General Delirium as a mechanic or archetype in cube

XRS

XRS

I started playing during Shadows over Innistrad. I believe delirium has a very special place in my heart for that reason. I find that it offers an interesting challenge during drafting, but until recently the options for payoffs were from only one set. In SOI the payoffs were centred in Abzan. Along comes MH2 and gives us more options, notably in blue and red.

With the return of delirium in MH2 the question on my mind is: is it worth it to build around this mechanic? And in which case how?

2 overarching strategies for implementation:
1: Nested in one color pair or shard 2: Across 4-5 colors independant of each other.

Are there other riptiders who are excited about deliriums return? Which payoffs do you run and in which colors?

I'll share my theoretical approach to enabling delirium:
Cantrips/baubles and other effects that put a card in the yard.


Diversifying the types of effects in the cube (traditionally on instants or sorceries)


Cards with more than one type


Filling your graveyard with looting, milling and sacrificing goes a long way, but it ultimately boils down to diversity in card types. Delirium is different in that respect to delve and threshold which simply pay you off for filling your graveyard as quickly as possible.
 
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blacksmithy

including lots of cheap spells, as well as a fetch-centric mana base, helps immensely with delirium. additionally, while they certainly clash a bit with delirium, escape and delve cards are great in the same environments where delirium is great, because in either case you’re quickly filling the yard just by playing magic.
 
sigh

sigh

I run some incidental support for delirium (that is primarily support for other things) and have found that generally that kind of specific support can be quite low in numbers since there is a very straightforward route to delirium via Creature + Instant + Sorcery + Land.

So I, for instance, run the two spellbombs mentioned, as well as Witching Well, firstly to provide numerical support for artifact strategies, but they do help with delirium counts. I don't think you need to stretch into every spellbomb and seal to try to support the mechanic. It could be a good idea if you have the archetypes to support that card type on a base level (an enchantment theme to support adding extra enchantments like the seals over more efficient spells for instance).

Creatures with two types are also a good way to speed to delirium, but again, I wouldn't necessarily hunt down every artifact creature just to up the two-type density.

Enablers will often be more important at achieving delirium than actually having a broad spectrum of card types in your cube selections. Faithless Looting will do wonders with hitting 4 types; it will generally be much more impactful than running Seal of Fire over Shock. Doubling up on that type of filtering spell might be a good consideration, and/or swapping to some card choices that bin cards to the grave (strategic planning and grapple with the past for examples)
 
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blacksmithy

flooting is indeed a stupid fast way to do it, as you get a sorcery + whatever you discard in the bin immediately. if you cracked a fetch to cast flooting, you may have t1 delirium already!
EDIT: that said, Seal of Fire is actually really good and you should probably run it regardless of synergy
 
sigh

sigh

blacksmithy said:
Seal of Fire is actually really good and you should probably run it regardless of synergy
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For sure! It just competes semi-directly with Pyrite Spellbomb, which meshes with a more supported archetype (artifacts.dec) and also offers a colorless card draw mode. I think many cubes would find it more prudent to run the spellbomb if only given one slot, unless artifacts have no format support and you just want mana efficiency.
 
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blacksmithy

i agree with Sigh’s assertion that the simplest path to Delirium is land + creature + instant + sorcery. it certainly helps to run other stuff, but those 4 types are gonna be your bread and butter about 80% of the time. just make sure you have plenty of cheap ones so it’s not hard to get there within 1-3 turns.
 
shamizy

shamizy

Yes, I'd say Delirium is definitely more viable now with more cards utilizing the mechanic as well as newer mechanics helping to fuel it. A big one is Surveil which has allowed for additional avenues to pitch different card types into the graveyard without straying from your normal gameplan. Sagas being able to self-bin themselves allow you the chance to get an otherwise difficult card type into the yard more frequently. Ditto with more playable enchantment creatures being printed with the last Theros set.

I'd say Delirium has enough glue to be one of those incidental archetypes in an environment, promoting additional utility for pieces, but there is a marked difference in power between the top-end Delirum payoffs and those we've been seeing at lower rarities with MH2. I still think you want to center it in something like G/B with payoffs like Ishkanah, Grafwidow or Mindwrack Demon available, but now you have greater utility in being able to bleed it as a theme in other colors.
 
landofMordor

landofMordor

Administrator
For my money, playing Delirium cards at a higher power level, it's almost trivial to get Instant/Sorc/Creature in the yard just through normal game actions. A triple-fetch manabase makes it easy to supplement with lands (although that's not everyone's cup of tea, it does enable a lot of synergy).

Essentially, if your curve is low enough to take a lot of game actions in early turns, Delirium gets much easier to turn on regardless of which game actions you're taking. No need to put stuff in the cube as explicit support unless that's part of a different design goal.

That said, sometimes Mishra's Bauble, Pyrite Spellbomb, Seal of Fire, Tarfire, Walking Ballista can enable some truly disgusting sequences with early Delirium. As a drafter, I'm definitely looking for ways to add those enablers to my deck without sacrificing too much raw power. So as a Cube designer I try to be cognizant of how and when these types matter -- for example, when choosing my Nth marginal-upside-Shock-variant, I might go with Pyrite Spellbomb and Seal of Fire over some other options.

Another dimension I'm trying to be aware of is the degree and polarity of grave hate in my format as a counterbalance to playing a high density of Delve and Delirium spells. If every game becomes a simple matter of "exile the opponent's grave before they exploit it", or if Delirium can be consistently turned off at instant speed, I'm not sure those play patterns are ones I want to support. Blowouts feel bad, and in this case the opponent isn't really earning the blowout except by getting lucky with the order of their deck relative to the opponent's (unlike, say, a blowout in combat, which involves pre-committed resources and a non-zero risk of failure).
 
TrainmasterGT

TrainmasterGT

I think the "problem" with Delirium as an archetype isn't that it's difficult to trigger. Rather, it is finding the density of payoffs required to make Delirium a "deck" as opposed to a minor value "theme." Using the contemporary card pool and modern Cube design theory, it is relatively easy to make achieve the cards in graveyard requirement. However, there aren't a ton of cards that work at any given power band to make a Delirium package anything other than a few cards with the keyword as opposed to a fully-fledged color-pair archetype.

For example, how many of these cards go into the same cube:

(The last three cards are MH2 the cards Scuttletide, Dragon's Rage Channeler, and Prophetic Titan)

While a few of these cards could be fine in a cube together, the majority of them really want to be at different power levels to shine. I don't think anyone is really going to want to play a Colossal Dreadmaw that doesn't even have trample without Delerium. The dedicated Delerium player might not even want that! Meanwhile, pretty much any green midrange deck is going to be chomping at the bit to get a hold of Tarmogoyf at the power level where more than a few of these cards are viable options.

This doesn't mean that you can't or shouldn't include Delerium cards in your Cube. Rather, I just think you should be cognizant of the fact that there aren't enough payoffs for this archetype to play as a streamlined deck. Instead, a Delerium package will most likely consist of a few high-value cards (at a given power level) that make the reward for having 4 or more card types in the graveyard worth the deckbuilding cost of having to add a few random cards with different card types to a deck.
 
sigh

sigh

Agree. Delirium (unless you really stretch the cube design to purposefully fit it) is going to be an ability that your GY decks can utilize, much the same as delve, flashback, etc.

If you do run delirium cards, it is nice to make sure deckbuilders have some options to make it as achievable as possible, and many of those options do fit into other themes or provide other upsides (artifact/enchantment synergies, sac triggers, recursion of permanents, etc)
 
Chris Taylor

Chris Taylor

Contributor
Having tried it, typical games will get you 3/4 really easily through some combination of instant/sorcery/land/creature

Getting the 4th type is HARD. Some draws you have 3 instants and no sorcery, or no land yet
You can supliment this with the odd artifact creature/enchantment/planeswalker etc, but make sure they're things that actually find their way to the graveyard.
Courser of Kruphix is not a reliable source of "enchantment in graveyard", it's got 4 bloody toughness. Seal of fire works better.
Huge shoutout to the mostly vestigal card type "Tribal" for these purposes:

As another type. Bitterblossom doesn't help though, for reasons mentioned above.
 
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blacksmithy

i’d go with both if i felt i needed the extra support. as is, i actually really like how you can just run out Seal proactively whenever, and crack it for free later. i think it’s a unique play pattern that other Shocks don’t have. But Tarfire is just Shock but better for these odd synergy purposes.
 
sigh

sigh

A perennially underrated (IMO) "cantrip" that does wonders for lots of things GY, but definitely for delirium, in the same vein as faithless looting:
 
inscho

inscho

TrainmasterGT said:
I think the "problem" with Delirium as an archetype isn't that it's difficult to trigger. Rather, it is finding the density of payoffs required to make Delirium a "deck" as opposed to a minor value "theme."
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TrainmasterGT said:
This doesn't mean that you can't or shouldn't include Delirium cards in your Cube. Rather, I just think you should be cognizant of the fact that there aren't enough payoffs for this archetype to play as a streamlined deck. Instead, a Delirium package will most likely consist of a few high-value cards (at a given power level) that make the reward for having 4 or more card types in the graveyard worth the deckbuilding cost of having to add a few random cards with different card types to a deck.
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Agreed. Without breaking singleton, this problem also extends to a whole host of other mechanics. I gave up on defining an archetype by a mechanic a long time ago.
 
ravnic

ravnic

sigh said:
Lucid Dreams is a decent option that just got printed, for a power level that can handle tidings with possible down- or upside. But yeah overall it's a design space that hasn't been explored much.
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Yeah, a few more cards like that (around the same power level) and I'd be very tempted to make delirium+ a thing innmy cube. Honestly, it sounds more interesting than the typical "card type tribal" themes (enchantments matter, artifacts matter ...) and could be something spread across all colors. Than drafters would be challenged to thoughtfully combinate the right colors for maximum effect, since certain cardtypes are more common in certain colors. For example, green white could be a worse combination, since both might be heavy on the same types (creatures and enchantments), so drafting white would be better paired with blue or red.
 
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