Mechanics Forward Design

Join Team Uber Cube as we discuss the aspects of mechanical first cube design. Tune in as we road map the journey and questions presented while designing both “Eye Spy” and “The Exile Files.” We chat on applying a “Cube Scientific Method”  for stating a mechanical goal and asking questions of the design as it evolves. Thanks for listening, sharing, 5-star reviews and as always happy cubing!

Eye Spy

The Exile Files

Join the Uber Cube Discord

Anthony's Cubes

May's Cubes

Stu's Cubes

Uber Cube is now on YouTube!

MTG Cube Drafting Page

Find us on Twitter @UberCubeMTGPod

Find us on Bluesky@ubercubemtgpodcast.bsky.social

Uber Cube YouTube

Email Uber Cube : ubercubemtgpodcast@gmail.com

Thanks for Listening and Happy cubing!

Transcript

Intro, and libations of the show.

SPEAKER_03 0:14

Welcome to Ubercube, the podcast we discuss all things cube, but with refreshments. This is your host, Anthony Adams, aka Uber Bear. And I am back from vacation. We'll talk about that soon.

SPEAKER_05 0:29

I'm also back from vacation.

SPEAKER_03 0:31

May hi.

SPEAKER_00 0:32

Hi. Are you back from vacation? I am the vacation.

SPEAKER_05 0:37

I'm always on the vacation.

SPEAKER_03 0:38

Yeah. And we've got Chris, aka Samich, the other vacation.

SPEAKER_02 0:42

Hey, no vacation here. Coming up. One coming up, but not right now. No. Yeah, so since we've always been here the whole time.

SPEAKER_03 0:49

Since we have last spoken, it has been about, I don't know, a couple of weeks since our last episode. We kind of talked about we're going to do these intermittently. A month? It's been almost a month, right? It's been a month. We're going to try our we're going to adjust our frequency. But I had my or my wife and I had our 25th wedding anniversary. We went to Bahaba, Maine, had a great time. Too many blueberries, saw the Acadia Mountains. It was just amazing. Absolutely just great experience. Need a little bit of break. And what about you, Stu? You just got back from a vacation. I went to the beach for a couple of weeks with the fam. Yeah. Yeah. Heard you made a lot of friends on the beach. I make a lot of friends everywhere I go. I like to make friends.

SPEAKER_05 1:27

Summer loving happens so fast. Uh yeah, yeah, you could say that. Uh it wasn't not really that kind of summer loving, more like loving of water activities like fishing and, you know, good stuff that you do at the beach.

SPEAKER_03 1:41

We had a delightful on our actual anniversary night. Uh I decided my wife and I found this lovely little kind of, I don't know, rhystic hotel, if you will, with the fire pits, having a great time. Didn't want the evening to end. I said, let's go inside and get a nice bottle of scotch, enjoying some scotch, lost track of time. It is now 10.30. And what we did not know is that in Bahaba, Maine, they shut down all of the Ubers and Lyfts and taxis at about 9.30.

SPEAKER_05 2:08

I was gonna say it wasn't the werewolves card.

SPEAKER_03 2:10

Oh, dude, we had to walk like two and a half miles back to our hotel room in the middle of the night. That's fantastic. Just a great crescendo to a wonderful vacation. My wife wanted to kill me. But that's that's what I've been up to. And uh May, what have you been up to since the last time we spoke?

SPEAKER_00 2:24

Hey, great question. I have mostly just been doing the what I usually do, I suppose.

SPEAKER_03 2:29

Fighting crime.

SPEAKER_00 2:31

Meh.

SPEAKER_03 2:32

Being a superhero. Yep, makes sense.

SPEAKER_00 2:34

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 2:37

Can't really talk about our secret lives like that. I get it. Sorry, I didn't mean to mean to throw off your identity. We got KubeCon coming up. That's another thing that's on the horizon here that we are gonna do. This is a little bit of a news. We're getting kind of back in the flow here, but KubeCon's a couple of days from now, approximately, probably T minus 20 from today's date. Getting excited about that. Myself and Chris and Christian and our friend David. And I would say, Chris, you've got a cube in KubeCon this year, don't you? As does David.

SPEAKER_02 3:04

Uh yeah, I got three cubes in KubeCon this year.

SPEAKER_03 3:07

Trying to take the trying to take the title from me. You're trying to get that playmat with all those cubes.

SPEAKER_02 3:12

I've already done it. I I've already done it. It's achieved. You you yeah.

SPEAKER_03 3:16

Did you have three? Yeah, you've already done it. You broke my record. Got it. Cool. Did you not have any cubes in KubeCon this year? I did not do it this year.

SPEAKER_05 3:22

Did you submit some cubes for KubeCon?

SPEAKER_03 3:24

I didn't know if I was going this year. And now that we're talking about that too, the reason why I'm glad it didn't, because I'm going to Dallas like two days before. So I'd be lugging. I already told my coworkers I'm going for a corporate event. I am bringing an entire suitcase full of nothing but cubes. That's gonna be fun to do. Wow. That's gonna be fun. I'm gonna risk it too. I'm checking them. That's gonna be funny. You are a brave lunatic.

SPEAKER_02 3:46

I'm doing mine and carry-on, man. My carry-on bags will be. I would rather have my clothes.

SPEAKER_03 3:50

I'd rather have my clothes than have my cubes, not gonna lie. But you can buy new clothes.

SPEAKER_05 3:55

There's always a JP. There's a TJ Maxx, you know, in most places, right?

SPEAKER_02 3:59

Just go get yourself up. I'm not gonna have cubes up there. I might have really won't have anything. I'll have my cubes that I'm checking in, and that's about it.

SPEAKER_03 4:07

So we're not here to talk about that today. As fun as that, what we just wanted to kind of you know loosen the vocal cords a little bit, get the conversation flowing, try to figure out what May's secret superhero secret identity is. She still won't tell us today. Boo, boo. But if that Darkwing Duck.

SPEAKER_00 4:22

Well, you see, I'll let you in on a little secret. I'm actually the descendant of Mothman. Oh. I want to see the V Mothman.

SPEAKER_03 4:31

We have talked about that. The one year that we're not traveling to QCon via vehicle, because we used to drive it out by 18 hours. I try to get these guys to stop all the time because the official Mothman Museum is right there on the, what is it, the Ohio, Kentucky, yeah, Ohio, West Virginia, Ohio Process. West Virginia, yeah. Yeah, something like that. You can see the bridge. Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty wild. So, anyways, moving on. So, what we're here to talk about

Libations of the show

SPEAKER_03 4:54

today, it's kind of a culmination or an idea where both Chris and I, and then we'll go OG a little bit with May, have built cubes kind of single sourcing or using just a basic mechanic or a card attribute to kind of become like the seed crystal. Not so much a singular card, but a concept, right? And how you, the listener, can take a concept and grow this into a cube. So we're gonna talk about some examples, but before we do that, we're gonna have a word from our sponsors and talk about what are we having to drink today, Stu? What are you having?

SPEAKER_05 5:27

Well, Anthony, you have been kind enough to furnish us with some wicked weed brewing freakish pale ales. I've been falling down on the job. I'm gonna put it out there. I've got some old fashions if you want to have a little cocktail afterwards. But um, yeah, I've been hanging drywall in my in the ceiling of my garage the last couple of days, which has been about as unfun as you can imagine after the clearing out of the fridge freezer that that failed. The shrimp and pork putrefescent rotted goo liquid that took me four hours after I got back from vacation. Yeah, yeah. I'm like I said, I'm a pr I'm pretty sturdy at uh things, but that that smell was uh was pretty cool.

SPEAKER_03 6:10

Two palms is uh very much like Tom Hanks uh money pit.

SPEAKER_05 6:14

My house is the Amityville Hara. It is the Amity Vilhara, but much more expensive.

SPEAKER_03 6:20

What do you have in May?

SPEAKER_00 6:21

I just cracked open a Sun Cruiser Iced T vodka, and I cracked it immediately after hearing that audacity.

SPEAKER_03 6:31

What do you have in there, Chris?

SPEAKER_02 6:33

I'm having some uh Southern Star uh bourbon, some cast strength bourbon that I really like. So it's one of my favorites.

SPEAKER_03 6:39

Simulating to who's not here right now.

unknown 6:41

Ooh.

SPEAKER_05 6:42

Yeah, there you go. Good job. I also made the mistake today. I got so I'm working, I finish early, it's a Friday, so I'm like, you know what I should do before I know I'm gonna have to go to Home Depot and get drywall and then stand on a ladder with drywall above my head. You know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna work out. I'm gonna do some weights for a while before I know I have all this hard physical exertion. So I did that, and I'm regretting my life choices at this moment in time. I'm just I know, yeah, call me all of that. I deserve it. So, all right, please let's get to the topic. Let's talk about let's talk about cube.

Mechanics First Design Concepts

SPEAKER_03 7:17

All right, so we're gonna start out talking about my newest cube, which we will include in the show notes, and we're gonna talk about the XL files. But we're gonna do this kind of as a basis. So to give a little bit of background, Chris has the graveyard shift, which is a graveyard-centric cube. It's your kind of your bug churning the graveyard, as we talked about it before. Kind of, we'll say the landfall is kind of your above-ground package. You got a purgatory package, and you got your in-the-ground package. That's how I've defined it, right? Your your typical, I'm churning things, things coming back, resurrection, if you will, right? Kind of what you expect out of those schemes. Is that about accurate, Chris?

SPEAKER_02 7:53

I know. Yeah, it's like a I I built it without like super defined archetypes. They just everything kind of works to works together. That's what of the way I built it. So most cards will work in any deck you put them in, which is what I kind of wanted to do. But uh, you know, it's like there is a lands package, as you said, and but there's a lot of reanimation, a lot of drawing and discarding, a lot of a lot of ways to turn turn through your deck really quick.

SPEAKER_03 8:15

So really playing to the strengths of those cards. So when you thought about that cube, let's talk about this for a second. What was the concept? What was what made you want to do this? This there's I'm driving to a point.

SPEAKER_02 8:26

Yeah, no, what made me want to do this was that they these are my favorite colors of magic, the blue, green, and black. And also the fact that uh it's my favorite way to play. Like with uh just doing stuff with the graveyard. I loved it when when we when we used to play Commander. I would always play that if I played a blue, green, or black duck, it was gonna have something to do with to do with the graveyard. And that's what I did. And uh I decided, you know, I think we can build a cube out of this. And we started out with like a 180 tuber, and it worked out pretty well, and then I said, Well, I can expand this, and it's worked out even better. It's it's just gotten better uh when I expanded it. I have more room to do a lot of stuff with it.

SPEAKER_03 9:02

And then your next one is the exile files. And what is the conceit of that?

SPEAKER_02 9:06

The conceit with that was was that I years ago I had a couple again, this is going back to commander again. I had had a couple of uh commander decks that all liked casting from exile, either through cascade or actually casting from exile. I think I had a Faldoorn deck that uh liked to make wolves by casting from exile. And I decided, you know what, this would be a fun bar cube. I don't know why I chose to make it a bar cube, but I did, and uh and and it was a very complicated bar cube, which people call I think uh Sam called it the so the Battlefield sobriety test is what he called it. And uh because it was just a difficult cube to play.

SPEAKER_03 9:40

It's a very much throw the keys up in the air, and whoever catches them, that's your driver.

SPEAKER_02 9:45

So yeah, so I said, yeah, so we we we can make a cube out of this, and it worked out really well again, and uh the the everything seemed to work well together, so I said, Well, I can make it even better by making it a 360 and went from

Zones of Design

SPEAKER_02 9:56

there.

SPEAKER_03 9:56

So it's it's based off of both these cubes are very much based off of very particular zones in the game of magic. I mean, one's very graveyard-centric, and we'll call that the zone, and the other one we'll call it very on-the-board type zone with that one. And then the other one, the exile files is playing to well, to the exile zone, if you will, right? Or the command space, or whatever you want to call it, right? Outside of the game, bringing it back into the game. And that was kind of the core conceit of that idea. So going through and seeing Chris, in particular playing the Exile Files, again, featured at KubeCon. So if you're going to KubeCon, I highly recommend you play this cube because it is one of my favorites. I put an earworm in my head that I couldn't get out, couldn't stop thinking about it. And I wanted to build a cube that found its way to weave between these two ideas without kind of overstepping the identity of another, because that is something that does happen. We're going tangential here a little bit. We've got a lot of cubes in our space, and one of the problems you have when you have a lot of cubes in your space is you got to do something to make your cube stand out and to be different. And so what we're talking about from a construction standpoint was well, I was thinking, I like how he's been playing with these different zones spread across two cubes. And now I'm gonna roll the Fey cube up. I also like how you played with different zones with Adventure. Any thoughts on that before I proceed? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:19

Like a big thematic part for me with adventure cards was like mostly what had to do with like the thematic flair of like the Alderin's orders and less to do with like the mechanics. Don't get me wrong, mechanically, adventure is one of my favorite mechanics in limited just because of the modality and the fact that you can get a two for one out of it if you put a lot of work into it, or you can get the creature just out of it for aggressive plays. There's a lot of really cool things that adventure cards can do for limited that I particularly like for that kind of design. But when it came to designing for the fade cube, a lot of the adventure mechanic ended up becoming so centralizing just because of its proximity to Eldrin and like my draw towards the Eldrin frames. So unsurprisingly, it started getting more Eldrin Adventure support from like Baldur's Gate and whatnot, so I started just slamming those in too.

SPEAKER_03 12:11

But so as the kind of cube world has grown, right? And we I say I think we as a group or we as a tribe have kind of, I guess we'll say, transcended away from just the traditional days of and not no shade towards them, but the pauper, the peasant, and the vintage. We've seen this massive breakout, like through the advents of KubeCon and grassroot events and sharing, sharing these ideas virtually across the world, right? Including our podcast, it's kind of like this pseudo-arms race of cube development. At least that's how I see it, from just like a metaphorical type idea, like everybody's trying to come up with the next cool thing, right? Like come coming up with an idea that stands out from the crowd, if you will.

SPEAKER_00 12:51

Sorry for me interjecting. No, you're good. The real breakout part of that was once 100 ornithopters started becoming really popularized, and that was kind of the real breakout part of ah, yes. I know that y'all want to disagree, but that's one of the biggest parts that got it into the public eye, unfortunately. Because like even with my friend group, they were even talking about like 100 ornithopters and like the kind of absurdity with it, and they don't know a lot about cube versus a lot of people like in the cube community who already know that like we've been experimenting with it for a long time, and that we've already been like playing around with the rules and with the ways that we can like experiment with like a limited environment and etc. We've already been trying to do that like within our community, and what has broken out of our community in the public eye was once that started getting popularized. And I feel like that that's what started like getting the traction towards people starting to be willing to experiment a little bit more.

SPEAKER_03 13:47

And we're all playing

The Same Catalog but Different?

SPEAKER_03 13:48

with a virtual same magic set, right? The same paint palette. We've all got the same outside of people who are doing custom cards or rules modifications, we're all using the same, I don't know, 30 plus years of magic, and that's our catalog. And you're taking these cards and you're trying to find a degree of uniqueness or a way that you can present your cube that's not it's this little fine dance that we find in our group, even where if a cube is too bombastic or too audacious or just too over the top, or the rules are just too nuts, we kind of check out or we turn it into like a delicacy, right? Like a slice of cake, we don't want too much of that. And then we get some bread and butter type cubes that are a lot more played, say like Sandwich's Peasant Cube. We see that a lot more in our revolution coming around, or like just a vintage, some kind of vintage cube or a legacy cube or the Black Parade or whatever we got. Those are kind of the, I guess, the the names, the staples that you'll see quite often turn in our group. And we don't I I would say in our in our small circle, we're not overly gimmicky in the sense of cube design.

SPEAKER_05 14:48

We're very mechanics and I've I've always thought of the cards do what the cards say what they do, rather than here, I've sharpened here and I'm going to adjust this here. I think that's important. I really do.

SPEAKER_03 14:59

Yeah, I like that. I think the game, this is just a me, uh my personal opinion, the game's complex enough, right? So I'm trying to find an avenue of play to I I was so fascinated by his exile files, like more so than anything else. Like I've kind of openly said before, the graveyard, graveyard synergy cube's not my not my cup of tea, but that's fine. It's not everybody. Some people love it, and I'm just not one of those. It's just not a playstyle that I really but the something about this exile files just caught on like fire for me on day one. Something about just kind of making me think about like I've got these four cards sitting in front of me, and one might be on an adventure, one might be, I don't know, foretold out or whatever you call it, and etc., or wearing a cowboy hat. It's just something about it was so entertaining and making me think like at a different level in the game, seeing like layers to a game that instead of just in my hand on the board. And I really like that. So I started kind of thinking about well, what can I do that is different? What could slide in between this and not sure share some of the card pool again? We're sharing a same card pool. That's something that's gonna happen with every cube. You can look at a power vintage cube, and then you'll find cards that are in a peasant cube and the power vintage cube. The bleedover is gonna be real between different cube varieties.

SPEAKER_05 16:12

Yeah, but let's let's be honest, right? Anything that is exile and or graveyard centric, there are 30-something years of magic cards that you have to work with, right? Tens of thousands of cards, and it's not like graveyard and exile shenanigans is any kind of fringe mechanic or fringe style that is going to be difficult to want to be able to incorporate into a cube. So then you have to start asking questions, and this kind of follows on with that. How do you make separation if you've got a group or if you've seen someone's cube on Cube Cobra or wherever else, how do you create that separation between your ideas and someone else's ideas? So, how do you do that? Do you decide to lower the power level? Do you decide to raise the power level? Do you just decide, you know what, I'm gonna make a mental note or whatever of some of the very specific exile and graveyard y mechanics that exist in that cube and separate my cube away from them? I I would imagine that, you know, and you're talking about your cube being, you know, coming after Chris's cube. How conscious were you of that? How conscious were you that you wanted and maybe even needed that separation? And what were the measures that you took in order to vary?

SPEAKER_03 17:26

Well, very conscious. Like, so uh the I'll tell you what the cube's all about, right? So I was kind of flipping through my binders and I realized I had a bunch of the Scrylands. And I kind of, you know, over the years, people have kind of just said, I don't really like Scry. They've kind of said, I like Surveil Moore as a mechanic, something like that. Who doesn't like Scry? Well, I saw the competitive nature between the fetchable surveils that came out. What is that? Murders at uh Karlov Manorov Manor versus Timples, the Temples when they come out. I can't remember which set that was, but uh one of the Theros, the therapy, one of the Tara sets, I believe. Yeah. So I always

The Questions Presented

SPEAKER_03 18:03

like the first Theroset. I always liked the Temples, and I like that top deck manipulation. And I was just slipping through my binders one day, and I was thinking about Chris's cube, and I'm like, I just kind of had this epiphany. I like Scry. A lot of people like Surveil. I like Surveil more than Scry. Can I make these two things work together in a cube? So I just asked myself a question. Can I make Scry and Surveil play nicely together in a cube? That was the core conceit. And then I asked myself, what do these two effects do? They do top deck manipulation.

SPEAKER_05 18:34

Okay, I'm gonna I'm gonna ask a question. Why do you think that people like surveil better than Scry?

SPEAKER_03 18:40

I think I think a lot of people play a lot of the power plays around putting stuff in your graveyard. Because in your graveyard, you can go to another team is screwed on his own. Yeah, exactly. Scry has kind of taken it away from you. You're putting it to the bottom of your library, and there's not a great deal of bottom of the library cards that matters outside of, say, Grinzo. Thank you. Thank you. There's not a few. If there were more magic cards, say play the mystery card from the bottom of your library, like Grinzo does, then I could see kind of being like a top deck, bottom deck manipulation type strategy. That could be really weird. Like seating towards the center of your deck would be such a neat cube concept. Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 19:19

Well, I I I I like what uh you're talking about, the top deck manipulation and everything. And that's one thing that I when I built exile files, it's a thing I thought about. Like things like Future Sight and stuff like that, but I ended up not putting hardly any of that in there. I think I've got a few green cards that do it. You know, like I think you have that new Alatamari uh in your cube. Yeah, I've run him too, but I'd only recently put him in. Like when uh, you know, because I didn't really have him in there. What I like about what you've done is that you are doing a heck of a lot more off the top of the library. Mine is is almost completely casting from Exile, Graveyard, or you know, something like that. But it's almost not almost nothing off the top of the library.

SPEAKER_03 20:02

Yeah, and I was trying to find a zone that felt different because I didn't want to, and again, this is going back to this idea of someone's trying to think of a cube, is how do you make your cube different than peers in your group's cube or in the in your friend circle, right? So that you don't have all these same cubes and you're not in direct competition with one another. Not that that would happen, but you know it definitely happens, right? Let's say you and I had a peasant cube and it's going to happen. Either we're mimicking each other or we're trying to tech up over each other, or uh secretly you want them to say, I like yours more than his. Whether people want to acknowledge that or not, that's kind of a human nature, the thing that's going to happen. So it's just a good idea, in my opinion, to have different flavors. Because even our two vintage cubes, the only thing that differs them is I'm a 540 or a 360. I mean, that's virtually the way they separate themselves. But other than that, you could bust one of the two out and they feel they could feel similar, at least it's from the card pile that we're kind of looking at, right? So getting back to that core conceit, I just had a thought, like, well, what if this was like a Dan Dan type idea, right? Like I was got it really just kind of sent me down this path of, all right, what if Chris was going after the top card of my library? He wanted to take that away from me because he had viewed it somehow, and he knew that this was going to somehow another alter his game state. Or, or he wanted to put something that's on the board back on top of my library so he could now take it from me. So I started thinking about cards, and this became collaborative, and this is one of the game changers that I did during this particular environment. Day one, when I just thought of the idea, and I encourage everyone listening to this, I just went to my group and talked this idea out. And immediately because of the new feature that's on Cube Cobra, I David and Chris in particular were interested in help kind of build this out and make card suggestions. I could make them kind of, was it joint curators or joint designers in Cube Cobra, which is a really neat feature. Because Chris is thinking of things that I can't think of, but we're also trying to moderate this idea. He's also got the same thought that I do. I don't want to cross that little that you know thin red line over into the Graveyard Synergy Cube or cross that thin red light over into the, we'll just say the uh Exile Files cube. And so I'm kind of doing this weaving between two cubes to find my own identity in a cube. And it was a really neat experience. Happy for you. I know I think.

SPEAKER_02 22:28

No, I I and I think you you kind of succeeded here because it's like it is different enough. And I do like the fact that you don't have balanced colors, you know, that actually kind of makes it a little better and everything, you know, because your your color balances aren't there. And uh I it's just neat. There's a lot of fun things that you can do with this cube with playing around with that top of the library, um, which is different. And I and like I say, it plays very differently from the exile files because I pushed power level in exile files. I really did. I I pumped it up uh as much as I because I had power outliers. I said, well, you know what? What's it like if every color has power outliers? And let's go that route. Let's go that route. And uh so that's what I did.

SPEAKER_03 23:08

That's a neat design concept, too. Let me ask you a question about that too, for anybody that's new to designing. We're going into kind of to kind of step it back for a second, we're going into complicated cubes. Like I would say these are fine for anybody to build their first cube, but these are uh typically I would say these are not what you I wouldn't just take the XL files and set it in front of a new magic player because that may cause their brains to melt down in front of you. But it is it is a good starting point to kind of say, well, I'm a little bit more advanced in cube curate or cube design, and I want to push the envelope a little bit. What are my favorite mechanics? And that's how these kind of started. If you really take these and distill these back, and we just make this super simple, Exile Files is based around Exile, the the zone Exile. That was we the graveyard is the graveyard. You're playing to that as your main game piece, your main zone. And then mine is treating that top deck as your main zone of play. And I thought it was an interesting way of doing cube design from a different platform instead of just thinking about like generally like switch over to the Faye Cube for a minute, May. And yours is more of a thematic build around a storybook. That was your your breakoff point, correct?

Thematic Design versus Mechanical Design

SPEAKER_00 24:19

Is that I was I was focused more around like old folk folklore and fairy tales and like old Fay stories and whatnot.

SPEAKER_05 24:28

And what is the criticality of whether or not the appeal is going to because we talk about new to, right? And there's new to cube, new to magic, new to this, new to that, right? And I would always kind of maintain that new to cube is a pretty abstract concept in and of itself, because if you're new to magic, then obviously you're gonna be new to cube anyway. Whereas someone who's new to cube, if you are established across multiple formats and that can be limited, it can be constructed formats, whatever, I kind of feel that Cube is gonna feel like a pretty safe and easy space for you to drop into, right? Rather than oh my gosh, I've only been playing Magic for six months and I'm used to playing, you know, pre-con commander decks, or someone's handed me this 60 card friendly deck that I can play. Whereas with Cube, if you're familiar with those archetypes and those capabilities, especially going, you know, I would say even more with recent magic where the design concepts and the designs have become more complex, I feel like it's going to become pretty easy. I agree.

SPEAKER_03 25:33

So, like we took see, take take the world of Inistrad, for example, where you'd have Day and Night, or you just have the werewolf mechanic, or you just have some kind of typo like vampires and they play off each other, or maybe you've got some kind of reanimation package in there. But when they do these individual core sets, when you go to Inistrad the first time, you've got, you know, flashback and you've got a couple of these, and then you kind of figure out that, well, maybe Delve works really good with this idea, and you kind of play off. Some mechanics just play off better with other mechanics. Well, imagine if Wizards of the Coast released a set that said, we're not going to call this a world, we're not going to call this a plane, we're going to call this the first strike, trample, and flying world. And these are the only three supported mechanics in this world. That's kind of like what we've done with a cube, not to say that the cards in the exile files are only saying the word exile on them, but 85 to 90% of the cube is centered around this world where you're going in and out of this zone. Wizards wouldn't make that set. They would have done five cards, three cards within a set that would have done this mechanic. Now you can take this mechanic or this core idea and then make an entire plane where people are just, I don't know, it must be a horrible place to live, flickering in and out of existence and going back and forth. But but imagine if you, the cube curator, could go, well, I just want my world to be trample. Trample and first strike and death touch. You could pick it. That sounds awful. It does, but that sounds awful. But you could take these three like base mechanics and go, all right, I'm gonna now do a scryfall search for everything that does this. I'm making this super simple, but now whenever I went to the iSpy Cube, I said, All right, cool, I'm gonna look for everything that says the word scry, so O tag scry. I want to O tag surveil. I also want to O tag top deck matters and kind of start working it that way. I don't know what cards I'm gonna put in here yet. I just want to see what the library, what what can I go to the video store and check out of movie genres that are in a similar vein so I could have a horror movie night? You see what I'm doing, right? And that's what Chris had to kind of do with the Exile files. What are cards that play in this vein that I can now have an existence of 360 of these game objects that somehow another refine and say, this is what my world does is go in and out of existence. And it's a really neat way of building a cube.

SPEAKER_02 28:00

Yeah, it's how I build cubes. I build cubes to be very mechanically focused. And this was easy, fairly easy for me. Although I will say, my maybe board has probably close to six to eight hundred cards in it. It's like it's ridiculous. I added so many cards to it. And uh I spent weeks moving stuff in and out until I finally felt I had it kind of where I wanted, and that's when I started to put together in paper for everyone to play. And we we finally got a first play of it. Uh, but it took it took probably well over a month for that for this to get to a playable format.

SPEAKER_00 28:29

Uh to piggyback off that a little bit, I know for me personally, I I personally build as I'm trying to uh curate a play experience. So like I know that we've been harping for the like vape cube a lot, and a lot of that play experience is like for flavor and thematics, etc. But like if I just mentioned the shadow game for a second, a lot of that is based around like Morph and Manifest, for example. A lot of the play like feeling around that, because of the group, I'm a lot more willing to experiment and play around like with sharpies and rules, etc. And a lot more of that is like I'm gonna sharpie some cards, I'm gonna add some more stuff, I'm gonna add some manifest and stuff. Even though it's like I didn't change the rules that much for a shadow game, it's still fundamentally pretty magic for me. But I'm more willing to experiment those things. The point was is that I was willing to do that to curate the experience of I wanted to have a shell game as a mechanic in Magic the Gathering. I wanted us to play magic and then have like a bunch of face-down cards and like reveal them and flip them around and be like, ah, I'm gonna swing at you for that flyer, I'm gonna flip up this reach creature. And it's just like, oh shoot. Anyways, I'm gonna flip up this other like big stupid flyer and then smack you anyway. I I want it to be like that kind of shell game feeling where it's just like you're flipping cards up and face up and face down and shuffling them around, and you can't really get that in normal magic. And the cube gives us the space to kind of create that experience.

SPEAKER_03 29:54

So, for anybody asking themselves a question, I'm gonna present the question that I asked myself back to kind of reiterate what I said. I wanted to make a cube that found its way to weave between two different cubes and didn't cross over, even if the cards were reutilized, that they felt different. Like the contextual feeling of some of my cards played differently, even though I had the same card as Chris does, because he has a different function that he's trying to do with the cards. I'm less going into the exile zone, more playing from the top of the library, but some of my cards will cross. So it continued a springboard from there to give something you can sink your teeth into to make this make sense. I said I wanted to have, obviously, back to the thing, I wanted to have the surveil lands and the sky lands. That's where I started at. I just entered them in and looked at them. Then I found some other lands. They were like from Spider-Man or something like that, that had a secondary surveil mechanic. And the more I looked, I started finding more cards that did surveil, like maybe ETB'd, and it didn't really make a color, but it said surveil. And I'm thinking, all right, I can build a mana base out of this, and and let's see what this mana base looks like, and how would this how would this feel? Like if I were taking a card off the top of my library and putting it in my graveyard, or if I was taking a card off the top of my library and putting it to the bottom of my deck, what type of decks would want to have that vibe? And yes,

Asking Open Ended Questions

SPEAKER_03 31:15

I found some keystone cards later, but I'm gonna give you a couple of them you can sink your teeth into, and this is off the primer for I Spy. I've got cards like Laps of Certainty. What if my countermagic, instead of putting it back in your hand so you can replay it, put it back to the top of your library? What if it went to the top of your library and now Chris's or May are going to capitalize off of this and find a way to take that card away from me because they don't, maybe I've got some giant juggernaut that's going to now wreck wreck the game, right? But they have a way of playing that. What if they put it back on top of there and now they could try to steal it from me? Or what if you wanted to avoid them taking your card off the field with some kind of theft mechanic or stealing it or whatever, and putting it on top of your library so you could draw it on your next turn to replay that card. Think about what's happening there now. And then I had to ask myself, how painful of a play experience would this be? Would this be like the worst game of you know, go fetch that anybody could imagine? Is this gonna feel like I'm shuffling my library out? I had to ask myself these questions. How long would these games take? And this was before I even put pen to paper. I just started asking myself like an open-ended question would this even be fun? I know Dan Dan's fun. I have a working example.

SPEAKER_00 32:28

So I think that for a lot of those questions, and to kind of bounce off of like not only the points that Sandwich made, that I made, and also you made, is that like when you were building this, you had a good idea of a mechanical thing that you wanted to do, right? You worked your way up into here's a bunch of cards that let me do the deck manipulation thing, and then you started getting like really caught up in the meta of just like, is this too close to somebody else's cube? Am I going too far into the exile stuff? Or more importantly, is how can I this is the more important part of this, is how can I maintain this so that way it's an actually good play pattern for the people playing the mechanics. And that section is the most important, like, question that you can ask for the actual mechanics of this. Because like the meta the meta parts, a majority of the people who are going to be playing your cube, etc., they're not gonna be going into this thinking, wow, this is just like the exile files, or going into this expecting to be playing some other cube, they're going into this expecting whatever you're trying to serve. I think that there is a certain amount of getting expertise and magic in cube the way that we have, where we get lost in the weeds and we get lost in the sauce. And sometimes it's just good to focus on the mechanical part of that and then try to optimize the functionality around that because that's the fun. You are finding the fun and the functionality because you have a good idea. And I actually have some really good suggestions of things that like I find really fun for like deck manipulation and whatnot. So if it's alright, I have a few things that I would like to see in here. Something like Galvanoth is one of my favorites. Yes, it's slow, but like it's a three red red for a three three beast at the beginning of your update. You may look at the top card of your library. If it's an instant or sorcery, you may cast it without paying its mana cost. Like it's one of those cards that can't really exist in a lot of places. But if you are doing the deck manipulation thing, this is the exact kind of card that I want to have that kind of home, right? And that's the kind of thing that I feel like when you're going into an environment, you are trying to find a home for of here's a cool splashy card that does this cool splashy thing. Uh another good one is that I think that maybe you should go harder into maybe theft mechanics and playing around your opponent's like uh top deck manipulation with Nightville Spectre. This is the Demir, Demir, Demir for a 2-3 flyer. When it deals combat damage to a player, that player exiles the top card of their library. You may play cards exiled with Nightfall Spectre. And it's just a generically good aggressive creature. It lets you just keep doing the normal magic thing, but your opponent can now interact with their deck manipulation in a way before damage to try to reduce the cards that you're getting access to. That is like a fun little maneuverability thing as opposed to just you're hitting the top and your opponent's just kind of sitting there.

SPEAKER_03 35:24

Yeah, can you see where this actually hurts? The more you think about it, the more I started once I started asking the core questions

Is this going to be fun?

SPEAKER_03 35:30

of just moving putting a card on top of your library, and I now know what it is. Now, what happens if my opponent also knows what it is? What if my opponent wants that card or does not want me to have that access to that card? And once I started kind of doing those root questions, and you can do this with any kind of cube development, you just kind of ask yourself, like, before I put it to paper, and before I spent the money, and before all that, I opened this up to a lot of like, I guess the questions keep getting more complex the more you branch out. The scenarios start getting wild. It started getting so wild in the scenarios, it made me almost start thinking, is this gonna be fun? Are we gonna spend more time making the top card of my library? And not that Dan Dan has that fault, but Dan Dan has it. Am I gonna spend so much time in a game, us messing around with the top five cards of someone's library that we're not progressing the game of magic? Yes. This was a question.

SPEAKER_00 36:26

Yes, I think it's fun.

SPEAKER_05 36:27

Yeah, I think it's fun, not just that, but I think the the concept of sometimes you want to play a cube where everything is known and the play patterns are relatively established, and familiarity does sometimes breed contempt, but there's a reason why the popular cubes, just like the popular or anything, are popular, right? Whereas something like this that can be a little off the wall, that yes, it's gonna be challenging, yes, the gameplay can take longer. If I have to play a cube that is going to take an extra five, ten minutes in a game because that top deck manipulation is such a critical part of the design function, I'm happy to for a fresh experience. It's maybe not something you want to do every day or every week or whatever, but a a foray into something that is mentally challenging as well as challenging from a gameplay perspective. I would say from a player's perspective, that is welcomed.

SPEAKER_02 37:24

Yeah, and I'm gonna double-act on on what May was saying about taking the top card. I run that in in exile files. There's a whole archetype based around stealing crap from your opponent because you can cast them from exile normally. So I know I recommended a whole bunch of cards for iSpy that did that. Um, that did that kind of thing, like uh the Gaunties. You know, there's several Gaunties in there, you know, kind of thing. I think Bismuth Mind Render was another one, uh Lightwing Bandit, all those really fun ones that just when they deal damage, they can steal something.

SPEAKER_03 37:55

I had the same dance that I'm doing, though, is that crossover back to the top of the episode we're talking about. Our group has a lot of cubes. And I intentionally decided to kind of you know uncomfortably put my shoulders between two people and say, excuse me, excuse me, this is my spot. And I'm trying to squeeze in there, right? And the the thing that I was really cautious about is while he's suggesting cards, is that it doesn't start making this transfer transformation over to the Exile files so that I'm in direct competition.

SPEAKER_02 38:25

I was thinking about that when I was adding cards, buddy.

SPEAKER_03 38:27

I know you were, I know you were, but I'm I'm evaluating each and every one of them to go, hey, is would this be great in Chris's cube too? Or would they rather see that in Chris's cube versus mine? Then I started, well, there's a d there's a thing that came to me. As we kind of develop this cube, I realized they spaced out enough.

SPEAKER_00 38:44

You're just worried about a nothing burger. I'm sorry to interrupt, but you're rebringing back you're re-bringing back yourself to that point again, and it's really a nothing burger point because a lot of your fears and worries are that this is not going to get played over other cubes. You are wanting this to like have some place in people's minds and hearts in a specific niche. And functionally, this has a specific niche that these other cubes are not doing already based on the basis of its function. The exile files isn't doing library manipulation stuff. Your cube is doing that. Yes, it might have some card overlap, but cards are going to overlap for cube. Also, because they called it my spy to GO cube doesn't mean that powered cubes aren't gonna also have cards in the NTGO cube.

SPEAKER_05 39:29

Do you think do you think that I am smart enough to be able to sit there when I'm playing your cubes and think, hang on a second, question sneak. You are into someone else. Exactly. I don't remember the.

SPEAKER_00 39:54

You poser.

SPEAKER_03 39:55

This is what I did though in the beginning. I'm really taking this is this was the first few days. Well, this was the first few days, is that I wanted to have enough like mechanical standout because I'm not I don't traditionally build behind the concept of mechanics first. I build around themes first. We'll call we can call this a theme. Top deck manipulation is in fact a theme, but it's also not werewolves, zombies, and vampires. It's a mechanic. Yes, I know. We could semantic this, but this is more of a mechanic. So this is my first real foray into like mechanics first, right? You may have remembered a long time ago, we had our you know, there's I don't even know if they're friends anymore. Kirby and Shoot. Do we still talk to these people? Oh, I'm seeing them. I'm seeing them tomorrow. I guess I have to introduce myself again. But we had talked about an episode where we had them on that we were considering the idea of me taking on a challenge of building a mechanical cube. And this is kind of where this started stewing. I just didn't know where my takeoff point was until I met the XL files. I didn't know what I could do if I was turned loose. Another level up in this cube, you said this early on, and I'm gonna recommend this to anybody building their first cube. I love symmetry and I love colors to all be the same and dress right dress. We know this, Chris does too. This one I said the hell with it. I broke loose and I just picked the cards. I didn't care what color they were, I just entered them in and they do the thing that I want them to do. In the end of the day, when the when the whole cube gets shuffled up, people, I mean, yes, black and blue are the predominant colors because they play it as surveil and into the scrying and get the payoffs from particular cards that others do not. However, the white and red and green did not suffer either because it all kinds of blend together. And the drafters at the end of the day, I've noticed this, and we've played to test this a few times, they don't seem to care much. I've seen a mono white deck come out of a very slim mono deck. It's mono white list is extremely shallow, but I've still seen a mono white deck come out because people are going to build what they want to build anyways, regardless of the whole card pool, right? I'm not balancing around the everything hasn't have to be perfect and there's perfect symmetry. It was so much easier to design this cube when I did not restrict myself to I had to have you know 50-50-50-50, right? And then have the exact amount of lands.

SPEAKER_05 42:15

We've had this

Breaking Symmetry

SPEAKER_05 42:16

conversation so many times where I'm like, you do not need to have that perfect symmetry across the colours or the perfect numbers lining up across the colours. I think you're just restricting the cards in the cube mechanics and the concept for no real good reason. Yeah, I can I would I would say like if you've got 10 black cards and a hundred green cards and 30 white, okay. In that perspective, it can make it complicated from maybe a lens and a fixing and you know that kind of perspective. But otherwise, if you're if your differences are fluctuating, 10-15 cards, it don't matter.

SPEAKER_03 42:50

You're looking at 40 white, 67 blue, 57 black, 35 red.

SPEAKER_05 42:55

35 red, you gotta pump those numbers up a little bit. Those are rookie numbers.

SPEAKER_02 43:00

Yeah, I'll say it does the the number of cards the number of lands, the number of colors in your colors don't matter. Do not look at my exile files. They are perfectly symmetrical. I don't know who did that. That's really weird. Someone like you.

SPEAKER_00 43:12

Also, don't look at the thing.

SPEAKER_03 43:15

I think anybody that's trying to take on something this difficult, anyways, and I'm not saying this is difficult. I'm saying this a little bit more advanced, at least it was for me, that also trying to balance colors would have made this pretty rough. Like I would have given up on this. I would have given up on it because blue and black are the predominant cube, right? Everything else is supporting cast surrounding it to a degree. And the identity, the core conceit of the top deck manipulation lies in the Demir subset within that.

SPEAKER_05 43:43

Do you rank your cards at all? I've started noting myself doing that when I am building and I don't I the I know this has been a while and you're gonna be like, What yeah, exactly. Holy cow is like absolute S tier, irreplaceable card in any cube. But like, even if you're if you're trying to balance it out, let's say for you know, for argument's sake, 40 white, 67 blue, 57 black, 35 red. Let's just say for argument's sake, you're thinking, okay, there's obviously a lot more blue cards than there are red cards, almost double. There's a few more black cards. Let's just say I wanted to cut down the blue in order to provide a little bit more red support. Can you, like just looking at this right now, say, here are, and I'll just throw it out there, 10 cards in blue that are not S tier, not absolutely critical to this cube in order for me to be able to pump the red numbers up, even if for just nothing else, other than allowing the mana bases to be a little bit more comfortably drafted when the cube is.

SPEAKER_03 44:49

Yeah, no, uh, like so. This this list is a living list. I started out with this is throw it together, see if people like it. And I think that's a great way for anybody listening to start a cube. I built these pieces out, I talked it out, kind of want to get a vibe check before I even started financially kind of investing in this cube. I wanted to know what my peers thought of it. So I pitched this idea and I recommend that to anybody kind of taking on something a little bit more daunting than your average bear cube, right? You're doing something, you got a weird idea, and I've seen other people say this. So you've got this weird idea, and I want to do, like, I don't know, say like Anthony Maddox's Turbo Cube. I want to do a price reduction of my cards. I think it's a cool idea to ask your playgroup, what do they think about that, right? Because they're the people that are going to play it with you, and either they get excited to help you with it, or they say, Yeah, that sounds great, or it's not my vibe. I did the same vibe check with this before I started even doing it. I said, Hey guys, I've got an idea. I pitched it to the room, and then suddenly they all, some of them got, I'd say, you know, five out of ten started getting pretty excited about it, and I started getting all these ideas kind of fed to me that I couldn't even think of. I had to slow them down and I put them in the queue. I brought in David and Chris to help get a little bit more sanity check as I added cards, because they knew the question I was asking, could I make this like Dan Dan meets cube, right? I mean, that's really what's happening here. But you're still playing to the board.

SPEAKER_05 46:09

And you were saying and that, like you've mentioned Dan a number of times. I'm interested to know how much of that, because this has got to be extrapolated out among all cubes, right? Dandan is a very specific and very kind of crazy magic experience, right? Whoever created that, good for them. You've got two players sitting across from each other, shared deck, you know, very, very conditional when it comes to all the cards that are there. Now, how are you taking that as not obviously anything kind of specific, but taking something very broad as some of the concepts that are introduced in an idea like that, and then applying them to something where you've got now eight drafters rather than just two players?

SPEAKER_03 46:49

Yeah, that was that was weird. I mean, the core conceit of Dandan, what is a Dandan? A 4-1, right? And the idea is you don't want the Dan to make contact with you. You have what, 20, 20 life, you die.

SPEAKER_02 47:00

You gotta attack five times with a Dandan to win. Yeah, that's your only source of damage.

SPEAKER_03 47:04

Yeah, and the only thing in the deck is Dandans. Well, what if a cube had, I don't know, an immense amount of, we'll call them all Dan Dans, right? They're all doing the Dan thing, the Dan thing, but we're putting it back on top, and maybe some cards, like you said, and this is intentional. Some of these cards are better than others. You you have to one of the questions I ask myself is at what point would Chris want to, I don't know, let's just say, at what point would Chris, or May, as my opponent, decide that it was worth paying four mana to do run out of town, which is three colors and one blue, the owner of Target Non-Land Permanent puts it on top of their library or top or bottom of their library. They you I get the choice, right? They did this to me. And the question I was asking myself is how threatening would the thing have to be that's attacking either of those people be for them to pay four mana to put it on top of my library. And then back to my question was are they putting it back on there because they don't want to get hit by it, or are they putting it back on top of the library because they want it? They have a mechanism to take it back to what Chris was saying, cards that attacked the top of my library. That created like all these uh like this tree of questions I had myself asked myself about how this cube may or may not play out, right? And back to what I said before, I was getting like analysis through paralysis. I wanted to make sure that we weren't locked up on I didn't want the game to entirely become again, we only saw three to five cards of each other's you know top deck here, and that's where the game kind of evolved or devolved. I needed it to can kind of move forward, and so to answer your question about the card quality, the card quality is all over the place for total intent. I have some cards in here that you're less, and this is through intent, and I don't know how this is going to play out some more, like Thrag Tusk. Thrag Tusk is in here, not because it has anything to do with the cube. It has to do with when Thrag Tuskers enters the board, you you gain a degree of life, and when it leaves the board, you leave behind a 3-3. I asked myself, would my opponent be so interested in having that go back to the top of my library so I can gain five life. I want it on the back on the top of my library. Yeah. So I was trying to think of cards like that too, like would be less uh say May's less interested in the idea of putting this back on top of my library because I get some kind of ETB benefit when it comes back in, sure, that they would not be enthusiastic. They'd rather deal with the creature on the board. And these were opening up more questions. You can see how, like, from a design standpoint, depending on how deep you want to go down the rabbit hole, that the fundamental idea is that I kept asking myself questions before these cards even got entered or I presented them in the world. I kept saying, Well, how's this theoretically going to look? Like, would they want to play case the joint on me and draw two cards and look at the top card of each player's library? That's a card in here. It costs four mana. They want to know what I'm going to be looking at next. So they can now change their decisions on what they play in their hand. It's a weird way of thinking about magic. I want to kind of take this back to the exile files. This is how the exile files feel. It feels like there's some mysteries in front of the playmat, right? There's another zone that's presented before me, the opponent, just like there is. But unfortunately, my opponent knows what's underneath there, right? A card that's foretold. I don't know what that is. It creates like this mystery. But what if I found a way to be able to see that foretell card? Yeah, I know that card doesn't exist, but I could flip it over and see what we're dealing with. Now I could make my critical decisions behind that. Do you see where this kind of goes spirals out of control? But it's this was a such a fun exercise to take something on like that.

SPEAKER_02 50:45

One thing I like about I Spy that I can't do in the exile files is you get to play with cards like with Miracle. I I don't get to do that because you're drawing, you cast them from your hand when you draw them. But the top deck manipulation is key for a miracle card. So you get to do all this really cool stuff that I can't do with that. So I know I suggested a whole bunch, I think I suggested all the miracle cards. And I think our friend John uh is the one who said he said, you know what? They're playing top deck of the library. Let's go miracle and let's go all in on that. Like entreat the angels. Entreat the angels, yeah, treat the angels, terminus, heck, even uh with Thunderous Wrath.

SPEAKER_03 51:21

The one that makes the zombies, whatever that is. I got one that brings things back from the graveyard. There's all kinds of neat ones that normally what they're very commander-esque cards that because of the conceit of this cube and the mechanics of this cube, it plays nicely because you get you're really counting on that reduced cost. Another one that I'm considering here, and this got suggested, and also denounce again back to our friend Kirby and Choop when I first said it. I'm testing out countertop in here. I'm gonna do counterbalance and top. That's probably gonna be miserable, but I got some sweet art that has secret layer with eyes. It's gonna be miserable.

SPEAKER_00 51:58

What have you done? What have you done?

SPEAKER_02 52:01

I wanna know. I wanna know. See, I like high power stuff, but I also like games to end.

SPEAKER_05 52:08

Yeah, they do end someone flips a table over when you've got that on the on the board. But I you know what? I I would I would love I like to see things like that. It's it's not just a single like here, I'm gonna make everybody miserable. It does require a little bit of setup and you've got to draw them both. Uh I I I think counterbalance and top would be fun. I'll I'll I'm not gonna lie, I think it would be fun.

SPEAKER_03 52:31

And they also have the secret lair that came out with eyeballs on it, which is something we didn't talk about. Back to my

The Wrap Up and Socials

SPEAKER_03 52:37

and May will appreciate this, no matter how much I try to break out from this whole idea of trying to be mechanical. I'm just a thematic boy at heart over here because I still said, you know what, this has got I spy in it. I'm gonna find every single magic card that hasn't not just eyes on it, but like an eye. And I am running cards that like that have an eye on it. Counterbalance has an eye. I got this sick opt card that has an eye on it. I also got iSpy. I I played into everything I could to grab like onto the keep my core virtue of how I like to design cubes. I still want flavor wins in my cubes. I just can never go full tilt into the idea of being a mechanical presence. I'm very much like Mei in my design attributes like that. That's why I adore the fake cubes so much. You can have both can live together.

SPEAKER_00 53:28

It's about harmony. It's harmony, it's about balance. It's about finding the counterbalance. It's about finding the right blend of people having a good time while also getting to experience the flare and the experience that you're wanting to show them. Even from the little things like from you putting on uh metal music for the mansion cube or me bringing out the little fairy ring uh land holder for the fakeybe, right? Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 54:02

Sometimes little things do matter and they they do add up, and it does help.

SPEAKER_05 54:06

They do. And I I would say if there's anything I would take away from all these, aside from all of the design concepts and you know, all of the mechanical stuff that I really do think is is for me one of the core sort of fun elements of cube design and playing a cube from a player's perspective, like just getting to do stuff where I don't have to build a 100-card commander deck and build something that might be fun not just for myself and for other people. And goes all the way back to what Chris and and and May agreed with is don't get too caught up in the weeds, especially if you've got a group of curators and you're looking to bring a unique or somewhat unique experience. Don't get caught up in worrying about is it gonna be unenjoyable? Is it gonna be enjoyable? Have I got too many cards in this cube or that cube from another cube? Or you know, I just like you've said, build it and they will play.

SPEAKER_03 55:01

Yep.

SPEAKER_05 55:03

All right.

SPEAKER_03 55:04

Well, I appreciate everybody listening. We will be back at our unscheduled time next time you hear us. We're next time you see us, we will be at KubeCon. I may or may not be walking around recording and interviewing people. So if you're interested and you see this uh definitely good-looking Ginger walking around with a baseball cap, that's probably me. Come up and talk to me. I'd love to interview people, get capture some experiences of KubeCon. I think it's be a great time. We're celebrating our 100k episode tomorrow at a local brewery. We've got some people coming in to talk about. 100,000. Well, wait, we've gone. That was so like a month ago, but we're here now. And uh, I'm excited about that, actually. We're just gonna go out and have fun, hang out. It was an excuse to actually just I had to make up something so I can go play at a brewery with my friends. I just told my wife it's 100,000. That's that's really what we're doing here. There's no prizes. But I'm sure people show up, like, where's my loot?

SPEAKER_05 55:50

I'll hope you brought some. I'll find something in a box somewhere that we can bring along.

SPEAKER_02 55:56

No, no, no. Stu, their loot is that they get to pay for their own beer.

SPEAKER_05 55:59

They do get to pay for their own beer. But I've got a spin down somewhere that I don't use that I can offer up in a sweet. And then other link you will you uh you can check us out on all the socials. Find us on Twitter at Ubercube, MGG Podcast at Gmail, all that good stuff. We've done a million episodes, they know where we are.

SPEAKER_03 56:21

Yep, you found us. Very cool. I'll include all that in the show notes, and we're gonna say the thing that we always say here at Ubercube, which is Ubercube.