My dear Alfonzo, thank you for the feedback!
Your changes all look decent.
Thank you
On the searing meditation life-gain deck. You've got two approaches (and can do both) - include tutors that can search for meditation, or have other lifegain matters build around cards so you have redundancy for the deck.
I happen to like tutors for this reason, but you need to get the amount and balance right for your format. Other than the black tutors, which can search for most things, you're looking at maybe
Tutor also fetches your well of lost dreams. Drift of phantasms also fetches you secrets of the dead and burned vengence.
You're right, I had been looking at a few possibilities.
Enlightened Tutor and
Idyllic Tutor are the two that stood out, but I am not a huge fan of tutors. That being said, the cause of that is EDH, which is not cube, so let's leave that baggage at the door. I like the tutors more than the transmute cards. So while Drift of Phanstasm can do more things, I'd be fine with having white as the "color with the cheap tutor" that build around decks might want to include. I'd be quite down to include it. It is now on my list of cards to add.
So here's the thing about
Searing Mediation. I didn't want to make a lifegain deck. I wanted to make something more a package. Something you can add to a deck already going into that direction. You've sort of hit the nail on the head when you mentioned that it doesn't really have a deck type. I'd like WR to have the possibility of adding it to their deck as a sort of reach plan while a control deck could add it as a way to stabilize and win. Now, I may be entirely speaking from lack of experience. This might be a common trap that noobs fall into where you think this might be a thing, but it just creates a lot of bad drafts when someone tries to make the deck. I don't yet know. I'm about to find out I guess. I don't remember if I had mentioned, but I had considered adding another
Searing Meditation (probably to replace
Lightning Helix), which might give it a bit more consistency, while still not being enough to trick people to build into it. I also think that even if you start building a lifegain deck, the lack of cards that fit might naturally push you towards a "real" deck, either agro or control WRx.
The other approach is using life pay effects to cause you to look for life gain to counter balance it. You've done this, but I think you have wayto much pay life in black and hardly any life gain to support it. You've got:
ulcerateulceratedevour in shadowskeletal scryingnight's whisperambition's costevincar's justicepestilencedeep analysislife // death
That's all kind of fine, but your life gain is fairly anemic. You could overlap the black/white life gain sac with, for instance:
There's other incidental life gain you could look to include, just off the top of my head, but there's more:
And there's a whole bunch in green if you wanted to go that way.
This is true. There is a lot of black life pay in there. I'm thinking of cutting
Evincar's Justice, partially because I wonder if I've got too many board wipes. However, I'm still not quite sure what to do here. I like the idea, I like the amount, and I feel like any given problems would show up in drafts, where I'll be able to tell more. The idea was to force the B deck to either self-select the amount of life pay it plays, or to highly pick life gain.
Now, I did agree with you that my life-gain was a bit lacking, but taking another look, it didn't seem that bad. I have quite a few effects, all semi narrow mind you, but white has access to these:
Sacred Cat (this is small, but with equipment, it can get fairly noticeable)
Blessed Alliance
Prepare // Fight x2
Seeker of the Way x2
Aven Riftwatcher which is repeatable
Chastise
Fumigate
and tricks with
Condemn, if you're really in a pinch.
With Colorless:
Elixir of Immortality
Sun Droplet
Pristine Talisman
Add in all the lifegain lands, and ways to reuse them.
All of which can be scaled with the game (no flat lifegain) by buffing your creatures, careful timing, or simple reuse. In addition, the defensiveness of white along with the extra power of the cheap suicide control black cards I feel should be enough to keep you from taking random damage here and there.
Stuff like
Devour in Shadow on the 4/4 to
Chastise the 6/6 is the way to go.
Also, while Green has lifegain in the cube, it has to work for it (
Gnaw to the Bone) other that than, I didn't really want to put much lifegain in black or green, as I wanted it to be uniquely white, and honestly, I think green's lifegain is so much better it would just overshadow white's.
Yeah, would agree that red black isn't very well defined. I don't agree it's because you've removed cheap reanimation (I think life/death still needs to go, and really think you're cheating by including it in green); as you can still build a decent reanimator with the 4CC+ cards, but there isn't a lot of support for it. You might want to try to define what you want rakdos to do (or suggestions for what you want and try to give it some more support). At the moment it's a bit aggro-y, bit discard-y/madness-y.
Yeah, unfortunately. I saw
Life // Death as a mono-black card, but cube tutor moved it over. I was convinced no one would ever play life, but have since come around to it (crazy with
Fires of Yavimaya). I don't know if I was planning on having creatures strong enough to be worth reanimating at 4 mana (they'd seem a bit too high power,
Scourge of Nel Toth I wish were a 4/4). I don't know what creatures would be worth reanimating at 4 mana.
The idea for BR, way back when, like three weeks ago, was this:
Red would have looting, or discarding as a cost;
Black might have "everyone discards"; (Some self discard, but quite limited.)
Both would have madness.
This enables a "madness package".
In addition:
Red gets tokens;
Black gets self-recurring creatures;
Red gets mass buffs, and a bit of sacrificing;
Black gets a lot of sacrificing for value.
This makes an aristocrat-like package.
Also, Black gets reanimation and self-recursion, which has synergy with Red's looting, which makes a reanimation deck.
This was the base idea. Continued in the next bit.
Yes, you probably haven't got enough red discard effects. Most obvious of which is faithless looting, which would support your spells matter aggro as well, and can be cast from the graveyard for those triggers. Really not sure why that's missing?
And here we get to it. Red and Blue both get looting. I wanted them to be different. Red's looting would be suited to Madness. Lower cost, fewer cards at a time. This means you can do a BR Reanimation Tempo deck, but not a Blue one, since looting for the first time on turn 4 is not really conducive to it. However, and this point, I'm really worried by the lack of cards in both red and black that work from the graveyard. Looting effects would actually feel like throwing stuff away, rather than storing it for later. (I've seen then probably overcorrected). For this reason, I don't want to add cheap blue looting (unfortunately, all the cheap good looting creatures are in blue, I'd love them to be colorshifted to red.) and wanted to keep red looting fairly low in terms of impact. Now, however, I'm certain you can have a card you want in the grave as the same time as a card with madness in your hand, so
Faithless Looting is basically made to go in. I just need a cut.
Sorry if some of that sounds a bit negative. There's lots I do like, I think you just need a bit more tweaking and refining, being clear about what kind of decks you want to be available.
No, man, this was great. I've explained my reasoning, and also came out of this with a few more changes I'd like to make. This was very helpful!
I've had a look at your cube. We're essentially going for the same thing, but at different powerlevels (not super far off, but I think you're higher power thna I am). It's always interesting to look at lists with such a relation for ideas.
Thank you!
