Rasmus 360 Office Cube

[Rasmus Källqvist]

360 Office Cube​

CubeCobra: N/A yet

I'm going to start sketching on a new cube, and this is a good place to keep notes.

There happens to be quite a lot of people at my office playing Magic, so my current play group is thankfully quite big. This community has a lot of new players in it, so in order to make this cube a fun experience, I want to make it accessible for those newer players. That means trying to keep complexity lower, and there being a benefit to picking cards from more recent sets.

I also want to experiment a little with designing "broad" archetypes like the ones mentioned in the Archetype Shapes thread by @japahn, where a given theme might be present in 4-5 colors rather just a single pair, in the hopes of giving more flexibility and creative opportunity to the draft.

Additionally, I would like to keep themes more prominent among the lower cmc cards, while the higher cmc cards can be more generally "good stuff" strong, to make sure aggressive decks have some flair, while making sure simple midrange and control decks are still possible.

Cube Summary:
- 360 cards
- Low-Mid power level
- Preference for simple non-wordy cards
- Good fixing (Shock, Checklands, Fastlands etc.)
- Target audience: new players playing with enfranchised players

(edit: used to be some stuff here but I've since removed it)

 

[Onderzeeboot]

Jealous of your office

 

[landofMordor]

I was expecting a bunch of custom cards with The Office characters on them…. But this is good too

fwiw I think the artifact cards you’ve selected are sneakily complex. Some make blue thopters, others make colorless, one gives your thopters Ward (which can’t possibly matter), having a million thopters and a million ways to sacrifice them balloons the strategic and interaction complexity, *and* cards like Rabbit Batter and Towashi Songshaper don’t align strategically with the Thopter Spy Networks in this list…

I don’t think this is fatal for this archetype, I’m just saying it may be worth a look at minimizing opportunities for new players to misplay in a public manner, specifically for the “insignificant-looking-game-objects-matter” deck like Artifacts. Good luck!

edit: possible solutions include narrowing down to only one or two keywords (affinity and metalcraft, eg), ensuring that the only payoffs you include are completely meaningful (eg instead of granting Ward 2 to a bunch of treasure/servo tokens), and making the complexity one-time, trackingless, or decisionless (Galvanic Blast grades out a lot better here than Makeshift Munitions, since Blast stops being complex once it’s put on the stack and Munitions only gets more complex the more mana/game objects are in play; Carapace Forger grades out better than Darksteel Jugg since the player is allowed to stop counting after 3). Anything that helps a new magic player set their expectations and gain familiarity with what the format’s decision space looks like.

 

[Rasmus Källqvist]

I don’t think this is fatal for this archetype, I’m just saying it may be worth a look at minimizing opportunities for new players to misplay in a public manner, specifically for the “insignificant-looking-game-objects-matter” deck like Artifacts. Good luck!

Thanks for the feedback! Do note however that this is just a collection of cards that could fit into a theme, they're not a strict selection for the cube, rather a card pool that all are relevant to the same theme. I might need to edit the post to reflect this.

Also, while the players are not completely enfranchised, they have played several games and can manage some complexity without issue. But of course, things like limiting the number of keywords in the cube is still relevant.

 

[Rasmus Källqvist]

edit: possible solutions include narrowing down to only one or two keywords (affinity and metalcraft, eg), ensuring that the only payoffs you include are completely meaningful (eg instead of granting Ward 2 to a bunch of treasure/servo tokens), and making the complexity one-time, trackingless, or decisionless (Galvanic Blast grades out a lot better here than Makeshift Munitions, since Blast stops being complex once it’s put on the stack and Munitions only gets more complex the more mana/game objects are in play; Carapace Forger grades out better than Darksteel Jugg since the player is allowed to stop counting after 3). Anything that helps a new magic player set their expectations and gain familiarity with what the format’s decision space looks like.

Hm, I do like this suggestion though of perhaps focusing more on things like metalcraft rather than "number of artifacts you control" and making it more focused on turning creatures sideways.

If anything, maybe I should rephrase the goals of this cube to be less about having very low complexity in general, because in my experience the players in my office are quite accepting of complexity (several of them play commander), but I probably want less "durdly" cards and more focused on the combat phase.

From that perspective: Carapace Forger certainly scores better than Makeshift Munitions and Thopter Spynetwork, since attacking and blocking is much easier to track than a bunch of "machinery"

 

[Rasmus Källqvist]

Ok, so I've tried to put together a 40 card UR artifact aggro deck. Hopefully I can go ahead and design another 40 card deck in some other theme and play test a little.

I picked several cards from the same set, to help out give some more density of keywords. I think playing some fliers together with the equipment-creatures + modular could be quite fun.

 

[Rasmus Källqvist]

Ok, update. I decided to build the cube out of cards I happen to have lying around, so I put together two decks to playtest with. Me and a collogue played a couple of games, I tweaked the decks a little between each round, and I've now ended up with my first batch of cards. (I will probably edit the opening post to reflect the current state of the cube).

I created one UW artifact deck, and one RB sacrifice deck. Both decks got to have some cards I really liked from playing Jump Start.



Skitterfang rules! I really liked the flexibility of this, being able to either choose flying or lifelink depending on if I was attacking or stabilizing
I've also figured out, I think, that Cranial Plating is the artifact payoff that I'm definitely going to keep. Unlike the creatures that grow if you have artifacts in play, an equipment doesn't suffer in the same way when you only have one or two artifacts out, since you can move the equipment around.





Super cool card. Attacking with Kari often lets you get in for 3 damage on turn 3, because Kari has menace and there's no point in trading with the monkey. Later on, you can easily use the monkey as sac fodder.

 

[Rasmus Källqvist]

Long time no see.

I've pretty much started this cube from scratch. While I'm working on it, I'm going to start posting some speculative decks here in this blog thread since CubeCobra doesn't not have anywhere near as nice a cube deck presentation as Riptide does.

First up: Amass Control

I thought amass was pretty darn fun in the one prerelease I played, and it seems like a surprisingly versatile mechanic; it plays into spells matter, into sacrifice decks and into +1/+1 counters matter (among other things I suppose).

Here's a UB deck that I think is a pretty nice port of the UB LotR theme:

UB Amass Control

 

[Rasmus Källqvist]

Jeskai Spells

Here's a triangle archetype with UR spells, UW spells and WR heroic.

UW Double Spells

WR Heroic

UR Spells Amass Control