Genericco's somewhat twisted peasant 360

[genericco]

So, I have a new cube.

http://www.cubetutor.com/visualspoiler/102364

360-ish
uncommon and common rarity, except for the shock / fetch manabase
Singleton, including lands
Not power maxed, somewhat flat power level, mostly to make design room for the big feature of the cube:

Somewhat twisted color pie

Green and blue are mostly aggressive. I try to keep cards that punish Welkin Terns to a minimum to keep blue's creature base viable. Green is attacking on the ground so there's an effort to keep GG creatures slightly above the curve. This last part, like a lot of the cube, is a work in progress

Red and black are decidedly not aggressive. Red has a bit of a spells-matter, spells recursion theme, but to keep up it also has creatures that ETB for value to play nice with B and W, the ETB recursion colors. Black plays a grindy creature-based role with most of the Blood artist and Gravedigger variants.

I couldn't really come up with a top-down theme that worked for the white section, so white does what it always does. Spot removal and white have both been under-performing lately to the point where I upgraded the 4cmc oblivion rings to actual Oblivion rings.

Jhessian Infiltrator and Maw of the Obzedat have been working as signposts for successful decks in the format. I've been happy with Rakdos as a control pair. With Fight with Fire and Fanning the Flames, red is the home for Thran Dynamo.

Token and ETB value strategies come together in just about every color pair. Cards that go wide with a single token type like Goblin Trenches can run into Echoing Truth, Echoing Decay, Bile Blight and the tapped-out Marrow Shards.

Strong Picks

Spoiler

Underperformers

Spoiler

Sweet two-card combos

Spoiler

& /
& & co
&
&
I know, I just had to fit Undying Evil or Supernatural Stamina in here somewhere

Anyway I'd love to hear feedback or suggestions from anyone who made it this far.

Cheers
Generico

 

[CaptnIrony]

So, I have a new cube.

Looks cool. I like the colour shift. It might just be me, but I can't see anything in your

Strong Picks
Underperformers
Sweet two-card combos

sections. The tags don't seem to work. I've also found out recently, if you separate them with new lines (enters), you can put multiple cards in the "\

 

[Alfonzo Bonzo]

It might just be you, I can ewe them fine.

 

[CaptnIrony]

Fixed :/

 

[genericco]

Here's a brief draft report from a 3-man draft last night.

I drafted GB mid-range, a bunch of green attackers, Diabolic Servitude to bring them back, with Rancor and Song of Freyalise to help them push through.

We only played three matches total. I lost to the best deck from the draft, a Mardu control deck with some really strong cards: Jagged Lightning and Fanning the Flames, Goblin Trenches with Maw of the Obzedat and Falkenrath Noble. Midnight Haunting also did work for him. Trenches is totally coming out.

Mardu tokens didn't win the whole thing however, it got mana screwed a game and out-raced a game in the match versus UW aggro. A turn-one drifter il-dal improbably did the heavy lifting.

There was a sweet moment where Mardu tokens cast Glimmerpoint Stag targeting aggro's Seal Away to rescue a blocker, but still had to attack that turn to race shadow, so Seal Away at least had a target on the way back down. I tend to forget that it's not just Reclamation Sage that interacts with Oblivion Ring type cards.

------------

There's a design tension in this still-new cube with the one-for-one removal. The four mana o-rings just weren't getting it done, and white needed a little boost, so I went minus stuff like Hieromancer's cage, Ixalan's binding, and Afterlife, plus Banishing light, Oblivion Ring, Cast Out, etc.

Sunlance may actually be the best of the lot, and the most dangerous kind of card to start adding to the enviro. When defenders can double-spell as effectively as the attackers there's not much reason to build an attacking deck. So while it may seem like an Oblivion Ring format would logically be a Fatal Push format, I don't want to go there yet.

The other design question is, how much further can I dilute the colors for the sake of sweet cards? U and G were once even more explicitly aggressive, with only stuff like Rise from the Tides for the grixis spells deck being off plan. Now there are recent additions like Squirrel Nest that you don't want in a lot of base green decks and can't splash for.

Can the attacking colors really afford to have two-drop slots go to non-attackers like Dryad Greenseeker? Right now the green and blue two drop section is all attackers. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure, as Colonel Kurtz would say. How can I break the seal on that? So I haven't ordered it yet.

 

[genericco]

Here's the jeskai tokens deck that a newer drafter put together. It's my favorite deck the cube has produced so far.

jeskai storm from CubeTutor.com

I got to play two games with it after, got to make a big turn. Something like mom hug -> search -> seething song -> voice -> grapeshot -> warrens.

Sadly, the madness synergies are kind of hard to line up. You need the outlet, the madness card, and a good target, when you could just hardcast the thing for 1RR without the hoops and timing restrictions.

If I break singleton I may try extra copies of fiery temper, or I may just need to accept that madness is one of those 'lots of work for not much payoff' mechanics.

Empty the Warrens, as sweet as it is, is definitely in that category. It wouldn't be well positioned in the cube even if there weren't token hate in the form of Echoing Truth, Echoing Decay, Bile Blight and Marrow Shards.