The Mox Cube

[troelslmunk]

Hi dbs,

I can see, looking at the cube list and the deck lists, that there are so many decks you can build here. And reading about your way of drafting, so many cards are seen every draft and many cards are not used, resulting in very concentrated, distilled decks, I would say. That's awesome in it's own right, but even more so when players stop to enjoy what one another has built

But that's not exactly why I'm here. I'm wondering if I could somehow work the moxen into my own cube without breaking it, and so I have some questions for you or anyone with some insight on how your cube works

My main question is, why do you think the moxen work well in your cube?

What stops one player from playing a mox and time walking their opponent who did not draft or draw a mox?
How come moxen produce better games in your cube, I assume, when people generally think they make for non-games in the MTGO Vintage cube?
What makes it possible to do "... busted things without it feeling like anyone has no chance to catch up", as Kirblinx put it?
Is the power level high enough or the combo pieces essential enough that a booster isn't reduced to a non-choice if it contains a mox?
What makes this a Mox cube and not just a combo cube with moxen in it?

I may seem to criticize the moxen, but I'm just perplexed and trying to understand. Especially understand where else the moxen could be incorporated. I would be delighted if someone could enlighten me

 

[dbs]

Hi dbs,
But that's not exactly why I'm here. I'm wondering if I could somehow work the moxen into my own cube without breaking it, and so I have some questions for you or anyone with some insight on how your cube works

My main question is, why do you think the moxen work well in your cube?

I don't have time at the moment to fully do this question justice but I can give you some quick hits. At a high-level I would say this: it depends on your cube objective. If your cost function is minimizing variance, then I have a hard time seeing how you don't end up with something very similar to Grillo's cube. But I'm not just minimizing variance, I'm trying to produce a certain kind of exciting, powerful environment. So the design goals are more like trying to find a point on the Pareto frontier with low variance, but where a player can still cast Paradoxical Outcome twice in one turn, drawing 11 cards.

Some design lessons: I think the moxes work especially well with very limited support for aggro and midrange. That avoids situations where you have a mox-mox-3drop turn one where you put a super efficient midrange creature into play, and immediately pressure their life total.

Second design lesson, with the explosive fast mana, I think it's also important to make it hard to kill someone without passing the turn. This speaks to the "busted things without it feeling like anyone has no chance to catch up" part of the equation. That's why I don't have Channel+Emrakul, or Kiki-Jiki in the cube. 1-turn kills usually require many cards together, and building up resources over several turns prior which your opponent can interact with (by blowing up artifacts, restricting mana, discarding cards from your hand, etc - you then have to find ways to recur resources that they've attacked in order to go off).

Third design lesson, I think it's important to have lots of efficient cantrips, draw-smoothing, and tutors. This help smooth the variance and makes the decks feel more like consistent pseudo-constructed combo decks.

Upsides of running moxen:

1. You get naturally higher artifact density, plus more resource-contention value for artifact removal.
2. Similarly to Vintage, it becomes easier to put 4- and 5-drops into your deck because curves work slightly differently. This opens up more design space for goofy combo decks (especially with pressure-based creature decks being so limited).
3. Unique combo strategies. The moxen make some cards way more exciting. Just a few off the top of my head:

Downsides of running moxen:

1. Though this is relatively rare, sometimes 1 player gets a double-mox start and the other player doesn't draw any. This is an unavoidable variance penalty of the approach of my cube. In a similar way, every once in a while, one player just won't draw combo pieces or tutors.
2. Even without much midrange/aggro I STILL have problems with efficient creatures. I've seen people go mox-mox-Hypnotic Specter. After that, I cut the card. Right now Tireless Tracker is on the cutting block for the same reason. It's a lot of card advantage, it pressures lifetotals and it's back-breaking on turn 1.

Hope that helps, sorry I don't have more bandwidth for this at the moment.

 

[vennythekid]

I don't have time at the moment to fully do this question justice but I can give you some quick hits. At a high-level I would say this: it depends on your cube objective. If your cost function is minimizing variance, then I have a hard time seeing how you don't end up with something very similar to Grillo's cube. But I'm not just minimizing variance, I'm trying to produce a certain kind of exciting, powerful environment. So the design goals are more like trying to find a point on the Pareto frontier with low variance, but where a player can still cast Paradoxical Outcome twice in one turn, drawing 11 cards.

I love that you've framed cube design as a statistic/machine learning problem. It's all about finding the right loss function
This hits some awesome points, and I love how you've clearly given this a lot of thought and have come up with some great insights.

 

[dbs]

I love that you've framed cube design as a statistic/machine learning problem. It's all about finding the right loss function
This hits some awesome points, and I love how you've clearly given this a lot of thought and have come up with some great insights.

Don't take the optimization metaphor too seriously, doing research all the time has kinda warped my brain. Both worlds care a lot about variance reduction though, lol.

 

[dbs]

After a large set of updates, I have another draft to share. I'm eliding two interim drafts while the card pool was shifting too much. The first of those drafts included a deck that won a game turn 1 on the play, and consistently won the game by turn 3. The other draft included zero combo decks. But after some serious tuning, the most recent draft was back to the usual standard of excellence. Overall, I would describe the series of changes as mostly being about (1) increasing the level of disruption, and (2) increasing the level of recursion. This creates a more interactive combo environment, where combo decks need to find ways to win around disruption. As a consequence, I've seen a large increase in the number of times someone "combos off" but doesn't immediately win the game. For example, they might have lost 2 key pieces, found some way to recur one of the pieces and then partially combo-ed to generate enough value to threaten a kill on the next turn or two.

Anyway, on to the lists. At the end of the night there was a 3 way tie with 2-1 match records. I'll share the 0-3 deck first, because frankly it was still pretty sweet.

Sultai Heartbeat

As usual, there's a lot going on. At it's core, the deck is UG Heartbeat Storm. The storm win condition is to chain untap spells with Heartbeat of Spring in play and kill them with Villainous Wealth. The deck includes Psychic Corrosion for long games, and a cute little Gifts Ungiven package for consistency. There's a small lands subtheme on top which produced some very very degenerate plays featuring:



The pilot snagged a lot of wins, so I'm obviously quite pleased that this is what "last place" looks like in our drafts now.

Next up, the first of the three "winning" decklists: Doomsday KCI.

Mardu Ironworks

Just filthy.... Turns out a deck with 6 moxen can do some pretty broken stuff. The drafter took the standard KCI core:



and realized that Doomsday was completely busted in the deck because you play from board anyway - your hand and library don't matter once you've got at least half of the engine set up. The trick was to get 5 black mana to cast both Doomsday and Marionette Master (which was usually the missing piece that was Doomsday'd for) by recurring Mox Jets with Scrap Trawler. Mardu KCI crushed Sultai Heartbeat pretty handily, barely scraped out a victory against GB Reanimator (coming up next), and barely lost to Bant Stasis because without a fast start the KCI plan was weak to very disruptive decks.

The second of the 2-1 decks was a streamlined GB Reanimator list:

GR Reanimator

The game plan was the standard Entomb or Buried Alive into Recurring Nightmare or Living Death. Oath of Druids put up a very convincing performance, as did Sun Titan + Animate Dead.

With double Duress and Reclamation Sage there was just enough disruption to not be drawing completely dead against Doomsday KCI. Likewise, the permanent and hand disruption produced some drawn-out games against the Stasis deck. Overall, GB reanimator has been a semi-consistent performer in our drafts, and this particular version is definitely the most powerful version we've seen so far.

Finally, we've got my deck, Bant Stasis.

Bant Stasis

Again, there's a lot going on here. The counterspell and removal suite was excellent and Stasis was an absolute bomb. Especially with Aura of Silence, my matchup against the 6-moxen KCI deck was pretty good. The matchups against Titania-Storm and Reanimator were extremely long and grindy - those two matches might be my two of my very favorite matches ever with this cube. Both tense AND busted.

Some memorable board-states:

In my first game against KCI (the only one I lost), he had a fast start. Without Stasis I would have died on the spot, instead we had the follow game position (I ultimately perished a turn or two later):




vs.




with basically everything tapped. Fun times. But it only gets better from here. Against Sultai I had a particularly good board state:


+ lands

vs.


+lands

The game ended up with both of us below 3 life. He'd bounce his lands with Meloku and replay them with Fastbond to get out from under Stasis and create more tokens untapped that could attack. But because he had to pay life, there was a limit to how quickly he could pressure my life total. On my side of the board because As Foretold kept ticking up, I almost never needed to tap lands. As a result Stasis stayed on the battlefield for 10 turns before I managed to get in with a Tireless Tracker for lethal. Over the course of those Stasis turns I needed Balance, Snapcaster Mage + Balance, Fumigate and 3 counterspells to not die. In fact, I almost threw the game to Titania because Balance let him sack 1 land for 1 elemental token that I wasn't expecting. Both players ended up casting a Force of Will pitching a blue card at some point in the game - very glad to have 2 forces in the cube.

At the end of the day, is this the most balanced cube format of all time? No. But I'm happy with the most recent changes - the average game length has increased, and the games are back and forth and tense. Happy cubing.

 

[dbs]

We've been drafting more or less the same cube list since May - I think the previous version of the cube was in a healthy place and there was more than enough unexplored territory to keep things fresh. But lots of interesting sets have been released since then, and drafting regularly let me get some good data, so I changed things around last week.

Overall, I think I took a big step toward Dom-and-Inscho-land - I think a testament to their environments that I continue to converge in that direction. In particular, I've begun integrating some aggro-combo strategies while still trying to leave no oxygen for straightforward midrange decks. The first aggressive themes include discard, dredge, artifacts, prowess, and counters. Across the board I very heavily emphasized card-draw and card-advantage engines for these aggressive decks to stick close to the original spirit of the cube. I cut a lot of weak and/or undrafted cards so the power level has bumped up yet again - and the first four decklists emphasize that big time.

In last place, with a 1-5 game record, we have a pretty busted token-ramp deck:

Naya Go Big Go Wide

This deck really has it all. Survival of the Fittest and Chord of Calling for toolboxing. Cryptolith Rite, Earthcraft, Gaea's Cradle, Sneak Attack for explosiveness. Purphoros, God of the Forge, with Siege-Gang Commander and Pia and Kiran Nalaar to combo kill, and Skullclamp to bury them with card advantage if they survive.

We had the following board-state on turn four, for example, in a very close game against a deck that could hypothetically answer the tokens with Walking Ballista with both decks getting full card-advantage engines online early:

Spoiler

vs.

In third place, with 2-4 game record, we have classic Esper Control:

Esper Control

Trying to play a slow control deck is always fraught against a field of unfair decks, but this one certainly had the pieces it needed to compete, if not dominate. Duress, Thoughtseize plus double Force of Will meant the games almost always went long by disrupting easy combo wins. But with basically only Mindslaver to close out the game (by say, killing them with their own Fastbond) those long games could still easily go either way.

A memorable moment:

Spoiler

With only Baral, Chief of Compliance in play, one card in hand, staring down a board of:

he went (in order):

shredding their hand, getting rid of the Smokestack and setting up for a very long game after that.

Second place at a 5-3 record, we had a list stuck somewhere between masterpiece and abomination:

Land Stax from CubeTutor.com

That's 5-color stax + land combos. The deck leverages synergies between Zuran Orb, Fastbond, Crucible of Worlds, Ramunap Excavator, Courser of Kruphix, and Tatyova, Benthic Druid to gain life, draw cards, thin the deck, and ramp out lands - going infinite with enough of the pieces together. The stax side of the deck used Smokestack, Braids, Cabal Minion, Cataclysm, Worldshaper, Thalia, Guardian of Thraben, and Wasteland to fight them over resources. And finally there's just enough beaters to close out the game the old-fashioned way while disrupting them. Lot's of cute graveyard interactions going on as well.

This deck gave us the most exciting game of the night against Naya. Here are two board states from the same game:

Spoiler

First, with the Lands deck at 5 life, during Naya's turn:


vs



and then a few turns later:


vs.

Last, the winning deck list with a 6-2 game record, was Uw Artifact Combo:

Artifact Combo from CubeTutor.com

Speaking of high power-level: another deck that kinda has it all. It was possible to go aggro with packages like



but with the flip of a switch, it could also play storm with:



All in all, another exciting draft, with a lot of the new possible deck angles still unexplored. Format feels very open right now, and I'm looking forward to see what gets cooked up next time.

 

[Nanonox]

I love reading these reports as the decks showcased are always completely absurd. But absurd in a good way, not just a big ETB dude taking over or a turn 1 reanimator, but whole engines that combine with each other.

Good job

 

[dbs]

Trying out Riptide Vintage Cube

Since quarantine we've only drafted three times, and I hadn't updated the cube list because it felt good. Now I'm going back over the cube with two main goals in mind. First, smooth out the unplayable durdly cards. Second, replace them with something powerful and efficient... but without losing the feel of the cube, i.e. no generically efficient threats, heavily combo-oriented, and highly overlapping strategies. In a certain sense, I'm going to more explicitly curate a "Riptide Vintage Cube" environment (already where the cube started heading as I cranked up the power). Balancing these combo strategies in such a way that there are back-and-forth games has taken work. For the last year, I've had Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker and Zealous Conscripts but no Twin, Exarch, or Pestermite. I'm pretty sure that's the sweet spot on Kiki at my current power level. Similarly, I'm still not going to include Emrakul, the Aeons Torn. But I don't think there's a hard-and-fast design heuristic to help accomplish this; it all has to be tested.

Anyway before going over new cards, I'm switching up the mox scenario. I'm moving the moxes out of the main list / draft, and we're just going to do a mox draft at the end. I typically have four players, so we'll just do a quick draft at the end so everyone gets two moxes. Everyone gets guaranteed power, and we don't have to use up draft picks or cube slots.

Alright, cube changes. I started by trying to better integrate lands with artifacts and other combo decks. My immediate thought was:



replacing Tabernacle and Maze of Ith which were rarely ever seeing play. I think Depths/Stage will draft fine: you speculate on one hoping to grab the other, a bit like Kiki-Jiki and Zealous Conscripts. It's more narrow, but it's just two cards. Plus, we can integrate Depths with artifact strategies very naturally through Golos and Mirror. Neither of these cards are narrow. Every time I play with Mirage Mirror I'm always shocked at how strong it feels, so I'm quite happy with this choice. With Golos, I can also sneak in Karakas. Karakas has a powerful, combo feel, and helps disrupt Reanimate (which I'm also adding this update). Lastly for lands, I'm trying:



to further bridge the gap between lands and storm. Fastbond and Heartbeat of Spring already exist in this intersection so it should be a natural extension. Valakut in particular looks super sweet. Now moving on to creature combo strategies, I'm adding



Triskelion should be playable between Mishra's Workshop, Tinker, and Hardened Scales. Then Trisk and Walking Ballista both go off with Heliod. This further integrates artifacts with mono-white aggro: Walking Ballista with Ranger-Captain of Eos is already a deck I've drafted before. Likewise, Heliod plays well with existing white angles like Anafenza, Kin-Tree Spirit and Kitchen Finks. To finish flushing out this space, I'm trying Winding Constrictor and Stonecoil Serpent. To support other creature combo shenanigans, I'm looking at Karmic Guide, Woe Strider, Lurrus of the Dream-Den, and The Great Henge.



Next up, Doomsday is back in. I like the idea of including two cards (one which is widely playable) that opens up a new deck to draft. This is a theme that I want to orient non-creature combo ("storm") around more generally. We go with centerpiece build-arounds which generate multiple flavors of storm.



Instant/sorcery-based "ritual storm" has historically been underwhelming. Underworld Breach, Brain Freeze, and High Tide open up some new possibilities. Blue/Green storm with Turnabout and Heartbeat style effects was already pretty effective. High Tide opens up a mono-blue option. In general I want to have a bunch of good high velocity cards that get tied together into a variety of modular storm decks.

For example, you can run Reanimate + Griselbrand with a Tendrils plan. Or Oath of Druids, Griselbrand, and Underworld Breach. Or Thassa's Oracle, Underworld Breach with or without Doomsday. Valakut Exploration + Fastbond. Past in Flames + Thousand-Year Storm. A lot of the support cards are shared between these strategies. A Breach + LED deck and a Valakut Explo + Fastbond deck both want Manamorphose and Wheel of Fortune. But also, all four cards could just go in the same deck. There's quite a lot of space here.

With new combo elements added and with some unplayable slow cards removed, the quality of disruption has to go up in response. In particular, I'm up-ing the count of free or extremely efficient removal:



I've decided to not include Counterspell. I like the idea that most of the counters in this cube are actually card disadvantage. I've also up-ed the count of disruptive creatures (both weenie and bigger):



I imagine this will take a lot of additional balancing through playtest, and I should have some goofy initial decklists soon. One last thing for this post, let's check in on the state of duplicates in the cube. Right now, I'm running two of each of the following cards:



This pretty much summarizes how I've ultimately decided to use duplicates in the cube.

 

[dbs]

I ended up replacing around ~70 cards. You can see the changes in the Cube Tutor blog here:

https://www.cubetutor.com/cubeblog/97600

I also created copied the list over to Cube Cobra:

https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/xi7

 

[Erik Twice]

I'm tempted to just go and print proxies of your whole cube. I would never play it, I don't think I know anyone skilled enough to do so, but I love it.

 

[dbs]

I'm tempted to just go and print proxies of your whole cube. I would never play it, I don't think I know anyone skilled enough to do so, but I love it.

Thanks! My paper version of the cube (stuck in our lab office for the last year) is all proxies. I don't think we're especially or unusually skilled (speaking for myself of course), but I guess we've had the exact same group of four drafting this cube since it's original form 3 years ago. So because of that it's difficult to judge how hostile it is to newcomers.

But check out these lists someone (Nanonox I think) drafted! So sick!

Spoiler

UB storm/Dark depths from CubeTutor.com

UGr Paradox Engine from CubeTutor.com

One more deck to showcase, turbo-discard from Nanonox:

Wheels from CubeTutor.com

 

[Nanonox]

Yeah, that was me. I have no idea if these lists are any good (compared to others and in the face of disruption), but I always have a blast drafting your cube and finding ridiculous synergies and engines. I like the changes you made btw, the new combos seem to fit right into the others or fit with the engines.

This is what a powered cube should be for me. You have all of the power and speed, but not the variance of opening a lotus.

 

[Dom Harvey]

Drafted this beautiful freak:

 

[Onderzeeboot]

https://luckypaper.co/articles/an-introduction-to-the-degenerate-micro-cube/

Just wanted to drop this here, because it sounds like something you would like

 

[dbs]

Thinking about disruption and aggro:

We've done a couple remote drafts and I'm continuing to refine my last update. I've been reworking my disruption suites and testing aggro-combo. I built some hand-picked lists to try out the feel of different aggressive strategies and then me and one of my regular drafters did a series of test matches. We pitted two aggro-combo decks again KCI and UB Storm. One of the goals was to pay attention to what disruption/interaction felt good on each side of the aggro match-up. I'll share the two aggro lists and a couple of notes that came up.

UB Reanimator Aggro from CubeTutor.com

The first deck aimed to play from the yard and was piloted by my buddy while I played KCI. One thing I appreciated was how flexible the game plan was. Hedron Crab, Stitcher's Supplier, and Frantic Search fill up the yard very quickly, and from there you end up with board states that always play out slightly different: recursive threats with equipment, explosive turns with dread return, woe strider + blood artist, or reanimating griselbrand. That flexibility also made it fun to play against because as the KCI player, I had to zig and zag to either stay alive or try to throw resources into a rushed kill. Having multiple possible gameplans is a quality I want in all of my aggro decks for this format.

Regarding disruption: I'm happy with the choices here. Kitesail Freebooter is very good and carries wargear. But the pilot commented multiple times that Daze and Snuff Out both felt great in particular. Even when I played around Daze, the disruption to my sequencing was pretty effective. We enjoyed the play patterns enough that I'm going to add a second copy of Daze - I think that just sounds superior to trying out Force Spike. Likewise, I'm testing Disfigure right now and maybe that's supposed to be a second copy of Snuff Out instead. Aside from that, Force of Will and Collective Brutality are obviously long time favorites.

RG Discard from CubeTutor.com

The second deck was RG discard/lands and I piloted it against UB Storm. We had a third potential aggro deck - GW artifact/lands - which I considered playing, but at the last minute I decided to test a second GY deck instead. Turns out it was a complete blast: very very fun to play. The standout element is the raw amount of mana generation. With Earthcraft, Gaea's Cradle, Lotus Cobra, Fastbond, and Ramunap Excavator, I was getting to 10+ mana consistently by turn 3 to threaten turn 4 kills. This timing was perfectly, because UB Storm was poised to go off consistently on turns 3-4, but the pressure to do so on turn 3 lead to rushed/convoluted lines. In past cube drafts, these often lead to a whiff into a board wipe which semi-resets the game and spins into a very weird late game.

The explosiveness of the mana generation was paired with virtual card advantage out of the yard plus Wheel of Fortune and Magus of the Wheel. I absolutely felt like I was playing a combo deck, with an abundance of finicky and non-linear turns. Notably, having access to Bazaar and Cradle made sequencing in turn-1 Elvish Reclaimer games super interesting.

The disruption on my end was so-so: I really only had Wasteland to slow him down, and often preferred to just use my mana to speed up the clock by a turn. We talked about potentially putting Strip Mine back in the cube, but I'm not sure it would actually make game play better: I'm leaving it out for now. Notably, Lightning Bolt was great even without creature targets and going face with Bolt mattered in at least one game. I'm very happy to have two copies of Lightning Bolt instead of putting in something like Lightning Strike, and at this point I'm considering adding a third copy over one of the other burn spells. If I wanted a more disruptive gameplan in RG against storm, there are plenty of options within the cube that aren't in the list: Reclamation Sage and Avalanche Riders come to the top of my mind. The way the matchup played as is was fun, but maybe it's worth re-testing with more resource denial.

Overall, these are exactly the kind of aggressive decks I want in my format. They were fun to play and could create a lot of pressure very quickly without relying on a boatload of 1 mana 2/1s. It also provided a useful device for checking on my disruption, so I'll probably do something like this again later as I continue to polish. Since decks from hand-picked cards in the cube don't necessarily reflect how draft decks turn out, I've been trying to think about draft dynamics explicitly, and I might write more on that at some point.

 

[dbs]

I'm working on making a new cube blog to represent my most up-to-date list and design choices. The first post in this one is very outdated, although I'll be trying to compare the current list to some of those earlier ideas. In the meantime, I want to share some card impressions from our most recent draft. I'll share two decklists as well.

UG High Tide Depths

I drafted Blue Green High Tide with Teferi's Tutelage and Dark Depths as the main win-cons. Some card impressions:



First up Dryad of the Ilysian Grove was very good and I'm happy with my choice of a second copy instead of Courser of Kruphix. It ramps you, fixes your mana, combos with Bubbling Muck, High Tide, and Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle, plays super well with Dark Depths, and is incidentally an enchantment. All of these modes turned out to be relevant this draft, so I'm pleased with it.



This is also my first time testing Mental Misstep. I played with it as a four-of in Vintage for a while and obviously its good there, but holy cow is it good in cube. I think it was easily the best card in my deck - a really clutch zero-mana counterspell in most of my match-ups for the night: especially Esper Reanimator and Bant Mentor. I'm speculatively going up to a second copy.



I sided in Dragonsguard Elite against some more creature-light opponents. With all the degenerate mana it was easy to activate the 4GG ability, but not being able to get through a chump-blocker is rough in storm. Regardless, it puts on the pressure when it comes down early and it stole me at least one free game. Quandrix Apprentice was also good because I wanted a lot of lands but I never actually wanted to draw any lands for fear of running out of gas. Effectively that meant Apprentice just reads "Magecraft: draw a card". Plus, it's quite strong with Fastbond and Dryad where your magecraft triggers also net you mana.

Mono-Brown

The other deck I want to share is nearly completely colorless. This is the perfect example of a deck that could switch back and forth between aggro plan and combo plan wherever appropriate. Here are some new individual cards that stood out:



These cards were both very good. When every card in your deck is an artifact and you have enough broken fast mana to flood the board, these represent a ton of power. The equip cost on Nettlecyst being so cheap was also relevant in at least one game.



Ravager stood out positively for a simple reason: it was always good on its own. You just need a bunch of random artifacts around (especially ones that want to be sacrificed) and then suddenly blocking and combat becomes a nightmare for your opponent. I include Hardened Scales and Ballista in the cube as well, but those are just gravy; Ravager can clock them on its own.



Previously I put this in the cube, no one picked it, and I cut it. Never again though, because Foundry was sick. It looks so innocuous, but it was an all-star in several games. A highlight was the artifacts player using Krark-Clan Ironworks to get a bunch of mana and draw a bunch of cards off of Chromatic Star, and then using the mana to spin the Foundry and grind constant value.



Maybe the biggest surprise of the night, Kaldra is exactly the big artifact pay-off I've been looking for. I don't like the play pattern of Blightsteel Colossus; Kaldra is powerful but actually plays well. It's a great Tinker target - the haste is especially relevant for setting up a clock. But on the flip side 5/5 isn't SO big that the gain would end on the spot. Being an equipment is all upside because you can also Stoneforge for it. Plus at 7 mana it's easy to cast. My first match against the artifact player, they went Turn 1: Workshop + Foundry Inspector. Turn 2: Mox, Ancient Tomb, Kaldra. I came very close to winning that game anyway, but damn, what an explosive start.

Anyway, I'll be posting a higher-level summary of the current environment's goals and design ideas sometime in the next few weeks. In the meantime, I'll be looking over the rectangle draft picks - very excited about how that turns out!