Alphez's first Cube! Suggestions are very welcome :)

Red is also one of the most important colours for the Aristocrats deck. But that archetype is also quite aggressive, I'd say.
Yes, it probably needs some diversification. That's why I would like Gruul to better support ramp, because that way red would hopefully acquire some depth. Dragonlord Atarka is coming in, for sure. I also want to include some monored fatty, but I have yet to decide which one. I could also swap Chandra, Pyromaster for some monored PW that is more control-oriented, but I really like Chandra's abilities. Plus, she's a hottie (pun intended).

I would also like to have more ways to fill the graveyard in red, but there are not many options that I like. Faithless Looting is not for me, because I think it's too narrow (no card parity...).
 
You could go for tormenting voice or Magus of the Wheel, but I'd strongly recommend rethinking good ol' looting. It's a graveyard filler you can activate from the 'yard! Another card I really love in red, that fits both as an aggressive reach tool and a control piece is molten vortex. Sweet card!

Interesting aside, but I can't help but notice that your Stromkirk Nobles have a ton of humans to walk past at low CMCs :p . Don't know if this is an issue.

EDIT: Tormenting Voices have told me you already thought of this card. How about a red looter like Daretti, Scrap Savant?
 
You could go for tormenting voice or Magus of the Wheel, but I'd strongly recommend rethinking good ol' looting. It's a graveyard filler you can activate from the 'yard! Another card I really love in red, that fits both as an aggressive reach tool and a control piece is molten vortex. Sweet card!

Interesting aside, but I can't help but notice that your Stromkirk Nobles have a ton of humans to walk past at low CMCs :p . Don't know if this is an issue.

EDIT: Tormenting Voices have told me you already thought of this card. How about a red looter like Daretti, Scrap Savant?


Voice and Magus are already in. I love Voice! Magus didn't see any play yet, though.
I don't know, I guess I could try Looting... It's quite a clear signal in a a certain direction. I'll see.

Yeah, you are totally right about the Nobles. They proved to be too much to handle. Those and Goblin Guide are definitely going to be downgraded to something more manageable.

Daretti is sweet, but I don't support any artifact-based archetype. I don't want to trick my players into believing that such a deck exists!
 
I think you'll find that it supports itself! You have Triskelion Battleball, and Duplicant. These are perfect bombs, which can be traded in for things like you Perilous Myr, epochrasite, or the like. It actually takes a very low density of artifacts to make Daretti just work incidentally. And it certainly gives Red something more diverse to do!

Another cool incidental artifacty dude is Feldon of the third Path. Plays well into GY themes also!

But anyway, if you don't go for the Daretti, what you think of the new Chandra? I know it's six mana.....

I haven't looked thoroughly at your list, but a really really sweet Red discard outlet is
 
New draft, new post!
I am in the process of making a major update, both to include some Oath cards and to try and address the issues we discussed recently. I will talk about the changes in greater detail once I update the CubeTutor list (I am waiting for them to include Oath in their database). I plan to change ~75 cards out of 405. At the moment I already changed ~45 in the physical Cube, but the others are still being shipped. I wouldn't have wanted to draft with the Cube being in the middle of this process, but my playgroup asked, so... :D

We had:
UBw Reanimator (me; slow and controllish deck, 2-0-1, tied for the win)
4c Pod (no blue, 2-0-1, tied for the win)
Mono-black Pod/Aristocrats
Esper control (some Prowess dorks, counterspells and other top quality spells)
RGb Ramp (with some graveyard shenanigans)
BG Rock (a lot of life gain/life pay going on here)
Grixis control (generic good stuff, 0-2 drop)
Bant midrange (generic good stuff, 0-2 drop)

Notable things:
- why the hell do people drop in a 3-rounds, casual event?
- for the first time the winner is not a red-based aggro deck, yay!
- even though I couldn't yet implement all the changes, we already saw some effects (green-based ramp was there, for example).
- good stuff decks exist, but they seem to collect worse results than the ones that try to follow a specific strategy. I love this.
- I am starting to get annoyed by Commander cards. I love most of the ones I run, but they are so powerful that I almost feel guilty when I drop them. I would like to slightly lower the Cube's power level and if I want to do so the Commander cards might need to go. But they are so sweeeet...
- a whopping 7 players ran some amount of black cards, and we even had a mono-black deck. I will monitor how the colour fares in the next drafts, because I am afraid that black has now become the strongest colour.
- some drafters openly said that the changes improved the Cube. Good :D

As for my deck, I decided to force Reanimator after picking a Life//Death P1P1 in a pack that also included some blue manipulation that I expected to wheel. This is not really my favourite deck type, but I wanted to see if the archetype was good enough and I wanted to show to my playgroup that cards like Strategic Planning, Deal Broker and Scourge of Nel Toth are worth playing (they didn't see the limelight yet). The problem was, I knew that the density of giant fatties was very low (4 of the ones I plan on running are currently being shipped) and I was afraid that I wouldn't get enough playable crits. The deck still came together, somehow, but all the fatties I could get were Scourge of Nel Toth, Razormane Masticore and Duplicant. I didn't face very aggressive decks, though, and so I could do my thing (thanks to some misplays here and there from my opponents, actually). My MVPs were Lingering Souls and Gifts Ungiven (real men look for 4 cards), but all the fatties pulled their weight and Wall of Omens, Wretched Confluence, Unburial Rites, Nekrataal, Looter il-Kor and Blackmail all proved to be very solid. Funnily, I didn't cast my P1P1 once. I was always too low on life.

All in all, I think I am moving in the right direction. This draft suggested some additional refining is advisable, but I think it's quite an enjoyable Cube.
 
OGW update done! And what a big one it was!
I seized the opportunity to make some of the changes I talked about in the previous posts, namely I:

- reduced the amount of cards with double-specific mana cost
- repealed support for the Flash midrange/control deck and for the +1/+1 counters deck. They felt quite underpowered compared to the rest and made Green unappealing to my group
- beefed up the Ramp and Reanimator archetypes. The cards for the Ramp deck are also present in the Gruul and Simic sections, in order to signal what those colour pairs are about (they were the two ones that were struggling the most to find a clear identity). Reanimator wasn't really there before, but now it's a perfectly draftable deck (albeit not an overly fast one). I wanted to have a truly graveyard-based deck, as well as create competing demand for the fatties that ramp decks also want
- included more hate cards for the graveyard, as well as artifact/enchantment removal. The graveyard is a very important resource in my Cube, I wanted additional checks for it. Artifact/enchantment removal was too scarce; hopefully now it's enough. These measures were also needed to nerf Pod, which was very very solid and reliable. I also cut Murderous Redcap because it helped Pod way more than it needed
- nerfed Red a bit and made it slower. Now it's not just the colour of beatdown, but it can be paired with Green to build a good Ramp deck
- made Green stronger, with efficient fatties, ramp spells and decent blockers for the early turns.
- tried to make White a tad more aggressive. So far, it was mostly played as support colour for midrange and control decks
- increased the Cube's size from 405 to 440. I was already annoyed by the fact that some archetypes were forming quite often. I want them to be viable, but I don't want anything to be a given. If you already know even before drafting that there will be a Pod deck, a Sligh deck and an Esper control deck, things will get stale pretty soon.

While doing this, I was trying to lower the Cube's power level. Not by much, but I wanted to get rid of some bomby cards that just felt too good. Mystic Confluence and Sylvan Library are good examples of what I am talking about.
Here is the CubeTutor list! As usual, opinions and suggestions are more than welcome.
 
After reading some other posts in this very forum section, I was wondering: what is the more effective way to ensure variety in my decks? Is it to increase the Cube's size, or should I rather reduce the amount of multiples I run? Like, for example I have 3x Birthing Pod and 3x Bloodsoaked Champion in my list. Maybe if I trim a copy of each, as well as some other cards here and there, it would be better than going up to 440 cards like I just did.
Dunno. Any thoughts on this?
 
After reading some other posts in this very forum section, I was wondering: what is the more effective way to ensure variety in my decks? Is it to increase the Cube's size, or should I rather reduce the amount of multiples I run? Like, for example I have 3x Birthing Pod and 3x Bloodsoaked Champion in my list. Maybe if I trim a copy of each, as well as some other cards here and there, it would be better than going up to 440 cards like I just did.
Dunno. Any thoughts on this?

The way I think of it is: Higher card diversity is variety you can control, a bigger cube is variety you (generally) can't control. I've been pondering myself dropping down a little in size, further than I have. I started out at ~430, and am at 415 now. I haven't missed the 15 cards, and my next step would probably be 405. The hardest part, of course, is accepting that there is only a certain density of explicit archetypes one can support at a given time. The real trick, I coming more and more to believe, is how to layer the pieces of the cube. Done properly and I think things start organically popping out of the woodwork. How to do that? Well, it wouldn't be a trick if it was easy....
 
The way I think of it is: Higher card diversity is variety you can control, a bigger cube is variety you (generally) can't control. I've been pondering myself dropping down a little in size, further than I have. I started out at ~430, and am at 415 now. I haven't missed the 15 cards, and my next step would probably be 405. The hardest part, of course, is accepting that there is only a certain density of explicit archetypes one can support at a given time. The real trick, I coming more and more to believe, is how to layer the pieces of the cube. Done properly and I think things start organically popping out of the woodwork. How to do that? Well, it wouldn't be a trick if it was easy....


Yeah, I think I agree with you on this.
Oh well, I didn't update my physical Cube yet, so I might as well tinker a bit more with my excel file before I do so.
I will go back to 405, or 415 maximum. If I go to 415, I will do so by including a "cycle" of shards/edges cards. One per colour combination. I've been thinking about this for a while but never pulled the trigger because I don't really like the idea of those cards wheeling infinite times. But on the other hand, it's not like we lack playables in a Cube environment. Having some cards which are easily dismissed unless you happen to be in the right colour combination might actually make things easier for my less-experienced players. And if people don't like their inclusion, I will just take them out.
 
So, I was thinking about sigh's suggestion of including Daretti, Scrap Savant. At first I didn't like it, but then I slowly started to change my mind. I think that adding it, together with a compact package of artifacts and artifacts-related cards, would do a number of good things to my cube. Namely:

- Reanimator is currently an Esper archetype (mostly by virtue of Unburial Rites almost forcing a white splash). Including a package of Daretti and Goblin Welder (together with Feldon of the Third Path, which I already run) would probably open up a Grixis reanimator archetype
- if I keep my artifacts on the controllish side of things, I can easily avoid the issue of having both prowess and artifacts as aggro themes in Jeskai colours (this might not seem like a problem, but that's the main reason that originally made me stay away from the artifact theme)
- having an increased number of artifacts would alter the power level of some colours in a desirable way. Namely, black would get slightly worse (I run stuff like Terror, Shriekmaw, Nekrataal and Flesh Carver) while green's disenchant effects would get a lot better
- having people maindeck artifact removal would make Birthing Pod more manageable
- I could finally run sweet cards like Trinket Mage, Academy Ruins and Thirst for Knowledge without fear of giving false clues to my playgroup

I don't quite like the idea of adding another theme, but after all I just cut Flash control and the +1/+1 counters archetype. If I add this, I will probably get rid of most human-matters cards (nobody ever builds that deck anyway. I think that sticking to a hatebears theme would actually make white more desirable as an aggro colour, while keeping other strategies in check). I would also try to focus the graveyard-centric decks towards a limited number of strategies.
 
Daretti is the real reason to want to have some artifact overlap in your cube. The looting ability is just so strong. When origins came out everyone jumped on the mini artifact theme bandwagon, myself included and I threw in sharding sphinx, moltensteel dragon and thopter spy network. I think this was a bit of a trap really and I'm pulling right back on artifacts and keeping it mainly in red. I think sharding sphinx is probably playable by itself anyway, though I find that it makes *blue* thopters irritating. Of course you have Pia and Kiran Naalar and Whirler Rogue as more sacrificial fodder.

Trinket mage is super sweet, I love that little guy. I find Academy Ruins is a bit un-interactive by nature of being a land and can lead to repetitive game states, but YMMV. Thirst for Knowledge is fine and is quite a good (subtle) indicator card if you want artifacts to be a bit of a thing in blue, but is probably interchangable.

If you're thinking of grixis reanimator, are you thinking of artifact dudes to reanimate. Depends on where you want reanimator to be but I think the following are 'safe' in my environment:



There's the danger of turn 1 welder, turn 2 faithless looting, cabal therapy or thought scour plus say chromatic star for turn 2 reainimation which isn't where I want to be.

I'm going with triskelion (pitches to force) and duplicant in mine, though I wonder if there's something suitable at 7CC+ that doesn't ruin games. I like the idea of artifact faties as it gives all colours access to them and so you can cut back accordingly.

The narrowing it down to red also gives me more of an excuse to finally pull the trigger on pyromancer's goggles.
 
Re your update

There's lots here that I like. Soul of Shadalar, Dead/Gone and Seed Guardian are particularly cool adds. I like what you've done with your low CC red creatures. Helm of Possession is one of my favourite cards.

Is there a reason you're using multiples of rampant growth instead of some diversity such as farseek or the one that cycles that I can't remember the name of right now!

If you wanted the simic section to look even more about ramp then you could try Kiora, The Crashing Wave. I'm not sure your gruul guild cards scream ramp to me either, but that colour combination has always been difficult.

That Primal Command -> Verdant Confluence is super dodgy. Verdant Confluence is proper lower power and even worse after repealing the +1/+1 counters theme.

I think Fury Charm is just one good mode away from being playable unfortunately.

Twin Bolt is pretty unexciting. Could you at least go for Fire/Ice?

I'd be really interested to hear how Jotun Grunt works out for you.
 
Thanks for your posts, Alfonzo. I really appreciate the interest and help you (and other users, of course) are showing me!

At the moment, my "physical" Cube is lagging a bit behind the CubeTutor list. I am still waiting for some 30 cards that I bought online, but the seller wouldn't ship before OGW's release. They should arrive soon. Moreover, I have yet to think about the Daretti & friends patch. Therefore some things are still untested. I can tell you the reasoning behind my choices, but in most cases I have no actual facts to back them.

I think my "artifact package" will be more or less the one you described. It will be mostly UR, with the occasional W and B cards. The only other artifact fatty I plan on running is Myr Battlesphere.
Yes, the Grixis reanimator deck would be entirely artifact-based. Goblin Welder could be risky, as you say; maybe Trash for Treasure would be a safer option. It's not like UR has no ways to give it flashback if needed, and there are regular reanimation spells in black for additional consistency.

I am not a fan of the Goggles, but I might try out Wand of the Elements as I suggested you. I also run Life from the Loam, after all. I can see that happening.

We'll see how the new additions behave! I particularly like Dead/Gone, I was in search of a cheap red removal that couldn't be pointed at a player and this is the best I could come up with.

Re: Rampant Growth. I am not a fan of Farseek: the fact that you cannot search for a basic forest bugs me more than it should, lol. Never tested Edge of Autumn. I ended up sticking with Rampant Growth because it's the most basic effect, and that's what I was looking for. No frills needed. But this could change, I don't have overly strong feelings about my ramp spells :D

Kiora is cool. It's not in there because I am not a huge fan of what planeswalkers do to a game of Magic. I have this unwritten rule of only having 2 planeswalkers per colour, including multicoloured ones and flip-walkers. This could change in future, but at the moment I am happy to keep walkers to a minimum.

The thing with my Gruul section is that there are some RG cards that I love and that play very well with some archetypes I support. The problem is, those archetypes are not typically Gruul-based :( This could be confusing players, I don't know. The only real incentive for a Gruul ramp deck is Dragonlord Atarka, but in our last draft it was enough to make it happen. We'll see how things go in the future :)
Interestingly, Atarka's Command - which is in the Cube for entirely different reasons - also has an Explore mode which can be handy in a ramp deck. I always saw that mode as flavour text, but the guy who played ramp in our last draft actually used it!

Yeah, I am also unsure about Verdant Confluence. I just want to have a non-creature, non creature-related spell with a relatively high mana cost in green, since it is the colour of big mana. I was disappointed with the green Command and I couldn't come up with better alternatives. I considered Rude Awakening, but I don't like insta-kill cards. I'll gladly accept suggestions for this slot.

Fury Charm is very meh. I wanted some maindeckable artifact removal and this was one of the best candidates I could find. After the Daretti patch, artifact removals will hopefully be more valuable and the Charm will become a Smash to Smithereens or something like that.

I'll let you know about Jotun Grunt. It's one of the cards that I hope will help white become a better aggro/hatebears colour.
 
No worries, we're all here because we love the cube!

I don't think you need to replace dead/gone because it's cool, but there's also flame slash as cheap efficient removal.

Part of the reason I mentioned things other than rampant growth was because you had some posts higher up about having some more diversity, and this seems like an easy place for it. No love for explore, it's not as guaranteed but I love how it's more useful later in the game as well. Search for tomorrow?

I'm with you on the insta-kill cards and planeswalkers. Re a big green spell, how do you feel about see the unwritten or primeval bounty? Both are a bit archetype dependent, but I like them.

Don't worry about the anti-artifact package too much, there aren't many good solutions for it unfortunately. Sometimes you just have to have things that will do the job. There should be something better in red, pretty disappointing there isn't.
 
Nissa's Revelation is pretty cool. I didn't know that card.

I like Primeval Bounty, too! I think I like this one better that the other two because it guarantees rewards that you can plan for. The other two don't really give you any certainty... Only finding a mana dork is not a likely scenario, but the possibility of that happening is enough to turn me off.

While I was at it, I did a quick Gatherer search and found a couple interesting options:


I like that it stabilises the board. I don't like that, if your opponent has no creatures on board, it does nothing.


This feels very epic, but... that's it, I think. You've been ramping the whole game and your reward is... more ramp? Nah, thanks.

I think I might go with Primeval Bounty. It's the only card of the bunch that rewards tight play. I mean, when you're spending 6+ mana you deserve some certainties!
 
Big green spell slots for Ramp I personally think are best filled with either scaling cards or powerful search tools. Two of my absolute favorites:


They both require investment into the deck, scale with cube power levels, and reward good deck building. I also do like primal command, but it's your cube, your rules. Participation points to chord of calling and green sun's zenith.

Also, Ezuri's Predation is a gross violation of the color pie (MaRo agrees), and so I can't recommend it in good faith. The Card would probably have to be Ug or RUg to fit in the color pie. Praetor's counsel is cool but hella slow. I've used it as combo insurance in my former EDH deck, but that was while I have infinite turns/free spells.....

EDIT: Primeval bounty was also part of that combo. It requires a turn of investment generally, but the abilities are A+ at stabilizing and and building steady advantage. If you don't immediately die because of the time investment.
 
Sooo, I finally managed to do this. Here you can see the changes on CubeTutor.
I basically did what was discussed in the previous days with Alfonzo and sigh, namely:

- went back down to 405 cards (from 440), as per sigh's suggestion. With the same target in mind (greater variety in my environment) I cut Lore Seeker. Let people see 15 less cards, variety will come. Also, some players were still having issues figuring out how the whole thing worked. Lol
- introduced a light artifact/Daretti theme, mostly focused in Grixis. I also introduced Trinket Mage, together with a number of trinkets for him to play with
- cut the Champions, which were never considered by my drafters. The problem is, this also caused white-based aggro to be almost nonexistent. I switched to generic good weenies, hoping that people will now get the hint
- since I have no tribal synergies left but I do have a light artifacts theme, Mutavault became Mishra's Factory. Hmmm, that vintage feel...
- included Primeval Bounty as the green expensive non-creature spell of choice. For the reasons I stated in my previous posts, I think it's the best option
- cut the 3rd Pod, which got substituted by Green Sun's Zenith. The thing is, I want a Pod deck to be viable. I just don't want it to be there all the time. Now people are more likely to pack artifact removal and there's one less Pod around, so I hope things will go as expected. I introduced GSZ in order to guarantee enough consistency, but also to push the Pod deck towards being mostly green (instead of being a collection of good creatures with ETB/death triggers in all the colours of the rainbow)
- inserted 10 tricolour (or pseudo-tricolour) cards, one per shard/wedge. Not sure if it's a good idea or not, also because power level is all over the place. We'll see how it goes

Aaand that's it. The things I want to see now are mostly 1) how the tricolour cards are received and if they get picked or not, and 2) if aggro is still viable or if it was nerfed too much.
 

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
Did two drafts, of wildly varying power level, I think? The first draft was really weird, I kept getting cut on colors, so I kept changing. In the end a decent-ish Temur deck came out. I guess? The second draft was more focused (with Grafted Wargear wheeling, really?) and looks pretty vicious.

Onderzeeboot's BW draft of Grop's Cube 2.0 on 03/02/2016 from CubeTutor.com











That's going to pile up damage fast, and with five LD spells/lands and a super low curve, I am going to take advantage of every misstep my opponent makes. Yikes!
 
I didn't get to draft at all lately, so I couldn't try out my new entries.
I've been goldfishing my list on CubeTutor, though, and I came to the conclusion that those tricolour cards need to go.
The thing is, I really like some of them, but they constrain players in ways that I hate. So, out they go in favour of additional monocoloured cards. Some of them are new, but others are the very same cards I cut in order to make room for the tricolour ones (details here).
 
I didn't get to draft at all lately, so I couldn't try out my new entries.
I've been goldfishing my list on CubeTutor, though, and I came to the conclusion that those tricolour cards need to go.
The thing is, I really like some of them, but they constrain players in ways that I hate. So, out they go in favour of additional monocoloured cards. Some of them are new, but others are the very same cards I cut in order to make room for the tricolour ones (details here).
I like all 11 of those changes :D! I've found ~40 multicolor cards has worked well for me @405, with 5 or so three color anchors. That seems to be almost exactly what you have now so yay. I'm sad about a couple of them going, namely Sidisi cuz she's awesome imo, but I think it's a worthwhile endeavor to trim down.

While I was poking around, I tossed a draft together. Got Daretti! :) Probably one or two smaller artifacts short of being truly happy, but it's decent as is. I've noticed that your list has virtually no mana artifacts, which makes the welder/daretti deck slightly harder to pull off. Even just Mind Stone and Prismatic Lens, maybe the Sphere of the Suns (sac when it's out of counters!) would really help the theme take off. Is there a reason, maybe somewhere above, that you have no rocks? Anyway, here's the deck:

This is Sigh - Daretti Control :) from CubeTutor.com










 
Yeah, I am not really a fan of artifact mana. I'm going to avoid it, unless it's absolutely necessary.

I hope that the various incidental artifacts in my list will do the trick. I am talking about the various Mishra's Factory, Pia and Kiran Nalaar, Whirler Rogue, Blade Splicer and so on. I need to draft a bit and see if this works or not.

If I were to add mana rocks, I would like to try out Phyrexian Totem. It's slow and limited enough for me to like it, and it doubles as a cool control finisher.
 
Yeah, I am not really a fan of artifact mana. I'm going to avoid it, unless it's absolutely necessary.

I hope that the various incidental artifacts in my list will do the trick. I am talking about the various Mishra's Factory, Pia and Kiran Nalaar, Whirler Rogue, Blade Splicer and so on. I need to draft a bit and see if this works or not.

If I were to add mana rocks, I would like to try out Phyrexian Totem. It's slow and limited enough for me to like it, and it doubles as a cool control finisher.
It can probably work out fine that way, just know that a lot of the incidental cards, literally every one of them you mentioned at least, are very good and probably highly picked. This can make the "low end" of the artifact-themed list hard to acquire. Someone's gunna have to basically mop those cards up to support the Daretti/Welder, and they have to know that they need them to get the incidental artifacts.

I like basically all of the totems, maaybe excepting the Blue one.
 
Yeah, you guys are probably right. Hm. I didn't really want to have artifacts become a big part of my Cube, though.

I think I will try and fit some colour-related artifacts. Stuff like the aforementioned Phyrexian Totem, or other cards like Crystal Shard or Spire Golem. I have fond memories of the Golem from old Standard, but maybe it's not that strong outside of a monoblue deck. And I honestly suspect that, even back in the days, it was only good because it was in the same block as Vedalken Shackles, lol.
If I end up packing mana rocks, it will probably be stuff like Seer's Lantern. Not too powerful and with some extra utility.

Do we have any artifact that could support a reanimator theme? Are there any cool artifact hatebears?
Finding artifacts that can slot into my other themes would be a good way to increase the numbers without me feeling bad about it :D

I'll look into this over the weekend.
 
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