180 Artifact Tryout

[henkdetenk]

I wanted to make a new cube, but I didn't know what about, but then I saw this little guy, and I knew it was the universe whispering sweet, sweet nothings into my ear.



Everything about this card speaks to me. The art. His hair. His hair in the art. So I had to make a cube where his hair would shine. The problem was that it would likely have to be an artifact themed cube, but I hate artifacts. So I figured, why not build an artifact themed cube? What could possibly go wrong? Oh, I know, let's make it 180 cards while I'm at it, because I've never done that before and I'm sure it'll be fine.

Mostly. Somewhat.

Here's The Resulting Cube

These were my guardrails:

- 180 cards (draftable for 4 players, 5 packs of 9)
- Artifact themed
- Peasant rarity (with a few exceptions because I have an authority problem)
- Medium complexity

I cut the cube down to 180 cards rather than the usual 360 because I noticed I rarely draft with more than 4 players, and shuffling up and playing something quick and easy is something I like (also, I am now old, and time is scarce). I also liked the design constraint and the problems a small cube posed. The main one was that I worried the smaller cardpool and number of players might cause little competition over colors, so I just cut out Green entirely, because it's objectively the most boring color in magic.

Well, I say that, but I did play around with ideas for green, but other than map or food tokens, most of green's artifact interaction stems from hating artifacts, and while it would be funny to have green as the primary control color, cutting green solves a few key problems: first, there's be more competition over the remaining colored cards: 4 players, 4 colors to fight over, rather than 5. Second, it allowed me to deepen the cardpool for the remaining 4 colors, from something like 23 to like 30 per color. It would have made sense if I went much deeper into the colorless section, rather than still keeping to 30 colored cards per color, but it felt like a way to mitigate the same-y feeling a smaller cube gives.

I'm not even going to pretend I have fleshed out archetypes. Red and black lean into aristocrats a bit more, blue likes discounts, white likes equipment and servo tokens. Artifact matters cards are very plentiful across WURB, as are artifact creatures. So even if a card only has a parasitic-ish appeal, it can still be playable in a whole host of decks if it happens to have a relevant artifact card type or makes or leaves behind a relevant token like a clue or a whatever artifact token that does thing wizards dreams up these days.

As for mechanics, I've tried to go for ones that work on multiple levels, with fabricate being my favorite one, by far. It creates a token creature which is also an artifact, or it supports counters (or, in this cube's case, modified). So it slots into token decks, aristocrat decks, blink decks, tinker decks, artifact matters decks.

I'll be taking her for a test run tomorrow, and I'll post the first draft decks soon(tm) hopefully. In the meantime, I do have a few design issues I have yet to iron out. Mainly the ratio of sac fodder to sac outlets, the number of removal spells (specifically, how many Smelts I should include in red), and overal power outliers.

The main ones that bug me right now are Pia and Kiran Nalaar, and Arcbound Condor. I suppose I'll need to do a few drafts to figure out if they're too good for their own good. I mean, would there ever be a pack where you wouldn't pick Pia and Kiran Nalaar first?

I'll keep this as a blog thing, but if anyone has any experience with artifact cubes and has any tips, please, feel free to drop a line (I have no idea what I'm doing).

 

[Zoss]

This rocks! Here's hoping you get a good first draft out of it.

Two quick notes:

1) Aggro (1-drops in general) seems a little light on the ground. Combined with a high density of Smelts, I feel like control might be pretty strong. But! I might be wrong.

2) Where is Scrapwork Mutt???

 

[henkdetenk]

Got the first draft in yesterday, and it was a blast. The draft was fast and fun, everyone liked their decks, and they want to try it again. So, mission accomplished on that end. As for insights provided by my drafters (who have particular tastes, they prefer the feel of retail limited over powerful cube enviroments):

1: Removal felt too strong a lot of the time. Because so many creatures are artifacts, smelt is essentially a fatal push 50% of the time, because 50% of the creatures in the cube are artifacts (without counting tokens), so something like a Abrade pretty much just read 1R: destroy target creature/deal 3 damage, and Plundering Barbarian is a cheaper Ravenous Chupacabra with an additional ETB to choose from. I might replace him with a Manic Vandal or a Oxidda Scrapmelter to tone down the power just a tiny bit. I think the main issue was the low CMC of many of the smelt effects though, so simply upping the CMC with cards like Smash/Raze to the Ground might be an option too, but I'll test a bit more before I make any definitive choices. If anyone has any experience/suggestions..

2: Getting modified online was surprisingly more difficult than anticipated (might have been caused by one player windmill slamming every piece of equipment he came across). More living weapon type cards are a good option, but I'm also looking at more creatures with modular like Arcbound Prototype.

3: White and Black are a bit lacking in agressive one drops. I'm considering a Swooping Lookout, but I'm open to suggestions.

4: The mana base was too good (lol). Trilands with only 4 colors to choose from made it pretty easy to play three colors without much issue at all. My friends prefer 2 colors, with the splash needing to be an actual challenge. I'm inclined to agree, so I'll probably opt for duels, and more situationally untapped ones.

DECKS!

Esper Equipment

I was on the fence when I designed this cube about whether or not I should include an equipment archetype, but I'm glad to see it worked. The combat trick equipments especially were a pain in the ass. Valduk was a monster. Struggled against heavier control matchups but eked out some surprising wins. Shame they didn't get their hands on Relic Seeker, would have loved to see how well it performed, but Trinket Mage was a decent stand-in.

Grixis Grind

Riddlesmith + Ovalchase daredevil, and Cryptek + Junk Diver are extremely annoying. The deck suffered a little because it lacked a sac outlet, but it was very consistent and sticky, holding on long enough for Walking Scyscraper to come along and ruin everyone's day. Ian really overperformed.

Orzhov engine

It just kept going, and going and going. And going. And then kept going some more. Very consistent deck, with Fen Hauler as a surprisingly potent finisher. Was very happy to see this drafted and work so well.

Rakdos Control

I drafted every piece of removal I could get my hands on and assembled an engine as I went along. Kept the board clear to get value out of Arcbound Condor and Molten Gatekeeper. Surprisingly, the best cards in the deck turned out to be Fire Navy Trebuchet and Glaze Fiend. Very fun deck to pilot, but it did run out of steam every now and again, because I barely had any recursion and zero card draw.

This rocks! Here's hoping you get a good first draft out of it.

Two quick notes:

1) Aggro (1-drops in general) seems a little light on the ground. Combined with a high density of Smelts, I feel like control might be pretty strong. But! I might be wrong.

2) Where is Scrapwork Mutt???

Thanks! Agreed on both points. I added a mutt as soon as I saw your post, just before the draft! I think I agree on the 1-drop department and the smelt problem. I'm not really sure how to solve it yet. Either removing smelt effects outright, or making them more expensive to cast.

 

[Nemo]

Cool cube - I always love artifact stuff like this. And it has Sage of Lat-Nam, so what's not to love about it?

I like four colors for this, because I'm a big fan of not having all five colors in cubes for less than 7 people. I'd even consider three colors if I was doing this as a 180 card cube.

For one drops, these all look appealing to me:


Red is just flush with cool two drops for this stuff.


The Wanderglyph is more solid than it looks, in my opinion.

It wouldn't be too hard to switch the removal for stuff that costs 2 and 3. You already have Break Ties in there, which seems perfect. For red stuff, you could make some of the artifact destruction spicier while making it more expensive. It doesn't all have to cost more - you have the option to leave stuff like Abrade in place but tweak some other cards like Ingot Chewer or whatever.

There's also no harm in adding Shatter. People would play it, presumably.

 

[Zoss]

So--I don't want to steal your thunder, but a very very similar cube exists in BARTIFACT, which I played at Boston Cube Party a few months ago. (https://cubecobra.com/cube/about/87f695d4-ca23-4827-b4d2-b3db65c7fe35?view=primer)

I think you and Nemo are exactly right in that shatters need to cost, like, 3. Suplex was absurd in BARTIFACT, and I think anything stronger than that is going to be bonkers. That cube was, uh, distinguished by having like 3 Bonesplitters, which was as bananas as you might expect. I think your version has a really nice twist in that you don't require absolutely every card to be an artifact or to reference artifacts explicitly.

 

[henkdetenk]

Cool cube - I always love artifact stuff like this. And it has Sage of Lat-Nam, so what's not to love about it?

I like four colors for this, because I'm a big fan of not having all five colors in cubes for less than 7 people. I'd even consider three colors if I was doing this as a 180 card cube.

Thanks! If you would, what color would you cut? White and black both have the least artifact synergy, but they do have distinct things they add, though there's a lot of aristocrats overlap.

For one drops, these all look appealing to me:

Thanks! Well, I do love all of those as well. I'm not sure why I missed Reinforced Ronin in red, it's aggressive and plays nicely with artifact ETBs. Maybe I forgot he was an artifact creature. Reconfigure creatures in general are an interesting addition (one of my drafters mentioned it too), could replace some of the more boring equipments, and solve some of the low creature count equipment decks tend to cause. I'm iffy about Disciple of the Vault, mostly because I already have 3 similar effects in black, and I'm thinking I might need to add more aggressive stuff in the 1-drop slot, like your other two suggestions. A 1 mana deathtoucher is always annoying, and something to scale into late game is welcome too, reminds me of Retrofitted Transmogrant


Could be cool too.

The Wanderglyph is more solid than it looks, in my opinion.

Agreed! It can go along with Scrapwork Mutt and Melded Moxite, it'll be great for more deck filtering and fueling recursion.

It wouldn't be too hard to switch the removal for stuff that costs 2 and 3. You already have Break Ties in there, which seems perfect. For red stuff, you could make some of the artifact destruction spicier while making it more expensive. It doesn't all have to cost more - you have the option to leave stuff like Abrade in place but tweak some other cards like Ingot Chewer or whatever.

There's also no harm in adding Shatter. People would play it, presumably.

I like all of those suggestions. I currently run Ingot Chewer, Raze the Effigy and Gleeful Demolition as literal smelts with upside I could replace. If 3 mana is to be the minimum cost for a smelt, I'm on the fence about downgrading Plundering Barbarian to Manic Vandal or Bumbling Pangolin to bring it in line with Ravenous Chupacabra. I mean, if 3 mana nets you a 2/2 and a smelt, why bother with any of the other 3 cmc noncreature spells?

And Kuldotha Rebirth could replace Gleeful Demolition, because I just love the effect. The flexibility is what makes Gleeful Demolition so good, though, so it might end up too narrow a card.


Also looks pretty neat, cleaning out 1-drops and sacrificing itself against anything else. Could be too strong, because it can hit quite a lot, but it might be interesting to take for a spin.

So--I don't want to steal your thunder, but a very very similar cube exists in BARTIFACT, which I played at Boston Cube Party a few months ago. (https://cubecobra.com/cube/about/87f695d4-ca23-4827-b4d2-b3db65c7fe35?view=primer)

I think you and Nemo are exactly right in that shatters need to cost, like, 3. Suplex was absurd in BARTIFACT, and I think anything stronger than that is going to be bonkers. That cube was, uh, distinguished by having like 3 Bonesplitters, which was as bananas as you might expect. I think your version has a really nice twist in that you don't require absolutely every card to be an artifact or to reference artifacts explicitly.

Oh sweet, I love looting from other people's cubes for inspiration.

Well, one of my design goals was to make sure at least 50% of the creatures in the cube were not artifact creatures, to make sure all those cards with passive buffs from having artifacts wouldn't just fire off every single time, and it would take actual effort to get a good balance in decks. I think the cube as a whole is only 50ish% artifacts as it is now, and I like the balance.

 

[Nemo]

On removal:
Plundering Barbarian doesn't seem crazy to me, but you're the one who has experience playing the cube, so your info is better than mine. I think I'd be more inclined to replace Ingot Chewer to reduce the one mana stuff - maybe he becomes a one or two drop to help aggro depending on whether you want to reduce the quantity of removal or only increase the cost. And you can always go partway and swap Raze the Effigy with a two mana spell like Shatter. If you did Shatter and Lightning Strike instead of Raze the Effigy and Abrade, you would still have two maindeck playables, and now you're making the players choose between damage and artifact removal, even though there is overlap. Or maybe Explosive Entry is a good 2 MV option to help with modified, and then your two mana spell is sorcery speed.

I generally like Raze the Effigy in more of a normal cube, because the +2/+2 mode is going to be important for aggro decks as a combat trick, and the artifact destruction might not be a maindeck effect without the alternate mode. But for you, the +2/+2 is probably used less often and you don't have to worry about artifact removal making the maindeck.

On the topic of four colors, I think you could remove any of the colors. As a hot take, I might actually be inclined to remove blue if I really wanted a 3 color artifact cube, but this reflects my biases toward aristocrat and token stuff. And the blue does have some neat stuff going on here.

Have you ever looked at The 180 Jeskai Cube? I think that's a really cool cube that might offer you some food for thought. That cube is mainly for 3 players, but I think even for 4 players it makes good sense to try 3 colors to have color competition and avoid having a pile of the underdrafted color getting passed around the table in the last 3-4 picks of a pack. Did you notice that happening at the end of the packs? If so, you could also make the cube bigger, use more packs with less cards, and burn some cards at the end of each pack. That's a way to keep the variety of 4 colors without letting a player get 4 black cards from a single pack when the other players aren't in on black.

For example:
200 card cube, and 4 players draft 5 packs of 10, burning the last 2 cards of each pack. The burned cards prevent players from seeing a pack for a 3rd time and have the effect of causing everyone to see more cards overall during the draft. In an 8 player retail draft with 3 packs of 14 cards, drafters see 252 cards, whereas in a 4 player draft with 3x15 they see 162 cards. Bumping up that number makes them read more cards but also provides more variety and depth to what is possible to build. You could go further and make the packs 11 or 12 cards, burning more cards and increasing the size of the cube to 220 or 240. If you went all the way to 240 (5 packs of 12, burn 4 cards per pack), now the players are seeing 210 cards in a draft. The downside is that the decks can end up a little too polished that way, depending on your preferences, and it gets more agonizing to cut a deck down to 40 cards when you're looking at card pool with 34 solid playable cards and needing to cut 11 of them.

Anyway, I think the discussion of how many colors to include in a cube goes directly back to the number of cards in a pack. If you reduce your format to 10 card packs and keep 4 colors, you'll find that sometimes you're drafting red-black and then you see a pack that doesn't have thoes colors in it. My habit is to mitigate that issue by seeding each pack with one random card of each color and one land before filling the packs with a random mix of everything else. If you did 3 colors, that's less of an issue.

I think 4 colors is perfect for a 6 player, 240 card cube, by the way. And one approach would be to build a cube like that and then randomly pick a color to remove before a 4 player draft, then make up the packs accordingly.