Rarity Restrictions, Budget Considerations, and Cube Identity

Ryan Overturf discusses how Stadium Tidalmage inspired a significant update of his Pauper Twobert, the changing landscape of budget and rarity-restricted Cubes over time, and the importance of an aesthetic identity for his enjoyment of Cube. 

The Pauper Twobert on Cube Cobra

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What's up gamers? Welcome back to 180MTG. My name is Ryan Overturf, and today I'm going to be talking a bit about an update that I dropped to my popper tubert, my all-commons 180 card cube. But there's also going to be some broader focus today on rarity restricted cubes, generally budget cubes, which is a really related topic, and then cube identity, which is why I haven't updated the popper tubert as much in recent years as I had before the advent of play boosters. I'm going to dig into all of that, and also some struggles I have relating to my own peasant tubert. So let's go ahead and dive in. I want to start today by talking about the event that got me really thinking about all of these things, which was a week or so ago. I was watching my friend Ian do a draft of Secrets of Strixhaven. And I haven't spent a lot of time looking at all the commas and uncommons. When I parse a new set, I'm largely looking for cards that specifically speak to the cubes that I actively curate. And Popper and Peasant is something that's been a lot more out of my mind lately. And so when he was drafting, it's the first time I really noticed a card, Stadium Title Mage, which is too blue red for a 4-4 Jinn Sorcerer that says whenever this creature enters or attacks, you may draw a card. If you do discard a card. Now this is not the most powerful common ever printed, but when I look at this card, I think that's not a common. And to be clear, Stadium Title Mage doesn't look like a rare or anything, the complexity here is very low, but the rate here is just so loud. 4 mana 4-4 in blue-red with this extra text on enter and attack, being able to loot every turn, that's a strong thing to do. I'm somebody who has happily cast a lot of looter ill cores. So given the rate here, Stadium Title Mage really reads like an on-common to me, but that just has to do with me having a lot of experience, or rather a lot of my retail limited experience being dated by so much. The game has changed a lot since the days of me drafting Rise of the Eldrazi three or more times a week. It's just a different time now, and there's nothing wrong with that. But to me, Stadium Title Mage, it just really felt loud seeing this card as a common because it kept showing up in packs. It's like, oh, there's another stadium title mage, and it kept being there, and I can just imagine having this card in so many old limited formats and just casting it and expecting my opponent to have no shot to be competitive in the game anymore. And I do think that Stadium Title Mage does stand out even among commons and secrets of Strixhaven, but this card being a common today does just have to do with the fundamental shift that's going to be play boosters. A few years ago, they changed the booster pack model. There's fewer total commons in every pack. And what that means, because you're playing with more uncommons, more rares, and retail limited, the commons do just have to be a little bit stronger. And stadium title mage is just nowhere near a constructed caliber card. This card doesn't offend me in any kind of way. In fact, I think Stadium Title Mage is really cool. Why I've been thinking about it so much is I think I want to cast that card. But Retail Limited doesn't really speak to me in the same way that it used to, so I, of course, am turning to cube. I want to cube with Stadium Title Mage, so I've been thinking about it a lot. And the most natural home that I have for a strong common is going to be my popper tubert. Now, my popper tubert, people maintain popper cubes in different ways. There's actually kind of a wide range of what you can do with commons. I've always had more of the strongest commons of all time than other players. I've always been sympathetic to having Sprout Swarm in my popper cube because I have nostalgia for drafting Time Spiral Block, for drafting Future Sight, and Sprout Swarm just being a common, that just being part of what's happening. Pestilence being a card that's been a common in multiple booster pack environments, Rolling Thunder being a common, and actually being more available in the drafts of Tempest Remastered on Magic Online because it was an uncommon in all three packs instead of a common in just the Tempest packs. I like having access to these really strong cards in kind of a draft environment. And you don't get to play Stadium Title Mage and Construct it, it's not strong enough, and it also doesn't compete with a lot of the rares, certainly the kind of rares that break into constructed, which tend to be hallmarks of many of my cubes. But the PopperTuber is where I started thinking about the Stadium Title Mage, and that's a cube that I haven't worked on a lot in recent years. Some of that does have to do with play boosters and me not really drafting retail limited in anymore these days too much. There's some sets where I will get into it, but if I tell you the most recent limited set that I've played a lot of, honestly, the most I've played in the last year has been Spider-Man. So I do not play a lot of the retail limited sets. Um I'm kind of out of step with that, and so I'm not really in tune with Playbooster Limited. And the PopperTubert is something that I made a pretty big update to back in 2023, which was actually a tightening up of that environment regarding color-based archetypes and getting every individual color into a place where that color did something very coherent. Instead of just being a stack of strong cards, I started focusing more on what each color did and trying to ensure that the cards within one specific color had more harmony, more synergy, more reason to play all the cards together, and I really kind of tightened the cube up in that way. Though after that, I did have some drafts with the cube that I didn't have the most fun with. Some of that has to do with the fact that green and white have gotten a lot stronger in Popper, which has to do with a lot more creatures with enter abilities that generate card advantage, a lot more cantripping green and white creatures. And I haven't updated all the other colors to really keep up with that, because historically, Grixis and the value you can generate in those colors based off of spells has been where the strength has been in the popper cube environments, at least in the popper cubes that I have curated, and the turning up and the power level that has happened gradually, and then more and more cards happened over time, where green and white just got a lot stronger, and green and white kind of felt like they were eclipsing. Certainly, red had gotten a lot weaker in my environment, and I think that those changes that I made that gave red more of an identity, I really pushed it to be kind of a prowess kind of thing, but I siloed it a little bit too much, and so when I've been thinking about Stadium Title Mage, I ended up dropping a big update to the PopperTuber, and some of that focus has been how can I make Red more competitive in this environment? And I tried to look for aspects of burn spells that play more than the creatures with prowessy kind of effects I had. I had like Firebrand Archer, and a 2-1 is just kind of bad in an environment with so many token makers, so many other creatures that draw cards. It was just kind of hard for red to actually get up to the critical mass of that kind of effect that I'd kind of seated in that cube, and I felt a little bit deflated because you know red is my favorite color, of course, and having the red decks struggle more against the green-white decks, and I had just gotten a little lost in the sauce. I had too many red cards that were for a specific deck, who were weaker cards even in that deck, and that also I had maintained a lot of keeping the historic power outliers in the cube. I still have Treasure Cruise, I still have Sprout Swarm, still have Rolling Thunder, so there's like good red cards, but then the weak red cards really weren't pulling their weight, and so now I have added kind of more just abstractly powerful red cards. They still largely play in the same deck, but I'm less forcing you to do a spells matter thing in red, which I think I pushed a little bit too hard in that update. And I spent some time working on other cubes and really shelving this one for a while, but I am excited about this new update. Which really does bring me back to my cube roots a bit. My first cube was a popper cube. I built it at a time where I had really been fascinated by cube, but I didn't think I could afford to build my own, and I drafted my friend Dana had a popper cube. He's somebody who bought a lot of sealed product when a new set came out, and his popper cube was a home largely for the cool foil commons that he opened. So his popper cube was largely foiled, and it's just cards that he got in packs, and there was some curation, like he had like the foil sprout swarm, and he had a lot of the same sensibilities about having strong commons, but then it was rounded out more with a lot of weaker cards just because there are foils that he got in packs. But that experience did inspire me to build my own popper cube and shape it a little bit more around my experience playing Popper Constructed. Popper Constructed is a very popular format now. A lot of that popularity is because it is one of the cheapest formats playing all commons. It's really inexpensive to build a popper deck. Though that wasn't actually what I liked about Popper Constructed when I was playing it 15 years ago. What I liked about Popper Constructed then is that Popper really was kind of a legacy light format. It was a format that was fundamentally broken. The strongest decks were oppressive. Right now, there's a lot of heavy curation of the popper format. You have the popper format panel, there's a lot of work being done to maintain a healthy and diverse metagame. Whereas when I got into popper, and actually some of the things I liked about Popper were that the strongest decks, it was just highlighting all of the busted things you can do, even if you were only playing commons. So commons got to shine a little bit more, and the decks, I am a empty the Warrens apologist. Storm was one of the big decks. I loved the Storm decks, they were really cool. Storm has always been a fascination of mine. Infect was one of the decks. You know, now there's cards banned from all of the decks that I liked when I started playing Popper, and I did like that there was this really tight metagame and it only engaged with the strongest comments. I think that it makes sense the way that they do it today. I think that it appeals to a wider audience, and it's not important to appeal to me because I will play other constructed formats, I'll play my cubes, you don't really have to design popper for me, I'm not upset about any of that. I'm just kind of setting the scene for what Popper was and why I loved it as it was so long ago. And because of that experience, because I loved Empty the War in Storm and Popper, because I enjoyed Treasure Cruise being a thing in Popper, Getaxi and Probe, because I am a sicko who didn't play Popper for years and played a ton when Chatterstorm was legal, when Modern Horizons 2 was printed, and then quit immediately when it was banned. My Popper Cube has always been a home for the deranged stuff that you shouldn't allow in Popper Constructed. And the constructed archetypes that I enjoy in Popper that broken stuff, not all of that translates well to cube. Chatterstorm is not anything I've tried to make work, certainly in a singleton popper cube, but I always have had sympathy and a desire for an all-common environment to have historic power outliers. I like having Sprout Swarm kind of for the same part of me that liked playing Empty the Warrens and Constructed. I like highlighting busted commons, not just nuts and bolts cards. And that's really why Stadium Title Mage grabbed me the way it did. I looked at it and I thought, that's not a common, but it is a common. It's a common in a retail limited set. It's a common in a standard legal set. You can draft it as a common and retail limited today with the current set. And because it seems so much stronger, that kind of reignited the fire in my brain, the passion I had for Popper Cube when I was first building it. And I thought, yeah, let's get the band back together. Let's go update the Rolling Thunder Common Cube. Let's get this Stadium Title Mage in there and get this back up to something that I really like. So putting that update in has been fun for me. I'm excited to start drafting the cube again. And Stadium Title Mage is just kind of the exact kind of card that is a one-for-one. It's a strong card you can put in your deck. It is just a strong rate card. It is strong for a common, but you are still playing a game of magic. You can conceive of how it's a common, even if it's maybe something that quote unquote should have been an uncommon. And that's the home that I like having in my popper cubes. But then this does bring me to kind of a broader question about power levels in rarity-restricted environments. That also relates a lot to cube identity. I had lost some interest in my popper tubert when I made red this really focused thing around spells mattering, but I had made red weaker than I intended, and I got a little bit deflated about that, and so I ended up shelving the project for a long time without giving it a ton of thought. I had made updates here and there, but I had not been as excited about the environment as I had previously after making those changes. And some of the detachment I felt from the cube has had to do with a couple years of some really truly broken commons that were printed that I don't enjoy as much for Constructed, that really warped, limited, that I ended up fully moving away from with one mechanic and then not ever embracing at all with another. And I'm of course referring to the Emblem Mechanics, Monarch, and the initiative, which today there's been some bans regarding these mechanics in Popper Constructed, but today some of this stuff is still legal. Some of this stuff is what a number of the constructed popper matchups and uh aspects of the metagame are about. And it's something that really turned me off from my own popper cube because in my mind, my popper cube had been the home for the broken commons. I was always the Sprout Swarm apologist, even though it's clearly way too strong to be a common, warps the games around it with a high degree of frequency, very few interaction points with Sprout Swarm, but it at least was a card that did everything it said on the card, and you were still engaging with just creatures and life totals and the base resources of the game. The emblems of the monarch and the initiative, much more the initiative, change the texture of the game. With Sprout Swarm, you have to focus on actually getting your opponent dead because it's it uh cascades, avalanches value so quickly. Once it gets going, the snowball keeps growing. But with the monarch, if you just can't attack for a turn, then you're just kind of dying. With sprout swarm, there's some aspects to having burn spells or drawing to a counter spell. At some point, maybe you can turn it off. Once there is a monarch emblem in play, you're playing a monarch game. Once you have ventured into the undercity, you're playing an initiative game. There's no way around that once that starts happening. And for a while I had embraced the monarch in my pauper cube because I liked that there was a good white monarch card, Palace Sentinels. I liked that there was a good green monarch card, Entourage of Tress that gave me green and white cards to play. And as there kept being more green and white strong value cards, or even just rates that played better in an all-common environment, it became less and less clear to me, or became less and less fun to me to try to engage with this monarch stuff. And then the initiative really pushed it to a head where it was like, this is just going to be all the games all the time if I put these in a popper cube, especially in a tubert in an 180-card environment. These cards are gonna show up regularly in the four-player draft, they're in every draft. In a two-player draft, they're gonna show up in a high degree of frequency, and this is just what all the games are gonna be. And so one day I just put my foot down. I had this popper cube that was a home for many of the broken popper cards or the strongest commons ever printed, but I'm just not gonna allow the monarch and the initiative because they just take up too much of the air in the room. It's just too much what too many of the games are about, and so I cut them. But after doing that, I had this kind of perception of my popper cube being a home for the strongest commons, but now I'm excluding many of the actual strongest commons. So what was I left with? And I kind of just struggled with the identity of the cube. It was less uh exciting for me to engage with. I felt like I had lost something, but really I was just waiting to reconnect with it. And I should add that there were some really oddball reprints and downshifts to common that made me feel like it was really hard to keep up with my popper tuber. And I do think that these are things I could have handled independently, but I think with that texture of monarch and initiative, it just kind of was another aspect of something that I was more generally having difficulty uh parsing for the environment. But just like things like Gopher the Throat being a common but only in the Warhammer decks, somebody had to tell me that. I would never have known that, I would never have discovered that on my own. And it's just like some off the top of my head. This is an older example, but there's a forked bolt that's a common in the dual decks. I think it's Zendakar versus the Eldrazi. And just these oddball downshifts, it's like hard to keep up with what is allowed to put in a popper cube. And when you just have this kind of vision about putting the strong commons in, then there's also a coherent goal in mind. Also keeping track of all of those oddballs, it just kind of becomes exhausting. And if the identity of a cube is just strong commons, it's not really a vision that is easy to keep coming back to when there is so much information to track and the legality for all commons just a lot of it does feel pretty arbitrary. So you have to have more than just common set symbol going for you. And truthfully, my experience working on cubes like the pre-modern tuber, like the life and times of Gerard Capuchin, are they I have to say that these were an aspect of me now having this reinvigorated interest in my popper cube environment, because those were cubes that only allowed older cars, and that kind of just woke up the part of my brain that was like, hey, just because it's no longer true that I have all of the strongest commons ever printed, or my sensibilities, or to see how strong an environment with only commons can be, just because I am excluding many of these power outliers, something that I wouldn't have done on power abstractly in the earlier years working on it, I can still just tap into what I liked about that cube. I didn't like that cube because it was the strongest commons. It was demonstrative of you can play games that are high power with commons, but I think that that's just kind of something that's just more commonly known now and is also just kind of less interesting to explore because there's so many more commons because commons are so strong today. And so now my popper cube, it can just be hey, these are the commons that I think are sick. And looking at Stadium Title Mage, I was like, Yeah, this card is sick. I want to play with this card. And so my popper tubert, it's in this space now where it has many historic power outliers, but they're not there because of the strongest commons ever printed. I'm avoiding some of the strongest commons ever printed deliberately now, and just mechanics I don't like. These are the commons that I enjoy playing with, and that's what the cube is allowed to be. You're allowed to make a cube whatever you want, and I'm happy to have gained this new perspective and to update it this environment to make it something that I will enjoy again. I'm really happy about that. And the design has roots in my nostalgia for a popper constructed format, now many years obsolete, but the roots are still there, and I get to add just new things that I like, and I have freed myself of kind of the sense of trying to define it in terms of power level at all. And so now the cube, it has more of an identity, and it's really just more of a personal thing to me, and that that's really cool. That's all that cube has to be. But then that does bring me to the broader topic of rarity restricted cubes and budget cube designs, and how it was really important for me to get back into popper and just feel this kind of emotional resonance to be able to kind of tap back into that nostalgia, that excitement I had about the cube once upon a time. Because I was gonna say up front, I don't have that attachment to my peasant tubert, commons and uncommons. There has never been like a peasant constructed format that had any significant traction. It's not anything that I've ever played. I'm sure that people play it. It's just not anything that outside of maybe some odd weekly arena event that I have ever done. So when I worked on my peasant tubert, I've played peasant cubes, I've enjoyed playing peasant cubes, but I've never had a sense of what I liked about them or what they should be, and that's never gotten firmer over time. Whereas Popper, I've had waxing and waning interest and cards that I've really liked, but the cards that I've loved, I've always loved, or with Peasant Cube, I just don't have any kind of inspiration that I've ever really tapped into in those kind of environments. The Popper Tubert to me is evocative of memories of playing daily events on Magic Online with Empty the Warren Storm and Mono Blue Control, but there's just no such anchor like that for me to peasant. There are cards that I think are sweet that mostly could only play in that kind of environment. I think about the card Ultimacia Time. Sorceress from the Final Fantasy set a lot. The first and only Uncommon that has a take an extra turn effect. I think it's really cool that they have an extra turn effect on an uncommon now. I have that in my peasant tubert, but I just haven't actually cast it. It's something when it comes time to pick a cube to play, the peasant cube is just not something that ever really jumps to the front of my mind. I just have less emotional attachment to that environment. And that has made it more and more difficult to update the peasant tubert over time. When a new set comes out, I'm not really looking at uncommons for things that stand out for being uncommons, because I'm just not really drawn to that environment. I just don't have the same kind of history to it, and so my emotional connections with my other environments are just stronger. If I had a history with a peasant constructed environment, if I could go back in time and maybe one of my first cube experiences was a peasant cube and I would get really attached to that, and my first cube had commons and uncommons instead of just being a pauper cube because I could afford uncommons, there'd be a lot more for me to work with, a lot more that I would have become attached to over time, but that's just not the reality, and so I do just have a stronger emotional connection to my other environments that tend to have inspiration beyond just kind of wanting to play with uncommons, which is really all that I really have with my own peasant tuber. There's archetypes that I like, there's cards that I like, you know. I just said I like Ultimesia, it's not the only card I like there. I have the spider spawning archetype, stuff that I enjoy playing with absolutely present there. It is something that I did spend time curating, I've had some fun drafts with it, but it's something that just got pushed to the back of the shelf over time, and I have less motivation to bring it back to the front. And I think a lot of that is that to the extent that there are limited archetypes that I have seeded in the peasant tuber that are historic archetypes that I enjoyed drafting in retail limited, they're all things that I can fit somewhere else. When I want my spider spawning fix, I can draft Spooky Cube and I'll have a much better time, and it's something that I have a lot more emotional attachment to. Just playing with commons and uncommons, there's nothing there that really speaks to me in a way that I couldn't get from some other play environment. In fact, a trend that I have noticed over time is that players that have worked on peasant cubes some years ago, I started hearing about things called peasant plus cubes, where they are cubes that are broadly commons and uncommons, but they allow some sampling of rares, rares that don't necessarily break the mold in the peasant space. Big examples tend to be mana fixing lands, just because when you play with commas and uncommons, you start to get to a high uh a power level that is generally higher than with Popper, and you start getting one mana spells that you really want to cast on turn one, and there's just really not mana fixing lands that enter untapped at lower rarities. So get into some higher rarities for that, or cards like temples, which are technically rare, but certainly now in the world where we have type surveil lands, temples feel like they certainly could be uncommon or maybe even common realistically these days. And so Peasant Plus kind of accesses that. And there's still generally a focus where these are broadly inexpensive cubes, and don't get me wrong, I think that something being affordable is great. It makes the experience more accessible, and more people can build a cube if the parameters make it less expensive. But a format being inexpensive as far as the gameplay doesn't make any kind of statement regarding that. Cards aren't fun because they're expensive, but a card being inexpensive also doesn't guarantee that it's going to be fun. When somebody tells me I should play popper because decks are cheap, that's not a reason to play popper. That's a reason that I'll have less regret if I try it and I don't like it. But when the conversation starts around the cost of something, that really takes me out of it. Because if the something sounds fun to me, I will entertain the conversation about how much it costs to partake, because ideally, I'll have a good time with it and it'll be worth the money that I spend. And if it's not fun, I don't even want to do it for free because it won't be worth the time I spent on it. And that really is just the rut that I'm in with my peasant tubert. There's no reason for me to take it apart because I couldn't sell it for anything. None of the cards are very expensive, they're in a box, it doesn't really cost me anything to continue owning it, but I don't really have a reason to actively curate it. There's nothing that's really pulling me there, and now that I have it, it just kind of exists. And yeah, it didn't cost me very much to put it together, but also it's something that has not really kept me excited to continue to use it. And that's not a fault of it being inexpensive. There's lots of inexpensive cubes that I think are very fun, and that's really where I want this conversation to go. I'm not trying to doggone things for being cheap. I just think that when the conversation starts there, that's not a hook. That's not gonna get me interested, it's certainly not gonna keep me interested. But going back to how the design of Commons and, of course, commons and even a lot of rares has changed over time, just the design of magic has changed over time. The average card is just so much more appealing. A second-order effect of that is that many cards are very inexpensive now. When I pick up cards from new set releases, a lot of what I pick up is like 50 cents to a dollar. If you're not going after the chase cards, if you're not going after cards that are immediately appealing for commander players, if you're not going after cards that are the constructed staples that immediately see four of play, certainly the ones that see play across multiple formats, there's a lot of rares that are just more appealing and oftentimes can really seed archetypes and kind of focus designs. And you know, they're more powerful than old cards. If you have an attachment to weaker cards, this stuff won't appeal to you, but you're doing your own thing. I players in that space are totally fine. You don't need my advice to keep doing that, playing with the old weaker cards. There's there's a time and place for that, and I love that stuff too. But I'm just saying that when I pick up new cards, so many of even the rares that I get now, if I wait a week or two after a release, they're just a dollar. Like there's a lot of rares that are stronger and more fun to play with than a lot of the rares that they used to make that you can get really inexpensively. And particularly I keep my eyes open for things that supplement the things that I already like playing with. Anytime there's like three or four new rares for Spooky Cube, stuff that plays in discard matter, stuff that plays in the graveyard. I already have an environment there that I have a history with, and these are just cards that are inexpensive that end up being evocative in those spaces. They just make a lot more cards that supplement environments at the lower end of the power band. I don't love all of the newest, flashiest stuff, the most expensive cards. I end up only picking up a small handful of those as they're released, but there are so many more inexpensive cards that are appealing that come down the pipeline these days than there used to be. And even more than new cards being appealing and inexpensive, the way the cards are reprinted now has changed a ton in the last 10 years with so many commander releases. That's aware a lot of cards get significant reprints. But you see things like the list, uh, there's more limited ones like special guests that don't really rank. I don't count secret layers. Secret layers, they tend to be something you pay uh you you you pay for what you get. Uh the secret layer reprints don't really impact market prices, but a really loud example. This is not like a great cube card, but it's just it's one that a friend of mine that inventories cards complains a lot. But there's uh like over 50 versions of the card exotic orchard now, right? If you go back 10-15 years, a card will have like two or three reprints. The cards that had like five or more reprints were the exceptions. Many of them were commons, or it'd be like a chase rare that they bust out every like eight years as a reprint, like Birds of Paradise and Snaring Bridge is a card where there's like a big gap and they reprinted it as like, oh, it's a big deal, we can get this card again, where so many cards are reprinted a lot now. And they're still expensive cards, and an aspect of that tends to be that they only get so many reprints. But to like kind of to dial into the world of cube and a powerful cube card that EC play even all the way up to Vintage Cube has been reprinted a few times and it's now very inexpensive. The card Brazen Borrower. This was like a $30 or more dollar card when it was a standard player. It's a really strong card from Throne of Eldrain. It plays in Vintage Cube just because of the bounce attached to a threat, also being a blue card that's really good for a high power environment. And it's continued to be worth like $10, $15 for a long time. Started dipping to maybe like 5 to 10 after it was reprinted in a commander deck and with uh Wilds of Eldrain, and then it's in the Secrets of Strict Haven Commander deck, and today the card's like a dollar or two. And it's still just strong in Vintage Cube, and it's a card that plays as strong in the original recipe tubert. It's just an appealing card, and it's inexpensive today because of the new kind of reality for how cards are reprinted and the greater frequency of that, which I think is really great. Brazen Bar was the kind of card that would have been really difficult to reprint in the time before Commander decks. Definitely if you really go back before modern masters, uh, you know, not even talking about modern horizons, before modern masters and other masters sets, like adventure and having a reprint there, there's something really specific happening, so it's showing up in multiple commander decks and now being a very affordable card, where if it just was never reprinted, it still has a lot of appeal in even like Legacy Constructed. I think it still shows up a little bit, and it's like a fine commander card, still a big cube card, but these reprints make it very inexpensive. And there's other things where I like to play with the original printing of a lot of cards. So my pre-modern tubert, like pain lands in the original printing, are very expensive now. And pre-modern constructed is a big thing that's to blame for that. A lot of players that are trying to play these nostalgic formats, they want those original printings. But if you just need the game piece, pain lands have been reprinted a bunch of times now. Most of the pain lands you can get for like a dollar, and those are untapped mana fixing that are going to be untapped on the first turn that can add some strong mana fixing at a very low cost in terms of budget to a lot of cubes, and that's great. Reprinting cards more often has really made it so the range of power levels of game pieces that you can easily access monetarily has really expanded with uh the proliferation of more reprints these days. And I'm not trying to say that every card is cheap, that magic is super affordable across the board. It is very much a luxury hobby. Some cards have stayed expensive despite many reprints, fetch lands are still pretty expensive, a tenset of shock lands is still about $100 despite a lot of reprints there. But there are cards like Dark Confidant, is like $5 today. Cards that were strong and constructed 10 or 15 years ago. Many of them, and these are the cards that a lot of people are going to Cube for to get nostalgic hits. Dark Confidant being like $5 is a pretty big deal in terms of approachability for the format relative to what you would have spent on that card if you were building that sand cube 15 years ago. Tarmagoyf, barely more expensive than that. So many, many cards are cheaper than they were. Certainly if you are interested in playing with the older cards, not if you're going to original printings for pre-modern, but many of the cards that were good in the aughts in the 2010s. And so the consequence of that is just that more things are inherently more affordable. More play environments are going to be budget, even if that's not what you set out to do. And so I don't really feel drawn to a cube environment when the first thing I know about it is that it's a budget cube, because it really doesn't tell me anything about the kind of cards I'm gonna see there. I don't know what the play environment is, I don't know what archetypes are supported, I don't really have a feel for power level. There's a lot of powerful cards that are very inexpensive now with 30 plus years of history to the game. And so the cubes that I'm drawn to, even if they are budget cubes, they're not budget first, they're about something, and it just so happens that the cards are affordable, and maybe you have a specific technical or aesthetic vision and you design it with a budget in mind, but the first principle, the first part of the conversation is not that the cube environment isn't expensive, it's built on a budget. So the uh tundra, for example, my snow desert tubert. This is a cube that breaks singleton for a lot of things. It's my first desert design, so you have to draft your basic lands. Those are the conversation starters, those are the things I want to tell you about at the cube. I want to tell you this is a cube where there are six Kindles and six accumulated knowledge. Those cards are not expensive. And if you're familiar with them, you know that they are just commons. Maybe you would just know offhand that you can get these cards for pretty cheap, but that wasn't what I built the environment around. That just was kind of a consequence, is all the cards I was looking at in this space. Uh, cards that care about having multiple copies, they can't see play in commander. And commander can be a real price driver in Magic the Gathering. So cards that you need multiple copies of, like Corelash, Air to the Blackblade, pretty cheap card, I think, largely because grandeur doesn't play in commander at all. And this was not something I set out to design as being a very budget environment, something where if I thought of a cool card, I was going to spend within a reason whatever it costs to get the card, but it just kind of shook out that scrying sheets is the most expensive card in the Tundra. And Scrying Sheets is like four or five bucks. Uh, it has a reprint on the list, it's just not that strong of a card, doesn't really play anywhere. I'm sure that it's in some commander decks. There's probably some other people in the Snow Space and Cube as well. Just not a lot of demand for the card though. So it's kind of inexpensive, it's kind of a cool historic game piece. Cold Snap, not the most open set, so it's kind of maybe worth a little bit more than it would be if it was in a more popular set. And that reprint does help there. But my point is just that just in pursuing cards that seem like they were cool and played in this space to me, it so happened that there was a way to do it where the cost of the cube is like under under 100 bucks for the entire 180 card Tundra environment. And it comes up in conversation when we're drafting the cube, like after we play, like sometimes players that are really familiar with the cards will just make that observation like, is Crime Sheets just the most expensive card here? And is it even worth anything? And you know, I I like that you can build a budget environment, but not have that be the lead because the game has so many more affordable game pieces these days. So I do think it's good when there are inexpensive game pieces that's really important for accessibility, and that's really one of the great things about cube is that only one player has to front the cost of any play environment. Even if I want to play with more expensive cards, if I bring the cube, everybody is able to play with those cards with me. There's no buy-in for anybody else, so that is very good, and that is just kind of something that's fundamentally true about cube, but you should also be able to start the party, even if you're on a more limited budget yourself, and it's good that there are a lot more ways to do that today. And of course, I should mention that there is no shame in proxying. Many people do proxy up their cubes, makes a ton of sense, especially if you are just using somebody else's list, especially if you're copying like the Magic Online or Magic Arena powered cubes. There's no reason to own all those cards, those are exorbitantly expensive proxying, totally reasonable. I do not personally like to proxy in my environments. I like to play with real magic cards, I like the way that they look and the way that they feel to shuffle, so those are my preferences, but absolutely by all means, I encourage anybody who wants to proxy to proxy in your own play environments. As always, everything I discussed today is just speaking to my own preferences and experiences. I would never presume to tell anybody else how to do it with their own play environments. I know that for me, the chase of acquiring all the cards can be part of the fun. Every game piece kind of having a story of where it came from, how it came to be in my possession. I love it when I have a card that is over 30 years old and it's been traveling however long to get to me. That's another added layer of fun and certainly emotional attachment to cube and to magic just generally for me, but that's not going to appeal as much to everybody, and that's not going to be accessible for everybody. So absolutely by your means, play the way that you want to play. It's just something that is a barrier that that's kind of why the peasant cube doesn't really do it for me. There's kind of no aspect of the attachment beyond these cards are common and uncommon, so they're easy to get. And that's why that one's kind of on the shelf for me. But even with the popper cube, which is even uh kind of definitionally more accessible only using commons, because I do have that history with the constructed format, because I do have that nostalgia, because in a way it brings me back to my early days of cubing when I really couldn't afford to be building a cube with a bunch of rares in it. The popper cube has that layer of emotional resonance and attachment for me. And that's the kind of thing that keeps me coming back. Magic is a luxury hobby, you have to approach it from what makes sense within your own means, and there are many very fun cubes that can be built on a relatively small budget, and of course you can proxy anything, though I think that leading on the cost, leading on something being more or less expensive isn't really the aspect of the conversation that makes something fun, and it's certainly not what makes something enduring. It is good when something is accessible and affordable, but cube kind of by its nature is like that, and designing something with fun game pieces, with a fun play environment in mind is really gonna have that lasting resonance for me, and that's why the Popper Cube is something that I'm really happy to have found some reinvigorated excitement for, and why Peasant Cube is something that I have on the shelf and maybe some inspirational strikes someday, but I just don't know what that would look like, and I don't know if it's an environment that I'm really gonna approach with the same level of excitement and the same level of curiosity to mold more into the future. And what I absolutely love about Magic is all the thoughts that I've shared today. These are just the things that have been swirling in my head just because I saw stadium title mage in a booster pack in a draft that somebody else was drafting. Magic has so much history to it. I have personal decades of experience to draw from, and when I'm designing cubes, like appealing to that experience and building something that has resonance just with something that I've spent so much time with in my life. No matter how much it costs, whether I'm playing with new cards, old cards, real cards, or proxies, magic is something that I've spent a ton of time with that brings me a lot of joy with this specific game. And the cubes that tell a story, the cubes that speak to that history, those are the cubes that are really going to capture my curiosity, that are really going to make me want to invest my time into playing them and shaping those environments. And there's no reason why those cubes couldn't be a peasant cube. I'm certainly interested if anybody listening has a peasant cube that you have a lot of history with that has a particular story that you've been with for many years. I would love to hear about what that means to you and how that has been impactful for you because Popper has been a big deal for me because of the time that it found me and my economic circumstances, just the amount of money that I had to spend on the game at the time that I became aware of Popper Cube and Cube more broadly. But that's going to be it for my discussion today. Thank you for taking the time to join me as I kind of walk through some of my history with Cube, what Popper Cube means to me, and how budget cubes, my relationship with them, and the ones that speak to me more or less and kind of where I'm at with all that, rarity restrictions and budget first versus aesthetics first. Really important for me for a cube to tell a story because there are so many stories to tell. I'll of course have the Popper Tubert Cube Cobra page in the show notes. You can look over those lists and check the changelog for my recent changes and kind of how this has evolved over time. This is a cube that I play on sleeved. Many of these cards are very marked, they're well worn and well loved. And hopefully that cube list and the discussion today will maybe give you some inspiration or some food for thought in your own personal projects. But thanks again for listening, and I'll be back next week talking more cube, later gamers.