Limited Resources 846 - A Conversation with Zach Barash, Wizards of the Coast Designer of the Arena Powered Cube

What is up everybody? Welcome to another episode of Limited Resources. This episode number 846. My name is Marshall. I'm one of your limited resources and joining me on the line all the way from Denver, Colorado. It's Louis Scott Vargas. Did you win your cube draft? I did. We, you know, we have like a kind of, I would say like twice a monthly date or so where we play against a team of Finnish guys, the Finns and they're all great dudes. Actually, Ira just top-aided a pro tour pretty recently. Wow. You might have gotten to cover one of his matches. He was like, I think the standard one. Mm-hmm. Two PTs ago or something along those lines. But yeah, all's fun to cube draft against those guys. There's really something to cube drafting with the same people and same teams because it's usually like me, my buddy Mark, Walsdrasp, Bulls, the Citadels, Will and Quinniak is like kind of our standard team. We just get to know each other's predilection. So I opened Timewalk, Mox, Ruby, Demonic Consultation. My teammate Mark two seats down. I knew it was going to line up. I take Walk. The guy in between just takes Ruby. Mark gets a third pick Demonic Consultation and is it kind of in the lane he wants. That's the vibe. Hey. It can be really fun. Do you have a good sense for the opponents as well? Yeah. Yeah. You get a sense of kind of what the things they like to do like full arrow like drafting, you know, kind of mid-range edX sometimes or or Grexis he defaults to that. Whereas like Testang and Max, they both really like combo decks it seems like. So it's good times. I mean, you know, cubing is fun as it turns out. Yeah, it is. And in fact, that's what we're going to be talking about on the show this week. But not just between Luis and I, because we have very special guests coming on the show as well. We'd like to welcome in in right now. This is Zach bearish from Wizards of the Coast. Zach is the digital product manager events, which is kind of like an official corporate title. But really what he does is a lot of game design, including being the cube designer for well, for all the cubes on arena. And for right now, you know, that means the arena power cube that we've all been enjoying so much. So Zach, we'll bring you in right now. Welcome to limited resources. It's great to have you on. Hey, thanks so much for having me. Long time listener, first time caller. Oh, that's great. We love to hear that. And we're really excited to pick your brain about a whole bunch of different topics relating to the arena power cube. So cool. You know, once we saw the news that it was going to come out and that we were going to get actual, like powered, you know, power nine and all that stuff on arena, Luis and I were so excited. And it has certainly lived up to the hype. And we've been, you know, jumping into it content wise with both feet as well, because, you know, we always want to talk about cube on this podcast. And but it's a little bit of a niche thing because you'd have to play it on magic online. Not everybody has that or you'd have to have a cube. Not everybody has that. Now it's kind of available in all the places where magic is played arena, magic online and real life. And so we feel, you know, a little bit of empowerment to go ahead and dive in. And we thought it would be great to have you on to talk about some of the behind the scenes stuff on the power cube, how it came to be and the design decisions and everything that goes into it. So thanks so much for joining us, Zach. Before we get into that discussion, I wanted to say thank you to everybody who supports us on Patreon. It's patreon.com slash limited resources. If you'd like to support the show, we also want to say thank you to Ultimate Guard for their support of the show. If you have a cube, for example, or any deck or anything like that, you're going to need to protect those cards. Cube cards are expensive. They're hard to get your hands on and they are meant to be played by groups of people, which means something's going to happen. Somebody's going to spill something. Somebody's going to drop something and you need to protect those cards. So you're going to need sleeves, for example, Katanas are the ones that Luis and I prefer, but you know, they have a few other versions as well. And then you're going to need a place to keep all of these cards, deck boxes, binders, backpacks, all that kind of stuff you can find at ultimateguard.com. You can also pick up their stuff at your favorite local game store or favorite online retailer. Thank you, Ultimate Guard. We really appreciate it. Zach, we thought we would kick things off by doing a Arena Cube crack a pack with the upcoming version. And, you know, we can kind of get to learn a little bit about what you think about cube and how you approach it. This pack is a real test of your metal, I would say. This is a heck of a pack. And so if you don't mind, Zach, we'll just dive in and do a crack a pack. Does that work for you? Yeah, absolutely. All right. Our first card up is Mystic Confluence. This is one of my favorite cards in the cube, especially given that it's exceeded the hurdle of being five mana, but I also still like it. I adore this card. I'm trying to remember exactly how old it is, because I think this card is about a decade old at this point. Yeah. In my mind, it's two years old. You know, it just came out. Oh, it was a couple of years ago, but you're right. It's got to be nine or something years old at this point. Commander 2015. Mystic Confluence, absolute powerhouse, completely agree with you. Five mana cards are like, you have to be incredibly powerful to bother playing them. But I love blue. I love this card and I already have my eye on it as I'm looking at every other card in this pack. All right. Next up is Delighted Halfling. That's the green one, two, that taps to add colorless or you can spend, you can add one mana of any color, but you can only use it to cast legendary spells. And if you do that thing, can't be countered. I'm on Mystic Confluence here. I like green ramp cards, but like it's going to be hard to tear me away from blue or from red. There aren't very many five drops in the cube. You'd even really consider this early, but Mystic Confluence being so flexible is definitely, puts it puts it on that list though. I don't think there's a green card in the cube that would take over Mystic Confluence. And not Earthbender Ascension, which is our next card. Not so much. You know, Minsk and Buu and Oko, I think are competitive. Those are multicolor cards, but yeah, I think I think Earthbender Ascension is not going to not going to sway me here. Yeah, Earthbender Ascension is part of a landfall package that we've been testing out with green. I don't expect it to be a massive power level outlier, but the goal is it's something it's going to show up relatively late and reliably in the pack. And the hope is, I mean, we can talk about this later, but we're testing out different identities for some of the colors in the cube that have not quite as many tools as every other color does, namely green and black. No other color is going to be able to match the just raw power nine level tools that blue has. Or just some of the like one, two and three drops, then white and red have. We're going to see in the we saw in the previous version, landfall did decently well, and in the next version, we're adding a little bit more support for it. So I wouldn't take Earthbender Ascension, but I would keep it in mind for the rest of the pack. Yeah, that actually became low key. My favorite deck was the, I would call it the lands deck in general. Luis and I talked about it recently on one of the podcasts where, you know, it's not just landfall, but it's also a strip mine build aroundy stuff. And then we talked about Titania a lot as well as being a build around in and of its own, like with any, you know, land sack ability, like particularly if you could just stack your whole board of lands and create an army of five threes, like that, that type of thing. I was going for that a lot. I'll tell you the card that I wanted to open the most in the last iteration of cube was strip mine. It really was like, because that's where you get like turbo powered draws where things can get kind of dumb. Earthbender Ascension, like you said, I like how you framed it, Zach. It's not high on the list, but it does reliably wheel. So like if you are in this deck, you could pick a fetch land here instead of this and then, you know, feel pretty confident that you're going to get the Earthbender Ascension back, which I, you know, that's important too. Next up is hallowed fountain. Well, I will say real quick that the Titania and Bailoth Prime, which I know isn't quite on Rene yet, have made green. That have been, I think, one of the most interesting new kind of packages for green. And actually is one of the reasons I draft green the most often. I think if you get Titania or Bailoth Prime plus a Zerunorb or Sylvan Safekeeper, you go pretty hard. And I've been impressed with how that all works out. It few cards, I feel like have been on quite the hero's journey that Zerunorb has been. Totally. Absolutely broken, just busted in 1995. Then was essentially not powered cube playable for the longest time. And now it's a menace once again. Yeah, totally. Part of multiple combos around, yeah, Strip Mind Recursion plus the combos that Luis just mentioned. And yeah, I don't know how all this works. I've never played with or against Bailoth Prime, but I'm interested. Luis read that card to me and I'm like, are you kidding me? Like this thing seems great. So, you know, work whatever magic you need to work, Zach, behind the scenes to get that card onto Arena slash the cube. And I want to try that sucker out. All right, you said to the process by which cards get added or have gotten added to Arena for the powered cube. But I think we want to save that for later than the cracker pack because that story is not short. Okay. Yeah, I'm really curious about that. Yeah. Okay. So then you said you liked blue and red cards. So our next card is red and it's one of the, you know, with a bullet cards that's come out more recently and it's Pyrogoyf. Modern Orazins 3 Commander Powerhouse. House. Love Pyrogoyf Tribal. So great. And the like the random type of synergies of this card matter even though they are I know 1.5 percent of its power. I know. But the times when that happens, it feels so unfair when somebody is just like, nethergoyf and you're like, yeah, what? Oh no. And all of a sudden you're dead. The double goif games are really funny. They really are funny. Do you have Pyrogoyf above Mystic Confluence? I think it, if you're strictly going for win rate, I think Pyrogoyf is going to do more for your win rate. But I think it's still close to Mystic Confluence in my estimation. I also have a fun trivia fact about Pyrogoyf specifically. I was looking at the win rates of every card in Powered Cube based on your rank. And almost every, you would expect in general, if your rank is higher, your win rate is going to be higher with every single card. There were a few exceptions. Pyrogoyf is one of the only cards where your win rate decreases with rank. And it actually is the most worst performing card as you go from bronze to mythic. Mythic players actually went about 2% less with Pyrogoyf than bronze players do. Wow, that's really interesting. That's enough of a percentage to be pretty meaningful, I would say too. Now, the fun thing about data is I can give you that as a statistic. I can't tell you why. I can't tell you what it means. I can give you stories for it. I mean, a fundamental challenge of digital game design or game design in general is you can look at data, but you can't connect that to emotions or what's in players actual minds, which is why so much of what goes into cube isn't just data itself or theory crafting. It's also attic data, what people are saying, what people say online, which we do read. I'm opening up a whole bunch of cans of worms here. Oh, that's great. That's great. I'll say I probably would take Pyrogoyf, but looking at the rest of the pack, I'm not sticking with Pyrogoyf. Okay, well, the next card up is Breeze. I agree with that, by the way, that I think pick one pack one. If your goal is to win, I believe that you should take Pyrogoyf or mystic confluence. Oh, I agree. Yeah, I would take Pyrogoyf for sure if I'm trying to win. Confluence is still in the conversation. It's really, really strong card. But yeah, I mean, the shortcut that we've used for newer players, Luis, for a long time is take the cheaper card. I mean, this is not only cheaper, but it's easier to cast and maybe even in a less contested color. There's a lot going for the Goyf. Brazen Bauer? I got a soft spot for it. I'm a big fan. I love Brazen Bauer. It actually does change the calculus a little bit for me. I think I find this card routinely wheels. And that adds a tiny fraction of a point to mystic confluence. And there's just the fact that I love playing with blue cards. It doesn't change the calculus for me. I'm still on Pyrogoyf, but I'm keeping it in mind for that mystic confluence. Next card is another absolute house in red. It's Fable of the Mirrorbreaker. I'm jumping ship. Cheaper card is better card. Yeah, exactly. Fable of the Mirrorbreaker, stronger than Pyrogoyf. I don't pass this one. Fable does more when you've got nothing going on. It does a little less in the end of the leg game, where you just need something that immediately has a huge impact. But it's cheaper. It can get things going in a bad draw. It's still very good in a good draw. It's got to be Fable here. Next up is Ignoble Hierarch, but we talked about green there. It's very similar to the lighted half-length. Yeah, I like Ignoble a little more than the lighted half-length. But yeah, in neither case, am I taking one of them over Fable or Pyrogoyf from Mystic Confluent to pick one. Next up is Grizzlebrand. Exalted matters, but uncount... Oh, sorry. Oh, go ahead, Zach. No problem. It's because the exalted on Ignoble Hierarch isn't irrelevant, but I think the lighted half-length's uncounterability and five-color mana generation give it the edge. Gotcha. Grizzlebrand. Oh, this actually reminds me of a question. Are you going to do a little beef-up reanimator? I feel like reanimator has been lagging behind. That could be wrong. That's just my kind of interpretation of how it's been playing out. Yeah, I was thinking back to classic Magic Online Holiday Cube from, I think, 2013 when it debuted. And Grizzlebrand of 2026 is not the same as Grizzlebrand of 2013. I do like reanimator. Reanimator, we can talk about this again when we talk about adding cards to Arena and some of the challenges with some cards that aren't there. But I am taking note of it, but if I'm starting in reanimator, I'm looking more for a reanimate or an animate dead or one of the best reanimate cards like an Atroxa. Grizzlebrand isn't getting me off of the mirror of the mirror of it now. Yeah, it's tough. It feels like the bar's been pushed on reanimator for I need it now. And it also has to be compatible. I think this is what you're alluding to, Zach, but it has to be compatible with all of the different reanimator things. Basically, I would want it to work with Flash, for example, and Grizzlebrand doesn't. And I would also want to be able to bring it back with all of my, ideally, all of my reanimation spells, and there's a few that don't hit Grizzlebrand. That type of stuff really kind of hurts it. Moxopal, Luis, run. Look the other way. I do like a Moxopal. I can't really countenance taking Moxopal pick one over fable Pyrogoye for Mystic Confluence, which all three of those, I think, are pretty close. You could really make a good argument for any of them. Yeah, artifacts is one of my favorite decks. I love a Moxopal, but there's too many good things in this pack. I want to see Moxopal pick three. That's when I'm ready to just pounce on it. And you've already got a couple of artifact leaning slash artifacts. That's what you're doing. Pick three. Why so early? Yeah. I want a six pick Moxopal. No, Luis, come on. Any time Luis sees one of these things in a pack, he's like, hmm. You know, like, I have to try to justify this, but next up is Shadow Wee Backstreet. That's the black, white surveyor land. There aren't that many lands in the cube that I'm going to take over fable Ameribraker. Like Tularean Academy, fetch lands I'd consider, but fable is still one of the stronger on color non powered cards in the cube. Yeah, I think fable versus fetch land pick one pack one. I think you could totally justify fetch land, especially if it's like one of the blue ones or whatever. But certainly none of the surveils or duels or triumphs or anything. What about like Caracas? That's pretty good too. Caracas is awesome. Yeah, Caracas has been overperforming. Next up is another. This is actually a tri-land. It's Zagoth Triumph. I like taking note of these, though. If we're taking a red card out of this pack, this is not the number one thing we're looking for. But I find in general, if you have a one or two fetch lands, you always want to have a triumph. Yeah, it's such a game. Or a surveyor land. Crucible of Worlds is next. Another very niche card. This one's a very niche card. This one's, I would say, probably more included for historical value and the fact that I think there's like there's an expectation of strip mine loops and locks. If we, if that's all Crucible did, I don't think it would still be in the arena powered cube. But the fact that there's also shenanigans that you can do with ice till with Zerun orb. But still, this is the card that I'm looking for. But still, this is the card that I'm expecting to wheel. Definitely. More than anything else. Galvanic blast. So nice little burn spell, but it's not on par with the other red cards. And then our last card is kind of, it is a question at least, and it's brain freeze. And, you know, Luis and I had talked a couple of weeks ago about irreplaceable cards in the cube or combos in the cube, right? Where, you know, you were just talking about Crucible of Worlds, but you brought up ice till and previously there was Romanopp and there, there are numerous ways to accomplish the goal of getting, you know, lands from your graveyard, either back to your hand or onto the battlefield. So you kind of view those as a group. But, you know, there are a few storm cards, but like brain freeze is its own thing, right? And it is the only brain freeze in the cube. And it always stands out to me whenever I see it because I want to try to live, live the dream. But it's felt more like a trap than anything recently. Brain freeze is tough. Oh, sorry. I was going to say, I, I love a brain freeze. If we're being completely honest, though, you really shouldn't take brain freeze or mox opal out of this pack. You should just take fable, the mirror breaker. It's going to be the most consistent card. Even if the high end of opal or brain freeze is definitely higher than fable, the average case is heavily slanted in favor of fable. The question I have is, do you take a card out of this pack differently if it's a 4v14 draft? No. In fact, it makes it even better to take fable because because you can Kate read on the person in the left. In the event that they take the pyrogoy, if you actually end up, you end up being really happy. Yeah. Yeah. So, Louise, you're settling on fable, the mirror breaker here. Yeah. I think so. I mean, I could definitely justify, talk myself into a brain freeze here and there. But yes, that is what I would take. And Zach, you too. Yeah, I'm on fable. Brain freeze is nice this early because it means you can just commit to a breach if you see it. But you need multiple cards to be in the cube. A third of the cube isn't even opened because it's a 540. So, I'm on fable. It's just a really strong card that plays every single role. Yeah. I would take fable as well. Odds are that I would actually just take brain freeze a lot of the times that I see this pack. But if we're talking what you should do, I can't really justify that. Mm-hmm. Why do you say that, though, Louise, just because it's more fun or more interesting? Yeah. I like drafting that deck a lot. Yeah. I really like drafting the brain freeze breach deck out. Again, it depends. If I'm drafting on my phone because the arena cube is online and I'm just doing a random draft for no particular reason, I'm taking brain freeze here every time. Maybe some of the times I'll take an opal if I really want to do that. If I'm drafting a team draft. Yeah, like today you did your team draft. I care about the outcome and my teammates do too. I don't want to let the team down. I'd probably take fable and hope that they take Pyrogoyle and try to cut them on red. I think that's going to be a stronger setup. Yeah, that's a much stronger setup. And then what does your teammate end up getting? They get Mystic Confluence? Well, if they take, I would say that Mystic Confluence is the most likely, but there is always like they open Managrand and they second pick Mystic Confluence, then my teammate takes Pyrogoyle. Or there's some other configuration where my teammate opened Academy and second picked Amanavolt and then they're going to take Mox Opal here. Right. So, you know. Kind of interesting. My third pick, it starts to get a little dicier. Yeah, that was a good pick. And I do feel like I have a better sense for how you approach this stuff, Zach. So, that was good. I did want to ask you those. Yeah, I was just... Yeah, get into our conversation here. What's your personal history with Cube? Very much. So, I started drafting Cube in, I think about 2012. My crew in New York City, we had vintage Cubes, we had high-power Popper and common and uncommon Cubes. I made my first Cube in 2013 where we had all the high-power things locked up. And as a theme in my personal life with Cube, I wanted to ask a question I didn't know the answer to. So, I made something that was more like a legacy light Cube rather than a legacy Power Max Cube. I've stayed with Cube. Limited, Booster Draft and Cube are my favorite formats. They have been for... Since I started playing in 95, I didn't really discover Limited for much later because Limited didn't really exist back then. Got into team drafting, did a lot of Cube team drafts. During COVID, I got very involved in several Cube servers. That's where I met J-Bro. Among other people wrote an article about his Cube. Oh, I should also say, for 10 years, I wrote articles about Magic and Game Design and Cube for Hipsters the Coast. It was a column called Drawing Live, which I stopped writing three years ago when I started at Wizards. During COVID, got really involved online, went to the first CubeCon, designed a Cube for that, went to the second CubeCon, designed a Cube for that. And there's been this explosion of regional Cube events, particularly all along the Northeast corridor. So I try to go to like four or five of them a year. It's a little bit harder now that I'm a father, but I draft a lot of different types of Cube. And I love powered Cube. There is a reason it is the most popular form of Cube. It is a massive crowd pleaser. You're getting to engage with so much of Magic's history, the most iconic cards of all time. So I would say stop me because I would talk about Cube for hours and hours. Well, we get to do that anyway. That's what we're here for, actually. That is one heck of a Cube resume, my friend. You are about as deep down the Cube rabbit hole as you can go. I love to hear that. And I should say, I've been... Since I started, I was helping the great David McDarby with Cube, starting in 2024. I took over. So every single Cube that's been on Arena for the last two years and change, I've either worked on or owned the entire design of or was on Paternity Leely for. OK, that's great. Yeah. So you are all the way down the road on Cube. What is your favorite Cube archetype? That has changed over time. If we go back a decade, I really loved Hard Control Dex. I still love Control. I still love multicolor piles. I think in terms of strict Cube archetypes, Draw 7 is my favorite. There's nothing quite like the satisfaction of end of turn, whole breacher, untap, end the game. Yeah. Yeah. That is. And that is a more modern, you know, take as we've gotten multiple cards that have that really punished the opponent when you cast a Draw 7. So if we do that... Go ahead. It's wonderful how Cube has changed over time. Of like once upon a time, Will Of Fortune was like, I guess this is sort of a mono-red card where it's just like, mono-red is going to play a bunch of burn spells and then refill its hand. And now it's a value and combo card. We talked about Zern Orb earlier. Flash is another card that we probably should have been playing it in 2014, because World's Fine Worm was produced in 2012. And we just, we didn't know. Totally. We didn't realize how good history had given it to us. I love it. Yeah, I ended up building a retro cube last year that went up to like 2018, something like that. I don't remember the exact set. And it had a lot of stuff that was different from the way cubes looked back then, because, yeah, we didn't get to flash. There were, there's just, there was a bunch of other cards in that vein of like, clearly this should be in the cube looking back, but we all, people weren't really thinking about cube that way, or as much. There were, there were fewer people thinking about cube just in general. So it's kind of interesting. If we zoom out a bit here, Zach, how did the powered cube on Arena come to be? So this goes back over three years before I started. Arena has something called experimental frenzy. It's sort of a game jam. The very first experimental frenzy was in, I believe, early 2023. And friend of the show, Alex Werner, wanted to see could we make powered cube happen? Like, implemented a whole bunch of cards. And by implemented, I mean, they were functional. They didn't have art. They didn't have UX UI. They would break if we ever put them in front of people. But it was just like, can I just start implementing cards? I got hired. We, the second experimental frenzy, we also worked on powered cube. And we were like, this is possible. This is an enormous amount of work to actually incorporate all these cards, because some cards are really easy to add to Arena. Some cards take literal months of time. And the cards that define powered cube, a lot of them take literal months of time. So we had a really good proof of concept. And then that slowly made its way through the system. So by the end of 2024, the conversation had shifted from, are we going to do this? To, when are we going to do this? Alex was spending basically all of his free time implementing powered cube cards. And it was one of those, like, we have this brilliant engineer. Can we get him to work on anything else if we act? We might actually be able to do that if we can release this. That's not true. He's just going to keep implementing more things. Booster Truder was part of an experimental frenzy at that point. And we were like, oh, no, we have something really cool that isn't available elsewhere online. So by about November 2024, we built our list of everything that we were going to request, which was about 150 cards to add to Arena. We had no idea what the process was going to look like, because Arena has an incredibly fondly tuned process of receiving a set from Studio X. And then it goes through all the different parts of the process from making sure the cards are implemented and have the proper UX and UI, user experience, user interface, the arts properly added in. We've tested them. They all function properly. There are no card interactions we haven't thought of. And my team, content is on the very end of that process. So we essentially needed the tail to wag the dog. We have this finally tuned machine. And then we needed to ram all of these cards we wanted in from the end of the process and see how that worked. So we locked that list in February of 2024, knowing it was going to happen at some point, but not when. Why so early? Well, we needed to give ourselves time. And I wanted to make sure every single thing was done, because I was going to become a father. And so the entire, not the final cube list, but every card we were requesting was locked by February. And we were optimistic at some point in the next 12 months, powered cube was going to happen. Wow, that is wild. And this is primarily around compatibility, like the cards that are introduced will work within the confines of the rules engine or whatever it is. And then also with the other cards that already exist. Is that the hurdle that you're trying to cross? There are a lot of different hurdles. It's anybody who's worked in game designer, digital game design is like, oh, everything is, it's not fun to hear. Things are more complicated than you want them to be. Let me do some individual card stories. But like, so some cards that aren't on there, and I can speak a little bit to why. Number one is through the breach. Yeah. We had meetings and meetings about this particular card. Through the breach is like such a wonderful. What a job that you get to have meetings and meetings about through the breach. Sounds awesome. I say that when my entire career is in some former fashion getting to play games or talk about games. So like, I'm not like jealous because I know that I also struck the jackpot. But how funny is it that you're like, yeah, we had all these meetings about through the breach. That's crazy. But it's also the like, what are the options that we have on the table? Through the breach is like such, it is in general, I think not as strong as sneak attack, but it's a really essential important piece of redundancy for that deck. This is something that we've talked about publicly already, but it has that thorny little splice onto arcane claws. Which is funny because that I played more to you than just about anyone else on earth. And I've never seen through the breach splice be relevant in any way. Yeah. I think I've seen it happen once in like 2015 in a weird storm breach deck where it was spliced onto a desperate ritual to try and get around a counter spell. But like, we don't have any other arcane cards. And yet, we don't do non-functional text on a card. So like, do we exit out? Is it broken? Did we make a new card? Ultimately it was decided we could make it work or we could implement like 30 other cards. It wasn't a can we or can't we, it's what is it cost to do this? Gotcha. And like, especially with us adding booster tutor, you could theoretically splice up through the breach onto a through the breach and somebody's gonna do that. Oh, sure. So sometimes it's a card is really, really expensive. Sometimes basalt monolith is another like common card. It's used as an infinite mana combo. And arena has this tagline fast fun magic for everyone everywhere. Infinite combos are not the smoothest on arena. Particularly it has to work on multiple devices. It has to work on a phone. We wanted to make sure that everybody had a good positive experience. And also we had to do a whole investigation of like, all right, how do we make the timers work properly? Because you could twiddle it infinitely. Oh, and the rope would just keep resetting enough that you could just keep going. Like you will rope out, but it was one of those, the cost of implementing the card was surprisingly higher because even though the mechanics of the card are very, very simple, the dynamics that emerge from having it on arena mean we have to put in a lot of work to make sure that experience is pleasant and not accidentally inducing misery. And in the fact that just we were implementing a whole bunch of things at once with a process that had never been done quite that way before. And a couple of cards either ended up on the chopping room floor or were, well, we have no idea what the audience response even is going to be powered cube or optimistic, but like we'll see how that happens and then we will reevaluate whether it's worth doing this again. But at that point, you have to make decisions based on we could put all this effort into getting this right or we could unlock 10 less challenging cards. I think this is something a lot of people don't understand about the world is everything is just trade-offs. That's all it is all the way down. It's never as simple as like, it's not just is it worth spending 30 hours on through the breach? It's like, well, if we spend 30 hours on through the breach what else could we do? Like in Zach's example here, we got to do 15 or other cards or whatever, 30 other cards. And it's a lot like how people talk about like political stuff where it's like, well, why don't we just give more money to this group and this group and this group? Why don't we do everything that everyone wants? Cause you can't do it all. And it actually does end up being a thing where you have to make a decision as to what trade-offs you were willing to accept in a certain spot. So it's hard to justify through the breach under those lens, that's for sure. Are you saying the world is defined by limited resources? One could argue. Yes, that is how we see it, Zach. That's correct. That's correct. Yeah, but I mean, that is one thing that we always have to keep in mind when we're outside the building is that we just don't get to see those decisions being made. And we aren't presented with, you know, well, would you rather have this or this? And I think that, you know, if we were, I think that you'd find a lot fewer people complaining. I think they would just say, oh, well, I would rather have the thing that we got rather than not. And plus, you know, these things are still being put on a scale, right? I mean, it's not like, like there are things about, through the breach is one card for one archetype, fair enough. But, you know, there are cards, I'm sure, that were difficult for you to implement, but that you said, but we need them. Like this isn't, this loses too much of the nostalgia. It's too iconic. It's too core to the identity of a powered or vintage cube to lose a card like this, right? So, you know, I'm sure you did have to do cards that were difficult too. And to their credit, the team that really did so much of the work in the trenches, they were saying, yes, every single step of the way, it really was a question of trade-offs at the end of the day. We got so much more of our wish list than we expected to get. That's great. I think we got 90, 95% of every single thing that we asked for. It wasn't a matter of we couldn't do it. It was a matter of trade-offs. That's incredible. So is this a development team within Arena then that was doing that? So there are several different squads that make everything happen. One of the frontline teams of this is the card set team, RULE. They're the folks who are actually programming the cards, feeding them into the game's RULE engine, determining whether the cards probably function or definitely don't function, fixing all of those issues. And then every single prompt, like when a card holds priority, when a card asks you a question with a custom dialogue box to clarify what the intent is rather than just like, a card has a pop-up and it says, yes, no, and you have no context, every single bit of that seamless design to make a card's interface so pleasant you don't think about it, that's on RULE. And they are wonderful. Wow. Well, bravo to that team because, yeah, I would have expected more, wait, why does this work this way? On the first implementation of new cards and being out in the wild for the first time like this and there were very few. So that's really impressive. It worked really smoothly. The one bump in the road that I think we encountered that you guys fixed pretty quickly was, it originally lines eye diamond, it wasn't giving you correct priority and underworld breach LED was really tricky because it would just pass the turn sometimes, but that got fixed in pretty short order. And if I had to rate the like cube rollout, I would rate it quite highly. I think it did a really good job. Like I think it came out really smoothly. Yep, we caught LED late in an internal play test and it was the, we don't think we're gonna be able to fix it because there's actually a lot of decisions about when it holds and how it holds and what, but we will definitely fix it for the second inversion. Yeah, and it did. So really grateful that it was a smooth rollout and y'all have been having fun with it. Oh yeah, I mean, we're in that. We had high expectations that were absolutely detonated. People were, people had responded so positively and so much more strongly than we anticipated. That's great, I was gonna ask you about that. We've been running it back. I've been asked, I was gonna ask you about that. How has been the reception from the community and are you guys seeing what you wanna see on your side? We were getting a much stronger reaction than we anticipated. I am less in the numbers forecasting side of things, but I am blown away seeing how many people are engaging with the cube, seeing what people are saying about it on the community. And I love the fact that there's disagreement. I love the fact that there's been acceptance of some of the changes that we've made. I was very curious when we did the first version and boros hit way harder than we wanted to. That's why in every single article I've written since, there's just sort of been a boros check-in. I was really curious how people are gonna respond to us taking out cards like Guided Souls, which like isn't like a ludicrously powerful card on its own, but was one of the highest win rate cards in the cube. Are people gonna see that as a, well, this isn't real powered cube. This isn't the Moto Vintage cube if they're taking things out that are like tier two, tier three power level. And we were pleasantly surprised that there was general acceptance of, yeah, boros has too many toys and too many toys that are hitting too hard. And this still is a authentic, fun, diverse, replayable experience, even if we reduce the density and potency of some of boros' toys. Yeah, it was interesting because, you know, I had that reaction when I first saw, and I'm like, oh, you know, they're messing around with this a bunch. And I felt strongly that it needed to happen. But I will say it is kind of funny because I might have my opinions about it, but if it works, my opinions kind of go away, you know? And it did. I didn't have the feeling that about three times a draft, I would have somebody play one drop, two drop, three drop that are all like legendary, awesome, amazing cards at every mana point. And that if I don't do something specifically against that type of deck, then I'm kind of dead. Once that disappeared, which it did, I'm like, okay, you know, like whatever, however you got to the point that you got to, whatever changes you decided to make, this feels a lot better. And the proof's in the pudding. And so, you know, it kind of takes away the fangs from anybody who, you know, has a critique of it, including myself, you know, where maybe I look at it and go, oh, I would have done it a different way or whatever. Instead, I just go, okay, well, let's see if it worked. And then if it did, I mean, I'll tell you, you know, that's kind of all I really need to see from my perspective. Keeping things big picture here, Zach, how would you describe your overall cube philosophy and like, what are the goals for the arena-powered cube, big picture? Biggest goal is we want to delight our players. We want to design something that is fun, that is replayable. Game design fundamentally is a balance between familiarity and novelty. We want to have, keep enough continuity of the things that people associate with powered cube, while continuing to experiment and try new things out. We don't see cube as a museum that's just a static list that never changes, which I feel like is something that was less true a decade ago and I think has become more so true now, where like a lot of powered cube lists, even like the magic online vintage cube, you don't always see time vault. You don't always see the initiative creatures, is not just about going max speed, highest power level every single time. So delight is the main one. After that, we're trying to learn, we're trying to experiment. We have a lot of information about powered cube on magic online. We know that there are a lot of other cubes out there. I have certainly watched a lot of Louise's cube videos. They were really good companions when I had late nights taking care of my new board. And every single version of the powered cube. I'll tell you that much. Yeah. Every single version of powered cube is an opportunity for us to try something new and learn something, which means sometimes we're gonna try something and then go back on it. We're trying new things out with this upcoming version, which we can talk about. Landfall is one of the bigger swings that we took with the last version. We're adding a little bit more support and maybe it goes away if it doesn't work. Some things go back to the benches and we keep trying things out. And the last goal is just share how awesome cube is with people. I think cube is like one of the most fun ways to play magic. It's this constant that's been in my life as a magic player for, I don't know, going on 15 years now. And I'm really grateful that we get to share that awesomeness with as many people in arena who engage with the experience. Yeah, cause you know, we're all I'll forgive you for saying one of the most fun ways to play. So, I'm actually really heartened by this being your philosophy because that's exactly what I would pick for the curators of the cube. And one of the things you said really, it really kind of stood out to me, which is, yeah, cube used to just be magic's great hits, but then people started approaching it as a deck building competition or like a design competition of how can we design this to create the experience that we want to have. And I think that that's really, really cool. And I think that that's kind of ushered in an era of really, really solid cubing, I will say. Definitely, yeah. You know, one of the ways that we've talked about cube and Louise has kind of opened my eyes to it in a way as well is that, you know, there's only so many cards that go into cube, right? Usually seven, 20. And there's a bunch of check boxes that like will not be out of the cube power nine, you know, kind of the old staples and stuff like that that are sacred cows on some level. And that doesn't leave a whole lot of extra spots. And the way I kind of view it is in card packages now, you know, you just talked, Zach, about the landfall idea, right? And you put some in before and now you're bolstering it for the next iteration as well. And you're going to see how it goes. And to me, that's really cool. Like that's a grouping of cards that are relevant to each other. And of course, there, the web spreads out a little further than just the cards that say landfall on them, you know, fetch lands, all different types of cool stuff that can be overlapping and interesting as well. But it doesn't mean that that has to be in every version of the cube, even if it does do well and people seem to like it and it's performing and solving a problem for you, right? And there's all types. I mean, there's, you know, archetypes from the past that used to be around, you know, every cube used to have Splinter Twin in it and all that kind of stuff. And, you know, I really like the idea of kind of putting cards into these packages. And when I come to Arena Cube and it's out for a stretch and I go, all right, what do we got? You know, it's like, oh, OK, it looks like they've gone away from the landfall or the, you know, land-based stuff for a little while. That's OK, you know, but now we have this other thing that I don't normally get access to because I think if, like I had you two sit down in a room and go, name me all of the relevant packages of cards that we could put in the cube within reason, we would have too many, like to fit in the actual cube at any given time, right? So it is cool to me that you can not only find new things within the cube itself, but also from a bigger picture perspective, you could be rotating in these packages or combos or groupings of cards over time. Yeah, at this point, you don't expect to see, like, titanium without Xurran or Recylvan safekeeper. There's a lot of these, like, sets of combos that have actually worked out really, really nicely. And, you know, if you took those out and maybe we went harder in the, you know, green-managed direction or whatever, and we got back to crater-hoofing people or something, you know, who knows? I'm not advocating for anything, but, you know, I just find that interesting that, you know, the cube itself can kind of be on a merry-go-round as far as what's actually being allowed in at any given time because one thing is obvious. You cannot have all of the things at once, right? There's just not enough slots. Yeah. Oh, you started to talk. No, go ahead. Oh, if you have any thoughts on that. Yeah, cut-sand swaps are always going to be painful. I would say the approach is there are very, very few sacred cows. Definitionally, a powered cube is sort of a, yeah, if you don't have the power nine, or really the power eight, because Time Twister is a very different class of card nowadays, is truly a powered cube. Like, sure, if you exclude Mox Ruby, but that's an awkward design choice, why not have that? And if you're having those cards, you're probably gonna have Soul Ring, and you're probably gonna have Mana Vault, Mana Crypt. And you might as well have Mana Vault, but Mana Vault isn't the central. And then it's a series of packages, and those also a series of concentric circles expanding outwards. I think I said this in a previous article, like Tullarian Academy is not strictly speaking a card that absolutely must be in a powered cube. If a powered cube doesn't have Tullarian Academy, it loses all legitimacy. I picked Tullarian Academy specifically because Tullarian Academy is awesome, and it plays so well with those central cards of powered cube. And you don't truly need a dedicated artifacts package to make it work. But I think if you approach it from the idea of there are no true sacred cows, it is worth trying different things out. You are open to, you end up with more than like 30 slots in the cube, where you can rotate things in and out. And the rest of the list is this tight locked museum. As things get sort of dusty, or you, the Borostec stays the same, even if you're rotating in and out some of the constituent components. I'd say we have very, very few sacred cows, but also we have not taken a massive swing where we replace 150 cards. Right, right. And there's also a question of, are there 150 cards that are truly in dialogue with the remaining cards that are in the cube? Right. When you're starting with Black Lotus in a cube, the power level floor that card just has to be able to surmount is really, really high. So the vast majority of cards in Magic aren't going to fit in there unless you're making a truly unusual experience. Right. And Luis calmed down, he didn't say they were gonna cut to Larian Academy, you're all right. His blood pressure just shot up at this point, I'm pretty confident to learn Academy safe. Okay. And you know, that brings me, Zach, to another question that I wanted to ask about how the decision making works, which is, if I can frame it this way, how much of it is art versus science and data? You know, there's that kind of vibes thing, and then there's the data that you have access to. I would say there are three major inputs into how the cube is worked on. One is data. As we said earlier, data tells an incomplete story. Data is something you could sort of twist in a variety of ways, but data is helpful of like, oh, boros is, its win rate is too high, and it's the most played color combination of the cube. We don't want both of those things to be that true to that extent. I don't think it's bad for boros to be the highest performing archetype in the cube. I think it has a lot of factors working in its favor from replaceable parts to it's arguably the most approachable archetype in the cube. And I also think boros today is really different than like Mono Red Agro of 2013, 2014, 2015. No shade to those decks, but like Ragevan and Leilia are very, very dynamic game pieces in a way that like Jackalpup and Hero of Oxidridge, they're just different. You've got a lot of more dynamism in your gameplay. So data is often gonna help us identify major outliers, but data is not nearly as helpful for things that are like super high skill floor cards, where if you don't know exactly what you're doing with the lion's eye diamond, if you haven't gone into the cube having done your research, you should probably never put that card in your deck because it's only going to hurt you. Right. Data's gonna say, yeah, that card doesn't perform low unless you look at a very high skill level. So another major source is Anak data. What are people saying? We've a lot of people on Arena and at Wizards overall who play the cube, I get a lot of feedback from them. We have a lot of people in the real world. I'm not saying Wizards aren't real people, we are. But like people outside of Wizards, there's so many of you and a lot of you have a lot of things to say on the internet and we read a lot of that. So what people are saying, particularly, what are people enjoying? What are people frustrated by? That kind of emotional data is so valuable in a way that just like, I think you should add this or I think you should cut this is often not the easiest. And then the last thing every cube designer is gonna know is you got a theory craft. I think people over rely on it, but particularly when it comes to unreleased cards, you're making guesses about how is this going to hit which archetypes this is going to slot into. Like is deceit gonna is as good as it looks? Is deceit not as good as it looks? Though I'm at least grateful to say like, I have the superpower of, I have a lot of Wizards who care a lot about this. We run play tests internally of versions before they go live. I work pretty closely with play designer, Abe Corrigan, who I've known since he was very little because he played it by local game store in Brooklyn. And Abe has played with all the cards. So he will flag things for me that I haven't caught. He's a magic online vintage cube expert and has his own. So I get his perspective as well. I don't wanna get too much credit. Like, yes, I own the final design of these cubes, but a ton of people make all of this happen. And Abe is one of those folks making sure I'm not missing cards that we really should test from upcoming sets or I haven't forgotten about some particular combo that like, oh yeah, he was really advocating for, I think the end stone. I think the end stone had the absolute worst performance numbers of every single card in the cube. Not seen end stone to play infinite times, but the number of times I have seen it in play and the player decks themself is like 30% or something, which is crazy for a card. You would think that end stone is only, the only cards that really are in competition or oath of droolers, which I've seen cause that before. And then like, you know, the demonic consultation or something like that. Oops, I named the wrong card. Yeah. Does nostalgia play a role in deciding if a card stays in the cube or makes it into the cube? It's a great question. I, we talked about this a bit with Crucible of Worlds. Of I think, and frankly, like when we were first developing the internal list way back in 2023. It was a question of like, what's the proper level of misery that we should allow players to induce upon each other? Where's the line with Strip Mind? And the unanimous response was like, no, no, no, Strip Mind belongs in this environment. It does good work, particularly against, well, like Caracas and Tolerian Academy, among other things. And, but I would say, we try not to let nostalgia dictate too much because that's going to lead to us getting too many sacred cows and the list potentially stagnating, us not experimenting with new things. I would also say, some colors get more locked than others. There's just like a lot of really good blue cards and making cuts there as hard. Black and green are colors that have struggled for identity at this particular power level. And a lot of historical things get to stay in there because, well, like those are tools that are accessible to those colors. And sometimes they don't have anything else, but I don't know. I think we need fewer sacred cows and to test things out. And then I say that, and then I have to go and make cuts and swaps for the next cube, and they're all painful. But do you kind of view them as temporary? I mean, like each time you do this, it's not, I'm never bringing this card back, right? It just doesn't happen to be in this version. Yeah, nothing gets banned from the cube. It just goes to the maybe board. It sits on the bench and maybe it'll come back. In the next version, maybe it'll come back in a year. We haven't been long enough for something to be benched that long, but every single card that gets taken out of the cube is just another opportunity when we are making swaps the next time. Yeah, I was gonna say that you're in an interesting position that Magic Online is not, where Magic Online has basically all the cards except for the new cards, but they have to add those. They're not really, there's nothing that, they're not doing extra work to enable these cards because the Magic Online kind of by virtue of just having the whole catalog, they just get to build the cube out of the cards they want for the most part. You are in a position where if you want to add a new card, the cost is you also have to like actually get it implemented. So that has to limit to some degree the shots you are interested in taking, I would imagine. Yeah, I'll say at this point, we have that mass bulk import, which was a process that was almost three years, two and a half years in the making, I guess close to three years in the making. And we now have real world data. Will we ever spin that machine up again? I think, I wouldn't be surprised if there's encouragement from people. And I would also say, if we were doing that, we were like just now have the data to spin up that process. And I don't, it's a restriction. Restrictions breed creativity, so we don't have every single tool under the sun, but that also means we get to cherish the tools that we have and potentially try things out that haven't been done on Magic Online or haven't been done on Magic Online in a couple of years. One question I always think about, I try to think about this for limited in general. And when we're doing the podcast and when I'm doing the Pro Tour broadcast and all that kind of stuff, is I always try to keep in mind new players. And in this case, I think I would augment that a bit to be new players to cube. Do your first limited event being a cube would be the very, very deep end of the pool and it may just be overwhelming to somebody. But let's say that you're a player, you play on Arena and you've started to do some booster drafting and you've decided that you like it, but you've never done a cube before. When you're doing the design, like is this person in your mind or is this the kind of product where you're like, nah, it's not really for that type of player? How do you approach that part? Cause you do need new people to try out the cube at some point, I assume. That's a great question. Who are the audiences that we're thinking about? And cause Powered Cube, the skill floor is high. If you don't go in having done your research and if you try to draft a strategy that isn't a flavor of agro or mid-range, it probably isn't gonna work out well for you. So we don't treat the Powered Cube as something that is for every single person, but we do have different buckets of audiences. And we wanna try and satisfy every single one of them in their own ways. And again, we're conducting experiments, we're trying to identify what are the predilections of Arena players? What do they respond well to? What do they struggle with? Like, top level audience, we wanna make some of the best cubers in the world have fun on the cube. There are, like, I think we just cut Yawgmuss Will. Yawgmuss Will is a historically significant card. It is extremely hard to make it work, but I think some small number of people are gonna have joy with making that card work. Like, I want this to be a cube that, among other people, Luis is going to have fun with. Not as Luis is only cube. There are too many great cubes out there to try, even if you're just looking within the Realm of Powered Cube. But we want that to satisfy really high-skilled cube players. We also want people who... In me. Yeah. Yeah. We want people who are dedicated cube drafters, not necessarily playing at, like, the top peak skill level to still have a variety of options that they can play. We want that balance of novelty and familiarity. And we want there to be some array of options for, as you said, Marshall, people who are dipping their toe into cube and powered cube in particular. It is a high-skill format where if you go in not knowing what you're doing, many of the avenues simply don't exist for you. Right. And that's part of the reason why, like, there are multiple reasons why I think creature-based aggressive decks, even if they're not necessarily boroughs, are often gonna be some of the best decks in the format. They have replaceable components. Most of the combo decks have a finite number of replaceable components. And if everybody woke up tomorrow and decided Reanimator was the best deck, Reanimator would cease to be the best deck because everybody would just stretch the deck, divide the deck amongst four people and it wouldn't function. Those creature-based decks are more approachable. And frankly, I'm curious, the next version, we're giving Black a lot more creatures. What that does to help people engage with Black is the color and the cube overall. Is this an example of players getting new avenues to test out? It's a more approachable avenue because it plays a little bit more like booster draft style creature combat-based decks. Or is it not something that works out? This is a play at understanding our audiences better and seeing what people respond to. You know, one of the things I've thought about with building and maintaining a cube, and I'm curious if you have a process or a mentality around this aspect, which is, you know, new cards come out from new sets. I'm assuming that there's some expectation that you use some of those new cards when they come out and not that they have to stick in the cube forever, but trying out new stuff and gives you a way maybe to highlight a few cards from the new set or something like that. But they get a better runway. Yeah, but then if we fast forward two or three years of that, it can get messy, right? Like there can just be random cards. Why is it still in here? And, you know, all of a sudden, one archetype gets deluded because other cards kind of encroached on a few of its things and then they didn't really find a home. And what I really want to know is, like, do you do kind of a state of the union on the cube when you're going to do an update to it? Do you do a refresh top down kind of, where is this thing at? You know, or is there some type of beauty in kind of just incrementally adding stuff and seeing what forms from that? A lot of things to chew on there. I guess working backwards, there are different approaches. Sometimes, like we've, our first couple versions of the cube were gentle. We were conducting experiments. What happens if we don't do, if we just do the cube as is with no universes beyond cards, no digital only cards. Second version, we add universal beyond cards. Very positive response to that. Third version, we just added Oracle of the Alpha and the general response was, that's the balance of digital only cards that we want. I think sometimes gentle iterations are going to be good. We lean more on the side of familiarity. Sometimes we have to take bigger swings and that's where the novelty comes in. In about adding new cards in particular, something that might be a surprise to listeners of limited resources are timelines of, on the arena team, I'm not in Studio X. I'm not play testing and developing these cards as they come out. I'm having my first encounters with these cards, maybe a few months ahead of people playing with them, but I don't have so much experience with them that I have a high degree of confidence of exactly how they're going to perform in a powered cube. It's part of the reason why Abe is, Abe Corgan is such a wonderful resource. But the other thing is, we have to lock the list at least a month before the event goes live, which might be surprising to people, but fundamentally what the implementation of a cube looks like is 546 digit numbers. And if any single digit is incorrect, the cube breaks. Or it breaks in surprising, mysterious, hard to reproduce ways. There was an evil version of Lanamor elves that just like broke the arena cube before the powered cube five times, which like we fixed internally every single time, but why do we lock it a month in advance? Well, it's so we have enough time that our QA team can go, they're so good and just catch every single issue that can happen. We make sure that our build is gonna be stable in advance, which means oftentimes I'm doing a leap of faith with upcoming content. Sometimes this makes me more conservative. Interesting. Like I left deceit out, I think, of the Lauren Eclipse version of the cube, where I was just like, I think this card is good. I love, like as far to put it, it's a hybrid card, so it could be blue, it could be black, could be blue, black. I'm not sure where I cut it for, and the fact that it bins itself is great, but the fact that it doesn't work when it's reanimated, I'm not sure. I'm gonna let other people task with the card and circle right back to it for the next version of the cube. I think I was too conservative with it, should have tested it, but also it was a matter of like, I don't know what to cut for this particular card, but our timelines are much longer than people might expect. So generally by the time, like I think Luis's server probably has a consensus about a card based on their testing. After we've locked the list, but before it's gone live, fun little trivia fact, Luis, you put out a video called How to Fix Powered Cube. I looked at the date. I will say that the title was, it's a YouTube thing. No, no, no, I'm not, I was very complimentary. I know, I know you're not getting mad. I just think it is funny that it was a little more in the area of a title than maybe it was fully warranted. Luis is all about the clicks, let's just be real here. I was a content creator for 10 years, I can understand. But the horrible thing, I locked the list the day before. Literally the day before. I signed off, I implored, and so the video went from, it went from this series of helpful perspective, anecdote, expert perspective of all these things that we could do, and it went from data that we could use to, you didn't know this, but it was just a series of predictions of like, all right, I'm gonna watch this video. How many of the things that Luis identified, did we also identify? And then how are people gonna feel about it? Cause yeah, by this point, in general, when one cube is live, I'm probably already working on the next one, before the next list of the current session has ended, I've probably locked that list. That's really funny. One thing that I, we'll see if you can talk about it, but one of the interesting things that happened was that people started to notice that it was feeling like there was one piece of power at the most in a pack, where even though occasionally you get past a piece, so you kind of assume that somebody else had opened up two pieces of power and you just were the beneficiary, but it kind of never happened to you was the vibe. And our friend, Cyrke Wittes, dove into some of the more public data that we have, and he determined that that was actually- As I remind you every time, acquaintance, acquaintance. Oh, sorry, yeah, acquaintance of the show, Cyrke Wittes. And from what he found, he's like, yeah, this does look like it's like on purpose, actually, that there's one piece of power at the most per pack. So I guess I'd wanna ask you, if that's true, if you can talk about it, and if so, what can you tell us about it? So in our Colations, there is a rule that the power nine and I think mana crypt and soul ring will only ever show up in a single, like they'll never show up in the same pack as each other. And honestly, like we talked about this internally, we really didn't see it as a big deal, we didn't see it as being sneaky, we're sorry if people perceive that as that. I'll say Colations are more complicated under the hood than people expect. Way more. But we have definitely gotten the piece of feedback from some people that they found it very jarring. If you wanna hear the thought process, it's based in human psychology. Like a lot of game design is human psychology and loss aversion is a powerful thing. In general, people are more afraid of losing the things that they have, there is more pain in having to give up something that is in your grasp, than gaining something that you want. It's gonna lead to a lot of irrational behavior and in game design, it often means you could be setting your players up for painful situations that could otherwise be avoided. The theory, and you can disagree with this, this is not hard science, cause hard choices are part and parcel of booster draft and certainly in powered cube. But there's this idea of like, if the sking of having to pass a piece of power is greater than the thrill of opening two pieces of power or like getting past one, like why not just test something different? Why not just see how players respond to it, especially when it's gonna happen such a tiny fraction of the time. But happy to hear what people have to say. If you're like, nope, I don't like this rule. It doesn't happen in, with a physical cube, I accept that. Well, okay, so I do have opinions here. I wanna preface it by saying, I don't think it's a big deal either way. I don't think this came across as sneaky to other people. At least, I mean, I just don't think that's really how people saw it. I don't think it was like a bad thing to be, to necessarily do. I do disagree with it. I think that it is good to open two pieces of power. I don't think anyone really feels particularly bad about passing a piece of power when they're opening one. They're getting a piece of power. So I don't really- I think to be the clever one who takes the one that they think's better than, right? The better of the two. Yeah, they get to do that. And I think that you, basically I don't think that it's really too costly to, like I don't think the passing a piece of power being painful is really part of the equation because you're getting a piece of power. And it's actually, I think even more interesting when it's like, oh, ancestral or mock sapphire, what do I take? You know, and a lot of them aren't that interesting. It's like, I opened two moxes, which color do I like more? But it also leads to good screenshot equity. You're gonna see people posting on social media with like, oh, I open soaring an ancestral, you know, or whatever the thing is that they care about. And I think overall, I do think it would have been better to do this, but to not have that rule. But you know, it is the sort of thing that like, I believe it should be, you're gonna wanna fix it or change it, but you know, it's totally, I don't think it's the worst thing in the world. I just think the upsides are much higher than the downsides. Yeah. And happy to hear what LR listeners have to say as well. We do read what people say, we do care what people have to say. And hopefully my being here is communicated, like we do listen, we do care, and we don't have too many fixed beliefs about what we believe PoweredCube ought to be. Our main goal is to create fun for as many people as we can. That's awesome. Yeah, we really appreciate you being open too. It's really interesting to get a look behind the scenes. I've got one more little section I wanted to cover with you, Zach, and that's the, because I actually didn't know, but the next version of the Cube is coming out in what four or five days from when we're recording. This is 26th today. Yeah, it's coming out on Tuesday, pulling out my calendar because of what is time. Yeah, Tuesday the 31st. The 31st, and there's the new version of the Cube with it. And we had had a chance to take a quick look at that. Can you give us any insight into what may be changing, what we can expect from that new version? Sure, we actually opened a pack of the new Cube though. Foolishly, I didn't curate it to make sure something new was in there. Although it was at least an interesting pack. I'd say the top line thoughts are we're testing out a couple of cards from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, because it's a new set, we should play with new cards. We're continuing the experiment with Landfall. We're cutting an asymmetric cycle of 10 dual lands and adding in three of the modern horizons, three common fetch lands in green. Just a little bit more support for that archetype. The big swing I've mentioned this a couple of times is, black is a color in Cube that oftentimes struggles for identity, it's an outstanding support color. It has really good disruption in discard, in creature removal, it has a lot of combo support, but it's been losing creatures over time, which perpetuates a vicious cycle where black has fewer creatures, so black creature based acts don't perform as well. We're adding 10 more creatures into black, we're gonna see how it works. It might be a one time experiment, it might be something that we iterate on, it might be something that goes over well with arena players. We've cycled out a couple of the higher skill cards, like I mentioned Yagma's Will earlier, it's sitting on the sidelines, it will assuredly come back at some point. I mean, you could call it higher skill, but if we're being honest, Yagma's Will's not very good. Like I have it in because the one out of every four drafts or five drafts that someone puts in their deck, it can be pretty fun, but if we're talking from a strict, like should this be in this Cube, from a power level perspective, not really and from the goals of arena gameplay perspective, probably not really either, so I think cutting it was not a bad idea. Yeah, Underworld Breach really seems to have taken that spot. Like that's the card that- It's lunch pretty nicely, like that's the card you want, that's the card that makes these deck work and it's fine to not have Yagma's Will. I think the saving grace for me for Yagma's Will is Underworld Breach is an irreplaceable card. Yagma's Will for a failed breach deck can be a decent backup, it's part of the reason it was there, and again, Yagma's Will, the data told a consistent story. People don't pick it that much, people pick it very low, people don't play it that much and it loses a lot. That's a tough one. Which I was- But again, that's an example of data tells an incomplete story. We know that card is hard to play, we expect that card to delight a small segment of players and it's only one slot. In this particular case, it was we now have a reason that we need a whole lot more free slots in black, it was just time for Yagma's Will. I think it will come back at some point, it might not come back immediately, it might not come back for a while, we'll see. And finally, the Boros update, because there's now always a Boros update. Comet, I love Comet, Comet, we got voice acting, for a dog, made me really happy. Also, we didn't even talk about this. One of the things that can be really expensive about adding a card to the game, if it needs voice acting or custom VFX, the laneswalkers need both. Comet, I love that card, Comet's a really good boy. Comet's taking a break, just because I don't wanna have too many of the biggest Boros cards there. And a lot of them work well in a lot of archetypes, but Gut and Broadside Bumper Deers are coming back for this version. They are really, really good in aggro and they're really good in a lot of different forms of Red Deck. I'm really happy to hear those come back because I think those, like you said, different forms of Red Deck is the key there, where those are just fun cards in a lot of different decks. Bumper Deers, especially, you can at play in like a blue-red artifact stack. Like there's just like so many cool things you can do. You know, Gut in red-green is really cool. So I'm glad to see those back and I'm happy to see Boros being balanced around, maybe not cutting the cards that I think are, a little more applicable across the board. You excited about this new version, Zach? I'm excited about every version. I'm always happy for it. I'm happy to play Cube. Zach, you could not be the best better cheerleader for Cube if you try. This is great. I know, I just teach you up and you just smashed it. Well, I mean, for us, it's like, we find out who the person behind the curtain is when it comes to Cube and it's like, oh, perfect, this is who I would choose. This is exactly what you wanna hear because you want Cube to be in good hands because we care a lot about Cube. You know, we wanna be Cuban in the future and the way this has been set up and the approach seems like a very sustainable, like systemic one with plenty of flexibility because I think killing sacred cows is really important when it comes to this. Like, there's just cards, I remember cutting bribery from the Cube and people were like, whoa, you can cut bribery. It's like, yeah, you can cut any card you want. You know, the Cube, like, I agree with your earlier point which cutting Mox Ruby and none of the other Moxas makes no sense. I can't really justify that decision but there's a lot of cards in the Cube that you could cut and it would be totally fine to cut. Well, thank you. That's very high praise. I'm grateful that I'm not alone in this responsibility. I've named a few people. There's a ton of people at Arena at Wizards more broadly who are involved in Cube but I'm humbled by the responsibility and I'm gonna do my best to be as good as Steward for Cube as long as I can. Well, we really appreciate you taking the time, Zach, to join us on the show and we'd love to have you come back on again and talk to you. Anytime you want, we can talk about this stuff about the design and the behind the scenes or you just seem like you've got your head on with Cube just to talk about it content-wise too. So if you ever wanna just give us some tips and tricks or your favorite stuff or stories or whatever, we'd love to have you come back on. We really appreciate you taking the time out of your work day as well to come chat with us. Thank you and for better or worse, you now have the ability to DM me your thoughts. Perfect. Worse for you. I mean, our door is all open. We're always interested in talking to you. So whenever you've got a desire to do that or if there's something you would be good to get out in front of people, you know where we're at. Yeah, and with that in mind, where can, you said that you keep tabs on everything content-wise and what the community's saying. Can people reach you or like, what is the best way, let's say one of our listeners has a strong Cube opinion that they want you to know, is it, how would they get that to you the best? Is it directly, is it posting about it on Reddit? What's the idea? That is a great question. I would say like social media like Reddit is probably gonna be one of the better sources for me to read it. I am not completely off of socials, but I'm not that active and I'm a parent. So a lot of my free time, I'm trying to minimize the amount of free time I spend on my phone and very little of my free time is at my computer anymore. So I would say reaching out directly is not always going to be successful. I apologize for that. But I would also say- Don't apologize for that. Don't apologize for it. That's not part of the, but yeah, but people, if they, you know, YouTube videos, Reddit posts, like these are some of the places that you get your info. Yeah, so many people at Wizards are reading those things. I cannot tell you how many things have been sent to me or I have seen firsthand. We really do care about this. We're like, we're not just people who are like, well, we are creating this game mode that players will engage with because we are faceless robots. Like we love this game. We love cubing. I get to cube, like the day the cube comes out, I'm going to be in the queues. I'm also, I'm weird. I play best of three. I love best of three. I actually play a lot of best of three cube because what will happen to me is if I'm in the middle of recording and I don't finish, I've now got like a best of one cube that I played five matches up and I haven't finished the last two. So then I'm locked out of best of one until I finished that recording. So then I dropped best of three. So throughout the entire cube season, I'll have a best of three and a best of one cube usually going at the same time. Oh, that's really funny. Well, thanks again, Zach. We really appreciate you taking the time and we look forward to having you back on their show sometime soon. Thanks so much for having me. If you want to find us on social media, at Marshall underscore LR and Luis is LSV, pretty much everywhere. You can find, of course, everything related to the podcast over at LRcast.com, including links like, for example, to Luis's YouTube channel. You can watch that video that we were talking about earlier. And Luis does make a ton of cube content even outside of just the actual cube matches that he records. He'll talk about new cards in the cube or things that different topics. We're seeing this update. I'm going to slam Zach in my next video. Yeah, oh yeah. Hit peace incoming. Oh yeah. Yeah, so make sure you. He confirmed that they took all my changes from the last video. Yeah, yeah. So make sure you check out Luis's next video with the hit piece on poor Zach. No, but anyway, you can check out his channel there, of course, and LSV on YouTube anywhere there. We want to say thanks to everybody who supports us on Patreon and thank you as well to Ultimate Guard. That is going to do it for this episode of the show. We'll see you next week. So as I mentioned already, that my other obsession besides cube currently is Slay the Spire and it really has been delivering. I have been playing a lot of runs of it. And what's funny is I'm very much a vibes player. So frequently I'll end up losing a run or like dying in the middle when I'm just like, kind of playing my cards and I look at them like, oh, I'm actually going to die next turn. I probably should have done something about that. That's why I go on. Probably my biggest leak is that I don't do what I do in magic as much of like, let's plan out my whole term. What's my game plan here? It's more like, sometimes I'll do that, but sometimes I'll just kind of flick the cards and play them. The other thing is you get potions and you have a couple of potion slots. And then once you fill the slots, you can't get more potions till you use them. I'm so bad at using my potions or I frequently will be like, when a fight takes some damage and then end of the fight, it's like, oh yeah, there's another potion. I now have excess potions. I didn't use these. I got no value out of them. So it is, the best comparison is my desire to take Cogwork Library in cube and then never use it or basically hold it until it's like too late or you don't get anything good. Classic, I just do that all the time. It's that in potions. And people will start to notice those are two of my favorite activities, which really led me to, I showed you and Cheon this quote because I thought it was so funny. Someone said about me in one of the YouTube comments that if the perfect being the enemy of the good was a person, like I never let the perfect be the enemy of the good. That is not my philosophy. I'm way more likely to, instead of, what that saying means is by striving for perfection, you actually are making it so you can't do something good, which is, like I wrote, I've written the perfect article about cube draft, but it's not done yet. I need to make it better and better and better and you just wait, wait, wait, and you just keep making it better because you want it to be perfect. And then it doesn't get released. People don't read it or it's too late. You're like, I have the ultimate archetype primer for modern horizons three draft and you release it by the time MHD draft is over, people don't care about it anymore. That's the perfect being the enemy of the good. I have never been accused of that. So that is very much not a trap I at least fall into. I think that Slay the Spire really brings that out in me, but I've been having a good time with it. I think that's the perfect thing. I think that's the perfect thing. I think that's the perfect thing. I think that's the perfect thing. I think that's the perfect thing. I think that's the perfect thing. I think that's the perfect thing. I think that's the perfect thing. I think that's the perfect thing. I think that's the perfect thing. I think that's the perfect thing. I think that's the perfect thing. I think that's the perfect thing. I think that's the perfect thing.