Far too long ago, I announced a CubeTutor design contest, where participants were tasked with shaking off seasons of dust off my cube and bringing it into the present day. The not-so-subtle goal was to get myself excited about cubing again. From that perspective, mission accomplished.
As for the contest itself, you’ve all noticed that I’ve dragged my feet on announcing a winner. The blame lies on me for designing the contest in the way that I did. The submissions were all pretty great, but crowning a winner has been difficult.
Grillo’s submission seemed brilliant in spots, but doubling and trippling down on ETB Tapped lands and cutting aggressive black 1-drops (while retaining control bombs like Grave and Inferno Titan) feels like a pretty significant departure. There are some alterations made to compensate (white can no longer wipe the board with 4 mana), but on the whole it feels like a solid entry that I don’t personally identify with.
Aoeret’s list intrigues me with double Collected Company and generally aggressive singleton breaking, but then there’s the eyesore of triple Pridemate, effectively giving me flashbacks of a memory I had tried to repress.
Ultimately, the list I chose was Kirblinx’s, whose wonderful and elaborate submission I’ve posed in the linked forum thread. This was the entry I came to over and over again when revising my own cube.
That said, I don’t agree with all of Kirblinx’s design decisions. In particular, he proposes replacing Shocklands with Battle Lands, a change that dramatically alters the balance of the environment, and not for the better. If the current Standard environment serves as any indication, the Battle-Fetch dynamic really emphasizes Turn 3 and 4 plays, and that’s with on-color fetches being used. In cube, you usually end up with an assortment of fetches that can grab your on-color dual lands, and if these dual lands enter the battlefield tapped, aggro is already opening the game on the back foot.
I do agree that they are great in terms of adding meaningful sequencing decisions, but I would want to build an environment around them, not slot them into an environment tuned to ETB untapped mana sources.
Congratulations to Kirblinx, our CubeTutor Champion Contest Champion!
Honorable mentions:
shamizy
vennythekid
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