The Dandy Cube (Chris Taylor's Cube)

safra · Aug 27, 2016

Chris Taylor said:
One more thing:

So this is a card I've been perfectly happy with, save one thing. The art is from an existing magic card, which I'd like to avoid where I can. (Naya Battlemage)

But as you might imagine, it's kind of hard to find art on the internet of someone being held in place that's.... safe for work.
This is close: (ish)

View attachment 1126

Should I make the switch?

What? No. No, no no, dude. No.

How long did you spend trapped in a fetish art hole that you thought this was SFW? Or okay?

Some alternatives:
http://imgur.com/a/EKiLx

Chris Taylor · Aug 27, 2016

Like I said, it's REALLY hard to find appropriate art for a card like this. I've found like 1-2 examples ever that even come close, so I ask anytime I can.

I like the last image of that album you linked, Brandon Kitkousi one, but it's for a different card.

Grillo_Parlante · Aug 27, 2016

You could also take some lotr art pieces of merry and pippin being trapped by old man willow.

James Stevenson · Aug 27, 2016

I looked for devil's snare art from Harry Potter. Didn't see anything good but it might be worth a shot.

Chris Taylor · Aug 27, 2016

The hilarious thing is I got the idea from Domenic Deeann, a webcomic starring a mage, but it's so lo-fi I can't just use the panel

Onderzeeboot · Aug 28, 2016

Chris Taylor · Aug 28, 2016

Holy crap those are amazing! I should ask you guys for art suggestions more often!

This one has more of the feeling I'm going for with the art, but really looks like magic art Circa Urza's Saga, which looks out of place in my more modern styled cube.

This one has a more modern look to it (Much more digital looking) but the dragon in the art kind of just looks inconvenienced.

I'm going to make both versions and run it by my drafters, what do you guys think?

Chris Taylor · Aug 28, 2016

Huh, that first one came out better than I expected

safra · Aug 28, 2016

Yeah I like the first one too!

Onderzeeboot · Aug 29, 2016

safra said:
Yeah I like the first one too!

I like the first one best as well.

Chris Taylor · Dec 5, 2016

Notes: Maybe swap out deadbridge goliath
Ajani Goldmane, Lifebane Zombie, Grafted Wargear, and Gavony Township have been cut for power
Emissary's Ploy and Sovereign's Realm have been cut to make this feel more like magic

Wasteland has been cut due to complaints from my drafters, but this has made any lands with an ability more of a problem. Maybe tectonic edge is the answer, maybe I just need to piss off my drafters. Time will tell. What is clear is that no land destruction is a problem, and I don't want to cut non-fixing lands to solve it.

While probably effective, court machinations feels horrible to cast. Suggested options for a similar spell involved something along the lines of:
"Reveal a card from your hand and the top 3 cards of your library. Put one of the revealed cards in your hand and the rest on top of your library in any order"
Sort of a barter/trade theme going on. It works, but even an instant that just did that for

was not worth a card, so it was attached to a savannah lions instead.

However, I don't want my control decks to have to play a 2/1 for

to improve their draws, so I much prefer the cheap instant/sorcery idea, since both ends of the spectrum are happy playing such a card. I'll post ideas as they come to me.

Gravecrawler is being treated more and more like squadron hawk week to week, as are a lot of the cards that interact with him. All 1 drops are parasitic to an extent, and I'll have much less of a problem including zombies than other people (Here's a list of all nonblack zombies, which totals 32 cards, few of them great), but perhaps there's a better way to have this sacrifice based aggro deck I love.

Other than that, here's a few recent cards I've been testing:

an evasive black creature, a sac outlet, and technically a way for gravecrawler to "block". It might need to lose the zombie typing, but it hasn't been too powerful thus far.

With most of my Ajanis leaving, I've got a hole to fill with white planeswalkers, most of which seem too powerful for the job (Gideon, Ally of Zendikar, Elspeth, Sun's Champion, Gideon Jura) or too weak (Nahiri, the Lithomancer, Gideon, Champion of Justice, Ajani Steadfast) so I thought I'd take a stab at erratta again. One of the big problems with Elspeth, Knight-Errant was how indestructible it was with both abilities being a +1. So far this change has made her much more reasonable, but she hasn't been in many games so far, so it's possible 4 mana is just too cheap for a + ability that creates a token. I cut Nissa, Voice of Zendikar for less.

Firstly, it's surprisingly hard to find innistrad appropiate art on the internet ("victorian" search queries are almost exclusively dresses. I couldn't find much art of people in tricor hats and leather dusters

)
Secondly, I think one of the decent ways for white to be able to control it's draws is for it to become the "clue color", so I've co-opted one of blue's 2 drops.

not a solution on it's own, but it could be a start.

Unfortunatly while I love the art on the right, it's nowhere near as striking in a proper magic frame, and the version you see here is extremely hard to read once actually printed out and subjected to the smudging of sleeves and low resolution of the average printer

I've also opted for a different name, following the single word discard spell fashion. I'm pissed WotC already used Unnerve, that would have been perfect.

This was originally a spell mastery version of stoic rebuttal, trying to slide in a few more cheap counterspells that don't fall off completely during the lategame, but I'd noticed that a lot of my blue section was costed at

and worse, so I'm trying this, hoping people will now have something to play in their sub 11 island decks other than mana leak.

I tried Ingenious Skaab for quite a while and he came up a bit short. While I mourn the loss of a zombie, I like the idea of a synergy based 3 drop, since the only real one the prowess deck even has right now is monastery mentor (and possibly Chandra, Fire of Kaladesh)

Lastly, for anyone using imgur to upload and keep track of images (Like I do for my custom cards) a bug has rendered the ability to sort your albums by anything other than click and drag inoperable, so they've temporarly (as of october) removed the feature (See here).

One user has come up with a python script to replicate the old behavior (Link). I haven't tried it, but I thought I'd give it a mention.

NimbusToad · Dec 27, 2016

I've done a few test drafts and this cube looks very fun to play. Powerful decks all around and good archetype support.

One question: How has it been to give blue such strong aggressive creatures? Somehow it seems funny to me that blue gets all of those no downside one drop beaters. (though all the other colours get to have them, so why not?). Is the blue aggro/tempo deck quite good?

Chris Taylor · Dec 28, 2016

People ignore the fuck out of the blue aggressive creatures

The blue aggressive deck is good, but that's more on the power of brainstorm and snapcaster combined with usually seeker of the way or young pyromancer. Somehow all the power is located in the 2 drops.

Edit: One of my drafters commented that seeker "Basically has double strike", and while that's false, it's close enough to the truth in my creature based environment to be funny

Chris Taylor · Feb 16, 2017

Alright let's put this longform esoteric rambling in my cube thread because it's related to a problem I'd been having:

Are Green's Cards worth a card?
That's probably more confusing than inflammatory like I intended.

So, there's a lot of cards we just don't add to our cubes; things we've learned from a lot of long magic theory aren't worth expending a card for.
1/1s for 1 with no abilities, or lackluster abilities (Serra Zealot counts, grim lavamancer doesn't)
Milling cards, especially oneshot milling effects (Tome Scour, for eg)
Pure Lifegain (Healing Salve)
etc

While there's exceptions to each of these, magic is a game about challenging what you think you know, so I'm going to plow right along as if we all acknowledge that those exist, but aren't really what we're talking about here.

So, to the point, when I look at my red section, here's what I see:
-Creatures, obviously worth a card.
-Burn Spells, worth a card barring some bizzare creatureless opponent with an impossibly high life total.
-A few tormenting voice style cards, these count.
-Planeswalkers, which are worth a card by the same measure as creatures, for the most part

There's a few cards that aren't quite as straightforward, like threatens (Which are worth it if you can sacrifice the creature you borrow or kill your opponent) and a pump spell (Which if it works successfully as a combat trick counts, but doesn't on it's own), as well as a few force multiplier combo style cards like Goblin Bombardment and Goblin Sharpshooter, which individually aren't worth a card, but work well enough with archetypes in my cube to justify their existance.

So that initial example out of the way, let's look at other colors:

White has the usual suspects, as well as a few counterspells (Emerge Unscathed) which are worth a card when they work
Blue has bounce spells (Declaration in Stone also works like this) which are worth a card if you can utilize the time they give you
Blue also has the first of our manlands (Faerie Conclave) which are worth a card in that they don't really take up a card, since you'd be playing lands anyways
Black has some raise dead and zombify style cards which are worth a card but aren't always castable

However, green.... green poses some more difficult questions:
Is Rancor worth a card? Probably, it's enough damage to count, even if it requires a creature.
Is Mirri's Guile worth a card? I'm going to tentatively say yes, though I'll also respect that it (even more than thoughtseize type effects) are not worth a card beyond the early turns of the game
Birthing Pod is quite specifically not worth a card, but as with goblin bombardment before it can be twisted in combination to make up for that

What about Survival of the Fittest? I think the initial tutor is overvalued in a vacumn, and you likely need to be doing this more than once to actually see the returns that justify it. Nobody would be playing this if it were a

sorcery that required you to discard a creature, after all. While I imagine most people likely file this one away with birthing pod and goblin bombardment, I'm not sure I'd do the same, since given the lack of reanimator, this has little use in my cube outside of draw fixing.

But here's the big question: is Rampant Growth worth a card? (Just pretend I actually run rampant growth rather than the slightly better custom for ease of understanding)

On it's own, no, not specifically. Rampant Growth isn't cheap enough that you'd add it to your deck in place of a land (Like say, you would a mox jet or treetop village), so it is taking up one of the ~23 cards you'll end up playing. It doesn't add to your board state, it doesn't subtract from your opponent's board state, it doesn't give you resources like say brainstorm does or remove them like thoughtseize does, it doesn't even improve your card quality like merfolk looter would.

That's not to say it's inherrently useless. Rampant Growth does fix your mana by letting you get the colors you want, but since placing that effect solely in green's hands was thought to be a poor idea for the enjoyment of other colors, we have nonbasic lands aplenty to provide that role, and they don't cost you a card. It does let you get to the endgame faster, but proceeding there slowly is an option as well, why ramp it up? What's the difference between playing your 4 drop on turn 4 or turn 3? Or your 7 drop on turn 5?

This can be advantageous for a few reasons. Threats deployed early enough can outpace their answers, (think Dark Ritual into Hypnotic Specter), they can be difficult to interact with (Think Thragtusk), or the threats you deploy earlier with rampant growth can help make up the card disadvantage with their own card advantage (Think Massacre Wurm). But again, we have to go back: would it indeed be better to wait a turn or two and be up a card rather than accelerate out card neutrality?

Given how long it can actually take to draw the amount of lands required to cast 7 and 8 drops, it might not be better to wait as the game might be over, despite your best efforts. Anything cheaper than that though is eminently castable in your average game of magic (Part of the reason why titans were so good is that you didn't need to contort your deck around casting them, unlike you would to cast say Craterhoof Behemoth).

A lot of the natural balance point of what feels unscientifically fair in my format (A relatively high power one) seems to have converged around 6+ drops that feel fair on turn 6 and on turn 4, and a lot of the threats I can think of that might buck this trend feel unfair at both parts on the curve (Grave Titan, Hornet Queen, Some hypotherical larger true-name nemesis, etc).
(I've also found this to be true lower on the curve with 4 and 5 drops being fine on 3, but I've got fewer examples for that so roll with me)

So if all that concludes that rampant growth is bad with the power level I've got going on, What does that say about Cultivate? Everything that was true about rampant growth is true here, except cultivate can't even help us accelerate up to 4: it's strictly limited to helping cast our 5+ mana cards, usually the sign the endgame has begun in earnest.

This worries me because it's been such a big part of green's design for so long not only in my cube, but in magic as a whole. To find out that this core belief might be a flawed concept is a revelation I'm not sure how to react to, like finding out burn was bad all of a sudden. What would red even do?

Perhaps this is why the cube designers of old touted that a good green section was ~66% creatures. A lot of the non-threat options green has don't really hold water, it's removal is essentially nonexistant, so overload on threats. This combined with the willingness to add in cards I currently consider "broken" like grave titan contributes a lot to making the last 33% (Comprised of rampant growth style acceleration and a few oddball cards like Sylvan Library, Naturalize, Regrowth, etc) more playable.

Maybe I'm going about this all wrong. My initial look at red and finding that about 45% of the color was burn spells gave me pause, since I thought with that much removal available (and similar ratios in other colors, though lessened) that aggro decks would struggle, but that just hasn't been the case. Aggro decks are still the more solid options, and prowess (An aggro deck characterized by a low threat count, the deck that should be vulnerable to an overabundance of removal) has been the dominant archetype for a long time now.

Maybe I ought to cut down on the sheer amount of cards available that are so straightforwardly good, but I wonder if whatever I add (unless it crosses into archetype specific enabler, like goblin bombardment) might just fade into the background of packs, chimney imp style.

I've also experimented with expanding what green can do, specifically in the removal category. The cards individually work, but feel incredibly unnatural.

These two cards illustrate that difference well:

Somehow Show of Strength (which I repeatedly describe as the green incinerate) feels so strange compared to Protect and Serve, despite probably being closer to incinerate on it's own.

There's also the green pacifism:

Which is technically Roots, Adjusted for M10 removal standards of removal. (Ie the Dawn of the age of Doom Blade, since we're currently in the age of Tidy Conclusion)
Roots is mostly an oddity of early magic color itentity, and has been shown more recenly as Suppression Bonds and Sleep Paralysis, feeling much more at home.

And as I've discussed here before, prey upon and it's ilk don't really work in a doom blade style context, since they all have the invisible rider of "You must control a creature", and were that rider to exist on doom blade or incinerate or any of it's compatriots, you couldn't possibly make them cheap enough for players to care. It has little to do with you creature getting killed in response, giving your opponent a 2-for-1, and more with how often they just aren't castable.

So I'm not really sure where to go from here. I just sort of realized this may be the crystallizing moment of why I've had so much trouble designing green traditionally, and haven't really gotten any further than that. Maybe you have some insight?

Fuck man all my thinking on magic has been so stupidly esoteric lately. Everyone else is like "What are the cool cards from AEther revolt?" or like "Hey, do you think Fumigate or Hallowed Burial is the better card for an environment?" and here I am blabbering about the underlying theory of how we evaluate magic cards and fighting game design's applications to a completely different experience

Fuck me. How did I used to do this on autopilot?

ahadabans · Feb 16, 2017

You used to do this on autopilot the same way we all did... a combination of not knowing any better and having a much lower expectation of what a cube game should feel like. Before it was just a shock and awe of seeing a super stupid powerful limited environment and all these design possibilities (even if horribly unbalanced), and now it's about trying to fine tune this perfect meta were everything is evenly balanced and represented yet we somehow have an infinite number of deck options. It's all gotten sort of unrealistic really.

So my 2 cents here. One of the things I've seen as being super super common is over supporting (strong word but can't think of a better one) aggro. We keep getting more and more 2 power 1 drops. More and more above the curve betters. The average cube can sleep walk to a really solid aggressive deck that curves out. Meanwhile, that comes at the cost of other archetypes needing to build that much tighter deck lists to compete. Green in particular is in a bad spot just in general because it's the ultimate midrange color. Unless you are specifically supporting green aggro (bad) or some flavor of combo (not a lot of options outside elves and natural order), you have a color that cannot compete with control/combo decks and which is now even having a hard time against what should be it's best matchup (aggro).

Having experimented heavily with a midrange list where I was trying to make the perfect meta and then dramatically shifting gears to a straight combo list, the green midrange problem has become more apparent to me. As you are using custom cards, I would recommend you approach it one of two ways - make green aggro a real thing or make green combo more diverse. Maybe even a little of both. I think in both cases, you are going to be forced to make green cards that are largely outside what green traditionally does. Where I might look for inspiration though is Sylvan Library. I think it's probably the most powerful green card. Maybe card quality can be something green gets in your meta? Not sure how you feel about miracles, but they obviously work well here. And you have things like Oracle of Mul Daya and Courser of Kruphix. Magus of the Future as green perhaps? The fact that you make cards, you really can go way outside the box here. It is and will always been stupid that blue gets all the draw and CA effects. It's the most powerful effect in the game, and all colors should get their own flavor of it.

One other thing that actually is uniquely green and I think largely unrepresented now in most cubes is shroud / hexproof creatures. Kodama of the North Tree is like 8 years removed from being a cube card in most lists, but a 6/4 trampling shroud creature is no joke and it's a rare 5 drop worth getting out early that can't easily be answered. You need an edict or a wrath and there isn't much - especially for defensive decks - can do to stop it in combat. That thing is a wrecking ball. Make a slightly beefier version of that but keep the GGG in the cost. Maybe that's incentive to go heavy in the color?

Personally, I often make fun of green and then end up drafting it. But I also support Wirewood Symbiote and love making Rofellos decks that do stupid things with mana. So I'm definitely more a combo green supporter. I also think Experiment One, Strangleroot Geist, Vengevine is a super cool foundation for a resilient Gx aggro archetype. Add to that / modify and I think you might have interesting and powerful lines of play in Magic's worst cube color.

Grillo_Parlante · Feb 16, 2017

The way you have your green section setup right now its going to be defined by birthing pod, survival of the fittest, evo leap, and the corresponding ETB creatures. There is a lot of de facto redundancy there. There is also huge redundancy in ramp, so you end up with a 66 card section that can be largely divided up as:

1. Ramp cards
2. Creature exchange library searchers
3. ETB creatures that you either want to ramp out, or search for.

Its kind of shallow in what it will allow.

What are your G/x deck combinations? This seems like way too shallow an offering of diversity of effect for all of the possible G/x deck combinations to be represented in the meta. I'm guessing that the section is leaning heavily on the ramp and color fixing options to largely draft three or four color decks when those color gaps start to present themselves.

Chris Taylor · Feb 16, 2017

Grillo_Parlante said:
The way you have your green section setup right now its going to be defined by birthing pod, survival of the fittest, evo leap, and the corresponding ETB creatures. There is a lot of de facto redundancy there. There is also huge redundancy in ramp, so you end up with a 66 card section that can be largely divided up as:

1. Ramp cards
2. Creature exchange library searchers
3. ETB creatures that you either want to ramp out, or search for.

Its kind of shallow in what it will allow.

What are your G/x deck combinations? This seems like way too shallow an offering of diversity of effect for all of the possible G/x deck combinations to be represented in the meta. I'm guessing that the section is leaning heavily on the ramp and color fixing options to largely draft three or four color decks when those color gaps start to present themselves.

This is actually the base problem at hand: I've spent so long cutting things from my cube that I'm not really sure what G/x is supposed to be doing.

Ideally, I'd love each color pair to have 1-2 options available that aren't Control, Aggro, or Midrange. Green aggro might be rare enough to work, but I'd much prefer a more synergy based archetype like prowess or the gravecrawler strategies.

Current Pair identities I've got mapped out:

: Prowess

Pod. (There's not a ton of support in any one color, and you don't explicitly need the 3rd, but there's still the odd FTK or Blade Splicer helping things out)

: Artistocrats. (My hope is to expand this into green since I've never really found a compelling reason to include white in these decks)

As well as the more conventional:

:Control

: Wildfire

: Aggro

Leaving

,

all mostly directionless. People have drafted these colors, but the decks are happenstance rather than something I've designed for.

I used to have the +1/+1 counter deck, but as that was mostly White Lords/Volt Charge + Counter creatures in all 3 colors, I ended up cutting it because white/red seemed so thinly spread.

Chris Taylor · Feb 16, 2017

ahadabans said:
You used to do this on autopilot the same way we all did... a combination of not knowing any better and having a much lower expectation of what a cube game should feel like. Before it was just a shock and awe of seeing a super stupid powerful limited environment and all these design possibilities (even if horribly unbalanced), and now it's about trying to fine tune this perfect meta were everything is evenly balanced and represented yet we somehow have an infinite number of deck options. It's all gotten sort of unrealistic really.

So my 2 cents here. One of the things I've seen as being super super common is over supporting (strong word but can't think of a better one) aggro. We keep getting more and more 2 power 1 drops. More and more above the curve betters. The average cube can sleep walk to a really solid aggressive deck that curves out. Meanwhile, that comes at the cost of other archetypes needing to build that much tighter deck lists to compete. Green in particular is in a bad spot just in general because it's the ultimate midrange color. Unless you are specifically supporting green aggro (bad) or some flavor of combo (not a lot of options outside elves and natural order), you have a color that cannot compete with control/combo decks and which is now even having a hard time against what should be it's best matchup (aggro).

Having experimented heavily with a midrange list where I was trying to make the perfect meta and then dramatically shifting gears to a straight combo list, the green midrange problem has become more apparent to me. As you are using custom cards, I would recommend you approach it one of two ways - make green aggro a real thing or make green combo more diverse. Maybe even a little of both. I think in both cases, you are going to be forced to make green cards that are largely outside what green traditionally does. Where I might look for inspiration though is Sylvan Library. I think it's probably the most powerful green card. Maybe card quality can be something green gets in your meta? Not sure how you feel about miracles, but they obviously work well here. And you have things like Oracle of Mul Daya and Courser of Kruphix. Magus of the Future as green perhaps? The fact that you make cards, you really can go way outside the box here. It is and will always been stupid that blue gets all the draw and CA effects. It's the most powerful effect in the game, and all colors should get their own flavor of it.

One other thing that actually is uniquely green and I think largely unrepresented now in most cubes is shroud / hexproof creatures. Kodama of the North Tree is like 8 years removed from being a cube card in most lists, but a 6/4 trampling shroud creature is no joke and it's a rare 5 drop worth getting out early that can't easily be answered. You need an edict or a wrath and there isn't much - especially for defensive decks - can do to stop it in combat. That thing is a wrecking ball. Make a slightly beefier version of that but keep the GGG in the cost. Maybe that's incentive to go heavy in the color?

Personally, I often make fun of green and then end up drafting it. But I also support Wirewood Symbiote and love making Rofellos decks that do stupid things with mana. So I'm definitely more a combo green supporter. I also think Experiment One, Strangleroot Geist, Vengevine is a super cool foundation for a resilient Gx aggro archetype. Add to that / modify and I think you might have interesting and powerful lines of play in Magic's worst cube color.

As much as I understand that aggro has been overrepresented, It's been my cube mission statement to oversupport aggro

I find the aggro mirror really interesting to play, much moreso than the control or midrange mirror, and I've been an aggro player all my life (in more than just magic. I'm really fond of glass cannon characters in fighting games as well) so it's going to come through in my design.

One of the big goals in my design is to make sure every color has access to cards it should, and I actually think for the most part it's fine that blue is the sole owner of cards like Concentrate. Brainstorm and other "improve my draw" style spells however, are far too important to be kept to one color. I haven't settled on a specific green card to accomplish this, but I do have a few ideas in right now:

I love intuit the most (See Abundance for this being green) even though I don't actually think the effect is good enough. Single Word names are hard to come by these days, especially ones that make this much sense with how the card works.
Deadwood druid is great if your deck revolves around a specific card (I had one drafter build a deck around Verdurous Gearhulking as many times as possible) but somewhat mediocre otherwise.
Skyline Ranger is alright, but might do with a better body given how marginal the effect is. Scry 2 is about as far as I'd push it though, since scry gets exponentially harder the higher the number gets.
Harmony Charm has been amazing, but mostly in that it's a solid combat trick and counterpspell that can be tossed away for a land if you'd be screwed without it. It's awesome, but it's no brainstorm.
Pioneer is actually a rather unfortunate card given how often you need specifically an instant or sorcery when panic digging, since that's mostly where the removal is (Even if I make green's removal permanent based like pacifism, young pyromancer nudges me towards doing the opposite in other colors)

In terms of specific card suggestions:

Kodama of the North tree is powerful in the most boring way possible, and that description you gave has as much in common with it as it does with true-name nemesis, with the downside being I can't put rancor on a creature that doesn't need it at all If this is what it takes to make green good, I'll cut green.

Magus of the Future as a green card actually makes a lot of sense. That gives you something to do with the 11+ mana you'll have on a ramp draw that didn't get any fatties, and the downsides of running 4 copies of llanowar elves are lessened when you're casting them off the top. I'm actually really excited to try this!

Sylvan Library has long been a bugbear of mine. I love the fact that it improves your draw so well (Hell it's like it casts brainstorm instead of your draw step, and I spent all this time trying to make brainstorm feel green ). The problems I have with it are that it's overly complicated (You can only put back cards you drew this turn, and you can draw additional cards sometimes, but only 2, and oh christ you can REALLY tell this card was made 20 years ago. It feels right at home alongside homelands wording cards, except it's also stupidly powerful ) and while it is likely a better card than Mirri's Guile (The fixed version, before the fucked it up again with sensei's divining top), it suffers from the same problems of being mostly dead beyond the early turns. Also given the hefty price of cards, it's also one that lets you snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, which I'm not sure how I feel about. I think if I could get away with not running this kind of effect at all I would, but I imagine a simplified version of just "At the beginning of your upkeep scry 1" flows better and is probably on the same power level. I get that paying 4 life and 0 mana for a card is cool, but I'm not sure working that in is worth it.

In the end though, I do think you're right, especially about the whole "I make fun of green and then end up drafting it". People still play it, and a green ramp deck has gone 3-0 at 2 of the last 3 drafts I've hosted (though given how much we care about proper pairings that might not be the most trustworthy assessment of power) but I'd still like it to be more interesting, and both of those drafters did end up cutting farseek, despite having 2 they could have played

ahadabans · Feb 16, 2017

Intuit is sweet. Really nice card. Wizards, print that!

Sometimes I think I'm biased against certain decks. And I can easily get into a mode where I rationalize them away and stop supporting or under support or whatever. I love graveyard anything, so I tend to over support that. Not saying this is bad. And not implying anything specific about your cube choices either. But more defending Kodama a bit. It's a card I'm not going to go out of my way to draft. And it's effective in a very brainless sort of way. But there are inevitably always players that want this. And I feel like it's worth running a few just to appease the hard core Timmy types. My favorite design on those types of cards is heavy color choices though. It stops being a good stuff dumb choice and a conscious drafting decision that often gives a deck identify. Not saying Kodama is necessarily a shining example, but I think some card choices like that are worth exploring. Especially in the more mindless color combinations (like GR, GW, etc).

Grillo_Parlante · Feb 16, 2017

Chris Taylor said:
Leaving , , , all mostly directionless. People have drafted these colors, but the decks are happenstance rather than something I've designed for.

Thats a big admission on your part, and really encouraging. Step 1 would be to flesh out what you want those combinations to be doing, rather than debating individual card choices.

The first three are fairly shallow guilds--which is where much of the design challenge comes from--while selesnya is a bit uninspiring. UG and BW must be fairly assertive decks to justify not just running a third color to make up for their mutual deficiencies. I already tackled much of those problems in the min/max, you would just have to calibrate for your power level.

At your power level, for UG, I would expect to see something like an edric, spymaster of trest--basically the higher power ophidian cards: edric, bident of thassa, opposition. The tricky thing is calibrating for your exact power level, but UG in cube is basically just another variant of all of the ophidian decks we've seen throughout magic's history (e.g. mono-blue devotion for a more recent example). Blue and green evasive pressure, blue disruption to stay ahead, and some sort of payoff for flooding the board (preferably which involves drawing cards).

The discussions for the B/W decks I still don't really like, and feel that their identity is exceedingly poorly framed. From what I can tell, they are supposed to be an aggressive deck that uses evasive tokens to punish spot removal, and recursive threats to punish mass removal. If you want to make it kind of more fancy, various death triggers seem to be the way to go, and this is where we start to kind of shift into disruptive territory with symmetrical effects.

Going on another B/W rant, I understand that on paper its supposed to be an aristocrat/stax color combination, but in practice its just hard to see how it doesn't become 10x better with red. Any attempt at a midrange B/W deck I've seen just seems like its so strongly disfavored against any similar blue deck, to the point I wouldn't want it in a meta.

The easiest tweak to R/G would be to add dragonlord atarka and other incentives. R/G is a really easy ramp combination, but no one wants to give red ramp targets. Ideally you want 7+ mana ETB creatures that help control the board, draw cards, or gain life--those decks should feel something like R/G tron in modern. If you look at your curve for red and green, they don't really encourage ramp decks. You tap out at 6 mana for the most part, and that just drives everyone to pick up elves/farseek, and try to gain marginal curve jumps on their midrange creatures. 6cc is the top of the curve for a midrange deck, not a ramp target.

Otherwise G/R becomes this sort of good stuffy midrange stomp deck with planeswalkers that beat face like sarkhan dragonspeaker. Its a bit par for the course i.m.o.

The list is a bit big too, which makes things harder since you need more redundancy, which ironically constricts the card population. I would cut all of the other customs in a heartbeat for some good custom conditional tutors attached to bodies. I'm basically drooling at the thought of being able to sprinkle custom imperial recruiters around the color pie and just opening the list up however you want.

Being able to grab those mini-overruns would be huge in G/R, or being able to blink them to generate library manipulation and CA in G/W. Just tons of utility and library manipulation for aggressive decks, but conditioned enough where play patterns don't become overly rigid.

Chris Taylor · Feb 16, 2017

ahadabans said:
Intuit is sweet. Really nice card. Wizards, print that!

Sometimes I think I'm biased against certain decks. And I can easily get into a mode where I rationalize them away and stop supporting or under support or whatever. I love graveyard anything, so I tend to over support that. Not saying this is bad. And not implying anything specific about your cube choices either. But more defending Kodama a bit. It's a card I'm not going to go out of my way to draft. And it's effective in a very brainless sort of way. But there are inevitably always players that want this. And I feel like it's worth running a few just to appease the hard core Timmy types. My favorite design on those types of cards is heavy color choices though. It stops being a good stuff dumb choice and a conscious drafting decision that often gives a deck identify. Not saying Kodama is necessarily a shining example, but I think some card choices like that are worth exploring. Especially in the more mindless color combinations (like GR, GW, etc).

It's such a cool card, but it's not actually that great

It tends to play a little closer to Sleight of Hand than Brainstorm, power level wise, which I felt a little disappointed by. It's also got enough text on there that I can't really try and change it to power it up without making it unreadable

I agree that sometimes you just want a dumb beater, and kodama could be one of those to run, but I'd much rather have something more interactive/less resiliant but with a higher power level to draw people in. I think Vorapede does this really well, and might be something I want to consider here.

Damnit how many green 5s is too many?

(I'm not running all of these, but they're all cool)

Oh, and on a mostly unrelated note, remember old Experiment Two from ages back?

I had a whole bunch of complexity problems with this guy, and recently tried to salvage the design, since I'm going to try the +1/+1 counters deck again.
I thought I wanted experiment one higher up the curve, but turns out what I was actually after was scrounging bandar adjusted for cube play

Now with adorkable new art!

Also:

Might need a flavor text, the card looks a bit sparse. Also a lot of people love the planar chaos border, but back in the day when I used it for all my custom cards to flag them I soured on it.
Nobody cares that this card is similar to Magus of the Future

Plus I take pride that my customs kinda feel like real magic cards from time to time, and if I flag them with weird borders and make them stand out I'm not going to fool anybody.
Also, I wonder if the intervening years having been kinder and kinder to creatures mean this card needs like deathtouch or something

Chris Taylor · Feb 16, 2017

Grillo_Parlante said:
Thats a big admission on your part, and really encouraging. Step 1 would be to flesh out what you want those combinations to be doing, rather than debating individual card choices.

The first three are fairly shallow guilds--which is where much of the design challenge comes from--while selesnya is a bit uninspiring. UG and BW must be fairly assertive decks to justify not just running a third color to make up for their mutual deficiencies. I already tackled much of those problems in the min/max, you would just have to calibrate for your power level.

At your power level, for UG, I would expect to see something like an edric, spymaster of trest--basically the higher power ophidian cards: edric, bident of thassa, opposition. The tricky thing is calibrating for your exact power level, but UG in cube is basically just another variant of all of the ophidian decks we've seen throughout magic's history (e.g. mono-blue devotion for a more recent example). Blue and green evasive pressure, blue disruption to stay ahead, and some sort of payoff for flooding the board (preferably which involves drawing cards).

A lot of your assumptions hinge on green having a sort of token theme present, which I've never really convincingly been able to pull off. While green does have some solid payoffs in Overrun and friends, the actual multi-body creatures are leagues behind similar white cards, with basically only Deranged Hermit and Master of the Wild hunt being anywhere near strong enough (Nest invader, Kozilek's Predator, and eyeless watcher all suffer from being 50% devoted to ramping, making them far less effective as pure army in a can dudes). I know hornet queen, and avenger of zendikar count, but they're expensive enough that they warp the strategy, and you need more signets than token payoffs.

Maybe it's time to try your favorite Saproling Burst? I know my enviornment has fewer reasons to love the card than yours does, but I'm mostly concerned with the mathy nature of it. Hopefully my drafters intuit that there's a sweet spot of counters to remove to just beat down with, and you might want to remove more or less as the situation demands. (This was something I could never really internalize though, I just had to brute force the math each time I cast it)

Now if I was able to solve this density issue (I don't care how many imperial recruiters are in the environment, you can't really build a color identity around casting the 2 token producing green cards), we still run into the issue that white is likely a far better fit for this, since their tokens are usually evasive and more abundant (I can see Emeria Angel and Geist-Honored Monk fitting in very well with Bident of Thassa style cards). So this deck might work, but it doesn't really solve the problem

It's possible you intend for bident of thassa and similar to be worth it with regular old one card one body creatures, but I'm not sure how realistic that is without severely tuning down the removal, or making the individual creatures resilient enough that you likely wouldn't need the payoff. As an example, if you cast bident and swing with all your creatures, how many have to connect for it to be worth it? I'd say probably 2-3 (3 is on par with concentrate, but I don't want to discount the threat of still having the bident in play. I don't think that alone would push me to be happy if I connected with 1 creature though), which curve wise means your opponent hasn't killed anything you've played yet, AND all of them are unblocked.

Grillo_Parlante said:
The discussions for the B/W decks I still don't really like, and feel that their identity is exceedingly poorly framed. From what I can tell, they are supposed to be an aggressive deck that uses evasive tokens to punish spot removal, and recursive threats to punish mass removal. If you want to make it kind of more fancy, various death triggers seem to be the way to go, and this is where we start to kind of shift into disruptive territory with symmetrical effects.

Going on another B/W rant, I understand that on paper its supposed to be an aristocrat/stax color combination, but in practice its just hard to see how it doesn't become 10x better with red. Any attempt at a midrange B/W deck I've seen just seems like its so strongly disfavored against any similar blue deck, to the point I wouldn't want it in a meta.

It's odd since because of the presence of goblin bombardment, the BW resiliency/stax deck is ALSO 10x better when you add red

Lingering Souls, powerful card as it may be, makes a hell of an arc lightning sometimes. I know you've said that card is essentially a mardu one in cube, but given that's one of the archetype combinations currently without specific direction, it might be a decent idea.

The symmetry angle with stax and braids is one I've tried before, and ended up cutting it because it was miserable to play with and against. Maybe I can try it again and make it fun? Part of the issue is that gravecrawer and the like are such a core part of the environment that you're likely to see them on the opposite side of the table, which can render symmetrical effects quite embarrassing. While I often feel the same way playing a UB control deck against anyone running gravecrawler, it never really feels great to face an opponent (in limited no less) that feels like their deck is pre-sideboarded against you.

I've found similar about the BW midrange deck to you, but that certainly hasn't stopped my group from drafting it. I think the draw is the various powerful walkers in those color combinations, as I see red black control variants attempting a similar idea with the recent stronger chandras. I'm not sure it's something I should actively try and prevent, but it has happened

One thing I have seen is that black white does seem to contain a lot of the creature card quality in my cube at the moment, so I've seen a decent amount of success from my drafters attempting to recreate the old pod decks without green: a series of efficient, resiliant threats which are effective against both control and aggro, backed up by...well in my cube essentially nothing, but the pod decks of yore had a combo finish plan and a tutoring/card advantage engine to go along with. This is specifically uncommon, since it essentially relies on you being able to draft 23 first pick quality cards, but it has worked. Not something I'd likely encourage.

Grillo_Parlante said:
The easiest tweak to R/G would be to add dragonlord atarka and other incentives. R/G is a really easy ramp combination, but no one wants to give red ramp targets. Ideally you want 7+ mana ETB creatures that help control the board, draw cards, or gain life--those decks should feel something like R/G tron in modern. If you look at your curve for red and green, they don't really encourage ramp decks. You tap out at 6 mana for the most part, and that just drives everyone to pick up elves/farseek, and try to gain marginal curve jumps on their midrange creatures. 6cc is the top of the curve for a midrange deck, not a ramp target.

Otherwise G/R becomes this sort of good stuffy midrange stomp deck with planeswalkers that beat face like sarkhan dragonspeaker. Its a bit par for the course i.m.o.

I feel you on the ramp front. I've got a few powerful 7 drops in the format in Karn Liberated and Myr Battlesphere, but I'd been trimming them since my realization about rampant growth that started this whole buisness

The 6 drops were specifcially chosen as the top end point in that multiple archetypes might want them, which may have been my mistake.
Dragonlord Atarka and Bogardan Hellkite feel like natural fits, (Possibly Thunder Dragon? There's a blast from the past!) but I'm not sure how many of these I want, since they are truly ONLY for the dedicated ramp drafter in my environment due to the absence of Reanimator or any similarly cheatsy deck like Natural Order or Tinker. It might do to replace the colorless ones with R/G ones, if only to guide people.

Part of my wish for this sort of deck is a solid red sweeper along the lines of Rolling Earthquake, since it has the problem of occasionally killing you. It does have the upside of occasionally killing an opposing planeswalker, but I'm not sure which of those sides ends up coming up more often, and if there's a better X spell I should be considering (or making).
Perhaps a cheaper Magmaquake? I've never seen the CCX spells perform really, dating all the way to when Black Sun's Zenith was the second best candidate for a black sweeper we had.

Grillo_Parlante said:
The list is a bit big too, which makes things harder since you need more redundancy, which ironically constricts the card population. I would cut all of the other customs in a heartbeat for some good custom conditional tutors attached to bodies. I'm basically drooling at the thought of being able to sprinkle custom imperial recruiters around the color pie and just opening the list up however you want.

Being able to grab those mini-overruns would be huge in G/R, or being able to blink them to generate library manipulation and CA in G/W. Just tons of utility and library manipulation for aggressive decks, but conditioned enough where play patterns don't become overly rigid.

See this is interesting, because I've tried the various recruiters again and again and I've never understood the appeal. While I understand in theory they allow you to run multiple copies of integral cards, just casting them felt so poor for me (even if they were finding me my lynchpin) that I often felt they had a lot in common with vampiric tutor: What are you finding that's worth going down a card? (Or in the case of the recruiters, putting a 3 mana 1/1 in your deck?)
But hey, I'm one of those bizarre people that's always thought coiling oracle was a pretty shit magic card, so maybe this will be lost on me forever more

You talk a lot about the mini overruns in red, and I think I understand that to mean Goblin Bushwacker/Reckless Bushwacker, and possibly scourge devil? (#Haze of Rage in Modern) who I'm not sure are really at home here. Probably the most applicable mini overruns in red are Hellrider and Hero of Oxid Ridge, who can't really be found with the recruiters. Maybe this is a place for me to step in.
I also notice that hellrider and hero are decidedly permanent, making them less mini overrun and more glorious anthem. You think this is an issue?

ahadabans · Feb 16, 2017

I'll stop with the Kodama sell. It's less about that card and more about shroud. I know that is a powerful (dumb?) effect, but one of the huge weaknesses midrange (green midrange in particular I feel) has is to things like bounce or Pacify effects, or super cheap kill spells. You build a deck that gets fat things in play early and they eat Path to Exile, or get bounced, or whatever. It just hurts the entire archetype so much because it's just TOO effective. I'd argue in power lists with all the best removal etc, it damn near cripples it to the point of barely being viable. My suspicion is that aggro gets drafted more than it should (talking ratios of decks), which is making dumb midrange decks look better than they actually are in a powerful cube meta.

So something really hard to remove that is decidedly a green creature. It's something unique and it's so much more consistent against other decks (control/combo). Vorpapede is a lot of monster. But it gets bounced and pathed and you lose so much tempo it can cost you the game. Clearly better against destroy effects, but it's still very vulnerable.

Snake Cult Oracle!!! That's sweet. As far as green 5's, yeah there are a ton. But I think having a higher number makes sense since most green decks ramp. No Deranged Hermit? Card is busted.

Chris Taylor · Feb 16, 2017

ahadabans said:
I'll stop with the Kodama sell. It's less about that card and more about shroud. I know that is a powerful (dumb?) effect, but one of the huge weaknesses midrange (green midrange in particular I feel) has is to things like bounce or Pacify effects, or super cheap kill spells. You build a deck that gets fat things in play early and they eat Path to Exile, or get bounced, or whatever. It just hurts the entire archetype so much because it's just TOO effective. I'd argue in power lists with all the best removal etc, it damn near cripples it to the point of barely being viable. My suspicion is that aggro gets drafted more than it should (talking ratios of decks), which is making dumb midrange decks look better than they actually are in a powerful cube meta.

So something really hard to remove that is decidedly a green creature. It's something unique and it's so much more consistent against other decks (control/combo). Vorpapede is a lot of monster. But it gets bounced and pathed and you lose so much tempo it can cost you the game. Clearly better against destroy effects, but it's still very vulnerable.

Snake Cult Oracle!!! That's sweet. As far as green 5's, yeah there are a ton. But I think having a higher number makes sense since most green decks ramp. No Deranged Hermit? Card is busted.

Well Hermit is in the next post responding to grillo so consider it an honarary mention

I totally agree (in theory). Spending lots of cards to ramp out a huge creature only to have it EoT pathed is a shit feeling, but I've usually tried to shore up that weakness in ways that aren't "Well I guess you just lose". The specific call for an edict or wrath that shroud brings is a bit unfair in itself since edicts are so shit (Half the good ramp creatures are creatures anyways, and against otherwise fair opponents killing their worst creature is terrible value) and wraths are a bit too niche to be considered as an answer.

One card I loved that did this really well was Prognostic Sphinx, where it wasn't always untargetable, and your opponent could throw away their path/doom blade/pacifism etc to some effect, but not a backbreaking one.
Shame scrying 3 every turn is a huge pain in the ass

ahadabans · Feb 16, 2017

I like Frost Titan's ability too. That's a tamer version. He was too good with 6 toughness though (and the 5 mana dragon version was too weak with 3 toughness), but something in between could be good?

I prefer Shroud to Hexproof because it's always a set value. You can do really unfair things with hexproof and aura's or pump spells, etc. Shroud keeps you honest. Kodama can be killed and you don't need an edict or wrath. Just get 4 power in it's way during the block. Another way to look at that as green's version of a 2 for 1. My dude is huge and you can't just one for one it with removal. You have to put two or three dudes in it's way to kill it.

I know I said I'd stop and here I am not stopping. But this to me is decidedly a very green thing that it actually does well which is rewarding you for committing to the color. And it's annoying to face down, but lots of things are and isn't it nice for green to get something like that?

The Dandy Cube (Chris Taylor's Cube)

Contributor

Contributor

Steamflogger Boss

Contributor

Ecstatic Orb

Contributor

Contributor

Ecstatic Orb

Contributor

Contributor

Contributor

Contributor

Contributor

Contributor

Contributor

Contributor

Contributor

Contributor