Card/Deck Single Card Spotlight

Rusje

Rusje

Thanks! This forum made me make a cube a while back.

Your drafters probably do not know Gurzigost so if you do not mind you could sharpie the mana cost away. Or alter it to pay 2 life?

Nanonox if you have such a strong mill theme may I suggest Genesis ? It is almost a one card engine and is a card you want in the yard. You already run Anger so I assume you know of the others? Glory is not everyone's cup of tea but in a multiplayer cube it is less punishing.

Personally I like to have answers against graveyard strategies/dredge cards/ the judgement cards. It is quite a story if someone's plans thwarted by Faerie Macabre. Ofcourse hypnotic specter is a stronger flyer but macabre gives free graveyard removal with a meager flying body if there are no targets.
 
ravnic

ravnic

I'm against mechanically changing cards or adding customs for my cube personally, as it feels like cheating to solve the puzzle. But I might have a slot to test it. I love how this forum helps one to find crazy little games of old days :)


Edit:
20 minutes of thinking made me realize I should run this card over Grizzly Fate most likely. Thank you, @Rusje !!
 
Nanonox

Nanonox

Rusje said:
Nanonox if you have such a strong mill theme may I suggest Genesis ? It is almost a one card engine and is a card you want in the yard. You already run Anger so I assume you know of the others? Glory is not everyone's cup of tea but in a multiplayer cube it is less punishing.
Click to expand...


Thanks for the suggestions.
Gurzigost is a really cool card I didn't know about, but doesn't quite get there for my cube. It's missing a keyword or 2.

I have run Genesis in the past, when my cube was a little slower. It was always a decent engine. But now with a higher speed, I find that taxing 3 mana a turn to get back some random dude doesn't cut it.
As for Glory, I like it since it ties white to the GY theme, but I'm not a fan of protection.

I agree that having some counter play to stategies is important, which is why I was eyeing Primal Command and Loaming Shaman as ways of either disrupting or reusing the GY.

By the way, if you have your cube up somewhere, maybe you could add it to your signature. I like to check out other people's cube and draft them to get inspiration.

I'm probably going to try to fit Loaming Shaman or maybe just Elixir of Immortality as a universal way of helping those decks. Thanks everyone!
 
Brad

Brad

Chris Taylor said:
How do you feel about Ash Barrens vs Prismatic Vista
Pretend price is no object, I know prismatic vista is like 30 fucking dollars or whatever
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I'd run both for sure. They're lands that any deck will play, except maybe the aggro-est deck avoids Barrens. That's the kind of fixing I'm after until we get inundated with it to a point where 5C is common.

Nanonox said:
What is your experience with these recycling cards? Are they needed and if so which ones do you play?
Click to expand...
I've only seen one deck out in The Black Cube and I looped Stitcher's Supplier off of Gisa and Geralf for a mill 18 lol.
 
Velrun

Velrun

ravnic said:
I'm against mechanically changing cards or adding customs for my cube personally, as it feels like cheating to solve the puzzle.
Click to expand...

Or a way to create a new puzzle if you’ve already solved the puzzles Wizards gave us. It is like how scientists look for new problems even though the civilized world already functions like intended.

On a side note I feel like custom cards belong 100 % in the custom thread. I promise to never post a custom card in any other thread again since I want the non-customers to have their custom free threads.

Also I have almost dissolved custom card designing because I have moved on to creating custom rules for my cube instead and it has proven to be much better received by the player base.
 
ravnic

ravnic

But the puzzle is the cube one creates. It is very difficult, but can be switched into easy mode by customizing things. It's like cheat codes in Grand Theft Auto. Just my 2cents.
 
Onderzeeboot

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
ravnic said:
But the puzzle is the cube one creates. It is very difficult, but can be switched into easy mode by customizing things. It's like cheat codes in Grand Theft Auto. Just my 2cents.
Click to expand...

If you want analogies, I can give you a better one. Cubing without customs is like decorating your living room with stuff you can buy exclusively. Cubing with customs is like picking up brush and paint, hammer and nails, and using your creativity to add homemade stuff to whatever cool items you bought. Could you paint a 6x6 feet canvas a lurid orange and green? Yes, yes you could. Would that make your living room a nicer place? Doubtful. With designing customs it's the same. You're looking at the various archetypes in your cube, and try to find which ones need more or different support cards, and you design to plug those holes. I mean, I can see where you're coming from with your analogy to cheating, but calling it that is almost insulting. Calling it easy mode is even worse, as finding the right custom is definitely not a matter of sitting in front of a computer for 5 minutes and going: "lulz, this is much stronger and better than what WotC printed, done!" I can't speak for others, but designing customs takes me a lot more time than looking for WotC-printed cards (obviously ignoring the cycle completion customs, like Esper Triome for my Wheel of Change cube). I don't want my customs to outclass printed cards, so striking the right power level is important. Like I said, I'm mostly designing customs to fill a specific role or archetype, which takes some time to get right. To this end, I spend hours testing my cube's custom before actually printing them and including them in the cube. And then there's the art, I can easily spend an hour to find the right art for a custom card, sometimes more if I can't directly source the art and have to figure out who painted it, because I do want to attribute it to the right artist. Easy mode, right?
 
TekLazar

TekLazar

With my brief experience with making custom cards I agree with onderz. I can see where Ravnic is coming from because yes we could finally get that red 1 mana 2/1 without trinket text BUT will that card play well in our environment? Should I make the card's tribe relevant? Should I then bring in that tribe to my cube? If yes, should that tribe be incidental? or heavily supported?
And that's just a vanilla card, it gets heavily more complicated when you have to factor in... everything.

But at the same time it is very satisfying to design a cube with your own limitations, and some people's limitations are not to use custom cards or to break singleton or anything else like that. That's just how it goes with the cube community.
 
ravnic

ravnic

Sorry Onde, maybe my words came off a little rude, I didn't intend to insult anyone and I know that you and other put a lot of work, thought and time into your customs. But in general I'm sticking with what I said. Because, in theory, when you habe limited resources to solve a problem, it is harder to solve than with unlimited resources in most cases. Let me give a cube related example:

Someone runs a W/B lifegain theme and a B/R goblin theme. This person realizes, that both decks need a black 2 drop, W/B one that is a source of life, B/R one that is a goblin. But they have only one free slot and they can't find a card that fulfills both roles. Now it seems like the easier way to just create a card like this:

Goblin Butcher 1B
Creature - Goblin
Lifelink
2/1

Sure, it is difficult to create the perfect card, but still more difficult to solve when you just can't have the perfect card or the one that works for both aspects. You now have to search for alternatives. Maybe you can't cut another 2 drop, but you can replace a 3-drop that's in for your U/B theme and replace it with something that still works for U/B but is also a goblin or lifegain source.

This example is highly simplified, but it shows how difficult the process of problem solving with a limited card pool is. And that's why just creating a custom for such needs feels like a shortcut to me and I would enjoy cube managing less if I did it, personally.

I have nothing against it when others do it properly and I love some fan made custom sets and card designs I've seen here and elsewhere on the internet.
 
Onderzeeboot

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
ravnic said:
Sorry Onde, maybe my words came off a little rude, I didn't intend to insult anyone and I know that you and other put a lot of work, thought and time into your customs. But in general I'm sticking with what I said. Because, in theory, when you habe limited resources to solve a problem, it is harder to solve than with unlimited resources in most cases. Let me give a cube related example:

Someone runs a W/B lifegain theme and a B/R goblin theme. This person realizes, that both decks need a black 2 drop, W/B one that is a source of life, B/R one that is a goblin. But they have only one free slot and they can't find a card that fulfills both roles. Now it seems like the easier way to just create a card like this:

Goblin Butcher 1B
Creature - Goblin
Lifelink
2/1

Sure, it is difficult to create the perfect card, but still more difficult to solve when you just can't have the perfect card or the one that works for both aspects. You now have to search for alternatives. Maybe you can't cut another 2 drop, but you can replace a 3-drop that's in for your U/B theme and replace it with something that still works for U/B but is also a goblin or lifegain source.

This example is highly simplified, but it shows how difficult the process of problem solving with a limited card pool is. And that's why just creating a custom for such needs feels like a shortcut to me and I would enjoy cube managing less if I did it, personally.

I have nothing against it when others do it properly and I love some fan made custom sets and card designs I've seen here and elsewhere on the internet.
Click to expand...

Apology accepted :) For the record, I have nothing against people who don't want to use customs either. It's not that I think that every cube would be better off if they would only use customs. Your example is great though. In this case the 'solution' might be simple, but I love that. There's an obvious need, and your cube will (presumably) play better if only that 2/1 goblin with lifelink existed. That's the magic of using customs, because if you need it, it exists. You have more of a focus on the puzzle of building a cube, while I have more of a focus on the gameplay with that cube. For me the puzzle is figuring out that there is an intersection that could solve both the needs of goblin tribal, and the needs of life gain matters. If the solution to that puzzle doesn't exist, because Wizards hasn't printed it (yet), I'm not going to wait for them to do that, I am improving the gameplay of my cube right here, right now, by adding that custom that would be the solution.

Of course I can appreciate that you're looking for a different puzzle :)
 
Velrun

Velrun

Just in case anyone missed it:
Cubing is custom by default. You are creating a new Mtg set to draft.

Cubing is one kind of custom. There are others like creating new cards that also didn't exist before. Or changing artwork on cards with acrylic hand paint. Or changing some rules for the tournament like "All Basic lands are Snow Basic lands."



The custom Ravnic is talking about is the one where we design new cards.
Here there are also several variants and reasons for doing so.
A huge downside is the appeal to others. Strangers will often dislike unofficial cards because they feel like it's cheating to play with cards that they can't bring to a Vintage tournament. The upside has to outvalue the downside or else the customs fail.

One upside is you can open up design space. For instance we have played with Companions for a long time and now Wizards print the mechanic.
Another upside is you can create archetypes that otherwise has too little support to function in a high-powered, mid-powered or low-powered cube.
Personally I have 99 % stopped with custom cards because I have moved on to custom rules for my Roguelike deckbuilder Mtg boardgame. As an example here is an oversized playmat we use. The size of this playmat is 2,5 normal playmats.

The Town.jpg

Each of the squares at the top named "Classes", "Advanced Classes" etc. have the size of a sleeved Mtg card. The "Pit" has the size of a deck box.



Lastly I wish to say that designing a custom card (or a hundred) is easy and printing a card that is too strong is easy and perhaps cheating. However designing a clean, interesting and fair custom card not only takes time. It also takes talent and sometimes brute force :p

We have a custom design challenge coming up soon and I greatly encourage Ravnic to participate. Even though you might never include a custom card in your cube. I hope you want to try the challenge and see if you can defeat the other competitors or a least have a blast trying :D More on this by Kirblinx soon.
 
ravnic

ravnic

Oh, yeah I would love to participate! It's not like I don't design customs, I just don't want to mix them into my cube. Will you make sure we won't miss more information regarding the contest? :)
 
TrainmasterGT

TrainmasterGT

Velrun said:
We have a custom design challenge coming up soon and I greatly encourage Ravnic to participate. Even though you might never include a custom card in your cube. I hope you want to try the challenge and see if you can defeat the other competitors or a least have a blast trying :D More on this by Kirblinx soon.
Click to expand...

Well this is interesting... I'm excited! :D
 
Velrun

Velrun

I have read several times here on Riptide that this beautiful Hideaway land is OP.

Can someone explain, please? I am thinking of including it into my cube but I fear it won't ever activate its hideaway.

 
sigh

sigh

It is much easier to get to 20 cards in your deck than you might be thinking. Unless your format is blazing fast. Most blue decks especially should be able to meet this criteria without any real effort.
 
Rusje

Rusje

Most cubes have there players start with a deck of 40 cards. So, with your starting hand of 7 including the isle you only need to thin your library by 12. Since it is a blue card it is likely you will draw/loot 4 cards in 6 turns. Not to mention fetchlands which lower the clock by one. It is just a free card which often will let you play a spell for free by (a rough estimation) turn 6 without even having to resort to mulch type of cards.
If your power level can handle that, and you include some answers like (warning the following cards could be viewed as offensive by some people) wasteland, armageddon, or ravenous baboons then go for it!
 
Onderzeeboot

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
Like people said, depending on the speed of you cube, the requirement can be trivial to fulfill. In addition, this lets you cast anything at instant speed, for only 2 mana! I've ran it in the past, and let me tell you, Cruel Ultimatum is not a fair 2 cmc instant! I think the most high value Shelldock Isle I ever saw was a pre-declare blockers Grave Titan.
 
ravnic

ravnic

Plays better than it looks, I think I usually get 2-4 cards/damage out of it OR the opponent uses a removal spell for it. Gets bonus points if you have madness synergies, but it doesn't need it to be good. The "discard your hand" clause is relevant though, obviously, as you don't want to use it's ability when you still have too much goodness on your hand. That gives opponents more time to deal with it. But then again, if they are using a removal spell on my 1-drop, then it worked out just fine.
 
inscho

inscho

In my cube, I’d say courier would exile 2 cards on average.Then it sits on the board until your hand is depleted or until it eats a removal spell. Baiting removal is pretty strong in a raging goblin. There were definitely instances where it would net 4+ cards. My graveyard cube has several archetypes that have low creature counts, and it would obviously have more play against those decks. I also run it because I support artifact aggro. It’s one of the more interesting one drops available to red and I always felt good about running it.

Edit: looks like me and Ravnic on the same wavelength on this one :D
 
ravnic

ravnic

Exactly. As a hasty 1-drop he usually gets a few hits in or sometimes trades with a 2-drop or etas a removal, but when he survives, he can refill your hand and hopefully give you the reach to close out the game.
 
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