Would you be interested in a finished cycle of horizons? I just got them in from the printer last week and they look pretty dang good if I do say so myself. Of course, you might not want proxies, but if you do . . .
General Macroarchetype Cube or: Who's the Beatdown Cube
- Thread starter japahn
- Start date
Bob's on the list. I don't think Pain Seer is much better than Audacious Thief, but I may run it too.
Ferocidon might be fine, but it's kind of punishing the opponent for trying to make a comeback and I view it as a card that's unfun to lose to.
That's a reason not to go to this power level, as I want all colors to support macro archetypes roughly equally.Also, just a semantics point that might inform card selection, aggro/mid/control aren't really true penta archetypes at the RTR Standard-ish power level.
- Aggro isand/or
- Control is
- Midrange is
I'm not married to these exact breakdowns, but my point is that unless we're breaking the color pie, we won't see truly equal distribution of macro-archetypes among colors. Therefore, I think it's okay to have a color's effects be slanted towards one or the other macroarchetype.
I'm not sure it is correct, though. There have been lots of recent printings at high power levels.
Legit question: do you want to stick to just the "big three", or do you also want to support stuff like tempo aggro-control disruptive decks?
Because blue "aggro" has a strong tendency to actually be curiosity.dec or ninja.dec, which doesn't really play the same way (or want the same cards as) a "true" balls-to-the-wall aggro deck. And it isn't even like they're a proper "synergy" deck, anymore than a deck with a bunch of cheap evasive creatures + bushwhackers is a synergy deck.
Because blue "aggro" has a strong tendency to actually be curiosity.dec or ninja.dec, which doesn't really play the same way (or want the same cards as) a "true" balls-to-the-wall aggro deck. And it isn't even like they're a proper "synergy" deck, anymore than a deck with a bunch of cheap evasive creatures + bushwhackers is a synergy deck.
Definitely want to support tempo aggro control disruption merfolk fish. I would like aggro decks to have disruptive elements in other colors as well, like discards in black, instant hexproof/indestructible in white and green. Red is trickier, but it can work on these sorts of decks by using burn to either clear out blockers or provide reach.
just nailing down the “color pie core effects” and a good ballpark of their densities will be a really good start on this
landofMordor
Administrator
It costs 33% less mana than Thief for the same stats, and is only slightly less likely to draw cards (plus offers synergies with Convoke/Vehicles/etc). I think such a swap is highly likely to represent an overall increase in power level.
Ok insert whatever Centaur Courser with upside you prefer, of which there are plenty -- I think the point stands that cheaper threats are higher-power swaps, and that leads to less bomby gameplay, which will be increasingly salient if you're increasing the density of strong power outliers.
yeah I mean, it might just be a definition thing, of how I (mis)understand these terms. Cuz if you're telling me you want to support base-green control, I'm hearing "fight spells paired with big creatures" which seems like it's either 1) midrange by another name, or 2) a Retail Limited deck. And #2 seems below the power level of any of the cards you currently have highlighted, let alone the power increases you're considering. Maybe you just mean control = "not the beatdown until the last couple turns of the game", in which case ramp = control? idk.
But I agree with Mapi that if our definition of aggro includes fish and green-ramp-to-a-5-drop, then it'll be possible to make it penta (or really 5-10 mono/guild archetypes, because I also agree with Mapi that each color's aggro won't want cards from the other versions of the deck).
Couldn't agree more here. This will resolve the hard theory and definitional questions that I'm trying (and failing) to resist bikeshedding, haha.
That's actually why I called it "aggro" and not aggro — to me, a big part of two (non-combo) decks "belonging" to the same archetype is that you can sorta jam the decks together and have the result still belong to that archetype.
White, Red, and Black aggro have very similar gameplans, so you could jam together some cards and get, say, RW aggro. You can't really do that with Blue Tempo (which behaves more like a control deck with a cheap finisher than, say, RDW) or Green Stompy (which focuses on being Big instead of being Wide), since they approach the same basic problem of "beat villain's face in as quickly as possible" in very different ways.
You could potentially get Blue and Green to produce a "normal" aggro deck, but it'd restrict you to a very specific power band.
landofMordor
Administrator
ten copies of kessig prowler and phantasmal bear is magic at its finest
I'll proxy this cube, yeah, no way I'm buying 3 cycles of fetches plus the rest of the $4000 my incomplete list is at.
I don't want to run customs, though, simply because it's easier to manage and play online without then. Thanks for offer though! I may ask you for tips on printing!
Honestly MPCFill makes it really, really easy. It's a little expensive (no less than 30 cents a card or so at the most efficient rate) but they look gorgeous. The texture is indeed offputting, as many people have noticed, and the smell isn't quite as pleasant as that of genuine cards, but once they're in sleeves they work just fine.
Haven't made any cuts or put the right number of cards yet, or even tried to all removal... but I can already draft aggro and control!
WR Aggro:
https://cubecobra.com/cube/deck/6364a6c470d1e90abd9b0695
WUR Control:
https://cubecobra.com/cube/deck/6364a8d870d1e90abd9b1087
I need to add some removal now, but I think this would be a pretty cool matchup already. Any guesses at who is favored here, and at what win rate?
WR Aggro:
https://cubecobra.com/cube/deck/6364a6c470d1e90abd9b0695
WUR Control:
https://cubecobra.com/cube/deck/6364a8d870d1e90abd9b1087
I need to add some removal now, but I think this would be a pretty cool matchup already. Any guesses at who is favored here, and at what win rate?
landofMordor
Administrator
My guess is that this aggro deck wins 75% of games. I drafted this same Aggro seat and I think you could even go lower in curve -- you've got so many mana sinks that you don't need to go up to 5 mana (although I would have picked a 4-drop if I'd had the opportunity). And the manabase is actually quite good for a 2-color aggro deck. I could see this kind of deck being a thing if our draft pool were (e.g.) singleton RTR-era Standard.
Control, though it's a spicy and fun-looking brew, doesn't look like it can compete on this level. The core issue IMO is that control can't do anything to disrupt aggro in the early turns, or dig itself out of mana screw. And moreover, aggro has pieces which specifically hose the control gameplan of 1-for-1 trades backed up by big creatures. Legion's Landing, Gods Willing, Giant Killer all bust that gameplan wide open. And that's on top of the curve issue in the control deck -- I ran the hypergeo and 35% of Control's games, they won't even draw 2 cards <3mv by turn 2. Meanwhile aggro can dump their whole hand by T4. I don't see Control surviving to get the benefits of Fact or Fiction, let alone Drakuseth. (I tried to redraft this Control seat but we must have different proclivities, because I ended up in Abzan midrange. The Abzan deck looks pretty good although the mana is shakier than I'd like as a player. So take this with a grain of salt!)
Hope this data point helps.
I played vs myself on Cockatrice and it was Aggro 4-0 Control, so you may even have underestimated it But the games were fine, it wasn't actually just running over the control deck, but dealing like 5-10 damage and keeping pressure on to force wipes while you had protection up, finishing the game on turn 10+ with Hammer of Bogardan and Lightning Bolt or a flipped Legion's Landing. So I'm pretty optimistic!
But the games were fine, it wasn't actually just running over the control deck, but dealing like 5-10 damage and keeping pressure on to force wipes while you had protection up, finishing the game on turn 10+ with Hammer of Bogardan and Lightning Bolt or a flipped Legion's Landing. So I'm pretty optimistic!Mana was fine, but the lack of removal was really problematic for control.
I sort of forced control there to get a control deck that I could pit vs the other, which may not have been very fair, so definitely gotta take these results with a grain of salt and not assume aggro > control, even at the moment. I was mostly interesting in how the gameplay worked, and that went how I wanted, so I'm happy
As much as I'm loving spectating this, I feel like I'd take it in a very different direction to achieve the stated goal - the presence of archetypes (Aristocrats, Humans, Reanimator, whatever) seems pretty linked to the mechanics and complexity/word count of the cards in the cube, while theaters (Aggro, Control, Midrange, Tempo) only care about the board presence or card advantage a given card gives you at a given point in the game. You can throw out most of the text on a card and still support theatres, while totally crippling the concept of synergy-based decks. Conversely, the wordier the cards the more likely an unexpected or unintended synergy is present, giving drafters the chance to find said synergies, or trick themselves into looking for them despite the stated goal of the cube (or to look for them in an attempt to be clever - of which I am definitely guilty).
Divination, Day of Judgement, Air Elemental, Elite Vanguard - which one doesn't belong in a deck with the other three? The fact the answer is so obvious is enough of an argument to me
Core set limited turned up to 11, basically.
Divination, Day of Judgement, Air Elemental, Elite Vanguard - which one doesn't belong in a deck with the other three? The fact the answer is so obvious is enough of an argument to me
Core set limited turned up to 11, basically.
The biggest problem to solve in this sort of environment is the lack of gameplay agency. The Elegant Cube has been in a space similar to what you're describing and Ifelt that, while the decks were perfectly functional, the individual cards not being very interesting created games that were not very interesting.
From there, I took the Elegant cube in a direction that used synergy and microarchetypes to introduce more deck variety, and that brought some more gameplay variety with it. This project to me is sort of a "what if" I had instead taken the cube to a direction of choosing interesting individual cards instead of choosing interesting archetypes.
From there, I took the Elegant cube in a direction that used synergy and microarchetypes to introduce more deck variety, and that brought some more gameplay variety with it. This project to me is sort of a "what if" I had instead taken the cube to a direction of choosing interesting individual cards instead of choosing interesting archetypes.
Now that I'm getting into the more specific card choices and decisions for this cube list, I created a thread in Cube Blogs: https://riptidelab.com/forum/threads/whos-the-beatdown-a-macroarchetype-cube.3674/#post-120580
Hey sorry for not replying to this sooner, I got busy with school and forgot about it again until reading back through the forums .
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To your credit, I think you did a good job balancing the removal section in the last version of the Cube I looked at. While I would still cut path and chastize if this were my Cube, the rest of the options look even enough to keep the gameplay balanced but broad enough to provide interesting draft decisions and have cards tailored to certain decks. Gold star!
All in all, I still think this is a good project, and if you continue to work on it, I am excited to see more results. I think this a really unique cube, and I'm enjoying seeing it's development.
.Ok good, we're on the same page.
I definitely think the tempo bottleneck in some formats does change the calculus on cards like Path and Thalia (one mana makes a much smaller difference in a game that's lasting 15+ turns). I don't really agree on the lifegain point since most modern formats don't have a ton of incidental life unless it's a supported archetype, but I think that's mostly semantic. Card evaluation in a fast set like All will be One or Amonkhet is going to be fundamentally different than something slow like Invasion block.
This is an important point– if you want some of these less pushed cards to be good you definitely need to adjust the power level of the environment accordingly. And yeah, you can definitely make something better or worse depending on the context. That's really the fun part of this type of Cube, as I'm sure you've found– there's a lot of open space and knobs that can be easily adjusted.
My broader point with those specific card choices was just to show how you could design a removal section with diverse options of a similar power band. I definitely did a worse job illustrating that point with my second set of cards, mostly because those are among my favorite lower-power removal spells
.To your credit, I think you did a good job balancing the removal section in the last version of the Cube I looked at. While I would still cut path and chastize if this were my Cube, the rest of the options look even enough to keep the gameplay balanced but broad enough to provide interesting draft decisions and have cards tailored to certain decks. Gold star!
My main point with talking about power bands so much is that it is easier to get reasonably balanced gameplay in a Cube like this using a tighter power band than compared to the average synergy Cube. Microarchetypes necessitate cards with broader internal power bands than macro archetypes (Drake Haven is either winning you the game or a 3-mana do nothing; Dark Confidant always does the Dark Confidant thing). Usually with this sort of Cube it's easier to build the first gameplay version with a tighter band in mind becasue it gives you a better idea of what the average draft is going to look like when the Cube is complete. If you don't like that version, you can broaden, tighten or change the range of the band from there to get the desired result. In my experience with this type of environment, power outliers tend to dominate the first few drafts until you've adjusted accordingly, so you don't really have an accurate idea of what the Cube will look like once it's closer to where you want it to be until later on in the process. All that said, I think having a broader than final band is perfectly fine during the ideation stage and early testing. Just going too broad too early can make it harder to figure out where your Cube is ultimately going to land. I remember seeing the decks you and Landofmordor posted in the blog thread for this Cube and thinking the Aggro decks and Control decks looked like they came from completely different Cubes. Unless I'm misreading your design goals here and that's what you want from the environment, I don't necessarily think that disparity in deck quality is going to be particularly healthy for this type of Cube.
I agree; removal outliers are definitely harder to detect than threats. It's really only obvious when a super-efficient removal spell is blowing out some mediocre threat (like Go for the Throat killing my Thorn Elemental). However, a player is unlikely to notice that Lightning Bolt is better than Shock when either spell is used to kill Thalia, Guardian of Thraben because they're both killing a small, low-investment creature.
All in all, I still think this is a good project, and if you continue to work on it, I am excited to see more results. I think this a really unique cube, and I'm enjoying seeing it's development.