Thing is: I have made decks in the past. Either the preconstructed ones or ones where the decks did not have more than 6 rares, no card more than three times and uncommens/rares not more than two of the same. Thing is, they were much more boring than expected compared to the preconstructed ones. Anyone advice how to proceed?
General Favorite cube cards from the late 90/early 2000s
- Thread starter gaytransmulldrifter
- Start date
Two things
1. I want you to know that all the cards you will be including will have been designed with those rules in mind. I think it will be strange to play strictly with cards that suddenly don’t work the same way they were intended.
2. It’s not 90th rules only. It is also 2009 rules. Ruled get changed all the time with every set. But the major one happened in 2009 where combat damage left the stack among other things. You could call the rules 1996-2003 rules as per the format restrictions.
Onderzeeboot
Ecstatic Orb
I have had fun building decks like this in the past by following the following rules/guidelines.
- Block/set/world decks only (so no combining cards from across the timelines/universes, personally I found decks with a strong identity more fun to pilot)
- Choose a color pair or triple, and build around its draft identity
- 5 x 2 (nonland) uncommons (start with the uncommons, as they will form the core identity)
- 5 x 1 rares (pick rares that add a little oomph to the identity)
- 7 x 3 commons (fill out the deck with commons that shore up weaknesses or play into the core identity)
- 24 lands (lands don't count against the rarity count, but do adhere to the amount of cards based on their rarity, so common lands x 3, uncommon lands x 2, rare lands x 1; include fixing if possible, limit the amount of utility lands)
For example:
Innistrad Block UBR Flashback
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This deck tries to dig for either Burning Vengeance or Homicidal Seclusion to finish off the game. In the meantime you are bouncing and burning creatures to avoid certain death
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Onderzeeboot
Ecstatic Orb
Aw butts, now I want to make more of these!
Odyssey Block UG Madness
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Onderzeeboot
Ecstatic Orb
Invasion Block Necra Beatdown
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If you have any pairs of decks that you know from experience are fun to play and fairly well matched with each other, I'd be interested. I think this is pretty valuable.
Onderzeeboot
Ecstatic Orb
It's been ages since I got to play these, since everybody is only interested in EDH nowadays (which I also like, but still). I used to use these decks to get a feeling for a set, e.g. see how the Ravnica guilds measured up to each other (the second time we visited there), and took apart most of them long ago. So, in short, I don't really remember which ones were well matched. The decks I loved the most, though, were those silly archetypes like the Grixis Flashback deck from Innistrad. I imagine you could also have a lot of fun with Modern Horizons decks!
Edit: That is to say, these decks play a lot like improved and focused limited decks, so decks from the same era generally play best against each other for power level reasons.
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I have followed something similar, but having most cards double or triple let to repetitive games.
I have been looking at the pre-constructed decks of urza block and oddessey. These decks had 2x1 rares, between 11 and 14 uncommons (urza’s saga), and at least 20 different non-land cards (but more often 23 to 24). Some of the cards were 4 offs in the deck (The plague deck with pestilence), but mostly 2 offs with a lot of one offs.
Thing is, the decks need to be balanced with each other. Another thing is that allowing multiple rares is likely a tad boring.
I like your focus on identity, so I think I will start from that and go from there.
Alara Block Exalted (with special guest Rampant Growth, from the contemporary M10)
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I think you're always going to lose a lot of the fun by taking away the agency in drafting and deck building. You also lose the huge majority of the variation, which can lead to things getting stale much faster. With this loss comes an increase in quantity of cards required to achieve any amount of variation as you add more and more decks.
Jumpstart provides some decent variance by mashing decks together, at least.
Sometimes you do not want to draft (yes, the horror I know). With jumpstart you get variance, but often you just mash two themes together. That is a different kind of variance than with a deck of 60 cards that follow one or two themes over all the cards. If one adheres to each nonland card 4 times then there is not much variance in the deck. However, if it is singleton then there is a lot of variation without having to change the deck (I.e. jumpstart).
Knowing myself, I likely want something which is not possible.
This is where I always end up when I design something that isn't a draft.