General Spell Velocity Themes

[Warped]

I would like to preface this thread with the fact that in the grand scheme of things, I am relatively new to cube as a format, as well as drafting from cubes.

I have always been a sucker for the idea of storm. It has a lot of zing, but for the most part it is a horribly parasitic archetype to throw into a cube. However, the release of MH2 has me rethinking some things, alongside some of the strives made from Grillo's cubes. One of my dreams would be to develop fair spell velocity themes, that are not overbearing, but still have enough teeth to compete with other synergies within a low to medium power cube.

Upon the release of MH2, more support and cogs for spell velocity themes were released, mostly in Gruul, a color pairing I think has had promising pieces already for spell velocity themes. In draft gameplay, these gruul decks would operate in such a way that you leverage your spell velocity as either an engine to keep playing, or surge in tempo to pull ahead, as opposed to a monolithic wincon that storm is traditionally seen as. With other support (original storm cards in SCG. Suspend, storm, and free spells in TPF. Rebound in ROE and DTK. Foretell and second spell support in Kaldheim, etc etc.) I think that there is a mounting number of options to support a wider spell velocity theme in a cube where individual cards will not be overly parasitic, and allow players to play at different tempos and with varying tactical agency (which ideas thereof have been alluded to recently in Jason's wetness thread)

I guess, if we imagine the decision space as a physical space, a 'dry' environment has lots of paths that are physically very close to each other, even if those small differences can create very meaningful differences in win percentage. A small advantage the size of a 2/2 bear could be enough of a margin to swing the game.

In a splashier environment there are much more divergent ways the game could unfold. Like in Strixhaven a lot of games hinged upon whether to tempo out a Serpentine Curve or sit back and try to extract maximum value out of it later. The two approaches to playing a matchup felt super different based on that choice, as well as a lot of the wish choices.

All of this leads me to my next sources of insight, being Grillo's innovations.

One of the takeaways I gained from my study of Grillo's cubes, alongside the threads relating to them, is that he sparked it with the idea that combo could be baked into base of a format, non-parasitically. He achieved this with a bounceland format, using bant colors to power large to infinite amounts of mana for a combo kill/overwhelming tempo. Through years of tinkering and playtesting, true works of genius (in my opinion) were achieved, first with Penny Pincher, then again with Inventor's Fair 2.0. I think that at this point in time, I would like to use some of the lessons learned from that endeavor, but seeding the beginning of the cube in a different way.

I am not a fan of infinites. I'd just like to get that out of the way. But I think that expanding on P.P.'s base of bouncelands, untappers, "free spells" and intelligent use of blink is a great baseline for introducing spell velocity into a format. So ghostly flicker would be the first to go. The rest however, build greatly towards player tactical agency in terms of tempo decisions for spell velocity friendly cards. White has blink, low cmc, and repeatable self-bounce. Blue has untappers, card selection, and tempo enabling cards. Black is a little less velocity friendly but cards included in the past such as reaping the graves and consuming vapors were great roleplayers, in addition to some of the CA and selection the color offers. Red has some great low to the ground spells, and is a classic spell velocity color. Finally, green enabled consistent explosive turns with land untappers, alongside a lot of spell velocity support not included in the cube. I think the blueprint is there, it's just a matter of putting the work in to find the format that makes storm and its cousins work.

I think that floor of that format involves base decks being able to have decent results off of a storm count of 1. So in other words, second spell themes. Reaping the graves and sprouting vines becoming an instant speed divination I think is pretty decent. Putting a little sequencing work in to make galvanic relay into a discounted concentrate or better is a great rate!

I like to think that I'm on to something here, and that I (with some help ) might be able to whittle away at a complex format backed by the lessons I've learned lurking these forums for the past year or so. I'm curious as to what you veteran riptiders think?

 

[blacksmithy]

this is a great post, and i think some awesome ideas will come from this thread’s discussion!

“spell velocity” is an awesome MTG concept that just results in fun gameplay, and i try to weave it into every color in my own cube
https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/shingekinocube
through abundance of cantrips, cheap spells, and smoothing effects. it works pretty nicely!

 

[Erik Twice]

Imagine a storm spell that put lands into play. I would love that.

 

[sigh]

is the basis for a lot of the "storming" or at least "casting and recasting of several spells at once" that I do in my format, and feel it would be central to the Gx portion of a format based around that sort of premise, especially Gruul+

 

[KlavierAchse]

Spell slinging is my favourite way to play Magic and it always creeps up on my cube building (ex.: Gruul Creature Storm)
I like it when casting many spells reward you with stronger effects, casting even more spells or drawing more cards.
In my lower powered cube this manfiests as a play 2 spells per turn / prowess / extort / cast triggers for artifacts & enchantments tetra/penta archetype.
My main cube also supports stormy decks as well.

You could probably build a cube that goes super deep on Spell Velocity with multiples of verstalie free spells (like Manamorphose, Burning-Tree Emissary, Memnite, Mishra's Bauble, Pentad Prism, Snap, Snuff Out, ...) and lots of good 1cmc cards (Monastery Swiftspear, Brainstorm, Llanowar Elves, etc...).
I think you'd need to be careful not to end up with a cube where some colors are really favoured or all colors feel the same. (At least I feel that not all colors offer payoffs for spell velocity that feel distinct and unique to that color.)

But there is always the option to cut colors or go heavy on some like @Brad does in his Black Cube.

Instead of doubling up on support cards for spell velocity you could also do it like @blacksmithy and keep the cube super concise. His cube average cmc is also around 2,22 where mine is way higher at 2,85.

this is a great post, and i think some awesome ideas will come from this thread’s discussion!

“spell velocity” is an awesome MTG concept that just results in fun gameplay, and i try to weave it into every color in my own cube
https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/shingekinocube
through abundance of cantrips, cheap spells, and smoothing effects. it works pretty nicely!

I still can't wrap my brain around how you manage to keep your cube at 224 cards. I'm going insane adding & cutting cards in my 360 cube

Imagine a storm spell that put lands into play. I would love that.

Maybe storming with rituals + Animist's Awakening scratches that itch?

 

[blacksmithy]

Instead of doubling up on support cards for spell velocity you could also do it like @blacksmithy and keep the cube super concise. His cube average cmc is also around 2,22 where mine is way higher at 2,85.


I still can't wrap my brain around how you manage to keep your cube at 224 cards. I'm going insane adding & cutting cards in my 360 cube

Thanks!
My cube is designed for 2-4 players which helps, and i have a large roster of “unofficial occasionals” that i swap in and out between cube nights, which makes it easier to cut something if i know it’ll probably be back at some point for a limited time.
(being ruthless about cutting down the mana curve and bringing up the power helps too, as it just invalidates a lot of cards by default.)

 

[Warped]

is the basis for a lot of the "storming" or at least "casting and recasting of several spells at once" that I do in my format, and feel it would be central to the Gx portion of a format based around that sort of premise, especially Gruul+

I agree wholeheartedly. I think that the consistency gained from a mana system that combats negative variance (Bouncelands, Scrylands, Cycling lands, rewarding land sac outlets, and in color mechanics that use lands as currency whether on field, hand, or GY) is great for a format where you need that consistency to play a longer game, where you get to see the number of cards that can support blowing through a lot of cards in one go. It's what I really like about Naya in Inventor's Fair 2.0. This I think, tied with the power of aggro in a format is what will make or break the variable velocity decks.

 

[Warped]

You could probably build a cube that goes super deep on Spell Velocity with multiples of verstalie free spells (like Manamorphose, Burning-Tree Emissary, Memnite, Mishra's Bauble, Pentad Prism, Snap, Snuff Out, ...) and lots of good 1cmc cards (Monastery Swiftspear, Brainstorm, Llanowar Elves, etc...).
I think you'd need to be careful not to end up with a cube where some colors are really favoured or all colors feel the same. (At least I feel that not all colors offer payoffs for spell velocity that feel distinct and unique to that color.)

I think I want to be careful with raw low cmc ramp effects. I also want to be careful with true free spells like memnite et all. My central idea is Temur as the main "stormy" support colors, with more "fringe" support in black and white. These off enablers will be made to still feel like their colors, but be able to work with velocity themes. One I am particularly excited about what with all the rebound and other "free" spells floating around will be

 

[blacksmithy]

i wanted to contribute more to this thread so uh, here’s some of the ways i personally increase overall spell velocity and reward players for doing so, but i don’t have a lot of words about it… it all just kinda goes together nicely to produce a high velocity environment, hope it makes sense

Spoiler

 

[landofMordor]

Another way to do this is through custom rules such as "all spells and abilities cost 2 less to cast", such as Anthony Maddox's Turbo Cube.

 

[Brad]

Is there a difference between "spell velocity" and having a quite low curve? Would it be from having payoffs for casting things?

 

[blacksmithy]

probably? i take the term “spell velocity deck” to mean “a deck that casts lots of spells per game” and in my mind a low curve with lots of cantrips/smoothing is a way to make that happen. i think what will generally happen with a high curve spell velocity deck is you start out with actually quite a low “velocity” until lategame, since your spells cost too much to cast a bunch early, and then suddenly you get big mana and go off in the later turns. so i guess you can play with “what turn do i want the velocity to go up?” within an environment. for me that’s turn one but that may not always be the desired outcome

 

[Rasmus Källqvist]

Yeah, didn't grillo come up with that term to better describe a deck that tries to go off around the mid-game with a barrage of spells that all give some incremental value, like prowess?

 

[sigh]

From what I recall, it was developed as a more holistic term for "spells matter", or at the very least that's what I've used it for for the past few years.
Aggro: Not necessarily spell velocity. May have a very low land count and still cast relatively few cards per turn in the grand scheme of things. Casting extra spells doesn't necessarily gain the deck anything synergy-wise, beyond "having more spells in play sooner".
Spell Velocity: Repeatedly casts a high number of spells in order to drive deck progress (prowess, YP triggers, counting spells in the GY, etc). Often backed by cantrips and other cheap card selection, and burn.

 

[dbs]

Ode to Do-Nothing Cards

Recently, I've been fleshing out my support for Green spells deck. For example, including



alongside token generators like Chatterstorm and magecraft payoffs. I feel great about choosing to double up on Abundant Harvest and Green Sun's Zenith, and triple up on Manamorphose because these are all cards that go effortlessly into a wide variety of different green decks - spells-based or otherwise. Along these lines, I was considering adding Simian Spirit Guide and Elvish Spirit Guide, but decided that it would be better just to double up on Lotus Petal instead because of the artifact and graveyard synergies. From here I considered doubling up on Mishra's Bauble as well, since I already run two Gitaxian Probes - an instants/sorceries variation on the same theme.



Thinking through possible decks and drafting dyamics, I deeply appreciate the flexible role of these "do-nothing" cards and bursty mana accelerants. They enable a surprisingly wide variety of different deck archetypes each of which falls under a broad spell-velocity umbrella. Each of these decks wants the same baseline enablers; the same "veggies" like Git Probe or Baubles. Some of them use these building blocks to up the storm count. Some make use of the various triggers that come with playing many free spells of different card types. Some use them just to thin the deck aggressively. With multiples of the basic enablers it's still exciting when the draft pulls you into a certain set of payoffs or another (Monastery Mentor! Urza! Brain Freeze!) but there's no scarcity of the components that make the decks actually function.

I'm going to try to walk through some of the options with a series of examples. In one sense, this post is going to be about "non-parasitic storm" in so far as (1) the decks are focused on playing a lot of spells each turn, but (2) they win in different ways, and (3) the drafting dynamics are very open instead of narrow and on-rails.

Let's start with a more traditional looking storm combo deck. In fact, let's take the green spells and do-nothing cards idea to the extreme and consider a "1 card archetype." A deck with only 3 lands. Goblin Charbelcher, using only cards I'm considering for my next cube update.

Charbelcher

Note, I'm going to ignore MDFC lands for the purposes of this discussion; they would go in for free. The goal here is purely to show off the do-nothing cards in their various forms. We have cards like Land Grant, Lotus Petal, and Chrome Mox to act as "lands" which also count as casting spells. We have Gitaxian Probe, Mishra's Bauble, Abundant Harvest, a Tutors to thin the deck. We have rituals for bursty mana, and some ultra-powerful card advantage engines like Yawgmoth's Will, Wheel of Fortune, and Underworld Breach. The win conditions are Tendrils of Agony and Charbelcher.

I generated some random starting hands, and they look pretty good even with the ultra-low land count:






This Charbelcher list is basically going to play the same as typical storm in a powered cube - but just a little more extreme. If this is all we got, then I wouldn't be interested in doubling up on Lotus Petals, Git Probes etc. The game play is very all-or-nothing: you either draw charbelcher + mana and win, or spin your wheels for bit, do nothing, and whiff. But on the other hand, we have a deck sketch here with a LOT of ways of drawing through our deck and doing nothing. This forms a starting framework to have a much more interestingly interactive deck by including cards that care about the random spells being cast. Sticking with the Green spells theme, here's a RG aggro version featuring Berserk where we've gone up to 6 lands.

RG Velocity Aggro

You can see that we have a pretty aggressive game play with cheap burn and pump along with prowess creatures, pyromancer, and a few storm payoffs. Most cards in the deck can equally utilize cheap or free instants and cheap or free artifacts. But we could lean in one direction or the other in order to specialize further. We'll return to the RG base in a moment, but for now here's an artifact-specific version where we've now gone up to 8 lands:

UW Artifacts

We have a few strong ways to interact in chalice, winter orb, balance. But now we have an overall extremely strong combo plan with Tinker + Urza + Emry + Paradox Engine, Zirda + Grim Monolith + Mana Vault, three wheels, and a nice Urza's Saga package. We have Brain Freeze, Walking Ballista, and Monastery Mentor to close out the game. The game plan looks quite a bit different from the previous RG aggressive deck, but a surprising number of the basic veggies fit into both.

Returning to the Green-based ideas, we can take a tokens approach which utilizes creature synergies (but again featuring many of the same do-nothing cards). The land count goes slightly higher as we lean more heavily on 2 CMC permanents.

RG Tokens

Now we get some mana dorks and Earthcraft as ways to make mana from our creatures. We have Skullclamp and Glimpse of Nature to turn our creatures into more cards. We get Purphoros and Embercleave to turn creatures into a kill. Now your Gitaxian Probes, Seething Songs, and Manamorphose can make creatures off of Young Pyromancer while still drawing you a boatload of cards with Galvanic Relay.

Next, we'll edge the land count up to 11 lands + 2 mox. It's another variation on the same theme but with a more explicit focus on instants/sorceries:

Jund Spells

Now we're turning out do-nothing spells into Witherbloom Apprentic and Sedgemoor Witch triggers. We also get to dip into Duress, Bloodchief's Thirst, and Dark Rituals alongside the original RG cards. But huge chunk of the deck are the same old do-nothing veggie cards. You can also see the makings of a graveyard-heavy plan with Arclight Phoenix and Faithless Looting. This would be yet another direction in which to specialize the deck.

The do-nothing spells and fast mana also form a very natural bridge with other combo strategies. Here's a nice example that focuses on creature cheat, where many of the creatures are especially degenerate when your decks is filled with free spells:

UR Storm Cheat

In the previous examples, I was largely sticking to the green base just to illustrate branching paths. Here I consider a version that dips into the very powerful cheap and free blue cards. The deck is still mostly cheap or free, but we've traded Lightning Bolts and Duress for Force of Will and Gush. Getting a Niv-Mizzet into play looks especially fun.

So to recap we have 1 meme deck and 5 genuinely draftable decks that can use different but overlapping parts of the basic storm / spell velocity package with wildly differing pay-offs and game plans. There's just so much room to maneuver here as a drafter. As always, these examples are heavily skewed towards my idiosyncratic environment. But we can see some of the same ideas reflected in Nanonox's recent post (https://riptidelab.com/forum/threads/fast-multiplayer-cube.3208/post-110580) on their storm shell and spells-matter themes at a slightly lower power-level and without breaking singleton.

Likewise, Mown's cube (https://riptidelab.com/forum/threads/sequence-cube.3524/) is yet another step down in power-level but also incorporates some of the singleton breaks on key cards like Manamorphose, Burning-Tree Emissary, Once Upon a Time, Preordain, Faithless Looting, etc. I think these inclusions are way more critical to making spell velocity decks be diverse and well supported compared to playing literal Tendrils of Agony, or heavy-handedly doubling up on powerful pay-off cards. Maybe further down the power ladder might include Cloud of Faeries and Sunscape Familiar or doubling up on Strike it Rich. But again, its the do-nothing spell velocity enablers that really need to be present in high enough density. Then diverse gameplans and archetypes should pop up naturally from there.

 

[LadyMapi]

The other nice thing about those "do nothing" cards is that they let decks get away with running fewer lands — some of them, like Land Grant, all but demand that you run fewer lands to get the best results possible.

And, on top of that, they're usually power agnostic — because they "do nothing", their actual power is highly dependent on what else is in your deck.

 

[dbs]

These points are so dead on!

(1)

The other nice thing about those "do nothing" cards is that they let decks get away with running fewer lands — some of them, like Land Grant, all but demand that you run fewer lands to get the best results possible.

This is exactly right. I started sketching these decklists in part to explore some ultra low land counts. This was inspired by getting down to 12 lands in my UB deck in my most recent draft. I didn't even come close to having mana problems. The decks above have 5, 8, 10, 11, and 13 lands (including the moxes) respectively!

(2)

And, on top of that, they're usually power agnostic — because they "do nothing", their actual power is highly dependent on what else is in your deck.

Again, this is spot on. I think Mishra's Bauble and Manamorphose are probably the best examples, they fit everywhere. Likewise, the Green cantrips can probably go relatively low down the power spectrum. They're a fair bit weaker than Ponder, although many low power cubers here prefer to limit their card selection heavily.

One thing you're keying in on is that there are two power-level axes here. There's the pay-off axis and then the "how many cards you can play a turn axis". The mana accelerants like Lotus Petal / Dark Ritual and the velocity advantage engines like Yawgmoth's Will crank the cards-a-turn axis up to 11. Whereas if you just pack a few Manamorphose + Land Grants, maybe that's more likely to be triggering your Clarion Spirit.

But this is still at least partly distinct from how strong they pay-offs are. E.g. storm vs magecraft vs second-spellers. Or even Vedalken Archmage + Disciple of the Vault vs Jhoira, Weatherlight Captain + Marionette Master.

And of course, building from the ground up in this way makes the whole enterprise much less parasitic. You start with the enablers that are broadly applicable and you can specialize by layering on some themes and coordinated pay-offs on top.

 

[Mown]

All my homies love spinning wheels.

 

[blacksmithy]

love to hear about people running 12 lands in a deck, that’s some real magic right there

 

[LadyMapi]

Alright, time to make myself seem like a crazy person:

There's an additional category of "do nothing" card — let's call them "extra copy" cards:



The idea here is that, sometimes, there are cards that an individual deck wants extra copies of but the cube doesn't. These cards make that happen.

 

[inscho]

love to hear about people running 12 lands in a deck, that’s some real magic right there

10 Land Stompy in Extended was my jam back in the day