General Multi-Picks
- Thread starter Diakonov
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What did you do specifically? I like the extra gravecrawler idea (which I'm going to adopt).
CML
Contributor
i think i disagree with this idea in a vacuum. beatdown is intrinsically fun enough for enough players (at least competitive players) that you don't need to ask both my playgroup's best and worst player (the latter of whom doubles as my dad) twice to draft G/W. there has been more beef here about how the gravecrawlers are tough to beat with control. personally every time i spend a pick taking a single gravecrawler it feels fucking great and i am not exactly eager to stuff double terminus in a single sleeve, if you catch my drift
Oh man, you've never heard somebody say "I went 3 - 0 with this WW cube deck and was bored out of my mind?" Have you never played a Standard aggro deck where the game just played itself? There are plenty of boring beatdown decks out there, and this has nothing to do with some ivory tower "competitive players" argument.
A large part of the fun of building a great aggro deck is purely from the designing perspective. Sure, aggro has a tendency to autopilot once you play, but the key is getting satisfaction out of the architecture. Mono-red aggro was particularly boring because both the games AND the draft were auto-pilot. I think it might have been one of your articles, Jason, but I remember not too long after arriving here that I learned the philosophy of "compel your aggro players to play more than one color." This is why I double up on Kird Ape and Loam Lion and NOT on Rakdos Cackler and Dryad Militant.
At the same time, though, double-picks gives the aggro player space to go after more interesting cards, or even sideboard cards. You can freely take that Caller of the Claw instead of feeling forced to spend a second pick on Experiment One.
The bottom line is that control has a variety of interesting choices during draft, and without double-picks, this had been much less true for aggro.
Much like CML, I actually find picking up a second copy of Champion of the Parish to be satisfying, and then wheeling the third and final copy hugely rewarding. Same with Delver of Secrets or Gravecrawler. Nothing says "my plan is coming together!" like getting your much needed tribal one-drop to come back around late.
Aside from my well-worn stance on "if it makes your deck, it's worth a pick", I really enjoy spending draft picks on multiples of the same card.
I suppose I don't really buy the notion that multiples are crowding out control cards, either. That's a choice a designer makes. If anything, they're just crowding out lesser one-drops here. I no longer run Elite Vanguard, Savannah Lions, or only-works-for-Waddell-special Steppe Lynx, and I haven't bothered to add Tormented Hero. Even with my doubles and triples, I've restricted myself to seven white one-drops, five black, and six green.
Aside from my well-worn stance on "if it makes your deck, it's worth a pick", I really enjoy spending draft picks on multiples of the same card.
I suppose I don't really buy the notion that multiples are crowding out control cards, either. That's a choice a designer makes. If anything, they're just crowding out lesser one-drops here. I no longer run Elite Vanguard, Savannah Lions, or only-works-for-Waddell-special Steppe Lynx, and I haven't bothered to add Tormented Hero. Even with my doubles and triples, I've restricted myself to seven white one-drops, five black, and six green.
Onderzeeboot
Ecstatic Orb
You don't run red one-drops?
How is multi-Delver working for you, and how many are you running? I feel like two is maybe a good number in a 3.5 Brainstorm cube...
With something like Champion, I only really see two possible scenarios:
1. Wheel it because why in the world would someone else take this;
2. Someone else takes it hoping to also go Humans, and now you have screwed each other pretty hard.
Maybe I'm underestimating Champion, but he seems like the type of creature that you really want to have 2 of in your deck to justify running it. Gravecrawler, on the other hand, while great when you have 2, is still very useful in a lot of other places.
EDIT: Steppe Lynx, FWIW, has been one of the greater successes of the double-pick mechanic. It's a pretty narrow card on its own, but receiving two makes it easier to justify any sort of landfall support cards.
The nice part about human tribal, unlike zombies, is that there are so many incidental humans in your cube, that even just taking and running a single Champion of the Parish is rarely wrong. When I used to run four, sometimes they would get split evenly between two drafters, and each would still have a good deck.
A recent 3-0 deck that wasn't heavy on the human theme, but still ran one Champion:
http://riptidelab.com/forum/threads/decks-that-have-3-0d-your-cube.47/page-25#post-17642
A recent 3-0 deck that wasn't heavy on the human theme, but still ran one Champion:
http://riptidelab.com/forum/threads/decks-that-have-3-0d-your-cube.47/page-25#post-17642
It's.. not very good here. I'm stubbornly sticking with it, because I want to see the nut Delver deck happen once, but I'm no longer optimistic.
It should be better with multiple Brainstorms, though.
CML
Contributor
honest answers: no and no
cube: the last time someone killed it with WW it involved some eight-and-a-half-tails subtleties and was completely hilarious. spellskite and mother of runes too. everyone enjoyed losing to it
standard: standard control is easier to play than standard aggro right now. in cube this is likely untrue because you have to play with creatures and do not have 4 sphinx's revelations, but cube aggro is still not too easy to play if the opponent is also doing stuff. cards like sulfuric vortex which define games in grim mon cubes become delightfully double-edged and boarding is hard and combat math is hard and some stuff has triggered or activated abilities and you need to squeeze through the last few damage sometimes and play around sweepers and i'm just surprised this isn't the experience everywhere
Onderzeeboot
Ecstatic Orb
I'm going to double up on Champion of the Parish. For me it's the poster child of a fun aggro card. It impacts the way you value cards during draft, and it provides a nice little sequencing subgame during play.
