General Color Identities

[CML]

Seems like new threads spur a great deal of discussion, so, in the interest of bringing the forum alive, I'm going to make 1-2 a night for a week and see what happens.

In this thread we will talk about such abstract notions as

what each color ought to 'do' in your cube
the dangers of having a single color do too much
the dangers of having a single color do too little
cross-color themes
fixing density and how it impacts cross-color themes
the tension between 'cards that go well in everything' vs. 'cards that only work in one spot'
synergy vs. 'combo'
my hatred of signets
the glorious reality that is legal weed in washington state
whatever more interesting thing comes along to do a threadjack

i'll start. my cube has something like

G -- primary: ramp, aggro; secondary: recursion, tutoring, 187
R -- primary: aggro, aggro burn; secondary: conditional sweeping, tokens, sac / recursion
B -- primary: recursion / aggro, reanimator, removal; secondary: devotion
U -- primary: card draw and filter, counters; secondary: devotion, maybe tempo, 187
W -- primary: weenies, control; secondary: 187, tokens, taxes, weenie control (i.e. D&T)

talk amongst yourselves

 

[Goldenpineapple]

I'm going to make 1-2 a night for a week and see what happens.

This'll be interesting.

White is mostly aggro (hatebears included) with control support/finishers and some spot removal.
Blue is draw/filter/tutor, aggro/tempo support with flying/curiosity/unblockable, counters and finishers.
Black is spot removal, tutors, big mana for finishers/dumps it also has, reanimator and enablers.
Red vastly aggro and burn with some support for ramp (dragonmaster outcast and finishers) and a few goodies for counterburn (cunning sparkmage)
Green is midrange, ramp, some naya aggro support, big dumb guys, creature tutors.

The color identity issue I hate the most is seeing red being "the aggro color" in cubes; white and sometimes black and green have it too, but if no one is playing "the red deck" the color just isn't getting played outside tiny splashes. Other local cube owner refuses to add wildfire or similar effects, instead jamming through the breach and sneak attack because sneak/show is his favorite legacy deck, again making it a tiny splash color. Red has to be the most common victim of "color only does one thing."

On the other hand, I took notes for the other local cube owner with him as we watched his cube get drafted, and only one person (of six) at the table was not playing some amount of blue or white(three played both)- his list has both colors doing too much.

I'm still not entirely sure where I want black. When aggro-supporting it looks very white, even if it plays differently (weenies, disruptive crap (in black's case discard), spot removal, sweeps, strong midrange and control finishers). The similarities are far more plentiful than differences, it's kind of absurd. I haven't seen a black section I was ever particularly fond of. I'm not big on the "all them gravecrawlas" plan I've seen here in the lab, not big on sac all the things, not big on kill all the things... black's identity across magic just feels very muddled and confused IMO. Currently I'm ok with where it is for me, I wish it had more cheap creatures or spells with more varied effects.

my hatred of signets

I also detest signets to the point of keeping things like guardian idol and prismatic lens out of my list. Mana rocks are all cmc 3+ with the singular exception of mind stone because it gets cracked instantly half the time. The effect of skipping a turn of curve in every deck is both boring to play and not interesting to draft.

 

[anotak]

my cube isn't the best space for good design as i'm still pretty new at this and i sort of went in a different weird directions. i think one of these days i might just do a complete reboot

white is... sort of badly designed in my cube. i'm working on it, i know some good changes to make i just dont have the cards or proxied them yet. white might be the best splash color in my cube but the worst primary color (the power difference between the weakest cards and the strongest cards is too much). i have wraths, weenies, removal, and angel of serenity / resto angel. theres a little bit of token stuff here

blue has control, card draw, good utility creatures for midrange, and control/ramp big things. my 3 drop blue creature section probably needs to be cut in half.
perhaps cool blue card: equilibrium.

black has recursion, sac, midrange guys, and some control stuff. black aggro basically doesnt exist

red has aggro and control, not much midrange though
r/b control from my cube http://riptidelab.com/forum/threads/decks-that-have-3-0d-your-cube.47/page-10#post-5914

green is ramp + aggro + elves.

i'm not a fan of kill combos in cube, but synergy is excellent. an early version of my cube had both triskelion and mikeaus, the unhallowed and i soon cut the first one because i didn't want people to just die out of nowhere to that. i like long interactive games with a lot of decision density to borrow a phrase from the other thread, and in the right environment stuff like that can work, but i'm not sure how to make actual combo more interesting than 'hey do you have a terror/counter/whatever? nope, you lose'. you can't really play around it because there's no guarantee that your opponent has both pieces or will even draw both pieces and many times its a crapshoot to try to draft it because 2 people trying assemble the same combo means nobody assembles it. so when someone actually does it just feels random and bad.
i absolutely love synergies though. that's why i love cards that just happen to do a lot of engine-y stuff like trading post that happen to create all sorts of accidental synergies sometimes

the danger of having a single color do too much: black in my cube is everything except aggro. nearly every draft over half the drafters are at least splashing black. i dunno. it doesnt seem overwhelmingly broken and nobody has complained about it but its still, unsettling. im not too unhappy because black is my favorite color and hey personal preference. this has gotten less and less true as time as gone on but still its there.

the danger of having a single color do too little: blue in my cube is.... drawing cards? something black and green can do just fine in my cube so....

 

[Jason Waddell]

In my opinion the reason that people said black was so bad in cube for so long is that they tried to make the color do too many things ans it did all of them poorly. Black improved tremendously when I narrowed it's focus. I think part of the problem people have is that they see their cube as this "one eternal draft format", and I think things improve when you allow yourself to cut off sections of design space.

 

[FlowerSunRain]

I've always been sort of flabbergasted about how people believe that red is limited in scope (or even downright weak outside of hard aggro). Red gets board resets, sweepers (which are often semi-controllable), 2-for-1 removal and repeatable burn. While it can't really combat things on the stack like blue, so long as the majority of your gameplay happens on the table, red is an amazing control color.

I suppose if you give white and black 10+ wraths and slant gameplay towards broken plays, red control suffers in comparison.

Black has always been a funny color. I've slanted it towards recursion, given it the best finisher, a metric ton of removal and a little crosscolor archetype support. Its a little unfocused, but I prefer to keep all my colors a little unfocused. Perhaps people in the pass were building blue 100% control, red 100% aggro and wondering why there 50/50 black section was sucking.

Green and Blue have never been a problem, except for the fact that no one I play with really likes blue. It does well when it gets played.

White has always been the toughest color for me. It just seems that much of the color's purview isn't very desirable (protecting stuff, lifegain). Its good removal is too good, but it doesn't have a lot of it, so you can't build it like black. Traditionally its card pool has been smaller because it is so filled with Circles of Protection, Wards and that ilk, so I've got a little bias against white from the early days of cubing that I never go over. I don't think I've ever been 100% satisfied by my white sections. Right now its just anthem aggro and symmetrical control with some targeted removal.