Limited Resources 840 - Sierkovitz Answers: Black Lotus or Sol Ring? And Off-Color Archetypes in ECL

What is up everybody? Welcome to another episode of Limited Resources. This episode number 840. My name is Marshall. I'm one of your limited resources and joining me on the line all the way from Cornwall in Wales in the UK. Yeah, we almost got that. One day we'll get there, Sirkevitz. It's Sirkevitz. Sirko, welcome back on the show. It's great to have you. Good to be here. It's been a while, but I'm glad I returned because I have to continue my fight for either the Limmy for the best guest appearance or the Limmy for the hungriest host because today I cooked myself two dinners and I ate them both. That's good. You're making a good run at both. It's great to have you back on. No, Luis again this week. We mentioned it before, but one of his kids has been sick, one of his many children. When one of them is sick, then it kind of throws the whole routine off for the household and everything. Luis has had an inordinate amount of extra responsibilities that has kept him from coming on the show and making some videos, but things are looking good on that end and I think he'll be back next week, no problem. Hang in there, Luis, and we'll get him back soon. But for this week, we've got Sirkevitz on to talk kind of two broad strokes topics, but we're going to cover a bunch of different stuff. Of course, we're going to talk about Lorne Eclipse and some of the things that he's found through his studies of that. Then we're even going to touch on Cube and we are going to answer the eternal question, which one's better, Black Lotus or Soul Ring? We're going to dive deep on that with Sirkevitz to kind of finish up the show. Before we do, we wanted to say thank you to everybody who supports us on Patreon. It's patreon.com slash limited resources. Yeah, you can support the show directly there. We really appreciate everybody who does. 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One of the perks that you get for being a Patreon supporter of ours is you get to put questions in for the Patreon question of the week. This one comes from Jeff and he actually asked two questions. First one is he says, more and more modern sets have a higher density of playable cards and limited. That's true. Cards that in a chaos draft would be a C level. And so in the set review, get a C level grades. But in the context of a set, a good bit of cards end up falling to the D level over time and with experience, especially with the added insights from early access. Do you guys think modern limited players need to recalibrate how we evaluate cards early? Should we be more willing to state claims that a card would be a historical C is actually a D because despite playability, it is a worse card than the average card in the set. Or is it better to just let cards clump up in the C range because modern playable cards don't actually hurt your win rate? It's a really good question, Tim. And we've more or less decided that, you know, to kind of respect where we think the cards fall on the curve, which is they do clump up around C. There's a lot of D pluses. We I think we give way more D pluses these days than we used to in the past. And I think that that's because there are more D pluses around. The other thing that I would say is, yes, it would be better if we could stake a claim early because we knew or had a really good reason to do so. But early, early in a format, you don't, you know, these are the types of things, these subtle differences, these cards that fit in well with a format that kind of go, you know what, that one's actually like a C plus, right? And then cards that maybe don't fit quite as well end up slipping down to C minus or D plus, you know, kind of on that fringe of playability where you're or at least, you know, happy enough to put it in your deck. And to, you know, so for us, you know, we're, we're ballparking it out where they stand in at that moment, not in a complete vacuum, but also not without the full knowledge of having done multiple drafts and really kind of seen what fits and what doesn't. I mean, if we could, we would. But the thing we want to avoid is staking a claim early on a card and then having to backtrack it or just be completely wrong. Like that, that does, you know, people listen to us. And if we come out and say, Hey, this card's amazing. I mean, look, if we're just wrong or we had our reasons and they ended up not being true, we're totally willing to take that risk. But I don't think that we want to start giving out Ds to cards that might end up being C pluses in our mind. We'd rather just hedge a little bit and do C minus. You have any thoughts on that circle about how, how we could approach it? I mean, ideally we could have an even bigger range, you know, but we like to keep the grading scale simple, you know, because it's not really the main part of the set review. It's, it's a punctuation mark on our review. I think that we're historically priced into the current grading scale because people understand it intuitively. And you know, I listened to multiple set reviews. Definitely I listened to yours and definitely I listened to corticals and listening to both, I know that, oh, Luis gave it a B minus. Alex is going to give it a C plus. Does it mean that Alex values the card less? No, their scale is just slightly more tilted backwards compared to yours. I know that you give slightly more generous marks. Does it change anything? No. Do you need to run faster than the bear to escape it? No, you just need to run faster than one of your friends. And when you compare cards, you have to use this sort of principle, I think, where you shouldn't like look at the mark and say, okay, this is how I picked the card, but look at this mark and compare to the other marks from the set because both you and Alex are going to have a good feeling of which card is a bit more powerful. And the fact whether it's a C plus or a B minus and the other one, whether it's a C or C minus doesn't really matter that much. It just matters that, hey, C plus is better than C. Yeah. I know that this card should be sort of better. And obviously, adjustment will happen after the set is released. And we will know that there are some like, for example, I'm pretty sure that the Kildred Zellot wouldn't get like C plus slash B minus grade in the set preview because it's a six drop. I think we gave it a C. Yeah. Yeah. But now we would probably correct it a bit more because it turned out that it's a much better card than we assumed. And then a couple of them will probably go down, especially in the rares, that lots of those rares that look splashy, but just didn't end up in the right color combination will go down. Now, this is something that will always happen. But I wouldn't worry too much about the inflation of the marks. I would still mark the cards in vacuum if I would be doing set review that looks at the cards. Yeah. We sorted it out in a different way. We do the set review instead of looking at the cards. We just build deck for each color pair. And we talk about why did we build the deck like that? Yeah. And that's really good if you have that baseline understanding you can kind of shortcut a lot of stuff, right? If you do that. But of course, if you're newer to the game, the card by card helps you. Oh, no, no. All of them are useful in their own right. Totally. I think that the whole point of it is that having diversity of set reviews allows you to prepare better for the super hardcore people. Totally. But if I would be just needing to prepare for a pair lease, I still remember like I played a GP in London that was a pretty least GP. Mm hmm. So it was this like your first time seeing the cards basically? Yeah. War of the Spark it was. And I was on the train for six hours from Cornwall to London. And on those six hours, I was listening to your set review to see which cards should I play. And then I opened horrendous pool and I crashed out after three rounds and moved on with my life. Dude, that's brutal. That's a long train ride. But it is a long train ride. But it was fun. I bumped into Luis, even though we didn't know each other at that stage. Oh, that's cool. You may in the coffee shop because we were both turning at the same time and we literally bumped into each other. Oh, that's funny. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, I think the other thing to Jeff with the grading scale thing is, you know, we do want accuracy, like to be the differentiator. And the truth is, is that these cards are just close together powerwise, right? Like we do delineate like a C plus basically means that we think that this is one that's going to be a desirable common for your deck. And a C minus means that we're a little bit dubious of it, but that the basics are in place for it to be a playable and a C is right in the middle where it's like, no, this looks like a card you're going to be playing like, you know, most of the time. And, you know, that that is that seems like a little microcosm. But I think when you look at the cards that fall under those grades, you'll be like, yeah, that one's slightly better than that one. And that one's slightly better than that one. So all things equal, sure, I'd rather have the better one. But is your deck going to, you know, fall off a cliff because you have a bunch of C minuses instead of C pluses? Not really, right? Bigger picture of things like your curve, the synergies in your deck, your, your, uh, how good your mana base is and stuff like that are going to win more than having a few C pluses over a few Cs or C minuses, uh, you know, in, in a set. Um, second question from Tim, new Lorwin as Tim, sorry, not it's Jeff Timlin. So from Jeff, uh, new Lorwin feels a lot like Bloomberg to me, fun and clean magic, but very on the rails, both in drafting and in play. To me, this feels a bit like a convergence to the mean given the formulaic nature of sets these days. There are less duds, but I do feel we end up with very sanitized play and draft environments at times. Do you agree with this feeling and what advice to set designers and game designers would you give to avoid playing things too safe like this? This, you know, the set designers and game designers questions really for Luis, cause he's actually done it, you know, as a career, uh, and I haven't, but, um, but I do, I do know what you're saying. Um, what I try to remember is a few things. One, you mentioned it, which is that becoming slightly more formulaic, um, also means that we just get so many great sets now that are like the formula has settled at really good. And these are not graded on a curve. Like, you know, if a set is great, there is absolutely nothing that says the next set can't also be great. And if you want to rank them, that's fine. But you know, if they're all 9.5, well, this one's a 9.4, this one's a 9.6, who cares? Right? We're in the nines. We're loving life, right? Where when a set comes out, that's a three, you know, Spider-Man or whatever, and you're like, Oh, right. They can make really bad sets that nobody wants to actually play. And then you want to go running back to win everything's, you know, between seven or eight and 10, you know? So I, I like that it's become more formulaic in that particular way. And I do think that this sets like Bloomberg and Laurel and Eclipse. And I do agree with, with Jeff's assessment as well, that these are mostly on rails, fun and clean, but maybe a little, a little too much of that. I do think that that's conscious. I don't think that they are plugging in a bunch of generic stuff. And then it sometimes just spits out these kind of, yeah, on rails type decks. I think that these are really important for new players. And I know I bring up new players a lot and a lot, most of our audience isn't new players, you know, they're kind of hardcore limited players, but I always want that door to be open for people to find magic for whatever avenue that they find it in, whether it's, you know, us through, through limited play, which is kind of what we think is the, the best of magic, you know, the best gameplay and the best experience that magic has to offer from a gameplay perspective. But even if it's something else, even if it's completely, even if it's lower based stuff or commander, you know, constructed or old formats or collecting cards or whatever, I just want to make sure that all those doors are open. And I feel that the way that limited has that door open is to have a set like Bloomberg or Lore, when every once in a while, where if I'm new, man, it's, I got something to hang on to. There's only five decks. We'll talk about that in a minute, but there's basically only five decks and they make it very, it says elf on it, take it, right? It says elf on it, take it. And, you know, they really give you those handholds. And yes, for me, I mean, I'm already kind of getting a little bored, right? I feel like I've drafted all the decks, you know, a number of times and, you know, they put the cube up on arena and I jumped on it. And normally I don't do that. Normally, if I'm really enjoying a format, I'm like, I know cube, cube will be there, you know, I'll be able to play it kind of whenever, and I'll stick with a format, but I didn't for this one. And I think that, you know, part of the reason why is because of what, what Jeff said. But anyway, I really do think that having these sets out there every once in a while, you know, once every year and a half, two years, something like that, come out with one of these sets. I think that if you compare this and or bloom bro, you know, just sets like Final Fantasy, right? Final Fantasy was an amazing limited format, but holy smokes. I would never want that to be the first draft experience for somebody. It is just straight up overwhelming. I mean, you have to know so many things. You have to read so much. Like, can you imagine a timed like where you're at a local store and okay, it's my first draft and you've seen a few of the cards, but you're not really familiar. And then you got everybody staring at you while you read the front and back of every, you know, card that's, that's handed to you. It just would be miserable where here, you know, maybe you open up a good, you know, goblin or whatever, and you just hang on for the ride. I like that. I think that these are there. And I'm very much willing to, to pay that tax, if you will, as a experience limited player that would prefer sets, you know, that were good to the hundredth draft or whatever. But I think this is a necessary thing. And I also like the way that you described it, Jeff, clean, fun, you know, like this is good magic. Like these aren't bad sets by any stretch. They're just, you know, there's not a lot of room to explore. What do you think, Circo? No, I agree with what you said more or less. I was thinking about answering it from a slightly different angle. I think that for this specific set, I think that they could have maybe potentially pushed a couple of those off color and commons and rares maybe, or if not, add a bit of a build around spin to the off colors. It doesn't have to be powerful, but build arounds are fun to draft, even if they're not powerful, because certain type of player that includes yours truly likes to, you know, draft your builder style and deck or whatever you, you know, my style, you know, that I like my build around, mad deck construction. Yeah, you'll find your pet card and kind of go for it. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So I mean, I think that because the supported colors already have the volume, you know, they have the elves and like every second creature is an elf. They have more multicolor cards. There is the eclipse cycle. There is the Lord cycle. There is a bunch of stuff. The unsupported color pairs, they just have this one hybrid uncommon. And those could have been maybe a bit more pushed. I mean, those feel like a straight up trap somehow, you know. Exactly. Because, you know, but imagine if the, if the, the fairy payoff was like a three two flyer. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. Interesting. Right. Maybe, maybe enough to push you in a direction. Yeah. Yeah. Or if you had like some kind of a Marduk card that allows you to put the blight very cheaply and remove blight very cheaply, like sort of that kind of so when you can play around those things. So, but that's about it. I think that the set is fine as it is. You want a type of set, you want to have return to a world. And I think that, you know, return to the world was the main focus. And I think that the world building was very good in this set, you know, combining the shadow more and lower wind and adding this little spin with those flip around creatures. And I think that, yeah, probably they should have done fairies as an archetype just because people wanted it more. And the fact that there was no fairy then, then, yeah. But apart from that, I mean, they know what they're doing. They're delivering really good limited sets. Last year was probably unprecedented in terms of quality of limited sets. Yeah. And I didn't know that, by the way, I didn't know that you're such a big fan of Spider-Man 3. Wow. Yeah. Huge fan. But yeah, you know, so it's interesting because, you know, Jeff asked, well, what advice would we give to the designers? And the funny part for me is that I would get much more nitpicky. Like it wouldn't be about doing these archetype base sets or these creature type base sets. Those are fine. And for the reasons that I said in my mind, so I wouldn't advise them to not make these. What I would say is that like if you're going to return to Lorewind, you have to figure out a way to not cut out half of the fun, half of the everybody's favorite creature type, whatever it happens to be. Right. Because yes, the goblins players are like, sweet, I got mine. Well, I thought fairies was the most interesting archetype from old Lorewind, mainly because it's blue black, but it's not just a control deck. And I think that that's, you know, if you were to, you know, if I asked you for a list of the different archetypes that we get in the color pairs, set after set after set, blue black is typically a controlling pair. I happen to really like that. But I thought that, you know, fairies is one of the few times that they've really thrown a nice twist on it, where it doesn't play out that way at all. Right. It's this kind of annoying tap your thing, hit you with the flyer, make a little one one counter something, you know, just totally different vibe. And, and of course, fairies is a popular archetype and constructed. And there's a lot of people that really like it. And it just went away. Right. And like, I really like tree folk. I really like the toughness matter stuff. I've always thought those cards were cool. And they put some really powerful ones in, but it's just, they don't really have enough of a home. Maybe every once in a while, you'll find one that can fit. But it's like, it is weird to get me hyped. Then I open up my first pack, and there's literally blue black fairy payoffs that I'm like, Oh, okay, well, I guess like, I didn't think it was one of the main archetypes, but maybe it is. And then you go down that road and you, and you almost feel trapped. It's like you definitely shouldn't have done that. And you're not going to win any games or even really stand a chance. So that those are the types of feedback I would give, you know, would be to, you know, you have to, you have to find a way to accommodate a full 10 archetypes if you're going to do a lower wins because of the expectations bloom. Who cares? Like I didn't know what was going to be there. If they did bloom burrow this way, which they kind of did, I'm like, whatever, you know, okay, I'm the mice deck, I guess, right? But I don't have any expectation going in that some certain color pair is going to be something specific, but I absolutely do for, for a lower win. And they didn't get that. Speaking of lower and circle, let's do a crack a pack here. And we can use it as a kind of a platform for you to give us your take on the format as it sits. Our first card off is shore lurker. That's a three in a white three, three flying merfolk. And when it E.T.B.s you surveil one. Yeah, it's a fine card. It's a fine card that I'm happy to play, maybe one or two in my merfolk deck, but I'm not going to first pick it. Here's a good. It was a bit of a data darling in the first early days, but they quickly, quickly turned out that it was just an accidental win rate. And as soon as the sample size got large enough, it dropped back. Yeah, the, you know, four drop is a tough spot. This next card, though, does hold its own in many ways. One of the best commons. It's Donhand eulogist, a three in a black three, three elf with menace and win a E.T.B.s, you mill three cards. And if there's an elf in your yard, you drain them for two. Yeah, it's a great, well, this is by the way, this is talking about the set reviews. It's a great common in elves. Yes. Yes. Yes. How do you put the mark on that? You need to put two marks then and then it becomes a bit too complicated. Yeah. But yeah, it's a great, but it's not the card that I definitely want to start my draft with. I will do really, I think that this set, the most powerful cards, like the top 20 30 are just so much more powerful than anything. And also I find that commons are generally very replaceable. And yes, maybe Donhand eulogist is going to be a C plus, but I don't think it like reaches the B level. Right. But then the other ones are going to be like C's. So the delta between eulogist and the other commons is not that big. So I'd rather be fishing for like extreme power, which you only find in uncommon and rare. So I might be interested if it's the empty pack and there's no uncommon and no rare that I'm interested in. But if you're really looking at the other ones. Okay. Yeah. That is how I approach it too. The next card is elder auntie. It's two in a red for a two, two goblin. And when the ETBs you make a one, one goblin token. Talking about the set design, a couple of goblin cards, I think that are just missed in from conceptual point of how you want to deal with them. Like elder auntie would have been great as a merfolk or as a kitkin or as a, even as an elf, I mean, because elf has a lord. Goblins don't get the Lord like in the sense of it bumps the power toughness. And because of that elder auntie is just not a good enough card. Yeah. Yeah. I think they were going for like, here's a place to put, you know, a blight counter kind of where you get to still keep a creature or something. But I agree that this is the archetype that cares least about having, you know, multiples of the creature. Next is moon glove extractor. This is the two in a black, two one elf. And whenever it attacks, you draw a card and lose a life. It's really sad when all the elves is the sort of best consensus archetype in the format and you are the crappiest of the elves. You're the worst elf, for sure. Next is gravelgill scoundrel. This is the one in a blue one three vigilance and when it attacks, you can tap another creature you control that's untapped. And if you do this thing, can't be blocked. Great, a little enabler for that deck, huh? Yeah. And also it's a pretty potent clock on occasions and a very annoying card because it's also blocks all the smaller creatures, generally smaller creatures in this format also like struggle because you can blank them so easily that they don't do. And this is one of those two drops that cannot be blanked very easily because it's unblockable most of the time. Yeah. And also it's a three three quite a lot of time. So I like scoundrel. Obviously, I'm going to first pick it. I'm going to pick it somewhere in the middle of the pack. But there are some mirthful deck when I'm happy having three of that and there are some mirthful decks when I don't want a single copy. Yeah, it's kind of funny. Although probably I always can get one. For curved purposes, you probably always have to. Yeah, I guess. Yeah. Next is timid shield bearer. This is the one in a white two two kithkin with activated ability four and a white creatures you control get plus one plus one and tell him to turn. These are always interesting too because, you know, as you as you get a little more familiar with the format, you start to recognize which cards just are a creature type, but otherwise are they don't care, right? Versus which cards are a creature type and then rely on other things being creature types. Like for example, gravel girl scoundrel is a merfolk works well with merfolk. But the thing you tap doesn't have to be a merfolk and timid shield bearer doesn't say kithkin get plus one plus one until an alternative. It's just all your things, you know, so like you can throw this into a merfolk deck as a if you're in need of a two drop and it might actually do okay for you, for example. Yeah, but also what noting that timid shield bearer is one of not that many cards that are actually working fine in both of the white main artifacts. It is not normal. It's okay in a merfolk. More than okay. It's like you'll be happy if it's your it's your 17th best card in the deck. Most of the time in the merfolk deck because merfolk suffer from the same thing as goblins. AKA body sizes are slightly small and can get blanked by larger creatures. What merfolk do to avoid that is that they have a lord that gives plus one plus one to all the creatures, but also things like timid shield bearer can act as the sort of like reserve version of the Lord, right? You have to pay mana for but it achieves the same thing. So it makes your creatures big enough to actually compete with the larger mid range elves or elementals. Next is wild vine pummeler. This is the six and a green six five with reach and trample and it costs one less to cast for each color among permanents you control. So this is an interesting card in a way that I like it in some of my decks, but it is not going to be a reason for me to be in those decks. So it's not quite enough of a draw for you to be like I'm going vivid? Yeah, exactly. But in some decks, it just naturally will happen that I'm having enough of the changelings that are having hybrid costs so they can reduce that maybe puka eyes, whatever it's called. Yeah, and a couple of other things and all of a sudden those pummelers fit very well. And then I'm going to pick them if they are circling around the table. But I'm not going to like first pick it and try to build around it because even if I pay two mana for it, it's not like wow, I have seven mana now and I paid only two for this one so I can double spell with it. It's not that big of an incentive for me. But in some decks, it's a perfectly fine card to put in your deck while maybe getting into that deck for other reasons because maybe you pick the seven mana giant mythic that is actually broken. Or you have a couple of shine strikers and maybe something else or whatever. Yeah, I do love that they put reach and trample on that card. Those are kind of the exact two things I would want this type of card to have where I feel like if I'm going to put this extra effort in to play wild vine pummeler, maybe I get it at four or five mana. But I really want it to come down and like either beat my opponent down or help stabilize my board. And it's particular two abilities do exactly that, which I appreciate about it. I think, for example, if it didn't have reach, I think it would be a lot worse. You're already, it's already dubious if you should be extending your hybrid cards, mana base, just running this at all as a giant berserker that doesn't go into anything else. You're already kind of on thin ice. These payoffs really need to make it worth your while. And I think the pummeler, it's just on that razor's edge. They did a really good job of not making it a no brainer, but also, you know, it's not, it's not so bad that you don't, that you don't even go for it at all. Last comment is mischievous sneakling. That's the one and blue black hybrid for a two, two changeling with flash. I'm definitely lower on it than Luis was. Because Luis said that that never, never misses the cut. For me, it misses the cut quite recently, I have to say. I just generally don't like two drops in this format. Most of the two drops are quite replaceable. Even the ones that are like top quality two drops like the Liselana, the three one that surveils on enter and die, even the two, two life linker, they're fine cards, but can get blinked very quickly in the games. And there is no coming back for them most of the time. So I'm not prioritizing two drops that much. I need to have some because I don't want to get overrun too quickly if I have a bit of a slower start, but I also don't prioritize them. And if they are sort of vanilla ish, I'm not interested in playing that. Sneakling is still a surprise factor of being able to trade with something then without the opponent expecting or with opponent at least having doubts, which lead them to attack into you and then you can cast it. The one that is absolutely horrendous for me is the two one first strike one. The feisty spikling. The feisty spikling, there we go. Yeah, that one's very rough. I definitely not going to pick this one from the spikling. So far, after looking at all the commons, it's going to be the eulogist, I'm afraid. Okay, well, let's see if we can upgrade that. Our first uncommon is SWAT away. That's the two blue, blue instant. It costs two less to cast if a creature is attacking you and the owner of target spell or creature puts it on their choice of the top or bottom of their library. Yeah, I think that it's a bit disappointing. I thought that this card is going to be better. And I don't, yeah, I don't even know why it isn't because, you know, on the same hand, the temporal cleansing is one of the better blue commons and this card that looks much better is not. And I don't know if it's the mana value or... I, you know, Convoke goes a long way, I think. Yeah, it does, it does, that's for sure. But this one has also its advantages. This one can cost two if it targets attacking creature and you remember variant books from Strixhaven, that card was having the same kind of discount and was costing three and was much better. So I don't know and it can counter a spell in a way or well counter, temporarily counter a spell. So I don't know exactly what it is, but maybe the best versions of decks were to be good are not that heavy blue, maybe. Yeah, that could be. But I would pick Eulogist over it still. Okay. That's, that's, that's, that's... This next card is the type of card I love to see in Limited and it kind of makes me a little bummed out that it's not in one of the main archetypes. It's a Noggle Rogue, it's Noggle Robber. This is the one red, red, one green green or one green red you can choose. It's a three three and when it enters or dies, you get a treasure. So this is probably the card that I missed the most on in card evaluation throughout this format. Because I was, this was the kind of a card that was always cutting from my deck, not, not, not because I was like not liking it, I was still picking it. But whenever I was making the cuts to my deck, it was just that card because, oh well, it doesn't have the type of synergies, double pipped. So it's maybe like my 24th card and I was making the last card. And then this week I made this episode where I looked at the win rates of cards in each of the color pairs. And I looked at Noggle Robber's numbers and it's got huge improvements in almost every combination of colors. Like, you know, if an average elemental deck wins 55% games, Noggle Rob, Robber in elemental decks has 58% game in hand game rate. Alps 57% win rate, but Noggle Robber has 59 in Alps. So it's always improving on those archetypes. And it's even in Kitkin, it's got like Kitkin has 56 and Noggle Robber has 57, which for me is a sign of a card that I'm happy to put in my deck. So probably I was under appreciating how good it is. And it would now with knowledge of the data that I acquired, it would have been my pick so far. Okay, yeah, I've definitely been impressed by it, but I have the similar reservations to those that you did, where unless you're in gruel, which is not a supported archetype that we will touch on gruel in a little bit, you know, you really want to play, you know, because the card itself is good, but do you want to pay one double red or one double green in your deck? And you know, generally I would lean away from that, not all the way, but exactly kind of where you found yourself, where I'm like, you know, close, but not quite. But it turns out it's actually pretty good. And of course, if you are playing, you know, a vivid strategy, this card goes up a lot, like getting the very good in gruel and very good in gruel. Yes. Next up is, is what a card type that, or a category of card that we don't actually see that much of in this set, but that definitely pulls its weight. It's sizzling changeling. So this is the two in a red three, two changeling. And when it dies, you exile the top card of your library. And until the end of your next turn, you can play that card. You know, this is, it's really telling, I think that when I see a card like sizzling changeling, I'm like, Oh, I can take a card and go multiple directions with this card, because, you know, regardless of archetype, if I'm playing red mana, it's going in the deck. And there's very few cards like that, you know, even if you just look at the pack that we've had, this is one of those few cards that's actually pretty dang powerful. And we'll go, you know, happily into anything that can cast it. Yeah, but it's just shy of that level of the best red uncommon. I think it's like one tier below them. Because, you know, the best things like explosive protogy, flame braider, seer, definitely, boulder dash, maybe sourdough, sourbread, sorry, not sourdough, sourbread, anti. Yeah. And these are like the top five uncommon. And then you have that level below it's the changeling. And I think that something to do with it is that it's power toughness is not aligning. You know, I told you that the best cards in the format, they completely make a mockery out of two drops. But this one doesn't, because it still trades with the two drop. Okay, you got that impulse draw from it, but that's about it. So for me, that card is mainly, mainly an elementals card, honestly. Yeah, I agree. And then, you know, the competition for three drops in elementals is quite high. So I would have to see what kind of a deck I would have. And I think that there is this kind of aggressive elementals build. But that one comes together very rarely. And changing would have been much better in there because of course, the more power than toughness. But most elemental decks are actually quite defensive where the stat line of two, three would have been much better or the one four is not terrible. Like the Eclipse, the Flamken has. I would pick Noggle Robber over it now that I'm out with my newly acquired knowledge of the numbers being amazing on the card. Yeah, I mean, I think the thing that I like about the changeling is like the cards you mentioned are more powerful in their deck. But I have to be in that. If I take Sourbread, Antio, Over, Sizzling, Changeling, it's like, well, that's a very plant your flag style pick double red, Goblins only, right? For the most part. And then, you know, and then if you go down the other cards, they're similar, right? You know, if I play Flambrader, it's like, that's going in one deck effectively. And this one, I actually have the option it's so rare that I feel that I like, when I first pick a card in the format, I almost always feel like I know what archetype I hope to be in straight away. And I, you know, as long as it doesn't go off the rails, there's a decent chance that I am. I do take a similar approach to what you said, Sirko, where I will just take, I don't care about taking an eclipse card into another eclipse card, because I'm going to kind of see what the table gives me and I'm willing to throw away a couple of picks to do that. But it is nice to remember that there are draft formats where you can take a card and go, this could go anywhere. I could be in any number of, you know, three or four archetypes from here, where this one is like, you could be in two and you're like, yeah, you know, like sweet, the door is wide open. And one of them is goblins. And one of them is goblins. Yeah, that's the bad news. Last uncommon is Warren. I mean, I don't want to be spreading the anti-goblin propaganda. I am very keen on drafting goblins. And I think that there's very, very good cards in that archetype. It's just, I don't want to pick change link to be in goblins. I want to pick either a bomb, a grab, grab scumant, or one of those Bogart's mischief slash the signed post uncommon cards, because I think that these are essentials. Change link is going to be a filler in my goblin deck. So I'm not happy to start my goblin adventure picking a filler card. Yeah, you're going to, you're going to first pick one of those key build around goblin. Yeah, exactly. And then you're going to wheel this mischievous sneakling. And that's going to be very, very, I'm going to get late even those amazing payoffs. And then I know, okay, it's also open at the table. I'm also not that keen on first picking them because if I have to compete with someone for goblins on the pot, I'm not going to be in a good position at the end of that draft. That's right. Yeah, you want to pick it up fifth, sixth, and kind of go, okay, I got a little easier. Yeah, exactly. That's, that's, that's this, even fourth, why not? Yeah. You know, half the table is clear. Yeah, exactly. Last and common is Warren Torchmaster, which is one in a red for a two, two goblin. And at the beginning of combat on your turn, you can blight one. And if you do turret creature gains, haste and talent of turn. Yeah, it's a weak card. It's a weak card. It just doesn't do whatever you want. It's like the reverse rate turns out is not very good. Yeah. I can imagine that there are some kind of decks where it might be fine because you are playing, I don't know, some kind of Rakdos tree folk or Boros tree folks, and you want to be putting minus one, minus one counters. And this is the role that the card is going to play putting minus, minus, minus one counters on your things. But this is a one in a hundred deck that we're talking about. So I'm clearly not going to first pick something to get into one in a hundred deck. Card has like what, 51% game in hand win rates. That's not impressive at all. That's rough. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The cost is just too high. No, the rubber has 57. That's the difference. Yeah. That's huge percentage points in win rate. Our rare is another red card. It's end blaze epiphany. This is the red X instant. It does X damage to target creature. And when that creature dies this turn, exile a number of cards from the top of your library equal to its power, then choose an exile card this way until the end of your next turn. You can play that card. I mean, it's a lot of text. And I think that this is, has deterred some people from drafting that card because I've seen it way too late. This is, this is a bomb. Yeah. This is like, this is the third best red card in the format after soul emulation and spine rock tyrant. Okay. So you just have this as like a straight up instance. Straight up. Yeah. Straight up. It's great in every, it's also, this card is great in every color pair that, that, that can host it, including the off colors, you know, like it, this is a card that can make a white red deck being decent. I see. So, yeah. So I would, I would see it as a, as a straight bump and I would pick it here without batting an eyelid. I think there are two cards in this format that people I don't know fully appreciate. It's, they're easy to read weaker than they actually are. One of them is this. And the other one is the Glenn Elendra's answer, the counterspell. Oh yeah. And you get a one one flyer? Yeah. Or two and two, you get two of them quite often. And I think that those two cards are often misread by people and as something weaker, but they're very powerful, both of them, and go still way too late. I think. So yeah, I would, I would not even hesitate, pick the, pick the rare. And this opens me to a lot of outcomes because this is not a type of card. It is great in also those maybe less supported archetypes. And this is exactly how I want to start my draft. A powerful card that doesn't define where I want to go because I get an extra level of flexibility. That is the dream. And in this set, you don't get that that often. So easy to pick up there. There's very few cards that are fulfilling those criteria. Yeah. So in blaze epiphanies to pick up. Now I did want to get your take before, well, I wanted to get your take on how you drafted this format, but I wanted to touch in with you just because I don't know how many people actually know this about you, but you do kind of consult with a pro tour testing team as to get them. I mean, what do you do? You get them limited data. You help them parse out the limited format, especially, you know, this last one was a very short turnaround time from when the set was out until it went, but you've been working with team cosmos for a few pts now, right? Yeah. So I think I started in Final Fantasy to work with them. So there was a pro tour Final Fantasy. There was also a very short turnover one. Mm hmm. And then worked ever since. So I worked on, oh, sorry, I bumped my microphone. I worked with them on all the pro tours ever since. And my role is it's complex. Let's put it like that. Because at the same time, I'm running some sort of limited meeting. I usually actually show that there's win rates for specific color pairs, because I think that that level of granularity appears even with those early pro tours, it appears like just exactly two days before the pro tour starts so they can have fresh information. I can get them the latest info on which cards are good in which color pairs and why. But you know, if someone needs one on one session to get a catch up, we have done that. Analyzing the draft logs, applying, I think, I think some kind of strategy of how to approach learning limited and how to work together as a team, those kind of things. I'm helping with all that. I'm not the only limited even specialist that is working with the team, because also Mark Anderson, Cordacl's set review partner is also working on the team. So we have two different approaches. I do the data. Mark does the pundit tree, and we try to sort of combine it and figure out what to do with it. And of course, there's of course internal expertise, because Cosmos has a couple of players who could be considered good. Yes, yes, they do. That is a stack team, including having won the last pro tour. Christopher Larson took it down. Congrats to Chris. After going 6-0 in draft, I don't care what he did with the excruciator. No one's interested in that. 6-0 in draft, Chris. That's amazing. That's awesome. I just think that's really cool that a team is tapping your shoulder for that kind of stuff. And we're getting to see in these... With Chris, I can't take any credit. Chris is a force of nature, as you might well know. I am aware, yes. And because of that, I cannot take any credit for teaching anything to Chris. He has just this very vibrant brain that absorbs information in a way that is unteachable. Yeah, there's always players like that. But still, it all adds up. The things floating around, the testing room, the stuff in the Discord servers, the conversations that are had, and you are a part of that as well. So I think that's really cool. And I wonder if more teams are going to try to branch out, because we've been in the data-driven era of limited for a while now, since 17 lands really came to prominence. But the challenge has always been the same since day one, which is to interpret the data. This is why we started Have You New on the show in the first place. I think even a bigger challenge is converting the best of one arena data into something that is actionable for a pro tour. And this is something that I'm really struggling sometimes, because I can give them the advice from arena and first week of drafting of the format. And it's there, draft the most busted Elf deck possible, because you can reliably do that on arena. Now try that in the pod and the pro tour. Right. And we saw that we were talking about that in the booth as well for both of the drafts, which is that pro tour drafts are generally very scrappy, we call them, right? You almost never get one of those golden seats where you're just being handed everything you wanted. People are fighting it out. And then when you take the total number of archetypes from a normal, ostensibly 10, but let's call it eight, seven, somewhere between seven and eight that are viable, because usually there's a couple that are kind of like just a, you just can't really play them. And then you go down to five trending towards four. It's like, now you've got a real boxing match to see who's going to hang on. And we saw that with Seth, right? Where you mentioned it earlier in the show, he just, he took some Elves early and then he just hung on for the ride. And there, he got kind of bailed out in the pack that he had cut super hard. So he got his payoff. I had some quarrels with his picks in the second pack. And I think that that cost him a deck that could have gone to one. I think that couple of times in pack two, Seth picked the good two drop over a good four drop. There was a couple of picks were here, either Lyselana in Formant or the Life Linker and the Cavalry. And he picked the two drop every single time. And he missed a couple of those bigger things. And a couple of the games, it seemed like he just ran out of steam. He had those two drops, but they were virtually blank by something and then, and then couldn't push through. And Cavalry is very steamy. Exactly. And the second draft, there was Mark, is it Marko Belakka? Yeah. Yeah. I saw that pack. And I know that Luis Elvater from the team was sitting a couple of seats further. And I saw the first pick and I don't remember what Marko picked, but I would have picked, I think, the Goblin signpost on Common, the two, three. Oh, yeah. The Death Touch. The Death Touch one. That would be my pick. And then I thought, oh, I really hope that Luis picks that card. And indeed, he picked it. And he did. And he had, he had grab, grab's command. It was like, Marko's deck went to one. And it was a deck where you looked at the deck and thought, how on earth did this thing go to one? Must have been navigated perfectly plus some luck. Luis's deck, you looked at this deck and said, how on earth did this thing go to one? That's an easy three, oh, yeah. But it turns out that, you know, Ashley's command is still a powerful card and you cannot win with everything. Yeah. But yeah, it's funny to watch, to watch Pro through when the team that you're working with is playing and you have to support them from the sidelines because you have a different perspective. I look at the pack and I'm not thinking about what the person's going to pick. I'm thinking, will this thing get to my teammate? Right. That's where your rooting interests lie. Well, that's really cool that you're doing that and good luck with it going forward. What were, what were, you know, let's, let's zoom now to drafting philosophies, right? What are some of the ways that you found best to, that you have found best to approach Laura when eclipsed, you know, draft? This practice for this program was sort of an epiphany moment for me because it's things that we understand sort of intuitively, but this time I verbalized it because I had to talk, I had to communicate on the strategies of drafting. And, you know, there are people who are more like, oh, I'll be more on the forcing side. There are people who are more bobbing and weaving, you know, drafting the hard way, the Ben Stark philosophy of approaching a draft. And they are usually sold as a package. Like this is the philosophy. That's how you draft, you draft like this or you'd love like that. But of course, it's not always this case. Different formats will have their own specificities. Even, you know, even like within one format, you might be having more success with one strategy in quick draft and one strategy in premier draft and obviously that completely different kettle of fish on the proctor. So we discussed a lot about this philosophical approach on how to draft and we had a couple of them that were conflicting. And I think that all of them can work. It depends on how it works with your personal preference. So as you mentioned, Seth, for example, picked good cards and elves early and then stuck to it. I think that for the first five picks in the proctor draft, he didn't have a realistic way out of the Elf deck and that he was deep enough in elves cards that he just attacked it. And I think that I probably would have done the same in his seat, honestly, because he had too much of a volume of those good elf cards already and was sort of committed and it's better to like not to pivot out of it. And there was no clear off ramp, like you said. It wasn't like, oh, you should have been paying attention to this. It was like clear off ramp. Yeah. But in this, my strategy for the format is that I, if I pick like a good elf's rare, let's say maybe not gloom ripper, but maybe something slightly worse than gloom ripper. Like哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎 because I know that from now on, whether I'm in Elves or whether I'm in Merfolk, my top card is going to be solid, because I either have Morkand or the Eclipse Mero. And I don't know if Elves are open. If Elves are not open, and I go all in for that Morkand, I might need to pivot out somewhere else, because Elves are quite popular on Arena, especially right now. And then if I end up in Merfolk, and I wasted my second pick for not picking a really, really good Merfolk card, you know, honestly, when I pick a second pick Eclipse Mero, I'm more likely to be in Merfolk than in Elves after the draft, because at least one person next to me, pass me a very good Merfolk. You actually have a data point. I actually have a signal, yeah. So that's why I'm going to do it. And I will go like that, maybe even to like pick five or six when I will pick a great Elf card, great Merfolk card, some generic Red Rare. And then I pick four, five, six, seven. I start to very carefully read the signals and read the signals for the cards that I actively want to put in my deck. And eventually, I find a lane or not. Because the risk of that kind of drafting is that, just to give you the impression, all my trophies so far in the format have been in the non-supported color pairs. I had some really, really strong Elf decks. I had some really strong Merfolk decks, but just came like one win short of a trophy. All my trophies I trophied with a Boros deck. Boros deck splashing green for the green mythic titan with the vivid, you know, the one that puts permanence from the top of the library equal to your vivid count. Man, that is one with, yeah, I have not had any success with the off-color deck. So that's impressive. But I have success because I do pick those super powerful cards in all colors. And sometimes I will have like, in this particular deck, I had the hour pick from the draft. So I had the end blaze epiphany, a ton of red, good red removal, because somehow it was open in pack one. And I was distracting red. But I also had the 7-7 colossus that turns everything into a 1-1. And a bunch of solid white creatures that I could combine with it. And I didn't never found a lane. I was trying to get into Kithkin, but it was hard closed. I was trying to get into elementals because I had all those spells that would be useful in the elemental deck, but nothing was open. But in the end, I just had powerful cards in white, powerful cards in red, and a bomb in green that I could splash because it's a perfect splash, because I also had like, three of the four or three elementals that make a treasure. So splashing was absolutely trivial. And I got there. Another deck I had was just Grewl. And just Grewl mid-range, big things. I was splashing Brigitte and Bray into that deck because I was picking powerful cards and I got them. And I got late Bray. I could easily splash it because my mana base was pretty solid. And then just a bunch of like giants. I had them, some small combos with change links and the giant that gives things double strike, which sometimes that thing works when you have large enough creatures to support it with. And it worked. And I trophied with it also quite easily. And my third trophy was Grix's Elemental Ferries. Splashing green. What? Did you get Marilyn or whatever it's called? Well, my first pick was Bitter Blossom. Okay. Like the creature, right? No, the Bitter Blossom. Oh, you got actual Bitter Blossom. It's on the bonus sheet or whatever. So my first pick was Bitter Blossom. And then I picked a couple of those Demir, Demir, Demir Ferries that give you fairy payoffs. But Black was never properly open. Blue was very open. So I picked a couple of Elementals. I picked like a Rhymekin Clues, or maybe even two of them. But then I started seeing a lot of red and a lot of Elementals. And I started supplementing my focusing on blue, but supplementing it with the red cards that were like removal. And I also, by the way, I also think I had the end blaze Epiphany quite late. Oh, okay. That's where my experience of that card not being evaluated rightfully. And then like part three, I also like saw quite late Marilyn. And I thought, well, it's too cool to play Bitter Blossom and Marilyn in the same deck. So I played the basically Marilyn, but with almost no elves. It was all Ferries. It was still great. It was still great because Bitter Blossom turns out it works quite well with it. That is incredible. But again, I got on it because I picked our full cards because Bitter Blossom is a powerful card because the red rares that I was picking were quite strong in that deck. And then Marilyn sort of dropped into my lap. I probably shouldn't have played it, but it was just too fun not to. And it is a very powerful card, but. Yeah, I had to stretch my mana a bit too much because remember, I still had the bunch of those Demir Ferries that I needed to cast somehow for Blue Blue Blue most of the time. So I want to rewind back to those early picks, the examples that we were giving, like if you took more more can't pack one, pick one. And then you got, you know, one of the really solid, you know, like the elf you mentioned, the, what's it called the 2, 2, Life Link mill elf or something like that. But then you were saying, okay, but I'm going to take the, you know, the triple colored, you know, Merfolk card over it. Do you worry that if you do end up being in elves that you're going to look back and say, I didn't get critical mass? Cause, you know, it's one thing to be able to hit playables in a normal draft format where creature type isn't as focused on as this, where you can say, well, I'll dip down into that C minus D plus range. I'll take some risk here if I end up being in the two colors of the card that I initially picked, if you first pick a gold card, you know, you probably can think to yourself, well, yeah, maybe my deck won't be quite as powerful if I give up on this card, but I'm leaving myself that option. I think it's worth it. So I'm going to go for it. But here, you know, you need, it's not just color, right? Your cards, your creatures need to be on type. And you know, that isn't the only payoff for that, right? More, more can't is a payoff for it. But do you like, how do you balance that part out? Cause I think I would probably chicken out if I had a card as good as more can and just take the, the common there where my, my, my, my thought is like that. And it's a very simple creature. Yeah. I'm not over intellectualizing ever in my life. I try to be as pragmatic and to the point. You're literally an intellectual like that's your job. But my secret of being an intellectual is that I don't over intellectualize. I just intellectualize the right amount of it. But if I pick that elf, if I don't pick that elf and I end up my draft not being a bit short on elves, I probably shouldn't have been drafting elves. If it's open, it's open. It's not open. It's not open. I mean, if I'm running short on playables in the modern day and age of limited, well, that lane was not open. I can guarantee you that. For sure. Especially in a normal set where creature type is not supposed to be drafting it. And if I was not supposed to be drafting it, I probably was supposed to draft something else. And maybe that something else was Merfolk. I see. And so you want to make sure that that's imagine that, you know, you pick the more cut you pick the elf and then it dries completely. You need to pivot and you see like a pick seven, what's the five mana to two that comes with the one one in Merfolk. And then back to you open SIG. Sky Swimmer. What happens then? Don't you regret not picking that Eclipse Mero? What is the bigger regret? Not picking Eclipse Mero or not picking a Tutu Life Linker that is replaceable? Yeah, I have a hard time with that because my normal strategy is the one that you said, which is I would much rather keep myself open because as you also mentioned, these are data points coming in versus a pack one pick one that has no data to it, right? It's just what card did I open? And but, but I also have found myself feeling like I'm heading into pack three and I'll, you know, click on the little stats thing on arena and I'll say like, how many elves do I have? Right? Like, am I going to get across the finish line to make these other elves cards like, you know, that I got more can't size, I got more can't and maybe I have the Lord or something like that. And I'm like, well, I do need critical mass of these things. Like if I only have eight elves, this deck's a lot worse than if I have 12 or 13 or, you know, something like that. And so that's like a layer that I don't normally I would just say, do I have enough playables in my colors? And that leaves the table way more open, right? Like, because it's just I can just pick up something anything to fill that gap. So that's the that's kind of that fine line, you know, that I've that I've struggled with is, you know, if I just get over the finish line, as far as critical mass of the creature type that I need, that's where I start to go, hmm, should I should I have been more willing to commit or discipline or whatever you want to put it as, you know, should I have done more early and not, you know, faft around or whatever. This is not a comfortable drafting style. I can tell you that. Makes sense. There is, you know, not not not only Cosmos is looking at data when testing for the Protor, Worldly Council, they have Eduardo Shai Gallic. Yes. And also top aided by the way, who by the way, it's Shai Gallic. It's a Slovak name and I'm sticking to that. Even even if he doesn't pronounce it. I've asked him so we say it how he told us. He is wrong on his own. I had him on my podcast as well. So I mean, of course, we know each other. Yeah. But he said that in this format, sometimes he picked a lane middle pack too. But you know, if you draft, if you and he has, I think, very similar strategy than I do, because they release their limited meetings, obviously, one looks at what competition is doing. It's being staying open till mid-pack too doesn't mean that you have no deck until mid-pack to right. It just means that you maybe have a slightly smaller pool of cards. You maybe have six Miracle cards and six Elf cards and you're waiting for like mana from the air from the heavens to start falling. And in this format, people panic, which means that sometimes mid-pack to all of a sudden elves open wide. Oh my God, I have seen that happen. Yeah. Yeah. So staying open till late and and and hedging your bets. But yeah, it is not comfortable right to get there because, you know, you have eight playables in the Miracle can eight playables in Elf until the mid-pack to you really need to catch up in those last picks. It really needs to open up properly. But that's why my strategy was more hedging the bets on being in those middle of the non-supported color pairs. Because I think that if you draft them well, and if you know which cards to pick, you can get there. You can have a decent deck. But the problem is that you really need to know which cards are good in those decks and which are not. That's why I'm doing those analysis when I look at the win rates of cards in their individual color pairs. And then I can build myself a map and I can tell you that, for example, the what's the name of the thing that we were talking about picking from the pack, the Noggle Robber is a great card because it goes into seven archetypes and it's great in each one of them. Now, obviously, good Grewl deck is going to be competitive with slightly above average Elf deck or maybe above average Elf deck. It won't be competitive with the most busted Elf deck. Right. That has the highest ceiling. But if your choices between a very mediocre Elf deck and a really top of the notch Grewl deck, you're going to win more with the top of the notch Grewl deck. So this is why it's worth knowing what you need to pick it. And there are some cards that are just good in those middle of the way archetypes. And you know, like Black Removal, for example, the Boxlet is a Brace Blythe Root. These cards are great in in white, black and in blue, black. So if you pick those cards, you have always that option. Yeah. Right. I'm not a particular proponent of blue, black, but white, black, I think is a strong color combination if you find the open lane, because there are some good cards in that. Like Rime King recluse. Yes, it's an elemental card, but it's great in every deck. So if you pick a card like that, you are slightly open to those of color combinations. Shine Strike, another card that is great in all the color combinations. Okay. Yeah. Omni-changing also. Fine in every blue color combination. So by picking those cards, you are having that extra pivot. Not something that you want, because you want to be in one of those five type of combinations, but something that you have access to and options are important and limited. So if you pick cards that are generically good, rather than super specialized, you will have slight options. Now, obviously, you don't want to compromise power on that. Yeah, that's what I was going to ask. You would still take the shot on the ultra powerful thing. You just- Yeah, I would pick Morgan's eyes over Rime King recluse most likely, because I just think that this card is very powerful. And there are some cards like- Oh, the perfect example of extreme power, but very focal is Thunderflock. Yeah. Thunderflock, it's almost unbeatable in elemental decks, but it's very mediocre in non-elementals decks. So what do you do with a card like that? Well, you pick it, because it's so, so good in the elemental deck that it pays- Sometimes you won't play it and you won't care that much about it. Because you're not assuming that you won't be able to get the archetype that you want. You're just open to the fact that it may not be there. But you take the shot, and then if you get past a Rime King recluse, you win, mill, slam it, and you're like, we're off to the races here. Yeah, but if I pick some kind of a medium-medium quality elf payoff, I am not particularly keen on picking it over a card that is generally good in almost every color combination that it has. Okay, yeah, that's interesting. I'm thinking which would be the generic elf payoff. Maybe like the 2-3 in the path for 2. Maybe this is a little indignatory. I think that this is like a perfect level. Yeah. It's an elf. It's a solid elf. I like the card. I like the card if I'm an elf. But if I have a pick of this over the rare that we picked now, I picked the rare. No questions asked. That's maybe not a fair comparison. What about one of the removal spells or something? Where is that line with Blight Rod or the Exile one or whatever? Are you willing to stay? Because that kind of signifies, well, this is going to be good no matter what, good enough. But the ceiling on the dignitary is higher. Yeah, so I would pick the dignitary probably over Blight Rod. Blight Rod is in my opinion in a sort of awkward spot because there are two types of removal that I really like in this format. One is cheap removal like Cinder Strike. And the other one is Unconditional Removal like the Blight Rod. Okay. Not the Blight Rod, the other one. What's the name? I'm getting so old that I cannot memorize cards anymore. I just like... Vox Slithers Embrace. Vox Slithers Embrace. Dude, I've been there for years. Yeah. I just stopped caring about memorizing cards. I can go, you know, the Exile one that can Blight whatever. So I would happily pick Vox Slithers Embrace because I like to have my Unconditional Removal and I might happily pick Cinder Strike. But with Blight Rod, I would have to give it a think. Because that one's not quite there. Okay. But we found that border, right? Yeah. The end blade's epiphany, that's way above it. You're very happy to take that. But these are ones where you're like, huh, you know, maybe I'd prefer to stay open. I think removal is very important in this format. At least some amount of it. And I've had like really, really good decks that didn't trophy because just the removal didn't align well. I had like, you know, I'm sitting there with the Seer and two Cinder Strikes in hand and my opponent is killing me with the two X-Fives. And then I mean, I can kill one of them with two cards. I won't feel very good about it. But yeah, that's the problem I can have. And that's for example, like the Rakdos Signpost Common. That's Chaos something. Chaos Rock. Spear. Orper. Spear. Chaos Spear, that's the one. The Five-Four. I think that that card would have been so, but so much better if it was a Four-Five. Oh, for sure. But the Five-Four aligns so bad because there's like a gazillion of three Mana Four-Trees, Four-Trees in the set. Totally. So even if you play it big, it just attacks into a three-drop and dies. And Cinder Strike and Blight Rot. Yeah, they just all kill it. But if it was a Four-Five, that card would have been really, really strong. And maybe the whole Goblin archetype would have been that one much better just by flipping the power toughness of those two, of this particular one card. Yeah, I think they were really trying to be careful about big toughness in the Goblin's deck because it just gives you a place to dump all your blood, you know? But we talked about Moralin. And part of the charm of the Moralin is that it's a Four-Five. It's super difficult to kill. Yes, very difficult. Yeah, that's really interesting. Yeah, this is definitely a set I think that challenges that line the most about, you know, how much are you willing to push? Because you definitely don't want to, you know, you don't want to look back and think that you kind of did have the deck handed to you. You just didn't take it. You were, you know, going back and forth and trying to find a better lane or whatever. You don't want that regret. But you really don't want to go, okay, fine, I picked a good Elf card pack when pick one, but there was no data to it at all. And I just got shipped an amazing deck and one of the other archetypes and I was too stubborn to let go, you know? Because if the one that you want to wait for, like the one that you want to put your, your bet down on is, is the one where your seats open. That's the one that matters, right? If, if I gave you, you know, even, you can pick your rare, right? Out of one archetype. And then I told you, but this archetype is open for the seat. You would take the open archetype every single time because there is no one rare that gets you that much more value than, you know, where you're the third player fighting for the archetype or it's being called. There was one rare. There was one rare. What was it? Masked exhibition from Strixhaven. Because you drew it every game. Yeah, that's true. You'd all, or Luris maybe. Yeah, that is true. You can keep paying it. That is true. How about in this set? There isn't a, no, no, there is nothing. But, and I think that this is, this, this is where, you know, I am the data person in the end, but data struggles with that because, if I'm drafting, like I tell you, I will of course supplement myself with all the information I can get from data, but in the end I have to make a decision and my decision will take into account what I already have, what I think I still need, which cards, which functions do the cards play in my deck. If I have three removal and I see another removal, that would be less of a priority for me than let's say a three drop or two drop. Three drop is never a priority, but let's say I have a good two drop. Maybe I need it. Maybe I think I like the top end and I will pick a card that is sort of like five mana because I think I need those bigger things because I don't want to be outcompeted in a late game by having smaller creatures and all those things are going to play a very vital role when I'm trying to pick my lane because I'm talking about not the situation when I'm drafting elves and I'm choosing between a two drop elf and a five drop elf. I'm talking about the situation when I'm drafting a bit of elves and a bit of merfolk and now I need to decide, do I pick a five drop elf or a two drop merfolk and that might define which lane I'm going to finalize in my draft. So this is a lot of the small decisions that you need to make to navigate the draft as well as you can. And also I don't claim that my strategy is the best strategy. I think there are merits to what Seth was doing. I think that there are merits to what Eduardo is postulating and some people within Cosmos also disagreed with what I was saying and I think that they have their points. You just need to also suit it to your personal drafting style and how you want to navigate your draft and what do you want to be playing. Most of us, we don't play it competitively. So winning is nice, but we also have other goals apart from winning. I like to explore my boundaries of the format and that's why I maybe subconsciously pick a strategy that will lend me in those unsupported color pairs more frequently than it probably I realistically should be ending up. Totally. And I mean, to back up that point, context matters. I mean, if you're talking to people who are about to draft in person live against other professional players at the pro tour, that's a very different thing than best of one on Arena, which is what a good chunk of the players are playing these days. It is a different vibe. It's a different thing, not only just from a technical format perspective, but also just like the level of play, the quality of competition, all that kind of stuff is so different. By the way, I heard I never tried myself because I didn't have time to draft normal, believe it or not, I didn't have tried that one. But I've heard very positive things about pick two draft of this format because it was available on Arena. Because pick two draft of this format, you sit with four people at the pod, there are five supported archetypes. It's almost like a gentleman's agreement that I picked my elves, you know that the elves are not going, you go into Merfolk, then you are the elementals and you are the goblins and it goes in a circle and everyone picks their own deck and then you go into the wild and start playing. That actually is cool. Actually, it was not a bad idea to draft it as a pick two draft. Oh, that is cool. I did not know that. Yeah, I still see the appeal to pick two draft, but haven't been drawn to it. I'm not naturally wanting to go learn. I really like focusing on the way that we've played, the way that the vast majority plays. It also matters for me for both doing this show and for doing the commentary at the PT that I really need to like. Yeah, yeah. But that being said, it wouldn't take that much to get me to try it. I definitely see the appeal and I've done a pick two style draft before for two headed giant, like when they used to run them at GPs, we would do them and they do the same thing where you're taking two cards out of each pack and passing it. So I've definitely tasted that and it's good. It's actually, it does work. And I mentioned it to Luis, but I'm, you know, I'm pretty sure that they're trying to make pick two a thing to try to get commander players to draft. Because the perfect way that I think that they're also selling those kits for drafting with friends and stuff like that. Exactly. I still prefer to have seven enemies than three friends and that's why commander style play is not pretty for me. That's good. But what about cube? Cube is good. I was just telling you before. What was your experience with cube before it came out on arena? Like, are you a cuber? I am. Well, you know, it's very hard to declare yourself as a cuber on this specific podcast when one of the co-hosts may or may not be, you know, it's funny because of course, no one is going to take away the fact that Luis is in the conversation for, you know, the top three, top five players of all time in terms of professional play. However, for most magic players, Luis will be known as the cube guy for sure, independently of how many producers he's still going to win from now on. He's still going to be in the head of many people as the ultimate cube oracle. So I'm not going to say I'm a cuber, given the fact that I might be evaluated from perspective of Luis. I, when I started playing magic, cube was not a thing. I came back to magic, cube was a thing, but I of course started, you know, the normal career progression as basically as I would start from beginning just with good fundamentals. It's basically me restarting playing magic is like someone moving from Pokemon to magic. You have the good fundamentals, but you play the very, very different game and now you move into this one. Yeah. It's just for me, it was a time travel and for them, it was more lateral move. So I didn't understand cube and actually listening to LR gave me a lot. They gave me the philosophical approach to what is different in cube, you know, the importance of fixing the, you're drafting literally a constructed deck that is sort of loosely defined, but then you can also go completely off piece sometimes and because of the power and combinations. And you know, of course, there's million versions of cube, but after that, it turns out that one person in our area has a vintage cube. So we have this every three months, a group of very middle aged men of which one wife moved somewhere for the weekend meet in the apartment of the lucky abandoned husband. And we just dropped cube. We usually start with, we try different combination. We usually start with the popper or artisan cube. So commons and commons or just commons. And then for the dessert, we do the vintage cube because we decided that if you do it opposite way, it's just, it's hard to gear down. Yeah. It's like moving from a plane into a very dilapidated bus. But if you do it the opposite way, it works fine. So I started drafting more and more. Obviously, the fact that Arena had its own cubes helped. I started playing those and it was fine. But after playing vintage cube, the other cubes, there are issues there. When they announced that there's vintage cube, my first thought was, oh boy, that's going to be interesting data to analyze. That was my first thought. First thought because it's a combination of new players entering vintage cube and then lots of the explore. You talked about it in one of your episodes that I found out that the packs are seated and that you cannot have two pieces of power in one pack. Yeah. I couldn't believe when I read your thread on that. I was like, whoa. It's worth, you know, at first, someone commented that to me and I thought, oh no, another conspiracy theory, but I'll check it because I am a diligent person. I have a diligent person. I check Shuffler truthers and I check the people who tell me that the packs are seated. And turns out it was not a conspiracy. That's just how it is. So packs are seated. And also I started to think, how am I going to analyze the cube data? And the first problem that you have with the cube is that, okay, how do you check the win rate of the card? I can check the win rate of a black lotus, but then I'm checking the win rate of black lotus in a Boris agro deck. I'm checking the win rate of black lotus in blue white control. I'm checking the win rate of black lotus in Lurus deck or something like that. So there's a plenty of things that are complicating it. So I decided to use my expertise as a biologist. What we do in biology is whenever you have one ecosystem and another ecosystem, it's very hard to compare those two ecosystems because, well, how do you compare two ecosystems? There's different types of animals in one and different types of animals in the other. So what you do is you sort of look what animals are in one ecosystem and look what animals are in the other ecosystem. And you convert those ecosystems to sort of numbers. And then you can sort of look where those numbers are. It's very much what I did for the archetypist when I compared decks for the different format. The problem with archetypist is that the methods I used are not very good in distinguishing between magic decks in retail sets because retail sets have 280 cards. Most of them are rare. So you see very few of them. And there's like 80 commons and they repeat across multiple decks, which means that it's hard to find separate clusters. But cube, 540 cards, singleton, everything has same rarity, which is the most important part in there. So I thought, why don't I make a very ambitious version of archetypist for the cube? And I took like 47,000 decks and I started clustering and I found those clusters. And what I did is that because, of course, you don't tell the algorithm that you write what those decks do. It doesn't know it. It just looks at what is inside and then spits out those clusters. And I'm going to give you... So what I did is that I found most defining cards for that cluster. And most defining card, it means that if, let's say, on average, 7% of the decks in the whole cube have that particular card, the defining card for a cluster will have like 7 times more than that. So it will have 49% of the decks have that particular card. Yeah, that will be the definition. And you assume that, okay, since that card is so much more frequently in the cluster than outside of the cluster, that card is very, very defining. So I'll give you some examples of the... Yeah, I'm curious. ...defining cards for a cluster and you can guess what this cluster is doing. Defining cards. And tomb, grizzle, brunt, life, death, persist, arcane of cruelty, necromancy, soul of the lost, and burial rites, grave, titan, collective brutality. Yeah, and now I know I have this cluster. I can look at every game in that cluster and I can look at the win rates of the decks in this cluster and tell you which are the most winning cards for that cluster. So you are... Problem is... So you're saying, okay, I found the reanimator deck and now that cluster represents the reanimator archetype in the cube. Yeah, exactly. That is awesome. That is really cool. So, you know, when I looked at the... I looked at two different win rates, the defining cards and all the cards. Why? Because defining cards are going to be specific for that cluster. But for example, Black Lotus will not be a defining card ever because everyone picks Black Lotus, which means it will be roughly evenly distributed between the clusters. Right. So, you know, 7% of the reanimated decks will have Black Lotus and 7% of the boros decks will have Black Lotus and 7% of the breach decks will have a Black Lotus. So, it will rarely be defining, but it will be still important to know. So, the highest win rate card in the reanimator will be Ancestor Recall and the second highest win rate card in the reanimator with Black Lotus and then there's going to be Time Walk. But if you look at the defining cards, well, the most winning defining card is Psychic Frog, but then we have Flesh, Animate Dead, Reanimate, Barrow Gove, Arcan of Cruelty, Demonic Tutor, Sneak Attack and Tuba Necromancy, which means that the best versions of reanimate decks have multiple plans that include also Flash and Sneak Attack kind of effects. Because these cards are good. Rather than just the straight-up graveyard based. Because the problem starts like, what happens if you draw your Arcan or your Gristlebread? You can either discard it or you can just drop it into play and get the value out of it. Yeah, or you face some graveyard hate or whatever. Yeah. Okay, let's try another cluster that I can tell you and maybe you can guess what this cluster is. I like my chances. Mishra's Workshop, Candelabra of Taunus, Pinnacle Amissary, Nettlesist, Kappa Canon, Yurtularian Academy, The Mindstone, The Weekstone, Mox Opaul, Tesseret Crew, Captain Expedition Map. Yeah, they academy decks. Yeah, obviously. Obviously, it's the academy decks. And you know, this is, by the way, we talked about it. We gave the spoiler that we're going to tell you which one is better, the Lotus or Sol Ring. And generally, in every cluster, Lotus had a much higher win rate than the Sol Ring. So it's still Black Lotus, you've answered the question. I mean, I did accept for Academy where in Academy, Sol Ring is better because it stays on board, it gives you mana. And that's what you want to be doing in the academy decks. It bumps your artifact count that stays. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So Sol Ring is actually the most winning card in the academy decks. And then you have like Recall, Ruby, Timewalk. Academy actually makes the most winning cards, despite being also the most defining cards. And then in the defining cards, you have Tolarian Academy, Tinker, Oogin Eye of the Storms, which I thought was the most surprising finding there. That is definitely the best win con going right now for that deck. That is cool that that showed up. Yeah. Saga, Golis, Retrofitter Foundry, Currency Converter, Urza, Candelabra, and Upheaval. These are like the most winning cards that are defining the but what I found actually the most interesting find because I also checked the least winning defining cards. And I'll give you a couple of them on that list. And that's the Endstone, Bolasus Citadel, Triplicate Titan, Portal to Phyrexia. Oh, that's perfect. Yeah. So it basically encapsulates like a Tinker sub package there. Exactly. But Tinker, on the other hand, is one of the highest winery cards in the archetype. So I was thinking about it for a second and it's obvious. It's obviously obvious. Yes. Endstone, Bolasus Citadel, Triplicate Titan, and Portal to Phyrexia are great cards in that deck, but you bloody don't want to draw them. That's right. And of course, I'm looking at the Game and Hand win rate. So if you draw them, you're screwed, but if you don't draw them, you Tinker them and then you're happy. And then you're really happy. And they're not, and they're generally not in your deck unless you're Tinkering for them, especially for like Bolasus Citadel. But at least we learned that Game and Hand win rate is good most of the time, but not for Tinker win cons. That's interesting. But yeah, it's a lot of fun, fun findings like that. What is, what are, I mean, there are some generic clusters like the Cheeons. The Blue-White Cheeons, yeah. The Finding Cards, No More Lights, Wrath of God, Teferi Hero of Dominaria, Sunfall, Teferi Time Raveller, Celestial Colonnade, Beza, and Meticulus Archive. I mean, obviously this is the Cheeons. That makes sense. Yeah. Those are the... What do you think is the most winning defining card for the Cheeons? Was it one of the ones you just mentioned? No, it's Tamiyo, Inquisitive Student. It's Tamiyo? Wow, I would not have guessed that. Yeah. And then three steps ahead. But that's the most winning, but also under the umbrella of being a defining card. Because otherwise it would be Time Walk or Ancestral Recall or something. I define defining cards is that in this archetype, it's at least two times more dominant than a general population. Still, Tamiyo, that's a cool one that I would not have gotten there. Yeah, I would have thought... From the non-defining, we have the Ancestral Time Walk Black Lotus Pyrogorph, surprisingly high. Pyrogorph is very often very high in those. Did Flage show up anywhere? So I often... No, I played Blue White Red a lot these days, especially during the last iteration when Boros was even better. It's still really good, but better than it was before, where I would just happily run all the cheap red removal spells. But Flage was really big. I felt like every time I drew that card, I had a big edge. That's like my... It's probably not a sleeper, but that's a card that I'm really high on in that game. Yeah, and I think that there is merit to it. And I think that splashing red especially. But maybe Flage... I didn't capture enough of the Jeskai strictly, Jeskai decks. Makes sense. I think I had more like white, blue with the splash of red. That makes sense. And Flage would be better because you need the double red to cast it. You do, to really take advantage. Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense. And it's... Blue White is a pretty definable archetype, but Jeskai is a variant. It's not as... It's not like you see that. I have last cluster for you. Okay. Let me see if you can guess it. Ten Drills of Agony, Underworld Breach, Brain Freeze, Yogmoth's Will, Lion's Eye Diamond, Seeding Song, Witchclaw, Talisman, Monomorphos, Jace, Wielder, Mystery's Frontic Search. Which, by the way... Underworld Breach. Where's Breach on the list? There is a second. It was. Ten Drills, Underworld Breach, Brain Freeze. Underworld Breach is 16 times more prevalent in this cluster than in average population. That's unbelievable. That's definitely one of those cards that you would think. But that's unbelievable. Oh, man. The most winning card is still going to be Black Lotus. But when you look at the defining cards, the ones that are, you know, the one that you care about. Yeah. I wonder. I mean, that's interesting because Black Lotus, it would actually... Let's say, well, like, like, LED's the comp for it, where it doesn't go anywhere else and it's a defining card there. But Black Lotus would be a defining card in that deck too. And by the way, it is. It is. It is. It is. Because I think what happens is when people first pick Black Lotus, they tend to skew themselves to try to draft that deck. They do, because Louise says that on his videos all the time. You know, like, yes, this card is good, but if you really want to break it, you should be doing this. So, and then the deck is not great in terms of generic win rate because it's like 51% win rate or something. Yeah. But Game and Hand win rate of Black Lotus is like 65%. Oh, I see. So if you draw a lot to see your golden. And then the next best win rate cards are Howl Breacher, Brain Freeze, Underworld Breach. And then you got like Rima and Thunder Crap Trainer, Stock Up, you know, let's dig. Dak Faden, let's dig. Yeah. Trinket Magen Narcet, which also makes me think that it's nice to combine a breach with some sort of wheel time twister kind of strategy. Yes, it is. The draw seven's deck, it can be its own thing, but it fits really well into, because, you know, I mean, functionally, that deck really is a three card core that you can kind of do whatever you want around it. But the thing that most people do are ways to generate mana and ways to find the combo pieces and then somewhat manage the board. You know, that's kind of the thing. But if you can just throw in a Narcet, you know, and a whole breach here and get a draw seven or two, especially, you know, since Echo of Yonze goes up a lot in that deck, because it's often running LED and it's such a potent combo to just have those two cards plus any of these punishes your opponent, things when you draw seven. I mean, that that's a game winner too. Yeah, but yeah, and yeah, and I do agree. But yeah, generally, generally, I looked at the first iteration of the cube. So this data is not from the last iteration. I didn't rerun that analysis for the last one. And probably won't, but maybe I'll do try to combine like all those cubes into one file and try to make more clustering. I wanted to have Louise to talk about it. But unfortunately, I was also on the receiving end of one of the many illnesses of his children. And we couldn't make it happen. And I can only feel for him because I do know that there is this strange period of child's life when they just tend to chain one illness after another because they grew out of their infancy. And they get all the viral diseases that we never remember that existed because we were too small when we got them. Yes. But the parents do remember because you just live in work. My daughter was like always poorly for like two years. Yes, he is in that stage. Sheep disease, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then random crap seasonal. Yes. And it never ends. And then for us to just finish, it was nothing since then, knock on wood. So hopefully he's out of the woods at some stage. He will be soon. Yeah. I talked to him on the phone a bunch and he said he's feeling like, I mean, because the problem is, is that they've got the twins that are both in that stage that you just mentioned, plus just a few years older as Santi. And so this combination really loops it together. And then they have Naya, who's the older kid and she'll bring home a thing every once in a while too. So it's like, oh man, I, he is in battle mode. I will tell you that. And he's very good at it. He really handles those things well, but you know, the combination of like lack of sleep stress, stress being sick, it's overwhelmed. Yeah. It's the first time. And I've seen him multiply in the PT finals. So, you know, I mean, well, that's great. But you know what, and there's maybe one thing that I would like wanted to add is that if you look at this data consistently, I'll maybe give you the link to the episode so people can rewatch it if they feel like. But one thing I found is that in almost every archetype, the on color moxen were one of the most winning cards, but the off color moxen were not far behind. And I think people pass the moxen way too often. They're still good. There's like zero mana artifact that gives mana is just good enough. It's fine. Even if it's colorless. And maybe sometimes you can splash something of it. Yeah, definitely be taking that. I mean, that's actually been my gripe with them, which is that I feel compelled to take moxen regardless. And while they are exciting to draft because they're old and they have that nostalgia and the power level thing, you know, they're not very interesting. Right? Like, you know what I mean? Like there's a lot of really cool cards in the cube now where you're like, oh, you know, this planeswalker that lets me do this or this build around card or this thing that I can explore or, you know, even something a little more straightforward, like I really like flage in the cube, right? And but it's like, I just got to take the mox, you know, and, you know, but it feels at this point kind of like taking a land. There are some players that would probably say that taking flage is the better idea in terms of win rate. And they may be right. But my guess is even with me being high on it, I still am just supposed to take the mox. Yeah, even in Boros deck, mox is going to be better because if you look at the mox winning cards in Boros, in order, Black Lotus, Mox Pearl, Mana Crypt, Mox Ruby, Mox Jet, Caracas, Ajani, Parallax, Wave, Ancestral Recall, Sol Ring. Wow. Ancestral Recall is still one of the top 10 cards in Boros decks. That's wild. That is wild. Yeah. That's really cool though. Yeah, I'd love to check in with you on if this is somewhat repeatable on different versions of the cube. You know, we just had the, when they made the Boros shift on the last version. I mean, that was a major, you know, that was, yeah, you could feel that. You could feel that, right? They were like, hey, here's our first version of the cube. It was pretty obvious that it needed to be addressed. They addressed it. It seems to have helped a lot. Boros is still strong, but that's okay. Boros can be strong, but just not on the level it was. But now I feel, you know, they've added the Lord of the Rings cards and, you know, now they've put in a few of the, I don't know what they're called. I know. I'm playing Palantir of Orthanc in my deck currently. So, you know, I know that there's. And then they have the, it's one of my favorite cards. I actually have no idea if it's good. It's the, the Oracle that they put in that puts the power nine in your deck. Oh yeah. The Oracle of the Alpha. Yeah. I still have absolutely no clue if that card, that's, if that card's even good, I always take it probably higher than I'm supposed to. It was usually quite high win rate in the arena cube, but that doesn't convert to the regular. I think that in the right deck, it would be easy to, easy enough to check. I like it in the draw seven stack a lot because then you end up peeling a lot more mocks and then you know, fast mana stuff off your draw sevens, but. But yeah, you mentioned that they did the changes to, to, to sort of hose a bit the boros decks. And I read the rationale that they gave and they said, oh, boros decks have too much redundancy. And I was so happy to read it because if they tell me this, I'm much more convinced that they did the right changes because I looked at the data of boros and first thing that struck me was the sheer redundancy of, of that deck. Absolutely. And if the data tells me that there's too much redundancy and that's why it's so good. And they say, well, if you thought it was too much redundancy, therefore we remove some of it. Now that's looks like to me that they did the, their homework very well and it's going to be good. I wonder if that, I didn't even check what changed with this iteration. I just jumped into the queue, drafted something and I'm quite happy with how it worked out so far. So. Yeah. Well, great stuff, Sirocco. Thanks so much for coming on as always. We really appreciate you taking the time to hang out with us and talk magic and talk numbers and dive deep into, into your, into your world. We really appreciate it. Well, my pleasure is always. Where can people find you? What have you been up to content-wise and all that? Well, I'm still recording my podcast. I'm still having my discord. I'm still trying to do stuff on X. It's, it's been quite a marathon for me recently, but I'm coping. I'm coping. Protrures over. I have a bit of time. Maybe one day I'm also going to play some drafts rather than just think about them, talk about them and, and, and write about them. Theory-crafting your way through a format. Well, you know, I'm not a full-time content creator. I also have the, sort of this thing called job and I need to do it for good eight hours a day. I'm unfamiliar with that. Yeah. I know, I know. We can talk about that next time. You know, I mean, how would you even know that there's eight hours? How would you measure that time? You don't have a way to measure. We need to make sure Louise is here for this talk. Yeah. Does this require, I know what day of the week it is too? Or what are you? No, I think you can only measure things in hours. No, there are no gears big enough to measure weeks. That's right. We do not have week weeks. I can do hours. I can do hours for you. Yeah. Maybe days if you have a fancy watch. That's right. And moon phases. Yes. Oh, maybe moon phases do come with you. Yeah. Oh, I would go down that rabbit hole, but yeah. But I'll put a link for your X account and for your podcast, the one that you mentioned. Just put the link for the YouTube video of the Q-Episode because I think that the Q-Episode is just going to be interesting to the LR audience generically. You got it. And at least they can get more details of what we're talking about here. That's great. I will do that for sure. That's great. And thanks again, Circo, for coming on. We'll look forward to having you on again soon. If you want to find us on social media, marshal underscore LR, and again, I'll post Circo's links in the description here for this thing. We want to thank our Patreon supporters, as well as Ultimate Guard for their support of the show. Thank you so much. If you want to find anything related to the podcast, you can go to lrcast.com and right on the front page, you'll find links to all the stuff. And then of course, you can find every episode of the podcast actually ever posted there as well. And you can check out old ones. If a set comes back on flashback, you can listen to the Sunset Show or the or the set review and try to get your, your head around what's going on a little bit ahead of time. And I'll just kind of it's there for you. Anyway, that's going to do it for this one. Thank you so much. And we'll see you next week. Circo, I'm going to use a sign off that I had for Luis and I'll probably do it for him too. Maybe we can compare and contrast. I was watching or I saw on social media a thing that Brian Kibler had put up where somebody asked him, and I'll let you define this however you wish, but for his top four iconic magic cards of all time, you know, we call that like a Mount Rushmore, where you kind of get to pick four. What would yours be? And you know, you can kind of do it off the top of the cuff here. What comes to your mind when you think of the top four most iconic magic cards? Okay. Black Lotus, Time Walk, Liliana of the 61, the attractive one, of the veil. Yeah, there you go. That's good. And then because and Tamagoy. That is so you that's interesting. So your brain goes everything from power all the way from alpha to the true, you know, like the biggest, most whatever. But then you kind of went towards like modern vibes, right? Well, I mean, I don't think that any card that was printed in the last five years can be called one of the most iconic cards in the game. Agreed. In 10 years, I might change. In 10 years, I might tell you quantum riddler. No, no questions asked. The more you mulligan, the better it gets. Right. The only card like that. Right. But now it's just too fresh, I think. And also now it tends so that a lot of those iconic would be iconic cards, get the X after four months of being iconic, because there's maybe a bit too iconic, because I could see a very dominated standard for four years. It would have been one of the most iconic cards. I think that C-Dry know just dropped off too much, but it was also one of those iconic cards, because people talk about it still. Right. Where it dominated its time frame. Tamagoy for me is the fact that if someone opened the foil, Tamagoy for the proto draft, drafted it and not only did this and everyone was like, wow, but also then later sold it for like 10 K. This for me means that the card is bloody iconic. And Liliana is iconic from combination of playability and lore and lore reasons. You know, great answers. I love that.