General Guaranteed Power - a real 'Vintage' Cube

Dom Harvey

Contributor
Let's say every player gets the five original Moxen in their pool when building their deck. What cards (outside of the obvious 'artifacts matter' stuff) would you want to run in the Cube with that in mind? What ripple effects would you expect this to have?
 
Anti artifact cards would be high value
2 drops would be a lot more suppressive than 3 drops
In fact I doubt aggro would be super easy to achieve in such a cube
I also expect more multicolored decks. You will want to run all 5 Moxen in your deck almost no matter what

A friend of mine has a custom and proxy cube with the following theme: “What if Power 9 was the right power level” so all cards in the cube is on Power 9 level. There are 2 mana Primeval Titans and 3 mana Cruel Ultimatum. There are 1 mana Contradict and 0 mana Blood Moon. Or cards that are very close to them. An entire 360 card cube with OP cards. The comment I wanted to leave for you was that it can be quite fun every now and then to play with massively overpowered cards. So I encourage you to try out your format no matter what feedback you get from us.
 

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
I also expect more multicolored decks. You will want to run all 5 Moxen in your deck almost no matter what.
I was leaning the other way, since splashing with basic lands (which is essentially the fixing power of Moxen) is quite bad. Bear with me, obviously you run all five Moxen, and you run them instead of lands (unlike, say, Mox Diamond, which counts as a spell). That means you have 11-12 lands left. Using just basics, you could achieve a 7/7 split in a two color deck at best (since you run three off color Moxen), which is quite atrocious, especially if you're trying to cast double pip cards (e.g. Counterspell and Eternal Witness). Part of your Moxen will surely act as Wastes that don't count as your land drop for the turn.

Hence, I expect having five Moxen in your pool would have the following effects on deck composition in respect to colors.
  • Dual lands are (even) higher picks in this format than in regular cubes.
  • Color intensive cards (like Bloodghast and Necropotence) are harder to support in multicolor decks.
  • It's easier to play a "monocolor" deck that splashes for one or two other colors than it is to play true two or three color decks.

I agree with Velrun that aggro becomes a lot harder to support. Basically you're skipping ahead one or two turns on average in mana development each game, which gives aggro decks 1 or 2 turns less to capitalize on their early threats. The only type of aggro that stands a chance in this environment, I feel, is a heavily disruptive style like Death & Taxes in Legacy. Here's an interesting article to maybe point you in the right direction, though I expect a player of you caliber will already have realized this :)
 
I think aggro would almost have to be anti-artifact, which runs the same risk that running efficient land destruction does. It might ruin a lot of games... But maybe your decks are so fucking strong that winning off land destruction doesn't seem that unfair here.

Not to derail, but now I'm curious: What if, instead of a basic lands box, you had a Mox Box?
 
I am inclined to go more in the direction of shandalar - grey ogre cmc-to-stats and a lot of lower impact, high cmc cards. But in contrast to shandalar, I'd like all colors having some velocity to get through their decks. Then, there can be a focus on a lot of actions needed to win a game.

Or in a more powerful environment, make mana costs very restrictive such that omitting moxes odfcolor is a viable strat (like vintage RUG).
 
Not in the long run. Terrible idea! :p But it would probably be fun to play one tournament like that.

I had a weird idea where you'd cut a color from the cube and basic box, but insert Moxen as access to the color and some cards for it or something. Restrict the color but make it better. It's probably too high variance, but that was the only semi-fruitful idea I had.

Basic Shrine Box? No. No. I've gone too far.
 
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