Now I have spent my time stewing over my plan of just trying to jam solid aggro cards, and following some great discussion in the main forum, I think there I am probably confident enough to attempt to root sacrifice/tokens in red. Instead of simply discussing only Red cards, this needs to be layered across colours to take advantage of these themes, to sow the seed of these in-draft and in-game interactions.
Lets start with the core of this, Red tokens. Red is actually very few decent token cards at lower CMCs. There is a whole glut of average ones at 4/5 CMC, but that is too high to really assist aggressive decks, since despite this skew, I still want Red to be a solidly aggressive colour. The token cards I am going with are:
While I was cautioned about double War Marshal earlier, the lack of other reasonable options have led me to at least want to test running two of them. I feel these cards are reasonably universal, with Pyromancer being a Human, as well as a solid player in a spell-value deck, and War Marshal being a very reasonable roadblock for more control-oriented decks. Note to self: ensure sufficient density of spells for Pyromancer...
I can branch the token production into the gold section with a solid card like
Huntmaster, and potentially a not-so-solid card like
Sunhome Guildmage (Thoughts? Worth a shot?).
Supplementing tokens in Red is a little difficult, but there are a few cards which benefit from attacking with lots of creatures.
Curse of Stalked Prey is an interesting card which comes on line early and could get out of hand, it is not as potent as
Curse of Predation, but might be worth considering. I have already stated that I am favouring artifacts over enchantments in this cube, so both might sit on the sideline for now.
Supplementing tokens (note that where I keep saying tokens, I probably mean 'numerous small creatures') in other colours is another component of making Red more token heavy, as adequate fixing makes 'the mono-red deck' way less of a thing than typical cubes.
White probably has the most native support for mass-creatures (it is kind of a typically white thing), with
Daring Skyjek and
Accorder Paladin just in the very playable 2-drops.
Hero of Bladehold and
Sublime Archangel top out this kind of strategy in a very powerful way. Seeding these cards (which I was probably planning on playing anyway), creates a nice natural crossover.
The crossover into Green is more difficult to achieve. There are a number of Overrun effect which benefit from random creatures lying around, but are the sort of mid-rangey/rampy decks that play cards like
Garruk Wildspeaker going to want
Young Pyromancer or
Mogg War Marshal? There are some battles which are probably not worth trying to win.
Blue has
Opposition. I feel very little need to be written on this, except when that deck comes together, it is completely insane. The crossover with blue is probably more likely going to be about grinding value out of Young Pyromancer, using tokens are roadblocks, etc. rather than trying to get some odd 'have lots of small creatures' synergies going.
Black gets the sacrifice themes. Don't be greedy.
Contested War Zone into the utility land draft is certainly happening.
The other, and probably far more interesting component of this is the sacrifice theme. This ties in very strongly with some of the graveyard interactions discussed earlier, but also can provide an engine all on its own. While there has been a lot of discussion about sacrifice outlets in the other thread I created (
here), I think that I am going to start with the following:
Supplemented by the following off colour cards:
While I did hear the passionate cries of the
Mortarpod support group, I think it can stay on the sidelines for now. I want to give
Jinxed Idol a shot in its place for now. Maybe if the
Venser deck is desperate for blockers/pingers, or Goblin Bombardment becomes too oppressive, it will get the call up. Also, check out the sweet Human tech on Falkenrath Aristocrat! Caldera Hellion is definitely, as Jonas said, a high risk card, but I want to at least test it out.
This sacrifice theme cannot be simply be fed tokens alone, it needs a number of cards which either want to be sac'd or don't care about being sacrificed to function. Luckily, Red has quite a few reasonable suicidal creatures.
These complement the
Perilous Myr and
Epochracite which were already added as part of the Tinker package (cross-archetypal synergies, so exciting!). In addition, thanks to CML, I can probably add
Sprouting Thrinax to the list.
In addition there are a number of cards which get better when you can kill creatures easily.
Sacrifice themes carry over to Black incredibly obviously, but don't really play particularly nicely with other colours. White can feed tokens to sacrifice outlets reasonably easily, but again, there is little interplay with Green and Blue. Perhaps I should take a leaf from Jason's book and bring
Diregraf Captain along to the party. Luckily most of these cards are pretty solid on their own, in multiple types of decks and only the sacrifice outlets are particularly parasitic. Goblin Sharpshooter might be a little weak, but I have never played it, and it seems like such a fun card that I want to find an environment where I can see if that fun is a real thing.
There is definitely still some space in Red after this (especially for non-creatures), but I feel the core is so much better now than just running a whole bunch of generally strong if uninteresting one and two drops.
Kor skyfisher never pulled it's weight for me. Much like the ninjas, it took too much tempo to replay whatever got bounced, so he got the axe.
