General The Anti-singleton Singleton

[Lionfish]

You heard it right. But I need your, help, feedback, cynicism, and emotional support.

The idea is having a singleton cube strewn with copy cards throughout. Half are labelled A, the other half are labelled B. Please don't give up on me here, the next paragraph ends it.

When you first draft a Copy A, you must imprint one of the cards in your pool. From then on, every Copy A you see will represent a copy of that imprinted card. The same applies to Copy B (allowing you to imprint a different card). Copy A and B for your opposition will represent whatever they imprinted instead.

This house rule suddenly allows non-singleton and parasitic cards to flourish while maintaining high card diversity.



The imprint mechanic is also costly - to turn your aether burst into 2 copies, you will have had to dedicate 3 draft picks. So it's up to you whether you go deep on A or B, both, or neither to just take good stuff/fixing.

Anyway, my mad scientist idea has been driving me nuts so I need your help on steering this bull.

Without further ado, here is the list so far:
https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/eb55b7d4-5338-4614-bff1-80afcc9926bf


Additional notes:
- I like the idea of non-synergistic cards present but think lightning bolt would be too oppressive.
- Risen Reef is probably the ceiling of bs
- We still want multiple copies of flame burst to feel good.

 

[shamizy]

This sounds similar to the Duplicate Voucher system I've been running for a couple of years now.

The original idea for me was inserting buildarounds and allowing vouchers that could be traded in for a copy of the given card (provided that you also drafted the single copy that exists in the cube). 2 ended up being the sweet spot for my cube and with my card choices, but it could be different depending on what you're going for. It's changed a lot over the years as I've identified core strategies and card interactions I wanted to maximize within my environment.

I've gone through many iterations testing different batches of cards, usually with an update every year or so, but this is what I'm currently on:



As long as you're up front with your drafters about the additional draft mechanic it should be pretty simple for them to grasp. The only thing I'd be worried about with your iteration is complexity overload if there are too many potential choices and combinations. It's a cool draft feature, but sometimes players opt in or out on the idea and just want to draft a cube like normal. It really comes down to what you think your playgroup with be fine with and how refined you want to get with your system.

I personally like the idea of duplicate vouchers as a clean solution so I threw in 4 copies of these as wildcard picks in the main cube:

I go into more detail on the linked primer, but this system has worked very well over the last 5 years solving issues I had with "dead" duplicates for buildarounds in a draft pool and creating variable demand through a pod.