The Lands Deck In Cube - Archetype Breakdown | #93

In this episode of Powerful Nothing we're taking a deep dive into the Lands Deck, and how its quickly become the best, and most fun to do in Green in Cube.

Card Gallery: https://moxfield.com/decks/_0xNeVlJbUOqmMoeo6JNXQ

Timecodes:
4:25 - High Powered Lands Package
26:54 - Lower Powered Lands Package
44:53 - Importance of Redundant Effects
48:36 - Playing The Deck
56:22 - Final Bits

Video Version: https://youtu.be/LQRVu3YiF7U

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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Transcript

0:02

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. How are you doing on this warm, warm day? It is aggressively toasty, isn't it? I'm sure we have lots of listeners and country is this warm all the time, but if you've ever visited the UK and some of you know that we can't cope well, the UK like this is like, yeah, we're currently at temperatures that most Mediterranean countries would like laugh at the temperature. But like in our defense, all of our houses are like designed to like keep heat in the not like the the lack of any kind of aircon system in anyone's out is really, we're we're really so. So if you here did listen to the sound of a fan in the background, at any point I will do my best to try and remove it. But no, that is medically load bearing. But we have a banger episode for everyone today. I sort a topic as the temperature that me and James are both sweltering in. Today we're going to be talking about the Lans deck and cube before we jump into our main topic. Just a reminder to you all that there will be a card gallery down in the show notes below. If you're listening to this, on your podcasting app, if you want to see the cards we're talking about, we will try and read them where possible. But sometimes we kind of get caught up in the moment. They'll be nice. Pretty pictures in the show notes below. What did down there? Please consider giving the podcast a five star review. Thumbs up! Tell a friend whatever positive affirmation your podcasting platform allows you to do, please consider doing it right. Preamble. Done? Check. Let's move on to our main topic. Today we're gonna be talking about the lands deck and Cube. So I think James a good place to start with. This is like what do we mean by the lands deck? Like don't all draft decks have 17 lands that James, what are we talking about when we are specifically talking about the lands deck? Yeah. So what lands deck? We're basically talking about a strategy where we're going to use our lands for more than just tapping for manner. This isn't just like the sort of five color deck where where we're making a bunch of different colors to cast powerful spells, fishes or lands are doing more for us from that. So we might be, for example, sacrificing our lands for value. The carrying them from the graveyard might be using them to interact with for our opponent, to even lock our opponent out of the game. But we're we might be getting bored advantage of them. We might be drawing cards off of them, but we're doing more than just tapping them manner and casting our powerful spells. No, I think that makes sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think one thing to want is, like I said to James, like, this isn't like the this isn't like a five color multicolored deck. It's it's more the value comes from like mechanics, like landfall rather than domain. It's kind of what I want to say with it. Exactly. Yeah. Stuff like landfall, stuff like Chris of all the carving lands out of the graveyard, things like even like a Dark Depths combo, if you want to get spicy or something like that now, awesome. That makes a ton of sense. I kind of like, I think just from a broad point of view, kind of like, what kind of cubes can the lands that show up in, would you say? And so this the nice thing about it, it's a very broad archetype. So really any power level of cube, I think it's certainly it can and does show up in the highest power level cubes, powered cube. There's a, I'd say more of a land package for a full on land archetype, but, it is very, very powerful. It works very well. But if you go down to more sort of mid power level cubes, you obviously have way more options in terms of be land synergies that you can you can build in. And I guess like, would you say like maybe the restriction is, is like maybe like peasant and pauper might struggle a little bit. I did just Google like strip. Mine is technically a is peasant legal ship by necessity legal AI. And you could push it made in your peasant cube. It would be fine. I question if you should. Why is to, like, strip mine, lock your opponents in and, you know, because, like, having a strip mine in your deck does not make it a land stack fight. But if your game plan is to occur, this fit mine a bunch of times, then that does lead to about direction. No. And I think that's a very good point. It's, it's it's not just a deck that's running a bunch of utility lines. It is supposed to be trying to get some additional value out of them in some way. That kind of like gives it that gives it that like, yeah, strip mine in some cubes. It's a very solid pack one, pick one. But just because you have that in your deck, you're not playing a land deck. This if you combine that with something else like the, recursive, effects, that's where you kind of you go from a card to a archetype or a strategy or a deck. And that's kind of where we're going to be looking at today. Let's talk about the cards we see in like, the highest and the highest power level gives you kind of like, like, what does our land package like James in like something like the MC Go vintage Cube or something like, like you have, Power Cube or like the arena, power to keep going. Like what? Describe the package to us in that sort of environment. Yeah. So I think you're looking at the very highest power level of cubes for probably the most powerful little package of synergy that's based around lands for you. Almost always seeing these cubes is some type combination of Titania bail off. Fine. So they obviously both. Whenever you sacrifice a land, you get a creature. The case of titanium, it's A53. In the case of my time so far for, And combining those with a free sacrifice out that your lands. So this is good. If you have a bunch of other ways to sacrifice lands, you get a bit of extra value. Maybe you have a shipment, maybe you have a bunch of factories. But this is also you can just use a pretty lean like a plus B combo, right? If you play Titania, you get a land back you have with five lands in play. You get a land back for your graveyard, you have six lands in play. You sacrifice maul. That's that's 30 power. That's probably get a when you've a game. It the so it doesn't like necessarily matter that much if you have a very fleshed out land stack around it. But it is better if you do because it means you're more likely to have a land in the graveyard for your titanium to get back, plus titanium and a land stack can be very powerful, even if you don't have the seven all by self and safe keeper to immediately sack all your lands because you can just go titanium, get back to my strip mine, strip mine you I now have that's for five manor. I put ten power on the board and made two five threes and, killed your land. That's fairly powerful. But yeah, that was pretty lean. The whole package to start off with. And honestly, that is like one of the best things green is doing in base keeps for moment. It plays out really very well. It gets the game over with very quickly in a way that doesn't really care about creature removal very much, and that's quite powerful. Yeah, just a few things I do want to touch on there. And actually, so specifically for those on a where a card like an orb, why, it's quite powerful when you combine it with the tiny, and built from zone over zero mana for an artifact that says sacrifice a land you gain to life. So it's a free sacrifice. And I like, think of it like it's a you know how in like, an aristocrat deck. We love, like we love a visceral sphere because it's free. We can respond to stuff. We don't have to put any manor into it. This is that. But for lands, basically, it's a cheap, efficient way of putting a land from your deck or from the battlefield into the graveyard. And I like this deck. Like titanium will work with cards like, like Fetch Land as well. But it's not something you can, but it's not repeatable, if that makes sense. But like a fetch land with titanium will make you one elemental. But an orb? You can suck all your land straight away and make that 30 power that James is on about. That's where it gets very scary. Yes, exactly. It's the titanium without the stack. Outlet is an excellent value card. I say no with the stack Outlet generally wins over game. The next set. Yeah, definitely makes sense. And it's worth saying, I guess as well that there are other free stack outlets you could play that the two you most commonly see a sylvan safekeeping. 702 because they're both very cheap. So mana and one mana, they have colors and green dots. The green is the sulfur based color of this this whole package. And they both have some utility outside of this. So Sylvan safe keeper can be quite nice. With Naidoo specifically, both at protect not doing it triggers for energy. Seven of you can end up playing in some academy. That's a zero amount of artifacts, and it combines quite well with balance. In particular, you can sacrifice all your lands and then balance them. And I have a bad time. That's quite fun. But they're both like the main reason we end at this point is, is during this say, saying, yep, they lost some stuff. And I said, yeah, yeah, yeah. I just for yeah. For everyone's benefit. Sylvan. Sylvan safe. Keep a single green for a one. One with the same ability of sacrifice. A land, then target creature you control gains throughout. So it's again, it's another free sacrifice outlet. It's nice and cheap. And also green is quite nice because like, creature like creature tutors being able to go and get Sylvan safe keeper annual titanium or your Byleth Prime is nice. You can get both halves of your combo, as it were, and then the added ability to actually protect your creature from a removal spell is going to be nice as well. And like that target is is is what we're talking about with the Naru specifically, which is very nice. So the sacrifice land make a bunch of power, whether to tie in air or bailout one that's kind of like the that's kind of like the more combo version, but they're all kind of like, guess like more classic, kind of grindy versions and like, running. This is definitely something that kind of got more juice over the last couple of years just because we've seen more of these effects printed. But like classic, like cube cars, like Wasteland and Strip mine, like wasteland is a wasteland is a land that taps out a catalyst, or you can sacrifice it to destroy target on basic land and strip mine is the same thing, but you can suck it to destroy any land that was kind of Crucible of Worlds, which is an effect that lets you replay lands from your graveyard. That's always been kind of like a thing in kind of like the back burner, if that makes sense. It's been a thing in cube since, Crucible got printed. But like, especially in the last couple of years, there's just been this additional there's so many of these crucible effects that, like, it's basically a crucible of world effect has become like, the on like the list of things to put in a set. We're getting kind anything like 2 or 3 a year now. So there's so much redundancy and so many cool want to talk to. We're kind of like James. We're talking about this. We will we'll use the term crucible effect and strip mine effect. But basically we are destroying a land, playing that land again the next turn and destroying another. That kind of like what what is the dynamic with that? Like, how does that play out? Like, why is that good. Yeah. So if we take the sort of the most basic version of this effect by Crucible of Wells Freeman artifact. Player lands object graveyard on a ship mine, which means that to destroy any land, so if you combine these two cards, it is powerful. You have you have sufficient value. So that's every turn. I'm going to play this ship, mine out of my graveyard. I'm going to strip mine one of your lands. And if you're continuing and say, if I start doing that when you're on free mana, if you continue to play a Land of Return, you will stay on free manner and be able to cast your free drops. Just. I'm stopping you getting more mana, but it's not amazing for me. But at some point you start missing land drops, right? And then I am eventually going through the new house of lands and you'll get down to no mana. And then I can start using my land drops for other stuff, develop my own mana. And, you're never going to have more than one mana again in the game because returns you to top deck of land. I'll play this, get mine out of my graveyard, and ship mine at the chance. You don't, I'm gonna buy a different land and keep going. Getting ahead on mana. That is powerful. It's hard. It's a very hard way, to develop a way of slowly getting something for mental advantage. But it is very slow, and, it doesn't affect the board, so if I go, say, 10 to 10ft, strip mine, you turn four, I'm going to play the Crucible, play the strip mine again. That's fine if it's empty. But if you have like one okay, creature. Bubbles. Then all of a sudden that game plan looks pretty dicey, right? Yeah, it's sort of way, like, early on. Like, like when I first played strip mine and Crucible of Worlds, it was in a white deck where I had, like, cheap removal and like, Mother of runes to kind of like, that's like, this was quite a while ago. Don't do this anymore, kids. Boris has got some tools since then, but kind of like that was more of the shell for this rather than in green. Is that faring? Yeah for sure, for sure. So how it tends to end up playing now I think is, is you want to be like green something and you have a bunch of answers. So he tends to be quite a few colors. So you have a lot of fairly good removal in not followed behind on board. And and you can try an attrition of amount that way. And that stuff is fine. But say is very slow for one that has kind of changed the dynamic a little bit, though, because I felt like that was kind of struggling as a package, but I still explore that specifically has really changed this dynamic. This this is a good one. You want to read eyes to explore, James. Yeah, for sure. So I still explore. Is two green queens. So four mana total for a wonderful, two for two for. I was doing it from memory. I've, I've never attacked with my cell explorer. I have no idea. Reasonable. Reasonable. Yeah. For Manistee for you can play an additional land on each of your turns and you can play lands out of your graveyards and also as a landfall trigger whenever you play land milk card. It does it does everything just so much. It does so much. It's really nice. And why that's huge is that extra land for each turn means for I'm not just waiting for you to run out of lands to play for my hand. I'm actually putting you down lands each time for actively. Because I'm stripping. I'm destroying two of your lands right? And I'm blowing up your lands faster than you can play them. If I've got this mind going, Or I'm destroying your land and playing my own land. So I'm still continue ING to develop my mana. Plus, on top of that, even if I don't have the strip mine. Right. Even if I just have a fetch land, I'm still getting a ton of value off the this right? I'm going. I'm vamping pretty damn hard with this card. And if I have the strip, my novel wasteland in my deck somewhere, I'm have my land going. I'm generating a bunch of mana. But I'm also digging for that strip mine of a wasteland with female effects on the landfall. Yeah. And on top of that, all of that. It's actually a very good blocker, right. For I was pretty resistant to a lot of bad for me little spells. I'll jump in the way of a lot of cheap creatures that doesn't, you know, pull you back from behind amazingly well. But it is very relevant as a, as a blocker if you're if you're prone, just has a 1 or 2 smaller creatures in play. So this has been, in my opinion, a real game changer for this archetype. We've had a as you said, we had a ton of new crucible effects printed in the last few years. A all of others are sort of fine, but, you know, maybe small incremental improvements. A baseline crucible wise, this one's a veil. A veil changer. No. Exactly. Yeah. That's like the back. This in green as well means that going like this, this probably isn't coming out on turn four. We are going to probably have ramped beforehand so we can start the train rolling on our turn three like our opponent might be on tapping on their turn three with one land. If things have gone to plan like that could be quite, but quite powerful. But. Yeah, but but but why? This has got a lot better is like I still explorer I think is around like the $15 mark at time of recording. But like where we're at and Crucible maintains its value. I'm assuming I'm going to say commander because it's colorless. It goes no mistake. But like all of the other ones, like there's, like a card, like walking closet is around like $7. That's the room. One that also lets you play a glance of your graveyard. There's also, Conduit of Worlds. This one is, like, less than $4. That's the four manor artifact that you can buy. You can do the Crucible about things, but then you can tap it to choose target online. Permanent card in your graveyard. If you haven't cast a spell this turn, you may cast that card. If you do, you can't cast additional spells at time. Activate only as a sorcery. But like there's enough of these effects that like like there will be more that we haven't mentioned. And that'll be one that we haven't mentioned. Is that because it's very good, but like there's a bunch of redundancy now. So it's also nice to kind of like for larger cubes as well. This can be supported like like yes there's, there's, there's strip mine and there's wasteland. But like there's a bunch of like in a 540 cube, we're going to see both halves of the again combo, as it were. I know there's one other one I want to touch on, James, which was specifically, Ren and Six. I want to read up Ren a6 because that one, like this has been a decent cube card for a while, but like, again, got better in this deck. Basically. Yeah for sure. Then six plus Ren six is a veteran, a queen. So just two mana for, a legendary planeswalker when you can. It starts for free loyalty. You can plus it for the ten one target land card. From your graveyard to your hand, you can minus one to deal. One damage 20 target. And for minus seven, which does come up occasionally as you get an emblem with instances of all three spells in your graveyard. Have beat face so stats you can cast them from your graveyard by discarding land. But the main thing we're here for is just that plus one, right? It's not isn't it starts off as explosive or something, like I said, because you kind of see use it multiple times. That's had my I still actually play the land again, but it is two mana. Two mana is huge. And I mean, this is a phenomenal card, even if you're just getting back that land. If you have like 2 or 3 fetch lands in your deck. Imodium for running venom six. But if you have the wasteland of a strip, mine is obviously for the not. So it's, it's such an efficient card. Plus like that minus one. Just two mana. Kill yourself. Kelly. Over. Bhagavan is so powerful. Kelly. Amongst other things. And that's all you have. I really helps with the downside of a card like Crucible, which is three mana and doesn't affect the board in any way. Right? Yeah. No, I've vengeance six is not a card that requires necessarily loads of building around, but it does. You know, if you have these these very powerful lands to occur, it does become very, very powerful. Yeah. I'm kind of in more powerful cubes. This is more the type of card that we're looking for than the crucible of worlds, because it's in hyper level cubes. We need efficiency like we need just raw. But to be honest, they just raw power level with that makes sense. And like like Crucible has it if you have all the bits around it. But if you're not in the deck, why would you take it? Whereas A and six again you mentioned like like yeah, if you have a strip mine awesome. Take it. But again it's just good if you have fetch lands or anything like that and yeah. Yeah, very solid card. Yeah. Just the final subject. Forensics is now surprisingly affordable. It's only like $14, so I was distressed. That's one good as I don't want to say how much I bought my venom six as far. Oh, so. So I'm the flip side. I know wifey got on to it before they showed up in price for legacy, and then sold them after they were banned, I think. Yeah, I convinced myself it would be fun to play martyr in advance of that and sixes. And that was fun. It's fun. Oh, it's still legal. It's still legally still legal in modern. Yeah, it's just less good. Used to be. When was last time you played modern games? I know when venom six was good. It's like 20, 20. Some some nonsense. I had to fight. Okay. Marvelous. Yeah. Let's let's stick with powerful cubes. We're sick. There's one big land, the outlier that I kind of wanna talk about. It's a very unique effect. This might be one of your. If I. One of your favorite cars. James. It's definitely. It's it's a card you added to my cube for winning a bunch of or for winning it enough. Let's talk about fast bond. It's a single grain for enchantment. You may play any number of lands on each of your turns whenever you play a land. If it wasn't the first land you played this turn fast bone deals one damage to you. James. Talk to us about how this can be very, very egregious when we combine it with some of the effects that we've talked about. So if I spawn, let's just play any number of lands a turn. Yes, we lose a life. Don't worry about it. It'll be fine. But how does this work with things like fetch lands or strip mine? And how does that then combine with effects that let us play lands from our graveyard? Like talk to us about that powerful loop. Yeah. For sure. I mean, touchstone is just a super power, super powerful card. You can do some pretty busted stuff with that. This is one of my favorite cosmic cubes. You're sadly not really meant to be out for fast picking up fast bonds anymore. I'm afraid to say. It's, That's not so much for this keeps you apart anymore. But it is. It's still does have that really high ceiling rate of when you really get it to pop off. It's amazing. And it's amazing in a bunch of different contexts. Right. And it doesn't have to be specifically Landsat that also amazing with like double sevens. It's like, that can go well in a sort soft storm adjacent deck. But in our land stack has a few really powerful applications. So if we have, say, a crucible and a strip mine, obviously, if I just have no land instantly, but then you play your crucible. That's amazing. And they're basically not casting spells for the rest of the game. That's dope. But also, if we just have Crucible in effect land, we can now pay a life or pay to life to fetch land out of our deck as many times as we want with that fetch sand. As long as we have catchable lands left. So that's very powerful. So it's like almost think of it as, like a mini channel, but it's getting you permanent land. Simply live off of an you've coalesced mana for ten. Plus, it's like at a certain point for finning aspects actually becomes very relevant for, if you have any sort of landfall trigger going at the same time. Yeah. You're gonna, you're going to wrap up, forget them pretty quickly at that point. But then it also has a very powerful application are a few Latin zonal, which we discussed. We already want to be running in these cubes for the application with Titania, but seven all play fast and and feasible because you can pay a life to play the land out of your graveyard when you suck it to, you tap it for mana. Then you suck it to serve an orb and gain to life so you end up plus a life and plus a manor each time. So that's actually is infinite mana. Infinite life. You should be able to close out the game from there. Yeah, yeah. And if as effects land, you've removed every land from your deck as well, while also going through that loop as well. Yeah. So that's fun. There's a lot of fun. And I like there are other bit that there are other cards kind of like that. I incidentally work with this like little like, course of grief extremes that has landfall. When a land enters the battlefield under you control, you gain a life. Yeah. Sadly, if we're talking about strictly the highest level cubes, Modern Horizons has kind of done a number on course after Effects. Are afraid to say I know, but I still like course crew is still cool. Oh, yeah. I mean, I'm not. I've taken care of poke also in our core of multiplayer and you'll have a great time. Well, this is a separate issue for this deck of just like a bunch of the cards they print for all tend to be three mana. So the it's it's competitive, but it does mean there is a lot of redundancy and you can tailor it to what you want, which is which is quite nice, but but with infinite landfall, this kind of brings us on to a bunch of very powerful creatures that are just some of the best things that green can be doing. And if I they work so nicely in this build and like, you don't have, I just have to have the fastball. And like any ways of playing multiple lands at turn like I still explore are going to be good. Talk to us about like, like bristly Bill James or a card like Tyler's track. I kind of like these. How did these get benefits in this? In this type of show? Yeah. So these are mostly going to be useful if you're in a slightly less combo, adaptive attack. Right. Like I'll just play bristly bill isn't necessarily if you're gaining infinite life and in the cards and they came for that matter. Right. But if you're just like, oh, dope, I've got, like, a venom six strep minor, maybe I'm, No, I'm terrible at it. But maybe call an exploration something like that. Then all these landfall features, which are already good cards, right? If you're playing into your like, normal, proactive green plan, your bestie bill your five cat, curb your Tyler's tracker. If I can put a lot of love, power and toughness on for it, and that is just going to be happening more frequently at a higher rate and in a LAN stack, because you're I mean, more reliably making your land drops because you're carrying your lands, you might be making extra large drops of something like exploration or Fast Pond. So it just puts these already powerful cards up, up a notch, which is very nice. And then finally, if you have a nice thing with this, we've talked about a few sort of distinct, little packages of synergy which, which work very well for the land in the land space. And and that the power cubes. But they all also work well together and they all make each other better. Right. Like, my Crucible is actually very good with my titanium, right. Because even if I don't have the sack out that I can play my fetch land out of my graveyard and make a pie for every turn, all with my bailiff theme for, the fast ones. Also very powerful. The face cards that you're getting from earlier, you know, getting your hands into your graveyard earlier. So it doesn't have to just be. I have this little pocket package in my deck. If you've got a bunch of these things together, they all build on top of each other very nicely. Yeah. It was very nice about this. This deck is kind of a it's there's a lot of overlap like a lot of cards here overlap with cards here. And you can they synergize together very, very nicely. But we have been focusing a lot on the highest power level cubes. Let's go down a bit of power. But like, maybe we're talking more like mid-range cubes, more budget environments, cubes that kind of, like, aren't running the most powerful cards. They're kind of they're not running the most powerful cards, as it were. They're kind of, maybe someone's first cube or an upgraded chip, something like that. There's still a bunch of things we can do here, James. Like in our last episode, we touched a bit on, like, a graveyard land deck. You want to touch on, like, like, like how we can use self milling as a way to power up a land deck. Yeah. For sure. I think there's a lot of interesting stuff in this space, and it is all quite powerful, actually. It's not this isn't something that I think is aimed, you know, peasant and pop cubes and things like that. So it's, it's just you probably need to not have, like, a vagabond and ocelot fight and for failing us in single cube for, for this stuff to be good enough, you know, but there's a ton of really interesting stuff in this space. I think there's several different versions, but one I quite like is a slightly more graveyard centric version of The Land Stack, where you're doing a lot of self milling, and you can use cards like Aftermath Analysts and Splendid Reclamation. These are both cards for, the turn all your lands in your graveyard to play at once. So aftermath on this is a two mana one for that melds you for some amount one and says and you can pay for manor and socket. Galileo lands back from your graveyard for the battlefield taps, and splendid reclamation is just a full mana sorcery. If I gets all your lands back from your graveyard taps. And you can end up doing some pretty interesting stuff where you're like sacrificing your lands to generate mana with something like squandered resources, which, Queen back enchantment. Why exactly lands mana like, something like Vein of Fell. I just got psychic lands for black and silver. End of turn. And then secondly lands. You make tons of mana. Get them all back. You can start small again. Yeah, you can get some. You can end up generating, like a ton of mana in one pair. Not most player might solve a system adjacent deck, which is quite cool. Yeah, I like like go gory high tide type type thing, which is cool. Exactly. Yeah. And there's lots of really interesting overlap with trying to do basically. So there's cause like spelunking is one I quite like in this, this space. This is a two and a green enchantment one and says you can put an extra land into play and you draw cards, and it makes all lands into untap. So this can do really powerful stuff with something like aftermath analyst because if you're bringing back tons of lands and they're all untap and you could tap them and sacrifice them again, then you're generating a ton of mana. You can also do things with, things like the bounce lands are very powerful hand like having them enter untapped. You can tap them immediately to mana and the summons your hand. That's pretty good. Plus, cards like Lotus Field, I think is a really nice build around here. This is for, recently banned in modern land. It was it. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah. This does powerful things. Marvelous. It's, it's a land with hex food. It taps for free manner of any one color, which is rather powerful. And, but when it answers, you have to sacrifice two of other lands. Oh, yeah. Sacrifice to land. So. Yeah. So don't don't play it without two of lands and kind of the. Because you'll have to sacrifice itself. But this is really nice in that if you have any ways to untap, it goes kind of hand by like, it's cool to have, you know, something to do with a cans of lava or something to have a high tide, but isn't just, plowing academy. I think that's cool. But then it also puts a bunch of lands in your graveyard to get you out of, land graveyard synergies going. It's really cool with balance. That's quite nice, because you effectively have free lands in play, because you have free manner. But as balance counts at, you only have one land to play. And that's pretty dope. And there's a bunch of nice payoffs, public lands in the graveyard as well. Probably the best value mentioned here is forget Pokemon Surf, which is a card I really like. This is another. Yeah, yeah, this one is the kind of, I love the get roll. It's so awesome, commander. But, yeah, very cool and very cool. And cube and I would like to get it working more. I'll read this one out. It's three black and a green for six. Six frog horror with death touch. And I think every upkeep sacrifice to get you monster unless you suck a land, you may play an additional land on each of your turns. And then I guess importantly for this deck gems, whenever one or more lands are put into your graveyard from anywhere, draw a card. So not only are we possibly going infinite with our zero and orb type stuff, we're also drawing our whole deck as well. That seems rad. Yeah, this this card, because I kind of just blow your deck some of the time. If you've really got vibe on this deck, it can be very sweet. And that extra land drop is really big, right? And it's just A6X. It's one of those cards where it's like, I, it's very I have no idea why it's A66, but it is A6X and that has the most and irrelevant line of death touch I have ever seen. But okay, I'm assuming they got the artwork first before they. And I was like, oh right. Okay. I mean, yeah, it does look like you would have to search to be fair. But yeah, I think and you just get a lot of nice, cool build around like the, the wind graces in the form I think is quite cool. That's like a Gen five mana planeswalker, which could get land in your graveyard in the cyclones out of your graveyard. It generates a lot of value for you. Sort of how I view this stack is, you know, first think about like from most of the noxious land stack you've ever played against in a game of Commander. Yeah, I think it's fun to recreate that in cube. You know, like to be, some things which I think socially acceptable to command the table, but are a lot of fun to put together and in 40 card formats, you know. No, I agree, and I think probably the biggest difference between playing this in draft and playing the command, the deck that's led by the get Rogue monster or led by Lord Wing Drakes, is that you don't have access to them straight away. You have to do you have to play a game of magic and then you might find it and then or then you might draw it. You have to kind of build your engine, and then you might get this kind of the pay like the pay off value card, but kind of like it's not saying in the command's own, basically. And that's like one of the nice things about 40 performance in general. Sorry. Yeah. And I think these things were always cool and cube as well. Just because you don't have a perfect version, right. By definition you, you don't have all the pieces and you're having to try and make it work. And it's different every time versus, you know, you play it in a, in a constructive format and it's you know, it's always for perfectly tuned dungeon and always you always find what you need was, is an end draft. You have to work for them. All right. Which is cool. No, I'd agree. I think there's one lands deck package archetype that probably a bunch of listeners are kind of shouting, why have we not got to it yet? Because, like. And the reality is kind of it belongs here in this kind of middle mid power level of cubes. It doesn't mean it's not cool, but it's time for us to talk about dark depths. Dogs. Apes is rad, but it has been Minecraft out of the highest power level cubes. For those unaware, Dark Depths is a legendary snow land and the best estimate of it with ten ice counters on it. You can pay three generic mana to remove an ice counter from dark depths, but the gimmick is we never do that because when darkness has no ice counters on it, sacrifice it if you do create merit. Liege a legendary 2020 black avatar, squiggly fish with flying and indestructible, we're going to combine it with an effect that that either removes all the counters from it, or makes a copy of Dark Decks without any counters. So we have things like vampire, hex, Mage is the classic way of removing counters from, a permanent all cast like Thespian Stage or Mirage Mirror make a copy of Dark Decks with no counters on it. The ability says it has no counters on it. Therefore, we second straight away when we make that big 2020. This is rad. It is cool. It's not very good. I love it so much, is it? Will always. It will probably. I'm just checking the updated version of my list. Okay, it's finally come out, but it has been in my list for the best part since its inception because I think it's cool and awesome. But, James, talk to us about what do you think about Dark Depths in 2026? Yeah, it's interesting. It's very unique combo, especially with the the Caspian stage angle. Right. There's not really any many other ways to win the game in a reasonable amount of time, where literally all you have to do is play lands, right? No spells need to go on the stack at any point. You just go dark. That's Lantern fest in stage. Activate 2020 attack. You win. Yeah, ten could have had forces fill up the entire game. No one cat and that's pretty cool. The problem is, right, you're down a lot of material because you're actually down to lands when you activate this, right? Because you make your thespian stage into a dock that you legend will obey the dark depths down one land, then you sacrifice B in stage. There's no clamps on it, and you make your 2020. And even if all of that works, you know, just set neutral all your pieces. People do just have ways to kill the 2020 indestructible. Like it's like, sure, if I win red black fan, it's hard. But if I'm in white break and I have exile, the movable type in blue UV, I can have bounce spells. It's, and you kind of just lose the game when it gets dealt with, as you put so much energy into it. And yeah, you had to run the dog steps, which doesn't happen manner. It's I'm not saying it's some playable, but it doesn't it doesn't warrant being in like Powered cube. And it was in fact, it was in like the Moco version for a really long time. So I think people sort of associate it with being for a higher power level cube than actually is. Because it is just quite slow. It's hard to get going and it's hard to protect, you know, I, I think it's more it appeals to people who traditionally have played the Mego Vintage Cube, like, like as in like this, like, this land, like this bit like the dog. The assassins stage was a decade in, like legacy. It may, but I was it a deck in vintage? Probably. And like most things at some point are. But but like, it's it was more appealing to like that kind of crowd. It was there as a it's only two cards. We'll throw it in. It is a cool thing you can do and it is a deck. But like, yeah, it's from a power level point of view. It doesn't belong there anymore. It's like I think that's it. And then like, there was a brief moment where we were kind of like, bail off Prime. That's the like the card we talked about earlier that does come in with stun counters and it's a 1010 maybe that's like a second copy of Dark Decks. But the reality is, is that as a copy of the Tamia, not not not a second copy of Dark Depths and Dark, that's in general because there's only one dark depth effect, only one true 2020. I win the game if I do this thing and it's not answered. It's always struggled above three seconds in my opinion as well, because it's like thespian stage is a fun card, but it's a dead card unless Dark Depths is open. That makes sense. Like like at least with Kiki you can Kiki Inferno Titan, which I have done in one games with any other bit without Dark Depths, doesn't really do anything. Yeah for sure. It's one of those things where it's like, it's enough work for it, for it to be good in those very powerful cubes. You'd need it to always win the game when it when you assembled the combo. And it just doesn't. There's too many ways to kill it, you know? So it just block it. It doesn't have trample like, oh player lingering souls and merit lay just does nothing. You know, that's like partons of the barrel age does nothing. It's it's it can be a bit tough, but in in the moment power level cubes as cool as an option. Because the thing this does fight is it really pays you off for being able to find specific lands so you can have a bit of a tool box thing going on. Right? There's some very powerful land tutors, which I want to play anyway. You know, stuff like expedition map, stuff like, crop rotation. And if you're trying to do a bit of a tool box thing and this is like a win condition that you can assemble with that, so if you're leaning into that, I'd also recommend having a few, like slightly more niche utility lands, which you wouldn't normally include, like try to Paducah Bog, for example, and and command the cube. That's, that's that's been pretty relevant. Something like, Glacial Chasm is a nice one for to, so I can keep you alive. You can get a little bit of a toolbox of that going, which is quite cool. Yeah. I was like, it's actual chasm is a fun one. That assumes of upkeep pay to life when it enters the land, but actually, just you control. But, and and creatures you control can't attack. But the plus point is it prevents all damage that would be dealt to you. So while you have this out, you kind of can't lose the game. And if you have ways of recurring, it, then you kind of can't lose the game. Yeah, yeah. No it's it's cool. It it does something quite unique. Right. Which is and it's something that these decks can really need because they can be quite slow and deadly. This is, you know, your opponent has a giant board here at six, and the glacial chasm can keep you alive if which is, which is very valuable. You can also run some things that, if you are in favor of foxes, have lots of money, you can run something like Tabernacle as well, which is quite cool, that, that's definitely if you're a fan of proxies, that is that is the card this $3,000? Yes. For for the love of God, it's a good magic content. It's it's not cheap, but, or seven ticks online. That's nice because, yeah, you spent $3,000. That would be like, like vague, playable at very valid stats that people draft. One said if you did it again. But I mean, yeah, that's right. But the the tabernacle at Pedro Vale, legendary land org we just have at the beginning of your upkeep, destroy this creature unless you pay one generic. So it's like a good at keeping the aggro decks in check. It's a very solid lander. Yeah. Legal and commander sounds miserable. It's a game changer. So, Yeah, yeah. Just to bring us back on topic a little bit, like, like, like in, in general in these decks or in general in cubes. You will have room for some utility lands, like I'm, I'm looking at mine like I run like, like bazaar of Baghdad. I run cards like field of Ruin. Caracas. When you have tutors for the when you have land tutors, maybe for this lands like those cards going to go up in value as well. Because like that more like lead up to find them more things like as a saga you can kind of do some cool I do to for this and then these get this and then I can tutor further with my A saga like you can go to to for your zero not for example, nice and tight. But just to add for if you have a lot of these utility lands there, talk tap glacial chasm. Especially for ones that don't tap for mana. And another really nice inclusion can be to get, Bulk Empire and you have Maya cradle of grave. So these are basically the same card in green and black. So, yeah, for my fatal grave. For green one is legendary land that says each land is a forest in addition to its other types. And what this does, it's gonna let your dark. That's your glacial cousin, your, tabernacle all tap mana. Because the problem with these lands, right, is they're essentially not lands in your opening hand, right? They don't have matter. I don't like cast your spells. A, hand with, like, a forest and a dark depths you probably can't keep. You only have one mana, but a hand with a Yavin Maya and a dock that you can keep because you have two mammoth, lets you actually use that as a land ally and have a means a lot of the downside from from having those utility lands in your deck by. Cool. No, I agree, and, I realize we're kind of jumping around into the, into kind of like into like top tips of how to play the deck, but like from a building point of view, I also wouldn't consider a land that doesn't tap for mana, a land it doesn't go like Glacial chasm doesn't go in my land section like neither does like Dark depths, like I, I if I want to run a 17 land deck, it's 17 plus dark depths or plus those effects, not including because as James, you're saying, if you draw it is not going to be your turn one land. It's not going to oh, it can be. It is not going to do anything. Basically, but kind of what we're just talking about, like general tips and tricks to kind of make this deck work. And like from a cube design point of view, like we've gone over some bits of redundancy, but like we have talked about some cards like kind of like very powerful one offs, like we talked about fast and fast one is an incredibly powerful, unique magic card. And like in an ideal world, we will take fast ball and and we'll have it in our deck and then our opening hand all the time. Magic doesn't really work that way. Like ideally we would have some redundancy. And while we can't get as high as fast bond and some other effects which we'll talk about, but like, there are still some cards that we can go to, like, we talked how there was a bunch of crucible of world effects. That's good. They can print those. You can't really print another copy of Fast Ball. And I mean, I say this, give it a year and Modern Horizons for there's like an energy one. It also makes an energy or something I don't know. But like I have I have I told you about it aside. Yeah. Yeah I see that would kind of this is a big tangent. But like you can pay an energy to put a land into play that probably goes in for something. Ignore me. But like but but like there is some redundancy out there and it is important to kind of look for it. So like why? Another reason why we like Ice Tail Explorer is because the additional land drop means it sort of does the fast spawn thing a little bit. Not not as good, but a little bit same. But but I mean, you can run a card like exploration for example, single green mana enchantment. You may play an additional land on each of your turns. This card is not fast bond, but if you are trying to support this land deck, remember that, especially if you're going up in size. If you're not a 360, if you at a 540 or 720 and not every card is being opened, what happens to the lands deck if it doesn't see fast bond are not going to be as strong. But if we can give it something like an exploration or these type of effects, that's it all. You can still have it. You can still support the deck existing and that is important. Yeah for sure. And a lot of these cards where we've highlighted a lot of sort of specific combos and interactions, which is very powerful. But they're certainly not the only things that be the only synergies that will come up between these cards. Right? If you include all these cards, which are good as helping you move lands between sounds, it's an accelerated rate. You will find new and interesting ways in which fans react with each other, and that's quite cool, I think. It doesn't always have to be this very streamlined. Like I've got my titanium and my seven all types of handy things I care about. Especially if you're, you know, in the more mid power level cube thing, you can kind of just throw a lot of these cards in and people will do interesting stuff with them. I've found some. Yeah. Like like there's just a button like in the last couple of years. Like there's been some like there's been a bunch of cool cards printed that go in this like, like like, Tifa Lockhart, for example, from Final Fantasy one, the green one to trample and land for whatever land you control and just double its power and trying to turn. There has been some turn to that, too. There's been some turn one and two kills with this in the powered cube recently. Like, that's kind of rad. Like we haven't touched. Like we mentioned bristly Bill. We didn't mention size cat cub. There's all these kind of cool, powerful cards I'd like, like again like like so like like carbon receivable are just good cards. But if you're doing infinite land drops, they can become your wind con like. And these are cards that already run in a bunch of cubes. So there's it's like it's ways of pushing you over the edge, which I don't think we're short on now. There's a bunch of very, very cool options out there. And then I guess just some final bits of advice, James, like briefly thought so. Most of what we touched on so far has been kind of like how to like cause to consider to put in a cube or to put in your deck, but kind of like what happens when you actually have the deck. Like how do these kind of decks play out? Kind of like, what are your good matchups? What are your bad habits? What kind of like are there any tips and tricks on on actually playing the the land deck as it were? Yeah for sure. I mean, it's gameplay choices can help seem very massively depending on what sort of build you have, what self CPU and but in terms of matchups for certainly some common themes. So the land synergy stuff, it tends to not be the faster stack, but it's often one of the most resilient. It can be pretty hard to disrupt the engine once it's going, Partly just because, fi, you can't land to fundamentally a difficult type to interact with. You can't counterspell someone playing a land you can't forces that land. You can't generally kill the land very easily. Like like they can just do it at the start of that. Without you being able to do anything. Like when they attack it. Yeah, they can technically take it back as well. Okay. And, and these tubes, you know, will have, you know, the 720 cube, you might have like 60 spells. They can kill a creature. You're going to have, like 0 to 2 that can kill or land, you know, so it's pretty hard for people to disrupt you, if you're getting value off your lands, inherently. And that means you have inevitability against a lot of attacks. So you tend to do quite well against the control decks, quite well against mid-range attacks. But why? You're giving up for that? You're giving up some speed. If someone has a very fast tool with an aggressive deck, you can struggle with that. So I would very, very easily prioritize chief creature removal. I really like to have one sweeper in my land. Sacks, if I can find one. And if my mana supports that, because you you're not gonna, generally get your, get your engine going quick enough that you can beat someone. You can. There's someone who's gone, you know, one, two, up to 12, three, 12 without interacting with them. Also against combo decks, kind of effort against fast combo can be a very tough match for me. Stacks, because you're not going to have a ton of permission. You don't tend to be base blue, so maybe you get a discard spell, but you know you're not can be able to prioritize far over more important stuff over things like fetch lands over for your key set pieces. So quick combo can be a very tough match up like I don't. I certainly don't want to play against a Re-Animator or storm or anything like that. Yeah. But you tend to do well against the the control decks and the like, you know, 4 or 5 color decks. And to be a nice matchup for you, that makes sense. Kind of like in terms of what our deck looks like. I do I yeah, I mean, because I think basically I'm looking at the card gallery I've been making as we've made this and there are three cards without green in them somewhere. But but I'm assuming because of the fact that we want fetch lands or we want like even an even if keep doesn't keep doesn't have specifically like arid mesa like like onslaught zendikar fetch lands. We're still going to want like evolving wilds or time off expanse or even like the like I this type of deck. They were trying the, lands from Modern Horizons three that got that cycle and confection of one of three colors. I'm so, so is it fair to say is kind of like the core of the deck is green, but the rest of the deck can just be like, what's open or like like good card like like this isn't the 4 or 5 card the deck, but it can splash. Is that fair? Yeah. For sure. You'll you'll always be base green. You might have a second base color. You might not. But yeah, you'll certainly be splashing some cards outside of that. Because we can't just also we can't just be a pile of singed pieces that we want to be able to kill some creatures. I said, it's that's really important. We don't want to be too far behind. So. And green can't kill a creature. Green has never been able to kill a creature. So, So we want to be stoked. So that is a very popular splash. Splash is by pops and Splash. But you can kind of be anything, also, we're talking about assembling lots of contextually powerful cards that don't do that much on their own. So some amount of selection is going to be really valuable here. Green again, not brilliant at that. Like you have malevolent rumble that cards amazing. But outside of that it gets a little bit tough. So going into black for some tutors can be really powerful. On to blue just for some. Some cards for can be really good. Yeah, definitely. And and also on the topic of splashing. When we are splashing we are still being sensible. We're maybe splashing like one pip. Like I know we've talked about vampire Hex Mage in this episode, but that's one reason why the dark that's combo isn't as solid as it used to be, or that's about the numbers as much anymore, because it's double black pips are quite hard. Like I'm like, don't be good with your splashing is kind of what I'm trying to get. I'm going to get to it because I've got because yeah, this is the kind of deck that like, we'll take some fetch lands and could pick up a try. But it is still a like we're going to have a bunch of green pips in the deck. We are definitely a green deck Splashing. We're not like a the ominous. I have a bunch of individual colors and it all come together because I just need to make one of each. We need probably double green quite consistently in this deck to make it work. Yeah, for sure, for sure. And it's so it can often be nice to have. Yeah. Like green plus one as a base color or even just, just green as a base color can be quite pretty good. And then, you know, we can be confident that we're going to have our mana set up late game, but, the early game set. So it's very fine to have some win conditions which are a bit more, a bit more spicy on the amount of alignments that, but you need to make sure your early game sets up stuff. You know, you're saying disciplined. Yeah, I completely agree. I'll say final point on that. Be aware of, a bunch of the plans you put in your deck aren't lands. We sort of set this from a Q building point of view. The same very much applies from the deck building point of view. You can't play 17 lands and include dark depths, chasm and Pinus lands. If they don't tap mana, they don't count as lands. Even things like. Yeah, like strip mine, wasteland, things like that. I'm sort of counting as half land because you really want to use it as a spell a lot of the time. So often the actual land count will be like 20 ish sometimes. And these decks, if you have, if you have a ton of these utility lands. Yeah, definitely. That's very sensible. And also it's a thing of like if the thing are doing its thing our deck is doing is lands. Anyway, it makes sense that we're not going to run 17, we're not gonna run 16. We're going to run slightly more, we're gonna up that number. And yeah, makes a bunch of sense. If we don't include effects that don't tap for mana like that. They're almost enchantments. They're almost artifacts, if that makes sense. You can just only play 1 or 10 for free. But we love that for us. All right. Marvelous. I think that's going to do it for today. James. Pleasure, man. Yeah, yeah. Lands is a very cool topic. And, like, one thing is really cool about it. It's kind of like there's also so many other synergies and cool combos out there that you can kind of run, and they're going to keep printing more. Which is very nice because landfall was very popular, explains like Zendikar and that kind of stuff are very popular. We're going to get more of these effects and kind of like it's this is I feel has been the most improved or like Green and Cube has improved so dramatically over the last couple of years, specifically because of cards like, but because of this type of deck. And that's been very cool to see. And yeah, good to talk about it today. Yeah for sure. I think this stuff feels like a lot more where green is at in most cubes now that evolve and then, you know, Elvish mystic based strategies you love. Creator of behemoth gemstone I. All right. But that's gonna do it for today, James. Pleasure, man. Thank you very much. That was a good chat. Yeah, always a pleasure. Marvelous. All right. This leads me to thank you all very much for listening. As a reminder, please give the podcast a five star review. Tell a friend. It greatly helps us out. Until next time, it's goodbye from me. Okay, bye from James, and we'll see you all soon. Goodbye.