I'm bad with names. Maybe I'll come up with a cooler one later: Oleg's synergy cube list.
I thought of making a so-called “Season 2” update, but gradually realized it’s better be treated as a whole new project with stuff I actually wanted to include. So this is a work in progress for my second cube. I started from throwing together around 4000 of cards, and now I’m carving something out of this pool, until around 300-500 will remain. There's still a lot of work to be done about removing the most niche cards or finding an optimal number of similar effects. Then I'll proceed to physical testing. I feel like I’m going in circles, and would like to have some fresh eyes on this.
This is a cross-synergy cube. I aim somewhere between a moderate sandbox with hooks (Anthony Mattox's Regular Cube) and a full-blown combo cube (Caleb Gannon's Powered Synergy Cube). I dislike generic goodstuff, but also don't want actual linear combo decks.
My idea is to sprinkle a lot of synergy pockets across all colors, so players could combine multiple in one deck, instead of drafting a preset linear archetype. To end up in token aggro with spellslinger, aristocrats with an artifact theme, go wide with +1/+1 counters, tiny tribal packages etc. The unattainable ideal is "everything combines with everything", so I'm trying for something resembling that. Finding new interactions between components is one of my favorite things in games. Even if you draft the "same" deck, it should turn out differently. My first cube had some on-rail draft patterns. I suppose good stuff value decks should still be possible, but they shouldn’t be vanilla. While there’s plenty of generically good cards, they will still wink at each other using my main themes.
I started the list from the idea of lower power to let niche forgotten cards shine, but ended up finding a lot of stuff that looks amazing, yet might be way too broken. Say, Wrenn and Six is stupidly perfect for many things in my cube, but I worry she’s way too generically strong instead of being a role player. Then I’ve never tapped a Tolarian Academy in my life. It’s probably a bad idea. Currently it’s the highest Cube Cobra Elo card in my list.
If I let these monster cards share a space with my lowest Elo cards like Ion Storm, Bloodbriar, Shu Yun, the Silent Tempest, Soulfire Grand Master, do I shoot myself in the foot? They seem fun, but will they waste card slots and rot in sideboards?
I need more competent people to point out my blindspots. I’m afraid I pushed power too high here.
I have a tendency of disliking a lot of generic workhorses. Especially after making a bit vanilla cube with simple cards, I crave to use every possible space for hooks and promises, maybe to my detriment. I know for a fact, that I tend to oversupport themes, as is evident from my first cube. I just crave for “the thing” to work. While I claim I want an experimental sandbox, I push niche things too hard.
I worry that some archetypes/themes I want to have are just not worth it. And I don’t know how much support does each one need. Say, there are too many sacrifice themed cards currently.
I realized I poorly understand aggro-control, despite reading a lot of material about it from constructed formats. In my first cube, UW and UR always gravitate towards long grind, instead of tempo-based decks. I love the idea of switching gears back and forth during a match. Watching Delver and Canadian threshold was once a big revelation for me.
I’ve learned about several styles of doing this in constructed formats: fish (multiple disruptive creatures), thresh/grow (few creatures you protect with your spells), stompy (throwing down lockdown artifacts while punching face). Here are unique kinds of disruption different colors might offer:
My platonic ideal is maximum amount of viable deck combinations and near endless replayability. Some of Riptide folks post their deck examples and I go “how the hell do they cram 3 archetypes in one beautiful monstrosity?!”
My desire to push fun archetypes conflicts with the idea of player’s choice and experimentation. Letting some ideas go is the thing I struggle the most with. Point me out to anything with repetitive patterns or requiring too many space in cube.
I finally finished the first cube by forcing myself to cut half the crap in favor of my players, who were new to MtG. Now I’m tinkering with the ideas I removed last year, and have missed ever since. I need to cut down from 1000 cards to around 400 probably. There's still a ton of work to be done before I proxy this abomination and try to persuade my group I have a new coolest cube ever.
I feel like I'm going in circles and really need some new eyes on this. I appreciate anyone who takes time to write an advice or comment, even on singular cards. I need new perspectives to push forward. I’m stuck way too deep in my head about this project.
I’ve read a ton of Riptide Lab, and can’t name everyone. But special thanks for this particular cube go to:
Duplicating the link: Oleg's synergy cube list.
Intro
After months of tinkering, my first cube was finished out of necessity to actually finish it, and be accessible to a regular board gamer, not core MtG-players. So it had a lot of concessions and drastic cuts, including whole themes and archetypes. Read my First cube, lessons learned essay.I thought of making a so-called “Season 2” update, but gradually realized it’s better be treated as a whole new project with stuff I actually wanted to include. So this is a work in progress for my second cube. I started from throwing together around 4000 of cards, and now I’m carving something out of this pool, until around 300-500 will remain. There's still a lot of work to be done about removing the most niche cards or finding an optimal number of similar effects. Then I'll proceed to physical testing. I feel like I’m going in circles, and would like to have some fresh eyes on this.
This is a cross-synergy cube. I aim somewhere between a moderate sandbox with hooks (Anthony Mattox's Regular Cube) and a full-blown combo cube (Caleb Gannon's Powered Synergy Cube). I dislike generic goodstuff, but also don't want actual linear combo decks.
My idea is to sprinkle a lot of synergy pockets across all colors, so players could combine multiple in one deck, instead of drafting a preset linear archetype. To end up in token aggro with spellslinger, aristocrats with an artifact theme, go wide with +1/+1 counters, tiny tribal packages etc. The unattainable ideal is "everything combines with everything", so I'm trying for something resembling that. Finding new interactions between components is one of my favorite things in games. Even if you draft the "same" deck, it should turn out differently. My first cube had some on-rail draft patterns. I suppose good stuff value decks should still be possible, but they shouldn’t be vanilla. While there’s plenty of generically good cards, they will still wink at each other using my main themes.
A few design considerations
- I refuse double sided cards and vehicles, just because I don't like them. I limit Universes Beyond due to aesthetic.
- When I can control myself, I limit amount of major mechanics. Cube is already very complex. For example, there are no sagas, adventures or morphs.
- I try to limit variety of tokens, up to declining cards with weird rare ones. Since I proxy, I plan to unify a few subtypes, for example white 1/1 humans, soldiers and warriors or red 1/1 goblins. Yes, this is non-negligible functional errata.
- After my first cube, I decided to eschew 1-drop aggro specific cards. They take up a lot of slots, and aren't that favored by drafters. Instead, I focus on 2-drops and various themes of attack from disruption to overrunning the board. And you can take the first turn to play a tapland, cantrip, discard spell or a small utility creature.
Main themes
- Graveyard interactions across all colors. Primary in
, minor in 
. - Artifacts go from full-blown decks to just efficient role players. Primary in , minor in . There are small treasure and clue subthemes.
- Noncreature spells marry spellslinger with artifact decks. Primary in , secondary in , minor in . I just love noncreature and spell density strategies.
Smaller subthemes
- Lands, including landfall, graveyard and 5-color. Primary in , minor in .
- Counters primary in , secondary in .
- Go wide, branching into tokens, sacrifice or mass creature pump. Primary in , minor in .
- Sacrifice is primary in , secondary in , minor in .
- Flash and off-turn casting. Primary in , minor in .
- Tiniest tribal pockets: humans, faeries, wizards, zombies, goblins.
Minor packages I’m unsure about
- White hatebears, taxes and prison elements, branching into artifacts
- Blue aggro-control and bounce
- Black discard
- Red artifact reanimator
- Big red (Gauntlet of Might, Koth, Fire of Resistance, Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle)
- Green control (Seasons Past, Stunted Growth, Genesis)
- Mana rocks badaboom (Catastrophe, Upheaval, Death Cloud, Wildfire, Plow Under)
- 30+ fetchlands (shuffling topdeck, landfall, threshold, delve, lands in graveyard)
Core problems
Power level
While I’m a strong believer that power level is contextual, it’s still all over the place. There are a number of broken cards, But I'll have to see if they are that strong outside of powermax Vintage context. The plan was to test, and then cut down to the lower level of most fun, instead of tuning up to the strongest cards. But I got sucked in deep.I started the list from the idea of lower power to let niche forgotten cards shine, but ended up finding a lot of stuff that looks amazing, yet might be way too broken. Say, Wrenn and Six is stupidly perfect for many things in my cube, but I worry she’s way too generically strong instead of being a role player. Then I’ve never tapped a Tolarian Academy in my life. It’s probably a bad idea. Currently it’s the highest Cube Cobra Elo card in my list.
If I let these monster cards share a space with my lowest Elo cards like Ion Storm, Bloodbriar, Shu Yun, the Silent Tempest, Soulfire Grand Master, do I shoot myself in the foot? They seem fun, but will they waste card slots and rot in sideboards?
I need more competent people to point out my blindspots. I’m afraid I pushed power too high here.
How many role players
How to decide the optimal number of certain effects without going overboard?I have a tendency of disliking a lot of generic workhorses. Especially after making a bit vanilla cube with simple cards, I crave to use every possible space for hooks and promises, maybe to my detriment. I know for a fact, that I tend to oversupport themes, as is evident from my first cube. I just crave for “the thing” to work. While I claim I want an experimental sandbox, I push niche things too hard.
I worry that some archetypes/themes I want to have are just not worth it. And I don’t know how much support does each one need. Say, there are too many sacrifice themed cards currently.
Aggro-control
One of my goals was to make aggro more varied and interesting. I think one side is already reasonable: aggro-combo flavors, be it prowess, sacrifice or artifacts and counters. Critical mass with a possibility of an explosive finish.I realized I poorly understand aggro-control, despite reading a lot of material about it from constructed formats. In my first cube, UW and UR always gravitate towards long grind, instead of tempo-based decks. I love the idea of switching gears back and forth during a match. Watching Delver and Canadian threshold was once a big revelation for me.
I’ve learned about several styles of doing this in constructed formats: fish (multiple disruptive creatures), thresh/grow (few creatures you protect with your spells), stompy (throwing down lockdown artifacts while punching face). Here are unique kinds of disruption different colors might offer:
- Hatebears and taxes in white and artifacts;
- Counterspells and bounce in blue;
- Targeted hand disruption in black;
- Blocker removal doubles as face burn in red;
- Flash creatures and temporary hexproof in green;
- I’m unsure about artifact prison elements. I know they go from being completely frustrating to underpowered. I personally love Winter Orb, but it’s a divisive card. Still, Lodestone Golem stompy is such a unique way of pressure! I try to put a reasonable amount of maindeckable artifact hate to exclude complete lockdowns.
- I don’t think I want cheap land destruction, that randomly invalidates a perfectly good hand, especially with limited mana bases.
Replayability
Big reason why I left constructed for limited is dislike for metagaming and prevalent strategies. Either you play one of the top 2-5 decks, or you are wrong and suboptimal. In my dream game everything should be viable and justified to exist. Obviously, dream game is a problematic concept. But that’s what a dream is: a cube where everything is theoretically playable with each other.My platonic ideal is maximum amount of viable deck combinations and near endless replayability. Some of Riptide folks post their deck examples and I go “how the hell do they cram 3 archetypes in one beautiful monstrosity?!”
My desire to push fun archetypes conflicts with the idea of player’s choice and experimentation. Letting some ideas go is the thing I struggle the most with. Point me out to anything with repetitive patterns or requiring too many space in cube.
Complexity
I worry cube became too wordy now. There are also a ton of nuances, that are easy to miss:- Search deck for any land or a basic land;
- Sacrifice a permanent or a nonland permanent;
- Noncreature artifact versus nontoken artifact.
Outro
My cubes are fully custom self-made proxies. Old 1996 frame with modern Oracle text. I allow myself to type in keyword reminders by hand or even minor functional erratas, like token subtypes.I finally finished the first cube by forcing myself to cut half the crap in favor of my players, who were new to MtG. Now I’m tinkering with the ideas I removed last year, and have missed ever since. I need to cut down from 1000 cards to around 400 probably. There's still a ton of work to be done before I proxy this abomination and try to persuade my group I have a new coolest cube ever.
I feel like I'm going in circles and really need some new eyes on this. I appreciate anyone who takes time to write an advice or comment, even on singular cards. I need new perspectives to push forward. I’m stuck way too deep in my head about this project.
I’ve read a ton of Riptide Lab, and can’t name everyone. But special thanks for this particular cube go to:
- Japahn for advocating for archetype shapes and lower power;
- inshio and Nanonox for their synergy and combo focused discussions.
Duplicating the link: Oleg's synergy cube list.
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