New draft, new post!
I am in the process of making a major update, both to include some Oath cards and to try and address the issues we discussed recently. I will talk about the changes in greater detail once I update the CubeTutor list (I am waiting for them to include Oath in their database). I plan to change ~75 cards out of 405. At the moment I already changed ~45 in the physical Cube, but the others are still being shipped. I wouldn't have wanted to draft with the Cube being in the middle of this process, but my playgroup asked, so...
We had:
UBw Reanimator (me; slow and controllish deck, 2-0-1, tied for the win)
4c Pod (no blue, 2-0-1, tied for the win)
Mono-black Pod/Aristocrats
Esper control (some Prowess dorks, counterspells and other top quality spells)
RGb Ramp (with some graveyard shenanigans)
BG Rock (a lot of life gain/life pay going on here)
Grixis control (generic good stuff, 0-2 drop)
Bant midrange (generic good stuff, 0-2 drop)
Notable things:
- why the hell do people drop in a 3-rounds, casual event?
- for the first time the winner is not a red-based aggro deck, yay!
- even though I couldn't yet implement all the changes, we already saw some effects (green-based ramp was there, for example).
- good stuff decks exist, but they seem to collect worse results than the ones that try to follow a specific strategy. I love this.
- I am starting to get annoyed by Commander cards. I love most of the ones I run, but they are so powerful that I almost feel guilty when I drop them. I would like to slightly lower the Cube's power level and if I want to do so the Commander cards might need to go. But they are so sweeeet...
- a whopping 7 players ran some amount of black cards, and we even had a mono-black deck. I will monitor how the colour fares in the next drafts, because I am afraid that black has now become the strongest colour.
- some drafters openly said that the changes improved the Cube. Good
As for my deck, I decided to force Reanimator after picking a
Life//Death P1P1 in a pack that also included some blue manipulation that I expected to wheel. This is not really my favourite deck type, but I wanted to see if the archetype was good enough and I wanted to show to my playgroup that cards like
Strategic Planning,
Deal Broker and
Scourge of Nel Toth are worth playing (they didn't see the limelight yet). The problem was, I knew that the density of giant fatties was very low (4 of the ones I plan on running are currently being shipped) and I was afraid that I wouldn't get enough playable crits. The deck still came together, somehow, but all the fatties I could get were
Scourge of Nel Toth,
Razormane Masticore and
Duplicant. I didn't face very aggressive decks, though, and so I could do my thing (thanks to some misplays here and there from my opponents, actually). My MVPs were
Lingering Souls and
Gifts Ungiven (real men look for 4 cards), but all the fatties pulled their weight and
Wall of Omens,
Wretched Confluence,
Unburial Rites,
Nekrataal,
Looter il-Kor and
Blackmail all proved to be very solid. Funnily, I didn't cast my P1P1 once. I was always too low on life.
All in all, I think I am moving in the right direction. This draft suggested some additional refining is advisable, but I think it's quite an enjoyable Cube.