General CBS

G1 he lost to a turn two Drowned Secrets
Where's your enchantment removal at? What was the opponent doing that they couldn't answer this for a dozen spells?
G2 he lost to a turn one Hedron Crab with two fetches following
Opponent can't kill a 0/2? Crab is quite a clock, though.
G3 he emptied my whole hand with Pilfering Imp, Hypnotic Specter, Agonizing Remorse and Okiba-Gang Shinobi. Yeah, he had like 60% of my cube's hand disruption effects.
Targeted and random discard steal the target's agency. I'm not personally a fan. They can make a borderline hand completely unplayable.

I'd try to look at what problems led to these unfun games. If it isn't mana screw/flood, which we're cursed to deal with, then your games should all be decent.
 
Where's your enchantment removal at? What was the opponent doing that they couldn't answer this for a dozen spells?

Opponent can't kill a 0/2? Crab is quite a clock, though.

Targeted and random discard steal the target's agency. I'm not personally a fan. They can make a borderline hand completely unplayable.

I'd try to look at what problems led to these unfun games. If it isn't mana screw/flood, which we're cursed to deal with, then your games should all be decent.
Black is strong. It’s weaknesses are enchantments and artifacts. Discard mitigates those weaknesses.
It becomes a problem when the answer becomes too strong. Similarly, when a lack of an answer becomes too weak. To me it seems that both of those points were valid at the same time.
 
Have you guys ever not had fun playing your cube? Usually, when I draft and play with mine, I'm having close to maximum fun, but today was a different experience. I mean, of course I had fun, I was playing MtG with one of my best friends, but the gameplay was kind of dull.

I guess the reason were the weird decks we've drafted, it was me with mono blue mill (I had a Lab Man but ended up milling him) vs. mono black discard (didn't know that was thing). Those are probably two of the most annoying decks to face in Mtg outside of weird combo bs, real ass hole decks you wouldn't use for teaching someone :D

G1 he lost to a turn two Drowned Secrets
G2 he lost to a turn one Hedron Crab with two fetches following
G3 he emptied my whole hand with Pilfering Imp, Hypnotic Specter, Agonizing Remorse and Okiba-Gang Shinobi. Yeah, he had like 60% of my cube's hand disruption effects.

I guess it was a one-in-a-thousand scenario, but still was weird to have a game play that uninteractive and low in agency, compared to what I usually experience.

Getting the dedicated combo versus dedicated disruption match-up right is extremely hard. I think it ends up converging to higher and higher power. On the one hand, to avoid lines like "you just lose to Drowned Secrets" you need some super high quality disruption - whatever it may be, Nature's Claim, Force of Negation, Thoughtseize. On the other hand, good disruption will simply run over combo decks unless those combo decks are doing something broken enough to fight through it. And then what if the combo deck is the one to snap the Force of Negation and Thoughtseize? Do the reactive decks get run over?

For me personally, the answer leading to the most exciting games is to push the interaction as hard as I possibly can. You very regularly get to explore the weird nega-space of combo matchups where just enough pieces have been disrupted that your game plan isn't linear any more, but you're doing powerful enough stuff to be capable of pulling together a nonlinear plan.

BUT, there's a very clear draw back. When the disruption is extremely efficient, the non-combo proactive decks need efficient threats to not get crushed on tempo. That's where I found the convergence to high power.
 
Where's your enchantment removal at? What was the opponent doing that they couldn't answer this for a dozen spells?

Opponent can't kill a 0/2? Crab is quite a clock, though.

Targeted and random discard steal the target's agency. I'm not personally a fan. They can make a borderline hand completely unplayable.

Green and white have plenty, like 7 or 8 answers. Black is still lacking, but I am trying to get there. Currently I have Feed the Swarm, Debt to the Kami and Baleful Beholder. He even had the latter in the sideboard and didn't want to bring it in, however, he sided in Smother and Bondeshredder, which helped with the crab in game 3.

And to the discard topic ...

Black is strong. It’s weaknesses are enchantments and artifacts. Discard mitigates those weaknesses.
It becomes a problem when the answer becomes too strong. Similarly, when a lack of an answer becomes too weak. To me it seems that both of those points were valid at the same time.

That's still true for enchantments currently and it will probably stay true for artifacts, and that's okay. I'm actually cubing Agonizing Remorse as a placeholder for the next enchantment removal we might receive soon in black.

I am not a fan of discard being all that common, but I don't want to cut this effect from blacks color pie completely. That would feel wrong and unnecessary. Hyppie and Shinobi are also some kind of pet cards. But I am replacing Unburden as soon as I can.
 
So, who wants a cube with Vampire Tribal to be a thing?

I basically threw this together this evening because my life has been hellish lately and I wanted a distraction. It probably doesn't have enough creatures and some of the cards are probably terrible in this particular format... but rest assured, Vampire Tribal is a thing.

(Granted, that's because the only non-Vampire creatures in the cube are Humans, but...)
 
Can someone please show me some heroic decks from their cube?



I'm thinking about this type of deck.
Or you're also very welcome to create an entire new thread with the topic <3

I would be curious to see if there's any way to implement a heroic deck in a low-powered common/uncommon cards cube.
 
Can you guys help me find as many variants on the mechanic flashback as possible?

Retrace, embalm, eternalize, encore

What else?
 
Top