Grillo_Parlante
Contributor
This is probably the worst idea ever, but the posts in Turillazzo's thread got me thinking what a cube built around painlands would look like.
I have the shell here, just with the lands, as it occured to me that there was just too many creative angles to approach. This almost feels like a reinvention of the game.
Basically, life would actually become an important commodity: a finite resource that would have to be carefully leveraged out in order to create the game's tempo. There becomes a real tension between life gain as fuel, and life loss as translated into action.
This means a few things:
1. Even fairly blase life gain cards become playable, and good life gain cards become insane. Stream of life is a card, and soul warden becomes a real engine. Blood artist becomes an absolute mythic bomb (maybe broken).
2. Its traditionally been difficult to include fun prison archetypes in cube, as the sort of resource denial WOTZ traditionally produced just shut people out of the game, and they have not printed prison cards since. However, when the resource being chocked away is raw life points, this really expands the pool of possible cards, and opens up the entire NWO pool. Pingers, for example, could suddenly go from being fringe playable cards, to being part of a unique resource denial strategy.
This is a chance to reinvent the prison archetype without new printings or custom cards, challenge the player to rethink the nature of the game, as well as reevaluate cards in an entirely new light.
3. Aggro disruption/aggro control/pressure control/tempo/insert other moniker here decks also come to the fore, as the implications of life loss in the format gives every aggro deck native disruptive tools.
4. Do you guys remember hand discard strategies? The old rack based decks from the 1990s. Well, these suddenly seem much better, as discard provides pressure to play into a damaging mana base. The rack itself becomes much better when its incrimental damage is being augmented by the mana base.
5. There are also some interesting mechanics that interact with pain lands: bloodthirst, fateful hour--cards or mechanics that care about damage taken in a turn. Mirror Universe!!!!!!
6. House mana burn rule always in effect.
I have the shell here, just with the lands, as it occured to me that there was just too many creative angles to approach. This almost feels like a reinvention of the game.
Basically, life would actually become an important commodity: a finite resource that would have to be carefully leveraged out in order to create the game's tempo. There becomes a real tension between life gain as fuel, and life loss as translated into action.
This means a few things:
1. Even fairly blase life gain cards become playable, and good life gain cards become insane. Stream of life is a card, and soul warden becomes a real engine. Blood artist becomes an absolute mythic bomb (maybe broken).
2. Its traditionally been difficult to include fun prison archetypes in cube, as the sort of resource denial WOTZ traditionally produced just shut people out of the game, and they have not printed prison cards since. However, when the resource being chocked away is raw life points, this really expands the pool of possible cards, and opens up the entire NWO pool. Pingers, for example, could suddenly go from being fringe playable cards, to being part of a unique resource denial strategy.
This is a chance to reinvent the prison archetype without new printings or custom cards, challenge the player to rethink the nature of the game, as well as reevaluate cards in an entirely new light.
3. Aggro disruption/aggro control/pressure control/tempo/insert other moniker here decks also come to the fore, as the implications of life loss in the format gives every aggro deck native disruptive tools.
4. Do you guys remember hand discard strategies? The old rack based decks from the 1990s. Well, these suddenly seem much better, as discard provides pressure to play into a damaging mana base. The rack itself becomes much better when its incrimental damage is being augmented by the mana base.
5. There are also some interesting mechanics that interact with pain lands: bloodthirst, fateful hour--cards or mechanics that care about damage taken in a turn. Mirror Universe!!!!!!
6. House mana burn rule always in effect.