FR tho, thanks for your responses (and also to all my other respondents). If people around here want to contribute things I missed, or their personal most/least favorite ways to lose, I'm happy to add their thoughts as well.
MH2 was the most influential set for my cube, ever. Many of these designs still spark a lot of joy over one year later.
"Staple for years to come" Tier
I won't say much about the performance of Prismatic Ending, Damn, Grief, Ignoble Hierarch, Abundant Harvest, or Subtlety since they've made such a Constructed impact. They play about like they do in Constructed and I like those play patterns. Tourach, Dread Cantor is just dripping with cool, and yet is eminently fairly costed. Hymn to Tourach is way fairer on Turn 4. Dragon's Rage Channeler is synergistic and powerful; great combo. Unholy Heat got done dirty by being spoiled during the last day's dump of draft chaff. This card is so good and I would play it over Chain Lightning if I could only pick one, just because of the art and play patterns and cool factor. General Ferrous Rokiric is a build-around Mardu/Jeskai/Naya card that really delivers. Territorial Kavu is Watchwolf + Tarmogoyf; what's not to love? Scion of Draco is also extremely cool, and together with Kavu form the core of a "Domain Zoo" deck in my format which I love playing. Lose Focus is clean and performant. Esper Sentinel I didn't expect to like, but I opened one at prerelease and ended up feeling really clever when I equipped it, even though my opponent usually still went "kill your thing, you can draw". In other words, it seems powerful and is synergistic, but doesn't ever lead to feelbads. Bone Shards slipped under my radar, but it's just flexible enough to be worth 1 creature or 1 card, especially given how much Delve/Flashback/etc my format has. Urza's Saga is a one-card archetype and is SO COOL. I don't need to tell you this. But I've also loved how it's powerful enough in this format to be worth building around, but Limited keeps it from getting too repetitive. Hive of the Eye Tyrant has the coolest art, and has turned out to be a much cleaner design. @blacksmithy is correct to note that landfolk like this are way less feel-bad than Creeping Tar Pit-framed lands, since the latter are often mistaken for Watery Grave and ambush inattentive opponents. Den of the Bugbear is also quite strong. Cave of the Frost Dragon has the second-coolest art. These things are so cool. I don't know if I'd play them without the sicko showcase frames. Portable Hole has been solidly performant.
"Good in my cube, but maybe not for it" Tier Fury I'm still playing, but it might squash too many synergies. Watchlist. Solitude, ditto. Murktide Regent, ditto. Grist, the Hunger Tide I did cut for being too strong-and-unsynergistic, but I'm a little sad about it.
"Ambivalent" Tier
Blazing Rootwalla
Flametongue Yearling
Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer (So strong, but so pricey and I don't really care to acquire one!)
Asmoranamardicadaistinaculdacar/ The Underworld Cookbook
Dakkon, Shadow Slayer
Priest of Fell Rites
Rakdos Headliner
Breya's Apprentice
Hard Evidence
Nettlecyst
The Blackstaff of Waterdeep
Lair of the Hydra
"Chop-Chop" Tier
Timeless Dragon I never got around to testing and haven't missed. Dauthi Voidwalker hoses graveyards instead of doing a Scrabbling Claws or Rotten Reunion style selectivity, so it's out.
Rishadan Dockhand
Bloodbraid Marauder
@blacksmithy is correct to note that landfolk like this are way less feel-bad than Creeping Tar Pit-framed lands, since the latter are often mistaken for Watery Grave and ambush inattentive opponents.
if your opponent is intoxicated enough, they will still miss that you’ve got hall of storm giants and 6 extra mana open, found that out this past weekend. no system is perfect…
So, I support Zoo and multicolor aggro. That should explain the majority of the things that say Domain on them, as well as the gold cards. The rest is mostly just efficient removal, along with Shivan Devastator, who's probably too weak but I have to take the chance anyways, because it's not often an honest-to-goodness Timmy-appealing DRAGON gets printed at the right power level for me.
Back to Zoo for a second -- I really love manabase math concerning "marginal splashes". What I mean by "marginal" is that the splash only adds marginal value to a deck, instead of enabling the deck entirely. For example, I enjoy finding a few sources to get maximum value from Lingering Souls and Prismatic Ending more than I like finding the to splash Fatal Push and Cut Down.
To break it down simply:
- Unmake always costs OR
- Vindicate always costs AND
- Lingering Souls always costs , and MAYBE -- and that's why I like it
I think the reason I enjoy marginal splashes is that they have a non-zero floor. Fatal Push as a splash has a binary yes/no outcome. But deciding when to Delve away my Lingering Souls and when to save it for the chance of Flashback has more nuance, and is a decision I really enjoy.
The second-order effect of the decreased risk is that the drafter is less likely to warp their draft for the splash, but they might re-prioritize Treasure-makers or City of Brass or the off-color Triome. So marginal splashes contribute to the overall synergy of the environment in a dynamic and organic way, and they don't scare away the drafter because they're low-risk. (I also just like the crunchy manabase decisions that marginal splashes entail, when it's not obvious whether the splash is justified and you're not priced into keeping it because it's marginal.)
All this to say that most of my DMU/DMC tests involve mana costs of "always X, sometimes Y, Z, or W", and I love it.
What do you think the Urborg Lhurgoyf decks in your Cube are going to look like? I've seen a lot of apprehension towards this card but I think it looks like an awesome inclusion in Sultai Graveyard decks.
What do you think the Urborg Lhurgoyf decks in your Cube are going to look like? I've seen a lot of apprehension towards this card but I think it looks like an awesome inclusion in Sultai Graveyard decks.
Not exactly sure. I want to bring in Stitcher’s Supplier while I’m at it, though. I figure the game plan will be mostly aggressive beat down with ambitions to cast this as a 3- or 4-drop, then to use whatever noncritters we’re mulled as fuel for Delve or other shenanigans. (In other words, I’m seeing the Kicker as kind of a Pyretic Ritual with suspend, haha.) Not married to the card but I think it’s cool
Edit: my dark ritual analogy sold me on Founding the Third Path, which is likely to be: "1: Manamorphose the thing you were gonna cast anyways, 2: Cabal Ritual, 3: Snapcaster trigger" in my format. Maybe I'm lost in the sauce, lol.
Not exactly sure. I want to bring in Stitcher’s Supplier while I’m at it, though. I figure the game plan will be mostly aggressive beat down with ambitions to cast this as a 3- or 4-drop, then to use whatever noncritters we’re mulled as fuel for Delve or other shenanigans. (In other words, I’m seeing the Kicker as kind of a Pyretic Ritual with suspend, haha.) Not married to the card but I think it’s cool
Not exactly sure. I want to bring in Stitcher’s Supplier while I’m at it, though. I figure the game plan will be mostly aggressive beat down with ambitions to cast this as a 3- or 4-drop, then to use whatever noncritters we’re mulled as fuel for Delve or other shenanigans. (In other words, I’m seeing the Kicker as kind of a Pyretic Ritual with suspend, haha.) Not married to the card but I think it’s cool
Decreasing the overall cube size significantly (~90 cards or so). The reasons are threefold:
1. I've finally gotten tired of my artifact synergies first introduced in February with NEO's release.
2. 500 cards is too many to keep up with
3. I want to force my players into a little bit of scarcity, so that they maindeck stuff like Disrupting Shoal as I want them to
The main gameplay goal, though, is item 3. To this end, I've focused on trimming outliers at the upper end of my cube's power band, and trimming redundant utility spells.
A small handful of DMU cards will actually make it into the list for now, but I haven't drafted this set much in paper, and honestly, I've been focusing on other cube projects recently. I've realized that something about high-power formats acts like a damper that limits the effects of my card-pool changes -- maybe it's the removal quality and quantity, or fixing? I can change 50 cards, as I did in April and May, but the cube's gameplay patterns won't change as significantly as the card-pool did. That has taken most of the urgency out of updating this cube or chasing down my test-list. I'm probably gonna just add any DMU cards I draft, and wait for BRO before purchasing any cube singles.
on the note of other cube projects... it'll be finished on Cube Cobra soon, and the sleeves are on their way! don't tell anyone.
I've realized that something about high-power formats acts like a damper that limits the effects of my card-pool changes -- maybe it's the removal quality and quantity, or fixing? I can change 50 cards, as I did in April and May, but the cube's gameplay patterns won't change as significantly as the card-pool did. That has taken most of the urgency out of updating this cube or chasing down my test-list. I'm probably gonna just add any DMU cards I draft, and wait for BRO before purchasing any cube singles.
I wonder if the reason why changing the card pool is having a smaller effect on gameplay patterns than one might expect given the number of cards changed is because of the tight-ish power band of this environment coupled with the high interchangeability of many of the parts. At this point, I think you've explored your cube's space enough to have a pretty good idea of how a given card is likely to fit in with your environment. As such, you're probably playing cards that provide some sort of redundant support for things already going on in the Cube. For example, Nishoba Brawler might be a new domain support card, but functionally it's not too different from your other "watchwolf" variants like Fleecemain Lion and especially Territorial Kavu. So while the introduction of Nishoba Brawler is a great thing for the Cube, it's not really changing any pre-existing dynamic so much as reinforcing a gameplay pattern that already exists.
I wonder if the reason why changing the card pool is having a smaller effect on gameplay patterns than one might expect given the number of cards changed is because of the tight-ish power band of this environment coupled with the high interchangeability of many of the parts. ... So while the introduction of Nishoba Brawler is a great thing for the Cube, it's not really changing any pre-existing dynamic so much as reinforcing a gameplay pattern that already exists.
Y'know what, I think that's it. I was circling around this idea, but you've put the pin right on it. Because the parts are so interchangeable, it doesn't matter if I make swaps that preserve the power level, because the core decks aren't changing.
Another example that's more irksome for me: I can change Force Spike for Disrupting Shoal and it doesn't make a difference because people just play Mana Leak versions 1-10, never needing to scrape the bottom of the barrel. Meanwhile, I can change Mana Leak #10 for Lose Focus and not notice any difference because these cards are 99% the same anyways. (Hence my apathy towards obsessively making like-for-like changes during preview season -- it's obvious to me the individual changes won't matter very much.)
I think the decrease of overall cube size may contribute to a shift, though. This will decrease the size of my players' pools, so they might only have 5 Mana Leak variants and will be forced to try something new. Also helpful is cutting from the top, which hopefully contributes to churn in power outliers.
I think the decrease of overall cube size may contribute to a shift, though. This will decrease the size of my players' pools, so they might only have 5 Mana Leak variants and will be forced to try something new. Also helpful is cutting from the top, which hopefully contributes to churn in power outliers.
I agree. I always draft my Cube with as much of the card pool as possible, even when there aren't enough players to fill out the entire draft pod normally. In these events, players are given a wealth of cards to play, but they don't necessarily play anything offbeat because the normal strategies are so well supported (except for when they are deliberately doing something weird). In fully pods, decks tend to be a bit more strapped for playables, leading to some of the more niche cards being deployed.
For what it's worth, I think this is a good place to be. It basically means you have a stable format that can act as the canvas to experiment with cool things. Maybe instead of thinking about small-scale changes like the role of force spike and disrupting shoal, you could consider more esoteric concepts like exploring new archetypes in your Cube and maximizing space through untested glue cards. I think getting synergistic high-power environments correct is very difficult, so getting to a place where an environment is both powerful and stable can lead to some great discoveries in design.
I was able to attend this year's CubeCon, and had a great time playing some sweet cubes. It inspired a couple design-oriented reflections:
Cube designers suffer from "the curse of expertise".
I had the misfortune this weekend of playing against Calciform Pools. My opponent tapped six lands and said, "I'm removing two storage counters to pay seven mana". Confused, having never seen the Pools in my life, I said, "wait, can't you only pay six?" They paused, tanked, agreed with me, and cast a 6-drop instead. After that game ended, we realized that we were wrong -- the Pools can tap for to pay its own cost (and because I'd won that game, it caused some friction that might have been prevented with a cleaner design). The same cube had a Beta Icy Manipulator that didn't have a tap symbol (since tapping was implied in the typeline "Mono Artifact") and my nemesis Crystalline Giant.
It reminded me of the first time I played the Ship of Theseus with a new group after making several art upgrades. Immediately they asked, "what's this Japanese card?" and "what's Investigate do?" and "how does Foretell work?" Suddenly my "upgrades" of Duress, Tireless Tracker, and Starnheim Unleashed didn't seem as appealing. It's all well and good when my partner and I are playing 1v1 casually, but quite another when playing at the LGS with relative strangers.
Familiarity desensitizes us to the complexity of our cubes. Outsiders may find that complexity to be more burdensome than fun.
Aggro is only the fun police if you make it so.
I played a cube where the last three picks of every pack were 6-8 mana spells. Also included at this draft table: 3 blazing-fast aggro decks, intended to punish the drafters foolish enough to maindeck the 6-8 mana spells. This essentially metagamed out of existence the infamous "greed pile", but also degenerated the gameplay quality. Alternative solution: instead of soft-banning decks you don't want to see, hard-ban them by cutting the awful 6-8 mana cards!
Forget Seek and Spellbooks -- Arena's most lasting legacy is in automating triggered abilities. That's maybe led to some clunky designs, but it also presents a design tool for those of us who play cube online. (I've actually been inspired by this realization, banging out two Arena-only cubes in a fortnight!)
Singleton restrictions have design drawbacks, too.
Somewhere between my critical-mass aggro draft of The Devoid Cube and my Madness draft of the UMA-Inspired Cube (designed by Hipsters of the Coast writer and new friend Zach Barash!), it occurred to me that I wished I could trade out 10 of my most interchangeable-but-slightly-different game pieces for strictly-worse-but-identical game pieces.
Cubes originally adopted singleton to 1) emulate the early-days draft format of "1 of every Magic card", and 2) to give maximum replayability to the semi-pro Magic grinders who owned the first cubes. The restriction makes sense when all your players have memorized all 3000 cards in existence in 1995. And to some extent, the restriction persisted as power-seeking cube designers used singleton to stretch for playables, recapturing a Limited-like sense of scarcity. In 2022, the drawbacks of this approach are more salient.
In Devoid Cube I was playing like 6 random Gorilla Warriors and Goblin Pikers with upside, all of which I'd never cast before in my life, to serve my curve. And after that draft, I went to another three cube drafts back-to-back, casting other cards for the first time in my life. The low-level buzz of nearly-meaningless rules text was constant throughout CubeCon and eventually struck me as ridiculous. We're pretending the cube designer's chokepoint is still cardslot variety, but for a decade the real chokepoint has been format accessibility.
I do think there are valid reasons to pursue largely singleton designs:
- your cube sees a lot of play from a highly engaged, highly Magic-knowledgable, and/or non-rotating group
- the point of your cube is a custom rule [e.g. Turbo Cube or Devoid Cube] that recontextualizes huge swaths of never-before-seen cardboard
- your online gameplay platform handles all the rules technicalities for you
But singleton's costs are often ignored or minimized:
- the Nth staple-card-but-different will take just as much brainpower as the 1st to comprehend and play, but will offer diminishing returns to gameplay novelty
- impossible to support certain archetypes at a desired consistency and/or power level
- some basic color pie effects are so perfect for Standard that WotC just repeatedly reprints them without any changes (e.g. Duress, Lightning Strike, or Opt)
- burdensome for new, lapsed, or less enfranchised players to parse packs and learn cards (longer drafts)
- more opportunities to lose games to a lack of rules knowledge
Non-singleton design offers real solutions to these design costs. Primarily, the tool can trivially enable grokkability and simplicity. It still requires designer creativity to select the optimal cards in the appropriate numbers. And it can still support engaging gameplay -- not by forcing variable game pieces, but by ensuring interesting game pieces.
I'm not saying you need every card to be a 10-of. Non-singleton designs have costs, too. But cards have a burden of proof to earn their singleton slot, and that burden of proof increases in situations like CubeCon, where drafters are in shorter supply than cubes.
Conclusion
A lot of these thoughts go back to complexity and novelty in a Cube format. In a situation like CubeCon, there were so many draft formats competing for attention that the standouts were as effortless as they were engaging. From the Desert Cube's rule of "you don't need to worry about your basics" to the Turbo Cube's heuristic of "the only real card text is 'draw' and 'add mana'" to the Regular Cube's tightly monitored complexity budget, these cubes were the foremost among all of the delightful cube experiences I had over the weekend.
When MTGO and Arena make it trivially easy to cube online, and when LGSes have multiple cubes available to the group on top of EDH and multiple 1v1 formats (not to mention other excellent modern board games), the definition of "a replayable Cube" changes. A replayable cube no longer means "the most novel when played 10x back-to-back", but "frictionless enough to be played more than once." Thanks for reading, and cheers! There were too many design insights for a single post, so I'll try to return to some ideas (including scarcity-as-synergy and the origins of the Cube format) another time. Hope to see you at the next CubeCon! (Or PAXU in December!)
If you've never heard Sam Black's podcast, Drafting Archetypes, you should give it a listen. The latest episode is Cube-focused in the wake of CubeCon, so it's a great place to start. It's quite a thought-provoking episode, but its attention is split between cube designers and cube players, so I thought I'd summarize it for my designer-brain and in a written medium.
Heuristics for predicting cube gameplay 1. "Staples" matter more than archetypes.
Sam uses the word "staple" to signify "high power outlier" with a connotation of "competitive Constructed threat from years past." Cards like Oko or Goyf or Kiki. He argues that these power outliers matter more than whatever archetype support the designer may have planned. You see Uro in a pack, the best move is to pick it and then pick cards that synergize with it, such that the staples self-generate their own synergies.
(I hear you say, "but context matters!" and normally I'd agree. But Sam has a point that "staples" earn that status because they're strong. So you may be able to make Oko contextually bad, but you have to accept violating your players' expectations to do so. More on that later, but most cubes only include historically powerful effects if they intend them to be strong.)
One funny second-order effect here is that Sam argues that looking at the ~20 most powerful threats in a cube will tell you a lot about the gameplay. For example, take a look at a retired cube of mine. Here's my guess for some premier threats:
Lingering Souls
Thalia's Geistcaller
Emeria Angel
Laboratory Maniac
Meloku the Clouded Mirror
Syr Konrad, the Grim
Dread Presence
Sylvan Advocate
Nightveil Specter
Ingenious Infiltrator
Angrath, Captain of Chaos
Spider Spawning
Improbable Alliance
Burning Vengeance
Travel Preparations
In hindsight it's striking how low-power this cube is. Makes it fairly obvious that if I'd included historically Constructed-playable threats in this cube, they'd easily crack this list. Even so, this spread of threats tells you a lot about the cube -- it's grindy graveyard stuff, and kinda token-spammy. Maybe it's not a perfect heuristic, but it'll get me a lot of the way there when drafting or thinking about a new cube.
2. Support pieces matter less than threats*
According to Sam, bread-n-butter gameplay pieces like cantrips, counterspells, and removal tend to have a smaller perceived footprint on the format than threats. Of course, an environment's removal also determines which threats are viable, and to what extent they're viable. But if you suddenly switched out all my 1-mana removal for 2-mana versions, I wouldn't have a fundamentally different cube like I would by adding a mana to all my cube's premier threats.
*Sam does note one exception, which is for cubes with fragile or linear synergies. When removal constitutes virtual card advantage by reducing game size, it can really shape a format.
Design thoughts 4. Cubes can be heavy or light gaming experiences
A heavy game is one that takes a lot of player thought to learn, conceptualize, or play competently. Examples include Magic relative to Spades, XCOM relative to Chess, or "Welcome To..." relative to Yahtzee. Light games require less effort to learn, conceptualize, or play competently.
Sam noted that cube design decisions like the inclusion of "staples" affect the heaviness of a cube. This really segues into my CubeCon thoughts from last post. Namely, I think my criticisms of singleton boil down to diminishing returns in a heavy cube. The cubes that felt the heaviest fundamentally changed Magic's game engine. I usually adore re-learning Magic's game engine in new contexts, but when the cube is already exceptionally heavy at the strategic and tactical levels, I don't see much point in embracing lower-level forms of complexity. (I want to lose Magic games to misunderstanding the game engine, not to misreading decade-old draft chaff.)
Other factors that might change a cube's heaviness include: (non)singleton, complexity in all its forms, decision density, familiarity of the card pool and mechanics, use of Constructed card eval and deckbuilding heuristics.
5. Meeting or subverting player expectations
When most players see Pestermite in a pack, their mind immediately goes to Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker. But if the cube intends Pestermite to support Faerie tribal instead, the player may misread their draft, be disappointed when they realize their error, and/or blame the cube designer. Conventional cube wisdom is that it's better to meet the player's expectation (add Kiki), or avoid giving them those cues in the first place (cut Pestermite).
I don't think we can or should insulate our cubes entirely from false expectations. (I've had a drafter interpret Deathrite Shaman as a "signal" for a big ramp deck based off of P1P1 and zero other data. Stuff like this just happens when you play with a wide skill range!) And sometimes it's possible to hide the times where we create false expectations (e.g., a negative expectation like "X isn't viable in Limited" is easier to break than a positive one). But generally, the Cube hive mind has gotten pretty close to ground truth here -- don't set expectations you won't meet.
6. Will your cube will recapture or reinvent?
Broadly, cubes are on a spectrum from recapturing a Magic experience to reinventing the game in a new context. These extremes have different default design decisions.
Recapture-style formats are trying to create a warm fuzzy feeling of nostalgia and comfort -- from a favorite era of Constructed or the players' own histories. As such, they will tend to meet player expectations about that era, prioritizing well-known "staples" with the intent that they will be powerful and gameplay-shaping. Since the staples are often Constructed all-stars, this tends to raise the power level of such a format. Familiarity breeds a lighter gaming experience, since players already have shortcuts for much of the cardpool, and the cards that matter are the ones they already know. Aesthetic considerations like foiling or original printings may be key parts of elevating happy feelings. MTGO Vintage Cube is the prime example of a recapture-style cube, but it's playgroup-dependent: another group may identify nostalgia with triple-INN set cubes, or "RTR Standard Format" cubes, or whatever.
Reinvent-style formats are concerned with crafting novel decision-making experiences in the Magic game engine. Since they're definitionally novel, they will require more mental effort to strategize and play, leading to an inherently heavier gaming experience than Magic-as-usual. As such, these cubes will often take care to avoid setting false expectations. Since well-known "staples" will introduce false expectations and bend the gameplay toward familiarity, reinvent-style formats may avoid staples to some extent. Aesthetic considerations like up-to-date rules text and grokkability may take primacy in such a format. They may change cards very often in order to generate metagame shifts, or they may be played less frequently so the metagame can't be solved. The Turbo Cube (all spells and abilities cost less), the Devoid Cube (all cards are colorless), The Degenerate Micro Cube (15-card combo decks), or the first week of a new Limited format all fall on this end of the spectrum.
Most cubes exist somewhere in between these two poles. The DMC, for all its novelty, uses mostly-familiar combo archetypes, such that player attention can be focused on the new deckbuilding restrictions. The MTGOVC, for all its nostalgia, introduces new Constructed cards to generate novel gameplay interactions. Even so, it's really hard to generate both extremes in the same format. If "staples" are relevant to a cube player, it's because they're powerful; if staples are powerful, it will shape gameplay into a familiar experience. You can still do it -- Blacksmithy's customs have provided new play patterns for Legacy-style cubes; bah-roken Commander cards can provide fresh spins on old staples.
Believe it or not, there's still more to say about CubeCon-derived insights! I still haven't gotten to talk about my favorite cube of the weekend! So, come back soon, I guess.
eyyyy shoutout to me!
would love to hear more about CubeCon!
(i couldn’t justify the price tag + weekend away and so ended up not going, but i’ve heard mostly positive reviews)
Sam's podcast did feel like a brutal takedown of everything I've ever tried to accomplish, but I realize that from a spike's perspective, you should assume the cube designer is shit at their job, and as such the things they talk about are utterly irrelevant to what is good in the format.
In fairness, it applies equally to WotC formats and cubes. They may tell you “hey this is the werewolf set” but because they juiced the removal so hard, it’s actually the Decayed Zombie set. Or they may support aggro in MTGOVC or random 4-card combos with no redundancy but that doesn’t mean it’s a +EV move to draft those decks!
Did you watch the CubeCon drafts? It should help put into context what he's saying. For example in the old border foil cube, he started by picking 3 value "modern" cards that were just good stuff compared to the power level of the old border time - EWit, Resto and Simulacrum I think?
I agree strongly with those point you listed - I'm just starting to listen to the Drafting Archetypes episode. Especially the first, I think cube designers very often miss the mark on threat power level and render synergies secondary. The cube that seemed to do it "right" that was featured in the CubeCon stream was the UMA inspired cube, see the madness matchup that was super cool (though mostly decided by misplays I think).
Did you watch the CubeCon drafts? It should help put into context what he's saying. For example in the old border foil cube, he started by picking 3 value "modern" cards that were just good stuff compared to the power level of the old border time - EWit, Resto and Simulacrum I think?
I actually haven't, yet. One of my friends beat Sam Black on coverage in that cube, which was exciting. But I totally believe that would be Sam's approach to drafting that list, or many others.
I agree strongly with those point you listed - I'm just starting to listen to the Drafting Archetypes episode. Especially the first, I think cube designers very often miss the mark on threat power level and render synergies secondary. The cube that seemed to do it "right" that was featured in the CubeCon stream was the UMA inspired cube, see the madness matchup that was super cool (though mostly decided by misplays I think).
Time to discuss my favorite cube at CubeCon, the Amonkar Desert Cube. I loved every cube I got to play, but this one was really special. Partly it's because it was my one 3-0 record of the weekend, but I had been looking forward to my first Desert-style draft for years. The prospect of drafting my entire deck including basics was very intriguing to me, and I would soon find my expectations were all exceeded.
The Draft
I began the draft with Magmatic Channeler over Living Death. I knew Death was more powerful "in a vacuum," but I hadn't even looked at the cube list, so I was gun-shy about such an all-in synergy 5-drop. Channeler, on the other hand, mitigates mana screw (which I valued highly in this format) and punishes the opponent's mana screw. I went for the low-risk option. My next influential pick was Queen Marchesa as pick 2 or 3. Her rate was high enough above every other card I'd seen (even Living Death) that I thought she was worth speculating on. In picks 2-9ish, I picked up some Mardu-aligned lands (including Hall of Oracles) and removal. After the wheel, I noticed some colorless 1-mana cyclers like Drannith Stinger had wheeled, and happily snapped them up.
Somewhere in early Pack 2 or late Pack 1, I felt an interlocking set of synergies coming together. Irencrag Pyromancer was a very high-upside for me thanks to my cyclers (and the Monarchy). Subira, Tulzudi Caravanner was an early pick-up that regained Monarchies and synergized with the creature side of my -cost Cycling cards. Baird, Argivian Recruiter was a post-wheel pickup and synergized with the filler creatures I'd already picked (plus Hall of Oracles), plus made tokens for Subira. I pursued this nexus of synergies throughout the rest of the draft. Oh yeah, and P2P4 I was blessed with Balance.
During pack 3, I felt nervous about the quantity and quality of my lands, so I picked several marginally playable lands like Access Tunnel and Petrified Field, in addition to prioritizing basics. (Packs were 18 cards to allow me to draft a full manabase.)
Gameplay
Games were generally as smooth as butter. I was never screwed on quantity of lands, and rarely missed on my colors thanks to my 5 -cost Cycling cards. My deck's late-game plan was consistent, powerful, and fast enough to punish mana screw. Best of all, I could deploy my late-game plan while developing my mana. For example, I could play Irencrag Pyromancer with the intent to cycle in search of my 3rd color, or Explore with Deadeye Tracker or activate Hall of Oracles while setting up for Baird.
Subira, Tulzudi Caravanner impressed me several times by pushing through 6-8 damage. Electrostatic Infantry was a behemoth in every game it was cast. I got to assemble the Pyromancer / Monarch combo. Unearth and Sevinne's Reclamation were copies 2-4 of my best cards. I activated the non-mana abilities of all my utility lands at least once. I never drew Braids (the least castable card in my deck).
Survivor bias and small sample size be damned -- I felt like I was playing a totally different format than my opponents. Between my consistent manabase, my wordy creatures, and my graveyard synergies, I always had enough options and resources to abruptly pivot tactics, relentlessly punishing each opponent's weakest point.
The one downside to my extremely synergistic deck is that I felt a bit burdened by the sheer volume and variety of triggers produced by my cards. I would have liked to do a better job tracking them, but I would have to play a lot more Magic to have the brainspace for winning and immaculate bookkeeping at the same time.
The Epiphany
The draft and deckbuild of this format were some of the most fun moments of Magic I've ever had. Any quibbles I had with gameplay complexity were far outweighed by the delight of building this deck.
One reason I enjoyed myself so much is that I like when my mana dictates what spells I can play. Knowing that my manabase can't support costs as easily as tells me which draft picks are likeliest to be maindecked. The Desert stipulation enhanced this feature, because free basic lands weren't there to enable misguided "what if?" inquiries.
The second reason is related to the first. Low-power Desert means everybody's mana sucks -- it's inconsistent; it's split between splash colors whether you like it or not; it's diluted by basics and colorless utility lands. Unless you want to lose some % of games to R-N-Jesus, you have to dedicate 5-10 spell slots to making your mana better. Some of my opponents did it through Expedition Map-style tutors, others did it by Cycling like I did, and others leaned into their slapdash color distribution by playing 4+ colors and 18+ lands. Those deck slots dedicated to mana-fixing fluff are just the price of entry for Desert.
The thing Amonkar excelled in was rewarding players who recognized that necessity of fluff and crafted synergies such that their fluff-slots became real cards again. My build-arounds turned my deck's Cycling and Explore into Lightning Bolt or Eager Cadet or Fruit of Tizerus, and my fluff cards enabled the bombs to come online. One extreme or the other was insufficient -- you couldn't play 24 bombs, and you couldn't play 9 fluff spells at face value. You had to deckbuild around your fluff as much as your bombs! Amonkar made that really rewarding and intuitive.
Scarcity can accentuate synergy.
I want to apply this to The Ship of Theseus. How can I get players to deckbuild around their bad (but well-designed) cards? One way is to enforce scarcity. Desert is one route to scarcity, but another would be a reduction in draft pool size, or cutting redundancy, or cutting down threats that invalidate prior game actions.
The latter design tools tend to suck in Cube when they're unevenly applied, e.g. cutting Aggro 1-drops in MTGOVC while leaving Blue's counterspell suite untouched. I'll have to be judicious in applying those techniques. For now, I'm weighing 3-4 changes:
1. Cut the Triomes. I love these cards' aesthetics, but they subsidize mana too effectively.
2. Add 20 basics and make it Desert. (Or, y'know, "Rainforest," or something that sounds as lush as my fixing land section.) I believe this will effectively decrease pool size, since players won't be able to splash freely.
3. Cut some upper power outliers. I think it's probably time for Murktide's sabbatical.
4. Swap ABUR duals for Shocks. This pressures mana and life resources.
No immediate changes because I've got other fish to fry. But maybe soon! Thanks for reading.
in which I finally bite the bullet. Updates for Scarcity, aka Biting the Bullet
For almost a year now I've been trying to heighten the importance of "interesting decisions" in my format. The idea of scarcity, which I talked about in the last post, helped crystallize some steps towards that goal. This update finally aligns my cube's draft format with my card-level goals by enforcing scarcity. Just in time, because I'm hoping to get a weekly Cube night set up with my LGS owner this month!
I'm not going to make my eyes bleed with a million inline card images, so follow along on CubeCobra if you care about that.
Out:
- Overall decreased size to 360 (well, technically 364 with Cogwork Librarians). Smaller pools mean scarcer resources.
- I'm cutting the Triome cycle without replacement. (I do have Shocks and Painlands on deck, just in case.) This reduces the chances of a player adding a 4th color to their deck to avoid well-designed but less-powerful cards.
- Almost half the format's board wipes. They just never see play. I'm keeping my favorite ones -- name a more iconic trio than Wrath of God, Damnation, and Damn -- but the marginally playable ones in and are out.
- Reduced redundancy in removal, discard, counterspells, and other staple effects. This makes draft pools less deep. The top-shelf versions of each effect will gain value-over-replacement, but the lower-tier versions will see more play due to scarcity. The latter effect is what I want to see.
- Some complexity offenders. I expect to cube with newcomers soon, so some foreign cards and wordy cards are out.
Notable Swaps:
- Murktide Regent is out; Sailors' Bane is in. The latter is less grokkable (due to a lack of Constructed play) but far more interactable.
- Cut Down over Vendetta is a somewhat arbitrary swap.
I'm actually a little conflicted to have cut all my format's most powerful threats! Cutting power outliers like Oko, Uro, Klothys, and Murktide was undoubtedly the right decision for my cube -- they have a gravitational pull that compresses the possibilities in draft and deckbuild, and they muffle the impact of any changes I make underneath their power level. But even so, I genuinely like 2020's rogues' gallery. I'll miss beating the snot out of my opponent with Murktide Regent or tilting Andy off a cliff with Klothys.
So I've devised a somewhat janky solution. In my cube box, I've kept my "banlist" sleeved up and separate from the main cube. The banlist includes Uro, Lurrus, my second copies of Thoughtseize and Lightning Bolt, and so on. I'll be able to add these in whenever I feel like injecting a jolt of power to cube night. (And most importantly, I can convince the reptile portion of my brain that Oko isn't gone forever, he's just on vacation.)
BRO & Other Tests
Below is what I submitted to Lucky Paper's set prospective survey (3 high, 1 low). It was... ambitious. There's no way in heck I'm gonna test all these.
Special shout to Teferi, Temporal Pilgrim, who's grown on me since I rated him a 1. I think he's a really elegant planeswalker design -- the Spirit and Teferi each share the same "Lorescale Coatl" ability, and the other loyalty abilities are also perfectly viable. The other tests should be fairly self-explanatory.
These should tide me over until post-ONE, at least. I'm already pumped for Jor Kadeen, First Goldwarden and multiple cycles of full-art basics. Cheers and thanks for reading!
When WOTC eventually does the Polynesia and Roman Empire worlds, it would be funny to build an entire Cube called "Oko on Vacation" which is just Oko and a bunch of cards from sunny, warm locations like Theros, Ixalan, Naya, and Jamuraa.
sources to get maximum value from 
