General Alternate Wins in Fair Cubes

(Select all that apply) What win conditions are NOT OK in a fair cube?

  • Burn

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Mill

    Votes: 5 20.0%
  • Labman

    Votes: 2 8.0%
  • Door to Nothingness

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Kiki Twin

    Votes: 21 84.0%
  • Tendrils of Agony

    Votes: 16 64.0%
  • Warp World

    Votes: 8 32.0%
  • Anything goes!

    Votes: 1 4.0%

  • Total voters
    25
See poll. This came up in this week’s draft league- what “alternate” win conditions, such as burn and mill, are not fun to face in an otherwise “fair” environment? (fair here meaning “you win by attacking with enough creatures to reduce your opponents life total to zero”)
interested to hear thoughts on what is perceived as fair or unfair, as well as by degrees- is winning by bolt for 3 OK, but winning by Banefire for 7 not OK?

discuss!
 
I'm going to go back to a set of classic arguments here--I voted for Kiki, Tendrils, and Warp World, for three different reasons.

Kiki and other two card combos, especially with cards that just aren't excellent on their own, are not my cup of tea because they're overly centralizing. In reanimation (which I think you should add to the poll!), it doesn't matter if you're reanimating Griselbrand or Elesh Norn or if you're using Animate Dead or Reanimate, there's a lot of different ways to use the parts and you don't trainwreck your draft if someone else speculates on the combo. (Offramps into Sneak Attack or Goryo's Vengeanceare perfectly respectable) Also, a lot of specific two-card combos make the draft very experience-dependent, meaning that people will either not understand what these cards are doing in your cube or, upon seeing Pestermite, will assume you have a Kiki-Jiki and draft accordingly only to be frustrated when they find out at the end that the combo is simply not there.

For Tendrils, it's really hard to interact on the stack, meaning that there's not much you can do as the opposing player besides try to kill them before they bonk you for a bunch of damage out of nowhere, which brings me to another big gripe I have against combo--it oftentimes is very difficult to anticipate what combos you might be playing against, especially in a new cube, meaning that you're even more taxed in terms of counterplay. For aggro, midrange, and control, it's generally easy to figure out what they're up to within the first couple of turns and to assume either the beatdown or the non-beatdown position according to that deck and yours. Furthermore, the goal of the Tendrils player is to assemble the combo as quickly as possible as they've generally made significant sacrifices in terms of what their deck is capable of doing to do so, making it very feast or famine. I'd love to see a deck that uses Tendrils as a win-con after aggroing someone down to 6-10, but generally it's hard to make a deck that starts offensively and then transitions hard to a defensive spellslinger stance. (I've been inspired by Mizzix's Mastery, though...) Door to Nothingness doesn't bother me as much because it's both very expensive and restrictive (10 mana!!), and is highly interactive, usually sticking around for a turn cycle and offering a target to be removed unless you get to fifteen mana, which probably means you've won anyways. I wouldn't include Door because I think it's usually a trap, but I'm totally fine with losing to it and would actually be impressed.

Warp World, on the other hand, is loss by randomness. If I'm going to lose to a combo, I want to see fireworks going off, not a series of coin flips.

Again, these are not new arguments, but I think they're pretty standard for a reason. I'm fine with mill because usually it's both a double-edged sword in my cubes due to there being significant play from the graveyard and it not typically being supported. Again, I'm not a fan of dedicated mill cards and probably wouldn't put that in my cube (e.g. I would play Didn't Say Please but not Tasha's Hideous Laughter), but there are a number of otherwise playable cards that offer decent counter play (Loaming Shaman, etc.) so I think it could become a decently competitive theater to play in if a cube is designed with that in mind.

Burn is a subset of aggro for me and is kind of inevitable with enough red removal. Besides, normal Magic involves managing your life total anyways, so there tend to be more options in the sideboard to deal with this sort of thing than there are for mill.

Finally, labman dies to removal. Thassa's Oracle is a little more suspect for me because it doesn't, but generally speaking these creature-based combos are easy enough to interact with and tend not to win the game the turn cycle you play them, so I'm more okay seeing them.

Going back to my point about expectations, something that's very important to me are the expectations your players have about how they need to use removal. If a player is using it "intelligently," by using removal on key threats, I don't want them to be punished for doing so by whipping out a combo that wins on the spot. While big creatures offer a comparable "remove or die" challenge and can also be exploited by trying to run your opponent out of removal, they're often some combination of obvious and slow. Baneslayer Angel requires a full turn of setup and often needs two or three to actually win, as do many massive threats, whereas combos tend not to offer either that sort of window or that type of interactivity.
 
As no on warp world, because it would be very difficult to actually gain an advantage with it (have it be a win con). It's difficult for it to be a wincon in EDH, let alone cube. I voted mill because it's the much more BS version of burn that you can't counter with lifegain.
 

Laz

Developer
Echoing Zoss:
No on Kiki/Twin. Invalidating an entire game to a two card combo because you tapped mana on your turn is not fun?
No on Tendrils - I mean, the card is fine, but it distorts your cube and the draft a lot.
No on Warp World. Is this even a card you want to play? Why?

I think one of the good ones which you didn't list here is Approach. I find it provides a nice alternative win-con for control, and is easily able to be raced.
 
This thread is making me seriously reconsider Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker. I'm a fairmax cube for the most part, with a few exceptions that have been falling off the list at an alarming rate. I have a 720 cube and no Deceiver Exarch or Pestirmite...but I do run
Zealous Conscripts, Restoration Angel, and of course, there's shenanigans possible with Reveillark and such as well.

Now I feel like I'm both 1) allowing straightforward two-card combos in a cube that's generally pretty fair and 2) giving off poor signals to drafters.

The issue here is that I love Kiki-Jiki, as do my drafters, and he's typically been run in pretty fair ways, exploiting the additional body and ETB effects in a repeatable way that hasn't been oppressive. At 720, the chances of getting either Resto or Conscripts with him is pretty low as well...I'm just not sure.

Re: who voted Labman, that was me! The Labman is fine on his own, but Thassa's Oracle was not, even if there weren't many ways to auto-win with her.
 
TBH i put most of these options in as jokes, i really just wanted input on mill and burn and labman/oracle haha

but the resulting discussion is great!
 
6W + 6W is much easier than 5 + WWUUBBRRGG.

What I'm taking from this discussion is that, if it's hard to win in a certain way, your opponent deserved it and it's fair. If it's easy, then it's unfair. Which... makes sense.
 
It’s also one card (draw) vs. two card (draws).

Odds of drawing two cards together is a lot lower than odds of drawing one card together :p

Same goes for odds of drafting them together.
 
What I'm taking from this discussion is that, if it's hard to win in a certain way, your opponent deserved it and it's fair. If it's easy, then it's unfair. Which... makes sense.
I think this can be wrapped back to the agency players have in a game. Players like the chance for their decisions to matter. Easy combos can take a game before the opponent has a chance to use the tools they drafted for themselves and have at their disposal at that moment. I think this is the same reason things like overrun (and especially craterhoof behemoth in EDH) can leave some people salty. They didn't have a chance to notice the threat and add it to their game plan. It just happened and that's game.
 
Perhaps more than agency per se it's a matter of predictability. Generally speaking I'm fine if someone bluffs a lack of removal and takes out the lynchpin of my strategy just when I decide to go shields-down; when they rip the same answer off the top of their library it feels less earned. Combos blindside people in a way that turning all of your critters sideways tends not to, and I think that's where the salt tends to come from. Under this definition easy combos are therefore ones that you can hide in your hand and both plop down and win with on the same turn rather than a combo that is easy to remember, as, let's face it, unless you're playing KCI (RIP), most of your combos are pretty easy to execute.

(Sidenote: I think KCI was the pinnacle of unfair Magic in the best possible sense. It's probably the single most elegant exploitation of the game engine I've ever seen, and I wish it still existed as a viable deck in some format for that reason alone.)
 
Burn, Mill and Lab Man just seem like fair alternative win-cons if the drafter can assemble them. As long as they aren't parasitic with cards that only enable that particular archetype, I think you're fine. As long as there aren't specialized cards just for that single deck or strategy, but you can utilize them elsewhere, I don't really mind them in fair environments. Lab Man and Thassa's Oracle are fine with me since I don't include cards like Inverter of Truths or Demonic Consultation that would only serve as super niche enablers to make it work. This is also why I really dislike that Chain of Smog combo with the release of Strixhaven; minus Magecraft, Smog is just a super shitty card and not worth consideration. Door and Warp World are both very expensive and don't really warp whole decks or drafts around them. Cute inclusions for most cubes I'd say, stone unplayable in my environment and cubes that operate with similar speed.

From a power level perspective I think Tendrils of Agony is okay, but having to incorporate a whole storm package that no one else will be interested in during draft is not okay. It's not necessarily too strong or unfair, but I don't think I'd want something that has a person playing on a completely different axis with an isolated subsection of cards to draft. It's just too parasitic and niche, not really worth the real estate. So this one is kind of a 50/50; yes on power level, no for good cube design.

The only one I voted for out of this list 100% was Kiki Twin. I ran Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker for years in my cube and did enjoy drafting it once in a while, but the main issue I have with it is that if you end up with Kiki-Jiki or a blue enabler ala Pestermite, that U/R deck is now a Kiki deck. Your whole goal becomes to look for that other piece in draft and then assemble the combo. It's not ridiculously powerful in the context of cube, but it does create unfun scenarios where a lack of interaction/removal means that you can just get got by an easy to assemble combo with the filtering and card draw options available in blue. The biggest issue I have with it is just how it makes the draft and deckbuilding process so reductive once one half of the combo is picked up.

At least with other payoff cards like Restoration Angel and Zealous Conscripts you can explore synergies and cool ways to interact with the board in other decks, but that's not the case with the blue Twin cards in Pestermite or Deceiver Exarch. No one else will ever want these in a draft pool. They simply exist to be the companion piece for the combo. Once I realized this I took out Kiki and the crappy side pieces and haven't really missed it all that much. Twin was fun in Modern with the plethora of interactive cards making the matches into an interesting series of mind games, but it's far less appealing in cube where you can't reasonably expect an opponent to just be ready to interact and fight over every action or be willing to into a draw-go showdown. That's just not realistic in a fair cube environment.

TLDR; kiki twin sux butt
 
what is KCI
Krark-Clan Ironworks is a fair card that allows you to do some fantastically dumb things like sacrifice Scrap Trawler and Myr Retriever at the same time and use their abilities to get the other back. Edit: The B&R sums it up pretty well and probably better than I do, though it doesn't go into the combo itself.

https://magic.wizards.com/en/articl...ry-21-2019-banned-and-restricted-announcement

Combining this with, say, Chromatic Star will allow you draw your library and do whatever you want, basically, but the really cool thing is that as KCI's ability is a mana ability and so you can activate it at almost any time and with almost no recourse from your opponent. This is also what allows you to sac the Retriever and the Trawler simultaneously, letting the Trawler's ability see the Retriever die and also see both cards in the GY. Edit: so basically, Retriever returns one thing for its own ability and Scrap Trawler returns two, one from it dying and one from seeing Retriever die, for a total of three artifact returns. Return both Retriever and the Trawler and then another artifact of choice costing 0 to generate infinite colorless mana or those two and the Star for infinite draw.

This article shows the deck and talks about the basic loops, but it was so hard to pilot and such a slog yet so oppressive that KCI ate a modern ban VERY quickly (final edit--took about a year and a half, I think): https://strategy.channelfireball.com/all-strategy/mtg/channelmagic-articles/how-to-kci/
 
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Perhaps more than agency per se it's a matter of predictability. Generally speaking I'm fine if someone bluffs a lack of removal and takes out the lynchpin of my strategy just when I decide to go shields-down; when they rip the same answer off the top of their library it feels less earned.
Seems to be just mucking around trying to find 'precise' wordings honestly. Someone bluffing removal is making a risky decision to play into what they hope you will take their bluff for. Both players are in control of their decisions and usage of cards, hence my usage of the word "agency". I don't think play patterns need to be "predictable" for both players to still have agency. You could for instance be counter-bluffing your shields-down moment, perhaps with a one mana hexproof-granting instant. Point being, both players are being allowed to utilize their skills and cards to the fullest extent possible in an interactive manner. A (bad) combo removes that control of decision-making, timing, interactivity etc.

And most usages of removal aren't immediately game-ending like many combos. You have opportunities to try to work yourself out of the predicament, except in the very late stage of the game perhaps.
 
What an interesting topic! (It's not unusual, on this forum...)

This thread is making me seriously reconsider Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker. I'm a fairmax cube for the most part, with a few exceptions that have been falling off the list at an alarming rate. I have a 720 cube and no Deceiver Exarch or Pestirmite...but I do run
Zealous Conscripts, Restoration Angel, and of course, there's shenanigans possible with Reveillark and such as well.

Yeah, I think consistency is the thing that helps Kiki combo the most. If you have only Kiki-Jiki and Pestermite in your cube, or only Kiki, Resto and Conscripts (and no Twin), probably it's okay. Yeah, sometimes somebody will draft both parts of the combo, but they have to draw both of them to instantly win, so probably they have to build a decent deck that works even without. On the other side, if the cube is small and you have Kiki-Jiki, Splinter Twin, Zealous Conscripts, Restoration, Pestermite and Deceiver Exarch, somebody can easily play a deck which only win strategy is to combo off. That is not bad for the environment, if the other decks are at the same power level, but that's not "fair Magic".

Now I feel like I'm both 1) allowing straightforward two-card combos in a cube that's generally pretty fair and 2) giving off poor signals to drafters.

I think it's to consider also how many answers to the combo you have. Something like Cryptic Command or Echoing Decay or even better Rakdos Charm can be considered as potential answers. The only presence of Rakdos Charm in a cube makes the Kiki-combo drafters more cautious about when they combo off, since it can make their instant-win combo an instant-lose combo.

The issue here is that I love Kiki-Jiki, as do my drafters, and he's typically been run in pretty fair ways, exploiting the additional body and ETB effects in a repeatable way that hasn't been oppressive. At 720, the chances of getting either Resto or Conscripts with him is pretty low as well...I'm just not sure.

Yeah, I think there is no problem in running them

Re: who voted Labman, that was me! The Labman is fine on his own, but Thassa's Oracle was not, even if there weren't many ways to auto-win with her.

I voted for Labman too, and the reason was the same!

(Sidenote: I think KCI was the pinnacle of unfair Magic in the best possible sense. It's probably the single most elegant exploitation of the game engine I've ever seen, and I wish it still existed as a viable deck in some format for that reason alone.)

I think Second Sunrise combo (the Cifka deck) is even better than KCI. I was in love with that deck in 2012 and bought all the cards to complete it... and then they banned Second Sunrise. That's when I decided that I don't want to play competitive Magic :)

On a sidenote, does somebody have a functioning "Eggs" archetype in their Cube? I would love to be able to play that deck again!
 
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