Conspiracy-ing

So I don't have a cube. I do have a list (see sig), but I don't have a play group and so cubing is mostly an intellectual exercise. That's cool, I like intellectual exercises. That cube is mostly a good stuff cube, trying to hit cards I like and good cards from most sets and/or mechanics. That means that the themes are mostly post-facto. I've not updated since conspiracy came out thought because a) netrunner, b) prepping for D&D, but mostly c) I want to do something a bit more targeted, as briefly discussed in CBS.

Inspired by Laz's threads about building cubes, lets start posting about it!

First up, basic fixing lands: 2x shocks, 2x fetches. I'm not interested in running duals and shocks, and shocks have actual play to them instead of just being better than basics. This will expand, but I want a solid basis in the first place.

Next, the first post on the cubetutor list: Inspiration. This stuff is contributing the pillars of archetypes, and is generally about doing cool stuff, either in the draft or in the game.


Why hello there! This is what we want to be doing, right? We want sweet decks that do bonkers stuff. We also want fixing to be good so you don't have to grab a conspiracy to dig them out; more on that in a sec.

Lets be fair: scapeshift is on my hitlist. It might go in, but it might be too bonkers. The main thought here is that worldknit, ever land in your deck that isn't Valakut can be a mountain, but is still dope fixing. Maybe we want two worldknits to enable this more. I think we do. Hang on, I'll add it in.

So there's our second worldknit. Also, this is our fun stuff in draft category (for now). There was discussion about how Paliano is actually dope due to signalling, and Deal Broker is great for going 'oh shit, I have a tight deck but too many dregs I have to run with worldknit, who wants it' which sounds like the silliest/best thing to do.

Other conspiracies I feel comfortable running. Considering we may have to run some stuff that's a bit knob to limit worldknitting and to fuel Deal Broking (if we can set up synergies to get that going), and that I suspect we're going to run a lot of 3-4 ofs, we might want the other creature ones, or possibly the cantripping one (at a real stretch). Perhaps the cantripping one makes sense, as we probably want games to be a little bit slower so that people can do silly things like cruel ultimatum or coalition victory without just dying to 2 power 1 drops, so we probably don't want a lot of things to be 'good' in normal cube terms.

More to come as I think about things.
 
Side thought: I might include more cogwork dudes and also more flip cards than average, because then you can see some of what people are drafting, for more targeted deal broking. Maybe I need more deal brokers if I go down this route.

Also, I will probably target 390 cards, because not everything being in every draft is way more interesting to me than drafting a known quantity each time. This probably necessitates more redundancy in a) fixing, b) cool stuff to do, and c) conspiracies.
 
Answers to land searching:


With the lack of non-basic searching, and what does exist being pretty expensive, I'm more tempted to actually add a couple of secrets of paradise to get some extra ramping off of early creatures to get to it.

First thoughts on themes related to this:
mono-red scapeshift
which implies some landcycling?
which suggests astral slide or lightning rift
dragons - this is a pretty dragon cube anyway, right?
multicolour matters, leading into coalition victory
which implies domain and also likes landcycling
i like the idea of unearth and/or self mill sort of stuff to go with cruel; except not really
we've got cascade on maelstrom, so lets have a look at that
cascade likes scry and brainstorm-a-likes to cascade better
scry gives us optional flamespeaker adept and/or stormchaser chimera
we've got a bunch of looting and cycling, so maybe a threshold theme makes sense?
looking through alara block for the colour matters stuff, there's some artifacts there that might work well with conspiracies
 

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
This seems like a really fun idea.

Hopefully, this will involve knight of the reliquary, lots of landfall cards, and harrow. I could see scapeshift being a combo deck with landfall triggers, but also able to use valakut to win. Worm harvest might be really good here too.

The double fetches seem really good...maybe go crazy and run triple fetches?
 
I forgot knight of the reliquary. Landfall seems like another good call.

The problem with running additional land fixing is that worldknit drafters really want to pick up lands so that they can reduce their deck size, but they also don't care about the fixing, so trying to get non-land fixing probably helps. Another solution is to add a couple of cogwork grinders to eat dead picks. Having some focus on monocolour, or at least going deep on a single colour, may also help the lands get to the player who wants to natural coalition victory. With that in mind, I think I'd rather go 3x shock rather than 3x fetch, but we'll see once there's more to this.

Another thought: I don't really have to give many shits about colour balance. The basic premise of the cube is world knit and unexpected potential letting you draft whatever bonkers shit you want, so as long as colours are deep enough to do strong single colour, I don't think I need to worry too much about them being properly balanced, compared to a normal draft.

With that thought, lets analyse our themes above to see what colours they represent, to make sure stuff lines up and we're not completely empty on black strategies or something:

Dragonstorm: Well this is sort of red. Dragonstorm is red anyway. We probably want some manamorphose to let you storm up a bit harder; we can also include some other dragons if we can get them to line up with other themes (eternal dragon says hi). Dragons tend to be big [citation needed], so we could fit in some jund 5-power stuff here, which can get sprinkled into other colours. Call this bRG as actual Jund-ness?

Scaleshift^MLandfall: I said mono-red scapeshift earlier because I'm a maniac, but looking at this this is basically combo-or-landfall. Obviously we need green. We also get some benefit from any landcyclers. Then we need soemthing to power up with landfall, which seems to be Gwr. This theme is probably in service of other themes.

Astral Slide/Lightning Rift: So white and red then? We'll have some other coloured cyclers, which seems fine. I think this is probably a minor deck that crops up if someone gets fed the cards, rather than a dedicated staple deck.

Multicolour Matters: Dumb statement: all 5 lol. More seriously, while we want all 5 to get to coalition victory, really this is primarily green for fixing, and we can put it into other colours if we want. Like blue. For evasive action. Just saying. We also get propped up by landcycling here. Overlapping themes; woo. That sticks us at more or less Gwu and probably a tribal flames or two.

Unearth/self-mill: I don't really want to run reanimator, as the cube's theme is casting big dumb stuff, so if you can entomb->reanimate, then we lose the entire fun. On the other hand, something like artisan of kozilek might work in here. With that said, we probably do unearthing with >5 power creatures, try and dip into 'whenever a creature enters/leaves the battlefield' effects (hello blood artist!) and so forth. This is clearly grixis in UBr, picking up a few bits and pieces from red for pandemonium and critical unearth mass.

Cascade: Cascade as a theme is a bit weird. Possibly this is really just another name for 'make maelstrom wanderer good', but it'd be entertaining to make this work. If we do this, we want to grab scry and brainstorm to stack what you want to cascade into. The other option is things like erratic explosion and other top of library stuff (preemptive fuck your miracles). This puts us in Urg, which makes sense given wanderer. We'll see. Maybe this is a subtheme.

Threshold: Well we have a bunch of colourless enablers here already, via deal brokers, and a bunch of cycling, and we can do some self mill to go with unearth/self-mill. I suspect this ends up being Wu, but I've not really looked into it as our options are really broad here. This probably picks up missing colour weight if it's roughly ok to start.

Arteifacts: There's some interesting stuff we could do with artifacts, where there's artifacts matters stuff in esper, but also we can bring in non-esper artifacts from commander and/or scars block. Sure you can splash them, but you could also worldknit them! We also probably want some mana rocks (or secrets of paradise), so going with artifacts vis a vis the idea someone posted about that you go deep on enchantments or artifacts so as not to dilute their removal is smart. This probably has to be Bwu, but I might be pleasantly surprised.

Fun Police: I suspect we need some fun police to keep people at least slightly honest, and by this I mean something a bit D&T-y, so that you can just draft a fair deck and win with it, rather than being forced to get an archetype or not be competitive. Either that or people will hate draft the thing that hoses them and dilute their deck. Colours pending, based on what needs help.

So lets examine. We've got stuff in these proportions so far:
{W}{W}{W}
{U}{U}{U}
{B}{B}{2/B}
{R}{R}{R}{2/R}
{G}{G}{G}

Hey, that's pretty good! On the other hand, D&T is primarily white, and a couple of those are mad speculative as the theme might not actually come together. I think this is probably a good point to stop theorycrafting and stick 15, 20, 30 cards per theme into cubetutor and see how it looks.
 
Oh right, I talked about flip cards. Who knows! That pretty much puts us in werewolves, which I'm sure someone could've told me and/or if I'd thought about it. Not sure if that's quite what we're aiming for here.
 
On review, I'm actually partial to cut haste conspiracy and add squadron hawk conspiracy and bop conspiracy. Reasons: squadron hawk only works on things that a) have multiples in the cube and b) you draft multiples of, making it not an instant gimmie conspiracy draft, unlike the others. Bop conspiracy prefers you to have multiples, and also to get one drops. If we dodge multiples of one drops, we can try to avoid mad ramp off of that. For similar reasons I might add +1/+1 conspiracy, a) to enable Naya 5+ power stuff on 4 power dudes, b) to shore up fun police, c) I doubt we're getting multiples of hyper efficient creatures, as our hyper efficient creatures are dragons and other 6 drops, as +1/+1 on a 2/1 for 1 is absurd, but +1/+1 on a wooly thoctar isn't.

Similar thoughts abound about Cruel Ultimatum. As much as it's the quintessential 'play this big dumb card', its hard to support it without being awkward. Maelstrom we can improve our cascade chances, coalition victory requires setup. Cruel is just good all the time. If we're letting unexpected potential let you grab a bomb from out of colour, I'd rather set up the bombs so that they are better in a sensible deck of that colour, but can still be dumb and fun as a surprise splash so there's some tension to them.
 
Dragonstorm! I fully expect this to be very silly as is here and need revising. The mana curves are well out, but we'll get all our themes laid down before we worry about that too much; broad strokes to start, details later.


How I storm? Manamorphose also lets players cast big multicolour spells easier, which is a bonus.


Actual dagrons. We've got some big ones for value dragonstorming, and some small ones to make playing actual dragons palatable. Bonus! We've got some threshold dragons, a plainscycler and an affinity for artifacts (uh oh) dragon for other themes. We've also got prossh to power out some tokens for the devour dudes there, and I expect devour to show up in the unearth theme as well for value.


Additional explicit dragon support. This might be too good; who knows! Dragons!


Naya 5-power support (hits most of our dragons) and a bit of support. Triple godtracker might be going too deep. We'll review later.


We've got a bunch of devour-y dragons, so here's some stuff for them to eat. Bonus: they're ETB effects so we can astral slide them.

Other overlaps: we don't interact much with landfall/scapeshift, aside from being red/green. We might want some more cyclers in here to fire off astral slide and lightning rift. We've got multicolour dudes. We've got fun things to cascade to. We've got a little threshold and artifact fun. Unearth/devour is a combo. Pretty good first pass, I think.


The grinders are another avenue to get 5 power mans from, and also to help worldknit players not hobble themselves. Deal broker is dope so I added another.
 
Looking at our non-cruel ultimatum top ends in grixis I've found these:

These all fit our unearth/sacrifice/self-mill/multicolour/being huge theme, so I might go with some, none or more of these. Thraxi is a bit self-completing. Sedris just does mad recursion. Tresserhorn just cruels us, which is interesting. We'll see when we get there.
 
Oh hey, changelings. I somehow forgot about them. That first list is also pretty useful; there's some stuff there I'd passed over on the first look, but actually look super neat on the second. The changelings especially look useful as I need some stuff that costs less than six to make the deck work.

For now I won't include them, but I'll keep them in mind once we've got the basics down.
 
OK, artifacts. This is hard; there's a lot. It looks like we're going to do some recurssion-y stuff with artifacts, because we can a bit, without worrying about proper reanimator style shenanigans. We're not tinkering, but we might shape anew.

So there's two types of pull cards for this. Firstly, the big haymakers because lol.

(dragon: check. 5 power stuff: check)

Secondly, the quick beaters.

Cyclers and ETB effects let us get value out of slide as well here.

Also, we're a cheaty cube, so we could run some stuff for that.

(frantic salvage lets us set up cascades too, which is nice)

And some general support stuff.


Also, we can anticipate swapping out spells for things like courier's capsule[/ci] and
 
Chief engineer might be better than double etherium sculptor, or maybe he won't! This is hard!

I think I prefer steel hellkite to moltensteel, as moltensteel secretly costs 4. I don't know how i missed it in my (multiple) searches though. Plus its a 5 power!
 

Laz

Developer
I love this thread so much. There is so much craziness. That said, a lot of that artifact post looks pretty poisonous unless your environment is basically Mirrodin (I did the maths (back when gatherer actually listed the number of search results... Why would you take that functionality away?!), to echo Mirrodin or Scars blocks, you are looking at something like 160 artifacts in your 360 card cube). Dragonstorm though? That is something I can get behind!
 
Yeah I got that feeling laying them out. I do think that some casual bonesplitters, plus density of deal brokers helps with this. It's definitely something I'm keeping an eye on. Once the core stuff is a bit more laid out, I'll either come back and cut some artifacts-matters stuff and add some more artifact dudes. I also know there'll be some unearth artifacts and some esper stormblades and some other theme-y artifacts coming in, I just got a bit overwhelmed to start with it. Also, probably some signets/keyrunes/something for fixing.

Also, totally cutting argivian restoration after I realised that you can deal broker away a fatty and then zombify it. Oops.
 
So sphinx sovereign might be a better pick than filigreed angel. We can cut the etherium sculptors and shuffle things around. Maybe I could take out etherium sculptor and kinda go with the recursion theme rather than the beaters theme. Cut a thresher, go to double sanctum gargoyle rather than gragoyle/griffon, cut mechanist, add a couple more coloured artifact dudes, preferably with ETB effects to reuse. I think the homunculi stay, if only as food for the affinity for artifacts dragon, and because sticking a bonesplitter/scimitar on them seems pretty good without the rest of the artifact theme.
 

Dom Harvey

Contributor
A lot of the artifact stuff is really janky. Arsenal Thresher and Sludge Strider are bad most of the time and the BCS isn't even that good for either of them. I like Filigree Angel over Sphinx Sovereign. Vedalken Engineer?

Esper Stormblade is a really nice crossover between artifacts + multicoloured stuff (Borderposts!)
 
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