Wow . . . I'm really glad I found this forum. I've been looking for a place like this for ages, since I'm the only person interested in cube design in my area.
So, my question is, how do you make a "decks-matter" cube? I maintain a 540 Peasant cube, where I tried to push certain archetype ideas in certain colors. While some of them worked, others flopped flat on their face and haven't shown up in a single draft. Currently I'm working on redesigning from the ground up (Because what fun is it unless you're constantly improving?
) and having been mulling over a lot of the questions that came up in this thread. Anyone have any good ideas on how to design for one strategy over the other?
Welcome to the forums!
As far as pushing archetypes, there's a few things I think everyone should know - these are
my beliefs, so if anyone disagrees, chime in!
First, you need a
density of effects (also called
redundancy). If you're packing in an archetype, there have to be multiple tools capable of performing the task the archetype seeks to perform; what can a player do to build a sacrifice deck if the only tool for it is
Goblin Bombardment and another player drafts it? What if they draft
Goblin Bombardment, but it's consistently at the bottom of their deck each game? They need multiple tools that can perform the same function, or else the archetype, even once drafted, will be too inconsistent.
But what kind of redundancy? Most often, the density of effects you'll look to put into a list are some combination of
payoffs (cards that reward a strategy for working, like
Blood Artist in a Sacrifice deck) and
engines (cards which generate value in an archetype, like
Life from the Loam might in a self-mill deck); oftentimes, though, your engine
is your payoff (like
Winding Constrictor in a +1/+1 Counters-Matters deck). Since payoffs and engines so often overlap, I prefer a unifying term for these effects:
signs. Signs indicate that an archetype exists, and that there's an incentive to build around it for value. Though you can put archetypal tools across several colors, for best results, signs for an archetype should be clearest in 2 or 3 colors. In a 360 list, I believe 3-5 to be the necessary
density of an effect to show and support an archetype in a two-color pair.
From there, you'll want some cards that reinforce and support an archetype, and which may have extra use in some decks more than others, which I like to call
lines. Lines are cards that aren't overly narrow, and can be used in any deck, but which hold some special relevancy in certain archetypes; they offer unique
lines of play. For example,
Mogg War Marshal is a serviceable card in any deck, but there are unique
lines of play to it in a Sacrifice deck, which can generate 3 bodies out of it to feed their engines/get rewarded by their payoffs.
An important thing to note is that when it comes to cube design, size matters. Archetype support is really hard the larger your list becomes; that's because it's harder to consistently get access to its pieces, since you aren't seeing as much of the cube each draft. I used to have a 540 list that I've slowly cut down to a 360; I can tell you firsthand that decks are a lot more generic the larger your list unless you work
very hard to put in archetypes.
Another factor to consider is your cube's
removal power level and
power band. A cube with lots of
Doom Blade-level removal is going to require more efficient archetypes than a cube with
Crippling Fatigue-level removal. That's not to say you can't support archetypes at a higher power level - just that you have fewer good cards to choose from. This ties into
power band issues; if your green 4-drops are
Polukranos, World Eater,
Vengevine, and
Pack Guardian, it's a lot less likely that someone is going to pick
Greater Mossdog for your
Self-Mill deck.
If you're not sure how to determine what sort of power band you have, here's a neat trick: take all the cards you have in a section and compare each card in a given spot in the curve against each other. Afford yourself more leeway lower on the curve, but be more strict by the 4-drop slot especially.
Ask yourself questions like:
- In my 4-drop slot in White, are any of these cards always the best one to pick?
- How much "better" is it than the others?
- If I dealt each of these cards randomly to my drafters, which card would I be least happy to be left with? Which card would I most want?
Once you've done all the sections, compare the sections against each other; white compared to blue, and black, and red, and green. This will often reveal why one color might be drafted more than another - because one color's cards might simply be more powerful overall, or contain more bombs, or one color could just be underpowered. This kind of critical thinking can help you develop a cube experience that's more balanced and which allows more creative exploration of archetypes.
Note that this exercise might reveal to you that your format is
bomb-oriented, which isn't a surprising result - most cubes are! And that's a fine and fun way to cube - so don't feel you have to change it! - but it
does make archetype supports more difficult, as the decks may still lose to the powerful cards routinely enough so as to not be worth the effort and risk in assembling them. Mark Rosewater often says: "Players will do anything you incentivize in a game, even if it's not fun." If your strong cards easily beat your synergy cards, it doesn't matter how fun they are - most players will focus on winning anyway, and will gradually adopt whatever practices they think are most likely to enable this.
But let's say you've evened out your
power band, assessed and perhaps revisited your
removal power level, and are ready to pack in archetypes. Where can you go from there?
This is the point where you can start looking at reinforcing your archetypes by adding more
lines to pair with your
signs. Typically, this involves determining if your list includes any
unnecessary duplication, and shifting those slots to be something more archetypal (but still flexible enough to fit into multiple decks, ideally - this is
another big debate in cube development, over "narrow enablers", which are cards that only ever go into a single deck, like
Buried Alive, but I'm going to assume you're shying away from them for the purpose of this post).
Peeling out
unnecessary duplication is what I consider high-level design, but it goes a little something like this. Let's say you're running
Divination,
Compulsive Research,
Monastery Siege, and
Frantic Search in your cube. That means you've got 4 draw spells in the 3-drop spot alone for blue, and 3 of those explicitly support graveyard decks. That's quite a lot of draw effects! Certainly you could diversify further. You could perhaps decide to cut
Divination and add something like
Ghostly Flicker instead to support a Blink archetype, which is likely to have a similar, but much more varied and stronger effect, by re-using common ETB triggers like
Sea Gate Oracle and
Bone Shredder. This also has the potential upside of forcing players to use the sifting-style cards already available, which might gently push them into archetypes they'd never run into by just using
Divination. But again - this is one example, and one where there are many, many possible answers.
I know this was a lot to absorb, but I hope it helps serve as a sort of general-purpose primer!
