Ok! While I have been randomly tweaking and touching up this cube over the last year, I think it is time for another rebuild, since now my brain is ticking over from Magic Origins. Red has embraced tokens! And they are tokens that support the artifact theme! I mean I could probably pull cards here and put cards there, but I like to have a big bang approach every now and again, just to shake out cards that somehow survived all of the changes.
So, things that are currently working well:
Humans
A 'human-centered' deck doesn't come together every draft, but lots of the components work well on their own, with
Mayor of Avabruck being the only semi-weak link.
Xathrid Necromancer normally does good work, and
Champion is a solid 1-drop that admittedly does get relegated to the sideboard on occasion. However, when the deck does come together, these, combined with
Bloodsoaked Champion, have been truly terrifying, and kind of makes me want to run less effects which 'destroy' and more effects which 'exile' or 'put on the bottom of their owner's library'.
Graveyard themes
This is very broad, and overall the theme adds a lot of lines of play, which is a net win for the environment. However sub-themes within this have had mixed success. Generally the graveyard adds value and options to a bunch of decks, which was kind of the point. Reanimation is less of a combo deck, and is mostly supporting mid-range value decks, to get more use out of their ETB effects. Recent threads have caused me to question what I want midrange decks to be doing, and how they interact with my aggressive decks, so this probably deserves a second look.
In my 'draw-a-card' cube, graveyard decks tend to be tool-boxy, with cards like
Tortured Existence and even
Pit Keeper leveraging stocked graveyards to get the right creatures at the right time. I had a game the other night where I used
Bone Shredder three times, letting it die to Echo each time to use one of my re-buy effects for value, until I eventually got something big to actually close out the game with. That cube is all about durdly value engines, which virtually every deck has access to (I saw an Esper Heroic Aggro deck start a
Spirit Cairn,
Undead Gladiator loop!), but some of that feel might be nice to recapture here. Then again, that just sounds like 'supporting mid-range value decks', and
Birthing Pod fills that role pretty well.
Spell Density
CMCs are low, and spells are flowing fine. I love how action packed the early turns of games are, and how Flashback spells often pull double duty in spell-based decks and in control decks. On that note, I am loving Prowess, and would like to make it a bigger feature, probably by pushing a UWR Tempo archetype (or, pushing it more).
Sacrifice Theme
A fan favourite. Maybe need to be more of these effects that benefit from multiple tokens. For instance,
Jinxed Idol is great and all, but only really needs 1 goblin to get going, and only
Goblin Bombardment and
Greater Gargadon really benefit from having many bodies to throw away (Oh, also Blood Artist, that card is insane). Overall though, this provides a great engine, but I am going to note here, mostly for my own reference, that I want to run
Humble Defector. It might be worth noting that this theme is strongly RB, and probably could afford to bleed more into other colours. MM15 implemented a GB sacrifice theme, so that might be worth a look.
Things that are 'fine':
Artifacts
Fair
Tinker was always going to be interesting, and overall I think it is going ok, but not amazing. I think I can afford to slowly ramp up the power of Tinker targets until it breaks, which is something I haven't been testing that much, as I have been tending to play the 'draw-a-card' cube a lot more recently (at $129 according to Cube-Tutor, I have no issue drafting it with random people at the LGS). I am hoping I can add some more support with the artifact theme that Red has jumped more heavily into since this project started (er... restarted).
Go-Wide Red
This theme has also been fine, but not amazing. It feels like there is a lack of Falter effects, so possibly these cards benefits from the tempo cards mentioned above. That said, this theme plays really well with the sacrifice effects, but might need a boost on the beatdown front.
Things that are pretty bad:
Actually not much. While there are cards here and there that haven't proved the most adequate, most of the themes and build around work well. Maybe some of the cards in the 'top of deck' matter theme are a bit low reward, the theme isn't really build-around so much as 'Oh! I could do this... then that happens!', which is a pretty great experience for people drafting and playing the cube, so the problems can likely be solved by tweaking the cards. I am sure when I dissect further I will find things that I don't like as much and I would rather add something else in its place, but at present, I only really have problems with cards, not ideas.
Some recent discussions about mid-range beef and giving aggro options as games go longer, as well as some things I have learned from the draw-a-card cube will be front of mind as I go through this process, and hopefully we end up with a slightly more refined iteration this go-around...
