Rasmus builds a medium power cube

[Rasmus Källqvist]

Rasmus Medium Power Cube
I'm building a cube that I think I'm going to have fun with. The feeling should be of drafting during the summer where the core sets offered a really clean magic the gathering experience.

Cube Goals:

• A fun cube that I can play with friends who only play magic occasionally.
• You should be able to draft decks with build arounds like Laboratory Maniac, Drake Haven and Life from the Loam and win.
• The cards that support the build arounds should be good outside their dedicated decks, allowing for both more general decks (good stuff) and more focused, crazy, decks
• Very clearly communicated themes, new players should be able to figure out draft-able decks themselves.
• Most decks should be able to go 3-0, so that I balance different strategies against each other.

Decks available to color pairs:
- tba
- Laboratory Maniac self-mill
- tba
- Stompy gruul aggro / Stormbind+Molten vortex+Life from the loam
- +1/+1 counter tribe
- Disruptive Aggro(hatebears)
- Dredge Graveyard Stuff / Reanimator
- tba
- tba
- tba

Spoiler: Old outdated OP

This cube blog will function as a notepad where I can write down stuff I'm thinking about, and primarily saving deck sketches.
What I want to achieve:

• A fun cube that I can play with friends who only play magic occasionally.
• Decks defined by simple mechanical interactions.
• Very clearly communicated themes, a new player should be able to figure out draft-able decks themselves.
• Every deck that archetype should be draftable, and I as a cube designer need to make sure that I can uphold that.
• Most decks should be able to go 3-0, so I have to make sure that deck archetypes I include are competitive.

Design rules (sort-of-ish):

• For every card I include, I must be able to show an example decklist that includes that card.
• I have to think the cards I'm including are fun. This is a pastime activity for both me and my. players, so if I'm not excited about a card it's not worth including it.
• If I have choice between a complicated card and a simple card, I must choose the simpler one if it does the job well enough.
• If I have a choice between a card that supports a deck archetype specifically, and a card that does it implicitly, I should almost always choose the more general card.

Some examples of classical mechanical interactions I'm thinking of;

Spoiler: two card examples

Hopefully these are things you the reader recognize from drafting and playing. I want these kinds of interactions to define the decks in the cube. I'll add more examples as I think of them.

Some decklist sketches (old by now):

Spoiler: decklists

UW Draw Go Control

UB Discard Tempo

UB Delve control

BR Treason Sacrifice

RG Fireball Ramp

RG Combat Tricks

GW Auras

WB Discard Aggro

BG Aristocrats

BGw Reanimator

UG evasive

Peregrine Drake + Ghostly Flicker + Archaeomancer + Bounceland = infinite mana

UR Peregrine Combo

UR Fevered Visions Aggro

WR Token Aggro

How you can participate:

• Comment on the decklists, do they look like something you'd want to play?
• Help me find simple, fun mechanical interactions like the examples.
• Tell me if you think the cube looks cool, or if it's lacking something you'd like to see.

 

[Rasmus Källqvist]

http://www.cubetutor.com/viewcube/89230

The first version of the cube is now up! I got a 4-man draft down last friday, and got to see a BG reanimator deck, a WB discard/tapdown aggro deck, UW token/tempo deck (remand and lingering souls) and a RG aggro deck. Didn't manage to get any deck lists, but I'll be running an 8-man next week hopefully. Stay tuned!

 

[ravnic]

I gave your cube a spine, wound up with this sac deck:

http://www.cubetutor.com/cubedeck/807559

I think you're pretty close to what you wanted to achieve, simple and synergie drvien. One concern is that a fewcards seem too much below the average power level, so you might not play the even in the perfect deck. Like Rage Thrower in this case. Very few cards though.

Also i noticed you have two Delvers and Bonesplitters. You could consider adding Riddleform and Trusty machete if you want more diversity.

happy cubing o/

 

[Rasmus Källqvist]

Thanks for drafting! I would've maybe built the deck slightly more aggressive to help the treason-effects to be more impactful. I agree with you that there might be a couple of cards that run the risk of not being included in decks, so I'll keep a lookout for those cards when I do the 8-man draft.

 

[Rasmus Källqvist]

Update between last draft, a few online drafts and before next draft.


IN

OUT


I wanted my red section to have some more interesting three drops, and captivating crew seems perfect for the entire threaten-deck I want happening. Shivan dragon comes in as a curve topper that isn't as nice niche as rage thrower.

IN

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Trying to tune my gold section to fit more into what I want the guilds to be about sort-of somewhat. WR gets more token support, and UB gets some more healthy control support.
I'm throwing in bloodwater entity after hearing good things and not minding increasing the amount of prowess I have in the cube.
Jeskai ascendancy sadly has to go, as I don't really have the supporting mana base and enough confidence in there being that much of a UR spell pile deck yet, that even wants to splash for it.

New draft this friday, I'll try to get a 3-0 decklist back from there.

 

[Rasmus Källqvist]

Another four man draft done! We played a burn-draft, where you play with 6 packs, and randomly remove one card from a pack after each pick ("burning" the cards from the draft). I managed to get a win with a 3-0 GWb midrange deck, and the three other players had a WB aggro, GW aggro and UR spell/tempo pile.

Rasmus Abzan Midrange 3-0

I have to say that I'm really happy with keeping all the 5+ cmc creature cards pretty vanilla. Landing a really big creature quite often turns a battle into your favor without a massive enter the battlefield effect, and it helps keeping the drafts cleaner and less busy. Sentinel of the eternal watch is a great card.

IN

OUT


IN

OUT


Cutting out two weaker cards for some more support for UW tempo decks, and doing some more tweaking in the gold section. I think Lotleth will help both reanimator, BG aggressive decks and maybe spider spawning better than Varolz. Teysa gets replaced with Sin Collector to make BW more of a generic "disruptive aggro" color pair, which was how it got drafted in the 4-man today. I'm also trying out some stronger black discard spells.

----------------------------------------------

Next day edit:

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OUT


After getting some feedback in the Fight Club thread I decided to put in lorescale coatl, and also added snakeform to help UG with the removal problem in blue and green. Bishop comes in as a more interesting five drop, and adds to the incidental subtheme of vigilance in white (which I've noticed really helps the slower white decks). I'm doing a silly techy switch where I move lingering souls to the white section in place of heliod's pilgrim, and then add snakeform to the gold section, just so I can keep the numbers looking nice. Lingering souls is an unexciting white card, but it can be very easy to splash for the black flash back in a WXb deck.

I'm going to try and double up on Dread Return and Unburial Rites. They're the two four mana reanimation spells that I think are both clean and a bit techy. They're both castable from the grave, and in two very different ways (although both imply a white splash with dread return comboing will with tokens). Hopefully this will help newer players put together a reanimator deck.

There might still be to few big creatures to reanimate, so I've added sphinx of uthuun (that also helps control decks happen) and scuttling doom engine as a nice colorless six drop that also combos in a subtle way with the flashback of dread return.

 

[Rasmus Källqvist]

Another 4-man done. I got to play a GR midrange ramp deck, and faced of a big UGb tempo deck with Whirler Rogue, Wolfir Avenger and Sphinx of Uthuun. We also had a GB Lotleth Troll aggro, and a kind of unfocused junk reanimator deck with Braids and Living Death. All in all, pretty fun.

Sweepers
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OUT


My players pointed out that midrange seemed well positioned, although I think that's hard to really say given how few drafts we've had, and that there's a lack of sweepers. No one has really drafted control yet, and even though I have some reasonable finishers, I think of the reasons have been that people associate control so strongly (and rightly) with sweepers. There needs to be a way for that kind of slow deck to stabilize and retain card advantage, so the 1-for-1 removal needs to be backed up by these many-for-one's.

Life from the Loam
IN

OUT


Kird ape gets moved to the red section so I can keep fiddling the numbers of how many mono cards I have and the number of gold cards.

I want to open up for more interesting ways to play out the slower decks, and I'm super intrigued by Loam as a durdly value engine with different discard outlets. One thing I was really missing in my RG deck was something more than just big creatures. Molten Vortex and Stormbind seem like two really good cards for giving the slow RG deck some more options, acting as board control early and then pivoting into finishers.

Another card I'd love to find some space for in my environment is laboratory maniac, but I need to play the cube a bit more first. There needs to be a critical amount of self mill stuff and ways to get labman back to finish the game, so I don't want to just half ass put him in without knowing what a laboratory maniac deck would look like in this cube.

-------

A concern of mine right now is that I might be veering off from my initial design goal of interesting interactions between simple cards, but then again, compared to other cubes this might actually still be fairly straight forward. I'm especially happy about running mostly vanilla creatures at 5cmc+, that is, not that many ETBs or activated abilities.

I did get ridiculed for running Sengir Vampire, but I love that card.

 

[Rasmus Källqvist]

Double post time, is that something that's allowed when you're posting in your own cube log threads?

Laboratory Man!!
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After reading some posts over at the cube talk, I got convinced I gotta slot in laboratory man right away. My players seem to love graveyard strategies, and BUG, so why not give them what they and I want? Adding some of the good dredge cards that were absolutely missing, together with forgotten creation, that seems fucking nuts together with darkblast if you need to clear the board and also want to mill yourself.

Red One Drops and Discard Friendly Burn
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My red aggro seemed a little weak, because I was running too few one drops. While I was at it, I changed the burn spells to some more discard friendly ones, to help with cards like stormbind.

+1/+1 counters
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Fellow board member ajk drafted my cube at cube tutor and made a +1/+1 GW deck that was only missing some lords, so I thought why not just put the cherry on the top.

 

[Rasmus Källqvist]

GR Stompy

This deck went 3-0 last draft, showcasing pretty much every red one drop I have in the cube. My favorite moment of the night was my Gruul player swinging in with Duskwatch Recruiter and another creature, and me flashing in two spirit tokens with midnight haunting and blocking. Gruul player activates the ability on recruiter, looks at the top three cards and reveals; ghor-clan rampager! He now gets to pump recruiter, kill my blockers and trample over damage to set my at like 3 life, essentially ending the game. I went ballistic, such a cool way to go.

Another played noted that the slower decks have a hard time interacting with the one-drop aggro decks. I'm thinking, after this deck doing so well, maybe I should cut back a bit on the red aggro? Cut back on the one-drops?

 

[japahn]

WRb Midrange - japahn's draft of Rasmus Low Power Cube on 19/11/2017 from CubeTutor.com

Drafted this on Cube Tutor. The deck a pile of good stuff concentrated on midrange/control, and make me worry about how the synergies can flower if I can draft good stuff nonsense instead.

 

[Rasmus Källqvist]

Drafted this on Cube Tutor. The deck a pile of good stuff concentrated on midrange/control, and make me worry about how the synergies can flower if I can draft good stuff nonsense instead.

Thanks for drafting! That's a pretty important question for me to answer. I think the way Grillo reasoned about this was that good stuff is always possible, so in order to make people draft synergy decks the meta has to favor a coherent plan (a deck) over a non-coherent goodstuff one (pile of cards).

That deck you drafted looks pretty good, but I've drafted to few times with this cube to really say how well it would fair against more synergie based decks. I have a feeling that the synergie decks would just durdle for a while until this deck kills them.

Do you think I should dial back on cards that are individually strong..? I really want people to be able to win with stuff like spider spawning, laboratory maniac or loam decks, so the power level would have to cap with those decks.

 

[VincePendrell]

I tried my hand at a draft and got this:

Abzan Ramp/Aggro/What from CubeTutor.com

I started from a Noble Hierarch and Tried some ramp-like strategy, but BG seemed more open. I have enough cards left to side in blue for Migratory Route and Deep Analysis in grindy games, or just bring in more fatties if ramping is better than attacking in the match-up. Overall, really nice, though I felt a bit off-theme during the draft.

Do you think I should dial back on cards that are individually strong..? I really want people to be able to win with stuff like spider spawning, laboratory maniac or loam decks, so the power level would have to cap with those decks.

I'd suggest focusing on having stronger get-there cards for these strategies. You know how the end-game of a match will be, so you just need to bring more early and late game to make it happen. In my case, I feel like I would've embraced the graveyard strategies more if I'd seen a Splinterfright, Boneyard Wurm and maybe Horror of the Broken Lands (and other cards that tend towards the graveyard). I seen Stinkweed Imp, which is fine, but I really missed something like Golgari Grave-Troll as a juicy payoff card.

Other thing I noticed is that some removal seems awfully strong. I got both Faith's Fetters and Consuming Vapors in my draft, and these feel like quintessential goodstuff stall-the-game-until-I-draw-bombs cards. If you are going to cut down on cards for goodstuff decks, first reduce the ability that these decks have to stay alive.

I feel like goodstuff decks are the last resort for new players that don't know the list very well, so it isn't bad that this happens. As long as some people in your playgroup get the themes and try to go deep and win with them, my experience is that the playgroup will adapt to it, and crazy stuff will start to show up (as long as it can win, of course).

And not sure if it is a theme you want to support, but based on what I've seen, you could use more of these:

 

[japahn]

I've done about 5 drafts. I feel like I've always been lured by good stuff cards and never got enticed enough by synergies to think they were worth it. Looking at your original post, all of the synergy examples are blown out terribly by instant speed removal except for the last, which is playable but a little slow.

The thing is that if one runs a deck with enough instant speed removal, they can just disrupt your combos and kill you with midrange nonsense meanwhile. There's no reason I'm playing Feral Invocation and Tuskguard Captain when my opponent has Lightning Bolt and Restoration Angel. It's just too steep a climb. So these cards are unplayable, but they were supposed to be the stars of the cube!

Aren't you perhaps running too many sacred cows? 80% of your list looks like a mid-high powered list with a lot of cube classics. If you want those synergies listed in the first post to be a viable path for winning, you need to go lower power than that - both for threats and for removal.

I feel like your colors are:
R > W >> B > U >> G

Cards that I will play over any synergy there:


I know you've put a lot of time into this, and I feel like a jerk for posting this, but this is a path I've gone down and both your good stuff cards are way better than mines, and the synergies are much slower and weaker, so I just look at them and see "trap" written all over.

I'm also trying to find the middle ground there, but in my case I want 80% emergent "aggro, midrange, control" archetypes and 20% synergy decks, while it seems like you want the opposite, and the card qualities are skewed in the opposite direction.

 

[Rasmus Källqvist]

Thanks people for helping out!

I'd suggest focusing on having stronger get-there cards for these strategies. You know how the end-game of a match will be, so you just need to bring more early and late game to make it happen. In my case, I feel like I would've embraced the graveyard strategies more if I'd seen a Splinterfright, Boneyard Wurm and maybe Horror of the Broken Lands (and other cards that tend towards the graveyard). I seen Stinkweed Imp, which is fine, but I really missed something like Golgari Grave-Troll as a juicy payoff card.

Other thing I noticed is that some removal seems awfully strong. I got both Faith's Fetters and Consuming Vapors in my draft, and these feel like quintessential goodstuff stall-the-game-until-I-draw-bombs cards. If you are going to cut down on cards for goodstuff decks, first reduce the ability that these decks have to stay alive.

I agree with you about the removal, and I'll probably look through my entire removal suite and look at what kind of threats I want and how to answer them and rebuild it from there. I'm not sure I agree with you on the graveyard pay off though! The suggestions you gave are all very narrow. The reward cards I'm running right now are spider spawning, living death, ghoultree and nemesis of mortals and the reanimator spells. It's possible I should run something more, like kessig cagebreakers, but there are reward cards.

I know you've put a lot of time into this, and I feel like a jerk for posting this, but this is a path I've gone down and both your good stuff cards are way better than mines, and the synergies are much slower and weaker, so I just look at them and see "trap" written all over.

I'm also trying to find the middle ground there, but in my case I want 80% emergent "aggro, midrange, control" archetypes and 20% synergy decks, while it seems like you want the opposite, and the card qualities are skewed in the opposite direction.

I'm starting to realize now after doing some drafts and especially now after seeing your decks that what I want probably is to keep the cube as I have it now, at a medium power level, and focus on build arounds rather than synergies. I should change the OP text, since I'm not really interested in running that low of a power level. I love every card in that list you posted Japahn, so that is a strong indicator that I should rephrase my goals.



These are build around cards that I've been particularly excited about recently, so if I can set a goal for the cube it would be to be able to craft an environment where all these cards are pickable. Lowering the power level somewhat, and maybe running slightly slower, could be ways to make that happen.

I don't mind good stuff as long as these cards would still be pickable cards. The synergies I posted about in the OP don't really reflect what excites me or my players. I'll see if I need to remove some of the good stuff removal though, since that might be a way to make cards like stormbind and molten vortex more appealing.

Does it seem reasonable that I'm looking for build arounds rather than perhaps synergies based on what's going on in the cube right now?

 

[japahn]

Emergent archetypes/good stuff plus some build arounds is also the path I'm going for at this moment - the theory being that generic good cards make for a fun, replayable environment themselves, and there's extra spice in a crazy deck appearing sometimes based on a build-around. The build arounds are best when they work with a large swath of the cards that were in the cube anyways - say Favorable Winds because there's a lot of fliers in the cube. This is in contrast with dedicating a large portion of your slots to combat tricks to support Heroic, for example.

That also has the effect that if Favorable Winds doesn't show up, you have a serviceable deck with good cards, and if it does, you have those nut draws that reward you for going deep into fliers. It's also not a consistent enough deck that requires much testing and balancing.

If you love those cards, like I do (well, not all of those, but the majority of them), by all means keep them and build the best environment for them to be fun and fair.

The lands discard package looks fine (I like Swans of Bryn Argoll as an option for that deck btw, while also being a very good card, except against red). Laboratory Maniac is something I have never tried because it feels so fragile, but I can see it working with the right shell that protects it.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

To clarify a little too, since I was referenced, the articulation that was described by one of the drafters, was that my format was "good stuff synergy." I think thats a useful perspective. I dislike the good stuff vs. synergy deck dichotomy, because I'm not sure its practically possible to keep those two catagories seperated in a meaninful way. Players will always orient themselves in a meta, and producing those drafting lines to form distinct catagories seems nightmarish to me in the first place, much less keeping one from overpowering the other. With a small group of players, maybe you can get a reasonable distribution, but even that takes some luck.

You just get to draft the best cards and make a synergistic deck with them.

So by narrowing the power band, so that the best cards are synergy cards, now my good stuff deck is a synergy deck.

This is an easier relationship to achieve with lower power cards, because they tend to have more jagged edges and contours to them, so its easier to overlay cards, and to see where an overlay is needed, but I doubt its limited to that world. The challenge of going up to higher power is that the cards become so generically good that they have a hard time actually representing anything tangible.

What would be interesting would be a more structured high power cube, where we narrow the power band, so its strong cards with abilities that have inherient synergestic properties, and see what happens. Sun titan, reveillark, and karmic guide are good examples of that: we have the fast ETBs and spell velocity, but the ETB wants a second card. Daretti as a planeswalker is another good example: fast free planeswalker abilities upping the spell velocity, but it wants a second card. You can run top tier removal with that.

Those might be part of a narrow power band set at a higher point in the power scale, but we can't actually use those cards without overlaying them with something else. As long as we're consistent with our power band, that should give us a pool of the best cards, that you than have to make synergestic decks with.

But the challenge is finding 360 cards (or more) like that.

 

[VincePendrell]

I agree with you about the removal, and I'll probably look through my entire removal suite and look at what kind of threats I want and how to answer them and rebuild it from there. I'm not sure I agree with you on the graveyard pay off though! The suggestions you gave are all very narrow. The reward cards I'm running right now are spider spawning, living death, ghoultree and nemesis of mortals and the reanimator spells. It's possible I should run something more, like kessig cagebreakers, but there are reward cards.

Just to clarify my point: I think narrow cards are exactly what would push people to draft the strategies around the cards you want. Them being in a booster signifies to me that this type of thing strategy is possible, otherwise this card wouldn't be here. And while Nemesis of Mortals and Ghoultree seem fine, something like Splinterfright and Golgari Grave-Troll fit the same type of strategy, but in a much more narrow way (and they also fuel cards that have similar requirements, in the case of these in particular). Kessig Cagebreakers can fit any green deck and rewards graveyard synergy, but Golgari Grave-Troll (as an example) fuels your Spider Spawning and is not going to be picked by the guy going RG Aggro on the other side of the table, because it demands synergy, instead of rewarding it.

 

[Rasmus Källqvist]

I went through the cube and made a lot of changes, cutting some one-drops and aggro stuff as well as cards that were a little too good on their own (restoration angel), and gave room for some really big spells for the slower decks. Super happy about the change! We had a 4-man draft today.

Super stoked about having drafted a RG control deck!! Stole some cards from Grillo, and really happy about having done it. Very fun way to play, especially since it's a slow RG deck that isn't really a ramp deck. It's mostly about getting a land drop every turn.

Spoiler: Decklists from draft

UG Tempo (1th place)

RGu Control (2nd place)

4C Living Death (3rd place)

WBG Oversold Cemetery

A short summary of the games played;

Got to face off against a cool UG tempo deck that destroyed me with a turn 1 delver, turn 2 flip delver -> rancor. Even though I had some cheap burn, the combination of my slower lands and the counterspells in the UG deck really made it hard to survive.

The 4c living death deck was ridiculous, it had no right to function at all being that greedy, but we ended up trading each others bombs in game 3 for so long that our top deck war ended up in us almost decking ourselves. I was at 6 life and played Primal Command to shuffle back all my cards in my deck, and then searched up a Flametongue Kavu to kill off one of my opponents creatures.

Villain, at 10 life, then plays shriekmaw to leave me with no blockers. I top deck Sandwurm Convergence and slam it, get a wurm and pass the turn. For some reason Villain completely brain farts, and plays Artisan of Kozilek without reanimating anything, and forgets that shriekmaw has fear and just passes the turn. I draw a land and pass the turn back, making another wurm.

Villain swings with Artisan, forcing me to sacrifice two lands, and then gets double blocked by the wurms. I thought I was gonna win off the back of my wurms, but it turns out that Villain only has two cards left in their deck! I kill of shriekmaw with a mizzium mortars, create another wurm and pass the turn. Villain plays a chump blocker, that blocks a wurm, but just two turns later lose due to decking. It was a really exhilarating match!

 

[sigh]

Now that's the sorta RG deck I'm talking about! I'm imagining the bouncelands were really great in this build.

 

[Rasmus Källqvist]

Now that's the sorta RG deck I'm talking about! I'm imagining the bouncelands were really great in this build.

Yeah they really really helped with reaching those 8 cmc cards. Primal Command was sick as well, let me stay in the game pretty much every match. Being able to answer graveyard decks as well as troublesome permanents (got rid of a whip of erebos with it) was really nice, as well as tutoring for answers was phenomenal. Might have to take a look at more sweet green control cards (or non-creature cards for slower green decks).

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

I really like these decks. The color combinations I usually look for are RG, BW, and UG, are those tend to be the combinations that don't flow together organically, and require at least some design, and I see them present here.

That R/G deck looks excellent. I really like Borborygmos Enraged, which seems about perfect as a ramp finisher/control piece. I like that a lot more for that deck than either sesmic assault or vortex.

 

[sigh]

Borborygmos feels like a classic control wincon here, in that playing it once stabilized should end the game extremely quickly. It doesn't seem to fit in the same slot as Vortex or Assault generally do, which actually control the board throughout the game. Stormbind is performing this duty well here, I'd imagine. I'm actually one micrometer away from switching from assault to Bind, because it does consistently look great.

My interest definitely focuses on the Primal Command and Urban Evolution. These both seem like really great mid-game spells for this deck. Really want to give evolution a test run now. And find a slot for Command again.

 

[Rasmus Källqvist]

Borborygmos feels like a classic control wincon here, in that playing it once stabilized should end the game extremely quickly. It doesn't seem to fit in the same slot as Vortex or Assault generally do, which actually control the board throughout the game. Stormbind is performing this duty well here, I'd imagine. I'm actually one micrometer away from switching from assault to Bind, because it does consistently look great.

My interest definitely focuses on the Primal Command and Urban Evolution. These both seem like really great mid-game spells for this deck. Really want to give evolution a test run now. And find a slot for Command again.

I wasn't sure about urban evolution but if you have midrange decks that can afford to tap out turn five like that it feels great to draw three cards and then explore. It certainly benefits from having expensive ramp targets in the cube. Happy about splashing for that card!

Primal command rocks. 7 life is a lot when you're just tutoring for a creature, and the other modes are useful as catch all answers in my format that have some graveyard focus (got a couple of recursion spells in pretty much all colors).

That R/G deck looks excellent. I really like Borborygmos Enraged, which seems about perfect as a ramp finisher/control piece. I like that a lot more for that deck than either sesmic assault or vortex.

Thanks man! I really liked the point you made in the pincher 2.0 thread about viewing it more as value discard than "lands deck". Getting your hand full of lands just happen to be a great way to both support your big cmc finishers and value discard spells.

I did have Molten Vortex in my draft pool, but I didn't have enough cards that gave me lands so I played another burn spell I think. Turning lands into shock is really good in this format I hope because of most 2-3 cmc creatures having at most 2 toughness.

 

[sigh]

I do think this is a really great execution of this deck. Really happy to see it. FWIW, I think Vortex would have been fine in this deck, you IMO do have a decent number of land-get effects. Deck looks great without it though. One thing that I do notice looking at your burn section: your burn spells are really, really good. You have powerful instant-speed burn all across the curve, and some great sorcery effects besides. This reduces the stock of the engine you have to create for Vortex and Co.

Vortex is a card I could see you doing without in the format. I really push the "lands" side of things hard, and it shines in that setting. You are missing, for instance, Crucible effects, or even simple land-get effects like Kodama's Reach. You've made this archetype work perfectly fine with a different focus (which I love to see). It is a fine card for you for redundancy and variety of effect, but not critical I think. Flame Jab I can def see going for a variety of other effects.

To be frank with myself, I should just directly copy your Gruul section. Bind and BorBor are both stellar for this game plan, and I honestly am not entirely sure why I haven't included them long ago... ***reasons***

Struggle//Survive is a card I might recommend for you. It works really great in this shell.

 

[Rasmus Källqvist]

Seems like you're right! I'm actually tempted now to cut back on the instant speed burn and shift it over more to sorcery speed. Flame jab was included more as a repeatable prowess trigger. I have Ramunap Excavator on its way over to me from channelfireball, but shipping from america to sweden apparantly takes forever. I wouldn't mind running one copy of kodamas reach though, the thought has crossed my mind.

Go ahead and steal the gruul section! I've stolen most of it myself already. I'm considering running Mina and Denn, Wildborn instead of ghor-clan rampager. Supports both stompy and the go-big decks, so I might run that over Struggle//Survive or just cut one of the burn spells for it. It looks like another good signalling spell!