The Riptidening—Building my Cube from scratch

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blacksmithy

I've made my BFZ pre-order, so hopefully i can get a final pre-play list together by October 2!
Taking into account the good advice from y'all about trying to avoid doing too much and coming up unfocused and messy, i've taken another hard think on how i'm structuring the cube and its themes. Some things that were needling me about 4-color + wedge design were:
-artifacts in black is pretty darn forced, but with prowess in jeskai it's got nowhere to go but WUBR.
-tall board growth and wide board growth are two separate themes that i've been pretending are combinable for the sake of structure.
-my enemy color pairs are stretched further than my ally pairs.
Taking these things into account, i decided to do a couple things:
-fold artifacts into the prowess theme.
-separate tall and wide into two themes.
-reduce my total theme count.
-spread all themes into all colors as much as possible for now...
-...and throw caution to the wind.
Blink is also losing most of its dedicated support and being folded into "creatures matter." This theme encompasses blink decks, aether vial decks, thalia decks, pod decks, etc etc.
The themes im going now for are: Counters, creatures, spells, enchantments, lands, deathrattles, graveyards, and topdecks. I think there's at least a few cards in every color that would go nicely into decks built around those themes. We'll find out, anyway.
 
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blacksmithy

Okay! Guess what! I got all the mono sections cut down below 60. My next two steps are to fill them out with some of the generic-but-not-oppressive guys my drafters like (one guy in particular has been loudly requesting Terrastodon), and then put together the colorless section. I think we're gonna end up with probably 60 cards in each mono section and shoot for 450; the ULD takes a lot of pressure off my colorless section.
 
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blacksmithy

Uh, maybe? I'm honestly a terrible drafter and can't read anything but the most obvious signals myself, so it hasnt been on my radar yet. But, it's a good note.
My ideal scenario for the 5-color theme scheme is that drafters will more or less keep building 2-3 color decks with the occasional 4-5 color pile, as already happens; and that when they pick a theme they dont feel locked into a certain pair. Yknow, like, say youre drafting a power cube and you get Survival of the Fittest and think, "well shoot, i guess id better be Golgari now, since the best available deck for me now is rec/sur." Thats a little hyperbole but you get the idea-i want to use the themes to avoid "locking" my drafters into colors. Mixed signals may well be the cost of that benefit.
 
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blacksmithy

The colorless section's first draft is up! It was honestly easier than I expected. With this in hand, I think I'm ready to get this thing together on paper as soon as the BFZ cards come in.
 
Diakonov

Diakonov

I try to do a very similar thing with my cube in terms of spreading themes throughout all five colors. It depends on how broad the theme is, but generally I try to have a theme centered on one or two colors, and then I stagger the support in different amounts down to as many other colors as possible.

For example, in my cube the artifact theme is most prominent in red, followed very closely by blue, black is distinctly third, and then white and green are at the bottom. So, a player looking to build an artifact-based deck would want to make sure that they are at least playing red OR blue, but they could still find a very small amount of support in green or white. Blue-black splash-green could be a reasonable artifact build in my cube.
 
Rasmus Källqvist

Rasmus Källqvist

I think that's the best method probably. For me the advantage of having guild centered themes is that they lend a guiding hand during the draft. If you're dumb struck ed and really need to commit to a direction to take the draft this very pick it's nice to know that you should try to aim for these colors.

If you see an opportunity to go outside of that you should still be able to do it (hence why the themes should be bled) but that should be optional. Keeps drafters who aren't as familiar from feeling like they're fumbling in the dark!
 
Chris Taylor

Chris Taylor

Contributor
On the other hand, in FSR's cube most of the themes are spread more or less evenly around the colors from what I can tell (Haven't drafted it myself) so perhaps he's the one to talk to?
Assuming you want to keep this direction I mean
 
Grillo_Parlante

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
Diakonov said:
I try to do a very similar thing with my cube in terms of spreading themes throughout all five colors. It depends on how broad the theme is, but generally I try to have a theme centered on one or two colors, and then I stagger the support in different amounts down to as many other colors as possible.

For example, in my cube the artifact theme is most prominent in red, followed very closely by blue, black is distinctly third, and then white and green are at the bottom. So, a player looking to build an artifact-based deck would want to make sure that they are at least playing red OR blue, but they could still find a very small amount of support in green or white. Blue-black splash-green could be a reasonable artifact build in my cube.
Click to expand...


Yeah, this is what I keep on trying to say, to various degrees of effectiveness.

Its fine to bleed outside of the guild, just be aware that sometimes that results in isolated mechanics, making certain cards dead, or results in over powered wedge or shard combinations that you never intended. Starting from a base guild combination makes that harder to have happen (though it probably will still happen, and you will have to make adjustments), and the guild combination also helps make sure you haven't forgotten a color combination.

I had a big (continuing) mess with the innistrad theme cube where I didn't map out the guilds at the start, just bleeding themes around as much as possible, and than lo and behold I had no Gruul or orzhov decks showing up in my drafts, while BUG was the predominate three color combination. Its very awkward to have to fix those issues after-the-fact.
 
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blacksmithy

It's a problem I'm aware of. I'll keep an eye on what decks are getting made and what decks aren't once we start drafting the thing. I have plenty of time between cube sessions to troubleshoot.
Speaking of decks, you can see some of my pitiful attempts (actually I think they went okay) at forcing archetypes in the "Decks" tab now. Lands is a wild one, but I've tried it twice and had a pretty good pile of synergy both times (though the Internet dropped for a sec during my first attempt). It just varies pretty widely in terms of what your deck actually wants to do. Which is good! It's very good! I feel like that crazy goggles guy in Back to the Future!
But yeah, it's ready to draft on CT! So have fun!
 
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blacksmithy

Okay, so here's a deck I really liked. I actually tried to force goodstuff and ended up with a deathrattle/graveyards deck that can transform into (low-powered) Tinker out of the board. Here's my mainboard for those who don't want to click the link:

There's a lot of stuff going on there: I can build up devotion for a huge Gary swing to stabilize; I can drop Pack Rat late in the game to overwhelm the opponent; I can get tons of card advantage via saccing my Perilous Myr/Sultai Emissary/Baleful Strix ad nauseum with Trading Post or Vampiric Rites; and if push comes to shove I can just mill 'em with Codex Shredder or Elixir of Immortality. Plus I've got Tinker and Reanimate in the sideboard for some surprises game 2. (Also creeping tar pit as my lonely only fixer.)
Compare this to the winning UB deck I posted in the 3-0 thread:

4 islands, 4 swamps
That was a really fun deck! But this one looks EVEN MORE FUN, and that's what the new cube is all about—more fun, more synergy, more awesome.

EDIT: Also notice that hella low curve. This is a HARD control deck that has milling Villain on the short list of gameplans, and I curve out at 5.
 
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blacksmithy

I cannot for the life of me get those tags to work. I even copied out of the tag tutorial once, no dice.
Codex Shredder is legit, man! It mills Villain AND lets you Regrowth at instant speed! I mean it's no Sphinx's Tutelage but you can't recur Tutelage with your Trading Post anyhow.
 
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blacksmithy

There is no lantern in the ULD, haha.
I may be overly optimistic about Shredder because of how sleeper-OP it is in my EDH playgroup, but I think there's enough of a graveyard focus in the cube that it can do good work in the right decks (which it will obviously wheel to). It's not like my opponent is going to waste removal on it before I can crack it for the regrowth effect, so it'll always replace itself eventually as long as its controller lives that long, and in the meantime you can mill yourself for fun and profit or mill your opponent to get that (slow) clock going.
 
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blacksmithy

Man, I didn't realize how much I love U+splash control until I started test drafting this cube. Here's a Uwb Lands deck I thought looked fun:
 
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