Theorycrafting - Every Card Has Morph in a Cube - #87

In this episode of Powerful Nothing, Dan & James talk about what a cube would look like, if every card in it had Morph. If your thinking about building a cube with a unique take on constuction like the 100 ornithopter cube, or DanDan, this is a good starting point as the steps discussed outline how you can come up with your own ideas, and then check if they're worth taking further.

Timecodes:
1:20 - Main Topic
11:25 - How viable is the idea?
15:48 - What is the environment like?
31:11 - What are some cool cards/synergies?

Card Gallery: https://moxfield.com/decks/kkDKQjP_Y06FFZuXBFr_MQ

Cube List: https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/EveryCardHasMorph

Video Version: https://youtu.be/Qo7S65gr3Qg

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

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Transcript

0:02

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 this week? I am yeah, I'm pretty good. I'm pretty good. How are you? I'm doing all right. Thank you. I'm excited because we've got a fun topic to talk about today. Today we're going to be theory crafting, an idea I had for a cube. So what that means is we're not going to be building the whole cube. We're going to discuss this idea I've had and kind of go over some ins and outs, go over the things that you need to think about when you're thinking of putting a cube together that's a little bit outside the box, kind of everyone at the moment is looking to build the next dam down the next 150 cube. And this theory crafting that we're doing today is the first step in making an environment like those, the cube are going to be theory crafting is what if every card in the cube had morph spice? A little topic I think is going to be a bunch of fun. Before we get into that main topic, do make sure you like the podcast. Give us a five star review. All that good stuff. Also, down in the show notes, there will be time codes and a link to a card gallery. We do generally try and read out every card we talk about, but sometimes we get caught up in the moment and we forget. So there will be a link to nice pretty pictures if you want to follow along. If you want to follow along there, there'll also be a link to a video version if you just want to watch, the cards appear in front of you as we talk about them. Yeah for sure. Fairy crafting is honestly a thing that for me generally is like in the pub after you have played a cube and that that's the normal venue. But today we're going to try and do it on a podcast. Since that. So we're going to get some more overtakes as is exactly, well, nice. We can try. I think one important thing to touch on is before we get into the fairy crafting about a cube where every card has morph, let's actually set the scene of kind of how we came up with the idea. And also, if you're thinking of building a cube this outside the norm, like this kind of some steps that you can follow to try and come up with your own environments that work, but some good ways of coming up with these ideas. The first one is restricting yourself in some way. So like take a desert cube, for example. A desert cube is you don't get a land box. You're restricted by not having basic lands available to you. After the draft, you have to draft your lands in the draft well. So 100 Ornithologist Cube. You are restricting yourself by removing all other all of the creatures apart from ornithologists. And then if you take it to the next level, a bunch of other of the most popular cube types are also based on the restriction, like pauper is only using commons, peasant only uses commons and commons and even even to an extent like like horror themed cubes, like the spooky cube, which is really popular as well. They're only using cars that are themed around, like horror tropes and such as a restrictions like that are a good way of getting yourself a nice base for a cube. Yeah, for sure. It's, they can be they can make for cube building process a lot easier. I honestly, I'd suggest if it's your first time you've built a cube and you're not super confident in how to go about it, a few facts you can take. One is like do a take on a cube that already exists, but another is if you go for quite, restrictive restriction, it actually makes for cube building process a lot easier because you just have a way smaller pool of cards to draw from. It's, if you do something really open ended, you have to have quite specific ideas in mind about what you want the gameplay environment to be like, because otherwise you're just going to be kind of overwhelmed by the choice of, of cards available to you, because otherwise you have every card in match excuse for me. And that's a lot. Yeah. Like for a first cube, a great restriction could be every card cost less than $0.50. You can put that into scry for there's a search condition and that will cut down so many of the more expensive cars that are harder to get and harder to put together for your first cube. But there's another way you can build cubes. Instead of restricting you add something. So a good example of this is James's dual command a cube. In that cube, you get the addition, you get something additional of a commander, which is a different type of play environment. Like, again, it's a one on one cube, James's dual commander cube. You're not playing a game of commander. You are playing a one on one game of magic. But you but you get the addition of a card in the command zone that you always have access to. That is something on top of what you get normally, not something you lose. There's also a good example of the ball pit cube. I'll put a link down to that in the show notes. But in that cube, in the ball pit cube, every card is also an MDF. See, with a copy of Chromatic Sphere on the back. Yeah, it's kind of spicy. There's there's a lot of there's a lot of scope for this stuff. You know, if you want, if you want to get creative with it, there's, there's loads of places you can go, and it's, some of them will be fun to chat about ten minutes and then absolutely not workable. Some of them will be fun for a couple of drafts, and some of them like 100 auto flops, is will actually turn out to be surprisingly deep magic formats, you know, I will say like the variance is high among them. I think it's really good if you're going for one of these more out of, cube ideas to find some way to test it a little bit before you go and spend money on magic cards. But I can lead to very rewarding gameplay experiences. That just different, you know, it's, And that's often what you want. 800%. And definitely with the rise of things like proxying has just meant that people are more likely to with the rise of proxying and also the rise of like cube tournaments where people want to try new and interesting things more. There is definitely more of a want for cubes like this. One thing that's important, however, is to keep things on some kind of rails and not just go a bit to harm. One important thing that I think you should really stick by if you're building a cube like this is only change one thing. And again, I'm not your dad. If you want to build a cube where you throw every roll out the window and throw every niche thing at the start at the cube, go ahead. But my gut is cube is already hard enough. People don't have the bandwidth. If you change too much and you will get more out of it. If you pick one thing and really focus on it. As James mentioned with with the restrictions, it makes the building part of it easier, but it's also an easier sell to people who might want to draft it. A good example of this is I was a while ago, I was thinking of building a redacted cube, basically a cube where you take magic cards and a black Sharpie and you scribble out some lines to make new and interesting cards, kind of like like a good example. It's like you remove the words once a turn from a bunch of cards, and then and then you get something more broken. That's really cool. And I thought that was a really cool cube idea. But then when I was doing that, I was also shopping a bunch of lands and like, ooh, these lands come into play on tap now. They're really powerful. So I had the idea of what if I do a redacted cube? There's also a desert, so you have to draft your lands in the cube. But then I took a step back and thought, what is the draft experience of that? What does that look like? You have all the people in the draft having to read all these cards for the first time, work out what they do as well as on top of that, have to worry about how many lands of I drafted. That seems like a pain. And that's where I kind of like you're going. You're being too smart, you're doing too many things. My gut with this is find that one thing, that nub of the idea, and that's what you focus on. And that's what will make your cube unique. Yeah, for sure. And it really wants to be something you can explain in one sentence. Right. You don't need you don't want to be adding a bunch of descriptors like, yeah, A3 cards are more arbitrary creatures and all the way up to visa. Like, you can get that right away. There's an idea, there's a hook, and, you don't want it to be changing a bunch of stuff make it very complicated, and it's halfway through the draft before the players really understand what's going on. Yeah, exactly. Because the reality with a lot of these cubes is they just won't get drafted as much as, like, a normal cube. Our player group will not want to do it every time. They they're more like they want to do one of my regular cubes. I want to James's regular cubes than the one that is completely changing. Flip upside down everything all the time, if that makes sense. Like like the like the 100 on the top two and like this one typically are more. It's not like having too much desert, if that makes sense. You're going to get sick of them a little bit quicker than you would like a cube that is a bit more standard. Yeah, especially if they're quite, you want to avoid from being to like about one of two gimmicks, right? Yeah. I think it's easy to get drawn into that. And then you draft it once and you do the karmic thing, and that's fine. And then you kind of feel like you've done it and you don't want to draft it again, you know, you've got to make sure. Yeah, you actually have enough variety of gameplay experience. You're not just playing the same sorts of games over and over again. That is going to make people want to come back and keep drafting it. Yeah, and I think that's why the 100 on the top two cube works is a great example of like a, like you're really changing the way that you are playing magic with that. Your only creature is this. But how can you make the most of it? And like they found like they found enough ways of taking decks to make it interesting and to make it replayable? Yeah, and enough stuff isn't just pumping my own if opposites, right? Like you said, Vancouver's like, you just gotta, you know, put a bunch of equipment or councils or whatever on your foxes and attack with them and fine. You know, maybe you can take something. Whatever. But the work done is they built something where all the strategies are still about the other factors, but there's a bunch of, of the, the foxes never attack, you know, they're just they're just game pieces that are being sacrificed, still returned to your hand, cost advantage or whatever. And, and, you know, there's a storm that and that's dope. And I think you've got to have those. You've got to make sure you still have a very wide range of decks. And it's not just a couple of gimmicky things, and that's the whole cube, you know, just I'm just laughing to myself, cuz I think every time I've played your for your two bit version of the 130 cube, I've been like the one player without an infinite card drawing. Let we sat down opposite like you and render the end of the show for modo and you'd be like okay, I infinity draw my dick this way or this way. And I'm just like, I'm just casting an overrun. What am I doing? Everything is fine. I've never seen a cube where you so frequently are able to draw your deck and not able to win the game, you know? Haha. Perfect, perfect. But again, like, it's a unique environment that it really kind of is a testament to how it's built, but also how how it was thought about in the first place. I think that's a good position for us to move over to our topic, which is what if every card in the cube had morphed? So what we're gonna be doing is we'll start off with like the questions we need to ask ourselves to see if this is a viable strategy, and then we'll kind of deep dive into some more of like specific archetypes or specific cool cards that could kind of work. In this. There will be a link down to a Q Cobra list. I put this together in December. It's like it's not a full cube list. Don't go there expecting like, by now. Ship it. It's done. It's it's more just a collection of all the cards that I could or initially thought could work quite well with this. So if you want to use it as a base and build it yourself, by all means copy it and keep going. But crack on. Would love to see it. But let's jump in with our discussion on what if every card in the cube had more so I've read more importantly. So a morph is something that can be played facedown as A22 creature for three generic manner. It's colorless and it doesn't have a creature type. It also has no abilities. So with that, ask yourself, what does that mean? What? What is the thing you're changing to the cube environment? Like how is it good, how is it bad? And the easiest place to start is by breaking down the thing that you're changing. So for us, if every card is a morph, what characteristics do more? Well, we know that that's three manner that color spells. There's a bunch of cool effects that care about colorless spells that we could look at. They're creatures. There's a like like like if every cardinal cube is also a creature, effects that care about creatures are going to be better. They they morphs all have to power. There's a bunch of effects that care about either low power or two or less. We could look at running those. They all have toughness. Two that will make a bunch of removal instantly better. Like, things like shocks are really good in this cube because a bunch of people are going to have 202 toughness creatures. Most also have no abilities. They're vanilla. That's cause that care about vanilla creatures. That's an interesting thing that we can play around with. And on top of that, there's also just the general cards that care about morphs. There's a bunch of cool things you can do with morph says, cause it turn morph spikes up, up. That's cards that let you look at a morph that's face down. There's some cool interactions with morph. There's things like like, like like if you flicker a morph, it will, leave the battlefield and come back face up. These are some cool things that you can do because like, once you've kind of, like, looked at the thing, you're changing and just basically go over every timeline but really go over, like every part of the card, everything you're changing, you can really start finding like that's the base to finding cool things to do in your cute. Like that's what they would have done with the 100 on a top two cube. They would have. It's an artifact. It's it's a creature. It has flying. It is zero mana. It's got zero power. How can we? But what cool things can we do with that? This is the very first step in finding the cool things that will actually make your cube work. Yeah. For sure. It's, You want to be starting to think at this stage. Not not really about decks, per se, but ideas and of cost synergies. You can start building the decks around. Right. And ways to, sort of exploit and profit from the V rules quirk you've introduced. If that's the way you've gone with your cubes. This I invite, and that is going to like give you a bit of inspiration when you start to move on to like, what do you want the archetypes to be exactly. And it will also let you know pretty quickly, is there enough, is there enough depth to your idea? If you can only come up with like 1 or 2 things, like eventually those 1 or 2 things are like the basis, like like they're not the final archetypes, but they're like the nubs of the idea for an archetype. And if you just have eight people and there's only 1 or 2 decks, is that a deep enough draft environment? Should you continue? This is kind of the point of this is like, we haven't bought any cards yet, or which cost us is ten minutes having a conversation at a pub or on a discord call. These. This is kind of like the these are the starting points of it basically. Yeah for sure. Honestly, if yeah, if you're struggling for ideas at this stage, there's probably a better cube you could be building. You know? Yeah, it's cost you nothing at this point. Just change the idea to something else and keep on trucking and you'll be okay. But once you have those ideas, you can then start asking yourself, like, what else do we need to think about? Like, how will our change affect things? So with the with this cube, with every card in the cube has morph. There is the obvious question of do we need to run any creatures because like like and there is no correct answer to anything we're asking. Like, I guess design choices of how we take things. My gut is because I think we lose. We would lose too many cool interactions with morphs by not running creatures that I think we've still run creatures, but there is a world where you could build a cube where every card has morph. Do we actually need to run any dedicated creatures? Because all your lands are more? For instance, your sorceries are more like. They are also creatures like they all become like they effectively. They all become like. All your cards are split cards, which are also three mana creatures, but that is a way you could take it. Kind of like on on this one. Like my gut is. I personally want some creatures. No, I hate that I. We don't have any creatures because I think so many of the ways, the interesting things we can do with moths involve them being creatures and I think in that scenario, if if we're all spells, we're probably just going to play spells, base stacks against each other a lot, you know, and largely be ignoring the moth text. Other than I don't need my sixth land, I'll make a great ogre and stats, you know, and that's that's not that fun. Like, sure, you could still have some face down creature payoffs, but it's kind of hard to make them good if you can never flip up your moths, I'd say no. I would agree. And like for me, one of the coolest part about moths is not knowing what it is, is it Will Bender, is it not? Will Bender like if you know for sure it's not a creature that is less interesting to me. But if it's like if there's a world where, like, it could be a creature or it could be a big, beefy creature, I'm going to flicker and try and cheat into play that way. There's more tension there. There's more interesting. So for me, I think that's like I think it's an important one to start with. But yeah, for me, I think we are definitely running creatures. The next one is is a big one as well because but not all effects with morph, but most of them, most cards with morph traditionally have a way of turning themselves face up of un morphing. So I'm going to read Enoch Tracker. This is five and a red for A33 creature hound Scout with fur strike and more for four and a red, so this can be played face down for three generic as A22, and then at any point you can turn it face up for that four and a red cost tradition. I wasn't initially thinking of putting a turn them face up cost, but it is something we could do like that would potentially be manifest. I believe. But James, what do you think about that look like? Like what is your gut like? Should we give creatures that don't have a turn face up cost? Should we give them a cost? So realistically, the cost would be that amount of cost, right. It would be like when you manifest manifest ragdoll or actual manifest a creature, you can just pavement Acosta turn and face up. Right. Yeah. I think both answers here are fine. I think it's a really big, so decision point in designing the cube because, it really dictates a lot of the card choices we're going to make down the track. Right? Because if part of the thing you're excited about for building these cube, this cube is playing with a bunch of the cool creatures that have morph, then you shouldn't let other creatures flip up, right? Because then there just aren't enough reasons to run them off. Creatures. I think it's also partly depends on what sort of power level we're going for here, because, if we do like creatures send up, for example, here, there's some interesting, very powerful stuff we could do, right? Like, creatures with, where their CMC is low, but they, they have a big additional cost to put into play normally, like something like an apartment. Oculus. Right. It would be very powerful. Use type face down. So that's messed up. Yeah, yeah yeah, yeah, yeah. And then, you know, like, flipping into more manifests and stuff. That's cool. But if we game something more low power. But I think if we, if we're saying only moths can turn face up of other creatures. Com then we kind of need to pitch for power level of the cube. Not that a free mana two two is good, but a three mana two two has to be relevant, you know? And that does put a little bit of a cap on what sort of power level we can go for. I think. Yeah. Yeah, I would agree. My gut is I think you get more out of it if you don't let them turn be turned face up, which does lower the power level. And also, there is a world where the branding of every card has morph is better than every card has manifest. Yeah yeah yeah yeah. No. Once not twice. Like I'm thinking of how many clicks am I getting on the on the, how many cards on the cards manifest? Manifest. Does. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Like like like I think that I think that's a key part of it. I kind of like if you are changing it to something like this, I think you need to be very clear. And, like, technically, they won't have, they can be played face down as a morph, but they that make sense as a card. Then also the additional because because everything else will then change depending on what it costs. I think that's an additional level of potential confusion. So my gut is we go with that. We go with every card as morph. They can't be turned off, they can't be turned face up unless they have an ability that lets them do it. And then that's the power level we go with. But with that in mind, that is a very good point of what comes next. We are kind of committing to putting quite a lot of creatures with lots in the cube, and I think, right, because otherwise you have too many mobs. That's, just face down dudes. Yeah, yeah, I agree, on the power level point of view. Yeah, I think we do need to have the combination of for the power level to work, it needs to be good that someone is spending ten three playing a two to. That's the kind of where we need to be like. Like when I think of that, when I think of more to an extent because. And you, you, you, I believe you will go with me on this chain because we're both of a similar start time in terms of coming back to magic. Some cons of talk here. Draft. That was a draft format where morphs was a deck that was viable. And it started with a lot of people going turn one, tap land, turn to tap land. Yeah, I'm on 22 life. Turn three. I'm going to fight my two to yeah. Like that's kind of where we are with this, which is not good or bad. Like it means you don't get to run the most efficient cards by is, but it will make the environment cheaper. It will make the environment more budget, which is always a good thing as far as I'm concerned. If you can put a cube together for cheaper, because in the environment that works like tap lands are good and fit the environment, that's kind of fine. Yeah, for sure. I think, I mean, it's it's not meant to be good and skew paying a, okay sound creature on sentry. Right. Because we can always do that. That's like for floor of our turn three. Right. But it has to be relevant. It can't be like, completely, you know, your opponent can't be doing something that's completely on another level, right? Yeah. And talking of on an on another level, this is kind of where we are. I think it's if that's our goal, it means that we have to be careful with thing with with with cards we're putting in because like we can't have a thing and morph on turn three is the bait. It's kind of like the average. That means we can't have people playing a two man, two powered first striker, for example, or we can't have them playing a two mana 2 or 3, because that just wrecks or combat and that kind of stuff. So that's from our from our level. We are we are very much working around the two mana or like the, the two two is the base of all the creatures as well. Like it's fine to have things that are bigger than that, but we also need to be aware of power level for things that are around the one two, three mana mark. They can't be. You can't have things that shoot up in power level above that basically. Yeah, that makes sense. Probably a reasonable baseline is. But there shouldn't be many two drops that beat them off in combat. Right. And trade them off. I can't beat them off too well. So so that was also something that they did when they went when they brought them forth back. King Kong, when they brought MMORPGs back in counter talk here, when we seen them originally that you could just trade with anything, any amount of mana could trade with any amount of money because they're face down. They can be flipped up, flipping up a more if there's a special action. If you want to feel smart in a draft, it doesn't use the stack. It's not restricted by timings, that kind of stuff. But like, when it when most was brought back in Khans, they introduced a rule of no creature in the set can animal off and kill a two to well, surviving itself. And that's the morph cast with more than five manner. So like it means that if you attack with a morph and your opponent has four manner, you know that you're not going to get blown out. Basically, if they have five mana, then they could, then they could eat your two two basically. Yeah. And I think part of the decision to go down that right was to avoid the thing where I think in a lot of the older, more formats, it sort of felt like your whole game would just swing. Well, I'm guessing which more that I think there was a particular dynamic with. I know the name of someone can tell me, but, they were like legions. Yeah. Maybe legions. Why? Like they were of a form animal where, like, it would slip up and it was a first strike and it would eat your guy. But those are different. More for the same manner. Cost adds common. Where would flip up many feet, dealt damage to a player, would shock something, and you would just say you would just, you know, one of them massively punished you for blocking one for massively punish you for not blocking, and you would just kind of make taking a stab in the dark every time. And that was the whole game. Right? So yeah, I think that was that was the idea between five CMC roll. I don't know. But we need to be like super rigid on that in the Q I would agree. It is something to bear in mind. I would agree. And part of that will just become from a lot of the older morphs are a bit more like some are quite powerful, but some of them are very janky. So I think it's more in this. Q we're probably gonna run the morph cards that are cool and interesting. From a power level point of view, I think it will probably be fine. Like, yeah, my guys, we don't have to stick as, as as rigidly to this as cons draft limited did, but it is a knob. We can turn back the other way after testing is my is my goat app. The next question I think we need to ask is how James is morph now isn't the only type of face down mechanic. There are other face down cards that you can run. I put every card in for me. Every card in this cube has morph, but do we run other face down cards like things that manifest, things that disguise things that cloak things that manifest dread. Like there may be more in that list of of facedown style cards. Like, like, do you think we should run more of those, James? Or do you think that could be a bit too confusing? I think it's fine for them then. Like so. Manifest Red specifically is a mechanic I quite like because you had a lot of interesting overlap with, like, the graveyard stuff. And that's all pretty good. You do need to be quite clever. I, as you know, I'm generally quite lazy. And I just give everyone the, the, infinity power tokens for cube. I think if you were to include manifest and board, you would actually have to get manifest tokens and morph tokens, because it would be slightly confusing in that, in a way that doesn't really come up in normal cubes. Right? Because. Because you can in this cube morpher creature that doesn't have morph. But we're saying that creature isn't allowed to turn face up, but if you manifested it in bits, then it would be allowed to turn face up. That is a potential source of confusion, right? Not saying we can't do it, but it is something to be aware of. I think. Yeah, I'm quite torn on this, because a lot of the cards with these mechanics are very cool. There's some cool design space with them, like, like you mentioned about an Oculus. That is a sweet card. Like it from a power level point of view. It might just be too strong for this cube, but I'm not going to say it's not a cool card that if we're doing face down stuff, would be quite cool. Mike. Again, there is no right or wrong in this. My gut would be you don't run them just just from a ease of explaining things point of view. But I don't think it's incorrect. I would not add the ones with Ward because I actively annoys me. Oh, God. Is it? Is that disguise to disguise it? Those ones actively annoy me. No Ward is going in this cube because I hate. Oh, that's that's a me issue. More than. Yeah, I'll go. Can you imagine? So you could well disguise or morph your disguise cards. Yeah. Yeah, that sounds horrendous. I know I've seen cubes where, people are doing the morphing, and they're just like, the disguise is the same as the more various. No. What? Because it's also does the thing where if there's only a couple of disguise cards in the cube, and you disguise a creature of often morphing it, and your opponent knows what creature it is, and that, as you said, like a lot of the joy of morph is, is trying to work it out right. So there's only a couple of options. It's kind of less fun. No, I think yeah, I would agree. Like, like in, in my head, like if I'm going full I'm making this, I'm getting custom sleeves with every cut, with everything has the more fat on the back. That is, is my big brain play. If I'm doing a sack, I really like that. Yeah, yeah yeah yeah. Well, we really need a sponsorship with a custom currently. Leaf. Yeah, that could be good. Please. Do guys like, like, unironically? If I was building the ball pit cube, the one where every card is also a chromatic sphere on the back? I would do that if you're committing to the bit that much. I think you get sleeves, but that's a separate thing. Because yeah, I think those are important decision points. And again, there is no right or wrong if you're building this and if you're building a cube self, there is no right or wrong. It's it's what you think works best for you and your play group and what you think will be the most fun. Those type of conversations are very important to have very early on, so you are setting the restraint for you. So when you're searching for cards in Skyfall, you know what to to search for. If you're if you if we decide to go with manifest cards, it's a it's an extra keyword. It's an extra search term we can search for when we're looking for cards. It opens the pool that little bit more. If we don't want to have them, then we don't have to search for them. It's like it's just good things to consider. Right. So after they've had those conversations in terms of like what is the play environments like, how fast is the cube, that kind of thing. Like, like, I think it's a point to start where to start looking for some cards that are good. So again, these are not decks. These are kind of like starting points for decks. I think a good place to start with morphs is the morphs. There are there's a bunch of build arounds. So like this would be the same with ornithologists if there was like an ornithologist Lorde, for example, if there was like a artifact that specifically powered up the word ornithologist, I don't think there is. But with morphs, there's a bunch of cars that care about morphs. So a card like Trail of Mystery is a great start. It's one in the green enchantment. Whenever a face down creature you control enters, you may search a lobby for a basic land reveal to put into your hand and shuffle whenever a parent you can show is turned face up. If it's a creature, it gets for supersu until end of turn. That is a morph off. Like James, I'm assuming we like Trail of Mystery. Trail of mystery seems great. Yeah. It's, is important to frame these cards in for right context. Very like because we think of them in our head as built around spike, because that's what they are in every other format. And morph built around. So they're not in this format. Right. But they're just powerful card advantage engines. Right. Because every card in the deck says more now. Sure. If your deck is more built around, you know, just casting the spells out of your hand for some passive movements, morphs, then these will be less good. But, these are not built around in this cube in the traditional sense. Right. Exactly. And, and basically this reads whenever you play a creature effectively, you can go and get a basic land that's very that's very strong. You'll you'll be able to hit this as much as you want. And there is a world where you need to work out, like, is all the payoffs too strong for the environment you're building? Like the other idea I had, which we're not doing, is what if every time had cycling a card like fluctuate, it reduces the cost of cycling by a bunch. So it just becomes a card that lets you just put your whole deck into the bin. That seems like it would break the environment a bit too. Like too much to actually be fun for everyone. Like, I think the next card, might be similar. Like a card like Dream Chisel. This is a two minute artifact that says face down creature spells. You play cost one generic less to play, but that's been around to say one less to cost. So that means all our morphs now cost two. If the base level of all your creatures get cheaper, like this is a cool card. But James, like, do you think this card is too good in this environment? Not having is too good. Next, it's a like a cost reduction is generally going to be less powerful than sort of like secret plans. Okay, I've missed you. I've given you a card advantage because if you just go tend to theme chisel and free morph morph turn for morph ball like I've done. You've got some two twos. You've probably seen running out of cards in hand at this point. Yeah, cuz I'm going to kill your opponent because they can also play some two twos. Even if it's like low rate, you kind of have to do some more than that. I'm not not saying it's a bad card, but I certainly don't think it's busted. There might be some interesting like janky combo nonsense for free cost reduction stuff, I think as well. I do like, like if you can stack up some of the cost reducers, and get your mobs just down to zero, then since, you know, we can get like, paradoxical outcome and, we can, we can really build around it, right. There's maybe even, because it is every card face is a face to face ranking. So you can if you have something like a summoning in. That's fair of, the black enchantment, all the other creatures cost to last, but all your creatures have minus two, minus two. Another cost to you. So you could get the cost down to zero. Right? So all your morphs just end to zero mana die. And then if we have, like, anything. But let's just draw a card on the way through, like, you know, like a midnight repo or secret plans or anything like that and can, like, go of way through our deck. That could be kind of dope, you know, it sounds kind of janky, and it's like few pieces, but maybe, you know, if, if the cube allows it, I this feels like the environment where we should be leaning into the Jags a little bit exactly. Like and like. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I like that because there'll also be cards that make color spells cost cheaper to cast as well, which would be, I'm sure that some draws I'm sure there's a is it all draws that reduces the cost of colorless spells. That could be another I think I have Newgen does I have you can say, color spells. I mean that's too powerful. I think that does. Oh no, it says colorless L draws and spells. Yeah. Herald of causes a like one and a one. And is it two four. Otherwise it's your own devoid and colorless spells you cast cause one generic list of cast. That's another one of those effects. But there's definitely something that that could be quite cool. Like look like it again. If you can find these different decks, then that's that shows that you're onto something. Basically, if it's not just just things smashing into each other, everyone doing the same thing, if we can make a cool deck with it, then I think that's a a good sign. There's something that like like you've mentioned secret plans a couple of times, James, I'm going to read that one out now. That's, green and a blue for an enchantment. Face temperature control, get a zero plus one. And whenever a parent you can show, turn face up, draw a card. This might become the best card in the cube since. Very powerful to snap. Yeah. So we would need ways of interacting with enchantments. There are plenty of morphs that, morph and destroy enchantments, which is nice, but yeah, it seems tiny said. But then also like, if we can't put secret plans and I'm off cube fam, what? How are we doing? You know exactly. We just accept that this is the Black Lotus of this card. It's this, is this 14 cent uncommon from kinds of talk here that, I'm so happy with this. Yeah, there's a bunch of other cool morph cards, like some that stood out to me. You have a card like Cadena slinking sorcerer. This is the four mana sort I commanded that that lets you play the first of the first facedown creature spell you cost each turn, cost three generic less to play, so it just gives you a free morph every turn. And it also, whenever you flip a more space up, draws you a card. That one seems pretty solid. There's a couple of effects that do similar things like that. Another type of one change. What I would do. Think about these. Like I quite this could be a bit too inside baseball, but like what do you think about cards like Lens of Clarity and Smoke Teller? These are cards that basically let you look at a face down creature. Don't forget keeper for lens as well. Absolute banger. Oh one mana one two. Phenomenal in the, field in the two two with the same topic. Yeah. So like baseline these effects are really bad. Invert. Like it's not. It's just not worth a card normally to look at, look at the face sound creatures. Right. But I think it's really cool. And I would like. To be able to include some stuff that makes this good. Yes. I think one kind of interesting thing you could do with this effect, though, to make it playable is, if you have a peaceful ways to flicker your opponents stuff, it's kind of interesting, right? Because normally when you if you flicker a face down creature, then it's going to return to a battlefield face up if it's a permanent. But if it's an instance of sorcery on the other side, then it's just going to go away. So you, you don't really want to be out there just flickering your opponent's face down creatures without knowing what they are. But if you have a lens of clarity in play and you can see that face, that face down creature is a, is an instance of sorcery or even, you know, even a play game. It's a land you don't care about from having bland, and you can start flickering them. So that would be a kind of cool build around the thing you could do with the lens of classy type effects. Yeah. Weaponizing flicker down and removal seems like. Yeah, it's you're leaning into the unique aspect of this game. I think that's quite cool. There's some other cards I think could be interesting. You have cause like Exodus or Reality sculptor and skirt alarmist. These are both cards that effectively have an ability that turn a face down creature face up. So it's a way of flipping up your morphs and also flipping up your creatures that aren't morphs. I don't have a well, I've lifting up your non morph ability based creatures. It's a it's a draw is also a five mana three four with with with a lord effect for morphs. It gives off more plus one plus one. I think these are quite cool. I think you probably like these. Seem like the real like they're kind of cool build arounds that you can lean into. Like effectively, effectively. James Cook alarmist alarmist is one and a read for one to haste when, turn target face down creature. You can troll face up anytime you sacrifice it excadrill and skulk omastar basically sneak and show. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I'm not sure we're getting a Crystal Van Dam rescue, but if it was there, you could play it face down for three mana and then turn it face up. Nothing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a bunch of, like, morph matches cards from around the years. And also you can look up cards that say like face Down. I think those are kind of the ones I kind of, like immediately came to mind in terms of like, these are quite powerful. I know there's a lot of them morph, kind of like cool effects kind of revolve around those type of things are either like drawing you cards in some way or they're like turning morphs face up, like those are those are some cool effects. I think we can definitely look at running and like, I yeah, my guys, outside of secret plans, I think they're all fine. They're all cool when they're good, build around and secret plans is just kind of like it's a like there's a world where like HQ Cobra, where you pick where you select the picture of your deck. It's either going to be the morph picture or it's going to be secret plans, basically. So I think it's iconic enough. You probably still run it. Let's move on to some other things that kind of get better in this environment because like, like again, we're going back to that list we had at the start of kind of like what are characteristics of morphs that we can lean into. So one thing that's important is like, cards that remove tattoos. Fantastic. Like where is the level and removal? Like, like disfigure gives a creature minus two, minus two shock. Just deal. Two damage to a creature. Ceremonious rejection. Single blue instant counter target color spell. Infernal reckoning. Single black. Exile. Target. Colorless creature. You gain like, equal to its power. Like these become very, very good. Like, I think for the target removal, I think we still run these, but, like. Oh, I think we run these. I think a pirate plasm might be too good, but where do you think on the power level of the removal? James. Yeah. I mean, I think we've kind of found mine that people can and presumably will still be just casting a bunch of fake face up creatures a lot of the time. But it's like, it's not it's not like every game is just going to be I have four tutus and you have four tutus, like, that's a thing we're doing in the cube is building building around for the face down creatures and maximizing them. But it's not like we're not casting any other spells. Right. So I feel like we could go a bit too deep. Just targeting tutus with removal, and it may be ends up at the point where, the tutus get worse and casting features face up gets better. So, I mean, we can have a little bit of that. I think. But I wouldn't go go to Ham on it because I think we, we kind of want to give people reasons to cast their creatures face down. And I. Exactly. Yeah. So so that's the thing. These guys are all super efficient and they're like the first things that will come up when you look at them. But there's a world of like, should all of, removal be at full manner so that people can actually play their morphs and then they get answered rather than like it just it comes down and they already have the manner to answer it, basically. Like like there's like a reasonable discussion. Like it's like like in my Treat Yourself cube where the goal is to go a bit bigger. Most of my removal is bigger because I don't want someone building a big engine and putting that much amount of putting something into play, and then it's just sawdust. And like that. The investment in manner is so much like is is a big blowout, basically because you spent seven minutes put to do something, they spent one minute to answer it. That's a real feel bad. Yeah. I mean, I think I'm thinking it's the worst thing for people to be able to, you know, answer a more faster man of advantage and figure out the end of the world. But I just wouldn't want to have too many of, small ball the movable spells that hit the moths that don't hit any of the good face of creatures. You get to cast strikes. I don't want it to be like someone plays a bunch of two twos when the other person plays A33 and goes for a cast of three for each face up and that explains everything. You know, we I think we need to be able to to answer cards for people to cast as well. Like. Exactly. Yeah. So say it looks like maybe like we're not going to run every disfigure and every shock effect. But like if we have like a big colorless section that is just as at the cards as well, then maybe the colorless counterspell gets a bit more interesting. It's not just it's not just answering the morphs, it's answering other things as well. Maybe that's a good way of of doing it. The other thing about morphs is that they are all generic creatures. So like you have a card like Morrigan, the petroglyphs, three and a three and a green enchantment. Creatures with no abilities get plus two plus two. Like this seems like night. Like like like like for some people. They will love building a combo edge. And some people will like smashing morphs into your face. That seems like a pretty solid, like, build around for that. Like, would you go along with the James? Yeah, this is interesting. I kind of feel like you need maybe some other ways. What I'm thinking about this is what's the curve look like where this is actually great with just casting face down creatures, you know, like, why go, like, ten feet more, turn form more, turn five cast petroglyphs attack. Looks okay. It's not amazing. My gut is my guy's dream. Chisel. Morph. Morph is good in the dream chisel attack. That's true. Yeah yeah yeah yeah. Like, that's that's where I think this is good. And it's I, I added this one to the list because we've played a cube where this is the aggro deck. The blue nothing cube. This is what beats you down. It is it's play a bunch of morphs and then play and then work on geometrical. This is the thing that can kill you, like, like like. I think my gut is that these games had the have the potential to go long. And I think this is more interesting than an override because it's still leaning in to what the cube is doing. That's very true. Yeah. Yeah, I, I'm not to I don't think it's like cracked. I yeah, I think you could do some work. No, I agree, I let's the other thing as well with mods is they have two power. So there's a bunch of cards that reward you for playing cards with two or less power. Like there's a card like Arabella abandoned doll. It's, red in the white one three. Whenever it attacks, it feels like time. Switch opponent and you gain next life, which is the number of creatures you can with power. Two or less. We have cause like said, condo of Gomorrah to green and a white to five flanking. That's the main downside of this card. You have to remember what it does, but it does have a reminder text vote. But it says switches your opponents control without flying or which can't block features with power two or less. So this is a nice way of weaponizing your morphs, making them unblockable. That's kind of cool. There is also the there's the Simic accessory that I'm a big fan of is the one with the it's the experience down to one that whenever a creature with power two or less enter the battlefield on your control, you get an experience counter. Then at the beginning of combat on your turn, but explosion counters on another target which you control, which is the number of Spanish cannons you have. There's an interesting things you can do it like like basically one thing is we don't have to run all of these, but this is a nice avenue we can don't go down. There are rewards for which is having power two or less like this seems like similar to the Miranda petroglyphs. It's like another way I think you can take an aggro deck in this format is what I'm trying to get at. Basically. Yeah, for sure, for sure, because I think we're not. If we're saying we're not going to put in loads of super efficient two drops, if we want an accurate deck, it kind of needs to be doing something else not right. So yeah, it's nice to have some options. Nice. And then the other aspect of morphs that we can really dive into is that they are colorless. I'm assuming, James, you're a big fan of a card like Mystic Forge in this type of environment. Mystic Forge is for mana artifact. You can look at the top card of your library any time. You may cast artifact spells and color spells on the top of your library. Tap Pay one Life exile the top card of your library. Now, the real question I'm going to ask you straight away as a rule question does this work? I'm pretty sure it does because it's run in a bunch of morph ADHD eggs. So therefore, unless ever I have seen this before and fallen for right? Just completely building up a rules interaction. But I'm pretty positive this works the way you want it to. And if it does, do we like it? J yeah, it's really powerful, right? Like because, you know, in various morph stacks that only cast for morphs off the top face in in our Q the cast, that's the thing. It's it's super powerful, especially if you get any of those cost reductions going. Seems like a very powerful thing to be doing. And this keeps me, like, even with no synergies, I think it's really good. And yeah, if you, if you get a cost reducer going, it seems pretty busted. I, I, I like this is, is the start of something powerful. If it helps, I'm looking at the numbers on Ed rec 751 people are running this in their morph command deck, so it's not us. Who's wrong? I'm you. That guy? Yeah. Make sure. Let's go with that. Yeah? Yeah, but I, Yeah, there's some other colorless matters cards that are really cool. Like. Like a card like Ghost Fireblade. Seems quite solid. One generic for an artifact. Equipment. A quick way to get some supers to equip. Three or go as far as by ability. Cost two less to activate if it targets a colorless creature. So again, we have some range with, aggro here of. It's a cool artifact, but it's a good artifact that plays with what the deck is trying to do. It's a better bone splitters, which is not nothing at. It's got very powerful. Yeah. If you played cons of top tier limited, you know, what's up for a ghost Fireblade? Because it's boxy. When you flip them off, it doesn't leave the battlefield as well. So the equipment will still be attached. That's kind of hard. Yes, I do like that. And then, another card that I think is quite fun is a card like Gruesome Slaughter. This one, it's hot. Six generic for a sorcery until end of turn target colorless. Oh, that's like another term. Colorless creatures you control gain tap. This creature deals damage to equal to its power to target creature. So you're turning your your, your board of morphs into removal, which is quite fun. Then it also doubles up with cards like, that there's a bunch of Rattus cards from around this sort of time from. But it was in the card that do similar thing with color switches. There's like Barrage Tyrant, which is for an a red breath for a creature that says, two in a red sacrifice, another color creature barrage tyrant deal damage equal to. It's like a equal to the sacrifice, which is power to target creature or player. You can start throwing your morphs at other people. That's kind of fun. There's a bunch of other effects, kind of like nettle drone, fly, a drone, and molten nursing that also like, will ping your opponents when you cast colorless spells or do things with colorless creatures, like there's a whole kind of like colorless matters section here. It's kind of, I think works with the power level, like there's a world where Mystic Forge is a bit too, big and dumb, but it's very cool. So we're probably gonna run it. Everything else is kind of like a decent power level with it. Like. Like we could go as high as, like like in my in the list I've got. I do currently have bug an eye of the storms, which is the big seven manor again, the exiles stuff. Whenever you cause a color spell that might be too good, but like there's a real depth of colorless matter stuff that will that we can look at that, that would work in this cube, I think. Yes, we can specifically use a lot of the ultra stuff. Right. They've they've gone back to that well, a few times with, or they'll toss sets up a bunch of colorless, massive stuff, which is going to work pretty well here. But yeah, yeah, there is a ton of really cool, like, colorless matter stuff that I think you can really lean into. Like there's also cards like like Forsaken Monument, which basically gives all your colors, which is plus two plus two, which I think is going to be quite solid. Like there's that there's so many of those options that I think are quite fun. We've touched on flicker. Like, I think flicker is going to be really good because it, it can be removal that is really interesting, but it's also a way of cheating things into play, like in morph decks in general, like, a chroma Angel of wrath, I think is the red one that has morph anyway, and that it's emulating that or flickering that is good in a bunch of formats like, that's basically. Yeah. As you went over when you flicker a more if it comes in on the other side, so you can cheat on a bunch of matter. But that's not the only thing you can do. Like, there's also things like polymorph effects. Real polymorph effects are really fun. These are effects that let you sacrifice a creature to go through your deck. And until you hit another creature and you put that into play in this deck, what I think is quite funny is that if you run polymorphs, you have the creatures like the rest of your deck is creatures, so you only have to run the polymorph effects, some interaction and your cheat targets, and you kind of have a cool deck. What do you think of that one, James? Yeah, I think that's sweet. Yeah. So, I mean, it's kind of like building an oath deck, right? Where we're specifically trying to not have chief creatures because all of our spells double as crew chief creatures. And, yeah, it's nice in this cube for even if with the cheating stuff. And by flipping them off, we don't actually have to have top big top end fats that have more of that can be anything. Because while we can't flip from face up by paying a bunch of mana if they don't have morph, but we can still performance by play face down. So yeah, I really like this. I think the polymorph is a really nice idea, because I think it's good if you're going to put big uncomfortable creatures in your cube. I really like to have more than one bite. Chief play, you know? It makes it feel a lot less one dimensional. So, yeah, I think polymorph some flicker life sounds great. Yeah, yeah, I think they're going to be a bunch of fun. Like. Like, Yeah. Like those, like those along with, like, excadrill and, skulk alarm. As we mentioned, I like the fact to be like, this is our kind of combo deck. Like, I think that's kind of like you can classify it like, oh, it's a version of a combo deck because you are a plus B equals and you are cheating something cool out of it. Like, like it isn't the infinite of combo, but like we we've already gone over some decks to do that as well. What's nice is like, I kind of like by talking about these cards that are good with morphs or do interesting things, we kind of we have our aggro deck, we have like some combo decks and like, like, like like building a control deck in this format. James probably isn't going to be that hard. Like, like, like maybe we do run one pirate plasm or something like that, and like, that's, and like, like, like, like there are ways of removing small creatures. There's ways of interacting with stuff like, like of holding down the board. Like that is a base for a control deck. That seems quite easy to put together. Yeah. I think quite a lot of what the control deck is going to be doing, right is, You want to kill the few cards that actually matter, the payoffs, and you have them have some cheats for a while, and then you play a pirate class and, the I guess the thing that makes it slightly more challenging for control by going into the late game is that a lot of your plan with control going into like game of why you get advantage is you have cards, your spouse do you stuff, productive things to do with your mana and your opponents split it out. And that doesn't happen as much in escape. Like even though they might not have exciting things to do, they can always play two twos, you know? So you do just have to be prepared for that and make sure you can actually turn the corner then, and play something more powerful at the top end. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, yeah. It's it does completely change. Like like, yeah. They always have a creature to play so that it's definitely a different mechanic. But I guess you always have a blocker to play, but it is like a Yeah. Like like, yeah. There is some there's some ways we can take that. Another deck I think could be quite cool is like, is using cars like horizon Stone and crucifix got a horizon. So like horizon Stone is a five generic for an artifact that says if you would lose unspent mana, that mana becomes colorless instead to. Basically you can use these as battery. So if you tap it, if you don't have a if you don't have anything to do your of for you, just tap it and pocket on the horizon stone in your Manipal. Where this gets interesting is with cosmic like untap your lands on other people's turns so you can start making a lot of mana, and then you can just power it into big colorless spells. So maybe that's where all you can comes in. But but like also if we have the if we have the, car draw engine, when we play face down spells, we can then just park all this mana and have one really big, powerful turn where we're just playing and we're playing a morph face down with a bunch of with the other with ones about Park Manor. We draw a card, we do it again until we find the way of winning the game. Like it's. This is very early draft, but I think there is something there. And I do think a big mana deck is a nice way of taking this type of cube as well. Yeah for sure. I mean, for big Man on deck, Chronos H this be a deck that's interested in the more expensive to unlock features, right? Yeah. Yeah, depending on what power level we go with. Yeah, like, get some Sargon molars or whatever. And then, Yeah, I was thinking more. We had cast a across in Colossus. Yeah. Give me, give me a while. He locks it down anyway, I know, I mean, that's a slam dunk. We knew that was going to be. It's not clear to me that. Well, the locks are done and you can can be in the same cube, but, But we'll try. We'll make it work. We sure will try, James. Nice. And then. Yeah, I think one of the combo that we probably mentioned is a pretty classic, morph combo with Bryn elemental, SUV and shapeshifter. Like, effectively, what this means is if you get these two working correctly, the brain elemental, when it's turned face up, your opponent skips their untap step, and the vision shapeshifter basically puts it down. So with these two lock pieces in play, your opponent never untapped. Very classic like they. This has been the same draft format twice. I think. In times by auto in. Yeah. And it as well I mean it has a remastered you could do this. That seems quite classic thing that that will, that will probably be included because it's a cool, iconic thing that morph can do. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think it would be. I think the, the people would lose their minds if you build it as a morph cube and you couldn't pick up someone you know. Yeah. No. 100 and like, I must think of like, what we've gone over isn't the final pass like. But yeah, this is sort of. But this is sort of a call to action to you all up there, like. Like if you want us or if you want me or James to carry on building this, let us know. It's something we can definitely look at. But if you want to take the less than, continue building it. Go ahead. There's a bunch of cool cards in there like it's. I do have a list of 172 cards that I think could work in this type of environment. I think we haven't discussed how big the cube would be. We haven't discussed like, like, is it going to be balanced around all the colors? Like traditionally morphs tend to be in more team colors. Like that's not where we are in the in the conversation yet. We are in the is there enough different things that are cool? Is there enough decks that are interesting to actually take it further? And I think that there's definitely something there with James. Would you go along with that? Yeah, I think it's an interesting idea. I think there's a lot of different directions. There's a lot of different sort of power levels. You could you could shoot for here as well. Yeah. I mean, if you do take care of it, if you do take it forward anyway, do put the list in the comments as well, because I've certainly be curious to, to see what people come up with. Yeah, 100%. But yeah, I think that's where we're going to end it today. James. Pleasure, man. Yeah, I thought that was a really good chat. And like, yeah, I do this type of like, this is the part that I this kind of like early design part of the cube is this is really gets my timid juices going. Yeah, yeah yeah. This is look at that for sure. Yeah. Now always a pleasure. Nice and yeah yeah. Oh yeah I did for thank you very much for listening. Do make sure you like share subscribe. All that good stuff. I hope people found this conversation helpful because yeah, that's just been such a big uptick in people trying to find the next hotness in terms of cube and kind of like the steps we've gone through, I think are a good base for anyone doing that. So hope you all found it helpful. Until next time, it's goodbye from me and say bye from James and we'll see you all soon. You'll take care. Goodbye.