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Episode of the Casual Magic podcast with Shivam Bhatt
Last week, I was on Shivam’s Casual Magic podcast to talk about cube, as we had interviewed before but the episode became lost media and I wanted to make sure that I recorded with him before he retired the show. It went differently than expected, but it was very fun. Check it out below. 🙂
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Secrets of Strixhaven: Cube Follow-Up
Over the years, I’ve done a few follow-up articles on previous sets and mused about the purpose of post-mortem cube reviews. In previous ones, I’ve done re-evaluative looks at how each card that I rated shifted in evaluation, but I’m going to take a more broad approach and look at either cards that I didn’t…
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Cube 101: Building a Cube for Dummies (Video)
In 2024, I was invited out to CubeCon by Jonathan Brostoff (RIP) to do a video panel about designing a cube for first-timers who may be intimidated by the process, since it’s a daunting process. I came back in 2025 to record the panel as well. There were various attempts to record the panel at…
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Paving Desire Paths in Cube Design and Cube Drafting
(Originally posted on my Substack on 12/18/25.)As a techy nerd who got into cube design during its infancy, and whose writing helped to pave the ground to define modern cube design theory, I wanted to discuss this topic for my 60th article about cube design as I felt a strong connection when I saw the…
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Follow-Up Avatar Article on Hipsters of the Coast, thoughts on Lessons/Learn.
Like with Edge of Eternities, I did a follow-up post on Avatar over at Hipsters of the Coast, where I was able to get in some reps in with cards from the Avatar set, along with some reps with some Learn cards seeded into the draft. I kept it to the top 10-ish cards but…
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Going Through Cube Changes
(Originally posted on my Substack on 10/14/25.)Originally, this article was started in 2016 with the whirlwind of great sets in that year. It’s now 2025 and not only do we have more sets per year, but the sets are generally more powerful on a pound-for-pound basis. As someone who got into the world of cube…
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Micro and the Macro Aspects of Cube Design
(Originally posted on my Substack on 5/6/25.)Like with the idealized thinking/additive distraction article, the purpose of this is more to define a concept in more depth than a blurb of words would do, so that I can just link to it. Like with many things I’ve written about, it may be something you’re already doing,…
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The Cube Is Bigger Than You
(Originally written on my Substack on 4/23/25.)Since the early days of my cube writing, I’ve been wanting to do an article about defensiveness in cube design. I’d created several drafts of it, but it never got much further than “hey, don’t get defensive about cards in your cube.” I’d certainly seen my fair share of…
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Stoneforge Mystic, Metallica’s Load/Reload and Changing Contexts over Time
(Originally posted on my Substack on 3/9/25.)In our pilot episode of The Third Power, I had some hesitation about including Stoneforge Mystic in my cube. When we started our podcast in 2011, the newly shown Sword of Body and Mind looked to supplement the package of heavy hitters like Skullclamp, Loxodon Warhammer, Basilisk Collar, Umezawa’s…
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How Heirloom Blade Made Me a Better Cube Designer
(Originally posted on my Substack on 1/21/25.)I worked with Parker over at Lucky Paper on an article about what Heirloom Blade taught me about cube design. This is another article that I’ve had in my brain for a while but never wrote. Heirloom Blade has become a namesake card of mine since praising its merits…