Card/Deck Tokens Combo

ahadabans

ahadabans

xyz said:
Let's do some ROUGH math here.... To deal 20 damage you need: 1 Aristocrat, 2-4 Artists, and 5-10 pieces of Fodder (depending on how many artists you have in play).
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Not sure how others are looking to design this, but the sacrifice mechanic to me is more about reach. So you build a basic aggro or whatever shell and then you have a handful of cards that pay dividends for on death or LTB triggers. It helps with overextension, which is neat. You can drop 4 bodies on the board and know a wrath still nets 4 direct to the face (or more if with multiple triggers - say bombardment and blood artist).

If you manage to get something resembling an actual "combo" (for lack of a better term), where you get 3+ online, you essentially make it so virtually any move your opponent makes is fatal. With blood artist, bombardment and outpost seige in play, 3 additional bodies (plus artist) is 12 points of instant speed reach (16 point life swing). That's if you don't or can't attack. Obviously more if any of that can swing in during combat.
 
Grillo_Parlante

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
Exactly, and the board states are really neat. You toss in something like goblin sharpshooter, and suddenly things just become hilarious.

There is just a ton of depth, and it would be nice to enable some more space for drafters to explore.
 
xyz

xyz

ahadabans said:
Not sure how others are looking to design this, but the sacrifice mechanic to me is more about reach. So you build a basic aggro or whatever shell and then you have a handful of cards that pay dividends for on death or LTB triggers. It helps with overextension, which is neat. You can drop 4 bodies on the board and know a wrath still nets 4 direct to the face (or more if with multiple triggers - say bombardment and blood artist).

If you manage to get something resembling an actual "combo" (for lack of a better term), where you get 3+ online, you essentially make it so virtually any move your opponent makes is fatal. With blood artist, bombardment and outpost seige in play, 3 additional bodies (plus artist) is 12 points of instant speed reach (16 point life swing). That's if you don't or can't attack. Obviously more if any of that can swing in during combat.
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Yea yea I know lol. I just figured I'd outline it since people were asking about the pure combo version.
 
Grillo_Parlante

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
I think it would help to refine "pure combo" a bit more too. Its not so much that you are looking to get 20 tokens out with a sac outlet and blood artist. Its more like using the tokens you were going to run anyways to power unfair interactions.
 
Dom Harvey

Dom Harvey

Contributor
Aggro-combo tokens:

Wbg Tokens from CubeTutor.com











A few highlights:

- Westvale Abbey allows you to convert a clogged board into a quick clock to steal wins out of nowhere and satisfies the Timmy that lives inside my id
- Windbrisk Heights is massively underrated in Cube + is incredibly fun and powerful. It adds an element of 'controlled variance' to the game that leads to amazing blowouts, creates a fun subgame where the opponent has to stop you attacking with three things (or making that attack unprofitable) or work out how to play around what might be under Heights, and adds an element of 'brokenness' to a colour that very rarely gets it. It's also nice with lands-matter stuff if you run it and the more wide-ranging 'blink' effects in white (Kor Skyfisher, Flickerwisp)
- Earthcraft is the OG Cryptolith Rite, and your creatures having 'haste' makes it so much better. Examples of some busted starts:

T1 Windbrisk Heights
T2 Earthcraft
T3 Lingering Souls, flashback Souls, KotWO
T4 Curse of Predation, attack, activate Heights

T1 Thraben Inspector
T2 Earthcraft
T3 Ophiomancer, Ayli, make a token on upkeep and sac the Clue
T4 Archangel of Thune, sac the token to Ayli to trigger Angel; make a token on upkeep, do it again
 
Chris Taylor

Chris Taylor

Contributor
Unless you're casting some really color intensive stuff or your manabase is STACKED, isn't earthcraft better? Foiling process aside I'd double up on it :p

Haste > Color Requirements imo
 
Grillo_Parlante

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
I would try both to see if my players can surprise me; but what you're saying does make sense.

What neat ways are there to abuse it? It seems like a potential broken effect, especially alongside eldrazi scions or spawns.
 
Grillo_Parlante

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
Alfonzo Bonzo said:
Earthcraft is degenerate, and I'm not sure it has a place in most of our lists. Cryptolith rites isn't far behind it. The mana burst you get is so powerful. You don't need anything else to make it powerful.
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Talking point:

So, I was on modern nexus yesterday (which is yes a site of magic pundits, and iffy pundits at that), and came across this exert (bolding me):


I’ve heard Standard described as an amorphous blob where there are a number of good cards and that the greatest skill is to know when and how to combine these cards for a given tournament.
It’s more about deck choice and positioning than skill with any one deck.

Modern is different. It’s not so much about piles of powerful cards as it is internal synergy and incremental advantage. Yes, Jund looks like a pile of good cards, and it is, but it wouldn’t be Modern Jund if the pieces didn’t work together well and there wasn’t a lot of synergy between the cards that gradually pull you ahead. Haymakers are rare (outside of Tron) and hard to resolve so it’s far more about efficiency and combinations of cards than Standard. There are decks that don’t play “normal” Magic like Lantern. Many decks may attack from the same angle(s) but they operate and must be answered in very different ways; think Zoo vs. Affinity. Your deck may change its matchup role based on who wins the die roll and which game you’re on.
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Which somewhat surprised me, as thats pretty much exactly how I've repetitively described low power magic. This is, at least on some level, an analogy, and like all analogies it will be imperfect, but I can't help but feel that there are at least some solid theoretical underpinnings here, namely in the sense of what happens to formats when you stop focusing on degeneracy.

If we take these two things (incremental advantage/degeneracy), and separate them out, I think you get a pretty good rough descriptor of what differentiates a riptide format from a power max format.

I've tried to enable some level of degeneracy with untap effects, but how far is it acceptable to push the line? I have no doubts that earthcraft is degenerate, but is it so inherently unheathly that it must be banished to a format that focuses upon degeneracy?

We are playing with fire here: any fun combo deck is supposed to enable degenerate plays: and I am trying to accomplish the same thing with tokens that I tried to do with bouncelands and untap effects. I think its fun to allow drafters to push the line a bit, have some excitement, but obviously we don't want to be making everyone miserable.
 
whydirt

whydirt

Some ideas from red:

  • Elemental Mastery is kind of a "fair" Splinter Twin that works better when you have ways to abuse multiple bodies. It does go infinite with Midnight Guard.
  • Kyren Negotiations provides a red control finisher for a tokens deck as it allows you to hold you team back and still burn out your opponent.
  • Lightning Volley is probably a bit underpowered compared to some of the other options in this thread, but again provides another angle for creating value out of tokens that doesn't involve pure beatdown.
 
Grillo_Parlante

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
Dom Harvey said:
I don't recognize that description of Modern Jund at all, there's barely any synergy.
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Yeah, I'm not saying the argument isn't full of holes: its modern nexus after all. It just seemed like an interesting talking point as to different flavors of magic: incremental gain (fair magic) as opposed to haymaker focused magic. Do I really need to cut everything that can produce unfair feeling interactions? Even if we highly prioritize incremental magic, it seems a bit stale to make everything fair all the time.

This just seems like language that people throw around lazily, without really think of the meaning.
 
Chris Taylor

Chris Taylor

Contributor
I assume the synergy argument comes up because everything is of a similar power level (since more broken stuff is banned and anything worse is unplayable) so to eke out advantages in a format where everything is so close, you need synergy.

I don't play modern enough to type that out without rolling my eyes, but hey
 
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