Powerful Nothing

The Best Card in Vintage Cube is…. Ajani Nacatal Pariah? - #71

• Too Sweet MTG • Season 1 • Episode 71

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This week we crunch the numbers on the Arena Powered Cube to answer the question, what is the best card in vintage cube, and what does this mean for the format?

The Data: https://www.17lands.com/card_data?expansion=Cube+-+Powered&format=PremierDraft&start=2025-10-28

Image Gallery: https://moxfield.com/decks/1ihgCLGfsUOAh21yaHBIMQ

Timecodes
5:24 - Where does the data come from?
23:25 - Why is boros so good?
28:24 - How can we balance things?
57:38 - The effect of best of one on the cube...

My Cube: https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/sweet
The Treat Yourself Cube: https://cubecobra.com/cube/overview/treatyourself
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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Hello everyone. Welcome back to Powerful Nothing and Magic The Gathering Cube podcast. I'm your host, Dan, and as always, I'm joined by James. James, my boy. How are you doing this week? I'm doing well. I'm doing well. It's, it's very early evening and is already pitch black. I would like for some summer back, but other than that, I'm doing well. I've been taking vitamin D tablets for the past month, so. My hair. Yeah. For real? For real. The UK is bleak, but what is not bleak is the hotness of our episode today as hot as my transition is? Anyway, today we're going to be talking about the Arena Vintage Cube. We're going to be deep diving into some of the stats that have come out of it, because this is the first time we've ever really got statistics on cube. So today we're gonna be kind of deep diving into that a little bit. And, some of the interesting results that have come out from it. I think it's a fair way to say, James. Yeah, I think, certainly the the cards that the data says, quote unquote the best, probably not the cards you would pick in a vacuum. But, there's some fancy results in here. I think it's interesting. Yeah, definitely. And so we're going to be looking at it in terms of what we can take from the data, what we can learn from the data, and also kind of try and talk about how it can actually affect IQ building and what kind of what we think of the future of this cube, or how we can use the data to affect the choices we make when we build our own cubes and all that good stuff. Before we kind of deep dive into some data. James, I think we should maybe just start with like, how was your experience of the arena powered? What did you think about it? Yeah, I thought it was pretty fun, actually. It was I think it plays noticeably differently from the versions we've had on much, Caroline. But not like night and day, I think. Yeah. Factory attacks are really good, but certainly not unbeatable. I think, I, I just sort of drafted through the whole season. I think I did like ten drafts. I drafted a bunch of attacks. A couple of lower stacks. I think Lois actually matched up really well against the format. Just, to incentivize. You just have lots of cheap to move all. And I think that last of teams move on some card advantage is a nice way to to beat out the boss menace. I just did a few combo backs to mixed success. I, I think the first draft I did, I second picks a brain freeze and that was an error. I but yeah, overall I had a lot of fun with the, the cube. I thought it was pretty good. Yes, I am, I really enjoyed it. It was the most amount of cube I've played in a short amount of time, if that makes sense. Yeah. Because because because I don't play MIT. Go. Because, I want my interfaces to look better than windows 98 and stuff. Yeah. Like, look like we normally cube once every couple of weeks. So, so just having access to it for like three weeks, like whenever I was, like like I played some games on my lunch break. I played a bunch after work. I played on my phone. That was. Yeah, just having it in the arena. Client and and it being so accessible, I thought was awesome. I really liked it. Yeah, I did get bodied several times. Like I did like I logged on like the moment it started to do a cube. I like to actually record a video. I was like, oh, this is going to be great. I'll do a video. And like it was, I, best of one was ranked and and I was in bronze at the time because I hadn't played arena in like four years or whatever it is. But like because I was in one of the first groups of people to fire, it was like it was like mythic and then low numbers. So I think I was playing against like a bunch of top 50 in the world. I'm just getting steamrolled and bodied after bodied for like the first hour because, okay, we're not going to release this video because it is not gone. Then just seeing the light slowly die from my eyes as I get bodied by, like all all of that as these mates and such. I think some people might be into that. Yeah, like, if we ever do a Patreon, maybe that can be the starting go. You get to see the, the body cut. Yeah, but no, I just having access to it pretty routinely was was awesome. Yeah, yeah, I played some games on my phone, which is not what I thought I'd ever be doing with arena. That was like with Power Cube. But yeah, outside of a few balancing things, which we'll kind of probably touch on today, I thought that as an experience. Awesome. Bring me back. Like the next time I play arena will be when it comes back. We don't know when it's gonna come back at this point. I think at the time of recording anyway, yeah, I assume it will be next time there is a not minuscule gap between sets, right? Because I think for now it's sort of it's quite close to the, low end, like low and obviously coming up in the new year. And then it's quite small, like to, avatar. Avatar came out on Friday at time. Well, exactly. Yeah. I've shot like I haven't ever spent time. I there's a small break between avatar and low end valve simply so I'm guessing it doesn't get in the following. And then maybe it's been around for like stupid tussles set because no one's going to actually own stuff. By the way, it's a small set, so I guess maybe that's when it comes back sick. Okay, well we'll we'll do an update video to the cube when that comes out. But yeah. So let's actually gonna move on to the data that we're gonna be talking about today. I think one of the important things to mention just off the bat is that we have never had this level of data before, kind of jump into how it was acquired in a moment, but kind of like these type of plug ins and these type of analytics just aren't available on go and aren't available in paper because no one like, like outside of play groups, people aren't really recording like wins and losses of cards and stuff. James, talk to us about kind of like how the data was actually collected, in the arena. Client for the powered cube. Yeah. So it's collected using a pretty popular, tracking tool for arena called 17 lands. This has been a thing for quite a while now. Mostly amongst for, like, limited grinders on arena. But it's become fairly popular. Because it's pretty popular. And a lot of people have play a lot. We end up with really pretty big data sets. These cube. So Sentinel is basically a tool that you can install and will like track your wins and your losses, and you can go and look at your stats. And that's interesting for players, but it also will send your stats off to few, a lot of central website where they you can view the aggregated stats across all players. So you can see across all players who had 17 lands installed for example, like how much, how frequently of a drafting particular cards, how frequently they're playing them, and when they put face cards in their deck, how often have they winning? So, we end up with pretty big data. I think we had 500,000 games for this cube season. So it's, you know, that's enough data where you can start to draw some pretty, pretty reliable conclusions fairly, but you do need to put it in context for what we are seeing here. There's not data from all the players on arena. It is players from a data from a very specific subset of people, I believe, ones who decided to go out and install this tracking tool. Yeah, exactly. Like if you're installing a tracking tool to see how to see your win rates and all this kind of stuff, it means that you're probably going to be a at a minimum and franchise player, but also someone who's looking to improve and get better. Like, I know that like testing teams use this data to kind of like help them win or to help them compete in like, like GP's or like competitive events, that kind of stuff. Kind of like, like, does that bring problems to the data? Would you say, James. Yeah, for sure. So it's so firstly you've got to sort of adjust the data a little bit just because, the the players you're looking at, it's not a cross section of all right. So for example, the main, the main stats we're going to use talk about today and so on. On the card level, is called game in hand win rate. So this is when that particular card is drawn. It shows up in a player's hand how often of winning those games. So it so in an ideal world right. You'd expect that to be sold 50% for a complete the average card. However it's actually not because because 17 lands uses win more than they lose because they're more experienced, more competitive players than than the average arena player. So if the average 17 land vessel wins, it wins 54% of their games. And this season. So that's actually sort of par for win rates for the card. And we just have to remember as well verse the decks that 17 uses might gravitate towards a and not necessarily going to be the same as the decks, but for regular use, taking towards they may be a being a little bit more spiky and just trying to, to win the probability of trying to maximize their win rate more than most people who are maybe showing up and trying to just draft something sweet. So what I'm hearing is my janky bruise will not be skewing the numbers in any way. I mean, listen, I'm on 17 lands and I told you I can fix it for free tonight, so we're certainly not talking. And that's good. I think it's, there's above average amounts of tryhard amongst 70 large players. It's not a bad thing by any means. No, definitely. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I don't like that. Kind of like 54%. Like I was saying, the kind of like that's our average. So everything above that is, above average guys. Everything below that is in theory, a below average card is that, baseline that we're kind of working with. Yeah. For sure. That's, that's a pretty good place to start. Marvelous. All right. Well, let's let you just jump down to brass tacks. What? James, what is the data telling us is the best deck? Like, what do we want to be drafting? Yeah. That's interesting. Right. And, so I use this. I've used this for quite a bit for looking at various different pieces of draft formats. Right now. And, and as well showing you for win rate of cards also shows you win rate of backs by like that like color combinations. Right. So normally you go into this data and then it's like very, very early in the format. You know, you look at the color paths and you might think like, say when like Shadow Raven sometimes black is fairly good. Like, okay, well blue, black best dark and work. That's like, you know, 57, 58%. And then like, green, white say is is complete fashion. And you look at the data that's that like 54%, you know, that normally fairly closely clumped together. And similarly in terms of how often people are drafting them, it's mostly people and mice and force people to draft say, right. That's not the case here. Yeah. I've never seen it so dominated by. So the specific two colors, red and white aggressive backs are drafted by 17 lands. Uses way more than everything else. Unfair, absolutely clashing with them. They had ten times more games than AWS of just looking at the the data here. Yeah. If you look in general, if you look at purely two color decks, which I understand is not necessarily most cube decks, but if you look at straight two color decks, there were more bar stacks in the in the 70 lands database than the other nine color bars combined. Wow. Okay. And it wins way more. So, yeah. 1796. It has the highest win rate. Yeah. Flat playing straight balls. Win 61.2% of games. The next highest color pair is back. So? So 56.5. And, oh, this is sort of, pans out as well if you look at sort of the mono color decks, mono white and mono, that went way more often. Everything else, if you look at mono color plus a splash, then mono red plus a splash and model Y plus a splash, a winning morph, and then everything else. I've never seen data this skewed before. It's certainly interesting. And a really pans out if you look at the card data, that the card data is, if anything, more, more jarring. I would say, the. Yeah. If you look, if you look at the win rates of the cards and you sort by when they the, the top cards in vintage Q, it turns out with all along it's a Johnny in a castle pariah. What have we been doing all this time? Talking about, like, Black Lotus and all these other apparently good cards? Yeah, yeah, the raw numbers is a Johnny Gatto pariah. Damn you. Modern horizons three. Yeah, yeah yeah. Okay. Followed by ocelot five time walk finally showed up at third place. How parallax wave DC out Black Lotus the most jarring to me was Sanguine evangelist at number eight. Like that card is. Yeah, my card is very solid. You know, don't get me wrong, I'm not being a hater. But, but what we're seeing here, right, is that the B win rate data from the color paths is actually sort of almost invalidating the win rate data for, for individual cards because we're seeing the cards that are only played in both or only played in an aggressive that's having way higher stats than everything else. Because even though if you know a Mox Pearl is better cards and you're white aggressive that for a Johnny. I don't think that's a controversial statement. But decks that play a Johnny are probably white aggressive decks and probably raffle win loads, whereas that's for play. Mox Pearl might be some combo deck which, have not been doing well. If you just look at the stat in aggregate. Yeah, the context for that is very important. Yeah, yeah. As you're saying, a Johnny is only played in the most winning it's deck where as in theory, anyone could take a mox pearl and it could go in effectively any deck. So the strategic nature of a Johnny kind of puts it above, like when it's in its deck, it's going to perform stronger, but it's only played in its deck, whereas like Mox is applied in everything, that kind of stuff. Yeah, for sure, for sure. And that's why you see, you know, I think the fifth box is actually fairly far down the list. I think we're still in the late sort of 30 ish. Mox Ruby is, the Mox with the highest win rate. It is just below showdown of the Scarlet, just below Jesus Christ, I would he's going into Power Cube drafts and following these win right to not show your card. I will say that is that is wild. And I think we've known for a while like like like it is a thing of like on mic go like when, when the power cube has been up. If you want to, farm wins and go infinite, you do kind of like it has been a thing in the past. If like you for smaller white or you fought Boris or you forced Boris mono red hasn't been as hot in the last couple of years. He's kind of like a mono white or Boris build. There's kind of like people have generally known has been the strongest for results. But this seems overkill. It makes sense. Like like like I'm assuming most cubes aren't as balanced. On as unbalanced as this data. James. Yeah, I think there's a few things going on here. So firstly, I want to come back to, who this data is from, from like limited grinders. Right. It feels good to be a draft. I think you can draft boss and cube very well. Like, the play patterns are not unfamiliar play patterns for anyone who's, like, played them a set a bunch, right? And you can probably identify the good cards pretty easily. And it's kind of just these two draft, but all the cards are more powerful, right? Yeah. It's it's turning good things sideways. I like I like not to diminish the archetype because it's very strong, but like, it is, it is turning things sideways and killing people as quickly as possible. It is, in theory, less convoluted than like, your flash pile. Like like your flash stack or your doomsday pile, if that was in the queue, for example. Yeah, exactly, exactly. It's, and I think, you know, you do play a lot of like, long and interactive games of these stacks, but it's a very much like limited, fundamental sort of play experience. Right? Whereas, the combo attacks and I think even to a certain extent a controlled act. So, going to be a little bit more will take more getting used to. But like, I'm not saying like these are the hardest things in the world to draft to know in contract. But, it maybe takes a little bit more getting used to and you need to and, you sort of mess it up a few times. First, if you haven't played a bunch of cube and then you get the hang of it, right. So I think that's a bit of what's going on. But the other thing is, In a normal limited format. Right. Say you look at these stats after like a week and it's and looks like this. And what you'd expect to happen is that everyone starts taking the pass cards, because they're getting ordered by it every time they play. And then it becomes harder to get a good version of the bar stack. And so other stuff starts winning more. That didn't happen here. Like this cube was up for like a few weeks, right? Yeah, for three weeks it was up. Yeah. The Saturday may look any different. If you look at the first week versus the last week. So you could look at that and say, I for one drafting, it's not here. And they don't notice. They keep losing to the same deck every time. And they can't adjust. I doubt that's what's going on. Somehow I, I'm sure you could look at it and say, well, 70 lines, you think bar size, but if you look at the data, it actually doesn't suggest that that holds for the general population because, we can look a little bit deeper than just for win rates. Have as a stat for 17 months facts called average. Last seen that. So this is basically how like the card goes on average. When it shows up in in your draft as a 17 chances, what's the last pick you're likely to see it. And the interesting thing about this stat is it's affected by everyone's draft picks, not just 17 Lance uses. Right? Because yes, if everyone's taking the card very early, then I'm never going to see it. Six pack. And the value is, you know, if it's if it was a card that was hypothetically always taken, the first pick would have an average last seen that of one. And a card for always went 15 I guess would have an average last effect. Seen that a 15. So like black loses for example. It's not as exactly now of 1.06 because it's almost always taken first though statistically it is past. Okay, good. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So you'd expect these bias cards that are winning loads and people are adjusting to, to have really low average. That's not right. And it's it's just not true. Like you look at parallax wave that's like the fourth most winning card. And cube has an average last seen at of 4.5. So you get that like full full back on set 70 Lance in most drafts. Compare that to something like Time Twister, which has a way lower win rate that has not fixed I see not 2.5. So okay, so a hold to two picks earlier on I think. What that sort of tells me is that most people just trying to max for one vote. Right. I'm, I shouldn't be surprised. Like, I think most people who show up to that vintage cube want to do a cool vintage cube thing and may maybe down to draft bias once or twice, but they also want to try and do some big splashy stuff. And that's sort of okay with that. If if that's not necessarily the most winning strategy. So I think what I, what the outcome of all of that is, is that the format doesn't really adjust. And that's how you end up with these fairly skewed numbers. Right? Because in the last week of the cube, the people who are grinding bars can still get a great version of football stat. And, and we have a think of a ball effect compared to other decks and cube plays. It's very redundant. Like it's not relying on getting on opening specific cards in the way, but a lot of other decks are right. Like, sure, Johnny might be the two best to drop, but if you don't get a Johnny and you have Luminar Carson, like your deck will still be good. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, yeah, I think there's a bunch of different factors that I kind of want to drill down into as to why I think why Boris is so incredibly strong and like like, so tell me back to one thing you said a minute ago in terms of if this was a regular, limited in format format, people would be adapting. I think that's because, yeah, yeah, like cube is more of a unique thing. Like like when people see people play or like most of the content we've had over the last couple of years of Power Cube isn't people turning into Johnny sideways. It's like, how do I win with this storm deck? Or how do I do this? Kind of like, like like one of the selling points of Power Cube is doing the big, dumb, splashy thing. So like, like, I'm not saying that the stakes are lower than a regular set drop, but like, I think the mindset going into it for a lot of players is if that makes sense. It's like, oh, this cube has this in it. I want to do that. I it's more of a thing than you get in regular, limited environments. And I think that's why maybe we're saying like this is a personal anecdote, but like, I would rather go into a game of arena cube and try and do something cool and lose a bunch of games, then do the same thing every time. I think that, and I think that is definitely a feeling for some people when it comes to the power. If you can have like we on that point, before we kind of dive into anything else, would you kind of go along with that? James yeah, absolutely. I mean, yeah, I, I don't think I drafted any boss this season. I think what I saw on this is I'm like, okay with like in cube most of the time not drafting the most winning strategy. I want to do something that's cool. I don't want to feel like I'm being an idiot for that. You know? I know that I don't want to feel like I'm just like chucking away my when I win that quickly, you know, I, I want to feel like, you can get there with these other decks, even if it's a little bit harder, you know, yeah. No, no, I, I would agree with that. And I think let's move on to kind of some of the, some of the other reasons why Boris might be so strong. And you touched on it a moment ago as well, in terms of just redundancy with the archetype. From a cube list, this does have a lot of redundant effects in, aggressive slots. And to an extent, this is a kind of a byproduct or like it's a byproduct of multiple things. But kind of like the inherent goal of a powered cube is really to include the most powerful cards. And it means that kind of like a deck that's just running that, that kind of like there isn't that much synergy in a Boris aggro deck, but it's more play efficient, powerful cards and have a bunch of them and turn them sideways. And like as an archetype in this type of cube, that's going to do well in general, because it's just like all of your one and two drops in white and red. Are just efficient death spells that there is a lot for you to choose from on top of some of the most broken cards in the cube, with things like broadside bombardiers and guns being available to you, as well as your top end like like and Parallax Wave. As James mentioned, being one of the most strongest cards in the cube. Like like, but yeah, just from a consistency point, it's going to be strong because there are so many slots for it. Like, what do you think about that, James, in terms of just like let like make up of the cube? Just just how many cards could in theory go in a red and white aggressive deck? Yeah for sure. There's a lot of slots and it's got a lot more haymakers than it used to. Is the thing. Right. I think one of the big things, however, is, is modern horizons. And like some very aggressive decks weren't great before. They were set fire to the modern Horizons type sets. If you, going to be one of those cards of outstanding power left like cube, outside of obviously, you know, that set of cards, generally it was because there was some interaction. Right? But you're maximizing, That was you could make the card do something for. Right, because they just didn't think cards of, standalone power level, for which they would make them sort of stand out, love cards and Power Cube, whereas for modern horizon cards, and this includes but is not limited to aggressive features. You don't have to do work to make them of outstanding power level, right. Like you give them you they just have to do the thing they say on the card. Like a Johnny Ocelot Fide guide of souls. These cards don't require you to build around elevate like your your all of those cards have interactions which can make them better. Like, you know you go a Johnny and Goblin Bob possibility. Yeah. It's broken. It's cool. But a Johnny by itself is already insane. And I think they. That means that the power stacks just get get haymakers in a way that they didn't, but it didn't used to. No. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. It's card quality has definitely gone up. But also I just did a quick, very quick count of cards. I would be happy running in a Boris aggro deck and in this five four quarter cube I got to like 60. That means realistically upward. I think I was 60 without even getting into colors and multicolored, so it's going to be more so. Realistically. A pod could support two Boris aggro decks and they'd probably be fine. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it can be, you know, sometimes it's like there's a bar stack and like a heavy white decks, flashing blue or something, you know, and that's, but yeah, it can, it can support multiple players to show which, again, didn't used to be the case. Right. Like yeah. Mono why it's great. But you don't want to have to fight for it. Whereas Sway Bars is now you kind of counter that. And the reason it's bars, by the way, more so than mono color, is because you do have these haymaker cards. So a lot of the ball stacks will be, will have like a base color of how they'll be like base white with, you know, 5 or 6 red cards or base flat with 5 or 6 white cards, old gold cards off slate. But, then the calls for two. The two colors have such slight overlapping goals about trying to be aggressive. And, so you often just end up often ends up for if you're crafting a base white, aggressive back, it makes sense to play some of that cards, or vice versa. But no. Yeah, that does make sense. You already kind of touched on that. You don't that the thought of not playing Boris being an incorrect choice is a reason I could potentially put you off playing. Like, do you think this needs to be rebalanced for future iterations of the Q? Because it a thing of like in theory, if their goal was to create a very powerful cube with all the powerful cards, they did, in theory do that like they did make a very good Boris deck. But there. But like there are other cards, they are not running from a power level point of view. Like there's no initiative cause there's no time vault, that kind of stuff. Do you think that maybe we'll see this rebalanced in the next iteration of the cube specifically? I don't think we're in a spot where you have to force pass. I didn't do a tutorial trying. I did like ten drafts, but my win rate was very good, so I didn't really play boss. But it is probably the easiest way to get a get a really high win rate. You know, I did very much find myself warping my picks to beat boss. Right. Okay. So what what, you're taking that, what, toxic deluge? Or you're taking, like, a fire covenant or like a burst lightning slightly higher than you would normally. Yeah, I think people are really undervaluing the cheap move. Like, I really wanted, like, 3 or 4 one mana removal spells in my deck if I can possibly get them. And, like, I'm willing to play. Not great once, you know, like, I'm looking at, like, a random Jessica control scare. I'm playing galvanic, galvanic flasks with not very many. You know? So I just want to be able to kill that one channel from ten from, And I think that was, that is a bit of, the weirdness of how having a ladder works, where, even though you draft against a group of people from a mixture of ranks, you if you're near the top of mythic, you're playing against other people. Never top down effects on that. I'm disproportionate playing and slaughter stacks. But I did find that was very much warping my picks to to try and beat boss. And similarly, like, I drafted a bunch of, like, lower stacks because they have loads of I want to play loads of cheap interaction anyway, so that like leans into, that's beat up on boss thing. But I could honestly do a whole episode about like, how you can try and farm boss. I think it's, it's interesting. So I don't think it's unbeatable, but I do think it is, like, warping, you know, and I think there's also a bit of a thing here, right. As I think the stats show quite clearly that, people, go is sort of going out of their way and like, giving a willing to give up some win rate to that some of the other stuff rather than this. And it kind of raises the question of like, if your players, having as much fun fact the stack and want to draft other stuff, and maybe you should just build a cube in a way where they're a bit more incentivized to do that. No, I got you. So I was like one of the thoughts I had and and it's not really a rebalance. It's more, just give the colors more things to do because like, one of the ways that I've, in theory, power down aggro in my own game environments is by making them do stuff. So it's not. So it's kind of a you're not just giving them all the best broken red and white cards. You're kind of like giving them a bit of an engine. It's not just a free win. So like in mine, yeah, we've talked about the artifact aggro package, but I have that in kind of like ragdolls in mind, but like, you could do things like an energy package or you could do like plus one plus one counters in Celestia to kind of like take some of your picks from white. You could do like a token, a strategy for maybe some aristocrat stuff. So like I think part of it is like this as a cube is when I say it's not a tight list, I mean that there is a lot of cards you would be like. You could cut this down to a 450 incredibly easily just by removing efficient cards. But what that means is kind of like there's just a lot of room to, like, cut the third best lightning bolt and add some and add a bit of synergy or do something like that. So I think that's something I would like to see on the further iteration of this. Like not just like cut card like like don't, don't cut. Raghavan for a worst one mana to one. If you're going to cut a card, make another archetype, something like that. Kind of like. Would you go along with that, James? Anyway, yeah, I'd be dumb for that. And I think, you know, this can be fairly light touch, right? I don't think, you necessarily even need to go in and cut. They have both side bombardiers and guts in that thing because, you know, it's it's powered by people want to play with the best of cards and, you know, players get to play with, time walking on natural light and like, I think, you know, that can have some kind of cracks, free drops, like, can have a parallax wave. Yeah. No go for, but you can maybe do, like, just a few tweaks, right? Yeah. I think making them have a little bit of a synergy is, is kind of an interesting idea. Right. Like, I think there was a point where the Mitko vintage cube was, like leaning into that discard matters for them a little bit more, and you kind of see it already a bit here, I think, like envoys and for example, and then like maybe you just lean into that a little bit more and cut a few generically good, bad aggressive cards, you know, like maybe, you know, that Creatures Champion can go or something like, I'm sure it has a higher win rate and then all the mocks and I don't want to know about it. You know, maybe that can become like some interesting discard that discard. Right. And then maybe white can be doing some token thing. And, you know, it doesn't mean all the card, all the, that aggressive cards have to be bad, but you can have a little bit of a package and a couple of generically powerful cards and maybe that just, tweaks the balance a little bit. You know? Exactly. And I think this is like this part of the conversation is an important one for anyone who runs a cube, because every cube does need to be balanced, like, like one of the things with the 17 lands data is that we get hard, like a lot of data, very quickly on what needs to be balanced. So that's why we can kind of spend all this time talking about what what needs to happen to Boris. But like in your own cubes, this is where things like taking pictures of winning decks can be helpful because effectively you are getting you are slowly gathering your own data set like I like. Sometimes it's easy and sometimes you see the same card or wrecking house like five drops in in a row. But sometimes just by getting pictures of like ice cube decks, you can slowly gather this data for yourself and kind of like you won't be able to go into as much granular detail in terms of like and find out. The specifically Guide of Souls is like the fifth winningest card in magic, for example. But like you can at least like start building that, that data set yourself to kind of ask yourself these questions of how can I adjust? So like we've touched on ways of not downgrading Boris, but kind of like adjusting it by like maybe adding some more packages or the market types. One thing they could also do, which is another kind of lever, you can, a lever you can pull is upgrading other decks. Like one thing I had with this cube and like from my experience of it is it's like things like Re-Animator was fairly underpowered because it was missing the instance made reanimation effects and it was missing cause, like through the breach. And when we've done cube, normally the thing that stops the aggro player is running into, turn to, kind of cruelty like that really stops the aggro player and it's in its tracks a lot of times. And just like, do you do you think the lack of Re-Animator was a part? Why? Boris was so strong in this one, for example? Yeah. For sure. I think it matters. I think it is, one of the sort of natural predators of these aggro attacks fade because the aggressive techs don't have great ways of interacting with, with the Re-Animator stuff like of cards, your main deck, it's basically containment priest a bust, right? Yeah. And the, the good reanimated trolls are just quicker. They just go too big, too quickly. And not that, you know, you need shallow grave to beat, to, to be very aggressive tactics if you're into the animator. But it is just a downgrade to that deck in general. Right. Especially I think, for, I don't understand really why they bothered putting in all the big old files because there's just not enough to do with them like that sneak attack and channel. The channel kind of sucks. So it's kind of just. Yeah. So I, I think so. I was in my notes. I wanted to touch on it at some point, and I think this is the best place for it is like to an extent, as a project. This is awesome. I'm a big fan of it. But one one thing I think you are seeing from the keepers, I kind of we touched on some of these weird inclusions, like like a card like Jace, wielder of mysteries with no support. And so it's a when you're when the game, if you have no cards in library, there's no other cards to support that strategy in this group. Some of the choices they made do come across that they it it comes across as a byproduct of copying a cube rather than designing one from scratch. So they've looked at the powered cube like like I like the, they have looked at a power cube. They may have looked at the go vintage cube and gone, oh, it's full of big old drowzee. Well, we need big L draws as well, but they haven't really thought about why are the L draws there. And like having ways of getting them into play consistently is one reason they are there. And if you don't and there's a conversation that could have that maybe should have been had of from a design point of view, if we don't have the instant speed reanimation effects and we don't have, through the breach, all the L draws a good like in hindsight, we can see that they are not like these are cards that are in like. So we talked about some of the borrowed cards being in the top percentile of cards, like most of the L draws, a, like ranked under F tier, with the only one not being m recall like big like big big M recall. All the other Titans are like the lowest ranked cards in this cube, which is wild and like, there's a lot like, one thing I do want to move on to is like. Like, I think part of it is like looking at looking at the top of the cube gives you some interesting anecdotes and things you can work on, but also so just looking at the bottom of the cube, like like in terms of rankings, like as I mentioned, all the L draws, they are there. But so gristle brand. So as well. So survival of the fittest and to place and displacer kitten like these didn't become bad cards overnight. I think it's more of a symptom of the decks that they are part of. Either aren't like some of them I think are down there, because maybe they are showing that age. Things like Creative Behemoth has been cut out of more powerful cubes now. And I think that's a card that's kind of the card card and a strategy that has shown its age. But like bonuses, Citadel is one of the lowest ranked cards in this cube, and I'm not going to hear that. That is a bad magic card. So I've spent some time using this data to analyze. I'm a little bit on that fate, and I think one of the lessons I have to learn is that, so having a good win rate is certainly very strong evidence that the card is good and well positioned in that. Right. You can't win and have a 60% game and win race and secretly be a bad card. That doesn't make sense. Having a low win rate, I think, actually is not conclusive evidence for the card is that, because it can just be the people are putting it in decks where they shouldn't, and people are using the card. Well, like so cards. I give an example. First fight is and displacer. Kitsune was right down that the bottom for something horrendous. It is the second worst blue card in the cube according to the data. Make sense? And then I think I can give an educated guess. But the reason that is fair, right, is that people are like, oh look, I've got like a few good battlefield effects display for my deck and that would be great. And you can't do that. It's a formality to, if you're just doing that. Picard sucks. But if you're doing something you, like, have a bunch of zeros and you have, like Kitsune cover to Jewel going and it's really strong. Oh, I had a really nice kitten that I had for like a convo with a female and a fairy and a friend had like four zero's all the rules. And so like, you know, you can think of a planeswalker with, and that's like a lot of us to pick up the bubbles and keep going. And it was really strong, like Displacer Kitten was a card I wanted to see and all of my chores. But a lot of times space cats. So, you know, if people only put displacer kissing in the deck to actually belong, then it probably has a more like middle of the road win rate, right? But people are buying this despite getting a bunch of tax rate doesn't belong and using it wrong for the card has no form and right. I think yeah. Like similarly like like yahoo.com as well as a trash bin. Right. That's five minutes on not save it like you should be playing as well all the time of of nature. You certainly shouldn't be taking it highly, but I think it does merit a place in the queue. You know that there are attacks of early one Aqua, and it lets you do a bunch of interesting stuff. So like I wouldn't go through and say like, oh, we can cut off, cards, but Yeah, yeah, 100%. I was not going like all the cards in F, just like I was not going to chop them that trash. They're gone. I never want to play with. Yeah. Crucible of Worlds or Survivor. But this is again I am not it's I, it's more I'm saying that I either because Gristle brand is down here and I know magic has changed, but like there was a NSV article like 3 or 4 years ago that still had gristle brand quite like extremely like. And I think it's like what I'm saying is that's more of a sign of I think some of these cards are down here because the decks that they are here, here aren't supported, like like, like like survivor. The fed is being down here like so I would say this is maybe my top three in terms of favorite magic cards, but it doesn't have a place in this cube for survivor like so I love it. This is an awesome card, but it does show its age. And for it to be in a cube, you need things like I know some madness creatures, you need revenge, right? You need to be doing something it can't just be, value slowly find my combo type card. Especially as there's no creature combos really in this cube as well. There's gonna like, what is survival doing for me? Like. Like I like I think there was a bunch of choices like that, which, yes, they are very cool cards, but cube isn't a like like, that's one of the reasons why Boris, I think is so good is because individual cards are good individually in a vacuum, whereas survival needs a bunch of cards to support it. So does Grizzle Brand. So does yours. Well, so does like, so many of the cards which are down in the bottom tiers of this cube. Yeah, for sure, for sure. Yeah. If you need cards, support them. And you need to draft a very, very specific deck, right. To make to make survival good. Like, even if there were some pieces that justified survival, you would still have a bunch of people putting it in decks where you shouldn't play survival, like, say, like, oh, it's just five cards because it's cool. It is, it's cool. It is very reason to play any card, but it would trash it. So anyway. Right. Whereas, you know, you look at the cards at the top like, you know, how do you, how do you play a Johnny Vulcan? You know, you kind of can't. Yeah. So, yeah, I think a combination of some of the cosmic bomb, Paul said, some of them, you know, you can draft good decks of, them in this tube, but people also. But from the bunch of decks where they're that. Yeah, that one is still very like context dependent cards. Right? No, definitely 100%. But like like like like when I see Gristle Brand down below in terms of, in terms of win rate, that is a card that I think would prey on on an aggro deck. So if in the next version of this cube, it'll be a combination like, like if Gristle brand is higher, I think that will mean naturally that Boris will do worse. That is trick. It is actually worth flagging while, stuff like Chris and there's a little bit of weirdness in the SATs with things like that. Because remember when we look at game in hand, when we're looking at when you had that card in your hand, in your hand, like it shouldn't be in your hand? Well, I mean, a lot of the times you want it in your hand like you want to see it in your hand at some point because you want to discard it and then be animated that it does show up. It's worth noting that, like, if you happen to put Gristle Brand in your graveyard Memory Animator, this is never in your hand. That game. So that game doesn't actually count for the stats, even though there's literally one other game. No, that is important things. No data because. Yeah. Okay, so so maybe bonus assist though. Sundering Titan the down here. Yeah. Think of target. Do you think it's like it's never in your hand? Okay. Again. That is again. Like like this is something I kind of like. If you just looked at the data, I guess you wouldn't. You wouldn't get from that. Yeah. Again, context is very is very king with that. I'm assuming as well then is that a similar reason why like all like most of the Trojans are really far down the list, from my experience is like triumphs of, like having an untapped jewel. Land is has been more important in this version than ever. But it's like I'm assuming because we're if we're a splash deck with fetching for our triumphs, main is it's not in our hand. That would also be why they're relatively lower on the win rate or on the appearing in our hand when we win a game type. Yeah, it's giving you a bit of value being in your deck even when you don't. Yeah, maybe that's morphing. It's kind of weird, right? Because you often it's like if you have one, the one tap land is fine. Two is not side of things. Like you're downs have a first time when you're opening hands, you have to get three colors off that that you don't want the second ones. Yeah. There's it's interesting because that's because there's, you know, game in hand. Win rate is often like the default phase gone through because it's, yeah, it's arguably, you know, if you're going to pick one number, it's maybe the best one, but, it's certainly not perfect. And there's stuff like, yeah, things you just want to think of for maybe it's not the best way to judge that win rate. Right. I know that you can use this game play to win rate twice that. That's just looking at how often do you win when that card is in your deck, regardless of whether you draw it or not? Which is very stats tend to be a lot flatter because you're not you're not differentiating between you know, for games where you do your, your can do them against where you didn't like, but but it does remove the weirdness about things you choose off of. Oh, God. Do you want to know what the highest game played win rate card in a cube as. Tell me, James, what is it? Sanguine evangelist read. Yeah, a 60.9%. There's a world where we didn't. We did a set review on this set. There's a world we didn't even review. This card. Or if we did, like, it's a fine rabble master, blah blah blah, blah, eye on. Let's read Sanguine Evangelist because I feel we should. That's the most winningest card. Two in a white two one creature vampire cleric with battlecry, which means when it attacks each other, attacking creature gets this one, but so until in the turn and when it enters or dies with A11 black back creature token with flying better than a mox. Yeah, I so yeah, it's just a thing where people are only putting that card in a very specific deck. I mean, don't get me wrong, the cards rarely saw it's, good against removal, gives you, gives you a lot of damage and nothing bad to say about it. But it is a free mana too, because it does that. If, yeah, it does feel like they will adjust it in some way. And, and yeah, we've talked about a couple other of your options. My gut is, is they will do a combination of both. I think that because of these like the reasons why cards like the instant speed reanimation effects and and through the breach aren't on arena are because they both have mechanics that are a bit of a faff to the code or that basically they weren't. It wasn't worth it. So with the insane speed reanimation effects you'd need to program graveyard orders matters into arena and with through the breach you need to, program splice onto arcane. With the success of the cube with with the success of like how it well it's gone, I would imagine they will have the bandwidth to program these cards for the future. The other thing as well is the, this like the I'm going to keep also obviously didn't have any universes beyond cards. And I'm not saying that there aren't any good Boris aggro cards and universes beyond that definitely are, but it does add other tools that they can kind of pick from to try and rebalance things as well, like things like One Ring or orchestra like Orcish Bone mass is being introduced. Could quite like that's quite good at picking out some like it's a good early threat for a slower deck. So that could be some nice tools like like I think we'll see their introduction slowly over the life cycle of this cube. Like it might not be within the next version, but I think we will see that like as well as sort as well as some other balancing basically would be my God. Yeah, I mean Beaumont say it against boss. I think that's a great point. But ring quite strong as well. Yeah, I think my, my guess is they won't do that much. The boss, I think, felt like maybe Chuck had a couple of cheats move up spells to like Gibson was slightly more tools, and they'll, I think they will make some changes around, like. Oh, yeah. There's not anything to do with this is about like, I can see an argument for keeping em cool. Exactly. Because it's, like sneak chemicals, rarely. So very good. And, it's it has this channel and the cool is like, well, it's not actually good. I feel like it's, Well, there it is. Good. But the shadow attacks are not good. It's iconic. Exactly. It's an iconic, like, busted thing. You can do in Power Cube. So I think you leave it, but we don't need for what's right. Yeah, I think they'll do suffer that. I doubt they'll actually make big changes to the boss stack. So, I mean, I'm sure they'll, like, tweak things, but I'm not expecting them to really, like, lean into that. I could just not match. Yes. Oh, 100% again, because in theory, the ace, the goal, the game plan of building a power cube is I am making the most powerful environment possible. But yeah, I in my own environment, when I've gone for that, when I, when I when the goal has been to hit a level of power, trying to raise other things up, I think is the first place to go and then like and then bring it down like it's a short way of saying I expect them to cut some green ramp cards, to add Re-Animator, and to never add initiative to this queue because it would just break it. Oh yeah, oh yeah, yeah. If I can't initiative. The thing is, when you say like, raise up acts like it's not like very like the shallow grave and corpse stance, but I think there are issues with getting them on. We know and it's, it's in most cube environments right. You can just buff off attacks. A lot of the time in Powers Cube, it's like you want to buff a stack that the cards do not exist, right? It's not like they're a bunch of better reanimate cards for the reason. So there's the instant speed effects. I think troll would be a big one. Just getting that on arena again, that's not all that might be is something. Yeah. You do, just as you just sort of have less spikes. No, no, I, I do agree, but like, I think like that there's enough chaff and enough choices in here that you can do to kind of like effectively give people other cool things to do so that it's not. So you will have people who want to win, always forcing the Boros aggro deck. But like, I mean like there are so many green ramp cards in here that just you can cut some and put in like some more beefy green creatures so that you can race the Boris Agritech. Or maybe it becomes a three color deck or something like that. Like there's ways of of changing up. So it's not just the same build in the same shell every time. I think that's kind of the thing that they're kind of like, might that don't make Boris worse, but kind of like make, Neuer better make other kind of combinations better make other colors want that card so that it's not as just as, as free, I guess, would be my way of putting it. Yeah, for sure, for sure. And I don't say, like, I don't want to overstate how bad I think this is. Like, I saw a ton of, playing this. I think it's not nearly as unbalanced as the data makes it look. I think a big part of what's going on is, it's not that the bar stacks, the only good that sits there, you can't really go wrong drafting, you know, like I found I did quite well drafting, like, for the four and five color decks I found, I did while drafting this guide. But, like, I have played a bunch of powered cubes by in the past, like. Yeah. Yeah. And I think, you know, this piecing together synergies like, they're getting a good, not too good space, getting like these, you need very specific things and you need to know when to go for them. And why not to. And, you just don't really need to know, but details get lost, pretty much. Right. You know, it's. You just can't go that long. Like, you can play it badly and it is still sensitive to play, but, I think it's you don't need tons of fall in that knowledge to identify the good cards and traffic, good curves of past features and stuff. So, yeah, one thing you said I do want to just touch on and agree with, like Boris being like, unlike other limited formats where the best deck has been known and it can and it can affect your enjoyment of the format a bit. I did I had no negative. Well, like the Boris being the best deck in this format did not really affect my enjoyment of it. The main reason we wanted to talk about it today is because it's the first time we've had this data available to us on the On Power Cube, and it is so striking. It really does stand out, which is kind of why we want to have a chat about it today. Yeah, for sure, for sure. I actually think it's a slightly off topic, but I think having the sort of quote unquote fun police of a format I quite like, I often like don't drafted a bunch, but I think it increases my enjoyment of other decks to the, to have that, that clock. You know, if I like, like, I think my, my thing is like, I will definitely draft Boris aggro. I will drop in aggro, Jack. I'll throw off white aggro or like chunky red. But for me it's more I will draft it when it's open. Exactly. Oh or say I. Yeah. So there's nothing in my first pack, but there was a broadside because I know that's a cool card. Like maybe we'll go that way, but it's not like I with any environment. I'm less of a fan of it when it's auto. What are we doing today? If that makes sense? Yeah, yeah, yeah a lot of time to give. I'm like, yeah, I'll drop out of I drop boss at some point now I'll be like, next as it's like I just drafted bar seven. Can I take a blue card? That's you know, that's fine. Exactly. And yeah. And yet all of this, does that have the very big caveat as well as like this is the first time we've seen it on arena. This will be a lot of people's first time playing with a cube of this power level. I don't think it's hard to see a world where just in the future, the other decks start doing better as people who are experiencing it for the first time get more experience with those decks. Like if you've never seen storm before, having a couple of goes at it, you're going to be better the third or fourth time compared to the first. One last thing we should probably touch on just from a. Again, this all context is important with with any kind of data set. Is that, because the ranked drafts were all best of one. Boris is very, very good pre sideboard and there are a bunch of cards in the cube that off sideboard cards like I'm looking at like unlicensed Hurst for example. Like these are cards that know when it's best of one. You don't have the ability to sideboard and I like aggro is generally worse against sideboard decks because they can bring in any spare removal they have. They can bring in a board, right? But like, maybe they're kind of like, aggressively deck two. But if you're fast some them, they can like they can have it in to sideboard in a sweeper in game two. But in best of one I go decks can just run supreme because it's like, what are we doing? Oh, I'm dead before you can do anything, you have a chance to react to them. So that is something that's important as well. Kind of like comparing it to a traditional draft which was best of three. The the other cards do a bit better. Like, it's fun to say that. So when you can sideboard the blue deck sounds a bit more of a chance. I might have actually fractured identity. Jumps up as well, which is quite nice to see. So. So it does seem that kind of like the in best of threes. There is a little bit more of, swing to non-aggressive decks. Yeah. No, I think the sideboard thing is a great point. And the other thing, which I think people really underrate about the difference between game one and game two, it's not just about the cards in your deck, right? It's that, you know, what you're playing against and you know what you're playing against when you make your mulligan decision, you know what you're playing against when you play your first land. I think you have more, more reactive facts. You just make much better use of that. Right. How many times if you capture the thing hand thing like this is fine and less fair on ice, you know, and sometimes you just gotta keep those hands and then they play a ten one island guide of souls, and you mentally go to game two. And that's a pretty big edge post board, right? But the, the reactive deck gets to Logan for a hand, which like has some tools. Not that you always, you know, you can a mulligan for a perfect hand, but you can, but you have a lot more decision, a lot more knowledge when you make that decision. And I think that's a more, a bigger deal of, so a more reactive deck tonight is for boss, because, it's mostly just going to keep hand with a good curve, and it doesn't really care that much when it's playing against. Now that does try. Yeah. It's also nice to see that in best A3. I cod like tango jumps up to being like an A-minus. So yeah. So there is more room for more combo oriented cards and best of three says also. Nice to say yes for sure. All right. Awesome. So I think that's where we're gonna end our conversation today. But yeah, in general, like I don't want anyone to go away from this thinking, Arena Cube, Arena Power Cube to get anything apart from two thumbs up like from my end. Awesome. Love to see it, but just yeah, just having the data for the first time was really interesting. So that's kind of why we wanted to break it down a bit today. But yeah, for sure. And it's cool to just get this data about cube for the first time about like we've we've never seen anything like this before. What about you? Yeah, exactly. And I also just remembering the context of it as well is one of the other things you want to touch on. Because it is. Yes. Ajani Carter pariah, technically the winningest card in Powered Cube, but there is context. It does need it does need some help. Still take your black lotus or your cell rings first. Please get it will not suffice is to know that there are some bad Reddit takes on this from a quick so. So there's some Reddit takes. Is what I'm hearing good? Yes. Perfect. Okay. All right. Well I think that's where we're going to leave it for today James. Pleasure man. Thank you very much. Yeah, always a pleasure. Awesome. Oh, actually, by the time this has been out, you will have been up to goop clash. So we'll have to get your thoughts on that on the next on an upcoming episode. Oh, yeah. I'm psyched about it. Awesome. Yeah. I think if anyone beats you, they get a booster pack potentially. That's what did last time. Well, we'll see if that sort of thing let me know afterwards. But yeah yeah, yeah. See if at some place. Right. But that's going to do it for today. Thank you all very much for listening. Do give the podcast a five star review, tell a friend all that good stuff, whatever positive affirmation your podcast platform of choice allows you to do, if you could do it helps us out and is all greatly appreciated. Until next time, it's goodbye from me and it's goodbye from James and we'll see you all soon. Goodbye.