Onderzeeboot
Ecstatic Orb
Introduction
Once upon a time, someone with too much time on their hands, and too little opportunities to do live drafts with one of their two cubes (curse you COVID-19!) thought it was a good idea to start a third cube. I may not have a lot of opportunities to draft my cubes, even under normal circumstances, but variety is the spice of life, and even if it doesn't lead to an actual IRL cube, it's a cool thought experiment at the very least.
Cube link (caution! extremely work in progress!): https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/tgo
Aims and Constraints
Before I start diving in head first, I better define what kind of cube I'm actually trying to build here.
Odyssey remastered++
This cube is about Odyssey block, and it should be recognisable as such. That means I want to include a lot of cards from the block, though it's probably not feasible to include only cards from the block in conjunction with the next point. This also means that what's already available in Odyssey block should largely dictate the themes and archetypes available in draft. If possible, I want to avoid importing keywords from other sets and work with what we have, mechanics-wise at least.
Weed out pet peeves and design mistakes
Odyssey has a lot of highlights, but it also has a lot of less ideal components that I want to get rid of. First and foremost, it's known for the color imbalanced it introduced to limited play. Where the set Odyssey itself was normal, Torment skewed the numbers by pushing black and downplaying green and white. What do I mean? Well, Torment contained 26 blue cards, and 26 red cards. Close to the baseline for a small set at that time. Black, however, had a whopping 41 (!) cards in the same set, and green and white both had a mere 20, less than half of that. I'm sure you can imagine how that would affect the draft. The third set in the block, Judgment, reversed the balance, including, once again, 26 cards for both blue and red, but this time containing only 16 (!) black cards, to white and green's 32. Mark Rosewater has gone on record (twice) that color imbalanced limited formats are not going to return, giving them the full 10 points on the Storm Scale. Since this cube is about Odyssey block as whole, and the colors actually got about the same amount of cards in the whole block, I am definitely not going to bother with baking this color imbalance into my cube. Trying to prove it can be done when WotC themselves admits it was a mistake would be an act of hubris. Let's not go there.
Another personal pet peeve of mine is how protection affects limited play. Imagine how you would feel if, after drafting a cool monoblack deck in this cube, your first round opponent drops a Phantom Centaur on turn 4 (or heaven forbid, turn 3 off of a Werebear). I loathe protection from on creatures, especially ones that need to be killed or you're dead. Odyssey block had quite a few of them, and while not every one of those is problematic (looking at you, Commander Eesha), those that have permanent protection from a color are mostly out. I will likely make an exception for at least some of Iridiscent Angel and those cards involving a cost (e.g. Glory or Resilient Wanderer), but expect to see zero copies of Mystic Enforcer, Treetop Sentinel, and Mystic Crusader.
Lastly, I would be remiss not to mention Upheaval. Let's avoid the broken limited cards, shall we.
Modern set design sensibilities
That said, Odyssey is a block from a different era of design. Since Odyssey WotC has matured and refined their design principles a lot. Do they still make mistakes? Oh lord, they do! However, when you look at how cohesive modern era sets are compared to the... sparse mechanical identities of yore, it's obvious Odyssey block has a lot of room to grow into a more modern draft experience.
One of the major cornerstones of modern set designs are the marquee gold uncommons that tell a drafter what's cooking in limited. Thunderclap Wyvern shows you
is about flyers in this limited environment, Drana's Emissary tells you has a lifegain theme, etc. This is a strategy I also want to be using, but Odyssey is relatively sparse on gold cards...
Reprints from other sets are okay
Which is why I will be allowing reprints (preprints?) from other sets. As a quick example, is largely devoid of a theme in Odyssey block, other than their hatred of black, but I already mentioned I'm not going to include protection from black, let alone have it be the mechanical identity of one of my color pairs. Instead, I'll be looking at the phantom creatures (Phantom Tiger and friends) that were printed in Judgment. These would go along well both with a +1/+1 counters theme and with an aura theme (because if you pump the creature with, say, an Elephant Guide, it becomes essentially immune to combat damage). Both have been supported many times in the color pair, so I feel borrowing a few choice cards could really cement those themes. Looking at the gold options, there's Thaumatog from Odyssey block itself, but that feels a bit suspect (Psychatog it ain't). Looking beyond Odyssey block, we find Satyr Enchanter, Centaur Chronicler, Good-Fortune Unicorn, and Travel Preparations, which are all strong tie-ins and clear signposts for draft. We'll have to figure out how many of these signpost gold cards we want in draft, but for now, know that we will be incorporating those cards into our cube.
True to block look and feel
There is one problem though... Centaur Chronicler might be a cool signpost uncommon for the +1/+1 counters theme, and it's even a centaur, a tribe strong in Odyssey, but it doesn't look like it belongs! This means we will have to rely heavily on proxies, using the old border and old wording to approach that Odyssey look and feel even with newer designs. Let's just pretend these were preprints and make them look the part
Replicate a (sort of) retail limited the draft experience
And that leaves one final question, how are we going to divvy up the card pool? Now, fair warning, the following numbers are going to be arbitrary, but here's what I figured out. I want to somewhat replicate the feeling of a retail limited draft, so I had planned to seed boosters as follows: 1 rare, 3 uncommons, 10 commons, and 1 (mana fixing) land. Commons should appear reasonably often, let's say I want two thirds of the common card pool to appear each draft. To support an 8 person draft, that means I will need 24 * 10 * 3/2 commons (an 8 person draft uses 24 boosters, containing 10 commons each, and if I want 2/3 of the total common card pool to appear, I have to multiply by 3/2 to arrive at the total number). E.g., I will need 360 commons in my cube. I want the cube to contain duplicates of the commons, so that you can draft multiple Aether Bursts, for example. Let's say we want each common to appear 3 times in the card pool, that means we have 120 unique commons to work with.
Let's do the same calculation for uncommons, but assume we want only half of the uncommons in the card pool to show up. They are, after all, a bit rares. This gives us 24 * 3 * 2/1 = 144 uncommons to work with. Uncommons are often an important backbone of draft decks, so let's say we want each uncommon to appear twice in the uncommon card pool. This gives us 72 unique uncommons to work with.
Next, let's calculate the number of rares. This one's easy! If we assume we want only a quarter of the rares to show up, we will need 24 * 1 * 4/1 = 92 unique rares. That gives us a lot of room to unclude a bunch of marquee rares, while also borrowing some sweet capstones for the archetypes we want to include.
Last, but not least, there's the mana fixing slot. I thought long and hard about this one, but in the end, variety is not necessarily what we're looking for here. We just want to make sure the mana bases are relatively playable. Odyssey isn't a set with a heavy gold focus (in fact, monoblack is one of it's defining decks). I think we can safely resort to a set of 24 fixing lands that are always included, no randomness needed. The Skycloud Expanse cycle is a nice starting point, and if we are going to add any customs to the cube, this is the place to do them, I feel. Apart from those, Evolving Wilds is a natural fit in an environment that wants to get cards in the graveyard. If I include four of those, that leaves room for one other land cycle, but I haven't decided which one I want to include yet. I'ld include the painlands, but those have very un-Otaria names (Otaria is the continent where the story of Odyssey takes place). Odyssey doesn't have any blisteringly fast aggro decks, so there's no need to resort to the expensive untapped duals. I can probably get away with proxying the check duals (Glacial Fortress and friends), or even the uncommon taplands (Meandering River c.s.) Yeah, I think I like the taplands, that leaves the filter-cycle as the best fixers (because untapped), which is great.
Alright, that leaves me with the job to find out what archetypes I want to run, but let's be honest, this post already takes up way too much real estate. Let's save that puzzle for another post
Once upon a time, someone with too much time on their hands, and too little opportunities to do live drafts with one of their two cubes (curse you COVID-19!) thought it was a good idea to start a third cube. I may not have a lot of opportunities to draft my cubes, even under normal circumstances, but variety is the spice of life, and even if it doesn't lead to an actual IRL cube, it's a cool thought experiment at the very least.
Cube link (caution! extremely work in progress!): https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/tgo
Aims and Constraints
Before I start diving in head first, I better define what kind of cube I'm actually trying to build here.
- Odyssey remastered++
- Weed out pet peeves and design mistakes
- Modern set design sensibilities
- Reprints from other sets are okay
- Tue to block look and feel
- Replicate a (sort of) retail limited the draft experience
Odyssey remastered++
This cube is about Odyssey block, and it should be recognisable as such. That means I want to include a lot of cards from the block, though it's probably not feasible to include only cards from the block in conjunction with the next point. This also means that what's already available in Odyssey block should largely dictate the themes and archetypes available in draft. If possible, I want to avoid importing keywords from other sets and work with what we have, mechanics-wise at least.
Weed out pet peeves and design mistakes
Odyssey has a lot of highlights, but it also has a lot of less ideal components that I want to get rid of. First and foremost, it's known for the color imbalanced it introduced to limited play. Where the set Odyssey itself was normal, Torment skewed the numbers by pushing black and downplaying green and white. What do I mean? Well, Torment contained 26 blue cards, and 26 red cards. Close to the baseline for a small set at that time. Black, however, had a whopping 41 (!) cards in the same set, and green and white both had a mere 20, less than half of that. I'm sure you can imagine how that would affect the draft. The third set in the block, Judgment, reversed the balance, including, once again, 26 cards for both blue and red, but this time containing only 16 (!) black cards, to white and green's 32. Mark Rosewater has gone on record (twice) that color imbalanced limited formats are not going to return, giving them the full 10 points on the Storm Scale. Since this cube is about Odyssey block as whole, and the colors actually got about the same amount of cards in the whole block, I am definitely not going to bother with baking this color imbalance into my cube. Trying to prove it can be done when WotC themselves admits it was a mistake would be an act of hubris. Let's not go there.
Another personal pet peeve of mine is how protection affects limited play. Imagine how you would feel if, after drafting a cool monoblack deck in this cube, your first round opponent drops a Phantom Centaur on turn 4 (or heaven forbid, turn 3 off of a Werebear). I loathe protection from on creatures, especially ones that need to be killed or you're dead. Odyssey block had quite a few of them, and while not every one of those is problematic (looking at you, Commander Eesha), those that have permanent protection from a color are mostly out. I will likely make an exception for at least some of Iridiscent Angel and those cards involving a cost (e.g. Glory or Resilient Wanderer), but expect to see zero copies of Mystic Enforcer, Treetop Sentinel, and Mystic Crusader.
Lastly, I would be remiss not to mention Upheaval. Let's avoid the broken limited cards, shall we.
Modern set design sensibilities
That said, Odyssey is a block from a different era of design. Since Odyssey WotC has matured and refined their design principles a lot. Do they still make mistakes? Oh lord, they do! However, when you look at how cohesive modern era sets are compared to the... sparse mechanical identities of yore, it's obvious Odyssey block has a lot of room to grow into a more modern draft experience.
One of the major cornerstones of modern set designs are the marquee gold uncommons that tell a drafter what's cooking in limited. Thunderclap Wyvern shows you
is about flyers in this limited environment, Drana's Emissary tells you has a lifegain theme, etc. This is a strategy I also want to be using, but Odyssey is relatively sparse on gold cards...Reprints from other sets are okay
Which is why I will be allowing reprints (preprints?) from other sets. As a quick example,
is largely devoid of a theme in Odyssey block, other than their hatred of black, but I already mentioned I'm not going to include protection from black, let alone have it be the mechanical identity of one of my color pairs. Instead, I'll be looking at the phantom creatures (Phantom Tiger and friends) that were printed in Judgment. These would go along well both with a +1/+1 counters theme and with an aura theme (because if you pump the creature with, say, an Elephant Guide, it becomes essentially immune to combat damage). Both have been supported many times in the color pair, so I feel borrowing a few choice cards could really cement those themes. Looking at the gold options, there's Thaumatog from Odyssey block itself, but that feels a bit suspect (Psychatog it ain't). Looking beyond Odyssey block, we find Satyr Enchanter, Centaur Chronicler, Good-Fortune Unicorn, and Travel Preparations, which are all strong tie-ins and clear signposts for draft. We'll have to figure out how many of these signpost gold cards we want in draft, but for now, know that we will be incorporating those cards into our cube.True to block look and feel
There is one problem though... Centaur Chronicler might be a cool signpost uncommon for the +1/+1 counters theme, and it's even a centaur, a tribe strong in Odyssey, but it doesn't look like it belongs! This means we will have to rely heavily on proxies, using the old border and old wording to approach that Odyssey look and feel even with newer designs. Let's just pretend these were preprints and make them look the part
Replicate a (sort of) retail limited the draft experience
And that leaves one final question, how are we going to divvy up the card pool? Now, fair warning, the following numbers are going to be arbitrary, but here's what I figured out. I want to somewhat replicate the feeling of a retail limited draft, so I had planned to seed boosters as follows: 1 rare, 3 uncommons, 10 commons, and 1 (mana fixing) land. Commons should appear reasonably often, let's say I want two thirds of the common card pool to appear each draft. To support an 8 person draft, that means I will need 24 * 10 * 3/2 commons (an 8 person draft uses 24 boosters, containing 10 commons each, and if I want 2/3 of the total common card pool to appear, I have to multiply by 3/2 to arrive at the total number). E.g., I will need 360 commons in my cube. I want the cube to contain duplicates of the commons, so that you can draft multiple Aether Bursts, for example. Let's say we want each common to appear 3 times in the card pool, that means we have 120 unique commons to work with.
Let's do the same calculation for uncommons, but assume we want only half of the uncommons in the card pool to show up. They are, after all, a bit rares. This gives us 24 * 3 * 2/1 = 144 uncommons to work with. Uncommons are often an important backbone of draft decks, so let's say we want each uncommon to appear twice in the uncommon card pool. This gives us 72 unique uncommons to work with.
Next, let's calculate the number of rares. This one's easy! If we assume we want only a quarter of the rares to show up, we will need 24 * 1 * 4/1 = 92 unique rares. That gives us a lot of room to unclude a bunch of marquee rares, while also borrowing some sweet capstones for the archetypes we want to include.
Last, but not least, there's the mana fixing slot. I thought long and hard about this one, but in the end, variety is not necessarily what we're looking for here. We just want to make sure the mana bases are relatively playable. Odyssey isn't a set with a heavy gold focus (in fact, monoblack is one of it's defining decks). I think we can safely resort to a set of 24 fixing lands that are always included, no randomness needed. The Skycloud Expanse cycle is a nice starting point, and if we are going to add any customs to the cube, this is the place to do them, I feel. Apart from those, Evolving Wilds is a natural fit in an environment that wants to get cards in the graveyard. If I include four of those, that leaves room for one other land cycle, but I haven't decided which one I want to include yet. I'ld include the painlands, but those have very un-Otaria names (Otaria is the continent where the story of Odyssey takes place). Odyssey doesn't have any blisteringly fast aggro decks, so there's no need to resort to the expensive untapped duals. I can probably get away with proxying the check duals (Glacial Fortress and friends), or even the uncommon taplands (Meandering River c.s.) Yeah, I think I like the taplands, that leaves the filter-cycle as the best fixers (because untapped), which is great.
Alright, that leaves me with the job to find out what archetypes I want to run, but let's be honest, this post already takes up way too much real estate. Let's save that puzzle for another post
