General Midrange vs Combo Cubes

[ahadabans]

Interesting article I'm just going to post a link to:

http://mtgcube.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-two-kinds-of-cube.html

For those who want the reader's digest version, it boils down to design philosophy:
1. Midrange cube has power restrictions and all (most) cards are meant to be playable in multiple decks - so a goodstuff cube more or less.
2. Combo cube would likely have much loser limits on power (if any) and midrange as a theatre essentially gets replaced by combo. More out of necessity since midrange loses to everything except aggro so is simply not competitive against enough of the field in a true combo enabled cube.

Most Riptide cubes probably are midrange cubes. I'd argue that most MTGS cubes are combo cubes masquerading as midrange cubes, and that any "midrange" deck that does exist is more creature control (or aggressive midrange) than true midrange. Semantics perhaps, but I think it's important to differentiate. My own experiences with a semi-powered environment inclines me to believe you have to combine broken elements in any deck that isn't hard aggro or you just lose. My recent exploits with this Retro Cube project of mine (absolutely a combo cube) led me to build some "midrange" style decks, which performed very poorly when I went to test them. Primarily because so much of the midrange value pieces had been gutted, but also because there simply isn't any incentive to play a fair deck when you can do unfair things fairly easily with other builds.

Anyway, what is interesting about this is the idea that card evaluation is often very different depending on which cube you are running/building. And it probably would help us with our own cubes to start thinking more in that context (though many probably already do). A lot of cards end up with wildly different opinions in the forums, and part of the reason might be what type of cube environment these people are playing in.

A discussion started up in the Conspiracy thread about goblins. Started with Goblin Matron and sort of dove into what goblins you can fetch and how much support you can or should have in cube. And it occurs to me that the answer is tied to which type of cube you are designing. A midrange cube simply isn't going to want a lot of narrow enablers. A combo cube isn't going to generally want generic midrange cards that can't be broken.

In the case of Goblins, Wort, Boggart Auntie is actually pretty solid with some high powered goblin options (madcap, siege-gang, etc) and things like Nameless Inversion. But in a combo or high powered list, this is probably utter garbage. The only goblin deck that could compete in a combo cube is likely one that went full tilt with lackey, recruiter, ringleader, piledriver, etc - and you'd have to draft all of them to make it work.

 

[Peter LaCara]

Good link. I would agree that most Riptide cubes fall into the 'midrange' archetype, which is the style of play I generally prefer. There's a lot of other good articles on that blog too. I particularly like the one about green card quality spells.

 

[ahadabans]

That blog has really cool insights. I enjoy it quite a bit despite running a pretty different cube and disagreeing on some of his stances. It's clearly well thought out and based on a lot of actual play experience.

 

[sigh]

Agree on the article being very good. Am finding it a little hard to relate to some of his other stuff, though. He seems to generalize on a lot of concepts, and has a very predetermined power level set in mind. Not saying there's anything wrong with that, its just when he lowers his evaluation of a card 'because spells matter only wants stuff 2 or less', he's in a different bracket than me.

Was thinking about an interesting concept in that I think a lot of RTL cubes are midrange cubes but don't stop there. What I mean is, many of us will actively work to make generic power-picking midrange harder to pull off. There are interactions we work towards building into our environments that we want to have trump the generic builds. Less agro-control-midrange and more agro-control-synergy. As such, cards are meant to be flatter power level, but not at the expense of powerful synergies that prop up unique midrange-y decks. I know that at least in my environment I want these 'midrange decks with a plan' to beat out generic builds. I think that worked out in my last draft.

Short story: I think its more a spectrum and synergy is the middle man between combo and generically flat power level.

Edit: dude gives Gisa and Gerald a 0/10! Come on...

 

[GiftsForgiven]

Nice article!

My current project def. falls heavily into what he calls 'combo'. I don't think that's a bad thing, although when Kaladesh comes I'm going to try and swap out my metalworker for something less feast/famine.

My cube still has a long way to go.

tl;dr- cubing is hard...

 

[ahadabans]

tl;dr- cubing is hard...

So much this. LOL.

And to your point Sigh, I scratch my head at some of the stuff he writes too. But I do that on the forums too, and I will sometimes come back a month later a year later whatever, and I have a different appreciation for the perspective I originally may have dismissed. And in the defense of the author of this blog, he has commented more than once on his often wildly inaccurate set reviews.

I've played a lot of Magic. Maybe not competitively, but hard core casual. There was a 5 year stretch maybe where I literally played every single day. I've designed over 100 constructed decks and have played probably 10,000 individual games of Magic. Not stating any of this to try and inflate my skill level (considering how much I've played, I probably should be better than I am), simply point out I've played a lot and yet I'm wrong about a lot of cards and mechanics and sometimes completely miss things, etc.

This game is deep. Anyone who is truly playing this game in an evolving meta can't possibly feel the same way about cards and what not over time. If they are playing a static list (or one that very rarely changes), this might not be so. But with how much my cube has changed, it's just not possible to have the same opinions today I did even a year ago (I wouldn't be learning anything if that were true).

I bit of rambling but in the end, this is one of the most enjoyable aspects of Magic. Cube design is great. I really dig it. And I love hearing how others are doing it and how cards have worked out for them - especially when wildly different from my own experiences - I'm just a big fan of that.

 

[ahadabans]

On the subject of midrange versus combo cube... we put a lot of emphasis here on balance and trying to remove GRBS. But in the end, truly balancing a meta is extremely difficult. Wizards has a staff of however many working full time and they can't even do it half the time. I play Magic once a month, maybe twice these days. For me, it's simply not even a realistic goal.

That said, I do enjoy synergy and being rewarded for maximizing card interactions. So my cube tends in that direction. The eternal struggle with auto-draft goodstuff has frustrated me though due I feel mostly to creature power creep. And that is what prompted my retro cube experiment. It feels alien drafting it but also exciting, so I'm actually going to build it with real cards and use it at the next session.

There's something of an overlap I feel with synergy and combo - maybe not exactly what you are saying Sigh, but I think in the ball park. And that might be where I want to end up with my main cube - something more combo than midrange but lower power level.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

Combos are synergiestic by nature: they are always a critical mass of spells. Value focused creature cubes can include small micro-combos that feel organic







Little synergies that either generate value better than individual cards could, or which can win the game in a creature-centric manner. These can become the building blocks for entire color combinations, giving form and structure to a cube.

There is a limit though to how far you can push combo interactions before they start operating on a completely different axis that the value generating decks can't really compete with.

That was the fate of the familiar deck from the Penny cube. One of the original reasons why I wanted to make that format, was that it seemed like the perfect opportunity to put a true focused combo deck into a fair, creature focused, value generation format. The pieces of it were all modular, being either creatures or the mana base, and all reasonable at the operating power level.

It did not work out as planned.

I'm not quite sure I agree with his parlance, and I don't think the article is as well articulated as it could be, but its still quite good. Midrange cube is a reasonable descriptor for fair, creature focused formats, that revolve around value interactions, and combo cube is reasonable for more spellcentric formats that want more polarizing effects. After all, midrange decks tend to be the kings of value generation, and are suitable poster children for this portion of the heuristic, as are combo decks for the latter.

The gravitas he describes also seems correct, with the midrange formats having a preference for redundancy (which we take to the extreme of singleton breaking), something that I think we probably have too much of a focus on. I think there is a reasonable argument that this mode of cube design stems from a subconscious desire to push cubes ability to feel like a constructed format.

The combo formats sacrifice some archetype consistency by providing more narrow cards, allowing for a somewhat broader band of decks to be constructed. Singleton makes much more sense here, as we're seeking to maximize distinct builds.

 

[ahadabans]

I think there is a reasonable argument that this mode of cube design stems from a subconscious desire to push cubes ability to feel like a constructed format.

Agree 100%. One of the drawbacks to the flatter power cube design. Goes to the thread you posted on emotional resonance. Some of the excitement is derived from doing unfair things. The more balanced and value based you go, the less of that you can find. And while it's nice to see the enchantress deck come together and you turn O-ring into a cantripping piece of removal which is all fine and good, there is something missing with that I feel.

The combo formats sacrifice some archetype consistency by providing more narrow cards, allowing for a somewhat broader band of decks to be constructed. Singleton makes much more sense here, as we're seeking to maximize distinct builds.

I'm not sure I agree here. Consistency feels more important in a flatter power cube, where you are designing around value essentially (whether straight value or synergy based value - doesn't really matter). Here, you are much more likely to run into balance issues since so much of the cards are good on their own and/or overlap thematically. You can make a "solid" deck a number of ways. My modular cube experiment takes this to an extreme level. You pretty much have to be impaired to draft a pile of cards that doesn't form a good playable deck. So in this scenario, if I want a +1/+1 counter deck to come together and compete, I'm forced to hit a certain threshold of draftability and power. Clunky decks simply don't do well in this meta.

By contrast, a combo cube is more dependent on narrow enablers and is inevitably less consistent (at least if is if drafted in a traditional manner). And because of that, you can have a loose grip on balance simply because things are not going to come together nearly as cleanly. And I think you actually want that. Take something like Reanimator. It was clearly a super powerful archetype in my cube from day one. But when did things break down? Not until you could assemble it in your sleep using Recurring Nightmare + any one of the 100 value creatures in the cube. When you had to get 3-4 discard outlets and 3-4 reanimation spells and 3-4 fatties and make all that come together in a deck somehow, it simply wasn't all that easy to do. Lot of janky reanimator decks that did their thing one time in five and just got beat up the rest of the time. It was balanced in a way by simply being hard to pull off. And people didn't really care all that much since that one victory was crazy when it did happen (though this is not a spike mentality obviously).

You also have the problem with combo that it by nature cannot be truly balanced. How do you balance T2 swing with Goblin Lackey drop Seige-Gang Commander? You don't. You played a 5 drop for free on T2. Game mechanics have been shit upon. You rely on the fact that it is a play that will only happen once in a blue moon. And yet the fact that it does gets people excited about trying to make the goblin deck. As opposed to having your payoff for drafting enchantress be that O-ring now draws a card. Yay.

Talking this out, I feel like my main goodstuff problem is the fact that there are no longer any carrots for trying to draft anything other than a pile of good cards. It seems somewhat compounded too because there will be times you see something like Abzan Falconer and think you really want to draft +1/+1 counters, but it doesn't quite come together like you wanted and it just feels like a clunky deck with subpar cards. Falconer by himself is really sort of a sad panda. Not saying that won't also happen with combo (and probably happens more often), but the payoff seems a bit higher if there are those possibilities for really powerful plays. This feels really odd since I'm sort of arguing for power max mentality to some extent here (though not entirely the case).

What you did with Penny Pincher though is maybe the best of both worlds. Where you've crafted something with truly powerful synergy plays, and that sort of was discovered after the fact (some of it was anyway right?). You didn't plan for everything that happened is the point, and some of what was unexpected was unexpectedly awesome. Which coincidentally is precisely what first playing cube is like. That feeling of awe when you see how cards can come together in really crazy and powerful ways. This sort of dovetails into the philosophy of forcing archetypes and synergies versus just putting some good flexible cards and seeing what happens. And a healthy balance of the two is likely ideal.

 

[Diakonov]

I've been slowly drawn to finding ways to add more narrow cards for these reasons. I don't see you as arguing for power max above, but rather a small dose of poison principle. I like your Goblin Lackey example.

As I've said before, I feel like things are going well if the pure goodstuff decks are winning 40% of the time. It's group dependent, but some players just want to build a GW value deck, and you don't want to totally punish them but you also don't want them winning the draft with something like that. Having some portion of flexible value cards also helps the crazier, narrow synergy decks from turning out like utter jank when things don't go exactly as planned.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

Maybe the term I wanted was more "redundancy" than "consistency."

A lot of the midrange cubes revolve around having a lot of redundant pieces, to an extent thats probably not strictly necessary. Even when not breaking singleton, they run lots of suspiciously similar looking cards that are effectively grid filling. Thats why they have a problem of good stuff drafting, because everything is so modular, which is a perhaps necessary evil when trying to lean towards constructed level consistency as your gaming mantra. Breaking singleton on birthing pod, for example, is something you do when the redundant pieces you want don't exist, but you still want to offer a playing experience defined by pod.

The bounceland and artifact structure that the penny cube is built around is unique, and occupies its own niche in cube design. It feels like a true self-supporting system, and is very picky about what can go in and what can go out, to the point where changes feel more like they make it worse, or are offering only diminishing returns: I am very happy with the final result.

That being said, in the grand bifurcation set out above, it rests solidly in the "fair" cube quadrant, or midrange cube, or value generating cube--pick your term. It was built off of a ruthless spike constructed format, and it is a ruthless spike limited format. It is much more interested in value generation, board state development, micro-interactions, and pushing tempo at an opponent's expense. Players communicate primarily through creature combat. Its also predominately focused on preserving the fairness of its experience--to such an extent that it will happily violate its own rules of player expectations if that means the grander experience is more level for it (e.g. flickerwisp and persecute)

It has perhaps less problems with good stuff drafting than its higher power amici, as lower power cards tend to be better rounded, rather than being the pristine and perfect examples of efficiency designed by WOTC to sell cards, which so often populate rare cubes. The bouncelands themselves are good examples of this, providing incredible power in terms of ramping and card advantage, but having an interesting and meaningful negative in the form of bouncing one of your own lands.

This balance between positive and negatives in the individual cards, naturally encourage synergistic deck drafting and construction, yet the overarching focus of the format is still much more in line with the "midrange cube."

While part of its original design specs was to bridge the gap between the two worlds, it failed in that endeavor, because the organic combo deck murdered all of the fair decks. I had to trim the combo elements, though I still left the core pieces there (because I just don't care its sweet), and familiar combo has been lingering as the bogyman of the format ever since.

I think you are maybe putting too much of an emphasis on the neologism "synergy"? I have much less experience with playing the combo cubes, but I know the difference doesn't rest on the actual presence or absence of synergy (all formats possess synergy), but rather on the degree of commitment a format is willing to make to critical mass strategy.

When your critical mass "combo" decks are fast enough where they start heavily impacting the format's tempo, thats where you've crossed the line, because the only policing tools that fair decks have are isolated in black or blue. They start to naturally eat fair decks out of the format as viable options, cuts follow, and your format begins to drift in one direction.

 

[ahadabans]

I agree with you about that Diakonov. Everything in moderation in life and in cubing. Just reducing the percentage of ETB value guy density might be enough to curb things and get to that 40% number (which I agree is a good target).

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

Having some portion of flexible value cards also helps the crazier, narrow synergy decks from turning out like utter jank when things don't go exactly as planned.

A lot of the lab maniac decks are great examples of this. Basically, you are drafting a perfectly reasonable control deck, and it just happens to have this goofy but awesome way to win in it.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

Also, to get completely divergent, the article's idea of a midrange cube seems rooted in post TS block development, where a proliferation of ETB creatures and planeswalkers promotes a play style revolving around cards commonly priced at the 4-6cc spot (aka everything you hate about magic).

Once you take out the unfair spells, planeswalkers quickly become apex cards in terms of power level. This is especially true in cube, where you lack the density of anti-planeswalkers spells you see in constructed. The primary means to interact with them (or defend them) is via creatures which immediatly starts warping a format towards a certain game pacing, and warping deck design in a certain direction. Their raw power has to be leveraged out over the course of several turns, and what better way to defend them than with ETB creatures, that allow you to have both card advantage and tempo advantage at the same time.

When you combine this with cube being a singleton format, any sort of ability to actively abuse those ETB effects becomes insane, which pushes value reanimator or blink (made even more degenerate by blink being attached as an ETB to seizable creatures with evasion...) as powerful archetyoes.

At that point, you no longer really have to make the historical magic choice between card advantage or tempo, and instead of having drafting, deck construction, or games coming down to a balance between two competing schools of theory that can diverge sharply from one another into distinct creations pursuing the game on completely different axes (because they are), you end up with another serving of good stuff soup. Sure, the flavoring might be different from various themes or archetypes, but the games still tend to be, at the end of the day, warped around getting your tempo at the same time you got your card advantage, and who did it better.

Part of why that retro cube is feeling so sweet, is that for all of the faults of old design, it did a much better job of forcing you to choose and commit amongst those strategic axes. I don't think that much of the articles bifucation applies particularly well to it, or even has to apply at all. Its kind of fresh design space, and should be fun.

 

[ahadabans]

Good observation.

Odyssey/Onslaught in particular (really many of the old blocks) seem to have just a crazy amount of interesting build-around mechanics. Some of it horribly unbalanced of course, but there's just a lot more to work with there than I was expecting when I started that exercise.

Take Astral Slide. I get that it's obtusely narrow and utterly unplayable in most scenarios, but that is blink done correctly. You really have to work to get blink effects out of it. In a way, it's blink - old school reanimator style (where you need several pieces to have anything workable - discard/fattie/reanimation spell vs astral slide/cycling card/something worth blinking or some triggered effect).

Modern day blink is so much easier to do and the benefits (creature ETB effects) are much more abundant and powerful too. That archetype IMO is the most broken one in midrange cubes, and it's where I always look when I want to phone in a draft. ETB creatures and ways to get multiple triggers (whether blink or recursion or whatever). Can't go wrong. Might not 3-0, but you rarely wind up a loser.

There's nothing positive I can say about walkers in any context. But that's just my opinion and I've beat it to death so I won't say more.

 

[japahn]

Theorycrafting about cube design is awesome, and I think it's always interesting to read different opinions. There is a big merit in this article, which is realizing that cube environments are on a spectrum which strongly affects card evaluation, rendering statements like "I wouldn't run this anywhere below 720" plain bullshit.

However, I think this article confuses two correlated but different dimensions: speed of the cube environment and narrow card tolerance.

I see the speed dimension in these sections:

I rate these [scry lands] incredibly highly as lands however that is from a midrange cube perspective. In a combo cube lands that come into play tapped are pretty costly

the midrange cubes tend to give the most interactive games, epic sagas with mental things happening on both sides of the board

And the narrow dimension here:

Each pack will have more playables and more contested cards, your final pool will have more build options

Most of my deck techs come from the perspective of a combo cube as I try to highlight the more exotic things you can do in cube

Midrange cubes have a minimum entry level for playability rating as it were while combo cubes can almost ignore this rating and focus purely on the power rating

The confusion stems from a (in my opinion) false dichotomy between [fast with combos] (think Channel, Mox Sapphire, Tinker) or [slower without combos] (Mulldrifter, Kolaghan's Command, Thragtusk).

It should be possible to build a slower cube that uses narrow, slower cards, but then to make the narrow cards playable by keeping everything slow. This requires a very low power level and weak removal/disruption. This is actually my preferred style: long, complex games that rely on making the combination of your cards be more powerful than your opponent's combination. I just loved being killed by Spitemare + Clone + Blasphemous Act, and my most memorable win ever is Archive Trap + Reverberate.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

The article wasn't claiming that there are only two ways to design a cube, he was just pointing out the existence of the two prevailing designs that he encounters. There is no false dichotomy here: just the acknowledgement of a dichotomy.