General The Fixing and I

[japahn]

Good conversation here, thanks for the replies @japahn @inscho and others, but it sparks an additional question from me: why is worse fixing more “scrappy”?

Well, that's a really good question. I didn't know, so I went and drafted my cube, then redrafted the seat imagining I had perfect mana. Didn't figure it out, then I went and drafted Attack on Cube.

What I felt is that when I have to pick a couple of colors instead of be able to cast anything, I lack tension during the draft. I often ask myself during drafts with less fixing: "will I have a decent deck?" "Did I pivot too late?" "I wanted this card, but I really need to pick this dual." "Maybe I have to let go of my first pick." With incredible fixing, there are fewer risk/reward choices. Picking the best card in the pack is pretty much always safe. It felt comfortable, but I missed the uncertainty, the curiosity to see the next packs and the excitement when the cards I wanted wheeled.

It's more scrappy because good cards feel scarce rather than abundant. Putting together a good deck feels like an accomplishment rather than an certainty.

in retail limited, there are some amount of games where I’m locked into my lane such that it’s correct to pick Reave Soul over Questing Beast (which I did many times in pack 3s of ELD). It gets even worse in heavy gold sets like RTR or IKO. I’m not actually fighting other players for maindeckable cards cuz we’re all already siloed into retail limited draft archetypes (although I guess im scrapping to make 23 C+ or better cards).

We have such different paradigms in this respect! When I pass Questing Beast P3P1, I'm ok with it going to the green drafters. Each colors gets its share of rares, and it's a reward for who found the open colors. If I could just splash it into my UB deck, it would make the P3P1 feel forced, since it's obviously the best card in the pack, and I'd begrudgingly pick it, play it, and apologize to my opponents when I cast it. I couldn't even say "yeah, I saw green was open then got this passed pack 3!" There would be no merit to me, it would just be "yeah, I opened this."

in a high fixing density format, a greater %age of cards are viable picks in each pack — not only the lands, but the spells — which to me sounds more scrappy, since drafters are more free to pick powerful cards and shoulder into others’ lanes. More picks are fought over more vigorously, ime.

The best cards can always be played though, so the overall deck power in the same cube is higher. In lower fixing environments, lots of top cards stay in sideboards because they were taken early, speculatively, or, to a lesser extent, hate drafted. That opens up space to use those fringe, "bad" cards that would 100% stay in sideboards if there was perfect mana.

Same thing about fewer sideboard slots. I never use all 15 slots anyways, and so fewer sounds scrappier to me.

If there aren't many slots to leave spells out of your maindeck because nonbasics took up draft pool space, then being stuck with narrow or bad cards is particularly bad, since you might have to maindeck them. This creates an incentive to make safe picks rather than speculative ones.

I also feel riptiders are uniquely well-suited to know that one can mimic any environment via Cube, even a Legacy format with Wastelands where 4-color isn’t always optimal but otherwise @japahn’s points are well taken

Oh yeah, for sure you can have mimic Legacy including the land disruption. But if the intention is to move in the way of avoiding color and mana screw, it seems counterproductive to add cards that actively promote it.

Then again, maybe it’s all just semantics about scrappiness that went over my head, lol.

Yeah, it's badly defined. It's something I feel more than think about, and hard to translate into words. I always think of the feeling of scarcity when playing Slay the Spire, Don't Starve Together, Rimworld, and other similar games. That satisfaction of creatively and skillfully carving a path through a challenging situation.

 

[Brad]

Maybe I missed it, but has anyone discussed a mix of both strategies? My designs typically have mostly 2 color duals but also include City of Brass, Evolving Wilds, etc. Probably 6-10 five color lands. This lets the splashers splash but maintains the tension in trying to run more colors off the back of a single Mana Confluence and Prismatic Vista.

EDIT: The 5 color lands also fit into all of your typical 2.5 color decks.

Spoiler

 

[Jason Waddell]

I think any retail comparisons have to take into account that the power delta is likely much greater than any of our cubes, and that has a huge impact on these fixing dynamics.

 

[Velrun]

Doing this in a 15-card format would be sweet. Degenerate, but sweet.

Let that Gemstone Cavern forever be the 1 card you never see in your two hands

 

[Velrun]

you’re always going to be making trade offs as an architect and drafter. i can’t really justify supporting mono red aggro in my list because why in the world would a player ignore the 15 lands i’ve seeded in the cube for each player and go mono red? but i find three+ color midrangey decks to be way more fun to draft and pilot than stuff like mono red aggro or UW control, so i made the trade off to properly support those kinds of decks. i know fun is subjective, but even in a cube that supports mono colors and has bad fixing, i’m gonna try to force three color+ decks because those are more fun to me. i don’t think it’s wrong to properly support decks you want to see come together in your cube.

I think it’s more than fair. You have to make a decision about which decks are available so you might as well choose the ones that make one guarenteed player around the table happy. I’d also argue it’s easier to balance a cube if you have a greater knowledge about play patterns and people tend to have greater knowledge about things they like above things they dislike.

 

[blacksmithy]

then I went and drafted Attack on Cube.

Thanks for drafting!

EDIT: obviously it may not be everyone’s cup of cube tea, but i’m glad you noticed how hard it is to trainwreck an Attack on Cube draft, a big goal of mine is that even someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing can end up with a moderately sweet deck, and having excellent fixing and extra picks to accommodate taking the extra fixing is part of that design.
of course… i feel like my cube is somewhat tangential to the topic of “ways to reduce mana flood and color screw” haha

 

[Nemo]

I've thought a bit on the problem of designing a mana base that promotes consistent 2-3 color decks without incentivizing 4-5 color good stuff decks. This is, of course, a subjective design goal.

One solution is to include dual land vouchers in the draft, and specifically each voucher would list one of the five colors. After the main draft, the people with the vouchers take a dual land that includes the voucher color. No fetch lands. This entails extra time to pick the dual lands but also saves a bit of search and shuffle time.

The dual land draft can be managed in various ways. To save on time and decisions, you can just provide an ample pile of proxy dual lands that are all the same type, and then it's just part of the deck building process. On the more complicated end, you can have priority numbers on the vouchers and draft them all in order. Players would need time to decide what colors they're playing before that type of dual land draft. A similar concept is that instead of vouchers, you could allow a "dual land trade-in" process during deck building. Trade in a dual land for a different dual land from the pool that shares a color with the one you drafted.

2 color decks can pick 40% of color vouchers instead of 10% of dual lands.
3 color decks can pick 60% of color vouchers instead of 30% of dual lands.

Those are the same percentages as fetch land mana bases, except that in game it plays out differently. Fetch lands are 4-5 color lands if you have the right dual lands, whereas all of the lands drawn in game with a voucher system would be 2 color lands. This means you'd have to draft quite a few dual land vouchers to build a consistent 4 color mana base. Also, you wouldn't have incidentally drafted dual lands for your potential 4th color laying around in your draft pool. Instead, you'd have to allocate some of your vouchers to supporting a 4th color at the expense of using those vouchers for your primary colors.

 

[sigh]

Just one set of fetches and duals, and then the rest as non-fetchable duals and other more utility type lands seems to also do the trick. The multiple sets of fetch+fetchable is where you can really start to see color proliferation.

 

[japahn]

Thanks for drafting!

EDIT: obviously it may not be everyone’s cup of cube tea, but i’m glad you noticed how hard it is to trainwreck an Attack on Cube draft, a big goal of mine is that even someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing can end up with a moderately sweet deck, and having excellent fixing and extra picks to accommodate taking the extra fixing is part of that design.
of course… i feel like my cube is somewhat tangential to the topic of “ways to reduce mana flood and color screw” haha

I think I need to bring this back a little bit to my cube with a slightly different premise - the comfort that if you can stick to two colors, you'll have a reasonable deck.

Thank you all for the discussion. I'm learning a lot of things even beyond matters about fixing, like that I can probably ease off of synergy a bit more and the color system + macro archetypes should still provide deck variety. Then I can use those slots to improve agency.

More on topic, I'm thinking of replacing Checklands with Bounce lands in my Trilands/Shocklands/Checklands/Creaturelands mana base. That should mitigate mana flood and screw.

 

[shamizy]

I've thought a bit on the problem of designing a mana base that promotes consistent 2-3 color decks without incentivizing 4-5 color good stuff decks. This is, of course, a subjective design goal.

One solution is to include dual land vouchers in the draft, and specifically each voucher would list one of the five colors. After the main draft, the people with the vouchers take a dual land that includes the voucher color. No fetch lands. This entails extra time to pick the dual lands but also saves a bit of search and shuffle time.

The dual land draft can be managed in various ways. To save on time and decisions, you can just provide an ample pile of proxy dual lands that are all the same type, and then it's just part of the deck building process. On the more complicated end, you can have priority numbers on the vouchers and draft them all in order. Players would need time to decide what colors they're playing before that type of dual land draft. A similar concept is that instead of vouchers, you could allow a "dual land trade-in" process during deck building. Trade in a dual land for a different dual land from the pool that shares a color with the one you drafted.

2 color decks can pick 40% of color vouchers instead of 10% of dual lands.
3 color decks can pick 60% of color vouchers instead of 30% of dual lands.

Those are the same percentages as fetch land mana bases, except that in game it plays out differently. Fetch lands are 4-5 color lands if you have the right dual lands, whereas all of the lands drawn in game with a voucher system would be 2 color lands. This means you'd have to draft quite a few dual land vouchers to build a consistent 4 color mana base. Also, you wouldn't have incidentally drafted dual lands for your potential 4th color laying around in your draft pool. Instead, you'd have to allocate some of your vouchers to supporting a 4th color at the expense of using those vouchers for your primary colors.

I'd say the main thing you need to make 2-3 work without incentivizing 4-5 is just tailoring your land cycles accordingly and introducing opportunity cost. There needs to be an cost to premier fixing. It's part of the reason why I've never really wanted to try out ABUR duals in my cube; it's just too easy. I ran into same issue of 4C/5C goodstuff piles when I first began cubing when I would run double shock/double fetch. Savvy drafters realized early on that prioritizing fixing would make your life MUCH easier down the line and there was very little to dissuade you from playing a midrange pile of efficient cards. I still wanted good fixing, but I didn't want drafters to feel like they could just play 4C whatever without working for it or having to sequence correctly.

The key to fixing this was two-fold. One, I had to bump up aggressive decks and make them capable of keeping up via recursive threats and extra reach that could let them get through these durdly piles. There needed to be some way to make the opponent think harder about doming themselves for 2 or 3 off playing lands that wasn't as one dimensional as Mono-Red Aggro with burn for reach. Reading up on Recursive Aggro here helped me flesh out my own ideas and settle on the W/B Humans archetype that's been a mainstay in my cube for years now. It gave my drafters the right tools to deal with value piles while keeping the gameplay element fresh with sequencing decisions and various lines of play.

The second fix was to find a 2nd cycle of lands to complement my shocks. Honestly, my favorite cycle for this are the BFZ duals:



You still get the fetch-able dual typing, the less colors you have the more likely you are to be able to grab an untapped dual in the mid-game to continue developing (or just fetch tapped for a tempo hit), and they get "worse" with the more colors you're playing. I've found most of my decks in the last couple of years to lean 2 color with a light splash for a 3rd the majority of the time, mix it up with more colors and greed if I end up prioritizing fixing earlier in the draft. The lack of readily fetchable targets to enable greedy curve outs has been great for me ever since I made the swap. Now I'm just patiently waiting for them to complete the cycle with enemy colored duals and I'm ready to use this same landbase forever.

 

[Velrun]

…Now I'm just patiently waiting for them to complete the cycle…

You have more patience than me I very much like that Wizards make us wait and I especially enjoy it when the second half of the cycle is from another plane (Like Fetches, Fast, Shadow/Swirls etc) but it’s been 6 years