I'm pretty sure there's a lot more nuance to cheap threats than just the linear aggro vs control matchup that seems like its just being glossed over here as there's certainly games between two creature heavy decks where the fear of a wrath isn't present and decks are jockying for board position through spot removal and opposing blockers which is the kind of gamestate that strongly rewards these sorts of cheap snowballing cards. A lot of these creatures are also blue threats, which means they are inherently more likely to contribute to an adaptive midrange gameplan rather than linear aggro and additionally because they're blue they're going to be backed up by countermagic which means they can actually be protected from sweepers.
Sets (STX) Strixhaven Testing/Includes Thread
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they still have the flaw of requiring to be drawn in a certain order, as opposed to something like Tarmogoyf, which counts previously-achieved game actions as well as future ones (counting existing GY types and adding anything new that enters later).
If I draw something like Champion of the Parish Turn 7, even in a nuanced matchup that's down to the wire, it's basically a dead draw compared to even a 2/1 for 1 that hits with twice the power right out of the gate no matter what. Still would rather not draw the 1-drop at all, but it's much better to have the consistent power for trading etc. rather than now having to rely on even further turns in the future for benefit.
If I draw something like Champion of the Parish Turn 7, even in a nuanced matchup that's down to the wire, it's basically a dead draw compared to even a 2/1 for 1 that hits with twice the power right out of the gate no matter what. Still would rather not draw the 1-drop at all, but it's much better to have the consistent power for trading etc. rather than now having to rely on even further turns in the future for benefit.
Yeah I just don't think this is accurate. Cards falling off in value as the game goes on has near zero impact on their influence on winrate in the archetypes that want them. Goblin Guide blows ass on turn 7, but that doesn't matter because the decks that play Goblin Guide sign up for saying "if I'm still playing the game by turn 7 then my winrate should be in the toilet". The snowballing cards like Young Pz are significantly different however in that the midrange decks that want them should be able to generate enough gas to enable them well into the later turns. There's a reason why UR Delver in Legacy can still be found playing Young Pyromancer, you just load your deck up with cheap cantrips to reliably proc the card and dig for value generation effects like Uro to keep you gassed up. In cube, even if you're singleton, this is an easily achievable configuration of cards to curate as there's tons of reasonably priced cantrips and ways to generate card advantage in 2021 magic.
I've noticed a similar problem with landfall. I tried to mitigate it as much as I could by making my landfall archetype tend more towards a very grindy midrange playstyle than the aggressive version. Also cards like Soratami Cloudskater, Kor Skyfisher or Life from the Loam (with self sacrificing lands for example) help the landfall triggers coming in the late game.
I'm on the same boat as @japahn here, I just think it is sometimes worth it to still include cards that are better drawn early, if they have a good impact on the environment. (I think the landfall mechanic is great because it turns every topdeck into chemicals). If the same is true for young peezy in @inscho's cube is something I can't say.
I'm on the same boat as @japahn here, I just think it is sometimes worth it to still include cards that are better drawn early, if they have a good impact on the environment. (I think the landfall mechanic is great because it turns every topdeck into chemicals). If the same is true for young peezy in @inscho's cube is something I can't say.
japahn already mentioned that the winrate isn't heavily impacted or even relevant to our point, even though it can play a part. Champ is still much worse for your chance of winning turn 4 or even 3, compared to turn 1. This is about cards like it being a worse and less consistent play experience. It adds another layer of luck factor of how your deck is stacked.
Not all RTL cubes can just "load up on cantrips". It has a disastrous impact on play balance in a lot of RTL power bands. YP is just not needed for a lot of RTL environments these days, from what I see. Many aren't building up for anything close to Legacy deck power and consistency (combined with not matching Legacy's penchant for more open board states where a couple vanilla 1/1's might actually matter)
Not all RTL cubes can just "load up on cantrips". It has a disastrous impact on play balance in a lot of RTL power bands. YP is just not needed for a lot of RTL environments these days, from what I see. Many aren't building up for anything close to Legacy deck power and consistency (combined with not matching Legacy's penchant for more open board states where a couple vanilla 1/1's might actually matter)
I'm new here so you'll have to forgive me with unfamiliarity of the power band you cats tend to play in. I'm more familiar with higher power formats so every time wotc prints a new busted cantrip like Abundant Harvest I'm content to say "Oh yes, another broken card, thank you very much WotC, I accept your generous gift!", and then I put it in my cube.
Yeah. I don't think it's particularly good, but it's a cool design. Like I said, it's likely getting cut and may have already been cut. I can't keep track during this reconstruction.
I'm not sure what I have to say is relevant to the main argument here, but I may have something to contribute.
1. Young Pyromancer isn't needed everywhere anymore. He's a good card no matter what, but cubes without a spells-matter archetype or a billion cantrips and burn spells won't necessarily miss him. I've cut Young Pyromancer before and not missed him.
2. Draw order can affect any card, top deck, or otherwise. A Quirion Dryad drawn on turn 7 is contributing to variance about as much as an Overseer of the Damned (or some other expensive card) drawn on turn 1. Expensive cards don't do anything until they can be cast, so they're effectively a squandered resource until they are able to be deployed. Let me provide an example.
I play the Cycling deck in historic*. In cycling, almost every card in the deck either has cycling or is a mana source. There are only two cards that aren't: Flameblade Adept and Zenith Flare. Flameblade Adept is a vital card to early victories. Its menace ability means that most decks won't be able to block it until turn three or four. This card allows for many quick victories. However, its value significantly falls off after the opponent is able to play several blockers. It's one of the worst cards to cycle into, even on an early turn! However, the deck still wants Flameblade Adept because it is so strong when drawn early. Drawing it late isn't good, but the sacrifice is well-worth the potential variance. After all, a 1/2 menace is never completely useless, even when it isn't actively useful.
Zenith Flare, by contrast, is amazing when drawn late but mediocre when drawn before it can do it's thing. Often, Zenith Flare just says
: Win the Game. However, a 4-mana card can be a bit pricey for a strategy that only plays 2o lands. In addition, the fact that Zenith Flare needs several cards with cycling in the yard before it can actually win a match means that it isn't always active. It can even sometimes lose players games when it is drawn in excess or when it can't be cast. However, it's a mistake not to play Zenith Flare, as it does win games when it is cast.This is anecdotal evidence, but I have lost more games to drawing too many Zenith Flares that I couldn't cast than drawing too many late Flameblade Adepts. In my experience, I lose more to variance when I'm not able to cast my spells than when I draw my spells in the wrong order.
3. In short, I do not believe variance from draw order is as big of an influence on the playability of scaling threats as some seem to be insinuating. Draw order is an issue that affects cards from other sectors, it is just most apparent with cards that get their value from being in play when certain conditions are met. Draw order is something designers should consider, but for scaling threats, I think it has a bigger impact on how the cards feel as opposed to how good they are in practice.
*The list I shared isn't the exact list I play, but it has both of the cards I am discussing here and uses the same basic construction formula.
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How good cards feel in play is as or more important than how they actually play in practice. Human brains are wired to remember negative experiences, no matter the average positive performance (it's something like 4x the affinity for negative experiences compared to positive ones, but I may be off on that).
Your parallel to high CMC cards is decent, but there are differences. If I draw a 7 drop on turn 1, the other 13-14+ cards I'll draw by turn 7 will help lead to me casting it as part of my normal gameplan. This is basically par for the course, and is aside from any potential shuffling, discarding, etc. Sometimes I really want Overseer of the Damned T1 for that faithless looting pitch, and it's rarely "bad" to have it early if my deck plan naturally involves casting it at some point.*
Compared to that a 1 drop on turn 7 is basically always disappointing, and a 1 drop that relies on interacting with all the other creatures that have already been played throughout the game is more disappointing. Same can be said for YP, quirion dryad, and all the other low drop snowball-type creatures.
Basically: high drops drawn early can be a neutral to great thing. low drops with snowball-type synergies are almost never good or neutral drawn late; it's just an unfortunate draw.
And this matters because there are low drops we can pick that don't have this added [A then B] fragility like Magmatic Channeler in place of Young Pyromancer.
*This is assuming you aren't stacked with 4x copies of a higher drop like in the constructed example. You can never "flood out" on Overseers since you have just the one. I get how that can happen in constructed though. Been there.
Your parallel to high CMC cards is decent, but there are differences. If I draw a 7 drop on turn 1, the other 13-14+ cards I'll draw by turn 7 will help lead to me casting it as part of my normal gameplan. This is basically par for the course, and is aside from any potential shuffling, discarding, etc. Sometimes I really want Overseer of the Damned T1 for that faithless looting pitch, and it's rarely "bad" to have it early if my deck plan naturally involves casting it at some point.*
Compared to that a 1 drop on turn 7 is basically always disappointing, and a 1 drop that relies on interacting with all the other creatures that have already been played throughout the game is more disappointing. Same can be said for YP, quirion dryad, and all the other low drop snowball-type creatures.
Basically: high drops drawn early can be a neutral to great thing. low drops with snowball-type synergies are almost never good or neutral drawn late; it's just an unfortunate draw.
And this matters because there are low drops we can pick that don't have this added [A then B] fragility like Magmatic Channeler in place of Young Pyromancer.
*This is assuming you aren't stacked with 4x copies of a higher drop like in the constructed example. You can never "flood out" on Overseers since you have just the one. I get how that can happen in constructed though. Been there.
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Chris Taylor
Contributor
I mean TBH between abundant harvest, blue as a color, and faithless looting, we're a few cards away from having sweet good cantrips in every color
WotC will just never print a white one
WotC will just never print a white one
This is nowhere close to true and we see this reflected in constructed. The floor value of cards is the most important and defining factor that contributes to their power level. The more expensive the card is, the less situations you can use it, and regardless of your gameplan, this is a bad thing. The cost of drawing an expensive card in the early turns is catastrophically bad as you are essentially playing down a card until you survive to the point where you cast it. No one wants to mull to 5, mulling to 5 sucks, you have less options and can't adapt to the gamestate as well because of your handstate. A deck that draws an opening hand with two expensive cards is essentially playing on a mulligan to 5 as a significant portion of their handstate isn't unlocked early. The early game is by far the most important part of the game, it is when most advantages are eeked out and when entire games can be won. Mono Red decks in Standard don't cast Goldspan Dragon because casting a 5 mana threat is inherently powerful, they play it because they don't have access to Lightning Bolt, Chain Lightning, Goblin Guide, Monastery Swiftspear, Fireblast, etc; they are deprived of powerful and less expensive options and because of that are priced into higher risk options to win games.
We aren't playing in constructed, hence my postscript on that:
maybe your decks play like constructed, but none of the decks I've seen in my cube or other cubes like it have anywhere near the urgency nor the consistent, honed plan that a constructed deck does.
Having one high drop early is rarely game breaking, especially given the abundance of secondary ways to utilize it like the aforementioned Faithless Looting. It will rarely just be a dead card in hand until turn 7, and even if it is, if it's an important finisher, it's better to have it in hand from the beginning than just to never draw it.
When I draw the 1 Champion of the Parish in my deck late, it's just dead. I missed the 5-8 or whatever humans that should have pumped it and there's nothing I can do to get that synergization back. I have a 1/1 for 1.
We aren't playing in constructed, but the power levels can approach damn close if you want to. The same principals that apply to constructed like "expensive cards are worse than cheaper cards" apply to cube too, it's a fundamental part of magic's mana system and you simply cannot escape it, regardless of power level; even in retail limited there is a limit to how many copies of Bookwurm you can reasonably accommodate and that number rarely exceeds 1. Sure, there are exceptions, linear combo decks can be built to enable casting traditionally uncastable cards like Peer into the Abyss or Karn Liberated, but they don't do it through traditional means. If my entire gameplan involves playing discard outlets to discard giant creatures so I can then cheat them out of the graveyard early, then sure, like legacy Reanimator, I want to play Griselbrand and friends, but I'm still not planning on casting them as the number in the upper right corner is too large.
The cost of drawing a Champion of the Parish later is offset by two things, the winrate of the card when you draw it in your opener, and the fact that your deck is never built to be playing a game in the late game anyway, either you drew a good opening sequence of cards and your opponent failed to interact with you and they died, or you bricked or they played a lot of early interaction and stalled to their superior lategame; thems the breaks kiddo, life ain't always fair in love, war and magic the gathering and sometimes you lose the video game, that's okay, you'll have better luck next time. If you don't want to support linear aggressive strategies in your cube because you don't like that they experience draw order RNG in this way then I totally get that, but it's a totally separate argument from "1 and 2 drops are bad bc they are bad on turn 7", which simply isn't the case.
The cost of drawing a Champion of the Parish later is offset by two things, the winrate of the card when you draw it in your opener, and the fact that your deck is never built to be playing a game in the late game anyway, either you drew a good opening sequence of cards and your opponent failed to interact with you and they died, or you bricked or they played a lot of early interaction and stalled to their superior lategame; thems the breaks kiddo, life ain't always fair in love, war and magic the gathering and sometimes you lose the video game, that's okay, you'll have better luck next time. If you don't want to support linear aggressive strategies in your cube because you don't like that they experience draw order RNG in this way then I totally get that, but it's a totally separate argument from "1 and 2 drops are bad bc they are bad on turn 7", which simply isn't the case.
The power level can get close to constructed, that doesn't necessarily make the decks play anywhere close to the same. Almost all constructed decks run on 4x copies of most of their best effects. You just don't get that in cube unless you specifically build to accommodate it.
I'm not arguing against the fundamental mana curves of magic. In my example there is only one Overseer because I'm assuming the deckbuilder is somewhat competent. There is nothing particularly special about my example gameplan. Just that one high drop in an opener in a competently constructed cube deck shouldn't be a big detriment. Just a par for the course puzzle piece.
My argument isn't that 1 and 2 drops are bad late, it's that snowball-type 1 and 2 drops are exponentially worse late than they should be when drawn on time. Isamaru, Hound of Konda near-linearly descends in value over time with twice the floor of the Champion, a Champ dives off a cliff of usefulness after the first few turns because you already have all the needed humans on the battlefield. A Tarmogoyf gains usefulness over time, a Quirion Dryad falls off the same cliff as the Champ. Maybe Champion of the Parish in particular has enough "drawn on T1 upside" to be worth it, but a lot of "A followed by B" type creatures just... don't. They just don't work as well as written on the box because they are terribly inconsistent in a cube environment. I've experienced it for years, and so I'm largely switching to "A count B" effects and other similarly higher-consistency abilities.
I'm not arguing against the fundamental mana curves of magic. In my example there is only one Overseer because I'm assuming the deckbuilder is somewhat competent. There is nothing particularly special about my example gameplan. Just that one high drop in an opener in a competently constructed cube deck shouldn't be a big detriment. Just a par for the course puzzle piece.
My argument isn't that 1 and 2 drops are bad late, it's that snowball-type 1 and 2 drops are exponentially worse late than they should be when drawn on time. Isamaru, Hound of Konda near-linearly descends in value over time with twice the floor of the Champion, a Champ dives off a cliff of usefulness after the first few turns because you already have all the needed humans on the battlefield. A Tarmogoyf gains usefulness over time, a Quirion Dryad falls off the same cliff as the Champ. Maybe Champion of the Parish in particular has enough "drawn on T1 upside" to be worth it, but a lot of "A followed by B" type creatures just... don't. They just don't work as well as written on the box because they are terribly inconsistent in a cube environment. I've experienced it for years, and so I'm largely switching to "A count B" effects and other similarly higher-consistency abilities.
Throwing my hat into the ring of the debate we've been having the last few days here, I think the main difference between Funchian design and Riptidean design is that Riptide wants to make better Limited environments whereas Funch's main thing is drafting decks that are as close to Constructed decks as possible. This isn't news. However, I'm going to posit that Constructed and Limited Magic are drastically different games, practically to the point where they shouldn't be considered the same game at all. Saying they're the same game is like saying that checkers and go are one and the same because the pieces are, technically, interchangeable.
This matters because Constructed-Limited hybrids under the Funchian paradigm will result in much more focused decks. This shows up in the MTGO Vintage cube and its ilk as things like the Storm deck. There are certainly parts of these decks that will be fought over; however, due to the mutually exclusive nature of these decks, cards are a lot more siloed and therefore fewer cards will be plausibly fought over once players find their seats. The main challenges of the draft are, therefore, claiming your seat and then figuring out what you need to prioritize.
Riptidean design tends to be a lot more fluid, with an emphasis on making as many parts as possible useful in as many combinations as possible. I'd argue that the phenomenon of "decks [the curator] never knew existed" isn't merely an offshoot of one of the prevailing philosophies here, it's actually the main reason we design how we do (or, at least, it's what I'm trying to make happen. Lightning in a bottle, I know.). That's not going to happen in a Funchian cube because
a) stronger decks will come together more often due to the replaceable nature of a lot of cards, which weeds out weaker decks and
b) if a card isn't in one of those decks, it gets cut.
Under this paradigm, the main challenges are how to react to a set of unusual parts and how you want to build things from there. It's the difference between The Long Dark and Factorio, for example.
In short, I'm not convinced that power level per se is the main difference here. It plays a part, but that's mostly because high-power cards tend to be simpler, which makes them less interesting for people who explicitly want weird things to happen. Rather, there is a fundamental difference in terms of what kind of game is being made.
Yes it absolutely does mean this and they do.
This deck that 3-0'd in my cube last year does not have a fundamentally different gameplan to Modern Jund, sure the mana is worse and the exact ratios of the cards are worse as well as there being a greater power level delta between variations of effects, ie modern Jund wouldn't ever play a card like Ulcerate as they can just play a playset of Bolts and Fatal Pushes. But these differences are fairly minor and the overarching way this deck approaches its matchup tables are going to be very similar, so even though the precise cards we're running are on a greater range of quality, the kinds of things their doing are still redundant with each other in a similar way to the playset copies you see in constructed. Running Ulcerate, Vendetta and Bloodchief's Thirst still allows the deck to have access to a multitude of ways to interact with an opposing creature on turn 1, which is the important thing the constructed deck's playset of pushes are there to do.
One high drop in your opener can massively effect your expected win% in that it is equivalent to taking a mulligan and that is bad. You ideally want as many cards in your hand to be viable options each turn as possibly starting from the first turn. Spending more mana on things isn't inherently powerful, that's a downside; you want to be able to do as much as possible for as little cost as possible and not all effects are created equal. If you can play a win condition that costs 3 mana like Oko, Uro or Klothys then you don't need to play a win condition that costs 6 mana like Grave Titan as you've already got that box ticked in your decklist by a stronger and cheaper card.
This simply isn't true and often the best 1s and 2s in the later stages of the game are the ones with higher value ceilings. Young Pyromancer is a legacy staple precisely because its a live card well into the later stages of the game because the decks that play it can stay up on gas for long periods of time and leverage the top of their library to eek out extra value from their card. A late game Tarmogoyf is still going to trade 1-for-1 with an opponent's Swords to Plowshares, but a late game Young Pyromancer has the opportunity to generate 1/1's before it bites the bullet and there's a lot of power in being able to trade profitably in those exchanges. Cards like Champion of the Parish are of course a bit different in this aspect because they simply grow taller through extra resource commitment rather than going wider or generating actual card advantage like stuff like Pyromancer, but that is somewhat mitigated by the mana cost of Champ being half as much as that of Pyromancer so it comes out earlier; not that this is enough to make Champ a better card, of course it isn't still, but its not all downside.
A bit of pushback here on my cube not having a strong emphasis on interchangeability. My cube is as hyper redundant as it is with basal effects and mana fixing precisely to allow for a lot of cross pollination of cards between archetypes. Parasitic archetype payoffs do exist of course, I certainly don't expect anyone but the zoo player to want Wild Nacatl for example, but those cards are the exceptions to the rule and the majority of the list is populated by different variations of "deal 3 damage", "destroy target creature", "counter target spell unless" or "draw a card with minor upside", all of which can flex into an extremely large percentage of decks, especially so given that the format is designed to largely yield 3 color decks as opposed to 2 color, which also helps to increase the number of drafters interested in the gold cards as now a card like Dreadbore isn't only played by one person at the table in the Rakdos seat, but is a consideration for the Jund, Mardu, Grixis and 4-5c player, effectively quadrupling its utility.
Funch's cube and similar brainstorming cubes are a lot closer in philosophy to riptide cubes to MTGO vintage imo - redundant effects most decks want are the bread and butter of brainstorming cubes and interchangeability as they create a baseline of powerful effects that can be used as the base for a wide variety of decks, and unexpected archetype variants can spring up all the time - I distinctly remember a conversation with kactuus a couple weeks ago where she brought up a jeskai aggro deck that had sprung up in a draft, utilising cards in a way that hadn't been done before to create something new. Generally brainstorming cubes don't include all that many hyper parasitic cards, which inherently creates a variety of potential archetype variants and interesting decks that can spring up during drafts
We aren't seeming to grasp the actual point of the arguments being made here, and more importantly the context they are based on and originally aimed at! (Inscho, japahn, mine, and ravnic's cubes). The fact that you are using Uro and Klothys vs. Grave titan as your examples of why my one opening-hand 7 drop is a bad thing is just... yeah. Little to do with the contexts we were trying to frame the original discussion around. The example deck has a 7-drop in it that's a part of the normal gameplan. Period.
The 7 drop being in my opener is not bad in my context. It's widely useful throughout the early turns via a huge array of spells and abilities and other cards carefully built into the format, and at a floor is in your hand for the turn you need it rather than just not being drawn.
My formats don't care as much about "the only way to win is to spend the least amount of mana on each spell that maximizes effect". I don't power max, and my decks don't goodstuff min-max. The 7 drop is a key piece to a functioning set of archetypes and gestalt sub-archetypes. The deck is theoretical anyways. My drafters have room for creative experimentation that doesn't just get blown out by a 15-lightning bolt uber-burn deck. It's a low pressure format fundamentally. I have inexperienced players, I'm not going to subject them to sequence-or-die hell.
The extended utility of a YP in Legacy means literally nothing to to the discussion that was being had or for my cube context. My games don't play anything like Legacy, and a late game 2/1 that maybe poops out one more 1/1 off an even later drawn spell is absolute ass for me.
Swords to Plowshares is an extremely rare sight on RTL, and that doesn't change anything in the discussion anyways. A t1 Champ can run into it too. A Young Pyromancer can run into it before you can cast a spell. It's a non-argument against a counter example for Quirion Dryad (not YP lol).
Champion is just dead for me late. I don't care how many high power cubes make it useful until late, or how much mana-efficient burst damage it can get in on a good draw in a near-constructed deck. That's not the type of deck that was undergoing introspection.
As much as you want to "pushback" on Zoss, I think he made an excellent set of points, points that you seem to have backed up in the post dedicated to understanding the differences in cube principles:
Especially point three, which is the main point Zoss is making.
You need to interact with us in a limited environment context to understand how we are evaluating cards, and we need to understand how a card fits into a powermax scheme and if it fits into a constructed style of play when evaluating cards in your direction.
Efficiency of rate isn't always a primary decision point, more often 'effectiveness at archetype enrichment'. The discussion regarding Kor Skyfisher shows this difference in approach clearly (it's not about how good is it on curve in a vacuum, but how good is it at interacting with the varied deck plan the drafter could be assembling). This post is a good example:
The 7 drop being in my opener is not bad in my context. It's widely useful throughout the early turns via a huge array of spells and abilities and other cards carefully built into the format, and at a floor is in your hand for the turn you need it rather than just not being drawn.
My formats don't care as much about "the only way to win is to spend the least amount of mana on each spell that maximizes effect". I don't power max, and my decks don't goodstuff min-max. The 7 drop is a key piece to a functioning set of archetypes and gestalt sub-archetypes. The deck is theoretical anyways. My drafters have room for creative experimentation that doesn't just get blown out by a 15-lightning bolt uber-burn deck. It's a low pressure format fundamentally. I have inexperienced players, I'm not going to subject them to sequence-or-die hell.
The extended utility of a YP in Legacy means literally nothing to to the discussion that was being had or for my cube context. My games don't play anything like Legacy, and a late game 2/1 that maybe poops out one more 1/1 off an even later drawn spell is absolute ass for me.
Swords to Plowshares is an extremely rare sight on RTL, and that doesn't change anything in the discussion anyways. A t1 Champ can run into it too. A Young Pyromancer can run into it before you can cast a spell. It's a non-argument against a counter example for Quirion Dryad (not YP lol).
Champion is just dead for me late. I don't care how many high power cubes make it useful until late, or how much mana-efficient burst damage it can get in on a good draw in a near-constructed deck. That's not the type of deck that was undergoing introspection.
As much as you want to "pushback" on Zoss, I think he made an excellent set of points, points that you seem to have backed up in the post dedicated to understanding the differences in cube principles:
Especially point three, which is the main point Zoss is making.
You need to interact with us in a limited environment context to understand how we are evaluating cards, and we need to understand how a card fits into a powermax scheme and if it fits into a constructed style of play when evaluating cards in your direction.
Efficiency of rate isn't always a primary decision point, more often 'effectiveness at archetype enrichment'. The discussion regarding Kor Skyfisher shows this difference in approach clearly (it's not about how good is it on curve in a vacuum, but how good is it at interacting with the varied deck plan the drafter could be assembling). This post is a good example:
Yeah a lot of what I’m reading here is just apples and oranges. Which is fine! We all have our personal set of principles and methods of card evaluation that we’ve come to rely on that are sympathetic to our design goals. I enjoy reading funch’s perspective....a lot of it doesn’t resonate with what I’m trying to do, but a contrasting position is still valuable for challenging assumptions and exploring new design territory. I think we’ll see some good stuff arise from this cross-pollination
Young Pyromancer is a card that is dependent on the density of spells around it. It's a snowballing baneslayer that accrues value even in the late game. It can't do that if you don't have the necessary density of spells in your deck/environment to consistently trigger it. The same is true for cards like Champion of the Parish and Dragonsguard Elite - it's all about densities. I don't think it has anything to do with power level, or limited v constructed, it's simply that the density in some environments is not enough to make these snowballing baneslayers good in the late game. Obviously they have a fail state, but I would argue that if the fail state is that they don't trigger, then most of the time either the density isn't high enough or you've already expended so many resources you're in either a highly advantageous or highly disadvantageous position. I think the environment dependent part is how many times it needs to be trigger to be satisfactory over other plays, and how large the upside of having PZ in the early game is compared to the fail case of drawing it late and getting zero value
Sorry if I'm unclear; I'm saying that you actually have a much higher emphasis on interchangeability than the average cube seen here. This means that people will fight over numbers and quality of effects rather than the effects themselves. Either there is plenty of that effect to go around (burn), or only one deck will conceivably want it (Supreme Verdict is blank unless you are control). This is also something we need to adjust our heuristics to accommodate.
edit: I think you're talking about how I mention Storm as an example of a focused deck. That may have been a poor example--mono-R aggro is a more amenable highly-focused deck for us, I think. The point was that you get the hyper-focused decks in your style of cube and in the MTGO cubes which have that density of redundancy.
double edit: Riptide means maxing out the permutations of decks. Funch means maxing out gameplay. I'm putting words in your mouth, but I think it's not inaccurate?
Funchian cubes tend to have really tight Magic gameplay, but there's a limitation in terms of the draft component--you don't support Black-based aggro, and you'd never see it be competitive. Conversely, Riptidean cubes can have some uneven gameplay, but the draft component is crazy, kind of like playing back in the heyday of EDH when you could make anything work and when Oloro, Ageless Ascetic was considered broken. It's a very different goal, and great when it works, but I think we all need to take a page out of your book, Funch, to make sure that the in-game experience matches the game-around-the-game of drafting.
Again, this could be an over-simplification. Take it with as much salt as MTG will give you.
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