Iteration Synergy Cube

[Iteration]

Hello, everyone! Jumping right in, this cube was inspired by Modern Masters and Ravnica's color pair design. I liked how those formats were not about sticking an unanswerable threat, but drafting a cohesive strategy where the whole was greater than the sum of its parts.

WU: Blink, tempo fliers or control. Venser and Brago are slightly too powerful at the top end, but it's an obvious and easy draft for people new to the cube.
UB: Artifacts, sorcery speed control. This deck plays mana rocks and wraths and card advantage until it can win with Darksteel Juggernaut or Tezzeret or Inkwell Leviathan.
BR: Recently changed to loosely "Mardu", with an emphasis on dash creatures. Vampires, Goblins, and sacrifice hadn't really worked in this slot, so I'm just trying an archetype that recently worked in a Wizards limited format.
RG: Fires. Like blink, pretty easy to support. I try to have the fires effects do something else so they're not redundant, but otherwise midrange creatures and mana elves do the workit .
GW: Creature Swarm/Selesnya. I would like to recapture the Ravnica guild a little better; in those games it felt like you were actually building up weak creatures to something powerful, but in my cube often you just brute force a lot of creatures and then punch the opponent to death quickly. But it still works well enough.
WB: Another archetype in flux; currently trying small shadow creatures and equipment. There is more metalcraft-style artifact counting than the mass production in UB, but the overlap is definitely there and Esper decks happen. If this doesn't work I'm going to try lifegain.
UR: Counterburn. There's a somewhat hidden strategy here to use looters until your library is empty and win with Beacon of Destruction or Red Sun's Zenith. I don't like how hard it is for drafters to pick up on that without adding like Lab Maniac but it plays out really well.
BG: Morbid. There's no big sacrifice engine, because that actually came together so rarely in previous versions. Instead there's just a lot of ways to incidentally have creatures die, and things that give you bonuses when they do.
RW: Battalion . It's really just Boros, but having that mechanic makes it feel cohesive. That there's no Sulfuric Vortex or Armageddon effects really takes away from aggro's ability to steal games, so I try to balance the overall power level to around here.
GU: Ramp. This deck will exist in any cube with green and blue cards, so all I did to support it was a mini Explore theme. It also has a couple of game ending threats with shroud, making it harder to answer once it gets rolling than the other guilds.

Edit - Version 6.2.4: http://www.cubetutor.com/viewcube/44652 and http://forums.goodgamery.com/viewtopic.php?p=1307510#p1307510

 

[Iteration]

7.0.0

Spoiler

 

[Eric Chan]

Welcome to the forums!

Card tags are done just using a [c] tag, so creating a hover-over for Inkwell Leviathan would be: [c]Inkwell Leviathan[/c]

For listing your entire cube, we recommend the excellent www.cubetutor.com, which is a great tool for managing your cube overall. Then you can simply link to your uploaded list from here. Our site isn't really built to list out entire cubes, unfortunately, but the good news is that we don't have to be when CubeTutor does it a hundred times better!

 

[Eric Chan]

Commenting on your actual themes:

- I personally am not a huge fan of Venser, the Sojourner, but Brago, King Eternal is exactly the kind of build-around that would get me to dive head-first into blink. Is Momentary Blink also a possibility, or is that too narrow?
- I might watch out for the artifact theme being a little narrow - even when there were only five supported shards in Alara, it turned out that artifacts didn't interact with any of the other archetypes, and was a prime example of the poison principle.
- From your descriptions, I worry that Gruul, Selesnya, and Boros just merge together into "animals". Without taking an in-depth look at your card list, I wonder if there's enough differentiation between these colour pairs.
- Also, if Rakdos's theme is dash, and Gruul's is Fires, is Jund essentially just haste creatures?
- Overall, it might help to divvy up the rough speeds of your guilds, and group them into Aggro/Midrange/Control. You probably want a 4/3/3 split, or possibly 3/4/3, but it would help with your high level planning to decide which colour pairs will be fast, moderate speed, and slow. Then you can check a guild's neighbours, and see if it has at least hopefully one other guild playing at the same speed, to ensure that you get more deck variety.

 

[Chris Taylor]

Venser is worse than Conjurer's Closet, can attest

 

[Jason Waddell]

Define worse. Color commitments and interactability are cool. Don't let everyone poo-poo Venser.

 

[Jason Waddell]

- Overall, it might help to divvy up the rough speeds of your guilds, and group them into Aggro/Midrange/Control. You probably want a 4/3/3 split, or possibly 3/4/3, but it would help with your high level planning to decide which colour pairs will be fast, moderate speed, and slow. Then you can check a guild's neighbours, and see if it has at least hopefully one other guild playing at the same speed, to ensure that you get more deck variety.

If you read Rosewater talk about Ravnica design, he actually talks about letting there be a slower and faster way to play each color pairing. I would try to keep this in mind when designing.

 

[Eric Chan]

That makes a lot of sense when you're talking about, say, the four guilds of original Ravnica, or the five guilds of Return to Ravnica. When trying to design for the full ten two-colour pairs, while maintaining the feel of a retail limited format, I'd worry that there wouldn't be enough space for slow and fast archetypes in each of the guilds, without diluting all of them down.

 

[kevthewalker]

UR: Counterburn. There's a somewhat hidden strategy here to use looters until your library is empty and win with Beacon of Destruction or Red Sun's Zenith. I don't like how hard it is for drafters to pick up on that without adding like Lab Maniac but it plays out really well.

The hidden strategy part sounds very intriguing, albeit somewhat vague to drafters I would think.
A couple options which come to my mind immediately are:

 

[Iteration]

Thanks for the replies, everyone! I love discussing this cube, so feel free to bring up any thought you have

- I personally am not a huge fan of Venser, the Sojourner, but Brago, King Eternal is exactly the kind of build-around that would get me to dive head-first into blink. Is Momentary Blink also a possibility, or is that too narrow?

Venser emperically works well as a flagship card, while closet never seems to get picked or sits in the sideboard of blink decks. It's entirely possible the artifact is better, but players seem to like the planeswalker a lot more. Blink is in, wish there was one more instant speed effect worth playing

- I might watch out for the artifact theme being a little narrow - even when there were only five supported shards in Alara, it turned out that artifacts didn't interact with any of the other archetypes, and was a prime example of the poison principle.

Yeah, this is a hard issue to balance. The dedicated artifact ub deck spends literally every pick on artifacts or shatters if possible. On the other hand, almost all the artifacts themselves are wanted by other guilds. Blink wants the clones and token makers, ramp wants the mana rocks and giant robot finishers, shadow wants the equipment and enough anciliary support to hit metalcraft, the capsules are fine standalone, etc. Great Furnace is awkward because it's in a red slot while red never cares, but having 6-7 artifact lands is good for making the archetype more consistent than swingy. Basically agreed that it's poisonous but think the guild is in a decent place despite that

- From your descriptions, I worry that Gruul, Selesnya, and Boros just merge together into "animals". Without taking an in-depth look at your card list, I wonder if there's enough differentiation between these colour pairs.

I feel these play out differently; Boros is the standard "needed a second color Red" cube archetype that doesn't want a curve much higher than 4. Gruul values elves, the fires effects, and beefy 4 and 5 drops very highly. I'd like to tweak selesnya to have a weaker neutral game but higher ceiling with its swarm, more like original Rav.

- Also, if Rakdos's theme is dash, and Gruul's is Fires, is Jund essentially just haste creatures?

Yeah, I don't love that overlap. The spoilers for Oath are making me look into RB devoid as a way to both get away from RG and overlap with the noncolored artifacts in UB. The actual gameplay of dash/raid/goodstuff has no problems, but I'll try giving it a more defined identity and apparently a bunch of 3/1s for 3 to see what happens.

- Overall, it might help to divvy up the rough speeds of your guilds, and group them into Aggro/Midrange/Control. You probably want a 4/3/3 split, or possibly 3/4/3, but it would help with your high level planning to decide which colour pairs will be fast, moderate speed, and slow. Then you can check a guild's neighbours, and see if it has at least hopefully one other guild playing at the same speed, to ensure that you get more deck variety.

Aggro - BR, WB, RW
Midrange - RG, GW, BG
Control - WU, UB, UR, UG

Apparently blue is control and green is midrange! Some of those decks can slide up or down a little; WU has a lot of tempo fliers and mana leaks, BR can prioritize removal and the late game more than the aggro rush, and GW can go anywhere on the spectrum.

Also words of war is a cool add! I'll definitely try and find room, any card that supports self-mill while still being decent is worth a shot

 

[Iteration]

also I'm planning on cutting my 15 fetch/20 dual section down to 10 each of painland/filterland/misc to fit the colorless guys in, mostly for RB but also the blink 3/3 and whatever else looks good

 

[Iteration]

Here's my current 7.0.0 update; the format is a card being cut followed by a card being added.

Spoiler

 

[Iteration]

First big thing is fetches and duals for pain and filters. I'll have wastes available as basics, but it should also be easy to make D (is that what we're using? Or G?) incidentally. The shocks could stay as they are, turn into scry lands, or be unique per color pair. I really liked how players would snipe off color fetches during draft, but not shuffling is a better play experience. I also cut most of the other tutoring, from trinket mage to twisted abomination; players won't always be familiar with the format or deck, and not having the time sink of searching makes games smoother. Also cut a lot of things that benefit from fetchlands, like landfall and exiling from graveyard as a cost.

White is mostly things I wanted to add, and just removed the closest thing. Kytheon is fine except for being a planeswalker and a flip card, cutting that cycle for personal preference. (Planeswalkers are fine, I'm just specifically trying to avoid the superfriends deck. Flip cards are too awkward, especially if they're proxies). White feels like it has one or two too many 2/2s for 2, probably going to cut Soulfire Grand Master. Judging from the prerelease Eldrazi Displacer might be oppressive but we'll see. Blue doesn't have much interesting going on, cut a flip walker and a tutor and a delve card for various good stuff.

Red and black are the bulk of the changes. Again, dash was great for curving out cleanly and just worked as a color pair. These cards seem much weaker neutral, but hopefully the colorless creature synergy is stronger than I thought. It can dip into robots pretty easily to fill the gaps. Also tried to put more shatters and cheap burn in; I especially like burn that can both remove a creature and hit a player for UR. I feel bad about breaking up the confluence cycle, but the green one doesn't really do much my archetypes want. I only have tier two of ramp so the land search won't really accelerate into a huge finisher, and the +1 counters don't do anything special. There is a mini-regrowth theme, but I replaced the sorcery with a regrowth creature so that works out. The rest is unexciting except that the tooth and scale are mostly placeholders.

Oh, and I still need to get words of war in!