General Makin' a dragon cube!

B

blacksmithy

Aight Riptiders, as is my wont, i want to make another dumbass theme cube. This time around, i want to make a cube that completely commits to being a stompy dargons experience.
To that end, i am going to SEVERELY RESTRICT and possibly just ban spells under a certain cmc. Also, NO ARTIFACT RAMP UNDER THE CMC CUTOFF! Dreamstone Hedron? Sure! Thats a nice draw spell. Worn Powerstone? GTFO. Green might get Cultivate or something, if it would help overall gameplay.
Also, my dual mana will be composed of the following: scry, gain, man, storage, bounce, bounce.
My vision for the cube is that the opening turns will be largely about getting value off lands, suspending/cycling/morphing, and then on turn X, the haymakers start rolling.
My question for this thread is, what turn should turn X be? My guess is that 4 is the right answer, but i'm known to be wrong. Feel free to discuss anything else too! I'll make a real cube thread eventually when i've got more of a clue what i'm doing here.
 
ahadabans

ahadabans

Sounds fun. What's the reason for restricting ramp though? The more mana people can get (and the faster they get it), the quicker you get to the haymakers. My two cents is you want guys interacting as soon as possible otherwise it becomes more like solitaire for the first half the game before people start paying attention to what the other guy is doing (similar to how free-for-all multiplayer generally plays out).

What about using eldrazi spawn for generating mana (things like Awakening Zone)? It's slow and steady and less bursty like Worn Powerstone. It can also be more easily disrupted encouraging denial strategies.

My 2 cents is you'll need to decide very early in the design if it's going to be a combo cube or not because that will determine the power level you shoot for. If you go with a rare cube, you are going to have combo whether you want it or not. Broken cards + mana = degenerate game play. The only thing keeping that in check in most cubes are aggressive strategies that threaten to win the game early. Without that presence, there is nothing stoping guys from just building resources for 6 turns and then doing something ridiculous with all the pieces they've assembled unmolested. So if you go more pauper power level (penny pincher maybe), you will limit how much degeneracy you let into the cube which will drive the game play feel. That will play out more like a limited gaming experience IMO. I've thought very hard about making that sort of cube simply because it's very hard to balance degenerate game play at higher power levels regardless of what type of cube you are building and there's something to be said for having game states that can't be undone or won with a single card.
 
Alfonzo Bonzo

Alfonzo Bonzo

You are right to restrict ramp, otherwise it becomes about who can ramp into their threats the fastest. You are right about identifying turn X as well, though I think it should be turn three. If you have a high density of bouncelands, that's when they come online. Also is when you start making morphs.

I've played around with something similar and you are bang on with the focus on early turns with cycling etc as you want those early turns for players to establish themselves in the game ready to start pushing out the haymakers. You need things for players to do in the early turns without giving on side too much of an advantage.
 
Chriskool

Chriskool

Masters Edition III Visual Spoiler

Above is an oft-overlooked, "retail" set that played very slowly; the plays worth making were turn 5+. The card quality of the earlier plays was so low that players had to look to big drops to have the power to close out games. Reliance on 5-7 drops made both Force Spike and Remove Soul quite effective. Smaller creatures needed evasion or a non-combat impact to be playable in most decks.

I would imagine a "stupid dragon cube" to mimic ME3's rough outline with lessons from ROE: higher impact starts at 6cmc, the curve from 2-5cmc is support and glass-cannon "threats", removal is very conditional at low mana costs, smaller cards that scale with additional mana investment (levelers, invokers, etc.). If I were designing a cube in this fashion, I would:
  • not include anything that messes up lands (no Vindicate, Riftwing Cloudskate, Acidic Slime, etc.). The games will probably last quite a few turns, and any disruption to normal mana production feels against the spirit of the environment.
  • look to storage lands, bounce lands, scry lands, Kyren Toy and cycling lands for the mana suite, as they cost in current tempo for future advantages (as well as some being ramp available outside of green). I would also consider keyrunes/DTK dragon statues as color-fixing ramp that has non-mana implications.
  • limit card advantage and go more towards card selection (Impulse over Compulsive Research). I wouldn't want any deck burying another in 2-for-1s that affect creatures or big draws into a lot of 1-for-1s. By this logic, I would also steer clear of a lot of Man-o'-War and Nekrataal creatures (but would include some Conclave Naturalists).
  • in low casting costs, look for cards with higher toughness than power.
To give the different colors some identity, I would:
 
ahadabans

ahadabans

Could madness/threshold work here? I love both mechanics but they are hard to make worth the effort in modern cubes. A card that would probably be sweet here with all the dragons running around is Big Game Hunter. I always wanted that to work in cube but it's too narrow in most environments.
 
Alfonzo Bonzo

Alfonzo Bonzo

Threshold could work in the slower environment but I'm not sure there's a huge number of payoff cards and then you open up the graveyard as a theme, which while possible is a whole other theme. Madness would need a lot of support, again doable though.

Great post Chris, if you did have an assassin theme in black you could get to play with these cool cards:

 
B

blacksmithy

Thanks everyone!
Two notes i want to clarify: in my current concept, during turns 1-3 you can totally set morphs, cycle cards, suspend things, etc; you just can't hardcast (most) spells. Also, i want to avoid artifact ramp because having nongreen ramp in the environment will, indeed, make things a race to draft and slam ramp cards. I really want there to be a cushy, non-violent preparation/development period at the beginning of each game.
That said, carry on! I'm loving the ideas and discussion so far :)
 
Alfonzo Bonzo

Alfonzo Bonzo

Alfonzo Bonzo said:
Threshold could work in the slower environment but I'm not sure there's a huge number of payoff cards and then you open up the graveyard as a theme, which while possible is a whole other theme. Madness would need a lot of support, again doable though.

Great post Chris, if you did have an assassin theme in black you could get to play with these cool cards:

Click to expand...

Though on second thoughts if you have a bunch of early game cycling then you are already feeding the graveyard and are ripe to take advantage of it.
 
Alfonzo Bonzo

Alfonzo Bonzo

blacksmithy said:
Thanks everyone!
Two notes i want to clarify: in my current concept, during turns 1-3 you can totally set morphs, cycle cards, suspend things, etc; you just can't hardcast (most) spells. Also, i want to avoid artifact ramp because having nongreen ramp in the environment will, indeed, make things a race to draft and slam ramp cards. I really want there to be a cushy, non-violent preparation/development period at the beginning of each game.
That said, carry on! I'm loving the ideas and discussion so far :)
Click to expand...

If you don't have artifact ramp green becomes super attractive (which might be fine) but you already have colourless ramp wit bouncelands and storage lands. You might also want to consider

 
B

blacksmithy

Familiars might be good, yeah.
And bear in mind that green's ramp will start at 4 cmc, so it's not THAT big an advantage for the green deck's early game.
 
Grillo_Parlante

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
Chris: MTGO Academy said:
Masters Edition III Visual Spoiler

Above is an oft-overlooked, "retail" set that played very slowly; the plays worth making were turn 5+. The card quality of the earlier plays was so low that players had to look to big drops to have the power to close out games. Reliance on 5-7 drops made both Force Spike and Remove Soul quite effective. Smaller creatures needed evasion or a non-combat impact to be playable in most decks.

I would imagine a "stupid dragon cube" to mimic ME3's rough outline with lessons from ROE: higher impact starts at 6cmc, the curve from 2-5cmc is support and glass-cannon "threats", removal is very conditional at low mana costs, smaller cards that scale with additional mana investment (levelers, invokers, etc.). If I were designing a cube in this fashion, I would:
  • not include anything that messes up lands (no Vindicate, Riftwing Cloudskate, Acidic Slime, etc.). The games will probably last quite a few turns, and any disruption to normal mana production feels against the spirit of the environment.
  • look to storage lands, bounce lands, scry lands, Kyren Toy and cycling lands for the mana suite, as they cost in current tempo for future advantages (as well as some being ramp available outside of green). I would also consider keyrunes/DTK dragon statues as color-fixing ramp that has non-mana implications.
  • limit card advantage and go more towards card selection (Impulse over Compulsive Research). I wouldn't want any deck burying another in 2-for-1s that affect creatures or big draws into a lot of 1-for-1s. By this logic, I would also steer clear of a lot of Man-o'-War and Nekrataal creatures (but would include some Conclave Naturalists).
  • in low casting costs, look for cards with higher toughness than power.
Click to expand...
This is really good, and you should be able to get a pretty enjoyable format out of it. I don't think you could have asked for a more perfect blue print than this.

I'm imagining a rampy format with players being asked to manage their mana well (rather then generating card advantage), threats with incredible utility but which demand a high mana investment to obtain, and which are pushed in the face of available answers.

A strict 4cc rule seems bad, and its probably better to keep the idea of mana sinks and high mana pushed threats separate. I also agree that its important not to run too many 2 for 1, or 3 for 1 effects: having free ETBs or extra spells stapled onto existing spells goes against the spirit of mana management. Probably also a good idea to stay away from most planeswalkers.
 
B

blacksmithy

Grillo_Parlante said:
A strict 4cc rule seems bad, and its probably better to keep the idea of mana sinks and high mana pushed threats separate. I also agree that its important not to run too many 2 for 1, or 3 for 1 effects: having free ETBs or extra spells stapled onto existing spells goes against the spirit of mana management. Probably also a good idea to stay away from most planeswalkers.
Click to expand...
I've been mulling over this as well, and i agree that there should be a few low-cost cards floating around in the cube. The question is, which ones, and how many? Stuff like Treasure Mage, Squee, and Student of Warfare springs to mind. I think Doom Blade, Counterspell, and friends might be too much tempo swing though. This format's removal would be more like Annihilate and Dismiss.
 
Grillo_Parlante

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
Here are a few articles that might help:

ROE draft primer
Ars Arcanum article on ROE limited

To sum: removal was strong, but within the context of the set, it was outclassed by the threats.

That makes sense when you think about it, because you don't want to dump 6-8 mana into a threat, and than have it be dealt with by a less costly unconditional removal spell. Cheaper, more conditional removal, however, is still good at interacting with the "glass cannon" and "support" parts of the cube, going on, say, turns 1-5, that Chris alluded towards.

This is a neat topic to think about.
 
Quirk

Quirk

blacksmithy said:
Stuff like Treasure Mage, Squee, and Student of Warfare springs to mind.
Click to expand...
I think a 3/3 first striker attacking turn 2 is going to be really pretty powerful in a dragon cube - against a deck on the draw which has nothing below 4 mana in its hand, it's going to nail them for 3 damage turn 2, hit for 3 again turn 3, and then fully level to a 4/4 double strike for turn 4, making a lot of damage before an answer arrives.
I think levellers are a great idea though. There's probably room to include some of the slightly less powerful ones and they provide a useful mana sink in later turns when you've got 7 mana and everything you have available to play costs 4. More generally, cards which aren't too threatening when they hit the board as early drops but which provide mana sink value seem like they'd support what you're trying to do.
 
James Stevenson

James Stevenson

Steamflogger Boss
Staff member
If nobody's doing anything till turn 4, doesn't that mean just a little mana screw puts you way behind?

Also, run cards with cycling, I guess.
 
B

blacksmithy

Yeah good point about Student. Less aggressive levelers are probably the way to go... I mean really this is not a format where aggro exists as mtg players know it.
Re: mana screw, i think between storage, double bounce, and scrylands, plus cards with landcycling, mana screw is going to be much less of an issue than in basically any other cube. There's going to be a LOT of ways to hit your land drops built into both the manabase and the list. Also, the "standard land number" for this cube is likely gonna be at least 18, which also helps.
 
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