General Small archetype packages

[Rusje]

What if you would allow your drafters to add a certain amount of the cycling lands (not bicycle) from the land box? And add the bicycle ones in the draft. Cheap way to increase the amount.

 

[XRS]

I think it was someone else here go estimated that you needed 60 cyclers in a 360 cube to get the same as-fan as Ikoria?

It was the release of Ikoria that sparked my interest in trying to make the cycling aggro archetype work. Your numbers may be right and makes it a daunting task for a cube designer. However, having given this some thought I think that Ikoria is not the goal to strive for. The fox in Ikoria draft routinely clocks in as a 4/4 or 5/5 by the second attack step. This is more powerful than most other white one drops.

As the foxes have cycling 1 other cycling payoffs may want to include them in their deck. My thinking is that I will support a drafter to pick up the aggro cycling payoffs - 2 foxes, Stinger (maybe include more of these per TGT's advice?), Valiant Rescuer, Snare Tactician. Maybe I put back in Prickly Marmoset. Outside of that I try and make overlapping synergies. Ghitu Lavarunner also appreciates sorceries and instants that find their way to the yard. Flameblade adept isn't as explosive as the Fox, but it is evasive and has other synergies in the cube. Spinehorn minotaur is scary with cycling 1. And if the deck doesnt come together every draft - at least the other players who are trying to enable Improbable Alliance, Drake Haven or Faith of the Devoted can use the cycling 1/2 on the aggro cards.

Am i too high on Tectonic Reformation? It seems the perfect remedy for the cycling deck both in drafting and in-game. It even has cycling itself for when you top deck it with no land (though maybe you should have been sandbagging some of those).

 

[Rasmus Källqvist]

It was the release of Ikoria that sparked my interest in trying to make the cycling aggro archetype work. Your numbers may be right and makes it a daunting task for a cube designer. However, having given this some thought I think that Ikoria is not the goal to strive for. The fox in Ikoria draft routinely clocks in as a 4/4 or 5/5 by the second attack step. This is more powerful than most other white one drops.

On my phone - will elaborate later. As the foxes have cycling 1 other cycling payoffs may

That's probably a good point! Making it less of a "tribal" theme and maybe rather another angle to an existing aggro deck would probably be a good way to go about it.

 

[TrainmasterGT]

I think it was someone else here go estimated that you needed 60 cyclers in a 360 cube to get the same as-fan as Ikoria? I didn't do this math myself, so I don't know, and probably you can get away with a slightly lower density of cyclers if you have fewer payoffs. The enablers are going to need to take up a good chunk of your cube either way you do it, but it's cycling so that should hopefully already be a mechanic that you run a couple of cards with.

Quite fond of having a very large number of enablers for something there is only maybe 1-2 payoffs. The enablers are transparent in this case in that you'd always want the cyclers anyway, but a card like thundermane can come along mid-pack 2 and just spice things up alot while also not taking up that much space in the cube!

That was me!

I love cycling as a mechanic. If you want the cards that only trigger off of cards that cycle to be approximately as good as they are in Ikoria limited, you're going to need ~60 cards with cycling to get your as-fan ratio to a similar state. If you manage to do that though (which isn't hard at the peasant power level, mind you, you've already selected 32 options!), you're going to have a fun and interesting archetype for your drafters.

The easiest way to pay off an Ikoria-style cycling deck in a 360 cube, in my evaluation, is adding this:

The best cycling decks in Ikoria always seem to have between 3-4 Stingers, so just throwing 4 in the cube means your drafters can get the density of payoffs they need without needing to include a bunch of really narrow cards. Stinger is nice because it also lets any red deck run fewer lands thanks to the inherent smoothing multiple cost cantrips entail, while still itself being usable as a decent body.

Now, I still advocate running more cycling payoff cards than just a bunch of Drannith Stingers to have a more combined cycling/discard archetype, but stinger is the best payoff if you're trying to do an ikoria-style combo-cycling deck and I think it's the one card where breaking singleton to accommodate it is the most worthwhile. I could also see singleton breaks on Valiant Rescuer, Flourishing Fox, and especially Zenith Flare, although I think any more than two copies of each of those is a little overkill.