The Dandy Cube (Chris Taylor's Cube)

I don't believe the card "Graceful Falconer" technically does anything as worded, because of the layers system.

"Creatures with power greater than their base power have flying."

Edit: maybe it does? The layer where you check if a creature has flying is before the layer where you determine a creature's actual power. Can the the layer system forecast this for this instance.

Edit 2: Just don't ever have this on the table next to a Favorable Winds, or, god forbid, Crosswinds. I'm certain the game can't handle this.

lol thanks for reading my rules pedantry.
 

Chris Taylor

Contributor
I've swapped from Aurelia to Tajic, Legion's Edge. I probably want the drop in power level anyways, and I love that green and white both have "burn" spells in my cube (he even protects from traditional fight cards)
0z94kiu.jpg
UQWyQL1.jpg

+1/+1 counters is in {R}{U}{G} right now, but I feel like the bleed is worth it here
 

Dom Harvey

Contributor
Got to Cube with Chris again, as an actual Canadian this time. 4-0ed with:










+ Ancient Mantra (R for Tormenting Voice with Flashback: 1R, sac a permanent), Tracking (G, look at top 3, put one to hand and rest to GY), Deadwood Druid (G 1/1, ETB search library/GY for a creature/land and put it on top), Ondu Guide (1G 0/4, Landfall = surveil 1, Threshold +3/+0)

The original build was a 4C mess with great mana and a ton of filtering but over the night I realized this Naya good-stuff deck was better. Nothing too flashy here but the custom card selection spells ensured I always had lots of stuff to do. Great defensive creatures + Anger beat up the aggro decks and the powerful 5s/6s along with Guide/Courser won the grindy mirrors
 

Dom Harvey

Contributor
4-0ed tonight with:











(Relevant SB: Wall of Roots, Wall of Blossoms, Grapple with the Past, Fleetwheel Cruiser)

Customs: 2 Tracking, Deadwood Druid, Show Dominance (1G, destroy target artifact/you deal 4 to a creature and it deals its power to you)

I remembered Chris saying last time that nobody else was playing the counters deck - which I love! - and he was to my left so I decided to force it; it turned out he was trying to draft it too, and a lot of the pieces (especially the customs) weren't opened in the draft, so this ended up as a mainstream-ish deck with some fun counters stuff (best draw of the night was T1 Stormtamer, T2 Plunderer, T3 Rishkar to pump both and attack + trigger Plunderer to pump again, T4 Root-Kin). If I wasn't forcing the deck I'm not sure I would have ended up in it - I passed a lot of top-shelf 'normal' U/G cards to end up in it, and that deck probably would have been better. Again, I appreciated the custom card draw/filtering spells making sure few games were unnecessarily lost to screw/flood
 

Chris Taylor

Contributor
Might be fucking with my color wheel again: what do you guys feel about Grixis prowess?

UR has always felt like the home of the spells deck, but I'm not sure white is the best fit if I'm in charge.

I can custom up black versions of seeker of the way, Kess, Dissident Mage would make a ton more sense, and basically I'd be trading token spells like battle screech for discard spells like inquisition of kozilek, and protection effects like Emerge Unscathed for Unearth and co.

This does make black a touch akward, as it's also part of my threshold colors, so the prowess decks will want their non-threat cards to be spells, and the graveyardy ones will want their non-threats to be creatures. Blue's kinda shouldering this burden right now, and I'm not really sure if it's a problem because my drafters just love blue no matter what its doing.

On the side this lets me go from Temur to Naya counters (right before simic releases, natch) and from Abzan nothing to Bant nothing.
 
Might be fucking with my color wheel again: what do you guys feel about Grixis prowess?

UR has always felt like the home of the spells deck, but I'm not sure white is the best fit if I'm in charge.


I felt this a bit too. I try not to think of having my archetypes as limited to certain colors, but certainly during the drafting process when you have a Soul-Fire Grandmaster and a Seeker of the Way, the spells that feel good with this style of deck are usually not in white.

I think my answer to this is to have white prowess decks be artifact-centered. Enchantments in white trigger prowess and the sorcery-speed isn't a problem if you want to prowess-up before combat, but I've been consistently disappointed with enchantment themes in cube. Red/Blue tend to incidentally have artifact support so even if red/blue are more spell-centered and white is more artifact-centered, the prowess decks anywhere should feel natural. Mishra's Bauble, Chromatic Star, etc are prowess-triggering cantrips. Here Tumble Magnet or Icy Manipulator maintain the tempo-play feeling of many prowess decks. Pyrite Spellbomb feels right at home.

I see in your list you have the noncreature colorless section super pared down, but you have a boatload of incidental artifact creation in white between the artifact creature tokens and the clues. Those don't trigger prowess, but the groundwork is there for something... although that's probably a bigger overhaul than you're interested in doing. I've been working on a relatively much small number of changes to get artifact themes working better in my cube and I've been sorta stuck on it for month or two - hopefully I'll have something to say about it soon.
 

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
Might be fucking with my color wheel again: what do you guys feel about Grixis prowess?

UR has always felt like the home of the spells deck, but I'm not sure white is the best fit if I'm in charge.

I can custom up black versions of seeker of the way, Kess, Dissident Mage would make a ton more sense, and basically I'd be trading token spells like battle screech for discard spells like inquisition of kozilek, and protection effects like Emerge Unscathed for Unearth and co.
Holy shit, black Seeker of the Way sounds awesome for my cube. Pity the rest of the white prowess cards in my cube don't translate as well...
 

Chris Taylor

Contributor
Okay, I thought I'd throw a few hundred words at you about a card I just added, giving you a bit of insight into my design ethos:

094 - Old Watchbark.jpg
So, first off: I do think a 1G 3/3 is printable, even in standard. However, I don't think they would because such a card is kinda boring, even if it would be good. Given their willingness to make cards like Sylvan Advocate and Terrain Elemental (This is in a PRECON btw). Sylvan say play, but supposedly it was the worst card in the deck (Everything in that format was a 2/3, so not being able to attack past them or have an ETB probably contributed to that. Without the six lands clause, they might not have added it to the deck at all. Which blows my mind about a 2/3 vigilance for 2, but I gotta move on.)

However, I do think the text box on this card is incorrect. Typically I'd like my independently playable cards to have some small synergy upside leaning you in the direction of a more focused deck (Eg: Blade Splicer provides 2 bodies to sacrifice or benefit from anthems.) while leaving payoff lead ins like this for cards a bit more below the curve.(See volt charge). I'd rather not the +1/+1 counter drafter have this swiped from them by someone in a BG midrange deck who just wanted something that trades well.

It also probably needs a flavor text. Looks a little barren.

However, given I'm drafting tomorrow, I've got this in for now so I don't forget both ideas :p In terms of what to replace the text box with, green does +1/+1 counters and graveyard stuff (Think like, grizzly fate or oversold cemetery). Any ideas?
 

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
However, given I'm drafting tomorrow, I've got this in for now so I don't forget both ideas :p In terms of what to replace the text box with, green does +1/+1 counters and graveyard stuff (Think like, grizzly fate or oversold cemetery). Any ideas?

With that art, it would be a real shame to do nothing with the graveyard.
  • When Old Watchbark dies, return target land card from your graveyard to the battlefield tapped.
  • Dredge 1
  • Make it a 0/0. When ~ enters the battlefield, exile [any number of/up to X] creature cards from graveyards. Old Watchbark enters the battlefield with that many +1/+1 counters on it.
  • When Old Watchbark dies, look at the top X cards of your library, where X is the number of creature cards in your graveyard. You may reveal a [pick something, creature card? land card?] from them and put it into your hand. Put the rest on the bottom of your library in a random order.
  • Make it an Enchant Forest, enchanted forest is a 3/3. When enchanted forest dies, you may exile a creature card from your graveyard. If you do, return Old Watchbark from your graveyard to the battlefield.
  • Each Forest you control is a Swamp in addition to its other land types.
  • When Old Watchbark dies, search your library for [again, pick something that fits] card and put that card into your graveyard. Then shuffle your library.
  • Whenever Old Watchbark attacks, you may exile a creature card from [a/your] graveyard. If you do, [scry 1/investigate].
Also, I think it's funny how you said this article was amazing, and then go right ahead and ignore it completely by not coming up with a three mana 3/3, but a two mana 3/3 even, with upside :')
 

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
I like this, Bloodline Mentor is a great tweak of Monastery Mentor! The only thing I do not like is that Gilt-Leaf Scarblade own power and toughness are not equal, but that's the same knock I had on Gilt-Leaf Winnower. It just doesn't feel right :)
 

Chris Taylor

Contributor
I like this, Bloodline Mentor is a great tweak of Monastery Mentor! The only thing I do not like is that Gilt-Leaf Scarblade own power and toughness are not equal, but that's the same knock I had on Gilt-Leaf Winnower. It just doesn't feel right :)

I get where you're coming from. but on the other hand, should I actually make it a 2/2? every scroll guy I've made has been much stronger than I'd thought initially, and I wasn't exactly making 187's payable in installments
 

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
I really don't know. Despite coming up with the wording of scroll and the MSE template, I've never had a scroll custom in my own cube :) I still love the idea of scrolls, and sincerely hope WotC discovers the idea themselves :D
 

Chris Taylor

Contributor
It is time to retire Aristocrats.
Sad to see something that's been part of my cube since day 1 leave, but it's been a tough nut to crack.
As my format gets more and more fair over time, the endless supply of 2/1s offered by black is becoming a real issue for the rest of the archetypes, especially reactive ones.

There's a few options I could take to try and make this work: Maybe Bloodsoaked Champion costs 2 to cast so the combo angle is still there, but the agressive gameplan is worse.
Maybe have the creatures be 1/1s rather than 2/1s, forcing the deck to lean harder on anthems or the combo angle.
It's also possible that you could balance this by hitting just the right number of payoffs/enablers and bringing everything down just enough to feel fair, but my group is just kinda tired of it.

I think this is a sweet archetype with interesting drafting decisions, especially when you're limited to printed magic. Blood Artist and Goblin Bombardment are narrow cards to be sure, but they're way less narrow than some other cube archetype cards like Entomb or Deceiver Exarch. Me? I can do whatever I need to for cards to overlap however I want, so the flexibility offered here actually feels low compared to my other archetypes.

Anyways, time for a scene change. I've decided the new direction is an artifact angle, specifically in {U}{B}{R}. I also considered white, but while there's a ton of ways to generate clues and servos and golems in white, there's not a ton of ways to pay people off for having artifacts.

Anyways, post archetype shuffle my cube now includes:
{U}{G}{W} +1/+1 counters
{U}{R}{W} Prowess
{G}{B}{X} Graveyard
{U}{B}{R} Artifacts

The plan was originally to offer each archetype as having 3 functional 2 color decks or a 3 color variant for spice. This has worked with moderate success, both prowess and counters work like this, but the graveyard deck has only ever had a solid showing in GB. Mixing in a 3rd color only ever happened for 1-2 cards (typically generic power cards as well) and any variant with just black or just green just...didn't work. There were a few individual blue cards that worked well (Search for Azcanta, Jace, Vryn's Prodigy, various looting effects) but never really enough to actually justify having a heavy presence of blue in your deck.
I'd tried switching it to red with...disastrous results.

Mostly this idea was built off the RG lands in graveyards matter theme from modern horizons, and while all these cards say the word graveyard on them, there's a philosophical conflict in what the deck is trying to do.

See grindy graveyard based decks take a lot of mana to operate. Loops are often bound by mana, and a lot of the payoffs are expensive. Cards like Molten Vortex, Throes of Chaos, Tectonic Reformation, Living Twister etc all end up taxing your mana when you'd much rather just be hitting land drops. A Huge disappointment was centaur vinecrasher, who demands a really insane number of fetchlands and self mill to be close to on curve.
So that angle doesn't really pan out. I think the better approach is to handle this like a 5 color green archetype, where it's solidly BG, but you can kinda splash around for whatever works (Spitebellows + Oversold Cemetary, Recurring Hydroid Krasis, or whatever. Maybe there's some sweet white cards I haven't thought of. Sun titan?)

As well, we also had the Artifact deck debut! Hilariously both players drafting hard in this archetype played white for artifact count support, and some of the cards in red and black I added (the more aggressive ones) ended up in other decks and had no synergy reason to exist there.

I kinda knew that going in, as I didn't have quite enough ideas that all fit in a midrange shell, so a few aggressive cards were added. Embraal Bruiser is a cool card, but I don't think it really fits.

I'd doubled up on Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas and Karn, Scion of Urza, and our own Dominic Harvey stole many a game with unblockable 5/5 blurry beebles.
Thopter Spy Network was a solid overpreformer, but that card is so near and dear to my heart that I'm willing to give it a lot of leeway. (notably better because of the addition of 8 signets to my cube)

However, the strongest card of the night definitely goes to my custom Karn:

03 Karn the Corrupted.png

A few things about this card need to change. The theme is there, but it's just a bit too strong in a few too many places. This is my first custom planeswalker in ages and it shows :p

After some analysis with my drafters, we've decided on this:

Karn, the Corrupted 3BB
Whenever an artifact you control dies, each opponent loses 1 life.
+1: investigate
-2: create a 0/0 construction token with "This gets +1/+1 for each artifact you control"
Starting Loyalty: 4

Gaining life really was the big thing on the passive: A lot of this deck involves pumping out a bunch of servos, thopters and clues and exploiting them, and this provided a lot more wiggle room than necessary.
the + adding black was an idea of mine thinking the + was too weak initially. I'd underestimated the passive, and it's not :p Also, going up to 6 and accelerating you also proved a bit much.
Slightly adjusting the CMC and starting loyalty rounds out the changes. I wish he could mirror Karn, Scion of Urza, but at least now he's a mirror :p
If it needs further nerfing, I'll probably adjust the Karnstruct to a -3.

Also I should probably Tezzeret the Schemer his clue and have him make a unique token with a different name because clue doesn't make a ton of sense. (That tezzeret basically makes treasures, but there's no flavor in them being called that)
 
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Dom Harvey

Contributor
It turns out Beeble is unblockable UNLESS they have glasses, which has made me rethink my view of the card (but not my amateurish and probably offensive typecasting of various Magic players!)










Preordain = surveil Preordain
Reaver Drone = B(Phyrexian B) 2/3 artifact Zombie (we sharpied Golem onto it too for Splicer synergy)
Kindly Cognician = Cognician + Etherium Sculptor mashup
Glint-Nest Crane = same but an artifact
Thraben Inspector = 1W 1/2 ETB Investigate, Fabricate 1 (LOVE this design! I did suggest this should be an artifact too and was gently but correctly rebuked)
Demonic Tutor = 5BB 5/5 Flying, ETB Demonic Tutor, Evoke 1B

Artifacts was under the Grixis banner but the white cards felt much more natural. This is a good impression of what I'm trying to do with UW Artifacts in my own Cube and it was a lot of fun to play (highlight being Tezzeret juicing up a Blurry Beeble against an unfortunately unspectacled opponent)
 
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Chris Taylor

Contributor
Now two drafts in with the artifacts theme, and its been incredibly well recieved. However there are still problems :p


I love this card, it really scratches the same itch birthing pod did with this cute little minigame, and it's a mana sink which we all love.
But why god why is that last ability free?
Thoptors are basically the most common token random colors make (followed by clues) in my cube, so upgrading each of those to 4/4s is extremely strong.
Hell, there's even a 1 drop that creates a thopter in my cube!
vUGX1o4.jpg


It's too much at the moment. Makes sense, it was designed for a format where 4/4s are chump change.
I'm not sure if I should
1) Up the cmc to 3
2) add some ammmount of mana to the 3rd ability
3) swap them to 3/3 golems
4) some combination of the above.

Also, this motherfucker?

Pretty stong on his own. Not the most resiliant thing on earth but he does produce value almost instantly. a constrant stream of 2/1s proved frustrating for a lot of people as the gravecrawler deck proved, and yeah, you can run people the fuck over by turning your clues into myr.
Or:
14.jpg

You can obliterate people.

Both of these were in one person's deck on sunday, and I quote:
"This is probably the most fun I've had drafting cube ever, and it probably needs nerfing" :p

As well, I've noticed there's a lot more artifact "glue" than I'd estimated. My actual artifact section is notoriously small compared to mot cubes, and when I initially added this theme I was struggling to come up with anything that even mentioned artifacts in my red and black sections, thinking the results would be "These cards seem cool, but there's just not enough artifacts"
Turns out there's like a dozen white cards I hadn't even expected would matter, a smattering of others, and the artifact section is actually playing a bigger role than I'd thought.

So I might need to prune back :p
Ah well. Always nice to see I've over-supported something without noticing :D
 

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
Why does Dawnsteed, a card that has steed in the name and shows a pegasus in the art, creature type bird instead of pegasus?
 
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