General [Brainstorming] Vintage Cube

[Jason Waddell]

Assuming we built a cube with lots of FoW and broken shit, what archetypes / combos / cards would you want to see in it?

Keep in mind (if possible) competing demand, and assume each deck would have access to about 3 Moxen.

 

[anotak]

im gonna say utility power draft again

i think a big part of the appeal would be cards like gush that most people don't get to play with very often

 

[Laz]

For clarity, when you say Vintage Cube, do you mean like the vintage meta-game? Or do you mean 'a-well-designed-powered-cube'?

I am assuming the latter, where spells are the primary awesomeness in the cube.

If this is the case:
Draw 7s (Timetwister, Spiral, Wheel, Jar, etc)
Lots of Artifact-mana
Untap of lands (Turnabout, Rude Awakening, Frantic Search)
Making lands tap for multiple mana (High Tide, Bubbling Muck)
Fastbond
Tutors
As the thread title implies... Brainstorm

Ok, this is starting to just sound like a combo cube... I am not sure if that is where you are looking to go with it though...

Prison decks?

 

[Ryan]

This mostly sounds like my combo cube with maybe a couple other archetypes thrown in.

 

[Konge]

The brown deck sounds like something you would be interested in. Lots of cards which other decks are interested in, and only a few lynchpins (e.g. Metalworker, Mishra's, Tolarian Academy) - the fatties are there either way for sneak attack/show and tell. Include a Tezzeret or two for more awesomeness.

 

[Jason Waddell]

For clarity, when you say Vintage Cube, do you mean like the vintage meta-game? Or do you mean 'a-well-designed-powered-cube'?

I am assuming the latter, where spells are the primary awesomeness in the cube.

If this is the case:
Draw 7s (Timetwister, Spiral, Wheel, Jar, etc)
Lots of Artifact-mana
Untap of lands (Turnabout, Rude Awakening, Frantic Search)
Making lands tap for multiple mana (High Tide, Bubbling Muck)
Fastbond
Tutors
As the thread title implies... Brainstorm

Ok, this is starting to just sound like a combo cube... I am not sure if that is where you are looking to go with it though...

Prison decks?

I would say I want it to be less combo cubey and more Vintage constructiony. Focus on interaction and answers, and tension, versus unopposed comboing out.

Considering handing out Force of Wills in the same way one would hand out basic lands.

 

[Ryan]

I would say I want it to be less combo cubey and more Vintage constructiony. Focus on interaction and answers, and tension, versus unopposed comboing out.

Considering handing out Force of Wills in the same way one would hand out basic lands.

I mean Vintage is largely combo based. If you look at Vintage list most of them have a lot of overlapping combos like Time Vault and Voltaic Key. I think while you can make it not entirely combo based a good portion of it is going to lean towards combo. That's just what the cards in that format lend themselves too. I think your best bet is going to be starting with my combo cube hacking away at the more corner case combo cards and filling in what's missing for the archetypes you're trying to push. Most of the groundwork for many different vintage decks is already there.

 

[CML]

After suffering through a handful of drafts, I think Powered Cube has all the terrible aspects of Vintage (lots of non-games due to busted combos or p9 starts or whatever, along with games where the deck does nothing) with none of the awesome ones (the remaining games are often very interesting with huge amounts of opportunities to fuck up). Honestly, looking at half the Vintage lists, I have no idea how the players (playing non-linear decks) accomplish anything, but something keeps their decks together -- whereas the typical Powered Cube experience is that your linear strategy either comes together in time, or it doesn't and you lose to some jackoff curving Frenzied Goblin into Ember Hauler and beating you to death with 20th-century creatures. The games with disruption are barely more complicated. Clearly the thing to do is to make the decks much more like Vintage decks, so I'd consider

-- Several copies of Power
-- Several copies of FoW / Mana Drain / Spell Pierce
-- A pile of cantrips and draw (maybe Gush could finally be good!)
-- Some tutors
-- Excellent mana (duh)
-- Maybe extra "archetype staples" (Mishra's Workshop, Oath of Druids, Skullclamp, etc.)

You could easily find the slots for this by cutting, well, Frenzied Goblin and Ember Hauler ...

I'm sure I've linked this (horribly written) article before feat. the grognards of Seattle Magic but some of the ideas are worth a look, especially the section on 'redundancy' -- http://www.starcitygames.com/articl...---Vintage-Rotisserie-Draft-Extravaganza.html

 

[Billy]

Here's a different way to do it....

What if you played by Vintage constructed rules, but drafting a card allowed you to play that card in your deck. (like Squadron Hawk)

For example, draft an Underground Sea, you can play 4 of them. Same with Polluted Delta. But draft a Mox Ruby, you can only play one.

You make 60 card decks. Now you can play enough fetch lands to make them worthwhile (and cards that depend on them). And all the most broken cards are much less broken because you can only play 1.

You still have to pick which cards to include in your cube, but I think this would lead to a very different draft and play experience.

 

[Jason Waddell]

Here's a different way to do it....

What if you played by Vintage constructed rules, but drafting a card allowed you to play that card in your deck. (like Squadron Hawk)

For example, draft an Underground Sea, you can play 4 of them. Same with Polluted Delta. But draft a Mox Ruby, you can only play one.

You make 60 card decks. Now you can play enough fetch lands to make them worthwhile (and cards that depend on them). And all the most broken cards are much less broken because you can only play 1.

You still have to pick which cards to include in your cube, but I think this would lead to a very different draft and play experience.

I could see this being an option, but my main concerns are:
1) having to print out that many proxies / the annoyance of having to sort it all and deal with bookkeeping to ensure all the cards are in the right place
2) calibrating the number of picks. If you did it this way, would you still need 3 packs of 15?

I do like the idea of borrowing Vintage's card restriction rules though.

 

[Changling Bob]

It seems like the aim is to run high powered cards in a fair environment; ie: no massive degenerate combos, just super high value? We don't want massively linear decks (aha, I drafted tinker and tutors for tinker and blightsteel and mana rocks), but want to be able to jam the best modern creatures (and planeswalkers) against the best spells of yore (although maybe not all of them). Am I roughly on the mark here?

 

[Jason Waddell]

No, I think that massively degenerate combos are fine, but the games should be around setting up / protecting the combo, not just jamming it because odds are they don't have an answer. I want a player blindly running out a single combo to lose to somebody holding up Force of Will.

 

[Changling Bob]

So, here's an idea. The new netrunner draft format gives everyone a core set of cards that you need to functionally build a netrunner deck:

1x Runner/Corp Identity (double sided)
2x Armitage Codebusting
3x Crypsis
5x Priority Requisition
2x PAD Campaign

So that's enough VPs for a game to function, economy cards for both sides and generic icebreakers so you don't just lose as a runner.

Should we consider a similar starter pack for this? Say, 3x FoW, some sort of artifact mana (not mox/lotus/sol ring, but whatever the next tier is that's viable (actually maybe a mox saphire, given everyone will want blue for FoW)), maybe a wasteland or two, some other blue cards, eh I dunno I don't play legacy.

E: (I just got into netrunner and it is my new obsession. sorry cube, wait your turn)

 

[Jason Waddell]

http://riptidelab.com/android-netrunner-full-review/

 

[Jason Waddell]

So, here's an idea. The new netrunner draft format gives everyone a core set of cards that you need to functionally build a netrunner deck:

1x Runner/Corp Identity (double sided)
2x Armitage Codebusting
3x Crypsis
5x Priority Requisition
2x PAD Campaign

So that's enough VPs for a game to function, economy cards for both sides and generic icebreakers so you don't just lose as a runner.

Should we consider a similar starter pack for this? Say, 3x FoW, some sort of artifact mana (not mox/lotus/sol ring, but whatever the next tier is that's viable (actually maybe a mox saphire, given everyone will want blue for FoW)), maybe a wasteland or two, some other blue cards, eh I dunno I don't play legacy.

E: (I just got into netrunner and it is my new obsession. sorry cube, wait your turn)

But seriously, this is a good idea. Not really sure what to put in it though.

 

[Changling Bob]

Well you said about giving everyone free FoWs, so that's where the idea started. At that point you probably want to let everyone splash a bit of blue, so you want some support for that in there? Some basic stuff that's in every legacy deck cf: wasteland might be nice, similarly to my artifact mana suggestion. The other thing to do is to support the not-those decks a bit, and put some good aggro cards in, but I don't know what they look like in legacy. Maybe mox ruby works as a freebie, for going in whatever RDW sort of strategy is supported, but also being a tinker target and just generally you probably run it whatever.

This is where my suggestion falls over really as my exposure to legacy is limited, but it sort of depends on what we want to promote in the cube?

 

[Dom Harvey]

Even though it might seem like Vintage is a good model for Cube because of the amount of restricted cards/singletons, the glue that holds decks together are the 4-ofs. Something like Billy's idea is probably necessary.

 

[Jason Waddell]

Even though it might seem like Vintage is a good model for Cube because of the amount of restricted cards/singletons, the glue that holds decks together are the 4-ofs. Something like Billy's idea is probably necessary.

Could that not be said about most formats though?

Once I actually saw a winning Vintage decklist that was entirely singleton, save for a playset of Force of Will.

 

[Dom Harvey]

Sure, but in other formats the effects can often be substituted for other things (or at least, when trying to replicate that play experience in Cube workable replacements can be found). That decklist you saw was just as much a Force of Will deck (and, I imagine, a blue fetchland deck) as your average 13x4 + power Workshop deck is a Workshop deck.

 

[Jason Waddell]

Yeah, but I think part of the problem is that many of the actual Vintage decks are fairly poisonous. Dredge, Workshop, etc.

If there is a way to emulate that threat level and interactivity that would be great.

What if you had 8 different starter packs, and like, one of them came with a playset of Mishra's Workshop... maybe super dumb. I think it's dumb but maybe somebody else will have an idea.

 

[Ryan]

We draft my combo cube with Utopia lands so that there's never the moment of "do I take this card that would make my deck good and have bad mana or do I have good mana and a slightly worse deck" It works out excellent for us because then it really feels like you're playing a 40 card vintage deck, not to mention it lets cards like High Tide,Bubbling Muck, or Sundering Titan be the powerhouses they truly are. I have hundreds of drafts with the thing under my belt and I can tell you that pulling together a something like a Workshop or Tezzeret deck is very easy to do. Dredge is definitely the only vintage style of deck I wouldn't include but Bazaar of Baghdad is still an extremely powerful card that can go in multiple different decks. Not to sound like a record on repeat but your starting point is definitely within my combo cube. I think there's a very good core of what it is you're looking to do there and it would be very easy to build outwards from there and breaking singleton for things like Gush that's just going to be good in every deck and lets you include Young Pyromancer.

 

[anotak]

suggestion for basic "package":
up to 4 original duals of player's choice
up to 4 fetches of player's choice
up to 3 moxen of player's choice (each must be different)
1 black lotus
1 sol ring
1 force of will (and put some in the draft too)

 

[Jason Waddell]

http://www.starcitygames.com/tags/Vintage

Brian DeMars remains my favorite SCG author

 

[Jason Waddell]

Vague package idea: each player gets X pieces of power. (probably bad)
2 Wastelands per player in package with a couple more in draft proper.
1 Brainstorm per player in package?
I know Brainstorm is restricted in Vintage but I don't think we have to worry about that.


Accumulated Knowledge???


I think the pillars of the format are Tempo < Combo < Control < Tempo. Count "Thalia Aggro" as tempo. I need more ideas for Combo that are not poisonous. We're not doing Dredge here. We will consider prison. And reanimator. And Tinker cheats. Workshop decks. More?

 

[anotak]

tinker cheats can work w/ reanimator and show and tell to be less poisonous but idk how big a deal those 2 things are in vintage