General CBS

TrainmasterGT

TrainmasterGT

LadyMapi said:
So, what are people's worst archetypes? What decks just never come together, regardless of what you've tried?
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I've never been impressed with my attempts at making enchantress//constellation work. The deck can finally "come together" thanks to Theros: Beyond Death allowing for a suitable number of mid-power enablers. The problem is that they all cost 3 or 4 mana, so they run very awkwardly. Setessan Champion and Archon of Sun's Grace would both be great cards if they were enchantments that triggered themselves like Eidolon of Blossoms, but since they're just regular creatures, they're mediocre. Often times they just eat a removal spell before they get to generate any value.

It's really disappointing that enchantress has a hard time working, because there are so many great enchantments that just go into most cubes anyway. Omen of the Sea, Pacifism effects, and Utopia Sprawl variants are all great inclusions that can easily make up 20-30 slots in a cube by themselves. It's just that these cards want to be cast early in the game before a 4 or 5 mana constellation payoff has been resolved.

Even thought constellation isn't a bad deck anymore, the payoffs feel way worse than the enablers. It never feels better playing some generic midrange pile in the same way decks like Aristocrats, Loam, or Blink can.
 
japahn

japahn

Helm of the Gods might help with being an enchantments payoff that doesn't mind if the enchantments were cast earlier. Not that I had great success with enchantment either, but people seemed interested in drafting it - the issue was that the enchantments that provided enough density didn't really all go in the same deck, and the generally good enchantments were scattered between all colors, and they prevented overlap with stuff like blink (because enchantments aren't creatures), artifacts, and spells. Maintaining enough good stuff density of generically playable enchantments was a big drag with very limited crosspolination.
 
Dom Harvey

Dom Harvey

Contributor
I've struggled to make any theme work in UR in a way that connects well with the rest of my Cube. Spells matter, artifacts - none of it seems to come together for me. I wish Goblin Welder wasn't such a trap!
 
TekLazar

TekLazar

Tribal dragons or any tribe that just doesn't have enough cards to make it in cube (yet). But specifically for tribal dragons, most tribe decks want to be low to the ground and go wide, but dragons are all big and stuff. Even though dragons certainly have enough support cards, a lot of it is junk, especially if you want the more powerful dragons to be flagposts like the dragonlords. The archetype is certainly possible, but you need to put in a lot of dedicated cards, and most if not all of your finishers in your cube's colors will be dragons. I think focusing on the meta of Dragon's of Tarkir could make it interesting. Overall, to make dragons work you need to make it part of the entire game-plan of your cube.
But if you want incidental dragons, you're better off with humans, goblins, and zombies.
 
Brad

Brad

TrainmasterGT said:
I've never been impressed with my attempts at making enchantress//constellation work.
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I often feel like this is basically a tribal deck. Right now I run Zur, but he just needs access to a few O Rings or something to work.
Dom Harvey said:
I've struggled to make any theme work in UR in a way that connects well with the rest of my Cube. Spells matter, artifacts - none of it seems to come together for me. I wish Goblin Welder wasn't such a trap!
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That's interesting. It's typically UR cards that tempt me away from Blackness.
TekLazar said:
most if not all of your finishers in your cube's colors will be dragons.
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When designing my Onslaught nostalgia cube, kind of like Onslaught Remastered, this is basically what I found. If it was going to be a red card at a higher CMC, it HAD to be a dragon. The other colors had some dragons sprinkled in, as well. Luckily, a lot of the dragon support is incidental, like Dragon's Hoard or the Draconic Roar cycle. Having playable cards with tribal payoffs is so much better than the usual poisonous tribal garbage. You could make dragons work if you wanted to, you'd just have to be willing to sacrifice most of your 5+ CMC slots.
 
sigh

sigh

The general GW color space has always been a struggle for me when trying make anything coherent. I currently have it left as like... "generic midrange color combo" for people who don't want to think to hard that night.
 
ravnic

ravnic

My most recent "worst archetype" was {G/U} Landfall. It came together, but the deck lacked the ability to punch through and actually kill an opponent. It also had no 4-drops and got overrun by very aggressive decks a little too easily evey time. I now made a few upgrades/additions to the archetype and future drafts will prove them effective or not.



Guardian and Scythecat have already proven to be good individually, although it was not in a dedicated landfall deck. I also expect Aesi to be a huge boon for the archetype!
 
TekLazar

TekLazar

Brad said:
When designing my Onslaught nostalgia cube, kind of like Onslaught Remastered, this is basically what I found. If it was going to be a red card at a higher CMC, it HAD to be a dragon. The other colors had some dragons sprinkled in, as well. Luckily, a lot of the dragon support is incidental, like Dragon's Hoard or the Draconic Roar cycle. Having playable cards with tribal payoffs is so much better than the usual poisonous tribal garbage. You could make dragons work if you wanted to, you'd just have to be willing to sacrifice most of your 5+ CMC slots.
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Yeah I'm not saying all of it is junk because there are some great support cards, but I don't think its worth it for the amount of cards you need to put in to make it viable just yet. As the dragons get lower and lower in cmc (while still being playable) I do think dragon tribal will be a great archetype eventually.
 
Velrun

Velrun

ravnic said:
My most recent "worst archetype" was {G/U} Landfall. It came together, but the deck lacked the ability to punch through and actually kill an opponent. It also had no 4-drops and got overrun by very aggressive decks a little too easily evey time. I now made a few upgrades/additions to the archetype and future drafts will prove them effective or not.



Guardian and Scythecat have already proven to be good individually, although it was not in a dedicated landfall deck. I also expect Aesi to be a huge boon for the archetype!
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Do you run duplicates?
I think this could fix the problem super easily.
 
ravnic

ravnic

Nope, and I don't want to, as it would reduce variance and uniqueness of cards, and most importantly give my another and in this case preventable advantage over my drafters, who don't know if they have a second chance to get card x. Sorry :)
 
ravnic

ravnic

Very cool card, the only problem is that he woukd be a virtual simic card as my other blue archetypes would have no interest in him probably. Therefor I run less explosive but more flexible landfall enablers in blue like Gush or the better than looking Cache Raiders.

Anyways, I am pretty confident, that my recent update made landfall a top tier deck :)
 
ravnic

ravnic

sigh said:
The general GW color space has always been a struggle for me when trying make anything coherent. I currently have it left as like... "generic midrange color combo" for people who don't want to think to hard that night.
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Have you tried tokens? Just lots of 1/1s with team pump? It's not super innovative but fun and no piece of this parasitic or unflexible at all. It's also possivle to connect this to the graveyard for your cube specifically.



Maybe your cube is too high powered for these suggestions though
 
LadyMapi

LadyMapi

"Weenies Matter" could be hilarious for a low-power theme. Just run a bunch of 1/1s, and then run cards like:



Green has some pretty neat 1/1s outside of the obvious mana elves, like:

 
LadyMapi

LadyMapi

How could I miss Lovestruck Beast?

Brad said:
I think all tribal will get better as they print more things like Windrider Wizard, Wizard's Retort, and Winged Words. These spells with a reasonable base effect and a slightly better effect in-tribe are much more usable designs and I look forward to seeing more of them.
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I absolutely love the "better with flyers out" spells that they've printed - they're a way better design than yet another "this creature has power and toughness equal to the number of flyers you have".

 
Velrun

Velrun

I have a math/statistics question

Say I have a cube with 135 white spells, 135 blue, (etc. for black, red and green), 100 colorless, 10 of each Guild and 3 of each Shard/Khans spells
Say I have 3 players
Each player gains X random spells and 4 random non-basic lands
Each player gains 3 random legendary creatures (from this pool: https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/5fa71b2e00b06b0fe8484510?view=spoiler) which you'll note has an even distribution between colors
Say each player must be able to construct a legal 40 card Commander deck following the Commander color identity rules and the deck should preferably contain 22 or more spells and they must use one of the legendary creatures from the list as their Commander.

Define X
 
LadyMapi

LadyMapi

Do you want a guarantee, or just a pretty good chance?

Because if you want a guarantee... each player needs to get 693 cards. Because otherwise you have the rare possibility of someone getting 3 White commanders (or whatever color) and not getting 23 playables within that color identity.
 
Velrun

Velrun

Damn

Didn’t think of that.

Let’s up the number of Commanders to 4. And now I want a pretty good chance of all three players being able to present a legal deck. You get to decide exactly what ‘pretty good chance’ means.

I was thinking 40 spells each.
 
sigh

sigh

Wouldn't it be most consistent to offer equivalent random pools of each color, at least for the 5 main colors? That is to say, 20 random from each color, then some amount from all the other cards. It would be nigh impossible for someone to have 0 decks with that sort of split. You'd at least have 20 directly in X color that can be used for a mono-colored commander, and you won't have nay worries that some guild is extremely under represented.

If you want more randomness, you could implement either a commander swap function or a commander mulligan option, to allow for people to find alternatives in the off chance things aren't looking good for them.

20 is just an example number.
 
Velrun

Velrun

Yes it would but that is not the math asignment ‘you were given’ :p

But yes you are right! This is how we did it but I was wondering if it was possible to make the switch to this new version where players gain X random cards from the cube instead.

If we gave the players a fixed amount of cards of each monocolor, we could probably give people 10 or fewer of each. As long as they also get 2 or more colorless spells they have enough for an 22/18 spell/land split. Then we just gotta guarentee they gain at least one non-monocolored Commander. This was the other solution but I was curious if anyone could do the math for me on the first solution.
 
LadyMapi

LadyMapi

OK, this is a pretty standard hypergeometric calculation. Let's say you're looking for a 99% chance that, given a mono-color commander, you can find 22 cards of the appropriate color (or colorless). You can achieve that by giving everyone 123 cards. If you're willing to settle for 90%, you only need to hand out 104 cards.

Of course, the probability will be higher that you can scrape together playables if you have a two or three color commander, and we have three commanders to pick from. You can get a >95% chance of being able to scrape together a deck with just 90 cards each. This goes down to 85 cards if you have four potential commanders.
 
Velrun

Velrun

If you did the math/statistics and your numbers are correct, then we can conclude that it is not feasible to give each players random cards and hope for the best.

We will have to do what Sigh suggested: Give each players a certain amount of cards of each monocolor. Oh boy this is what I wanted to avoid because it will take 'forever'.
 
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