General CBS

ahadabans

ahadabans

I'm not a very good drafter, so for me I'm gambling if I go outside the box too much. 17/40 is a pretty good place where I feel many limited style decks will do well at (mine at least). There are certainly times I feel 16 or even 18 is the right number, and maybe in those cases where I'm not sure I should bump to 41 and go with the higher land number. Not sure. I dislike uneven card numbers though as my pile shuffling isn't even and I end up thinking someone has one of my cards or I have one of theirs.

What I do know is that 95% of my Magic experience is constructed, and my version 1 mana base in virtually every constructed deck I made was suboptimal and I later tweaked it after much play time and testing. And that's the problem with limited and cube by extension. I'm basically stuck with my version 1 build for the night. Not that I haven't made tweaks after I got slaughtered in my first match, but it's the exception to the rule. And a handful of games is insufficient to dial in a deck even in the most ideal of situations, so it feels a bit like over engineering to try and get crazy with building mana bases thinking I'm squeezing more efficiency. I doubt I'd be doing that the vast majority of the time.
 
Diakonov

Diakonov

Since we're on the topic of 41 cards smoothing over land-drop-density, don't forget: the statistical likelihood of hitting your land drops with 17 lands on the play is virtually the same as 16 on the draw. Sideboard in/out that basic!
 
shamizy

shamizy

I only go to 41 if I straight up am hurting for playables or can't justify a cut. It's very rare that I'll go there since I go into all my 40 card decks with the mindset of a 17/23 split of lands to creatures + spells. I mean, you can obviously change to 16/24 for a low-curve aggro deck or 18/22 in slower formats, but 17/23 is usually the sweet spot.
 
whydirt

whydirt

I end up playing 41-45 card cube decks all the time simply because I can't figure out what I want to cut and don't care enough to worry about shaving a few percent of my win percentage. Incidental protection against mill decks is a bonus, heh.
 
Eric Chan

Eric Chan

Hyalopterous Lemure
Staff member
Diakonov said:
Since we're on the topic of 41 cards smoothing over land-drop-density, don't forget: the statistical likelihood of hitting your land drops with 17 lands on the play is virtually the same as 16 on the draw. Sideboard in/out that basic!
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I've heard this line before, and have also read about it in an article on CFB, but without a lot more additional research onto this topic, I'm unconvinced that most situations call for subbing out a land in a limited environment. You run the risk of colour screwing yourself to a much greater degree when you go down a land - even if it's just a basic - because the nature of most limited environments means that your mana base is a lot shakier at producing all of your desired colours than the equivalent constructed mana base. The potential for colour screw remains the main reason that most aggro decks run 17/40 = 42.5% lands, even when their constructed counterparts often get away with 23/60 = 38.3% lands, or fewer.

As a corollary, if you're running a mono-colour aggro deck in limited, there are few reasons to go above 15 lands, or possibly even 14. When colour screw is no longer a factor, you can get away with a lot more than you'd normally be able to.
 
safra

safra

why indeed, MTG Cardsmith?
tumblr_o0m4bk0i2T1tm904wo1_400.png
 
B

blacksmithy

vennythekid said:
Decided to draft blacksmithy's Power Cube (it's squaded) for the lolz and ended up with this deck:

Wheel of Pack-Rat from CubeTutor.com







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I apologize for not seeing and loving this until today but nice draft venny!
That cube is my way of saying to powermaxers, "if you REALLY wanted to powermax, you would break singleton." Or something. I forget the point i was making??? Its a funny cube tho.
Sorry again for the necro self-aggrandizement! Carry on!
 
Grillo_Parlante

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
Really great article from Paulo about the twin ban.

Love this part:

In the end, I think the best approach is still to just cut the Modern Pro Tour. Modern is a non-rotating format, but non-rotating formats aren’t very exciting for high-level play, and I’m sure the Modern PT at least incentivizes more bans as a form of keeping it artificially fresh, on top of conserving a bad format for a while because bans have to wait until the PT (so, if you were miserable playing against Amulet anywhere in the past 5 months, you have the PT to blame).
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shamizy

shamizy

It's a good article, I agree with his reasoning for the most part. Twin was fine and it did a great job policing the format and keeping certain decks honest. With it gone, I'm not looking forward to facing Tron/Affinity/Infect all the damn time. Maybe it will take a shitty Pro Tour in two weeks for them to realize the horrible mistake they've made. That 10% opened up by Twin won't be filled with blue decks; Tron is just going to fill in a huge chunk of that void. I'm going to miss the Twin mirrors very much, they were a ton of fun for me to watch.

I do not want to see the Modern Pro Tour gone. I love watching Modern and Legacy because Standard just becomes super stale a few weeks after the new set is officially released. I make sure to tune into most Modern/Legacy SCG events on stream if I have the time, but I won't go out of my way for Standard ever. It's just not worth it.
 
Chris Taylor

Chris Taylor

Contributor
Okay, so this reddit thread scratches my itch in a good way:
https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/4309x7/wordplay_of_the_day_take_a_50_card_then_change/
Take a 50$ card, change one word, make it a 50 cent card.

Also, is this not actual decently cool design space?
[[Scalding Tarn]]
{T}, Pay 1 life, Sacrifice Scalding Tarn: Search your sideboard for an Island or Mountain card and put it onto the battlefield. Then shuffle your library.

Like people keep on complaining about how fetching and shuffling adds like 30 minutes onto each legacy round, this would be hilarious.
 
Chris Taylor

Chris Taylor

Contributor
Onderzeeboot said:
Oh! Oh! I don't have a Reddit account, but changing flashback to recover on Snapcaster Mage would most certainly do the trick!
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Basically, he turns into U1 Archaeomancer, but he needs morbid. And it's super complicated.

Still useable, probably too bad. Also actually functions within the rules, unlike changing instant to Equipment, or changing flashback to overload or some shit.
I love all the people who think removing flash would make snapcaster a bulk rare. Who the fuck are they kidding
 
Onderzeeboot

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
Chris Taylor said:
Basically, he turns into U1 Archaeomancer, but he needs morbid. And it's super complicated.

Still useable, probably too bad. Also actually functions within the rules, unlike changing instant to Equipment, or changing flashback to overload or some shit.
I love all the people who think removing flash would make snapcaster a bulk rare. Who the fuck are they kidding
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I would still cube the shit out of Snapcaster without flash. That card is way better than Wizards anticipated I think, but it's also very cool to play and it scales well with the power of your cube, so still a homerun. Good job Tiago Chan! :)

PS. Would not have mind if snappy had turned out red though.
 
Chris Taylor

Chris Taylor

Contributor
Onderzeeboot said:
I would still cube the shit out of Snapcaster without flash. That card is way better than Wizards anticipated I think, but it's also very cool to play and it scales well with the power of your cube, so still a homerun. Good job Tiago Chan! :)

PS. Would not have mind if snappy had turned out red though.
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I think Evan Erwin said a podcast or two ago "Someday we're going to look back on modern and wonder how Snapcaster was ever legal"
 
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