General CBS

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
I run 20 shocks + 20 fetches + 10 trilands (Alara and Khans).
I love the trilands because they provide versatility (at the cost of being a wee bit underpowered, compared to other options). Each one serves three colour pairs, which means that:
- they are desirable for more players
- if you find yourself needing to change colours mid-draft, you will likely still make use of your triland
Maybe it's just me being overly fond of them, but I can't see why not many people pack them.

I like this argument.

Basically, your fixing will be pretty aggro-friendly if you already have double shock/fetch, and what you do from there kind of adds texture in terms of how you want playing / drafting to play out.
 
Another vote here for the tri-lands and temples. The tri-lands are played for the reasons Alphez says but work better if your format speed is a little slower. Great with converge and sunburst effects too.
 
Would you think adding tri-lands to the ULD is an option? or do they provide a fixing too good for an extra draft with the given circumstances (20 fetches and 20 shocks or 10 shocks and 10 BFZ/OGW duals)?
 
I think a danger with that easy fixing in the ULD is that it warps peoples drafting process. I already have some players that just bank on wheeling and picking up a bunch of shocks and pick up some good stuff later. If you add the ability to snap up one or two additional pieces of excellent fixing or even three, that seems pretty nuts.
 

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
Would you think adding tri-lands to the ULD is an option? or do they provide a fixing too good for an extra draft with the given circumstances (20 fetches and 20 shocks or 10 shocks and 10 BFZ/OGW duals)?

My solution would be to add a "Triland of <choice>" slot, if you want one. The full cycle of 10 is too much, but letting one player get their on-color tri-land is generally fine.
 
MTGO Legacy Cube updates ('holy shit, we did it!') are up.

Summarized and quoted:
-Vedalken Shackles isn't fun, blue is too strong, so bye-bye Shackles. What an encouraging start to the article! This is great stuff for the MTGO cube to be doing.
-{B} devotion worked and people thought it was fun, so now the Cube's designer needs to fix {G}. She (it's Melissa DeTora, awesome) decided to do that by upping the density of mana elves and cutting a lot of colourless mana rocks. "In the end, almost all of the mana rocks got the axe."
-Dedicated Reanimator only really came together as UB. Last iteration's attempt to fix this by adding Lol Troll, Mongrel, etc, was "among the least successful and least desirable to draft in the entire cube". Accordingly, Shallow Grave-style reanimator comes out and more Aristocrats tools come in.

INDIVIDUAL CUTS AND ADDS:
{W} good new cards come in, Akroma's Vengeance and Angelic Destiny leave
{U} rip condescend and mana leak. I understand why they've gotta pull Dig from the Legacy Cube and the adds seem reasonable but I think those two losses will be felt.
{B} Herald of Torment is I think a loose cut, <3 that guy, but the rest of this seems pretty good. The adds are a mix of current standard Aristocrats cards and OG innistrad Aristocrats ones like Blood Artist.
{R} I think the thing that surprises me most here is that Goblin Bombardment wasn't already in the cube. Mogg Fanatic finally gets cut from the format that ostensibly reflects Legacy - good.
{G} more elves and value pieces
{X} some mana rocks go, and so does Aether Vial. A+ cuts. Eldrazi Monument and Newlamog are spicy and A+ includes.
gold: nothing interesting happens.
 

Eric Chan

Hyalopterous Lemure
Staff member
Refereshing take on cube design, love the article and the reasoning behind the changes. It's only a matter of time before 6 Brainstorm and 3 Birthing Pod. I can feel it.
 
definitely agreeing that the favorite thing for me about reading this was just the energy and angles she has on the design. You know, angles like "fun" and "the color pie" (cut down on artifacts being better at mana than green.. sheesh.

I like:
-The black devotion. That's neat.
-whirler rogue and pia and kiran nalaar. Super well designed cards.
-The possibility that even one cube designer out there stuck in a rut sees this and realizes that there are unique avenues to take!
 

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
From Reddit:
I think adding some underpowered cards is unavoidable. Drafting themes often rely on having cards that only one deck wants, since those cards will always wheel. Goblin Bombardment is probably one such card.
Ah. Aha.. Ahahahahahaha!!! Hilarious! Bombardment is such a niche card guys, you heard it on Reddit first!

Of course everybody is pissed about the removal of mana rocks, because green was "doing well enough!"
 

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
To be fair Goblin Bombardment is fairly narrow, as far as cards go. Underpowered... well, that depends on the context. Obviously it can hack it in Legacy in the right deck/hands, but it's not an obvious bomb.
 
You gotta have the synergy, though. Goodstuff drafting is gonna lead to gob-bom getting sideboarded a lot that night.
That said, it's an easy synergy to obtain if you're paying attention.
 
Just curious if there's any interest in an explicit Peasant Cube thread here. On the one hand, people here are cool about lower powered cubes and cards in general and aren't just evaluating things in a purely binary is this card good or bad way, so such a thread might be redundant. On the other hand, if there's interest it'd be cool to have a central place to talk shop.
 
What Grillo said. Honestly, we are getting to a point where there is just a huge gulf between Peasant and Power max. I'm all for trying to better define that format so that there's a way to better share information. So many rare cards are being printed and rejected outright by the power max audience, and they offer really great mechanics that would nicely fit into a Peasant base I feel. Penny Pincher is a great example of that and there's plenty of other design space at that power level and higher (but still below power max).

Take the new card Jori from OGW. Power maxers aren't even going to test it. Peasant will ignore it because it's rare. But it's potentially an archetype defining card in a lower power rare list. This forum is really the only place it will get any attention. And that's unfortunate I feel.
 
Yeah, that was very disappointing to see over at MTGS forums but it was expected. If X card can't break into some arbitrary top 4 within guild ranking at a given cube size, they won't even sniff it. Synergies be damned. They were all super hyped over new 2/3 pushed rare though while most of us weren't fans, I guess there's the difference between our two design philosophies in a nutshell.

I do like their Includes/Testing Results thread whenever a new set is released though, there's some valuable information in terms of gameplay to be gained from it since I don't cube nearly as often. We should probably have some Testing thread with results and discussions of new cards somewhere, I love reading of how new cards have worked out for people whenever a set is out. It's kinda tough to navigate through either CBS or Single Card Spotlight to find some nugget of info.
 
Me too. I complain a lot about MTGS for being myopic, but I still read the posts over there. It's valuable in my mind to know where the power max audience is at with certain cards and mechanics because it helps me figure out if something is going to be too strong in my list. Occasionally, I think a card I want to run is going to be underpowered and I see it getting praise in power lists (which helps reassure me it does more than I think). And as critical as I am of the power max mindset, it does provide a solid basis for comparison and it makes sharing info easier for those running similar lists. I get why they are doing it, but I still think it's an antiquated mindset at this point due to the large number of powerful cards we could be playing with but don't because they aren't top 5'ing CMC lists.
 

Aoret

Developer
They were all super hyped over new 2/3 pushed rare though while most of us weren't fans, I guess there's the difference between our two design philosophies in a nutshell.

Bruh. Totally spent >1 minute looking through the spoiler trying to figure out which card you meant before I gave up and wrote this post to whine about it.
 
Bruh. Totally spent >1 minute looking through the spoiler trying to figure out which card you meant before I gave up and wrote this post to whine about it.

sylvanadvocate.jpg


I gotchu
 
Over one year ago, I heard about the shrouded in legend mono blue cube. I never actually searched for it on google but I always wanted to work it out.
Combo, Control, Tempo, Skies Aggro and Ramp/Tron/whatever would be the most possible archetypes, merfolk, faeries and wizards the most supported tribals.
I personally love the colour and am really thinking about creating such a cube.
 
Over one year ago, I heard about the shrouded in legend mono blue cube. I never actually searched for it on google but I always wanted to work it out.
Combo, Control, Tempo, Skies Aggro and Ramp/Tron/whatever would be the most possible archetypes, merfolk, faeries and wizards the most supported tribals.
I personally love the colour and am really thinking about creating such a cube.
Check these out:

 
I recently added



to my cube to support a Wildfire-theme and add some neutral ramp. Do you people have experience with Wildfire in cube? Any suggestions will be appreciated.
My personal thoughts on this are, that Dreamstone Hedron might be a bit too expensive, you'd need to play it first and then Wildfire which would be somewhat suboptimal as you usually want to play Wildfire as fast as possible. I even think of cutting Mind Stone and doubling up on Hedron Archive as I find that card to be the best fitting of those three and it fits into other control decks as well (but I fckng LOVE Rex's art on Mind Stone).

The alternative to Wildfire would be adding other/doubling up on two drops and burn spells to make aggro more consistent and give some other highly contested removal which also provides reach to the drafters,
 
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