We Built A Duel Commander Cube!! - #79

In this episode of Powerful Nothing, we discuss James's new Duel Commander Cube. We talk about the design process and what you have to consider when adding a commander to a powerful cube deck, and then go over all the cool things that you can do in it.

Duel Commander Cube: https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/603bf4d4-e9bd-463e-892b-e5a1bd224ef4

Card Gallery: https://moxfield.com/decks/kKtQSZZaWUq1lJ7CpDOnmA

Video Version: https://youtu.be/LMswHWnZFcg

Timecodes:
0:54 - What is a duel commander cube?
15:58 - How did we tackle colour identity?
27:37 - What are the archetypes?
54:59 - What does the rest of the cube look like?

My Cube: https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/sweet
The Treat Yourself Cube: https://cubecobra.com/cube/overview/treatyourself
James Cube: https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/ba642a54-a6c7-4587-b97e-1d95429c59b5
MTGO Vintage Cube: https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/modovintage

Social Links: https://linktr.ee/toosweetmtg

Runaway by Diamond Ace | https://soundcloud.com/diamond-ace-music
Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
Creative Commons / Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0)
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en_US

Chapters

• 0:54 What is a duel commander cube?
• 15:58 How did we tackle colour identity?
• 27:37 What are the archetypes?
• 54:59 What does the rest of the cube look like?

Transcript

0:03

Hello everyone. Welcome back to Powerful Nothing and Magic The Gathering Cube podcast. I'm your host, Dan, and as always, I'm joined by James. James. How are you doing? Yeah I'm good, I'm good. We, chatting about a new cube today, which is cool. We are. This is one that, that you've put together, James. It's a dual command, a cube. I have a lot of cool stuff to get through today before we jump into our main topic. Firstly, up top, please consider giving the podcast a, like a thumbs up, a five star rating. All that good stuff really helps us out. Also, we are talking about a new cube. A link to that cube will be down in the show notes below, and I also will try and read out every card and that we talk about. But if we don't, there will also be a link to a card gallery which has some nice pictures of every card we talk about, so you can check that out as we're talking about them. And also there'll be time codes as well if you want to jump around to some specific bits of the episode. So those bits out of the way, James, let's talk about your new cube. So I think the first the, the, the, the most obvious place to start is what is a dual command, a cube. What are we doing with that. Yeah. So dual command is a set format which I got myself into playing last year, which was a lot of fun. But it's basically the rules wise. It's, it's a conflict format. It's like a singleton format. But you play normal two player games of magic. You just have a commander. So like 20 life. But commander works from the command zone as it does in the vector. Let's all play a game of commander. It's a lot of fun, and I kind of, for the gameplay experience of that. My transfer over to cube quite well, which was kind of a starting point for building this. No, definitely. Yeah. Yeah, it it functions very much like a regular cube, but you have the added bonus of having that commander available to you. And like from a rules wise point of view, the game can just drill down into kind of like into what? Like what the decks look like. What are the games look like. How are you playing this. Yeah for sure. So I think when people hear Commander Cube, right, they sort of assume that it's going to be slow and deadly and you don't need to do anything until thought ten four and that is true of for player commander Cubes, I think in a lot of cases. But it's not true of duel Commander cube vs one on one games, 20 live. So your chief interaction is good. There are aggressive decks. There are combo decks and stuff too, but that it's, it is. It feels more like a, regular, like, knock quite out cube, but a higher power level, normal cube. But with the added thing, if you have a command that built around and you have I have that legend, you have access to every game. So anything that synergize this with that legend is going to go really well for you. And, obviously plays into very different drafting dynamics as well because, your, your, your choice and your card prioritization obviously is going to be very, very different depending on what commander you have locked in. Even within the same sort of larger archetype. Yeah. And one thing I quite like about the way you put this together is that, yeah, we're still playing 40 card decks. I know a lot of the kind of command, draft formats that Wizards have made and a bunch of the other, commander type cubes out there do 60 card decks and being honest, I think this was really nicely for our play. Like, we know how long to, like a 40 card deck takes to draft that kind of stuff. You can we can say hello, have a catch up, do the draft in an hour. Then each round is now a we know we're going to be done in a certain amount of time. I personally found that kind of like 60 card decks and like command the decks, drafting those generally take a bit longer just because you're drafting more cards. Yes. So that's one benefit I definitely found from, this type of cube being built this way. Yeah. For sure. I don't see a lot of reason to build it this way for me was, I really liked the idea of drafting around a command. I think it's really cool, but I personally, I mean, I have played multiplayer cubes I've enjoyed, but they're not my favorite in general. You know, I feel like the, the games just go so long and you, everyone sort of weirdly disincentivize from attacking. So you really need to have, like, a big over-the-top plan. And that feels very, you know, you're just like, sat there for two hours playing a game of magic, and it's like, that's fine for a regular game of commander, I think, because, you know, now that in that setting we just like, show off and play a game and that's fine. But, but, you know, I kind of want to get a few games in with my back, and that's not really possible. And a lot of small player cubes like. Yeah, yeah, exactly. What was that. But that's kind of the point of draft and limited is that you're really never going to play this deck again. If it's commander, you're going to play the deck again. You can have you can try and get the most out of it. But when it's a draft environment, you're only really going to shoot for it. That, that like that day basically. So yeah, be able to make multiple games and, and generally like it's something we should do at some point. Like I've been kind of tinkering with doing a multiplayer AI multiplayer game, but it would be 20 like 40 card decks because I just find the games are smoother and quicker. But yeah, I like the fact that you've, done it for this, but kind of but and another benefit of doing it this way is that you kind of get the cool part of command. But in the time frame and with the power level and consistency that comes from a high powered cube, because effectively, what we're doing is it's a really interesting deck building construction where effectively you have access to a eighth or maybe ninth card in your opening hand. And like that can just be the strongest legendary in your deck, but it can also be an engine piece. It can be something that you build. Right? Because you know you're going to have access to it for the whole time. I think that's like that. That's it. But as someone who likes building, like the building part of the the deck is kind of like for me, the most fun. I really like the additional design element that comes with this because it's like, ooh, what cool thing can I build? Because I have access to this card. Also, I know, like, I like, yeah, it scratches the itch of commander, you can do the command thing while still playing one on one, draft games that feel very normal, basically. Which is something I really like about this cube. Yeah, for sure. And I quite like as well that you get to do all the stuff which you can't do at most commander tables because people will get annoyed with you, you know, like, yes, I'm, I'm not going to build an Arkham. Dyson stack because everyone will think it's miserable and they will not have a nice time. In in a two player cube environment, Arkham. Dyson seems sweet, and I'm really excited to draft that. Arkham dice sci five ways for for Monopoly legend. You can. It's kind of like a repeatable tinkerer on the stack, but on tap. So you've got to on tap with it. And, you have to sock creature artifact creatures and you get a gnome creature, but you can just tap it so one one gets a portal to fracture, or you can tap it and guess your setup. You're like grindstone combo or something like that. And, and yeah, that's going to be a miserable stack, right? If you build that. But but to draft that seems to me you're no, no, no at the end. Like one thing that's nice about this environment is that kind of like in commander like generally the commanders tend to be kind of mid range. Like on average the AI commander tends to be a mid range value engine type thing most of the time. Whereas in this cube we still like like we have aggro decks, we have control decks, we have tempo decks, we have mid range decks, and we have like combo decks which can all exist with the commanders like that, like, like like I've, I've played someone in this who's just mono white. Screw it. We're running a small hound of Conda as our commander. They always have that one drop that's quite that can be quite strong and like like, like like that isn't something like in a multiplayer game of commander, where you start on 40 life. It's Amaru. Isn't the SML like that level of aggro isn't? I mean, all power to you if you want to do that, but you will struggle basically. But in this it can be like because because you have that lower life total and because there's one on one, oddly, more decks are viable, I think is a nice way of saying it. Yeah for sure. Like I that sounds like I mean, it's is not a great card, right? That doesn't sound amazing when you say it first, but I actually like building a mono white deck where you always have a one drop on turn one and you never 12 or 1 drop later when you don't want it, but because you don't have to play, other one drops in your deck because you always have a small crew and you have opening hand, that's very powerful. And the same applies like we've cut out decks in general, like in this cube. If you have that heap commander, you can then actually prioritize that stuff on the curb for other creatures. Right? So, so you've got into as your commander, you don't need to prioritize twos highly anymore because you always have that to, like, prioritize ones and threes. But then moving away if you're not in the aggro space in your more in the, like value engine space as you save as, then you're more it's not so much about curve. It's about just prioritizing things which are going to accumulate value if you're commander, which is, I guess, where you end up more of the time. But then there's also a lot of combo potential with some of these commanders. Notes that I like. I think what's nice about it is that you can effectively do what you want with it. It can just be what's the best card for my strategy? I will play that. So I know I was going to hit it on curve. Or you can really take a commander that's a bit more open ended or a bit more build around it and really build around it because, you know, it's going to be that. That for me, I think is one of the strongest things about this. Q but let's keep the ball rolling, kind of like from a power level point of view change. So like you mentioned, you wanted this to be like not a vintage power level, but still quite high powered. Like like talk to me about like that kind of decision because there's a lot of strong cards in this cube, like most things seem to be quite efficient or like, not powered, but like very light. Like most of the cards in this cube would look at home in my unpowered vintage cube, for example, like, would you like, like like what made you settle on that power level? Yeah. For sure. So I want this to be a pretty high power level. Q partly because, I saw taking inspiration from Q commanders a constructed format, which is a very powerful format. I wasn't using it as a guide in terms of like some cards in this cube which abandoned your commander, for example. I didn't really think following panels is a super useful way to build cubes generally, but, I am using it as like an experience as a as fresh, like how I want for games to play and stuff. Right? So I was going for a high power level and back, and also for the thing of as I was going earlier with, I want this to be a place where you can do all the broken stuff, you wouldn't do on a normal and a normal commander part. Right? So that was sort of a reason to pitch it fairly high power level, but I did, I did realize quite early on I had to be quite cautious with the power level of some of the commanders. Because I think having some power outliers in a cube is pretty good, right? Because, it gives you a bit more of a dream. A Q means you can your decks have higher potential? But when that isn't potential, that's the thing they do every game because it's in your command zone. I think that's not a great experience. Like, I think having having your best, the very best cards in the Q, P, B commanders would actually be a mistake because, then the whole game is about that card. Every single time I, like to imagine a event deck with vagabond as a commander and, you know, just have turn one back on every single game. I was going to get quite reflective. I think. Exactly. Yeah. It's it's it's also not interesting, if that makes sense. Yeah. It's a card that just takes over the game and just kind of. Yeah, yeah yeah I you're right. It makes the game be about it immediately. I can see that kind of in a similar vein. We don't have like a Johnny Nagato pariah in here. I'm assuming that that's a similar sort of choice of like, very, very strong card, but but like when you're building this type of cube, you just have to be more careful when it, when it comes to putting a powerful legendary in over anything else. Basically. Yeah for sure. Like if my if I, if I sit down my opponent is I have this flag about as my commander, I have to mulligan to a hand that cannot get hit by Raghavan on turn two. Right. Yeah. And that I don't think that's that fun personally. But you're like, oh, well, my turn could, like, do some other kind of interesting stuff, but it's going to take two hits, knock it down before I can do anything about that. So I have to mulligan. Like, I think that kind of sucks, you know? So yeah, I was like, I think the one drops have to be a little bit turn down and things like, like as, for example, is not in this cube as a lot higher. So I say, even though Larian Academy is considering Academy, is in your 40 card deck and you have to draw it to for your academy deck to do it's. But it's an Academy thing. As of in your command zone, definitively where every game I think not as cool. No, exactly. And like, I think just coming back to it, I can see specifically why you didn't follow the banned in restricted list for dual commander. Firstly, because as far as I can tell, there's two different websites telling me two different bits of information. I don't know if I've missed some t there at some point, but it looks like it looks like drama that we're not getting involved with. But but definitely as a format they have banned as commander and banned in the deck, which is not something the like which we are doing in this cube. If you draft it, it can be your commander. Is that kind of like was that part of it as well? Oh yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Banned as commander wouldn't work in cube. Also, a banned list is kind of nonsensical. Like I think vamp is banned, but as in, like, none of this makes sense. And some, you know, this is a safe level for format thing. Whatever. But I do think it's a good gameplay experience as a format, so is more like leaning on it as a, it would be cool if a games played out like this. Right? And I took a lot of the so staple commanders from, dual commander and putting them to stuff like Malcolm that the blue red legend is like, this is cool. You can draft a good tempo spells deck. And that's the thing from your commander to, my absolute favorite deck in that format was a, glob valued action glob for some legend. Very cool. Is that the frog? Yeah. It's like a to two for death touch for free. You can play Lancelot. I think they got printed after I tried to build every time. So it's on the list. James is on the list. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'd recommend it. Good project. One of the important thing that comes the kind of always comes up when there is drafting a command. In any sort of limited environment, is how color identity works. Like, I'm using this in a limited draft. It's where thing like, like, like stuff like partner gets used or there's, like colorless commanders or backgrounds that can kind of go with another card to kind of give you that dual colors or maybe even try guys like, like when I've done the Gavin Verjee mystery events at like, magic bombs, they've like, they've kind of done rules of like, any mono colored commando cap on it with any other monocle like commander. And this is something you have to think about a situation like, how have you decided to run with it in this cube? Yeah, this is actually the soft decision point that I found most challenging building this cube. So I've done a couple of other little flats. I'm quite happy with one where I'm now, but, I knew V sort of default commander color identity rules, which is going to be to restrict set. Firstly, it makes mono colored commanders incredibly challenging to play. Right? Yeah. Okay. Because it's still a draft as well. Like, like think about how hard it is to be mono colored in a regular draft format. Like drive formats are generally two colors because the cards you're seeing and what is open in your seed, if that makes sense. Like, like being a mono colored generally is quite hard in in limited. Yeah for sure. For sure. It's really a it's really tough to be genuinely mono colored and and even beyond that, like say, even if you draft a two color commander, it's just taking away so many options from you in the draft. Right? Like, say I idea, Vivian. Let's say, for example, a lever for the blue, that kind of very powerful. And I move in a draft to blue red spells, and I'm doing that kind of tries a little that I don't have any options. Now if I want to keep using my beefy. Right. I, so I have to pivot and find like a commander in a different color. And I think that, well, that would often end up with is you end up just playing a commander for the colors fight. You're you're mostly picking your commander to satisfy color identity, rather than genuinely like building around it and trying to maximize that. And so that to me kind of defeats the fighting and doing a Commander Cube fight. If you can't really try and build around your commander in a synergistic way. Well, on the flip side as well, like there's there's definitely the world where that V play, just takes V sometime in Pac one and then their draft is on the rails, but then on like for then almost anyway. Like they're like they might not be like they to be passing all the good cards like like like I know the deck is open, but it's like, well, I've got this v v and it's really good but kind of so, so that's kind of the flip side of that as well. It can lead, but I think just being strict as it could be not only can lead, I think lead to a less fun gameplay experience, but also, from a from a construction point of view, it would mean you would need to spend a lot of time seeding in legendaries of different colors and maybe look at something like part, but kind of like, let's let it go through. I think maybe interesting kind of go through the different iterations that you've gone through, and then we'll go over the one that you've actually settled on. So when you first draft to the change, what was the first iteration of like like how did commanders work? How did color identity work when you first built this? Yeah. So one thing I've had all the way through is, the color identity of your commander doesn't actually restrict what spells you can put in your deck. If the strict swap basic lands you have access to from the basic land box. So I like this because it gives you the freedom to splash anything you want from the draft, if you can. It gives you that flexibility, but you have to work for it if it is outside. Because if your commander, by aggressively drafting the fixing, you need all of them or what have you at all. So I like it. It gives you the opportunity to put off color spells in your deck if you don't need to cast them something like Bolas, the Citadel might go in a blue deck phase trying to cheat it into play as an artifact right? I think it is good to not take that that possibility away from people. Yeah, as a restriction, I think it's worked really well. It means that there's still something you have to build around. It's not just free. You can't just run any command that you want, but it means like, say you take some cards in pack one and then have to pivot to a different color. It means they're not dead, because if you draft your lands, you can still play those cards, which is quite nice. And how have you found it? It's play games. So I think that is good for addressing the problem of the draft being two unveils, but it doesn't actually address the mono colored problem that well. Right. Because, even with the possibilities of splash other stuff, it's going to be very hard to, draft, say, a Yakima fan, physician, Darksaber, mono black commander, and have a genuinely black two color deck. You still have to be like, almost entirely black cards because you wouldn't have access to any of the basics right? So to address that, I initially went with, everyone gets a prismatic paper at the start of the draft. That's for, Yeah, I'll just read that quickly. It's a five. This is from, Command the Legends. This is how they addressed it in that set. It is a five generic three three. If if, legendary creature shapeshifter. If the piper is is your commander, choose a color before the game begins. The prismatic Piper is the chosen color, and it has partner. So that's how that works. But but but how were you running it in the in the draft? Were you saying that any Moloch mono colored commander could partner with the piper? So I honestly said any commander could partner with a piper. Which is obviously like, that's giving people very much of restrictions, right? You get to add basically a free color onto your onto your commander's color identity. I think it was fine, but also a lot of the decks didn't actually need it, and it felt kind of. I also didn't like for people got it for free, and would then put it in that command zone just to be able to run one fewer cards in that deck. That feels kind of bad. And and had this random five man free, free command of it doesn't do anything. And it was in reality, like most of attacks people drafted, it felt like they didn't actually need that because they had a gold commander, which, and that those of the colors of that deck, so what I've kind of settled on is, the Piper's only can, partner with mono colors commanders. And they're not you're not going to start with them. They're going to be in the coop. So as far as five and up for the moment, you can draft you draft them like any of the cards. So if you want to play a mono color commander, you can prioritize a piper and then you get to play an extra color. Yeah, that reminds me, I will actually put a we've made slight altars to this. We'll put a printable version of this in the show notes as well. If so, if you want to print these out and proxy them for yourselves. These are the cards that actually appear in James's Cube, which is quite nice. I would like to ask you, James. Like like like like in your opinion, why did you not why did you not go with the every mono colored commander has partner, which they've done in like mystery events and stuff that they're like magic wands. Yeah. Good question. So the issue I have with this fight is that I think if you have firstly, it makes the monocle of commanders way better than the gold commanders, right. If they'll partner with each other. So you just have two commanders mount. Very powerful. So to compensate for that, I'd really have to tone down the power level of the mono cause commanders. And I don't really want to I think a lot of them are cool. Like, I want to have me on my tube, and I want to have psi in my cube, but I think the mono blue artifact stack funding Emery and science for commanders might be a little bit too much, you know? So that was one reason. The other reason is I actually think it would get pretty boring. Like, I'm not sure you're playing an accurate DAC and you have a, oh, a two manner and a three mana commander. And every game, every single game, you're just going to have that the same two to off into the same three, two up. I think that's gets I think by the end of round three you're kind of bored. You know. Well it's just effectively like most of the other cards you play don't matter. Like say yeah say you go into into Adeline or something like that. Like you. That seems quite easy to win a game of magic if you do like like that's good enough for the regular go vintage cube. But like, if it's guaranteed and you had an like like like like like that's for me. I think the main reason why I like the Pipers because yes, it's because like when you partner effectively you are adding two guaranteed cards. You have access to play. They can't both be bangers, if that makes sense. Like they both can't be like like like I know partners in Regular Commander are very strong and very broken, but like like they there's a reason why the original like two like dual color partners, they're all a bit weak actually. Like, they're like like that whole cycle of them. Like like I know that like like they are mainly good because of the because of the colors that they gave you access to. But imagine if they were good. Imagine if they were like super version commanders. That also gave you access to all the colors. But that's one of the reasons why I like something like the Pipers, I think is a nice check on that, because yeah, you can have one aggressive card and the other one is just there to fix, but it's not like like a five mana three three with no other abilities. Feels fine to give you access to a whole nother color and be able to play a whole nother color on your deck by giving you access to the basics. I quite like that. Yeah, fish of a pipe do not actually feel like having two commanders fight. It's, it's very rare you see one cast. It's like sometimes you flat out you have nothing else to do and show your player. That's, It's not what the cards for. For. Yeah. I like the way you've done the color identity and the Pipers and the whole package of this in this too, because it means that I mean this in a, like, in a good way, that it means that I'm putting the cube, the rest of the cube together is more straightforward than having to worry about. Is this efficient legendary to drop to good because I can partner with this I like it's giving you more freedom to just play cool cards. It's a nice little release valve on the pressure of just like cards being too strong. Basically like like it's what you were saying about like, yes, you haven't got rid of them, but you still have energy. You still have Layla. You're still able to play these super efficient, aggressive cards because there is a depth like it's not free to just run another color with them, which you might get if you were doing other rulesets basically. So yeah. Yeah, I, I quite like the way that I think it works very smoothly basically. Right. Let's keep it rolling. Let's move on to archetypes. James, talk to me about what the decks you can build in this cube. Yeah, kind of like, you want to kick off? Yeah. For sure. So the the archetypes are sort of pretty fluid by design. This very much isn't a cube where you're like, okay, I'm in blue vats, and this is the blue that archetype. So that's what my deck is doing. You know, what your deck is doing is, is gonna be more determined by for commander you're playing and by, by the color choices you made. Phi it's not going to be that sort of unveils this color identity as, is, is doing this thing, but having said that, they're very much, still archetypes. They're just a bit more big picture and a bit more fluid for my, my other B otherwise B so partly for that reason, they're not so much based around color pairs as, a lot of the archetypes have sort of one color, but they where they're more primarily supported. And then they branch out into multiple different other colors. So for example, for discard matters of madness type deck is is this red base deck, but with bits of black bits of green, in that as well. So you might be if you're doing the discard masses madness stuff, you could be mono red even you could be Red Queen, you could be red black. You could be a full giant. But you probably wouldn't be black Queen because it's it's, you have that sort of density and that that's going to support it. And then, yeah, you can splash around all that. Oh, be a fan of two color deck in any face, other colors. Now that's nice. Yeah. Yeah. But want to touch on that as we go through every deck. But I like the fact that it's a I did something similar with my treat yourself human like when there's an element of building an engine, not just being raw efficiency, having multiple places you can go with a deck, I think is nice, and especially when color energy does matter in this. Yeah, it's a whole nother level of, well, do I have a command to let me play all these colors, this kind of stuff? I think that's quite a nice way of taking it. Like, yes. Like it means that like in this cube where splashing is a real cost. You have to work out where is this awesome card splashing for? I can kind of make it work. And those just having more options and choices like that, I think makes the whole thing more interesting. But you touched on how madness and discard is over, like the Jund Spectrum. Talk to me about the next one. Like aristocrats. That's, What are we doing with that? Yeah. So this is favorite for a black based archetype. We're doing the classic, you know, make make lots of tokens. Sacrifice, for value. It can be it can be pretty aggressive, but probably your average one is going to be more about the the grind, the accumulating value stuff. So we're, we're sort of in the Marduk colors, but yeah. So you could be black fat, you could be black white. The I think there's a few really good commanders here. Gog Mars is probably the one that, the sort of jumps off the page a little bit, that does some, actually like a very powerful engine, but with any sort of token generation. There's also stuff like raids if you want to go for more like stat C aristocrats, D stuff. That's pretty good if you can make a lot of tokens. There's also some combo bits in there, like Max V unhallowed as your commander has some, has some very interesting combo potential. But obviously going up to six mana commanders is a pretty well cost. Yeah. And I can see, like, if you want to go, if you can make the colors work, a card like Caesar Legion's Emperor, there's one I think is very strong and kind of like like it. It shows like it's a good signpost to. Here is what Marduk was doing. Basically it's one and a mardi for a for four legendary creature, human soldier. Whenever you attack, you may sacrifice another creature. When you do choose two, you can either create 211 red and white soldier creature tokens with haste that attacked and attacking. You can draw a card and lose one life, or you can have it deal damage equal to number of creatures you control two target opponents so that's kind of if you see Caesar early, that is a good way of getting into that deck, basically. Which I think is quite nice. Yeah, for sure, for sure. And so if your intention with skew is has enough legendaries where you can take for powerful spells for an archetype, early, and if archetype is open, you will get a good commander. You know, you shouldn't have to be like, oh, I can't take that felt. I don't have a good command of it. Yeah. But yeah, I think, Caesar is really good. I mean, you can even go into, green for, I think, one of the best aristocrats decks actually seen drafted in this cube was a, called Faker King. That. Yeah. That's a very strong one. Yeah, that's the big dragon that when it attacks, you can sacrifice a permanent. Oh, no, I mean, enters or attacks. You use like, a permanent or whenever you take a permanent, put a counter on it and draw a card. And if only those two are not linked. Yeah. So you sack things, you start drawing to your deck, and your big flying commander gets very big very quickly. Certainly does. So yeah. Yeah, that's very good. And yeah. And yet there's a bunch of individually like yeah there's like token stuff in white and red as well as some more abstract stuff in black, which is quite nice. Like I like Sapphire off just actually being a blood artist. Effect on a commander. It's got it. It's quite a nice version. So that's quite cool. Talk to me about green X lands. James, I like, like, is this a play as many colors type of lands deck or is it, is it up. Is it a play lots of lands type of deck. Kind of like. Or is it doing something else like what are we doing with the green X lands package in here? So hopefully you can sort of do any of those things that you would like to do. There's some combo stuff. But there's also be great. There's a lot of like graveyard D land stuff in here. So things like forget fog monster, can can go pretty hard. And you've got stuff like standard reclamation and, aftermath on lists. The Galileo lands back from your graveyards. That's played out fairly well, actually. But yeah, lands is very much, you can be green with any and all of the other colors. There are some really powerful land space commanders in mono green bow. So you might want to, I'm not saying you will ever really be mono green, but you may well, often. Lots of have a mono green commander and therefore not have basics for the other colors, but you can also get fixing in a lot of other ways in your, and your land stack. But yeah, like commanders like Azusa, I think is very, very powerful in this cube because you have, you have bounce lands, you have thing, you have, a bunch ways to play lands out of your graveyard. So anything that gives you extra landmarks is, is going to be really good. And as you. So with the the two action props I think can can go pretty hard actually in your command. So it's one of those effects where, it's kind of a tough card to make work in a regular cube fight because you have to make a lot of sacrifices to make it good. And then when you don't draw that, you kind of have a bunch of janky bounce lands and then nonverbally works. But when it's in your command zone, so you get it every game. You it is worth leaning into it enough, you know? More for my own benefit like I do I. If Zeus's your commander, are you running more lands? Yeah, I think I think a lot of the time you. Well, But really, what you want to do is find ways to make multiple land drops without having to do all that many lands. Right? So, for example, if you have a crucible in the thatch land, then getting to it when your land drops down costs you a card, right? So you're just playing that stuff three times a turn from your graveyard. It's, you're going to fetch every land out of your deck pretty quickly. Yeah. The reason why the bounce lands are very good is they're they're centrally to that land land swap. So it's up for two mana, but they only cost you one card. So I think you want to do as much of that stuff as you can. Like Lotus Field I think goes really well here as well. So it's, Yeah, if you're getting those lands back out of your yard, it's it's basically free land drops and one on the actual land. No matter where I go to Tamia is in here. Like how like are you? I wasn't there for the one with this popped off. But talk to me about the two tinier lands that I kind of like. How that can really do some dumb things. Yeah, I think is is one of the more powerful commanders in stew. I will say it is probably like on a watch list at this stage, you know. So I think the first draft we did, I had a titanium, seven of deck, which it went very, very hard. So I was also running things like, Lion Side Diamond as just a very all in way to get you on the outs incredibly early. So I think no game for I was like, you know, ten, ten, one lands ten to you go lions. I diamond seven, not crack my diamond, discard rest of my hand. Play Titania the turn of that land called my land. So I have like 25 pile on 70. You know it's like it's one of. It's one of them. All the stuff you can do. Obviously you also have. No, no, there lands in their cards in your hand. So, the game sending one way or another, but it's really hard for them to be. Yeah you are. You do have 25 power in play. I mean, there is a world where the combo piece and the lines I diamond famously fair magic cards could also be the problem in that situation. But yeah, that is a very cool thing that you can do. It's possible. It's possible. I mean, obviously you need like a lot to come together. So that's what I call I was like, that's the feeling. The insane thing is, actually, if I lost that game, what did they have, James? What did they have? Oh, it was like, kill one of kill the titanium, double block, another token, and then the next ten, like, cast licorice, which is actually the perfect card. You have a token trade with another token and managed to save life from that. It was a really cool game, actually. Now, that sounds awesome. Let's keep it going. Talk to me about artifacts. So artifact seems to be base blue, but it seems to be touching every color apart from green. Is that fair to say? Yeah, very much so. So, I think sort of different colors and different flavors. So we have a pretty big range. I think we're from like really big manor artifact stuff. Thought she sort of leaning into each player in Academy and, and whatnot. And but then down through the more beat down artifact stuff, we've got commanders like, for example, Mendicant Coffin, etcetera. Which case, a sort of cheap of a chief creature's power is equal to number of artifacts you control, doing a bit more of a BattleBots type thing. But then a lot of how has. Yeah, the, the model of do artifacts command is obviously very, very powerful. It's mentioned earlier now as, but various things like sign ups, foster must have Optimus, and the lack of the lock, things like the reality ship actually, I think is is pretty strong. And then some interesting gold commanders, too. I like, I really like for, Esper as, which is basically makes a construct on each and stuff. I think that's very powerful. Yeah. If you can cast that, that's extremely strong. We also have shroom is the shroom combos in here. James. We were you had did you have to be careful there. So shroom the idea is you're trying to like you're playing a bunch of graveyard stuff. You melee for your giant artifacts, and then the enemy sets. No. That's fine. Yeah, it's shroom and, way of cloning an artifact. And then, like, a blood artist effectively has infinite death triggers, which is quite hard. That's something we can get onto it in a little bit, but like, like like the like I don't see that in the cube, which is probably a good thing, because it's one of the reasons why you don't see it in come on as much, because it's based on the ones that you build it once and like I've done the thing, move on, if that makes sense. It's like having a combat base and in the command zone is something you do have to be careful for. So yeah, it's nice to see that kind of like I can see you've been careful with that, which is nice. Talk to me about nyah tokens. That seems to be another, like, it kind of. White is the main color in this, but then red and green seem to be helping out as well. Talk to me about that deck. Yeah. So this is, I think the you can be a very sort of streamlined, white based, aggressive token stack is certainly a very real thing. Like Arthelene. There's obviously a pretty strong beat down command. Something like I call, and then pickle, I think it's called the, those kind of like Scrabble master. So there's a bunch of that stuff going on, but then if you lean in a bit more, I'd say on the green side, you also have, a bit more of a go a bit longer, make a lot of bigger tokens, make a lot of mana, sort of. And, you know, and you can lean into things like the, yeah, yeah. Gaia's cradle, for example. Going very wide, making a guy's cradle. You can do all of that stuff, too. And the, I guess of the pivot feeding Besson versus physics for that very first foundry can can go pretty hot here. You've got some interesting combos actually with that. And the, Straight hanger automaton has been a combo that I've come up a couple of times is really powerful, actually. So that's, female of artifact creature. Wow. That's a you make a token, you get that token plus an additional factor. So with that true fighter, you can stack up to make a full four and a factor on top of that. Professor. Keep going. So, yeah, the, the token stuff I would say is, is where V is where the aggro decks live. A lot of the time. But there's also some, some powerful like, and stuff if you want to as well. No, definitely. That makes sense. Then. Greg. Sis. James, Greg sis is like a spouse or the excess shard. I'm gonna go with shard. Is, it's kind of like a spell slinger type of thing. Like, like our characters, commanders. We have things like Cass dissident mage and Saruman the White. And then there's a bunch of other ones in those kind of colors, like. Like, what's spell slinger doing, James? And is, is this like a is this, the like a blue, like blue first and then the other ones, that kind of, red and black are smashed out from there? I say blue, blue and red can both be very central. Yeah. So this is you can sort of have a whole range of control up to something fairly beat down any, I think, within this art, within this archetype. So for example, you drafted a Cass dissident mage control spell. See that? That looks very powerful. Yeah, that was awesome. It was just Cass play all my removal spells twice removal and tutors twice. It was very strong. Yeah. Seems really good. But then you've also got stuff like, Ballymore battle mage captain. That's for blue in a red for the one three. When you cast an instance of sorcery, all your creatures got plus one. Plus Aaron trampled until end of term. So if you can do that with a, say, young pyromancer, type effect, go white so you can kill them pretty quickly doing that. Yeah. So, and, I think Ivo also really very powerful command from space. So yeah, hopefully a good, a good bit of flexibility here with how aggressive you want to be nice and then keeping it rolling. Moving on to abs. The seems be kind of like, doing what abs, does better. Kind of like a creature combos and like a toolbox type of things. Like, we've got a bunch of cool abs, we've got ways of finding our creatures and we've got ways of kind of like attacking and recurring. Then there's like a familiar nightmare. There's recurring nightmare down of, like, pieces, going around zones. But you're kind of primarily focusing on what the edge of stuff. Is that fair to say what you're doing with, the sort of, deck games? Yeah. This is one hasn't got drafted a bunch yet, and I really want to see it work out, so I might force it next time we draft a badass. I'm staking my claim now. So this is basically, I've just got all the cool apps on creature combo cards, but for men with a bunch of, ways to find them. Yeah, you've got the birthing part. You've got the, Athena, if you've got the wealthy tutor, and I think there's probably. I'm. My hope is that you can just take those cards early, spec on one half, have enough combos, and you'll you're sort of almost guaranteed to get there on some of them. Plus there's some commanders which do some combo stuff in this space. So, Sapphire starter I think is a pretty cool one. That's for I do like some sapphic combos there. Very cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. That's for, green in a white. Tutu. You can stack it. When a creature is putting shockwave out from play this turn, you. Can you get it back? So there's a there's actually a bunch of ways combo of this card, but, one of the easiest is something like an extraction specialist, where when a sentence you get something in, small creature bites face a sack area, and you sack Saffy to target your six action specialists. You sack your specialist, it comes back, sassy comes back. We go round and around. Then there's also stuff like the Hilliard walking ballistic on is again, another combo where it can live in your command zone, which is quite powerful, I think. That you are giving up something there because Hilliard is not a credit card when it isn't compiling. That's not really a big life game theme here. We're more just doing it for the combo element, you know? And even into black, we've got stuff like, yeah, the mix can do some combo stuff. There's also for like, Samwise Gamgee, there's some of the food combos in here as well. So yeah, it was kind of a werewolf. A combo card set for wall and see what works. You know, there is I don't think there is one combo card I don't see in here, and maybe because it's doing stuff with counters, but I'm assuming gave guru spores must combo with some stuff in this cube. Like I've had a bunch of game decks in my time, and it's kind of impossible to not trip over your own combo in that deck. But I don't stuff with counters, though, so maybe because it isn't really up counters theme in this is there? So it's not a counter theme, but maybe that maybe it come work. Oh, I'll, I'll let him spell it. I'll put that one on the watchlist. The first free person who's ever had a game deck either got no matter what your intention is, you have found a combo while playing the game deck. Yeah, I mean, it just won't come out. Yeah, yeah, it's. I will read it for, for those key players you haven't experienced gave in the wild and commander gave you spoilers is two white, black and a green brazier zero legendary creature. Fungus shaman enters with fire first on counters. On it. You can pay one to remove a counter from a creature control to create a green. One one green sapling. Which token? And you can pay one second creature to put a counter on target creature. So there's a bunch of ways. There's a there's a lot of stuff that goes infinite with this. Like any on edits, right. There are 2729 combos with this card. Probably one of them already. Yeah, yeah, one of the cube daisies. Yeah. But yeah, that's a that's potentially one thing instead of but that's and then that's a great point. And then I will look at that one. And this I she raises the point of an issue I have had building this cube is I don't play tons of commander. I basically I play commander with I'll play group where it's not super high power level. So I don't know some of the busters commanders. So please tell me about them. And I know that's that's what like I'm in. Don't worry. You know I've got to my boy I've got you. Extend that to a comment to tell me commanders you think are cool and I might puff them in nice. Cool. Let's keep it going, though, because we have one more big, big archetype to go through, and it's one of my favorites. It's salty. It's always doing like a self mil graveyard sort of thing. I like, talk to me about this deck. What? I kind of like the key cards. And what stands out to you. Yeah. So this is basically million sell for loss and and there's a variety of ways to profit. So Cavil is, a card I really like for this. That's for salty. Commanders like for mana for, for when it attacks Yaml for the channel. And, and whenever one or more cards leave your graveyard to make a two to, this I think is a nice I'll have a source of commands that I think works really well here because it's a good build around, and you can sort of do your insidious roots type thing, and that's pretty powerful. But it is also a command of it is a for mana for, for fly, and envy one on one. Well, if I were playing with fantasy life, that does matter a lot too. We also got things like who got, the baseball. If you want this as if this is better as your commander or in your deck, but, I think it can be pretty powerful in both. We do have stuff like the altar of Dementia to go off with that. And I really like for as an addition from a new set of really like card as well, which is Lewin and Imperial Imperfect Naturalis, which is the two go go mana for a one free one and says, you Malfoy, you can put a creature or land on top, and among them, and then you can just tap it, cast worm harvest. So it's, That's very cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So five mana top discard land. Make A11 for each land in your graveyard. So yeah, it's it's basically a bunch of ways where you can build yourself and put a bunch of stuff into play as well. Sometimes doing. Yeah, it's insidious. Rootstech and I am I am all here for it. That's everything I want to bring in a game, a commander that's like, oh yeah. So again, those are kind of like the overview overarching archetypes. But but like, yeah, I like the fact that they are quite fluid and it's not. You have choices as you're going into into decks. And like each deck has a bunch of different commanders that like, each deck has a three color commander, but it also has a bunch of two color commanders, which is also quite nice. It means that. Yeah, yeah, and I know so because of the way that you've built it, a key point you've mentioned is that if you're in the deck and the commander's opened, it should come to you. People aren't going to be speaking on like, like like in pack one potentially. If someone as a powerful commander, they might take it. But like in packs 2 or 3, if you're the one who's in the aristocrat deck, if Caesar gets opened, it should come round to you, basically, which is nice. I'm assuming that was in, like, having multiple options for you was something that was intentional, like, like, what else did you do, James? To make sure that everyone gets a good commander. Yeah, basically there's loads and loads of legendary creatures in this cube, like every slot. If I was like, is there a legendary creature that does this thing, then I will default towards the legend because I just want there to be enough where you're not worried about ending up with a bad commander. You know I'm not going, but I kind of feel colors like, you might not get the perfect commander if the everything that's in the cube. But it should be, you know, if you're say, say you open your first act first like a fast on van, you're like, okay, I'm going to do Valencia. I'm going to do the fast van thing. I'll take the fast van. They'll take like a crucible of worlds, yada, yada yada. You have the end of pack one. You still have a commander, but you have a bunch of alphaland cards. I want that to be okay. You know? I want it to be enough legends where you're like, I will definitely get at least a pretty good commander from my land stack. If, even though I don't have one yet, you know, so. Yeah. Yeah, I just want to sort of spec on powerful synergy cards early and then have a bit of faith that the commander will will work itself out. Right. But having said that, you know, the well, commander you end up with is going obviously going to affect which cards you want. So there is something to be said for trying to, to lock in your commander early, but yeah, but I certainly some, some flexibility built in that, but yeah, like, if you have a solid blue artifact stack, for example, the which artifacts and which spells you want for your deck is obviously going to be very different depending on if you're, say, a Psi Master, Master Fortress stack or an Arkham Dyson deck. So knowing which one of those camps you're going to fall into early is is still important. But, yeah, you should it shouldn't be like I have to take for commander first and then draft for that. You know, you should be able to just take good cards and get a commander later. Yeah. I think the important thing of of what you just said there is like, is the difference between the sidekick and the Arkham deck is one wants lots of artifacts. One wants big artifacts. That makes sense. So. Yeah, so so so I again, different decks in the same realm. But again, having that variety is nice. Like like it's we've gone over oh blue, blue X's artifacts, but there's different decks within it. And that's one of the things that's nice about having it be a command to keep. Like this is the command is going to lead you down different directions. They can be nature, they can be more general. And that's quite a cool thing. Given the fact that everyone starts with a commander in the command zone, how did that affect your choice for the other cards in the cube? So the cars aren't specifically legendaries that can be run as your commands, like like the other 400 or so odd cars, like like like like at a base level, I can see that there's no characters in here that seems like a sensible choice. They're kind of like like like, how did that affect the other cards you picked? Basically, yes. Actually, one of the things that has been quite cool building this cube is that of a bunch of cards that you get to include that don't really work if you don't have a commander in your command zone. So, for example, things like the Cyclops legendary sorceress from Domino, for example, has been really cool. And that doesn't work in those cubes, right? If because you just don't have the density of legends. What I say you do. So, yeah, I've got, like, your compose file offering and try assimilating Inferno in a moment. That's further blackened by that one. But pretty powerful expensive cards. But yeah, with a cycle of resources, you can only cast them if you have a legendary creature in play. So in most cubes, that's going to be too restrictive in this cube edition. That's kind of nice. I think. There's also, for example, the cycle of, cards for free if you can, if you control your commander. These are really powerful. But honestly, they're kind of on the watch list. I saw you ruining everyone's day with deadly violet caffeine carries, which is fair for black Quan. Black removal. That's free if you control your card. Yeah. So. Yeah. So deadly relic is three in a black for an instant. If you control your commander, you may cast a spell without paying his manor. Cost. And it's exile. And its ability is exile. Target creature. So I had this in a deck with with Cass as the commander. And I also had a bunch of tutors. So my game plan was pretty much tutor for deadly. Click on turn four cast Cass, then exile two of their things. Yeah, it's pretty gross. It's quite wrong. And that is quite gross. I can see why you put them in there. These are great, fantastically powerful cards. I can see why you're watching them. I would agree on both. That's aspects. Cool. Yeah, I, I, I, I didn't include, fierce guardianship which is the fee like negates. That's free. If, if you have your point, I felt that one might be too much. Yeah. That's evil. Exactly. On a watchlist. Deflecting swats I think is cool. That's for that one where you get to redirect. But, yeah, those cards are very powerful. There's also a bunch of cards that just, the work in specific decks. Five more like synergy cards for but care about commanders. So, Sky fire Phoenix, I think is a nice and I saw one here that's for, it's a full amount of free, free flying haste. But when you cast your commander, you return it from your graveyard play. So this is nice. And this cube, I think, actually doesn't really work in any of a format, right. Because in actual command, it doesn't care about your beefy fire that you got for free. Right? It's just not high impact enough to, you know, everyone has 40. Like, you have too many opponents. And it doesn't work in any format without a commander, obviously, but in Duel Commander specifically, I think this is a pretty strong card for, for, discard matters at the stack actually. Like you just discard to early cast your commander, you get it back for free and free. Free flying haste is is a pretty potent fat, pox Walker's works in a similar way. Obviously you can get that back in a bunch of other ways. But it does work by casting your commander from the command side. So it just says. But have you cast a card from anywhere of your hand? And there's also just a bunch of interactive spells which line up particularly well against commanders. So things like wash away is a, a counters in blue. So it's a blue to counter target spell that wasn't cast from its owner's hand. But it's got their cleave mechanic. So you could also pay you can pay for full, free manner. And it's based just to cancel their free amount of counter the thing. But yeah, this is a free man account for anything but one mana counter commander is actually pretty powerful. Because you can often predict what turn your opponent's going to cast their commander and leave a blue up for that turn. And yeah, things like price of fame wise, very cheap. If you target a legendary. I just found there quite a lot of cards like. Yeah. There's tails end as well. One the blue counter, target activated ability, triggered ability or legendary spell. But that's quite a nice one because to an extent you do see their commander coming. They're going to try and play on curve most of the time. Exactly. Yeah. It's not it's not a secret. Right. It's so you can five you can plan around it. No. Fantastic. So we've gone over our commanders and we've gone over I kind of like cool cards that we can run, like, cause, like deadly Violet, which are awesome guys that we can now run in this environment that we can't run in a normal cube because we have commanders. Because. Because we're introducing that as a thing. But like, talk to me about, like the rest of the cube, like that, like, like, in terms of a base, like we've touched on that are that are that it does look but that power level wise, it's similar to a unpowered vintage cube, kind of like like, is that the point of inspiration for the rest of the cube? Because like, like a lot of the rest of the cards in here do look quite efficient. Like we have lightning bolt, we have path to exile, we have duress, we have careful study. We have all kind of like the just bread and butter, cards that you would expect to see. Like we have Birds of Paradise in here, like this kind of stuff. Like, like like it's in terms of the rest of the cube. Have you gone for the more efficient cards or the more big Mana Commander cards? Because like, like as I kind of like, is it closer to like, the Mega Vintage Cube? Always it closer to like my treat Yourself cube where like the removal was at like 3 or 5 man of that kind of stuff. Like like where on the spectrum in terms of speed and efficiency. Would you say the cube is hitting? Yeah, we're definitely about efficient cards here. So and this I think has to be the case if you're going to run reasonably powerful commanders. Right. You have powerful game pieces the opponent always has access to and has built DAC around, if you don't have efficient interaction for those creatures, then the games are just going to be, you know, two cars passing in the night. And that can be over very, very quickly. So yeah, the the interaction is pretty efficient, I would say, as I mean, it's pretty much like max efficiency, honestly. We've not we've not gone, we've not gone very persistent. There's no like, there's no soul stashes. And so we've, we've cut like a couple of the absolute most efficient ones. But yeah, we've got really good interaction. We've got good contracts. And the idea is why I don't like we talked a lot about the sort of packages of synergies and the, the builder around the commanders, and that's an important part of it. But, the thing is, if you make the whole cube about, this card's really cute with this commander over here, and this card only works with this commander, then you just end up with. No one has functional stats, right? And then the only things actually matter for commanders, because the rest of your deck isn't doing much. Because you got the few little bits that were good for your commander. But then a lot of the other cards are meant to be working in some other space, and and you don't have that flexibility to pivot around them. But draft, serve as a solid like base of, of of just good cards. And, across most of the colors we've got the interaction we've got for selection, we've got for good and, and some pretty good vamp and green as well. Yeah. As I mentioned, we have Birds of Paradise, we have the hierarchs. That's so nice to see. And also worth mentioning, as well as the the fixing is good. I think most like the jewel colors each have six options plus triumph, plus a bunch of, like, five color plans, like, including things like, like Lotus field and Lotus Veil and the like. So kind of like, like that kind of leads into what we've talked about earlier about, yes. The basics. You have to be color like linked to the color density, but you can get there on a draft point of view if you want to. Oh yeah. For sure, for sure. I've seen you can be pretty aggressive with your the colors you play if you're willing spend fix some of the fixing this cube. I think for me, the funniest example I've seen of this was a, A, a fairy, sculpted deck. So that's for white, blue, black, red legend. And this was with females, where Prismatic Piper can partner with anything so you can partner a five pro event. And that was one in a primarily green deck. I played against that. It was very good. It was strong. Yeah. That's, Yeah, it's some very powerful things for, Yeah. If you're willing to spend the fix on the fixing, you can play a lot of colors in this cube. And. Yeah, so I've, and we've seen like, monarch green commanders specifically, played with a bunch of other colors. So you have to be fairly heavily base green, but that the fixing is fast, to splash moth color cards. But you do just have to bear in mind the scale drafting that, you're not going to get to put in basics if you're actually outside of a color identity. So your flatlands, for example, you know, your polluted delta, if you're only one of those colors in your color identity, you need to fetch multiple. You can't, you can't. Islands. Thompson. If you're not blue on black. No. Yeah. Of course. And then the other thing to flag up is there are some there are just some little packages for the outside of those blood archetypes. We've described as well. There's quite a lot of face actually. So for example, there's like doomsday fast as I recall, thought flash is is a little packet bag package that exists in this cube. And that's, I think, a pretty good thing. You can fast you can, the, the we've had a doomsday tactic really well, already. And you can probably just draft that with any of the commanders, which will use some cards, and we'll get you through your doomsday pile slightly quicker. Right. And you can play as a sort of generic, value game up until that point. So, yeah, it's not all in those soft big macro archetypes, lots of little packages in there as well. Awesome. Yeah. Okay. We're kind of coming to the end of our episode now. Jane, some of you and kind of like, what has been the main takeaway from, like, the building experience, building and play experience of this kind of like, what have you enjoyed the most and like, what have you found most rewarding out of putting this together? It was a lot of fun put together. It took me a very long time to come up with a list I was happy with. Because for when if I wasn't one where you can look online and there's something kind of similar and you can adapt and change at how you like it, I very much felt like going from the ground up, which was a lot of fun, to put it together. And I've actually been really happy with the play experience for the most part. It is very much still a work in progress, I think. I expect this cube to change a lot more, in the next solid. Yeah. I've been saved. My power cube. It's it's not as settled as, I have. I have other ideas of things for and and people keep suggesting cool commanders to me and I want to add them. So, yeah, it's it's very much a work in progress, but I've been pretty happy with how it's played so far. Item one draft that. How did you find that? Yeah, I really liked it. Yeah, yeah, I like so yeah. So we, we we talked about the about the deck I built, in a bit, but like, I'm looking at the deck list. I forgot I had a gristle brand in here. I'd love to see that, but, Yeah, it, what I really liked about it is that it scratched all the itches that I was looking for, which is a really nice thing to get from a cube of like. It. Yeah, as I just. I'm someone who likes trying to. I like the building part as well as the gameplay part, and, like, I like the thing I like about like I love drafting. I was which is the main reason why cube is like my favorite format, because it's like it's like the best draft experience you can get. And the thing I like about command, which I've always struggled with and it's like, why on this channel, I spent four years doing weekly deck decks is the I like the brewing part of it. I like doing it once and then I move on to something else. So that's kind of like how I've always been with commander. So this makes experience is perfect for me because it's literally every time I get to build a deck and then I get to give it back to you, and I like to do something cool next time. For me, I really like I thought, like for me, the best part was leaning into the commander a little bit. For me, I get the impression the best decks are the ones that aren't just being efficient, but are trying to lean in to the command, and get the most and get the most out of it. Like, like you're never going to have the most optimal version of a commander. Like like it's never going to be a one for one rack to deck you build in this, but one that. But the me, I think the decks that will do best are the ones that can make the most out of the commander. So. So it's going to bring that synergy as combined with the power level of the cards. And yeah, yeah, for me that was awesome. And I really enjoyed playing it nice. Yeah, I think it's. Yeah. Yeah. That was at the expense of the whole thing for there's so many really unique commanders that you can bring in and yeah, they're not all fitting into the sort of big archetypes we described, but hopefully most of them are at least very viable. Like, I don't I'm hoping that aren't sort of traps in here. But yeah, like, well, I'm really excited to draft, for example, as, hashtag scarabs fest. Yeah, that's a sweet card. I love that card. Yeah yeah yeah yeah, that's a black and a white. But then when you discard a creature, you can play two in a blue and make a token that's copy of it. And it's like, that's nothing to do with white espers. So on the face of it, doing in this cube, has some big features and there's some ways to discard cards. So I think you can definitely get that, you know. Yeah, I think those commanders are very interesting because they're quite open ended, like, it's not, like there is a world where like, like a card like level, for example. Wait, it does everything. And it's kind of it's like like I guess the fact, because there's so many options is the nice part about this and the fact that because as a 540, you're not seeing every card, so you're not guaranteed like you're guaranteed to get a commander for your deck, but you're not guaranteed to get the best commander for your deck. And I think that is very important. So yeah. So yeah. So, so because I have it on, I, I love because I think I to build this example, I just cuz I think it's really cool when it's, it's very open ended in terms of what you do with it. And I think those are the commanders I'm most excited by. But that might just be me in general. I like being able to like, find this, like finding synergy with my commander that isn't the most obvious. Where is like some of the more recent ones? The value engine plus the wink on if that makes sense. Whereas, like, I don't think it's perfect because it's just it's it screams do something cool with me. Yes. Yeah yeah yeah yeah. I mean I'm like hoping there's a good range in valor you know like and I'm, I actually like it. You know if you want to show off in draft why really you can still do that to you know, yeah. And and the fact that you can and, and again, the fact that there is all the decks here, there is the tempo, there's the agro, there's the control, there's the mid-range, there's the combo. It means that you can't just doodle like and like. Yes, you can pick a four color commander to get access to all the basics. But then there's the world of do I have the man base to make it work? Should I be doing that again? It still has all the complexities and awesomeness of cube, but with it's it's it's like more cube. It's more design choices. And that's what I like about it I think more cube in your cube. Exactly. Nice. Seems like a good way to end that. Yeah. Phenomenal. Yeah. And as we mentioned at the start the list to this cube will be down in the show notes below. If you want to check it out you can do some drafts. There is the playtest function and cube Cobra. Check it out also. Yeah. If you have any comments, put it the easiest way is the YouTube. We are working on some things in the future where we can get more feedback directly from you, more to come on that at some point in the future. But yeah, that is a good place to end it. James. Pleasure, man. Thank you very much there. I thought it was really good. Yeah, I it's a pleasure. Wonderful. All right. Thank you all very much for listening. Do give the podcast a five star review. Good stuff. As you mentioned at the start. Until next time, it's goodbye from me. I say bye from James. And until next week. We'll see you all soon. Goodbye.