[Design/Construction] Lets build the Scuttlemutt Cube!

[Jason Waddell]

This is making me want to bust out Eldrazi Domain again. Tons of overlap here.

 

[Laz]

This is making me want to bust out Eldrazi Domain again. Tons of overlap here.

I still hold your article on designing the Eldrazi Domain cube to be one of the best pieces of writing on cube design that exists. That article planted the seed of an idea that sprouted into this cube, and I feel you deserve an incredible amount of thanks for that. There is indeed a lot of overlap here, some of it incidental, other parts stolen from you. So, I think what I am trying to say is thanks Jason, you are doing really good things for Cube design.

 

[Jason Waddell]

I still hold your article on designing the Eldrazi Domain cube to be one of the best pieces of writing on cube design that exists. That article planted the seed of an idea that sprouted into this cube, and I feel you deserve an incredible amount of thanks for that. There is indeed a lot of overlap here, some of it incidental, other parts stolen from you. So, I think what I am trying to say is thanks Jason, you are doing really good things for Cube design.

Aww, thanks man, glad to hear it! Keep up the awesome design work!

 

[Jason Waddell]

Uh, have you considered putting more Fear / Intimidate creatures in here? Seems to go perfectly with the color-matters theme.

 

[Ryan]

Just spitballing here I see that you've got some domain stuff going on so is there any room to take the theme a little deeper and make land types really count and play spells like Submerge or Massacre?

 

[Laz]

Uh, have you considered putting more Fear / Intimidate creatures in here? Seems to go perfectly with the color-matters theme.

I have, but Fear and Intimidate are costed so highly it seems. I have done my best to include it without having to play cards like Bladetusk Boar.


These are the closest that I have to efficiently costed Intimidate creatures, though I acknowledge they are hard to cast.

Higher up the curve, some fun creatures start to appear.

These guys are pretty efficient, though are included mostly to support the counter theme.

Then there are a few temporary Intimidate/Fear granting cards.


I am very much on the look out for awesome Intimidate/Fear cards, but most of them are simply not costed aggressively enough. Maybe Blind Zealot or Bellowing Tanglewurm get called up, but I don't know.

 

[Jason Waddell]

Lifebane Zombie?

 

[Chris Taylor]

Tanglewurm seems awesome

 

[Laz]

I will likely give both a shot. I am now awaiting a big shipment of cards so that I can start drafting this for real.

 

[Jonas]

 

[Chris Taylor]

I....really? Isn't he practically a hate card in this cube?
And for a 3 mana 1/1?

 

[Laz]

Rules question. Does changing the colour of a spell on the stack with Ersatz Gnomes (also, I don't understand the naming, are those people shrunk to gnomes, hence Ersatz?), change the colour of the resulting permanent? I suspect that the precedent for this is Hallow, which when cast on a Haste creature on the stack, prevents damage that the permanent it becomes would deal that turn.

Ersatz Gnomes, while mentioning colour probably won't make the cut. Now... if it tapped for mana...

Also, exciting, playtesting this for the first time on Thursday.

 

[Jonas]

I....really? Isn't he practically a hate card in this cube?
And for a 3 mana 1/1?

It is, I found it a bit amusing,

 

[Laz]

Ok! First draft happened. Tales follow:

Initially the plan was for me to sit out and observe, but one of our drafters couldn't make it, so I had to make up the numbers. Opportunity lost there I think.

I drafted a very sweet practically mono-red aggro deck, with almost the full set of R/X 1-drops. I was only missing a single Figure of Destiny from the 2x Rakdos Cackler, 2x Tattermunge Maniac, 2x Figure of Destiny set. In combination with other Red one drops, it was a little insane. I was also allowed to get 3x Burning-Tree Emissary and both Shrine of Burning Rage to go with my 8 1-drop creatures and 2x Pillar of Flame, which led to some pretty broken plays (such as Shrine for 7 on turn 4, followed by Shrine for 7 on turn 5...). While it originally started out as a Shrine/Ion Storm Proliferate deck, I just kept being fed awesome aggro cards. I should never have been allowed to assemble the deck, and won every match pretty easily.

I suspect that the other drafters underestimated how aggressive this cube was, and went for slower strategies, while not packing the lesser Wraths (Pyroclasm, Drown in Sorrow, Sudden Demise).

Some archetypes worked really well, for instance the 'lots-of-colours matter' archetype with Knight of New Alara and Civic Sabers. It got built into a Naya shell where Woolly Thoctar was able to be cast pretty reliably, and was routinely at least 8 power. That deck didn't perform as well as I think it should have, mostly because it faced the above aggro deck first, and went 2-1 (The victory was pretty impressive though, turns out Knight of New Alara is pretty good with Thoctar and Transguild Courier...). The following match proved that Scuttlemutt was amazing...

At one stage, the opposing boardstate was the following:

Shenanigans abound! This line-up basically makes attacking and blocking impossible if there is any mana up. Plus, Scuttle can tap for mana, so that isn't a sure thing either. It was death by a thousand cuts, but Scuttle was amazing.

Control was an archetype which had no success in last night's draft, mostly I suspect due to aggro's underestimation. The control decks simply didn't have enough early interaction (most early plays were rampy/domain enabling) and tended to be overrun. I will have to see if this keeps happening, but looking at the unplayed cards makes me suspect this was simply a deck-building error.

Counters/proliferate as a overarching theme for a deck didn't really happen, but was a support strategy in a lot of decks, so I am not too concerned. Azor's Elocutors got unmade with Gilder Bairn's trigger on the stack, so there is clearly potential sweetness.

Running tallies:

Progenitus hardcast - 0
Progenitus cheated into play - 0
Azor's Elocutors filibuster victory - 0

Quick note on the first: Observing a game, I counted 10 mana in play, with Progenitus in hand and exclaimed 'My god! It is happening!'. Opponent promptly ripped Wasteland and made it not happen. Profuse apologising followed.

 

[Chris Taylor]

While I'm not going as deep as you are, I've found the proliferate thing to be more of an incedental synergy as opposed to a whole deck unto itself, though that could well change with more proliferate cards.

As I've mentioned before, the main deck I find that wants them for me is a GR aggro shell with experiment one and unleash guys. Is Tezerets gambit good there? Is Contagion Clasp?

Good find on knight of new alara, that sounds sweet
Really though, transguild curior? Is he really necessary?

 

[Laz]

Hey! He has words about colour on him! That is basically the only requirement to be included in this cube!

More seriously, being an easy to cast 5-colour creature is pretty useful in this cube. Lots of things care about 'controlling a <colour> permanent', and lots of things care about number of colours. Bloom Tender is the biggest one I can think of in this vein.

 

[Chris Taylor]

Fair enough. If he was just a weird small fusion elemental for the knight deck I'd be worried, but so long as there's more stuff there

 

[Laz]

Notes to self: Goblin Razerunners. Eight-and-a-Half-Tails kind of obnoxious...

 

[Chris Taylor]

8.5 is annoying in regular cube.

 

[Laz]

Changes:
Eight-and-a-Half-Tails -> Bloodcrazed Hoplite
Ashiok's Adept -> Agent of the Fates

Had a blast drafting this again today. I learned that there was a quite strong Landfall package in there that I didn't know was a thing until it came together. Adventuring Gear is pretty strong when you are using a fetchland to trigger Khalni Heart Expedition during combat... Knight of the Reliquary also did serious work triggering landfall.

Also, a fantastic unplanned discovery was this:
Kulrath Knight > Calciderm

I built an aggressive Naya deck that basically had the game plan of 'over-extend into a wrath', because you know... synergy. When you have a couple of creatures out, say a Burning-Tree Emissary and a Naya Hushblade (which has trample in this cube), playing that Knight of New Alara is really tempting.

 

[Laz]

This cube is fast. Often blazingly so. This doesn't play very well with some of the more interesting interactions available, so I think it is probably preferable to make a few small modifications to slow the overall pace of the game down. Much of the speed of aggro decks comes from the abundance of two and three power creatures. This puts creatures with four toughness in an excellent position to slow everything down. Today I actually ran Vorel of the Hull Clade in a deck with zero profitable counter interactions entirely for his 1/4 body to allow my Rampy-Domain deck time to resolve something like an Allied Strategies or a Bringer to regain control of the game. Even then, aggro decks often over-ran me despite all of my early game removal.

To this end, I am going to make the following changes, which although minor, will hopefully give some of the slower decks some more play against aggressive opponents.
Lightning Coils -> Wall of Omens
Shrine of Burning Rage -> Frostburn Weird (bringing the total to two)
Realmwright -> Wavecrash Triton

Quick explanations: Lightning Coils has proved way too slow, even with counter-manipulation. Shrine numero duo was too strong, and double shrine was terrifying combined with proliferate and all of the pseudo-red spells. Single shrine should be much happier. Realmwright never really did anything.
These 4-toughness additions will hopefully slow the pace of the aggro decks a little, and bring additional value to cards like Intimidator Initiate and the like, with Wither allowing decks to bring these blockers down over two turns.

Edit: Update to this, Wasteland should probably become Tectonic Edge...

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

Laz, do you have any decklists to share? I love this cube, but its hard to see how everything fits together in practice by just looking at the list.

 

[Laz]

Laz, do you have any decklists to share? I love this cube, but its hard to see how everything fits together in practice by just looking at the list.

I would love to offer some up, but I don't have any handy. I am about to go away for a couple of weeks, but when I get back and we draft this again, I will try to put some up.

Last deck I played was a removal-heavy UWR/Domain control deck, which won more than its fair share of games by simply burning the opponent for 10 with 2xTribal Flames. The highlight of that deck was having both Allied Strategies and routinely casting them for 4 or 5. It lost in the finals to a pretty insane pseudo-mono-red deck, with a pair of Burning-Tree Emissaries and both Boros Reckoner and Boggart Ram-Gang. These guys managed to power out burns of 7+ with Fanatic of Mogis...

At the moment it feels like colour as a primary design aspect has been very successful, but counters are always supporting. We are up to one filibuster win, so there is that I guess.

 

[Laz]

Laz, do you have any decklists to share? I love this cube, but its hard to see how everything fits together in practice by just looking at the list.

Ah! The delay!

After mostly playing my other cube for the last couple of months, I couldn't play last week. Rather than deprive my friends of cube, I dropped both cubes off with them, and went about doing my own thing. Apparently last week someone said something like 'We haven't played this one in ages! Lets give it a shot.', since this week, when I showed up, the consensus was that everyone had forgotten how much fun the Scuttle-cube was and wanted to play it again. We drafted it and had a ball. This time I actually recorded some successful decklists too.
Apparently last week, a UG-based 5-colour ramp/domain deck took it down, which I am sad to have missed seeing, but according to the drafter it was built by 'just taking all of the ramp, and every big 5-colour thing I saw'. Apparently a fast Allied Strategies for five into bomb after bomb after bomb is enough to win games...

There were a couple of cool decks this week, here are two successful ones (we started late, so only got to play two rounds, but these ones went 2-0).

Grixis Incidental Counters Domain Control Burn

This was the deck I drafted and played. It was an interesting and atypical draft, simply because Red was almost entirely open (6 person draft). It was touched by another player who was playing aggressive Naya and also an 'Almost mono-black Rakdos', but I was drafting all of the burn really highly, so I think they ended up with a couple of Pillar of Flame, a Dark Temper and the other Sudden Demise or something like that. In fact, I was basically only drafting burn and lands, which is why those are awesome and the rest of the deck is a bit of a mess.

The name is pretty accurate, this deck played out as a control deck that churned through the deck and won every game on the back of 8-10 points of burn, essentially only needing a couple of creatures to stick to help the opponents lands get them below 10. Homicidal Seclusion continues to be amazing in this cube, keeping me from death at the hands of aggressive decks and usually meaning it only took 1-2 swings to get the opponent to burn range, since I could often burn out blockers.

Incidental counters has basically the combination of Fume Spitter, Skinrender and Puncture Blast and wanton Proliferate (No one wanted Gambit it seems). I was able to take down multiple 4-6 toughness creatures just by slowly adding -1/-1 counters over a couple of turns. I did get to proliferate Etched Oracle once or twice too, which was pretty awesome.

Another deck that went 2-0 was 'mono'-white (though it was actually being fought with during the draft by another almost mono-white drafter).

Mono White

(Reminder, Scuttlemutt is a 2 mana 1/2 in this cube)

Mostly a straight-up beatdown deck, with super consistent mana, but had awesome play to it. They ran Terminus and Day of Judgment mostly based upon their other experiences with this cube which was 'on-board presences tend to snow-ball really fast, so sometimes you need a reset'. This echoes my experience, there is a lot of p/t pumping synergies between creatures and enchantments/equipment, and being able to clear the board often very welcome.

I got to see some sweet colour changing tricks with this deck, my favourite of which was 'Make your dude gold with scuttle, make my Wilt-Leaf white with Cloudchaser, then Renounce the Guilds.' It might not have been an efficient Doom Blade, but it was a sweet line. There was also apparently a great Niveous Wisps play, though as I was in different game at the time, I didn't see the details of it. This deck really benefits from Soldier of the Pantheon, but as I mentioned earlier, there was draft tension between this player and the one who had first picked Honor of the Pure.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

Yes...finally, these are great.

How is draining whelk in your environment? I'm a little surprised to see it there because I remember you saying earlier that the cube could be very fast