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We may have our differences from time to time but I think we can all agree, cube is great.

Totally, and fwiw I've never drafted a cube and had an inherent 'bad' experience, or at least one related to the contents of the cube. (I've cubed with shitbags, so it goes.)
 
Totally, and fwiw I've never drafted a cube and had an inherent 'bad' experience, or at least one related to the contents of the cube. (I've cubed with shitbags, so it goes.)

There's a bit of douchebaggery at the elite levels of pretty much everything. And that goes for Magic as well. Best to find a cool group of people you like and build a cube for that group which caters to those people. My feeling is that will lead to the best Magic experience of your life and ruin all other formats for you forever (in a good way).
 
There's a bit of douchebaggery at the elite levels of pretty much everything. And that goes for Magic as well. Best to find a cool group of people you like and build a cube for that group which caters to those people. My feeling is that will lead to the best Magic experience of your life and ruin all other formats for you forever (in a good way).

There's a bit of douchebaggery on every level of everything involving gaming. My LGS pretty much closed down because the owner let shitbags who were shitty play without repercussions and pretty much made me and all my friends not want to go there anymore. I've dealt with it other places too involving the website and what-not--people talking shit on their videos/streams (lol), people talking shit in comments, people talking shit everywhere. Everyone is the greatest, no one else knows what they're doing, and I wonder who they are on the pro tour as I've never seen them there.

People really put the 'asshole' personality on a pedestal, but in reality all assholes eventually either end up alone or put in their place. Life is too short to be constantly derided over gaming and opinions or what not, and it's generally not worth getting up in arms about shit like cardboard. I'm not perfect with this mantra, but compared to some I feel like a saint because, boy, there are some *real* shit heads involved with the magic (and gaming) community.
 

James Stevenson

Steamflogger Boss
Staff member
I've played powered cube with people I like and hated it. I don't play magic these days because I almost always dislike it - the exceptions are some excellent games, or some dumb kitchen table fun, or cubes that suit my taste. Everything else just makes me wish I was doing something else.
 
Liking magic is an inherent requirement to liking cube, the previous statements are made assuming that personal requirement is fulfilled.
 
Power cubes tend to be problematic on their own due to the inherent lack of balance they provide. Who wants to be blown out on turn 2-3 without being able to do anything? Personally, I prefer to have more back and forth in my games or some sort of mini game added in, so that the games feel close/fun.
 
Midrange cubes lead to better games of Magic, I would agree with that. Powered cube can lead to better stories though. So I think to some extent it really depends on what your group is looking for.

My feeling is that everyone should try playing a powered (or semi-powered) environment at least once. It's quite fun. If you have a regular group, that might wear on you as it did with my group. You start to expect more from your cube sessions I guess, that's my interpretation of how things evolve (or did for us anyway). At first though, you can't help but be amazed at how much depth and synergy this game has just by throwing a bunch of powerful cards together. Pretty much all cubes - even bad ones - are still sweet.

We've spent a lot of time on Riptide trying to craft super deep metas - and I think many have done just that - but reality is 80% of that experience can be recreated by running a basic list of high powered cards focused on good stuff, with a decent mana curve and relatively low number of niche cards. It's going to be good.
 

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
We've spent a lot of time on Riptide trying to craft super deep metas - and I think many have done just that - but reality is 80% of that experience can be recreated by running a basic list of high powered cards focused on good stuff, with a decent mana curve and relatively low number of niche cards. It's going to be good.
I bet maintaining a basic list of high powered cards takes about 20% of the time of maintaining the average Riptide cube. The Pareto principle strikes again!
 
Midrange cubes lead to better games of Magic, I would agree with that. Powered cube can lead to better stories though. So I think to some extent it really depends on what your group is looking for.

My feeling is that everyone should try playing a powered (or semi-powered) environment at least once. It's quite fun. If you have a regular group, that might wear on you as it did with my group. You start to expect more from your cube sessions I guess, that's my interpretation of how things evolve (or did for us anyway). At first though, you can't help but be amazed at how much depth and synergy this game has just by throwing a bunch of powerful cards together. Pretty much all cubes - even bad ones - are still sweet.

We've spent a lot of time on Riptide trying to craft super deep metas - and I think many have done just that - but reality is 80% of that experience can be recreated by running a basic list of high powered cards focused on good stuff, with a decent mana curve and relatively low number of niche cards. It's going to be good.

For real. Drafted my powered cube last night--my deck had lotus/library, opponent's had mox x2 and recall. We didn't have one game end or even virtually end by turns 2-3, and those cards saw play pretty much every game. Is that always how it's going to be? No, of course not, magic is a game of variance. Is that how it is most of the time? In my experience, yes.
 
For real. Drafted my powered cube last night--my deck had lotus/library, opponent's had mox x2 and recall. We didn't have one game end or even virtually end by turns 2-3, and those cards saw play pretty much every game. Is that always how it's going to be? No, of course not, magic is a game of variance. Is that how it is most of the time? In my experience, yes.


Exactly. I know we can sometimes look down on the power max community, but we aren't being fair or honest about things when we do that. I'm not saying we shouldn't be exploring lower powered cubes because I think they have a lot to offer and the power max community is largely ignoring them, but powered Magic is also fun. And while not really balanced, singleton helps to mitigate a lot of that variance. As long as you are packing a lot of answers to things and avoiding some of the true polarizing "I win" conditions (Time Vault combo let's say), you should have a lot more fun games than bad ones. I've seen virtually every "unwinable" situation end a way you didn't expect. T2 Inkwell has been beaten and that's a great story when it happens. It's also really hard to get T2 inkwell even with all the pieces in your cube. To some extent, difficulty in assembling and then drawing things like that have a way of balancing things because truly degenerate early game scenarios like this cannot be recreated at will in a limited drafting environment.


I bet maintaining a basic list of high powered cards takes about 20% of the time of maintaining the average Riptide cube. The Pareto principle strikes again!

To some extent that is why I won't even go truly low powered because its too much work to craft. What Grillo does I do not have time for. That's not to say I don't enjoy seeing where he takes things and might one of these days steal one of his lists and play it with friends, but I won't be making one of my own that doesn't utilize a common suite of relatively high powered cards that I am really familiar with. It just isn't worth me tossing my experience with them and starting over. It also allows me to still use a lot of feedback on power max forums, especially if I dig back into older posts where cube lists were less powered.
 

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
I think the problem is less with power max and more when power maxers start to stile the exploration of other ideas.

Like I said in the other thread, cube is a casual kitchen table format, and as long as that remains the case, there is no real reason to be overly concerned about variance. In a certain sense, I don't think its possible for a midrange cube or power max cube to really be strictly "better" than the other, because they are both catered casual formats, just located at different parts of that quadrant. One offers the illusion of fairness acted out through more back and forth, while the other gets rid of it completely in the name of more memorable games.

On a certain level, I think most mtg's players expectation of the game is ultimately the ability to do unfair things to their friends, and the debate is more about how far to allow that, and not so much eliminating it.
 
Exactly. I know we can sometimes look down on the power max community, but we aren't being fair or honest about things when we do that. I'm not saying we shouldn't be exploring lower powered cubes because I think they have a lot to offer and the power max community is largely ignoring them, but powered Magic is also fun. And while not really balanced, singleton helps to mitigate a lot of that variance. As long as you are packing a lot of answers to things and avoiding some of the true polarizing "I win" conditions (Time Vault combo let's say), you should have a lot more fun games than bad ones. I've seen virtually every "unwinable" situation end a way you didn't expect. T2 Inkwell has been beaten and that's a great story when it happens. It's also really hard to get T2 inkwell even with all the pieces in your cube. To some extent, difficulty in assembling and then drawing things like that have a way of balancing things because truly degenerate early game scenarios like this cannot be recreated at will in a limited drafting environment.



One time I had a hand with Island Mox Mox Tinker. I had only one Tinker target in my deck which was Sundering Titan (so it goes when you're drafting, believe me I would've taken anything else) and on the draw guess what the first thing I draw is? Sundering Titan. It would've been insane there even only destroying one land, and instead we had a pretty balanced and fair game.

In terms of balance or excluding from a powered cube, there's only three categories I explicitly exclude:

1) Ante cards, as I don't like errata-ing cards even though Contract From Below is insane and would be a top pick if I played Ante.

2) Conspiracy cards, as I like to draft my cube on xmage when possible and they aren't compatible there, even though some Conspiracies are on power-level.

3) Time vault combo, as it's really boring and can take forever to combo off and assembling it is fairly mindless.


Otherwise, it's all fair game. To tie this into why we 'ignore' lower power cubes, there are a few points to address there.

1) When discussing cards, it's a lot easier to be on the same page than it is to make exceptions for every card and why someone is making an argument without having to go 'I run this type of cube and...' There have been instances where people have gotten into spats defending cards that everyone in the argument knows has no business in a powered cube for a variety of reasons, and then they say 'Please note that my cube is a such and such cube and therefore...' and then everyone either feels dumb or like they wasted time arguing shit there was no point in arguing. I think it's fun to see where certain cards fit when they can't fit into an unpowered/powered cube. If I'm trying to debate why I'm running a card vs not running it and we are talking about entirely different environments, then the debate carries less weight and you have to add a bunch of caveats. Some people like that, and that's great, but when Im specifically discussing power cubes I want to specifically be discussing them. It would be like debating on a BMW forum by saying 'well, my Jaguar...' which is adding almost nothing to what it an overall specific subject. And yes, there is a time and a place for those arguments, and there are connections that can be made there, but it's just easier to think powered/unpowered than it is to conceive every possible cube environment out there when discussing a card.

2) That being said, I really don't think lower powered cubes are ignored so much that their exposure is SO MUCH LESS than an unpowered/powered cube. If the majority of people's main experience is the unpowered/powered environment (which it is, and thank MODO for that), then the majority of debate and discussion will pertain to those cubes. This is less an opinion and more fact, so while I don't love the MODO cubes it's hard to ignore not only how many people are playing them but how few other cubes they play.

3) People who run powered cubes want to do broken things, and that's typically not what lower powered cubes are designed for. Like, you don't throw lotus and sol ring into your cube because you want an environment where explosive things can't happen. And frankly, people who play these cubes and continue to find them cool! Like, I think it's great when T2 Inkwell Leviathan happens, or someone draws a million cards off of Library, or s0meone goes infinite off Time Walk + Witness + Crystal Shard. I can't and won't speak for anyone else, but these types of games are FUN to me as I like the really broken degenerate shit. The stuff I don't like? Mana screw. Mana flood. i.e. the variance that occurs at all power levels of limited.

So yeah, bit of a book there, but I think there's less of an 'ignoring' or 'looking down' aspect from power cubers than implied and more so a 'I know what I like' frame of mind that is really only achieved from running a powered cube.
 
Good posts. I agree for the most part. I will just say though that there are high powered variants which exclude some of the more abusive cards which can still be quite degenerate even without them. I feel my cubes have always been outside the norm simply because I have never run a single walker in any of them even when I was running mox and higher powered creatures.

To Grillo's point - and I think this is becoming more true as power creep in cube continues - but I feel that endlessly "upgrading" cards in a cube is cutting off diversity in a bad way. For me at least, part of what made cube so sweet in the beginning was seeing some of these interactions sort of organically unfold. And for that to happen, you need time (games can't end in 4 turns) and things have to be somewhat slower and even clunky at times to allow some exploration in the game to happen. The tighter and more competitive lists get, the less room there is for that sort of thing. And I think the experience is lessened as a result.

I don't think if I were to have discovered cube today (versus 8 years ago) I would have been nearly as excited by it. Had I built one of these hyper power cubes, it would have struck me as pretty rigid and maybe even a tad unfun once the novelty of playing Upheaval wore off. This is my main objection to power max design and the never ending power creep thing. There's a sweet spot I feel in Magic where you have degeneracy but your average power level is low enough that you can still get away with being creative. The Goldilocks zone if you will.

And maybe this is where I can finally agree with Grillo on the level that cube is a casual format. I'd argue you could make it competitive if you wanted to, but I'm uncertain I would enjoy that version of it if I'm being honest. Part of the reason I started losing interest in my midrange list is it felt too efficient. I felt like I took it to a place where if you weren't doing what I had designed themes around, you were just going to lose. Maybe I didn't cross pollinate enough or whatever, but it was easier to create the illusion of choice in a higher powered list (if that makes sense). That's my experience anyway.
 
Totally, but instead of a different color of magic those cubes tend to feel like different shades. I played an unpowered cube the other night with no planeswalkers, and it felt like how an unpowered cube with planeswalkers would typically play out i.e. a lot of the archetypes you'd find in one showed in the other. I don't want to say it was unnoticeable, but it wasn't as drastic as a change of play experience as you would think. (Well, maybe not you since you also exclude planeswalkers :p)
 

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
There's a sweet spot I feel in Magic where you have degeneracy but your average power level is low enough that you can still get away with being creative. The Goldilocks zone if you will.

Yes. If you're going to have both fair and unfair decks in a format, the unfair decks can't be so powerful that the portion of the cube dedicated to fairness becomes effectively dead zones in the cube.

Thats the big advantage of having a tightened powerband and lower (but not too low) power: there is more room for the format to breath, and safely explore both aspects of the game without one obsoleting the other.
 
I still think it's important to differentiate between average power level and maximum power level.

Again going back to how cube started, the card pool was sparse. People were running River Boa and were happy about it (not exaggerating). And when that is the low bar you have for "filler", it's naturally opening up a lot of options because tossing Reveillark in those decks (magnitudes better than River Boa) makes a huge impact. It actually defines the deck. Lark doesn't define decks in powered cubes anymore. Some people are even considering cutting it now for "not doing enough". That's a really sad place for this format to be IMO.

So it comes down to this I feel. You have high powered cards (relatively speaking) in all cubes no matter what your average power level is (something is always "the best"). And what those cards drive (either raw power or synergy) largely defines how your meta will play and what it will revolve around. As average power level has crept up and up (and high end power level has not really gone up that much honestly - creatures to some extent but not really even all that much there from 2010), you wind up with a much more efficient environment where your loose value based lark decks are suddenly defined as "fair". So to me, it's even less about things like Inkwell Leviathan or Thragtusk and more a problem with Tireless Tracker's and the orgy of options in this power range at practically very CMC. We are now at a point where filler is really really good. So good that it's nullifying any reason to try and dig out synergy unless it's purely degenerate.
 

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
I think the issue that those formats are having is that they are starting to butt up against a ceiling. Recent printings have been so good, that the power gap is stating to naturally narrow, and now is at the most marginal point its been in years.

Once the power gap hits a certain point of narrowness, individual card identity begins to lose significance, and drafting starts to revolve around broad classes of cards, muting the individual distinctness of the cards. The distinct cards that were miles better than the rest of the pack, and which were filling in for the designers inability to create structure, by acting as build arounds, are now having a harder time functioning in that role.

This is the advantage of being able to lay out all 10 guilds, and devise distinct identities for them, rather than relaying on the magic of power max itself, which is doomed to consume itself at a certain point once the format boarders start to limit how far it can continue to grow.

To put simply, at a certain point its going to be like a format without rares or uncommons, because everything has been compressed together. Welcome to bland city.
 
This is the advantage of being able to lay out all 10 guilds, and devise distinct identities for them, rather than relaying on the magic of power max itself, which is doomed to consume itself at a certain point once the format boarders start to limit how far it can continue to grow.

Well said. To use anecdotal evidence: I have played in two pauper cubes. One was very archetype driven, and I happily spent months drafting that one weekly while trying out different archetypes and refining who to build the decks. The other one was the "good stuff" type that devolved into figuring out the right ratio of threats to answers. (It turned out aggressive threats and bolt was the correct answer for some reason.)

I feel that the reason that the first cube worked out better was that there were overt options (the ten guild pairs) and less overt options like a signet ramp deck. This gave newer players an obvious focal point that they could grab onto and end up having a good deck. The more they familiarized themselves with that deck the better they learned to build it. (This plays into one of Magic's design principles of having cards that are good, but appear bad on first glance.) The less overt options made it so that drafters did not feel like they are on rails (a massive problem in MM2 addressed in MM3) and encouraged drafters to explore other possibilities.

To address an earlier made point about unsupported archetypes not popping up: Is that really a bad thing or unexpected? It is a relatively safe assumption to say that a tuned list with archetypes will have support more strongly dedicated to those archetypes. It means that you know that drafters are not going to have a less enjoyable experiance because their sweet deck is a few cards off of what it could be and/or get ruthlessly stomped by supported/good stuff decks. If they are doing something that is obviously not supported, like horror tribal, that is more so on them than anything else. They know they are off the reservation. (Some people even have more fun going against the grain because they know exactly what it is).
 
To address an earlier made point about unsupported archetypes not popping up: Is that really a bad thing or unexpected?


I think for me it's just more finding a balance between what I'll call "scripted archetypes" and "organic synergy". One of the great parts about early cube for my group was uncovering synergy. There was no defined meta at all with my first cube or even really a strong focus by guild or whatever. It was largely just powerful cards thrown together. And people were combining things and discovering powerful interactions as a result. No one looked at WU and thought blink archetype is supported here. They saw ETB effects, momentary blink and then it just came together. Momentary Blink was not put there specifically to enable this archetype. It's a versatile card that generates value, blanks removal, resets blockers and generates additional CA from discard. It was put in the cube for that reason.

To some extent this is like with Legos. Some sets have a bunch of very specific pieces that really only make one thing - those are still cool and that one thing is usually super sweet. But the generic blocks- a little more boring perhaps- tend to have greater possibility and foster more creativity. I think you want a mix of these things. Good stuff cubes (which we've all probably wound up with or played at one time or another) I feel is an outcome of overly focusing on generic legos. On the opposite side, you have something like a combo cube with nothing but custom pieces that only work in their scripted archetype or set combinations. Somewhere in between all that is this place where you might have some general archetype focus but the really creative players can manufacture some new decks from interactions that are versatile enough to transcend your original intent. And those home brew creations have to be competitive enough otherwise you wind up with just the scripted stuff and this illusion that you can actually build outside the box decks.

I guess my point is it's very easy to overly focus on building archetypes and end up locking yourself out of some of the organics that a cube (especially ones with higher powered cards) will naturally foster. And I think that's missing part of what makes this format so awesome. At the same time, the endless power creep race is locking people out in a different way by making synergy less important compared to raw power.
 
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