Genericco's Sibling cube

[genericco]

Hey all, this is my cube. We draft it about once a week, usually heads-up, sometimes three or four players. Head to head drafts are done ten packs of ten face-up, which leads to a lot of cutting and countering what your opponent is drafting.

It's my first list, and after a lot of revision I'm pretty happy with the drafts and the games it produces. I feel like it could always be better, though, and if we ever vary the format by adding more players (or simulating it with stuff like glimpse drafting) I'm worried the color and archetype balance might not hold up. Here's what I'm specifically looking for in future cuts/adds:

Keep Aggro Alive
I feel like every time I add a strong card that isn't specifically for fast decks it makes fast decks struggle to keep up. Having huge bombs in the environment like Consecrated Sphinx, Elesh Norn and Sheoldred, Whispering One makes every aggro plan without a fireball to draw into a risky venture.

The density and flexibility of red removal might also be why I worry that aggro has become a trap, or these might be reflections of my own draft profile; I'm a pretty inexperienced player and tend towards removal-heavy control strategies.

In any case, I'm presenting unsolved questions to you lot I've been asking such as, "What supports white aggro without being even better in mid-range or token decks?" and unasked ones like, "please count the cards that screw over aggression to see if there are too many".

There are some design ideas I have that I won't belabor (like the cycles of transforming and two-color planeswalkers and the 'filler' removal alongside to the good stuff). I'd rather show groups of cards the way I think of them.

Favorites
These are all cards where I'm happy that I added them to the cube. Of the cards in my list, these are the ones I would spotlight for possible inclusion in other lists:

Spoiler

Destiny has become a first pick and a reason to go into white. Wargear is just lovely.


Mindshrieker's in both my cube and the other cube I draft. We haven't had this fellow come up in a while, but when he does he usually outperforms his pick order and makes for tight games. More or less the 'blue fireball'.


Plenty of ETB effects and utility creatures worth copying. The most recent target was Grim Poppet.


Blue creatures that hold their own.





Just some black cards that I love.

Demonic Rising has become a staple win condition, near Desecration Demon as a signpost for .


Rabblemaster is often a first or second pick.




Surprise factor is always nice. Best in matchups where removal depends on toughness.


Cute cards.


Some artifacts that have earned their spot.

And now for some of the weaker parts of the cube...

Super Situational Cards
I think it's okay to have a few of these, but they're also candidates for being cut.

Spoiler

Fodder for cheat-into-play decks.


Rarely make it into decks. I have pulled off each of the last two, though, and they are both glorious to see.


Might be better off with Wildfire?


Recent adds.


No-one would miss this.

More Late Picks
In heads up drafts, I'll try and remember to write down first picks and last picks, for science. Here are some barrel-scrapings from the top of my head in the meantime:

Creatures

Spoiler

All basically below average...

Non-Creatures

Spoiler

Nothing essential here or even necessarily in line with what I want from these colors.

Double as discard/yard fill tech, in theory.

Considering cutting this since I've added Sparkmage's Gambit.

Power level's just a bit too low.

Broken Crap
On the other side of the spectrum is the candy, the lottery jackpots, the juiced-up power.

Spoiler

Probably pick one of the whole cube. I keep telling myself, "it dies cleanly to Doom Blade", but that never seems to happen when I play it. Instead it sticks around a turn or two, putting the game effectively out of reach for any opponent.


Amazingly not always first-picked.






The best of the reanimation package.

Other popular first-picks are the huge creatures of green, white and black, wrath effects, acceleration and any-color mana rocks, removal, and auto-include artifacts. It's not clear what would be picked if the first pack had a mox, Solemn Similacrum, Spellskite and Lotus Cobra, for instance. It's also become a competition between a friend and I to take Cultivate and Kodoma's Reach over flashier, probably stronger cards, just for the satisfaction that comes with that level of fixing and fetching.

That's probably enough for an initial tour. Next time we draft it I'll jot down some notes about the drafts, decks and matches, and if I come up with any changes, I'll update with what convinced me. Thanks in advance for reading and your comments.

 

[sigh]

Wow, quite a list! A nice solid powered up list, generally speaking. That by itself will make aggro's job very hard. When your midrange deck can be slamming down moxs and blooms and monoliths, a nice fast and fair white (or red or black) deck will be slightly outclassed I'd think. To give them a chance in this environment, the low drops might slowly have to become slightly less tinkery and more to the point. Maybe like...
->
->
->

And so on. Only one 3 power 2 drop I can see, and you've got Cathedral Membrane and Serene Master. Another potential avenue for exploration. One of those could become wall of omens cuz wall is awesome.

Your three drops are A+, four drops mostly also. I've noticed there is a little bit of a wide power band overall high sentinels of arashin <-> sublime archangel for instance, or Elesh Norn vs.... most things.

One thing that helps WW along is team pump, which will help tokens but those archetypes often blend well. The usual suspects. Is there a reason for 0 Planeswalkers?


Another couple things that help WW aggro is evasion and... evasion (spell evasion). What I mean is that delaying and tripping up your opponent is often the correct thing to do to push the aggression. Time spent fiddling with legacy death and taxes gives you much pause on this topic. Here are some:

Thalia also counts here.

Tying white more into spells also is a big thing for WW. Getting off disruption like oblivion ring, journey to nowhere while pounding in with:


Another kind of spell that can be capitalized on (grafted wargear):


Thoughts just on white aggression. One, final thing that helps aggro, but I don't recommend only mention because it's your choice: reducing cube size. Basic reasoning is that control decks can be a menagerie of levers and cogs, while aggro of any kind requires this kinda tower of construction that has to happen in a certain way. That tower is easier when the pieces are easier to find (larger percentage), while control will happily cobble itself together no matter the size.

 

[sigh]

Continuing on my look through your list, I went to looking at the deck list section, which hasn't been flushed out fully yet. There was an interesting theme, however. I noticed that 2 of the three lists were a UR list that brings to light some of the issues and uphill battles fast aggro will be facing.

ur from CubeTutor.com

This is a nice list, but a few cards in particular that I want to look at are:
goblin guide
pyrokinesis
fireball
and
ancestral recall
time walk
archeomancer
mox sapphire


This deck is not strictly an aggro deck, but it is taking key pieces of that deck, and adding them to a windmill slam of midrange face-punches. The prospect of a T2 Purphoros into T3 Siege Gange makes the less exciting prospect of just dudes that get into that redzone... less exciting. And the fact that it can use aggro pieces makes the chances of aggro reaching that tower they need ever less likely. Now, this could be the face of the "aggression" in U and R, namely punishing spell-matters. This seems to be that to a tee. To that end

Are huge. Cards like realmwright and valley dasher can easily find themselves leaving for spell-matter support. Much like the post above, often "aggro" can't find it's home in the heart of RDW and the like, because it's almost immediately outclassed. Here the aggression rides on coattails of disruption and draw.

On the topic of aggro hate, a couple cards that make aggro cry:
A really rough and hard to remove tax on wide decks, that comes down early and funcitons without input from there on.
Why little dudes when I can big dudes???
Modern sideboards use this effectively against tuned burn decks. This'll be very effective against cube aggression.
I'm not saying remove these in particular, but there definitely are pieces and cogs in the list that make "go dudes go" strategies fairly difficult. Is that bad? That part is up to you.

 

[genericco]

Thanks Sigh for the input and ideas. It's a lot to chew over but it makes me want to make some edits before the next draft.

There's some background to the cube I left out in the original post. It started out as even higher-power and I've been gradually removing the cards I feel are too strong, too oppressive, too obviously first-picks. So while that UR draft with seven bots still represents an archetype I'm worried that aggro can't compete with, it does have a lot of cards that have since been cut. Cards that I felt were excessively unfair like Ancestral Recall, Pyrokensis, and Treachery have been retired. Most recent retiree is Myr Battlesphere, for the crime of outclassing the other colorless ramp payoffs cards.

The overpowered UR control deck is still out there, with efficient red removal and blue control magic to punish anything a fair deck is trying to do, but those cards are highly contested, and in a heads-up draft you can plan around your opponent's archetype if you know what it's going to be.

In any case, Timely Reinforcements might have to go. I like it generally, but it has no place in a deck that wants to be the early aggressor, instead punishing those decks severely. Removing it might help balance the scales between white you want to splash for a control deck and white that gives more broadly useful tools like single-target removal and bounce tech. That and the card is one of my earlier and uglier proxies

Heck, I could probably just swap it out with Thalia. On second look her effect is really attractive.

Propaganda I'll keep a close eye on. It was not especially effective in its most recent deployment, but is a monster against honest decks that just want to chew you down with gravecrawlers or what have you.

I'm not sure what I'd replace it with, though. The blue 3 spot is a little bare, with Trinket Mage and Serendib Efreet as the only ones I'm picking high. I don't know if we're serially overlooking Timetwister, as it's fallen to about middle-pack status and sometimes gets referred to as 'the shitty Wheel of Fortune'.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

sigh makes some good points here! I'ld like to add that fast mana is hard on aggro as well. One of my first list featured Coalition Relic and Worn Powerstone, which consistently would enable midrange and control decks to power out six drops on turn four, completely shutting down the opposing aggro deck with an ]Inferno or Frost Titan, for example. All of these cards have left my cube by now, in fact, I also cut 2 cmc mana rocks to avoid t3 Damnations. That may be a bit extreme though. What you can do, however, is make sure midrange and control at leat have to put in some work to get past the ealy game. Much the same philosophy can be applied to super defensive cheap cards like the Propaganda and Timely Reinforcements sigh already mentioned. Room is precious in a cube, so ideally the low drops are playable in most any deck, but of extra value to aggro decks. Suggested cut:
>

 

[genericco]

Yeah, Grim Monolith is the easiest rock to abuse right now. It could be cut on power reasons alone.

If I were to add Hedron Archive, would I still need Thran Dynamo? I've liked the balance point on that card, but I may have one or two too many in the mana rock section:

 

[sigh]

Agree with Onder on this. Colorless fast mana = little reason to not use it to make your deck into an aggro deck just by virtue of speed advantage. This effect can easily be focused into green, both giving it an identity and helping stop midrange brawl fest. Unless you want that.

you forgot some rocks, btw (disregarding if your paper version is different than what I'm looking at):


kinda


Your cube does have quite the mana rock section. I could honestly see all the mox becoming like... talisman of blah or fire diamond etc. They.... kinda are really strong. They should be automatic first picks almost all the time, regardless of pack and color, usually. Even if it's out of color, its a land that says
": Add to your mana pool. Ignore the lands per turn rule"