What would it need to work? I don't have baubles/sac artifacts, but it could work with artifact creatures.
I finally had a (5 player) draft. I'll post more info soon, but one comment I got was that there seems to be a lack of removal, both mass and single target. Also that the removal seemed to lack in quality.
I'm curious what everyone thinks about this. The cube is sort of based on the ideas of the Penny-pincher cubes, but I might have gotten a lot less removal than them.
I've been busy with work, so its been hard for me to find time to comment.
I don't really have time, unfortunatly, to put the removal suite under a microscope, but there are a few things that might help in regards to assessing removal:
1. Be very conscious of casting cost. Generally speaking, spot removal should cost less than the threats that they are removing. This is even more important, the more time efficent the threats become (ETBs etc). If a player falls behind, you don't want them to be being left behind, because they can't double spell in a turn to catch back up. This can be especially tricky with red burn spells. Often times the most interesting red burn spells are priced at 3, and in many cubes, 3cc is where you get a greater density of influencial creatures or other utility spells. This creates a squeeze at the 3cc slot, for example, that can start to artifically thin out removal options, since there is only so much that can be fit on the curve.
If you look at the PP 1.0's red removal, it has that problem, and in 2.0, I tried to address this with cards like burst lightning, or stoke. This moves the casting cost around the curve a bit more, and provides more breathing room in the draft.
2. Overly conditioned removal can artifically reduce your removal suite. This goes back to the idea that if you have too big of a power gap, people just cut out the bottom of the hierachy. If people view your removal as being overly clunky, or positioned poorly against threats, it tends to fall down the pick order, and get beat out in favor of a smaller selection of premium removal and effective threats. This means less removal makes decks.
Even if you take overly conditioned removal and sort of flatten the hierachy, you still run into problems in the actual game. This is because you get these removal dead zones, will removal is too conditioned to be leveraged effectively (or too highly costed to be sequenced effectively). The innistrad cube I made was guility of both of these faults.
Generally, if you are going to condition removal, you want it to be generally good, but maybe with a few quirks to it, that gives threats some breathing room, to prosecute a game forward, or perhaps create an incentive for more synergistic play. So for example, say we have a burn suite. We might deliberaly run lower toughness threats, but include a way to boost their toughness to make them tougher against the formats prime removal.
Also, in 2.0, there is a huge focus on discard in the grixis colors, and cards that care about graveyard density, so even if you run (say for example slaughter) and get matched up against some odd mono-black deck, you generally have the option to convert it into another card, to fuel another interaction.
The tricky thing is that the idea behind conditioned removal is to
increase interaction and synergy play, not to
decrease it, but thats a difficult balance to reach. The biggest benefit of running some conditioning, is that you can have normally fragile creature engine cards work effectively, without being zapped automatically for 1 mana from no where.
3. Mass removal density is very tricky, becuase in limited its essentially a board reset, before its anything else. The question there is, "how often and how easily do I want people to be able to reset my games?" The more wipes you add, the longer your games go. Also, they tend to just ruin any sort of creature based engines. Cards like Krenko, for example, because miserably less fun when matched up against 8 wog deck, and makes someone feel punished for looking for odd or interesting interactions (which people love to do), rather than just running efficient spells and zerging in.
Again, sorry for having to wait a week to respond. Hope that helps a little bit.
