General Prison in Cube

[Dom Harvey]

Lots of you are prison abolitionists but some us want to watch the hope drain away as the villain's few outs end up in any zone but their hand, somehow.



The basic problem with prison cards is they tend to be heavily polarized: either they do nothing and it's not fun, or they decide the entire game by themselves and still aren't fun. Ensnaring Bridge definitely falls into that category but is it acceptable if you have enough ways to win outside of combat? The card is interesting when it creates clear and realistic objectives ('I have to get in as much damage as I can while they still have a few cards in hand and then make sure I can find and resolve a large enough Walking Ballista'). There are lots of ideas that never get off the ground because they can't compete with a fast aggro start; rather than having to choose, what if I spent a few billion dollars on a shiny missile defence system?



One redeeming feature of prison is that various prison cards attack on very different axes, so no two prison decks seem too similar and the same deck can change a lot between games. Bridge and Weirding may as well be from separate universes but you can also imagine using them together to good effect. Bridge beats the board but needs insurance against topdecked answers; Weirding offers that insurance. It prevents the 'size' of the game from getting any larger which is perfect if you're a low-curve deck that needs fewer cards to win and probably has those in play already... or a control deck with enough removal to keep your life total up (or just hard-code it with Pristine Talisman or similar) and higher individual card power. It's at its weirdest in graveyard-centric decks - eventually you'll mill your Genesis or Life from the Loam (Dredge and other replacement effects get around Weirding) and lock the game up.



I was looking for useful utility artifacts for a low-mid power environment and Codex Shredder jumped out. It's a fine card in its own right but I wanted to try exploiting the on-demand mill and the obvious analogue was the Lantern deck in Modern. It's not seen as fun to play against but as a novelty in Cube - where there's nothing on the line - it's situationally interesting (same is true for prison in general). On top of things like timing Miracles, there's actually a lot of uses for these effects (and redundancy for Shredder):

- Oust/Azorius Charm/Unexpectedly Absent become hard removal
- Thought Scour (already a card I considered doubling) gains yet another use
- Predict becomes pseudo-Vindicate + Inspiration (or 'just' Inspiration) for 2 mana
- repeatable build-your-own-scry (or dig, for Chris!) with Sensei's Divining Top or
as a one-off for Brainstorm etc
- Hedron Crab, Nephalia Drownyard as other locks for Lantern
- disrupting Villain's scry/tutors
- Lantern lets you regulate the timing of general self-mill (Satyr Wayfinder) and shuffle effects to optimize your draws



etc

For those of you who have tried prison, do you still support it and how? Anything you'd add to this list?

P.S. If you're one of those old people who wants to play the game as Garfield intended, note that most of early Magic was about stopping your opponent from doing anything meaningful (Armageddon, Circles of Protection, Karma/Flashfires/Conversion, Stasis, Blood Moon, Winter Orb...).

P.P.S. All of these cards have barely been mentioned here so far (for good reason) so this should boost my SEO

 

[Fulcrum]

I have some thoughts.

To me, the most interesting prison cards would be those that require committing a lot of resources to the prison cards themselves and in the process of doing so, allow the opponent to interact with the prison cards. Hiding behind a Moat or Ensnaring Bridge doesn't seem like compelling gameplay but trying to craft a situation where you have enough resources to hide behind a Solitary Confinement, generate enough mana to keep Elephant Grass alive, or gain enough life to control the game with Zur's Weirding does (or at least as compelling as playing against prison can be)

Mana Vortex seems like a super neat card. Maybe that's more Stax? Maybe Stax is just a subgenre of prison.

Contamination was an under the radar card that got talked about on MTGSalvation a long time ago. It's another one of those prison cards that demands continued resources.

Is Tangle Wire just the most interesting Winter Orb variant?

I like Standstill because it can be broken anytime at such a high cost. The opponent can decide, "I have enough resources accumulated. I think I'm ready to fight through this" as opposed to, "I have no way to bust through this Ensnaring Bridge in my 40"

Nether Void seems more like a black Armageddon rather than a true prison card. MAYBE IT'S A PRISON CARD FOR BLACK AGGRO DECKS. MAYBE PRISON CAN BE A WIN CONDITION FOR AGGRESSIVE DECKS.

Some questions to maybe fuel discussion.

If you want to support prison, how much space would it require?

Would you aim for a dedicated prison deck, incidental prison, or one card locks? (a Lantern control deck/ a Control Deck where Solitary Confinement is at home and works towards the same goal as the rest of the deck/ Moat in a control deck that just runs Moat.

How do you design for dedicated and incidental prison?

Bonus: Information from our past selves

Bonus Edit: Incidental Prison?

 

[Alfonzo Bonzo]

If you were going to pursue prison, which I'm not sure I'd recommend, is the question, what prison is the most interactive, if such a thing is possible.

 

[Rasmus Källqvist]

I would like to say that if you could achieve interactive prison style decks, it could maybe give a fun angle to drafting control decks. Breaking Zur's Weirding seems like a fun drafting minigame.

 

[sigh]

Took a look at the older prison thread. Lots of debate about the usual suspects being too good or not, but right about here is where my interest was piqued:
http://riptidelab.com/forum/threads/prison-in-cube.834/page-2#post-39124

This is at least partially in theme with what I'm trying to do, which is a soft-lock RG deck using board control (Vortex, Seismic Assault, etc).

Also liked right at the end where it got into:

Which is a neat deck that soft-locks people out of the game by refusing to die. It seems trivially easy to recreate this concept in cube, because people are already running a lot of the pieces.

 

[VincePendrell]

Taking a very generic concept of prison decks, I run the Opposition deck, the Wildfire deck, the Braids/Stax deck, the Fastbond+Crucible of Worlds+Strip Mine deck, and there is a Glare of Subdual somewhere, plus some lock elements to help out aggro (like Armageddon and Hokori). If you count Mono-Blue Control, with tons of permission spells as a prison deck, I think it is possible in my list as well, although I haven't seen anyone draft it yet. Granted, I play at a power level higher than most here, but they usually tend to match well against other decks.

My rules of thumb to balance these archetypes against the other decks are:

1. Building a prison deck and establishing a lock should not be trivial. Moat and Ensnaring Bridge demand very little to lock out most decks out of the game. Opposition at least demands lots of creatures in a deck that needs to pay .
2. Prison decks should have ways to end the game quickly or make it clear that the game is over. Lantern Control in Modern is hated so much because people don't realize that they are dead on board and keep (not) playing the game for half an hour. Death Cloud in Standard was ramp, cloud, Kokusho, game, and that was an example of a good deck with prison elements in this regard.
3. Have enough artifact/enchantment removal (and Pithing Needles) to allow other players to have cards for sideboarding, if needed.
4. It is usually good if a prison deck can be tackled by smart strategic decisions, like sideboarding your midrange deck into a more go-wide aggro to beat Opposition and Smokestack, siding in ramp and artifact hate to break Wildfire's mana rocks, siding in early threats to land before the Crucible combo, etc. If one type of prison deck starts to dominate, you can choose to empower the decks that prey on it's weakness before nerfing or cutting that deck.

I was looking for cards that would be interesting in a Eminent Domain type of deck (Like the old Standard deck, with Wildfire, Annex, Flagstones of Trokair, Boom//Bust, Numot, Remand, and some mana rocks and card draw) and found these cards that might inspire you guys into interesting prison decks:

 

[Jason Waddell]

I tried Ghostly Prison once and it wasn't all that fun. I think there are interesting concepts, but for me I always felt the interactivity can be hard to get correct. I'd be interested in seeing a different iteration in action though.