Shoebox Event Report

Ryan Overturf talks through his experience attending the first ever Shoebox event, highlighting the various Cubes that he drafted over the weekend. 

Eiganjo Drift 

Budget Synergy Cube

Spicy Ramen Cube

The Ball Pit

The Fire Swamp

Bonus Cube: 100 Black Lotuses

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What's up, gamers? Welcome back to 180 MTG. My name is Ryan Overturf, and this week I'm going to be talking about my experience at Shoebox, which just happened a little bit over a week ago here in St. Paul, so a hometown event. If you're not familiar, Shoebox was something of a celebration of casual magic. This year was the first shoebox event. I hope the first of many. I had a really fun time there. There was a lot going on. I personally spent my time in the hall at the cube main event. So I was cubing the whole time I was at Shoebox. There was a lot of other stuff going on. There was Commander, there was a Team Limited event, which is on the more competitive side, but then there was more bizarre limited events. Shivam Bot ran a chaos brawl sealed deck. It was kind of wild. Sounds like people had fun with that. Nick Floyd, the creator of Dan Dan, was there. Nick Floyd, a fellow Minnesotan. So a lot of cool and creative people coming together to just celebrate what is fun about magic. For the Cube event, there was no monetary prizes. If you had 3-0 to draft, you would get a pin for 3-0ing that draft. And then there was a cut to top 64 after some number of drafts, and the winner got a cube trophy, which is, you know, nice, you're playing for pride, you get something from the mantle, but low stakes. Mostly people are there for the love of the game, and I really felt that in the atmosphere there. For the most part, everybody was super friendly. It was a lot of fun meeting with so many cube curators and players and just talking about design and what we love about magic. And yeah, just a lot of really fun people that are really great energy. I had a blast at Shuebox. This isn't the first cube event I've played, but this is the first that I've played at this scale, and I also pushed myself a bit out of my comfort zone. So I did commentary for KubeCon a couple years ago, but I wasn't engaging the same way a player does, really getting into cubes that I'd never played before. I didn't do any of that. I was pretty much working the full weekend. I had a really weird schedule, so I don't know that I cubed at all when I was at KubeCon, which is unfortunate. I want to go back this year as a player. I very much intend to do that. And I was a part of a cube event that was ran at Lodestone late in 2024, and I just kind of stuck to stuff that was familiar. I drafted one of my own cubes and I drafted a powered cube, so I didn't really push myself to do anything out of the ordinary for me. And so I've been listening to a lot of Lucky Paper Radio. They do a ton more cube events that like to show up and do what they call going full random. When you play a cube event, you log into, or at least the cube events happening now all run on something called the Hedron Network, because cube events run a bit differently than your typical competitive magic format, where if you are all playing standard or seal deck, for example, you're going to be using Swiss pairings every round. You play against somebody with a similar record. For cube events, what the Hedron network allows you to do is play against players or just in the cube you signed up for. And even if you're in round four, you can B3O and play against a player that's 0-3 because you are seated based off of your preference. And then within the Hedron network, you get to rank the cubes you most want to play, as well as to rank some cubes on the other side. You can choose cubes that you want to avoid. So you get a list of everything that's in the event. You can prioritize some, you can deprioritize others, but then going full random is just listing no priorities and drafting whatever they put in front of you. And generally speaking, I'm a pretty particular person. I like what I like, I don't like what I don't like, but with shoebox coming up and just getting a feel for how other people are engaging with these events and how they enjoy them, I wanted to try that experience out to see how it spoke to me. I didn't want to just go and prioritize something that looked familiar. I wanted to draft things that I wouldn't normally draft. And for day one, I thought that full random really made sense because I didn't even want to pick the thing that looked the most weird to me. I just wanted to experience this event as a player, just get a feel for what it's like to do that full random thing. So I'm gonna have a link in the show notes to the Cube Cobra page for every cube that I drafted over the weekend. And I'm also just gonna kind of go over my drafts. I'm not gonna share like decklist photos. A big part of this is I didn't look over almost any of these cube lists, even the ones that I did look at, I barely looked at before drafting them, or maybe I listened to a podcast about them. So I had some insights. I wasn't fully in the dark when it came to day two, but on day one, I barely knew anything about the cubes that I drafted. But let's just go chronologically here. I'm gonna talk about the cubes I drafted in order, what my experience was like drafting them, how my decks turned out, and how the matches went. And you know, they'll give more or less details based off of what was more fun or interesting as the event won on. But mostly I'm just sharing stories. I'm not here to critique any of these cubes. I just want to share what my experience was like. And if you're familiar with these cubes, then there's some insights here. If you're interested in my thoughts on them, certainly those will come out. But then I think more than that, I want to speak to people that have never played a cube event just to give you an idea of what you'd be getting into and to share just how much fun that I had at Shoebox. So starting day one, I get randomly assigned to a cube called I Gonjo Drift. I Gonjo Drift is curated by Judge Bones. If you don't know Bones, super cool dude, has designed a ton of cubes, is involved in a lot of cube events. He was working shoebox, he was very involved there, had multiple cubes in the event, certainly knows what he's doing and contributes a lot to the community. So shout out Bones for I Gonjo Drift. This is a rules modified cube. So I didn't really I had heard of this cube. I didn't really know how the rules modification worked, how it impacted gameplay. I knew it was a big rules modification, and this is something that I don't usually work with in my own designs, so I never really read much about it. So I get assigned to I Gonjo Drift, I sit down at the table, and I'm like trying to get the cube Cobra Pay to load up my phone, to read a little bit, but I also don't want to slow the draft down, so I get a rough idea of what's going on. The big thing happening in the cube, each player starts with a land on the battlefield. The land is mech hanger from Kamagawa and Yan Dynasty. It taps for colorless mana, or you can tap it for one mana of any color, but that can only be used to cast pilots or vehicles. And then for three mana, you can tap it and target vehicle becomes an artifact creature until end of turn. So as the rules modification of starting with the mech hanger implies, and the name I Gonjo Drift suggests, I Gonjo Drift is a cube that's very long on vehicles. A lot of the gameplay is about casting vehicles, crewing them, and making attacks kind of based off of that. So a lot of vehicles, that's what's going on here. Very thematic cube. So the mech hanger, you use it to fix your mana and to crew vehicles in some spots as well. Importantly for the gameplay of the cube, the mech hanger you start with, it enters tapped. So if you're playing first, it's tapped on your first turn. But if you're playing second, you will untap it, and then when you make your land drop, you'll have access to two lands as you play your first turn of the game. So pretty significant rules modifier there. Impacts how play and draw play out. Before starting the draft, I read the mech hanger, but I don't think I really internalized even what the card did. Certainly not the impact it would have on the draft. And I fumbled my way through this draft a little bit. I know that in the draft, for the most part, I drafted the strongest cards that I saw and tried to figure out what colors were open, but I still found myself scrapping for playables at the end of the draft. Another thing about this cube, Bones has it set up so you draft three packs of 13 cards. And I think if you know what you're doing or like pay attention and know what the rules modification does to the cube, it's fine to draft a little bit lighter on playables because the mech hanger, it will fix your mana if you're smart about it. Uh, spoiler alert, I wasn't very smart about it. And I certainly could have drafted better. I ended up with a fine deck, but it was rough around the edges. I think that starting with a land on the battlefield is going to incentivize you trimming some lands from your deck and applying more spells. And I think that that's also something that Bones is fighting against by giving you a couple fewer cards in every pack, so you can't just really freely exploit starting with that land on the battlefield. It's a big deal just in general by how many vehicles have one pip in the cube. And there's a decent clip of pilots as well, some with one pip, some with two colors, but then the mech hanger gets you most of the way there, becomes pretty easy to splash, at least the right cards in this environment, uh, because that mech hanger can make one mana of any color. If you have a pilot that only costs one pip, it's kind of colorless. And that's kind of where my draft starts, both by me taking the strongest card in the pack, but me not realizing the implication of it. I opened up this draft on Demonic Junker, which is a vehicle for six and a black that has affinity for artifacts. Long and short of it, it has a decent body, crews to enters the battlefield, destroys one of your opponent's creatures, some extra text there. That's mostly what it does. Has affinity for artifacts. I know that this card is pretty strong. It's a two for one, but it's a vehicle, but mostly it's interaction, it's a two for one. I'm into it. And in my mind, I think I have a really strong black card. I hadn't really processed the significance of the mech hanger. Because you start with that and play, this card only has one black pip. In this environment, it's pretty much functionally colorless. No matter what colors you're playing, the mech hanger will allow you to cast a card like Demonic Junker. You just have to use the hanger for the black mana. And so all of pack one, I'm drafting looking at, alright, well, I picked up a black card first. I'm gonna look at what the black cards in the pack are. At the same time, I was looking for other potential power outliers, what the strongest cards in the pack were. I know that late in this pack I saw Halia guided by light, which I think is a quite strong card. A lot of cards in this cube. The power band's pretty wide. A lot of the cards were like limited filler kind of cards. Hallia is a card that can potentially draw you an extra card every turn, has a pretty solid body, the warp ability there makes it very good for crewing vehicles. I wasn't gonna pass that, certainly not to what I relative to what I had picked up in the draft. And I did get a black-white land in pack one, so I kind of thought that I was drafting maybe a black-white deck, but Hollia was really the only white card that I got in pack one. Didn't feel like white was open, which was weird to get such a strong white card late, but anyway. Pack one, I got some strong cards. I was confused about what colors I was and what mana I had access to. The lands, the mana fixing in this cube are a little bit weird. It doubles up on fast lands and slow lands, and then there's bridges and tapped gain life lands. So outside of the mech hanger really fixing you for vehicles and pilots, the mana is pretty modest. And while I don't remember what I picked over these cards, there were two cards in pack one that when I played against them, I thought, man, I really wish I picked that up. One of them I strongly considered picking. I want to say that I saw it early in the pack, maybe I even opened it and took the junker over it. But Daring Thief is a strong one, two and a blue for a two-three human rogue that whenever it becomes untapped, you may exchange control of target non-land permanent you control, and target permanent and opponent control that shares a card type with it. So, with this, there's a decent clip of tokens in the cube, a lot of vehicles. You can just trade some crappy card for your opponent's best card, and because there's so many vehicles, this cube is very long on vehicles, it's kind of designed around that. So can't remember exactly why I didn't draft Daring Thief in Pack 1, despite identifying it as a card that seemed pretty strong in the environment. And then especially when I picked up Hostage Taker early in pack two as a strong blue-black card, really wish I had the Daring Thief. And my mana ended up kind of awkward. I was kind of trying to figure out what colors were open, and I saw just kind of a number of strong cards later in the pack than I thought they should be. So figuring out the balance of that with modest mana fixing, and also just bungling the fact that my in my mind, my strong black card, demonic junker, was actually colorless. I absolutely could approach this draft better. So some of this is absolutely on me. And then the other card that kind of got away from me in pack one was Captain Rex Nebula, one red white for a 2-2, notably a human pilot employee, an employee because it's from Infinity, as beginning a combat your turn, it turns a creature, or sorry, a non-land permanent you control, becomes a vehicle with power and toughness equal to its mana value and gives it crew to. And it also has its ability where when that permanent damages a player, you roll a d6, and if you land on the damage dealt, you sacrifice it and deal that much damage. Scary if it never hits, it's not what came up in the games. Mostly, this card is stronger than I read it as because this cube has a decent clip, like kind of a lot of creatures that have mana value higher than their printed power and toughness. There's also a number of synergies with crewing, reasons to tap creatures that just turning another thing into a vehicle was stronger than I understood it to be. The mana for this would have been awkward for my deck. I was base blue black, I went a little bit out of my way to splash Halia and one other white card in my final deck, and I wasn't thrilled about it. I was off color in one or more games in the actual draft. I don't know how cat how castable Captain Rex would have been, but I didn't register that it was a pilot. I was busy reading all the other text on the card and really not uh immediately understanding how strong the text box was. Never got to the fact that I was actually kind of close to casting it. If I'm already splashing white, then my mech hanger does give me the red mana to cast Captain Rex Nebula. And Rex Nebula and that uh aforementioned Daring Thief did both put the hurt out of me in round one here. My deck did come together in some ways. The hostage taker is a really strong blue-black card. I was happy having the junker, had some strong cards, found some pirate synergies, a number of pirates that entered the battlefield and generated some value in one way or the other. In pack two, I picked up Mary Reed and Anne Bonnie. This is a card from the um Assassin's Creed set. One blue red, three, three, legendary human assassin, pirate. I I kept finding it really funny that my deck had pirates, but the mech hangar fixes mana for pilots. So the near rhyme there certainly costing my mana base. But uh Mary Reed and Bonnie, 3-3 with haste, tap, draw a card, then discard a card. And whenever you discard an island, pirate, or vehicle, create a tap treasure token. On rate, Mary Reed and Bonnie, just kind of strong in this environment. I mentioned that this cube kind of has a lot of creatures that have mana value higher than their printed power and toughness. And when you just see a creature on rate with a keyword, just on the curve 3 mana 3-3, actually that's gonna play pretty well in this cube, at least based off of my very limited experience with it. And this card would have been one of the stronger cards in my deck, but I didn't pick up a single red fixing land. There were multiple players, I think, in a row in the draft that were blue-red, I found out after the fact. They were on the R side of the table. That's why I was past Mary Reed and Bonnie, but I just didn't really get a sniff of blue-red fixing. I know I passed like a spire bluff canal in pack one, but then I just kind of had to figure out actually casting the cards that I had drafted. So my band ended up rough. I definitely blew it in some ways. Couldn't play the Mary Reed and Bonnie, but ended up with just kind of a couple playables short. I ended up actually playing 18 lands, I think, because if you know what you're doing and you draft well, you maybe trim a land or two in this environment. I didn't know what I was doing. I drafted kind of poorly, and so my deck was a little bit rough around the edges. So I wasn't able to play one of my best cards, but I had kind of a functional pirate deck with a couple synergies, some things that didn't come together, and some mana woes. But my deck was fine. I ended up losing round one to that Daring Thief, to that Captain Rex Nebula Nebula. Actually, in game three, my opponent played Smuggler's Copter. I just kind of laughed about that. The cube has kind of a wide power band, which some people have more of an appetite for than others. I mentioned there's a lot of like retail limited level cards, and then that card is like a constructed power level outlier. So it was just kind of funny to have this back and forth match against a deck that I think was generally stronger, better drafted than my deck, and then in game three you just lose to what was by far the strongest card I would see the entire draft. But them's the breaks, you shake hands, you move on. Uh big thing that happened in match one here that I thought was really fascinating is based off of the mech hanger that you start with entering tapped, a lot of discussion going on. My opponent and I were talking about, well, do you want to play first or draw first? Is it stronger to untap with it? And other people at the table were talking about it. Some of them had played the cube before, and some of it is a factor of mana curve. If you have one mana and three mana spells, it's pretty good to be on the play, especially if you open up on a one, cast a three mana spell on turn two, you're really humming. But then on the draw, if you have a lot of two mana spells, a deck on the draw can take a lot more advantage of that. And then another factor, my deck was, I think, a little clunky, a little weak. My worst cards were kind of not really playable, even if I had some really strong cards within my deck. And so I chose to take the draw every time that I had the option in this draft, which I thought was really cool. That's something that he used to do in retail limited, certainly in sealed deck, you know, 20 years ago. The cards were a lot weaker. Um, so many of the commons were just kind of junkier, and you had that wide power band, junky commons, strong rares. And so being on the draw, especially if your deck was a little slower or a little weaker, maybe both, you can leverage the extra card there. And the extra mana on the mech hanger really lets you take advantage of that. So I thought it was really cool that it was an environment, you know, and I could be wrong, and it could be different based off of how I draft, you know, both that mana curve consideration and also just drafting the cube with a better understanding of what's happening in the environment. But it was really cool to me be playing an environment where I felt right taking the draw. In round two, I played against Anthony Maddox of Lucky Paper Radio fan. If you don't listen to Lucky Paper Radio, really fun podcast, really enjoy their stuff. Anthony, of course, one of the people giving me that inspiration to go full random in this event. Not really a lot to report in our match. We played a couple awkward games. My junker came to be a two for one and take advantage of that. We played these games where both of us controlled more vehicles than we did creatures, which is, I'm sure, something that comes up in this cube. Definitely the less familiar you are with it, the less you drafted it. After the draft, I know that I felt long on vehicles, and that's something that I would try to prioritize differently the next time that I drafted the cube. And I had I was mindful of it, but there was already so much else to keep track of and things I was getting wrong. So having a better selection of creatures, a smaller selection of vehicles is an aspect of something I would advise if you were to draft I Gonjo Drift in the future. But kind of uneventful games. My deck just shows up a little bit more than Anthony's. And then in round three, I played against Kai, somebody who is involved, I know, at least in organizing and running KubeCon. They were super cool. We had a really funny match where Kai got by the cube way worse than I did. So there is a card in the cube. I don't know how long either of these cards are gonna remain in the cube. Maybe this first one will stick in, but uh Kai did something really funny. So they cast a card called Anchor to Reality, two blue blue, sorcery as an additional cost to cast this spell, sacrifice an artifact or a creature, search your library for an equipment or vehicle card, put that card on the battlefield, then shuffle. If it has mana value less than the sacrifice permanence mana value, you scry to. So long and short of it, it's a four mana tinker, but it can only find equipment or vehicles. So the idea there in Gaijo Drift is that you're going to find a massive vehicle inputter on the battlefield. The vehicle that Kai found was a Reaver Titan, a seven mana 1010 vehicle that has protection from mana value three or less. When it attacks, it deals five damage to each opponent and it crews four. So Kai's battlefield, they only had one thing, they sacked it to go find Reaver Titan, and then it's a giant 10-10 vehicle, but then the untap for their next turn, and they go, Oh, protection from mana value three or less means I can't actually use the mech hanger to turn this into a creature, which is kind of the idea there. The whole plan was alright, well, I'll go and find this big vehicle, but I can fire it up with the mech hanger, and then that just doesn't work with this giant uh vehicle. So I I told Kai that they should file for comp. But anyway, uh that was one where uh kind of a deck that didn't really work or an interaction that didn't really work showed up. So that put me at 2 1 despite my fumbles with the draft, and I did have. To read a lot of cards here, basically everything that's at like a retail limited power level, to the extent that I read it maybe during previous season, I do not retain any of that information. So, in a way, this is the kind of cube that I would generally avoid because it's kind of overwhelming to need to read so much. But I've kind of been honing the skills of tuning in or out relevant information. And I guess I tuned out too many things. I will reiterate that I could have absolutely drafted better if I understood that rules modification, what the mech hanger did better. But anyway, at the end of it, I didn't feel fatigued. My matches went fine, my deck was fine, one, two, one, and that made me feel a little bit more energized to jump into whatever random cube somebody would put in front of me. For my second draft at Shoebox, the Hedron Network randomed me into the Budget Synergy Cube. Pretty straightforward name there. Didn't feel compelled to read the Cube Cobra page or look at the list at all here, but I am looking at it now, just kind of talk about the cube in retrospect. To define budget, it looks like they go for no card that's more expensive than about $3, which doesn't really impact your experience as a drafter. I know with budget that rules out like Fetchlands, Shocklands, so I was expecting a modest power level, and that's what the cube environment did deliver. The cube list, it doubles up on Painlands. It seems like it's fully singleton at a glance, except there's two copies of Painlands. That's something that I generally don't like. Oh, there's four Ash Barons. I kind of just like sampling from the entire history and all of the options. In drafting this cube, I ended up with multiple copies of one or more of the Painlands in my three-color deck, and I thought that changing that second cycle of Painlands just into Trilands, crumbling Acropolis et al. from Shards of Lara and Cons of Tarkir, that's something that I would have preferred, but everybody does it their own way. Totally fine to do it this way. I ended up opening a pack where Revelark was far and away the strongest card, which I suspect is pretty common for packs with Revelark in this cube. The card I don't think has ever really been worth much money, but it is a tremendously powerful card that does not really require synergy to execute on. Four and a white for a four-three flying elemental. When Revelark leaves the battlefield, return up to two target creature cards with power two or less from your graveyard to the battlefield, and evoke for five and a white. This was not close to being close the strongest card in the pack that I opened. I knew that once I picked it, I was going to go out of my way to play Revel Ark, and then there's some amount of considering making sure that I get cheap creatures to return Revel Arc to the battlefield. I actually didn't end up too long on that. I think I only had about eight creatures that Revelark actually returned, but some of that is just that the rate of 5 mana 4-3 flyer in these lower power environments, that body, I just attacked with Revel Arc a lot. There's enough going on there. Like this card is definitely a power level outlier in this environment. Amusingly, the best cards that I had to synergize with my Revelark were not creatures that Revel Arc can return to the battlefield. It checks the power of a creature. My best cards with Revelark were Mistmetal Vanisher, a two and blue-white hybrid creature. It throws three mana, but one is blue-white hybrid for a 3-2. That whenever it becomes tapped, you exile up to one target non-land, non-token permanent, then return it to the battlefield to under its owner's control at the beginning of the next end step. So with Revelark, it's a leaves the battlefield trigger, not a dies trigger. So if you're able to blink it, you get a Revel Arc trigger there. That came up. The Vanisher also was just a pretty strong card. I had a few other ETBs, and then it does just remove blockers when you're getting aggressive, which is the slant my deck ended up taking. And then I also had Kiro Attentive First Year. This is a three mana, one, and two red-white hybrid mana three, three that you tap two untapped creatures you control to copy target triggered ability you control. You may choose new targets for the copy, activate only once each turn. That actually played pretty well with the vanisher. I used that once to remove two blockers. I played some fresh creatures, attack with the vanisher, copied the trigger, got in for a lot of damage. So I ended up just kind of pack one, pick one in Revel Arc, and then following the mana is kind of what I refer to. My process here, I had a pack one, pick one that I was married to. This card was so clearly stronger than the other cards that I had seen. And so any white mana fixing land I latched onto, I saw a red, white land pretty early, and I believe I saw a white black land, or maybe it was even red black, and they just ended up in Mardu because they had mana fixing there. Revelark is going to contribute to both going wide and to sacrifice decks, which is kind of what Boros and then Orzov and Rakdos. That's like that's just the overlap of these crop colors. So my seat, in my belief, was very easy to draft. My pack one pick one was one of the strongest cards I saw in any games, and I just kind of built around it and just followed the mana, drafted the colors that were open that allowed me to play my powerful cards. In my matches, the deck just kind of showed up for me. I had a little bit of card selection, I had some creatures that do some rummaging, I just had a pretty solid curve, uh well-defined with Revelark on the top end. I ended up picking up Violent Outburst in the draft, or excuse me, Violent Eruption, which is one red red red for an instant, deals four damage divided as you choose among any number of targets, and has madness for one red red. I had a small number of ways to discard this and trigger madness, like Voldar and Epicure, but honestly, this card just on rate is bonkers. This is a card that I think is too strong for Spooky Cube or strong in a way that's not fun, and Spooky Cube is both not a budget cube and a cube that I think is at a quite a bit higher power level than the budget synergy cube. So picking up Violent Eruption, that was something I was very happy to have in just kind of my aggressive Mardu deck with a couple synergies, but honestly, mostly just rates. I didn't do anything too exciting in this draft. And so my first couple matches, they very pretty easily won my way. I didn't draw the violent eruption until match three. This is I did give up one game in round three. My opponent was playing kind of a Rakdos reanimator kind of strategy, where the creatures here that you're reanimating, they're quite a bit more modest than your gristle brands. Like one of them is Arbiter of Woe, six mana, five, four for four black black. It's an additional cost to cast this, sacrifice a creature, flying. When it enters, each opponent discards a card, loses two life, and you you draw a card and you gain two life. So you don't have to sacrifice a creature if you zombify it or whatever. And uh the strongest card that uh my opponent put in was Overseer of the Damned, which is a 7 mana 5-5. Where it enters, you may destroy a creature, and then whenever a non-token creature an opponent controls dies, you get a tapped 2-2 zombie. My opponent put both these into play as reanimating, and even then I think the game I lost was kind of close. So they were doing cooler things, but just kind of jumping through too many hoops. In game one, I was too fast, and in game three, he kind of just didn't do his thing. Cast some cheap cards that did not facilitate, enable, or reanimate any large creature, and I just cast my Revel Arc and just cast Violent Eruption after Revel Arc had attacked my opponent down to four. So um mostly just drafted, cast, and attacked with creatures that were strong relative to their mana values and had some supplemental removal and spells. Um pretty straightforward approach for a pretty straightforward cube, I think. So got the trophy in the budget synergy cube. And then the way shoebox was structured, there were three drafts, Fridays, pre-drafts, Saturday, a cut to top 64 in the main event, but you could always do two more drafts on Sunday, whether you made that final cut or you just wanted to play some drafts. You could also sign up for individual drafts instead of the main event, but that was there for the main event. And then regarding that main event structure, the cut to top 64 only counted your four best drafts. So there was six possible flights, but it's only your your worst two records are drops, so only your best four drafts were used for the top 64 cut, which I think is really great. It allows you to take a breather if you're not feeling it, or if you have a more limited day, you only want to do a couple drafts for whatever reason. If you're even if you're trying to make the top 64, you could skip a couple drafts, or if you have a really bad draft, you could just play the next one, and it wouldn't punish you. You wouldn't be out of the tournament just because you owe three to one of your drafts, which I think is really cool. And when you're playing for Pride and Pins, I think that it's really good to have a tournament structure with less pressure, less uh need to do as well as possible, and still allow you to keep playing and competing. And even if you miss that top 64 cut, you can still do a couple drafts on Saturday with some structure having a start time, which I know that I really value. I like having that structure. A lot of other people were happy to go out and find people and just do pick-up drafts, which is great. I love that for them. Personally, the structure is very meaningful to me, and this kind of tournament really good for people that do value that structure. But anyway, I decided on Friday I wanted to play all three drafts, and so I jumped into one more full random draft Friday night, and I was seeded into the spicy ramen cube, which is functionally another budget synergy cube. I had heard of this cube. Uh, the conceit of this one is that each card has kind of an average price that's about the price of a pack of ramen, so another budget cube there. It allows for some slightly more expensive cards as long as there are cheaper cards to get that average out. Uh, I did play against the curator of the spicy ramen cube, Matthew, uh, I think in round two of the budget synergy cube. Super friendly guy, enjoyed chatting with him, and then went and played his cube in the next one. The Hedron Network put me there. And my pack one pick one in spicy ramen was a lot more interesting. I I once again did not review the cube cover page at all. No reason to look at the cards. I knew that this was a budget and synergistic cube, so kind of just took the same approach where I'm just gonna open the pack and try to read the draft. And pack one, pick one. I did not have any significant power level outliers. There was a couple, in my opinion, kind of boring aggressive cards. I know off the top of my head that Scrap Heap Scrounger was in the pack, which is just a really strong aggressive card, mostly colorless. You can put in any deck and beatdown, but I just played a beatdown deck, and so I wanted to try to do something more fun. I ended up pack one, pick one, taking Samwise Gamji, which is a food card that is really synergistic with certain things. There's packages and combos with Samwise, and without knowing the cube list, this is kind of a don't try this at home pick for reasons I'm about to outline. So Samwise is green, white, 2-2, legendary, half-ling peasant. Whenever another non-token creature enters the battlefield under your control, you create a food token, and you can sacrifice three foods to return target historic card from your graveyard to your hand. So I'm looking for big food payoffs. I know that there's a lot of wild stuff you can do with Cauldron Familiar. That's kind of a modern deck. I know that Cauldron Familiar is a pretty cheap card. I know I'm really looking for Academy Manufactor, 3 mana 1-3 that whenever you make a food, clue, or treasure, you would make all three instead. So there's a couple really big payoffs that exist that I think might be in the cube, but I didn't look over the list. Turns out neither of those cards are in the cube, so I'm kind of just drafting, trying to really leverage this Samwise. I ended up with a number of token makers. I got Tireless Tracker and Tireless Provisioner. This cube had the Modern Horizons 3, 3 color, Fetchland, Cycling Lands, so had some landfall stuff there. Had a decent Celestnia value deck, but I didn't hit any of the big things that I had hoped would be in the cube. I thought maybe this didn't show up in the draft or somebody else picked them, but I uh I think that the Samwise, looking at the cube list, I would have just taken one of the boring aggressive cards or at least explored a different lane there in retrospect. Samwise did not deliver uh relative to my hopes for the draft. So I ended up with the green-white deck that had some tools to go along and some synergy used to grind out value, but my strongest cards, they even then, like I had a Vergorous Gear Hulk, but I wasn't expressly aggressive. I was just kind of uh it's like Patrick Sullivan sometimes to look at a deck and say it's a little offense defense. My food deck was a little offense defense, it wasn't very focused, it wasn't the best value deck, and it certainly wasn't the best aggressive deck, and it was kind of trying to do both. Uh so round one here, I did play against Kai again, and this time Kai just ground me to dust over the course of a very long match. I did win game one, and then our game two went super long. Kai actually cast the same Elspeth Conquers Death, I believe no fewer than eight times uh in that game, and I was able to squeak out a couple points. Some of my stronger cards only cost two, so Elspeth Conquers Death couldn't answer those. But Kai drew a ton of extra cards, was leveraging a dower port mage, two mana creature from Bloomborough that says whenever one or more creatures you control leave the battlefield without dying, you draw a card. And for one and a blue, you can tap dower port mage to return another creature you control to its owner's hand. So Kai was comboing that with Baleful's tricks and some other enter the battlefield's abilities. I made a ton of food. I think Kai had the deal like 50 damage to me in game two, and we were getting really close to time in the round. Eventually, Kai won game two, and then game three, time was called. We didn't play to a conclusion, but the writing was on the wall. Kai had a much faster start than I did in game three, so I conceded. I think that getting a draw just feels weird. Like somebody should get the pin, I feel. I think that every round of these events should have a winner, and it made sense that I was gonna be the loser of that match. So I picked him up, so Kai won that one, got uh revenge from our earlier bout, uh much more functional deck this time. And then in the second round, I just got smooshed. I played against a pretty cool Golgari graveyard, goal graveyard, if you will, deck that just really understood the assignment way better than my deck did, really filled the graveyard quickly, got on the battlefield quickly in a big way, and my deck just just was not up to the task. And at that point, I did see somebody else drop from the match. When you check out in the Hedra network, so importantly for these cube events, you are playing with somebody else's cards. So the Hedra network allows you to upload a decklist photo. You post your entire pool so everybody knows what cards you have, so no cards end up walking off. We know who's responsible for what. And then at the end of a draft, there's a checkout photo where you take a picture of your pool again, upload that, a judge will come by, verify that. I saw somebody else doing that. I in general, I'll want to try to play all my rounds for these events. People came here to play, were playing for fun, but I was not having the most fun. I was pretty burned out at this point of the day. Three drafts is a lot with three cubes you never played before, and you know, I am not in contention for the pin, and this is clearly going to be one of my drafts that is dropped if I'm caring about top 64. I started out 02, and I saw somebody else checking out, and I was like, all right, I can go home. So I called it for the evening there. This is uh no shade on the spicy ramen cube. Once again, if I looked at the cube list, I would know that Sam Y is just not something I'm actively interested in. And if I hadn't just drafted a different aggressively slanted deck in a similar cube, I would have been very happy to jump on Scrap Cube Scrooger or some other aggressive creature. So once again, I blew it. This one did not go my way. And after this, I was thinking, you know, I got put into these two budget, synergistic cubes in a row. And I was thinking, I really enjoyed the experience and trying playing something really novel with Igonjo Drift, even though going into the weekend, it's something that I had not really taken interested in, really outside of my comfort zone. And I thought, you know what I'm gonna do tomorrow? I'm not gonna go full random. I'm going to explicitly prioritize in the Heatron Network playing the really weird stuff because I want to maximize this experience. So I got to signing up for my Saturday cubes, and I prioritized the ball pit and the fire swamp, and those are the two cubes that I got into. So one at a time, let's talk about what happened Saturday at Shoebox. So my first draft Saturday morning is the ball pit. I'm stoked. If you haven't heard of this one, this is a cube where you draft four packs of 15 and you play all 60 cards. This is a desert cube, meaning you have to draft every land that you play, and then you play every card that you draft. And very importantly, why the cube is called the ball pit, every card can be played face down as a chromatic sphere. This cube is curated by Jane McKinney, who is cool as hell, did a spot on Lucky Paper Radio talking about this one. And this is a cube that I saw, I know this has been to a few events, I saw a draft of it at KubeCon last year, and I thought, this really isn't for me. And that's actually something I really enjoyed about Jane's interview on Lucky Paper. She said the ball pit she wants, one of her goals for the cube is that it's going to teach you something about magic. And what you learn might be that this experience isn't for you. And I just really enjoy the self-awareness of a cube curator saying, Hey, this isn't for everybody. I'm not gonna go out of my way to try to make it so. This is just a cool specific thing, and yeah, you might not like it. You gotta know what you're signing up for. And that made me more motivated to play this cube, just that amount of self-awareness, and that really made me excited to jump into the ball pit. So it's hard to say if that's the contrarian in me who wants to do the thing that I'm told I might not like, or maybe it's the person, the part of me that enjoys the reinforcement of already thinking this isn't for me and then being told it might not be for me and having those statements line up. Regardless, the ball pit is a masterpiece and was a ton of fun to draft and play. And an element of this is that Jane is really committed to the bit. Jane actually has acquired 480 copies of Mirrored in Chromatic Sphere, importantly, the art with the ball, and every card in the ball pit is sleeved in a clear plastic sleeve with the chromatic sphere facing backwards, so you can just play it face down and it's chromatic sphere on the backside. Which is just awesome. It makes it a little bit cumbersome to shuffle because every sleeve has two cards, but it's not that big of a deal, and there is a utility there where you always know which way the packs are facing. You're never gonna shuffle cards in the wrong direction because a chromatic sphere shows you which side is up. I did actually spend a little bit of time looking at the cube cobra page for the ball pit overnight once I decided to rank cubes just to get more of an idea of what I'm going into. I knew from watching the CubeCon stream and listening to the Lucky Paper interview that this is a very overwhelming cube to draft. Every card's a modal card, and it costs you a mana to play the chromatic sphere, what cards to play face down, how you want to crack them, what mana you want to make, valuing your lands as a desert cube, trying to manage how you are winning games, and that impacts what cards you can afford to play face down. This is a tremendously complex environment, and sight on scene would have been very overwhelming for me to draft. But the information I had already absorbed made it pretty approachable, and then I also pulled up the cube cobra page. Something Jane does that I think is very cool, is she has marked and highlighted a number of cards that are frequent 3-0 cards based off of a number of drafts that have been done with the ball pit. So you can just kind of glance at it and look at the cards and the strategies that generally perform well. And this isn't like a massive data set, it's just these are literally cards and decks that have 3-0'd. Who knows if they were played as the face-up card or if they were played more often as Chromatic Star. You know, this isn't like a big number crunch thing, it is just something that makes it a little bit easier to parse what's happening in the cube. And that was really nice, and you know, knowing what information to tune into and what information to tune out of goes a long way in drafting cubes that you're unfamiliar with, so I really appreciate that. When it came to the draft itself, I opened up on Platinum Angel as my pack one pick one. A lot of the lands are broadly interchangeable, like there's some mana fixing lands, but your chromatic spheres will eventually make kind of any spell castable. So I wasn't going out of my way. I don't know that I drafted a single mana fixing land, actually. Maybe one or two. I was going to prioritize heavily stuff like Cloud Post, which gets really broken if you have multiple copies. Even just cycling chromatic spheres, if you have extra mana, you just get to draw a couple extra cards every turn. You know, not in terms of card advantage, but in terms of finding your business. Extra mana goes a long way. Most of the lands just tap for one though. There was no broken land or kind of exception. Exciting card in my first pack. I ended up never casting the Platinum Angel that I first picked in any of my games. I played it as a fear once or twice. It's something that I expected to be pretty high impact. Um, there's only so much interaction in the cube. If I was able to get some of that broken mana, it's a giant flyer. So I was pretty happy to first pick it, but didn't end up being my plan. Pack one, pick two. I immediately get past a mirror enforcer. There were 16 copies of mirror enforcer in the cube, seven mana, four-four affinity for artifacts. If you weren't playing when Mirrodin, original mirror was in the standard, this and Ravager Affinity, just a lot of really broken stuff. Knowing you have access to a bunch of chromatic spheres, easy to piece together why Muir Enforcer is a frequent 3-0 card. Windmill Slam, the pack 1, pick 2, mirror enforcer, picked up an okay land pack three. Uh picks 4, 5, and 6 in pack 1 were all mirror enforcers. I just jumped on this train hard, ended up with 8 mirror enforcers in the draft, and that's mostly what my deck did. Once I scooped up a bunch of mirror enforcers, I was basically just trying to win games that mirror enforcer can win. And maybe that just sounds like I'm not saying nothing. That sounds like nonsense, but I'll highlight what I mean. I am committed to mirror enforcer. I have four copies of my deck. This is what my deck is doing. I need to prioritize cards that make me strong against mirror enforcer's weaknesses. There's a couple ways to do that. You can have interactive spells. I actually got very little interaction in this draft. I ended up just kind of prioritizing, of course, mirror enforcer and making sure that I got enough lands to play. I wanted to get about 25-ish lands. I would have been happy to have a few too many, but really upset to have too few lands because you do need to make your land drops. Chromatic Sphere is not a land, so you do need a lot of lands just to play ball in the ball pit. And so I was valuing lands highly, and interaction is one way to make mirror enforcer matter. If you don't allow your opponent to control anything that is stronger than mirror enforcer, then your four-fours will just win the game. The thing that I ended up with a good amount of in my deck is cards that modify the power and toughness of mirror enforcer. One way to beat a mirror enforcer deck is to have a creature with five toughness. Certainly if it has at least four power. Now Mirror Enforcer just starts to get into blank cardboard. If what else is happening there just has stronger stats, more power and toughness. So it was valuing cards minimally that were able to break a mirror enforcer mirror. One of the stronger cards in my deck actually ended up being Veil of Assimilation, which is a one and a white artifact. When it or another artifact enters the battlefield under your control, the target creature you control gets plus one, plus one and gains vigilance until another turn. So that both gives you vigilance so you can attack without tapping and makes you larger. And so that's just a card that can really break open a mirror enforcer or mirror. And because all of your chromatic spheres, as you cycle through them, they will trigger the veil. You can kind of outgrow most anything, with the exception of the Frexian red dots in the cube with uh cards like this. So I was prioritizing really just stats, ways to make my mirror enforcers punch through whatever my opponent might present. And with eight mirror enforcers, I just had a very consistent deck with a coherent game plan that lined up against what I played against very well. My first opponent, Jordan, was a delight to play against, really enjoyed our match and the banter involved, though Jordan's energy chamber deck just wasn't the most functional thing. Uh so that was the uh the easiest match that I played in the ball pit. Ended up winning uh another one that's a little bit more back and forth in round two before round three played against Aqua. Of course, Aqua curates Aqua's powered cube with the most outrageously expensive foiled out powered cube ever seen, and he is so generous to bring that to this event, and others like it. Aqua had a Phrexian Dreadnought deck. Also, really leveraged Golem Foundry, which is a three mana artifact that gets a charge counter whenever you cast an artifact and you can remove three counters from it to make a 3-3 golem token. But ultimately, my Mirror Enforcers and Veil of Assimilation were victorious, was able to punch through Blink Moth Nexus, actually was the card that put the last nail in the coffin or deciding game three. Being able to fire that up as a flyer and pump it with Veil of Assimilation and playing whatever as chromatic spheres allowed me to fly in for the last point of damage, through a ton of power and toughness on the ground to claim my second trophy at Shoebox. Drafting the ball pit gave me a lot of appreciation for event cubes. And what I mean by that is cubes that somebody is maybe gonna draft exactly one time, having something exciting, something novel, enough firework, so you have a story. Even if you never draft the cube again, it's something that's gonna stick with you. And I don't know how many times I could draft the ball pit, or at least it's not the kind of environment that I would want in my regular rotation. It's so specific and unique, and it's very cool, but I don't know how many drafts of the ball pit I have in me. You know, maybe like once every every few months, something like that, I could revisit it. And there are things that would change if I could draft it again. I would definitely try to get some more removal in my pool. And I did learn some things about evaluating threats and different pieces of the decks. Uh, some of that supplemental stuff that backed up by mirror enforcers was really strong, like Steel Overseer, of course, was an ace, but then Volshock Morning Star was a pretty weak card in my deck, and I probably picked that card too highly just looking for something to break a mirror enforcer mirror. So I'd absolutely enjoy drafting the ball pit again with those changes in priorities, maybe see how having more understanding of it impacts how I'm going to draft what my decks look like, and also having a table maybe where everybody has drafted the cube before and has a strong understanding of it. It'd be cool to see how it shapes up as you draft it more. But more than that, the ball pit is such a cool thing to walk up to. The cards and the sleeves of the chromatic sphere on the back, just the uniqueness of the play environment. It makes sense to me why this is a draw for people to go to cube events, why people would travel to play unique cubes like this, even if you're only gonna play it once. It's an experience that I'm so grateful for. It was so much fun. It's absolutely one I would recommend if you're able to make it out to any event that features the ball pit. The ball pit is great, and it was so much more for me than I originally thought. And then after the ball pit, it was time to draft the fire swamp. The fire swamp, another cube that makes the rounds at these cube events. This is a partial desert cube, which means you do have to draft most of the lands that you play. A full desert cube has no land box. So with the ball pit, you play exactly what you draft. With the fire swamp, you can add any any number of basic swamps to your deck after the draft, but you don't have access to the other colors. The cube is mostly jund. There's a lot of green cards, or a good amount of green card, but half as many green cards as there are black cards. The cube is predominantly black, and then there's half as many red cards as there are green cards. Any forests you want to play, any mountains you want to play, you gotta draft those. There's very little in the ways of things that would be blue or white. The cube is mostly jund, but when it comes to swamps, you can play as many of those as you want, but everything else you do have to pick up in the draft. The fire swamp, of course, a reference to the princess bride, and this environment is tremendously punishing, you know, being a mostly desert cube. If you want to play those other colors, which there are strong incentives to, you have to draft all the lands for your red and your green sources. And then a lot of the cards in the cube just have extra costs, have drawbacks, you have to pay life, you have to discard cards, you have to sacrifice permanence to do a lot of things in the fire swamp. So by design, a pretty punishing environment. There are some cards that are power outliers on the strong side, but the partial desert cube aspect does finesse that experience a little bit. When it comes to red and green power outliers, the fact you have to draft your mana sources does make it real to consider if you want to draft the strongest card in the pack, if it's not black. There's also some stuff going on where there's a good amount of removal in the cube that destroys non-black creatures, which is really interesting to evaluate when you know that everybody is going to be playing black in some capacity. You just don't have the cards to play not black. There's 143 black cards in the cube. There's enough cards that in theory you could play just a red or a green deck, but given the way the mana breaks down, it's probably just incorrect to do that, even when it's possible. So there's some strong green or red cards that might make you want that removal that can target non-black creatures, but then also against a lot of opponents, and in a lot of games, it's not really going to be effective against the average creature in the cube. Of course, many of the black creatures have downsides where the green creatures they tend to be a little bit stronger. The downside is that you have to draft the mana sources to actually cast them. So the Fire Swamp is another environment that when I first heard about it, I wasn't sure it was going to be my thing, but as soon as I picked up a pack in this draft, I was just grinning ear to ear. You can tell there's a lot of like heavily played cards in the cube. These cards are kind of beat up. You can tell that the designer Brett really loves it. Got to meet him this weekend. Really cool guy. He cooked up something really special here, and I will say that partial desert aspect while drafting this, I really came to appreciate that. I've worked on my own desert cube at this point in the tundra, but the thing about that is I have this awareness if a player just train wrecks for whatever reason, they just get off-color cards, they don't draft enough lands. There's very easy to imagine outcomes of the draft where a player has difficulty playing the games outside of the typical range of mulligans and mana screw that exists in every environment in games of magic. But the partial desert, the fact that you can add swamps, if you only draft six or seven lands, you can always add more swamps. You might have a lot of difficulty casting the red or the green cards, but you're able to get to 17 lands if you want to play 17 lands. You're gonna have to value the fixing if you're gonna play the non-black colors, and some of the stronger cards are going to be in the non-black colors, but the partial desert, the access to some basics, means you can always play, and that gets around some of the harsher aspects of the restriction of a desert cube. So I think that partial desert, that's really cool here. As for my draft, pack one pick one, I opened up Volrath Stronghold, just kind of an iconic all-timer strong card. Didn't really consider anything else in that pack. Then I pretty quickly moved in on red. I believe pack one pick two, I was past Anger, another kind of historically powerful card. However, not being able to add basic mountains to your deck, and then the mana fixing in the queue with not being typed duels, means that you really do have to work for anger. I was expecting to have some discard outlets or some easy ways to put into the graveyard. At the end of the draft, uh Anger didn't actually end up making my deck. I ended up being black red, but it just wasn't reliable for me to put anger into my graveyard outside of casting it, which seemed fine. You can cast it, attack with it, block with it, but I just had a lot of stuff that cost four and five mana, and so anger didn't end up fitting into my plans. But picking it that highly did mean that pack one, pick three, I scooped up a basic mountain. It wasn't really even a consideration. I knew that if I wanted to play some of these other colors and I didn't want to be mono black unless there were powerful, like very powerful black cards in every pack. I was I certainly wanted to explore the other colors. And at the time when I picked that mountain, I did think anger might be that thing. But as the draft progressed, I ended up picking up a good clip of Redlands. It did not seem like green was going to be open. It turned out on the other side of the table, there was kind of three players fighting over green in a row, where one got a lot of green cards, the other one kind of got all of the fixing, and then there was a third player there who was specing on a couple strong green cards. And so the cards that got past those, I ended up getting kind of late in the pack. I was able to pick up some really strong red cards. I had fireball in my deck, I had cone of flame, which is red, red three for a sorcery, deal three damage to something, two damage to something else, one damage to a third thing. So that can just be a three for one. Sometimes you have to deal one damage to yourself to resolve it because you do need all three targets. That's a fun aspect. That's very much in theme with the fire swamp, where so much stuff has costs to pay, and the way that sometimes you resolve that and damage yourself is very flavorful, but the ceiling on the card is incredibly high as well. At the end of the draft, I had four basic mountains, and my deck had Lava Dart and Fire Blast, which I thought was really funny. The idea of paying the alternate cost on Fire Blast or flashing back the Lava Dart seems tremendously unlikely to come up, and it's really cool to recontextualize cards in that way. I had a ton of fun drafting this one and then playing the games. A lot of things were kind of scrappy despite having Volrat's stronghold. I was using it to recur things like Ravenous Rats, which I valued very highly. An actual positive two for one on your end is quite powerful in this environment, and getting the Ravenous Rats back with the stronghold can be strong, but at some point your opponent just doesn't have cards in hand, and they still top deck every turn, so ravenous rats can't lock them out. I did have chittering rats, but without a sacrifice outlet, and there's not really a specific you have to get into a specific kind of game for that to be a lock, never came up. There was a game where I use Volrath Stronghold to get back crypt rats, which is black and two, and it's a 1-1. When you have it in play, you can pay X black mana to do X damage to each creature and player, and I got back the Crypt Rats to use it a second time, and doing that put me to one, and I was able to stabilize at one in a game that I won, which was really cool. So the Volrath Stronghold definitely did work for me. I think my deck was pretty strong. As far as drafting my seat, I think I navigated correctly to be the red black deck. I won my first two matches. My second match was against Jake Grist, who actually is the curator of the Bodleian Cube, which is another cube that makes the rounds at these cube events. Jake's a super friendly guy. Our match was really fun and tense in a really unique way. Jake was also black red, and he had drafted Mournsong Aria, which is an enchantment for one black black, says players can't draw cards or gain life. At the beginning of each player's draw step, that player loses three life, searches the library for a card, and puts it into their hand, then shuffles. So instead of your draw step, every turn you're resolving Grim Tutor, and he casts it, which means I lose the life and tutor first. And in both games, he curved Tangled Colony on turn two, which is a two mana three-two, into the Mournsong Aria. So he just had a fast clock out of the gates, and I had like a firebolt in my hand, I think in game one that I didn't want to cast because the tangled colony, when it's dealt damage, if it dies, Jake would get to make 1-1 rats for every damage it takes. So it really doesn't solve the issue with the clock. And I had echoing decay in my deck, but then that costs two mana, and it's really tough to think about the card that you want to tutor for every turn. It's costing you three life every time. And I have Fireball in my deck, but Jake also kind of had the initiative here where I'm paying the three life first. So in game one, he got me with Song of Totent Tats, making a bunch of 1-1 rats with haste. But then in game three, I was able to navigate in a way where I had contagion in hand and was able to soak up enough damage or kill enough creatures and then be able to fireball him for lethal. So they were really tense turns where every turn. I know that I was thinking like two or three turns ahead. If I get this this turn, what do I have to get next turn? How can I set up? I was building to that lethal fireball, and then Jake went for the Song of Totentance, would have been lethal if I hadn't left up mana, if I didn't have the contagion at the ready for him. So really cool games. I don't think I could play Mournsong Aria games all day. It was really tense. You know, that that life cost on the aria itself, so many of the cards in the cube having drawbacks, a bunch of the creatures being 1-1s and 2-2s, just this really crunchy arithmetic going on there. But it was so fun to do that for exactly one match there. And then I did end up losing the finals here. I played against a player who had a strong black-green deck. Um, mostly I did Mulligan to five in the game one. That was a really close game, though. I actually got smushed in game two, where I think we were both on seven card hands. That game wasn't close. I kind of got bodied by Oversold Cemetery, is a lot of what happened there. In terms of turn over turn value, my deck really couldn't compete with an oversold cemetery unless I got out of the gate swinging, but my opponent had a good amount of removal as well. So their deck was really strong. I was not able to pull that one out, but certainly didn't mind the 2-1 record and the fire swamp. It was a ton of fun. Another cube where I don't know how much I could draft a fire swamp every week, but it's really cool just to have more cubes in the rotation. This was a great one to draft the first time. After drafting it the first time, I certainly have a better understanding of the environment. Definitely have an appreciation for that partial desert cube aspect. And the Fire Swamp is really just an awesome design. I would absolutely check this one out if you make it out to an event as well where it is featured. So after that draft, I had two three 0s, two, two, ones, and then the O2 that we don't talk about Debbie dropped. So as far as top 64 contention, I knew I was safe and I knew I would kind of burn out if I did another draft that day. Also, the more important thing, there was a really serious blizzard the weekend the shoebox. It was actually a really intense wind the Friday night, and then Saturday night it started snowing into the evening, and I I don't know exactly, but it must have been no less than a foot of snow. I know it was one of those storms where I did multiple rounds of shoveling. Like I went home Saturday night, I ate dinner, decompressed for a while, shoveled. There was the Prismatic Party Saturday night, which I want to make it out to you, but it kind of just started snowing as it was time to make evening plans, and I just wasn't really sure about getting back and forth. It was snowing at kind of a reasonable pace. It just snowed for 20 hours, so it ended up being a lot over time. Maybe would have been fine to drive out there, but it had already been a pretty full couple days, so I just ended up not making it out there. And then Sunday morning, the snow was so bad. They pushed back the top 64 draft by an hour, so it was gonna start at 10:30. But I shoveled in the morning, and it was another like five or six inches that I shoveled, and it was this heavy, wet snow when I checked Google Maps about the drive time from Minneapolis to St. Paul. Like kind of the whole route was yellow and that could turn red in any second, and I had some other stuff going on, and it was just kind of too much. I thought better of driving to the event. So kind of unfortunate to not play the top 64, but that is kind of another aspect where it's cool, where we're mostly just playing for pride. Not showing up on Sunday means that I didn't get my top 64 pin, which I'm a little bit bummed about. I would have liked to have claimed that pin, but you know, I hope that everybody that did make it for that draft had a lot of fun with it. Uh, so I just didn't show up on Sunday at the con. It continued to snow through a lot of the day, but I did end up, Andy Mangold uh invited me to a bit of an after party at the BNB that uh they were staying at, and there was just a ton of really cool people there, a bunch of people that worked the event, a number of the cube designers for the event, all hanging out. At one point, there were three different cube drafts going on. I partook in a draft of Spencer's 100 Black Lotuses Cube. This is another cube inspired by 100 ornithapters. It's exactly what it sounds like. It's a cube with 100 black lotuses, a lot of busted stuff going on here, and I had a ton of fun drafting that. We had eight people drafting 100 black lotuses, we had our 60 card cube. I more or less forced a favorite vintage cube archetype of mine that I call broken blue. I just did not waver from wanting to cast blue cards that drew cards and countered spells with my black lotuses. Really interesting thing about all your mana sources being Black Lotus is you can play a card of any color fairly easily. So I ended up casting Grave Titan into my deck sometimes. I used Eternal Witness mostly to immediately rebuy a Black Lotus, so I got a free 2 1. And I had Tinker for Blight Steel Colossus. So sometimes I was attacking with 2 2s, other times I was cheating out giant 11 11 trample indestructible infect. And a big thing about it, I wanted to stay largely blue. Because I was taking Force of Will over Black Lotus. I had Force of Will and Force of Negation. I think it's pretty fascinating how Force of Negation plays in this environment. If you're just playing a singleton vintage cube, you're going to Force of Negation Black Lotus almost every time. You actually have to think about it in 100 Black Lotuses because you just like don't know. Do they have another Lotus? Is there payoff a creature or a non-creature? It was fascinating. And there's slans here. I did find Spencer's Cube Cobra page. I'm going to link the 100 black lotuses. I know this is the environment that Spencer's going to keep working on. I did encourage, I think that this would be an awesome event cube. Of course, this would be a cube for an event that has to allow proxies. It's not like there's 100 actual black lotuses here, but Shoebox was a proxy-friendly event. And this is one that it's not going to be for everyone, like the ball pit, like the fire swamp, like I Gonjo Drift. But I had a ton of fun playing this. It's an environment that I'm excited to see how it shapes up. I would love to see this at an event. I think it has some punch, some appeal, like a hundred Black Lotuses, it sounds cool. There's of course going to be skepticism about how that play. And I don't know. I had a lot of fun playing it. It reminds me of just really high power vintage cube. Like what I like about Vintage Cube when I did my podcast about falling out of love with Vintage Cube, a lot of that was too much of Vintage Cube is just mid-range garbage. 100 Black Lotus is about casting Black Lotus and beating Black Lotus. So I loved it. I did pull off the 3-0 here with my broken blue deck. So, you know, of course the winner had a fun time, but I would genuinely draft this again. I think it's just another really fun one. The games are pretty fast and sometimes they break in weird ways. It's that old high power environment magic kind of thing, where sometimes the game is over on turn one. But I had another game that had a really tricky decision point where I could have cracked my two black lotus to mystic confluence something that I thought that I could beat, and instead the game played out. I held off on my counter spell and ended up attacking with trinket mage and treasure maids just like eight times, just this really drown out of fear. That's kind of another aspect of Black Lotus being most of your mana sources, is that once you sacrifice them, they're gone. And so a tutu on the battlefield ends up being real in this environment. So it plays in really exciting and explosive ways. There's a lot of fireworks. Played a game against Spencer where he went five black lotuses, crackle with power, and I said, How much damage is that? And he said, 20. And I said, Oh, and we've moved on to the next one. Uh, it was a ton of fun. I definitely hope to see this cube at events in the future. I would check it out if it does make the rounds. But that's gonna do it on my shoebox event report. So no top 64 for me, but a ton of fun was had. I enjoyed all the cubes that I played, and more than that, I just enjoyed meeting all of the passionate, creative, friendly people. I felt so welcomed. I am a person that struggles a lot with social anxiety. It can be difficult for me to go out alone where I don't know who I'm gonna know or when they're gonna be there. So the structure of shoebox went a long way for me having designated start times and getting things off the ground, having good ways to break the ice and start talking to people. Met a lot of other people that create in the cube space. I don't want to do specific shout outs. I just know I'm going to miss people. I know I already did shout out a lot of people just over the course of who I met playing the event, but everybody that I interacted with this weekend was just so welcoming and friendly. I absolutely intend to make it out to more cube events. As soon as I got home, I started thinking about some designs I felt inspired to work on after this weekend and making sure that I knew people that were gonna make a car to go to KubeCon this August. I absolutely want to do more of this. I just had so much fun this weekend. Everybody was incredible. Everybody that was at Shoebox, you're great. Everybody that was at the after party. It was so cool and fun to meet and interact with you all. Looking forward to seeing more of y'all in the future. I'm gonna do my best to be around more often. I absolutely want to be doing more of this. I can't believe I haven't been going to more events like this to this point. And at that, I've got to shout out everybody that's in event planning and organizing for Shoebox and similar events. So much happens behind the scenes. The judge staff is very involved. There's just so many people that make things like this happen, and y'all contributed so much to so many people having a wonderful weekend at Shoebox. So, shout out to the Cube community, shout out to the event planners, organizers, everybody that makes stuff like this possible. I'm looking forward to seeing more of y'all in the future and to meeting more people in the community. This just was just a blast. Can't say enough positive things, and I can't say enough about how awesome the experience was and the high that I'm still riding from the event. And thank you to everybody at home for taking the time to listen to this week, for doing whatever you do to support the podcast, liking, subscribing, commenting, reviewing, sharing. I appreciate y'all too. So take care of yourselves, look after your neighbors, be well, be good, and I will be back next week talking more cube. Later, gamers.