The Mox Cube

[dbs]

Introducing The Mox Cube: a combo-centric environment intended to serve as a deck-building puzzle for the players. I've been putting this cube through regular play-testing with my group for around three/four months, and I think it's finally reached a point where I feel happy sharing. Besides, I've been using this website for close to four years now, so I thought it'd be good to make an account and try to contribute something back.

Cube Tutor Link: http://www.cubetutor.com/viewcube/97600

In a normal cube blog this is where I would give the breakdown of color combinations by archetype. In this cube, the archetypes are more like very broad links in a chain to be assembled, so color combinations aren't an especially useful abstraction. I'll give a rough sketch along with some structural notes in the section labeled "Structure" below, but the Mox Cube really all comes down to assembling engines. If you want to see a sampling of specific cards we found to be good or exciting based on our play-testing, then skip down to the following section and maybe that can give a general flavor. Frankly, the only real way to convey the flavor of any cube is decklists - but I haven't been recording decklists. Next time we sit down to draft, I'll make sure to save a few and update this thread!

Structure:

1) The format. The Mox Cube, is first and foremost a combo cube. The drafting process usually involves constructing an engine out of overlapping themes to produce an overwhelming amount of mana, card advantage, damage, or board presence - often all in one turn. Aggro, midrange, and control also exist, but it is not competitive to build an aggro deck by picking efficiently-costed creatures on curve, or to build a control deck by choosing the best removal, counterspells, and card draw. Over half of decks, including many aggressive creature decks, can win without resorting to the combat step, and control decks must tax and deny the opponent's ability to "go-off". Very often decks are organized around powerful artifacts and enchantments.

However, this is not a combo cube in the sense that there's a huge collection of two-card infinite combos. And many popular powered cube win conditions (e.g. Emrakul, the Aeons Torn) have been left out. I really wanted to center "deck-building as puzzle" in a way that would reward creative thinking, rather than just playing super broken magic for its own sake.

2) The moxen. The namesake for the cube are the ten moxen - two of each original mox. They have become so iconic with my players that a recent suggestion to test swapping them for the signets was greeted with intense scorn, and fighting over the moxen has become an almost ritualistic part of the drafting experience. Most games start with a turn one mox from one or both players (note we usually draft with 4-6 people), and the extra mana combined with the nature of the decks produces a fairly unusual play experience.

3) Card evaluation. Card evaluation has been extremely difficult, because the Mox Cube does not play like a typical limited environment. Many cards that I would normally consider busted (Recurring Nightmare) turn out to be quite fair, and cards that don't come to mind as powered-cube all-stars (Ogre Battledriver) consistently over-perform. Duress might be the single most sought-out disruptive spell in the environment - not something I realized until I saw players jamming two in the maindeck. Given the fast mana, the raw resources decks can develop, and the de-emphasis of traditional creature-combat win conditions, this makes sense but nonetheless presents a challenge. I've certainly made a lot of cube-construction errors, and I've had to lean almost exclusively on empirical evidence - I'm sure the cube will continue to evolve substantially in the next few months.

A corollary to card evaluation: I've found this format to be very challenging to play. Due to the high volume of tutor effects, and the general goal of building up a critical mass of resources before going-off, players need to be thinking about their entire library on most turns. While the format is fast (it's been normal to win on turn five and six), I've found the total playtime of games to be longer than my typical cube games due to players tanking.

4) A Few Features and Principles. Here are a handful of features and design principles I've tried more-or-less to stick to:
- not a lot of super-efficient or bomb-y creatures
- relatively weak removal suites, and no four mana wraths
- emphasis on artifacts and enchantments
- a variety of alternative win-conditions
- many decks that win with damage should be able to do so outside of combat
- strong representation of consistency and tutor effects
- two of each fetch has been absolutely critical

Finally, the archetypes. Again, this is a rough sketch because it's very difficult to delimit many of these archetypes. They blend and overlap, and different overlappings can lead to vastly different decks. It would be much more sensible to organize the cube into engines and their support, but I think giving a broad color-based breakdown is still potentially insightful:

Spoiler

Big Mana - UGRB. Sample cards: heartbeat, mul-daya, turnabout.
Mana Cheat - RUG. Sample cards: sneak, dream halls, tinker.
Big Spells - RGB. Sample cards: vial smasher, terastodon, villanous wealth.
Reanimator - BGR. Sample cards: golgari grave-troll, entomb, living death.
Discard - UBR. Sample cards: waste not, wheels, rise from the tides.
Storm - URGB. Sample cards: time spiral, rituals, mind's desire, bargain.
Mill - UB. Sample cards: psychic corrosion, codex shredder, grinding station.
Prison - UW. Sample cards: stasis, hokori, lantern.
Taxes - WG. Sample cards: sphere, thalia, spirit of the labyrinth.
Lands - GBWR. Sample cards: crucible, titania, global ruin, worm harvest.
Tokens - WRGU. Sample cards: anointed procession, sprout swarm, young pyro.
Sacrifice - BWRG. Sample cards: second sunrise, birthing pod, blood artist.
Tap/Untap - URG. Sample cards: intruder alarm, earthcraft, fatestitcher.
Elves - GU. Sample cards: beck, wellwisher, lys alana.
Artifacts - URBW. Sample cards: krark-clan, maroinette master, mycosynth lattice.
Spells Matter - URB. Sample cards: guttersnipe, baral, pyromancer's goggles.
Lifegain - WBG. Sample cards: archangel of thune, cliffhaven vampire, soul warden).

Very Powerful First Picks:



If You Pass You Won't Wheel:




Cards That We Cut For Being Too Good:




A Selection of Various Player-Favorites:



Closing Remarks:

So far, the Mox Cube has been an absolute blast to draft and play. I plan on getting many many more cube nights done in the following months, and I'll update this thread with decklists when I actually remember to record them, and with card updates as they inevitably come up. I'd be happy to answer any questions - reading the back-and-forth conversations has always been the most useful part of riptide for me and I would love to take part in that! Any comments and criticism also welcome. Thanks!

Follow-Up Topics:

I'm considering doing follow-up posts covering the following topics in the Mox Cube in greater detail (if anyone is interested).

• Regarding Spheres, Stasis, and Duress
• All About Zuran Orb

 

[Alfonzo Bonzo]

Welcome to the forum! Your cube looks fun and sounds like your group are really enjoying it. Thanks for sharing. I would certainly be interested in your follow up topics, particularly about zuran orb.would also be interested in seeing some decklists. And just a couple of questions :

Why did you consider walking Ballista too good?
Is Paradoxical outcome particularly good because of your mox heavy environment?

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

I am really interested in the cards that you cut for being too good. What are the markers for a card in this context being too good? Is it just purely the 2 card combo aspect?

 

[inscho]

Welcome! I can relate to many of your cube's principles, many of which I've been exploring in my own cube which is graveyard centered and combo focused.

There's a lot of refreshing card selections and threads of synergies you've included. Just looking over your list prompted me to make some tweaks to my own. Ensnaring Bridge is a spicy include, and makes sense given that you've allotted for non-combat win cons for most strategies. My format has more of a combat component, therefore I've shied away Bridge for now....(although it sits in my reserve binder). Stasis is Carolina Reaper spicy...what does that deck look like?

I'm curious to hear how Titania, Protector of Argoth hasn't been too good for you. It's a card I waffle on daily. It's been very very good for us, and I've cut it several times. Opposition? far too strong in my cube....also interested to hear how it hasn't been oppressive....same for Recurring Nightmare though you state it to be fair....doesn't mirror my own experience. 187-ing Chupacabras isn't broken against a low creature count storm deck, but you certainly have ton of juicy recursion targets for it to get out of hand easily. I tend to think of Opposition and Recurring Nightmare as 1-card combos.

I see that red's contributions to tokens is more combat/tapping oriented than sacrifice based...utilizing Kyren Negotiations and Ogre Battledriver over something like:



Could you speak more to that? It's an interesting decision to me. As a sacrifice the board and recur via Living Death or Rally the Ancestors is a little more common combo win around here.

On that note.....these two cards in the same cube is hilarious to me:


I'd also like to see more utility from this:


A pet card of mine. 11 targets isn't enough to warrant its inclusion imo. Maybe consider:



?

Although, that may be a little too midrange for your cube. On first look you seem to shy away from midrangey inclusions...instead opting for disruption or combo pieces in the 3-4cmc+slots....still Lunarch might be worth a look. Really cool with Rishkar, Peema's Renegade fwiw.

or maybe:



Given your "life" theme.

That's what I got for now. Looking forward to your elaborations.

 

[genericco]

It just occurred to me how Kylo Ren negotiations is an infinitely-more-fair opposition

 

[inscho]

It just occurred to me how Kylo Ren negotiations is an infinitely-more-fair opposition

 

[genericco]

apologies for derail but is that poor robot being clobbered with its own arm? or does it come with 3 arms

 

[dbs]

Quick Additional Follow-Up Topics

More things that will show up in the near future:
- Prison Connoisseur: A Report on Forcing Prison Every Draft
- Lifegain as Resource for Combo and Prison
- Our draft format
- Re: inscho's Questions and Suggestions


Rationale For Cutting Cards

Grillo, you asked why were cards considered too good and what are the general requirements for cutting them. I thought I'd try to give some more detail, because I've found this tricky to tune and I don't think it's exactly right yet.



The first class of cards - Aluren and Kiki-Jiki - were cut because they're hard not to go infinite with. I don't think they add anything substantial to the deckbuilding process, and they end games very quickly. My rationale on this evolved several times. Early on in constructing the cube, I thought the problem was that they allowed you to build infinite combos that just end the game, and I didn't want that to be part of the environment. After a bit of thought, I refined my position to saying no two card infinite combos specifically. But it turned out that wasn't quite right either: I've realized that infinite combos are fine, as long as there's play to it - either by involving an interactive battle over the resources necessary to go off (e.g. crafting a hand and board state to storm and win, often generating infinite mana somehow in the process), or by not ending the game instantly (creating infinite tokens and passing the turn, or gaining infinite life). I've found the majority of the combos whose presence in the cube I enjoy require more or many more than two cards. However, at one point I cut the following card for being a "two-card combo" perpetrator:



and I think this was a mistake. A couple weeks ago, I put Palinchron back in because its ability to generate infinite mana either with Sneak Attack / Elvish Piper or with mana doublers doesn't really create unfun games. It's most often a powerful engine that let's you do broken things, but it has a relatively good amount of play to it (especially when taxing/prison effects and discard effects hamper your ability to just win that turn and you have to think up a creative line to set yourself up to win). I planned to write about this more later, but I had an incredibly fun time a month ago playing UG storm with Palinchron against a RB disruptive discard deck. Often many of my key combo pieces were in the yard from Duress, and I needed to figure out lines that would somehow draw me to an Eternal Witness or a Timetwister to get them back, while still being set to go infinite with Palinchron the next turn. BUT I couldn't leave a Heartbeat of Spring on the field that my opponent could use to win after I pass the turn (by barely having enough mana to bounce the heartbeat at end of turn for instance). You have to further consider the fact that when you Timetwister or Time Spiral with heartbeat in play, your RB opponent might burn you out with extort triggers from Pontiff of Blight given their new 7. With just heartbeat and turnabout/frantic search I would still have been able to win undisrupted, but I probably would have just conceded without the extra explosive power of Palinchron to barely weave my way through the extra disruption.

Anyway, this seems to me very different than the way an infinite combo card like Kiki-Jiki functions. That being said I'm not sure I've gotten the balance 100% right yet. It's particularly hard to do because it's not just the infinite combos you have to balance, but the amount of disruption available to counteract them and make the games into the interesting resource fights I described above. I've been experimenting with effects like Winter Orb, Thorn of Amethyst, and Duress as being ways to create these interesting resource battles, but I think there probably needs to be more... without getting to the point where you have a bunch of non-games.



Whereas I cut Kiki-Jiki and Aluren for specifically being degenerate combo enablers, I cut these two cards for being too good all-around. (1) They are really powerful colorless creatures so it feels like you want to jam them in any deck. I try to avoid those solid midrange-y cards in this cube, especially when they're colorless. This is particularly true of Ballista which shines in control shells as well. (2) They are powerful combo win conditions. When many (if not most) of the decks in the format are capable of creating large (or infinite) amounts of mana very quickly, these cards become an easy way to convert that to a win. Again, Ballista is the biggest offender. (3) They are combo enablers: it turns out zero mana artifact creatures that go to the yard instantly can end up broken, cf. Enduring Renewal.

Now, if only one of these things were true then I think they'd be happy additions to the cube, but all three together is a little too pushed for where I want to be. Then again, while writing this I think I just convinced myself to put Hangarback Walker back in, lol. It's not removal, it produces tokens, and as a win condition it doesn't end the game instantly with infinite mana since you have to tap it to add counters.



The last category of cards were cut for taking away decisions. I cut Mazirek for being too good after playing a Birthing Pod deck with sac outlets and persist creatures last week. It was a super fun and challenging deck to play that took me back to old modern. However, over and over again I found myself realizing the best line of play was to just pod for Mazirek, go infinite and win instantly. Some games, I would play Carrion Feeder on turn one and my opponent would kill it. On those games I would have to go for other pod chains and I found those games WAY more interesting, leveraging untap options and recursion (which occasionally led back to the infinite combo, but in a way that was more openly-contested by my opponent because they had more time and information). It's not that Mazirek as a card by itself was too good, but rather that it really cut out decision making. In part, it's because Mazirek is a 5-drop: I've only had very positive experiences with Mikaeus, the Unhallowed in this cube - the extra cost and color symbol makes the deckbuilding and play decisions not quite so obvious. The fact that Mazirek was never getting picked outside of persist pod deck made it an easy cut.

As of last night, I've decided another card is gonna have to go for the exact same reason:



I knew this card was not fun in traditional cube, but I put it in because of the aforementioned difficulties associated with card evaluation in this cube specifically (I promise inscho that I'll talk about why Recurring Nightmare is relatively mediocre in this environment). I got to play with it extensively last night and I found a familiar pattern to Mazirek: pretty much any time I drew Forbid, I realized I didn't want to cast any other spell or play any more lands because they would be better used fueling Forbid buyback until my deck closed out the game (see below for decklists!). So the card took away interesting decisions for me and made it so my opponent effectively couldn't do anything - sounds like another easy cut, this time confirming Riptide wisdom.

Some Decklists

We did another draft last night and I recorded the decklists! Twice in the night, a player went infinite and lost the game. A particularly juicy highlight:

Player 1: makes an all-in play to gain infinite life with earthcraft, paradox engine, and cloudstone curio powering out kitchen finks. He passes unable to end the game.

Player 2: casts living death punishing him, stablizes, gets mikaeus, carrion feeder, and rector into play and sacs rector to get enduring renewal, but has no way of punching through infinite life.

The game actually continued several turns with Player 2 staving off one or two creatures while trying to find a way to reanimate his red-cap to do infinite damage and close the game out. By that point I think all of us had eyes glued on this table. Eventually reveillark pulled red-cap out for the win, but I was on the edge of my seat the whole time, wondering who was going to get there first.

Anyway.

U(rb) Paradoxical Lantern from CubeTutor.com

This was the deck I played, and it was everything I had been hoping for from lantern. The deck alternated between (1) a control deck clearing the board repeatedly with oblivion stone, shredder, and academy ruins and preventing them from comboing with lantern/shredder and forbid. In this mode, the deck milled them out with shreddering and sensei's divining top + psychic corrosion. The second mode was (2) a mill combo deck. In this mode, vedalken archmage + phyrexian metamorph combined with psychic corrosion + paradoxical outcome and 1-drop artifacts to aggressively mill them out over one or two turns. In this mode I was topping and shreddering lands off the top of my own library to get the combo pieces I needed. Upheaval was an all-star in both modes of the deck.

BW Combo Sac from CubeTutor.com

This was a dedicated black white sacrifice combo list. Compared to other creature combo decks this shell was a little slower than normal, but the recursion gave it an inherent resiliency that helps handle counterspells and removal. The most notable element was the raw variety of ways to win. I got to witness at least 5 different win conditions (some from across the table, some from watching him next to me):

1) Infinite Altar sac: Phyrexian Altar + Enduring Renewal + One drop + Blood Artist
2) Infinite Persist sac: Sac outlet + Mikaeus + Redcap
3) Infinite Reveillark sac: Phyrexian Altar + Reveillark + Recurring Nightmare (with Gray Merchant in the yard to kill)
4) Living Death + Sac Outlet + Blood Artist and Zulaport
5) Recur a bunch, sac it all to Carrion Feeder and bash (and scoop to Commit)

GWRU Untap Combo from CubeTutor.com

Our resident "I just play good black and red removal spells with as many duress as I can grab" drafter went all-in this time around and built this monstrosity. At its heart, this was an Earthcraft, Cryptolith Rites deck. It abused Retraction Helix, moxes, Paradox Engine, and Cloudstone Curio to go infinite. Similar to the BW deck, I was impressed at the sheer variety of ways the deck could win. While the variety of overlapping combo pieces created more options, this particular build probably had too many non-creature spells which hurt the consistency (in favor of style points).

One random highlight moment: this deck was matched up against the Approach control deck (below). His opponent had already played approach and the board was stalled by mentor tokens so it was looking hopeless. But, the player of this deck ended up resolving Fatesticher + Winter Orb at the last possible moment to prevent the second Approach and locked the game down. It was not a style of win condition that I was expecting from this type of deck and reflects the fact that the tap/untap deck can be a combo deck, but tapping permanents gives you a way to interact with your opponent as well.

UG Storm from CubeTutor.com

Heartbeat storm is a deck I've drafted at least three times so far, so I was glad to see another player move in on the archetype. This was a very pure/focused version of the deck that could go-off very early (often turn 4) but had no way of winning in a single turn. I usually draft a slower version that doesn't use tokens, but uses something like Psychic Corrosion, or Villainous Wealth instead.

The most entertaining moment from this deck was a turn 3 Mind's Desire for 1 which hit Time Spiral, eventually landing the player with 12 4/4s from Hunting Pack that same turn. I'm not saying Mind's Desire for 1 is a thing anyone should be casting, but it was certainly a spectacle.

Esper Approach from CubeTutor.com

Our self-styled "Prison Connoisseur" (just kidding, only I call him that) drafted this Approach control deck as a way of "branching out" into a different archetype. His goal was to test whether a deck with a bunch of card draw, counterspells, one-for-one removal, and sweepers was good in this environment as a sort of negative control experiment (pun intended) for the stated design goals of the cube.

The answer? Yes the deck was good. But I think it was interesting the way the deck played - it was actually more like a weird tempo deck than a control deck. Without prison or lock-pieces, the deck has no way of actually controlling the game against a dedicated combo deck after around turn 7-8. So his game plan always ended up being: 1) control the board for the first couple turns while aggressively drawing to hit land drops, 2) find or tutor for approach, 3) transform into an approach combo deck where you use Demonic Tutor, Azcanta, Merfolk Looter, and Sphinx's Rev to get to the second approach as quickly as possible before your opponent inevitably combos off. Ultimately, I don't think this is necessarily a failed experiment. The list doesn't feel oppressive, and the race-to-approach element added an interesting facet to the deck when the combo opponent started to overwhelm the counterspells.

 

[dbs]

Cube Update:

I made a small cube update - mostly stealing ideas from Inscho. The changes are as follows:

-->
Forbid felt unfun and extremely linear. I wanted to replace it with a 3 mana counter, and disallow seemed like it would be an interesting choice given how backbreaking abilities can be in this format.

-->
I cut sylvan because it was making Titania, Protector of Argoth too strong.

-->
Divinity is not where I wanted to be with lifegain. I don't want a huge boring creature to be the payoff - Lich's Mastery is MUCH more interesting. See the sample decklists I posted in Inscho's cube blog for examples of how I imagine this could be used.

-->
Ancestral Vision was way too slow. Repeal is good with moxes, and helps get rid of permanents like Notion Thief when you want to go off.

-->
Really wanted to try Mesmeric Orb. No one was playing caged sun because mana flare and heartbeat are just better.

-->
Cruel was way too slow for this format, and I'm (potentially) excited for mindslaver combos. We'll see how the card does.

-->
Thousand-Year Storm is a perfect card for my environment. This was an easy exchange.

-->
I run two Rishkar, so I cut one to test Sower. Originally I had two Nettle Sentinel so double Rishkar made more sense.

We did a draft with these changes in - I'll post the decklists sometime soon. A brief note from that draft, I've put the following two cards on probation as possible cuts because they're extremely powerful:

 

[dbs]

Engines / Support / Overlap

Again following in Inscho's footsteps: 6 card images per archetype. I'm dividing it 2-2-2 into engine/payoff cards, support cards, and then two cards that demonstrate the way the archetypes overlap. Sometimes things don't perfectly line up this way, but I did my best to give a good representation of what the environment looks like. I could probably think up more archetypes than the ones listed below, but I think it's a good starting place. Here we go:

Spoiler

Big Mana:


Mana Cheat:


Big Spells:


Reanimator:


Discard:


Storm:


Mill:


Prison:


Taxes:


Lands:


Tokens:


Sacrifice:


Tap/Untap:


Elves:


Artifacts:


Spells Matter:


Lifegain:

Another Small Update

Switching a few more cards around as part of the on-going iteration process.

Out:


In:

 

[dbs]

Praxis time! Since November, I've done a number of drafts and changed around nearly 70 cards. If the original post in this blog captured the Mox Cube in beta, then the current list is getting very close to a 1.0 release. Most of that work has been smoothing out the overall card quality, and as a result I feel that the drafting process itself has improved significantly. Here I'll post the four lists from the draft we did this weekend. It's probably the best draft of the cube we've ever done in terms of quality of the actual games. Every match was close, and the individual games tended to run quite long and end in some catastrophically flashy way.

4C Artifact Prison

One of our drafters forced the new-and-improved artifact suite. They ended up with a base-blue mindslaver recursion deck that splashed red, white, and black. Scrap Trawler recurring Engineered Explosives every turn did some serious work. Counterbalance Top was a very exciting soft-lock which never felt bad because of the wider CMC spread in cube compared to Legacy; I'm definitely keeping Counterbalance in.

GW Lands

This green spash white lands list is the first test run of Fastbond in the cube and I'm very pleased with how the deck played. On turn one of the first game, Fastbond with Ramunap Excavator fetched every single forest out of the deck. Cataclysm + World Shaper is a cute and powerful combo, and with the moxen on the other side of the table, the land destruction never caused uninteractive games. GW Lands ended up losing game 3 of a nail-biter to Artifact Prison by getting Mindslavered with Fastbond, Ramunap, Fetchland, and Sylvan Library in play - even "infinite" life with Zuran Orb wouldn't have saved the day!

4C Corrosion Control

This deck was the "most boring" in-so-far as at least three of us try to draft this strategy literally any time its open. A boatload of powerful spells, mana acceleration, Monastery Mentor, and Psychic Corrosion. After winning a fairly long game 1 against Artifact Prison, game 2 ended up going over 40 minutes. It came to a close when the Corrosion player Sphinx's Reved down to the last 2 cards in library to find Timetwister. He was short one mana at the end of the turn, so he passed leaving up a As Foretold with 6 counters + Force of Will in hand. The Artifact player cast a Memory Jar to go for the kill and then hail-mary-ed a Sensei's Top spin to hit Gilded Lotus on Counterbalance to counter the Force. A real game for the ages.

4C Sneak and Show

The winning deck was four color OmniTell which played Sneak Attack, Living Death, and Recurring Nightmare for redundancy. I was particularly impressed with how well this deck performed because in a vacuum the match ups are really bad. It's a all-in combo deck with an ambitious manabase fighting against a field of disruptive decks. The Eternal Witness + Greenwarden of Murasa, and Demonic Tutor + Demonic Intent added a level of resiliency and consistency that helped it overcome impossible situations. Importantly, without being able to find Wickerbough Elder, the deck would have really struggled to close out games. I can say confidently that artifact and enchantment removal are more valuable than creature removal in this cube.

Overall, I was ecstatic with how this draft turned out and I'm looking forward to the next one.

 

[Kirblinx]

Cube is looking reeeeeaaaaalllllyyyy sweet. It feels like a riptide vintage cube, which in saying that, sounds like my dream format. Doing busted things without it feeling like anyone has no chance to catch up.

Just curious as to how you draft with 4 players. 4 packs of smaller size? I feel like you would want the moxen spread out as much as possible.

Also sad that mesmeric orb didn't make an appearance in that draft. Card just wants to see some play.

 

[dbs]

Through chance experimentation, we ended up with a draft format for 4-6 players that has worked so well we've stuck with it.

• First you do a "face up" phase. This is 20-card-pack Rochester draft, you go through one pack per person. Each player gets to take two cards per pack and you discard the rest.

• Then everyone gathers up their picks and turns them over. This is the "face down" part of the draft. From here you do normal booster drafting (one pack per person passing left then passing right etc). You still do 20 card packs and each player still only gets two picks per pack (i.e. discarding when there's 12 cards left). You keep going until you've seen the whole cube.

With 6 people you do 15 card packs instead of 20 with all other rules the same.

I like this format for a couple of reasons: (1) If you're looking for a certain combo piece, it will always be in the draft pool. (2) Only getting two out of twenty cards creates tough drafting decisions. (3) It smooths signalling a bit in a fairly complicated format. (4) It doesn't take as long as a full Rochester.

... but to be entirely honest, the real reason we all love it, is after the "face up" phase, everyone starts aggressively cutting and moving in on other people's colors. Maximum betrayal time.

 

[Rasmus Källqvist]

So if I understand you right, you sort of rochester draft the card pool for the face down part?

 

[dbs]

So if I understand you right, you sort of rochester draft the card pool for the face down part?

Oh, no, nothing that complicated. Just half the draft with picks revealed, half the draft with picks hidden. Drafting recursively would probably take longer than a full Rochester, lol.

 

[dbs]

Latest draft was just as good or better than the previous. This time around we had a 3-way tie for first place, and the brews were as sweet as ever. For the most part I still think I don't want to make any meaningful changes. I might replace the X spells Ravaging Blaze and Exsanguinate so that if you make infinite mana you have to do something more elaborate to win. Anyway, here are the lists:

Green Red

This was the closest thing to an "aggro" deck in the draft. Earthcraft/Cryptolith draws into Siege-Gang Commander were particularly explosive (in fact, as far as I can tell Siege-Gang Commander was the most common Demonic Tutor target). The deck took the go-wide Earthcraft + Kyren Negotiation shell and added two specific twists. First, is the white splash for a Heartbeat -> Zacama strategy. Second, is the black splash for Demonic Tutor + Season's Past as a grindy value engine to contest slower decks in case the game goes long. Very spicy, only lost to Mardu BlinkSac which comes next:

Mardu Blink/Sacrifice

Another powerful brew that matched ETB effects with both blink and graveyard recursion. The deck played a solid midrange grindy game, with the ETB recycling providing a lot of value. What made the deck really scary were the loops and the high-end payoffs. Karmic Guide, Reveillark, Sun Titan, and Animate Dead provide ways of going-off extremely quickly, especially alongside Purphoros and Yosei. This is the most Riptide-y of the decklists, plus the extra bit of degeneracy that I live for. The Mardu deck only lost to BG Storm (although every game in the match involved a razor-thin margin):

YawgBloom Storm from CubeTutor.com

This is basically a mono-black deck (almost every single land was a swamp) with a "storm" plan. The mana generators were Crypt Ghast, Fastbond, and Cadaverous Bloom. The draw engines were Yawgmoth's Bargain, Griselbrand, and wheel/twister effects + Yawgmoth's Will. The win-cons were Griselbrand, Crypt Ghast, and Exsanguinate/Regrowth. Overall, very consistent with high redundancy. Notably, there are a bunch of broken cards in the list, but Crypt Ghast was the MVP by a huge margin, generating bursts of mana, and providing much-needed lifegain to keep Bargain/Griselbrand/Fastbond going strong. The deck only lost to Green-Red (and to be honest, it was an absolute beating).

Finally, the last place deck was (unfortunately) an artifact deck. But. BUT. (1) it actually won quite a few games. More importantly, (2) there were memes to consider. It wasn't a deck constructed to win games. It was a deck intended to build an over-elaborate rube-goldberg engine.

UW Artifact Untap

The engine had two parts which were perfectly complimentary. First, you have Sai, Chief Engineer, Paradox Engine, Krark-Clan Ironworks, Vedalken Archmage, and Auriok Salvagers. Second, you have Tradewind Riders, Intruder Alarm, and Retraction Helix. The game plan was to achieve an infinite combo w/ some mix of infinite mana, infinite card draw, infinite creatures, and infinite permanent bounce. Could the deck have stuck in something like Glassdust Hulk or a black splash for Marionette Master to actually try to efficiently win the game? Yes. Did anyone involved have regrets for how it turned out? Hell no.

Still on cloud 9 about the current cube list. I'll post again if we have another sweet draft!

 

[Rowan_CB]

dbs, it strikes me that you have not just a great cube, but a really great group who are super in tune with the nuances of your cube and can identify and draft these distinct combo-oriented strategies you've baked in there. I'm wondering if you can share a little bit about what leads to this dynamic? I'm wondering if it's due to sharp-magic-minded Johnny's who can sniff out a combo from a mile away, or if you take a lot of care to walk them through your design choices and the potential decks you have envisioned?

 

[dbs]

dbs, it strikes me that you have not just a great cube, but a really great group who are super in tune with the nuances of your cube and can identify and draft these distinct combo-oriented strategies you've baked in there. I'm wondering if you can share a little bit about what leads to this dynamic? I'm wondering if it's due to sharp-magic-minded Johnny's who can sniff out a combo from a mile away, or if you take a lot of care to walk them through your design choices and the potential decks you have envisioned?

I'd say for the most part, our group weren't originally Johnnys (only one person plays combo in our vintage playgroup). I see the in-depth combo strategies arising in two main ways.

(1) By Design

In my environment, there's not really a "path-of-least-resistance" aggro or control deck to fall back on. But more than that I've really pushed the overall density of combo elements so that even when someone tries to draft something "standard" it ends up coming together in an interesting way.

I'll give an example. We had a new player join our cube group a while ago - he hadn't played for 6 years but had lots of limited experience. For his first draft, he just focused on the retail strategies that he was familiar with, i.e. take the good removal, good disruptive cards, and efficient ETB creatures. He ended up in a Black/Red deck which was indeed quite grindy and disruptive... but interestingly, we started to notice over the course of the matches that he almost never won games with combat damage. He would cast Wheel of Fortune with a Crypt Ghast in play, then cast a series of burn spells with extort to win. Or he'd bounce and recast Siege-Gang Commander two or three times and then burn them out by sac-ing goblins (even if the opponent had an Ensnaring Bridge in play). So this was a case where the raw density of combo-like angles and in particular the raw volume of spell velocity in the cube naturally cohered into something that didn't play out like a standard "Jund"-style deck.

Likewise, I've tried to cut down on the cards that are too efficient at stopping other people from playing this style of game. A couple of cards that got the cut for not contributing to the overall combo environment: Fiery Confluence, Glen Elendra Archmage, and Strip Mine.

(2) Through Moments at the Table

At the end of the day, this might be more important than the design. Whenever someone is "going off" with some really cool combo or engine, everyone else stops their games to walk over and see what's going on. This gets everyone invested in trying to think up a cool strategy of their own, and gives everyone ideas on novel ways of using cards together. I've definitely had interactions come up I hadn't even dreamed of in the design - and then forced those strategies in a later draft! The exciting table moments are a great way for this stuff to get shared organically.

There's another version of this that I think is under-appreciated: narrow but really exciting build-arounds that show up each draft but often get passed on. Every time you see cards like Enduring Renewal or Stasis wheel, it really makes you think "oh man, I've gotta try forcing that next draft!" I've literally had people tell me that their current draft deck was something they'd been planning for 2-3 weeks. That's something more than just design - it's a cube culture that's emerged.

 

[astraedm]

The sheer amount of awesome moments created by this cube and work you've put into this project makes me want to proxy it out and try it. Inspiring to be sure.

 

[Kirblinx]

The sheer amount of awesome moments created by this cube and work you've put into this project makes me want to proxy it out and try it. Inspiring to be sure.

Yeah, I have been picking up pieces of your cube throughout the last couple of months in a bid to make a similar format. I am going to aim somewhere between yours and inscho's cube. I just don't want to have moxen in my cube because I feel like they still fundamentally break the game, even though you have proved they are manageable. Also, they cost a lot. So that is another counterpoint to no mox.

This will force me to have more cube nights, and will hopefully make people more interested.

But mainly just wanted to continue with the praise that this cube has been given, and know that it is a BEAST.

 

[inscho]

Ok, you've officially raised my interest in Intruder Alarm. I first came to cube looking for a place to play Tradewind Rider...so anything that brings it back into relevance is worth considering

I'm running a lot of IA-friendly pieces already, but if you had to strip it down to a somewhat bare-bones support package, what would be the cards you'd recommend?

 

[Rowan_CB]

Intruder Alarm would do pretty degenerate things with:

 

[Onderzeeboot]

Intruder Alarm would do pretty degenerate things with:

Or with any free token maker, like...

 

[dbs]

Ok, you've officially raised my interest in Intruder Alarm. I first came to cube looking for a place to play Tradewind Rider...so anything that brings it back into relevance is worth considering

I'm running a lot of IA-friendly pieces already, but if you had to strip it down to a somewhat bare-bones support package, what would be the cards you'd recommend?

First, I'd say I have 4 distinct versions of the "untap" deck.

1. Elves, i.e. mana dorks and creature-cast card draw
2. Tokens, go wide and abuse "tap creature" effects together with mass untap
3. Artifacts, the bridge between Paradox Engine and Intruder Alarm
4. ETB/Bounce, i.e. Kor Skyfisher, Erratic Portal style looping with constant untap

I'll try to breakdown the main components by their role and you can probably pick and choose the style you want to support. There are probably other directions you could go (like Survival of the Fittest, Anger style RG Madness decks). So these card choices are more to give you ideas rather than be a "core set of must plays".

Redundant/overlapping pieces:


Then mana generation:


Card draw:


Payoffs:


Loops (increases explosiveness/infinte potential):

Or with any free token maker, like...

I actually avoid all of the free token makers, partially for this reason. One exception:

 

[CaptnIrony]

Follow-Up Topics:

I'm considering doing follow-up posts covering the following topics in the Mox Cube in greater detail (if anyone is interested).

• All About Zuran Orb

I'm curious.