ante doesnt work bc it feels bad for players in all the way that being milled feels bad* without any of the design upsides of mill. triggers all those loss aversion bells, it runs in direct counter to one of the main things that makes magic work, the sense of ownership over the deck and how it plays.
it also makes losing feel worse. we dont need to make losing feel worse, it already feels bad.
agree on my current designs being too swingy
*mill doesn't feel bad to me personally tbh, but i'm just commenting on my general experience of seeing other people be milled and their emotional response. there's seems to be this sensation of "oh my god they're taking my cards away"
You could easily make catch up mechanics on custom cards.
Come Back From Behind
im not sure if i would want this particular thing too commonly? but 1 or 2 cards could be fun
but i am sort of thinking about like, a lot of the interesting stuff in magic (and games in general) has to do with overlapping curves
interfering with each other and how they create interesting emergent complexities from that
a simple example being "X is good on turn 1, bad on turn 5, but Y makes it better on turn 5 but worse on turn 1"
so another larger set of curves outside the individual games is part of why i'm interested in looking at this? especially bc it's something that's only possible in this cube environment. gives a much more specific & identifiable reason for folks to come play your cube. play to our strengths
another thing to consider here is that good experiences build toward a climactic intense finale, and so increasing the power as the cube goes on is a potentially good way to accomplish that
actually, weird thought:
what if we let people draft more between rounds somehow?
like you open a 15 card pack and put it on the table, and then all 8 people get to pick 1 card. people with less game wins go first.
too slow? too clunky?
Mindswapper
Flying
When Mindswapper deals combat damage to an opponent, you and your opponent each exile the top card of your library face down. Then each card exiled this way is shuffled into the other library.
(These cards become part of your respective draft pools permanently)
this still feels bad in that same way as ante (or my previous mindswapper design) tbh for much the reasons i said
Booster Wish
Sorcery
Open a sealed Magic Booster (or a cube booster) and choose a card from it. Put that card into your hand.
(It becomes part of your draft pool permanently)
Remove Booster Wish from your draft pool.
this seems fine? maybe? i've never played with
booster tutor so i dont know how strong it is
Never Give Up
Conspiracy
Whenever you lose a game this draft, gain an advancement counter. (Advancement counters persist throughout the draft)
At the beginning of combat on your turn, target creature gets +X/+X where X is the number of advancement counters you have.
do triggers work outside the game
do we need separate counters
this seems interesting, however conspiracies still seem clunky and weird to me
also
so.
Ideas Beyond Time
Instant
Draw three cards.
Extratemporal
(This spell costs less to cast for each round of the cube draft you’ve finished.)
this mechanic name sucks
