Limited Resources 869 - Anatomy of a Great Cube Deck, Plus Luis on Overall Cube Philosophy

Foreign. What is up, everybody? Welcome to another episode of Limited resources. This episode, number 869. I mean, my name is Marshall. I am one of your limited resources. And joining me on the line all the way from Denver, Colorado, it's Luis Scott Vargas. Luis, we'll talk a little Cube today. Can I interest you? Sure can. I mean, it's important. You know, Cube is now an evergreen format for us limited players. It used to be a more difficult thing to find. You'd have to either play on Magic Online or know somebody who had a cube. But now it's also on arena and it's kind of everywhere that we play. Right? Like, if you play in real life, you can build or. Or hopefully have a friend even that owns a Cube. And if you play a Magic online, you've got that. And if you play on arena, you know, Cube pops up pretty often these days. So this is a topic that we like to try to weave in when we can. And we figured since the Hobbit, it hasn't been the most popular. Luis is kind of off it. I've been playing it just because they've been having the winterboxes up again and I'm kind of an addict for those. But. Yu-Gi-Oh but, you know, the format itself hasn't been exactly an all star. It's been okay, but, you know, kind of what we expected when we first came in. And so we figured we'd take a little bit of a reprieve here and talk about Cube. For this week, we've got some very, very big topics for Cube as well. Some more narrow takeaways for you if you're thinking about dipping your toe in a cube or if you just haven't done it in a little while. And we're talking about that today on the show. First up, though, we want to say thank you to everybody who supports us on Patreon. It's patreon.com limited resources. If you'd like to support us there, you get a thank you card and a sticker in the mail. And we really appreciate everybody who supports us over there. The other thing I wanted to say is thank you to Ultimate Guard for supporting the show. They make some of the best stuff in the business when it comes to protecting your cards, your decks, and your collection. Everybody that owns Magic cards knows you need to take care of them when you play. You need to take care of them when you store them. You need to take care of them if you ever want to sell them, trade them, whatever. They are valuable. They cost a lot to get. And you are dang right. You need to protect them. So if you need sleeves, playmats, deck boxes, long boxes, binders, backpacks, all that kind of stuff, you're gonna find it@ultimate guard.com and I really appreciate the level of quality for their products. That's like the standout thing for them is they really make great stuff. And, you know, making a really great product is hard. It takes a lot of work and effort, a lot of detail. There's a lot of things that don't appear on the outside until you actually get into the weeds of making something and have to start making decisions where it's like, hey, if we want it to be this price, you can either have this or this. Which one do you want? You can't have everything that you want with every product that you make and still keep it at a reasonable price point. And I just think they do a brilliant job of that. They marry really great materials with really great design, and it ends up being a really great product. If you want to check out their full line, you can go to Ultimate Guard and and you can buy them at your favorite local game store or online retailer. Thank you, Ultimate Guard. We do appreciate it. If you are a Patreon supporter of ours, you do get access to our Patreon question of the week. And this one comes from Chromomic. Oh, man. How is that, Luis? Chromonic. Comicus. Yes, there we go. Chronomy. Chromicomicus. Yu-Gi-Oh Chromacomicus. Chromacomicus. Yes. And Chromacomicus says with every set, wizard seems to print cards for almost every play format constructed, commander, draft, etc. Sometimes these are total blanks for us because they do nothing for draft. The one format they do not print cards for is Cube. LSV is left looking for cards that will fit in the cube rather than the other way around. Putting your design hat on. If you could create cards that accentuate an archetype or a play pattern, or perhaps breathes new life into older archetypes that have gone by the wayside, what would they be? Is there anything else V could create that would help him stop hating Green? Yu-Gi-Oh Shots fired. That's obviously a bit of an Excel exaggeration. In fact, I just drafted green for a cube yesterday. There you go. I think that some of the things that I would be interested in. Well, the advantage of creating like a direct to cube sort of product would be that you don't have to worry about what it does to other constructed formats, which can be Valuable because I mean that's part of the reason that like the Modern Horizon sets are cool because they can print cards that are way too powerful for Standard that go directly into Modern. When it comes to Cube, I wouldn't mind the Reanimator archetype getting a little bit of a boost. I feel like that one has kind of been on a consistent but slow or slow but consistent kind of journey downwards in terms of how good I think it is. Like Entomb is still a good card, obviously. Thoughtseize is still a fantastic card. Animate, Dead and Reanimate are strong cards. But I, I feel like that archetype as a whole is, is getting a little bit worse. And I wouldn't mind a cool animate maybe or a cool creature to animate that they wouldn't want to print in other formats. You know. You know they, they have to keep in mind the. All these old formats when they make some of these creatures. But you know, when you look at Modern where like Goryo's Vengeance, Atraxa and Griselbrand is a really strong deck. Well, if they put a really cool legendary animate, they'd have to contend with what it does to all these other formats. I think they could probably get something cool into Cube. I, I don't have like a card in mind or anything like that. I wouldn't mind Storm getting a little bit. Storm is really bad in Cube right now and it's a really fun deck. Like people love it. People love drafting bowls to Citadel. They love Yog Muswil tendrils. I mean some people do, a lot of people don't and that's fine. But I think Storm, rather than being like basically a terrible deck to draft, it would be cool if it was a, a slightly stronger deck. Maybe some kind of ritual that they could print. Like some kind of mana generation effect. Doesn't have to be literally a ritual, but some, some way to, to. To generate mana that would be cool in this deck and maybe cool in Cube in general that you would not want to make in, in Modern. I think Modern is probably the biggest format for that because you can skip standard by printing direct to Modern. There's no direct to legacy vintage slash Cube. So that would be a cool opportunity for that. And I wouldn't mind selling some decent creatures that again, you Goldin print in some of these other formats. I think it like, I think Nadu is added a lot to Cube, for example, not as one of the best green cards in Cube and adds a cool deck and you know, obviously Nadu was a bit too good for these formats, given what happened, so. But you can imagine a Natu printed direct in Cube Masters or whatever, where it would be fine. Yu-Gi-Oh We're going to talk even more kind of philosophically about this topic as well, about printing cards directly for Cube. And we're also going to be talking about kind of how to approach the modern cube. Modern cubes, I should say, and where they stand right now. Before that, though, let's do a. A crack a pack from Vintage Cube. And this will give you. If you haven't drafted in a little while at a vintage Cube level, you'll get to see some of the cards that better here. Some old favorites and some new ones too. First card out is the three Baby. Thraben Inspector's a cool card. I'm not very close to cutting it, but it's also like not a card you really want to take early. Certainly. Next up is Wheel of Fortune. What's the status right now on the Draw 7 archetype? You know, there was a good stretch there where taking Draw sevens plus the. The various cards in the cube that punish the opponent. When you have one out and they don't and then you cast a Draw seven was. Was very much a thing. Is that still a strong. Yu-Gi-Oh So there's still Hull Breacher and Orcish Bowmasters as the good versions of that effect. Would that really punish them? Whole Breacher is the best. If you. If you cast a draw 7 of whole breacher in play, you basically always one-of-one It has to be that you're losing badly on board and draw nothing that you can do with seven fresh Treasures. Bowmasters, of course, puts a ton of pressure on the board and sometimes just kills them. There's also Leo Bold and Narset, which both prevent them from drawing more than one. That is still good, obviously. I mean, literally yesterday Mac Time twistered me with Leo to play on turn two. That was pretty impressive. Oh, Yu-Gi-Oh But I would say that a lot of the times Narset and Leave Old still don't end up with a one-of-one because you're not getting anything on board. You're not getting Treasures, you're not getting to ping for 7 and a 7 7. So sometimes you'll like Leovold Narset or, sorry, Leovold Wheel. Then on their next turn, they already have a board, they play another thing and they can still one-of-one But the idea of drafting Draw sevens for that is reasonable. The problem is Leavel and Arsenal aren't that good. And Hullbreacher and Bowmasters are pretty early picks. So when I first pick a Wheel of Fortune, I'm not thinking I'm going to draft this deck, but Wheel's still a pretty powerful card. There's a lot of combo decks that can make good use of Wheel. It's good with fast mana, which everything's good with fast mana, so that's not like the most outstanding thing, but it's a. It's a generically pretty powerful card. If I first pick a wheel, I'm looking for cards like, you know, Lion's Yu-Gi-Oh diamond or Lotus Petal. Looking for free spells like Subtlety or Force of Will. It can be really powerful to go like Subtlety or two, Drop on, Tap Cast, Wheel on, Turn, on your own turn two or whatever. I'm not really that thrilled about first picking a wheel, so I would hope not to. But you know, it is at least a powerful enough card. I wouldn't mind it. Ursa's Saga is next. That's another strong card. Urza's Saga is very good. I also prefer not to lead on Saga just because sometimes, I mean, the best part of Saga is when you have acceleration like a Mox, and it's also good to get. Well, you're just not going to be able to guarantee that you get a card like that. Saga is better when you have some of the really good cards. When you first pick Mox Ruby, then Urza's Saga becomes a Zebra appealing pick. Pick one, Pack one, or a Saga. There's a lot of times it will end up not being that good for you. Do you play it outside of like an artifact based deck? You can play Urza's Saga as long as you have usually like two or three artifacts to get and some good acceleration, it's still not that great. Like a Boros deck that has one mox and I don't know, a Skull Clamp and like a Lotus Petal. Yu-Gi-Oh it's fine to play in that deck. Not amazing, but fine. I think that a lot of decks you. Outside of a dedicated artifact deck, you can still play Saga if it's getting a card that's important enough, whether that be like a Skull Clamp or retrofitter foundry, that kind of points you in the direction of an artifact deck. Sensei's Top in a combo deck, like let's say you have a combo deck that. Like an Underworld Breach deck that has a Lotus Petal and a Sensei's top, like in a Lion's Yu-Gi-Oh That's fantastic. Gets your Combo pieces plus a top. But it's still. You can first pick a Saga. It's. Saga is like an a 9 out of 10 card once you have like a Mox and another good thing to get and it's like a 5 out of 10 card without that. So Yu-Gi-Oh I would prefer not to first pickers of Saga. Next up is Time Spiral, which is just another draw seven. Except for it's expensive. Just. He says, Yu-Gi-Oh Time Spiral is. Is. Is. Is expensive. So I. I typically am not first picking Time Spiral. Interesting one. Next, which is Teferi Time Raveler, a card I. I'm always attracted to in Cube. I do wonder though, at this point, am I. Am I okay to still love Teferi Time Raveler, or is it kind of a safety blanket at this point? The definition of that being something that makes you feel safe but doesn't actually do that. Oh no, you're. You are definitely cleared for takeoff to Ferry Time Route was an excellent card. I. I think pick one, pack one. I would rather take Teferi than Wheel of Fortune. I'd still probably take Urza's Saga over Teferi, but I would. I would definitely take Teferi over Wheel. Phyrexian, Revoker, Provoker's good, but it's not a card I'm. I'm gonna go out of my way to pick up. Certainly not this early. Nadu. Nadu is an excellent card. Nadu is, I think the best Greek card to pick one. Pack one. Minsc. And Boo is also very good. You're. You're looking to try to combine this with Lightning Greaves or Lava Spur Boost, though I've actually recently replaced Lava Spur boots with skateboard in my Cube, which is. Oh, that's kind of fun and. Or like targeting effects like scythe, Cat Cub, Bristly bill, mana dorks like birds. And you can end up with a pretty strong combo deck. Nadia was just such a good piece by itself. Just the fact that by itself it's like a big Fleer that really punishes them for targeting stuff and works with a whole wide range of cards. It's very different than say Pandora Servant Grindstone. That's a two card combo that wins the game. But neither card is good at all by itself. Besides the virtue of it's a cheap artifact sometimes that's intrinsically a little useful, not as just a great card to cast. You can even have no combos with it, and it's pretty good. And then of course, it wins the game very quickly when you do combo with it. Yu-Gi-Oh I Love Nadu and the Cube. That's been a really cool addition. Next up is Force of Negation. Force of Negation is excellent. This is. So far the cards that I like the best are Nadu and Force of Negation. I would take either of those over Wheel or Urza's Saga. Pick one, pack one, and then Terry Time was somewhere in the middle there. But I think I would be inclined to take either Nadu or Force over Teferi at the beginning. Yu-Gi-Oh I think of the cards we've seen so far, I would take Nadu and then second would be Force and then third would be Teferi. But I love Nadu these days. I really came around on it. Next up is Flashback. Is that any good? In the Cube, Flashback's been a cool addition. It's one red mana and it gives an instant or sorcery flashback. And it's a. What's it called? A. An instant itself. This is if you have like Time Walk or Ancestral and you know, or some. Some really powerful spell like that. And then also or like a combo deck primarily. Next up is Entomb, which is interesting because we just talked about. We just talked about it. And I mean that is the single most important card, right? Like that's the most irreplaceable thing for the Reanimator deck. Yu-Gi-Oh I think if you knew you were Reanimator, like it's pack three. You're like firmly committed. You have reanimate, animate, data trucks. All that In Tune is probably better than Demonic Tutor for you. But Demonic and Vamp are pretty comparable because they get you whatever you're missing In Tune is better than those once you're in dedicated Reanimator. Yu-Gi-Oh The reasoning, by the way, that, you know, if you're wondering why Entomb is even good at all in that is because it does take care of two of the three things that you need to do, which is you need a big creature to reanimate. You have to have a way to get it into your graveyard and you have to have a way to reanimate. So there's three tasks that you need to check the box on before your Reanimator deck goes off. And in TB for the low, low price of 1 Mana takes care of 2 3rd of that. And that means that all you need is a reanimation spell plus Entomb. And on top of it, Entomb has that tutor like effect where you can actually pick which thing you're going to get back. And that's. Yu-Gi-Oh And. And it's also Just difficult to replace. There's the two mana sorcery one that some people play, but it has a restriction on. It can't get a. It can't. The fact that it can't put a legendary creature in the graveyard is a pretty big drawback. Big deal. Yu-Gi-Oh And Tomb is just kind of untouched right now. I don't have Persist or unmarked grave in my cube, though I think it's reasonable to put in either of those. Yu-Gi-Oh You know, when you were talking just now about our Patreon question of the week question about if it would be. If there's a way to improve it Reanimator, you know, I just kept thinking. And so it's not the way I would want to do it, but like another Entomb would just go a really long way. You know, a second copy of Entomb or a functional reprint or even a slightly improved one or slightly different one or whatever. But that. That, I don't know, that doesn't interest me that much. I like new stuff, you know, just like making a deck that isn't quite keeping up more redundant isn't. I don't know, it feels like it goes against the Cube ethos a little bit. I also think, like you literally could just put a second Entomb in if you wanted to. I think. I think most Cubers would find that off putting offensive. Yu-Gi-Oh Next up is the Black White Verge. Yu-Gi-Oh I mean the. The Verges are. Are fine. I. I would not take a black white virgin nearly this high, but they're. They're solid lands. Next up. Kind of interesting. Same mana cost as Nadio. It's. It's Uro, Titan of Nature's wrath. I love Earl, in fact, is a card I would hope to wheel if I took an auto out of this pack. So what do you think about cards like Yu-Gi-Oh these days? Right. Because it doesn't really fit the description of the type of cards and we're going to talk about this more this episode, but the type of cards that tend to really overperform in cube these days, you know, they tend to be like a creature that stays on the board and gives you a bunch of something right away. Mana value removal, whatever it happens to be. And this one's a little bit more of a slow burn. Right. The turn you cast it, you're paying three mana and you're getting a card some life, maybe get one to drop. But Yu-Gi-Oh you're not really getting your immediate mana value back. Where that does kind of seem to be the name of the game these days. How is O still kind of hanging in there as a threat? I actually think Earl's really good. Still it does not help with some of the like what we're going to talk about like your early game that much because Yu-Gi-Oh it's kind of inefficient and even if you like turn two mox Uro get another land into play, like that's more the strength of a mox than URO is what's being demonstrated there. But I think URO is really good that there's plenty of game to play once you've kind of survived the initial onslaught or like, you know, you've interacted with them at the beginning or they've interacted with you. Though if you have A in your deck, it's usually you. Interacting with them is a really good way to one-of-one those games where both players have spent a lot of cards. I think it's really powerful. It also comes out of your graveyard. So when you have like Malevolent Rumble or I still explore Fleer or whatever milling yourself, Earl can get there. It's resilient to discard. It's just a really good card. And Flage is even better. I, I think Flage is actually one of the best. Red white cards. Like, I don't mean Boros cards, I mean red or white cards. It's just near the top of the heap for me because yes, it's not very good against combo. Same is true of Uro, but boy do these cards just smash aggro and mid range, especially if you have some good support for them. So Yu-Gi-Oh I wouldn't take URO over Nadu, but if I took Nadu, I would hope to wheel Hero. Yu-Gi-Oh and you might do it too. Next up is Palantir. Pretty, pretty often. Yu-Gi-Oh Next up is Palantir of Orthonk. I'm not a big Palantir enjoyer. Honestly, I think that it's a fine card, but it's not, it's just not fast enough. So I, I tend to not draft or play this card very often. Honestly, it's really slow. Next up is Brazen Borrower. I do love Brazen Borrower. I think Brazen Borrower is quite strong. Cheap interaction. I don't think it's. I don't think it's as good as Force of Negation by a long shot. So we're not, we're not taking that. Okay. And then our last card is Bilbo. Thief in the Night. Bilbo is a cool new addition. This is the best card from the Hobbit. So it's one in a blue for a two. Two legendary Bilbo with mythic rare spells you cast from not in your hand cost one less. So spells off of Yawgmoth's will or underworld breach or Billbo second ability, which is you can play an instant or sorcery spell from your graveyard or an artifact. And if. If a instant source should go to your graveyard, it's exiled artifact just goes into play. The artifact clause is really big actually. It just adds to the list of targets it can play. Especially in Cube. Yu-Gi-Oh especially in Cube. I think this card is just awesome. Do you remember Dreadhord Arcanist? The one in the red one three. Yu-Gi-Oh And it gets trampled. Cast a spell from your graveyard equal to his power or less. That card actually was. Was too much in like Legacy for example. Yu-Gi-Oh And Bilbo doesn't play the spell for free, but it gives you a one mana discount. So a two mana spell costs for one man or whatever. And it's also. There's no restriction. It can play a five mana spell from your graveyard. Dreadheart Arcanist didn't really work in cube. I tried it. Because you just had to have too many 1 mana spells and pumping its power wasn't really that realistic. Bilbo is just amazing. It just works with every spell in your graveyard or an artifact. So you play like. You play like a lotus petal out of your graveyard or they blew up a talisman. You can cast it for one mana. Like it's a great card. I don't think it's better than force negation. I don't think it's better than Nadu. I don't think it's better than Urza's Saga or In Tomb. But I would expect Build build to be taken kind of in the middle of the pack out of this pack. Just very solid card. So what do you like here? That's our whole pack. We had Nadu Force, Entomb, Bilbo Teferi. I don't know. I mean I can tell you what I took. Oh, okay. What did you take? This was from a draft. I took Nadu. You did take. Not. Okay. I. And you know, take that. Those who say I hate green. I think that Nadu is a really nice card to take first pick because you kind of guaranteed that no one else wants lightning greaves. Yu-Gi-Oh Which is the best card to combine with Nadu. And it's really strong. Even if you don't get greaves. It can be pretty strong. I think it's Just a really good card. I don't mind first picking it. And, you know, it worked out pretty well. I did end up getting Greaves and a really good Nadu deck. I wheeled Uro out of this pack. I think the defensible first picks are Force of Negation, Nadu, and Entomb. I think if you're taking Urza's Saga or Wheel, you're just being a little bit too optimistic. I just don't think that's going to work out that well most of the time. I think if you're in Tomb, do you just view the ceiling as being a bit lower than, like, on Naughty? Yu-Gi-Oh I mean, I. I think it's. Like I said, I think it's totally reasonable to take in TB out of this pack if. If that's. If that's where you're at, you know, if you want to draft that deck, I think you. You can. In fact, INB could work out really, really well out of this Beckett. Like, it's definitely not. Not a bad pick. I think the best overall pick is probably Force of Negation because it's just going to be excellent almost no matter what. I felt like taking Nau and it worked out really well. I think Nadu, Entomb, and Force are all legit. I think if you take Wheel or Urza's Saga, you're more likely going to Cards not being great than I would like, but they could still just be really good sometimes. I think I would narrow it down to Entomb and Nadu. I. I really like Force of Negation, but for my early picks, I do like to try to kind of shoot for the stars, and those are like the. Those are two Absolute key pieces of their archetypes. I've really enjoyed Nadu. I would probably take in tb, though. I still think that deck is fine. I agree with you that it's not as good as it used to be, but starting off with in TB is nice. One other quick question about the Nadu. How greedy do you get with Greaves? Like, let's say. Let's say Uro isn't in this pack and we go Beckett. Pick one. And there's grieves in Uro. Do you just take Earl and go, I'm gonna wheel the Greaves, or do you eat your vegetables and just take the dang Greaves? I would. I. I feel like people are up enough on. On the whole Nadu thing that I. My guess is I would. I would probably not try to wheel Greeds most of the time. It would have to be a. I'd have to have seen it early enough in the pack and have it be a really good pack. Okay, so you're a coward is kind of what you're saying then. I mean, look, I'm like, number one on the list of people who try to wield things they shouldn't, but in this case, that is true. Nadu Greaves is just really strong together. You do have your stripes as far as ambitious wheel attempt, so I can't really knock you there. Okay, let's talk about Cube, kind of in a big picture. I have a bunch of questions for you, Luis and I want to start off with maybe the more tangible stuff for our audience if they're going to dive into Cube, if they haven't cubed in a while, or if they just want to try it again or whatever, or even if it's their first time of it. But what does the anatomy of a good cube deck look like now? Right. Because Cube has gone through many different seasons, let's call it, over the past 20 years. But, you know, for the past, I don't know, two or three or four or something like that, it's been kind of the way it is. I don't know how you. Where the delineations are for you, but I want to know what it's like now. Like, if I were to fire up a Power Cube on Arena or jump on a Magic Online and do a vintage Cube, or jump into your Cube server and do one with your Cube, or the. Like I said, the Magic Online vintage Cube. What is. What are some of the ingredients that I need to have what. What you consider to be a good deck. So Cube. Cube has gone through a bit of a renaissance over the last couple years, I would say, for a couple reasons. One is it's become more available. I. I think I take and take some credit for that, too, in terms of, like, pushing it forward to. To them having it more on Magic Online, which I think, to be fair, they were heading in that direction one-of-one But I was there riding the wave at the very least. You know, like, Cube. Cube has gotten more popular because Cube is really fun, and a lot of people have realized you could just play that all the time now. Right. Cube has gotten pretty competitive, and especially when you're talking, you know, like the Magic Online Cube are indicube, which a lot of people will interact with. There are some things that if you don't. If your cube deck is missing these things, I think this is a really easy test to kind of look for. And what I like about this is it's Pretty dec. Agnostic. Like, we'll talk about some of the exceptions, but I don't need to know what your cubedeck is trying to do to know that if you're missing some of these things, your cubedeck is going to struggle. And the most important things are acceleration. So when I say acceleration, in an ideal world, Moxes, of course, are the best. Best of the business. I mean Lotus as well. But Lotus, Mox, Sol Ring, Ancient tomb, city of Traders. Lotus Petal, Dark Ritual, Birds of Paradise. Basically, you know, Elvish spirit guide. Like basically ways to play your cards ahead of schedule. Your four drop. You really want to play it on turn three or turn two if you're lucky. Turn one if you're really lucky. Because every turn that goes by. I mean, think about this way. At this point, an average Lumina game is what, between seven and eight turns? Around eight turns. Something like that is what it. Something along those lines. I would say most cube games are pretty well decided by about turn five. Not all of them, certainly, but by turn four or five, someone usually has a pretty substantial advantage. Well, playing. If you think about it, playing your 4 drop on turn 3 instead of turn 4 might like double the amount of relevant time it stays in the game. Or something along those lines. Yu-Gi-Oh that's crazy. The shorter the game is, the more each turn counts. If your cube deck doesn't have any acceleration, that doesn't mean your cube deck is bad. But if you have no acceleration, well, that leads us to kind of our next point, which is you got to have some zero mana plays. And I don't mean one mana plays actually specifically means zero. So I'm talking Force of Will, snuff out, Pyrokinesis, Fury, subtlety, solitude. These are all cards that don't cost any mana and give you a way to kind of catch up or stay ahead. I mean, there's a reason Force of Will and Force of negation. Our cards, every time we open a cube pack, if they're in the pack, you're going to talk about them first pick. Because there's basically no cube pack that you could construct or you wouldn't at least want to consider the force of. Obviously you're going to take Black Lotus or Time Walker a mox over it. But if you open two moxes in a forceable, I think in a team draft, I think firmly that the pick is just going to be forcible most of the time. It's really, really good. And you get to pass a mox to your team teammate after your Opponent takes a mox in between you. So zero minute plays are critical. Every color has access to them. Green has endurance, you know, green has force of vigor. Red has pyrokinesis and fury, and mine collapse is even. Is even a zero mana play. Blue, of course, has force of will, force negation, and daze and subtlety. And then white has solitude, primarily with the ability to like, you know, splash other colors. If it needs something else, like snuff out in a white deck is like totally reasonable, but white's a little bit on the short end of the stick in terms of zero mana plays. The upside is that it has a lot of good one mana removal because that's the next part, which is cheap interaction. Not. Not even zero. But I think zero has to be in its own category. Category. So we're talking cards like swords to plowshares, like duress, like Galvanic discharge, Inquisition of Kozilek, you know, spell Pierce Stern scolding. What I'm trying to get at is if you don't have acceleration, you don't have zero mana plays. You don't have that many one mana plays. When you're on the draw, you're gonna get run over. Even when you're on the play, if you don't have a one drop, even if you've got a two drop. If they then flip the tempo by going two drop plus snuff out your two drop. Or they, you know, you play your three drop and then they go play my three drop days. Your four drop untapped, kill your three drop. Like they can steal that tempo back. If you don't have any ways to do these things, you're you. You are going to end up in a pretty tough spot sometimes. You'll be on the play and you'll have your. Your good curve and it'll be fine. You one-of-one ever get behind, so you one-of-one really feel that. But boy, when you're behind, when you're on the draw or you don't have like an early play, it's going to be so hard to catch up, especially if you don't have some of these cards. So if you're drafting a deck that doesn't have these things, you better be a really fast deck because you can actually dial down the interaction the faster your deck gets. Because in general, I would say that cheap interaction is kind of, as we put it, table stakes. It's what you need to have to show up to play. If you don't have a way to interact with your Opponent early, you better be ending the game by turn to four or something like that or you're going to be in trouble because your control deck just can't go turn one Pandora turn two Flow State and expect that to work out well. Or turn two Tap Land. It's just not going to happen. However, if you have a demonic consultation, Thassa's Oracle or Time Vault, Voltaic or even in the cube that doesn't have those like really really Hyper powerful combos, something like Flash World Spine Worm or Underworld Breach, Lion's Yu-Gi-Oh Diamond Brain Freeze. Yu-Gi-Oh there are ways to one-of-one even if you've done nothing to interact the first three turns. Most of the time though your best path to victory is going to be spell piercing their turn, casting a snuff out on their three drop. And I I find it that you've got a lot of things you need to balance and you're drafting a cube deck having ways to accelerate which most of those picks are pretty early picks. So you're not going to like pass up on those if you have the opportunity. Certainly not for like a mox. There's a reason though that Chrome Mox and Mox diamond go so quickly. It's worth the price City of Traders. It's worth the price Gemstone Caverns, you know that's even a really hard one to use. And car disadvantage still very good. You got to have a way to get your cards out early because guess what? If the game ends on turn five and you have two cards in your hand you haven't cast well, imagine how much better it would have been if you got to ditch one of those to Chrome Mox, cast the other one and be a turn sooner. So Yu-Gi-Oh you've got to have these things or you've got to have a really solid plan to end the game. My my Academy decks for example, if I have a good tiller and academy deck that has Mox Opal, maybe like another like a real mox has an expedition map, has a lot of good plays to make a lot of cheap artifacts. I can run pretty light on interaction. I don't care about their 2 and 3 drops. If I'm just casting a 7 drop on my next turn. Ugin erases the need for early interaction if you can cast it on turn four decks that can't do that are forced into a position where they do need to answer their opponent's plays. You know one of the trends that you'll see throughout magic is as a format ages and as it grows as more cards are Added to it, you know, it tends to get faster. That's. That's one thing that you see basically every single time. And then there also tends to be this, this trend line where you'll see players building decks that are usually less interactive. You know, if you look at constructed formats going back, you know, modern legacy, vintage pioneer before that, you know, you will see less and less interaction generally speaking than like compared to more current sets or current formats like standard or something like that. And you'll also see players, it you can tell that they feel incentivized to enact their own game plan as fast as possible, while to the extent that they can get away with it, ignoring what the opponent's doing is that trend line. Does that trend line carry over into Cube? I. I think that one of the allures of Cube is that if you do your thing, you can kind of ignore what they're doing. And that can be true, but it's not true across all decks. One of the. One of the issues I actually have with Reanimator, for example, is Yu-Gi-Oh if you turn one in turn in tomb, turn two animate dead, pretty much any of the things, you're probably going to be in a pretty commanding position. It's going to be great. What if the card you're putting into Blue Ice like a vault born tyrant or like a sin and instead of turn two it's like turn four. A turn four vault born tyrant's not even better than casting like a turn three season dungeoneer or they cast a turn three minsc and boo. You can totally get overpowered. Even something good like Atraxa. Let's say you. Let's say they disrupted your first attempt at it and then you get it. You're Atroxa on like turn five Boros deck could definitely just go path exile attack you and you could still, still be losing. Or you. You do all this to Atraxa or Griselbrand. Even if you don't have some of those free spells, then maybe your opponent's combo deck is going to untap and just still just beat you on their turn five. By the way, Atraxa and Griselbrand really make me want cards like Grief that are free or force of negation or whatever. Because once you cast a effectively like a Draw 7 or Draw 10 or whatever, having free spells, that's all that matters. Like when you put a Griselbrand into play at 18 life all you really care about. Let's say you tapped out, used your land drop, Do I Have lotus petal in my deck. Do I have grief in my deck? You know, do I have ways to turn all of these cards, these 20 cards I'm going to have in my hand into something, anything. Because you just have to delay them for a turn. Usually if you want to ignore what your opponent is doing, you have to be right about how much over the top you're going. Your academy deck with ugin and upheaval. Yu-Gi-Oh That can go over the top. Fantastic car. That is a pretty good job about going over the top. Does your reanimator deck that's reanimating one of these things especially like not one of the like at top top things that reanimating a woodfall primus on turn four is not necessarily going to get the job done. Especially if you're not double triggering it, putting a torsten into play. Yu-Gi-Oh you can still lose so that you, you do have to make sure that the, the thing you're doing has to be sufficiently strong to make up for the fact that maybe you weren't interacting the first couple turns. Something like hold Reacher Wheel of Fortune. Yu-Gi-Oh you'll one-of-one the game if you do that. Leal Wheel of Fortune after they've had three turns of playing cards. Yu-Gi-Oh you could lose that game. I've seen that happen plenty of times. Okay. Yu-Gi-Oh So we're not quite at the two ships passing in the night phase of cube. You can have matchups that way, but the vast majority are not you. And the other thing is especially when you're playing best two out of three, but not even just then, let's say you are kind of in that setup. Well, one of the decks usually is faster. Let's say you're playing breach brain freeze LED deck. Those decks are great, but their strength usually isn't their speed because it's a three card combo. Usually it's that those can play a nice interactive game, a normal blue red game and then just cast a breach on turn six and one-of-one from from kind of out of nowhere. Well that deck is not going to outrace like a good reanimator deck or even like a good time vault deck or you know a deck that's like really trying to like a, like a flash and tune deck. So it has, it's kind of forced to interact because it's just not going to beat it on speed. Whereas like against an academy deck you can usually outrace an academy deck if they don't have any good interaction. So Yu-Gi-Oh you could. It's kind of both decks racing to do their thing sometimes. But most of the time, one of the two decks knows they're slower, so they're. They're kind of forced into a position where they have to do something. Now, I wanted to talk a little bit about threats and what your expectations are for a given threat in the Cube. And by threat, I don't necessarily just mean a creature or even an attacking creature. I just mean something that is advancing your game plan enough that your opponent has to deal with it. And usually it's a creature, maybe a planeswalker or something like that. And, you know, if we rewind threats, the expectations on threats weren't quite as high. You know, there was. There was a long time when Tarmogoyf was in the cube and it was fine, you know, never really great. But, you know, you put it out and, you know, all of a sudden you've got a four, five or a five, six or something for your two man, and you think, okay, that's a pretty good threat, right? That doesn't seem to cut it anymore. It feels like it's more now. Meaning I cast a threat. I want to get something now and then have it stick around and do something later so that even if it gets killed, I feel like I've gotten ahead or, you know, at least kept parody or something like that. Is that how you feel? And if so, and if not, even what are your expectations for a threat in the cube? Is it a give me something now world? It is like, if you look at powerful cars that need to, like, untap an attack, they have to be near, kind of near the top of the power level curve for that to be something that you're interested in. Like, what are some of the best threats? Well, like broadside bombardiers. Well, that does something right away. Really strong headliner Scarlet, for example, immediately makes it so your opponent can't block and draws cards when it sticks around Oculus, you know, poor in Oculus takes a lot of setup, but it immediately on their upkeep is already giving you a 2:2. Even if. Even if they do kill the thing. I would say green has some amount of these. Like Leatherhead is a good example. That's the 2 green green 54 with hexproof trample. And then when it hits them, you can remove the counter to blow up an artifact or enchantment. That one doesn't do anything for a turn, but it has hex proof. So you had the expectation is that you attack. If you're looking for Bane slayer angels, those don't really exist in cube so much ones that just sit there and need to. Basically, you must survive. Primeval Titan's been priced out at this point. Like how many creatures in the cube don't have a good ETB or like a strong effect right away? Like Leovold, for example, is like kind of affecting the board immediately and have no protection and cost like more than 3 mana. Very few. Even at 3 mana, you're looking at cards like, what are some of the good ones? Well, Sentinel Lost City, I think that's a good one. You know, what's one that I. That I have in the cube that I don't think is that good Earth sign Monstrosity. That's the tuna green three. Three that flips a card every turn becomes indestructible and huge when it attacks. But it doesn't have haste and it doesn't protect itself except when it's, you know, indestructible on your next turn. I don't tend to play that card or pick it very highly. You can see it in my videos. I very, very rarely end up with that in my deck. Even at 3 Mana, I'm just not that interested in a card that takes a turn to set up and go. And most of the threats you're. You're going to want something out of them right away. That's not even cube specific at this point. That's just magic. Now, I mean, how many games unlimited do you play? Five mana creatures that don't be something right away? No, we're really hard in the set reviews. Even if they have good stats and look pretty good, we're pretty down on this for threats. I'm looking for some money up front and hopefully like a threat or some value going longer. The more of a threat it is longer the less I guess I'll accept up front. But there's just not very many that don't really provide. Like Vivi, for example, is one VV ornithier. The. The O3 that gets counters. That's one that takes like some spin up and doesn't do anything right away. And also I'm a lot lower on that card than I used to it. It's just not the same in Cube as it was in Standard when it was kind of dominating. Now if the threats cost one or two mana, does that change the equation? Definitely. The. The bar gets. The bar jumps really highly for every mana it goes. Whereas like, I mean, look at like Usher of the Fallen or descendant of Storms. A one man, a two one that when you attack you pay two to make a one one. That's not like a good card, but that's a playable one mostly often did get played. Figure of Destiny is like a fine card. Like the one man of cards like Voldar and Epicure has some combo potential. Like we're not talking like incredible power. One mana is already pretty powerful. You. You're happy with that even at two mana. I mean, one of the cards I want to talk about from the Hobbit that's been good is Bejeweled Warg. That's the two mana. Three two trample when it hits them, either gets a plus one plus one counter or it makes a treasure. It gets. That card's been pretty cool. Yu-Gi-Oh it's, it's, it's. It's a strong start. Like, Yu-Gi-Oh it's good enough. And it's a 2 minute 32 trample. That is nothing until it attacks. Doesn't protect itself. Even has to hit your opponent. But at two mana, that's okay. Yu-Gi-Oh At three mana, absolutely not at four mana, like what are you talking about? Right? You could make a 4 mana, 65 version of this card and it wouldn't be that good. Right. So the one and two, you know, Bilbo is another one. I mean, I guess if you somehow took advantage. I mean Bilbo's got two mana. Two, two. No protection that. Right. Needs to attack, to do. To do something. Most of the time. Clearly you can go Bilbo Underworld Breach and play a bunch of cheaper spells, but that's not usually how that's going to end up going. Okay. And then I guess the shortcut would just be if. If it costs one or two mana, it's okay if it doesn't give me immediate return, but it does need to be threatening enough so that my opponent kind of is forced to react to it or pay the price. Right. Like another one I was thinking about is Magda. Right? Like nobody wants to allow you to start turning Magda sideways. I don't even know if that's in the cube anymore. But. But that's another. And Magda, it does do this, you know. Yu-Gi-Oh So it's another example of these that don't really do anything when they come in, but since they cost one or two, that as long as they have that threat of, you know. And again, like, like Bilbo is another good example. Right? You don't, you don't. You know, as much as it doesn't do anything when it ETBs like your opponent does not want to let you Untap with it and start turning it sideways. Like things can get ugly pretty quick. I had a game the other day where I went turn two Bilbo and they didn't kill it on their turn two. And then I went turn three time walk Attack replay time walk. So I just immediately taking a bunch of turns. They just obviously died really badly from there. That's Bilbo. Time lock is of course near the top of the list of things you can do with it. But even with no spells in my graveyard, like your opponent went turn one tapped Steam Ben's turn two Island Bilbo. I'm killing that thing if I have the opportunity. I don't want to find out what they're planning on doing with it. Because even if something as simple as a picture Pandora is still just like attack plus one card. Like Yu-Gi-Oh And then the rest of the cards that cost three or more, they often will leave you with a card or protect themselves. Right. That's something that you mentioned that's important to cards like Nadu and Leovold that don't technically have that checkbox. But if your opponent does untap and try to kill it, you're going to get something back, you know, for your troubles. And then like you said, once you get up into the four plus mana range, if it's not protecting itself is, it probably just isn't in the cube and it definitely shouldn't be anymore. Mana fixing. Where are we at with mana fixing from a big picture perspective as far as how important is it and how hard is it to get? Well, you know, it's funny that going through kind of this. This episode, it made me realize how many of. How many what the bar is like of things like the checkbox, list of things I want in every cube deck. And it's actually more than you might think because besides zero mana plays and acceleration and cheap interaction, you also need mana fixing. And this is without. We haven't gotten to what does your deck do? What is the strategy of your deck? What is. What engines does it have? Or what is it trying to accomplish? Setting aside all of that, you still need fixing and you still need cheap plays. That's just always true. And the reason mana fixing is so important is in cube, not true of. I mean all constructed formats and even limited now if you stumble, you're in trouble. And in cube, sometimes you have pretty intense mana requirements. You're trying to play like I would say. I would say three color and two color are like you're pretty likely to be two In a splash or three, almost as often as you are two, you're more likely to be three than one. Certainly you're probably still more likely to be two colors than you are four or five colors, because that's adding an additional wrinkle. But a lot of the time you're going to be either two colors or two in a splash, partially because if you're red white, and you see a really powerful blue card go by, like, it'd be nice to be able to take that. Like you open a time lock, that's a classic way to get forced into a third color. Or your red green. But seasoned engineer boy, would that be good in your red green beatdown deck, you know, so like you're going to want fixing for those. Because if you stumble, I mean, think about it this way. What if you. You have an Ajani in your hand? You're. You're red, green, white, but you just open on all red green lands. If you don't play anything on turn two, then you play a Johnny on turn three. Because that's when you draw the land. It's like you got time walked. Yu-Gi-Oh you, you. Your spell that cost 2 now effectively cost 3. Stumbling on Mana is huge. Like, it's really bad. You want to avoid it. Even in a two color deck. If I don't have like three duels in my two color deck, I kind of feel like I'm setting myself up to lose a game off of drawing three islands, one plains and Eratha God. Or you know, even worse, three islands, no planes, and just not be able to play any of my white cards. So I think that mana fixing. I expect to take a couple lands out of each pack or try to, especially if I. Once you're three colors, you cannot do it without like four basics or non basics or something along those lines, maybe more. So you are prioritizing it then like it's very heavily. Okay. And. Well, part of it is that the Fetchlands are like completely broken. Like they're such a good card. I. I've said this before, but I view a Fetchland as like a pick one pack, one equivalent of taking a good common out of a normal set pack where like you're not thrilled usually when you take like one of the top comments because you obviously would prefer an uncommon or rare, but you don't feel like you started with like a bad pack. If your opening pick is a polluted delta or you know, like a wooded foothills or something. You don't. You're not sitting there feeling like, Yu-Gi-Oh I opened a real bummer pack. You. You just feel like, okay, you know, that was solid. Because the Fetchlands, I mean, besides fixing up to five colors, all untapped, sometimes they can also get a surveillance. They fill your graveyard for URL and flage. They shuffle you for brainstorm. Like, we all know why fetch lines are just incredibly good, right? So they're at the top of the list. You don't mind taking those early. In fact, they can even push you in a direction. One of the examples that. That I. I often go back to is you don't need white and blue cards to want to take Tundra. Let's say. Let's say you start with swords to Plowshares and then Fleer I think Tundra is like a totally legit third pick if the pack is kind of weak. Like, I would take Tundra over something like a Cathar Commando at that point. Like, Cathode Commando is a good card. It's a replacement level card. If you. There. There's like a ton of cards in the cube where if I. If I had a white deck and you told me, like, you can either have Cathar Commando or random one of these cards and it would be like, okay, that's all about the same. Like, there's. There's not a lot of cards, like, worse than Cathar Commander that you're happy to main deck. So Yu-Gi-Oh I would take a Tundra without any blue cards because white. Blue Ice a great deck. And let's say you pick up Tundra and then you pick up like an arid mesa and then a Celestial colonnade. Late in the pack, you still don't have any blue cards, but like, blue's so free at that point, you're very. You're in a good position to take it. And I think that taking those fixing is kind of the same as taking the cards of that color in terms of once I take Tundra and I have Tundra and like Seachrome Coast. Well, now, now, no more Lies gets pretty close to Mandelake. And Mana Lake is a really good card, so you get to get effectively A Mana Leak 10th pick sometimes. See normalize routinely Wheels, because if you're not exactly white blue and planning on having both colors early, it's not very good. Well, if you get the fixing, you can take that card. There's also obviously three color cards. Like Aragorn is a great Jeskai card that you got to have some fixing to play. But more than that, seeing what color duels are getting passed to you also gives you A signal of what's open. So let's say, let's say you start with some good red cards, right? You open on let's say Raghavan and then Fable, the Mirror Breaker and then Lightning Bolt. Well, if you get a Badlands or Volcanic island, you know the next pick. Well, obviously volcanic is better because Blue Ice better than black. But if you, if you have a pack with all like replacement level cards and some good duels, just take the duels and see if, if it works out because it's so much better like Badlands, you know, if you, if you pick up Badlands and Blood Crypt, all of a sudden you can take black cards at a pretty low cost yourself. And some of those cards will be better than the red cards you have access to. Clearly you're going to want to branch into a second color. Mana fixing can kind of lead the way. The other thing that's important here too though, you should know which colors go with which because there are some kind of predetermined paths that you can go on that are really good. The example I used before with white, it is actually true in order. If you start with aggressive white cards, red is the most likely color to be followed by blue, followed by black, followed by green and like I think pretty clearly delineated there. Yu-Gi-Oh like red, white is obviously a great Boros is a great deck. You end up red, white a lot. They're very complementary. Well, white, Blue Ice also a really good deck because you know what a great way thing to pair with your aggressive white creatures. Just a couple counter spells that'll shore up your combo matchup nicely. Well, white, black's also great because you know, duress into felia is a perfectly fine start. I would say it comes together a little bit less often than white blue because there's more counters than there are discard and white has all the threats. So black, you're just looking for removal and discard and white has plenty of removal. It's a really good color. White's probably the best color in cube, maybe the second best after blue, depending on how you look at it. But white might be the most winning color and green of course doesn't offer that much to white comparatively. So Yu-Gi-Oh green, white can be good. I have bright glass gear Hulk in the cube and when you get the opportunity to draft it, it is fantastic. But Yu-Gi-Oh you're not as likely to be that. So if I had started with three or four white cards, I don't mind picking up Tundra or Plateau. Those are both great cards. To pick up. I'm not in a hurry to pick up scrubland or savannah, you know. Right. There's also a hierarchy of like the lands at the Tippity top. Fetchlands. You know, Fetchlands are just the best. I'm. I'm setting aside the, like, Tolarian Academy, Urza's Saga Strip mine type lands. Those are their own thing. They're also very good. Yu-Gi-Oh This is in the context of fixing. Yu-Gi-Oh Right. Fetchlands are just like Top top. It would be. It has to be really late in the draft before I'm taking a Fetch Land over like a dual Land or. And certainly almost never over a Triumph. But of course, if you're straight blue black, it's totally fine to take Underground Sea over a Fetchland because you need Underground sea. But Fetchlands are at the top, followed by Alpha Duels. It's actually funny that they've held up really nicely. Underground Sea, for example. All the two color Duels that end are untapped. And I. I view Watery Grave and Underground Sea is effectively the same card. Okay. Clearly Underground Sea is better. But the Shocklands and the Alpha Duels are the same thing. So that's next. Because they're. They're untapped and they have land Topps so you can fetch them. A lot of things that fetch. The next is Surveil Lands. And these are like things like Thundering Falls that come into play Tapped and Surveil there. They have a land type so you can fetch them. I love having one Surveil Land in pretty much any deck I have, especially if I have a couple of fetches. But they are Tap Lands. And the reason they're a little lower relatively is that there's also Triumphs. There's this full cycle of surveillance and triumphs. The three color Lands, they overlap a lot. Once I have a Thundering Falls, I just don't really need Catria Triumph that much. And vice versa. If I. If I started with the Catria Triumph, especially in like three Color Deck, I'm just not that, you know, excited to take a Thunder and Falls. I might still. But. But you have a number of tap ones that you really want. Once you have like two or three tap lands, like the cost goes up a lot. You. I want to spend my mana every turn, you know. And the Tap Lands are not always the best way to do that. There's also other cycles of lands, like things like Fast Lands, like Dark Sick Shores or Verges Mana Confluence Horizon Canopy Lands. They're all good. They're important mana fixing is important. I play all these cards in particular. I think Mana Confluence is actually pretty underrated. I think it's probably behind the Alpha Duels and above the Surveil Lands for most decks. There are some decks that don't like it as much. The longer you're trying to play the game like the Control deck, the less good it is. Your Boros deck should take Mana Confluence over Elegant Parlor almost every time. I would suspect. Unless you. You really have like multiple fetches that need the red White Duel. Untapped lands are just so powerful. And Mana Confluence, if the game lasts 5 turns you losing 2 life off a mana conference does not matter very much. And I wish I could put City of Brass in the cube, but the interface on City of Brass is so unbelievably bad and painful that it's just not worth doing. Doesn't it like make a trigger or something? It puts a trigger on the stack when you tap it. It's just. It's awful. It really. It truly is bad. It's just an unpleasant experience. So I've. I've tested it plenty. You don't want that card. Yu-Gi-Oh And. And if you know in a. No, in a. In a normal draft, you. You do. You know, you. You're doing like a hobbit draft or what have you. You. It's. You know, you're trying to find the open colors. You're trying to draft like a reasonable curve and have enough interaction. All those things are good. Cube puts that to the test so much more. And because the cube, the way the cube is curated, you're always going to have access to a bunch of lands. It's really hard to like. It is technically possible but pretty unlikely to draft a blue white deck and have never have a reasonable pick where you could have taken a blue white land. I'm not saying you get lands every time. And sometimes it's a pretty tough thing like, oh man, do I take Tundra or do I take Mana League? You know, obviously that's a tough pick and it'll depend on what cards you have a lot of the time. I would take Mana League, but for the most part you should be able to pick up two to four lands, if not more. And that's almost a requirement. Otherwise you're just leaving money on the table because you're going to get enough playables. It's really hard not to. That's the different right is that you just have so many extra cards at the end of every cube draft and they're all really good cube doesn't have bad cards in it. I mean, it has some. Obviously there's a gradient, right? Black Lotus is definitely better than Swords to Flashers, which is definitely better than Path Taxile. But even the worst cards in the cube, the worst cards in the cube tend to be the more narrow ones that you just one-of-one be interested in for the most part. Most people, I bet they would one-of-one more in cube if their last two cards were replaced with whatever the next best cards they could have had access to and they got two additional lands. And it's not always that simple, of course, but even taking, I actually bet even if I take two of the cards out of the middle of the power curve in your deck and replace them with two on color lands, you probably, your deck probably gets better for, for a lot of the people who are drafting. So I think it is really important to make sure you have lands, to make sure you have cheap interaction, to, to grab acceleration, to value it appropriately. Like, look, you don't always get offered moxes. That's totally fine. You do get offered Ancient Tomb, City of Traders, Chrome Mox Mox, Diamond. Like you, these will cross your path. And you should be making sure you have some amount of cards like this. Okay, I have kind of an abstract question, but how often? And I want you to talk about this. I don't really need a number or anything, but are you like well into a cube draft before you know what archetype you're going for? Or another way to put it would be how often would you say you draft a deck that doesn't really have an archetype name that you could associate with it? Easily. It's like, not really reanimator, it's something else. Or, you know, it's a multicolored pile or it's some mix of multiple archetypes together. Like, how often is that happening for you in Cube? Is that common? Well, it depends on the start because you can draft to that direction. It's actually a strategy. So like, let me give you an example. If I pick one Pack One Flash or Entomb or Underworld Breach or Tolarian Academy, I don't have a lot of questions about where my draft is heading. Obviously it might not work out, especially with like say Underworld breach or. Or a tomb. You could end up five picks later. You're like, Yu-Gi-Oh this is not really working out in two more often because that deck's more all in. A breach can just kind of chill in your sideboard until pack three. You get past brain freeze and Then you're like, oh, okay, well, I guess I'll try, you know, rise this from the dead. But let's say you don't open one of those very heavily directional cards, because if, you know, if you pick one Academy and then. Then second pick, you know, Retrofitter Foundry and then third pick, Basalt Monolith, you're off to the races. You're probably not getting pushed out very easily. Let's say you open swords to Plowshares or Polluted Delta or Mana Leak. Yu-Gi-Oh those are pretty generic cards. And especially when you start with a couple fetches, you don't get offered one of these good engine cards. You go Pluto Delta into flooded strand. Mm. You know, and then maybe you take like, an underground sea or a tundra afterwards that goes with those fetches. You can kind of defer your decision pretty. Pretty long as to what you're doing, especially if you're just taking good interactive cards. I've had a lot of cube drafts that start something equivalent to Swords to Plowshares into Polluted Delta into Preordain into Mana Leak into Tundra. I. You know, I like that start look. No, it has no power. It doesn't have a. Like a strong card that's giving you a direction. But you have Swords and Mana Leak as good interaction. Preordain is a good smoothing card. You know, makes your deck run better. And then Pluto Delta and Tundra. So you have, like, a really good start to White Blue. Fixing that deck could go a lot of different places. That deck can end up White Blue tempo. That deck could end up esper Control. That deck could end up a combo. Right. There's a lot of combos that would fit into that shell. Yu-Gi-Oh Reanimate. Yu-Gi-Oh You could end up on Reanimator. You could open a time Vault in Pack 2 or, you know, a flash. You. There's. There's a lot of stuff you could do well if you. If you don't find a. Cards that push you in those directions. As long as you just keep taking good fixing and interaction how you one-of-one the game. There's a lot of different ways to do that, especially if some of the decks that I. That I've had the most fun with. Let's say you start wooded foothills and diverting catacombs into windswept teeth or something along those lines. Three Fetchlands. Then I'm like, thinking I'm going to be domain. And what. When I say domain, I mean all five colors and what those decks tend to. Those are like the. The perfect mox diamond deck is a good way to put it is those decks have a lot of zero and one man interaction. You know that it can, it can try and get and then like 2 and 3 Mana threats cards like Oko and Dak fade in. Maybe Dark Confidant or Bejeweled War. Just like good value cards that have a really low curve because you don't. You, maybe you didn't get a mox or maybe you get one later, that's fine. But you're, you're just looking to play kind of like small to medium ball with all the best interaction of all the colors because you have. You, you started with all these fetches. You didn't start with a strong directional card. Most of the cards in your deck are pretty good on their own. You know, cards like Preordain, Mana Leak and Fatal Push are all just fine cards. You don't really need other cards to, to make them work. And then you end up in a spot where you, you, you, you just are open to taking anything. But you also know you're not really going to go too deeply into any combo or linear deck. You might have like a light touch thing. I've had, I've had some of these decks that, that have like let's say a Baloth prime and a Zuror where you sack your lands make four fours. It's a great combo. You just have one of each of those and you're not really the lands deck. You just have this like two card combo. Right. But more often, I mean I end up in loose jes guy a lot. Which is to say I've got some fixing, I've got some duels, I've got a bunch of interaction and I have some card advantage and ways to one-of-one And I don't really have a strong unifying theme. Is that deck better than a dedicated Flash and tune time vault breach deck? No, a lot of the times it's not. But if that's what's open, it's going to be one of the things you're going to want to be able to draft the reality realities of cube. Yu-Gi-Oh I've noticed that over time that seems to be more and more what I see. You know, you've been doing your Roto Cube drafts on your YouTube channel and I know you just put up another one. And you know when you go through people's deck, some of them do line up where you're like oh, this is Reanimator deck. And they have the things that make that. But then sometimes that's not the case. And it seems to diverge even more in a competitive draft. Not necessarily a roto, but a regular one where people are kind of scrapping a little bit more, especially like a team draft. But even on the others, I find that happens all the time, where I have the checkboxes that I want, the mana fixing, the speed, the early interaction, but it doesn't fit a clean archetype. It's like, well, I Beckett up the other stuff that I thought would help me get across the finish line or one-of-one the game. And I feel like it. Even though there are some archetypes still in Cube that are very clearly delineated, there are a lot more that aren't and that feature little packages of cards surrounded by these things that Luis is advocating for the speed, the, the acceleration, the mana fixing, and the early interaction. Plus, like what you were talking about Luis, with like a two card combo or a three card combo, or a package of synergy cards to go really well together, but are fine enough on their own. Things like that, I think are becoming more and more common. Where I feel like Cube is rewarding fundamental understanding of how it works with regards to those, Those key principles that you mentioned. And then that way, you know, when I look at your Cube decks, they don't look the same as each other except for Academy, but. But the others, you know, are like, they're all over the map as far as what cards you're playing, what combos of cards you're putting together and stuff. But I have a feeling that if I were to do like a deep dive on, let's say, if I just grabbed your last 20 cube drafts or something from your channel, that you would see a pattern of those fundamentals being checkboxed and then the other stuff being a reasonable amalgamation of the extra stuff that you need to one-of-one the game, but not the cards that are like Zebra important or not necessarily the key focal point of the deck. Even though it may look that way, you know, Luis might have a deck with Nadu and Lightning Greaves, and you might think, oh, it's a Nadu deck. But if you look, it may not be a Nadu deck at all. It may just have those cards in it. But it's not doing all this extra stuff to support the combo. It's doing the things that he knows he needs to do to fundamentally work one-of-one games of Cube, which is what we've been outlining here. And I think that's really interesting that you could be part of the way through your draft and kind of go, I know what I'm doing, but there's no name for it and it's not going to fit into a neat little box. And even when you're all the way done with the draft, you could say here's the deck that I drafted. And you wouldn't be able to say, oh, it's, it's red, white, aggro. You know, it's like no, it's like three and a half colors. And, and I checked all my boxes and I think that's a big feature of Cube. Yu-Gi-Oh I would say that. You know, I don't know what percentage I end up there, but a pretty good amount of the time you're at like three to five color mid range. And I will say that those decks typically have blue. I don't build very many, like four color, no blue mid range decks. And the reason is because you need some counters as the game goes along. If you're not closing the game quickly, like duress and thoughtseize are great, but if you duress and thoughtseize them and then don't close the game quickly, like at some point they'll draw a good card and you'll probably lose to it if your deck isn't very good at closing. The longer your deck wants to go, the more it needs some way to just like stop what they're doing. But Yu-Gi-Oh I mean three to five color domain, mid range soup, whatever you want to call it. Yu-Gi-Oh I would say not a completely uncommon thing. Let's talk a little bit more theoretical here. What's been the influence of, I'm going to call them not normal set magic sets being introduced to the cube. You know, things like supplemental products and things that didn't weren't in standard or anything like that. Like do you wish these cards were or weren't in the Cube? Was it better before they came out? Yu-Gi-Oh So this has been around for a while. I actually distinctly remember when this started, which is when Minsk and Boo and Lalia even honestly true name Nemesis. Like Yu-Gi-Oh these cards speak as an aside how ridiculous it is that Trudy Nemesis was debuted in a Commander deck. And it's like a horrendously bad card in Commander. That is you choose one player, it's protection from just that player in a four player game. That's obviously terrible. Totally. And apparently not good enough for Cube anymore either, by the way. No, no true name's good enough. It's not great, but it's good. Okay. I think that the card is, is reasonable. I don't think it's amazing. But I think it has its moments. In any case, I remember when these cards first got it added and they felt a little fake to me for sure. I'm like, what are we doing here? You know, where did these come from? Why I'd never seen these before. They just showed up in the Magic Online cube. At this point. I, I, it doesn't even register for me. It's not, not a thing. Like if someone doesn't want, you know, Marvel slop or whatever you want to call it in your cube, that's fine. It's your cube. Do whatever you want. If you don't like it that these Commander or ancillary products present powerful cards also fine. You don't have to put those in. I have found that they don't really incur those costs anymore. I mean, what's the difference between a Spider man card, which is in a like normal quote unquote set, like a full set, you know, small set, but like not a like Commander product with, you know, 20 cards in it though it's the Universe is Beyond card or a card like that shows up in the Commander set. So like something like Lelia did, or a card that is in a normal set but also just looks weird, which there's plenty of like that. You know, you look at it, there's some Edge of Eternity's cards that are just like spaceships or whatever. If you don't know the, the provenance of all these and you're playing in a cube and your opponent plays like a card that looks like a spaceship Lelia, which just looks like a completely normal magic card, you would never blink an Yu-Gi-Oh if you didn't know it originally came from a Commander set and a Spider Man. Well, some people object to none of those. Some people object to just the Spider Man. Some people don't like their purists. They don't really like that Layla Arminskin Boo or whatever Fracture Identity was another one was from these things. And some people don't like that they're spaceships and they don't want to put spaceships in their cube or you know, what have you. At this point, I don't think most of the people I play with, and I certainly don't really draw a huge distinction if they're a legal magic card and they exist on Magic Online, I consider it fair game to put in my cube. I, I'll add it if I think it'll make the gameplay better. And Yu-Gi-Oh because I, I go back and forth on one hand, like I don't really Care about the IP or whatever. That. That's not really my concern. It's more, is this a real card in the sense that it had to exist in a greater ecosystem? And that, to me, puts different restraints on it and makes it more interesting to try to find the right stuff to piece together and the right power level and the stuff that really stood out. It also adds a level of nostalgia or familiarity with it that you may not already have if it's just presented to you as some ancillary product that you've never heard of. And you're like, this is a magic card now. And you're like, okay, I. That's the line. But at the same time, I can come up with examples from the past that I bet you people maybe wouldn't even know and that I myself, even though it exactly fits that description of being from some other set or whatever. Like, the card that comes to mind for me is Baleful Strix. Sure. Yu-Gi-Oh That originally was in one of the Commander decks. Yu-Gi-Oh And I'm like, well, no, that's a staple. Awesome Cube card, right? I mean, that is like, Yu-Gi-Oh Bill 506 is cool. It's really cool. It fits the bill for what we talk about with Cube these days. And it's interesting. And there's all these little twists, like it's an artifact and all this stuff that just make it really, really, really cool. Yet that is exactly one of those cards. Right. And like you said, cards like Lelia, I don't really blink at those these days, even though I. I do prefer an environment where these cards aren't curated for it at my base level. So I'm a little conflicted on it, to be honest. But I will tell you, and this is a. A question that I have is to kind of. I like to kind of stress test these ideas, right? Because, like, we're obviously fine with where it's at now because we keep playing. It's not like this is driving me away from the format, even if there's a preference for. For less of it. But what if, let's say, Wizards came out with a Cube centric set called cubemasters, and it had a lot of cards in it that were made. Cube horizons would be the term they might use now. Okay. Cube horizons. And let's say they had a lot of cards. Lot of cards in there that were slightly better or even much better than their current versions of a busted. Of a bunch of, like, busted stuff in the Cube. Like, would you be excited about these? You know, like, and I'M talking about like staples too. Even old stuff, you know. Would you be like oh hell Yu-Gi-Oh Like they came out with a new version of. And then pick some card that you, you know let's just say they came out with a better version of Tolarian Academy. Let's say it's a. An island too or something. I don't know. Whatever. Right. Vegetables starting Academy. Nice. Yu-Gi-Oh Yu-Gi-Oh Vegetable to Larian Academy. Right. Would you be like. Or let's just say a tap for blue like on its own or something. Sure. You know, would you be like heck Yu-Gi-Oh Like get Academy out of here. I want this, this new one in or I want two of these in there. You know if they reprinted Mox in or you know even if we don't go that powerful into more just like staple level stuff that you've played with you know, forever. Let's say they made a slightly better. Give you some examples that I think are sound a little more realistic. They're not going to make a fetchable Academy or like you know, mock Mox Jasper 2 or whatever. It's just a mocks Ruby that's a different name. Or snow covered Mox Ruby. Right. Like that, that. That's not very plausible. But what if for example they made like a new pitch counter that was really strong. Yu-Gi-Oh That they wouldn't want to put in those formats like you know like let's say blue, blue one counter target spell return two islands to cast this Right. Like a powered up thwart that might actually be good enough and that card seems like be really obnoxious to put in a lot of formats. Or they make like a planeswalkers that are like slightly better like around Oko Minsc and Boo level but you know maybe too strong for again normal formats but they put in that. Or, or. Or a really good version of like like another red removal spell or another discard spell. Let's say on par with Thoughtseize but meaningfully different enough that it doesn't sound fake because they wouldn't make cards like you just some of the cards we were just talking about sound completely fake. They're not going to make snow covered to learn Academy that you can fetch as an island. Right. That's just. That doesn't really make sense. But what if they did put a bunch of cube power level like top 50 cube cards or top hundred? Yu-Gi-Oh Let's say it was replacing a big chunk like let's say they. It would depend on the number. The number matters. If they made us a set of 300 cards that were all good enough to put into Cube, I wouldn't put the whole set in because that sounds like I don't want the whole cube to be just seismically shifted overnight. Right. Like, but if they made a cube like a Cube Horizons set and it had a. A lot of good interest, the key is good. A lot of good designs are interesting designs that I think would make Cube more fun. I wouldn't be intrinsically opposed. It's a little weird because Modern Horizons, first of all, a lot of people have problems with Modern Horizons, which I think is totally legit. But let's say Modern Horizons, it impacts Modern, but it doesn't. It's not like every single good card Modern Horizon sees play. That said, Boros Energy was just a Modern Horizons theme deck. That obviously was like a bit much. But let's say. But for a Cube, if you made a 200 card set and they were all just Cube bangers. Yu-Gi-Oh I guess you wouldn't really want to put all 200 in. But it would be kind of like, you know, it would be an interesting decision. Yu-Gi-Oh weird. Like, and what. I think it would be more interesting to make a smaller product. I would, I would be more in favor of that. But I also don't know. I mean, maybe Cube gets popular enough that they make. That they do want to do something like this. Like, hey, this is a set of cards that are too powerful for modern. Maybe our legal legacy and vintage. Because, like, the standard usually is that you can play those in that format. Like Fantastic Car, for example. Right. That's from like an ancillary product that you can play in Legacy. Well, you could play in Legacy until they banned it. Yu-Gi-Oh For the, for that month or whatever. Yu-Gi-Oh But I think that. I think that. I think that that could be cool. I think the details do matter once we start talking about this. How many cards is it? How good are the cards? Are the designs cool or are they just like thoughtsies too? Because I wanted an extra thoughtseize in the Cube, I would find that kind of boring. But I mean, I'm sure you could design fun card if you, if you, if you were to task me to design 30 cards that would be interesting for Cube, but you Goldin print in a normal set or wouldn't want to print in a normal set. I bet I could come up with some interesting ones. Sure. Yu-Gi-Oh But, you know, if anyone from Wizards is listening, want to shoot me a little contract backward, get, you know, get me on the case. But I do think that the details really do matter, because. Yu-Gi-Oh if the cards are too good or too obnoxious or aren't good designs, like, Yu-Gi-Oh that makes me less excited. Whereas, like, I think, like, Fracture, Identity, Baleful, Strix and Lelia, to use these old examples we're talking about, are great, great cards. These are all, I think, actually pretty. Pretty well designed cards. Like, they are. You know, they are. Do I think some, like. Do I think Fantastic Car is a well designed card? No, I don't think it's a particularly well designed card. Also, it makes four tokens. It's the Fantastic Four. Why does it cost three instead of four? It's broken at three. It would actually be kind of interesting at four, though still potentially very powerful. Why is that? That is the other way around. Yu-Gi-Oh I know, I know I've ran out about this before, but I can't help thinking about it when I see the card. It feels like an afterthought. They had to, like, make it too good to also make it a worse, less resonant design. But then it's in whatever. That said it. It's not even a thing. It's like, it's like it just runs roughshod over everybody. I, you know, I think what the exercise here is, is if I were to go through the cube staples and give you slightly better versions, would you replace them? I think it starts to get at the core of, you know, regardless of whether you're like, sure or no, it gets it. Well, what do you, what, what besides raw power level do you value and playability do you value in the cube? You know, if I gave you Force of will, that was four and a blue instead of three. Blue. Blue. It's like, well, it's better. It's not really, like, fundamentally changing. Yu-Gi-Oh But it would feel. It was called Force of Shill, and I said, here you go. And you're like, well, I should. In a limited edition Release, that was $200. Exactly, exactly. Exactly. You know, and I just like. If you are a purist in the sense of, I want the best versions and I want the most powerful stuff, well, then you would do that. But if nostalgia mattered to you, or if playing with cards with cool old artwork or something along those lines, or the historical part of it where you're like, oh, this card was this and it did this and it used to be worth this, and, you know, just the kind of cultural stuff that we have around magic, well, then maybe you wouldn't give it up for just a slightly improved version. Right. And like you said, I Think most people would have a pretty bad knee jerk reaction to, oh, they actually just reprinted. They actually just took the current LSV cube and made like tiny incrementally better versions of literally all of them. So I'm just going to swap the whole thing out because these are just better, right? Like I think most people would be like, wait, what? Like that's a seismic shift overnight. Even though you could make the argument, no, the cube cubes better now, right? Because they're slightly more powerful or they're. They cleaned up the design or they're a little more whatever. But you would be like, Yu-Gi-Oh but I do kind of like playing with some of these old cards. So it is an interesting discussion to have about how much is too much for these and what Topps of cards, you know, because to me that's really the main thing is a lot of the cards that you've mentioned are really good, interesting designs. I think Baleful Strix is a clean interest. Interesting, cool design. I think Laelia, you know, is a cool threat. Now it starts to get to be maybe too many of them when like every two in a red threat is just amazing. But still Lelia on her own is like, oh, that's an interesting, powerful threat. It also has this window where you can interact with it and it doesn't really get you. There's just like a lot of cool stuff there. Same thing with Fractured Identity. It's expensive and kind of slow, but it's a big game swinging effect in a color pair that can really use it. That's a kind of an interesting design too. And if we view each of these on their own merits, then I think it makes a lot more sense about what actually makes it into Cube and what doesn't. It's when it starts to be all of that stuff. And I'll tell you why I brought this up, Luis. Big picture, it's because of the changes, the change that I've seen in Commander, right. Which when it came out, it had a more dig through your old binders or go to the local card game store and start sifting through boxes of old six drops that nobody wanted and never really played. And. And a lot of those cards just never found a format where they could actually go because they were just too slow. And now I can put them into my Commander deck. And when you would play, you would see a whole bunch of decks, a whole bunch of cards that you've maybe never even seen before because kind of part of the point was playing a little bit of off off the wall kind of Pandora slop, stuff that nobody really wanted. But if you fast forward to now, there's two interesting observations. I think one of them is that it's not like that anymore. A lot of the decks are a lot more streamlined, there's a lot more redundancy in them and many, there's been so many specific products that people play Commanders that aren't. I found it in an old Pandora and I'm trying to make something work around it. They were just purpose built, built for a very specific archetype with a very specific subset of cards and you're going to have half your deck kind of chosen for you and you can maybe pick out the rest. And so it's a much, much more curated experience, which I, which for me would be a turnoff. But that brings me to my other observation, which is that, well, Commander is now the biggest thing in magic and it's bigger than it's ever been. So it's kind of hard to argue with those results. People seem to really like that curated experience overall. And I, I do wonder a lot about, since Cube is kind of has a lot of, you know, connections to Commander as far as using cards that are no longer in rotation, at least again, when, when Commander first came out. And Cube also does seem ripe for wizards to print some stuff that would go right into it if they wanted. I mean, both formats are pretty high and you get to play with the cards you like to play with. Totally. Like, they're totally infinitely customizable. So, Yu-Gi-Oh I, I don't, I don't see a reason from my perspective why this product would be bad on its face. I think there's ways it goes wrong, clearly. I don't know if it really makes sense for wizards to make it, but I can tell you there's got to be people at Wizards that are thinking of, how do I, how do we get more out of Cube? How do we, I mean, we know that they're, they're, they're milking that they found that Commander, you know, like very, very, very effectively. I, they, I don't know what they're doing, obviously, but if I were them, I would certainly want someone thinking about, okay, Cube is Zebra popular. How, how do we monetize it more? I mean, that's, that's kind of their job, right? To some degree, obviously, for sure. Well, great stuff, Luis. Really interesting discussion. And we always love to talk about Cube when we get a chance to, because I guess I mentioned at the top of the show it's everywhere. If you want a Cube, there's no longer excuses as far as availability goes. You do have to either have a friend that has one or scrap together the money to play on arena or Magic online. But it's there. You will basically be able to Cube draft whenever and even with extra stuff like Luis is kind of riding the wave that he started or pushed forward in some ways as well, you know, because he's got the, the Cube server, right where people cube draft every day. And then, you know, now you've got the, the Lotus Lounge tournament and all this other kind of stuff or league going on as well. I mean, Cube seems to be really at the highest that it's ever been and it's, it's really fun to watch. So if you want to dive in, if you've never done a Cube draft before or if you've lapsed on it a little bit, I would highly recommend recommended Cube. Cube is in my opinion and I think Luis's as well. It's, it's the pinnacle, right? I I to me it is the end game for competitive or people that like Magic at the way that Luis and I, and probably you do too, listening at home could not recommend it higher. Let's call it a show there. If you want to find us on social media, Marshall underscore LR and Luis's LSV pretty much everywhere you can find us on lrcast.com you can find everything related to the show over there, including all the old episodes of the show and information including links to Luis YouTube channel and everything else that we do. Again, that's lrcast.com I want to say thank you to our Patreon supporters as well as Ultimate Guard for their support of the show. We really do appreciate it. That's going to do it for this time for this one. We'll see you next week. I'm kind of having a fun experience watching the TV show Silo. It's on Apple tv. It's in its third season right now. And what's funny is that it's based on a series of novels by Hugh Howey which came out as like ebooks in, I don't know, not quite 20 years ago, but something like that, 15, 15 plus years ago. Because I remember I was reading them when I lived back in Oakland and I enjoyed when I read them there. They were like they're really cheap on the, on the Kindle. Again, this is like, I think this, this author's one of their first works or at least the first one I came across and I remember reading them, enjoying them, and I didn't think about anything, think about it much. And then it started a couple of years ago, being a show. It's actually. It's actually really good. Rebecca Ferguson is the lead and she's awesome. And what's cool about it is I don't remember anything from the books at this point besides, like the actual setting, which is they're in a silo. And so. So it's like I knew I liked this thing, thing, and I was willing to give it a try. As a result, I don't actually remember what happens. And I think it's even divergent enough from the original books. Not that I would even know because again, it's been so long since I read it. So I'm having this experience where it's like, I like this. I went in positively disposed to it and then the show is good, so I keep watching it. But also I'm not like spoiled by it because it's been so long since I read the books and I think they're different enough that I just don't really remember. But it's kind of cool. It's this, like, it was this little not Zebra popular book when I first saw it. Didn't think of anything about it for a long time. Now since it's like giant show and like, you know, it's done well enough to get renewed and all that. So it's been fun. I would recommend watching it. It's a fun show. Sa.