Feel free! Drafting your cube was what made me realize how important that quality was for me and my cube.
* Would be good to include a link to the cube at the top of the page, I think the only link is in your sig still.
Leave it to me to spend a week writing something and forget to include the most important part. Funny coincidence: I just dropped my wife off at the airport, she had been planning what to pack for over a week (had a spreadsheet and everything!). We get to the airport and she had left the most important of her two bags at home. I had to drive 90 mph all the way back home to get it and then back so there was enough time to get through security. Birds of a feather I guess...
* I really liked the Versperlark deep dive to show what the interactions are capable of.
I think this is where you could get the most mileage out of your write up. You have even less clear archetypes. The snapshots are less useful for you, and loosely mapping out the types of interactions would be super enlightening for those approaching your cube for the first time.
* For the boros example do you actually have a prowess aggro deck (only 2 prowess cards) do you want a better way to describe it?
I'm pretty careless with my archetype naming. I call things madness this or dredge that when there are 3 cards with the actual dredge mechanic and 3 cards with the actual madness mechanic. Then again, I call one archetype the Wildfire deck when there is only one
Wildfire in the cube. I'm mostly trying to capture the spirit of an archetype.
But I see that this does give the wrong impression. I need to think on it some. I'm open to suggestions on alternate archetype names.
As an aside, I wondered about bag of holding when I saw it in your list before. It's almost like a discard matters pay off card, which was cool, but then I remembered that the effect exiles from the graveyard, which goes against part of the role of discard in my cube which is simply to get things in the graveyard. Interested in your take on it?
First difference to note between our cubes is that getting things into the graveyard is never an issue for this cube. What is an issue for some archetypes is reliably profiting off of discard-centric effects. I'll use madness as a the main example: when your cube is full of things like:
all of the many card parity looting effects and card disadvantage discard mechanics instantly become card value. I've tried to run a higher density of these cards in the past, many fell out for just not being good or flexible enough for my goals. I was never interested in running ones that weren't good hard-casted. Arrogant Wurm makes me want to punch things. So I'm down to only 3 madness cards.
Without all of these madness cards in this cube, there are several strategies that aren't as able to reliably get value from all the discard-driven cards within their pool of cards. I say this with the understanding that a
Merfolk Looter activation provides a valuable hand sculpting effect that is generically useful, but this cube thrives on leveraging cards/mechanics in creative ways for extra value.
Important things to note for my uses:
- The card is discarded. So it triggers things like
Archfiend of Ifnir,
Drake Haven, etc
- The card enters the graveyard before being exiled triggering things like
Syr Konrad, the Grim twice,
The Gitrog Monster,
Turntimber Sower, etc
- It's an artifact and a trinket to boot. Artifacts are among the easiest permanents to recur and search for in this cube.
- It interacts with cycling as cycling is a discard effect. You can recklessly cycle away cards in the early game, and get them back in the mid-late game.
- The discard/exile effect is static and can get nutty with mass discard: An example, with an
Ayula's Influence and the Bag you can pitch several lands and return to hand like a one shot
Life from the Loam. Influence and
Zombie Infestation are free discards that won't interfere with your need to keep 4 mana open to crack the Bag and replenish your hand
- It feeds itself, and has a solid baseline as cheap reusable hand sculpting effect
- If it starts to interfere with bigger and better plans, you can just sacrifice it
To give an idea of its usefulness in a hypothetical deck scenario. I'll use the example of Dimir Control. I recently cut
Bone Miser and
Faith of the Devoted so I'm left with the following discard-matters payoffs:
The color pairing has a ton of cards with a discard component:
(Plus all of the cycling lands and colorless cards with discard components)
If we don't have at least 2 of Curator, Haven, and Archfiend how do we get more value from these cards?
Well, there's delve and reanimation, there are cards that recur themselves...and there are some other small ways, but all of these cards are also top priorities for other drafters. That
bloodghast will absolutely be drafted by the Gruul Berserker deck. What is typically in abundance are the glue cards that discard to some capacity. Sometimes you are just a little low on payoffs. I find that this tends to happen a little more in the slower blue-based decks. So in this example, in the absence of multiple payoffs, Bag will function much like any slow value engine would in your typical dimir control deck.
It's far from a perfect card, but what I like most about Bag of Holding is that it presents a very different axis for the discard foundation to function on.
