Lorwyn Reloaded - Tribal Cube (360)

[shamizy]

So I began playing Magic again around M14 and missed a lot of the sets that had come in years previous. The last time I had played prior to that was casually with friends back in elementary school, not really knowing the nuances of the game. I ended up missing a ton of cool blocks and one of those that I regret missing is the entire Lorwyn block. MTGO has been having flashback drafts this year and they most recently featured a handful of Lorwyn drafts. They seemed pretty interesting so I kind of had the idea of getting around to craft my own take on it.

Additionally, after playing a handful of EMA drafts around two weeks ago, I was inspired to start building a tribal cube after playing GB Elves. My normal cube is too high a power level to implement a lot of the themes, and tribal is usually poison-y without enough support, so it was a chance to create a lower powered environment (something I've wanted to do for a while) that would let me play with some sweet cards that I missed out on.

Also, to be honest, I just really like Deadbridge Shaman and after playing with it again in EMA I wanted an excuse to slot it into the final 360 of a cube. So yeah, I ended up building a tribal cube just to use Deadbridge Shaman.

Thus, a friend and I collaborated on his Cubetutor account to bring Lorwyn Reloaded! We've been working on it for the last two weeks and its finally in a position that is presentable here at Riptide Lab.

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Fixing



One of the issues I had been having in my regular cube was the prevalence of goodstuff decks and how common they were. I like seeing synergistic builds come together, but if the fixing is too good, then you just want to splash for whatever good cards you can get your hands on. For this cube, we wanted to create an environment where you'd go into two color decks as the norm, with single color decks also being a common enough occurrence. As much as we love our fixing with double shock/double fetch, that's way too good at this level. Thus we decided to limit it to a cycle of gainlands and two sets of each Vivid Land. This limited fixing pushes drafters towards two color decks, but there is the potential to splash for a third color and even go five color (which I'll touch upon later) if they prioritize fixing highly enough.

The Tribes


While we've decided to us the Lorwn/Shadowmoor block as a base for this Cube, there were too many sweet cards and tribes from other sets that we also wanted to mess around with. We've got the basic Goblin/Elf/Merfolk/Faerie base, but why not make it a little wacky and try out some lesser tribes? This led to us including Clerics and Rebels as well, both of which have enough interesting cards and play to them to be worth a closer look. Their power levels also slot right into the range that we're looking for.

But what if someone wants to play more than just two colors? No problem! We decided that it would probably be best to bleed actual races into three color pairs, with classes being spread through two colors. This allows for cool decks to come together like Jund Elves splashing for a Bloodbraid Elf letting you Cascade into Shaman of the Pack.

Five color though? We've got just the thing by bringing in Allies. While BFZ wasn't the most inspiring block in terms of design, I did like their designs for Allies in Limited and thought it would be kind of fun to have that available as a given archetype if someone were to prioritize the fixing (sort of like those 5C decks from KTK Limited).

Thank god for Changelings, they really were the glue that held Lorwyn Limited together and they pull double duty here by providing more sources of tribal synergy and decent bodies across multiple archetypes.

So right now we've got the following archetypes clearly present, working on the implementation of others:

UW: Merfolk
UB: Faeries
BR: Goblins
BG: Elves
URG: Elementals
GW: Human Auras/Voltron
BW: Clerics and Rebels
5C: Allies

Gameplay

For a Tribal Cube, the format is going to be focused mostly upon combat and boardstate complexity. We've included a ton of creatures with activated abilities that affect combat, various ETB effects that interact with the board, and a handful of payoff cards in each color to take advantage of your developing boardstates. There are combat tricks aplenty, a lot of information to digest from given boardstates, and a ton of interactive abilities.

These are some of the sweet decks we've drafted on Cubetutor thus far:

Jund Elves

UR Elemental Control

BW Clerics

RB Goblins

So there you have it, Lorwyn Reloaded! Feel free to give it a test draft here, I'm open to any suggestions you guys have on improving the cube. Let me know if I missed any cool cards or if there's anything I overlooked!

Hopefully we'll be able to assemble it in paper and get a real life cube session going in the next few weeks.

 

[Chriskool]

Hi there, this card list looks obscure and complicated; the best way to play (tm)!

Do you have many power level concerns? I see your watch list of:

Your level of removal leads me to believe that a few turns of all of these creatures but Perfect is acceptable from time to time.

And in addition to Imperious Perfect (whose activated ability is a bit too obnoxious in a middling-powered environment for me), I am a bit worried about:


Grenzo is ridiculously powerful given one untap (and is very efficiently costed); it's a highly-powered card in my eyes. Similarly, Glen Elendra Archmage blanking two removal spells in a format where decks will probably not pressure as quickly as in a higher powered environment. For Mother of Runes, I see only about 13 ways that cleanly deal with her effect (which is *quite* obnoxious in a combat-driven metagame). I have memories of Lin Sivvi from over a decade ago, but perhaps she is tamer now. Edric is probably manageable as well. I haven't had much experience with Liliana, but the 2.5-for-1 nature of the card (with decent combat stats to boot) rubs me the wrong way when I want to see longer games.

Hope it's as fun to tune and play as it looks. Cheers!

 

[shamizy]

Hi there, this card list looks obscure and complicated; the best way to play (tm)!

Do you have many power level concerns? I see your watch list of:

Your level of removal leads me to believe that a few turns of all of these creatures but Perfect is acceptable from time to time.

And in addition to Imperious Perfect (whose activated ability is a bit too obnoxious in a middling-powered environment for me), I am a bit worried about:


Grenzo is ridiculously powerful given one untap (and is very efficiently costed); it's a highly-powered card in my eyes. Similarly, Glen Elendra Archmage blanking two removal spells in a format where decks will probably not pressure as quickly as in a higher powered environment. For Mother of Runes, I see only about 13 ways that cleanly deal with her effect (which is *quite* obnoxious in a combat-driven metagame). I have memories of Lin Sivvi from over a decade ago, but perhaps she is tamer now. Edric is probably manageable as well. I haven't had much experience with Liliana, but the 2.5-for-1 nature of the card (with decent combat stats to boot) rubs me the wrong way when I want to see longer games.

Hope it's as fun to tune and play as it looks. Cheers!

Oh crap, I didn't get a notification for this and haven't been in the Cube Blogs for like 3 weeks. Sorry for the late response!

The watchlist was mostly something that we put together on a quick glance of our list, as you can see it's mostly just lord-type creatures for now. You may be right on Perfect, that was one that I wasn't the biggest fan of, but we'll see if it's too oppressive once we get an actual cube session with 8 people running.

In a higher powered environment like my own cube, Grenzo has been just a middling to below average card most of the time. There are games where it can just take over with some lucky flips, but I've found the average case to just be him at 4 power flipping up threats like half the time. Glen Elendra is likely too obnoxious, but the way I see it, with the majority of this cube being focused upon combat and on-board tricks, there won't be nearly as many gotcha moments as you have in your typical cube. That 2/2 body is bound to get outclassed very early and I imagine that it'll be protecting a lord with it's sac ability more often than not.

Without explicit Rebel support everywhere, I think Lin Sivvi will be a lot more tame in this iteration with rebels being more of a cool tricksy tribe. It's mostly there to tutor up the Rebel aura since it's a pretty sweet trick to bust out every now and then and my drafters love tech-y plays. Finally, Edric and Lily have both been just solid cards for me in my cube but we'll see how they do here. I don't envision Edric being too busted and Lily isn't super abusable without super value creatures to bring back. She's mostly in just because of her cleric typing, there really aren't that many great options tbh.