#48 - Introducing The Treat Yourself Cube!!

If your looking to play big, swingy, multicoloured games of limited, then this might just be the cube for you. This week we introduce the Treat Yourself Cube, a new battlecruiser type of cube that we've put together.

The Treat Yourself Cube: https://cubecobra.com/cube/overview/treatyourself

00:00:00 - Intro & Overview
00:04:23 - Inspiration for the cube
00:07:09 - Designing the cube
00:15:29 - Cogwork Librarian
00:23:39 - Conspiracies
00:32:21 - Archetype Breakdowns
01:11:46 - Package Breakdowns
01:20:25 - Pack One, Pick One's
01:47:35 - Final Thoughts

My Main Cube: https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/sweet
James Cube: https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/ba642a54-a6c7-4587-b97e-1d95429c59b5
MTGO Vintage Cube: https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/modovintage

Social Links: https://linktr.ee/toosweetmtg

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Creative Commons / Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0)
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en_US

TCG Player Affiliate Code: tcgplayer.pxf.io/toosweetmtg

Chapters

• 0:00 Intro & Overview
• 4:44 Inspiration for the cube
• 7:30 Designing the cube
• 15:50 Cogwork Librarian
• 24:00 Conspiracies
• 32:42 Archetype Breakdowns
• 1:12:07 Package Breakdowns
• 1:20:46 Pack One, Pick One's
• 1:47:56 Final Thoughts

Transcript

0:24

Hello everyone. Welcome back to Powerful Nothing a Magic The Gathering Cube podcast. I'm your host, Dan, better know on the internet as Too Sweet MTG,. And as always, I'm joined by my co-host James , James How you feel today? You. Well, yeah. Pretty good, pretty good. Let's talk about your shiny new cube. You've got it is? Yes. Today we have a fun one. It's again, we have a new nice and shiny cube to talk about today. We're gonna be talking about a cube I've built. I've called it the treat Yourself cube. Vague Parks and Rec reference there. I think it's something that made my wife say to each other quite a lot whenever we just trying to be a bit splashy. But that does kind of sum up this cube a little bit. Yeah. Today we're going to be talking about, the Kuiper Belt, how I kind of put it together and kind of an overview of why it is cool and good. So the goal of this cube, the goal of the treat yourself cube, is to go very big and very colorful. It's kind of like a meld between the live the dream cube and the chromatic cube. The idea is that it's a tri color cube. The archetypes go over multiple colors, so normal draft environments that you see, like, like standard sets are generally two color sets, where I kind of like each color pair has its own like signpost on common every now and then, like cons, for example, or new, you'll get like a tri color set where the archetypes go over three colors. And that's how this is built, because, I thought it well, one, I wanted to build it that way because I thought it'd be a cool, interesting way of doing it. And also it kind of means that kind of like, like the best decks are either a full three color deck or, at a minimum, that two colors that want to be splashing either a third color or maybe even a fourth color for a cool effect. But in general, the kind of the cube is much higher than a normal cube, and the games in it are more battlecruiser and swingy. There there is less aggro than a regular cube, but aggro is still doable. But you still have to be across 2 or 3 colors to kind of do it. Yeah, I'd say from playing it a little bit, it's the claims aren't like glacially slow. It's not like people aren't doing anything. You just do have a bit more time to set up, like signatures, for example. Feel very good. They set you up to do a powerful play a turn earlier than you would normally be able to, because there's a lot of reduce failures like four and five manner in this cube. And we say aggro isn't so much for a thing like the above, always aggressive decks, because there is always a deck which is a little bit of a lower curve than the other decks. Aggro is a relative thing, right? Like a curve. That would be a the curve of a aggressive deck in this format might be the curve, but looks more like a control of habitat. Can like a powered cube, but in this cube, it's going to play out as an aggressive deck because it's a little bit more low to the ground relative to the decks around it, even though it wouldn't be considered low to the ground. And ice cubes. Yeah, exactly. Like like like the average CMC of like like the go vintage, for example. It's probably going to be around like two, two and a half just because there's so many cheap, efficient spells that get into those kind of keeps. The average CMC of this cube is four. That means that on average, you're doing stuff really around two and three and four and kind of like like, yeah, that might sound like games take longer, but realistically it is more likely that you're kind of going like that, kind of like your turn start really kicking off. So like if both players is going land, go for two turns. That's quite quick. That's not like real like like yes, yes. Games kind of go to like turn 10 or 11. But the first couple of turns are quite quick to get through, which is still like like like it's remember we've only had one one hour, round. But both players in it said that it was some of the best magic they've played. So I will take that. But yeah. So I guess, but yeah, I think in general the way you actually end up with really long games, right? Isn't that the cards are more expensive, it's that the interaction is massive and of effects. And I think that's not true here. Like I think the facts are pretty good and the interaction has moved higher up for mana curve along with the fact it's not like we're here hanging out with swords to plowshares and Mana Drain. Against this, I'll have four and five drop manifests, you know? Yeah, exactly. Like they're gonna break this on to kind of like the, like, the inspiration for this game. So kind of like, as I mentioned, it was kind of like the Live the Dream tube that's been on mic Go a bunch and the chromatic cube and like when I was putting this together, I did. So it's like the archetypes of, different from those kind of cubes, but the actual kind of like, like some of the bread and butter cards. I did look at those for inspiration because like when you're building a power cube, it's natural to look at the vintage YouTube as like the inspiration of like, like, like for your removal for your bank of like the general pieces that kind of go into it for, for these guys. But those kind of cubes, what I kind of saw from the interaction is that, yeah, stuff like, yeah. So it's the plowshares like manually would be so good in this cube. But like like like like they're just too efficient. Kind of like if it, if you sawed someone's three drop in a power cube, that kind of feels good. But like in this, if you saw someone's eight nine drop, which is going to be a lot more of that deck, that kind of mana swing is so unbelievably brutal. So kind of like all the, like, direct kill spells cost like, but like like like there's no two minute doom blades in this, or the Doom blades are like 3 or 4 mana, like the counter spells. 3 or 4 manner, that kind of thing. It's kind of like like everything's slightly slower in response to where you're playing your threats. And that was a big kind of like inspiration from the Chromatic Cube and the that the GMT because like that, those games have been around for a while. Like, like, like I'm not going to try and reinvent the wheel. They, they have done the game testing like like it's a great thing to do if you're building a cube, it's fine. Cubes that have a similar sort of ethos to what you're trying to build and use them as inspiration for, like for just the key bits for like the overlap, you know, kind of like help bring the cube together, basically, but for the more stable bits basically. Yeah, for sure. I think, it's an interesting comparison of ice cubes when I've played Chromatic Cube on Arena in the past, which admittedly was like a few years ago now, because the alchemy stuff kind of annoyed me. So I stopped playing it. But, I, I found that to be a lot more sort of super fun. Your cube feels. Your cube feels like it has like the archetypes of boards. And you can sort of straddle two archetypes sometimes, but the archetypes very much do exist and other things that people will trap. Whereas often to me, Chromatic Cube felt like we're all just drafting like 3 to 5 color good stuff decks a lot of the time and making a lot of mana. And that was most of what was going on. Why is your cube feels like there that a pretty distinct, like synergistic archetype so you can gunfire now that there. So there are a couple of things from a design point of view that kind of, I think, kind of lean into what you said there. So like the fixing is pretty good. So in it we have fetches about jewels, shocks, trims, pain. So the whole thing's proxy. By the way, I should say that when I just casually throw out about jewels, but, but yeah. Pain. No. Like, slow lands, so veil lands and a full cycle of sickness. But, like, I specifically haven't given green that much fixing. Like, green can make either. Colorless manor or Green Manor like, I think one thing that like, like I've seen it in my, like, in my normal cube of just like green soup decks where I just kind of let you just play, Birds of Paradise because it's generically good. And then that kind of like, like, like I one of the goals of this cube was to reward people for dropping their lands and kind of like Birds of Paradise does kind of undo a lot of the work that dwarfing your lands does, if that makes sense, because it's not like I'll just be in green, I'll drop out of The Birds of Paradise and a bunch of other stuff that makes any color of mana, like, don't need to draft any land like I like. I want people to like, have to drop their lands in this cube to make their mana work. And also if they do that, they get to splash for other guys because like, one of the things with the archetypes is, yeah, we mentioned that there are over three colors, but one of the things I did with the cube and then designing was like, there are archetypes across the whole cube, like, like like there are there are tokens, synergies in some form over every color of the cube. And that really allowed crossovers and kind of it's definitely like a nice byproduct of that is, is it's really from they're kind of people have found archetypes and things to do in the cube that I did not plan or intend, and that's really cool. But I kind of it means that kind of like if I'm like a journey deck, there might be a blue card that actually works really well in my deck. And then it's like, okay, I want to play that. I just have to get a land to do it. And that's kind of that's been quite nice. It's like like like like the best decks I have seen in this cube are people who, who, who have drafted their land so they can splash something cool or powerful and synergize is in some cool and interesting way. And that's been really fun to see as a designer. Anyway. Yes, for sure. You want a cube which pays your players off for being creative, right? You don't just want to be like you all colors. Therefore you draft this package of synergy. You want to give some room to, make synergies work across multiple colors. Oh, find synergies with cards. Which one's even where to be played alongside each other? I think that's that makes a cube way more fun to me when there is a bit more depth to it. In that way. Yeah. So kind of we, we will do a bit more of a breakdown of the archetypes and the packages within it, kind of like, like as we're doing this overview part first, I think it's worth mentioning kind of like there are like in theory like, but there are ten tri color archetypes in the cube. But this is probably the most, deepest. I've gone on packages in new BI built in terms of like cards I'm putting in to interact with each other. And one thing I really did with this is just kind of like try and find as many cards that overlap with things as possible. So like find like a two, like like like some of the interactions are just two cards working really powerfully together, but some are like, I went down this rabbit hole of like, okay, devoted to it. What is devoted to what is devoted to combo? Combo within this cube devoted to it does some cool stuff with Merkle. Lord of bones. Cool. What? What does Merkle overlap with? It overlaps with Astral Dragon. Cool. All right. What does Astral Dragon overlap with cast mirror. Cool. And you kind of go down this. Yeah there's like then we get to fly over heat bound. We get to luminous brood moth, we get to unstoppable slasher and solemnity. This is all kind of like this rabbit hole of like card interact with this, which interacts with this interesting kind of like there's so much overlap and there's so much like, like I have tried to list what I believe are all the combos in my queue, but I know I am nowhere near short because every time we play it, someone finds something new and cool to do. That is really fun to see. Yeah, for sure, for sure. It's honestly looking through the list before looking at this, I was like, why is my first solemnity in here? None of that makes sense to me. But then actually makes a ton of sense. I had not seen that used as really a combo card and cube before. I'd only seen it used for like the funny stuff with Nine Lives, but yeah, but yeah. Does that have a cycle that. No, no undying creature and a slam? C is is pretty cool. Yeah, yeah, there's there's a lot of cool stuff. And I can have like a couple of other bits just on the build and kind of general bit of the thing to kind of go over is, one of the other inspirations that I got from the Live the Dream and the Karate Cube is their use of split cards, because like the first draft of this, we did, we did like the goal was for people to do stuff like game, but it was a bit swingy with people who were just who were consistently doing stuff on terms two and three and people who weren't. So what we found is by adding more split cards to it, even if the effect isn't super efficient, but just having something so you can be more impactful in the game, even if just like meals on cards. But some decks, that's what they need to kind of get things going. Just adding more split cards. So, so, so direct split cards, like, the ones from like Resnick, have been in but also like, I've also recently added a bunch of runes because rooms are split cards and they are very good. And like just also because games are going longer, just having more things for people to spend their manner on is generally good. Can like like like manor things in general do get more important as you go into games that are going longer, because they can be the things they kind of can break board stores like like a great example of, manor think in this is Tivat, the Pamela. It's like one green grain for A33. That can actually be a combo card. But it also has an ability of three green green cards. You can get this exposition turned. Wax is the greatest power monkey. Just to control a die is a great card to kind of like build towards. And then you can dump your magnet into it and win the game. That's great managing, but just having it be on split cards like I can pet, I can play Polluted System on turn two and then dimmable. Yet on turn five to reanimate something. These are all kind of things that kind of like, yeah, just lets you use your mana in cool, cool and interesting ways. Yeah. I mean, I think that's certainly true from a player point of view. Mana cube designer point of view. If you look at the cube, if I get the saw cards, which are going to win and lose claims for the big fat, coming down on tens four and five, that doesn't mean you can neglect your early game. It means you want you still need to be casting cards on send to you just want them to be cards that set you up to have a better plan for you. But that's a handful. So things like vamp or you have to swap, switch, do something on, turn to you. But you know these games are going to go a bit longer. So with the two drops which then also do something later, really premium because you are just going to have a better time with this cube if you are doing something on turn to like, it doesn't have to be amazing. You're not going to find the, the sort of two tops you find in, in quicker cubes. But it's going to be night and day where if you have like 4 or 5 swaps versus if you only have 1 or 2, because you will just be a step ahead in terms of setting yourself up for those powerful and three and four plays. And that doesn't just mean vamp, right? Like I think the cygnets are very good for that. That also means space. Things like filtering stuff like, blue has a few like liters of two mana. I think they're really good because, we're looking to assemble, like, powerful, like, combos or like synergistic cards, which work very well together. So just getting that better selection at least can be very powerful or like it has the ones which make treasure, right? Like it's not vamping you in the same way as a signal, but it will let you get your full mana play out ahead of schedule. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. And like like green has a card like, say, to where you find it, like like you're not going to beat down an opponent with a say to you find it, but it will start filling up the graveyard for those graveyard kind of decks, that kind of stuff. Yeah, yeah, that all makes sense. Yeah. Just, just doing stuff in magic is always important. Nice. Let's, let's touch on a couple of personal bits. Should we say, this one I've already listed down as. But kind of. These are bits that kind of give it a bit more personality, basically. And also the first one I think might also be a reason why it why you don't end up with as much of a soup sort of deck. And that's because everyone in this cube, when you draft it starts with a cog librarian. If you've never played conspiracy, I'm terribly sorry because it's one of the best drawer formats of all time, but a cog library. And then the easiest way of explaining it I will read card, but the easy way. The thing is, is if you played sushi Go, it's chopsticks. But Cog librarian is for generic. For A33 artifact creature construct. You draft librarian face up. As you draw off the card, you may draw an additional card from that booster pack if you do, but cog would librarian into that booster pack. Well, this basically means is that so you start with this just free. And at any point you can put it back in the pack and you can take two cards from a pack. The librarians then go round the draft. People can draft them so that later in the draft, once you've used yours, you could pick up someone that someone else has used. It also has the ability of if you have two of them, you can take three cards from a pack, because they do stack. That's quite fun. How have you found Coco like librarians to look like like we've. I have always had one cognitive librarian in my regular cube since I formed it. But how have you found found games, everyone, starting with the Coco library into effect, a cube draft? Yeah. I mean, it's been interesting, actually. It's very powerful. I think the main effect it has on the draft as a whole, I think, is that more of the cards end up with a deck that can use them best. So if you're if you have a graveyard deck, for example, and you see an excellent self-image enabler and an excellent payoff, you don't have to choose between them. You can take both. And it means that you that self mana say acknowledge after you be okay. Well, I'll take this pay off. And then the say to Wayfinder goes to another green player who may or may not play it like it's a fine card anyway, but they're not maximizing it in the way that you would be. And it means those the particularly synergistic cards which have greater value for one player than than the others at the table, that player is more likely to end up with them because you don't end up with those, there's horrible choices of, which of these two cards fit are absolutely crucial for my deck and my will? Do I need to take, I will say you should have a pretty high bar as to where you're using them, and you should take from 50 highly out of packs. If you, taking, like, a solid playable card for your deck. But not one, but not sort of one you expect to be, say, one of the top ten cards in your deck, and there's a clockwork librarian in the pack you should probably take for a clockwork librarian, because the bar for that to be better, right, is just, you see a card. I see a pack in the future where the second best card for you is better than that card you would have taken, and that's especially early on in the draft. That's probably going to happen. When it does go, it certainly goes lower down in your pick order. As the draft progresses. So yeah, it's just because you do end up with the clockwork actually. Exactly. The even like end of pack two, like taking clockwork is less powerful than ever. An early pack one because you just have fewer chances to see that pack with multiple cards. You really, really need, that early that you should take them pretty highly. Although I've definitely found that. Yeah, the less cards in a pack just being closer to getting a whole fresh new pack, that's when I personally take my brain slightly higher, if that makes sense. Like, like I, I found myself to be kind of quite liberal with them. I don't know if that's correct. Like, like I think we are definitely like like in when we've done it. I definitely think kind of two trains of thought I'm quite liberal. Unless. Yeah, unless as you said, there's something that kind of like you're not, but like if it's a playable or coed librarian, then take then I'll take the pick. O'Connor around. I have seen like, what's the most you've had ready to go in one? I don't know, seeing someone with four librarians going into pack like 2 or 3. Yeah. I don't think I ever got four. I think had free at one point. But I like being able to take four cards from a pack or two cards from a pack, then two cards from a pack, then 2000 back. But like, like that is very strong. That is a very good way of, of either one, getting like the powerful cards you need or two getting your fixing like I like. I personally will snap off in this cube like a tri omen effect land in pack one, like pack one, pick one to try and fetch with a with a cargo librarian. I think that's perfectly solid in this game just because, like it does just set you up quite nicely. Like like fetches are so premium in this. And so I try, as well, just because of that ability to splash like your deck will be more powerful and you'll be doing a cooler thing if you do have that ability. Dispatch. So, so, so, so called working four lands I do think is a solid shout as well. Yes. Yeah. I think it's very reasonable. And I think it's sort of depends where you're at in the packs. Right. Like if you're in pack three and there are two good lands for your deck and you have multiple clockworks, then I think by all means use one on the fixing. If it's like pack one, I try not to just because, like, well, just because I expect there to be a pack with two really important cards for my deck, right? Like, if I'm the artifact that can I see a pack with, like, say, seed shock and psi must have up to in it? I'm going to be mad. Like I'm going to be a bit mad if I bent my clockwork librarian on that, right? But I've definitely found that because you also have to announce when you are using the clockwork librarian that like once the first person goes, I like to like person two and three are like, oh yeah, fine, I'll do it. Yeah, yeah. And then you start having them go round and then like like like like I think in the last time we did this, I think like clockwork, like five times, I never had more than, like one in my pool. But I was able to pick one. I would have to pick them up relatively regularly. And that will depend on playgroup and like cold librarian, for what it's worth, is worth less than 30 PD. If you have a cube and you're looking to spice it up, just buy eight of them and try it. I like like outside of this cube. I do think it is a cool thing to do every now and then just to spice up, like like in general in my cube, we do it when there's ten people or ten or more just because of just for the reason that like, yeah, combos should exist. Like combos exist in like my, my regular cube. But you do has a thing of like two of the combo cards are in one pack like and therefore. And there's too many people for stuff too. We'll that's why we do it in larger games. But in this like in this, the good librarian fits the ideal of treat yourself. Because if I see two cards I want, I should be able to take them. That isn't the ethos of the cube, and I think it kind of fits quite nicely. There. It's also, I found interesting drafting that sometimes as a pack where if you could only take one card, you'd take this like Signet, but because I can take two cards potentially, I don't take the signet at all. I take these two of a cards that go really well together. Right? Yeah. Like in snap of a like a dream hold. Plus a time twist to say about like puts you into that archetype. It can be a way to sort of plan your flag if you like. But, yeah, they do then later on. But like, they make you don't want to be stuck with them at the end, as we said. But they do sort of get more powerful once you know what really what you're drafting. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Because you will just see the packs where it's like, like these are the two perfect cards that this deck specifically needs, and I probably won't really fit them. So that's a great time to use your whole book. Sort of a transition. So, so so there is technically a librarian beatdown deck available in this cube. And that's because we are there are some some conspiracies in here as well. Also from, conspiracy one and conspiracy to Take the crown. Conspiracy is also fantastic ways of making a cube unique and spicing it up so there aren't really any. So Cocoa Librarians is the only card with the same name in it. But we do have a couple of cards like Drago's favorite that, it's a hidden agenda. So, you start the game with it facedown and you have to name a card on it. So normally you like, write on a bit of paper, slip it in, and then at any point you can turn it face up and spells of the chosen name you cast Kos one generic. That's the cast. This is kind of in here as kind of like a part of a package of like, maybe someone can draft all the librarians and beat down with them because in theory, like, you can make these, like three mana, four fours, that kind of stuff that, that draw you another one that could actually be quite fun. But, I mean, James, my wife got a bit annoyed at you when you turn one. Astrid pest against her. We understand that your wife, when she lightning bolts hit my Astrid pad. So I did not have that. Sorry. I just had James do this. I didn't hear that immediately. It was fine. Okay? Yeah. I didn't get to attack it once. All right. But I have unfounded complaints. Yeah, but it's just the thing with face hidden agendas, right? That, like the here to do the clockwork thing, they they also just end up with someone, even if the clockwork thing doesn't happen and you just name your nice, impactful creature to cast early on. Yeah, I think this that one that like, it's fun to like fixes colors for a specific card or whatever, which can be a cool, totally cool way to enable a splash. Exactly. So yeah, so, so, so unexpected potential is a it's a conspiracy. You can draft again. You hidden agendas, a you name a card before the game and then you may spend you may spend mana as though it were a man of any color to cast the spell with the chosen name so you could fully like. Like you could take a five color card and just have this fully splash with this. Like like like again, it's like it's for people to find like, I don't I did not have anything any kind of particular interaction in mind with, with unexpected potential. But that's it's kind of in the name. The potential of this card is unexpected. I kind of want to see what people do with it and do some cool stuff with it. Like, like like in my last cube or like in my last deck. I had, someone is bond. So this has a double agenda. And with this you start. So I always write down and you name two cards with this one. Whenever you cast a creature spell with one of the chosen names, you may search your library for each card with the other chosen name. So if there are, there are those. There aren't really two card Thomas in here, but there are three card combos. So that so that's going to get you some key bits. But I had this and I named where is it Academy rector. That's the full amount of one two that when it dies, you can go for any enchantment from your deck into play. I had that and trumpeting Connor saw which has two and a red just got to deal three damage to any creature or planeswalker. So with that, if I cast Academy rector, I go into trumpeting Connor, so I'll put it into my hand. I then use this ability to, bolt the academy rector, and then I go and get omni omniscience, and then I go off. That's a very cool thing to do in draft. That wasn't really why I put those in the queue, but I was cool. Yeah, that's pretty sick. I think a lot of these conspiracies are really powerful, as I like to take them pretty highly, like the one that fixes one spell like, that's such a game changer. Imagine you're playing like the coolest artifact vamp deck, right? And I'm looking at what you're vamping into. And there's, you know, there's this dramatic already. There's a nexus of becoming. There's a shimmer which discovers and you unsnap. Like those cards are all fine, but what if we cast a cool tomato? It's that, you know, like, you can just. Right. You get one card which is just completely color washed. That's cool. That's kind of a nuts, I think. I mean, progenitors is in this as well. Just get them I action get to ten. That's, the thing you can do. Some other things. Just just on the fixing side of the conspiracy. So there are some. I'm not running. I'm not running power play. Because that's just you get talk about who gets to go first. That's a bit too strong. Like, that's Power Cube where they. And there's another one which gives you a free hand of seven. You get a free, free mulligan. We're not running that one. That's also too strong. Y'all doing what I think are the fun ones. We have World Net, which is conspiracy. Stop this game with it. Start the game with conspiracy. Face up in the command zone. As long as every card in your card pool started the game in your library or in the command zone lands, you can try and have tap add one manner of any color that is treating yourself as well as I've been said, like this is a card you want to see early. I have train right to drop by taking this in pack three and then just starting dropping a load of multicolored cards and then realizing I just made my deck way worse. But I enjoyed the draft and it was fun. And there's a couple like this is also, sovereign's realm, which is a similar type of thing. But you can do the, every other card game. Anything of you can exile a card face down, and then you get a land that taps for any color, that kind of thing. So there are some cool ways to do different things and like, like, like these are my conspiracies. Yeah. They're not in here for a specific deck, but they are in here to kind of make things more interesting and kind of make unique decks when they appear. And I that is another cool thing that I think this kind of cube can offer you basically. Yeah, for sure. I think this especially seems kind of sick nicely as a it's such a unique, constraint at first. Then you're right. It's kind of like crafting a Jovian deck plus even. But yeah, but but you get a feature as well, James. Oh, yeah. I'll tell you what. You really don't want to end up with a clockwork librarian at the end of a draft. If you have a world that, well, it's four for away, so you can play on kind of that might not be the worst thing that you're going to be playing in that deck. Well, possibly. It sounds sweet, speculative though. I'm kind of down to try that at some point. I, I suspect it's really good, actually, but I'm not sure I'm really low confidence in that. You'll have to come back to me once I've draft, but I think you would be really good with this because you are annoyingly really good at drafting your lands and playing like three, 4 or 5 kind of splashy things that kind of synergize really well together. I could see you taking this back and pick one and doing something obscene, like some very powerful engine that really kind of pulls together because, like, so, so with oddly with, with world that you do still want to be drafting your lands like, like you take lands over a bad card. Does it still have to be in your deck? So like, oh, a bad card for your deck? Because, I mean, it's like in theory, it's a cube. There's no actual bad cards, but there's still cards like this card that don't synergize together, which is kind of what you're after. And also like in the original conspiracies, there was cars that removed cards from the draft, and I didn't put those in because those aren't fun. We're not treating yourself by removing cards from the cube. We want to be adding more cards. That's what Cog Librarian is for. Yeah for sure. It's interesting where it lands with well, they're actually upside of drafting lands with worlds. Net is you get to make your deck a bit smaller. Yeah. So yeah you have to fight every spell you draft. Right. And then the number of spells you play dictates the number of lands you have to play to keep the ratio of lands to spell sensible. So if you draft more lands, you get to play fewer spells and therefore play a smaller deck. Which is what you want, right. Because you just want to draft for good driver good cards more often. There's a reason why F1 plays the minimum number of cards you're allowed to play. You want to try a good cause more often. Well, that puts this massive restriction on you. But you have to play all your cards, so you want to minimize the number of bad cards that end up in your deck, or fill cards that end up in your deck saying, draw your bangers more often, and you will have a lot of bangers because you get to play every color. Yeah, yeah. No. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. It is really a cost. Like it's, it's more because then you think that then you might initially think having to play every card in your pool is like, like like for example, that like in conspiracy, there was a card that there was, there was a conspiracy called Advantageous Proclamation, which was your minimum deck size is reduced by five. And that was actually pretty strong because busted. Yeah. Like if you're just playing a more efficient deck like like like this is one the ones that kind of empowered you, that might be quite strong because there's like less. Yeah. Less filler. You're just hitting your good stuff. Yeah. Very strong card. All right, I think let's move. Let's kind of do a bit of an archetype breakdown. We'll basically we'll go over the architects and what they try to do, and then we'll pick out some cool interactions or some key cards that we think are worth talking about, but some people will have played with before, so we might not touch on them too much. But like the ones that are a bit further out there, we will kind of go in a little bit more detail. So the first one we can touch on is Esper and it's vaguely artifacts. The idea is with this is that you are trying to make as many artifacts as possible and then profit from this, like the signpost cards are things like so. So there's a bunch of ways of making things like clues, food, treasure, doctors. You have cyber drive awakened as a wing condition, and then my kind of, we saw this, cube at cube slash, in London end of last year, and I love it as a wink on and I did. I just stole it. I thought it was great. Academy manufacturer and time Civ. Basically, the goal is you just make so many tokens in a turn with academy manufacturer. That's the three generic. If you would create a clue food or treasure token. Instead, create one of each and time save, which is artifact tap and sack. Five artifacts take an extra turn after this one. There is a world like you can just be making so many artifacts that you just take a lot of turns and beat them down. This is, esper artifacts. It's actually been, like, very well represented and very strong. Just kind of like, that's kind of. Those are kind of the signpost cards, but just, stuff like Nexus of becoming, transmog transmutation font. I've just been incredibly strong. I was like, you drafted one of these decks, and you change like. Like, how have you found artifacts to be in this cube? Yeah, I think it plays really well, actually. I think very few different builds. You can actually go kind of. I mean, aggressive is a strong word for this cube, but, you can go you can put quite a lot of power and toughness into play relatively quickly with, especially the stuff that makes constructs. So, Thousand Moons, Smithy is a card I've been I was really impressed by. That's the two white white led tree house fact for answers you make or just slightly better constructs to cancel your creatures as well. And then you can tap five for tokens getting off your main phase, flip it over over them, and it becomes a land which makes even more constructs. It's, that was very powerful. And then just stuff like, sci master fortress, crime house, sea shark, forensic gadget here in just, assemble a tremendous number of artifacts. It and not all of my sci impact, but there are loads of them. So if you have any way to convert that into material to win the game, it plays very, very well. Oh, it's a very good home, actually, for a new card. We have a few, the, last set review, the straight, straight hanger automaton. That's, Yeah, a free generic buffs all your foxes. Whenever you create one or more artifact tokens, you get a fox as well. This stacks really good at making lots of artifact tokens. Yeah. There was another one that I had. We hadn't played too much before until, like, it's got I wanted to test out. And I've been unbelievably impressed by this, secure Tron squadron. You kicked my ass with this, James. A is one and a white for two. Two with squad three. Which basically is you pay three generic. And then as all squad three generic, which means initial cost of the spell, you may pay three generic any number of times. And this creature ends the battlefield. Create that many tokens that are copies of it. The squadron has vigilance and whenever a creature token enters the battle under your control, will encounter on this on it. When we kind of reviewed this, I definitely didn't over the clock that it was every token from then onwards like this with like psi where all your stop does get massive like like because games are going longer and this it's very like most of times this is, this is a five drop. So you're getting is it 5 pound tokens on the board. And then every token afterwards will come in with two positional counters on it. That is obscene. You can kill people so easily with that. Yeah. Yeah. You actually get six right away for if she's got it once because the token sees itself because it is a token. Right. Okay. Yeah. It gets buffed by valve one. So if you squat it once, you got two, two and a full fall and then the next turn. Wait, if you're when your PSI makes a flop. So it's a three fee fault, right. It's it's huge. And you can also just run out on ten two VI. And then if you have ways to make tokens in a few trivial, it's just going to come over an extra counter. It's got that flexibility. Do you ever get like that twice for games. Probably over. Very powerful card. Yeah. That's been I mean I've only ever had it played against me, but that card is really good. Yeah, yeah. Artifact in general I think is quite strong. There is definitely a rebalancing probably coming where there's like more incidental ways of getting rid of artifacts because, I shatters too good. There's probably like like I probably put a cog around or something like that. That might be like a six man eight that destroys artifacts. That might be where we're going. But. Yeah. Yeah. Very strong. Next up is this. This is kind of like a control spell's deck. So with this, you are using big spells to win the game. They're kind of some some signpost cards, like Cass dissident mage, that's the one. And it's three for the. During your turns, you make casting. So sorcery card from the graveyard. If you, if a card would be cast this way, put it into your grave or this turn exalted instead, there's just a bunch of big city spells that you can kind of do this. This does overlap with the the, the jet guide spells. That goes. Well, but yeah, this is also just been very strong and good. Let me find some examples. But yeah, it's with running things like, kind of like big score and unexpected windfall. They're kind of like they're kind of progressing your game plan while also giving you treasure that you can then cache into cast bigger and bigger spells. So I think James mentioned Cool Ultimatum earlier that's in here, along with a bunch of other big things that that you can be doing with it. I don't think we've had a dedicated access deck yet, James, but like it just in general, there's just a bunch of stuff that it can do. Like it's also quite good at playing your opponent spells. So there's things like siphon insight in here. We've had, things like Halo Forge to get some of your stuff back. I think it's, it's it's a very good shell. I just don't think it's fully come together yet. Is that fair, James? Yeah, I think we just. Guy in the spells deck certainly sort of bleed into each other quite a lot. I think you can. I think that's fine. I think you can solve that curve. Probably because you got to make some treasure. Investec quite often. Which helps a lot with your fixing, I guess, and for the Greeks, this one is probably leading a bit more into the interactive side of it, whereas the just one is maybe trying to cast one big spell or have one really big turn, which, even if it doesn't end the game immediately gets hit a long way ahead. Yeah. And I think and Quick Spells is good. It's good at the carrying spells. It's good, getting a lot of value and, has some, has some nice finishes. And there was a flight crew ultimatum. Yeah. And, I see, I guess with the treasure, it does make it so, so so there are extra turn spells in this group, but these are actually quite high. Like we're not running, time walk. We're running, like, temporal trespass and Beacon of Tomorrow. There's like eight and so is that 11 mana for temple. Just like those kind of spells. This this kind of it has. No it does have that that is true. That is doing. Yeah. The ten stuff I think is good because there's also there's a lot of ways of copying your spells in this cube. Which I, I think, I mean, I've not actually played a ton of them yet. I in my mind they should play out quite well because that's, Yeah, things like, like Double Vision and Arcane Bombardment. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think they pair well, because obviously your dream light is copying one of the giant things, but, also just stuff like Big Skull plays really well with copies because you don't pay the extra cost of discarding the card on the second one, you're just going to draw a bunch of cards and make a lot of treasures, and that'll set you up fairly well for casting whatever you're into. Yeah. I mean, I mean, I guess this is also one of the better colors to take advantage. Like there is a sprinkling of like polymorph stuff in here. There is like Reality scramble and a couple of other bits like that where basically you can get rid of a dorky creature. And then because black does have like some bulk, all colors do have some big reanimation targets, like you have avatar. I mean avatar like we're talking like Astral Dragon, avatar for vein Reaper, something kind of sword rather than necessarily like, we're not your branding in this game yet. We might maybe in the future. Maybe in the future we could look at Grizzled Daddy, but like in theory, this is a it's good at taking advantage of that because it does have like some five mana reanimation spells, which might be a good way of of using those copy effects. So that can be pretty strong. Yeah, sure. Avatar avatars. Well, I mostly psych, and, I love the Soul Cauldron. At some point, Jesus was going to have great economy. Yeah, yeah. Very strong. Very. I saw a creature. If it's, just salt ocean. You don't worry about V and not even that restless sex. I assume it's horrible if ten or more. Which cause the total that. Yeah. Yeah. Can't be. But. Yeah. It costs a million mana just to soak alternate. No. Re-Animator. Haha. Nice. All right. The next archetype, is Jund tokens. So you're ramping into making big tokens and then turn them sideways or sacking them for value. So kind of like the signpost cards for things like KOF old Fake King. We have things like rampaging bailiffs with landfall, and here we have things like Gray Titan. Gray Titan is still a great card. But also lower down the curve you have things like annex hardened in the forge, like like those. I kind of like. So because tokens is kind of over all of them. Oh, is over all archetypes. Kind of the the newer ones, which we don't do a minute, are more creature, more creature tokens and then kind of black and blue and a bit of white is more like artifact tokens at the end of it. So it's like, I think actually, you know what? It is a nice smorgasbord. Every color can make artifact tokens and every color can make creature tokens. And kind of Jund is leaning more on the bigger side of tokens, like ramping into getting more bigger. Jund is doing some things basically, you know, putting some beef into play. You're killing some things. You are judging them as you would expect to join them. Yeah. The one of the cards really stands out to me, John, that she's I think this is a great cube for Core Vault. Yeah. It's it's such a bargain, value wise. Right. Accumulates value so quickly. All the decks are capable of making just putting a ton of pieces of cardboard and play. There's lots of treasure. There's loads of food, which is its own archetype we'll move on to later on. I just forget who deck I couldn't quite make my work. I really wanted to just play the core vault because it was, is such a powerful way to convert those, there's food or treasure or whatever it is you have into more cards. If you play it, you get your card, fire away. May have to kill it. If it's it's not a ton of efficient removal in this cube and coal vault. Unanswered goes pretty mad as, people who play it in its standard format can attest, cobalt is like one of the the best examples of this of it is a card that other colors really want to splash and make it work like like, yeah, the white food deck, the white deck, this kind of running. Some of the outlets want to splash this because it synergize with like some of the food and artifact token stuff, but also like like the aristocrat style of deck, like the modular cigaret deck also wants to kind of splash this because it's really it's a really good stack outlet for the creatures as well. So like like that's a sign for stuff like like both like the model deck and the abs on deck. Want to splash this John card because it's powerful. That is a good sign. But it's kind of like some of the things that this cube is trying to do. Like like there's overlap everywhere. And like you are. Yeah, you're rewarded for drafting your red splash in this by being able to play kobold. Yeah for sure. Right. Let's move on. Next. Next up. We've touched on this a bit earlier, but niya is go wide with tokens. So make as many small tokens as possible and go like this is the more sort of aggressive deck. You do have things like say slice a goblin. That's the one, the red two, one with raid, which is a beginning of your ends. If you attack this turn, create A11 red copy. Which token? This. This is one of the decks where the security on Squadron is best. We haven't gone full goblin rebel monsters, because that might be a bit too strong. But we do have, like, an ax. We have squid. Dubious monarch. And kind of the payoff of this deck is sort of like, is it a card like Jetman? Nexus of rebels. That's one of the. Yeah, for a five for that has a lot of text, actually. Now I'm looking at it. Basically, if you have three or more creatures, things get plus one. So and vigilance, if you have six more creatures, they also get plus one was own trample. And if you have, nine or more creatures everything will get plus three plus. Oh, and double strike, as well as trample and vigilance. Like it's like it's a it's it's sort of an overrun, but it's no fun. You have to do a bit of work for I think overrun might do, might just be a bit free in this queue. I won't be able to have to work for and pay and be paid off. And you get to play this cool big kitty. Yeah, gym is really cool and it does a lot of powerful things. I smash it with current design. Why is it A54? Yeah, I know this is A22. If, on the end, I don't have to make it good. I want like it's already gathered five, four, five before. No, I do agree, I do. Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's a ton of other, like, cool token makers in this. Like like like we're running hot monster the fellows. Mainly because I like that card, that kind of stuff. This is a ton of cool like cheap token makes. And also we haven't just gone. I have just looked for. I haven't just gone for a like, as I mentioned, Goblin Rebel master a bit to good and efficient like we like we're running things like doomed artisan like two and a white one. One sculpt is you control can't tackle. Block the beginning of your end step. Create a color sculpture artifact for each token. With this creature's power is equal to number of sculptors you control. Like that is an interesting card. It can go. It goes in an aristocrat deck. It goes in an artifact deck, and it can go in this kind of token. You go white deck. All you have to do is give it a couple of turns, kill to do monsoons, and you have a bunch of four, 4 or 5 fives like that. Those things are a touch more interesting to me in this environment than like, yeah, Golden rubble master or rebel master adjacent efficient. This like like like originally I think like literally in the signpost cards we had, what's the big rabbit, James. Jack rabbit. Jack rabbit. Yes. Jack rabbits. Yeah. I think that was a call that you point out. Might just be just generically a bit too snowballing, like it's a bit too much. I play a and I win the game in this Q by very I like at a minimum I kind of want you have to do A, B and C to win the game. But that is just I do A and I, I'll allow A plus B to be good a plus B the C wins the game, but it's a winning. The game is too much. Yes for sure. Next up we have Bant, which is kind of a pretty classic, like a solo strategy. So you have rune. The Hidden Realm is kind of like a signpost. There's a bunch of flicker stuff in here, and also just good orbs. We yeah, we we mentioned your earlier, and then you have cause like Bramble Sovereign, which is the, for mana for for in green whenever the whatever. No. Not too great changes that are not under your control. You may pay one to green if you do make a token of it. Finding like a good balance was a bit tricky. So because, like, I like some of the very early, like more, more standard, like ATB style stuff I thought was maybe a bit too not good, but it's a bit too early. So so so so so I have, I have added a couple of cool things that so we've added. So we do have like a few cards, our ETB draw a card, but we've also adding things like combat pressure. This is a seven mana three three with double strike that when it enters the battlefield draw card. That's prototype for two and a white. And this is quite interesting because you can play it for the prototype. Comes in, draws a card. It's a woman with double strike. And then if you flicker it with an effects you now have A33 double strike. You've done something a plus B equals good. This is kind of where we are with this. And like like I've seen some people do some very cool things with, but there's a lot of very powerful and magic now, James. Now to James. And like, how have you found the flicker deck to be sure. Yeah. I've, I've not played I've not played with or against the same thing really yet, but it looks very good to me. I think we have a good density of creatures, partly because you don't have to really try to put a good density of creatures in cubes generally, like I said, just a lot of the cards for the good. And I think a nice selection of flicker effects. Jovian looks great here. You know, a lot of the time, probably not meant to companion it. Just put it in your deck. If you get there and you can companion it without having to play too many horrible cards, and that's fantastic. It'll be great for you. But I wouldn't say, like, a way too many lands. So some card, a lot of cards already don't work for your game plan. If you don't get that, just put it in your deck. It'll be a very good five drop I like as well as we've got the flick request to go with it because, because flick with PC comes back end of ten thing, not a comes back immediately thing. You can actually do a loop with flick a wisp and European. I say loop quite slowly, but like European blinks out of a flick West and all the other very cheap stuff, flick wisp comes back, European goes away, you're in the next ten seven and then comes back. Flick is obviously a question because there's that delay. They can keep flickering each other and each time you're in is also blinking everything, all your RGB stuff, and you're gradually accruing value that way. Then at some point, regrettably, you have to stop because your opponent said, and that's fine to a certain extent. But, yeah, it's a real shame. You like, you can't see it. Yeah. And but yeah. No, it looks sweet. It looks sweet. I like the dim glasses. And it's a, the cool include. It's also I think one of the times for like, I think one of the most subjectively powerful, intensely snowball cards in the cube, which is failure. Exuberance. Shepard. That's a failure card. Yeah. That that stood out to me, reading through as, like one of the most noble things you can do. Right? Because, I always think when you approach a new cube that someone has built as a player, right. There's sort of two approaches you can have to it in my mind. You can, you can try and sort of traffic cube as intended and, try and go for themes and, bell syntax. The quest might have been imagining a lot of interesting synergies, or sometimes with cubes like this. And I think you'll cube is actually quite resistant to it, which is good. But you can call sort of call bullshit sometimes, right? You can say, yeah, yeah, okay. I get you're trying to get me to do this, splashy multicolor stuff, but what if I just drafted all cheap creatures and, failure is, like, definitely possible to do that. Like, cheap kind of out thing, which is very, very powerful. Like, you play that into anything. What you collect around you, you find a way of game, right? And you don't need the long term game plan. But I think, I think there's enough in this cube for can stop that from happening where I don't expect it to be a huge problem, but yeah, it's just it stood out to me as like, this is like, objectively one of the most powerful, most efficient cards on the cube. And the band cycle seems like that that quick is really going to use it very well, not 100%. And also worth mentioning with the fact that it's like we up, we are trying to treat yourself here. So obviously we do also have things like Ellis Norn and Pan Harmonica, which will double up because there's enough time in this group to play, to play a harmonica. And I think, yeah, that has been a lot of fun. The band was involved in the one hour round one. Yeah. Checks on the decks. I, I'm assuming it was gaining, like, somehow how they didn't. Miller. Oh was it a euro on pi? Was it how they wasn't my friend yeah, I would say it's a long time familiarity and dark night. The next thing I'm going to throw to you, James, is. That's right. Because this is one I kind of I normally when I'm good, normally when I'm adding a cube archetype, I have a pretty good idea of how it plays and what it's doing. This one, I will be honest with you, was very much a vibe of I'm going to put these cards in. I think they work together. I've seen people do stuff with them, but I've never played it myself. And that's the absent archetype. And it's food fight. The idea here is play a bunch of things that make food, eat the food, get value out of the food, and gain some life. James, want to talk about how you found the food deck to play? Because the first time we dropped this, you came away with a pretty strong food archetype here. Yeah, I think this this plays very well. I think this is like the vibe power level of cube. Follow it pretty much. Exactly. So I've, I mean, if you listen to we did an episode back in the day on, on on food as an archetype, I think, yeah. This is the solve cube. Five networks is so good at generating. You can generate so many food so quickly. And this it's kind of the, Yeah. Like so for example, Samwise Gamgee I think is like probably the most premium card for this stack. If you're committing to a food thing, this is, a green, a white for an oven, a two to an F, another non token creature. And this battle field, your control, create a food and then you can stack three threes. Return a solid card from your graveyard to your hand. So many of your creatures legendary. The fat is almost static creature. And, and that the amount of food you get very, very fast is, is very, very powerful of this. It means if you're doing anything with that food, you can run away every game pretty quickly. I like for partner hobbits as well. Yeah. They're cool in this. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a nice little, sort of mission in the draft, right? To, to assemble your partners. And because a lot of the partners have, like, a strong half and a weak half as well. Right? So I think that when you can play for weak half 100%, the the best part about Mary, warden of Eyes and God is that it gets Pippin warden of eyes and God. Yes. The shellfish show. Yeah, yeah. The Terrapins stuff is entirely to go and find. Perfect. Yeah. And yeah. And the salmon Frodo is good because Sam is fairly strong, actually. Sam just pops out of food every turn, and, And then your food crack for one last, the, there's some good, like, way generic ways to use artifact tokens as well in the cube, which function really well in that, in this stack. For Fox, a guy we spoke about earlier, I think this is a fantastic home for it because you're generating a huge amount of food and it's mostly like lots of, single triggers that make one food fight so it doesn't care that it's one or more. You have like five triggers to make a food. You don't have one check if it creates five food so you get a lot of properties off of that. However, is is also really nice, to have a friend of a forest. This is two and a green for two. Three legend tokens you control have tap to add a green. This is so much mana. Investec. Like even if you have nothing else, you have it. You can use manna from some of your foods, factory other foods, and make extra stack incredibly hard to kill with damage. Because the amount of feeds you're pumping out and you have some payoffs that life gains stuff like, so envy, two mana black. So then where you can flip it and then, the other side, like, not someone equal to the amount of life you gained this. And that's a very powerful win condition in this stack. You'll often like run out, crack a bunch of food just from that same turn in the late game. Yes. I'm so happy this archetype is coming up. It's also because a lot of the hobbits and a lot of these cards are actually quite cheap. It's sort of the aggro deck as well. It is one of the decks that can do things like, like it's it's a deck that you really you are rewarded by drafting this deck. Basically, you are rewarded by actually having one of the more synergistic decks that actually I can really just start doing its thing earlier than some of the other decks. And yeah, when I played, I think I played it quite like the first time we did this, you had kind of a very good version of this. And then I think last time, like it wasn't the full food by deck, but it was food adjacent deck. Just do it. Like, again, food is an artifact food. Just synergize it with so much that this cube is trying to do and like, yeah, I've been I've been like, I was prepared and ready to just make abs and there's almost one counters like I had it in my head is like, okay, we'll do your food a couple of times. No one will draft it, and then we'll, we'll make it possible on counters or something like that, something a bit more generic. But foods really found a place and I'm so glad of that. I'm very happy that food fight is alive and well in this game. Yeah for sure, for sure. I think it's I think things evolve more than a lot of the of attacks. There are a chunk of cards in here which probably only you want. Yes, there you do. Get them late and you can often take more generically powerful card and like for random hobbit round the table, you know it will come back to you. We have a card actually, which I when I drafted for few deck, I think I passed it for some the movable spell or something and vaguely regretted it was, feasting for a bit. This is is one a green for a two to halfling has devour food free. So as an answer, this may sacrifice any number of food, and then three times that many counters on it and can't be blocked by, So like creatures with power less than feasting, hobbits can't block it. I think this card is probably insane in the food deck. Actually, I had to undo just how many food I would have. I think if I drafted this late, you wouldn't play it early, right? You play it on, like, turn five, and I think it's going to be like a 12, 12 hour, 5050 on the time. And I just never gonna be able to block it if I don't have a hard removal spell right now. If I die. Yeah, it's going to be huge, actually. Yeah. Awesome. Sick. Phenomenal. All right, let's keep the ball rolling. The next one is Jess Guy. And this is kind of yeah. This is kind of dovetails into the this one by being big spells. So this is also wanting to double up your spells with things like double vision. But this is kind of I guess more where the dream halls and and dream halls and omniscience come into it because you do have access to Academy rector as a way of cheating those big things into play. Yeah. Yeah, we kind of touched on this deck when we talked about graces, but there's some other kind of cards to mention here is like, this is also where things like scholar of the Lost Trove can come in. That's one that, similar to, torrential Cloak. They can come in and it can cast an instant sorcery black card from your graveyard work paints amount of cost, this, amount of fly, fly, fly. But again, just ways of cheating, big incident and sorceries, casting that makes it so so so we also have like a physics mastery that can either go in the greater stack or go into this deck. It's just doing big cool things with big, expensive spells and like, yeah, like like I think the last time we played James, the sublime epiphany you cast against me, like in Regular Cube, it's kind of back breaking, but in this cube where you're really putting mana into where you can be up on mana with the sort of epiphany that is so back breaking. Yeah, yeah, my cards kind of discussing when you get, when you got stuff, obviously it's like a six man offense. And if you're behind, sometimes it's not great. But, yeah, when it, when it works, it's, it's one of the best cards in the cube. I think. Yeah, I quite like this big spell stack. I think you can do a lot of fairly good, like, go over the top stuff. And I think the big spell stuff is a lot more fluid than when we talked about the food that we're like, okay, this is going to be like mostly an abandoned deck. Most of the time. I think the big fake spell stuff really bleeds into different archetypes very well, which I think is really interesting. And you definitely want some synergies like that. I certainly did very badly last time we played this too. A I think it was soft fall color, maybe, big spells, he stuff with that scarlet. It's so much work. And like, it's one of those games, like, I kind of felt like I just was so ahead on board, I didn't really feel like a lot could go wrong. And, I could even maybe had a campfire up and hadn't cast for reanimate spell would demonstrate. So two copies on that on the sack, I forgot back. A scholar. Scholar took another turn and I went from like, I very think I can, I'm very likely to lose this game. So I took like four turns and I died. As of those things, I was like, oh, I need it to be fine to end this game quicker than I was because I didn't realize that there was this end game, but I couldn't deal with right? Yeah. No, definitely, I, I think the Jesko version maybe gets a bit more use out of, wheel effects as well. So, so there is just, so real, this time spiral. There is time to a string here. I don't consider this a powered queue, but there is time to restore in here. It's not very power. It's a proxy as well. Don't worry. And also, thing is, like, like Wheel of Fortune. These are in just because they are cool. There isn't like like that. There is no dedicated wheel deck in this. Like there's no shield, right, or anything like that, but just these are cards that kind of allow cool and splashy gameplay. And so that's why they're in the queue. But I think this deck, like basically specifically the, deck doing Dream Halls omniscience really gets a lot out of the drawer. Seven's basically, really like those. Yeah, for sure, for sure. I mean, yeah, dream halls especially is go so well with wheels and, I think there's also an interesting complaint here with Wheel of Fortune, specifically with the coffee effects. You can deck up Wheel of Fortune very effectively. And, you know, if any start with faulty cards if they build themselves a bit, an example itself as well. Right. You can get it back. I think that's maybe an avenue you could go down. But yeah, I think the wheels are cool here. Like, they look they look like sort of more powerful cards than what is in the rest of cube bags. We associate them with the busted things you can do an empowered cube, but none of the rest of the busted stuff is here. So you have to kind of do something else and figure out another powerful thing to do with wheels. Then things that used to. Right, like there's no all cash paymaster stuff, obviously, but there's also, you know, you don't have a fast manner to really get ahead of the game. So, yeah, finding a way to make fat bake for symmetry on wheels. I think this is a good puzzle for this cube. Yeah. Yeah, I yeah, I personally quite enjoyed them and like. Yeah yeah yeah. Exactly. Yeah. He's finding something to do with with the cards is one of the main modes of the cube. Let's keep it rolling. Next up we have, we have three archetypes left, and then we'll get onto some cool packages. Next up we have sort. I, to the surprise of no one. This is like a graveyard shenanigan deck. So this one has actually changed a little bit from my initial inception of this. Effectively, what it's kind of become is the insidious roots deck. I read Insidious Roots, where I don't know where it's, black and or green for enchantment says which tokens you can throw, have tap at one man of any color. Very good in this cube. As like which tokens then also has the ability. Whenever one of your cards leave your graveyard, create A01 green upon which token, then put up some counter on each plant you control. We've actually seen a couple cards like this, and effectively what this deck is trying to do is move cards into the graveyard, trough it, move cards out of the graveyard, profit moving back again, move them around. Great, graveyard into play. There's things like CDC for some milling, this cursed cage breakers for making a big board state. There are other versions of insidious roots, like, scouting crew is just coming in, but you also have things like, circumvent the grim, a great card that rewards you for milling or for moving cards between zones, that kind of stuff. We have things like, torture existence so you can really get a very powerful engine going on with this. This is definitely one I've seen in more recent updates. I've tried to focus to actually kind of make the deck be a thing. And I'm, I'm happy with with where this is going. It also has the nice, cool little alt wing condition sort of in, in, in quotation marks of out of the tombs. This is what maintains it's discussing beforehand. And it's two in a black or an enchantment. There's going to be upkeep. Put two eon counters on out of the tombs, then mill cards equal number of iron counters on it. If you would draw a card when your library has no cars on it. Instead return a creature card from your up to the battlefield. If you can't, you lose the game. This is currently as close as we're getting to. That is Oracle. We might toy around with this a little bit more with some of the other, effects that, can win the game if you mill yourself. But this is just like a nice little this is a reward for doing all that hard milling and will stop you if you mill a little bit too greedily. This is definitely one that I have toyed around with. Like, like like we're basically I'm being a bit more direct with it. Previously was just kind of generally just a bit more just just mill and come up with something. But now, like we're adding this a Conrad, we're adding the things that reward you when you move around. And we're also adding hog access. Just, Okay. Cool. Worst case, we'll kill them with the jack. Yeah. For sure. And how Jack, I kind of always want to be busted and keep because. Yeah, I mean, we've spoken about before. Like when wizards make design mistakes, it's often very good for us as key players because they're really fun. And cube, I think you see that with nod to you in more powerful cubes. Not is certainly too good for this cube that I think Hogarth is, is something that would be very it's very fun to explore. Mythos cube. I tried it in Powered Cube before. It's it's quite hard to get it to work, but yeah, I think it could be a very sweet head. I think in this specifically where you're one making a bunch of tokens so you can convoke it and you're filling your graveyard like like the, the complaints of this deck up to this point have not been. I've not been. I, like people haven't had issues milling themselves. They haven't had the the payoffs they felt have been enough of a reward. And I feel how you get really does feel like, oh God, really does fill that hole. But also if you're killing them with a second rat while you're doing it, I think that's also a pretty nice, solid way of doing it. Yeah, I think the the huge thing with Hogarth over a lot of the other payoffs, right, is you don't need to talk about the classic issue graveyard decks when you mill the payoffs. Right? Yes. And Hogarth gets around that. Yeah. Dread return also coming in with the next update. So by the time you're saying this, as long as the cards have arrived, which I think they have, dreaded time. Yeah. All this, all these updates that we're talking about should be in as well, but let's keep it rolling. The next one I'm not going to spend too long on because do is aristocrats. Most people know the goal of an aristocrat. The main difference between this cube and others is that the curve is a bit higher. So again, like, sort of like, blood artifacts are things like second rate, as I mentioned, and also sanguinary priest. That's the four man, two four. I start to use cleric with Lifelink, and whenever another creature control dies, it deals one damage to any target. So that's our blood artist. Two. Man, everybody's probably a bit too good in this type of game, but that's where we're going with it. There's also a bunch of Boris makes tokens. Also. I've had some drain effects, that kind of stuff. In the very initial draft of this cube, this was a bit too aggressive. All of it gold cards were to matter, and it meant people just curving out a bit too aggressively. So we kind of we pushed up a little bit. We have things like butcher of the horde, which I liked a bunch of the horde is such a good card and this cube is great. I'm glad it's doing work and but like, like I brought in things like a lender. The dusk Rose is kind of like a cool payoff for the aristocratic deck, but not like, two mana thing. That kind of can just really kill them really quickly. So that's kind of been pretty solid. Team of James, I, I really like this deck. I sort of had a version of it last time, as to cheat things into play. So you're going to ramp and you can get the biggest things into play as possible and kill your opponent with it. So you do have things like pattern of rebirth. You have you have that things like Song of Creation, which actually play an actual land each turn when you also spell your daughter cards. And then at the end of that you discard your hand and then cause like bigger on the inside kind of you're ramping into things like, maelstrom, Wanderer, that kind of thing. You're just putting a bunch of beef into play, getting as much as possible. It's a very bread and butter archetype, but in a deck, in a cube like this, where we have, where the goal is to go long, I feel we did need a deck that could go bigger than the rest of them. So you have things like giant add of aged, rampage. As we mentioned, you have things like trumpeting dinosaur, like actual dragon. These are some of the big things that you can get with it. We have like, pile wall, plywood gear, hulk, quartz, wood crusher, just big things basically for you to get into play and kill your opponent with. Yeah, this looks really cool. I like the monster Manual. I like three log for baseball. Yes. Big pig. Yeah, the LC scramble sack for, the. I like a polymorph with, beach face. I would, I would honestly love to see, like, another polymorph or two, because I think if you get multiples, you can commit a bit more to the idea of, I'm going to try and not have many cheap creatures in my deck and have like ways to make creature tokens, which definitely exists in this cube, and try and polymorph and be very likely to hit a big thing. So I think right now we've got like Fire Flux Squads and Vitality Scramble. I and don't do creativity sort of the yeah yeah yeah I don't that's a bit a bit harsh. I'm but it's tough. Yeah there is calamity Galloping Inferno but that is all that is a six mana spell. Same as Mirage. So yeah, maybe a cheaper one. I could say maybe like like actual polymorph. Yeah, like a classic of the Java. Yeah, yeah. Like an actual like like like 3 or 4 mana one. Yeah, yeah. I can see that doing some work in here. Actually, I get that this one is very fun and it's very easy for people to kind of get their head around if there's like, okay, ramp a bit, take something in, kill bottomless love that I think you need that element. Yeah, yeah. I'm also 100% kill myself with Song of Creation at some point if we if we can save a few more seconds sick and I always, I always just run out of cards and die. But yeah. No, it's good luck with that. But that's when you. But that's why in your team, idiot, you're splashing black or out of the tombs. Got him nailed it. All right, so those are kind of the overview, like the overall archetypes, but we, I'm not stopping there. There is, a bunch of packages in this cube that, Yeah, this is kind of like one of the main I just said earlier, it's kind of one of the main things I've kind of really tried to make this of overlap work. So there's just a bunch of stuff that works really well with each other. There will be a link to the cube if you want to check this out in a bit more detail, but kind of like James said, I think if we going to go through and pick out some of the ones that kind of we like the most, I like what I want. I wanted to touch on because it's one that it's one that I took from modern but, madcap experiment and Platinum Imperium has like a nice little two card interaction, the madcap Experiment is three and a read for sorcery. Real class on top of your library until you reveal an artifact card. But the card on the battlefield and the rest on the bottom of the lab in random order. Make an experiment. Deals damage to the number of cards revealed this way, but an Imperium is an eight eight, eight that says your life title can't change. So if this is the only artifact in your deck, you cosmic experiment you cheat into, play an eight eight. That's pretty cool. There aren't like like you can just kind of be a hero and run madcap experiment in a deck with some other artifacts and see how that goes. But like, yeah, yeah, that's a nice, cool little thing there. Kind of like if you see it and you can build around it. And also with the, cargo librarians, it is something that you kind of the more like to be able to kind of get just because even if they're not in the same pack, it just means that you can take the madcap experiment and the land as well. If you already have the platinum pyramid kind of makes us makes drafting a little bit easier there, basically. Yeah, sure. That one looks fairly sweet. I really like the look of the solemnity stuff as well. So, solemnities two in a white enchantment, players can't get counters, counters can't be put an artifact. Creatures enchantments are lands. So if you combine this with a creature with undying say, which above all, unstoppable slashers. A nice one. That's for my. I've, Amongst other things, when it dies, if it had no counters on it. The turn. It's the battlefield. Tap of two stone cancels on it, and then any psych outlet you can then just trigger as many times as you want. So if you have something like an ultra of dementia or goblin bombardment, you can just, kill them with that. That's that seems cool and kind of powerful and, I'm down to try it. Yeah. As I mentioned, that is very much like I've listed a bunch of these interactions on the website on the Q Cobra overview, but there is a lot more than I probably initially thought of. Yeah. So that is a cool card. It does a lot of cool and broken things. That one thing we didn't touch on when we talked about the food deck is there is actually a bunch of food based combos in here, which is kind of another thing of like, this aggro deck also has a combo word, which kind of is kind of cool and fun, but like a lot of the combos revolve around the card experimental convection there. So that's two in a black for two three human peasant, whereas the battle would create a food token whenever you sacrifice a food grade A11 black rat creature token, with this creature, you can't block. So this kind of goes infinite with any kind of card that says, if you would create a token, make a food like Paragon does that. And then it also combos with things like whoa, Strider and Yaga, because Yaga turns everything that you make or everything you have into a food. So kind of the rat is a food token you've made. You can sack it and keep going round and round around. There's a lot of cool stuff with experiment monkey factories, as I mentioned here, which is it? Cards only the food deck once. So you're like to pick it up. So yeah, as well as being aggressive you can combo them out which is quite quite funny. Yeah. Yeah I think the thing I like about these combos as well, by the way, is that we're not vetting any bad cards to enable them. You're not really giving up anything. So sure, it's not going to like come together every trap, but some of at some percentage of the time when you're drafting food tech, you'll be you'll see an experimental confection there. And then probably you look at your deck and you have something that combos that. And that's kind of cool. Yes. Similar with another card that, I think we touched on maybe, maybe early, but a devoted druid, there's a bunch of devoted druid combos in here, like devoted druid. Merkle, Lord of bones to for the druid and Hazel's brewmaster. Devoted druid. Tovar. Parmalat. I think of, creature with five power is also infinite. That's how that one works. But just having, like, droid is a cool card. Just having ways that people can make infinite mana. Like, again, like, if treating yourself, a little bit of infinite matter, I think that's fine. I think we're good with that. Another one, like the first package I added to this, which I should actually touch on. There is poly about two combos in here. I love poly wrapped. This is like my excuse to play with this is an eight drop eight. You might have five five when it's dealt damage with a token. There's a copy of it. We also have cause like ten of the peaks in here. We have war, storm surge. We have. I get instant data. These are all things that I think we kind of can deal damage to some stat one or something when they come in. So if you have a way, basically these numbers revolve around poly. Raptor comes in an effect. You have two effects that deal damage. When something comes in to a target, one of them deals it to the poly Raptor. One of them does it to your opponent. It just you're making infinite poly this at that point and you're infinitely picking out your opponent. Yeah, that's this is fun. I've been I've I've been killed with this and I did not care because. Well then my opponent I love it. Yeah. Put it out. Does it poly out. There's a sweet it's a sweet dorky card. I think it's just perfect for this kind of environment. Another card I want to mention there isn't really a package, but. Oh, it's a kind of a package by itself is displaced dinosaurs. This is a card I think can do some really broken things. It's a seven out of seven. Seven as a historic pamphlet and as the bat world under your control, it becomes A77 dinosaur addition to its other types. So this is sort of a pay off for the food deck. If you cheat this into play, your food becomes seven seven. It's kind of powerful. Yeah, yeah. Or like your fosters will become seven sevens with flying, like pretty good. Yeah I think yeah. This place down. So it's kind of a, it's a one card package because so much of the, of the cube is artifacts. Just naturally because of, artifacts being such a strong archetype in the, in the cube. So that's another fun little thing to add there. I think this is a good illustration of approach of yes, very good ways to cheat stuff into play. But once the thing is in play, it's not gonna just do it on its own. Right. Exactly. If you you don't get an arc on of cruelty, you get a displaced dinosaurs, and then you've got to find a way to make some seven sevens. I think that's cool. Exactly. Exactly like I like I want people to be doing the thing and having an awesome time, but kind of like the game. I don't want the game to just end like draw out you enjoying yourself to your opponent, enjoying joys. Like there is some cool stuff you can do. Like, like like yeah, like the big spells. Don't like the big spells are very strong. Like like like like vein rippers in here. And Vein Ripper did a ton of like vein ripper combined with the Eternal Wanderer. Like just code me out of nowhere like one game because Eternal Wonder is a, sacrifice board. White with vein ripper. I was like, oh, okay, I lost 18 in ones that I lose. That's that's powerful. Yeah, very strong actually. Very strong. Yeah, yeah. No, I think there's a lot of interesting passages in there for druid stuff. I really I mean, this is another great home for, unexpected potential for, a conspiracy, but color fix is one of your cards because often one of the issues is, I have infinite green mana. Now, how do I win the game? And there's not always a ton of ways to do that, but when when you can draw it out, you'll put Genesis like that. I kind of does the there's, I mean, so that I could see a world where I might need more infinite mana sinks, like currently it's pest infestation. And I mean, Genesis wave. Genesis wave is a vibe with infinite matter. You put your whole deck into play and I assume you win the game at that point. But I mean, if you don't, it's it's it's it's just it's not on me as the case designer that is on you as the builder. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There is a bunch more different packages in here, including the Cog Library and Beat Beatdown Deck, which, if you want to check out the link to the cube, obviously all down this just below, and that there's a bunch of other kind of cool packages and, like, cool things that you can do in this game. Yeah. If you if you're looking for inspiration for your own games, 100% recommend checking it out. I think that there's a lot of cool stuff in here. But I think let's round things off today with some pack one pick ones. Remember that we do have a cold librarian, so we could be doubling it, doubling up. Let's go through this first pack. So we have, the Lord protector. That's the Mel the US at the max, for instance. Also cheaper, we have final showdown, which is the spree card that can be, six amount of board white. We have Sundown Pass, which is the Boris, slow tap land. We have Pippin. That is a food card. We have Shimmer Dragon. That is a big dragon card Druid spell. We have Baraga, which is very good, and flicker prismatic lens, which is a cheap artifact that can do a bit of fixing. We have also we have also Signet for some ramp. We have tough cookie, which is a cheap food feature that can animate another artifact. We have a fear monster, which is a great blocker and great. And the aristocrat deck we have squee dubious Monarch, which is a rebel master variant. We have Savannah, which is the white green jewel, and we have Nexus of Becoming, which is a very broken card. I actually need to read the beginning of a combat on your turn, draw a card, then you may exile and automatically check out from your hand. If we do create a token as a copy of the exact card is just a three tree golem artifact creature in addition to its other types. I had to read that because I don't always remember what that card does. We have five Luck squad, which is a polymorph style of card on a creature, and we have fly of the height bound, which is a creature that deals damage when a creature enters from a graveyard to a creature or a player, and also has undying, so you have the undying combo aspect with it as well. I, I don't think we're working with this pack, but I if we were, I think I have two cards I could be tempted to take. What are you feeling from this pack, James? So there's a couple of cards that stand out to me from the Soft of stay open, play. Quite safe. I really like Prismatic Lens. I think just for two mana acceleration is very, very good in this format, as we discussed. This is going to be good in basically every, any deck. I could draft. Outside of that, I think to me, Nexus of becoming is like the most exciting card here. Yeah, it's the highest upside of just like you can really. Artifact. Tall creature. Like. Yeah, A33 grave Titan is still pretty good at three three. I mean, there's plenty of other big dumb artifacts, and there's. It doesn't matter if they were three three or not. It just you. You want the ETB or the ability of the artifact. Exactly. And it's on your card. Every frame. Yeah. I think there's just enough good, good big stuff to cheat in here. And six mana is very attainable, and I'd be pretty tempted by that as a first pick. Also even works with fee like token synergy stuff, right? Stuff like you put in is a token. Oh yeah, this way the token doubler there is, like, primal vigor in here. Oh, yeah, that's kind of great. It's pretty good. How do you feel if you were going to cog work, how would you feel about as, an nexus of becoming really planting your flag in the artifact, like, oh, is it going to do that? Is it prismatic lens? Nexus is becoming. And, I think I would probably be on Lens Plus Nexus. I guess you could also go Nexus plus Fire Flux quads as a way to double down on, like having massive creatures to put in numbers. Oh, yeah. I'm just really focusing on cheating stuff into play. That could be quite cool, real nice. Okay, I like that. Yeah. Yeah, my gut is that we're not cog working this pack, but I think, yeah, I think I'm on Nexus of becoming. Yeah, I think that's a pretty solid shout. Next up we have Mana Confluence, which is a five color land. We have charismatic conqueror. It's the two men, two. Two that, you know that, like, taxes your opponent's creatures when they come in. Otherwise, you make vampires. We have Basim ibn Ishak, which is kind of like, more cracked, baleful strix. We have Grau signet, which is the Grau signet. We have the milestone in the mix stone, which is the other half of the, the flip guard. We have the massacre two, which is a big, the massacre that is about stuff dying. We have overgrown two, which is the go gory shock. We have primal vigor, which I was up all tokens and an opus on counters that I put on stuff. That is your opponents as well. It is symmetrical, so there is a bit of a downside with that, but it has potential to be very strong. We have Wake the Dragon, which is a sorcery that makes A6X dragon with flying menace, and has flashback. We have Bazaar of Baghdad, which I love as a magic card. We have Crystalline Crawler, which is four generic for A11 with converge, and it enters the battlefield with a number of colors, spent to cast it, and you can remove a counter from it to make a mound of any color. And then you can tap it to. But it can't do it. It's a slow, big mounted orc. We have we have unstoppable slasher, which is the it's sort of the combo card, but it also, if it does come with damage to a player, they lose half their life of electro dominance, which is a cool card for the instant sorcery payoff deck. Exact damage when you target and you make Mikasa card with innovative magic costs x or less from your hand without paying as many cost. I infinite amount of combo. We love that we have malevolent Rumble, which is the one in the green kind of which like a mulch effect, but you get an O1L draws a and we have flare of the hate bound, which I do. We have that in the last pack. We had that in the last battle. Yeah. So fun to keep love square the hate about. What are you feeling from this pack, James? I think I know what I'm taking, but I think I'm wrong. What are you taking, James? I mean, the question. What I think you should take. What would I take a quite different hand. What I think you should take. I think the theme is very powerful, but obviously it's two colors. But, like, you just get to 12 draw cards and hit from when you play off. That's basically that seems, seems quite powerful. Cool. Signa. Excellent choice. As we've discussed before, Maleficent Rumble is really like the best of this sort of effects in vamps you from 2 to 4 and gets any permanent, and that's kind of a great job. I think that's very, very powerful. In the Graveyard Deck. Unstoppable slasher we talked about. It's a combo card. It's also just a very good card. It's a free mailer. Two free. After three days it comes back and when it hits them, they lose half my life. Very. Yeah. That's just going to be a strong card in any black sack, basically. It'd be I would probably just say bizarre effects and an I probably wasn't playing this stuff, but I'd have a lot of fun. Yes, I want to try to squeeze. I want to draft a master of death. I want to draft an insidious free, you could even maybe talk me into, cold working here for, bizarre plus rumble. I think that is very much. That sounds. Yeah. How bizarre is the card I want to take? Again, there are dredges in this. We didn't mention that when we're doing the doing the regular deck, but there are dredges in here. Like, you will be putting a lot of stuff into your bin. Exactly, exactly. And what I accept. So I'm not saying I don't think because is a powerful card in this queue. Like I think you could take this out and do very well and get a great deck. I'd be fairly confident in saying, like, if your only goal is to maximize your would invite them. Bizarre is not the correct pick. Just because it only goes in one deck, right. And you need to get quite a lot of those for like like I have added like hash it on there is, there is, there is something that we're slowly increasing the discard matter stuff in the K like yeah yeah. So so and if you iterations I think this will go up and up and up a bit. So, so two cards I don't think I mentioned. So I don't think, man, a confluence is a terrible pack one pick one because it is a land that taps for any color of mana. That's not terrible in this cube. And it will allow especially it's not as good as a fetch or a jewel or a shot or something like that, because you can't guarantee. But like with, like taking the pick one, pick one, it will be in your deck. So that is at least nice. And also I've been relatively impressed by crystalline color. If you like the decks slower this comes down. It can make you like they can put it. Yes, 11 Rumbo can take you from 2 to 4, but this can take you from 4 to 8. And this family can be quite good in this game. So yeah. So those are worth mentioning it I, I think I'm train wrecking pack one, pick one and doing bazaar. But yeah I think this one. Yeah I think I don't think it's a bad pick invert like it could be. Well it could be the best card in your deck right there. It's quite an all in pick. And if y'all got caught on graveyard stuff, then you'll find it tough. But I would be hard. I would be very tempted to take this out. Just because it's such a unique card is being a thing that, like, yeah, when we give this to you for drafting, to have fun and you only you only get one shot, a bizarre fight. There's no there's nothing that's a little bit like a bizarre. A bizarre is is one of a kind. Yeah. So I do. Pretty tempted by that. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's weird, but we a bizarre thing, I think. And then we are looking to use our cogs on maybe dredges or maybe like, like ideally tortured existence and, insidious roots basically. I think it's kind of the, the end goal of this line probably. But yeah, very fun. God, we love it. Yeah, sure. I think for me, I'd be like, who got convicts of, two cards, which are kind of, possible to me once I've got a bizarre. Yes, the gak. Yeah. I go yeah, yeah. Actual ways of winning, not just engine. That is where I am weak at. I will admit that I yeah, I do tend to win games. This got trampled. James just shot us. All right, let's do another one. We have as options. We have Lenoir. Visionary. That's the, three man, elf that comes in, draws a card, and and and taps for it. We have rapacious guest, which is a Food Matters card. We have Wall of Omens, which is a wall that comes in and draws a card. We have lingering souls. That's one that makes two spirit tokens, with flying and as flashback, we have audacious swap, which is actually a polymorph effect. We have Goblin Bombardment, which is a free satellite and pings a player for damage. We have War Storm Surge, which is a six mana enchantment that when you enter the battle under our control, we can deal. It's damage to any target. We have blood for the blood God, which is a rat as hell. 11 mana spell that cost one less for each creature. The died this time. And you can, When you cast it, you discard your hand. Draw eight cards. It deals eight damage to each opponent, and then you exile it. So this is. That's very much for the big spell. We'll deck we have an interesting one. Next we have sovereign's Realm. This is kind of like well that that we mentioned earlier. It's a conspiracy. You, your deck can't have basic land cards and your starting hand size is five acres of the card from your hand. This turn, you may play basic land cards from outside the game, and basic lands you control have tap add one manner of any color to your manor pool. We have diabolic servitude which is like a slow and there's a four manor animate dead, but you can get divert subject back to your hand when it goes. We have cobalt the legend we mentioned earlier, we have Frodo Adventures. Hobbit. This is the authors of, Frodo that goes with Sam, which is actually the really good pay off for food. We have magmatic channeler, which is like an impulse draw effect. Yeah. Which is like a rummage, impulse effect that can become, for, for we have Toby Beasty befriend. That is a three mana one one. Then when enters, you make a four for based so decent and token decks and quite good with flicker because the token you make is not legendary. And then we have Tyger, which is the gruel og jewel land. What do you like from this pack, James? I think that's we should probably talk about sovereign's realm. First of all, just because this is a card that gets better the earlier you take it. And this is the earliest that we can take it. What do you think about sovereign's realm? Pack one, pick one. It's a really cool card. I, I'm struggling to work out if it's good. I think it might be very good, but I could also see being vault. So my reading of this fight is, So you're saying hand size five sucks? Obviously. You'll put some if you won't. Really. You'll play most of your spells, but that's fine, because you can play any infamous lands basically at any point. The way I would be looking to draft this, I, I want my curve to be fairly low. The reason being that I'm already starting down two cards, right? What I'm getting for that is perfect mana. And I never get flooded and I never get screwed. So to for it to give me that value back for me to, get my cards back to song, down to cards, I want to be able to stop playing lands before it. Yeah. I mean, I really don't want to have to play my six land, right? Because that's just putting me down a card. So I kind of don't need to be down. And I'm already short of cards. That might be kind of tough and risk play, I think in a different cube you could say, oh yeah, this is sick. I'm going to play like, oh, I might have is going to stop at three. That's going to be amazing. I usually do that in this cube. That's fair, but you're going to try and have your start cards certainly stop at five, I think, I, I'd be very tempted to take it sort of a science, as it were, because I want to play with it and see if it's gets, but I wouldn't. Yeah. I wouldn't stake my one. One thing with this is you still have to get to 40 cards. Yes. So you're playing. It's almost like the other one where you're playing at the draft. Right. But it's in some ways that's less of a cost, right? Because the bad cards that you put in your decks, I kind of just, I just landed. Exactly. Yeah. So I think the way I so I think I would take this and then I would still try and draft one of the archetypes, but just effectively it's perfect mana like ideally this and like the deck that draws me seven cards. This with wheels, these wheels is so good. Oh, I didn't even think of that. That's phenomenal. Yeah. Okay. I'm feeling southern. Well, the other thing we should have said by. Oh, yeah. Yes. But basic. So f tap for any call. Yeah. This seems s it seems really like the upside seems fairly high. I, I want to try to take something. Yeah I do want to take something solvent trash around that I think, the other thing safest card is not in this queue because these affect something, but this can be incredibly broken in certain cubes because it just says exiling a card from your hand. This and you may play basic land card mount five game is let's say you may play a basic Land card from that game and play as many as you want. If you have like a fast bond in play, you could just play basic ones outside for game for as long as you had life points. Yes can. Okay, it's still linked to the number of lines. You can play a ton, but yeah, yeah. If you have if you have an effect that that lets you play multiple lands and yeah, you can really you can really get to get it down with, with, with something like I, there must be 1 or 2 effects that let you play multiple lands in this. But that would like on a rampaging base loss that seem pretty solid because, yeah. What would you need it to be? Lands. They all lands when they're spells are spells. I'd be tempted by sovereigns around, but not. But that's the thing I don't think. Like, I actually don't think like a five color best of soup deck is going to be the best deck in this. I think you still need to be. You need to have at least a little bit of synergy. Bad. Like like maybe it's you're up, you're picking up out, like your interaction and your card. Joy is in every colors, but you're still kind of focusing on, okay, I'm still going to do like a bit of token making and I'm going to win that way, or I'm going to do a bit of artifact and win that way. I still think like a sovereign realm is not a, I can just take the best card, like, like like in conspiracy. It was. I'm just I'm taking this and I'm taking just the best card in each pack. I intended a bit to curve. I don't think you can do that in this. I think you still like. For me, this is a way of just guaranteeing I have perfect mana. And like, I can like, like like there are multicolored, but again, like like like in this pack we have Corvo, which is the Jund card that wants to be in the sacrifices. They also have goblin bombardment, lingering souls, like there's a world where you just hoover up all those bits as it goes round, and you just have the most busted version of the deck because you have perfect mana, and then you pick up a couple of wheels or a couple of aggro big draw spells to kind of refill your hand and really kind of push you over the edge. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I think, certainly. Yeah. So I mean, you're certainly right in that you shouldn't just be drafting like five color soup. Don't have a plan deck, but, the fact that you don't have to care about what your colors are anymore will just fundamentally approach to change the way you approach, I think. Right. Like, I don't think you're going to take someone's vellum and then be like, I'm Nya tokens because it will just fundamentally change the way your deck looks at the end, because you didn't have to care about what color your spells were. I think you're certainly right that you should still be like, you still need a plan to win the game. It won't just be. I'll take the best card I have. I think that is it actually sovereign's realm. And then you do anything to get a song of creation. Play a traditional land. Oh, song of something. So, Oh, that's so good. That's so much fun. Okay. Yeah. Okay, I'm taking something. Oh, that's not close nicely. Yeah. Change that. I'm committed because it's because it's pack one. Pick one. I think you have to give it a go. But like like again if, if you weren't feeling it, there's a bunch of good causes. Like like I don't think you like lingering. So I wasn't going. I would go great in the same deck, but I think you can probably wheel one of them. I think I'm probably taking like my next pick off. This is probably bombardment. I think just because it's a very flexible card that will go in any kind of second deck and there's a bunch of tokens. Yeah. And I can I think it's the sort of card where it's kind of a best in class in terms of, I think if you don't, a lot of you have scrap stacks. If you don't get a bombardment versus if you do, will feel very, very different. Yeah. I think that would be a very reasonable pick. Diabolic servitude I think, is also probably very strong in this cube. That's sort of, it's animate that you could sort of use when the creature dies. It's very, very powerful. So there's just not a ton of animates in this cube type of I have a lot of good big things. So that seems pretty powerful. Cobalt I think is excellent, but I would try and not take a free color card necessarily. So, in this cube, I think you, it's not as bad as as in other cubes, but it's still not super ideal. Pick one pick. You want to get three. Yeah, yeah, I yeah, I think we're sovereigns roaming and we're just trying to see what happens. I think that could be of show. Nice. Should we do one more? James. Yeah. One more. Sounds good. All right. A last pack of the day. We have otherworldly escort, which is a form out of flash. When it dies, if it's not a spirit, you turn it to play under your control with four charge counters on it. It's a spirit, detective. And you can remove a charge under from it to destroy a creature that dealt damage to you this time. So it's a nice little removal spell later in the game. We have Sata wayfinder, the, two mana self card in green. We have deserted beach, which is the Azria. Slow land. We have Queen Taurus canned, which is the Boris planeswalker that ruins standard recently. It has, minus three to discover four. And then it does some other cool stuff with, if you can spell some exile. So there's a bit of synergy there. We have Space Marine Devastator, which is which is another squad card, but effectively this is this destroys an artifact or enchantment. Very good card in this cube, but I think is a bit. So, it's not that card we're taking early. We have steam vents, which is the. Is it shock land? We have Caesar Legion's emperor, which is actually quite a messed up card. I will read this one because, it's from the fallout set. It's one an armada for A44. Whenever you attack, you may sacrifice another creature. When you do choose to create 211 red and white creature tokens with hasted attacks and attacking, you draw a card and you lose a life. Or it deals damage equal to the number of tokens you control to target opponent. That really is a top end for the aggro deck. We have the Boris slow land next in sundown pass we have shields. We have shield going. Sire. Famine. It is a five manor elder demon with it doesn't really have a downside. It's just A66 flier that you can, has a free sack outlet to, and you create a blood token. And then it has a triple hybrid is, also have actually the ability to sacrifice six blood tokens to return each, which is really great, but the battlefield with a finality counter on them. We have Scalding Tarn, which is the. Is it fetch land? We have Frodo again. We have quartz wood crasher. That is a five mana six six scroll beater. We have pan armonica. And if you want to double up some ATVs, we have cyber drive Waikanae, which is a six manifold or flier that gives other artistic creatures. We control flying and it also animates non artifact creatures a ton. They come in make some more for for so it turns food and treasure into four, four flies. Pretty solid. And then we have Rosie Cotton of South Lane, which is a food card that makes food. And whenever a creature token is put, I whenever you create a token, put a plus one counter on top, which you control. Other than Rosie. So what are we feeling? James? So just raw power level from Iron Caesar is actually a very messed up magic card, but it is a three color card. I could see myself taking scalding down first just because it is phenomenal to have a fetch land. It is a bit boring, but I could see scalding on the steam vents just as a way of getting my mana in. Is it pretty set? Maybe. Oddly, if the steam vents was a different jewel, like if it was, blue green jewel or a red green or something like that. So, so so my scalding tarn got me three colors of mana. I think I would be more open to, taking that with my clockwork. I, to just because fetishes are so strong in this and they really let me, they really open me up to so many decks and just having a good amount of base. I think I'm scolding tone, but from a raw power level point of view, I know Savage Awakening will win more games. What do you what are you thinking of? What are you thinking from this back, James? Yeah, I'm in a similar situation, I think. And cyber driver Waker, I think is the, most powerful of the mono colored spells by quite a lot. That card in this, in this sort of Q Plaza, we've spent a lot that you can just create a lot of little lost fat tokens, that will just win games for fun. It comes down, I'm getting that win condition early, and building around it could be very strong. Caesar, honestly, is not a card I've read before in my life, but it seems kind of messed up. Like the fact you get that trigger on any attack as well. Caesar doesn't have to attack, so you get it. But when you play it, that seems very powerful. But honestly, I would just take scalding tan here. I wouldn't double up with the, with the clockwork, because the thing is right, I'm not really taking scalding tarnas in this a card, right. They said that it's a cube with trims and jewels, and I'm assuming that scalding tan is going to get all three of my colors. If I'm a the goddess of, what three colors I end up playing of, that might end up playing more than three colors. And then it gets even better. Yeah, I to me this is a take scalding tan, be 100% open and have a great fix locked in, and that that's reason why why? I mean, I've said we've recommend, like, taking lands off any of the other packs because. But when you're taking a faction that's kind of fundamentally different because you're not committing to a color. Right. Even if, if taken OG Jewel, that cause can be great. If you offer two colors, but you have to be those two colors. Coddington is almost certainly going to be great regardless. Yeah. And I think it's much better than something like Mana Confluence, because even in a slower cube like tapping your land, like when you have to play a mana conference on turn two, and then you just take a damage every turn for the rest of the game's. Kind of like you started on 12, you know, it's kind of, Yeah. No, no, I do agree. I like photon a lot here. Yeah. I think the only other thing that I do kind of want to shout is just, tarot is, is is part harmonic? Like, I don't think you necessarily need to be in the, like, there's just so many good at orbs just running around this cube. Is this is also the type of cube where you can spend turn four to play. I do not think enchantment as long as you are then following it up afterwards with like five or 6 or 7, 5 or 6, getting your value back. So you don't have to be flicker, but you do need to have some strong orbs in there, which isn't super hard in this cube. Yeah. So so so I think I mentioned also, it also is colorless, so it can go in, it's in a shell. But again, you can be any kind of like like the actual flicker cards are more based in or as always anyway. So kind of you can very much kind of team that up with but some of the cool artifact broken stuff as well. So very solid shot. I mean, I think we spoke earlier about about how the oxides bleed into each other. And I think flicker is very much one of those, I very easily imagine my modular aristocrat stack having enough good TVs that I want to play your hand, right, and then like, harmonic kind of beats and stuff. Yeah. Sweet. Yeah. Panasonic. And from the moment it's been printed, very cool and fun. Magic card. I should have used this at the top. But like I think a good way to explain this cube is that pan harmonica is good in it. Yeah, I think I like to see if that's how you start building a cube. Well, I'm building a cube plot to what could be that? Okay, a solid approach. We had just a final thing before we wrap up today. One of the things I've been really happy with this is just the games we have played with this cube, and the drafts we've done have been, so much fun and everyone that has played it has really enjoyed it. Another thing as well is just this type of cube is very different from, like the other cubes I built, like, on the aluminum powered vintage cube, where kind of like those slots in and up admin shape seem a bit more predefined, if that makes sense. Like, like like there is an element of like the best cards go into it that kind of already taken. There's less flex, whereas this is effectively all flex. And the games have been great. And just also the conversations we've had afterwards, there's just been a lot of conversations of like, oh, what do you think about this card? What do you think about this card? One of the things that we're doing with this cube is also, if you win it, you just get to add a card you can't add manually because efficient cards are too good. But but as long as it's cool and interesting, you can add it. So we have had some cool cards added. We've had. Yeah, I get the Soul cauldron and we've had repurposing, but you get added, so if you win it, you get to add a card to it. It's kind of like how have was your like like it's all, yeah. Me as a as a design of this is a little biased to how it's kind of applied and the experience of it, but how have you found playing the tree yourself cube. Yeah, I think it's been very fun actually. The games feel great, like they're the sort of games where if you draw a hand that functions and you, you, you will have time to execute your game plan. You don't get infinite time like your deck. I think the decks don't have to be that quick, but they certainly have to be quite consistent. I think I've certainly run into some decks where they have very high potential to do powerful things, but a lot of draws that just don't. So I think that's going to be one of the things that people get used to is like how to increase for consistency of decks. But I think the games will be very, very fun. Like there's yeah, there's, there's time setup. There's a lot of back and forth is often when the deck gets to do its big thing, it doesn't end the game. Which I think is a good thing. Like, it's not that the games never end. They don't drag on forever, but there's, there's a lot of back and forth. Right. You can you still have scope to recover after your opponent has had that big turn. So yeah, I think it's played great. So far. Nice. Honestly. Yeah. That's really nice to hear on. Yeah, yeah. Long may it continue. So as we mentioned link to this tube down. This is below if you want to check it out. Also let us know on the socials what you think of it. What would you add. Are there any changes that kind of stuff? There is a chance that some people might get to actually draft this cube in paper. I have submitted it to Cube Clash. London was taking place, in a couple of weeks at time of recording. So if you're in the area, I'm going to be there. James will be the, James, you're looking to take down the title. You came so close last time. Yeah, I lost him the finals last time. So see if we can go one step further. But it was the only game of magic you lost all day, to be fair. So I better magic. I lost all day. Yes. Jesus. Okay, nice. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So the queues for that haven't been finalized yet, but I have submitted it, so. Yeah. Fingers crossed. If I get selected, you could be dropped in this game. So this could be a little primer for you. Get you ahead of the rest of the competition. Marvelous. But, yeah, that's gonna be it for today. James. Pleasure as always. Thank you very much. Fun. Yeah. Always. Pleasure. Thank you. Nice one. All right. That's going to do it. Please make sure you like, share and subscribe. Give the podcast a five star review. Tell a friend. All that positive stuff really helps us out. Until next time, it's goodbye from me. And it's goodbye from James. And we'll see you all soon. Goodbye.