CML
Contributor
PROSE-AK NATION: HOW THE MAGIC ONLINE CUBE EXPLAINS ANTIDEPRESSANTS
Hello Cube aficionados (and EDH players and Legacy players — really, anyone who wants to buy old and expensive pieces of cardboard to show off to their friends while boasting to an audience of five!),
I’m Adam Prosak, and I'm a developer in Magic R&D. In spite of my surname, I am a tad less melancholic than Tim Aten, and I was happier than Jon Loucks before he quit, too. My job description is best described by the illustrious Sam Stoddard, who brings you tales from development each week, as well as awkward phrases in the passive voice, in his Latest Developments column. When I’m not busy playtesting future Magic products during my day job, or at least theorycrafting about them to the point we miss mono-Blue and mono-Black devotion and spend a year boring people with Standard as a result, I enjoy playing more Magic! I enjoy playing my favorite game in many different ways to the exclusion of all else in life, which is why I write at a fifth-grade level, but Cube Draft is definitely my favorite format. I built my first Cube nearly 10 years ago, before Cube had been popularized, and I’ve drafted more than 45 unique different Cubes that are all basically the same. When the fine people in Digital R&D, the same ones who brought you such hits as a login screen that takes 5 minutes to clear, triggered abilities as big as a bazooka, and a lack of Pauper daily events so you can just jam Master of Waves well into 2015, approached me about updating the Magic Online Cube, I jumped at the chance to fuck up something that was (a) not my responsibility and (b) already completely fucked up.
What is a Cube?
At its core, a Cube is a collection of cards that you can shuffle up and generate piles of cards that simulate a booster pack. Then, you draft! It’s like fantasy football, or Vietnam. The beauty of Cube is that it can be about many different things, chiefly the very worst Limited design mistakes R&D made and refused to acknowledge harder than the CIA.
To that end, I’ve drafted everything from Multicolored Cube to tribal Cube, but my favorite — the one I enjoyed the most, in my enjoyable and favorite game — is the Mercadian Masques Cube, since it contained nothing but mistakes, mistakes we at R&D are aware of, on some level, then suppress and rage at anyone who brings them up. The Magic Online Cube, like most players’ Cubes, is about the entire history of Magic, which contains stupidities and failures that make M14 limited look like the dawn of Starcraft: Brood War, though you also wouldn’t know it from reading the Mothership. The Magic Online Cube has 720 cards from nearly every set from Alpha through Magic 2015. Many of the most iconic and powerful cards in the history of Magic are present, but we’ve also taken care to focus on cards that create enjoyable games, or cards that R&D knows don’t create enjoyable games, but are thought to create enjoyable games by most potential drafters, so we put them in anyway and let people pretend they’re having fun, when we at R&D know better.
Personally, I love Cubes because they give you an enormous amount of variety in game play and nearly endless replay ability. For example, you could lose three lands and four cards to Balance — or four lands and three cards! You might even lose a creature in there, sometimes. You could Tinker up a Blightsteel Colossus, and kill them the next turn — or the turn after that, if they have blockers! You could play a bunch of Red cards, only to get housed by that Sword of War and Peace — or that Sword of Fire and Ice! The list goes on.
The ability to generate interactions between cards printed a dozen years apart is something that is very unique to Cubes, since we don’t really support Legacy. Master of Waves and Opposition combine from over a decade apart to make it totally impossible for your opponent — or you! — to cast spells for the rest of the game. On the topic of enchantments that both create repetitive gameplay and take over the game in such a slow, miserable way that they also refuse to end it, Attrition combines with a card like Bloodghast to punish anyone who likes playing with creatures. If I had to pick a favorite interaction, I’d pick both of those — and if you say I can’t have two favorites, just remember that I work for Wizards and you are nobody. Those interactions are not just unique, but very unique. How’s that for enjoyment?
Cards from Portal Three Kingdoms show up next to cards from cards from Journey Into Nyx and Conspiracy — and if you really want to earn my respect, make sure the P3K cards aren’t proxies, otherwise Sheldon Menery will judge you passive-aggressively for the rest of the evening! Cube games are full of awesome Magic cards and crazy board states, both of which are meant to distract me from my use of meaningless adjectives that reflect the gloomy, drooping way in which I comport myself.
What did you do to the Cube?
If you simply scrolled down to the bottom of the article, you may have noticed that the number of cards being changed is bigger than they have been in the past — you might have missed my platitudinous, pleonastic prose, and thought something was actually going to change. Ha! This is because the Digital R&D team felt like there was a significant opportunity for us to improve the Magic Online Cube experience, or pretend like we were improving the Magic Online Cube experience to the point some chumps might believe we did, and that was a goal worth focusing on. As a team, we decided on some goals for the Magic Online Cube, and we set about the task of making the Magic Online Cube seem like the most fantastic, most unique, most superlative experience it can be for your enjoyment, while ensuring that the gameplay was unchanged enough that you could still lord your expertise over your friends. This iteration of the Magic Online Cube is the first step in our new process — we will continue to act as if we were improving upon and updating the Cube as we feel provides the pale semblance of the best experience for you. If there is something you like and/or don’t like about the Magic Online Cube, do not hesitate to share your opinions, so we can feign interest in them while secretly fuming over your effrontery, and venting about it to our equally furious coworkers. Your criticism is valuable to us! Without enemies, or people we think are our enemies, what else would we use as a scapegoat for our overworked, underpaid, and unhappy lives?
Balancing Archetypes, or “Why All the Rhetorical Questions?”
One of our primary goals was to balance out the various colors and archetypes in the Cube, or at least effect a forgery of balance that was close enough to get you to draft the wrong colors, lose, then draft the right colors and win enough to feel better about your life choices. In general, we feel that the Cube is most fun when all of the cards in the Cube have the ability to contribute to a winning deck, or look like they can contribute to a winning deck. This is why we’ve continued to run cards like Kami of Ancient Law, which you’ll sideboard once and never again, as well as overhyped planeswalkers like Gideon, Champion of Justice, early-2000s bombs like Pristine Angel, and 20th-century control cards like Thieving Magpie that appeal to the people who haven’t played a tournament in five years, but still act like the popular kids on Facebook. And, if you don’t know what Thieving Magpie does, you should come back and talk to me when you know who I am.
When we looked at winning decklists from previous iterations of the Cube, analytics we are scared shitless to share lest you draw your own conclusions from them, we noticed that some strategies were either too successful or not successful enough. In particular, Red as a color had an unbalancing effect on the Cube. Many of the successful decks were not only Red, but mono-Red aggressive decks. Red decks were generally more successful when they did not have other colors in them. We did not like the overwhelming success of mono-Red, not because having combinations of colors is what helps provide variety in gameplay experience, but because it means we have failed utterly as designers and our attempt to make a Cube based solely on market research was about as fucking awful as anyone with half a brain would expect it to be. However, since you are also part of that market, you have no right to criticize us! We were just trying to give you what you wanted.
Many other cards and strategies were less successful because of how strong the mono-Red strategy was against them. For example, the four-mana artifact that did nothing was ineffective against Red, so we decided to swap out some Red cards. Furthermore, the five-mana, three-color card that nobody played was rarely coming down in time against Red, so we also had to get rid of a couple aggressive one-drops. We also felt that mono-Red, by killing people too quickly, was cutting down on the awesome stories about cool plays the more skilled players, like me, liked making — you know, stuff like turn two’ing an Emrakul with Channel, or Sneak Attacking a Griselbrand and drawing seven, or destroying all their permanents with Jokulhaups — really, anything that entirely negates the previous gameplay and makes the opponent completely helpless. Nobody tells their grandkids about swinging in with a Hellrider! Now that mono-Red is no longer oppressing the format, I will be able to tell stories about the time I owned some upstart kid at Cube so bad, I might as well have not had an opponent. For me, that’s what “nearly endless replay variety” means.
When a face-to-face Magic set is in development, we do our best to identify these problems and fix them before a set is released. With the Magic Online Cube, we have the opportunity to continue to work on balancing the Cube, or to pretend to work on balancing the Cube, even after releasing it. As you’ll see in the changes, we’ve moved Red cards away from total aggression and more towards middle- and late-game Red cards, or simply Red cards nobody will ever play. You’ll see cards like Chandra Nalaar and Form of the Dragon where you previously saw cards like Reckless Charge and Ball Lightning. This helps diversify the strategy among the cards in Red and line them up with other colors, which also feature a lot of overcosted, anachronistic and unplayable cards, better. Our goal is not to eliminate mono-Red aggression as a strategy — there are still cards like Goblin Guide and Lightning Bolt, after all, even though we had to cut Tibalt — our goal is to give the archetype the same tools as the other archetypes, which have gaping holes in their curves, and consequently lose to themselves one game per match. Not more. Not less.
The other thing the team did was to balance the number of lands in the Cube. We felt like non-basic lands were at their most interesting when you have to decide between a land that fits into your deck and a non-land you can also fit into your deck, and always pick the non-land. We think the drafting experience is more fun when different cards with different roles compete for your attention during the draft, until you try to pick the wrong one and elect to never do so again. For example, we want the decision between Ghor-Clan Rampager and Stomping Ground to be an interesting one, or appear interesting to the first-time drafter. We decided to remove a cycle of nonbasic lands (the Ravnica bounce lands) in order to help these decisions become more interesting, more unique, more enjoyabler, and most favoritest.
Removing Traps
While we noticed that mono-Red aggressive decks were too strong, which to the untrained eye might suggest we should lower the curve for other strategies so they’re not as slow as retail Limited, ramp up the amount of fixing so the players can actually cast their spells, break singleton because these goals are impossible to achieve in a 720-card Cube without doing so, and otherwise dispense with the mindset that Cube is what Evan Erwin said it was ten years ago, we also noticed that a number of cards were, like Magic players in business, very rarely successful. Many of the cards that are removed from the Magic Online Cube are cards that we considered “traps.” In general, a trap is a card that looks powerful and fun, but is a little too bad to seem powerful and fun to the dolts that are our customer base. You might think this means we ought to stop printing bad cards in retail Limited, but this is a logical leap on par with paying Modo developers competitive wages, or making professional Magic a real thing — I will give you a pass for your impertinence, this time. Anyway, I previously stated that one of the goals for the Magic Online Cube is to provide avenues of synergy from across Magic’s history. Unless we actually include the cards that provide the cool interactions, the card will fail like a tortured simile or metaphor with vague antecedents. Lots of individual cards suffered due to a lack of support around them, including Goblin Welder, Deadbridge Chant, and Etched Oracle — did you really think you were going to produce more than two colors of mana in Limited? In addition, the Storm archetype significantly underperformed. Personally, I love watching a Storm deck come together. However, it didn’t come together often enough to be worth taking up space in the Cube. Can you see how Cube design transcended my biases? I deserve at least one Ativan for that. Mind’s Desire and friends, I’m sad to see you go, but the Magic Online Cube is not the right place. Step aside for Chandra Nalaar and Form of the Dragon, which are to be disowned as traps in the next article I write on this topic.
New Set Releases!
Finally, we had a goal of introducing new cards to the Magic Online Cube in a way that meshes well with the rest of the Cube. Each new set becomes part of the history of Magic, and Cube is a way that we can celebrate this history, magically transmuting what were frankly miserable Standard and Extended environments into something we, as corporate whores, have always enjoyed and always will. We want to provide new cards without making the Cube feel like it’s dominated by the new set. With that goal in mind, we settled on 12 cards from Magic 2015 that we thought would be valuable to the Magic Online Cube experience. We will continue to evaluate these cards as they are drafted in the Magic Online Cube. We will continue to use the first-person plural to refer to myself.
My Five Bestest, Favoritest Cards in the Magic Online Cube
I am a big fan of all types of Cubes, especially the sweet, awesome, interesting, enjoyable, favoriter, uniquest, Cubes that are the same as all the others, and I draft them whenever possible. After years of drafting Cubes, I definitely have some pet cards and cards that I have a very difficult time passing when they are in my pack. These aren’t always the most powerfulest cards, but they are the cards that I enjoy the most, proving that playing with the same cards over and over again is what gives environments nearly endless replay variety.
5. Lands! – One of my favorite parts of Cube is that it is almost trivial to get enough cards that you want to put in your deck, due to the fact that every card is powerful if the Cube is built well, which it is, of course. You might say this stretched definition of “powerful” is responsible for all of the decks sucking against mono-Red, but that’s an amateurish argument that we at Wizards, as professionals, have already thought of and denied vehemently. Cube is for the good cards! That’s why the new list retains such favorites as Narcolepsy, which doubles as an ailment that is, yes, treated by Prosak.
This endless self-justification allows me to make speculative picks that may or may not work, or, really, do anything — I’ll always be right. I will take an Entomb early, even without a card like Griselbrand or Animate Dead. Even if I have to abandon the Entomb, I am still likely to have options available during deckbuilding, all of which will be the bestest and favoriter options.
Often times, I use these “extra” draft slots to take non-basic lands. If I am drafting a deck without huge mana requirements, such as mono-Red, I place a very high value on a land such as Rishadan Port or Mishra’s Factory. If I am unsure what I am drafting, I will often take a multicolored land to keep options open — for example, if I take a Bad River, I can play Blue control, but I can also play Black control — I might even be able to play Blue-Black control! I particularly look to draft a fetchland + Ravnica- or Revised-dual combination, as it provides exceptional flexibility when it comes to what colors I can draft and fit into the final deck, and I will pretend to look for the Mirage fetches too because they’re in the Cube and therefore cannot be a total embarrassment, until we cut them. Sometimes I get a little too ambitious with this strategy, take too many lands, and don’t have enough cards to fill out a deck. However, I really love a 4-color deck with perfect mana — what else could provide a justification for nerfing mono-Red, and make it seem reasonable to cut lands from a Cube where a solid 50 percent of games are already decided by color screw?
With this version of the Magic Online Cube, lands will be at a higher priority because there are fewer of them to go around. We feel this balances out the Storm cut because, rather than being able to cast spells that do nothing, you will now have spells you want to cast and will not be able to. Good luck in the next draft!
4. Guttersnipe – Guttersnipe is one of my favorite Standard cards of all time that saw no play. There’s nothing quite like casting an Izzet Charm while having a Guttersnipe and a Young Pyromancer in play, because they will either have killed your guys or be indifferent to the shock and token. Much like Standard, I’ll often play Guttersnipe in blue decks, so I can chain draw spells together to finish an opponent quickly, around turn 9 or 10 by Magic Online-Cube standards. I also like how Guttersnipe is the kind of card that’s good enough for Marshall Sutcliffe, but, really, what isn’t?
3. Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker – The biggest, baddest Planeswalker in the Multiverse. The Magic Online Cube offers enough so that a huge endgame card like Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker can realistically come down and dominate a game — maybe while you’re still casting three- and four-drops, because that’s how fast artifact mana works. Take that, Pyreheart Wolf! Gilded Lotus and Eureka provide ways to get Nicol Bolas (and other huge permanents) into play in ways that would not otherwise occur in a game of Magic. I am still a sucker for huge, awesome permanents, which is why my good friend and colleague Tim Aten is always of sunny disposition while playing Sneak and Show at the unsanctioned Legacy tournaments in and around Seattle.
2. Smokestack – There are so many cool things that almost work with Smokestack, I don’t know which one to draft most of the time! White tokens — think any of the Elspeths — provide a constant stream of permanents that allow you to ramp up the Smokestack to higher numbers, but call into question the necessity of Smokestack, especially when there are like 20 Wrath effects that could just kill them all. Black disruption decks can use Smokestack to layer on top of discard spells and other disruption, while maintaining the constant sacrifice with cards like Bloodghast or Bitterblossom, and bitching about having a four-mana artifact stuck in hand until we finally discard it to Smallpox or something. Red mass-disruption cards such as Wildfire and Burning of Xinye increase the likelihood that my opponent will have to sacrifice something he or she doesn’t want to sacrifice, while I’ll have to do the same and lament how unlucky I just got. Add in that it’s a great nickname for Huey Jensen, and Smokestack is a sure winner not just in the Magic Online Cube, but any Cube that shares its stillborn design principles.
1. Palinchron – What do Sneak Attack, Mirari’s Wake, Phantasmal Image, Heartbeat of Spring, and Recurring Nightmare have in common? That they’re all dull and durdly cards that, more often than not, do nothing or completely take over a game, but are popular due to the groupthink mentality of MTGSalvation? Close! That they were all printed around when I began my dependence on the sedatives that at once make it impossible to write well but also enable me to function in society, kind of? Closer! That they can all make infinite* mana with Palinchron and a bunch of lands! Duh. Cheat in Palinchron, bounce it, cheat it in again — how’s that for endless replay value?
You might notice that many of the cards on this list are older cards that don’t really see play in Eternal Constructed formats. That is not a coincidence! I love finding new ways to use cards I’ve loved for years, that were good back when I actually played Magic. I also like making excessive amounts of mana, then passing the turn and dying to Hero of Oxid Ridge. This makes Palinchron my favoritest card in the Magic Online Cube, and that proves that things that used to be good in 1999 are not at all washed-up and stuck in the past, but continue to be good, or close enough to good, to this very day.
Long-Winded Wrap-Up
I hope you’ve enjoyed a trip through the ostensible changes that are in the Magic Online Cube. Personally, I really enjoy Cube Draft and have a great desire to spread my love of Cube to as many clueless, depressed people as possible. If you haven’t drafted Cube before, I highly recommend you give the Magic Online Cube a try — you may not have fun, but you’ll think you’re having fun, which we at R&D consider to be good enough. I am a man named after an antidepressant, after all — or was the antidepressant named after me? In conclusion, I may not believe what I just wrote in this article, but I may believe it, and wouldn’t that make it worse, if you ever realized what was going on? The important thing is that you believe it, which makes these changes to the Magic Online Cube the most sweetest, awesomest, interestingest, enjoyablest, favoritest, uniquest, Cube that is based on everyone else’s preconceptions of Cube ever made.
Mardu, Mardu Über Alles,
Adam Prosak “Nation”
*pointless footnote
(Adapted from http://magic.wizards.com/en/MTGO/articles/archive/magic-2015-cube-update-2014-09-01)
Hello Cube aficionados (and EDH players and Legacy players — really, anyone who wants to buy old and expensive pieces of cardboard to show off to their friends while boasting to an audience of five!),
I’m Adam Prosak, and I'm a developer in Magic R&D. In spite of my surname, I am a tad less melancholic than Tim Aten, and I was happier than Jon Loucks before he quit, too. My job description is best described by the illustrious Sam Stoddard, who brings you tales from development each week, as well as awkward phrases in the passive voice, in his Latest Developments column. When I’m not busy playtesting future Magic products during my day job, or at least theorycrafting about them to the point we miss mono-Blue and mono-Black devotion and spend a year boring people with Standard as a result, I enjoy playing more Magic! I enjoy playing my favorite game in many different ways to the exclusion of all else in life, which is why I write at a fifth-grade level, but Cube Draft is definitely my favorite format. I built my first Cube nearly 10 years ago, before Cube had been popularized, and I’ve drafted more than 45 unique different Cubes that are all basically the same. When the fine people in Digital R&D, the same ones who brought you such hits as a login screen that takes 5 minutes to clear, triggered abilities as big as a bazooka, and a lack of Pauper daily events so you can just jam Master of Waves well into 2015, approached me about updating the Magic Online Cube, I jumped at the chance to fuck up something that was (a) not my responsibility and (b) already completely fucked up.
What is a Cube?
At its core, a Cube is a collection of cards that you can shuffle up and generate piles of cards that simulate a booster pack. Then, you draft! It’s like fantasy football, or Vietnam. The beauty of Cube is that it can be about many different things, chiefly the very worst Limited design mistakes R&D made and refused to acknowledge harder than the CIA.
To that end, I’ve drafted everything from Multicolored Cube to tribal Cube, but my favorite — the one I enjoyed the most, in my enjoyable and favorite game — is the Mercadian Masques Cube, since it contained nothing but mistakes, mistakes we at R&D are aware of, on some level, then suppress and rage at anyone who brings them up. The Magic Online Cube, like most players’ Cubes, is about the entire history of Magic, which contains stupidities and failures that make M14 limited look like the dawn of Starcraft: Brood War, though you also wouldn’t know it from reading the Mothership. The Magic Online Cube has 720 cards from nearly every set from Alpha through Magic 2015. Many of the most iconic and powerful cards in the history of Magic are present, but we’ve also taken care to focus on cards that create enjoyable games, or cards that R&D knows don’t create enjoyable games, but are thought to create enjoyable games by most potential drafters, so we put them in anyway and let people pretend they’re having fun, when we at R&D know better.
Personally, I love Cubes because they give you an enormous amount of variety in game play and nearly endless replay ability. For example, you could lose three lands and four cards to Balance — or four lands and three cards! You might even lose a creature in there, sometimes. You could Tinker up a Blightsteel Colossus, and kill them the next turn — or the turn after that, if they have blockers! You could play a bunch of Red cards, only to get housed by that Sword of War and Peace — or that Sword of Fire and Ice! The list goes on.
The ability to generate interactions between cards printed a dozen years apart is something that is very unique to Cubes, since we don’t really support Legacy. Master of Waves and Opposition combine from over a decade apart to make it totally impossible for your opponent — or you! — to cast spells for the rest of the game. On the topic of enchantments that both create repetitive gameplay and take over the game in such a slow, miserable way that they also refuse to end it, Attrition combines with a card like Bloodghast to punish anyone who likes playing with creatures. If I had to pick a favorite interaction, I’d pick both of those — and if you say I can’t have two favorites, just remember that I work for Wizards and you are nobody. Those interactions are not just unique, but very unique. How’s that for enjoyment?
Cards from Portal Three Kingdoms show up next to cards from cards from Journey Into Nyx and Conspiracy — and if you really want to earn my respect, make sure the P3K cards aren’t proxies, otherwise Sheldon Menery will judge you passive-aggressively for the rest of the evening! Cube games are full of awesome Magic cards and crazy board states, both of which are meant to distract me from my use of meaningless adjectives that reflect the gloomy, drooping way in which I comport myself.
What did you do to the Cube?
If you simply scrolled down to the bottom of the article, you may have noticed that the number of cards being changed is bigger than they have been in the past — you might have missed my platitudinous, pleonastic prose, and thought something was actually going to change. Ha! This is because the Digital R&D team felt like there was a significant opportunity for us to improve the Magic Online Cube experience, or pretend like we were improving the Magic Online Cube experience to the point some chumps might believe we did, and that was a goal worth focusing on. As a team, we decided on some goals for the Magic Online Cube, and we set about the task of making the Magic Online Cube seem like the most fantastic, most unique, most superlative experience it can be for your enjoyment, while ensuring that the gameplay was unchanged enough that you could still lord your expertise over your friends. This iteration of the Magic Online Cube is the first step in our new process — we will continue to act as if we were improving upon and updating the Cube as we feel provides the pale semblance of the best experience for you. If there is something you like and/or don’t like about the Magic Online Cube, do not hesitate to share your opinions, so we can feign interest in them while secretly fuming over your effrontery, and venting about it to our equally furious coworkers. Your criticism is valuable to us! Without enemies, or people we think are our enemies, what else would we use as a scapegoat for our overworked, underpaid, and unhappy lives?
Balancing Archetypes, or “Why All the Rhetorical Questions?”
One of our primary goals was to balance out the various colors and archetypes in the Cube, or at least effect a forgery of balance that was close enough to get you to draft the wrong colors, lose, then draft the right colors and win enough to feel better about your life choices. In general, we feel that the Cube is most fun when all of the cards in the Cube have the ability to contribute to a winning deck, or look like they can contribute to a winning deck. This is why we’ve continued to run cards like Kami of Ancient Law, which you’ll sideboard once and never again, as well as overhyped planeswalkers like Gideon, Champion of Justice, early-2000s bombs like Pristine Angel, and 20th-century control cards like Thieving Magpie that appeal to the people who haven’t played a tournament in five years, but still act like the popular kids on Facebook. And, if you don’t know what Thieving Magpie does, you should come back and talk to me when you know who I am.
When we looked at winning decklists from previous iterations of the Cube, analytics we are scared shitless to share lest you draw your own conclusions from them, we noticed that some strategies were either too successful or not successful enough. In particular, Red as a color had an unbalancing effect on the Cube. Many of the successful decks were not only Red, but mono-Red aggressive decks. Red decks were generally more successful when they did not have other colors in them. We did not like the overwhelming success of mono-Red, not because having combinations of colors is what helps provide variety in gameplay experience, but because it means we have failed utterly as designers and our attempt to make a Cube based solely on market research was about as fucking awful as anyone with half a brain would expect it to be. However, since you are also part of that market, you have no right to criticize us! We were just trying to give you what you wanted.
Many other cards and strategies were less successful because of how strong the mono-Red strategy was against them. For example, the four-mana artifact that did nothing was ineffective against Red, so we decided to swap out some Red cards. Furthermore, the five-mana, three-color card that nobody played was rarely coming down in time against Red, so we also had to get rid of a couple aggressive one-drops. We also felt that mono-Red, by killing people too quickly, was cutting down on the awesome stories about cool plays the more skilled players, like me, liked making — you know, stuff like turn two’ing an Emrakul with Channel, or Sneak Attacking a Griselbrand and drawing seven, or destroying all their permanents with Jokulhaups — really, anything that entirely negates the previous gameplay and makes the opponent completely helpless. Nobody tells their grandkids about swinging in with a Hellrider! Now that mono-Red is no longer oppressing the format, I will be able to tell stories about the time I owned some upstart kid at Cube so bad, I might as well have not had an opponent. For me, that’s what “nearly endless replay variety” means.
When a face-to-face Magic set is in development, we do our best to identify these problems and fix them before a set is released. With the Magic Online Cube, we have the opportunity to continue to work on balancing the Cube, or to pretend to work on balancing the Cube, even after releasing it. As you’ll see in the changes, we’ve moved Red cards away from total aggression and more towards middle- and late-game Red cards, or simply Red cards nobody will ever play. You’ll see cards like Chandra Nalaar and Form of the Dragon where you previously saw cards like Reckless Charge and Ball Lightning. This helps diversify the strategy among the cards in Red and line them up with other colors, which also feature a lot of overcosted, anachronistic and unplayable cards, better. Our goal is not to eliminate mono-Red aggression as a strategy — there are still cards like Goblin Guide and Lightning Bolt, after all, even though we had to cut Tibalt — our goal is to give the archetype the same tools as the other archetypes, which have gaping holes in their curves, and consequently lose to themselves one game per match. Not more. Not less.
The other thing the team did was to balance the number of lands in the Cube. We felt like non-basic lands were at their most interesting when you have to decide between a land that fits into your deck and a non-land you can also fit into your deck, and always pick the non-land. We think the drafting experience is more fun when different cards with different roles compete for your attention during the draft, until you try to pick the wrong one and elect to never do so again. For example, we want the decision between Ghor-Clan Rampager and Stomping Ground to be an interesting one, or appear interesting to the first-time drafter. We decided to remove a cycle of nonbasic lands (the Ravnica bounce lands) in order to help these decisions become more interesting, more unique, more enjoyabler, and most favoritest.
Removing Traps
While we noticed that mono-Red aggressive decks were too strong, which to the untrained eye might suggest we should lower the curve for other strategies so they’re not as slow as retail Limited, ramp up the amount of fixing so the players can actually cast their spells, break singleton because these goals are impossible to achieve in a 720-card Cube without doing so, and otherwise dispense with the mindset that Cube is what Evan Erwin said it was ten years ago, we also noticed that a number of cards were, like Magic players in business, very rarely successful. Many of the cards that are removed from the Magic Online Cube are cards that we considered “traps.” In general, a trap is a card that looks powerful and fun, but is a little too bad to seem powerful and fun to the dolts that are our customer base. You might think this means we ought to stop printing bad cards in retail Limited, but this is a logical leap on par with paying Modo developers competitive wages, or making professional Magic a real thing — I will give you a pass for your impertinence, this time. Anyway, I previously stated that one of the goals for the Magic Online Cube is to provide avenues of synergy from across Magic’s history. Unless we actually include the cards that provide the cool interactions, the card will fail like a tortured simile or metaphor with vague antecedents. Lots of individual cards suffered due to a lack of support around them, including Goblin Welder, Deadbridge Chant, and Etched Oracle — did you really think you were going to produce more than two colors of mana in Limited? In addition, the Storm archetype significantly underperformed. Personally, I love watching a Storm deck come together. However, it didn’t come together often enough to be worth taking up space in the Cube. Can you see how Cube design transcended my biases? I deserve at least one Ativan for that. Mind’s Desire and friends, I’m sad to see you go, but the Magic Online Cube is not the right place. Step aside for Chandra Nalaar and Form of the Dragon, which are to be disowned as traps in the next article I write on this topic.
New Set Releases!
Finally, we had a goal of introducing new cards to the Magic Online Cube in a way that meshes well with the rest of the Cube. Each new set becomes part of the history of Magic, and Cube is a way that we can celebrate this history, magically transmuting what were frankly miserable Standard and Extended environments into something we, as corporate whores, have always enjoyed and always will. We want to provide new cards without making the Cube feel like it’s dominated by the new set. With that goal in mind, we settled on 12 cards from Magic 2015 that we thought would be valuable to the Magic Online Cube experience. We will continue to evaluate these cards as they are drafted in the Magic Online Cube. We will continue to use the first-person plural to refer to myself.
My Five Bestest, Favoritest Cards in the Magic Online Cube
I am a big fan of all types of Cubes, especially the sweet, awesome, interesting, enjoyable, favoriter, uniquest, Cubes that are the same as all the others, and I draft them whenever possible. After years of drafting Cubes, I definitely have some pet cards and cards that I have a very difficult time passing when they are in my pack. These aren’t always the most powerfulest cards, but they are the cards that I enjoy the most, proving that playing with the same cards over and over again is what gives environments nearly endless replay variety.
5. Lands! – One of my favorite parts of Cube is that it is almost trivial to get enough cards that you want to put in your deck, due to the fact that every card is powerful if the Cube is built well, which it is, of course. You might say this stretched definition of “powerful” is responsible for all of the decks sucking against mono-Red, but that’s an amateurish argument that we at Wizards, as professionals, have already thought of and denied vehemently. Cube is for the good cards! That’s why the new list retains such favorites as Narcolepsy, which doubles as an ailment that is, yes, treated by Prosak.
This endless self-justification allows me to make speculative picks that may or may not work, or, really, do anything — I’ll always be right. I will take an Entomb early, even without a card like Griselbrand or Animate Dead. Even if I have to abandon the Entomb, I am still likely to have options available during deckbuilding, all of which will be the bestest and favoriter options.
Often times, I use these “extra” draft slots to take non-basic lands. If I am drafting a deck without huge mana requirements, such as mono-Red, I place a very high value on a land such as Rishadan Port or Mishra’s Factory. If I am unsure what I am drafting, I will often take a multicolored land to keep options open — for example, if I take a Bad River, I can play Blue control, but I can also play Black control — I might even be able to play Blue-Black control! I particularly look to draft a fetchland + Ravnica- or Revised-dual combination, as it provides exceptional flexibility when it comes to what colors I can draft and fit into the final deck, and I will pretend to look for the Mirage fetches too because they’re in the Cube and therefore cannot be a total embarrassment, until we cut them. Sometimes I get a little too ambitious with this strategy, take too many lands, and don’t have enough cards to fill out a deck. However, I really love a 4-color deck with perfect mana — what else could provide a justification for nerfing mono-Red, and make it seem reasonable to cut lands from a Cube where a solid 50 percent of games are already decided by color screw?
With this version of the Magic Online Cube, lands will be at a higher priority because there are fewer of them to go around. We feel this balances out the Storm cut because, rather than being able to cast spells that do nothing, you will now have spells you want to cast and will not be able to. Good luck in the next draft!
4. Guttersnipe – Guttersnipe is one of my favorite Standard cards of all time that saw no play. There’s nothing quite like casting an Izzet Charm while having a Guttersnipe and a Young Pyromancer in play, because they will either have killed your guys or be indifferent to the shock and token. Much like Standard, I’ll often play Guttersnipe in blue decks, so I can chain draw spells together to finish an opponent quickly, around turn 9 or 10 by Magic Online-Cube standards. I also like how Guttersnipe is the kind of card that’s good enough for Marshall Sutcliffe, but, really, what isn’t?
3. Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker – The biggest, baddest Planeswalker in the Multiverse. The Magic Online Cube offers enough so that a huge endgame card like Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker can realistically come down and dominate a game — maybe while you’re still casting three- and four-drops, because that’s how fast artifact mana works. Take that, Pyreheart Wolf! Gilded Lotus and Eureka provide ways to get Nicol Bolas (and other huge permanents) into play in ways that would not otherwise occur in a game of Magic. I am still a sucker for huge, awesome permanents, which is why my good friend and colleague Tim Aten is always of sunny disposition while playing Sneak and Show at the unsanctioned Legacy tournaments in and around Seattle.
2. Smokestack – There are so many cool things that almost work with Smokestack, I don’t know which one to draft most of the time! White tokens — think any of the Elspeths — provide a constant stream of permanents that allow you to ramp up the Smokestack to higher numbers, but call into question the necessity of Smokestack, especially when there are like 20 Wrath effects that could just kill them all. Black disruption decks can use Smokestack to layer on top of discard spells and other disruption, while maintaining the constant sacrifice with cards like Bloodghast or Bitterblossom, and bitching about having a four-mana artifact stuck in hand until we finally discard it to Smallpox or something. Red mass-disruption cards such as Wildfire and Burning of Xinye increase the likelihood that my opponent will have to sacrifice something he or she doesn’t want to sacrifice, while I’ll have to do the same and lament how unlucky I just got. Add in that it’s a great nickname for Huey Jensen, and Smokestack is a sure winner not just in the Magic Online Cube, but any Cube that shares its stillborn design principles.
1. Palinchron – What do Sneak Attack, Mirari’s Wake, Phantasmal Image, Heartbeat of Spring, and Recurring Nightmare have in common? That they’re all dull and durdly cards that, more often than not, do nothing or completely take over a game, but are popular due to the groupthink mentality of MTGSalvation? Close! That they were all printed around when I began my dependence on the sedatives that at once make it impossible to write well but also enable me to function in society, kind of? Closer! That they can all make infinite* mana with Palinchron and a bunch of lands! Duh. Cheat in Palinchron, bounce it, cheat it in again — how’s that for endless replay value?
You might notice that many of the cards on this list are older cards that don’t really see play in Eternal Constructed formats. That is not a coincidence! I love finding new ways to use cards I’ve loved for years, that were good back when I actually played Magic. I also like making excessive amounts of mana, then passing the turn and dying to Hero of Oxid Ridge. This makes Palinchron my favoritest card in the Magic Online Cube, and that proves that things that used to be good in 1999 are not at all washed-up and stuck in the past, but continue to be good, or close enough to good, to this very day.
Long-Winded Wrap-Up
I hope you’ve enjoyed a trip through the ostensible changes that are in the Magic Online Cube. Personally, I really enjoy Cube Draft and have a great desire to spread my love of Cube to as many clueless, depressed people as possible. If you haven’t drafted Cube before, I highly recommend you give the Magic Online Cube a try — you may not have fun, but you’ll think you’re having fun, which we at R&D consider to be good enough. I am a man named after an antidepressant, after all — or was the antidepressant named after me? In conclusion, I may not believe what I just wrote in this article, but I may believe it, and wouldn’t that make it worse, if you ever realized what was going on? The important thing is that you believe it, which makes these changes to the Magic Online Cube the most sweetest, awesomest, interestingest, enjoyablest, favoritest, uniquest, Cube that is based on everyone else’s preconceptions of Cube ever made.
Mardu, Mardu Über Alles,
Adam Prosak “Nation”
*pointless footnote
(Adapted from http://magic.wizards.com/en/MTGO/articles/archive/magic-2015-cube-update-2014-09-01)
