Limited Resources 867 - The Hobbit Format Overview and Level-Up: Mental Toughness

Foreign. What is up, everybody? Welcome to another episode of Limited Resources. This episode, number 867. 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, how excited are you to talk Hobbit today? Today. Well, so, but when we're kind of debating what to do with the show, I was like, hey, I don't want to talk about the Hobbit. And you're like, well, we got to talk about the arena Direct. And I've been playing it a bunch. I'm like, no, no, that's great. You should talk about the Hobbit. I'm not going to talk about the Hobbit. And what I mean by that is I did like three seals. I did like three drafts. I didn't want to play anymore. It really wasn't fun for me. I'm not going to like lose my mind over it, but I just chose not to participate and I'm not going to play any more of the format either. Yu-Gi-Oh and you know, that's. I said, you know what, we might as well just lean into that for, you know, because I curious. I am curious about it. But it feels like that does at least in some way reflect our audience. In other words, some of us are playing, I'm playing it, but some people aren't because. And we'll talk about it. We're going to do the format overview for the Hobbit, or I am for the most part. And then we're. But we're also going to do a level up show on mental toughness this week too. So we've got kind of a double header lined up for you here. But it is interesting, you know, this experiment with these small sets. This is the last of the ones that we know about because I don't think Star Trek is going to be a small one or whatever reality fracture. So, you know, I don't know if there's more of these coming in the future, but this does kind of put the final chapter on the Spider Man, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And now the Hobbit being these pick two draft format or however you want to frame them. And it's really interesting because it forces us limited players to kind of put the gavel down. And I think, you know, I mean, from Luis's perspective, that's two out of three that you're more or less sitting out. You play Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but that isn't like an all timer for you or anything, right? Yu-Gi-Oh I think part of it is fatigue where, like, Spider man. This Hobbit's better than Spider Man, I will say that. But I. I didn't really want to, like, after Spider man, after Ninja Turtles, like, these small sets are really unappealing to me and I've had a lot less fun playing them than a lot of the, you know, other than basically the average other set. So it's like I just don't want to. I just didn't want to play it. I think if I were to rate them, like small set versus small set. Spider Man I think still is the worst, though. Part of that is like the Omenpath stuff, but that is part of the experience. Hobbit was better than Spider man and Neutrals was better than Hobbit, but none of them, like, all of them were worse than, like, you know, a lot of the sets that you could imagine. Like a lot of just the normal sets. Yu-Gi-Oh And it challenges us to think in terms of, well, if we're getting four big sets and then they just threw three small sets at us additionally, well, who cares, right? Then it's just like we can just choose whether to play each one of those or not. I think the downside of it is what's on Arena? What. What are people? Where. Where's the critical mass of people aiming at any given point, you know, to figure out what I'm going to be playing? Because I tend to go where the winds take me when it comes to limited. And if Hobbits the thing right now, then that's what I'm playing. And so that is what's happening. But it is interesting to try to settle. Well, do we judge these as full on standalone extra set, or full on sets that get compared to the other sets of the year or these little extras that we get because they don't feel like bonus set are the main set for the time that they're there, even though that time ends up being pretty short. So. Interesting stuff. We'll talk about it a little bit more when we get into the Hobbit. Before we do, we wanted to say thank you to everybody who supports us on Patreon. It's patreon.com limited resources if you'd like to check it out. And we'd also like to thank Ultimate Guard for their support of the show. They make the best stuff in the business to protect your cards, your decks and your collection. If you need sleeves, playmats, deck boxes, long boxes, binders, backpacks, all that kind of stuff to make sure that your Cards in your collection are protected and safe and also that they're nice to interact with, you know, you know when you go play a tournament or if you go play with your friends, you know you're having to take that deck box out, put it back in, take you put the cards in and out over and over and over and over again. And little tiny design choices, little tiny material choices add up and that's really the specialty of Ultimate Guard. I highly implore you to check out their products. You can look@ultimate guard.com for their full line of products and you can pick them up at your favorite local game store or online retailer. Thank you. Ultimate Guard. We really appreciate your support of the show. Before we get into our Hobbit Crackapack, Luis, you've got like a really cool thing going here. Yu-Gi-Oh So the team draft server that I run is called the Lotus Lounge and I have two servers. One is the Divination. That's kind of like the stir I made when I was streaming a bunch of for folks who like the stream and that a lot of team drafts are run there. It's casual, like people are just playing. The Lotus Lounge is a little bit more competitive. People frequently will play team drafts with stakes and they're both open entry. Anyone can join on the Lotus Lounge. We're running a team draft tournament. So it's going to be a three on three vintage cube tournament. It's a league. So it's four matches over four weeks and it's pretty flexible in terms of the timing. You just are paired with a team at the beginning of the week and the two of you have to basically come up with a time that the teams can play. It's 150 ticks per team. So for the whole thing and all the Prizm money is just getting distributed to the participants. Like it's all going into the Prizm pool. It's signups close on Sunday. So that is like what the 22nd? 20th? Yu-Gi-Oh Yu-Gi-Oh Hey. Signups close on the 23rd and we're going to do probably a cut to at this point we've got almost 20 teams and I'm expecting slightly more than that. Maybe more than that. I don't know. We'll see. Cut to either a top six or top eight because we don't want to have it determine breakers if we can of course avoid that. And I'm really looking forward to it. I think it's going to be really fun. Anyone who wants to join. If you don't have teammates, there's a find A team channel. The sub rules, the substitution rules are very flexible. So you can sub in or sub someone in pretty much whenever, like and you could even play in multiple teams. We just basically want people to play, get to play Cube. It also is usually going to be run with my cube, but any cube that the opposing team agrees with you guys can play. Basically the way it works is you can agree to almost anything with the opposing team and if you can't agree, it'll be using my cube and it'll be at the time that the tournament is scheduled. But obviously it's like mega flexible and everyone's been really chill who plays in the lounge. I mean that's a big part of our philosophy is just having good time playing Cube. So I'm excited if you want to join us. There's a lot of awesome teams signed up. You get to play against a lot of folks who are really into Cube and it's a good place to learn. It's a good place to enjoy getting to play against. I mean Piculo might join Matt Nass, Sam Pardee, you know, Tribute Carl Serop, like a lot of the like pro, former pro tour or current pro tour players. I'm going to be playing with my buddy Mac and Tom Martel. So we've, we've got a good squad. A big shout out to Aberdasher. He is a longtime mod on Twitch and he is writing the bot for the, for the Lotus Lounge. And it's, it's really cool like this, how it all works is very automated and like there's a lot of cool, cool features. So I'm really excited about this. I don't usually run stuff like this, but Abra was like, hey, what if we did this? I'm like, Yu-Gi-Oh that sounds really fun. So we're going to run, Yu-Gi-Oh we're going to run this tournament and hopefully it goes well and maybe there will be more if people like it. So check it out. We'll have a link to sign up to to join the discord here in the show notes. I did have one question. So you said that you know, people can use a different cube or whatever. What is a, what is one round of this look like? Like, let's say I've got me and my two buddies and I get paired against you and Tom and, and Mac. What, what happens? Like we drat. We do a team draft against each other and then report back the, the winnings of that and therefore the, the thing we're drafting is kind of up to us or if it's it by default it's your cube. Is that what you're saying? Yu-Gi-Oh So basically let's say you, Adam and Jay got paired against me, Mac and Tom, right? So at the week it's like, okay, these are the guys you're playing. Usually you would start to communicate because everyone, the bot makes everyone their own like chat room. At least that's what worked last time. I'm not 100% sure about that point, but usually that is how it works. Like when you join a team draft on the server after the draft, the bot automatically makes chat rooms for each team so you can coordinate with your team. And there's also a main chat room with both teams in it so you can talk about stuff and you report results to the bot and they display there. So we would message each other be like, hey, you know the cube matches are like scheduled for like whatever day. But hey, what days work for you? And usually you will give a range to the other people. If you can't agree on a time, it will happen at the scheduled time. But almost every single match is just going to be played at the time that people agree on. You know that, that, that, that works for the, for both teams. And then if again, what cube do you want to use? Oh, do you want to use like the fully powered like Time vault consult cube with initiative or do you want to use the power Cube without that? Or it's like, hey, I want to play modern cube. That probably one-of-one happen much. My experience with the last time we ran a draft league like this is every match was basically one of the two powered cubes that I maintained. Okay, technically you could run any cube you draft against each other. The bot again handles making the draft room and all that and all those things on draft. Answer. We, we draft on draftmancer, which is a third party website, a great one by the way. It's really cool. And you draft your deck, you then get a text file of your deck for cards. Everyone is responsible for having their own cards. But the bot rental services like cardholders, mana traders, goatbots, whatever, usually around like 15, maybe 20 bucks a month, whatever the cheapest rental tier is is usually enough to rent a cube deck. And if you're missing one or two cards because it's like you ended up drafting the one ring plus Bowmasters plus Lotus or whatever, usually someone on your team is going to be fine to lend that to you. It's just that you should be coming in with the expectation that hey, I can, I can provide these cards and then you play the matches on Magic Online, Then you play the matches on Magic Online. There's pairings, you report them, and then at the end there's always a winning team and then that winning team gets reported, and that is that. Dude, that is cool. Yu-Gi-Oh that's going to be really great. So people have through Sunday to sign up, or is it like Saturday night? It cuts off. No, end of Sunday. End of Sunday. Okay, cool. I mean, we can. Me and ever can also just change it if someone really wants to get in there and they barely miss the window. But yes, please sign up by Sunday if you want to play. Are we going to be able. Are you going to give us updates on this as it. Oh, for sure, for sure. And are you going to be recording videos? Yu-Gi-Oh my plan is to record all my matches. Okay. So the LSV YouTube channel will have some of your matches worth of content on this. Dude, this is sweet. This is really cool. Yu-Gi-Oh I think it's going to be a lot of fun and I don't know, it's just adding a little bit more to these matches and I think that that is a really fun way to go about it. Dude, that is sweet. All right, so once again, where is there a link I can put in the discord? If I'll run through the discord, I'm going to have a link that has. It's a website that we set up, just a tiny one that has basically all the info that you would want. It has where it is, how to sign up with the. The kind of like the. The whole logistics and everything. And you can give that to me for the show notes. Yu-Gi-Oh okay, cool. Lotus Lounge. What are you calling the tournament? I think we're just calling the Lotus Lounge Draft League. God. Come on, Vargas. Like you, you, you. Your whole career is naming stuff. Like, let's. It's true. It's true. Well, maybe. Maybe season two will have a really clever name. Okay, so make sure you check that out. And again, I'll put a link to that site down in the show notes. Let's do a cracker pack for the Hobbit and then I'll get into some of the broad strokes discoveries that we have made since the set has been fully released. So for our cracker pack, our first card off is Mirkwood. That's the black green Dual Land. These ones have been. Okay, not quite as good as some of the ones that we've seen in the past that have repeat uses or outright get you cards. You know, this is two plus one. Plus one counters on specific creature Topps It's okay, you'll take it. But the majority of the value from these is the fact that they are dual lands. And dual lands are always valuable, so you should keep an Yu-Gi-Oh on them. Hobbit Hole. Speaking of dual lands, this is the Evolving Wilds, but it randomly has halfling cycling for four, and there's actually some pretty decent stuff in both blue and black to get with it. So that even though it's extremely slow, it does mean that drawing this as your seventh or eighth land or whatever is not completely dead. You usually can go get something actually pretty good at the common or uncommon level. And you know, it does go up to rares and stuff too. But you know, any of the. The Bagginses or the. What's it called, the Golems, you know, will fit this. So that. That is actually some decent stuff to get. Next up is Iron Hills stalwart. That's the 400 red 45 reach trample. And you can attach an equipment when it ETBS card's been a bit of a flop. Suffers from the classic five drop problem of it's up against a whole bunch of other things and, you know, not that good. Same thing with Escaroth Garrison. The next card, it's four and a white for a star five. That's equal where its power is equal the number of creatures you control. It does give you a little bit back and lets you recruit the turn that it enters again. Both of these cards are are in the playable realm, but they're not exciting at all. Next up is Long Lake nuisance. This is a three in a blue three, one flying bird. And when it ETBs, you recruit. This one's better. This has been a fine four drop playable. Luis, you said it in the set review that you know, hey, let's just get the power all up on the front. And who cares about the toughness on this card. And that has been how it's played out. I mean, it dies to basically anything, but who cares? It probably would have one-of-one And a bash is pretty decent and it gets you the recruit trigger as well. Next up is Little Bear. This is the tuna green 3 2, flash. And when it ETBs, you can untap another creature you control. If it's a bear, gets a counter. I find it funny that the Little Bear is the cheapest bear in the set. Yu-Gi-Oh it is. It wants another bear in play and there are a lot of them. Next up is Rage into the Valley. This is two and a black for a sorcery you draw a card and lose a life and you amass goblins too. It's fine. I actually thought it would be a little bit better than it is when we first saw it. And it's just kind of a checkbox level card. You're like, Yu-Gi-Oh sure, I can play this. You know, a mass Goblins two is not the same thing as getting a two. Two. It's just not it. It. This set has been well designed in the sense that it doesn't punish you for having a big amass Goblins token. That. That is. That isn't really a thing here. You know, they made the removal. The static removal on board to. To kill it so that you can again and stuff. Or it gets exiled or killed and then you just start over. But it is not. It would be much better if it was just you get a 22 goblin token or something like that. Stacking up all your stuff on one creature. Even if you're not being punished in the sense of like it gets pacified and now you're stuck. It still is putting all your eggs in one basket and you don't have a choice. There is definitely a thing as over amassing when you have too much amass. Because then, yes, it's exactly what you're talking about. About. Yu-Gi-Oh 55. Now it's a 77. It's basically the same creature. And yes, you get your card back, but not that great. Next card. Oh boy. This one has proven to be the best common in the set and one of the best commons we've seen for a while. Did we get this one wrong at all in the second? We did, but not. I mean, I don't know. I don't remember what we gave it. Do you remember what we gave it? We were not enthused about the card. And it's the best comment. I. I'm not saying we give it an F, but I think it was like a C or D level card. No, we. There is no way we gave this thing a D. Like I remember saying, Equip two is actually good and plus two. Plus one is what you want, right? God, I hope we didn't give it a D. It's crude Bent blade. This is two in a black artifact for an artifact equivalent. When it ETBs, they sacrifice a creature of their choice and then it leaves behind this very reasonable. Quite good actually. Equipment. Equip two for plus two plus one. You don't get any free equips or anything like that. And generally speaking, three mana edicts aren't Very good. And there are many times when it's very mediocre. Even in this set, if you're playing against a recruit deck, for example, they always seem to have a random one one if you're playing against red black, they always have like some little army building. And you get it, but you get it kind of for free. Because the truth is is that the equipment is just good enough to run one-of-one Equip 2 +2 +1 is legit. Like that is a totally good card. So basically you get like kind of a medium level edict and a pretty solid equipment. And that adds up to a really powerful common. We definitely were lower than it should have been, even if we didn't give it a D because this is like a B level card. It's really, really good. And there are of course the times when you're on the play and they play a two drop and you just go crude blade kill it. And it's like, oh my God, they spent their mana on it. Or God forbid they stumble a little bit. And you get their three with this card or you combine it with another removal spell and wipe their board. That happens all the time. Card is fantastic and it is the best common in the set. Next card is also excellent. It's Goblin Plate Mail. This is the one in a black red hybrid. So 2 mana total again for an equipment. But this one amasses Goblins one when you play it and then also attaches itself to it. And the equipped creature gets plus 1 plus 0 and has menace. So you get a 2:1 menace to start off with. And then it almost always gets at least a little bit bigger than that thanks to a mass Goblins by the time you're bashing. So that's already good. Equip cost sucks. It's four but plus one plus and menace is really annoying when the game goes long and you have a death toucher, you have a big army, you have anything along those lines. It actually does become a reasonable mana sync late in the game. And I've seen Goblin Plate Mail equipped countless times now at this point. So it is not the kind of equipment that you play it. You get your creature, it dies, and then you just kind of forget about the equipment forever. It actually does things. The other thing it does, both Crude Vent Blade and Goblin Plate Mail. It's crazy that we opened both of them is that they leave behind just material. They both, you know, leave behind this random artifact that you can sacrifice or do other things with as well. And that does add up too with whatever the the removal spell is called. I always forget the stupid names but stir up trouble. You know that you can sacrifice an artifact to that and only play black. And you know, having a crew bent blade or a Goblin plate mail around to do that and still maintain your board state can be really good too. So these are two excellent cards right next to each other. Two egregious common equipment. Yu-Gi-Oh totally. I mean, completely nuts. These are very pushed cards for sure. And you know, I think I'll say one last thing about Crude Blade as well, which is that this is exactly the type of format where this type of card would excel. It is a core set adjacent vibes format. I'll talk about that more in a minute. But you know, this is where, like, power and toughness matters. Creatures on board matter. It's a very straightforward format where your board state is what's going to dictate who wins and who loses in a very linear fashion. It's just like you build out a bigger board, they don't catch up. You're going to one-of-one It feels like a core set in that way. And having edicts is better in that environment than one where somebody maybe doesn't care about creatures or isn't even running that many, or that's not really what their deck's all about. Or they're playing a control game or something like that, where your crude plane is like, Yu-Gi-Oh sure, I'll sacrifice some random thing. Or maybe it's like a heavy token set where everybody's going wide and this thing only ever nabs a 1:1. That's not the case here. Again, sometimes it happens, but a lot of times it doesn't. Last comment is Tidings of War. That's the red sorcery mask goblins 1 and then flashback 3 in a red and you mask goblins 3 if it was played from your graveyard. Playable minus. It's. It's just whatever. For our Uncommons, first one up is Troll Negotiations. This is a two green. Green Sorcery. Put two plus one plus one counters on target creature you control. Then it fights a creature an opponent control. So this is a straight up fight. Like it is not a bite. So you do need to make sure that your creature is bigger, but thankfully that's kind of built into the card. It performs well. Yes, it's four mana. It's a little bit slow. It's sorcery speed, but you always play it in green and it gets the job done. Next up is Thranduil Sindarian Liege. This is the 2 and 2 green or 2 blue or green and a blue. So four mana total for a 2. Three legendary elf that gives other elves you control plus one plus one and it has Landfall make a 1. One elf. And then it also has Sylvan Rally for 1 and 2 blue green hybrid, which is a sorcery that allows you to mill four cards and take up to two land cards from among those and put them into your hand. This card plays out pretty well the the archetype has not very well. But this card is not the reason why that this is a totally fine payoff at uncommon for for the blue Green Elves deck. It just doesn't seem like that deck has really come together. Next is Bjorn's Hospitality. This is the one in a green enchantment with landfall. Put a plus 1 plus 1 counter on a creature and you can pay 5 green green to make this thing a bear. That's power and toughness is equal to the number of lands you control. And it still has the other ability to. So it. It kind of does all the things, but the card's mediocre. Yu-Gi-Oh you just don't really want to spend your. Your. It's really hard to find a spot to spend two mana to set this up because unless you have a 1 drop, it doesn't really work. What you end up doing is playing your two drop and then playing this on two and then playing a land after that to put a counter on your two drop. But it turns out the removal is really good in the format. Again, it's a fairly punishing format to falling behind on board, which this thing's kind of a specialty of doing. It accentuates your opponent's removal. And if you get that far behind, you're never seeing that seven mana where you get to wake this thing up and have it, you know, start brawling in sealed. It's like slightly better, but it doesn't play into the name of the game, you know, which is a much more attrition based battle. And in that case, this is exactly the type of card you don't want to have. So Yu-Gi-Oh this card has not been something that I really want. Our last card and our rare is Ravanian Rampager. This is the two and a black. Great. Yu-Gi-Oh Two and a black three two. And whenever it attacks, you can sacrifice another creature. And if you do, you put that many plus and plus one counters on this thing equal to that guy's power. And then when this thing dies, you amass Goblins X. Where X is this thing's power. And that's actually the most important part. Yes, you can leverage it in certain spots to do the sacrifice thing and make it into a relatively huge attacker kind of out of nowhere. But the key is, is that if they ever kill this, you just get to replace it with an even better thing. Like it turns from a 3:2 into a 3:3. And if you sacrifice even just a small creature and make it say into like a five for you sacrifice a two two. You know, when it dies, it dies into a five five. It is a pain in the butt. It does need. It does. There are answers to it that exile it or return it to hand or whatever. But for the most part, this is a good way to take advantage of the amass thing that we talked about earlier where it's like, like I have a 2 2amass and I've got a couple more amass cards and like piling it all onto one isn't really going to get me anywhere. So you attack with your rampage or sacrifice the two two. This guy's a five four. He hits. Then you just do another amass thing and you still got like a blocker and a board state and all this other stuff. Card's really good. Definitely would come down to that. Or the crude bent blade for me. Yu-Gi-Oh I mean my inclination is to take the rare. I think the rampagers seems like it's better, but it is actually the fact that it's close really says something. Yu-Gi-Oh it does. And, and it is worth noting that the, that the crude bent. Crude bent blade is on the like rare one-of-one rate level at this point. Like it is that good. What was a great common from the last set? The hero in training here in training. It's like that, like it has a one-of-one rate in that like, you know, around 60% range. I don't know what the rampager has, but my guess is that it's in that same area as well. To me, these would be very close. I think I would just take the rampager probably, but I don't know. I would be surprised if in fact I can just look. Black rampager is 60.4. Crude bed blade is 60.7. So they're within margin of air. So they're basically a tie. It's kind of like do you want a, a threat or an answer or something like that? I would, I would go with the rampage or myself, but. But you're not really going to be faulted either way. That wasn't that cool that, that a powerful rare in that color is tied with the, the Bent blade. That is something. Yu-Gi-Oh that is definitely something. Let's talk broad strokes for the Hobbit. I have been playing an Absolute crap ton of it. It's been fine. How's it been going for you? I have three boxes, one in the directs. And I think that that's something that is worth noting here too, is that at this point, I now have more seal decks done than drafts, which is almost never the case. But they put up the arena direct, like right away. Like it was, what, a couple days in and it's still up now? Is it still up now? Yu-Gi-Oh Yu-Gi-Oh that's a lot of. A lot of direct arenas. It is, Yu-Gi-Oh I've just been jamming and jamming. I know. Last time I talked to Paul, he was at four boxes, one. And sealed's been good. I mean, it's a solid sealed format. I think it's a solid draft format too, at least if you are willing to grade it on a curve. And that's kind of the big thing with this is that like, this set has felt totally fine to me. It's. I. I think it's core set adjacent is how I would describe it. Meaning it's not leaning fully into the core set stuff. But, you know, it really does feel like what they call a core fantasy flavor. Right? Like elves and goblins and stuff. Feels very old school magic and very, very different from the normal universes. Beyond stuff that we get where it's like, hey, we're back in New York again and we're eating pizza or whatever, you know, now it's like, you know, we are doing very, you know, trolls and goblins and elves and all that kind of stuff. Wizards, literally. I mean, it is that set. But I like that. I really appreciated the era when we had the actual core sets, you know, M10, M11, 12, that era, because they felt like pallet cleansers. They felt like getting back to the basis basics of magic. And they felt like a great way to remind us and show off that booster draft. Just as an entity has so much going for it that isn't based on how complex or interesting the cards are, that's extra. But just doing a draft is fun. Just figuring out which colors are good is fun. Just figuring out how different cards combine is fun. And. And then when you add interesting, complicated designs, it just gets that much better. And I always really look forward to that time. And this feels like that it has definitely been been designed with intent and detail. It reminds me a lot of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and not like Spider Man, I think Spider man was really an aberration. I can't remember exactly what happened, but there was reporting at the time that like, they got kind of curveballed or something that like it was going to be this set and then they had to move it and change stuff. And I think it really suffered for that because Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and, and the Hobbit have not felt like that at all. They've been well thought out. Interesting designs, clever nods to the key characters. Like it. This feels like a fully fleshed out, you know, design experience, but it's small. It's a small set. Again, this is the third of these things and it's just not that exciting. It suffers from all the downsides of the small set framework. I cannot see this at having any longevity. Meaning at draft 100, I think I'm just going to be bored to tears. Not that we'll get that far because it's not out for that long. Far less design space. Only five archetypes that are truly explored here. No stretch goal archetypes. You know, the, the 11th archetype, that's like five colors or something crazy. Some version of another archetype that only comes up under certain circumstances. The lack of build arounds, all of those things are very much impacting where the Hobbit goes from here. My takeaway is, if you want to look at it half glass full, then your takeaway is, well, this is a set that we wouldn't have gotten in prior years one-of-one And these small sets tend to only be out for like a month and a half. So if it doesn't have that much depth, who cares? Like at a month I might be like, okay, let's get that cube in here. You know, we're a week and a half in now, whatever it is, and I'm already starting to kind of go, when does cube pop up back on Arena? Or should I dust off my magic online account and fire up a cube or whatever? But I'm not quite there yet. And I'll do a few more drafts of this set and it's been totally fine. That's the glass half full view. The glass half empty view is why, right? Like, this is overwhelming. Like, we do set reviews every other month now. And why, like, why do we need to have a small set that isn't that deep, is only out for a month and that potentially cuts off time, detail, effort, everything into the big sets that we actually love, the ones that come out and that are really good and that we're like, hey, they Hit something. I'm really vibing with this set. And now it's like, oh, here's a small universes beyond set kind of out of nowhere and that's going to now usurp the one that you are taking. That's the downside. Look at it. Also, the fact that it is. I don't believe that it is possible to make any of these small sets perform at the level. I mean, just when you start off with only half of the archetypes are really available. I'm kind of already just like, well, you're never going to get to the level of the big sets, then. It's just not possible. So this is the third of these, Luis. I don't know if there's more coming next year, but there's not this year. What is our takeaway from these is would we rather have these be like a side product that doesn't end up being the draft of the moment for a month and a half that, you know, the PT may be on or, you know, they didn't do that in these cases, of course. But you know that we're playing real tournaments in. Or that's the main featured thing on arena for an extended period or are we fine just saying? Well, we cut the other one off a little short, but there's always something around the corner. You know, it's like I. I read a thing when I was in Amsterdam that said, if you don't like the weather white, wait five minutes. You know, it's like, is that what this is like too? I mean, there is some element of that. And that's kind of what I'm doing in this case. I just. I just don't have it in me to slog through another small set format where one of the color pairs especially is just like so much better than everyone else. Like, I think I played against red black, like, certainly more than half my matches. And yes, if you extend that to like black cream. That was like 85% of my matches or something. Yep. Like more on that shortly. You are totally right, though. So, Yu-Gi-Oh I'm just. There's no stuff to do. Look, I play magic every single day. It's not like I'm not playing magic. I'm just choosing to play the formats I like. I prefer to play pre modern. I prefer to play cube, of course. I mean, I just. I can't really get enough of Cuban. Doing some Winston drafts. One of my buddies who does the rotos with me, Broccoli Rob in a Jess guy Winston Cube, which is just like all Jessica cards and like, you know, I look forward to digging into a big draft format, like the current set draft format. Like there have been some that I played a lot, you know, and just my bar has gotten higher. It used to be that if I would just play whatever. The current draft format is a pretty good amount. Even if it was like kind of not great. I just don't feel like I have to do that anymore. And I'm actually really excited about the prospect of getting into a good level up show. Like that's what we're going to do as soon as you're done talking about the Hobbit. So just kind of just, just text me or something when that's the case. You're gonna go make some lunch and I'll let you know. I'll keep it short, but it's actually been a while since we did a good level up and I think this is gonna be a really good one. So that's where I'm at. You know, I would still like to give our listeners what they need for each set. And you know, it does not mean we need to do six episodes in the Hobbit or four or two. We've already done two actually. We did the reviews and you know what, I'm getting to the point where I don't know, we'll see on these small sets. I'm hoping that we sent a message by not participating, but then they put the arena directs up and it's just such good expected value to play for a lot of. I mean, I think it was even at like a 55% one-of-one rate. You're a positive value given the cost of the Hobbit boxes and I don't blame anyone for playing those. That's obviously great. Just play, play it. If you're having fun and you're making some money, that, that's awesome. It's not for me. And I hope enough people didn't play them. Like, yes, everyone can be bribed to play these formats, even if they're bad. Just give us some good draft formats. I know they know how to make a lot of awesome draft formats. They do it all the time. Yu-Gi-Oh totally. So let's talk about the draft format here because we do know that you come to us to figure out what's going on in a given format, what direction we. You might want to try. And Luis did actually sum it up quite nicely. So what has been working so far? White and green have been the worst performing colors. Black is definitely the best. And then blue and red are pretty solid too. We talked about crude bent blade. It has been the breakout common of the set. It is, you know, at a rare level of one-of-one rate and it is absolutely busted in this environment. The we do have that combination of best one-of-one rate plus most drafted in this set which is Rakdos the black red deck. It has been the best one mostly off the strength of black. But red is a very good complement for black in this set. And then you get the synergies that come with goblins armies, that type of stuff too. Golgari as Luis mentioned, is also right there both in terms of how much it's played and its one-of-one rate. And it's also very strong as well, which is kind of a rarity for green because Simic the elves deck has been absolutely terrible. Boros has been just fine and Azorius Draw two has been fine. There was one thing that I when I was putting the notes together that I noticed that I haven't actually seen or done myself. And now I'm kind of curious. So maybe this is something to explore. Much much less played but when played or Zov White Black actually has a really solid one-of-one rate it major. I mean it's got 3,300 games played where for example Golgari has 47,000, Azorius has 43,000 and Erakdos the king has 72,000. So you know, we're talking like 20 times as much. But still is at the one-of-one rate of the highlighted dec for whatever reason. So I don't know, maybe black white is a little. A little Beckett of value that might be worth noting. My guess is for that sort of thing. What is more likely is that people just play black white when they have like four good black white rares and you know, like what the. Not. Not. It's not always exactly that. But to get black white across the finish line to like submit that as your deck, especially when a format does not have any reasons to do that, it's because your card quality is probably through the roof. That's what I assume too. That's just going to be what happens, you know. And the removal suite in those two colors combined is. Is unassailable. It is absolutely fantastic. So one-of-one But that might just be a little thing. Otherwise the other decks, the ones that aren't highlighted have very low play rates and low one-of-one rates. So you know the five it is a five deck format at the very most. It's. It's really like a three deck format. Probably maybe four if you just take out Simic Elves. For the most part, the drafts that I've done black has dictated where I go. You just really can't help at first picking black cards. Like it kind of sucks if you can't. But it happens all the time. Mainly because of the commons. You know, I we in. In the cracker pack, we just did like we were three picks deep before we would start considering a non black card. I mean that's, you know, two commons in a rare. We got there was. There wasn't even an uncommon black card in there. So that does for me dictate a lot of where I go. I am open to any of the two color archetypes. I did start off by playing a bunch of elves and kind of banging my head against that wall. It is one of those confounding decks where there's a bunch of things that work well together and that and that seem individually powerful, but it just doesn't have the tools to keep up with a quick start from a more assertive deck and you just fall behind in this form format that is the death now. So that's the big picture on it. The other thing I wanted to mention was sealed. We just talked about how that's been up. I have been playing way more sealed lately in general and in this set I. Like I said I've actually played more sealed than draft. Since they've had the arena direct up the whole time. It mirrors a lot of what you see. Red, black is 100% the most played two color pair, mainly based off of the red and black commons. It means that you very often can put together a build. Also, the sealed format is weird. There are so few cards compared to what we're used to that your Yu-Gi-Oh just gets used to seeing the same. How many of this that I get? How many of that did I get? Because there's just not that much variety and you can really start to build. I build my pools really fast now because I just know exactly what to look at for and Whatnot. And it's easy to see because there's just not a lot of stuff to. To muck up your view of it. The matchups tend the red black matchups, which are the ones that define the format. And you can throw black green in there too. They get really interesting. They end up being slog fest, grind, grind, fest, if you will. Right. So much removal out of the two sides. And then when you combine in like crude bent blade and stuff like that too, it is a lot of removal flying back and forth. And so I know Paul And I were talking about it and we've both been putting a bit more at the top end. Smaug is one that comes up quite a bit that the. The four and a red do five and then seven Mana five five Fleer That card is a little too slow, you know, to be happy with. But like we've been putting the second copy in because it is one extra removal spell. And then if you're trying to play this, I want to have the last threat standing thing. Well, a 55 Flying Dragon is a pretty good place to have that happen. But and this really matters, you have to be really careful to maintain some early board state. You cannot do the thing where you're like, aha, we're going to find ourselves in a grind fest. So I'm just going to go light on two drops. I'm going to be one step slower than my opponent that you will absolutely get run over. It's very difficult to come back in this format once you fall behind even and sealed. So you have to maintain that early stance. What you can do is have it look more like a, you know, like a big, like a little. A lot at the beginning of your curve and then kind of less in the middle like a valley. And then. And then, you know, you can stock up a little bit more than you would normally at the high end to try to cover that. So basically your idea is maintain some type of board that I don't just die and then kind of skip over the middle part where a lot of those cards are comparable to, you know, a lot of the four drops are like roughly a three drop or a five. And if you start casting, you know, five sixes and sevens, you can actually kind of overwhelm your opponent in the late game. That's. But that's. You got to be subtle with it. Don't overdo it. Cards like Pinecone Strike, Ravening Warg have done really good work in sealed because of their ability to hold down the fort in the early part of the game. Game Pine Cone Strike trades up almost every time. And the Warg, that's the Death Touch one. And then also if you attack when you have Ferocious, you gain two life later, which can also help you come back a little bit. But like, if you're playing against green, if you're playing against any of the big dumb red creatures or whatever, the revenue morgue sits there and is a bit of a stop sign for them and. And it can really get done. So you want cards like that. And then, you know, at the common Level you can finish with Smalgan. Those type of cards, of course, rares, you know, put them in wherever you want. That's worked for me pretty well. I have had some success with blue white, which isn't really the. The go to two card combo in sealed, but when it does come together, that is the other deck besides black, green and red black that I. That I really do like. Okay, let me text Luis. I'm done with my. With my spiel. It's a good sealed format, though. It is in the same way that it's a good limited draft format in the sense that it has checked the box for what it can do, but we are grading on a curve. It is good for a small set. And same thing I would say with the sealed type. Now, Luis, one of the things that you and I talked about before we did this show was that we wanted to do an extra level up here, and I threw out the idea of doing one that. I've seen some good examples lately of people that I know that have not demonstrated this, which is mental toughness as it applies to magic and what its place is, how you get there and why it's important. Important. Yu-Gi-Oh So I think that one of the best things magic does just overall is get you better at this, because magic, especially if you want to play it as a competitive game, which, you know, I would imagine a lot of our listeners, not all of them, and that's totally fine. But a lot of our listeners do engage with magic that way. And. And I don't even necessarily just mean tournaments. I really just mean any match of magic or game of magic that you care about. Winning is competitive. Like you. It could be a casual game. You could be playing against your brother at the kitchen table, or you could be playing at the. The local store and playing, you know, fm, or just a casual, like, you know, like a commander game or whatever it is you're playing on arena. You're playing. Whether you're playing in an event on arena that costs gems to enter or not. If you care about the outcome, there's the possibility that, you know, things that happen in the game will be unpleasant to you. Right there. That is. That is part and parcel. It's better to care than not care, because if you don't care about the outcome, then that means that you don't really care about the activity most of the time. Not always, but that it. You know what's more fun to you? A game of basketball where you care about winning or when you're just standing around shooting Hoops not keeping track of score. I only know of one of those, Louise. Right. You know, it's that important to me. Yu-Gi-Oh Right. And so one of the best things about magic is that it teaches you how to lose, how to handle, you know, kind of tough beats, and ideally, how to keep your composure when those things are happening. One of the reasons this is particularly salient right now is that these arena directs are, like, the perfect recipe for horrible tilt. You know, more on that in a sec. And losing a lot of money. Right. And having a, like, a really bad day. Like, these things can go hand in hand. So I wanted to go through. And this is a great suggestion on your part, kind of like how the mental game works. Mental. Like, how do you build your mental toughness? And some strategies for detailing as well as what is tilting and how you recognize it. So I think that a strong mental game starts well before the actual game or the event that you're playing. And I'm going to use tournament as a shorthand here just because that's just the context that I've played a lot of these games in. But tournament can, again, mean an arena direct. That's definitely a tournament. It can mean an F and M. That's definitely a tournament. It could mean a match you care about a lot. You know, playing against someone even if you're not. There's no literal stakes, but if you care about the outcome, I'm going to just use the shorthand of tournament. Right. So the first thing is expectations actually color a lot of this. I mean, imagine two magic players, they go to a Grand Prix, a Spotlight series. Now, one finishes 16th, wins $500 and, like, you know, a promo, and the other finished 128th and wins, like, $150, no promo. Well, you can clearly see that it might be that the person who finishes 120th is much happier than the person who finished 16th. Like, the actual Prizm is not really what matters quite as much as what is their expectation going into the tournament. Yu-Gi-Oh If you need to top eight the Grand Prix in order to qualify for the next thing or get enough pro points back when that was the system, then, Yu-Gi-Oh finishing 16th is going to be disappointing. If you feel like you spent, you know, 150 hours on this format and your deck is perfectly positioned, and you finish 16th, and then, like, two of your teammates finish in top eight. Like, I. I been in that position on both sides. Easy to feel bad about that. Well, what if you'd never played in a Grand Prix before and you made day two and then you finished 128th and you one-of-one some money. Can you imagine how excited that person is like that, that person's way happier than the person, maybe even someone who finishes in the top eight. I mean, like, as someone who's gotten second, walking out of the tournament hall, finishing second doesn't necessarily feel good. It certainly doesn't feel just good. There are good things to it. But again, your expectations and what you were hoping to get out of an event could really determine kind of where, what you feel like when something happens. The thing though, it's not as simple as just saying have low expectations, because I actually don't think that's the answer either. Some people are motivated by high expectations. You know, the people who, they walk into the tournament feeling like they're going to crush everyone, they're at the top of their game and that's actually really important to them. That's important to how they're going to play that, that day. And that's important to how they, they're going to interact with the tournament. It, I do caution that people who are like that often an early loss can be pretty devastating. So, you know, there, that's not necessarily the best place to come at it from. But you people are different. Not everyone is different from everyone else, but people are generally different from each other. And some people, the way they roll is, that is high confidence, high energy, high expectations. And that's fine if that's, if that's who you are, you should know that about yourself. And this can actually maybe teach you that, because through all of this, when we're talking about mental game stuff, it really does depend on who you are and what you're, you know, kind of what your psyche is and what your, your habits are and what all of that kind of folds into. People have different ways to approach things, different ways to get out of them. And you know, there's not a one size fits all approach. But I would say for most people, keeping your expectations realistic and maybe not tying their expectations to their tournament finish can be really, really valuable. I know that. I can tell you this as a fact. This applies equally to everyone. If you have a bad time when you do poorly at a tournament, you're going to have a bad time at way more tournaments than a good time. Yes. Because most tournaments you do bad at. That's just how it is. What, what if you're one of the best players of all time and have like a 65% one-of-one rate? Well, I can tell you from experience that does not mean you do well at all the tournaments. In fact, more tournaments than not, you still do poorly. Especially if you're in that position. Your expectations are probably on the higher side, and finishing 128th at every tournament would not make you happy. Right. So, totally, I think. And again, this. I'm going to speak to my experience here, and you can take from that what you will. When I come into a tournament, I find it best to hope for a great finish and do my best to put myself in a position to achieve that finish. But I don't put the final standings as. This is a deter. You know, this is. This is kind of the judgment on whether your tournament was. Because first of all, that's not the verdict on whether your preparation was good. I've been really prepared and done poorly many times. I've been poorly prepared and done well as well. That both things can happen. It doesn't mean you made no mistakes, because, first of all, you did make mistakes, because everyone does. But even if you're playing the best tournament of your entire life, you might still just do poorly because magic has a lot of variance. That's how it is. I think that I find it the most useful to put a lot of my expectations and hopes on, well, hopes. I always hope to do well at the tournament, but expectations. I want to walk out of the tournament feeling like I did everything I could to succeed. And if that all lines up with success, great. That's awesome. I love it. You know, and that's. I've had that. That happened plenty of times. But you can't control whether you multi five. Well, I guess you literally control whether you click the mulligan button, but you can't control whether you get two nolanders in a row to mold a five. You can't control whether they top the superhero civil war, you know, the turn before they die, and then they one-of-one You can't control any of those things. What you can control is, are you making good decisions? Are you playing a good deck? Are you prepared for the tournament? Did you manage your emotions and your tilt well? Do you make sure you had enough food and water during the tournament? These are all things you can control. And you can, to some degree, control how you feel. You can't exactly, but what you can do is you can. There's a lot of different things you can do to put yourself in a better position, because emotions are a funny thing. Yes, you don't control your emotions exactly, but you can. Obviously, some people have better control over their emotions than other people. And a lot of kind of figuring out how to end up in the right mental state is just making sure the inputs are at their best possible. Yu-Gi-Oh you know, I really love this, this focus on the expectations because I, I do think that that's a really big gap for a lot of people that you can't help but hope for more or expect more, especially if you feel that you've put in the work. But one little shortcut that I like to do is, you know, like, if I'm at the pro tour, I'm looking out at the sea of players, you know, there's 300 players that have all worked really hard to be there. This is a big moment for them, whether they're a veteran or their first PT, PTs are always a big deal and everybody is excited and wants to try to one-of-one and do really well and all that. But if you put yourself at even footing with the rest of the pro world, right, and there's 100 players, you got a 1% chance that that's how often on average you're going to one-of-one the pro tour. If you are even with everybody else, Even if you extended it to top eight or top 16, like, you know, the percentages go up because there's more slots, but that's still like you're not talking to something that's going to happen every time or even most of the time. That's right. And, and I think that people don't really realize that, you know, or at least they don't internalize it. You know, another one would be, you know, I ran the numbers for the arena directs, you know, just to. I wanted to have an idea for myself about like where I needed to be. And so, you know, I punched in some of some basic numbers for the Hobbit, for example, and you know, the, the break even point, assuming that the things that I put in were correct with regards to how much the collector box is worth for the Hobbit and blah, blah, blah. The break even point is monetarily, if you don't care about gems, which you should, right. Anytime you get to four, when gems are future entries, which saves you money, but. Yu-Gi-Oh exactly. So, so this is actually the most pessimistic version of this is 57% for this particular one. But what that means is you are not winning very much. Like, if you have a 60% one-of-one rate, so that's above the break even point, meaning that it is profitable you to play these over and over and over again, you're going to one-of-one the box about one in every nine times. Nine and a half times or so. And if you've ever seen how complicated random outcome things actually play out, even if, even if we're generous and say that you will one-of-one one every nine times, one out of every nine times that you play, that means that it would be totally within realm for you to get to 18 entries and you haven't one-of-one one until even your 16th. That happens all the time, right? And then it's like, oh, I one-of-one two in a row, right? So out of 18 I one-of-one two. That's even being generous and saying that you actually do convert one out of every nine, which, it doesn't work that way either. You might play 30 of them and then one-of-one four in a row. Like it doesn't, it is not distributed that way. And even if we put that parameter on it, you could have easily well within the realm of possibility at a 60% one-of-one rate, which is again kind of just above profitable, you could have lost 16 entries in a row, easily 16 entries in a row, and not have 1, 500, right? And I'll tell you, actually it's like 40 bucks an entry. It's about 40 an entry. So if you, it's like 650 bucks or whatever, right? So now you're down that much. And you know, let's just say little Marshall and Luis appear on your shoulders right after you lost that 16th, but right before you one-of-one number 17 and number 18. How you feeling? Right? You're going to be banging your head against the wall and some people would be absolutely losing their mind. And what I just described to you is an optimistic view on how random things play out. When you don't have an overwhelming advantage, you have a good solid advantage. I bet you a lot of our listeners would play at that clip at 57, 60%, you know, into the profitable range, but not at that 70 range where you're really starting to turn these things around and you know, pick up a bunch of money and one-of-one a bunch of, you know, like at 70 one-of-one rate you would one-of-one about one out of every four times that you played. You know, so you're doing really well if you're at that 70 one-of-one rate. But you know, the difference between 60 and 70 is huge in gaming like this and in outcomes. You know, that's why, you know, not to take this off the rails. But that's why, you know, when you look at investing, when you look at any long term thing, people are, you know, they freak out over 1 or 2%, right? And you think, well, it's not that big of a deal, like, who cares, right? It's like, well, this is why. Yu-Gi-Oh it matters in a massive, massive way. And it compounds on itself to every 1% better that you are. Every match you go in, it compounds over time. So. But it's interesting because, you know, Luis, like, honestly, really honestly, our listener base, our friends, if I would have told you that as a good player and under fairly optimal conditions, you could lose easily 16 entries in a row and that would be completely within the realm of possibility, do you think that anybody who had just actually had that happen to them would say, oh Yu-Gi-Oh that's exactly what I signed up for. That's totally within the realm of possibility. I mean, they would say, I cannot believe I lost it. Because those losses are going to come in all different shapes and forms. You're going to get mana screwed, your opponent's going to have a nut draw, they're going to top deck you. They're, you know, you don't get to determine all the different range of outcomes that actually happens on. But I genuinely wonder, going back to your point, Luis, about expectations going in, if any of us human beings would actually be able to internalize emotionally the fact that that was totally within the realm of possibility, that a solid 60% one-of-one rate player could one-of-one that many or lose that many matches. People are incredibly bad at figuring that kind of thing out. I remember once when you were testing, we were talking about whether we want to play three or four duresses and someone on our team was like, well, why don't we just try it? Try both. Like, no, we are not going to play enough games to determine the difference between three and four. We got to just talk about this thing. You know, this is a theoretical exercise. Yes, for sure. But Yu-Gi-Oh so. And you're totally right, like the expectation. Not the expectation, your. Your expectation of what's going to happen in the reality. They're not always going to line up. I, I go in hoping I'm going to one-of-one every tournament I play in, just about. I mean, there's some maybe that I don't, but just about every sing. I've never gone into a pro tour without envisioning myself winning it. You know, like, and thinking about what that would be like and thinking about maybe today's the day that, that Marshall gets to call me for the top eight. Like an activity that we both enjoy quite a bit. We do have done quite a bit too. Yu-Gi-Oh Yu-Gi-Oh More than our fair share, maybe. Yu-Gi-Oh But, but you can, you, you can do what you can to control Your expectations and let's say you get them to a place where I think. And again, I'm not saying this applies to everyone, but I think it is pretty healthy to go in to like one of these arena directs thinking like, okay. And actually specifically for any direct, I think setting aside an amount of money that you want to spend on it is a good decision to try to make ahead of time. You can operate however you want. If you want to be a tilt box and just keep going back and you have the capacity and the money to do that and it's responsible. I'm certainly not in the business of dictating what you should do, but I think it's probably a pretty good approach when you're talking about a slot machine esque feeling of I can Easily click the minus 200 button to play five more times. Every time I one-of-one I one-of-one $800. It's really easy to lose $600 doing that if you, if you, if you get to a bad place. So, but let's say you're sitting down for a direct and you're like, all right, I'm going to do this. Well, there's still a lot of things that can happen because the hardest part, because the expectations might happen before the tournament. As you're walking in, there's a lot that can happen in the tournament that are going to be, that's going to be very difficult. So I would say bad beats are kind of what we're talking about here. And bad beat is an extremely broad definition. Bad beat can be anything from like they top deck. They're one of to beat me. I'm all the five in game three to just straight up, I lost playing for the box. And then you feel horrible about it. I mean, nothing even unlucky had to happen there, but no one's gonna feel good about like, all right, I lost playing for top eight and you know, like it was a totally normal game. In fact, I got a little lucky to even be in it. It still feels bad when you lose. And that's, that's kind of when the testing starts because once you sit down, you open up the possibility that unpleasant things will happen to you. You're playing a game of magic. Someone's going to one-of-one and someone's going to lose in these contexts and you're going to be the person that loses a lot of the time. So the thing we're trying to avoid here is tilt. And tilt's a pretty old concept at this point. I was actually looking it up in preparation for This, I know, Shocking, right? And the etymology of tilt. Most people think it comes from pinball, but poker is kind of wrapped into it. So for pinball, we're talking old things here. If you play a pinball machine and you move it too much, if you tilt it too much, the sensor goes off and it burn. It bricks your game to stop people from doing the thing where they move the cabinet, they tilt the cabinet so that the ball rolls the way they want. Obviously, that's just like cheating. So you know that that's what. That's the pinball definition of tilt. The one. And I think that's where the word probably did come from. But basically what tilt means is when you're tilted, you're in a frantic or frustrated state. You're making obviously much worse decisions. You're chasing your losses. Like, I mean, this happens in every kind of game. I used to play fighting games competitively, like Street Fighter. Yu-Gi-Oh Until it was classic there. The classic. What happened is someone would catch their opponent with a big combo and hit them for like, half their life. You know what the first thing the opponent always does in this situation? They run back in trying to get the. Get them back, and it's just like. And they just get hammered again. Like, that's not what you're supposed to do it. I mean, what happens when someone loses at a blackjack table? Well, often what will happen is they'll get some more chips and they'll. They'll run it back because they're like, Yu-Gi-Oh I just lost $1,000. I can't, can't leave now. I'm chasing it. Or in the case of Arena Direct, click the buy gems button. You know. Yu-Gi-Oh So, but once you're tilted, it's a vicious cycle where your one-of-one rate goes down and then you get more tilted, usually because you're already in this, like, susceptible emotional state. And then you're losing more in your mind, you're suffering more bad beats. In the reality of the situation, you're playing worse. So you're going to lose more and you're going to feel worse about it. So there's a couple things here. One, it's important to be able to identify when you've started to enter that state. And knowing about it goes a long way. Just knowing it's a concept, knowing this is something that could happen. I know when I lose, like two or three arenas directs in a row, I have to check in on myself. Okay, hold on. Am I actually making good decisions here, or am I submitting a deck in 30 seconds, which you can get to once you've built enough of these decks. You just go click, click, click. And am I playing bad? Am I not mulliganing well enough? Should I take a little break? Because there are a lot of ways to solve tilt and, and it really depends on the context because one of the best ways to stop yourself from tilting is to just remove yourself from the situation and take a break and you know, for things like the arena directs, that's great. Put down the phone or the iPad or get off your computer, go have lunch, go for a walk, go do any of those things, right? Just go watch a movie, go do the chores you probably should have been doing anything, but you don't always have the luxury of doing that. What if it's round two of a team tournament? Well, you can't just storm off or you're just completely screwing your teammates, you know, and team tournaments especially are actually like easy to, easier to detail because you suffer losses together and you suffer wins together. So you have this like, you know, shared goal and the support system. But even, even not a team tournament, you flew to a regional championship and you started four. Oh, and you lost your next two due to some horrific beats. They top deck three times in a row. Whatever it is some legitimately unlucky things. Well, if you tilt off and you, and you quit and you drop then, or you play horribly, then you're really ruining a lot of what you flew there to do and prepared there to do and qualified there to do. You got it? You can't give yourself. Giving yourself only two losses in a, in a tournament where you get three losses, like, you're just making yourself so much less likely to ever do well at the tournament. I would question going to a tournament if that's what you're going to do. So while it is good to be able to take a break, you aren't always in a situation where you should do that. And when you're tilted, it's really valuable to find ways to de. Escalate that to get yourself out of that situation. So I'm going to share some of the ways that I do this. Hard drugs and alcohol? No, that's for after the tournament. But more on that, funnily enough, that actually not literally those, but I do have that as actually one of my bullet points here. But. But the first one is the easiest. Take a quick walk, take a water break, a bathroom break. Just refocus. Get yourself. Help your body, get yourself some of the things that it needs because part of what could lead you to be tilted is to actually be lacking. In some of these status bars, they're blinking red. You didn't drink enough water. You didn't go to the bathroom. And I don't want to belabor that point, because everyone understands these things, but that can't help even just. I mean, honestly, I see this with kids all the time. Your kids just spinning out, even literally removing them. Going to a different room, doing a different activity for 30 seconds can sometimes break that right away. Totally. And you mentioned the food thing, like a snack. You and I are both the same way when we don't have enough food. Like, brain's not working right. Yu-Gi-Oh totally. And. And while it's good to pack healthy snacks and water and all that, honestly, slimming convention center hot dog will still get you some calories and get you. Get you moving again. So another one. I find my teammates and I tell them my bad beats sometimes. That's you and Paul. I mean, honestly, if people could see that our group chat during pro tours, like, it's. It's outrageous. Like. Cause I. You guys are busy doing coverage, so you're not checking in all that often. You often are not, you know, on your phone. And I'm either being like, oh, hell Yu-Gi-Oh I beat him that round. Look at the sick deck, or I'm just, like, just dropping all my, you know, rage messages there. Yu-Gi-Oh but you're venting, like. And we and Paul and I both know that this isn't like. Like, you're not expecting us to, like, pick you up or something. Right. This is a way for you to kind of go, this is BS Now. You would never do that. Yu-Gi-Oh You know, this is just bs, you know, like, why me? You know, Like. And it's like, it's a safe space for you to do that. You know, I mean, honestly, I even love complaining. That's part of my whole ritual. I love complaining. Even times when I know it's stupid to complain. Yu-Gi-Oh You know? Yu-Gi-Oh Mac has been, you know, giving me a lot of crap because I've been complaining throughout the entire rotisserie draft, all of these rotisserie drafts, and I've one-of-one so far, all of them. So it's like, what's going on there? And what's going on there is I love to complain. And that one, he was up, like 70 before he started. That is a bad beat for Mac. Yu-Gi-Oh he should be complaining, not you. Well, he did. We finished our rotisserie draft, and I didn't play my matches over the Weekend because I don't record stuff on the weekend typically and I wanted to record, record them. Mac played all his matches except against me, was up 70 out of his eight round tournament and we tied for first because I beat him and went and went 6 and 1 against everyone else. We both tied at 7 1, but he was 70 and I was 00 and we tied. Anyways. I do tell my teammates and my friends about these. And look, we all know these stories are kind of boring and dumb, but your job, your responsibility as a friend and a teammate is to listen to them and it's to commiserate. Look, you're not supposed to like, you know, I'm not looking for you guys to blow smoke up my ass here and tell me, you know, oh Yu-Gi-Oh that's the unluckiest thing I've ever heard. But it's like you got to just listen and just let, let them vent, right? What I don't do, and I would recommend that you don't do this is this applies to everyone. Do not do this to your opponent. Your opponent is not the person you should be complaining to. That's. That is not sporting and that is, I think, poor behavior. Look, your opponent knows they top deck in game three. They know that you will defy and that, that you know, that sucked. You don't need to be belaboring the point and telling them about it. They understand these things. So let your opponent sign the slip, say gg, shake their hand. Go find your friends and complain about the lucky idiot who beat you because you mold to five and they top decked or whatever. You know, you don't even have to call them an idiot, but if it makes you feel better, I guess you could, you know, as long as you're not doing it to them or. And especially not if you're like really being serious. Your opponents aren't all idiots. Maybe some of them are. Here's a big one. And this is one that not everyone is necessarily going to be able to even achieve if they want to. And some people one-of-one want to, but I think is pretty useful, you know, not to go too deep into like the meditation type space. But I, I think if you can achieve a pretty much an empty mind while playing your matches empty. What I mean is free of distractions and free of things that aren't the match. I, I can honestly say for like 99 of my pro tour matches, I wasn't really thinking about anything when I was playing except the match I was playing. I wasn't thinking about what happens if I one-of-one this match or lose this match. You know, am I playing for day two? Am I playing for top eight if I one-of-one this X, if I lose this Y? I wasn't thinking about that. I wasn't thinking about the bad beats I suffered early in the tournament or even earlier in the patch auto doesn't matter. None of those things matter. Those things are actively detrimental to you winning this match in front of you. And this I understand, I don't necessarily control, but I don't really think about whether I'm hungry or thirsty or, you know, in these matches, like afterwards, Yu-Gi-Oh I'll drink like an entire bottle of water or huge iced tea or go get something to eat. But like, for someone who cares about food so much, and I really do, when I play matches, I can sometimes go multiple rounds without even thinking about it because I'm just in the zone. I'm thinking about the matches. I'm not thinking about whether this was a lucky or unlucky pairing. Plenty of time for that afterwards. And trust me, I do think about all these things afterwards during the match. I really just thinking about how I was going to beat my opponent. What could I do to play this, this well. And I think the closer you can get to that, the better. And that does take practice. All of these things take practice. Almost everything worth doing takes practice. I mean, some things you kind of born with it or you're not. This is not, I don't think, one of those things. Everyone is put together a little bit differently, so some people aren't going to get there. But one of the biggest pieces of advice I gave to one of my friends when we first started playing and he first started playing PTQs and Grand Prix and started to get a little better and started to get featured every now and then. And he would always get really nervous at the last round of the ptq and everyone's watching because you're playing for top eight, right? Or at a Grand Prix, you get your round six feature match because you're, you're five zero with a cool deck. You, you can't think about the fact that all these people are watching you. And I've played at this point, probably more magic with people watching than maybe anyone. Like, I'm not even exaggerating because if you combine all the videos I've done, and I've done videos forever at this point, plus all the PT matches with all the people watching, I mean, I would assume you've like lapped the next person, like maybe there's some people, maybe Kenji actually, because he, he does just stream infinite. But regardless, it doesn't matter whether I'm 1st or 10th or whatever. I mean, you know, there's not many people who've done more than that, I can tell you. Honestly, I don't think it ever affected me that people were watching. I didn't really think about that part of it. And that's lucky that that helped me. I think a lot of skill for sure. I think a lot of the advantages I've had in this realm are things that I kind of fundamentally or like were natural to me and that's what drew me to all of this. But you can still work on it. And my friend one-of-one in this case, he did work on that and he did get to the point where he wasn't nervous when people were watching him play and he played a bunch of pts, you know, and like that is the sort of thing that the less you can be thinking about that isn't just the match you're playing, the better you're going to be at B. Because if you're spending brain cycles thinking about how your last opponent top decked against you, like, you know, you're losing percentage there, it's not, it's not particularly useful. Yu-Gi-Oh and there's a corollary here that really applies to the arena directs. When you're playing Magic on a screen, it is so easy to have Discord open and you're looking at your phone when someone texts you and you're listening to music or God forbid, watching a show or a podcast or something. Right. You can do those things if you want. You are probably making yourself play a little bit worse. And you look, if you're playing arena because you're. You wanted to do a draft before you go to bed. Yu-Gi-Oh of course you should be listening to music and, or watching a show or chatting with your buddies on Discord. If you're paying $40 to play a sealed Winterbox, I would consider doing less of those things. You know, I think that. And, and look, I'm, I'm, I'm pretty guilty of this. I play a lot of these things on my phone while I'm doing other things. And I know I'm losing percentage. As long as you're aware of what you're doing, I think it's totally fine. You can just make those decisions. What I don't want is people frustrated that they're losing because they're trying to do three things at once and not realizing how badly that hurts you. Because it really does hurt. So I would recommend minimizing those things. On the other hand, you know, playing with. Playing with friends on Discord can be very helpful in terms of getting better and maybe making the right plays. But you gotta figure out the right spot for that. And I think in general, the less fewer distractions, the better. Another thing that helps for me, and this one definitely does not work for everyone, is after a match, I like to try to figure out what I could have done differently. Some people don't want to think about their loss that they just took, and that's totally fine. What you shouldn't do is try to explain to your opponent in the ways they messed up. Right. I've seen people be like, if you'd just done this, and it's like, that's not helpful. Like, for some people, it can be. I've had people who I played specifically ask me at the table, hey, do you see anything I could have done differently? That's awesome. I love when people do that. And I'm happy to. Happy to talk to them. Unless they just beat me in a horrifying fashion, then that's probably not the thing I want to do the most. But, like, most of the times when people do that, it's because they lose to you and they want your advice, and that's totally good. I don't give that unprompted. I think that would be, you know, not, not, not, not good etiquette. But I do find it helpful to think about what could I have done differently in that match? Because first of all, when I've got my, you know, analysis helmet on, I'm spending less time thinking about how unlucky I got or whatever. Yu-Gi-Oh It's a different mindset. The other thing is, I kind of prefer losing to my mistakes. Because you know why? Next time, if I don't make that mistake, maybe I'll one-of-one Yu-Gi-Oh If I just lose. If. If everything you chalk up, if you chalk all your losses up to luck, what's your path forward? What's your where? How are you getting better? How are you improving? How are you changing that outcome next time if you just think it's all luck? I mean, trust me, we all know these people. The people who think they get unluckiest all the time are the people who are just not giving themselves good outs in whatever endeavor they're doing, and they're blaming it all on luck, and they're not improving. It's fine to acknowledge luck because luck is huge. It's a big part of it. Everything that happens in life, honestly. And I think if you don't think that, you're foolish. But it's not useful to blame luck either. I may have gotten really unlucky in the match. I just lost. But what if I did make a better decision on turn five? Maybe I still could have one-of-one that. That would be awesome. And so I find it useful to look at. Look and see what I could have done differently and try to take what I can out of that. Maybe not every time, but I think that is something that can be good. And then to get back to your earlier comment, save the till for afterwards. Once I'm eliminated or the day's over. Yu-Gi-Oh I'll let it out. At that point. We have a ritual called the tilt shake. And that's when you go get a milkshake and you just have too much ice cream. Ice cream because you're tilted and helps you detilt. That's true. That's totally fine. I mean, obviously do. Don't do things that are, like, too unhealthy or risky or whatever. But, you know, time to let it out is after when. When you're not playing anymore. I think that's a totally fine time to kind of let that pressure out, because it is there, even if you're kind of ignoring it. And for me, it's like, Yu-Gi-Oh I feel pressure literally before round one of a tournament, but once it starts, it's just. I don't feel any of that. It's all done. End of the day, kind of those things kind of come back, come rushing back in, and you can, you know, you know, whatever release valve you need. So the last thing you can do is you can really just stop for the day. And, Yu-Gi-Oh arena directs. Like, look at your EV calculator. Right? At 55, you one-of-one X. At 57, you one-of-one Y. At 60, you're. The number starts going up pretty well. Yu-Gi-Oh So 57 is your break even point. At 55, you're losing, and it goes down fast. Like, Yu-Gi-Oh you. You know, if. If you can conceptualize what percentage of your one-of-one rate you lose when you're tilted. And it is a percentage, no matter who you think you are, you are not playing your Absolute best when you're on tilt. Even some people are a little better at managing. Some people completely lose their mind, right. And just, you know, they'll just attack with everything. You know, they're just going off and then be there. But you do some decorated pro tour players, even people, perhaps in the hall of Fame, who if they lose the first two rounds of the tournament, they just never come back from that. Never have never come back. Yu-Gi-Oh One of the coolest things that ever happened in Magic is when Paulo started O2 at Pro Tour Rise of the Eldrazi and one-of-one the Pro Tour because every single time I was 02 afterwards I thought, you know, Paula one-of-one the Pro Tour from that. If I'm. Is Paulo better than me? Well, the answer is actually yes, but there's not that many people who I would agree to that Blue Ice better than me. But I could still try to toe in the Pro Tour when I start O2, you know, and, and if you don't, if you cut those possibility space off, it's like you're just completely screwing yourself. Yu-Gi-Oh And when, and when you think about it too, you know, if you do. This isn't really how it works in the real world, but it's a reasonable framework. Is what we were talking about before with okay, I'm going to take my skill set, my one-of-one percentage, it's matchup dependent, player dependent, there's a whole lot of variables. But if you, you know, get the furthest zoomed out you can, and Luis wins at 60 something percent at the PT and he sits down and just gets to apply that over and over and over and over and over and over again. His go is basically just to Blue Ice many matches as possible because there's only a small, small fraction of players who can Even equal his 1% at the PT, let alone be better than him. And they're probably not even in the room. So, you know, it's really just a question of that. But if you zoom out and you look at all your matches for like, let's say day one of a gp, you know, back when I was playing or whatever, you know, when I really looked if I lost one really early, it felt really bad because I thought it made, it made such a worse chance for me to make day two or you know, to try to make a run for the top eight or whatever I was trying to do. But in reality, you know, those were individual instances, right. My one match against this one player, I never hit my third land drop, etc. Etc. And I lost. And I thought, okay, well this is kind of over now. But if I was had a good deck and was playing well, I might rattle off five or six in a row and it's like, well, it just so happened that that loss that I was going to take happened at the very beginning of the day. But if I zoom out And I look the entire day of, you know, six, seven, eight matches, whatever it was that I was playing that day, you know, you don't really get to decide when those losses come and you don't want to over index for it. And that goes both directions. If you get them early, you don't want to over index for, well, it's over, who cares? This sucks. I shouldn't even have flown here, blah, blah, blah. But also if you do happen to get close and then pick them up late in the day, you know, you don't want to over index for that either. You know, you can say, you know, I was actually running pretty good just to get to this point and now I'm playing against higher level of competition and this is where it kind of fell apart for me. That's not that surprising. That, that is not you getting unlucky. That's just you picking up your wins a little later and maybe even being lucky just to be there. Then that can be a really difficult thing to, to get through your head too, that. But it can be a little bit soothing. I think to go well, on average, I'm going to lose a couple of matches today. When they happen isn't really that relevant whether it was at the end of the day or at the beginning and maybe allow you to just keep on fighting. Yu-Gi-Oh I, I agree. And at the end of the day, I think that one of the strongest tools you have in your arsenal is just, is just stopping. Because if you're, if you're a 59 player and you're, and your expectation is positive playing these, that 59 is like, it's not you playing at your best because your lifetime one-of-one percentage isn't reflected of your top one-of-one percentage. But let's save your lifetime59 with like a pretty good sample size. You drop to 57, 55 really fast when you start playing tilted. And then, and then again that just kind of is a cycle, a race to the bottom. So I think that especially there's so many directs. Like look, the EV is different. You know, some of them are much more appealing than the other ones and, and all that. But like this one was on for like a week, you know, I don't even know. Yu-Gi-Oh why don't even know when it finishes. I don't either. And you could, you don't have to play right now. You can stop for a couple hours, stop for a day. In my case, not because I was tilted exactly, just because I wasn't enjoying it. I stopped the whole time. I just, I Don't want to do this, you know, like so I think that knowing unto walk away is really important for your long term, kind of like not only like healthy relationship with the game, but also just your one-of-one percentage and how much. In this particular case, we're really harping on this in a direction because it's exactly the thing that our listeners are going to hit really hard and could hit them back really hard. It's going to be good for your wallet to not be playing when high expense or high entry fee events when you're not giving it your best. So I think that this is something that's really, really worth practicing. And it's good to know what your mindset is going in, what your expectations are, how that can help you find good expectations. Like you get to choose those things. Like I see, I see kind of your relationship with a lot of these like kind of emotional things. It's a little bit like you're the captain, you are driving the ship, but the ship's pretty big and it takes a while to turn it. And as you get better at steering the ship, you can do a better job at it. I mean, learning how to master your emotions is something we just go through our entire lives figuring out. Right. And I think the keys here, like to kind of summarize it is know what good expectations are like for you. And I, I, I shared mine to, to recap, mine are I always hope to do, do as you know, do well and one-of-one the tournament and top eight and I try to put myself in the best position I can of the things I can control. And I understand that things I don't control will sometimes be beneficial and sometimes not that. And you know, so I have high expectations in terms of like my play and my preparation and in terms of, I have high hopes in terms of how I do, but I don't expect it because I just don't. I think that's a fool's errand. Once you're in the thick of it, once you're playing the tournament, playing the event, whatever it is, try to identify when you start to get tilted. When you start, when your performance starts to degrade, when your mental state starts to degrade. Like because not only just performance wise, like you just have less fun. I want you to have fun in these tournaments. That's the whole point. There's a lot of things you could be doing with your time as we, as we mentioned. And then once you identify that you're starting to get tilted, what are your strategies to combat that? Are you taking a little break? Are you complaining to your friends and your teammates about the horrible beats you suffered? And you having a drink of water, having your food, whatever it is, you're analyzing your games or not or not thinking about them. Some people do better. Just. I know people who, at a pro tour, when their round ends, they put on their headphones, they sit at the table and they wait for the next round. And that's totally legit. Do what you can. I mean, Kibler is someone who, when the pairings go up, he's listening to whatever his song of the tournament is, and he listens to it until. Until he sit down and starts playing, right? Like, he goes and looks at his pairing and that's his, like, entry music, right? He gets pumped up doing that. And then I think a really valuable skill to work at is when you're in a game or in a match, really just be thinking about that match and that game. I've. I mean, I've played. I've played pro tours where I'm getting texted things about life that are not things I needed to be thinking about at that moment. And I just shelve it till the end of the round, then I go deal with it, right? Like, there's, you know, I've played plenty of tournaments where I have work responsibilities that I have to kind of juggle in the middle of those and. Or personal ones. And like, I'm not saying that makes the tournament easier, but being able to just go into every round like tabula rasa, just nothing else going on but the match in front of you, that's Zebra valuable, too. You do all those things and you. You'll become a more enlightened magic player. No, you'll become, I think, a more resilient magic player is really what it is, because as I've mentioned many, many times, this applies outside of magic. And if I had to choose the number one thing that magic has done for me and other people, I've seen in terms of making them more prepared for life, it's being able to handle losses and, you know, bad luck, basically being able to handle things that are bad that happened to you, whether it was completely random or whether it was because you made a mistake, either one. And there's a lot of people in the world who don't do well with that at all and try to. And maybe they don't put themselves into positions where that matters as much. You can choose not to play magic or a competitive endeavor, but you can't opt out of life. And life Will give. Deliver bad beats, no matter who you are and what you're doing. There are people. There are some things that will happen to you that are bad, and how you deal with them is really important. And I think magic is a really good. It's kind of a brutal training ground for it, but it's a really good training ground. Maybe poker is even more brutal because poker is the worst. But, Yu-Gi-Oh money on the table with these coin flips. But, yes. And the worst part is when you do lose one, you have to watch the person who did the wrong thing. Things stack up your money, and I'm telling you. Yu-Gi-Oh right. And as you might expect, the people who are successful in magic and poker, I think, tend to be fairly resilient when these things happen to them in other parts of their life. And I think that that's a really awesome skill to take away. So hopefully this is useful. But, you know, I think that at the end of the day, figuring out what works for you is really important in this realm. But I think these are some. Some good best practices. And then the last thing is I know some people who never solved this and they stopped playing magic, and that's fine. I mean, you could continue playing magic while not solving this. I know people who've done that too, but I think that is, like, kind of the worst of all worlds. So hopefully this will help you on your next arena direct quest and you'll one-of-one some more boxes and lose fewer gems. That's right. Yu-Gi-Oh Keep those expectations in check. I think the biggest takeaway that I have when I hear people complain about this stuff is they complain, they say, what happened? And then you say, that's totally normal and exactly what you signed up for, even if it doesn't feel that way. And until you can get that through your head, that winning, losing four, four in a row or whatever is really not that big of a deal. Totally within the realm. You're probably overvaluing your own one-of-one rate a little bit. Like, there's a lot of things conspiring here, and that is completely normal. And it just doesn't feel that way. If you go O2, O2, O2, you know, you lose four in a row, you don't get any gems, you get nothing. And you're like, this is BS Why am I losing? Why is this happening to me? What did I do wrong? You know? And it's like, that's normal. Like, people don't want to hear that, but it's the truth. It's like that that is exactly what happens. That is exactly how these things can play out. And in fact, the times when you one-of-one are the exception. And when things aren't going, quote, as they should or normal, it just feels that way to you. So get that way. Get that through your head and it'll help out a lot with your expectations about what you're actually signing up for with tournaments of all different Topps games and cards and all that kind of stuff. Okay, let's call it a show there, Luis. Great stuff. Hopefully useful on both fronts for our listeners. And I am really curious about what our listener base thinks about the Hobbit. You know, we took a stand with the Spider man one where we did the Sunset show right after the set review, but we didn't know how that was gonna go. It's just how we felt about it. It turns out it did line up with our. Our listener base, this one. We'll still talk a little bit about the Hobbit, but it clearly isn't holding a ton of our attention and. And I'm curious if it's holding yours. So, Yu-Gi-Oh let us know. I'm really curious. You can find us on social media, Marshall Underscore LR and Luis's LSV pretty much everywhere. You can find everything related to the show@lrcast.com which, by the way, is now redesigned. It's got a little bit of better search functions and stuff, and it just looks a little more modern. That's lrcast.com it has links to all of our stuff, including, like, Luis's YouTube channels on the following page there. And, you know, Paul's Everything, you know, related to the show over there. And of course, still all the episodes we've ever done. And they're searchable and you can even look at them by level up or sunset, that kind of stuff. So just some nice little improvements over there@lrcast.com Also, we want to say thank you to our Patreon supporters as well as Ultimate Guard for their support of the show. Show that is going to do it for this one. We'll see you next week. I just wanted to give another shout out for the Lotus Lounge Draft League. I think it's going to be cool. Yu-Gi-Oh you know, I got to tell a story I haven't really told before. This is a little bit chasing the dragon for me because there was a period of time about two years ago where me, Mac and Martel, or me, Mac and BK were. We're drafting against these Austrians. And you can actually go back and find the videos on my YouTube channel. And I didn't mention in the videos, but it's funny, they don't stakes, they were poker players and we were just cubing for like $1,000 a person. Like that's what, that's what the stakes were for each draft. And it was, it was electric. Well, in your case, it was $900. It's true. I, I, I, no, it was 800 because it was $800. I, I, I, I let Marshall and Paul stake me for $100 each draft, which was a great deal for them. It was an amazing easy deal for us. Very much appreciated. It was a fun sweat and it was also highly profitable. We did a bunch of these drafts and those guys were good. And one of them was actually a former pro tour player, had PT top eights. Max Brock, actually, if you remember, he's from, from an old school player. He, I remember him from like the first worlds I played at. And, and they were good. The drafts were really close. We did one-of-one more of them. I think we, we were, we were advantaged and Yu-Gi-Oh you know, eventually they moved on. They, they wanted to just stop playing magic or what have you. But those were really fun. And that was, that was something else. It was a very different world. You, I was more dialed in on those than, than most drafts. I'd say that was a lot of drafts. I'm like, Yu-Gi-Oh I'm gonna take the Parallax way. I'm gonna draft Boros though actually that was usually max job. The way we had break broken it down is not that we had, we stuck to this plan every time because drafts are drafts. But he would more often than not play White one-of-one and I would more often than not play like a combo deck of some kind. But these are also three on threes. They were pretty, they were pretty grimy. Like it was a lot of mid range slug fests. And let's just say one of the drafts I ended up with the card Misha's workshop and the card Griselbrand in my deck. And we did one-of-one that draft. I went one and two. They were in your actual deck. I drafted an Academy deck that also had Griselbrand Corpse Dance in it, but also didn't have Academy. It had Mitchell's workshop, which is not as good as Academy. And to commemorate this, I'll have to, I'll have to send you a pic. Marshall Mac got a custom, an altar made that's, it's a Griselbrand altered with Mitchell's workshop on it. Oh, that's amazing. The gristle shop, it's upstairs though. It's another computer. It's great, I do need it. But oh man, I missed those days because there was nothing that made me feel more alive than top decking in match nine of a draft where it's like, you know, you're, you're playing for it all. And it was, it was really something else. So have it. I've gotten that experience a few times over the course of my life. I remember before Pro Grand Prix, Sydney in Australia. This is back in like the 2010s. Me and David Ochoa flew down to LA, had a one day layover before flying to Australia because there was a different poker player and group that wanted to draft against us. And we, we, we, we one-of-one our plane tickets before we headed over to, to Australia. That was, that was some good times. I mean, that's incredible. Look, the way I feel about it is as long as everyone understands I'm a professional magic player. They're not professional magic players. And they're the ones who want to draft high stakes that, you know, they're big boys, they can do what they want. And they, I think, I mean, you know, poker players, you are a poker player that, you know these guys that, you know exactly what they wanted. They wanted to feel alive, they wanted the stakes, they wanted to play some magic, they wanted to play against the best. Best, you know, or in this case, me. And they wanted, they, they wanted it to be the best competition possible and didn't mind that on their thousand dollar bet their expectation was like $800 or something because it was not like, Yu-Gi-Oh they were pretty good. Yu-Gi-Oh it was not like we one-of-one every single time. Certainly they would have stopped well before that. But we one-of-one more than we lost. And I did enjoy that part. It.