"Planar Masters" - Microsealed Cube

[MULRAH]

Hi everyone,

I'm interested in any feedback you might have on a low-power cube explicitly designed for 15-card "microdecks." For this format, each of four players will get a 45-card pool comprised of 33 commons, 9 uncommons, and 3 rares. From this they will build up to 3 decks microdecks that all share the same sideboard. You do not lose to decking.

I have been playtesting this on my own and with my group, so there have been a lot of revisions so far. I think it is finally ready for potential review from a wider audience, and there are three areas that could use feedback:

1. The list: I'm interested in any thoughts you have on the list. Every common would be seen in every session, so they are the most important. There are a few commons that are on the watchlist as being too oppressive, but I'm leaving them in for now. Uncommons recycle every three session, and rares/mythics every nine, so they've had fewer tests but are also of lesser concern. The power level is low, and the card pool is constrained only to budget cards from the eleven planes included in the set. The set is designed around wedge themes with shards contributing secondary subthemes.
2. Custom plane cards: At the start of each match, players can pick a plane card tailored to facilitating the functioning of microdecks in a unique way. For ease of viewing, I have added the plane cards at the bottom of this post. These have been playtested quite a bit, and I feel like they are at least presentable.
3. Scoring: Players score points for "exploring" different planes, which is accomplished by winning games, as explained at the top of the cube's overview. The scoring system is also meant to incentivize building multiple decks without requiring it. It also introduces a very minimal "investment" component that could create interesting decisions about which plane you select later in the session, but we have not playtested that part very much.

Thanks for any thoughts you have!

- Chris
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[Zoss]

What's on your watchlist? Right now I'm seeing the following as outliers at common:

Vault Skirge This card is consistently better than it looks, especially with so few good 1-drops.
Arcum's Astrolabe can be disgusting in enabling you to make a deck with all your best cards, and drawing a card is absurd in 15-card formats. That's the equivalent of drawing 4 cards in a 60-card format, and might even be better than that. That's better than Ancestral Recall, but it can be very subtle in how it powers things up. I'd watch out for this.


And for rares:

Sylvan Anthem is super strong. Maybe it's okay because the scry doesn't matter and because it's so hard to build a mono-colored deck due to variance, but it seems tough to beat when critters are so small. (avg common toughness: 2.59, SD 1.44; avg common power: 2.34, SD 1.42. Honestly, I prefer to have more power than toughness, but if it works it works!)
Astral Drift and Marit Lage's Slumber seem like traps in this cube. Maybe they work with the micro-sized decks, but it feels really hard to get to, say, 10 snow permanents if you don't have snow lands in your BLB unless you get Kaldheim (idk how Planechase works), but at that point it becomes very strong, which seems problematic to me.

Speaking of which, New Capenna seems strong as well. Food OR Clue tokens and then having Volrath's Stronghold for cheaper?? I'm excited for the set!

Also, Wonder is super strong. Maybe that's okay without too many ways to put it into your graveyard manually and with your scoring system, but . . . it's a super strong card without much counterplay once it gets into the yard, and I don't think you have many ways to attack strategies that try to discard it.


Overall, it looks like a ton of fun! The planes are the star of the show, and they look really nicely balanced.

 

[MULRAH]

Hi Zoss,

Thanks for checking this out! I really appreciate the feedback.

Through playtesting, we have found that card draw is actually quite bad in this format, which has been counter-intuitive and takes some adjustment. If this were a higher power cube, it might be otherwise, but here card draw serves to accelerate the depletion of your library, leading to turns when you are punished for not being able to draw a card at the start of your turn like everyone else. There are ways to get cards back from the graveyard, but it usually costs you another card, mana, tempo, etc. As a result, I actively removed card draw spells because they ended up being so weak.

In order to give blue some measure of card advantage, I include some very limited one-at-a-time mill spells, with the intent of gaining card advantage later in the game by pushing your opponent to library depletion earlier. However, these cards--primarily Cathartic Adept and Jace's Erasure--have at times been pretty oppressive, so they are two of the cards on my watchlist. (The other one is Springbloom Druid, which "combos" with Alara, perhaps a little too easily/repetitively...)

Your comments on the rares are very valuable, as these have had the least playtesting. I am not as worried about the ones you mentioned, but I will keep an eye on them. Wonder works best in the graveyard, but most decks really can't afford to have cards in their graveyard for very long. Plane cards are available to any player at the start of their match (they are not drafted or in sealed pools). Therefore, you can choose Tarkir/Ikoria for Astral Drift or Kaldheim for Marit Lage's Slumber.

New Capenna is the newest plane card, so it's received the least testing. In any other format, pumping out artifact tokens at will would probably be broken--imagine affinity with New Capenna!--and I'll confess that when I first tested this card, it felt pretty unfair as I amassed a seemingly endless amount of resources to be used at will later in the game. However, as soon as my deck was gone, it suddenly became a lot more fair, as my deck struggled to keep up with the opponent's ability to shuffle cards into his library and keep creatures on the battlefield. However, that was just one test, and your comparison to Volrath's Stronghold increases my wariness about this plane's design.

Thanks so much! I really appreciate you digging in on this one with me!

- Chris

 

[MULRAH]

Hi again!

I missed your comment, Zoss, about power and toughness. Very astute, and I appreciate you looking just at the commons for that, as they're the main contributors to your pool! This disparity is definitely worth tracking. It's been working out so far, but if we find games starting to bog down, then that is a very good place to try to loosen things up.

If anyone is trying to try out the cube, be advised that you should use one of the custom drafts, preferably "Full Sealed" (which will auto-"draft" a pool of 45 cards from which you can build one or more sealed decks). You will also want to set the number of players to whatever the instructions say (usually not 8).

- Chris