This is why I never actually play Magic — it'd taint the design experience.
Dear lord, I get a LOT of use out of this emote...
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- Thread starter James Stevenson
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This is why I never actually play Magic — it'd taint the design experience.
Dear lord, I get a LOT of use out of this emote...
Probably, that doesn't mean that this "jank pile" was a better cube than your well curated list. It just felt fresh and exciting, because you didn't know what to expect. Maybe it's the act of thinking about it, that makes it less exciting. Longterm you'd probably have less fun with the pile than playing your cube
Did it lead to any spontaneous changes?
https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/4i04q?view=spoiler&scale=large
Can I get some quick critiques on this? Might throw it together irl. It's at 500 with the expectation that playtesting cuts it down to ~450.
Can I get some quick critiques on this? Might throw it together irl. It's at 500 with the expectation that playtesting cuts it down to ~450.
If I had to start my cube over from scratch and was playgroup agnostic, this is very close to what I would want to build.
I don't know how helpful that is, but there are 30 easy cuts or so from a power outlier perspective...but all on the bottom end, which isn't the end of the world. They're spread out throughout the colors and archetypes enough that I honestly wouldn't worry about it; just cutting the last 2 picks from every pack of its first draft (even a mock one online) will get you there.
Onderzeeboot
Ecstatic Orb
At work, so I don't have time to look at the whole thing, but the white and gold section looks cool! I would personally cut all the Terramorphic Expanses, and add painlands. Having all Evolving Wilds in existence is a cute gimmick, but I don't think the card is good enough to warrant cubing all 26 variants (including the Expanses) XD Incidentally, there's enough variants that you could also just hand out 3 to each player after the draft, and save your players the trouble of drafting a few fixing lands!
You have a lot of artifact hate; do you need this much? It keeps a lot of things like Smuggler's Copter in check, but it feels a little arbitrary in a format with this many artifacts.
I dislike Ashnod on the grounds that she's very wordy in a disconnected way. Gorex, for example, is wordy, but the abilities make sense together. You don't seem to have brevity as a defining feature of your cube, but she's an outlier.
Lethal Scheme is a huge power outlier. It is difficult to overstate how absurd this card can be.
Village Rites > Deadly Dispute? The latter makes an artifact that sacs...
Granulate seems weird to me in that it feels like it will be very polarizing and that there's not much artifact decks can do about it.
Gwenna is weirdly good. T1 Random Elf -> T2 Gwenna -> T3 Any Six-Drop seems really rough, especially given that Gwenna fixes.
Canopy Baloth is a really bad card unless your opponent has no creatures. It has keyword: Large, but I don't think it's especially interesting compared to the other things that four mana get you.
Tanuki Transplanter adds a lot of complication in one card. Might Bear Umbra accomplish something similar?
Clay Champion was underwhelming in retail limited.
Sky Terror was always weird to me because flying and menace are just two different forms of evasion. The bulk of other fliers are in Blue, and most of them are tempo one-drops, so if you have them on the defensive I think you're doing well already.
Astor is a lot of words and I dont think you have any vehicles. (Edit: lots of vehicles now. He's fine, I just think he's inelegant. )
Perennial Behemoth is very expensive and makes you very vulnerable to removal for what it gives you.
Platoon Dispenser is a groan test benchmark for me.
Mechtitan Core is easy to disrupt and I think it's a trap. Maybe you have enough artifacts to trigger it early enough.
Nimblewright Schematic and the 2x Servo Schematic feels weird to me, especially because you have no other duplicates.
Smuggler's Copter is a power outlier up. Probably the ideal p1p1 right now.
This is the ideal cube for Slagstone Refinery and I'm still not sure it's good enough. Maybe you need something like Makeshift Munitions to both use powerstones well and to get rid of them?
Anyways, looks great! Hope this was coherent/helpful.
I dislike Ashnod on the grounds that she's very wordy in a disconnected way. Gorex, for example, is wordy, but the abilities make sense together. You don't seem to have brevity as a defining feature of your cube, but she's an outlier.
Lethal Scheme is a huge power outlier. It is difficult to overstate how absurd this card can be.
Village Rites > Deadly Dispute? The latter makes an artifact that sacs...
Granulate seems weird to me in that it feels like it will be very polarizing and that there's not much artifact decks can do about it.
Gwenna is weirdly good. T1 Random Elf -> T2 Gwenna -> T3 Any Six-Drop seems really rough, especially given that Gwenna fixes.
Canopy Baloth is a really bad card unless your opponent has no creatures. It has keyword: Large, but I don't think it's especially interesting compared to the other things that four mana get you.
Tanuki Transplanter adds a lot of complication in one card. Might Bear Umbra accomplish something similar?
Clay Champion was underwhelming in retail limited.
Sky Terror was always weird to me because flying and menace are just two different forms of evasion. The bulk of other fliers are in Blue, and most of them are tempo one-drops, so if you have them on the defensive I think you're doing well already.
Astor is a lot of words and I dont think you have any vehicles. (Edit: lots of vehicles now. He's fine, I just think he's inelegant. )
Perennial Behemoth is very expensive and makes you very vulnerable to removal for what it gives you.
Platoon Dispenser is a groan test benchmark for me.
Mechtitan Core is easy to disrupt and I think it's a trap. Maybe you have enough artifacts to trigger it early enough.
Nimblewright Schematic and the 2x Servo Schematic feels weird to me, especially because you have no other duplicates.
Smuggler's Copter is a power outlier up. Probably the ideal p1p1 right now.
This is the ideal cube for Slagstone Refinery and I'm still not sure it's good enough. Maybe you need something like Makeshift Munitions to both use powerstones well and to get rid of them?
Anyways, looks great! Hope this was coherent/helpful.
I like a lot of what is going on, and have a few thoughts:
White artifact payoffs
White has a lot of support for artifacts, but not many payoffs. Digsite Engineer is great as is Dispatch. But a few more build arounds would be cool. Here are some suggestions:
Puresteel Paladin or Sram, Senior Edificer: With so many equipments, giving aggressive decks some draw would be a good way for them to fight a longer game.
Toolcraft Exemplar -> Court Humunculus. When turned on, The Humunculus is on par with your other 1 drops. The Exemplar is above rate which is what I'd like for a payoff.
Swiftblade Vindicator -> Sky Terror. The Terror is a little generic, while the Swiftblade is a premium target to load up with equipment.
Steel Overseer: You make a lot of artifact tokens in White, the Overseer could be a sweet anthem effect that can be played elsewhere too.
Instants and sorceries matter?
With such a heavy artifact theme throughout the cube, are the spells matters payoffs worth it? You have Balmor, Artist and Forager as the big payoffs, which feels like a trap. That could allow you to swap out some instants/sorceries cantrips to things like Spellbombs or Skullbombs.
More trinkets
With so much of the cube being artifact centric, I'd love to see more effects as artifacts, like the following
Dispeller's Capsule -> Lucky Offering
Capsule is an artifact, triggers Revolt and can be recurred.
Mono colored aggro
Considering that your fixing is almost always ETB tapped and the fact that there are a ton of colorless cards, I think your fastest decks will be monocolored. Not saying it's good or bad, just a comment to see if this fits with your vision of the environment.
That's all I have for now, once again fun looking cube! I am a sucker for artifacts so always happy to see a list where they are heavily supported.
I appreciate that! Seems like a great compliment!
The Wilds vs Vistas thing is because I wanted a highly flexible land that's monetarily cheap, as this cube was intended to be printed on WotC, not MPC, cardboard.Why not
Power level seems high enough for untapped fixing for sure
I don't know. Lol.
That makes sense. I do like one drops, though.
I started responding card-by-card, but I ended up realizing that I largely agreed with everything you said. Thanks!
I fear the Exemplar is too far above curve. The first strike makes it particularly vicious.
True. Maybe those get cut for, like, Stormchaser Mage, nothing, and Treasure Cruise.
That's so much weaker, though. Filter: "t:artifact or o:artifact" yields 245/500 cards right now. That seems sufficiently high? KLD has 257/516 on the same search, so I'm in line with that. MRD block has 409/621, so I'm only a bit under that. It might end up that you're right, but I'm hesitant to make such severe swaps right now.
Not sure if this is good or bad, either. Probably good to enable a wider variety of decks?
You guys really have me questioning my mana base. I've got some thinking to do. I appreciate the feedback!
EDIT: Just saw that Nano did some drafts with additional feedback. Thank you. Won't be adding the suggested card because I dislike the ancient frame. It's a good one besides that, though.
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Chris Taylor
Contributor
Kinda? I've got a few (Radha's Firebrand, Leyline Binding, Nishoba Brawler, Shadow Prophecy)
Duals tho
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How do you like it, overall? Might proxy that whole mess up... I never know what I want to do lol.
Chris Taylor
Contributor
I think it adds some interesting decision points. I like encouraging people to reach a bit more with their splashes, and fitting in that one plains is a cool feeling.
Leyline binding is kinda just a good card though, it does encourage 4-5 color nonsense.
Leyline binding is kinda just a good card though, it does encourage 4-5 color nonsense.
me!
Mostly it's actual 4-5 color bombs instead of cards with domain though
Woah. You actually run 76 (fixing) lands in a 400? I was considering a higher land count, but it would be utilizing manlands and stuff for some diversity.
~20% of the Cube being lands is pretty standard for High Power environments these days. It's a good way to increase the power level of the average deck through consistency without necessarily having to sacrifice fun archetypes that have higher variance.
i run triple fetch, one set of ABURs, one set of Campus Shocks, and one set of Horizon Shocks for 60 fixers in draft.
then each drafter gets 1 Vista and 1 Formless Void for free (these are 61-76). theyre in the list so that i can have them show up in custom draft setups.
so my actual "cube size" is 384 with 60 fixing lands
How good are the CLB adventure guys like Crystal Dragon, Guardian Naga, Sword Coast Serpent, etc? They look sweet as an early play and a late lite-bomb in something kinda low-mid powered.
DMU had white as a "go wide" theme. If you had to choose a different theme for this super shallow color, what might you choose?
DMU had white as a "go wide" theme. If you had to choose a different theme for this super shallow color, what might you choose?
in my cube, white is only really a "main" color for blink, but it can support a fair number of decks:
blink (usually Esper+)
domain zoo (usually Naya+)
spellslinger (usually Jeskai+)
loam control (centered in GW, but i have seeds for it in R and B and someone played this in Bant once with Hall of Storm Giants as their wincon)
"lite" crats (i say lite because you cant really go deep on the sac part but there is some good recursive aggro stuff in Mardu)
I feel like that gets so close to a tribal deck :\A little more seriously/broadly, having White be the Enchantress color would actually be pretty neat.
It is already possible right? Sleeper enchantments, enchantment creatures, pacifism variants, oblivion rings, pariah, enchantresses, tutors, return, Opalescence variants. Just do not have mass enchantment destroy and you have an archetype. You could then add other enchantments into white, e.g, worship, and enchantment creatures into other colours. I do not know whether the strength level is what you desire. Also in a small cube (e.g. where almost all the cards are drafted) I am not sure about the replayability.