The Dandy Cube (Chris Taylor's Cube)

[Chris Taylor]

I'd say I'm pretty committed. Prowess is one of the better and more interesting deck I've supported over the years, and it's never really had the "one build" problem quite as bad as aristocrats had it.
I can see base UB and base BR versions of this deck, and the rest is just balancing

 

[Nanonox]

My favorite archetype for Grixis right now is Discard matters.



Are all plenty powerful and unique. RB can be super aggressive. UR can be more spells matters and UB can be more controlling.

You can easily tie RB to your Mardu artifact wedge with stuff like The Underworld Cookbook to spam artifacts for Arcbound Ravager or get Hollow One out for cheap and buff it with Steel Overseer. Bomat Courier and Scrapwork Mutt pull double duty, etc.

And your UB discard should be able to find plenty overlap with the GY theme in Sultai. It might actually be a little too similar if anything.

You can't go wrong with Prowess, it's a great choice, but thought I'd throw this one out there too!

 

[blacksmithy]

i also like discard theme but i run it in BRug, and prowess in URbwg. i theoretically like crats in WBRg but i usually end up cutting cards that need sac fodder to be good so its more like go wide than crats

EDIT: also i am very excited about your civ deck and i wanna hear playtest results because i can see myself copying you on it

 

[Chris Taylor]

Alright, finally managed to gather a draft now that the holidays are over, and we can finally see if printing a bunch of enablers for CIV helped any.

So we had 8 people, the people's own @Dom Harvey grabbing the 3-0 with artifact aggro, sporting a lot of card quality.

Maybe this image is helpful to people, maybe not.

Here's the broad archetype breakdown from the evening:
Dom - Artifact Aggro
Tom - Jund Card Quality (Removal Dense, left Lurrus on the bench for being mostly instant/sorcery based)
Rob - Bant CIV (Walker Heavy)
Freyja - Sultai Midrange (Civ adjacent, mostly just card quality)
Me - GW Midrange (Hard in on CIV, got all the bad cards)
Sophie - Grixis Midrange
Liam - Grixis Midrange
Andrew - UR Prowess

So yeah, of the 3 broad archetypes: no Tokens drafter, arguably one delirium drafter, one artifact drafter, and a pile of people who refuse to read signals? (Myself included)

Individual card notes:

This card is good! I actually missed that it could block indestructibly. If it proves over the line I'll probably change that


Few notes with this thing:
1) It's better preordain (which I'm okay with trying) but 5 is too cheap, 2 cards is too much. Turns out I added enough enablers (And this is an enchantment itself) that CIV is basically free. Having any board presence that requires a clue is not a big ask who knew.
2) Name's not great. One manifest destiny would never make it past legal at WotC, and two how does a card with a name like that not involve lands in any way? (To say nothing of what color it'd be). Needs a full re-do on concept, really.


This however, was completely off the rails. I knew these were powerful, but this gains close to 8 life, plus it's already mostly strategic planning. Again, I'm fine with powerful cantrips, but this is obviously a very overpowered rider to staple on an already amazing card.

This should probably just be Oath of Nissa. Sure the cards won't go to the yard anymore for delirium, but the alt text on that can actually enable cool things.
Maybe the fact you can't find artifacts/enchantments/battles with it means I need to switch back, but that's worth testing at least.

These two provide an interesting contrast.
Scholar is an interesting minigame, and pays you off quite well for playing it well. 10/10, no notes.
Education is just future sight but it costs UU less.
Again, this recent set of patch notes turbocharged the enablers for CIV, so that text is on the majority of the time, especially since this is an enchantment.
Proposed changes are that it can't play lands once active, or if it needs nerfing further have it only be able to cast permanents once active (IE no lands/instant/sorceries), which at least feels on theme. Feedback was to try the lands nerf first.


This card is crazy but has no home. There's no ramp deck in my cube to speak of (There's just like 8 total acceleration cards and nothing that costs more than 6 to ramp to in the first place) and so while there are openers that allow you to t3 a 6 drop with this thing (they involve a 1 mana enchantment and an artifact land, but hey) mostly it's just there tapping for 2-3 mana when you have nothing to spend it on.

It's also a 2 mana 1/1, so when you do have nothing to spend it on, it's got very little other reason for it's existance.
I think this might be better served as a steward of valeron style design where it's a medium creature, can add mana, and can do both when you have CIV active.

This thing is hilarious, look how far we've come.

So one, the vigilance is really burying the lead here, hidden in the CIV block, so I think if I do want to keep this, it earns the hilarious first line of "Defender, Reach, Vigilance".
That being said, do I want to keep this? I like reach, but 1g 3/3 is just not that great, I run tarmogoyf, regal bunnicorn, etc, so the bar for 2 drop beef is somewhat high and also mostly sidelined.


This does feature in Dom's winning deck, and we've found out that it's extremely strong.
Pings do a lot in my cube (shoutout to Spitting Dilophosaurus) and since making excess rectangles is the name of the game anyways, this is frequently doing more than that.
I really never learn my lesson borrowing cards from MSE Modern, they're tuned above where I want to be, but in ways where I don't notice until it's on the battlefield.
Also if this is over the line, should I really be running Orcish bowmasters?

This guy also proved to be excellent but not overbearing, and while it's not borderless I do get to play a version without cheesy flavor text and jurassic park on it.

OH MAN we didn't even get into the jank

See if you can spot the error on this one

While this technically works in the rules, I should specify that the caster chooses where the creature goes.

Yes I know blue Nekrataal is a weird choice but I am honestly so dry on ideas for payoffs for CIV.
Dom pointed out that this should probably just ask the player to shuffle the creature into their library rather than bottom --> shuffle.

We did have a good time. Glad to be back cubing with people after the holidays, and I've definitely got some actionable feedback.

 

[TrainmasterGT]

This guy also proved to be excellent but not overbearing, and while it's not borderless I do get to play a version without cheesy flavor text and jurassic park on it.

Technically you still have Jurassic Park on the card, since Dilophosaurus didn't actually have Rootwalla frills or spit poison. That poison was something Michael Crichton invented for the book, and the frills were added to the film to make the creature look more menacing.

This is one of the reasons why I really don't like Frilled Deathspitter:

Few notes with this thing:
1) It's better preordain (which I'm okay with trying) but 5 is too cheap, 2 cards is too much. Turns out I added enough enablers (And this is an enchantment itself) that CIV is basically free. Having any board presence that requires a clue is not a big ask who knew.
2) Name's not great. One manifest destiny would never make it past legal at WotC, and two how does a card with a name like that not involve lands in any way? (To say nothing of what color it'd be). Needs a full re-do on concept, really.

I really like this card design. You could change the name to "Manifest Fate" or something along those lines if you don't want to allude to Manifest Destiny.

 

[Chris Taylor]

Technically you still have Jurassic Park on the card, since Dilophosaurus didn't actually have Rootwalla frills or spit poison. That poison was something Michael Crichton invented for the book, and the frills were added to the film to make the creature look more menacing.

This is one of the reasons why I really don't like Frilled Deathspitter:

Look man I just look for Dilophosaurus art on the internet, this is what I get

I really like this card design. You could change the name to "Manifest Fate" or something along those lines if you don't want to allude to Manifest Destiny.

It's a neat idea but it is absurdly overtuned.
Name suggestion from a friend this morning was "Inspiring Grandeur", which I love

 

[Chris Taylor]

New Arts:
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This last one matters a bit less but it looks less photorealistic so I think it fits better.

Full album is here, I realized I hadn't updated the visual spoiler in a while, I'd just been uploading patch notes.

 

[Chris Taylor]

Patch thoughts:

The thing I felt I needed to change from my last iteration was that removal was likely a bit too strong. We hadn't seen prowess or tokens at the top brackets in a while, and the hypothesis is that had less to do with the deck itself and more to how people were reacting to it.

I've cut swords to plowshares and flame slash for punching a bit too much above their weight class. Path to exile stays for now, as I want something good to strive for and it's certainly the more fair between it and swords. While there's powerful 1 mana removal in the other colors (fatal push, stern scolding, etc) I think there's a big difference between what I cut and what I left.

I also made a pass over the cheap (3-4ish mana) multi creature removal. I'm a bit worried about the losing player's ability to "Break-Serve" if these get removed, so I'm toning them down

These both went from 2C to 1CC. I absolutely adore Hunger, but it's proven REALLY powerful (can you imagine it was an instant to begin with?)
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Now to be fair I knew Fleshmelter was insane, but I also didn't really want the 4/2 statline of FTK. I think impact is a cute little middle ground.
I think there's 1 flicker card in my entire cube, but there's a few snapcasters so while this isn't a net upgrade, it's less of a downgrade than it might seem.


I needed a medium expensive blue creature, and I'm experimenting how far I can get with something so "fair"
Ward might be a hair too expensive for something that probably already eats an attacker, but we'll see. Pitch high and nerf is a lot easier than pitching low and buffing, after all.


While not strictly speaking necessary, I decided to put in one more faux-delve beater, this time opting for Gangler to join his friends Faux Dig through time, Faux Hooting Mandrils, and Faux Murktide Regent

The big difference between these is they don't compete for food the way delve spells do, so I've gotta keep a tight lid on the total number. Lets see if one more breaks it.

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I'd been doubling up on Rakish Bloodwitch, but since it's just so much of a lava spike, the prowess decks can't really run too many copies of it lest their deck just not affect the board well enough. I'm keeping one in, but I've added two copies of Dragur Reaver (Can you believe this name wasn't taken yet?) to hopefully attack and block (how unusual for a black creature!) a bit while still fitting into the theme.

I had a bit of a thought about it returning to hand rather than to the battlefield to make double spelling on subsequent turns easier, but that feels like a long time to wait.


I'm also dipping my toes into custom walker design again. I think my cube would be mostly fine with Vivien, Monsters' Advocate, but I don't love it being the only source of keyword counters AND the green decks in my cube all tend to diversify on card types quite a bit (Delirium and Civilization quite explicitly, and tokens involves a might more instants and sorceries than what ends up being a mostly creature deck) so the passive/minus ability end up being a lot worse than presented.

This is replacing Nissa, Vital Force who while cool, really does the wrong thing for a planeswalker to do: it's just a 5/5 haste that is doom blade resilient, and occasionally regrows things 1 game out of 10. If that's really what I wanted, I'm sure there's a creatures that I could make that does mostly the same thing. I want planeswalkers here to do planeswalker things: give you choices each turn and provide recurring value, and I think this does both of those pretty well.
It'll be a bit weird choosing reach but hey, I could see it.

Maybe as I get more of these under my belt that I'm happy with, I can start to address the token situation.
I'm starting to feel the token creep a bit more when white has all these for 2/2s:

Like all of these are from white cards I might want to play, I'm even currently playing Wandering Emperor and Gideon, Ally of Zendikar...

Sigh. A problem for another day

 

[Chris Taylor]

You know there's really nothing better for a designer than someone who's really invested in what you're doing:

I've been spending some time thinking about Civ, and the struggles it's been having versus its actual strength. I think I've landed on an issue of identity, and why my play experience with it seems to be different from when I've seen others play Civ.

I think a good example of what I'm talking about will come when I talk about Delirium in SOI.

Delirium was a major deck in both SOI draft and constructed, but those decks took very different forms. In draft, you were mostly a BG goodstuff deck that kept an eye on your graveyard, and tended to be stronger in longer games. You would still take the good cards above everything else, but if you were drafting and had a choice between 2 similar cards but one was a harder to acquire card type, you probably pick the card with the weird card type. Overall, it's a fair midrange strategy with some synergies to power the late game.

On the other hand, in constructed, Delirium was far more synergy focused. You played stuff like your Vessel of Nascency to power out 7 mana emrakuls. You sacrificed a ton of card quality to hit these powerful synergy spikes. Ishkanah and emrakul were wildly above rate compared to other things in that format.

I think we're weirdly straddling the line right now, where depending on the drafter, card evaluation is swinging wildly. I'd never put an ephara's oracle in my deck right now, even though it's civ in a box, for example. (I'm not saying this is correct, btw). I'm treating this archetype like it's delirium draft, where it seems the current push is towards delirium constructed.

This comes from a drafter of mine, Ephara's Oracle is Hard Evidence except it's an enchantment creature instead of making an 0/3 crab token.

Weather or not it's correct to cut hard evidence from a midrange deck aside, this lays bare an interesting preference of mine as a designer: I don't like "light touch" synergy.

IMO, if we had two mono red aggro decks: one of which had 6 heroic cards in it like Akroan Crusader, and another which was just an assortment of aggro red cards, I would prefer the latter in my cube, even if I'd prefer an actual 23 card heroic deck above both.

I prefer decks which are wholly committed to being about a strategy, and the first deck is either playing 6 bad cards, or 17 cards that don't synergize with the heroic package and just didn't get there, and both of those are frustrating to me.

Now this desire normally leads to really linear drafting, but with custom cards, I get to produce so many cross archetype glue cards that "picking the artifact card out of the pack" still probably ends up with you looking at half of it, especially given lands and removal spells usually aren't tied to synergy in this way. (Sure you can play cards that synergize with fetchlands, but you're never looking at a fetchland and thinking to yourself "eh, I don't actually have many landfall cards")

Now when I initially designed Civilization, I think I wanted it to be a linear deck like the rest of my archetypes. Artifacts, Tokens, Prowess, all require a lot of commitment; I didn't really want you to run off-plan cards.

However, it ended up being extremely easy to design enablers for this strategy, but I ran out of ideas very quickly trying to design payoffs for it. Especially within the confines of my cube, where Tarmogoyf already made the idea of "This creature has power and toughness equal to the number of card types among permanents you control" seem quaint, and all my delirium payoffs were powerful delve spells with delve swapped out for "affinity for delirium". That's a lot of design space that I felt I mostly couldn't use for fear of it just being a worse version of another card in the pack: it's easier to put card types in your graveyard than it is to keep them on the battlefield after all.

Tom (the drafter quoted above) and I both agree that the contrast between Civilization being less all-in and my other archetypes requiring more commitment is nice. Nobody should be afraid to put path to exile in their deck because it doesn't contribute to their Civilization count.

But it hasn't escaped my notice that the more linear archetypes artifacts, prowess, and tokens) are easier to draft, more aggressive, and also HEAVILY overdrafted. We've had 5/8 people somewhere in the mardu space for the last few drafts now, all clambering over each other to get to 23 playables.

Mardu artifacts in specific is one of the more powerful decks in this cube if you aren't fighting over half the table for your rewards, as there are some more fundamental game design weaknesses with Tokens (You're a slow aggro deck with medium reach and little card draw) and Prowess (You're extremely threat light and fold like fresh laundry to an opening hand with 3 copies of shock in it).

I also notice the Civilization and have blue-green in common, and the best deck is just the exact opposite colors of that. That could well be more fundamental too, as I specifically exclude both ramp and any kind of combo deck, so going over the top still has to be done with attacking and blocking. Something to look into, even if I'm pretty committed to this being a fair, ramp deck free environment.

I don't have an answer right now, just musings. I'll detail another post below about recent stuff I've added.[/c]

 

[Chris Taylor]

Lets talk about some stuff that I've added in the (christ) 8 months since I posted last?
Full card album at time of writing is located here

Enduring Innocence is a card designed to do a very different thing, but I like the technology of creature that dies into a global enchantment. I've also added this in as a concerted effort to include more playable anthems, as at the power level my cube is at, the core issue is that they don't provide any board presence unless you're already not losing, and they don't really help keep your creatures in play in a meaningful way (yes 1 toughness helps but it aint ward, it aint indestructible, etc etc)

This might need to be ETB or attacks instead of each combat, but it's a flier, provides gas to the tokens deck, provides a boatload of artifacts, and honestly the 3rd clue is a LOT less useful than the first two.

It's alright. Honestly disenchant effects are becoming more and more maindeckable in my cube as time goes on, but this is a removal spell with Civ synergy. It's a bit of an awkward wording for sure.

Regal Bunnicorn didn't cut it, so I'm trying something else. I don't think this can safely cost 1W, but maybe I'm wrong.

This is from magic set editor modern, so excuse the strange modes. Build your own niche FTK is a nice spot to be in.

Nobody has put this card in their deck.

This is the delver my cube always wanted. It's still enough work that it's not free, but not so much that its not worth doing.

Honestly the issue with a deck that wants to be all permanents is that instants and sorceries are the stuff you interact with, and black and red are the colors with the interaction. Blue and green get to make due, so I've added the nekkrataal blue deserves.
Tracker is a bit too free now that lands are included in your Civ count for simplicities sake, so it ends up being 1 bigger than I'd like.
Probably changing it to 1GG now that it's base 3/2, I really don't want its toughness to *-1, that's so aesthetically unappealing.

This thing has been quite good in the bigger blue decks. Initially had ward 3 and that was insane, this is just merely quite good, and extremely easy to play around if your opponent doesn't have a ton of instants in their deck.

Both the best and everyone's favorite black prowess card. Ward 1 is about as resilient as I want this thing to be, but Double Spell > Draw a card is a feedback loop that I could see causing problems in constructed. It's proven strong but fine here.

Honestly, we had no idea how good this card was for fully 6 months after it got added because it never lived to untap. It's good now, but still a bit slow, honestly the kind of thing the more midrange black decks need.

A beloved bugbear of mine, this went from 2B instant to 2B sorcery to 1BB sorcery to this insane strive wording and it might now actually have been nerfed too hard, given how hard it is to have a deck that can reasonably make triple black in my cube. There's plenty of fixing, you just usually want to be more evenly spread.

I think if this current design at 1B continues to disappoint I think I just go back to 1BB sorcery and just enshrine it as one of the more powerful cards in my cube.

Honestly since the initial outing of Coalesce cards as super broken 3 for 1s, I've gotten the hang of designing them so much that I undershot it.
Turns out the front face of this just does so little that it still ended up being bad. That might still be the case, it's really hard to find the sweet spot where these are cheap enough that they aren't relegated to control decks, but you are designing an adventure creature with an ETB trigger basically.

I always want this card to be better than it is. It's very flexible, but unless you have better stuff in play, even flying Forbidden Friendship is bad.
The combat trigger also whiffs if your opponent has an instant speed removal spell, but maybe I'm just expecting too much of a 2 mana enchantment.

These have been fine but still nowhere near broken, feel really good about the changes I made to YP if that's the reaction honestly.

Says Civ on it, playable in basically any green deck, also got a big kick from lands being included in Civ count, and really strong with dead weight exactly.
I'm happy with all that, it hasn't proven to be broken, just strong. Reminds me of Meren of Clan Nel Toth, but more in line with my goals.

Chatterfang has so much bullshit text on it.
I hate forestwalk, I hate the unintuitive way the trigger is worded where it does double your tokens but its worded in a way where it looks like you're only going to get one additional squirrel, I hate that sometimes you sneak a swamp into your otherwise Naya deck and starts machine gunning your opponents shit.

This hasn't been in a deck yet, but I think the idea is solid.

 

[Chris Taylor]

2/2

Yeah fuck, I dunno. Maybe. These numbers probably need to be a LOT bigger to matter, or it needs to be a lot cheaper to activate. Or both.

I've really gotta take a look at the interaction in my cube, because even teamwide indestructible doesn't do it. I think even if indestructible did what it purported to do I'd still run this over heroic intervention because of the flexibility, but I am clear that even though I like this card, it is a symptom.

Strong but not broken, which is a lot to say for indestructible mana dork which attacks and blocks freely.

A full new suite of Boros multicolor cards. Rip Apart is flexible but not really powerful enough for a multicolor removal spell, so I'm trying Scour Away.
Lavamane Sovreign is meant to address some issues in the token deck with resiliency, and I think would create worse draft dynamics if it made servo tokens for eg.
Trees and Stones Speak of War is another in the line of "anthems that also do a thing", and I think I've got the right amount of stipulations on it to justify it being one mana.

This fuckin card. I do eventually want to change the Universes Beyond-ness of this, but also coming up with a convincing planeswalker is harder than it looks, especially with this kit not really folding in to an existing Bant planeswalker.
The Jinnie Fay mana cost is a holdover from a different time in my cube, and I'm not sure it has the power to justify a more restrictive mana cost. Much like everything else in that cycle, it looks ugly and plays well.

The main issue here is the ult, which was originally mirroring Tragic Arrogence, a cruel card to put on a planeswalker since you need to commit more to the board to stop it from ulting, and that makes your post-ult position worse. Now when facing it down you get to at least choose the permanents you keep, eliminating the "I'll choose your thopter token as the artifact and creature you keep, sac all your stuff" play patterns.

 

[Suicufnoc]

Surely not good enough as is

 

[Chris Taylor]

Oh christ oh god why

 

[Suicufnoc]

You have any experience with Lórien Revealed?