Limited Resources 845 - Q&A For Spring 2026!

What is up everybody? Welcome to another episode of Limited Resources. This episode number 845. My name is Marshall. I'm one year in Limited Resources and joining me on the line all the way from Denver, Colorado, it's Louis. Scott Vargas. Louis, we've got Q&A. We haven't done one in a while. Yeah, I'm excited. I really like the Q&A episodes and a big part of that is people come up with these like pretty interesting questions and we get to talk about things we're passionate about, which you know we do every week because of magic, but yeah, there's other things too. So they're all a lot of fun. That's right. And yeah, we love doing these shows, you know, kind of one for us, right? We get to have a little bit of fun with it and kind of you get to learn a little bit more about us and about the way we see the world. So we're going to do that. Excuse me. We're also going to do Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Crack A Pack just to stay up on that format and yeah, that's going to be the show today. First off though, we want to say thank you to everybody who supports us on Patreon. It's patreon.com slash limited resources. If you'd like to support us there, we'd also like to thank Ultimate Guard for their support of the show. We're actually streaming live right now on Ultimate Guard's Twitch page and we do that once a month. Now, as part of our deal with Ultimate Guard and that means that yeah, you get to see us behind the scenes. We also do this for our patrons every week, but once a month we'll do it for the Ultimate Guard stream. So hi to everybody who's watching us on there and if you want to make sure to check that it's Ultimate Guard live over on Twitch. Ultimate Guard makes the best stuff in the business to protect your cards, your decks and your collection. Sleeves, deck boxes, binders, backpacks, everything you need from beginning to end for your magic cards, whether you're using the playing tournaments or whether you're a hardcore collector, they've got the best stuff in the business. They use premium materials and really well thought out designs and they combine those into a fantastic product. You can check them out at ultimateguard.com and you can pick up their stuff at your favorite online retailer or local game store. Thank you, Ultimate Guard. We do appreciate it. I was going to do this Patreon question of the week, but I'll actually save it for next week because we're going to be answering so many questions on the Q&A. We'll let those be the Patreon question of the week of the week. But two things to cover here, Luis, before we get into the Q&A. One of them is this crack-a-pack for Ninja Turtles and also just wanted to touch base on Ninja Turtles. Two main things that I wanted to bring up with you, Luis. One of them was we had a WinnerBox, an Arena Direct on the weekend. I wanted to check in with you to see if you'd played it or if you had any thoughts on that. Then the other one is just your take on the format as it sits right now. I know that we were both pleasantly surprised to find this to be maybe a bit more of a format than we had expected given the expectations coming over from Spider-Man. I want to know if that's held true for you. Yeah, so I didn't do too many of the WinnerBoxes. I played one, had a pretty good blue-red artifact stack and just went O2, just got completely smashed. I was just like, yeah, I can sit this one out. I've been feeling like they've gone back to the WinnerBox slash Arena Direct plus limited weekend well quite often. A lot of places to spend gems. Cube's going to come back at the end of the month. I wasn't in a hurry to burn through a bunch of gems if I wasn't really feeling it. I've been playing a lot of Slay the Spire 2 and Once Upon a Galaxy. I've got some competition when it comes to magic. I do think the format is fine though. I think that Black-White, it seems like it's been a bit of an uptick. More than that, the games you lose to Black-White can be lopsided. That's just the sneak mechanic. It requires having unblocked things. It's so dramatically different when they play a Beaver's or a Pigeon on turn 1 versus not. I am at the point where if they play the One Drop Flyer, either one, I just feel like, okay, I'm going to lose this game. I like multi-colored decks. I like the artifact deck. So I've had plenty of fun playing the format. I'm ready to move on to the next format. I'm not saying I'm not, but this was definitely more than just a let's just skip this and move on. It was not that at all. Turtles gets to blame Spider-Man for that. There's a consequence to making bad sets. A bad set makes you not want to try future ones. Spider-Man definitely did that for us and a lot of other people. That's right. Yeah, I think the turtle set definitely checks the box on what a small set should be or could be. I don't know why they're doing small sets. They went away from it a long time ago and everybody thought that was a really good move. All of us limited players loved that move. The shoe horning in the small sets in the block structure for draft was they tried to fix it by reversing the order in which we opened the packs to try to give a little bit of shine to the new small set that had come out, but it just never really clicked. And when they went to standalone big sets, it was like so much better for limited. The consistency improved. And we got deep, interesting formats, at least possible every single time they came out. Now we're kind of back to, okay, I guess we're just getting random small sets, which my assumption is that this is a limitation on how many basically R&D, how many cards they can produce in a year. I mean, if the bosses came in and said, okay, boys, it's going to be seven sets a year, full sets go. I mean, that's got to be horrible, right? Like they must just be like, we can't do that. So I assume that a few of these universes beyond sets end up with the tag of getting these smaller set. But for a limited, that's not a good thing. Like it makes it very difficult to have a really great, fully fleshed outset. That said, Teens Me Ninja Turtles, you can tell that they put a lot of love into this one. It has a much different feel than Spider-Man. There's a bunch of cool little things that pop up, you know, bebop and rock steady together and just all these neat little interactions that you're like, oh, that's cool. Really good job with the design of this set. If you're going to aim for just five archetypes, this is what it should look like. So yeah, it's kept my attention and I keep drafting it. I did play, I had kind of a weird weekend for the arena direct. I played a bunch on Friday and then a decent amount on Saturday because I had a really full day plan for Sunday and I knew I wasn't going to be able to play that much. And then I woke up Sunday and I was sick and I was like, okay, well now I have to cancel all my plans and I'm just going to sit here and play these arena direct. So I played this. I mean, I went nuts on it. And it was interesting. I had a similar experience to a few that I've had where I don't know, the emotional feel is that you're just getting your teeth kicked in. I just, you know, a lot of O2s where I just, I felt like I had a decent deck and just was not competitive. I felt like I was running kind of bad, but you know, that's always hard to determine. I did end up winning two boxes, but I mean, I took a ton of tries to do it and I did a little experiment because I've kind of got the vibe from multiple groups of player types that they feel that these are very difficult and that they, you know, I've seen a lot of complaints about that same kind of vibe that I had where you feel like you're just getting smashed. And I did, I ran some numbers and like, it is actually quite difficult. I mean, anytime you have to get to seven wins before you get your second loss, even if you have a pretty darn good win rate is going to be very difficult. It's harder than you think. You know, if you're 50-50, it's like, I think it's 3% or something that you do it. Like if you're a 50-50 gamer. So that's like really, really tough. But on top of it, I also just on Sunday just tracked my wins and losses just on a post-it note, just out of curiosity. Like I never do that. And I was like, well, I know how I feel. I don't know how I'm actually doing it. And at the end of the day, I checked it and I was 16 and 16. I was exactly right. You know, there's a program you can use. I know. 17 lands. I know. I'm on a map and it's harder to set up. But you have to do, you have to open up the terminal, which I know you don't know what that is. It would probably be easier to vibe, code, and app than use a post-it note, right? But then the record, I'll just kind of randomize what it tells you. It'll just be like, great, great job. You're such a special, great person. It's not a losing streak. It's resilience and training. Oh my God. That's so good. That is so good, Louise. Yeah. I want you to be my new AI. I like it. Always keep me pumped up. But 16 and 16 is actually a bad record, especially for me. I should have a better win rate than that. But I had a very bad day. I'll take even for you, but yeah. Fair. Maybe that's true. But I had a really, like I felt like, you know, I felt like I was just getting my teeth kicked in all day long. And the truth is, I wasn't. I went 15 and like game, you know, but how those losses came does matter. Like when you go 0-2 into 0-2 and you thought you had a decent deck, it's like, what am I doing here? So anyway, it was interesting, but I did play an absolute ton of it. So I've got a lot of reps with turtles now from drafting the weekend there. Anyway, let's do our crack and pack for it real quick here, Louise. We'll just kind of boast through it. First up is very solid, common April and Neil, the one on a white t-shirt or something like that. Trainee. Yeah. Trainee. Yeah. Yeah. Good card. This is like the headliner card for me of why legendary common creatures are just like, you know, not very good. Like I don't like it is Chee on saying, hey, I have six of these. How many can I play? I want to play all six, but I know that's bad. And it's like, yeah, you should probably play like three or four. I don't know. Can't play six. But anyways, it's a good card. Very good card. Yeah. You know, the sneak deck requires a couple of things to really pop off. And one of them are one or two man of plays that you're actually happy to put back in your hand. And April and Neil's kind of the headliner for that, the uncommon's at the one drop slot. You know, the beavers and the pigeon or the other, you know, all stars in that way. But the common April and Neil's like the big thumbs up for that. And then you also need cheap sneak creatures ideally, like this next one, Leonardo Big Brother. That's the two in a white one, three with sneak white and gets plus one plus zero for your number of creatures. Not not my favorite. Like this is not the best of the bunch, but I don't cut Leonardo Big Brother from any sneak deck. Yeah, and you shouldn't. It's it's obviously fine. It's I think it's worse than April and Neil, but it's a solid card. Yeah, I agree. Next is Hamato Guardian stance. This is the white pump spell plus one plus three flying in scry one. I never play it. I just find that I don't have room for it in the decks that I run, even though this sneak deck should put up some high leverage combat trick scenarios where people feel compelled to block or trade, but I don't ever run it. I kind of feel like you probably should run more than zero of these. Like I bet you you slightly under run this card, but I'm not going to argue that you should be certainly shouldn't be taking it. And I don't it's not like I take it super highly or whatever. I just think that my guess is that zero is not the right number. Yeah, and I am on zero. So yeah, I don't know what it is or at what point I would do it. But yeah, I think I know what it is. It's that you don't like combat tricks. I mean, I generally don't. But I mean, in a deck like this, I thought I would like I would have you know what I mean? Like this is the type of deck that really can leverage a combat trick because people just you know, they feel like they have to block. Yeah, to not let you sneak. Next up is Skrullanoids. This is the Black 11 Death Touch. Very good card. Another great common ninja enabler here for sure. Totally. They don't want to block it. And of course, it only costs a one mana. So while it doesn't have the benefit of like April and Neil where you're like, sweet, I get to recast this. It does have the benefit of being so cheap that you don't mind you just put it back on the battlefield sometimes even that turn. Next is Retro Mutation. That's the two in a blue flash and chant creature that makes it an 01 Turtle with no abilities that cannot attack. Can block though. Yeah, I mean, I mean, this card also ends up being pretty good. I play it. I think that they've definitely cracked the code a little bit more on like how to make these cards good. Like we've it's kind of like the four mana bounce spell. Like I feel like there's a while where the blue bounce spell and the like transformer creature cards weren't very good. And now they've generally been pretty good. Agreed. Yeah, this one's totally fine. Next is No Group Biological Assets. This is the two in a red 3-1 with first strike on your turn or whenever it attacks, you can discard a card. And if you do draw a card, this one's interesting. This one's a little bit in my blind spot too. Really hard to argue with the stats on this thing, right? I mean, that is a lot of stats to give and abilities and stuff to give a common. But the fact that it's not an artifact like really hurts it for me. I'm more often if I'm playing red and blue red rather than white red. And that makes it difficult. I end up not playing this very often, although I do occasionally. Yeah, I'm always suspicious of artifact payoffs that aren't artifacts, just because a lot of the time you you just cut those before you don't cut artifacts and you don't cut the really good payoffs. This is just the medium type, okay card for an artifacts deck. I mean, it doesn't even go in the art. It doesn't even care about artifacts, right? It's just... Yeah, it just looks like a vaguely aggressive card that can help you loot and put stuff together. Yeah, and there are cards in artifacts that care about stuff in the yard. But like you said, when I go down the priority list, I'm like, is it an artifact? That's my first thing. And then does it care about artifacts? And then what are my payoffs and null group biological assets? The most succinct name they've ever come up with there doesn't fit any of those. And so it's just too easy for it to end up card number 24, 25, 26. Next card is really good. Again, Aroku Saki Shredder Rising. This is the two in a black three one. Then when it hits them, you lose life and draw a card and it has importantly sneak for one in a black. This is the card that when they play, it always feels like this is the ninja card. They started with a one drop into this and you're like, but... You watch the win percentage just plummet. It's a good card. It's pretty bad when you're doing poorly. It doesn't work that well when your stuff isn't working. But it's still a solid card, even if you're not ninjaing it. And it's very, very good. And when you are, it's obviously very, very strong. Yeah, the only thing it really doesn't want to see is the bots, whatever it's called, the one one flying vigilance for one in a blue. It's like, that is this thing's natural enemy. Next common is Tenderize. That's the one in a green incentury creature. You control deals damage. It bites. Very good card. Yeah, makes something nice and tender. Yeah, there's a lot of death touch around. You know, if you're, if you're green black, you get scroll anoints and you also get Frog Butler. So that's really nice, both at common and then being in green, there are also plenty of just big creatures that you can use with Tenderize. Yeah. I'm basically never happy first picking a green fight card, you know, but it's obviously a fine card. It's just, I always gonna hope that you can do a little bit better than that. Last common is Action News Crew. That's the one in a white two, two with vigilance and Channel Six. Put a plus and plus encounter each of your creatures and draw card. Yeah, strong card. It's fine. I mean, yeah, it just does exactly what you want. Yeah. It's flexible. It's either like medium early or pretty solid late, you know. But I also, I had a funny situation against this card actually where they played it on turn two. My turn three play was the bow, the bounce equipment. And I was like, you don't want to give them the opportunity to make a better play. Well, it's like, you don't play that card on turn two, unless that's your only two drop, you'd rather kind of keep it for later if you can. Yeah. And then. But then they're going to go three, four. Yeah. And I was just like, well, I guess I have to play this. Ultimately, I did play it. And then they ended up replaying their guy. So it's like, it wasn't a disaster. But I can just imagine, yeah, you play it, and then they go three, four, five. And then all of a sudden it's like, oh, I put a good late game card into their deck. Right. I helped them out. Yeah. Next card, I like a lot, it's Shredder's Technique. This is the two and a black sorcery destroy a creature or enchantment, if it's an enchantment, you lose two life, but it has sneak for black. So you can get it down to one mana and pseudo instant speed as well. And that's very powerful. Flexible too. I'm liking Shredder's Technique well enough here. I think that's probably where I would be. Yeah, it's where I'd be right now too. Although the next card might change your mind. It's Courier of Commestibles. What do you mean, might? Might? No. We're reading that pizza, man. I can't argue you're not taking this card. I was just saying, it might change your mind. It's one in a green for a one, two. And when it ETVs, you can search up a food. And if you don't do that, then you get to just create a food. It's a pizza delivery guy. I love that card. It's just so good. It even gives you the like fail case of like, oh, you don't have anything left? Here, get a food. He's going to deliver one way or another. He's going to deliver. Yeah. So this allows you to search up a wide range of things like everything pizza. If that's the deck you're in and that's where this really shines. But it also can get pizza face. It can get the cat, you know, the one three, the ice cream cat or whatever it's called. Or it can go get, excuse me, the other pizza that just draws you a card and makes you a different color of mana. So that's a whole lot of different things to be able to get with it. And like you said, even if you've exhausted all of those, it still just makes it. Your average black green deck, you play this, it can either get the ice cream kitty, the intro of your banana pizza, or sometimes yeah, like a pizza face, like a bomb or some kind. So it's like, you're too many to think, tutors up or removal, a blocker, a bomb or, or just gives you a food if you got nothing else to do. Yeah, I'm in. Yeah, yeah, the intro of your banana pizza too is probably its best target. Last uncommon is Casey Jones, jury rig, whatever, just this year, it's a one in a red for two one haste. And when it enters, you look at the top four cards of your library, you can reveal an artifact card from them and then put it into your hand and put the rest on the bottom in random order. I always run this in my artifact decks, but I'm not actually that impressed by it. It feels like you kind of give up a lot by playing this thing. It's still two for one, so I'll take it, but yeah, I think basically what this card is is like, if it, if it misses, you're pretty unhappy. And if it hits, it's like, this is okay. It's slightly better than okay. So like, I do like the card, but this feels a little like a reverse lottery where you're satisfied when it hits and unhappy when it misses. So it's like, you're not like thrilled either way, like the courier, it never misses. Right. And then our rare is improvised arsenal. This is the one in a red equipment. The creature gets plus one plus zero for each artifact you control and the equip cost is just red. And then you can pay four in a red to create a token that's a copy of this equipment. So if, if, if the game goes late, you run out of gas, you can actually just start paying five mana plus another red to get another one of these things on the board and equipped. It's pretty cool. Yeah, I mean, I would, I would be, I would be pretty happy to take this card if the courier wasn't in the pack, but because the courier is, I'd rather just take that. Courier too. Okay, let's get to our Q&A questions here. Luis, let's see what our, our dear, dear patrons have, have asked of us. Oh, this could get ugly, Luis. You don't know, right? It could be anything. Let me load up all of the comments here before we dive in. All right, first question comes from Hans who says, what is the best barbecue meat? Honestly, I think that's Q&A, that's Q&A start. If the first thing I always get when I go to a new barbecue place is brisket, because if they do brisket well, first of all, that means that I'm already happy going there. Like you don't need to do much more than that. I guess if, if you went to a place and they, and none of their sides were good and none of their other meats were good and just the brisket was good. Yeah, that, that's tough, especially if you have people with you who don't want just brisket, but you don't need much. I think one of the things that people kind of get wrong about, not just barbecue places, just places in general are, you don't need a restaurant to make five dishes you like. You really just need it to make the one. If, if they make the one that's great, like who cares about anything else? It's part of the reason that kind of like the mono dish places tend to be among the, the favorite ones, like Hattie B's Nashville Fried Chicken, In-N-Out makes burgers, you know, or Chick-fil-A. Like these places are specialty. They make the one thing. I'm sure that you can find a bagel place like that or a biscuit place like that. It's all, you, you are going all in. If the thing you make isn't good, then you're completely sunk. You, you don't have the cheesecake factory. I have 150 things on the menu sort of deal to defend you. But if you go to a place, it's like this makes the best brisket you've ever had and everything else sucks. Like, yeah, I would still think that's pretty good. Yeah, I think about that a lot with a lot of different things in life, not just with food or restaurants, but with everything that there's really, you know, I thought about this. In fact, with like the Watch YouTube channel, right? Like at first I was like, well, I can do different types of videos on it. And really early, I was like, no, I think that like, when people come here, I want them to know exactly what they're getting. And I don't want to ever throw them a curveball where they're like, well, I wanted to sit down and watch this restoration. And now I got to hear this guy talk about what he thinks about some watch release. They're like, nah, that's not for me. You know, and, and I think that's that's definitely true with the barbecue. I mean, places and as it turns out, next question comes from Joshua who says, Hey guys, I just got my first vintage cube together. Very excited. What would be the best way to get people interested in trying it, or to keep a play group together? Most of my friends are mostly interested in commander or other TCGs. Have you found ways offline or keeping a group together slash keeping interest in playing in person? And actually, Jeremy responded and said, Hey, Joshua, I just saw this post and wanted to say that I hope you find a great group about a year ago, I started a group to cube with at my local game store. We meet roughly once a month. That's awesome, Jeremy. Thanks for adding that. I mean, Luis, you're in a weird situation because you moved to Denver, and then you dragged about half of the California magic professional scene with you. And now you're just surrounded by people who automatically love cube. And yet, well, we don't cube that off. But life is hard. If you wanted to, you could, right? Like if you know what I mean? Like if you had the time for it, I don't if you wanted to, he would. Yeah, I think that I think that if I had a burning desire to cube live, I could make that happen certainly more often than I do now. And I will get to be doing to do that more. I know I'm just in a season of life where I don't have a lot of that time. I think that there's not like one way to maintain and obtain this play group. I think being open to meeting new people is definitely part of it because if your current group of friends is not as into it or won't do it as reliably, one of the ways to do that is to find people who will. Like you can do that. You're allowed to make new friends. I know it can be hard, but you are and like going to a local game store or using a discord. I mean, there's I'm sure that what if you live in any reasonable size city, there's like a number of probably like city magic discord type groups, you know, either you there's used to be Facebook groups, I guess more have migrated to discord, but and you can find like-minded people and you can you can try to get that going. I think that's a big part of it. You have to be the person basically I found as a frequent organizer of events and the person driving the ship, which again, I've stepped back from that, which is why it's happening less often. But when I was doing that, you just have to be the person in control and don't spend a lot of time asking other people like trying to get other people to do that stuff. I think the best way to do it is be like, instead of, Hey, when do you guys want to cube? It's like, here's three dates, vote for the date that you want. And if you get enough votes, just run it on that date. Or if people can't make it those days, maybe they can then suggest something. But the more you can put in front of people, here's a multiple choice, pick the thing that works best for you and you take care of all the details and you get, all right, we're cubing at my house two o'clock on Saturday. You know, XYZ, you bring some drinks, you know, other three people, you bring some snacks or I'll have it all or whatever it is. The more often you're going to be successful, you have the cube, you do all the things. And obviously that's more burden on you. But you're the one who wants to make it happen. And then you make it happen. I find it very satisfying to make things happen. And I like things happening the way I want them to happen. Being the organizer lets you do that. You know. Yeah, I it's funny, I was going to give the exact same advice, Luis, that if you want to make this actually go, this should be a dictatorship. Like, I'm an American, I'm a, you know, democracy first guy. But when it comes to this type of stuff, you tell people when it's happening and then see if you get the thing because I mean, it's a vintage cube, it sells itself. It's an amazing experience once people kind of get their, you know, legs under them about it. The but the question is, if I get yet another text inviting something and I have to decide something or I have to give my input or it's a big group discussion. The other thing I would say that's an extension of this is if you make it regular, like the third Monday of every month, I am doing a cube draft, you are invited, I will send you a reminder, you know, and you can tell me if you're coming, right? But like, this is happening. Like, put that out there into the world that like, so because the thing is, what I found is that really, if you just tell people when it's going to be, then they can decide if they can plan around that or not. And if you get one of your friends that says, well, I'm never available on that day, okay, fine, then maybe you start to move it around a little bit. But, you know, if you set the date, then say, if you want to be here, then this is this is how this is going to work. You know, rather than asking people what they think about it. Good luck with it, Joshua. It looks, it's the best. And if you get a good group going, it is awesome. Next question comes from Todd, who says, the bad news, aliens are attempting to take over Earth. The good news, they are incredibly intelligent and revere two pieces of Earth media. One is Space Jam. And the other is, you know, this is going by the way, the other is Luisa's YouTube channel. As such, they are challenging the citizens of Earth to a 4v4 for control of the planet. And Luisa is the point of contact. I'm terrified. On Earth's point of view, but I am terrified that you're the point of contact for this. Oh, I missed the message, you know, who should he put on the team? The best all-around magic player. I missed the message. Of the two of us, who's more likely to miss a message and not respond? You. I don't know, man. It depends on the context. It might be close. I'm not trying to, yeah, I don't want to overstate it. I know actually it's a little more nuanced. I think the average message, I'm probably a little more likely to have missed than you. But when you have decided in a specific conversation that you're not really going to be checking it, you can just lights out and not look for responses. That's kind of more a hot. That is actually painfully accurate. Okay, so Todd says, who should he put on the team? The best all-around magic players like Finkelpaolo, the entire Jakobovitz family? Who is that? That's JJ and the rest of his family he qualified for the old per the QT. Oh, that's right. Yeah, okay. Team draft server staples like Slacks and Quinniak, or they're a handful of people at the intersection of cube and pro-level magics whose names aren't obvious. Okay, well, this actually answers this question, of course, a little bit of context. I know Todd's not here to like literally update us, but I'll give you like the two answers. The one answer is, or the first question is, how much time do we have? Because let's say we have six months or even like three months. Let's say the aliens give you three months. Okay, well, the three month answer is I would probably pick John Finkel, Nathan Stoyer, William Jensen, you know, some combination of just like the best magic players. Not people who maybe have like zero cubed or done literally zero cube, but we're talking about the fate of the world. If I tell Huey his job for the next three months is to just cube 80 hours a week and, you know, the world will provide a private chef for you and, you know, take care of all your logistics and we're going to have a whole team and we're going to do all this. I would probably just look for the historical best magic players. And I think, I mean, Finkel loves cube anyway, so that's a no brain. Well, the problem is he would just force storm. Can you imagine the earth getting destroyed because he had to take cabal ritual over failure or whatever? He's just like, he opens a pack with also a lot pride and lotus paddle. And it's just like, well, sorry, sorry guys. I'm going to go down with the ship. Play one way. But so then I would probably honestly, my team would probably be like, you know, me, Finkel Huey, and I'm even trying to think who the fourth would be. I would probably dig up. You could train that pollas pretty good. Dig O and up actually. O would be great. O would get a ton of cubing and, you know, he actually watches my videos, still I still chat with him. So, you know, it's funny, we started actually talking after Kai had passed. He reached out and he's taken up the mantle of the person who messaged me with the picks I made wrong. So there's a little bit of continuity. Kai is on. I like that. Yeah. But I think a little more interesting answer to the question is what if it's like next week? What if it's like, hey, we have 16 hours. We're not doing any training. We're just like picking the people, you know, like, or if it's like, even to just go more absurd, what if it's just right now, the aliens are like, hey, we're teleporting you and the three people you choose right now. Right now is kind of tricky because like, yeah, if you had asked me six months ago when JJ was cubing a lot, JJ is certainly one of the people who I would choose. Ely Kaseez actually has currently the highest win percentage on her draft server lifetime. I'll say that mine's only slightly below his and I played three times as many matches, but still. Ely is clearly a master. I mean, when we were really practiced and up when, I mean, there was a period of time about a year and a half ago where me and Mack would draft some pretty high stakes draft against these Austrians like every weekday, you know, and at that point, I would have taken him over anyone else. So I would certainly say Mack is in the running when he's like fully practiced as well. When the people who live Breathe and Eat cube, Quinniac and I have, sadly, we lost. So we're now 15-1 and 2 when we're on the same team together, which is a pretty nice set of stats. And then he three-0ed the next draft, not on my team, unfortunately. So Quinniac is great. He topped it a world last year and he plays a ton of cube and he's very skilled. So yeah, it's tricky. It's like, this is the age old question. Do you take, who's the best white weenie player in the world? It's like, well, was it the people who really liked white weenie or was it the people who are the best at magic? It just depends on when you're talking or what time period you're talking. Yeah, picking Paulo for this was probably not a bad idea if he has enough time to prep. But I think if I were to go into a cube arena right now, I would, you know, there's times when I would pick BK when BK is really up on it, you know, that sort of thing. Martel, Tom Martel is fantastic. He's, Tom is, I still think one of the best team draft teammates you can ever have, because he does so much thinking about who's going to take what and why and what the implications are and how to take advantage of that. And he's really good at that. So the time period, my answer literally changed whether it's zero hours, two weeks or three months. So there's options for all of those. I like the three month squad of you, Finkel, Huey and Paulo. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that would give us a pretty good shot. I'm not gonna knock him out. I would be calmly losing win a box over here while you guys saved humanity. I'd be fine. Next question comes from Brian who says, Hi, Marshall and Luis. This is my first post. Oh, welcome, Brian. After listening for about four years, I don't have a lot of time to play, mostly just pre releases with a couple of friends, but you've helped me improve my game significantly. And I frequently mention your show. Thank you, Brian. I appreciate you saying that. Of note, my 12 year old daughter recently played in her first pre release. And I use your keto framework to coach her in deck building. Oh, that is awesome. She went 03, but still had a blast and appreciated the community aspect of the game. That's really great. Hopefully she'll stick with it. I average to one in sealed and won't share my 17 lands record out of embarrassment. My question is how to cut the last few cards in limited to get to 23 spells. I have a reputation as the 44 card deck guy. I have such a reputation here. I have such a hard time making those last couple of cuts that I frequently don't. I keep those cards either because of specific synergy, mana curve, creature count, removal, or all of the above. Do you have criteria I can use to help me make cuts or maybe reference a prior episode? And then Brian also says, finally, my suggestion, this is Brian mentioned that he had a suggestion for the show, is to put out a survey of listeners, follows, patrons for better understanding of your audience, more out of curiosity than anything. We've actually done that in the past. I'm curious where I fall on the spectrum as a 44-year-old married father of three that only does two paper sealed events per set release, plus two arena drafts per month. Cheers, Brian. I think you're right in that. We probably are due to do another big survey though. It's been a long time. It would be a good idea. That's a great idea. You did that right in time and it was really interesting. I would say a very similar demographic except for the fact that I do a lot more drafts on arena. Yeah, it turns out it's your job. So how can we, Brian, Brian, I need you to commit no more 44 card decks ever. Like the last one that you built is the last time that you do this because this discipline is really, really important both in your win rate and just sort of fundamentally for magic, but it also reflects your approach to the game and then to other things. You have to strive to be optimal at these things. If you're just accepting a 44 card deck and not really holding yourself to that higher standard, you are giving away win percentages every single time you do that and we've got to get you off that train. I think one of the things that doesn't stand out necessarily, Louise, is that you know, Brian said specific synergy, manicurve, creature count, those type of things, but any time that you give a concession to one of those and keep extra cards in your deck, you are inherently taking away spots from the other things that normally would have a higher percentage of your deck. Right? If you say, well, I want to keep my creature count at 15. So I'm going to keep these extra four creatures in and I'm going to run this 44 card deck. Well, you are deluding your spell count. You're also deluding yourself. Synergy count. So how can Brian reach deep inside and find that discipline to cut down to 40? It can be painful, but the way I kind of look at it is it gives you a really good sense and you'll get better and better of what matters. And some of the heuristics, I mean, we talked a little bit about like the artifact deck. When I play an artifact deck, like whether it's in cube or regular limited, you know, a deck that's looking for a critical mass, right? Because you've got a Tillerian Academy or you've got whatever artifact payouts are in this set. I start by saying like, okay, let's first look at all the cards that are not artifacts or even say the word artifact on them in any capacity. And we'll cut from there. And usually that gives you, let's say you're, let's see you need to cut like five cards. Usually you can probably cut like at least three right away where it's like, Hey, this card's not a good removal spell and isn't an artifact. This is a random creature that does not have anything to do with my theme. Just cut those things. You want your theme to play, you want to give it room to breathe. Then you have to make some tough cuts. And really, I think that again, to lean on heuristics, because we're talking in a general fashion here, look at the top of your curve first, you do want to make sure you have ways to finish the game. But do you need the third? Well, it looks like we lost Luis here for a minute. But I don't think he goes that yet. Oh, look at the more expensive cards work your way down the curve. You're back. And then you've got to make your back. I saw you froze for a second. And then you got to make some tough cuts. But at the end of it, here, you can go ahead and bloom Marshall specifically and just channel your frustration into him. And but then cut the card and, you know, know that he's not going to be yelling at you afterwards. I will take the hit if it gets him down to 40 cards. Absolutely. Yeah, I it is so important that you do that, Brian. I you also also, Luis, I got the answer. You have to set an example for your three children, right? I mean, maybe they'll say or at least two of them for your daughter who's there with you watching, you know, you can't you know, you can't be like, I learned it from watching you as she starts playing these 44 card decks. I don't know if you mentioned it because it kind of cut out there, Luis. But what about mana pips? Like that can be a place, right? If you're on like the yeah, that's a great example. You're let's say, let's say you're playing a blue white deck. And you're, you know, you're regular limited, you've got no dual ends. It is it would be who have you to cut, let's say two double blue cards. Now you have no double blue cards, you only have double white cards, and you can play like a 10, seven, or even nine, nine, eight mana base in favor of planes and be a little bit more consistent. That's also a good kind of like way to be like, all right, make a tiebreaker at least to make a decision between those things. Thanks for the question, Brian. And thanks for joining us on Patreon too. Next up is from Kyle, who says Marshall with the likely return of the Supersonics. Boy, who would be your pack one pick one for their roster keeping in mind their first season won't be until 2028. He says has to be Wemby, right? So Kyle is referring, of course, to my beloved Seattle Supersonics basketball team, they've been gone since 2008, and they are holding a vote next week to continue to go forward with plans to expand the NBA from 30 teams to 32 teams, one here and one in Las Vegas. We have been teased many times as Sonics fans that the Sonics were going to come back in a variety of different ways. So with that in mind, I'm, I'm keeping myself on the even keel and recognizing that really anything can happen. That said, this is definitely the best news that we've ever had about them coming back. It's the most realist people are assuming is going to happen at this point. The news, sports news and stuff is just talking about how it's going to work and what an expansion draft looks like and all that kind of stuff. And what Kyle's asking is who would I want on the team? And I think he did answer his own question here. Victor Wemben, Yama, you know, seven foot five guy with skills like many of the guards in the NBA is kind of a cheat code. Really one of the most like unique players we've seen in a really long time and has basically an unlimited ceiling. Like if he can stay healthy for the long run, he actually has a chance to be considered the goat. And there's not that many people that can knock on that door. Obviously, he's not a favorite to do so, but there's very, very few people that you'd realistically look at in their second, third year in the league and say, no, this person legitimately has a chance to be the best basketball player of all time. And Wemby is one of those few people. He just, he is. So yeah, that is who I would take. If I could have anybody, Kyle, for sure. I'm keeping, you know, until I see a basketball hit the floor over at climate pledge or wherever they end up playing, like I'm just very zen about it. Even killed. I'm not going to let myself get too excited. James says, what era of vintage cube is your favorite? I know LSP has a retro cube, for example, and not a question, but he does request Jim here request that we bring back. Let's stump Vargas, which we've done. We should we should we haven't been doing or yeah, we haven't been doing it too much though. But we can we can pepper something for sure. You know, honestly, this era is my favorite era of vintage cube. I don't know. I don't know how you would split the arrows exactly. But I feel that cube has over the last couple of years, especially as people, the fact that with the advent of online tools, well, cube cubbers been around for a while, draft managers been around for a while, but like putting those together, using discord to organize cubes. And of course, now it's basically always on magic online or arena in some form or fashion. But there was a while where that wasn't the case. And we you know, this is where the draft servers kind of came from, we were drafting all the time when we couldn't do those, we still do them because team drafts are fun. But you know, there's there's a slightly less need for them. Once that started all started happening, though, and everyone really had eyes on cube, I feel like the lists have just gotten better. I look back at the retro cube list. When I made my retro cube list, it has a lot of cards that we did not have in cubes back then. It cut a lot of the cards that people were like, oh, you know, this is obviously a cube staple. And that just shows to me that much like if you went back long enough in and looked at constructed decks, you would you would find stuff that you'd be like, what people aren't playing, you know, four brainstorms in this deck, or like they aren't playing all the fetch lands, like stuff like that, like flash just really wasn't in cubes until like a couple years ago. And now it's obviously just like a staple. It's a really cool card that works really well. So I like it because I feel like cubes gotten just better and better over time. So Mike, the current era is kind of my favorite. Yeah, I would say it's either now or right before the non core product cards came in. I really like that era too. I mean, I have a fondness for when I first started playing cube, which was a really long time ago. That was when like upheaval was the card and stuff. I definitely have a nostalgia, but but my favorite, I think would either be right now, I think it's really great. Or right before those other like one of the things that I really liked about cube is that it had this element of cards that I remembered having played or commentated in my case or whatever and constructed from a long history of all this used to be in that deck or remember this card. And when the cards from supplemental products started kind of being pushed really, really hard and ended up being cube worthy and then commonly included in cube, they feel like good additions to the cube. Like as a card, I don't have a complaint, which is why I think probably right now is the best that cube's been. But they do completely lack that context that I had, where I remember opening these or collecting them or playing with them in a deck or commentate, you know, that kind of stuff, where if they're, you know, from some random commander thing or something like that. So it's one of those two for me. I probably would just stick with what we have now. There's many of the cards that come from that type of product that I really like and that I wouldn't want to see go away. So, you know, it's not really a knock on the cards themselves, but there is, I believe, a slightly purer form of cube, you know, that uses the cards kind of that are more in the heavy rotation of an average magic player. Jonathan says, Hello there, my dudes. I've played a ton of Slave Aspire one and I'm loving the second one. It's fun to see Luis doing some runs on his YouTube channel. I want to know what relic is Luis's favorite and why is it unceasing top. And then he says, Marshall, you should definitely check out Slave Aspire as well in lieu of you having Slave Aspire experience. What's your favorite artifact? Oh, I see. So unceasing top is an artifact that says when you have no cards in your hand, draw cards. So it gives you, it's just like a sensei's top of sorts where you can just keep, you gauge, gauge, keep drawing cards as long as you made a deck full of like zeros and stuff like that, which obviously is pretty fun. I really do like that card. That's it is one of the most fun cards. A couple ones I like, it's a little bit boring. I like Thorns or Bronze Scales where every time you get attacked, they take three damage. And the reason I like that is you can build a really defensive deck and just do block, block, block, and they just kill themselves by attacking you. And then there's one Brilliant Scarf, which is the fifth card you play as free. And that's really fun because you get to like line up like cards in this game typically cost between like zero and three mana. There's some outliers and three is really expensive. Most of the cards you cast cost one mana. Setting up a two or three mana card to be free is all is all is pretty satisfying. And then I guess since I don't know about that, they're asking what my favorite artifact is for magic. I would assume so, yeah. Yeah, first couple that come to mind. I mean, I love artifacts like when I first started playing magic after like a couple years after magic came out. And I was in high school and I didn't play competitively. In fact, I almost never even played like actual games, but I really like building decks. And I guess I was trying to be like a combo player or something because I would try to find these synergies from just like the pile of cards that I owned and try to build it. And I remember one of the decks that I had built was around snake basket and classic card. It's a four mana artifact. And you can pay x and sacrifice it at sorcery speed to make x one one snakes. Ole Arate won his Invitational card, Sylvan Safekeeper with a snake basket deck. Oh, man, I didn't know that. I probably should have tried to find that list back in the day. And then I that deck I had. What's the altar that lets you sack a creature to make two mana? Ashnod's altar. Yeah, Ashnod's altar. And then I had some green creature that doubled your tokens or doubled something. So like if you had all three of those, you could spit out a bunch of one ones and then just lose the game to something with shadow or whatever. So that was that was one of my original favorites. And my original favorite artwork and a card that I always wanted. I ended up buying it like maybe 10 or 12 years ago now or something is timefall. You know, awesome. Yeah, my first favorite artist was Mark Tadine. It still is. He's still on my my list. And he did the artwork for it. I was always fascinated by the art, but I can never afford the card itself because even back in the day, it was expensive. But then I actually ended up buying it off of Corbin from Coverage, Corbin Hustler, the hustler. He had one that he had he was he buys and sells cards and he was doing that quite a bit back in the day. And he gave me a really good deal on one. So I picked it up. I still have it. Should I get that graded or something, Louise? Is that something I need to care about? I mean, it would depend on how nice it is. But yeah, maybe I'll send you a picture of it. I don't know. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Next question comes from Paul who says, I think it's time we address the real reason behind LR's longevity, the fuel of every set review. This is a good timing for those on video Arnold Palmers. I recently got into drinking these during the day and they are delicious. How do you make them? What tea are you using? Do you make your own tea and put it in the fridge? Do you keep up? Do you keep it with the lemon juice? Fun fact, I'm originally French and Liminade is not lemonade, but more akin to like Sprite in France. So I first started having tea with Sprite Zero and it's also pretty good if you feel adventurous. And if you feel really adventurous, ask producer Jeff about Rock Chandy, although its popularity may depend on the Irish region. Okay, we'll bring Jeff in in just a second if he doesn't mind to tell us about if he knows what a Rock Chandy is. This is the best question I've ever gotten, Luis. I literally have an AP in my hand right now. I'm very passionate about this subject. Nobody ever cares except for Brian David Marshall. And now I have my platform in front of me. So I've made APs a bunch of different ways over the years. I have a picture that has a tea filter in it. And so you put the tea in and it's attached to the lid and that goes into the pitcher and then it brews the tea. You can do some tea, but I don't like to do that. I just do it in the fridge. And after a couple of days, you take out the middle part of the lid and you can throw away the extra stuff. And then boom, you've got your freshly brewed tea there. I also will buy it in a bottle from the store, Unsweetened Black Tea. That's what you want. There are other ways to make APs and they are good, but if you're asking me, Unsweetened Black Tea, that's what I want. And then lemonade, it is the best if you make the lemonade. I never do that. I'm way too lazy. So I buy it in a bottle from the store. And now the last two ingredients or last two things to consider. One, your ratio. This is really important. This is really, really important. The ratio is what makes or breaks it. A lot of people think that in our Palmer, and by the way, I guess we never said what it actually is. It's lemonade and iced tea mixed together. That's it. But it is the best thing to drink, I think, because it has enough flavor and complexity that it doesn't get boring, but it is not like soda or something like that where you're just jamming a ton of sugar and that kind of stuff. And that's where the ratio comes in. A lot of people think that it's a lemonade drink with some iced tea in it, but it's not. It's the other way around. My ratio. At least the good ones are. My ratio is close to one to three. So 25% lemonade. I would even say it's probably closer to 20 is what I actually aim for. Like seriously, like this one I have right here for those on video. I've drank about half of it, but I will fill up this much of the glass with lemonade and this much with iced tea and water. Excuse me, iced tea and ice. So the ratio, I think a good beginner ratio is between 25 and 33%. So a quarter to a third lemonade and then all the rest iced tea. And then the other thing to consider is ice. I'm a big ice guy. I think it's an American thing. I don't know, but like I have one of those pebble ice maker things. Like seriously, the one. Yeah. And like I love that thing. Well, I'm also an inventor at ice cruncher, which I know is bad, but pebble ice is pretty soft. So it's way better than doing that otherwise. Totally. So I do a significant amount of ice and then think 75, 25 or so for your ratio. Make sure it's nice and mixed up. I like to just shake up each of the bottles before I pour it in there. And you will be living in heaven because seriously, it is such a good drink. And if you do the calories on it, it's actually very low. I mean, it would take me four or five that I have just to have one glass of lemonade. So that takes a long time. I mean, the lemonade bottles, I go through them very slowly. So to me, it's the best compromise where you're drinking something that's more interesting and flavorful, but it's not quite like soda. Jeff said he is going to pop on to tell us what a rock shandy is in just a couple of minutes here. So once he's ready, he can just poke his head in. Next question comes from Emory who says, do you guys use AI tools often? What's your favorite chat bot to talk to? I use, I use chat GBT sometimes. I wouldn't say I use like, I don't like vibe code or do any of that. But I find, I mean, look, if you use a Google search these days, the first thing it shows you is what Gemini thinks. So like a lot of and a lot of the other results you're going to do are either AI generated or impacted by AI. So I kind of just use chat GBT as my Google search bar at this point. I understand that it can just completely hallucinate things and make things up. So I'm not like taking everything that says face value without checking, but it's good at finding links to the things. Like it will say like here is where you can read about this. And I would say that like sometimes like if you have like, you know, a word doc that you need cleaned up in some way, like there is, you know, there's ways like, hey, can you reformat this list to look like this? Like it does a pretty good job of you just telling it in kind of like plain English what you want. And it'll, it'll try to do that. Like I remember when we were deciding which minivan to buy, it's a pretty good job of making pros and con lists of a bunch of different models, you know, like I thought like it's really good at like data collation and like that sort of thing. Yeah. With the understanding that like, I've had it tell me things and I'd be like, no, that's wrong. And be like, oh, no, you're right. That's wrong. This is the actual, it's actually this. And it's like, okay, well, my confidence level here is not high. That's how I use it too. I do use it, but I try to use it in the areas that I'm actually confident that it's good in rather than trying to push the boundaries and have it do things that's outside of apparently its comfort zone. I'll use it for some of my watch stuff because finding information on obscure watches can be really difficult. And it's very, very good at parsing that stuff and pointing you in a direction. Like you said, Louis kind of almost more like a better Google search. And I'll use it for research sometimes if I want to try to get up to speed on something, you know, that that I could search up or whatever, I'll try to use it in that way. I have dipped my toe in just to see what it could do for a couple of the things that I do for work like, and it's been very disappointing. Seriously, just like blatantly wrong with no even hint of like, this is outside my comfort zone. And the one it's actually magic related that was at the most hilarious was I was writing an article, I think for Wizards or something, and I wanted to look up, maybe it was like build arounds or something like that, I can't remember. And I thought this will be kind of funny because I didn't think it would actually be able to do anything with it. But I said, what are the best build arounds from whatever said I was thinking about this is like last year or something. And it spit out a few cards that I'm like, those actually were kind of the build arounds like that was a nice shortcut, you know, for me not having to like dig them up. But one of the cards I didn't recognize the name of but it's I mean, it was a magic card name, you know, it was whatever very much in the magic card name realm. But I'm like, yeah, I just I don't know. And so I searched up for the card. And I couldn't find it. And I was like, I'm like, this isn't in like, Scryfo. Sorry, so getting over a cold. So I'm like, I just legitimately cannot find this card. And so I'm like, can you show me a picture of this card? Or, you know, what is this card? And it was like, it couldn't find it. And I'm like, did you make up that card name? And it was like, actually, yes, I did. And I'm like, like, that card doesn't exist. And you like, and I asked what it did. And it told me like the card, like it made a card. And I'm like, yeah, never doing this again. Right. Like this is just like completely unreliable. To the point, I mean, I'm already, I don't like the idea of offloading my mental stuff. Like that doesn't sound like desirable to me. I do like the idea of saving time when I have a lot of information that I need to plow through. But like, I never use it for like my writing. I don't use it for even for emails and stuff, because I'm just like, I want to be able to do it. No, the other thing is, it's also just so apparent when people, I mean, look, this will change. I actually do think that people who underestimate AI kind of do it at their own peril. Because you remember when people were like, oh, AI pictures and video look like garbage, you can always tell, look at the hands. And it's like, yeah, but a year later, they're really, really good. Like I, you can still tell, but our ability to tell their friends in AI, not AI, is going to go down as it gets better and better. But right now, you can tell when stuff's AI written and it just make, it just turns on the filter in my brain, like this is slop. If someone sends me a, like a personal email that's I've written by AI, that's, that's bad. It's not, you don't even have to write that many emails these days. Like, you know, like, same reason that it's like, if you look at a Facebook post or Twitter post, you're scrolling and it looks like, hey, I just don't read it. So yeah, I would not want to use it for those things. Me too. And it's weird because it, you'd think having a perfectly formatted, well-reasoned, good English, all punctuation, everything good would be more impressive. Wow, you really took your time with this, but we just humans are so good at seeing that stuff that we're just like, yeah, no, that's, that's AI slop. Okay, let's bring Jeff in. He says he, he maybe does actually know what a rock shandy is. I do indeed actually. It's a, so what do you think it is off the top of your head? Well, a shandy is kind of a beer with like a summer shandy is like a beer elimination, which is, which is why I assume we're on this topic here. Yeah. So a shandy would be the, like slang for beer, particularly in Australia, I think it's not really used around here, but a rock shandy, it's named for a town which is now a suburb of Dublin called Black Rock, as far as my understanding of it goes. And it is a mixture of like 50, 50 lemonade and orange juice, both, you know, carbonated. Oh, and yes, apparently it comes from like after rugby practice, a bunch of guys would go into, I think it was Black Rock Lounge and they would ask for the rock shandy. What is carbonated orange juice? Is that just like, is it have in it too? No, no, it's, it's completely non-alcoholic. It doesn't sound like that. So it's like, like for all the world, Fanta basically. Yeah. So like Fanta Lemon and Fanta Orange mixed. We might need you to do a research project and go try one of these things, Jeff. I have them all the time. They're exceptionally common. Oh, okay. Are they good? You can just like buy it canned, like from the store. What is it called? Just a rock shandy. Oh, it is. Oh, that's funny. Yeah, yeah, just pull on a rock shandy. It's like, well, it's my favorite soft drink. Oh my god. Okay, so Jeff definitely knows what it is. Wow, producer Jeff just coming in with a show. That's great. Thanks, Jeff. You're very welcome. Producer Jeff adds to the show in so many ways. Next up comes from Blue Beats who says, Dear Marshall and Louise, I really appreciate all the recent content driving, diving into the arena power cube as a newcomer to the format. Any plans to discuss other cube types or cube design heuristics for LSV as soon to be dad in two months, any tips to survive the early weeks and months? Thanks for everything. And looking forward to watching cube videos when on night shift duty with the little one. Well, first of all, congrats, and congrats. Congrats, Billiards. I think that really the best you can do to organize your life such that you have very few responsibilities outside of the baby. And I understand not everyone has this luxury, but hopefully, I mean, certainly mom is not going to be going to work, right? You postnatal. But hopefully, you can take some time off yourself because when you first get a baby, it is like that is the only thing you're really capable of doing. Try to line up. Again, without knowing the specifics of what you got going on, friends or family who can maybe provide, like this is the time, if you, this can be a friend. If you have a friend who's about to have a baby, I want you to hear this too. This is the time you can help them out the most by just taking stuff off their plate, whether that means bringing food by helping clean up and depending how close or friends you are, of course, you're not going to go into someone's house and start cleaning if you don't know well, but helping just with any easing of burdens that they have that are not directly taken care of the baby because it's a lot. And when the baby sleeps, you try to sleep, you're not going to get as much sleep as you want to. I still don't, but you know, and just know it gets better. You start to learn what the baby needs and how it needs it. And you know, it seems feels overwhelming and it feels like a ton, but a lot of humans have done this and a lot will continue to do this. And the first time you do it, you're not going to know anything about it. So the more you can just go in with like a very agile mindset of like, I'm going to learn what I need to learn. It's going to work out the way it needs to work out. I'm going to try my best to like be there for both baby and mom and yourself. Like you need to make sure that you're functional too. It's like, you know, the example you all use is like, you know, you put on your oxygen mask before helping your kid in the event of an airplane crash. Well, it's kind of true here too, where you need to make sure you're eating, you're showering, you're doing the things you need to do so that you can show up and be present and be doing the things, you know, it's really hard, but it just, it rapidly gets better. It just, it all gets better over time and it starts out really, really tough and gets rapidly better still being very hard because, you know, it's a hard thing you're doing. This is a, you're raising a human being. Did I ever tell you about the, when I was on an airplane once and the, they were doing the, your speech thing before you take off and the guy, the guy just slipped in. People were like laughing and kind of going, what, he was talking about like what you just said about, you put the mask on yourself. And then he said, if there's not enough masks for your children to pick the one with the most potential, he said that over the thing. I was like, wow, that's really brutal. And he didn't break, like he just went right through. And then the other question from Blue Beats was, are we going to discuss any other cube types or cube design heuristics? Probably not. I mean, that's not an episode we wouldn't do, but like, what are we going to do? Go deep on all the, you know, the, I don't know, common cubes or the all one. I mean, I think what we could, I think, maybe I could talk a little more about, like, we talk about the arena cube, sometimes the magic online cube, sometimes my cube, those are, those are some different cubes. We probably are not going to talk about like focus on like the ornithopter cube or popper cube or whatever. Unless we really feel the, feel the need to do that at some point, but maybe a guest would, would be able to, because like, I do like the idea of like, all comments or comments and uncommons cube. I find those really, really fun and, you know, they're way cheaper to put together. You can, you can get one together for a couple hundred bucks versus, you know, we all know how much vintage cube cost to build. I mean, you're in the thousands, even if you get, you know, not real versions of the cards, it's still a ton of money. So, of some of the cards, I mean, anyway, yeah, probably not going to be a focus. Also, I mean, to me, I keep thinking in terms of the power cube slash vintage cube, like we just have so much we want to say about that. And that's way more relevant now, you know, being on both magic online and arena so much. Next comes, comes from Finth the Druid who says, this question is for Luis regarding vintage cube with how many new legendary creatures there are. And with the card design, having a strong focus on making cards work in commander, do you think there would ever be a point in the future where you would consider removing Caracas from the cube? Caracas is banned in commander due to it being a very efficient way to remove an opponent's commander from the battlefield. Is it possible as a number of legendary creatures in the cube increases that Caracas would be too good and stifle too many strategies? Thanks to both you and Marshall for the podcast. Very possible. I wouldn't, I would not rule that out at all. Like, I don't think that that's a crazy thing to think about. Like, it's completely busted. When you have the game where like your opening hand is like, you know, you've got questing beast, you've got like, let's say bristly bill, you've got like, you know, Leila, your red green beats, and then and you go like turn one elf, and you're just like, oh, we're going to steamroll and they go, you know, Caracas Ocelot pride, and you're just like looking at that. Okay. I guess I can play bristly bill, play land, make my tapped alpha two, two, then they bounce it, hit me and make a token. I can play Leila attack, not play the card, and then they bounce the Leila. My questing beast is probably not going to do and these are even legends that have haste or in the case of bill abilities that happen right away. Yeah, it can definitely be a demoralizing card. And I certainly don't think it's like, you know, out of the question to think that Caracas might end up just being too unfun. Like, they're not that many cards right now in like a normal vintage cube that aren't in the cube for power level reasons. Time Vault and demonic consultation, those are power level reasons. Like, when I say power level, it's a combination of play pattern and power level, but Time Vault and demonic consultation are really, really good. And also lead to kind of like, you know, not the most interesting games. Look, we I have two cubes, the fully powered cube, and then the cube without console Time Vault and like the initiative creatures and the drafters on the server actually prefer to Time Vault one more often, which is fine. I think it's really fun. You do more busted stuff. I understand why people wouldn't include those. It's but it's a high bar. So Caracas being cut for like, again, the combination of power level slash play pattern, whatever, you know, mix that it you want to call that. I could see it happening. I'm not there yet, but I don't think it'd be impossible because also it really sits on creatures and I really try not to put too much stuff in there that's super hostile to creatures just because the base nature of the cube is somewhat hostile to creatures. Yeah, yeah, it's weird because normally I'd kind of be all for punishing, you know, people taking or playing more narrow cards like legendary cards, but it's a cube. It's like, they don't really have a choice like that. These are the creatures in the deck that many, especially with other products like we talked about with Commander and what Fint talked about too. It's like, well, there's just tons of those around. It's not like people can be like, I'm going to play this innovative strategy where I don't play these legendary creatures. Like those are the creatures. They're just the ones in the cube. So I have a choice. Next comes next question comes from Swordsman who says, thank you for the, thank you for the LR team continuing to deliver great content. You bet. We had about 15 folks show up to our FNM last week at our local shop. It was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And I'm trying to figure out how to take card evaluation out of arena and into the local game store, given the pick two format with maybe just four drafters, it feels like the evaluation of cards and colors changes significantly with a four person pod versus the more wide open world of pick one eight person drafts and arena. And my way off base with that point of view feels like we hear heuristics heuristics like red is the least draftable color, which may be true for arena, but falls apart in a very small pod where if you were the only drafter in that color, you know, you know, and you know what you're facing for the rest of the night. Are we in a world where real life draft grades or draft archetypes will very significantly versus arena? I mean, I don't think real life is really the thing, but you are, I would not draw a big distinction between real life and arena. There's a difference in quality of players and stuff like that. But you know, the archetypes I would expect to more or less mirror themselves. I don't know about for pick two, though, there may be a distinction there. Yeah, I think there is more of a distinction when it comes to pick two versus arena, but I versus pick one or like normal draft. My the biggest difference in between like arena and real life is that the people in real life are just worse, like that at most of the places you go to, obviously, if you curate a draft group, I'm not saying your look, I'm not saying your group of friends who are all fantastic drafters is bad. I'm saying if I go to an FNM in a random store, random city, whatever, like just whatever the average FNM is, and I join an arena draft, the arena draft is going to be harder. If I join a magic online draft, that'll be harder than that. You know, and that's just like kind of the function of the audience is obviously with some variants, you know, in every direction. In arena, if you go look at draft two, you know, day arena open day two drafts, those are going to be tougher than a random draft. So I think that the question here, what's different between paper and arena? Well, in paper, I think signals mean a little bit less because people are generally worse. You know, like I don't think you need to just drastically change how you draft or anything. Pick two is very different. I don't I haven't drafted enough to know, know all that much. But my guess is, you know, with all this kind of thing, though, that what cards you should select in a given pack, I basically doesn't change in between any of these things. Like you should you should try to draft the best thing you can. And most of the time, that's not going to be different based on the environment by that much. No. And I mean, even the example given there, you know, if red is considered the worst color, well, that will translate to pick two. I mean, yes, you might be able to get red, but you still have to make a card or a deck out of the cards that you've drafted. And if you go into a deeper color, you'll have more options, you know, and presumably better options as well. So I would assume it translates mostly, mostly over. Next comes from Jeremy who says, Hey, guys, I'm so excited for another Q&A episode. You all have so many great questions. I hope you're doing well. Thank you, Jeremy. Marshall, how's your new venture and the watch repair business going? How did that come about? And I guess, and then it says it sounds like it sounds like the revivals were going so well, you needed to help to keep up. It's been cool to see your growth. I'll answer that one. And then Jeremy has some questions for you too, Luis. So yeah, I opened with my friend Alex. We started a website a few years ago to sell tool kits for repairing watches, which is something that I wanted to do in conjunction with my YouTube channel about repairing watches. And then sort of Jeremy about so it's not that basically I just get asked so many times now to fix watches that it was overwhelming. It's not that I wanted to open up a shop to relieve that pressure. It was that I noticed that there's a lot of people in this world who have family heirlooms, and they cannot get anybody to work on their watch. And the problem is, is that I can only work on really a handful of watches a year for the YouTube channel because filming and editing stuff means that I don't actually fix that many watches over the course of a year. So this business was, is an attempt to try to fill that gap in the market basically and start it. It's going okay. It is a very tough business for sure. And we are trying to do everything we can to like make it fit just right. The toolkit stuff has always done pretty well. It started off well, and it's kind of grown from there. But this is much harder. You know, we have six full time watchmakers, we have a director of the shop and then a part specialist. I mean, we have a, you know, 10 employees over there now. And that is a very different beast than from when it was just Alex and I and then maybe one other person shipping out the tool kits. Those are still kind of humming along nicely. And they're more or less supporting the repair side. But it's kind of stressful. Like the starting business is really hard. And there's a lot of pressure to kind of make everything work. And we are doing our best to do that. And then it says, and then let's see you. It sounds like here we go. Luis, I've enjoyed your love for pre modern and your videos a friend of mine introduced me to it a year or two ago. And I have grown to love it as well. A few months ago, I played some games with some of my brothers, and they said it was the most fun they had playing in a 60 card format. One of them as an as a has an awesome cube. And that's how they primarily play the recent growth of pre modern has done funny things to the card market that has brought up the old reserve list discussion. Again, do either of you have any strong opinions about the reserve list? I feel that it could be approached with some nuance. We don't have to get rid of it, but there are some cards that could be removed. Anyway, I appreciate you guys so, so much. Thank you once again for all you do and keep up the great work. Thank you, Jeremy. We really appreciate you too. You've always been a great supporter of us and we appreciate these really well thought out questions. Luis, strong opinions on the reserve list. Well, I wish it was did doesn't need did I wish it did not exist. I feel like they did kind of back themselves into a bit of a corner with it. Like it, they're not gonna, you know, they're not gonna get rid of it at this point, I don't think and I don't even think like something like oh, you could maybe we just adjust to take a couple cards off like I haven't I haven't really researched it. I haven't looked deeply into it, but my guess is that that would not fly. I think they're probably gonna stay away from it as best they can. They use some pretty definitive language and I you know, they wanted to craft a strong statement and they did for better or for worse. I am generally against that sort of thing. I think that this was I mean, this was a million years ago was an overreaction in a new world in a new game all that I understand how that could happen, but I do think I would prefer to reserve this didn't exist. I think more people playing with the cards is better. The other thing which is kind of funny though, do you know how much a sheven dragon costs like a like a let's say you know, whatever version, whatever a recent blockboard or sheven dragon five cents, basically, or something. Yeah, an alpha sheven dragon or a beta sheven dragon are in the thousands and like, you know, high thousands if it's a good condition, especially if it's alpha one. Well, that shows to me the reserve list is not particularly protecting sheven dragon in any way, shape or form. The old sheven dragons are worth a ton. The new ones are not worth anything because sheven dragons desired as a collectible piece, the old art, the old border. That's what people want. Now, that doesn't hold true for everything. Underground C is being shielded by the reserve list because if they reprinted underground C, the prices of like beat revised underground C's would drop quite a bit because those those are game pieces. People are playing that use those to play games. A beta underground C, it would probably go down, but not by a lot if in long term, I don't even know that it would. So the reserve list is in a lot of ways, not protecting the values of the cards it's intended to protect, but at the same time making it so they can't reprint and get the playable versions into people's hands because I think in a world without reserve list, a lot of these iconic old cards would still be worth a lot and yet people also get to play with new versions of them. So it's kind of the worst of all worlds right now and I yeah, I don't I don't love it. Yeah, for me, I mean, I first foremost, I don't really care. But beyond that, there's only two explanations that make sense to my brain. One of them is that whatever they did put out at that time, and I have I know what you're talking about, Luis, and it was strongly worded like that they're not going to do that is legally binding. If that's the case, then it's legally binding and that's going to be that if it's not, then I assume that the combination of going back on their word which I don't think they care about. Like, I think people in the building do but I don't think Hasbro could care there they'd be like, are you kidding me? Like we could hit this button and make a ton of money do it. Like, it's not it's not illegal, right? Maybe it's like, not going to be viewed by some members of the community but like hit the button like they've shown over and over. The scientists explaining to the leadership team in Hasbro. All right, so if you press this button, you'll make a lot of money but here's and then they're all just hitting the button, right? Totally. I didn't tell you the downsides like, no, it's okay. Yeah, I mean, and we've seen this, you know, in the last, you know, more recent memory, 10 years, 12 years, whatever, where like remember when they came out with secret layer, that was actually really controversial because that was the first time that Wizards said, we are going to sell singles to players directly. The model before was always we sell sealed product to stores that product gets opened stores sell singles to players or players open them up in their own packs. They were very hesitant to step on the local game stores and to put their toe in the water of are you what are you printing here? Are you printing game pieces and then you kind of take your hands off of it or are you printing money? Right? And they said, well, and if you look at the communication around the very first secret layers, it was very guarded, it was very, we're only going to do this, we have we're not going to ever do it for this. These are things we're not going to do. And within three years, all of that was gone because it turns out button makes money, right? And you know, and then we saw the same thing with universes beyond. Nope, they're not going to be core products for us. They're going to be supplemental always. They said that you can read that, right? And then they saw how big they were and all that's gone. Like that now it's four out of seven sets in the year are universes beyond. So, you know, they are very, very willing to, you know, go back on whatever they had said in the past, if it turns out it makes them absolute crap tons of money. And so my guess is that they don't think that this will or the or it's legally binding in some way and they can't efficiently legally binding or at least legally painful because I like if they face a class action lawsuit, then they would, you know, yeah, they have enough money that I'm sure they could figure something out if they if they if they thought it was, you know, right, it's incredibly important to do that. Right. And it just doesn't seem like it is. And that to me, I mean, because I mean, yeah, I mean, at this point, you know, that was such a different era, such a different thing. And like you said, I don't think it really affect that stuff that much anyway. Next up comes from Nikolai Bolas, who says, Hey, guys, my question is about continuing to improve when you were already a great player. I know playing a lot is definitely a factor as his practice for a specific event or format. But I was wondering if there are other tech techniques techniques you use to practice and improve your skills. Is the difference between a player like Marshall, who was fantastic, but did not play on the pro tour and LSV who is regarded as one of the best players ever, just that LSV played more? Or was there an element that helped Luis improve to an elite level beyond just playing constantly? Obviously, variance is a big factor in results at big events. But seeing younger players like Nathan Stoyer, for example, do so well against players who have been playing for much longer, for a much longer time, makes me wonder if there are elements for skill improvement that I can add to my arsenal aside from just playing the game. Thanks for all you do. Dang, Nikolai Bolas coming in with a great question here. I mean, I can give my initial take and then we'll get yours, Luis, because you're going to be more definitive on this, I think. But no, the difference between me and Luis is not just ours. There are definitely other factors that come in. One of them I would say is, I don't know how you would describe this bucket exactly, but more talent. You know, Luis is better at this stuff than I am at a base level. If we ever look at a new game, I'm slow to pick it up. I usually have a decent ceiling with this stuff, but I'm like, I really have to get my head around what's going on at a base level before I feel like any sense of confidence or skill at anything like that, where Luis can pick stuff up really, really fast and then just start running with the ball. So there's a big difference there. Raw processing power. I mean, I've seen Luis, and Luis is a special guy, so it's a little unfair, but still just his ability to look at a board state and like immediately break down what's important, what's going on and come up. You know, it reminds me of when you watch like chess masters and they go table to table and they go and they just make a move against an opponent at each table who's and the opponent gets to sit there and think the whole entire time and they show up and kind of scan the board and make a move and go to the next one. Luis is like that. And so there's that part too. And then I think the other ingredient would be the people around him. You know, Luis, you know, he was friends with Paul Cheon. Paul's a really good gamer. Paul's kind of like me. I still am actually. Yeah. What I meant was, was friends with him when you were young and when you were in your developing stage for magic. And you know, Paul's a little bit built a little bit more like me, where like he has to like, he has a really high ceiling, but he builds it up over time. And you guys were able to make that work for each other, you know, by grinding really, really hard. But also, Team Channel Fireball came together, right? And like all of a sudden, you know, you were surrounded by a really motivated, really talented team of players who helped you form your game and, you know, rising tides and all that kind of thing happened from there. And I think that, you know, and then the time, the time and effort that you put in, you've played a lot more magic than me, and I've played a crap ton of magic in my life. And you've played way more than me. And that's like, you know, all of those things I think come together to make that none of those outside of who you surround yourself and how much you play are applicable for Nikolai Bullis's question about like, well, what can I do about it? How do you see it, Luis? Well, I, well, first of all, I appreciate the high estimation you seem to hold me in. No, but I think that, I think that you're certainly right that it is not just about time. That would be a pretty big error to make because the best people both played a lot, but also had a lot of other things happening in their direction. Because there's a lot of people who played have played near infinite hours of magic who aren't very good at magic, which is fine. It's not everyone's even goal to be good at magic. And I think that you exactly had it right that the biggest place is the reasons that I think I got good or other people who I played with. In fact, Team Channel Fireball is a great example, because when we started the team, it was a mix of people's, of people, different accomplishments, but none of us were like, when I, when I say Team Channel Fireball, we're talking about myself, Paulo V. Tordomarosa, Brian Kibler, Ben Stark, Shuhei Nakamura, Eric Frohlich, Owen Turton-Wald, Josh, Josh Uter-Layton. Like the, every single person I just named is in the Hall of Fame. None of us were in when we started this, of course, we started well before that. We are in the Hall of Fame, a lot of us because of the team. I mean, all of us to some degree because of the team, because we all practiced and played together. We would get together for multiple weeks. We did a bunch of stuff that a lot of people don't really have the ability to do just because of time commitments. And none of us would have been able to do that now. Of course, we're all a lot older in different stages of our lives. But when we were living, breathing and eating magic in room room with a lot of other people doing the same thing, that's an incredible crucible in terms of form, forming like good skills, good fundamentals, really honing the edges and getting all the little like, you see, you know, Paulo make a play and you ask him and Paulo is fantastic about telling you why he makes plays. And Paulo has the thing that a lot of people don't have. He just has such a different approach to a lot of what was going on. Like, I remember, you know, people would have a plains in the sideboard for a constructed deck because, you know, you want an additional land in this match up or because of this, he's like, well, why don't we cut a card for the main deck to make an extra planes and then we could always have that sideboard slot for something else. Like in a way that I could never heard anyone really talk, think about it from exactly that direction. And I really think that that like number one in my development was Channel Fireball, like the team. Number two was Magic Online. And number three was Living with Chion. Like, you know, and it's not to say that Living with Chion was the least important of those, but I think it set those things up. And in fact, me and Chion, living together and playing tons of Magic Online specifically is where we got good enough that we were able to even form the team because at this point, at that point, I had the reputation and the kind of like, you know, accomplishments to gather other people who basically all of us were kind of near the beginning of our career. But like some of us more than others like Paulo at this point had more accomplishments than the rest of the team. But we were still early on enough in our career that we were looking for this and we found it and we were able to test together. And what you can do now, like, I'm assuming people listening are not in a position or have the desire to go for two weeks to test before a Magic tournament. That's not very realistic. I mean, Discord is an amazing tool for connection. I have been really impressed with it. Make a Discord of your friends who like to play Magic or join one or whatever, find in a community and find people who like to do Discord calls where you play Magic and you watch each other play and you talk about the plays. That's going to be a really good way to simulate a lot of what we're talking about here. And you just, basically, you have to have the time, you have to have the desire, you have to have the opportunity, you want to find people, you don't want to be the best player in your group, you know, like, it's kind of like you don't want to be always be the smartest person in the room because it means you're not in the right rooms. Like, when we all got together and tested, like, I don't know who was the best of us or who ultimately being the best, whatever, Paolo, I guess is probably the best player to come out of that. I think I'm probably not that far behind. We all made it each other better. It wasn't about who was the best, you know, it was about figuring out like, what does everyone have to offer? And what do they have to say? And what do they think about things? And I think that I think that that's like the biggest key to success is finding like-minded people who you can talk to and get information from and bounce plays off of and all that. Yeah, if you're feeling like you're starting to top out Nikolai Bolas, that's 100% the next step. Next question comes from Ryan who says, thanks for all the work you do on the podcast. It's definitely made me a stronger player. Awesome. I have a question about deck construction and high stakes tournaments. I recently played in one of the limited championship qualifiers and it was a 500 plus person sealed event. Normally, I would focus on playing my best cards, but balancing that against having a consistent deck, good mana curve, good mana base removal, etc. But in an event where you effectively have to win seven of your eight matches, are you supposed to get greedy? Like, should you splash a few more powerful cards at the expense of your mana base and hope that you draw well? At the end of deck construction, I was left with the deck that I thought was solid, but I knew there was no way that I was going to be able to get six or seven wins with it against the 15% of the crowd or whatever that opened the busted pools. This is kind of a longstanding question, Luis, about whether you should, you know, about this concept of do I take on more variance if I feel that I need to have a particularly high win rate? The answer is no, right? Like, win rate is win rate, right? You make the best deck that you can and the best means the one with the highest win rate. And the reason, Ryan, that, you know, your inclination is to make a deck that has a balance of good mana, good curve, the best cards you can put in there, removal and everything is because that is, generally speaking, the one that provides the highest win rate. And that is what you should do even in a 500 person event. I mean, I don't know, maybe there's some world, Luis, where if you're going to play one round or something, and you knew you were outmatched by your opponent, maybe you just go for it and hope to draw well or something, I don't know, there could, there is, there is strategic value in the short term to upping variance if you are outmatched by your opponent. This is something that people in poker do. But that is also very much just taking less overall win rate for a chance to actually win. And when we approach magic tournaments and drafts and all the events that we do, that isn't the mentality that we want to take in. We want to view it as kind of one, one big event that, you know, begins and ends every once in a while, but that you're just trying to carry the best win rate you can from event to event. What do you think, Luis? I mean, I think generally you are, you're, you're correct. And I think people way over do it on the side of like, oh, I'm at a disadvantage, better increase variance. It is true that there is, there's like, there's an element of truth to that. If, you know, if you play against LeBron James, you're not going to win in basketball, but maybe your best chance to win is taking half court shots over and over again and just hoping to hit three in a row or some nonsense like that. Right. Where if I just go dribble, dribble, dribble, shoot, he's 6'9", 260. Like, good luck. You know. But when, when it comes to magic, most of the time, I would say that you're, you're better off trying to just enact the best strategy possible, which is to say, don't draft differently in the top eight. You know, you don't need to do that. But there are times, an example is like, look, overall, you want to just be constantly practicing and trying to do the best thing you can, because that long-term will ultimately set you up the best. It is true, though, like if you're, if you're going to play in a, like, let's say, let's say you qualified for the world championship, but like back when it was like a 32 player tournament and, you know, you, maybe, maybe you really got lucky and the other 31 players are like established players, and then there's you, right? You're like, you know, weekend warrior or whatever, like Marshall Suckler. Let's just say you randomly played in a thing and you want to, you're like, you top eight at a GP, played it, played at the regional championships and won it, and you're like, cute for worlds. And you're just like, well, this is cool, but everyone else here really is better than me, right? Right. There, maybe, yes, you should play the mono red burn deck instead of playing the control deck, because realistically, you play against Nathan Stoyer, your win percentage is going to be higher playing a burn deck than a control deck, just because of the virtue of how the cards work. It's, you know, you're compressing the decision space, you're making the game shorter, you're making fewer different things matter. You can beat Nathan in those kind of games a lot more easily than a psychotog mirror. Really, you're not going to beat him doing that, you know. But most of the times you're playing at a PTQ and you think like, well, I'm not as good as the best players. It's like, yeah, you should still play the deck you think is overall best. And at the very least, you'll learn how to play that deck better. Most of the time, that's what you should be doing. There are a few rare situations where, yes, you should take that like high variance route or whatever. Right. And I think that, you know, the, I think the examples that we both gave are really good here, but they also illustrate an important point, which is that it has to be really bad for you. Right. I had to use a pretty convoluted example. Right. Where it's like, right, where I'm going to play some like super drawn out mirror against Nathan Stoyer, or I have to play LeBron one on one. Okay, I'm going to take some uncharacteristic lines of play to try to do that, because I really don't fare well in either of those scenarios, you know, generally speaking. But if it's like, this isn't my best matchup, well, toughen out, you know, like you got to learn how to play the dang thing. Right. And if you're only giving up a few percentage points going for some, you know, moonshot thing is a bailout. And I would not do it. Udyon says, Hi guys, I love the show and the episodes are a consistent highlight of my week. Oh, that's very nice. I've been playing magic for a while, but my partner is relatively new. One thing I've noticed is how the aspects of the game that we enjoy differ quite a bit. For example, recognizing the difference between dyes and exile might be standard to an experienced player, but can feel like a great aha moment for a newer player. My question is, how has your enjoyment of magic changed over time, both as you have become more experienced in the game and grown in your personal lives? That's a nice question. Yeah, it's kind of interesting. What, like how, how is my, I mean, certainly when I first started playing, I was not doing the similar things to like, we were just playing with all our carts who were like, all right, well, this is like my snake basket deck, right? Yeah, right. This is a deck of me playing all of my cards in it. Yeah. And that's what's going on. I mean, my snake basket deck didn't have four snake baskets because I didn't have four of them. Like that was, that was the whole deck revolved around it. You know. Right. So we're in a very different world. I think the biggest thing, honestly, is I used to play casual magic against my friends all the time. That's how we played it. We didn't even call it casual magic because that wasn't, it wasn't. That was just magic. My buddy Seth would come over and we'd play a bunch of magic. At this point now, I don't think I've played, I would, I've never played a game against Sam Pardee where we're like, hey, do you want to play a game of magic? Let me pull out some decks and we'll play a game. And we'll just goof around. Yeah. Like, that's just not really how we interact, interact with the game. But I've played a lot more magic with my friends now where we're, but one of us is playing and we're all watching. Like a very common thing. Well, like, you know, I'll have some of the gang over for dinner, right? I'll be grilling, especially as we're getting into summer. This is great. And someone will just go to my computer in the living room, fire up a draft, put it on the TV and we all watch it. And that's awesome, you know, especially while you're doing something else. In fact, I love it when I get BK to do a draft so I can hang out during the draft portion, then go do whatever I want. Well, he has to play the games. Well, he pumps away the games. Yeah. And then when he loses round one, I try to convince him to drop and draft again. You know, this is a tale as old as time. Yeah. So I guess that's probably the, one of the biggest things is I went from playing magic against my friends to playing magic with my friends at a much higher rate because that's a, we find that to be a little bit more captivating. Yeah. For me, it hasn't really changed much. I mean, I've always, you know, it's been a combination of like competitive outlet plus I like to try to figure stuff out, you know, and that's, that's very much still what it is. That's why when a new draft format comes out, I'm still like, all right, what do we got? What do we got? I think the way that I enjoy it is different in that I'm much more business now. Like just give me the cards. Like I don't, you know, I don't get caught up in spoiler season. I don't even really keep up with stuff. I'm just like, what's in front of me? And then what's the next thing? And it sounds weird because I have a podcast about magic and Luis always seizes me about being kind of out of the loop. But I actually prefer it because it makes it more novel to me when the cards come out rather than knowing half the set, you know, before I draft, I mean, in our case, you know, we do the set review before the drafts come out of the commons and uncommon. So I guess I do kind of know half the set. But back in the day, I used to know that know that stuff like right when it hit the internet. And nowadays, it's a little more like, I want to talk about some of the cards and see them for the first time on the show. And I want to react to how they come out and try to keep that novel. Because if anything, it feels like magic and many things in life have gone this direction, you know, has become overly saturated with information, where a little bit more of the mystery and the surprise and stuff, I think makes it a little more fun. Next question is from Jeremy, who says, still super new to magic, but getting introduced to the limited format and by extension, your podcast has made this an incredible journey into a new hobby. Awesome, Jeremy, welcome. Thank you all, Marshall, Luis and Paul for all your hard work and the enlightening perspectives you share. You're welcome. My question is about blocking on both your podcast and during PT broadcast, I've heard you talk about blocking mistakes. We would love to hear the general rules of thumb you use to decide when and how to block and what you see as the most common blocking mistakes that players make. I think, you know, the really common line of play that you'll see in limited is somebody will tap out to play a creature, then the other person untapped and then attacks with an attack that is either a trade or maybe even not, maybe it's just a, I'm running my creature into yours and that decision point comes up all the time. Do I block or not? If I block and my opponent wasn't bluffing and most of the time people don't bluff, then what do I get out of it? And if I don't block, then what happens? And this is a really common thing because the play pattern among experienced players is often or maybe not experienced, maybe like semi experienced players will be, they're just enough to be dangerous to themselves. Exactly. I play my creature, I say go, you attack me. My thought process is, well, I don't want to block because if you have a combat trick, you're going to win this combat and I don't want to lose my creature. So no blocks. Then on my turn, I play my land and I'm going to be crafty and I say go and I'm like, haha, when they attack this next time, now I'm going to block and I have my removal spell and if they go for a pump spell, I'm going to get them. And then of course they don't attack into that. Right. This sequence happens all the time. And what it really does is force a decision sooner. So as a more experienced player, when my opponent attacks me, you know, they're two, two into my two, three and I'm tapped out, you know, I'm more thinking like, hmm, if I block, do I really care about losing this two, three? Like is it a big deal? Is this one of my best cards? And if it's not, I kind of don't mind it. Sure, I let them leverage a pump spell as a little bit more of a removal spell than anything, but they have to tap mana and they still are only trading one card for one card. And oftentimes, they then look at the board and look at their hand and they're like, okay, go. And you're like, all right. So I got kind of a tempo swing back in my direction. Yes, I lost my creature, but you're still down a card and you didn't get to develop your board. If the creature isn't that important, that's a trade off I'll often take. It also prevents you from being bluffed because if once you get the reputation for being the person that just blocks in that situation all the time, then eventually they stop doing whatever the ops of a calling station is. Yeah. Well, it is a calling station. Yeah. Because I'm just they're like attack, you're like call block, right? Yeah. So, you know, that's one thing that comes up a lot. And then the other one I think that comes up a lot is when you should block with more than one creature. And, you know, there's obvious times to do that when you're one creature wouldn't otherwise trade for the thing that's attacking. That's when it really comes up. But there are also other times to block with multiple creatures. If you have a lifelink creature, you know, and that's not the one that you anticipate them actually assigning the damage to you can just block with it and get a couple of extra life thrown in there. I have a quick story about that. Back when I was working on Eternal, if you've ever played that, that's a digital card game made by a dire wolf. It's actually what I moved to Denver kind of to do. Yeah. Many years ago. We made kind of, I don't want to call it AI, but you know what I mean, like we made it so it the program learned how to play Eternal because you're single player mode, right? And just like algorithmically, it algorithmically, it was actually really funny that Dan Burtic, he ended up being the leader of play design over at Wizards, but when he's at dire wolf, he was the one working on that. He would actually constantly be asking what I would do in a situation when he was writing the framework for this. But one of the plays it made that was impressed me so much was once it blocked a 5-5 with a 7-7 and a 1-1 lifelink or sorry, blocked a 7-7 with a 7-7 and a 1-1 lifelink or so the 7-7 trade and it gained one life. And I was like, oh, yeah, no, that is a really good play. That's something people do not do enough for sure. Right. Because what are they going to do? Like user rule spell on your 7-7 after blocks? You know, you threw away your 1-1. That isn't how it works. Say what it just killed your 7-7 up front. So, yeah, those are some of the things that come up the most often for me with blocking, Jimmy, and something to keep an eye out for. A couple more questions. This one comes from John. Hey, Marcel Nelsvi, I'm trying to capture the PowerCube, VintageCube experience points for an in-person playgroup. What tweaks would you suggest for card slash combo inclusions for drafting in-person versus virtual? Also, if we typically have four drafters, what would you recommend to ensure that we see enough cards to assemble combos and strategies appropriately? You need more than four. You can definitely do VintageCube with four players. No, I know you can play it, but if you're trying to see enough cards so that you're trying to do a lot of the typical two or three card combos, that's going to get rough. Well, what I would do is one of the things we would often do is just do draft like four packs of 12 or five packs of 10. So, you're not only seeing slightly more cards. Five packs of 10 is 50 cards. You're getting more first picks. Okay, good tip. That can be pretty exciting. So, I don't mind doing that. I think that's a reasonable way to go about it. I also, if you end up doing teams, do teams afterwards so people aren't incentivized to hate draft as much during the draft. I think that can be kind of interesting. Yeah, those are like the main things. I've played a lot of four-person cubes. They're very fun. They work out totally fine. Okay, but what about getting the experience points? Like, is this a good way to do it? I guess is what I'm asking. Yeah, it's fine. It's close enough. You're still getting reps. Okay. You're still getting reps. I think it's not ideal, but it's still totally. You're not going to notice a difference really. Next up is Nick, who says, I was glad to hear in a recent sign off that Louise is a fellow sleigh. The Spire enjoyer. Is there anything that the Magic Devs could learn from the fun and design success of sleigh the Spire in its recent awesome early access sequel? I understand the answer may be no given how different the genres are, but I figured I'd post the question. Oh, I mean, certainly there's a lot they could learn. Sleigh is a really well-designed game. Who makes it? Mega Crit, but it was basically made by like one guy as far as I know, at least a very small team, the original one. One of those games? Yeah, yeah, it's an indie game that's got really popular because it's really good mostly. I don't have to think of what I'm not sure exactly what that would look like, but I mean, you can learn something from pretty much everyone whether it's a positive or a negative. So I wouldn't be surprised if there was a lot they could learn there. Ken says, after the set has been sunsetted, how do you store your cards for your more valuable, memorable cards? Do you treat them differently than bulk, aka put them in a binder versus a storage box? This is a question for past Marshall because I basically never end up with any paper cards anymore, or if I do it, some random sealed product that I got when I was commentating a PT or something like that and it's in a box. So I just put a box on a shelf, that type of thing. But back in the day, especially when I was keeping up with standard, like trying to have play sets of stuff so that I could build standard decks when I was PT queuing. This is a long time ago, but I had binders. I really liked doing any binder that I could comfortably enough fit four copies of a card into. Once I put that in there, then I knew that I had the four, so I had a play set and then extra ones could be sold or given away or whatever. But I was big on binders and then for anything that I thought that might be standard playable and that I'd want to have access to and then binders, or excuse me, boxes for the rest is what I did. What did you do, Luis? It would literally disgust people if they saw how I keep my cards. I have a cabinet that is, first of all, it's locked but somewhat reachable by the children, so that's the first strike against it, especially the older, more clever ones though. I do believe the intersection of configuring how to unlock this cabinet and would not randomly destroy cards is pretty strong, so I'm not that worried about that. But it's a bunch of shelves. There's a bunch of those long Ultimate Guard boxes that have effectively random assortments of cards. Literally, you can grab a scoop and you'll look through and you're like, okay, well, this is half of a Marchman the Pean's draft deck from the Pro Tour. This was what looks like a deconstructed modern Yoggmoth deck. Here's a beta time vault. Scroll back a little. Okay. Now, here is 17 elemental tokens. There's also piles of just straight up cards in there, not in boxes or anything, and they get knocked down all the time. It's ridiculous. At one point, I was opening and I was looking through and I'm like, oh, this is where this modern deck went. Cool. I have one box in there that's the white Weenie deck I lost in the finals of the PTWIFT. I haven't taken anything out. It's just the whole deck right there. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. It's bad though. I really need to organize my cards at some point because it's like right now, someone's like, hey, do you have Forza Wells? I'd be like, oh, yeah, let me look through every single card I own, then I'll find them. Like that's basically the way it goes. It's not ideal. If only we were sponsored by a company that makes a bunch of great products to help organize your cards, although I guess they don't come out to your house and do it for you. All right. That's the end of our questions for the Q&A. Thank you so much for everybody for putting your questions in. We really appreciate it. And thanks, of course, for supporting us on our Patreon as well. And also thank you to Ultimate Guard for their support of the show. If you have a similar question like Ken about figuring out how to organize your cards, they are going to have a product over at ultimateguard.com to help you reach your goals with organizing your cards in a rational manner rather than how Luis decides to do it. We also want to say that you can follow us on social media, martial underscore LR and Luis's LSV pretty much everywhere. And if you want to find everything related to the podcast, it's at lrcast.com, including a link to Luis's YouTube channel. And if you're a Slay the Spire fan, he does have a few videos up on that as well as another galaxy. Once upon a galaxy. Once upon a galaxy. That's another game I've been getting into for sure. Yeah. And so, yeah, and of course, Cube and other magic stuff up there as well. So that's, you can also just search for LSV on YouTube itself. That is going to do it for this one. We'll see you next week. Luis, you got a sign off for us? I thought we were going to do Q&A here at the... We are. We are. Oh, okay. We can make that the sign off if you want. Yeah, I guess that'll be a bonus thing. For somebody that thought that's what was next. So that's where I was at. Okay. I was just going to do it for them. But yeah, I might as well. All right. So anybody in the chat on our Ultimate Guard stream here, if you have any questions, we've got a few minutes to kill here. I don't know. Anybody has anything in there? Oh, this cold just won't let go. Yeah, I don't know what happened, by the way, Luis, with the signal there in the middle of the show. Yeah, yeah, you were out for a bit. I don't know. I think you were. Oh, I was... I think we all were. It might have been a discord thing. Ah, okay. You definitely were from my perspective, Luis, but... And you both were from my perspective. Okay, I was only looking at Marshall, so I guess that probably explains that then. Yeah, I think you kept talking, so hopefully we have a recording of that. I did. I didn't stop talking. Yeah, that was good. That was good. Story of my life, but... Just says, what's the biggest learning point for picking up team cube drafting versus regular pod drafting? That's actually a really good question. There's a lot. I wrote an article on this at some point on Channel 4, probably might be able to Google and find it. It was a while ago. But the biggest difference is it's an adversarial process where when you pass them a good card and they take it, that's just straight up bad for you, whereas you should basically not hate draft in an eight player draft, like under very, very rare circumstances. Is it good at all? But let me give you an example. I actually had a recent draft where I opened a moxjet and a force of well is the two best cards. I'm going to take the moxjet there every time. That's obviously what you should do. But I knew the player I passed to took the force of well and I took like, you know, manager in second pick and I, you know, basically tried to cut blue because I correctly, as it turns out, thought that they were going to take force of well and go into blue. They ended up drafting a just guy deck. So it's not like I was able to completely screw their deck, but I during the draft tried to kind of, both by looking at what I passed and what's been passed to me, figure out what the people around me are doing, because there will come a pack where it's like, there's four cards left, there's no cards for your deck. There's a land of our elf and there is mother of runes, let's say. You have to know which one you want to hate draft and you don't have that answer for sure. But if you're pretty sure they're playing white mother of runes is definitely the card to take. If you're pretty sure playing green, you'd rather hate the elf in the vacuum. I hate mother of runes because it's much better than land of our elf. So you, you just default to not taking the good card, but it's kind of a disaster if you hate the wrong card and then pass them a good card and kind of hated from your teammate. So you do have to kind of try to figure this out. The other thing is, let's say you, you see a pack and there's two good blue cards and one good black card left. Well, it makes more sense to hate the black card because if they're playing black, you hated a card. If they're playing blue, well, they'll just take the other blue card. It doesn't really help. And this way you at least maybe pass your teammate, you know, a good, a good blue card if they're in blue. And overall, there is a lot of complexity to it. But the kind of the short version is that you're trying to manage the cards you pass to benefit them the least. Yeah, I think that's the biggest because once you understand that it's zero sum, okay, you can kind of view the world that way. But the trick or the thing that pops up the most often is trying to figure out what it is that because it's such a huge benefit, right? If you can pass a pretty strong card and get it through to your teammate or force them to hate draft it, right? And that leads to very unintuitive picks sometimes. Are there any new recipes that you've been enjoying in the past few months? I have. I found some really good new stuff, Luis. What did you get? I think I told you about it. But one of the one that I would highlight is Luiti is a Korean beef dish. And I've been doing I use my wok a lot like I'm a big wok guy. And so I'll make stir fries of different types, very versatile, right? Some meat, some vegetables, steam up some rice and you're good to go. And, and it's decently healthy, it tastes good, etc. And but one, the one thing that I was kind of missing was which kind of meat, the different types of meat that I would have. So I'd have like chicken or pork, fish or shrimp or something like that. But I would also frequently have a bit of ground beef. Normally, I would use that for like spaghetti. But I found a recipe for like gochujang beef. But it said it was really easy. And the person who put it up said like she eats it three or four times a week or something. And just as like a go to kind of meal preppy lunch thing. And I'm like, Okay, I'll give it a shot. And, and I made it. And it's awesome. It's, it's, and it's also the easiest of all the things that I, I had it actually today, before we went live today. And that is definitely like, you know, when you find a recipe that's a keeper, where you're like, this tastes really good, it's not too hard to make. Like I could see myself eating this once a week or whatever. It was one of those. And, and I have definitely done that. I've made it for other people too. And they've really liked it. So that's one of the ones that's been popular in my household recently is the Humbone beer sandwich, which is the classic French sandwich of just like a good baguette. You spread some butter on it, you put just some thin sliced ham. And then if you want, you can put a slice of cheese. But often, you know, I make a lot of dinners. I'm actually a bit of a short order cook here at home, because we have the combination of the kids and Gabby and Gabby's dad's visiting and all this. Like I'm making a bunch of different meals because I don't, I don't mind doing that. And the kids have different, you know, there are different stages in terms of what, what they enjoy eating. But this one is a pretty consistent hit. And the key is just get good ingredients. And that's not a good thing you should be doing anyways. Obviously, to the degree you can, but like baguette, for example, a really good baguette here in Denver, you can get for like four to $5, you can get a decent one for like three bucks. And you can get like kind of a mediocre one from like, you know, Safeway or whatever grocery store for like two bucks or, you know, buck 50. I think it's worth paying a little bit more because the quality goes up quite a bit. And we're not talking about a particularly expensive item. And so if you have good bread and you have, you know, just butter, I mean, obviously, you can get really good butter. But I have found butter is like, once you're just dealing with real butter, the quality isn't like drastically different when you pay a whole lot more. So I tend to kind of go middle the road on that. And then ham is like ham is that's one where I do like getting one from like a butcher that's really good as opposed to like, you know, the one that has like a bunch of like, you know, sodium solution injected and all that stuff. But if you're only, if you're dealing with a three, a list of three ingredients, and they're good ingredients, you put them together, that's a really good meal. You don't have to get super fancier, try very hard in my opinion. Boyzanaka wants to know how we feel about the small sets, the pick two sets after Spider-Man, they were very pessimistic. But after Teenage Mutant and Turtle, I've changed my mind. Yeah, we talked about that at the very beginning of the episode that we just recorded here. And yeah, we feel the same way. Teenage Mutant and Turtle seems to be, you know, a good version of these small sets. I still would just prefer bigger sets because they're deeper, more interesting. But if we're going to have small sets, this is how you do it. Like, there's definitely some care put into this set. It's held up just fine. And it seems to be a totally reasonable format. And that of course isn't true for Spider-Man. Okay, let's call it there, Luis. Thanks everybody for hanging out with us in the chat. We really appreciate it. And we'll be back next month. We do one of these for month here on Ultimate Card. And then we do the live behind the scenes recording every show for a picture on this