General Cube design and maintaining balance

[Dwayne Madore]

Good day folks,

I have assembled my first cube in the last few months (unpowered) and have taken it out for a few tries with different groups of people, and so far, despite the overall good experiences, some things struck me as problematic with my cube. I am basically at a a point where my cube doesn't really have any bad / boring or pointless cards in it, but some cards end up just dominating the drafts when they are played (notably mimic vat, vedalken shackles and wurmcoil engine). I tried adding more artifact hate in each colors but nobody seems to get the message and this caused more friction than good in our drafts, leading me to a bigger decision, either taking out the bigger "bombs" or increasing the average power-level of the cube untill i reach a point where such haymakers will not destroy games as much as they are affecting them at the moment.

So, for a short, how do you deal with the bigger bombs in a developping cube? hedge against them or make everything better to compensate?

Thank you for your time

 

[HannesVersmissen]

I'm not the most knowledgeable person around, but the general motion is to simply don't include Wurmcoil Engine. It's a colorless bomb, and one of the best 6-drops ever printed and It gets even better when it enters limited.
Mimic vat is a key card in a certain type of deck, and if it feels too strong, but you wish to keep it in, you can always look at your creatures with ETB triggers and take out the biggest offenders there.

shackles i don't have any experience with. i've seen it go unplayed in jason's cube, but that's all i know about the card

 

[Jason Waddell]

Good question. We actually had a chat about this in our podcast thing this weekend: http://www.twitch.tv/riptidelab/c/2727125

Around the 49:00 mark we discuss various bombs, Swords in particular. The main takeaway is that in game design you should be very conscious of what your top end is. I've had great results with trimming a bit off the top (i.e. cut Wurmcoil, Mimic Vat). There are a lot of other related ideas regarding density of artifacts versus density of artifact hate, which is perhaps a future podcast topic.

 

[Eric Chan]

Great question, Dwayne. We've all experienced this exact problem with our cubes, in some form or fashion. It's particularly frustrating when an artifact comes in and "blows up" a game, as it were, especially if the game up to that point was fun, interactive, and skill-based. When a game-warping artifact gets plopped down and changes the dynamics of the game to one of "Do you have the Shatter?", it's usually no longer a good game anymore. To be sure, it's still a game; it just might not be the game you intended to design.

The tough part about running powerful artifacts is that answering them usually requires cards that are orthogonal to the rest of your strategy. Your game plan might be one where you're playing a lot of creatures, and hoping to swarm your opponent, or one where you're stalling and clearing the board, trying to reach inevitability. Those axes of interaction normally have you playing and removing creatures, and interacting via the red zone. Requiring players to maindeck the likes of Disenchant and Nature's Claim in order to be able to cope with bomby artifacts that opponents most likely have makes for bad feelings all round.

The other thing about strong colorless cards that your playgroup will pick up on over time is that it's simply wrong to pass them during a draft. You may want to test a sweet new strategy that you injected your cube with, which would require taking, say, Goblin Bombardment early, but objectively speaking, you're better off with that Wurmcoil Engine in the same pack. The same goes for any number of dominating artifacts, including Jitte, most Swords, and Coalition Relic. When people realize that they have to take the best colorless card to remain competitive, and pass on the sweeter, but weaker colored card, I've found that everyone's enjoyment goes down.

Personally speaking, I cut the three cards you mentioned, along with many more. I'd say, give it a try! If it's not to your group's liking, you can always revert back. And if you're worried about player protests over cutting the biggest bombs, don't even tell them before the draft. Just sneak your changes in there, and see how well it goes over. Unbiased testing is the best kind of testing.

 

[CML]

Hi Dwayne -- every time the conventional Cube community talks about their 'balanced' environment, I think of Fox News and a certain two-mana sorcery.

My approach is to invite good players, exhort them to give me honest feedback, and cut the cards they hate or never play.

 

[Dwayne Madore]

Thanks for the quick answers folks;

@ HannesVersmissen:
Thats actually a very good angle of attack on the mimic vat power level, i'll try to keep it in mind in my future modifications, and for wurmcoil I am fairly sure it needs to get the axe.

@ Jason :
I went ahead and listened to most of the cast and it brought up a few good points about power curves. I currently only play a sword (fire&ice), and artifact hate is somewhat present (in the form of hate bears) however nobody ever drafts them, despite the fact that they are never dead (signets and such are always likely targets). However i will try and take another more careful glance at my top end, and see what i can do with it to keep things fun and at least not as degenerate.

@ Eric :
You bring some good points here, as packing hate vs synergistic cards is not an intuitive way to draft and is rather hostile to newcommers. The issue is that i wanted to support some wilder artifact-based decks, and they unfortunately didn't work out too well for me and my group. Back to the drawing board!

@ CML :
Unfortunately my current roster for drafting partners is rather slim, and getting the full 8 people to draft at the same time is rather rare, and inviting better players is not a very feasible option for me, so i will have to improvise and settle for an imperfect cube, but hopefully it will be a fun and rewarding experience for my friends despite the lack of input from outsiders.

 

[CML]

Yeah, it's discouragingly hard to make a good friend group in paper MTG. I look back on it and doubt it would have all come together without all of the following: living in Seattle, quitting my job, t8ing an SCG Open, and another friend laying much of the groundwork / getting us to go to Vegas and LA in December.

The best tips I can offer are "play Legacy" and "bring people together under the guise of a playgroup, when that actually means drinking, though it might also mean a playgroup"