General Jumpstarting your cube drafts

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blacksmithy

So, after making some guild jumpstarts, tearing them apart to rebuild my cube from the ground up, finishing that, making some mono jumpstarts, and then finally going back to guild jumpstarts... I think that in practice, especially with a small group, guild packs are the way to go. You get to have splashy gold cards, great fixing, and even utility lands in your JS packs without adding any steps to the process.
I allow my players (right now that equals my wife thanks to pandemic) to pick their color pairs and just encouraging them to pick responsibly (in other words, don’t pick a 4-color set). The games play out amazingly well thanks mostly to the manabases you can build into a guild pack that you just can’t in a mono pack. See my JS cube thread for an explanation of what i mean:
https://riptidelab.com/forum/threads/the-jumpstart-cube.3149/
 
Brad

Brad

I'm hesitant to hand people whatever packs they want, but I've previously expressed my boredom with monocolor themes. We do need to find a better way.

Part of the fun of designing a cube is the amount of creativity a single card like Gifts Ungiven or Doomsday can open up to a drafter. Then you design a JS with a few ramp spells and green monsters and it feels horribly lackluster in comparison to the rich, diverse, interlocking, overlapping puzzle of your 360-540 card cube. As a designer, the format hasn't excited me at all since moving to the monocolor mentality, but it's something that my beginner players would appreciate.

Another issue is that I wish we had something 1.5x the size of a cubeamajig, because I still think the 25 card packs are vastly superior to the 20 card ones. 20 cards isn't even on my radar anymore. This bit of extra flex may facilitate multicolor packs as a less volatile option.

Added Edit: Do you think that a stronger mana base than basics+1 Thriving is enough to overthrow the WotC idea of monocolor decks? What if they'd had 3 multicolor lands? What about 5?
 
B

blacksmithy

to answer your edit question: absolutely. as cube architects, our goal is not to ape what WOTC is doing. it’s to surpass it!
TENGEN TOPPA!
if you’re running a hyper slick Alpha/Fetch/whatever manabase in your cube, run a hyper slick Alpha/fetch/whatever manabase in your jumpstarts! make 2-color jumpstarts! make 5-color jumpstarts! make a colorless Turbo Eldrazi jumpstart!

probably 60% of the fun i had playing Cube Jumpstart last night came from interactions purely within the manabases of the smashed-up packs Villain had chosen. we spent a good 10 minutes in the last half of the game mathing out together how she could chunk me with a double striking manland through my recursive 6/6 blocker without playing any spells from her hand. You’re not gonna get that level of play out of your mana if you only make mono packs. i took it not quite to the extreme and gave every pack 4 dual fixers, 2 utility lands, and 2 basics. you can go even further if you want. manabases are truly the core of any cube/cube-like format.
 
Brad

Brad

Man, I'm looking over my secondary cube idea hoping to convert it to JS instead and it's such a shame to see these cards that fill 3-4 roles in the cube and I'll be forced to put them into a prebuilt deck. The beauty is in the versatility. Not that it's the best card for any of those 3-4 decks, but the fact that it's a fine card in all of them. Hurts to throw away that design. It simply doesn't make the same kind of impact in a JS pack.
 
B

blacksmithy

yeah, for those of us who are really invested in the cubing experience, it’s never going to be the best format. i see it as a way to simply get more playtime in when i can’t get enough folks to draft, which is why i’m not using any cards from outside my cube. i want to be able to swap back and forth between drafting and jumpstarting as my group allows.
 
Brad

Brad

How are you planning to store these? Seems a little tricky to keep 20-40 decks all separated in a convenient way.
 
B

blacksmithy

i’m keeping them in a fat pack box separated by dividers. right now i’m only keeping 10 active at a time, since that’s how many my cube lands can support.
 
Brad

Brad

I'm pretty concerned about it when I'm trying to randomly assign 32 of them lol. I need like 40 half-deckboxes. Just pass 4 to each player and get on with it sounds really nice. Anyone know of something like that? Cuebamajig is going to be too small. Like maybe a deckbox for another game where they have 30 card decks or something.
 
B

blacksmithy

you know, now that i think of it, those old school plastic deck boxes that come with 60 sleeves and a single divider could each hold 2 decks for you, Brad. Idk how many of those you have laying around, but...
 
Brad

Brad

I was thinking I could pretty easily front-to-back two decks in the same box, but it's not going to have the same level of randomization as each deck being in a separate box without going through the effort of rearranging all the pairs of decks. Yugioh deckboxes are designed for 40+sideboard and are ~2/3 the size of a Magic deckbox, but they're designed for Japanese sized cards, so I'm not sure we'll fit. I'll have to dig it out if it looks like the potential best option.
 
Alphez

Alphez

Chris: MTGO Academy said:
I have only browsed the thread, so my apologies if this has been brought up specifically: What methodologies have been discussed for "Choosing packs" or making decks?

This appears like one of the hardest parts of designing a system that outputs fun decks for the way-to-play. There is a risk in designing packs that are more than one color. What happens with UB Zombies and RW Mentors are the "packs selected"? My assumption is a bad play experience (but I am willing to be wrong here).

I've seen (some of these may have been from Reddit):
  • Choose from several 20-card half-decks
  • Choose from several 20+-card half-decks and pare to 40.
  • Choose from several modular half-packs and based on what is chosen, get appropriate multi-color cards (i.e., blue pack has UB, UG, UR and UW modules).
And it got me to thinking, would this be an "easy to manage" system to Jumpstart:
  • Build packs based on single color, color pairs, color triads, five colors.
  • Develop a system to relate the packs. Something like:
    • single color: can meld with another single color or color pair
    • color pair: can meld with a single color that shares a color OR a color triad that shares the pair
    • color triad: can meld with a color pair that is included in the triad OR another color triad that shares a color pair in the triad
    • five colors: can meld with a color paid OR color triad
  • Randomly select however many packs for each player. (I would probably look to some sort of random # generator and CubeCobra filtering for this). Each player chooses one pack.
  • Based on packs selected, randomly select second set of options from the approved pool of packs per relation system.
The more I see responses and sweet "packs", the more I am worried that I am going to end up making a Jumpstart Cube to add to the... 10 or so cube-like card populations in the closet... :)
Click to expand...

I like the way Arena handles this. You first choose a packet among 3 possible options. You then choose a second packet among 3 new options.
This system is simple and good enough to make sure players end up having a playable deck, without giving them full control.
I also like that some themes have multiple variant decklists, so when you choose you can't possibly have full knowledge of what you will get.

I'm thinking of setting up my own JS set, because why not, and this is what I plan to do.
48 individual packets (enough to accommodate an 8-player group, considering that each player will need 6 packets to follow the 'Arena structure'.

Of those, there will be:
- 9 monocoloured packets per colour (3 themes will have 2 decklist variants, 3 themes will have unique decklists)
- 1 'rainbow' packet
- 2 colourless packets (I like the idea of going Eldrazi for at least one of these, so I can include some painlands or something along those lines to make things easier)
 
Onderzeeboot

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
Five counterspells feels like way too many, you can cut at least 2 (keep Complicate though for its synergy with Gavi). Radiantis Judgment is extremely narrow removal. You have 3 sweepers, which seems a bit much. The two red ones actually work well with your creature package, and you have a bunch of relevant enchantments in the deck that you don't want to lose, so I would cut Akroma's Vengeance. Forsake the Worldly is a bit narrow, and you already have the Cast Out, and counterspells, so I feel that's another cut.

So, in summary, I would cut:


Or if you prefer, cut Neutralize over Miscalc.
 
Velrun

Velrun

Are we doing 3-colored decks now? I thought it was already a stretch to do 2. Can you briefly repeat for me how you are giving your players their decks?

I really like this deck and I agree with Ondezeeboot.
I worry the deck will either be too strong or too weak in combination with others. Strong because almost all the cards have cycling which means there is room for the other deck’s synergy to shine. Weak because you will only ever end up with 50ish % cycling in a deck. But then again it might just be perfectly average then :p
 
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