I thought I'd write up my thoughts from last night's excellent draft, given that inscho has asked for feedback. This will hopefully save you the effort of transcribing my notes from another source; instead you can just link this, haha.
First, I'll describe my draft through my "player mentality" trying to spike the draft and have a fun night with friends.
I started with a P1P1
Ashnod's Altar over
Misty Rainforest and some shockland. I was thinking to myself, "here's this infinite mana enabler thingy, and that seems like a higher value over replacement than a fetchland." On P1P2, I picked some sort of removal, I think
Skyclave Apparition, also considering that it would allow me to interact with my opponents' combo pieces. Shortly thereafter, I was gifted a
Volrath's Stronghold, which was around the time when I realized I do not have the cube-specific or general knowledge or experience to build a combo deck on the fly, much less with Ashnod's Altar, so I shifted lanes to push as hard into W aggro as I could. I had already seen a Thalia which I suspected would wheel, and it did, followed by a late Declaration in Stone, which really made me feel I'd found an open lane. I paired it with Black based on a speculative early
Godless Shrine plus a
Windswept Heath, but because I didn't see much fixing, I was hesitant to move out of base-white.
Later in the draft (packs 2-3), I was trying to prioritize 1) fixing, 2) premium interaction, 3) a critical mass of cheap critters -- in that order. I felt like I had to compromise quite a bit, playing
Timeless Dragon/
Weathered Wayfarer/
Tithe for manafixing, which kinda fed into my lack of cheap creatures, since I had to play
Dread Wanderer and
Gutterbones in my mostly-white deck, plus half my white beaters were off-plan for a deck as aggressive as I wanted to be. That said, I still had a neat little synergy package with
Collective Brutality,
Priest of Fell Rites,
Sevinne's Reclamation, and other graveyard loopy things, so there were definitely some highlights in the draft phase.
Round 1 I played Inscho's combo-y deck that luckily had very little board presence, so I got to set up pretty effective locks with
Tidehollow Sculler nabbing recursive pieces and
Phyrexian Revoker stopping W6 out of the board (I wasn't confident in my ability to name combo pieces blindly, so I started Revoker in the board, then brought him mainboard when I realized how many face-up
stuff existed that would be worth stopping, e.g. equipment and sacrifice outlets).
Round 2 I played a RBw Sacrifice-matters deck in what would be my favorite of the three matches. Game one was pretty tight but I lost to a Greater Gargadon +
Mayhem Devil doming me for 10. Game two was a beauty, though -- I had established a pretty firm lock using
Volrath's Stronghold+
Cathar Commando+
Skyclave Apparition, exiling anything that mattered, and used a
Balance as a 7-for-1. I eventually lost when I passed priority to my opponent's
Pia and Kiran Nalaar at 5 life with no flying blockers, even though I
knew doing so would present the opportunity for lethal. I think the lateness of the evening caught up to me at this point, but it was still such a close game at all times that it was a complete blast to pilot.
Round 3 I played a UW artifacty durdle pile, which as far as I could tell was relying on the all-around strength of its Urzas, Nettlecysts, Walking Ballistae, and Kappa Cannoneers to achieve near-unbeatable card quality in the lategame. I managed to disrupt this shell in game 1, but wasn't fast enough in later games (plus some shaky decisionmaking overall).
Okay, cue the editorializing. I quite enjoyed the not-max-power draft and deckbuilding opportunities, including my Priest/Sun Titan/Unearth/Volrath's loops and the cute interactions between stuff like
Touch the Spirit Realm and Tidehollow Sculler, etc. I don't usually get the opportunity for being that johnny in my own cube -- some cute stuff exists, but it's forced to be on the game plan of "curve out with good interaction, or perish" a little more than in this environment. So I just had a few turns over the course of gameplay where the novel synergies took up the mana I'm used to spending on Escaping Uro or chaining cantrips or trying to force through the last 3 damage. Great stuff.
I did feel, however, that my deck was somewhat doomed due to its twin lack of consistency and power. Sure, I had Balance/Thalia/Volrath's and a low-ish mana curve, but I lacked the fixing/redundancy to be consistently proactive, and lacked the overall card quality to be consistently powerful. I feel like either one would have sufficed to take my deck up a tier of power. I observed that my opponents in R2/R3 had those deck strengths respectively -- the RB deck had many redundant artifact synergies that meant it never used up its turn activating Wayfarer to fix mana, nor did it have deck slots taken up by off-plan cards; meanwhile, the UW artifact pile wasn't proactive, but had a fathoms-deep roster of powerhouses, including many cards that define Modern and/or are too powerful for Pioneer.
This reads like I'm just complaining I didn't win more, lol. But I do think there are some general design insights here, which you should take with several grains of salt and/or corroborate with other drafters and your past experience:
1) This cube context is very unique. It's not as impenetrable as the Degenerate Micro Cube, which was kinda miserable on the first draft because it's so idiosyncratic. But it was in the least-grokkable half of all cubes I've played, kinda similar to the first time I played power-maxing Pauper or Peasant environments. The flip side is that I could already tell how deeply replayable this format is.
2) I felt that a chokepoint in this format is average card quality. Yeah, I'll make 23 playables easily enough, but are my 23 as strong on average as the person who drafted Wrenn & Six? Combo enablers, while they get a bye for being literally game-winning in the right context, definitely contribute to this variance, because there's two kinds of combo -- the one that requires you to loop Myr Retriever and Mindslaver for a bajillion mana and like 4 high-risk/high-interactivity game pieces, and the one that requires you to just put Wrenn and Wasteland into your deck. The combos which utilize above-rate game pieces in this format seemed to dominate the ones that required scraping the bottom of the card quality pool for enablers. My Volrath's/Commando combo was somewhat median, I felt -- Commando isn't embarrassing on its own, and Volrath's comes with opportunity cost and manascrew risk, but the ceiling of both together was inordinately high. Mayhem Devil + stuff that attacks and blocks also seemed pretty median, but the ceiling is a lot lower there.
3) Another chokepoint may(?) be on consistent access to bread-and-butter effects (interaction and fixing), especially during draft. I was really crushed that my aggro deck would be forced to play only 2 mana-fixing lands, plus two colorless lands (Wasteland/Volrath's), which is definitely a function of my predilections as a Magic player, but it did create some unpleasant moments in draft where I felt unable to successfully "draft the hard way" early, or pivot out of an archetype late, even when I knew pieces for other decks were flowing (like that pick 8 Wrenn, haha). These moments came because I knew I couldn't incorporate the strong cards that wheeled late, nor could I afford to pivot away from my premium removal or the precious few fixing lands that I
did get early, so I felt forced to pick mediocre or off-plan things in my current lane.
On reflection of these three points, I think the most fun I had during the draft was discovering the cool pockets of synergy with just-barely-on-rate pieces (again, that Unearth/Priest/Sun Titan package). To be precise, I think the average rate for this cube is roughly Path to Exile (not Swords), Lightning Strike (not Bolt), Opt (not Ponder), or Sylvan Advocate (not Goyf), or Rankle (not Liliana). The coolest game pieces I interacted with during this draft were the game pieces that were just at or below that power level, because they let me explore a new format in a way that was more low-risk than venturing into bizarro combo territory, and still have a sense of discovery and of maximizing underappreciated game pieces. And, to be clear, I had a
lot of fun doing that! My design criticisms are simply one perspective in an effort to give you constructive feedback, but the main takeaway for me is how much I want to make a cube where Priest of Fell Rites can be the star of the show, because I had a blast using it.
Thanks again for hosting the draft and for inviting me!
