Thanks:
gaytransmulldrifter and their Goblin Game - Got me past a year+ long conceptual hurdle, I was able the list together in a week after reading that thread.
I have wanted a two player microcube that is incredibly dense with archetypes for some number of years now. I've had this picture in my head of a pie chart, where each slice is a card. By choosing an arbitrary 23-card wedge of adjacent slices, you'd get a reasonably solid deck with a easily identifiable gameplan, centered on some key enablers. There would be some number of "anchors" spaced evenly within each wedge, and at the edge of that "anchors" reach (ie, within the adjacent 23 cards) would be bridge enablers that support that anchor, but also support the anchor/s of the adjacent archetype/s. I'd been tinkering for some time, and spent more time going back to the drawing board that I did assembling lists - forget about actually drafting or, god forbid, playing a game of Magic.
Recently, I encountered gaytransmulldrifer's "Goblin Game" here on RiptideLab and so many pieces instantly fell into place. My two most enjoyed, most drafted cubes are a 180 card colour restricted list, and a non-basics only 72-card desert microcube. Somehow combining the two, with the additional restriction of "only basics", and with every card getting drafted? It was like getting struck by a Lightning Bolt.
So many issues with visualizing the 'pie chart' idea disappear under those constraints.
One colour? So much easier to cross pollinate between decks and archetypes and 'splash' off-deck cards.
Drafting the lands? Now they sit inside that pie chart, distributed unevenly around the circle - a higher density near the control decks, and a lower density with the aggro decks. Now we aren't looking at 22-24 wide wedges, we're looking at 40 card slices.
Only running exactly enough cards for exactly two decks to be built? That 40 card slice also defines the slice occupied by the opponent, and that had me conceptualizing archetypes not just by what they include, but what they exclude.
With two players drafting every card, a design problem (Fully fleshing out ten+ 23 card archetypes with only 90 cards) turns into a design feature - I can oh-so-slightly undersupport each deck, forcing each deck to run some number of cards it doesn't want to, and this is part of the game of the draft - what can you get your opponent to pick that they won't end up wanting?
Revitalized, I scrapped my previous list and returned to the drawing board. This has been by far my most successful attempt.
The point of this exercise is to have a semi-disposable, highly replayable, and entirely self contained Magic experience I can take on tour or to the pub after a show. I'm not going to assemble this with actual magic cards, as I can't be arsed to add to my current list of singles to chase down and I don't particularly enjpy buying cards online. Instead, I'm going to be drawing my own proxies on cardstock to remove some rust from my visual arts skills. That means custom cards are on the table, though I'd like to keep them as magic-feeling as possible - something that you could imagine seeing print in a Time Spiral, Reality Fracture, Horizons set or Mystery Booster.
It also means a custom draft format, something I've been calling FoF draft - There's a short explanation at the end. The goal is to have the draft take as little time as you can get away with while still having a degree of strategy and counterplay.
There are only 80 cards, of which 34 should be Mountain in order to allow for two decks with 17 lands, or a deck with 16 and a deck with 18. There's no room for waste in the remaining 46 slots - every* card should go in multiple decks.
Every card is seeing play - if one player passes it, the other will be playing it. There should be risk/reward to putting cards into your opponents deck - palming off fringe playables that are hard to justify casting into the opponents deck should come with the risk of it being the exact narrow enabler they needed, especially considering it wouldn't have been included in the cube to support the decks you're drafting towards.
I'm okay with not featuring pet cards. I have two cubes that already do that. However, I do want to highlight my favourite archetypes.
When it comes to mono-R, I think there's a lot to love. Some of the best decks to play are Burn, RDW/Sligh, Storm, Big Red and Wildfire, and that already gives us a cross section of aggro, combo, midrange, and control.
I want to fit at least 8 'decks' with semi-distinct game plans into this list, so we're looking for at least 3 more archetypes - probably another aggro one, another combo one and another control one. Midrange just happens, man, there's nothing you can do about it.
Each archetype should have an anchor to pull you towards that deck, which means that card should be a power outlier but also have a narrow range of decks it suits. This is why that asterisk was next to "every" a few points ago.
I want to run cards that play with the specific features of the format. Not so heavily that the cube becomes a gimmick list, just as a gentle seasoning for some spice.
• Colour matters effects get interesting - Protection/chroma/devotion/adamant in one direction, converge/vivid in the other. Similarly, effects that care about land types - domain, landwalk, etc.
• You know the exact contents of the opponent's deck. Cabal Therapy is obviously not a contender here, but called shot 'Name a card' effects are very cool, especially the longer a given game goes and how that changes the odds.
Artifacts are easy to interact with in red, so any that get included should be strong to create decision points about what to blow up, especially as there's likely to be a very little room for artifact removal.
Enchantments are hard to remove (likely outright impossible short of running something like Scour from Existence), but we don't want to waste slots on weak or uninteresting ones. There should be some risk/reward to playing them, and heavy restrictions on what decks would want them.
It would be nice to have a dragon in the list. Maybe a phoenix too?
Getting this cube together started with the archetypes I wanted to support, so let continue in that vein and point out the one I should probably add to flesh it out.
The most represented, diverse, and iconic red creature type is Goblins, so they need to be represented just to like... make the list work. Out of 80 cards, somewhere around 34 should be creatures to make aggro vs aggro or aggro vs midrange matchups occur, so even traditionally creature-light archetypes will therefore end up running a lot of bodies. I could slot Goblins next to a lot of different archetypes and I'll find the cards to make that decision make sense. Welder and Prospector are probably autoincludes given the decks I'm looking to support, and they're both sac outlets which could be worth expanding.
Now lets look at what I want to do and get some preliminary ideas down.
Burn requires a really high density of direct damage, so it doesn't work here. We could move it towards Goblins with Ember Hauler and Emberwilde Augur and such, but I'd prefer the Goblins slots go towards narrower or less creature-adjacent decks. Instead, lets move it towards Sligh by featuring Spark Elemental/Ball Lightning, which are Elementals - a creature type I also happen to have an attachment to thanks to a very solid competitive history with in various eras of Standard and Modern. Elementals really like making mana, which also gives us an angle to support Storm.
RDW/Sligh just needs enough efficient bodies low on the curve and some direct damage spells. We're in red. That will happen.
Storm needs mana, card advantage, and a payoff that wins the game.
Looking at payoffs first as that's the most informative: Bar cube, so no token makers like Empty the Warrens or Elemental Eruption. Low cube space, so no room to support Dragonstorm. Spreading Insurrection and Ignite Memories add extra requirements regarding our opponent's position to the combo, as do Ground Rift and Haze of Rage with regards to our own board state. Sure the Storm deck is probably running bodies, but requiring them is still a vulnerability we can avoid entirely.
Let's be honest, it was always going to be Grapeshot. We are on Elementals as the adjacent archetype to Storm, so Storm Entity might fit too.
Mana we can get from dorks, rocks, and rituals - red is flush with all three.
Card advantage is the sticking point for red. Impulse effects would go well with some kind of spell velocity deck if we add that as an archetype, but don't let you continue to stack cards towards a lategame. Rummaging/looting is great for filtering or accruing virtual CA through card quality, but don't get you more resources at all. Best option in red is CA through recursion, and the lowest investment/highest payoff recursion Red has for instants and sorceries is probably Underworld Breach, Mizzix's Mastery, and Festival of Embers. If I'm running one or more of those, they need to support other decks too, probably control or combo ones. That also means we need discard outlets so we can recur our big spells.
Oh no, finding a discard outlet in Red, however will I accomplish this.
Big Red wants to ramp into five or six mana threats that provide value. That overlaps with both Storm and Wildfire - Storm wants rituals, Wildfire wants rocks and resilient bodies. Easy - put two or three decent bodies into the list and this deck will be an option.
Wildfire is "Big Red meets White Weenie". Hot take maybe? Create asymmetries in mana production/efficiency and exploit symmetrical resource denial to take a board advantage and snowball it into the game being over. Tax effects -> mana rocks, Armageddon/Ravages of War -> Wildfire/Burning of Xinye. There's even a classic Boros version of the same concept - Gargageddon. Oh hey we should run the 'Garga' to go with our six-mana 'Geddon'. With that and the existing Big Red support, the only thing to add is Wildfire itself.
That does it for the things I want to run, so what can we fit between the gaps that exist?
• We have bridges from Sligh -> Elementals -> Storm -> Big Red -> Wildfire.
• We added Goblins who can bridge however we need them to, probably between Sligh and slower board-based decks.
• We need to justify a Mizzix's Mastery, and we already have a big suspend threat.
Sounds like adding Worldfire on its own makes a brand new control deck with a two- or three-card combo win. Suspend a Gargadon, cast Worldfire, before it resolves sac down to 1 time counter, win next turn. Alternately, pitch a Worldfire and a burn spell, ramp into an overloaded Mizzix's Mastery.
That's six archetypes locked in, two to go.
...
I'd still like to find an angle to support Burn. Underworld Breach or Festival of Embers might let Burn happen after all as a slower/controlling Storm variant that favors incremental advantage over one big turn, but probably won't do that in practice - Breach because it's too universally valuable to waste on attempting that deck instead of going for Storm or just recurring two or three creatures, and Festival because its a lil finicky - you don't just ramp into a Festival and start accruing value, you need to play the game for a bit first, then use it to stay in the game once you already have a 'yard.
Instead, we could bridge any creature-based deck to burn with the addition of more sac outlets and decent payoffs, but I feel like that would be a dead end. After all, Aristocrats wants tokens, and without em you don't get to go wide or generate CA through sac effects while also actively progressing a clock, and I'm pretty committed to low toughness creatures to boot. In that context Goblin Bombardment or Goblin Sharpshooter look way too good at making a really unfun play pattern the optimal line. The First Strike on Spiteful Prankster is way too huge. That leaves like, Hissing Iguanar and Rage Thrower as payoffs, and in moving away from Goblins we'd need to start adding other sac outlets that are good enough to run but narrow enough to not get snapped up by any old creature-based deck.
Off the top of my head only Grafted Wargear interests me and that's just because of the minigame it creates around artifact removal.
On a midrange/burn angle, Arc Slogger has potential, but it is so much worse in a 40 card deck and also kinda checks aggressive strategies too well from the other side of the table - it'd be a fine replacement for one of my midrange-y bodies, but not as an addition. Lightning Crafter would be sick as a Burn top end and a cute way to hide threats in Wild/Worldfire decks, but it's too good against Worldfire, not to mention that being able to safely chunk in for 3 without ever entering combat while also threatening to lock down the board is a lot. I think we either hope Hammer of Bogardan puts in work, or accept Burn as dead.
Going back to the topic of Bombardments, Arcane, Fiery and Raid all crossed my radar as build-arounds, but like Goblin they all have issues. Arcane, too slow and random, not really distinct from any of my spell-based archetypes. Fiery, all same issues as Goblin even if it's a got a little more spice. Raid looks great, but just kinda goes in any aggressive creature deck rather than creating a weenies archetype like it did in RoE.
Shame, Oops_All_Bombardments.dek would have been a funny draft.
Some other thoughts:
A Grapeshot with no storm count should be worth casting - 1 toughness dudes should be prevalent. The ideal "average creature" is Piker with upside. That'll be a reeaaaal challenge to flesh out in red.
Trade+Shock should kill pretty much anything and Wildfire is a premier wrath - This makes 4 toughness a breakpoint, and IMO anything above that should be so far above it as to say "Shuffle up and go again, game's over bud.". Or preferably, not exist - Greater Gargadon should be in a class of its own.
I like the idea of a TOR-era Nightmare or a Lorwyn-block Champion to hide stuff from a wrath - that's super interesting on both sides of the table. Lightning Crafter may have been way too much, but we could easily get away with a Petravark.
Firebreathing is a great way for combat based decks to use those rituals only combo decks want, so it would be great to have 3 or 4 firebreathers. Especially a dragon, still want one of those. One that can survive a Wildfire, but needs to jump through some hoops to do so. Hm.
A medium paced midrange or control deck that looks to ramp into an early large creature to win the board, then start smashing in for large damage.
There are a lot of adjacent decks you can head towards if a Big Red deck isn't coming together. The need for heaps of mana means it might transition into Storm, Wildfire or one of the Worldfire combos - Goblin Welder can do a lot to generate mana with rocks that don't come in tapped. There are a fair few Elementals that serve as removal and ramp for the deck, so eschewing the lategame to focus on a faster clock could also successfully get you away from this deck. If all of your removal is spell-based and you have the Hammer of Bogardan, you could even transition into Burn.
Usually a fast spell focused aggro deck that just seeks to reduce life totals to 0 as fast as possible, with a secondary focus activated abilities that deal direct damage for a degree of inevitability.
In the context of this list, if a Burn deck somehow gets drafted it will likely be a slow controlling deck that prevents threats from pressuring your life total before using Hammer of Bogardan as a win condition. Pyromancer's Swath massively speeds up that clock, so would be a worthwhile include, and a Mizzix's Mastery could deal a lot of damage straight to the face in that situation - Especially with a Grapeshot in the 'yard.
Wait, that's just Storm - picking up some rituals and card draw would be a good way to recover a failing Burn draft. You probably want a Ball Lightning or a Spark Elemental anyway, so maybe consider Sligh or Elementals as options if the list isn't coming together. You could instead grab some bigger bodies and ramp, treat your burn as removal and look to play Big Red instead?
A fast creature-based aggro deck that uses disposable creatures to get in for large damage, before finding some way to close out the game by going over the top with a recursive clock or other burn. Its creatures also serve as its removal suite, and marking damage on a blocker with one of those before combat can let a trampler smack your opponent even harder.
If you aren't finding the aggressive Elementals, the mana- and CA- granting ones do a great job at supporting both Big Red and Storm. If you're only finding the aggressive ones, give up on the type synergies and go straight Sligh, or if you're willing to risk it, Burn.
Goblins can, and have, done a great many things across a great many decks. Here they're a medium-paced, creature-based aggro deck that floods the board with small synergistic creatures to snowball damage.
Is your Goblins deck feeling rather low on Goblins? Give up on those three- and four-drops, give Sligh a try! Got a Keeper of Kookus and Skirk Prospector? Try a midrange deck like Big Red or Wildfire, especially if you've got a Goblin Goon to go along with them.
A fast aggro deck that focuses on the raw damage each card can deal in a vacuum, focusing on individual card quality and speed over synergy. Is its power greater than its mana value? Does it have haste? Is it a burn spell? It's for Sligh.
If all your creatures share a type, you might want to grab some of the synergy pieces and transition into Elementals or Goblins. If you've picked up the burn spells, the world is your oyster - you could go into any deck you want.
A medium paced combo deck that looks to sculpt its hand or graveyard, then cast a large number of spells in quick succession to end the game.
Missing your Grapeshot or Cinder Pyromancer? Got a lot of card draw or filtering? Got a Mizzix's Mastery or Greater Gargadon? Consider transitioning into Worldfire. Got the mana rocks and maybe a Goblin Welder? Try Big Red or Wildfire. Got the Elementals? Yeah you can figure that one out.
A medium paced control deck that looks to ramp in order to break symmetry on resource denial spells, before winning with a large or otherwise difficult to remove creature or clock.
You know what they call Wildfire without Wildfire? Big Red.
Sometimes you go for the early Wildfire angle, with Rummaging Goblin and Mizzix's Mastery, and you just don't get there. That's okay, you can always cheat out a Worldfire, or start spamming spells and go for Storm. You could even just focus on removal and a Hammer of Bogardan and play control Burn!
Depending on the wincon you went for, Worldfire-less Worldfire can transition into Big Red off a Gargadon, Storm off Mizzix's Mastery, or even one of the aggressive decks with a Changeling Berserker. Got none of those, but a lot of the support pieces like mana rocks, defensively relevant creatures, and removal? Head into Wildfire, or Big Red.
Yes, there is a ninth deck. It's probably even less viable than burn, and barely deserves the title of archetype, and this is from a guy pretending his Big Red, Wildfire, and Worldfire 'decks' have meaningful distinctions beyond like, three cards.
No I won't tell you what it is. Its synergy based rather than a combo deck, that's all I'll say.
You might spot it if you ever draft this and give me feedback hint hint.
Well, 34 lands and 34 creatures was a pipe dream, but with all the rocks, rituals, dorks and burn running about 32 and 30 isn't awful. Based on the experience of gaytransmulldrifter and the relatively similar curves of our lists I'm hoping that averaging 16 lands per player turns out to be sufficient. Other than that I think I hit all my other goals - largely by blatantly copying their chosen Goblins from Goblin Game before bothering to look for my own.
On the topic of counters and customs:
There are two cards with counters in this bar cube! Except I tend not to track suspend cards with counters - it's usually pretty easy to count down.
Eeeexcept I'm running a suspend card that manipulates its own counters. My ability to track game state is up to it, but I want to recognize that's not true for everyone so if you make your own version of this list you'll want other ways to win after a Worldfire. This was a lot easier to justify when the suspend card was Rift Bolt...
Storm Elemental is another thing altogether - I'm running it as a Storm payoff creature, I didn't want to run prowess-like effects that you commit to the board before you start going off, and the only other creature focused storm payoffs make tokens. I'm fixing the one downside, the counters, by removing them on my custom version, printed in "Planar Chaos if it was printed in Planar Chaos.".
Its new card text reads:
Emberstorm Entity 1R
Elemental Lhurgoyf
Haste
~'s power is equal to the number of spells cast this turn, and its toughness is equal to that number plus 1.
*/*+1
That's right, it's a Tarmogoyf. "What isn't land, gets cast. And what gets cast grows the Embergoyf."
If it's feeling too strong, it might become a */* creature to maintain the current theme of "Elementals wot die after givin yez a smack", but for now I like the cleaner reference.
And in other news, Jackal Pup is not the creature it used to be. I should be running Satyr Firedrinker. But the pup is an icon, and the satyr an abomination. In recognition of the above, I present:
Jackal Firedrinker R
Jackal Shaman
Whenever this creature is dealt damage, it deals that much damage to you. : This creature gets +1/+0 until end of turn and deals 1 damage to you.
2/1
"Maggie! Your familiar's gotten into the spirits again! Ooh, that looks like it burns."
Yeah its just the Satyr but I have an excuse to draw a puppy. Incidentally, we can have Hound and Dog and Jackal and Wolf and Werewolf but we can't have Cephalid? Make 'Canine' a type or give us back our fantastical creatures. Aboshan and Lorthos have far less in common than any random Khenra does with some arbitrary Ainok, but we're all fine with Mirri and Ajani sharing a type? Creature types should be based on phylogeny. I want a full tree of life featuring every creature ever printed, updated every set. There should be 7 layers of subtype covering kingdom, class, phylum, etc. Just think of the design space it would open up, MaRo. You'd easily get a few years of creative output before you'd have to come up with another name for Chroma, or Sunburst, or Horsemanship (Which would of course be Equestrianmanship, so as to account for Donkeys, Zebra, Tapirs, and Rhinoceros - including their subfamily, Unicorns).
The decision to cut Gauntlet of Might was the hardest test I've ever faced. It was like Sophie's Choice, if the children were 'Initially aesthetically pleasing but ultimately kinda boring gimmick." and "Maximally interesting draft and play experiences". If you knew me, you'd be shocked I did the boring sensible thing.
...
Filling the last few slots was really tough. I knew what I needed - everything had to be a creature for the numbers to work, I had to give Goblins a distinct identity outside "curve filler that also closes a gap in the list", Storm badly needed a way to make Grapeshot actually lethal, I wanted a liiiitle touch of card draw, and I needed a mana-generating Welder target as backup to Heart of Ramos.
The Goblin identity crisis was solved by looking at what Elementals did (Live fast, die immediately), and going the other way. Goblin King is a classic lord, Mogg Flunkies needs a friend, and Goblin Soothsayer wants you to have more bodies than your opponent. Let's make Goblins care about sticking and building a board by giving them a top end that bridges into midrange. Horde of Boggarts and Mudbrawler Cohort were my first thoughts, until I remembered Goblin Goon and Reckless One existed. Hasty threats felt too similar to Elementals, and Horde of Boggarts has way less going on in and against Wildfire than the Goon, so the big lunk got the nod.
Storm was harder - I spent a long time contemplating Embermaw Hellion, but my top end was pretty much covered and it had the exact opposite interaction with Wildfire as compared to Goblin Goon, which created drafting incentives I really didn't like. Pick a midrange threat that doesn't survive your boardwipe or give your opponent one that does? Ew.
Also, it's a 4/5, the boringest stat line in existence. Fat enough to be annoying, small enough to be a dull clock. In the end I decided that I'd bite the bullet, cut a creature slot, and run an enchantment. Breach was never seriously in contention, so for the longest time I was going to go with the Festival. Buuut it just didn't sit right, especially considering Hammer of Bogardan iss a kinda iconic wincon, so in the end I went back to one of my very first cuts from the draft list and pulled Pyromancer's Swath off the bench. Performs in Storm, supercharges the Hammer into an Axe, couldn't ask for more.
In for a penny, I immediately gave up on choosing a creature that would slowly or inefficiently draw cards and brought Liar's Pendulum over from the initial shortlist. Originally it was meant to do the job of "Cursed Scroll but Worse", in the same way Kris Mage (And later Arc Mage) was included to be "Grim Lavamancer but Worse". Plus I wanted a "name a card gimmick".
30 creatures is plenty, right? All my other non-creatures are sick, I can't cut any of them for this piece of chaff.
The Welder target took an unreasonably long time. I was pretty close to running one of the primeval's Attendants at one point. Then I remembered Lion's Eye Diamond was legal in modern if you were willing to spend two mana and wait a turn for your 2/2 to tap. Then I spent an embarrassingly long time looking at the list for ways to win with a Diamond Lion that didn't require me to go back and add Breach. Then I spent a while trying to "fix" Diamond Lion so it worked with Welder and without Breach, without breaking it in half and ruining the card reference at the same time. Then I gave up and had a think about fixing the problem another way - replacing Worn Powerstone with Thran Dynamo. But you can't cast a Thran Dynamo off Infernal Plunge and that mattered to me - Three mana was a sweet spot. Wait. Worn Powerstone. I collect USG printings of it because Higgenbotham is the greatest and most iconic artist of that period of nerd culture. Infernal Plunge. I wanted to run guys that yearn for the grave, but didn't end up keeping any.
Three.
Three.
Three/Three.
"You own so many copies of Cathodion.", I thought to myself.
"You constantly go out of your way to find more.", I continued.
"This is the perfect excuse to actually play it - the Herigaast deck you never completed doesn't count.", I finished. "It also blocks and kills that Subterranean Spirit you're worried about having included.", my conscience added.
Feeling like an idiot, I added one of my favourite pieces of magic art to the cube.
In my defense, I've not been thinking about the art as I'm planning to do my own. And I said at the start I wasn't looking to run pet cards. It's perfectly reasonable to forget that card you have half a binder of, sitting right next to your collection of Baloths, right in plain view of the table you sit at to use the computer on which you're compiling the cube it would be perfect for. Ask anyone.
Pretty happy with the non-creature non-land suite. In 18 cards there's five burn spells, three rocks, three ways to draw cards (Four if Hammer of Bogardan counts), three enticingly expensive sorceries, two rituals, and two spicy enchantments. All of them have interesting texture to them, except Shock which exists to serve as a baseline and have Toggo flavor text. Feels like I'm hitting all the key notes of Red.
On the creature side of things, would be nice to have something that cares about going Hellbent. Unfortunately everything red is either multicoloured, not a creature, overtuned, or Gathan Raiders. In fairness I did consider Rakdos Pit Dragon, but Fledgling Dragon felt more Dragon-y and more of a roleplayer in multiple decks - Sort-of Shivan Dragon is still pretty good when it's the only flier and the decks that want it are getting Actual Shivan Dragon at a 2-mana discount. That said, there are some cool artifacts in Hellbent design space, like Mindstorm Crown, which is on the shortlist to come in over the Pendulum, and Ensnaring Bridge, which most definitely is not.
I'm strangely proud of the T1 Memnite->Infernal Plunge->Worn Powerstone line being pretty fine. Like, look at the four drops you would be curving into - none of them are scary on T2! Probably the best thing you could do is play a pair of creatures (Bearing in mind you only have 2RR, so no Goblin King+Goblin, or Ball Lightning+1 drop). The real potential problem is a T3 Subterranean Spirit this way, or off a Seething Song, but I also think that might be okay as it ate extra cards to get it in so it should get to feel powerful for a small while before getting Ghostfire'd or blocked by Cathodion. Plus you opened yourself up to getting massively blown out by an Ingot Chewer eating your mana rock you spent half your hand on. It'll be fine.
Right?
Overall I really like how the list has come together. While I want to start a new project where I push even harder and get as close as I can to that perfect pie chart cube, I think what I'll do first is this, again, but in a different colour - after I've got this one all drawn and sleeved of course. It'll probably be blue.
Hell, I might even run a competition for the other colours over the forums. Let me know if that idea sounds like fun.
Each player gets 4 packs of 10.
Player 1 opens their first pack and splits it into two piles of 5 cards.
Player 2 takes the pile of their choice and Player 1 gets the other.
Player 2 then repeats the process with their first pack.
Continue alternating packs until all cards are drafted.
Shuffle and play.
4 player
Each player gets 1 pack of 20. As above, but its four piles of 5, and you progress around the table clockwise for picks and counterclockwise for packs.
That looks like a really fun challenge, building something so small and archetype dense.
I love your Cathodion welder target and it reminded me of a card. Pyromancer’s Goggles? Another Welder target that can play in control, big red, storm and wildfire. Copying Plunge or Song is huge, might need a Cathartic Reunion or something to really make it pop. Thanks for sharing the thought process and design work!
