My Cube Year in Review
(I can't look at this anymore, so even though it needs work I'm posting it anyway)
Introduction
While this report is going to cover the time period of 9/1/13-8/31/14, I'm going to start off with some background information to give it context. With that in mind, lets head to December 2012!
Every year a whole bunch of my friends meet up in December for a weeklong gathering where we do basically nothing other then play games. My friends are generalist gamers: we play all kinds of games. Card games, board games, video games, roleplaying games, you name it, we play it. During these gatherings Magic has not been a major component in the past, even though most of the people know how to play. Magic is a living game and a collectible game, so most of the people prefer to stay away from it and play games that are easier to pick up. That said, we had drafted and cubed in previous years and when I brought my cube along this year, most people were happy to play it.
And they were disappointed. Some people had fun, but there was an air of frustration about that hadn't existed before. People didn't like the design as much as they had. They preferred retail limited and it wasn't even that close.
Immediately, I knew the problem, because I had some frustrations of my own. In 2011 I had become aware of the popularization of cube and over the next year and a half (or so) I had been ferociously devouring information and attempting to utilize it the best that I could. However, that information wasn't being simply gathered in its own context, it was inextricably mixed with my years of experience designing cube. Unfortunately the outcome was hopelessly intermingled and compromised. The cube information I was reading was focused on providing evaluations of cards, but those evaluations were based on an incestuous environment. Simply put, the bulk of cube information I was consuming were people saying which cards are good in cube based on which cards in cube are good. Unfortunately, this is a literal dead end. With much money spent on "improving" my cube and little direction as to where to go next, it became clear that I needed to get deeper into the discourse so as to generate design discussion and tap the knowledge of the cube community.
We know how that turned out. Riptide Lab formed soon after and I started participating in cube design discourse.
So, by September of 2013 my cube had been improved greatly from a design standpoint and was certainly more fun then it was in December 2012, but unfortunately it was missing something huge. It has no character. It was a well tuned pile of generic. Sure, it was more fun to play, but nothing about it was very unique. If something didn't change, then my cube would end up in the endless cycle of looking at new set spoilers for cards that "improve" the cube by making it do the exact same thing with slightly different artwork.
And it was when I was looking over the Theros spoiler that everything changed.
Theros inspired me to go all in on a characterful cube design. At first, the goal was simply to get combat tricks into play. I was so inspired, I even wrote an article about it called "Live Big, Live Heroic". Later, I went in on enchantress. Devotion even plays a small role in my cube. Combined with some of the other things I support, my cube has a very strong, unique character. When you play my cube, you can't mistake it for anything else. Which is exactly how I like it.
But it took a lot of tinkering to get there.
Space
The first problem that became immediately apparent was that supporting heroic took up a decent amount of cards to do. All kinds of stuff needed to go to make room. A lot of it was no problem. There were still a lot of artifacts of bad design hanging around in my cube that took some time for me to realize that, no, these cards weren't adding anything at all to the environment. While I was able to get everything to fit, the frustrations of space began percolating in my mind. The biggest "space waster" in cube was easily manafixing. You need a bunch of it, but it really adds nothing to the draft process. You just take it. The differences in the quality of the fixing could arguably a draft tension, but in my experience it was nothing more then a headache. Events like "all of the r/g and none of the b/w lands" coming out in a undersized draft or "he got Taiga and I got Karplusan Forest" are banal. Plus, dozens of slots could be opened up if there was just some way to get rid of them.
That was around the time the utility land draft was presented. I fell in love with the idea and (mis)use it for a completely different purpose and I doubt I'll ever go back. I've been doing it so much that when I draft someone else's cube and see a Stomping Ground in the pack, it confuses me. This change has given me more design space then I could conceivably have had otherwise, because it follows the golden rule of design space: YOU CAN'T CREATE MORE DESIGN SPACE BY ADDING MORE CARDS, YOU CAN ONLY GET IT BY ADDING MORE PICKS. Which is what the land draft does and by fixing the cards in this extra "pack" it ensures the a necessary and vital resource (manafixing) is abundant and available.
It turned out that "Living Heroic" wasn't simply a matter of slamming in a bunch of heroic dudes, auras and pump spells. A lot of work went into making it work. The first thing that needed to be done was question some basic assumptions regarding cube composition.
The Color Pie
Since basic assumptions were being questioned anyway, I figured that I needed to start at the bottom and decide what effects I wanted in the cube and where they should exist. The most pressing matter by far was removal, as removal forms much of the basis for early interaction and strictly controlling the cost, speed and type of removal was vital for getting heroic to work. If removal was too cheap, versatile and instant speed, the theme would be a trap. However if removal is too weak, your choice of threats becomes severely limited if you don't want rocket tag dynamics. The arrangement I ended up leaning towards making sure the cards weren't overloaded in these three factors: cheap, versatile or instant speed. So, Tragic Slip is cheap and instant speed, but its versatility is conditional, while Journey to Nowhere is cheap and versatile, but sorcery speed. Moves to cards like Flame Slash, Volt Charge, Hero's Downfall and Prison Term were conscious ones that was a prerequiste to getting the new cube functional. With that in mind, lets discuss the colors.
White: White completely changed. At first, it was subtle. Out came things like
Swords to Plowshares and
Elspeth, Knight Errant. Removal was certainly a white thing, but quickly it became apparent that mass removal would be better off somewhere else. White instead is loaded with ways to remove enchantments in addition to creatures. The removal I chose to go with in white was generally flexible and generally sorcery speed, generally powerful but in return itself targetable by removal. The effects range from
Oppressive Rays at 1 to
Faiths Fetters at 4.
White's purview needed to shift somewhat, because it is the main color for heroic support. Strong auras along with cards that support enchantments and creatures that are good at carrying auras took up a good amount of space and a sprinkling of powerful combat tricks rounded out the color. Anthems and token generators remained in the color to support the go wide option and a sparse sprinkling of high end effects gives long game decks reason to pick up white. The color's threats were generally smaller.
After running my cube in a few full table drafts, I was astonished at how powerful white was, especially after having pruned out almost all of the traditionally thought of as "first pick" cards. White aggro was exceedingly good and I was very happy to see that Armageddon was no longer a necessary evil. The reason for the success might be non-obvious and it certainly took me some time realize why, but it was sort of the opposite of the old "why black sucks in cube" argument. White's niche had become focused. Instead of bleeding support in different directions, adding white to a deck gave it a specific strength that was powerful and obvious. White was the color for beating face and the card selections actively supported this rather then offering a compromised selection requiring massive disruption to work. The aggressive deck was allowed to be aggressive in this environment.
Green: The purpose of green in my cube is pretty general, but the implications of green's role in my cube plays out somewhat differently. Green generates mana, creates resilient threats, destroys enchantments and is the only color to have more then 20% of its cards cost more then 3 mana. The oddity here is that all of the non-green ramp cards are completely absent in my cube: generating extra mana requires playing green or taking lands with significant drawbacks. Being the only source of efficient mana, green is a staple of control decks.
Green also provides significant archetype support for a number of decks. Enchantresses provide fuel for enchantment themed piles, the numerous efficient +1/+1 counter generating cards provide for proliferate/ion storm decks and resilient threats fuel aggro decks that don't gas out on turn 5. One of the more interesting synergies that was developed later in the year were the pinata cards (the newly printed Hornet Nest helping to provide critical mass). These cards worked exceedingly well with red decks, but the upper echelon "fight" mechanic cards like Setessan Tatics and Ulvenwald Tracker really make them shine. As it turns out the fight cards also worked well with resilient creature aggro and +1/+1 counter decks as well random midrange piles, which have helped to make green a much more dynamic color, along with its disproportionately useful enchantment removal being a legitimate means of interacting as opposed to the "save or die" nature of such effects in other cubes.
Red: Red has never been a problem in my cube, so very little changed. Some 2-3 drops shifted to give better synergy, a few enchants cycled in, and a few engine cards rotated, but the color basically does exactly what it has always done. Red's spot on in the color pie is simple: lay down aggression, remove blockers and sweep the board. Attempting to embrace the trend towards filtering in red, madness cards have also become a part of the equation, but these cards still do the same basic red things. The color goes from Goblin Guide to Crater Hellion with an incinerate or a slagstorm in between.
The removal choices for red were tinkered a bit, but using damage gives an inherent limitation to all red removal. The main offender in the color was lightning bolt, which was axed in favor of flame slash, which has been a favorite ever since its introduction for its ability to kill stuff red traditionally can't kill, but not for any good reason. Mizzium Mortars bridges the gap here as well and the removal suite attempts to give a reasonable selection of cards that cover to necessary change of cost, speed and utility.
Black: While white underwent a complete renaissance in its role and power level, black also was completely redefined in other ways this year. Twice. With white moving further and further away form sweepers and big creatures, the onus for those things was clearly moving to black. One of the perhaps strangest decisions was the one to keep Grave Titan, even though other powerful high cost drops were vanishing left and right. The decision to keep perhaps the most powerful titan was a nuanced one and keeping it the black card was for a reason. Black was to play the spoiler role in this cube. Instead of building up, black would destroy, then use the remains. This typically puts black into the control roll, as control decks attempt to dismantle the aspirations of active strategies. The speed this cube was still very real and the general lack of ramp meant that six mana cards must be decisive if control is going to be able to compete.
In a fortunate twist of fate, black happened to also get very strong cards in unexpected places during the Theros block, with strong heroic creatures, constellation cards and bestow creatures. So, while black's primary role is long term value and destruction, the color can still contribute to the primary themes if needed. Black and White are the polar opposites of the cube, but there is enough overlap that black/white heroic or white/black control can still come together.
Blue: The much maligned blue section needed less work then one might expect. A strong move towards softer, cheaper counterspells was an obvious decision helps blue both have stronger early game interaction and more late game counterplay. With the general curve lowering hitting the color hard, blue's niche was turning to general support. Needing a bit more identity, blue took over the mana denial role in the cube, giving it strong incentive for play in aggressive strategies as well as taking the burden off of other colors allowing them to diversify their cards more. It turns out blue who some of the best auras in the game, which doesn't hurt. The color is rounded out with powerful fliers, card selection and a nice variety of archetype enablers.
Large scale changes
To go along with furthering the goals of the cube, a few changes that went across all colors were established.
Mana Rock Purge: I took them all out and it was probably the best change ever. Not having colorless ramp made the mana cost of cards a much more accurate value of both of resource requirements of the card, but also the timing. Detailed tinkering and card cost analysis had actual meaning beyond the relatively shallow parallel comparisons. Simply, asking the question of "What SHOULD a 4/5/6 mana card do?" made more sense to ask when I could now reliably know WHEN a 4/5/6 mana card would hit the table. Whether or not my card selections for those costs are correct, any mistakes are correctable now that a proper scale has been developed.
Colorless Card Purge: As the color pie has become more important, colorless cards became much less important and slowly but surely have been purged. Mana rocks were a large percentage of these cards anyway, but effects where possible have been steadily moved to colored options whenever possible.
Lower the Mana Curve: With the combination of increasing mana reliability by drafting lands separately and eliminating ramp, more of the game takes place in the early turns. In order to ensure quality gameplay with meaningful decisions and diverse game states, there needed to be lots of different cards that could be played in these turns. As such, the man curve has been mercilessly lowered. As a rule of thumb, 80% of all non-land cards should cost 3 or less. This is where the diversity of threats makes the most sense. One thing I had noticed in many cubes was that there was so much redundancy in the upper casting costs, where there would often be literally 4 times as many cards in the card pool as needed to fill those slots. A player would have a buffet of choices to customize their deck to their precise desires. Meanwhile, in the lower casting costs, there was merely a bare minimum of cards, whereby you would have to draft and play anything you found, making the deck by necessity brought on by lack of availability rather then any actual design. You can look at many different cube lists and see these trend, where a given white section might have eight total 1 drops and seven more 5+ mana finishers, as if the two things are in equal demand. In my cube you will find 16 one drops (plus some are doubled, see later) and five 5+mana finishers, a much more realistic split.
The Land Draft
The utility land draft wasn't my idea, I just followed ran with it in a somewhat different direction. The effects of this change were quite impressive, but it hasn't been without its flaws.
Pros
- The decks function well from turn one more consistently and as such the games are better.
- You get to play with sweet lands and have hilarious plays with cards that you wouldn't otherwise see. The game where all three of Springjack Pasture's abilities were required to stay in a game (and no other land in Magic History would have done it) was hilarious and it didn't cost a single cube slot to do it.
- The proper manafixing is always available.
Cons
- It adds draft weight and length. Especially with players who aren't well reversed in the magic cardpool and AP prone players.
For me, the pros clearly outweigh the con, but the con is very real. You can occasionally see frustration in more experienced players faces as a newer player is reading through all the green/white duals to pick which one they want. Similarly, the newer players can be frustrated with the load of additional cards they are expected to process. However, once the games start, everyone agrees its awesome, so the root of the problem is finding a better way to execute the actual drafting of the lands, which is a definite goal for next year.
Double Picks
Some cards just work better in mass, but having them take up multiple spots during the draft simply decreases the diversity of what you want. With double picks, a single draft pick gives you multiple copies of a card to put in your deck. Doing this gives you the redundancy you need without compromising variety.
One drops were the most necessary place for double drops, as simply increasing the number of one drops wouldn't actually solve any of the problems. Plainly, there aren't enough good one drops in Magic and there certainly weren't enough quality one drops in my cube, particularly with the movement towards the lower mana curve. If I simply freed up slots by cutting high cost redundant cards, but then used them to put in redundant cards one drops, the issue would only be half solved. There would be sufficient one drops, but there would still be pointless redundancy, just in a new place. While double picks create some theoretical issues, in practice those issues are fluff compared to the benefits.
Theoretical issue #1: Since you get more cards, the draft is easier because you need less picks to fill your slots.
Pragmatic reality: The decks that need extra one drops generally play less land, so they are filling up the same number of slots anyway. If one were to say that double picks are an issue for this reason, then one would also need to conclude that 18 land decks are problematic in traditional cube for the same reason, which is an issue I've never seen levied.
Theoretical issue #2: Opening turns become too similar.
Pragmatic reality: Consistency of early drops is the key to incentivizing early gameplay.
Theoretical issue #3: But that's bad.
Pragmatic reality: Its way better then the alternative.
Eliminating Obsolete Cards
Instead of doubling up, we could instead run more distinct one drops. Indeed, that's what a lot of people do, for whatever reason. However, if they are doing it for the sake of "gameplay variety" they are being delusional. Running obsolete cards for consistency is horrible, because not only does it not create any positive variety by increasing the line of play available, it also generates negative variety by varying power level.
Consider Jackal Pup and Firedrinker Satyr, for instance. Both of the serve the exact same niche, go into the exact same decks and produce the same general lines of play. The only difference is that one of them has additional functionality and that functionality makes it a more powerful card. By running both you aren't gaining ANY increase in variety, instead you are just being inconsistent on the appropriate power level of a card of that cost and niche in your, as well as creating the complete random "feel bad" from having the worse card in your pack. By picking the right card and playing that one in whatever form (by itself, as a double pick, in two slots, whatever), my draft environment that makes more sense. Cutting out all the obsolete cards has made a small difference in the quality of the games, but a noticeable one in player satisfaction. The players never need to worry that they are picking the wrong card for the effect they want or that someone else in one of there games will slam down the same card, but better. Many Magic players seem to consider obsolete cards part and parcel of the experience of playing Magic but I disagree. The feelbad of picking the obsolete card is solely the fault of the designer.
Custom Cards
Trying to support archetypes, eliminate obsolete cards and lower the mana curve comes with difficulties, particularly when you generally want to avoid redundancy (and thus duplicate cards). The Magic card pool serves many masters, from constructed formats to limited environments to casual appeal. It does not specifically support my cube. As such, in order to make my cube work it became clear that customizing cards would be a requirement. Early on I decided to work within the confines of editing existing cards, mostly out of convenience. If there is ever a need to design a new card from the ground up, we will cross that bridge when we come to it.
Basically all of the holes the needed filling were easily filled editing existing cards. Magic design has done a great job capturing the variety of effects that make sense in the context of the game, however, that does not mean these cards were developed with the proper power level to coexist with the cards in my cube. As such, stats, keywords and casting costs can usually be edited to get the effect to the power level where it needs to be. It would both egotistical and futile to think that the developers should aim their creations specifically to my needs. Applying the sharpie gets things done where waiting for someone else would not.
An example of one the best edits was to Oakheart Dryads. The card was a perfect enchantment enabler to get aggressive decks in the game and was also at the best casting cost to do it. Unfortunately, the card is extremely weak. It reminded me of another weak card, Oath of the Ancient Wood, which helped tie in the +1/+1 counter theme. The idea of dropping Oath of the Ancient Wood's casting cost did cross my mind, but the appearance of Oakheart Dryads have a better solution: change the Dryads' trigger to the oath's! Problematically, this useful trigger was a bit too much on an easy to cast 2/3 (that could come into play as a 3/4), so its toughness was lowered and a well liked, competitively drafted, archetype binding card was born.
Attitude
During the winter I accidentally deleted my cube from Cube Tutor. I obviously still had the physical cube and could have easily retyped it, but instead I just took apart the whole cube and rebuilt it.
Simply put, this was the best design decision ever.
Years of baggage were still hanging around in the old list. It was improving, but "adds and cuts" are just an awful way to go about making improvements. Abandoning the old list completely and starting with a clean slate helped me forget all of the bad advice, arbitrary decisions and unnecessary structure. I was embracing a new theme with my cube. All of the old stuff had to go and the best way to do that is to start with nothing and build up. A lot of the cards I assumed were important (and as such never "cut) weren't the ones that were put in when I rebuilt it. They were just sort of there, getting in the way of design improvements.
When I was rebuilding, I decided to ignore all arbitrary design criteria and instead focus completely on the goals. There was literally no restrictions as to what or how many of anything would go on. Whatever the final arrangement ended up being, it would be that way because that was the way things worked to best. Not surprisingly, the number of mono-color cards in each color ended up being roughly equal, but maybe surprisingly the numbers of cards in the different multicolor combinations varied wildly. I just reminded myself not to care and kept iterating.
The goals in question? Promote active boardplay, emphasize quality gameplay, deemphasize draft tension and push selected themes.
In Depth on Draft Tension
I’ve mentioned a few times about how creating draft tension in my cube not a major faction of the design and many of the design decisions serve to lessen the amount of draft tension. I’ve been steadily moving in this direction for a number of reasons and it seems likely that I will continue to do so. This is done by increasing the effect amount of draft picks, flattening the power curve and increasing the amount of synergy reliant power. Here is an overview of the motivations and effects of this movement.
1) Less experienced players get more leeway to screw up and still get a deck they will be happy to play. Low margin environments are fine if everyone is hardcore, but when less experienced players join in, it’s nice for them to have a safety. The more generous margins allow for the experienced players to make speculative choices, craft sideboards and otherwise play the meta because they won’t be scraping for playable cards.
2) You actually get slot choices. As I said earlier, most cubes only give redundancy and real card choices at higher casting costs: a lot of the time you don’t actually get to deckbuild, you instead take whatever quota filler fits your needs. Lesser draft tensions means a wider variety of cards are available across all casting costs. This means the problem isn’t if you can get a card to fill a certain role, but rather which one should you use, which is in my experience the more interesting problem.
3) You can afford to fit in really narrow cards. More leeway means having cards where it is possible the demand for in a given draft will be zero is much less problematic. In basically any cube environment, there will always be leftover cards that don’t make your deck and by decreasing draft tension this pool is effectively increased in size, giving the narrow cards a place to go when their niche isn’t realized.
4) The premium cards in the draft are the removal and disruption. When you are dealing with synergy related themes, you want these cards to be circulating so that drafters can see the big picture of what’s available and these cards can reach the proper players. As I mentioned before the draft choke point in my cube is really the removal, which causes the synergy dependent engine cards and threats to circulate the table more, which is good for the environment.
Principles
I would be remiss if I didn't mention the Riptide Lab influence in my cube. The principle that I least directly follow is the poison principle. I run a lot of poisiony cards. However, in understanding the poison principle I knew I had to do two things. First, I needed to draft more cards in order to make up for the number of narrow picks. The land draft easily solved that. Second, and this happened as a happy developmental accident, I needed to create a separate draft chokepoint since "broadly powerful cards that lots of decks want" wasn't going to be it. I thought is was going to be 4 drops, which are heavily limited in this cube, and to some extent, it is. What it really turned out to be creature removal. In detuning removal, there is less broadly powerful removal to go around, which means even the more situational removal gets snapped up quickly. The jockeying for the proper removal suite is probably the most tense drafting mechanic in my cube. It is also one that newer players don't tend to sweat over like getting a crap manabase or not having enough playables, because you still get to play a cool deck that does something awesome even if you misdraft and actually have no chance of winning.
The Riptide principle that I have fully embraced is the mana. I was a holdout on this one for a while, but being able to play lots of colors and actually cast the spells is fun. It makes for more creative deckbuilding and synergies at all kinds of different angles. Devotion and favoring shocklands over duals give you clear incentives to limit your colors, but its nice to be able to go nuts and play Marchesa aggro if you want to.
Possibly most important way in which Riptide Lab was influential in my design was not actually a Riptide principal, but rather the form of the discourse itself that occurs on the site. One of my largest frustrations with cube discourse is that much of the discussion comes at the process from a deckbuilding angle. That is, the relative power level of cards is discussed with regards to how they perform in the context of the other cards that exist in the world of Magic. These relative power levels are used to fill quotas of cards of different colors, costs and effects. The theory seems to be that role of the designer is to first pick the correct quota, then fill the quota with the best cards and that the doing so will end up with a great cube.
Which, bluntly, has always struck me as completely backwards.
The nice thing about discourse on Riptide Lab is that rather then focusing on comparisons and quotas, it focuses on delving into the question of what makes for enjoyable games of Magic, then how to design a card pool that creates those games. It makes so much more sense, is much more valuable and most importantly is worthy of actual discussion. These conversations have helped me become an active participant in the discourse instead of a disinterested bystander. Riptide Lab generates the meaningful thoughts about design because it doesn't confuse it for deckbuilding. Long story short, a cube needs to be built card by card, not slot by slot. You won't get where you want to be by filling a taxonomical spreadsheet. Mistaking evaluation for insight is probably the biggest mistake you can make when designing a cube. I still catch myself occasionally thinking in terms of needing an "x cc, y color, z type" card and, sure, sometimes those shortcuts can feel nice. And that's really what they are, shortcuts where you don't have to actually consider the holistic effect of what a card does in your environment. In order to advance your cube to any real extent, though, you need to stop the focus on categorization and start actually engaging in the exploration of the relationships that make up your environment. You need to study design then design yourself.
There's a lot more, but all of it comes from the quality of the discourse. The exact sources can be lost in the conversation and often the way things are implemented don't exactly match the original idea. I know I blatantly stole the +1/+1 theme, was subtly influenced by team volcanic hammer and continue to run ordeal of heliod mostly because someone said I shouldn't. And I thank everyone for contributing the healthy discourse where these ideas come about.
The Themes Proper
Heroic, Hexproof and Doublestrike: These interrelated concepts revolve around throwing enchants on dudes and beating face with them. Depending on the approach, these decks can be beatdown, disruptive aggro or combo, either by overarching design or in response to a given had. White is usually involved, but its not required. The necessary ingredients are creatures, auras and disruption, be in protection spells, countermagic. mana denial or discard. These decks have been very successful so far producing a fair number of 3-0 and 2-1s and while they were extremely supported at first, laying it on thick wasn't as necessary as it first seemed and many of the elements are used regularly by other deck types. Lots of redundant cards were dropped from this theme over the course of the year and I think that the current level of support is approaching correct. Cards like Wordmail, Favored Hoplite and Spectral Flight are strong cards that are guaranteed wheels for the deck. These decks are the most explosive in the format, but are also vulnerable to proper disruption making judging tools available to other players disproportionately important to playing with or against these decks.
+1/+1 Theme: This theme adds leverage a beatdown or midrange strategy by utilizing cards that take advantage of +1/+1 counters. The +1/+1 counter manipulation isn't the deck itself, but rather a resource that players can attempt to make use of for profit. This theme transcends all colors, with incentives ranging the very aggressive Oona's Blackguard and Rage Forger (both with custom changes) to longer term investments like Ion Storm and Marchesa. Useful cards for getting +1/+1 counter are utilized by basically every deck, so players looking to take advantage of the incentive cards need to take them more aggressively as the incentives are more likely to return to them. Proliferate is amazing in this theme. This was simple to implement as with only a few incentives and keeping an eye towards including cards that have +1/+1 counters. It takes up minimal space and has amazing play to it.
Lifegain Theme: The pool of incentive cards for this theme is still shallow, but the decks for this theme are amongst the most interesting to play. Forcing longer games can be tricky in this cube and generating the mana to leverage additional life is similarly difficult, putting this theme in a strange place. Some ideas for customized cards have recently come up to try, focusing on lifegain triggers (Archangel of Thune, Ajani's Pridemate) rather then life total, which is better leveraged via life payment in the context of the greater metagame of my cube. This theme has contributed to some solid 2-1 decks, so I'm in no rush to shove raw power into it.
Constellation/Enchantress Theme: This is pretty new in my cube, with its current form only going back to Journey into Nyx. The implementation was pretty simple, mostly consisting of moving comparable effects from non-enchantments to enchantments. The main purpose of this theme is to provide a modular, incremental advantage that runs off of cards that you would play otherwise. Granted, a few cards are included to turn these cards into engines, the individual incentive cards in the theme can run off of incidental enchantments. A Jund deck has been the most successful implementation of this theme and one of the most rewarding decks I've ever had the pleasure of playing. Still, there is more development to be done here.
Misses
A few cards ended up being totally awful, but none was more memorable then Attrition. Nothing made for a slow, painful, frustrating game more then this card. One obvious retort might be "you should have more enchantment removal", but I don't buy that argument. A card should actually create interesting gamestates. Saying the solution to a card is ensuring that it doesn't stay in play says to me that this card doesn't belong in my cube. I'm trying Grave Pact for a minute, as it takes more commitment to cast and requires more synergy to utilize.
Heliod, God of the Sun was pretty useless, in spite of a very favorable environment. Unless your cube gets huge value out of mana sinks or is mono-white, he's probably not good.
On the other end of the god spectrum, Purphoros, God of the Forge was pretty universally despised. The amount of damage it creates through its "synergy" with playing creatures is obnoxious. A card with build around potential like the red god has is fine, but not if "combos" this well with playing the game normally.
Where now?
Having invested heavily into a number of themes, the current agenda is refinement, increasing depth and of course figuring out how to squeeze more support for fun themes in. From the looks of the latest set, a dedicated sacrifice value theme looks promising.
As stated before, the land draft needs refinement in terms of execution. Cutting down the number of available lands would no doubt make the process simpler to process, but I am not sure how to do that while retaining the depth the current process adds. I've toyed with the idea of circulating land picks during the draft process and this seems to have promise, but I haven't found an implementation that I like yet.
Getting the right level of theme support is another thing I would like to work on. If themes can be supported with fewer cards, more mini-themes can be integrated. Finding more crossover cards and being able to better recognize when support becomes extraneous are things that will improve my cube.
The next big project for my cube is inspired by the current set. Gold cards are funny things. The opportunity cost for them in most cubes is the same as any other card, but the actual demand and risk of not making your deck when taking them is greater then all but the most color intense of their mono-colored counterparts. Gold cards (and extremely color intense mono-color cards), due to their restrictive nature, aren't "worth" a full slot in a cube. Traditionally, cube slots are binary in nature: a card is either in or not in, so people tend of include gold cards in slots normally is the alternative is not to play them at all. Double picks mess with this a bit, but in this case they don't help. The polycube idea posed by Mr. Waddell is an interesting take on this issue, but in this case its less desirable both logistically and in its execution: while with a polycube design one could make each individual gold card less likely to appear, inside the actual draft process they would still be functionally equivalent to their less restrictive counterparts.
The solution for my purposes requires gold cards to be drafted separately, similar to how lands are handled. Also similar to how lands are handled, this would carry the secondary benefit of increasing design space. However, the drafting process could not be the same as the land draft for numerous reasons: varied demand, poor timing within the draft process and noticeable increase in draft length.
My idea, which is still a work in progress, is to separate the gold cards and allow them as replacement picks. This means (in a booster draft) that there will be a pool of gold cards available to be drafted along with each pack and instead of taking a card from their pack, a player may take one of the gold cards instead. The player would also remove a card from the pack in this case, not adding it to their pool.
This is advantageous for a number of reasons. A player will never have to pick between the gold card in the pack or "something else". They can take the gold card whenever the pack has nothing to offer. The opportunity cost would be much smaller, because the window of opportunity is much bigger. Further, the cards in the packs would be in higher demand as none of them would be narrow gold cards, making more competition for specific cards in the draft. However draft tension would not be significantly increased because more cards would be seen by the players. In my personal favorite format Westchester Draft, the extra gold pool can be implemented through an additional row dedicated only to gold cards.
Figuring at the exact implementation of the number of cards in the gold pool, the relative power level of these cards and the specifics of implementing the communal pool are still being considered.
Also, I want to utilize the prowess mechanic because unlike other spells matter mechanics, enchantments actually trigger it.
