Revisiting the Tempo Twobert

Ryan Overturf breaks down how The Tempo Twobert has changed since it was first designed, outlining shifts in philosophy and where the list is at today. 

The Tempo Twobert on Cube Cobra 

Transcript

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What's up gamers? Welcome back to 180MTG. My name is Ryan Overturf, and this week I'm going to be talking about the Tempo Tubert. This is one of the first Tuberts, one of the first 180 card environments that I ever worked on, originally designed to be a cube where the cards Delver of Secrets and Nimble Mongoose would be appealing for players to draft and put in their decks. That kind of goes back to my experience playing Legacy Constructed once upon a time. I was a big fan of Teamer Delver, or Canadian Threshold, you might call it. Canadian Threshold for the old heads there. And this cube borrows from a lot of other constructed decks, low to the ground, historical, modern, and legacy decks, so it's a lot of the inspiration in this environment. And today I'm going to be talking about some better terminology, some better understanding I have of this environment and how to construct similar environments that I have learned over the years. It was almost five years ago that I wrote my first article on the Tempo Tube for Star City games. So we're going to be unpacking a little bit of what I have learned since then, just about the foundational aspects of this cube, as well as talking about some changes that I've made to the cube over time, some big fundamental shifts, and some smaller tweaks, talking about some cards that have been in and out. It's been kind of fun to look at the older list of the cube. So I'm going to be unpacking some big changes, some small changes, and also just talking about just some fundamental aspects of what makes the Tempo Tubert tick. So let's dive in. And I will of course have the Cube Cobra page for the Tempo Tubert in the show notes here so you can follow along. So first relating to the color-based archetype concept I've been talking about lately, the TempoTubert does use the mono color archetype approach, so each color is kind of treated as its own deck, and that's something that's going to become more pronounced based off of a very major change that I made to the cube that I'll be talking about shortly. But just for now, every color is curated as if it's its own kind of deck. So the cards within one color are largely there to play with other cards of the color, and then depending on the mana fixing involved in the draft, the order of the cards, and how you want to combine things, you can choose to combine any two-color, three-color pairs. Not uncommon for somebody to play a four-color deck in the tempo tubert. And then there's different incentives for that, but mostly the colors are designed so that every card of a given color is going to play reasonably well with every other card of that color. And then you can choose to explore two or three or four color decks however you do so desire as it shakes out in the draft. And then regarding macro archetypes, the big thing that this cube is about, so the macro archetype reminder for the original SCP tubert is mid-range, you can go more controlling or aggressive. The macro archetype for the tempo tubert, I guess I could be cheeky and say that it's tempo, but I think it's more accurate to say that it's aggro. The idea of the tempo tubeert is that everybody is going to draft some kind of aggressive deck, and that breaks down in an interesting way, because aggro exists very differently in a more open environment. If you want to talk about building even a standard deck, your aggressive deck is designed, you have to be mindful of, of course, aggressive mirrors, but then how you're going to play against controlling decks and a range of different things that could be on the other side of the table, how you prepare for combo decks is different than aggro or control as well, most of the time. But then when you have a cube where overwhelmingly players are going to draft aggressive decks, it does break differently than constructed because you are only preparing for aggressive mirrors. And the way that that shakes out in games and matchups, it tends to mean that in a given game, this can oscillate back and forth, but you are going to want to try to take a controlling role at least some amount of the time. Maybe you have the most aggressive deck at the table, and there are some cards and colors that are more suited to that, where you can try to beat the aggressor all the time, but it's typically the case for aggressive mirrors that at least in some of the games, on some of the turns, you want to turtle up, play a little bit of a controlling role. You can't always make good attacks on every turn of the game in every matchup. And what I'm talking about is not going full, destroy all your opponent's creatures, don't attack ever. I just mean a controlling role in an aggressive matchup could be as simple as leaving a creature back to block. Blocking is going to be a big aspect of playing the control when it comes to an aggressive mirror when many of the cards are creatures. So that's just what I mean. You are going to be aggressively slanted, but there are things you are going to do that involve trying to interact positively, trying to stem the bleeding, trying to blunt your opponent's aggressive plan of their own, which is functionally taking a control role on a given turn or in a given matchup. And so there's a good amount of removal peppered into the tempo tuber, which is very useful for when you want to play those controlling roles. But then there's also some cards that are very good at trying to really affirm yourself as the aggressor. Recent addition is Monstrous Rage, which is very good at making good attacks through blockers. And then Berserk is a card that was once very bad in the cube, but based off of some fundamental changes I've made recently, Berserk actually performs very well. And that's a fun card because sometimes you use Berserk in a controlling role. You can use it as a removal spell, and then it's a big card for punching through when you want to be the aggressor. And that modality on Berserk is something that's pretty important when it comes to using aggro as a macro archetype, because a lot of the cards that are exclusively aggressive, they can perform really poorly in this kind of environment because you can't always be the aggressor in a creature-based aggressive mirror. You just won't always have good attacks. And there's a card that really stands out in my mind as a card that was really informative in the early curation of these tubert environments. Something I had thought about or tried in the Abraham Recipe Tubert. Something that I had tried even harder to make work in the tempo tubert here is the card Goblin Guide. If you're not familiar, it's a little antiquated, doesn't show up too much in Cube these days. One red mana, two two haste. When it ever attacks, the defending player reveals the top card of their library. If it's a land card, they put that card into their hand. So Goblin Guide is really only good at attacking. Technically, it's an okay blocker, but it doesn't scale at all. It is really just trying to attack, and blocking is something you do when you have to. It's not the most desirable function for an aggressive deck to take. And Goblin Guide, of course, is there. It has that downside because the idea is if you attack turn over turn, getting two, four, six damage for your one drop is supposed to be pretty powerful. And it is in the right matchups. When it comes to playing Goblin Guide in one of those more open formats in a metagame where you can play against a control or a combo deck, then you can more reliably get in those shots where the goblin guide is worth four or more damage, and then the card has really done its job. But in an environment like the TempoTubert, where your opponent, of course, has a lot of cheap removal, but more importantly, there's just a ton of cheap blockers, just a myriad of ways to trade even on mana with a goblin guide, and that makes it so the drawback just is going to catch up with you. And giving away a card can actually be a really big deal in an environment like this. When both players are aggressively slanted, and so many cards are cheap. There's a lot of stuff here that's one and two mana. A lot of cards are just going to trade even one for one at mana parity or very close to mana parity. And when you are operating at parity on mana and cards, any kind of card advantage can actually go a long way in putting your opponent away. You just take any trade that you can, and then enough of those exchanges, if you have a good amount of life total, as long as you keep yourself out of lightning bolt range, all of those card advantage exchanges are just going to make it a little bit easier for you to keep trading and then make a good attack when it's convenient for you. So the card disadvantage that Goblin Guide could present here, given that you could not reliably position yourself as the aggressor because all of your opponents are going to be good enough at blocking where Goblin Guide's not appealing aggressively, or your opponent's just better at attacking. There's stronger stuff here than Goblin Guide 2, that's part of the problem. But the big issue is that downside of giving away cards, it's just going to catch up to you with how many even card exchanges are happening here in terms of mana value and one-for-one exchanges. And on the topic of card advantage and just how powerful it is in environments that are this low to the ground, I used to feature a pretty decent clip of ways to draw extra cards and generate card advantage that way in the Tempo Tubert. I still have some card advantage, but I used to have some cards that were really overwhelming in this department. The most egregious example being Treasure Cruise. And I had those cards in, and I justified it because I really did enjoy playing Treasure Cruise and Constructed once upon a time in the modern and legacy Delver of Secret stacks. And I wanted to have it in this environment. And uh for a while I let myself believe that because you didn't just win every time you cast Treasure Cruise, that made it reasonable on power level. But ultimately, what it comes down to is in the games when it wins, it is so obvious and it is so not fun when you get buried under the card advantage of a treasure cruise. I am thinking of a very specific draft where a friend of mine, actually a very accomplished magic player, drafted this Rakdos deck, and I kind of ran them over with a blue-red. I think I had Treasure Cruise and Bedlam Reveler and Expressive Iteration. Like I had all these two or three for ones that uh I guess Bedlam Reveler can be a four for one. So just a lot of card advantage stuff that's really difficult to come back from, which is not to say that my deck was unbeatable, but that's also not the problem here. The problem was we played this match that was just really not fun at all. And I was trying to pick their brain after the draft, you know, why did you play this Raghdose deck? And it was one of the most biting but accurate and honestly totally fair critiques of any of my cubes I'd ever gotten. They said, I didn't think that the matches in the tempo tubert will be decided by whoever cast the most divinations. And so after that, that that kind of rattled me. And I was thinking about it, and it was just totally reasonable. Like there was no reason based off of any information that could easily be communicated to think, well, you shouldn't play Rakdos, it's not as strong as the blue decks drawing extra cards, and it's not as easy for the Rakdos deck to take advantage of the red card advantage cards. You know, Bedlam Reveler plays better in blue-red than it does in red-black. And I didn't immediately overhaul the cube or anything like that, but that's feedback that really stuck with me and it's something that was on my mind every time I would see or play a game where card advantage really easily put a game away in a way that I understand would be deflating for the opponent. And over time I've scaled further and further back on easy access card advantage. There's still a decent clip of two for ones, but there's no treasure cruise here. I had Lurus of the Dream Den for a while. That one was a really filthy, easy, you know, eighth card in your opening hand. And I liked preserving these aspects of constructed formats and cards that I don't really get to play with anymore. But the gameplay was just too bad, and there was something that was really fun happening in this cube that these cards, despite my nostalgia for them, they were detrimental to what is actually joyful about drafting and playing with a lot of these other cards. So I've scaled back on that a lot. And I think it's also important to say that scaling back on card advantage in this way is what has helped cards like Berserk shine in this environment. When I first built the cube, I had Berserk in for a while, and it was just awful. It was just too much. You would try to cast Berserk, your creature would be killed by a removal spell, or you just wouldn't be able to get out in front enough to want to cast Berserk, or if you have treasure crews, Allure So the Dream Den, Expressive Iteration, there's really no reason to reach for Berserk because you will eventually win your game without having to ever take on the kind of risk that a card like Berserk would invite you to take. And scaling back on that card advantage has kind of incentivized more playing games where you have to make yourself a little bit more vulnerable. You have to be a little bit more scrappy. And I've really enjoyed the direction that scaling back on that card advantage has taken the cube. And so I'm gonna break the cube down by color and talk about some of the cards that have been in and out and how these big changes have been addressed by color and why the cube looks the way that it does today. But I actually want to start with lands before I get into the color breakdown, because one of the big fundamental shifts actually had to do with changing the mana base. I've always had fetch lands and shock lands in the cube, but for a long time I only had that one fetchable cycle of duels, and that led to a really weird texture. I had a third cycle of lands, every two-color pair had some third land, but they weren't fetchable, and that meant in this environment that it was actually a higher priority, absolutely, if you were going to play a two-color deck to pick up your on-color shock land than it was to pick up fetch lands, because fetch lands are only mana fixing if they can fetch different kinds of lands. If you're playing a two-color deck and you have four fetch lands, but you don't have the correct shock land in an environment with no other fetchable duels, then those fetch lands are glorified basics. There's some other things they can do. They can trigger a number of abilities, they can put cards in your graveyard for threshold, delve, whatever, but they are not very strong mana fixing, which is an important part of what fetch lands do. And so for a long time in the tempo tubert with only one cycle of fetchable duels, blue-red was the strongest color pair because of all these card advantage cards. And because of that texture of one fetchable cycle, Steam Vents actually made a very compelling argument to being the overall pack one pick one pick of the cube if you were going to do like a rotisserie draft. And that's different texture than a lot of cubes, and I kind of liked that this cube made the fetchable duels a little bit more appealing than the fetch lands if you knew what you were doing. But also it's something that if you aren't drafting this specific cube a lot, you wouldn't necessarily pick up on that. And if you undervalue the shock lands on color in that environment, it's really easy to find yourself in a position where it's very difficult to cast your spells. And so I thought it was neat that the cube had this different texture with fetch lands and fetchable duels, but it just was this kind of specialized knowledge that if you weren't in on the joke, it would be really punishing. It was very common that I would do drafts of this cube, and somebody would just have a horrible two-color mana base, and that's just not fun at all when you can't even really make your mana work for a two-color deck, especially in an environment that the mana curve was so low that you were incentivized to play fewer than 17 lands. And so it makes it even more important to have some decent fixing when you're playing fewer total lands, because you end up playing fewer total colored sources. And let me tell you, 15 basic lands is a really rough mana base for a two-color deck. And it would be easy for me to appeal to my own ego and say, well, that's just be that's something that the players have to figure out. That's an aspect of the environment that I've designed, and it's a fun cube. But the reality is the cube is more fun if I make it more intuitive, more approachable, and make it so players have an easier time assembling a functional mana base and being able to cast their spells. So the big change here is I added a second cycle of fetchable dual lands, and those are going to be the surveil lands from murders at Karloff Matter. And I hesitated a bit on doing this because I was worried that you would see too much four or five color mana bases. It would be a little bit too easy to just play all of the best cards, but I have found that tapped lands they are a real cost in an environment where there's so many one and two mana spells. You can just fall behind. It's really difficult to have three or more surveil lands in the same deck and not lose at least a game in a draft because you had to play your lands tapped and your opponent was just able to run you over easily. So that has actually felt like a pretty good balancing point in this environment. The extra cycle of fetchable duels has made two and three color mana bases better, and it was already true that by picking up a bunch of fetch lands and shock lands, a player could play four color, and I haven't felt like the surveil lands have made those decks all that much more powerful, especially scaling back on the card advantage cards. You still have to draft a deck that's about something. So it's a really difficult environment to just draft a bunch of mana fixing and try to take the quote unquote best cards because I've scaled back on what those best cards are and how easy they are to execute on. And then something that I've also changed in my curation since adding this second cycle of fetchable duels, because I feel it's a much easier to get into a strong two and three color mana base, I have made a point to kind of firm the color pie in the cube. I've made it so certain effects you are going to have to go into a color. There's some colorless stuff, there's some Phyrexia mana going on here, but I've experimented a little bit. I've had weird removal spells on the cube. I wanted to make sure that blue or green decks could have an answer to a turn one Mother of Runes. So I had some stuff like Hornet Sting and Piracy Charm, but those cards are just kind of weak, and with better mana fixing, you can more reliably make red, black, or white mana, which is going to give you access to real removal spells. So I've moved off on that stuff, whereas putting weaker cards and colors that don't normally get it. I did find those color pie breaks pretty charming, but there's just less need for them in an environment where there is better mana, and I can make you work a little bit harder to be able to compete with a card like Mother Runes, making you go into an extra color for removal, I think, is pretty reasonable to do because the mana bases are still quite strong. And then I also have tried, like I only have protection spells. Protection spells have been a big part of the environment the entire time it's been a cube. I think blossoming defense has always been in the cube and I've had some other protection spells. And I've experimented with stuff like shore up, moving that into blue a little bit, whereas I've added more prowess threats in blue and it made some sense to have a blue protection spell. But an aspect of tightening up the color pie here is I only have protection spells in green. If you want to cast a blossoming defense kind of card, you have to go into green to do it. And that helps give the colors a little bit more definition. It helps make it so you can't just draft all of the mana fixing and play the best cards. Every color is kind of the best at doing something, and so you have to be a little bit more intentional in how you approach your mana fixing regarding what your goals are and what you're trying to do. So, as compared to when I first built it, the cube today has better mana, more focused colors, less easy access card advantage, and that leaves the cube in a more focused on combat kind of space, where you have to be a little bit more diligent with your removal spells, and those are really the hallmarks of enjoyable aggressive mirrors for me. So those kind of big changes of mind. Let's go ahead and look at the cube by color and talk about what's going on in the colors, maybe some stuff that has changed over time, and where every individual color is today in the Tempo Tubert. So starting with white, white has always been a color that's really overperformed in the Tempo Tubert in my experience. This is the most likely color for a player to draft a mono or mostly mono color deck, and it's not based on much in the way of synergies when it comes to prowess or caring about casting a certain number of spells. There's some payoffs in White, they're not as strong as other colors. You can't make as many tokens with Clarion Spirit as you can with young Pyromancer, but all the cards just kind of do what they say on the tin. Novice Inspector is going to be worth two cards when you eventually crack that clue. And there's not much in the way of standouts on power level for White. I guess the loudest one is that Swords to Plow Shears is the strongest removal spell in the cube as far as answering any creature. Mother of Runes, another obnoxiously powerful card, the one that you can cut through with the removal spells and other colors. For the most part, I think that white gains a lot of its strength from the player who identifies white as open, really just having easy access to whatever the strongest white cards are, and being able to consider a second color for whatever seems the most open, and you'll likely be able to find the panafixing to splash blue, black, red, green, whatever, to have all the best white cards, and then to touch on a second, maybe a third color to shore up any weaknesses in your deck. I think that Luminark Aspirant is a really good card for highlighting what white is about in the Tempo Tubert. It is a card that generates decent value turn over turn. You get a plus put a plus one plus one counter on one of your creatures on each of your combat steps. It's immediately very fragile, and it is only ever going to give you one plus one plus one counter every turn. So it's not something like a prowess creature that can grow very large, it's only gated by how many spells that you can cast and you can take an indeterminate amount of damage, but it will keep chugging and doing its thing every turn. So the mono white decks and the tempo tuber, they tend to be less explosive than the other colors, but they really reliably do what they do. There's nothing that's the flashiest thing, you're gonna see very few fireworks outside of a Couple cards and a couple interactions, but everything in the white column is very dependable. You will do something with a reasonable floor, even if your ceiling is maybe not as high as the other colors. A card that was part of my initial design in white was Stoneforge Mystic. That's a card that has shown up in a lot of legacy decks and modern decks, and it was something that really spoke to me. I guess more extended than modern, but it was a card that spoke to the kind of low-to-the-ground decks that I was trying to highlight here, but it ended up just being really parasitic in the cube, and it played really poorly. I had Batter Skull and Umazawa's JT, kind of some classically powerful equipment, and those cards they tended to cut one way or the other, where they were either too inefficient. If you tried to equip a Jite, you could lose on the spot to a removal spell, or if you were successful in equipping it, there's no more game to play. So it's it's a card that people now and again talk about they should unban Umazawa's Jite in modern, because maybe you get more of those games where your creature gets hit by a removal spell. But the games where you successfully equip a Jite and start dealing combat damage are so bad that there's really no reason to pursue it being in almost any environment. And it was a poor fit here. And ultimately, even though Stormforge Mystic did speak to the kind of magic that I was trying to highlight here, and it has this, you know, really visible, constructed pedigree, it's something that I think was detrimental to the play patterns of the environment, so it just ultimately had to go. And something I'm experimenting with it now in the cube, I've added a small energy package. So in white I have two cards. I have Guide of Souls, and I have Static Prison, and then in red I also added Galvanic Discharge. The Galvanic Discharge is the I think only red removal spell, one of very few red removal spells. There's uh there's one or two others that can only hit creatures, but I did want an instant speed removal spell there. And then I did become convinced to try out some energy for a couple reasons. It's something that I was immediately dismissive of putting into a cube, unless I went heavy on an energy theme. It's just something that's kind of random to track, which can be annoying. But Guide of Souls and a couple other energy cards and no Galvanic Discharge have been in the digital powered cubes, and so just having a couple energy cards is something that there is this high visibility example of, which kind of reduced my hesitancy to put a couple energy cards in this cube. I do think Guide of Souls is quite strong, but in a way where it is evocative of Boros Energy. You know, I'm not reaching for Flag, I think that flage would play horrendously. It'd be way too strong in this cube. But Boros Energy very much feels like the style of deck of old team or Delver, of Death and Taxis style decks, which is some of what I'm trying to go for with cards like Mother of Runes and the white column here. So I have become convinced that the Guide of Souls, a very small energy package, is something that hits the right notes here. It is a card you're gonna want to answer right away, but I'm fine with having some must-answers. Uh Pillar of White for me in this cube is Mother of Runes, and the play patterns of that card are really bad, but I think it's important to let White have some powerful things to do. And the energy cards, they speak to me in that way. And static prison, I think, is a lot weaker than Guide of Souls, but I did want to try out the additional energy thing, and it is kind of a tempo card, you know, just as a baseline, as an individual card. You run out of energy, you'll have to give the thing back. So I just kind of want to see how that plays out. I could definitely see cutting the static prison, and it might come to pass that the guide of souls is too strong in practice. I kind of doubt it. I might move off of the voice of victory because that one-two punch is really powerful, and that could be undesirable, but I want white to have some powerful things to do, some things that are evocative of constructed magic, which is really rooted heavily in at least three of the other four colors. And so I like having the Guide of Souls in the environment. I no longer have aesthetic concerns about the small energy package, and I do think that the power level of them are in line with the way that a lot of the other threats in the cube do scale. I don't think that Guide of Souls Ocelot Pride are on the level of like a Regavan in the way that they can just be game-ending in a really unfun way. I think that Regavan even is a little bit weak in terms of how easy it is to block. I just think it's so not fun when it works. And there's I think there's so much stuff that blocks Ocelot Pride. You kind of have to work with your Guide of Souls, and your opponent's going to often have really high access to a lot of one-mana removal. I'm at least willing to see how it plays out for a while, and it has not been a problem so far. Moving on to blue, the big change here is of course the removal of treasure crews. So there's a lot of just one-for-one canthrifts. You still have brainstorm, so there's a lot of really good card selection in blue, but there's been a lot of prowess threats printed since the original construction of the Tempo Tubert, and that's the big change as far as new cards being added. And when you have access to more cheap prowess threats, Storm Chaser's Talent being a big one. You have Triton Wave Breaker, so Blue gets some one mana prowess threats, some really good two-mana ones in Drake Hatcher and Kitza Otterball Elite. That makes these one mana cantrips function as pump spells. That gives a really good bridge between blue and red to be these prowess aggro style decks without having really easy card advantage that can make you just really easily run your opponent over on every axis. You can make really good attacks, but it's at the expense of using all of your mana just on card selection, not at card advantage. And then a really loud thing happening in blue. I have 25 cards in the blue column here. These numbers are a little bit fuzzy with Phyrexian mana. Loudly in blue, blue has Gataxian probe and mental misstep, which just go in any color deck. There's like consideration, you know, Dismember is also kind of colorless card, gut shot, kind of a colorless card, but these two are just so strong on the being fully colorless that it does feel like a little bit of a disservice to blue to count them as blue cards. I'm not gonna go out of my way to restructure and call them colorless, but I do just want to call attention to the fact that there are technically more blue cards on the page, and this actually had less to do with the Frexia mana and more to do with a little bit of playing I've been doing with the gold column. I've always been a little fuzzy on the gold column as far as card counts for two-color pairs. I've always used a little bit of hybrid mana to fudge these numbers a little bit. I started with two cards for every two-color pair, and then I had like five hybrid mana cards in the original spread, and I've added more hybrid mana cards to the cube over time. So there's like four technically Celestia cards on the cube right now, but one of them is figure of fable, one of them is kitchen finks, these are mono white cards, these are mono green cards. You can play green-white, you'll you'll be able to more easily cast them or whatever, but they're not green-white gold cards fully. And two color pairs that have been really problematic, not very strong in terms of individual cards, even if the colors might play well together. Blue-white, I have struggled to find appealing blue-white cards, and blue-green. I even had one that I really aesthetically liked in Shardless Agent, but it just plays so bad in the blue-green decks. Blue has so much that's bad to cascade into, or you cascade into a cantrip, or green, you cascade into a pump spell, that's awful. So there's not a lot of reason to really play Shardless Agent ever in this cube. And so I trimmed one of the blue-white cards, and I trimmed Shardless Agent, so there's only one blue-green card, and the gold column. Again, this is a mono color archetype base, so it's not that important, but I added a couple blue cards here, and then you have the extra Celestnia cards, so green and white aren't really losing out on cards because of this, but that allowed me to play a little bit, adding some stuff into blue. I'm trying out days. I didn't have days in the cube for a long time because a lot of the idea was everything is one and two mana. There's more three mana stuff now. There's an extra fetchable cycle of duels so you can reliably have an island in your two-colored decks. I want to see how Days plays on the environment, and I've also been adding some more bounce spells in terms of firming blue's color identity. So you have fading hope now, in addition to vapor snag. I used to have repeal in the cube, and some of that was I used to have Gurmag Angler in the cube. I wanted to have that delve threat, and I didn't want to make it so a bounce spell. Like Vapor Snag is often functionally a kill spell against Gurmag Angler, but Gurmag Angler just wasn't that strong, and repeal just didn't really speak to me in this environment. It's kind of reverse tempo. You have to spend X, you have to spend one plus the mana value forever you're bouncing. It just didn't really fit the environment as well as I would like to. Vapor Snag speaks to me more in this cube, and so I moved off of repeal. Blue has a little bit more actual tempo cards where you give up cards to try to gain a positional advantage with these bounce spells, and so I'm trying that out along with Daze, a classic tempo card here. It might be strong, it might be weak, I don't really know, but I do want to give Daze a go here in this world with these two cycles of fetchable duels and giving blue a little bit more in its color identity. This cube, I have not had too many counter spells in this cube ever, but because the mana curve is so lean, I might try out actual counterspell at some point. For now, I'm testing the waters, seeing how I feel with days. I think that counterspell is a little bit too much in the actually fully controlled territory for what I am doing with the aggro macro archetype, but it's something I have in mind to maybe try at some point. You know, for now you have mental misstep, you have Stern Scolding, you have Spell Snare, some one mana counter spells, you have the Daze, you get a little bit of what blue is up to, without blue turning into like this card advantage controlling monster, while still being able to take a control role with cards like Jace Rin's Prodigy and Snapcaster Mage, but just in a way that the other color is a little bit better at interacting with playing on the battlefield. Moving on to black. Black has always been a color around Death's Shadow in the Tempo Tuber. That is the modern slash legacy deck I'm really trying to highlight in black, and this is actually the reason why the cube features shock lands instead of ABU duel, is at least a big part of it, so that you can shock yourself to turn on your own death shadow. Black, of course, has a lot of spot removal, some targeted discard. There's been some cycling through in the threat column in black. Kind of the biggest shift, I guess, would be away from Gurmag Angler, which had to do with the blue bounce spell suite. It also makes a Dark Confidant and the newer ad, Caustic Bronco, a little less hostile, you're less likely to just die. There is kind of a delicate balance there with supporting Death Shadow with cards like Snuff Out, Dismember, Frexian Mana, Fetch Land Shocklands, and making it so you have enough life for all of your effects, and then your Dark Confidant and your Caustic Bronco don't just kill you. Something that I've liked having in black is trying to have some aspect of catch-up mechanics or way to play it from behind, or some high impact spell outside of just being an aggressive or value creature. Initially, and for a while I had Plague Engineer in the cube, which could answer things like young pyromancer tokens that got out of control. There's a lot of one-toughness humans in the cube. But the play patterns are just so bad, it can be so much value immediately for three mana, and it's nothing to do with how you construct your deck. It's a purely reactive card, which is something that seems kind of antithetical to the premise of aggressive decks being the macro archetype here. And the card that I have in this slot now is Spitting Dilophosaurus from the Jurassic World Collection, which released alongside Lost Caverns of Ixelon. This is a more obscure card, two and a black for a 3-2 dinosaur. Whenever Spitting Dilophosaurus enters the battlefield or attacks, put a minus one, minus one counter on up to one targeted creature, and creatures your opponents control with minus one, minus one counters on them can't block. This really feels like what a Titan, like a the grave titan or that anything in that cycle, attack or enter's triggers, would look like in a cube where three mana is a lot of mana. So spitting Dilophosaurus really fits the cube aesthetically in that reason in that way. I don't love that it doesn't have a border, it only comes in a borderless card. I would really like to get a version of this card that has a border, but that gripe aside, the way that it plays here, it's really good to have this creature that is very hostile to Mother of Runes that can play on turn three and actually turn a game around, even if you are behind a mother of runes. Answers a lot of cards with really high output in this cube, a lot of one-toughness stuff that can scale in powerful ways, and it also can just remove blockers. The body here is solid. Spinning Dilophosaurus adds this texture of being kind of controlling or being able to pick off your creatures one by one that generates some card advantage, but through casting a creature and through needing to maintain an attack with that creature, which is exactly what I want to have in this cube: some way to fight battles of attrition without just easily drawing extra cards and pulling ahead that way. So I've really enjoyed the way spitting Dilophosaurus has played in this environment. Black is easily the color that is longest on interaction in the tempo tubert, and it does have a healthy amount of ways to generate card advantage, but overwhelmingly, any of the strong cards in black or many of them, they do come at some cost. You have to be willing to gamble with your life total a little bit to really take advantage of many of the strong cards in black, your Dark Confidance, your Caustic Broncos, your snuff out, and that can expose you to red. Let's go ahead and take a look at what's happening in red in the tempo tubert. Red has a bunch of prowess creatures or more just cheap creatures that scale well into long games, some card selection and a lot of burn, some targeted creature removal that can't go upstairs. And it used to be the case that I had more going on in kind of a burned space in the cube. I had Boros Charm for a long time, and so that was one of the constructed decks I was trying to capture. But the actual burn aspect, like pointing a Boros Charm upstairs, really just isn't interactive magic. So I've been trying to zero in, make the games more about attacking and blocking, clearing blockers, answering strong attackers. So Red is much more in that space now, but it still maintains some ability to go upstairs. But the biggest swings are coming from attacking with your prowess creatures. Slick shot show off, maybe the nicest card, or one of the standouts to pair with the Berserk in this environment, and you have monstrous rage, which makes for a really useful way to try to attack through the ground, while making you a little bit vulnerable to some spot removal spells, unless you're willing to go into green for some of those protection spells. So a lot more texture going on there. And I want to talk about the card Fire Blast. This is a favorite of people that really like this cube. When we were drafting weekly on the We Will Be Cubing stream, Fire Blast was always the talk of the stream, whoever had the Fire Blast. Usually my friend Mike was always doing ridiculous things. Like there was one time where he handed his phone to his opponent, I think it was our friend Ben, and he says, It's for you. Like he goes, he does a gag like he's answering his phone, and he hands the phone to Ben and he says, It's for you. And then Ben like goes to grab the phone and he just has the fire blast tucked in on his phone. And it's just a fire blast that's for lethal in the game. So it's a lot of fire blast gags. I do think that fire blast is maybe something of a power level outlier/slash a card that only plays in a very specific way. It is difficult to pay the cost of a fire blast, either sacrificing two mountains or paying six mana. Paying six mana almost impossible in many of the games in the Tempo Tubert, and sacrificing two mountains, it can be difficult to keep playing the game if the Fire Blast does not outright win the game or radically alter the texture of the game. But with these changes I've been making, without Treasure Cruise in the Cube, without Bedlam Reveler in the Cube, it's a lot harder to just happily play Fire Blast unless you are confident you'll be able to position yourself as the aggressor. So it goes into more specific decks now. It's harder to make use of it, and also you are more likely to use it as a removal spell. And I actually am really happy in the games where you have to get a little bit scrappy, use fire blast to remove a blocker, maybe trying to line up an attack over two turns, or if you have to use it as a removal spell, the spells are cheaper enough where the game can still continue. It's a card that I think if it wasn't so beloved by the people that I play the cube with, it probably would be out. My sensibilities say that I am happier trying to make Monstrous Rage a big aspect of the gameplay than Fire Blast, but it's such a classically cool and fun card. That Fire Blast does stay in, and I do think it has gotten more modest. It has had a more interesting texture since moving off of all of the card advantage spells. So Fire Blast can be a big explosive game winner, and it is just kind of a hallmark of this cube. And if I'm willing to bear Mother of Runes being kind of miserable some of the time, Fire Blast is at least more fun, at least for the things that I enjoy about magic. The Fire Blast for Lethal when you're tapped out is something that really never gets old. And there are still a couple ways to gain card advantages in red. You know, flashing back, firebolt is certainly something you can do it, but even more directly, Abbott of Carol Keep can give you a card if you're able to cast it the turn you cast the abbot. So there's some tension there. It's always been fun to me to decide when you want to cast the abbot on two just to get something going, or when you do want to try to get the card advantage. I'm a huge Abbott of Carol Keep fan. And Bone Crusher Giant is a really nice top end. I say top end for a three mana creature. It is inefficient for the environment. Two mana for stomp to deal two damage. That's useful when you're trying to play a control role, but it doesn't kill everything. And two mana is a lot here. And three mana four, three, it is strong. It's bigger than a lot of things, but three mana is a lot, and there are creatures that will outgrow Bone Crusher Giant. So really cool kind of top end for red, plays into the prowess theme, gives you a big creature, and deals damage if it's ever targeted, so it plays into kind of the burn category, and it is strong but not overwhelming. I've really been happy with some of the three mana creatures in the tempo tubert and how they establish a higher impact card that you can cast, but you do feel the cost of spending three mana on something. So strong but not overpowered, and a card that can play very differently from game to game, which is something I really enjoy about trying to position yourself into aggressive mirrors. Sometimes you just don't have time for stomp. Sometimes you use the stomp and you never have time for bone crusher giant. So it can be a really strong two for one, and you can build around it in different ways and take advantage of it in different games based off the texture of the game. So a lot of maneuverability in red, and it's there is that aspect of Fire Blast where it is kind of single-minded in what it tries to do, but not to the extent of like Bedlam Reveler, where you just cast all your cards very quickly and you make up the cards later. You do have to be a little bit more deliberate in how you play your red cards in the tempo tubert today. And that leaves green. Green is probably the color that has changed the most in the cube, both in an individual card level and in fundamental ways. I've had so many cards in and out of greens and different natures of cards. I've had mana creatures like noble and ignoble a hierarch, scaling creatures like experiment one, quote unquote haymakers like Thrun the Last Roll, I've tried to make just like four mana spells part of what green does, and all this stuff just played really weak. Noble Hierarch, who needs really extra mana if you're only going up to three or four. Exalted didn't amount to much. Those creatures are also just very fragile, which part of the problem with Experiment 1, and even as they scaled, they scaled contingent on you playing larger creatures, so your decks would just be kind of one-dimensional in ways that were weaker than the other colors, especially if you compare that to White's more one-dimensional card. So they just kind of gave you more value or scaled better than the green cards. So it was tough to get an identity for green, and really most of the development of green in the cube has just been waiting for better cards to be printed in the space. Tarmagoyf has always been great here. Nimble Mongoose has actually played great, a big part of that just being Shroud. A lot of this cube is about trading one for one with removal spells. You can't use that on Nimble Mongoose, so you can just keep attacking with that one. That card is always performed here. But then the big innovations lately have been Bristly Bill and Scythe Cat Cub, these landfall creatures. It is kind of weird because you only want to make so many land drops in this cube, but the green decks get to prioritize the fetch lands a little higher. Tireless Tracker is always a card that has played well here, and that is just a card that generates card advantage, but Kraken Clues does cost a lot of mana relative to the environment. And I do like that for the most part, you do want to be lower to the ground, you want to use Bristly Bill or Scythe Cat Cub and maybe make one or two land drops after, maybe three, preferably fetch lands all of them, and that's going to give you enough power to close the game. But then you can take advantage of tireless tracker, you can move in on the Blood Bright Elf in the gold column, and you can end up in this more mid range, maybe Jun style deck that comes together some of the time. These are cards that play well when you are the aggressor that can scale more when you. Want to try to play a slower game, a more controlling game, and the amount of mana involved in leveraging Tarless Tracker while also being kind of fragile, it does immediately die to a lot of the removal spells, is kind of a cool space to open up where you can be more aggressive but skew a little bit mid-range, and that opens up more textures of games here. So that's something that Green does pretty well. And these scaling landfall cards, despite the fact that you don't want to make that many land drops, and there's currently no mana acceleration, they play better than they might seem to at a glance here. And then the general scaling back on easy access card advantage has allowed cards like Berserk to shine a lot more, has allowed Become Emense to become more of a player, has given you more reason to play a card like Primal Might instead of all divinations and doomblades. Even Mutagenic Growth has been opened up quite a lot here as a playable card, given that players are just going to run out of cards in hand, or it's more appealing to force some action because it's more difficult for an opponent to gas back up after some big exchange on the stack. So that aspect has made a number of the historically weaker cards in the green column shine a little bit more in the cube. But then there's also just those new printings. I do think that Bristly Bill and Scythe Cat Cub were tremendous boons for Green and the Tempo Tubert. And I've already talked about lands and gold cards, tighter mana base, looser management of the gold column, which is all facilitated really well with that five monocolor archetype base here, so you can get a little bit funkier with that stuff. The better mana and just more approachable, more intuitive mana relative to how magic is normally played and drafting other environments where you have multiple fetchable duels with fetch lands, way more approachable. Mana bases on average have been stronger and more consistent without being problematic. Love that. And the gold column is just more cards that can reliably and happily make decks, whether it's cards that you always play and are just strong, like Baleful Strix when you're blue black, or cards like Blood Bright Elf that do sometimes incentivize more of a go big, often Jun style deck that is seeing the Blood Bright Elf early can cause you to approach crafting differently. These are all appealing cards, got rid of some of the less appealing stuff in the gold column. There's not a ton to report with colorless. I've already talked about removing those equipment for the Stoneforge Mystic package that no longer exists there. Smuggler's Copter has always been a really strong colorless card in the environment that you can put in any deck, but it is going to often play better in the white decks just because they naturally have more creatures, so you can more reliably crew it, but it is just a strong card. You can play it anywhere. You have a couple baubles to trigger prowess to enable delirium, definitely some delirium stuff going on in this cube. You can pump up your Tarmagoyf easily with it. Hangerback Walker, just a colorless card that shows up anywhere. There is no sacrifice theme in the tempo tubert, but hangerback walker is a very effective blocker that can just grow large and make some good attacks, so it's a useful tool for slowing games down. I've also been trying out engineered explosives. I guess it's been in the cube for a while now, and it's just one that I don't expect to make main decks almost ever. But when you find yourself in a matchup where you are just going to be consistently behind, maybe you're playing against a deck that has a really strong token maker or multiple token makers. This can be a catch-up kind of mechanic. If you're playing against a Mother Runes deck and your deck is a little bit slower, having the explosives is just a clean answer to one. It's something you pay a lot of mana for. You pay for what you get, but it is a useful tool that it won't allow you to just play a full control deck. It only destroys one mana value of cards. But in certain games, you can position yourself to really take advantage of engineered explosives, and it's something that just adds some more texture to how you can approach. You could I could conceive of somebody main decking the card in this cube, and it is a really useful card when making sideboard plans. So some cool texture there that I've been messing with in the colorless column. And that's gonna do it for this look at the state of the tempo tubert, how that cube has changed over time and my current philosophy, things that I have decided I wanted to change, and some things I'm experimenting with right now. The big notes here, better mana, more focused individual colors, less card advantage, certainly much less easy access card advantage. And that leaves the cube in a space where the games are a lot more focused on combat, making decisions around blocking and potential blocks, being more diligent with your removal spells, and these are really the hallmarks of enjoyable and replayable aggressive mirrors for me. So really happy with how this cube is shaped up over time. Initially, a lot of the motivation was paying homage to some historic constructed decks, having cards and strategies from those decks represented here. There is still a lot of that, but over time the cube has more and more taken on its own shape, which even when you have a lot of inspiration, I always really enjoy it when a cube really becomes more of its own thing, and it's less this card is played in this deck, I'm gonna put it here, and more this card fits the play patterns of this cube environment. The spitting Dilophosaurus, for example, that's a card that really just fits in this cube really well. And I've never seen it or played with it anywhere else, so in my mind, spitting Dilophosaurus is a tempo tubert card, and figuring out how to shape green where there's some inspiration, there's cards pulled from other environments, but it's just so different from how green plays in any other environment where mana acceleration is really not a thing here, and these scalable threats, it's been tough to get that right packaged together, but over time just I've tried enough different things, and now I have this package that's kind of like this value pile that's kind of these large stats, but you get the stats in ways that are harmonious with the environment, and it allows you to play berserk here in this really unique space. So the cube really has become its own thing over time. This is a cube that a lot of people immediately really enjoyed upon playing. It's long time it's been something that I've been very proud of as a design, as a cube that really highlights a lot of cheap creatures and lets those creatures shine without easy access ways to go over the top of them. And it's a cube that I've learned a lot about over the years, curating. I go back again to that feedback about the cube once being about too many divinations, and I've really learned how to hone in on and highlight the things that I want the environment to be about. And when it comes to cube curation, you're never really done. You can decide that you're done, but as long as you're still having fun exploring the environment, and I have still have been having fun learning things and changing things in the Tempo Tubert and just watching this environment evolve over time. This is one that I know that a number of other players have built for their own playgroups. That's really cool for me anytime I hear about something like that. I'm confident that other groups have gone different directions with the cube. It's really cool the way that people can take one of these designs and make it their own. And for those that have been following my development closely, I hope that this look under the hood here has been informative and interesting and maybe gives you some food for thought in designing your own environments or maybe some changes that you would make to this cube if it's something that you play with your own friends. But that's gonna do it for me for this week for my look at the tempo tubert and where the cube stands today. Thank you so much for listening, for taking the time to like, comment, review, share, subscribe, whatever you do to support the podcast. Word of mouth certainly goes a long way. I appreciate you listening and for any of that, and I will be back next week talking more cube. Later, gamers.