CML's Cube (405, polychromatic)

[CML]

i also wanna add some fixing to the utility lands, so i'm throwing in vivids (+4 random other ones). i gotta say last wednesday i blew it with the utility land format and it was still great; tomorrow i'll put them in the middle of the table and my playgroup will just have to deal with reaching for beers

 

[Jason Waddell]

Drink spillage is the #1 cube hazard. Before I cut manlands and filterlands from my cube, I used a bit of a grab bag for the extra fixers that was pretty fun. I liked playing with the really random lands like:

etc.

These are all fun in their own ways, and you feel awesome when you fetch Bosk or reveal a relevant creature to make something ETB untapped.

 

[Jason Waddell]

in

thornling
malfegor
lightning angel
baneslayer angel
vela the night-clad
battle screech
honor of the pure
call of the herd
tombstalker
devoted caretaker
mistral charger
gore-house chainwalker
chain of smog
greater gargadon
jinxed choker
myr battlesphere
sorin, lord of innistrad
thornling
eight-and-a-half-tails
woodfall primus
grave titan

out

slumbering dragon
boros charm
grand abolisher
hermit druid
planar collapse
savageborn hydra
scroll rack
serra avenger
tracker’s instincts
borborygmos enraged
illusory angel
firespout
mirror entity
smokestack
genesis
kokusho, the evening star
wildfire
elderscale wurm
who/what/when/where/why
sprouting thrinax
master of the wild hunt

thoughts?

Maybe you could go into some of the thinking behind these cuts? The strangest one to me is taking out Boros Charm for Lightning Angel. Boros Charm is a lot of fun to play with, and is much more likely to make a deck. However, I'm certainly not of the opinion that cube should have no three color cards, it's just a matter of cohesion. As you play a high-density of fixing, I don't mind Lightning Angel so much.

I too ran who/what/when/where/why for a while, and didn't really care for it. It's one of those cards that entered the cube collective consciousness at some point, and it is cute, but pretty unnecessary.

EDIT: I also edited your post to wrap card tags around your list, so hopefully it will be easier for people to grok the changes.

 

[Eric Chan]

Did Wildfire not end up working out? I did a cube comparison the other night, and actually added Wildfire back into my own cube when I saw you were running it.

 

[CML]

d'oh, thanks for the card tag wrap.

boros charm wasn't really doing much for the aggro decks, they usually just wanted another threat. situational and hard to cast = meh.

i threw in lightning angel because of her performance at the modern gp! she's a really strong card, one of the few creatures from that era that's aged well at all.

actually i'll just do individual card thoughts (redundancy removed from IN, two new cards added / one new card taken out)

in

thornling-- fun 5 w/ activated abilities, the only playable 'ling' (aetherling and windreaver notwithstanding)
malfegor-- wanted a splashy 6 (of course rotate in and out)
lightning angel-- see above
baneslayer angel-- seems dangerous, but wasn't OP when i put her in beforehand. certainly powerful but also worse than reveillark
vela the night-clad -- tryin a splashy 6
battle screech -- wanna support tokens again, and this is a powerful 'spectral procession' that isn't god-awful on manabases
honor of the pure -- see screech
call of the herd -- per jason's rec (need easy-to-cast green 3's that are beaters!) graveyard synergy + CA is gravy
tombstalker -- was gonna be ghoultree but then i figured out this guy is infinity times as awesome
devoted caretaker -- trying per another rec on this forum
mistral charger -- actually gonna be spined thopter, like white needs more 1W beaters and less WW ones but thopter is even easier to cast
gore-house chainwalker -- soft spot for colorless + colored cc 2-drops, this card was pretty good a couple standard formats ago. like this card is by no means great or even mechanically interesting but the chainwalkers of the world are a big reason why the whole of my cube is greater than the sum of its parts
chain of smog -- i love it!! another rec from this forum
greater gargadon -- ditto
jinxed choker -- ditto
myr battlesphere -- ditto
sorin, lord of innistrad -- ditto (sorin was in beforehand as a kind of watered-down elspeth)
eight-and-a-half-tails -- flexible card with difficult decisions, well worth the WW cost imo (it had been in for months)
woodfall primus -- rotating in fatties
grave titan -- rotating in fatties (this guy as the best 6 of all time except maybe WC Engine is pushing it, though)
all suns' dawn -- maybe with a stronger gy theme this card will get played? it never used to back in the cube's infancy
olivia voldaren -- my lazy college freshman friend finally gave her back to me, hooray

out

slumbering dragon -- bleh doesn't do much
boros charm -- see above
grand abolisher -- bleh doesn't do much
hermit druid -- the effect seems really powerful but nobody played with him, when i cut him from my loam deck it was the last straw
planar collapse -- bleh
savageborn hydra -- enough RG beaters (though i do love double strike)
scroll rack -- see hermit druid
serra avenger -- too situational, but a sweet card (i might be wrong)
tracker’s instincts -- see hermit druid
borborygmos enraged -- rotating out fatties
illusory angel -- not good enough
firespout -- rotating out sweepers
mirror entity -- i didn't like this card as much as i thought i would
smokestack -- rarely played, though extremely funny. i'm in the minority in actually liking this card a lot
genesis -- rotating out fatties (gy theme is strong enough already that i can spare a slot)
kokusho, the evening star -- rotating out fatties
wildfire -- this deck never really came together (i'm very light on mana rocks) and i have enough LD, incl. armageddon & boom/bust for sweepers
elderscale wurm -- rotating out fatties
who/what/when/where/why -- this was one of my favorite cube cards for awhile, but it may have been left behind. who knows
sprouting thrinax -- a terrific card with a lot of things going on, will probably rotate back in
master of the wild hunt -- trying other 4's this week, will probably rotate back in
precursor golem -- will probably rotate back in

UTILITY LANDS
---
i'm gonna stay with 6 picks / person out of 63 cards (7 / person), with the draft going per jason's suggestions on cfb. i wanted some fixing that would be slower and 'situational' (i.e. oriented towards the control decks). i also got to toss in another weird land in shinka. as i see it, why not have a bunch of these lands? it's not like they're competing for draft slots in your cube -- that they aren't is the entire point of moving them out to their own draft. new lands:

shinka, the bloodsoaked keep
nimbus maze
river of tears
calciform pools
dreadship reef
vivid crag
vivid meadow
vivid grove
vivid marsh
vivid creek
cut: gargoyle castle

edit: decided to go with mindslaver instead of grave titan this time. how does everyone like mindslaver? it's miserable in constructed but a friend of mine whose opinion i value (if not trust) has told me it leads to some pretty fun turns

 

[HannesVersmissen]

I have a little question about an interaction in CML's Cube:
If i have an empty hand and a Blood scrivener in Hand, and a stinkweed imp in the grave, can i have Blood scrivener trigger in my draw phase, then use the first of the two draws to Dredge, and have the last card trigger Blood scrivener again ?

 

[CML]

i think so. (it's not a trigger but a replacement effect, but i'm pretty sure when the draw resolved you'd mill 5, get the imp, draw another card, and lose 1 life, in that order but all at the same time, if that makes sense w/r/t how state-based stuff works.) funny if you cast sphinx's with x=5 hellbent w/ bartleby you get 10 cards and gain 0 life.

 

[HannesVersmissen]

if i'm correct it checks for each draw seperatly. (or so i've read)

 

[CML]

really! i guess i don't understand the rules. (i've heard something like this before and would be surprised if you weren't right but i have no idea why.) JUDGE???

 

[Nlin]

Jason asked me to chip in on this ruling.

/judge mode start
First of all lets be clear that Dredge and the ability of Blood Scrivener are replacement effects. So they don't trigger as has been suggested.

Replacement effects create "new rules" (in most cases) overwriting rules in the game. This means that if an event is about to happen, the replacement effect kicks in and makes sure something else happens. (Most replacement effects we know as players are Damage Replacement effects and good ol' Regeneration is also a subtype of a Replacement Effect, namely a replacement for when the creature would die...)

Now the difficult part is when multiple replacement effects affect the same thing. In this case: a draw. The rulings are quite lenient: the affected player can choose in which order the replacement effects happen.

That means we can either choose to let Dredge kick in and than Blood Scrivener his ability or the other way around. (Do note that Dredge is "you may" and Blood Scrivener kicks in anyway)

The next problem is the Dredge ability... It works to replace one of the draws, but read it the reminder text good! You will return the card with Dredge back to your hand, meaning during the second draw you won't have a card in GY available that can replace that second draw by instead dredging. (Unless you would have 2 Dredge sources in your GY)

To what does this result? Simple as a player you have the choice to replace the drawing with the following options:

Draw 2 (We decide not to dredge) [loose a life]
Draw 1, Dredge (We decide to let Blood Scrivener to "go off" first, and than we have 2 draws for which we choose the second one to be replaced by a Dredge) [loose a life]
Dredge, Draw 1 (We decide to let Blood Scrivener to "go off" first, and than we have 2 draws for which we choose the first one to be replaced by a Dredge) [loose a life]
Dredge, Dredge (We decide to let Blood Scrivener to "go off" first, and than we have 2 draws for which we choose both to be replaced by a Dredge) [loose a life and only possible if you have 2 dredge sources in the GY]
Dredge only once (We decide to let Dredge "go off" first, the Blood Scrivener has no effect right now, when placed second) [don't lose life!]

/judge mode end

 

[Eric Chan]

Holy crap, a judge actually ran over to answer the judge call! I'm floored.

 

[CML]

ow, i sprained my brain!!

i wonder how people who dont play on modo learn the rules?? it'd be as impossible as memorizing 10,000 cards without playing for me at least

 

[Jason Waddell]

Yeah, MODO is probably the best teaching tool for learning about priority / when you can actually cast shit.

 

[CML]

IN

more red spells!
---
chandra's phoenix
hound of grisebrand
hell's thunder

fun graveyard stuff!
---
gravecrawler
geralf's messenger
breaking / entering
unearth

gy hate / trinket mage package!
---
pithing needle
nihil spellbomb
loaming shaman
withered wretch
trinket mage
samurai of the pale curtain

f it
---
rites of flourishing
diregraf ghoul
battle screech
angel of jubilation

OUT

all suns' dawn
explore
domri rade
spined thopter
crucible of worlds
pyrokinesis
mindslaver
spitting image
ranger of eos
call of the herd
dragon broodmother
reckless spite
living death
hypnotic specter
vela the night-clad
rhox war monk
the mimeoplasm

 

[CML]

(making some pretense of color balance). that's all for today!

in

brimstone volley
serra avenger
rhox war monk
fire // ice
call the skybreaker
assemble the legion
gisela, blade of goldnight
boom // bust

out

bloom tender
daybreak ranger
increasing savagery
seize the soul
night’s whisper
corpse dance
chain of smog
death’s shadow

 

[Jason Waddell]

Ah, Chris, you're such a tinkerer, I love it. Serra Avenger was out of your cube for about 24h?

You know, I tried Living Death for a long time and it never came together. Probably one of those cards you really need multiples of.

 

[CML]

'unemployed like a boss' i always say. wizards should hire me but then i'd respect them too much to work for them.

that's a far-out observation about living end. you and i like to dredge and we still had roughly the same experience where the card was too situational -- it might be as simple as 'either too good or too bad.' (imagine a hypothetical card that costs 3BB and wins half the time and loses the other half -- i think LE, as splashy and cool as it is, is too far towards that extreme.)

multiples eh, travis woo-style? are we making monstrous carabids and pale recluses too? what if the non-cascade version was legal in modern?

 

[Jason Waddell]

I just view it as one of those build-arounds you can't actually build around because you only have one copy.

 

[Dom Harvey]

How much trouble do you have forming sufficiently deep assessments of new cards given your constant rotation of them (which I like in general, it just carries some obvious problems)?

 

[CML]

dom: some. i rely heavily on my playgroup for feedback and analysis.

 

[CML]

Today we cubed with 4 people. How did we make it hilarious and great? We drafted five packs and sixty-card decks. I highly recommend this variant. The decks were hilarious.

The Loam deck is a giant pain the ass to pilot and it seems apparent to me that the success of mid-range decks in Cube is based on how many sweepers you have and not a lot else. This is a depressing conclusion and I hope someone can prove me wrong.

Loam and Wasteland was bested several times, so that kind of thing is probably OK, as just another tool in a deck's bag of tricks. It fits well with my design philosophy, surprisingly, because it almost never 'takes over a game' in a way that is somehow worse than another win-con.

My playgroup wants me to double up on certain pieces of graveyard hate. This makes sense, as, well, why not. Who doesn't want another Scavenging Ooze? It's less stupid than having a Tormod's Crypt.

I had an insight about planeswalkers: the nature of their repeated effect makes them extremely sensitive to balance calibration, since it's something that happens every turn. Every buff or nerf is magnified, and that's why they're either $2 or $150.

Chain of Smog was a major hit! The utility lands were decently powerful (though there was a complaint about Dust Bowl, if a game gets to a point where Dust Bowl is good, I'm ok with Dust Bowl being good.) Black Zombies seemed sweet enough, though it was hard to tell given that we didn't get most of them.

The mill package was not loved. I guess it is kind of dumb. I'll probably take it out, though I want to keep Orb in (as well as Nemesis). Consuming Aberration seems like where we want this theme to be at. Jason was right!

I think that's all for tonight, I'll see if I can reconstruct the Cube-winning Yore-Tiller Reanimator deck at some point, though Naya Ramp was also not bad (especially against Wasteland). Really the main discovery is five-booster, sixty-card decks.

 

[Jason Waddell]

Interesting going with the 60 card decks. Did you not find it repetitive? Also, how was the competition for cards?

I've posted this elsewhere, but my current experimental 4-player format is:
Draft as usual (24 packs, 8 in Pack 1, 8 in Pack 2, 8 in Pack 3).
Every time you select a card, you also "hate draft" one card from the pack and put it back in the box (or the center of the table, wherever).

My "midrange" decks usually don't really run sweepers. They kill aggro by dropping moat-like Obstinate Baloths and other monsters. To me "midrange" means that they play the beatdown against some decks, and the controlling roll against others. I don't usually want a ton of sweepers in that configuration. I find the success of midrange to be far more a function of the number of two-for-ones you can jam in your deck (e.g. Flametongue Kavu).

 

[Eric Chan]

Jason beat me to the punch, as I was going to say that the best midrange decks here just jam all the two-for-ones they can find, along with efficient spot removal. It's literally Jund, right down to the colours. A winning formula here for months consisted of Terminate, Staggershock, Consuming Vapors, a bunch of Nekrataals, and a Garruk or two, all to stall until the pilot could slam a Grave Titan.

 

[CML]

Yeah, I guess it's kind of like how Modern Jund will run Jund Charm or sometimes Firespout or Junk with Zealous Persecution or Melira Pod with Orzhov Pontiff. I'd like my mid-range decks to function more like your guys', but even a deck loaded with Finks, Huntmaster, Bit Blast, and a few others usually 'looks good on paper' but then fails to do much of anything. I wonder if this is a function of aggro's power, kind of analogous to how Standard Junk Rites needs at least a bit of removal to beat Naya Blitz regularly...

Re. the hate-drafting idea, I want to instinctively dislike it because it has "hate" and "draft" and "Cube" in the same sentence -- what kind of decks do you guys end up with?

Edit: motherfuckers love Vivids!

 

[Jason Waddell]

Well, I've only done the hatedrafting thing once, but the decks pretty much felt like 8-man decks. The dynamic is a little different (you can't benefit as much from cutting a color, for example), but it's really just me floundering to find entertaining substitutes for a product that was designed around an 8-player draft.

I also can't really empathize with what you're talking about re. midrange because it is so far off from my experience. The basic "rule" of Magic is that you either want to be a little bit slower than your opponent or a lot faster, leading to the classic RPS of:
Aggro < Midrange < Control < Aggro.