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[Assistant] The data is easily uploaded by them and you can see a dashboard on your body that also gives you personalized recommendations for exercise and nutrition.


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[Assistant] If you'd like to try InsideTracker, you can visit insidetracker.com forward slash Sinclair.


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[Assistant] Use the code SYNCLARE, my last name, at the checkout.


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[Assistant] That's a good starting point. So in the 1980s, it was all about just free radicals. We didn't know that aging could actually be controlled by any genes.


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[Assistant] Certainly not single genes. And Cynthia came along as a young graduate student and looked for worms that would live longer.


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[Assistant] And she mutated them and found a strain of worm, a mutant worm that was living twice as long.


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[Assistant] And that was the start of a revolution in understanding how to control aging by using genes and


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[Assistant] Supplements and drugs that turn on the body's defences.


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[Assistant] Yeah, I would say that was the first, it came very close to the work that we were doing at MIT.


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[Assistant] Not so much me, I'm careful because my supervisor Lenny Guarente used to get really annoyed when


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[Assistant] That's right. These signaling proteins, like the DAF2 one that Cynthia discovered and the sirtuins that we work on.


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[Assistant] We didn't know what they were doing at first. This is crazy. It's got nothing to do with DNA repair and free radicals.


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[Assistant] Track what they're actually doing. It turns out they're speaking to the rest of the cell to keep the cell healthy and alive.


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[Assistant] So in the case of that worm, those worms won't just longer live.


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[Assistant] The program to survive was activated. Those worms are stress resistant. You can.


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[Assistant] Hit them with heat, you can hit them with cold, you can starve them.


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[Assistant] Normally a worm responds to its environment. If it's starved, it'll hunker down, it'll survive. But here we had a worm that was mimicking starvation.


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[Assistant] And was able to have the benefits without having to starve itself.


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[Assistant] Uh, well there are various sensors, and so the three main pathways.


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[Assistant] That control this, uh, we've talked about mTOR, which is sensing the levels of amino acids in the cell. Lower levels of certain amino acids, branched chain amino acids are good.


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[Assistant] For the cell because they down regulate mTOR activity. That's one way. The AMPK senses energy, glucose.


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[Assistant] And then the sirtuin sense NAD, which is a molecule that goes up with exercise and hunger.


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[Assistant] Together, those are the sensors. Now, how does a cell communicate with other cells? Well, there's insulin, right? We know when we eat a meal, insulin goes from our pancreas into our bloodstream and tells the rest of the body, hey, you've got sugar already, suck it in, use it. That's a signaling protein. And what Cynthia's worms ended up when they were mutated is that that signal to bring in the glucose was mutated.


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[Assistant] And this insulin signal was absent. And when you don't have the insulin signalling in your worm, it means you're hungry and you get the benefits of being hungry without having to starve.


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[Assistant] And so in the past, our bodies were constantly fighting disease.


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[Assistant] Food and shelter. We can sit down. We don't have to run away from predators very often.


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[Assistant] Are lethargic. The body doesn't expand energy to defend itself unless there's a need for it. And modern society is the worst thing.


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[Assistant] Right. And as long as we have adequate nutrition, that's what we call it, intermittent fasting with adequate nutrition or IFAN. This is another term we just coined in this podcast.


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[Assistant] That allows the body to turn on these defenses without suffering long-term negative consequences.


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[Assistant] What's interesting I find is that even though we know the fridge is probably full with food.


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[Assistant] Our bodies are not that smart. Our bodies don't get that message and we can trick it, trick the body into thinking, oh my goodness.


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[Assistant] You increase your metabolism so you've got more energy to run around and find food. You become more alert because you've got to go find more food.


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[Assistant] Yeah, it's not that hard, uhm, as we say sitting here, uh, doing this podcast.


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[Assistant] But one way I do it is I have a standing desk. So my butt actually atrophied. When we were writing this book, Lifespan, I ended up with a cramp in my piriformis muscle, which is the one that...


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[Assistant] It's right in your hip, it goes through that hole in your pelvis.


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[Assistant] All right. And then so, but it was cramped up on my left-hand side. So I was limping.


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[Assistant] For about nine months after we wrote the book and I thought great, you know, I'm writing about health and longevity and I've now crippled myself.


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[Assistant] I eventually got it to go away with a combination of exercise, physio, and an injection of


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[Assistant] NAD and my butt, which we'll get to in probably the next episode. But the point here is that sitting down is bad for us. You atrophy.


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[Assistant] You have less muscle, which means your hormone levels, particularly testosterone will go down. Um, and you become, you know, in pain. That's not a good thing.


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[Assistant] Even better, go for a walk. Even better, go for a run or cycle to get what we call a hypoxic state going. Your body.


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[Assistant] Needs to suck in more oxygen and that has remarkable health benefits.


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[Assistant] Yes, that's true. And what I think most people don't appreciate is that exercise isn't just beneficial for


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[Assistant] That's true for cardiovascular disease. In fact, it has an even bigger effect on that.


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[Assistant] 30% reduction just by doing moderate exercise every week. 50 minutes is sufficient or three times a week with 10 minutes.


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[Assistant] All cause mortality, right? So what we are, all cause mortality is basically, mortality is basically slowing down aging.


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[Assistant] We must be exactly. And we can also now measure that with the biological clock, the so-called Horvath clock named after my good friend, Steve Horvath.


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[Assistant] That is now a measure of the process that leads to


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[Assistant] All of these diseases that kill us. And one way that we know for a fact to slow down the ticking of that biological clock is exercise.


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[Assistant] Right, so try to get 4,000 in. 10,000 seems to be, uhm, even better.


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[Assistant] And particularly after a meal, as we spoke about last time, walking after a meal gets your glucose levels to be more level, which is what you want.


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[Assistant] It'll get your muscles moving and stimulate the production of new blood vessels. Make sure that you don't run out of oxygen later in life.


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[Assistant] But mostly what happens when you move, the first thing that happens.


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[Assistant] There's a really important reaction that involves one of these longevity pathways, the middle one that I refer to called AMPK.


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[Assistant] Yeah, so AMPK registers energy in the cell, which is chemical energy called ATP. And when you have low levels of ATP, AMPK gets activated and it stands for AMP activated kinase and AMP.


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[Assistant] You will make more mitochondria, which gives you long lasting benefits. So after you've exercised, your body will be making more power, more of these, uh,


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[Assistant] These organelles, we call them, that will actually give you long term health benefits beyond the period of exercise.


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[Assistant] Vigorous exercise is so important beyond just walking and standing. It's that you have hypoxia. Low levels of oxygen are undoubtedly good for you, even though they may not feel good. And you know you're hypoxic when


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[Assistant] Right. So again, it's this hormesis idea, a little bit of what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. So what's happening is when you're hypoxic is you're turning on.


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[Assistant] A good friend and colleague over at Harvard won the Nobel Prize in 2019 for discovering HIF-1 alpha and its role in biology.


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[Assistant] Now the other thing that happens in that, there's two things. So one is the F1 alpha that turns on a genetic program. That's good.


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[Assistant] Those electrons that, uh, that should normally be used by what's called the electron transport chain in mitochondria which generates ATP.


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[Assistant] They fly out and they become a super oxide radical.


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[Assistant] Yeah, it's a little, it's a little battery made of proteins and there's a string of proteins that come together in the membrane.


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[Assistant] The goal is to make it really acidic by putting in these protons into there. And this electron transport chain does that. But you need oxygen because at the end,


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[Assistant] Okay, and then that's called respiration. It's the reason we need to breathe so hard when we, when we, uh, when we run.


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[Assistant] So now you've got what's called a gradient. You've got more of them in that space than inside the mitochondria in the, in the, in a bubble.


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[Assistant] They have to, they want to get out. If they got too much somewhere, they should equilibrate. And what the cell does is it puts little holes that the protons can escape through. It's called the ATPase.


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[Assistant] And what happens is, as those protons shoot through, it's like a hydroelectric, uh, dam turbine.


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[Assistant] And as they shoot through, it literally spins like a turbine. There's a little wheel at the bottom of this tube that spins super fast, many times per second.


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[Assistant] And that spinning allows it to make ATP or chemical energy, which then you use then to burn to make the muscle work.


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[Assistant] And, uh, so what's really interesting is that the more mighty Conrad you have.


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[Assistant] If you've been exercising for a few weeks, allows you to make more chemical energy and you don't feel puffed.


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[Assistant] Regain that ability. With drugs, molecules and supplements.


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[Assistant] Besides what we're talking about today, exercise itself.


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[Assistant] There's two problems, right? First of all, you don't have your energy to burn in the mitochondria to make energy.


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[Assistant] We know that is type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease.


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[Assistant] The lining of the blood vessels. Now the lining of the blood vessels is made of cells called endothelial cells, which pick up the signal. They have little receptors that sense VEGF. And when they get that signal that says, Oh, wow, we're being chased by a saber tooth tiger for the last week. We better build more blood vessels. And they do that. Normally if you have a tube, which is a capillary, almost microscopic, um, blood vessels,


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[Assistant] You won't build new blood vessels, you'll actually have fewer and fewer.


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[Assistant] And your muscle and your brain start to get starved of oxygen. Now one of the big problems we discovered.


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[Assistant] Is during aging, that signaling pathway, that signaling mechanism is defective.


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[Assistant] And even though you're exercising as you get older, you're not getting the benefits of it. You don't get the new blood vessels.


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[Assistant] But we found a way to restore the youth of the muscle.


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[Assistant] And restore the ability of that VGIF to trigger new blood vessel formation. And the trick was to turn on the production of NAD, which is the fuel for the sirtuin survival circuit.


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[Assistant] The relative of that ancient yeast gene that we talked about in the first episode that extends lifespan of yeast cells.


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[Assistant] Tells the genes whether to be on and off and that goes wrong during aging and may actually be the reason we age.


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[Assistant] And one of the reasons we believe that is that you can measure biological age now in people. I could take one of your cells, Matt, back to my lab. Well, actually I have to take a chunk of your cells or a cheek swab. Uh, and we can measure the rate of your aging. Um, it's called the Horvath clock or DNA methylation clock. And when you look at people that have lived a healthy lifestyle, say they've been exercising for the last 30 years,


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[Assistant] They are much younger epigenetically, according to this clock, than someone who hasn't.


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[Assistant] So that tells us that very likely that exercise is not just protecting you against cardiovascular disease, it's slowing down your overall rate of aging.


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[Assistant] Right, so you can measure proteins in the blood which change predictably over time. Uhm, there's a protein called GDF15 which


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[Assistant] It circulates now at a really great biomarker for aging.


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[Assistant] Uhm, in fact, GDF15 is one of those genes that


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[Assistant] was used in that study we referred to last episode, where the Mediterranean diet slowed the aging process. They found that GDF 15


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[Assistant] The methylation on that clock marker was also slowed down.


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[Assistant] The point here being that these proteomic clocks and the epigenetic clocks and some others like an immunoclock can be used now to understand what slows down aging, but importantly


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[Assistant] We had no idea what was going on in aging. Really we had to look at.


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[Assistant] We can tell you here in the podcast how to actually slow and reverse that process.


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[Assistant] Right, take it to the body shop repair, uh, and the mechanics more often. That's what we're talking about for our bodies. And that's why knowing is important.


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[Assistant] Right. So right now, if you want to check your biological age, you can go to InsideTracker, one of our kind sponsors. Uh, that's a, that's a blood test.


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[Assistant] Or you can also have a DNA test, which is available by for a few hundred dollars from various vendors.


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[Assistant] A student in my lab, Patrick Griffin, we've posted recently a paper which can be accessed on bioarchive.org that describes a way to pull


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[Assistant] Put together thousands of people samples and run them all together, bringing the cost of that test down.


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[Assistant] Uhm, or just meditation, whether you're actually benefiting from that.


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[Assistant] So instead of that, you probably need to go for a longer walk afterwards to really burn off those calories and get your blood flowing.


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[Assistant] Sure you can. And the benefits will be huge. You'll feel better. You'll look better.


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[Assistant] That's a good indication of how well you're doing. And if you've got a high heart rate, uhm,


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[Assistant] Yeah, and I'm a big proponent of measuring things, right? Because otherwise you're flying blind.


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[Assistant] Uh, I am, this is also measure sleep which we'll get to in another episode.


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[Assistant] Attacks as well as the flu and all sorts of issues like depression.


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[Assistant] I've been measuring myself for over 10 years using inside tracker and that data.


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[Assistant] It's wonderful. It's graphed and you can see when things go wrong, I've corrected it.


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[Assistant] They do an inner age study. Um, there's a measure called inner age 2.0, which tells you how you're doing compared to others, your age, and you try to keep that low. And based on that calculation, I've been getting younger for the last 10 years, which is great to talk about, but it also means that I'm optimizing my body every time when I do something and if something doesn't work, then I won't do it.


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[Assistant] That's exactly the response of my doctor too. My doctor, uh, said, uh, well how do you feel?


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[Assistant] Exactly. And they can be fun too. You can use GPS to see where you're going. You can compare it with your colleagues, your friends. I'm running more than you.


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[Assistant] Travel a lot and so I'm taking weights with me. But the reason that I do weightlifting is that it's going to maintain my hormone levels.


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[Assistant] It's going to maintain my ability to walk well and stay upright and have good posture. It makes me look better. Uh, although you may say that's debatable.


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[Assistant] Uhm, but also, as I get older- It's not debatable. You're a really good looking guy, David. Thanks. You're lovely, Matthew. Thank you.


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[Assistant] The other thing is that that is often not appreciated is it's harder to build muscle as you get older.


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[Assistant] You're gonna fall over, right? Everyone falls over, especially as they get older. And if you break your hip, that's close to a death sentence. A lot of people.


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[Assistant] Um, well, 19 people every minute fall over and break their hip in the United States, which is a major cause of mortality in the world.


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[Assistant] Well, it's equivalent to having metastatic cancer. That's how bad it is. But if you've got muscles and you're flexible, you do.


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[Assistant] Say Pilates in your older age and stretch, build up the muscles, particularly around your waist, uh, then you're much less likely to break a bone when you fall.


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[Assistant] Right. So I had trouble maintaining testosterone levels like most men my age. Now there are two ways to go about it generally.


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[Assistant] And I've compared the two. I have tried cream on my arm for testosterone. It worked okay. My levels went up maybe by 20%. Wasn't great. I really maxed out my testosterone levels by


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[Assistant] Doing leg exercises and back exercises. I'm talking about things like leg extensions, leg curls.


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[Assistant] They are, it's called the SASP, the senescence associated secretory phenotype. And these proteins cause inflammation, they also cause cancer. So the fewer senescence cells you have in your body, the better.


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[Assistant] And we're starting to find that lifestyle and supplementation and some drugs can slow their formation. Remember, keep the iron levels low, but also we can kill them off.


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[Assistant] Standing desk or a desk with a treadmill, walk around the block after dinner or lunch. Those are the simple things.


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[Assistant] For sure. A few times a week, 10 or 15 minutes, lose your breath. It can be the form of HIIT, high intensity interval training, or running on a treadmill.


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[Assistant] That will get your blood vessels flowing and your mitochondria amplifying.


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[Assistant] Wait, that's just as important. So maintain that muscle mass for your hormones, testosterone, particularly for men and women.


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[Assistant] Right, or HBOT. Yeah, this is really fascinating because, uh, for a while we knew that


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[Assistant] Wounds repair or heal faster when you give them more oxygen.


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[Assistant] Well, it's not clear. It could be hormesis.


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[Assistant] Free radical generation could be that more oxygen in the tissues allows them to grow better.


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[Assistant] But it's found to be quite therapeutic, particularly for neurological disorders, but increasingly for aging itself.


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[Assistant] Right, you can go up a couple of atmospheres or more and you supplement that with oxygen. You can breathe in a bit more oxygen, uhm, or pure oxygen.


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[Assistant] And uh, so I recently tried this actually. I went out to LA. Unfortunately, unlike you, I'm not claustrophobic.


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[Assistant] It certainly was funnier, but it might just be because, uh, everytime I watch it, it gets funnier.


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[Assistant] But it's really relaxing. I believe I was in there for about an hour.


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[Assistant] Actually, it looks like a control room from Star Trek. It's really high tech.


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[Assistant] But also what they were finding was that the humans that were put in there that had


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[Assistant] And cognitive performance, uh, there was six elderly patients suffering from memory loss. And in 2020, this new study came out and they all improved.


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[Assistant] 10 bouts of this treatment before and after and see if their biological age went backwards.


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[Assistant] Hypoxia, like you're running as you come down from high levels to low levels.


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[Assistant] It's the differential and that fits with the new findings, which is going up once and coming down once is not as good as going up and down and up and down within a treatment.


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[Assistant] Yeah, they took 30 people and put them in their large chamber, the one that I visited, and they...


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[Assistant] Did 60 daily sessions of 90 minutes, five of those per week.


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[Assistant] And had a look at the number of senescent cells in the bloodstream before and after and telomere length. And what they found remarkably was that those aspects of aging were reversed.


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[Assistant] And they found that there was a dramatic reduction in the number of those senescent cytotoxic T cells as they're called.


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[Assistant] Well, there are a number of centers that are run by doctors in major cities. It'll become more popular. It's growing rapidly.


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[Assistant] But in this case with high levels of oxygen in your body for a short period of time.


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[Assistant] They don't have brown fat, but they also develop type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease as a result.


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[Assistant] And it was very long lived because it had a mutation in a gene.


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[Assistant] The growth hormone receptor, which means there were small and dwarfs and these little small dwarf mice would live.


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[Assistant] Up to three times longer than a normal mouse. It was quite an amazing thing.


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[Assistant] And the field was rejoicing. Wow, we figured out how to make mammals live that much longer.


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[Assistant] Yeah, which is super disappointing, right? But what it told us was that


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[Assistant] A large effect of longevity was due to them being cold.


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[Assistant] Brown fat has a lot of mitochondria and within those mitochondria.


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[Assistant] Why is that interesting? Well, first of all, that generates heat that helps the animal and we survive cold.


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[Assistant] But also you get fewer free radicals produced when you uncouple mitochondria with these proteins and consistent with that if you make an animal, let's say it's a


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[Assistant] You get to play music at least, uh, I got to choose help by the Beatles, which was quite appropriate because by the end of those three minutes... You wanted out.


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[Assistant] Well, the first two minutes I'm like, what's the problem? This isn't called, but that last minute.


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[Assistant] As well as young mice. So what you want to do is middle age, do these treatments. Uhm, and so that you're ready for old age when it becomes harder.


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[Assistant] Yeah, though it's never too late. We do find that things work in elderly mice and elderly people.


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[Assistant] But it doesn't work as well if you start midlife or even earlier.


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[Assistant] No, we were shivering probably most of the time during the ice age for sure. And our bodies.


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[Assistant] Recognize that we've got those genes that respond and they keep us healthy as we've talked about.


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[Assistant] So there are a number of ways you can, if you don't have a cryotherapy center near you, what do you do?


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[Assistant] Well, you can take cold showers. Some people do that. I don't, I find that unpleasant, but you can do that. It's very cheap to do that.


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[Assistant] Uhm, or you can do something that I do actually do which is sleep with very few covers on my bed.


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[Assistant] And lower down my body temperature and that's also been shown to activate these uncoupling proteins and build brown fat.


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[Assistant] They are, they are, and some of them are really enjoyable. I think sauna bathing is called in Europe.


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[Assistant] Is super enjoyable. Uhm, and it also is good for your skin. You get to sweat and get those pores unclogged.


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[Assistant] The data that I've looked at, which we'll put the show in the show notes is that.


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[Assistant] There's absolutely no doubt that men who partake in sauna bathing a few times a week, often at home because they build this into their houses.


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[Assistant] Have a dramatic reduction up to 20% in the rate of cardiovascular disease and mortality caused by heart attacks.


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[Assistant] Uhm, either by giving them a lot of heat or genetically modifying them, they also live longer.


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[Assistant] And that way, I think you get the maximum benefit from these adversity memetics.


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[Assistant] Or shower. Or hot shower. I certainly do that. I like to turn the heat way up.


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[Assistant] There are a variety of different sonas. There's the old fashioned type, which is the cedar.


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[Assistant] Planks sitting in there and you just throw water on hot rocks. That's traditional. There are new ones such as infrared saunas and the infrared light actually penetrates the skin and is thought


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[Assistant] And there's some evidence, real believable evidence, that also in the skin layer, uh, can reverse aspects of aging as well, and including improved hair growth.


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[Assistant] Yeah, that's one of the nice side effects. That's when you know.


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[Assistant] As I mentioned, I used to do, and I will do again, uh, the cycling of the heat and the cold.


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[Assistant] Uh, about five times during one day of the week. This was on a Sunday with my son Benjamin.


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[Assistant] But I would say more is better. There's no evidence that you can overdo this.


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[Assistant] And that will work almost as well as, as dunking yourself into a cold bathtub. Or you could do what?


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[Assistant] Uh, I did, but that was, that was different. That was hyper hypoxia. What they do is they make you do exercise.


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[Assistant] With weights at the bottom of a pool below your height. So you're underwater and you have to jump up with those weights to get a breath there.


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[Assistant] Uh, I think everybody should go knock on their front door and do it with them. Uh, no, it's, but you can get hypoxia from exercise. It's very similar.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So we've talked about hot and cold. The hyperbaric is more of an issue.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There's not a lot of these centers around and it's expensive. It's hundreds of dollars per treatment.


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[Assistant] We are, and it actually, I think a lot of people will be excited that we can mimic this adversity with molecules, with pills, with injections. And we're going to talk about that in the next episode. In the next episode. Yeah.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, I'm excited about this one because I get questions every day about it and I think it's going to be one of the most downloaded episodes. Yeah, I think a lot of people are going to want to.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Thanks for joining us this episode on exercise and other forms of acute stress. If you're learning from and enjoying this podcast.


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[Assistant] Please subscribe to it on YouTube, Apple podcasts and Spotify.


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[Assistant] Thanks again and we'll be back next week to discuss supplements and molecules like NMN, NR, resveratrol and how these impact longevity.


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[Assistant] Yeah, so I've actually played basically since it was called EDH way back in the day before Commander was a thing. I played when Tolarian Academy was a legal card in the format.


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[Assistant] I've been around, you know, I love building decks, I used to work at a card store and


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[Assistant] I build five, six decks a week for people. Really, just a lot of stuff. You know, for anyone who hasn't heard me, squawk this somewhere on the internet. I actually helped design one of the recent Brawl decks that came out. That's right. I am no stranger to the Singleton format.


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[Assistant] So I think that a lot of the time whenever players are sitting down at the table,


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[Assistant] There are some sort of underlying social contracts that everybody is assuming we're all gonna be on the same page and we all want the same thing out of this. And that's not the case a lot of the time.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And try hard, for lack of a better term, Sign of the Ur Dragon, Hermit Druid, Combo Deck, and these players are just not ever going to have a good time with one another.


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[Assistant] Okay, look, no one's perfect, especially you. Uhm, that might have come out. No, no, that's


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[Assistant] So I think that the two players absolutely can, and technically you are allowed to sit down at basically whatever commander table you want. That's the beauty of commander in general is that there are so many ways to play it.


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[Assistant] You know, maybe this is a hot take on the record or what have you, but I kinda just think that Commander at this point is the purest form of magic there is as far as...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] How you end up sort of expressing yourself through deck building and can kind of customize your power level for your playgroup and so on.


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[Assistant] You know, modern is a very competitive format. Sure. Standard is almost going to be the FNM format a lot of the times, or there are his Brawl, which has all these special events and everything on Arena.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It feels like EDH Commander, you can really kind of do what you want in the format, and so when you sit down at a table,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It, it does a lot of work to ask other people at the table something like, hey,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What, what power level are we at? What are we trying to get out of this game? I know...


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[Assistant] You've kind of sat down a few times and kind of outlined like, hey, there are certain kind of decks I don't really prefer playing with. Is anyone gonna be doing that?


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[Assistant] Okay, so some of the things that stick out to me, some of them are related to those social contracts we alluded to previously, and some of them are more in game or deck building mistakes. One of the big deck building mistakes that I'll see people make is kind of put cards in their deck that just don't


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You'll see our cards that are pretty good on their own, and pushed way over the top by whatever the commander is, not sort of ham-fisted, oh yeah, if my deck is doing exactly what it wants to do, this card's pretty good, and otherwise, it's very bad. I think that's one of the things that you'll see a lot of people commit, say,


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[Assistant] Five, maybe even ten slots in their deck to these kinds of cards and then someone paths exiles or counters their commander and


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[Assistant] They're not actually gonna get to do anything until turn seven or eight.


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[Assistant] Right, so there's a really good example. I play, uh, Zedru the Great Hearted Commander. She's the donating goat lady. Right. Uh, I really enjoy it, and I get...


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[Assistant] A bunch of people who will suggest cards that I should put in it that all have...


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[Assistant] Some big drawback and the idea is that you'll give it away to somebody, right?


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[Assistant] Uh, one of the ones that comes up a lot is Aggressive Mining, which is a card where you can't play lands and you can sac lands to draw cards. It's the basics of what it does.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Which sounds great because you can make it so someone never plays a land again. Cool stuff, right?


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[Assistant] Except if say I go to cast aggressive mining and they kill my Zedro.


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[Assistant] Fires of Invention, which is a card that will let me cast my commander for free.


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[Assistant] And then I can give Fires of Invention away and maybe make it so a combo deck can only cast two spells a turn, which...


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[Assistant] So it's an already good card that has a bunch of play with my commander, rather than a card that only plays with my commander.


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[Assistant] So a lot of it's gonna come down to the cost of putting these cards in your deck, or the cost of implementing them. So, Darkest Hour is pretty cheap to cast, if memory serves correctly. Uhm, going back to the Aggressive Mining card I mentioned before, that's a four drop.


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[Assistant] And your card would say just have little impact if it's not on the battlefield.


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[Assistant] Or if you don't have Teyza on the battlefield.


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[Assistant] But if you do get tasered, there is a ton of upside. That upside being you literally win the game.


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[Assistant] Uhm, on the other hand, something that costs 4 mana has a drawback if you're not doing whatever it is that you want to do, and then also doesn't have the upside of literally winning the game and just kind of shuts someone out of playing lands.


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[Assistant] That's a bit riskier. So generally, I would say you probably only want to have somewhere in the area of one to three cards that have no text.


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[Assistant] has a big drawback if you don't have your commander. Doing nothing is so much better than doing something that is bad for you.


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[Assistant] So another common mistake that I'll run into when looking over other players' decks or


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[Assistant] Even kind of brewing up my own stuff is I will have...


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[Assistant] Too many interactive cards, and I think that that's something that


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[Assistant] A lot of players will end up doing. You'll play against someone or look at their deck, and they'll have 15 counter spells.


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[Assistant] These are, these are the cogs in your well-oiled machine.


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[Assistant] Exactly, I'm talking about the card counterspell, Swords to Plowshares, Red Elemental Blast,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Croson grip, that kind of thing. These are your interactive things that are good to have a not zero number of, right, but you don't want


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[Assistant] Half your spells to be these cards, or you're going to struggle to actually win games.


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[Assistant] Uh, are you familiar with the term, uh, with what a one for one is? Yes, I am. In terms of card advantage. This is you giving, for anyone who might be unfamiliar with the term, uh, this is when you trade your one card or one resource for your opponent's one card or one resource. So, counterspell.


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[Assistant] Is a card where you- they lose their spell, you lose their spell, one card for one card.


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[Assistant] Because there is a point where you have three opponents, you can't just keep making one-for-one exchanges over and over and over.


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[Assistant] Or you'll end up empty handed and everybody else has one or two cards left.


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[Assistant] So, you actually need to play things that are proactive, building towards you winning the game.


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[Assistant] Or you're just not going to, you're going to come in probably third a lot, where, you know, you can stop.


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[Assistant] From dying for a little bit, someone dies, and then the other two people kind of easily gang up on you because you're out of resources.


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[Assistant] Exactly, you're only getting one extra resource each turn because of the draw step or turn cycle, but they're each getting a resource which means you're getting one and the cumulative umbrella. Exactly, we'll call it opponent is getting three.


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[Assistant] So, generally speaking, my approach is to try and reduce the amount of it that I have in my decks.


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[Assistant] If you are going to have it in your deck, you want it to fit in one of a few categories. You either want it to be very cheap, something like...


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[Assistant] Veil of Summer is actually a really, really good example of this, where this is a one mana card that turns off all counterspells. That's a pretty good exchange for one mana, right?


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[Assistant] Uh, you want it to be something like a sweeper, so terminus, or supreme verdict, something like that, that's going to deal with way more than one card, for your one card. So this is one where it's inefficient, but it is getting you a bunch of value, and...


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[Assistant] To a point, uh, Path to Exile falls more into that first bucket of being incredibly efficient, so it ends up being fine, because even though you end up down a card,


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[Assistant] Uh, and this actually is a great way to segue into what you should be using your reactive cards for, and that's answering specific problems. So Path to Exile is a one mana way to break up, say, a creature combo. Sure. Or to just get a commander off the battlefield.


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[Assistant] And that has a bunch of value, but if you're just trying to trade resources a bunch and


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[Assistant] Take a bunch of their cards away with stuff like Thoughtseize, which isn't really playable in Commander, I mean, sometimes in 1v1, but for the most part you're not running into Duress.


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[Assistant] It's just a one for one, which is actually kind of a one for one third exchange. And...


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[Assistant] You really need your cards to be more impactful than that if they are taking the place of what could be a card that puts you closer to winning the game, either a mana rock, a card draw spell, a damage spell, a combo piece, etc.


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[Assistant] So I think it's gonna depend a lot on what kind of deck you're playing.


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[Assistant] Uh, if you're playing a, let's say a traditional deck that is doing something where it's just trying to get very big and then win the game because of how much is actually put on the battlefield, uh, that's the kind of show where


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You're probably gonna want to have something in the ballpark of, we'll say, three to eight-ish.


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[Assistant] Or Tanish, removal spells total and that's counting.


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[Assistant] You, you really want to be playing cards that are going to contribute to you building this mass of cards because it's going to take you a ton of resources to go over the top of what everybody else is doing.


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[Assistant] If you're playing, say, a combo deck, I...


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[Assistant] I think you have more, more room to put very specific answers in your deck.


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[Assistant] But the kinds of each answer or the actual quantity of each kind of answer is going to be lower. That's to say you might have


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[Assistant] 10 or 15 things in your combo deck that can deal with what your opponent is doing to try and stop you, but you're only going to have one or two things that kill creatures, you're gonna have one or two things that deal with artifacts and enchantments, you're going to have...


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[Assistant] One or two things that can stop counter spells or one or two things that stop them from blowing up your lands and so on.


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[Assistant] Right, that's not a way to come in first. A lot of times, when you are committing, this is getting a little bit into talks that are closer to what we'll call tempo, which is how much of your turn you're giving up or how much time you're committing to a play. Whenever you play, say,


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[Assistant] You are giving up part of your turn and putting yourself further away from winning because you are just tapping two and having one less card.


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[Assistant] And if you look at your resources in a vacuum, you've tapped two, one less card.


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[Assistant] To make your opponent tap however much mana they tap for their spell and also be down one card.


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[Assistant] So all you have done is put you and someone else further from winning the game. That is effectively...


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[Assistant] If what you are trying to do is win a game of magic, that is all you have actually accomplished, is putting you in one of your three opponents.


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[Assistant] Further from winning, you are not actually closer to winning the game that way.


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[Assistant] So, uh, I think a lot of what you want to make sure that you're doing is actually putting things in your duck that put you closer to winning the game. And this is a great segue to another mistake that I see a lot of players making is just


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[Assistant] But they aren't actually the things dealing 40 damage or running someone out of cards in their library. You need things that are...


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[Assistant] And Craterhoof Behemoth is one of those sort of eye-win buttons where you get paid for having fifteen creatures in play.


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[Assistant] Yeah, and I think combos are one of the things that kind of go back to those social treaties mentioned before where


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[Assistant] You need a lot of things to go right for that to happen. Yes. I feel like so I think that's why that's something that is more in bounds where


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[Assistant] Right, and I think that's a super valid way to play the game. Uh, I think that people get so afraid of being viewed as one of these sort of...


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[Assistant] Sometimes three or four hour commuter games are fun, but...


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[Assistant] I feel like by the third hour, most people are kind of ready to either play another game or...


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[Assistant] Get done with this one. And having a way to ensure that it doesn't reach that point is a healthy thing.


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[Assistant] Yeah, I completely agree with that. I think a lot of it is kind of attacking this stigma that...


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[Assistant] Being the bad guy who ends the game doesn't actually make you the bad guy.


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[Assistant] Exactly, yes, thank you. That is perfect.


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[Assistant] Are you just dragging me right now because of Command Fest Seattle? Hi!


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[Assistant] I play what Minnie would call a control deck, and I played three games in one day because my deck won all three of the like two and a half hour games.


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[Assistant] If it helps at all, I literally got home and I look at my partner and go, you know, I had a really good day today, I had a lot of fun doing this, I don't get to do it enough.


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[Assistant] Yeah, like sometimes your Kimba's just taxed out and then they go, alright, fine. Pure steel paladin. Right. And you're just like...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Alright, well, here we go, let's do this.


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[Assistant] Alright, so for this next mistake, uh, I feel like it kind of needs a sort of preface that this is meant to be...


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[Assistant] Respectful of the fact that a lot of people play the game more casually than other people. Obviously I've kind of...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Shaped my life around magic the last couple of years, so I'm gonna know what-


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[Assistant] What players will do is they will sort of not really think about what they are going to be doing on their turn before they get to their turn. And that can lead to a sort of...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] For lack of a better phrasing, it almost disrupts the pace of play for everybody.


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[Assistant] To a point, I feel like slow play has a very different connotation in Magic where it's an intentional thing, and I don't think it's intentional.


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[Assistant] On the other hand, there's a point where, even if you are not in the game, you also, outside of the game, while you're building your deck, can have an idea of what you're going to be prioritizing in a game and kind of make it more of a deck building exercise to know,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] How am I going to prioritize these things? How do I want to sequence them and so on?


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[Assistant] Rather than always figuring it out on the fly, because there is a point where...


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[Assistant] It just kind of takes away from some of the experience if one of the four players is taking half the playtime. You know, and not in a gameplay kind of way, like if there are combo decks sometimes that's just how decks work, but


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I don't know, I, I don't think it is necessarily always anyone, or I very much think it's not someone acting maliciously when this happens, at all.


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[Assistant] But I do think that there is a point where people who do that kind of thing will...


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[Assistant] Sorry, I'm just not sure what I want to do. I think this is a close thing. And when it's them figuring out which ramp spell they want to play, that's something that I feel like they could have thought about before the game started.


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[Assistant] I think that that would help a lot of people honestly just play better as well.


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[Assistant] Just because you're going to be thinking with a clearer mind if you think about it before the game rather than...


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[Assistant] So I think that gets into a really good way to actually frame the thought process. Because I think one of the big reasons that we end up in these spots is people will get overwhelmed by how much is going on in Commander. And I think that's a very fair thing to feel. There is so much. Yes.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A blue-white-red deck most of the time, which involves doing things with my opponent's cards, trying to figure out when I need to play my cards, it's its own puzzle, and the way that I will think about it,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so then I'm thinking that is, if I'm playing an interactive turn or an interactive card, that is what I'm going to interact with.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] At the same time, I'm trying to think what is the best card in my hand that I can play.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And if I can do both of those things, that's great. But if you have, say, Sanguine Bond, and you don't have the other combo piece in play yet,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I can be thinking, is that scarier or is?


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[Assistant] Prof doesn't have a combo piece. Nekasar doesn't like my blue deck drawing cards. I'm just gonna go after Nekasar, if that's what I'm gonna do. So when I draw my card, I don't have to go, alright. So there's a Nekasar.


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[Assistant] And there's these enchantments, and there's a sanguine bond, and there's, it is just, that is what I'm thinking about, because it's the scariest thing. And if I don't have a better card to develop, then it is to answer Nekosar, if answering Nekosar is more powerful than me playing.


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[Assistant] Whatever my planeswalker or what have you is, then I just do that and that is the way to try and simplify all of it to a couple of cards instead of


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I have six cards, three of them can each target ten things, now I have to think about all of them.


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[Assistant] I think it is a very tryhardy and not cool thing to just be like, you can check.


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[Assistant] That's like, there's a, there's certainly a point where it is, derived information is a thing that you do not have to tell your opponent.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I understand this is speaking from a place of privilege, but I'm going to assume most of the people I play with are fairly literate and could suss out.


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[Assistant] And say, hey, so instead of reading every single creature for the next two minutes,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Flyers? Yeah. Flyers? Yeah. Flyers. Right. No flyers.


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[Assistant] I, what is, this makes me mad, and it might be it's own side tangent, it makes me upset when people, when you go, how much money do you have? And they'll go, I have five lands untapped, and they have a gilded lotus and a noble hierarchy, it's just, come on, we all know what the person was asking, can we?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So, my rule of thumb with Commander, I just try to say be excellent to each other. Right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But, like, just, just be nice to everyone. People are here for, to have fun.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Be a part of that, you know, if you're not there to huff. And if you play competitive commander, that's cool too. But I think most people who play commander...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Are there because they kind of just want to play a game with some people, so be a gamer with some people, you know?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] All over the internet. You can read my articles over on StarCityGames.com. I do broadcasting and commentary over on the SCG Tour. And I have a podcast called The Play Set.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] With Chulane and a couple of other cards, and some are less obvious than others. As long as you have a total of four creatures and five lands, Chulane, Peregrine Drake, and Gaea's Cradle allows you to do everything. Chulane's own bounce ability is surprisingly relevant in the deck and should be utilized when possible.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Hello and welcome to another episode of Untitled Magic the Gathering Podcast. Yes, that is the title, and today Princess and I are going to be talking about Star Trek, specifically Deep Space Nine and what


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Had never read Worn Peace and learned quite a lot about it from you on your program It's Lit.


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[Assistant] So if you guys want to check that video out, I'm linking that and a couple other, uh, princesses stuff in the description. Today however, we are talking Star Trek Deep Space Nine.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, we were just chatting casually about our love of Deep Space Nine and Star Trek and Magic the Gathering and Commander and we started just talking to each other about


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Wouldn't this be who Cisco as a card is? Or wouldn't this be who Odo as a card is? And we just said, you know what, we should just stop now, turn on the cameras, and start filming. Which is what we, well, that was like a month ago, so now we eventually had some time in our schedule.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Are you gonna share with us what the Deep Space Nine tattoo is gonna be, or do we have to just have you back on to show it off when you get it?


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[Assistant] I love, too, a lot of people don't appreciate that Cisco actually designed the Defiant when he was working at the Utopia Planitia shipyards, and a lot of people overlook, I think, Cisco's role as the builder.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Put it so much in your face in the show the way they did with like Picard the Diplomat where it's easy to walk away from.


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[Assistant] The next generation, say Picard was the diplomat, but Psysko was the builder and that was because he was trying to build on Béjour and that they wanted a show that built not in terms of individual episodic things that are disconnected, but rather a connection and a world and everything and


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, so I've been through many rewatches, but we were just rewatching, uh, Dramatis Personae, where they all take on, uh, uh, this other personality. Yes! And reenact a struggle for power, and in that,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, but that's again because he's the builder and one of the most underrated episodes, which is my- one of my personal favorites, is- don't worry, we'll talk about magic in a minute.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I had just gone into this gifted magnet program and found out I did not have what it takes to be an animal biologist, which had been my lifelong dream.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I fell out of the sciences and I discovered a love of writing. And I was writing my first novel at 17, 16 in high school. And that moment where Jake said that, I mean, I had always been a fan of the character before, but I was like...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now I always say, like, when everybody says, in Star Trek, what would you be? You know, like, engineering, sciences, command, and I'm like, I would be Jake Sisco the writer. That's me in Star Trek.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, why don't we start with Captain Cisco then? Yes! And Precursor...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What a cursor going into this, ladies and gentlemen. I know there are a million articles out there, I don't know, I didn't look into if Mark Rosewater has ever done, what colors would Deep Space Nine characters be, and if he has, maybe he's gonna have said completely different stuff.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And why? And you tell us in the comments what you think. Play along, but please don't get upset with me if Mark Rosewater said, well, actually, Quark would be mono-red. And okay, that's great, but I have a different interpretation. And the method that we did use was we want to look for an existing card. So this is a little different. We want to look for an existing card.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That we feel we could put the character onto. So instead of inventing our own mechanics for each character, we're looking to kind of create a skin, uh, uh, or an altar as you would for each one. And so we're going to rename the cards and we're going to put the Deep Space Nine characters on them, but keep the existing


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Mechanics, and so we're gonna start with Captain Sisko, and we each have a pick for this one. Princess, why don't you go first? What did you think for Sisko, for looking for a card to be Captain Sisko of Deep Space Nine?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I really love this pick, and I wanted you to go first because I actually think that is now my pick, so when you told me to say whether or not Captain, I'm like, oh, it's perfect, especially the idea that the Captain brings in


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Their crew, right? And so Sisay does that mechanically, but that's Cisco too, is that he's assembled one of the finest crews in the galaxy, and then he brings in all these other legendary characters we're about to touch.


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[Assistant] Talk about, and I do love the idea of Cisco being all five colors to allow everybody to be in the commander deck, but also the fact that Cisco more than any other captain.


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[Assistant] That builds in each and every color. So Cisco is willing to do anything that needs to be done, uh, and that in a way is embodied by each of those different colored abilities of Kenrith. And I think that that's very Cisco to me. And also, you know, the returned


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[Assistant] That they really wanted to emphasize that he wasn't abandoning, uh, uh, Bejor or Deep Space Nine or even Jay, especially not Jake, that he was simply to be gone for a while and then he would return.


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[Assistant] And so I like that, that synchronicity with Kenrith, the returned king. Next up.


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[Assistant] Uh, at a delicatessen in Hollywood, I grew up in North Hollywood and my mom was working at a delicatessen in


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[Assistant] On my wall, I had my, my everything, you know, all that stuff.


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[Assistant] And, uh, when that happened, she, she went up to, to, uh, Nana and said, Hey, I know, I'm so sorry to do this, but my son, it means so much to him. And she got.


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[Assistant] Uh, where Major Kira is delivering her speech that she needed Jake to punch up the jokes to and stuff.


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[Assistant] Make himself look like other people because that's a little too difficult, but it's not that type of shapeshifter. Uh, but I really more liked and what resonated with me as a kid was how he was felt alienated and one of a kind and alone and


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[Assistant] Yes, we'll get to Noggin Rob in a minute, but for Odo, I envision


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[Assistant] The card, uh, seven mana of any color. It's another wooberg though, but this is, this is the tribal.


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[Assistant] Okay, so speaking of characters that came over from the next generation to Deep Space Nine, we have the man himself, Chief Miles Edward O'Brien. You are going to tell us your


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[Assistant] For a legendary card that represents O'Brien. I actually have one I want to offer as well for this one. We'll, we'll, we'll see our different opinions. But Princess, take us away first. Who's O'Brien?


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[Assistant] So why, tell us, tell us why of all of Magic's legendary creatures, Fiblethip is the one that resonated with you. I know your reasoning on this and I love it.


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[Assistant] Right, right. I was thinking more mechanically.


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[Assistant] And I went with Shroom the hegemon, because O'Brien is the guy who fixes anything, and Shroom is the commander that brings artifacts back from the graveyard. And Deep Space Nine literally was in the graveyard in the first episode of that show.


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[Assistant] The Cardassians trashed that place, and O'Brien brought it back from the grave.


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[Assistant] And that's what he was the miracle worker and what he was famous for fixing and all of this old technology and making things work. He's the engineer. And so I was tempted with another card that actually went to another one of our characters later.


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[Assistant] But when I thought of O'Brien I think yeaah, he's the guy who brings artifacts back from the grave. So that's who I was.


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[Assistant] Yes, and I would, I would again, just being, being the, the perfunctory type, just be Miles O'Brien, Chief of, Chief of Operations.


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[Assistant] What a fantastic pick, and what a great character too, and I'm a, so you actually, you told us at the beginning you have not, you're going through Star Trek in out of order, so you actually haven't gone through the next generation yet, have you?


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[Assistant] We didn't have Dr. Crusher or, or Counselor Troy just making a fist and punching anyone throughout the course.


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[Assistant] She was his mentor, and she was an old man, and now she's in this young, attractive woman, uh, uh, woman's body, and I liked that they also said,


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[Assistant] No, he's able to just be friends with her. Yes. It's a single guy, shh, you know, they go, and then it's like, no, he's able to just be friends with her. There is no romantic interest between them, uh, with the exception of the- We don't talk about that episode. We don't talk about that episode.


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[Assistant] Oh, she was. And, uh, that episode that you're referring to was the first, uh, uh, lesbian kiss on network television. Yeah. And so Star Trek gets the award for first interracial kiss on network television and first, uh, uh, lesbian kiss.


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[Assistant] They did okay, but not from what I've read from, from, uh, queer voices. That great, uh, of a job with it. So at least with Dax, they, they, they were a little better about it.


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[Assistant] And it was, they were able to, to tell mature and enlightened stories about somebody who, uh, uh, in one lifetime is in a, a male body and in another lifetime is in a female body and, and, and what that means for our concepts of love and sexuality and,


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[Assistant] They probably could have done more, but what they did for the time was pretty impressive. Great character.


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[Assistant] I wanna talk about the character I hated as a kid and love as an adult, which is QUARK.


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[Assistant] Really is, uh, and all of his rules of acquisition and comments on society and having to work and scheme and plot and just- just steal enough to get a- a head.


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[Assistant] Uh, as a kid went right over my head and when I rewatched Deep Space Nine after, after, well, by the time I was in my twenties, I was just laughing hysterically. Because Quark sometimes is the smartest guy in the room. Absolutely. Quark really is.


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[Assistant] I envisioned quirk, I thought what colors is quirk, and it's, no, quirk is not colors, quirk is one color, and that color is black, and out of all the mono-black


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[Assistant] Legendary characters in Magic the Gathering. If we're looking mechanically, I was drawn to Gonti.


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[Assistant] And, uh, then, also, but, the whole using mana.


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[Assistant] Uh, that, that you have as if it were mana of any color is also you're getting away with something. You're breaking the rules here. I'm gonna steal your mono red card and I'm in a mono black deck, but you know what? I'm gonna spend my black mana as if it's red mana. I feel like the only thing


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[Assistant] About Gonti that isn't Quark-like is the Death Touch. Cause Quark was a very bad fighter and, and, and they always did that. He could barely hold a phaser and the few times he tried and, and was not good at that stuff.


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[Assistant] Uh, so I don't know about the Death Touch, but I love the mechanic effect of him digging through, uh, your opponent's, uh, decks, his opponent's decks, and trying to just take whatever he can take, to me seemed like a very quark quality.


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[Assistant] Uh, that, that's, that's also funny too, where Deep Space Nine was able to have those, uh, dare I say, human moments, where Dr. Bashir, I love at the end of that one, walks into the infirmary, and because Klingons, Klingons are apparently a little rough, uh, when they mate, and he's, he's just reading his, his, his medical report pad, and he's like, bruised ribs, contusions, what, what have you two been up to?


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[Assistant] And then looks up at them and they're just cackling and it's like, oh, no, no, no, got it, got it, nevermind, got it, got it, got it, Klingons are on the station, people having sex.


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[Assistant] Speaking of Julian, Julian's next and you're going to take us through your Dr. Bashir card. You have a very interesting pick.


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[Assistant] That's, I, I really, what resonates with me is that idea of him being partner because he was like that, especially early on where he wanted to be everybody's friend and did have that cool friendship with O'Brien and he was originally interested in Dax and, and later on just was a kind of partner character. He does make a good partner.


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[Assistant] Briefly, but I really, it's too bad a lot of these, these, these actors, uh, get typecast and we don't really see that much of them.


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[Assistant] No notes. I think he's super talented as an actor. Like, I mean they all are, but in particular he's just fantastic. Uh, what do you think? I'm curious about the whole genetically engineered change to his, uh, uh, uh, character. It was never something I was big on. I was like,


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[Assistant] This was the last era of television where they were really latched onto that idea of at the end of an episode everything's back to normal and none of your main characters die and we weren't in the golden age of television where it was like, oh yeah, kill off a main character, oh yeah.


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[Assistant] And I like that, I guess what I didn't like was that afterwards they wrote him as having heightened intellect and he would quote off statistics in a way that was supposedly, you know, more than an average human and I think that they robbed


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[Assistant] Him of some of his humanity in doing that and that it would have been better for him to still be the same.


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[Assistant] I think keep him as he is and just say he got that way because of, of, of illegal genetics work and you can have a conversation about why that's wrong and start trekking in and all that stuff, but yeah.


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[Assistant] To see your take on how Worf is presented in that show, because there's a lot to talk about there, and I think that he got fleshed out so much more on Deep Space Nine. He was a cool character on TNG, but he was often in the background more.


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[Assistant] There were some Cool Wharf-centric episodes, but he was a little less...


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[Assistant] He's about honor, he's about strength, but he's also idealistic. He believes in that law-binding community together. And I actually started to think Naya was some really cool colors for him. I actually think Ajani is a cool


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[Assistant] We can't have a Johnny as a commander, and so I was looking at the Naya Planeswalkers, and I'm thinking, which one of these is, is wharf? Is it, uh, Mael the Anima? Is it, uh, uh, Zacama, Primal Calamity? There were some powerful ones, and I finally settled on Samus.


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[Assistant] If you're beaming down into an unknown situation, you're pulling your 8- 08 team together, who do you pick to come down with you? You probably want Worf on your team.


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[Assistant] Uh, if it's any sort of, like, unknown situation, Mr. Wharf, come on with us. He's gonna make the team better being there. Uh, uh, and also Samet has the ability to untap another target creature. There's a little bit of protection, there's a little bit of strategy, and there's a really well-trained warrior. Definitely went with Samet as Wharf.


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[Assistant] It's, it's an interesting, I, I like that you picked Rata too because we saw Rata kind of grow up over three cards and I mean come on, we watched Warf from TNG to Deep Space Nine and he was supposed to be on TNG, he was just a lowly lieutenant, he wasn't even Chief of Security originally, he had no


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[Assistant] Real like job, he was just in the background with a couple lines and we watched him grow up over the course of


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[Assistant] Wow, over a decade. And so that's, that's an interesting parallel as well, watching, watching, uh, Rada grow up.


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[Assistant] Again, as someone who didn't see TNG, what did you make when Worf showed up right away? I mean, you were familiar, of course, that he was coming over from the Enterprise, but like, did you not, did you know anything about his character ahead of time? Did it feel, did it feel out of place to you or forced in? At what point did you accept him as a member of the crew? What were your thoughts on that?


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[Assistant] We still have not touched on Jake's Cisco, and you're gonna tell- you thought of- I- I was-


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[Assistant] I'm gonna have my own pitch for Jake and then you told me your pitch and I was like, it's the most brilliant.


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[Assistant] One. You've got it. You nailed it in one. Who was your, who do you think Jake would be of legendaries?


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[Assistant] Uh, the novel, this is if you go to The Visitor, uh, and they reveal that the famous novel that, that Jake Sisco, who was an old man in The Visitor, was likened to maybe like J.D. Salinger or something. He wrote that one brilliant novel and then retreated from the world and, uh, that was named Ancelent.


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[Assistant] And, uh, we never knew what it was about, really. I think it was a very dark and painful...


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[Assistant] Uh, a tail. Jake was very unhappy to be on Deep Space Nine, especially early on. He lost his mother. But whatever it was about, I would have, I would say that maybe we would go with just Jake Sisco, author of Anslem.


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[Assistant] But of course, if we're talking about Jake Sisco, we have to also talk about his best buddy, one of my favorite characters, Nog. Let's talk about Nog.


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[Assistant] Cadet Nog, Ensign Nog, or just originally Troublemaker.


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[Assistant] A delinquent nog. What an amazing character journey. If you had told me in Season 1 that nog, who we first meet breaking into the infirmary,


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[Assistant] Uh, and getting arrested by Odo is gonna end up outranking Miles O'Brien.


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[Assistant] By far, you know, uh, it's, it's, it's such a great journey. The thing with Nog that really resonated with me is that idea of like, you think I'm trash, but I know I have something to offer. And that's what Star Trek is about. And that scene with Captain Cisco is, is to me very,


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[Assistant] Very Star Trek-ian and Deep Space Nine got away from some of the Star Trek-ian idealism, but it was still about, I've got something to offer, I want a chance to prove it. And I loved that that was what Nog became.


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[Assistant] Absolutely. And, uh, I think Abram is a great example. I mean, season one, he tries to murder Quark.


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[Assistant] Uh, and by the end, he literally is in some ways responsible for saving the Alpha Quadrant from the Dominion and talk about a huge evolution. With Nog, I picked Sram, Senior Artificer.


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[Assistant] Mono White, uh, and this is the artifact guy. This is the guy who works with machines and gets knowledge from it. And I originally thought of this card


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[Assistant] He was this tenacious get things done and it was through that tenacity and that knowledge and working with artifacts and he, he was still kind of mono-colored and he became very like, like the fact the idea of nog is mono-white.


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[Assistant] You know, that's not what you think of with a Ferengi, and that's not what you think of with his nog, maybe season one and two and such, and maybe that's not. But by the end, nog was absolutely about the laws and the order and the procedure.


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[Assistant] And, and all of that stuff, and he was, he, he became fascinated with engineering and using engineering to get ahead. And so that's why I went with SRAM.


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[Assistant] Uh, senior artificer for Nog Tenacious Ensign is what I would call him because I liked that tenacity. That was a word that, uh, Aaron Eisenberg, RIP, uh, uh, would use about, he would say tenacious is how he always interpreted his character of Nog.


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[Assistant] And I think we're gonna go a little bit further and say that Mizzix of the Ismagnus, the ultimate storm commander, is who I would have for Rom. And my thinking behind this, besides just that Rom was the ultimate


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[Assistant] Tinkerer and person who rigged up Bajoran Ferengi Federation and Cardassian technology to work together.


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[Assistant] When I think about, uh, Mizzix and this idea of a storm commander, at first it's hard to see how powerful she is until you actually play against her or with her in a properly tuned deck and how far that goes in terms of just getting out of control and out of hand. And I feel that's the same way with, with Rom where he starts out very subtle, very small.


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[Assistant] Uh, uh, mines for mining the wormhole and saving the outfor quadrant. And so I think of that just escalating progression of technology with ROM. And I would definitely name the card ROM Idiot Genius.


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[Assistant] He's both of those things. He's- he is an idiot, and he still was kind of an idiot, but then he would just be like...


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[Assistant] Oh yeaah, genius. Genius things. And he ends up being Grand Negus because he understands how rules, regulation, and environmentalism and rights for women is all profitable.


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[Assistant] Uh, more so than the current system and that that understanding is what's gonna put him in charge of the new Ferengi Empire.


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[Assistant] Fans of Sloan and Eddington, I sent out a tweet about Eddington, only I disguised it as being about Les Mis, uh, uh, uh, you know, uh, we can talk about Sloan, I mean, come on, L'Zov, the Multifarious, and, and, and such, but I do want to take a minute


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[Assistant] To still talk about the two big villains of Deep Space Nine, because Deep Space Nine did villains great. They had the great, and there were lots of villainous characters, and even really three-dimensional villains like Damar, who starts out as a villain and then ends up not being a villain at all. But, but, we gotta talk about Kai Wen and, uh, Gold Dukat, for sure.


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[Assistant] Oh no, I skipped Garrick, but wait, wait, wait.


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[Assistant] What do you mean I skipped Garrick? Garrick was just a plain, simple tailor. You think there's more to discuss with Garrick? The plain, simple t- Garrick? Just simple Mr. Garrick?


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[Assistant] Let's talk about the real villains of Deep Space Nine. The two biggies, uh, uh, we've got Kai Wen.


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[Assistant] Right? Mmhm. Is that gold you caught? Why don't you start with Kai Wen?


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[Assistant] Filing complaints to the school board passionately about organized religion, uh, and so I was very much a fan of, oh yes, unfortunately being 16 or whatever when you file a official complaint about the Halloween pageant, uh, uh, as being religious, forced religious ceremony. That doesn't go too well. Oh, I was a real, real kid.


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[Assistant] Oh yes, yes, yes. That panned out interestingly. But nonetheless, I very much adored that the villain of Deep Space Nine, one of the villains of Deep Space Nine, was the leader of organized religion for Bajor. And, uh, uh, that she was a hypocrite and that she ultimately turned on her own faith for power and all of this. But when I think in Magic the Gathering,


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[Assistant] of a Magic the Gathering card that is the ultimate religious leader, who is one of the biggest villains in Magic the Gathering. I think Mono White, and I think Elish Norn, who is the leader of the machine orthodoxy on New Phyrexia, who is a terrible twisted


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[Assistant] And she's, uh, absolutely difficult to deal with and who I would pick as the legendary replacement for Kaiwen.


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[Assistant] Uh, Gold Ducat. Now here is the villain to end all villains. I think Gold Ducat is a better villain than Q.


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[Assistant] Ducat is definitely mono-black, and I was looking through mono-black commanders and thinking which one of these mono-black commanders is Gull Ducat, and the answer is Sidisi, undead vizier, is absolutely Gull Ducat. And I didn't just go with the most


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[Assistant] Uh, uh, uh, a powerful mono black commander that I could find. I really wanted to tap into who and what.


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[Assistant] Dukat was, and I love that Sidisi Undead Vizier has that exploit.


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[Assistant] And when you sacrifice a creature, you may search your library for a card, put it into your hand, and then shuffle your library.


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[Assistant] Uh, she's got Death Touch, she's mono black, but she's Gold Dukat. Because Gold Dukat sacrificed everything to get what he wanted. Much like Kai Wen, they were very good.


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[Assistant] The exploiter of Bajor, the exploiter of Cardassia, the exploiter of the Alpha Quadrant, and the greatest villain Star Trek has ever known.


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[Assistant] It created a good dynamic then, where, so for those at home, the original plan was they did want to love, like, they did want Kira to start to have a love interest with, interest in Ducat, and, and Nana was like, uh-uh. That is ridiculous. He's Hitler! He's Hitler!


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[Assistant] You talk about whether or not the writers were, you know, like, like, where their failings were. One of their strengths, I think, was recognizing that this man in power and, and this


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[Assistant] War criminal and horrible, like, I mean, you can very easily argue the guy had genocide on his hands and that someone in that power dynamic that they kept writing in that he really did like,


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[Assistant] Uh, that was, that's some real dark stuff that they were luckily aware of and wrote in very well to the, uh, uh, episodes. But yeah, what a freaking monster of a guy. Uh, uh, nice actor. Nice character. Very nice actor, I'm sure.


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[Assistant] And Mark Alamo says I didn't pull back enough, and Avery Brooks says I leaned in too much, but basically the punch


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[Assistant] It wasn't supposed to be anywhere near it, it was supposed to be camera trickery, the punch doesn't even, he's a foot away, and it just looks like he hits him, and whatever happened, it 100% connected, and Avery Brooks broke his nose.


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[Assistant] And, and he had to go to the emergency room bleeding profusely in full Cardassian makeup because that stuff takes hours to take off.


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[Assistant] So, there's so many other characters, there's so many other characters, we can't get through them all.


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[Assistant] Ah, no, the series is over. There's absolutely no legs left.


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[Assistant] Compound fracture of the right radius, two fractured ribs, torn ligaments, strained tendons, numerous contusions, bruises and scratches. What have you been doing? I mean, what have we been doing?


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[Assistant] Thanks for having me, prof. I'm excited to talk about how wonderful the Magic the Gathering eSport viewing experience is.


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[Assistant] More so than like the average person you're probably gonna have on your channel and probably more so than like the average like consumer of esports.


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[Assistant] eSports, right? So if you go with like the most stringent definition of what an eSport is, you're going to have somebody who says that it is a competitive video game.


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[Assistant] I don't know. There are tiers to Magic decks, right? When we play a Legacy Open, if you're playing something like Miracles, right, that's a real Legacy deck. But if you say, I'm going to a Legacy Open and I'm gonna play Meat Hooks, someone might look at you and be like, that's not a good deck.


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[Assistant] Tier 2. Tier 2. When we talk about tier 1 esports, we're obviously talking about games like CSGO, Overwatch, League of Legends, and Dota 2. Those are like the current big four. StarCraft is starting to fall by the wayside. That's kind of the progenitor of a lot of esports.


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[Assistant] Competitive video games designed to be played competitively. Now...


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[Assistant] The longer esports has become a thing, the bigger the market has become.


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[Assistant] The more loose the definition has started to grow to be, to be competitive gaming.


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[Assistant] That's an esport, right? The bigger that esports has become, sort of in the mainstream media, the more the definition of esports has sort of flexed because it's the same thing for like, you know, band-aids, right? A band-aid isn't a band-aid, it's an adhesive strip.


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[Assistant] Online and make guesstimates based on sales. But like it's not sort of the same hard numbers that like legal legends can try to give you. So...


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[Assistant] What I have to scale by expectations. And I will say that as a product, Magic Arena is everything that I think Magic should, should have had years ago.


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[Assistant] Cool. It looks as captivating as Hearthstone looked when it came out. And I was like, man, if only Magic Online looked like Hearthstone, people would want to play it. But the problem is,


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[Assistant] And this is because we're not just using pros. WotC and Channel Fireball, uh, and to an extent StarCity Games, they've started to use people who have only been interested in magic in so much as they want to be magic commentators.


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[Assistant] And I think for the longest time, to the detriment of magic, uh,


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[Assistant] differently than e-sports, the rest of e-sports, is that Magic has had this like,


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[Assistant] Worship complex, when it comes to broadcast, where it has to be somebody who is, uh, respected by the pros? Right. Roots on the game.


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[Assistant] Or is or was a pro player. And if you're not one of those three things, you don't deserve to be on the broadcast. There is nothing you could ever give to the broadcast that is of value to the viewer.


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[Assistant] So I think visually, and the quality of commentary, not to say the old school commentary was bad, right? I have nothing against Marshall, or when they would have Kibler on, all the old, like, broadcast standbys.


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[Assistant] They did a great job. But I also have to remember, and I brought this up in my Twitter thread the other day, which is what sparked us wanting to do this episode of the Untitled Magic Podcast, is it's impossible to look at something like magic.


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[Assistant] It's pretty easy to go, oh, we'll see us go, right? Counter-Strike Global Offensive. What is the goal of that game?


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[Assistant] That positioning, uh, the whole, the whole finance of, of, in between rounds, buying, buying weapons and, and resources and yadda yadda yadda. There's so much going on, and if you're a, a huge CSGO fan, like that all matters to you.


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[Assistant] As a magic person, it's really hard to separate. The viewing experience?


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[Assistant] And so there's this, uh, knowledge barrier that comes with having to watch magic at any level.


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[Assistant] That explains the, uh, oedipus of that tweet that everybody was referring to, of like, why do magic numbers not-


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[Assistant] Compete with esports numbers and it's like, I can turn on a CSGO match and be like, oh, that team has won that many maps, they have this much money, and currently they have two people to the other teams, one currently alive. This looks like a win for this team.


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[Assistant] Turns on the Mystic Invitational 10, right? There is a chance that Nancy has no clue.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Is talking to Nancy and trying to explain everything. It would be very difficult. At best.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Nancy won't learn anything. Nancy will get frustrated, and Nancy will, you know, tune into Pokimane, right? Or Ninja. Like, just, nope, sorry we're not watching this on Twitch today Albert, like I just don't have the time.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Obviously it's very intricate, there's a lot of moving parts, there's gonna be turns thrown around that you don't know. Huh, sounds like another game that we may know. But here's the difference, the commentators.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I understand it from like a very, very basic way. I will occasionally watch the World Series of Poker though.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Because you've got these colorful characters, you know, people with their big ass hats and their sunglasses, you know, trying to like, hide their tells, and...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Sometimes there's cutaway to like pre-recorded stuff to like tell you the background of a player. That stuff I think is super cool.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, and then like there's the percentage screen, right, when they show you the hand and they tell you like what the percentage is based on what's on the river.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Even if you don't know the jargon of League of Legends, you can kinda piecemeal what's being said, right? The game has slowed down because the other team has more gold, and because they have more gold, they have better items, so it's not safe to fight now, so we probably won't see them fight until a major objective is back on the map.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So I'm gonna be honest with you, Magic is a very complex game, and the Dark Souls analogy does kind of work. That it is the complexity, the difficulty cap,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Magic is at the competitive level, not the casual level, not our 1 DH decks, uh, the competitive level.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Is that sort of thing. Because, even if you play an aggro deck, there are so many moving parts to making your aggro deck face off against the midrange deck, the combo deck, the control deck, that it's just not a simple game.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think there is a world where you can display live competitive magic to the layperson.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, maybe we shrink the card space more, because let's be honest, I don't care how many lands and how many creatures are on the board all the time, right, because we have a lot of quiet moments in Magic. You can put a reminder text that is, uh, Huey Jensen is playing White Weenie, and his goal


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Let's be real, if I say to you, what's a mid-range deck? What is your answer?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But that's the problem, right? You can throw out some of the more gobblygook terms in League of Legends and get the context clues. But if I say during a game that Huey Jensen is playing a mid-range deck,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I just keep going from there. And I don't stop to explain midrange.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Cool, 70%. Got it. These cards are on the table, these are the cards in the hand, 70% likely to win. Let's get rid of the 70%. Now, if someone just said, oh yea, 70% favored because of this combination, I'd be like, well, wait, why is the other hand so bad?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's not hard to be like, alright, real quick, Huey Jensen playing white weenie. Alright?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, Ja- Jackie Lee is playing mid-range and that's her goal in this game.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think that this is where some of the problem for Magic butts heads with other esports. There is.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There is a reason why all of these people are fighting. There's, there's all this lore, I swear, it exists, I promise you. None of it. Ever.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Comes up on the broadcast. There's some-


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Some League of Legends lore, there's a character named Lucian, he's black, he's got two guns, he's really angry, he likes to kill ghosts.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Thresh, he's a ghost dude, uh, he's the warden of souls, he goes around and steals people's souls and puts them in his lantern. They hate each other. There used to be, you know, just like the fun jokes that people would make when Thresh and Lucian were in the bot lane together because one's an AD carry and one's a support.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But lore doesn't matter. And the weird thing about wizards is they have this philosophy, right? That pro play spells magic cards.