General Decks Not Cards--Synergy and Power Design

I mean, G&G is decent value in a graveyard-themed deck even if you don't have zombies. I think it would be a lot more realistic to look at the card that way and if you happen to hit a zombie it's just gravy.

Edit: I wish there were more creatures with subtle ETB effects like this that you could accumulate. I'm trying out Mindwrack Demon but haven't seen it in action yet.
 
I mean, G&G is decent value in a graveyard-themed deck even if you don't have zombies. I think it would be a lot more realistic to look at the card that way and if you happen to hit a zombie it's just gravy.

Edit: I wish there were more creatures with subtle ETB effects like this that you could accumulate. I'm trying out Mindwrack Demon but haven't seen it in action yet.


I have mindwrack demon in the cube that I'll be testing soon. Hopefully I'll be able to do a full writeup, and will report back.
 

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
Yeah, I was thinking these species of cards:



That gives you a critical mass of self-mill ETB triggers to feed the deck. Having them attached to ETB bodies is really good, as it helps justify an otherwise marginal looking effect, and its kind of another utility ETB ability.

The deck is really about exploiting ETB gravepulses attached to these creatures. God I should incorporate this into my cube, it would slot in so nicely with the nerfed blue cantrips. Dread Return is such a great card.
 
Yeah, I was thinking these species of cards:



That gives you a critical mass of self-mill ETB triggers to feed the deck. Having them attached to ETB bodies is really good, as it helps justify an otherwise marginal looking effect, and its kind of another utility ETB ability.

The deck is really about exploiting ETB gravepulses attached to these creatures. God I should incorporate this into my cube, it would slot in so nicely with the nerfed blue cantrips. Dread Return is such a great card.


I really like how Sidisi ties them all in together. I think Sultai Soothsayer may be a bit expensive for a self-mill effect though, no? You usually want those early game, and want more pharika's mender effects lategame. I feel like this deck is crying out for an insane engine to 'flicker' these creatures. If only recurring nightmare wasn't, well... a nightmare in draft :p
 
Exactly why I run Sidisi!

I feel like GBU already does a fairly good job with self-recursion of stuff for grinding that advantage. I mean, G&G are an engine piece all in themselves! But in colors, besides the listed Dread Return, you've got recursion stuff like:


Besides ways for the deck to really "power up" off of the back of the self milling creatures:


Deck is really robust if you put your mind to it, and I love it in my environment. Important to this thread that some of these would never make power rankings on their own, same for prior mentioned cards.
 
I guess I'll chime in since the example came from my cube.

The logic here echoes what Grillo says here
gives you a critical mass of self-mill ETB triggers to feed the deck. Having them attached to ETB bodies is really good, as it helps justify an otherwise marginal looking effect, and its kind of another utility ETB ability.

G&G are first and foremost an engine to dump cards into the graveyard. The fact that they have a decent body means they'll never be bad and if you get a few zombies they have a huge upside. Now I do want to include some zombies to "live the dream", but I don't want to include cards that don't fit the cube's themes (like Sigh mentioned).

That's what I like so much about G&G, the worst case scenario is ok and it introduces a draft mini-game with huge potential upside. The downside is that by including the card, people are expecting a fully fleshed out zombie theme which isn't present.
 

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
You also have a broad power band, which makes GG very loamish

I like RVB's breakdown though, because it helps explain why cards like life from the loam tend to struggle in cube. Loam has that shell game quality too it, but its a dedicated synergy card, and those synergies tend to be hard to support for a lot of formats. The end result is often a signal to nothing on all fronts: it has neither the raw power to send someone on a shell hunt, nor the synergy support to act as a signal to a great deck.

I really do feel like their has to be a UB plan for it to clearly fold into, and that GG should be running the crest of the format's power band to justify a slot. But opinions are opinions.

Instinct says controlish, and maybe these cards:




Catering more towards Spell Recursion control, and using zombie tokens to keep the board stable.

Couple that with some delve and recursive finishers:





This really does seem like it would slot in very nicely in my existing design, with the reprogramming structure in BUG. Delve is a bit of a nombo in UB though.
 
Wow . . . I'm really glad I found this forum. I've been looking for a place like this for ages, since I'm the only person interested in cube design in my area.

So, my question is, how do you make a "decks-matter" cube? I maintain a 540 Peasant cube, where I tried to push certain archetype ideas in certain colors. While some of them worked, others flopped flat on their face and haven't shown up in a single draft. Currently I'm working on redesigning from the ground up (Because what fun is it unless you're constantly improving? :p ) and having been mulling over a lot of the questions that came up in this thread. Anyone have any good ideas on how to design for one strategy over the other?
 
Wow . . . I'm really glad I found this forum. I've been looking for a place like this for ages, since I'm the only person interested in cube design in my area.

So, my question is, how do you make a "decks-matter" cube? I maintain a 540 Peasant cube, where I tried to push certain archetype ideas in certain colors. While some of them worked, others flopped flat on their face and haven't shown up in a single draft. Currently I'm working on redesigning from the ground up (Because what fun is it unless you're constantly improving? :p ) and having been mulling over a lot of the questions that came up in this thread. Anyone have any good ideas on how to design for one strategy over the other?

Welcome to the forums! :D

As far as pushing archetypes, there's a few things I think everyone should know - these are my beliefs, so if anyone disagrees, chime in!

First, you need a density of effects (also called redundancy). If you're packing in an archetype, there have to be multiple tools capable of performing the task the archetype seeks to perform; what can a player do to build a sacrifice deck if the only tool for it is Goblin Bombardment and another player drafts it? What if they draft Goblin Bombardment, but it's consistently at the bottom of their deck each game? They need multiple tools that can perform the same function, or else the archetype, even once drafted, will be too inconsistent.

But what kind of redundancy? Most often, the density of effects you'll look to put into a list are some combination of payoffs (cards that reward a strategy for working, like Blood Artist in a Sacrifice deck) and engines (cards which generate value in an archetype, like Life from the Loam might in a self-mill deck); oftentimes, though, your engine is your payoff (like Winding Constrictor in a +1/+1 Counters-Matters deck). Since payoffs and engines so often overlap, I prefer a unifying term for these effects: signs. Signs indicate that an archetype exists, and that there's an incentive to build around it for value. Though you can put archetypal tools across several colors, for best results, signs for an archetype should be clearest in 2 or 3 colors. In a 360 list, I believe 3-5 to be the necessary density of an effect to show and support an archetype in a two-color pair.

From there, you'll want some cards that reinforce and support an archetype, and which may have extra use in some decks more than others, which I like to call lines. Lines are cards that aren't overly narrow, and can be used in any deck, but which hold some special relevancy in certain archetypes; they offer unique lines of play. For example, Mogg War Marshal is a serviceable card in any deck, but there are unique lines of play to it in a Sacrifice deck, which can generate 3 bodies out of it to feed their engines/get rewarded by their payoffs.

An important thing to note is that when it comes to cube design, size matters. Archetype support is really hard the larger your list becomes; that's because it's harder to consistently get access to its pieces, since you aren't seeing as much of the cube each draft. I used to have a 540 list that I've slowly cut down to a 360; I can tell you firsthand that decks are a lot more generic the larger your list unless you work very hard to put in archetypes.

Another factor to consider is your cube's removal power level and power band. A cube with lots of Doom Blade-level removal is going to require more efficient archetypes than a cube with Crippling Fatigue-level removal. That's not to say you can't support archetypes at a higher power level - just that you have fewer good cards to choose from. This ties into power band issues; if your green 4-drops are Polukranos, World Eater, Vengevine, and Pack Guardian, it's a lot less likely that someone is going to pick Greater Mossdog for your {G}{B} Self-Mill deck.

If you're not sure how to determine what sort of power band you have, here's a neat trick: take all the cards you have in a section and compare each card in a given spot in the curve against each other. Afford yourself more leeway lower on the curve, but be more strict by the 4-drop slot especially.

Ask yourself questions like:
  • In my 4-drop slot in White, are any of these cards always the best one to pick?
    • How much "better" is it than the others?
  • If I dealt each of these cards randomly to my drafters, which card would I be least happy to be left with? Which card would I most want?
Once you've done all the sections, compare the sections against each other; white compared to blue, and black, and red, and green. This will often reveal why one color might be drafted more than another - because one color's cards might simply be more powerful overall, or contain more bombs, or one color could just be underpowered. This kind of critical thinking can help you develop a cube experience that's more balanced and which allows more creative exploration of archetypes.

Note that this exercise might reveal to you that your format is bomb-oriented, which isn't a surprising result - most cubes are! And that's a fine and fun way to cube - so don't feel you have to change it! - but it does make archetype supports more difficult, as the decks may still lose to the powerful cards routinely enough so as to not be worth the effort and risk in assembling them. Mark Rosewater often says: "Players will do anything you incentivize in a game, even if it's not fun." If your strong cards easily beat your synergy cards, it doesn't matter how fun they are - most players will focus on winning anyway, and will gradually adopt whatever practices they think are most likely to enable this.

But let's say you've evened out your power band, assessed and perhaps revisited your removal power level, and are ready to pack in archetypes. Where can you go from there?

This is the point where you can start looking at reinforcing your archetypes by adding more lines to pair with your signs. Typically, this involves determining if your list includes any unnecessary duplication, and shifting those slots to be something more archetypal (but still flexible enough to fit into multiple decks, ideally - this is another big debate in cube development, over "narrow enablers", which are cards that only ever go into a single deck, like Buried Alive, but I'm going to assume you're shying away from them for the purpose of this post).

Peeling out unnecessary duplication is what I consider high-level design, but it goes a little something like this. Let's say you're running Divination, Compulsive Research, Monastery Siege, and Frantic Search in your cube. That means you've got 4 draw spells in the 3-drop spot alone for blue, and 3 of those explicitly support graveyard decks. That's quite a lot of draw effects! Certainly you could diversify further. You could perhaps decide to cut Divination and add something like Ghostly Flicker instead to support a Blink archetype, which is likely to have a similar, but much more varied and stronger effect, by re-using common ETB triggers like Sea Gate Oracle and Bone Shredder. This also has the potential upside of forcing players to use the sifting-style cards already available, which might gently push them into archetypes they'd never run into by just using Divination. But again - this is one example, and one where there are many, many possible answers.

I know this was a lot to absorb, but I hope it helps serve as a sort of general-purpose primer! :D
 

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
Thats pretty good.

A few things I might add:

1. Its fine to just populate an initial list with cards you feel good about. Take a little bit of time to think of sort of broad format concepts: power level, intent behind the format etc. Often times its overwhelming to sit down and carefully map out archetypes at the onset, and its more practical to do an initial list population on ideas or individual cards that emotionally resonate with you. That population can be grounded against your initial format specs.

2. After that, maybe get a few cube sessions under your belt, and than write out the 10 guilds. Can you clearly articulate what each guild is doing? Do you have something in mind that you want the guild to do? Do your best to take those decks from a theatrical standpoint to something that could be incorporated into your cube.

3. Probably get a few more cube sessions in. At this point you should feel like you've been chipping away at the marble and are starting to see a form. Does the format feel like its intent is clear to drafters? Are the archetypes fun, are they being drafted, are they balanced? Are you clearly expressing what each archetype can do? Look over your guild list again, and see if you're still dependent on vague descriptors like "control, midrange, graveyard, or UR tempo" how clearly can you describe these decks and what makes them unique? How clearly can you describe their gameplay? The more clearly you can articulate each guild's individual personality, and the cards that make it up, the better you are doing. What factors are holding this back: look at the power band etc.

4. Do a few more drafts. At this point you should have a fair amount of data, and can start asking yourself how the different guilds are overlapping with one another. Are there any unexpected relationships? Do we want to encourage this or curtail this? Now we are in wedge/shard design, and doing much the same as we did initially for the guilds.

As for building guild relationships, I tend to prefer cards that are reasonable, but signal as to a deeper relationship:




Both of these cards have a reasonable floor on their own, but their ceiling rises exponentially in conjunction with other cards. Whirler rogue says "find me artifacts to interact with and I will perform better for you," while dread return says much the same thing about tokens. When you start building those relationships into color pairs or shards/wedges, you now can funnel people into different strategies.

Count the interactions:

B/G/r tokens from CubeTutor.com












U/G from CubeTutor.com












UR spells from CubeTutor.com










 

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
I just want to take a moment to appreciate how well those two cards work together


Yup, we could brainstorm a UB deck off of them right now if we wanted.

Toss in skeletal vampire, maybe rise the tides, shrine of loyal legions, bident...boom, UB deck.
 
Wow, lots of good stuff. Responding in order. First, which worked, and which didn't? I've gotten friends together to draft the cube around 20 times, and I kept records of wins and losses every time.

Generally, Selesnya +1/+1 counters and Orzhov Lifegain were very successful, no one drafted Rakdos sacrifice or Boros Tokens, and Simic +1/+1 counters and Dimir saboteur/ninjas were very bad. Azorius blink, Izzet Spells, Golgari Graveyard and Gruul landfall/ramp fell about in the middle. I was thinking of changing Dimir to a zombies theme, Simic to Domain/Converge, and toning down the Orzhov lifegain a bit. I would post a link to the cube from Cubetutor, but currently it's a mess with my attempts at changes.

RavenbornMuse, that was an excellent primer you wrote.:) I think I'd read about what you said about redundancy and density in other places, but the way you explained them made a lot more sense. One question I had was on Payoffs and Engines in particular: does an archetype need both? For instance, I was thinking of building a Domain/Converge archetype, and looking through the cards available, most of what I could find would be considered payoffs, such as Allied Strategies or Tromp the Domains. Does this kind of thing stop an archetype from being effective?

The advise for determining the power band was something I'd never seen before, and I'm really excited to try it. I expect it will reveal at least a few problem cards.

Grillo, thank you also for the good advice. As I start redesigning I'll probably start with a bunch of cards that I know I want, and then build each of the archetypes, and then fill in the mana curve where it needs it.

My last question for everyone is this: in a 360 card cube, how many cards do you need, both signs and lines, to use RavenbornMuse's terms, to support an archetype? How many is too many?
 
One question I had was on Payoffs and Engines in particular: does an archetype need both? For instance, I was thinking of building a Domain/Converge archetype, and looking through the cards available, most of what I could find would be considered payoffs, such as Allied Strategies or Tromp the Domains. Does this kind of thing stop an archetype from being effective?

I think the enablers/payoff framework is a good way to think about archetypes, it works for many cases.

The most important lesson I've learned about archetypes is that you need to run mostly payoffs that are not too scaled to the archetype. It's a weird phrase, but let me give an example:



Nim Shriker does not only ask you to play you a lot of artifacts, but pretty much requires you to do it, else it's unplayable (ok, it might be unplayable regardless, but pretend it costs {2}{B}).

Foundry Screecher is mediocre but usable without artifacts in play, and rewards you for playing enough artifacts, but not for going overboard.

The difference in cube design is that Nim Shrieker is narrow. If you put that in your cube, it'll only be played if somebody is all-in on artifacts, and will likely sit on the sidelines. Foundry Screecher, though, can be played in much more decks, although it does reward you for playing the artifacts archetype. Let's build a table of power in relation to artifacts/deck:


Code:
                    3 artifacts  6 artifacts  9 artifacts  12 artifacts
Nim Shrieker                  0          1%          60%          150%
Foundry Screecher          30%          75%        100%          100%


Running Foundry Screecher-like cards makes people less likely to trainwreck drafts, makes the cube easier to balance and avoids too many dead cards being passed around. Most importantly, it avoid the feeling of drafting on rails, or unshuffling the storm deck.

We call poison this characteristic of having decks that do not mingle with others, a homage to the infect mechanic in Scars of Mirrodin block.

In your domain/converge example, look at each card and think:
  • if there is no dedicated domain deck, which of these cards are playable? Allied Strategies, for example, is very bad even in 3-color decks. Evasive Action is perfectly playable in 3 color decks.
  • would a deck of that archetype actually play this? Voices from the Void might be a strong play with 4 or 5 basic types, but the domain deck spent its first turns setting up domain and it's behind in the board. Not affecting the board at that point is a death sentence.
  • is this card very good even in decks that don't care about an archetype? This is a yellow flag, since it's less likely that archetype will get that card, as others would be picking it high. Radiant Flames and Painful Truths are the best examples for domain. These are the best kind of cards to run! The only problem is that they don't count too much as critical mass, as other people are likely to take them.
My last question for everyone is this: in a 360 card cube, how many cards do you need, both signs and lines, to use RavenbornMuse's terms, to support an archetype? How many is too many?

I won't talk about numbers, but do remember this: when you run a 8-player cube and put just enough cards to have the right density, when you draft with 5 players those archetypes will be diluted. This is the reason why I've been trying to make a modular cube work.
 

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
Honestly, numbers is just something I've developed a feel for over time. I'm very comfortable with density at 360, but something like a 540 feels awkward for me to design for.

In practical terms, this is something you get informed of just by doing drafts. You'll probably go with a gut feel for how much blue draw you think you need, overshoot the real number because you're inevitably breaking it down into sub-categories of blue draw, after a few drafts realize that U/x decks are destroying non-U midrange decks due to greater consistency, and than realize you have to scale it back.

Its just a very human process.

That being said, I find you don't actually need too much density of similar effect. Usually I end up with somewhere between 2-3 cards to fill a particular niche.
 
RavenbornMuse, that was an excellent primer you wrote.:) I think I'd read about what you said about redundancy and density in other places, but the way you explained them made a lot more sense. One question I had was on Payoffs and Engines in particular: does an archetype need both? For instance, I was thinking of building a Domain/Converge archetype, and looking through the cards available, most of what I could find would be considered payoffs, such as Allied Strategies or Tromp the Domains. Does this kind of thing stop an archetype from being effective?

The advise for determining the power band was something I'd never seen before, and I'm really excited to try it. I expect it will reveal at least a few problem cards.

My last question for everyone is this: in a 360 card cube, how many cards do you need, both signs and lines, to use RavenbornMuse's terms, to support an archetype? How many is too many?

I'm glad you found it helpful! :D

I think a lot of the "how much and what kind" conversation is archetype and cube dependent. As a general rule, I think an archetype needs anywhere from 3-5 signs if you want it to be clear and rewarding; you need your signs to be persistent enough in draft to lure drafters into it and reward them for working towards it. Remember that your drafters don't have the knowledge you do about your cube; they're drafting completely without reference. Even if you tell them what archetypes are in the list for each guild, they'll still likely end up not really understanding how the cube operates until there's been a good number of drafts done of it. That makes in-drafting indicators a lot more critical to easing them into archetypes. That's why archetypes like Spells-Matters tends to be so easily successful; something with Prowess very explicitly says "If you cast noncreature spells, I'll do something cool/function above-curve for my mana cost". It's a very clear message that drafters immediately can pick up on, without thinking too hard about, and requires very little effort to achieve (every deck will want at least some noncreatures).

As far as lines go, that's something that gets more evident as you do some practice drafts (CubeTutor practice drafting can help this a lot, too), but it really depends on the archetype. Sacrifice decks will, as a general rule, require a lot less line-crafting than, say, a Lands-Matter theme will.

I'll give you an example: Sacrifice-Matters, one of the easier archetypes to support, just likes cards that make multiple things to sacrifice, or things that want to go to the graveyard. So a card like Lingering Souls, which is already quite strong, can serve as a great line of play, feeding into a reach plan with something like Yahenni, Undying Partisan (a sacrifice engine/payoff) and Blood Artist (general-purpose, but especially good as a sacrifice payoff). We can take it another step further - Skirsdag High Priest, another sacrifice payoff, can then tap Blood Artist and that second Lingering Souls token to generate its 5/5 flying Demon. Next turn, you can do the same trick, slowly converting those 1/1 flying Spirits into 5/5 flying Demons, while triggering Blood Artist to bleed out your opponent as you generate more evasive beaters. From one or more of these axes of attack (bleed from Blood Artist, beefy fliers from Skirsdag High Priest, indestructible Yahenni, Undying Partisan), you should eventually be able to grind an opponent out, even if the board is heavily stalled.

So let's look at the cards here: the only thing that's really a bit "unconventional" is Skirsdag High Priest, because Yahenni, Blood Artist, and Lingering Souls are all powerful enough to make it into many decks, even ones without a sacrifice focus. And we've gotten a tremendous line for that {W}{B} intersection into the Sacrifice-Matters theme in a very, very desirable cube card - Lingering Souls!

Note, also, how we've drifted away from what is typically the Sacrifice-Matters pair, {R}{B}, and used the black tools a more aggressive Sacrifice-Matters deck might like for a longer, more grinding plan in {W}{B}. We've dropped a very powerful incentive card into white, stretching the archetype and promoting competition among drafters, and with one or two more such additions (Monastery Mentor? Blade Splicer? Emeria Angel? All of the above?), we can further reinforce this theme across 3 colors. And then those token-producers can serve, not just as lines for the sacrifice deck, but also, in order: as signs for a Spells-Matter, Artifacts-Matter/Blink, or Lands-Matter/Skies archetypes! Add in some anthem effects, and Go-Wide Aggression decks become viable. So, as you can see: the lines are often already there, waiting to be found, and many of which may be pulling double-duty as signs or lines for another deck entirely.

Once you've done some practice drafts (CubeTutor drafting is your friend here as well), you'll notice which decks lack depth, or where more can be supplied at little to no cost. That's where some tinkering is usually in order.

I'd also say that payoffs are more important than engines, but that really depends on the theme. I wish I had more general advice, but alas - context matters, and what you and your playgroup like or do with a cube can vary wildly from everyone else!
 
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