The Dandy Cube (Chris Taylor's Cube)

[Chris Taylor]

I'd say I'm pretty committed. Prowess is one of the better and more interesting deck I've supported over the years, and it's never really had the "one build" problem quite as bad as aristocrats had it.
I can see base UB and base BR versions of this deck, and the rest is just balancing

 

[Nanonox]

My favorite archetype for Grixis right now is Discard matters.



Are all plenty powerful and unique. RB can be super aggressive. UR can be more spells matters and UB can be more controlling.

You can easily tie RB to your Mardu artifact wedge with stuff like The Underworld Cookbook to spam artifacts for Arcbound Ravager or get Hollow One out for cheap and buff it with Steel Overseer. Bomat Courier and Scrapwork Mutt pull double duty, etc.

And your UB discard should be able to find plenty overlap with the GY theme in Sultai. It might actually be a little too similar if anything.

You can't go wrong with Prowess, it's a great choice, but thought I'd throw this one out there too!

 

[blacksmithy]

i also like discard theme but i run it in BRug, and prowess in URbwg. i theoretically like crats in WBRg but i usually end up cutting cards that need sac fodder to be good so its more like go wide than crats

EDIT: also i am very excited about your civ deck and i wanna hear playtest results because i can see myself copying you on it

 

[Chris Taylor]

Alright, finally managed to gather a draft now that the holidays are over, and we can finally see if printing a bunch of enablers for CIV helped any.

So we had 8 people, the people's own @Dom Harvey grabbing the 3-0 with artifact aggro, sporting a lot of card quality.

Maybe this image is helpful to people, maybe not.

Here's the broad archetype breakdown from the evening:
Dom - Artifact Aggro
Tom - Jund Card Quality (Removal Dense, left Lurrus on the bench for being mostly instant/sorcery based)
Rob - Bant CIV (Walker Heavy)
Freyja - Sultai Midrange (Civ adjacent, mostly just card quality)
Me - GW Midrange (Hard in on CIV, got all the bad cards)
Sophie - Grixis Midrange
Liam - Grixis Midrange
Andrew - UR Prowess

So yeah, of the 3 broad archetypes: no Tokens drafter, arguably one delirium drafter, one artifact drafter, and a pile of people who refuse to read signals? (Myself included)

Individual card notes:

This card is good! I actually missed that it could block indestructibly. If it proves over the line I'll probably change that


Few notes with this thing:
1) It's better preordain (which I'm okay with trying) but 5 is too cheap, 2 cards is too much. Turns out I added enough enablers (And this is an enchantment itself) that CIV is basically free. Having any board presence that requires a clue is not a big ask who knew.
2) Name's not great. One manifest destiny would never make it past legal at WotC, and two how does a card with a name like that not involve lands in any way? (To say nothing of what color it'd be). Needs a full re-do on concept, really.


This however, was completely off the rails. I knew these were powerful, but this gains close to 8 life, plus it's already mostly strategic planning. Again, I'm fine with powerful cantrips, but this is obviously a very overpowered rider to staple on an already amazing card.

This should probably just be Oath of Nissa. Sure the cards won't go to the yard anymore for delirium, but the alt text on that can actually enable cool things.
Maybe the fact you can't find artifacts/enchantments/battles with it means I need to switch back, but that's worth testing at least.

These two provide an interesting contrast.
Scholar is an interesting minigame, and pays you off quite well for playing it well. 10/10, no notes.
Education is just future sight but it costs UU less.
Again, this recent set of patch notes turbocharged the enablers for CIV, so that text is on the majority of the time, especially since this is an enchantment.
Proposed changes are that it can't play lands once active, or if it needs nerfing further have it only be able to cast permanents once active (IE no lands/instant/sorceries), which at least feels on theme. Feedback was to try the lands nerf first.


This card is crazy but has no home. There's no ramp deck in my cube to speak of (There's just like 8 total acceleration cards and nothing that costs more than 6 to ramp to in the first place) and so while there are openers that allow you to t3 a 6 drop with this thing (they involve a 1 mana enchantment and an artifact land, but hey) mostly it's just there tapping for 2-3 mana when you have nothing to spend it on.

It's also a 2 mana 1/1, so when you do have nothing to spend it on, it's got very little other reason for it's existance.
I think this might be better served as a steward of valeron style design where it's a medium creature, can add mana, and can do both when you have CIV active.

This thing is hilarious, look how far we've come.

So one, the vigilance is really burying the lead here, hidden in the CIV block, so I think if I do want to keep this, it earns the hilarious first line of "Defender, Reach, Vigilance".
That being said, do I want to keep this? I like reach, but 1g 3/3 is just not that great, I run tarmogoyf, regal bunnicorn, etc, so the bar for 2 drop beef is somewhat high and also mostly sidelined.


This does feature in Dom's winning deck, and we've found out that it's extremely strong.
Pings do a lot in my cube (shoutout to Spitting Dilophosaurus) and since making excess rectangles is the name of the game anyways, this is frequently doing more than that.
I really never learn my lesson borrowing cards from MSE Modern, they're tuned above where I want to be, but in ways where I don't notice until it's on the battlefield.
Also if this is over the line, should I really be running Orcish bowmasters?

This guy also proved to be excellent but not overbearing, and while it's not borderless I do get to play a version without cheesy flavor text and jurassic park on it.

OH MAN we didn't even get into the jank

See if you can spot the error on this one

While this technically works in the rules, I should specify that the caster chooses where the creature goes.

Yes I know blue Nekrataal is a weird choice but I am honestly so dry on ideas for payoffs for CIV.
Dom pointed out that this should probably just ask the player to shuffle the creature into their library rather than bottom --> shuffle.

We did have a good time. Glad to be back cubing with people after the holidays, and I've definitely got some actionable feedback.

 

[TrainmasterGT]

This guy also proved to be excellent but not overbearing, and while it's not borderless I do get to play a version without cheesy flavor text and jurassic park on it.

Technically you still have Jurassic Park on the card, since Dilophosaurus didn't actually have Rootwalla frills or spit poison. That poison was something Michael Crichton invented for the book, and the frills were added to the film to make the creature look more menacing.

This is one of the reasons why I really don't like Frilled Deathspitter:

Few notes with this thing:
1) It's better preordain (which I'm okay with trying) but 5 is too cheap, 2 cards is too much. Turns out I added enough enablers (And this is an enchantment itself) that CIV is basically free. Having any board presence that requires a clue is not a big ask who knew.
2) Name's not great. One manifest destiny would never make it past legal at WotC, and two how does a card with a name like that not involve lands in any way? (To say nothing of what color it'd be). Needs a full re-do on concept, really.

I really like this card design. You could change the name to "Manifest Fate" or something along those lines if you don't want to allude to Manifest Destiny.

 

[Chris Taylor]

Technically you still have Jurassic Park on the card, since Dilophosaurus didn't actually have Rootwalla frills or spit poison. That poison was something Michael Crichton invented for the book, and the frills were added to the film to make the creature look more menacing.

This is one of the reasons why I really don't like Frilled Deathspitter:

Look man I just look for Dilophosaurus art on the internet, this is what I get

I really like this card design. You could change the name to "Manifest Fate" or something along those lines if you don't want to allude to Manifest Destiny.

It's a neat idea but it is absurdly overtuned.
Name suggestion from a friend this morning was "Inspiring Grandeur", which I love

 

[Chris Taylor]

New Arts:
-->
-->

-->

-->

-->
This last one matters a bit less but it looks less photorealistic so I think it fits better.

Full album is here, I realized I hadn't updated the visual spoiler in a while, I'd just been uploading patch notes.

 

[Chris Taylor]

Patch thoughts:

The thing I felt I needed to change from my last iteration was that removal was likely a bit too strong. We hadn't seen prowess or tokens at the top brackets in a while, and the hypothesis is that had less to do with the deck itself and more to how people were reacting to it.

I've cut swords to plowshares and flame slash for punching a bit too much above their weight class. Path to exile stays for now, as I want something good to strive for and it's certainly the more fair between it and swords. While there's powerful 1 mana removal in the other colors (fatal push, stern scolding, etc) I think there's a big difference between what I cut and what I left.

I also made a pass over the cheap (3-4ish mana) multi creature removal. I'm a bit worried about the losing player's ability to "Break-Serve" if these get removed, so I'm toning them down

These both went from 2C to 1CC. I absolutely adore Hunger, but it's proven REALLY powerful (can you imagine it was an instant to begin with?)
-->
Now to be fair I knew Fleshmelter was insane, but I also didn't really want the 4/2 statline of FTK. I think impact is a cute little middle ground.
I think there's 1 flicker card in my entire cube, but there's a few snapcasters so while this isn't a net upgrade, it's less of a downgrade than it might seem.


I needed a medium expensive blue creature, and I'm experimenting how far I can get with something so "fair"
Ward might be a hair too expensive for something that probably already eats an attacker, but we'll see. Pitch high and nerf is a lot easier than pitching low and buffing, after all.


While not strictly speaking necessary, I decided to put in one more faux-delve beater, this time opting for Gangler to join his friends Faux Dig through time, Faux Hooting Mandrils, and Faux Murktide Regent

The big difference between these is they don't compete for food the way delve spells do, so I've gotta keep a tight lid on the total number. Lets see if one more breaks it.

-->
I'd been doubling up on Rakish Bloodwitch, but since it's just so much of a lava spike, the prowess decks can't really run too many copies of it lest their deck just not affect the board well enough. I'm keeping one in, but I've added two copies of Dragur Reaver (Can you believe this name wasn't taken yet?) to hopefully attack and block (how unusual for a black creature!) a bit while still fitting into the theme.

I had a bit of a thought about it returning to hand rather than to the battlefield to make double spelling on subsequent turns easier, but that feels like a long time to wait.


I'm also dipping my toes into custom walker design again. I think my cube would be mostly fine with Vivien, Monsters' Advocate, but I don't love it being the only source of keyword counters AND the green decks in my cube all tend to diversify on card types quite a bit (Delirium and Civilization quite explicitly, and tokens involves a might more instants and sorceries than what ends up being a mostly creature deck) so the passive/minus ability end up being a lot worse than presented.

This is replacing Nissa, Vital Force who while cool, really does the wrong thing for a planeswalker to do: it's just a 5/5 haste that is doom blade resilient, and occasionally regrows things 1 game out of 10. If that's really what I wanted, I'm sure there's a creatures that I could make that does mostly the same thing. I want planeswalkers here to do planeswalker things: give you choices each turn and provide recurring value, and I think this does both of those pretty well.
It'll be a bit weird choosing reach but hey, I could see it.

Maybe as I get more of these under my belt that I'm happy with, I can start to address the token situation.
I'm starting to feel the token creep a bit more when white has all these for 2/2s:

Like all of these are from white cards I might want to play, I'm even currently playing Wandering Emperor and Gideon, Ally of Zendikar...

Sigh. A problem for another day