Looking good Pete!!
Pete's Cube Redesign Thread
- Thread starter Peter LaCara
- Start date
Thanks, dude!
So. I figure I might as well detail a lot of the big top level changes from my initial sketch. Firstly, I finally caved and included fetches. I hadn't included them for a few reasons. 1) The extra shuffling is kind of a pain. 2) They have the potential to make mana too good, and I like it when people have to be disciplined with their splashes. 3) They're goddamn expensive and I only actually own about half of them. Modern Horizons finally tipped the scales for me with the lands in graveyard theme, and Wrenn and Six is just too cool not to include, but dude just doesn't work without fetches. The upshot is that fetches really do turn on a ton of cool stuff like Titania and Crucible of Worlds.
Second, I have the archetypes for each color pair locked in.
Azorius - Spirits and blink (and blinking spirits).
Dimir - Steals your stuff and beats you to death with it.
Rakdos - Aristocrats
Gruul - Literally throwing lands at your face.
Selesnya - A midrangey token control strategy, kind of like the old GW manifest decks.
Orzhov - Resilient aggro and reanimator (sometimes both). Ayli is a placeholder for the new BW zombie knight from M20
Golgari - All hail the hypnotoad. I mean, graveyard stuff.
Simic - basically the stuff Simic is doing in standard right now.
Izzet - Spells. It's a classic for a reason. I'm trying to slant it a little more aggressive than it's been in the past where it's been more of a control strategy.
Boros - This is an experiment. We're slotting in Feather and Tenth District Legionnaire and a few more combat tricks. There are also a bunch of modal spells where one of the modes targets one of your own creatures. I'm not sure this actually works in an environment with this power level, but I want to try. It's a shame most of the actual heroic creatures kind of suck.
Third, Planeswalkers. I settled on 10 monocolored walkers, a male and a female for each color. I don't feel great about leaving Elspeth, Sun's Champion out since it's one of my favorite cards of all time, but I can't not include Serra. I've been crushing on Serra since I was 10. I'm also a little concerns about Davriel's power level, but Ob Nixilis is soooooo boring and I really want to include both 3 mana Lili's but I've got a whole theme going and I'm too stubborn to change it. I also threw in a bunch of the WAR hybrid walkers. I'm taking a lot of design cues from WAR in general about how to design a limited format with access to a bunch of planeswalkers.
Man, I wish there were some better cards with changeling. I really like how they are the glue that holds multiple random tribal archetypes together in Modern Horizons, but the power level on most of them is just too low. The only one I'm really tempted by is Mirror Entity and that one might actually be too good. The downside of narrow power bands.
I’m still on vacation so I’m not in front of my computer and therefore cannot write a super long thing, but I’m noticing that you don’t really have enough creatures from your tribes for their respective decks to always come together when someone tries to draft them. I’ll elaborate more later, but you definitely need to add some more tribal guys, especially spirits if you want them to work as a main 2-color archetype. I’m not going to drone on about “critical mass” since I feel that not every card wants the same mass of synergistic pieces to be maindeckable, but, I would be a bit weary.
I’ll expand a bit on this later.
I’ll expand a bit on this later.
That's a fair criticism, but I refer you to the bit above where I'm in the throwing cards in a box phase where nothing is remotely balanced. I'm going to be making several passes where I go through and adjust numbers of stuff, but I'm not quite there yet.
Okay! The first draft is ready to uh... draft!
Give it a whirl!
http://www.cubetutor.com/draft/62331
Give it a whirl!
http://www.cubetutor.com/draft/62331
Woo! A bunch of people have been drafting my list on cubetutor. I'm fairly pleased with the results so far. Here are some of my favorite sample decks from the last few days:
Well, I've made the jump to CubeCobra: https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/1jv
I did a bit of tweaking in preparation for Eldraine. I appreciate that we can add cards to the cube from the new set before it's been released. That was the straw that finally got me to switch. The editing interface is a lot nicer too.
Here is my inaugural draft: https://cubecobra.com/cube/deck/5d81894191139f32f86146c2
(I wish CubeCobra had a deck export like cubetutor. I'm sure it's coming)
That is some sweet 4c nonsense that somehow is not just goodstuff. I want to play that deck now.
I did a bit of tweaking in preparation for Eldraine. I appreciate that we can add cards to the cube from the new set before it's been released. That was the straw that finally got me to switch. The editing interface is a lot nicer too.
Here is my inaugural draft: https://cubecobra.com/cube/deck/5d81894191139f32f86146c2
(I wish CubeCobra had a deck export like cubetutor. I'm sure it's coming)
That is some sweet 4c nonsense that somehow is not just goodstuff. I want to play that deck now.