Grillo_Parlante
Contributor
Innistrad Themed Cube (360 Unpowered)
I.Introduction
II.Design
A.Tempo
Looking at different forums I see this term used interchangeably with a number of different ideas. To avoid any confusion with semantics, when I say “tempo” I am referring to the order and timing of when spells are cast. By having a “tempo driven format” I am referring to a format where you have to interact with the board early on and maintain that impact. To that end, I have tried to create a format driven by powerful scaling creatures and early drops that demand interaction in a certain time frame.
Since some of these may be raising some eyebrows: briefly: I would prefer to shape a format to include interesting build arounds for an aggressive player rather than simply give all of the interesting interactions to the mid-range or control player. To that end, I hope that I have a reasonable density of humans to support champion and a reasonable density of brainstorm/token spells to support delver. There is also enough creature buffing to keep them relevant in the mid and late game. I love reckless waif's design because it directly punishes people for ignoring tempo.
I am not running many naturally powerful mid-range creatures (again in order to encourage synergy and tempo) opting instead to buff the early drops so they maintain impact throughout the mid and late game. I also have the werewolf tribe present again in R/G.
B.Archetypes Diversity
C.Lack of Quality Removal/Synergy Over Power
III. The Middling Strokes
A.Graveyard Hate
B.Library//Shuffling Manipulation
IV. Conclusion
I.Introduction
So, this is a project I’ve been toying around with for about the last month and was finally able to give it its beta run this weekend. After running my cube for a while, I wanted to build something that reflected more what I had learned about cube design, and would reflect more of a guided design of what I wanted a cube to be like from the ground-up, rather than feeling like a patch job of ideas. As always, I have to credit the people on this board for thinking outside of the box. In particular, Christ Taylor and FlowerSunRain for writing their articles on double strike and heroic: involving the idea of removal light but combat trick focused cube environments. And of course, all of the numerous posts from other contributors, without which, I would still be running a much less fun, power maxed, singleton cube.
Since this was the cube's beta run this weekend, I still have some polishing to do, but as there is some unusual stuff going on in it, I’m going to do my best to briefly break things down, before issue spotting from the play session and requesting feedback.
First off, for reference, the cube tutor list is here.
II.Design
This is a cube built to emulate the sort of design successes of Innistrad limited. A brief article can be found here, but I will spoiler tag the relevant portions below:
The first thing to remember about Innistrad is the importance of Tempo. Many people say that Innistrad was a fast format, which isn’t entirely true. What they mean to say is that it is a tempo driven format. You had to be able to interact with the board early on and maintain board impact through the entire game. There are two main reasons for this. First, the Green, White, and Blue decks were able to field cheap but effective creatures that punished players who did not interact with the board. Second, there were several cards, like Silent Departure, Travel Preparations, or Feeling of Dread, which allowed these decks to punch through board stalls in the late game. This is the importance of tempo. These decks were able to impact the board quickly and maintain board impact long into the late game because of equipment and flashback.
The second thing to remember about Innistrad was its depth. Innistrad had more potential draft archetypes than the vast majority of formats, and this created an incredible amount of depth. There were many cards that seemed almost unplayable, but that gained significant importance when placed around certain other cards. Players had a large diversity of options for deck building, and many like me were able to continue innovating new deck ideas throughout the Innistrad season. This made for a volatile format where anything was possible, and drafters had to consider each card on its situational merits, instead of just memorizing a list of pick orders.
The third key to the format was the lack of quality removal. While there were more removal spells in the set than an average set, they had difficult restrictions, and they were spread out over all the colors. It was difficult for any deck to have answers to everything played by another deck. This meant that you often needed to focus more on picking up the best threats and synergy, instead of just picking all the best removal spells.
In the broad strokes, I’m designing for 1) a heavily tempo based format, 2) with deep archetype variety, 3)lacking quality removal, 4) to encourage synergy over power (perhaps most easily represented by combat tricks).
In the more middling strokes I’m hoping to focus heavily on 1) graveyard manipulation, 2) library/shuffling manipulation, and 3) token manipulation. I will pick out the ones which I think deserve further explanation.
A.Tempo
Looking at different forums I see this term used interchangeably with a number of different ideas. To avoid any confusion with semantics, when I say “tempo” I am referring to the order and timing of when spells are cast. By having a “tempo driven format” I am referring to a format where you have to interact with the board early on and maintain that impact. To that end, I have tried to create a format driven by powerful scaling creatures and early drops that demand interaction in a certain time frame.
Since some of these may be raising some eyebrows: briefly: I would prefer to shape a format to include interesting build arounds for an aggressive player rather than simply give all of the interesting interactions to the mid-range or control player. To that end, I hope that I have a reasonable density of humans to support champion and a reasonable density of brainstorm/token spells to support delver. There is also enough creature buffing to keep them relevant in the mid and late game. I love reckless waif's design because it directly punishes people for ignoring tempo.
I am not running many naturally powerful mid-range creatures (again in order to encourage synergy and tempo) opting instead to buff the early drops so they maintain impact throughout the mid and late game. I also have the werewolf tribe present again in R/G.
B.Archetypes Diversity
Here, I've opted to avoid breaking singleton as much as possible, in an attempt to encourage players to use tutors to tutor up draft around cards (more on that later). My goal is to have it so that when you look at pack 1, there are about two or three different build arounds. I felt that with my old cube, too often you would look at pack 1 and it would be just support cards, or there would be only one clear pick either by power level or because it was the only build around. Some of the archetypes I am encouraging (besides the before mention aggro build-arounds which fit into most of these):
1) Combat based reanimation: adarkar valkyrie/necroskitter + prey upon effect
2) Mill: hedron crab, altar of dementia, undead alchemist, nephalia drownyard
3) self mill/dredge: same, but laboratory maniac, dream twist, spider spawning, splinterfright, skaab ruinator, golgari grave-troll
4) Token Aggro: Dictate of Heliod, hellrider, instigator gang, gutter grime, awakening zone, lingering souls, gavony township
5) sacrifice ramp: token producers + ashnod's altar, nest invader, emrakul's hatcher
6) Sacrifice Aggro: furnace celebration, carrion feeder, greater gargadon,goblin bombardment, unruly mob + threaten effects
7) Burning vengeance: lots of flashback in the list
8) Birthing pod: threaten effects ect.
9) Spells matter: charmbreaker devils, guttersnipe, young pyromancer, delver of secrets, Mondronen Shaman
10) Double strike: prophetic flamespeaker, kruin outlaw, silverblade paladin, dictate of heliod, homicidal seclusion, bonesplitter
C.Lack of Quality Removal/Synergy Over Power
So, this is probably the worst removal suit you've ever seen in a cube. That’s ok, where one door closes, another opens, and by weakening removal it opens the door to all kinds of synergy and helps bind the environment's themes together. The three main forms of synergy removal are 1) sacrifice outlet + threaten effect, 2) fight effect + buffed creature, 3) top-of-library bounce + mill effect. And of course, powered combat tricks like dictate of heliod.
III. The Middling Strokes
A.Graveyard Hate
I feel that the graveyard and token interactions are fairly self-explanatory (tokens are the fuel for sacrifice decks and take advantage of creature buffs; while yard decks want to fill the yard up and use it as a resource). The only thing I want to touch upon here is graveyard hate. Since this is a graveyardcentric format, I want to stay away from feel bad "mass graveyard hate" like rakdos charm or relic of progenitus. I also don't want scavenging ooze or deathrite shaman as this is not how I want people attacking the graveyard (more on that in a moment), and I feel that they are still too efficient at what they do for a format running low quality removal.
My graveyard removal suite consists of cards at this power level:
B.Library//Shuffling Manipulation
Ok, this is where things get more original. The obvious interaction here is the library being fuel for graveyard strategies, thus creating a tension between wanting large numbers of cards in the graveyard to exploit as a resource, the risk of decking, and the risk of being decked by mill strategies, and an opponent’s desire to disrupt the graveyard player. The perfect solution--and playing multiple roles in this environment--are the afore mention memory's journey, stream of consciousness, gaea's blessing, and krosan reclamation.
This is also a format with lots of singleton build arounds thus encouraging use of tutors. I do not run tutors that put cards into the hand, but instead I run tutors that put cards on-top of the library.
The result is the memory's journey package also serves as powerful disruption of those tutors: complicating both when and in what role those disrupters should be played (is it more important to disrupt the graveyard or the library?), and encouraging a tutor player to play more cautiously to avoid getting blown out. I had always wanted the fetchland-stifle tension to translate into cube, but it never worked well for me because stifle effects are just really narrow and limited. This adequately recreates that tension. I've also opted for shadow of doubt over stifle, because SOD has increased utility in an environment like this and cantrips.
In addition, the shuffling dynamic has a lot of sweet incidental interactions with cards like delver of secrets, mul daya channelers brainstorm and lim-dul's vault, increasing the self-shuffling density, and complimenting the fetchlands.
IV. Conclusion
That is a brief synopsis of the format I am trying to build. If you have any questions I will do my best to answer them, but hopefully this provides enough of a framework so the list makes a bit more sense.
. I did however, draft an 
