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CML

CML

Contributor
safra said:
from the sound of things he actually hasn't had that many stabs at it
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yes :(

i had this really good article idea about swindling Birthright out of a free trip. an acquaintance inc college (5'2", m) had lost his virginity to an IDF fighter (compulsory military service is a great way to make your country fascist, cf. Korea) and I had an idle fantasy about springing upon such a woman the Foreskin Surprise. but it was not to be

in general though the only women of my color / class (not that high) that get married / really believe in monogamy tend to be Jewish—wonder why that is. obviously I'm not about it. it's led to a bunch of theories about how The Biological Clock is a Useful Fiction and I am pretty sure this is true, but like check out this video

 
Jason Waddell

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
I'll chime in and say, yes, I deleted the post. It had been reported and, in my own personal reading of the post, seemed to cross a "line", whatever that actually is. CML later states that he meant it another way, and I can see that this is possible, but, I would wager that nobody read it this way, and that at the very least CML committed the sin (for a writer) of communicating poorly.
 
japahn

japahn

If only it was a pile of garbage, it's a pile of good stuff!

But seriously, is it that bad? It runs many interesting cards, though the curve is super midrange.
 
shamizy

shamizy

It's terribly designed. There is crappy filler all across the cube alongside actually good and powerful cards. If there was a consistent power band throughout or actual thought put into certain card choices that was plain to someone looking over the list I wouldn't be as critical, but I really REALLY dislike this cube. Even more so that most WoTC offerings honestly. Maybe it's because someone took their time designing this with the Modern restriction and then decided to create a pile to reach a quota. It just doesn't feel balanced, tested or thought out at all. I've posted this elsewhere so I'm just gonna copy/paste my thoughts:

I just don't think there was enough thought put into this cube in terms of balance within the environment, which is probably the worst thing you could do in terms of design. At 540 there will be obvious issues in ensuring representation of loose archetypes and synergies, but at the point you need to TIGHTEN the power band and keep it level, not bring in shitty filler to reach your 540 quota.

The most egregious problem is that they basically went well, lemme put in all these walkers since my Modern restriction doesn't let me support certain archetypes well enough. Like look at Griselbrand. You can almost never actually cast it in most cubes, this one doesn't have many ways to cheat it in or reanimate it effectively. I counted 3 on color ways to pull it off in Unburial Rites, Ever After and Whip of Erebos. That's way too few to make it viable in a 540 list.

The choices they made to reach a 540 quota are questionable at best. Prophet of Kruphix in a cube with 8 ways to deal at least 3 damage at instant speed? Obzedat without real cheat-y shenanigans and an almost impossible 1WWBB cost to deploy? Hornet Nest what. Cutesy cards like Vesuvian Shapeshifter and Voidmage Prodigy alongside actual real cards? Why is Jinxed Choker even...just why? If this is a Modern cube working and updating with the current card designs that R&D is pumping out, these cards just do not reach a power threshold to compete with others. You can't be deploying Limited All-Star Azure Mage alongside Jace VP and tell me with a straight face that that is balanced whatsoever.

My biggest gripe is the thought process behind the planeswalkers, if you could even call it that. They are the most value oriented card type within any cube environment by providing continuous value throughout their existence on the battlefield. The majority of them slot into midrange (which is the usual default when playing with MTG greatest hits), and FORTY TWO is just way too many. Why would I mess around with fringey synergistic archetypes when I can just play good cards with no real repercussions? Elementary cube design requires you to really think about the interplay between various styles of gameplay to create a nuanced, balanced environment and it just feels like that wasn't a priority at all. I didn't even account for the 5 Origins flipwalkers either, you can up that count to 45 as an estimate in that case. Just insane.

TLDR; As someone who has spent their free time tinkering and working on a cube with constant changes and iterations for the last three years, I'm just disappointed that this was what WOTC went with.
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sigh

sigh

Haven't played this cube, but it does have some... quirks, even when you just give it a cursory glance. My very first pass through green and it felt super one dimensional, but wasn't quite sure why... turns out its 37.5% ramp spells! That's a lot. 10-20% more than RTL levels based on some casual random sampling.

return to dust. Some reason, that card really bugs me.

I hope the one rune snag is a joke???

Dunno. I think polishing a lower-than-power-max-level cube takes quite a lot of actual design effort/time, more than standing on top of the scaffold of picking to power-max. Probably quite a bit more time than the designer(s) were given to complete their project. Would make a stellar 450 list imo.

edit: the article ensures hundreds of iterations but I dunno man...

editedit: the article also talks about changes being forced upon the prior existing cube. I can see this twisting a lot of prior iteration work done on the environment
 
japahn

japahn

I was doubting the 37.5%, and counted 40.3% (29/72) ._.

Things I like:
  • The amount of non-basics
  • Tempo looks good (though has a glut at 3-mana)
Things I don't like:
  • The amount of planeswalkers
  • High curve. Ramp seems mandatory.
  • Synergies are too sparse to explore.
  • Midrange vs midrange environment. Too hard to draft aggro. Too hard to draft control. Every single time I tried to draft one of those, I feel into midrange
  • Narrow cards (Gifts Ungiven, Honor of the Pure, Phyrexian Obliterator)
  • Too many multicolor cards
  • Linearity of green. Draft green and you're pretty much forced into ramp. 4/10 two-color combos are taken.
  • The small amount of morphs, you probably know what it is every time.
  • Too much redundance in effects that don't need it (Control Magics, Disfigures, Angels)
  • Random 2-card combos including bad cards (Pestermite)
 
shamizy

shamizy

So Wastes kind of blow out of the basic land stash, and I've got these in the cube:



After testing out a bunch of the Smalldrazi a while back, these are the only ones that have stuck around. Breaker is pretty good even if you never recur it, but the other two explicitly need colorless sources to function. I'm thinking about squadroning a copy of Crumbling Vestige with each of them after seeing how successful and easy the process was in my last draft. I liked how the card played in OGW draft, it ensures a crucial land drop and colors on curve, and it has less of a deckbuilding cost since you can just envision it kind of like an immediate shot Tendo Ice Bridge. I remember discussion about Crumbling Vestiges in the basics box a while back but I don't recall if anyone actually ended up trying it or had any success. What have you guys done after including any of the Smalldrazi?
 
safra

safra

shamizy said:
So Wastes kind of blow out of the basic land stash, and I've got these in the cube:



After testing out a bunch of the Smalldrazi a while back, these are the only ones that have stuck around. Breaker is pretty good even if you never recur it, but the other two explicitly need colorless sources to function. I'm thinking about squadroning a copy of Crumbling Vestige with each of them after seeing how successful and easy the process was in my last draft. I liked how the card played in OGW draft, it ensures a crucial land drop and colors on curve, and it has less of a deckbuilding cost since you can just envision it kind of like an immediate shot Tendo Ice Bridge. I remember discussion about Crumbling Vestiges in the basics box a while back but I don't recall if anyone actually ended up trying it or had any success. What have you guys done after including any of the Smalldrazi?
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I ran basic land box Crumbling Vestiges. It was good; people took 1-2 if they were playing Eldrazi and a small handful of times grabbed one even without eldrazi for when they switched colours late and ended up with really poor fixing. It wasn't overpowered.
 
sigh

sigh

Yeah, like, how long can one stay excited about an evolving wilds variant?

I threw it in main board right away and have been happy since. Think it might be a touch strong to include as a freebie. I'd be tempted to pick those up just for the Barrens even if I don't run them.
 
Chris Taylor

Chris Taylor

Contributor
There's probably a limit to how many evolving wilds you can comfortably run before you're not just root maze-ing yourself. Maybe that's not something I want my drafters thinking about, but then again I also don't want people running 15 basic decks :p
 
Fulcrum

Fulcrum

Chris Taylor said:
Man, when we were making fun of BTP, why did nobody notice their Tesseract project?
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There are warnings in their art.

neSaED1.jpg
 
Onderzeeboot

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
whydirt said:
Random cube idea of the idea: Devotion vs. Domain

Tell me why this would be fun or stupid or both.
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So you want to build a cube that both heavily supports mostly monocolor decks with heavy single color mana requirements and full five color decks. You do realize that domain decks can't really afford to play the CC and even 1CC drops that are critical to devotion's plan, and domain cards are really, really, really awful in decks that can at least reach 1, and maybe even 2 basic land types? People will pick a theme based on their first few cards, then stick to either domain or devotion, ignoring half of the cards in each pack since they're basically 15th pick filler for their chosen archetype. Even worse, if lucky, a devotion drafter will be the only drafter at the table interested in the on color cards for his archetype, while the domain drafters will all be fighting over the same cards.

So, there's the "stupid" argument for you, anyone wants to do the "fun" argument? :)

(Spoiler: No one has to, because it's really, really hard to make cube not fun!)
 
ahadabans

ahadabans

Well, I feel like domain really is just 3+ color goodstuff. Incentivizing it feels like a bad idea since splashing colors has so much upside already (larger card pool = higher average card strength). Only thing additional you have to navigate is mana, which can get tricky I guess. But more tricky than just drafting 1/5 of the cube to make a devotion deck (assuming single color)? Even if you push guild devotion, I think domain is just way easier to draft than devotion.

My feeling is that most devotion is bad anyway. Mono black I think works because so many sweet cards are high CC (messenger/necro) and Gary is just awesome as a finisher and complimentary piece. Blue devotion was largely a failure for me. Purphoros was just a ping engine (wasn't about devotion at all). Everything else was not even testable in my mind (maybe Keranos - who I thought was too slow).

And that's another problem. Are there even enough payoff cards if you warped your cube entirely around these ideas? It's sort of like how hard I'm trying to make Astral Slide happen, and there are probably 10 times more cycling cards.
 
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