For everyone supporting populate, why not also support the dream?
I think I've shared my cubing origin story in parts before, but never from the start and never in a single place. It all started in the far-flung mists of March 2018 with the release of a set called "Masters 25." Like many others, I was drawn back in to Magic by the promise of seeing old friends and new all together coexisting in harmony. Yet the more and more I saw of this set the less and less I liked it. The cards were individually nifty, sure, but the limited environment felt like the worst parts of a Chaos draft stapled together at an elevated price tag that still somehow didn't manage to hit reasonable reprint targets. In short, I was disappointed. It felt like Wizards should have done better. It felt like *I* could have done better.
That's when the virus takes us. The cubing bug lies dormant, gorging itself on our arrogance until it spots a juicy morsel of pride it can't resist, and all of a sudden the disease manifests itself in full. For me, the catalyst lay in trying to make Zoss' Masters 25. Obeying all the rules of a retail masters set, I was determined to prove that a moderately well-motivated guy could make a better product than WotC.
Zoss' Masters 25 has remained half-finished for many years, but from there it was only a short slide into cubing. The first drafts of my cubes kept the museum aspect of containing at least one iconic card from every expansion intact, but other elements of the original design of Zoss '25 intact. These goals included the following:
1) Coherent draft archetypes recognizable to the modern eye
2) Reasonable, but not outrageous, reprints
and
3) A whole lot of spice.
Goal #3 led to me including, among other things, a full cycle of realistic alternate win conditions. They were as follows:
...Red only having two alternate win conditions made it very easy, especially as the other one relies on coin flips which are obviously difficult to support.
The full cycle never made it past that first iteration, with the Hellkite being dropped first, but the dream lives on: assembling a cube in which alternative win conditions are taken seriously and drafted around. Now, I don't mean "combos that deck your opponent or that remove all 20 of their life," I mean literally "you win the game" effects. Hard locks can go pound sand too. These can be discussed later, but for now, I want to pose the following questions and try to answer them in brief:
1) Are alternative win conditions fun? That is, do they add an enjoyable tension? If so, what factors make them enjoyable and what factors detract from the fun?
One thing that's very important in alternative win conditions is making sure that there's an appropriate window for the opponent to win. Part of that means letting your players anticipate what alternative win cons exist. The more obscure the win condition, the more you need to slow it down.
In general, I've enjoyed playing against alternative win conditions, but I don't think I'd like playing a cube with more than one or two alternate win con decks in a pod of eight. Any more than that and the chances of two players playing solitaire go way up for my liking. As with any spice, it's possible to add too much of a good thing! Except ginger. I've yet to find any recipe that uses too much ginger. Or garlic. But you get the point.
Similarly, if you're going to add alternative win conditions, you may want to make sure that your cards all serve two roles. If you include Felidar Sovereign and few other lifegain cards, that's going to be a trap! Plus, when the Sovereign player doesn't draw the cat, it becomes very hard for them to win. This leads me into my next question:
2) How much and in what ways does an average Cube have to be distorted in order to make alternative win cons worth pursuing?
Some need more, some less--a lot will depend on your cube and the specific cards. I think a lot could sneak into more cubes with minimal tailoring. Take Helix Pinnacle, for example. In many cubes with a ramp archetype that also likes stalling out, this could be an easy single-card archetype. However, you have to be careful, as any infinite mana combo becomes that much more problematic. Even Joraga Treespeaker is likely a no-go.
A lot of alternative win conditions are enchantments, meaning that if you're running more than one or two of them, you'll likely want to pack more indiscriminate removal and/or enchantment removal. Also, a few of them involve fairly parasitic mechanics (lifegain, treasure), so those will necessarily warp your environment. Then again, if you emphasize these mechanics this may be a plus to spice things up!
3) Ultimately, is it worth it to run alternative win cons?
I'm going to sidestep the question by creating The Authoritative List of Alternative Win Conditions. Tiering will based solely on my discretion, with points awarded for purely subjective measures of fun and viability. Points will be deducted if an alternative win condition requires severe warping of a cube's overall themes. I'm basing my judgments on the basis of an 'average' cube, whatever that may mean.
S Tier, AKA 'Lab Man Tier':
These alternative win conditions show up in fully powered cubes. They tend to interact well with aspects of powered cubes, but they're especially strong and so are worthy of respect. People will generally be aware of the possibility of decks build around these cards and will actively seek out 'the lab man' deck even without seeing it.
A Tier:
These cards are somewhat commonly featured in 'normal' Riptide cubes, which I'd put squarely at a medium power level. You don't have to change much to make them viable in an average deck, and they present interesting puzzles involving a certain amount of risk.
B Tier:
I believe that these are underutilized but could lead to interesting gameplay.
C Tier:
C Tier is mostly populated by interesting yet impractical win conditions. They may use a commonly interacted game element, yet tend to require an absurd amount of that element in order to win.
D Tier, AKA '5C Tier':
If you can put together an environment in which these are viable, I'd love to see it. I certainly cannot imagine what it would look like.
F Tier:
Normally I'd say this is prime material for 'so bad it's good' cubes, but they really aren't. Please do not run these cards. I'm begging you.
(Note: they tend to be kind of reasonable in Un-cubes, but that's a vanishingly small subset of cubes)
Honorable Mentions:
I think these honorable mentions could be A- or B-tier material if they were squadroned together with at least three other copies of themselves. Thanks to LadyMapi for inspiring this thread with Biovisionary!
Having asked and attempted to address these questions, I'd like to open the discussion to your experiences with alternative win conditions. Explicitly, I also want to hear people's experience with prison decks, mill decks, storm-type alternative win conditions, and anything else I've forgotten. Do my ideas make sense? Do they sound like they'd be fun? With some luck we'll be able to figure out some of the whens, wheres, hows, and whys to run alternative win conditions of all stripes.
