The Voices of Cube Con

During this must listen episode we are recording live from the halls of Cube Con 2026. Join us as we capture the magic of Cube Con as we interview players, designers, and iconic cube personalities. Tune in as we chat on topics including design, curation, content creation, draft techniques, event coordination, and so much more! Thanks for listening, 5-stars, and as always Happy Cubing!

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Transcript

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Welcome to Cube Con 2026!

SPEAKER_09 0:14

Welcome to Ubercube, the podcast we discuss all things cube, but with refreshments. This is your host, Anthony Adams, aka Uberbear, and I'm going solo for this one because I am at KubeCon in 2026. Well, was. This is a post-recording. During this particular episode, we're going to hear the voices of KubeCon, which will include players, designers, cube personalities, how people manage crafting, how people pick their particular designs, and how how this particular event is a melting pot of all the cube designers and players across the country. So without further ado, let's get to the episode.

Mono White Cube

SPEAKER_09 1:07

Hey, we're back again. This time we've got my good friend David, who first time KubeCon and first time cube in the event. We're going to talk about the cube and what it's like to actually finally get to join his friends at KubeCon.

SPEAKER_24 1:21

Yeah, I'm excited to be here. I don't usually get to come because the usual GameholeCon Association is just not a time I can get away. So I'm excited to get to be here. I've been playing Cube for a long time. Uh building too many cubes, but I'm excited to, thanks to you, have a cube in the event. Hopefully it gets fired. That's what I'm obviously nervous about that, that people aren't gonna want to play it. Um it didn't get voted in, but it got put in. I'm lucky enough to have had it featured on this show before on Loading Ready Run. So maybe people want to play it. Hopefully they get a chance to do it. It's the mono white cube, I should probably say that. All spells that could be cast with white mana. I think there's a bunch of good archetypes in there. Hopefully, people have a chance to do different things with creature type old decks, enchantments, equipment, things like that. So hopefully they'll get a chance to play it and enjoy it.

SPEAKER_09 2:13

You bring up a good point. I actually had that happen to me one time. You know, I had built a cube for KubeCon, the Monopoly, low, low budget, didn't cost me much. It was more of putting together like this meme type concept, right? Not not to be comparative, but it there is that possibility and that nervous tension that we do get as designers is well, question, will they like my cube? Well, we we don't even know if they don't play my cube, right? And it's a thing about designing your cube tailored to your audience, right? So you build for your local meta. But when you come to these large conventions like this, you might as well just blow the entire concept of a meta. People are gonna build decks that you've never even thought about before. So that is something that that that little bit of baggage, that little bit of weight, that is the thing that we feel as designers, as cube curators, is when we present these two people, especially unknown variables, out on the you know, the battlefield of KubeCon here, you know, what's that like?

SPEAKER_24 3:10

Like put that in your own words. Yeah, so the big thing is is anybody well, one, are they gonna want to play it at all? Two, if they do, are they gonna like what they do? This they're gonna open it up and just see a wall of white cards, and you know, maybe they're like, oh, I instantly want to do this, or they're like, I have no idea what to do. So the idea for when I built the cube was that anybody could just draft it and have a playable pile of cards at the end. Now, there's also archetypes in there, but that's not necessarily gonna be obvious. You're just gonna like we we joked about it the first time I was on the show with you, calling it the open lane, and that's kind of what it still is. Uh just hopefully people find something that they want to do with it.

SPEAKER_09 3:49

Yeah, we've had some cubes we've played like that in our group, and this is similar to that. Sometimes you draft a cube and you don't really have a bearing on what you're drafting. But once you lay the cards out, then kind of you unlock the synergies and you see what you've grabbed, right? And a lot of people will be, you know, motivated, power motivated. Maybe this card sticks out to them because it's either, you know, in the power advantage, or maybe they've got a friend's cube to have it, or maybe it's on a commander deck, right? And that'll be their motivation. And it's interesting to get behind that space. But with a cube like this, and I'd say any kind of singular color, mono-colored cubes, I can see where there's a degree of washout. Like, right, we use color as a signal uh to get our bearing as to what we like as magic players. You know, for example, I'm a dirty Esper player sometimes, and or I like mono red. Mono white's not what I gravitate towards. Now I get a whole grip, a handful of cards passed to me that are mono-white. I gravitate towards like this is a planeswalker, this does something. I know planeswalkers are good, especially 1v1. How do you combat that? And you have a lot of mono-colored cubes. I have all the mono-colored cubes.

SPEAKER_24 4:58

Um, yeah, the general idea is hopefully because it's it's tough, right? The idea when you're drafting a quote unquote regular cube, a lot of times what you want to do is just take whatever is objectively the best card in that pack, and that's harder to assess when the environment has just this focus, whatever, whether it's a thematic focus or something like that. If it's monocolor, so for this, I've tried to build specific archetypes with the more powerful cards being a guide toward what the different deck archetypes are. So if there's a mythic in your pack, it probably leads to something that you could build a whole deck around.

SPEAKER_09 5:32

Yeah, so I'm looking forward to seeing this cube fire. You get the feel I a little back to that little I that one time the Monopoly came out and nobody played it, and I had sad face and little rain cloud around my head. I think everybody in this room is going to be feeling that, right? With these big events, that's this is the whole room. So it's not even not you in a bubble here. It's gonna be all of them are like, oh my goodness, I hope they enjoy my cube. I can assure you they will, right? It's an amazing cube, it's beautiful, it's tricked out, foiled, artist proofs, it's gorgeous, and I'm not even a mono white player, so I'm looking forward to getting feedback on this cube. Other than that, we'll be back with some more interviews. Thanks for listening, and you know, please forgive the audio quality. We are switching between mics here in a hall.

Ian Braverman

SPEAKER_09 6:16

It's this guy again, and we've got a pillar of the community, Ian Braverman, to tell us a little bit about their KubeCon experience, what cubes they have in the event, and what is it like to be a cube designer?

SPEAKER_07 6:28

Good morning, Uberbear. This is Ian Braverman of Cube Reviews. I hope you're all doing good. I am very excited for KubeCon this year. I am fresh off of Cube for a Cause also in New York, which was a super fun event. So cubes all weekend, two days of work, right back to Cube. Uh, and I have two cubes in the event. I have Curated by Kiwi. I'm curious. Which is uh my pet bird, my 18-year-old, sort of featherless parrot named Kiwi, supervised the creation of this cube. He he was the manager of the creation of this cube. And the only thing that people know for this cube is that it has one card, Gildie Goose. That's all you know.

SPEAKER_09 7:13

I think that was the Maby Board edition. Is that accurate? You and I were talking about for the memes. You had Kiwi in one and then you and then the Maby Board.

SPEAKER_07 7:22

And also I have my trinket cube in the event, which is a cube all about zero, one mana cheap artifacts and fiddling with them, like sacrificing them, blinking them, recurring them, and all kinds of funny synergies with that. And I'm super excited for this year's event.

SPEAKER_09 7:41

I actually have questions about parrots. Tell us a little bit about parrots. Like, I want to understand like how long they live. Is that a malting process or something they go through when they lose their so I've had Kiwi for about 18 years.

SPEAKER_07 7:52

We adopted it at one year old from another family, and when birds are under stress, they will sometimes pluck their feathers. So he started plucking his feathers like 15 years ago, and he just has been plucking his feathers since then, and maybe we could have done something, but he's healthy and fine. And they lived 25 to 30 years, so he's like middle to upper age. He still has plenty of energy hanging out all the time. We I take him out of his cage all the time, put him on the porch. Yeah, he's a good little bird.

SPEAKER_09 8:24

So this was Kiwi's first attempt at actually building a cube, right? Did you give Kiwi any guidance or did Kiwi go completely solo with this design? I mean, what did what advice did you offer Kiwi?

SPEAKER_07 8:35

Well, Kiwi doesn't have any hands as in the cube cover description. So he would squawk and I would ob I would obey. I would do what he wanted.

SPEAKER_09 8:45

So that would be an interesting build design, right? So I wonder how many cubes will come out based on birds post-the-Kiwi situation we have here, right? I think that's amazing. I should have built one for my Australian Shepherd Odin. He would have done something similar. My cat Loki, the little ragdoll, would have actually been able to build the cube. That's a maniacal little evil love child there we have. But yeah, it's really great. I'm excited about that one that's going to be on my list. Is that in the same vein as kind of like the event they just did at Cube for Cause, the Obscura?

SPEAKER_07 9:14

Yeah, it's a mystery cube. So you will only know one card in the cube going in, Gildagoose. And who knows what the rest of the cube will be? All you know that is that it was made by a bird.

SPEAKER_09 9:25

So this conversation came up yesterday. We were having kind of this internal little philosophical debate about going into an unknown cube. People have their taste, right? They have what they like. What do you expect? Or is that an adventurous type of personality you're looking for? A first adopter? Do you think that people that play traditional magic, we don't need you don't tell us, will they be okay?

SPEAKER_07 9:48

I mean, I think a lot of people at cube events just kind of go full random anyway and don't really look at a lot of lists. I know that I do that too. I'll just like look at the name of a cube and be like, look at the description and be like, that sounds fun, and just go in. And I think people like that, a mystery cube like this, is perfect for. You will just get into the cube, nobody will know what's going on, you'll open up your pack and figure it out from there. That's what it was at Cube for a Cause, Obscura. You would open up the pack, all you knew was one word about the cube. Like, for example, there was one ritual or there was one called uh telemetry. Telemetry.

SPEAKER_09 10:26

I love the names to begin with. The cues were amazing.

SPEAKER_07 10:28

And then you would get into the pack and figure it out from there. And it was it was a blast. Very fun event.

SPEAKER_09 10:35

Yeah, I'm actually, we were talking about the reason why this came up is we were doing a comparison, like at our events, the Uber Cubathon, I go random too. And I've gotten vibe checked on that. Some people like it, some people don't, and generally, well, I I I mean this in the most loving manner. I I'm doing it anyways. But but I think that that was kind of an inspiration I received from the first Uber Cubathon we did. The owners of the LGS shout out to the gathering place when I was talking to them and working with them to set up a cube event. The the one person is doing it, I'm like, uh, should we just kind of you know build out pods? How we should do this? Like it's full random. Cubers are gonna cube. And I thought that was that kind of stuck with me. People that are in it, they're just gonna do it anyways.

SPEAKER_07 11:15

So would you agree with that? Yeah, I mean, I'm happy with any cube I get put in. The only ones I usually avoid are my own cubes or cubes from my local playgroup, because I play those all the time, or cubes that I've played at other events already. Other than that, I'm down to try whatever cube shows up, and I think it's fun to kind of figure out a cube on the spot. Like the only thing I usually want to know is what is the fixing? Like, are there fetch lands? Okay. What kind of how many colors can I go? But other than that, I just want to figure it out and see what kind of crazy synergies I come up with and probably get stomped by somebody who knew what the best thing was, but it's fun.

SPEAKER_09 11:49

Yeah, that's typically the questions I ask, and I think we could probably lead into that just for a second. I always ask, is this singleton? question mark, right? What's your mana base look like? Question mark, and what do you think the most powerful card in your cube is? Those are kind of my one, two, threes. Those are my litmus tests to kind of gauge it. If they say soul ring, then I know what I'm working with here, right?

SPEAKER_07 12:06

But Obscura, you literally do nothing. Like when we went into there was one cube called the Deja Vu Cube, and we knew nothing except deja vu. And I see my first pack had cloud post. And I was like, if there's one cloud post, there's gotta be more than one, right? Or there was also accumulated knowledge. And so the cube curator put in signals that made it very clear what you would expect in later packs, and I thought that was a really smart way to do it too.

SPEAKER_09 12:36

I appreciate you coming on. Everybody check out, make sure you check out Cube Reviews. I'll include that in this link. Once I and please excuse the audio, we're gonna be cell phone phoning this as much as we could. I tried some cool mics, they didn't work. There are too many buttons, and it was causing chaos. So we're iPhoning this today. So thanks for listening, and I appreciate it, and more interviews to come.

Kade and Recross the Paths

SPEAKER_09 12:56

Hey, it's me again. I'm here with Cade to talk a little bit about uh KubeCon, what's it like to be at KubeCon, what's it like to run a podcast, whatever comes to your mind. Matter of fact, you're asking, what do I do to prep? Don't prep, just just talk.

SPEAKER_19 13:10

Yeah, that's that's so many things to think about, right? All at once. No, it's is honestly just a treat to be back at KubeCon. It's been a couple years since I've been here, and we've talked about it before, but events like this are like reunions for people you've never met in person. You know, just the opportunity to connect with all these folks. It's like, I know your gamertag, I know your handle on Discord or whatever, and then you get to actually shake hands, share hugs, and share drafts, which is what it's all about.

SPEAKER_09 13:33

I'm with you on that too. I'm still trying to figure out. Uh some people want to go by their name, or some people want to go by their gamer tag. And sometimes I just blend them together and I don't know what to call people, but and I I hear their voices, or I I I've had people walk up to me sometimes and they'll go, hey Uber Bear, and I'll kind of look around. It's funny, I I've never really told anybody, I kind of did, but when I was in the military, United States Air Force, that was my radio call sign was Uber Bear. And then during our first episode of Ubercube, Stu and I talked about, you know, the idea of anonymity and whether or not, you know, what's the internet like, and we're not very good at like should we tell people who we are and where we're at. And so I say, all right, cool, let's go, let's hit record. And I say, Welcome to Ubercube, this is your host, Uberbear. And then I look over at Stu and he goes, and this is just Stu. And it just blew away the whole social contract right in front of me.

SPEAKER_19 14:18

I love that story. It there is something funny about it. I have no misgivings about anonymity in the digital age. You know, publishing podcasts, you know how it goes. Like if you don't create a separate account, here's my full government name that tells you where this podcast is coming from. But, you know, especially in this space, it's it's this opportunity to sit down with people from all walks of life, from all preferences and predilections. So, like that sort of thing, hopefully is it's comfortable for you to just get to sit down with all sorts of people. Uh, and that's valuable. You don't always get that in every space of life.

SPEAKER_09 14:48

So, what do you think about KubeCon? Generally, I actually said this while talking to Ian, and I want to get your take on this. I kind of made the joke that this is like the final boss fight, the final form, right? It's where all of the small homegrowns kind of culminate. We come from across the country. We find ourselves in the Madison area, right? What do you think that does to like not only the social aspects, but as far as like the metas and what you learn about magic having people from different locations?

SPEAKER_19 15:15

I I think KubeCon is kind of like the er event. You know, like it's the one that spawned so many of these. That KubeCon happened, you know, for the first time in 2022, I think was the first one. And then that was really the galvanizing force for so many people to be like, oh, this is possible, this is doable, there's enough interest to go beyond just our local groups and to try to put something together that's bigger. So even as there are so many more events, I mean you've seen event calendars, there's opportunity to travel most every week of the year if you really want to, uh, cover the world and play a Cube event. But KubeCon being where it started, I think is going to hold a special place for a lot of people. And I don't know if I would necessarily say the final boss, but it is a gathering place for all these people to come together in the official setting, if you want to think of it that way. Like this is kind of the a core of drawing people together around that. So I don't know that that makes it like necessarily more competitive, less competitive. It's like I think it just has the the weight and the pedigree of of where it's come from. That's really appealing.

SPEAKER_09 16:16

Yeah, I would agree with that. I think that as a person that's went, this is now my fifth one, every time I come here, I learn something. And or if I would encourage any of the listeners to actually submit a cube, not only to KubeCon, but any of your local events that are popping up, right? Whatever you're at. And there's a lot of ways to find that. You can find that on our MTG drafting Facebook page, you can find that on MTG Talk Discord, you can find that in all these Discords, people are talking about it. So if you're looking for the idea or want to know how to structure your own event, KubeCon, while it's larger in magnitude than most people would be willing to do, if you wanted to do a 32 or a 64 or 128, whatever your whatever you choose, whatever your comfort level is, the formula is now there, and that's what KubeCon, they did proof of concept, right? They showed that you could get enough people that would have gained enough interest and want to put themselves out there with their designs, which I think is fascinating, and take critical feedback live on camera, right? These are all kind of aspects, but it's so cool because it taught us how to, you know, monkey see, monkey do. We can now do this in our regions, right?

SPEAKER_19 17:14

Yeah. Yeah, well, and and so much of the value too, like you said, the inspiration, certainly. You have you have the opportunity to play all sorts of things in the main event, or you can go to like the little black market corner and play the stuff that you know that you can't do in the main event for whatever rules or procedure descriptions. There's opportunity to get inspired that way. There's also just opportunity to play. Even like at these structured smaller events, you have kind of sometimes you have a limited window, you have smaller spaces in which to play, so you have to be really careful and selective about what's up. I find that particularly at events like this, if you want to draft at any hour of the day, or literally 24 hours a day, you can find other people who are interested and willing to sit down and draft. And you don't have to bring your own cube. I think that's the other important part. You can, and you can learn, and you can put other eyes on it. Or you can just be a player. It's the Anthony, it's that comical problem of like sometimes you'll sit down at tables like there are eight people and there are 12 cubes. You know, like, okay, which one do you pick? Like the opposite problem what you usually have of scraping people together to play. So being able to capitalize on that experience. People are here, they want to draft, and you get to be part of that.

SPEAKER_09 18:17

Yeah, it's exciting. So everybody make sure, and I'm sure you already are, go check out Cade's Recross the Pass. It is S tier as far as actually interviewing the community. He's not going to agree with me, but it is amazing what you're doing, the work you're doing, you're bringing spotlights to people's cubes, talking about their designs, how they got there, what's their favorite magic card, and how what would be the one they'd like a beautiful reprint of. One of my favorite questions. I just by what artists? These are fantastic. I think you're doing such pardon me, but you're doing the Lord's work for this. As far as the cube community is concerned, I appreciate what you're doing. You're bringing people together, you're creating community, you're a pillar. I appreciate you.

SPEAKER_19 18:55

I appreciate you too. You I mean, you've inspired so many people over the years. I mean, we were talking about that yesterday. You've been doing, you know, the Uber Cube podcast. You're running for so many years every week, you know, doing that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Seriously, it is a grind. I can commiserate to some extent of what it takes to edit, what it takes to put that together and put out something you're proud of.

SPEAKER_05 19:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_19 19:13

So certainly seeing you do that in the community has also been awesome. And I'm so excited to be here for this weekend just to sit back, play, enjoy, and like I said, hopefully get inspired by what other people are doing this weekend to for more conversations in the future.

SPEAKER_09 19:27

Big same. Gonna kick my feet back and just watch Uber Bear out. Hey,

Elliot Discusses Draft Tactics

SPEAKER_09 19:32

it's this guy again, and I'm here with our Uber Cubathon invitational champion for 2026.

SPEAKER_23 19:39

Say hello. Hello. My name's Elliot. On uh MTGO, I go by Poner God for I think 411, and I sometimes Twitch stream uh as Jupacabra.

SPEAKER_09 19:51

Oh yeah, so we're here at KubeCon, you know, as we're doing a KubeCon compilation, meeting everybody. We actually had some of Elliot's loot that he had left at the event. What how many months later you actually get back this like precious was it a dice collection?

SPEAKER_23 20:04

Yeah, so this is a dice box that well my wife got me for a birthday gift. It's like a 3D printed box that she originally thought it was supposed to be like a deck box, and I was like, this does not fit like sleeved cards. So I used it as a dice box, you know, and uh it has like all my good dice and coins and all the things you need for uh for a good cubing experience.

SPEAKER_09 20:26

So that's what we do here at Uber Cubathon. We meet people, then we hold like their loot hostage so that we have to meet them twice, right? The only reason why you came to KubeCon is to get your stuff back, right? Absolutely.

SPEAKER_23 20:35

Because it definitely wasn't gonna come in the mail, that's for sure.

SPEAKER_09 20:39

So you're here, or do you think you're a really good magic player? You you kind of, I won't say mop the floor, but mop the floor with some of our Raleigh champions. And before that, your good friend Ben did the same thing. I'm starting to see this legacy run at our events where what I don't know if you can invite any more of you guys from here because you just keep rocking us. So, what what inspires you to play Cube in particular?

SPEAKER_23 20:59

I started playing Cube with the Magic Vintage Online Cube. Um that was my first foray into it. Um I didn't even know anything about it before that. And then my one of my good friends who's actually gonna be arriving here in like 10 minutes, uh, has a peasant cube and a 15 cube that he's developed over the years. Um, and so cube has just become a huge part of the way I enjoy magic. I am a dirty commander player too, but I just love all magic. I've been playing it since uh like what 13 years ago now. Um, so not the longest, but it's definitely become a big part of my life. And Cube in particular has been how I've stayed engaged with it. When I can't find people, I can play online, um, and it's become more popular now. So now you have these events which are awesome. It's my second KubeCon, and I'm really, really excited.

SPEAKER_09 21:50

How do you approach the different cubes? Yeah, I I know that you're actually well we'll say it for a lack of better terms. I believe you to be a competitive player. You play you play magic hard. Like you're not you're there's gonna be some people. here they're gonna be going every single table every time there's a round. I am not. Do you have any advice for anybody that's playing from a say a drafting standpoint, generic advice you could give someone that you know new to draft, new to cube, that could help them along with these cube events? Like what is your kind of your do you have a formula you can share?

SPEAKER_23 22:19

Honestly, for me, especially when I went to Uber Cubathon and last year's KubeCon, I made 128. My goal coming in was not to win. My goal was to have fun. And I think that helps like taking your focus off of just sheer winning. Like obviously when I play I'm trying to win but my goal wasn't to win. My goal was to do whatever the cube sort of focus was whatever the fun thing. So I specifically chose cubes that were interesting or fun and not necessarily cubes that I was familiar with. So like last year I don't think I put any like vintage cube. Like that's the thing I definitely know the most I'm definitely the best at. I didn't put any because I was like I could do that anytime. I could do peasant cube anytime. I could do 15 cube anytime. I want to do the weird stuff. And I think I found success playing the weird stuff by dipping into like reading the primer you know before the cube starts. I didn't do any like studying in advance. It's just read the primer before the cube starts try to get a feel for sort of the vibes of what's going on. And then for people who are new to drafting and new to the idea of sort of this competitive element I would say just pick your lane. Like if you have to force it force it. But like pick your lane force it try to do something cool. You'll either have a great memory of doing something cool or you'll talk about the fun story of how you try to do something cool and it failed but I think trying too hard to like be a good drafter is going to be the thing that makes you mess up more. And that's been proven in the last couple Cube events to be fairly successful.

SPEAKER_09 23:55

I would say get a good night's sleep. Yeah don't bring that bring a bottle of water probably dress a little warm and then just like you said I think that sound advice from Bay this is don't let your uh I guess your eagerness to win get in the way but it is a game based on you know strategy and you know but but if you kind of get out of your own headspace you you can be a successful drafter.

SPEAKER_23 24:20

I would say definitely I mean if your goal is to win a Cuba ban or anything limited I mean just watching people play limited there's so much more cube content now than there was ever like there's so many great people you can watch your LSVs and your Paul Chians and your Caleb D's I mean there are there's so many streamers so many like YouTube videos that your Ubercube your Ubercube do you do you have a gameplay video? No nobody wants to watch that I would say like if you want to specifically like get better at the gameplay aspect of it because like everything's great in theory you can talk uh you know all day about like how you could draft or would draft but it's a different thing altogether when you watch someone navigate a draft or watch them play there's lots of little lines especially in these cubes I feel like cubes hyper emphasize sort of niche interactions that you're not going to see in traditional limited magic and you have weird interactions of cards and if you just have a compilation of these weird interactions from watching video or playing more cube then when you go into a cube environment and you see these cards your brain is already pre-triggered to look for similar cards. It's like oh I see a displacer kit in let me start looking for things that go infinite with displacer kitten. Oh there's Teferi? Okay, there's probably an infinite with displacer kit you know those kinds of things I mean I was at I think at Ubercube watching someone like work it out in real time. They're like oh I think this loops and I was like oh yeah that's like a really common loop that you see on vintage cube if you play a lot of vintage cube but those are the kinds of things I think will help you the most is just exposure to like two card, three card interactions.

SPEAKER_09 25:58

Yeah and I think these type of events for me personally I can speak to it they have made me better at just playing the game as in putting me outside my comfort zone, making me see lines that I would have never expected. And you know just learning kind of the sportsmanship aspect and you're a good sport about it, right? You're a person that wins the week but you keep a good attitude about it and that's what these events are about. They're about the community getting together showcasing people's cubes and then taking yourself a little bit out of your comfort zone and playing something that's not in your traditional meta. But I appreciate you coming on I'm excited and we'll see if we can get another uber cubiton again. Wherever Stu decides to live we'll get back to you on that. But thank you and this is Uberbear out. It's this guy again coming to you from a cube from from KubeCon 2026. It's day one is this the prequel it's a prequel day zero prequel prequel it's one of the days prequel day you know you start drafting a lot time just as a construct and becomes a blur anyways I'm standing here with my good friend Matt and we were having an interesting conversation about artifact cubes and I thought maybe we could just talk about that for a few minutes. I'll lead you with some questions but the gist was you've put some cubes in you and I have rivaled this happened we've talked about this we've compared notes you and I have worked together in our own weird circles to try to solve each other's cubes Uberbear's Artifact Cube and uh Dozer's Artifact Bazaar I guess yeah so artifact cube yeah we're we're artifact brothers from another mother I'd say right what as far as that type of cube design what what what is the appeal of making an artifact centric type I guess universe well it's if you like one card type then you can absolutely go nuts and you can have all sorts of like synergies that in that connect in ways that you didn't really anticipate.

SPEAKER_14 27:49

For example one of the I was b I was bird dogging a match in uh a capital kubecon and what somebody had a the four mana Urza that has tempered steel attached to it and his opponent had Jaegra in play. Oh yes and they didn't realize that all of his all of their creatures were artifact creatures that get bit boosted.

SPEAKER_09 28:14

So it's tons of little synergies like that like little and big uh but it's yeah it's uh just a lot of fun with I actually had the ple pleasure of playing your cube at Capital Cube Championships where I was taken down by Anthony Maddox and the cube that I see I'm so good at right the concept I get I got wrecked and you know Anthony's an amazing magic player from Lucky Paper Radio. But how many cubecons have you been to so far is this year this is my fourth one?

SPEAKER_14 28:42

Yeah I want to say it's been around for five years or is this this is the fifth one yeah yeah so fourth four years.

SPEAKER_09 28:47

What makes KubeCon so special to you?

SPEAKER_14 28:49

Um it is Madison is an island for those of us who travel to it uh which is great anytime you can get to an island to do like it's like a cabin in the woods where you and just your friends are doing a thing. So that's one the qubits are one though like I love the prize wall that they've they've put up it basically means that we all pull our tickets at the end of the and the end of the event and get more draft stuff.

SPEAKER_09 29:14

I did that one year I'm gonna as tangentially we combined our qubits at the end we handed us to our friend Christian and he went off and kind of like he took our cow and traded in for three beans and brought it back.

SPEAKER_14 29:26

Oh god so we're not combining anymore oh did you I mean what is he got what he wanted off the wall we got the no no no we well we just go like hey like last time we did a Dominaria draft a Final Fantasy draft and then like another I think an Ixilon draft yeah and just with our prize tickets.

SPEAKER_09 29:47

What would you say to anybody that has not been to a KubeCon, what would be the reason why they should go like what's what I mean there's gotta be a a pool here right?

SPEAKER_14 29:54

Yeah I would say it's the all uh unlike other events it is all cube all the time like you can show up Wednesday early in the day uh today's Thursday for context you can show up Wednesday early in the day and cube until you leave Friday Monday evening. Uh there's just there's cubing at the airport there's cubing at stores there's cubing at the event it's just it's just cubing all the time. No it'll be less it's interesting because it's changing with the Ubit Rise and other events. I think the attendance this year is back down to its I think it's first year attendance.

SPEAKER_09 30:35

I think there's 350ish players which is oh we were close to well I I don't know if we got past 200 the first time it's it's grown it's nice but there's probably the second year year two attendance.

SPEAKER_14 30:46

So but if you're like first year they had 200 next year they made they capped the event at 400 yeah next the next year they capped the event at 600 yeah and then it's sort of fallen off a little bit because it's separating from game whole con but that's a whole other thing.

SPEAKER_09 31:00

Yeah so what makes it nice though is a melting pot of like cube ideas and construction like I'm actually interested in Ian Braven's Drake Braverman's Trinket Cube. Again you and I back to the back to the artifact conversation we had I like it a lot right it might give you and I some inspiration that's one of the things I get out of this right so for anybody that hasn't built their first cube or if you're thinking about it this is a great place to come out and you know taste the experience of a few different cubes to see what kind of fits what you might want to craft into your the image that you want to see your cube right you pick up an idea you're thinking to yourself while playing this I like what they did with this but I think I can you know quietly do it better right or I have a way but I can I can make this fit like what fits my audience right and so it's very inspirational for anybody. So that's why I would recommend coming out what kind of cubes do you think you got on the Docker today? What are you looking at?

SPEAKER_14 31:48

I'm on a unique so there's one that is a mystery cube it basically has one card registered in it. It's Gilded Goose and all the other the the entire thing is a mystery so that'll be my first one but I am actually going for all unique cubes.

SPEAKER_09 32:02

You're talking about the Kiki cube that's Ian Braverman's I'm the one that told him to put the Gilded Goose in the maybe board because he's got birds of paradise on the main I think it was and Gilded Goose and the maybe I've got it a fun juice. I that's what I thought I said I told him to add that for flavor I said people get a kick out of that because nothing else is known except for these two birds that may or may not like each other was the gag.

SPEAKER_14 32:19

Oh okay yeah yeah yeah but other than that I I'm going for unique cubes that I've never played before I'm not into gimmick cubes as much as other people are not me in terms of like changing the rules of magic or I although the cascade cube if you get a chance to play it it's it's pretty awesome. Force of will incredible incredible card because you can counter their first spell and then put have a creature in play on turn one or turn zero. But yeah that's so just unique cubes so that I haven't played before.

SPEAKER_09 32:54

Well Matt thank you for coming on the show it's fun uh it's always fun to talk to different designers especially ones that have like comparative cubes I guess we're in the same vein with the same genre of magic so yeah I'm looking forward to this and this is Uberbear owl hey

The Chrome Wars Game Play

SPEAKER_09 33:08

it's this guy again we just finished up the prequel draft of Chrome Wars where as one might imagine I am and was at the bottom of the bracket but had a great time an amazing cube by our good friend Brian Sensi absolutely gorgeous tricked out foiled cube triple sleeved just a totally thematic immersive experience.

SPEAKER_01 33:27

Now we're going to talk to our champion who has trophied hi my name is Fan Chen I trophied uh the Chrome Wars yeah this cube seemed like a lot of fun when I saw the cube cobra uh of it it seemed like a nice immersive experience and yeah it just felt like a good time.

SPEAKER_09 33:46

So what card took you to the victory was it was it a synergy piece or was it a multitude of cards? It was I guess on the back of a single card or was it pieces that you put together in the play how did you get to the strategy?

SPEAKER_01 33:59

So technically speaking the card that was like most impactful for me was Grist the Hunger Tide. It is a synergy piece in the deck because it it does synergize with like multiple insects and unearthed cards in the deck. However it is also just like a very good card on raid.

SPEAKER_09 34:18

Just an excellent play experience and spoken like a true champion I'm glad you had fun. We've got one more shout out here as you can hear this is a conference event loud audio quality please forgive and now we've got another individual our good friend Ryan here that also went to the top of the bracket playing for the trophy pen right what you got to what you gotta say here join in I would just like to shout out New Jersey love y'all just the entire state of New Jersey shout out Garden State let's go happy cubing hey it's Anthony again

Chatting with Ryan Overturf

SPEAKER_09 34:50

coming back from day two of KubeCon this is day two right day one day one day zero day zero do we count that yeah we we work between them I mean it's like it's a Thursday so a lot of people weren't here yet right that's correct I've been here since Tuesday and I am carrying that record still will be very proud I just owe three the Chicago Cube I tried but we were joking with the staff up here a few minutes ago about I'm going for the record of cumulative highest score total as then I'm in the 500s every time we come here.

SPEAKER_18 35:20

So yeah KubeCon's an experience they got with me right now you'll know the voice you'll recognize it introduce yourself you know like they don't know you already gamers Ryan Overtur here talking to your boy Uber Bear so how you been you uh what what cubes have you been playing over the KubeCon season this year? Uh yeah so I did two on day zero there's a prequel draft I played one up which is a cube everyone has one life it's not my scene I'm trying to try different things and I uh I didn't really latch on to something anything I was supposed to be doing so that that was a one two that was tough but you know it's day zero we're shaking it off I played the uh alpha reimagine cube for the side event last night that one delivers what it promises on it has like an alpha experience where some of the cards just end the game that that's what they intend to do so I really like the way that that cube is true to what it says it's gonna be and this morning I played Bridges over troubled water which is a cube where both players start with two bridge from belows in play and I've never had that card in play before despite having had it in my decks many times.

SPEAKER_09 36:22

So you're going outside of your comfort zone I'm a person so I was encouraged I was talking to our good friend Matt Melcher and he's like Anthony just spin that wheel and I just can't bring myself to spin that wheel but I accidentally last night during barcube session just picked I might as well have been spinning a wheel at that point because I've enjoyed some old fashions of barcubing and I ended up in the Chicago cube which is an amazing cube shout out to the developers and designers. I loved every bit of it even though I got my butt kicked with Urza nonetheless there's no reason for me to have lost except for this is definitely pilot error. What type of cubes do you typically gravitate to when you come to these large conventions? Do you have a certain type that you seek out at an event?

SPEAKER_18 36:57

I'm relatively new to the larger convention um I did coverage for KubeCon two years ago and I even then was like trying to cover familiar cubes because I learn cards. Like I I saw a card for the first time drafting bridges over trouble high today and it was cool because like I first picked it it was the strongest card in the pack and so it's it's really fun to have those moments of discovery and this time that's that's what I'm optimizing for. I'm trying to play the least familiar cubes possible. If I win great but what I want to do is see something I haven't seen before and just rock in my horizons in this space.

SPEAKER_09 37:31

So I promised Ryan a short and sweet conversation because this is in the middle of lunch here, but a follow-up final question I have what's the reason why people should come to their homegrown local events or KubeCon on a season what what's what do you get from these type of experiences?

SPEAKER_18 37:45

I think it's a big thing certainly relative to other magic events and if your hesitation is that you don't know anybody you're worried about playing in a tournament it is way more casual than you think it is people are broadly overwhelmingly super friendly. Everyone is here to have fun and if you come here with that being your goal you have a good attitude yourself you're gonna have a good time and you're gonna experience a lot of creative things and people are going to want to talk to you about your experience you can share in that maybe you have your own cube you want to have drafted even if you're only gonna be selected submit it come here talk about your cube get to know some people it's a blast.

SPEAKER_09 38:22

100% agree all right let's go get some lunch what do you say all right thank you for listening and Uber Bear out hey it's this guy Uberbear again I went and took a long nap my actual win loss rate this season is about as good as I expected Stu would be proud so I decided to talk to some people that actually know how to play Magic so we can get a little bit of insight into what makes KubeCon so special. I'm standing here with my good friend Kirby how's it going? And Kirby has some cubes in the event can you tell us a little bit about like kind of roll it up into the idea of what's it like to have your cubes in the event? How do you prep for them?

SPEAKER_16 39:00

You know give us kind of a little bit of insight long form to talk a lot so I have two cubes uh two returning favorites at KubeCon this year uh one of them is my Omnipresent imposters cube uh each player receives two copies of the mystery booster card omnipresent imposter which is a generic too generic for a 2-1 changeling has every card name and if you would search your library you can search for it instead so it's a cube built around typal archetypes name matters cards and different ways to be able to search it up has been a ton of fun a lot of positive feedback about it the most difficult thing in prepping that one is since it is a typo focused cube if a certain creature type doesn't work out you gotta take all those cards out and put in all replacement cards. So Green White still doesn't really hasn't figured out what creature type it wants to be it's humans right now I've tried allies I've tried other wild card stuff a lot of trial and error it it's finding its path and one of these days wizards will like really well support a creature type for green white more than just humans.

SPEAKER_09 40:18

So based on that idea having a typo cube in an event I had my horror cube here once before actually maybe twice I can't remember but either way's horror cube that one's pretty static right I mean the gothic horror genre and then we roll up some maybe some Eldrazi or something in the future something scary. But when you're doing something like you're doing how much has that cube evolved between last season and this season at KubeCon and other I imagine you've been to other cube events.

SPEAKER_16 40:45

I would say between last KubeCon and this one there I think there's a lot of refining done uh finding nice niches figuring out how much you want to support any individual card type or creature type because you don't want somebody to go all in on a specific creature type and feel like it's uh just on rails. You want them to mix and match you want them to utilize imposter as that changeling especially since you're able to quickly search it up with like a fetch land or ash barons or another effect. But yeah a lot of it was just getting the reps in seeing how things were playing seeing if there was any severe power outliers seeing what people were looking for what people were excited about. Like you need to have those hooks so people are like man I love this card or I got to do this really cool play with these together. So that's what you're really trying to find. Like this is definitely my cube that focuses on player emotion and making them very excited.

SPEAKER_09 41:47

So let me ask you a question this is kind of for individuals that are curious about maybe submitting their cube to KubeCon or to Ubercubaton you know not that we do that so much, but you get the idea or and on one of the many grassroots across the country what advice would you give them in say from a preparation standpoint, how to organize this? How did you get there? So first off just do it.

SPEAKER_16 42:14

If you're like uh I'm not sure how people think about or whatnot just try it. You're not gonna find out until you do. And you can always try again later. Second would be it's not going to be perfect. Somebody's gonna find something that's broken that you didn't anticipate go fix it next time. Or something might not work as well as you thought it did or it worked well with your play group but not other people who like really are well versed in magic and can figure out how to exploit the cube but it really it's just trial and error and give it a shot. Don't worry too much about it being perfect or whatnot.

SPEAKER_09 42:53

Just make it the best you think you can I think that's great advice for anybody that's listening and they're like well how did you get your cubes in there and why did you do it? No cube is perfect. They are living creatures they are subject to feedback cannot prep for an evolving meta especially from homegrown anywhere. I don't care if you're homegrown's in Florida and people come and see you from say Illinois to play your cube they're gonna have a different meta. That's something that advice that I'd say we as designers and curators of these cubes, we kind of know that going in but I would say every single time coming out of them my cubes have strictly gotten better and had I kept them encapsulated to the greater Raleigh Durham area out without the advice and I guess the insight of people who see things differently than say I do or my playgroup does or Meta, they kind of would have been for lack of better terms potentially stuck in the mud right set in the ways. Do you agree with that statement?

SPEAKER_16 43:49

Yeah I would also say you're playing this type rope, the tight rope of you got to be humble and when people are like hey this is a problem you have to kind of Understand, see where they're coming from, see how the card is making them or their opponent feel to make that determination. But also just figure out like, hey, this is the theme, or this is specifically how I want my cube to play, and you kind of have to hold your ground there. So it's a weird back and forth of you need to be open to feedback, but you also need to know what you're shooting for. And sometimes those be kind of like at conflict with each other.

SPEAKER_09 44:28

You might have somebody Yeah, there's a dichotomy here, right?

SPEAKER_16 44:31

You might have somebody that's like, hey, I don't like this, and you gotta be like, that is understandable. I'm like, it's not your taste, but this is the environment that I'm looking for. But at the other side, you also have to be like, hey, this didn't have a good play pattern. And you're like, I love that card, but okay, I see where you're coming from, and maybe that's not great for my environment. So just keep them both in check.

SPEAKER_09 44:54

And I agree with that totally, and that's what makes these type of events. I encourage anybody that's listening right now to either submit yours to a local event or to kubecon or follow up and just kind of grow your circle. But the idea is to learn more and grow more, and like Kirby said, you know, you'll get the feedback and you will adjust to taste, you know, to quote the great Ousman. All right, Uber Bear out. Hey, it's Anthony

The Jank Diver Podcast and Peasant Cubes

SPEAKER_09 45:17

again. I mean, surprise. I am at KubeCon. This is day number one, and I am standing here right now with two of the hosts from the Jank Diver Podcast. I'm gonna hand the mic over to them, have them tell you a little bit about like what it's like to run the Jank Diver podcast, what they're all about, and then we'll just kind of roll from there. Super casual, enjoying this con, and here we go. Let's start out with introduce yourself.

SPEAKER_17 45:41

Okay, hey, uh, my name's uh Tim. Sorry, I I'm misnamed Anthony already.

SPEAKER_09 45:47

Andrew.

SPEAKER_17 45:47

Andrew, I did it again, see? Andrew Bear. Andrew Bear. I'll just call you Bear because that's what I know you about. Um yeah, my name's Timothy with Jank uh Jank Diver Gaiman. We do the Jank Tank podcast. Uh basically centered on peasant cube content at this point, and uh this is our first cube con. I'm here with Dan Denelius, um, who has been just tearing up the weekend with pizza decks. Everything pizza is the hotness, but um at some point we'll break away from Peasant Cube and maybe play something that's not Peasant Cube this weekend.

SPEAKER_10 46:16

Maybe later, but for now it's just all peasant cube all the time.

SPEAKER_09 46:18

Isn't it only Peasant Cube? If there were a peasant con, we'd all be the peasants anyways at this con, right? You should start a peasant cube con. There you go, we'll just do that.

SPEAKER_17 46:28

There is chatter, and I've talked to a couple people about what we can do to get some sort of east coast version of this going. We've got peasant only. I don't know, okay. My dream would be peasant only, but I know you guys are centered over there in Raleigh. Uh we've got a couple people, myself and Chris, uh also from the Jen Tank, in like the Charlotte area, Greensboro area, and I don't see any reason we can't do this like on the East Coast, you know?

SPEAKER_14 46:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 46:51

Well that's funny you mentioned that. Every year we start doing we've been doing a private event. We kind of decided to reel it back. So Ubercubaton the first couple times was open to the general public, going for 64. Last year we experimented, we went 32, and we did it completely free. All proceeds go to charity. Bring food items. There's no reason why two podcasts can't get together and then and then actually do some good here on this planet. That's that's so I think we're signing a social contract right now on anybody listening to.

SPEAKER_10 47:17

Well, there's a there's a a KubeCon that happened last week in Toronto, there's one that happened, it's happening in Dallas, where I live in a few weeks. So yeah, there's there's little events happening all over the country. We should have a peasant-only KubeCon. Come on, okay.

SPEAKER_17 47:30

Yeah, I don't know what your thoughts about that are, but uh I'm I'm all for peasant only. But the thing is that we're gonna try to like start something over there on the East Coast, we want to be inclusive, you know. All right, fine. It's just me, me, me and Dan obviously want peasant only.

SPEAKER_09 47:42

We played three peasant cubes so far, so I just had some dialogue with someone earlier, and it was about regarding Sandwich's Peasant Cube. Now, a little backstory, uh, Chris, who's on our show all the time and has you know, cubes in the event, in particular, Sandwich's Peasant Cube, which is a turning favorite. I was talking to one of the individuals that I was playing in another cube, and I understood what they said. They said, I don't know if I like his cube as much as I did two years ago. And there's a reason why I'm saying that. Because Chris takes a lot of influence from, I guess you have a peasant cube Discord, right? And there's this new idea where there's a lot more game pieces involved. This is a little bit of a disruption to the traditional kind of, you know, creature stick, flyers, aristocrats. Now you got slices of pizza and donuts and pigeon tokens and whatever you're, you know, right? Stop signs and mailboxes. And I'm I'm I'm actually, because we actually had teased Chris about this. So what I guess I'm formulating here is when I spoke to someone, they're used to this traditionalist, uncommon, right? I'm playing the cards that you open up in a sealed event, right? And I open them up, and normally uncommons are pretty good, like if you go to a pre-release. Like those are the cards to grab. That's what you win with, the commons and uncommons. But they're very, they're less complicated during a certain timeline. Now we're seeing this power creep, right? And then more game pieces all over the thing. Bigger games. How do you feel like this has changed the landscape of Peasant in terms of cube curation and design?

SPEAKER_17 49:11

Uh I'm gonna mostly let Dan speak to that, A, because when Dan kind of joined the Jank Diver gaming team, like he he kind of spread this idea of uh we were calling it objectification, now we call it like object creation, just cleaner that way. I will say, just from a tactical standpoint, like playing Sandwich's cube, playing our own cube, putting all the tokens together to get that in paper, there's a lot of like physical upkeep that I don't think existed five years ago. And you could probably attest to that. You know, for every cube, you could have 70, 80 tokens. So I'll let Dan talk about how it affects like gameplay.

SPEAKER_09 49:49

Toss in some token management in there too. People want to hear about this. How do you do it?

SPEAKER_10 49:52

Well, what I think what Samuel's doing and what you're doing now is the best way, which is um you use uh token, sorry, you put tokens per card in the sleeve of the color of the card that makes the token. Then you you write it out basically and you say, this is the set of tokens for that particular card. It was very easy, but it puts a lot of onus on the cube curator to spend a lot of time. How long did you spend putting those together?

SPEAKER_17 50:13

I might hours. Uh an unquantifiable amount of time. But I again, thanks to Samuch again if you're listening to for that idea.

SPEAKER_10 50:21

I think that works really well for the players. It is a pain for for y'all. But in terms of like the gameplay, I think that it's it the games are so much better when you have access to more things to do. And that's ultimately what you know these objects are. They're just like more ways to use your mana, more ways to synergize, more ways to create combos. That's all a plus. The big downside is yes, it's more complex, games may take a little longer. It you know, we're coming from arena where none of this is a problem, and I think for arena it's a slam dunk. You should definitely do this stuff. And in paper, I think there's like room for, I mean, the cube we just played has way less object creation than Sandwich's does. I definitely prefer Sandwich's cube and ours, but I think there's room in Peasant for a range. I also think that if you really like kind of that old nostalgic version of Peasant Cube, just play Popper Cube. That's basically what Popper Cube is these days, in my mind, anyways. In Peasant, you get to kind of play with a little bit more of the power crep cards that they're printing these days. I think that's a good thing. It's good that there's room for multiple options, you know?

SPEAKER_09 51:15

Yeah, I would agree totally. Back to the token management, this is a conversation that we've had in-house. I'm awful at this. I just take them, stack them, alphabetize them, and then there's soup after that. Good luck. Where's your Thopter? I don't know, it's somewhere near the zombie, I guess. And that's that, so back to the management, to be more descriptive of that, Savage's, or Chris, is taking basically the colored sleeve of the serving card that made the object, right? And then writing outside with a, you know, like a sticker, put it on there, and then write down how many. And it is a really good management system. Because I am getting heckled regularly now when I bust out Uberbear's Artifact Cube or whatever, and that's like covered in tokens. So I've actually, as a fix, because I don't want to go out and buy all these sleeves, there's a budget aspect of this, right? You want to have all these red sleeves. You need to buy a pack of 50, maybe, as a solution, or maybe go through and try to get red-ish sleeves, but enough color distinguishment so that you have your source card when it produces the token, have those in there sliding in there. But another complexity issue, because no one's solved this token game. This hasn't been solved. I've seen people try to do this with Rolodexes, I've seen people do this with binders. I did that originally, I thought that was so cool until I actually had to try to pull them out and they're stuck in the binder and rip you. There's no good solution. So what do you do do you think that maybe there's a critical mass of tokens? Is there such a thing as too many tokens?

SPEAKER_17 52:33

Uh first off, like Dan said, play digitally. Not to take away from the paper cubers, but digital, we've learned this. This is our first KubeGon, the first time JDG has existed in paper. We love the digital gaming space. Not that we hate the paper gaming space, but it solves so many of these issues. It has its downsides too, but whatever. Uh yes, there are too many tokens. I I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but Moro's teaser for reality fractures, like, there's a new artifact token that we've never used before. And it's like, that was a good Mauro impression off the time. Um Yes, there are too many tokens. My thing is when you get down to like uh Kazar making the Zabu token, and like it's one-off tokens that only exist for one single card. It's like maybe we could do a little bit less of that, especially when they're legendary and you have to keep track of them, and you just you're never gonna have two Zabu tokens. I'm rambling, yes, there's two.

SPEAKER_09 53:23

Some of them have death touch, some of them are flying zombies, some of them are playing.

SPEAKER_10 53:30

Sure.

SPEAKER_17 53:31

Shuri now makes Shuri makes a hero robot with flying, but we only have hero robot tokens without flying.

SPEAKER_10 53:39

Oh yeah, we have Sunet who makes uh jellyfish tokens that don't exist. Yes.

SPEAKER_17 53:43

My final answer to that is I wish we would reuse existing tokens a little bit more than Charlie. There you go.

SPEAKER_09 53:48

Now we got there. Yes. Or I'm just gonna say, so tokens are tokens. When I started playing Magic, they were just marbles or dimes and nickels and pieces of candy that you turned sideways. I mean, these were things that you used, the little gems we'd buy from big box stores or whatever, right? Craft stuff. Now we've kind of come to this where everything has, you know, a representation of a card. Another solution that I have done is I get a zombie card, I got a lot of zombie cards, I'll just literally take out a sticker or something and put it over and mod that zombie, right? If it didn't change color profile, you can give it Death Touch with a sticker. So I'm just offering solutions to the listeners, right? Because token management is a thing. Because when you come to these large cons, players, I'll see a mixed bag. Some are actually using the token, some are just gonna flip the cards over anyways, and some are just gonna say, I don't understand Anthony's alphabetization, anyways, right? So there's no good answer here. I'd be curious for the listeners to give us their feedback on how they do their token management. That would be something I'd want to hear. So reach out.

SPEAKER_10 54:52

We play a lot of game on arena, it handles everything for you. Okay.

SPEAKER_17 54:55

We're evangelizing MTGA at this point, but uh that's because that's where we play.

SPEAKER_09 54:59

So one more follow-up question for you guys. This is your first KubeCon, first time at event. What'd that feel like?

SPEAKER_17 55:06

Um, I have mostly positive things to say. I will say one thing about the location, Madison, Wisconsin, is I was immediately greeted by what I felt were friendly people. No offense to my fellow North Carolinians, but it seemed like everybody in Wisconsin was just in a good mood. Maybe because I'm at a convention where everyone's playing Magic or whatever. As far as the KubeCon itself, I think it's been run very smoothly. I haven't seen any hiccups. Like if you compare it to the have you ever done the old GPs?

SPEAKER_09 55:32

No.

SPEAKER_17 55:32

Okay. It reminds me of the old GPs, but it's obviously less competitive and less sweaty, and everyone seems like happy to be here. It's a little less try-hard from what I can tell. So it's been it's been fun and interesting. Granted, I've mostly kept to my shell of peasants, so it's it's familiar for me.

SPEAKER_10 55:50

Yeah, agreed. It's great to be in a room with a bunch of people who are here for the same reason. Everybody's really positive. Um, that's great. Yeah, I can definitely see this. Is the only way I can imagine doing queuing in person in the future is a big con like this. Otherwise, we'll probably just stick to Arena. But this is a good reason to come out and see folks.

SPEAKER_09 56:08

All right, and last but not least, how can the listeners find you?

SPEAKER_17 56:11

Uh, CubeCon, Madison, Wisconsin. We're here right now. Uh actually, um, best place to find me and Dan is on YouTube at uh the Jank Tank or Jankdiver Gaiman. Jank Tank is the name of the podcast, Jank Diver Gaming is the name of the YouTube channel, and then we have a couple Discord, the Jank Diver Gaming Discord is where you know me and Teld and all the rest work on our cube. Denelius has his own cube, the uh Danelius Peasant All-Stars Cube, which is very similar but 540 set of 360, and you can play that in the limited level ups server where they fire off like pretty much daily at this point.

SPEAKER_09 56:43

All right, very cool. Thanks for coming on the show, and this is Uber Alt, and I'm gonna go back to walking around and uh staring at gameplay at KubeCon 2026.

Brian C and The Chrome Wars Design

SPEAKER_09 56:53

Hey, it's Anthony again. We're at dinner now. We are now post-day one. We're queuing up for Bar Cube coming soon. So we're having a nice little local meal here at the Craftsman Table in Tap. Well, we heard they have the world's best cheese curds. Can confirm they are fantastic. I'm sitting here with my amazing friend Brian, who has a cube in KubeCon this year, and we're just gonna do a little bit of hello. Again, this is super informal compilation episode. Pardon the audio, it's always gonna be in this case outdoors or in a conference hall. Here we go, Brian. I'm gonna ask you a few questions. We're gonna prompt you up. Let's start with number one. What cube do you have in KubeCon? Tell us about the conceit of the cube and what it was like to develop it for a large cube event such as KubeCon 2026.

SPEAKER_20 57:39

Uh, yeah, hi. Uh Brian was on a previous episode of Uber Cube talking about this exact cube, the Chrome Wars. The Chrome Wars is basically otherworldly threats invading, well, the it's a thematic first cube with otherworldly threats invading the planet with pe uh uh a lot a lot of defenders, Frexians, Eldrazi's, artifacts, think about Edge of Eternities on crack kind of thing. To answer the third part of your question, honestly, it was just draft as many times as I could with my local friend group until it annoyed the piss out of them, quite literally, and take feedback from there, and then also annoy my wife with how many times I rebuilt it. So that's that's that was my preparation process for this.

SPEAKER_09 58:20

Yeah, so this is your first time in. Have you gotten any feedback on the cube? It's a large event, so you're open source basically to people that have different, you know, viewpoints on cubes, and you're obviously chasing a thematic build, and some people may be looking for mechanical construction or basically how the cards, you know, read the cards, explains the cards, right? And uh versus maybe a story sometimes. How's that landed?

SPEAKER_20 58:41

Uh good question. Um most of the feedback, well, before I get into the feedback, a lot of uh what I was trying to do was also making it while thematic also be functional mechanically. So in that vein, most of the feedback I've gotten so far has been very positive. Um I did get a few shoulder shrugs when they some some people didn't know that I was the cube curator, or the cube designer rather. But I I would love to hear more about those shoulder shrugs before they understood that I was the cube designer. But most of the feedback's been very positive.

SPEAKER_09 59:13

I may have started that one because I did you know I do this. I walk around the table, I go, hey, what do you guys think about this cube? I didn't really like it, I didn't enjoy it that much, and I got Brian standing right beside me, and somebody goes, you know, eh?

unknown 59:23

I want to do that.

SPEAKER_09 59:24

And then I'm like, okay, maybe we should not do that. But anyways, that is part of what you learn to kind of absorb here when you go to these events, is because you don't have your local playgroup, right? And they don't maybe have the expectations. Some of them don't even look at your primer, they haven't absorbed the story, they're not quite sure what they're even dealing with, they're just looking at card quality oftentimes, right? So, how do you insert the idea of card quality into a thematic design from your perspective?

SPEAKER_20 59:47

That's a good question. Um, so I thought I was super clever, which I'm not very original apparently, uh, with a curated list of special guests where I could take cards that I perceive to be power outliers and randomly shuffle them in as marked cards into the draft, which is like secretly playtesting them and saying, like, would counterspell work here? Would Urza work here? I repeated that over and over again with the special guest list and realized that no, Urza was, much to some someone's chagrin, probably, and uh complaining uh that Urza was not a problem. And then also Counterspell was not too powerful for that. So when I realized like those cards were fine, I upped the power level of some of the base level uh cards. So instead of maybe I'm gonna make up this example, maybe like the worst Elspeth, I picked one that's a higher power level, like Archangel Elspeth, as a pair as opposed to Knight Errant. That's another conversation we can have all day about which one's more powerful, but I think Archangel is much more powerful in this environment. Oh, but I couldn't get away with probably putting in Storm Slayer because she's kind of OP. Uh so that's that's the kind of balancing I did to try to up the power level while also being thematic.

SPEAKER_09 1:00:58

So you bring up an interesting point about play testing cards at a large event. So maybe you've got, let's just say, for example, your cube is thought to be stable, right? By anybody that's built a cube. I'd be interested if you could do a shakeup design, as we know you know, our good friend Samage sitting down here right now, probably eating a hamburger of some sort, kind of does, where during these large events, why not take some risk and inject some power outliers? I mean, the reality is you could have a seasonal change. Now, I want to give a dichotomy that a counterpoint to that. Say, say your cube has a few power outliers in there that maybe, I don't know, lack of better terms, poison the well, taint the water, right? And so maybe the experience is drugged down. It is a word-of-mouth concept. I know this from proof of concept, say with my artifact cube, not to keep harping on it, but the idea of collector oof, where I was clearly told by Chris that it was a power outlier and broke the conceit of the artifact cube. Yeah, I put it in because I did the logic of, you know, it dies to removal, right?

SPEAKER_05 1:01:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 1:01:59

But where what would you give advice on the taking of risk, right?

SPEAKER_20 1:02:05

I would say um to quote the famous Shia LaBeouf, just do it. The take the risk, do it, don't be afraid of the negative feedback. As a cube designer, I find us to be creative, like or that creatives rather, and this is the way we are trying to pursue that creative outlet. And if you're being a creative and you're not being told you're doing it wrong, nine times out of ten, you're not being true to yourself, probably. So don't be afraid to take the risk, basically, to sum that up very nicely.

SPEAKER_09 1:02:32

Perfect. All right, we're gonna have our meals now. This is Uberbear out. We will continue perhaps with some bar cube, but we're thank you for listening and out. Hey,

Cube and Networking

SPEAKER_09 1:02:42

this is Anthony from the Ubercube Podcast. It is Barcube night on uh cube day number one, which is a technically a Friday. We're listening to Ghost in the background right now. Oh my gosh, love ghosts, seen them in concert. And I've got an individual here that's gonna tell you about a cube club that they have, which I think is sick as hell, just gave me out a business card. I kind of want to talk about that. Like the business card is the reason why I want to speak to you. Like, sometimes it's hard for us as cube curators and building playgroups and all that. There's something interesting about the exchange you just did right now. Yeah, you had some prep. And now I'm interested in where you play cube at, right? Yeah, tell us about that because sometimes people struggle with getting people to play cube with them.

SPEAKER_13 1:03:20

Yeah, absolutely. Uh so we're based in Louisville, Kentucky, um, or the Louisville Cube League. We're drafting pretty much every other weekend, basically year-round. We struggle sometimes in the like holiday months of the winter and in the middle of summer, obviously, when people are traveling inside. Yeah, uh, I'm Philip, pros as you might see on the uh on the Discord if you're ever in there or see our post or anything. Um just a few of us who are who are mostly in charge of it, but I would say I'm as close to the ringleader as can be. I gotta keep everybody in line a little bit, you know. Um But yeah, and uh yeah, the business cards are something we've been doing for a while. Like you said, it it's a lot easier to hand somebody something and let them, you know, join in on their own rather than say, you know, go to this website or get out your phone, let me give you a Discord something or other.

SPEAKER_09 1:04:01

Um I just thought the exchange was so cool. We were just talking, Phil came over and said, you know, I introduced myself, said I'm in the Raleigh area, Greater Raleigh, then I got your Louisville area, and then we started communicating about it, and then you handed me a business card with a QR code on it, and here's my group. And I thought that is like the best solution to actually introducing yourself, even if, like, say, for example, you're at one of these cube events, and maybe you don't necessarily want to communicate or whatever, right? Go around and network and go, hey, do you want to play cube with me? You just solved a problem that I think our listeners might be interested in. How'd you come about that? Like, this is a like an idea that was pitched for your group or whatever.

SPEAKER_13 1:04:37

I just thought it was so fascinating. We just we coordinate via Discord, we do all of our planning, everything in there, and it's just easier, you know, even at home when we're in a shop and people stop by and they see us playing and they, you know, they're saying, you know, I want to play with you guys sometime. You just hand them the business card, let them join on their own time. You don't they don't have to stop what they're doing, get their phone out to get a phone number, you don't have to send them an email or send them to some website they're not gonna remember to visit. Um they just get the business card and it, you know, it gets them in the Discord, gets them, you know, maybe watching videos, maybe chatting with us, following us on Twitter, Blue Sky, whatever.

SPEAKER_09 1:05:07

Um just such a neat way to actually expand your Cube group. Now, one more question I have for you because I told you this to be super short form. What's it like being at KubeCon? Have you had is this your first, second? Have you been here before?

SPEAKER_13 1:05:18

This is my third. We've been coming for three years now. Um we drive up, uh we started with a minivan in 2024. Last two years we've driven a we've got a 15 passenger van this year. There's 12 of us from the group. Every year we bring more people, and every year they keep coming back. I'm having a great time. Every year has been better than the last.

SPEAKER_09 1:05:34

Yeah, I'm gonna make you do one more thing. We're gonna go KubeCon here. We got KubeCon! KubeCon! Uber bear out.

Artifact Affinity

SPEAKER_09 1:05:41

Hey, it's Anthony again. It's ourCube night. We're on Friday of KubeCon. And I'm talking to my good friend here that's telling me all about their artifact affinity.

SPEAKER_06 1:05:50

Yeah, my name is Matthew. I'm from Louisville Kentucky. I have Matthew. Yeah, it's really pretty, it's really fun. I have a couple cool ideas in There, that does uh some cool things, as well as I'm trying to make it really foil and alter it and get stuff signed. The big thing, the big selling point, is that in my cube, you have the tricket mages in the draft can be exchanged for any of the five mana value mages that all cost they all cost three, they all search for an artifact that costs a different mana value, but I have one for every mana value. So they will what's the word? You can pick which one you have as you're going for the draft. If you draft a lot of two drops, you can get the two mana one, or if you in your draft, you're like, oh, I have these two really important three drops, I can grab the three-drop one, but you don't have to settle on that until you finish. So you get five slots collapsed into one slot of the cube that goes from a bunch of 40% playable cards to one 90% playable cards.

SPEAKER_09 1:06:44

So, what Matt is showcasing actually at KubeCon is how we're exchanging ideas. We got some more artificers here, right? Yeah. So Uber Bear's Artifact Cube has been featured four times. And at this point, what's really interesting, I've had a lot of people approach me today and talk about like exchange of ideas, right? You're not the first Matt that's come up here and talk to me, actually. It's kind of funny. It's something about the word Matt. People actually like to make artifact cubes. And it's been really neat to kind of learn how different, you know, different folks target this idea of how to build the artifact synergy cube, how they approach it. In this case, you were kind of pitching this idea about like this almost emblem where they go, the the the tutors, right, they go out and seek out certain cards and you're pitching the idea. I thought that was fascinating. I think that's another aspect of KubeCon that sometimes gets lost is the exchange of ideas, right? That's a big deal. Going into any of these homegrown events, people have a chance to learn more about like how do other designers approach their cube? What are they looking at as far as um comparatives between other cubes? Where are they drafting their ideas from, right? And that is one of the joys of coming to a larger event. Now you were talking about your Louisville group, right? And how did you guys actually organize? Because this is something our listeners would actually be interested in learning. How did you get people to come together into the same place?

SPEAKER_06 1:07:57

So it started out with pros, who's, for lack of a better term, we call them the prosident. My friend Philip Rose, we call him pros because there was another Phil in the group. We used to just be a group of friends that got together and cube drafted at people's houses. But over the years, as everyone I'm sure knows, people just don't have time. They have kids, they have lives, and they can't make it out of cube drafts. So we stopped being able to fire them. And so we we were like, what can we do? And pros had the genius idea of opening it up and taking it to a local game store and making it an official thing where it's through a Discord that is public to sign up. If you're in the area, you're welcome to join the Discord, and signups are very easy. There's no commitment, no cost, anything. And you it's very, for lack of a better term, not there's no social hang-up, for lack of a better term. I know a lot of people are like, yeah, I don't, I I want to come CubeDraft, but like I don't know anyone. And the the Discord just being a you just sign up, and if you want to come out, you can come out. If you don't, you don't, makes it really easy. And he he has put in a lot of care and a lot of thought into making it as approachable and as widespread as possible because we want to just share the joy of cubing because that's what it's about, right?

SPEAKER_09 1:09:12

That is 100% what's about. Growing your cube group is something that people ask about all the time. That's always a concern, right? I've got my cube. Hello everyone, hi, my name's whatever, right? And I'd like for you to play my cube. I've actually seen it happen here, right? And it's a hard pitch sometimes, especially when you're competing against in the I don't care what group you go to, as far as like SEG Con or you go to KubeCon or you go to Vortex or whatever, bringing your own cube that's not in the main event sometimes can be a little bit of a challenge because you're trying to get these after hours drafted. I in fact, I've actually got a couple of cubes here that have yet to fire. It's just something we all deal with, right? You've made this beautiful idea, you've thought about it all the time, all week long, while working, whatever, you're just pondering on this cube that you built, and you're so excited to actually showcase what you have designed. What would you suggest or offer to people who are listening as an idea of how to get their cube noticed, right? You've got a cube group, you formed it.

SPEAKER_06 1:10:05

How do you now actually get people to play your cube? My honest opinion is to just go to events like this, draft with other people that have made cubes, for lack of a better term, network, talk to people, and be like, hey, I have a cube, I don't know if you guys want to draft it or not, but later on, I'm gonna put a draft up and see who of the people that you played with and talked to are wanna come out. I have last year at KubeCon 2025 on my some of my friends top 60 for it, I didn't, and I wanted to draft my cube, didn't have enough in my friend group that wanted to draft it, so I just went up to open play and was like, hey, can I schedule a draft? And six people that I didn't know from Chicago came and just sat down, like, yeah, we're drafting. So we they had a blast, and this year at Cincinnati KubeCon, I saw one of them, we chatted, and today actually today I saw that guy again, and I exchanged Discord info, so now we can talk and like exchange ideas because we talked, we had fun, we enjoyed each other's company, might as well. So I think the the best idea that I would have is just get out there. Like, yeah, you have your your your friend group now, might not be big enough, but do any avenue you can think of to expand it. If it's go what Pros did early on was he went on to Reddit, like the the local city Reddit for Louisville, Kentucky, and was like, hey, we're gonna go up to through the decades. Does anyone come want to play CubeDraft? Does anyone want to come CubeDraft? And people that we had no idea who they were were like, yeah, let's go do it. And they joined, and now they're regulars and they're good friends. So the worst thing you can do is just accept that nothing is gonna change and let it die. Just go out there, meet people, and worst thing they can say is no, right?

SPEAKER_09 1:11:51

So just draft. I got nothing to offer besides that. That was absolutely beautiful. And if you're listening, I hope you understand that. Just reach out to people, expand your circle, take some risk, be willing to hear some great feedback and some good feedback, and your cube will be successful. Thank you so much for actually joining us. That was a pleasure.

SPEAKER_05 1:12:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 1:12:10

Uber bear. Oh. Hey, this is Anthony

A Discussion on Cube Con

SPEAKER_09 1:12:13

again, Bar Cube Night, day one. And I've got some people that have walked up to me and said hello. We're talking about Cube, a little bit of Cube Theory. Uh, so you're at KubeCon 2026. Have you got a chance to play any cubes? Introduce yourself.

SPEAKER_15 1:12:27

Howdy, I'm Yubi at Mostrimonium, everywhere where it matters. This KubeCon has been such a blast. I'm coming off of playing the six-drop cube. Oh my god. Talk about restructuring how you think about magic. Cube where everything is a six-drop, you're using depletion lands, like your moxin, and you're hitting land drops, like thinking about how I'm gonna order everything. So much fun. All the cubes here are so crazy. And we got some great people here.

SPEAKER_09 1:12:56

Oh wow. And we have another friend here. It's just gonna say hello.

SPEAKER_11 1:12:59

Hi, my name is Boxy.

SPEAKER_09 1:13:01

Are you having fun?

SPEAKER_11 1:13:02

Yep. Yeah?

SPEAKER_09 1:13:04

Do you have a favorite cube?

SPEAKER_11 1:13:06

Honestly, I really love my boyfriend UV's Strixaver Dragonstorm cube. That's been my favorite cube so far, even playing all the awesome cubes here.

SPEAKER_09 1:13:14

That would be the pick. Are you in the free player area or are you actually out in the field?

SPEAKER_15 1:13:18

Out in the field. Ooh, just picking up whoever's walking by.

SPEAKER_09 1:13:23

Heck yeah. I'm so happy you guys can join us. I hope everybody's having fun. Best KubeCon ever. I'm gonna make you ask what do you like about KubeCon?

SPEAKER_11 1:13:32

Uh everyone is just so enthusiastic to play Magic. Like, it can be so hard to get like a pod together with like just like people around your town or something like that. But here it's like you can get a pod together like that.

SPEAKER_09 1:13:46

Pressing you a little bit more, but we kind of talked about this tonight. Getting a cube, a cube circle, a cube group, people that are familiar with how you play cube and enjoying people. It's hard. How have you guys addressed this?

SPEAKER_11 1:13:59

Not yet in our own playgroups, unfortunately. We don't have a lot of limited people, a lot of people who are like really tethered to Commander or to the more light or like competitive 60 card formats. So it's I think you get some of the say as well.

SPEAKER_15 1:14:13

I say, you know what I did? I built a two-player tube to play with my friends one-on-one because we couldn't get a whole group together.

SPEAKER_09 1:14:20

It's an excellent solution. If anybody's listening right now, building a cube that's designed for two, three, four, right? They seem dumb, right? I've actually played cubes like a goldfish, my own cube, to figure out what I'm doing, right? And then you kind of just branch out from there. So learning how to play cube alone and then moving from there. Building a friend group is hard, right? Like we talked about that. Actually, we talked to Louisville people today that had a great time actually using like QR codes and business cards to grow the friend group.

SPEAKER_11 1:14:49

Because not it's not easy for everyone. Would you agree? No, no, it's not. It's because like people have yeah, people have schedules that don't always work. Like I work food service, and so like my schedule goes all over the place sometimes, and I mean they're working, sometimes they're working nights, and that doesn't work for people who are working days and all that.

SPEAKER_15 1:15:06

Well, you know what, even at this Cube Convention, we were Detroit area, Detroit Represent. We found some Grand Rapids groups that we're now in the Discord for, driving distance, willing to make it work, connecting with people and meeting new people. That's what's awesome about this.

SPEAKER_09 1:15:22

So I got some cool news. I've got a new account. This in Grand Rapids, we should probably hook up and play some Cube. I'll be visiting there soon. My family's from Michigan. My wife's family, rather, my father-in-law, etc. So Michiganders, yeah. Shout out.

SPEAKER_15 1:15:35

Shout out!

SPEAKER_09 1:15:36

Yeah, shout out, Michiganders.

SPEAKER_15 1:15:37

Michiganders, Lake Michigan, it's ours.

SPEAKER_09 1:15:42

Hell yeah. Ubercube out.

A Discussion on True Name Nemesis

SPEAKER_09 1:15:46

Good morning, Cubers. It is Anthony, and we are at day three of KubeCon 2026. If you can hear from my voice, that's because of shouting KubeCon, having some libations, and I probably need more coffee. But good morning. I am sitting here. We're getting a little, we're getting ready to fire off what is this, the third main event draft here in just a couple of minutes. And I just wanted to chat it up with some of the people in the hall, right? We're moving around. So I've got an individual here that's going to introduce themselves, tell you a little bit about what they're kind of doing at the KubeCon, and uh, yeah, here we go.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:16

All right. Hello, folks. Uh, I'm Eric Ospy. I'm from Lebanon, Indiana, and I'm here at my second KubeCon. This year has been kind of ups and downs. One of my cube dress 03, and this year I got my first three OPI, so very happy about that. My main cube project right now, I call it uh the Conspiracy of Unrelated Shenanigans. The Cube's got some conspiracy cards, got a little bit of silver border. Mostly it's just good clean mid-range magic. So uh if it comes up, I'm happy to tell you more about it. Otherwise, hey, I'm just here to be happy at KubeCon.

SPEAKER_09 1:16:48

Yeah, we are actually having a kind of a cool conversation that I butted myself into. That's you know, every time I have these, uh we fall into a conversation. And I think it's interesting for the listeners. We were talking about, you were like, I think some people said in my cube, true name nemesis, which is what? Is that two two blue two blue pips?

SPEAKER_02 1:17:05

One and two blue for 3-1.

SPEAKER_09 1:17:06

Yeah, that basically protection from the opponent, right? Okay, yeah. Yeah, and and it came down to some people might have said it was too strong, and we were rationalized that. So, how did that kind of go down for you?

SPEAKER_02 1:17:16

Uh so we drafted my cube last night. You know, everybody, everybody who played had a good time. I owe three'd on mono black because that's just how my cube goes. Uh, the only piece of feedback I got from anybody is hey, trim name nemesis might be a little bit too strong just because there's not enough answers in every color for it in your cube. And I saw at least one game last night where it picked up an equipment and turned a sort of quick clock into a this is gonna kill you in two turns kind of clock. And you know what? I think they might be right, it might be just a little bit too powerful for my cube because most colors have like one or two answers for it, uh, but some colors have no answers if it's on the board, and that might not be a fun experience if you were on the inside.

SPEAKER_09 1:17:58

You bring up the point fun experience, and that's where I was going, where people use the word might be too strong, and I was tilting it a different direction, which we've talked about on the podcast before. I was kind of leaning towards the idea that it might not, it's kind of true name nemesis in a vacuum. It's the idea of it is that it has very little interaction points, and then that might be entangled into the fun, which becomes the word strong. And what I was saying that as a designer of the vast majority of my cubes, with a few exceptions, I avoid things like anything that exceeds, say, Ward 2 or Hexproof or indestructible things like this to allow interaction points. I mean, interaction points are kind of the volley of magic is what people sit down for.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:41

Would you agree? Yeah, I think you want to have the best games of magic are the ones where you go back and forth and somebody pulls it out narrowly in the end. You don't want like the games where your opponent mols to four and then never does anything, like you win that game, but it's not fun most of the time. Uh and in cube especially, you want to have like you want everybody to have at least a little bit of fun with the deck they drafted and the deck they're playing. So if you don't have at least some level of interaction, it's like, well, okay, we're just playing solitaire here, and why did I even draft this cube?

SPEAKER_09 1:19:11

Yeah, then we were kind of you know going along with the idea, say uh you do decide to add a card or two, and your argument is it's a power outlier that has very little interaction points, right? Then you almost find yourself in this web of consideration of what toolbox do I need to now add to my cube to deal with this card. I asked myself, if I'm adding a whole suite of cards to deal with a card, then does that card even belong? That's the question that I think. Chris, you're sitting here, would you agree with that?

SPEAKER_21 1:19:39

Okay, something like Trinity Nemesis, I think that you literally cannot interact with without a sweeper, basically. Yeah. I don't view that as healthy for most cubes. Yeah. Now, there if that is your design goal, if your design goal is to have like the most busted broken thing and have unanswerable things, go for it. You do you. But it's not for most of my cubes. I've cut it for most and any cube that used to run Trinity Nemesis, I've cut. Cards like that I don't like. There are cards that are more difficult to interact with that might take two pieces of removal, which it depends on what your design goals are. Again. Mother Runes. Yes, Mother of Runes. Mother of Runes is an extremely powerful card in certain environments. Some environments it's totally fine. Other environments it may just maybe not be there. It's in my peasant cube currently. It probably shouldn't be, but it is. I I leaving it in for now. It is a busted card, but it is not the card that's gonna, in my opinion, it's not it can be backbreaking, but it also isn't sometimes. So it dies to everything pizza. Yeah, it can't protect itself, it dies to a lot.

SPEAKER_09 1:20:38

I want to tag along with something you said. You kind of said if you want to put in busted cards that can't be interacted with, you do you, right? Yeah, I want to put a counterpoint to that idea. If it I think there's a there's a a line though, where if you construct a cube about all the things that you want to do, that you might lose sight of what your audience or your players might want to play, right? And that's a trap that I see sometimes happening where people, you know, I've done this before. You build a cube about how you want to play magic, right? Without consulting the your basically your audience, right? And you sit down and you the you do you part, and this is my cube, and you know, it's almost like written in stone that you're gonna doubt child not play. You get the idea.

SPEAKER_21 1:21:20

Well, I do, but he also, there's a second part to that. You do you with your cube doesn't mean people are gonna want to play your cube. Yeah. So that that's the issue, is that you have to balance that. You might want to put all this busted crap in there that people don't want to play, that people you think that's not a problem, it's just a 3-1, who cares? You know, if like Trinity Nemesis is what you're talking about, or mother friends in my in my case. It's just you have to balance it with the fact that people may not want to play your cube, they may not find it fun. And that's where you the fun is where is where the problem lies. If it's not fun to play, people aren't gonna play it. So you have to decide what you want to do with that. And just uh whatever, and I'll play whatever I want. And whatever what you want, be damned.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:58

You know, it's like any final thoughts on that? Um the best thing I can think about for cube is if people are saying, hey, this card is not good in your cube, uh, it might be time to say, you know what, don't be afraid to kill your darlings. You're allowed to have some pet cards in your cube, you're allowed to have stuff you think is fun in your cube, but if you want people to play your cube with you, sometimes you have to be willing to say, okay, this one I'm willing to let go. And in my case, yeah, I think this time uh true name is gonna get let go here pretty shortly. Alright. Thanks for talking with us and Uber.

SPEAKER_09 1:22:33

Hey,

Chatting with Misty Steps on Cube Con

SPEAKER_09 1:22:34

it's Anthony again. This is what, day three-ish, two-ish, somewhere. We're on Saturday. We'll call it Saturday. And I'm standing here and I'm just walking around the room doing my rounds, doing little micro interviews. And how about you introduce yourself?

SPEAKER_22 1:22:47

Uh I'm up for my misty stuff on the internet. I make magic the gathering and DD content, and I'm a local. This is my local magic event.

SPEAKER_09 1:22:54

Oh, very cool. So you said you frequented KubeCon a few times and may have drafted at least one of my cubes, but but how's your KubeCon experience been so far?

SPEAKER_22 1:23:01

It's been great. I've been I've been kind of going for things with more of a gimmick, or that it's not just like straight magic, and I've been having a blast with it. My last cube, I did the by 10 cuts, and I lost all of my games. But if you can lose all of your games and still have a great time, that's a great cube. So I'm gonna be able to do it.

SPEAKER_09 1:23:17

Have you found a favorite cube yet, one that you've enjoyed the most, or lines up in your playstyle?

SPEAKER_22 1:23:21

I really like the ginger boot cube and like in the same vein the ornithopter, where it's just kind of like everyone starts with the same thing and you have to find different creative ways to get around each other. That was that was fun.

SPEAKER_09 1:23:31

And have you built a cube for yourself yet?

SPEAKER_22 1:23:33

No, I had a couple ideas. Like, I there's a a meme at my local game store about the city pigeon card. So people have been giving me city pigeons so that I could do like something like a hundred ornithopters with like a food twist, but I don't know if I'm smart enough for it yet, but I'd like to someday.

SPEAKER_09 1:23:48

There's a lot of resources here at Cube Company. You know, you get to see them, everybody gets to get a little taste of everything they like, play styles and whatnot. So I think that makes a big difference. I've met a few first timers that are now hooked on, like former commander command. We like to think we like to think former commander players, but we know they're gonna do.

SPEAKER_22 1:24:03

No, that was I was a commander player, and then they reached out to me because I'm local if I wanted to do it three years ago, and then I played a couple of like, oh no, no, I like this, I'm gonna keep coming back. Because I don't really like to draft, it kind of stresses me out, but I like that all the cards I know are handpicked for this cube, so I know that they go together. It makes it a little easy for me as a commander player who doesn't draft very often, so that's why I like cube a lot.

SPEAKER_09 1:24:25

Well, I promise you short and sweet. We gotta get to our next draft, but I appreciate you taking the time to join us, and yeah, it was nice meeting you.

unknown 1:24:31

Meet you too.

SPEAKER_09 1:24:31

Anthony out. Hey, so

BK and Cube Con

SPEAKER_09 1:24:34

it's Anthony again, and I am here with none other than Brian Kowal. Tell us about KubeCon. You have worked hard. I I I this KubeCon, I mean, I keep telling you this over and over again, you're gonna get a big head. Everyone gets better than the next one. This year, I'm telling you, you've cranked it to 11.

SPEAKER_25 1:24:52

Thank you. I'm really glad people seem to be really enjoying it. Um I love the changes we made and the new venues. It seems really great. I like it a lot. It's been a good time.

SPEAKER_09 1:25:03

Let's talk about the venue selection, because a lot of people are trying to plan their own events and they're always thinking about it. What kind of logistics goes into something like that? This is a big event. I mean, how much planning are we gonna do for something like that?

SPEAKER_25 1:25:12

Honestly, so last year we decided we were going to game all kind of just trying to do this, go find our own venue, go with a hotel or something, and and do our own thing. And uh we were prepared. We were prepared. The idea was we would try to hold it again in October, you know, this is the same time of year as we normally do and people wanted to say, you know, we're used to it, you know. But the issue was in the Midwest. We wanted to keep it in the Midwest. You actually can't get a menu within like a year or year and a half of when you're doing the event if you wanted to have a year. So this was one of the better times we could find. Uh we should have everything we do for this event. So it's about it's gonna get a while. That was really great. They were really good at like looking at our contract and like the mod, it was a good deal.

SPEAKER_09 1:26:30

Yeah, for those that aren't here, definitely watch the mods that'll be coming out of the house. But you don't get to see the magnitude of this event and the layout of the organization, and the fact that vendors here, and everybody's having a good time, and even like just the organizational setup for the judging room or the movie structure that you have. Like, that's why I'm giving you that. I mean, it goes a long way in there. But I can see the attention here.

SPEAKER_25 1:27:10

I have to get over the crowd more than anybody who have all the technical part last year before open player and this year. Open deal with us. And then he also did even more planning at all with a lot of stuff. So he was he was so instrumental. And then John Slash even um our judging stuff. I believe the card was called Holland the turn. End of interview.

SPEAKER_09 1:30:39

Yeah, thank you. I appreciate your lesson. Hey, it's Anthony

Chatting Cube with CalebDMTG

SPEAKER_09 1:30:44

again coming to you live from KubeCon on the Saturday. And I'm sitting here with a special guest and just asking people moving around the room. You may hear the audience in the background because things are happening. Gears are turning right now at KubeCon. Just doing a fast little session here. Tell them about yourself. I got somebody pretty special here to the Cube community.

SPEAKER_12 1:31:00

Hey, my name is Caleb Durward, known as uh Caleb DMTG on Twitch and YouTube, season one KubeCon Champion. And I'm I'm having a goddamn blast. Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 1:31:12

So tell me about your experience. What cubes have you drafted over the weekend? How are you moving along?

SPEAKER_12 1:31:16

Um, I did a mono red cube. I did a uh an old border, old timey good time cube where I got to um derange tournament opposition some people, and that was a blast. I just finished up the gold border cube, the world championship commemorative, and uh that cube is like very near and dear to my heart. Every cube con year they give previous champions like a cube that they can like make sure is auto-included in the con, and that was my choice. I was like, I love gold bordered cards, I play a lot of pre-modern, that's just like very much my air. I have a lot of nostalgia for those world championship decks and like jamming them into each other and stuff, and it's just a really fun style of magic, and the cube is really well designed. Um yeah, I just had a great time. One more follow-up question.

SPEAKER_09 1:31:56

You're a known, you're a good drafter. You're a good drafter. I consider you a very good drafter. What so we know how to a lot of people build cubes, a lot of people have cubes. The thing that, as a matter of fact, Justin Parnell pointed us out one time. We don't talk about how to draft cubes very often, at least not on my show, because I'm not a I'm not, I would not consider myself an amazing drafter. What's some basic draft advice you'd use? Like, what are you using for skills? What skills are you applying while navigating these cubes?

SPEAKER_12 1:32:20

So a lot of cubes have like reflections of previous constructed formats in them, and if you've happened to have played those formats, you have a big leg up, you'll get a little bit you can like see a Lord of Atlantis and be like, oh, Merfolk is supported, and you have like a general idea of what that sort of deck looks like, and you can kind of like flesh that out. If you do not have that background and you're just learning a new cube, the cube designer is still giving you signals. They're still including cards like, I mean, the Lord of Atlantis is a good example. If you see that in your opening pack, it's like, okay, Merfolk's is supported, and that can give you a good early direction and uh and uh endpoint you in a way where you can get a coherent deck at least by the end of it.

SPEAKER_09 1:32:56

Well, very cool. It's great seeing you here at KubeCon. I promise you it's gonna be short and sweet because you're moving on through the tournament. Thank you for having us and happy cubing. Yes, this

Draft Tactics with Shoup

SPEAKER_09 1:33:05

guy again. Yeah, I'm still here at KubeCon, making my rounds, they're making here. It's kind of fun. This is an interesting way of looking at it. We're traveling around, I'm walking around the floor, networking, meeting people, part of the fun and adventures of KubeCon. And what I'm trying to do is get an entire collection of the voices of KubeCon. I've got here one of my really good friends, my brother from another mother, besides Stu. Right. And we're sitting here and we're gonna chat a little bit. But what I was actually just asking Shoop about, who's gonna talk, I was asking to give some draft advice. I just talked to Caleb D about this a few minutes ago, and one of the things that kind of spawned to my mind is we don't talk about how to draft very well, how to read. I know we talk about building cubes, designing cubes, what cards add. But a lot of times I'm finding myself falling victim to this at these large events. How do you navigate a large event? How do you draft?

SPEAKER_26 1:33:50

I want to hear your Yeah, so when it comes to uh ranking cubes and looking at what you want to draft, it's all about choosing what you want to have fun in, whether that's playing your grindy every card matters cube or playing your vibes cube. If you're trying to win, regardless, the point is read the primer, make sure you understand what the cube's asking of you, and then you just do a scroll. And you check for things, you go, what does the removal look like? What are the threats on the top end look like, what are the cards look like, and you just kind of make a category in your mind of ideas. And then once you do that, you open your first pack and you go, I like this card, and I uh every time I open a first pack, I count out the next eight cards that I think are the most powerful, and I guess which one is the ninth one coming back to me. And if it matches up, I like my first choice a lot.

SPEAKER_09 1:34:34

I was gonna ask you, if you took a 40 card deck that you're you know building while drafting, actually 45 is what you're doing, right? Sure. All right, how do you do a like a pie chart from it? What are you looking at like interaction points? If you had to think in your mind, are you thinking of like a skeleton of a deck? And what does that look like if you broke it down to the basics?

SPEAKER_26 1:34:51

Yeah, so for most cubes, I'm looking at the very traditional limited curve. Like if you played limited retail, you know your twos are high and then your threes are slightly lower and it curves back down. I'm looking for a usual curve of that type. And then I want about a fourth of my deck probably to be interaction points, uh non-creature spells that I can use to interact. That number will go up and down depending on how fast or slow I want the game to be. Uh if I'm pressuring my opponent, I don't need as much. If I'm not pressuring my opponent, I don't need to I need to have more. And then you just think about as you're drafting, if I'm playing with this deck, what am I losing to? Uh am I going to get uh thought-seized in that card taken and now suddenly everything collapses because I built my deck around this one card?

SPEAKER_09 1:35:35

Like a glass cannon type.

SPEAKER_26 1:35:36

A glass cannon type thing, or if I have to play against a deck with a lot of sweepers, am I gonna be resilient against that? There are also cubes where you're looking to build an engine where it's like, okay, I have this piece that's part of the engine, and uh my staff of the storyteller is gonna enter on with tokens. I need a lot more token makers now. I need, well, now that I'm making tokens, this Benny Brax looks a lot better, I'll take this. That also pays off and overlaps that way. So there's a lot of ways to approach it, depending on what the cube is. But yeah, I like looking for a curve and just making sure you have decent spells.

SPEAKER_09 1:36:04

Yeah, because I uh I just ran through a cube, which I absolutely loved. I think it was Good Clean Magic was the name of the cube. I absolutely loved it. And I very much played to vintage staples, if you will. I had Kirora, I had Grave Titan, I had Preordain, I had Ponder, I Inquisite, not Inquisition, but I dress. I just kind of played through, but I found myself fixated on the most powerful cards, and I and I actually got beat by people who played into the cards that were outside of that power maximum, you know, utility way of thinking that I'm trying to use. To follow that up, I got a real draft question. How many three drops are too many? I I got this question for myself.

SPEAKER_26 1:36:47

Yeah, if I have in a regular cube more than like seven, I'm I'm cutting down that number down. I want just about as many two drops and three as three drops in most cubes. If you're playing like a like an older cube or a real slow cube, you can you can go up on that number, you can play less in the early game because your creature will your creature your bombs will be the important thing at the end of the game. So uh I think if if with good clean magic, I I've looked at the list a little bit. I would imagine probably about six or so would be my number I'd look for.

SPEAKER_09 1:37:18

Yeah, as you can hear, we're in the convention hall live right now. But what I really wanted to get out of this conversation is we talked to some of these people, they're good drafters, right? And uh again, we've focused on cube curation and design and all that, but sometimes, you know, even I'm mostly probably asking for myself. So I thank you for taking the time to sit down with me. We're gonna go get some food now. We're we're hungry, and I'm not in the 128. Neither are we I'm not in the 1300, I'm not in the 1300, so I'm gonna get some food. Out.

Draft Techniques with Dom Harvey

SPEAKER_09 1:37:47

Yeah, it's this guy again. We're hanging out KubeCon, and I've got another guest. I'm just making my way around the room, and we'll just say hello and tell us all about your day.

SPEAKER_04 1:37:55

Hello. Uh I am Dom Harvey, I'm not from around here. Traveled a long time uh time to be here, and honestly, well worth it. Uh was having a blast with I mean with you, with others, and despite not doing a lot of winning, but today I have done a lot of winning, so I just having my cake and eating it too.

SPEAKER_09 1:38:10

Yeah, so yesterday we got to do something kind of cool, kind of special. We drafted a beta cube yesterday. You were part of that, weren't you sitting down there with us in the atrium last night?

SPEAKER_04 1:38:18

It was, I would say it was like pre-modern boomer fun stuff, but like very heavy emphasis on like vibe, aesthetics, a lot of cool alpha beta stuff in there. You have stuff which was graffitied and anteed and five colour 20 years ago and now has made its way into the cube, but you can the the the card is so scuffed that despite the double sleeves, you can see it anyway. Like it is exactly what you would hope for.

SPEAKER_09 1:38:39

It was a piece of magic history we actually got to touch. I was talking to BK earlier. We used the banana as a token at the table. That's how serious we were playing Magic last night. But how's your what's your cube diversity? What's it look like for you? What are you chasing down when you're here? What are you looking for in order to play?

SPEAKER_04 1:38:54

Well, for the uh the the prequel event on day one, I I thought that's the time to try some of the weird experimental stuff, some of the weird stipulations, rule changes, whatever. Uh got my fill at that. And then you know, today it's been some of the color restricted stuff, so like SolTech Graveyard Cube, Esper Cube, where it's the magic you know and love, but it's within that like that restriction. So there's a lot of everything. I mean, I you know, Aquiban has the ultimate vintage cube here today if you want that. I obviously that is the the weightless of that is off the charts. I don't expect to get a seed in that, but like whatever you want is here somewhere if you know where to look. So it there's something for everyone.

SPEAKER_09 1:39:29

Yeah, so you have a type of cube preference generally that you gravitate towards, or what do you what's your you just do you go random or do you pick out something that kind of brings you joy?

SPEAKER_04 1:39:38

I I try and select stuff. I mean I mean I know some people take the approach of like full random or they have something they don't want to do, but then they'll let G just hit the wheel otherwise. Um for me, I I just I want to seek out specific things, but I'm open to trying stuff that maybe wouldn't be on my radar. But yeah, as long as as long as I think the cube has a coherent vision to it, like it can be something I've never heard of before, wouldn't have thought of myself, but as long as I can see where that vision is and how they stuck the landing, then I'm in, you know?

SPEAKER_09 1:40:04

Yeah, so one more question for you. I told you I wouldn't hold you too long. Do you have any draft advice? This is something I've done with a couple of people that I know really good. I've talked to Caleb Durwood, I've talked to a good friend Shoop. These are people you're obviously a great drafter. What is your type of drafting style? What would you recommend to people learning how to cube?

SPEAKER_04 1:40:20

Okay, well, are we talking about after hours here?

SPEAKER_09 1:40:22

Are we talking about after PC or like what are we going for? Offer whatever direction you take when you're doing card evaluation. How are you summing these cubes up on the fly?

SPEAKER_04 1:40:30

I mean, it's vibes is not a great answer, but it is honestly that. Like even like these days, competitively, like a lot of people default to stuff like 17 Lands, or there's a lot of information out there, like a lot of good content creators. Like, so if you want to go in knowing something, you can know something, right? But part of the fun of KubeCon here is you can choose to go in just completely blind if you want. You can study the cubes, like try and think about okay, these are the cards that I think are maybe better, worse than the cube underexpected, so we're gonna target those. Yeah, so whatever you want to do it on, you can here. I think in general for drafting, I would say like really keep an open mind at the start, but have a vision of where the destination is. So you don't want to be creating all over the place. You want to know, okay, well, this this card is whatever normally, but in this context that I've engineered for myself that I'm forced into, right? Yeah, it's gonna do do more work than it should. So I I think just don't yeah, take it as one long experience that is all kind of informing itself and try not to get too kind of lost in the details or anything like that.

SPEAKER_09 1:41:29

Yeah, so I appreciate you taking the time with us. I know you gotta go back to the you're going back to the big title fight. Are you in the top of 128 now, aren't you? I would assume so, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:41:37

I we'll find out in a second.

SPEAKER_09 1:41:38

Well, congratulations on your outing here today. I'm glad to see you and glad to finally get to talk to you and have a good one. Bye.

Online Play with Matt Belcher

SPEAKER_09 1:41:46

So we are on the final day of KubeCon. This is the most relaxing part for those that have been grinding all week. Currently, what the top 64 is going right now?

SPEAKER_26 1:41:55

Yeah, top 64 is on right now.

SPEAKER_09 1:41:56

You got some friends in there, don't you? Uh yeah, I know a couple people in there. Nice, nice, nice. I'm not there. So, what did we just do? I'm not here either. We did. This is shoot, by the way. Hello. And I got with us. Hey, Matt Belcher. Yeah, so we're just kind of shooting shooting the breeze. We uh my good friend Christian and I, we just lost our reign of terror and the two-headed giant cube. We lost it specifically to Chill and Matt Belcher. What did you think of that cube? Did you have fun? This was a good, like relaxing scenario. I thought we had a good time.

SPEAKER_03 1:42:21

Oh, yeah, this is this is the third time, my third time playing this cube, and it's a blast. Every time it's super fun. You get to play with all of the multiplayer cards that you don't normally play with in Cube. It's always fun to play with a partner. And two-headed giant's one of my favorite formats.

SPEAKER_09 1:42:33

There was some kind of villainous choice card, like a Doctor Who card that none of us even know what it meant. Like, it's but it totally wrecked us. And then, how did you guys actually win? That's that was the funny part. What was the thing that, like, the final blow? I think it was Liliana the professor.

SPEAKER_03 1:42:45

Yeah, so we played Professor Onyx, the Liliana professor, and then on it was a totally empty board because we had just you guys had just wiped the board the turn before. I followed up with Liliana, and then my partner played Clever Impersonator copying Liliana. And we both had crazy high numbers of spells in our decks. So we were able to just and Liliana with a two-headed giant play, it says each opponent loses two life, but they count as each opponent, so they lose four life for every spell you play. And it ends up just adding up to a ton of damage. Speaking of which, we have the other champion here, the two-headed giant. What do you feel like, champ?

SPEAKER_08 1:43:14

What's up? Always trust in your partner because they will always see you through. They will carry you through. I suck. Matt was awesome, thank God. That's not true. We would have blown it that one turn if you hadn't said like. Oh yeah. Well, yeah, no, it's uh two-headed giant cube is like, it sounds so innocuous, but it's some of the most fun you have. And it like Anthony's built just you've built just such an incredible environment. It's just like now it's a thing we do every year. I look forward to it every year, and uh, it's just it's real fun.

SPEAKER_09 1:43:44

We created a tradition, and our good friend, you know, Judge Jin allowed us was super cool, and I said, Hey, can we go get some pins? And because I don't got any pins, you guys might actually have some legit pins. But we just played for pins. You two have actually pins from just side event made up side event pins. But also, one more thing that I wanted to emphasize real quick in this conversation is something you do online specifically, Matt. You want to give a pitch to that for anybody that's interested?

SPEAKER_03 1:44:08

Yeah, so every Wednesday on the KubeCon Discord server, I run a digital draft on Magic Online. So we pick a cube that's gonna be at some future cube event. It's not necessarily KubeCon, it could be like Cube for a cause or anything, as long as somebody picks it. And then we pick a cube, we draft it on Draftmancer. I get all the cards for the cube, I loan them to everyone on Magic Online. It's totally free as long as you have a Magic Online account. And then we play the cube, and then at the end I get all the cards back, and that's it. That's great. So if you're interested in playing with us, it's always usually Wednesday night, 7:30 Eastern time, so whatever time's I need to do the adjustment.

SPEAKER_09 1:44:41

But yeah, so that's pretty cool. So if you don't have a play group and maybe you're looking to learn some more about other cubes and cube diversity, join the KubeCon Discord, find Matt, and just join up and start playing. And yeah, I had to do a little bit of hurdles to learn how to play Moto basically. It's a learning curve, but it is a way to actually see more cubes and learn more about them. So we're kind of closing off here, right? We have final thoughts. So final thoughts on KubeCon.

SPEAKER_26 1:45:04

Love KubeCon, love seeing friends, love drafting cubes. What's what's better than that?

SPEAKER_03 1:45:08

Yeah. Same, it's best time, it's best cube event every year. That's my favorite. I love this. This is my favorite way to play Magic. I always love it.

SPEAKER_08 1:45:15

And if you're listening to this, you haven't been to KubeCon, come out every year. It's better and better. This is the best one yet.

SPEAKER_09 1:45:20

Yep.

SPEAKER_08 1:45:21

And I just love these friends. Alright, other than that, happy cubing.

SPEAKER_15 1:45:26

Happy cubing.

SPEAKER_09 1:45:28

Bye. Hey,

Discussing Cube Con with Dana Fisher

SPEAKER_09 1:45:30

it's Anthony again from Ubercube. You know this at this point. I am leaving the hall, but I wanted to say hello to a special guest at the event.

SPEAKER_00 1:45:38

Hi, I'm Dana Fisher, and yeah, I'm at KubeCon. It's one of my favorite events of the year, and I'm really happy to be here.

SPEAKER_09 1:45:44

What was the type of decks or type of cubes you drafted this season?

SPEAKER_00 1:45:47

I drafted a lot more of the straightforward power cubes. I did two different power cubes. My ranking system for the cubes was which cubes had the most NISA was the general principle of my rankings.

SPEAKER_09 1:45:58

Heck yeah. So I I love KubeCon. This is you've been out here multiple times, I've seen you out here. Do you see that every season it gets better and better? Why should people come out here?

SPEAKER_00 1:46:07

Absolutely, it just gets better every year. Uh, this is my third year, and if you love cube drafting, you just get to come to an event where all you need to think about is cube drafting. There's so many friendly people here who are all wanting to cube and use a cube till as late as you want, like 2 a.m., there's generally still people cubing.

SPEAKER_09 1:46:26

And that's why I'm leaving. I am tired and I'm an old man. But thank you so much. And other than that, happy cube, and Anthony L. Thank you. It's nice meeting you.