Latro's cube (480)

[Latro]

Cube Goals

1. Aggro-control game play
   In short, I want aggro decks to lean heavily on disruption, control decks to lean heavily on on-board control elements, and midrange decks to accumulate value through synergy.
   There should be sufficient support for aggro decks to thrive, and non-traditional aggro colours (or just blue, I guess) should be able to complement the aggro decks with a hefty portion of disruption.
   
2. Jank build-arounds
   The primary reason I started cubing was to play the cards I found interesting that weren't powerful enough to find a home elsewhere.
   
   Naturally, wanting to play a bunch of durdly value engines puts this goal in opposition to goal(1).
   If goal(1) is the objective function to maximize, goal(2) is the main constraint.
   The cube should be slow as necessary to enable some key build-arounds, and no slower.
   
3. Human-centered Drafting Design
   This goal took a while to articulate, and hasn't really made its way into the cube yet.
   Card choices should be dictated by how people actually draft, not my incessant theory-crafting. So far, this has manifested as:
   • Power spikes. Or at least, that's how I'm rationalising
     
     and the like.
     Being presented with too many equally-valid options p1p1-3 can slow the draft down, so it helps to have something flashy to help guide those intial choices. The trick will be making sure these cards aren't completely out of whack with the rest of the cube, so they're all on the watch-list.
   • Broad archetypes. Probably the area in which been most influenced by lurking here, keeping archetypes broad and spread over multiple colours keeps drafter's options open. It reduces 'on-rails' drafting, and reduces trainwreck drafts where your archetype support dries up in pack 2.

The problem with the above is while I know what types of decks my regular drafters enjoy, I don't really have a clear view on how they draft their decks.
I expect aligning to goal(3) will drive most of this cubes updates while I try to figure out what my drafters actually enjoy.

The Cube

Medium sized, medium power, like most cubes a permanent W.I.P:
http://www.cubetutor.com/viewcube/94219
The colour pair archetypes (to be elaborated on later):
UW: Prison, artifacts
WG: Pod/Sac and recur, go-wide
GR: Aggro, discard
RB: sacrifice, discard
BU: Graveyard value
UR: Spells matter
RW: Artifacts, equipment
WB: Life-gain/pay
BG: Graveyard value, sacrifice
GU: Miracle grow, +1/+1 counters

Caveats & drafting information
Regular drafting usually numbers between 4-6 players, so drafting may be done with either 3 packs of 15, 4 packs of 15 burning the last 4, or some similar configuration.

Mana fixing is usually not an issue, as with fewer players packs are built from a pool of all the lands + a subset of the non-lands; the land:nonland ratio changes draft to draft, but it's usually 10-15% of the pool.

Daring sleuth is modified with "EtB:investigate", because I wanted unobtrusive artifact support and Thraben Inspector has been tops.

 

[Latro]

Macro Archetypes - Graveyard
Main colours: UBG
Bleed colour: R

1. UB recursive tempo:

Spoiler

Looks to throw down a few cheap, resilient beaters, disrupt the opponents game plan with counter magic and discard, and push through with evasion/tapping/removal. Since you don't care too much if your threats die:


So you can dedicate the rest of your deck to disruption and reach, which focuses on pushing recursive creatures through or evasive top-end:


If you aren't handed enough recursive creatures, you can pivot to UB graveyard value or a more discard focused deck.

2. BG graveyard grind:

Spoiler

Classic BG graveyard value, where the deck gets stronger as the game progresses and your graveyard grows.


Differentiates itself from UB above by being less willing to delve away its graveyard and more willing to protect its creatures, particularly cards like

- though there is heavy crossover with the aristocrats archetype, so this is likely limited to a few key creatures.

3. UG graveyard:

Spoiler

UG in this cube is rather focused around landing a creature and protecting it, so while it's more of the minor colour pair in this trio the graveyard focus gives it a few tools to this end:

and protection:

4. Red bleed:

Spoiler

More of a discard focus to tie in with the above themes:

 

[dbs]

Your cube is extremely my shit. I'd force this deck immediately:



but I have a feeling it's not 100% the most healthy cube experience . I'm probably about to cut Titania at this point; she's way too good, at least for my list.

 

[Latro]

Thanks! Yeah, Titania feels a bit risky in my cube - she hasn't shown up in any drafts yet so I've no data on how she plays here, but I have a feeling she sits right on the cusp of degeneracy.
Which is a good springboard to articulate just how unhealthy I want this cube to be:
1. Relatively safe - gross build-arounds
From the above cards, exemplified by

These are the cards I love to support. On the minus side, with the right support it can completely lock someone out of playing magic.
On the plus side, I (and a most of my drafters) are completely fine with games like this, as long as it took time and effort to set up.
On its own, constant mists requires constant sacrifice of on-board resources - it'll buy you a few turns, but needs sufficient support to lock your opponent out. And when it does, it can function as support for the spells matter/graveyard decks, powering up other incremental value engines. It also leaves me with a lot of levers to pull to balance it: push aggro decks harder, cut back on its supporting cards, give aggro more reach outside of creature damage, etc. The right level of degeneracy for my cube.
2. Wildcards - powerful build-arounds

Unlike the first category, these cards start out powerful and only get more obscene. Cards in this categpry are all on the watch-list, and my thinking here is as long as these cards suggest a direction to deck-building and can fit into multiple different decks, AND they don't win games single-handedly, they're fine. My hope for Balance is that as easy as it is for decks to play it as a two mana wrath, there's enough aggro support that it can be played for the discard/LD effects as well, and ideally control decks will feel nervous about pitching their hand to wipe the board.
The fact that it's not a threat on it's own gives me hope, so I'm willing to wait and see with these cards.
3. Dangerous - degenerate threats
While for the most part this has led me to cut army-in-a-can cards likeHero of Bladehold and the like, this also applies to the above

The main risk is their role as game-winning threats: constant mists's worst case (from the perspective of the opponent) is a continual investment of resources to lock them out of the game; balance's worst case is blowing out their board/hand position, but forcing you to follow up with something to win the game (or have it already in play). Titania's worst case is a stream of giant threats that demand an answer or end the game. In danger of being cut.

To summarise: I'm happy with unfair magic as long as it takes effort and doesn't win the game on it own, but puts you in a position to win.

 

[Latro]

Macro Archetypes - Aristos
Main colours: BGR
Bleed colour: W

1. BR Aggro sacrifice:

Spoiler

Pairs a more classic RB aristocrats deck:

with a RB graveyard focus:

2. RG Aggro:

Spoiler

One of the decks I'm mandated to include in the cube as as least two of my drafters love aggressive RG decks.
It wants to throw away its hand for board advantage, throw away it's board for damage, then throw away it's graveyard to finish the job:

Unfortunately my Gruul section is mostly aggro-beats rather than spicy archetype support as I haven't found anything I really like here, but my drafters enjoy the deck so I can't complain too much.

3. GB Sacrifice:

Spoiler

Alluded to in the graveyard archetype, but BG is a loose coalition or sacrifice, graveyard synergies, and growing bigger (usually with +1/+1 counters).

Also contains a small amount of +1/+1 counter support with the payoff in green:

As much as I would love to run Retribution of the Ancients, that would probably be too many archetype payoffs in black, even for me...

4. White Bleed:

Spoiler

WG is largely focused around a go-wide kind of deck, so even though I've moved away from direct token support white's focus on creatures/recursion lets it naturally support aristocrat style strategies.
Repeatable recursion such as:

gives it its main point of crossover with aristocrat-style decks.

 

[Latro]

Macro Archetypes - Non-creature Spells
Main colours: URW
Bleed: B

1. RW artifact aggro

Spoiler

Each of the three main colours largely cares about 2/3 of artifacts/sorceries/enchantments, with the prowess (and pseudo-prowess) cards helping to tie these themes together:

Red and white share a heavy focus on artifact spells, with an aggressive bent:

Going deeper brings an equipment focus, mostly supported by doublestrikers but also:

The first two are fine with just one great target.

2. UW prison

Spoiler

The further down I get, the less happy I am with how the archetypes mesh with the cube - UW is on the block for a heavy refresh.
While prison is something I do want to support (provided it's not too easy to enable) it's more of a play style that will function with a few key cards - it still leaves plenty of room to support a mechanical theme alongside it, which has been in various iterations: artifacts, enchantments, devotion, blink, and a tempo/skies kind of deck supported by tax pieces.
The key pieces are:

At the moment it's somewhere between supporting artifacts and enchantments, which is muddled and not particularly distinctive.
Ideas for where this might go:
Blink/Flicker - I've never had much interest in this kind of deck, as a lot of ETB effects revolve around 'draw more cards' or 'remove a thing' - so that blink effects just turn into squeezing out as much value from your creatures as possible. I'd only go down this road if I could figure out how to support a deck focused on prolonging temporary effects (flickering your Flickerwisp to keep your opponent's stuff off the battlefield), breaking symmetry on negative effects (bouncing winter orbs on opponents end-step, etc.). Having enough good and flexible flicker engines is probably the bottleneck here, with being restricted to creatures or strict with their timing.
Go deeper on artifacts - with a focus on tapping/untapping artifacts. Or maybe draw more on red sacrifice effects, turning it into an eggs/Improvise/Affinity deck with white offering Open the Vaults, Restoration Specialist, etc. So far, love the interaction of Winter Orb and Inspiring Statuary - this would likely take it further down that path. Dream card to get working at this power level:

Cycling - I just really like the newly spoiled flicker/cycling card. Not sure of support for this, especially in white.

3. UR spells

Spoiler

Like the above, this one's pretty close to getting a refresh. While I enjoy how it plays and it's mechanically rather solid, it's also not terribly interesting.
With the right environment (lots of instants and sorceries, no top-tier removal) I feel these kinds of decks could be supported with far fewer cards - a few buildarounds:

Add a few rebound/retrace/buyback spells most decks are happy to play on their own, and there's a compact little spells package that naturally slots into counter-heavy control shells, tempo shells, anything that plays instants and sorceries.

While the core package will likely remain untouched, ideas for where else this colour pair may go:
Scry/Top of the library/Miracle - would be nice if I could find interesting payoffs, + supporting cards that don't slow the game down to a crawl (looking at you, top).
Artifacts - if UW leans towards artifacts, UR will likely follow. Things like:

incline me to make this some kind of trinkets/artifact storm deck.
Given the token focus of the above spells package, Brudiclad, Telchor Engineer could be interesting...

4. Black bleed

Spoiler

Partially reflecting an earlier time in the cubes life-cycle when BW enchantments was explicitly supported, White has a lot of enchantment based removal and Black has more than its fair share of do-nothing 4+ mana enchantments. Particularly like some combinations of the following:

 

[Clyde]

I'm really liking the Bound by Moonsilver tech in your BW enchantment support.

 

[Fulcrum]

I'm a big fan of how you're diving into your archetypes. Keep up the great work!

Curious about how D'Avenant Trapper is playing for you. The effect seems very good if it you can get it to trigger consistently.

 

[Latro]

Disparate Archetypes - Isolated Pairs
Final deep dive into the colour pairs that aren't part of a broader theme. While I could overhaul these pairs to fit into a larger archetype, 1) currently I enjoy these individual archetypes too much/am too stubborn to cut them, 2) I have no macro archetype I'm willing to align them too.
So far my approach has been:

• A) to make sure there's a focus on game-plan as well as mechanic, so if you don't pick up enough archetype payoff and can't pivot to another colour you still have a coherent deck, and;
• B) make sure each pair bleeds into some of the other colours, to support splashing for archetype support or pivoting into another colour.

1. UG Miracle grow (+1/+1 counters)

Spoiler

Standard game-plan is to land a little thing and protect it while it gets big:

With protection preferably granted by creature spells to so you have targets for +1/+1 counters and to support your evolve cards:

The more mechanical component is provided by proliferate + Adding +1/+1 counters:

And finally, there's a bit of bleed into the other colours. Black has a similar theme of creatures getting bigger (albeit at the cost of filling your graveyard and killing creatures), while white's go-wide support is granted by a few +1/+1 counter cards, which can easily become disgusting with proliferate:

One issue I'll have to bear in mind (prompted by drafting the WAR UG proliferate.dec) is if one of my archetypes focuses on growing creatures big, I need to make sure the bulk of other creatures are below a certain critical power/toughness - if you put in all that effort to grow your 0/1 to a 5/6 and your opponent drops a 6/6 on turn 5, it devalues the miracle grow deck. What that critical size is and what proportion I'll allow over it I don't know, but first guess would be the 5/5 mark. On a similar note I'll have to check the efficiency of my bounce spells and transition some to tap...

2. GW recursion/go-wide

Spoiler

This archetype is a bit less muddled than the name suggests. Basically, it leans towards your GW weenie style decks with 1 mana 2/1's, where the reach is provided by pseudo anthems, equipment, and overruns:

(+ bonesplitter and friends), and the wrath protection is provided by recursion effects:

Go-wide is currently supported by some token generators, largely in green as it doesn't have much to contribute in the way of recursion (to battlefield), but it does offer sac support and the non-token focus in white helps support Birthing-Pod and similar strategies (plus, it wouldn't be pod without some filthy persist combos):

There's some pretty clear bleed into the aristocrat strategies in red and black, and as mentioned above slight overlap with the +1/+1 counters. Anafenza +Glen Elendra is very rude.

3. BW Lifegain/pay

Spoiler

Inspired by some of the cards from Ixalan, minus the tribal component. Black loves paying life, white loves getting life, mixing those two together is easy and non-parasitic: aggro decks love to pay life for board advantage, control decks love to pay life to remove threats, control decks love to gain life to stabilise, most of these cards will fit anywhere. Life gain there's probably too many to mention succinctly and they all do the same thing, but for life pay:

Payoffs for gaining life (outside of just being able to pay life more consistently) are relatively restrained or build-around heavy:

There's support for it to make more of a controlling BW bleed deck, slowly killing the opponent while you lock down the board:

Which helps it bleed into the UW prison theme with white's enchantments.

 

[Latro]

Curious about how D'Avenant Trapper is playing for you. The effect seems very good if it you can get it to trigger consistently.

With a sample size of one I've been impressed - she saw play in a GW tokens/equipment deck that triggered her to tap down key blockers and push through a massive threat - granted, that threat was Hero of Bladehold, so the game would likely have soon been over anyway, but she pulled her weight.

 

[Latro]

I'm going to be transitioning URW into the artifact archetype (Thanks to Trainmaster's post on green artifacts convincing me I can bleed support into green, helping out my under-supported +1/+1 counters deck no less!). I figured out sketch out the revised UW/UR archetypes here so I'll remember what I'm trying to accomplish.

UR and RW will explicitly support artifacts, UW will remain a prison/tempo deck where the artifact pieces offer a way to break symmetry (tapping down your own Winter orb with Inspiring statuary, convoking with Chief architect to get around mana restrictions, etc., while BG will largely support artifacts via sacrifice/+1/+1 counters. I'll have to expand the colourless section too..

Spoiler: Potential adds

Coloured build-arounds:

Open the vaults and Hanna both support enchantments equally well, which keeps UW as a more flexible prison pair that can move into artifacts if they're open, or shift into Esper for the black enchantments. With a high enough artifact creature density, I'm hoping Pia's Revolution will see play in RW decks looking to keep the pressure on with artifact creatures, as well as RX sacrifice decks, rather than just artifact tribal welder decks.
Brudiclad I'm excited to try out - between the UR spells focus on token generators, creating welder-sac fodder, and silliness with artifact tokens/clone tokens, it should help define UR archetypes without pigeonholing the drafter into artifact tribal. Also adding: Quasiduplicate.

Incidental coloured artifacts/artifact support:


Things to support Tinker/Welder:

No desire to go down the Inkwell Leviathan path, so Myr Battlesphere is the largest artifact beef I'm willing to put in. Mindslaver and the already included God-Pharaoh's Gift should round out the tinker/welder cheat targets, with the rest being more restrained (i.e. Gearhulks).

Bleed:
Archetype bleed I'll use for two purposes - to pull you into new colour, either as a splash or a second colour if you haven't committed (your UR artifacts deck is looking a bit light, but some black cards let you transition to a grixis deck) or they help you escape entirely (UR is a trainwreck, but those black artifact cards can help you transition into black sacrifice deck that utilises some artifacts as sac fodder.
The problem with the first is that bleed colour must be able to support the archetype you're shifting from - no sense jumping into black artifacts if it's not supported outside of a few cards. For the most part, broad archetypes with plenty of crossover fixes this issue.
The second is a balancing act - the bleed cards should be in the intersection of archetype A and archetype B, without being narrow enablers. I haven't yet found cards I'm 100% satisfied with for black:

as the first two both call for a high density of artifacts - something I'm hoping a higher density of artifact creatures can fix. As it is, Herald of Anguish is still a big flying 5/5 who strips you opponents hand, can act as removal and is playable off equipment, only getting better with more artifacts - Syndicate Trafficker I'm far more skeptical about. All support a sacrifice theme, so in addition Braids, Cabal Minion should help round out the sacrifice archetype.

edit: Actually, thinking on this a little more - I may just scrap all my colour pairings and expand the macro archetypes further. During drafting every card starts out as a viable pick, then narrows down as you consider a) what cards you need to fill out your deck's curve/manabase/gameplan, b) what colours are open/closed/fit in with my deck, and c) which cards have the best synergy/strong interactions/don't synergize at all.
a) is largely dictated by format speed and similar, as it determines how lung you can afford to durdle and the amount of removal you need, whether combat tricks are playable, etc.
b) is dictated by draft dynamics + the quality of fixing available,
and c) is where drafters have the most leeway in picking up subtle links, mixing together cool build-arounds, and finding synergies you never knew existed - the last thing I want to do is limit players with 'that's not in my archetype', and the polar opposite is a collection of archetypes that span all colours.
If artifacts can be supported in green, there's no reason I can't extend all the loose archetypes to span all 5 colours, with colourless cards helping glue things together. White fills a niche in sacrifice and graveyard with tokens/weenie recursion, and blue tokens + extort style creatures + recursive beaters could help extend the sacrifice themes.

Themes will be as above:

• Sacrifice - although some colours will remain in more of a supporting role, sacrifice will be pushed as a means of pressing a board advantage to prevent board stalls, and helps support;
• Graveyard - all colours will use the graveyard to some degree, mostly to support one of the other three themes.
• Growth - creatures grow with equipment, +1/+1 counters, graveyard, etc. but it all prioritizes a format shifting towards Theros/heroic on the creature spectrum - natural fatties should be minimized, bounce should be rare and removal limited in scope, with a premium on unconditional removal. Not to the extent of Theros, but you get the idea.
• Artifacts - which helps tie all the themes together with colourless support, as well as being an archetype in its own right.

 

[Latro]

MH update:

Large update focused around expanding the above archetypes into 5 colours.

The obvious issue with 5 colour archetypes is uneven colour distribution; for instance, aristocrats is naturally concentrated in black, heavily supported in white, red and green, but outside of a handful of exploit creatures and some Innistrad cards, there are no obvious hooks for blue decks.
There are multiple (and not mutually exclusive) solutions to this problem:
> Decrease the cubes power level/speed, if it allows you to run lower-powered enabler cards;
> Break singleton on key supporting pieces;
> Crossover support, which is the approach I'm taking here.

Going off the above example, blue may not have enough sacrifice oriented cards to really drive home the theme, but my blue section does already contain a whole load of token makers that synergize with the other archetypes.
By having either packages or other archetypes crossover and support the main archetype where it's weakest, I'm hoping it will provide sufficient support to enable Ux sacrifice decks, or Wx graveyard decks.
'Package' I'll be defining as a set of build-around cards which can be natively supported with minimal effort, either supporting an existing archetype (land-loam in graveyard decks) or pairing with common effects (non-creature spells, life gain/pay).

To illustrate,

Spoiler

Aristocrats:
Blue supports artifacts, +1/+1 counters and graveyard strategies, but is weak in sacrifice synergy.
Token providers:

Most of which trigger on spells, or artifacts, or make artifacts, giving blue a unique twist on generating sac fodder.
Instants/Sorceries I'll keep as a package (which crosses into artifacts matter by virtue of them being mostly non-creature) and use it to support sacrifice decks with token generation.
Sacrifice is explicitly supported in the other colours, so a few archetype signalling cards that fit into other decks:

>Silumgar Sorcerer, Sidisi's faithful and Elder Deep-Fiend are all generically playable spell-effect creatures, signal a sacrifice theme, and play well with the evolve creatures in blue.
>Siren stormtamer and Glen Elendra Archmage are both self-sacrificing creatures for death triggers, and can fit in most decks with creatures.

The main weaknesses of this approach are the lack of archetype signalling, and a lack of strong build-arounds.
I'm hoping the unique identity of the support cards imparted by crossing over archetypes/packages (a sacrifice/stax deck that chains cantrips with Murmuring mystic and Metallurgic Summons to keep ahead of Braids, Cabal Minion?) is enough to draw people into the colour, while (1) isn't a major issue - there are plenty of signals for the more traditional pairings.

Briefly on the other archetypes:

> Growth:
Pushing +1/+1 counters further into white, with more of a go-wide feel, and black has already incorporated +1/+1 counters with its sacrifice/growth style cards - Yawgmoth, Thran Physician really helps out with providing some incentive to go into black.
Red is the weakest in this archetype at the moment, but Red and White both support an equipment package.
This archetype is a little loose, partially because there isn't really a strong payoff for growing your creatures, outside of having bigger creatures.
I'll likely push +1/+1 counters further into red to tie things together mechanically.

> Graveyard:
White's the obvious weak link - although it already has a solid creature recursion suite that plays into the sacrifice theme too.
In order to really play into the graveyard theme it needs its recursion spells to scale with the size of the graveyard - return to the ranks, dusk // dawn fit the bill for creatures.
Here I'll be supporting Wx Gy decks with the enchantments package as well:
Starfield of Nyx and Open the Vaults will give an incentive for full graveyards, so kind of the opposite of the U-aristocrats approach - payoffs are here, while other colours can lend support and add a new dimension to the payoffs.
I may add a slight enchantment feel to green as well, but nothing narrow.

> Artifacts:
Green and Black both are very light on artifact support in my cube, so green will ply its +1/+1 counter support into modular decks, while black will support artifact decks with artifact sacrifice.
Also, live the dream of a Gx artifact prison into: Titania's Song.

The Swaps:

Spoiler

Red:
Out:

In:


Motivation:
Make the spells package more lean, support artifacts. Blademaster and Hound will probably not last long, but wanted to add some doublestrike to encourage equipping things.
Vortex may make a return as an antidote to prison decks.

White:
Out:

In:

Motivation:
Artifacts. Porphyry nodes makes a nice self-saccing enchantment to recur with Starfield.

Blue:
Out:

In:

Motivation:
Artifacts, sacrifice. Make spells more lean. Cumberstone should keep tokens down. Brainstorm and Ponder to support Tamiyo and that red zombie wizard I forget the name of.

Black:
Out:

In:

Motivation:
A R T I F A C T S. Some more 1cmc targets for the red wizard. Doom Whisperer cut for being too much beef. Some more sac support.

Green:
Out:

In:

Motivation:
Support Tamiyo, some green aggro.

Multicoloured:
Out:

In:

Artifacts. Considering adding The Grand Calcutron. Delve/convoke looks like a cool deck building puzzle, and 8/8 is a big boy in this list.

Out:

In:

Motivation:
Increasing cube size for higher artifcat density. 500 is a rounder number anyway. I think hex parasite lost all its support 10 cuts ago.

To summarize:
Archetypes;
UBGR - graveyard.
RWUB - artifacts.
BRGW - sacrifce.
GUWB - growth (+1/+1 counters mostly).

Packages;
UR - spells, supports artifacts and U sacrifice with tokens.
Wb - enchantments, supports W graveyard with recursion effects.
RW - equipment, supports artifacts and R in growth/power matters.
GR - lands package, supports graveyard.
WB - life gain/pay, seems to cross into sacrifice a fair bit.

 

[Latro]

Draft report, now that I've finally gotten around to actually drafting.

General Observations

• Whether due to some strange quirk of the draft, player preference, or actual colour weakness, Naya colours were over-represnted and blue was massively under-represented, leading to archetype cannibalisation. If it happens again I'll need to make blue more palatable to my drafters...
• Spreading the macro archetypes over multiple colours worked out well, with a few archetypes cropping up in decks outside of their core (a BW artifacts deck and a RG counters deck).
• The format could stand to be a little more aggressive - there's a desperate lack of one-drops. Overall things tended to play out as planned, with faster synergy-driven decks attempting to disrupt the more engine-based durdly decks before they could get their engine online and overrun the game. Games didn't overstay their welcome, and board stalls were infrequent and short-lived.
  However, the aggressive decks weren't as fast as I would have liked, and often ran out of steam after a few well placed pieces of removal.
  This could have been a function of the cannibalisation noted above, or it could have been a lack of redundancy in aggressive options - all decks were generally lacking in one-drops.
• Overall the cube is working as intended, with a few overall balance issues to work out. Will need a few more test drafts to see tune up the archetypes.

The Decks

In a vaguely ascending order of success:

RW Control

This was a bit of an odd one, being a general RW control deck looking to set up some recurring source of damage, then drop a Solitary Confinement to close the game out. Suffered from lacking a reliable way of refilling the hand while in confinement, this not being a common effect in RW - liked the idea, so will attempt to support with R graveyard focused shenanigans rather than hand refill.

RW Weenies

A weenie aggro deck looking to disrupt with Dusk//Dawn and Slaughter the Strong, but had to fight all the other RW decks for playables - particularly the one drops and lands.

GR counters

A bit of a slower RG deck using World-Breaker + recursive creatures to build inevitability, with a slight lands sub-theme. Unfortunately never assembled the mini-engine of Wrenn and Six + Evolution Sage.

BG Sacrifice

Sacrifice + recursion. Need to check if there are sufficient sacrifice payoff floating around the cube in BG.

BG Self-mill

A disruptive midrange deck that could pivot to a baron-like thing with Bow of Nylea. Metallic Mimic worked well as generic tribal support when paired with Curse of Shallow Graves.

Naya Pod

A full Naya deck, and probably the one that suffered the most from cannibalisation. What looks like an early pick of birthing pod ended up struggling to get enough playable 4 drops, and so moved to a lower CMC curve, which made it easier to pick off creatures and disrupt any pod chains.

UR Tinker

This one was mine, and the only one playing blue (which with hindsight I could have leaned far more heavily into). Brudiclad was a lot of fun, generating insane value even with 3/3 golems / 1/1 thopters as his best target tokens. Emry was fine even when recurring the more expensive artifacts.

BW Artifacts

A blend between the macro artifacts archetype and the BW lifegain package. Happy that the lifegain package was noticed and drafted, the recurring life-drain effects seem to help a lot with making that package playable - hope to see more aggressive incarnations in the future.

Pleasant Surprises

I wanted to see how this functioned without moxes/cheap rocks + massive cheat targets, and it did not disappoint. There were enough artifact tokens to throw away 90% of the time, and the other 10% it still allowed for a decent value play.

This could easily end up sitting around doing nothing, not being able to attack when you want it to nor block when you need it too, but most games I never even noticed the blocking clause. With all the self-mill/discard floating around it set up a fun mini-game for the opponent to keep their graveyard large enough to get value from, but small enough (via delve, reanimation, etc.) to stop the gargoyle from attacking. Helps that the cube has such a strong GY focus, and being an artifact is nice.

Despite being amess of a card, the multiple types for tutoring/recursion + repeatable return-to-library effect + having backup effects makes this a compact way to support a baron-like deck. Very cute in the BG self-mill deck with mesmeric orb.

I was fully expecting this to be overly domineering and go straight to the watchlist, but was dealt with quickly in most every game it was in.

Another card I expected to be too clunky to use effectively, it managed to prove itself every time it came down. Overrun effects already require you to be ahead or at least on par with board presence anyway, and asking for a creature to sacrifice was never too much of a cost to really compromise that. A nicer and thematic.

While it needs more support in other colours outside of BW (the triggered drain effects being a way of getting ahead on your dwindling safe turns), the RW deck using it successfully proved the concept, pairing it with a Glint-Horn Buccaneer and a Blind Obedience. With few more sulfuric vortex-type cards + red cast from GY cards (e.g., the upcoming escape cards), this could give a unique spin to RW prison style decks.

Disappointing Failures

I thought it would be slow, but even the slowest decks didn't want this. Given I'm planning on increasing the format speed, this is getting swapped for an Antiquities War. Even when played early the game finished with 8-10 counters on it, cast later it was effectively useless, and the mana ramp ability is near useless in this format.

Watch List

No surprise here. I like it as a signpost for an equipment based deck, plus New Phyrexia is cool, so I'd rather a) support aggressive decks to go under it, as redeploying it is costly; b) pushing the critical toughness further to 4 toughness, so there's a higher density of answers available; c) More artifact removal, which shouldn't be so niche with such a strong artifact presence.

Actions

• More aggressive one drops
• Some slight archetype warping to focus support for some of the build-arounds in certain colours (i.e. Solitary Confinement)
• Reorient the removal suite around 4 toughness
• Add more artifact removal
• Get more data on blue. Maybe everyone just likes big bomby Naya creatures...