General Getting Started - The Core of A Cube

Karn Cuberated

Karn Cuberated

Jason Waddell said:
As Onderzeeboot said, drafting your cube is the most valuable feedback you can get. You can theory craft to a certain degree, but a lot of your assumptions or worries will be stripped away once you actually start playing.

One of the great things about a sacrifice theme is that you can build it with cards that are generally independently appealing. This is a good quality, because it provides a few things:

a) you can draft cards from this theme without fully committing to it
b) you can use sacrifice effects as a subtheme in another deck
c) most importantly, since there is competing demand for cards in the sacrifice theme, your decks will look different every time. It's not just the storm drafter collecting the storm cards, but everyone will be cutting into these cards to some degree



These cards will get put in decks because they're good cards. But, on top of that they have lots of nifty interactions. Then, if you have a lot of sacrifice effects, you can take one of a few "dedicated support" cards like Goblin Bombardment.

The sacrifice theme is a nice one because your players can audible to an aggro or midrange deck, but a dedicated sacrifice deck is quite a joy on its own to play.
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I guess you described sth similar to this in your article about life gain in cube: we run cards which are independently nice and fit well into other decks, but which can also form their own theme/subtheme, if we want them to. I thought I understood this thing, but I've just realized that I haven't been fully using this approach in designing archetypes. Fortunately, I still have time to do it:) Thank you!
 
Jason Waddell

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
Yeah, that was the idea behind Lifegain. I think in the end the archetype had too many cards other drafters didn't want, which I didn't realize initially.
 
Karn Cuberated

Karn Cuberated

I don't remember if I asked about that already, but how can I make sure that all archetypes in my cube are equally supported at the stage when I have about 10 free slots in each colour?:) It seems to me that I worked at everything we wanted to support, but I still have place. And I don't know what to add (except 30 lands) to finish the list.
 
Jason Waddell

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
Karn Cuberated said:
I don't remember if I asked about that already, but how can I make sure that all archetypes in my cube are equally supported at the stage when I have about 10 free slots in each colour?:) It seems to me that I worked at everything we wanted to support, but I still have place. And I don't know what to add (except 30 lands) to finish the list.
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How many land slots do you have?

If you have lots of extra room I would start looking for cards that are useful to multiple archetypes you support. If different drafters want the same card for different reasons, often that creates a good draft dynamic.
 
Karn Cuberated

Karn Cuberated

Finally, I've added 40 lands to our cube. I tried to give guilds the lands they need (according to deck types which are hidden inside). Though this way is controversial, I see one way to avoid the problem of drafting, say, only Control in Azorius if there're only lands that support control: if people think, for example, that they could draft a great Aggro in Azorius, but they didn't find necessary fixing lands, we'll replace 1-2 controlish lands with sth more contributing to Aggro.
The other thing we doubt about are "creature lands" (maybe, manlands?). They're wrathproof, it's good for Aggro support. On the flip side, they ETB tapped, which is not so nice for such decks. Maybe, if there's enough fast fixing for a colour pair, such a land could be included?

If you want, here's our cube available for drafting: http://www.cubetutor.com/viewcube/98102
Your feedback is important for us, too. To leave it you can go to this thread: https://riptidelab.com/forum/threads/the-modern-utopia-cube.1933/
Thank you in advance!
 
Karn Cuberated

Karn Cuberated

Good day, folks!
I pointed out that Aggro decks in our cube tend to curve out on 3-drop pile: there're only two or three 4-drops, they are typically "packleaders": Hellrider, Brutal Hordechief and so on. So, it means, that turn 3-4 are crucial for Aggro in our environment?
And the next question flows out of the previous one: does it mean that we should design Control and Midrange decks in the way so that they wrath the board on turn 4-5? I heard that cube designers should always think about such things, but I don't know which speed of reaction from Control will be healthy for the dynamics which formed in our cube. I guess, it would be interesting enough to make them able to wrath at the point where they're low on HP, but not dying to 1 burn spell.
 
Onderzeeboot

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
This is an excellent question, in fact one I have answered for myself. For my cube I decided that I didn't want a wrath before turn 4, the interesting thing is that this not only had impact on my choice of wrath effects, but also on my mana acceleration! Think about it, Azorius Signet into Wrath of God means you can wrath on turn 3 in traditional cubes. I started with increasing the cmc of my wrath effects to 5, but I followed that up with increasing the cmc of my mana rocks to 3 as well. This preserves the natural sequence of mana rock into wrath effects in my control decks, but delays that sequence by a full turn. I'm happy to say both the mana rocks and the wrath effect get played aplenty. Increasing the cmc of either will do the trick as well, so you'll have to play around a bit with your cube to get a feeling for what works, all I can say is I like where my cube ended up in this regard.
 
Karn Cuberated

Karn Cuberated

Onderzeeboot said:
This is an excellent question, in fact one I have answered for myself. For my cube I decided that I didn't want a wrath before turn 4, the interesting thing is that this not only had impact on my choice of wrath effects, but also on my mana acceleration! Think about it, Azorius Signet into Wrath of God means you can wrath on turn 3 in traditional cubes. I started with increasing the cmc of my wrath effects to 5, but I followed that up with increasing the cmc of my mana rocks to 3 as well. This preserves the natural sequence of mana rock into wrath effects in my control decks, but delays that sequence by a full turn. I'm happy to say both the mana rocks and the wrath effect get played aplenty. Increasing the cmc of either will do the trick as well, so you'll have to play around a bit with your cube to get a feeling for what works, all I can say is I like where my cube ended up in this regard.
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Yeah, the question of mana acceleration is what I started pondering a few minutes after thinking about wraths. So... We increase the mana cost of wraths and mana rocks, it slows down non-green Control decks. But in my cube green has some turn-1/2 ramp spells. They usually go into GR Ramp, but they also fit into green-black, and black has some wraths too. Should I, maybe, decrease their amount a bit? In fact, I agree with you that this area of questions is pretty hard one to solve without playtesting.
 
Karn Cuberated

Karn Cuberated

There's one more question on control: how many counterspells does a Control deck need? I run not only control decks, but also Tempo (Aggro-Control). Does it mean that my blue section should be chockfull of counters?
I heard there're two kinds of control: Draw & Go and Tap-out. Probably, the second one needs less counterspells, but I'm not experienced in this area of Control yet.
 
japahn

japahn

My drafters like counterspells in their blue decks, so they are high picks here, even though 10/62 of the cards in blue are counterspells. I mix tempo, control and generic counterspells to ensure that between a control and tempo drafter, each has access to some the other is not too interested in. That also improves signaling and natural rebalancing during a draft.

Favored by tempo:


Favored by control:


Generic:
 
Karn Cuberated

Karn Cuberated

Hello, guys! I need your help again ;)
We've already playtested our modern cube a couple of times, and now we have a new question: how many creature 1-drops should be in an average cube aggro deck?
At first, we tried to figure the approximate quantity ourselves, but we still didn't succeed. We tried both high amounts (8-10) and (in comparison to them) quite low numbers (4-5 + some removal in this slot). There was visible difference in the amount of creatures deployed, but not in the effectiveness of decks. Probably, they became not as fast as they had been, but that didn't reflect on their winrate a lot. I guess, more creatures would make Hellrider-ish cards and the whole sacrifice theme (which is dominating in our aggro-shell) more defined, but I see many people taking not too many creatures in general and 1-drops in particular. So, what to do?)
 
dbs

dbs

I think the fundamental tension you're hitting here is summarized in the following post. It doesn't necessarily provide you a direct solution to your problem, but the suggestions at the very bottom might give you a starting place. (The quality of posts you can find trawling through this forum is so high, it's crazy)

Grillo_Parlante said:
Aggro​

​

I think you can take aggro decks and divide their game play style into two phases: the tempo phase, and the reach phase.

In the "tempo phase", they are just trying to establish a board presence, and the traditional way to do that is to curve out 2/x creatures for one mana. The cheapness of the threats lets them outpace their opponents on spell castings, and create a racing situation where they pushing tempo. This sets them up for the "reach phase", where the board starts to stabilize and the aggro deck tries to close out the game in a variety of ways, traditionally burn.

The traditional mistake that most cube designers make with aggro design, is overemphasizing the tempo phase, which they do because thats how consistent, constructed worthy aggro decks work. Filling your lists with lots of savannah lions is bulky, creates a feeling of narrow bifurcation in the draft, and oftentimes isn't even that effective. It just goes against the nature of a singleton format constrained by limited slots, to devote so much space to functional singleton breaks. In addition, the prospect of curve stumbles will always be much greater in a singleton format with less than perfect mana, than it will be in the ultra consistent realities of a constructed format. This means decks and matches where the aggro deck just randomly losses to itself, and this isn't even going into whether this is even fun for either player.

In cube, its much more interesting to embrace and develop the "reach phase" of an aggro decks play pattern. This is much more interactive, reduces the number of non-games, and is more in line with the challenges and constraints cube places upon drafters and designers. A focus on dealing a reasonable amount of early damage, into a more involved mid or late game built around damage generation, is a more satisfying way to play the game for both players, and opens up the aggro archetype to be far more diverse.

Mass damage generation, whether through berserkers (really like that label btw), mass horizontal pump, evasion grantors, or traditional reach leads to far more compelling gamestates, while letting a list slim down and run more flexible cards.
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shamizy

shamizy

Agree completely with that post from Grillo, it's definitely a common mistake most cube designers make when trying to buff up their aggro suite. Lucky for us, we've gotten many cool toys to play around with to add variety and flavor to the various aggressive builds that people are capable of drafting in a given environment. I wrote a long detailed post about my favorite archetype that I've implemented a few years back and I think it might help provide some direction.
 
Karn Cuberated

Karn Cuberated

Yes, that's what I understood only after a couple of drafts. I felt there're some slots that could be filled with more flexible and demanded cards. That's the reason for why this question appeared :)
Thank everyone!
 
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