Competitive Constructed and Cube Design

Ryan Overturf talks through how experience with competitive Constructed Magic informs his personal Cube design and the ways it can inform Cube design generally, calling on examples from his history playing Standard and Modern Prowess. 

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What's up, gamers? Welcome back to 180MTG. My name is Ryan Overturf, and today I'm going to be talking about how competitive constructed can impact cube design. I guess more to the point, I'm going to talk about how my experience with competitive constructive magic informs my cube designs. This is something that's going to speak more or less to different players. If you're somebody that has a very serious background in retail limited and you work on cubes that are in more of the set cube kind of space, where you're trying to more one for one emulate a retail limited environment, this probably won't speak to your process. Maybe there's going to be some insights if you want to explore a different kind of cube design. This is more going to inform how I develop my cubes, which as always, there's no right or wrong with this stuff, but this is a topic that I've wanted to do. It's something I've been thinking about recently. And given that I recently just played a regional championship with my beloved prowess deck and standard here, it seems like a good time for me to try to get some of my thoughts out. Just generally, I think a passing knowledge on some of the history I've constructed, some iconic cards, what the cards are that have seen the most play, that have been the most successful, is going to give you an idea of the kind of cubes that you want, certainly in power maxing environments, and it can inform some lower power level cubes. For example, in the original recipe tubert card that I highlighted really early on that I wanted to have in that cube was Jace the Mind Sculptor, because I wanted there to be exciting cards to draft and play with there. And then just kind of going through the history of standard, I was playing a bit at the time, was pretty up to date on what was happening in the standard metagame. When Jace was first printed, it didn't see a lot of play initially until Bloodbraid Elf had rotated out of that format. So I knew that Bloodbraid Elf was another card that has a lot of resonance with a lot of players. A lot of players are familiar with and like playing with that card, and it's a card that I knew could directly keep Jace the Mind Sculptor in check. And so just kind of being aware of cards that have seen play historically, how they line up against each other, that can inform a lot of construction and balance when it comes to cube design. But today I'm going to zoom in a little bit more specifically and talk uh more directly about my experience with Prowess as a constructed archetype and how I have stuck with that deck through many years across multiple formats and different metagames, rotations, etc., and how sticking with one deck and seeing the same kind of archetype through multiple environments can be really informative when it comes to cube design. I'll be talking specifically about prowess, but I think that there's some general prints principles here that are useful to anybody that maybe takes an interest in constructed, that is familiar with the history of any archetype and how it has changed over time from metagame to metagame, format to format, that kind of thing, and I'm hoping to give some general kind of principles here that can inform Cube Design more broadly through that lens of my experience specifically with Prowess and Constructed. So let's dig in and see what we can come up with here. I definitely dabbled a bit with Monastery Swissbeer and Friends before Modern Horizons 1. There is evidence I absolutely was casting some Wizard's Lightning as we go into 2018, but Modern Horizons 1 and the printing of Lava Dart into Modern, and it's really where my journey with the archetype begins. But for the start of this, I do want to talk, I want to focus in specifically on standard. So I just played the RCM Milwaukee. I went 11-4, which is uh one win shy of a PT invite. But I mean, I lost round one. I'm not like whining or complaining. I think my play was generally good. There's some mistakes I can point to, but mostly I'm just saying that recent record, just to say that, you know, I know I know what's going on with this deck. I've been playing this deck for many years and have recent relative success with it. And I have been playing Prowess in approximately the standard format for a little bit over a year now. I actually won in RCQ with Blue Red Prowess and Standard before Tarkier Dragonstorm was printed, just the RCQ season before that. So the deck really hit the format hard with Tarkier Dragonstorm and Standard with the printing of Corey Steel Cutter, which inevitably got banned in the format, and it was the best deck for a short while. But I I've been playing Prowess and Standard, like this standard before that card was even printed. Uh so I had elusive otters, and so there's been through a lot of cycles. So I've been following the deck when I first started playing it in this version of Standard. Domain was one of the big decks. So you end up playing against a lot of decks over time, which is where I'm trying to go with this. So I start playing the deck, you have elusive otter because it's just the only thing you can do, and you get a feel for what the tools are that are available. Obviously, Slick Shot Show Off is one of the best in class prowess threads. You have Monastery Swift Spear at that time, which is excellent. I was playing some Ember Heart Challengers, which is still a card that sees some standard play. Less of a prowess card because it doesn't have any native evasion, because it costs two mana. So that one it performs worse than you know the other prowess threats. It still sees play in standard, it's a good card, but it's less about the deck. Um, mostly just highlighting a bunch of moving pieces that have been in the deck. Uh when Cory Steel Cutter was printed, Elusive Otter no longer really made sense as part of the recipe. That's a card that's kind of bad at grinding. And what I'm getting at with Cory Steel Cutter is just that the texture of the deck can really change just by changing a couple small pieces. And you'll commonly hear about that being slots in a deck, but when I think about slots, I think that changing an individual card slot, that's like working on a deck for a specific weekend. For the exercise that we're going through right now, where I'm talking about a deck shifting over time, I think it's more appropriate to refer to these as knobs, where the different things that decks are doing are knobs that are being turned up or down as the format changes. If you're not familiar with the turn, this is something they use internally a lot when it comes to card design. A knob is anything you can turn, you know, like uh like a knob, left or right, just some kind of mechanism where you increment or decrease some aspect of a card. So a creature having power and toughness, the power of a creature is a knob you can turn. If it has four power, you can turn that up, and it has five, that's that's adjusting a knob. Changing the mana value on a card is a knob that you can turn in game design. So it's just kind of any aspect of a card you can change. So as a deck changes over time, I think it kind of makes sense to think about these things as knobs more than slots, because you're talking about environments changing, not just cards and decks. And another aspect of why I prefer the framework of knobs more than slots is you're also adjusting the volume of these things. It's not just card for card what's the best creature. You're modulating the total volume of creatures, the interaction, the cantrips, these are all moving parts, and changing the volume of any given thing, that's a knob that you're turning on your deck list, that's a knob that you're turning in your cube design. So that framework of knobs really makes sense when you get into changes over time regarding the volume of any individual type of card. So prowess has evolved a lot over the last year, a lot of it having to do with first cards being printed that the deck wants to play, and then cards being banned, which is actually very similar to cube curation. Absolutely, if you're talking about the kind of cubes that I curate, where I like to borrow from the entire history of magic. For a lot of my cubes, I like to add new toys from the new sets, and sometimes I like them and I stick with them, sometimes I remove the new stuff, sometimes the new stuff makes the old stuff less appealing, and so there's always cards changing, and so while you are literally changing slots card for card, there's also knobs that you're ingesting in the environment that causes different things to be more or less desirable. So it's not just so much one card for one card, but there's a lot more moving parts. So I think that that terminology of knobs is useful in terms of thinking about this thing. And so prowess, you know, is playing it before Cory Steel Cutter, Cory Steel Cutter, massive update to the deck. That card shows up, puts the deck as the number one deck in the format, gets banned, Vivi Orantier gets printed. Vivi kind of makes Prowess less appealing because the Vivi Cauldron deck is so broken. I still was RCQing with Prowess, and you had to change the tools because now there's a different blue-red deck that is just stronger than the blue-red deck that you're trying to play, and you had to join them on some level. So I won an RCQ playing VB standard with just two VVs in my prowess deck, and Lightning on 2 was kind of an interesting journey where I played an RCQ. I top 8 in one week with four VVs in my prowess deck, and I just kind of got smushed by VV Cauldron in the top eight of that tournament. I got flooded on VVs in one of the games, so I left with kind of this sour taste about drawing too many VVs when I was the worst VV deck, and so then it kind of made sense the next weekend. I showed up with two, and I was just trying to win the game first. I wasn't better at Ving than the Cauldron decks were. I had to approach it from a slightly different angle. So your deck kind of has to change as aspects of the format change, both in terms of what you can play, what you are playing, and what is happening in the field. So I think it's useful then also to think about what is happening at the field is the another knob that's being turned. When you think about how you're changing things in the deck you're drafting, the environment you're designing as a cube designer, you're you're changing knobs, you're turning knobs both on the cards that you're trying to put in an archetype and also on the cards and the archetypes that exist in the field at large. All of these things are subject to change at any time. You can adjust the knob for the cards in a given archetype, you can adjust the knobs for the tools for the other archetypes in an environment, and another knob being turned in cube design here is the archetypes in the environment change. You know, that's an aspect of constructed metagame shifting too. You know, this VV cauldron deck showing up that impacted the landscape. There's a massive difference in how you develop your own constructed deck if you're expecting to play against decks like Blue White Control and Domain, where you have to grind through long games, and then suddenly you play against just a different blue-red deck in the form of V V Cauldron that's pretty good at killing your threats and also has this kind of combo finish. So all these knobs are being turned, you gotta change what's happening in your deck, and things in the environment are changing, which is really the exercise of cube curation for me. As I change things in a cube, I'm always looking at multiple archetypes at the same time. And as I approach constructed, I'm doing this through the lens of navigating with one deck. I've been ride or die with prowess for the last year, but even just playing one deck and being invested in this competitive metagame shows you things with a lot of pressure on them. Other players are also trying to win. The people that make the game are both trying to design fun game pieces and of course sell packs. So things are changing constantly. And while you can't be an expert on everything in magic, really nobody is. What I'm trying to drive home today is I think that if you have a good understanding of one deck, then you know, in constructed, there's everybody else is smart and working hard. They're gonna come up with what matters for the other decks, and then you just kind of internalize that, and you can learn a lot, even just knowing one deck, that really informs your approach to the format as long as your deck remains competitive and you have a handle on why other people are doing what they're doing, even if it's not what you would have thought of in the first place on your own. And this kind of a knowledge can really inform your own sensibilities and what you want to do as you curate your own cube environments, and so you can really learn a lot from experience in this kind of realm, even if it doesn't seem related necessarily one-to-one. And so I'm just gonna keep talking about examples of things that have changed as I have stuck with prowess across changing formats, and then come to some abstract notes and individual cards that have taught me lessons or things that I have learned from changes either in the deck itself or in metagames writ large. So let's keep diving into what's going on with prowess and what that maybe means for cube. So I mentioned the printing of Cory's steel cutter and the subsequent banning being very significant, and there's absolutely things to unpack there when it comes to cube design. This is a card that made its way into the digital powered cubes and can still hang in those environments, which is also something that informs uh the general power level of cards, and if you want them in other environments, it's a card that I had into the tempo tubert for a while, and playing with the card a lot in constructed and playing it a decent amount in cube as well, kind of shows you what the card does differently from other prowess decks and how that knob is turning when you add it to an environment. The thing about prowess is that you can always build a prowess deck to be kind of grindy. I generally think that prowess plays quite well into controlling decks. I think that a lot of people that play control might think that they're more favored than they are, at least on my side of it, because Prowess usually has access to some kind of tool that can really supplement your threats to draw extra cards. In those early post-modern Horizons 1 modern prowess decks, Bedlam Reveler was a really effective tool for gassing back up. Uh Light Up the Stage has been a really effective card for this kind of thing. In standard recently, stock up, and actually in the in the list right now, 4x stock up is kind of stock in prowess decks. It's a card that's really effective at grinding. I think that Cory Steel Cutter did is it was a threat and your card advantage engine. As long as you could play two spells a turn, which is a lot of ways to do that at least a couple of times, just drawing a card naturally, it doesn't take you that long to have two spells. Suddenly spot removal went from something that you had to pay mind to to something that was fundamentally disadvantaged against your deck. And that's good to know playing with card a lot, and then when a card gets banned and constructed in any constructed format, it's usually a good sign that at least some people don't like it, which, you know, that that on its own can be reason to avoid a card and cube, but the particulars there, really having a lot of experience with it and identifying that spot removal is just kind of useless, that turns off an axis of engagement and ways that games can be fun. Even if Prowess is generally advantaged against control, I think there's something to the fact that control players can tell themselves and believe that they are advantages in the matchup, even if it's not true, they couldn't even tell that lie when Corey's Steel Cutter was legal. They were just gonna get smushed, it was obviously the best deck. So it's something that, you know, the Tempo Tubeert is a cube that really involves a lot of those one-for-one exchanges. Fatal Push, Swords of Plow Shares, those are quite appealing cards. And cards like Young Pyromancer and Slick Shot Show Off, they're a lot of what the gameplay is about, Tarmagoyf, Mother of Runes, and even Mother Runes, like that kind of pushes it on that removal one-for-one axis that can blank a lot of cards or make it hard, but two removal spells usually cuts through a mother of runes. Two removal spells isn't even playing the game against a Corey Steel Cutter in a reasonable draw. So being aware that the card got banned and why it got banned, you know, you don't have to play that many games uh to get smooshed by a card, but it is useful to be really aware of this context. And you do also have to judge for the cube itself. If red was one of the weaker colors in the Tempo Tubeert, then I'd be really excited to have a card like Cory Steel Cutter to kind of put it on the map and to be a little bit dynamic, make those spot removal spells, if they were the strongest thing in the cube, a little bit weaker. But given that it's so hostile to them and that red is already just a strong color in that environment, that's just kind of something that's true of this standard format with these cycles of bands too. Both Corey Steel Cutter and Monstrous Rage were banned out of standard, and Mono Red continues to be kind of a playable deck. Prowess is one of the tier one decks right now after these multiple bands. So if the color is already doing well and you have a card that is known for being too strong in some context, it's something that you don't necessarily want to add to an environment. But on that note, Monstrous Rage is actually a card that I added to the cube as I started changing some things around. I do plan to do an episode sometime in the near future where I break down some changes in philosophy and updates to the Tempo Tubert. I've had that cube for, gosh, I looked it up recently. My my article on it was in 2021 in SCG, which is longer ago than I think any of us wants to admit. But anyway, when it comes to that texture of spot removal being something I want the cube to be about, and Steel Cutter invalidating spot removal, Monstrous Rage was a card that was not a welcome aspect of standard and gameplay, because uh the joke I always made playing with it is the card existing made blocking illegal. At any time, any creature was just going to get some giant stamp boost and trample, and the trample lasts turn over turn, but oftentimes when you cast monstrous rage, the turn was over immediately. And that's something the blocking is a really important texture of what is fun about creature versus creature mirrors, and monstrous rage just completely turned that off. The mono red mirrors were very disinteresting, the card was very powerful in prowess and did some filthy things with V as well. You know, V would of course later get banned too, but anyway, Monstrous Rage just didn't fit the environment well. But if you're trying to make it so spot removal matters, spot removal can be really effective against monstrous rage, and then it adds some dynamic gameplay to a game where one player or both players are trying to attack and block, and monstrous rage can really punish you for making a block that's disadvantaged against it, but then you open yourself up to spot removal where Corey Steelcutter has kind of invalidated everything going on there. Monstrous Rage was too strong for standard in the context in which it existed, but it does add texture to combat, assuming there's some healthy interaction going on. Otherwise, it was just kind of too strong of that specific thing for the time, but it's a kind of thing that can be really fun in normal games of magic. I think a combat trick is a good place to design something that you bet high and it came in too strong. But Monstrous Rage is totally fine if you have a lot of one and zero mana interaction hanging out in the environment otherwise. So that one I think does add some fun texture to the tempo tubert because it forces you to maybe expose yourself a little bit instead of just ignoring anything your opponent could do. So that knowledge of what was too strong, it can help inform things, knowing why something was too strong, that's another level to it, and then being able to translate that into your own environment is of course a skill to itself, but you can kind of feel these things out, and it's easier to reach those conclusions if you were in the weeds in those constructed formats where these changes happen as well. So Corey Soil Cutter gets banned, Monstrous Rage gets banned, VV gets banned, and then a big shakeup happens in standard, rotation happens, and I'm not the best at keeping up the date at what's legal and standard anymore. I'm not gonna lie, the format's massive now on this three-year cycle with so many set releases that are all legal and standard. So sometimes it takes playing against a card or somebody else putting on the map an established deck for me to be like, oh yeah, that you can play that card. And when rotation happened with Edge of Eternities, I actually thought that Slick Shot Show Off was rotating and Monastery Swift Spear would still be legal. Turned out I had that backwards. Swift Spear rotated, and Slick Shot Show Off was still legal. So that was really interesting. Now I had to rediscover how you play the deck when you have access to a really good two-mana creature, but you lose your best one-drop, kind of that historic fundamental card. If Monastery Swisspear wasn't legal in modern, you really just couldn't play this kind of archetype, right? So that was something I had to figure out again. Elusive Otter was still legal, Emberheart Challenger was something that I did try initially because it had haste, and so it was once again exploring the knobs, and that's kind of similar to cubing as a drafter, and something you do have to be mindful of as a curator. What happens? How do you play the deck when you don't get the best parts? And there's more to unpack going back to that Vivi thing, where you know, if you put a power outlier in your cube, like VV ornate here, you're gonna play that with whatever spells. The power stack is going to want that, but any blue-red at the player is good at the table is gonna want that too. And so while in constructed, I'm talking about the decks playing against each other in Q, we kind of end up in this dynamic where players are fighting each other for cards, and so you kind of want more volume. And then the the aspect of Swift Spear rotating kind of speaks to that volume and navigating, designing environment and drafting too. Because when you are curating, you got to think about the fact that, okay, well, I have all these prowess creatures in the draft. There's a real chance that multiple players are going to be eyeing the same thing. As a player, I got to think about okay, what does my deck look like if I get all the prowess creatures, then the lane is totally open, versus what do I have to do to pivot if I only get some of them? So it's simpler ways to think about it. This is I have less concrete to say here, but it's kind of interesting to point out you know, you no longer have Monster Swiss here and constructed versus in the draft, you're not always. Going to get all the tools. And that's useful to think about as a curator because I'm thinking, okay, how can I make it so a player can still win, even if their lane isn't fully open? That's something that's really meaningful to me. I think that a lot of players with a retail limited uh background, certainly players that are very spiky, that care a lot about competition, kind of consider finding the open lane, something that should be rewarded. For my sensibilities, I want to try to make it so that decks can still be competitive even when they don't fully come together. I don't want the exercise to be over just because the draft has concluded, and I go out of my way to kind of make it so that cards are kind of interchangeably playable, and there's stuff that's better and worse, and when your lane is open, you will get rewarded. I think that just happens naturally. I don't want to punish somebody for finding a close lane. So thinking about how somebody can play a prowess deck when they don't get all the best cards certainly translates on some level to cube. And for a stretch after rotation, I was playing Emberheart Challenger in standard. It made sense to change one haste creature for another. Granted, Emperheart Challenger is just a weaker card than Monastery Swift Spear, it turns out that one mana is worth a lot for these decks that are trying to cast multiple spells a turn and are trying to close the game quickly, generally are better at attacking than blocking, though depending on the texture of game matchup, they can block pretty well too if you have a number of instants. But anyway, Emperheart Challenger, just a weaker card than Swift Spear, and it was the release of Avatar the Last Airbender that really put Elusive Otter on the map in a big way. Before Corey Steelcutter, Elusive Otter was just a card that was legal and you played it because you only had so many cards, standard was smaller then, there's a lot more tools in this format now, and Elusive Otter kind of shone through as stronger than Emperheart Challenger as Badriumul Cub rose to prominence. Suddenly, your two-mana prowess creature on the ground was really easy to block. It was hard to make good attacks with it, and Elusive Otter's unblockability really made it so it was just one of the cards that you were supposed to be playing. Like Storm Chaser's talent has just been in the deck throughout throughout. That card is great. It just in general, if you're trying to do blue and prowess, it makes sense you would want that in constructed cube, whatever you're doing. But elusive otter is something that I was playing before the deck got good, and then it also is good in the deck again now as a reaction to what's happening in the format. If your opponent is really churning out a lot of 1-1s, SlickShot Show Off is great, it can fly over them, and then Elusive Otter, it's it's way more vulnerable to spot removal by virtue of not having haste. And the adventure is also a little bit rocky with the mana. Making green mana, even in lists that can do it, it is absolutely not free. There's costs in deck building, and you're doing stuff like multiversal passage costs in individual games, even though sometimes it can be very powerful. And so it's just interesting to think about okay, elusive otter is a deck, is it's a card that can perform in the deck. You want it less than the best in class cards, but it's going to show up and be meaningful in some matchups, and that's something you can really bring into cube design as you think about the knobs of what other players are playing. If blocking is a big part of the plan and you want to try to offer some evasion to Prowess, then you would slot elusive otter as one of the cards in your prowess deck. And then it's also just important to keep note of the cards that actually break through. There's a lot more cards printed with the prowess mechanic than those that have broken through in constructed magic. And if you're really in the weeds, knowing the difference between one and two mana and how much that matters in an individual game, how elusive otter maybe looks kind of uh innocuous, is kind of vulnerable to spot removal, but can really matter if the games are about creatures and attacking and trying to block, and it has that texture really similar to Monstrous Rage, where it doesn't break through all the way and overwhelm players like Corey's Steel Cutter. It's something that gives you a puncher's chance in the average game and can build interesting tension around making sure you can make it large enough to make an attack and spot removal being able to catch you. It is powerful, but it's vulnerable, and being aware of those cards as you curate your environment is really just good information for you to have as you change that deck. And when you were specifically on, you know, prowess as an archetype, I'm thinking about that, the tempo tuber, it makes sense to put in the cards that are played there, and then I'm thinking about all the stuff that is strong against me as I play this deck, too. Which brings me to a pretty compelling note, I think, about the pursuit of fun games, because there's a lot of cards that are strong against prowess that lead to games that are completely just removal checks, where the game ceases to happen at all. Kind of like how Corey Steel Cutter can just make it so somebody trying to one for one you can't possibly win. There's a number of cards against prowess that make it so the prowess deck can't play at all. The big one that I'm always railing against, I hate Chalice of the Void. That's a card that has ruined a lot of my days playing Constructive Magic. But I think it's also interesting in the context of standard prowess to talk about the card High Noon, a two-mana enchantment that makes it so players can't cast more than one spell a turn. It's not the most fun thing. It's not fully lights out for prowess. Sometimes just casting one spell a turn, you're still able to hang, but you can't there's not a lot you can do to build a deck around High Noon. It's just kind of a card that you play that makes it so it's just a rule setting card, and it's going to punish players with cheaper spells trying to cast multiple spells a turn. It's not like fully a non-starter for a cube. I don't want to disparage anybody that thinks it's a super fun cube card, but it's the kind of thing that if you have it, then you kind of want to have interaction points. I think Chalice of the Void, like, I mean, I I'm hesitant to say that there's cards you should just never put into a cube, but the barrier for proving that that card is net positive into environment is very high. I'm a little bit more forgiving of high noon, but then what I want to talk about, so high noon existing in the format, that's a knob for the opposition and what you have to play against. And that's something that highlights an aspect of the changing composition of the prowess deck in standard. A removal spell that's very commonly played in these decks is into the floodball, which is an unsummon, it can only target your opponent's things, and you can also gift your opponent a tapped fish, and you can bounce a non-creature if you do that. So it's always one blue mana instant that can bounce an opposing creature, and then you can give them a fish to bounce anything, and that is a card. So High Noon was hostile to Corey's Steel Cutter, uh, actually more hostile to Corey Steel Cutter than just the creatures, because the creatures always have power and toughness. Corey Steel Cutter kind of doesn't do anything if you can only cast one spell a turn. It's just a bad equipment at that point. And so Into the Flood Ma opens up some interaction there, and it's the kind of thing where the games are just not very good around it. When you're developing a constructed format, you are serving a lot of masters, and some of that is an extension of a retail limited set. Part of why I like cubes that are more cube-like, that are not specifically emulating retail limited, that are more being their own thing, is that retail limited has to make cards for everyone. Standard players, modern players, commander players, kitchen table players looking for their new Merfolk Lord. There's different product lines that will have cards for all of these, but overwhelmingly, some of these cards still show up in booster packs that have to serve everyone. So there's stuff that's not really that relevant to a limited environment that show up in packs. And then this kind of stuff, it makes it so all the stuff is legal in standard or whatever constructed format as things are released and have these legalities, and you just end up with so many cards and you have so many players that want to do different things, and there's definitely decks that internally they are betting on that they think are going to be the strongest decks, whether that's by design or once the pieces are already in place, they through their testing determine what's going to be the strongest. And then you kind of just have to have safety veils. In recent years, they've been more proactive about printing safety veils. Like if there's going to be anything with the graveyard, they try to have stuff that's graveyard hate, like Rest in Peace, Soul Guide Lantern, Leyline of the Void. I think those are all currently standard legal, just in case, because it's really negative if you have a broken graveyard deck and no way to interact with the graveyard. And you want to make sure you have tools like into the flood mod that can fight through that if that ends up being an aspect of your environment. But this is stuff that broadly I consider things that we don't have to do in Cube, and Cube is better for it. The cube is better for us not incorporating these aspects of constructed, where if something is too strong, you can just not have it in your cube. In the pursuit of good games, we don't have to have stuff that is unfun strong and unfun opposition to stuff that is unfun strong. We don't need high noon, we don't need into the flood mod a fight over high noon, but we don't need Cory Steel Cutter to make it so we need cards like High Noon, right? We can just dial everything back and say, you're playing your creatures, I'm playing Elusive Otter, I have Monstrous Rage, you have Fatal Push, and we can just stick to these principles of things that we know that are fun. And that High Noon into the Flood Mod dynamic actually reminds me of a more extreme example from Modern. These days in Modern, I always splash green on my prowess decks, and a little bit of that is that the first surveil land is pretty nice in your Fetchland decks, especially if you got like Mistress Bobble, you're going for Delirium, just kind of plays really well there. But the green mana is also relevant because there is a setup. Granted, this is not the strongest thing going on, it's kind of come in and out of popularity, but there is something that some opponents are going to have in the room, certainly if you play a large enough tournament. It's an interaction between Leyline of the Guild Pact and Scion of Draco. The Leyline makes it so that all your lands are every type and all your creatures are every color. Scion of Draco only costs two mana if you have that full domain, and then it's a 4-4 flyer that's going to have vigilance, hexproof, lifelink, first strike, and trample if you have a creature of every color, which the ley line is going to give you. The scion just itself will check all those boxes. And just a giant vigilant lifelinker is going to just be unbeatable. You actually can't play a game against that with Prowess, and so you need some kind of answer. It has hexproof, and so I always have four pick your poisons in my modern sideboard now. It's a one green mana sorcery, causes your opponent to sacrifice an enchantment, a creature uh with flying, or an artifact. So it can answer either the ley line or the scion, kind of whatever the texture of the game dictates. Now, pick your poison is a fine card. It's nice to have it, it's a good interaction piece for like Urza's saga, which is a powerful but not oppressive card. You can still play games, you know, even if your opponent is making construct tokens. Um they can run away with it quickly if what they're finding with the saga is amulet of vigor and they kill you with Permeval Titan and Landrops, but I digress. Anyway, when it comes to Ley Lion Scion, Prowess just can't play a game if those pieces are assembled. So it's not like you have your thing and we're playing on. It's like you have your thing and I either have picked your poison or the game is over. Like I just can't not register that if there's any chance my opponent is going to do this. And that's not a back and forth game. It is a test to see if I can draw a specific card. So first, do you have your specific combination, which is kind of a big hallmark of why you're playing the deck in the first place, or both four of so you're not super likely to have it, but you'll have it in some of the games. And then if you have it, I either draw Pick Your Poison or I don't. And then another fun layer is Pick Your Poison doesn't play against almost any other card in the deck. So kind of just have this card that, you know, while I would put it in my sideboard probably based off of another other number of other things you could expect to see in the format, I need to have it in case this specific thing happens, and it's not even good if that thing doesn't happen. I can play it and it gives me a prowess trigger no matter what, but it just doesn't always have something that it kills. And that is just not fun gameplay. That is fine to have in constructed. There's nothing there that needs to be removed from a constructed format, but there's nothing there that is appealing, that is enjoyable, that I would want to translate into a cube environment. Just kind of being aware of where games can break down, how you can put players in positions where they're not playing a game, they just either have a specific answer or they don't, that's really unfun. And I want to clarify, every game, I mean almost every game of magic does break down to eventually there is some threat that ends the game. Either you have the answer or you don't, sure. But if we're talking about just basic we are playing creatures and removal spells, eventually you won't have an answer. When we get into specific textures of you need a destroy target artifact for enchantment effect, and there's just not that many of them, and there's not that many removal spells for them, and drawing them is questionably useful. The game, a texture of that is just not that interesting as a player. Like it's it's kind of fun to do like the big Ley Line Scion thing. I get that. Like, it's fine to have that in a cube, but you want to then make sure that the cube also has other really big things going on. And so if you want to have Ley Line Scion on the cube, you probably would not also want to have prowess in that cube. It's not very fun. You're talking about turning the knobs in one deck and also one of the knobs in a cube being the present archetypes. I think that if you want to do something that's potentially oppressive, making sure there's a range of things where a game can still happen instead of just a check to see if you drew a specific narrow card, that is something that I consider important for driving fun in cube draft and gameplay. Like one of my most disliked cube cards going back many years, for a long time, mote was in the Magic Online Vintage Cube. Four mana white enchantment, two white white, creatures without flying can't attack. And mote just kind of breaks down in a couple ways that make it unappealing. One, it's not powerful in a proactive way. You don't cast mote and now you have won the game. You cast mote and you ask, okay, is your opponent playing a creature deck at all? If they're just doing some other combo stuff, it doesn't even do anything. And if they have flyers, well, they can still attack with those. And so there's a question of if it's powerful at all. You can't just put it in a deck. It's like a card that you can lean on in some matchups, maybe it's a sideboard card, and then if it is strong, your opponent either has a disenchant effect or they don't. Then the game is alright, how many draw steps does it take them for it to show up, and what can you do to win the game in the meantime? The moat just kind of sidesteps the aspect of a game, and instead we're kind of doing Candyland, which, you know, there's there's there's an argument. I I've been convinced that Candyland is still a game. I just think that there are many games that are more fun than drawing one card at a time and seeing who would win based off of the order of the deck. And that's just my sensibility. Some people like moat. You're allowed to play moat in your own cubes, but I think that I have presented why that's not the kind of thing that I like in my cube. So for my sensibilities, cube is an environment that through your own curation empowers you to level a playing field where everybody is engaging on similar terms, and most of the cards will play most of the time. That's really what I try to do in Cube. And, you know, I think that kind of the big overarching point here when I talk about my experience in Constructed and forming my cube design is that Constructed shows me a lot of things that I don't want to translate to Cube. I take the good, I leave the bad on the sidelines, and I try to get players tools in their hands to play games with cards that will generally always play. Sometimes they do things more extreme. When the lane is open, when you're really doing your thing, your deck is naturally going to be better. I don't need cards that stop the game from happening because naturally there's going to be friction in getting the best possible deck. And the other archetypes on the cube are also informed by the presence of the best possible version of any archetype that I'm trying to include. Even though my knowledge is going to be a lot wider when it comes specifically to Prowess, I've played against the other decks so many, and I have such a good idea of what those decks are trying to do and how they can win that those decks are going to be represented in a way where they are strong and they'll be back and forth, and the best possible versions of those decks are also going to be very powerful in the environment without having to introduce any cards that ever say one player just can't play this game. And cards with similar textures to that that just kind of end games are definitely a part of retail limited too. A lot of sets tend to have quote unquote unbeatable rares. There's some cards that show up and the game is just over. And it can be fun to pursue how to draft those. I know that solving a limited environment is a big part of the fun. You know, when it comes to build arounds, that tends to be more rewarding than just having like the chase and the most powerful mythic rares or things of that nature. But kind of the point of why I'm talking about these examples in Constructed and why I value constructed to inform my cube duration is that those really strong rares are kind of just an aspect of limited. It kind of has to be there. It goes back to what I was saying about limited serving a lot of masters. Sometimes those cards are just really too strong and limited and don't really see play anywhere else. But even then, they're always kind of designed with at least one kind of player in mind. Even if they don't show up in your commander tables or in constructed environments, somebody's playing them on the kitchen table. And you know, sometimes just those specific limited cards. It does is also good just to give newer players access to a rare that's very hard to beat. They're often not going to be able to draft decks that are as consistent, as coherent as the stronger players of the table. And you don't just want the stronger player to win every time, you want to keep the new players coming back, and so sometimes juiced rares for limited are an aspect of that. And when it comes to cube, I do generally prefer a more narrow power band, but then I do also, for that reason, think that a wider power band can be an aspect of the fun. Certainly if you're playing with players of a wide range of experiences, some cards are just stronger than others. Absolutely, when it comes to decks, decks are easily just some decks are stronger than other decks, and it's important that newer players have some ability to beat the stronger players, and that's just an aspect of what keeps people coming back. And I will say that that specific retail limited example of just the unbeatable mythic rare is actually a better implementation of how to do that kind of thing in Q, but then the constructed example of having answers for everything. Sometimes when the answers lead to games where the games just aren't competitive because the strong thing is just destroyed by the answers, it's gonna be something like Ancient Grudge, uh destroy target artifact with flashback, and it's gonna get two for one if you want to keep an artifact deck in check. Like making it so that the artifact deck gets completely smooshed some of the time directly by hate isn't more fun than somebody just playing an unbeatable, hex-proof, lifelink individual card. So I've definitely come to value power outliers, definitely in the forms of like appealing and fun dragons, or just something aesthetically cool that somebody, even if they're less experienced about magic, can look at and be like, yeah, that card is super cool and can conceive of being fun to play with. Like giant stat monster is really fun to play with, mote is not. So yeah, I'd rather see kind of the oraboroids of the world in cube much more so than the moat and the high noons. And then the last aspect of Constructed that really informs my cube design, I think much more so than retail limited. I'm not as strong of a retail limited player as Constructed, I don't think, by a long shot. So maybe somebody who is very good at retail limited will correct me on this. But I think that Constructed is much more about what is called a fundamental turn in games of magic, where there's a specific turn where generally in the format you really have to be doing your thing by that turn. The loudest example, um, I guess it's kind of a meme in some ways, but modern was long established as a turn four format, which it was initially announced by wizards that's how they were gonna curate it, where decks generally couldn't win before turn four. And it's more true that your deck should be able to win, or at least establish itself, be able. stop the opponent from winning and being on the path to win with whatever its gameplay is that needs to be set up by turn four. So it's more like do your thing by turn four than you have at least until turn four, which I think is what they always meant by that, or at least that's how they understood it, but it was really taken the other way by a lot of players, which is why it's become kind of a meme that moderns a turn four format. Doesn't mean you can't win by turn three. It means you need to have a plan to have the game on lock by turn four. And if you're not doing that, there's a good chance that your deck's not competitive, but I'm getting away from it a little bit. So when it comes to fundamental turns, it's just like the idea is your game plan needs to be in motion and on way to winning the game or be able to disrupt other decks that are approaching this fundamental turn and trying to win on that turn. So the Prowess deck in standard over the course of the last year, it's a deck that gold fishing when Monstrous Rage was legal you could win on turn three and that's also true in the current build with Wild Rides to be a big hasty pump spell, but just in the average games played often you're trying to close on turn four or five. If you're not established by turn four you're going to run into a lot of problems. So that's kind of what I mean when I talk about fundamental turn an aspect of it is how quickly you goldfish, certainly with proactive decks, but not the extremes, more the average. The extremes do matter though, if a deck can win on turn three, you can't do nothing on turns two and three. Like your best possible draws is an aspect how the games play out you need to have interaction on turn three four if you expect to lose then or before then. You can't wait until turn four to stop something from happening on turn three. That's just math. And that fundamental turn tends to line up with the other proactive decks in the environment the Badgermole cub decks, they can put a craterhoof behemoth onto the battlefield on turn four. They can do some really filthy things on turn three just the mana output of Badgermole Cub is so high. So you need to get going early and the other decks like there's Jeskai control as kind of a playable deck. There's this blue-white tempo deck with Aang and high noon that cannot by any stretch of the imagination win the game that quickly but it has the two mana high noon that can really slow these stacks down. Three mana Aang is disruption either on the stack or on the battlefield so these cards play before the game could possibly end. But the long and short of it is when you have one proactive deck and and in cube is certainly if you're in a larger cube where not all the cards show up all the time you're going to be less focused on the extremes but you do kind of want to be aware of that average case. Like maybe there's the best possible deck that goldfish is on turn three but it's just unrealistic to get all the cards even if you have all the cards unrealistic to actually happen in a game but for a lot of decks if there's a conceivable possible turn three win that means that there is a much more accessible turn four win. And so you want to be mindful of that and then once you have one proactive deck that can play really well and try to win on turn four the other proactive decks have to be racing in that way. And sometimes the decks can feel like ships passing the night if both players are proactive and trying to win on the same turn but at least it's not the case that one player just loses because they're a full turn behind. If you have a combo deck centered around resolving a five mana spell you will often just be a dog to a deck that goldfishes on turn three you're going to be fundamentally disadvantaged. There's ways to make up for this you can have a lot of removal or relevant disruption for the deck trying to win on turn three but a lot of the other stuff in your deck is going to have to be cheap to allow you to buy time to get to turn five. You'll also probably want to be presenting something that is not vulnerable to the same kind of interaction that breaks up the turn three combo deck. If you have a five mana spell that loses to terminate which is what is breaking up whatever is happening that's winning the game on turn three, it's just going to be all around a worse deck slower and vulnerable to the same thing. So that's an aspect of understanding fundamental turns as well is that something that is a bit slower has to be more resilient or make up for that gap in some other way. So it doesn't mean that your deck has to win by the fastest fundamental turn of the format. It just means that once you establish how quickly decks win, then it's really important to have interaction that comes online some number of turns before the game can actually conceivably end. So a lot of my cubes definitely talk about the tempo tubert, even the original recipe tubert there's a lot of really efficient stuff and once you have efficient stuff that can win the game very quickly you need efficient disruption to buy more time. Now retail limited generally things are evaluated more in terms of abstract power level of archetypes and a lot more things just come down to individual card assessments. Retail limited is just a lot smaller than any constructed format. You're drafting just generally one set at a time you know it was a time where you would draft a full block and that would be the same general card pool as block constructed but less consistent and weaker decks on average but I'm getting a little bit away from it. Just what I mean is that when it comes to booster draft the interaction you play is the interaction that's available in the packs and nothing you can do can change that. When it comes to cube you can change the interaction you can build a deck you can seed an archetype and you can determine what that archetype is trying to do and what kind of interaction you want to have in the cube to fight against this archetype and how efficient you want to be based off of how quickly you would expect this deck to be able to win. Whereas in retail limited you're going to be mindful of the best rares they're just not always going to show up in in cube you know I bias towards cubes where all or most of the cards are consistently drafted. At larger sizes you can hand wave this a little bit but there's still just going to be games where the best possible thing does come together and if the tools available in the cube don't meet those best possible games then those games just aren't going to be very good. You kind of gotta be a little bit aware of the best possible even if you're more designing for the average an example that's kind of loud to me in cube design is these days in the vintage cube on Magic on Lime the storm package for the storm archetype has gotten very small. There's not a lot in addition to just the Underworld breach brain freeze lion's eye diamond package and that's a composition of cards that just wins the game on turn two. You play Lion's eye diamond you play underworld breach you crack the diamond you have enough cards to brain freeze yourself that because that's going to give you enough graveyard to immediately get the Alliance eye diamond back and keep brain freezing. That will just win the game on turn two. It's not going to come up too often it you can't always get all of those cards kind of difficult to get a three card combo in a large cube blah blah blah it's only going to come up so often but when it does come up the games are very often not going to be competitive and that's kind of why it makes sense for this package to be kind of small but it existing puts a lot of pressure on making sure that the cube does have the zero mana interaction your force of wills your griefs what have you which of course are in the Magic Online Vintage Cube I'm mostly just saying that when you have decks that can conceivably win that quickly you have to have interaction that's a turn or two faster than that so you don't just lose every time that it happens. Similar to Time Vault being a potential option for a powered cube I like Time Vault. Time Vault B combo being part of your cube does necessitate a lot of main deck playable artifact destruction that costs one maybe even zero mana two kind of at the most because if it costs more than two you won't always be able to do anything about the time vault combo. And that's what I'm trying to get across when it comes to a set cube or playing retail limited you play the strongest cards you have access to you try to draft the colors and archetypes you believe to be the strongest and you play the interaction that is available. As a cube designer you can modulate these knobs and you can change the individual archetypes you can change the interaction points you can change the other archetypes and you can also kind of change how quickly a deck can win what the fundamental turn decks are going for is. And when they're designing for retail limited it doesn't make sense to make it so that the common removal available is strong against the best rares and strategies. You want players to be able to explore and find out what the best things are and you want players be excited to open the best the most powerful individual cards and if you aim the removal at being strong against those cards then suddenly the middle tier of the power level is just very weak because it's just bad against the common disruption whereas in Cube the power level will often be a lot higher and again I'm speaking to my own designs my own sensibilities I like a low mana curve I like powerful cards which necessitates the inclusion of efficient removal and a lot of that those those are knobs that I'm turning around the fundamental turns of what the proactive decks can do which establishes how quickly the reactive decks need to be reacting where again if you're very in touch with retail limited maybe fundamental turns is a bigger aspect of it than I understand but I think mostly players are trying to play the strongest cards, strongest archetypes and the most efficient options for removal and just kind of an aggregate determining is it better to have this threat? Is it better to have this piece of removal and it's less so about when the game is expected to conclude because there tends to just be a wider range of how long this game how long games will last in retail limited which I think is generally true the lower power level a format gets so when your cube is at a lower power level fundamental turns is something you're going to think about a lot less when you come to cubes like of course vintage cube and the tempo tubert which are based off of a lot of historically powerful constructed cards, then it makes a lot of sense to focus in on how quickly decks can possibly win, what turn they are trying to win on, how consistently they can do that, and how efficient you need to make the interaction so that games can actually be played in a meaningful way when these decks are doing their thing. And so I suppose the ultimate takeaway here today is that if you are interested in curating cubes at a higher power level, competitive constructed and experience with constructed formats and kind of following a deck through the changing landscape of constructed formats, be it rotation, new cards being printed, cards being banned, even just general metagame shifts is really going to inform what individual decks are trying to do and help you establish your own metagame have other archetypes playing in similar spaces with interaction points that lead to compelling games and some back and forths as opposed to the safety valve approach of having just stuff that's really powerful like putting underworld breach in your cube but putting in Soul Guide Lantern in your cube so that somebody could blow up your graveyard. The game just ends very quickly one way or the other I think that the Soul Guide Lantern game in that example is even less fun because some of those are games that continue despite the fact that the actual gameplay is over as early as turn one. And so for me my experience with competitive constructed it has absolutely shown me ways to build and adapt in archetype. Working on and playing my own deck has shown me what the opposition to that archetype can look like and ways that are more fun or less fun to build the opposition once I have an idea for one thing I want to seed into a cube. And then that concept of fundamental turn is something that definitely is a big aspect of my cube design which I feel is more in line with competitive constructed than it is with retail limited and is something that very much informs my cube design process. I'm gonna own that my script was a little bit looser today. I had some bullet points that I definitely wanted to hit. I hope that I shared some ideas that you found interesting and useful or at least entertaining some food for thought for your own cube curation or if you're somebody that does things differently more power to you. I hope you enjoyed this breakdown of some things that I'm thinking about as I work on my own cube environments and how competitive constructed magic definitely influences my personal designs. As always thank you for listening for taking the time to like comment review subscribe share whatever you do to support the podcast take care of yourselves look out for your neighbors be well be good and I'll be back next week talking more Cube later gamers.