Build More Cubes

Ryan Overturf makes the case that whether you've built zero Cubes or twenty Cubes, that there is always goodness in building more! 

Transcript

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What's up gamers? Welcome back to 180MTG. My name is Ryan Overturf, and today I'm here to make the case for why you, yes you, and by you I mean everyone, should build more cubes. Whether you have one cube, five cubes, especially if you've not yet designed any cubes, and for me, I at this point, I have 20 cubes actively constructed at this time, and I still am looking at new projects. Two of those cubes are something that I drafted this week and have seen some structural issues that I am working on designing around. And that chase, that process, that is part of the fun of cube. Designing the cubes is an inherently fun part of cube. I do sometimes hear people talk about making updates, being all this work and getting a list together, and yeah, it is work. But guess what? A lot of life is work, and if you don't find any joy in work, you're gonna have a bad life. So, yes, it does take effort to design, build, and curate a cube, but in my experience, it is very joyful effort. And if I was never playing cube, then yeah, that is the thing that a lot of people say is well, you know, there's already saturation of cubes in the area, it's hard to get people together. It is true if you are never playing a cube, then actually putting something together, that is a point where you don't get the return. It is kind of a cyclical thing. You do have to be playing, and that it does allow you to continue to curate and iterate and build your own things. If there's no play, then the joy of that curation does become lost. But I do find that the curation does feed the joy of playing, and they do allow each other to kind of cycle and you get to enjoy both things in that way. Very similar to building decks. Building decks is one of the first things I ever really enjoyed about magic, is the customization there. And this is something that's loudly on display if you look at the behavior of commander players. Commander is magic's biggest format, and I do think that a lot of that is just how fun it is to build a commander deck. Like if you go to a commander deck, maybe you don't play commander, and maybe you try to disengage with that part of the game. But I do think it's good to be aware of what other people are doing in magic, and specifically with commander players, commander players build so many decks. I think that for some players that play other formats, it can be a little bit surprising to know that commander is such a big driver for the secondary market. The cost of magic singles, cards that are relevant, and commander is really inflated relative to even a lot of constructed formats where you can play four copies of cards. And part of that is because go look at what commander players are bringing to commander knight. It is very common to see commander players roll up to commander knight with 10 or 20 decks on them. This is not every deck that they even own. These are the decks that they have a box for they can bring to Commander Knight. And it's not like they're playing 10 or 20 games, they're not playing all of these decks that they bring out. Some of that is you have a variety so you can meet the needs or the play level of other players at the table, so having the variety there is good. It's not like they're playing 10 games, it takes a while to play a game of commander, but another aspect there is that it is just fun to build decks, and that is something that other formats can lose, uh, other ways you can get engaged with magic. Like if you are really into competitive constructed, there is not always a lot of room to build your own decks. You really have to be able to compete with what's going on in the environment. So often that's going to be net decking, playing one or maybe two different archetypes. But when it comes to cube, I do think that this is an area where there's sort of a cultural notion where in my mind, cube could be, to me, cube is just a more fun way to play magic than commander. I really enjoy the games a lot more, but I also understand why commander is more popular. People really see it as a stronger form of self-expression. You get to build your own deck, but all of that is true for cube as well. But I do think that there is this kind of conversational topic where we lose some ground to commander, and that's because commander players know that building decks is fun. They're building decks all the time. But in cube, we allow ourselves to talk about designing and building a cube to be a lot of work, and yeah, it's a lot of work, but so is building a commander deck. Both things are just fun, and I think we need to talk about the process of designing cubes and how that is a fun part of the process as well. And I think that we need to be building more cubes and exploring that fun. And it is worth pointing out there is a very big difference between having a commander deck and looking for a four-player pod than having an eight-player cube and needing to get an eight-person draft together. Even if you're talking about like the variety of having a bunch of different commander decks and having one that's right for the table, there's less need for that. When you're getting that many people together, getting eight players together for a cube, you less want a bunch of different options. I know that oftentimes when I get a group of that many players together and you're talking about what different things you can do, people can be kind of wishy-washy, have difficulty choosing the thing that they really want to do. So the variety can actually be a hindrance. So it does make a lot of sense that if you're getting a lot of people together, then just having the right tool for the job, which often is going to be just the most known cube, people default to just playing the Magic Online or Magic Arena powered or vintage cube, and just something that people are familiar with, and something that people find mostly agreeable, even if it's not everyone's favorite thing. It is at least something you can put on the table and people will be able to engage with. But it does become a lot easier to open up the space if you're looking at two and four-player cube games, which this is, of course, where I'm going to sing the praises of the Tubert model, the 180-card cubes for two or four players. It's just a lot easier to get a small group together going. And also just the amount of time it takes for an eight-player draft. You can play multiple cubes if you are playing two and four-person drafts in a night. They just don't take nearly much as much time. Oftentimes, when we do four-player drafts in my group, we only play two matches. If you switch based off of who won the first match, and you have a 2-0, two one-on-s, and an 0-2. Also, sometimes you only play one match. Or you can play all three matches. You know, you can definitely modulate that based off of how much everyone is enjoying the experience. But because it just takes way less time and even less when you do a two-player draft, typically we only play one match. So sometimes with the two-player drafts, you you play a match and it's like you play some close games, and you say, Hey, can we just like play one more? I want to see how my deck plays. And that's always a sign that you really have something good going when people just want to play more games. But more to the point this week is that is where having multiple cubes in your bag is really useful, both for meeting the vibes of the group, similar to commander players and their 10 or 20 decks, but also you can just play a bunch of cubes in a row with a small group, especially with only two players. When I go to meet up my friends to hang out weekly, I typically have somewhere between three and six cubes in my bag. And there's weeks where I draft all six tuberts, like with that small cube size, especially if you're just playing with two players, you can cycle through and play matches very quickly. Sometimes the entire draft plus the match takes like a half an hour, and you just go and you play the next cube. And doing this kind of helps to keep all of the environments fresh. Uh, for me, I'm never going to burn out on cube. I can find myself not wanting to immediately run back a specific cube. And because the building, the cubes, the design and the curating is part of the fun. What I really enjoy about having a bunch of cubes and playing a bunch of different cubes on the same day, the fact that I can see something that maybe needs some refinement. Maybe one of my new projects has some package or some archetype that I want to change after a draft, and I don't necessarily want to play it until I update it, then we can just go and play the next cube. I can bust out something like the original recipe tubert, which is kind of more close to what its permanent shape is going to be. And so having a bunch of cubes in your bag allows you to think about all these different things. And I also think that the more you work on different cubes, the work you put into one cube is going to make you a stronger designer, give you better sensibilities or stronger ideas of what you like about cube, and you can apply those to your other environments. Which does bring me to a very significant point when it comes to just the notion of building cubes or telling people to build more cubes, is oftentimes when I hear about somebody maybe wants to build a cube and they're overwhelmed at the concept, and I ask, well, what do you like about magic? What do you want to put in the cube? And they'll often have a very long list of things that they want to cube with, and that makes sense. Magic is awesome. There's a lot of things to like about magic. I could not possibly fit everything that I like about magic into one environment. And so, yeah, it makes sense that there's a lot of things that you like, and it makes sense that it's overwhelming to fit into one cube. That's why it's good to build more cubes, to explore more space. And until you build your first cube, you're not gonna know which of those different things that you like are gonna fit together. And what I hear when somebody says that they have all these things that they like about cube, but they just don't know where to start. There's this fear of failure being expressed there. I like all these things and I want to put them in a playable environment, but I'm just concerned that it won't work. And the thing is, like that fear is self-actualizing if you don't try. You can't succeed if you don't try. And also, there's not really a penalty for failure. This isn't something that is important to quote unquote succeed at. This is something that is fun to do. And it is true that at your first crack at a design, there's going to be things that you don't like. When I build a new cube, there's still things that don't work on the first couple of drafts. But as long as your starting point is things that you like, things that you think are sweet about magic, there's going to be some likable things about it, and there's going to be more space to explore. And especially if you're dealing with a smaller cube, if you're going to build a tubert, you really only need one other person to play with. And one thing that the tubert 180 card cube size allows you to do is it's really easy to just, if you can latch on to a macro archetype, or even find like the color-based archetypes I've talked about here, where all five colors are doing their own thing, or even if you break into color pairs, uh, however you want to do it, but it's easy to fit five archetypes into a model designed to be drafted by two or four players, you're gonna have enough support for all the things that you're doing, and you can explore really weird spaces here. And I think that that's something about cube when somebody expresses that they have something that they want to build and they don't know how to go about it, it can be overwhelming because there's not necessarily an example of what to do. A lot of the things that people want to see in Cube aren't present at all in things like the digital powered cubes. There's only so much stuff that can fit in those environments, and so finding the right inspiration or examples of similar things can be really difficult depending on how niche or specific what you want to build is. But at this small cube size, you can do so much that is difficult at 360 cards, that is impossible at 540 cards, especially at high power levels. You know, black lotus takes up a lot of the air in the room, but when you're trying to just explore something that you think is fun or cool, the range of what is possible in cube is truly infinite. And at this small cube size, I've been able to make things work that I just didn't really think were possible in Cube, things that I had scratched my head about for a long time that I didn't know how to make work, things like having Death's Shadow as a supported and strong archetype in the Tempo Tubert, making that work just with singleton because the small cube size allows more breathing room for things that can only have so many cards that support them. Things like having Urza's Tower in a singleton cube and having it be a high pick in the Aldrazi tubert is just another thing where I demonstrated to myself that you can just do whatever you want to do in Cube. The only barrier is actually building it. It's actually taking the time to design something. And to that point, I do think it is really helpful to have these frameworks, things like macro archetypes, things like color-based archetypes to zoom in and choose a small number of things that you like. I do see that as a big barrier when somebody is excited about cube, wants to build their own cube, and they just have this list that is just too many things to realistically fit into their environment, especially when they don't know how multiple of them are gonna go. I have this friend that every time we get together in Cube, he's always telling me about this thing he wants to build. The last time we cube, he was talking about he wants to build this powered commander style cube, but you can also draft it as a battle box, and it's like, why don't you just build a commander cube, a powered cube, and a battle box? Like just build three different things, and then you'll have them all, right? And it it is efficient, I guess, to have this thing that can be played in all these different ways, but just start with one thing, and then if it also plays fine as the other things, great, but really just start with one thing that you can easily approach, and you don't have to have all these different goals that don't necessarily work together and find yourself serving too many different masters, just like build a thing, and then if that thing doesn't do everything you want it to do, you can change it to do more things or rework it entirely. There's no failure in trying. Like go build a battle box, and if it's fun, keep it. And if you think it could be better, change it. And if you don't think it's fun, take it apart. If you have this idea of success in your mind is that you have to build this thing and it has to be all these things, then you are allowing yourself to fail. But if you have the idea that you just want to build something and enjoy the experience, enjoy the journey, then you can't fail. And I think that letting go of this notion that a cube has to be good or permanent really goes a long way. Like, especially if you are thinking, well, I I like the idea of building cubes, I never get to play them. Actually, physically putting something together that could be a lot of time, it could also be a monetary burden, but just playing on a spreadsheet, just getting a list on cube cobra and just thinking about something, and just spending some time poking around, that curation can be very fun. And then maybe eventually you find somebody you want to play it with, or you find a group that you want to play it with, and you actually put it together. And I will say that if we start building on cube cobra, I know this always happens to me, you get interested in an idea, you start refining it, you do like the bot drafts, and then the bots just behave so weirdly. You do a bot draft, and you're like, this doesn't make any sense. I want to see what humans do. It'll it'll give you the itch, it'll give you the motivation to actually put something together in paper. So, you know, caution, but also advice. If you want to build up some motivation, go do it on the spreadsheet, because doing it on the spreadsheet is going to make you want to do it in paper. I do want to expand on what I mean or the significance of saying that it doesn't have to be good, because that's also something I hear people say a lot. They're worried that if they build a cube, maybe you're coming from an active community and you are worried that there are so many cubes to drafts, and you build something that plays bad on the first draft, people aren't going to want to play it again. Or maybe you're coming from an environment where you don't have anyone to play with, or you have a group that plays different games, and you're worried that if the first draft isn't good, they're not going to want to do it again. I think being forward about those feelings and expressing, hey, I don't know if this is going to be fun or not, setting expectations like that actually goes a long way. Like if you show up and you say, We should try cube, it's the best, and you you put something experimental, or even if you put something really polished in front of people, if you say, Let's draft cube, cube is the best way to play magic, and you bring the magic arena powered cube, and people are just like, I don't like Black Lotus. Like that's a very real thing that can happen. You know, it's it's the most popular way to play cube, and I think that having the power is like this big neon sign in the window. Like it is something where people are excited about the idea of playing with Black Lotus more often than not, but not everybody feels that way. So I do think it is important to be earnest and then invite conversations about what people like more or less and to kind of move towards the direction of the group. I think that you can get a group acclimated to cube even if it's not their normal thing, but it does involve a little bit of finesse. You can't just say, this is the best thing to do, we have to do this thing. You say, hey, I would like to try this thing. And at the very least, your friend group should humor you, and maybe you like it, maybe they don't. I do know that the act of drafting is something that can also be intimidating for players. So if you're trying to get commander players to draft, there's gonna be a barrier there. It might not work out. You want to be respectful because Cube is not going to be for everybody, but I do think people that enjoy magic, that approach drafting with an open mind and are interested in learning this new skill and new way to play the game. It is really the deepest and most replayable and most fun way to play magic for my money, but I also want to be respectful that it's not going to be for everybody. Not everybody wants to put that much effort in or learn this new way to play the game. So you want to be respectful of that as well, but people should at least be willing to try it once, and if they don't like it, that's fine. You never have to visit it again. Maybe you find a different group. There happens to be a lot of magic players, more magic players than ever. So eventually I think you'll find somebody who will be excited to cube with you or a group of players to cube with. Though I will say that building a cube from a point of having nobody to play with, I understand why that's going to be more daunting and maybe you're going to play more with these spreadsheets than anything, actually building a physical cube before you have anyone to play with. I understand why you wouldn't do that. That makes more sense. But let's say that your reservation is that you do have a group and you're worried that there's so many cubes and that everybody wants to play these other cubes that are so well refined. Maybe you're part of a group that has one or more really good cube designers, or you just have a group that's really happy playing the Magic Online or Magic Arena powered and vintage cube, and you're worried that they're not going to like as much something that you designed. And this kind of group, I will say, should be very willing to try what you designed. If they're into Magic Online, Magic Arena, maybe Powered Cube is just where they want to be. But if you do have a group that's meeting at least somewhat regularly to engage in cube draft, then that's a group that I think is going to be amenable to at least trying something new. At least once, if you set expectations correctly. But then to the point about maybe being worried that there's better cubes in the area, as somebody who designs a lot of cubes and enjoys working on my own environments, I'm always so happy when somebody in my group brings something that they have designed because it gives me a look at how they enjoy and think about magic and I get to explore this new environment. Importantly, you want to show up with your designs with a curiosity and a willingness to hear feedback and to incorporate feedback and to update your design. You want to be willing to adapt to the group. If you come in and you have a strong-headed idea of how it should be and how it's always going to be, and you're not going to change it, then you're going to run into friction. It's not going to be the most fun to play with you, but as long as you are willing to collaborate, that's where cube ends up being very fun. And in addition to building more cubes, a part of this is that it's just good to play more cubes, playing other people's environments. It'll show me things I hadn't considered about magic, the uh time I've spent playing my friend Andy's mono black cube that showed me some stuff about color restrictions and how to explore those and color imbalances in my own environments. You just learn something and see things. My experience at Shoebox this year, my design for Stadium Stampede very much inspired directly by a cube that I drafted at Shoebox. That was Judge Bones' I Gonjo Drift, which then was also inspired by a different cube that Judge Bones had drafted. And so we just get to keep feeding each other's creativity and designing new projects and playing in new spaces and keeping everything fresh and keep inventing new and fun things to share with each other. And I'm not gonna sugarcoat it. Your first design might be awful. If you've never built a cube, you might just do some things that you weren't supposed to do. But I know that for my own personal journey and growth, it's important to make those mistakes. Like when I'm preparing for a competitive constructed tournament, a lot of what I'm doing is just losing matches and learning different ways to lose matches, and just getting all of those mistakes and ways to lose out of my system until eventually I'm only left with lines that win games or give me the best shot to win winnable games. And similarly, a lot of designing Cube is finding stuff that doesn't work, and then you have some stuff that does work, that's the stuff you're gonna keep working on a project for to try to preserve that stuff and make it better and supplement it with other things that harmonize in the space around it. But there's going to be some stuff that doesn't work, there's gonna be some stuff that you don't like, but it's it doesn't mean that that's a failure, that's just part of the process. Like when I owe five a constructed league on Magic Online, it doesn't mean that I failed, it means that I learned something, hopefully. You know, sometimes you do just lose, you didn't learn anything, but I mean, even learning that you didn't learn anything shows you that you should change your process and change your approach and try something new. So you're kind of always learning if you're looking for something to learn. And something I hear from other people in the cube space is that the floor of playing magic. Magic is such a great game, it's so fun that a cube can only be so bad. And I don't fully agree with that. I think that sometimes it Can suck to play magic and kind of tying in competitive constructed here. The last time I qualified for the Pro Tour, the Pro Tour I played Oko Thief of Crowns was legal and standard. Just awful. It just made me really not want to try in a competitive way anymore because you don't get to control the kind of magic that you play there. And that experience certainly is a part of why I focus so much more on casual magic than competitive magic. That's an aspect of that. If you were going to qualify for tournaments, you don't get a control, you have no say in the kind of magic you have to play when you qualify for a regional championship for the Pro Tour for whatever. You have to play whatever the format is, and that means acknowledging and engaging with whatever is strong in that environment. Where in Cube, you choose what is strong, you can change your environment, but you can also build a bad environment. If the people that make a living off of designing the game make the occasional OKO Thief of Crowns, you're gonna do that too in your cube. Sometimes a draft of your cube is going to suck, but that's fine because you learn something. As long as you approach it with curiosity and a willingness to adapt, that means you're gonna build something better next time. And there's gonna be more low points, there's gonna be more bad drafts, it's gonna be more bad cubes, but those bad cubes are gonna be part of building great cubes later. And so a cube doesn't have to be good, a cube doesn't have to be permanent. There's a number of cubes that I've taken apart in my time. You don't get to having 20 cubes without having taken apart some cubes along the way. A project that I put a lot of time into that I published kind of an article series over on Star City Games a few years back now that a number of people were excited about was my time capsule cube, which kind of isolated different phases of the history of the game and how cards were designed, and put these lists together of kind of just drafting around these different eras. And I kind of realized that the era specific stuff is not something I necessarily enjoy. Even when you look at my pre-modern tubert, I am using the old card frame, but I am not playing by pre-modern constructed rules, and I'm also kind of not abiding by the sensibilities of any actual time. I have cards that you just weren't allowed to play with at all in any constructed environment that overlapped in any meaningful way. I'm stretching multiple arrows there. I'm also allowing things like portal cards, which were never legal in tournaments at the same time as these other cards, until much later in the history of the game. Even in my cubes that are inspired by constructed magic, I'm not strictly abiding by any reality of what those constructed deck lists look like. The tempo tubert is largely inspired by old, modern, and legacy Delver of Secrets constructed mirrors, but I just don't have a lot of the cards that you would see in those decks. For example, I think Force of Will is pretty weak in that environment, so it's just not going to be in the cube. And then I allow myself to add newer cards because I think newer cards play in this space. And I'm not doing anything like breaking singletons so that you have to play Delver of Secrets when we're playing these cards. I'm exploring this environment and allowing it to have new cards and to explore new space inspired by old space. And that's the kind of cube that I really enjoy. Cubes that are really open to future refinement and can change when something new, when some inspiration strikes kind of in the space without necessarily being exactly what the existing infrastructure offers. So does that mean that the time capsule cube was a failure on my part? No, absolutely not. It was a lot of fun to work on, it was fun to draft the times that I drafted it, and it's kind of fun to look back on and the things that I have learned from that environment. And it reminded of some other cubes, even a couple cubes that I have together right now, I draft very infrequently, and I don't know that I'm ever going to draft my Marvel's Spider-Man uh design into the Spider-Verse ever again. There's not a lot of depth to that, it only uses cards from this one release that is kind of universally panned, it's not very well liked. I drafted relatively recently with my brother, and it was kind of fun to play the cards there, but even then it had been a few months since I had drafted it, and I found myself needing to like get a refresher on the card. So it's like a lot of reading, not a lot of familiarity is kind of the silly thing. But that set is something that really explored designing for four-player drafts. So it's a meaningful set to me, even if the set does suck, has a lot of blights on it, having that box and working on that project is something that I do think fondly of. And then working on that cube and also my Final Fantasy VII theme cube, Return to Midgar, those were both like these universes beyond specific things that have really specific non-magic aesthetics that are hard for me to get magic players into drafting, unless you also really like the other thing that they're themed around. But both of these cubes gave me meaningful insight and the motivation to work on the life and times of Gerard Capuchin, my weather light crew magic lore-driven design that really focuses on this aesthetic structure. And that was a cube that's also based off of my experience playing casually 20 years ago, but I just didn't know, I couldn't conceive of how to make that into a cube because so many of the game pieces are so unappealing. But working on these other two cubes that were so aesthetically driven gave me insight on how to build that environment, even though it's something I already had experience with. So just kind of the the upshot of what I'm saying here is building more cubes allows you to build in space that you maybe even already had the motivation for. Every cube you build better informs how to build something you're gonna be excited for later, even if you don't love what you have built today. And something that's really cool about having a lot of cubes is that you get into the spaces where you have cubes that realistically would have no overlap, you have cards that just wouldn't play in other environments, and just stuff that you get to play with more of what you love about magic, and you get to share more of these game pieces with other players and get insights into what they like about magic and show them some things they haven't seen before, and maybe show them a new card that they're going to love. Something that was really fun for me is when I built the omniscience stack that's a cube where every spell can be cast for free. That cube involves highlighting a lot of cards that either aren't good anymore or just maybe were never good or really hard to justify in most environments and most games of magic, but you get to just see some stuff that you don't normally play with and stuff that I have a really strong nostalgic attachment to, like Dark Steel Colossus, which just isn't strong anywhere, but is actually really strong in that environment the way that I've curated it. And I have Searing Wind, which is a nine mana instant that deals 10 damage to any target, and nine is just not really a castable number, and there's just so many stronger effects now when you're getting that much mana. Why would you ever play this card? But it really just plays there. And the omniscient stack is where a friend of mine saw the card Searing Wind for the first time, and they just became fascinated by this card. They actually tried to build a modern deck around it. It was just like so cool to show somebody this card that they just kind of fell in love with or they wouldn't otherwise see. And that's part of sharing cube with other people for me, is just showing them things that I think are cool and the hopes that they pick up with some things that they think are cool as well, and just sharing that excitement together. That's the beauty of cube there. And that's a lot of what's happening at these commander tables, too. And I think that cube can definitely be that same kind of space where we are playing with all these different things. It doesn't have to just be powered cube, right? It doesn't have to just be the best cube in your area, playing a bunch of different cubes, designing more cubes, we can find more things to share our passion about with each other. And one of Magic's greatest strengths as the game is just how complex it is, how deep the history is, and just how there's always more stuff to learn if you're interested in learning more about the game and refining any of a myriad of different skills that the game tests, and cube similarly is just infinitely deep. You can always learn more and experience more in the realm of cube design. And in that way, every cube that I work on makes me a little bit better at refining my other cubes, and often I can find inspiration for one project in a place that I never expected to find it. I did an episode on the podcast here about how I've kind of lost a lot of interest in drafting powered cubes, and how I've even lost a lot of interest in my own powered tubert, but I have been working on that environment a little bit since then. I actually found some inspiration working on 30 to 50 feral hogs, that cube being really color imbalance, skewed in favor of having a lot of red mana fixing because you need to play Razor Swine to actually compete in that environment. And for a powered cube, certainly for a powered tubert, I've always wanted to have a color imbalance in favor of blue, and I've started to just kind of borrow things more directly from 30 to 50 feral hogs for the powered tubert, and I'm pretty close to having something that I'm happy with in the powered tubert space, so I'll be sharing that soon here on the podcast. Look forward to that one if you're a fan of powered cubes. I know a lot of people have expressed interest in the powered tubert and even do the drafts on Cube Cobra with my rougher lists, so I'm I'm really looking forward to having something that I am personally happy with in that space. And 30 to 50 Feral Hogs has informed that design. And then a restriction that I have on my own designs that I think helps keep things a little fresh for me and does encourage me to explore newer spaces is I have sort of a self-imposed rule where for most cards I don't allow myself to own more than four copies of a given card. And this is kind of a budgeting thing where owning more than four copies of every shock land starts to get very expensive, but then it also helps me to explore more unique game pieces and just see how different aspects of magic fit together. You know, there's over 30,000 magic cards, and different lands are going to shape environments differently, and that's really the choke point for a lot of this, and where I end up having to explore something very different from cube to cube is I have my 40 set of shock lands, my 40 set of fetch lands, so I can't play with those anymore. I have my 40 set of surveillance, and I really enjoy where these can fit into different cubes, and shock lands I think are just excellent game pieces. You can cube with them almost anywhere, but because of this self-imposed rule, I end up playing with different game pieces and trying out different lands and just seeing how different lands play in different spaces. And this some sometimes causes me to change the lands in some of my existing shells just because I think, based off of other experiences, that different lands are a better fit for a different environment. Kind of a notable update I made relatively recently was adding Surveil lands to the Tempo Tubert after just really enjoying how they played. At first, I didn't want that many different fetchable duels because the mana gets kind of out of hand, but Surveil lands are just something that I enjoy playing with so much and they play so well with fetch lands, and I have liked the impact that that has made on the Tempo Tubert, specifically having multiple fetchable duel land cycles makes it so you can pick a fetch land a little bit more highly, and you can be a little bit more at ease about getting a fetchable duel in a given color pair. So just seeing different combinations more, playing with more mana fixing lands. And there's some exceptions to this 40 rule for me, like I own like a weird amount of Legends Chain Lightnings and like lightning bolts. Cards that just go into a lot of different cubes. I have a bunch of Thraven inspectors, but certainly for lands for expensive cards, I don't allow myself to own more than four. And that does lead to having some pretty cool and different stuff in some environments. I did my breakdown of Stadium's DMP last week, and there's kind of a strange mix of mana fixing lands in that cube, and something that's really cool there. I really like the way that the egg lands, the sky cloud expanse cycle plays with Trixhaven Stadium, giving you the mana filtering off of the colorless mana there. And I don't know if I would ever would have gotten there if I didn't have this four-of rule that did kind of encourage me to explore more of Magic's different land cycles. I also have a set of the Modern Horizons 3 common fetch lands and find one of three basic land types in that cube, which are much weaker than a number of different mana facing lands, but I like the way that they play. They're similar to fetch lands, but texturally a bit different. They can't find dual lands, they're limited to three different types, so you get three instead of two, but then they enter tap. So these play very differently from Onslaught and Zendnikar Fetchlands in terms of power ceilings and the relative strength of them and tap lands on tap lands, that kind of thing, but they still enable some graveyard stuff, some landfall synergies, which I have access to in that cube, while not having the absolute strongest mana fixing, mana fixing that can get you the right colors without necessarily enabling you to play all five colors very easily. So just kind of experimenting with different land cycles, the different incentives that they offer and the ways that they can play together. That's something that I really have enjoyed exploring in the world of cube. And the lands that you play impact the spells that make sense in your environment as well. Even things as simple as double or triple pipped cards, cards that are more difficult to cast because they have more hard mana requirements for casting them. Different lands cause different incentives for different spells, and you just see a lot of different things in cube, and then you can change what's in any given environment based off of what you've seen in another environment. So playing more cubes, building more cubes just lets you see more of what is possible and refine even your existing designs, even something that you maybe didn't think you would ever change. Like my pre-modern tuber is still one that I make the occasional update to, and I like being able to change these environments and the way that new things can even change the way that we think about old things. I think that that's very cool. And I also think it is just fun to do thought exercises about how you would build something. Even if you are perfectly content to draft the Magic Online powered cube as the only cube you ever played, it's still, I think it's fun to just kind of lay the list out on like Cube Cobra or even just pencil and paper and just kind of map out things that aren't there, maybe how you would do it, things that you would consider doing differently, and just think about that and exploring and playing with the space. I remember getting into magic in high school and writing decklists and margins of notebooks and just having all these scrawlings about, you know, decks that I would never build, or I wanted to play like a PTQ, and here's the deck list I'm gonna play, and just thinking about building decks all of the time, and tinkering with cubes is the closest I'd get to that feeling of really being excited about building a deck today, and just the fact that I can still capture some of that feeling, and that cube is a space that has all this customizability and this the space to explore, this infinite landscape to explore, is something that I value very highly now as an adult, because it's really hard to keep that level of whimsy. You really gotta work. That's an important thing to have in life. It really enriches your life to have these kind of things to think about and daydream about, and cube really is that space for me today. And even if you never build the cube, just the messing around on cube cobra, the scribbling in notebooks, that kind of stuff, it really does just enrich your life to just play in that way. And then one last thing I want to touch on today, which is related to that last point, is that with so many different things happening in magic, with there being so many different things that a given player is going to be excited about, I think it is very cool to have your own perspective and your own take and to bring the way that you think about it, maybe spend some time focusing your thoughts or your interests or the way that you want to present something, even just as a conversation piece. I did my episode on Tarmagoy here recently, and I was really excited to sit down and talk about Tarmagoy. It's a card that's so impactful on the history of magic, a card that has been omnipresent in so much of my own journey through the game, just kind of watching it where it fits into this or that format, uh, having it in cubes, also it being a really important constructed card across multiple formats for me when I was really getting into the game competitively. And some of my motivation for that was that Aristic Studies a while back did a really cool YouTube video about Tarmagoyf, talked a lot about the history of the card in the game, high-profile tournaments where Tarmagoyev was really influential, stuff like the foil Tarmagoyf at GP Vegas was part of that. And I mentioned that on my episode about Tarmagoyf here, kind of how I wasn't talking about that because that wasn't my history and experience. And I was motivated from that video to talk about the things that matter to me that are significant to me about Parmagoyf that weren't present in the video. The way that Parmagoyf ever existing really reshaped the way that the game was designed and how we approach the game today, the way that Parmagoyf really brought creatures to the forefront, even all the way to the eternal formats, creatures really mattering in legacy and vintage. Tarmagoyf really changed the game, and that was really exciting and interesting for me to talk about. So there's already other people who are very passionate talking about very significant aspects of this card, and then I felt that there was something else that I can contribute, or at least something that I appreciated or wanted to talk about in a similar space, and there's just so much to explore, so much to express, and so much to share with magic, and it's really cool to just get your hands in there and make something yourself and share it with people. And so that's why I think it's great to build a cube. That's why I think even if you already have a cube, it's great to build more cubes. It's both a tremendous avenue for self-expression as well as a craft that you can hone and improve upon and get happier and happier with the things that you make, and just building new cubes and playing new cubes and sharing cubes, whether they're my own or somebody else's design that they bring to the table and drafting and playing games together is really exciting for me, and I never get tired of seeing and working on a new cube environment. And the most important thing that I want to say about cube, the thing I have come to believe is absolutely true. One of the fundamental things about Cube is the person that can build your favorite cube is you. I have a lot of experience building cubes, I've seen how a lot of different things fit or don't fit together, things that work, things that don't work. I have curiosities about things to try, I have things that I really like that I have played with, but ultimately, even if I can maybe take an idea that you have and offer some insights, maybe I can see a list that you have, you can tell me your goals and maybe my experience will help me to help you realize your goals. Ultimately, you know what you like, you know how to express what you like, and then by working on that, you can build the cube that you are going to like the most. It is true that the Magic Online, Magic Arena, Vintage, and Powered Cubes are the most drafted cubes. There's something going on there with the excitement of drafting with power and these being curated to hit the widest audience possible, but for most people, I just don't think it's possible that these cubes will be your favorite cube if you take the time to explore and build something yourself. You know best what you're excited about. The act of cultivating and curating it yourself is also going to build your attachment to it. So the person most capable of building your favorite cube is you. And so I say as a person who has 20 cubes assembled, who has disassembled 20 more cubes, who has a stack of cards on his desk for a pending cube project, building cubes is just a fun part of the process. Building cubes and refining cubes between playing the matches is just more fun. It is the same fun as building decks. It is just a really enjoyable set thing in isolation that does multiply the joy of playing the games, being able to play and curate and kind of weave those together. Two great things that are fun to do that amplify the fun of each other. And I see it both as true that curating cubes makes the aspect of playing the games more fun, but it is also just a fun pursuit in its own right, and that's why I say that everybody should build more cubes. And that is where I'm going to leave things today. Thank you for taking the time to listen today, for doing whatever you do to support the podcast, liking, commenting, reviewing, sharing, subscribing, all that jazz, and I will be back next week talking more cube. Later gamers.