Our Favourite Cube Build Arounds | Part 2 | #99

In this weeks episode of Powerful Nothing, we're back talking about some of our favorite cube build arounds. We talk about why they are great, and how you can easily support them in your cube to help make it a deeper play environment.

Card Gallery: 

Timecodes:https://moxfield.com/decks/RKwnrpA_p0Ch0xlXVgJSjQ

1:19 - What is a build around?
3:52 - Agatha's Soul Cauldron
24:47 - Dream Halls
39:20 - Skullclamp

Video Version: https://youtu.be/XqCScROb1m0

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 Q podcast. I'm your host, Don, and as always, I'm joined by James. James, how are you doing? I'm doing well. I'm doing well. So I think when this episode goes live, will have just watched England progressing for World Cup semifinals. Is my prediction. We'll have we'll take him Brazil a pass. I'm gonna say having dispatched Mexico in the previous round. Yeah, it's it's all going to be fine. That's that's my that's my call. Everything will be fine. I'm sure those comments will age wonderfully. Yeah, 100%. James. It's definitely, definitely coming home. I'm saying that with full confidence at time of recording. We have a great episode for everyone today. Today we're going to be doing part two of an episode. We did I think about like maybe about half a year ago, we're going to be looking at some of our favorite build arounds before we get into that main topic. Just as a reminder, down in the show notes below, there'll be a link to a card gallery if you want to see some of the pretty cars that we're gonna be talking about, as well as things like time codes and a link to a YouTube version of the podcast where you can watch the pretty cars appear on screen as well. While you're down there, please consider giving the podcast a five star review. Thumbs up greatly helps us out. Let's move on to our main topic though. This is part two of our favorite build arounds. Before we get into the actual section, talking about some awesome cars and what you can do with them, let's just remind everyone what is a build around. A build around is a card that is weak in the average deck, but can be strong if it's well supported. It requires you to change your picks and draft differently to accommodate it, but generally it's going to be like a cornerstone card of a deck. So some great examples of build arounds are some cards that we touched on in our first part of the series. So previously we touched on cars like Birthing Pod opposition, Oath of Druids and Lewis. These are cards that you take them and they really reward you for getting other cars that synergize really well with them. Yeah for sure. And I think a builder round is slightly different from just being a synergy based card. Right? So if you think about a card like Mox, Opal, for example, it's definitely a card that needs a specific setup to work. Right. You need to have lots of artifacts in play. I wouldn't really put it in the build around category five, right. Because it's just you just have to be in the artifact stack and any good version, if not fact deck Mox Opal will be great. It doesn't actually ask you to make specifically different picks to make Mox Opal work, like you'd make similar picks if you had first fact deck without Marcus Opal, where there's a card like, oh for sure, it's for example, the deck is going to look very, very different because of that one card, right? It puts different restrictions on you have to not play little features. You want to have a bunch of giant stuff to open to. So for me, the key thing about build rounds, it's making you draft very, very differently. And they can add a huge amount of replayability to cubes. So I think, like because it's not a whole archetype fight, it's just one card for we're surpassing so often for not very many additional card slots. You can sort of almost introduce whole new decks into the cube, right? And even if a bunch of a time no one takes them, they get last pack. Fine, because it's kind of worth it for that one time where, where someone does take it and build around it and it, it generates a whole new archetype for it didn't exist before in the cube. Yeah, exactly. It's one of the best things about these types of cards is that it is open. It's by adding one card, you get so many more possibilities and it just makes the cube way more replayable. And that's something is really awesome. I think with that, let's actually talk about our first build around. It's a card. I don't think I've played with enough, partly because it kind of scares me a little bit, James, but I'm glad. I'm glad you're going to fill me in on it today. First up we have Agatha's soul, so let me read this one out first. This is two generic mana for a legendary artifact. You may spend mana as though it were manner of any color to activate abilities of creatures you control, creatures you control with puzzles on counters on them have all activated abilities of all creatures. Cards exiled with Agatha's Soul Cauldron, and you can tap it to exile target card from a graveyard when a creature card is exiled this way, but it doesn't counter on target creature you control. So James, I can see how kind of this is. Just like a the fair version of this seems like a pretty cool, like value engine. You eat some stuff in your graveyard. When it dies, you put some coins on it, make it bigger. You maybe turn a creature into a lantern, or else I'm assuming we can do some cooler stuff with this. Kind of like, talk to us about this card, James. Yeah, for sure. This this card can play in a lot of very different ways, and some of them are actually very powerful. The, the default thing that this does right is it's a fairly mediocre bit of graveyard hate. It in the drafts where no one does this whole cauldron thing fires. What sort of symbol to send someone sideboard, flower pot and against randomizer. Fine. But it can actually be a very, very powerful engine piece as well as that. So the key, of course, is to get some creatures with very powerful activated abilities, get them into a graveyard, activate your soul cauldron, put a counter on a creature in play that's going to get that ability without you having to having to cast a creature. And, that's going to scale really well because each time we keep activating the soul cauldron and because it's all creatures, get the abilities of everything exiled, turn it so we can end up with multiple creatures in play, all of which have really powerful activated abilities. So one approach you could go with best, right, is just look for the absolute, most powerful activated abilities in the cube and not worry about casting the cards just fine. Get it into the graveyard. Excellent vessel called. We can go from there. That definitely can work. Like Gristle brand, for example. Very powerful. Isolated ability. You, you exile your quest and under assault culture. And all of a sudden, your little one mana creature in play has the ability to pay seven life into all seven cards. That is really powerful. And kind of dangerous. Yeah. You're not killing the seven seven license part of the puzzle. Although that does seem key. I mean, you only need to draw seven cards once. Fairly, right? In most games. But also at that point where, well, we're kind of just a Re-Animator deck with more steps. Fair value. Right? Which is fine, which is certainly a thing we can do, but it's, I think the real strength of so-called thing compared to, like, say, playing of animation spell is that, it scales across multiple creatures. So even if it's not a built as game Viking as tool, seven cards, once it stacks up on multiple creatures, it can be very, very powerful. And we don't necessarily have to go to the trouble of like playing features we can't cast just to front of a soul cauldron. We can just play good fats with fairly powerful abilities, and then if they die off, we Melvin over. If I go to a great job, naturally and we'll get input from on, then we're going to get from a multiple creatures that are in play. And, but it's going to be a really powerful like long term value engine. So a few of the like very premium ones, grist for hunger tied. This is the one green black planeswalker for modern horizons. But crucially, it says when Christ is not on the battlefield, it is a creature, which means we can exile this onto our so-called to and get the abilities. So essentially, all of your creatures with a plus one plus one counter on them become plains workers at this point, in the sense that they have the loyalty abilities of the quest. So you can eat your creatures, you can put a loyalty counter on them to create A11 token and then a card. Or if you get to two loyalty counts on them, you can then move to loyalty counters to use the minus two ability on quest, which is massacre creature. If you do destroy target creature planeswalker, it's pretty unlikely to get to your five, but this is just like fuels itself very, very well. Because each time you use the plus five, you're creating more bodies, which then can pick up more counters. Plus your milling stuff over your melons. More stuff to exile into your soul cauldron. It's going to represent a ton of long term value. Yeah. Turning, turning all your board of creatures into plains walkers is fairly powerful. And that plains walkers that can't be attacked right? But because they're just creatures in play, they just happen to have these loyalty abilities real nice. Yeah, that seems like a really nuts little combination to kind of. Maybe they did think of that when they designed it. But yeah, gris gris is a cool guardian. That's really awesome. And what are the good examples other games like are you looking like are you really trying to lean into like the activated ability side of things of this? Like like what are some what are some of the good activated abilities on creatures that, that we might want to give the rest of our board? Yeah for sure. So another a very powerful one. We've got fairly recently as loot for Pathfinder. This second has been really impressed within a powered cube and general actually, that's in the I think it's maybe the best strength plant or cell culture West Point. So this is the two and a team. So two green blue red five mana total. Oh a legendary creature. Beast noble as double strike vigilance and haste. And it has three exhaust abilities seven exhaust you can only use once. So, you can play a green and tap it to add three manner of any one color and pay a blue and tap it to draw three cards. Or you can buy a V8 and tap it to deal free 20 target. To get this under a so-called frame, it goes pretty quickly. All of a sudden, your creatures can tap to draw free cards for just a grid manner or lightning bolt. Something. And on the regular loot, I find you don't use that man of ability that often. But when all your creatures have these abilities that man of ability is actually quite good, because it's because you're going to be drawing so many cards, you have so much to spend your manner on because your creatures all have these insane activated abilities. Thus, you end up actually wanting that mana generation of some of them. And again, this is not like some bad card we're asking you to put on your deck to make so-called team work. The same with quest, right? It's, it's a powerful feature of what you'd want to play anyway. But it just goes absolutely nuts once you get this sort all cauldron, like every creature with accounts on it just becomes a must deal with that for your opponent. Yeah, that seems very scary. Yeah, we do love pansexual Rico. And getting a bunch of it seems awesome. What else do you like, James? Yeah. So another one, which is really powerful and will be familiar to anyone who played standard of self circa six months ago is, Vivi from the Final Fantasy set. So Vive on this year is one a blue, an event for a zero free legendary creature wizard, and it has the activated ability zero. You may add X manor in any combination of blue or red. Where X is this creature's power. Activate only once, then bring your turn O. Activate only during your turn. And you once each turn. I think this would still be being played in standard if it wasn't the emergency bath. Yes, yes, I certainly imagine it would be, very fair. Magic combat. Yeah, yeah. VVA also has an ability of when you cast on creature spells, you put counters on that and deal damage to a target. So obviously when it's under the cauldron, we don't get that triggered ability. But we crucially. But when we're adding mana, you know, Vivi starts at zero power, so you need to get counters on it for it to add mana. For creatures where putting our counters on, we have at least one power because we've got a plus one from counter on it. But if we just put a counter on a full four, it made it into A55 and instantly that is going to be adding five mana for us right away because it's this creature's power, right? Is the power of creature we put the counter on. So this can be a ridiculous amount of mana generation if you get this into a cauldron. It's not sort of as complete a engine, I guess is something like loot, because it didn't give you something to do with a mana, right? It is just tons and tons of mana. But, again, a lot of magic, a lot of mana and their means. You can end up with other stuff exiled on to the cauldron as well. So imagine you had a vandal loot and it's kind of over, right? So you can use viability and you can throw a million cards, lightning bolts, everything. And by going to be dead very quickly, at the same time, like, I know there's some more examples you want to touch on, but with this, like are you specifically trying to find a combination? Because I'm assuming there must be a world where you got you can build your own Spencer in Kiki Gigi combo. I like, is that kind of how you're going with it, or is it more just like we're just trying to value out something good? I find that generally once you get going, you like if you have a couple of creatures with counters on them, like one of the any one of these is going to be, most of the time, good enough. Any two of these, you're probably winning. It doesn't matter. Like, you know, let's say you had a quest and I'll do it. For example, under they don't particularly synergize, but it just kind of doesn't matter. You're just creating so much value every turn. But it's going to it's going to run away from your opponent very quickly. You certainly could do combo stuff with best you could. You have all instant wins combos, I'm sure, available, but I find you're just generating so much value, but you actually don't need for combo. Just throwing so many cards, making so much power and toughness that, that tends to close up for you on its own without needing a combo. No. Yeah, that makes sense. That seems very cool. Yeah. There's two more you want to touch on. James, talk to us about, as a Lord High artificer. How does that go in, in, in I give this whole cauldron deck. Yeah. So as a you probably know, the, for mana one for makes constructs, and has to happen artifact to make a blue and five mana to shuffle your life, for example, top card. And you can play it best said about paying its mana cost. So this is pretty powerful. And just so cauldron invite deck, it sort of goes in a different tack than the the other ones we've talked about. Right? Because it's, this is going to go in and not fact deck. We're going to be making hopefully a bunch of tokens with say, third party iconoclasts South Africa. So but it's very sort of cards. We should have, bodies to put counters on. And if all of us went up, ends up in our graveyard, we can pop it into the soul cauldron. And we therefore still have access to super powerful US or ability, which is in a good artifact. Deck is kind of the way of the game, and we have a nice thing about that. This is the Soul cauldron is also a cheap artifact, which is already something I was attacked once. Severs. Yeah. There's this there's a certain amount of synergy for, and there are some other good artifacts you can put in the vessels as well. Like, walking ballistic goes really nicely under the cauldron. That seems like a way of going infinite, if I'm honest with you. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's cool, but, yeah, you can do some powerful stuff with that. But yeah, it's, it does highlight for me the so-called index can look quite different from each other. I did I think the sort of default is, a green based thing, but the, Yeah, you can make cauldron work and not fight dark as well, and that can be very nice. That's pretty cool. Yeah. I mean, I mean, specifically if you do have some cool combo stuff, but the model artifact tutors in your artifact deck, so that could be quite nice. You have one more on the list here. James, talk to us about your moth ran physician. Yeah, for sure. So this is again, another Modern Horizons card. This is two black. Black for a two for legendary creature human cleric. It has protection from humans, which no one ever remembers until it's very, very relevant. Very relevant. Yeah. You can pay one life to else has the crucially the activates ability pay one life sack another creature to put a minus one minus one count on up to one time creature and wall card. And you can pay black, black and discard a card to proliferate. So this is really nice. Invert feasibility is really powerful. And it is quite is quite a natural fit in some decks for want so-called fan already. It's not you know, it's not as sort of trail broken as having all those loot abilities, for example. But it is, it is going to grind out your opponent over time. A really nice combination actually, is that you can get this and the rest and, the cauldron, because so yeah, this is make means all your creatures with cancers on to make more creatures. And you can then sacrifice those creatures to the alchemist to draw cards and célula pendants, creatures at which point the amount of value you're just generating, turn on turn is going to run away with a game value very quickly. No? Nice. Yeah, this does seem like a really cool build. I think I need to kind of get into more decks. If you are trying to play it though, I'm trying to see what kind of like what other cards are you trying to put around it to support it? Like, like are you wanting other ways of putting counters on things, for example? Because I could see a world where if you have a bit of plus ones on counter synergy as well, it just means you don't have to do the work of putting counters on things. They just come in naturally with them like it is. Is that good or like, is there anything else you would recommend for, for getting the most out of this? Out of the Soul cauldron? Yeah for sure. So I think you can go in a few different shells. The soft default one I found quite good is a green based self milled deck. So you can see all clipping over your cards in show graveyard. Naturally, your, and you're finding these really important targets to exile with at. And crucially, in fact, those decks tend to put a lot of sort of fairly low value bodies into play. I think for state away finders, for stitcher suppliers, for town greeters. These cards are all very good here. Because they're gonna to begin to use your loot. So your quest or whatever you're trying to exile whilst at the same time providing and bodies put up the plus one plus one counter to and on top of that there, they're generating value for you by letting these lands. And these are, the reason I like it in this sort of that is it's is the sort of deck which always has creatures in play, even when it's not winning. Like you don't want. It's not actually providing you much value if all your creatures, you know, three and four mana cards which can kill the opponent on their own. And why do you need the soul culture? And if you have a creature in play, where this sort of that is just putting out a lot of very expendable little bodies. But but you can then buff up and make into really meaningful game objects with the Soul cauldron. And then but yeah, that can also say can be artifact shell can be quite good. Or you can do this is a bit more of a combo thing and be like, I'm very actively trying to find this one combination of cards and put it onto my felt cauldron. That I find tends to be a little bit harder to put together because it is the thing, like where you only have one soul cauldron, so you want to solve a functional game plan when you don't follow it. And those green self meld that, you know, they want lots of these cards anyway vibe they want quest, they want loose anyway, they want the Alchemist anyway. So they you can have a really like nice green self value deck and then this whole cauldron can just be like that little engine piece, which takes it over the top. And then I see in the notes here, James, I kind of it goes, it overlaps quite nicely with another one, another build round that we like a lot on this channel. That's the insidious root stack. Kind of like how is that going together? Like insidious roots does make it, I guess, a bunch of creatures with counters that also make mana. Is that kind of where we're going with this? Yeah, exactly. Seven Cities and City of Roots is the, green, the black enchantment. Whenever a creature card leaves are graveyards, you create as zero one plan. Put a plus one plus one counter on each plant you control. So this sort of works both ways for for insidious roots. Firstly, it triggers for insidious foods. When you activate your soul cauldron on your own graveyard. That's cool. Yeah. Pumping out creatures and then those creatures naturally plus encounters on onto so you don't have to activate your soul cauldron on each creature. They all get viability once per count, something of super counters on them. It pops off very quickly. Like, obviously this is, you know, a bit magical Christmas land of we actually have both of them in play, but, it certainly comes up and they naturally want a lot of the same things, right? They naturally want to be mulling over creatures into our graveyard. So that is quite a nice little overlap for now. Awesome. And then finally, I guess, strange. Kind of like with any of these build runs, we do kind of need to keep in mind the power level of cubes that they're going to go into it because some aren't. For every cube. What power level of cube do you think would get the most out of a I of this whole cauldron in terms of where it could go? I think it's pretty broad, actually. I've like set in Power Cube like, it's not like something you're doing all the time, but because it's kind of already okay, is a bit of graveyard. Hey, it's kind of okay to just chuck it in the cube. And then it does occasionally, like, you know, the stars need to align the little bit and powers cube, I think it's not something you should be taking early and looking to build around. But you know, when you're in like a team attack and you've got some self-will and you've got all loots and then you've got a quest, you could splash and you've got a bunch of creatures, and it's like you get that so-called friend back and you're like, oh, I could this draft, I can actually do the thing. And when you do do the thing, it's really powerful and it's, it's quite a unique angle, I think, for the ice cubes. And yeah, when we have a like now, 19 out of 20 chefs, when that doesn't happen, it ends up in someone's sideboard and it's valiant against Re-Animator. And that's fine too. So I like it that. And then obviously if you go slightly lower, more towards the like mid power level cube is probably where it's going to be at its best and you can like so looks to take it a bit earlier and build around it a bit more because you just have a little bit more time to set up in phase cubes. And probably afford to play a little bit more for like self meld sets up stuff. You know, most each can't I mean, I like safer way foundry stuff, but you can't be playing loads of that stuff, right? Yeah. You can find a love of, say, 25, that's for sure. I wouldn't be, I wouldn't go into more like butcher cubes just cause I don't really think they actually very enough, like, very powerful x rated abilities. A lot of assignment ice cubes, to sort of make this worth the effort, I guess. No. Awesome. Yeah. Really cool card, I think. Yeah, I I've got it in my Treat Yourself cube. It seems very treat worthy there. But yeah, I think I think it might need to come out into my more powerful cube as well. All right, let's keep it going. We have a card. Next up I know we're both big fans of but good to actually kind of break it down a bit and talk about how you can get the most out of it. And that card is Dream Halls. This is three blue blue for enchantment that says rather than pay the cost for a spell, its controller may discard a card that shares a color with that spell. I love Dream Halls is some of the most fun I think you can have. And cube is when this deck comes together, you're doing all the big powerful things. You're cheating on mana. You're just doing some incredibly broken things. You're drawing cards, playing big multicolored spells. This is one of my favorite build arounds, I think, in all of magic. James, what are we doing with the Dream Halls deck? What is the plan? What is the deck wanting to do? What do we need to make it work? Yeah. This is so much fun. So, dream halls, generally, the game plan is we get our dream halls into play, and then we're going to pitch a card right away to cast something that draws us a lot more cards. So the sort of default here is going to be some sort of Wheel of Fortune time twister type effect. It goes back up to seven. They can also be like maybe a dig through time. Or we want, like a big Cardwell spell, like, immediately stuck us back up. And then once we've got that, we've hopefully built our deck in such a way where we can kind of keep going and we have these really big haymakers because. Because we're not constrained by manner anymore, which just constrained by number of cards. So you can then look to cast some like very big spells that don't, that we can't otherwise think about putting on stuff. This is where you'll cool automatons come in your, just guy revelations. And that's, And we have a nice thing about dream halls is most Syfy's more recently fancied but similar sounding things will say. Things like to cast a spell from your hand to Dream Falls doesn't say that. So you can, If you go off with something like an underworld speech, you can use the Dream Halls to, to cast your spells from your graveyard. It also doesn't say exile cards like things like force. Well, whatever to do with discarding cards to a fueling our graveyard. At the same time. So you can play into that graveyard stuff a little bit as well. And then eventually we get to a point where we just have so much velocity that we're gonna, we're going to see our whole deck and then, and then it's just figuring out how we win that might be casting a cool to Mason a bunch of times. It might be something like a nexus of fate for inevitability can be quite strong. That's free time walk that shuffles back into your library when it resolves. I say time walk like it isn't seven mana to seven mana time walk. But, that doesn't matter. We have to still very do. Yeah, yeah. And you eventually get to a point where it's like, oh yeah, my library has like five cards, and that one of them is a nexus of fate. I'm gonna see them all every turn. I'm going to cast Nexus of Fate every turn. Well, it can even be like a brain freeze. This is a perfectly reasonable way to go about winning the game out of handfuls of acne. But really, the challenge is getting the dream halls and playing, like, guessing that first four seven off and keeping that velocity going through your deck. So you're always seeing enough cards because remember, you are going down the cards each time you cast it. We don't want to be like casting, ponders office. We don't want to be casting lightning bolts off this. We want to be casting big, expansive, impactful stuff. Yeah, 100%. Yeah, that the card draw especially I think is like the the it's what makes the deck most powerful but also the most fun kind of, you know, it's one thing I really like about dreams is that you get into play and it's not a guarantee that you're going to win. You're going to have to do some things, but by God or you going to do some things, what challenges do you think come up with Dream Halls, James? Because obviously it is symmetrical. That is something that kind of like might not be immediately apparent, but this is an old magic card like, your opponent gets to do it to like your deck needs to be more tuned to actually kind of take the most out of this. But that's kind of wait, where you're going bigger, kind of like, how are you breaking the symmetry, James? How are you getting more advantage out of this than your opponent? So, yeah, ideally, the way we're breaking the symmetry is that we have stream halls. When we win that turn, the the symmetry doesn't matter as much if your opponent doesn't get a turn right, because it doesn't they still they can cast instance, but they cast their sorceries. That being said, it is still a challenge, especially against permission. Because even if your opponent is tapped out and you get the dream halls down while they, now all of a sudden you have to think about the permission again, because that counterspell is now essentially a force of, well, like they can purchase blue cards to pay for that. And then some of that problems even more exacerbated because we're looking to pay for things like time first from Wheel of Fortune. So if I didn't have the Counterspell the fall of, I might have won now, you know, so that is definitely a challenge. And you can have some problems against those stacks, but you can also just, yeah, if they're not threatening you, you can't just go back and try and casting these spells yourself, which cannot, can also be effective. Right. You do just have you have a very high curve which can be good in those matchups actually, And then, there's also just the inherent challenge of to include a bunch of pool formations and whatnot in your deck, and you don't seal team halls, but they can be a bit tough to, to try and leverage. So you need but but fortunately, you know, already with stream halls, we're looking to play a bunch of cards. All right. So we can hopefully build a deck for this. Very, very good at finding stream halls. Tutors certainly are at a premium here. They're both excellent with the stream halls and play and, and really good at finding between halls. And then I guess a challenge is, a lot of the very expensive cards we already playing. Cube. If I can say, like, very expensive artifacts of, like, puzzles of fracture or, very expensive algebra, like hammer. Cool. And they don't work with stream halls. Impulse says discard a card that shares a color with it. No, no card. Share a color with amber. Cool. So that can be a challenge too. But, it is, you know, it would be less fun if you, if there were no challenges. I did see a really funny, interaction video recently where if you have, painter seven grindstone in your cube and you can cast paint to seven, seven, and then you can pitch everything to three balls, okay. Oh even your like, it's kind of sick. That's tight. Yeah yeah yeah yeah I was clarifying as well just for those who, who never played with it, you can't pitch an island to cast a blue spell because the, because it lands don't have colors or that kind of stuff as well. And also because it's because it's because it specifically says colors. You can't pitch like a, like a colorless artifact to cast you because they both don't have colors. It has to be, I call it permanent. Yeah, yeah. And what James is saying. Yeah. Grinds, paint a servant makes everything be that color. So they do like retrievals. That's quite funny. I do quite like that. Yeah, I think that's a cool combo. Anyway, so I'm, I'm kind of effort, but, Yeah. Not like non easy decks to drop. Non easy decks play but so much fun when that comes together. And it is one of those things where you, it makes you play magic in a completely different way. As it's been called since I write, which is quite fun. Yeah, I completely agree. And yeah, we touched on, like the cut, how the colors work, especially with dreamers, but like, what colors of the deck, I'm assuming. Well, blue, because we need to be able to cast our dream and get it into playable. What, like what's the shell that that would kind of working with with this and like we've mentioned cause like cool to make some more brain automated kind of like these are big blue spells. Oh, we actually is the shell wanting to actually cast these spells or is it more just like a it's a spell based deck and like, we don't it's kind of like Re-Animator. We don't care what colors attractor is. It just needs to get in our deck because it's big. Is that how we are with the ultimatums, or is there a world where we actually want to maybe cast some of these, the ultimatums in general? I'm not that worried about casting. Like, it's nice if you have outs to do that in a really long game. But I'm finally looking to to trim holes from. But, some of our other big expensive cards, though, is less color intensive, and we can cast Sphinx for, I think for take few times for the time spirals of that stuff. We can certainly cast, and Jim holes as an engine is just way better if you're clay sets a mono monoculture than not, right? Like, I'm not saying you're I think you're not really ever going to be actual monocle of. I mean, you will not that often, but, you know, ideally you don't want to be like 5050 blue and another color, right? You want to be like 80% blue. So that all your spells pitch to all your other spells, ideally. That being said, you will probably want a second color mostly for some interactions, keep you alive long enough to cast stream halls and find your dream halls. Yes. Blue doesn't do a great job of that. So, Yeah. Like blue. Red will be a really common one, but you could certainly be blue white or blue. Black, I think would work fine too. Yeah, I do agree with that. I think it's worth touching on actually that, that there's, there is only one dream horse. There's only one fully loaded actual thing that does everything we want. There is a bit of redundancy, like I'm personally a big fan of. If you are running Dream Halls, also running a card like mythic says mastery. This is three and a red for sorcery exile target card as an instance or sorcery card from your graveyard for each card except this way, copy it and you may cast a copy without paying its medical examiner's. It's mastery, but it's got overload for five. Red red red. So that lets you effectively cast every instance sorcery from your graveyard. I quite like this as a back up dream. It's not as good as Dream Wars. It's kind of like how through the breach as a back up sneak attack, but having some redundancy means that you're not just completely screwed if you don't see the dream halls. So that's a that's a card I like to like. I always like mentioning whenever we talk about dream halls, there is also like, it's not as good because, all of our ultimatums are sorcery, but Torrential Girl can be a solid card. It's the big joke that when it comes in, unless you cast an insane from your graveyard without paying its mana cost, there aren't as many broken instance as there are broken sorceries. But there are some cool cards. Like I'm a big fan of blood for the blood. God, that's a big 11 mana instant. At the moment, that's kind of it. But like in the future, if they print more big instant sorceries, this deck will get better and kind of more fun as well, but just worth touching on. I think the yeah, we have a nice thing about Hulk Fey is for Dream Halls kind of enable six. It lets you discard for powerful spell to cast for Hulk. Then the Hulk immediately flashes it back. So even if it's not seeing faction right, even if it's like a cryptic command or something, just like discards my cryptic command to cast my torrential gear. Hulk gear. Hulk flashes back cryptic commands. I can, like, cancel your thing. I can even bounce the Hulk back to my hand so I can keep going. You know, it's, It's pretty powerful. Yeah, it is. It is cool. It is just it's it's still a bit in nature. Like, it is a thing of just like there isn't if you actually search for, like, instance and just do, manor value down, all the really good ones are like the ones with delve that they're good because we can make them cost cheap. There isn't actually that density of just like actually good, high powered, like expensive instance. We want to try to play it, but it's given. But but but there will be in the future. It is just a matter of time. We get them every so often. What type of cube though, James, do you like? Like you mentioned some very powerful cards, like you mentioned wheels, and you've mentioned, like wait and I and the deck is built around cheating on manner and drawing lots of cards, whatever power level of cube because like for me, this is sounding quite high. But where do you think it can see play? Yeah, I think I'd say like mid to high. I think it is like totally defensible to run in vintage cube. I think it works enough. And for time, there's an argument for it's like tricky to dedicate the slots to have like free ultimatums and whatnot as well. But you can do it with just wheels. But anything like, yeah, I think is good. You've got to be okay with putting all these broken cars in, right? Like wheels are very powerful cards. Female self is a very powerful card. It's also, you've probably got to think about, What, you want the gameplay experience of your cube to be like, like the gimbals. It's set. I think we both said it's really fun to play, but it's like you can have a ten minute turn playing dream halls. Some some cube designers won't want that. It's not the most, it's not for, like, normal nuts and bolts magic, but you might be trying to build into your cube, right? So it's, I think even aside from power level, it's about like, how combo versus fair. Do you want the cube to be the subset? Very much on the combo end of the spectrum? But yeah, I think like mid to high power level cube, anything where you're like chill with putting a time twister into it. It's this is going to work very well. I actively call my Q and unpowered cube. Despite the like the time twist in it. It's not really power. Don't worry about it. Nice. All right, we have one more card to talk about today. And, I think this is quite a powerful card. Like, there was a, there was a long period of time where this card I would have put like just effectively if there's power, if there was a power nine, this would have been just below it since then. It's going very broad. Broadside got to have all been printed. So I don't think it's I don't know actually. Maybe this is part of the conversation, but let's talk about Skull Club. This is a single generic manner for an artifact equipment it has equipped. Creature gets plus one minus one. Whenever a creature dies, draw two cards and it has equip for a single and as a quip for one mana. But James minus one is a downside. Why would you want to kill your own creature? Yeah. So funny story about this card. It's, Apparently in the initial design, it was just plus one plus. So, but then Wizards decided that was a bit too powerful, so they made it plus one minus one. I mean, that's obviously that's just worse. Yeah. Yeah, but when we're not really about just putting this on creatures and hoping they die in combat, well, the plan with Skull Camp is we want to have a bunch of one toughness creatures. Then we can pay one manor crypt skull camp to them. They die. We catchments for two cards. That's really powerful. That's such a strong card. Fire engine. So obviously, to make this worthwhile, we need to have. We need to be making these one toughness features fairly cheaply. But we don't want to be, very valuable creatures. Now, if you play turn one vagabond and then turn to you, Pascal clan for the if arguably not made the best out of that, but think like tokens, feasible token generation is ideal. Or just like value features. You know, imagine you've got a, favorite card for day to wayfinder lying around. Chuck a skull cap on that two RC cards. The nominal value. We love to say it. And it's the fact that it can keep providing that ongoing card velocity throughout the game. Right. It's a really powerful card use, and it's not like you've got to make very specific choices in the draft to maximize it. You can't just blindly put this in any deck and have it be good. But, invite deck skill clamp can be, can be one of the most powerful cards and even the highest power level cubes. And this might sound really simple, James, but, like, what do we need to enable it? Is it just a deck full of one ones, or is there anything we can do to really kind of get more juice out of it than just running like a savannah lion? Yeah, ideally the things you're killing with the skull clamp, hopefully things you've not sort of spent a full card on. So it might be that you've spent a card for got you multiple tokens, and so you're clamping them each way individually for two cards. Or it might be that it was a value creature that gave you, like did something for you on the way in. So you cast a neck for tall, you killed for creature men. You equipped the skull clamp to it. There's a couple of really nice items for this, though. So I think probably the most natural one of a moment is, the artifact deck, because we have so many effects now of these features that make one ones when you cast spells. So I think fed passive iconoclasts, ravenous vapor, tentacle, emissary, The Freeman, Asahi, Lee. These all go absolutely nuts with a skull clamp. Because you're going to clamp the tokens. That's going to draw you into more spells, which you can cast, create more tokens. Keep going, keep going, keep going. See if you have something like a clarinet academy, as you're probably getting for your whole deck right there. It's obviously a that's one of those ends you have very times where you can. I've ended up wanting to play a fast, as I recall in my artifact, that because my skull clamp could get through my deck so quickly that I was going to add my as it was generating mana, I was going to just go my whole deck in a turn. And when with when we're fast vocal. That can be very strong. There's also but you can also just been leaning more into like, we have value features. We're making tokens even if they're not, they're feasible. You know, like you don't need tons of things that go a skull clamp for skull can still be really good, like, and just have a lingering souls in your deck. Right. That's h cards. You don't really need to draw more cards in that nice super time. Not that I don't want to, but eight cards is normally enough. So you can just be like a, a good creature deck and you have a few things that work really nicely with that, like, say, on Adaline, or if it's just going to keep generating one, one sort of, or you've just got some nice little value creatures which, which kind of get you value on the waifu. You can also think about it. It's okay with mana talks. It's not great. That wouldn't be my primary thing. It can be nice, you know, if I have my elf on turn one, I use it for bad of a bunch. Then later in the game, I clamp it away for two cards. That's quite good. But generally the plan of, you know, if I drew a land valve by castellan, I'll equip skull clamp to it. I spend two, manage it for two cards. That's fine, but, you know, that's it's a nine us for that. It's not like I sent him away for two. It is if you're going off with, like, iconoclasts or something, right. Or, but, you know, just having a few tokens lying around, like something like staff of the storyteller, you know, great. With skull clamp. Bitter blossom is kind of nuts, obviously. Yeah. It's just there's just a lot of token generation by default in most cubes. So not that, you know, clamp is going to be good in every deck, but if you take it early, you will probably see cards that enable you to make it work. Yeah. So yeah, I really like it with. Yeah. As you mentioned, just like the kind of free repeatable ones. So yeah, I'm a big fan of it with like Rebel Masters, creatures that attack and make tokens. Fantastic. It just finds your burn or finds your next couple of spells really good. And then and. Yeah, I guess like, like other kind of recursive, like threats, like things like a blood cast or, gutter bones, that kind of stuff. Really good. Just just get game crunching for some damage, sack them to draw some cards and just go again. I think it's really good. Yeah. And one of the things that's nice about, Skull Club is they kind of it's a busted card for like an aristocrat deck as well, which kind of doesn't really have too many broken cards. Like, like one thing with stock, is that people will take it early because I guess there's a world where kind of like. Because, like, creature base decks have got better. Skull clamp has got better as well, because people are playing more creatures. They're committing to the board more. There's more things for Skull Camp to just gobble up, if that kind of make sense. But, yeah, like, yeah, that minus one can cause your thing to die, to trigger your blood. Okay. So that is that is something that is that is cool with it as well. Are there any other archetypes that, we haven't mentioned? I think those are the big ones, but, I mean, it is just a pretty flexible card, you know, like you can have like, three that I can stick with, like a pyromancer and stuff like that. Then Skull Camp can be great for, you can have a, you can have black decks where it's great white decks, but it's great. It's it's one of those cards where it's it's more about the individual card faces you make drawing the graph than it is about the colors. I find, it's a card for is way more powerful if you take it early in the draft and if you can pack three in general, because you kind of do need to me, you do need to make those right choices to make school. Clamp. Busted. Yeah. And that's kind of the interesting thing of kind of like when I first saw the list you put together, James. Kind of like there's a bit of kind of like a mental pivot between, you see, dream halls and then you see Skull Camp because like, that part of me is like, oh, Scott. So kind of this, like, I don't say generically good card, but kind of like a buffet can go into so many decks. But I think what's important with it and why we're talking about it today is that if it is that thing of if you lean into it, if you treat it like a build around, you get so much more out there. Kind of like Jamie was talking about how he had a skull clamp deck and one with and one with that. That is Oracle. That is not, where my mind was going when he mentioned just a skull clamp. I was thinking more. The fair, lingering skulls, bitter bottom. But it shows that if you lean into it and if you support it and if you treat it like a build around, you can get more out of it than just this. Kind of like, cool. Good card is good card, but good card can be great card if you lean into it and commit to the bit. Yeah, for sure, for sure. I think honestly, I would. I treat this as a build around when I am drafting. Without, I wouldn't really treat it as built around from like a cube construction point of view because like, I don't think you need to make specific choices when you're building your cube to support skull clamp. And most places, like, it's just that there's going to be enough there naturally, but you definitely do need to make those choices during the draft when you're if you take skull clamp early because, you do need a good density of of one toughness creatures to make it excellent and ideally repeatable ones that aren't costing you much in terms of value to create them. But it's worth noting as well. The other mode of this one, which I guess is the mode for Wizards has in mind, does still come up some time. Face in your deck like you do. Do the thing of, you know, I have a fall for you. Have a fall, fall for, well, I'm going to equip my skull clamp to my fall for an attack to you. And if we trade, I'm going to juggle two guards and, like, that's fine. But, really, what you're looking to do have is, to generate things with, the token making. Yeah. And when it comes together, it's very, very broken. Nice. I think we should touch on. I think it's kind of been obvious from how we talked about this card, but we should just clarify what power level James, that we're talking about with skull clamp of the highest, yes. Yeah. Listen, inferior. Theoretically, I think this is an uncommon. I think you could put it in a pattern cube. You definitely shouldn't. No, you should decide this. This is a super powerful card. It's going to be a massive, powerful outlier if you put it in anything but for most powerful cubes. Like, it doesn't have to be an actual power cube. You know, it could be, like, unpowered, but of outside of that max power level. But yeah, this is this is a free to generate card. It's very, very strong. Yes. And we love it. Skull clamp. An utter banger. All right. I think that's going to do it for today James. Thank you for that. Really good chat on on three really cool build arounds that I feel I can definitely get more out of after today. Yeah. It's pleasure. Just leaves me to thank you all very much for listening. Do make sure you like, share give the podcast a five star review, a thumbs up. Tell a friend 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.