Limited Resources 843 - TMNT Drop-In and Lorwyn Eclipsed Sunset Show

What is up everybody? Welcome to another episode of Limited Resources. This episode number 843. My name is Marshall. I'm one of your limited resources and joined me online all the way from Denver, Colorado. It's Louis. Scott Vargas. Louis, you're ready to talk something going forward and something going back here. We've got Sunset Show for ECL and we're going to do first look at Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles today. Yeah, that sounds great. Actually, surprisingly enjoying Ninja Turtles more than I expected. That's been cool. And we'll talk about ECL. I think I like it more than you do. I know that much, but we'll see how it comes out in the wash. Yeah, not everybody has good taste. We will get into both of those things today. And yeah, looking forward and looking back today on Limited Resources. We want to say thank you to everybody who supports us on Patreon. It's patreon.com slash limited resources. 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You can pick stuff up at your favorite online retailer or local game store if you find something that you like. Thank you, Ultimate Guard. We do appreciate it. One of the perks you get for being a Patreon supporter of ours is you get to submit questions for the Patreon question of the week. This one comes from Chroma Comicus. This is an interesting question that's it's a good time to reflect on this. They say I recently noticed for the first time that Watsi made an intentional design change after the lost caverns of Ixalan set in November of 23, starting with murders of Karlov Manor. Murders was the first set that moved from a design with roughly 80 uncommons, 100 comments to 100 comments and 80 comments. Given that buildarounds and signpost cards are commonly uncommons, do you feel that this has made a significant impact on limited? This was was this a watershed moment for a minute or is it made much of a splash? I feel like it's made a splash, Louise. I it affected us directly because the set reviews got a lot longer. We just added a bunch of uncommons. The sets are just bigger and a lot more uncommons. It was even more heavily weighted in that direction. I feel like it's made a big difference having a lot more uncommons. Do you? Yeah, definitely. In some ways, uncommons feel like the new commons to me. It's like if your deck has a lot of uncommons and you play against someone who's got a lot of comments, you tend to do pretty well. I remember the witch set it was exactly, I think it was Echoes of Eternity, where it was something like every uncommon in your deck increased your win percentage over the commons by a pretty decent amount. I have kind of been feeling that. But overall, I do actually like there being more opportunities for buildarounds. Basically, I like it if they do a good job of using the space. If it's just a bunch of powerful uncommons, I'm already sick of the Mutanimals card in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I faced two of those the other day and it's like, okay, they played one into the next. It's like that's. Yeah, Mighty Mutanimals, that's the one, the white one that's like one of the top three cards in the set or something. It's like, yeah, if we're putting more of those in, that's not as fun. But if you're putting more wacky buildarounds here and there, then I like that quite a bit. Yeah, I do too. It does mean that they need to change the way that those buildarounds work a little bit. Excuse me, those uncommons work a little bit specifically for the buildarounds, because of course, with more of them on the sheet, you will see them less often in that uncommon slot. So it needs to be the kind of thing that like if you do get it, you know exactly what you're supposed to do and it kind of pays you off for it. But it gives them a lot of wiggle room for, you know, cards that would fit in a rarity between common and rare, but also are kind of just helper cards that make your deck a little bit better or are of a higher power level. And they have more slots to use to explore more design space within that, as long as they're not these like more narrow build around cards. And I think that's a good thing. It makes the draft feel a bit more variant. And, you know, it just lets them fill in some of the gaps. I mean, you got to realize, you know, when they're designing these sets, like there's a lot of cards that are kind of checkbox style cards that are in every limited set effectively. So there's a big chunk of cards that just go away. And all of a sudden, you know, you need to fit a bunch of cards with the core mechanics from the thing. And then you need, oh, there's a mandate to do this. And all of a sudden, like you don't get that much extra wiggle room to kind of try stuff or, you know, experiment around or whatever. And, you know, giving that many extra slots to the designers to kind of say, hey, go nuts. And uncommon means, you know, they get to take the gloves off a little bit, right? They can push to power level or the weirdness a little bit of those cards. And I think that that's a good thing. Like I think it actually, it was a quiet watershed moment for limited, you know, I don't, since there's still just the same slots, or I mean, they did make some tweaks around that too. But fundamentally, you know, the packs more or less felt the same, you know, even given this change, but they're not like it really is different having that many more in comments under the hood. And I think it was a good thing. Although it does make a sense. Can watershed moments be quiet? I guess they can. I don't know. Yeah. I don't even know what that means. I don't know what that means. Watershed, I don't know why it is that, but I mean, it just means like, yeah, big game changer or big big turning point, pivotal moment. That's what I like looking at. Have you ever been in a watershed? Like a literal shed that contains water? I mean, I assume it like maybe like has a well in it or something. I don't know. I've never seen or been in one. And I don't think anything really important. Could argue my garage is a spindrift shed, but I don't have a watershed. I'm going to head out to the watershed and get myself a spindrift. Great question. Thanks for that one. Let's just do our cracker pack straight off the top here, Luis. We're going to do one more lore and Eclipse Cracker Pack when we get to that part of the show. But for now, we're going to start with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Yeah. It's going to be a little faster segment to talk about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. It is the newest thing. So we're going to kick off with that. Yeah. We're going to kick off with it. We're going to do a quick drop in on a deck that we've both kind of dialed in on and are trying out early on and give us and we'll give our broad strokes takes on what we've seen in the format so far as well. And then we'll go to the sunset. So our first card out is Insectoid Exterminator. It's two in a black for a two, two flying insect mutant at common and it has disappeared at the beginning of your end step if a permanent left the battlefield under your control this turn. Scry one. This card is great. It's overlapping synergy between black, white ninjas and green, black disappear and it's extremely poor in either of them. Like you don't want to ninja your three drop back and the disappear payoff of scry one not good. That's hilarious. I tend to stay away from this one. The perfect pivot card just underpowered next is one of the definitely one of the early talking points with the set, which is Raphael tough turtle one in a red for a one three legendary creature. It's a mutant ninja turtle at common. Now I'll read the card. It's got alliance whenever another creature you control enters Raphael does one damage to target opponent. So you know, it's a two man of one three that pings your opponent whenever another creature ETBs and you know, particularly like in red, why there's a lot of tokens and you can kind of get it rolling been a fine card. I've played it. I played red white in one of my drafts and it was fine. It was pretty good. But I have to say, Luis, you know, we've we had some reservations about the ninja turtle set coming in primarily based on what we learned from the spider man set from before, because there are a number of similarities fundamental similarities between these two sets. I think both you and I feel maybe relieved and pleased to find that this is not playing out the same way that spider man did. It seems to have a lot more meat on the bone. The design seemed to have a lot more thought put into them and a lot more care and it does seem like we've got, you know, something going here in the format. That said, one of the things that did carry over as a concern point were the number of legendary creatures at common. And this is one of those. It is annoying, right? Like I totally saw a card because it's a totally fine card. And like you'll take this one, maybe the next one, multiples. Maybe you take one more of them. But you know, like Paul messaged up and it messaged us and he had four copies of April Neil, which is like a two man, a one or no white two copies. We had six. Okay. Yeah. And it's like, how many do I play? And it's like, you know, this shouldn't be happening, but it does because it's common legendary creatures. And you know, that's the type of card like April Neil is a good example that should just be like a bread and butter white two drop, right? You shouldn't be having to like limit yourself on these same thing with Raphael. You know, this card is, I mean, it's not pushed that far. Like this is a fine two drop to put in a deck. And somehow you have to be constantly aware of how many you have, you know, do you want to run the second one? The third one starts to get, you know, kind of sketchy at some point. And I found that to be annoying early, but that said, Raphael's pretty decent card. Yeah, I mean, it's a solid card. I think the legend thing is real. And I think at some point magic is good that it will be good for them to figure out what exactly their plan is with legends. Because I know that there's been debate internally there, you know, tomorrow's posted about it or whatever, where it's like, can we maybe separate the legend thing from like the mechanical thing from the flavor thing? There's a lot of ways to do that or consider it. But I think if they're committed to doing tons of common legends, then they should definitely look at it, hoping on a way to make that work out a little bit better. Definitely. And you know, the real one to punch here is that there's all these common legends and this set smaller than normal. So it's hitting you from both sides here. I mean, you're just, you could just get so many copies of these cards like Paul did. And it's really annoying. Next is TCRI building, which is a game land, which is a cycle of common lands in this set. And this is the blue red one, ATBs, TAP TAPs for blue or red. And when ATBs, you gain a life. I mean, honestly, Luis, like there is a world where you could shortcut me and say, hey, there's a new format coming out. It has game lands. And I'm probably like, yeah, I'm in then because I love game lands. They're some of my favorite dual lands they've ever made. Yeah, I love them too. Like you said, a format having them automatically makes me a little bit more interested in it. Next one is Foot Elite. This is two in a black white hybrid for a two for human ninja. And whenever this creature attacks another target creature, you control gets plus one, plus zero and indestructible and tell them to turn. It's been fine. Yeah, solid enabler for like some of the ninja stuff that can make it so your opponent like might not want to block you or what have you. Right. A little bit of extra damage. It's got good stats for a three drop, a two, four, you know, and when it attacks, it adds that extra power. So, you know, it's hitting for three a lot of the time. You know, it has to be a different creature, but still pretty good. I, you know, bread and butter common for the deck. Next is Foot Mystic. This is three in a black for a two for human ninja warlock with lifelink and disappear when it enters. If a permanent left the battlefield under your control this turn, you get a one one black ninja creature token. You know, I was set to not be that impressed with this card, but it did overperform for me in, you know, in a number of games when I was playing kind of like a green white black, just it was like black white control splash a couple of green bombs like the last run in. And I kept wanting to cut Foot Mystic decided to play two and they just kept being really good. So, okay, that, you know, that's anecdotal and I don't think the card is fantastic, but I had some pretty good experience with it actually. Okay. I have not played with Foot Mystic yet. I think one of my opponents had one or something, but it was kind of whatever. I guess the knock would be that it's four mana and the obvious synergy, you know, is to sneak something and then play the Foot Mystic, but that's kind of getting towards a lot of mana, you know, at that point, but whatever. There's many ways to get disappeared going. So that seems totally fine. I think it's that two for lifelink is actually like a pretty good stat line. Okay. Yeah. I did. I thought that that was good. Next is Pain 101. This is one of the black for an instant intelligent of turn target creature gains death touch and when this creature dies return it to the battlefield tapped under its owner's control. I have yet to play with this as well. Is this better in a sneak deck? Like people are kind of more inclined to block in those decks against those? Yeah, I think that's like one of the main strengths of the card is to put it in a sneak deck and then just like combat checks just go up a lot when your opponent has a field pressure to block. So there you go. Again, I haven't played with it yet though. Next is negate one in a blue for an instant counter target non creature spell. I have been playing a decent amount of blue, particularly a lot of blue green, but I have not played negate. Yeah, I don't think if you're going to engage with this format as a bust of one, which I think is mostly what people are going to do. I think I'm not at a point where I think negate is a great card to main deck. Probably pretty good internal sealed if that's the thing people play. I don't even know if that's a thing. That's interesting. Yeah, I guess probably not. Next up, they did have the mythic and rare coalition wrong on arena in some way. We're all over perform or over represented. So like in that world when every second opponent has the last run in, then yeah, you should probably main deck negate. So what was the story with that? The rare slot was getting mythics too often. Is that how it went? Yeah, let's go ahead confidently say that. I don't have no idea. I don't really know exactly what that is. Okay, I just, Jay texted me about it and it was like, oh, hey, they put out a statement that basically people were getting too many mythics, but I don't know the actual, like I didn't read the story from Wizards if there was one. I just saw that there was a tweet or something like that that said basically they fixed it now and if you got extra stuff, good on you, you get to keep it. But apparently those cards were showing up way too often. And so if you've dove in the first week and it felt a little weird, you were actually, the Shuffler truthers got a victory on their side that something wasn't right. Next is a card. I've been playing a decent amount. It's Rocksteady Crash Corsair. This is for Green Green for a seven seven legendary rhino mutant at common and it can't be blocked by more than one creature. And it says Bors you control can't be blocked by more than one creature. And it says it has four cycling for two. So it's like this six man a seven seven, you know, kind of hard to deal, hard to interact with in combat, but it also just four cycles, which is, you know, quite a good thing as well. So I've been playing like one copy of this in my blue green decks. Yeah, actually, I think that they pushed them in cyclers fairly well, like they all seem pretty good, which I like. Yeah, the blue one is fine too. Yeah. Yeah. Next comment is Eastwind Avatar. This is three in a white for a two four flying vigilance bird spirit avatar. And it has a lion's whenever another creature you control enters this creature gets plus one plus oh until and a turn. This seems totally playable, but not something I'm like super excited about. Yeah, definitely. It seems like a checkbox four drop to me, just one that's like it has enough stats and does enough stuff to make the cut. But kind of shrug. Last comment is mutant town musicians. This is two in a red for a two four trample. And it has a lions. This creature gets plus one plus oh until and a turn. Tell me where you've heard that before. So would you rather have a three man a two four trample with that ability or a four man a two four flying vigilance with that ability? Probably the flyer, but probably, but really probably neither is the actual answer. Yeah, probably so. It's haunting us. I saw that you messaged us that you had had somebody play this on turn four and then another one on turn five. I had the exact same thing happen to me yesterday. It is mighty mutanimals. So dumb. Two white white, two one, uncommon. It's a mutant rebel. And it says when this enters, you get a two two red mutant creature token. So four mana for two one and a two two and alliance. Whenever another creature you control enters, put a plus one plus one counter on target creature you control. Seriously, that's an uncommon. It's just an absolutely ridiculous card. It's just like, like what is going on here? That feels like there was one knob that should have been turned down somewhere here because yeah, that card's dumb. And when somebody plays one and then into the next one, it is ludicrous. So there's like, there's like five triggers on the stack or something. It's just crazy. It is going to be what happened is they played on turn four. I killed it in response to the trigger. I had an instant speed removal spell. So I'm like, okay, so all they got was a two two. I'm like, you know, we might be able to pull this one out. And then next turn they played another one. I just conceded it. That trigger didn't resolve either, but not for the same reason. Yeah. This is the early easy front runner for mythic uncommon in the set. And it is going to be very difficult to not take it. Next up is courier of, is it commestibles? Commestibles, I believe. This is, I think, the, the, the, the, it was like the highest win rate green card at, you know, when I, when I was looking this morning. Yeah. It's on my list for the deck that we're going to talk about too. It's really good. It's one and a green for a one, two human citizen. And it says, well, this creature enters, you may search your library for a food card, put it in your hand and then shuffle. If you don't put a card into your hand this way, make a food token. And foods, of course, are two tap sack it. You gain three. There's a lot of really good food. There are. Yeah. There's a few notables for sure. Again, we'll talk, that's kind of the deck we're going to talk about. So we, we will talk about it, but there's also interestingly, the one in a green black hybrid one three that I can't remember the name of obviously that is a food ice cream kitten. Yeah. Ice cream kitten. It is a food as well. And you can actually search it up with this. So there's even creatures you can get with it. But then you can get, you know, basically a card worth of value out of it from food or if you have the uncommon, everything pizza that we're going to talk about, you can get that. That can be a win condition or a, you know, great late game play. Well, there, there, there's even stuff like pizza face, the, the green black, like two four had uncommon. That's really good. He's a food like, there you go. You can, you can get some of the best cards in your deck with the card. Yeah. So that's really good. Next one is fugitive droid. This is blue for a one one artifact creature robot scientist. And it says this creature can't be blocked if an artifact enter the battlefield under your control this term. And it has blue sacrifice it to counter target spell that targets an artifact or creature you control. It's annoying. Yeah. I don't know how good it is. Like I don't have a sense for like, it all adds up definitely. I mean, like I've played against it twice and I've been like that thing is a pain. And so that's to me enough to think that it's a good card. I haven't really sorted out how good it is. Like is it first pickable? Is it like, you know, windmill slam? It's so good, blah, blah, blah, or, you know, as an enabler, I think it's probably just like a good card if you're in artifacts. If you care about like if you intrinsically care about having a cheap artifact, I think it's a pretty good card. I think so too. Wow. Okay, this is actually interesting, Luis. We got a rare that I had to play against. And I'm like, I it made me remember why I'm glad they don't normally design cards like this anymore. But it's leather head swamp stocker. This is too green green for a five four legendary crocodile mutant rogue. It's just a regular rare. It has trample. So it's a four man of five four trample that enters with a hex proof counter on her. So you can't kill it. And then it says whenever leather head deals combat damage to a player, you may remove a counter from her when you do destroy target artifact or enchantment that player controls. Now that part you can of course remove the hex proof counter if there's you know if it's worth it for you. But you know, mutagen tokens just mean that you this thing can pick up tokens kind of counters left and right. So if that does become the thing, then you know where you they have good targets or your playing against blue red, then you can usually make it work. But even if you don't, it's a freaking five four hex proof for four with trample. It's really annoying. Yeah, this I haven't added it, but I was considering adding it to cube. I probably am ultimately not going to. But it is a pretty pushed card. Like this is not a weak card at all. I tell you, I don't know. I haven't looked at the numbers for leather head. I would take it out of this pack. I've played against it. It was extremely annoying and powerful. Does a lot of stuff very hard to kill. Really good with mutagen. I mean, the thing is you want the extra counters in case you ever activate the ability, but also getting that toughness from four to five, five to six just makes combat so difficult for your opponent. And outside of death touch creatures, that's kind of the only way that they're going to kill this if unless you want to open that door. I wouldn't be shocked if mighty mutant mutanimals was just better. Yeah, I think it probably is. But I'm not sure either way. And I'd much rather be in green. So I would take leather head. Which one would you take? I mean, I would just take the mighty mutanimals. I think it's probably better. Like it's just really, really strong card. And the thing is, it is true that with with hex proof, it's pretty hard for you to lose out too badly on leather head either. But mighty mutanimals, like there's just no way that like no interaction goes poorly there. Totally. There is absolutely no way that they get out of that. I mean, if you just, just, you know, not again, 17 liens isn't the end of the story for everything. But mighty mutanimals is like 10% higher win rate. Like you're probably 10% higher. 9% higher. Holy crap. Something like that. Oh, sorry. 8.2% higher. Whatever. Still, that's like not even remotely close. It's not. No. Wow. Dang, that is ridiculous. It's a hell of a card. I mean, yeah. It is. I didn't expect it to be on that, that high though. That's, that is. I mean, mythic uncommon is one thing. This is like a step, a step ahead of that. Yeah, this is definitely on that next level. Well, I guess I will be sad with my, my leather head then. Because that means that leather heads like like solid uncommon level, man, maybe I'm just over indexing either I'm over indexing for 17 lands being accurate on day five or whatever, or which I'm not saying it's necessarily, or I think it does show that mighty mutanimals, there's no wrong way to play it. Definitely. There is definitely that. Yeah. Anyway, so there you go. That is our cracker back for TMNT. Let's talk about this ad in general. I definitely am on the same page as you. Very skeptical coming in. I'm not going to lie. The spider-man experience just left such a sour taste and all the hallmarks are here in T. H. M. Ninja Turtles to have the same experience. The differences that I've seen so far are even though there's many similarities as we outlined small set, only five archetypes kind of built for pick two, or at least with that in mind. And then the legendary commons are all, you know, kind of big hits against a format and those are here and they do count against it, but I won't lie. My expectations are lower for this set because of those reasons. So I'm not holding it to the standard that I would a full on big set or whatever. And even then you kind of had to drag me into it, Luis. I, you know, this is not a pro tour format, so I don't have the testing regimen that I need to get like jamming all the drafts I can before I get into the booth at the pro tour like I have for most sets. And there's also that question mark floating for us as content creators where I'm going, where is our audience going to go? Or is this going to be the thing for two months that we're actually drafting or are we going to kind of leave it behind us like we did spider-man? And so all of those added up to make me not that enthusiastic about it. But of course I'm going to try it. I mean, it's a new, you know, it's a new draft for him and I'm going to play it. And I've been pleasantly surprised. Yeah, those things that we mentioned are still there and they are still a factor, but I don't know. This set definitely feels like it has more care put into it. It definitely feels like a little bit more well rounded archetype wise. And I found a deck that I really like straight away and that helps out a lot too, which is the five color pizza deck or the three plus color pizza deck or whatever you want to call it. A well supported multicolor deck that kind of scratches that itch for me as well. And there wasn't anything like that in spider-man. What have been your initial impressions just from a, you know, are you going to play this set or you undo it? That kind of thing. Yeah. I mean, I also was a little slower to get into it just because, man, spider-man really burned me. It was really unpleasant, but there's a couple of things. I agree with all the points you mentioned. Additionally, not having through the Omen paths is huge because we're getting to play with actual Ninja Turtles cards and talk about them. We're not getting to play with terrible magic knock off versions of such. That's so big. I underestimated it. You kind of called it for spider-man and I was like, whatever. And then I played it and it really did bother me. And I'm also like, I grew up, I like spider-man. Like, you know, when I was young, I had comic books of spider-man and stuff and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles came out when I was young too. So like, you know, these are things that at least should have some nostalgia for me. And I kind of feel a little, you know, it's kind of fun, you know, seeing the turtle. So yeah, that's a great point, Luis. Those were, that was a big factor too. Yeah. So, and yeah, the five color deck is fun. The blue red artifact deck is really fun. I enjoyed that. You'll like that one too when you get to it. I've drafted it once and I liked it. Yeah. And I also, like, I think that just the cards are more fun. Like the game, the game's played a little more. Like, I really do think the legendary thing is an issue, but overall, I have been pleasantly surprised. I'm not saying I'm going to go completely nuts for this format or anything like that, but I was done with spider-man after like a couple drafts. Like, I did not have fun in those drafts. Whereas Ninja Turtles, like, I'm not done with Ninja Turtles. I'm like five drafts in now and I enjoyed all five. So that's a pretty big difference. Same. And I think, you know, I think what's going to end up happening here is, you know, we've realized, okay, there's some meat on the bone here. There's some good limited to be had here, but the constraints of the way that they set these sets up being a small set and only focusing on five archetypes, those will play out. And my guess is that this is Ninja Turtles is probably going to end up being the kind of, this is maybe not the best, best, best case, but this is like a good thumbs up, you know, a B plus and a mine, you know, just like, if I give you this, this lump of clay to work with where I say 190 cards, the restrictions that we just talked about, my guess is that this is going to be like kind of what you want to get out of that. And the downsides to that are going to be more in the longevity of it rather than the quality or the play experience of an individual draft. I think you can, this kind of shows at least early on that you can, you know, make a format with decks that feel different, are interesting and, you know, have a few different avenues to go down. But when you limit yourself to effectively five archetypes, you know, there's a lot of pressure on all five to work. Usually one won't work, you know, more on that later. And then, so you can really limit yourself as far as diversity of experience when it comes to what decks you're drafting. Another great thing about this is that the draft doesn't feel quite as on rails. The hybrid cards plus the fact that there is good overlap between the archetypes, you know, we're not looking at like a typo thing like we did for ECL where it's kind of like really urging you to stay in your lane. This does have a little more, oh, I could go over here or my first three picks can kind of go in either of these decks. I haven't really figured out what direction I'm at. And that opens a lot of doors too to make the draft more enjoyable. I just think that what's going to end up happening, my take right now is, okay, they're checking the box. This is a real draft format, but the restrictions on it are going to mean that we're not going to want to play it for as long as normal. It's going to get old quicker basically. The pizza will get stale. Still pizza is still pretty good. I know. I already eat it still. Yeah. And I think that that is just mostly that it's just like a small format right is just runs into this wall regardless. And I think Ninja Turtles from my, you know, limited experience here, but I'm planning on doing more. It has looked to be like a fairly well designed format. I agree. I think that the legendary stuff is annoying. I think that Mighty Mutantimals and some of the like Mutantimals, for some reason, there's just a couple of different Mutantimals cards that are just like, you know, completely busted. Like especially Mighty Mutantimals is going to detract from my enjoyment of the format because the card is so good. It just, when the card is so good, it just feels like BS when they play it. Like even if it's not like, oh, this is so game-roon and good, you feel like it is because it's just like, I'm sick of you losing to the stupid card and I'm already sick of it because I've already lost to it twice and they just heard people talk about it. So it's just like, oh my god, why, you know, but overall, I think this is just, it's not going to be anything remarkable, which is good for a small set. Like, you know, having a do, doing like 10 to 20 fun drafts in a small set sounds like a totally fine place to end up. I have no problem with that. You too. And I think it'll set the bar, Luis, because the question mark that we had is particularly after Spider-Man, the debacle that was Spider-Man was where do these small sets fit into our world, the limited, the draft or world, the people that love to draft like me, you and all of our listeners. And I'm like, you know, after Spider-Man, I'm like, I kind of feel like it doesn't, right? It felt like limited was an afterthought. The fundamentals of the set are not geared towards limited the small set, the stuff that we just talked about very clearly not limited friendly stuff. What you just said is a perfect example, by the way, just as an aside, they, let's say that they dropped the ball on, on Mutantimals. Oops, that, that probably shouldn't have done that. You know, we should have nerfed it a little bit or whatever. Well, now they get hammered on it because it's an uncommon in a small set. It is, it shows up way more than it would if it were a big set and you are going to see that card all the time. And it's like, dang, that one mistake is now going to like kind of haunt the format. It's been amplified by these factors. Yeah, you're right. So that's extra tough. But again, zooming out a little bit, you know, now I think, okay, if this is what these small sets can be where it's like, there's some cool stuff that they've clearly put effort into the design. It doesn't feel quite as after thought and that we don't have the, the Omen paths, you know, translation that we need to do, which I, by the way, I think the other Marvel sets do have that coming up. It's bad. I mean, again, what Watsi kind of has to decide if they think it's worth it, clearly they did for, for Spiderman at least. I think if we really don't like this and I really don't, the best thing you can do is just not engage with the set and they'll, they will, like, that's the, that's about the best message you can send. And maybe they'll back off the Omen path stuff some because I really, really detested. I don't even mind the universe is beyond. The Omen path stuff is just, it feels completely just, I don't know, it's not fun. It feels like artistically bankrupt. It's just like the cool part of UB you're not getting and you're just getting all the downsides of it. Right. Exactly. But yeah, so if we continue to have these smaller sets and this is what they are, I can get my head around that, right? Okay. It's a, it's a stripped down version of limited small set, fewer archetypes, and I won't be playing it for quite as long as I would a normal one. I can live with that. I mean, in many ways, these are bonus sets for us anyway. You know, me and Louise are still kind of rooted in the old ways of like, there's four sets a year that I really care about. And then there's some supplemental products. These are like in between, right? Like these aren't like modern horizons or something like that. They're kind of more towards the normal set end of the spectrum. And they get the treatment of that, but they're clearly not the same thing as a full on set. So as a limited player, you know, this is a fine place to land because it lets me adjust my expectations. And that's pretty, that's, that's really what I want to know is like where, at what level am I supposed to interact with these? Is it not at all? Am I supposed to be excited about these? And now I kind of know, you know, okay, yeah, this is one that, you know, I could draft for a month and then I might just kind of be done with it. But you know, hopefully by that time the cubes out and you know, or they do a flashback draft or whatever. And you know, we will have a little bit of a more of a smattering of things. I did want to talk about the five color deck Louise. I think you did do. Yeah, it's the deck that stood out the most just because it was the most fun and interesting one. And it seems really well supported. Basically, there's a blue, green based deck that you can branch out, you can branch out into a third color for effectively free. And you can, if you can go to five colors if warranted, and it doesn't cost you that much. And that's fun, you know, it to me, this is a little bit more of an admission in some ways, but it's, it lives in the realm, at least thus far of being just good enough or maybe not quite just good enough. You know, the good aggressive decks do tend to run this thing over. And yes, I really want to be playing my ramp and my car draw and my stuff like that. And the challenge that you face with these decks is to make it so that you can hang with a fast deck. What kind of cheap interaction can you find? What kind of one one death touchers can you find? You know, things to just be speed bumps because the late game ends up being really easy for decks like this. What's been your thoughts on the on the five color deck early? I mean, everything pizza is a really strong card. Like that's the two mana uncommon that goes and gets any land, any basic land. And then you can play two plus one of each color. So seven and sack it, you do like a deal three game three draw a card, they discard a card, you get three counters on a creature. That's a really, it's just a classic like, you know, one of each color contributes its thing sort of card. But the fact that it goes and gets a mana right away. It doesn't you don't really need it's not that hard to get all five colors first because think about it this way. When you cast the card, you usually have two lands already of whatever types. And so you and then you go get the third and the so you just need a fourth and a fifth and in these decks, that's just not that hard. It's not that hard. Yeah. I mean, I know you don't always have to two types when you cast it. But a lot of the time that's just normally what you're going to do, especially if you're taking some of the game lands and you have all that kind of hanging around. So that that's a strong reason to be it. It definitely definitely does get run over sometimes. I have had that experience totally like both black, white and red, white are capable of just, you know, trouncing you pretty quickly. Yep. And you really want to focus on early plays. The one one death toucher is awesome for that frog butler. The frog. Well, I was actually talking about the rat, but black one. Yeah. Yeah. Mutant squirrels. But the frog butler is even better. Frog butler is exactly what you want. That's like literally the card you want. It has an absurd win rate for it right now. It's really good. And so for those that haven't had a chance to dive yet, diving at frog butlers, one on a green for a one one death touch, and it taps to add mana of any color. And you can even pay two mana to give it reach until end of turn. So after you've kind of used up its ramp and you want to trade it off for a flyer, you can even do that in the late game. So it jumps. That's the joke. But anyway, it's really good for the duck. Kind of perfect. The only issue is that it is pulling double duty in two very different areas that your deck needs. One of them is ramp plus mana fixing it. And one of them is blocking and you can't have both at the same time. So you kind of need like what I found is I play it on two, I use it to play my splash card or to ramp something out. And then, you know, unless I have another one of those, I'm pretty willing to trade it off for, you know, anything that costs three mana or more basically. And that's a pretty good thing to do. We mentioned courier of commestibles as that engine kind of card for it. The card that, you know, drew me to it immediately, like the first time I saw it was lessons from life, which is this is like really just my favorite type of card. And whenever I see these type of cards, I'm like, please make this deck like at least fringe playable, which is that's the draw three, put a land into play. Yeah, two green blue sorcery draw three cards, you can put a land from your hand onto the battlefield tapped by the way, that is important because sometimes those allow you to put it in untapped and you can like double spell or whatever. But this is the perfect like pure Dirtle card, right? This is just one of those ones where it's like, how many lessons from life can you put into your deck, right? Because like a good, and this is a good time to bring up Omni cheese pizza, which is another, you know, commonly played card in this. It's a common, it's two mana for an artifact food when it ETVs you draw a card, you can pay one tap and sack it to add a mana of any color or two taps act to gain three life. So this is another way that you can get, you know, that one extra off color of mana, you know, to get your big payoff for the, for the what's it called pizza, the everything pizza, you know, that's the way you can do it or a splash that you have or you can gain three life if you fall fall behind a little bit and it replaces itself. But you know, if I told you that my curve out involved Omni cheese pizza and lessons from life, that is a lot of air, right? Like you are spending a hell of a lot of mana and not really doing much to the board. And that is the danger of decks like this. These tools are good. They make sense. They enable the game plans that you're trying to do. And in some cases, they're quite powerful lessons from life. That's that's four mana for three cards and probably a land drop. That is you're getting your mana value for sure, but you have to balance it with ways to control the board early and keep affecting the battlefield over and over. And you know how that goes, you know, if you build a deck and you're like, okay, I need a good amount of creatures. I need some removal spells. The slots end up disappearing pretty quickly for your lessons from life and for your Omni cheese pizza and for your everything pizza. Those start to go away pretty quickly. And that's that's the part I love is like, I'm trying to find that balance, right? Like where where does this deck actually thrive, where it can hang just enough with a good aggressive start so that I can get to my late game? Because then when you get to the late game, it gets kind of easy, right? You got like the land cyclers like we mentioned, which are really good payoffs. And any number of rares or mythic rares that are, you know, splashing around or just cost five, six or seven mana, there's tons of stuff in the set that can, you know, get you to the game. Somebody played that stupid black, I think it's seven or eight mana. It's like a six, nine or a nine, six or something at ETB destroys three creatures. I'm like, I just kept reading it. I'm like, what's the like, don't you have to destroy like sacrifice something or it's just like, nah, it's just a flat flash kill three things. And it's like, is it a nine, six or a six, nine? I can't remember, but I think it's a nine. I think it's a nine, six. Yeah. Anyway, but there's tons of places. You think they're going to be out here playing six, nine? Probably not. But yeah, it's so this set or this, this archetype drew me in. And, you know, this is one I'll probably draft for the majority of the format. Like if I, you know, can convince myself that it's open at all, I'll probably just go for it. Yeah, it was fun. The games were cool. Like the fact that we got run over, I think that's probably good for the format just because otherwise like it's a little bit too much of that sort of thing. Agreed. But it's also, one of my favorite archetype of magic games is the game where you start out really behind and you slowly stabilize and you're able to come back. Like that's super fun. So I'm a big fan of that sort of thing. Couple other cards just to mention that are good for, that I found to be really good for it. One of them is Regamuff and Raptor, which is a common, by the way. Foreign Agreed for a 4-3 when the ETBs return up to one target creature or food card from your graveyard to your hand. So that's, you know, a five man or four three that gets you back something important, your death toucher that blocked or the food that you needed or whatever, you know, even your wind condition in some cases. So that's really good. Primordial Packarderm, which is, it's a 4-4 with my, I think it's probably become my favorite combo of baseline stats, which is Trample and Reach. It's like, what do you want me to do? A little common, a little going. Yeah, I can block a little better. I can attack a little better, right? I like that. But it also gains two life when it ETB. So it is a very nice way to help stabilize the board for power, for toughness, reach, and you gain two life. And if you're at the point of the game where it's time to kind of clean up the mess and finish the game, it does a decent job of that too. So just a, again, just a solid common. Uncommon, I had to mention it, Metalhead. This is like the big mana war for the set. It's four and a blue for a 4-4, again, it's an artifact creature, by the way. It's also a legend of note and it's uncommon. When the ETBs return up to one other target artifact or creature to its owner's hand, and then you can pay red and sacrifice another artifact to give it plus one, plus one counter and menace and hasten till enough turn. So it can even do some cool stuff in the late game and the splash is easy and all that. But basically, you know, going back to what Louise just said, you're behind a little bit, you play Metalhead Bouncer thing and you have a 4-4, you probably just caught up. So that's a very good thing as well. And then we mentioned the pizzas, the Omni Cheese Pizza to fix your mana, get your cards and everything pizza to be your lane condition. And then of course, you just get decent removal and the blue and green both have decent removal here too. You get return of the sewers, which is the, what do we call these, Louise? The Bouncer to the top of the library card? Yeah, there's one in every vein. I don't know, Time-Eb is the classic. That's the old school one. Yeah. Anyway, this is the three in a blue instant. Atari Creatures owner puts them on the top or bottom of their library and you get a mutagen token. So that's really nice. You know, that's a solid removal spell. Anchovi and banana pizza is the food. So the two black, black food that when it E.T.Bs, you destroy a creature and then it's a food you can pay to tap and sack it to draw, to gain three life. And it's a common. So that's another one you can search up with the guy and you can buy back with the raptor and blah, blah, blah. So you can see how this is now that's double black. So you do have to be a little bit careful of it, but you know, that is a card you can play tenderize is the fight card. So that or bite card, I should say. So that's a good one. Tainted treats is the black green removal spell. And that's, you know, exactly the kind of thing that you can get away with in this, in this one, it's one green black for an instant destroy an artifact or creature. And if this mana value is four less, you get a food token. So that's another nice way to kind of help stabilize and get back into it. And then stomp by the foot is just like kind of one of the, the black removal spells. It's got kicker sacrifice and artifact or creatures, one in a black instant. Target creature is minus two, minus two. If you play the kicker costs, it gets minus five, minus five instead. So again, a lot of emphasis on keeping the early game taken care of. So that's really good. You got the game lands mutant town illegitimate business, et cetera. And those go a long way. You know, if you have three or four of them in your deck, you know, you're effectively starting the game at 21 life or maybe like 21 and a half life or something on average. And so that's pretty good too. And then when it comes to the payoffs, I mean, there's a ton of them. So, you know, figure out what your kind of primary three colors are and then go nuts and take all the rares and stuff to get to that fun deck. Definitely the one that's caught my eye so far, but we don't want to overhype it. It does get kind of ran over by the aggressive decks. Yeah. I'm not even convinced it's like amazing. Like I think that there probably are some good, really good builds of it, but it is fun putting it together. Any format that has the game lands, you should at least try the five color deck. For sure. That extra life game really does matter. So yeah, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Okay. All right, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. We're going to draft you for a while. And we're curious, of course, about how our listener base feels about it too. You know, we've been trying to keep a pulse on it. This one's a little harder, you know, to figure out. We kind of took our stand on Spider-Man and people kind of seem to agree with us, but we didn't know when we did that that that would be the case. We just kind of were like, well, this is where we're at with it. So we're going to go with it. This one, it feels a little bit more in between, but I think, you know, generally speaking, people are like, okay, this is an actual set. Yeah. But as always, if you make your voices heard, we'll do what we can, you know. And if people really want to hear more about the set, at this point, I'm definitely open to talking more about it. Me too. Also, it wouldn't be that hard. It does make our job easier when there's only the five supported archetypes. And if we get lucky, there's a rogue archetype that we get to cover, but I mean, there's not that much to it. It makes our job way harder. How come? We have less fun. It's much harder to do this, but if we're not enjoying the set, we're just not really going to do it. So. Oh, I just meant with breaking down the set. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I know, but I was looking at the big picture. You are. Big picture thinker. He's a visionary. Luis Garvarez. You are correct. It does make that part harder. Okay. Let's switch gears now and talk Lorwin Eclipse Sunset Show, because this was a much talked about and fairly interesting to talk about format and we didn't want to leave it in the dust as far as the sunset show goes. So first up, if you could summarize the set in one sentence, what would it be? For me, it was a find the open lane. Like if you could find, if you, if you can find the tribe that was open, you were, you're going to be pretty happy. Yeah, that, that does summarize the best strategy for mine was they aimed kind of low and hit the target. I felt like this set, my expectations for this set were very high. You know, this was a big set, a full on magic IP place we've been to a popular plane, like, let's go, right? Like I'm, I'm my expectations are right up there with any other set, you know, final fantasy, you know, any of the big, you know, gets a lot of hype and whatever sets. And when I realized that it was the, the five archetypes set up and that we, and that it was this type of thing where it was like, okay, these are the creature types and the color pairs that matter and kind of everything else doesn't. I was like, well, that's very limiting. Like, you know, normally we think of a set as having 10 archetypes possible with maybe a few extras, if there's triple colors or something weird. So maybe 10 to 11, if there's a five color deck, something like that. And then they're probably going to miss on two, two to four of them or kind of just not work out or, you know, they'll miss on them for whatever reason. So we end up with six, maybe seven archetypes that we could draft. And that's kind of where they usually land. If I'm kind of translating that to from five, you know, on average, it would be somewhere around four, four ish, you know, that would actually come through and work and everything. And I'm like, well, if I'm going to draft a set for three months straight, there's a pro tour for it, blah, blah, blah. And there's only a, you know, on average, going to say about four decks that work. Well, that's, man, I better love like every one of those decks somehow, or there better be something for everybody in there or whatever. And this one felt like that, but that, you know, that's an extremely limiting place to start for a long-term limited set to be really great in my mind. So that's, so I see it as like, well, that was the road that they decided to go down. And they did hit that target. I mean, they, in my mind, they did, they got their four archetypes out of the five that, you know, were competitive and worked well. And it just that, you know, drafting the same four decks for three months kind of gets old quickly. And that's how I felt. What turned out to be the best archetypes? I mean, elves, certainly, blue, white, merfolk, white, green, kithkin, or very solid. I like the blue red decks. Blue red X could be vivid. And, you know, goblins was behind those decks, but not by so much that you couldn't draft it. I actually think that once it all kind of played out, and as we got a little more time with the set, and for me, my biggest spike of drafting the set was definitely the, the limited qualifier weekend. But leading up to what I drafted, and then I drafted that. And then since then, I haven't been drafting as much part of it was like Q came out and I just rather Q than do most things. But I think that, I think that it was, there was like something like six ish decks, six and a half decks, even I would say, so there's maybe even close to seven, I don't know. Yeah. Uh, What do you mean six and a half seven? Well, so there was like elves, kithkin, goblins, merfolk, elementals, and I think those all functioned. Goblins, yes, was a little bit weaker. You had to have a stronger signal to go in, but those all worked, right? I wouldn't consider a failure. Like this, what it was not as bad as some of the decks where we're like, hey, like black, green counters and whatever set where you're like, hey, just don't draft this deck. But I do think it was a step behind that. It was bad. I mean, like goblins was like, it was below the mid cut. You know what I mean? It came in like less than average. It was less than average, certainly. Well, I mean, like what I mean is like below the average win rate. Yeah. So if that's your fifth out of 10 potential, that's pretty bad because that means that there's five other color pairs that are all below that as well. Yeah. I mean, I think that like it kind of depends on how you want to describe it, but I would say that goblins was not a good deck, but it was a deck you could draft sometimes. And look, you know what? Let's just call it a loss just because I think that'll make it easier to talk about. Like even if you counted goblins at a loss, I think that the blue red deck had a surprising amount of depth where blue red elementals was definitely a deck. But also, like five color vivid was definitely a deck. I also thought that like two color vivid was also a deck. And those were all like two- What two colors? It was just blue red. Well, it could be blue red. It could be other colors, depends on like I had a black, white vivid deck that played out totally fine. Like where you just had two colors that were open and you're leaning on Scarecrow's and Puka's eyes to get in hybrid cards to kind of branch to three and four colors or five colors. And that was like kind of interesting like sub archetype. But even if you rolled those two into the same deck, we're still talking about five decks, right? The four typo decks and then a vivid, that's five. So if you think that the two color vivid deck and the goblins deck both were just straight up zeros, you still get to five different decks there. Yeah, I mean, I just, I think there were only four that you could draft and expect to win consistently. Like I mean, there's definitely exceptions, but like- You don't think the vivid deck was one of those decks though? No. Huh. I don't think on power level, I think that you just got rolled by, you know, B minus B versions of any of the four, the three other, the three really good decks, like the elves, Murpho, Kithkin, just kind of, I don't know man, especially elves, but I just felt like those decks were so much more consistent and so much more supported with Eclipse cards and stuff like that that, you know, you just didn't get if you were trying to go for, you know, I was able to make it work occasionally, but I felt like I was working against the grain, I guess is how I would say. I mean, I didn't, I didn't feel that exactly. I think like the vivid deck was less consistent because you had to battle your mana alongside everything else that you would normally, you know, be looking to do. I think that's, yeah, that's probably how I would frame it is like, maybe the power level was roughly on par if you got a good version of it, but you just like, the other archetypes got like some of their absolute best cards for literally like free mana, like just, it didn't matter as long as they had the number of lands they could cast them and you were like fighting your mana a bit and that just means your, your win percentage is just tough. I, yeah, I mean, I still drafted those decks. Those were the decks that I went for to be clear, like cause I enjoyed the vivid decks, right? Those were the ones that I like to play, but it kind of reminded me of the decks, the deck we were just talking about with turtles where it's like, I kind of know I'm taking attacks for it where, you know, when I did do the arena open drafts, like I wasn't drafting that deck. I was, I was trying for a quote, real deck cause I was trying to win and it was, you know, so competitive. Anyway, go on. So I think that when I look at that, and then I, and I go through like having played the format more, I'm higher in the format than I started out, but I do think that the, you know, as we're going to get through it, there's, there, this format was far from perfect. Yeah. I think for me, it's like, it goes back to what I said. They aimed kind of low and they hit the target, right? Like if you and I quibble about, was it four decks, was it five decks, you know, whatever, it's like, you know, the number we really want is like seven or eight and we want those to be like pretty clearly like, yeah, you can do that or, you know, the first five are like good and then the next three are like, if they're open kind of deck, something like that, like good, but don't, but they don't happen as often or something like that. And this one, you know, felt like we're kind of scrapping to get to four and on a shorter term basis, sure. Like if you applied that same lens to like the Ninja Turtles mentality of like, it's a smaller set, we're not going to have it for as long. I'm kind of like, sure. But if it's like a big set that I'm like hyped up for, and like, I have those high expectations that it kind of falls a little short for me. Yeah, I think we probably just maybe started a little from different places and also in terms of like what our expectations were, because my expectations of lore were not like super high or anything. Why not? I didn't like lore the first time, I didn't really think that, and I didn't think it was that interesting of a plane, and I just, I didn't, I didn't see why that had changed, you know, 20 years being away from there, hadn't made me, hadn't did not make me think I would like it more. And in fact, well, that kind of hasn't, but yeah, so maybe that's just it. I, you know, I think that we're spoiled a little bit, right? Because up until like last year, we had a run of like four years where there was like one bad set or something, and like, it felt like every sunset was like a minus B plus a minus a, like, they were just knocking these limited sets out, like with such consistency that it just felt like every time we got a big, real set, it was just awesome. And I'm probably putting a little more pressure on a Loreman Eclipse because it's a wizard's IP, you know, like big set, and we just don't get that many of those. And then, you know, we had some shaky stuff with Spider-Man, and, you know, some of those are the kind of knock that loose. And I thought, okay, well, we'll be back to the like final fantasy, you know, we'll be back in that realm. And again, you know, it really does come down to how they, where they aimed this, right? When you put, when you say we're going to do five archetypes, I'm already kind of like, well, as an avid drafter, I'm a little skeptical just because, you know, I want to draft this set for two, three months. And I want to do, you know, 80 drafts, 75, you know, if I really love it, maybe get up towards 100. This one, I think I did, you know, probably 50 or 60. Like I played both of the, the Winnebox event, I played that whole time. And then I did the, you know, numerous runs at the, what's it called, the open thing, the qualifier thing. And then, of course, you know, this was a pro tour format too. So I had to do tons of drafts to leading up to the PT to try to get, you know, myself acquainted with the format underneath. But I did notice, Luis, and I don't know, you mentioned this a minute ago, but once the cube came out, I kind of went running to it. And if the set's really good, I will, it's a little closer for me. Like, like with Final Fantasy, I didn't go play cube, even though it came out, I was like, I'm just going to, I'm just going to keep playing Final Fantasy. This is on Magic Online, but still, I would routinely kind of switch gears if I was feeling like I was at the end of the runway with a set. But with this one, you know, I was pretty like, cube, yay, let's get over there. What cards were we most wrong about during the set reviews or that made you surprised? We got a list. Yes. I think that Don Han eulogist and Morkan's Eyes, when it comes to elves, were both like, way over performers from what, when I first read them. Totally, especially the eulogist, right? It still looked enough like kind of the filler four drop. Yeah, it just really didn't play out that way. That's so much better. I think it was a combination of two things. The first is that the mill effect was actually like so much better. It was just integral to the strategy in a way that, I mean, you could look at the cards and say that, but like, it wasn't clear how much elves didn't function if you weren't milling. And then the other part was that just Game Two Plus deal two is a pretty nice little combination too. Totally, yeah. And just that card just had everything stapled together to go perfect in that deck. Morkan's Eyes also, you know, I mean, it's interesting because another card that I thought of was Safe Rite Cavalry, the four drop common. Not that it's like so amazing, but it definitely benefited from being in elves, which was clearly the best deck, but also another four drop that I think is easy to kind of go, yeah, you know, they put a bunch of stuff on four drops now, but we never really prioritized them. And Safe Rite Cavalry was like, I'd say just a notch above that, not, you know, off the charts, but it was like the kind of card that is like, this is outperforming where I thought it would, and Eula just did that to a more than a notch above. But, you know, all of those cards kind of coming together, basically like if you would have popped in and said elves is the best deck by quite a bit, then maybe we would have been able to suss some of that stuff out, but we certainly didn't in the moment. So emulation? Oh, well, I was going to say Rooftop Percher, the common change. Rooftop Percher. That might be like the most off, not even just us, I think everyone pretty much, I mean, I obviously hadn't listened to every single set review, but just watching people talk about this card, most people were like shocked to discover that it was actually good, like actively good, like a plus, not, oh, this card looked bad, but it's playable. You know, this card looked bad, but it's actually quite good. So that was pretty funny. And it's another one too that fits an archetype that we've seen the five mana colorless, usually it's an artifact thing that like does something, but it's like those are almost never good enough to make the cut. And this one though, you know, changeling matters a lot. We were aware of that, but I still didn't think that the percher would would, you know, cross that threshold into playability and it very much did. Soul emulation, we had a good discussion about soul emulation. We certainly saw the potential of it, but the cost is high, right? We're like, well, do you always have the thing you need? Is it going to be too much? It just turned out that given the heavy creature based nature of this format and the fact that many of them had a lot of small creatures all the time, it just felt like a one sided wrath every time. Oh yeah, the card is just absolutely obscene. Just obscene. What about the eclipse cards? I mean, the eclipse cards, it was mostly just that like, this is a little bit like rooftop percher where they all looked good, but they were like A plus great. Like they were just not even not even in the ballpark of like reasonable. Like honestly, they ended up actually being one of my least favorite parts of the format. I think that they carry a large, if you're going to assign it to cards, I think that they carry a lot of the weight for kind of making the format, the things that I don't like about the format are bundled up in the eclipse cards because, you know, they already set the format up to encourage you to go down these two color single creature type paths for the most part. And these eclipse cards like shoved you down that path in a way that was so violent that you couldn't get off of those paths anymore. Right? Like the eclipse cards are the easiest thing to point out for what you don't get if you try to go off color or do something different. And it's like they are not only very powerful, but also very specific to their creature type and also effectively free to cast color wise. It's like they just, those were the things that really anchored you, right? And you just, it's so much harder to justify even messing around and being like, I'm going to be red-white giants this one time. And it's just like, but you don't get eclipse cards. You don't have that and they do. And it's going to make it really tough for you to compete with them because you saw those, you know, they're in commons, they're kind of in there all over the place. You know, I was surprised by the, because there are a couple of those types of cards, right? The off color, gold or hybrid style cards. You know, what was that something, skimmer, tomeskimmer, whatever it's called? Yeah, that's the blue-black, various things. Yeah, like those won't surprise me because... Sorry, I completely forgot. When we were talking about decks, if I would say that blue-black was actually a deck you could draft sometimes. Like, I did want to mention that. Like, I think if you combine all the percentage share of blue-black, black-white, red-white, blue-green, red-green, that adds up to like 0.8 of a deck if you draft it at all of those together. I just wanted to, I just wanted to make sure we were going to get two short shrift. I mean, I try black and I could not, I could not get it to work, but I wish it was. It's a good skill issue. Yeah, dude, it might be. But those, but those types of cards, the thing that surprised me about them was just that they were in the set because if you ever did dabble in that and go, well, you know, they put this like triple hybrid, like it's got to be something I can do at least every once in a while. And then you kind of get smacked around by one of the base decks and you're like, okay. And then they just, even if you could very occasionally make them work, they certainly weren't like a feature of the format, right? Like you weren't facing Demir hardly ever, you know, and if you did, you know, a lot of times it felt like, you know, a gift in some ways, yet they still seeded some of these cards. And I think that was a mistake because especially I think to newer players who were like, hey, I mean, and by the way, I fell for this too a couple of times, which is like, it felt a bit like a trap. It was like, there, here's a card that's a payoff for this color pair that isn't really supported. And so like, what's the use case for that card? Because if I go down that road, I'm just giving up these advantage to the color pairs that are. And I end up in a place that's, that's worse off or, you know, that isn't really, there's not a lot of gold at the end of that rainbow. And so I was surprised that they put those cards in. And I remember thinking in the first week or so, when you and I were talking about it, and I was like, why are these here? Like are they, they're leading me down a path that I probably shouldn't be going down. So I would have liked to see those. I actually just feel vindicated. We basically ignored those archetypes in our set review. And I remember getting a decent amount of feedback where people are like, why did they ignore half the decks? And it's just like, those aren't decks. Like, that's just not, that's just not going to come together often enough that you should spend a ton of time talking about it. Yeah. And it ended up being like a very niche thing if one came together. What were some of the most underrated cards? Gilt Leafs and Brace, definitely. And this is the, that was the aura that gives plus two, plus zero trample and destructible. Yeah. And that is just like, that's like the kind of card that, that frequently is going to get underrated because it just looks like a lot of really bad cards. And that kind of card tends to do poorly like on people's initial perceptions. And then when it turns out it's good, yeah, people usually figure it out. I think we're pretty good at that these days. Just, we as in the magic community as a whole, and you got to give credit to Seventeen Lands for that too. Like without Seventeen Lands, I don't know that Rooftop Purchase would be a card that would have entered my consciousness as quickly as it did. Yeah. Like I think what would have probably happened is like, you play against it a couple times and it's like, huh, that card is pretty good. And maybe you put it in a deck and that's like kind of how we used to discover these things and some of the harder cards to figure out where people didn't even ever figure it out, or at least they rarely did. Now with Seventeen Lands, you can on day three look be like, whoa, what's up with Rooftop Purchase? This card is way higher win rate than I would have expected. So I wanted to give credit because we, you know, we, we, we can learn about the negatives of which there are very real ones about having Seventeen Lands. I think we definitely want to acknowledge that the times when it's like, hey, this is super useful. Besides Purchase, I, I thought Glen O'Lantern just answered that's the mythic. There's like two blue blue counter all your opponent's spells and abilities and then make a one on flyer for each one. And I remember again, feeling confused, like, why does this card look like do so well? And it turns out countering one thing and making a one on flyer can be really good. And if you ever, if they ever have a something in play that says triggers when played and they play something and then that triggers and then you counter both and make two, like you usually just dumpster them at that point. Yeah, super good. I mean, a card that it's interesting because these type of cards have gone up and down in value over time is Kulrath, Zellot, right? These land cycling style cards are like, they used to be great, right? Like some of the best commons and things like that. And over time, they started to feel more clunky. It's, they've had cycles of ones that cost like one mana. And you know, cycling for one man is like such a different thing than two these days. That was just, that was just the Lord of the Rings one. I don't think they've ever done that was the only ones. Yeah. Well, the, Cory had one mana straight up cyclers, but that's not exactly what you're talking about. Right. Exactly. So yeah, you know, but two mana is like, that's a lot. And we have really had to get our head around modern limited mean that is not free or anywhere near it. Even if you're getting your land out of the deal or a card out of the deal, it does cost that said Kulrath, Zellot. Yeah. The payoff is there. You know, the beauty of these, of course, is like, it gives you something to do early that, that is a necessity to play limited your land drops. And then it, you know, they ostensibly give you somewhere to put your mana late, but it's just like, it's felt like those have both needed to be pushed a little bit. And Zellot did. It's actually really good. And it surprised me. And I felt like it was a little underrated coming in. Yeah. I think Shine Striker looked a little clunkier than it actually ended up being. That's the six mana three three with the vivid draw card. And I mean, I love that card. That would be one of my favorite cards to play with in the format for sure. What were the most controversial cards? Sprite Mighty is a good one. I remember we were talking about it with Chia and, yeah. So this is, that's the four in a green, choose two creatures, give them plus X plus X, trample and draw X cards where X is the power level difference or power difference between them. Yeah. Ultimately, the card ended up being not that good. But it did, you know, I remember Reid in his set review gave it a really high grade, which is not a knock on reader at all. I looked at the card initially, I was like, well, I wonder if this card's good. This looks like it could be pretty good. But part of what was so controversial and confusing about it is most of people's thoughts about the card were probably from times when their opponent played it and it was really good or when they played it and it was good. And like, yes, you could draft the card a bunch and then just come to the conclusion, well, this actually wasn't that good because I keep dying with it in my hand or having it not do anything. But you don't need to get run over too many times by this to think like, oh man, I wonder if that card is good. Totally. And you know, when we first looked at it, our take was set up cost seems high, but payoff seems high too. Right. So it was kind of like, well, if you can, if this happens, you know, it's a creature based format, maybe it just happens more than you think or whatever. And you know, you're getting a bunch of cards and doing some good stuff. But it turns out the setup cost was just a little too high. And plus, you know, you do need that gap to be there too. It's not just two creatures, like they have to have a difference in power. And then ideally, you don't have them to have a big difference in power to really make this thing go completely nuts. I guess the fact that it has a tree folk on it probably should have been a hint. Yeah, it was a little too hard. What about Kindle the inner flame? Was that the build around? Yeah, that was the clone and elemental or clone. Oh, yeah. And then flashback, you have to behold three. Yeah, elementals, yeah. Yeah. And I mean, the way this card ended up playing out at best was with the 7-3, like path of the inner flame elemental that just killed them because that was the one that dealt damage to them equal to the power when you've replayed an elemental. Yeah. And but the card in just an elementals deck, there's a lot of ETB elementals that actually could play out pretty well. But it was cooler than it looked, especially if you had the double trigger guy or whatever. You could do some like, okay, it felt like a combo finish. Yeah, and it did some cool stuff, but also rotted in your hand terribly other times. It was just an interesting card overall. Yeah. What was your favorite artwork from the set? Wisfulness. I've gotten to play with that card a lot now because I added it to the cube and it's been really good in cube. So I've seen it a bunch by Jesper Edgson. Yeah, that card's really, really cool. I actually took something similar. I took Deceit by Svetlana Velenov, who I feel like I've picked before. Svetlana has some really great stuff. But the art style reminds me of Mark Tadeem, who did like time-volta and whole bunch of cards from back in the day. It's a similar kind of vibe and that he was my favorite artist back in the day for Magic. So I really like the, you know, that kind of, I don't know, I don't know how to describe that type of art, but whatever that is, I like it. And I love that. I also happen to love that card. What were the best buildarounds in the set? This one's kind of interesting, right? Because there's a lot of, like, more can't size? Yeah, I mean, certainly one of the best cards in the set and you definitely qualified as a build around because if you didn't have a bunch of elves, you didn't do anything. Yeah. What about like Bogart Mischief and like the ones that turboed up? I like Bogart Mischief a lot. I did too. Because this did feel like, you know, the goblins that kind of felt like a smaller, slightly slower version of some of the other archetypes. But when you had these uncommon plus payoffs, it could kind of cook. I like that one. Like, yeah, I think that was a good reason to draft goblins. You know, it, me drafting goblins and having a busted Bogart Mischief deck in the early access was certainly set me on the course of like, ooh, goblins is great initially. I know. I had a similar, yeah. I had to kind of back off on that. My probably my favorite, though I haven't actually seen how well it did, I assume not not amazing was sapling nursery. This is, this is right where I want to be, you know, like this is the six green, green enchantment landfall make a three four merfolk with reach and it has affinity for forests and you can pay one in a green exile and give tree folk and forest indestructible until in a turn. But like, yeah, this is the type of card that, you know, is a one card win condition basically, but you got to work towards it. You need to have enough forest to bring that cost from eight down to like, you know, five or something like that. And then, you know, then then all top decks are good from that point on, basically. Galaeth Deidremer was a pretty fun one too. That's the one that went and attacked. You got you or when you play a spell, exile it when you attack, you got to play one of those spells. That was that was a good one. That's a must kill. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That was they always played it and you had that one turn window and you needed to kill it. And if you didn't, they play some removal spell killer guy attack where they kill your other guy and you're like, okay, well, this game's over. Which card still looks good when you read it, but just doesn't see play? I like the Six mana draw card for each of the same type card. Oh, yeah. The blue, the four blue blue. Yeah. Because in the problem with it is it's basically just, I think, worse than the common version. Yeah. So I did like it, but it just, I didn't often find much success with it. Oh, you can never stop me from playing that. The card for me that fit that was Luminolisk, that was Luminolisk, the three in a green, two for death touch vivid gain life equals a number of colors. Like, how is this thing not sweet, right? Game three or four, it's a two for death touch. So like making it really hard for your opponent to attack on the ground, stabilize you get, you know, it's a just sort of a late stage, like a vivid payoff card kind of sucks. Yeah. It did not work out well. I will admit that. Was this a prince or a popper set? Very popper here, right? Yeah, I would say so. Like all the, like many of the cards that I would be like, Hey, what cards do you want for this? Yes, of course, there's good cards at higher rarities, but it's like you start talking about eclipse cards, stuff like that right away, you know, then you know, you're in a popper set. The Uncommons were super important in this set. What is the, it's a bad card, but I love it anyway. Award winner. I have dream harvest because I want to live that dream. That's the five black, black, blue, blue or blue, black sorcery each opponent exiles the top, the top of the library until they have exile cards with total mana value five or greater. And then until end of turn, you can cast those cards without paying their mana cost. Yeah. For me, it's the Vracious Tomeskimmer, the blue, black, fair, eight. It's less than it's a bad card and more than it's just you don't get to be blue, black main very often. Yeah. But I did enjoy the gameplay of that card for sure. Yeah, it's a shame. It's a cool card. What's the, I literally never went with it, but it always seems to beat me card. It's a Huffle Hurler specifically out of Kithken. I had a bunch of games where it was like I stabilize against a fast Kithken draw and I think, okay, now it's my time to shine. Now I'm going to take over and it was just like, then they play Huffle Hurler, throw a thing at me, I take five and I'm just like, okay, I guess I'm dead. Yeah. And they're just going to keep chucking the thing. Yeah. For me, it was a card that I wish would work, but it wasn't really supported. It was Glister Baron. And every time somebody played it, I'm like, like, it's probably not correct to play it, right? This is the blue, green hybrid uncommon vivid payoff. I could beat the crap out of me too. Yeah. It's interesting because, you know, I did play the vivid deck a lot. Like I really was trying to make that thing work as best I could, but Glister Baron was never really where I wanted to be with it, but then people would play it against me and I'm just getting smashed. Maybe I should have played it more. What was the, my opponent played this? So now I must win or quit magic forever card. Definitely for.core. This is the, that's the three mana mana rock that you could turn into an elemental for, or a shape shifter for four mana. Yeah. And it was just like, that was like, I kind of felt like that was a bad vivid deck where if you had to put that card in your deck, you just weren't doing great. And so that means it's every time one of my opponents played it, I'm just like, okay, I really don't want to lose to this thing. No, totally. Because it's interesting because like if you put that into your vivid deck, you're not increasing your vivid count, you're only increasing your mana ability. And that is, that was not the name of the game. For me, it was mirror mind crown. That's that really expensive equipment to four mana equipped to, and it like doubles your tokens or something. No, you equip it on a creature and then every time you'd make a token, you make that creature instead. Okay. Yeah. Whatever. At any rate, if anybody, whatever, I don't want to lose to it. I get it. Yeah. Well, they never did it, which is why it's in this category. Yeah, that says something about the card for sure. What was the biggest groan test for you? I mean, for me, it was solo emulation. Like, I know that's one of the best cards and we try not to do a groan test for just, you know, oh, they played a big thing and now I'm dead. But it was like, it really had the ability to take a close game and just like in many times just literally end the game that turned that moment. And it really did have that kind of like, oh my God, like I was thinking about so many other things and then you played this and now the game's over. Yeah. So I think that, I think that for me, it would just be any Eclipse card because they play the turn three, they cast Eclipse Delphine, you just roll your eyes. Like I'm just always just like, okay, sure. Yeah. Like because the Eclipse card is just absolutely unbelievable. They really were. It was the sort of thing where it's like, they play the Eclipse card and it's not that like you can't win, but it's often you will end up losing to it, but it will just take a while. It always felt like they bought back the Eclipse card too, right? Yeah, well, it's Delphine especially. It was just like so brutal. What cards do you have your eye on for Q? So I've actually gotten to Q, but decent amount with these cards and Glint Islander Guardians are really good one. That's the two in a blue, three, four flyer that comes into play with a minus one counter. The fact that it has flash like goes a long way. Like this card is actually good in Q. Like you can use it to ambush a creature, you can play it, and then start to have a counter spell up. Like it does some pretty good work. Vibrance, Wistfulness, and Deceit. So basically not catharsis, the red, white and white and not emptiness, the black, white one, all the elementals are awesome. Like Vibrance can go get Stripmine in your, in your green Stripmine deck while also being a Bolt slash 4, 4 slash life game thing. Wistfulness is really awesome for like the blue green decks and Deceit playing as like a bad thoughts. These are a bad bounce spell or both on a creature. These are gonna stick around for a while. Especially the red, green one, red, green often struggles finding good gold cards. So that's a really cool one. And then one that I actually really have been enjoying is Flitterwing Nuisance. It's blue for a two, two flyer comes to play with a minus one counter on it. But then you can play a two in a blue and remove the counter. All your creatures draw your card if they hit the opponent this turn. So you can draw like two to three cards off this card. It's pretty good. It's good on Ninjas too. Are people play pattern wise with like Vibrance and stuff? Are they usually evoking or are they, you know, casting it a lot with those types of cards? It mostly, I would say that they evoke it more than they cast it just simply because it's easier to do, but a lot of both happen. Okay. Yeah. That's really cool. What was the most frustrating quote bad card to lose to or maybe a card that you'll misplan against or just annoyed you? For me, Bark of Doran, the equipment, because it was just like, it just didn't feel like it should be good even though it was okay. It was like, not good, but like it was plausible. But I just, it just, it did annoy me like, which is, I guess, the spirit of the question. Yeah, you got it. What was the bombiest bomb, the card you hoped to open pack one pick one or in your seal pool? I mean, Ashlyn's command or Tristan's command, both very high on that list. You know, gloom ripper and elves, I still can't get over the draft where I went pick one pack one more can't right the black green elf four four pick two gloom ripper pick three Tristan's command. It was literally those were my first three picks of the draft and I went like one three or something. To this day, I don't even really know how. Oh my God, that has to be the absolute best start you could imagine. I don't even, I literally don't know if you could, you could like create a better start if you tried. Yeah, that's wild. And then yeah, Ashlyn's command was kind of the, you know, gloom ripper, Ashlyn's command were kind of the top two win rate cards, you know, for the, for the duration of the set, the best common for each color for white wander, brine preacher, over liminal hold. I mean, I like that I, I'm a merfolk was my second favorite deck to play. I drafted it. I probably drafted merfolk the most out of any deck I tried for the vivid deck. But you know, if I got like a, you know, whatever an eclipsed marrow or whatever, I would just end up being in merfolk a lot. But it does kind of show that, you know, it's not really like the most impressive blue temporal cleansing. That was pretty clear black Don Han eulogist says a lot, Luis. I mean, it's not removal spell. It's, it's a, you know, tribe specific card. And it's, I mean, it ended up just being a total house. I would not have predicted that in the set review. But like you said, that combination of abilities came together. Red. Yeah, our boy, the Kola Zella took it down over flamkin gildweaver. I like that. Yeah. And then green, it actually ended up just being a cert perfection. So not an elf, but a card that went really well in elves. So yeah, our cert perfection was obviously totally solid. Whenever, whenever a spell gives like a one of the bite or fight spells, start with a little stat boost, they do tend to do pretty well because it just increases the range of what they can hit by so much. Yeah. Yeah. We have the, you know, what was the mythic uncommon for the set? And, you know, the mythic uncommon for the set isn't just like the highest win rate card. It's like, it has to have a little special something to it. It often is the highest win rate card as well. But for me, it's like not even close. It's eclipsed elf. Like that, that to me was the uncommon that I wanted to see. It was the one I didn't want to see on the other side of the battlefield. Yeah. Any of the eclipse cards were just, were just unbelievable. The elf is in particular though, because the elf had a lot of ways to recurrent. It had more ways to mill and bring it back. So you played like when you play against a elf deck versus a kith con deck, you, they will play eclipsed elf more often and they will get it back more often. So like, it just combines so nicely to really feel like you're just in for a slog here. I did look it up and it technically eclipsed elf was the second highest win rate and it was, the first was actually one of my favorite cards in the set is deep channel duelist, the merfolk lord, like the good merfolk lord. Yeah. So nice. Good for you. But no, it's definitely eclipsed elf for mythic uncommon. What was the worst card in the set, the biggest blank, the most last picked? This one is like, did they literally make this card for the memes? Like just for the pun? It's meek attack? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I would say that the pun probably waits a lot higher than you might expect in terms of like the card saying print, just knowing how game designer is. Because it doesn't make sense, right? It's like, why am I sneaking in these little tiny creatures? Like, yeah, but I mean, there's something to that, right? Like there is, I think that that don't know what it's like, I could just pay like one more mana and just cast it, you know? It's like, where are we getting out of this? But I mean, I'm sure there's somebody, you know, this is for somebody out there. I just, but it was not the card you wanted to see in your pack. That's for sure. Which card was the most regrettably valuable? Triple peaceling, baby. I swear to God, Luis, like of all the things that you're really good at in this world, and there are many, picking the card for regrettably playable might be your greatest gift. Like, you know what my unsung greatest gift is? I can watch a YouTube video and the first time that I hit pause to check how far it's gone, it's almost always right at half. Like, it doesn't matter how long it is. I have a six cents for like, how long is this going? And it's at half every time for you begrudgingly playable. The frightful feastling is just the bullseye. I'm just glad that my most useful ability or my best ability is a really useful one. Yeah, we both kind of wasted our talents, but everybody's got to be good at something. Is there a card you will miss drafting? I like Flame Breader a lot. That's the elemental that taps for, you know, two mana, soul ring for elementals, and I ended up, I ended up just every time I had that card in play, I was pretty happy. Yeah, really cool card. Mine was Mirror Form, the one that makes one of your creatures a copy of a different creature, all of your creatures a copy of a different creature. I felt like it lent a really interesting tension. It was a super fun card in the sense of like, it's kind of all or nothing, because there was many times when I would just copy one of my own things and it would be like, well, this is a flyer and now they're all flyers, I just kill you, right? And that was interesting because if you had it in your hand, it was a game plan, it's a mythic rare. So your opponent really didn't know that you had it. And they didn't know that you were playing towards that game plan. And you know, like, Luis, you've played for so long and you're such an experienced player that like, when somebody makes blocks and you kind of go, like, maybe they have a sweeper, like something's up. Like this just feels a little weird. With Mirror Form, it's like really hard to like figure out what you actually have. And then they play and they're like, oh, and it also had that interesting clone vibe or whatever where like what your opponent had also mattered. Like, you know, maybe, I don't know, maybe like, you didn't really have anything that could, you could copy all of them and win the game, but your opponent plays some bomb and you're like, cool, I got five of those and then kill you with it. That led to a lot of interesting play. Also the fact that I don't think it was like a great card. I don't think it was bad. I don't actually know. I could look it up, but how it rated. In fact, I will, let's just, let's just take a quick look. I am curious now. It is 55. So it's like, basically dead even win percent. So, you know, not a, not a card you want to go running after, but you know, it did steal games and made them a little more interesting, I thought. It also went pretty well in the Murfolk deck. Like there was multiple times that I, I mirror formed the Lord and it's really funny. It's just like, oh yeah, you go completely nuts when you do that. Yeah. And it also is an instant. So you could use it as a combat trick, which was really funny too. What was the LSVist card and the Marshallist card? I kind of thought Shine Striker was a good one for me because like it was expensive, didn't put that much on the board stats wise, but did draw you a lot of cards. And also wanted you to play lots of colors. I like all those things. There's a Dirtle element and a Value element that really is a good cross section for you. Mine was Disruptor of Currents. It is, you know, a man of war of sorts, but it's like a really good one. And again, I'm a huge fan of the Murfolk deck. Like that was my favorite non-vivid deck. But by a lot, I drafted it a lot and Disruptor of Currents was dope. That card is like gnarly in the middle of combat. What was my soapboxiest card? I don't know if it's like a single card. I definitely had my soapbox moments and even in this episode, just about the fundamentals of the set, like kind of aiming for the five archetype on rails style thing. And I think that that's probably the thing that I was most soapboxy about just because I really love to draft. And I like the draft portion a lot. And this very much felt, I felt boxed in. I just, you know, I really love what I'm three picks into a draft. And I'm like, I don't know where this deck's going yet. I don't know what I'm going to do. I have, I have a couple of feelers over here after Pack One. And maybe I'm going to switch colors or whatever. And I didn't feel, I didn't, you know, we had Syracuse Fitzhawne when you were out, Luis. And one of the things that he was advocating for was to even in the face of a more on rails draft format to stay open. So he said, like, yeah, he's like, if I first pick, you know, eclipse elf and then take another decent elf, and then I get like a third pick, like, eclipse marrow, he's like, I'll just take the marrow. And he's like, I realize that I'm, you know, burning some number of these picks, but he just prioritized that you absolutely have to find which deck is open for your seat. And that made sense to me. You know, that's, I think, I think either hang on for the, for the ride or doing that are reasonable strategies, but neither of them are as interesting as I'm going to actually stay open and be able to kind of morph my deck or, you know, make some changes to it as I go. And that was, I think, the part that I probably was on my soapbox about the most over the, over the course. Yeah. I would agree with that. I think that that's a lot of where that came out. Yeah. The individual cards, I think we're fine though. I, I, there wasn't anything that I was like, this is stupid. You know, there's some good cards and whatever, but nothing like that. What card do you still have to read when it's cast against you? Luis, you nailed this one so hard. I didn't even look up the rest because I had to do it every time. Marilyn Fay ascendant. It's like, can you tell me what the three color exile get to play a card, just one card based on how many you haven't played at the time of doing it or one just in play in general? Like, you know, like, it's, Totally. Every time. And it's a good card and it was worth a splash too. So like you did see it enough. Yeah. A very strong card. Yeah. It was like just enough to forget what exactly how it worked every time. I'll tell you what though, there was no good news on that card if your opponent had already played it. Okay. Let's get into some of the nitty gritty here from a design and development aspect. How did this set fair? How did the mechanics do? What were some of the wins and the losses? And, you know, the obviously the big, big mechanic where creature types matter, the five archetypes thing, changelings being in there, and then vivid, which I thought was a really cool thing. And then there was blight, the minus one, minus one counters. And we saw a little bit of convoke as well as to a lesser extent, there were some evoke, there were some behold stuff like that in the set. Yeah. So I think the biggest thing to talk about, honestly, is just the whole, there's five different creature type or five different decks mechanic or format structure. Because like you said, that was that's where ultimately, I think a lot of the, the kind of root of the displeasure was with this, right? Yeah. That and the way I see it is when there's five, when you start with a format that like, Hey, this is going to be five archetypes. It just puts a lot more pressure on making sure that all five of them relatively work. And how are you going to vary the draft experience? What other things do you have going on? What I really would have liked here and what I think would have been a win if they had done it, but was a loss the way they actually did it was fairies and giants and tree folk and then red, green and blue, green didn't even really have like an associated type so much. I wish that those had just been a little better. They didn't even have to be like a lot better. But let's say you did a hundred drafts of Lore and Eclipse, right? Which most people didn't because most people don't do that many and we didn't because we didn't like it as much as we would a set where we would do that. But if you did a hundred drafts from a base level, let's say all five, let's say there's only five archetypes, they're all exactly equal. You kind of expect to be in 20 in each time, right? 20 times elves, 20 times goblins. The way this format played out, if you consider their five archetypes plus vivid as a six and then all of the other ones is like a seventh, let's say. The blue, black, the red, white, all that. You really weren't supposed to be, you were supposed to be goblins like eight times, 10 times maybe, maybe a little less, maybe five times. You're supposed to be like blue, black or red, white all that together, like not that many times either. And then vivid, I think a decent amount and then elves, merfolk, kithkin, like a pretty large amount of elementals as well. However, you want to define that close to the vivid deck. I would have liked to see that the off-brand archetypes be closer to out of 100 times the drafting it, you drafted like 10 to 15 times. And I think it was probably lower than that. And I don't think it would have been bad if you drafted the main archetypes like 70 times total and 30 times in between vivid and the other decks. But it really just wasn't and I think that contributed a lot to feeling like A, it was samey and B, it was pretty punishing to speculate based on like, it wasn't just five archetypes. It was five creature-type matters, archetypes that you care about the density of elves or kithkin or merfolk in your deck to a pretty high degree. Elves especially when one of your best cards like Morkant's Eyes is like, hey, you just want to count the number of elves in your graveyard and it needs to be a pretty high number. Or I'm playing an elf card that's going to mill me. If I don't hit an elf, my turn is so much worse. Like I have a eulogist and if I don't hit an elf, I don't get the trigger. Or you have the Lyssalana 2-3 that taps for mana where on turn three, you're going to play it on turn two, on turn three, you're going to cast Midnight Tilling. And if you don't mill an elf, your turn goes from having three extra mana to one extra mana. That's a really big difference. So I think that's where a lot of the negative sentiment probably came from or at least certainly from can speak to our perspective. But even other peoples, I think, it was a combination of there weren't that many different decks by design, but then some of them, the not main ones, really didn't get their to the degree I think they would have liked to have seen. And then I understand what Serikovic was saying. And that's part of what I found challenging about the draft archetype actually. I feel like I could have done better at that, especially the one draft, I think about is the day two draft for the limited qualifier where I started in elementals and could have pivoted into goblins, which is also the least likely of those decks to be good and didn't. And it could, I think, ended up with a pretty good goblin deck. And that was just a challenging navigate. And I'm sure better players than me at this format would have done so. But I didn't. It's not to say that it wasn't difficult. It was skill testing. The format definitely was. But in a way that I don't find that fun where it's like, if you speculate and then don't get enough elves, a lot of the best cards in the format are locked out for you. Not even just more can't size, gathering stone, a lot of the other things. And it's like, that really punishes you for speculating. But if you don't speculate, sometimes they end up in the wrong deck and you end up with a really bad deck. And I don't know how often people find that fun. I certainly did not find that super fun. Yeah. I think that that was one of the biggest limiting factors for sure. I had a similar situation on that. It was my day one draft or whatever, but where it's the opposite, but the same, which is like, I started off with some elves cards, but I knew it would be contested. It felt contested. So I tried to pivot and keep myself open. And then of course, in pack two, I got a whole bunch of really good elves cards. I passed most of them, then kind of went back to it. And then it's just a disaster. But I felt like I was like flipping a coin. It was just like, well, you have to choose one path or the other. And you know, if you choose one path, it's going to be this kind of muddled mess unless something's really open, or you can choose the other path. And if you get lucky, and by the way, we saw this at the PT too. Remember, we watched Seth's deck or Seth's draft and he basically took some decent elves and then it dried up and then he just hung on for the ride, kept cutting it, got hooked up and packed too early and then got some lucky stuff and packed three and made an okay deck out of the deal. But you could just tell that he just didn't have that much agency over what he was doing. And I felt that that way when I was drafting a lot too. Not my favorite way to draft. Yeah. And so talking about the specific mechanics, I also just don't think I like creature type sets that much. I think that what we're describing is emblematic of these sets. It's not even unique just to Lauren Eclipse. That's kind of how creature type sets work. Like you density is just one of the clearly most important knobs and most important parts of the format when it's like, yeah, you're a goblin deck. What do they care about? They care about having a lot of goblins and that's reasonable. I just don't enjoy it that much. I think that it's got a lot of drawbacks, which we kind of just talked about. Vivid though, I thought Vivid was really cool. Vivid is cool. I would like to see that back again. It's just another cool, like chromatic-y archetype or mechanic that I think it can be a lot of fun. Really? Minus one, minus one counters. I don't like them that much. I think that the plus one, plus one counters are just a better game piece. So I don't think it's like bad to sometimes have formats that revolve around minus one, minus one counters as this one did, but I don't think it's something I'd like to see too often. I think it's intrinsically less interesting. Just you can't do a lot of put a minus one, minus one counter on something, but you can do a lot of put a plus one, plus one counter on something. Totally. When you compare the two, it's impressive that they made the Goblin's deck, even in the ballpark of the other ones, given that that was the conceit. It is really hard to make it worth it to shrink on board stuff that you've already paid mana for. That is similar to sacrificing a creature. It's like a partial version of that. Any cards that ask you to sacrifice stuff that you've already invested your mana and time into, they have to pay you back in a major way. So getting Blight even remotely close was, I think, a win for them because it pays value. The other ones are like, we do cool stuff and we don't hurt our own board presence at all. So it's like, this one really had to pay off. Kind of did. Yeah. Convoke, I love it. Can we just have Convoke forever? I love just Convoke as a mechanic. So I'm always going to be happy to see that one. And, yeah, Behold is cool. I think Behold is, I mean, it runs into a lot of the same things that go on with the creature type matter stuff, but that's fine. And it played it out totally fine. And then Evoke was just on the rare cycle. So that didn't have a huge part in this particular format. But overall, I think, again, the mechanics were fine. A lot of them were defined by the fact that just the creature types were going to matter. That's what Lauren's about. And maybe that's just a limiting factor. Yeah, and I think that's fine. But I think it's also fine to not enjoy that sort of gameplay that much as we did. What did the format teach you? I mean, mostly it was kind of like what we talked about, which is that it can be difficult to know when to pivot. And that was just more lessons on that, I guess. It varies format by format when you're deciding how to work that. But it's not that I specifically am walking with like an actionable thing based on that. But that's what was important in the format and just trying to figure out how to do that better is always the goal. Yeah, my takeaways were what we just talked about with the five archetype-ish thing and how it affects the draft. I think it's a negative effect on the draft. I really thought that it would have been better if the non-supported color pairs were a little more cleaned up. It just felt like they were like a tease, right? It felt like, well, there's cool giants here, there's cool. But then there isn't an actual deck here. And even for experienced drafters like us, like we can see that and kind of go, okay, but then what are these doing? Like, it makes them more difficult to cast stuff that's off-brand in the deck that you actually put them in, like you mentioned, the Hovel Hurler or whatever, right? Now they have to be pumped up on power level where you have to be able to justify putting a giant in your Kithkin deck, even though it doesn't have any other synergies and just say, okay, well, this thing just has to be good enough. And it does make for a confusing draft experience when it's like, there are fairies here. But the way you view them is, can I cast it? And if so, is it on just rate better than the next thing down, which would probably be on type? That just felt like a tease to me. Like I wanted to go down those roads, but there really wasn't anything at the end of it. For me, it does feel like there's more pressure now on Watsi when they make these type of sets to be really great for Limited. That might be coming from me, but I do have big expectations for these, right? When it's not Universes Beyond, I'm like, this is special. Like we don't get very many of these, and this is kind of, you know, for us long-term magic players, like this is the really good stuff. I really want these sets to be great. I don't care if it's Universes Beyond, by the way, like if they make great Universes Beyond Limited sets, which they have, I'm in. And I've given those A's and, you know, I'm good to go. But man, I really do feel like there's a little extra something here for these. And again, that might just be me. It doesn't, you don't seem to share that expectation. So maybe it's just a me thing, but man, I really do want the, you know, I want a StrixSafe and set to be really, really great. Like I want them to still be able to show, hey, we can knock it out of the park with our own stuff here. It's not just about, you know, outside IPs. Upside, as far as takeaway, the gameplay was very good. You know, these, the archetypes played out in a mostly mid-range fashion, which is kind of exactly what I think you should do for these heavy creature-based setups. I think that's the right way to go. If it was, you know, closer to Bloomberg, where it's like creature-based, but also you're just sort of running over each other or, you know, trying to get out ahead and then just capitalize on a lead, I think that leads to a less interesting gameplay. And I think it would have made the format worse, where you felt like the draft was kind of on rails, and then you jump to the game and it kind of felt on rails too. That can really lead to a tough format. One that I really wouldn't like. This one just had like things that I didn't like about it, but the gameplay I really did. I really liked Vivid. I really appreciated that they gave us something to aim for that was outside of that mold of the creature-based stuff. And it was interesting to try to figure out where it, you know, where the balance was with it, though, you know, it not being quite on the same power level as the other decks was, you know, I wish it was a little pumped up, but whatever. And then I did think that, you know, they had interesting takes on the archetypes that they did decide to choose. They maintained, you know, they were faithful to the old Lorwin, you know, with the creature types that they picked, but they mixed it up enough, you know, and they felt good. Like, you know, elves felt like it's very much its own thing. And that was cool. And Merfolk felt the same, you know, unique identity to it, different from the others, but also still very much creature-based type. I thought they did a good job with that. Like those were things that I was like, Hey, these archetypes, they do work. The ones that they brought to the table, they mostly got, you know, the goblins was a little bit behind probably just because Blight is a very steep hill to climb. But, you know, even then, like you said, it would pop up enough that you could draft it. It wasn't like a complete disaster. And if you got some of the upper rarity stuff, you could, you know, you could make that deck work. I mean, I won one of the collector boxes with, it was sealed, but with a goblins deck, for example. So you can definitely have done it. So a lot there to sum it up, what grade would you give the set? I'll give it a C. I think it's okay, but not, but not awesome. It checks the box, right? It was a limited set. There are some upsides. The one thing that I haven't mentioned yet that I think is an upside is that this, I believe, is an easier on ramp set for newer players, which I'm always trying to consider what would this be like if I walked into a game store and said, let's try out this drafting thing. You know, if you sit down for Final Fantasy, you may not come back. That there's so much reading. It's so complicated. You know, Airbender was, you know, closer to that than this. This one, it's like, yeah, I first picked an elf and I hung on for the ride and I ended up with a deck and I know what my deck does because everything says elf on it or cares about elves. There's a handhold there that's really good, you know, for newer players. So it's not all downside to that, but of course we're not newer players and we're, you know, speaking of it from that. And you know, for that, to me, this set did check the box for what they were doing, but I'd give it a C. I think it's a, that's all it did. And I'll tell you, you know, the cube came out. I ran to it. I went back to draft this again for the qualifier weekend and I was like, oh, right, I just am not loving this set. Like it really felt very boxy and again in the draft and I was like, yeah, yeah, this one's probably just not for me. That said, you know, it definitely checks the boxes and magic set. What was your favorite card? I think shine striker, sorry, Puka's eye. I liked everything it did. It was not quite good enough in a lot of senses, but I think it, I think it played out really nicely. I love shine striker. You know, we talked about it before, but it's just, it's got, it's got it all, right? It's, it's not really quite good enough. It's, it's, um, it's low. It requires setup, but it's like this huge value bomb. And if you ever got to combo off with, combo off with that and what was called Tam or whatever, you know, the, the thing that makes something all five colors really nice, you know, draw five off of it. Really, really sweet. So at least there was some sweet stuff to do for, for Luis and I as we end on Puka's eye and shine striker as the things that we wanted to be doing in the format. More than anything else. They were fun. They were really fun. All right. So we're going to be saying goodbye though to Laura when eclipsed and then turning our attention full time to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, at least for now. Um, you know, we, we talked a lot about the design constraints that were in place for a Laura when eclipsed and there are even more for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Again, my current take is that that at least looks like it's not going to knock the environment itself, but maybe just the longevity of it. So we're going to ride with the turtles for as long as it feels like that's the thing that we want to do. And then I think we'll probably turn our attention back to cube once it's around again. I still feel like we've got a lot of content to cover for cube now that it's a more mainstream format. We covered it before when it wasn't cause we love it, but now, you know, we've got the green light, uh, since so many more people are playing it, we really want to make sure that we stay up on that too, because cube has now become our evergreen format, right? It's the one continuous through line for us limited players that it will come out multiple times per year on arena and on magic online. And we can play it and talk about it and keep up with it. And it doesn't have to be, you know, where every other set goes away at some point. This one won't. It'll just morph over time and we'll, we'll keep you up to speed on it. And of course, all the basics and stuff too. I mean, Luis just has cube content coming out of his ears at all times. So we have to tap into that. Definitely. Yeah, that is definitely true. Yeah. Okay. Well, that's going to do it for this one. Um, if you want to find us on social media at marshal underscore lr, Luis is LSV. You can find everything related to the podcast at lrcast.com. We say thank you to everybody who supports us on patreon, as well as ultimate guard for their support of the show. That is going to do it for this one. We'll see you next week. Sorry. So I had a, I had a super small world moment happen to me this week. So a couple months ago, one of our friends was visiting from out of town and he mentioned that his mom is a teacher and one of her students plays magic and actually watches my videos. Oh, cool. And his mom teaches in Switzerland. So it's like, okay, cool. So he, so I gave him a signed foil, a juice of the mind sculptor and someone's tokens and some stuff to give to his mom or actually give to his brother, who's going to see his mom next, you know, whatever, like, dude, that's really nice of you. That's awesome. Yeah. So, uh, and I didn't think much else of it, right? I got an email a couple of days ago. It turns out this kid is the son of a friend of mine. I didn't even know what it was. He is the son of a friend of mine who I played magic with back in the Bay Area and who moved his whole family to Switzerland because he was working for like a startup or something. And out of nowhere, I get this email with a picture of the kid holding the Jace or whatever. And it was just straight up like a friend of mine I used to play magic with. That is wild. My buddy Lev. And it was cool. I hadn't talked to Lev in, I don't know, like not a decade, but like a while since I moved away from the Bay Area and he moved to Switzerland and all that, right? But he had my email and he emailed me and we've been, we've chatted back and forth a little bit, but it's just like, how cool is that? It was also kind of mind blowing for him because his kid just comes home from school. Hey, look what I got at school. He's like, what the hell? He's like, I know that guy. Yeah. And he, because, you know, he said his son's playing, going to be playing in an RCQ actually. He's like, really getting into it. So, I think that's awesome. I was super stoked and it was cool because it was like, again, it was just like, you know, look, that sort of thing doesn't happen to me all that often. Like, you know, magic is awesome, but it's not like, you know, I'm not out here like a, like a movie star NBA player where you're getting hassled for people for autographs. That really is not the life as I'm sure you can attest to. So when something like that does happen, it's like, oh, this kid's a fan. That's awesome. Let's, let me send him something, you know? And it just happened to be someone that I kind of indirectly knew. So very cool stuff. And a reminder that Magic Sweep and you get to kind of have these moments happen here and there.