Limited Resources 853 - Q&A + Storytime + Nonsense

What is up everybody welcome to another episode of limited resources this episode number 853 my name is Marshall I'm one year limited resources and joining me on the line all the way from Denver Colorado it's Louis Scott Vargas how's the week been great actually it's been a very very good week yeah just crushing it all week huh well just business as usual I you know I appreciate the weeks where nothing nothing bad or odd happens it's not to say that those happen every week but it's just nice to know you know have a chill turn sometimes normal's good for sure but I can definitely appreciate that so for the show this week Luis I thought we would do a little bit of a laid-back episode it's kind of a laid-back day we're both kind of in a laid-back mood and we're gonna do some Q&A and some story time and just hang out I we kind of indulge ourselves with one of these every once in a while and this this week we're doing it we we like you know part of the this show is is hangouts and sometimes we lean in to the to the hanging out part of it and that's what we're gonna do this time so we've got a bunch of great great questions from our patreon supporters or we're gonna talk some stories and just kind of make it a chill hangout type episode so before we do we want to say thank you too that's right everybody who supports us on patreon I just mentioned it but that is how you can submit the questions for the Q&A episodes like this one or the patreon question of the week or when we have a guest on if you want to ask them a question I'll put up a post this one actually went up just I don't know like an hour ago or something because we decided a little bit late that we wanted to do this one today but it's really great I mean we've already got a ton of questions from our patreon supporters and it's really just a great way to connect directly with your audience and that's one of the reasons that we love patreon our patreon is patreon.com slash limited resources if you'd like to join we also want to say thank you to Ultimate Guard they make the best stuff in the business it is known you know it's that combination you know this is one of the things that I really like about watches you know that that is such a big hobby and part of my job and all that stuff now you know which is when you can marry really great design with really great materials right when you can put those two things together in a sensible way where everything kind of clicks that's what Ultimate Guard's really good at and if you hold on to their products you'll know right away oh this thing feels nice feels nice in your hands they have a good weight to them and they're really well thought out design wise you know it's it's kind of interesting if you go from like those old school kind of like just plastic and velcro deck boxes that we all use for so long to something like a nice product from Ultimate Guard and you're just like oh okay yeah this is a lot back I was like how do we use those like for so long I mean even pro players would just carry their deck around in one of those things I had one that I got it like I think it was the first pre-release I went to which was Shards of Alara and it had a Johnny Vengeant on it remember Johnny Vengeant Luis? Johnny Vengeant was cool. I played that I played that card in a lot of constructed decks back then yeah it was really good then yeah I guess it would get kind of just laughed at now right? Yeah it's pretty it's just way it's it's probably one and a half mana too much for for modern limited or a constructed rather yeah anyway and I had one of those forever and yeah it turns out there's better stuff out there and that is Ultimate Guard if you want to check out their full line of products you can head over to ultimateguard.com and if you want to pick something up you can get it from your favorite local game store or online retailer thank you Ultimate Guard we're not going to do Patreon question of the week because we're going to be answering Patreon questions but Luis I thought we could just kind of chitchat a little bit before we get into them for sure and talk about some of the I don't know the the old school stories and the stuff that's been going on I've been kind of taking a look at my cards I don't have that many you know I I'm not really a collector either I think I have a lot fewer cards than people would guess in terms of like volume I have I have some you know pretty expensive cards but I don't have like boxes upon boxes because I pretty aggressively call stuff partially because my organization system as I've described is look through every card I own to figure out you know where these cards are so given that the fewer cards I own the fewer I have to look through you see yeah I was I am curious though guys I was looking at the the few that I have as well what makes you keep a card versus not or like what what is your what is your jam as far as like owning magic cards goes I think it's if I think the card is going to be useful to me in the future or I have some any some kind of attachment to the card so what that means is like if you know I'm not going to toss or if a card is valuable so useful it kind of encapsulates that but it's like do I think I'm going to play this card so even if the card is relatively low value or no value like you know Spell Pierce is not really a card that's worth anything but I tend to not throw away or give away Spell Pierce's because I eventually will use them in a lot of different contexts or a card that's valuable if it's not if it's not valuable I don't have an emotional attachment to it and I don't think that I'm very likely to to sell it or play it then yeah I usually tend to to donate it or to usually just people I know who like either like I know people who run magic clubs or anything like that or just to like someone I know who plays magic and and I think would appreciate it but I am certainly not not not very sentimental about cards in general except for like literally the ones that I like what like what are some of those well I like like online stuff like old old well I definitely have those cards but it's more like I really like beta lands and beta cards I have a lot of old cards in that realm just because I find those cards really fun to look at and think about and play I mean you know old cards like there's just really nothing like them yeah they have a certain vibe but did you did you say beta specifically or is it do you mean alpha and beta both yeah I would say you just don't see the alpha stuff around quite as often yeah what's your thoughts on the like the monetary part like do you feel like really happy to have some money parked in some magic cards or do you feel like you're giving up something but it's worth it to you or um it's tricky because like I don't uh I don't view magic cards as like an investment I think that's like right that's not I don't think that's a great way to to view them and I don't think it's like that fun of a thing to do either like I I don't know I don't I don't look at the my hobbies well I monetize my hobbies plenty actually it's just because like but as as my job right as doing something like the podcast or you know game design or make magic videos I don't buy and sell cards because I can like I'm trying to invest make make an investment I do have a lot of old cards but it's not it's not stuff I've picked up with an eye to reselling it as much as I like these cards like I got into old school you know for a while like about a decade ago you know and and I remember just picking up a lot of old school staples I have a bunch of beta jmd tones because I just love that card so it's there's no real look I'm not unaware that these cards are worth money or that that's that's relevant you know like but I'm not just using them as a way to like make some money yeah I think that's not really my goal yeah it makes me feel better about spending a bunch of money on a card knowing I can get some portion of the value back of course or they could go up right or they could go because they have I mean in your career they've gone up you know infinite right some of them some of them the prices are actually lower than they they were a couple years ago that you know zero interest rate phenomenon as everyone was just going nuts but but I mean I look at the way people interact like partially this is I'm not part of the Pokemon like TCG community really but whenever I see tweets about Pokemon people are all just talking about how much the cards are worth and I don't think they actually play or even did yeah I mean I don't play the Pokemon card game and I think it's I think like playing magic or Yu-Gi-Oh is more fun you know of the bigger games of flesh and blood Star Wars limited I would I would honestly play all those games over Pokemon it's not that I think it's a bad game or if you don't like it you know you know that's a that's like a mistake or whatever but I don't I generally don't see uh I don't I don't see the appeal over a game with that's like a little bit deeper strategy I think you know yeah and maybe maybe I don't want to get too far ahead of my skis here I'm sure there's a lot going on in Pokemon that and I haven't really looked at it for a while but I don't know about what I don't I don't know what your experience is but most of my experience so with people talking about Pokemon is just talking about market value and 100 scalpers and graded cards and 100 it's a culture thing it's not it's interesting because you know magic really does have both it has people who purely collect and it has players and then there's a huge overlap in between like people like you and I who have a few cards or maybe have a collection but you know we're not really all in on collecting but we have some but for me like when I look at the old cards that I've tended to hang on to it's mostly like nostalgia and I just like them like they just make me they give me a feeling right but also you know the reason that I liked them originally was because a lot of them were good cards you know like they were interesting cards in the game where I feel like the Pokemon thing has really like transcended any one version of the game whether it's the card game or the you know Game Boy or whatever however people enjoyed that game I think the Pokemon phenomenon is sort of expressed in the cards but I don't I from what I've seen there's many many many people who are hardcore Pokemon collectors and Pokemon fans but they don't play the card game and they haven't and that's not really what they what they like yeah I think the reason I think I brought up the the magic stuff Louise is like with the values is because I always I you know I have a few cards and they're pretty valuable like I have like I have a beta time vault for example and that was my favorite card back in the day and I always wanted one I could never afford it and then one time I was at a GP and you know Corbin the hustler he oh I do yeah Corbin hustler you know he he deals cards and you know he had had and has um uh worked the the singles for shops where he's from in Oklahoma and like you know all that kind of stuff and um he had gotten his hands on a on a time vault and he was like yeah I'm gonna sell it and so he was gonna go at a GP and shop around to the things and I was like well what are you trying to get for it you know and he's like well if somebody offers me this much I'll probably just sell it to them and I'm like well I'll offer you that much because it was like basically a dealer price you know it was like yeah he was looking to sell that about like like what he would get from a dealer exactly dealer to dealer and so for me I'm like well that's like I don't know 15 or 20 percent lower than they normally go for like if I were just to buy one so I said could I buy it from you like as a not dealer and he's like sure and I'm like here you go so anyway that was like freaking 10 years ago or something and I still have the thing but you know I don't do anything with it and it's really just sitting there and I have thought numerous times you know I don't I view it the same way that you do I don't really view it as an investment and I'm like well if that's the case and it has you know a decent chunk you know it's worth a couple thousand bucks you know maybe I should sell it you know if I'm not doing anything with it and but then every single time I go to grab it I'm like oh I love this thing you know it's like it's it still sparks joy you know but I just you know trying to be an adult and be good with finances also I'm trying to say well you know does that really make sense for me to own that card and you know in worst case if I just really felt like I still needed it in my life I could go get another one and you know what I mean like take that money back out or whatever but yeah I think it's interesting and I don't think to be clear it's bad to be aware of the value of your cards I think that I mean I we both are and when I've made card purchases it really is backstopped by the fact that I know that they're still worth money but I do find it a little off-putting that when the only interaction about a game is like what the value of the pieces are because then it's like then you're kind of playing sports cards right where like you just a LeBron rookie is worth a bunch of money and that's kind of what you care about with it which I'm not saying that sports cards enthusiasts also don't care about cards for other reasons too they clearly do but they're not game pieces and I just kind of get the vibe that Pokemon cards are less game pieces the way I've seen them talked about and maybe it's because like a mass influx of like crypto dudes went into that or you know you talk about you know Jake Paul or whatever but uh who knows you know collecting collecting stuff is fun no matter what so I really don't fault anyone for enjoying collection and I guess I I think I know the answer to this but I've never asked you are you uh get them graded like you don't do that well um you know where they get them in that slab and yeah slabbing them I I have some graded cards and I when I did the beta draft in in Las Vegas you remember this oh yeah funny story about that I should just talk about this draft actually because this draft is just hilarious I don't think people that weren't around would even believe that this is real yeah it's incredible so this was Vegas in like 2016 and or 2017 I think actually I'm not sure uh there's like Vegas tournaments all the time as an aside to our side to our show which is an entire aside in itself there was like a 15-year gap where they didn't hold a single tournament in Las Vegas kind of out of the fear of like oh magic's gambling now there's just three tournaments a year and it's great it's a good city to literally sell out the entire convention center like three days in a row now I remember sasa john sasa that you know the one of the founder of channel fireball my former boss and business partner great dude I love john he he was just for years he was just like why aren't that he was so mad about it he was just like he was not like mad like angry at them but more like just like what the hell like this doesn't make any sense this is his indication for sasa if he were to show up at the last magic con he'd be like really like this is ridiculous so um we go to Vegas and I'm slated to do coverage you know and I know because you're you're on the team and um this was the Vegas that the giant grand prix Vegas that I think money won with affinity right yeah or something like that um now coverage commentator money to booty yes exactly um and the but there but wizards in conjunction with uh I guess maybe channel fireball was running the event yeah the coverage I think we probably were yeah yeah so in conjunction with us but we were basically providing all of this they were running a beta draft and the way the beta draft worked it was incredible they but basically what happened is I guess they got a bunch of beta product or found a bunch of beta product yeah so cool um and they're lucky that the people who found it weren't the type of people to just pocket it because a lot of people in a big company they find a store room that has beta packs and they're like I'm out yeah this is three hundred thousand dollars you know are you kidding me but um I would imagine wizards also select somewhat for people who wouldn't do that just because the people who want to work with wizards they love magic they you know they're just not they're less likely to be that type obviously anyone could so I'm like whoa the beta draft and the way you qualified for it was if you you played these sealed events and this was back uh I guess we could probably exactly find the time because it was uh Dominaria sealed and uh yeah I you know I I opened a mediocre sealed but went 5-0 and made top eight and this was on like Wednesday night or something and then we're running these events at the there was there were eight sealed events and the winners of each event got to play um and I draft a sick black white deck and if you remember Dominaria had it had the Lira Dawn bringer the three white white 5 5 flying first strike you know life gain or vision or lifelink whatever all your angels got plus and plus one the the veins layer and I played against this person and in game one I blowed them out completely with sapperling infestation or whatever the remember black instant give a creature minus one minus one make a sapperling yeah I just demolished them in a game that like I was probably winning anyway and I debated whether to play it or not but I'm like you know I think this will just lock up the game so I'll play it really good I did foreshadow I lose game two game three I'm just horribly mana screwed and they have this like nice sapperling draw and I'm just like god I'm gonna lose my dexter nuts but I'm not going to get to the beta draft this is this is so bad I'm so tilted uh I they they ended up playing sissay that's the green white for a legend that's xx x is the number of creatures you have and I like first of all they don't attack their 2 2 on turn 2 on turn 3 into my one black mana because they're worried about the the sapperling infestation card I don't think that's the name of the card or maybe that is actually um they had the 2 2 that gives all their phthalids plus one plus one all their saplings plus one very valuable card so they don't attack into it so so they they they probably give up four damage by not attacking into it something like that and then later they get me really low I finally start drawing lands and at one point I tap out for leader except I have one swamp up because I got stuck on planes I had four swamps in play then I drew a plane then I drew another planes they have a 6 6 sissay and like 5 1 1 tokens and if they just attack with everything I'm forced to trump their 6 6 take no damage but I I'm tossing Liro I'm just dead they debate and they decide not to attack because they don't want to get blown out by sapperling infestation which would have made their sissay a 5 5 Liro would have eaten it gained 5 the game would have been over yeah but it's like I clearly don't have this card I've been managed screwed for 10 turns and there was a lot of opportunity that could have had to just cast this to maybe save some damage or whatever but they don't attack and then I untap and I slam urza's ruinous blast because I have a legend in play I blow up all their stuff and they have like a 1 1 sissay left or something like that and then my lira easily wins so I qualify for the beta draft I go and I remember telling you and Hagan I'm like oh yeah so you know I'm supposed to do coverage on Saturday I'm actually going to play the beta draft uh yeah so that's what that's what I'm going to do yeah it was like the negotiation was I'm doing this what happens now yeah it was and we ended up getting like like Martel to help cover Ritzel like yeah that's right it was cool wait those guys stepped up but uh it wasn't like my finest moment in terms of uh being a good co-worker but like it was a beta draft I would literally have done the draft if if if rich Hagan told me to my face I would never work coverage dude the hand of God could not have kept you off of that table no that was the that what that has to be one of the absolute highlights of your whole entire career it really was it really was so we do this beta draft and it's funny because like it obviously uh it's not a format most people have ever played and I haven't literally drafted like you know three sets of beta before but I've done a lot of old drafts in fact for all the things I'm good at I think if you were to choose someone who had to go back and play weird old format Rochester like I gotta be in your top couple people just you know like we're sure you we're talking people like me like Bob Marr like Hughie like the people yeah like the people who have been played who played been not only dinosaurs who have played a million years but also people who have just done like millions of drafts in their life and then also played a lot of these weird old formats we're like and I'll give you an example so it's Rochester Draft which is face-up right you Rochester is a horrendous format it's bad but it's so good for beta draft I think there's some things it does nicely but there's a lot that it does not do well and what it what it does is you have eight people the first person opens their pack puts all all 15 cards face-up selects a card it goes around the circle until the last person who's right next to that person then did they take two cards and they snake back right and you know you're playing round one the person who is directly across from you so like the you know kitty corner three there you go three seats over and then and it's there right so we start the Rochester Draft and to be clear Rochester is also the best format you could have picked for for the beta draft that what they did do correctly because it's like you get to see face up at people opening moxes and stuff like that other people not me but like you know and I I I think Ben S want because of the eight people who qualified for this draft by the way one was me one was Martin Yuzo one was Ben Stark so you know we and that's three players very much known for their limited prowess I mean that was impressive yeah we came out in force for that one and we so we we draft and I'm across from Ian Suzuki scalding hot soup he's uh you know he's used to be pretty active on like twitch and twitter and all that good dude I've talked to them a lot and he his deck was shaping up to be like the nuts he opened like an earthquake he had a fireball he had two crawl worms six mana six four he had some elves such a good deck here's where I got to use my like Rochester experience a little bit he he didn't really notice this because I was kind of drafting red green as well I picked up a circle protection red and a circle protection green and what those cards do they're an enchantment for one in a white and you pay one and prevent all damage a source of that color would deal to you this turn does this sound like a fun card no it sounds like one of the dumbest cards you could imagine and it clearly is but in the context of beta draft you can do some pretty good things and what I ended up doing was basically splashing white for those two circles and just two of the games I got a cop red and a cop green out he didn't pick up any enchantment removal and no card is that could ever deal me damage and I did find a way to win from there I mean it's just and those are the type of games you get because you just don't get that many threats creatures are even difficult to come by and if you have an unassailable answer to literally any threat game over like then you're just talking about who gets decked yeah and as it turned out I was also splashing blue for a projectile source or a tuna blue for a 1-1 tap deal one to any target which killed a lot of different creatures and of course could kill your opponent yes and it eventually did kill kill Ian as well and so then one sec I gotta go and deal with these guys give me one second okay no worries yeah I'll talk about the I looked up some of the details on the actual event this was in GP Las Vegas 2018 is when this actually went down and the yeah it had Luis Ben Martin Ian who he mentioned and then there were four other players so a total of eight but the cool part about the whole thing was we did it Rochester so that we could put the cards face up and get that big reaction like that's the main thing is that you know we want to open up beta packs right I mean Wizards comes out and says we have these packs what should we do with them and they end up putting together this event I mean it was ludicrous right and trust me this wasn't so long ago that it didn't feel exactly how it would today like if somebody came up and said we're going to do a draft of literal beta like every person's going to open up three beta packs it hit exactly the same they're just very rare very expensive I've never heard of anything like this like actually happening in real life and when they actually announced it it was everybody's like this cannot be real and then every single magic player Luis I was just updating them on it was 2018 at the at GP Las Vegas you know that that was the event itself and I was just kind of reiterating that yes that was a while back now but when they announced that it was a beta draft it hit just as hard as it would today it just was like what like there's just so few of those packs and cards around at all and and and I remember just being completely shocked that they were even going to do it like that it could even be done and then they did yeah and it it was awesome um I I ended up playing Martin in round two and he asked if I wanted to split and oh the prize by the way the prize wasn't just the cards he opened which was incredible Ben has opened a mox emerald and like an underground sea I opened like a fast bond a Nevenerals disc and people were rare drafting heavily which also worked out because the first place prize was a starter of alpha an alpha starter deck I think that's kind of the thing that gets lost to the history books not a lot of those running around you know a sealed starter alpha alpha starter is you know and I don't know how much our audience is into collecting you know we're all kind of hardcore spikes and we're playing a lot online these days and stuff but I mean you know just real quick refresher you know they they came out with alpha you know as a way to test the cards out in the market and to test the print runs and to make sure that everything looked and felt right and that there weren't any typos or changes they wanted needed to make and that meant that they did a very very limited run then they made some modifications to the cards to the shape of them to some of the printing they fixed some stuff and then beta came out which also has almost another tiny print run by any comparison and then they came out with unlimited which was the one where they said okay we're going to print until we meet demand basically but those first two and particularly alpha is an extremely limited print run so you know I mean dude I don't know what one of those starters is worth but like is it a hundred thousand dollars is it fifty is it I mean I don't know but it's a ton of money I think at it I think at its peak it was about a hundred thousand maybe a little bit more that was probably around 2020 2021 was like when everything was just going nuts I don't know what it is now at that time it was like in the 30 range right like in 2018 no and I'll tell you why I know that it's because I beat Martin badly he wanted to split I was like no way your deck sucks like Martin's a good friend of mine you know he he now even works for ultimate garden our sponsor yeah I love Martin we've been on team channel far well we made the whole thing together you know we've spent so much time together but it's like I don't need to give you money and when we play and you want to offer a split and my deck is like just going to smash yours like I'm just going to do that like that's right and if you and if Martin beat you would have said great great job you know like you're willing to sit down and let the chips fall as it were but but no you're not you're not chopping anything so you beat him badly and then I make the finals against Tim Rivera and Tim Rivera is I played him in my first grand prix so we go back away it's not like we're good buddies like I liked him like we just you know we're not we don't really talk much or whatever he's from like Reno I think or Vegas and we'd see him at PTQs and stuff growing up but we played in the first man the first grand prix I ever played grand prix Anaheim but his deck was great he had a really good deck he had a black deck like Sengir vampire and he had dark ritual and he had some good stuff and we go and we're allowed to split however we want basically because it's the finals it's not affecting anyone else and it basically we got a quote that said someone would buy the the alpha starter for 16k oh okay and like cash on hand in the room like I think it was maybe even Dave Williams or at least he was definitely willing to pay that much but other people were too maybe yeah and and there was also just like $2,500 for a second for just no reason he's like you know real free money tournament um and me and Tim basically we're gonna range he he's wanted cash right away I was like tell you what if we value the alpha starter at 16k you know and we have uh 2,500 for a second that's 18 and a half like just that would be you know 9.25 or 9,250 each and I think maybe even I could he could just took 10,000 I took like you know 8,000 or something like that or whatever it was um and we played because it was on camera and he beat the hell out of me but I kept the alpha starter and I still have it so you did a deal before you played where you got to get the starter and he got to get the the funds that would have if basically you just did a prize split with you getting the starter instead of the money yeah and we basically split the total value of the finals except I got to keep the starter and he got he got money right away especially yeah do and uh yeah I was pretty happy with that I'll say did you sell it no no it's it's it's chilling um no I meant like in the room you know you you had the offer was a useful tool for you to price that was that was just so we could set our price basically um and I don't think that was like crazy out of bounds it was hard to know what it was I mean that he you know we were both we were both happy with this deal and oh totally do I mean it's also one of those things where like the thing is worth what somebody will pay you for it and everybody has their own idea about what things are worth uh until they put it up for sale and say okay who's going to write me a check who's going to present me with the funds that is when you find out what something's actually really worth not what you read online that's true for this stuff I'm in with watches and all that stuff too people think their stuff's worth way way more than it than it is and it gets really interesting when you get to the high end of a particular space like an alpha starter you know is a high end product in the magic world that's one of the most valuable you know kind of individual products that you can get your hands on and uh that is where things get very very quickly I mean I wouldn't be surprised if like the range of over the fast you know five to ten years or whatever where these things were being sold that the prices some were sold within months you know three times as much as the others like it's just yeah the other thing is there was a period of time here where people were getting really into cracking these like doing like openings and and I'll tell you what every time I saw someone open alpha starter I'm like yep my alpha starter just got you is worth now two percent more or whatever like the more of those that get opened the the the more valuable mine becomes because it's not being open and certainly I don't plan on doing so I thought we were gonna crack a pack that bad boy on this on the show today we're not yeah a little crack a pack yeah see what we get yeah yeah no that was a absolutely insane event um I think me and Huey maybe commentated that thing I don't believe it he was in the booth quite a bit at the time with with CFB and stuff uh and probably also would have been willing to come in yeah that's amazing um what was the best card you got out of the draft well the funny thing is it's hard to describe for people who weren't involved in this in the scene that the old graded cards people were really going crazy for so like some of the cards I got really late in the draft were very surprising like I sold a conservator and a sacrifice these are uncommons that you could probably not even name what they do really bad conservators like four-man artifacts three tap prevent two damage to you or something I can see the artwork it has like a star it looks like the big like calendar yeah that's this is the one that looks like the big like mine calendar kind of yeah exactly yeah and uh you know some so I actually ended up getting all these graded and sold and sold them to a lot of the lot of the card collectors because they were also they also looked really good they were they were they were a high graded pack fresh right like so I didn't make out like a bandit into the the packs I opened I definitely did it with the draft as a whole I'm not gonna arc yeah but you also made it to the finals um you know because I remember I think Ben got like an underground sea and maybe a mox emerald and a mox emerald yeah those were the those are the two two cards he got it's a pretty good opens for for Ben yeah some some say Ben doesn't deserve it I would be that still echoes through the halls of eternity all these years later all right do you want to answer some questions from our people all right first question up comes from Sasha who says question from Marshall is there any chance you consider making a run to qualify for the limited championship next year I know you elected to pursue coverage over chasing the PT but the limited championship seems like the high level limited magic event for you I'm sure I speak for the whole LR audience when I say it'd be awesome to see you qualify and compete and of course we hope Louise is there as well Louise can you use your hall of fame on that event I can and honestly that is kind of what I'm expecting not expecting because I don't want to use the word that's too strong that's sort of hoping to come back for um I I'm gonna do what I can to to make that work to see if you can make it work yeah it's still I know it's still it's still in the earlier you know the kids aren't exactly off to college just yet so I know you're kind of cutting it close but that would be a great one you know that's really interesting Sasha that you bring that up because it's it's very difficult for me because everything that you just said about how special it would be to play in an event like that as from a commentator perspective I don't want to miss out on commentating that event I want to be the one to preside over the finals or a bunch of the rounds of that's my dream event I mean period right like it you know the shortcut is it's a limited pro tour it's not right it has a few other little whatever's and but it is effectively that the highest level purely limited event I've I will have ever been involved with you know that that is on this scale right I mean I've got to cover some smaller scale stuff that was limited but I mean this is you know I because I'm I I've been doing this long enough to like start thinking in terms of like my career and when I look back I'm like you know for these limited especially these really special limited events like I want to be the one to commentate it I want to be the one to translate what we're seeing on screen to the viewer and all that stuff and while playing it would be really awesome I kind of don't let my brain go down that rabbit hole too much because I'm just like so reluctant to give up the chance to cover it and I want that on my resume go ahead we were just talking literally about this yesterday about whether you would play or commentator pro tour and because I was telling them about how like our friends here in Denver we were talking and uh how when there's grand prix you used to play in some of the grand prix like a limited one but if you ever like qualified you you would end up in a spot where you're like not only do you give up exactly you're talking about but also money like you will make more money commentating than playing in the pro tour on average for certainly like I mean because you make more money commentating than most people do playing on the pro tour on average including the best players because it's just a job and you get paid the same every time right tour obviously you can spike a 10x or or mostly a lot less right and I'm realistic about my my current skill set and it's not there and also you know for a regular pro tour I would have to get good at constructed which I actually think I could do I think I just I would need some training basically but like I I'm good at like if I get told what to do I can do it and I can learn the subtleties like if I jam jam jam I can get it but that's not my normal stance I'm not that good at that by default and I don't really like it that much and then I would also have to be really good at limited which I'm pretty good but I'm not pro tour level good so it's like there's that too just that like I know I'm very likely to just get my butt kicked anyway um if it was just a random PT and I and I let's just say I fell into a qualification I would definitely play it like for sure like I that that would be kind of a dream for me and I would love it for my job and I would be willing to give up you know the money for that one event but I wouldn't want to put together like I don't want to be a pro magic player at this point that doesn't interest me at all it doesn't it also doesn't exist yeah and it also isn't a thing so you know at least like it used to be so but yeah I don't know I I have kicked it around a little bit but I'll tell you I just don't want to you know there's a approach were coming up in the um in the summer here that's in Amsterdam and I wasn't going to go but limited drew me back in and I you know there's a I guess it's is it known about this stuff Louise I do even know about this it probably has no I don't know anything yeah but you're not going don't count on me for information whatever anyway I am going and it's because of limited reasons and it's because I didn't want to miss out I just you know I don't I don't know how much longer I get to do commentary for right like I'm still doing fine at it but you know there comes a time you're not that old you got some years left and I but I've been doing it for a while and you know things can change and whatever and and so you know I just don't want to look back and be like oh well you know you went one three at the limited PT or whatever because you wanted to do it but you missed out on you know getting to cover such a cool special event so that's kind of how I think of it Sasha so I would say I'm much much more likely to commentate it than than even really try to play next question comes from Sam who says hey both what do you think are the most overrated and underrated decks slash strategies in vintage cube I'm thinking mainly about the MTGO slash arena cubes would I be curious to hear about how this translates to LSV's team draft server as well well it's interesting because it's a little hard to tell exactly what overrated underrated means it's all all his name big US term you know like who who's rating it or whatever I will say that storm at this point is no longer overrated I think it's not even underrated I think people correctly rated as pretty bad and it could be really fun and yeah if you get the if you get the cabal richel dark richel lion's eye diamond Yagmoth will demonic tutor tendrils deck you probably will do well if you have all those cards in your deck plus a decent supporting cast that's powerful you remove any any two of those cards your decks unplayable like it's not a good strategy and I think people know that so I think tinker is overrated I I have I have found that tinker for portal to Frexia is less likely to win than you would expect and certainly less likely to win than I would deem less acceptable for how much investment it takes and the picks it takes I still have tinker in my cube I have no plans to remove it but getting portal getting krang now getting blight steel those all just don't win as much as you want them to based on or considering that you have to put tinker in your deck you have to put artifacts you have to put these in your x sometimes you draw them and it's horrible the one card I haven't mentioned so far which is bizarrely not in the arena cube I understand storm sucks but they could have put bolus the citadel instill or kept it in because tinker citadel can still win like you can still you can win with that one um I think that I think that green ramp people have also similarly moved past I kind of think the cube playing populace is largely pretty good at figuring this stuff out at least there's been enough time so five six years ago if you ask people what mono green or green decks look like in vintage cube people talk about crater hoof behemoth and rafellos yeah and even then people are already rumblings of it not being as good but that's what people thought about now if you think of a good green deck you think of noble hyra into sentinel of lost city into questing beast and I think that's actually legit I I think that like the the five most common decks i draft and vintage cube are like artifacts like some kind of breach combo you know under old breach brain freeze combo sort of deal when I can get it that's kind of rare um just guy or four color like mid-range control like where you're just like good removal spells good card draw sort of things like that red green beats actually is like easily in my top five if I open on mana crypt or soul ring or something like mince can do obviously I I I do look to be red green and just have a curve that probably cops caps out around four sometimes with the like titania silken safekeeper package and you're just trying to beat them down you're just trying to play by broadside bombardiers into you know open wall oddity or whatever like combinations like that death greeter champion gut with good green things and some elves so you skip the two drops slot almost entirely in these decks here just you're trying to go turn one elf turn two three drop turn three four drop or if you have a moxer on the anacrypt you can kind of get started earlier so I think that people are basically on the money about all these things reanimator fluctuates sometimes I think it sucks sometimes I think it's good it just kind of depends on the cube or maybe how I'm feeling I don't know um and overall I would say people the cube populace is generally pretty savvy yeah that they have certainly gotten that way especially since the arena cube came out next question comes from ken who says marshal best watch movie that gets the details of repairs and restoration correct well that's like asking you know like like your rounders is actually pretty good about about demonstrating real poker hands and stuff like that yeah and especially for its era it was beyond excellent and it's it held it holds up okay but there really isn't one I mean there's no movies about repairing and watches it's not exactly maybe there should be hanging off the side of a building type stuff but although I will say having now done it myself it does feel that way sometimes hanging off the side of the building uh no repairing watches if there are times where it feels that way because you're like oh god please don't let this part break or you know I don't want to drop anything or whatever um but there are some it's interesting because there are some shows there's a so you have to recognize that in order for it to be interesting and correct they would need to use real watches and in order for real watches like branded actual watches to show up on screen as such they have to do a deal and if you want to have two different brands of watches on the same movie that are both being highlighted you need both brands to be okay with that and a lot of them are like how about we provide you with all of the watches and then everybody that's wearing anything in your movie is wearing this how does that sound and and leave that other guy out and they usually end up going that route that said there's a um I don't know Luis if you've seen the show I haven't and I don't actually know the name of it but it has John Hammond it and he plays some type of thief and it's currently out is that probably seen previews for that but I think you know that meme where he's like dancing I think it's from that show maybe yeah I've seen the meme I've seen the meme he's like the club looking kind of like faded very yeah it's funny uh the the meme has a song on it that's not the one in the show somebody showed me the one from the show and the one from the show is a song I really love and it's by lcd sound system and I literally repaired the watch of the lead singer of lcd sound system I'm like how do they take that song out that song so great for the for the meme but anyway um that one apparently is good I've heard rumblings in the watch community that they actually call out like specific models where they're like he's gonna steal this one or whatever and they'll like name it and and and that's pretty good one of the funny ones though I don't know this is this is maybe down the rabbit hole but I mean that's what our audience likes right is when they get it wrong or are forced to so one of the really interesting ones was you know the movie wolf of wall street louise yeah of course yeah the crazy uh Leonardo DiCaprio film um by martin scorsese and you know it's about excess in wall street and uh theoretically about the downsides of it though I think a lot of people watching it think that's kind of awesome I want to do that yeah they did a lot of that it felt like to me but you know yeah I'm like you know this is bad right guys right guys like you probably shouldn't live that way but anyway um the main character's name is Jordan Belfort based on a real person and um Leonardo plays him and as he works his way up through wall street of course he he gets nice suits and watches and all the luxury goods and stuff and the watch that he would wear that Jordan Belfort actually wore is a gold Rolex right it's kind of the standard issue 80s wall street guy yeah you know it's the watch that um what's his name from psycho uh american psycho if you've ever seen that Christian bale Christian bale plays I can't remember his name but Patrick Bateman Patrick Bateman and he wears a gold you know it's it's that watch right well at the time Leonardo had a brand deal with a different brand called tag hoyer and so he couldn't wouldn't wear a a Rolex like he his brand deal basically prohibited him from showing up even on screen wearing a Rolex so he wore a gold tag hoyer for the movie which is not what people would have worn then in fact the brand didn't even exist yet and it in that form I think the filmmakers probably correctly sussed that people would not that they didn't know and it basically just meant that they couldn't show that watch it just was like yeah it's a probably a Rolex you know whatever um and then in a kind of funny twist to the end last year or the year before Leonardo Capri announced that he is now signed to Rolex he's a Rolex ambassador there you go so he uh turns out he could have done it the whole time uh next question comes from Ryan who says um I was the one who had you sign uh oh yeah Louise I don't think I told you about this but Paul and I when we were uh in Vegas we they had this um thing at the at the magic con where they had cats like like kittens okay and they had this area blocked off and you could just go play with the kittens but and it was there uh in partnership with like a local shelter and so you could like go there the next day and get a cat if you lived in Vegas or whatever and so we just had Paul and I were just like okay I gotta see this like is are there really just cats flying around or like what is the deal so we went out of our whole you know behind backstage and we were going and Ryan found me and was like hey well you saw my car and yeah of course pulls out a DAC fading the grace between the multiverse yeah and I was like oh god I'm like Louise is gonna love this but uh anyway so Ryan says I was the one who had you signed my DAC for my cube thanks again for making time on your way to the kittens yeah I did tell him that's where I was going as well I only realized that uh after I didn't get your six signature on my Muldrotha or booster tutor so I'll have to track you down at the next one absolutely Ryan you can find me and uh and we'll do that my questions are sort of related do either if you have anything you still enjoy signing more than other others at cons or stories of wacky things that people have had you sign or take a picture of also how do you balance keeping sweet cards that you love in cube against them not being strong enough power wise for the current environment for example the super cool man a war that is a little weak for unpowered cube so we'll start with that one Louise do you have any nostalgia picks or special cards to you that you had to pull out of the cube or that you refuse to yeah I mean one right now that I'm you're not gonna like this either that I really I know in my heart of hearts should be cut but I haven't I haven't pulled the trigger it is fastbond fastbond is just not a playable card in vintage cube like it is totally playable what do you it does all this cool stuff combos good with draw sevens yeah yeah you know you you would think that but I can tell you that in in the cube server basically fastbond never works and it's too hard because it's really going to change too much like it does make me sad that really does I know I know I knew I knew you're gonna be both don't don't do it don't do it just it's okay something well I haven't yet I have I have I have left it in in the in the cube but uh I I know that that one is like on its way out um I mean do you still have Xeron orb well yeah but Xeron orb is busted because it's good with titanium and bail off prime so yeah I think that that's one one that I was like pretty sad infinite life and infinite mana combos okay noted go on one that I was pretty sad to cut uh was when uh riftwind clouds gate and bold drifter and some of that stuff went and that's why it's been fun playing the retro cube I haven't played the retro cube for a bit but it it is uh it does those cards are still like kind of legit in the in the in that cube which is what is cooler oh man I love benzer like such a good spot for that type of card um do we have anything that we enjoy signing more than others or wacky stories I mean I love signing mana war with with the artwork that's actually behind me here um that is my all-time favorite card with my all-time favorite artwork so that one I always love I also love signing the the original mana war too the the other one um either of those cards remember what was the card that uh people always had you sign louise back in the day that stupid what was it is like two in a black sorcery or something oh gruesome on course so that was actually we're into a good story I mean most cards do right so yeah this was uh before pro tour paris pro tour paris was the one that paul reetzel won uh ben sorry ben stark won beating paul reetzel in the f***ing finals um reetzel beat me playing for top eight actually and uh this is the one where team cfb we had uh stoneblade we had the stone forge mystic batter skull sword of feast and famine oh batter skull was not yet sorry stone forge mystic uh sword of feast and famine silvak life staff actually was featured in there and what's it called the bird cock whatever right and and uh yes squadron hawk jason mind sculptor manelik spell pierce that's one of the goat decks is one of the goat decks and one of the times when we were playing it's just like felt like we were playing and uh different game and just completely different games yeah you guys were on a different level yeah um so we we planned to meet in san diego because gay walls and if you i'll give you a little context of who that is gay walls is a former pro player like pro is a loose term he he was kind of he more hung out than that like played but he but he did he was like you got second at us nationals he had like i think a pd top eight grand prix top eight whatever he was very good he extremely gifted gamer yeah yeah um but he gay walls is a bit of a grifter and he's actually uh deceased now which is which is sad i kind of been lost touch with him his last couple years weren't great he he kind of you know i just had a lot of mental stuff yeah it was tough totally did yeah um so uh gay was like hey i i'm i'm i'm house sitting uh a beach house in san diego do you guys want to come and we're like and we can come test there and it'll be great and uh it's just like the game was time for person that that's like 50 50 that he's just squatting or the person doesn't know or you know so so we all get there so this is you know this is teams here this is like me and ifro and kibler and ben well benes actually didn't go because he met us in paris later but uh and like uh like yuza was there uh martin yuza and web and it's just like you know matt nas and like and raptor like all all all all the usual suspects right so we we go and on like the first day we get there and it's just like gorgeous like beachfront mansion um and like is in san diego's beautiful it's huge we're like this is incredible dude what's up with this place he's like oh no it's he's like it's great he's like but if uh if someone comes by just tell me you're visiting for the day i'm like okay i see oh my god dude this is like making me uncomfortable just thinking about it yeah and we're like okay yeah i guess so um no one ever came by we never really found out what the deal was you know that was gab like i i i have gotten a lot of good out of my interactions with gab in learning both from him and also from his actions good good and bad things i did i he's he's he's interesting well he's one of those people that the world was more interesting when he was in it and definitely and that comes with downside for those who are well versed in magic lore he was a little bit like pete saghetti ptr another like really old school player who actually is deceased now and a lot of people didn't like and had a lot of bad interactions but was also like a really just kind of out there dude just a wild dude you didn't never know what was gonna happen and be really funny it could be really charming like all those these things are not you know they're often these kinds of people are actually in fact charming and overall like i'm not gonna argue that these guys did good things because they didn't but also they made the world a more interesting place that is that is just genuinely true that funny story about that it's very short and it's not that interesting but i did mean to tell it to you um i was just gonna message it to you whatever but i can say here kind of funny one of the poker um youtube channels got a hold of all the world series of poker footage from like the heyday from like the moneymaker and on type days and so when i've been editing i've been having that up and it's just been this total i mean i was super into poker at the time i was very much the i spent a lot of my college years watching the world was a poker it was also just huge it was like on espn full on like it felt like a big event the two commentators like norma claren chad something or other norman chad and lawn mccaren yeah totally and they're kind of a i still remember their voices they were so it was just very soothing the whole thing it really was and and so i just have kind of had that back on on the background and and just so many names coming out of it oh i wonder what happened to that person looking up if they still play poker and you know people that i was a fan of and whatever and sure enough i have it on and you know 2006 or whatever and somebody's like all right cut over to this other table where gay walls is all in and he's there he was the chip leader uh at dr day one of the w saw twice right or something like that and there he is you know going all in against somebody and it's just like yeah it's just crazy um one the one funny i have a bunch of them but kind of the the one that stands out to me about cards or things that i've signed is somebody literally had me sign a potato once it was just like they're just like well you sign my potato and i'm like like i didn't see the potato at the time and i didn't know if i was being trolled or if like i don't know i was like gonna need a little more information and he pulled a potato out of his bag he's like well you sign it and i'm like absolutely he did not laugh like he didn't say like i'm gonna put this on twitter or this is for the memes or he was just like thanks thanks signed his potato walked out the door yeah sure um luke says can i well i didn't i didn't ever finish why gruesome on cor was was a thing oh my god you're right i'm so sorry the gruesome on courts here gruesome on core story right and that's the whole thing it's the dumbest joke in the world but uh gruesome on core was in that draft format and we started joking about this packs just a gruesome on core of the last pack and we started putting gruesome on cores in packs and it just evolved to just there was just gruesome on cores ever people always be saving them from the draft and put some people's seats or you'd be like playing against someone in a draft right in the house and if they weren't paying attention you put a gruesome on core like third from the top of their deck or something so like in a turn or two they would just draw a gruesome on core and just start to lose it and it was it was really something and uh you know you could pass somebody a pack that was just all gruesome on cores and they look at it like what the hell yeah so it was uh it was a it was a running joke for a long time and so getting back to testing we we at some point figured out that stone forge mystic was a good card and which is wild to say but this was back a long time ago long enough ago that people really just didn't find everything as well as they did now and we very quickly were like well stone forge busted and we figured that out and we figured out that you could just play stone forge mystic in your deck and and go get sort of feast and famine and then compare that with four pre-ordained four jays four man a leak three spell pierce a couple day of judgments some path to exiles some squaggin hawks and it's like I just named incredibly good cards those are powerful cards for standard yeah so so we get to Paris and martin usa and ben asked meet us there because they didn't come to testing because martin because he's from europe already he wasn't going to fly to san diego fly back and ben because he's a terrible teammate and never showed up for testing which I love ben but wow what a bad teammate um ben was on our team to run the limited meeting and it kept progressively getting worse where he just wouldn't started not showing up for that either at one point he was in the hotel in his room and wouldn't come down for the limited meeting like we kind of parted ways after that team wise it's just like dude yeah um it was really something but we go then we're talking to those guys and martin has this blue black tesseret deck and ben is like oh i don't know if i should play the tesseret deck or or your guy's stone blade deck and i'm like ben martin doesn't know if he wants jace or pre-ordain or both or neither just play the deck that plays all the good cards and not the one that's still trying to figure out whether you want these busted cards because clearly you want all of them the problem was the tesseret deck needed to play four tesserets and you know sphere of the sun and all these other things so like so then ben does play it and then wins the pt and uh you know that was uh that was that yeah that's great the gruesome encore deck that's what you really missed out on um luke says can we have a brief synopsis of louis's non-mtg career i've been listening for a while and i've and i've heard mention of channel fireball direwolf get lucky games or something like that and plenty of games and plenty of freelance work hope all as well thanks you both for the great content that is kind of interesting right if if somebody's been listening for say five or six years which is a long time you know to listen to a podcast they will have not really got a clean especially one of this quality yeah they will have not gotten a really clean view on me i mean because you know you know you have a non-traditional career so could you kind of string together what that looks like i i mean i've always said that i i i never played pro magic without having like content as in some other job as part of uh kind of what i was doing and that started with adventures on dot com black border dot com they're kind of the same thing if anyone remembers that old website i used to wear those like honestly kind of god awful shirts they were not i remember them the logo just wasn't very noticeable or big so it was just like they just didn't look good but cfb's branding was slightly better yeah yeah but uh much much love to abram hughes the owner of adventures on he gave him my first shot me and paul actually and so like i i'll you know i still talk to him and i'm always happy to to to give my shout out just because like it really was super important uh to to where we were at at that point um and we so we started doing i started doing content there and then i started kind of playing pro magic and uh then at some point i left adventures on to to start working at channel fireball right really to help found channel fireball i got brought on as a co-founder like oh we're like hey we're we're gonna launch this thing are you in you know and i was in fact in and um kind of simultaneously i ended up in like 2012 getting a job uh with direwolf here in denver and so i moved to denver and i'm still here you know and uh that was my entry into game design and uh you know game design is awesome like i'm a i'm really happy that that i went that direction and uh after leaving direwolf after being there for almost 10 years something like that i i did work at uh with uh mat place and matt nas and raptor at good luck games we worked on storybook brawl until until that unfortunately imploded you get lucky games and and now i work for for ebay because because tcg player bought channel fireball and ebay bought tcg player and i work for ebay i mean ebay employee it's great i i actually it's the biggest company i've ever worked for i worked for all like small business or small to medium-sized companies or even startups like channel fireball in a sense was a startup at one point right like it was starting to put that together yeah and and founding it so it's been kind of cool getting the experience of working for a big company very different in a lot of ways for sure you've worked for big companies for at&t for it was a long time was five six years and like that exactly yeah um so i think that uh i think that i've had a kind of long and winding path but i've been pretty happy with it yeah and then that's the non-magic you know and then he has all of his magic stuff uh oftentimes simultaneous louise works his butt off uh he's very efficient at it but he always has a lot of irons in the fire at any given time uh next one comes from greg who says i recently got into rotisserie drafting and it's my favorite format format bar none how would you expect the first few rounds of vintage cube roto to play out say seat one takes lotus they can guarantee brain freeze and underworld breach with their second and third round picks unless the player in seat two takes freeze to put the lotus player off the combo i'm sure you have thoughts and i'd love to hear them thanks for the great show oh i have more than thoughts we went through a phase but like last year where me and and the guys if you watch my videos uh mark blackwind who shows up in a lot of videos me him mac uh bk troll like but i just a bunch of the folks who play cube online retire devil all that all those guys we did probably like 10 vintage rotos uh until we kind of kind of figure out what was going on and then they once the draft started feeling like a little bit similar we ended up uh you know just finding other things to do but i can tell you very very concisely kind of what what the main things are and if you're doing the roto actually have some interesting strategies for you the first thing is black lotus was basically always the first pick um black lotus is a broken card like and the the other thing is when you first pick black lotus you are almost guaranteed to be able to just take on your second pick lines i diamond and like underworld breach and not and people won't contest you for that and uh you end up in a spot where you basically have that combo available to you and it's really really strong um the the next pick is often time vault time walk or ancestral recall though over the course of our drafts ancestral recall won the most of any of any card oh interesting and i think i think it's because the ancestral recall seat very frequently ended up getting to take like force of will a lot of the time would come back because you start right there's eight people and all eight make a pick and then pick eight makes a second pick and it snakes back around well like if you're in the middle there like let's say that goes like lotus time walk time vault and you take ancestral fourth the next bunch of picks are mostly going to be moxies you have a pretty good chance of getting force of will back yeah and and force of will is is incredible so totally and you know there's the basic premise of just if everybody has a bunch of really great cards i mean there's not that many great like the cards stay very high quality for quite a while in a roto draft that if you get to draw more of them you have a good chance to win i mean it's a simple premise but so uh the deck like raja one one raja salamine one one i one one and i think mac one one one are all with like ancestral force of will blue mid-range decks that's a good strategy time vault is a great strategy if we'll take you if you've banned time vault then you know do something else instead i suppose yeah and uh one of the other picks mac actually kind of pioneered this early staking the claim and it worked totally worked he just third picked he was third it went like lotus time walk he just took to learn academy and if you think about it it's actually great because you usually get a mox back still you you could take a mox and hope to see what you get back on the wheel but or you could just take academy and one of the particular quirks of roto is there's not that many incentives to actually like hate draft right because there's you're playing against a bunch of other people so what ended up happening is when you take academy no one else is taking candelabra of taunos from you right or even michael's workshop you can float those pretty late when you take lotus and lion's eye diamond you could just not take underworld breach for a while though it ended up being a kind of funny spot where we're like okay well how long do you have to take demonic consultation after you take thos's oracle yeah because somebody will at some point right because it's it's like people are getting kind of mad when someone hate draft then it's like well hate drafting is definitely part of this it it's a very fun the whole thing is very funny um what ended up happening basically is we near the kind of the end of our like roto careers as it were we we kind of said like hey if basically after the first like 12 rounds of picks or eight rounds of picks i don't remember the name number hate drafting is like is legit you can just hate draft if you want and that's basically a warning that like hey if you're trying to assemble a combo finish the combo it's time to it's time to do that you know yeah and technically anybody could hate draft whatever right yeah technically uh anyone could hate draft whenever but i mean it just the incentives don't line up for them to do it anyway right like they're just don't line up and it's like we're trying to have a good time here it's kind of aggressive if if imagine you you first pick time vault pick one pack one and i'm on the wheel and i just take full take key and manifold key yeah i mean i'm tanking my draft but i'm also taking your draft right that's not great it just but it doesn't make sense for you to do that if there's anything on the line no which is why we eventually we're like okay yeah this isn't how we well i guess what i'm saying is is that it's it's sort of already set up for you to not do that right yes i like even if you're allowed to but also at some point in the draft it becomes a good strategy to hate your opponents yeah for consultation because it's like you can't just get away with it forever yeah yeah right exactly exactly so well you can but no none of none of us yeah we had a Seattle vintage rotisserie cubes for a while we did them on a spreadsheet like did you do them in person like or i mean like was everybody in the same discord thing or room or whatever when you had a google spreadsheet uh martel martel found a nice one or mac mac found it sorry martel was gonna fix it and then never did that's what he said uh and uh which you would you would is what you would expect um and uh the way it worked is and actually i could i could share a link to a copy in the show notes for you because it's really cool if you're gonna do a rotisserie it's great you put in the people you put in the card pool and the separate tabs and then whenever you fill out a card it auto fills the card first of all but also it shows you if you ever someone tries to take a card it's already been taken it flashes red it like you can look at the card list the current card list and scroll down and see what's been taken like there's a lot of a lot of cool stuff that made the whole experience better and we we did it like somewhat slowly where it wasn't like you it wasn't live we're like okay we started the draft martel you've got to take uh you've got to take the card like did you take like a week or something to do it or we tried to get it done within about a week yeah that's what we did to basically what we would find is we would launch it we tried to coordinate with everyone to launch on a day where everyone had a couple hours to like get get a good start in with the understanding that sometimes someone has to go take care of a kid or whatever you know um any number of things and then during the week we would kind of like sometimes you're hurry someone along you're like it's like you know adam you're you're the the the picks on you or waden or what you would do is I would I would send you like I would make my pick and then I would send you marshal use my next two picks just put those in when they're there or I'd send you three or four cards if any of these are taken just go down the list in order these are the next four cards I want yeah there's a lot of ways to smooth it yeah it was really fun we had a really fun time doing it really fun the only reason we stopped was because we had done it enough that we felt like okay yeah we we kind of figured it out yeah yeah the one we did was for was like a see like I think Randy might have put it together he was definitely in it and it seems like it seems like the sort of thing he'd be yeah he's good at organizing stuff like that and and you know like B Wong was in there I think Charles Wong was in it Lauch's Zane Beg like it was it was really fun and then we all got together after we did that week thing and we played it out with like computers and stuff on magic online and and it was really that's how we we all we also played everything out on magic yeah it's really fun like because it just gives you this like it's fun to check the spreadsheet and see what happened since the last like who picked what and like yeah did somebody cut somebody off color wise or even snipe a card from them at what point does that start to come into play you know is somebody trying to float a combo piece just a little too long for Randy's liking or whatever and they take it you know on a spot where they're they're not giving up much or that you know they don't feel like they're going to get any retaliation a lot of really neat stuff the funny part is is that it's kind of like it's kind of like how I imagine commander to be a little bit which is like it's really fun to build a deck but actually playing it is like okay I it's more about hanging out with people and stuff that's kind of how that felt like the logistics around actually playing it out we're actually kind of cumbersome you know getting the decks together on moto and stuff like that yeah I think that I think I think less so the logistics being cumbersome because we all have been cubing so much that we either had all the cards or or had a rental account and can rent them but I would say overall like it was just a blast it the format doesn't change so that is part of why we we we kind of stopped doing it like yeah no we talked to recently about getting another one together I bet people be in I think overall the best decks to draft slam academy early and you suck up all the artifacts and just draft a really sweet looking academy deck some non-obvious cards that you might want to take really early in academy because here's the thing you don't have to take most of the like non-busted artifacts early like manna vault grim monolith obviously mox is sure those are early picks balance is one of the earliest picks I think you should take an academy managerians fantastic in academy and then you can pick up all the other stuff later the other thing is take lands really highly once it's funny when runs start happening on a card the first time someone takes a fetch land everyone starts grabbing fetch do they just go right down the line yeah I'm gonna lose all my fetch lands you know and I think that uh you you you want to make sure that you you're able to of course play all your cards uh I also I also so the other decks that were good was like a white red like fast mana initiative deck with like white pulm adventure caves cast adventure sort of cards and the way you got into this if you take mana crypt or soul ring or any of the like really early really busted acceleration cards and you want like besides like obviously mox ruby or pearl like city of traders that sort of thing um yeah you're just trying to to play something early and just have it have it you know have it pop off uh there was like the ancestral force control deck there's the brain freeze breach led oriox salvagers you know omega combo deck that uses lotus sometimes yog will there's time vault key like with that can go in whatever deck you want which is actually pretty nice um there's what are some of the other archetypes people played there's like flash sneak stuff and that's kind of nice because you don't really get you don't have much competition when you're doing those things um so like once you start taking big creatures there's usually just one big creature deck sometimes there's two sometimes there's like a flash combo deck and a sneak deck there's demonic consultation thosas oracle if you're if you're into that sort of thing um and uh overall it was a fun somewhat replayable format yeah the thing that i really liked about it was when people would kind of plant their flag because generally people take like generically good cards like moxon and card drawn the stuff that louis was talking about but then it's like somebody goes okay i'm taking academy and you're like all right all right you're gonna try to be the artifact stack and then somebody's like they take in tomb or reanimate or says like okay i get it like i see where you're going with this you know and then the interesting part to me was like if you fast forward like maybe three or four picks from there where people start to take cards that overlap with other archetypes rather than just trying to outright snipe important cards from people it was more like what could i take that they may have their eye on that i'm damaging them but it goes in my deck as well you know and then you also get to see where do people value all the different types of cards like where you know what what's your number one cantrip right like is somebody taking ponder preordain or something for free or whatever first right what's your what are your best counter spells like usually force of wills to kind of go to and then it's like mana drain and then it's like well are people taking other ones you know like what do they take straight up counter spell if so when is spell pierce on their list is days on their list you know that kind of stuff gets really interesting because it's like you can really see what how people really think about the cube and what they really value based on that because they could pick any of those and they have to choose the one they want for that deck and i always thought that that was a look you don't normally get yeah and i think the most interesting parts of the draft are the first like two rounds where people are laying the groundwork both in taking the busted cards but also like you said taking the cards like time vault to an academy underworld breach or whatever direction they want to steer and then and then the the next part that's really exciting is like once that's gone and people have taken the first couple rounds of like their deck cards what are people fighting over what and also as we got a little better at this you know i would say the first three of these were really fun the next couple were a little bit kind of business as usual and then people started trying new things that those are really fun and then we kind of stopped but once once people realized like when you take flash you don't need to just take like torsten next pick you know you know let's say let's say you've taken flash and mystical tutor mox sapphire managing whatever you don't need to then take torsten you didn't then need to take flooded strand or spell piers you need to take the cards other people want so everyone is what you wanted to do it's really funny take the minimum amount of cards to to demonstrate which archetype you are so other people don't go into that to learn academy is actually the best possible example is one one pick everyone kind of stays away from the 30 cards you really want but then you have to take the cards that are most contested and you have to balance that because if you wait too long like let's say you take flash and you take no other cards someone might on the wheel go okay well i'm just going to take sneak through the breach and now i'm going to go go this right and now they're actually have that archetype you they actually have a stronger claim to it than you at that point yeah definitely try out roto if you can get the logistics together it's cumbersome magical line makes it so much easier and the rental services a man of traders or goat bots or whatever a car tour or whatever you use like that it really goes a long way next question comes from jeremy who says hey guys i hope you're doing great it's ironic that you're doing a q&a episode this week because just this morning i thought of a question for you marshal all right i was wondering how you do your preparation for coverage particularly with the constructed formats do you build decks and jam a bunch of games do you collaborate with your colleagues it seems that kori is particularly good at breaking down a lot of the lines for the decks and then uh jeremy has another question lsv i've been enjoying your draft videos lately have you ever considered doing a complication style sorry i think compilation is what he was going for um a comp a compilation style video where you played highlights from some of your favorite drafts also what are your top five favorite constructed decks that you've ever played thanks for everything keep up the great work so the answer to your question for me jeremy is uh i i'm responsible to know two things right i have to know limited and i have to know constructed and this is very difficult especially now for example for secrets of strictshaven the set came out on thursday or tuesday on arena and you know in that way so then we fast forward one week it's the next tuesday so i've had the set in my hands for a week i fly wednesday we have rehearsals on thursday and friday morning i'm in the booth with paul like calling a draft so i have to absorb a lot in that relatively short time frame about not only what's good what's not but also card names and what the cards do like i i'm commentating live magic like i have to know if you cast this that it only hits things with you know power three or greater or whatever and if i don't i have to look it up in the booth or i have to kind of look at paul and go three or greater you know and that is a ton of information to take in so my approach is i focus on limited and the reason for that is the schedule that paul and i have for friday for day one is we do the draft we do a round of limited so we do round one and then we're off one and then we do another draft of limited so it's draft and two rounds of limited and then we do two rounds of constructed later in the day and so for me i feel the full weight of authority for the limited part and that's what i focus on when i get there is when i start asking people about constructed also because the dust hasn't really settled the sets are you know very new and by the time i'm there we'll actually have the metagame like we don't publish it ahead of time but we'll actually know what decks are there so now i can start to focus in okay what does this deck try to do what cards is it using how does its strategy work what are its matchups and we have a great team for that i mean paul knows his stuff monnie kory and we also have frank karsten on site and he is unbelievable um for example when we get to top eight sunday he will do a write-up of each of the quarter final matches before i even get to the site so he'll say this player is playing this deck this player is playing this deck here's here's how it here's what matters basically and then he'll break down how cyborg plans go and if things change after that and then he'll break he'll also call out any interesting or not that common or maybe unintuitive card interactions you know just be like this person basically can't play this card because the other person has five answers for it or whatever so they're just going to take it out even though it's a good card something like that and then he'll do that for the semis in the finals and so i'm like a sponge when i get to those meetings because basically i feel like i've been sprinting to understand limited and now it's time to soak up as much as i can about constructed before i get in but i do not jam games have constructed at this point the timeline is just too short if i was spending time doing that and then it ended up being a deck that it wasn't even popular at the format it would be a complete or excuse me at the tournament it would be a complete waste for me so i have to i honestly i feel like i'm behind even just getting there unlimited like i do probably 25 or 30 drafts by the time i show up and i'd like to do even more than that like i i like to sit down really comfortable and i sit down kind of going okay i made it across the line now it's time to actually commentate these things so that that's how i approach it but it's mostly out of necessity um have you considered doing a compilation video louise of your favorite drafts i have done at the end of the year because i i try to take a little more time off in december and with when the kids are home for like two weeks it's also hard to record i will do like here's my top five best like lotus decks or here's my top five best loris decks or academy decks that sort of thing i haven't done the high effort like here's a clip here's a clip show that's something i would i i mean i have an editor but i would need to either go in or have someone else go in and find all the clips and that that's pretty time intensive because that's the editor side of like actually making the content like what's good here right right and what's funny is that it for a lot of people or a lot of like this type of uh you know thing compilation videos can be a really great way to use stuff you've already done like you go back and you you stitch together a bunch of content you've already made so it's actually like way cheaper right for me i can just sit down and make new content and it takes me it takes me well it not much more time than than time it takes me to sit down and do it there's not that much like i'm pretty efficient at this point like honestly you want to my setup yeah i'll what if i'm gonna i'm set up to record a team draft right like a like a three on three or four and four i will do that i'll do the draft portion i'll then have another video that's one either like an arena video or a magic online video or if i'm doing like something like slayers fire or once upon a galaxy that can i can stop and start whenever i want and whenever i have downtime in that in the three on three i'll just switch to which video i'm recording so at the end of it the i'll have two videos in the in the time it could have taken me to record one if i just kind of let that time be follow in the middle dude that's nuts well i i think that is efficiency right there yeah it is just i i just don't have time to waste i'm trying to you know get everything together and and and i think that it's important to to try to use my my time well if i'm gonna do that um do you have any favorite constructed decks that you played like what jumps to mind when you think of that um i think that my favorite constructed the favorite constructed decks that i've played uh i think i mean the the the stoneforge deck was really good the the the one we had in paris it was it was pretty nice getting to play that deck i i think that uh i think that you know elves was fun because it was just like a busted deck when i played elves in berlin and the top eight was six elf decks or whatever the decks that i've loved i love the teachings deck for grand prix san jose which wasn't or san francisco which was in downtown san jose me chi-an paulo v tor damarosa and web david ocho all played this deck we spent all week testing and three of the four of us made top eight you know that was what deck was that mystical teachings in time spiral block constructed we broke the mirror by going teachings for to fairy flashback teachings for detritivore blow up on your lands sounds ridiculous but but it i missed that yeah and uh that sounds way cooler than this stuff we do a little before your time yeah it was yeah that's awesome and i will say i will say i really did like playing fairies once i really got into it as fairies in loren like loren era standard you know this is back on two-year rotation which i missed by the way um the first year fairies was out i tried to play every deck that beat fairies none of them did i lost all year second year i just switched to playing fairies and i top-getted a grand prix and felt really smart like i was like i should just been playing this deck well i actually felt dumb for not playing it earlier so that was one of the decks i really liked too yeah that's a classic i think my favorite deck of all time though is the deck that me and paul and web was our team back then played at nationals in 2007 this is the nationals that i won with arcane is the omnipotent and uh court of calling what a wild deck it was a ridiculous deck like flair omnicord is what we called it omnicord oh yeah yeah it was it was it was something yeah that that is a relic at this point right you just cannot make decks like that uh next one next question comes from kevin who says a marshall lsv as i've been listening to the set reviews i've started to try to guess the grade of the card before you uh before your take and compare it to how close i am i'm getting better in terms of alignment but there are sometimes cards i completely whiff on i don't have a specific card in mind but i seem to have a hard time evaluating combat tricks and non-creature spells is there a common heuristic i'm just lacking or is it completely context slash set dependent another example i can think of is a burglar rat type card i've noticed that it can be great in certain sets while mediocre and others is it just entirely set or context dependent thanks for the insight um i don't know about entirely but i would say largely yeah like that that is is is likely to yeah you're getting a guess of of our of how these cards traditionally perform in what you would call like the average set mixed with what we know about the set that's upcoming that's that's kind of what we're basing it on um i think it's interesting for the i i i wonder if if kevin is over rating the combat tricks and non-creature spells like i think that that's a common problem right like combat tricks can be fine but they're capped because they're just combat tricks there's only so many that you can put in a deck and there's usually more of them in the draft than are needed to fill the slots there so they're not high demand uh from the beginning and there's too many of them out there uh general you know relative to the demand so we usually give them a lower grade you know than maybe what the raw power level or how good it is compared to other combat tricks might suggest and non-creature spells suffer the same thing how many can you put in how many pure card draw spells life gain spells artifacts that do things can you put into your deck it turns out it's not that many they have to be pretty special and your deck has to really want something like that for it to be right uh and so we kind of have that baked in heuristically in our minds and i think that that's why you see those you know start off a little lower than maybe the power level you might think this is a really good card draw spell and we might say well you just don't need that many card draw spells or there's a lot of those or there just there's only a couple decks that really want cards like that you know and so that could be if there is a gap i don't know which direction kevin's going up and down but that's those are common misconceptions about those type of cards yeah i think that ultimately context really is the reason cards are better or worse like i would say on balance there's certain types of cards which you can usually bet on the the burglar rat type card is a pretty safe bet i would say it it ranges from like solid to great it typically is not bad so that there are sometimes when it's like kind of bad and i guess virus beetle is probably its peak because it was an artifact there was ninjas like there was like a lot of things going on there right but there's not that many formats where it's actively bad whereas the one mana combat tricks that do a plus two plus two plus a trinket text those range from bad to playable you know and like that's that's generally the range they're in where and then now you can look at patterns like the three in a blue put a creature on the top or bottom sort of card you know sometimes it costs a little less you know like run behind or whatever and sometimes you know does xyz these are these are cards that are always good they have they range from like good to like i would say great just about that they could be the best blue common yeah that that sometimes is the case but for the most part like you we have a good sense of these and that's one of the things you get when they they have the kind of like set skeleton that they stick to pretty strongly we just see these cards every time so at this point we have a pretty decent kind of understanding of them yeah so that's hopefully that helps kevin next one is from our friend zigmund alfessa this is when my friends and i first started playing magic we had a warped impression of which cards were powerful this is because we only had access to a limited and inexpensive group of cards and we were purely casual players for example scaled worm fireball and dark banishing were powerhouses to us do either of you have fond memories of playing terrible cards because they were the best you could find back in the day any fun stories you can share thanks for answering my question and for continuing to create fantastic and engaging content each week thank you zygmund um i mean yeah dude i have tons of those i mean remember you know i i don't know if these cards have a name louise but there was like you know the force of nature lord of the pit kind of cycle you know that cycle yeah i don't know if they were like meant to be sort of pinnacles of their color but they they they were the big scary you know shiven dragon ones that really stood out and i mean i was a hundred percent in on those like i thought force of nature was like the coolest thing it was one of my favorite cards when i first started playing it's so i mean have you seen his biceps like you you're not messing with that guy right like no no um so yeah those type of cards i loved i mean i think i was probably pretty typical for very you know for new magic player where like i didn't really understand yet the stuff that was actually good you know which was almost everybody i mean you know the classic story is trading like a mox for a craw worm or whatever right because you're like well this is just a stupid land you know who cares it's like a land but this craw worm can beat you down or whatever um i think i was more or less than that i've mentioned before on the show but i also after i got some cards uh you know i wasn't actually playing games very often against anybody like i play against jay and that was about it he'd always just kick my butt but i like to build you know try to build combo decks is that your buddy jay my buddy jay yeah and uh he um he was actually good at magic so it was kind of unfair but uh but yeah and and i had you know these contrived you know snake basket you know nonsense decks or whatever so i had a bunch of stuff like that too what about you any any bad cards from back in the day well i were you the craw worm person yeah uh i remember craw giant actually was in me with with rampage dude yeah i was a big craw giant guy too it was from legends it was like three green green green green for like a six four trample rampage two which is like if for every creature that blocks it past the first one it gets up likes two plus two dude i thought that was really good but legends has two of the like bottom five uh keywords of all time uh bands with others which no no not banding oh bands with others bands with that's not the same thing okay banding is is is one of the worst mechanics of all time that was an alpha legends introduced bands with others which was banding you could only band with other creatures of the exact same type oh god that's bad that is somehow really bad it's just just just really really atrocious honestly remember the first planeswalker in in legends the first planeswalker yeah what's the first planeswalker i don't remember what it's called but it has planeswalk oh you're talking about a righteous avenger yeah it literally like can't be blocked because it was the first plane it was forna white for a three one planeswalk and then there was the great wall which is three no white enchantment all creatures lose planeswalk because those are the only cars that had the word planeswalk on it at the time and isn't the great wall not a wall no it says enchantment yeah yeah this is part of the charm of you know the first few sets of magic that came out yeah there's some variance there yeah what you would get for sure for sure uh let's see this is tice who says hello to both of you louise what's something you love about each of your children wow for both of you what's something that you love about your mothers the second question was originally for marshall since he talks about his mother occasionally but mother's day was last weekend so you both get to answer uh well i got some children so so my oldest uh what i love about her yeah what i love about her is uh really just how how interested she is in like learning new things and figuring things out and uh she can be a very kind of a perfectionist which which is good and bad for sure and watching her apply that to something like star do valley it's a video game that uh she she really loves and uh she just like trying to optimize and trying to figure out and try to plan ahead i think video games are great honestly like look the kids have you know limits on what they can play and when they can play and all that stuff it's not like you know free for all but honestly i would choose a kid playing a video game like star do valley or magic or any any game that requires thinking which is basically all the video games they require thinking over just like watching tv and especially like just watching like youtube or something i don't know i think that i'm a little scared of the algorithm you know they're they're optimized to turn adults and children's likes brain into slots short I mean they turn ours into it i can't imagine an untrained child's brain yes exactly um but I I I just love how how voraciously she consumes that kind of content and figures out the best way to interact with it uh my oldest son he it's it's awesome seeing how passionate he gets about things and he usually has like something he's super into which that that's a trait he shares with me uh you know I wouldn't go so far to say special interests but we we can we can burrow pretty tunnel pretty deep we go deep yeah in this case magic the gathering was mine for sure but you know when he was when he was younger he was really into balls and basketball and we would go shoot hoops at the like local park when this is when he was like two years old can he like every day every single day uh well the hoops the right size he can yeah but uh but then he moved on to being really into into planes and and you do not know how much how how much I know about planes at this point like for example um the sr 71 blackbird one of the coolest planes ever is at 2000 miles per hour uh roughly top speed whereas like an an f15 that's about 1400 miles per hour you know and he's educating you on this stuff yeah and like one of the fastest planes ever made was like the x1 experimental plane that went about 4500 miles per hour but not for very long uh you know that is incredible the slower planes like like uh the b2 bomber and did you know b is for bomber c is for cargo f is for fighters so like that's why it's like fc and b and uh wow I we literally have a plane book that's like an encyclopedia of planes it's not a kid's book it's a book we got at the the kind of air and space museum here they have an excellent one actually two locations wings over the rockies we got the the squadron membership and title titles us to bring up to six people without paying we use it frequently um and we got an encyclopedia it's like a this dense encyclopedia that is just planes schematics of planes and all the information about them and literally that's what i would read to him he's three years old we're reading this you know now now he's almost five i was exactly like that by the way except for what's about dinosaurs insects and space right oh yeah dinosaurs i mean dinosaurs are another classic one right um and then uh the twins who are younger uh that the the boy he he takes after our older son and actually really those balls he's in his ball era right now it's so cool seeing that and you know without going to divin to it i'm not a scientist not an expert i will say having now been in the process of raising two boys and two girls and the boys have some similarities and the girls have some similarities and you know i think that there are everybody i know that there are differences between between the dentures when it comes to the things they're interested in and how like the boys tunnel so much more at least at least mine have they both tunnel so much more on the thing they're interested in and the girls the girls have a more wide-ranging interest um and then i the youngest girl twin she i love how much how passionate she is she gets you can see her visibly like get excited about things and what she's so excited about is animals she loves our dog she loves our chinchilla she's actually like we always have to be watching her with the dog because she's like jump on the dog and grab it and she's not great with it but our julie is a saint julie is now you know this is her she's lived through four kids at this point and they've all gone through their fur pulling you know put my body weight all on top of you grab your mouth grab the thing you're eating like we try to teach the kids not to of course we're very actually i think i think our older kids are incredibly good at interacting with strangers dogs they know to ask they know to how to approach they know not to just go up and do things they know how to be gentle julie's the one who taught them all that but she has done so with good survival instinct you know the the the worst thing she could do for her position is to be bad with kids and she's not and so that that is that is really great um as for my mom i i love how much my mom uh you know i it can be tough because me and her we kind of argue about this sometimes but i love how much she tries to go for what she wants and tries things like she does like she'll move into a new place or she'll get you know give away a bunch of her stuff to to go like downsize and and live in like yurt and stuff like she just like a lot of kind of like my mom is is very much like a like a kind of hippie in spirit and it has been cool seeing her kind of like spread her wings and and do all the things she she kind of wanted to do when she was raising us and just like didn't and now and now kind of gets the opportunity too and i think that that's pretty neat yeah my mom it's funny our moms are actually kind of similar people i've i've got a chance to meet louise's mom and she reminds me of my mom and i'm not that shocked because louise and i are similar people too but yeah my mom is is interesting in that she's like it's funny looking back at when i was younger because she just supported me like no matter what and i'm like i'm looking back and i'm like why did you like you're crazy for letting me do some of the idea you know i was traveling to europe and i you know just doing all this you know life stuff and and she has just literally always had my back on everything it's weird as i've gotten older to look back and think if i had a kid now that was that age what would i say to him and i'm like i would say hell no like what are you doing and my mom you know never did that uh ever uh and i i think that it worked out because like i had like a had on my shoulders and i could like i wasn't like reckless or whatever but uh i think her and i are both glad for that because if she just gave me the green light on everything basically um i don't actually know the answer to this question louise so this is also from ken from before any suggestions on coaches i can hire for draft for draft i don't really know who's offering i don't either at the moment i mean like ben used to and he's excellent i don't know i don't know what that scene looks like at the moment i mean it seems it seems to me that metafiles where people are kind of congregating at this point so if ben starts doing it i would recommend it he takes it seriously he he does show up for those i've seen him do it and he is of course extremely good you just have to tell him exactly what you want to get out of it you have to get ben pointing in a direction and then he can do the thing um peter says i haven't heard you talking about the seahawks yet how is the super bowl for you well it was awesome for those that don't follow football the seattle seahawks won the super bowl uh coolest moment though was not too far from where i live they had the parade the celebration parade and i went down there and cheered at everybody as they walked by and everything and it was a good moment a really special you know thing for the city so yeah that was great john says long time listener holy smokes since episode two what was wrong with episode one yeah what happened to episode one john you're a little late buddy seriously though that was like so long ago uh long time listener first time caller uh maro recently did a reflection of his on his podcast about how magic designed a development over his 30 plus years at watsy and how his approach to design has evolved over the years with those changes marcia what areas do you think have changed uh both limited resources and magic design over your time since you started and how do you see that your technique or approach of evolved over time um i guess the same question to louise though he's only been doing it for about half as long as the goat of lr that's first of all not not true that is funny um yeah that's well lr started in like 2011 right nine 2009 yeah okay so you you did lr for five years before i got there and we've been doing it for 12 years i'm gonna say louis has been here for longer than you think john yeah so it's interesting because it does feel quite a bit different um i don't the design part feels more codified to me it feels um like the differences between sets aren't as big but also the consistency is better um i like that as it turns out i do miss having a random rise of the eldrazi thrown in there for some totally different look at how they do it but that being said i really appreciate the consistency like now it really stands out when we get a bad set where before it was like yeah this one's not so great the scheduling feels way different there's just so many more sets it does it does feel as a limited player like we're being bombarded um which i think is not quite as good but i also don't hate when a new set's coming around the corner i think that's pretty cool i think i know a lot more about a set a lot quicker the whole entire timeline feels compressed so that feels different those are the things that like viscerally feel different i mean power creep is there the cards are just better but they're still just relative to each other so it doesn't it's kind of fun to go oh my god look at how good this uncommon is that would have been a mythic rare back in the day but it doesn't really affect the play that much because all the cards are good um one thing that i've had concerns about but i don't think it's really something that i would change necessarily is complexity creep there have been times when the sets have gotten just absurdly wordy and with a bunch of extra stuff on them that didn't really feel necessary and i always am concerned about newer players coming in because of that because you know i came in around uh shadowmore even tide and not that long after you know just a few years later they came out with m10 and that felt like a really great kind of reset and uh you know they they called it like core fantasy flavor and uh the cards were simpler but it was really fun those were balanced interesting sets that kind of just reminded us that just drafting is really fun just for the sake of it you know it you don't need all the crazy stuff to make drafting fun and they've really kind of gone away from that um and you know i they may be going back to it a little bit more but that part's worried me but also like selfishly it suits me like i like the more complicated set so yeah what about you is anything stand out that's i i i think uh the the thing i yeah as a designer would probably do the most differently from wizards if i were to be working there is i would probably push back more than the peers they have on the complexity because i i do think that it's difficult right i mean you know you've heard the face mark twain quote i didn't have time to write you a short letter so i wrote you a long one um which is i love the quote because it's just so it's so true i haven't actually heard that that's great it's really good and when it comes to design it's like yeah it's it's easier to make a complex cool card than a simple cool card i think definitely to be fair to them they've they've used up a lot of the territory when it comes to simple cool cards which is not to say there's not tons and tons left you know we can argue about whether it's infinite or not that's kind of a useless argument but i think that they they're complexity not even no understanding why they're there they're making you know they're making 5 000 cards a year or whatever like you know some hideously large not not literally that many but they're making like 2 000 or 1400 cards a year or something like that if they're making like eight sets a year of various flavors they're not all 300 cards but like they're making a lot more cards than they used to and they've been going doing this for a long time a lot of the a lot of the the low hanging fruit has been picked they have to climb higher and higher but one of the ways to kind of break new ground and then do that is to make your cards really complex and i think that they lean on that more than i would than i would prefer to so that has definitely changed the biggest thing that has changed which i don't like when it comes to limited is and you you're so striking if you go back and play like ipa or rise the o draws you're some of the old classic good formats um if you miss a drop now you you lose a lot of these games like you sometimes it's as simple as you don't have a turn to play on the draw and you're already like i'm i'm 20 85 to win this game you know and it used to be that if you didn't have a play till turn four you could just have a normal game afterwards now you can't it used to be that that you have like a doom blade in your hand and they play a four mana three three you don't just snap doom blade and untapped and take your turn now it's like yeah of course you cast the rule spell on their creature you're gonna wait all the creatures hit really hard or like look at some of the worst creatures in the last couple sets they all have really good abilities and they do things as you take turns and they hit pretty hard if you put them on the battlefield you you do not like that if they're sitting across from you even if they're the crappy creatures yeah right it used to be that when you had a removal spell you could have had to hold it because your opponent probably had three or four creatures you really cared about their deck now every creature is like i must kill um and i'm not saying old limited was perfect it wasn't but i i wish that there was a middle ground of you miss it between you know only two cards in their deck matter and if you don't play a two drop then you're really far behind i think that one of the things i actually liked about secrets of strict saving is when you play the soup mirrors the like multicolor control mirrors the spell mirrors you both can have kind of bad draws it just it smooths out because no one's doing anything and i actually do appreciate that even if um you look at uh like uh old formats and sometimes they're a little bit too glacial let's do some we'll do rapid fire for these last ones um luke says fill in the blank the best card in a format should ideally be blank i would say difficult to cast i hate it when the best card in the format mythic rare the yeah mythic rare yeah i i just hate it when it's like it's three white white best card in the format you know it's like come on like make me work for it a little bit gus says hey guys i was thinking about how you're both engaged in various things around games specifically i'm thinking of live commentary and luke's game design have you ran into surprising intersections when playing different roles ways that commentary feels like playing a game or a lesson learned when designing what's revealed uh that that's revealed a new angle that you've used as a player yeah i mean for me in the booth definitely uh getting a chance to see so many high-level players play from both positions where i have complete information for the most part it was completely eye-opening to me yeah i mean i one of the things i really enjoy about my life and my career is how synergistic it is where knowing people and magic led to knowing people in game design led back to knowing people and you know like it just it all it's all kind of circular in that sense yeah but also just like the skills that make you a good magic player first of all do not directly translate to make you a good game designer some of the the game designers who've done the most damage their games were been very good at the games they played um but there there are some skills that are very good to have in both and a deep understanding of the game certainly does help for for me it it's as i've gotten older the thing that honestly i've come to appreciate most in people is like the ability and desire to do things and get things done and that's a big dividing line there's just are there people who will get things done and who will try to find solutions like you know they're they're they're solution oriented not problem oriented like to i don't want to use too much buzz speak but i guess i'll wait to sum it up as high agency if you're someone when when something goes wrong do you try to find a way around it find a solution you're you're gonna figure out figured out or you're someone who's gonna accept the first answer you're given and just be like all right i guess that's not gonna work and it's like no there's just a lot of creative ways to solve most problems try to figure them out and that's that's like a cool part about games it's a cool part about how to win a game of magic or to design a cool format all those things kind of go together up to and including things like i remember at one point you know when i was talking about like my daughter like maybe taking a plane by herself right to go visit my grandparents or her grandparents my parents and it's like well i i need a ticket to go to the security but they actually have a like a you know accompaniment thing where they can you can figure it out but i figured out at one point when i wanted to go to a gate for a flight i wasn't taking i bought a ticket on southwest and then i just used it to get through security then i canceled the ticket and like i'm not didn't do anything wrong there southwest southwest likes it because when you cancel a ticket it turns into store credit which is all which is fine with me because i use enough flights or i used to at least it i wasn't i had a flight so i could make it through security my point was it's not like oh i don't have a ticket i can't go through security well there are solutions and in this case yeah i was paying the cost of turning money into southwest store credit but at the end of the day that didn't cost me any money because i used it and i don't know i i have found that in all the different endeavors i do trying to find solutions to problems is a trait that i i like working with people who do that i like interacting with people who do that it makes my life better to try to figure out solutions to or ways to make things better it doesn't all have to be problems you know it's also a rare trait um braden says i recently switched from coffee to arnold palmers yes marshal have you tried any of the sugar-free lemonade uncle matt's organic is my go-to sweetened with stevia i have but i realized i don't really need to because i use such a small amount of lemonade that it's it's you know it's an eighth of what i'm drinking so i just use the real i get the stuff from whatever just for the regular stuff from the store the good stuff but the regular good stuff um joshua says how do you stay motivated to keep playing magic have you ever experienced a slump in your career any negative mental hurdles to overcome i love magic but sometimes when i'm on a heavy losing streak it's demotivating for me but regardless i would never quit be quit it because it's still brought a lot of enjoyment to my life yeah i mean for me you know louise's answer i think is more important than this but louise and i are both though we're both we're like a dog with a bone man like we we just yeah we just go it's it's sort of how our how we're both built i i have a high high high tolerance to keep doing it and for me the thing that motivates me most is that it's like a competitive outlet like i like playing against people you know that's the interesting thing to me that's how i play poker all those years too even though poker gets boring at some point i mean you had more pressure because you were doing it for a living like yeah but i was doing it for a living because i loved it and i legitimately love magic look there are some professional magic players even extremely decorated ones uh not going to name any names here who don't really like magic who are who ended up there because just whatever series of events ended up that then being good at this thing and then making some money playing it and they kind of went further into it and it just became a logical thing to do that's totally fine they're i'm not going to delegitimize any of their accomplishments or or say that they're wrong for doing this but like you you know you basically know i'm talking about i do know you're talking about it we're talking about some of the best players like we're not talking about somebody who's like scrapped out a career you know yeah and they were talking about some people who they play this because it's a job and they it's a better job than what they would have otherwise gotten for whatever reason between the pay the freedom it is more fun to play magic than do a lot of work adjacent things but it is a job and outside of the pro tours they don't play magic they watch tv or play video games or whatever you know all totally find things to do i just love magic i would play magic even if i wasn't getting paid for it as demonstrated by hoff and i do when it's not really like moving the ball forward in any particular way for me you know i i don't do as many arena cubes i do when it's on arena on my phone because i need to practice for it or i or i care about my mythic rank i'm not even gaining mythic rank a lot of the time the way i draft you know like i've never passed the lines i down in my life doesn't work out all that often so and i have a very high tolerance for doing the same thing over and over again i i've cued on average more than once a day for the past couple years yeah that's a lot of cube yes yes you know i'm i'm not i'm not bored of it i would love if you ask me hey we've got seven in the queue do you want to join it but yeah i mean you know totally so i think for me it's whatever my particular makeup with the way my brain works is i am comfortable and happy doing the same things for a long period long time and i have a very high tolerance for this um i'm the same i think it's how you're built i think you should take breaks though if if it you know for for joshua if it's if it's feeling heavy you should take that break uh not everybody's built quite like that um bits and wolf says do either of you enjoy the outdoors hiking camping fishing boating whatever i'm plugging and getting away from the daily grind if you do what are some a memorable trip you've been on yeah dude i yes i love i i used to do even more of it um but i love it i i would go hiking by myself i'd go i got a whole setup i would stay the night up there i would do photography i've done i've hiked mountains around here like done like rock climbing and stuff like that back in the day uh with a friend of mine that i used to work with um i spent the night at the top of a mountain in one of those little lookout things which was probably not the best idea it was unbelievably cold uh more colder than we thought it would be um but we somehow survived it yeah i've done a ton i i love the outdoors yeah i i also love the outdoors and do less of it than i would like um i i used to do a ton of solo hikes here in denver the flat irons in shatako were one of my favorite hikes just really beautiful by boulder i don't because of the kids now and similarly unplugging isn't really a thing that exists for me i can't just turn off my phone at pretty much any time and just like you know disappear but that's fine i i'm really not unhappy about it at all i love my life a lot um so right now my taking the dog out on the walk is like a big you know a good way to get exercise uh the kids do they have me hustling plenty we actually uh me and the two older kids we we play dnd dungeon but not not really because like the youngest can't he can't read yet you know and we're we're basically playing like pretend fighting in the basement but i'm narrating an adventure and they make choices and they run around and they have a little camp and like you know it's kind of like i'm easing them in it's my secret plan that when they're old enough the older ones see she's almost 10 cheek actually could just straight up play but we'll just actually have a dnd game and they'll play it and i'll run it and so i'm i'm kind of priming them for that but um okay i when i was younger also i was in the boy scouts i i me and my dad and my brother would go backpacking every year one of my favorite trips was went to the filmon to big boy scout camp in new mexico huge camp like it's 100 many hundreds of square miles and did like a two week backpacking trip and it was just incredible so i love that stuff it's just a little harder for me to get away quite as much as this all right one more question speaking of dungeons and dragons this is louise's burrito dilemma after a long session of drafting with bk a primal hunger only galta understands overcomes louise only a massive burrito will satisfy local burrito shop only takes cash looking at his wallet louise finds 20 and sets out with bk on the way to the burrito shop bk makes a quick pivot and stops at a garage sale interested but hungry louise gets out to look almost immediately he comes across a battered shoe box that says $15 or best offer inside are a bunch of magic cards a quick look reveals the holy grail these cards are from alpha and beta and they are definitely mint power nine narrowly avoiding hyperventilation louise takes the box up to the checkout table or a little old woman with a kind count and says what you got there dearie do you one tell the sweet old woman that she what she's got in the shoe box two give her the 15 bucks and try to walk away as calmly as possible to the car three offer her $10 so you can still get the burrito you know the crumb the crumb and agonist game of the pretty good little scene here i i wouldn't do that third that's just that's just pushing it um so i've been in similar situations before i i i if it's someone who i think should know what they're doing like a k a not a little old lady who doesn't know what she's got i'll just buy the cards it like i i i remember at one like a magic convention many many years ago this guy was selling like beta dual ends for like way too prunish should it's like that's not my problem you're you have a collection you're at a magic convention you know you set the price i'm gonna accept it if i'm at a garage sale i found $10,000 worth of cards listed for $10 in my advanced age at this point i would probably tell them and and not just just shark them when i was younger i probably would have as 18 years old there's just no shot i would just be like wow what a good what a deal i got you know i got lucky yeah it kind of depends if the person's like a jerk or something then i would be less inclined to help them out if there's someone it's like oh these are my son's cards you know and i'm like okay i would feel too bad then that wouldn't be that wouldn't be cool okay well if you do leave with them there's a bonus question you send in all the cards to get graded dreaming of all the burritos you can buy with the proceeds after a week you get an email back from the grader all the cards are fake do you one confront the sweet the now now it has quotes on it sweet old woman about the scam she's running two try to sell the cards on ebay or three laugh about it and realize a burrito in a hand is worth more than two in the bush oh i was laughing about it if you have so $15 like they they got you that you know fair play at that point all right thanks for all the great questions for everybody from our patreon if you were to find it as patreon.com slash limited resources that's going to do it for this one we want to thank ultimate guard for their support of the show you can find us on social media uh marshall underscore lr and louise is lsv pretty much everywhere and you can find everything related to the podcast at lrcast.com including louise's first ever and every episode he's ever been off uh on the podcast going back 12 years now my god um anyway that's lrcast.com that's going to do it for this one we will see you next week all right not to disappoint but this show is basically alongside now so we're going to call it here because i do got a run yes yes a couple extra questions you can take it from here if you want more all right i got a bounce all right see louise all right so louise is gone but maybe i could okay i have i have one louise story i can tell everybody will believe it but we were out at breakfast with the whole channel fireball team and i was doing coverage and i joined up with them for breakfast and the lady was bringing out all the food and you know so oh somebody got the eggs whatever and the thing here and then um and louise got his breakfast and he's eating it and you know it's always like this rush before a tournament and it's like oh when do we need to be on the side and how are we getting there and you know that whole kind of you just want to get to where you need to be so you don't miss the first draft and i needed to work and all that kind of stuff and and and then the lady came out and was like i have an extra dish like somebody there's a breed like a breakfast burrito and louise just goes who who the hell would order an extra breakfast burrito like we all have our our full breakfast in front of us and she's like i don't she's like somebody ordered it and he's like yeah it was me literally order an entire extra breakfast burrito to like eat on the way to the to the convention center and uh of course nobody was surprised all right that'll do it for this and we'll see you next time