[Design/Discussion] The Spiral

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
Draft List Link.

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So, with the release of SOI, I've been getting some requests to redesign the innistrad theme cube, which I have not been doing out of laziness.

That cube was built on riptide ideas from two years ago, and those dealt more with spreading themes throughout your cube, than focusing on color pairs, and the deck creation within those pairs, which is what I do now. As a result, ripping the whole thing apart to balance it, so that non-value based strategies could flourish, was an exhausting proposition.

Thankfully, one of my RL buddies is helping, so we sat down for way too many hours last night to retool things.

Fortunately, hes been (rightfully) enamored by SOI limited, so that has saved me the headache of having to solve a number of higher power problems, and opens things up to cost effective experimentation, which is excellent.

I wanted to try my hand at another theory I've been toying with, which is to promote a sort of downward spiraling archetype design. We all know that drafter habits are to pick power max value cards, which tends to suffocate out more niche strategies that end up existing in opposition to those value strategies, putting a glass ceiling on archetype depth. But what if they didn't?

The Concept

Take the way madness works in SOI limited. We could say that there is a madness theme or a madness deck. Taking a traditional riptide approach, we would boot up a list of madness cards and discard outlets, and lace them through the cube, hoping that someone picks up a critical density of madness cards and enablers, in a thematic structure that suffers from all of the problems of tribal drifting. We might dump in some narrow enablers on the basis they were "build around" cards and hope someone picks them early in the draft, and warps their entire experience around it.

Or we could instead focus on the value enablers, as occurs in SOI limited, where madness becomes a value proposition: a way to mitigate the effects of ample discard attached to already highly desirable cards. The player starts out power maxing, selecting the objectively strongest card, with the niche mechanic being picked up for the value it offers, but as they go deeper into the drafts, they realize that the niche mechanic opens the door to all sorts of interesting configurations, which they are already at the cusp of realizing.

Take for example:



This is a great limited card that I am going to draft highly. What attracts me to it is the raw power of the card. I may have no interest in madness, and just want to min/max, selecting the objectively most efficient cards in the format. I than see this:



This is another strong card. The floor on it isn't too bad for limited, but the ceiling is exceptional, and I do like the value proposition of using such a reasonable card to offset the cost of madness. Still not in a madness deck though, still just shopping for value.



Here is another highly desirable effect. Maybe not worth a first pick like the axe was, but draw smoothing is something I'm in the market for. It also requires a discard, so this puts me more on the hunt for different ways to value max, which ups the pick value of madness cards.



The floor on this is pretty mediocre, but the ceiling is starting to look better due to all of the higher pick enablers I grabbed. I'm still value maxing and good stuff drafting, but I'm at that point where the context of value drafting is beginning to allow more niche and interesting picks.



And here is our build around piece, though not being built around at all. Our efforts at using madness as a good stuff value enabler naturally led us down a path where we had ample discard outlets, and it turns out a fair number of those value enablers happened to be vampires, and now stensia masquerade looks like a great, efficient pick.

I may still psychologically be in a good stuff drafting mentality, and I wouldn't be wrong: stensia masquerade offsets the discard costs on many of my most power and efficient spells. That value proposition is still true. However, the pursuit of that efficiency naturally lead me to a point where the text on those enablers allows for more creative and interesting deck design. This creates a feeling of discovery and exploration in the format, due to the heightened archetype depth.

Most importantly, it means that spike efficiency driven drafting, and johnny creativity driven drafting as threaded together, rather than existing as opposing spectrums.

So thats kind of what we are looking to do here.

Six Hours or so of Marginally Effective Tinkering
So here is where we ended up, a 191 card mess lol.

This actually was more productive than it looks. Here is where we got on the archetype board:

RB: Madness/sacrifice
RG: Wolves/ aura buffs
RU: Control/tempo (include equip)
RW: Beat down/tokens
UG: P/T cards in hand buff, tempo
GB: mulch, control
GW: wide aggro, control, self mill control
BW:
UB:
UW:
The vote was for no proxies, because they look horrible, and the fetch/shockland mana base lost the vote (which is a relief). We are probably looking at a row of bouncelands, backed with some cyclers.
I explained to him the four most significant problems with the old list:
1. That the power gap was suffocating out more creative strategies. The power gap was a result of old misguided approaches to color balance, the type of crude buff analysis where you add progressively better cards to try to make <insert color> as highly draftable as <insert competing color>. As I've said before, this is a backwards way to approach the problem, because mono colored decks are almost never drafted, and your real issue is more likely one of nonexistent color pair identity.
2. That ETB effects just warp formats. For the uninitiated: ETB effects unbalance a format because they effectively obsolete, or greatly diminish, the strength of spell effects. Because the built in 2 for 1 value that comes from ETB effects is so great, it shifts the focus away from spells, onto creatures, which shifts the entire format's focus towards creature pressure and value generation from those creatures. This suffocates out most competing strategies, and reduces the cube down to operating on a singular axis, which makes it feel stale.
3. I was using the "birthing pod build around paradigm" which has so many problems. This was supposed to be held together by a tutor network, which could in turn be disrupted by mill. Unfortunately, there wasn't enough effect density for this to really work, and having too high a density of build arounds can lead to really awkward packs, filled with narrow cards that don't really fit anywhere on their own.
4. It was built using theme design rather than the guild layout I use now, where you come up with various theme packages and sprinkle the support around the cube. This lead to all sorts of unbalance, because certain color combinations were just never taken into account, which constricts cube depth.
So what we actually did was go through each color and grade the cards for ubiquitous good stuff, which I defined as anything that has an enters the battlefield trigger, as well as looking for overly narrow cards.
This had some interesting results:
1. White, which was the best min/max color in the cube, was packed with ETB creatures. Red also has a number of disproportionately powerful cards.
2. Blue, on the other hand, which has always felt fair, was packed with narrow build arounds. Yes, in order to keep blue reasonable a disproportionate percentage of the color was narrow picks. Should have known something was up. >.>
The Weirdness
So lots of oddness, which I will pontificate on as the project moves forward, and obviously the list needs a lot of refining. But there were a couple things I wanted:
1. Way less ETBs. I like the r/g play out your werewolves until you have a critical max, than flip them and crush over. Thats magnificent and I want more erhnam djinns for my midrange punch. Look at all of those glorious werewolves in red and green, I love them. If we are going to ETB lets trash ETB.
2. Lets talk about green, and life from the loam, which is not on the list.



Someone stop him, this could go deep.



By why would someone want to recur land in the first place? Sure we could start and stop with a handful of done to death enablers, but why not go deeper:




Is this a good idea, is this terrible? Using these powerful above the curve beaters is a different focus on land recursion, creating an incentive for what is normally an incidental interaction with little incentive to it.

Than we can cap things off with:



Which would be well supporting by the row of bouncelands.

2. Another cute idea I had, was to push green control, which would mostly be done by




Which naturally means the blue draw has to be toned down somewhat, so that the gravepulses and green spell recursion has room to breath. The grave pulses also become better, because we can use flashback and delirium as value enablers, making the experience of self mill more of an upside.

But anyways, since we will presumably be experimenting with ways to put lands in hand, either via trash creatures, bouncelands, or grave pulses, which not tie that into a UG identity that also addresses our issue of blue card draw?




I'm a little overwhelmed with green right now, as it offers a lot interesting interactions. Solid aura buffs like moldervine cloak supporting a UG archetype with cards like



as well as growth based evasion.

3. The aggro plan will again focus less on early pressure from curve outs, which I view as being a problematic approach for cube due to the space it demands, and focus more on reach and evasion, which is consistent with SOI and III.

So lots of menace, growth based unblockables, flying spirits, stuff like that. I like that arrangement because it can really snowball the tempo generating effect of a single bounce or removal spell.

4. I have lots of creative ideas for





Evasive spirits in white, mulch tokens in green, discard based token generation in black...




There is no reason to overly focus on red token makers, and these two can really expand out on the roles they play. I just wish there was a decent tutor for them that cost less than a million dollars besides goblin matron.

I'm thinking that the black card draw should focus more on stuff like death denied or waltz. It would be nice for green to be the real heavy hitting card draw color for once.

5. Also, the vote was for lots of clue generation, which i've not thought of all the ways I want to use that yet, except for:



I will babble more later. Sorry for the formating above: forum software wasn't spacing correctly for some reason. I know this is kind of stream of conscious at the end, but I kind of just wanted to get some stuff down to form my thoughts around. Looking at a cube tutor list can be as overwhelming for me as it is for you, and this helps organize my thoughts.
 

Aoret

Developer
A few thoughts on various pieces of this:

1. This is a cool space and I'm interested to follow this as it evolves. I'm glad we're not getting stuck in a rut in terms of design philosophy (even if we've hit on some decent strategies)
2. I have a suspicion that the allowable power band height scales inversely with drafter skill. That is, something like this could never fly in my playgroup because I have everything from guys who are putting up major top 8s to people who are really excited to show me their "spreading seas" or "werewolf" decks.

2.5, the rabbit trail we always knew I'd go on eventually: A wide power band can't fly over here because top 8 playmat guy will have all the good cards by the end of the draft. Interestingly, moving to a high power level made the games closer than they were at a low power level. In something closer to limited, the better players were winning nearly every game. At super high power levels, I see them dropping at least a game just due to how hard it is to screw up casting Bloodghast. The really neat thing is that it's very obvious to everyone when more skilled players are winning based on skill, and my newbs are picking up on little things like not cracking their fetches right away to rebuy bloodghast later, etc.

3. Scythe tiger seems loose AF. Please let me talk you out of it. Totally into Fallow Wurm effects OTOH. I think this is a cool space to explore especially since you'll have madness enablers laying around all over the place too, and pitching land you plan on rebuying to make those enablers do whatever cool stuff they do is a really neat angle for green.

4. Not sold on UG handsize archetype, but I'm not convinced it's bad either. I think it's something to keep an eye on though because it seems like more of a stretch than some of the other things.

5. I like the narrative you told about the spiral. I want to challenge it a bit though and ask, how do you plan to ensure that people end up on the spiral track? What happens when a pack ends up totally loaded? What happens when variance puts a bunch of the goodies in P3? My concern is that the spiral draft narrative only works if the cards appear in something at least kind of close to the order you listed it in. If not, then I'm just riding this weird power band roller coaster. Maybe that's okay and drafters don't mind doing poorly in a draft or two based on seat position and/or pack variance, but I think it's a valid concern and something you should at least be thinking about and consciously choosing to accept the consequences of.

6. I wish I could change your mind about proxies. Can I? What would it take? Pictures of proxies that don't look terrible? Mailing you an example? I feel like you've gotten tons and tons of mileage out of doing cube design on the cheap, and that you've reaped a lot of benefits from those restrictions forcing you to be creative. I just kinda hate the thought that you guys wouldn't be able to use cards that might be great in your design because you're priced out of them. Attractive proxies are really easy to do.
 

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
I think there is a little confusion: paragraphs 2 and 2.5 just aren't issues. Scaling power bands, wide power bands, or drafting skill aren't topics. I seem to have completely failed to explain the concept. ugh.

Read Paulo's initial analysis of madness here.


The first time we had madness around, cards with the ability were very swingy. They weren’t bad if you didn’t have madness enablers, but they rewarded you immensely for being able to madness them out, since they cost much less. As a result, you’d draft bad enablers to enable your good madness cards, and sometimes you’d not play your madness cards because you didn’t have enough enablers.

This time around, things look different. There are cards that offer meaningful payoffs for madness'ing them—all the modal rares, Incorrigible Youths, Twins of Maurer Estate—but it isn't the norm. There are several madness cards that cost 1 less mana, the exact same amount of mana, or even more mana, such as Just the Wind, Stensia Masquerade, and Broken Concentration. Those cards get small upgrades if they are madnessed (cheaper cost or instant speed), but overall your reward for madnessing them out just isn’t that big, and it doesn’t justify running suboptimal cards as outlets.

Instead of drafting enablers to turn your madness on, in this set I suspect you’ll be using madness to mitigate the cost of discarding. This is a reversion, of sorts—now instead of enablers enabling madness cards, madness cards enable the discard effects (by making sure it's not a cost). In practical terms, it means you should not prioritize bad enablers because the madness cards are, as a whole, just not worth enabling.

This inversion is what I find interesting. Its the difference between drafting a "madness deck" vs. a good stuff deck "that happens to run madness." You would think based on Paulo's analysis that the format would be fairly bland, because every deck is a good stuff deck at its core, but two weeks later I'm reading about a G/W self mill deck that demonic tutors a card every turn.

Normally around here, we think of formats horizontally, where people are drafting good stuff decks and the challenge is making synergy decks competitive with good stuff decks. SOI approaches the issue vertically, where it assumes people will be good stuff drafting, but good stuff drafting incidentally rewards going deeper.

We start off with grave pulses because those are good cards, we want a lot of them, we than discover that this puts us at risk of decking ourselves, so we grab this recursive golem and subsequently stumble across a weird recursive control deck, whose creation was all driven by our desire to good stuff draft.
 

Aoret

Developer
I read both your post and Paulo's article, and I don't think there's confusion here, I think we simply disagree. I'll take a stab at summarizing your ideas though so you can tell me if I've got a piece of it wrong:

Both you and Paulo are saying that a dynamic exists (or can be created, in our case) where picking high powered cards naturally results in synergistic decks occurring. It's like you sort of just back into having cool synergy by picking cards you want anyone. You're suggesting we can design for this rather than doing the Waddellian thing where strategies are layered and cross-layered to create a feeling of depth.

My point is that the same lever you're using to back into these synergistic decks, desirable (relatively) high power level cards, also implies a wider power band than I currently run. For reference I'm talking about stuff like:
The player starts out power maxing, selecting the objectively strongest card, with the niche mechanic being picked up for the value it offers, but as they go deeper into the drafts, they realize that the niche mechanic opens the door to all sorts of interesting configurations, which they are already at the cusp of realizing.

All I'm saying is that if all of your drafters are good, this works great! If they all suck, it still works great! But if some of your drafters really suck, and some of them are good, this breaks down. My bad drafters can't tell the difference between the objectively strongest card and the cards where they're going deeper. I don't think that invalidates what you're doing in any way, but I do think it's something that people should be mindful of.
 
I read both your post and Paulo's article, and I don't think there's confusion here, I think we simply disagree. I'll take a stab at summarizing your ideas though so you can tell me if I've got a piece of it wrong:

Both you and Paulo are saying that a dynamic exists (or can be created, in our case) where picking high powered cards naturally results in synergistic decks occurring. It's like you sort of just back into having cool synergy by picking cards you want anyone. You're suggesting we can design for this rather than doing the Waddellian thing where strategies are layered and cross-layered to create a feeling of depth.

My point is that the same lever you're using to back into these synergistic decks, desirable (relatively) high power level cards, also implies a wider power band than I currently run. For reference I'm talking about stuff like:


All I'm saying is that if all of your drafters are good, this works great! If they all suck, it still works great! But if some of your drafters really suck, and some of them are good, this breaks down. My bad drafters can't tell the difference between the objectively strongest card and the cards where they're going deeper. I don't think that invalidates what you're doing in any way, but I do think it's something that people should be mindful of.
I don't think Grillo's idea implies a wider power band than you run. (You run Lily of the Veil, Control Magic, Adventuring Gear, and Dragon Fodder). It may require a few more cards to be closer to the upper and lower ends of the power spectrum, as opposed to being evenly spread out, but idk.

I may be missing the point too, but my takeaway, so far: If you include less power, synergy dependent cards, they should be the payoff cards(madness cards), not the enablers(discard outlets).
 

Aoret

Developer
The dragon fodder that I run is an instant and makes humans. Adventuring gear is buoyed by the fact that fetchland counts are routinely as high as 8 or 9. I'll admit I've considered cutting it anyhow, but I'm a bit low on how i value equipment as a player. I'm sure you could find other examples of bad cards I'm running (I can think of at least three jank cards I'm testing right now just for fun). This next point is more of just a fun topic and a curiosity than anything, but Lily otv is possibly the single best card in existence at scaling with the power level of the environment, so she's a bit of bad example. That said though, I'm quite certain you could find plenty of other poster children for strong stuff in my cube.

Even if we concede that my power level is wide (which I think is largely not true), your suggestion of adding more cards on either end certainly widens it, exacerbating precisely the issue I'm raising.

I guess I'm a little confused by the resistance to the argument I'm putting forward. If I came in here and said "this idea is shit and so are all of you," that'd be one thing. All I'm saying is "certain playgroups may be better candidates than others for this type of cube and I think that's interesting"
 
Here's an article on the mothership about how madness was developed for SOI that dovetails a bit into what you're talking about.

http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/latest-developments/fond-memory-madness-2016-04-01

The key takeaway is that WotC's intention was to make essentially make the madness cards and discard outlets so that they were a mana-saving mechanic for B/R vampires and a card advantage mechanic for U/B control. I've not gotten to play enough with SOI to say whether they met those goals or not.
 

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
I read both your post and Paulo's article, and I don't think there's confusion here, I think we simply disagree. I'll take a stab at summarizing your ideas though so you can tell me if I've got a piece of it wrong:

Both you and Paulo are saying that a dynamic exists (or can be created, in our case) where picking high powered cards naturally results in synergistic decks occurring. It's like you sort of just back into having cool synergy by picking cards you want anyone. You're suggesting we can design for this rather than doing the Waddellian thing where strategies are layered and cross-layered to create a feeling of depth.

My point is that the same lever you're using to back into these synergistic decks, desirable (relatively) high power level cards, also implies a wider power band than I currently run. For reference I'm talking about stuff like:


All I'm saying is that if all of your drafters are good, this works great! If they all suck, it still works great! But if some of your drafters really suck, and some of them are good, this breaks down. My bad drafters can't tell the difference between the objectively strongest card and the cards where they're going deeper. I don't think that invalidates what you're doing in any way, but I do think it's something that people should be mindful of.


No, no, no. It has no impact how good or bad the drafters are because you aren't running bad cards, at all. There is no bifurcation, there are no truly narrow cards. Everything is an independently reasonable card. Drafters shouldn't have to ever distinguish between good cards and cards intended to go deep with, because that division doesn't exist: everything is generically good and reasonable. The power band is very narrow, as was described in the exert:

Those cards get small upgrades if they are madnessed (cheaper cost or instant speed), but overall your reward for madnessing them out just isn’t that big, and it doesn’t justify running suboptimal cards

Because the rewards for madness are so minor, the cards can't be sub optimal to justify running: they have to actually be independently good limited cards. Despite this, the format is actually quite deep, which is whats intriguing.

The easiest higher power examples would be something like having a draw suite consisting of cards like:




If we are good stuff drafting, these are cards that we pick highly. If we want to min/max these cards, we can get a small upgrade to their effect by running some perfectly reasonable flashback cards:




We're taking the natural instinct to gather good cards within our narrow power band, but we are starting to focus it towards self-mill, a more specialized strategy that mere good stuff drafting on its own would never be directed us towards.
 
If I'm understanding Grillo, the idea lies in chopping off (or at least heavily curating) the top end of the traditional "good stuff" power curve so that the new peak is made up of synergistic cards that inherently nudge in you in a direction without outright screaming "You Are Now in the Graveyard/Tokens/Tribal/Whatever Deck."

Another example might be a P1P1 Pack Guardian gently pushing you into werewolves (because flash lets you flip them without wasting your turn) or a land recursion strategy. The traditional alternative would be a card like Immerwolf that obviously also wants you to play werewolves, but is basically a blank outside of that deck. Please correct me if I'm misunderstanding.
 

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
Yes, and that probably is exactly why they designed pack guardian the way they did. Also note that the land discard provides an incentive to min/max with reasonable delirium cards. You can good stuff draft pack guardian for months if you want, and thats fine, but your good stuff cards start to become better when they are gathered and focused towards the more specialized strategies that they incidentally can support.

This creates the feeling of spiraling depth over time, which is what I love about these formats.
 
Sooo... Pack Guardian vs Immerwolf there is basically the poison principle thing we've been talking about forever, no? Applying it to less extreme cases, but same concept. Correct me if I'm wrong
 
Sooo... Pack Guardian vs Immerwolf there is basically the poison principle thing we've been talking about forever, no? Applying it to less extreme cases, but same concept. Correct me if I'm wrong
I think this is pretty much spot on. The general idea of "Narrow build arounds can actually reduce format depth" is embodied in the poison principle.

Love Pack guardian, card is deep as the ocean.

Love this discussion too. There is a lot that directly relates to what I've been working on recently, and I hope to see something nice come out of this way of thinking about drafting!
 

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
Sooo... Pack Guardian vs Immerwolf there is basically the poison principle thing we've been talking about forever, no? Applying it to less extreme cases, but same concept. Correct me if I'm wrong


Yes and no: the poison principle is describing a specific type of narrowness, and its probably best to leave it where it is. Immerwolf is in the ballpark, but in a slightly different part of the stadium, due to its heightened narrowness.

It might be easier to think of it in terms of two of the cards that sigh wants to run in his experiment:




Neither of these care are bad or really even narrow, but think of how much better they become if our format's good stuff picks support them. If I have a density of lifegain cards that I am first or second picking, such as say kitchen finks, than suddenly punishing fire begins to look like a much more reasonable pick than it otherwise would. If my good stuff card draw consistently has a self-mill clause attached to it, suddenly life from the loam begins to look like a reasonable pick, when it otherwise would look like a synergy card I might not devote much thought to.

The idea is that if we think about what our good stuff early picks are, we can use those to set the tempo of the draft, using simple value propositions to nudge drafters in more interesting directions, and create this sort of vertical format depth, where good cards ladder us into more interesting strategies.

This is different than having our good stuff early picks not focus on life gain or the graveyard. In that instance, punishing fire and life from the loam start to exist on a different axis, and we end up with this undesirable dichotomy between "good stuff decks" and "synergy decks," trying to balance the two.

The next step would be to start laddering those cards down: we selected FOF and drownyard because they were good stuff control cards, which we min/maxed by good stuff drafting fire and loam for our control deck. Now, we might be approaching a critical mass of self-mill effects, which could enable an entirely new and different deck within our same RUG combination.
 

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
Another way to think of it is using good stuff picks to naturally create critical mass of an effect, and critical mass is where any synergy strategy wants to arrive at anyways.
 

Aoret

Developer
One of us is still missing something, and I'm not sure who. To me, this feels like we're trying to have it both ways. You're telling me that I start out by picking good stuff, I then look at my good stuff and say "wow I unintentionally ended up with a density of Y kind of thing, maybe I can do something with that!" ...does this not imply that I picked cards that are better than other cards? What makes them good stuff if not their higher card quality?

The alternative to this is what I'm starting to think you meant originally, which I may have misunderstood: that you just play a bunch of cards at a flat power level, all reasonable picks in their own right, and that I'm supposed to find cute interactions between them as I go and thereby experience a sensation of depth in the format. That sounds cool to me, and handily dispels my above stated concerns about who this technique can apply to. ...but I can't help but feel a little disappointed now that I think I understand. What I thought you were saying initially sounded radical and exciting to me-a fascinating inversion of our design principles and something really fresh. Now what it sounds like we're saying is "do the Jason thing, but a little bit better, and don't run any janky stuff" and to me that kinda just sounds like "improve our existing design philosophy slightly". Certainly a good goal, and one we all share, but that's always been our goal, right?
 
Even the humblest of improvements can require radical restructuring of the way you come at them. This is true in the design of real world objects, and certainly true in conceptual design. Yeah, its a little bit let-downish when you consider it.

I like that this thread is really trying to comprehend the reasons behind format depth. Investigating the formats known far and wide as the deepest of them all is the best angle you can take, imo. Flatter power level is probably a good prerequisite, but far from the only one I think.
 

Aoret

Developer
Even the humblest of improvements can require radical restructuring of the way you come at them. This is true in the design of real world objects, and certainly true in conceptual design. Yeah, its a little bit let-downish when you consider it.

I like that this thread is really trying to comprehend the reasons behind format depth. Investigating the formats known far and wide as the deepest of them all is the best angle you can take, imo. Flatter power level is probably a good prerequisite, but far from the only one I think.
Pretty much exactly this! I like that this thread may have hit on a way (or at least an abstract concept) to improve on our existing design philosophy. What I initially thought was more along the lines of disrupting our years-old design philosophy I now understand to be akin to sanding down one of the roughest edges of it. I guess maybe that doesn't do enough justice to the idea (which is a really great one).

Also totally agree that trying to figure out how really good formats tick is a great route to go towards getting better at design
 

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
Now what it sounds like we're saying is "do the Jason thing, but a little bit better, and don't run any janky stuff" and to me that kinda just sounds like "improve our existing design philosophy slightly". Certainly a good goal, and one we all share, but that's always been our goal, right?


No, it isn't at all. This is the absolute simplest way I can describe it:

Another way to think of it is using good stuff picks to naturally create critical mass of an effect, and critical mass is where any synergy strategy wants to arrive at anyways.

Jason ran janky cards when he would encourage themes. The best example of that was the lifegain theme that he wrote about (bolding mine).

1) Keep the narrow archetype support compact.
It's perfectly fine to run archetype anchors that only support a given strategy, but you need to keep their numbers in check. Otherwise you run into the following twofold problem: other drafters will have their packs filled with cards that are useless to them, and archetypes across your Cube become more rigid.
A classic example is the Storm archetype from early MTGO Cube iterations. The cards that enabled Storm were mostly useless to other drafters. The more extremely narrow cards you run, the less room drafters have to maneuver, and the more similar decks look from draft to draft.
With respect to life gain, that means we're not going to want to run too many cards like Soul Warden that are useless outside of a dedicated life gain deck.

We would never run narrow archetype anchors, because our cards are all reasonable, yet we are still going to enable drafters ending up in a more niche feeling strategy.

Here...let's make this a little more interactive. In SOI limited, there exists a G/W control deck that self-mills itself, than recycles the bottom card of its library every turn in order to effectively demonic tutor for whatever answer they want. How does a drafter discover this deck?

Because its very different than these contemplated archetypes:



WG

Key cards



WG is interesting because unlike our last visit to Innistrad, you see neither Travel Preparationsnor a huge Human subtheme. That makes drafting WG similar to UW in that the deck will be pieces that fall together and that may or may not have synergy.

With an abundance of cheap Humans in your deck, any Intrepid Provisioners you do draft will certainly be giving a bonus. This lets WG get ahead before an opponent can stabilize. At that point, it is important for WG to beat past large blockers. Timely pump spells in the midgame can help WG do that (which is certainly plan A), but WG also has the ability to go wide. Inspiring Captain is a good example of a card that can help in those later-game scenarios while still being a strong card to cast on turn 4.

If board stalls are commonplace with WG, then perhaps Ethereal Guidance will find a home. This type of effect has been very format dependent over the past few years. In KTK, similar effects were excellent in Mardu shells trying to punch through slower, defensive-creature-oriented Sultai and Abzan decks. Yet Magic Origins showed with Kytheon’s Tactics that similar effects can be unplayable if everyone is trading. Keep an eye on the texture of board states to see if this card is worth running. My guess from the limited amount I’ve seen is that it will sometimes be played, but will more often be a good board card for slower matchups.

One final way that WG decks can succeed is to time removal on turns 4-7 as its swarm of creatures continue to alpha strike. Surprisingly, WG has premium removal this time around, which means that you might actually be able to follow up 3 creatures with 2 removal spells. Good luck beating that curve.Angelic Purgedoes have a downside, but you’ll have enough small creatures, or a useless land lying around, that the first copy or two will just be great.
 
Okay, i think i get it now. I've been calling this 'gestalt synergy' in my blog thread for a little bit, selecting my strongest cards to be even stronger in archetypal decks (and trying to flatten the power band wherever possible). Notably though I'd consider a blink FTK deck to have gestalt synergy and not just be goodstuff, because ideally ALL my cards are goodstuff at least and ideally more.
 

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
Okay, i think i get it now. I've been calling this 'gestalt synergy' in my blog thread for a little bit, selecting my strongest cards to be even stronger in archetypal decks (and trying to flatten the power band wherever possible). Notably though I'd consider a blink FTK deck to have gestalt synergy and not just be goodstuff, because ideally ALL my cards are goodstuff at least and ideally more.


Yes, yes, this is much closer.

I want to see how far we can creatively push the idea. I would like it to be where you start out in a color pair with a horizontal range of X/Y archetypes/subarchetypes, but the initial tacked on synergy can open the door to something completely bizarre.

Maybe the good picks in my G/W color make grave pulses look like great value cards (maybe because of delirum) and I have so many of them that decking myself is a problem...until I realize I also have access to recursive elements, and now my deck is something completely different and unique. The final product is strategically unrecognizable from the initial "lets gather up strong cards in green and white decks" or second stratum "hey I think I'm supposed to be focusing on this neat G/W delirium archetype" type decks.
 


What are some cards that you'd consider have good enough of a effect for the discard cost that drafters would want to start building around it? I think it plays nicely into the fist-full-of-basics deck you can get with mulch and borderland ranger, but there probably needs to be (like you've stated in the opening post) enough power in the discard outlets to get incentivised.

edit: Also what particularly about GW do you feel makes for the selfmill pair? Is there some recursion in white? It seems like a strange fit compared to the traditionall UG or GB.
 

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
Sorry for the lack of activity: lots of real world projects.

Call of the bloodline, molten vortex, and stormbind are cards we aren't really looking for atm, because they are narrow discard outlets (they are A + B cards).

We would want to start with cards that offer a foundational effect, which doesn't require synergy to function. So something like: card draw, removal, cantrips, fixing, efficient threats.




What I will have to do at some point, is go hunting for cards that are good cards, but which involve discarding as a cost.
 

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
Ok, now that I have some time, lets fix this absolute mess of a green section.

RG: Wolves/ aura buffs
UG: P/T cards in hand buff, tempo
GW: wide aggro, control, self mill control

Here is our all over the place green decks. Looking over the section, we could divide it into a few messy piles:

1. loam effects: groundskeeper, harvest wurm, tilling treefolk, stoic builder, cartographer, pulse of murasa
2. Recycle effects: anuriad scavanger, battlefield scrounger, krosan reclamation
3. werewolves: wolfbitten captive, duskwatch recruiter, lambholt pacifist, hermit of the natterknolls, villagers of estwald,solitary hunter, ulvenwald mystics, sage of ancient lore.
4. Grave Pulses: mulch, scout the borders, vessel of nascency
5. Card draw: creeping renaissance, harmonize, seasons past
6. Removal: ambush viper, rabid bite,
7. Tokens: grizzly fate, saproling burst, night soil, crawling sensation
8 Powers matters evasion: skarrgan pit-skulk, wandering wolf, champion of lambholt, elephant guide, moldervine cloak, hunger of the howlpack, might beyond reason.

There are also some clue makers (fangren maurader!), flash cards for the wolves, delirium cards to take the edge off of self-mill, some ramp cards that send bodies to the yards, a few reasonable discard outlets (wild mongrel) and some cards intended to channel lands to the yard (fallow wurm, rogue elephant). Also, the maros.

What a mess. Of these, I think the most important are:

1. Grave pulses: what are we even doing here if not pushing these cards as consistency pieces?
2. Grave yard based mass card draw: I feel that its important that creeping renaissance be playable: this means life gain...
3. Recycle effects: Grave pulses to fuel the yard, which work well with graveyard based card draw, pushing someone to the point where they can create a draw engine of pure card recycling.

Removal, prob can go, the wolves should probably be trimmed down (just like them to prevent midrange ETB spam)

The token effects? Cards seem good, but is this necessary? Power matters evasion? Prob could scale down to champion of lambholt and be fine.

Scythe tiger too cute? Prob not really in sync with the slow durdly loam effects. Though I want a velocity of lands en route to the yard.
 
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