Poetry and Cube Design with Jane McKinney

Jane McKinney joins Ryan Overturf to discuss Cube as an art form, and how poetry can inform Cube design. 

The Ball Pit on Cube Cobra

Interview with Jane on The Ball Pit for Recross the Paths

Get your tickets for Inland Northwest CubeFest! 

Petal to the Metal on Cube Cobra

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

What's up gamers? Welcome back to 180MTG. My name is Ryan Oberturf, and today, for the first time on the podcast, I have a guest to introduce. So to start things off, I would like to introduce you to the curator of the ball pit, Jane McKinney. Welcome, Jane.

SPEAKER_02 0:16

Hello, hello. I'm like crawling out alien chestburster style of either your screen or, you know, the unremarkable surface of the nearest McDonald's ball pit.

SPEAKER_00 0:28

Well, that's a very evocative imagery uh image to start today's show. I love it. Um, yeah, so we are going to certainly be talking about the ball pit a little bit today, so in the course of the conversation. It's not our main topic. Uh, so I'm gonna have some background links there. The ball pit is a cube, of course, where you have no deck construction and every card can be cast as a chromatic sphere. I say, of course, as if any of that would be obvious, uh, but this is a cube that I've talked about before. I drafted this at Shoebox, so this is part of my shoebox uh event report here on the show. And I'll also have a link in the show notes to Jane's Cube primer over on Cube Cobra. Check that out, it's a fun read. I recommend the video as well, a fun little introduction there. And then I'm also gonna have a link to an interview specifically about the ball bit that you did with uh Kate over on Recross the Paths, which is an excellent Cube podcast if you're not familiar. And then uh also, you know, let's just get to know Jane a little bit first. You're the uh event organizer for Inland Northwest Cube Fest that's coming up in October. Uh, you know, tell us about that or anything else you'd like us to know about you before we dive in today.

SPEAKER_02 1:34

Inland Northwest Cube Fest is coming up this October. It's October 10th and 11th in probably sunny Spokane, Washington. Uh inconsistent Spokane, Washington. Uh come as you are, see what you find, Spokane, Washington. It's a very interesting Cube event, and I intentionally sell it that way to folks, as it's not a KubeCon. It's not a large, polished event where you come with multiple hundreds of other people and you have enormous selection over, you know, cubes from literally all over the US. It's a it's a smaller event, it's a 64-person, you know, local uh put-together thing, and it is entirely my brainchild, and therefore it has the slight brain disease that I do in all creative endeavors that I do, which is that it's guaranteed to be down to earth, it's guaranteed to be creative as hell. I try to get some of the people in the greater inland northwest area, which you know includes Washington, Idaho, and parts of Oregon, and then also as far afield as people are willing to buy plane tickets. But in terms of people driving up, I try to include some of the varieties of cubes that are not only enticing for someone to maybe travel for, you know, ball pit is the variety of cube that debuted at the first in the Northwest Cube Fest last year, but also just the sorts of cubes that you might not see as much at like a large polished event like CubeCon. So, you know, the occasional cube that might have some proxies, or, you know, a cube that is a little bit more vibes forward than the things that necessarily get through the voting rounds of, you know, 400 faceless drafters for a different variety of events. So it's a ton of fun, it's very relaxed for an event that you're still competing against people with. The focus is 100% on people having fun and people getting to know each other and people just exploring the beauty of Cube. And the competitive element of it is almost an afterthought. And I try to take steps as the organizer that make people not even realize that fact until they kind of reach the end of day one and they're like, wait, why can't I even see what my rankings are? And I just go, Well, because you can't see what your rankings are. That's that that's part of it.

SPEAKER_00 4:05

That's been true the whole time, actually. I love it. It sounds like a blast. If it was drivable, I'd be there in a heartbeat. Um, flying is tougher, but I'm still very I would love to be there, but uh definitely check out that. There's tickets on sale. We'll have a link in the show notes for that as well. So you and I met at Shoebox just a few months ago in St. Paul, where I drafted the ball pit, and we've been chatting a bit since then. The ball pit has had the wheels turning in my head. It definitely kind of expanded the range significantly, I would say, about what I find appealing about Cube and what I understand Cube can be and how these things can work. And in the course of chatting, I had something. I've been working on a project that's inspired a little bit by the ball pit, a lot by the ball pit. We'll come back to that though. But just in the course of conversation, I was thinking about um spoken word and poetry. There was some thoughts churning in my head, and just running some thoughts by you. You had said that poetic structure really informs a lot of your work, and that really piqued my interest. And so today, that's just what we're talking about. We're talking about poetry and what that can mean for cube design. It's a really exciting topic. I'm really excited to hear your thoughts on it.

SPEAKER_02 5:18

Poetry does inform a lot of what I work on in my creative spaces, and in that's such an easy, like liberal artsy thing to just throw out there because nobody can say that you're wrong. You know, I mean it's like the uh infinite discussions or I guess digressions that I've seen people go on and at times participated in on just like what is art. It that happens in the MTG Cube Talk Discord that I uh am basically the only cube space that I'm active in. Uh so I I do not wish to devolve into giving a nitty-gritty description of what exactly poetry is and why mathematically my thought process for cubing uh graphs in a way that, you know, best fits to the term poem. But, you know, I think that's fairly anathema to poetry. I think you can use the phrase as loosely as it is relevant, and what I meant by that when you and I were first chatting about that, was that when people look at poems, and when people start having poems formulated in their head, and when people then do the very wildly by person act of sitting down and putting a poem to paper or to word processor or carve into a tree, whatever it is that they prefer to do to create poetry, the process of me formulating what it is that I'm trying to do, or what it is that I'm looking at, in the case of, you know, being handed somebody else's cube, uh fires a lot of the same neurons for me as the act of producing or interacting with poetry, because we're all, I think, listening to this podcast, human beings, and the variety of pattern recognition that we have evolutionarily, I I've touched on this in, you know, Pac-1 Slick One's episodes before, but the variety of pattern recognition that we have means that disparate things will fire neurons in the same parts of our brain, uh, for reasons that we might not even understand. And for me, cubes are I mean, if you're looking at Cube Copra, wonderful website, uh you're looking at a collection of words, usually, that are arranged in a very specific way, that might have various ebbs and flows just to the shape of the words. And I every time you dig a layer deeper, you see more things that feel like artistic, intentional decisions that make it, yeah, it's a collection of words, but more than that, it has a feeling to it, it has a vibe, it has an experience about it that is far more, you know, uh developed than just a sentence. It there's there's an artistry there to me that resonates with me with the way that language communicates through poetry more than the sum of its parts.

unknown 8:18

Right.

SPEAKER_00 8:18

Yeah, a sentence is more than a collection of words, and a cube is more than a collection of cards. So you've already kind of answered somewhat the first question I have, or the first launching off point, is you know, we're talking today about thinking about cube as an art form. And so just more broadly, you know, what what does it mean for cube to be an art form? I know that when I first started working on cube, I was really focused on a lot of granular balanced things and how the cards fit together. I didn't think as much about the cube expressing something, which is a lot of what you're saying today, is that a cube is a combination of cards that expresses something more than a list of cards. When you think about cube as an art form, is that is that what you mean? Just that there was an expression beyond the card, or is there more to it than that?

SPEAKER_02 9:09

I I think there's a little bit more to it than that, which is you know, a poem can be there there are tons of different varieties of poetry. So I'm not trying to say that every cube comes about in the same artistic process, uh, but you know, the process for me of, for example, we've we've mentioned the ball pit. I have other cubes as well, uh, like the tabletop cube. The tabletop cube is a cube that I would, I don't think, have come to the concept of poetry nearly as easily as the ball pit. Because the tabletop cube is in my head, first and foremost, kind of like a like a community project. It's a resource that I want to be there for people that I also own. And one could argue that that, you know, there are poems that are like that, and that there are ways you can create poetry that are intended in that way. But it's a different feel for me. The language there is different. The ball pit, for example, and a lot of the cubes that I currently work on, because you know, tabletop cube I've I've had for over a decade, but uh the ball pit and cubes that I work on nowadays, there's much more of a focus on resonance. People will often describe them as vibes forward. I have also described them as vibes forward, and a lot of poetry is the vibe can be diverse, but a lot of poetry is very intentionally vibes forward and or just vibes. No forward at all. It's just the thing that it is giving you is the essence of a thing. The thing that it is giving you is a generalized uh feel for something that either the author wants to communicate or just something that the author wanted to get down. And the fact that you are able to absorb a vibe from what the author inherently wanted to write is itself another element of poetry in the like death of the author uh sense.

SPEAKER_00 11:12

Yeah, and that comparison between the two cubes, the vibes forward, and then being more something approachable, uh, a tool, something that can be an example, that really makes me think of a couple of my own designs. Like the original recipe tubert, this seems kind of self-aggrandizing. I almost don't want to say this out loud, but I think of that more as that's my approach to the platonic ideal of 180 card cube. Yeah, I am really not trying to do anything fancy there, and just what I'm expressing is this is a way to play a game. Whereas 30 to 50 feral hogs is very fives forward. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 11:48

Just the 30 to 50 at the start, you know. It's just like there's there uh there be hogs here, you know. You're you're off the edge of the map now, and that that as a concept is very poetic. You and I have talked about, you know, different types of poetry that uh that we can resonate with, but just to like just to throw out, you know, uh 30 to 50 Feral Hogs is already giving you a sense that there's a looseness here, you know, there's a a freedom of expression, there's a you know there's a freedom of meter, basically, um, to use the poetic catchphrase, and that is a variety of communication that is different from say 100 ornithhopters. You're like, ooh, nice round number, you know, 100 ornithopters just from the concept of it makes me know there are bounds here, you know, and there there are different types of poetry that can give various different senses like that, you know, where uh most people who are uh you know listening to this, even if they would not consider themselves a poet, even if they would not say that they have consumed much poetry, I would assume that most of you listening have heard some poems before or read some poems before. I am. And in I I hope so. If not, uh go try it. It's pause the recording right now. Yeah, go try to do it. It's kind of weird, but it's kind of fun. Uh yeah. If if you've learned about poetry for the first time on this podcast, then you know, we've we've done some good work today. Uh uh, but you know, most people who have read any poetry have reached a point in reading their in reading or listening to poetry where they went, I think I know what this was trying to do, but I felt a clunky thing. I like I felt like there was like a rhythm going, and then there wasn't a rhythm going, or the rhythm fell off. Or wait, oh actually, maybe I just read that wrong because the pronunciation is different than I thought it was. Um and that's the sort of realization that one can only really have within a rigid structured variety of poetry, as opposed to, you know, if you just go to your local city's uh, you know, slam poetry reading that's being held like out back of a Carl Jr. or something like that, just like in the parking lot at 11 p.m. on like a Thursday night, uh, someone will be telling you some poems, and you will never think, oh, the they missed something there. Because they're just they're giving you a deluge of art that does not it's 30 to 50 feral hogs in the parking lot behind the Carl's Jr. It's not, oh well, you know, the iambic pentameter here, the stress was on the the wrong syllable, and therefore, I don't know if that's an accurate, you know, it's different varieties of poetry have different guardrails built into them, and that is an intentional thing. That is a thing that is for the choosing of the artist to decide if they want to work in a space that is very constrained so that they can emphasize things within that constraint, or, you know, I've used the word constraints, oh, we're back in cube territory, uh or or if they just want to go, you know, literally balls to the walls and make a project that people struggle to critique simply because they don't know what they're supposed to be commenting on. Those are both poems, they're just very different.

SPEAKER_00 15:22

Yeah, we don't have to go deep into this specific subcategory here, but what I the something about the name 30 to 50 feral hogs is very disarming. It's really using humor to make the environment more approachable. Because if you are showing up as like a tournament grinder and you really gotta win, you have a really spiky attitude. Like, here's my cube where the name is already silly. There's a joke there and a reference there. And then also conceptually, let's play magic, but the only creature we can play is Razor Swine. Like, who would think of that? That's deranged, it's unhinged. And uh, I think that that's something, there's something similarly disarming in your cube cover landing page for the ball pit where you use the phrase this the the orbs will guide you. And it is really just saying, don't think about it too hard. This is art. I really do like that and appreciate that about that introduction.

SPEAKER_02 16:17

It's primers are their own variety of poetry that I will not dive into here. The uh other than just to say the ball pit has a primer that I like, that I wrote that one could argue is poetic in some ways. Uh, and honestly, as a comparison that I've already mentioned, the tabletop cube does not have a primer that I enjoy. The tabletop cube has a primer that is long, it is bloated, it was written a while ago, you know, it has out-of-date sections, and it's mostly just a proof of concept for an article that I wrote uh on how to write primers for kind of a maximalist approach to giving data to your drafters. And in that sense, you know, for me, the tabletop cube is just like it's a it's a textbook, you know, it's a it's a diagram as its landing page of here is a a thing that you can do. And, you know, a a textbook can be a poem in some senses, it's a form of literature that has specific uh bounds to it that uh some people really love and some people just like fall asleep listening to and it communicates something, but the vibe is completely different from you know Mary Oliver. Uh so you know, whenever Mary Oliver writes a textbook, I'll read it. Uh but you know that is not the tabletop cube's primer. Whereas the ball pit, you know, it has more me in its primer. It is uh because the only reason to touch that thing with a ten-foot pole, meaning just that cube in general, is that you want to have fun. You can have fun with all of the elements of it, you know. You don't have to be precious about making the introduction of it be accurate and competitively slanted when accuracy and competitive slantedness are just not intended uses of the cube as a whole.

SPEAKER_00 18:11

And something, if it hasn't been clear that I do really want to emphasize is that uh you you kind of mentioned in your introduction earlier where sometimes there's kind of like this hand waving and pointing to calling something art, and now you can't judge it at all. There's just no way to analyze it. There's this it's just art and it's good and you have to like it, you know. But uh there is uh an amount of work and scrutiny that comes into the expression. When I first heard about the ball pit and I look at it, there's cards that I think you're obviously not supposed to play. And when I'm working in my environments, those are often things that I am really prioritizing removing from my environments. But they are an important part of the aesthetic there, but it doesn't mean you just put them in and they live there and you're never gonna change the cube. The ball pit is something that, you know, when I listened to your interview with Cade, it's not even the original idea that you had. You started from a completely different starting point. So it's not just art because I put this on a page and that means you have to like it. There is also a lot of refinement involved in the artistry. I want to emphasize that as well.

SPEAKER_02 19:21

I I like how you started this with the concept of critiquing because uh one of the things I think is most helpful about thinking about your cube and other people's cubes as artistic expression is the concept of critique. You know, I know a lot of artists in the magic space, and they have usually uh had experience with the artistic critique, as in the like physical and temporal process of being in a room with other people with everybody's art, where what you are doing is you are critiquing each other's art. Because the verb critique there is used differently in the artistic sense than most people think of that word. Most people who have a cube, when they think about somebody critiquing their cube, what they think about is someone being critical of their cube, you know? What's this garbage? You know, uh I drafted blank card because it was in the cube, and that card only works in specific decks. Those decks were not draftable. Why have you put me through a personal hell of wasting my time on a Monday night when I could have been doing literally anything, you know, like there are ways to be critical of a cube that are not an artistic critique. The artistic critique is, you know, someone walks up to my table in like a college ceramics classroom where I have the ball pit sitting on it, and they go, Okay, I like what I'm seeing. There's obviously creativity going on here.

SPEAKER_00 20:59

Um honestly, like that I would shrivel up and die if somebody started their critique by saying there's obviously creativity going on here.

SPEAKER_02 21:07

Oh, I'm uh what one of the purposes of experiencing the artistic critique is to shrivel up and die. That's a necessary experience in human life. And if you have not shriveled up and died, you will not get to the point where you learn to unshrivel yourself.

SPEAKER_00 21:22

You will not yet be given to live until you have shriveled up and died.

SPEAKER_02 21:26

Yeah, where you learn how to rehydrate yourself by climbing into the nearest slip bin and just absorbing all the spare moisture and having nobody look at you. Uh but again, uh you know, someone will look at this and say, to to not use something like that. I see a lot of heart in this. And they'll say it in a genuine manner because they are also an artist, and it's all about, you know, it's all about tone. It's all about how you say a thing, just as much as it is what you are saying. They say, I see a lot of heart in this. This is a extremely unique thing. That looks like it kind of sprung from you, whole cloth. And I know because I have watched you in the studio with this for months that it that's not true that you have worked on it, that you have swapped things in, that you've made it something entirely different than what it is. I'll tell you some things I like, and I'll tell you some things that I don't really understand what it is that you're going for, so that you can either tell me what it is you are going for, or you can say, Oh yeah, uh, I don't know either. And then, you know, and then they bring up like the fact that they love Phyrexian dreadnought, and that that was a thing that they saw in their childhood that has kind of fallen out of favor. And well, I shouldn't say that anymore now that pre-modern has brought it back, but you know, oh yeah, the kids love the dreadnought. Yeah, yeah. Kids, kids are out there wearing their Jinko jeans with pockets full of dreadnoughts.

SPEAKER_00 22:48

Um on very long change, they pull several dreadnoughts out of their pocket.

SPEAKER_02 22:54

Yeah, they just they're just tied together by the little shrimpy tails. Um, but I uh they'll see a card like Void Rend from the the uh fun, like gold embossed printing of it from Streets of New Capenna. Absolutely gorgeous magic card. And they'll just be like, I I like that this card is here. This is a card that does not exist most places because it can't and it shouldn't. However, it just it's self-aware that this is a card that rhymes in the environment that I am looking at. It's a card that, you know, it has three pips in an environment with very few lands uh that produce colored mana. However, anybody could cast this card in their deck. You could have a mono red deck that only has spells with red mana pips, and then this one card, and you could cast it almost as easily as a card with three red pips in it. It's beautiful, it gives me a sense of, oh, I think I I think I got something. I I I want to use this, you know. Um I want to hear that again. Uh and I like that about it. And then you also you also have this card, Horrible Hordes, in here, which uh I wish I never had to see again, because it ended up in my deck when I was doing this critique, and uh every time I looked at it, I'd be like, yeah, this is a goofy little guy, and uh why is it?

SPEAKER_00 24:26

Well, that does also speak to something about the ball pit too, is that that rules modification of being able to play cards as a chromatic sphere, when you have that feeling of I don't want to look at this card, I never want to see this card again, the cube says just put it face down.

SPEAKER_02 24:42

Yeah, and like the uh that is a hmm. Uh well that I was going to say, well, we can talk about that as a critique too, because you know, when you're given artistic criticism, you can always cast it face down as a crazy experience and just get rid of it. Uh which, you know, that that's a departure from poetry. Uh however, you know, I I do think that is just that is an artistic element here, is that uh the way that you approach art forms is different than the way that you approach a spreadsheet. And there are valuable reasons to approach a cube, especially specific cubes.

SPEAKER_00 25:21

Well, I was thinking about that as an interactive aspect of the art, where when you have that feeling this card sucks, I hate looking at it. It's cathartic to cast it face down. I have the horrible hordes in my deck. That is an experience that did resonate with me.

SPEAKER_02 25:39

I do think of this cube specifically uh in some ways as performance art. And as you mentioned, that's that's an experiential thing. To bring it back to poetry, there is poetry that is designed to make you uncomfortable, you know. There are topics that are very uncomfortable to hear somebody talk about, especially in you know, a vulnerable space where they are right in front of you, you know, they're on like a small stage right there, and you're in like an uncomfortable folding chair if you're in a situation where you're listening to poetry, or arguably worse, you're at home on your couch, you know, you're in your space, and then you read a poem that's about the beauty of nature, and then you flip the page and it's about abuse, and you're just like, I I I'm not comfortable, you know. And I don't know if that's bad. I think I do not need to be comfortable all the time. And you know, I obviously the whole point of there being different artistic mediums is that there are mediums that are conducive to communicating certain things and mediums that are not, and like so many of the heavy elements of life are things I would not approach cube with, you know. I have created a lot of written work, I've created a lot of disgust work that could be called artistic about, for example, my transitional process. I would never make a cube that seeks to communicate things about that because there would be no way, given the materials that I have, to not have it be tacky as hell, you know? Like, oh, it's a transform cube. Uh like there are people whose own transitional journeys might be such that they're like, oh, well, you know, I came out because I read uh, you know, I read Twilight when I was like nine or you know, 13 or whatever, and I came out in the process of being like, wait, I don't want to be, you know, whichever gender character in this book. I want to be the other gender character. And like, there's someone out there probably who's like, I have an Inestrad Transform Cube that is about me transitioning. And off Jane, you'll have to bleep that one, but I have to say it, you know, this is a cube about me. Because poetry, you know, it can be raw, you know, it can be personal. You can make a poem that you know other people are not going to enjoy. You can make a poem that you know other people are gonna look at and go, oh, that's uh that's that's that's rather pedestrian, that's rather puerile, that's you know, that's uh beginner stuff. You've you've clearly taken the thing on the tin and said, oh, transform, you know, I can transform. No, that can you can make a poem about that that is 100% accurate to your life, and just you know, what you want that poem to be used for is baked into why you made it. And the cubes that I make are by and large intended for public consumption, which means that the ball pit is about as uh abrasive as they get, because I have other ways that I create art that I don't intend to share publicly, like poetry, for example. I've there's like one person who's basically ever read poems that I have written, because that's just that's not a element of my creative process that I really feel the need to share in many ways, and that is an element that is different for me from cube, which is relevant to point out when I'm saying, oh well, cube is poetry. Uh but I do think it's still connected because the reasons that I do not like to share my written poetry with people are still there with cube. They're they're just different, you know? When I make a written poem, I do not want to have to think about anybody's interpretation of it. I simply want to make a poem. And there is still that element of me in the cube world. It's just softened a bit, you know? When I started to make the ball pit, there was an element of me that was just like, I want to make a thing that's cool, but I I just don't want to have to bother the worst possible thing would be that this gets popular. Because then people would talk to me about it, which like doesn't that defeat the purpose? I can't like physically push them into the ball pit. So I'm stuck there with them. Uh, and you know, then it evolved into something that was different, and that's fine, and that's great. But you know, that's that is a specific variety of engagement with art that I do not need to have happen with my uh other artistic processes.

SPEAKER_00 30:23

Right. I think that's um something really uh underpinning what you had just expressed is that cube is not an impossible medium to express something deeply personal, emotionally heavy, or challenging, though it is a bit at odds with providing a fun experience, which is typically the idea of drafting a cube.

SPEAKER_01 30:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 30:45

Um, but that's not to discourage anybody from relaying something deeply personal and uncomfortable and and hard to sit with. I think that, you know, I I kind of now want to go to a cube night where that's the theme, but like one time.

SPEAKER_02 31:02

Yes, I uh I will say I'm I'm currently working on a cube that uh is a secret that I it is not a cube that is intended to be drafted lots of times, and it does deal with some heavier topics, you know. I I do have a cube in the works that is more evocative of the ways in which you can push that envelope. But it's like you were saying, it's different because you're building a game most of the time that you build a cube, and games are meant to be played, and there are certain concepts that you just don't really need to play with, or at least that you and those around you might not wish to.

SPEAKER_00 31:49

Yeah, and gate games are so often an escape, but as long as everybody can sense and opt into the experience, I'm really intrigued. Uh, when when this is no longer a secret, I do want to hear about this project. That's that's really that sounds really cool to me. Um, and then just generally now kind of shifting into how we can use poetry to inform design. You did mention earlier a little bit about cards that rhyme, which is there's a lot of different ways cards can rhyme. So we're gonna dig into that a little, but I think even over the course of today, we're only gonna scratch the surface here. But I do want to introduce kind of how you and I got on this topic in the course of chatting, is that I was working on a cube inspired by the ball pit. The card Lotus Petal has always been kind of a fascination of mine, and I've kind of wanted to do something with it. It's been the building block of kind of like a deck building concept I've never gotten to. And then just kind of thinking about the ball pit, I realized that you know there's there's a subset of cards. You couldn't really just use any card and do the ball pit. You could, but there are ones that are better and worse. But as far as a card that plays in your opening hand that can really change the texture of the game of magic, is what if you could play every card face down as a lotus pedal? And so I started working on this project that I had uh the working title was pedal to the floor, because I was thinking the floor of every card is a lotus pedal. And you actually pointed out that pedal to the metal is just a better name, and some of that is the rhyme. And so I'm there, we call it pedal to the metal now. And I was working on this environment, and I just kind of cribbed, just straight stole a lot of your structure for the ball pit. I liked the idea of drafting four packs of 15, no deck constructions, you have to play all your cards because that's a good way to push back against the fact that this rules modification is fundamentally broken. And so there's gonna be some high power stuff no matter what you do, and so you do kind of want to like make it harder for the players at least a little bit. So not allowing you to cut any cards is pretty helpful there. And over the course of sketching this, I'm somebody who generally prefers to maintain singleton if it's possible. So I got up to 480 cards singleton, and you know, it wasn't the final draft, anything close to that, but I just fired off a practice draft with the bots on Cube Cobra because I wanted to be like, all right, what does this look like? I looked at a pack of 15 cards, and it was completely inscrutable to me. The only person who's seen the list, the person who meticulously added every individual card, and I looked at this pack and I thought, I have no idea what to do here. And I was thinking about the ball pit and something that really made that a lot more approachable to me as a drafter, are the big singleton breaks. And there's stuff going on, there's like power outliers, like I'm drawn to Cloud Post because it's strong, but I'm drawn to mirror enforcer because there's 16 of them. And I was just thinking about that. Like, how can I make this something approachable? And you know, the example of 16 mirror enforcers is really just like rhyme, uh, rhyming a card with itself. And if I'm approaching pedal to the metal and I don't know what I'm doing, then it's like, well, I can at least draft, I see two copies of the same card, that can cue me in. Well, there's probably something going on there. And it's on the designer if the multiples are not appealing. Like, yeah, I'll totally take that heat in my design if I put two copies and you're not supposed to do it. And so they started messing around with breaking singleton, and then part of what was unapproachable initially was that I had a lot of two-color fixing lands, because even when you have all lotus petals, I don't want every game to end on turn one, because there's just no point to this exercise. I want to have some range of games that take multiple turns, and I had a lot of two-color lands like Hollowed Fountain. I see Hollowed Fountain in a pack, and it's like, I can believe, certainly retroactively or retrospectively, if I look at a game, I could be able to identify this is a turn where you should have played Hollow Fountain. And sometimes you're supposed to play Hollow Fountain as a lotus petal. But with no deck construction and with the rules modification that makes color not really matter, because Lotus Petal can make a man of any color, it feels weird and it's hard to approach both the concept of drafting and playing a hollow fountain. And then I just kind of had this epiphany, you know, drawing some more inspiration from the world of cube, and he man goals a hundred ornithopters. I was just like, well, gemstone mine rhymes with lotus petal. Like gemstone mine is a land that enters with three counters, taps for a man of any color, and the third time you do that is destroyed, which is like a land that is three lotus petals over three turns, and that's just much more approachable. And so I just cut all these two colored lands. I was like, this cube is gonna have a hundred gemstone mines. And that's just like another way to rhyme, a card rhyming with itself, but then the gemstone mine rhymes with lotus petals. So rhyme as a way to inform and build out a cube really spoke to me definitely in the specific environment.

SPEAKER_02 36:45

The concept of rhyming is I like it with cube because as you were touching on, rhymes are themselves messy and diverse. There are varieties of rhyme. You know, there can be the rhyme of you've just ended every line in a poem with the same word. And if you will read that poem out loud, it will, you know, it'll it'll rhyme, but also the listener will often go, did it rhyme or did they just use the same word at the end of everything? And the answer is yes, of course, both, you know. Uh it did rhyme, and it rhymed because they used the same one, as opposed to, you know, uh like a a limerick. So, you know, limericks are usually five lines that go line one ends with a word. Uh we'll say, oh line one ends with a syllable that is syllable A. Line two also ends in syllable A. Line three is shorter and ends in syllable B. Line four is shorter and ends in syllable B. Line five is longer again and ends in syllable A again. So it's it's rhyming, but it's not symmetrical because there's three of syllable A, there's two of syllable B. Also, syllable B comes closer together because they're shorter lines. So even though there are more of syllable A, syllable B can be punchier because uh, oh gosh, let me I'm I'm just gonna Google uh limerick right now. I don't have one off the top of my head. Um from uh poets.org glossary, uh, you know, uh, there was an old man with a beard who said, It is just as I feared. Two owls and a hen, four larks and a wren have all built their nests in my beard. So this poem, first of all, it rhymes beard with beard. It says beard feared, and then at the end it's beard again. Uh they're spaced out, so you might not necessarily know it, notice it, but this poem has a flow to it, you know? Ba-da-da-da-da-da-da, ba-da-da-da-da-da-da, da ba-da-da, da-da-da-da, ba-ba-da-da-ba. So it's it's very it's musical to it, and that only happens because it has a built-in pause of punctuation and rhyming words that cause your pattern recognition brain to say, ooh, uh, I've noticed some things, I'm building a shape in my head, even if I'm not thinking of it as like a geographical, you know, I've drawn out a shape, it has structure to it. And one of the points of the ball pit having so many singleton breaks is to give structure. And I'll give a few examples of that. Uh, you already mentioned the Murr Enforcers. The other big singleton breaks are Energy Chamber, Drown Yard Temple, Mouth of Ronum, and Zolfur and Void. And Zolfir and Void, I don't know how many there are in the ball pit right now. Oh wow. Which is a funny thing to say as a designer who does care a lot. I it's it might be 59. It's it's not a clean number. It's just a number where if you open the cube cobra page, you can look at most of the cube list on one screen, but you have to scroll down to see the rest of the artifacts because there's a lot of them. And then Zolfiri and Void, beginning with a ZH, is just the entire bottom right quadrant of this page. It is unavoidable because it's just it you cannot ignore it. It it is a rhyme that you see and you're like, there's repetition here. Uh I have a structure, which is that I I almost cannot open a pack of the ball pit and not have there be a Zolfirian void in it.

SPEAKER_00 40:39

And I think always uh sorry to cut you off. I think that that like drafting the cube, that repetition is something that was really meaningful. Because when I was talking about mirror enforcer seeing on the cube list, that was already appealing to me. Like Mirror Enforcer, uh, it's funny. I listened to your interview with Kate, and you said, I don't know if this card was ever a constructed card. It was actually part of one of the most broken standard decks of all time. So I I knew that mirror enforcer is something that I probably wanted to get my hands on. But Zelfir and Void, I was like, Well, I want Tron lands, I want locuses, I want the busted lands, but then I just keep seeing Zelfir and Void at a point with the repetition, it's like my deck's gonna have to play these, whether I like it or not. And that repetition is a really good uh guardrail. It kind of saved me for myself regarding the lands I was gonna put in my deck, which you need to play the game.

SPEAKER_02 41:29

And I I think of Mir Enforcer as if we're sticking with the limerick idea for now, Mir Enforcer is a syllable A. It's something that when you look at the first pack, you're like, okay, I see what's going on here. You know, you you see your next pack, you're like, okay, there's you know, there's numerous of these, maybe. I this is a thing I could commit to. Uh Zolfurin Void, I think of as a syllable B, and that as the lines get shorter, they just get punchier. You know? Uh you reach a point in the packs where you're just like, uh the the card pool is dwindling, which means the Zolfuran voids are growing. Just say beard again. And the uh, you know, I I genuinely think that they are good cards in this environment, which is kind of funny to say when there's so many of them that everybody has to play them. You know, can a card be good in an environment where everybody is forced to play them? I think yes. But it's it is a it's a rhyme that is there for the structure more than anything, Solfure and Voids. You know, in poems, when you have a poem that rhymes, which is not nearly every poem, there are lines where what matters is the rhyme. There are lines where, and I think about like uh some rap can be this way. You know, rap rap is poetry. Um, there are some lines of poetry in rap where the purpose is the rhyme, because they've taken, you know, a five-syllable word that's extremely academic, and they have rhymed it with five different expletives that do not chromatically make sense to line up in the order that they did. However, vibe-wise, it 100% makes sense. And those lines rhyme, and also the juxtaposition is beautiful because it like it'll jump straight from this like ivory tower BS to something that you could just like hear in a middle school classroom anywhere in the US. And the rhyme emphasizes that in a way that makes it it's a it's a load bearing rhyme in a sense. Whereas there are other rhymes where what matters is that the person has really, really crafted the message of their sentences in a specific part of a poem and the rest of the poem rhymes, so these two specific Lines should rhyme, but the meat of the message is in the words themselves. And the rhyme is just kind of an afterthought to give it structure. And I think of Zolfir and Voids as one of that variety of rhyme. Zolfuran Voids are not there to change somebody's worldview. You know, they're I mean, they're a void. They are there just to be filler. They are there to give people a structure, to remind people of the impending doom that is a desert cube. Uh, that the you know the land could vanish at any moment, as it did for Teferi, you know. Whereas Mirror Enforcer, or even more so, Energy Chamber, there are less energy chambers, but there's still like 11 of them. Uh, energy chamber is there as a thing that people will look at and think, I can rhyme this card with other cards. I want to make poetry now. I want to take this card and either do something fun with it, or maybe I can even do something unintended with it. You know, maybe there's something I can do with it that's weird that, you know, my that the designer might not have thought of. Like, i if I put a counter on if I put a one-one counter on an artifact creature, or a charge counter on a non-creature artifact, is there a is there something I can break by making a non-creature artifact into an artifact and then putting a 1-1 counter on it? Or like, is there is there a way I can like it just it makes people think, and it makes people want to make the poetry themselves. And that's very different from a Zolvir and Void, in my in my estimation, and in my intent with what I want people to do with the uh resources that I give them.

SPEAKER_00 45:52

And there's a certain harmony. I'm gonna express an idea, I'll leave it on you to tie this back to poetry, but there's a certain harmony mechanically between Zolvir and Void and Chromatic Sphere when you have access to as many chromatic spheres as you want, sometimes more than you want. You can fix your mana for one mana many color, and you draw a card doing it, and kind of scrying in between Zolfiring Void, entering, and scrying does set up for you to draw into the actual front half of cards that you want to cast. And they don't rhyme, but they do harmonize. There's kind of a good alternating line between these things that don't rhyme. And uh really funny observation I made playing the cube is one of my opponents had uh Horizon Canopy, and at the end of the game, we kind of were sort of riffing about it because there was a couple times where he tapped it. I was like, You lose a life, and he's like, Oh yeah, thank you. Because Horizon Canopy does not tap for colorless, it's uh it's not a normal pain land. And at the end, we were just kind of like I I asked him how many green and or white spells are in your deck, and he's like, Yeah, I think this horizon canopy sucks, but it rhymes with chromatic chromatic sphere way more than the Airfoid does.

SPEAKER_02 47:03

Horizon, I was laughing as soon as you started telling the story because colored mana is extremely important in this cube. Like the lands that produce colored mana are way more powerful than people often give them credit for until they have experienced their opponent not having to crack kematic spheres, and then they're like, hey, hey, stop! What are you doing? Like, how are you casting your spells? Yeah, I I was I was building my game plan on the assumption that if you had a three mana green removal spell, you would have to cast it at four or five mana because it has two one or two green pips. And you cast it at three mana, and that's cheating. I don't like it. Uh and they're like, you know, I just I drafted Color Mana, and I have I've almost died to my own horizon uh horizon canopy, or died to my own horizon canopy numerous times in this cube because life totals do generally matter. But you said that it's up to me to tie this idea of resonance between different cards that do not rhyme together. Um I don't think that there is a need to force a poetic simile to it, uh, or a poetic metaphor to it. However, I will branch from that into the ways that a poem is rarely doing just one thing. There are poems that do just one thing, probably. I don't know. Like, uh if you think of one, uh type up a message to send it to me, and then don't send it to Ryan, give him engagement. You know, I don't I don't need you to engage with me in that way. Exactly. Uh but like the concept of um I'll I'll bring up haiku now. You and I have talked a little bit about haiku, but haiku is from a lot of people's perspective, one of the most rigid ways to make poetry. In that, you know, if you took someone off the street who recognized the word haiku and asked them what it was, they would probably say, well, it's five syllables, seven syllables, five syllables. Uh, and then if they knew a little bit more about it, they might have a different response and say, Oh, well, you know, uh, based on like the culture it was originally created in, it was more like five words and then seven words and then five words, uh, and those just happen to be syllabic. But also, you know, it does sound more similar if you do 575 in English. Like, you know, there there's there's minutia to it. However, what I want to talk about in this context is that a haiku is a poem that does not usually rhyme. It is usually a poem where uh the repetition that in is in the repetition that is used is less about uh the sound that you are using and more about first of all, it's a sandwich, you know, 575. Uh, and the meter with which you speak or write those lines can have a rhythm to it that reminds one of rhyming even if there's not rhyming happening. But it is also a format in which, in a sense, the first two lines rhyme thematically, and the third one is something else, where uh let me again, I this is me showing that I did not do as much research as I could have beforehand. I have open just again the poets.org uh poem uh I mean uh page for haiku, and the very quick and easy example they give is an old pond wait, this one is Oh, I'm gonna use this because it's not 575, but that that reinforces what I'm talking about. Um, an old pond, a frog jumps in, the sound of water. The first two lines are visual in nature. You look, an old pond, you look, a frog jumps in, you hear the sound of water, and there's no rhyming going on there. However, when you hear the first line and you hear the second line, you have sort of a comfort built in there of those playing in the same space, which is the average person who can picture a little bit of like visuality in their head, which is not everybody, when they hear an old pond, that you know, those three words, they picture an old pond, and when they hear a frog jumps in, they picture, you know, the frog jumps in, and then they hear the sound of water, and they picture what it looks like when water makes a sound, and then their brain kind of goes, Oh wait, yeah, there is a sound there. Uh, what's that sound? Oh, okay. Uh and that's a twist. You know, haikus often go line line twist. And in cube, you can do the same thing. Where in the example I just gave, the element that I said rhymed between the first two lines was you know extremely bare bones. I literally just said, you hear a thing and you picture it. That is that is sort of a rhyme in that both of those make you do it, and you wouldn't realize that those two rhymed until you were given a third line that does something different. And cube is the perfect way to do something like that because there's just more area for growth. You know, someone could reach halfway through pack three, you know, they have made more than twenty picks, you know, they're 20 lines into this poem, for example, and then they go, Oh. I just got past, you know, uh, I just got past a what's a good example. You might have one. What what's an example of a twist in pedal to the metal that you can think of?

SPEAKER_00 52:54

Uh I think that life from the loam is a good example of a twist. So we haven't gone too much into the granularity of that design, because it's also something that I don't know if will ever exist in the physical world, if it'll go beyond a theoretical theoretical exercise. But two of the, of course, very broken archetypes seated there are Storm and Dredge. And so, you know, I'm playing with fire in this environment, and oh yeah, I mean I'm enabling you to win on turn one sometimes, but Life from the Loam is a funny card because I have four of all of the marquee dredgers. There's four grave trolls, there's four uh stinkweed imps, there's four life from the loam, and it's funny because there's not that many lands, like a hundred gemstone mines is most of the lands, and there's like a hundred and ten. So you have to go out of your way to make sure you have lands in your deck at all, and there's not fetched lands, so life from the loam plays a little bit weird, but then once you jump through the hoops, life from the loam is also a storm card because it picks up three lotus petals, and so that can be something where you're drafting, it's like I'm drafting a storm deck, and maybe you tune out all the other dredgers, and in the middle of the draft, you go, Wait a minute, Life from the Loam is four storm and plus one mana if I check the right boxes.

SPEAKER_02 54:11

Yeah, and that's I I would uh even being somebody who you know is willing to throw out, oh, cube is art, you know, like statements like that, uh seemingly on a whim, I would not say that what you're describing is a rhyme. I would not say that what you're describing is something that at first blush I would think of as poetic. However, the previous part I would say is poetic, you know, that you have multiple copies of various things that someone will see and recognize as rhyming with something else, and then at some point they realize that they've encountered a twist. And that is more just like a generic literary concept, not specific to poetry. That's a generic artistic example as well, you know. I love a painting where you will look at it and you'll be like, oh, this is this is beautiful, this is detailed. You get up close, you're like, yep, it's it's still beautiful, it's still oh, there's just uh there's a naked guy. Just like and this is not a painting where everybody is naked guys, you know. I'm just this is like a po a painting of like a like medieval hunting landscape. Why is one of these hunters in the forest, you know, Buck nude? Like that that catches me off guard in a way it wouldn't in another painting, you know? If it's some painting of a Renaissance interpretation of ancient greed, uh ancient Greece, and they've just made everybody just like uh sons out, buns out, like you're not gonna blink when yet another person in that painting looks like everybody else. It's when something catches you off guard that you then go, wait, what what is that doing there? You know, oh uh one of the one of the dogs like ripped his tunic off, you know? Oh, that's that's funny. There's I was not expecting humor in this painting because it's otherwise about, you know, it's about a hunt. It's very, it's very martial, it's very like toxically masculine. Uh and then there's this guy who's just, you know, just dog like pranked him. And that's something that can happen in poetry. That's a thing that can happen in uh I mean that's that can happen in painting as well as in poetry of limericks, again to go back to them often being that way, the first two lines, you know, starting with there once was a blank, they're they're usually just fairly they're fairly uh they're they're prose more, in a sense. Like they're setting the stage, and then you get two little colorful things, and then you get the funny twist at the end. And because you if you have heard limericks before, you're keyed in from the sound at the start to go, oh, this is gonna be a limerick, and then you're looking for a punchline. Technically everyone who's ever heard a limerick at some point heard their first limerick, and probably doesn't remember that process because it was probably fairly unremarkable, and they were kids, they were like, that was weird. Uh but you know, the first time you hear a poem like that, you don't know that the twist is coming until it happens, and then you're like, oh, oh, this is this is humorous. Um and you know, I would say with uh I would say that with Pedal to the Metal, the fact that Life from the Loam is as broken as it is is pretty darn funny, you know, because like you look at it in a pack and you're like, oh, Life from the Loan is busted. Uh like almost everywhere that it is. This is an environment where everything is busted, cool. And you either pick it or you don't. And then at some point you or your opponent realizes, oh, oh no, no, this is a special kind of busted because it's busted in lots of different places and in ways that it wouldn't be if I couldn't just like cast everything as a lotus petal. And if you took the last line of a limerick and just told it to somebody, they'd be like, weird sentence, bro. Like, uh you know, like where where was that one that I that I just said, oh yeah, let me tell you a sentence. Have all built their nests in my beard. You're like backing away slowly now with your hands up. You're just like, I what is going on? Like, you know, out of context, lines of poetry don't always make sense. Sometimes they do, you know. Like again, I mentioned Mary Oliver earlier. I I love her poetry, and her lines of poetry often do make sense out of context because they're simple and they're beautiful, and they're sentences. Whereas, you know, just like taking the line of a haiku, you know, a frog jumps in, that uh that doesn't make sense. And I mean, even in the context of me saying that that rhymes with the line, I mean that that's resonant with the line before it, if I haven't first told you the line, an old pond. If I just tell you the line, a frog jumps in, you'll be like, to what? To me? To to the world?

SPEAKER_00 59:08

Like uh As opposed to out, of course.

SPEAKER_02 59:11

Yeah, exactly. As opposed to a frog jump out, or like I I know frogs jump. Is this supposed to be an educational sentence you're telling me? I I I know that this happened.

SPEAKER_00 59:22

Like, you know, it's just subscribe for more frog facts.

SPEAKER_02 59:25

Subscribe for more frog facts. Yeah, uh, a pig blinks. That's a line that we've given you that means absolutely nothing to you. And I did have that second thought of wait, pigs do blink, right? You know, because I know I know that I know that there are animals that don't, you know, uh most fish. But anyway, the the fact that you can take a line out of a poem and both the poem does not work as a result, and the line that you've removed does not work on its own, is I think often one of the things about cube that can be most uh practical, if you want to be practical, to think about in terms of cube design. Of you know, there I I was just talking about, you know, this made-up painting that I've talked about. I have looked at a lot of paintings and tapestries of ancient uh I mean of medieval hunts. Um I the what the example I came up with I just made up. I don't know if that's in any painting, but if it were in a painting, you know, you could make that painting without that twist, and it would still be a painting. Or you could take a snapshot of nude guy with dog and just like post that as a reaction image, and people would be like, oh, that's me, you know, for real, for real. That's that's uh I'm gonna be able to do that.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:42

It's like kind of a classic like meme reply. Like I'm imagining the photos, of course, very zoomed out, and then people reply zoomed in on the the guy getting pranked by his dog, and that becomes the picture.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:54

Great meme format, you know. Uh someone else can c can write that down. Uh whereas, you know, poems can be different, and there are there are cubes that there are cubes that are more likely to fall into one of those categories. If I took the mirror enforcers out of the ball pit, the ball pit would not be what it is. It would not I mean it would not be as good as it is. I know that that's good is an unhelpful word, but I I I I mean that in all the ways that I have seen people meaningfully engage with the ball pit. It would not be as good as it is without mirror enforcer. And from my perspective, in my life, if I did not have the ball pit and I just had 16 mirror enforcers in my you know, magic hutch, I'd just be like, I have 16 mirror enforcers in my magic hutch. Like, what's your what's your question? They don't do anything, you know. Modern Affinity has not been uh a deck that needs this card. In, you know, I don't know. I've never played modern or standard, you know, for back when that was the I'm just appreciating the sentence.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:00

I have 16 mirror enforcers in my magic hutch as poetry. Maybe that should be the title of the episode. I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:08

Honestly, yeah, uh, which I I can say for a fact that that is a true statement. Uh, not because the ball pit is in my magic hutch, but because I have at least 16 other copies of it just in there in case I ever want to go back up to, yes, I said back, back up to 32 mirror enforcers in the ball pit. Um, it's also a true statement because I don't know how many I have. I just know that it's more than 16. You know, it's the 30 to 50 feral hogs. Yeah. Uh I've oh I'm I'm gonna Google this one because I want to get it right. Um uh let's see. Okay, here we go. Yes! One of my favorite poems ever is one that makes the rounds on the internet all the time. Uh I I am 100% sure I saw it on Reddit cross-posted from a Tumblr. But this is a poem called The Tiger by Neil H6. Let me read you this poem. The Tiger. He destroyed his cage. Yes. Yes, the tiger is out. And this poem, you know, written by a six-year-old, is better than any poem I will ever write, you know. Oh, yeah. It it's it's fun to hear, it's so much more fun to look at. The second yes is just all caps, there's no punctuation. It it doesn't need any of that because the tiger is out. I get it. It is already evocative enough as it is. It's so evocative. This poem, which let's see, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve words, not including you know the title and the attribution. Uh, these twelve words give me more vindictive joy than almost any other words I have ever consumed. Because, yeah, the tiger should be out. Like, he destroyed his cage. Like, first of all, we're already giving the tiger agency because it's his cage, you know? Right. Like, it this this poem is, I think, a perfect poem. And the reason I bring it up in the context of, you know, 16 Marin Forces in my magic cut or more, is I don't know. They've escaped. Like, they they've broken out not only of my estimation of how many of them I have, but of my concept of sanity when it comes to owning Magic the Gathering cards. Like, I have more copies of them that I am unaware of having than I have had most copies of any other Magic card randomly, you know. If you asked me like if I had 16 copies of any other magic card, other than like, you know, I don't know, something simple that everybody has a few dozen of, like a chromatic sphere, you know, uh I would have just been like, why would I need that many copies of them? Because I didn't. And I I don't need as many copies of chromatic sphere as I have, but like, it's it's beyond that now. It's it's not contained anymore. It's just it's just a thing that is existing in my magic space is I'll find a random one in a pile of other cards that I have, and I'll be like, oh, when do you get here? You know, like when did you crawl crawl your way out there?

SPEAKER_00 1:05:24

And what you're saying about mirror enforcer in the ball pit really reminds me of something that a lot of really gifted writers say about the process of writing, where when you write, you're not making up the words, you're putting the words on a page, and sometimes you just don't even know where they came from. And when you say you could cut the mirror enforcers and they make the ball pit worse, it's just kind of like I could cut the mirror enforcers, but it would be an affront to whatever your concept of the divine is. Like these these are ordained to be here. Don't ask me why. This is where they belong.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:02

Yeah, and that's not true for other cards. I've I've added a ton of cards to the ball pit. It's at least it's probably 50% by volume different than it started, at least. Which by nature that it is a numerically locked cube at 480 cards, I've cut just as many cards. And most of the cards that I have cut from the ball pit have been the, you know, David, the sculpture, chip away everything that doesn't look like David. You know, most of the cards that I have cut, uh, whatever your concept of the divine is, it is an affront to leave them in. You know? Uh, like, for example, the uh like Cloud Post. This this is an environment that needs Cloud Post, but it doesn't need as many as it had. And it was a worse environment when it had more of them, just because even when people weren't doing broken things with them, uh, the outliers always stand out.

unknown 1:06:58

Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:59

Even when people weren't doing broken things with them, just the the threat of cloudposts was not one of the threats that I wanted there to be in that way. I wanted the thing that terrified people to be, for example, like a Frexian Dreadnought. You know, that Frexian Dreadnought is a power outlier in this cube because there are a reasonable number of ways to enable it. And while there is a decent amount of removal, uh you only have so much control over how much removal you put into your deck, since this is not a deck, uh, an environment in which you can cut things from. And cutting cutting the things that are not crucial to it are are just as important as otherwise. You know, editing a poem is a thing that for a lot of poets is still a very important element of their poems. Not every poem just was written in one go in, you know, cursive fountain pen on nice thick paper and then like uh shipped to the nerds. Like, a lot of poetry is just like hammered out by somebody in Microsoft Word, and then they spend 16 hours on the 24 words that they put down because they want it to be right. And when they put their first words down on the page, they knew that it was not right because they had a concept and that was not it. And there are cubes like that where you will say, I'm going to write a simple poem that's only 360 words, and you write it out, and you're like, garbage. Derivative, you know, derivative, derivative, derivative. You're just like, What did I even do? I don't I don't like the fact that I made this. I haven't even showed it to anybody, but like it says something about me to myself. These are the first 360 cards that I put down. Uh, and again, that's when you shrivel up and die, and then you unshrivel up and you live, and you say, Cool. Uh I needed to get that out, I think. Right. You know, I wrote a poem, and uh oops. On to the next poem.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:16

And you can generously call that a draft.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:19

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it was a draft because it was a draft of myself. Like I I got out an unmade thing, and I I don't want to think about it anymore. Uh, and sometimes that's not the case, you know. Sometimes you write it out and you're like, oh, oh, this this is close. I just need to work on it. And that is one of the ways that I got to the ball pit. And then, you know, there are occasions where you put out those 360 cards and you're just like, yeah, that's that's a cube. Like the first the first version of a cube that I ever put together, I'm gonna keep this super short, uh, it eventually led to the ball pit. I mean, it eventually led to the tabletop cube. It was me going to my collection in my closet of my like one of my childhood homes, and what whichever one I was in in like uh end of high school, start of college over the summer, and I just put together cards that I thought people could draft, and then reached like 260 cards and was like, oops, and then added in more cards until I had enough that the people that I knew could draft it. It wasn't exactly 360 cards because I didn't I didn't know that was the number people were aiming for. I didn't know that I hadn't really drafted before. I didn't know that eight was the number you were supposed to design things for because spoiler, you're not really supposed to design for anything specific. I just put together enough cards and said, what this is a thing. I I did the thing I sought out to do, which is I have a pile of cards we can, you know, that we can draft. And eventually I changed it. But at the time it was what it needed to be. And that's very different from either the thing that you write and immediately burn physically, or the thing that you write and then immediately go, yeah, I there's bones here that I want to develop on.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:04

That's such a cool origin story for getting into cube. I was so entrenched in magic before I designed a cube, and I was designing a 360 card cube because I just thought having a tighter list was gonna be more fun and hammer out what I was trying to do way more. So just not even having a concept of the quote-unquote right number of cards. I really enjoy that. Um, and you had alluded a little bit earlier to Michelangelo removing the parts of the sculpture that were not the David, which is something I think about a lot just generally, that is such an awesome concept. And I think about it in the context of cube design. That's not really uh something I want to dive in more today because I think that deserves an entire own conversation. I kind of had that already penciled in to do an episode. Maybe we'll have to get you back to talk about that some more. Um, but I do want to talk a little bit more about cubes generating games and the types of cubes and types of games they generate in the context of poetry. You were talking about different types of poems. We got into this a little bit, but with your examples of haikus and the twist at the end and that not necessarily making sense without the first two things. I think about haiku a lot, and something we've already talked about uh off the show in the context of like very fast games or specifically combo decks, where I could tell a story. Here's my one-word story, it's my one-line story, Tendrils of Agony. That's a bad story. I'm at 22, you're at 18, right? Like the combo deck needs a setup, but it's not a very long story. So combo decks are kind of hypo's in that way. And then there's other cubes that try to generate different, uh, certainly often longer forms of poems as well.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:42

Yeah, the the way that different poems are experienced, I mean, you were just referencing the length of it, but also the removing the combo piece, of course, makes the combo not a combo. It's it's it's just cards. And like if you can think that you are putting together a good haiku and reach the end of your haiku and realize, oh, one of one of these lines, which I thought was perfect and pristine, uh, is eight syllables, and this is I'm making a haiku where I actually need that to have been seven syllables. And then, or in in the combo, in the combo sense, uh, that one was six and it needed to have been seven. So now my opponent's just like sitting there at one life, going, uh, do you have that last syllable? And you're just like, you know, I don't think I do. And they say, Cool, my turn to haiku, and then they dumpster you, you know, because they then make a haiku that functions within what it needs to in that space. And you know, that's take it or leave it. Some people love that, some people don't. Uh in in that space, I shy away from the relation just because I the varieties of haikus that I love to experience are rarely rap battle haikus. So it is kind of funny thinking of them in such a like uh combative nature, just because that in itself is already the twist, you know. You could make a haiku where the first two lines are about the artistic process of creating a beautiful haiku, uh, and then the last line is the rap battle is mine. You know, and fight me now, loser. Exactly. Uh yes, yes. Uh but yeah, combo combo environments often do feel like to me a a haiku in that as you are drafting, you're you're counting in your head. You are trying to think of how you can draft a haiku one word at a time to make sure that the end result is either that you have a line of five and then a line of seven and then a line of five, or that you have 17 words that as long as you do them in order, the breaks will naturally occur. And both of those are ways to draft a combo deck, you know? Like you can draft a combo deck that's like I hold out until turn three, at which point I will have one of my tutors that lets me get blank card. When I cast blank card, I cycle through my library until I hit X, which wins me the game. You know, that's like that's a variety of combo deck. Which that is a in my draft, I need to have a five, and then I need to have a seven, and then I need to have a five. And then there are combo decks that are like, you know, the sort of thing that happens all the time in Hundred Ornithopters, where you're like, I have a lot of Ornithopters. And I have drafted a deck where there are numerous cards that win me the game if I have a lot of Ornithopters. And as long as I have the right number, it doesn't matter as much, you know, which order they are in, or, you know, at what specific time I draw a specific card. What matters is that I built a deck that has a lot of hundred ornithopters and where that will win me the game if, you know, if my opponent does not do their thing faster. And that is a different variety of combo deck, but where you're still thinking in terms of the shape of it, it's still rigid, it's just, you know, the the line breaks might might matter a little bit less. And that's very different from like a a ball pit deck. There ball pit is a weird cube, as you know, we've said a lot of times. There is not like a way that ball pit uh games go other than that they usually use a lot of chromatic spheres. So that you know, the the chromatic sphere poem of the gameplay experience, not just of the deck building and gameplay, not just of the cube as a whole, is it is a much more rhyming one, you know. It's uh it's a cube with a lot more repetition, you know. Uh the like another famous tiger poem, you know, Tiger Tiger Burning Bright, you know, that's a cube, that's a cube. There we go. Uh that it that is a poem in which the first thing you do is you say tiger. The second thing you do, you're also saying tiger. Like, why? Yeah, you know, you because repetition mat because it's good, because it's a famous poem. Like, you know, there's lots of reasons you could say that you do that, but the ball pit often you start by playing a chromatic sphere, and then on turn two, like if you don't have anything better to do, you play a chromatic sphere. Or sometimes you very intentionally do have something good to do, and it's that you need to play that chromatic sphere so that you can crack it and you know still have the mana from your second available mana to do something else. You know, like it the ball pit is not a haiku cube, as much as I do like to say, oh yeah, well you can you can always find a twist in a thing. Um it is much more a long-form cube that has more built-in repetition. Totally.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:24

Yeah, and another thing that uh we talked about a type of poem that often translates into a very uh commonly played type of cube game, is more in the style of a limerick, where there's kind of this playful back and forth, and you know, it can it can go back and forth really for as long or as short as it does, and often it's gonna be a lot of alternating rhyme. And that really kind of feels a lot like the game of attrition and magic. This is a lot of the gameplay of the original recipe tubert, where it's like I play Lanoir Elf, you play Burst Lightning, it dies, and we're kind of just serving things up. And if my answer rhymes, we play on, but then somebody breaks the rhyme and introduces a new scheme, and eventually, like there's either the new thing, and if you can't rhyme with it, I guess the poem ends, and you lost the poem. Uh, if continuing my metaphor, but yeah, it's hard. You have to turn in your brush. Yeah. Uh yeah, it's just kind of uh more about the back and forth, and that cube very expressly doesn't have I have more of a background in comedy, so I almost use the word punchline, but uh, there's no button on it. Like the cards in that cube are very expressly not supposed to be game enders, they're supposed to find things that kind of rhyme in that negation sort of way where cards can largely cancel each other out, and there's not that goblin char belcher, there's not that tendrils of agony, there's not that reanimate for gristle brand, there's no big fireworks finish. Everything is supposed to be a little bit more in line with everything else.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:03

Uh, I will tie back into comedy, as you'd mentioned, that being what you come from, because uh, you know, a lot of comedic things are poems, a lot of poems are comedic. I have been already extremely loosely using the phrase poetry to refer to almost everything under the sun. And I stand by that, you know, as long as it's useful to you, as long as it's resonant for you, yeah, go for it. Call anything poetry. But like if I'm thinking of good improv involving like two people, you know, it could be uh I can never do names for things, and I also don't consume a lot of content, you know. But what is like the popular comedy show right now that has like two or three comedians, and then there's the third guy who's the guy who runs it, and uh it's uh are you talking about like there's a big um streaming network now?

SPEAKER_00 1:20:55

Dropout comedy is probably what you're talking about.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:58

That's that's probably it. But but anyway, uh you you know, imagine any form of improv comedy. Uh the concept of yes anding, meaning there's if there's two people doing improv, you know, person one says the first line of a poem, and you know, there might be visible elements as well, but people who are good at improv, their individual lines are kind of poetic because they're good at communicating things with their words. You know, they say something, their person that they are, you know, working with is yes and it, you know, they they say something that either rhymes or has a vibe that builds off of the previous thing. And then, you know, you go syllable A, syllable A, syllable B, syllable B, or you know, back and forth, back and forth. It changes a lot, and then at some point a line is said where good comics will know, oh, that's the end of this of this uh scene that we're doing. Or, you know, in the case of uh a show like that, whoever is proctoring it for lack of a better word, will be the person to decide, oh, that was a good ending, and they will end it. And for comedy, usually the win condition is that people are are are enjoying it. Uh, but you know, you can you can do competitive improv. Like you could have that game be we are building a story, but whoever says the line that just people think is the good way to end it is the person who won. And that is more like the Tubert scenario, you know.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:28

It's interesting too because that kind of punchline does rely on sort of a mutual respect and collaboration, because you don't know when it was supposed to be the button necessarily when you call it, when you say this is the punchline, because part of that is the knowledge and the reverence that if you continue the scene, it will get worse.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:52

Yeah, like a a limerick where you have line A and line A, and then line B and line B, but where it just keeps going. You know, it doesn't end the limerick, it keeps going and then it keeps going. At a point you'll realize, oh, this is funny, and then a point you'll realize, oh, this is stressful. And then at a point you'll realize, oh, this is bad.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:14

But but every so often it does get funny again.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:18

And then it gets exactly, yeah. And like your job as a cube player is to survive. You know, your job as the cube player uh is you know to reach the end of the poem, and if there's a win condition to be the person who does it. The from the cube designer's perspective, that's still a valuable thing to think about because there are people who want every game to end as the actual limerick, you know. Like, uh I mean some powered cubes can be this way, where there are multiple different ways to win before turn six, but unless you are the one person who is doing the thing where you win by going to turn 60, you should, you know, it will wrap up. It will be a reasonably length poem. And then there are- I mean, like you're talking about the the tubert. The two bert is a environment, I say confidently never having played it, where you are supposed to cast a thing that your opponent just says no to. You know, they counter it, they kill it, they invalidate it by playing something, and then you counter kill or invalidate what they played. Eventually pressure is applied, somebody's getting stressed, maybe both people are getting plus uh are getting stressed because it's it's tuned, you know. There aren't it's not an environment where you're supposed to just cast random bombs that just completely change the shape of a game without having put the work into them. Like, it will reach a point where things are breaking, and that is the point of the environment, because whoever is doing the eroding better is who will win the game by reaching, you know, their their opponent reaching zero life. Um and that in some ways is very limerick-esque because it's very much a back and forth, and it's a back and forth where the scope narrows as you go. You know, the lines get shorter, the speaking gets faster. But you know, it does keep going, and at some point, at some point it still ends, and it will have ended on either syllable A or syllable B.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:20

And there's a lot that we could crunch and chew on and expand on. Cube is so many things. Poetry, you said uh you mentioned how uh we're we're using the word poetry really broadly today, and the game of magic is also something that's so customizable. Cube, uh, in my belief, the most customizable way to play magic, and the really the way we can most make the game our own. But we do have to start, as much as I want this conversation to continue endlessly, and I do hope to have you back. I think that that pube uh cubist sculpture is a really deep topic as well, to the extent that we've even gotten anywhere as deep as we could on poetry. But as we start to wind things down today, you had kind of floated a question that you like to use uh uh as a potential kind of closing thoughts on our discussion on poetry today. And it's really amusing to me that this is very similar to the question that Cade asks opening every episode of Recross the Path. He'll ask his guest, why cube? And so the question here is why do people make art and why do we build cubes? And kind of the question, and I'm inviting your thoughts on however you want to address this, are these even different questions? And can these questions really be answered?

SPEAKER_02 1:26:38

Oh, I I love honestly, talking about the messiness of human language. I mean, I'm I'm a writer, whether or not that ever makes me any money, you know, I don't care. I don't call myself things because they are just my occupation. I love writing, I love using words, and I acknowledge that the whole thing that we call human language is just an attempt to give even the vaguest shape to things in our head that do not have a shape other than like weird neuron-firing maps over time that only make sense if they're plugged into the pre-existing way that our own brain is shaped. Like, I've just word-salladed there in a way that makes sense in my own brain, using words, because that's me describing what I think, you know, language is. And calling something what I just described and calling something art can be just as helpful or unhelpful, depending on who hears it, because the the joy and the horror of language is that you don't know how someone else is going to interpret it. You can just do your best to give the information that you think communicates what you want to communicate. And at the end of the day, for Me. I love having conversations with people about what is art to them. I don't love the like gatekeepy, oh, you made art, but it's not art. I don't love the art. Yeah, when it gets prescriptive, it's punching down, you know, like also, you know, it's uh that then that's not about actually what you think is beautiful about the world or the way that you can use beauty to explore the things that are hard about the world. That's just I want to be rude to somebody. Like, like, yeah, that's just that's its own thing. Um but to actually get to your question, uh why cube, why art? I use cube in the same way that I use art, uh, or I guess I should say the way that I use cube falls within the category of what I describe in my own life as my artistic expression, because it's really just any attempt to do something outside of yourself that is still relevant to yourself. And that is an unhelpfully broad category, and I mean that, you know. That's why I call so many different things art, and it's why I think specifically calling something unart is worth thinking about, you know, a thing that you can think of as an element of your life that you do, that you could get better at if you wanted to, that you can share with other people, you know, communication itself is an art. It is a thing that you can strive to be better at, it is a thing that you can strive to be beautiful, it is a thing you can intentionally choose to be abrasive, you know. Uh cube falls under all of those categories. Um The last reason I will give for I for why cube and why art is a weird little personal aside, which is I love poetry, and I have not consumed that much poetry poetry, you know, in the sense that the average person who would say that poetry is like one of their pastimes might think. Uh I just I know some stuff about poetry, and when I find things in the world that match up with that, I just let myself consider it poetry. Um that being said, when I was growing up, the house that I lived in until like middle school, uh in my parents' bathroom had a framed poem on the wall in like this weird little corner over by the toilet. And I think it came with the house because it definitely stayed with the house. When we moved, uh that poem left, you know, my uh observable world. I think at one point I asked my mom about it and she was like, Oh, like, I don't know. I didn't know you liked that poem or anything like that. But this poem, and listener, if you are going to listen to the next five minutes, you must promise that if you know what this poem is, if you know who wrote this poem, that you will never tell me. Because I do not know who wrote this poem, I do not know the name of the poem, I don't know when it was written, I don't know if it was a one-off or if like this was a print run of a billion that was sold at like Sears, you know, years ago. Uh, I live in a world of constant information. I could find out in three seconds because I have the first stanza memorized, and I actively do not wish to know because it doesn't matter to me. It is an experience that I had, which is that, you know, I was I was a kid who did not know I was, you know, depressed or have some of the health issues that I have that I now know that I have. Uh, but I was still depressed and had health issues, and I would not infrequently, you know, get sick and basically just be like, I have to sit in front of a toilet for a while. I might as well sit in front of the nicest toilet in the house, which is the one in my parents' bedroom, uh bathroom. And if I turned around, I could see this poem on the wall. And it had three stanzas, I think. The second and the third, I didn't really understand. You know, they were more about like adult relationships, like, you know, just things about life that I had not really experienced at all. Um, and I just was like, eh, whatever, I don't care. But the first stanza of it, which is just three lines, I memorized just because I looked at it a lot, and every year I learned more about how much I appreciate that one little line, which is again, don't tell me if you know this poem, but the first three lines are just something jeweled slips away around the next bend with a splash, laughing at the hands I hold out, only air within their grasp. All you can do is praise the razor for the fineness of the slash. And that's a poem. That's it's beautiful, it's very well written, it's evocative. I could talk for way longer than we have, you know, on why I love that poem so much. But it's it captures something, and one of the things it captures is that we often cannot capture the things in life that we find beautiful, we can just appreciate them. And cube for me, people will be like, oh wow, you know, you can't wax poetic about something like that and then just talk about a card game. Yeah, you can, you know. The whole reason we engage with things in our life is because we get something out of them, whether that's joy or community or beauty or anything like that. And the reason that I cube is because life is full of jeweled things that slip away around the corner. And sometimes you have the opportunity to put those things in front of other people, and maybe they don't appreciate them, you know? Maybe that's just a thing that they forget, like the rest of that poem for me. Um, but sometimes that sticks with them, or sometimes, you know, all that you did was you made their experience being nauseous in their parents' bathroom better for like 30 minutes or whatever, you know. I'm not saying people are drafting the ball pit in their parents' bathrooms, but you get the gist. Like the point of doing things in a public sense that are weird and artistic in nature is often just because sometimes that makes somebody's life better. And that could be yours, that could be somebody else's. And I would cube even if nobody ever saw my cubes ever again, because I enjoy them. It is a thing that lets me experience human creativity and funny little goblin in an interesting way that not a lot of other stuff does. Uh, and but I mostly cube because of the people, because of the community, because of the discussion, because of this, you know. What other things in my life make me bring up, you know, the poem that I read at like age eight on my parents' bathroom? It sure as hell isn't like taxes, you know. It isn't it isn't what I do to like, you know, take care of the sighting on my house, which spoiler, I haven't, it's bad sighting. You know, like there's so much stuff in life that just doesn't get you to do that. And forcing your adult head into a box of cards that's kind of intended for kids is a great way to just like, you know, hold on to that little jeweled thing for a second.

SPEAKER_00 1:35:27

Yes. Absolutely. Yeah, that's that's everything you said there. I couldn't possibly that that's the end of the episode. Yeah, we're calling the comedy, it does not get better. You used to express everything so perfectly there. Uh so Jane, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to uh talk to me today and uh for sharing just some of your insights here, and uh the way that you've expanded, really the way that I think about Cube and the way that um I have kind of expanded my thoughts about it as a creative endeavor and this conversation. I hope that our conversation around poetry and creativity today is something that uh gives other people listening something to chew on. I know that it's something that I'm going to be chewing on, and I do hope to continue this conversation with you as well. Um, but we are gonna call it here today. So thank you everyone for listening. Uh, Jane, before we go, of course, we're gonna have uh Inland Northwest Cube Fest, a link to that to purchase your tickets in the show notes. Sounds like an awesome event. Uh, is there if people wanted to find you and pick your brain, is that something that you would encourage? Is there a place that people could find you if you even want to be found, or is there anything you would like to say in closing before we wrap things up today?

SPEAKER_02 1:36:41

Yeah. Uh first of all, thank you for having me on. This has been a blast. Second of all, in some ways, I do like to be just like the weird poem on somebody's parents' bathroom's wall. Like they don't, they don't need to know my name. You know, they don't they don't need to know where like what house I currently uh exist in. I I will say I the only magic space I'm active in and and in which I would actively encourage people to you know reach out to me if they ever have any questions is the MTG Cube Talks Discord. It's public, so if you just if you just Google that, you you should come to it. Um the MTG Cube Talks Discord, I'm available there at just at Jane. Uh I technically exist on Blue Sky at Jane McKinney.blueSky. However, you know, I don't like social media. I I open that thing occasionally to be like, oh, uh does Klug have a new altar? You know? Uh does the uh public domain review have something, a cool article on like uh Renaissance fish? They probably do, because the public domain review also always has cool things going on. But those are the two places to find me if you if you really uh wish to find me. But I will say more than that, go go find yourself. Go write the worst poem you've ever written and then burn it and then make a cube as your like palette cleanser. It's uh it's a great way, a great way to get the process started.

SPEAKER_00 1:37:58

Well, thank you. Thank you again, Jane. Thank you so much, and thank you, everyone at home, for listening. And I will be back next week talking more cube, later gamers.