Magic Arena Planar Cube Retrospective

Ryan Overturf looks back at his experience playing the Planar Cube which concluded its three week run on Arena last week, offering insights on what played better or worse across the Cubes three distinct modules. 

Zach Barash's article announcing the Planar Cube: https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/mtg-arena/planar-cube-draft

The Planar Cube ported to Cube Cobra and sorted with card tags for each module for legibility: https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/d485d352-f798-49ee-a49c-bd1db31d819b?s2=Tags

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What's up gamers? Welcome back to 180 MTG. My name is Ryan Overturf, and this week I'm going to be doing a retrospective on one of the digital cubes. We just had the Planar Cube have its first run on the Magic Arena digital client. That's a cube that's a pretty interesting take on the whole cube draft experience. This was designed by Zach Barish, who kind of leads the Magic Arena Cube projects. It's a cube that has a base module of 200 cards, and then it rotated through three different planes. Those would be Zendikar, Inastrod, and Kamagawa, and it was a 360 card package for each of those planes that rotated through. So you started with the base module plus the Zendikar module. So you drafted that 560 card cube, and then 360 cards changed every week as you visited a different plane, and you would get into the mechanics of that plane, and there was no strict adherence to cards being from specific sets. It was more focused on the mechanics and kind of the vibes on those planes, borrowing cards from everywhere in the multiverse while kind of taking a tour through more specific themes. I've talked on the podcast about how I have lost a lot of interest in playing the digital powered cubes, or really any powered cube. I'm getting back into playing an 180-card powered cube, doing a little bit more of that in paper, but the digital stuff still really doesn't speak to me anymore. But because there was a different flavor of digital cube on, I wanted to go and experience that so that I could share my thoughts regarding this. So it would be more of a common experience where this was a cube that some of you may have drafted, or at the very least, was something very visible, so you'd have some awareness of that. And I'm gonna just talk about my experience, how I felt about this cube and its design going from week to week. I did about five-ish drafts of all three modules because I did want to at least get a few drafts under my belt, and I did play best of one. That's actually something I think is really positive about playing cube on Magic Arena, being able to do best of one over best of three, because I really don't care about getting the highest win percentage in cube. I like playing against a range of different decks. That is something that I think was kind of negative when cubes went from in pod play to league play on Magic Online. You could get a pairing more quickly, but it was always a little bit deflating for me when I would play against two very similar decks out of three matches in a league. Um, because there's just an aspect of matchups. Like your deck can be better or worse, you can execute better or worse based off your draft seat, but then sometimes you're just kind of disadvantaged against a specific color or archetype and you play against that archetype twice. Or on the other side, if you're like very advantaged against something and you play against it twice, it's not that engaging to actually play the games, but then playing more games at best of one, playing up to like can you play 10 games, nine games, um, seven wins or three losses, whichever one comes first, playing best of one, so you get to experience more of the cube more quickly that way, and I do enjoy that. So I'm gonna jump back and forth a little bit today between just looking at the list and talking about cards in the file, as well as talking about my experience drafting. And I should say that I did not look over the cube list at all before jumping into drafts. I did watch the limited resources episode where they had Zack Barish on talking about the cube, and they did like the sample crack-a-pack. So I knew a couple things about the cube before drafting it, but I did just kind of want to take in the experience and try to not have any thoughts on it before I started drafting and just kind of feel it out and see how the experience played as somebody just jumping into it. I had no interest in trying to shark the tables, there's no money in that anyway. I'm just looking for an experience. Before talking about the experience, I do want to address one of the more common comments that I saw online regarding the arena planar cube, is that the entry fee was just too high. I'm someone that's fully free to play on arena, I think I spent $5 on the new player bundle once upon a time. I take my morning slow, I do what I call my arena chores, uh, my dailies to get my gold, and I don't really play anything on arena anymore that has an entry fee. And so when it comes to something that I want to play, eventually cube rolls around, and like I don't play the powered cube anymore, so I had a lot of gold. I was able to just enter the events, but it's like 10,000 gold or 1500 gems, I believe, are the cost to enter the drafts, and you have to win at least five matches to break even on that entry fee. So it's really difficult to do, it's a very steep cost, and you're not really playing for anything. I mean, it's Magic Arena, you're rarely playing for anything anyway. So they're trying to get some dollars out of people to play in these cubes, and you know, they're providing an experience, you're playing to you're paying to play a game, whatever, but you know, charging so much for something that is just supposed to be a fun game to play, it leaves a bit of a sour take, so I understand why people are dissatisfied with that. I would like to see those entry fees go down, and in that way I guess I'm part of the problem because I was paying the entry fees and doing the cube drafts, but cube should be something more accessible for more people. If I want as many people to get into cube and enjoy playing it as possible, having it be more accessible on the ostensibly free-to-play client is something that I would prioritize. So the cube should be cheaper, but I'm jumping in anyway. And I did have an awareness from that limited resources episode that there was going to be some of the Magic Arena uh alchemy cards, the digital-only cards in the cube, but even still when I opened up a pack, it was more deflating than I was ready for to open it up and see just multiple of the digital-only cards. And I know that there is kind of a loyal arena base. People are certainly playing that format if they are continuing to make it, because it takes resources to keep making the alchemy cards. So there is an audience that has an appetite for that, and maybe having these digital-only cards is a way to get the people that only play formats like alchemy that are more digital only into cube. So there could be something to that. From my personal experience, I did not enjoy seeing all the digital-only cards, and in fact, my first draft, I stubbornly decided to not draft or play any of them, even the ones that looked pretty strong. I ended up playing a five-color landfall deck. It turns out that this cube had Field of the Dead and Golo's Tireless Pilgrim, which has kind of been a classically really busted thing for many of the Magic Arena Cubes. So, kind of talking about my history drafting the Magic Arena Cubes, I did play the first arena cube they ever had on, and I played Magic Arena Cubes for a long time. I kind of lost some interest in it when they started doing more of that digital only stuff in the cubes, and so many of the digital-only cards I was seeing for the first time. And when it comes to the Magic Arena Cubes, I actually have the most nostalgia. I feel like Magic Arena Cube is at its best when it first rolled out, the very first Magic Arena Cube, because there was a lot of charm to Arena having a much smaller card pool than Magic Online, and I just vividly remember the cube had charging Monstrosor, 4 red, 5-5, Trample Haste, that's it, that's the full card. And that card was reasonable, it was strong. You could play a red deck that topped out at Charging Monstrosor, and you could win matches doing that. It was competitive to play Charging Monstersur, and that was awesome. And the longer Q has been a Magic Arena, the less of that charm has been present in the Cube lists. And it makes sense, you're going to be putting in more of the new cards, cards that people know, cards that people are playing in competitive environments, so you have some familiarity there. But there is kind of an unfortunate aspect with the nature of arena's smaller card pool. More recent sets, like I'm fine with you adding strong cards from the standard legal releases, but something about the small card pool with just one of the sets on arena being Modern Horizons 3, and Modern Horizons 2 is on the client, is these are tremendously high-powered sets. And there are cards from Modern Horizons sets that I think are excellent, that are really great, play well, and are at reasonable power levels for Cube. We're gonna talk about some of those cards today. I think that there are some good Modern Horizons inclusions in this cube, but there are also some that are on the negative side, and some of these digital only cards kind of enter that space as well. As I did draft the cube more, even the second time I drafted it, I wanted to try to see what these digital only cards were about and try to actually embrace the full experience. You know, it's kind of obstinate on my first go, and I did get seven wins with the no digital only cards Golos deck, but then I did want to try out some of these heist cards, some cards I'd never played with before, just to get a feel with how they actually played. So if you're not familiar, heist is a mechanic where when you heist, you just are shown three random cards from your opponent's deck, and you have the ability to cast one of them. So you can just take cards from your opponent's deck. Often you have to spend mana, but you can use mana of any color, and so it's kind of questionably powerful because it's always a spell when you heist, you're not showing lands, but it's a spell from your opponent's deck, so it's not going to have any synergies necessarily, but sometimes you do just get a really strong card from your opponent's deck. And I think that the marquee card, kind of the strongest heist card, uh Grenzo Crooked Jailer, is a card that gets a lot of attention in this space. So it's four black, red, six, four, legendary goblin rogue. When Grenzo enters and at the beginning of your upkeep, you heist your opponent's library. So you'll look at three cards from their deck, uh three spells, and you get access to that for that turn. And then once each turn, you can pay zero rather than the mana cost for a spell that you don't own with mana value three or less. So this card is actually going to be reworked. You usually just be able to steal something for free every turn, as I understand it. But if you heist something that costs three or less, you can just cast that for free every turn, is basically what Grenzo does. And even if you get something more expensive, you still have the ability to pay mana. So you're getting card advantage, you're stealing stuff, and sometimes getting a mana advantage by casting the spell for free. So pretty strong card. What I found as I started drafting these cards and comparing them to other cards in the environment is that Grenzo kind of felt replacement level next to Inferno Titan, which is a card that was also in the Zendicar module. Both Grenzo and Inferno Titan were just in this one module. Inferno Titan, big impact on the battlefield when you cast it and you know what the output's going to be. Entering and dealing speed damage divided as you choose is just a reliably historically powerful thing like Inferno Titan, that Titan cycle, it changed the game when they were printed. And Inferno Titan really does hold up in a lot of cubes. The more you're playing on the battlefield, this is a big deal. And I found in my drafts that Inferno Titan, Grenzo, they did feel pretty comparable. However, the sentiment I seen expressed online, people had a lot of really negative feelings about these digital-only cards, and specifically Grenzo, I saw call out a lot as a card that people thought was unreasonable, they really didn't like. And I think that what's happening here, it's not a statement about that card being stronger than even the other options available in the cube. I think that really is just an expression of the dissatisfaction with the unfamiliarity and also the digital-only mechanics that just you wouldn't normally see in magic. And so when you lose to Grenzo, or if you feel compelled to draft it, it's not as fun or it feels worse to lose to that card than something familiar like Inferno Titan. And so maybe that card gets an inflated sense of how strong it actually is. Uh, I in my experience, I think that it is pretty much in line with Inferno Titan. And if my deck is more red, Inferno Titan can be easier to cast. So when I was drafting, I actually ended up valuing Inferno Titan more highly as the drafts progressed. But it makes sense to me that there was a larger negative feeling towards Grenzo because of that digital-only aspect. So that's just something I wanted to speak to because I do see that as a really big barrier to a lot of people playing these arena cubes. And so for that sensibility, I do think it is pretty negative for a lot of reasons to have these digital-only cards, even if they do play reasonable, which some of them I do think do play pretty reasonable. Grinzo's not a great example of that, but I will talk about some of them that I do actually like as we get further into this. Let's just talk about that base 200 card module really quick here. A lot of this is nuts and bolts stuff, makes a lot of sense, is exactly how I would go about this kind of thing. You have swords to plowshares. This is something that actually came up on limited resources where Zach was saying this card might be a little bit strong to have in the base module. I do think just one for one interaction is something you're gonna want to have present in every module. And if Swords to Plowshares is the strongest card in your cube, it's it's not offensive. Like it's really good if you have a lot of creatures with no enter the battlefield uh effects. If you are tapping four or five mana and getting nothing immediately, yeah, Swords of Plow Shares is really strong against you, but it is still just a one-for-one, and it's not that strong against cards that have powerful enters abilities, which there's going to be a lot of at high-powered cubes. And this cube actually ended up being pretty high power in every module. I did find that it was more power-motivated than synergy motivated, kind of through all the modules, but we'll kind of get to those one at a time. Other stuff I like here, just historically cool rates, strong cards like Baneslayer Angel, which isn't going to define a lot of decks, but it's going to make a lot of decks. Some strong removal, counter spells in blue, black and red, burn and removal, uh, green mana dork's gonna be here in every environment, Tarmagoyf in all three modules, it's a cool one to see. Tireless tracker, just kind of like a lot of classic cube cards, solemn simulacrum, which isn't gonna break anything, but it's going to be a welcome inclusion in many cubes, Mindstone. This stuff all makes a lot of sense. Also, a lot of mana fixing in the base module. There are Spetchlands, Shocklands, um, buddy lands. I like all of those. There's triombs I could do without those, but I also know that people have a big appetite for those. So they're not super offensive to me. I've gotten a bit acclimated to them, but I have found, certainly in the Zendikar module here, they did contribute to decks being you should play as many colors as you can and draft only the strongest cards of those colors, which is a bit on Rails for my liking, which I know is counter to a lot of people's understanding of what it means to draft on Rails. I often see people say, well, if you have access to more colors, you can play all your spells, you can do whatever you want. But it's always true that you are enabled, you're allowed to make mistakes. You can make suboptimal decisions no matter how good the mana is, but when the mana is really strong and the power level is really high, there's just cards that are never supposed to be in your deck. And the mana did get to that power level in this cube. So triomb feel very negative when the soup decks are just like, here's the strongest cards, never pass these, here's the weakest cards, never play these, and you don't actually have much agency if you care about drafting a coherent deck. But I'll stop whining about triombs for now. Uh Surveillance also in the spread, another awesome inclusion there. I don't want to like go over this list with a fine-tooth comb and say everything that I would like to see done differently. I do think it was pretty negative to have memory lapse just in the base module here, to the extent that I like having a one-for-one interaction. Memory lapse is actually kind of a historic example of a card that plays awful. It's like it's really big feel bad for one player or the other casting that. So they waste their draw step. The draw step being the most exciting part of the turn cycle, you completely diminish that excitement for your opponent, or it's really good and you have nothing for it anyway, and you have memory lapse instead of a real counter spell. So that that part is fine. Like you don't have a permanent answer to everything. I'm less sympathetic to the player casting the memory lapse, but memory lapse being so good when it's good, that's a pretty negative aspect of the card for me. But um, that that's not a huge deal. I think that some people do have an appetite for that. Actually, the blue card that stood out to me more, it's one of these digital-only cards. It's called Hydroponics Architect. One blue mana, one two flying insect. When it attacks, a random land card in your library perpetually becomes a basic island in addition to its other types and gains. When this land enters, draws a draw a card. Kind of a weird text box. It does have to attack to do anything, but it making the land a basic island also makes it less random than it might seem at a glance, because anything that could tutor for a basic island can go find your land that draws a card. So any fetch land, and that also goes for fetch lands that can only find basic lands because for whatever reason it turns land into a basic island. So you can actually tutor up that land and draw extra cards, which is kind of nonsense. It's a lot of rate, like the ceiling on a one-drop there is unreasonably high. That card sometimes it would show up in games, it would be kind of weak, but because the ceiling was so high, I found it to be very unfun. Just kind of too much output on a one-mana thing, which has been a consistent problem in standard. Like that's where a lot of the band attention has been happening in magic, kind of an issue with current design that they have acknowledged and are moving away from. So Hydroponics Architect, like being one of those digital-only cards, kind of speaking to the worst sensibilities of current design. That was a negative aspect of the cube. Something that was also a little bit strange. There is a digital-only land that I really like. I was cubing the arena cubes when this card first showed up, and I think it plays really well. It's called Captivating Crossroads land during your first three turns of the game. It enters the battlefield tapped if you were the starting player. So it's stronger if you're on the draw. You get an untapped land if you're on the draw, but it's not going to allow you to compound an advantage on the play. It's going to be tapped the first three turns. So I like this design, trying to give something to the player on the draw. When it enters, you choose a color and it taps to add one mana of that color. So it's five mana mana fixing, but kind of in the multiversal passage space where you have to choose one. It's not going to make you just able to cast any spell all the time. It's just modest mana fixing that advantages the player on the draw. Cool use of the digital only design space. I really like this one a lot. What's a little bit weird about it is that there's like three more digital only lands in that five color space, and I can't tell any of them apart at a glance because they're digital only. I really learn cards a lot more personally when I hold the physical components, and so there's a few more that all just kind of play worse, but here's an example of one Echoing Cavern. It's a cave. When it enters, you choose a creature type, attach for colorless, or you can add one man of any color, spend it only to cast spells of the chosen type, and exhaust for seek a card of the chosen type, which is like tutoring for a sp for a spell, is what seeking is. So that one, there are some typal themes in some of the modules. I get why that would play, but every time I was looking at a pack, anytime I saw one of these lands, I always thought that they were captivating crossroads, and then then I would read them and be like, oh, it's one of the other ones. And the other two, Desert Sonote and Forsaken Crossroads, I think that they actually play pretty well. It was really just the one, the typo one, that didn't speak to me, but it was weird to have kind of four things in very similar space in the digital-only space, which does speak again to that negativity around the digital only cards. There's less familiarity and less enjoyment of these cards for me and many others. Which is just to say that I think that with the digital only stuff, it's it's forgivable to do some of it, but a light touch goes a long way. I think if you were going to do this, you should only play the hits. Play the most beloved, play the most fun ones, and don't go super deep on this. Having a bunch of different five-color lands that people aren't familiar with. If you have one that it plays well and you can see it and at a glance and know that's the digital only land, that's pretty positive. I did like the crossroads cards when they are first introduced, but there's kind of too much of that happening here for my taste. But now to look more closely at the Zendikar module, the big thing happening here is the Zendikar module had two more sets of original fetchlands. So there's a set of fetch lands and the base module, and then in Zendicard you had two more. So there's three sculpting tarns, three arid mesas, etc. And so you have a lot of fetch land, and it also has the Modern Horizons 3 landscapes. And what this ends up doing, I thought it was really interesting that even with 30 fetch lands, you would still put landscapes in your deck. There's only one cycle of the landscapes here. But the landscapes are just reasonable cards. There is a lot going on with landfall in the cube, and kind of based off of how much I just wanted to play as many colors as I reasonably could in this environment. After this experience, looking back, I feel like it would have been awesome to break singleton for the landscapes and to only have 1x fetch lands of the regular fetch lands in the base module here. 3x Scalding Tarn, it just you kind of get to this point where mana is secondary. You still value fetchlands highly because they're broken, but the landscapes are just better synergy pieces. If what you're trying to do is just enable landfall, then landscapes do it in a much more modest but powerful way, whereas fetch lands just kind of scream, play as many colors as you can and only play the most powerful spells. The mana did just end up being too good in this environment. And my two max wind stacks, one was a five-color deck, but I will say you weren't incentivized to always play five color. My other max wind deck was a Naya deck, and I had Golos on my sideboard. I didn't quite get enough lands to get to five color. It's not like trivial to play five color, but it was not realistic to play less than three colors in this cube. It was just too easy to get up to three colors, and there's kind of too much stuff that you would never want to put into your deck, and enough stuff that was a power outlier or so strong you wanted to go out of your way to play it. So it was hard not to just play three, four, five color good stuff here. And that was what I had the most success with. And that was generally what I thought was scariest on the other side of the table. There were some aggressive options. I did lose to an aggressive deck once. I did try to force a heavily red aggressive deck to just kind of see how that would play. Maybe test if the three, four, five color decks have too much with lands entering the battlefield tapped or paying life for shock lands that you could punish. In my experience, what I found was the aggressive decks had a very small number of high value over replacement cards that you really needed to prioritize. You really needed the strongest cards for the aggressive decks, and most of your other cards were just bad. Like you were playing them because they had power and toughness or they dealt damage. Whereas in the three, four, five colored decks, you just have access to a wider card pool, and you just end up playing only spells that you were happy casting. Whereas in the aggressive decks, you really need the best one-drop, the best two drop. And there were really strong options, it's just that you had to get them. And so something that does stand out here, too, is that you are designing with that limited arena card pool in mind. There is some stuff here that is just Zendikar. Landfall makes sense. You have Akuhum Hellhound, the one red mana zero one that gets plus two, plus two on landfall. You could push that kind of card with these landfall synergies, but then it's also kind of strange. There's no step links on Magic Arena. That card's just not there. That's the card, the white version that Akub Hellhound was originally color shifted from. So that card just doesn't even exist on Arena. And then it's weird that Ocelot Pride is here. We just have a Modern Horizons 3 card. And so your aggressive deck is going to really want that Ocelot Pride. Ocelot Pride just also has an outrageous amount of tax. It doesn't even only play in aggressive decks. Anywhere where you're gaining life making tokens, you could take you could take advantage of some of what Ocelot Pride does. And so it's just a kind of huge disparity between these cards. I can definitely see a similar version of this cube that has Aku Mellhound, that has step links, maybe even breaking singleton for these, going with landscapes over fetch lands, and you're trying to really just kind of juice up these more modest cards and really pushing landfall there. And the extra fetch lands, the idea is that they are pushing landfall, but there's enough of the stuff that is just way stronger that's in the five-color space. For example, Lotus Cobras in this cube. That card is just kind of a historic power outlier and generating mana with a bunch of fetch lands. This is a card that you just need to kill on turn two. And the output, the range of things you can do with Lotus Cobra mana is extraordinary. The card is tremendously powerful. There's a lot of stuff in this cube that adds even additional landfall, stuff that like seeks lands, uh, you know, the solemn symbol anchor is not the strongest thing, but more stuff in that space is in this cube. Get some extra mana when you resolve your golos. It's like a lot of strong cards that also trigger Lotus Cobra as well. And having more fetch lands, yeah, it makes Akum Hellkite stronger, but Lotus Cobra is a categorically much more powerful card than Akuhum Hellhound, and they also help Lotus Cobra. So you're not getting the Hellhound closer to Lotus Cobra, you're just more often allowing Lotus Cobra to realize it's sealing, while Akuhum Hellhound may just stays as a modest card. Same deal goes for Saz's Chocobo. 1 mana 0-1 in green, that when the land you landfall gets a plus one plus one counter. That card is just not in the same territory as Lotus Cobra. There is a tipping point where you can be aggressive. Tifa Lockhart is here, that's a two mana one-two with trample where its power doubles when you landfall. That card has output that scales in a way where you can play it even in a non-purely aggressive deck, because it scales so effectively, it can be like a big combo finish. That's more worth pursuing than these purely aggressive cards. So there's something going on there. I would really like a version of this cube that pushed Akum Hellhound to be strong. And there's kind of a look at something that's really close to what I want to see that just wasn't fully executed. This kind of was just on the sidelines, it was not allowed part of the actual play experience. But there's three risen reefs in the queue, which I think is actually awesome. One green blue, one one elemental. When risen reef or another elemental enters a battlefield under your control, look at the top card of your library. If it's a land, you may put it on the battlefield tapped. If you don't put it on the battlefield, put it into your hand. So landfall enabler, elemental synergies there, you draw some extra cards. The rate here, it's easy to outclass this card. It's easy to destroy a risen reef, it's just a 1-1, but it's a cool value engine and a card that is hard to make work in cube when you're maintaining singleton, because there's only so many elementals, only in so many colors. But putting three risen reefs in this cube was pretty cool, and it would be a lot more cool if the cube also didn't just have Uro Titan of Nature's Wrath. Like, would you rather if I could give you one Uro or three risen reefs in your deck, you should take the one Uro. Like you would give up all three Risen Reefs just to have Uro in your deck. So there's a look at something that I think is really cool and worth exploring and making the cube about, but then the power band is just a little bit too wide. The strongest cards just kind of crowd out the cool stuff. And I think there's a really cool space to explore here. There's some bones to this cube that I think could really be turned up and would be more fun for my sensibilities. And I also know that there are people that just have the appetite for playing the powerful cards. That makes sense to me. So you're kind of serving multiple masters, but the weak stuff just can't hang with the strong stuff. And the part of me that misses charging Monstersore would really like to just turn up and focus on the weak stuff. That's the direction I would love to see this cube go. I see it as unrealistic, and yeah, that's why I want to talk about it, because that's what I would like the cube world to explore. That's what I would like to see in these digital cubes is arena going back to those modest roots and giving us something cool and fun to explore so we don't have to play Urrow all the time. And to be clear, Risen Reef gives you enough. It is enough rate that you would put the card in your deck, but it's never going to be a card where it shows up and you have an overwhelming advantage, and there are things in the spread here that do give you an overwhelming advantage, which is the whole thing I'm trying to highlight. And so when it comes to the Zendikar module, I like landfall. I really have a soft spot for the landfall beatdown creatures, but they do not exist harmoniously with the mana and stuff here, with the soup stuff, with the 3x fetch lands. You just have too much in the power maxing space, and you do have to really curb the power level to let these weaker cards shine. They're part of the spread, and you know, there's people that enjoy fighting the swimming upstream, whatever, going for the underdog, but I did find myself leaving this experience with an appetite for an environment that put more of the shine on the Alcum Hellhounds, on the Brushfire Elementals, on the Sauce's Chocobos. Alright, so let's jump into the Inastrad module now. This is very graveyard-centric. I really enjoy that. This module also does a lot of the typal themes from Inerstrad, break singleton to support some of them in a way that's like pretty parasitic, honestly. There's three Thalia's Lieutenants, three Champion of the Perished, and so these are cards that just kind of loudly scream, play creatures that attack and block with the right types. And I understand the motivation there to try to make these decks powerful, but there's not a lot you can do with these cards. They are really just attacking and blocking. So the lanes were a little bit parasitic in that way. But there were some cool singleton breaks. There were three spider spawning in this module. I love spider spawning. My first draft, I opened up pack one, pick one. I opened a not very exciting pack. I took a Seder Wayfinder, kind of a decent self-mill card, figured I wanted to explore that space. Pack one, pick two, I got one of the spider spawning. So I was like, great, I love spider spawning. This should be fun. Pack one, pick three, I got past the scarab god, which is the strongest card by country mile that I had seen to that point in the draft. And then it was clear, oh, I'm trying to do something cool and synergistic, but the rates here, there's are just going to be limited bombs, and I'm supposed to be playing those cards. So I took the scarab god. I think I went four three in this draft, uh, ended up kind of sticking in a spider-spawning lane, but the scarab's scarab god was like a defining card of my deck. Drawing that meant that I win, not drawing that meant that the games were hard or that I lost. I also got scavenging ooze pretty late into pack three, and that card is just not passable in context. With other graveyard stuff going on, first of all, my deck couldn't beat a scavenging ooze, and so I assume it's true at least some players at the table. It's less of a thing against those typeful decks, but for anybody exploring the graveyard, scavenging ooze just shuts you down entirely. I had at least one win where I had scavenging ooze and just blanked three or four of my opponent's cards, and I won solely on the back of scavenging ooze, which is also some of the strength of the scarab god. It's not just a bomb that gives you a ton of value, it also gives you a little bit of graveyard hate too, exiling stuff from your opponent's graveyard. So just kind of nutty cards in context. Scavenging ooze is in the base module, which I think is kind of cool to have some cards in that core that play better and worse in other environments, which is gonna happen naturally, but scavenging ooze is just so loudly very strong in the Inastrada module, and didn't really amount to much in the other two. So that one was kind of a weird one for me. There was a pretty cool alchemy card in the Inastrade module. Ishkana Broodmother, three and a green for a 3-5 legendary spider with Reach, gives you other spiders plus one plus two, and for one and a black-green hybrid, you can exile two cards from your graveyard to draft a card from Ishkana Broodmother's Spellbook. Uh, one thing about the spellbook thing, I think that they're all 15 cards, and you get to like look at three and pick one anytime you draft a card from a spellbook. I think that this is a mechanic I would avoid entirely when it comes to doing cube drafts on arena. There's just so much information that you either know or you don't. I treated this as fully random. I refuse to learn what any of these spell books are. I know that you could get spider spawning when you activated Ishkana Broodmother. I also know that some of the other cards were like giant spider and not remotely playable, so it's kind of like hitting a random button, which is a lot of what the digital only mechanics are. It was kind of fun because it's a little bit cheaper than spider spawning, it synergizes with spider spawning, and it sometimes gives you spider spawning, but then it's random and sometimes you just get like an awful card. Like there's a three-mana instant because the creature plus two plus four is one of the cards in the spell book, and I actually won a game using that as a pump spell, which is kind of neat, but in general, I had no idea what this card was gonna do at any point, which was uh kind of a weird experience. I leaned into it, I had some fun with this card, but the mechanic, the spellbook stuff is generally fraught. On balance, what I found, especially as a spider-spawning enjoyer, is I really wanted to lean into self-mill and do some cool graveyard stuff when I looked at a pack. In practice, I would get maybe four wins playing the heavily graveyard decks. I really started to feel like I was sabotaging myself if I drafted the cards that I thought were cool. I think that there was a lot more power level in things like the three Thalia's lieutenant just curving out and just doing something with a lot of stats, casting bombs with uh not a ton of attention to the setup. Spider-Spawning could be strong, but somebody just casting the Scarab God when they get five mana, completely ignoring the rest of the game, was much stronger. So I felt at the end of the day that the Anastrad module was a lot more about rates than it was about synergies, which was not the most fun for me. The only max win decks that I got, I believe that they were both Naya decks. They both had Winoda joiner of forces, and I was just trying to curve out and attack. And there's a little bit of consideration with Winoda of human versus non-human, but not enough, especially with just one copy of Winoda for you not just to take the strongest creature, the most efficient removal spells, and just kind of putting together the most coherent mana curve. So I did not work hard at all or do anything particularly cool in any of my max win decks in Inastrod. And I would have liked Spider Spawning to be something that was a little bit more powerful, and having it so similar to what was happening with Zendikar, where it's like kind of just this generically powerful stuff that sours the experience for me a bit. And I do think you need some of that, especially when it comes to players who are less engaged, that just wants to be able to open a bomb rare. Like you I understand why you have to have some of that in the experience, but it felt like on balance, the experience was heavily curated in favor of just having bombs, having the most powerful individual cards, and I felt like I was being punished for trying to pursue cooler synergies. And then the final leg was Kamagawa. I've always been a fan of Kamagawa, so I was excited to try this one out. I did find that this was very much in the space of Kamagawa Neon Dynasty, which of course makes sense. That set is actually on Magic Arena. There's not that much from original Kamagawa there. I have a lot more experience with original Kamagawa. I didn't really draft Neon Dynasty, but I do like the themes of the set, which is a lot built about uh modernity versus tradition, is the aesthetic, which is there are artifacts matter, there are enchantments matter, and there's kind of a conflict between the two. And there's colors that more naturally play with artifacts or more naturally play with enchantments, so there's kind of a natural tension there with an aesthetic that's really loud and makes sense and is fun to engage with. In my first draft, I really enjoyed. I found myself actually wanting to pick synergy pieces very highly, and I felt like I was being rewarded or incentivized to do that in the draft. I drafted a green-white enchantment stack the first time I played the cube, and I found myself at one point picking a spirited companion, a two-mana, one-one enchantment creature that when it enters it draws a card over a card that was a better rate because I saw enough stuff that seemed to reward me for drafting enchantments. And I did get seven wins in that first draft. I felt pretty good about the deck that I had drafted and the seat that I was drafting it. And so that first draft had me feeling pretty good about this leg, this the Kamagawa module for the planar cube. I will say it was a 7-2 deck, and my two losses were to blue decks, blue-green X decks, kind of controlling ramping card advantage decks. And a match that I ended up winning was against another blue-green X deck. That one was very close, and what I had noticed is that these decks had just significant individually strong power outliers. The one blue-green deck I did beat partly was because they cast Gingataxius Progress Tyrant. It was one of their big payoffs. This is a 7 mana 5-5 legendary Frexy and Praetor. When you cast artifacts, instance and sorceries, it copies your first one. And when your opponent casts one, it counters the first one. So just an obnoxious card to play against, strong output, and also limits your ability to play. But because I was in enchantments, I was able to journey to nowhere it and answer it of to no consequence, and my opponent didn't have the time to pay it off. But if my deck was playing at all, the card types that it counters, I would have been in big trouble. And so that's not necessarily the most fun thing. And the writing was kind of on the wall. I did see something kind of looming here where like the blue controlling decks seem to be just play powerful cards and seem to possibly be the strongest thing to do in the environment. In fact, one of the decks that I lost to actually set up an infinite turn loop. Using Emeritus of Abundance, they got up to eight lands and were able to rebuy Time Warp every turn. Emeritus of Abundance being a card from the core module, reasonably strong card, a strong rate, didn't really show up and matter too much, at least in the games that I played in the other modules, but it's always pretty reasonable to play with this card. But then Time Warp showing up in Kamagawa because it's on a bonus sheet, I guess, and then opening up an infinite turns combo was something much stronger than my deck of enchantments was able to compete with. A card that I really don't know why is in the Kamagawa module that was just really strong in practice is Quandrix the Proof, 4 Green Blue, 6-6 Legendary, Elder Dragon, Flying Trample, Cascade, Instant and Sorcery Spells you cast from your hand have Cascade. This is a Strixaven dragon. I don't know what it or Cascade or Instance and Sorceries Matter. I don't know what any of these things have to do with Kamagawa, but this card was completely bonkers when it showed up. It also highlighted both Dig Through Time and Treasure Cruise are in the core module. And it makes sense that it probably was an aspect of Delve being reasonable to do when you're self-milling an Inestrad. It didn't I didn't really see that shake out as being that important or meaningful in that environment. When you care about the graveyard, often exiling your resources is a significant cost. So something to that, they might have been reasonable there. But those cards in conjunction, giving them cascade with Quandrix, maybe casting both of them on the same turn, like Quandrix and then casting one of those and cascading again, is just bonkers. Like this was nonsense strong and does not really care about synergies. Like is having an 8 mana spell and giving a cascade a synergy? I guess technically, but when you do that with a 6 mana 6-6 flying trample that cascades, you're not really paying any costs, it's just you're putting two strong cards in your deck that play better together. I also found that the blue ninjas deck, this was more synergy driven, you did have to get specifically ninjas, cards of a creature type, but the blue ninja decks, typically blue-black, seem to really take advantage very quickly in a way that could be insurmountable. And I like some of the ninja stuff, like my opponent putting a ninja of the deep hours into the battlefield is pretty charming. That's a neat card. You could try to set up some synergies with that. The presence of Euriko, the Tiger's Shadow, a card that is only on arena because of a Final Fantasy reskin as Yufi Kisaragi, so that's the copy that's in the cube, which is a commander pre-con card that gives all your ninjas the ability that when they damage your opponent, you do a reverse dark confidant. So your opponent loses life and you draw a card. That card showing up quickly, making it so all your ninjas have this really strong trigger. That one felt like a power outlier in a way that technically fell into a synergistic deck. You did have to enable ninjutsu, but it was so much stronger than the other stuff in the ninja deck, kind of similar to what's talking about of like the aggressive decks in the Zenderkar module, where you had some specific cards that just run away with the game very quickly, and that did not lead to very engaging games. So even the the blue aggressive decks or the blue controlling decks, it did feel like blue was kind of by far the strongest color. Also, Sublime Epiphany showing up here, which I guess has comic hour art, but it's just like another really strong, like historically, one of the strongest cards in the arena cubes does lead to deflating games that kind of pushes back in a big way on your opponent trying to engage with you at all. I believe I had another six win enchantment deck, like I lost playing for the seventh win. Enchantments were pretty well supported, and I'll also say that I struggled myself to get many wins with the blue decks, and I think a little bit of it was uh playing, like I watch TV while I play, I don't really care about trying too hard in these, and the power outlier, like synergy agnostic decks are less engaging for me to play with. So I don't think I played very well, and I certainly could have drafted my seats better when I tried these decks, but when it came to the decks I played against, the blue decks, whether they be ninjas or the big controlling decks, were by far the strongest decks I played against, and they did kind of take some attention away for some of the cooler cards in the cube. There was definitely some Artifacts Matter stuff. I saw those decks seemed fine, they seemed weaker than enchantment, which getting the balance right on there is going to be tough, but I think if you get rid of some of these just power level game-state agnostic, just strong cards, you can put more artifact synergies there and kind of turn up the balance a little bit more. And then just some cool cards, like there's an equipment matters theme that didn't seem to show up. I never saw anybody trying this. There's a really cool card a six mana red creature Gilgamesh Master at arms, which I have to imagine that Godo Banded Warlord just isn't on arena, so it kind of seems to be shouting out that. This is a Final Fantasy card, the samurai that cares about equipment, but equipment matter was just so far off of being playable with some of the other synergies just being stronger, and then just too many generically powerful cards, like a 6 mana 6-6 that cares about equipment, when I could play a Sublime Epiphany, when I could play giant cascade dragons, why would I ever do that? I do think that the Kamagawa module was the closest to where I would like the planar cube to be, because at least in that initial draft and how I felt about the enchantment stack, and I did play against and lose to a few other strong enchantments deck, it felt like that was a really strong seated synergy. And even if blue was just the strongest color what no matter what you were doing, and there were some power outliers in the ninja deck, the ninja deck was at least a specific archetype, and attacking in blue is not the norm. So getting blue more aggressive and having synergistic lanes to pursue there, even if the weaker ninja cards were never beating you, there were there were the bones of a lane to draft there that made sense to draft, that supported synergies. I think that executed better than the Innerstrahd module, which felt largely just power motivated to me, and the Zendikar module, which technically had synergies with landfall, but overwhelmingly generating more mana, casting more spells, drawing more cards. Was really what it was about. Landfall explicitly. If a card said landfall, it didn't mean it was strong, but if it said landfall and gave you mana or cards and it was strong, so another power motivated like there. So I do want to say this undertaking was massive. Kudos to Zach Barrish for taking this project on and whoever else helped here, because this is three different cubes, and it is more challenging too to have a functional core module there that also plays with all three environments. Some notes hit better or worse, but I do think that this was largely functional, and there were some pretty fun things happening here. In the article announcing the cube, apparently this is something they were planning on rolling out a planar cube starting with Strixhaven, and they were working on a cube that did really heavily lessen and learn stuff. It was really themed around Strixhaven and the mechanics that we see there. And I would really like to see that. I understand why lesson and learn are kind of difficult, and you're going to naturally play longer games. I get that you probably break Singleton a lot in that environment, and it makes sense to me how they saw to maybe too much homogeneity from game to game, match to match, deck to deck with the conceits of that. But it's intriguing space, and I would like to see us explore more planes here. I do think that this concept could lead to some pretty cool things, and specifically Strixave, and that sounds cool to me. I want to see what they cooked up. I would like to see if they can refine that later. For the planar cube as it existed, though, what I want to say, the the largest thing is of course, the entry fee is too high. Let people have fun. Stop trying to maximize the entry fee at every individual shot. If the cube is fun, you'll make money. People will jump back into the cues, and if it's a lower entry fee, people are more likely to try it in the first place. And if they try it and they like it, they'll play it more. You'll make your money. I imagine, I mean, this is the same entry fee as the powered cube, so I imagine that they are successful with this exact pricing model for powered cube, but really this should be targeted at a different audience, and this is something that it makes a lot of sense to me to charge less for, and then if people like it, they'll play more. And if they run out of gems or gold, but you're charging them a modest fee and they feel like they could afford to play a few, but they really like it and they want to play more, you'll you'll get some money. People will pay for that. It's fine, it'll work itself out. Stop trying to charge them everything up front. For the design, I think that the uh specific implementation of the digital only chords, there's just too many of them. I'm not saying remove them all. I have seen people say they'd like to see all of them removed. I think that's a very sympathetic position. I would be totally on board with moving them all, but there are a few that do stand out as fun. If you want to keep the best ones, by all means, show off what your client does, be proud of the things that you make, but show us the good stuff. Don't insist that we know all of digital only cards. Just give us a taste, show us what is possible and show us your best designs. In general, I found the cube was too power-motivated, which is not to say that I mind the ceiling being high for the synergy decks. I actually really like that. Individual card sale was a little bit too much that was too strong in game-stayed agnostic ways, which did diminish my enjoyment of the experience. This is coming from somebody again. I really have a lot of nostalgia for the days of Arena Cube being about charging Monstrosore. I know we can't go all the way back, but there's a lot of charm between here and there, and turning up the volume on Modern Horizons 3 power outliers, having a bunch of fetch lands, it takes away from the charm. You don't have to go that hard. You can have powerful cards while still highlighting more of the synergies, and there's a lot of stuff that was happening in this cube that did hit those notes or was very close. Um, again, I think that breaking singleton for the Modern Horizons 3, the common fetch lands, over the rare fetch lands, would have been really cool. And if they do run the planar cube again, if they do Zendakar again, I would love to see that adaptation. Just conceptually, having the core module here, having a lot of functional cards that get you going, some rough edges on the execution, but having a lot of mana fixing lands, having a lot of cards that just play, interaction, cards at a reasonable rates, like Baneslayer Angel is totally fine. It's not in the same category as the Scarab God, like having a card that you can happily draft and put into your deck, but also won't necessarily be as strong as the synergy pieces. I think that's awesome for the core module. I'm definitely interested to find out how successful this experiment seemed for the arena team. If we are going to see the planar cube again, if we do see it again, I certainly will be drafting it. I do want to see how the experience gets refined from launch to launch. I love watching the evolution of cubes. I don't know if my word has any weight regarding the design of this cube, but if it changed in the ways that I like, great. If not, I'll draft it and see if it's for me, because it is really refreshing to see a non-powered offering on the digital clients again. And that really is just kind of my biggest critique of this play environment is some of the aspects were too power-motivated in kind of a power is the only thing that matters kind of way. The big thing though, it has to be cheaper. You know, Zach and the Arena team, they're very capable designers. I'm curious and excited to see what they put out next. But those are my thoughts on kind of this first run, the three individual legs of the planar cube here. Hope we see more of this, but uh that's gonna be do it for this week on the podcast. Thank you everyone for listening. If you're enjoying what you're hearing, I'm on Patreon. You can subscribe at patreon.com forward slash 180MTG. Of course, liking, commenting, subscribing, sharing, leaving a review, all that stuff matters. It helps. I appreciate any and all of that. But that's gonna do it for today. Thanks again for listening, for whatever else you do to support the pod, and I will be back next week talking more cube. Later, gamers.