Limited Resources 841 - LSV Returns and of Course Talks About Cube!

What is up everybody? Welcome to another episode of Limited Resources. This episode number 841. My name is Marshall. I'm one of your limited resources and joining me on the line all the way from Denver, Colorado, it's Luis Scott Vargas. Luis, welcome back. You're still among the living. Yeah, yeah. No, it was a tough stretch. I don't know what you guys mentioned on the show, but basically one of the twins, our youngest daughter, she had to go to the hospital with RSV and then it kind of turned into, or not turned into, but also led to pneumonia. So it was about a week and change hospital stay. It was actually worse because we got discharged and then we're back there within eight hours because we didn't know about the pneumonia and she woke up breathing poorly. So it was super stressful, scary, exhausting, all those things, but we made it through just in time for more kids to get sick. Things are good now. For the first time in months, honestly, like three weeks or something, both twins are in daycare at the same time, so I can get back to work. But it's just that part and parcel with the whole business. And as it turns out, the more kids you have, the more likely it is that one of them would get sick. It's not linear because one of them could get something, give it to another kid, even if the first kid wasn't really going to get sick. So it is. Are you rethinking ordering up twins at this point? No, when we were doing a request for twins, we didn't think about this part. Yeah, this wasn't on the radar. But like I said, everyone's good now, so I'm really glad to be back. Yeah, that's great. We're super happy to have you back, Luis. And we decided that in honor of your triumphant return to the show, we would talk about your favorite thing ever, which is Cube. We get to talk about Cube today. Yeah, you know, we've been, Luis and I have been kicking it around. And you know, we've talked about Cube before on the podcast quite a bit because it is our favorite way to play limited. But also, you know, it's relevant to our audience in the sense of we want people to explore, find this out. And, you know, a good chunk of our audience does play Cube in some form. But that was then this is now now all of a sudden Cube is in the rotation on arena in addition to on Magic Online. So it is much more ubiquitous than it used to be. And that means, you know, that we want to actually push even further in that direction rather than having it just be, you know, something that we kind of do, you know, maybe a show for us kind of vibe or, you know, we'll talk about Cube every once in a while. We want to have it be part of our more regular rotation because I think that what's going to happen now for the most part is that we will be playing the main set. For example, we were playing Laurel and Eclipse still still am to an extent. But then when the Cube comes out on arena, you know, it's like, okay, am I going to stick with the current release set for now? Or am I actually going to jump over and play some Cube? Or maybe I'm going to mix the two together. And we want to reflect that because we think that a lot of our audience is going to be doing something similar to that as well. And so we're going to be diving into Cube even more often than we used to, because it's kind of, it's funny enough, it's probably the set that is the most available now. It went from the least, right, to now it's every cycle we see it, right? Where that's not true for any other set. Evergreen set. Yeah, at this point, like it's not literally always up. But to kind of give you an example, the reason we actually have the draft server besides wanting to do team drafts, which are intrinsically very, very fun, is so that we could play Cube when Cube wasn't up. Or actually, we actually could use more people on the draft server. So if you if you want to draft with me, just send me a DM on Twitter or discord, I'm dot LSV on discord. And I'll send you an invite. There's been a few people there because now Cube is on Magic Online Arena basically all the time. And I think that's awesome. I'm not complaining by any stretch. I actually really love that Cube is becoming more of a focal point for just Magic as a whole. And that makes me really excited about it. It doesn't mean we're going to do a bit more Cube content here. And just even looking at like the LRK subreddit, which is one of our ways we gauge what's going on with the show, I would say in the last week, I don't know, more than half the posts, at least half the posts have been about Cube as opposed to ECL. So I think that there's clearly a demand for it. And honestly, Cube, I think is the best way to play Magic. I'm not saying you can't have a different opinion, but I put a lot of magic in a lot of different ways and Cube scratches like all the itches for me. It's like it's pseudo constructed in that you can like build these actual like specific decks that you're trying to build. It's definitely limited. You care about what you open. The gameplay is so novel. That's like the strongest selling point for me. Every Cube game is a little bit different, or some are a lot different. There's just crazy plays you make in Cube that you wouldn't make otherwise. Like for example, I had a game. Is this you're going to talk about Heartless Act? No, but that actually was one that I was like, Oh my God, I've never seen that creature. And they played the wandering emperor and put a plus and plus encounter encounter my heartless act of bloom. I was like, I was like, I've never seen that deck. Anyway, what were you going to say? Well, what I was going to say is I had a game where I attacked with Goldspan Dragon and then post combat, I cast Pyrokinesis targeting my Goldspan Dragon and targeting their Pyrogoyf, but it didn't kill their Pyrogoyf, but it put the fifth card in my graveyard to bring back Flage, which then killed the Pyrogoyf because I exiled my whole graveyard and I had exactly enough mana because I use Pyrokinesis as a ritual on my Goldspan. That's so cool. That's just such a cool play. And I just think Cube is great. I mean, if you're listening to the podcast and are on decided, hopefully this sells you on it. Now it's on arena. It's just the barrier to entry is just not that high. You should get busy cubing or get busy dying. It's just great. Yeah, it really is. And we also just love it here and we're kind of evangelists for it too because of what Louise just said. So yeah, we're going to be talking about it. And this episode, we are going to be talking about Cube. Before we do, we did want to say thank you to each and every person who supports us over on Patreon. It's patreon.com slash limited resources and it's a way to directly support your favorite content creators. You get a thank you card and a sticker in the mail if you support us there. And we just want to say thanks to everybody who does so. We also want to say thank you to Ultimate Guard. They make the best stuff in the business. If you're looking to protect your cards, your decks and your collection, Ultimate Guard is where you want to go. They have, you know, everything from, you know, individual card protection, like sleeves all the way up to binders, backpacks and things for your collection, as well as deck boxes and stuff in between. They use premium products, premium materials for their products, really well designed and some cool crossovers with different IPs as well. You can check out their full line of products at ultimateguard.com. If you want to pick something up, you can get it from your favorite online retailer or local game store. Thank you, Ultimate Guard. We do appreciate it. We've got a Patreon question of the week here. I like this question a lot. It's from Bits of Wolf who asks, how do you know when to play a counterspell? Lorwin Limited has been a slower format and has a few counterspells, but I never feel confident in my choice of when to play them. Do I play them at the first chance of getting something decent or do I wait for my opponent to play a bomb? And leaving up mana each turn has a cost associated with it too, says Bits of Wolf. How do you approach that, Luis? It's an open-ended kind of broad question, but, you know, is there any framework that you could apply to it? Yeah, I would say in general, the short answer is, if you have mana up for a counterspell and they play any card that's somewhat reasonable, you should probably counter it. And that's obviously a little bit unfortunate where it's like, okay, you're supposed to snap it off. And the answer is, yeah, you kind of are. You just can't really afford to be leaving mana up and not using it, but that changes the more knowledge you have. And this is where I miss playing a little bit more, Best of Three, where in a post-board game, if you know that they have like a rise of sozen right in Avatar, well, yeah, you're probably not going to want to use your counterspell on there, that kind of random fordrop. And in fact, that would even lead you to not leaving counterspell up until the turn where they could play the card you really want to counterspell. And, you know, that's the sort of thing you kind of have to think about. But it depends a lot on the counter, the cheaper the counter, the more time you have to kind of wait. Like you don't have, you can be a little bit more selective. An expensive counter, especially like an expensive counter that draws a card like, or in the case of like Lauren Eclipse, like the Una card that lets you, the counters and makes a one-on-flyer. Like that card costs four mana. If they play a card that just like a three-three, I'll probably counter it and make a one-on-flyer. Like you're not, you're not just leaving four mana for nothing. But I would say counters are at their best when you have a little bit of knowledge about that, what they've got going on. So you kind of know what to save it for. But also modern limited is such that you're really just going to be casting it on like the first available target, 85% of the time to just throw a random number out there. And then when it comes to, to talk about cube for a second, when you have a counter, like a mana drain where you get mana for equal to the cost, like when I leave managing up on turn two, I'm countering when they, when they pay three mana for a card, I'm countering it, even if it's the worst card in the world. Like, you know, they're playing, they're playing something extremely mediocre and you're just like, yeah, well, I'm going to manage it so I can play my five or six drop on my turn. Likewise, the barrier for using like a remand or reprieve, pretty low, they cycle, you get a card back, like just make, just, just cast it, you know? But I just think in magic across all formats, unless you've got another instant to play, when you leave mana for a counter, they play a card, just play the counter. You don't, you don't have to think too deeply about it. They does want it, one of the strengths of having instant speed cards though. Let's say you have, you know, consult the star charts in your hand. Well, now you don't have to just snap off your counterspell on their card. If their card is weak, cast your four mana draw to, and then deal with their card some other way and still have a counter spell up. So there is a pretty big strength. I remember really loving having like Jace's ingenuity plus a expensive counters back in like that core set where it was like five mana draw three instant speed. You'd leave up mana for a variety of things and they would maybe not want to play into it. And you're just like, okay, and turn Jace's ingenuity and then they feel pretty punished. Totally. Yeah. The only time, I agree, the modern landscape kind of dictates that you really just kind of fire it off. You don't have a lot of time to just leave mana up. But if the only time when it does get kind of more interesting as far as being able to actually turn down things to counter is in the very late game, right? Where you really can narrow down exactly what matters, right? It's like this, there's only a few types of cards that I really care about at this point. And this is where people are often drawing cards that aren't really meant for that stage of the game. You know, you find your like efficient little two drop or whatever. Well, it's turn nine, you know, that's probably outclassed by what's just on the battlefield already. And you certainly don't need to feel compelled to counter that type of thing. Your opponent plays a Raghavan on turn seven. Yeah, you don't really need to counter it. Right. You're going to wait to see if they've got a Glorbringer or something. Right. That's under the assumption that games go along, of course. But anyway, thanks for the question, Fitz. Well, if we do appreciate it. So, Luis, let's do a crack a pack for the cube. And then I've got a bunch of questions to ask you about kind of the current state of things with the cube and also just how cube works now is specifically the arena cube, especially for people that are having their first main experiences with cube with this arena cube that's only been out for a few months now. You know, I'd like to try to get them up to speed. And then, of course, we had always nudge anybody who's on the fence about trying out cube, you know, to do so. And some of these questions will hopefully make them a little more comfortable. Then we've also got some individual card discussion just to go deep on it for for our cube heads out there that are, you know, in the trenches as we are with the cube. I've just got a bunch of like, what does Luis think about this card type stuff? And we can talk about those as well. But let's get into our crack a pack. Our first card out is ephemerate. This is a card I think could just be cut from the cube. The best use case for ephemerate is blinking something like solitude or fury or a quantum riddler, like something you're like kind of cheating into play that would otherwise die and then you get to ephemerate it. It can be pretty strong with like eternal witness as well. But I would say based on my data from the cube that I run, this card really doesn't get played very much. And then on arena, I have not put it in my deck and I have not seen anyone play it, except maybe once or something. Yeah. Like so I obviously wouldn't take the card, but even more than that, I think I would just cut it from the cube. It just doesn't really do the thing. Yeah, I think that the two things that stand out about ephemerate are one, what deck has room for a card like that, right? When all your creatures have good ETBs or do the thing that they're doing, you know, you don't feel as much pressure to try to like do like a high leverage play where you're really going over the top with one of them. It's like if you have quantum riddler in your deck and you play it, it's like it's doing the thing that you wanted it to do anyway. Same thing with, you know, the evoked cards that you were mentioning. Yeah, you can do something cool like a combo, but it's also a high risk combo and these cards are just good on their own. So you don't really feel compelled. So it rarely makes the cut even if you have a deck that it would be pretty good and you're like, eh, I'm just going to play another one of those types of creatures and just kind of bury my opponent rather than taking on this risk. And then the other thing is from a vibes perspective, I have been hit by ephemerate a couple of times where I, you know, my opponent kind of got me with it, but it's very much in the camp of like, I'm like, really? Like you had the effect. Okay, I guess, I guess this, you know, you got me, right? But like the vibe in the back of my head is you probably shouldn't have that card in your deck, right? Like, I'm going to get you on that a lot of the times too. And yeah, so I agree with you. I think if it was taken out of the queue, it would be just fine. Next up is Astrologian's Planosphere. That's the one in a blue equipment with job select equipped to and whenever you cast a non-creature spell, you put a plus on plus on counter on the wizard that it comes with. Yeah, this card is solid. I tend to play it in like the blue red tempo style decks or an artifact deck sometimes. And I find that it can do the job. Like, it's not an incredible card, but it's a card I play a decent amount. Just because it puts two things on the board, it can grow pretty rapidly. Like you use this with like a taxing pro or pre-ordined all of a sudden, you've got a 5-5 pretty quickly. Like there's a lot you can do. So I have it in the same, like I, for whatever reason, I just end up comparing it to Corey Steelcutter mentally a lot. And I really like Corey Steelcutter and Planosphere. I'm like, sure. Right. Like if I need a two in that deck or if I need a little bit more of a payoff for casting a bunch of, you know, bobbles and stuff like that or whatever, then I'll play it. But like I really like Corey Steelcutter and Planosphere is kind of a shrug. Yeah, Corey Steelcutter is amazing. I think the card is fantastic. Yeah. I agree that Planosphere is not the same thing. Yeah. And I just, I don't know why, but I kind of bucket them together. Like they go in the same deck. Well, they're very similar cards for sure. Yeah. Next is Fairy Mastermind. Is Fairy Mastermind still good enough for the cube? Yeah. I think Fairy Mastermind is fine. I think it enables, the best thing it does is enable Fallen Shinobi and Kaito just as ninjas. But it's also pretty good at just being a good, like again, blue-red or blue-white tempo style card. There's some games that it can be really annoying for your opponent. Yeah, for sure. You know, you play a fable and they play a Fairy Mastermind. You're like, I guess I don't really want to discard or like you cast a Priirdane on turn two when they're on the play and then snap in Fairy Mastermind. So I wouldn't take it here. I would hope to take it a little later, but it's, I don't think it's a bad card. I agree. And also, it does fill that role that you mentioned before about being able to keep up a counterspell or a threat. That's really nice. Next is FOMO, Fear of Missing Out. Yeah, a solid role player. You can play this card in pretty much any like red aggro deck or in reanimator or sometimes in like blue-red if you want to like fill the graveyard a bit. It's nothing, again, nothing special, but it's a reasonable card for sure. Pest Infestation. I do like this one. This one I would consider taking, this is one of the best green cards. I think that Pest Infestation and like Malevolent Rumble, Oko, Minskin Boo are like some of the better green cards, Titania I love as well. And Pest Infestation is really splashable. So I would prefer not to be first picking it, but it's a card I don't mind taking. Let's say I have all like blue and red or blue and white cards. I'll still just take a Pest Infestation a lot of the time. Yeah, this is one of those cards that provides an effect that is very difficult to replace in the cube. You know, there are board states, particularly board states, the Louise finds himself having a lot, that really can't be beaten by much else outside of Pest Infestation because, you know, they knock out multiple artifacts at once and really can kind of swing a game that was out of hand back in the other direction. You know, the other one is the, what's it called the red, you know, fiery confluence. Yeah, fiery confluence, right? Those are the two cards that are just like, oh man, I thought I was doing fine and now I'm not. Yeah, Pest Infestation can be brutal. Sometimes you cast it for five mana and you kill like a Cori Steel Cutter and a Mox. Right. And they put four one ones into play. It is just just incredible. So it's also decent. I'm a big Pest Infestation fan. This is where I'd be out right now, even if I would again prefer not to be first making Pest Infestation. It's totally doable. Next one is Aang Swift Savior and that's the one blue, white, two, three, Flash Flying Aang. I think this card is okay. It's a little worse than it reads. It reads like, oh yeah, this is going to be a nice little like tempo card. It can be kind of like a Spell Queller, you know, Venser sort of deal. But there are times when spending only two mana is just not that bad. So like, it's quite a bit worse than like, I've ventured your five drop and now you've spent five mana. You've spent two mana. Right. That being said, it's a pretty flexible card. Flipping it can be pretty, pretty powerful. I think overall Aang is a card I would play in a blue, white deck, but I would not typically go out of my way to pick it early. Yeah. So that's where I'm at on Aang as well. Next up is the Mitestone and Weekstone. Where is this fit? You're kind of the artifact master. Where does this go? Well, it goes in artifacts. It's a... Does it? Like, does it make the cut? You know what I mean? Yeah, I would say it usually does. The strongest thing to do with it usually is Michel's Workshop because it's pretty good at doing that. And then there's like a lot of ways to turn Mitestone and Weekstone mana into like relevant mana. Candelabra, you can spend mana to untap your lands. It basically completely color washes it. It's good with like retrofitter. It's good at casting artifacts. You know, it's good with Sensei's Top currency, Convert all those things. And I would say that overall Mitestone and Weekstone is a card I wouldn't typically be looking to take early, but this is the kind of card I want to wheel it when I'm drafting artifacts, especially as a way to be like, oh, artifacts is open. I would like to... This is the kind of card I would definitely like to pick up. If you have not a lot of mana generation, it can be a little worse, like no workshop, no academy sort of thing. But even if like Manavall, Grim Monolith, or, you know, some Talismans, it can be fine. But this is a pretty archetype-specific card. I would generally not play this card out of actual artifacts. Odawara, Soaring City. I never seem to get this card. I like it. I think it's totally fine. But I guess I don't prioritize it or something. I almost never end up with it in my list. Yeah, you might want to take it like a little bit higher than you currently are, but it's still, I think, pretty good. It's still fine if you don't take it all the time, but I like the card. I would generally tend to take it around, you know, six to eighth pick, something like that, maybe a little bit later, depending on what's going on. And it's so free. It's a land that lets you get to use it as a bounce spell without having to do anything else. It's straight up is just like... It just asks nothing. Yeah. This card does exactly what you want it to do and it always works. So I think that, and sometimes you cast it for like, or use it for like two, two, three mana, it's good with currency converter. Yeah, so this is a card, a mid-pick card if you're blue, that I think is pretty solid. This next one is cool. This cycle of lands, I don't know if they have a nickname, but I've been really impressed by them. I think they're a cool addition. This is Gloom Lake Verge. This is the one that taps for blue or it taps for black, but only if you control an island or swamp. Yeah, these are good. They're solid. Verges. I mean, they're all verges. Just call the verges, sure. Yeah. Yeah. They, you know, the fact that it's primary blue is pretty good. That's something that you're generally more interested in. And so these work out pretty nicely. They're a little lower priority, of course, than fetches and duels and all that stuff. But I still think overall that they end up playing out quite well. I tend to stack them well against this next type of card, which is inspiring vantage, like a fast land. This land airs tapped unless you control two or fewer other lands, but it's a duel. This one happens to be white and red. But, you know, there's a cycle of these in the cube. And I like the verges better. Yeah, I think that the verges, the fact that you can put this in a heavy blue deck and know it's all going to be an untapped island is a pretty strong part. Right. Right. I mean, I think, you know, maybe in this particular case, inspiring vantage, you know, that one, it does perform very well in the archetype that it goes in, right? Because you're just a little deck dependent for sure. Yeah. Like boros would rather have inspiring vantage than Sunbilo Verge, I would say, just because it's a lot of its games concentrated in the first couple of turns. But like a blue green deck might want, you know, the Verge. And there are some blue black decks that want dark six shores and some that would rather have the Verge. It really kind of depends what your mana situation looks like. How many duresses do you have in your deck? You know, how many black one drops where dark six shores is going to be a lot better versus are you a heavy blue deck with a mystic confluence and cryptic command and you just untapped blue at any point is a lot stronger. This next card is one that I have a question for you later so we can go deeper into the broader implications of it. But Field of the Dead. Get this thing out of the queue. This thing is overstated. It's welcomed by so much. Field of the Dead is just complete garbage. There's no, you know, no way around it. Like I knew you were going to pop off on it. Yeah, it's terrible. No one puts it in their deck and except when people do, they lose. So yeah, don't put this, don't play this card. Yeah, I think, I think this card is horrendous. You know, I take 17 lands data with a grain of salt for sure, but I just out of curiosity, let me see, I have to scroll pretty far to find it. Oh no. Field of the Dead currently is yeah, 47% or something like that. Oh, that's really bad. Well, spoiler alert for the question I have for you later, I guess. Next up is lingering souls. Has lingering souls also lingered too long in the cube or is it still something you wanted there? No, I literally have that as a list on the list of the cards I wanted to talk about to talk about how good it is. It's, I'm not saying the card is busted, nor would I want to take it on like kind of the first time I see it. Usually I like to wheel it or take it later in the pack, but I think the card's actually a little bit underrated. It's not great in every matchup. When you're playing against a combo deck and they have a lingering souls, you know, or you have a lingering souls, you're like, okay, well, this isn't really doing much for me. But sort of mid-range matchup against control against aggro. Lingering souls is kind of a game breaker. It's just really hard to compete against lingering souls in a way that, you know, doesn't go badly for you. And you start combining it with skull clamp or ninjas or anything like that. And yeah, you're really talking. Do you ever play it like if you can't cast the front end, like just as like a discard and I'm going to flash it back? Like a black red deck or something? Right, exactly. I played it in a deck that has very few ways to cast it. Okay. But I don't typically play it in a deck like literally zero. You'd have to have like a obscene amount of discard for that to be good. But yeah, I mean, it totally functions though. What about mom, mother of runes? This is a great card. This actually is a card I think you could legitimately first pick from this pack. My guess is mother of runes and pest infestation are pretty close. And that's to some degree, like what is your color preference? I think mother of runes is very, very good. The thing about mother of runes is when you cast it on turn one, if your opponent doesn't have a way to kill it, you're just getting a two for one. Yes. Lock it in. Pretty much no matter what. The only way you're not getting a two for one exactly is if they're playing a deck that doesn't care about it, like they're just comboing and going over the top or they have like a sweeper. But in most matchups, it's like, yeah, at some point, this is going to have to eat two removal spells like in order or you get to use it in an advantageous combat and then it's a removal spell and you still kind of got a two for one. So yeah, I think mother of runes is fantastic. I gladly take mother of runes early in a pack. I also think it's great with a lot of the stuff that I really like doing like lures, for example. Yeah, for sure. Mother of runes protecting lures is quite strong. What about him to Turok? Him is a good card that mostly suffers from not being easy to cast. Obviously, that's the whole joke. Not really having a home. Yeah. So if you have the mana, if you have 10, 11 black sources, a lot of them are untapped, yeah, then I will put him in my deck a lot of the time, but I would say in general, this card goes pretty late for a reason. It's just hard to actually utilize. A lot of decks just can't end up playing it. It can be really good though. You know, I've been experimenting with mono black in the queue. What's that looked like? Well, it's been interesting because it doesn't look how a normal mono black deck would look where you get payoffs in two ways. Normally, one of them is cards like him to Turok, which become, you know, easy to cast versus quite difficult. Maybe even something that would have like a triple black, you know, would be a typical thing you'd see not in this queue, but, you know, in prior versions. And then you'll usually get something, you know, like gray merchant or some type of payoff that just, you know, counts the number of swamps you have or the number of black pips you have or something that does that. And those also aren't here. So there's no obvious pull to be mono black in this cube that's just like, you know, the clean, like if you're mono black, this card's amazing. And if not, it's not, that isn't really the thing. I kind of fell into it and thought, well, I'll just give it a shot. I guess it was, I just kept on taking black cards. They were open. I had him and stuff like that. And I was like, all right, well, let's just give this a shot. But I ended up having a bunch of very mediocre looking cards in there, you know, Cecil and grave, graveyard trespasser, whatever it's called, you know, just stuff that I'm just not really that interested in in the cube. And then I trophied with it. And I was like, okay, I mean, having good man is good, right? And a curve and like it just kind of made it easy to just play everything out. And so I tried it again, and I got to six wins. And then I tried it again, this is three in a row, by the way. And then I tried it, I was forcing it, I was just like, well, let's just see what's here, you know, taking one for the team. And, and I got a trophy with that one too. So seven wins, six wins, seven wins, which is definitely above my average. There's I think there's some meat on the bone. I don't think it's obvious. They all look the same, by the way, they all have those mediocre cards in there. I was playing May, scornful, whatever, you know, scornful striker. That's a card. I'm not sure really where that fits in. But I guess this this deck would be it. You know, it actually is. Yeah, I think that there's just enough there where it gets interesting, you know, you, you get to play these cards that don't have an obvious synergies with each other. But I think they actually do mesh together in ways that get really annoying for the opponent. You know, little things like may, you know, adding up against the decks that are trying to do thing, thing, thing, thing, thing, thing, and then not affecting you quite as much. And then, you know, Cecil, not a not a great magic card in the cube, right? But like it kind of does hit hard. And it, you know, combo with May. Yeah. And it's a combo with May at some point. And when it flips, you know, you flip it early and all that. And it's a pretty annoying card on the board. Okay. Trespasser. Well, it turns out like basically every deck cares about the graveyard, but like not that many decks want to put cards in their deck that are just like graveyard specific only type stuff. And then maybe they don't want to go mediocre enough to play cards like Trespasser. And you're like, okay, well, it actually does affect the game pretty meaningfully every time. And it's like pile up a bunch of those. And it, I feel like the suite of black cards in this cube are well suited to play against the types of decks that you typically see in the cube. You know, I mean, I mean, discard and removal are good across a pretty wide range of types. And black does have some card advantage, you know, Caustic Bronco, Dark Confidant. I'm playing all of those, all of them. Yeah. I'm bride to Bronco. Part advantage. Yeah. Grief, you know, stuff like that starts to become like a lot better over time. So I don't know. I, I'm not blown away by it, although I was blown away by the results. So still, still the, the jury's out, I would say, but kind of interesting. I think there might actually be a deck there. Our last card by the way in the crack pack, maybe the best one actually, Manileek. Oh yeah. Manileek's great. I would be pretty happy to take Manileek generally. I think that, I think that Manileek is the fact that it's easily castable and it is a good base skin at every, every matchup means that I would just take Manileek here, even if, even if it's not, you know, not the most powerful pest infestation is a little bit more powerful. I think Manileek is just so important. Like you're just always happy with a Manileek in your deck and it can go in almost every deck. Obviously, you're not always going to get to play it, but I would say that Manileek is pretty easy to fit in. So yeah, Manileek looks good to me. I also would be taking Manileek here. Plus, I don't think it would be crazy to take Mother of Runes here still, but if that's your preference especially, but I think that, yeah, I think I would take Manileek. Okay. So I'm going to put a link to the cube list for the Arena Powered Cube from Cube Cobra that we have here. So this is for anybody who hasn't seen the most recent build or just wants to kind of browse the cards, it'll be in the show notes there and you can take a look and just as a reference. But I've got questions for you, Luis. These are again, kind of conversation starter type questions, but we'll let them go wherever they want. How close is the current Arena Powered Cube to a quote, normal vintage cube right now? Effectively identical. Like it's not literally the same thing. There are some omissions or just like cards that aren't on Arena though, they've really closed the gap on that. Through the breach, for example, because it has splice onto Arcane is just not in the cube, but I think it could be, I think it's fine to not have it in, but it would be nice because that I think that archetype could use a little help. I'll tell you, I do miss that card. Yeah, no, it matters. And then there are some odds and ends, but I would say that it's just a completely legitimate vintage cube experience. I don't see them being different. They made some changes after the first iteration, mostly seemed around Nerfing Boros, which had kind of an outsized wind. Yeah, that was definitely like the biggest thing that they did. Yeah, did it work? Yeah, I would say so. I don't see tons of Boros. You play against it still. It's still a good deck, but it's definitely a step below the like, if you're playing against Boros, 40 to 50 percent of the matches and you lose to it a lot. It's gotten weaker and therefore has gotten less numerous though. It's still there and it's still good. I don't think Boros is bad by any stretch, which is a good thing. Right? I think we all agree. I think they really nailed it. Yeah, I do too. I was I'm really impressed with the surgical precision, which with the, you know, that they took to Boros because I really was was a little concerned that they would overdo it. And I really don't even mind if Boros is near the top of the list or even the best deck in the cube. I like that a, it's an on ramp for new players to give them a handhold on a creature based deck that, you know, is a little more easy to understand, you know, how to draft it and what to do with it so that they can start, you know, everybody has to start somewhere in the cube before you start to find archetypes that are a little more nuanced or difficult to play or, you know, that type of thing. So I like that part. And if they just made it disappear, I actually really like that it's kind of, you know, we call it the fun police, right? Where like there's a deck that kind of keeps the dumb, dumb decks in check. I like that. I know it sounds weird because I'm a person who is more likely to play one of the dumb decks than Boros. But, you know, to me, it doesn't really count, right? It's like, remember, they had that other cube on arena where you could just do whatever you wanted. What was it? The chromatic cube or whatever, you know, and, and like, that was kind of dumb fun. But like that got old really quickly. And one of the reasons that I really like vintage cube is because if you pull off like a really great storm deck, it's hard. Like that is not easy to do. It's not like everybody's doing that. If you put together some, it almost never happens. It almost never happens. Kind of a loser of an art. Storm's kind of bad. Yeah. That was true in vintage cube last 10 years. Sure. I don't think anyone ever really thought storm was like a good deck or like, obviously it's very fun and there's reasons to play it and it can be impressive. But generally, I would say storm is not where you want to be. I agree. I mean, give me a better example of a deck, you know, that's that that you feel like you kind of pat yourself on the back and say, like, I put together the pieces I played well, you know, and I got this deck across the finish line, you know, where if there is no aggressive deck in the format, kind of everybody's doing that, you know what I mean? It's like that that's the thing that I don't like is if it all feels like everybody's just drafting five color piles or everybody's just going for these combo decks and there's no, you know, check and balance on that. That's why I like boros to be good in the cube. And it still is when I play face that it's like, okay, here we go, you know, buckle up, but it's just not all the time, like you said, Louis. So great job to them for for really appropriately nerfing boros. They could have overdone it and kind of just wiped it off the face of the planet. And I don't think that would have been good for the cube at all. So great job. This cube is powered, meaning that it has specifically the power nine and then a lot of times we'll add what's it called on there to not man of all or mana crypt. There we go. And soul ring. So maybe power 11, you know, it would be a little more appropriate or do you take twister out? Like, I don't know. I was gonna say, I would say like a lot of people would I think appropriately discount time twister, like I think at this point. Okay, so power is a good card. I don't mind, I don't mind taking it early. In fact, I've frequently take it when it's offered to me in the pack. But you don't when you open a time twister, you don't feel like you open to piece of power. It's not a mox, you know, right, right. So if we consider we'll call it the power 10 minus twister plus crypt plus soul ring. We we know that at least that that the arena cube is set up so that only one of those gets open in a pack and there's no duplicates right from circuit was true. I don't know that that we can say that that's true anymore. Oh, really? Well, that was circumference based his data off of the last iteration of cube, not this iteration of cube. But they may have changed it. I see. I will say that it seems that like it used to be that the power was always the same kind of the same place in the pack and now it can be anywhere in the pack. You mean visually? Yeah. Okay. So that that could be an indication that they moved away from like having a slot for power. But I also have an open double power in a packet. So I couldn't say. Yeah. But but I mean, that's kind of kind of immaterial, ultimately. Yeah. So my question is actually more about how often do you pass non twister power in the cube and what would be the reason to do this? Because I have still had I am assuming that that that structure is still in place because I also assume you can only open one and never more than one. Yeah. So what's your how do you approach that? Is it just a mistake? Are you do you feel compelled to take the non twister power cards that we said? Or are there actually legit situations where you'd pass it? Pick one pack one. I don't think you should ever pass a piece of power. I just don't think that there's cards that are better than that. I think that if you are in a later pack, yeah, there's totally reasons to do it. Like imagine you had LED and brain freeze, and you open underworld breach and mox pearl. Well, often should just take underworld breach there. And that's one of the things that actually makes individual drafting quite a bit different than team drafting in a team draft. It's really hard to pass a mox in that situation, even if it's literally better for your deck. But in an individual draft, yeah, I mean, you should generally just take the card that's best for your deck. And that's not always going to be the the piece of power. Like it mostly will be. But you know, you're you're you're drafting reanimator, you have in tune, you have reanimate, you have that, but you don't have a good creature. And you open a pack with a Troxa and Sol Ring. And it's like, well, you know, reanimator is not even that good at using Sol Ring. So like, yeah, that you could definitely engineer the situations. Generally, what I would say is it would be you're drafting a combo deck and there's a critical combo piece in the pack with a piece of power. And even then Timewalker Ancestral, a lot of the time, you probably should just take it still. In the reanimator example, more so than in the breach example, the breach example, it's pretty tough to pass breach, I would say. The only reason that you could do it is you could get greedy. You could you could take a few. If you have the other two pieces, nobody probably wants to breach, right? But right. That's a good thing. But good luck. Yeah, people take stuff in a weird way. Are there any archetypes in your mind for the current state of the Arena Power Cube that are just clearly the best? I mean, I think that Boros is still quite good. I have been finding control to be really good. And it's not just me, you know, Trollocetic. Matt, he won one of our original champs. He's a good buddy. We all chat about magic and all that stuff. He is currently number two on the ladder and has basically just been drafting control every every every draft. So we've been comparing notes. But, you know, just multicolor, not even always blue control, just like card advantage, removal, low curve, you know, all that stuff. Cheap interaction. Yeah. Cheap interaction. Luris has been really good for both me and him. Lutri is obviously amazing. Like the companions are really strong. And I think Luris is actually pretty good right now. It's a lot, you know, it's gotten worse over time, but they also took out gut and bombardiers, which are both cards that, you know, were pretty good, pretty punishing to have to not be able to take when you were a Luris deck. So like that definitely has got made that a bit stronger. Are there any archetypes that you would consider a trap right now? Like, I guess the setup for this, Luis, would be an archetype that is well supported, right? That you can tell that they've put cards in there for the archetype, but that you've kind of feel like I don't actually want to go down that road. I still think reanimator is just not that good. Like my experience drafting it and playing against it is that it's just not that strong. And it is, I just support it totally fine. It's probably the most supported, right? I mean, there's so many, I mean, there's two entombs. There's like six reanimate spells, right? I mean, this has to be probably the most supported archetype, but you actually lean it a little more towards the trappy end of things. Yeah, I just think that like, look, anime dead is a strong card. Reanimates a strong card. You're fine just playing those cards just in general. But I would say that for the most part, you shouldn't be first picking in Tomb and hoping for good things. Like I haven't found that to be great. Flash, I think it's still very good, but I don't think that's good. I think tinker is kind of bad. Like I think that it can be good, but it's the sort of thing where I have just found my win rate when tinkering for portal to Frexia is not that high. And you have to put portal in your deck, which is obviously a brick to draw really bad to draw because you can't cast it and you can no longer tinker for it. And you have to put tinker and artifacts and stuff. So I so far haven't been that impressed with tinker, even though I do like artifacts. So I will say, I actually have yet to draft artifacts in this iteration of the cube. No, maybe I drafted it once. It just hasn't really been open. It's not for a lack of wanting to. Well, you ruin that for all of us. Speaking of archetypes that I wanted to ask you if they're a trap and I'll broaden the discussion a little further out than than just field of the dead, but the lands deck, that's another one that's very well supported. There's a lot of ways to get lands back from the graveyard to give you additional land drops. And then there's some land payoffs like field of the dead, but also, you know, the go to is strip mine, of course, things like that. And then you mentioned Titania as well. There's a whole lot of cards in the cube that do care about lands. Is that a deck that you think is more on the it's a trap side or on the let's let's do it? Well, it's actually that's a that's a great question because I think it's a little bit complicated. First of all, they took out the depth stage package finally, like, which is good because that was just really bad. Like, that was a trap for sure. I've talked about it every time. I actually really like Titania. I think Titania is a very good card. And I will frequently pick up a Xeronor or Sylvan safekeeper in the hope of at some point playing a Titania or picking it up. And because I you know, that was one of the cards out of my list to talk about later, I'm just going to do it now. It's five mana, put a land into play, make a bunch of five threes if you have a one of the sack outlets, or just make one off getting like a strip miner, windswept teeth back. And that's still awesome. So I've overall been been quite impressed with with Titania. I think that it's it's a card worth going for. And I would I would generally like to keep my options open for it. I don't like a lot of the land stuff, though, I will say that like I specifically like I still explore because that lets you play an extra land of return. So I still explore plus waste and strip that pops, like you get to go real fast, you play two lands a turn. And you can play ice till without having the strip. And if you have like a fetch land, you go replay fetch mill one sack fetch mill one, like you find it pretty quickly. Ice till is excellent. Benegrade ad works really well. Romanoff excavator garbage, don't put it in your deck. Like that same thing for crucible. Yeah, I think crucible and Romanoff are both extremely mediocre. Like I I'm not saying that if I had a strip, but I wouldn't put those in my deck, but I have had strip mine and I have played those cards, and they've still been generally pretty bad. And crucible is in this version of the cube, right? Yeah, I believe so. I think it is too. So I would say overall, I think that the land's deck as like like Elvish Reclaimer, Romanoff, Fast Bond, I think generally those are losers. You shouldn't try to draft that or put in your deck high on ice till high on Titania. And you know, I've got there's some individual cards that there that can work out pretty nicely. But I would say generally you also should just not try to draft like a typical green ramp deck. I don't think those will work that well. They can. The cards that give me into green ramp are Titania or just green in general are Titania, Nadu, Mana Crypt or Sol Ring can push you into red green beats, though without gut and bombardiers, the appeal of that has gone down a lot. I actually want those cards back. I think there's other ways to make Boros a little worse if you want. Those cards are pretty sweet and pretty fun. And they go in a bunch of different decks outside of Boros. Yeah. So I like those generally. But you definitely don't want to be doing the field of the dead stuff. So you're you're more focused in on a couple of tighter packages within the land's deck. What about does that change for you if you go pack one, pick one mediocre pack, but there's a strip mine and you end up taking it? Because I've always felt like the land's deck, that one of the critiques that I have of it is that it's so well supported, but there's only one strip mine. And that is just such an important piece of the puzzle because that gives you that ability to kind of just win the game if you put together these combos. Like you said, like Ice Tail plus strip mine, or if you do the exploration or fast bond plus Romano, slash crucible plus strip mine, then it's just strip them out. You know, these are the types of things that make people just go, OK, you got me, you know, you have assembled a combo and you're dead. But you know, it's really difficult to be picking up crucible worlds if you don't have a strip mine yet, because you don't even know if you're going to get it. And a lot of decks will just pick up a random strip mine and play it. So does it change dramatically for you if I kind of gift you a pack one pick one strip mine out of a mid pack? Well, I mean, it does make it so I'm more likely to want to play this strategy, but it still doesn't make that strategy very good. OK, so you're not like green light, we're doing it. It's still kind of an uphill battle. Where do you prioritize manifesting right now? You know, the types of lands that we get in the cube are always evolving and changing. And you know, we had a kind of a big change when like triumphs came in, you know, because they're fetchable and all that. And you know, now we've got the verges in here. Like where are you at on it? Is it top priority? Does it just kind of happen naturally? Oh, it's a very high priority. I think that I view like duels and fetches as inroads into a color. Like for example, let's say you first pick that manna leak and then you second picked a fetched land like a windswept teeth. I would take tundra third and be like, this is an inroad into playing white alongside this manna leak. I see. You know. I think that fetch lands are cards I'm happy to first pick. Like obviously you want to open a piece of power, but like fetch lands are about like tier 1.5 where like there's the power at tier zero. There's cards like Orcish bowmasters or the one ring or flash, which I consider basically like tier one. Like these are the next best Minsk and Boo that sort of thing. But then fetch lands are kind of in the next category. And I would say that typically are cards that I'm just very happy to take pretty highly. They just make your deck work. And that's a pretty big game. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I also still pay a lot of attention to it, but I always wonder, does the fixing get so good at some point that it's kind of like, I don't have to prioritize this. Like this will come to me. My mana will be fine. It doesn't quite feel like that, but it does feel like it's gotten closer to that than the way it used to be. What is the card you'd most want to start a draft with assuming you're playing for like $50,000 or something where it's like, Hey, I want to use. I still think black lotus is the best pick one pack one. It's just like it's colorless. It gives you an inroad into some some pretty sick combos like the, you know, breach combo primarily. And I would say overall is just like, you can't really go wrong with it. Obviously, like, Sol Ring is great too. Time walk is great. Those are both like really good cards to build around. I'm not complaining if I open any of those cards, but I think Lotus pick one pack one is is just where you want to be. It makes like Urza Saga incredible. Luris, if you get an early Luris, Luris Lotus is just just a delight. So there's just a lot you can do. You green card seem to be lagging behind a bit in the cube. I noticed that sure. Yeah. Yeah. A lot a lot of the packs will have three, four, five green cards left in them. Is that a vibe thing or is that actually happening? And you have any thoughts on it? Like, like, do you think green sucks in the cube? Yeah. Yeah. I think green is just just worse than the other colors. Generally, I mean, not like it's not unplayable. There are some green cards that would make me want to go that direction for sure. But I would say generally, yeah, green is just not that good. Like, it's just far behind. You know, it's the Mana Dorks are okay, but they died a removal. Also a lot of cube decks. You can just make a really good deck that it goes from like one to three, just doesn't need acceleration. You go, you know, duress into Mana Leak into some, you know, three drop planes, Walker interaction of your choice. Mana fixing with fetch lands is so good that like you don't need green for fixing, which is one of the spots it occupies in a lot of formats. It, you know, they, it just doesn't have like the high end isn't even there. Like, so yeah, I think that I think that green is definitely a fair amount behind the other colors. Yeah. When you see other colors doing a better job of what green is supposed to be good at, you know, it's kind of in trouble there. That's what I think. I think black also is a little bit weaker. Like I would say that I would say that overall, like red, white and blue are the strongest. Blue has like the strongest cards for sure, especially, you know, capped with Timewalk Ancestral Force of Will. These are some pretty busted cards. Blue tends to be somewhat overdrafted. Like blue, you frequently are going to be like, oh, wow, there's no blue cards. You know, like you're not, you're not getting a six pick good blue card, whereas you could get a seven pick great block or red card or what have you. But I think that I think that the color balancing, I'm not that worried about because there's just reasons to be in every color. It's more like, where are you heading with a specific deck? What are you trying to do? Yeah. Is one for one removal still something that you prioritize, you know, sorts of plowshares, path exile, flame slash cards like that that, you know, we talk about card advantage. Good ones are good for sure. So efficiency still counts there doesn't have to be a two for one or whatever. Yeah. I think that you can you can definitely take these cards early, like especially like flame slash oused fatal push like the one man of stuff is really, really good. And you just want these these cards in your deck so that you don't lose to eternal and ragavan or Oslo or have a way to kill eternal and bird. Yeah, notice that you'll lose to rag about an Oslo pride if you don't have a removal bird, you could still you could still win. I think that you know, you look at that and it's just like part of like the tax in cube is like, if I don't have a one man or removal spell on the draw, I could really run into some problems. Right. There's some individual cards that you wanted to talk about here. Cruise dig, Oculus, Flage, or. Yeah. So the first the first group is kind of this pack of like cards that utilize your graveyard. So the delve cards, cruise and dig, Oculus, you know, a born Oculus, which also effectively delve six. And then there's Eurow and Flage. And what's similar with all of these cards is that they utilize their your cards in your graveyard. And when I'm drafting, I mean, a blue deck because these cards, all except Flage have blue in them. When I'm drafting one of these decks, if I don't have one of these cards, I actively do want the first one pretty badly. Because if you if you don't, then you're just kind of giving up some value because in the middle of the game, you're going to have six, eight cards in your deck, you know, or in your graveyard, you're going to have sometimes more, especially if you have Mishra's Bobble, Fetchlands and Priirdids and Gitaxine probes and Spellpierces and Flame Slashes, all the cards I think you should always be taking. In fact, let me just do a little tangent. I think that the the number one way to that people could improve their cube success is to just take more Fetchlands, take more dual lands, take more cheap cards. Like when I look at a deck, if it doesn't have zero mana cards, whether that be Moxes or Force of Wills or Snuffouts and one mana cards and decent like good mana like Fetchlands and duels, that that deck is just going to have trouble winning in a lot of spots. I mean, you and I probably take Bobbles higher than anybody. Yeah. Well, I think most people would would do a little better, not just if they took Bobble higher. If they took Bobble higher, it also like drafted around it a little bit more. But so that that's like a more well, there's two bobbles. Of course, you know, it's like, give me all of them. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. And and Flaj was one of the cards that I wanted to bring up. I that card is so high on my list now I will bend my mana for it. I will first pick it. I played it on the list of cards that I just get one shot at by so often all the time. Right. It's just it's like you think everything. You just think you're like, I don't know how I'm going to lose this game. And then they go, they draw and they're like, OK, Flaj, kill your thing, game three life, bring it back, kill your other thing. Now I've gained six and have a six six that when it attacks wins the game. OK, well, yeah, yeah, I guess that is going to be hard enough. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I love Flaj and it's good against everything. There's really no deck. Like it's good against control because it comes back. It's good against aggro because of the life game plus the removal early enough. Yeah, I think Flaj is the truth and it's a card I happily build around. We mentioned Corey Steelcutter before. I love Corey Steelcutter. I think this card is very good. It does, again, take the right deck if you don't have zero mana plays and a lot of one mana plays and preferably some like cantrip. So you're not just once you're done like at no cards you can never trigger it again like a boros deck. Generally should not play this card. I'm not saying put this in boros, put this in black, red. But in your like blue, red decks, when you have a Mishel's Bobble, a Gitaxian probe, Mana Morphos, Priirdane, all of these cards, I find Steelcutter to just be really good. Same. When you go turn two, Steelcutter plays zero, whether it be a Bobble or a probe or if you're lucky a mox, into make a token and attack. Often next turn, you're playing a two drop plus a one drop and attacking for five and it's like, oh, yeah, this is going to go really badly for them. Like they're very close to dead right away. It's a very, very powerful card. Those reasons have so much success in so many different constructed formats. What about Luris? You're old buddy. I love Luris. I'm obviously obsessed with Luris, but I think that if you can draft a Luris deck, often what you can end up doing is putting yourself in a position where you just trade cards with, you know, you have thought sees, you have counters, you have removal. And after trading cards a bunch of times, you just put Luris into your hand, you play it, you get back a Bobble, you get back a decent one drop. And then especially if you can protect it with, you know, either reanimates like anime dead on earth, anime dead, by the way, sick in a Luris deck, because you can play Luris and play anime dead out of your graveyard because it's a two-minute play. That's just a sick interaction. If you can protect the Luris and just get multiple uses out of it, yeah, like that pretty much does end the game. There's not much they can do at that point. Yeah, what the pattern usually ends up being play Luris, get a little bit of value, then they kill Luris. And then the question is just, can you get it back? You know, can you either protect it or get it back? And if you can, the game just kind of avalanches towards the Luris player. Lutri? Well, just one more on Luris is, and the reason that that's the pattern is because they know you have Luris. So they're going to try to save or removal spell for it. But yeah, like that a very typical kind of sequence is you go Luris, replay, you know, card whether it be a 1, 2 or 0 drop, they kill Luris. And then if you have either the force of will to protect it or you untap and you just unearth it and then replay something like that usually seals the deal. It's pretty hard to come back from that. Lutri is also really, really good. Just in general, like you should be taking it higher. I've seen Lutri go seventh, eighth pick and that I think just basically shouldn't happen because it's hybrid red blue. How many decks the table can play a Lutri? It's like six out of eight or something. Yeah, almost all of them, yeah. Seven out of eight on average, I don't know, like a very, very high amount. And then yeah, there's ways to make it better for sure, but you don't even really need to do that. Like you can just play Lutri and have it be really good. Obviously, if you're copying spells, like you have cheap spells, it's fantastic chain lightning or pre-ordain that sort of thing, ancestral or time walk, if you really are getting spicy. And then the other thing about Lutri is it enables this really good suite of pitch spells, Fury, Pyrokinesis, Subtlety, Force of Will, Force of Negation, these five spells. I have played Pyrokinesis Lutri in a deck that had no red mana, like a blue-white deck. Because it's just sitting there. Yeah, that's... It's always there. And it's obviously, you typically are going to be able to cast those cards as well. But yeah, I would say that Lutri is not only under drafted a bit right now, it's also just really, really good. Like it is a very powerful card and one that I typically take early. It's just free value. It's an extra card that starts in your hand. Like, yeah, you have to pay three mana to put it there, but it's really good. It asks literally nothing of you. You make no changes to how you're drafted. We talked about lingering souls. What about Oust, your favorite? I just think Oust is closer to Swords to Plowshares than people think. In fact, I would put it Swords, Oust, then Path to Exile. Whoa, no way! It's not close. Oust is really good. Do you want to path the Raghavan or do you want to Oust it on turn one? Yeah, that is true. I mean, look, Oust does get a little worse in the late game because once you're at a point where the land doesn't really matter, which you do eventually get there, then yeah, it is better to have Path. But up until that point, I would rather just be using Oust. Also, it's so brutal. When you Oust, they're like noble hierarchy, they then draw it on turn three when they would rather not. It's really incredible. We do prioritize and judge our cards based off of how they do in the early game, not the late game. We don't look at these cards and go, all right, well, this card is great on turn nine in Q, but it's like, well, you don't get there all the time. You always get to turn one or two, so that does make sense. Yeah, so I think that Oust is still quite underrated. Look, I'm not saying it's a busted card, but people think of Oust kind of like it's a doom blade, and it's not. It's Swords to Plowshares, it's Fatal Push, it's in that tier. Whereas, some of these cards are like go for the Throne is very replaceable. The difference in one and two mana on a removal spell is massive. It's huge. You should not underestimate that. So you think that Oust is the White Swords to Plowshares is basically what you're saying. Exactly. What about Breach? So, under a Breach, I think it's a hard card to get to really work. Well, if you don't have brain freeze or time walk in your deck, I think you should basically never put Breach in your deck or very close to that. It just doesn't really function that well as a value card. Time walk is a special case because even if you don't have the brain freeze, just six mana Breach double time walk is just a win a lot of the time, and I'm willing to do that. I would also play Breach in a Luris deck even if I didn't have brain freeze sometimes because that interaction is really good where Breach can get Luris back and Luris can get Breach back. So either one gets the other one. That's kind of cool. I mean, I've had games where I go use Luris, replay Breach, play a card, next turn Luris, replay Breach, play a card. You can just keep doing that. The main combo, and I'm sure most people are aware of, Underworld Breach, Lines that I'm in, Brain Freeze, it's a little bit more flexible than that. The Brain Freeze and the Breach part are not really replaceable. Time walk, I guess, kind of can replace Breach, but we're not. You're not getting a lot of late time walks. The Lines I actually is replaceable by Lotus Petal and Black Lotus kind of directly, but also, if you have Frantic Search, Underworld Breach, Frantic Search is pretty close to a win if you can eventually dig into something. So how it works is, let's say you have five mana. You start the turn with the full sweep. If you go Underworld Breach, Frantic Search, every time you cast Frantic Search, it puts two cards in the graveyard and it takes three cards to flash it back. So it's only net minus one card, which means, let's say you started with seven cards in your graveyard, you could pretty much Frantic Search seven times. That is just how it's going to work. And that gives you a lot of looks to find Brain Freeze, which is the next card that, of course, you're going to win with. So you can actually get to the point, especially if you have six mana, you don't even need LED or petal, you go Breach, Frantic Search, Frantic Search, Frantic Search, Frantic Search, Double Brain Freeze you and usually that's enough at that time. Yeah, that's good. Sometimes the first Brain Freeze has to one target yourself just to get another card to flash it back. But yeah, that tends to work. And you can also Breach Brain Freeze off just a lot of mana, though that's a little worse. I've actually cut Breach Brain Freeze from my deck when I'd never got petal or LED just because that's more like a six to eight mana late game kill, which not every deck needs. Obviously, if you have LED or petal, you can just kill them on turn two or three pretty easily. I think if I'm being honest with myself, you shouldn't be taking Brain Freeze or Breach super early. Lions Eye, I think is a little bit more of a case for because Lions Eye Echo Vions is specifically very, very good. And you can even make a Yawgwil deck sometimes. A Yawgwil is kind of a card that I would generally not recommend people put in their decks as much as I like the card, of course. So I think that LED you can kind of justify. Where I'm at, I think the correct way to do this probably, obviously, if you want to draft Breach Brain Freeze decks, which I do take it early, it's fine. No one's going to get you in trouble. But if pack one, you see a six or seventh pick Brain Freeze. Yeah, I'll spec on that because that means no one else probably is interested in the other parts of combo either. And legitimately, if you get Breach Brain Freeze LED in your deck, it's really, really good. It's a really powerful thing. I also want to specifically talk about the role of demonic tutor with it because I recently had a deck that had those three plus demonic tutor demonic tutor plus underworld breach means you could have no pieces of the combo. And let's say you're on six mana, you go demonic tutor, get underworld breach, play underworld breach, replay demonic tutor, get lines that play lines, I diamond. And you can end up in a spot where you get to basically make the whole combo from just demonic tutor because of how good it is getting all these pieces. Yeah, that's really cool. Yeah, so I think that's pretty neat. What about Skull Clamp? I've come up on Skull Clamp a lot. I love Skull Clamp, yeah. It's just been excellent for me. There's a lot of ways to make it work. One of the things I would mention is that Skull Clamp doesn't need a whole deck to make it work. You can put Skull Clamp in your deck if you have just one, like I would say one of one or two of the engine cards and then and then also maybe a couple one-off creatures that can get the clamping done because basically if you have like third path iconoclast, pinnacle emissary, lingering soul, Sahili, Sahili, also a lot pride can kind of do it. Pest infestation is a great one too. Let's say here's an example from a recent deck I had. It was like a blue white deck splashing fable and pest infestation. So it mostly blew white though. I had Skull Clamp with like three creatures that I could clamp, but I also had a pest infestation and a staff of the storyteller and a lingering souls. And I think if I removed any one of those, I would still have played Skull Clamp, but then being able to have basically these one-shot engines where if you combine Skull Clamp and third path iconoclast and draw four cards, it doesn't matter if you do nothing else that game. Exactly. Like that's funny. I do that too. The thing is, this cube is really, really good at producing tokens, specifically one-one tokens. There are a lot of cards across the colors that do that. I mean, I've put Skull Clamp in decks numerous times that have like seven creatures in it. You know, and I'm like, that's fine. I have a couple of these, you called them engine cards, and all of a sudden you have a car dryer engine. And like you said, once you've drawn four cards, you know, for three or four mana or whatever, like games over anyway. Yeah. So I think that, I think Skull Clamp is a card. There's a lot of ways you can put this in your deck and have it be good. You shouldn't be restricted to just like, oh, I'm not white, green with a bunch of elves. Like I shouldn't be playing Skull Clamp. Totally. I view it as a more, like a combo, like a two card combo piece rather than one that needs to go into an entire archetype. One more card to talk about, Luis Nadu. Nadu is one of the other green cards that I don't mind specking on and trying to play. Because so the main combo is Nadu Greaves. So you know, that's a very A plus B combo. If you have Nadu, you are really looking for Greaves. But Scythecat Cub, Bristly Bill, both work as zero mana ways to target. You can use like Lava Spur Boots. It's kind of like a bad way to do it, but it can work. And there's just a lot of different ways to end up basically getting enough advantage out of Nadu that it's a good card. I even think that Nadu is fine without like hard combos, as long as you have like map tokens from Sentinel of Velocity. Like there's just a bunch of like little things that work out pretty nicely. And your opponent's also going to really want to deal with Nadu. If you play a Nadu and you have, you know, a removal spell for it, you're not going to be like, well, let's see how this goes. I wonder if they have the Greaves. You're going to kill the Nadu. Like that's what you're going to have to do. Right. Sylvan Safekeeper, great one with that too. Yeah. Sylvan Safekeeper works out quite nicely as well. I actually do have two more. I have a list, but we'll save them. I do have two that I wanted to hit you up with though. The first one is Caracas. I wanted to just like kind of put it on the radar because I think in our circles, people understand Caracas, but I think maybe in the wider, you know, Arena Cubes circles, it's still not quite getting its do. But that card is like closer to its do, but it's still not there. Yeah. Caracas is, I would put it in the tier one category like Orcish Boat Masters and Minsk and Boots. It's that good. So Caracas, it's a combination of when it works, exceedingly powerful. You have Tamio or Jace and a Caracas and they can't kill it. Felio Caracas is actually the most obnoxious because Felio comes in instant speed and there's a Caracas to protect it. It doesn't even do anything to, you know, to try to kill Felio. They just bounce it replayed immediately. The other thing that's busted about Caracas, maybe the most busted part is sometimes your opponent plays a Caracas and you're looking at the three legends in your hand and you're like, wow, these are all blank. Nice. Totally. And all they have to do is just tap their land like they didn't do anything. Questing Beast, Indie, Jace, like all of these cards is just like, yeah, these, you know, they basically don't function anymore. Yeah. And, you know, and that's natural because the designers of Cuba are trying to put the most powerful creatures in. A lot of the most powerful creatures are legends. So that actually comes up a lot. And then the last card I wanted to ask you about, Luis, this is Curiosity. Oh, by the way, we didn't mention even like part about Caracas. It costs literally nothing. It's an intact planes. Like, come on. Yeah, it is just zero to put in your deck as long as you want white mana. Oracle of the Alpha. This is a card, the two, three flyer for two and a blue. And when you, when it ATBs, you get to shuffle in the power nine into your library. This is a card that, you know, wouldn't really be a thing in real life, but is kind of an interesting use of digital, you know, objects. And then it has flying in when it attacks you, scry one. I love this card. I think it's really interesting, cool, fun. I am getting more and more skeptical that it's actually good. Where do you fall? Like, is this the card you actively want in your deck? Is it even good? Well, given that I have yet to see one in a pack, people are not passing it. No, people view it as a very powerful card. And for whatever reason, it stands out like that to me too. But I've noticed that it has like numerous downsides. I mean, when you play it, you are effectively putting, you know, five, six lands in your deck. I mean, like there's a lot of games where you play this and you would choose to not shuffle in Lotus and already the moxes. Right. They get worse as you go further down the line. I will say the one time when I've really thought that it did do well was when I put it in conjunction with one of my draw seven decks, you know, decks that are trying to take advantage of the punishing cards like whole breacher or or orcas, boy masters or Narset or whatever to keep it to my opponent. Doesn't get to draw the cards and I do, you know, if you've played an Oracle and then you draw seven, it's pretty nice. Like you'll hit a mox or two, like kind of a lot. And, you know, you can kind of turbo through. I still don't know if that's worth it. You know, it's like maybe a little bit of a win more. Do you think Oracle's good? Like as a good magic card? No, I don't think it's particularly good. Like it's super fun. It's a masterpiece design. I think it's great to have in the cube. I think it increases people's enjoyment dramatically. I think if your goal is to try to win, you should pretty much stay away from the card. I'm not saying you should never put it in your deck. If you have a deck that has like a lot of card draw, I mean, you could do worse like casting this and then casting some ponders or maybe like a mystical tutor or something like that. It all sounds pretty good, but it's more cool than it is good. That is unfortunately where it is. So, I think that there's reasons to put the card in your deck, but at the rate it's getting taken, you're just not going to find a lot of times when it works out. Yeah, it kind of flips it on its head. The cards you actually want to draw are Timewalk and Ancestral and in some cases Time Twister and then all the rest of them, you're like, oh, that's fine, I guess. But I mean, it just feels like you drew a land at that point in the game. All right, well, let's call it a show there, Luis. We've got to get you out of here. We will continue forever our discussion of Cube on this show. I mean, Luis is one of the best, if not the best Cube players in the whole world. I'm a huge Cube head. I love Cube. I play it all the time. And now that it's been mainstreamed, the floodgates are open. So, we will be talking about Cube at least once per set cycle going forward. And then we have to figure out this Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles thing. I looked at it, Luis, and it looks like basically the same as Spider-Man as far as setup goes. It looks like asslop, I'm sorry. Yeah, it's five archetypes. It's a smaller set, 190 cards or whatever. There's a ton of legendaries. And I'm just going like, man, I don't want to make the same mistake and really throw ourselves into it with set reviews. And this is what's coming. And then just have it be the same thing like Spider-Man where it was clearly not prioritized for limited at all. So, I don't know. This is what I was talking about at the beginning of the year when I was saying, I'm not sure where the eye of Sauron is going to be pointed for us limited players. What are we focused on? What's the thing? Like right now, it's Cube and still ECL, right? And if you told me that Final Fantasy was coming out next week, it's like, okay, I know where I'm focused, right? But this is like, this feels like one of those halfway done sets again. And I'm not sure that we want to dive into it. So, I don't know. We'd love to get feedback on that and let us know what our listeners think. I'm just not excited about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles because of the, I just don't want to do another one where there's only five archetypes and where it feels like it's just not really a fully fleshed out limited set. That did not work for Spider-Man. Also, half the cards didn't have pizza on them, which I knew pizza was going to be a big theme in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles lore, but they also made it to make all the pizza look disgusting somehow. It's like, what is going on here? Yeah, that's kind of rough. So, we're going to figure out how we're going to approach it. But there is a world where we kind of put the finishing touches on ECL and then focus on Cube for a while. It doesn't feel like we've had Loreman Eclipse for very long. Like there's still some meat on that bone too. So, I don't know. Again, any feedback would be great about that. But for now, we're going to call this one a show. If you want to find us on social media, I am Marshall underscore LR and Luis is also pretty much everywhere. You can find everything related to the podcast at LRcast.com. Make sure you check out Luis's YouTube channel for his daily drafts. He'll do some of the current format. He'll do some pre-modern and he'll do a lot of Cube on there as well. You can watch him play and put some of these theories that we were talking about on the show into action in real time over there. We want to thank Ultimate Guard for their sponsorship of the show as well as our Patreon supporters. Thank you so much. That is going to do it for this one. We'll see you next week. Marshall, I had the opportunity to sit down with Dirk and Marco. So, Dirk Babarowski and Marco Bloom. If you didn't know, these are the other two members of the Phoenix Foundation. So, Kai, this is his pro tour team. These are his oldest friends. They met when Kai was like 16 and they were like 18 playing magic in Cologne in Germany. Got to do a really cool interview with them. We talked for like an hour and a half, about 70 minutes, something like that. Basically about Kai, but more about like, obviously a lot to do with magic because that's a big part of Kai's life, but more like the side of Kai or stories about Kai that people hadn't seen because if you hadn't heard, Kai did pass away pretty recently a couple weeks ago due to cancer, which he had had for quite a while actually. It was a pretty long stretch from when he initially told our team to kind of when he eventually went to the hospice and passed away. As was Kai and as are Germans, I'd never heard him complain about it. Like, literally not once did I hear him complain about it. And he could have. I remember in the interview, which is on YouTube, you should take a look. It's on the TCG Player channel. I'll put a link to it. Yeah, I've watched about half of it. It's really great. Yeah. No, really good. And Marco was even saying like at one point later in the interview when we talked about the diagnosis and stuff, he was like, Kai, you can complain. Like this does suck. This is unlucky. This is unfair. All those things. And that just kind of wasn't it wasn't part of his personality. Like, you know, but I wanted to share one of the funniest stories from it in case for people who hadn't checked out the video. And if you like it, maybe check out the video. Just by the way, we did demonetize it just to make it clear. Like this was just about remembering Kai. We put it on TCG Player because one of the most people to watch it. And, you know, I think Dirk said it best, you know, as the saying goes, you die twice when you die. And then when the last person says your name, and we're going to do as much as we can to make sure that that second part doesn't come for Kai for quite some time. But the funniest story was about Phoenix Foundation. So at this point, my kind of perception of Phoenix Foundation was this was Kai, Dirk and Marco. This is the best team that has ever been assembled in terms of results. You know, they won the first two team pro tours. They lost the third team pro tour in the finals to Huey Brock and Lindy, you know, Huey's team. They won a team Grand Prix. And, you know, they at this point weren't playing by the time the second round of team events came, which was like in the in like the 2010s or whatever. And this is when like Owen Huey still, of course, Owen Huey and Reed, you know, the Peach Garden Oath were pretty dominant. Me, Ifro and Qian and me, Ifro and Ben, Ben has had had a good run for sure. We had some good dubs. The pork blood oath. Yeah, that's what we call ourselves there. They're, you know, Matt Nass, Sam Party and Jacob Wilson, right? They had some good things, but no one can ever touch the Phoenix Foundation. They're all time. They won a team masters as well, which was kind of like an invitation, like a more exclusive pro tour. Like it was like even harder to plan those in the pro tour. So, you know, when I tell you about the Phoenix Foundation, you're just thinking like, wow, yeah, this a German super team, like, you know, they, they, they, they crushed, they dominated. Of course, they were going to team together, you know, the, the, the Tres Amigos, these oldest friends. And that's actually not how it happened. Marco said that by the time they announced the first team pro tour, him and Dirk had already kind of moved on past magic to like real life, as they put it, like, because they were like, Hey, you know, we, we, we got to get jobs, man, you know, pro magic isn't paying the bills. An age old sentiment, right? And so Kai was still crushing everything. He was doing fine. He was winning every tournament at this point. He had won like three or four pro tours or whatever. And, you know, the consensus best player, but Marco and Dirk had kind of like fallen off like Dirk was working at a travel agency. Marco, I don't even know, remember what he said he was doing. And so then they were like, Hey, Kai, we need a third for this team pro tour. Like, do you know anyone who's looking for a third and kind of like, what are you talking about? I assume we'd play together. They're like, no, of course, you're going to play with some pros. Like you're not going to play with your old buddies from your hometown. Like, yeah, but if you could help us find a third, that would be great. You know, and Kai was like, no, dude, come on. And so they end up teaming together. And of course, they have this legendary run. Again, these guys are all so German, like Marco and Dirk just underselling themselves constantly talking about how, you know, and it's just like, no, you, Dirk's in the Hall of Fame. They both have won pro tours. Dirk won a pro tour before the Phoenix Foundation. It's not like, you know, he was dragged there or whatever. And it's just like it would be like finding that Oh, and Reed and Huey, instead of being this like, you know, awesome team assembled because they were on the same pro tour team and they were, they were, you know, good buddies and all that. It was like Huey had to convince those guys to team with him because they assumed he was going to team with someone else. And like, and so it's like, yeah, that is exactly why I thought the interview was so good is we got to see stuff like that that I would never have guessed in a million years, you know, and as it turns out, yeah, Kai did have to convince those guys, Hey, I do want to play with you. Even like, even though you guys in your minds are like washed up or not really playing anymore. And of course, like they, they, again, crushed like just unbelievable performance. So really cool interview. And if you want to learn more about Kai, it's a cool thing to check out. And I'm really glad that those guys wanted to, wanted to come talk about their buddy. It was, it was really cool.