[Design/Discussion] The Spiral

ahadabans

ahadabans

You could always run Arc Trail / Arc Lightning package for splicer hate. Not sure if that just makes burn too good though (or if you even want to run hate cards - dividable burn hurts a lot of decks).

Hard for me to be objective on any of those cards.

Haakon - sort of a pet card. Early versions of my cube, you could run that in any discard deck and it's a standalone value/threat due to the recursion. Without exile, it never goes away and you can just keep casting it. Works really well with Stax type decks or any high removal strategy. Wrath the board, recast Haakon. He is pure CA as long as the body stays relevant. As creatures have gotten more powerful stat-wise and do more with they ETB, this card has needed the Nameless Inversion combo aspect to remain draftable. You may or may not need that component depending on where your power level settles. I've never once coupled him with knights though. That part is flavor text as far as I'm concerned. His value is in being castable from the yard.

Reveillak - another pet card. This one pretty high power. My favorite play is combining with Karmic Guide. But it's fine as a top end for aggro-midrangy type Wx decks to just repopulate the board after a wipe. Is it a value card? Definitely. Boring? I don't think so at all. Getting back two 2 power dudes for 6 mana is somewhat at odds. If you are running a bunch of weenies, how are you getting to 6 mana? If you get to 6 mana routinely, don't you have better things to do than get back a couple 2/x dudes? So it feels like you have to build around the effect or you wind up with inefficient value. It's a very strong card and some meta's shouldn't run it, but of all the ETB abusive cards, this is the one I think is the coolest and most interesting.

Sun Titan - sigh... I have been against Titans from pretty early on. They were in one of my earliest builds. Grave Titan ruined some games. Later on, I tried testing Inferno Titan and it proceeded to ruin games. Frost Titan is the one I actually almost put back in a later version of my cube, but in testing it was too effective and was impossible to remove. Sun Titan though? I don't know if I've ever seen it really in action to make a fair assessment. But guilt by association. I think the package you get for 6 mana on all the Titans is just too much value. But I'll freely admit I have a hard time being objective about any of those cards, so I could very well be off here. It's like asking me about Planeswalkers. I ran the original 5 in decks and can speak to what they can do, but I have not played with or against any printed after that so I really don't know what I'm talking about.
 
ahadabans

ahadabans

Speaking of graveyard... when I was heavily supporting that mechanic, this dude was actually pretty good. He's an inefficient card, but being unblockable and castable from the yard means he stays relevant all game and is very good with equipment. Needing a black/green permanent in play is not terribly difficult to achieve, so his graveyard casting is almost always online. And you can hard cast from your hand, unlike Haakon.

 
Alfonzo Bonzo

Alfonzo Bonzo

I've re read through the thread and there are a few leaps where some of the design principles have been left behind,most I'm not sure where we are on some things now. Not a criticism, but my thinking might be out a little from where you are.

White is always the problem child with synergy cubes I find, because it's never been very well integrated in a lot of sets.

I like the splicers a lot but can't necessarily see why they are right here, might be worth thinking about. Not sure about Thalia's lancers. Is loam lion right for your gold section? Not sure. Some thoughts on white:

tithe
Gift of estates
Knight of the White orchid

Tie in with having multiple lands to play, some overlap with spells matters control, fuel for discard effects, some synergy with bouncelands.

academy rector ties in with leaves play, sacrifice and enchantments.
griff's boon which I know you're not fond of fits with grave pulses and self mill.
angelic purge gives a way to trigger leaves play.
archon of justice as a leaves play effect.
jotun owl keeper for the cumulate upkeep delirium fuelled with sac benefits.
 
Alfonzo Bonzo

Alfonzo Bonzo

Have you lost the spells matter from blue? There's only rise from the tides, vexing scutter and mnemonic wall as hooks.

How do you feel about

 
Grillo_Parlante

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
Whoa! Slow down, lots to respond too! :p

Kept Reveillark in, took out sun titan (which is sad).

Added the three land searches you suggested (as well as karametra), as well as land tax and sylvan library (before there was brainstorm-fetch there was land tax sylvan :cool: ).

I've not really thought out entirely how I want enchantments to work, but the land thining cards you suggested work really well. Not all of them may survive the first play tests, but I am sure some of them will. Not only do they help power landfall, but they provide discard fodder. It also takes an interesting aspect of green and shares it with white, which I really like: rather than devoting tons of green space to ramp/mana fixing cards, white gets to play a role, reducing that burden. In addition, and perhaps most importantly, they provide a way for white to organically deplete a library in a long game, creating space for bow of nylea to act as a recursive tool.

This provides some great overlap for a number of things I want G/W to be doing, and some deeper places to go with those interactions.

The spells deck is still looking pretty underdeveloped. I don't think it needs too much infrastructure, just the ability to recur removal, and some spell based graveyard effects to inform people of its presence. I think I want it in U/R, and for it to be a kind of reasonable burning vengeance, where spent cards are coming back from the graveyard to control the board, and ultimately win the game (ala rise from the tides) rather than a deck focused on aggressive value generation via spell triggers.
 
Grillo_Parlante

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
So, now comes the hard part for anyone thats game.

At this point I feel that there is a reasonable value generation layer that is intermarried with either/or graveyard growth, and the bouncelands. This is the fair "value" portion of the cube.

So now the question becomes, how to develop the "combo" portion of the cube, which becomes unlocked, so to speak, by the act of fair value generation.

A few obvious pieces:



What other pieces are ideal for developing the yard as a sub zone for combo development? What cards change valuation in interesting ways depending on if they are operating on the cube's pre graveyard "value axis" or the cube's graveyard "combo axis."

What am I supposed to be doing with saffi, reveillark, and karmic guide?

I'm holding off on white enchantments until I make a decision about this card:

 
ahadabans

ahadabans

This isn't new ground, but I really like the cycling guys and how they interact with Karmic Guide. Cycle them early for cards/fixing and then get them back later. They also work really well with Spider Spawning / Living Death and seem like a nice identity/overlap for Abzan colors.



I'm not sure about Saffi. Evoke dudes feel like the easiest way to abuse it, but that's probably 3 colors and goes against the ETB mandate.

Brain Freeze is going pretty deep into combo, or are you looking at it more as a self mill option and/or Laboratory Maniac combo piece? I have a hard time building around this card, so I'm going go to leave this to others to work out.
 
Grillo_Parlante

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
Saffi, reveillark, and karmic guide can all pair up in various ways to create an infinite reanimation loop: just not sure what to point it at.

Brain freeze is a self mill card for reanimation, that happens to morph into a storm win con. Its one of the ways that storm and reanimator can be linked.

Basically, its a deeper version of thought scour or dream twist.

Cards for this portion of the cube shouldn't be focused on value generation.
 
Grillo_Parlante

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
Ok, to help clarify, take for example, this card:



In a normal value generation role, this card is not very exciting. Its ok, but not great. However, when you combine it with aggressive self mill, it can suddenly put 10+ lands onto the battle field in a turn, like a sort of graveyard scapeshift with a much higher ceiling.

Than the boring value generating landfall creatures suddenly can do a lot of damage in a turn.




Or maybe you use it to ramp a ton of mana, or I can go completely exotic and add felidar sovereign, than you can ramp up that mana, reanimate sovereign, sac it all to zuran orb and win, etc.

I'm looking for cute, creative, self mill or library depletion interactions to win the game with.
 
inscho

inscho

I've been working on overhauling my cube and have arrived at some very similar thoughts:
http://www.cubetutor.com/viewcube/61719

I've been building around a land base of :
full set of karoos
full sets of both cycle lands
full set of fetches

Having fetches, cycle lands, and karoos automatically set me down a path of hand and graveyard interactions. There's a few interesting archetypes to emerge, but perhaps my favorite is the hellbent deck:



When you're low on cards...these guys get really good:



A weird one from the vault:


Also any gameplay altering permanents help you keep your hand empty without limiting your options:




Alongside all the typically mediocre flashback, unearth, retrace, delve, and madness cards:





My list is starting to come together, but I'll be keeping an eye on the developments here. I'm thinking that I now want to bring in:



to combo with

 
Fulcrum

Fulcrum

This could just be trash but how do you feel about



It seems like it would be an interesting way to win the game if you're dumping a bunch of things into your graveyard, kind of like a more expensive Laboratory Maniac except that there's a possibility you don't win on the spot.

I also like how it plays with



which could be an interesting win condition on its own as well as a value generator. It seems like it would be fun trying to time when to fire off Psychic Spiral depending on how much your opponent is milling themselves and how fast you're milling yourself.

It also seems neat trying to decide whether you should aggressively be milling yourself with the orb to try to get a big Psychic Spiral early and risk your opponent not milling out or whether you should mill yourself slowly and let your opponent contribute to their graveyard a little more and put yourself at risk to whatever their gameplan is.
 
Grillo_Parlante

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
The one that you pay 2 colorless to recycle cards (aren't I a lot of help lol...)

I don't think they make the power cut, and I am using bow to fit that role, but I do have a bunch of splicers...
 
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