It's pretty unreasonable to propose that people just get free lands with their gold cards. All you've done then is create a class of super-fixers because they come platooned with a gold card by default. This is some kind of an attempt to reduce the parasitism of lands, but it feels like a pretty abysmal execution. Why wouldn't people just slam every gold card they see so as to have a lot of lands? By doing this you certainly haven't alleviated the problem of people taking "lands" early in the draft.
I have to side with Onder here and say that this is kind of an unnecessarily hardline approach. It's "unreasonable" to offer free lands with tricolor cards - how is this so? What does reasonability have to do with any of this?
I think an important thing to do, and often, is step back from building a cube and developing a format and learning cube philosophy and building ideas, to appreciate what we're doing: we're customizing a game for
fun. The entire purpose of this activity is fun, and, for
most (?) of us here, that fun is derived in groups of people we all like, or at least know. It's either a hobby to share between friends, or a community that you're a part of, so I have to roll my eyes a bit when I see an argument resting on "unreasonability". If it's fun, if players perceive it to be "good", then what does it matter if it's unorthodox? (And please, no "
well why don't we just give everyone a Black Lotus" strawmans...)
As for unorthodox, I currently give out 1 triland after the draft to each player (there are multiples, so there's no bad feelings if you're sharing a wedge/shard). Is this free fixing? Yeah, and that's significant! But it's a level playing field, and it's
not enough. That
Cruel Ultimatum you picked is not gonna get there off a
Crumbling Necropolis.
Tamiyo, Field Researcher is gonna be really disappointed if all you've got is a
Seaside Citadel. You have to prioritize fixing in the draft, but it's not something that necessarily pains you. Players now feel comfortable drafting two and a splash at all times, or even using a tricolor card - and tricolor cards are exciting and cool, and often traps in other formats. They're not traps here - they just require some work. But knowing that you get 1 triland in the end anyway, players get more curious about stretching their manabases. Before, two color with a small splash was about the best I'd get as far as manabase explorations; now, I have my drafters really learning through trial and error how they wanna fix their mana for their more ambitious decks, and that's been great over here. Meanwhile? The aggressive decks
fly under those trilands and scrylands that compose a lazily-compiled manabase for a 3c/4c behemoth. There's play and counterplay.
The biggest thing to remember is that nothing is unreasonable if the playing field is level. It's unreasonable to add ten
Black Lotus to your cube and expect that to be perfect fixing for everyone - that's going to lead to some level of fixing inequality that is hard to disincentivize. But a free triland alone is not gonna help you fix a manabase you don't work with. It's just a little cushion for more cautious drafters - and I have no trouble giving that cushion to the cautious drafters, because the real daredevils of a format will maximize that free fixing in their own decks, anyway. It simply adds a different dynamic to the draft, knowing you have 1 piece of insurance. Maybe it reduces some of the complexity of drafting a manabase - sure, I'll grant that. But really, who cares? Isn't the point of the game to have fun? If it's not for you, that's fine, but I think dismissing it as "unreasonable" is the same kind of looking-down-your-noseism that pushed Riptide into being on the cutting edge of cube design by wholeheartedly embracing a non-singleton, non-powermax approach, which I've seen over the year and a half I've been around still slowly trickle into other communities to this
day.
