Stadium Stampede

Ryan Overturf's Stadium Stampede, a 360-card rules-modified Cube where every player starts with a Strixhaven Stadium on the battlefield tapped, has been voted in to be drafted at Cube Con this year! On this episode Ryan breaks down the fundamentals of the design to make the environmental more approachable for prospective drafters. 

Stadium Stampede Cube list on Cube Cobra

Cube Con Event Page 

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_00 0:00

What's up gamers? Welcome back to 180 MTG. My name is Ryan Overturf, and this week I'm gonna be talking about Stadium Stampede, a 360-card eight-player cube that I designed, and I'm talking about Stadium Stampede because it got voted in to be one of the cubes on offer at KubeCon this year. KubeCon coming up at the end of August here. If you haven't got your tickets yet, there is still time. I will be there. My cube Stadium Stampede will be there. I'd love to see everybody out there. It's gonna be a big event, the biggest cube event uh anywhere, still to date. This is the fifth annual KubeCon. I did commentary on KubeCon two years ago. This will be my first time attending as a player. I'm very excited to draft more cubes and really just meet people and engage more in the cube scene. So I'm really looking forward to KubeCon. It's gonna be in Middleton, Wisconsin, so very drivable for me. I know it can be more difficult to get to if you're on the coast, but it's gonna be a sweet event. I am looking forward to it. I'll have a link to the KubeCon website in the show notes here, as well as the Cube Cobra page for Stadium Stampede. So if you're unfamiliar, KubeCon every year, there is a round of voting where players can submit their own cubes and then people can just vote on the cubes that they want to have at KubeCon. I submitted two cubes this year, both Stadium Stampede and a 360 card version of the Tundra. So the Tundra was not voted in, but Stadium Stampede was, and I didn't promote the fact that I was submitting cubes at all, didn't talk about this at all on the podcast to this point, because I wanted people to vote for cubes that they wants to play, and I didn't want anybody voting for a cube just because I designed it. So I actually think it was kind of rad that um neither of my cubes made it through the first round of voting the way it works after there's like eight cubes, I think, were up for voting initially, and then the top two from the initial vote got into KubeCon, and then I think the next two went into like a sudden death thing. So cubes that didn't make it in their first round of polling were pair polled against other cubes, and so Stadium Stampede got in on the second round of voting, so it wasn't just automatically in, which I think is awesome. It means that people are excited for other cubes, and the whole point of KubeCon is to be excited about the cubes that you're going to play. So it's cool to see people voting for that, and I didn't want to put my thumb on the scale in any way there. But now that Stadium Stampede has officially been voted in, I wanted to do a little bit of an overview here prior to KubeCon, so anyone interested in drafting the cube could know a little bit more about what's going on in the design. I'm going to do my best not to really talk about things in terms of what are the most powerful cards or what are the archetypes you should be drafting. Rather, I just kind of want to highlight elements of the design, and that's going to inform how to approach it as a drafter. And I do want to kind of go over more so maybe some pitfalls to avoid as a drafter, because this is a cube that can be very punishing, and it's all based off around this being a rules-modified cube with a rules modification that can make the games go very fast. So if you're not prepared, you could certainly get run over here. And so I do want to just kind of highlight some stuff going on with the design because I want uh people to have fun playing the cube. I also obviously love talking about cube design, so here we are. So let's start with the rules modification here. Stadium Stampede is a cube where players start with the card Strixhaven Stadium tapped on the battlefield. I didn't do anything like an emblem, and I don't have any kind of rules modification beyond starting with a Strixhaven Stadium in play, because I want this to be as approachable as possible. I want you to be able to read the cards and have them intuitively do what the cards say. So kind of what I mean there is sometimes with these starting games things, you'll see some designers do something like do an emblem, and there are spots where that makes sense. I use an emblem for the omniscient stack, for example, but I just didn't want to have artifact destruction in this cube because you can then either have it, so you make the stadium an emblem, or you say you have the card, but you can't target it. No, you're allowed to target Strix Savan Stadium. I just don't have any cards that could remove it from the battlefield in the cube. I don't want to have a card that says destroy an artifact in the cube, but then have some weird aspect of the rules modification because adding Strix Savan Stadium into any game already changes a game of magic so much. I don't like having a ton of extra rules. So you just control the card Strix Savan Stadium, enters the battlefield, tapped on the first turn of the game. So both players start with a tapped Strix Savan Stadium in play. So what does Strix Savan Stadium do? That's gonna be an important thing to know here. Three mana artifact, of course, you get it for free, taps for a colorless mana, and you put a point counter on Strix Savan Stadium when you tap it for mana. Whenever a creature deals combat damage to you, you remove a point counter from Strix Saven Stadium, and whenever a creature you control deals combat damage to an opponent, you put a point counter on Strix Savan Stadium. Then if it has 10 or more point counters on it, remove them all, and that player loses the game. So clearly, this is an alternate win condition card, and this cube is built around trying to win with Strix Saven Stadium. But again, there's no additional rules modifications. You deal you do still have a 20-point life total. You are more likely, it is faster to win the game with point counters of Strix Savan Stadium, but I like kind of like the idea of the 20-point life total being sort of an alternate win condition in this cube. Also, having life totals and having that matter means that you're less likely to end up in a game that is some kind of weird stalemate. I don't want games to go to time or draw, which hasn't been a problem with the cube, and having your life total matter is another way, just kind of a fail-safe for that, and it's another way where you are just playing a regular game of magic but only one rules modification, not to make it too unfamiliar for players that just know the game of magic. I had mentioned on my episode about multiplayer magic that I really love the card Strixaving Stadium, and that I wanted to design an environment around the card, and this is that environment. Ended up not being a multiplayer thing. Though of course you could play this cube multiplayer, but at CubeGone it's gonna be two-player games here, 1v1. So I had been thinking about Strixaving the Stadium basically since it had been printed, but I got the inspiration to design this cube from drafting Judge Bones I Gonjo Drift at Shoebox. That is a cube where players start with a mech hanger and play, a design really about vehicles and crewing them and the mech hanger being meaningful for that. And that was something that played way better than I thought it would on paper. Talk to Bones a bit at Shoebox. That design also was inspired by a different cube called Reading Rainbow, which is a cube that I believe has all gold cards, and players start with the Pillar of the Perunes in play, which is a land that taps for one mana of any color but can only be used to cast gold spells, which kind of gets around the fact that most gold cards cost two or more mana and makes it so you can cast gold spells more reliably. And that was something that uh players thought played way better than it seemed to play on paper. So this starting with the manosaurus in play and having that contribute to some kind of theme, that is something that has exceeded a lot of people's expectations for what I've seen. So I was excited to play in this space myself, and something I'm doing that's a bit different with Stadium Stampede is that Strixhaven Stadium is not just a manasaurus, it is not just a thematic card, it is a win condition. And because I'm doing the actual card, and it is a manosaurus, this is not just an emblem, that means that the Strixhaven Stadium is going to start accumulating points very quickly. Reminder, these enter tapped on the first turn, but if you're on the draw starting the second turn, you have access to two mana with an untapped land drop, and every time you tap the stadium for mana, you get a point counter. In order to win the game with the point counters, that has to be off of the trigger from dealing combat damage. So you can't just tap it for the 10th point counter and win the game that way. You do have to deal combat damage at some point to give it 10 or more point counters to get that trigger. And that is the most important thing that I want to highlight today. If you want to know one thing about this cube before drafting it, you need to be dealing combat damage here if you're realistically going to win any games. And that's two things. The first aspect is that you need to deal combat damage to trigger the win condition on Strix Saban Stadium. But also, because of the other ability, when you damage a player who controls Strix Saban Stadium, you remove a counter from their stadium. You need to be making attacks to stop your opponent from running away very quickly with the game. If you're not attacking early, you have just the Strix Saban Stadium getting point counters naturally for tapping for mana every turn. And if they're attacking you, they're getting point counters. And if you're not attacking them, you lose your ability to knock their point counters off. So I very much think of this environment as being like a sports competition. And if you just show up and you are not trying to score any goals, you're going to lose here. The best defense in Strixabus Stadium is a good offense. It's very important to play to the battlefield with creatures here. And that tends to be the nature of the cards in the cube, but you know, I just want to caution that as clearly as possible, you really want to get busy trying to make some attacks in this environment. It's the most important thing to do. And there's a lot of ways to go about that here, and I'm not going to be talking about the strongest ways to do that or really explicit archetypes you want to explore. I do want players to explore what you can do in this environment and maybe show me some things I didn't think of. I'm really excited to see how people explore this environment. But just fundamentally, you want to get attacking, and beyond that, I'm going to just talk about some fundamental aspects of the design, maybe some pockets of synergy, things that kind of make this environment work and define what the environment is. And so I'll be informing maybe how you want to approach the environment in that way, without telling you anything beyond you should be making some attacks if you want to be competitive in this cube. So on the topic of broad strokes, fundamentals, I've already expressed how you're not going to have any artifact destruction in this cube. Strict Savan Stadium is going to be on the battlefield the entire game here. Another thing that I did to make sure that the games are about Strix Saban Stadium, I didn't want to do any further rules modifications. I could have said every instance of combat damage is only worth one point counter. Instead, what I have done is I have only included creatures with zero or one power in the cube, and there is no way to increase the power of any creature. The idea there is simple. If you hit 10 times with one power creatures, uncontested, you get 10 point counters, you win the game. That happens faster than dealing 20 points of damage. There's going to be some back and forth attacking and removing your opponent's point counters, but then also you get a point counter naturally every turn, tapping the stadium for mana, but for the most part, even once creatures have two power, then it becomes generally easier to win with 20 point lethal combat damage. But I like the idea of sometimes you win with combat damage just with the life total, and more often, and the easier way to do it is to win with the Strix Savannah Stadium. That's something I like about kind of a sporting aesthetic I'm going for in the cube. The idea is that you are playing this kind of weird wizard sporting contest, and a big thing about sports is they have quirky, stupid rules. The objective of the game is to get 10 point counters and win in combat, triggering Strix Savan Stadium, but every now and again you'll be able to deal 20 damage to your opponent before you do it. And it's just that kind of thing that happens when you watch sports with somebody who's really passionate about a particular sport, and maybe you're a casual fan or don't really engage with it at all, and something happens, and you're like, wait, what just happened? I've never seen this rule before. So I kind of like it that it has this thing that is just a rule of magic. You have 20 life points. That is not what the game is immediately designed to be about with this rules modification, but it still comes up. So it gets to be a natural rule that you just know and you're playing a game of magic, but then it also exists as a weird, quirky rule under this aesthetic. So it's approachable, but also kind of captures that feeling. So I really like that aspect of the design here. And then just kind of extending that aesthetic of weird rules and kind of a quirky sport. I have a small number of additional alternate win conditions. An example is Triskai Decaphile, a two-mana one-three that says you win the game if you have 13 or more cards in hand. It's certainly not easy to accomplish, but I kind of just like having this thing that uh gives you this other goal. So there's all this just kind of quirky weird stuff going on, where you know mostly a two-mana one-three plays here, but then you have that extra text so that games can go in weird directions. And I did experiment with a number of things that didn't make the final list. I have tried mill in some capacity, but the mill cards they just weren't fast enough and they were very parasitic, so you really didn't play here. I had more stuff that gave poison counters initially, but poison is kind of in a weird space when you can't modulate a creature's power and makes it really difficult to execute on something like Infect, where you really want to be able to use pump spells to give a lot of poison counters, but I do still have a number of ways to give your opponent poison, and poison is another way that you could lose the game. So another rule you would already know that makes for a quirky, weird rule in this cube that is largely about the game piece, the alternate win condition that you start the game with in play. There's a bit of a typal theme going on in the cube, though this is actually closer to Modern Horizons 2 Changelings Matter theme than it is to fully support a lot of these creature types. I will say that slivers do appear across all five colors, and so that slivers are a bit louder in what works together, and then elves also. There's a good sampling of elves and some significant elves matter cards. But then a lot of stuff, like Spell Sutter Sprite, I think is the only fairies matter card, and there's very little going on with fairies in the cube, but it's gonna play really well with changelings, so you can scale up the range of things that the spellstutter sprite can counter. All this just to say there are some cards that are gonna care about goblins, some cards that are gonna care about Merfolk, but you won't really be drafting Merfolk or Goblins decks. It's just you have these small shoutouts and then cards that are every creature type are going to be some of the bigger ways to take advantage of the typal synergies here. And some of this is just that typal synergies in a world where creatures are not allowed to have more than one power are pretty funny because you exclude a lot of the classic examples of creature type matters cards. You can't put Lord of Atlantis in this cube because it itself has two power and it gives other creatures additional power, so that's just not what we're doing here. So, because of kind of that design restriction I place, you end up with some quirkier examples of creature type matters and these kind of pockets of synergies and fun overlap there with changelings that I think is pretty fun to explore. For the non-creature spells in the cube, I heavily biased towards the aesthetic of the game's being a sporting event with physical contact, so there's a lot less in the nature of this is a wizard casting a spell, and a lot more of this is something that's happening in a physical exchange between two creatures. And this is really loud in the blue column, where blue actually has the most creatures of any color. There's some spells matter cards, but I shied away from cards like ponder, pre-ordained, counter spell. To me, those cards are just way more evocative of a wizard plotting in a tower than a sports team gearing up for a competition. So cards like outnumber, renegade tactics, strangle, you know, fights breaking out in sports, that's stuff that uh I have here that I would normally cube with less over cards that I usually like to cube with, like lightning bolt, chain lightning, firebolt, those just feel a lot more wizardry. And you know, there are gonna be some wizards in this cube, there are gonna be some casting of spells, but where I could, I kind of explored options that I don't normally cube with that lean a little bit more into the aesthetic or some kind of mechanical theme I have going on. And I also shy away from lightning bolt a little bit and really efficient burn because I don't want a lot of games to come down to dealing lethal combat damage, but I do want it to happen some of the time, so it's not a hard rule where I have no burn that can target a player, but I have less of it than I would in other cubes. Like I would never normally have galvanic discharge in a cube over lightning bolt. I think that it is a mechanically grotesque card by comparison, but for the design here, galvanic discharge does just fit what I'm doing better. A concern that some people raise, and a valid one, something I had to be mindful of in the design, is that with everything having one power, there are of course many creatures that have more than one toughness in the cube, so in theory, combat could get really gummed up, it could become difficult to make attacks, and so a lot of the design is finding ways around that to make it so these one power creatures can make good attacks into each other, or you can otherwise make use of your creatures that don't have good attacks or aren't making meaningful blocks. An aspect of that is I have a number of ways to tap creatures to pay cost, or to otherwise make use of a creature not engaging in combat. A mechanical example of this is I have a pretty strong sampling of cards with Convoke, so you can tap creatures to pay for the mana cost of cards with convoke. That's why you see Stoke the Flames here, that's a really good burn spell that can go upstairs. A lot of that though is the appeal of Convoke, not necessarily the burn spell that could be a game ender. At the time of recording, I'm still working on my Marvel Superheroes update to the cube. I like the name of the mechanic teamwork here, it really fits with what I'm doing here, the name teamwork for the sporting competition aesthetic, the tapping of creatures to pay a cost, but there aren't really very many cards with teamwork that really fit my design. The card Widow's Bite stands out, probably putting that one in, but just kind of shouting out uh the fact that it's not just Convoke, there's other things that tap creatures to pay cost, uh Sand Sower, Airloop Epic are a couple of cards I'll shout out here to make use of some extra bodies where you can't always get into combat with all of your creatures. There's a good spread of creatures with evasion here, that's another way to make good attacks even as the battlefield starts to get wide on both sides. Flying, of course, matters. There's a good sampling of stuff with unblockable, and another mechanic that I think really plays well here is death touch. Any kind of like one-two creature, any creature with death touch can make it so you can attack into creatures that have more toughness than power because you'll always at least be able to eat something that way. And there's a number of things that play with death touch in the cube. There's actually a decent sampling of cards that cause fighting. I don't often have a lot of fight spells in my green column. I usually just have removal more strongly present in other colors because fighting just tends to be worse than casting a kill spell, but fighting really works with the aesthetic here, just fights breaking out in the sporting competition. I really like that aesthetically, and it's something that does play mechanically well with the high presence of death touch, so you're gonna see a lot of fighting in this cube. I also spent some time trying to fit every card that proliferates that makes sense in the environment into the cube. Of course, the Strixhaven Stadium, it's accumulating point counters every turn. The 10-point point counter trigger is kind of the primary win condition of the cube, so any mechanic then proliferates and adds more counters to the stadium, accelerates the game. It's a mechanic that makes a lot of sense here, and it's a way where a mechanic just kind of plays differently, you know, always having a permanent on the battlefield, having something to proliferate as a baseline, so it just always makes sense that a card with proliferate could fit into your deck. I really like highlighting some of those cards here. And then that also has kind of a ramification in the cube. Because I have proliferate effects, that means that I can't have any zero zeros that enter with a plus one plus one counter in this cube. Nothing can have a plus one plus one counter if I have proliferate, because that will be a way to get a creature with two power, and that's not what we're doing here. So proliferate is going to be for ticking up your strict save in the stadium. It's going to be for trying to win with poison. Winning with poison is a thing that can happen in this cube. And then also minus one, minus one counter is so you can proliferate and take care of your opponent's creatures that have more than one toughness if you can get that first minus one, minus one counter on it. Kind of amusing here. This is something that they do in retail limited. They make a point not to have plus one, plus one, and minus one, minus one counters in the same limited environments anymore because of that rules change where they cancel each other out, and they don't expect everybody to know that or intuitive, and there's no reason that you need to make that an aspect of retail limited gameplay. It just happens to be because of my design parameters of this cube. As a natural consequence, I only have minus one, minus one counters and no plus one plus one counters in this cube, which is something I find pretty amusing. Another aspect of this cube design is that there are a lot of token makers, tokens being a way to make a wide battlefield and be able to make good attacks, even though there's a lot of creatures, just having more creatures. So token makers are really on display here. Looking at the Cube Cobra Analytics, there's around 60 tokens in the cube. That number includes stuff that is not really. A token, like for some reason it counts going on an adventure as a token. You would never catch me using an on adventure token, but like energy and clues, but for the most part, these are 1-1 tokens. Many of them with some kind of evasion, you can make spirit tokens with flying, that kind of thing. Though a lot of them are just 1-1s on the ground, and some stuff with a little bit different texture. You can get a 0-3 crab token to block with hard evidence, some 1-2 spiders with reach, though majority these are just 1-1s that can attack and block. I usually just use sideboard cards or empty sleeves to mark tokens. It's usually not that hard for me to keep track of what's going on, but I do know that a lot of less experienced players are going to be drafting this at KubeCon, so this is a reminder to myself to get all the right tokens for the cube. I also don't want to like only set you up with Infinitokens or something like that, because it can take some time to set those up. And the event rounds are of course time. So my intention is to have all the right tokens so everything can be easily parsed visibly in the games at KubeCon. Regarding token generators, I did make a point to not have anything that was extremely efficient at making tokens. I didn't want cards that could very easily for either being one sorcery or for being a repeatable effect that could make a ton of tokens, just because Alpha Striking, when you only have to get the Strixhaven stadium to 10 counters as opposed to dealing 20 damage, it's a lot easier to clear that bar. So something like Lingering Souls strikes me as just way too powerful or efficient for this environment, where Midnight Haunting, just a one-shot make two tokens effect, is way more at home. I have a couple options that can make three tokens, but I didn't put in Spectral Possession. That's a card that for three white mana or two white and two colorless, you can make three flying tokens. That's just kind of too much flying all at one time. So for the most part, if you're making three tokens, they're all on the ground, you won't be getting any evasion with those. And so I tried to be kind of modest in the strength of the token generators, or at least the ones that can make a lot of tokens, are something you have to work for, invest some kind of time or synergy or other resources into, so you can't really easily overwhelm your opponent with tokens. I also temper the strength of tokens by having a small handful of sweepers in this cube. As I mentioned at the top of the show, it's worth repeating, it's going to be the most important thing you can do if you're drafting stadium stampede. You need to get on the battlefield, you need to be making some attacks, but there are some sweepers there for the games that do get out of hand, that's going to put some fear into players who are getting just wider battlefields than their opponent. There is certainly a point where you can overcommit. I don't have any of the just generic destroy all creatures cards, even for five mana. I think that that's something that's just not really what the cube is about. That could either be something that's too strong if your opponent empties your hand or is not strong enough just because you do have to be managing your opponent's point counters as well. Like you need to be attacking, you could end up just too far behind even if you execute a sweeper if your opponent untaps and just is applying more pressure. So because you need to play on the battlefield, I took a light touch with sweepers. I wanted some counterplay for wide battlefields, but I didn't want anything that just screamed, you should play this card as a generically powerful card in the sweeper space. There's some stuff like Savage Twister can destroy a lot of creatures at a decent rate for that. Blasphemous Act can be a pretty interesting one, but that one does change texturally from game to game because the cost changes based on the number of creatures in play. So there's some interesting dynamics going on there. And with Blasphemous Act, there's at least like some cool planning around that, where because it's reduced by the number of creatures in play, that's going to impact how much you want to commit to the battlefield, how much you want to be making trades in combat. So a lot to think about there. And also in a way that your opponent might be able to sniff what's going on if you are clearly setting up a blasphemous act. Like there's decisions you can make in a game that would really telegraph that. So I think that that's kind of a cool texture. My favorite sweeper in the cube is actually Memphis Vapors. Um, this and it's because it's very modest, it's black and two for a sorcery, all creatures get minus one, minus one till end of turn. There's no shortage of three mana cards that can give all creatures minus two, minus two, or deal two or three damage to all creatures. And I really wanted this modest sweeper, specifically because it pushes back on going too wide with one-one tokens, so it kind of diminishes some of the power of token makers, where going wide is just going to be strong given the alternate win condition, or rather the main win condition of the cube with Strix Haven Stadium. So minus one, minus one to everything kind of pushes back on this thing that is pretty categorically powerful here. And then it also incentivizes you to play two and three toughness creatures, so you can try to set it up to be a little bit one-sided, and you lose your one power, so you can't use this and immediately alpha strike, whereas something like Pyroclasm could be a lot more punishing. I would want you to pay more mana for that kind of thing. And I also really didn't want this effect at instant speed. I really don't want you to do that at end step on your opponent's turn and then give you the first crack at re-establishing your battlefield. So these cards are all a little bit more modest than you often see as sweepers, certainly in high-powered cubes, and the ideas are kind of like some play on both sides to these effects. And on the topic of modest cards, I do have a handful of planeswalkers in the cube. It's something that I was a little bit wary of because when everything is only attacking for one damage, planeswalker loyalty can be really difficult to cut through. So for that reason, the planeswalkers here are mostly pretty modest, and also I did make sure to have some amount of removal that can destroy planeswalkers, cards like Pylon, Bitter Triumph, just making sure I don't only have cards that destroy creatures, but that also you can just destroy planeswalkers, red spells that can deal damage to creatures or planeswalkers in other spot where Yelbanic Discharge has a meaningful text there. So there's some planeswalkers here, they're gonna be strong in some of the games. It's something that I really didn't want to have planeswalkers that easily define games in the cube, but I didn't mind having some that were kind of appealing, and part of why I ended up on planeswalkers at all is in curating gold cards from the cube. They had some color pairs where there was some really appealing two-colored gold cards to have, and I generally try for symmetry when it comes to gold cards. I know you don't have to do this, it's just something that I find really aesthetically satisfying, especially for an eight-player cube. I like having every two-color pair having some appealing draw to it, and two-colored gold cards kind of the easiest and loudest way to do that. And some color pairs are just a lot harder than others. Gruel, for example, like what is Greg Green's whole thing? Giant creatures and making creatures stronger. So most Gruel cards just don't work under the parameters I have designed this cube under, and then I have Samut that tested a four-man in Green Planeswalker that can minus two to cast forked bolt, so it can clean up some tokens. It's like a lot to span that removal spell, but is repeatable, it can kill two things. So ultimately it's an appealing card without being overwhelming, and because you only need to get so many point counters because that threshold is so low, because tapping the stadium for a mana gives you a point counter every turn, you can often just ignore planeswalkers in games. And I tried to deliberately feature planeswalkers where that was more true than not. I really didn't want something that easily took over a game. And then one more note on gold cards, something worth thinking about given the way that starting the game with a tapped Strixhaven stadium impacts the way that players curve out. Two mana cards that have two colored pips and their casting costs. Actually, that's a pretty significant drawback in this environment because the stadium taps for colorless mana. And so the way the game is to play out, you start with the stadium tap. So the player on turn one has access to their land drop, you can play a one mana spell. If you're on the draw, you untap, you make your land drop, you have access to two mana on the first turn if you have an untapped land, and then the player on the play on their second turn has access to three mana, but one of it is colorless. That means that a two mana spell that is double pipped is just leaving one mana on the table. And you do get something for it. You still want to tap the stadium every turn, you still get your point counter for doing that, even if you don't have a spell to cast. But it does mean that I had to scrutinize cards that are double pipped for two mana a lot more seriously. So there's not a ton of that going on for gold cards, and there's not a ton of that going in even for the monocolor spells. If you see something that's double pipped, you really better hope you have a good plan for it, some kind of synergies, or it really is just powerful for that casting cost, because it's going to fit into your mana curve in a pretty weird way. Usually you won't be able to cast it until turn or three or four without leaving a mana on the table. And then the other side of that is that you do just have an extra mana to play with with that Strixhaven Stadium, so you get to cast spells earlier than you would normally, though that does not mean that you want to fill your deck with a lot of three and four mana spells. And you'll notice that almost nothing in the cube costs five or more, mostly as going to be things like flashback costs or X spells that scale into the late game. You really want to try to be double spelling as quickly as possible because of how quickly you are enabled to win in a theoretical goldfish using Nestrix Savannah Stadium. You can get 10-point counters pretty quickly, and you need to be able to combat your opponent trying to do the same. And then just some quick notes on the mana base. I have five complete land cycles, some utility lands, and some five color lands in the cube. So I have Buddy Lands like Glacial Fortress that enters tapped, unless you control an island or a plains and taps for blue-white, fast lands like Sechrome Coast that enter untapped if it's one of your first three lands. I have trilands, not triomes, just the enter tapped, tap for one of three colors lands. And I have the Modern Horizons 3 fetch lands, the ones that tap for colorless, or you can sacrifice them to find one of three basic lands. And then the cycle of lands in the cubes that are my favorite in context, they're a cycle of lands that generally are not very liked or very strong. It's going to be the egglands originally from Odyssey that now has the complete cycle thanks to some supplemental products. This was rounded out in commander decks, called Egglands, because they mirror the artifacts that are actually the name for the egg combo decks. So if you ever hear about eggs combo, it refers to artifacts that you sacrifice that can draw a card. So if you ever hear about cards like Chromatic Sphere or Chromatic Star being referred to as part of an Eggs combo deck, it's because of Sky Cloud Egg and that five-color allied cycle from Odyssey. And then the Sky Cloud Expanse is kind of a corresponding name. They're both Sky Cloud Expanse is the land. These are lands. They tap for nothing normally, but if you pay one generic mana and tap them, they make both colors they generate. So SkyCloud Expanse is the Exorious Land. If you pay one and tap it, it makes blue and white. So these lands are kind of awful, but uh I do like to kind of have at least one copy of every cycle of mana fixing lands. I never know whether they're gonna fit into a cube when I'm gonna want to slot them in somewhere, and I don't really let myself own more than four copies of most cards. So like my shock lands are accounted for in four different cubes, same as with fetch lands, but then I just had this set of the egglands that I got as they finished up that cycle on those commander decks, and they just sitting in a box, and I started working on this project, and I thought, huh, you know, if I'm gonna build a cube where you start with the colorless source and play, then you can actually just activate the egglands with the Strix Saban Stadium, and that opens you up to be able to use more pips. You turn your colorless mana source into two colored pips so that can make some of that stuff stronger. And I think it's just really fun the way that they play, given that they are always on, because you always have the strict savan stadium. Notably, if you're on the play, the stadium is tapped, so you can't use them for two pips on the first turn, which I think is good. I think it'd be really, really easy to get a significant advantage being able to do that in the first turn, but you know, there is a little bit going on with the dynamic of play draw here. Because the player on the draw untaps the stadium, they get a little bit of a mana advantage, so it's not 100% clear whether you want the player draw first. I will say from experience, the one mana spells, they are pretty significant in the games. Because the threshold is only getting up to 10 point counters, you want to go fast. So, you know, you tell me. I'm really excited to hear what people do with this cube, what their experiences are, how people feel about it, and you know, one thing I'm interested to know, are people taking the play or the draw? Do people feel advantaged on the play or the draw based on how the games play? A lot of stuff I'm interested to hear here. But this is where I'm gonna wrap up my look here today. I know that I tend to be a bit more long-winded when I talk about my own cube designs, when I break down one of my new tuberts, I'll often break things down by color and talk about a lot of individual cards. The purpose of today isn't for me to make you an expert on this cube, it's more just to offer a teaser and to offer a little bit of insight on the design structure here and just to kind of explicitly lay out the fundamentals here. I'm not big on writing written cube primers, so I think that just kind of going over on the podcast, it's a lot easier way for me to present it, and I think a nice way to digest it. And I also don't want to make this a super long podcast. I want anybody that is interested in hearing more about this cube before drafting it at KubeCon to be able to listen to the podcast here and making this an hour or more long. Like the longer I go today, the less approachable it's gonna be. So a little food for thought if you're interested in drafting Stadium Stampede at KubeCon. I'm very much looking forward to the event. Excited to play some new cubes, meet some new people, and it is certain that I'll be doing a retrospective episode on my experience as a player at KubeCon, same way I did with Shoebox. And I'll also likely be doing a retrospective on what it was like having one of my cubes featured at KubeCon. You know, it'll depend how much the cube gets drafted, but whether it's received poorly or well, you know, whatever people have to say about it, I do want to revisit this cube after the event, talk about maybe what worked, what didn't work, and just how this was received and what the experience was like having my cube featured there. So I'm excited for KubeCon, I'm excited to share the cube with some people, and I'm really excited to dive into some other people's cubes. So definitely check out KubeCon. If you're anywhere near Milton, Wisconsin, there's some still time to buy tickets. I'll have the link in the show notes there. If you want to check out my cube, awesome. But more to the point, there's a ton of cubes there on offer. There's certain to be something that you like if you're at all interested in cube draft, which personally I think if you're at all interested in magic, then there's going to be things for you to explore in Cube, and KubeCon is going to be a great place to do that. But for today, I'm signing off here. Thank you to everybody for listening, for taking the time to like, comment, share, review, subscribe, whatever you do to support the podcast. Tell your friends, tell your enemies, tell total strangers, and I will be back next week talking more Cube. Later, gamers.