Ravnica's 9th District

[ravnic]

When me and my best friend started playing magic in 2005, we each got a starter deck from 9th edition. We soon followed them up with more cards from that set as well as with starter decks and boosters from the original ravnica block. For me, this was the time, where there was the most "magic" to mtg. Everything was new and nobody knew how good or bad some cards really were. Yet, we had a total blast playing our decks, which were created from our very limited card pools and usually based on a color or guild.

For quite soem time now I've tried to recreate this feeling in a draft environment, while still applying everything I've learned about cube and limited design - and I think I've finally managed to succeed with this latest iteration.

https://cubecobra.com/cube/overview/nostalgie
https://cubecobra.com/cube/playtest/nostalgie

It's a cube, not a draft sim, yet the commons appear twice each and make up a majority of the cardpool (332/500), to recreate the "limited" feeling. If you want to try out a draft, note that afterwards, everyone gets a signet of their choice. This is meant to help preventing these powerful mana rocks shaping the format too heavily, as they now don't appear in draft and everyone gets exactly one.

The overall power level is pretty low. Removal is pretty good, with stuff like Last Gasp and Pacifism, while creatures seem weak compared to todays standards. Sell-Sword Brute is red's best 2-drop and dumb beaters like Watchwolf and Mahamoti Djinn are great picks. Synergy matters and there are some quite powerful rewards for going after them, even at common, like Sporeback Troll or Delirium Skeins. Yet good stuff is a viable option and often enough you're happily taking unexciting curve fillers like Centaur Safeguard.

As far as I can tell so far from doing drafts on cobra, there are three types of decks:

• Guild decks, playing two colors somewhat equally and usually focusing on the respective guild's playstyle/strategy
• I've reduced gold cards enough, that sometimes you end up rooted heavily in one color just splashing for ~5 cards, making your deck feel more "core set-ish"
• The enchantment theme of the block is there and should be enough for a deck, though it's more likely to be a subtheme

Outside of green, the fixing (mostly just 20 bounce lands) isn't good enough to go 3+ colors. In theory, there is a 2-card kill combo, but it's more something that might happen some day.

If you feel like jumping back in time and doing a draft, eleven year old ravnic will be very excited to see the results! And me, the grown up cube designer too, actually

 

[ravnic]

Just to show, that despite the low power level and the simplicity of many cards, the decks can be quite interesting, I want to show off this azorius deck I've drafted the other day:

https://cubecobra.com/cube/deck/604e0bd6584ae2105c4f3c9a

After a firstpick Sword of the Paruns, I got quite an interesting tap/untap package going here.

 

[Nemo]

Ravnica + 9th seems like a good idea. I enjoyed the heck out of original Ravnica block, so I gave this a whirl. If I was designing this to my tastes, I'd probably want to add another set of bounce lands to open up some splashes in 3rd colors a bit more.

I went into my second draft test with intent to force the Dimir mill deck, and that seems to have worked. I think that deck is pretty heavily dependent on Vedalken Entrancer to the point that it might be worth cutting Psychic Drain and Duskmantle, House of Shadow in favor of something that can also go into other decks. You could consider replacing them with support of a different nature: an additional untapper deck card, something defensive like Brainspoil (which can also tutor Belltower Sphinx), or Clutch of the Undercity as another tutor for an entrancer. Those entrancers the overwhelmingly most important card to the archetype in my experience. It's possible to draft it as an alternate win condition rather than part of a dedicated mill deck, of course, so it doesn't have to have a crazy level of support.

Cool project! This is from an era that I enjoyed, and I like what you're doing with it.

 

[Nanonox]

I enjoyed playing this too. I'll echo the more bounceland sentiment and as I pointed out in Cubecobra, maybe giving the option of Signet or Bounceland could be cool.

That untap deck is really cool. What I am missing is the hyper aggressive 1 drop 14 land deck from that block. Not sure it is worth supporting, but I remember having fun drafting it.

Thanks for sharing the project!

 

[ravnic]

Thanks a lot for the feedback guys, and I really like the decks you've drafted so far!

Another set of bouncelands or adding the pain lands from 9th is already a consideration. I just want to make sure, that splashing a third color doesn't become too common, and sadly the cobra bots take fixing lands super super highly, so I'd rather test this in person a few times before I add these.7

I went into my second draft test with intent to force the Dimir mill deck, and that seems to have worked. I think that deck is pretty heavily dependent on Vedalken Entrancer to the point that it might be worth cutting Psychic Drain and Duskmantle, House of Shadow in favor of something that can also go into other decks. You could consider replacing them with support of a different nature: an additional untapper deck card, something defensive like Brainspoil (which can also tutor Belltower Sphinx), or Clutch of the Undercity as another tutor for an entrancer. Those entrancers the overwhelmingly most important card to the archetype in my experience. It's possible to draft it as an alternate win condition rather than part of a dedicated mill deck, of course, so it doesn't have to have a crazy level of support.

Cool project! This is from an era that I enjoyed, and I like what you're doing with it.

Your words made me smile

Clutch of the Undercity is cool as another flexible transmute card, I could see adding this in over Duskmantle. Psychic Drain however, I'd rather not cut. It's not a great card, doesn't impact the board at all and really needs a lot of mana do be worth something, but if you can make the game go long enough, it is an actual finisher. It doesn't have to mill the opponent out, just heavily reduce the time needed for them to draw themself to death and giving you some staying power the same time.

I hope you're not completely right, as it would be a bit frustrating to have the mill deck not work at all without the entrancer. I mean there is also Glimpse the Unthinkable with six cmc 2 transmuters, Szadek, Lord of Secrets and the Tunnel Vision+Junktroller combo you already discovered.

I enjoyed playing this too. I'll echo the more bounceland sentiment and as I pointed out in Cubecobra, maybe giving the option of Signet or Bounceland could be cool.

That untap deck is really cool. What I am missing is the hyper aggressive 1 drop 14 land deck from that block. Not sure it is worth supporting, but I remember having fun drafting it.

Thanks for sharing the project!

Thanks for sharing your feedback with me!

Can you elaborate more on this aggro deck? I never actually drafted the block as little me didn't know what draft was back then, and I've never heard someone mention it before. I always thought RAV block drafting was mostly grindy 3-5 color good stuff decks.

 

[Nanonox]

You know what, I was looking around the internet and cannot find anything on the strategy. What I remember though is picking up as many 1 drop and 2 drops in Boros or Selesnya and jamming a bunch of combat tricks and removal to push damage through (Thrive was a card I remember picking up in the third pack often). The creatures were often super janky, but because of the durdly 3+ color decks, you could often go under them.

Maybe it was a fringe draft strategy, but I remember having success with it. Has anyone else heard of this or am I nuts?

 

[ravnic]

It sounds exactly like the thing I would love. And I totslly think, the cards are there:



I'm not sure however, if I could make this work in an environment where your average deck is two colors instead of four. As I said, I'd totally love to, but I don't really know where to start. I already run almost all the playable one and two drops from ravnica plus some bears and pikers from the core set.

 

[ravnic]

I decided to completely get rid of landwalk abilities (which were quite plentiful during that time). After initially building the cube, only two commons were left anyway (which means four cards):



The green 2-drop simply got replaced by a classic one, which won't ever be as good as the monky against green decks, but will be more solid against non-green decks and also more consistent.



It was a little trickier however, to find a good replacement for the Goblin. I was already reaching for playable in that slot, but I didn't want to reduce my number of red 3's. So the only solution seemed to add some uncommons. But for that, I needed to switch more stuff around to keep the 50 commons in each color (25 different one). Here is what I cut in the end:



And here is what replaced them:



Conclusion was an easy choice as one of the very few good commons left, that I didn't have. But I wanted to keep the removal numbers relatively equal. So the mediocre Guerilla tactics and the Embermage got the axe. While EMbermage is a great card, I feel like both, pinging and token hat is already very prominent, especially in red, so I didn't have a hard time cutting it in the end.

All this made it possible, to add two actually interesting red 3-drops to the cube. Sandstalker is just a nice creature/burn hybrid that all the aggro decks will play, even though it has some anti-synergies with hellbent. And the Whip Sergeant will at the very least be nice in the beefy Gruul decks, but it might also add something to all the creature with -abilities the format offers.

as a color has really been improved in magic design in general since 2005. In the pool I have here, it is kinda hard to find something else than direct damage, that is actually good. This is the reason I added Fiery Conclusion for now instead of Shock, because red is already so heavy on removal, that I hesitate to add more unconditional pieces. If I change my mind, those could become Shock or Pyrotactics.

 

[japahn]

I've reduced gold cards enough, that sometimes you end up rooted heavily in one color just splashing for ~5 cards, making your deck feel more "core set-ish"
Outside of green, the fixing (mostly just 20 bounce lands) isn't good enough to go 3+ colors. In theory, there is a 2-card kill combo, but it's more something that might happen some day.

I tried out a draft on CubeCobra, and the biggest problem I ran into was that there were so many gold and effectively gold cards being passed around, but no fixing in sight that I was forced into a guild and couldn't either find anything worth splashing or any fixing to enable that. So it just felt like I found an open guild in pack 1 and then there weren't any decisions besides picking the best card in the guild.


Ravnica is a really tricky block to make work as a two color format, because so much of the good in it is in the gold (and pseudo-gold) cards. There were a lot of gold cards passing by that I really wanted to play, but I couldn't. I think the best course would be to increase the amount of fixing.

 

[ravnic]

Thanks for your feedback!

Ravnica is a really tricky block to make work as a two color format, because so much of the good in it is in the gold (and pseudo-gold) cards. There were a lot of gold cards passing by that I really wanted to play, but I couldn't. I think the best course would be to increase the amount of fixing.

I fear that, if I just increased the fixing, I'd end up in a format were 3-color decks are the norm.

In my attempt to make it work as a 2-color format, I'm tweaking something about the cube and the draft itself. I basically turn all the gold cards (not the hybrids, not the fixing lands) into occasionals, which will make up only 20% of a pack. Before the average pack of 15 cards had 4 gold cards in it, now with that change I assure that it will never be more than three. It is totally possible that I will have to tweak the numbers further to achieve my goals, but it is a first step to make drafters feel good about being 2-colored.

In addition, this allowed me to cut down my mono color sections a little bit and remove some of the weaker choices. It only felt natural, that among those cuts were all of the Eidolons. Well, all Eidolons? No, not quite.



I left this one in because green should still be able to fuel a 3+ color deck.

 

[ravnic]

So, I've got an idea. What if there were wildcards for bouncelands (like 25?) and wildcards for signets (like 5?) and after the draft, people would call out "their guild" and then get the fixing fitting that color combination, bouncelands and signets equal to the respective wild cards?

I think this could make 2-color decks more tempting and easier to draft, as I can add a lot of fixing wildcards as safe picks for everyone. I am just not sure it would be worth the extra logistics, as now I am already going for the 2-rarity system to limit the gold cards in each pack.

 

[Heymaker]

So, I've got an idea. What if there were wildcards for bouncelands (like 25?) and wildcards for signets (like 5?) and after the draft, people would call out "their guild" and then get the fixing fitting that color combination, bouncelands and signets equal to the respective wild cards?

I think this could make 2-color decks more tempting and easier to draft, as I can add a lot of fixing wildcards as safe picks for everyone. I am just not sure it would be worth the extra logistics, as now I am already going for the 2-rarity system to limit the gold cards in each pack.

Hey Ravnic! I tried something like this a few years back and figured you might be able to find some ideas worth exploring in my write-up and the discussion. After a few drafts, my playgroup decided we wanted to go back to the simplicity of just the draft.

I think this kinda thing just needs your play group to bring up the issue and then you provide the solution. My players were kinda excited for something new and thought it was intriguing, but then the novelty wore off and became a time sink in an already lengthy night of drafting, deckbuilding, and playing. If your players have brought up the pain point of struggling to get fixing while wanting to play 2-color decks, it is certainly worth trying out and experimenting with!

 

[japahn]

That's interesting, though I wonder how different this is from "give away 3 of the same bounceland to everyone" and draft 14-card packs instead of 15. I think both would work, and the vouchers feel a bit more familiar, but the giveaway feels like it would accomplish the same thing with fewer steps.

 

[Chris Taylor]

So, I've got an idea. What if there were wildcards for bouncelands (like 25?) and wildcards for signets (like 5?) and after the draft, people would call out "their guild" and then get the fixing fitting that color combination, bouncelands and signets equal to the respective wild cards?

I think this could make 2-color decks more tempting and easier to draft, as I can add a lot of fixing wildcards as safe picks for everyone. I am just not sure it would be worth the extra logistics, as now I am already going for the 2-rarity system to limit the gold cards in each pack.

Uh, I've got this from a while back:

 

[ravnic]

I think this kinda thing just needs your play group to bring up the issue and then you provide the solution. My players were kinda excited for something new and thought it was intriguing, but then the novelty wore off and became a time sink in an already lengthy night of drafting, deckbuilding, and playing. If your players have brought up the pain point of struggling to get fixing while wanting to play 2-color decks, it is certainly worth trying out and experimenting with!

You're probably right. This secondary cube of mine hasn't been drafted a lot, the last test actually was last summer and it has changed a lot in concept since. So no, no one else has brought up this issue except @japahn in this very thread

However,knowing my players this is probably not the golden solution. Many of them are newbies and/or irregulars. They enjoy a good draft, but I guess it can easily be a bit overwhelming for some of them (which doesn't matter really because we don't cube with a particularly competitive mentality, but still). I also backed off from occasionals for my main cube and I figured I'd want another solution for this one too. No gold occasionals, no wildcards. I think the solution has to be something that is already done when I bring the cube to the table, and I think I've found it.

Actually, it was kinda obvious. The draft format I liked the most was triple RAV, as I already said in my initial post. And WotC also did something similar in their more recent versions of guild city. They only had some of the guilds in a particular draft environment, they just realized that 5 is a better number than 4 for color balancing, which I also realized today.

I'll do the same. I will always only have half the guilds (their multicolored cards that is) in a particular draft. There are many ways of splitting the guilds up, so it wont get stale. Replayability! And the best news is, I can do it long before drafting. I can sit down and go through my cards like I'd do anyways because I am a maniac. So my drafters won't have to do anything else than draftingand I can just tell them which 5 guilds are fighting tonight.

I reduced my cards with less than 2 colors to 255, and increased the guild cards to 21 each, which means adraft will have a nice 360 cards with 3-4 gold cards a pack on average. Oh, and I added a third bounce land for each guild. So far the test drafting was really fun and I am excited for this.

If someone wants to try it, the current settings on cube cobra are just the enemy guilds, but there are many configurations I could do.

https://cubecobra.com/cube/playtest/nostalgie

Thanks for all your help, guys!

 

[japahn]

Good idea! It's like a modular cube, but in a much, much clearer way than I did it, I like it a lot.

I was thinking, how many combinations are there? Assuming you have 5 guild each draft and want to have each color represented in 2 guilds so colors are proportional, it's basically "how many color wheels can you have" and there are (5-1)!/2 possible permutations in a circular arrangement that doesn't care about direction, so... 12. That's quite a bit of variety.

 

[Chris Taylor]

Okay the wordings not perfect, signets have a lot fewer words than Bouncelands afterall, but at least now you've got both for testing:


Also IDK if you need the "There's only one of each" since I don't actually think you're looking for that scarcity here.

 

[ravnic]

Ha, thanks for calculating that! I'm not that good in math, so I just tried out to some combinations and stopped after I realised that at least 8 are possible and figured that would be just fine. But good to know, that there are even four more.

My only fear with that system now is, that a draft might become too linear once you picked your guild. I already tried to add enough tempting mono colored cards to make decisions relevant, and I tried to embrace the overlap between the guild enough to make splashes a thing without promoting 3+ colors too much (not that I mind a sweet shard/wedge deck like this from time to time). Not sure if I should or even could do more.

I now replaced Golgari and Izzet with Dimir and Selesnya on CC. I think this is also how I will do it in real life whenever I feel like mixing up the guilds. remove two with the two other that contain the same four different colors.

 

[ravnic]

In attempt to get more variance into the core module in terms of archetypes/playstyles, I've added these two cards (over Dehydration).



There is a lot going on with this card, and it's a really potent build around in this format (hopefully not too good). In the core cube there are these cards that combo with it:



And the guild modules offer many more sweet cards



I think this will add some depth to the format and another path than "pick 1/5 guilds"

Then I also added this one, despite it's ugly artwork:



This doesn't only combo nicely with EtB creatures like Vedalken Dismisser or Gravedigger, but also with the EtB Aura-Cycle. Thus it will hopefully help making the enchantment subtheme better and add blue to the mix.

 

[ravnic]

I'm at 4 bounce lands per guild now, making the shar/wedge decks a little easier to draft. Simultaneously, I am thinking about adding more moo color cards, bu at this point I'd start to reach out for playables really. I COULD look into 8th edition, as it looks and feels a lot like 9th, but I don't know, that would kinda betray the idea, right?

I also feel like I always end up in white, especialy orzhov, selesnya and azorius (if there). I can't really imagine white being too good, as it sucked in ravnica block mostly, but I got to keep an eye on it.

 

[japahn]

I'm at 4 bounce lands per guild now, making the shar/wedge decks a little easier to draft. Simultaneously, I am thinking about adding more moo color cards, bu at this point I'd start to reach out for playables really. I COULD look into 8th edition, as it looks and feels a lot like 9th, but I don't know, that would kinda betray the idea, right?

I also feel like I always end up in white, especialy orzhov, selesnya and azorius (if there). I can't really imagine white being too good, as it sucked in ravnica block mostly, but I got to keep an eye on it.

Maybe it helps if you dip a bit into Kamigawa and Time Spiral (which was together with Ravnica in standard)?

I imagine ending in white all the time is a Cube Cobra skew because white cards typically have low Elo.

 

[Erik Twice]

I remember thinking 8th and 9th edition were very similar back in the day. They aren't (8th still has some old-school cards like Karma) but they should be very close.

 

[ravnic]

I feel like if decks like this are actually viable, I've done everything right




This seems to be capturing well the awesome grindy value of ravnica block - without having it be a 4+ color format. You don't see limited decks with that few creatures all that often. But note how it has enough auras to make Three Dreams better than Tidings probably, while it also plays 10 isntants/sorceries for Gelectrode and Chronarch!

Also, a cool thing that I've noticed from doing soe test drafts online is, that the wedges/shards will play very differently, depending on which two guild are actually collaborating. While Izzet/Azorius leads to very controlling Jeskai decks, Boros/Azorius seems to be a more aggressive skies deck most of the time.

 

[sigh]

Sweet deck! I love that sort of playstyle. Looks like things are coming together!

 

[ravnic]

I just did a quick cobra test draft, and it is great to see, that despite my 5-guilds-at-a-time-system, the core set additions AND cc's bots it is still possible to recreate the colorful ravnica block draft madness!