"Dies to Doom Blade"

Ryan Overturf breaks down the nature of threats and answers in Cube design and the questions he asks himself when curating the interactive elements of a given Cube environment. 

Transcript

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What's up, gamers? Welcome back to 180MTG. My name is Ryan Overturf, and this week I'm going to be talking about interaction in cube design, how to get the right balance of threats and interactions, or maybe not how to get the right balance, but how to think about these things and how to select the kind of interactive elements that you want to incorporate in your cube to generate the kind of games that you want to play. I landed on this topic just thinking about sort of a meme in the game of magic where people refer to creatures as dying to Doomblade. If you are talking about the strength of some creature, say for example, you're waxing poetic about Tarmagoyf, somebody might say, well, that dies to Doomblade. And the whole idea is it's this dismissive thing you can say, well, that threat's not that big of a deal because there is an answer, which is really reductive, that's why it became a meme, it's just kind of a joke. Like, did you just say that that dies to Doomblade as a rebuttal to somebody being overly dismissive? Because, as we all know, games and really just everything in life is more complicated than you can dismiss in one line. The Dies to Doomblade meme also reminds me of a quote that used to hear a lot in the competitive magic sphere from an old school pro named David Price, the so-called king of Beatdown, who said there are wrong answers, there are no wrong threats. The full quote there is People like control because they think it shows that they're good magic players. Active decks, on the other hand, produce threats, and control decks must have the right answer to the right threat. If not, they're in trouble. While there are wrong answers, there are no wrong threats. A surface-level analysis might say that there are no wrong threats is similarly reductive on the opposite side of the spectrum to saying that something dies to Doomblade, but there is more wisdom on display here, and really an important aspect of there are no wrong threats is it's coming from the context of competitive magic, and I think there's kind of an implicit assumption here that players are playing the cards that they're quote unquote supposed to play. If you're playing the marquee proactive deck in a constructed environment, then the creatures in your deck or whatever way you're trying to win the game, the threats in your deck should be pretty strong, should demand some kind of answer. The same is true in Retail Limited, if you know what you're doing and you're playing the creatures that are good enough to be playing in that environment and presenting a coherent game plan. I think there's considerably more wisdom in David Price's quote there than the Dies to Doomblade meme, but importantly, both of these statements do require additional context, and that's the topic of today. A question that I hear a lot in the cube space is people asking how much interaction they should have in their cube, how many slots, how many individual cards should they save to make sure that there's interaction for this or that. And I think that volume is something you can actually really pick up on feel of games. You can easily play a game, draft a deck at the end of it, think, well, I'd play a couple more removal spells here, or you play a game and think if I had a little bit more interaction in my deck, if I had higher access to interaction, we could have played a better game, it could have been more competitive. I think that it's it's not that difficult on feel to get down the right volume of interaction, and you can really easily just add another Doomblade, whatever, turn that knob up or down depending on how the decks feel, depending on how the games play. But I do think that having the right kinds of interaction and knowing the way different kinds of interaction line up with different threats and how these things shape environment is far more important. And that's the topic that I'm gonna try to tackle today. I'm gonna offer a lot of questions that I ask myself when I'm thinking about interaction that I want to put in my cubes, so you can hit the sweet spot on all the different things you can do regarding the kind of interaction that you will feature in your environment, the impact those can have on games, and I think once you are including the kind of interaction you want in your cube, it's a lot easier to turn that dial of how much of it that you want. So let's go ahead and get to these questions that I'm asking myself when it comes to seeding interaction in cube. So my first question is very basic. What does the interaction in question interact with? Doomblade, of course, will destroy non-black creatures. That is, it will destroy one non-black creature that you are able to target with a Doomblade. So, really just getting into the granular impact of a specific piece of interaction. And importantly, interaction is kind of the last thing I tend to find myself filling in in a cube file. And I think that that really is where people are coming from when they say how many pieces of interaction should I have in my cube, I think it's also implied just from asking that question that there is a starting point if they've already established the kind of archetype, certain threats that they want players to be presenting in the environment. So when you're asking what does this piece of interaction interact with, you're usually going to be looking at your spread of different threats that you're going to have presented in the decks and games of your cube. So, Doomblade, then what does it interact with? It's an important question to answer because you start to look at, well, how many non-black creatures can it target? And are these the threats that the games are about? So that's kind of a little bit of what's going on with that there are wrong answers kind of question. When it comes to uh a controlling approach for a constructed environment, that is something that a player is going to ask themselves in deck construction and also sideboarding decisions, what they're prioritizing in mulligans and how they want to leverage their spells as the game goes on. But from a cube design perspective, you are literally asking: do the pieces of interaction that I want to include in my cube interact with the tools that I'm providing players in a proactive capacity? So am I giving players right answers? This is a spot where you can put wrong answers in your cube. So it's a really basic question, but it is an important one. Another card that's gonna come up uh more than once today is disenchant. One in a white instant destroy target artifact or an enchantment. What does that interact with? Artifacts and enchantments. If you just start with disenchant in a cube file, if it's the first card, it does nothing. There has to be artifacts and enchantments for it to destroy. So if you're going to have interaction in your cube, it's important that it interacts with the things that are in your cube. So really basic question, but you still have to answer it. And with this question, you're gonna see delineations where you'll have cards like Demystify, which only answers enchantments. So if you have artifacts and enchantments, then disenchant's gonna be more appealing. With Doomblade, it only destroys non-black creatures, but you can reach for Terminate or Infernal Grasp, cards that can destroy any creature. When it comes to burn spells, shock is interaction for creatures with two or less toughness, or that already have some damage on them. It's interaction for planeswalkers with low loyalty, it's interaction for players with low life totals, different than a card like Flameslash, a sorcery for one red that deals four damage to target creature, that's going to be able to interact with slightly larger creatures, but it won't be able to interact with players' life totals or planeswalker loyalty. This is not a difficult question to answer, but it is important for framing the kind of interactive spells you're putting in your cube, because volume is really insignificant, it's of no consequence until you know the things that you want to answer. And you'll be thinking about the type of interaction you want in your cube, and certainly when you're revising after some games the kind of interaction that would be meaningful, knowing whether you're looking for answers to large creatures, small creatures, creatures of a certain color, artifacts, enchantments, planeswalkers, that's going to inform the kind of interaction that you want to put into your cube. So, what does this answer? That's just a fundamental question that you can't get away from when you are choosing the interaction for your play environment. The next question I ask myself is how efficient is this interaction? And there's two kinds of efficiency here. The first is mana value, the second is total impact. So break down two cards as a comparison here: Doomblade and Wrath of God. So Doomblade, one and a black, destroy a non-black creature, Wrath of God to white white, destroy all creatures, they can't be regenerated. So mana value is really easy to understand. Look at the top right corner. Doomblade costs two, wrath of God costs four. And then you do get into what kind of threats you're answering, that's gonna come up in later questions, of course, but I'm trying to take this one step at a time and keep these questions as isolated to their own meanings and repercussions to the extent that it is possible. So on the mana value spectrum, this is something where it just kind of makes sense if you look at the kind of threats you have in your cube and the kind of answers that you have. You can choose to make it easier or harder. One thing I'll say is that a place where it does become easy for the proactive player to snowball an advantage is anywhere where the efficiency in terms of mana value of it, of an answer, is less efficient than that of a threat. If I have a one mana creature and it costs you two mana to Doomblade it, I, as the aggressive player, I come out a little bit ahead this exchange because in theory I'm committing more one or maybe two mana threats, and your mana, you're spending a little bit more than me. And with the base resource system in the game being playing one land a turn, in theory, the aggressive player is going to be able to leverage something, at least in terms of the mana efficiency front there, if the answers just cost more than the threats. And you can curb this a bit when we talk about the impact of an answer. If Wrath of God answers multiple creatures, that's the whole idea, right? It destroys all creatures. There is a mana value question when it comes to using Wrath of God as a sweeper. How much mana of creatures did you destroy with your Wrath of God? That's one way that it can be efficient in that way regarding mana value. But then also with sweepers and cards that interact with more than one card, you start getting into a different kind of advantage, card advantage, uh, not just mana advantage. So Wrath of God can kind of do both there, but it's important to think about both of these questions, mana value and total impact, when you're selecting your interaction. Uh again, I'm assuming that this is common and this is certainly my process. I start by selecting the threats for my cube, but then the interaction I can modulate. So depending on the threats that I'm trying to incentivize in my environment, figuring out how efficient of an exchange I want those cards to have with my opponent's cards is going to be something I'm considering when I'm selecting my interaction. If I have a lot of vanilda creatures, trading with a Doomblade is pretty reasonable, depending how expensive those creatures are. If I am getting a negative mana exchange, I was talking about a Doomblade not being great against a one-drop. A Doomblade is really strong against a five drop. That's a plus three mana exchange for the player killing the five drop. And I'm gonna come back and talk more about how different five drops will have a different amount of impact on the battlefield, whether they're destroyed immediately or not. But you know, we're trying to take these just in order abstractly. Just in terms of mana value, that's a bad mana exchange for the player playing the five mana threat. And that's also gonna be true for Wrathagod there, because that just inherently trades down on mana. So it can be really punishing if you have just a lot of creatures that attack and block. And with that as the only consideration, the mana efficiency and just having something that can be a two for one against those kinds of threats, and that's where you're gonna modulate maybe you want sweepers or don't want sweepers. A lot of my cubes just don't have sweepers, and you can also increase the mana value of that in standard in recent years. We've seen a lot more five mana sweepers, stuff like Fumigate destroys all creatures and you gain a life for each. There's also sunfall, five mana, exile all creatures, you make an incubator token with uh plus one, plus one counter is equal to the number of creatures that you exile. That's a really strong answer in terms of efficient scope, answering all creatures, and also exiling over destroying. That is part of the question of what does this interact with? Exiling all creatures answers a slightly wider range of creatures than destroy effects. You can answer indestructible creatures, uh creatures that can pop out of the graveyard, exiling is gonna be more impactful there when you're thinking about the threats you have and the kind of interaction that you want, and then the the mana value there, bumping that up to five, allows for a faster aggressive deck to maybe get under the sunfall or tapping out for five. Maybe you have something with haste you can cast after the fact, but just modulating the mana value, modulating the impact, those are two things you can kind of do abstractly as you're selecting answers. Do you have an environment where you want to trade up or down on mana when it comes to answers, depending on the threats you selected? Do you have an environment where you want a player to be able to destroy multiple things to be efficient in terms of impact with card advantage? Is that something that you are wary of or something that you want to encourage in your environment for back and forth kind of depending on the threats selected? And as we ask more questions, we can start considering the answers in relationship to each other. So ask both what does this interact with and how efficient is this? Pulling an example from my recent episode on the OneBurt, this is a cube where everything has mana value one. So in terms of mana efficiency, things are broadly going to be one-to-one. There's some exceptions there. Uh so let's talk about the card Lava Dart in that cube. Lava Dart is a burn spell, does one damage to any target, it can flash back by sacrificing a mountain. So what does this interact with? Generally, one toughness creatures. You can also sacrifice a mountain to answer a two toughness creature. That's pretty inefficient. And it's not card advantage, but it is a mana efficient exchange if you answer two one toughness creatures with Lava Dart. So that is a spell that is generally pretty efficient at answering one toughness creatures, pretty inefficient at answering two toughness creatures, and it's just not interaction for three toughness creatures. But let's compare that to a card that I do not have in the one bird that I talked about, the specific exclusion of End the Festivities, one red mana sorcery, deal one damage to each opponent and each creature and planeswalker they control. So End the Festivities is tremendously efficient at answering one toughness creatures. It only answers one toughness creatures, but it does answer all of your opponent's one toughness creatures. And the efficiency there, there is a distinction between just hitting your opponent's stuff and hitting your own things. I'm not going to get super into that, but there are different textures to having a symmetrical sweeper like Wrath of God, to having a one-sided sweeper, a Pleguin in your deck. But for now, let's just focus on how efficient End the Festivities is at what it does. All it does is answer one toughness creatures and opponents who were at one life. But when you cast it, it answers all of these things. And why I don't like that in the One Bird is that it's just really good at answering this category. And once we get into this question of what it interacts with, well, one toughness creatures that's going to be pretty highly represented when it comes to uh all mana value one cube is going to be a lot of one toughness creatures that cost one. End of festivities is just really good at answering all of them. And Lobadart, it can answer two of them, but when you cast End of Festivities, it just answers all of them on the table. There's no additional cost for every extra one you get, so you rack up card advantage there. But importantly, the reason I exclude the card from the cube is that one toughness creatures are some of the weakest cards in the cube. They die to everything, any interaction will be able to answer that if you are so inclined. You're actually pretty rarely going to flash back lava darts to kill two one toughness creatures because they're often not really going to be worth a mountain, and that's where End of Festivities becomes, I feel, too efficient in the cube. One toughness creatures aren't really a problem. They tend to trade really evenly with everything, so there's no need to have an answer that is really efficient at answering the one-toughness creatures, as those creatures aren't really a problem in the environment. This is something where the threats start to look a little bit wrong if you start to have answers that efficient in your environment. So something to consider is how appealing is the thing that your answer interacts with, and how efficient are you at answering that thing. If you have something that's already not that appealing in your cube, and this is a pretty approachable example, the one toughness creatures in the one bird tend to be less appealing than the creatures with additional toughness. They just don't do as much, can't survive as much interaction, can't attack into as many things, then having answers that are very efficient for the threats that are already less appealing, that's a recipe for pretty dissatisfying games. You want to make sure that your most efficient answers generally are going to answer your most efficient threats, your most threatening threats, not just stuff that's really good at cleaning up all the cards that aren't that appealing in the first place. You want to invite your players to explore and really punishing them for playing the cards that are already a little less strong than the other cards is not a good way to do that. Having overly efficient answers for perhaps inefficient threats is really just the recipe for having cards that you're just not supposed to play in your environment. Remember that being kind of the implicit assumption for there are no wrong threats, only wrong answers, is that everybody is showing up with the cards that are playable in the environment. And that's something that I take really seriously as my responsibility as a cube designer. I don't want the game pieces in my cubes to be overly efficient in terms of being clearly the best things going on, especially when it's a contextual matter of other things really underperforming in that context. So if I have a lot of one-toughness creatures in a cube and I want you to play with them, I definitely don't want to put an efficient on mana one-sided sweeper for all of those creatures in that environment. Alright, our next question definitely blurs the lines a little, and this is going to be kind of a matter of taste. You might design a cube environment where you have different sensibilities around this, and as a player, you might be more or less willing to engage with this in a different way. The question is, how main deckable is this interaction? So if you use those examples, some of the cards we've been talking about, Doomblade, Naturalize, Doomblade is main deckable if there's expected to be non-black creatures, which is a pretty common circumstance. Creatures are often the building blocks of magic. Card like Infernal Grasp destroys any creature becomes more main deckable. A card with a little bit more modality, a card like Hero's Downfall that can destroy a creature or a planeswalker becomes even more main deckable if you have an environment that has planeswalkers present, of course. Vindicate, uh sorcery for one black and white that destroys target permanent is the kind of thing that you can basically always convince yourself to main deck. A card like Disenchant or Naturalize, destroy an artifact or enchantment. There's some retail limited environments where you're going to be really happy to main deck this kind of thing. Certainly a setting like Kamagawa Nyan Dynasty that both has enchantments and artifacts as supported themes that are very present in these environments, especially when you have a lot of artifact creatures and enchantment creatures, these spells get very flexible and are very main deckable. And then something like Lightning Bolt tends to be a tremendously main deckable card because it is not just interaction for low toughness creatures and also low loyalty planeswalkers, but lightning bolt is just very efficient at actually removing your opponent from the game. So burn spells really get a pass at being very main deckable as far as interaction. They won't always answer all of the creatures, but they do always give you that buyout of being able to answer your opponent if you can get them low enough with your other resources. And I do think that the disenchant, the naturalize example here is the one really most worth picking apart because this is something that is a huge part of the pre-modern constructed format. You have a lot of really powerful artifacts and enchantments, cards like survival of the fittest, Oath of Druids, Sulfiric Vortex, stuff that will close games very quickly if they stay on the table that can really take over games. And so in the pre-modern constructed format, it's not uncommon to see main deck disenchants, to see main deck naturalizes, and it's because there's this prevalence of these really powerful artifacts and enchantments that if you don't destroy them, they will just decide the game. And I have some of that going on in my pre modern Tubert. I do have Survival of the Fittest, I do have Sulfuric Vortex, and Sulfuric Vortex is a hugely game warping effect. If you're not familiar, red red one enchantment, players can't gain life at the beginning of each play. Upkeep, Sulfuric Vortex does two damage to them, so it really accelerates the game towards a conclusion. That said, when I tried some naturalized or disenchant effects in this environment, they really weren't seeing main deck play, and if they are, there's this texture of game that I really don't enjoy, where there's a pretty small number of these artifacts and enchantments in the pre-modern tubert, and only some of them really inform what the game is about. And pre-modern construction is a little bit more loud. You're going to run into a lot of moxed diamonds, destroying a moxed diamond after your opponent discards a land to it. That's pretty appealing. Even then, you will often wait for the archetype defining cards to destroy with a disenchant effect, but still there, they're gonna have four copies. These cards are really going to drive what the gameplay is about. Rather than having these disenchants and naturalizes that players weren't main decking in the pre-modern tubert, I also don't like the cyborg games where they come up, where if your opponent has up your vortex, you really want to be able to answer it, but then you have this disenchant that answers that. How many other cards in a gruel aggressive deck, for example, is that going to answer? Maybe they have Juggernaut, uh, maybe they have Chimeric Idol, maybe they have Curse Scroll, but it's only going to answer some of the cards, and it kind of does nothing if they're curving out with Grim Lava Mancer and Wildmongerel. And it's just a cube where I found that the disenchant effects were a really unappealing aspect of the gameplay. I just don't have an appetite for the did they draw the specific card type? Do I have my answer for only that card type? Those games are really not appealing to me in any way that they break, which we're gonna get into more with some of the future questions. But the important upshot here, just isolating the question of how main deckable is the interaction, disenchant just wasn't really main deckable. It was ill-advised to do that, and in a small cube environment, it's really tough to have many things that you're not supposed to main deck. It just kind of waters down the experience. So instead, I just kind of erred on the side of just having more stuff that players will happily main deck. A lot of the gameplay there is just way more about creatures, and so terminate is a very main deckable card. I have Vindicate in that cube. I have Chaos Orb. So you do have some odd answers to the very specific cards, but the game of specifically having to have the specific answer for do they have the artifact, do they have the enchantment, that stuff I really moved away from. If Sulfuric Vortex is gonna kill you, then you die. That's just something going on in that cube because the specific answers for that just weren't main deckable anyway. So if you have an environment where you go a little bit heavier, you know, the artifact tube is tremendously long on artifacts. So a disenchant in fact there is just going to answer a ton of the different threats available. Then you really are mostly just looking at the value, the mana value, the efficiency of the interaction in that environment when there are a lot of targets. But then the question of what this even answers is kind of the fundamental aspect of whether the card is main deckable in an environment that's just not as much about those specific things. So, how main deckable a type of interaction is, is certainly the something that you can modulate as you change your environment. You can add more artifacts or enchantments to make it more appealing to have a disenchant in your main deck. But if you don't have enough, if it's just I have a strong enchantment, so I want enchantment removal, I often find that it's better to have something that is just main deckable. You can either, you know, make it so that the disenchant is more appealing to main deck, or have something like an oblivion ring that can exile any non-land permanent, because that card is maybe not always the most efficient on mana value, but it is something that can always answer a permanent. So you will have fewer runaway games with kind of weirder card types if you have more catch-all answers. And then you can also move in on more copies of specific answers, they'll be more main deckable if you have a higher representation of the card types that that card can answer. And I want to be clear, I am somebody that does value having appealing sideboard options in Cube. I like being able to change a couple three cards between games, especially if I can take on a more controlling or an aggressive approach depending on the matchup, if I can really kind of change the texture of my deck in that way. I do find that stuff pretty interesting. That said, in over-reliance on sideboards and having a lot of narrow options that can change the texture of matchups pertaining to very efficient sideboard answers, especially if you get into the realm of hate cards, that can be a very negative play experience. And I want to highlight that using an example from a constructed format. A couple years ago, they banned the card Monastery Swift Spear in Popper Constructed. This came not long after the card was reprinted as a common, and at a time where the Red Aggressive deck, the deck that played a Monastery Swift Spear, was like a 50% win rate deck. So why did it constitute a ban? The answer to that is in the difference between pre-sideboard and post-sideboard games. At this point in Popper's history, the red aggressive decks were favored in basically every matchup on the matchup grid in the pre-sideboard games. The efficiency of Swift Spear, just a hasty threat that can scale coming down in turn one, really powerful card, supplemented with a lot of very efficient burn. Remember in Popper, you can still play lightning bolt, chain lightning, fire blasts. So there's a lot of really strong options for closing the game if you have an efficient way to get some chip shots in early. But then the red deck was unfavored in basically every matchup post-sideboard. And there were some matchups, I do want to say the blue versus red decks in Popper are something that I always enjoyed. The Pyroblast versus Hydroblast, both decks have this one mana card. If you're not familiar, Pyroblast is one red mana, can counter or destroy any blue speller permanent. Hydroblast is the opposite, one blue mana can counter or destroy any red speller permanent. So a lot of really even exchanges or efficient trades up on mana with these cards, and that's going to be able to keep the red deck in check. You know, post sideboard you have more answers in Monastery Swift Speeder, where in the main deck you always have cards like Counter Spell, where for two mana you can trade with a lot of these things, but that's just not efficient enough for Monastery Swift Spear. So in the sideboard games, the decks get stronger answers more efficient, and so the blue decks are far more competitive there. But then things get worse in terms of gameplay if we peel back more and talk about some of the historical hate cards you can bring in. A really strong card that's legal and pauper that would show up in sideboards when the red deck is very represented is Circle of Protection Red. One and a white enchantment, pay one mana, prevent all damage from a red source this turn. So that just fully counters a burn spell. For one mana every turn, you can check all of the damage output of Monastery Swiss spear, and the games are deeply dissatisfying. Now, this is a different thing than having a disenchant with only a couple targets and something you really want to make sure you have an answer for if it comes up in the games. But in terms of how fun these games are to engage with, at least according to my sensibilities, I just don't enjoy any of this stuff where here's this card where I'm never going to main deck, or if I do main deck and it feels like cheating because I have your number, or I have this card that's very narrow, I'm gonna sideboard in it, and it matters sometimes. I like sideboard decisions that allow me to impact my game plan and navigate around my opponent's game plan in a way where maybe I deploy different threats or go heavier on answers depending on what my opponent is presenting to modulate between being controlling and aggressive. But the more narrow the games, it makes sense that you would uh have a ban in Popper Constructed, even when this deck is only a 50% deck, because the pre and post-core games are both very polarizing in ways that do strip away player agency. When the red deck was so presented and was winning so many game ones, it meant that you had to allocate slots to your sideboard to answer that deck. And then once you had them, you had these games where sometimes you resolve one spell, you resolve your circle protection red, and the red deck is just dead to rights. And there's a little bit of a maneuverability there, but that kind of maneuver maneuverability around really specific cards, like you put in flaring pain, so damage can't be resent prevented this turn, but that's just a card that doesn't do anything, is fully trying to check an answer in your critical mass aggressive burning deck. Meanwhile, the circle protection red player can be drawing more cards that matter. The games just break down into just having answers and then answers for answers, and there's all this really granular layering there, and just removes you from the fun feeling of I've built a deck, let's play some games. And the games become really loudly about a small number of factors that players maybe just don't even have that much agency in, rather than just approaching, playing a deck, doing what your deck is trying to do, and navigating around what your opponent is trying to do. The more you zoom in and have really specific answers, especially if you can't or wouldn't main deck them, especially if they are aces in a reaction way, reactive way, if they're tremendously efficient, then the games just can break in ways. It's not enough to balance the gameplay. Again, the Swiss Spear Red Deck, it was a 50% deck, but the games sucked to play, and that's always something that I want to beat the drum of here. I always care about trying to generate compelling games in my cube environments. And this is not to say that you shouldn't put cards in your cube that will often start in the sideboards. I actually think of Doomblade as largely being a sideboard card. I'm going to want to have some amount of creature interaction in my deck if I expect to play against a lot of creatures, which I'm going to do in a lot of cubes, but I don't want to over-index on that, especially because oftentimes there's a chance that what I'm doing proactively is just going to be stronger than what you're doing proactively. And so a one-for-one exchange isn't always going to be that appealing to me, but Doomblade is always going to be a card that I will consider a relevant part of my sideboard. Sometimes I'm going to play against a deck that just has stuff that Doomblade trades up on mana against, or stuff like, I don't know, Luminaric Aspirant that is going to be a two-mana threat that I really want to answer on turn two. So I'm going to index higher on a Doomblade. So I like having some aspect of stuff that I want to change from game to game and sideboarding, but stuff that you just would never main deck is kind of inconceivable to main deck getting into that territory of hate cards and stuff that's really polarizing, pre-board, sideboard, stuff like a narrow answer to a specific kind of threat that players have low agency over whether you draw that and whether they draw the thing that it answers. That's the kind of stuff that the question of how main deckable the interaction is makes those kinds of cards less appealing to me. I like stuff that is generally kind of appealing, but questionable when it comes to whether you want to main deck it. And so you can have a textural difference in sideboard games without a 20% swing in who's favored. Or the creature deck that doesn't have a prayer against Oath of Druids unless you have your one naturalized. Those are games that I just don't find very compelling. And the next question is whether the threat has a lasting impact. So now we're going to be looking a little bit more at the texture of what we are trying to answer with our interaction. Kind of a classic example here is Baneslayer Angels versus Moldrifters, which is pretty dated, I guess. Baneslayer Angels from Magic 2010, the same set that premiered Doomblade. So Baneslayer Angel, 3 White White, 5-5, Flying, First Strike, Life Link, Protection from Demons, Protection from Dragons. So just a creature that attacks and blocks. It is strong, but it does die to Doomblade and trades down on mana when that happens. Does it have a lasting impact when that happens? No. You traded one for one, and now your Baneslayer Angel is dead. Moldrifter is going to be a very different thing. Four and a blue, 2-2 flyer, when it enters, draw two cards, and you can evoke it for two and a blue, so you have to sacrifice it immediately if you do that. So Mold Drifter replaces itself by drawing two cards. So these two cards both saw a lot of play in the same standard format, Baneslayer Angel and Moldrifter. The advantage of Moldrifter is that if it does trade with a card like Doomblade, you are up two cards. You drew two cards when it entered. And with Baneslayer Angel, the advantage is more if your opponent doesn't have the interaction because Baneslayer Angel just hits harder and gains you life. Kind of the eye-opening thing here was the knowledge that Baneslayer Angel races Progenitus, a 10-10 with protection from everything. If you attack for five and gain five life every turn, you actually win with your Baneslayer before your opponent wins with their progenitus. So that's kind of a cool aspect of the history there. Of course, assuming that the Baneslayer Angel does get the first hit in. And this question and the previous one are very related. Does the threat have a lasting impact versus how in main deckable is the interaction, which is really related just to the example of Doomblade against these two creatures. If your opponent's going to cast Tarmagoifs and Baneslayer angels, you're going to be really happy to have a lot of terminates in your main deck. Clean answers, trade even with a lot of creatures on mana, trade up on mana in the example of Baneslayer. If your opponent's casting Moldrifters and Flametongue Kabus and generating advantage with their threats, then trading with Doomblade with them, Doomblade starts to feel more like a sideboard card. So I really enjoy the texture of a cube that has a mixture of some cards that are maybe not the best against clean spot removal and some cards that can generate some advantage in the face of these clean one-for-one answers. And that's going to cause you to have some pause over how many of those Doomblades you want to main deck, which is what I was talking about. Being something I enjoy about sideboarding, is it being a real question how main deckable is Doomblade, how high of a pick is Doomblade, if the cube is full of mold rifters. And definitely if you get into planeswalkers and different card types, it becomes more questionable to main deck the Doomblade, and then that opens up more space. In a weird way, the value creatures can make the Baneslayer angels more playable if they make some of the clean and efficient answers to the Baneslayers less appealing. And that is important because the Baneslayer Angels, the Timer Goifs, they're really fun. The creatures that just attack, changing life totals every turn, those are some of the most compelling games from my perspective. So whether threats have a lasting impact that informs how playable interaction is, and you can get to a point where you have so much card advantage, if you have a cube full of planeswalkers, mold rifters, flages, whatever, then spot removal that trades one for one just isn't strong or appealing in this environment. But the presence of efficient removal will always keep the creatures that only attack and block in check. So having a good balance of threats that have some lasting impact, removal that can cleanly answer threats, and some threats that demand removal or are only good if they stick around is kind of the sweet spot that I find. You don't want all value all the time because it makes interacting kind of a fool's errand. You don't only want threats with no lasting impact because that can just make having a bunch of spot removal spells and answering all your opponents' threats a way to easily close the game against creatures that only attack and block. And while there's not a mathematical breakdown, I can't say you want half Mold Drifters, half Baneslayer angels in your threats, but I will say that this is something you can definitely feel in the texture of games when you are drafting and when you are sideboarding. When you start to appreciate the difference between threats with lasting impacts and how effective your spot removal is against them, then you do start to get a feel for, well, I don't necessarily need a ton of Doomblades in my environment if enough of the games are about Mold Rifters, and you also don't want too many Doom Blades in your environment. If you want some of the games to be about Baneslayer angels, just getting a feel for the threats that you like, and the way that they can make some of the even kind of generic removal like Doomblade feel more of a card, where you have to think about is it something that you do really want to main deck textually in your deck and how relevant it is in your sideboard. So having a spread, having some Baneslayers, some Mold Drifters, some threats with lasting impact, some that do get traded for one for one, is a really good way to make playing interactive games more appealing and something that will be dynamic from game to game in your environment as well. Sideboarding can be a very relevant part of Cube in a way that does not really require a heavy hand. It does not rely on you having really specific types of threats and really specific answers for them. Just with the kind of different range of even very similar game pieces, you can generate really meaningful and compelling sideboard decisions along the lines of interaction. The next question then is whether the interaction has a lasting impact. In the case of Doomblade, now you cast it, it's one and done. But then there's a number of different ways that an answer can have some kind of lasting impact. Most commonly, this is going to be in the form of card advantage, things like flashback, firebolt, which can kill a small creature, and then flashback for five mana later, cards that draw extra cards, any kind of cantripping kill spell that generates card advantage. This is kind of the inverse of the Mold Rifter equation. A card like exclude, two and a blue, counters a creature spell, draws a card. You are pulling ahead, you have the lasting impact of the additional card in your hand. Anytime you execute on exclude, electrolyze, fairly similar. One blue red deals two damage divided among any number of targets as you choose. I guess one or two targets, and then you draw a card. So if that kills anything, then you have the impact of an additional card in hand, just like exclude. Then there's stuff like flametongue Kavu. This is where the line between threat and answer can start to blur a little bit. Flame Tongue Kavu is, of course, a four mana, four power creature. When it enters, it deals four damage to target creature. The thing about that, the reason that I would call it an answer more than a threat, is if you play flame tongue kavu on an empty battlefield, it does just have to do four damage to itself and it only has two deafness, so it would die. So it's more of an answer, and then the lasting impact there is the creature you get there. Of course, solitude, something in this space, for a more recent, much more powerful design. It gives you that leftover creature while also answering some threat on your opponent's side of the table. And you can even go a little bit more extreme in this kind of threat/slash answer department. Something like a planeswalker that has some ability to manage a threat. Take Chandra Torch of Defiance, for example. I would say Chandra is something you put in your deck mostly as a threat, especially because of the relative inefficiency of the creature answering ability. It does cost you three loyalty to deal four damage to a creature with Chandra, but if you do use that ability, if you use Chandra Torch of Defiance as an answer, then it does still stick around with the lasting impact, being that you still have a planeswalker as a threat of your own. And these answers with lasting impacts, these are really important for the texture of that Baneslayer's versus Mold Rifter's equation. The threats with lasting impact, when you go back to the days of exclude, talk about invasion block limited, flameton kavu, also from the same environment, there were so many answers that just gave you something left over. Creatures that attacked and blocked were just horrible in these days. So if you're going to have these two for one answers, and it is important to have some of these value-generating threats so those things can exist in the same ecosystem. And then just kind of sticking with this Baneslayer example, I think that it's a really good point in the favor of Baneslayer Angel if you want to talk about having these cards in the same environment, that it has five toughness. Baneslayer Angel survives the effect of flametongue Kavu. You can't kill Baneslayer Angel with Chandra Torch of Defiance. So that goes back to our first question of what is this an answer for? And then if you're going to talk about the impact of threats, whether they have lasting impact, the ones that don't, it's important that they have some resilience, that it's harder to come by having answers for them, assuming you're gonna have answers that can generate some value, having some lasting impact, assuming you're gonna have some threats that have some lasting impact. Makes kind of a little bit more sense, certainly for balance. Certainly, if you want players to put the Baneslayer angels in their deck, to have the answers that can generate some lasting impact be more impactful against the threats with lasting impact and maybe. Have it so that the answers with lasting impact have more difficulty interacting with the threats that don't. Exclude is equally hostile to Baneslayer Angel and Moldrifter, arguably more to Baneslayer Angel, because sometimes you do evoke Mold Drifter, but Exclude will trade three mana for five against a Baneslayer and to draw you a card for the trouble. But then Electrolyze, I think, does line up in a way that does make more sense, that would make it more inviting to play with a Baneslayer Angel. If Mold Drifter gets electrolyze, you're pretty fine with that exchange. You drew two cards, they only drew one, and the other resources traded evenly, so you're up a card there, but just the existence of electrolyze makes it so that Baneslayer Angel is kind of appealing because it just has three or more toughness. It cannot get electrolyzed. But those value-generating answers are important to have kind of a balance with the value generating threats. Going back a little to that example of End the Festivities and the One Bird, a card like Electrolyze would just be brutally strong in that environment. Really anywhere where you have one and two toughness creatures that just attack and block, Electrolyze is tremendously hostile to these Savannah Lions, Grey Ogre type cards. And I do find it important to try to line it up so that answers with lasting impacts are at their best against threats with lasting impacts, and maybe have a little bit of a tougher time answering the cards that just attack and block, the threats that have less efficiency themselves. If we substitute Baneslayer Angel out for Sarah Angel in these examples, then Flametongue Kavu and Chandra Torch of Defiance, eating Sierra Angel for lunch and sticking around for dinner is a little bit too much to bear, makes it completely unappealing to put the Sierra Angel in your deck in the first place. And that brings me to one final question, and that is what does the game look like after the threat is removed? For those Doomblade versus Tarmagoyev questions, we play on. I lost one creature, you lost one card, we traded even on cards, traded even on mana. Presumably I have more threats in my deck, the game's going to continue, more threats will be established, more answers will be demanded. The texture is a bit different, and these flametongue kavu exclude electrolyze examples, where the player that removes a threat then is now up a card. You can typically bear getting two for one to once, but how many times can you sign up for the same thing? If my deck is all Sarah Angels, your deck is all flametongue kavus, of course in this extreme, I can't possibly win, you are going to demolish me if I ever play my cards. There's some balance there between getting two for one once and having a deck that cannot, as a fundamental aspect of the matchup, compete with yours, but for the most part, you get two for one the first time you play on. But then things do get weirder if we get back into the space of talking about cards like Oath of Druids, or maybe we're going into Powered Cube and we're talking about the card Underworld Breach. An Oath of Druids deck is typically going to have some number of giant, potentially uncastable, often uncastable creatures. Really, Oath of Druids is mostly trying to cheat in stuff like Emra Cool the Aeon's Torn and just get something that can easily close the game as soon as it's established. Underworld Breach is very commonly going to show up in conduction with Lion's Eye Diamond and Brain Freeze. It's a three-card combo, lets you continuously mill cards from your deck, loop Lion's Eye Diamond, making three mana every time until you've cast enough spells to brain freeze your opponent. You get to keep casting them because the Underworld Breach allows you to escape the same card multiple times in a turn. Really broken engine. And then when it comes to these breach decks, they tend to be pretty committed to this storm thing. Not a lot else going on with these decks. So with the breach deck, you know, you have those three cards, you really commit to the combo. Often a lot of your rest of your deck is going to be card selections, so you don't just draw these cards randomly in a deck doing something else, and you want high access to them because it's a really powerful thing. For an Oath of Druids deck, you're going to have these uncastable creatures, and maybe you have some other ways to put them on the battlefield, but you are really focused on trying to cheat these creatures. So what happens if I destroy your Oath of Druids? What happens if I destroy your underworld breach? Well, I severely diminish your ability to play the game at all. We don't play on. If you have an all-in combo deck, if you have only one or two win conditions, maybe your Oath of Druids deck also has show and tell, or maybe you have a reanimator angle, I can put you in a position where you have to set up in a different way, but then depending on the texture of your hand, maybe you can't play at all from this state. If I destroy your underworld breach, if I exile it, maybe this is the only way your deck has to win the game. And that's just something you have to reckon with with some of these really focused combo decks, is of course when they execute on their thing, the idea is it's so powerful it just wins the game when it happens, but then they also can just totally crumble if you give players high access to the right kind of interaction. There can still be a fight there. In Vintage Cube, there's going to be a lot of things like targeted discard, counter spells. There can be a build to the underworld breach kind of payoff that can make those games satisfying. And then you just say, you know, if the combo happens, the game is over, which I think is fine, and depending on your sensibility is what you want in your cube, there's no right or wrong answers. These are just the things that you have to think about. Oath of Druids has a lot less of a game going on. It's a lot more, have you already cast a creature? Can you play the game without casting creatures? And what can I do if you never commit a creature? The texture of that, I think it's pretty difficult to lead to compelling games with Oath of Druids. But, you know, you like what you like, you want to put what you want to put in your cubes. I'm just saying that when we're talking about what games look like after threats are removed, these really high power, really focused combo decks that are trying to win in a very specific way that don't allow much maneuverability make it really difficult to play satisfying interactive games. These games tend to be a lot more about just getting the puzzle pieces together. Which, you know, there's a time and place for that. I like some of that, just something to think about. Some builds of those decks and some other kinds of combo decks can more seamlessly just fit a lot of cards that play normal games of magic that leads you to game states where they attempt their combo, you interact with them and we play on. A good example of this is Splinter Twin. If I try to put a Splinter Twin on the Pester Mite and you kill the Pester Mite in response, I probably have some more creatures, maybe stuff like I don't know, a Keranos, some planeswalkers in my deck, stuff that can win the game in different capacities, and then I have this small package combo that I can execute on sometimes. So it's important to think about uh in the context of what games look like after the threat is removed, just how much space there is for alternate lines of play within a deck. There's a totally different direction you can go with this. Let's talk about this underworld breach brain freeze package where you say, well, here's this really strong combo, it'll mill your entire deck if it goes off. You can do things like having the Eldrazi, Emericle, the Aeon's torn, that shuffles your entire deck, your graveyard, back into your deck if it gets milled, and that's just like a hard counter to brain freeze. And to be clear, Emercull is totally fine, it serves multiple purposes, it is the biggest thing to cheat into play with sneak attack, channel, whatever, but it's when the other original Eldrazi, Kozalek, Ulamog, they were a fine to have in powered cube, you know, 10 years ago. But today they're like the 20th, 30th best version of whatever they're trying to do, where you know, Emrakul does still stand out as the biggest boom boom of all time. Kozlek and Ulamog showing up because you want more anti-brain freeze interaction, that's getting too deep into it for my taste. That's explicitly putting cards in the cube with the intention of reaching a game state where the game continues, but one player has lost their ability to continue playing the game. And then this is something that we've seen on and off in the Magical Line Vintage Cube, and then you like put Thoss's Oracle on the cube, and that way you can brain freeze yourself, and then you you escape the Thoss's Oracle after milling yourself, and you win with Thoss's Oracle instead of brain freezing them to make the game about that thing. And this is just kind of really going deep into having interaction for interaction, and now we're talking about sideboards, main deck ability. I think that that stuff kind of is really kind of lost in the sauce. It kind of gets away from the questions that I find way more compelling. And to be fair, Thoss's Oracle does other things. It's part of a doomsday package, it's a combo with demonic consultation. There's reasons you could have Thoracle as a combo card in a cube. And kind of when it comes to any example, things can really break down and cause me to have all kinds of asterisk and exceptions and points of clarification. This is just an example of where interaction points really cascade, and you have all of these what-ifs and hypotheticals and answers for answers, which is what I'm trying to get at, is that when it comes to interaction, really just as a baseline, having playable and enjoyable cards is more compelling to explore as a player and honestly as a designer than trying to have contingencies for any hypothetical thing that can happen in a game. It's really more fun to play games, and then if you find that there is something that you wish more was happening with so you could interact on a deeper level in the game and have players more engaged, that's great. You can address that kind of thing as you develop the cube further, but it's really not important until you're playing games to decide how deep you want to go on this answers for answers front. Often these answers for answers become really narrow things that just don't show up in a high enough clip of games and end up on drafted in sideboards at a higher degree than cards that just function. Those contingencies can lead you to some weird space, some creative and cool stuff can absolutely happen. I'm not trying to discourage any of that, but I think just from the baseline perspective, if I want to play games and I want my deck to function, making sure or trying to line it up so that decks can have multiple paths to victory, that a combo deck doesn't have to be so all in that it can fold to one or two pieces of interaction. I think that that's a lot more compelling than having some weird foil where, you know, what if Emracul is in their deck and then having an out to that, having outs for outs for outs? Like you have to draft a mana base, right? You have to draft all the combo pieces. You have to draft some of your own card selection interaction. There's already so much you have to account for in drafting, you know, there's all these pieces you always have to track down and be mindful of. And those latest games, you know, it's the kind of thing where, you know, if we're playing mental magic, sure, I want to be really creative and have outs and ways to slither through around to get out of any kind of situation. But in terms of cube, I think, at least for my sensibilities, I just want to get players to have functional decks in their hand. I don't want to ask a hundred hypotheticals. I want to play games and I want to see what happens, and just kind of having broadly playable threats and having main deckable and solid but not overly efficient answers leads to fun games in my experience. At the risk of belaboring the point, there are a couple examples from Constructed that I think kind of illustrate what I'm talking about, these undesirable play patterns of having answers for answers and going down weird niches. I want to talk about the card Krenkos of Budge Crusher, which is a 4 mana 4-4 flying trample artifact creature that says when Krenkos of Budge Crusher enters the battlefield for each player, destroy up to one non-basic land that player controls. For each land, destroy this way as controllers may search their library for a basic land card, put on the battlefield taps, then shuffle. So importantly, that line there, destroy up to one non-basic land that player controls. This means you choose to land, but you don't target it, which is just not how magic cards are templated. That's just not the standard rules of engagement for how you make a magic card. This gets around the hexproof ability, so notably Krenko's Budge Crusher only exists because they wanted to print an answer to Lotus Field, which means that you have to have something that can allow you to choose to destroy a hexproof land. So Lotus Field is a land with hexproof that taps for three mana, has been a part of combo decks in multiple constructed formats. Krenko's Budge Crusher largely going to be uh at the power level for Pioneer, which is where that combo deck has kind of had the most prominence over the years. And so Krenko's Budge Crusher is just this really heavy-handed answer to this very specific and narrow thing that just reads weird, that doesn't look like a regular magic card, that just really kind of highlights that they don't necessarily believe in the Lotus Field experience, which I think is fine. I think it's reasonable to not believe in the Lotus Field experience, because I think that lands are already so hard to interact with that giving one hexproof is just like this extra layer of protection that just makes these combo decks way less interactable than any other combo deck. So it's not an experience that I personally believe in. It's not something that I generally enjoy playing against. And I think that the modern format recently took an approach that makes a lot more sense to me, that I uh like quite a bit better. The modern format recently banned Lotus Field. So uh rather than try to interact in these really weird games, why not just remove the thing that you don't necessarily believe in the experience of in the first place from the environment? And there are a couple other examples of cards that can remove hexproof in some capacity. There's Detection Tower, which is a land with an activated ability that can remove hexproof from players and creatures. Shadow Spear is an equipment that has an ability that can remove hexproof from permanence your opponents control. Nowhere to Run is an enchantment that gives a creature minus 3, minus 3, and then just has a static ability that says creatures your opponents control can be the target of spells and abilities as though they didn't have hexproof and their ward abilities don't trigger. And all three of these designs are kind of flavorful. There's something I like going on here. Detection Tower being this tower you shine the spotlight on something, it's gonna lose its ability to skulk around, it's gonna lose whatever makes it undetectable or hexproof, whatever. Shadow Spear is this magical spear, that was uh part of the lore regarding Alspeth defeating Helios. There's something going on there, removing Indestructible, so there's sort of a flavorful reason behind that. Nowhere to run is actually the most resonant of these sweet cards for me. There is nowhere to run. You can't have hexproof, no matter what you do, the monsters are going to get you really dripping with flavor for the horror set. What I don't like about any of these cards is they kind of make it so once you have access to any of them, with the detection tower and the shadow spear, you keep activating them. It's it's like hexproof isn't really a factor in the games anymore. With nowhere to run, you just have this a static ability that says hexproof is not a factor in the games anymore. So I I've messed around a little bit. There was a cube I was working on that was gonna have an enchantment theme, and I was gonna do auras and hexproof creatures as a way to make auras playable, and then that would be a reason to have some number of these cards or remove hexproof, specifically nowhere to run being an enchantment, kind of plays in that enchantress space, and then would be an out to the hex-proof creatures, but the way that it exists on the battlefield, and as long as you control Nowhere to Run, says that hexproof just isn't a thing. Once you go down this road, it's like, well, do you believe in the hexproof experience or not? And ultimately what I concluded is, yeah, I guess I don't believe in it. To the extent that I think nowhere to run is a pretty cool design, is something to have and constructed because you know hexproof exists, the genie's out of the bottle, the play experience here, and there's a reason this card has to be templated in a weird way. Like you can't target a hexproof creature unless you have that static ability that says they can be targeted. Like you can't just have a card. Well, I guess you can. You could just have like another Kranko's buzz pressure that says uh choose a creature, that creature gets minus three, minus three, but that's just it's stupid. It's just like it's not compelling at all. It's a design that suggests that you don't believe in the base experience in the first place. And that's something that I try to get away from. I like to have interaction, and when it comes to certain themes, they're gonna push you maybe in a less interactive space. And I think rather than having something that's not very interactive to try to get some strength to try to make something more powerful in that way, and then having these weird niche answers, I would probably just not have the thing that's really hard to interact with instead of forcing you to have these very specific interactions because there's only so many copies of these cards, and it does just suggest what I have been saying that you don't believe in the base experience in the first place. Which has been true for me, which has been my stopping point anytime I find myself going down these weird threaded lanes of having answers for answers. I much prefer that approach of modern of just let's just remove Lotus Field from the format. It's really not worth protecting in this way. And that brings me to the last point I want to cover today. This one is not a question, rather it's a statement, something to consider, something that really informs the way that I design my cubes, and that is you can always remove the offending player from the game. Does your opponent have a really strong enchantment and you don't have a disenchant? Well, great news, they still have a life total. That's kind of an aspect of balancing Sulfuric Vortex and the pre-modern tubert for me. It's an enchantment that accelerates the game towards conclusion, but it doesn't say who wins at the end of that path. Kind of similar to Sarendib of Free in that environment. 3 mana 3-4 flyer, but it doesn't damage to you every turn. And if you attack with it, then sometimes your opponent can just race effectively. And if you don't attack with it, well, it's your life total that's going down. Maybe I don't have counter spells, I don't have discard, I don't have graveyard hate, I don't have a disenchant. So if you combo with your underworld breach, yeah, you're just gonna kill me. But I still have the capacity to try to win the game as quickly as possible. And I have to imagine if I have none of those interaction points, I probably have a pretty fast clock. So it you could get into this kind of ships passing in the night kind of gameplay, but I think that sequencing effectively, mulligan decisions, trying to give yourself the best shot to win as quickly as possible, those are skill testing things, and those are fun games to engage with as well. And if you don't have an appetite for pure races, then I think it's worth questioning whether you have an appetite for pure combo. Because interacting with the combo deck, it might make you feel really smart, like a good magic player in the control seat, but it also might be really deflating for your combo playing friend who just fizzled and then does not have the ability to play on after you removed their fundamental combo piece. And that cuts the other way too. A combo that I've really moved off of that I've tried in a couple cube environments is Kitchen Finx Persist combo, where you sacrifice Kitchen Finx and then you have some ability to put plus one plus one counters on it or otherwise reset it so you can persist it an arbitrarily large number of times and gain an arbitrarily large amount of life. This is a combo that when you execute it will make it so that your opponent will not be able to defeat you through creature combat at least, through burn, through traditional means, and then the game is maybe about who decks first from just drawing too many cards from their library. That's a game state where you're not really playing on. You didn't have the interaction, and now the game is kind of continuing, but it's still maybe a little bit dubious as to who's going to win. So game states that make it less true that you can just remove the offending player from the game. Game states and decks that really make the composition about having to have some narrow kind of interaction at the right time. I'm less into that, and I am more into giving players opportunities to defeat their opponents in a timely manner. Like all things cube, your preferences and mileage may vary, but of course, this is my podcast, so you're gonna get at least some of what I like in my preferences here. And that's gonna do it for my musings today on interaction when it comes to cube design and cubes game played. Reminder of those questions I'm asking myself when I'm selecting interaction for a cube. What does that interaction interact with? How efficient is the interaction, both in terms of mana value and total impact? How main deckable is the interaction? Does the threat that you interact with have a lasting impact on the game? Does the answer that you use against the threat have a lasting impact on the game? What does the game look like after the threat is removed? Keep these things in mind. You can inform whatever kind of game you're trying to play with the type and volume of interaction that you want to be playing with. The upshot, really what I am trying to accomplish as I consider these questions, I value generating game states where all the answers to what if is we play on until the game naturally hits a point where we don't play on anymore. One of the players, or sometimes both of the players, uh hit the condition for loss or victory and the game concludes. Insurmountable advantages and narrow threats that are difficult to answer are something that I avoid as I ask these questions, but the tools themselves, you can use these however you want. You can set whatever goals you have for your own gameplay, and I hope that whatever you're trying to accomplish in your own environments, that this kind of walkthrough of the things that I'm considering when I'm laying out interaction for my environments is informative and helpful for you as you map the type and amount of interaction that you want to seed into your own cubes. As always, thank you so much for taking the time to listen today, for liking, commenting, sharing, subscribing, reviewing, whatever you do to support the podcast, and I will be back next week talking more cube. Later gamers.