First cube, 360, unpowered, Guild themed

[Fergus340]

Hi everyone, first time posting here, just trying to get a little insight on my first cube.
http://cubetutor.com/viewcube/9080 is my list at the moment, but I plan on making some changes including: adding some conspiracy, removing wurmcoil and sol ring due to the power.
The questions I have are:
- Should i replace the check lands or scry lands with the fetchlands?
- I need to support some more archetypes (making graveyard viable, RDW, milling etc) so I need some more burn, more white creatures, heavy hitting greens etc, need a few examples of good cards as I am unfamiliar with most cards pre Innistrad
- I would like to find a few easy to play combos to make the cube a little more interesting than just a beat down.
- I am attemping to drop down to 5/6ish of each guild and use either hybrid mana or big bombs for the guilds

I also have a notepad file of cards I felt may replace some of the others currently in there

If there are any glaring cards needing to be removed please let me know. I am not attemping to make a power cube and would eventually like to bring it up to around 450 cards, so please remember that. Thanks.

 

[Chris Taylor]

Random Thoughts:
-I love knight of glory/infamy but I hate pro black/white
-Is Norn's Annex doing anything?
-Siren of the Fanged Coast will never do what you want it to do, I warn you
-Is blustersquall being non-overloaded often? Maybe sleep is a better option? It is an instant, but I don't think that will end up being better usually
-Sinister Possession and Contaminated Ground seem real bad
-Shredding Winds: I didn't notice any fliers with more than 7 toughness. Maybe just plummet?

It looks interesting overall. Do you think you need all 5 swords? Sure they're good cards, but does midrange need that much assistance?

cutting down on the multicolor cards seems like a good idea. 8 is a bit much, but on the other hand if you really do want people to be playing a lot of colors this is one way to encourage that (Like alara block draft)

If you do want to take your cube in a more muilticolor friendly direction, fetchlands will certainly help. Since only one side needs to be in your colors, (Arid Mesa fetches Stomping Ground after all) they're really great because they're useful to more drafters, and fix mana the strongest of any lands ever (See modern/legacy manabases)

I think what would be really useful is to try and map out what each color and color pair's archetypes are supposed to look like. That'll help us suggust sweet cards to help them come to life, and help to find overlap cards so your cube's drafting process doesn't become boring. (Aside: Modern masters had this problem. The archetypes were so clearly laid out and had so few overlap cards, each pack had 1-2 cards you would even pay attention to, even if they were all playable in a deck somewhere)

 

[FlowerSunRain]

I'm going to not answer any of your questions and instead make a completely different suggestion you are free to ignore. The reason I make this suggestion is because your questions seem sort of vague, so I get the impression you aren't 100% where you want to go from here.

If you want to go with a guild theme, I say run with it. Instead of dropping the number of guild cards and replacing duals, just add even more manafixing and gold cards. If that's your theme, don't dilute it: embellish it, almost to the point that it seems like a parody of itself. I'm pretty certain it'll be technically awful at first, but that's ok, because it'll have novelty and novelty is fun enough to forgive those problems. From that exaggerated state you can find the obvious flaws to address, hopefully before the novelty wears off.

To go with this guild theme, I think you are dead on about cutting the powerful colorless cards: if the format is about building crazy manabases to cast lots of multicolor cards, whats the point if you just take colorless bombs?

Similarly, I think archetype support needs to be spread across as many colors as possible for the same reason.

If 1 or 2 color decks are too good, then you can just camp a guild, take all of the synergistic cards in those colors (along with lots of gold no one else wants) and call it a day and what fun is that?

Again, I didn't really answer any of your questions, so if this advice is completely useless, you can tell me and I won't be upset. If you don't like this direction, that seems fair. I just think we need to solidify a direction before we can start thinking about supporting archetypes, building in combos or deciding on color identities.

No one on Riptide actively manages a "multi-color theme" cube as far as I'm aware, but CML's Polychromatic and Laz's Scuttlemutt cube might have some ideas you can use. One of my friends has long thought about trying to figure out an "all gold" cube, but we've never undertaken the project as of yet.

 

[Eric Chan]

Welcome to the forums!

- Should i replace the check lands or scry lands with the fetchlands?

Both of them.

The best way to encourage people to go multicolour is by providing powerful untapped fixing, rather than shoving gold cards down people's throats. If you add a lot of gold cards without adequate dual land support, you'll just see them tabling over and over, as some guilds will go unrepresented every draft. I've seen this happen firsthand, and it's not pretty, either for the players or the designer. On the other hand, if the fixing is sufficient, people naturally will move into three colours, which means they'll have three guilds' worth of gold cards to choose from.

 

[Changling Bob]

- I am attemping to drop down to 5/6ish of each guild and use either hybrid mana or big bombs for the guilds

If your theme is guilds, don't do this. Instead, I'd suggest going ham on including hybrid cards, probably doubling (or more) up on them, as people will snag rakdos cacklers for their boros decks, etc. There's also the whole 'if your theme isn't at common, it's not your theme'. Because I'm a nerd I have a handy as-fan checker, and you have an as-fan of guild cards of about 3. Some cursory research indicates this is pretty high for a mechanic, but pretty low for a theme, especially considering that with 10 guilds, the as-fan of a specific guild is 1/3.

I just remembered that as-fan is just the ratio of interesting cards to pool size in cube. I have a different tool that does C/U/R/M distribution. Whoops. I'll make a note to myself of that.

Anyway, if you want guild theme decks to come together, you need a) a whole bunch more dedicated guild cards (gold/hybrid), b) also a whole bunch of cards that get better if you draft on theme (but are fine otherwise); off colour activations, off colour kickers, etc, and c) a tooooon of fixing. Eric's got you covered on this detail, but also I'd put in at least one cycle of colour fixing artifacts, and cut the big artifacts and especially the swords. The swords are just byes if you draw them against the right decks, which isn't fun.

Also, take some lessons from Ravnica limited: most people ended up in three colours, so put some (but not so many) three colour cards to draw players into it. Things like the two different kicker dudes from invasion, or the three colour charms, or go deep and run Cruel Ultimatum.

- I need to support some more archetypes (making graveyard viable, RDW, milling etc) so I need some more burn, more white creatures, heavy hitting greens etc, need a few examples of good cards as I am unfamiliar with most cards pre Innistrad
- I would like to find a few easy to play combos to make the cube a little more interesting than just a beat down.

Given what I've just said, on these two points, I'd recommend thinking about what you want each pair of colours to be doing, to fill them out that way. You've got a lot of 'good stuff' cards, which isn't a bad thing, but doesn't necessarily lend themselves to things like this. Sit and go 'I want Izzet to storm' or whatever (don't do that (probably)), and then start thinking about how you can pull that together. We can totally help with questions like 'hey, I'm looking for a red burn card that overlaps my themes in RG and RB, can you think of anything' for pre-Innistrad stuff, but you need to know those themes so we can help you out! There's a lot of burn spells in that range!

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

If that's your theme, don't dilute it: embellish it, almost to the point that it seems like a parody of itself. I'm pretty certain it'll be technically awful at first, but that's ok, because it'll have novelty and novelty is fun enough to forgive those problems. From that exaggerated state you can find the obvious flaws to address, hopefully before the novelty wears off.

Similarly, I think archetype support needs to be spread across as many colors as possible for the same reason.

I just think we need to solidify a direction before we can start thinking about supporting archetypes, building in combos or deciding on color identities.

I support the above 100%

---

Looking over the list it looks interesting. You mentioned graveyard/milling interactions, and there are a few cube lists you can look at for that. Here is a 360 unpowered, here is a 360 themed graveyard cube, this my 360 unpowered, and this is a useful brainstorming session in the theme.

In accordance with the above quoted exerts, both the mill and graveyard themes look rather isolated. There are so many great graveyard mechanics and interactions in mtg that I have no doubt you'll be able to get there on your own with that theme. However, with mill strategies you really don't want to leave them partially isolated, because their axis is just so different from everything else. My solution was to tie milling in with a library manipulation and graveyard theme, thereby making those effects desierable on a broader spectrum, and I provide a deep density of effects. I am sure there are other solutions, but thats more-or-less the challenge of designing for mill: how to give it broad appeal and proper density without throwing off the rest of your cube.

To quote another article:

I have always loved my Doorkeeper decks in Return to Ravnica. The problem with drafting a mill strategy in RTR was the only real mill card was Doorkeeper.

That is pretty much what you want to avoid with any theme in your cube.

My only other thoughts were that, like me, you run a generally weak removal suite. In that sense the path to exile and swords to plowshares look a little out-of-place. It might be better to run mortify and putrefy, so that the guild colors help prevent your players from splashing such powerful removal in any deck.

 

[FlowerSunRain]

I don't know if I'd call the removal suite "generally weak". Besides Path and Swords, Bolt is there, 2 of the 2-mana bolts, as well as 4 2-mana instant black kill spells and Dismember. There are some decent combat tricks in here, but with all the cheap, instant speed removal the blow out potential is really high so that I might be hesitant to maindeck, say, Aspect of Hydra.

That said, the removal quality is highly variable: going from Swords to Plowshares, Lightning Bolt and Dismember all the way down to Sinister Possession, Celestial Flare and Fall of the Hammer (which I've never seen in a cube and seems playable, if inflexible).

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

Yeah, I didn't see the lightning bolt in there for some reason when I skimmed it. You got the gist of what I was trying to say though: that there is a high degree of variability in the removal.

While on the subject, the black kill spells that really make me pause are doom blade, go for the throat, dismember and ultimate price due to how splashable they are. It seems really strange to see the inflexible victim of night there, and it is probably indicative of the need to solidify the cube's direction.

 

[Fergus340]

It seems really strange to see the inflexible victim of night there, and it is probably indicative of the need to solidify the cube's direction.

-Sinister Possession and Contaminated Ground seem real bad

Many of those kind of cards come from just not having a large enough selection of cards to pick from yet. After reading the comments here, I plan on removing the swords as I felt from the start they may be too strong (just like the divining top, wurmcoil etc)

I'm not sure where each guild is supposed to go in terms of archetypes, as this whole cube thing is new to me, I was thinking something along the lines of:

Azorius - Control
Dimir - Control/Mill
Rakdos - Sac/Aggro
Gruul - Ramp / Monsters?
Selesnya -
Orzhov - ??
Golgari - Graveyard
Simic - ??
Izzet - Instant / Sorceries matter
Boros - Weenie / Battalion ?

I'm just trying to keep it as balanced as possible. I just don't want each guild to have only that specific kind of card (dimir only having mill etc) It would be nice to play test it often to find the useless cards, but unfortunately, our group can only get together once every few weeks so it's nice to sort out the junk in between the times we play. I am also working on trying to eliminate cards that no one uses (aspect of the hydra, brute force, giant growth etc), but just struggle having ideas what else to put in place of it.

 

[FlowerSunRain]

I'm just trying to keep it as balanced as possible. I just don't want each guild to have only that specific kind of card (dimir only having mill etc)

The biggest problem we had when planning out the "all gold" cube was avoiding strong two color archetypes, which is vital for it to work. Part of the reason for this problem is that each two color combination isn't equally deep. Thankfully, since we were looking at doing this, we have been blessed by Innistrad (offcolor flashback!), Return to Ravnica (2 color paradise) and even Theros (a smattering of awesome gold cards) so its likely much more possible now.

If you're having problems thinking about particular archetypes that's fine. Right now I think just doing your homework and finding as many multicolor cards as possible and making and idealized list of all the good stuff you can find will probably be the best place to go. You can go slow, just pick one two color combination at a time. Gatherer searching can easily find you the gold cards, but there are other cards too that will fit.

If I were to start with White/Blue, you're list would start with the obvious, current cards:

Geist of Saint Traft
Sphinx's Revelation
Supreme Verdict
Lyev Skyknight
Dentition Sphere

Then you could go back and grab some older cards by searching W/U on gatherer:

Absorb
Windreaver
Azorius Guildmage
Plumeveil

Then, find W/U cards that aren't actually White/Blue, which is a little tougher

Sejiri Merfolk
Arctic Aven
Azorius Herald
Talisman of Progress
Feeling of Dread

Once you get that pool together, you can start thinking of what "in house" archetype to support, but also which cards that are completely unrelated to that archetype, but still awesome that will be helpful in tying to other colors. So, if you want U/W to be mainly a control color, you should grab Verdict, Dentition Sphere, one of the huge sphinxes and Plumeveil or whatever that all work together, but then also grab Sejiri Merfolk and Lyev Skyknight so aggro decks have a reason to jump in.

 

[Changling Bob]

Also bear in mind that your chosen mechanical identity won't be the only thing the colour's doing. UW is going to be about control for sure, but it'll also have some fatties for finishers, and some small dudes that can do early aggression (via detain) that you can pull over into RWu deck or similar. BU will (should) have some mill, but is also largely, I find, about being a colossal penis to your opponent, via discard, bounce, permission, etc, and getting damage through via bodies stapled to those effects.

Also also, don't worry about balance to start with. Its much, much easier to have a design and then fix it than it is to try and keep everything balanced throughout the process. Like FSR says, find your cool cards for each colour pair that do the things you want. If that comes to 20 cards, great! If it comes to 60 cards, great! Either way, you're going to want to pare it down to about 30 of each guild (300 cards), and then fill the last 60 cards with gap fillers, fixers, etc. Don't try and find 30 cards for each guild to start, as you won't know what you're doing, and I'll bet good money you want to double some stuff up once you figure out what themes you want in each place.

 

[Laz]

I think you need to be careful with your theme here. Placing a heavy emphasis on multi-colour cards does not push the theme of guilds, rather it pushes 3-4 colour decks that span multiple guilds and simply play all of the colours using the fixing that you are forced to add in order to support your heavy gold commitment. This isn't bad, (in fact, I love my cube which is built to do primarily this) it just removes the guild focus.
Compare say, Dragon's Maze or Full-block RTR to 3x RTR or 3x Gatecrash. In the former, you tended to end up in 3 colours. Gold cards are pretty unforgiving about the colours of the decks that they can be played in, which combined with the heavy gold-focus across all of the colour combinations meant that you often ended up being pulled into three colours just to get enough playables. RTR and GTC solved this problem by not supporting all 10 guilds. Only having 5 guilds in each set meant that the gold cards pulled people into the defined colour pairs, and by differentiating what those colour pairs wanted to do, each pair could be designed to provide an appropriate 'feel' for the guild it represented. I think if you want to push this guild theme, there are some merits to following the RTR example over the full-block example, and push a smaller sets of colour pairs than the full ten.
That said, I do have some fears about this causing decks to feel too same-y, but I am not sure if there is a way to avoid that if you want to emphasise specific colour pairs in which those colour pairs have some defined archetype.