@japahn ,
@ravnic , and others have voiced a common piece of Cube design wisdom, which is that restrictive fixing breeds creativity and that better fixing homogenizes an environment, making it too easy to splash. There's some complexity here that I'd like to unpack a little bit (and forgive my loose paraphrases, as I'm too lazy to properly curate quotes).
0. The first idea is one that
@Zoss mentions above, which is that
drafters splash because of the promise of win equity. Toralf Severin never would have P2P1'ed
Dream Trawler at Worlds if he didn't believe the juice was worth the squeeze. Good manafixing makes the "squeeze" less energy-intensive, sure, but the "juice"
has to be present to make a splash worthwhile! Even with a perfect 5-color manabase, I'd play Mono-Red Aggro if there were no power outliers or out-of-pie effects worth the risk of color screw.
1.
"Restrictions breed creativity". Overall I only have beef with this phrase when it's implied that restrictions in the
manabase are the same as other Cube design restrictions. While Cube curators may benefit to some extent from restrictions, drafters will
always be restricted in some way or another by the format, and the amount of fixing isn't necessarily the primary restriction on a drafter.
Fixing is in a constant push-and-pull with
tempo,
power and
speed in a format (which Japahn is correct to point out). "How much win equity do I gain by splashing?", "If I stumble on mana, will I be punished?", and "If I draft this fixing land, what's the opportunity cost?" are all questions that govern the final composition of a cube format, meaning that there's no 1-to-1 correlation between fixing and restriction.
Even good mana comes with requirements -- it just shifts from an automatically predetermined number of colors (like Retail Limited) to the next-order restrictions that are inherent in deckbuilding inside the Magic game engine. If a cube devolves into 5-color soup every time good fixing is added, the tempo and speed of that format are more to blame than the number of fixing lands. (KHM and MH2 are prime examples of Tier 1 decks being heavily multicolor despite terrible fixing land quality and quantity.)
Another related idea that doesn't merit its own paragraph: Couldn't it also be said that too little manafixing is a "restriction that chokes creativity"? Imagine an alternate universe's Innistrad BUG
Spider Spawning deck that couldn't support all 3 colors due to poor fixing -- a "creative" drafter might see the unique deckbuilding opportunity but be unable to live the dream.
2.
"Too much fixing homogenizes a format". Again, speed and tempo are crucial, as are metagame considerations. Legacy allows 4x of the most broken fixing cards in Magic, and yet the best deck in the format is UR Delver right now.
Two colors. The same could be said for Modern, where UR Prowess, GW Heliod, and Dom's own GR Hardened Scales are recent standouts. Good mana doesn't mean that 5-color greed is a good deck. Even when 5-color greed is good, a strongly proactive deck like Naya Zoo or Wasteland Delver is heavily favored against that deck, so it might not be the right deck for a given draft table.
3.
"Good manafixing is a high-powered cube design choice". I think this idea comes from the exorbitant, ridiculous expense of a eternal-Constructed-quality manabase, combined with the atrocious fixing that WotC intentionally injects into their Retail Limited low-powered environments. But just because WotC is financially incentivized to create demand for the game engine's most important card type doesn't mean that the design decision is inherently low-powered.
My own low-power cube (
https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/barad_dur) runs high quality fixing lands, and the CC link is actually out of date since I added 2-3 more cycles of fetches and shocks. Even so, the format is characterized by durdly little engines and grindy Riptidean value loops. In fact, the extra fixing actually enables all kinds of pivot and penta archetypes for drafters to express their creativity. I've carefully tuned the aggro decks in this format to thrive and punish greedy manabases, so it did come at some cost to this format's speed and tempo, but the point is that losing to mana/color screw doesn't have to be synonymous with low-power cube design.
To illustrate from the opposite direction, a prior version of my high-power cube (
https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/1313) could have still supported 13-mountain aggro decks and mostly-blue tap-out control decks even if its fixing lands were Temples and gainlands.
4. Now, to
@Zoss 's point,
good manafixing is a higher-skill design choice. When there are no handholds to say "oh, too bad these cards are uncastable", deckbuilding relies more heavily on card eval skill and the ability to create a focused gameplan, making more trainwrecks possible by unskilled players. One also loses out on some luck-driven wins if the opponent rarely gets mana screwed. (To be clear, "high skill" =/= "better". No value judgment here.)
5.
"Good manafixing undermines the color pie and reduces replayability". Is this true? In a block like the RTR-GTC-DGM block, players could play 10 color pairs, plus an additional 5 monocolors (even though the latter were baaaaad). [3-color decks weren't supported (to my knowledge), due to the bad fixing and the low win equity gained by splashing.] That makes
15 total playable color combos.
In a cube that leverages a good manabase to promote deck diversity, where 2-to-4-color decks are equally playable, you get 10 guilds, 10 tricolor, 5 quad-color, and 1 WUBRG for a total of
26 playable combos. Almost twice as many viable decks.
As for the color pie, I'd hazard a guess that the color pie has value in cube design for making decks feel different to pilot. All I can add is, subjectively, I find Mardu very different to pilot than Naya, so I personally don't see a problem with it. Even if I'm able to cast all 5 colors, White is still unique for its spot removal just as Blue is special for cantrips and stack interaction.
Thanks for bearing with that ramble, and for sparking that train of thought.
)
