By: Jason Waddell

Last week, Justin Parnell wrote a nice article on supporting aggro in cube. I must confess, I was prepared not to like this article. The cube community long been over-saturated with articles that emphasize the importance of supporting aggro while simultaneously kind of missing the point.

While there are many tools at a cube designer’s disposal, at an abstract level most of the ways to bolster aggro boil down to:

1.   Making aggro stronger
   
2.   Making anti-aggro weaker

Under many cubers constraints, item 1 isn’t even an option. If you build your cube under the constraints of singleton power-maximization, you’ve likely already hit aggro’s power ceiling, or come close to it. Of course, if you ignore those restrictions other options open up. Andy Cooperfauss famously included a Rebel creature type errata to his cube, and my own approach has been to turn the aggro dial up to 11 (or more) by breaking singleton.

Parnell’s article primarily focuses on the second option, and he identifies well the types of cards that can disrupt the balance of your environment.

He then states:

I’m not suggesting you specifically cut these types of cards from your cube; rather, I want you to learn to manage their numbers so you don’t choke out aggro decks before they can even get off of their feet.

This is a good point. Hard design rules are rarely optimal. In my own cube, I run some of his identified cards, and omit others. Gideon Jura currently sits on my chopping block.

All in all, his article made me feel very optimistic. It was positively received on StarCityGames, and there doesn’t appear to be a vocal backlash against the suggestion that cards like Wurmcoil Engine or Thragtusk could be cut for balance concerns. Simply “pushing aggro” isn’t enough. I’ve played many cubes where all the best aggro cards were there, but the aggro decks simply couldn’t fight through a field of Moats and Walls of Reverence.

At the same time, it’s a little disappointing that it’s taken so long to get to this point. Imagine you were designing a brand-new Magic-like game, and for years playtest information reported that aggro was underpowered. This would be unthinkable. You’d either make aggro stronger, make anti-aggro weaker, or both. Achieving a balanced environment isn’t terribly difficult. Once you get past the basics of how to balance an environment, you can turn your attention towards finding the most fun ways to balance your environment.

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By: Jason Waddell

Before I got involved in the Magic scene, I worked as a writer for Major League Gaming. One of MLG’s primary contributions, beyond organizing the logistics of an annual competitive video game Pro Circuit, was to tweak the rule sets of games to make them more enjoyable when played at a high level. Out of the box, the gameplay of games like Halo 2 and Super Smash Bros. Melee crumbled when played by players with sufficiently high skill. The strategic depth of the default developer settings was low, and the games became increasingly frustrating as your personal skill level increased.

So MLG changed the settings, removing the sources of frustration.

Naturally, this caused a great deal of tension within each game’s community. Casual players viewed MLG’s actions as “stripping away the fun” and going against “developer intent”, and competitive players saw a game that was inherently broken.

Of course, this divide doesn’t have to exist.

The above image is from David Sirlin’s handout ‘Balancing Competitive Multiplayer Games‘, and touches on a lesson that I feel is generally well understood within the halls of Wizards R&D. In Magic’s design, there’s a systematic push to make any given format’s Tier 1 strategies interactive, keeping the hardcore satisfied. Quirkier strategies, like drafting a mill deck, are still available, but kept in check at a notably lower power level.

Regrettably, this understanding does not appear to have been applied to Wizard’s cube design. I frequently read posts by pro players lamenting the quality of Wizards’ cube design and the fact that such a design is used in high-stakes tournament environments like the MOCS and Players Championship. The same sort of community divide plays out once again, with some players calling for the removal of frustrating design elements and another contingency that views the exclusion of cards like Channel and Tinker as “stripping away the fun”.

Perhaps the worst assumption one can make is that the two are mutually exclusive. There’s room in the community for both schools of design to coexist.

That said, I do agree with David Sirlin’s sentiment that Blizzard’s handling of game design captures the best of both worlds. Starcraft 2 can be played by seasoned professionals with a hundred thousand dollars on the line, or by a couple amateurs slinging goofy strategies in Bronze League. There’s no divide because the game works for everyone, with no need for an organization like Major League Gaming to tweak the various strategies.

For a more thorough exploration of the subject, check out this article I wrote for MLG.

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By: Jason Waddell

Today is a holiday in Belgium, and we managed to scrape together an 8-man cube draft. We had 7 players commit in advance, and were able to wrangle a player named Glenn to be our 8th at the last minute. Over the last month or so the skill level of our drafters has risen significantly, and today’s draft was filled with local PTQ grinders. I was not up for the challenge, and was punished all day long for leaks in my play and a couple of outright punts.

I opened the draft with the following two picks:

The seat I was in was likely best suited for some Gravecrawler archetype variant, but I’ve played the deck a lot in recent weeks and wasn’t really in the mood to do it yet again. I had been itching to play Blue, and wormed my way into a mishmashed BUG tempo deck that was fairly high on card quality.

The deck itself was pretty solid and flexible, but as a pilot I really didn’t do it justice.

The biggest punt occurred in Game 3 of Round 1, midway through the game after a flurry of removal that had dealt with every threat I attempted to pose.  My opponent’s board read Liliana of the Veil, Sower of Temptation and my Deathrite Shaman (stolen, of course). I had a Jitte with two charge counters. Somehow I got it in my head that I could not afford to have him use Liliana to make me sacrifice my Deathrite Shaman, so I was going to kill the Sower on end step.

This is horrible for a couple of reasons. Firstly, Liliana’s -2 ability says “target player“, not “target opponent“, so the timing didn’t matter (if he had another creature to play). Secondly, letting him untap with my Deathrite Shaman allowed him to gain two life (off of Gemstone Mine, of course). Lastly, his Liliana was at 1 loyalty. Pretty much the perfect storm of punts.

Naturally, I get him down to 1 life, get milled to 0 cards by Nephalia Drownyard and die on my draw step with lethal on board. Poetic justice.

Our last-minute player Glenn swept the draft with this Gruul dino-deck, undoubtedly inspired by Triple Scars of Mirrodin draft.

In the end I went 1 – 2, with a deck that deserved better. I’m sorry deck. I let you down.

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