Drafted Shamizy's cube
Never should have passed that pod...
After a first pick
DRS I dove straight into a deep dark
oozy pit of jund. I was initially skeptical about the gold card density, but fixing seems pretty plentiful, and I like the tension between possible splashes versus committing to CC cards in you primary colors. I really appreciate the cohesiveness of this list, and I never once felt like a card was out of place or poorly considered.
However, I can't imagine delver is good, and picking up enough waste mana cards to be worth fixing for seems pretty unrealistic.
I'm curious how often people are drafting heavy synergy decks. For instance: how often does a dedicated delirium deck come together? Do you mostly see value
Deathcap Cultivator decks like mine? Or are people
Really getting their
Promised End on?
Thanks! I'll admit that Delver is a bit of a relic here and only shines within the UR Spells deck that comes together every now and then. Being a 420 list, it's not within the draft pool every time so I'm not as worried about it.
Ah yes, Waste mana is an interesting topic and one I've thought about quite a bit. Initially, I had bumped my cube up to 450 this summer to allow for more room to flesh out certain archetypes with Eldrazi being a theme. The issue then became a dilution of effects throughout the cube. Seeing only 360 (at most 375 via
Lore Seeker) of a 450 left it way too open to missing key pieces and payoffs for certain archetypes. I've since shaved it down to 420 where I've had the most success employing archetypes and themes with enough variance and depth to be functional.
These are the only creatures that care for a colorless source, and the ones that you might go out of your way splashing for are likely just the Thought-Knot, Displacer, and perhaps Smasher. Bearer and Obligator are merely payoff cards within aggressive B/R decks giving their best impressions of
Gatekeeper of Malakir and
Zealous Conscripts if you really want it. Their bases cases of
Vampire Interloper for 2 and 3/1 hasty for 3 are passable in those decks. Finally, the World Breaker is just a fine ramp target even if you never end up getting to rebuy it from the grave. A 5/7 reach is a major roadblock and being able to shoot down one of their fixing pieces is pretty big game. Newzilek was originally in this cube, but I saw after a few drafts that it just wasn't high impact enough nor worth subverting your mana base to support. There just wasn't a critical mass of cards to make it viable at the time, maybe it's worth looking at again in the future but as of right now it's just a shitty value reanimation target.
To reliably make use of the colorless kicker or cost on some of these, I feel like you need to splash for 3 sources of colorless within your deck. Within the main 420 list I have the following available that produce colorless/allow you to fetch a colorless source:
Within the Utility Land Draft, I've since moved
Wastelands as a squadron pick of 3 (using up all of your draft picks), since it's likely that it'll just be aggressive W/B or R/x Aggro decks that can maximize the value of that much land destruction as they stay low to the ground and apply pressure. It's a powerful effect when you have a density of it within your pool, but seeing just a single Wasteland within a draft is such a shitty feeling. Alongside it in the ULD we have an
Evolving Wilds and
Terramorphic Expanse as the only other sources of multi-color fetching,
Cavern of Souls,
Phyrexian Tower,
Mutavault,
High Market, a handful of the Innistrad block dual color activated lands (
Gavony Township,
Nephalia Drownyard, etc.) and others. With all of these sources, there's usually enough ways for someone who really wants to maximize the value of their Eldrazi to do so.
Emrakul, the Promised End is just an excellent card even without being able to cheat fully on the cost. Ramp decks will want it as a late game finisher, it's a fine reanimation target early, and obviously it's a major payoff if you build a deck based around the graveyard or with a plethora of looting effects. The base case I've seen for it has been around 8-9 mana which I think is just fine for something that will likely end the game in 2 turns or so.
Finally, synergy decks ARE very possible if players draft with an eye to it, though many of my drafters just decide to go for generically strong cards the majority of the time. The delirium patch is relatively recent within the last few month, haven't had much of a chance to draft, but through all of my testing on Cubetutor and theorycrafting it should be viable. In the last few months I've been tinkering here and there to get rid of more generically strong cards and put in slightly weaker variants that can be utilized within synergy driven lists. We'll see just how viable they are the next time I can organize a draft.
Hopefully this answered all your questions!
Also, we shoud never forget that the number one rule of cubing is that almost any cube can entertain. Even 
