Episode: 2638
Title: HPR2638: Dirt cheap Magic
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2638/hpr2638.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 06:56:01

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This is HPR Episode 2638 entitled Gert Cheap Magic and is part of the series Tabletop Gaming.
It is hosted by Klaatu and is about 40 minutes long and carrying a clean flag.
The summary is Magic The Gathering for Cheap Cates.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by an honesthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15.
That's HPR15.
It's a better web hosting that's honest and fair at An HonestHose.com.
Hey everyone, this is Klaatu and you're listening to Hacker Public Radio.
Today I'm going to do a entry in my gaming series about a little game called Magic The Gathering.
Now I've recently, fairly recently gotten into Magic The Gathering to the point where I could actually play it the way that it was meant to be played.
In school, long, long ago, I played Magic The Gathering with friends over lunch hour and stuff.
But I never, none of us, I don't get the feeling that any of us really understood how the game was actually supposed to work.
I think we pretty much just played by the numbers and kind of ignored a lot of the text and yeah, we didn't necessarily do it very well.
But it was fun and the artwork was always cool and there was always a sense of discovery because we knew that it was a more complex game than we understood.
And we were okay with that. We were okay with it being more complex.
It's actually very similar in a way to Dungeons and Dragons and how I started with that, you sort of start out knowing that you're not doing it right but being totally okay with that fact and just kind of settling into just having fun being in that world.
And it's kind of interesting because Magic The Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons converged at some point.
So back when I knew them, they were separate companies and then Wizards of the Coast, the creator and proprietor of Magic The Gathering, purchased the company that was the creator and proprietor of Dungeons and Dragons.
And so they both exist within the same halls now and in fact they're converging even more pretty soon.
I don't know when this episode is going to air versus when the book is going to be released but very soon there will be a book out from Wizards of the Coast so that you can play Dungeons and Dragons in a city, in a setting that exists in the Magic The Gathering universe.
So they're very much starting to converge in lots of different ways and that's kind of cool to know.
And in fact if you go to DMsgild.com or drivethroughrpg.com you can download a bunch of Magic The Gathering settings adapted for Dungeons and Dragons.
It's the Plane Shift series and most of them are free.
The sort of the culmination of all that work I guess is the Guild Master's Guide to Ravnica which is to be published fairly soon.
But you can get the free ones as well from online sources.
So that's cool, it's all very interesting and probably really has nothing to do with the topic of this episode.
But I wanted to mention that these games are, they share a little bit of history, share a little bit of culture back and forth.
A lot of the people designing one are talking to the people who design the other and so on.
But really the thing that I want to observe is the fact that back when I remember Magic The Gathering when I was introduced to it and I was playing Addeth, I wasn't really playing Magic.
But when I had friends with lots of cards and I would borrow cards to sort of play against friends, it was very much sort of the feeling that you had this deck of cards.
And that was your deck and that was the game. The game was I guess in a way self-contained.
There wasn't really any kind of feeling that well you have to keep up with all the latest releases and you can only play with cards that are three years or younger.
And that sort of thing. And that to me when I started getting into Magic The Gathering in earnest recently, fairly recently, I was a little bit surprised to find that that was very much the culture of Magic The Gathering now.
A big part of the Magic The Gathering culture is Friday Night Magic and you go to your local gaming store or your hobby shop or whatever and you can play Magic against other people and you can do these what are called drafts where you pay a certain amount of money and they open up cards.
You open up a pack of cards and you sort of look through them and find the good ones that you were the good one that you want and then you pass the deck to the next person and they pick out the one that they want and goes around the table.
It's just sort of this, it's a very, there's a scene to it and I have no problem with that. You want to pay 20 bucks every Friday to go play Magic. I think that's perfectly respectable.
People pay 20 bucks every Friday to go see movies so why not play Magic instead. That's sort of thing. That's not a big deal to me.
But at the same time it's not something that I want to get involved in because I don't pay 20 dollars every Friday to see movies or to play Magic and I like it that way.
So I wanted the Magic The Gathering experience without the modern day Magic The Gathering, I don't want to say culture because the culture is fine but the overhead of modern Magic The Gathering.
And I kind of started investigating how that could be done and it was a little bit discouraging at first because I did find that it's really built into the game that if you if you want to play Magic then you have to you know when you're building your deck of cards that you will take into a game.
You kind of you have to sort of make sure that it's it's legal quote unquote for for that format meaning that there are there are different kinds of Magic The Gathering games.
So if you're playing I don't know whatever the normal I think it's modern then then that means that you can only have cards that are I don't know what it is I forget.
But let's let's say three years or young or or or recenter more recent and then if you if you're just playing I don't know something else commander then you can maybe use cards that are you know only that only go back so far and and so on.
So it's an it's an ever evolving game they continually release a new not continually but they they periodically and regularly release a new set of magic cards sort of phases of cards and they have themes and back stories and it's all very immersive and it's it's a lot of fun I'm sure if you get into it.
But what I was really interested in was more of the you know junior high high school experience of hey here's a deck of cards here's maybe a couple of different decks of cards you can build a deck to take into a game and then you can play the game and then you can rearrange the deck and play the game again and then you can rearrange the deck and play the game again and that's it and there's no need to
need to refer to any master website of a card list to make sure that these cards are fully legal for this formats and and so on.
Now there's a there's a it sounds like a money grab and I'm I'm sure that it is and and and that's fine I mean it's a gaming company that that wants to fund the continued existence of the game.
So that's all good but the byproduct of that is that as they continue to release new cards of course the more they release cards the more conflict and rules become become possible with older cards so magically gathering if you don't know it's it's a battle card game so you have cards with really really fun art on them really just gorgeous fantasy art.
That's what attracted to me the me to the game initially but each card has a chunk of text on it that does something out of out of the out of the normal function of cards so for instance a card that you might have in your hand
here's one card that you have in your hand the aerial guide is a creature card it's a Drake so it's sort of like a dragon and it has to attack power and to block power so if you attack with it it will deal two points of damage to whatever it is a to whatever player it is attacking or to whatever creature that decides to try to block its attack
and if it is in turn attacked then it can block two points of damage so that's that's that's pretty straightforward if you really if you're trying to understand magic I mean that's that's pretty basic right you've got numbers at the bottom right of each card and they control the attack and the block so here's the Sylvan Ranger one one so she attacks with one and she blocks with one here's the shorekeeper zero three.
He attacks with zero or it really it's a tribal bite it attacks with zero but it blocks with three so you know not not not completely worthless and so on however there are very often there's there's text on the card
that adds something to just that straight number versus number interaction that that you might imagine the game would then be reduced to two so here's this Drake again this aerial guide turns out that it's got two two as I said but it's also flying so whenever aerial guide attacks another target attacking the creature gains flying until end of turn so that's completely different
and possibly meaning those to you what do I care if this card is quote unquote flying what does that mean well that's the sort of thing my friends and I would have thrown out back back before the internet was there for every question that we ever could have about magic the gathering but but nowadays the internet does exist and you can do research on this stuff if you really want to and it turns out that flying in a magic card means that it's harder to hit for other creatures
to be able to specifically hit a flying creature now the the additional text whenever aerial guide attacks another target attacking creature that's confusing what is a target attacking creature does that mean something that's attacking mean no it actually means well it means any creature that is currently attacking I can point to it and it gains flying until the end of the turn so this this aerial guide has the ability to grant some other creature some other card the flying bonus
so that's the sort of thing on each card every single card has well not every single card several cards most cards have some kind of oh by the way or you know sort of accept some some kind of exception on every single card meaning that if if the company as they do continues to develop new cards I mean they've got literally something like over 15,000 magic the gathering cards in existence today
so they keep developing cards and at some point two cards are going to completely contradict each other or somehow accidentally riff off of each other such that there's some kind of you know ridiculous endless loop of who knows what so to to constrain that to to rain that in a little bit
most sort of public you don't know who you're going to play magic with today most public gatherings of magic magic the gathering they enforce some kind of limit on how just how old you can reach into your closet and dig out those magic the gathering cards and bring to the table
because they just assume that if you bring something from I don't know 1998 and you're playing magic the got you know cards from from the 90s or the early 2000s there might be a card in there that will that will have unexpected results when it encounters some other card from a more modern deck
so that's the fear that's the problem that they're trying to solve by by limiting what what you're allowed to play with and that's fine as I say that's that's the company's ability to to continue to develop this game and to sort of keep the the interest going and so on totally get it but not what that's not how I want to play
so I started looking into into ways that I might be able to create a closed loop and I was advised against it people online I asked a couple of different people and they said no you don't you can't do it it's not possible or it's not advised or you can try it but you'll probably fall out of it and end up going to Friday magic Friday night magic anyway that sort of thing
and I just decided to go ahead and try it anyway I had a couple of friends locally who who are playing magic but but are are shockingly you know reasonable about it they sort of they they they they aren't really involved in the every single week let's go get the latest deck of cards or booster packs or whatever they're called
and so that that was kind of my target I knew that I had a pretty solid outlet for for magic the gathering if I could just sort of build an environment in which static fairly static set of cards exist and that's the constraint right it's it's just kind of like well here's my big box of cards
we can all build decks out of these and then play the game and and it will be more or less a sane kind of rule set so that's what I set out to do not very surprisingly I found fairly quickly that that someone else had already thought of this that this was a thing already
and as I say there are lots of sort of agreements that people make when they sit down to the at a table with each other with a deck of magic cards is a bunch of sort of things that they declare one of those the main thing is what format quote unquote are we playing and that defines what set of cards you are allowed to bring into this game
so if you're playing a modern format the modern format or the commander format or whatever then you can only bring in cards you know within a certain certain area certain certain set of cards as I said I'm not interested in that so there's another one called popper PA UP are as in poor person
a popper deck or a popper format is one that declares you are permitted to bring in any card from anytime as long as it is marked common and I think if I'm if memory serves the sort of adjusted value the monetary value of the card by whatever whatever organization could possibly
rate the value of magic the gathering cards whatever market value I think it has to be under I don't know let's say 25 cents it might be even lower than that it might be like one cent I'm not sure and even that so even popper for me was a little bit too rigid so I just decided I was going to just I was just going to create my own format and I don't have a fancy name for it but it's basically the popper format it is basically finding that I'm not sure
on cards that are mostly common and mostly dirt cheap and the way the very scientific way that I I set out to do this was I went to my local one of the many local gaming stores here in Wellington New Zealand service games and it turns out that they that after you know a month or two months
months of magic nights, Friday night magics, sessions, they put out all the cards that
all the the serious fans of magic literally don't want.
So these are the discards of magic, the gathering.
They are their cards that are valued at so little that people would rather leave them
on the table of the of the game night than take them home with them.
That's how worthless these cards are.
And so they put these out and they sell a box of it must be, let's say, I don't know,
let's say, let's call it 300, 300 cards for $5.
So whatever that average is out to, not very good at the quick maths, $60 a card, I must
have done that backwards, $5 divided by 300, ah, there we go.
So about about one one cent, possibly two if you're rounding up per card.
That's pretty good.
That's pretty, it's pretty spot on.
Now there are a couple of things that you have to sort of think about if you go this dirt
cheap route.
And if you don't have a gaming store around that that sells discards, which I don't know
how common this is, this could be something that all gaming stores do, it might be something
that they do sort of, if you ask, it might be something that they don't do.
But you can find, you can find collections of magic cards online as well.
So you can get a big stash of magic cards or garage sales, you know, lots of times people,
you know, the kid goes off to college and the parents find the big box of, of tradable
playing cards and they just think, you know what, I'm sure they don't want that anymore,
we'll just sell it for a couple of bucks at the garage sale.
So if you keep your eyes out, you can find them.
And if nothing else, you can get them online.
And there are marketplaces for magic, the gathering cards, so you can just, you can go
and pay your one or two or 13 cents per card and end up with, with quite a good, shall
we say, collection of cards for very little amount of money, especially if you're comparing
it to what it would cost to actually get involved in the magic of the gathering scene, which
we don't want to do.
Well, which I don't want to do, I don't know what you want to do, I don't want to do that.
So the problem here, well, there are two problems.
One is that usually this doesn't include land cards.
Land cards in magic, and this purpose of this episode isn't to explain magic to you,
so I'm not, I'm going to gloss over a lot of things.
Land cards in magic are basically, it's your fuel.
It is the thing that gives you the magical power to cast different cards.
So as part of the deck that you bring to a game, you need some number of land cards.
And we'll talk about how many we're talking, what we're looking at in a moment.
But you need some number of land cards, and typically land cards are not cards that people
would ever discard, because they purchase them in land decks and just big decks of land
cards, basic land cards, and that's something that they're going to use no matter what.
That's so, in other words, basic land cards are pretty timeless, you'll never see a basic
land card that you cannot bring to a game ever, like you can bring a basic land from 20
years ago, and it's fine.
I don't know if it's actually 20 years, but anyway, so when you buy these super cheap
poor man decks, you will not generally find basic land cards.
Now what you might be able to find are, I don't know what they're called, fancy lands,
advanced lands, whatever, land cards that are not basic land cards.
Now that means that they are over complex, they have, they're called land cards, but then
they have a bunch of text in the box, and a lot of times it will be confusing to you,
and it will probably have a lot of stuff that's maybe over-specific, maybe to cards that
you don't necessarily have, because you didn't get the pack that that land, that fancy land
would apply to, or something like that, or whatever.
Maybe it's just more than you want to think about as a beginning player, and certainly
no one would probably populate a deck with zero basic land cards.
So what you can do, if you find those sort of non-basic land cards, you can just grab
a bunch of those, and then declare in your game, ignore the text, these are all basic lands,
let's not worry about it.
Now there's another problem there, and that is that there are five different kinds of
lands, basic lands.
And so if you are piece-mealing a deck for as cheap as you possibly can from different
sources, you may not gather all the right sort of number, the right color of lands.
So what I do in my games, and this is super novice, and probably disqualifies me from lots
of people as sort of a serious magic, the gathering player, because I'm not.
But I just, I essentially declare that all land is equal.
So if there's a card that requires a green land and a blue land, then in the games that
I play with my friends today, and probably historically, I don't really remember.
But we would just, whatever land, it doesn't matter.
There's no color of land, you just put a land down, and if you're using it, you turn
it sideways a little bit so that it looks, so that people know that you're using it,
and it's just, it's whatever.
So there's basically all land is colorless, or all land is all colors, however you want
to look at it.
So we kind of, we bottom that out, and that's maybe not, you know, that removes a mechanic
from the game that does simplify the game and sort of makes it not exactly correct.
But that's fine, or it can be fine if you're fine with it.
The other trick that I've seen done, and I've done before, is to just grab cards that
you are not using as normal cards in your deck, and flip them over.
Now the problem with that is that when you're, when you're drawing from a deck and the next
card is face up, you know that, okay, that's a land card.
So in other words, you're using, your land becomes any given magic card, you know, turned
over.
So it's the back of the card.
But again, the problem there is that, you know, then you've got, you can see the thing,
you know that your next card is land.
So I kind of stopped doing that.
The third and final trick that I thought of to do this is to use a deck, and we'll get
into this in a moment, because this is actually the point of this episode.
But well, it's one of the points of the episode, but yeah.
So you build a deck, let's say, and it has blue cards and green cards in it.
It's a blue green deck, whatever, maybe.
So then you can just take a couple of, let's say, black cards or red cards, you know,
anything that is not declared as a part of your deck, insert those, and then those all
become land cards.
So you know that, well, I'm playing a blue and a green deck, and I've said I'm playing
a blue and green deck, that's what I've assembled here.
I've just drawn a red card, oh, that's right, because that's a land card.
And then again, so that it's not confusing, I just put those cards down, back side up,
because otherwise what we've found, me and my friends, is that we'll play, you know,
if you've got a bunch of cards on the table, and then you've got a bunch of cards down
at the bottom that, even though they're all red and clearly not meant to be, to be fighters
in your battle, they're clearly standing for land cards, it's just, it's information overload.
So we just put them face, face down, and those are the generic lands, works fine.
And that's the cheap, the cheapest possible option for playing Magic the Gathering.
That is the way to get into it.
By a bunch of dirt cheap cards, find something to stand in for land cards, whether it's just
other dirt cheap lands, other dirt cheap cards, or just an amalgamation of various non-basic land
cards, doesn't matter. And you'll have a big ol' set of cards that you and your friends can
then delve into to build decks in a, basically a closed loop system, and play Magic, because all
the rules work. I mean, there may be exceptions. There might be one or two things where you realize
this is such a specific card to what this particular release cycle had in mind that it really
doesn't make any sense. And you might have to throw that out. Big deal. What's that? 13 cents at the
most that you've just tossed aside, that doesn't matter. So generally speaking, you will find that
your game is pretty solid. If there is text on any given card that you do not understand,
you can later look it up online. In the game, ignore it. Play it by the numbers. It doesn't matter
that much. That's the best way I have found to learn and to kind of muddle your way through the
game without getting completely overwhelmed. Because it is, it's very, it is absurdly, some might
even say, obscenely overwhelming at times. They have symbols that they use to represent specific
things. They've got different colors, and you might not have all those different colors.
They've got lingo that they throw around that you may not know what that means. And then if you
look at, if you watch a video online of how, here's one, look, flash flying. What is, what are
either of those things mean? I don't know what those mean. And you don't have to. You just look over
those things. But yeah, you can look at, you can look at, at videos online trying to tell you how
to play this game. And it goes on for, you know, 45 minutes. And by the end of it, you've forgotten
what they said in the opening. So it's really just, it's kind of muddling your way through
at a casual pace, kind of ignoring what you don't understand. And again, that's kind of, that's,
that's how we used to play anyway, I feel, you know, in a closed loop set because we were kids
and couldn't afford even, I mean, I don't even know if it was a thing back then, but even if it
was a thing to keep getting updated sets, we wouldn't have been able to do that. So it didn't
matter to us. And anything we didn't understand, we just ignored, looked at the numbers, and that
worked for us. Okay, so the problem, the problem aside from, well, I don't understand the lingo,
and aside from, well, I don't have any cards. Well, you've solved the card problem. The lingo,
I've just told you how to defeat, just ignore it if you don't understand it, look it up later,
and, and don't worry about it. The, the final problem is, well, you keep saying, all you have to do
is get cards and build a deck. What does it mean to build a deck? Glad you asked, because that's
actually what this episode is about. I did a little bit of research into building decks, and there,
you know, there are a lot of opinions online, believe it or not, on the internet, and you can find
lots of different sort of methods and lots of different advice on how to build a deck, and then
quickly you start getting into really scary territory where people are talking about, well,
what kind of deck do you want to build? Do you want to build an aggro deck, or a pacing deck,
or a tempo deck, or, you know, or a control deck? Mine blowing and jargony and not very helpful,
so the, the best way that I have discovered, and this is not mine, this is by someone online who,
who posted a really great blog post on the subject over on RPGGeek.com slash thread 532
036, how dash build, dash deck, dash magic, dash gathering, it's by Eric Jones, J-O-M-E,
and it's a brilliant little article that kind of goes through the math of what you really need
to do in order to come out with a sensible deck. I've tried this several times, and it has worked,
I will say almost every time, and I say almost every time because there was a problem with one of
the decks, but I'm not convinced it was a problem with the deck, and it might have been a problem with
the way that the person shuffled the deck. I.e. didn't shuffle it enough, so the theory is this,
that, well, a standard magic deck when you take it into a game is 60 cards, so the way that needs
to break down according to this guy's theory is that you need 24 creature cards, and you'll know a
creature card because they are very clearly labeled in the middle of the card as a creature.
So you need 24 creature cards, and then 12 other cards, meaning, for instance,
sorcery cards, or instant cards, or enchantment cards, those sorts of things, and that breaks down
further. So every card that you put down on the battlefield, on the table, in magic, costs
some amount of land. Remember, I told you that land in magic, the gathering controls,
gives you the source of magic, that it's your resource, it's your fuel. So every card costs
some amount of land, and in order to build a deck that is sensible, you need to somehow strike
a mysterious balance between cards that are very powerful, but cost a lot of land to play,
versus cards that aren't so powerful, but are cheap. How do you do that? Well, Eric
Joan has broken it down for you. He says that a sensible magic, the gathering deck should
should include, and I'll put this in the show notes, two creatures, and then two others. So,
again, instant cards, or sorcery cards, or enchantment cards, two creatures, and then two others
that cost one land, four creatures and two others that cost two land, five creatures, and three
others that cost three lands, six creatures and two others that cost four lands, four creatures,
and two others that cost five, three creatures, and one other that cost six. That is, if you count
it all up, that's 24 creatures of varying costs, and 12 others at varying costs, and then the rest,
so that's what 24 plus 12 is, 36, so the rest of your deck, 24 more cards, need to be
land cards, and that's really tricky too, because in magic, if you're drawing cards, and you're not
coming across land cards, you literally can't do anything, there's nothing that you can play
without land, so you need to have a pretty good source of fuel, you need the resources of land,
on a pretty steady basis, and that's, it's a trick, it's tricky to get there, especially if you've
never, if this is your first time building a magic, the gathering deck, you have no idea how much
land to put in, how much, I don't know, 50 land and 10 creatures, 40, 20, I don't know,
well it turns out it's 24 land, 24 creatures, 12 others, and that will give you a deck that is
sane, I mean it's at least, and remember you do have to shuffle these things to make sure that
that land gets evenly distributed through your deck ideally, but in the end you'll have a deck with
with things that, that'll be in your hand, that you can play pretty much from the beginning,
because you've got, you've got one or two land on the table maybe, so yeah, you can, you can cast
this or, or play that, and then as you accumulate more land, you'll be able to, to play the, the more
powerful cards and, and so on, he further advises that your decks be two color, and the, the
significance of, of the color of the card is, is, is sort of a thematic, but, but in terms of,
of what kind of power the card has, so if it's, if it's a green deck for instance, I think it's
supposed to be about big creatures and kind of life fulfillment, you know, sort of life giving,
sort of positive energy as it were, if it's black, it's necromantic, and it usually means that
you as the player might take damage in order to further your goal of damaging others, and so on.
So the, the fact that, that there are different colors does, it does control in, in some ways,
what kind of, um, game you will experience, because yeah, I mean, if you're someone who,
who loves to trample over your opponent, then maybe a green, and I don't know, blue deck might
be what you want to play, but if you're someone who, who is a little bit more, uh, I don't know,
Rogish, uh, maybe a, a black and green deck might be interesting for you, whatever, you know,
you, you can kind of style the, your, your powers, really, or your, the weaponry that you have,
according to the, the color, the colors within your deck. Eric Jones article recommends, uh,
two color deck, assuming that, especially for, for new users, as, as I'm assuming,
that, that more than that would be a little bit overwhelming, because then there's ratios that
you have to figure out. Well, because the three color decks are how many of each color of land should
I have that sort of thing? Now again, in, in most of the games that I'm playing, I have collapsed
color into not being a factor in terms of the land. So if you're playing a black and a green deck,
all your land is both black and green, so it doesn't even matter anymore, and, and that, that
simplifies that ratio, and I recommend that. I do. I, I recommend that if you're starting out
with magic, because it's just in terms of, of self designing a deck that is, that is both
satisfying to you as a player and just functional within the game, um, that can be complex, and when
you, what, anything you can do to simplify, you having to figure that out early on is probably a
better idea. Now, I should, I should mention probably that another option to all of my convoluted,
back flipping, is to go to your game store and purchase a pre-assembled deck and live your life
with that deck. That is your deck. You can play it against your friends, and everything's good.
You, you're done. It's all the ratios are figured out for you. It's, it's a complete deck.
It is a game, and as long as you have other friends with a deck within that series,
then you're safe. You, you can play against each other from here until eternity, and the game will
not break. It is a, it, it will be a self-sustaining closed loop game. Easy, done. I just found it more fun
to dig through the trash, assemble a deck from, from the discarded pile, and, and try to figure out
how to make a fun game out of that. Turns out, it's not that hard. Magic, the gathering, it's a really
fun game. If you like rules, if you like crunch, you love this thing. Again, I spent five bucks on it,
and I've gotten a lot of play out of it. So, the poor way is a fun way, but if you can spend like
20 or 30 or 40 bucks, you can just go and buy a, a pre-made deck too. It's, it's kind of the,
the simpler way. Either, either, either Avenue, whichever one you take, it's a lot of fun. I'm
recommending it, and, and I'll, I'll put the post to the deck building tips in, in here, because
whether or not you go my way or the, the official way, understanding the, the math behind a proper
magic, the gathering deck is, is pretty interesting. It's actually a really good article that, that
sort of explains itself quite well, and you can argue against the points, and I'm sure a lot of
people do, but I found it to be a really good article, so I'll, I'll post that in the show notes.
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