Hello,
This is my first stab at cube design. Since I already have a number of draft-sim cubes that are great for 8-person drafts, I thought I would design something for a smaller audience. I noticed in my regular drafts that having 6 or fewer people led to wonky color distributions - someone often had a color all to themselves, while the smaller number of packs going around meant that fighting for a single color often got nasty. So I wondered what would happen if I just had a single color that everyone was fighting over. I read a few articles online that discussed mono-blue cubes, so I thought I'd try my hand at my own. I intend to draft it with 4 packs of 10 cards.
The visual spoiler is here: http://www.cubetutor.com/visualspoiler/25721
The list is here: http://www.cubetutor.com/viewcube/25721
In terms of cube philosophy, I'm aiming for a flatter power curve. Hopefully the weaker cards in the cube are not dramatically worst than the best ones. To that end, I cut a number of blue cube staples: in addition to the Power 9, I also eliminated Control Magic, Treachery, Force of Will, all planeswalkers, etc. I included as many creature/artifact/enchantment removal spells as I could within the mono-blue framework, but as one would expect those tend to be weaker than usual. Since most of the blue removal spells don't actually remove the creature, I'm leery about including must-answer creatures like Frost Titan, Teferi, and Consecrated Sphinx, as well as similarly powerful artifacts (e.g., Winter Orb). Some cards are clearly more powerful in the mono-blue environment (e.g., Dandan), while others take on a stronger role given the amount of countermagic flying around (e.g., Defense Grid).
Rather than push a few archetypes heavily, I try to support a large number of archetypes lightly. In addition to the standard aggro/midrange/control theaters, players can go for merfolk tribal, skies, spells matter, artifacts matter, morph, mill, graveyard matters, blink, and top-deck. Each archetype has about 3 key cards and then a number of ones that reinforce a theme and (ideally) overlap with others.
In addition to input into specific cards to be added/removed, I'd welcome any advice on the overall project. In particular, I wonder whether supporting a wide array of archetypes with 3 anchor cards is a good idea or not.
Thanks,
Kart
This is my first stab at cube design. Since I already have a number of draft-sim cubes that are great for 8-person drafts, I thought I would design something for a smaller audience. I noticed in my regular drafts that having 6 or fewer people led to wonky color distributions - someone often had a color all to themselves, while the smaller number of packs going around meant that fighting for a single color often got nasty. So I wondered what would happen if I just had a single color that everyone was fighting over. I read a few articles online that discussed mono-blue cubes, so I thought I'd try my hand at my own. I intend to draft it with 4 packs of 10 cards.
The visual spoiler is here: http://www.cubetutor.com/visualspoiler/25721
The list is here: http://www.cubetutor.com/viewcube/25721
In terms of cube philosophy, I'm aiming for a flatter power curve. Hopefully the weaker cards in the cube are not dramatically worst than the best ones. To that end, I cut a number of blue cube staples: in addition to the Power 9, I also eliminated Control Magic, Treachery, Force of Will, all planeswalkers, etc. I included as many creature/artifact/enchantment removal spells as I could within the mono-blue framework, but as one would expect those tend to be weaker than usual. Since most of the blue removal spells don't actually remove the creature, I'm leery about including must-answer creatures like Frost Titan, Teferi, and Consecrated Sphinx, as well as similarly powerful artifacts (e.g., Winter Orb). Some cards are clearly more powerful in the mono-blue environment (e.g., Dandan), while others take on a stronger role given the amount of countermagic flying around (e.g., Defense Grid).
Rather than push a few archetypes heavily, I try to support a large number of archetypes lightly. In addition to the standard aggro/midrange/control theaters, players can go for merfolk tribal, skies, spells matter, artifacts matter, morph, mill, graveyard matters, blink, and top-deck. Each archetype has about 3 key cards and then a number of ones that reinforce a theme and (ideally) overlap with others.
In addition to input into specific cards to be added/removed, I'd welcome any advice on the overall project. In particular, I wonder whether supporting a wide array of archetypes with 3 anchor cards is a good idea or not.
Thanks,
Kart
