Retro Combo Cube

ahadabans

ahadabans

Yeah. Processor was in power lists for a long time. That is a legit card and a good tinker target (assuming you aren't facing a lot of disenchant effects). Memory Jar is also a good target, especially if you are trying to queue up a large combo turn.

Colossus I've been tempted to try out, but it feels so much weaker than other options. More importantly, who is going to get pulled into tinker if they see it? Even if it's good enough, the "Pay 8 life: Untap" is going to scare most people away despite options like Pestermite, etc. I'll probably test it though. It's basically an unblockable 8/8 which is quite nice stat-wise.
 
Grillo_Parlante

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
There weren't enough artifacts in the penny cube for it. The main problem is that black in general dosen't have a lot of good cards that incidentally produce artifacts. It has to get all or most of its artifact density from elsewhere.

Otherwise it would be amazing, as it is a golem.
 
Rasmus Källqvist

Rasmus Källqvist

UW I'm out of my elements from CubeTutor.com












So I actually paid tribute and drafted the cube. I'm so out of touch with this style of magic, very hard to get a sense of what cards to pair. There's a lot of powerful cards in there, but I didn't ever feel like I was on autopilot. I think my idea with the deck was to play some early creatures, play the opposition game for a while, then try to reload my hand with time spiral.
 
ahadabans

ahadabans

That's a nice deck. Dudes + Opposition is just pure win regardless of what else you put with it. In this case, I think it goes extremely well. Sunscape gets you opposition on T3 and helps you tap down right away. That's nasty. You have multiple ways to reload later too (lark has nice synergy here).

I like decks like this in cube because they can easily switch roles. You can beat down if your opponent is durdling and you can go control if they are more aggressive than you. I have no idea how this deck fairs in this particular cube with storm and other things like that, but I'd play your list and feel good about it.
 
ahadabans

ahadabans

I've been working on an evolved retro list per the post above, and this is where it's currently at and what ended up being played last night. It's the base retro list with roughly 50 card swaps. All restrictions from the original retro list have essentially been lifted, but the goal was to keep the spirit of the "high power spell"/"lower power creature" idea alive. It needs work and I'll go into that a little more below.

http://www.cubetutor.com/viewcube/63093

So, one guy had never played Magic before. One other player was my spike friend and the 4th guy was a very casual player who really only plays Magic when we cube. Given that this list was completely new to everyone and one guy had never even played Magic before, we did 90 card sealed instead of draft. So the whole cube was technically in play, but as with sealed you tend to get locked out of building a tight archetype based list (I don't really care for sealed).

That said, the decks that got assembled where totally sweet and the games were super interesting (with maybe a few caveats).

I don't have the actual deck lists and am too lazy to put them together, but I'll give you the high level:
  • Spike - Went for an Abzan value deck. Lots of creatures with sweet recursion synergy. Very solid build. Got a little greedy I think with the mana base (was hosed one game that I know of), but it was a really nice deck I'd probably call aggro/control due to the ways he could play it. Some key cards for him... Sword of Light and Shadow. That was both reach on his smaller dudes, resilience and added life gain which helped with racing. He also had some evoke dudes (shriekmaw that I know of) to get extra value on the raise dead trigger. Also had Lark and Exalted Angel (who won more than one game). All the life gain he had was key. My casual friend commented that he did over 30 points of damage one game and still couldn't kill him. This deck went 2-1, losing only to me. But we played only one game (it was late by the time he and I played), and there were a ton of play mistakes by Newbie and Casual Guy, making me uncertain if this really would have gone 2-1 playing against different pilots.
  • Casual Guy - Build IMO the best deck at the table. It was a WG ramp deck. Best win condition was probably Mirari's Wake + Crush of Wurms, which he destroyed me with in game one of both our match and his match with Spike. He also had tutors to get his creatures (survival of the fittest and green sun's zenith), with really awesome targets (reclamation sage - which helped him beat my deck, troll ascetic (for removal heavy lists and to combo with his enchantments - rancor and armadillo cloak). I won the rubber match, and I'll go into more details below about that match in particular because it was an INSANE game of Magic we played. I probably should have lost but the way I won was just so awesome - game two in particualr).
  • Newbie - I helped him build his deck as he was a bit overwhelmed. He choose the colors and a handful of cards he wanted to play, and I helped him make a solid list and fill out his lands. It ended up a GR deck with a tiny splash of blue. Ramp deck basically with some elves and hard to deal with things. Blue was there for snap and treasure cruise, both cards that came in super handy. He was short removal options and had no way to refuel after board wipes, so these cards helped him and were splashed at almost no cost due to really good fixing. I helped him play against me, and this was my only loss of the night. I simply could not deal with all the pressure he was able to put on the board. Overrun was the best card in his deck (granted, he also had deranged hermit). My deck was a tad slow against what he was doing. He also was drawing everything he needed when he needed it. Beginners luck I guess? Honestly, we played 5 games while we waited for the other match to end and I lost all 5 games! I thought my deck was literally crap until I started winning with it after this match-up. It was demoralizing. LOL.
Speaking of Crush of Wurms.... so the one match I want to comment on in detail is the one with Casual Guy and his sweet ass GW deck.

Before I get to it though, I'll go very quickly through the other two matches. I got wrecked by Newbie's GR deck as I mentioned. I helped him play it (which certainly was to my detriment), but it was a really fast deck. I simply couldn't ramp fast enough and play enough removal to avoid death. I once opened with a draw that had a T3 Inkwell, and I still lost that game to this deck. I just couldn't race him. Another game, I landed Emrakul, did as much damage as I could with the mindslaver ability and still lost (to top decked overrun). Deck was simply beastly against me. I had to laugh. That game I had Emrakul, I had 13 life and emptied his hand only to die to an elf and 4 squirrel tokens on a top decked overrun. I mean, what can you do? lol.

Against Spike, I lived the dream with a T2 Inkwell (off a bounceland discard to 8 card BS play), to which his deck promptly folded having no answers. Yeah, Inkwell is probably just too retarded but thematically it fits so well with what blue is doing (artifacts) and it almost feels mandatory if you want tinker to not suck. I also got beat in no fewer than 2 games with a resolved inkwell against a no-frills be efficient creature deck. Inkwell can be raced (though maybe not on T2 to be fair). I don't know. I wish there was a less oppressive option that still was worth tinkering for. Battlesphere IMO is a much worse more oppressive card than Inkwell because it stabilizes and it's a faster clock and it costs 2 less and it's colorless to add insult to injury. Inkwell requires you to build a deck around it to play it. I did that and still wasn't winning when I got it into play.

OK, on to the match with Casual Guy. We played 3 games and they were all crazy. I won 2-1, but again I should have lost all three games (game two for sure). So first game, he sticks a Troll Ascetic with Rancor and just bleeds me out. I simply have no way to remove it. I misplay the hell out of this one too because I Supreme Verdict not realizing there isn't a "no regeneration" clause, Casual Guy catches me (very happy about that - he's gotten so much better at Magic). And that is all she wrote. Not that it mattered. He got this in play and then proceeded to plow under me afterwards. I spent most of the game just getting lands back into play.

Second game, he's wrecking me again but I clear the board I think with a cycled decree of pain (troll can't survive that thankfully). He gets wake and a crush of wurms with a billion mana and a handful of cards. I'm at like 6 life with nothing in play. This game I should have lost, but the play I make with Emrakul is so ridiculous. Just listen to this. I have no idea how I survive what is essentially 4 times lethal on the board but I cast Emrakul because why not? In his hand, Green Sun's Zenith, Harmonize, some land and some small creature I think. For the mindslaver turn, I play his land, the creature and harmonize to see what I can dig into that might save me. I draw a Wing Shards. Oh dear. Green Sun's Zenith for reclamation sage (knowing he had it), blow up Mirari's Wake so he can't flashback Crush of Wurms. That's three spells for those keeping track. I attack with his three wurms and his troll, and then wing shard him sacrificing everything. Game was over after he drew a land on his non-mindslavers turn. Literally, any other combination of cards in his hand and I just lose to his wurms.

So quick aside... Emrakul is probably busted. That said, I lost after resolving it twice. And it has a super interesting power limiter on it. The "on cast" makes it less good in cheat decks. And you have to put a lot of work into getting 13 mana (though graveyard cost reduction was key every time I cast it). This is probably GRBS, but this is one of the most interesting cards I've played with. Casual Guy was pissed off because both games I won were off of an Emrakul. I get it. To him, he sees me doing nothing but playing mana rocks and drawing cards like a durdle machine. Meanwhile, he's building a board and feeling like I'm stealing wins. This is the whole reason I built the midrange cube. So I totally get it. I can't fault him for feeling this way.

Anyway, game three is the most ridiculous game of the night. I ended up with 2 cards in my library. Mind you, this is after I played Time Spiral. The game was like an hour and I literally drew my deck almost two times over trying to beat Casual Guy's GW deck. I cannot remember all the details of this game. It was too long. But it included a wing shard more than one time on my Inkwell and Emrakul, plow under's, reclamation sages, troll beat downs, green sun's zenith for stuff I didn't want to see in play, windfall discarding hands to try and find answers. I don't even know what to say. This was an epic battle. So this whole ridiculous thing ends with me at 6 life and him at way more than I can do in a single turn even with two giant monsters in play. I can't attack without dying to an alpha strike, I can't kill him in one swing and I can't clear his board. He has lethal on his turn but I haven't conceded so he knows I have something in hand (decree of pain that would cycle down his wurms enough for me to live). He hesitates (which was the right move). I'm down to two cards in my library and pretty much think I'm going to deck. What do I draw? Fucking Time Warp. Swing, time warp, swing. Game.

Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good.
 
ahadabans

ahadabans

Thanks for getting through my novel. :)

That still feels a bit loose, though I like that it also costs blue mana. What I really like (and almost feel is essential) is that Inkwell has shroud. Nothing sucks more than spending all this time getting a 9 mana thing in play and then having it die to Seal of Cleansing or (even worse) a value 187 type guy. Speaking for myself anyway, the fastest way to make drafters avoid the tinker/artifact deck is giving them weak reward cards. It just isn't worth it with all the other stuff you can do in a list like this.

If Inkwell didn't have trample and was instead just a shrouded fat thing, it would be much less annoying since it could be chumped endlessly (though maybe it would then suck?). But what can get rid of (and how do you survive) a 7/11 shrouded trampler in the average deck? There just aren't a lot of answers. Wing Shards was basically a silver bullet against what I had, and most decks won't have those types of plays.

The card I'm looking for might be Sundering Titan. It has no evasion and it blows up lands (so sort of protects against removal to some extent). It almost always blows up your own lands too, so there's a cost to playing it. I found it pretty swingy when I ran it with an earlier version of my list.

I don't know. Inkwell is just one of those cards that makes me excited to try and build a Ux big mana artifact deck. That's the heart of it. I don't even like it that much in reanimator since there are just so many hoops you have to jump through to make reanimator work and all you get is a 7 power trampler? That play loses to wide aggro and midrange decks all day long (as demonstrated by my 0-5 demolition at the hands of the GR deck). I'd rather have pretty much every other fattie in the cube in reanimator.
 
ahadabans

ahadabans

So I tend to hijack threads in the open topic forums, and I don't want to keep doing that because I know it's an annoying habit. But I feel like rambling a bit more on the pre/post NWO thing...

Specifically in how I feel it has impacted cube designs. For those fearing an NWO bashing post, fear not. That is not what this is. I'm genuinely focused right now on the benefits both periods have and how I feel they create unique and interesting cube metas. And I want to do that because I have a personal dilemma around it. Specifically, that I feel the two are not super compatible with each other leading to the more obvious solution of creating and maintaining two separate cubes that play differently. Which would be all fine and good if it were not for the fact that I don't get to cube enough to where having two cubes makes any sense for me.

Let's start with pre-NWO. I'm talking cubes specifically here (where we are focused on "best of" - even if not power max in design). Bottom line for pre-NWO, you have more powerful spell effects than creatures. This period of Magic is marked by "broken" cards and so favors a combo based list. And there's a lot to like about that because singleton really limits how degenerate some of this can get, in a way that is simply impossible to simulate in a 4-of constructed world with perfect card selections and mana bases. And where you have specific cards that simply cannot be anything other than degenerate even in singles, you simply exclude them. The beauty of a fully customizable limited list right there in all it's glory. This is fundamentally why I think cube is not just the best, but the only form of Magic worth playing.

Advantages:
  • Combo is simply fun. And it makes the game feel non-linear because you have a larger variety of win conditions (or at least ways to get into a winning position). Even if you have decks that win with creatures, if you spent the first 5 turns doing things that setup your one creature, it does not feel like every other creature based win condition. And there is huge satisfaction with crafting decks that can do this sort of thing.
  • Drafting is more difficult and rewarding. In a list like this, you can make bad decks. That sounds like a disadvantage, but there is satisfaction in navigating a pile of powerful cards which don't all go together and forming something that isn't clunky. By comparison, in a well tuned NWO list I don't actually think it's possible to build a truly bad deck unless you are missing some brain cells. To some extent, decks are less tight in this sort of list and that has the net effect of making more archetype and creative deck list more competitive. A nut storm deck is going to ruin games of Magic. A typical storm deck that was drafted in a cube is almost always an ambitious effort that won't roll the table. And yet there will be excitement in playing that deck and facing off against it too.
NWO cubes I'm defining as ones that are dominated by creatures. This describes most modern cubes at this point, IMO. While powered versions are still very much combo in nature, it's not a spell-based type of combo due to the fact that value creatures have obsoleted a great deal of spell-only effects. Where this model is simply superior though is the depth of creature design. Specially talking synergy. And what that has created IMO is an increase of in-game decision density. In my modular list, I took this to an extreme but I feel it extends to most well designed cubes regardless of how they are drafted. A good portion of the focus has been pulled away from the draft and into the game itself in the way of complex game state building.

Advantages:
  • Synergy based Magic is super deep and skill intensive. While it might be more linear (since it's almost entirely creature focused), the amount of variability in how decks can come together and interact with each other leads to very competitive games and super interesting real-time game decisions. I think this is even more true in a list that is unpowered because you are very often faced with choices that (outside having omniscience) are not always black and white or easy to make.
  • Heavy decision density is very rewarding because it rewards skill, foresight and adaptation. Reacting to what is happening in-game versus what you "designed your deck to do". While some can look at this like "every deck is just midrange", I don't believe that is an accurate depiction. Because in any match-up, one player always has the better long game and recognizing this and knowing when you are better off letting the other guy be the beatdown - that (in the immortal words of G.I.Joe) is half the battle.
Elaborating a little more on decision density. Think of a card like Treachery. It's a card so powerful, that if you can play that in a game it is pretty much always the right decision to do so. The only choice you really have is when to make the play. And while that can have a great deal of skill associated with it (Treachery can outright win games if played optimally), you typically lose a decision point because making that play is almost not optional from a strategic point of view. Compare that to a list with a much flatter power curve. Where every decision you could make is equally justifiable. Essentially, you have more choice. Not just when to make a certain play, but whether you want to make it at all. This is because strategically you are not dramatically under performing in a game by choosing not to trigger an effect or cast one of your spells. You might even be giving yourself an advantage in the next game by not showing everything your deck can do. While this can certainly happen in decks with Treachery too (hiding that in game 1 can be very advantageous in games 2 and 3), it's a more black and white thing. Choosing not to play Treachery is intentionally downshifting the power of your deck one gear, almost regardless of what else is happening in game. This is fundamentally why I find super high powered cards less interesting to play with.

So yeah. I want to find a way to blend these advantage together, but they feel in some ways diametrically opposed. After running my midrange cube in it's current basic state for over a year, and after drafting my retro cube with friends - I think I prefer the depth that my midrange list offered from a game play perspective. There are absolutely things I prefer in the retro list though. I want to be very clear about that. I'd be unhappy just going back to midrange Magic. Hence my current dilemma. I did a "Pandora Pack" idea (introduce powerful cards via conspiracy cards), and that was a stop gap - allowing me to have a midrange modern list and turn it semi-combo. But the spell > creature paradigm is missing.

Where I'd love to find a way to merge these concepts might be by tackling it the way we generally look at archetype support. We look at color pairs and decide which mechanics we will push. Can something similar be done with NWO and non-NWO card design? My guess is something like this is far too ambitious and doomed to work only in theory . For much the same reason that you can't put in Mulldrifter and expect it to only get included in UW because that is where you decided that "ETB Value" belongs. If you put in powerful spell effects, creature decks will run them. If you put in powerful creatures, spell decks will run them. There just isn't anyway to prevent that outside making the power of these spells and creature linked to spell/creature-centric strategies. And while Wizards has definitely started exploring that in sets, I'm not sure the density yet exists to design a rare cube around.
 
Grillo_Parlante

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
Its important to remember that post-Lorwyn design is a school of thought, and it isn't exclusively limited to specific series of card printings. You can make an old-boarder list, max the number of ETB creatures in it (e.g. flametongue kavu) while curating spell power (probably on the dubious metric of GRBS) and get an entirely old boarder format that plays like an NWO format.

You could do the reverse as well.

The "retro" formula is a bit hard to nail down, because WOTC was developing, stumbling, and succeeding during that period. "What" magic was or was going to be, wasn't really clearly understood, and they were learning it as they went along. You would probably want to divide this into several sub-iterations. I think retro magic is defined more by that lack of focus, the design searching, and the creativity that went with that (for right or wrong).

With Lorwyn, they introduced a very structured vision of the game, built around mythics, ETBs, and planeswalkers: all intended to flow into a creature, or board state, focused game. It was a real re-invention of the game, that may have saved it financially. They've have been some flutters in that formula during the post lorywn era (certainly the pushed designs of titan era standard and jace taught them the boarders of ETB and planeswalker design), but more or less they have managed to stay on course, with little deviation.

To take it to an extreme, theoretical form, "retro" is going to be about the choice between using your mana to add to the board, or using your mana to generate CA. "Modern" is going to give you lots of options to break that rule, via planeswalkers and creature ETBs.

But thats an extreme, and requires us to anachronistically aggregate retro magic. True retro magic always was a hybrid of wandering, divergent ideas, the best of which would eventually coalesce into the slick polished game formula we have today.

It was just as much:




at times as it was




If you're going to merge the two, you're going to want to have some of the NWO elements, but not push them to the same suffocating extent that actually happened. You also might have to pick a specific "era" of retro magic to emulate.
 
ahadabans

ahadabans

Update to post #44 above.

Been a little while since I've done much with cube, but with the new set coming out I figured a small diversion is good from my other project (not Magic related). There's also a chance we may get a small FNM group going again semi-monthly. So I want to try and get some work in on this before that happens (if it happens). It would be great to be able to bust out a new list and know it's had some solid work put into it.

As I mentioned in my last long post, I've been stuck with a dilemma about the direction I really want my cube to go...

The retro list was really sweet to play with and I think I need to go out of my way to keep the heart of that in this next iteration. There's something super satisfying about taking cards that are either a bit weak by today's standards or clunky or which require specific builds to really abuse (or all of the above) - but that all have very high ceilings - and making something come together around that. Again, my midrange cube got to the point where it was just too damn easy to make good decks. Games were competitive and it was satisfying from that perspective. But I miss that trial and error experimental vibe from more combo oriented cards. You really got punished by trying to get too cute with deck lists in my midrange cube. Wasn't a fan of that.

This is a delicate thing because some things are inherently super powerful and will push out weaker archetypes. Tinker into Inkwell Leviathan sets a high bar. If your deck is a janky cute combo thing doing something random, it's only going to get magnified by having broken tinker in your cube. So I'm pretty sure any attempt to take some of the broken stuff that for sure works well and merge it with a very sandboxy type of design is ultimately destined for failure. I don't think I care though. I still feel like there's a place you could get to where there's a lot of interesting things going on and the tinker/inkwell deck isn't just ruining your meta.

I'll try not to keep babbling. OK, I want to push the power a bit from the retro list but still keep creatures from just being straight up best-in-slot. I'm also pushing the envelop on a few things I've never done before. Delver of Secrets is a card that inspires an entire archetype. I hate the DFC design with a passion, but I want to play with this card. So it's going in. I even toyed with running Sun Titan (as it's likely the crappiest Titan) simply because there's a lot of deck ideas that come to me when I think about how I'd use it.

Without further ado, I present to you a hybrid of old and new... The Original High
http://www.cubetutor.com/viewcube/63093

I named it that because the goal was to recreate some of the wonder that we all had when we first played cube - the sheer power and depth of running some of the best cards in Magic combined into one draft environment. My midrange cube lost that sense of wonder as I kept pushing it to play like a well oiled powered limited environment.

So couple things to point out:

1. List will likely change as I do more testing. I'm sticking with the deck lists I posted in post #44 as my design parameters. Those are the 12(?) archetypes I'm pushing for and the goal is to bring in cards that support as many of them as possible (with as much overlap as I can without just choking the cube with nothing but value-goes-in-everything cards).

2. Sphinx of the Steel Wind is probably a horrible idea. I know. But I had someone tell me they are not excited about building tinker/reanimate decks without cards that are super good against aggro (Bogardan Hellkite not good enough??? Inkwell Leviathan???). It just seems stupidly oppressive and unbeatable for several decks. I don't know though. I worry less about balance with a list like this honestly (pun not intended but that too actually).

3. Emrakul, the Promised End was tempting but after the backlash from the last session I think it has to go. Cool design on that card though. I really dig it. Cards like that actually make me thankful for NWO.

4. So I'm keeping to the brown border only artifacts (semi-cheating on SoLaS and colored artifacts). It's somewhat jarring now that I've bleed in quite a few modern creatures though. Phyrexian Colossus for example, looks stupid next to every other fattie in this list. But it still seems busted good on T2 with channel, and there's almost no artifact destruction in this list so it won't be easily answerable (really just white or edicts). I'm going to test it specifically and see if it wins games coming down early.
 
ahadabans

ahadabans

Quick update... still fiddling quite a bit with the list but I think I'm down to the final 5% tweaking stage.

Looking at the rough deck lists I have, it's quite clear how different this meta will be from my midrange cube (despite a lot of card overlap). And how much that is changing my card evaluations. For those who haven't read this blog post, I think it's really thought provoking and worth a read (I posted this in the main forum already, but wanted to link it here as well):

http://mtgcube.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-two-kinds-of-cube.html

The basic take away is that the more high powered or "broken" you go, the weaker midrange as a theater gets. And by that I mean winning games through attrition with "fair" decks stops being viable at a certain point. I'm using "fair" here to include most synergy based strategies we focus on with lower powered cubes - essentially riptide style value based strategies.

Anyway, I wanted to mention how much better tutoring effects are in this cube. Take something like Lim-Dul's Vault. It's not something I would use a gold slot on in my midrange cube (where the card power level is much flatter). For combo focused decks though, the card disadvantage is well worth it because the amount of consistency that type of effect provides the deck is so valuable. Vault in particular also has a ton of super interesting interactions because of the index effect - like sequencing land draws or putting a creature where you want it for Oath of Druids or something similar.

What is becoming clear though is that this list will be fairly hard to draft well. New players will have to navigate difficult interactions and avoid building bad decks. Much more so than my midrange cube. That was sort of the point I guess, but I can see that not working out well depending. I put together 12 decks and at least 3 of them were super clunky and didn't play well. And I designed the list!

I'll end with some more thoughts on storm. I finally got a reasonable list together and it highlights some of the problems with storm in general. Nothing we don't already know. It's very feast or famine though. I'm finding it very difficult making good mulligan decisions too. Since I'm just gold fishing, I'm playing aggressive and assuming I have to combo off by T5 (unless I use some of this for disruption or whatever - like grapeshot my opponents board position, etc). And hitting T5 is not all that easy. When it works, it's pretty fun to see how all the pieces fit together to perpetuate the whole thing like a chain reaction - that is awesome because you see the depth to the core game mechanics. When it fizzles though, it's equally disappointing. One game I had a 6 storm Mind's Desire and flipped 5 lands and a mox. Ouch. Another time I flipped 6 high powered spells, including two other storm cards and I could have killed an entire table.

More than likely storm is just a bad idea. Building a solid deck is possible but when it happens, no one will have fun playing against it. Much like Emrakul, the Promised End. I believe it looks much better on paper.
 
StormEntity

StormEntity

Yeah, I put a lot of work in to my Cube Eternal and after getting a few drafts in...I think I'll need to scrap the whole thing. Combo cubes really just kinda have some inherent issues. As one of my drafters put it: "I'm worried that I'll draft my combo deck, and my opponent will have drafted a better combo deck, and I'll just lose." Also they're really complicated, and we mostly play stoned, and I'm the only one with extensive combo experience (see avatar). Currently turning my attention to something a lot more fair--as much as I love drafting and playing combo decks, it really just asks so much of beginners and even experienced players who don't play combo often.
 
ahadabans

ahadabans

So in the combo list I added another 20 or so modern frame cards. Finally broke on the artifact restriction (old border). Running maybe 50/50 now on old vs new cards. Still needs a little tweaking, but it's pretty close now I think.
http://www.cubetutor.com/viewcube/63093

I also did a large adjustment on the dual land section. I posted this in the main forum, but I'm incorporating a partial cycle concept so I can run a bunch of different types of lands but only take up a few number of slots. Here's basically what I decided on - each one of these is focused on a single color (so 4 dual lands instead of the full 10). That gets me 5 different land types for 20 cube slots. So here is what I ended up with:

{W}{W} - Temples (Scry Lands)
{R}{R} - Fast Lands
{B}{B} - Pains
{G}{G} - Creature Lands
{U}{U} - Bounce Lands

And it gives each color a bit of additional identity too. Some color combinations will be entirely control focused (two ETB tapped lands - like UW is Temple and Bounce). Others mixed and other aggressive (like red/black). I still have the full fetch/shock cycles to round out my 40 base fixing lands. Tossing in the allied Tangos as place holders for the Bicycles. Those are super ideal for Astral Slide. Once the full cycle is printed, I will probably swap the Temples for the white Bicycles and go back to 360.

I have 13 test decks which use every single card in the cube. They are not all super optimized, but they all gold fish reasonably well. Next step will be to build them all with physical cards and play games with them to test archetype viability. That will be harder to do than in my midrange list where I was focusing on modules and simply because combo is inherently unbalanced. We'll see how motivated I am to go through all this work. First step is posting each deck list which I'll do one at a time with a short writeup.

More to come.
 
ahadabans

ahadabans

Mono Black
One of my favorite archetypes. Actually building a true mono black deck with zero splashes is fairly difficult to do in a real draft. So this list is idealized to some extent. That said, you can splash a bit and not be hurt terribly. It revolves around Pox style gameplay. Black has recursive creatures and a ton of ways to create degenerate CA (usually at the cost of life). Gary is the ideal card for this sort of deck and usually what you absolutely want to be slamming once you hit 5 swamps. This is a very effective deck in my midrange list. In a combo list, I think there will be times it's not fast enough. But the disruption will likely be even more effective, especially against things like storm.

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BUG Reanimator
This - or some flavor of it - was probably the best deck in my original cube. Primarily due to a very clunky mana curve (so aggro wasn't viable), and an overabundance of reanimation spells and targets. I do very much like playing this deck. It's combo, so tickles that spot for me. It's also got some decision making - like which finisher to use depending on the matchup and how to sequence your spells to get the pieces you need. In high powered lists, there are better finishers than I'm running here. But that is a theme of this cube - strong spells and weak(er) creature cards. This list plays three primary targets which all have really sweet advantages/disadvantage. Sky Swallower is untargetable so better against decks with a lot of spot removal. Hellkite is a personal favorite. It can wipe the opponent's board and leave you a 5/5 flyer, or it can do 5 now (or 10 with shallow graves). Borborgymos is new and has tested extremely well. If I have lands in hand, I generally want that over Hellkite since I can discard them in response to something. He's also better with shallow graves where you can do 20 points in one turn if you get lucky. Very swingy but also generally gives your opponent time to kill him. Sweet card. Final note, I've excluded the poorly worded reanimation spells. Even fairly auto include options like Necromancy and Animate Dead. Shallow Graves is really fun and a reasonable replacement and exhume has become one of my favorite spells due to it's elegance. Twisted Abomination and Krosan Tusker are very good cards because they are both threats for living death and land smoothers early. I miss playing with cards like this which is one of the inspirations for this list.

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Storm
Sigh... I really struggle drafting and playing this deck. It's complicated. It's like expert level Sudoku. I love Sudoku, but every time I try to do one of the super hard mode ones, I get frustrated and usually screw it up at some point. That's storm. This puzzle I want to solve that I often don't end up solving. The list below is spread over 4 colors. Biggest problem with this list is just living long enough to combo. By T6, it's not too hard (sans disruption) to have enough mana/pieces to just draw your whole deck. It does fizzle from time to time even in the best of scenarios, but there's so much degeneracy here you are usually good. Surviving 6 turns without dying to a lot of decks is pretty optimistic. I really feel that's true. So viability of this sort of deck - if you can even draft one this focused - is going to largely depend on how well you draw and how well your opponent pilots their deck. Long story short, I think good players will likely punish even good storm decks most of the time. With fast mana, this is likely less true since speeding this deck up two turns makes it virtually unbeatable. High Tide is a card that works really well in heavy blue lists. This list has a lot of islands considering it's 4 colors, but not an optimal list. I've gold fished this deck probably 20 times and I've won with high tide. It's also been in my hand useless. I feel like making a control deck that stormed later on would probably work against a lot of stuff and be less variable as a deck. But I don't know. I still hold that the single best card in here is Dream Halls. I want that in play as soon as possible and from there you can just go nuts. Cruel Ultimatum should be pretty much anything else in a list like this, but it doesn't go in any other deck I built and I want to put it in the cube. Might go at some point though. Guttersnipe is surprisingly effective here. Can speed bump worst case scenario, and if it lives all your spell chaining makes it lethal.

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Bant Opposition
This started just Simic, but I tossed in a couple white cards to help the tempo side a bit (sunscape and Armageddon). Opposition is broken so pretty much any list that gets it in play with dudes is going to have a good chance of winning. Decks with lynchpin cards tend to live and die by those cards. The creatures in this deck are not amazing (offensively) and if the deck plays fairly, it will lose to most things I feel. Bounce though is very powerful against top end heavy decks, so it's hard to say how will this will actually do. With a board lead, an Armageddon tends to end the game. My experience tells me it likely plays better than it looks but maybe not. Yavimaya Elder is an old school "Good stuff" card. Should probably replace that was something more aggressive, but there's nothing I want to really run and Elder slots into other decks (like the rock). There's a nod here to what I understand is an old school combination - Erhnam Djinn and Armageddon. Glad that sort of worked out the way it did. I didn't really plan it, it sort of just came together that way.

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Esper Tinker Control
This is likely better with Show and Tell and See Beyond, but both cards are in other decks. So this build is less combo and more control. I'm on the fence about making Seat of the Synod be a squadron pick (2 of). I will almost certainly do that with the cycling lands, mainly because Astral Slide desperately needs them (but more on that deck later). Barring an early tinker, this deck will probably just lose to other combo decks (storm should wreck this). It has enough anti-agro tech that this is probably a good matchup though. Grand Architect is a sweet card. Goes in this deck well because it allows you to slam out Tinker targets and/or large mana rocks. Plus it holds off weak aggro attacks. It goes in some heavy Ux tempo builds too. Just a great design and a card I always want to try and include in my cube lists. Gifts+Unburial was a late add. In theory, that works with Tinker but it's loose and probably should be something else. Not much more to say here. This is a boring deck. Sphinx just ends the game against aggro. Leviathan on T3 is not as unfair but it's certainly a hard card to answer. In my midrange list, cards like these two are really oppressive. In this list, I don't know if that is the case.









 
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Goblins!
Super linear drafting at it's best. RDW is largely replaced by this deck in this cube. And while that reduces drafting choices to some extent, I think this solves a problem that many cubes have (specifically that RDW and variants are too good and too easy to build). We've gotten a massive number of 2 power 1 drops and high power-to-cost ratio beaters in red and other colors. Many lists super focused on these types of cards can sleep walk to really tight aggro lists. Without getting too deep into this, I feel this is pushing creativity out of cube in general because the bar you need to clear to compete with easy to build aggro decks keeps going up. Goblins doesn't solve this problem entirely since this deck can combo a win on T4, making it faster than many aggro decks. But it's also pretty clunky when cards and lands aren't flowing. Lands in particular. You miss land drops a few times and this deck just falls apart. Lackey enables some truly degenerate plays. Recruiter is the easiest card to misplay because if you don't have the land you need it locks you out of the game. Often you'll be faced with a precarious choice. You have warchief and things are 1 cheaper, so you technically have the land to cast what you need. But one spot removal card and recruiter locks you out of land for 3 turns and the game is basically over for you. This deck really should run 17 lands in fact. 16 is probably not correct. But that's how it worked out in this exercise. Goblin Welder has no place in this deck (I guess he windmill slam hoses tinker if Sphinx is the target). He's a crappy 1/1 goblin, but the card I feel will find a place in something broken at some point, so I want to run it. Hellrider is really strong. Looks sort of silly next to these janky red creatures. But that is a really interesting design. You see hellrider and know how busted it is. Then you see all this chaff for red creatures and wonder how you can get a decent creature suite around it. And that's drafting aggro while having to actually solve a problem versus just auto drafting a solid aggro list like most cubes allow.









 
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The Rock
An Abzan list. Seige Rhino is perfect here but I'm not running it. The creature is a tiny bit too pushed. That said, if this deck is just really bad against the field, I might bring it in. Recurring Nightmare is surprisingly limp in this cube (just in general). I'm sure there's a really great cube deck with it here somewhere, but the list isn't bursting with value creatures or ridiculous ETB effects. This particular deck only has 14 creatures, so probably a tad light for nightmare anyway. Survival combos well with it though. My favorite interaction is lark/guide. Recruiter of the Guard finds so many things too, like Eternal Witness to rebuy the best card for your matchup. Wake/Death Grasp is a combo finish option later in the game. It's old and slow but I think it works here. Genesis allows for some pretty obscene value play later on when mana is flowing (esp with wake). This deck is not lacking in mana sinks. It could really use demonic tutor, but I stole that for storm. Still, there's enough tutoring and card draw that most games you should be able to find cards you need. It's a slow deck. Storm will wreck this. Aggro should lose. Control will have it's hands full because the sinks and CA here coupled with life gain makes this resilient. I see some deckings in this decks future (for or against). The rock is a really fun deck to pilot as you feel like you always have options and answers for most everything. It feels sophisticated. Deed is a card that has lost a lot of power as cubes have gotten faster (and walkers more numerous). In a cube like this though, I think it still holds a lot of it's value.

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White Weanie
There's something just pure about a straight WW deck. Like if this deck works in your cube, then you did something correct? I don't like this deck. Like, at all. But it is nostalgic for me (playing against it anyway). This isn't quite a hate bears type of deck - and I thought about taking it farther that way - but Thalia is an issue for many decks - storm in particular. Mother of Runes is annoying as hell. WW just has a high annoyance level about it in general even if you aren't full hate bears. Maybe I just really hate WW? Balance is the most broken thing going on here (that and an unanswered Silverblade Paladin I guess). It's especially gnarly if you get an advantage, and orb away your lands before it resolves. Basically make your own armageddon/persecute combo. But for the most part it plays fair but does so very efficiently. If your deck is clunky and you face WW, you will probably lose. And you'll feel bad about it because you basically lost to a bunch of no-frill beaters doing nothing truly broken. I originally had both solitari's in here. And I might go back to that. But I like Seeker of the Way. It's just a lot more interesting to me. That said, part of the appeal of this deck is just dropping dudes and swinging. Not every deck has to be complex and this is about the easiest deck to pilot. I chose Crusade over the technically superior honor of the pure. Mainly because I want WW to really be WW and not some splashy thing that just good-stuffs an aggro list. You want all the efficiency of white? Commit to the color. Another argument for both soltari's now that I think of it. I had one sword in this cube originally but I removed it. Felt out of place and I honestly don't think this deck (or any other deck) needs it. I've also gutted so many disenchant effects, it was probably necessary. I'm not sure how good Enduring Renewal really is. But if you get dudes in play and drop that, you pretty much can't run out of gas. So it seems like it provides inevitability (it also triggers prowess and helps feed you more cards that feed prowess - neat interaction). In addition, there is BS stuff like Martyr of the Sands and possible cross BS with Pox/Goblin Bombardment. It's as close as I can take WW and try to integrate it with combo. Speaking of Martyr... that as an opener sacrifice early for 15 life is brutal against anything trying to win by doing damage. Card is dumb in a list like this.

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