General Multi-Colour\Gold Cubes

[Kuldahar]

I love gold cards. I really can't tell you why I love gold cards either. Maybe I'm drawn to the pretty colours? I think my favourite sets were the Invasion cycle, and the Alara cycle, with the Ravnicas not far behind (I think I'm still dirty on the story of RtR block and the Dragon's Maze set in general).

As all good cube designers know, to make a cube more efficient and for archetypes to be more accessible, you should try to minimize how many gold cards are in your cube. Most cubes I see only 3-6 cards in each guild pair.

So how do you approach a cube that has an emphasis on multi-colour\gold cards? (not an entirely gold cube, but a cube that has more gold than average)

I know that you would need a lot more fixing than a standard cube.
Would you use more mana rocks?
Would you do something like a utility land draft, but have access to fixing lands instead\additionally?
Green has inherent advantage with ramp/fixing. How would you try to balance it? Would you try to balance it?

One of the keys to a successful cube is having cards that are synergistic with more than one type of deck. How would you try to address this when gold cards tend to only lend themselves to one colour pair, thus less multi-purpose? Would you just push one archetype per colour pair?

What other problems would you have to try to address?

Maybe a gold cube is just not possible?

Any thoughts, examples, testimonials would be great

 

[anotak]

fixing fixing fixing

i would push more than one archetype in each color combination because then moving out of a color pair makes it even more difficult beyond just the fixing. i wouldn't just up the number of multicolor cards but up the number of hybrids because they make splashing so much more bearable

for example even though rtr has guild-specific mechanics and playstyles that many of the mechanics work together and care about similar things, for example unleash, scavenge and evolve all care about +1/+1 counters.

 

[Alfonzo Bonzo]

I think a good starting point might actually be to try to work out why you like gold cards. It probably is more than the pretty colour It might help you determine in what direction you want the cube to go in. Do you want a cube that has as much gold as possible or do you want a cube that lets you play as many of the gold cards that you like as easily as possible? What gold cards do you like? Are you wanting to play just two colour gold cards or are you going to include shard gold cards and maybe five colour gold cards?

Another thing to consider is how many colours you want the final decks to be? Should people just be able to sit in one particular guild? Should they be in three colours? Is five colours possible? Linked to this is probably how many people are likely to draft your cube, what size should it be and how do you intend to draft it. Two player winston or grid vs a full regular eight player draft will probably mean you construct the cube differently.

Going some way to answer these questions will lead you onto the most important aspect, fixing. Are you going to load up on lands that tap for two or push with vivids, cities of brass and alara tri lands? Signets/talismans or chromatic lantern/coalition relic? Mixture of all of the above? Rocks are good for midrange and control.

How are you going to support aggro? Do you want aggro to be possible? What are good aggro gold cards that you want to play? (Jason's eldrazi cube and the Laz's scuttlemutt cube have ways forward for this).

You can choose to give green multi colour fixing if you want to or you can get it to do something else. You will need to make sure that all colours have a way to have fixing that gives them access to the colours that they need anyway. Maybe green should just have different ways to do that.

If you only have one archtype per guild, does every guild deck look the same? Maybe look at what a single colour can do and how can you bridge it across different guilds. Have a look at Jason's thread on the lifegain theme and how it's mainly white but can bridge into each of the other colours and what that brings to the party.

 

[Goldenpineapple]

I'll give you a testimonial.

My cube had a larger-than-most gold section for a long time. I believe I was shooting for 450 and then I just went ham on gold (and artifacts and lands) and it panned out to closer to 600; My gold section was almost twice as large as my individual mono sections. The games were fun and people got to cast a lot of really cool spells that don't often see the light of day, much less anyone's cube, but the games would easily stall. I haven't been playing magic very long (5 years) so I don't completely know how things were in the past, but one of the people I talked to about it described it as "almost battlecruiser magic."

People were ignoring early curve because a LOT of gold cards are super-strong effects at midrange+ mana costs. White weenie and 'the red deck' were available and powerful, but because people learned that there was a lot of good gold, they forced as many colors for as many cool cards as they could. The fixing was available and good, so everyone just ended up playing 3-5 color midrange. Again, the games were cool in that you'd see Nicol Bolas next to spiritmonger who was enchanted with eldrazi conscription from a sovereigns trigger facing off against a simic sky swallower backed up by ajani vengeant and Oona, Queen of the Fae, which is a memorable and powerful gamestate, but probably memorable for the 'wrong' reasons. If that's the kind of thing you want it's easily doable with enough lands and colorless fixing.

So my personal problem was that I went in on gold's really GOOD cards so hard that it wasn't even worth drafting a lot of the mono colored cards when there were just BETTER gold options. One thing I did was actually cut a lot of mono bombs and a lot of gold cheaper stuff to just keep the splashiest and best effects in gold, and that met with mild success. People are a lot more willing to splash when their gold card costs a decent amount (4+) so they won't get screwed early. Games still panned out similarly though, with people overvaluing lands and fixing, then just taking sweet gold bombs and jamming it.

I've been scaling it back slowly over the last year (have had my cube for 2?) and after a certain point I was getting increasingly frustrated with heavily-gilded packs that player simple did not want, so I recently hacked my gold list down to less than half of what it was, which was already reduced. I still can't let go of some cards, so my gold is still heavier than most in the 3+ color department.

TL;DR My cube was a normal cube with an inflated gold section. It led to many midrange slugfests, which have their charm, but aren't very technical, synergistic or difficult to draft, so I chopped my gold down. Gold-heavy cubes are hardly unplayable but don't expect the SCIENCE or special archetypes that most here get out of their lists.

 

[Chris Taylor]

SCIENCE!

But yeah, it basically boils down to that. I'll totally agree malestrom pulse is a sweet card, but is heroes downfall that much worse? Given that it can be played in so many more decks?

If you are dead set on making the multicolor cube, I'll suggust two things:
1) Take a look at jason's eldrazi domain cube on how to make multicolor aggro work (Look at the Alara "Blades" and Hybrid 1 drops)
2) Don't feel the need to keep the same number of multicolor cards per guild, or per 3 color combo. If you can only find 4 sweet UR cards, don't go digging for the least crap one because every other section has 5. Or (even more so!) for the least crap 4 because each other section has 8

 

[Kuldahar]

Cheers guys.

I actually have been checking out Jason's Eldrazi cube. I'm pretty sure his CFB article about it is what led me here.

I'm still doing a lot of research into this project because I would love for it to work. My hurdle at the moment is how to approach fixing. I want enough to make decks viable but I want anything more than 2 colours not to be super easy. :/ Thoughts? Help? I'm not even sure what cards to use.

Im definitely want aggro to be viable, and not all decks to be midrange control monstrosities.

 

[anotak]

some fixing related thoughts from CML
http://riptidelab.com/an-off-color-joke-fixing-dgr-cube-and-you/

 

[Jason Waddell]

I think some distinction on your goals needs to be made. Do you want high gold density or high multicolor-deck density? Because gold cards are inherently very narrow, and the classic way of making them less narrow is to make the players play more (read: 3+) colors. So I think the stated goal of high-gold and difficult to play more than two colors is an inherently bad one that should not be pursued.

You should read this: http://www.channelfireball.com/articles/cube-design-declassified-information/

Food for thought: If you want high gold density while having gold cards not be super narrow, try taking, say, a note from Alara's playbook and focus primarily on allied color pairings. Or, it doesn't have to be "allied" in the conventional sense, you can do what RTR and GTC did and rearrange the color pie in a unique way and then do allied stuff under that configuration.

 

[Changling Bob]

How high-gold do you reckon you need to be before two colour decks aren't good enough?

 

[anotak]

bump

might as well link my shit while im here http://cubetutor.com/viewcube/11849

 

[Dom Harvey]

A few thoughts about how to make a gold Cube work:

- You need a LOT of manafixing. The successful 3-colour decks in Constructed run very few basic lands: in Standard with the Ravnica shocklands, 12 shocks + 12 painlands or 12 shocks + 12 buddy lands manabases were common. It's hard to recreate that kind of consistency in Cube without separating out the lands in some way, as FSR proposed, or just giving people lands.

- The manafixing you have needs to line up with the cards you want to cast. For XX/YY cards fetchlands aren't good unless they're getting duals; you can solve the T1 X, T2 YY problem with a dual or fetchland into dual, but not with a basic or fetchland into basic. You want to favour XY costs over XX or YY, and ideally XY cards should be as easy or easier to cast; the idea is to justify cards like Azorius Charm which would clearly be Cube-able if they cost UU or WW and change how restrictive their mana cost is in context.

- You want a lot of your strongest cards to be gold, which isn't tough if you play the best gold cards as long as you aren't throwing Jittes/Wurmcoils/Karns at people. It's fine to have easily splashable monocolour cards as well, but you don't want stuff that requires a heavy monocolour commitment unless it also ties into multicolour in some way (e.g. devotion is actually fine still if you have a lot of hybrids)

- I think multicolour good stuff decks are more than fine and the criticism of them is silly, but colour restrictions in a normal Cube do differentiate between possible archetypes and you need something to substitute for that. This can mean gold cards that are narrow and thus doubly unsuitable for normal Cubes, things that span all five colours (Elementals? Domain?), or anything else really.

- Mimics might be a fun place to start for aggro decks? You can 'start' in UR for Riverfall Mimic and then go W for Mantis Rider, B for Sedraxis Specter, G for Savage Knuckleblade, etc.

- With most of your 2-mana cards costing XY I imagine it'll be harder to play two spells in one turn than it is in normal Cube; I don't know what this means, but be aware of it I guess.

That's all obvious and probably no help, sorry

 

[CML]

Anyone wanna take a shot at drafting a list? Eldrazi Domain might be a good template. I'm guessing the right proportions are around

360 cards
---
20 fetches
10 shocks
10 duals
10 trilands
10 temples
5 wwk manlands
paliano, the high city, mana confluence, and city of brass
---
1-2 3-color cards per wedge-shard, and 5-15 per guild
3-color card suggestions:

---
a 5-color card or two (maelstrom nexus? maelstrom archangel?) NB: gold cards that you want to include skew very heavily towards creatures, so compensate for that with extra spells in the single-color slots
---
no signets, just the standard roster of mana rocks. a fair amount of artifacts.
---
slightly nerfed power level, so something like
Path to Exile instead of Swords to Plowshares
Firebolt instead of Lightning Bolt
Consume the Meek instead of Damnation

 

[Jason Waddell]

I do think there's a point where you have too much fixing. 70 is a lot. Not that it is bad to have it, but I can see drafting it becoming very tedious.

But if you don't have enough, color screw determines a lot of games.

I'd also point out that most of our cubes are already pretty multicolor. If memory serves, shards of alara had about 15% gold cards, and a lot of us are already two thirds of the way there.

 

[Chris Taylor]

Overloading the Funsies draft is another way to make that work

 

[Onderzeeboot]

I do think there's a point where you have too much fixing. 70 is a lot. Not that it is bad to have it, but I can see drafting it becoming very tedious.

I'm at 54 in my current 360 cube (the pre-Waddellesque 3-color one) and my players complain that there are too many lands already.

(Some of you minst recognize this post...)

 

[Laz]

I'm at 54 in my current 360 cube (the pre-Waddellesque 3-color one) and my players complain that there are too many lands already.

(Some of you minst recognize this post...)

I am at 56 without a multi-colour theme (or even that many gold cards at 26), and I think it is in a really good place. Being able to cast spells is great, but failing to find basics is real if you prioritise fixing. There is rarely a shortage of playables. I think it is good, but maybe it would tie together a bit better if I took a leaf from Jason's book and added a few more cards that cared about lands (Steppe Lynx, et al.).

Scuttle-cube has a pretty decent land set for a multi-coloured focussed cube, though you could shuffle it now you have the full set of tri-lands.
20 Fetches
10 Shocks
10 Duals
5 Tri-lands
11 Five-colour lands (5x Vivids (with basic land types), 2x Fetchland for Basics, 2x Gemstone Mine, Ancient Ziggurat, Tendo Ice Bridge)

Then 3x Tectonic Edge, to keep players honest (was Wastelands, but that kept people too honest, and aggro decks too strong).

Obviously some of these lands are a little questionable (lots were tie-ins to the proliferate/Ion Storm themes), but Vivids with basic land types is something I whole-heartedly recommend.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

Yeah, 54 seems just right here as well, but my players aren't that experienced and apparently rather draft cards they won't play. Last time three of them managed to stay monocolor. Well... We'll see how that goes after the big shakeup! Building a monocolor deck will be a lot harder after the switch to supporting Grixis, Bant, Abzan, Mardu and Temur

 

[Rob Dennis]

Couple of weeks ago, I came up with a design goal of: "what kind of format would it take to make 10 shard/wedge charms in demand." I assumed I wasn't the only one thinking that, but I'm pretty excited.

Now that KTK is on cubetutor, I have the first draft's first test draft: http://cubetutor.com/cubedeck/199826
Full thread in the list forum planned after I have enough test drafts to cover all the decks I'm planning for.

For those of you who remember my lambic project, I'm glad I have it, because this project would be impossible to tackle in the old spreadsheet world: