Theme Based Cube

[mot88]

Hey guys, I have a cube list that needs some work. I have been playing with a fairly stock cube for about a year (lower power level), and I have recently decided to build something a little bit more unique. This list tries to avoid too many pure "good-stuff" decks, and focuses on heavily supporting a few themes.
http://cubetutor.com/viewcube/7790
Main themes: graveyard, enchantments (permanents matter)
sub-theme: devotion, flashback, build-around-me enchantments
Archetypes: loam, blue devotion, black devotion, green-based aggro, self-mill, enchantments (control and aggro), burning vengeance, reanimator, spells matter,...
burning vengeance, young pyromancer, tallowisp, gravecrawler, life from the loam, gray merchant of asphodel, thassa, god of the sea, academy rector, survival of the fittest

One of the big ideas of this cube is that you can pick up an early archetype anchor, and then build an interesting deck. See seismic assault? You can build an aggro loam, or some weird GR control deck. One note: I am have purposely lowered the power level of a lot slots; especially at the high end of the curve. I feel like low redundancy of good fatties will lead to interesting draft decisions, and maybe diminish "battlecruiser magic".

I have many worries about the list, and feedback on any of these questions would be much appreciated (I know some of these questions cannot be answered except by testing, but I will ask them anyways). My questions in order of importance:

Are the archetypes too linear? Will drafting the enchantment deck be too repetitive for example?

Is blue too mechanically isolated? If so any ideas to fix it? I tried to put graveyard enablers and cards that interact with the rest of the format, but I am not sure that I have succeeded.

Are the power levels of the archetypes too disparate? Will burning vengeance.dec ever actually beat a decent aggro deck? Aggro will probably need some tuning to get to the right place relative to the more durdly decks.

Is this draft environment going to be really unfriendly to people who haven't looked at the list?

Are there too many do nothing cards? I personally feel that the occasional dead pack might actually add to the drafting experience, because you will get rewarded more for good drafting, but I could be completely in the wrong here.

Is multicolor imbalance a major issue?

How should I do the manabase. I'm pretty solidly convinced on double fetches and the first set of shocks, but the rest of the lands are still up in the air at this point.

How much hate is enough hate?


TL;DR: here's my cube list: http://cubetutor.com/viewcube/7790
What do you think?

 

[FlowerSunRain]

I think your cube is really cool. Anyone who cubes Flickering Ward and TWO Gray Merchant of Asphodels is good by me. We share some overlap in a few "not-typically-cubed areas" in our designs, but are also drastically different in a lot of others, which is great for comparison purposes.

Rather then help you right now, although I promise I will, I am first going to ask you a question. How does Tallowisp play for you? This is a card that is theoretically perfect for me, but the spell type restriction seems to heavy for it to actually work. How many spirits do you actually run to make it work?

I think Enchantress's Presence is a must if you want to do the enchantment theme. Your single birthing pod is probably not very supported, perhaps that's a cut?

With Auras floating around and 3 black bestow creatures, Agent of Fates seems to be a very fun card you can easily support. On that note, Gift of Orzhova is probably great for you, with evershrike and hero of iroas hanging around.

I think you've got the Loam Package in a reasonable place. I personally hate land tax as a card, but it probably works here. You could run tithe as a more fair version of the same effect (plus is finds duals!).

Speaking of miserable cards, elephant grass is one of the big reasons everyone hates enchantress decks. Is it really vital to the archetype? At least sphere of safety costs a lot to cast! Speaking of which, Luminarch Ascension seems like one of the cards where if you are activating it, you would have won anyway. Am I wrong?

I'm not seeing why you are running 2 spikeshot elders.

As much as I hate to beat that drum, I'm not sure you have enough 1 mana aggro dudes to justify running the amount you have. One of my least favorite things in cube design is dedicating lots of spots to mediocre 1 drops just to fill the grid, but if you don't, those decks fall apart. HOWEVER, I am working on a draft rule to address this very issue which I will unveil with my next update that you may or may not find interesting. That said, it seems really hard to get together a good aggro deck if anyone else at the table is drafting one and that might need some addressing.

On the other hand, your big creatures are really much lower powered then what I'm used to seeing. Combined with a huge lack of ramp and thin aggro, it seems that you are really pushing games firmly into the midrange area. That's fine, but if you are going to do that, I say fully embrace it and trim out the extreme aggro and control cards because they aren't going to be very good anyway.

Blue is easily my weakest color designwise, so I share your pain when trying to evaluate it. It seems good. I would love to run thought scour, but I hate the art! Dream Twist is an extremely narrow card (even with the burning veng. and selfmill synergy), but I guess its a freebie for the mill player who will wheel it 100% of the time? Is it really that good in that deck?

That's what I have for now!

 

[Changling Bob]

Man that was fun to draft. Started trying to go R/B blood artist with recursion, ended up almost entirely mono-red splashing for Mogis, blood artist and messenger.

 

[mot88]

Thanks for the response FlowerSunRain!
As for tallowisp, I think I want to give it a shot. Unfortunately, there just aren't many more spirits I want to run. Currently in the cube there are 6 spirits in white, 3 in blue (though lone revenant is a little bit expensive to be doing what i want), 6 in black, 1 green, 0 red, +evershrike and sovereigns of lost alara. I feel like 4 spirits is probably the minimum for making tallowisp viable, with it being very good with 6-7 spirits. Maybe the support just isn't there, but I would have to do quite few real drafts to be sure (don't know when that might happen). Here is an example of the tallowisp deck "getting there," but it is just a draft with bots:
http://cubetutor.com/cubedeck/85120

I really like the birthing pod cut, I originally had it in there just because its a card I heartily enjoy playing, but now that you mention it, I see that it doesn't really fit in the cube. You are probably right about elephant grass (though it seems like such a perfect archetype enabler). I really want luminarch ascension to be a thing, so I'm going to give a shot, but keep an eye on it, same with land tax. Agent of fates seems good, as does gift of orzhova, but I'm not sure what the cut is. Maybe kitchen finks?

I also really appreciate your perspective on the aggro/control decks. I had never even considered the idea that maybe I don't need to support aggro or control. I will definitely be looking at going down this direction, but my initial instincts tell me that I should do what it takes to support true aggro and true control. I feel like aggro might be able to get there as it is just because the power level of the other cards is quite a bit lower than usual for cube. Tinkering is in order to figure out what level of aggro support is necessary.

Changling Bob - That is the most ambitious geralf's messenger I have ever seen.

 

[Changling Bob]

You're not wrong!

 

[Alfonzo Bonzo]

This all looks very fun. I think your challenge will be smoothing the themes around the edges so you don't have too many cards that don't do anything outside of their theme.

Here's an enchantress deck I drafted that looks super cool
http://cubetutor.com/cubedeck/85462

I would love it if we could get tallowisp to work, it's such a cool card. I'm not sure you can fetch bestow creatures with it though because of the way it's worded. But bestow guys are all spirits, which is cool. I didn't realise kor spiritdancer triggered off all aura's not just enchant creatures, so wild growth etc trigger it. I second adding enchantress's presence. I'm not sure I would want to play evershrike, ever Spirit of the Labyrinth seems like a bit of 'nombo' when you have a bunch of stuff that triggers drawing cards in enchantment decks.

I'm not a fan of luminarch ascension or land tax either I'm afraid.

What are your blue themes? Mill, self mill and devotion?
How about: