It's perfectly cool to debate in this thread. If anything it will generate more ideas and shine light on other perspectives.
General Debate Topics
- Thread starter Jason Waddell
- Start date
It's perfectly cool to debate in this thread. If anything it will generate more ideas and shine light on other perspectives.
Downgrading Lightning Bolt to Burst Lightning, EChan style.
At least I upgraded from Shock to Burst Lightning!
Did you know I also downgraded <burn spell of choice> to Volcanic Hammer, and to this day still get questions about it from my players...
*runs away*
Did you know I also downgraded <burn spell of choice> to Volcanic Hammer, and to this day still get questions about it from my players...
*runs away*
I get this move actually.
I took out lightning bolt and I got rid of swords to plowshare. Both cards are just so much better than everything else that they look totally out of place to me. Now, downgrading to Volcanic Hammer is going a bit far for my tastes, but if you want to really limit instant burn, I can see doing it I guess.
I don't know if it is a cause for debate, but has anyone considering including/excluding 'pure' sweepers from cube (terminus, wrath, supreme v. etc).
I'm constantly shocked that the magic community accepts wraths as 'a thing' since they generate 2 3 and 4 for 1s while changing the aggro players entire game.
I'm constantly shocked that the magic community accepts wraths as 'a thing' since they generate 2 3 and 4 for 1s while changing the aggro players entire game.
I (as of last update) only have conditional sweepers: harsh mercy and winds of rath (unless I'm forgetting something).
Of course then I realise I have cyclonic rift and mizzium mortars are in there, so maybe I'm just an idiot.
I don't think wrath's are as powerful anymore due to all the resiliency with today's creatures. I'm not sure what percentage of the average cube's creature suite is a 2 for 1, but I bet it's a pretty high number. From persist/undying dudes, to ETB guys. Yeah, you get 2 or 3 for 1'd on a wrath, but half of them come back to life (hallowed burial/terminus aside) and the other half gave you CA when they came into play. So you really didn't get 3 for 1'd.
As I've stated previously, I think the bigger detriment to aggressive decks are the oppressive finishers (Grave Titan / Wurmcoil types) or the runaway CA engines that just completely undo board states for too little mana. Not to keep sounding like a broken record here but back in the day you couldn't play a single card that acted as a 5 or 6 power beater while also simultaneously fogging your opponent every turn. Those types of cards are MASSIVE tempo swings which IMO wreck the game state and throw a lot of basic fundamentals of Magic out the window (or at least move the goal post significantly).
FlowerSunRain
Contributor
I haven't removed them, but I've channeled that into red/black. The red ones are damage based and as such semi-conditional. The black ones are the usual brutal suspects (Damnation, Toxic Deluge, Living Death). Whether that stays in place remains to be seen, but I like this color pie direction so far. I think these effects are interesting and should go somewhere, but not everywhere and it works better with black (who can recur stuff) then with white (who loads the board).
It may sound strange to say this, but as an aggro player, I love playing against Wrath of God decks. It feels like the ultimate test to measure your deck up against - the impossible wall that you have to scale, as it were. Though, as ahadabans mentions, a lost has changed in the last seven years or so, and the pendulum has swung far enough that facing down a Wrath of God deck now isn't quite the challenge it used to be. Between hasty beaters, three-power one drops, pesky removal-proof creatures, bodies that generate card advantage, ginormous flash dudes, and cards that really stick it to you for killing things, I would say that a four-mana board wipe is merely fair now, as opposed to backbreaking. It's gotten to the point in my environment where control can't buy a win, and I've just added a fourth white sweeper in my 380 list to try and give the deck a little juice.
That's not strange at all. In the traditional roshambo model, it's aggro's best matchup (aggro > control > midrange > aggro).
I just looked at your cube and it looks like you have really solid aggro support (some multiples to help consistency - 3 bonesplitters wow). I'm not surprised control is struggling with that.
My two cents is your cube is probably pushing aggro hard enough to run the more oppressive finishers (Titans, maybe even Wurmcoil). That is going to help control more than sweepers will IMO. Wrathing the board really just buys time (but it can be played around and mitigated). Control needs to land a finisher that can keep board control, and I think that becomes even more important the more consistent you make aggro.
The only problem to adding stronger finishers is you generally tend to make midrange better against aggro (since midrange can cast those cards too, not just control) and you potentially wind up with just a different problem (aggro getting stomped by midrange). It's a delicate balance.
I don't think I intended to say that sweepers make the games unwinnable, just that I always found them a massive effect which was treated in a low-key manner.
Modern creatures have gotten a lot better, although I find myself increasingly wishing that I could escape the oppression of feeling like every deck is a midrange/turn sideways deck. Some people tried to get me to play standard recently, and I think it is the most utterly repulsive format I've ever encountered.
debate idea - how much should spells matter, or balancing power between creatures/spells? (problems with interactive threats in cube?)
Modern creatures have gotten a lot better, although I find myself increasingly wishing that I could escape the oppression of feeling like every deck is a midrange/turn sideways deck. Some people tried to get me to play standard recently, and I think it is the most utterly repulsive format I've ever encountered.
debate idea - how much should spells matter, or balancing power between creatures/spells? (problems with interactive threats in cube?)
Yup, back when I had Titans, the default best strategy was to ramp Birds of Paradise into Farseek into Inferno Titan, and then follow that up with Grave Titan. Adding large finishers and planeswalkers can easily buff midrange moreso than control. I figure that adding sweepers is the only surefire way to boost control without inadvertently making Good Stuff the best deck.
And aggro's best matchup isn't control; it's aggro-control (or tempo, or what Wizards wants to label "disruptive aggro"). If you play that matchup ten times with two traditional decks from each archetype, you'd be hard pressed to lose twice from the aggro side. Control, when built well, isn't typically a favourable matchup for aggro. At best, you can hope for maybe a 45% win rate or so; after all, their decks should be packed with walls, removal, and sweepers. If your win rate approaches 50% or more, chances are that the control deck is built incorrectly.
That's a good point actually. Midrange is the easiest deck to build so having it ramp into brokenness is just asking for problems. I get it. That's why I don't run any Titans or cards of that power level actually.
I think I read a recent article about the new roshambo Magic meta breakdown and they now have 5 theaters (which ties into your analysis - we are probably referencing the same thing). It used to be simpler and I think the dominant philosphy for cube (at least on MTGS) is the 3 theater model.
It doesn't really matter though. It's all hypothetical anyway.
So just another possible solution for you to help make control better is by giving them specific aggro hosers. Things like Pulse of the Fields or Raise the Alarm or Constant Mists. There are a lot of cards like that which will really weaken aggro's matchup with any deck that runs those cards (midrange doesn't want to run those cards generally so it shouldn't make that deck better). Your other option of course is taking some of the consistency away from aggro, but that is probably not desirable.
I've been against that being the only definition from day one. So you won't get any arguments from me.
Magic IMO at its core is a much simpler game that than. Each game really boils down to one guy being the beat down and one guy playing the role of the control player. And it doesn't honestly matter what deck you built when you went into the game either. At the end of the day, one guy has the better CA engine and/or better card quality. The longer the game goes, the better that guys odds become. He should be the control player if he wants to win. And following that, the other guy really has to use tempo to win. He has to pay the beat down. And if he made a super slow ass control deck with zero early game or he tries to slow play just because, he will get 3-0'd.
It really isn't more complicated than that. The only variance comes from mana flood/screw, play mistakes and the occasional silver bullet scenario (protection guy you simply can't answer, etc.). That's really it. That's Magic in a nutshell.
And this is why I want to make my cube play more in the middle of the two extremes (super fast aggro and CA-mania control being those extremes which lead to NID game outcomes for many matchup scenarios - these ruin the game IMO).
This is something I can identify with. I remember testing the Alternate Standard format that Jason invented a short while ago against Calvin, where we both had super fast aggressive decks. Every time I was on the draw, I was the control player, and played as such, removing his bodies one by one, using my medium-sized dorks to defend rather than attack, and trying to lock up the long game. Meanwhile, when I was on the play, I aggressively pointed burn directly at his face and tried as much as possible to ignore his board state, focusing only on reducing his life total. It was delightful how clearly our roles were defined from the outset, despite both of us packing what, in theory, should have been aggro decks.
To address your earlier point, I try and run defenders and other low power, high toughness creatures that control would be more interested in than midrange. I don't want to go as far as packing dedicated hate like Timely Reinforcements, which would be like taking a sledgehammer to this delicate problem. Seraph of Dawn seems to be my calling card around here, and I'm going as far as to experiment with Nyx-Fleece Ram now. Anything to slow down aggro enough to buy time to stabilize with a board sweeper or two.
Grillo_Parlante
Contributor
Thats a really interesting problem.
If a control deck is a more spell based deck that runs spell based answers and wins in the late game, than the problem might be that that whole strategic approach is just struggling in your particular environment. The line between midrange and control is pretty thin, and the midrange decks can pretty much take anything you put in to buff control and run it, with the possible exception of certain board sweepers. The big different between the two is that one is spell based, while the other is creature based.
Modern environments, with diversified or weakened removal, i.m.o, tend to encourage players to focus on deploying the best threats or focusing on card synergy, leading to more synergistic, interactive, and creature/threat focused games. Unfortunately, its hard being the spell based late game deck, in a world focused on power creatures. In standard, we have esper decks that run almost no creatures, but they can also can break singleton on a few super powerful spells, largely in the form of sphinx's revelation, that make up for it (really, I can't imagine those decks existing without exactly sphinx's revelation). In cube, you might see one revelation or one cruel ultimatum, but ultimately it just makes a lot of sense to build a midrange deck, that can consistently stall the board with super powerful midrange creatures, that synergize really well with the rest of the cube, and can still steal about 90% of the toys put in for control.
I think, if you really want to buff that type of control deck, you might have to swing more in the direction of spell power rather than creature power. Or maybe break singleton on certain super powerful spells. If you do that though, you might be moving away from that modern feeling of the cube. That’s a pretty tricky problem though, and I’m not sure there is an easy solution.
Skeletal Vampire
Yup. I say the game is simple, but only from the standpoint of the roles that each player takes on in a game. Figuring out what role you should be and how best to play your hand and respond to what your opponent does has a huge amount of depth and strategy to it. And that is really what has kept me playing the game so long. It's a fairly easy game to pick up and the concepts are not complicated, but there is a wealth of subtleties to it.
Your approach is solid I think. And I agree about the hosers. I did run Pulse of the Fields and Timely Reinfocements at one time, but they can be oppressive against certain strategies and I just didn't like that. They felt really narrow and almost side board only type cards. I do not like playing with side boards so I really try to limit the number of those types of cards I run in my cube. It's probably not a popular opinion but I see side boards as a hacked way of fixing an inherent balance problem in the game. If matchup is that much of a problem to where the only way to make things competitive is to have a side board with hate cards in it, IMO your format is broken (specifically what I hate about constructed right here). My aim is to make it so matchup is a minor piece of the puzzle (as small as I can make it) so that the need for side board only cards simply isn't there. How realistic that goal is is certainly up for debate though (and I don't believe I've gotten there yet).
Totally agreed. And it's a thin line between aggro and aggressive midrange. Or even aggro and aggro control. It's cool talking about theaters from a theoretical standpoint, but in any actual matchup you really only have the faster deck and the slower deck. Every single loss in the history of magic happened either because you played fewer cards than your opponent or your opponent played better cards than you did.
Skeletal Vampire
LOL. You know, I'm super excited to play Batman again. But you are giving him WAY too much credit.
Dom Harvey
Contributor
Timely Reinforcements has a fair bit of play to it though. In Modern the aggro decks can try to neutralize it by paring down their own life total via fetchlands/shocklands, which is obviously much easier in Constructed but doable here if you have 2x fetches/shocks. Three tokens from one card is also highly exploitable in a lot of fun ways.
It's a fair assessment. And that was one of the last of those cards I pulled out and the only one I've considered putting back in for this reason (even more so now that I have some token abusers).
You bring up some interesting points on hosers and sideboards. I'm completely on board with you as far as disliking narrow hosers, and I've cut stuff like Celestial Purge, Deathmark and even Negate that I used to run. These cards simply aren't fun to draft or to play, and cube is all about building sweet decks, not stomping all over someone because they had the audacity to run green and white creatures.
On sideboarding, though, is where our opinions differ. I'm of the school of thought that sideboarding is a very fun and dynamic part of cube draft, especially because you have so many quality, powerful cards that don't make your maindeck. Building an aggressive blue tempo deck, but aren't really sure how you're going to approach the actual aggro decks? Remove your Vapor Snags, Remands, and Riftwing Cloudskates, and bring in the Frostburn Weirds, Sea Gate Oracles, and perhaps even the Spreading Seas. Changing up your deck configuration so that you can better fit your prescribed role in any given matchup is, I feel, a vastly under-utilized tactic of sideboarding. Even when you're drafting, when you've reached the point where you've hit your requisite number of playables, you should be looking for cards that let you transform your deck makeup rather than just grabbing additional decent spells that won't make the cut.
I don't disagree with the additional level of strategy possible using side boards. From a casual gamer standpoint though, I just don't like them. I don't disallow side boards in my group. And I've swapped cards before between games (though usually because something isn't working as expected but also for the reasons you stated - morphing a deck can be very satisfying and I've definitely built a few that did that).
I know that people in my group do not care to play with side boards. They make a deck and they want to play it as is not change it in response to what the other guy is playing. So I try to support that in my cube by removing hosers and minimizing the impact of match-ups in general.