jason, vengeant: not
bad on a clogged board, but not all that great. at his best in a control or attrition shell, see how modern UWR and dune-brood ("jund" as others call it) have benefited from his inclusion.
i agree white is an intrinsically strong cube color.
i know veggies and crawlers work well together -- believe me, if i thought such a shell was good in modern, i'd be playing it.
eric, i was freaking out about boardstalls when i initially made the cube (to the point that i included
hex!!) but then it isn't ever an issue. the clogged boards can turn into the same bored trench warfare that you see in really old draft formats, but that's far less common than a more complicated board state where there's some incremental advantage to be gained by attacking. stalemates aren't that hard to break.
sterling, champion is very reliable -- i think humans are the only tribe worth supporting in cube because there's so many of them that you don't even have to warp your design or even think about it. though he doesn't often get out of hand in the way he does in the standard tribal decks (and this is a good thing), he's still one of my favorite 1's. lynx of course can't block and is dependent on land-drops.
tin street leaves a body behind. i guess i just like big gold sections. multicolor aggro is fun. the issues with my cube melted away when i threw in a fucktillion fixers. thornscape is really powerful, of course he's gold too.
8.5: yeah. i also like
mother of runes. static protection is dull, activated protection is enough of a challenge that i think it's worth it.
your point about 'throwing a bone' and managing a certain kind of playgroup with a 'steep power curve' (ha!) is something i've thought a lot about, and i've written an article or two about it (
http://magic.tcgplayer.com/db/article.asp?ID=10597) claiming that cube is a good way to solve some of the intrinsic issues with casual play, including that one.
so you include jitte and skullclamp to throw 'em a bone, and for what it's worth wotc does the same thing -- why else are there bombs in draft, after all. as i see it, though, this is a bad solution. bombs become more of a crutch than anything else. it doesn't help these players get better, or think about the game in a way they might enjoy more. the flip-side is that they also pass them too often and end up losing terrible games, too. i think it's kinda condescending to these players to expect them to need bombs, and wizards' reliance on these kinds of cheap design gimmicks is emblematic of how they appeal to the LCD while failing to realize they can raise that LCD, thereby abdicating any responsibility they have to that end. i call it 'lies, damned lies, and market research,' and what comes to mind is some movie company trying to approach commercial success directly (or that excellent recent article on commercialism / indifference --
http://www.salon.com/2013/05/12/jaron_lanier_the_internet_destroyed_the_middle_class/). at this point, this design principle has gone long past being a reason for the design of NWO draft formats and has instead become a huge excuse. i'm pretty certain this is the explanation for why wizards makes, almost exclusively, draft formats far poorer than they're capable of. if you don't believe me, look at how good
modern masters was and ask yourself why not every format can be like that.
anyway, my own cognitive bias is to try and 'fix' things and be kind of a tyrant with my own high expectations, so take it all with a grain of salt.
---
this leads into my
big point, which is this (some admin, make this and some of the above discussion into its own thread?) --
i also don't disagree that some kind of curve is desirable, but i think it's impossible to
not have a curve, and as i see it part of my role as designer is to flatten it as much as possible for all the above reasons. like consider the following pack i got by mashin the cubetutor button
miscalculation
loam lion
recoil
fulminator mage
hymn to tourach
squadron hawk
huntmaster of the fells
cunning sparkmage
plated geopede
yavimaya elder
phantasmal image
liliana of the veil
helm of possession
wooded foothills
isolated chapel
you could first-pick LD (ramp or aggro) with fulminator mage, go into a WW / survival / control / token strategy with hawk (and its three buddies), go for solid value with huntmaster or yav elder, get the best creature in the best color with image, pick the most fun and flexible card (midrange, reanimator, control, etc.) with liliana. that's six possible first picks and none of them is 'better' enough than the others that you won't be able to draft a sweeter deck around it.
i imagine any one of my playgroup would be happy to crack this pack. now not all my packs are this sweet but, again, as a designer i think my role is to maximize packs like this, and maximize the number of first-picks, for all the reasons i listed above.
i wrote in another thread that cube is the successor to old-school, pre-NWO draft formats in its complexity and difficulty. sure, this wasn't a good business strategy for wizards, but free from the cost constraint i strongly disagree with almost everyone that limited formats benefit from all but a minimal direction.
Talk about changing how someone plays a game.
