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- Thread starter James Stevenson
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But what about my Future Sight vanilla 3/1?
I think it comes down to how dependent your gameplan is on getting it off. If Wildfire is a Plan B for an otherwise decent deck then you only need one, but if it's your primary win-con then you definitely need two. I had a U/R Vivi Wildfire deck my last cube draft that could have a solid gameplan otherwise, but the Wildfires definitely closed things out any time I was able to fire one off with Vivi on the board. Especially when I doubled up on them and just killed every single land and other creature, was pretty sick.
so when everybody talks about how you should only ever play this card as a 2-of, how real is that? are there any wildfire singleton defenders left to weight in on the other side of this debate.
There were actually quite a few cards that showed the "warning signs" of the incoming invasion before the "main event":
It's the same issue Streets of New Capenna ran into, where they shoved an old-school "there are big setting changes partway through" block story (Innistrad block, Zendikar block, Tarkir block, gestures vaguely at Lorwyn/Shadowmoor) into a single set, and so you get some thematic weirdness, like how New Capenna is supposed to not have angels but the set has angels because part of it is set after the angels unpetrify.
That helps. Thanks for shedding some light on that for a guy who doesn't keep up with the lore very much.
Flavor text sounds like me ignoring red flags from the women I date.
flavor text gets me every time
Anyone here breaking singleton? I have a strong desire to go nuts once I do with like 16 Nest Invader and 47 Lightning Bolt. How do you reel that in?
I actually just broke singleton with double fetches. Because I decided to stop messing around with fastlands and painlands and just play the stuff that synergizes.
I think fundamentally the answer there is "you don't!" - go deep, just do it in a second distinct cube or something. Because really, I assume we all thought the 100 Ornithopter cube was a meme, but then it was at CubeCon last year and all the games looked like this:
and as someone who was only just in Twitch chat, not even there... it was really memorable! That cube looks fun as hell! There was a lot going on! The commentators were stoked, the players seemed stoked, the chat seemed stoked, it was a good time. And 100 Ornithopters in a 360 card cube is easily the most absurd example out there, right?
I think fundamentally the answer there is "you don't!" - go deep, just do it in a second distinct cube or something. Because really, I assume we all thought the 100 Ornithopter cube was a meme, but then it was at CubeCon last year and all the games looked like this:
and as someone who was only just in Twitch chat, not even there... it was really memorable! That cube looks fun as hell! There was a lot going on! The commentators were stoked, the players seemed stoked, the chat seemed stoked, it was a good time. And 100 Ornithopters in a 360 card cube is easily the most absurd example out there, right?
Onderzeeboot
Ecstatic Orb
By realizing your goal is to create a fun and engaging draft format that can be drafted again and again. 100 Ornithopters might get you there, but 47 Lightning Bolts is just going to get people to draft the 12 Mountains + 28 Lightning Bolts Burn You Alive deck. Not all that rewarding. So aim for either a cube-defining singleton break like the Ornithopter cube above, or smaller breaks that allow your drafters to somewhat reliably draft your archetypes, without losing replayability value. And remember, WotC heavily breaks singleton in their own limited environment too. It’s called commons and uncommons!
I’ve found for your average cube singleton makes for better gameplay unless you have a specific reason not to stick to it. It makes games less repetitive and deckbuilding more interesting, and adds an additional strategic layer I enjoy of knowing which cards your opponent can’t have based on what you’ve seen in the draft.
I prefer to try and keep to the “spirit” of singleton because of that. If I’m looking for a red spellslinger payoff, Young Pyromancer and Thermo-Alchemist both do the job, but encourage building in different directions.
I would break singleton for a few reasons:
- there’s genuinely no redundancy for the effect you want. Fetchlands are the most common example where nothing else can really compete in terms of supporting synergies and being desirable to multiple drafters. Collected Company is another one I see pretty commonly.
- You want a lower number of unique cards to reduce complexity. The term “complexity budget” gets thrown around a lot here, having duplicates means fewer unique cards to read and thus more space for complicated cards elsewhere.
- You want players to be able to plan around specific cards or interactions. The 100 ornithoper cube is the extreme of this; you can guarantee both you and your opponents will have ornithopters so you can focus entirely on cards that interact well with them. A less extreme example I’ve seen before is running multiple copies of Mana Leak so players know how much mana they need to leave up to be safe.
Gravecrawler is the spell I think I've seen singleton-breaking here most often. There's just nothing like it (plus it works with itself in multiples!) in terms of cheap black recursive creature.
I break singleton on lands nowadays; double fetches, double shocks, double Prismatic Vista and double Urza's Saga. I also run my duplicate voucher system to artificially break singleton as well. Right now I'm on these cards:
Singleton is a weird concept. There are way too many cards that do exactly the same (except the name of course). So if that is fine, then non-singleton should be too from a robustness point. I.e., changing something small should not affect the outcome. Also note that most singleton formats break singleton on basic lands...
I do agree that constructed is often less fun than limited. And that is exactly due to the repetitiveness of constructed. Limited however allows for duplicates but does not have too many.
Ornithopter /dandan cubes sound fun!
I do agree that constructed is often less fun than limited. And that is exactly due to the repetitiveness of constructed. Limited however allows for duplicates but does not have too many.
Ornithopter /dandan cubes sound fun!
Onderzeeboot
Ecstatic Orb
This is actually a neat way of retaining that strategic layer, while still allowing for duplicates
The way I think of it, there are four distinct variants on "duplicate cards," all of which are described above:
1. Duplicate basic effects. I adore Firebolt and Burst Lightning, and basically no other 1-mana Red burn spells (Gut Shot, Galvanic Blast, Lava Dart, Lightning Axe--you guys are okay too dw), so instead of running a bunch of second-tier utility spells that would be otherwise different simply for the sake of being different, just run multiples of the same card.
Corollary: If I see you running Thraben Inspector and Novice Inspector in the same cube, I will physically take your Novice Inspector out of the sleeve and put one of my seventeen pocket Thraben Inspectors back in the sleeve in its place. It is the same goddamn card. If you want two, just run two!
2. Duplicates of build-arounds. This is your classic Wildfire and Burning of Xinye type of deal. The trick here is to make sure that only one person gets both copies, which is sometimes easier said than done. Don't ask me what happens when they wind up in the same pack. This one is the version that is best solved by running tutors or vouchers. Pro tip: make a custom tutor card that only searches up foil cards and then carefully select which cards are foiled. (I'm fascinated that this hasn't been an Un-card yet!) Or you could just put a sticker on the inner sleeve.
3. Color balance. Maybe you're running a 540 and don't want the GU drafter to get randomly screwed out of seeing Breeding Pool, so you add a second or third copy to make the odds of them seeing it way better. Most people are fine with this.
4. Multiple people will want a copy or copies of a given card. As in #3, several drafters could want precisely one Breeding Pool, but be planning to fetch it off of separate shocks because one is BGU and the other is RGu. This is a fairly land-specific thing, but it can happen with some specific effects, especially combo pieces that work for multiple folks--I'm thinking of stuff like Emrakul, the Aeons Torn which can be both a cheat target and part of a re-shuffle package.
So why am I taxonomizing this? Mostly because people tend to want some but not all of these things. For example, I find 1 to be a really compelling reason to break singleton, but not so much 2, because I think that it's fine if games open the same way but I don't want them all ending the same way.
...
As for reeling it in, the way I tend to choose to duplicate a card is during the initial editing phase. I'll build the cube singleton to start, then I'll see some card and think that it would be better if it were a second copy of XYZ, so I just do that. I tend to not go to three unless I want the cube to start building around that card, to be honest, but it's a really good way to set expectations such as "Red does 2 damage for one mana and 3 damage for 2" or "UU means a hard counter but 1U will be a soft counter of some kind," especially when satisfactory versions of that effects are highly limited.
1. Duplicate basic effects. I adore Firebolt and Burst Lightning, and basically no other 1-mana Red burn spells (Gut Shot, Galvanic Blast, Lava Dart, Lightning Axe--you guys are okay too dw), so instead of running a bunch of second-tier utility spells that would be otherwise different simply for the sake of being different, just run multiples of the same card.
Corollary: If I see you running Thraben Inspector and Novice Inspector in the same cube, I will physically take your Novice Inspector out of the sleeve and put one of my seventeen pocket Thraben Inspectors back in the sleeve in its place. It is the same goddamn card. If you want two, just run two!
2. Duplicates of build-arounds. This is your classic Wildfire and Burning of Xinye type of deal. The trick here is to make sure that only one person gets both copies, which is sometimes easier said than done. Don't ask me what happens when they wind up in the same pack. This one is the version that is best solved by running tutors or vouchers. Pro tip: make a custom tutor card that only searches up foil cards and then carefully select which cards are foiled. (I'm fascinated that this hasn't been an Un-card yet!) Or you could just put a sticker on the inner sleeve.
3. Color balance. Maybe you're running a 540 and don't want the GU drafter to get randomly screwed out of seeing Breeding Pool, so you add a second or third copy to make the odds of them seeing it way better. Most people are fine with this.
4. Multiple people will want a copy or copies of a given card. As in #3, several drafters could want precisely one Breeding Pool, but be planning to fetch it off of separate shocks because one is BGU and the other is RGu. This is a fairly land-specific thing, but it can happen with some specific effects, especially combo pieces that work for multiple folks--I'm thinking of stuff like Emrakul, the Aeons Torn which can be both a cheat target and part of a re-shuffle package.
So why am I taxonomizing this? Mostly because people tend to want some but not all of these things. For example, I find 1 to be a really compelling reason to break singleton, but not so much 2, because I think that it's fine if games open the same way but I don't want them all ending the same way.
...
As for reeling it in, the way I tend to choose to duplicate a card is during the initial editing phase. I'll build the cube singleton to start, then I'll see some card and think that it would be better if it were a second copy of XYZ, so I just do that. I tend to not go to three unless I want the cube to start building around that card, to be honest, but it's a really good way to set expectations such as "Red does 2 damage for one mana and 3 damage for 2" or "UU means a hard counter but 1U will be a soft counter of some kind," especially when satisfactory versions of that effects are highly limited.
(really though, if two people decide to go in on the same archetype, that makes the draft more and not less interesting, right?)
What if the first one is cross-pollinating with my Soldiers archetype and the second one with the Detectives archetype?!
Then I will gracefully admit my mistake: I have clearly sat down at the wrong pod.
That’s why fyndhorn vs llanowar elves is a slightly better example. However,
2 of the same makes
et all better. Magic is a beautiful game where often weird cases will bite you. If you can make a cube where both inspectorish creatures really matter, and you can pull it off to be singleton, and fun, I will be thoroughly impressed. I am afraid though that this is a challenge which is really really hard.Maybe use jokers/vouchers like:
Blue fetch, change for any fetch that fetches blue and one other type? Similarly with the dual? This solves the problem with the duals only being good in just a subset of decks.
Train and I were on a podcast somewhat recently talking about singleton breaking where we touched on a bunch of aspects of it, might be helpful:
https://usmantherad.substack.com/p/pack-one-slick-ones-episode-13-breaking
https://usmantherad.substack.com/p/pack-one-slick-ones-episode-13-breaking