http://www.cubetutor.com/visualspoiler/50386
The above is the first draft I have put together for a graveyard-centric cube. Madness, cycling, morbid, devour, flashback, persist, undying... all of that good stuff.
Let's talk archetypes: I don't know what they are.
Well ok allow me to elaborate: some color pairs have clearly defined things they want to be doing, and some color pairs really don't. If you guessed "the four color pairs involving black," congratulations, you've won a foil set of Torment.
A few others, like green-white have a loose plan, something loosely involving humans and heroic, but I'm not sure how those kind of decks will end up playing against the other people at the table who managed to get graveyard stuff going.
I considered actually pulling a Torment and having just more black cards in the likely event that everyone wants to force gravestuff. I still might do that. But I figured I should at least try to do the other things.
Each color has cards that are low-ish drops (i.e. 1-3) that care about/want to die. Each color pair has 5 multicolor cards which, in theory, outline a general plan for what you'd want to do in those colors. This works out better for some colors than others. Each color has different ways of interacting with graveyards; green and black can get stuff back to hand or battlefield; blue and red can cast from their graveyard or unearth; white can mess up other people's yards and/or do some Reveillarkish reanimation. That means also that blue-black decks can do a little reanimation and a little flashback for a controlling deck, and that green-blue can support a midrange strategy of recursive threats and re-usable spells.
Unfortunately, this is not enough to make a whole cube out of (at least, I couldn't do it, which means not very much) and something else needed to be going on on the battlefield side of things. What's something that all colors can do a little of and some colors do way better? +1/+1 counters. Happily, there's a lot of support for counters-matter in white and green, which matches up well against the grixis madnessflashbackreanimate/etc in the rest of the cube. Am I worried this orphans green-white from the rest of the cube? I'm glad you asked that question: yes, yes I am.
I have not obsessively gone over the curve of this cube. That means there's about a million red 3-drops, and some other weird anomalies. I'm hoping (ha-ha-ha) that as I do dummy drafts of this it'll become clear which cards are actually just totally bogus and irrelevant.
I'm also worried that there's not enough brick-and-mortar cards here. I know, what a silly thing to say, who wants brick-and-mortar cards in their cube, but I'm unsure how plausible it is to build a control deck without a critical mass of counterspells, even if they're garbage like Cryptic Command or Ojutai's Command.
Did I consider breaking singleton? Yes I did. It would likely be for cards that multiple decks want, that serve some kind of essential role in doing this or that (i.e. Brainstorm or Snapcaster Mage or ... other non-blue cards which I'm sure are useful and important) rather than cards that enable a specific archetype, even if that archetype would benefit from extra copies (like, say, Burning Vengeance) because I don't know if that's really a choice. I mean it's a choice for that one person drafting BV about whether to take the second one or that Geistflame or whatever but I think I'd rather just put in more Geistflames. If it turns out BV (or spider spawning or whatever) are just totally undraftable then I'll probably let you have a free one after that draft is over (so you can have a second BV if that's what you're into).
There are some cards with off-color flashback costs or similar. That's because idgaf.
There's exactly one planeswalker in this cube, and that's Jace, Vryn's Prodigy. There are others that might be included, but I got to the end and realized I hadn't added them and decided they might be extraneous. Liliana of the Veil, Nahiri the Harbinger, Dack Fayden et cetera are probably worthy for obvious reasons. IDK how I feel about it yet will probably change my mind.
Note also that for Icatian Crier I'm errata-ing that to be Human tokens, because of reasons.
"But Coke No Ice, what about _____? Isn't that an essential part of any graveyard cube and only a total rube would have forgotten its inclusion???"
Once again I'm glad you asked that question. I am a total rube and I probably forgot it. Either that or it ended up on the cutting room floor (Viscera Dragger ;____; ) and I wanted something else more. In either case pls tell me about it and why it's important I will listen to you you are smart.
Here's how I see the archetypes:
White-Blue: let's start out with a dud, why don't we. This is a color pair with no real agenda here. I think if you held a gun to my head I'd blurt out something about flyers and control but who knows really. I'm going to do some (more) dummy drafts and try to force white-blue to see what I end up with. Accordingly this has the loosest hodge-podge of multicolor cards. Honestly I got nothing here. I have to think about it some more.
Blue-Black: flashback for creatures and spells. Dralnu, Lich Lord and Havengul Lich (or as I like to call them, Dan and Steely) are the easiest build-arounds on the block. I've dummied this a few times and found it real super neato, which is nice because I usually hate blue-black for being a do-nothing mill strategy (also there is a do-nothing mill strategy in blue but (I hope) it's hard to assemble and will only work once in a while, because that's a dynamic I like in my limited formats, and I'll get to yell THE DREAM at my friends).
Black-Red: madness/unearth aggro. This is for punching people in the face and then topping out at Sire of Insanity, which may or may not be as game ending as it normally would be (probably still is). Does not include much else in the way of discard because it's a liability. Instead it's full up with re-usable removal and discard-as-cost.
Red-Green: so hungry. Devour and +1/+1 counters are where it's at here. As opposed to the following combination, this is the play Hardened Scales and laugh variety of +1/+1 counter decks. Play chumps and eat them as they become irrelevant, and watch your creatures get big with undying and bloodrush.
Green-White: the aforementioned anemic heroic/humans thing. Honestly this deck might be kinda cool because nobody is competing with you for cards, but that's not particularly good design and I'd like to change it.
White-Black: tokens and dies. White-black wants to gum up the works with small things and then accrue value when they die. At least, that was the plan. As I'm typing this I'm thinking of other cards to add but oh well there's always more cards.
Black-Green: reduce, reuse, recycle. This is your average rock deck built around the graveyard, with a hint of dredge and land synergy. Once in a while somebody will assemble some sort of insane The Gitrog Monster machine but most of the time I imagine this is just a value midrange deck.
Green-Blue: another "lol idunno" group. Remember when I said that green-blue can support a midrange strategy of recursive threats and re-usable spells? I think that's probably true but it's also probably true that you'd rather be in some other color combo.
Blue-Red: flashback/burning vengeance/lolspells. I don't think this deck will be very good but I do think it'll be hilarious. This color has a lot of looters and so it can peel through its deck to find whatever it's doing and stock its graveyard, with the occasional upside of madness.
Red-White: I don't know what this color combination does in regular cubes, much less this one. I'm hoping you can make some kind of combat-centric thing (and thus its multicolor cards are mostly combat tricks) but that might be sort of garbagey (lol might be) so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ . As I recall it was not a winning strategy in the original Innistrad, nor does it look appealing in the return set, and since this cube is pretty heavily based on those I'm not sure what to tell you except that suggestions are welcome.
K. That's it tho. I will continue to post in this thread with updates as they cross my mind/as this cube is drafted and people complain about things/as they are suggested by the lovely people of this forum.
The above is the first draft I have put together for a graveyard-centric cube. Madness, cycling, morbid, devour, flashback, persist, undying... all of that good stuff.
Let's talk archetypes: I don't know what they are.
Well ok allow me to elaborate: some color pairs have clearly defined things they want to be doing, and some color pairs really don't. If you guessed "the four color pairs involving black," congratulations, you've won a foil set of Torment.
A few others, like green-white have a loose plan, something loosely involving humans and heroic, but I'm not sure how those kind of decks will end up playing against the other people at the table who managed to get graveyard stuff going.
I considered actually pulling a Torment and having just more black cards in the likely event that everyone wants to force gravestuff. I still might do that. But I figured I should at least try to do the other things.
Each color has cards that are low-ish drops (i.e. 1-3) that care about/want to die. Each color pair has 5 multicolor cards which, in theory, outline a general plan for what you'd want to do in those colors. This works out better for some colors than others. Each color has different ways of interacting with graveyards; green and black can get stuff back to hand or battlefield; blue and red can cast from their graveyard or unearth; white can mess up other people's yards and/or do some Reveillarkish reanimation. That means also that blue-black decks can do a little reanimation and a little flashback for a controlling deck, and that green-blue can support a midrange strategy of recursive threats and re-usable spells.
Unfortunately, this is not enough to make a whole cube out of (at least, I couldn't do it, which means not very much) and something else needed to be going on on the battlefield side of things. What's something that all colors can do a little of and some colors do way better? +1/+1 counters. Happily, there's a lot of support for counters-matter in white and green, which matches up well against the grixis madnessflashbackreanimate/etc in the rest of the cube. Am I worried this orphans green-white from the rest of the cube? I'm glad you asked that question: yes, yes I am.
I have not obsessively gone over the curve of this cube. That means there's about a million red 3-drops, and some other weird anomalies. I'm hoping (ha-ha-ha) that as I do dummy drafts of this it'll become clear which cards are actually just totally bogus and irrelevant.
I'm also worried that there's not enough brick-and-mortar cards here. I know, what a silly thing to say, who wants brick-and-mortar cards in their cube, but I'm unsure how plausible it is to build a control deck without a critical mass of counterspells, even if they're garbage like Cryptic Command or Ojutai's Command.
Did I consider breaking singleton? Yes I did. It would likely be for cards that multiple decks want, that serve some kind of essential role in doing this or that (i.e. Brainstorm or Snapcaster Mage or ... other non-blue cards which I'm sure are useful and important) rather than cards that enable a specific archetype, even if that archetype would benefit from extra copies (like, say, Burning Vengeance) because I don't know if that's really a choice. I mean it's a choice for that one person drafting BV about whether to take the second one or that Geistflame or whatever but I think I'd rather just put in more Geistflames. If it turns out BV (or spider spawning or whatever) are just totally undraftable then I'll probably let you have a free one after that draft is over (so you can have a second BV if that's what you're into).
There are some cards with off-color flashback costs or similar. That's because idgaf.
There's exactly one planeswalker in this cube, and that's Jace, Vryn's Prodigy. There are others that might be included, but I got to the end and realized I hadn't added them and decided they might be extraneous. Liliana of the Veil, Nahiri the Harbinger, Dack Fayden et cetera are probably worthy for obvious reasons. IDK how I feel about it yet will probably change my mind.
Note also that for Icatian Crier I'm errata-ing that to be Human tokens, because of reasons.
"But Coke No Ice, what about _____? Isn't that an essential part of any graveyard cube and only a total rube would have forgotten its inclusion???"
Once again I'm glad you asked that question. I am a total rube and I probably forgot it. Either that or it ended up on the cutting room floor (Viscera Dragger ;____; ) and I wanted something else more. In either case pls tell me about it and why it's important I will listen to you you are smart.
Here's how I see the archetypes:
White-Blue: let's start out with a dud, why don't we. This is a color pair with no real agenda here. I think if you held a gun to my head I'd blurt out something about flyers and control but who knows really. I'm going to do some (more) dummy drafts and try to force white-blue to see what I end up with. Accordingly this has the loosest hodge-podge of multicolor cards. Honestly I got nothing here. I have to think about it some more.
Blue-Black: flashback for creatures and spells. Dralnu, Lich Lord and Havengul Lich (or as I like to call them, Dan and Steely) are the easiest build-arounds on the block. I've dummied this a few times and found it real super neato, which is nice because I usually hate blue-black for being a do-nothing mill strategy (also there is a do-nothing mill strategy in blue but (I hope) it's hard to assemble and will only work once in a while, because that's a dynamic I like in my limited formats, and I'll get to yell THE DREAM at my friends).
Black-Red: madness/unearth aggro. This is for punching people in the face and then topping out at Sire of Insanity, which may or may not be as game ending as it normally would be (probably still is). Does not include much else in the way of discard because it's a liability. Instead it's full up with re-usable removal and discard-as-cost.
Red-Green: so hungry. Devour and +1/+1 counters are where it's at here. As opposed to the following combination, this is the play Hardened Scales and laugh variety of +1/+1 counter decks. Play chumps and eat them as they become irrelevant, and watch your creatures get big with undying and bloodrush.
Green-White: the aforementioned anemic heroic/humans thing. Honestly this deck might be kinda cool because nobody is competing with you for cards, but that's not particularly good design and I'd like to change it.
White-Black: tokens and dies. White-black wants to gum up the works with small things and then accrue value when they die. At least, that was the plan. As I'm typing this I'm thinking of other cards to add but oh well there's always more cards.
Black-Green: reduce, reuse, recycle. This is your average rock deck built around the graveyard, with a hint of dredge and land synergy. Once in a while somebody will assemble some sort of insane The Gitrog Monster machine but most of the time I imagine this is just a value midrange deck.
Green-Blue: another "lol idunno" group. Remember when I said that green-blue can support a midrange strategy of recursive threats and re-usable spells? I think that's probably true but it's also probably true that you'd rather be in some other color combo.
Blue-Red: flashback/burning vengeance/lolspells. I don't think this deck will be very good but I do think it'll be hilarious. This color has a lot of looters and so it can peel through its deck to find whatever it's doing and stock its graveyard, with the occasional upside of madness.
Red-White: I don't know what this color combination does in regular cubes, much less this one. I'm hoping you can make some kind of combat-centric thing (and thus its multicolor cards are mostly combat tricks) but that might be sort of garbagey (lol might be) so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ . As I recall it was not a winning strategy in the original Innistrad, nor does it look appealing in the return set, and since this cube is pretty heavily based on those I'm not sure what to tell you except that suggestions are welcome.
K. That's it tho. I will continue to post in this thread with updates as they cross my mind/as this cube is drafted and people complain about things/as they are suggested by the lovely people of this forum.
