The Graveyard Synergy Cube
art by Ryan Barger
Hello fellow cubers!
I've been lurking around the forum for enough years now, that it felt appropriate to start a thread for my Graveyard Synergy cube. Also, Nanonox kindly called me out, showing me that at least one person would be interested in reading about this project of mine.
I don't get as much time to tinker with my cube as I'd like to, but I'll try to report on draft nights (roughly every 2-3 months) and updates with new sets (probably more frequently than that).
I have a group of two to three friends that I draft with the most and every so often we pull together a pool of 8 drafters. They all have experience with commander and retail limited, so I try to keep that in mind for my design goals.
Also, I want to mention that I drew heavy early inspiration from Ryan Overturfs articles and inschos GCC and zubats graveyard cube, as well as many others and hours spent reading here on riptidelab.
Finally, here's the list before I dive deeper into the cube itself: Schafkurais Graveyard Synergy Cube
Design Goals
As a lot of other cubes on here, mine has gone on quite the rollercoaster ride until now. It started as two 180 cubes, one focused on graveyard mechanics and one with artifacts, that melded together after two play sessions. It started with a high power level (wheels, diamonds, etc.), as I wanted a legacy power feel to contrast our normal retail drafts but I soon realized that the high complexity and swinginess of draft and games was just not for my play group. Slowly I've been cutting extreme power outliers, although some still remain. The cube is in a better place than one or two years ago, but it's still not where I want it to be.
From here on I'll copy some of Nanonox's headlines, to help guide me through.
Draft
As mentioned, we're often four players and adjust the standard drafting a bit. Everyone gets a Cogwork Librarian and we have more smaller packs or burn cards at the end, to see more of the cube. I think this is useful for cubes based more around synergy, compared to general aggro, midrange, control.
Power level & Speed
Ultimately I still want my cube to be somewhere between a masters draft set and a legacy cube. No power, no free spells, no mana rocks, removal a step below the best (removal should be able answer threats with MV+1, broadly speaking), no easy auto includes on power level (Fable of the Mirror-Breaker, Palantir of Orthanc, ...). It's a high synergy format, so weaker cards that work together should have a higher ceiling than goodstuff cards. No combos. Okay, I know that's a lie, because there are some in there (usually 3+ cards). They are not so easy to find though and I doubt they will come up more than once a year. Decks are low curving and lean, you should be able to play to the board by turn two or risk falling behind. Tempo is important but value can be important too. Fixing is plentiful but painful, generally I aim for 2-3 color decks.
Graveyard hate
Deserves it's own paragraph. On one hand it makes games more interesting if interaction with this very important zone is possible. On the other hand it's a delicate balance because too much can invalidate whole strategies and make it unfun for players. So far my experience is, that exiling the whole grave and multiple cards per turn (Lion Sash and Scavenging Ooze) is too much. One per turn is ok (as etb + attack for instance) is mostly fine. The heavy graveyard decks don't care that much, it can really hurt the more modest graveyard decks like welder though. Scrabbling claws is cool, as it gives the opponent the choice of which card to remove, but self-mill just doesn't care. What I really like, are the incidental one time effects (Dreams of Steel and Oil).
Archetypes
This is a difficult topic for me. The overarching themes are the graveyard and artifacts. All colors except white have good graveyard strategies. Artifacts are best in jeskai, although green and black are slowly improving.
(Incomprehensive) list of archetypes:
Self-mill - works best in sultai (+red) and has different directions it can go, like classic Golgari selfmillf, or Simic combo-y selfmill, to more aggressive variants such as jund delirium/tarmogoyf. Dimir likes to use the graveyard to fuel delve. Most of these decks are slower and more value oriented. They either use the graveyard as a resource (delve, recursion) or they care about types and number of cards in graveyards.
Self-discard - mainly in grixis, but other colors might contribute slightly. Red leans more aggressive and blue more controlling, with black supporting both directions. Madness plays into this space and to a lesser extent self-mill.
Lands/Landfall - most supported as an aggressive selesnya landfall Deck. Red and black have a few support pieces too and simic lands supplement the self-mill combo-y deck. Black and blue probably lean more midrange/control. Green is especially good at recursion.
Sacrifice - is not really thought through but might be possible in an aggressive rakdos Deck?
Reanimator - is also not a real deck. I tried with a weenie reanimator archetype in orzhov but my players were not convinced. Black had the reanimation spells but there are no high MV targets. Best you can do is a 4-5 drop on turn 2-3.
Artifacts - offers lots of different directions to go. There's a value reanimator sub theme with reds welders and synergistic synergistic removal. White and green are the colors of dinky tokens and critical mass. I don't know that I have an aggressive (white?) artifact deck? Blue offers a lot of support with recursion, tokens, and more. Black hast the least direct synergies with artifact builds.
Blink - there's a slight blink sub theme in azorius, that can supplement different strategies such as artifacts, tokeny things and recursion.
There are also some two-card synergies like:
So... This is what I got so far and I surely did not mention all archetypes. What I currently struggle most with, is having a clear idea of which decks exactly are viable in my cube. So far I just add cards from new sets that fit the cube, but I'm not sure if they actually fit into decks. I need a better understanding, which archetypes/decks supported well enough and which need help, specifically in what form. I don't get to play too often but I have the feeling that the decks are a bit unfocused which could be due to player drafting skill but for sure the main contributor is a somewhat unfocused cube. Am I trying to cram too many archetypes in? Probably. Do I just need to adjust the numbers? Possibly.
Let me know what you think, I'd be honored to be benefit of the centuries of collective cube knowledge gathered here in this community
.PS: My overview on CubeCobra is woefully out of date.
