Legends Matters in Cube | Archetype Breakdown | #98

In this episode of Powerful Nothing, we breakdown the Legends Matters archetype, something that's fast growing into the best creature type matters deck you can support in cube. We'll breakdown the small changes you need to make to be able to support this in your cube, as well as go over the key cards to make it work.

Card Gallery: https://moxfield.com/decks/19sRUVj-eESvkHHh0Vy6sA

Timecodes:
1:15: Overview
7:59: High Powered Version
23:54: Budget Version
28:31: Support Legends Matters in a Cube
37:58: How the archetype will get better
41:44: Dangers and Pitfalls

Video Version: https://youtu.be/Av5spjw2cDA

Cube Skeleton Episode: https://youtu.be/92aS4ZU_nd8

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

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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? Yeah, I'm doing pretty well. I'm trying to emotionally recover from watching England play Dr. Congo. It was quite traumatic, but we're still here. We're still in I. By the time you hear this episode, that might not be true. We might have lost to Mexico. But for now, we're still in. Yeah. Doctor Congo. We're actually quite good. It was kind of worrying, but. Yeah, yeah, yeah. As at time of recording is still coming home. James, it's going to be okay. Yeah I feel it's exactly. Yeah. We have a great topic for everyone this week. This week we're going to be talking about Legendary Matters in Cube. It's something that kind of we talked about a bit during our recent set review for the Marvel superhero set, because there's so many legends in that set, it kind of makes this whole archetype a bit more viable. So today, we're going to be doing a bit of a deep dive on that archetype before we get into that topic. However, down in the show notes below, there will be a link to a card gallery if you want to see any of the cards that we're talking about today. There will also be a link down to a YouTube version if you want to see the pretty pictures move around the screen while you're down there, please consider giving the podcast a five star review greatly helps us out. All right, but with that preamble other way, let's talk about some absolute legends. So the Legendary Matters archetype is definitely something that's kind of got just way more juice over the last couple of years. And it's primarily because of it's an archetype that is just tremendously benefiting from the way they are designing magic over the last couple of years. Like creatures and creature based strategies are getting better. Like like the Vintage cube now is more about playing to the board more than it ever was. And then because of commander and universes beyond, they're just way more legendary creatures than they used to be. Like James, I think we talked about in the last set, like there was like 350 odd legendary creatures in the Marvel set alone. Like there's just so many. Like we're just seeing them more and more in every set. Yeah, it's kind of insane, isn't it? I mean, it's to a certain extent make sense, how Universes beyond works with most franchises, I guess. Right. You can't really make a marvel set where that doesn't have a stupid amount of legendary creatures. But, yeah, it does feel like we are trending in that direction where you don't have to try to have a bunch of legends in your deck. Yeah, we're getting it from that access. And also the commander access as well. There's just a general rise of quality legendary creatures and just having more good creatures be legendary in the game means that, on average, more of a cube is going to be made up of legendary creatures. And that means we're getting to a point where you can support a dedicated legendary deck without too much trouble. It's kind of like how it's not like how humans has been the easiest way to do a creature type matters deck in cube, because so many effects have been on humans nowadays, so many effects are being printed on legendaries that very quickly this will become the number one creature type matters archetype like in the Mega Vintage Cube. At time of recording around 29% of the creatures in the cube are legendary, and that's just the regular cube without even trying to support this archetype. Yeah, exactly. And because we're, you know, dumb in most formats, legends come with a downside. And they just don't. And cube because we're playing Singleton. Anyway. So this is if it's something you want to support in your cube, it's it's really not difficult to get that, that critical mass that you need. Yeah, exactly. And and yeah, if you just do a search for your cube in Q-Global, you will find that a lot of the creatures in your cube are going to be legendary. And basically to turn this into an archetype or a package, it's a few easy changes that we're going to be going through today. And what's nice about this archetype compared to other creatures like matters archetypes, is that we don't really have to run too many bad creatures like like like like it's not like we're supporting elves or goblins, so we have to run a bunch of a bunch of cards that are very narrow and only go in that decks, like most legendary creatures that we're getting nowadays, are actually going to be pretty pushed. Yeah, for sure. And even though it isn't, you know, legendary isn't technically a type of thing in the same way as elves and goblins, fights are super type, not a creature type. But I do think that is the right way to think about it is kind of just a label that comes on our creatures and cube, right? And it's more abundant in magic now than any creature type ever has been. And we are getting more and more like actual decent pay offs for maker. It worth pushing as a theme. So yeah, an interesting one to look into. I think actually. Nice. So kind of let's actually do a, let's kind of ship it back and actually going to go over what is the archetype trying to do. So effectively the legend matches archetype is rewarding us for playing a bunch of legendary creatures. What it wants is a wide board state of legendaries, and a bunch of effects that reward us for playing legendaries. Like that is how it is. That kind of type of matters. Decade is kind of like elves is kind of like goblins. But yeah, as James mentioned, instead of the creature type mattering, it's the super type. The deck still functions like those type of decks. Like like we still want we want the deck to be made up of a bunch of legendary creatures, and then we want effects that help out those legendary creatures. We want lords. We want things that maybe buff up the power and toughness of legendary creatures. We want cars that that maybe make them cheaper, or maybe give them protection or a keyword. Basically, you're building up this board state, you're turning them sideways and you're winning it. At its heart, it is a classic creature strategy because legendary creatures are all creatures, because of the colors of the payoffs. Generally speaking, this is going to be a near base deck. And now at its heart and cube nowadays is very creature centric, kind of. James, would you kind of go along with that? Yeah, I think that's certainly like the most straightforward way to build a house. V a lot, a lot of the best payoffs are concentrated in those colors, and it's great to have a lot of legendary creatures. We first need to want to play a lot of features. And, that that tends to be what Nia is about. Like blue, blue control decks don't, easy to pivot into this space in the same way it's your, your vet or, you know, your white green decks are. Exactly. And it's I think it's a, it's a thing I like. It's not yet at its core, but with cube, if your manner is good, there's nothing stopping you splashing here and there. But like at the core of the deck, what you will see as we start going through some examples of cards is that the core of the deck is that kind of near base. And then the other thing to talk about is what power level of cube could this go into? Personally, I am of the opinion that this could go into a pretty high powered cube all the way down to some more budget cubes, but worth saying it from the from the bat. James, I don't think this can go in the most powerful cubes that are just running efficient cards. And like, we're not running bad cards in this archetype, but we still need room to make some choices and cube construction to support it. So I think that's largely true for moment. Yeah, I, I do wonder about with a couple of these very powerful payoffs, sort of specifically mock Sam, but I do wonder if we're just at the point in or close to the point and Power Cube where we could just put that card in, and maybe it would be very good, you know, like maybe you can kind of legends enough of the time now. But yeah, in general for these like slightly more built around the payoffs, I think you're, you're probably not looking at powered cube, but you're looking like just the next level down from that because you want it to be a high enough power level cube fit. You can run. All these are cheap, cheap, efficient and, and powerful legends, right? Because the way most of a payoffs work, you know, we don't want to be all about legends that cost four and five mana. We want to be starting test legends on ten, 1 or 10 to. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, this is quite a curve out. It's kind of a it's a curve out beat down deck with some added synergy. But the synergy is that they're all legends. I kind of how we split this up is we've kind of got like a more higher powered, optimal version of this list and then we have a more budget version as well. So we'll go over both in this episode. And some of the higher powered ones are actually still quite budget. So they can go in the more budget version. But we did want to split it up just in terms of like here is the optimal version, here is more budget version for people running more budget environments. Yeah. James, as you touched on mocks, Amber might be the strongest card here. Potentially. Mox Amber zero mana legendary artifact to at one man of any color among legendary creatures and plains walkers, you control Jesus. This is $75. Now I just realized that. Wow. Yeah, very powerful card. Which, if you're building around it, if you have those cheap legendary creatures, this is a free Mox in your deck. But also it's a free Mox that only you want. You're going to get past in a cube. That's quite tempting. What do you think about Mox Amber in this deck? Where is it? It's really. It's really what we're saying we're looking to have around like, well, in our in our 23 card deck, we're looking to have about 15 or so legendary creatures. Would you say fifteen's ambitious like fucking sick. If we can get to 15, I think. I mean, we 15 is about for creature account. We're looking for in a lot of decks, right? So if we say now, maybe we end up playing like two dozen legends or something, and we will, we end up with like 12, 13 legends, like, okay, 12 plus maybe realistic. Yeah. But, no more examples. Very powerful. The answer you have, Mox. Amber I'm not really looking at total legend count. I'm looking at total legend count at mana value like two or less, because this isn't a very good card. If it starts working on ten, four, you know, you really need that early legend to get for to get the explosive cap out. Because the dream is, let's say you play like a Bhagavan, for example, on turn one, then you could go Mox Amber, play another one job right away is, you know, given with not talking about power cubes, like, that's going to be a faster than anyone else can do. But five are going to be, you know, even in a deck where you build around there. Well, there are going to be draws where it's awkward, like they just killed your first legend, and it just doesn't tap for mana until that later into the game where maybe it doesn't matter so much anymore. But yeah, but the way it works, Mox and that's very, very powerful. No, exactly. And a card it'll pair up really, really nicely with is one of the bestest boys in all of magic. Is Yoshi Maru ever? Faithful? Is a single white for A11 legendary creature dog that says whenever another legendary permanent entity battled under your control. But a personal encounter on Yoshi Maru ever faithful, this is kind of one of the peak examples of cheap white creatures that we're going to play this, and then we're going to play our Mox Amber. It's going to get a counter. We're going to play another one drop afterwards. It's then going to be A33 on turn one. That's that's very strong. And this is a great example of a reward, a reward that this deck is after. It's a cheap, aggressive creature that can really start beating down. Yeah for sure. If you have somebody who's really good, you know, we we made a comparison to, the humans type attack earlier. Right. Like this is champion of the parish, but the legends. But it's actually kind of better because it's legendary, permanent. And it's also going to trigger off planeswalker, legendary Lands and spring. Yeah, but this can get pretty big pretty quickly. No. Exactly. That there will we will go through a bunch more one and two drop aggressive creatures that that are good that are good in this archetype. Then in a little bit when we get to the support section. But let's just go through some more high powered kind of payoffs, as it were. One way that this deck can be can get more powerful is by we've seen a card like like Yoshimura. It comes down cheap, it gets bigger, it grows. But then having some Lord effects again, it's a type of matters that we want. Lord effects. We have cards like flowering of the white tree. That's a white white for legendary enchantment that says legendary creatures you control get plus two plus one and have Ward one. It. It also buffs on monolithic creatures, which is also nice. And then you have a card like Hagar loyal bodyguard. This is a red in the green for three three. Legendary creature, human soldier with sacrifice. It legendary creatures you control get plus one base over again. Instructable into lender turn. So it's a nice little anthem effect and also protection because again this is a board base deck. These decks would love to run a card like Heroic Intervention, but you don't always get them into cube. This is a this is a protection effect for this deck. And also it's that little extra bit of power buff if we want to trade up wins with some creature. It's kind of like, how do you feel about Lord effects in this type of deck? James Yeah, I think this is where you want to be. It's, and I think there's a variety of approaches you can take. So the Legends Matter archetype, it doesn't all have to be go wide beat down, but I think it is kind of the easiest to build. And these these go wider. These lot effects can be very good. Especially something like, flowering of a white tree vine, where you might just be supporting a go wide white deck already. And this is just, it gets a little bit better if you're also happened to have lots of legends, but it's already like, pretty reasonable. It's just, it's just an anthem. I. I think it's one of be one of the quite nice things about this is not as a, as a package. Is that a lot of the cards don't ask you to be all in, I think often the way Obi is. Yeah. You have the ones that are quite all in like mock samba. And they may be get played slightly less of the time, but they're very good when they do get played. And then you have, you have stuff like flowering of the wide tree, which is a more reasonable card on its own, like so it's just plus one plus one. Your seemed to mana. Yeah, exactly. A token deck will just run that like it can get into a cube without having to be in this archetype, which is nice. Exactly, exactly. And that's that's a bit easier to slot in, although the, the double white cost is, is not not nothing. No. I'd agree. Some other cool payoffs. I want to touch on, we have cause like, snow keen eyes protector. That's one. And a white for a two. One legendary creature, bird scout with flying vigilance, you can tap it to exile it, to gain to life and scry to. And whenever a legendary creature. You can throw attacks. If it isn't blocked, if it is exiled, put it onto the battlefield attacking. And then you have a card like Mary, Esquire of Rowan. That's a red and a white for two to legendary creature, halfling knight with haste. It has first strike as long as it's equipped. And whenever you attack with Mary and A and another legendary creature, draw a card. Why? These are quite nice is that these are kind of card selection. They are card advantage as well. You get on top of the legendary body, you get some filtering, you get the scry with keen eye protector and you get some straight card draw with Mary Esquire of Rowan on top of an aggressive body. These cards are quite solid in this deck of just being cheap, beat down creatures that you're going to want. We then get a call win con with Eowyn. Fearless Knight. This is two red and a white for three for legendary creature. Human knight with haste. And when enters the battlefield, eggs. I'll talk a creature an opponent controls with greater power. Then legendary creatures you control gain protection from each of that creatures color until end of turn. Like there's a world where you curve out into this. If we're just playing a bunch of like, like small rules and regulations and that kind of stuff, we cut out into Eowyn, we're going to exile our opponents best creature, and then a whole board could be unblockable. That's quite a lot of damage. There's a very cool effect in a board state of all legendary creatures. James, what do you think about, like, I know, just throw off a bunch of creatures, but what do you think about those ones? Yeah. Aliens. Cool. I hadn't thought about that cards in a long time, but it is. It's not a weak card on face, Vex. It's, You know, it's not the intent of the creatures just gone. Even if they kill, kill Eowyn, they don't get that creature back. And that protection effect is, you know, so that that can break a board stall very easily. But one thing you do just have to be careful about is, if you make a bunch of attacks, assuming your creatures have protection from lots of colors, and then they kill this and make some upsetting blocks for you, you just need to bear in mind for that as a possibility. But no, there's some cool payoffs there. And, Yeah, I think I think the payoffs are generally like, they're not so powerful that it would be worth doing loads and loads of work to get them to work, but you kind of don't have to do loads of work. You just have to make a few slightly different choices. And then I think you get some pretty good cards out of it. So yeah, I think they're in quite a nice place. Exactly. So there's, there's two bits of interaction and then two lands. I want to go over before we kind of just briefly touch on a more budget environment of this. We have banished to another universe, which I quite like. It's four and a white for an enchantment that says affinity for historic permanence. So affinity, historic permanence are importantly legendaries, artifacts and sagas, whether it's the battlefield exile, target, non land permanent opponent controls until banished to another universe leaves the battle. So this is a nice oblivion ring effect that could cost very cheap in this deck. And then we have a cool one, as is ruinous blast. This is for an a white for legendary sorcery. Which, as a reminder, you can only cast a legendary sorcery if you control a legendary feature or planeswalker and it says exile or non land permanents that aren't legendary, it's not often that a aggro deck gets to run a board wipe. But if you are getting to that 12 legendary count, which will go over in a bit, how you're going to be able to do this effectively could be a one sided board wipe. That's quite cool. What do you think about these two? James. Yeah, it's been as fast moving as fast as very powerful. If you have enough that that density of legends, you are going to want quite a lot because, you know, you would like for attacking. They're not going to want to be carrying your own creatures with us. And obviously can't cast at all if you don't have any, but when it works, it can be very, very good. Like if it's not hard to imagine a scenario where you're just in a bit of a board stall, you cast this, your opponent is left with like one creature and you have a bunch, but it is, you know, it is worth mending with casts like this, but just because you're the legend stack, you do not have, you're not the only person who is going to have legendary creatures in that dark scenario where it won't kill all your opponents, but most of the time. But it will hopefully be killing a lot more fact creatures for next killing of yours. I also just really like the legendary sorceresses. As a template. I think there's a slightly different version of the Legend Stack where you lean into it a bit more, and the, y'all kind of smile offering is another really good one. That said, fall on a black, legendary Sorcery. You destroy one of fact features and reanimate something. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that one's pretty tight. Yeah, yeah, for sure. But banished to another universe I think is cool as well. I would one this if you were doing white as an artifact masters thing as well. I think that's honestly the best tome for this card. Just cuz it's like it's easier to have of artifacts in play, even for legendary creatures and play. Right? Yeah. That's, treasure and all the stuff that comes with it nowadays. Exactly, exactly. But it's a nice little bit of crossover if you're also doing the legends massive thing. No. Exactly. We have two lands in our kind of core section. Before we start moving on, we have Plaza of Heroes, which is a really nice one. It's a land that taps to other colors. It can tap to add one manner of any color. Spend this only to cast a legendary spell. It can tap to add one manner of any color among literally permits you control or for three and tap it. You can exile this land, target legendary creature game text move and instruct all until in a tone. So this is going to be some great utility. It's basically a five color land. It lets us get that nice, manor base as a splash. And the other land. That might seem a bit counterintuitive, but is very, very strong is Caracas legendary land tap to add a white return target legendary creature to its own. His hand. This is kind of a double edged sword because it if it's in a cube, it could record deck. But if we have the Caracas James, we can protect all of our creatures. What do you think about that? About these two? James? Either if this is, I'll take. I think if I was trying to spot legend masses in a cube, I would actually cut Caracas for that reason. It is banned in commander for that reason. Yeah, I think like, not that it isn't very powerful in your deck, but, Caracas is already a bust land, so people are going to take it very highly. So there's no like you're not actually more likely to get for Caracas. As for legends, massive player. If I guess I'll just be taken very early by whoever sees it. And if you're that 1214 legend stack and your opponent just plays Caracas on turn to like lands are not easy to interact with nice stacks, right? Like unless you have like the wasteland of the strip mine. What do you do about that? You know, I just how you play the ones. I was one of your creatures on the back of game. They can't bounce all of your one drops. No, I think I think that's, like kind of a demoralizing play experience for this league that's down it. Maybe it's Caracas I think is when I put this, this together, my thought was like this, this, this, this doesn't go in the most powerful cubes for reasons we've gone over, but it still gets into a cube with that has strip mine and that has strip land and waste that strip mine and wasteland. So maybe kind of like if you're going down the power level from there. So in the more kind of like mid-range in the more budget environments, then Caracas definitely comes out. Yeah, I think that's kind of like I, I, I think it's fun enough. And I think because the deck is very cheap in terms of like mana value, I don't I don't think it's as backbreaking as like, like if this was a mid-range deck where like, all of our legends were like 4 or 5 mana, then yeah, it's game over. We've lost. I think there is a world where we can double dip with them. But yeah, just having a free answer to our whole deck might not be worth the flip side of us being able to bounce our stuff. I think Caracas is still cool in this deck. But yeah, maybe it's like a a bit too much of a silver bullet. Yeah. And it's one of those cards right where I just. It's so free because it's just an untapped white source. But then in, like, a good chunk of matchups, it's just going to be absolutely absurd because it's not just against for dedicated legends player. Right. Like, if you want just has like five legendary features in that deck most of the time. It's just yeah, I just feel like there are going to be too many pretty demoralizing games thing. No, I think that's fantastic. With your fall seeds, I shouldn't. Okay, no. Okay, here's what I've done. I've kept Caracas in the car gallery under, high powered version, but I've also put it under dangers. Dangers? Okay, there's a danger section. Well, yeah. Yeah, yeah, it's. Yeah. A little asterix, I think next to it. Maybe, so that's kind of like, like the core package. There is a budget version I'll run through very quickly. We got, basically this is more of a it's cards doing similar things to what we've gone over, but for a bit more of a budget. If you have a card like ever had the cast, which is three white and a black for A33 uncommon death, that's lifelink that backs up our legendaries with two power to toughness. We have a card like rising of the day, which is two, and a red for an enchantment, because you can drive haste and you can just you don't get plus one plus. Oh, and then you have Bard class that's, red and green for a enchantment class. I read the first part, which is legend exchange, control and the battlefield with additional plus ones on counter on them. Kind of. These are all kind of more budget, slightly lower power level buffs. They're doing a similar thing to, to flowering of the white tree just a bit less efficiently and a bit more on budget. We have cards like, bas mer, which pings, an opponent, when a historic permanent comes into play. We have some cool tutors like Thalia Lancers and some different card selection with a card like board, whether, like, that's a, one. A white for uncommon sorcery that the top five cards of your library. You. You may reveal a historic card from among them. Put it into your hand, but the rest on the bottom of your library in a random order. Again, in a more budget environment and in a slow environment. That's pretty good. We have cards like Heroes Blade, which is a cool, equipment, again, in a lower power level environment that that can buff up a legendary creature. It's too generic for an artifact. Equipment equip creature. Guess plus three plus two. And whenever you enter the battled under your control, you can equip the Heroes Blade to it. Otherwise. Otherwise, it operates for four in a deck where we're going to be running a bunch of one drop. Like. Like where? Like the Virgo Belle Striker can get in, making it A54 on turn two. It's pretty solid. And then we also get a budget plan for this deck. Great. Hall of the Citadel to land with taps for a colorless. And then we can pay one and tap it to add two mana and any combination of colors. Spend. This manager only cast legendary spells like. That's a nice filtering land that does a thing that we want, but it's for a more budget environment. What do you think of these kind of selection gems? I know they're kind of a bit and all over the place, but like, like, it just shows that that there is depth lower, lower down the power level for this type of archetype. Yeah. I think once you step away from super high power level cubes, there's, there's certainly depth in that as, you know, there's sort of a placements of, very, very more powerful cards we talked about. But I think there's also scope for the deck to be doing slightly different things if you want it to like, like, I think there's scope for it to become a bit more of a multi-color deck, a little bit of a slower deck. I actually really like for legendary Fixing Lands. Because I think that gives you access to very powerful fixing that no one else can use. And I think, you know, one part of the walk you can run into effect is just like the legends you see on in the right colors. And that hard splash and these lands can help solve that problem. So yeah, like Ray Hall versus style, I like the, the, and playing a beacon is quite good. Plus with heroes is quite good. But they're certainly outs to be more colors. Even a card like Cephus for Hidden Hand, I think can be quite interesting in the light cube. That's for, apps on for free fall. You can exile two legendary cards from your graveyard, and that sort of lets you your quill for legends, essentially. And so I understand, which is quite a cool card. And it also makes your legends want them cheaper to cast. So yeah, I think once you're away from that like ruthlessly efficient. High power cube world where they leave a legend stack is mostly going to be a beat down deck. I think there's potential for a little bit more diversity. And what for that. Well what the deck could be doing right now. That's really cool. Yeah I guess once we kind of get get a bit slower, we could start doing like some savvy combos or something like that. With some cool legendaries. Sassy conveyors. Cool. There's some nice ones. Original Kanagawa I think. Is it very, very key is like what? Tuna green one to when after you play a legend, you draw a card. I can't quite cool. Yeah. Riki does seem like a really cool one. Cool. Let's move on. Because we kind of gone over, like the, like, the core package. These are like. But what we've gone over is like, the higher power level version, and the more budget version. I kind of like that. The selection of cards you would add to your cube to kind of make this archetype work, but we still need to do a bit of extra work to actually make this work as an archetype. And basically this is where this is with support guys. And for me, this this is the reason why I don't think currently this gets into the highest power level of cubes because we have to be here. We need to make some choices to make this deck work. And by that I mean we need to like, tailor some of our creatures to be legendary creatures. We need to make choices to support this archetype. So by that I mean, like one and two drop aggressive creatures. We want to make them legendaries because. Because as you're going over, we really want to turn on cards like Yoshimura. Ever faithful and especially Mox Amber. These will be fantastic at that. So by this I mean kind of like, but we're not going to run Savanna Lion, we're going to run a legendary creature version. We're going to run like cars like Basri, tomorrow's champion. Importantly, it is a one man, A21 legendary creature, human night. It has all the text. We care that it's legendary. We're going to run cars like SMU. Hound of Condor. Single mana for a two to legendary creature dog. We're going to run cars like Kitty and hero of across single white two one legendary creature human soldier has of the text. We don't get like a card like Norman Swift. Survivalist single red two one legendary creature, human human coward and then a card like Circa Bell Strike. As I mentioned. Single Red two two legendary feature orc Warrior. It has other text. We don't care. The important part is that it's one manner and a legendary creature with two power. And by having these in our cube, then that makes the density of cheap creatures that can make this archetype actually run like. Another great card for this deck is a card like carry Z Sky Ship Raider. This is the one red one, for A13 letter creature human pirate. It's got first like a menace. And when it attacks, it makes it to one monkey creature token named Raghavan. This is a legendary creature that makes another legendary lizard creature every turn. That will trigger that. That will trigger all of our stuff. It will get buffed up by all of our effects. These are kind of what we want from our cheap, aggressive creatures. These are some of the choices you have to make to support this archetype. Yes. I think if you if weren't for very streamlined, fat white, beat down any version of Flash and stack for one power. One mana, two power legends seem like a great place to be. I think this is also very emblematic of why this is probably one for not quite the highest power level of cubes, because, I feel like the these are the compromises you have to make to make this work, but, and don't get me wrong, some of you is a banging card, but it is not Gate of Souls, and it is not all flop fied. And that's fine. You know, we don't have to put those cards in every cube, but, the power level of the rest of your cube has to be curated around, like, the fact that we have this modular, not kind of solves, you know, it's exactly like, like, I think the best example or. Yeah, the reasoning I've kind of given on this is the kind of the the power cube has to be efficient cards. You don't have room for running something lower power level for synergy, whereas like there's a lot of room for cubes below that way. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we're in a cube where we can pick a card based on synergy if it will do a comparable job. It doesn't have to do as good a job, it has to do a comparable job. And that and we see that in like other effects and like, I'm not saying don't run mother of runes in this archetype, but we might want to consider a card like scrolls. Square is a single wait for A11 legendary artifact creature for action might. It's got toxic one. We don't really care about this part. It's got it's got. It can't block. We don't care about that. But it's got power for X in white and tap to choose a color. Another target which you control gains toxic one and hex bit from that color until end of turn. It can't be bought by creatures of that color this turn. So this is as close as we can get to a legendary mother of runes. This is not as good as mother of runes. This is not as good as giver of runes. But if we want to support this deck, we probably there's a world where we would want to swap out one of them for this card again, just for that density of legendary creatures. Yeah. Also, we're very possibly at a power level of cube where we don't want both of rooms. I think some people think kind of an obnoxious card, you know, like the play patterns. Not always. Not always what you want for every cube. Right. And, valve is kind of. It's the mother of runes, like fin and in the Cone of Magic for a reason. Right? No, exactly. And like some other good examples are like we in in the most recent set, we got Hawkeye master marksman. That's like the I mean, it is a pushed version of Robert of the Rich, but if we were running this deck, it makes cutting rubber of the rich full Hawkeye master marksman that bit easier, because we want that density of legendary creatures. This kind of goes into like our interactive creatures as well. Like, a great example is in regular cubes or like in power cubes, you see a card like Cathar Commando one and a white three one creature, human soldier with flash and pay one sacrifices creature, destroy, target, artifact or enchantment. There's a conversation of like Lauren of the third past two and a white two one legend creature, human artificer with vigilance. When it enters, it does the same thing. It does it shatter. If we're pushing this strategy, but like I know, in high power level cubes, we see both of those often same play. And that's primarily because there's more broken artifacts and power cubes. But when you come down a power level to to a power level where the stack might be, we might not need as many shatter effects. So if we're going for this archetype, we want to run lore and the third path over, Cathar Commando, because it's that legendary creature. You also see this with a card like again, from the restoration set. We saw a card like cloak and dagger entwined. This is a fiend hunter style effect that comes in, and it nabs a creature until it goes, this might be a cube where we want to run this over skylight apparition. So I give up. Apparition is like the gold standard of, cars that come in and remove something until they go. But it's not a legendary creature. And if we're looking for that density, then that's where we need to like. What I'm trying to highlight here is these are the choices that we need to make to support this, this this strategy. While there is already a high density of legendary creatures to make it as a deck, we need to kind of push it that little bit more where we can, and making these kind of small concessions, as it were, is where this deck will kind of come together and get more synergistic. Yeah, for sure, for sure. And the reason that this deck works now, right. And it didn't work a few years ago, is that these are actually fairly small concessions. When you don't need to run bad legends anymore. Really bad. Just like a tiny step below some of the some of the cards we might run otherwise. So. But you only have to make a pretty, pretty minor trade offs rarely to get this archetype to work. No. Completely agree. And then just two other cards I want to highlight of, something that kind of green can bring to the party anyway is things like the ramp, things like fixing. I know, a card like Delighted Halfling is great in this deck. A single green for a one to reach a halfling citizen, it taps, or to colorless or taps to add one man of any color. Spend this only to cast the legendary spell. That spell can't be countered. That's really good in this deck. Especially as kind of like I know most of the creatures we've gone over so far have been like white and red, one and two drops, but there's so many Good girl or Celestia creatures that we want access to. That is effectively a three color deck. And, and tight offering really helps you there. Another potential one, maybe this is more for a budget environment. But is it is it guard like the Iron Crag? It's two generic, but for a legendary artifact that taps to add a colorless. And then whenever a legendary creature and just about to put under your control, you might have it become, a legendary equipment named Ever Flame Heroes legacy. If you do, it has it gains equip three and equipped creatures, gets passed specific and loses all other abilities. That can be a nice option if if you're already running a card like mine stone in your cube. If you want to push this, this, this strategy, you could run a card like the Iron Crag. It's a legendary itself that rewards your legendaries. Perhaps you push through to for some damage later. That's quite nice. What do you think of those cards? Gems? Yeah, I think having the of them is important. I think, honestly, ideally, if I'm putting something like something like cube, I want it to go in that I want that to be more than one version of the legend stack, right? I don't want it to just be like one straightforward, fat, hippie damn thing. And I think having the green stuff with the fixing, because they're already going to be a bunch of fairly powerful legends in your cube across all five colors. It's very natural, fits to have, to have a legend stack that has the potential to be a bit slower, play a few more colors, and try and play a few more of those very high impact legends. Yeah, exactly. It just gives you that bit of extra reach, as it were. That kind of makes sense. It's very it's a lot of fun. Cool. So I think that's kind of like the bulk of the archetype. Again, we are and those are just some examples. Like I kind of picked out my favorite current, cheap aggressive creatures or cheap or cheap legendary utility creatures, but the main thing about this archetype is they will keep printing more a bunch of like the payoffs have come from sets that care about legendaries. So specifically like sets like Domino, Aria United, Lord of the rings cared about legendaries a lot. The Marvel set has just given us a bunch of legendary matches cards, but those are kind of like where the payoffs are coming for, but kind of like the bread and butter, cause like SMU cards, like Basri, tomorrow's champion cards like learn the third path. These are just coming from general sets. These are just cheap creatures. But like, there's a world now where where anytime. Like there's a good, cheap legendary that comes in. It can now be be a conversation for this archetype and what we're going to see more like like with cloak and dagger. It's one thing that it's one thing the Marvel set really brought forward and kind of kind of, for me, tipped this over into being a playable archetype. Is that because so much of the set was legendaries, it meant they had to put effects that you would normally see on normal cards or non legendaries, because they needed that density of legendary creatures and heroes and villains and such. They started putting those effects onto legendaries, and that's the part we're going to see more. And that's what kind of like this kind of like utility section really will get more. We're just kind of like like so many more of I was the bread and butter cards in your cube will be legendary, but like there will be a legendary mother of runes like like like one that's better than scrolls some point in the future. Because it's because it if I'm honest with you, if they have to print 350 legendaries in the set again, they're going to run out of ideas and there's going to go back and find effects they already have. We saw it in the Marvel set. They'll do it again. And we're just gonna get more of of the effects we like and want to run on. Legendaries. Yeah. For sure. I mean, legend, you know, when they started doing Legendary Creatures, and for a lot of magic's history, legendary creatures have been quite that. And they always came with, like, unique and splashy effects because they were trying to, like, tell a story about who that character was. Right. But that's when we got a few legends. Is that, like, now half the creatures are legends. That means they're not all that unique. And then that most of them are just, like reasonable utility creatures. Right. And if it effects exists on a non legendary creature, there's probably a legendary version of that somewhere. I fully expect to see a legendary fabled inspector at some point. And, yeah, it's. Yeah, if you're if you're looking to to think about, oh, well, you need all this critical mass and we've not talked about enough legends like we're not going to go through and talk about every legendary creature that will go in this stack, because there's half the creatures in your cubes already. You won't need to make that many changes as, like, as many as you think. I think if you look at if you do facts, you've got to see how many legends mean that. I think you might be surprised at how high is. There is sort of a legendary three an inspector that exists. It was, you know, in Amsterdam last year. There was that, oh, two years ago. There's like the unknown custom gods. Oh, yeah, there's the inspector Inspector two and a white one. Two legendary feature. Human detective. This. This might be a drawback. Other creatures you can throw into the battlefield just as copies of three one inspectors and pay two and sacrifice the inspector inspector to draw cards. Phenomenal. No, no I haven't. Yeah, yeah, I completely agree. I think, it's just going to get more and more. There is one thing I want to touch on before we get you all out of here. And that is the dangers of this archetype and this kind of like the dangers of any archetype. But I think it's always important to mention them as we kind of do these, intros to certain archetypes. And that's like the dangers. Like what? What can go wrong if you're trying to support this archetype. For me, the main thing is going too deep is getting lost in the source. So like I good example of this is like you look up a card like time of need, like you see a time of need. Perfect for this deck. One Green sorcery search a lobby for a legendary creature card. Reveal it. Put it in, put it, put it into your hand, then shuffle. You're like great. This is perfect for legendary. Like it's a tutor. Just for the legendary deck. We have to remember that it's still cube. A card like Ella. Damn, Cole still exists. That's basically the same effect, but better can go in any deck. And that's kind of where I think this deck can go awry if you kind of, if you, if you force the support too much. One thing we like about this deck, James touch on there, it's a very good point of that. Kind of like the concessions that we're making to support this deck aren't that much like flowering of the white tree. It's a great card in this deck, but it's seen a bunch of Q play. It may or may not still be in the mature vintage Cube or the arena powered cube, because it's just a good card in general. The point of this archetype is that we're not making too big a concessions once you start making those concessions, once you once you cut a good utility card for a niche card, that's when you're kind of going too far. Like another example of this is, is I'm going to say I'm going to call this going to Commander. Like this is an aggressive creature deck. Remember that? Like it might be like, oh, I'm supporting legends. That means I can run a card like a secret god of the tree or Joe to the unifier. These are like five color nonsense. Cards are tremendously powerful in commander. There's a I think there's talk of banning Jodo at some point, just because it kind of just becomes the legendary super commander. But like, these are tremendously powerful cards, but they're five colors. Do we want do we want to play a five color card in our three color aggressive deck? We can splash? Oh boy. We can splash the odd powerful permanents here and there, but we're not going to play a card with Warburg in its casting cost. You can't get lost in the source. Try and remind yourself when you're building this deck in your cube of of what it's trying to do, and that is to put legendary creatures on the board synergize with each other. And we're trying to turn them sideways and kill them and kill our opponents as quickly as possible. When not trying to play a five color creature, I think that's very important to the flag. Yeah, I think in general, I definitely agree with you. I think we don't you don't want to put too many of really narrow cards in, because this is true of all cube types. Your cube gets really boring to draft if that many of the cards only go in one deck. It leads to a draft environment where you just have to get in your lane very, very early on, and then you're just kind of committed to it and you don't actually have many more choices to make. We don't like that. We want flexible cards. Cosmic can go multiple different decks. You can certainly got a few cards that only go Investec, but be aware those slots are at a premium and and use some of the stuff that's going to be very impactful basically. So yeah, like a card like for, the chief, legendary creatures. Yeah. Make for an all time these call it can go at any time. Absolutely. But we're bad cards generally. I agree like Joker, I would not include. The thing is, even if you have a splash everything deck, being able to have access to five colors of mana is a very different thing from being able to make Bloomberg, like Sylvan Carrier said, can make you a man of any color and will enable you to splash a bunch of different cards. It does not enable you to make Ruby, it's very tricky, Frank Acevedo, because you can do it, but it's, it's a tough way to go pass that a seeker I would be kind of interested in just like mostly for front side, which is long green, one for tap amount of any colors and all your legend sap the amount of any color might be. I think if I was like a more multicolor green based version of this deck, that could be kind of interesting. Certainly not for the beat down version though. And then yeah, like just occasionally has the back side, which is a Bloomberg powerful enchantment. But yeah, I think the general points have, don't get too commandery. It's very easy to fall into if cube design, I think partly just because like if you have like a cool idea of I'm going to go into ledges and smasher and then you do some googling about all the stuff that's going to come off commander stuff. And if that's where you get all your ideas from, you, you can end up going down some routes, which then actually end up just getting run over because we're playing cube, not commander, and people are going to attack you know? Exactly. I think for me, what what was nice about about this, this archetype is that I made the list of like, like the high powered version and the support cards and the more budget version. And then I went and then I went and tried to, like, double check myself. So me and Skyfall are very well acquainted. I went through and I found all the cards, I think, I think go in this archetype. I then when I've had look offers to see if there's anything I missed and I did find I like the the commander version. Yeah. You see that's what you see Joda. That's where you see time of need. That's what I meant. Those kind of game cards came from most of this archetype, like, like the versions where we're recommending C play like like they. But there's like Canadian Highlander decks that effectively do this and I'm graded. Highlander is a more accurate version of cube than commander is because again, it's one on one is competitive, and you need that kind of density of effects because because there's a hundred cards. So I was quite happy with myself when I found a list that is running most of these cards already. So it shows that we're kind of on to something that that will work because it's transferable from other formats as well, which is nice to see. Yeah for sure. All right. Awesome. I think with that, that's a great place to leave it for today. James. Thank you for that, man. I thought it was a good chat. I yeah, I'm gonna need to add this to, I might cube at some point because, yeah, I like, like, I'll be honest in my cube. I would love to run, a small round of condor. That's kind of the power level my cube is. Anyway, so just adding a bit more synergy, I think is going to be so. So adding this package is a bit of synergy. I think it's kind of perfect for me, but yeah. Yeah. Thank you man. Very good conversation. The. Yeah it was pleasure. Marvelous. It just leaves me. So thank you all very much for listening. Do make sure you like, share, subscribe, give the podcast a five star review. A thumbs up. Tell a friend it greatly helps us out. You have been listening to Powerful Nothing until next week. It's goodbye from me and it's goodbye from James and we'll see you all soon. Goodbye.