a bunch of cards that spit out artifacts or can create a massive artifact board. And now the question is, did the creatures and the payoffs that they put in push it over the top to actually just get your opponent dead in a turn or do something really broken? And I'm. I'm kind of like. I think maybe yes, based on what I've seen so far. So that's a thing. And then I already liked a lot of the artifact token stuff before even they made these changes. Same. So I found myself playing Saheeli. And what's the, the blue red guy, you know, that spits out art. Iconoclast ravenous robots. Like there, there is. What's the one? I'm thinking of 3pi for sure. But what's the other one? I'm thinking the, the artifact, the 34 or whatever. You know, the 3 drop from. Oh, Pinnacle Emissary. Yeah, Pinnacle Emissary as well. And you know, I'm. I'm kind of. I've always, I've. I've always been impressed about how many tokens those type of cards actually can spit out. Like it kind of gets crazy. But you do need to find something to do with them. And sometimes it's skull clamp. But these days it looks like it can be a few different new cards that they've added. We'll talk about in a bit. Big headliner combos back. It's kind of funny because they said that they went through the individual win rates on a lot of the cards and they're not that high. And you know, that's, that's been our take for A while is the combo's interesting. It's fun. Fun, but like, if you got a lot of money on the line, probably not where you want to be. It's an inconsistent, difficult to put together archetype. I shouldn't say archetype, but style of deck. And they noticed that too. But also they have a really high ceiling. Like, when you do do it, it is kind of amazing. And you get to do things unlimited that you don't get to do any other format. And it has a really high story factor. I mean, you know, a lot of your most popular videos, Luis, are when you do crazy, you know, combo storm stuff that just nobody else can do. And, you know, there is no other archetype that can give you that type of thing. And so they're going back to it, and you mentioned it, but you got your bolus to Citadel back. Yeah, that's the. My favorite change. Really bolster. Citadel is just a really fun card. I don't really understand having Tinker in the cube without Citadel. So, like, it. It is. It has worked out nicely. I do think that combo isn't that. That good. And generally, if your goal is to win, you shouldn't really be approaching cube that way. But it's also like combo. Yeah. Is really fun. And like you said, this is. That's like the whole point of the cube, right? Like, is. Is you want to have fun. So I think that it. It makes a lot of sense to have that be available. It is just kind of funny that combo ends up being beloved and. And bad. But that's fine. But when it's good, it's so good. And then we talked about the painter serving grindstone coming in. It did make me think, though, of. Of a archetype or a combo that has been missing for. For a long time. And I don't know, maybe it would be better than the painter servant grindstone thing, which is the Splinter Twin package. Yeah, I knew that's exactly what you were gonna say. You know what I was gonna say, right? I. I always found it kind of interesting because it doesn't follow that trend that you talked about when you were talking about Painter grindstone, which is that the cards are very siloed off. They really only work well with each other. They don't really have any utility outside of there. Like, they're just not good enough to make the cut outside of that, unless you're really stretching. But that wasn't really the case with Splinter Twin. You know, you could look, you wanted to have the. The key Combo cards for it, no doubt about it. But you, you could throw in a pester mite or something like that, or, you know, there were other combos with some of the tap untap things. You know, you could untap mana rocks with them or do things like that that, you know, just had, like. It felt like it didn't make you feel quite as bad if you had to run one of those and didn't get the. What do you think the thought process is there? I think that the painter servant thing makes sense, especially as you are playing more artifacts and, you know, so they're like, they're naturally getting like a little bit of like some kind of free roll there. Right. And then you also can look at it as like, this is a new combo. Why this isn't, at least to me it's not obviously worse than a lot of the other combos that you might see in Cube. So I don't. My guess is painter Servant grindstone probably could have used more exploration earlier even. Okay, all right. So Luis is a supporter. Yeah. I wouldn't, I wouldn't hate seeing the splinter twin stuff come back. I, I've always, I always found it interesting in the queue because there's some tension. If you played against it and constructed when it was a thing, there was no tension. It felt like they always had it. Not a lot. Yeah, people played accordingly, which was one of the strengths of the deck, incidentally, is that people played as if you had it even if you didn't. But it felt like you did a lot because the redundancy in a 60 card deck with four of soccer is pretty, pretty raw. But here it was like, you know, you did, you know, sometimes people would play just two pieces of it. They would just have splinter twin. They would just have like a pester mite and they would play them and try to make that their kind of longer game finish. But that isn't that robust like that. You know, your, your, your pester mite gets killed or, you know, you don't have the full setup on turn four every single time. And, and it makes it a little bit more interesting. I wouldn't mind seeing it. And then the last thing, big picture wise, is not card specific, but it is sort of philosophy specific, which is that. Remember when we had Sirkovitz on to confirm what people had been feeling, which was that I never opened two pieces of power in one pack. And it turns out that that was true. You couldn't. In the prior versions, they had it coded that way for the Collation, end of things, which is kind of a complicated topic, you know, about how the cards get distributed. It's a difficult thing to set up so that it makes sense and so that things feel different and things don't overlap too hard and blah, blah, blah. But it also felt a little unnatural that you would just never get it. And by the way, it wasn't just the Power nine. They included Soul Ring and Mana Crypt in that group as well. So there were actually 11 cards that you just couldn't open two of. But they decided that they did a little bit of a deep dive about the psychology of how these things are opened and also some of the assumptions that they had made. The main assumption being that if you opened a piece of power, it was an automatic pick. They. They saw it as it wasn't. But, yeah, it wasn't that it was, like, boring. It was an exciting but easy decision. You would just take it. And so why would you put your, you know, player base in the position of having to choose between two when they were always just going to take the one? But it turns out that's not actually true. And also there are some interesting times when you have these. It's also kind of always interesting to get past a piece of power. So they've changed it. They said that it doesn't have to be the eternal change. They said ultimately the data changed our minds by disproving one of our assumptions, which is that it is not an automatic pick to take power. And when they dove into the data, they saw, no, actually, that's not true. So they're going to change it for now. But Zach actually asked for feedback on it about how people felt about it, because, you know, it seems like a kind of whatever serves the audience best type scenario from Zach's perspective. So he wants to know, so I want to know from you, what is your take, Luis, on the fact that you can now, and I have already, in fact, opened multiple pieces of power in one pack. I mean, it's exactly what I said on Twitter when this first kind of came out. It's, I think, just about strictly better to have multiple pieces of power available. I don't think it's really close. It's not that it's a huge, you know, magnitude and how close something is in terms of a decision is. Are not. Not correlated, not really at all. But in this particular case, I think it's very clear that you should have multiple pieces of power. But it also doesn't matter like, that much. The reasons I think it's clear. I think that opening multiple use of power is exciting. It's fun. Oh, do I want Time walk or mock staff? Totally. That's a really fun debate to make. And do you care about people sending each other screenshots? Of course you do. You want that to happen. And what am I more likely to do? Send you a screenshot of a pack where I'm taking a time walk or one where, look, dude, I opened Time walk. Mana, Crypt, Ancestral. What do you do here? Or even just not. What do you do? Just like, ha, look at that. It's crazy. It's really fun getting past power. So getting past power, which could still happen in the first world, but so obviously a lot more likely now. Also, yeah, making assumptions. Like, it's not an unreasonable assumption, but I understand why they made it. But yeah, your player base doesn't care about like, isn't going to automatically be like, oh, yeah, I have to take power. There's a lot of people drafting Cuber don't know what they're doing or just doing different things because that's what they want to do. Like, those are all fine places to be, you know, so totally you add all, you add all that up. And also it mimics just the way real packs work. And like when people just do their own drafts, like, again, I can't really find any evidence in favor of, of the way they had it before, to be honest. So yeah, yeah, I like the decision. I do too. And it also hits on a, on a more philosophical level for me, which is that I think as time has gone by with magic, I've realized that I'm just, I'm anti curation. Like, I don't like it when the products and the experiences are feel curated. They have to feel authentic and real to me. Like the randomness has to feel that way with like, oh, I opened two pieces of power in a pack because that can happen sometimes. And when it literally never does, it feels like there's somebody pulling the puppet strings that is making that not happen. Now the truth is that is exactly what's happening. But I can feel it when I never open that. And then I'm told, yeah, you, we have it programmed that way, but when it's done right, it doesn't feel that way. It still feels random. And to me, you know, this is a, again, a little bit more of a tangent, but it really matters to me, I think, which is that, you know, if I think about Commander, for example, you know, one of the great appeals to Commander, from my perspective, you Know, as a non Commander player, but I have played before. I did have some Commander decks when it first came out back before. Yeah, you and I have played one on one. We obviously played one on one on that cruise ship, as one does. As what does? Yeah, but, but yeah, you know, the appeal to it to me was that I could try to find obscure cards that would fit into my list that I didn't, that people had forgotten about or that was sitting in some binder at the local game store rotting because it was too expensive for any other format. Not monetarily, but, you know, it's six mana to go get a bunch of lands or whatever, and nobody wants that. But it actually fit in my Commander deck. These are the types of gems and the cool non curated experience that I thought was really neat. Once they started printing stuff that was like, that had the word Commander on it or just was like referencing your Commander, my interest plummeted because I'm not digging around in the boxes and trying to find those treasures. I'm just being handed them. And they were all better versions of anything that you could find. So, you know, you kind of felt like you were trying too hard if you didn't use those types of cards. And I'll tell you, Louise, I do not want to see curated Cube cards. It already feels like it's verging on that with all of the extra product stuff. So it's not. There's no challenge in like, you know, trying to find the really great stuff, the stuff that sticks in our brains from a certain limited or constructed format. Instead, we're just cherry picking the best cards, you know, from all of the stuff that Magic releases, which I don't actually like that much. I prefer it the other way. But if they ever came out with, you know, stuff that was Cube, like vintage Cube specific cards, I would hate it. I, I would run from it. I don't want it like. And you're saying what a lot of Commander players say, you know, is that right? That there, there is definitely controversy about, you know, like, is this, is it, Is it good for that? They make, you know, cards that are specifically for Commander. Okay, yeah. And I would fall on the camp of I think it's better without. But anyway, I think that this hits that same vein, which is, you know, I don't want it to be curated. I want it to be real. I want it to be, you know, us digging these cards out of the binders and putting them in the cube or picking the ones for nostalgic or historic or Power level reasons, and I want to open them up and see what happens. And I don't want to feel like. Like somebody's controlling that too much. So I like this change quite a bit. We've got takeaways for these things as well. But Luis, I do want to ask you, because this is. The little quiz thing is actually relevant to the multiple cards per pack. So there's four questions here and they're kind of interesting. So question number one. What was the most first pick card in Arena Powered Cube? This includes your first, second or third pack. So not only pack one Black Lotus, it has to be. I will tell you the answer. It is Black Lotus. And Zach says this likely surprises very few of you. Black Lotus is probably the most iconic magic card of all time and arguably the most powerful. If you guess, Soul Ring, Time Lock, Mox, Sapphire, moxjet, Ancestral Recall, Mox Ruby, Mox Pearl, Mox Emerald, or Mana Crypt. Those are the next nine in order. So you were close. Question number two. What percentage of the time was the aforementioned card picked first? So what. What percentage of the time was Black Lotus picked first when it was in a pack? 97% of the time. Oh, you had it. It's 96. Sound like I had it. Sounds like I got it wrong. No, you. You said 90 and I. And I know you were going for six, not seven. And then we changed it. And Zach says we expected that number to be closer to 100% with players only passing it because they had connection issues or didn't notice it in the pack. We can't know for certain what's in players hearts and minds, but the data strongly suggests that not taking Black Lotus was intentional, not accidental. Players repeatedly chose specific cards over Black Lotus when they were in the packs together. The further down the list we went, the more players surprised us. What if there was a pack with Sol Ring or two or Time Walk and no other pieces of power more than 10% of the time they were passed? Mana crypt was passed 20% of the time. And Zach says Powers actively chose not to draft power. And by the way, Luis, we got work to do, dude. Like our work is never done if 150 players are just passing Mana crew. Yeah, that doesn't actually surprise me. Manacrypt is certainly the one on its face that looks the worst, but it's arguably the most busted. I. I mean that. Yeah. Question number three. What card was most frequent, frequently picked over Black Lotus? It's for. I'm gonna guess either Soaring or Time Walk. I gotta think about it though, I think Time walk. This is unbelievable. What is it? It's Oracle of the Alpha. Oh, no, that is believable. That is actually like, okay, explain this to me as a game designer because I'm like, like, this is what Zach said. He, he said, why draft Black Lotus when you could have a chance at playing all the power? Is that tongue in cheek or is that where you were going too? Well, it's not exactly tongue in cheek in the sense that, like that, that is. People love Oracle of the Alpha for good measure. It's a really fun card. One of the best designs they've ever made. Yeah, I think, I think, I think it's awesome. So, yeah, I do. Like, is it, is it good? You mean it's okay? Is it worth taking over all the cards people take it over? Well, no, clearly not. You know, that's just, that's just what people are going to end up doing. But. So this is what Zach said about it and I think it backs up what you're saying here too, Louise. He said, we found this both astonishing and also saw logic to it. It suggested a much broader audience for Arena Power Cube than we anticipated. Despite its high complexity and skill floor, there's a sizable audience that it wasn't just optimizing to win or in it for the first and foremost to play with power. If we were seeing Parallax Wave or a Johnny Nakatl pariah picked over Black Lotus rather than Oracle of the Alpha, that would have suggested the unexpected data was caused by players who were highly motivated to win dedicated Boros cards like Parallax Wave and Ajani have higher win rates than Black Lotus. But much of that is due to Black Lotus going in in every deck, while Boros Agro enjoys a lower play rate and a higher win rate. I want to stress that we're still talking about a very small sample size. Black Lotus was picked first 96% of the time and we're just looking at the 4% sliver, but that sliver was eye opening and got us looking elsewhere. Last question. That totally makes sense to me. It's really interesting. Last question is what is the longest power has gone in a draft before being picked? Seven maybe. And we'll start with. Yeah, so, so pick it for, for anything in the power nine let's start with. And then we'll go card by card. My guess is like mana crypt is going to be the one that's got. That's taken last. And my guess is probably something like seventh or eighth pick. Really. I mean, this is all the Power 9, Louise. Oh, it's Time Twister. That. If we're counting. If. Yeah, I, I almost default to not counting Time Twister, but yes, if Time Twister is one of the cards we're talking about, then that's easily going to be the last pick. That's not. Yeah, close. This is the. We'll call it the power 11, including time twister. So Time Twister was actually the absolute latest pick. So I bet there's a 15th pick. Time tester. I bet there's straight up. Just. In fact, that happens. No one took this card of the sample that they looked at that happened 16 times. That. That Time Twister was the last pick. Black Lotus. What do you think the latest Black Lotus went fourth. That is correct. That is. Great job. Yes, that is exactly right. And this is on a large sample as well. So, yes, fourth pick. And then there's a big group of cards that have been sixth picks, including Soul Ring, Time Walk, Ancestral Recall, Mox Pearl, and Mox Emerald. Those of each of those were at least one time in their sample, a sixth pick. So imagine getting a six pick. Time Walk. That would be. Oh, my. That sounds like. That sounds like a lot swollring. Make it through six. Like it's colorless. Like, what are we doing? And then kind of funny, but Mox Jet and Mox Ruby went seventh, which is kind of funny. And then this one, I, I guess is. Is along the lines of what you were saying. Mana crypt went 12th one. Time 12th is pretty late. Pretty late. Pretty dang late. But yeah, Time Twister is the only one that went late. Anyway, those are the four questions. I thought they were fun. You did a good job. Yeah. I'm not surprised. This is your. This would be your lane. But you were 1% off on the Black Lotus. You picked Black Lotus and. And you nailed when Black Lotus was last picked as well. So you actually crushed this thing. There's no way you would. You could have got Oracle the Alpha. That. That is. That is just a total. No, it's one of those. It's one of those answers, honestly, that makes sense when you. When you hear it as to like, oh, yeah, this is what's going on. But also is like, oh, yeah, I wouldn't have just gassed it off the top of my head. Yes. Yeah, for sure. Okay, so what are some of the takeaways to these changes? And then of course, we could go through and look at some of the individual cards as well. If you want to talk about anything that either Left or came in. I. I managed to do about five drafts so far, maybe six at this point. And I think that the. Some of the takeaways, big takeaways. One is that our artifacts are much more supported. Like that is just straight up, like factual. There's so many more cards that care about artifacts, which I. I'm of two minds about. On the one hand, I like it because I love drafting artifacts, but on the other hand, other hand, I don't know. Do we want to make more people draft artifacts? Do like poor. How much are we pushing this theme? And it's a different direction for the deck. Right? Like think tall versus wide. You are more of the tall artifacts type of place. Well, lately I've been doing a lot more of the go wide stuff. Like, I actually like that there's multiple different artifact decks. I have been really high on Skull Clamp, Pinnacle, Emissary, Third Path, Iconic Class for a while. Same. I. I'm a little frustrated that they took out gobble in this change because Bombardment is obviously. It's busted with a Johnny. Honestly, Bombardment of Johnny is almost like Splinter Twin, where you just combine the two cards and you win. But even setting that part aside, like Bombardment with all these token making, I think is kind of nice. There's some artifact decks. Like, you know, my buddy Mark, who I always do cube dress with, he had a artifact tokens deck with Bombardment once. That was awesome. Like, Bombardment was just legit great in that deck. Artifacts are good. I don't know if like the welder stuff is good or the like the artifact aggro stuff is good. I've got so, you know, so I think Arcbound Ravager, for example, is a fantastic card. And I, I've seen it in play once so far in my opponent's side, and it was looking pretty good. I was like, oh, that's actually pretty strong. Is Chrome Dome good? Steel Overseer, Karn Legacy Reforge? Cranium. Cranium. I'm. I'm a lot more skeptical on these cards. But overall, and I want to say this before we even to look at the whole picture, I love when they make these big changes. For the most part, if you look at their cuts, parallax wave aside. Nothing to be sad about, really. I mean, obviously if you are individually sad about a card, that's totally fine. I'm not dictating what cards you should like or not like. But overall, I think that these cuts from my vantage point are made with someone who's really in the weeds when it Comes to Cube, they are cutting the cards that I think people don't play as often as someone who curates a cube and plays it every day. Yeah. When you cut a card like Procyonic Memory or Kite Sail Larcenist, when you cut, you know. Well, cutting all the Ninja Turtle cards is a freebie. Those are all terrible, and I'm glad they're all gone. But cutting like Sunblast Healer or Timeless Dragon Ultima. Yeah, you've. You've successfully picked the bottom of the white cards, and I think they have play rates and win rates, and that probably helps them some. But even without that, like, you can look at some of these cards just if you watch people's behavior, they're not playing these cards that often. I can tell that from playing the cube. They have even more. More information at their disposal. Yeah, I've been impressed by Zach and. And his squad over there. They have really seemed to really get it. Yeah, I, you know, there's nothing. There's nothing better than feeling like the people in charge of the thing you care about are really, like, they're passionate about it. They're good at it. You know, like having a. Having a qualified steward. Like, I can imagine this is what the frustration feels like when the GM of your favorite basketball team is just like a moron. Like, totally. Like, I can't imagine what it feels like to be a Dallas fan and just like, you know, like that. That recent trade is just like, yeah, it's going to go down in history as one of the worst ever. But anyways, and to, you know, to put a cap on it. Zach Barash is not Nico. Right. The whole. The guy's. That is his name. Yeah, he's not him. And he knows, by the way, he doesn't have a job anymore. So. I know. Yeah, I think that Storm is still going to be bad, but will be fun. So draft it if you want to draft. That's kind of how I feel about that. Like, I. I think. I think Citadel is good to have in because, like, if you're gonna have, like, tinkering, if you're gonna have some of these other cards in. Citadel is great, but the whole tendrils ritual, empty the war and stuff, like, it's cool that it's there mostly. You should avoid it if you. If your goal is win rate. But it's kind of cool to learn about how all that stuff works. And there have been Cube seasons where Storm is a little better than others. And my guess is here, it's not that Good. The Parallax Wave cut is big. This is kind of interesting. I'd never would never have considered cutting it. But there's a lot of cube philosophy that would go into that. Like do you just put all the best cards in? Well they don't have Time Vault in or demonic consultation. I know there's like arena changes some of that aspect, but even on the magic online cube, Time Vault's not usually in the power levels. Clearly it should be. Is that the right, is that the right choice? I think generally yeah, I think it's, it's probably right for the environment and I like that green is getting more and more beat down stuff. That's how I've been drafting green for a while. I think you probably know that like, like my, my favorite green decks are the, the curve into threes and fours. Yeah, yeah, great card, you know, beast whatever. Ever testing beasts and stuff. So I think that that's good. Artifacts has a lot of really fantastic stuff going on. I can't speak for every single artifact payoff. We'll have to try to find those. And I bet that the bottom five are all pretty bad. Like you know, whatever those end up being like there's some artifact payoffs that are really not going to be good. I've drafted Lewis twice and it's been great still. Lurrus is good. Beat down is good. Be prepared. You know, green is now more assertive. Artifacts more assertive. You, you always should be interacting early in cube but now you should definitely be interacting early in cube. So you do want to make sure you have early payoffs. And I, I had or early plays. I had a boros deck that had like nine removal spells and I was wondering like, because I had like path erode, swords to plowshares, dismember, abrade, suplex, lightning, helix, flame, slash. And I remember thinking like ah, this too many. And then it just wasn't. I played three, you know, against two out of the seven decks or eight. I think I played eight against eight decks. Two sick brags by the way. Two of the eight decks the removal like was pretty bad against and the other six it was fantastic. Even decks like a esper deck, it's like they still just have a lot of creatures. Creatures already put a lot of the power points these days and you know I did, I really didn't mind doing that. And you know now that they've changed the, the collation when you see a fourth pick mox it makes a little more sense. That probably still shouldn't happen. Too often. But yeah, I, I've liked this version so far. I like that they're trying new things. So it's going to rotate out, some of it's going to stick and like. But the iterative process is fantastic among many walks of life. And in this particular case I think that I would rather see major changes like this happen every time. And then maybe as time goes on, maybe the changes get like a little smaller as they find packages that work. Like for example, you look at the change log. Blue doesn't have that many changes because blue is pretty great. And the cards, it's very competitive. Those slots, black, you could probably swap 15 black cards every cube challenge and people would be happy about that. So like until you find one that maybe sticks and maybe there isn't one and you just keep rotating through, that's fine too. There's no rule that says all the colors have to be equal and they won't be. And that's okay. I think that that doesn't really detract too much from the overall cube experience. Yeah, for me I'm really taking a look at this green thing because I'm a little sad, you know, that green has been relegated to this, this beatdown role rather than, you know, even with its amazing tools of, of 1 mana ramp creatures which are still useful and powerful, you know, they're just, they haven't been able to hang for quite a while in vintage cube or powered cube. And this does make sense. This is, this is, I think the right way to go to keep green relevant and on power level is to, to put in more of these creatures. Like you said, it's a 3 and 4 that are just really good beat down style creatures. But it's a little sad, you know, I think, I think the ramp decks are more interesting, I think that not having that baseline ramp deck in the, in the cube, you know, the one that has just so much redundancy that you can kind of get it whenever you want, is a useful handhold for newer players that no longer is as supported. It still exists. I mean it's not like they took it out. It's just a lot of the things that you would have been doing in that spot are now replaced by lower curve, you know, more aggressive things. And this is a trend that you'll see on any format that, that the longer it exists, the, the cheaper the average card quality goes and the more powerful it becomes. And this is kind of a necessary adjustment to it. Even if I am a little bit bummed about it, I'VE seen some really cool stuff already though, with that. I mean, Luis, I. It's funny. The, the cube is really great at surfacing combos and little, you know, and I don't mean like, you know, infinite combos necessarily, but you know, things that pop up. I had a match yesterday where I had emeritus of abundance and time walk. Yeah. That if, if the way is clear, you can just keep attacking, getting regrowth, doing. Yeah, my opponent was at 14 or whatever, but they didn't have a good block for my three, four, vigilance. And I go, time walk, attack. And they just go, they paused, it took a while and they're just like, all right, this isn't going to change. And I'm, I just get to go time walk, time walk, time walk time, you know, until my opponent's dead. So they either have to interact with that first time walk, get it out of the graveyard, or kill my emeritus or the game's over. And that's kind of interesting, you know, or if they have a better blocker or whatever. But. So it's, it's a little fragile, but I mean, you know, that's the kind of thing that can happen and I think that those are really cool. I think it is interesting to see the emeritus package in here because it does feel like they're kind of at home, you know, in this cube. Like just the fact that we're playing a lot of the cards off of them that have been in the cube or are in the cube already is, is seems good. Yeah, the emeritus are cool. I've had good experiences with both the red and blue ones so far. The green one also seems totally, totally fine. So I, I think that the black one and the white one are both pretty poor, but every, all the other ones have, have been awesome. So the Grave Titans back. Yeah, I love the train. I don't know why it's here, but I'm here for it. Like, it's, it's one of the few, you know, I wouldn't call them old school, but middle school cards or whatever. Like it's not part of the, the more current wave of, you know, supplemental product and that type of stuff. But it's also not like, you know, alpha level stuff. It's kind of in between. But you know, I, I would say, I would say Grave Titan at this point is a, is a fine middle aged magic card. A middle aged magic card. It's not, it's not ancient, but it's definitely not new. It's definitely not new. No one would Claim that. No, but it still hits. Gets that kind of interesting middle ground where like it's just good enough if your Reanimator deck stumbles and it ends up in the yard to get it back and still have something powerful. But it's also castable. You can actually just, you know, spend the mana to cast it because, you know, like they cut. Like they cut Primeval Titan, for example. Yeah, I think that was good. Yeah. You. You were. I. I heard you saying on one of your videos that you thought it was. It had kind of maybe overstated, overstate. It's welcome. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I do think that. I think that. I think that the green ramp deck that you're like kind of bemoaning not having doesn't. Isn't exactly gone. You can still. You can still play like an assertive green deck that is not. Not necessarily like beating down, but is playing like more of a domain style deck where you still have some acceleration. I find that the like crowning, you know, finisher wants to be just Titania plus Sylvan Safekeeper a lot of the time. But there's a lot of ways to make the. To make those decks do something that I. I think that you'll still have fun a fun time playing them. Yeah. Okay. Well, that. That makes me feel a little bit better. Any other cards or things that you wanted to touch on before we call it a show here? Luis? I think Skull Clamp is actually just straight up like the nuts. Now. I would. I would be highly encouraged, inclined to take that card first and. Or take it very early because you've got a couple paths. You've got like the white path with a Johnny being incredibly good. You clamp the token, flip a Johnny, make another token, can clamp that etc with or lingering soul Staff of the Storyteller. Ocelot Pride. All that stuff you have green with like Pest Infestation is like the best one, but Springheart, Nantuko and then mana dorks. Clamping mana dorks isn't really like my first priority. I don't really want to be doing that because if you play a linear world, then clamp it. You cast a Knight's Whisperer. Congrats. You spent a greener one and you drew two cards. That's not that good. But clamp in a green deck that can make tokens and then can clamp the mana dorks. If you run out, totally fine. And then of course the best place is artifacts. Skull Clamp with any of the artifact token makers is just Crazy good. And you really, really can go go pretty hard. So I, I have it like drafting Skull clip my favorite cards to draft around early. And I'm not saying these are like the best as in you'll always win if you take them. But I found them to be effective. Lurrus Skull Clamp. Obviously Terrian Academy is a pretty big one. Time walk. Time walk one. It definitely sets your course. There's also this like Lutri force of will, force of negation, subtlety, pyrokinesis, fury. Kind of like category of like blue red pitch spells which I, I found that work out really nicely. So these are some of the things that I like starting with if I can. And they're all here in the cube and they're all great. What about Armageddon? It is now back in the cube. It's the first time that we'll have that type of effect in, in the arena Powered cube. Yeah. I mean Armageddon is an interesting one because it wins a lot of the game when you cast it and is uncastable otherwise. There's not that many close games that happen after Armageddon in my experience. Right. But I would say that Armageddon is the kind of card that would be a lot better if there were sideboards because there's a lot of decks I would have. I would board and get in but I wouldn't want to main deck it. So you know that's a, that's a nod towards best of three. But the way I look at it is if your Boros deck needs a way to like beat the bigger the decks that go bigger and you're not fast enough. Getting is kind of nice at that that when you cast a turn four Geddon after really one creature in play is often going to be good enough and two is certainly going to seal the deal assuming they don't have anything. The, the reason that Geddon kind of rotated out of the cube is that casting a four mana spell that doesn't affect the board that requires you to be winning is a pretty tough ask. But there's some matchups where it's going to be really good. So I don't think it's going to end up with great numbers. That's my prediction. I do think that if you had sideboards it would get better because I nothing more that I love than playing like a mid range green deck and boarding in an off color getting against a control deck and you just sneak into getting with one of your. One of those sentinels. I love so much, right? Sentinel City. You've got a noble hierarch and you just go get and play a land and all of a sudden like the game's over. That said, I wouldn't main deck into those decks a lot because you can have main deck getting. When you play against the mirror, it's usually bad, unless you're already winning. Play against Aggro, it's almost always bad. You play against like a combo deck, it can be good, but some combo decks don't care about that reanimator. They don't care about, again, that much because their, their, their game plan is fast Flash, same thing artifacts. Like, yeah, you can blow up an academy, but a lot of the time they'll have like a talisman and a mox opal and it's just like, okay, so we're really talking about control or mid range that has fallen behind. So. Or like a slower combo, like maybe a sneak attack combo deck. That's all on the slow side. So. Yeah, I don't think getting is going to do great, but I do think it is a really cool card. It'll be interesting to see the 17 lands data on getting. I, I agree with you. I, I would predict a low win rate, but it will be interesting to see, to be able to contrast between like when it's played versus when it's drawn and because it is really one of those, it is maybe the best example of the type of card that you really can only play when you're ahead and you just are highly incentivized not to play it when you're behind. So it will stay in your hand. You know, like if there's ever a gap, gap to be shown on, you know, when a card's played versus when it's drawn in the win rate gap, it should be shown in Armageddon, I would assume. And it's kind of cool that it's on arena now. Okay, well, let's call it a show there, Luis. Really cool stuff. Boy, they are not shy that, you know, my big takeaways are, yes, there's a bunch of changes. The green stuff, the black stuff's out, the combo's back, the you can pick up the two pieces of power, all of these changes. But, but, you know, I really appreciate that there's a lot of action being taken and not just words. Right. Like we heard from Zach on the podcast. We see what he writes, but he's actually backing it up. Like he is unwilling. He is very not shy about saying, let's just try it, let's just throw it in for an iteration. We'll think it through, we'll be careful about it, but, you know, we're going to try stuff out. And it also kind of makes it feel like every time the cube comes out, there's a lot of new stuff to learn. It's not, not stale and there's something for everybody because, you know, like, I think he even talked about it when he was on the show, which was like, yes, right now, you know, we're taking out this Combo stuff, but don't worry, you know, it won't stay out forever. And sure enough, here we are, and Combo's back. So all the Storm players are like, yes, I can do the thing I want to do again. And I'm sure that, you know, that will continue to rotate through. And I think that that's a, a feature, not a bug for sure. I, I think that there is way more design space within the confines of a vintage or powered cube than you could ever put into one, you know, specific cube. And, and it makes a lot of sense to have kind of different packages that you, that you rotate in and out so that you can touch on all those different things and hopefully make everybody get the experience they want, at least at different times. Yeah. And you know Chris Wolf, to give him a shout out on Magic Online. He's the one who runs the cube there. He's been doing a lot of that too. He, he, he has, you know, I would say, a slightly unhealthy obsession with the basking root wall of Bazaar, Baghdad sort of deal. Did you know in the Supreme Cube now there's three copies of Bazaar and three copies of like a cards that go with it. Yeah, good for him. Get in there. But I do think Chris does a fantastic job of trying different packages and different things. And I was like, looking at now Zach and Chris's cubes list when they come out, so. And I make adjustments to my cubes too. I think Cube is great when everyone's sharing information and when you see something that's a good change, just use it. There's no better compliment. Right. Imitation is this most sincerest form of flattery. If I see some changes I make to my cube that are reflected maybe later in a magical line Cube, that's great. It means I maybe made a good change and more people will have a good time for it. Totally. And I'll tell you, just from a vibes perspective, it really feels like we're in one of those great eras for Cube. This is, we have two different awesome cubes available to us online regularly. We have two people at the head of them that really care and really get it, giving it their absolute best. And it feels like a great time to be a cube enthusiast right now. No, better ever, I don't think. Just with the accessibility, especially with it on arena. It's just been really great. Anyway, rejoice. We have our Cube. We're going to call it a show there we you can find us on social media, Marshall, Underscore, LR and Luis's LSV pretty much everywhere. And if you want to find everything related to the show, you can go to lrcast.com and that has every episode of the show as well as links to all of our social and content and all that kind of stuff. There's going to be a link in the show notes for both the article that Zach wrote as well as Luis's breakdown of the change log coming in for this version of the cube on his YouTube channel. So you can make sure to, to check those out. And of course we want to say thank you to everybody who supports us on Patreon as well as Ultimate Guard for their support of the show. That is going to do it for this one. We'll see you next week. So we just finished watching One Piece Season two, the live action one on Netflix and I got to say, One Piece is pretty, pretty amazing. I know I've talked about it before on the show and what really, really struck me this, this particular season is One Piece does so much stuff that is so unbelievably stupid and crazy, but they just lean into it. They, they take themselves like completely seriously. They just play it straight. They like, you know, there's a character who is a. Studying to be a doctor, is a reindeer. His name is Tony, Tony Chopper. And like he wears a big hat. And like that, that is just the character. It makes no real sense. But he's also kind of like a were reindeer in that he's got like different forms, you know, where he's like more human than others or standing on his hind legs or, or whatever. But they don't explain any of it. They don't, they don't justify any of it. I think that's awesome. They are not hung up on this being ridiculous. And it helps when your source material is all similarly ridiculous, which I assume it is. So like they're just like, yep, they already know this works. They've got a lot of fans, right? And just the whole show, the premise just doesn't really make sense. What's going on doesn't make sense. But it just, the way it plays out is really good. Like, I think it's a fun time. They did a really good casting. I think the actors really get into it. It's the sort of thing where if the actors were hesitant at all, this would be terrible, but it's not. They just throw themselves into this and it's like, yeah, none of it makes sense. It's not supposed to enjoy the show. And I think that a lot of people could really learn a lesson from that. I don't know, it's kind of like if you, if you're gonna go stand up in front of which people make a speech, just do the thing. Don't be, you know, easier said than done. I know people practice to do this, but don't be self conscious. Just if you're going to do something, do it fully. Don't hedge. Hedging usually doesn't. Doesn't help that much. If you decide you want to go hit on someone in front of all their friends, which is I think a totally fine thing to do. If you do it the right way, you got to do it without being embarrassed or hesitant or shy. There are times in place to do those things. Trying to do a big public thing, that's not the time and place. You got to fully commit to the bit and one piece fully commits to the bit and I think that's awesome. So highly recommend it. It's a good time. And then I had one thing I wanted to mention too, Louis, before we took off, which is our friend Brian David Marshall. Oh yeah, his game is popping off. It's popping off, dude. He. So he launched a game that he's been working very hard on with. In fact, fellow magic players helped design this game as well. It's called Cataclysm Arcade Trading Card Game. And he has been working on this thing for quite a while. He's really put everything into it, I would say, you know, bdm, in the vein of what you just said, Luis, he does not go halfway. He is, you know, he, he designed this game, the ip, everything around it and he just launched his Kickstarter to officially launch the game. And as of recording, he has gotten to $761,000 of his $50,000 goal. So to say he has captured the hearts and minds of the gaming community would be an understatement. What an amazing start. This is a in person paper product. Like you open up a booster pack and you play with real. Those are all the rage these days with real people. Pendulum is, is. Is. Is. Is turning, you know, totally. And it's just the most BDM thing ever. You know, the. The theme behind the game has. Has you kind of working your way through the New York subway system, you know, getting higher and higher or maybe lower and lower, as it were, you know, to try to. To fight bosses and. And work your way up the ladder, as it were. And it kind of feels just like a combination of so many things from BDM and his aesthetic and what he really likes about things. You know, the movie the warriors is kind of in here, and, you know, it all has kind of a comic book vibe, which is, you know, he. He's. His history is in comic books and, and that kind of stuff. So anyway, I'll also put a link to the Kickstarter for that, just for bdm, because he's such a special person to. To both Luis and I. He's had, you know, a massive impact on both of our lives, especially. Especially me with my career and stuff. I mean, he's the one who said, hey, do you want to. Do you want to come try being in the booth at the. At a GP that I was actually playing at? Like, he's the one that did that, you know, and let's just say I would not be where I am without Brian David Marshall. So at any rate, if you're interested in other games besides Magic Cataclysm Arcade trading card game game is now up on Kickstarter, and you can check it out there.