Card/Deck Ramp

Karn Cuberated

Karn Cuberated

Hello, dear friends! Happy New Year! Hopefully, you've celebrated it with your friends and/or relatives, and, hopefully, you were warm and full.
I've been playtesting and trimming my cube list for some time, and one problem I've faced is Ramp as an archetype. Here're some questions which I'd like to ask you:
1. How many acceleration an average ramp deck wants to run?
2. How many cards of each type of acceleration (mana-dorks, artifact ramp, Cultivate- and Rampant Growth-like ramp)?
3. What about the quantity of lands?
4. How to make a cube ramp deck in more interactive?
5. Which strategies might also be interested in Ramp? AFAIK, control loves artifacts, and tempo loves mana-dorks. But, again, I'm not sure about the numbers.
 
Onderzeeboot

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
I made a conscious decision in my cube to have ramp at two (or more) mana in green, and three (or more) mana in other colors. So, Llanowar Elves and Mind Stone are out, but Nature's Lore and Pristine Talisman are fair game. This changes the dynamic somewhat, I guess. For pure ramp though, I currently run (in a 450 cube):
At the top of the curve, there's also these, but I don't really consider those ramp tools.
And finally, these mostly get run as nonbasic lands, though they technically are (and sometimes indeed are run as) ramp options.
So, that makes somewhere in the range of 20-25 ramp option, or around 5%, and those ramp options are heavily skewed towards RG.
 
Onderzeeboot

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
Karn Cuberated said:
How many ramp decks typically appear in your cube during the draft? And how many mana rocks usually go into control decks?
Click to expand...
1-2 for both, I'ld say. I engineered my curve so that the only decks that really benefit from ramp are red or green. You're trying to clinch your games with Wildfires, big X-spells, Sandwurm Convergence, or BIG MONSTERS. Sometimes a Grixis deck crops up that tries to get to Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker and Cruel Ultimatum ahead of curve, though just as often they get there naturally with a combination of removal and card advantage.

All of this is pre-Mana Flare, by the way. I'm still looking into that particular archetype.
 
Dom Harvey

Dom Harvey

Contributor
One of the things that sparked my distaste for conventional power-max Cubes was seeing how jumbled and same-y all the ramp decks were: Noble Hierarchs, Rampant Growths, and Grim Monoliths stood together with the singular goal of generating mana as fast as possible in decks that weren't fun to play with or against. Ramp is more fun - and a more healthy part of a format - when it has a distinct identity and you have to work for it. This can mean supporting unique varieties of ramp - extra land drops via Exploration etc along with bouncelands or draw spells, build-around ramp cards like Splendid Reclamation or the weird ones geared for casual/multiplayer (Traverse the Outlands, Harvest Season), all the Ixalan flip cards (Legion's Landing gives your white aggro deck ramp!) - or selecting interesting examples of common ramp effects: Devoted Druid is a mana creature that turns pump into rituals, Harrow has a ton of sweet interactions if you look for them, Sakura-Tribe Elder as a self-sac creature turns a lot of stuff on.

To make ramp more interactive, pay careful attention to what you can ramp into. If your payoffs reliably undo the work other decks can do in the early game, ramp quickly becomes the best thing to do in the format unless something else keeps it in check. Modern Tron is a scourge of the format because T3 Karn or T4 Ulamog crush anything and it furiously spins its wheels hoping to achieve that; Pauper Tron is fair and fun by comparison because it's still playing Magic before and after Tron is online.

(See this post for Constructed examples of appealing ramp decks)

Some ramp cards I especially like:

- Jeweled Amulet: Saw this one mentioned on MTGS and took to it quickly. My artifact decks have a lot of payoffs at 3/4 mana and also want cheap - ideally free! - artifacts for those (e.g. Sai, Monastery Mentor), so this fits the bill. Everflowing Chalice does something similar, with the added benefit of scaling nicely in the mid-late game

- Harrow: Keys off prowess and similar effects for cheap; puts a land in the graveyard for recursion, card type checking, or just stuff that cares about lands dying; great with copy effects; lets you chain spells for Storm or just efficient use of mana; discounts Torrential Gearhulk/Goblin Dark-Dwellers

- Sakura-Tribe Elder: Ensures anything that recurs or finds creatures can now convert into ramp, sets up cards like Liliana, Heretical Healer/Journey to Eternity/Pattern of Rebirth, gives a free morbid/revolt trigger, buys valuable time against attackers

- Wayward Swordtooth: Ascend is a fun subgame that I wish was on more good cards; curving this into Deranged Hermit or Saproling Burst is a dream
 
Karn Cuberated

Karn Cuberated

Thank you very much, guys, now I have a better understanding of how such kind of a deck should look like in general and in cube in particular.
Also, do my decisions on how many ramp spells should be at each step of the mana-curve of a deck have to depend on the idea of what exact card/group of cards I plan to ramp up to? F.e., if I want to ramp up to Tooth and Nail, which costs 9 mana (with Entwine), then I put *this amount* of turn-1 mana acceleration, *this amount* of turn-2 and turn-3 ramp.
 
Dom Harvey

Dom Harvey

Contributor
A cautionary tale from a few years ago, c/p from my thread:













This deck was obscene; across four matches, the closest I came to losing a game was almost decking myself. Ugin was on my watch list; I put it back in to give decks of all colours with late-game ambitions a reliable payoff to work towards but, after seeing it in action again, I'm left needing to find something else. It was so hard to lose after resolving Ugin; for it, Elspeth SC, and others that are potentially oppressive, I was careful to include a lot of cards that can 're-trump' them to maintain balance. I don't know if it's just how the draft/games went or the way my opponents build their decks, but in practice that never really happened for Ugin. After my second match I swapped it out for the SB Seasons Past to see if the deck would be more balanced, but it wasn't. Pristine Talisman, Thragtusk, and Nissa's Renewal were brutally effective at making up any lost ground, the blue card draw/manipulation made ramp's consistency problems look like an urban legend, and the countermagic neutered any attempts to run me over in the early game; it's a lot like the deck one of our locals used to Top 8 the GP but you get to run Condescend over Clash of Wills etc.

As one of the other Cube owners pointed out, with the Time Warps effectively acting as ramp, I have so many ramp cards that the usual problem of only drawing one or not drawing fast enough doesn't apply; this despite cutting all the Worn Powerstone/Coalition Relic effects and not going overboard with green ramp or mana rocks. I tried and succeeded in building a ramp deck that didn't have those issues, but perhaps it needs those flaws to keep it in check? I've noticed that a deck like this almost always becomes the best deck if you give it any room to breathe.
 
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