So I wasn't actually joking about that whole green prowess thing....
Preface
So my cube (up until this latest patch) ran the following archetypes:
Graveyard
Artifacts
Tokens
Prowess
Aristocrats
The goal is, for a given three color archetype, that you should be able to draft a functional 2 color deck in any of the combinations, or a functional deck playing all 3.
So for eg, You
should be able to draft a functional
,
,
, or Esper Artifacts deck
Of course "functional" is doing some heavy lifting in that sentence, but the intent is clear.
The more midrange archetypes (Artifacts and Graveyard) are pretty uncommonly two color, especially with how my fixing is (Triple Dual Triple Fetch plus some misc), but most 3 color decks are base 2 colors with a splash, rather than a truly even split, so we can still consider how each color pair is doing.
How are they doing?
Graveyard
-Blue Green could use some work, but I've also seen so few people try it. UB is honestly not that bad, leaning control with the ability to rebuy key win conditions.
Worth noting that blue weirdly does the least self mill of these 3 with my current configuration.
Artifacts
All three of these are fine and strong. BW is leaning heavily on some of my custom cards (see below) but you can generally make a large number of clues/thopters/treasures and turn that into a way to kill someone.
Again this deck is mostly 3 color.
Tokens
It's still early days for this archetype, but I've seen GW and Naya perform well, and I've seen enough RW/GR decks leaning on pure card quality with light tokens themes that I'm optimistic.
Fable of the Mirror Breaker is a hell of a card.
Prowess
UR and WR have been solid, but UW lacks the finishing power the other builds do. It feels like you're combining the support colors together, and while exactly
monastery mentor is strong, there's not much to draw you into this specific color combination.
Feels more like where you end up, rather than where you set out for.
Aristocrats
Hoo boy. This archetype has been an issue for me for a while now.
Black Red is fine, great even.
Goblin Bombardment is the best possible sac outlet, and black provides the best possible food to feed it.
This is the whole basis for the archetype, so to push it into three colors like I'm doing here is overdesigning, but I'm so close to the structure I outlined above so I want to try.
So what does an aristocrats deck without black even look like? Let alone the red green one I've shoehorned in here?
While technically you
can fling a pile of saprolings at an opponent with
Spiteful Prankster in play, I don't think anyone's ever done it.
You
should be able to use token spells from green where you use recursive black creatures, but since creatures tokens (regrettably) can block, they're priced a lot higher up the curve than your average
gravecrawler, and because they're green they tend to be larger, single tokens rather than a spread number of 1/1s. (Mostly)
Also bloody every creature death payoff and their mother says nontoken:
I get why, they'd have to be different rates, but there's just so little to work with.
You want a payoff? You get
Fecundity, a card you'd board out in a few matchups.
I can change these things, but it can be difficult to do that much heavy lifting.
The Change
All right, all that whinging aside, here's what I'm actually doing:
Aristocrats:
-->
I've tried Mardu Aristocrats before, and while it's hard to articulate my thoughts on exactly why, white seems to fit better than green. This probably
shouldn't be the case, all the token/dies cards I'm leveraging from green should likewise be found in white, but Black White has worked better for me in the past, and does feel like the more natural direction to take this archetype.
Perhaps it's the anthems,
overrun hasn't really been a favorite of mine.
Red White is probably on balance as awkward an aristocrats deck as red green is, but black white is an upgrade on black green.
Prowess:
-->
Here's where it gets weird. Blue and Red are so naturally spells matter colors that some cube podcasts derisively refer to blue red spells decks as "not an archetype, just what the color pie does".
GREEN on the other hand, has the least noncreature cards per capita of any color. A bold choice for the "cast noncreature spells" archetype.
So hey, I've got the exact same problem but I've moved it from one archetype to another. Progress!
Weather this problem is harder or easier to fix than the above: it's a different problem, which means I can jam fresh ideas at it.
On balance:
is unchanged,
probably has the same problems as
does but might have a linear angle to it that looks interesting to explore, and
is probably worse than
prowess was just because green isn't as aggressive a color as white is.
Casualties
There's a few cards I'll miss:
Birthing Pod was in as a GB sacrifice angle, but my cube isn't jammed full of ETB creatures as you'd think so they were baseline worse.
I do genuinely adore
Baba Lysaga, Night Witch but I think she requires a bit too much on top of your deck just being able to sac 3 permanents. Great for EDH, but if you like this card just play
Priest of Forgotten Gods (Which I am)
Other than these a lot of the cards I liked can actually stay as part of the tokens archetype or just general sweet things.
Gains
Alright time to talk about the weird shit
For everyone who's been excited to see what I'd do with this scroll mechanic I brainstormed back in the day well, the first design I've added in a while came from one of my drafters
I think this card is an interesting take on
Curse of Predation. You're limited on how many counters you can get out of it in a given turn, but you can apply them strategically and save up spells triggers as necessary.
Also most of my brainstorming about scrolls has been of the "ETB draw a card" variety, which generally means those cards need to be bad (see learn). Providing another way to get the scrolls means this can be costed somewhat more aggressively.
This forms the basis of the "more linear" blue green deck I'm envisioning. Hopefully I can get this deck to where it's interesting to play against a more controlling deck and not a 90-10 matchup in one direction or another.
#Text
And yes, I understand when WotC makes cards like this for arena, they don't bother explaining what naturalize does because you can mouseover and see the card beside it. I don't have that luxury, which leads to this book.
If this ends up being underpowered, I can see switching "ETB" to "ETB or Dies", but I'll test it here since all the options here gain you a card, even if they're conditional.
If the scroll is a literal copy of an existing card, I'm keeping the art the same for now. I don't run any of these cards in my list, and the border should be a good enough differentiator.
The OG scroll card is back! Card plays surprisingly well, always happy to have another reach creature running around the environment.
Also I love that the art for Skyshroud Packleader is just a zoom in of the art for Summon golem.
Ideally all my Scroll arts would relate to each other like this, but that's hard to get.
This is what I came up with for a
prowess signal for the multicolor section. My gut tells me I want a payoff, not an enabler here, but it's worth a shot.
Also I worry too many relevant cards just cost 1 anyways?
I still despise how this mana cost looks, but I'll admit they play extremely well. It's possible this should be
Kalamax, the Stormsire for simplicity, but I won't pretend there aren't gains here either.
I like the idea of
Bastion of Rememberance, but enchantment removal is few and far between in my cube so it's a touch more "emblem-y" than I'd like for a card that applies pressure like this does.
That's a touch more defensible in a multicolor slot, especially when it's a draw to a less played color combination.
I'll freely admit the
leyline of anticipation text is on there purely for fun, but I think if there's a color combination that can leverage that it would be
.
If this needs buffs, I could make the scrolls 1 mana, or for maximum possible spice just let them trigger off any spell.
This basically gives you infinite surges as long as this creature is in play, but maybe that's what a UG tempo deck needs in my environment.
