General How do you balance hybrids?

[Tom]

I started out with X cards per color, Y colorless cards, 2 gold cards per color pair, and 1 hybrid card per color pair. Perfect balance.

My boros hybrid was Double Cleave, but soon I realized I wanted to add Figure of Destiny and Boros Reckoner. I really wanted all three cards in my cube but couldn't figure out how to balance the colors. I finally decided to drop one white and one red card and allow Boros to have three hybrids. This means red and white both have access to an extra playable card but they have compete with each other for it, so I figured it balanced out.

Now I want to add more hybrids. I want to add Rakdos Shred-Freak for example, and now my previous trick won't work because I'm adding an odd number of hybrids.

Am I fussing about this too much? Is "close enough" good enough?

How do you guys approach hybrids?

 

[Dom Harvey]

One thing that it's hard to realize when talking on Cube forums is that nobody who drafts your Cube gives a fuck about colour balance. Even if they do claim to care about it, if you secretly adjusted the ratios of coloured cards in your Cube it would take a fairly drastic change before they (or you, if you were in that position) noticed. Damaging the overall health of your Cube just to make the figures tally nicely doesn't help anyone.

If space is the concern, some would argue it's better to cut gold cards for hybrids (which are like anti-gold cards) but I look at hybrids as an excuse to expand my gold section safe in the knowledge that each colour still has access to enough cards.

Also, welcome!

 

[Eric Chan]

Uh oh. You should know that the regulars on here have a burning hatred for discussion on the minutia of card classification. Before you get lynched, you better take cover while you can. I got your back!

While you're hiding inside a rickety ol' farmhouse, you can read Jason's take on the whole matter.

 

[FlowerSunRain]

Dom is 100% correct here. The only thing that matters is how your cube plays. Having arbitrary sections of identical size is not really a contributing factor to having a cube that plays well.

Personally when I sort my cube for upkeep I sort like this:

Multicolor
White
Blue
Black
Red
Green
Hybrid and Split
Colorless

So, I suppose I classify hybrids in a section for "cards that are more flexible then mono-color, but less flexible then colorless."

 

[Tom]

Thanks for the input everybody. What you're saying makes sense.

Thinking about this a little more... hypothetically if you built a cube with 70 white cards and 50 of each other what would end up happening? Sure, after one draft perhaps nobody would notice, but over time you would probably see a trend of people using more white decks. Unless of course those extra 20 cards were terrible, then everybody would just end up with a bunch of extra crappy white cards in their sideboard - the decks people play wouldn't be much affected by those extra white cards at all. In fact, this makes me think replacing a colorless card with a Rakdos Shred-Freak specifically to help rb aggro is just fine. If I've already determined that rb aggro is weak then perhaps purposely giving it an extra card is fine.

And hi, my name is Tom

I found the site through cubetutor. I've been playing Magic for years and recently built a cube. So far its my favorite way to play Magic. I've enjoyed reading through some of the site's articles and forum posts.

 

[Eric Chan]

I'm a little more anal than most people on here about classifying my cards, so if you want, you can take a look at my system. I basically count gold and hybrid cards as half a card in each colour, tally up the total counts across all the multicolour cards, and then compensate for any imbalances by adjusting the appropriate monocolour sections. Red has so many good multicolour cards that it'd be a shame not to run them all, so this lets me run four cards in most of the red guilds while ensuring that there are still enough goodies in the other colours to go around.

 

[Dom Harvey]

The other thing to keep in mind about colour balance is that it's a misleading measure of what options are available. Swords to Plowshares will go in every white deck but if Elite Vanguard and Wrath of God are in the same 40, something's gone seriously wrong. Adding another white card will help some white decks, but maybe not all of them.

 

[Eric Chan]

one time a guy played Elite Vanguard, Stormfront Pegasus, and Martial Coup in the same deck

he also crushed all of us so what do I know

 

[CML]

Metrics like "number of cards for a certain color" as well as "number of gold cards" are useful to me if you value accuracy over precision. I.e. some two-color combos (UR UG) have fewer options than others (GW BR) so like precise balance there is demented, just have more GW and BR cards. Compensate with extra U mono-color cards (something roughly like a G/W card is .5 G and .5 W cards) and that might help you home in on people actively wanting to draft all five colors of equalish power. Do remember that this is a pretty unimportant design feature of your Cube, though, compared to stuff like "curve" or more abstractly "themes."

I would say that not only does precise color balance detract from more important considerations, but also having the same amount of GW and UG cards in one's Cube is actively bad design.

As for hybrids, I just toss 'em in with the gold cards for "color balance," but the key difference is, while I like to limit, with pretty much no success, the number of gold cards, for hybrid I'd try to add as many as possible. Within the constraints of other Cube imperatives like "don't add bad cards" (hi there Rakdos Shred-Freak!) I'm not sure you can go wrong maxing out on hybrid. Double up on Cacklers and Militants. Give Judge's Familiar and Frostburn Weird a go. Play Murderous Redcap and Kitchen Finks but also Boggart Ram-Gang and Ashenmoor Gouger. Hybrid even plays well with Devotion and sets up a tension between multi- and mono-colored decks I think you'll like. For ref: http://cubetutor.com/viewcube/114

My BR section has something like 7 hybrids and one gold card, so if you want you can just go nuts. Then next set when Kruphix is boss toss in some Wistful Selkies and it'll feel just right. moooooooooooo

p.s. wtf double cleave

 

[Tom]

Within the constraints of other Cube imperatives like "don't add bad cards" (hi there Rakdos Shred-Freak!)

p.s. wtf double cleave

Can you explain why I shouldn't play Rakdos Shred-Freak and Double Cleave in my cube? What's makes them "bad" or "wtf"? Do you mean low power level? Bad gameplay?

I can try to explain my reasons for wanted them included. I'll start with Double Cleave. My cube is light on combat tricks, and I want to ensure there are plenty to keep combat interesting. White and red are the colors of early attacking creatures. I want to be able to attack into bigger blockers and give my opponent the option of not blocking (bluff?), or then perhaps I'll kill a creature or trade up. I already have plenty of burn, I want something a little different. Also, it has the potential to deal a lot of direct damage with something like an unblocked Countryside Crusher, Hero of Oxid Ridge or beefed up Figure of Destiny. Or, maybe one day it'll boost a firebreathing Steel Hellkite or Doomgape into a surprise win.

For the Shred Freak, I need him to provide early (turn 2) aggressive options for red and black decks (especially red-black). It's not the most powerful card in the cube but I think it plays a role I need filled. Furthermore, I value simplicity highly. In most cases I'd actually prefer something like "2/1 haste" to "2/1 haste. Whenever a nonbasic land enters the battlefield under your opponent's control you may pay 2 life to scry x where x equals your devotion to red," even though the second card is "better".

 

[Jason Waddell]

Don't mind CML.

 

[Alfonzo Bonzo]

Yeah I would just ignore his snide grenades, though that ps did make me laugh.

Double cleave might be interesting if you're promoting double strike more widely and if you're going down the heroic route then it might be interesting there.

Shred freak on the other hand suffers from mana issues. If it was 1b/r it would be a lot better but I think particularly recently people have been trying to reduce the coloured mana costs from their early aggro creatures so they can be played with more frequency in a multitude of colour combinations. If you're going to have a rr creature in a green red deck say you'd prefer ember hauler say and if you were playing it in red black then you'd probably prefer that rb 3/1 haste guy.

 

[CML]

Can you explain why I shouldn't play Rakdos Shred-Freak and Double Cleave in my cube? What's makes them "bad" or "wtf"? Do you mean low power level? Bad gameplay?

I can try to explain my reasons for wanted them included. I'll start with Double Cleave. My cube is light on combat tricks, and I want to ensure there are plenty to keep combat interesting. White and red are the colors of early attacking creatures. I want to be able to attack into bigger blockers and give my opponent the option of not blocking (bluff?), or then perhaps I'll kill a creature or trade up. I already have plenty of burn, I want something a little different. Also, it has the potential to deal a lot of direct damage with something like an unblocked Countryside Crusher, Hero of Oxid Ridge or beefed up Figure of Destiny. Or, maybe one day it'll boost a firebreathing Steel Hellkite or Doomgape into a surprise win.

For the Shred Freak, I need him to provide early (turn 2) aggressive options for red and black decks (especially red-black). It's not the most powerful card in the cube but I think it plays a role I need filled. Furthermore, I value simplicity highly. In most cases I'd actually prefer something like "2/1 haste" to "2/1 haste. Whenever a nonbasic land enters the battlefield under your opponent's control you may pay 2 life to scry x where x equals your devotion to red," even though the second card is "better".

OK SERIOUS ANSWER

No reason intrinsically, lower power-level cards do tend to work in lower power-level environments, though. Facing off with Shred-Freak vs. Reckoner isn't too absurd but having something like Double Cleave routinely fall to 15th pick is a bad drafting dynamic, like nobody argued Tibalt was worth a slot in the Modo Cube, or that the Cluestones and Awe for the Guilds were a good fit with the DGR gestalt. Combat tricks like da Cleave are almost always great fun in their draft environments, but they're not easy to balance in the more powerful environment of Cube, for all the Constructed reasons.

There are dozens of threads on this forum where someone (incl. me obv.) tries to promote a sweet theme like mill or Goblins or Vampires or whatever, but then nobody wants to draft it, or the cards aren't pushed enough, or the theme itself isn't pushed enough, and if it were it'd take up too much space, or any number of variations or permutations of that. We'll write paragraphs theorycrafting the virtues of our card choices like Cleave, which will sometimes work and often won't, due to Magical Christmasland thinking or the idea that designing a Cube is tough. While da Cleave is good gameplay, the kind of effect that does make combat more interactive and difficult, its low power level will probably outstrip that factor in a cube feat. Boros Reckoner. So then look for similar effects that are pushed a little more. The combat trick thread exists. How about like Wrecking Ogre that guy does a million damage and is hilarious. Boom

FWIW I don't share Alf's objections to the Shred-Freak, dog has a reasonable cost and is only a little on the weak side as a 2/1. Not sure Spike Jester is worth the extra spleen but who knows

 

[FlowerSunRain]

I really do think Shred Freak is just bad.

2 mana creatures that just attack and block need have 3 power or evasion. The rare few that don't bring some kind of huge combat advantage with them.

Not only does Shred Freak bring none of those, on top of it he has 1 toughness. So besides being blocked by everything, and many times not even trading because there is a lot of toughness 3 out there, he gets killed by almost every single creature ever, even 1/1 tokens. He also gets killed by every random javelin token, mogg fanatic, the bottom side of ever split burn spells and super tech earthquake x = 1.

The total possible upside for this? You get in for 2 extra damage if they have nothing on the board. While you can usually overlook situational disadvantages in exchange for speed, Shred Freak just has SO many that more often then not his will come up so doing so is going to cost you some games.

Lots of other creatures have some of these problems, but they are also utility creatures with them awesome special abilities or cost 1 (even without haste, its significantly better).

Also <3 wreaking ogre, I think he's destined to return to my cube next update as I try to bash Purphoros back in and need to get rid of Siege-Gang Commander to make it work.

 

[Dom Harvey]

I've liked Rakdos Guildmage a fair bit.

 

[Alfonzo Bonzo]

I've liked Rakdos Guildmage a fair bit.

I like him more too because he *does* something other than just attack. Not enough to put him in my cube though.

I have no problem if you're going for the simplicity factor though, because at the end of the day if that's what you want and need then go for it. You are best placed to decide what's proper for you and your cube

 

[Chris Taylor]

I kinda hate wrecking ogre. kinda like he reads: bloodlust: phage

 

[Lucre]

Yeah I totally cube Balance as a hybrid.
I put it in for the wildfire decks.