Grillo_Parlante
Contributor
Draft List Link.
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So, with the release of SOI, I've been getting some requests to redesign the innistrad theme cube, which I have not been doing out of laziness.
That cube was built on riptide ideas from two years ago, and those dealt more with spreading themes throughout your cube, than focusing on color pairs, and the deck creation within those pairs, which is what I do now. As a result, ripping the whole thing apart to balance it, so that non-value based strategies could flourish, was an exhausting proposition.
Thankfully, one of my RL buddies is helping, so we sat down for way too many hours last night to retool things.
Fortunately, hes been (rightfully) enamored by SOI limited, so that has saved me the headache of having to solve a number of higher power problems, and opens things up to cost effective experimentation, which is excellent.
I wanted to try my hand at another theory I've been toying with, which is to promote a sort of downward spiraling archetype design. We all know that drafter habits are to pick power max value cards, which tends to suffocate out more niche strategies that end up existing in opposition to those value strategies, putting a glass ceiling on archetype depth. But what if they didn't?
Take the way madness works in SOI limited. We could say that there is a madness theme or a madness deck. Taking a traditional riptide approach, we would boot up a list of madness cards and discard outlets, and lace them through the cube, hoping that someone picks up a critical density of madness cards and enablers, in a thematic structure that suffers from all of the problems of tribal drifting. We might dump in some narrow enablers on the basis they were "build around" cards and hope someone picks them early in the draft, and warps their entire experience around it.
Or we could instead focus on the value enablers, as occurs in SOI limited, where madness becomes a value proposition: a way to mitigate the effects of ample discard attached to already highly desirable cards. The player starts out power maxing, selecting the objectively strongest card, with the niche mechanic being picked up for the value it offers, but as they go deeper into the drafts, they realize that the niche mechanic opens the door to all sorts of interesting configurations, which they are already at the cusp of realizing.
Take for example:
This is a great limited card that I am going to draft highly. What attracts me to it is the raw power of the card. I may have no interest in madness, and just want to min/max, selecting the objectively most efficient cards in the format. I than see this:
This is another strong card. The floor on it isn't too bad for limited, but the ceiling is exceptional, and I do like the value proposition of using such a reasonable card to offset the cost of madness. Still not in a madness deck though, still just shopping for value.
Here is another highly desirable effect. Maybe not worth a first pick like the axe was, but draw smoothing is something I'm in the market for. It also requires a discard, so this puts me more on the hunt for different ways to value max, which ups the pick value of madness cards.
The floor on this is pretty mediocre, but the ceiling is starting to look better due to all of the higher pick enablers I grabbed. I'm still value maxing and good stuff drafting, but I'm at that point where the context of value drafting is beginning to allow more niche and interesting picks.
And here is our build around piece, though not being built around at all. Our efforts at using madness as a good stuff value enabler naturally led us down a path where we had ample discard outlets, and it turns out a fair number of those value enablers happened to be vampires, and now stensia masquerade looks like a great, efficient pick.
I may still psychologically be in a good stuff drafting mentality, and I wouldn't be wrong: stensia masquerade offsets the discard costs on many of my most power and efficient spells. That value proposition is still true. However, the pursuit of that efficiency naturally lead me to a point where the text on those enablers allows for more creative and interesting deck design. This creates a feeling of discovery and exploration in the format, due to the heightened archetype depth.
Most importantly, it means that spike efficiency driven drafting, and johnny creativity driven drafting as threaded together, rather than existing as opposing spectrums.
So thats kind of what we are looking to do here.
This actually was more productive than it looks. Here is where we got on the archetype board:
RB: Madness/sacrifice
RG: Wolves/ aura buffs
RU: Control/tempo (include equip)
RW: Beat down/tokens
UG: P/T cards in hand buff, tempo
GB: mulch, control
GW: wide aggro, control, self mill control
BW:
UB:
UW:
The vote was for no proxies, because they look horrible, and the fetch/shockland mana base lost the vote (which is a relief). We are probably looking at a row of bouncelands, backed with some cyclers.
I explained to him the four most significant problems with the old list:
1. That the power gap was suffocating out more creative strategies. The power gap was a result of old misguided approaches to color balance, the type of crude buff analysis where you add progressively better cards to try to make <insert color> as highly draftable as <insert competing color>. As I've said before, this is a backwards way to approach the problem, because mono colored decks are almost never drafted, and your real issue is more likely one of nonexistent color pair identity.
2. That ETB effects just warp formats. For the uninitiated: ETB effects unbalance a format because they effectively obsolete, or greatly diminish, the strength of spell effects. Because the built in 2 for 1 value that comes from ETB effects is so great, it shifts the focus away from spells, onto creatures, which shifts the entire format's focus towards creature pressure and value generation from those creatures. This suffocates out most competing strategies, and reduces the cube down to operating on a singular axis, which makes it feel stale.
3. I was using the "birthing pod build around paradigm" which has so many problems. This was supposed to be held together by a tutor network, which could in turn be disrupted by mill. Unfortunately, there wasn't enough effect density for this to really work, and having too high a density of build arounds can lead to really awkward packs, filled with narrow cards that don't really fit anywhere on their own.
4. It was built using theme design rather than the guild layout I use now, where you come up with various theme packages and sprinkle the support around the cube. This lead to all sorts of unbalance, because certain color combinations were just never taken into account, which constricts cube depth.
So what we actually did was go through each color and grade the cards for ubiquitous good stuff, which I defined as anything that has an enters the battlefield trigger, as well as looking for overly narrow cards.
This had some interesting results:
1. White, which was the best min/max color in the cube, was packed with ETB creatures. Red also has a number of disproportionately powerful cards.
2. Blue, on the other hand, which has always felt fair, was packed with narrow build arounds. Yes, in order to keep blue reasonable a disproportionate percentage of the color was narrow picks. Should have known something was up. >.>
1. Way less ETBs. I like the r/g play out your werewolves until you have a critical max, than flip them and crush over. Thats magnificent and I want more erhnam djinns for my midrange punch. Look at all of those glorious werewolves in red and green, I love them. If we are going to ETB lets trash ETB.
2. Lets talk about green, and life from the loam, which is not on the list.
Someone stop him, this could go deep.
By why would someone want to recur land in the first place? Sure we could start and stop with a handful of done to death enablers, but why not go deeper:
Is this a good idea, is this terrible? Using these powerful above the curve beaters is a different focus on land recursion, creating an incentive for what is normally an incidental interaction with little incentive to it.
Than we can cap things off with:
Which would be well supporting by the row of bouncelands.
2. Another cute idea I had, was to push green control, which would mostly be done by
Which naturally means the blue draw has to be toned down somewhat, so that the gravepulses and green spell recursion has room to breath. The grave pulses also become better, because we can use flashback and delirium as value enablers, making the experience of self mill more of an upside.
But anyways, since we will presumably be experimenting with ways to put lands in hand, either via trash creatures, bouncelands, or grave pulses, which not tie that into a UG identity that also addresses our issue of blue card draw?
I'm a little overwhelmed with green right now, as it offers a lot interesting interactions. Solid aura buffs like moldervine cloak supporting a UG archetype with cards like
as well as growth based evasion.
3. The aggro plan will again focus less on early pressure from curve outs, which I view as being a problematic approach for cube due to the space it demands, and focus more on reach and evasion, which is consistent with SOI and III.
So lots of menace, growth based unblockables, flying spirits, stuff like that. I like that arrangement because it can really snowball the tempo generating effect of a single bounce or removal spell.
4. I have lots of creative ideas for
Evasive spirits in white, mulch tokens in green, discard based token generation in black...
There is no reason to overly focus on red token makers, and these two can really expand out on the roles they play. I just wish there was a decent tutor for them that cost less than a million dollars besides goblin matron.
I'm thinking that the black card draw should focus more on stuff like death denied or waltz. It would be nice for green to be the real heavy hitting card draw color for once.
5. Also, the vote was for lots of clue generation, which i've not thought of all the ways I want to use that yet, except for:
I will babble more later. Sorry for the formating above: forum software wasn't spacing correctly for some reason. I know this is kind of stream of conscious at the end, but I kind of just wanted to get some stuff down to form my thoughts around. Looking at a cube tutor list can be as overwhelming for me as it is for you, and this helps organize my thoughts.
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So, with the release of SOI, I've been getting some requests to redesign the innistrad theme cube, which I have not been doing out of laziness.
That cube was built on riptide ideas from two years ago, and those dealt more with spreading themes throughout your cube, than focusing on color pairs, and the deck creation within those pairs, which is what I do now. As a result, ripping the whole thing apart to balance it, so that non-value based strategies could flourish, was an exhausting proposition.
Thankfully, one of my RL buddies is helping, so we sat down for way too many hours last night to retool things.
Fortunately, hes been (rightfully) enamored by SOI limited, so that has saved me the headache of having to solve a number of higher power problems, and opens things up to cost effective experimentation, which is excellent.
I wanted to try my hand at another theory I've been toying with, which is to promote a sort of downward spiraling archetype design. We all know that drafter habits are to pick power max value cards, which tends to suffocate out more niche strategies that end up existing in opposition to those value strategies, putting a glass ceiling on archetype depth. But what if they didn't?
The Concept
Take the way madness works in SOI limited. We could say that there is a madness theme or a madness deck. Taking a traditional riptide approach, we would boot up a list of madness cards and discard outlets, and lace them through the cube, hoping that someone picks up a critical density of madness cards and enablers, in a thematic structure that suffers from all of the problems of tribal drifting. We might dump in some narrow enablers on the basis they were "build around" cards and hope someone picks them early in the draft, and warps their entire experience around it.
Or we could instead focus on the value enablers, as occurs in SOI limited, where madness becomes a value proposition: a way to mitigate the effects of ample discard attached to already highly desirable cards. The player starts out power maxing, selecting the objectively strongest card, with the niche mechanic being picked up for the value it offers, but as they go deeper into the drafts, they realize that the niche mechanic opens the door to all sorts of interesting configurations, which they are already at the cusp of realizing.
Take for example:
This is a great limited card that I am going to draft highly. What attracts me to it is the raw power of the card. I may have no interest in madness, and just want to min/max, selecting the objectively most efficient cards in the format. I than see this:
This is another strong card. The floor on it isn't too bad for limited, but the ceiling is exceptional, and I do like the value proposition of using such a reasonable card to offset the cost of madness. Still not in a madness deck though, still just shopping for value.
Here is another highly desirable effect. Maybe not worth a first pick like the axe was, but draw smoothing is something I'm in the market for. It also requires a discard, so this puts me more on the hunt for different ways to value max, which ups the pick value of madness cards.
The floor on this is pretty mediocre, but the ceiling is starting to look better due to all of the higher pick enablers I grabbed. I'm still value maxing and good stuff drafting, but I'm at that point where the context of value drafting is beginning to allow more niche and interesting picks.
And here is our build around piece, though not being built around at all. Our efforts at using madness as a good stuff value enabler naturally led us down a path where we had ample discard outlets, and it turns out a fair number of those value enablers happened to be vampires, and now stensia masquerade looks like a great, efficient pick.
I may still psychologically be in a good stuff drafting mentality, and I wouldn't be wrong: stensia masquerade offsets the discard costs on many of my most power and efficient spells. That value proposition is still true. However, the pursuit of that efficiency naturally lead me to a point where the text on those enablers allows for more creative and interesting deck design. This creates a feeling of discovery and exploration in the format, due to the heightened archetype depth.
Most importantly, it means that spike efficiency driven drafting, and johnny creativity driven drafting as threaded together, rather than existing as opposing spectrums.
So thats kind of what we are looking to do here.
Six Hours or so of Marginally Effective Tinkering
So here is where we ended up, a 191 card mess lol.This actually was more productive than it looks. Here is where we got on the archetype board:
RB: Madness/sacrifice
RG: Wolves/ aura buffs
RU: Control/tempo (include equip)
RW: Beat down/tokens
UG: P/T cards in hand buff, tempo
GB: mulch, control
GW: wide aggro, control, self mill control
BW:
UB:
UW:
The vote was for no proxies, because they look horrible, and the fetch/shockland mana base lost the vote (which is a relief). We are probably looking at a row of bouncelands, backed with some cyclers.
I explained to him the four most significant problems with the old list:
1. That the power gap was suffocating out more creative strategies. The power gap was a result of old misguided approaches to color balance, the type of crude buff analysis where you add progressively better cards to try to make <insert color> as highly draftable as <insert competing color>. As I've said before, this is a backwards way to approach the problem, because mono colored decks are almost never drafted, and your real issue is more likely one of nonexistent color pair identity.
2. That ETB effects just warp formats. For the uninitiated: ETB effects unbalance a format because they effectively obsolete, or greatly diminish, the strength of spell effects. Because the built in 2 for 1 value that comes from ETB effects is so great, it shifts the focus away from spells, onto creatures, which shifts the entire format's focus towards creature pressure and value generation from those creatures. This suffocates out most competing strategies, and reduces the cube down to operating on a singular axis, which makes it feel stale.
3. I was using the "birthing pod build around paradigm" which has so many problems. This was supposed to be held together by a tutor network, which could in turn be disrupted by mill. Unfortunately, there wasn't enough effect density for this to really work, and having too high a density of build arounds can lead to really awkward packs, filled with narrow cards that don't really fit anywhere on their own.
4. It was built using theme design rather than the guild layout I use now, where you come up with various theme packages and sprinkle the support around the cube. This lead to all sorts of unbalance, because certain color combinations were just never taken into account, which constricts cube depth.
So what we actually did was go through each color and grade the cards for ubiquitous good stuff, which I defined as anything that has an enters the battlefield trigger, as well as looking for overly narrow cards.
This had some interesting results:
1. White, which was the best min/max color in the cube, was packed with ETB creatures. Red also has a number of disproportionately powerful cards.
2. Blue, on the other hand, which has always felt fair, was packed with narrow build arounds. Yes, in order to keep blue reasonable a disproportionate percentage of the color was narrow picks. Should have known something was up. >.>
The Weirdness
So lots of oddness, which I will pontificate on as the project moves forward, and obviously the list needs a lot of refining. But there were a couple things I wanted:1. Way less ETBs. I like the r/g play out your werewolves until you have a critical max, than flip them and crush over. Thats magnificent and I want more erhnam djinns for my midrange punch. Look at all of those glorious werewolves in red and green, I love them. If we are going to ETB lets trash ETB.
2. Lets talk about green, and life from the loam, which is not on the list.
Someone stop him, this could go deep.
By why would someone want to recur land in the first place? Sure we could start and stop with a handful of done to death enablers, but why not go deeper:
Is this a good idea, is this terrible? Using these powerful above the curve beaters is a different focus on land recursion, creating an incentive for what is normally an incidental interaction with little incentive to it.
Than we can cap things off with:
Which would be well supporting by the row of bouncelands.
2. Another cute idea I had, was to push green control, which would mostly be done by
Which naturally means the blue draw has to be toned down somewhat, so that the gravepulses and green spell recursion has room to breath. The grave pulses also become better, because we can use flashback and delirium as value enablers, making the experience of self mill more of an upside.
But anyways, since we will presumably be experimenting with ways to put lands in hand, either via trash creatures, bouncelands, or grave pulses, which not tie that into a UG identity that also addresses our issue of blue card draw?
I'm a little overwhelmed with green right now, as it offers a lot interesting interactions. Solid aura buffs like moldervine cloak supporting a UG archetype with cards like
as well as growth based evasion.
3. The aggro plan will again focus less on early pressure from curve outs, which I view as being a problematic approach for cube due to the space it demands, and focus more on reach and evasion, which is consistent with SOI and III.
So lots of menace, growth based unblockables, flying spirits, stuff like that. I like that arrangement because it can really snowball the tempo generating effect of a single bounce or removal spell.
4. I have lots of creative ideas for
Evasive spirits in white, mulch tokens in green, discard based token generation in black...
There is no reason to overly focus on red token makers, and these two can really expand out on the roles they play. I just wish there was a decent tutor for them that cost less than a million dollars besides goblin matron.
I'm thinking that the black card draw should focus more on stuff like death denied or waltz. It would be nice for green to be the real heavy hitting card draw color for once.
5. Also, the vote was for lots of clue generation, which i've not thought of all the ways I want to use that yet, except for:
I will babble more later. Sorry for the formating above: forum software wasn't spacing correctly for some reason. I know this is kind of stream of conscious at the end, but I kind of just wanted to get some stuff down to form my thoughts around. Looking at a cube tutor list can be as overwhelming for me as it is for you, and this helps organize my thoughts.
