Card/Deck Flagstones of Trokair

[Jason Waddell]

Flagstones has almost no drawback. It's targettable by Wasteland, but even this doesn't seem advantageous for your opponent. But how can we get any value out of it?



Mostly while ramping. Harrow and Edge of Autumn go into overdrive with Flagstones on the board. It also makes both of these spells a far more potent top deck in decks running cards like:


Free food for:


If you run these cards, it breaks symmetry:


I didn't think it had much of a home in RipLab aggro, until I found this interaction:


The usual trick of casting Boom // Bust with a fetchland trigger on the trick works even better here, because we can curve into this on Turn 2, wiping the opponent's mana while giving Steppe Lynx an extra trigger and fetching up a dual land.

Additional interactions:

 

[FlowerSunRain]

Its even nuttier with Raze. Not only do you get an extra Lynx trigger and not lose a card, you still get to play a two drop. 0 mana stone rain + shock to the face.

 

[safra]

Its even nuttier with Raze. Not only do you get an extra Lynx trigger and not lose a card, you still get to play a two drop. 0 mana stone rain + shock to the face.

Have you found Raze to be playable outside of Flagstones synergy? Very curious to know if it's good for a Cube.

e: VVV
thanks!

 

[FlowerSunRain]

I don't play raze. I assume its good in all in aggro and useless everywhere else. If you absolutely can't have the opponent hitting 4 drops and you have no real plan to win after turn 5 other then topdecking burn, its a solid card.

 

[Jason Waddell]

I don't play raze. I assume its good in all in aggro and useless everywhere else. If you absolutely can't have the opponent hitting 4 drops and you have no real plan to win after turn 5 other then topdecking burn, its a solid card.

Yeah, I like that Boom // Bust has more interactions though. Always looking for more things for people to do with fetchlands.

 

[Chris Taylor]

I love all of the cards you mentioned but don't have a ULD. Is this thing worth a pick?

 

[Jason Waddell]

I love all of the cards you mentioned but don't have a ULD. Is this thing worth a pick?

It's worth a pick 13th - 15th in a pack. It will make your deck ~100% of the time you are playing white. Only real downside is if you run out of fetchable basics for things, but I doubt cube is the environment for that.

 

[blacksmithy]

I already run Flagstones, but after reading this article I really like Boom & Bust!

 

[Aoret]

Note the interaction between boom/bust and cascade. Whether you want that effect or not is up to you, but everyone should certainly be asking themselves if they're okay with it

(personally I think it's pretty sweet...)

 

[Chris Taylor]

Note the interaction between boom/bust and cascade. Whether you want that effect or not is up to you, but everyone should certainly be asking themselves if they're okay with it

(personally I think it's pretty sweet...)

Do you mean cascade as in Bloodbraid elf?

Oh right it lets you cast Bust for free ><

 

[Jason Waddell]

I think a homebrew Armageddon is fine to run. It'll happen rarely enough to be sweet.

 

[Aoret]

Do you mean cascade as in Bloodbraid elf?

Oh right it lets you cast Bust for free ><

Yeah, BBE or Shartless if you run him. I think it's certainly fine if you have to be in three colors to do it, and probably fine in GR as a sick two card combo as well. Now I definitely want to run this... D:

 

[Jason Waddell]

Other minor interaction: eat a targetted land with Gargaddon with Boom // Bust on the stack.

 

[Aoret]

I like that it's an extra (shitty) wildfire for the wildfire deck, if that's your cup of tea.

Related: I just decided to double up on cataclysm in my next revision because that card is fucking sweet.

Unrelated: Wadds, have you changed your stance at all on your idea of sorta stretching themes into other colors? You mentioned this a loooong time ago with the zombie archetype and used it to justify sketchy inclusions like fatestitcher. I ran all of your suggested cards for quite some time and never once saw "fatestitcher is a zombie" or "mirror entity is a zombie" matter. I think the more important question though, is: if we still think this is a cool idea in the first place, how do we balance the ability to splash out for something sweet against a color or color pair having an identity? If "life stuff" is a W, GW, and/or BW thing, so I really want to bleed that into additional colors (in the imaginary world where I could?)
I'm not examining any particular example in particular here, just the idea as a whole.

 

[Jason Waddell]

Unrelated: Wadds, have you changed your stance at all on your idea of sorta stretching themes into other colors? You mentioned this a loooong time ago with the zombie archetype and used it to justify sketchy inclusions like fatestitcher. I ran all of your suggested cards for quite some time and never once saw "fatestitcher is a zombie" or "mirror entity is a zombie" matter. I think the more important question though, is: if we still think this is a cool idea in the first place, how do we balance the ability to splash out for something sweet against a color or color pair having an identity? If "life stuff" is a W, GW, and/or BW thing, so I really want to bleed that into additional colors (in the imaginary world where I could?)
I'm not examining any particular example in particular here, just the idea as a whole.

I do still think it's a cool idea. I don't want the person who picks up a Gravecrawler to be in BR 100% of the time. The main problem is that, when operating outside the realms of custom cards and errata, there's only so much you can do. Kathari Screecher as a 3/2 with Zombie subtype got played and linked the deck to blue. It's like, Fatestitcher is nominally a zombie, BUT, it also needs to be a zombie that pairs well with the cards that need incentivizing (e.g. Gravecrawler). That's why things like Mikaeus the Unhallowed or Grave Titan shouldn't be counted in your list of "zombie support".

Right now I'm working on some Zombie / Humans cross tribal thing, and I still think it's important to have it as modular as possible.

The main issue was that Fatestitcher wasn't good enough. Full stop. We need most of our cards to be playable without explicit synergy, and fatestitcher wasn't even that playable with it. I saw it do cool things in Pod, and I did see Mirror Entity as a zombie be relevant occasionally, but...

I don't know, there's a lot to write on the topic. I don't really care about a color pair having an identity, so much as I care about there being sweet mechanical spaces for the player to explore that aren't "pre-built" for them. More colors increases that modularity.

I think a good example is maybe the Top of Library subtheme. All the cards that care about it are good (well, almost all, you're borderline Lorescale Coatl). It resides primarily in UG, but it has some interactions in Red and Black as well. I wish I could provide something in White but it's not really there.

This is definitely the right thread for this discussion.

 

[Laz]

Flagstones of Trokair - Legendary Land - Zombie

 

[James Stevenson]

Zombie Plains

 

[Chris Taylor]

Yeah whenever I had fatestitcher in all it did was tap opposing creatures

 

[ahadabans]

I don't really care about a color pair having an identity, so much as I care about there being sweet mechanical spaces for the player to explore that aren't "pre-built" for them. More colors increases that modularity.

I really like this message and have been slowly migrating in that direction as well. I went pretty far down the "guild theme" design route and it certainly is a way to do it, but I'm no longer convinced it makes the most versatile environment.

My modular cube experiment almost forced me down a different path because each module focuses on just one shard and one wedge. Any attempt to pigeonhole/focus (like what I did with guilds) came off as super heavy handed (more so than when I did it with guilds for some reason), and so I found that broader mechanics just work better. And the more I can spread those mechanics out, the better it seems to be. It's very much a WIP though, so in a few months I may have a completely different perspective.

 

[Chris Taylor]

Sometimes I wonder though.

Lets take for example, +1/+1 counters as a mechanical identity.
I've intentionally included cards in naya, but there's one card in black that would contribute well:

Great in the deck, great on her own, etc. I'm fine including her since even if she doesn't always go in the same deck as Abzan Falconer or Volt Charge, she's fine.

But what if that lone black card contributing to the +1/+1 counters theme was Oona's Blackguard?
It does open up deck space. Technically it also works naturally with a few black cards, like Drana above, or if you connect with a Carrion Feeder. There might even be one or two Rogues in my list.

But on the other hand, why am I stretching my mana to include the one black card that would actually be good in my deck? Yea sure I could probably add doom blade or whatever, but I've got white and red to get removal from, it's probably not really necessary.

Why am I including Blackguard? It'll most likely go 15th draft after draft, this is what we make fun of amateur cube designers for when they wonder why Isamaru does the same thing when it's the only white 1 drop in their 1080 card power cube.

I can change that by adding more +1/+1 counter cards to black, but that means taking out cards that play well with my current suite of black archetypes (Not every creature is kitchen finks after all), and you end up with Gravecrawler players lamenting that she's in the pack instead of Bloodghast or Bloodthrone Vampire or whatever it was that you took out that they actually wanted.

Maybe the answer is just run fewer identities in more places, but I don't like that, since a lot of my favorite archetypes are literally incompatible. A prowess deck wants Dragon Fodder, Pod Deck wants Mogg War Marshal, and neither deck will bother playing the other because of how the decks operate on a fundamental level. If you restrict which colors a mechanical identity is in (Like restricting Pod to BUG or something, for eg) then you can make sure the colors where Pod is and Prowess isn't have all the pod friendly guys, and vice versa.

If you tear up the rails, every color becomes this contested color where you end up doing the dragon fodder/mogg war marshal debate ten times over, and I feel like you end up either running too many colors to get on theme playables, or you get a "normal" deck running things it really shouldn't be, like a Pod deck with vampire nighthawk, or a Wildfire deck with Sulfuric Vortex

 

[Jason Waddell]

Maybe the answer is just run fewer identities in more places, but I don't like that, since a lot of my favorite archetypes are literally incompatible. A prowess deck wants Dragon Fodder, Pod Deck wants Mogg War Marshal, and neither deck will bother playing the other because of how the decks operate on a fundamental level. If you restrict which colors a mechanical identity is in (Like restricting Pod to BUG or something, for eg) then you can make sure the colors where Pod is and Prowess isn't have all the pod friendly guys, and vice versa.

You touch on a lot of great points here. I think a lot of the problem comes from this idea that we have "the one cube". Retail sets don't jam every idea at once. They shouldn't. There are examples of sets that have themes that are "literally incompatible" and we hold up many of them as failures.

I agree that synergy in theory isn't necessarily synergy in function, and that if we are going to connect a color to a mechanic we should do so in a meaningful way.

This is a very tricky question, and I imagine a good next step (for me at least, maybe for all of us) is to step back and look at the themes we are supporting. What cards overlap between them? What cards are anti-synergistic. Would the environment be better suited if we took out a theme? Or can we create more overlap between them?

I am worried. Delver and Champion of the Parish and Gravecrawler and Steppe Lynx all want different things. Are we putting too many dependencies here? At what point do you move too far away from "good stuff" to a point where everyone's strategic options are too stratified.

 

[Alfonzo Bonzo]

I'm not sure this is the best example. Oonas blackguard counts because it actually is/could be a key part of the theme, drana just gives you more fodder. The cards across colours should be a lynchpin to support the theme, not support it.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

Honestly, you can't really get away from color pair or shard/wedge identity. I think thats fatestitcher's ultimate lesson. When you lay out the sub type zombie, its mostly low power blue creatures, or a broad spectrum of black creatures. There are a few gold (g/b) options, and at the end of the day it will be a wedge identity regardless of the designer's intent.

Its just a bit harder to run mechanically isolated cards when you acknowledge that you are promoting a color pairing, and can honestly assess how deep or shallow the pairing is.

A big part of fate stiticher's problem is that it just dosen't have a deck to go into and costs too much mana in a format that powerful. Its not part of a synergy based strategy because their is no depth in blue, but at the same time its too weak to stand on its own. If you had a reasonable density of powered u zombies it might be different, but as it stands that color pair isn't a reality, and an exercise of simple mechanical distribution is not well situated to catch that issue.

I don't mean to seem so negative on this topic, but Its just kind of a well worn road at this point. Every time I try to put mechanical distribution first, I find myself desipointed with the results, as the mechanics always are subordinate to the realistic density possible in a color. The ultimate result is always color pairing, which can leave some cards mechanicaly isolated where the density didn't exist.

Some mechanical distribution I think is fine, and I do use it, but I don't see how it can ever actually exist as an alternative to pair identity.

 

[ahadabans]

If you tear up the rails, every color becomes this contested color where you end up doing the dragon fodder/mogg war marshal debate ten times over, and I feel like you end up either running too many colors to get on theme playables, or you get a "normal" deck running things it really shouldn't be, like a Pod deck with vampire nighthawk, or a Wildfire deck with Sulfuric Vortex

Funny you should mention specifically nighthawk in a pod deck, because I've actually done that. Which brings me too...

How far do you push archetypes and specific decks is not an easy question to answer. In a fully optimized pod deck, you would have better things to run than nighthawk which has no real synergy. But are fully optimized decks what most people end up drafting? My cube isn't that tuned and my group isn't that good at drafting even if it was (I'm certainly not - I afterall put nighthawk in my pod deck). That pod deck with nighthawk wasn't great but I won some games. And I poded into nighthawk a couple times because I needed the lifegain (pod was more a nerfed survival of the fittest in that deck). Super inefficient but sometimes you win ugly.

I guess there is probably truth to saying "everything in moderation". Some amount of archetype focus (whether mechanical or guild driven or whatever) is desirable to provide drafting direction. Too much and you can get "drafting on rails". I've always leaned more towards a looser draft simply because I really enjoy guys experimenting and mixing and matching. This is harder to do when you can easily assemble insanely powerful decks based on obviously pushed archetype support cards. IMO anyway.

It's probably also worth nothing that the people posting here are more than likely WAAAAYYYYYY more intimate with their cubes and with Magic in general than their groups. So we see all this subtle synergy and get all excited and stuff but half our drafters miss it completely (or worse misdraft it). As much as I dislike generic good stuff decks, I can't have them become an endangered species or I kill the cube experience for half my players that just want to draft some cards and play Magic will having a Corona.

 

[Diakonov]

There is a major difference between having a theme spread equally throughout a cube and having one that's centered in certain guilds/shards.

I've used this example before, but in my cube the artifact theme is mostly in U & R, then somewhat in B, and only a bit in G & W. A drafter could very reasonably play a UB splash white artifact deck. Obviously you don't want to shove a narrow artifact-theme enabler into white, but look at cards like Blade Splicer: it's good enough on its own and yet still contributes to a theme that's centered outside of its colors.

In Chris' post he rightfully explains that Oona's Blackguard can lead you down an undesirable path; but what about the aforementioned Drana? She is ideal in my mind, since she's fine on her own but happens to be great if she makes into a +1/+1 counter deck. This is exactly what I'm looking for: medium goodstuff with high reward if you pull off something weird.

Something else that I think we're disregarding is how heavy certain themes need to be. Prowess, for example, can be a light theme in your deck and still be perfectly serviceable. To use Chris' example again (sorry Chris, not intentionally targeting you. Just like you weren't intentionally bashing Mishra's Factory, the single most wonderful magic card ever conceived), lacking Dragon Fodder is not exactly going to make players be like "aw man, my prowess dreams are ruined!" but a pod deck missing out on a Mogg War Marshal might truly be bummed, because pod decks are much less forgiving in construction.

This is also why it's important to me that I have a certain threshold of goodstuff cards. I enjoy seeing beautifully constructed synergy machines, but it's also nice to have some traditional decks with several light themes contributing to the overall strategy.

I am worried. Delver and Champion of the Parish and Gravecrawler and Steppe Lynx all want different things. Are we putting too many dependencies here? At what point do you move too far away from "good stuff" to a point where everyone's strategic options are too stratified.

Though, on the other hand, Gravecrawler and Steppe Lynx fit in with a normal aggro deck, even if you aren't really capitalizing on their trademark synergies. Even Champion could potentially fit that bill: he doesn't really need (or warrant) a full "humans" theme, but rather just a few friends hanging around would make him worth it. Delver might be pushing it, perhaps.