General In search of ideas

ColonelSanders

ColonelSanders

Recently my cube has been going through a bit of a mid life crisis. More specifically, I've grown weary of the slow power creep that has come with acquiring more and more cards for it (and reading mtgs cube forums). I've begun the process of gutting it and making it a more interesting environment to play in (and coincidentally found this forum at the same time). However, I'm finding that I have more slots to fill than I have cards for and that the kinds of cards I'm looking for are hard to find in gatherer.

So, basically, I'm looking for cards that encourage more interactivity, more decisions, or create fun game states. I realize that fun is subjective, but I can say pretty definitively that jamming cards like batterskull, grave titan, treachery, etc. has grown old quickly. I also realize, that to some extent, certain strategies need a critical number of 2/2's for 1 to get the job done, even if those cards aren't the most exciting to play.

some cards that I've added/previously played with that have worked out pretty well.

fact or fiction
overburden
rite of replication
deep-sea kraken
knight of the holy nimbus
silverblade paladin
reveillark
galepowder mage
mikaeus, the lunarch
porphyry nodes
rotting rats
skirsdag high priest
mindslicer
chain of smog
rescue from the underworld
goblin bombardment
greater gargadon
taurean mauler
goblin sharpshooter
birthing pod
oath of druids
polukranos, world eater
spawnwrithe
skinshifter
knight of the reliquary
tangle wire
winter orb


TL;DR... In search of fun/interactive cube cards. Also open to larger scale ideas and archetypes. Aiming for a medium power level and with a high skill cap
 
FlowerSunRain

FlowerSunRain

Contributor
Ion Storm is everything I wanted furnace celebration to be.

I think we need a little more information to give meaningful advice, right now everyone is just kind of throwing out cards we think are cool.

Speaking of which:

 
Kuldahar

Kuldahar

I was in the same boat as you. I had a MTGS cube that could tinker a blightsteel colossus on turn 1. *shudder*

I found Jason's article http://www.channelfireball.com/articles/cube-design-eldrazi-domain/ which set me on the righteous path. To be honest, my cube was so out of whack that it was almost impossible to save it. So I scrapped the whole thing, and I built Jason's (primary) cube to start with a new base. Everyone's cube here is slightly different but with much the same design principles, so trawling through their cube lists was the next thing I did. Over time it has evolved into it's own beast based on my player's playstyle, and my own quirks.

The sad thing about all this, is that retail draft feels absolutely horrible now that I'm avoiding spending my money on it and just buying singles for my cube...
 
Laz

Laz

Developer
Kuldahar said:
The sad thing about all this, is that retail draft feels absolutely horrible now that I'm avoiding spending my money on it and just buying singles for my cube...
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It has been so long since I have bought boosters... Drafted Conspiracy with some friends a couple of weeks ago and realised how much I missed opening packs...
 
Laz

Laz

Developer
CML said:
i am excited for tomorrow
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Presumably because you have procured a mechanism for making the pre-release more bearable?

Oh, Colonel Sanders, I feel FSR asked a good question before, what is it you want to do? We can throw out huge clumps of favourite cards for a while (then we will get bored and start comparing the Lorwyn art direction to that of Eventide or something), but that doesn't really help you build a cube.
I would advise trying to determine some sort of concrete aim. "I want interactive games with less 'I-win' cards" is a little too general to provide anything of real value. If it were 'I want to increase the level of on-board complexity, but preserve the value of combat tricks' then we might be able to talk about interesting creatures with activated abilities, or James could attempt to sell you on running a whole bunch of Experiment Ones along side Ion Storm.
Your concrete aim could be 'I want to make Scuttlemutt good' or 'I want to recreate the feel of Innistrad Limited, but with a higher power level and more nuanced interactions'. Just find a starting point and go from there. The article on the Eldrazi Domain cube that Kuldahar linked above is a fantastic example of this. The initial aim was 'I want to make a cube in which Eldrazi can be played, without it being silly', then this led to Eldrazi spawn, which enable easy Morbid, which crosses over with Evoke, which allows for an Elemental sub-theme, etc...
 
GenericZero

GenericZero

CML said:
i just finished a prerelease without shrooms. big mistake. i am excited for tomorrow
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The Colonel of all things good shows up as a brand new member to our small forum site asking for design assistance, and before we even reach the second page you're talking about missing out on shrooms for a prerelease...

Now no one's gonna get any free KFC...
 
ColonelSanders

ColonelSanders

Real life interferes for a couple days and my thread devolves into this... lol

Jokes aside, looking through all these cards reinforces the idea that I need to figure out a more specific plan for my cube design. I'm going to try to get the guys I play cube with together this weekend, play a bunch of rounds, and hash out some more likes/dislikes and see what we can all agree on.

That being said, I know one thing that definitely needs improving now. White based aggro decks in my cube have struggled. Not because they're weak. It's just that no one wants to play them. The games come down to dice rolls and opening hands where the decks either steamroll or the opponent stabilizes too quickly. It rarely feels like there's a lot of room for outplaying your opponent or coming back after a resolved thragtusk (outside of immediately top decking something like thundermaw hellkite). All my other aggro colors have something that gives them a distinctive feel and some form of endgame reach. Black based decks have duplicate gravecrawler/bloodghast sacrifice synergies to get a little reach (also, this idea is how I ended up at this site). Red has goblin tribal/token support and can close out games with cards like krenko + furystoke giant/goblin bombardment/gargadon shenanigans (I've done a fair amount of card modifying to make goblin decks a nonbinary deck in my cube -- I want degrees of strength, not you get there with it or you didn't). Green is only sort of an aggro color in my cube. The aggressive side is normally just T1 mana dork into powerful 3 and 4 drops with red or black to supplement aggressive 2 drops for when you don't draw a mana dork. Blue can't really play aggro at all in my cube. Back to white the white problem... Right now, white gets a lot of stax-ish cards in the form of multiple thalia's, leoning arbiter, aven mindcensor, and imposing sovereign plus some anthem effects to keep creatures relevant. My cube uses multiple fetches so the search hate does do some work and white also has generic aggro creatures like accorder paladin to fill out the list. However, the decks just aren't... enticing. or fun. Also, WR is really the only white based aggro deck that appears. WG and WB end up as midrange, and WU is always some kind of control.


This brings me to conundrum number 2. Something that I've been mulling over for a while but have been afraid to commit to because it would take a lot of time to rework. I've been thinking about taking aggro out of my cube entirely. Madness you say? well hear me out for a bit. First off, an important thing to know is that my cube is used for sealed play about 75% of the time. Aggro in sealed is pretty difficult to do and taking aggro out would give me a huge amount of room to play around with new cards/archetypes. Second, my play group has never really been that attached to aggro even when it's powerful and dynamic to play. Basically, I play aggro to test it or win easily (because it stays wide open or players don't prepare for it). The only other time it gets played is when one of the more spike-ish players wheels sulfuric vortex and decides its time to cruise control to an easy 3-0. Point number three is that I probably shouldn't say I want to take aggro out completely. What I really mean is that I've considered taking out all the traditional weenie strategies. For instance, black would probably still get a playset of gravecrawlers/bloodghasts and some other recurring creatures and have a strong sacrifice deck with the potential to win fairly quickly (think falkenrath aristocrat, attrition, recurring nightmare, skirsdag high priest, gargadon type cards). In a similar vein, GR would probably end up a lot like RG monsters in standard where turns 1-2 are ramp and then the rest of the game is throwing big hasty creatures. These decks wouldn't curve out and kill on turns 4-5, but they would still put significant pressure on UG-5 color durdles and UW/UB control decks. If I did take this route, the biggest challenge would be ensuring that each color and guild had ways to be relevant and have a distinct identity (basically, I'm concerned with U and G based decks dominating such a format).
 
Dom Harvey

Dom Harvey

Contributor
I'm completely behind cutting aggro. For as much as we talk about certain archetypes being 'poisonous', aggro is more guilty of that than anything else. You can replace a lot of the unexciting aggro creatures with a handful of narrow cards that enable interesting decks as well as cheap cards that uphold the importance of having a good curve while not being obsoleted after turn 4 or so.
 
Jason Waddell

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
Aggro decks pretty rarely come together in Sealed so I think it's reasonable. Like CML implied, it's not great in draft.

The other option is to go in the direction of retail: most decks have a pretty similar curve, and playable card supply is limited.
 
Grillo_Parlante

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
Dom Harvey said:
I'm completely behind cutting aggro. For as much as we talk about certain archetypes being 'poisonous', aggro is more guilty of that than anything else. You can replace a lot of the unexciting aggro creatures with a handful of narrow cards that enable interesting decks as well as cheap cards that uphold the importance of having a good curve while not being obsoleted after turn 4 or so.
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This is more-or-less what I did. I got rid of the roshambo approach and focused on supporting credible early pressure that could maintain relevance into the mid-game. That way the format still has a sense of urgency in developing early board presence, but you don't have the super narrow hyper aggro decks that I feel make for bad magic (and would not work in my format anyway).
 
ahadabans

ahadabans

Grillo_Parlante said:
This is more-or-less what I did. I got rid of the roshambo approach and focused on supporting credible early pressure that could maintain relevance into the mid-game. That way the format still has a sense of urgency in developing early board presence, but you don't have the super narrow hyper aggro decks that I feel make for bad magic (and would not work in my format anyway).
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Man do I love what you just wrote.
 
Eric Chan

Eric Chan

Hyalopterous Lemure
Staff member
Are there any design lessons that can be cribbed from sets like Rise of the Eldrazi? That format didn't really have aggro decks in the traditional sense of the term - Glory Seeker was the most unplayable it's ever been - but still had interesting, varied archetypes, and a surprising amount of depth to it.
 
Grillo_Parlante

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
ColonelSanders said:
Second, my play group has never really been that attached to aggro even when it's powerful and dynamic to play.
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It’s also possible that your aggro section--while perhaps on paper appearing powerful and dynamic-- is not that dynamic to your players. A lot of cube players aren’t competitive spikes and are more interested in exploring the design space of the cube or just doing something cool. To those guys, something like goblin guide won't even be a card in the pack, due to how narrow and comparatively boring it is compared to sweet midrange or control cards. I know I had that problem here.
 
Grillo_Parlante

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
Eric Chan said:
Are there any design lessons that can be cribbed from sets like Rise of the Eldrazi? That format didn't really have aggro decks in the traditional sense of the term - Glory Seeker was the most unplayable it's ever been - but still had interesting, varied archetypes, and a surprising amount of depth to it.
Click to expand...

Yeah, ROE had U/W levelers, which is another good example of a format running interesting cards could exert early pressure, and which than scaled as the game progressed into the mid game.
 
Eric Chan

Eric Chan

Hyalopterous Lemure
Staff member
Yeah, I often feel like Calvin and myself are the only ones remotely interested in drafting aggro in my cube, over the last year and a half. Most of the other twenty odd players who've popped in for cube here and there would not touch Stromkirk Noble with a ten-foot pole. But wave a Chameleon Colossus, Nekrataal, or Cloudgoat Ranger in front of their eyes, and watch them drool over it...

This whole thread is making me wonder if I should dial back aggro support in my own cube.
 
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