sharzad (safra's cube)

They're indeed quite on theme, or at least, feels more 'synergy-helping'.
Zur seems to have only a few targets sadly (but interesting ones : O-ring, threads and necromancy are all very differents but very good, bestow creatures fit nicely there but they're black).

I don't think all of the 10 will be equally played, some will probably see often sideboards/be last picked, but having them in draft will sometime create decks that would not exists otherwise so.... why not. It doesn't take tht much space.
 

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
So, I'm trying a new color wheel arrangement again, and wanted to put Pick the Wrong Fight back into my cube. Unfortunately I lost the old files, and I just couldn't find back the art. Thanks Safra, for still cubing it! Thanks to one of your old and grainy pics I was able to retrace the image! If you feel like crediting it again in your current cube, here's an art link to Dan Masso's original deviantart post of the image :D
 
It's been almost 2 years since my last post, but I've been playing a lot of Arena lately, and now that I've got my second shot, I'm genuinely thinking about updating my Cube again. I saw this guy on a mtgtop8 Bring to Niv list:

and i was like oh man I want to finally port my cube to cube cobra.

Anyone have any other cards they think I'd be a fool to pass over when I start looking through the last uh 4 years of legacy-legal printings with a critical eye?

PS i can't wait to start reading some of these threads and new posts but wow I do not have the time just yet! I'm going on a work trip this week and next, though, so I'll hopefully get to read 10,000 cards on scryfall and consider them, while I sort my various cube card-boxes, if I bring them. iA

Thanks!!!
saf
 
Anyone have any other cards they think I'd be a fool to pass over when I start looking through the last uh 4 years of legacy-legal printings with a critical eye?
Hey, welcome back!

I'd recommend looking at the Testing and Includes threads for the last few sets in order to see what the community is kind of high or low on from a design perspective. Here is the one for Modern Horizons 2 and Here is the one for Strixhaven. I've also been writing some top 10 exciting cards articles for the last couple of sets which people seem to like, here's the Modern Horizons 2 one if you would like to see what they are all about. In my cube thread, I've been going over every mechanic from the last few years and talking about how they fit into my cube. I'm not sure how close it is to what you're doing but it should serve as a nice quick refresher for everything.

There have been some cool new Cubes posted to the site, I particularly like our newest moderator @landofMordor's Cube (link), @froggy's 288 Cube (link), and @blacksmithy's 2021 update for Attack on Cube (link).

Hopefully this can help you get back into things!
 
Welcome back, safra! Outside of Modern Horizons 1 & 2 (which are required reading for high-power inclusions), I am a big fan of a ton of new cards. Here's a "small" list from the recent year...:


All of the MDFC "dual" lands (Pathways) seem cool; some cost to support 3+color but great in 2c or to enable a light splash. If you're up to play 2-faced cards, I'd take a look at every MDFC to see if any make sense (both land and double spell varieties). https://scryfall.com/search?q=is:mdfc&order=set

I'm sure there are probably some cool walkers, but I don't play with that stuff. Excited to see sharzad the updated when it comes!
 
I'm still working on my 2022 iteration - I may have a playgroup again??? - but here are a few design theories I'd like my cube to test.

THEORY 1: Free counterspells enable 'protect the queen' Baneslayer-style threats. This could be provocatively renamed SOME OF THOSE THAT CAST FORCES / ARE THE SAME THAT SLAM MONSTERS ...... This is the old school UW Control JTMS-is-my-only-threat philosophy of threat development, but ideally in my context, it's not an upticking Jace but, like, a Miirym, Sentinel Wyrm . As is revealed in the Miracles thread on The Source:
BUG.dec is generally a very good matchup for UWx as Jace is so hard for them to beat, Swords is also phenomenal when none of their threats go wide.

You plan in this matchup is to resolve Jace pretty much. He takes over the game so easily, after that you kill everything and it’s fairly easy sailing.
try to save fow to protect mentor or jace, but sometimes you need to burn it on something sooner
At the micro level, this looks like Daze protecting a one-drop, but it's the same philosophy. Make your baneslayer, activate or swing with it a couple times.

THEORY 2: Dragons are cool as shit. This is axiomatic, but we can extrapolate into OTHER kinds of card that are also very cool. For example, dinosaurs, and angels maybe, but for sure, dragons are very very cool. Cube is a collaborative-competitive storytelling experience and stories about dragons are mythopoetically resonant. Also they have Flying, which simplifies board states and combat decisions. This is good for me especially, because my players could use a little help with combat decisions and realizing they can turn the clock to lethal. Probably a lot of dragons is better than not enough dragons, and I can pare down from there rather than continue to add individual scalybois.

THEORY 3: Everything's more interesting as a combo deck. Aggro-combo? Cool! Combo-control? Cool! Midrange with a combo finish? Cool! Honestly, even Dark Ritual into t1 Liliana, +1, is pretty cool. And I have a lot of 'Johnny' players who want to create something that's 'more than the sum of its parts' - to me, that means Tendrils of Agony storm, but I think it's broad enough to encompass stuff as 'well, read this one card and get excited about it' as Kaalia and Zur; one-card-archetypes that weaker drafters can get hyped enough about to go on-rails for.

THEORY 4: Green and Red should be obviously cool. They ARE cool, but I worry that this isn't obvious. Blue is already cool and blue drafters know this. Black is cool and people who care a lot about targeted discard, Dark Ritual, or zombies, they also know that. White does some interesting things these days. But Green and Red have deep wells of cool effects that are interesting at higher power; spellslinging was a welcome addition to red some years ago now, but is today a firmly entrenched part of its identity. Gx aggro can be thrilling and exciting in ways that aren't just 'Forest, Rogue Elephant, go', and which provide the reach to close out stronger and faster games. And who isn't intrigued by Dragonstorm or an overloaded Mizzix's Mastery? By comparison, 'Purphoros + tokens for lethal', something that was reasonably cool when Purp got printed, looks absolutely pedestrian.

THEORY 5: We can kill planeswalkers more easily than we could a decade ago and therefore they are more fun than they used to be; or less un-fun/GRBS. Will carefully monitor my safety valves to provide a strong experiment to test this.
 
And here are some (spoilered for size) CubeCobra test drafts I've been doing all month to figure out what goes in a deck and what never makes a 40 (and should, therefore, be cut). They also serve to get me hyped for the kinds of games I'd like to see.

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'SMALL GAMES' AND LEGACY-LITE

0) Preface

Sam Black – one of Magic’s better theorists – says in a 2021/Kaldheim article that Elvish Visionary and Elderfang Disciple are a microcosm of an important game design choice – that players, decks, and even formats can “vote for big games” or “vote for small games”. Just like voting in the real world, these are only expressed preferences and statistical trends, not the actual will of the people made manifest. Two players with decks that they believe “vote for small games” in a “big game format” (like 3xROE) may struggle to see player skill translate into improved results. I’d like to look at this idea in the context of 3xROE limited, Constructed Legacy, return to Sam Black’s two articles, and then conclude with my own thoughts on “legacy-lite” Cube design. If you haven’t read “Elvish Visionary vs. Elderfang Disciple: The Nature of Card Advantage”, please read it before continuing in this piece – I’ll refer to its ideas and assumptions a lot and expect that you’ve also read his essay.

1) Rise of the Battlecruiser Format

Simon Goertzen writes in a 2013 format draft primer for MTGOAcademy (spurred by Flashback Drafts):
Thanks to the Eldrazi, an army of Level Up creatures, and the Invoker cycle, ROE is one of the most mana-hungry limited formats of all time. As is the case with most expert-level sets, this challenges traditional views on Magic‘s fundamental strategic concepts. Just looking at the above mechanics and cards allows us to formulate some questions and answers to keep in mind when drafting and playing ROE limited[...]With the exception of Rebound, ROE is not a format defined by card advantage.

Or, as Laconic Smart Verygoodplayer wrote about Glory Seeker in his set review:
Limited: 1.0
A legitimate first-pick in Onslaught draft, a solid playable in Zendikar, and borderline unplayable in Rise. This set is awesome!

And even the Mothership’s article, ”Designing Rise”, adequately written by Brian Tinsman (a bore), has this hilarious (unintentional?) diss on Ken Nagle (a boor):

[The “battlecruiser Magic”] idea came into focus after a discussion with fellow designer Ken Nagle. He had been watching some YouTube games of world-class real-time strategy players and noticed that their games looked nothing like the games he played. High-level players optimize every movement, micromanage their resources, and know in less than 10 minutes who's going to win or lose. When Ken played the same game, he and his friends would turtle up, ignore each other, and start working on battlecruisers—the biggest, most awesome units in the game.

Tinsman goes on to discuss the design principles of ROE Limited in a piece I’m sure we’ve all read before. The gist is this: the format should “lock up the ground from t3-t7 or so”, until “A 6-power creature [can] get through”. And he describes countless people in Playtesting failing to understand this, much as LSV warns his audience not to first-pick Glory Seeker:

These players had built their decks using normal Magic deckbuilding models instead of building decks for a battlecruiser world[...]It wasn't easy for them to learn the solution either. Even after repeatedly seeing five-mana Auras and giant monsters winning games, those players couldn't unlearn their old deckbuilding habits[...]Some experienced players scoffed at the spoiled cards[...]In the end, I wanted to make a set that was as fun as your first week of Magic. The point was to recapture that sense of wonder.

2) Urza's Legacy (no, not that one, no not that one either)

Ken Nagle played Legacy once, in 2005. The format doesn’t interest him. I will be polite and assume that this is because he prefers to vote for large games, and Legacy is a small games format. Legacy’s safety valves (Force, Wasteland, Thalia, Thoughtseize, Daze) prohibit Battlecruiser Magic in exactly the same way 3xROE prohibited swinging with bears.

An aside: as in Islam, Vintage is commonly understood to have “five pillars” that define devotion and adherence. You can’t be a devout Muslim without praying fajr or going on hajj, and you can't win a game of Vintage if you’ve never heard of Shops, Dredge, Oath of Druids, Fish (bears like Lavinia, Monastery Mentor, and Endurance, plus walkers like Narset, Oko, and W6), and Omnath. (no, I didn’t typo ‘Oath’ of Druids twice; as far as I can tell, Omnath is now a pillar of Vintage.)

Legacy’s ‘pillars’ aren’t so much those of Islam as they are Of The Earth, of those of the Catholics in Ken Follett’s book – they came together over a very long time, support the architecture and stained glass, and keep it all from falling in on you unexpectedly during Friday Night Mass, but they’re organic, not the Word of God. You can build a nave off to the side of the cathedral and still receive the guidance of grace. I submit that today, Legacy’s key cards that keep games Small are:


While the games that go Big tended to be fueled by:


The top 6 cards are all legal in the format, and the bottom 6 have all been banned. Legacy gameplay is defined by cards that invalidate your opponent’s cards, but legacy bans are defined by the threat that Big games pose to its existing gameplay. Actually, a lot of Legacy’s bans since 2010 have followed this ideology; the bans of Treasure Cruise, Dig Through Time, Top, and Astrolabe were meant to shrink Viking Funeral.dec, Omnitell, Miracles.dec, and Snowko.dec. Banning Lurrus was a response to reading the card. For extra fun, think about the differences between mana created by Deathrite Shaman and the mana created by Dark Ritual.

The lesson here is simple. To achieve a desired kind of gameplay, provide the tools for a format to self-police (strong mana denial, free counterspells, targeted discard, tax effects), but make the costs of those ‘safety valves’ real costs. The first free counterspell should be surmountable – Legacy combo decks play targeted discard like Duress, or other meta-answers like Silence or Xantid Swarm, and fight through interaction, not under it – but a combination of safety valves should present exponential barriers, not additive ones. Most blue decks in Legacy now play six forces – 4 FoW, 2 FoNg. They also play between 4-8 more cantrips than they used to. Exiling a blue card to Force is a “real cost” in Legacy’s ideal gameplay, but it’s one that you’re presumably more than willing to pay, and the additional Forces provide that exponential increase in defense during a ‘showdown turn’. The combo deck can afford to dedicate space to answering one Force, but suffers excessively if it has to be able to go off through two of them. In order to support the additional Forces, xerox decks had to play more spells, ‘see more cards’ per game. But these games remained Small, not Big, because they condense to a critical point (losing a fight on the Stack, lethal Storm count, you ran out of answers to Snowko/Czech Pile, you got locked out by Eldrazi/D&T, TNN beats, and so on).

3) Sam Black’s articles

The article I made you read at the top of this post, Elvish Visionary vs Elderfang Disciple, was written in 2021 for Kaldheim. It’s an excellent essay, a refining of his thoughts on the subject from the previous year’s article he wrote about Companions, and more specifically about Lurrus in Standard – “Welcome to Haymaker Magic: Why Card Advantage Is An Outdated Concept”. In the earlier article, he writes:

When Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths was announced, many players expected a return to [battlecruiser Magic], but that’s not really what we got[...]Howling Mine leads to big games. Liliana of the Veil leads to small games. In big games, both players have a lot of resources, while in small games, players have very few resources. Card advantage matters more in small games, whereas tempo and battlefield presence matter more in big games.

The next year, as you’ve already seen, he elaborates on this idea.

[Canadian Threshold] in Legacy is a great example of a deck that’s hyper-focused on voting for small games. It plays cards like Daze that are much weaker in large games, so it wants to trade down resources at every opportunity[...]To my mind, tempo and attrition are opposite ends of a spectrum. Tempo games revolve around a mana bottleneck and attrition games revolve around a card count bottleneck. Tempo games are won by the player who doesn’t give their opponent time to use all of their resources, and attrition games are won by the player who depletes all of their opponent’s resources.

Not all games can be perfectly described as either — sometimes a game is won by an unanswered trump, like a large flying creature that the opponent can’t answer even if they can cast all of their spells. They have plenty of cards but those cards just don’t line up right[...]In small games, anything that sticks matters more than it would in a big game.

How large does that "large" flying creature have to be? Big enough that its owner can Protect the Queen long enough in an average game to ride it to victory.

4) Mordor’s essay

In this post, Mordor discusses designing for a big or small format.

The big games in which Synergy thrives come with increased complexity/tracking to the players, but also provide ripe opportunity for exploring novel card-wise interactions of Magic. Big games essentially improve the odds that players will witness a novel combination of cards in relevant zones. (Maybe this is one reason why EDH, famous for its ethos of "cards you've never seen before", is a 40-life, 4-player format.) [...] Moreover, even small games can turn into big games: if both aggro players have played 6 lands and traded all their creatures without killing the opponent, then we're in a big game where the player who has more mana sinks will be favored.

Pair this idea with the idea that Legacy's banlist doesn't ban cards for offending the idea of what's reasonably powerful (Legacy is full of monstrously powerful cards that produce unfun game states), but for creating BIG unfun games (Ragavan, Oko) or for threatening the dynamics that keep most games Small (Astrolabe, the blue Delve draw spells). Legacy has Big Game decks - control, Lands, 8cast, Nic Fit...but unless these decks have play in the Small games produced by Legacy's resilient combo decks, they struggle to establish the board state that they're relying on winning with.

Nic Fit uses targeted discard and hard-to-interact-with permanents. 8Cast plays FoW and Chalice. Moon Stompy plays Chalice and Blood Moon. Lands uses Wasteland, Port, and Tabernacle to attack on an oblique axis. In each case, the Big deck is reliant on multiple cards to fight against Xerox.

5) Legacy Lite

I’ve written a lot of nonsense over the years about my attempts to design what I landed on calling a ‘Legacy-Lite’ format. I’m not beholden to the particularities of Legacy’s Constructed Banlist, but I’m now able to articulate that I was, have been, trying to ape its desire for Small games. When people who don’t play Magic ask me, Saf, is this MTG thing genuinely that good to justify how much you think about it, I laugh and say no, but then, I say this: I think Magic is up there with chess as far as having a theoretical ‘perfect’ state of thrilling gameplay (“sequence of interesting decisions” cf Meier). I then say that I think chess is a remarkably beautiful game with emergent complexity, whereas Magic is a game of emergent simplicity, as the game eventually condenses to a single question(*), and ‘studying for the test’ (knowing what Question might finally be asked, choosing lines of play that keep you able to answer a variety of Questions) is the mark of a good Limited player.

(* this is why the all-in Legacy Storm deck was once called “Pact – Spanish Inquisition” – it went door to door and asked a single question, but unlike those red-smocked murderers, it asked “Did you keep Force of Will”?).

The first format design safety valve is one both Sam Black and Mordor identify.
In small games, typically a lot of cards trade and both players are left with relatively few remaining resources. Because modern design sensibilities discourage land destruction as a form of resource denial, we don’t typically see land destruction as a source of small games outside of Legacy.
-Mana chokepoints (players can't play their resources because their lands are destroyed or taxed, or they're killed before playing their lands)

Wasteland is a harsh mistress. As Dom Harvey writes in his design thread in 2020:

Modern Magic design is about accumulating resources and using as much of your mana as possible every turn - this formula is a recipe for success in any format younger than Legacy, where cards like Daze and Wasteland that would be unprintable today place severe constraints on what you can do. The result is that most midrange or control decks (it's easier than ever before to slide between those labels) are great at amassing resources and competing in longer games but also at operating on few resources on the rare occasion that happens. I think this trend is fantastic for Magic in general and Cube in particular but it does encourage an arms race where you always have to be doing the biggest thing. In Standard, this has meant Fires of Invention or Wilderness Reclamation effectively bypassing the entire mana system. In every format, this has meant Uro. The contrast between these two giants is the perfect illustration of this. Uro is the best card in Standard, Pioneer, Modern, and Historic and has prompted calls to delete it from Constructed Magic altogether; Kroxa has seen modest success with zero complaints at all, as far as I can tell. Kroxa attempts to downsize the game in colours that are best at doing that - if we trade resources (with the ample discard and removal in black or burn in red), Kroxa can facilitate those trades while also being the biggest thing on a sparse board. In most Constructed formats, one key plank of that - cheap mana disruption - is off-limits and it's tough to effectively downsize the game in this new world.

Blood Moon, Back to Basics, Hymn, Vindicate, tax effects – these broaden the scope of cheap mana disruption enough to make it a feature of a holistic environment, not just a random ‘there’s one Wasteland deck per Cube night’ screw-job.

Let’s put it all together.

AXIOM 1: If you want Small Games, you need mana denial in your format.

AXIOM 2: Small Games are less likely to result in board stalls. This means they are often resolved by an “unanswered trump”, whether that’s a creature hitting in for lethal sans relevant blockers, a Walker’s Ultimate or snowballing value, or a combo kill that doesn’t get discarded or countered.
COROLLARY: Flying threats condense a stalled battlefield into a much smaller set of relevant game pieces, for threats as well as answers. The prototypical ‘unanswered trump’ in Legacy was once Insectile Aberration; in my format, I’d like Large games to condense down to the fight over a 4/4 with Flying.

AXIOM 3: Just like those playtesters struggling with their Glory Seekers against a field of Ulamog’s Crushers and levelers, having one’s expectations of ‘how Magic works’ dashed by a format’s unique assumptions and safety valves is not fun, and players can struggle to figure out that they’ve even made an (obvious, visible) mistake. Any format that seeks to change ‘the rules of Magic’ will alienate initial playtesters, but you can regain those players and even enthrall them, within the right social context.
COROLLARY: As Dom also writes, perhaps a way to defang this tension is to encourage a context wherein either Uro OR Kroxa is a viable premiere threat. This means that the ‘safety valves’ of the format must have a puncher’s chance at whatever your format’s Uro is doing.

AXIOM 4: Small games trend towards the ‘attrition’ side of Sam Black’s tempo-attrition scale. To support small games, support attrition gameplay. Run fewer Mulldrifters and more Baneslayers; make your combo decks more resilient; match powerful answers to your format’s threats.


As Tinsman wrote in 2010: "The point [of ROE] was to recapture that sense of wonder [of your first week learning Magic]." I guess we really are all chasing that Shivan Dragon. saf out[/c][/c]
 
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landofMordor

Administrator
Sick article and analysis. I'd never read that ROE design article and it was really neat to get that clear articulation of their design goals.

AXIOM 1: If you want Small Games, you need mana denial in your format.
I think this axiom is a little too strongly worded. Mana denial is just one knob among many to create small games. Aggressive Limited formats like M21 or GTC don't have much explicit mana denial, and yet many of these aggro games are fairly small. I guess it works if you broaden the definition to include the mana denial of dying before you can cast all your spells... but maybe I'm just splitting hairs.
COROLLARY: Flying threats condense a stalled battlefield into a much smaller set of relevant game pieces, for threats as well as answers... I’d like Large games to condense down to the fight over a 4/4 with Flying.
I really like this. It's a neat way to summarize how to get a Large game to end quickly.
Small games trend towards the ‘attrition’ side of Sam Black’s tempo-attrition scale
I think tempo (mana chokepoint) and attrition (card chokepoint) are not necessarily correlated with game size. Sam mentions the "High Resource" games which can't be described perfectly by tempo, and I'd also argue that Death and Taxes is a deck that cares about Tempo and Small Games (trying to decrease the number of relevant cards by reducing the opponent's ability to cast them). But, like, I still think I agree in broad strokes; I just think that there's a lot of variation within these broad strokes. If the tempo-attrition rates for every deck were plotted in a histogram, I'd expect each deck's histograms to have huge standard deviations depending on matchup, decision trees, and luck of the draw.

Cool read! Thanks for giving me something to think about in the most boring part of the workday :)
 
Big announcement! I am finally willing to say that I have completed initial tweaks of SHARZAD V3.0 !!! A brief writeup, then I'll move on to discussing some archetypes and colours.
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Sharzad 3 is a 500 card Legacy-Lite environment that tries to recapture both the thrill of learning Magic and the thrill of learning to play combo. I am deeply indebted to this forum, Caleb Gannon's cube and articles, and to my old playgroup for saving me several years of iterative design - my sincere thanks to anyone who reads this post. It's my hope to reduce the size of the cube to 450 once I've had several chances to draft it in person with a full cube night's worth of participants; for now, I've hedged my bets and decided to include more cards that make me happy rather than feel sad when I cut beloved cardboard from the cube.

There are some major differences between Sharzad 2 and Sharzad 3. This time around, combo is much more established in the texture of the environment; it's my hope that at an 8-drafter night, 2 players will be all-in on combo (whether that's storm, berserk, aristocrats, etc, idk.) with everyone else running the gamut from aggro to midrange to control to prison. Seeding the environment for combo calls for more artifact mana (though I've avoided the Grim Monoliths et al of yesteryear in favour of Talismans and Lotus Petals), more ritual-based fast mana, and custom cards to provide the effects I know I need at the lower costs I need them to have. That said, I'm at only ~25 'custom cards' in the pool of 500; these are seasoning, not the main course; nails and screws, not wooden beams.

I agree with Caleb Gannon's philosophy of combo in cube, i.e. that 'engine combo' is really fun. Spell-based Storm combo, insha'Allah, is a viable archetype in my format. There's still broken two-card combos, like Channel+Emrakul (I am very nervous about Channel but want to try it), or Narset+Time Spiral, but in general "it takes three to combo"; Scale Up and Berserk require an attacker, a lethal Tendrils requires some kind of nonsense to set up, and as back-breaking as a turn 1 Dark Ritual into Liliana might be, it's not enough to actually end the game.

Many of the noncreature spells in my format will be familiar to Eternal format players and Cube devotees. Where my Cube begins to show its intensely personal and idiosyncratic nature is the creature suite. Much like in Legacy, sol lands can power out Eldrazi, who usually go into a deck that's heavily-based in one colour and which might splash {c} and possibly something else as well. I think the Eldrazi are one of Magic's most interesting creature types, something not found elsewhere in generic high fantasy, and I like that they are part of not only the game but, since Eldrazi Winter, very strong Constructed formats as well.

I also like dragons. One of my design goals for gameplay, as I wrote two posts up, is for games to 'condense down to an unanswered trump card'; to achieve this, I make use of the fact that 'flying threats condense a stalled battlefield into a much smaller set of relevant game pieces, for permanents as well as spells'. To this end, the rubric for a premium removal spell in my format is whether or not it can answer a 4/4 flier. A mere ~30 cards in the cube have more than 4 toughness, and only ~60 have more than 3 toughness. This provides a meaningful tension between Lightning Bolt and red removal that is not called Lightning Bolt.

The density of dragons informs ramp, fatty cheat archetypes, and even Storm - Dragonstorm is a real contender in the format, with overwhelmingly powerful combo kills at Storm counts much lower than Tendrils or Brain Freeze decks require. With Sharzad 2, I shied away from my love of combo in order to 'get back to basics', to provide compelling and evocative gameplay for my playgroup (mostly casuals and EDH players, with no fellow Storm pilot to shoot the shit with at cube night). With Sharzad 3, Dragonstorm is the solution I've landed on to bridge my love of big dumb fliers with my love for rituals and combo. And by raising the power level of counterspells and protective tools, I'm able to make tapping out for a 4- or 5-drop far more palatable; Force of Will / Negation or even Daze/Veil backup let baneslayers survive to swing in an environment that would otherwise emphasize mulldrifters.
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I'll write much more on each colour some other day. For now:
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Here is the Sharzad 3 link on cube cobra. Bot drafts would be very much appreciated, but not as appreciated as replies to this thread! Wishing you all a good one. xoxo saf
 
I did a few drafts and had a lot of fun. The mix of high powered cards, combos, dragons and synergy hit a sweet spot.
Personal favorite I drafted was a Boros KCI Eldrazi deck, with Jegantha as the companion:











Regarding the combo aspect of the cube, I noted three classic cards that are absent and would love to hear your take on why:



I could actually see Breach being too strong as it can be pretty easy to combo off with a number of cards in the list.
The wheels seem strong especially the Jar since it is one-sided mostly and can be recurred with Goblin Welder and Emry, Lurker of the Loch.
Adding the artifact draw 7 could entice drafters to combine Welder and Emry to their storm decks alongside other recursion targets like LED and Wishclaw Talisman.

Also absent is



I've had a lot of fun combining Lurrus with the aforementioned artifact recursion cards and Scrap Trawler + KCI. It would go well the the existing Sun Titan and Auriok Salvagers in White too!
It does go against the whole dragon part of the cube, since it focuses on low mana value cards though.

Thanks for sharing the cube and your thoughts, again, lots of fun!
 
Regarding the combo aspect of the cube, I noted three classic cards that are absent and would love to hear your take on why:



I could actually see Breach being too strong as it can be pretty easy to combo off with a number of cards in the list.
The wheels seem strong especially the Jar since it is one-sided mostly and can be recurred with Goblin Welder and Emry, Lurker of the Loch.
Adding the artifact draw 7 could entice drafters to combine Welder and Emry to their storm decks alongside other recursion targets like LED and Wishclaw Talisman.

Also absent is

I'm nervous about Lurrus but there's no reason I don't have the wheels besides iterative confusion. Breach is a little too easy to combo out with; if I need it, I'll add it, but right now YawgWill is filling a similar role, I hope....Lurrus I will keep out until I can draft in person and then I'll ask my players.


Thank you very much for the drafts! They look like a lot of fun.
 
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