Original buylist: http://www.cubetutor.com/viewcube/47317
*I'm currently in the process of making lots of changes to my cube. I haven't gotten around to putting up an updated list.
===Key features of the cube===
#1- Advantages of mono-colour:
- Less mana screw
- Less complexity in the mana base system.
- Booster pack size can be reduced to 11. This means slightly less reading.
Disadvantages of mono-green:
- Possibly fewer archetypes than multi-color (or other mono-colour) cubes. If I had to re-do the cube, I would probably do white instead.
#2 - Modular archetypes
Archetypes in the cube:
Voltron - Enchantments like Boar Umbra, some equipment
Tokens
Growing Ranks
Graveyard matters + Threshold
Enchantments matter
Cloudpost / 8-post
Ramp
Assault Formation - so cards like Reach of Branches
B-I-N-G-O - (haven't gotten the cards yet) Build-around-me card from Unhinged.
Roaring Primadox / Temur Sabertooth recursion
So a card like Boar Umbra would be good in Voltron, but also might be viable in the Growing Ranks deck. Grizzly fate is good in the Threshold deck, but is also viable in the tokens deck.
There are different ramp synergies:
Put lots of lands into play - Seek the Horizon, Life from the loam
Ramp (untap lands) - Voyaging Satyr, Fertile Ground
Ramp (buff mana producer) - Viridian Joiner, Gyre Sage
Karametra's Acolyte - may be on the too powerful side.
Overgrown battlement
Exploration + Karoo bounce - e.g. Gaea's Touch, Sakura-Tribe Scout
#3 - Power level is a few steps down from powermax.
One of my goals with this cube is to highlight obscure old cards like Gaea's Touch. Unfortunately, some old cards may be too powerful: Blanchwood Armor, Gigantiform, etc.
There are some throwback/nostalgia cards like white-bordered Desert Twister.
#4 - Removal has been significantly toned down in quality and quantity
Desert Twister, Scour from existence are very playable in this cube.
Getting rid of good removal enables Voltron as an archetype, without having to deal with the un-interactiveness of hexproof.
Having very few removal cards means that players dedicate more cards in their deck to synergistic cards, so they hit their synergies more often.
The cube runs Tumble Magnet, which is a temporary form of removal. I think that leads to interesting gameplay because there is more tension to the game. Once the counters run out, you have to deal with their giant creature.
Fogs serve as "trump" cards, creating interesting games that can swing back and forth.
#5 - Advantages and disadvantages of this cube
Advantages:
- Cost
- It's a fresh format and nobody can netdeck the best draft archetypes.
- I think the drafting aspect has *a lot* of depth.
Disadvantages:
- Lots of obscure cards means a lot of reading for people who haven't been playing Magic for two decades.
- Complexity is high relative to drafting retail sets.
- Board stalls. It's not quite as bad as Fallen Empires, but there can be big board stalls with lots of complexity on board.
- Sometimes games are decided based on whose combo is more broken, e.g. Essence of the Wild + token generation gets out of hand.
- Possible combo kills with Incoming. I haven't seen that card played yet. (It is very possible to hard cast Emrakul in this cube, though Emrakul is not in this cube. The mana cost is not a problem.)
===Details===
If you draft one of:
cloudpost
glimmerpost
howling wolf
You get the entire playset.
- Needs *lots* of dice. Also needs lots of tokens, but that's a lot easier to track.
===Design Aspects===
My thoughts on complexity:
The way I see it, the best kind of complexity is in games with simple rules + millions of interactions. Dominion is the best example. The strategy is incredibly, incredibly deep since each game has a completely different set of rules. However, it has a lot of "lenticular design"- cards that appear to have low complexity to new players but actually have a lot of depth. In MTG, Day of Judgement / Wrath of God are examples of cards with desirable complexity.
"Grokability": Ideally, cards should be easy to understand. Grokability in this cube is moderate.
"Action paralysis": When players sit there spending a lot of time figuring out there next move over something with a very small incremental advantage. I don't like the card Ponder for this reason, and think that Preordainand Serum Visions lead to better gameplay. Monocolor cubes have no shocklands, so players do not have to think about whether or not their land should enter play untapped. Action paralysis in this cube is moderate.
"Piloting complexity" and "Board complexity": Having lots and lots of stuff on board means complicated math with complicated decisions. Some people like it because they like the idea of making a ridiculous amount of tokens and then attacking with Beastmaster Ascension. However, I think it's better to keep board complexity down so it doesn't play like Fallen Empires draft. The board stalls in this cube is high. They get resolved when one player assembles a synergistic combo.
Tangle and Moment's Peace (and Fog) may make it extremely dangerous to alpha strike an opponent, which might add too much complexity to this cube.
Depth: I think this cube has lots of depth from a strategy perspective. Obviously the price of that is complexity. I think the depth:complexity ratio can be improved.
"Swinginess": In my opinion, games shouldn't be very swingy in the first few turns. It is ok if games get very swingy past turn 7.
I think Taunting Elfwould lead to unacceptable swinginess because Taunting Elf + Buffs can kill the opponent's mana producers + Voltron targets.
Why Day of Judgement is a great card (and why I kinda wish I made the cube monowhite)
It does a lot of desirable things:
- Easy to grok
- Lenticular design. The strategy is complex playing with and against it.
- Reduces board complexity
- Good flavour
With enough totem armor and indestructible effects, Voltron can exist in the same format as Wrath/sweeper-based control.
Making the cube fun for newbies:
Originally I thought that this cube would be newbie-friendly. I don't think it entirely reaches that goal.
For new players, this cube has lower complexity than powermax cubes. There is no complexity in managing your mana base. There are no needlessly complicated cards like charms and commands (which are the ways that Wizards makes the Standard format highly complex). There aren't too many on-board abilities. But the problem is that there is a huge amount of reading because:
A- It's mostly singleton.
B- To a lesser extent, I wanted to include obscure old cards that you won't find in other formats.
C- I really like strategic depth, which leads to complexity. (Dominion on isotropic.org is one of my favorite games but that era ended.)
I suspect that cube is inherently newbie-unfriendly. Battle box is a lot more newbie friendly. I have a variation that has more depth, more close games and lower complexity than Battle Box.
Suppose that all the cards were very grokable and many cards were repeated. Then you'd have to figure out how to deal with the skill disparity between newbies and experienced players. If all cards were of a similar power level and there was very little synergy, skilled players would not make substantially better decks than newbies. (Wizards does something evil by putting in cards that would appear powerful to newbies but aren't powerful, making newbies lose more than they otherwise would.) If you take the deck construction element away, it would be a turnoff for skilled players because the game is not very skill-testing. You can introduce luck via mana screw, bomb rares, etc. However, skilled players prefer skill-testing over luck.
I think the way to make the cube fun for newbies (while skill-testing enough for experienced players) is to have fun cards in the cube that would attract newbies.
I don't know the power level of these cards in this cube; it would require testing and would depend on how many of these cards+enablers exist. Enablers = commune with the gods to look for fatties, regrowth, etc.
The other way to make a cube newbie-friendly is to create back and forth games so that you have fun even if you lose. (This monogreen cube could do a lot better.) To make games go back and forth, you can:
- Change the mana system. During the draw step, each player can draw a basic land or draw a card from the library. Libraries would consist mostly (or entirely of non-land cards). This avoids mana screw and mana flood creating one-sided games.
- Create trumps that turn games around: sweepers, mind control their best creature, threaten effects, fogs like tangle, etc.
- Try to make the power level of cards very similar. Swinginess will depend on the drawing synergistic cards (or failing to draw them). Swinginess will also depend on curving out.
Without bomb cards, mana screw, and mana flood, games will have a lot less swinginess.
===Design issues===
Board stalls
I would prefer fewer board stalls in this cube. Some tools:
Lure effects like Golgari Decoy, Lure itself, etc.
Trample - Trample is a good interactive evasion mechanic. However, if somebody Voltrons a trample creature early, it may be overpowering against token decks that rely on chump-blocking to survive.
Rogue's passage
Vigilance (sort of) - Green creatures and equipment don't have a lot of vigilance though
Equipment with vigilance and/or trample - I am going to experiment with this.
Druid's call (sort of)
Unfun archetypes like infect
Infect has low draft complexity. Only a few cards work in Infect and other archetypes (e.g. Livewire Lash is secretly an Infect card and a Heroic card).
The other issue with Infect is that the games are less interactive. Dying to an early Infect kill is not very exciting. Effects like Phyrexian Swarmlord are interesting, but the enablers lead to early kills.
Turbofog is another uninteractive archetype.
Lands is another uninteractive archetype- the Legacy lands decks basically involve various locks (recurring ravens crime discard, recurring glacial chasm, recurring wasteland, etc.).
Deathtouch
The issue with deathtouch is that it leads to horrible board stalls. If you have a 1-power deathtoucher, there is very little upside to attacking with it. So it will sit back and play defence, holding back a huge army because the opponent doesn't want to lose their best creature (which may be heavily Voltroned).
Maybe I should get rid of all cheap deathtouch creatures (which is all the deathtouch creatures).
Morph
Maybe I will make a morph sheet of all morphs in the cube. Or maybe I should take them all out... I don't know.
Aggro / Midrange / Control - The rock papers scissors dynamic
I don't think bad matchups + RPS leads to great gameplay. It's not fun knowing that you are playing at a big disadvantage.
Some players saw archetypes that didn't exist
Originally I was going to make a white-green Voltron cube where lifegain was a theme. I copied cards from that list into the monogreen cube. Of course, green doesn't have lifegain payoff cards. Uh... chalice of life and ageless entity is all you get. Neither of them are very powerful (I think there would be too many token chump blockers for ageless entity). I left lifegain cards in thinking that it would enable control decks. In practice, tokens enable control/ramp because each chump block is a lot of life 'gained'.
Players who aren't hardcore Spikes
I have one friend who I played 60-card sealed against (1vs1). To him, the complexity of Theros draft is a little much. My cube may be too complex for him if reading 60 cards (mostly singleton) is too much. If it were an 8-player draft with packs of 11, he would have to read around 168 cards.
Sealed
This cube isn't great for sealed. If you have a small pool, you can't do a lot of the archetypes. e.g. You cast Splinterfrightand have it die instantly because you have no creatures in your graveyard.
If the pool is deep enough to do archetypes, there are too many to choose from. The complexity there seems like an issue.
I find multi-player draft to be more interesting because people's decks will have very different archetypes.
Some archetypes might be weak
Enchantments matter may be really weak.
Cards that are surprising stronger/weaker in different environments
Wizards does this in their retail draft sets. For example, Springleaf Drum appeared in the set with the inspired mechanic (e.g. pain seer).
Mystifying maze is strong in this environment because it strips enchantments and equipment from Voltroned creatures. It creates board stalls and should be avoided.
Singleton
I think I can greatly reduce the number of singletons in this cube, without affecting strategic depth.
More Fertile Ground
Less Abundant Growth
*I'm currently in the process of making lots of changes to my cube. I haven't gotten around to putting up an updated list.
===Key features of the cube===
#1- Advantages of mono-colour:
- Less mana screw
- Less complexity in the mana base system.
- Booster pack size can be reduced to 11. This means slightly less reading.
Disadvantages of mono-green:
- Possibly fewer archetypes than multi-color (or other mono-colour) cubes. If I had to re-do the cube, I would probably do white instead.
#2 - Modular archetypes
Archetypes in the cube:
Voltron - Enchantments like Boar Umbra, some equipment
Tokens
Growing Ranks
Graveyard matters + Threshold
Enchantments matter
Cloudpost / 8-post
Ramp
Assault Formation - so cards like Reach of Branches
B-I-N-G-O - (haven't gotten the cards yet) Build-around-me card from Unhinged.
Roaring Primadox / Temur Sabertooth recursion
So a card like Boar Umbra would be good in Voltron, but also might be viable in the Growing Ranks deck. Grizzly fate is good in the Threshold deck, but is also viable in the tokens deck.
There are different ramp synergies:
Put lots of lands into play - Seek the Horizon, Life from the loam
Ramp (untap lands) - Voyaging Satyr, Fertile Ground
Ramp (buff mana producer) - Viridian Joiner, Gyre Sage
Karametra's Acolyte - may be on the too powerful side.
Overgrown battlement
Exploration + Karoo bounce - e.g. Gaea's Touch, Sakura-Tribe Scout
#3 - Power level is a few steps down from powermax.
One of my goals with this cube is to highlight obscure old cards like Gaea's Touch. Unfortunately, some old cards may be too powerful: Blanchwood Armor, Gigantiform, etc.
There are some throwback/nostalgia cards like white-bordered Desert Twister.
#4 - Removal has been significantly toned down in quality and quantity
Desert Twister, Scour from existence are very playable in this cube.
Getting rid of good removal enables Voltron as an archetype, without having to deal with the un-interactiveness of hexproof.
Having very few removal cards means that players dedicate more cards in their deck to synergistic cards, so they hit their synergies more often.
The cube runs Tumble Magnet, which is a temporary form of removal. I think that leads to interesting gameplay because there is more tension to the game. Once the counters run out, you have to deal with their giant creature.
Fogs serve as "trump" cards, creating interesting games that can swing back and forth.
#5 - Advantages and disadvantages of this cube
Advantages:
- Cost
- It's a fresh format and nobody can netdeck the best draft archetypes.
- I think the drafting aspect has *a lot* of depth.
Disadvantages:
- Lots of obscure cards means a lot of reading for people who haven't been playing Magic for two decades.
- Complexity is high relative to drafting retail sets.
- Board stalls. It's not quite as bad as Fallen Empires, but there can be big board stalls with lots of complexity on board.
- Sometimes games are decided based on whose combo is more broken, e.g. Essence of the Wild + token generation gets out of hand.
- Possible combo kills with Incoming. I haven't seen that card played yet. (It is very possible to hard cast Emrakul in this cube, though Emrakul is not in this cube. The mana cost is not a problem.)
===Details===
If you draft one of:
cloudpost
glimmerpost
howling wolf
You get the entire playset.
- Needs *lots* of dice. Also needs lots of tokens, but that's a lot easier to track.
===Design Aspects===
My thoughts on complexity:
The way I see it, the best kind of complexity is in games with simple rules + millions of interactions. Dominion is the best example. The strategy is incredibly, incredibly deep since each game has a completely different set of rules. However, it has a lot of "lenticular design"- cards that appear to have low complexity to new players but actually have a lot of depth. In MTG, Day of Judgement / Wrath of God are examples of cards with desirable complexity.
"Grokability": Ideally, cards should be easy to understand. Grokability in this cube is moderate.
"Action paralysis": When players sit there spending a lot of time figuring out there next move over something with a very small incremental advantage. I don't like the card Ponder for this reason, and think that Preordainand Serum Visions lead to better gameplay. Monocolor cubes have no shocklands, so players do not have to think about whether or not their land should enter play untapped. Action paralysis in this cube is moderate.
"Piloting complexity" and "Board complexity": Having lots and lots of stuff on board means complicated math with complicated decisions. Some people like it because they like the idea of making a ridiculous amount of tokens and then attacking with Beastmaster Ascension. However, I think it's better to keep board complexity down so it doesn't play like Fallen Empires draft. The board stalls in this cube is high. They get resolved when one player assembles a synergistic combo.
Tangle and Moment's Peace (and Fog) may make it extremely dangerous to alpha strike an opponent, which might add too much complexity to this cube.
Depth: I think this cube has lots of depth from a strategy perspective. Obviously the price of that is complexity. I think the depth:complexity ratio can be improved.
"Swinginess": In my opinion, games shouldn't be very swingy in the first few turns. It is ok if games get very swingy past turn 7.
I think Taunting Elfwould lead to unacceptable swinginess because Taunting Elf + Buffs can kill the opponent's mana producers + Voltron targets.
Why Day of Judgement is a great card (and why I kinda wish I made the cube monowhite)
It does a lot of desirable things:
- Easy to grok
- Lenticular design. The strategy is complex playing with and against it.
- Reduces board complexity
- Good flavour
With enough totem armor and indestructible effects, Voltron can exist in the same format as Wrath/sweeper-based control.
Making the cube fun for newbies:
Originally I thought that this cube would be newbie-friendly. I don't think it entirely reaches that goal.
For new players, this cube has lower complexity than powermax cubes. There is no complexity in managing your mana base. There are no needlessly complicated cards like charms and commands (which are the ways that Wizards makes the Standard format highly complex). There aren't too many on-board abilities. But the problem is that there is a huge amount of reading because:
A- It's mostly singleton.
B- To a lesser extent, I wanted to include obscure old cards that you won't find in other formats.
C- I really like strategic depth, which leads to complexity. (Dominion on isotropic.org is one of my favorite games but that era ended.)
I suspect that cube is inherently newbie-unfriendly. Battle box is a lot more newbie friendly. I have a variation that has more depth, more close games and lower complexity than Battle Box.
Suppose that all the cards were very grokable and many cards were repeated. Then you'd have to figure out how to deal with the skill disparity between newbies and experienced players. If all cards were of a similar power level and there was very little synergy, skilled players would not make substantially better decks than newbies. (Wizards does something evil by putting in cards that would appear powerful to newbies but aren't powerful, making newbies lose more than they otherwise would.) If you take the deck construction element away, it would be a turnoff for skilled players because the game is not very skill-testing. You can introduce luck via mana screw, bomb rares, etc. However, skilled players prefer skill-testing over luck.
I think the way to make the cube fun for newbies (while skill-testing enough for experienced players) is to have fun cards in the cube that would attract newbies.
I don't know the power level of these cards in this cube; it would require testing and would depend on how many of these cards+enablers exist. Enablers = commune with the gods to look for fatties, regrowth, etc.
The other way to make a cube newbie-friendly is to create back and forth games so that you have fun even if you lose. (This monogreen cube could do a lot better.) To make games go back and forth, you can:
- Change the mana system. During the draw step, each player can draw a basic land or draw a card from the library. Libraries would consist mostly (or entirely of non-land cards). This avoids mana screw and mana flood creating one-sided games.
- Create trumps that turn games around: sweepers, mind control their best creature, threaten effects, fogs like tangle, etc.
- Try to make the power level of cards very similar. Swinginess will depend on the drawing synergistic cards (or failing to draw them). Swinginess will also depend on curving out.
Without bomb cards, mana screw, and mana flood, games will have a lot less swinginess.
===Design issues===
Board stalls
I would prefer fewer board stalls in this cube. Some tools:
Lure effects like Golgari Decoy, Lure itself, etc.
Trample - Trample is a good interactive evasion mechanic. However, if somebody Voltrons a trample creature early, it may be overpowering against token decks that rely on chump-blocking to survive.
Rogue's passage
Vigilance (sort of) - Green creatures and equipment don't have a lot of vigilance though
Equipment with vigilance and/or trample - I am going to experiment with this.
Druid's call (sort of)
Unfun archetypes like infect
Infect has low draft complexity. Only a few cards work in Infect and other archetypes (e.g. Livewire Lash is secretly an Infect card and a Heroic card).
The other issue with Infect is that the games are less interactive. Dying to an early Infect kill is not very exciting. Effects like Phyrexian Swarmlord are interesting, but the enablers lead to early kills.
Turbofog is another uninteractive archetype.
Lands is another uninteractive archetype- the Legacy lands decks basically involve various locks (recurring ravens crime discard, recurring glacial chasm, recurring wasteland, etc.).
Deathtouch
The issue with deathtouch is that it leads to horrible board stalls. If you have a 1-power deathtoucher, there is very little upside to attacking with it. So it will sit back and play defence, holding back a huge army because the opponent doesn't want to lose their best creature (which may be heavily Voltroned).
Maybe I should get rid of all cheap deathtouch creatures (which is all the deathtouch creatures).
Morph
Maybe I will make a morph sheet of all morphs in the cube. Or maybe I should take them all out... I don't know.
Aggro / Midrange / Control - The rock papers scissors dynamic
I don't think bad matchups + RPS leads to great gameplay. It's not fun knowing that you are playing at a big disadvantage.
Some players saw archetypes that didn't exist
Originally I was going to make a white-green Voltron cube where lifegain was a theme. I copied cards from that list into the monogreen cube. Of course, green doesn't have lifegain payoff cards. Uh... chalice of life and ageless entity is all you get. Neither of them are very powerful (I think there would be too many token chump blockers for ageless entity). I left lifegain cards in thinking that it would enable control decks. In practice, tokens enable control/ramp because each chump block is a lot of life 'gained'.
Players who aren't hardcore Spikes
I have one friend who I played 60-card sealed against (1vs1). To him, the complexity of Theros draft is a little much. My cube may be too complex for him if reading 60 cards (mostly singleton) is too much. If it were an 8-player draft with packs of 11, he would have to read around 168 cards.
Sealed
This cube isn't great for sealed. If you have a small pool, you can't do a lot of the archetypes. e.g. You cast Splinterfrightand have it die instantly because you have no creatures in your graveyard.
If the pool is deep enough to do archetypes, there are too many to choose from. The complexity there seems like an issue.
I find multi-player draft to be more interesting because people's decks will have very different archetypes.
Some archetypes might be weak
Enchantments matter may be really weak.
Cards that are surprising stronger/weaker in different environments
Wizards does this in their retail draft sets. For example, Springleaf Drum appeared in the set with the inspired mechanic (e.g. pain seer).
Mystifying maze is strong in this environment because it strips enchantments and equipment from Voltroned creatures. It creates board stalls and should be avoided.
Singleton
I think I can greatly reduce the number of singletons in this cube, without affecting strategic depth.
More Fertile Ground
Less Abundant Growth