Card/Deck Green in a Core Set-style Cube

[Zig13]

As a relatively new player (August 2012), the standard theme for a Cube - 'Magic's Greatest Hits' doesn't really appeal. I really like what Wizards have been doing with draft formats as of late - primarily making Removal weaker and Creatures stronger. What I don't like are the archetypes, bomby rares, straight bad cards and of course the cost.

My plan is then to design a cube with a pretty flat power level with each colour restricted to the centre of it's colour pie and no explicit inter-colour synergies. I also favour formats that tend towards two colours. I decided a good way to keep the power level flat and keep colour screw low would be to exclude cards with double costs (e.g. 2UU). The plan is to have two complete cycles of 2-colour Gold cards (so 20 total) and 30 colourless cards (including Conspiracies and maybe some utility lands but no Duals).

This is where I am at so far: http://www.cubetutor.com/viewcube/35406

My biggest problem is Green. I though I could give it a Trample exclusivity deal but that didn't really stick. It seems to be that by making all Creatures better, Wizards has somewhat snatched away Green's crown and glory. I've really struggled to find Green creatures at the power level I want but with only 1 G in thier mana cost. I'm hoping as more sets are released I'll be able to round them out but BFZ Block hasn't been all that helpful what with the Eldrazi being all strange and defying colour boundaries.

I'd appreciate any suggestions people have on how else I should characterize Green bearing in mind I don't really want any fixing :/

Thanks!

 

[Onderzeeboot]

There are plenty of ramp options that don't fix for green.



You can still make green about ramp without making it about fixing.

Also, there's some pretty cool tutors!



Two other points, besides your questions about green, I want to address are your aversion to archetypes and the strict rule about "color intensity".

Firstly, archetypes are awesome, in that they help to create an identity. What you (probably) don't want are isolated archetypes. Storm is a classic example from the MODO cube. A lot of the storm cards (storm cards themselves and fast mana mainly) are of little interest to other archetypes, so they either wheel a lot and end up as 15th picks if no one is drafting the archetype, or their are not enough of them if multiple people are forcing it. This is, however, not an inherent flaw of archetypes. As long as you avoid narrow cards, and use a lot of cards that are interesting in multiple archetypes, you should be able to create an interesting environment. Do remember that cards that signal a certain archetype can also be something to latch on to for new drafters. "Oh, there's a Hardened Scales in there, I guess +1/+1 counters are supported in this cube!"

Secondly, color intensity matters most on low casting cost cards. While a WW drop is significantly harder to cast than a 1W drop, a 2WW drop is not much harder to cast than a 3W drop in a two-color deck, provided your fixing is up to snuff.

Which brings me to the secret third point: if you want to support two-color decks, you are going to do your drafters a huge favor by including good fixing. If you don't not to invest too much many, just black out the "enters the battlefield tapped" line on Boros Guildgate and friends. Most Riptiders will agree that 50 lands is not too much in a 360 cube!

 

[sigh]

The first thing that popped into my head was that green is the color of growth, and as such creatures that scale upwards seems a decent addition to your repertoire. This could be evolve, monstrous, threshold mebbe.
Some examples of what I'm talking about could be (if there are card age/power restrictions I'm crashing thru, please ignore):
gyre sage
experiment one
crocanura
hydra broodmaster
nemesis of mortals
nessian asp
werebear
nimble mongoose

 

[Zig13]

First off, thanks for the fast feedback guys!

There are plenty of ramp options that don't fix for green.


You can still make green about ramp without making it about fixing.

That was certainly a line I was considering. I already have Nature's Lore and Hunting Wilds in the list although they look like they might be a little bit difficult to obtain. I guess Ranger's Path will do in a pinch. Wood Elves are a great idea - I can only assume I mis-read them as grabbing Basics. I think I didn't list Elvish Mystic et al partially due to power and partially because I wanted Green to start at 2 to emphasize the fatty-ness. I have Voyaging Satyr instead.

Also, there's some pretty cool tutors!

Collected Company seems a little White to me :/ . It's a Green thing to tutor Creatures to the battlefield but the fact it specifies size and gets two makes it feel a little weird in Green.
Edit: Sure Green has had saprolings historically but I like how White has been taking over the small token space more. White and Green are the best colours for creatures but White specializes in the smaller ones (CMC 1-3) and Green the Larger ones (CMC 4+). Otherwise they tread on eachothers toes too much.

R.E Birthing Pod, I'm avoiding Phyrexian Mana as it's this weird space between coloured and colourless. Also I'm restricting Sacrifice to Black.

I will certainly consider Green Sun's Zenith. It's a little pricey but probably a worthwhile investment. It's a little worrying that it can ~fix for 8/20 of the Gold cards (which are of a higher power) in the set but it probably needs that to be playable as the list doesn't have the 'toolbox' creatures that are usually played alongside it.

Firstly, archetypes are awesome, in that they help to create an identity. What you (probably) don't want are isolated archetypes. Storm is a classic example from the MODO cube. A lot of the storm cards (storm cards themselves and fast mana mainly) are of little interest to other archetypes, so they either wheel a lot and end up as 15th picks if no one is drafting the archetype, or their are not enough of them if multiple people are forcing it. This is, however, not an inherent flaw of archetypes. As long as you avoid narrow cards, and use a lot of cards that are interesting in multiple archetypes, you should be able to create an interesting environment. Do remember that cards that signal a certain archetype can also be something to latch on to for new drafters. "Oh, there's a Hardened Scales in there, I guess +1/+1 counters are supported in this cube!"

The thopter creators in Origins were powerful enough that anyone in Red or Blue wanted them. That meant that the R/U Thopter achetype not really a thing a lot of the time and I think that was for the better. I disliked drafting both of the Modern Masters formats. Some of it was the underwhelming/spell-like Creatures but a lot of it was the strict archetypes. I like to draft reasonably openly and feel out what colours my seat should be in. When there are archetypes some are bound to be better than others and suddenly a 2 colour combination (often U/G) is next to unplayable.

By not planting any archetypes or special synergies and having each colour do what it does, I have instead natural archetypes. Against the bots I have drafted B/W Flyers, R/W Aggro, R/G Aggro and a G/U 'Land and Skies' deck. Some are a little weird due to a combination of bots behaving weirdly and the cube being incomplete but I see them as a good indicator of things to come.

Secondly, color intensity matters most on low casting cost cards. While a WW drop is significantly harder to cast than a 1W drop, a 2WW drop is not much harder to cast than a 3W drop in a two-color deck

That's kind of the problem. Risk-and-reward is all good and well but most of the time a 2WW Creature is just going to be straight better than a 3W Creature. That's a potential feel-bad situation when you have invested the same resources as your opponent but what they have is just better. On top of that you've got the rare occasion it's a dead card in your hand because you're stuck on 1 producer for that colour. You could argue that that's the downside of having the more powerful card but you didn't really have a lot of choice when it came to running it.
Including colour intense spells also doesn't derestrict you that much as you're bound to have to remove the odd spell that they now supersede lest you have strictly worse versions floating around.

Which brings me to the secret third point: if you want to support two-color decks, you are going to do your drafters a huge favor by including good fixing. If you don't not to invest too much many, just black out the "enters the battlefield tapped" line on Boros Guildgate and friends. Most Riptiders will agree that 50 lands is not too much in a 360 cube!

I don't predict any issues with 2 colour decks being supported when there are only 20 Gold cards and no colour intense spells. All 8 decks I have drafted so far were comfortably two colour. If in further testing I run into issues, I think I'd prefer to go with bonus lands rotisserie draft as discussed in these forums. Picking fixing in a draft is such a feel-bad. You know you need to do it but spells are so much more interesting .

The first thing that popped into my head was that green is the color of growth, and as such creatures that scale upwards seems a decent addition to your repertoire. This could be evolve, monstrous, threshold mebbe.
Some examples of what I'm talking about could be (if there are card age/power restrictions I'm crashing thru, please ignore):
gyre sage
experiment one
crocanura
hydra broodmaster
nemesis of mortals
nessian asp
werebear
nimble mongoose

Nessian Asp is already in the cube
I considered Gyre Sage but based on my poor experience of it when drafting Gatecrash I decided against it. That might be more a reflection on my draft knowledge and skills back then more than the card though. What are people's opinions/experience with Gyre Sage in a Cube?

I get your point that Threshold is a growth mechanic but it's one that can be accelerated by self-mill and playing Instants and Sorceries which makes it feel quite un-green to me :/ .

It's not the graveyard interaction per se - it makes total sense for Green to get Lands and Enchantments back from the bin - it's just to make the flavourfully Green graveyard interactions worthwhile there needs to some non-green stuff like sacrifice discard and/or mill.

 

[sigh]

Nessian Asp is already in the cube
I considered Gyre Sage but based on my poor experience of it when drafting Gatecrash I decided against it. That might be more a reflection on my draft knowledge and skills back then more than the card though. What are people's opinions/experience with Gyre Sage in a Cube?

I get your point that Threshold is a growth mechanic but it's one that can be accelerated by self-mill and playing Instants and Sorceries which makes it feel quite un-green to me :/ .

It's a strong card, leaving off the mana production. Often easily a 2/3 the turn you attack with it, and later easily a 5/6. That can make .

If you want another Nessian Asp, you can run ghoultree. Another vertical growth strategy is on doods dying:
algae gharial
Rot shambler

Green is actually a very graveyard color! Historically actually one of the closest linked to it, but usually in narrower ways.It's a strong green theme, and makes a strong GB pair, if you really have a 2 color focus.
Here are some cards for instance:
tarmogoyf
tilling treefolk
restore
regrowth
mulch
satyr wayfinder
tracker's instincts
commune with the gods
splinterfright
life from the loam
centaur vinecrasher
fauna shaman
scavenging ooze
gnaw to the bone

 

[Ferritovore]

It sounds a smidge like you're saying, "How can I make green interesting?" then defining rules that prevent green from being interesting. Big tramplers are cool and important but green does a lot more than that:
http://mtgsalvation.gamepedia.com/Green

 

[sigh]

I do caution you against falling into the trap that Ferret has pointed out.
Also, I'd strongly recommend that you revisit "# of color symbols always = more power". Here's an example:
vs.

Scry 1 is powerful, but the ability to scale to 5! damage, and be at instant speed is incredibly more valuable.

 

[Ferritovore]

Skimming that page, I think lure / provoke effects will go well with all the big beaters you're running!

 

[Ferritovore]

To belabor the point further, Collected Company is just a flexible continuation of green's long tradition of multiple small creatures + Overrun.

Look at all the elf tokens, squirrel tokens, fungus tokens, thallid tokens, plant tokens, spore tokens, etc across magic's history and just imagine that CoCo is putting 2 sexier tokens on the board and not locking you into a specific kind of token deck.

 

[Eric Chan]

I disliked drafting both of the Modern Masters formats. Some of it was the underwhelming/spell-like Creatures but a lot of it was the strict archetypes. I like to draft reasonably openly and feel out what colours my seat should be in. When there are archetypes some are bound to be better than others and suddenly a 2 colour combination (often U/G) is next to unplayable.

Going completely off-topic here, but I agree with this observation and find it interesting - Modern Masters 2 was boring to draft, full of linear archetypes and narrow, poison principle-y cards, but the games themselves were still interesting to play and surprisingly skill-testing. This feels like the polar opposite of, say, Holiday Cube, which I imagine is a hoot-and-a-half to draft, but turns dull as soon as you're finished the deckbuilding phase; rather than play through the monotony of the games, you'd rather just jump back into the queue to draft again.

No idea what that means as a takeaway for cube, but, I like derailing!

 

[Chris Taylor]

First off, thanks for the fast feedback guys!



That was certainly a line I was considering. I already have Nature's Lore and Hunting Wilds in the list although they look like they might be a little bit difficult to obtain. I guess Ranger's Path will do in a pinch. Wood Elves are a great idea - I can only assume I mis-read them as grabbing Basics. I think I didn't list Elvish Mystic et al partially due to power and partially because I wanted Green to start at 2 to emphasize the fatty-ness. I have Voyaging Satyr instead.



Collected Company seems a little White to me :/ . It's a Green thing to tutor Creatures to the battlefield but the fact it specifies size and gets two makes it feel a little weird in Green.

R.E Birthing Pod, I'm avoiding Phyrexian Mana as it's this weird space between coloured and colourless. Also I'm restricting Sacrifice to Black.

I will certainly consider Green Sun's Zenith. It's a little pricey but probably a worthwhile investment. It's a little worrying that it can ~fix for 8/20 of the Gold cards (which are of a higher power) in the set but it probably needs that to be playable as the list doesn't have the 'toolbox' creatures that are usually played alongside it.


The thopter creators in Origins were powerful enough that anyone in Red or Blue wanted them. That meant that the R/U Thopter achetype not really a thing a lot of the time and I think that was for the better. I disliked drafting both of the Modern Masters formats. Some of it was the underwhelming/spell-like Creatures but a lot of it was the strict archetypes. I like to draft reasonably openly and feel out what colours my seat should be in. When there are archetypes some are bound to be better than others and suddenly a 2 colour combination (often U/G) is next to unplayable.

By not planting any archetypes or special synergies and having each colour do what it does, I have instead natural archetypes. Against the bots I have drafted B/W Flyers, R/W Aggro, R/G Aggro and a G/U 'Land and Skies' deck. Some are a little weird due to a combination of bots behaving weirdly and the cube being incomplete but I see them as a good indicator of things to come.


That's kind of the problem. Risk-and-reward is all good and well but most of the time a 2WW Creature is just going to be straight better than a 3W Creature. That's a potential feel-bad situation when you have invested the same resources as your opponent but what they have is just better. On top of that you've got the rare occasion it's a dead card in your hand because you're stuck on 1 producer for that colour. You could argue that that's the downside of having the more powerful card but you didn't really have a lot of choice when it came to running it.
Including colour intense spells also doesn't derestrict you that much as you're bound to have to remove the odd spell that they now supersede lest you have strictly worse versions floating around.


I don't predict any issues with 2 colour decks being supported when there are only 20 Gold cards and no colour intense spells. All 8 decks I have drafted so far were comfortably two colour. If in further testing I run into issues, I think I'd prefer to go with bonus lands rotisserie draft as discussed in these forums. Picking fixing in a draft is such a feel-bad. You know you need to do it but spells are so much more interesting .


Nessian Asp is already in the cube
I considered Gyre Sage but based on my poor experience of it when drafting Gatecrash I decided against it. That might be more a reflection on my draft knowledge and skills back then more than the card though. What are people's opinions/experience with Gyre Sage in a Cube?

I get your point that Threshold is a growth mechanic but it's one that can be accelerated by self-mill and playing Instants and Sorceries which makes it feel quite un-green to me :/ .

Why are half the card links in your post gatherer hyperlinks and the other half the forum built in mouseover?

 

[Onderzeeboot]

I don't predict any issues with 2 colour decks being supported when there are only 20 Gold cards and no colour intense spells. All 8 decks I have drafted so far were comfortably two colour. If in further testing I run into issues, I think I'd prefer to go with bonus lands rotisserie draft as discussed in these forums. Picking fixing in a draft is such a feel-bad. You know you need to do it but spells are so much more interesting .

I disagree, having to pick fixing creates nice tension during a draft, at least that's how I experience it. Also, without fixing, you presumably draft 45 playables, which means that you have to cut half your cards. Now some of those are going to be off color, but then again, everything has only a single colored mana in the casting cost, so you could easily be tempted to splash for that third color and then get wrecked when your mana turns bad anyway. A typical cube has no chaff, unlike retail drafts anyway, which typically contain a bunch of more or less unplayable cards each set. That means a lot more picks can be wasted on actually allowing your player to play the game, i.e. not get mana screwed. Anyway, just my $0.02.

 

[Zig13]

I've made some additions: http://www.cubetutor.com/cubeblog/35406 . Thanks for the tips!
Tempting Licid is surprisingly cheap at only £0.20. It seems pretty powerful to me but I guess all that matters is it's not powerful enough for Legacy

With the 3 Green additions coming in Oath of the Gatewatch, Green will be at 58/62. TBH I don't think I looked through my Green non-creatures that thoroughly as I got distracted trying to find enough Creatures.

The key thing now then is filling out the Gold cycles but since I've upped their target power level and removed the Common+Uncommon restriction I might be able to fill in some slots with reevaluations.

Hopefully come Shadows of Innistrad being released I'll have the full 360 planned out

 

[Zig13]

Why are half the card links in your post gatherer hyperlinks and the other half the forum built in mouseover?

Because I only realised half-way through how to do the autocards. I guess I should fix that...

I disagree, having to pick fixing creates nice tension during a draft, at least that's how I experience it.

Each to thier own I guess

without fixing, you presumably draft 45 playables, which means that you have to cut half your cards. Now some of those are going to be off color

Looking at the decks I've drafted, most of the time the sideboard is just under half off-colour except for a couple of times where confusing signals meant I ended up having to play almost every card in the colour pair. It's not a great sample set and it's biased by the way I draft, but building those decks was fun. I didn't feel like I was cutting half my cards - rather I was selecting those that filled out the curve best and had the best synergy with each-other. And that's with an incomplete cube. A good portion of the colourless cards will be conspiracies and utility lands and so will not count towards your 22/23.

but then again, everything has only a single colored mana in the casting cost, so you could easily be tempted to splash for that third color and then get wrecked when your mana turns bad anyway.

If some portion of cards in a set have et al in their costs, it would be foolish to boycott them.
However in a format that supports 2-colour well enough, it is entirely your choice whether to splash a third. You get to have real satisfaction if it pays off and you can take responsibility and learn from it if it doesn't.

A typical cube has no chaff, unlike retail drafts anyway, which typically contain a bunch of more or less unplayable cards each set.

This is one of the things that attracts me to cubing. A Cube has no care for Standard just like me

 

[Lucre]

Love love love love the idea of a "white-boarder" cube. Mild plays and small profitable interactions are really appealing to me.
You may wana stock up on a lot of doubles though because a lot of limited formats have priced the same cards in vastly different ways.