Laz
Developer
This cube has been rebuild a number of times now, the original post is in the spoiler block below.
Here is the current list:
Cubetutor Link
Utility Land Draft (lands have a 'pick cost' associated with them, for details, see here)
Core Tenet: I want my format to be about 'playing good Magic', and instilling player agency during both drafting and gameplay.
This cube is designed to be quite high-power, where the aspiration is on the outcome of games being decided by the combined results of as many decisions as possible. I have intentionally moved away from running the single most efficient examples of cards in the aggressive, midrange and control theatres towards cards that have far more contextual power, cards that encourage players to make assessments about how to maximise their use, both in the draft process, and especially during a game.
The primary driver for this was to make aggressive decks more interesting to draft and play, a Savannah Lions is always a Savannah Lions, but Seeker of the Way forces sequencing decisions and constant threat assessment. As part of this, I am attempting to open up routes in order to prevent aggressive decks from falling off as hard as the games go on. Copious Dash creatures keep aggressive decks from having to commit to the board as much, and they themselves offer a number of decision points. The sacrifice theme provides options around an exchange of resources, be it the outclassed aggro creatures for damage, or for vertical growth, or even for cards. The presence of CMC restricted reanimation spells, in Rally the Ancestors, Return to the Ranks or even Ojutai's Command provide the option of something of a combo-finish, reanimating the team for an alpha strike past mid-range blockers or adding more sacrifice fodder. Similarly, there are a lot of powerful tempo tools available. These tools require solid sequencing and assessment decisions, but add far more flexibility and reach to an aggressive deck.
Adding all of these options to aggressive decks also ratchets up the number of decisions required by midrange and controls decks as well. This is a result of these decks being forced to factor in the options available to the aggressive player. This concept well illustrated in current standard (KTK+BFZ), where the threat of Become Immense + Temur Battle Rage out of an aggressive deck forces the opposing player to constantly be making threat assessments. To borrow one of Grillo's concepts, the 'perceived pressure' from the aggressive deck is hugely important, and adds elements of bluffing, educated guessing and hedging to a matchup, all of which reward better decision making from each of the players involved.
An odd and somewhat unexpected consequence of moving to more flexible cards is that hard control is somewhat absent in this environment. It certainly feels as though control decks are perhaps more like control in Modern, where the emphasis is on generating superior value as games go longer, than about locking the opponent out of the game.
Here is the current list:
Cubetutor Link
Utility Land Draft (lands have a 'pick cost' associated with them, for details, see here)
Core Tenet: I want my format to be about 'playing good Magic', and instilling player agency during both drafting and gameplay.
This cube is designed to be quite high-power, where the aspiration is on the outcome of games being decided by the combined results of as many decisions as possible. I have intentionally moved away from running the single most efficient examples of cards in the aggressive, midrange and control theatres towards cards that have far more contextual power, cards that encourage players to make assessments about how to maximise their use, both in the draft process, and especially during a game.
The primary driver for this was to make aggressive decks more interesting to draft and play, a Savannah Lions is always a Savannah Lions, but Seeker of the Way forces sequencing decisions and constant threat assessment. As part of this, I am attempting to open up routes in order to prevent aggressive decks from falling off as hard as the games go on. Copious Dash creatures keep aggressive decks from having to commit to the board as much, and they themselves offer a number of decision points. The sacrifice theme provides options around an exchange of resources, be it the outclassed aggro creatures for damage, or for vertical growth, or even for cards. The presence of CMC restricted reanimation spells, in Rally the Ancestors, Return to the Ranks or even Ojutai's Command provide the option of something of a combo-finish, reanimating the team for an alpha strike past mid-range blockers or adding more sacrifice fodder. Similarly, there are a lot of powerful tempo tools available. These tools require solid sequencing and assessment decisions, but add far more flexibility and reach to an aggressive deck.
Adding all of these options to aggressive decks also ratchets up the number of decisions required by midrange and controls decks as well. This is a result of these decks being forced to factor in the options available to the aggressive player. This concept well illustrated in current standard (KTK+BFZ), where the threat of Become Immense + Temur Battle Rage out of an aggressive deck forces the opposing player to constantly be making threat assessments. To borrow one of Grillo's concepts, the 'perceived pressure' from the aggressive deck is hugely important, and adds elements of bluffing, educated guessing and hedging to a matchup, all of which reward better decision making from each of the players involved.
An odd and somewhat unexpected consequence of moving to more flexible cards is that hard control is somewhat absent in this environment. It certainly feels as though control decks are perhaps more like control in Modern, where the emphasis is on generating superior value as games go longer, than about locking the opponent out of the game.
Building the Scuttle-cube was a lot of fun, and made me take a long hard look at my current 370 (I explained this somewhere, was aiming for 360, while also being too lazy to cut 10 cards...) and realised that I didn't love it as much any more. I mean, it is great fun, but it doesn't feel as refined as the Scuttle-cube from a design standpoint, too many cards which don't justify their existence.
First things first, I am probably going to be overly verbose in this thread, and I know that a lot of the stated ideas will be obvious to most readers here. While this may irk some of you, for which I do apologise, I feel that more information is better than less information, and I would love for this to serve as a primer to this Cube, which may be played by those with less of an appreciation of the points of cube design than the regular riptidelab reader.
I don't know if I want to start completely from scratch, and I will probably port a lot of ideas from my current cube into this one, but a rebuild gives me a chance to explore new ideas that simply would have required me to shoe-horn things inelegantly into my current environment.
Mission statement: I want Cube to have as many layers as Legacy.
Cube Tutor link: http://cubetutor.com/viewcube/12399 (Give it a draft!)
I think asking for Cube to play like Legacy is too much, as so much effort goes into creating incredibly consistent decks, with massive redundancy and highly focussed game plans. I want a cube with Legacy-style decision trees, where games are won by inches. As a point of illustration, I feel that the moment I realised that 'shuffles' were a resource that needed to be carefully hoarded and spent for advantages, I decided my current cube was a little ham-fisted.
Lofty goal perhaps, but let us at least allow it to be aspirational.
There are a number of themes which run through this Cube, some as major build-around concepts, others as small drafting hints.
This cube treats the graveyard as a resource, not simply a place for dead creatures and used cards. There is nothing so obvious as Entomb into Exhume or Reanimate into 'Good game', rather the graveyard provides additional options and angles of play, whether it be through cards that can be cast from the graveyard or cards which interact with that zone. Don't worry, Reanimator is still a supported archetype, it is just slower and designed to slot into control or midrange strategies, rather than be the all-in strategy it often represents.
Artifacts are quite prevalent in this environment, and provide a number of options. These options range from a density of equipment for aggressive decks to allowing for the existence of a Wildfire deck. Multiple Tinkers and Tinker-like effects exist, though their targets are not nearly as oppressive as expected from this archetype. Steel Hellkite and Colossus of Akros stand in for Wurmcoil Engine and Blightsteel Colossus, providing solid, but not instantly game-winning Tinker plays.
There are also some smaller themes, which offer joins between colours. These are not as overt as many cube lists, which have wonderful write ups like '
is all about flyers! does tokens!' (Aside: I have no idea how to do that, it always seems too isolating from the rest of the Cube). Rather there are a few considerations I have added, which tend to end up focussed in a couple of colours. In this cube, those considerations included the following:
- Sacrificing Creatures
- Instant and Sorcery Density
- Top-of-deck Matters
- Going Wide (having a large number of creatures, which could be tokens)
- Flicker Effects
- Creature Type: Human
- Creature Type: Zombie (ok, so there are Gravecrawlers...)
- Birthing Pod
The above were all represented factors which I held in mind when deciding on cards to include in this cube. There are not optimal decks for each of these themes, unlike say, the Flyers archetype mentioned above, but there will be decks which feature these concepts to greater and lesser extents, and I would like to think, if I have done my job right, these decks will be stronger than those which are simply a 'bunch of cards'.
First things first, I am probably going to be overly verbose in this thread, and I know that a lot of the stated ideas will be obvious to most readers here. While this may irk some of you, for which I do apologise, I feel that more information is better than less information, and I would love for this to serve as a primer to this Cube, which may be played by those with less of an appreciation of the points of cube design than the regular riptidelab reader.
I don't know if I want to start completely from scratch, and I will probably port a lot of ideas from my current cube into this one, but a rebuild gives me a chance to explore new ideas that simply would have required me to shoe-horn things inelegantly into my current environment.
Mission statement: I want Cube to have as many layers as Legacy.
Cube Tutor link: http://cubetutor.com/viewcube/12399 (Give it a draft!)
I think asking for Cube to play like Legacy is too much, as so much effort goes into creating incredibly consistent decks, with massive redundancy and highly focussed game plans. I want a cube with Legacy-style decision trees, where games are won by inches. As a point of illustration, I feel that the moment I realised that 'shuffles' were a resource that needed to be carefully hoarded and spent for advantages, I decided my current cube was a little ham-fisted.
Lofty goal perhaps, but let us at least allow it to be aspirational.
There are a number of themes which run through this Cube, some as major build-around concepts, others as small drafting hints.
This cube treats the graveyard as a resource, not simply a place for dead creatures and used cards. There is nothing so obvious as Entomb into Exhume or Reanimate into 'Good game', rather the graveyard provides additional options and angles of play, whether it be through cards that can be cast from the graveyard or cards which interact with that zone. Don't worry, Reanimator is still a supported archetype, it is just slower and designed to slot into control or midrange strategies, rather than be the all-in strategy it often represents.
Artifacts are quite prevalent in this environment, and provide a number of options. These options range from a density of equipment for aggressive decks to allowing for the existence of a Wildfire deck. Multiple Tinkers and Tinker-like effects exist, though their targets are not nearly as oppressive as expected from this archetype. Steel Hellkite and Colossus of Akros stand in for Wurmcoil Engine and Blightsteel Colossus, providing solid, but not instantly game-winning Tinker plays.
There are also some smaller themes, which offer joins between colours. These are not as overt as many cube lists, which have wonderful write ups like '
is all about flyers! does tokens!' (Aside: I have no idea how to do that, it always seems too isolating from the rest of the Cube). Rather there are a few considerations I have added, which tend to end up focussed in a couple of colours. In this cube, those considerations included the following:- Sacrificing Creatures
- Instant and Sorcery Density
- Top-of-deck Matters
- Going Wide (having a large number of creatures, which could be tokens)
- Flicker Effects
- Creature Type: Human
- Creature Type: Zombie (ok, so there are Gravecrawlers...)
- Birthing Pod
The above were all represented factors which I held in mind when deciding on cards to include in this cube. There are not optimal decks for each of these themes, unlike say, the
Flyers archetype mentioned above, but there will be decks which feature these concepts to greater and lesser extents, and I would like to think, if I have done my job right, these decks will be stronger than those which are simply a 'bunch of cards'.
