Powerful Nothing
A Magic the Gathering Cube podcast hosted by Dan and James. Talking Cube and other magical goodness.
Powerful Nothing
#43 - Cubing With Two Players
In this episode we talk about how best to cube, with just 2 players. Then we talk about Cube Clash London, that took place recently.
Don't forget to fill out the voting form for the most magical night of the year, the Golden MTGies - Voting Form
00:00:36 - The News
00:01:47 - Two Player Cube Overview
00:09:15 - How To Draft With Two Players
00:22:09 - Size Of Two Player Cubes
00:27:43 - Colours For Two Player Cubes
00:35:12 - Style Of Decks
00:37:13 - Ornithopter Heads Up Cube
00:48:21 - Heads Up Combo Cube
00:57:33 - Ryan Overturf Twoberts
01:05:30 - //Sweet Sultai Twober
01:09:41 - Stand Out Stories
01:15:06 - Cube Clash London
Heads up Ornithopters: https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/4b464789-8968-4258-9a47-11ea09c8c48f
100: https://cubecobra.com/cube/overview/100-ornithopters
Combo cube: https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/145aaa78-5b81-452b-bc89-6d4f26d40085
Ryan Overturfs Twoberts: https://cubecobra.com/user/view/5e88d0f7df3ffb7493f5655c
Sultai twobert: https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/a7cy
Cube Clash London: https://cube.memorici.de/
The Dalston Desert: https://cubecobra.com/cube/overview/bc0eceda-1b5e-4827-a45a-211423c68042
Illusions of Grandeur: https://cubecobra.com/cube/overview/illusion
My Cube: https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/sweet
James Cube: https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/ba642a54-a6c7-4587-b97e-1d95429c59b5
Social Links: https://linktr.ee/toosweetmtg
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https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en_US
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Hello everyone, and welcome to powerful Nothing and Magic The Gathering Cube podcast. I'm your host, Dan, but not only to the two suite mtg and as always, I'm joined by my co-host James. How's it going, man? You well? Yeah. Pretty good. Pretty good kind of space. Yeah. So today we have I know you've been looking forward to this one for a little bit. Today we're going to be talking about two player cubes. We have a bunch of cool stuff to go over. This is something I know, James, you've been doing a lot of in your spare time, and there are some spicy cubes that you've built yourself along with. Friend of the show fire truck, modo in here, as well as a bunch of other ones that are going to be talking about. There will be time codes in the show notes below if you want to jump around, because first up, we have a little bit of news before we jump into our main topic. The only bit of news for today is that our next episode is our annual MTG Award ceremony. It's going to be the most magical night of the year and we all need your help. There is a voting form down in the show notes and we need to hear from you, the Academy, on the big topics of the year, things like best set, things like worst things like Biggest Mistake and the big one of them all part of the year. Voting for that will close in a couple of weeks, so do make sure you get your votes in. A couple of them are very hotly contested, so there is still time to get your favorites in and to change. Who takes home a golden statue, which we probably may well make at some point, but as far as you're aware, we're making them go for. I have such strong opinions about pacifier. I'm feeling quite invested at this point, but I like more than the set of the year last year. Not going to Lord of the rings. There is. There is a chance I'm going to be more furious at who wins pet of the year this year than anything else we've ever done, but it wasn't a memory card this year, though, right? There is a cat in there that looks very like my cat. Okay, I am biased. That's fair. Yeah, the form is down below. Please check it out. Greatly helps us out, right? So let's jump into our main topic of the day. Today we're going to be talking about two player cubes. So obviously cubes are normally larger affairs. They're normally 6 to 8 players. They take several hours in multiple rounds that kind of thing. Drafting with two players is kind of a different experience. So I think the first kind of place to start, James, if it's all right, is why would you draft with two players? I think the first reason, and probably for the reason that everyone starts drafting with two players, is you get to draft way more people have lives. Is is an unfortunate thing that crops up with with cube some time and you can't just spend all of your weekends in, in a local game skull thing, some cube. And it's a, you know, it's quite a lot of effort getting eight people. Then you've put a coordinate, you've got a plan in advance, and it realistically takes like a good half a day to do a full eight person cube. To play a cube, on the other hand, you need one other person and like an hour and you can basically draft and play or get play some games in an hour. And you can do it on like a train on the way to event. You can do it pretty much wherever, so you can the small versions, you can just put it in a regular like commander that size deck box, carry it around with you. So yeah, I wouldn't say do this instead of drafting with eight players, but you do get to cube a lot balls and actually has some kind of fun and pretty unique to to play, drafting, experience and skills has definitely a knack to it. Yes, some of those we're definitely going to be exploring a bit more in the episode. Like, like I definitely want to ask you a little bit about like, hate drafting and that kind of thing, because I could see that being much more important in a two person cube. But just some of the bits on, like why you would draft with two players. One thing with these, two player cubes is there is generally they are they are a lot smaller, which means they are one both cheaper and two easier to build and maintain. Jason, what's been your experience with the ease of managing a two bit like this? Yeah, it tends to be pretty straightforward because as you say, they're a lot smaller. Say like the minimum size you can go to is 90 cards. Probably wouldn't go higher than about 180 though. So at that minimum, like half size of the a, at the smallest, a player cube you can build. But often a lot smaller than that makes it. Yeah. Cheap to build. You don't need that many cards. You don't need breaking a million basics with you and, Yeah, tends to be tends to be a bit of a piece put together, actually. It's also quite nice, but you can, you can kind of update a lot quicker as well because you have, you know, you get more drafts in. So it's, it's easier to sort of iterate and figure out what works and what doesn't. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. As someone who's received that cube this year, the financial impact of only having to buy one pack of sleeves, oh yeah, that's kind of appealed to me. I spent so much on sleeves for my 540 is sort of reasonable. Yeah. One pack of dragon shields and you can sleeve a, a small to that, which is pretty good. Nice. And then. Yeah. But the other benefits I can imagine with these things being things is more is, is that because of the cost implications are a bit lower? They're easier to put together and it means that so so not just from a cheaper point of view, but it means you can try and do new and interesting things and like, yes, some of the ones that I'm going to be looking at today, some of the ones that you've put together or you've put in the list to kind of go through, do look very fun. But yeah, I'm assuming James kind of just like, yeah, the ability to try new it and new things is one of the main benefits of this 100%. Yeah, it lets you experiment more within the context of a few people, but it also means that because it's just a lot of investment upfront to build the cube. I think that's why you see a lot more like wacky cube fiends into bets, right? Because, you don't necessarily feel like I spend all this money all this time, all this effort playing this 540 together. It's got to be something that's very rarely replayable. Am I going to be replaying it for years? You know, two bets. Can you. It's easier to put together. You can just be like, oh, here's a cool idea. I'll put it together. It might be fun. If not, I didn't really lose so much. No. Exactly. And then also, I'm assuming because it's just two players probably can be quite easy to do online as well. I'm assuming you could get to a point where both players owned all the cards on like make go arena, and then you can use something like draft mounts, and then just do direct challenges. That seems like quite a big benefit of this. And is that how you play a lot of the time? James, are you meeting up in person? Yeah, I've done I've been doing a decent chunk online with, with a friend of a show, fire truck Moto. And yeah. Say it's it's pretty straightforward, really. If you can buy the whole cube of magic online for that sounds unreasonable. But for a lot of these two bets at various. And it'll cost you like sub20 quid. Or if you already have a subscription to one of the dental services, Magic Online, you can do that all if of course using on arena you can just acquire of cards in a cube and you say direct challenge. Would recommend the third party site draft month. So if you do want to do that as a as a way to draft, obviously Magic Online doesn't let you, draft with one of the person in the client. But there's a third party website called draft. So where you just upload the cards in your cube, you can choose how you want to draft it, how many people you on staff with in the same session. When you finished draft, you export all the cards you drafted in a text file import. It's a magic online arena and then you have your deck so you can build. Yeah, that's the way I could really see that as, like if you just have an hour to kill at home or as you mentioned. Yeah, in person with someone just. Yeah, just the ease of these type of users to get some just to get some extra games in is kind of cool. And that's kind of something that generally I like. And I think magic players do as well. Like like it is different because it's AI, because there isn't a draft involved. But like something like Dan, Dan has just exploded in popularity over the last couple years because people like the ability to just play quick and easy games of magic. And this is kind of, I guess like Dan Dan, but there's drafting involved as well. For the cube heads out there, being able to draft as well kind of sounds sick. Yeah yeah yeah yeah for sure for sure. They have a nice thing actually about the, the Magic Online is that it's because it's like zero effort to try new cards in your cube fight. You literally just update a text file and you can play. You can just very quickly. And because it's a smaller cube, you'll see the cards quite small frequently. So as we often talk about in the context of larger cubes, you've got it. You want to really think about adding which new cards you're going to add. If you're asking a new package, make sure you give it a few drafts to, to see if it actually works out, which, you know, in terms of time, like months, five months. Whereas on this you're like, oh, I wonder if this package works. Yeah. At the end, you don't have to find the cards of doom that's online. You play for a few hours, you've done three drafts. You've played two of a cards a bunch. It even works. It doesn't. If it doesn't work, you take it out and at least you got to figure that out. Yeah, I do like the idea of being able to work out if something works in a cube. In the space of an afternoon. That kind of sounds really helpful, but, let's let's keep things moving, James. So let's say so. So we kind of talked about like why and some of the benefits of drafting with with two people. Let's talk about how you actually draft with two people. So obviously we'll go into kind of like some of the cubes later on, but kind of the actual mechanics of drafting with two people. There was a couple of different ways that you can do it. I think I'll kick things off with Winston Draft. This is quite this is quite a popular one that you can do. The way the Winston draft works is basically you get all your cards that you're going to be doing for two players. That'll be 90 cards. And you shuffle them together into one big stack, one big pile of cards. What you then do is you take the top three cards and put them down into three individual piles. The first player will take a look at the first card. They can either take it or they can pass it. If they pass it, they add another card from the main big stack to that pile, and then they move on to the second, one of three. Basically, they look at that card. If they want it, they can take it. If they don't want it, they they repeat the process and they add another card to the top of it. You do that with the third card. And if at that point you still don't want what's there, you take a card randomly off the top. Winston is way less complicated than it sounds. And what's nice about it is that you are still drafting, but there is some information like, you know, like like like like sometimes you will never know what is on top or what is in a pile. So if you take a pile, you are still going to replace it with a card so you don't know what's there. But if you leave a pile with some cards in it and put a card on top, you can have a vague idea. You have a bit of information in terms of what your opponent is doing. James, do you done a fair bit of wins and draw from the sounds of it, like how do you find it generally works as a two player draft format? Yeah, I think it's really nice. It's, it's probably my favorite White's draft two for that. I like the background information, but only very partial information about what your opponent's drafting. You really do have to figure it out because you get you're getting data points right about I know one of the cards in that pile. They just talk, but there's always an unknown card in the pile. If I just talk. So, you never know. Did I actually want the card that I knew about? And therefore they're in the deck for that person? Or did they actually want the new card? So you can't really work it out just from one pitch. You've got to really be paying attention and, and figure it out then then sort of multiple data points as you go through the draft. And that means that, hey, drafting was definitely a thing. Like it's two player draft, right? It's zero sum. It's in many ways, you know, if you have can take a card, it makes your deck 10% better or less a card, but would make your opponent stack 10% better. Those are, in theory kind of equivalent, right, in a two player draft. So it does lend itself well to drafting. So I think having that element of concealed information so that you, you really have to do some work to figure out what they're drafting. And you know, sometimes you check for that and you, you convince them one thing and you draft very aggressively against it, and it turns out they're in something completely different, all moved away from it because you were just. Yeah. Yeah, there's kind of a lot of layers there. And, yeah, it's also like a pretty, a pretty intuitive process, actually. Once you, once you start drafting. Another thing I do like about it is that, it's surprising when I've done it before. How much people do the blind take a card off the top? It is. There is there is something about the gambling element that you don't actually get in magic. Like, generally there is an element of like chancing a lucky dip type thing which which is a unique part of Winston's drafting. I do quite like that, actually. There's a few other that we want to talk about. So next one, you've done a bit more than me, James that talked to me about grid drafting. Yeah. So this is, I think maybe sort of the easiest and maybe most intuitive way to do, which is, so you deal out nine face up cards. So in a three by three grid, the first player takes, if they the column in that grid. So taking three cards, the second player then takes another row or column. So it might only get two cards if, yeah. If the first player took bottom of a house in that column, then you discard the rest of the cards, deal out nine new cards, and vice versa for first. So this means that you need more cards than you are actually going to draft. You can't go out if you have just a 90 card cube, because obviously you're discarding some of the five cards. You'd probably you'd want I'd say 150 probably if you're drafting, maybe a little low, maybe like one first is fine, but, not so means that the information is fully known. Right? You you know exactly what's in your offense pool like you're not a spreadsheet, right? You're not. You. It's not like you have perfect memory of every card that they have drafted. And, yeah, sometimes I'm paying more attention than other times, and sometimes I've completely forgotten about it. I've, I've it took it the first few, but, it does reward you for, like, really paying attention to what they're doing and at least paying attention to, like, combo pieces, if that's something that's in there. If, you know, like if you if they fix this once, when you really don't want to give them the opportunity ever to see if it's not right. Yeah, I think that's way more important than like paying attention to like the fourth lightning bolt variant and the cube, that kind of thing. Like it's it, it is more the bigger combo pieces like like the game enders are this like or like archetype specific payoffs. Those are the things you kind of want to pay a bit more attention to it. Just just in general in these type of two player environments, because it's not like in a passing game where there's a chance you're going to play against it. In this, you are 100% going to play against it. If they take the twin and the deceiver, there's a highly likely they're going to play it against you. Sure, sure. And it's actually even a little bit deeper than just, say, drafting, because it's not just about trying. You're not just trying to give them a generically worse stack, you're trying to give them a worse stack against the deck that you are drafting. And similarly, once you figured out a good amount for bad drafting, you want to take cards that are good and that match up. There might be a, a very premium removal spell, but you don't actually care about it because you realize that they're not, they're not on a creature based rescue. Right. Similarly, that might be what would normally be a sideboard card, like have now meltdown or something, but it's phenomenal against you and you need to take it because, your opponent gets the, you know, they get to build their deck just for you. Right? So if they if I know that you've drafted not backed stack, you get to just put that meltdown and bad deck. I don't have to wait till side boarding. So, yeah, there's there's quite a lot of sort of levels to, to the approach you can take and, and 2000 Faf sometimes. Not exactly. Yeah. And kind of like specifically because grid draft is a like everything's face up. It's a face up information format like unlike Winston where kind of like both of you are trying to vaguely work out what each, each of the ones doing grid draft is perfect information, as is another draw format that we'll touch on quickly. And that's Winchester Draft. This is one that I actually, I tend to favor when me and my wife have done two player drafts at home. The way that Winchester works is basically, again, you shuffle all your cards into one big pile. We'll call that a stack, as it were. Then you lay out four piles, and then basically you take it in turns. One person picks a pile and then puts a card on each of those piles. So in the second round, there's one pile with one card on it, and the rest have two cards. And basically you keep going on that way. That is also a perfect information format. I'll, I'll put down a link, to a video I made alarmingly four years ago, in the height of Covid, where I have a, self-inflicted haircut and more of a tache than I do right now. But the cat has a very starring role, so that is a reason in itself to watch it, but. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I like Winston drafts. So check that video out. There is another type of drafting called Minneapolis drafting. This is generally used for the classic. Kind of like Ryan over turf 180 card two. But, for this, I think you do actually need 180 cards for it to work. But the way the Minneapolis job, like Minneapolis draft is more it's more akin to regular drafting. And I think that's why people like it. But Minneapolis draft is though both players have eight packs of seven cards. Both players pick up the first pack. They then each draft one card from those packs. They pass them to their opponent, who then takes two cards from those packs. You swap the packs back, and then both players take another two cards from that pack, and then anything left in the pack is discarded. You then do that for the other seven packs left. This has its benefits in some ways because it does replicate regular drafting. It's kind of like an eight player draft or a regular draft, like like we used to. You are. You have a hand of cards and you pass them to your opponent, that kind of thing. But, I guess one of the downsides with this is that, yeah, you do need the 180 cards for it to work, so it doesn't work to an extent with, with the 90 cards or the, oh, with the smaller, two player formats basically. Yeah, for sure. And final draft for that to give a quick shout out for, which I think is probably the wackiest one we're talking about today, is Solomon Draft, also known as Fact or Fiction Draft. This is that's what it is. Right okay. Yeah. Dear god yeah. This is kind of what it sounds like. So you take a shared stock in the same way as you would an, Winston draft instead of doing the face down piles. One player will look at the top five, split them into two piles. The other person gets to take a pile and the pile of, I didn't take guys who sent them. And then you switch orders. This doesn't take an hour, does it, James? A lot of people love. I think it's I think it's very cool. The decision I came to is I'm not clever enough to draft this way or I, Well, I think really what you need is to be thinking, like I'm going to split some piles, I have some idea and then not worry about it too much, because the problem here is that you can very easily spend like five minutes thinking about every single split, right? Because it is way harder than just doing a regular like factual fiction pile in a game of magic. I'll say that because you're thinking about all these different facts as as we already make two players draft hard, but then you've got to factor in all the different sides of what they could take, whether that's good for you, whether that's bad for you. It's yeah, I, I struggle with it, to be honest. And, I think this has the highest possibility of you spend like, an hour doing the draft, and then both of you have train wrecked. Yeah. Yes, 100%. Sounds fun, though. It's something. Yeah. We should do it once and then say you've done it and move on I think. But yeah, but like like I think for some people this will really appeal to them. Like especially if kind of. Yeah, have a bit more time to get the most out of this I guess. Yeah, for sure. I felt like I, I think it's probably one that's better to do once you have drafted for cube a few times in some other way. Yeah. Because at least if you're familiar, you're not also working out what the cards have the cards interact in. What a good practice on this, you know. Yeah. You don't be reading the cards as well as working out which pile of should I should go in. Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah I can see a large world where there's like one card you really want and it's basically is the pile one and four or is it two and three, that kind of thing. Like, I can see a world where basically I don't have playable. So it's what I'm saying. I, I can't make a deck. Yeah, you definitely do. For a lot of us, sometimes I think, the draft of what the future, the draft of This Way, if I was, I was an install and the flow comes off the top and I it doesn't matter what the other four cards are. If you want your maths. Well, you got nothing else. Yeah. That's reasonable. No. Yeah. And I actually I did touch on something that, that we should probably mention with, Winston Grid and Winchester Draft. You do need to keep track of labels. You are not guaranteed 45 cards at the end of it. That is what you should get on average. But if you're if you're taking, piles with less cards in them, you you just it's just something to keep in mind. You do need to make Bibles. I guess that might be a reason why people like, Minneapolis draft is that you are guaranteed a pile, whether they're playable or not. But like, you are guaranteed a normal amount of cards basically at the end of it. But yeah, just something to keep in mind. Let's keep it moving again. So a couple of things that we've mentioned with this, it's kind of like, when we're talking about, size of cubes, we are mentioning things like 90 cards, were mentioning one, 80, 180 cards. And James, why do you think it's not as fun or is not as optimal to do a two player draft with something like a 360 or a 540 cube that, like people might already have? Yeah. So it's interesting. I think it's actually not so much about the number of cards in the cube. It's more about how the cube is built, because when you build a cube, it's designed to be drafted with eight people. You're assuming that each player is going to settle into one of probably like ten, say, ten archetypes. If you just went with a very simple like each color pair has an archetype sort of set up, often there'll be more distinct archetypes. From that. You assume that each player is going to settle into one of those. Maybe some people end up fighting for some of them, but, basically, once you're in your luck type, if your archetype is even a little bit open, you're going to be getting cards from all the way around the other side of a table that only all archetype can really use that for. You can't from late, and you just see a lot more cards in the draft, right? Like if you assume for I'm the only person drafting blue red as this section of cards, if only I want, then in a eight player draft, 360 cards are open, right? So I get the blue cards from 360 cards in a two player draft. That just isn't how it works, right? You open a way smaller number of cards. So you kind of can't make those. You, you can't have a big number of distinct archetypes and have them all feel suitably supported. You just aren't going to get that, streamlined synergy deck available for each one. So there's a lot of ways you can mitigate this, right? But I think the biggest thing is that you need a lot of overlap between the different strategies. Because you yeah, they don't want cards that just go in this really narrow thing and you want probably a smaller number that's, real sort of macro archetypes if you. Well, like, you have a lot of little packages. So Phil for sure, songs for cards. Only useful in that narrow context. But yeah, you don't generally want to be like, I have ten, I have all these color bars and they're all doing a completely different thing and have a set of cards that only that color pair once. Yeah, I think, I think that that's that's something that will track with, with most people who have ever drafted like that, like it's, I think something you see even more just actually in, in just regular limited draft, like a six player, pod feels so much different to an eight player pod just because things like, things are wiggling quicker, but also you just have like less packs to get the bits that you like need, like, like like we've all been there, an eight page draft and like, like like in theory, things should be fine to come round from like, picks like 5 to 8. That's where I'm getting teary. If your line is open, you kind of get rewarded. But in a six player draft, like you see the same cards quicker, you kind of realize that just the pools that you are playing with is a lot less. And I'm assuming that just like super like like like if it's notable and not optimal at a six player pod for like a five 4360 cube, but like just compressing that down to like, two players, like at that point you might as well just do sealed if you want to play with a larger, larger cube. Yeah, for sure. And there's also for things like have, two card combos. You're just way like likely to see pay offs. So generally just. Yeah, just you don't want to be in the spots of, Oh, there's this world spun when it works with Flash and Sneak Attack and that sets in the whole cube that those, two cards in 540, you know, and we've only kind of open 90 cards. That's that. The math just doesn't work out for. Well, it's fine one being a good card to put in at that point. I mean, I'm struggling to get anyone to to bloody play Dark depths in my regular cube. Like to like like yeah, getting that working in a two player. Or if I were two players drafting my game just yet, it's just literally like never going to happen. Yeah for sure. Whereas if you go with the approach, if I have a 90 cause cube, which we're drafting between two players, then it's kind of the other extreme, right where, if you take world five and one B flash is guaranteed to be open at that point. Which I will say I think is also not ideal. I think somewhere in the middle of those two extremes is is best, but it's yeah, that is the reason that generally you wouldn't have like a 540 card. Two. But yeah, there is definitely a world where you could shrink down your regular cube like I've seen. I've seen a bunch of players do this basically just take their cube and effectively end in something like Cube Kobra where you can highlight and you can tag, you can tag a smaller version of your cube. There is and then the admin of taking them out of the main box and putting them in separately. But like there is a world where you could condense like you could take your regular bases, work out what are the key 180 cards like? Just like have every aggressive creature keep in keeping the key signpost cards for like, yeah, as you mentioned, like I, James mentioned like packages, that kind of thing. So yeah, there is a world where you could be doing this with the cube you already own and you could shrink it down, but like if you were thinking of building one Jameson of like, one of the thing I want to touch on is because if, like, colors, like, from your experience, James, kind of like what, what is a good ratio of colors in the two, but like, like, like if there's two players, is sticking to a five color cube optimal here because in theory. But like one of the reasons why we have five colors plus artifacts plus gold cards in a regular cube is because there's eight players roughly. And let's everyone find that two three color lame, that kind of thing. But in two players, in theory, like like an even split for a five color two that would be one player has two colors and one player is three. But like that player might not want three, but like a two color like might be better. So what kind of like, what issues have you found when it comes down to like balancing colors in in a two player cube? Kind of like what have you found to be most optimal? Yeah for sure. So for a lot for this reason, right. You'll often see two, two that's fit. I like so tie to that fight like still tie combos or whatever. And yeah, for exactly that reason because you kind of don't want to be in the spot where there's just one player drafting blue green, one player drafting that. Why no one cares about the black cards? Because why not just is. No one cares about the black cards. Also, no one cares about the blue cards that only work in the work while in blue that your, the black cards felt like while in black green. So, yeah, I can imagine it. It just becomes like two ships passing in the night. Basically. It's just like like effectively after the first, like five picks. Effectively the draft is kind of pointless. You might as well just hand each other, each person, the colors. And that isn't as fun, I'm assuming. Yeah, exactly. It becomes an exercise in hate drafting versus, taking cards for your deck. But yeah, it's it's kind of not that interesting. That doesn't mean you can't have all five colors for sure. But it's one that we can talk about later. Does have all five colors, but I think it's quite important if you are going to have five colors in your two, but that three, there's a lot of good fixing and there's a lot of, good synergies that exist between multiple color paths. You want you generally want if you're going to have five close in your two, but you don't really want people to be playing to two color decks, you want to give them the incentive and the means to, to go beyond that. Yeah. Yeah, I yeah, yeah. Looking looking at a more kind of like tri color style of like overlaps, kind of like if you're doing, like, I'm just gonna pull out tokens out of the air, but, like, have that over, like, nice, if that makes sense. Exactly, exactly. And even go beyond that, like, give them. Don't confine your strategies to the colors too much. Like give them like one six tokens payoff in black. Right? Okay. Yeah. It makes it more interesting. Like because then is trying some of the fixing for that. And it's like hard more players are interested then. Right. You you want to always end up in a spot I think where they're at least some cards that those players want that make sense. Yeah. Because yeah. Otherwise the the draft process can just become a better, a bit trivial. Really. Yeah. So I think they're gonna be. Yeah, yeah. Five colors are doable, but you do need to kind of, think about it. The overlap, which is quite important because, like, because, like, I, I didn't, one of those we'll talk about, about a bit later. I've done a, I've kind of done some of them, some five other two. But before and like there is a bit of a fear that, just like a five color soup deck is just the best because, like, you just can run all the powerful cards and the fix seems quite good. And like, how would you like, like is going down to three colors. One of the ways of alleviating that, James or how how would you handle that in a five color cube. Yeah, I mean I, I generally say for every five color soup deck is too good, then one of the ways to go about fixing that is to just sip of synergies a little bit more. They, for 2 or 3 colors, more synergistic decks. If those synergies get buffed, that makes the five color attack worse, because five color soup kind of, by definition, is not able to access those powerful synergies by it's just trying to play the best cards that you see. Similarly, I guess make the how are, outliers in terms of the individual cards, a little bit less extreme? I like I think you could compare this, for example, in Vintage Cube three, snapping the, even though the kids got quicker, the five color soup deck is still quite good. Just because, you know, you see him in skin blue, you get to play him and skin right? You see comment. You got to play comment. You see time. Well you get to play time walk. And I think face power outliers give a real buff to to five color because you just get to play more than that per draft on average. So I guess trying to reduce the power that lies within of a way to, to combat five color, getting that to get. And of course, you can reduce for fixing if you feel like for fixing is is so good, but it's three to be five colors, then and maybe that's something to look at. Flipping that around then going from five colors, let's talk about mono color because I'm assuming as well that is also something that could work quite well in a two player format, just focusing on like the strengths of one color. I'm, I'm assuming people would jump to blue, but like like, yeah, know like like what do you think, James, about like a whole cube possibly being just one color? Yeah. No, definitely seen, seen a few mono color cubes. To me, it sounds kind of boring. I'm not sure I've played two. And honestly, you just like drawing. I can see. I do just like testing on this. That's true. I could see a world where you make it interesting, but again, you need to make sure you have enough distinct archetypes within your one color. Right? Like, I saw a, a list for mono red, one for cube, which is like what I read and that for spell class one and I, I'm sure that's fun for someone. I can't imagine how that's fun. Like, I can't imagine having, Well, I mean, the games would be quick. Yeah, it would be crazy. Yeah. You have? Yeah. Half an hour. Let's play like that's not. Yeah. You can finish and draft something else soon. That'll be good. Games. But. Yeah. Yeah, I guess it's not for me. Not for me, I guess. Yeah. I think you just need to make sure you have enough, like, distinct stacks, right? And that you're not just taking the best card out of every pack. And like, those players basically want those cards and in the same priority order like that, that makes draft not very much fun, I think. But yeah, if I could imagine like a mono blue cube where you have, where there is like enough variety there that you can have like a tempo deck, a control deck and burn some nonsense. Yeah, yeah, high side sounds crack. So that's good fun. Nice. Yeah. But yeah, I kind of like, like to hear generally what you're saying. I do see now. Kind of like like. Yeah, I think it's kind of environment. I could see three color being like, I don't know, like optimal, but kind of like give you enough or kind of just works within the constraints of it's it's between two people. You are incentivizing people to fight over cards because you're highly like to be like, at least overlap, at least like one color, and you still have enough room to do different archetypes within it. So yeah, I think that kind of makes sense. I just kind of just pulling it back, zooming out, kind of different style of decks. Let's talk about things like, like aggro, tempo control and combo like, is it like from your experience, do you think it's healthy for these type of cubes to have each of those in, or are we doing the opposite? What kind of like is there a world where just having the same thing? So like like you mentioned them on a red one. Like that's clearly like an aggro key where the goal is just kill your opponent as quickly as possible, like you have something like again, again. I'll mention that. Then again, even though it's not a cube, but like that's effectively a tempo mirror. Like, do you think like like where do you kind of things that kind of lies. I think you certainly can support all of them. But again, you don't have cards that work. Well, again, more from one of those archetypes. Right? Like you don't want too many goblin guides type cards which are only good in aggro because presumably in a bunch of drafts. Yeah, we all have one person in control and one person in combo, and then all the credit cards just add to everyone, right? No one cares about the goblin guy. Whereas if you have more like creatures that can attack him, be powerful, aggressive creatures that also maybe do things for other decks, then, then you're making the draft potion more interesting, right? Because you're just giving players more options if the cards go in, in more, in more distinct archetypes. But you can also definitely have cubes where it's, that's really only 1 or 2 of those sort of macro archetypes, supported as long as they're supported in, in distinct ways. I like the combo cube, which you can talk about later, is pretty much all combo decks, but there, you know, they've changed very broadly in like how they're trying to play out and what disruption is going to be effective against them. So, so it feels like you're drafting very different archetypes, even though they come under the umbrella of combo now. Awesome, cool. Like love that I think. Let's actually let's talk about some of the cubes. So we'll touch on some ones that you've been playing games. And then we're going to move on to some ones that kind of other people might be aware of, but. And we'll put cucumber links to all of these down in the show notes below if want to check them out for yourselves. This first list has 40 on adopters in it. James, talk to me about all the heads up I I've heard of larger cubes where there is a bucket load of. One of thought was in there. I'm assuming this as taking some inspiration from those. Would you say? Yes, very much so. A large amount of credit for this goes so, effects at lucky paper. Let's paper radio is it, I think the name for, the content creation space. But they, they built this cube 100 on the cube, which is, really very fun. I'd recommend anyone listening to go and check it out. Will link be unfit on a 5 to 8 player version and be two part in the show notes? But yeah. So the premise of the cube is that as in the two pack version, we have 48 of this saves every minute or two flying off that creature. Those are the only creatures, not only for this, for only creatures. There is no way to win the game without all of the foxes in play. There's no for example, there's no lightning bolt in this cube is lightning bolts could deal free to their face that could win you the game. You're not allowed lightning bolts. You can only deal two creatures, which are a lot of factors. So you have a bunch of other foxes and then a whole bunch of very different stuff to do with all the foxes. So sort of the baseline easiest thing is to just pump you all the foxes. Right. So you've got a plus one plus one counter archetype, got some good equipment stuff. You've got some things like obelisk of door vanquishes banner which give, give which full features of a coyote chasing creature type. Then you've got some weirder stuff. There's a pretty the throbbing stone in here, James. That's a foaming stone. I love that, but you can say there's a lot of interesting do around, like sacrificing your own effort to that damage. We've got, like, goblin bombardments in here, for example. Spontaneous combustion. Oh, yeah. It's fun. Yeah, yeah. Love that. Okay, so I mean, it's always like sakura foxes with damage and get them all back. There's a ton of recursion in this cube. Things like, second sunrise seems nuts. A card that returns all artifact creatures and enchantments and lands were put into the graveyard. This turn it back into play. That seems very good. Yeah. For sure. Pretty cracked things. I things like echoing return, turn, target feature cards and all of a creature cards have a name with it from your graveyard to your hand. Weird quirks about on five to being zero mana. Generally better to return them to hands and play. Oh yeah, I can say that. Yeah, yeah. Oh yeah. There's a paradox about gone when there isn't there. But yeah, that's that card is actually cracks in this cube. There's even a pretty legit storm deck. Honestly. There's only one storm going on, but it's pretty good. Ace of rage. Now he's afraid. Chase of rage is one a red for a sorcery with buyback. Two features you control get plus one for the so until end of term and it has storm I James I should not be expected to know what a haze of rage does. I mean that's fair. That is fair, but I appreciate it in this. Yeah yeah yeah it does look cool I could say I can say it with like a, a card like glimpse of nature that whenever you play a creature spell this turn, draw a card. That seems quite correct. This is very strong. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The haze doesn't get from haste. But you need a haste enabler. But that's not. Can be a pretty legit wing con, because, yeah, this is the sort of cube where you draw your whole deck quite a lot. Not going to like that. That that is just thing that happens between the, that's, that is basically to, glimpse effects as the new one as well. And then there's a bunch of ways for said all your artifacts, your hand paradox Falcon being the best that even things like retract very strong echoing truth. And then if we play them, you get your triggers again. The can kill them with like an impact. Tremors is pretty strong as well. So you ping them all. You're on a fox. Is ping on the way in? There's there's a lot of good stuff you can do here. Yeah. Then just big pump stuff. There's also some interesting, like, ways to tap your Nerf options for effects. You got things like Earth craft. And I'll even call this to let your own fox tap mana. And then things like just Gaia ascendancy of oh, of the, intruder alarm to untap. When you play more spells and you can kind of go off that way, even kill them with something like a, the assassin charm and quicksilver dagger, which lets you on a foxes star that's, be enchanted all the way up to tap to deal damage to a player. And you draw a card and you keep on tapping it. There's it is shocking the, like, actual diversity of, strategies that are available in that cube whenever anyone conditions the policy on off of those, I will say we had to make like quite a lot of changes from the original 100 on the flop to version, just to, look around and really make it work. And, for two player, I found out of the, the, the big combo stuff where you put a million all the factors into play was kind of getting dunked on too hard by all the sweepers. Like the original version has stuff like meltdown in it, right. That was not an acceptable card to have in this format. There's a little bit of that silver stuff like bile fly, but it's hard to cast. And the thing with meltdown was it also kills most of the payoffs, like a lot of artifacts. Do you know, so we cut that stuff. We cut some of the more, like, standard lady fat stuff, which kind of wanted for, the possibility of going big spigot, like, because obviously not being an A player to after getting things set on their tax, you just see fewer cards generally they sort of baseline good cores get a bit better. So we sort of had to account for that a little bit by yeah, clang, clang. Some of the sweepers cutting some of the big things that just makes like 1 or 2 on the Fops is able to win the game and push a bit more combo like overcome. Nice for combo stuff is still in there. Like there's a little bit of even like two card combo stuff, not counting it on a four plus something like I love the thought. You have to make the caveat. It doesn't make it okay. Yeah, you're going to have thought of after this five. But yeah, stuff like enjoying when you will. Goblin bombardment is a nice little two card combo. If not a factor that works during renewal is the two piece enchantments. Like if your hand revealed to draw each card to start, it doesn't matter. Whenever a creature card goes to your credit card from pay, the turn hits your hand. So if you have that casting on a flop to suck it to goblin bombardment, deal one two. When it comes back to your hand, go again. Jesus, that's pretty good. Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah, I, I do like what you've done with it. Like. Yeah I can see. Yeah. There are definitely less. Just like the obvious answers than there like. Yeah. Like you mentioned there's still bile blight. They're still echoing decay, which is one I'd like to give all creatures with the same name minus two, minus two, when there is still echoing ruin, which is always a large attack with the same name, but kind of like it doesn't seem like. Yeah, it seems like the goal of this was to let the player do the thing first, and if they can be stopped, cool. But like, it's not going to be like that. Like it's there. It doesn't seem like there is a control deck in this, if that makes sense. Not really. No. As, there's some very good like by you. Some time cards, like a null is very powerful in this format. But you're not, like, trying to just stall out the game involved job on your cards. And when they're invisible. So you've got to be doing something powerful yourself. And. Yeah, did. And I guess just having to put a bunch of other in there that kind of lends itself. Anyways, I honestly did not renowned as a control card. Well, and even like a lot of the card advantage actually relies on you having a lot of up to space stuff like, military intelligence. Whenever you attack with two or more features to a card is there's a lot of that sort of stuff rather than just, like, straight up card shop. And that makes sense. And I think that's quite a good way of approaching a cube like this that already has kind of like a quirk you're like, already hamstrung in your players in one way by not putting a single creature with power into the cube. So therefore don't have ways of just like, easily killing creatures because they're already doing the work in the first place. I think it's kind of like that's something good to consider if you are thinking of doing something a little bit different ways, a cube or going a bit off piece, as it were. Hey, keep that in mind. I've had like, you can hamstring your players in like one aspect but don't keep piling on them. Basically, I think it's what I'm trying to say. Yeah, there's one, there's one that sweet. And I guess I should ask the question if you are drafting this cube, how many doctors do you think you need? I think I have like, I only have like ten, I think, which is enough, which is about the number you want for one, for that player in your deck. And this cube I found, I'd say like eight, maybe seven. Absolute minimum up. So maybe 11 is generally the range you want to be in. It depends on your strategy a bit. If you're doing stuff like Paradoxical Outcome or wings for ten, for example, or the mass pump effects, things like, passive predation, those really want you to have a lot of all the factors in play. Whereas if you're doing if you're trying to, get ahead with some of the equipment, for example, then maybe you can get away with slightly fewer. That's yeah, I, I'd say 7 to 11 is, is generally the range you want to be in. So then nothing to do with Christmas coming up, James, how many own effectors do you own in paper currently? I think tennis. Hey, we can do we can see. Well, do you, do you do you have a preference? Not. Not work. Hopefully not the foil one. There's a turner or the Jesus. There is a calabash invention. One that's pretty vibey. Oh. That's spicy. There's the the other small one. That's kind of cool. Oh, the sketch one. Yeah, that was the retro frame artifact. Okay. Reasonable. Okay, we can do that. We can do that. James. Nice. Cool. So yeah. So as you mentioned at the start, there will be a link to all these games that we're talking about down in the show notes below. But let's move on to our next one. This is one we briefly touched on a bit earlier. But James talk to me about the heads up combo cube. Just from looking at the first thing that comes up immediately is that the one red card is a World War two dragon. Talk to me about the combo cube. James. Yeah, this is this is spicy. What's this is this is one me that me and Josh pretty much, built from the concept of what if we just played all the fun combos and and tried to make ones that don't quite get there in regular cube. Got that. You know, we found for most of the combo stuff we wanted was so Ty that okay, well, let's build a so ty to. But as we've discussed for reasons why, restricting yourself color wise might be good. We ended up splashing in a couple, a few white cards. I think there's six white cards and one red card. The reason for this is the white cards and the red cards all come by pieces that go with existing clouds. They enable a broader range of interesting combos, we think, and the red cards you never need to cast. So there's no that for using land. Well, gotcha. Dragon you know doing nonsense with animate dead on that fancy. The white cards. There's a few there's some white triumphs, basically. And we're playing fetch lands. So you've kind of just don't need that many white lands to make a few small number of white cards left. So we kind of felt like I was okay as, as a small concession to make, but. Yeah. Base core. It's a tie cube. I'd say the combos we found for the more like we're trying to do, like, both spells, the stormy type condo stuff and creature base combos. Yeah. I see we have some possessed creatures in here, so that's kind of the creature side of things, basically. Yeah. So the creatures combos, we've got some persist combo. We've got like devoted to the edge combo, like those costs and stuff. Yeah. There's like chili off the list. Yeah. Yeah. All of I got nonsense into like other and then things like that. And then we also have like the storm stuff. So we've got you brain freeze. Yeah. Well, all that good stuff. To our sevens, etc., etc.. We sort of found if you just go in with that approach and putting off most powerful things, then the spells combos tend to be a little bit better than the creature combos, because that just harder to interact with, right? And they tend to be like more of a clean kill where you don't have to on top of anything. So sort of compensate for that. We the, the movable is very sparse and generally pretty inefficient. But there's, there's bit there's I've got a bit of fairly good removal as those dismember involves a bit of strength, but it's not, yeah. It's not abundant. And so you kind of balance that a little bit, a little bit. I kind of like giving like I see, like there's hand attack in black. So we have like deep cavern bat and Inquisition. And then there's also a touch of counter magic in blue. Which kind of creature Dex can still run, I guess. Exactly, exactly. And then, the discard was also just very, very strong and weak. So there's a reason there's not forces in here. You know, we, we went with, like, an inquisition, as in, and then it's stuff like deep cavern bass and mesmeric fiend, you know, because when the whole joke is about trying to assemble combos, discard gets very, very strong, you know, that's there, that's, and then some of the combos, you may be have to jump through and, one whoops more than you normally would. So, for example, if you're trying to do flash things, we didn't give you a whirl spine worm to make it easy. You're basically the best of the best thing to flash is a protean Hulk. And then you go in assemble, you have a combo of the Hulk. File is kind of a joke. Yeah, yeah. For the, doomsday side of things, there's not a fast historical in here you can do, but you can do it with a lap man sort of thing. So that was just a way of sort of trying to power balance for, the different combos, because if you just vamp everything off as hard as it can go, then stuff like a low and combo just becomes a little bit difficult, you know? Yeah, that's fast and sorry, someone who there's only Ham who's only learned off a couple of times. I could see that being an issue. But yeah. So it kind of told me about, like, to kind of give the listeners some ideas of what they could do for their own future and like, what are some of the cool in, like, what are some of the other cool interactions and stuff in here that, that you could mention? Because like I see an oval chase daredevil in here, James that's three in a black for A42 that have not. If I enter the baton under your control, you may return it from your grave, but your hand. Like how don't you combo with that? James? That one's that one. I'm not going to I don't think is catching that. Unfortunately, the idea was to do stuff with Osmo. And the Right. Okay. And so Phasma gets and then you, you know, you just got it to the, what's it called, the underworld cookbook command that comes back and it just turns all your makes all your discards free because, because you're getting the daredevil back, and then you can use that to do to whatever. It's a little bit tough, to be honest. I was, but I think that might be one that gets cussed at some point. Unfortunately. I see we have na do in here is not, that has not you found a place in the in the combo cube? How's that been doing here? I'm assuming solid. Yeah. Not do not do has been putting in some work for sure. Yeah. We've got Zuko. We've got the, I think we have Creed section. I think it's just Zuko. I felt. And we thought Greaves would be a bit too applicable. And the other creature conveyed, actually, you know, there's. Yeah, there's, there's shugo, and then there's some other good ways to target. You can definitely get a lot done with. Not in this cube. If anything. The issue, if not do, is that itself kills them a bit. Well, by attacking, you know, which is very much against the spirit of it, there's just too much of an on right flier. Exactly, exactly. That's why should I have with that? It's an and not not do just very well. I'd say it works well in that creature combat package as well. Like some of the cards that have been performing very well. The things that knit together, all of these creature combos, things like that thing part is actually good in this cube. And that makes me very happy. Good. I am glad to hear that. Bring make pod great again. Exactly, exactly. Because the thing is, you can take the pod early, right? And then whatever creature on those, you end up having all the pieces fall. It works by like I found it to be faster. Use back on the creature on those. You take your birthing pod. Well, D2 first type stuff and then the one. Generally you'll get there on 1 or 2 of the creature containers, and then that's kind of a deck, you know? And then there are just a lot of distinct creature combos in here. We've also got example of, one Soul Trader stuff. That's one. But you can sac creatures make treasures? And that of these, the sac. Oh, that's the up combo. But it's also is very hard for things like chatter Fang of, grave Crawl. And there's just a lot of outs if you take these, these cards, which can combo with 5 or 6 other cards in the cube, you just do a lot of speculating early and you'll get that on some of them. And sorry, I see an academy rector in here. What are we getting with that? Because I don't see I always in terms of combos, I kind of line up with like pattern of rebirth. You can go and get your protean Hulk, but, what are you getting with Academy? Right, James? I've had fun getting the cycle recycles to get one, so get skip your draw phase. Whenever you play a card, draw a card during a discard phase two and discard all but two cards. Okay? Yeah, yeah. Seems like an engine. Nice. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can get an alone with it and get a survival, right? Yeah, you can, you can just set something together, you know? Yeah. It's. And there are just so many good stack out that sit over that. It's pretty easy to enable it. Yeah. And then kind of be that quick, you have to bit more is a more distinct thing. Is the storm that the storm that just kind of harder to oops into? I think you kind of have to be going for it a bit earlier on. And taking a cue card for that. I think it's also pretty effective. Not crazy to know it's more effective when Josh shafts it from when I do, but, but it certainly does some powerful things. I believe in you, James. Let's go. All right. Let's let's keep moving. Let's talk. I think probably we should touch on some of the two. But by Ryan, overtime, he was kind of the initial proponent of the two, but it was kind of like designed for two players, but also draftable with four. So all of the ones that we mentioned now are like one eight cubes. And we'll put links down to these in the description below. And we're going to touch on some of the ones that we've drafted ourselves, because obviously we have a bit more experience with them. But like the sixes two. But James, I think this is this might be one of the earliest ones, the earliest examples of a two particular kind of like really got popular. I've drafted this one a couple of times, and I know that you've drafted, like a, a version of this that has had a lot of tuning done to it, and it's way more strong and powerful. But like, yeah, the just one is really cool. It's I, I'm going to say similar to the it's similar in style in that there are a bunch of commas in here, but there are also aggro in here, like, like, but like it's not just like like despite there being an aggro section in red, there isn't in T, there isn't that kind of stuff. There is things like Killing Fiend, everything's like Runaway Steam King. There's like Causley, kind of like it's not just free. Okay, I'm going aggressive. I have to do stuff. And I think that's kind of something you'll see in these cubes is that. Yeah, you get like. Like like you do have to be doing something. You don't just get in this environment where you are trying to balance things. Something like aggro will normally take a backseat. And like I one of my favorite things in this, however, is, is all the prowess creatures with a card like how to even is it mage busy is really cool. That is a playtest card that's, a hybrid. Is it? And it just says return card name to its owners and dump as much management to it as you have. And you have that many spec cast spells that that one is really fun. But James, I know you've played a bunch of or though. Yeah, as I mentioned, I version a version of the quest is too, but kind of like, how do you like, what do you think about this one? Yeah, I think this queue plays out really well. I've mostly drafted this as a four player cube, so, Oh, I version of this to say a bit more combo, a bit more powered up, but, yeah, as a full player, cuz I'm certainly say it works great. Self C and I full player if you're drafting 1 or 2 cards with four players, you draft every card. But I think that's kind of more okay with four players because, it doesn't mean I personally am going to see every card, or I personally am going to see a smaller number of cards. Five relative to if you're drafting 90 cards with two players. And yeah, I think it works very well for I think in this sort of cube, limiting yourself to three colors is is a very good call. I think you mostly end up being sort of two and a splash. Just fine. I will say in if you get, a combo, I think the that ends up being the worst color by, like a not trivial amounts, but I certainly like things you can do to try and combat that. Yeah, there's, there's a lot of very strong stuff to do and have the, the animator is incredibly strong. The, artifact decks are very, very good. Some can certainly work. It's it's it's really nicely balanced, actually, between, between strategies, I would say similar to the, the combo cube we just talked about discard. Very, very important in this cube. I'd say actually a lot better than Counter Magic, which is, I think, kind of different to the regular A player cube trap, but because it is more combo centric, it's being able to proactively shift way back on that combo piece and then start playing your own fact. If game is sometimes better than, and hulking up permission. Yeah, yeah, 100%. I would definitely agree with that. Well, the thing I want to say, I've shown you building these, powerful converting cubes, be important decisions. As much for cards you leave out as the cards you put in. I think it plays out very well that they don't include be top on a schism. This cube, because it means, yes, you can do interesting stuff with the dwarf sevens. It isn't just diamond kill you, you know? And, it kind of makes the draw sevens more interesting on the cards that you actually have to make contextually good in your deck, rather than just kind of being an A plus B combo piece. And yeah, in a test tube, honestly, like how beat should be unbelievably messed up is a thing. And this gives a lot because this is way less feature based than most cubes that you will play. People don't play that much removal that just kills creatures. The stuff that kills like creatures and other artifacts is a little bit better, but like and generally, yeah, that's a heartless action. Hey, I think it's very medium. I generally don't play at like I'll have 0 to 1 natural justice, destroy a creature type cards in most of my decks. And that does mean that when you do play a creature, it often sticks. So, that that you do want to try and make the not include the creatures where your opponent just can't win one that I would play and I know exactly. Yeah, actually, I'm just looking I'm looking at the list and there's. Yeah, there's one piece of black removal that will just kill the creature. Apart from that, it's red burn that probably the aggro deck is going to have anyway. Yeah, exactly, exactly. But that makes a ton of sense. Yeah. Yeah. What are you saying about the wheels? I do like that. It's kind of. It's a it's a tool for all decks to use, because I'm just looking down here and I'm seeing, a Wheel of Fortune, a sneak attack, and an emerald on Storm. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't get. And so my hand full of big crashes, that's all. Yeah, it's doing stuff like that rather than, like, punishing them for drawing cards. Yeah, that doesn't make much sense. I also quite like this as a bunch of cards, which you'd normally think of the sideboard cards of actually just very good main deck cards. It's like obviously like pyro blast and red elemental blast sticks with, something like Vacuous Charm as being a velo for bomber. They did that in a black clay, for instance. That's free modes. You can exile old cards from the graveyard, send notes on the animator, destroy an art artifact that's a little stacks of artifacts about the artifact deck is very strong, of each feature, each creature deals one to its controller for weakest mode. But incidentally, if I try and splinter to a new, it just kills them, which is quite funny. Nice. And yeah, very, very sort of, slightly narrower cards when there's just a narrow range of strategies can actually work out being very good as main deck options. Yeah. I think I've done that. Kill conditioning commander before when someone was going off, but. Yeah. Nice. How many you see for exotics would you like to make? 1 billion. Excellent choice. Yes. My is to go the domino. Yeah. So we'll touch on some of the other ones in here. But yeah, as I said I'll put a link down here like effectively Rhino vertex cubes, Cobra pages, like, library for all the different ones that you can build. But, yeah, I know the tempo tuba was a iconic one when that first started. That one is built over a kind of like how the Combo Cube is focusing on combos. This is focusing on more tempo match ups. So it is this one is five colors. It is built more about tempo gaining advantage over your opponents rather than just, rather than being a balanced cube. He does also have things like, peasant two. But if you're looking to build on a budget that might be a very good example. Yeah, I'll put a link down to all of these in the option below so that you can have a look at. So I so that's so that you can have a look at them. There's a lot of good work gone into that. So yeah I'd highly recommend Ryan over to Cube Cobra Page as a resource for building your own ones of these the last two. But that will kind of touch on before we talk about some like, gameplay that we've kind of had with these is, I myself built my own salt. I too, but a while ago, I built it a couple of years ago. I haven't played it in a while. Because I, I'm a fiend for building salt. I command the decks, so I might need some of the bits, but it was a ton of fun, so I, I went down more the traditional way of building this. So I kind of had like an archetype for gallery and archetype for demo and archetype, the cynic. And then kind of like, soul tie. I thought to be like the gold style archetype for all colors. And then had I had a bunch of different like packages in it as well, I kind of did that because I was coming at this more from like, this is going to be more like a four player thing. So I was trying to get an archetype for each person, so go I did, mold aggro, which is something I do love, but don't get to play that often. Main was control sim. It was like a miracle grove on a ten bow kind of deck, which is another type of archetype I do really love. Like the, playing cheap creatures that kind of, like, get a counter on them when you cast an int through a sorcery or when you cast a blue star. So I really like that. And then shockingly, salt I was spider spawning. James, you might be very surprised to know that I built that, but then got like again, kind of like that was kind of like my base of it. But then I kind of fit in other type of like, archetypes around that or like packages. So we had like a guy through the Re-Animator package. So kind of like all the big fatties for the Re-Animator were even so that you could do it with Garuda. That was like a lands package, kind of like replaying strip mine and waste wasteland with things like life and alone around up escalator. And because it had like a discard matter section with like, like archway into within the archway near Drake Haven and like living death is the wing conditions. And then because also go go is good at stacking stuff. I was like I don't get every aristocrat thing in there as well. Kind of like I definitely approach this more from like a, I like creatures style of, building and, and design. But yeah, I found kind of like the thing I learned about this is that kind of I didn't need to be as rigid with the archetypes. I didn't need to be as rigid as, oh, go gory is the aggro colors. Like I could have put aggro in all of the colors and it would have still worked. It would basically like it lets people find their decks a bit easier actually, because like, one thing I did find with this is that I couple guys did end up in the like. It's a sort like cube. I'll just drop sort I cards. I kind of ended up with a bit of a mid-range soup, that kind of thing. But I think kind of like if I had sprinkle like, like one of the things you were talking about earlier about kind of like sprinkling synergies over all colors. So kind of like they find their deck a bit easy. I think that's definitely something that kind of like, yeah, I need to relook at this because again, I mean, I love Salty James obviously, but like, yeah, I think that there's definitely some bits I've learned from this episode that I can kind of apply to two buckets in the future. Nice. Yeah. I do think if you're doing the, three color two bit, which is kind of a classic way to do it, I think it is better to start off with lists of these of the archetypes I want to support than these, the color paths. This is what they're doing, because I think it is just the majority of drafts. You're going to be at least two in a splash. Just because, like, even if you don't have a ton of lands, a lands are all one color for that. For one, like, every dual land helps you. So it does tend to be like splashing is pretty easy. And it's and it's more important to have a clear list like these are very broad archetypes. I would like to work, you know, and like if two of those are based in blue black, then that's fine. Actually. Yeah. As long as all the colors, you know, contributing something good fit works with with the rest of the Keith, I've definitely. I kind of like, like one of the main takeaways I've got from today is kind of like two buckets or like two player cubes are definitely a thing where you can experiment. These are the type of things where you can do cool and interesting things. Like, I'm like, I've kind of made a note that kind of I want to try something with Universal Automaton. That's the one creature with Changeling. Meaning is every creature type. That has to be something cool there that you can do with that card. Yeah. I it's kind of. I like the fact that the it's the, it's giving me ideas for brewing, so. Yeah. That's awesome. Before we kind of wrap up the conversation on two player, cubes, cup. James, you played a bunch of to help, like, do any game specifically stand out to you? One of the things that came to mind was for the first time, we drafted this on off the cube. Well, actually, the second time to first time was a complete, but a a different but quite funny reason that if you draft on draft one serve as a setting that's, called duplicate protection, where it, it stops you getting more from. And because of this, it stops you having more from one artifact to add attack. I, I have seen people post that on on like like messaging lucky paper radio being like like yeah, it's an issue that didn't work. I think, unless we recorded some videos, Winston drafted it. It had exactly the same problem. So yeah, the first draft is kind of a dud because we're drafting Winston with 90 cards, a six pack. So we have six of the foxes between us. That wasn't enough, but we worked that out and I mean did another draft. This was with we were just drafting I think it was the full 540 original version of this, but doing it between two players, battle suites and whatnot. And I just have this cool Song of Creation combo deck. It comes up for Team of Enchantment. Whenever you say a spell, you draw two cards, and, I think you have to discard two cards. Advance. Yeah, yeah. So what my deck did was a cat song of creation, and it put out for you all the options playing through the deck and then it returned, and then it could win on the next set. The first game, I executed the game plan flawlessly. I had all my all the foxes in play and all of my cards in my hand. And I could win the next ten, I guess. Now the foxes didn't have haste and then doesn't have King Cass meltdown. I've still got a song of creation in play, so even if I draw one of my remaining artifacts, I can't cast it. It won't have enough cards left in my deck. And my whole deck was built around their side to do a full deck rebuild inside. Barding trying to, like, scrap it and see way like, oh, maybe I could win with some equipment or some nonsense because it was just one of those things where I saw had multiple sweeps of the deck, because it's just there's no way this game can pan out when my game plan actually functions, you know, as Sam as well, one of the things I think that sometimes happens the first time, you do have the cube fight where the thing that you think is going on and the thing that you think will work just doesn't work. In that context. And obviously that's not the face of the cube, because we would see it not in the way intended, but it's intended for eight players. We drafted it with two, but it was, I've never been beat in such a way where it was so stock that I there's no scenario where I could win with the cortex currently as setups as they are. No. Know the we've we've definitely iterated from that point to now. And now the jank is pretty good. There's there's a lot of nonsense stuff. They like Yog. Well I think it's a good fast fact because you can you can do a lot of nonsense, sacrifice your defenses for mana, make mana flops, make more mana, win the game. So we've, we've got back to drawing your deck, being a, a positive thing. I think. Phenomenal. Oh, that sounds great. I guess the other thing I do want to ask is, obviously this hate drafting is more of a thing in these. What's the best thing you hate drafted or is anything that's that. Oh. Have you ever had, like, the key part of your deck taken from you? Yeah, absolutely. I remember at one point I first picked a tinker. This is in order to CUV again. And drafted around it in that I had a bunch of ways to add ways to find my tinker, add like the vamp and everything, and have all my artifacts and some other cheap artifacts. Josh is drafting some nonsense that involves making lots of mana and casting expensive artifacts. I end up with no artifacts that cost two or more. And my pool. I still had to play the tinker in the end, because I knew my main way I could win was with, the artifacts that deals damage on and step equal to the number of features you have, so ends up just having to think of that. But tinker, when it's always a minor disadvantage as well as being down a card. Pretty rough place to be as not not where I was hoping that deck would end up. That's not. That's the one. I always have high hopes whenever I don't have to tinker. But yeah, I yeah, you always go for the moon and then. Yeah, yeah. I think Tinker for Engineered Explosives was maybe a line that came up a lot as well, which is actually decent. That's the one where it's, destroyed, like blow up everything with mana value. Yeah. Next is the number of countless levels of mana you spent on it. Then this cube X being zero is quite good because it kills all failure factors. Okay, nice. Love that. Cool, right? I think that's where we're going to end our conversation. On to player cubes for today James I think that was awesome. Yeah I yeah as you mentioned we'll put links down to all the games we've discussed in the show notes below if you want to check it out before we get you out of here, we have our last section, which is what have we been playing? So one thing we did want to touch on was an awesome cube event that happened a couple of weeks ago in London. We finally got a big cube tastic day. James, we're gonna talk about cube clash, London. So this took place in Loading Bar in Stoke Newington. And it was a ton of fun. There was 32 people queuing for a whole day. Some played a lot more cube than others, which we don't do in a moment. Well done James. Yeah, it was awesome. Sorry. What was that was there was 32 players drafting for cubes. And then after, so so everyone did two drafts in the day, and then there was a top eight afterwards, trying to find out who was our grand champion. Yeah, it was a super fun day. A lot of fans of cube, but, all the cubes I thought were very interesting and fun, ranging from, like vintage cube, as you'd expect to some really wacky, basketball janky cubes. But they all played great. Which ones that you draft on? So I started off drafting the, a cube. That was awesome. I hadn't played a proper cube in a while. Pull up a cube, but, like, but, like, with all the cool, fun banned cards and all the ownership cards was very, very strong. And then afterwards was one of the ones I was, I was most excited to draft by. I took the draft, I drafted the Desert Cube. I don't know if you got the chance to do this. It was the Dalston Desert Cube, and basically it was a cube where, the whole thing was built around. You have to also draft your land. So, I think everyone ended up, it was three packs of 18. But yeah, you do not get to add any basics or anything on that to your own offers. You had to draft your deck and my deck, I, I feel like my deck was good. I, I'm not going to say game the system because I went one, one, one with it, but, I drafted aggro in this format. I prioritized lands that came into play untapped because there was a lot of tap lands in there. I was looking at the list, Untapped Lands and back to you. Seems like a mox in another key. You know, the designers definitely took the word desert very literally in that there were a lot of deserts. But yeah, it was it was really cool. But like, like I was able to deal 20 damage in one time, which was really cool for me that that was exactly what I wanted. Art out of a cube draft day like this is like like like I like the idea. I like the idea of drafting cool and interesting cubes, but kind of like it's not something that kind of like I can convince of, like you to do kind of like every couple of weeks when we were to where to cube, kind of like, but like, at an event like this where kind of like if it's sort of a novelty that is really cool. And yeah, I was I thought the, Desert Cube was really fun. James, how about yourself? What did you get to draft in the day? Yeah. So I start off drafting Vintage Cube, which is kind of fun because it's Vintage Cube, and especially because I got some very, very powerful magic cards. And you're like Spain. It was really nice. Okay. Yeah. It was, I had, like, two marks and a time walk with a clarinet academy and, plenty of artifacts and a whole beach. And like, a twist in the memory jar. It was, it was really messed up. You could kind of kill him with a ham sandwich in the end, because you had Infinite Manor and they had no cards. No. So that was a ton of fun. Then the second cube I drafted was called Illusions of Grandia Cube, and that was the other cool one that that that I did like the look of. Yeah, yeah. So sorry. Tell us about that. Yes. It's like a lot of the, like slower combo stuff or like synergy stuff. So a lot of people doing deadly things with, like, an academy manufacturer, all that is this. You'd expect actual illusions of grandeur. Donate in there, which I did see killed someone. That was very cool. I drafted a sort of taxi sacrifice. SeaTac. The the ultimate lock was, doom foretold. But vehicles of enchantment, where people have to stack non tokens on their bow upkeep with tear grit. Which makes my friends. When Jesus sacrifice have an end to you. Guess it's, He's estranged. Yeah, that was pretty messed up. Like it took a long time to win, but, you very really ground from down and those. There's not a lot they could do. So. Yeah, I'm a six. I am the Swiss. And then, in top eight, I lost semifinals with a, so top. I was like, I'd say, I'd say maybe a little bit less powerful in your cube than, say, like, quite a fair ish slanted legacy cube sort of vibe. I'd say. I ended up in Celeste. Yeah. After a lot of pivoting in the past games. My boy, it's really a place you want to base. I mean, my deck was sort of powerful. I'd like some some of the powerful white beat down cars and, like, a power like, wave and stuff along way of, some docks to get it out early. The veil overperform for me actually was, good. Is it? Doll makers shop? This is the room from, Dust Bowl googling. Okay, so it's. You have two sides, you two of my streams. The cheap one is one to white whenever you want to. More non toy creatures attack. And one or more non toy creatures. You control a soccer player, you create A11 toy artifact creature token. So really cheap. Start getting some bodies early. If you have. If you have a cheap creature, then the other side, which you can just pay to unlock later is for white. White creatures you control have base power and toughness equals the number of features you control. So you play the cheap side. You go very wide with all the toys I found. Although basically every time, if you want, you can flip this card. It's normally be when you first certain you flip it and it seems very powerful. Actually, I think this one's going in my pilot cave, I think, and we we talked about it on the set view and we thought it was good. But I think it's it's even better than we thought. I did lose in the final two. I, a blue artifact stack doing much more powerful things than me, I would say is going off with, so and, pilots are doing an absolute ton of work pumping out the, to stay alive and tap mana. But yeah, it was a really fun day. I also did not play very well of soul in the finals, and that's a bit sad. So I, I was feeling the eight previous rounds of this. Yeah, it it was a fun day. It was a long day. And I know for the next one they have considered maybe going to two days, but yeah, kind of like, if you're in the London area, keep an eye out. I think they did post it in the, in the cube, like in the main cube discord under events. And also it was shown on the Lucky Paper website. So, so keep an eye out for the next one. We had a ton of fun there. It was awesome. And, yeah, I'm I'm really glad the. But there was a big cube event like this in London because, yeah, it was awesome. And yeah, it was it was great to try some new cubes and yeah, great to meet a bunch of cool. And also people who also love cube that there are other cube groups out there in London. James, it's really nice to see that. I thought it was just us around Waterloo who were left, but no, it's good to see other people doing it. Yes, tubes are indeed played outside of our usual pub. It turns out I'll put a link down to the, cube slash Facebook event page. It'll be for the previous one, but hopefully they will update it with the new one when that comes in. And also put down there the cubes that we discussed from that event as well because, yeah, yeah. But the desert one is something I think a few people who've tried it in our play group are thinking of, like toying around with like, this has got me wanting to try and build something new, something big and splashy that I wouldn't normally do. I don't know this, but yeah, I. Yeah, yeah, really fun. Really awesome set. Awesome. I think that is going to do it for the episode today. James, thank you very much. Pleasure as always. Yeah, always a pleasure. Thank you. Nice one. And just let me just thank you all very much for listening. Please. Like and subscribe. Give the podcast a five star review, tell a friend all that good stuff. I'll just do cool and new things. I'll just keep things growing. Also, as a reminder, please fill in the end of your voting form for our MTG Grand Award ceremony. Coming up next episode. But anyway, until next time, it's goodbye from me and it's goodbye from James and we'll see you all soon. Goodbye.