Power Creep, Sacred Cows, and Boiled Frogs

Our Zenikar Rising Cube Survey is open! Please take a few minutes to let us know what you’re testing in your cube from the new set, or if you’re not keeping your paper cube up-to-date through isolation, what you would be testing, under better circumstances.

On this episode, Andy and Anthony are talking about power creep as it applies to cube design. They do a pack 1, pick 1 from Swervestar’s The First 10 Years of Magic Cube, of which the owner graciously blessed us with a photograph of a real, physical pack. They discuss how the normal pattern of adding new cards to your cube and cutting the worst ones may lead to an unintentional power increase in an environment over time, how difficult it is to be critical of all the cards in your cube it slowly shifts and changes, how Cube captures all of the best aspects of the early years of limited Magic, how the dedicated Commander products changed Commander as a format, what Magic has in common Mario Kart, whether “fun creep” exists, and Arena “Turbo Draft”.

Discussed in this episode:

• Lucky Paper Radio Episode 5 — The Problem with Five-Color Goodstuff
• Ship of Theseus
• Limited Resources Episode 560 — Paper Magic at Home with Brian David-Marshall

You can find the hosts’ Cubes on Cube Cobra:

• Andy’s “Bun Magic” Cube
• Anthony’s “Regular” Cube

If you want us to do a pack 1, pick 1 from your cube on air send a link to your cube, your name, and pronouns to [email protected].

Musical production by DJ James Nasty.