Draft #9
Not believing anymore that aggro is the best deck of the format, I go back to the midrange/draft good cards plan, now with a better grasp on what are the best cards of the format.
RG Aggro-Midrange Superfriends
I watched Deathsie's stream and he kept saying red was ok but not the best color, but then he drafted an RG Midrange and crushed with
Rampant Smasher, simply because it's a 5/5 for 4 when people are still setting up. I don't think he had it in that draft, but he kept talking about how
Tibalt, Rakish Instigator is one of the best red cards in the cube. I couldn't see how, so I checked it for myself.
This deck is as solid as it gets, and simply playing a consistent midrange plan yielded a
7-1 record. I had to cut
Thrashing Brontodon and
Precision Bolt to smooth out my curve, and was rewarded for that. The 2-drops ate removal and created board pressure so that I could play my planeswalkers and my top ends on the offense. This deck was fast in the early game, and though it didn't have the best scaling, it kept attacking relentlessly and the opponents had to keep making bad blocks to stabilize.
I had a particularly memorable game in which I was very far behind against a lifegain deck doing nuts stuff with Heliod and lifelinkers, but slowly crawled back with
Klothys, God of Destiny draining two life every turn, playing the synergy between Tibalt, Rakish Instigator and Jaya, Venerated Firemage, brokering my planeswalkers' lives with my own and chump blocking to avoid lethal by one of two life for multiple turns in a row, treading the edge of 7 devotion to have a ground blocker when I really needed it, and closing out with a big Banefire for exact lethal. The game was a wild ride and my best played one in all the drafts.
That was sort of an outlier though. Mostly, I just played big things and attacked with them.
Player lesson: There's no shame in playing midrange good-stuff.
Cube design lesson: WAR planeswalkers can be good and not feel oppressing at the same time. Tibalt was actually quite good every time, sometimes because it stopped the lifelink deck from growing their
Healer's Hawk, other times simply because it created tokens that shot down utility creatures. It's hard to appreciate how it's good without a game to put it in context, but it was always good. Being one of the best was true, but more of a function of red not having many bombs and lifegain being so out of control.
Jaya, Venerated Firemage was super cool to play, and this draft made me consider it for my cube. I like the Torbran,
Thane of Red Fell effect, but the dwarf is ridiculously strong. Jaya is much more in the power level I'm working with.
Draft #10
In the last day of the Tinkerer's Cube, I wanted to do something I had not done yet. So I more or less forced control.
I got a lot of blue and red spells, so I thought I was going to play an amazing version of the deck, but as the packs were passed, I realized I had very few wincons. Pack 3, I see
Lochmere Serpent and take it, though it's too late to pick black fixing. I decide I don't have enough nonbasics to have a decent splash and just play UR spells for the first two games, and I'm at 2-1. However, I had serious issues in all games with closing it out before it got out of control. I won one by attacking with a
Ptemander carrying
Shadowspear and another by getting lucky opponent had zero removal for
Sprite Dragon. I decide this deck can't be competitive without a finisher, and add three swamps to splash
Lochmere Serpent.
URb Control
Of course, in both games I draw my 3 Swamps and can't cast my spells and I get steamrolled and end
2-3. The last game I even manage to get out my serpent, but it gets exiled immediately after eating a blocker.
I made sure to try
Double Vision because I read on Reddit it was one of the best cards in the cube.
Player lesson: Don't listen to Reddit. Do listen to good streamers.
Player lesson: Don't fuck up your mana.
Player lesson: Not all decks can 7-x, take your 3-3 and move on.
Cube design lesson: Good threats vs bad answers = bad control.
Draft #11
For my last draft, I just wanted to finish with a decent run.
UGr Midrange
It doesn't look like much, but a lot of the cards here are great in the context of the cube. Without much removal (particularly removal that actually removes the creatures from the battlefield)
Dragonmaster Outcast,
Oracle of Mul Daya and
The First Iroan Games are straight up bombs.
Multani, Yavimaya's Avatar is the best green finisher (reach is super relevant, and you tend to have a lot of lands and time). 3 damage is a good place for burn spells (
Ral's Outburst,
Fateful End).
Unsummon is almost a Doom Blade because big creatures are made, not cast.
Bubble Snare,
Essence Scatter and
Waterknot are pretty good removal. The fixing is top notch, so I didn't have color issues like in other certain drafts.
Shadowspear is a race winner, and
Primal Empathy and
Merfolk Skydiver were great in the long game.
The deck doesn't scale much, but again plays a solid good-studd plan: deploy threats, remove the opponents' apply pressure, get value. I went
7-2 with it and it felt pretty good to pilot and was decision-intensive. A fine way to finish my runs.
Player lesson: Each format has its own learning curve, but most are about identifying the good cards so you go into the colors where people are passing them.
Cube design lesson: There is player satisfaction in format mastery.
Quirks of the Cube
Focused on midrange threats
The threats' power was low on the cheap end (1 and 2 drops), high on the middle (3 an 4 drops) and low again on the top end (5+ drops). This creates an environment in which you have time to setup your synergies, but once the ball gets rolling, the board grow scarily fast. This is so pronunced that it seems intentional.
Low powered removal and counterspells
Cubes often have a lot of removal, and this one has an amount of removal more similar to a modern limited environment. More than that, removal is significantly weaker and favors creatures that only need their static abilities. That's actually a good decision: Pacifism only partially shuts down
Setessan Champion, so the Enchantments deck isn't punished too harshly for running creature engines. Red is the best color to destroy the engines by far, but the burn spells almost all deal 2 and 3 damage, so larger creatures like
Trostani Discordant,
Witch of the Moors and
Archon of Sun's Grace are quite resilient.
The counterspells are pretty bad, and apart from
Essence Scatter and an aggressively cycled
Censor, I didn't find them worth playing. Remember the best threats are 3 mana, so 3 mana counterspells don't match well and on the draw they are terrible. Bounce is really good, though - it breaks up combos and removes counters and auras.
Medium synergy cube, after all
This was built as a synergy cube, and it only partially succeeds in the endeavor. Some archetypes are very strong, but other archetypes are just bad. I think decks are around 50/50 in terms of good-stuff decks vs synergy decks.
Slow environment
Aggro is weak, so you have time to setup, and the best cards draw their power from growing or providing value turn by turn. This leads to a handful of incredibly long games, though on average they were not that long: around 9 minutes.
Macro archetypes
There are therefore two styles of decks:
- Aggro-midrange, which try to go under the opponent, applying pressure to prevent them to setup their scaling.
- Synergy-midrange, which tries to develop its scaling plan and grow faster than the opponent, involving one or more micro-archetypes.
I'm not sure the meta would evolve beyond that given enough time, and I had a lot more success with the aggro-midrange decks than with the synergy-midrange ones because everyone was so focused on the latter, which are less consistent.
Actual aggro is weak because the low power cheap threats do not match up well against the high power medium cost threats. Control is also bad, first because of the lack of board wipes, second because all synergies involve running lots of creatures, third because finishers were weak. This last feature also makes ramp bad. Why cast
Mind Stone to ramp into
Sifter Wurm if you can go
Scavenging Ooze into
Rishkar, Peema Renegade instead? Many good 4-5 mana cards are a setup for scaling rather than a threat in themselves, like
Renata, Called to the Hunt and
Ridgescale Tusker. Other colors have the same effect, blue top ends at
Shipwreck Dowser and
Syr Elenora, the Discerning. Red at
Lava Serpent and
Drakuseth, Maw of Flames (which I didn't see attack even once).
Micro archetypes
WG Counters: Great. Almost half the green cards add or care about +1/+1 counters, and they are pretty strong, so this is the foundation of the cube's metagame. White is the second color with most +1/+1 counters enablers and has has a couple of payoffs, but payoffs matters little in this archetype, actually. The counters are the payoffs themselves.
The Ozolith and
Grateful Apparition are just icing when you're playing
Luminarch Ascendant,
Mikaeus the Lunarch,
Voracious Hydra, and
The First Iroan Games.
WG Tokens: Good. I think this may have been intended as WR Tokens, but I'm not playing
Goblin Rally, I'm playing
Champion of Lambholt. A lot of the payoffs involve putting counters on all your creatures, so this sort of blends together with WG Counters.
Trostani Discordant,
Divine Visitation and
Rhys the Redeemed are some of the payoffs for this deck that don't involve counters, but it has a lot more enablers.
WB Lifegain: Good.
Witch of the Moors is the best payoff.
Vito, Thorn of the Dusk Rose is good too, but that's about it for black payoffs. The best reason to play this deck is
Heliod, Sun-Crowned, but white gets other good ones:
Ajani's Pridemate,
Resplandent Angel,
Twinblade Paladin. The gold signposts are sweet:
Indulging Patrician and
Regal Bloodlord. Half the white and half the black cards involve lifegain, so if you draft WB, your deck will at least to some extent be a lifegain deck.
Wx Lifegain: Average. Half the white cards gain life, so sometimes you just draft the white lifegain deck with another color. This deck is of course less synergistic than WB, but in some seats you first pick Heliod, and black is cut out, so you draft blue and put your counters on
Shacklegeist or something.
WUB Fliers: Bad to average. There are four good reasons to play WUB Fliers:
Skycat Sovereign,
Empyrean Eagle, scarce removal, and green. Green doesn't have much reach, which makes
Kraul Harpooner and
Multani, Yavimaya's Avatar two of the best green cards. Despite these environmental tailwinds, there are many issues with the WUB Fliers archetype: first, a lot of fliers do not go in the same deck. Second, a lot of fliers are bad, particularly the blue ones. Third, if you go WB Fliers, you're really going into WB Lifelink with a fliers subtheme and ignoring the payoffs. Good fliers like
Nighthawk Scavenger and
Resplendent Angel are at a premium in this format, but the power level of fliers is pretty low.
UR Spells: Bad to average. There are plenty of cards that care about spells in blue and red, but most payoffs are slow to generate value and get outscaled easily by green and white synergies. The best payoffs are the gold cards:
Crackling Drake,
Experimental Overload and
Ral, Storm Conduit, and the deck's merit is that it can disrupt the opponent easily, but it's awful at closing the game. I don't think it's generally worth going deep into this archetype, best to just play the good spells. Note this deck is extremely insular from other colors because white, black and green are too busy casting enchantments, they have very few instants and sorceries, so all payoffs are effectively gold.
WGB Enchantments: Bad. Yeah, I know. Another WG archetype. There are a ton of enchantments, but the problem is the payoffs don't align very well.
Kor Spiritdancer,
All that Glitters and
Ancestral Mask are scary but it's a fragile game plan.
Archon of Sun's Grace is very strong, but too strong - all white decks want it.
Sigil of the Empty Throne is probably ok, but I've never seen it played.
Setessan Champion is pretty good. There are ~6 others but they aren't very good. Black has a high density of enchantments and can be in this deck too, but
Aphemia, the Cacophony is the only payoff maybe worth using, so black feel inferior. What this archetype really does is being a background theme for the cube, the high enchantment density mattering here and there, and making
Reclamation Sage really good. The aura-based removal in white, blue and black make non-combat abilities like
Dragonmaster Outcast hard to remove and self-bounce effects and sacrifice enablers a bit better.
UB Mill: Bad. I did lose to an actual mill deck once, but the other few times I was milled it was just
Patient Rebuilding by itself. Blue dedicated a bunch of slots to these, and it's both a poisonous and suboptimal deck.
BR Sacrifice: Bad. I heard/read that it was good, but I didn't really run into any decks that seemed very powerful, then I found out that the cube list is radically different from the September one, and I was hearing about that other list. There aren't many reasons to play BR Sacrifice, apart from
Priest of the Forgotten Gods and
Judith, the Scourge Diva. The sacrifice fodder is bad, you don't want to drop
Deathbloom Thallid when your opponent goes
Imperious Perfect or
Aerial Responder, and these are pretty middling cards. This gets outscaled easily and can't compete with good stuff.
BG Graveyard: Unplayable. There are a lot of good cards that hate the graveyard deck, and I'm not even sure it'd be good if they weren't there - I don't see much in the way of payoffs. There's a bunch of reanimation, but threats need time on the field to accumulate counters, and the top ends are scarce and bad. Escape is a relevant mechanic, but it doesn't interact well with itself - there's diminishing returns in running multiple escape cards. The enablers are very questionable, like
Venomous Hierophant and
Carrion Grub. Plus, there is a lot of random mill and games go long, so milling yourself isn't a great start for a slow deck.
WR Wide: I think it was supposed to be wide aggro/tokens, but green's better at tokens and I conside wide aggro to be a macroarchetype.
UG ?: After 73 games and looking at the list, I honestly have no idea if there was supposed to be a synergy archetype here. Not a bad color combination for good stuff, though. The gold cards tell me this is supposed to be counters, but the blue section disagrees.
RG ?: Because I see
Irencrag Feat and
Sarkhan's Unsealing, maybe there was supposed to be a ramp deck here? There isn't, but it's a great combination for good stuff.
Verdict
The Jan/2021 version of the Tinkerer's Cube is a very strange, very particular cube. The archetypes are completely unbalanced, and the fact that half of them are very bad detracts a lot of the allure from the cube. The drafting part did not feel good, because I got rewarded for picking good stuff and punished for tinkering with combos. There were a ton of trap archetypes, and your first drafts, going in blind, are bound to be miserable. For a cube that's going to be played by so many people, I'm disappointed it was so crude and confusing until you got a few drafts in and understood the format.
The actual gameplay, though, was fun to me - much more fun than retail limited. The large boards, nice balance between tempo and card advantage, and plentiful recursion, high agency, and a slow environment made me feel like I earned most of my victories and deserved most of my defeats. Not very often I lost and felt it was bound to happen. There was always some play I could have done that might have won me a game. Thinking a couple of turns ahead and predicting how boards would scale and how life totals would evolve in the next turns was actually necessary, and combat was fun and interactive.
