General Fight Club

Eric Chan

Eric Chan

Hyalopterous Lemure
Staff member
Chris Taylor said:
I feel like the 3rd card will usually be a land though (Unless it's like said legacy deck and it's what, 10 lands?), so paying an additional U to up the card quality significantly is nice in my book
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After playing a land light, UR spells matter / tempo deck tonight, I can safely say that if the third card could always be guaranteed to be a land, that would be fantastic. The deck runs tight on mana as it is, and getting that fifth or sixth land in the lategame to open up some options gives you some much needed breathing room. I know that I was always struggling to find mana to kick a Burst Lightning, or to cast Brimstone Volley alongside another spell.

These decks are the same ones where {U} versus {U}{U} matters the most, too.
 
Lucre

Lucre

MCMcEmcee said:
The gap between U and UU is bigger than the gap between draw 3 and look at 7 pick 2 imo
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I'd be inclined to agree but I am getting supes scared about how impossible it's getting to play draw go with any effectiveness in cube. Like, you need to do a good deal of trading to get your expensive concentrate into some sort of obscene divination, and not having played with the cards, I worry about cube decks ability to play that spell without wasting more than half a turn in this "New World Order" of creature design, and in a post deathrite and scavenging ooze world.

Tapout control relying on concentrate feels like it's gonna be super wonky in an environment filled with 3 power 2 drops, ETB effects and guys that avoid summoning sickness. Throw in a lot of sorcery speed removal and you've got to wonder when these decks are getting to fill their graveyards with counterspells etc.

I do think I like cruise more than big impulse, but I think it might not be as good if you have more journey to nowhere's than doomblades, and your blue decks are more manowars and sea's and sphinxes than brainstorms and counterspells and tinkers (though tinker is probz a misleading example).
 
Jason Waddell

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
Draw go playability likely depends on your density of instants. Sorcery speed removal makes counterspells worse. But I think the trend is likely true regardless, just accentuated in Eric's cube.
 
Lucre

Lucre

You also just have fewer opportunities to trade etc if you are playing stuff as sorceries because your mana will be tied up in inconvenient ways more often and you might encounter timing problems and missed opportunities. It's weird the more I play with sorcery alternatives in different formats the more I realize how much deeper the difference is in play dynamics.
 
MCMcEmcee

MCMcEmcee

It doesn't really take a lot to enable Cruise for better-than-Concentrate/Divination. Fetches do a lot on their own, any random instant or sorcery gets you one step closer, any random chump block or trade with a "real" creature, etc. Looters are great, Compulsive Research/Thirst For Knowledge are great, Faithless Looting and Frantic Search are very efficient at powering out a Cruise, etc. Then stuff like Forbidden Alchemy, ramp sorceries, cycling cards, etc.
 
Chris Taylor

Chris Taylor

Contributor
I think you guys might have convinced me. It doesn't hurt that one is common and the other is rare either :p

Man stupid birthing pod. Do you guys have trouble supporting both pod witch is super creature heavy and these spells decks which are basically the oppisite? I fee like every time I add something like midnight haunting I'm taking away from one archetype and giving to another.

I love playing pod though.
 
Eric Chan

Eric Chan

Hyalopterous Lemure
Staff member
I think there might be room for both, actually. I'm sold on Treasure Cruise in the high-velocity blue tempo decks; the next time I give a slower blue control deck a whirl, I'll see whether or not I would've liked to have had a Dig Through Time in place of any of the card draw spells.
 
Lucre

Lucre

I like the idea of cutting down on pods. Pods let you put creatures into the graveyard which isn't so bad for cool delve trix. But pods themselves are rather dull draws in combination and lead to decks that perform very consistently when drawn all the time. I'd say going over 3 pods in your small cube is probably silly, there's a lot of ways to make decks like that work with alternatives that add more diversity.

I do agree, the spell velocity + graveyard themes have a lot of trouble with some of the more popular modern cube design routes. I'm fascinated to see what becomes of the human deck in coming years. Supporting aggro is also kinda hard while trying to support both spells matter and control. Has anyone else noticed this?
 
Grillo_Parlante

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
I support both, though I don't support birthing pod as deeply as your list does, which might account for the difference in experience. The two decks occupy very different parts of the cube space. My pod decks are also less about ETB triggers.

Anyways, I'm never really happy with the way I describe these U/R/w aggro-control decks. Thankfully, the new U/R/W "tempo" decks in standard provide something of an idea.

You have to go to 1:22:30 in the recording, but both game 2 and game 3 show how the deck works in principle. In game 2, he has the "burn draw", where he just slams a few times with mantis rider, using it as a source of repeated damage to bring the guy into burn range and kill him. In game 3, he gets the "control draw," where he uses his burn spells as spot removal, anger of the god's comes in as a sweeper, he has counterspells, and he also has a source of card advantage that synergizes with the resource expenditure (dig through time). The deck has a very explosive early game, but can also play a slow game.

Our decks are delver rather than mantis rider, and flashback cards rather than dig through time or treasure cruise; but the principle stays the same.

Also, its interesting that he opted to run dig through time in that list rather than treasure cruise. In that game 3, it looks like dig helped him win a little bit faster. Are three average cards in your deck better than 2 cards you know you want? And is that worth paying one extra blue for?
 
Diakonov

Diakonov

Grillo_Parlante said:
Also, its interesting that he opted to run dig through time in that list rather than treasure cruise. In that game 3, it looks like dig helped him win a little bit faster. Are three average cards in your deck better than 2 cards you know you want? And is that worth paying one extra blue for?
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It depends on the deck, but generally I think it's better to pay the extra blue to get what you want--at instant speed.

This reminds me of the debate about whether it made more sense to run 4 Standstill or 4 Brainstorm in Vintage Fish circa 2005. The conclusion seemed to be that Standstill was better, because a deck like Fish was so consistent that it really just wanted to draw more cards. It usually wasn't "looking" for anything in particular.

So, I think the question of which is better depends a lot on the cube deck. If your deck is more reliant on exploiting certain synergies, then I think Dig is definitely the way to go.
 
Grillo_Parlante

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
I know I've seen a few people reference this, but if you want to see the new U/R legacy delver list running treasure cruise in action, check out here at 34:40:00 for the final match of the recent SCG open.

Treasure cruise seemed amazing, and he was able to cast it multiple times. Monastery swiftspear seemed good, though part of why it was in the deck was because delve makes grim lavamancer pretty bad.

I like both these delve cards, they seem like they would really challenge the player both in the draft and during deck construction. Delve seems to be pretty forgiving too if you error a bit in deck building.
 
Lucre

Lucre

Omg are these cards horrible with snapcaster lololol

"oh snapcaster is the best card I revealed and I just have this shitty 8 cost hand filler in my yard because I ate by bolt and terminate and brainstorm to get it in there...."
 
Dom Harvey

Dom Harvey

Contributor
Treasure Cruise vs. Dig Through Time is interesting for Cube because it's (quasi-)singleton. The homogeneity -> drawing cards is better argument doesn't come into play as much because you often have one or two bombs that you're hoping to draw and your cards do different things; you can't really build a linear deck like Burn or Draw-Go in Cube.

Also, if you look at the Legacy decks playing Cruise they consist almost entirely of free or 1-mana spells and have a very low land count. As a result, the one mana difference between Cruise and Dig matters a lot because a. you have fewer mana sources to cast Cruise/Dig with and b. that one mana can probably cast a spell that you're finding with Cruise/Dig. Most Cube decks have nowhere near that many cheap spells and you're likely to have made most of your land drops by the time you're casting either of them on turn 4-6, so Dig will often be functionally as cheap but more effective.
 
Onderzeeboot

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
I thought as much. Zombie Leech is certainly the superior creature type to Cat Demon, but I like the resiliency and late-game inevitability of the Deathdealer. I wouldn't mind my opponent topdecking leech on turn 8, but Deathdealer? Eek!
 
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