Vampires are Storm
by: CML
—
The Legacy Cube is back online this week, sporting a redesign that is, let us not forget, well-intentioned. To his credit, Randy Buehler has spoken at length [link to
http://mtgcast.com/mtgcast-podcast-...box-episode-6-the-legacy-cube-w-randy-buehler ] about the redesign process — yet it is the drafters who will ultimately decide what has worked or not. As I write this, we are less than a day in to Legacy Cube drafts on Magic Online, and there have already been dozens of hilarious tweets that express concisely what I’m going to argue below:
[images]
To be sure,
Magic players like to complain about changes, but this is a little stronger than usual — we see players rarely critical of Wizards condemning Vampires categorically. The defense “Have you tried it?” makes little sense, as the critics are contending that you didn’t even need to try adding Vampires to know it was bad — and, as someone who has tried Vampires in my own Cube, I completely agree.
In this article, I will look at Cube design, both as how it was originally conceived and how it has evolved over the last two years, to contest that the addition of Vampires to the MTGO Cube is half-baked, ill-conceived and doomed to failure.
Most drafters would agree underpowered archetypes are a bad design choice for Limited environments — nobody wants to draft a deck that will seldom come together; a drafter will make that mistake once, and will never try again. Think of the balance problems with the guilds in triple-
Gatecrash, wizards in
Onslaught block, Storm in your friend’s unpowered 720: trap decks are some of the most feel-bad experiences in
Magic. Most would also agree Black aggro is underpowered in conventional Cubes, and that MTGO’s Legacy Cube is, in spite of “redesigns,” a very conventional Cube. Moreover, the MTGO Cube probably has to be conventional to satisfy people's expectations of what an official Cube “should be,” which limits the number of solutions the designers have at their disposal. There is to be no [link to
http://www.channelfireball.com/articles/cube-design-remodeling-part-two/ ] sac theme with 4 Gravecrawlers and 2 Carrion Feeders — yet.
At any rate, Carnophage et al. are too weak of cards to match up well against much of anything in the average 2015 Cube environment. They will win some matches, but sometimes people beat Torrent Elemental or get there with Dimir. All this is undesirable from a design standpoint. So where do we go from here? One idea would be to weaken the overall power level of the Cube by cutting its strongest cards, but I tend to prefer higher-power environments, and, given how widespread is the idea of “power-maxing,” so must the MTGO drafters. Another solution would be to just cut Diregraf Ghoul et al. and replace them with different Black spells — more finishers, more removal, or more viable yet more expensive creatures. This would strengthen Black, the conventional worst color in conventional Cubes, to the point it is no longer “Blue in
OLS” or “Black in
AVR.” It would also promote deck diversity through balance. I will come back to this.
The argument for trying to keep Black aggro would also be one of diversity: if a color doesn’t have aggressive options, then there’s less you can do with it. So in order for Black aggro to be worth having around, what Black gains in versatility has to outweigh what it will lose in (already deficient) power level. Does it? This is an evaluation that every designer has to make for every “theme” they put in their Cube — should I have Academy Rector and a few goofy targets, or a Sublime Archangel and three more beaters?
Aggro “themes” are bigger than other themes — they require a lot of slots — but we don’t think about it much because putting in beaters in Naya is what everyone does and what everyone should do. However, the conventional Cube community, at large, has ruled against at least one aggro theme: Blue aggro. Check out
http://www.gatheringmagic.com/enabling-blue-based-tempo-or-“blueggro”-in-your-cube/ and tell me that Lu Xun, Horizon Drake, and Mistblade Shinobi are worth three slots in your Cube. If they’re not worth it, the other weak support cards you need to make the theme big enough to be supported aren’t worth it. Thus we cut not just Carnophage but also Sarcomancy, then maybe legit good cards without a home like Bloodsoaked Champion or Dark Confidant. In the case of blue, we can allocate the slots to six Brainstorms, four Rune Snags, and a Dissolve and see how drafters respond to that.
I mention the multiples because in the case of Black aggro, I could come up with no solution that did not involve breaking singleton. Jason Waddell’s articles on this site have a lot of ideas worth borrowing, and the most successful one I’ve implemented in my own Cube (
http://www.cubetutor.com/viewcube/114) is detailed in the Gravecrawler-and-Carrion-Feeder article I linked above. The short version is that Black aggro with Gravecrawlers, Carrion Feeders, Bloodghasts, and Blood Artists is lots of fun because the cards interact well with a number of other themes, can be reduced or increased in number to nerf or buff, and are viable and flexible enough to lead to interesting drafting and gameplay decisions.
About a year ago I noticed that some of the cards the Gravecrawler theme works well with are Vampires, and my Cube contains Blood Artist, Bloodghast, Bloodghast, Falkenrath Aristocrat, Guul Draz Assassin, and Stromkirk Noble, popular inclusions all, as well as DKA Sorin who makes little lifelinking Vampires. These cards are delightful — Vampires, once an OK deck in a Standard format with Jace and Stoneforge, is among the most-pushed tribes in
MTG history. A Cube Vampires theme is therefore tempting. I tried it. It failed, but I learned something from it, and some of what I learned I will type out below.
To the above lineup of Vampires, you could also add Bloodline Keeper, Olivia Voldaren, Kalastria Highborn, Vampire Nighthawk, Gatekeeper of Malakir, Vampire Nocturnus, Blade of the Bloodchief, Bloodthrone Vampire, maybe Anowon, the Ruin Sage, and maybe another few that I’m missing, without making the theme too obtrusive. People who aren’t drafting “the Vampire deck” will want to play with some of these cards some of the time, and that’s what you want.
The theme has some strong and flexible cards. So why didn’t it work? Because the incentive is too low. You want the “filler” Vampires to be fought over by a bunch of different people, but not too much — so far, so good. But you also want there to be the incentive of synergy if you get a lot of these cards, and this is what did not happen. The payoff for assembling the tribe was just not that great, so the tribe didn’t come together often enough.
For the week or two I tried the Vampire theme there were maybe 20 vampires in my Cube of 450 cards, or 4.4%. By comparison, there are 56 Humans in my current build of 470 cards — 11.9% — and I still cut Mayor of Avabruck and worry about people not picking Champion of the Parish and Xathrid Necromancer until late.
Yet 4.4%, which is insufficient, is
significantly higher than the proportion in the Legacy Cube — and my list did not include Bloodcrazed Neonate, Vampire Interloper, and other draft dreck I see here. If you try to make the theme big enough to support itself, the card quality drops off drastically; that is what sometimes happens if you stick yourself with singleton. It is always funny to me how Cube power-maxers say “Cube is about the good cards,” and then include Sangromancer and try to tell me how “it’s actually good.”
[rakish heir]
“These Vampires are so terrible.” “And there aren’t enough of them, either!”
But I digress. The Legacy Cube has a higher curve, fewer Black aggro cards, and a diluted concentration of Vampires compared to mine when I tried the theme. The environment is almost “strictly worse” for supporting the tribe. This is a bad sign. In the unlikely scenario someone assembles a decent Vampire deck in the Legacy Cube and gets an incentive card or two, they may win some matches. Far more likely are scenarios where the deck only comes partially together (40 percent of cards aren’t “opened” in a 600-carder), or where all the cards go 13th pick. The Zombie theme, synergizing as it does with sac outlets and recursion, is only partially a tribal theme; by contrast, Vampires (minus Bloodghast) are just regular dudes. Due to its linearity and need for critical mass, pure tribal in Cube is fundamentally problematic unless it is Humans, and even Human tribal has to be limited in scope. Mayor of Avabruck is too weak for my Cube, yet it is a two-mana lord in a big tribe who gets you very far ahead if they pass the turn on 2 and/or 3. Yet compare him with the incentives for playing multiple Vampires:
— Blade of the Bloodchief is a bad card. No other drafter will ever want it.
— Bloodlord of Vaasgoth is also a bad card, see above.
— Rakish Heir wasn’t even good in
ISD draft.
— Vampire Nocturnus looks like it should work, but it will not. 1BBB is a restrictive cost in my Cube, which has a lot of fixing — and no one who has ever played full-
RTR block should ever bemoan games decided by something other than color-screw.
— Stromkirk Captain is particularly glaring for being underpowered, gold,
and poisonous [link to
http://www.channelfireball.com/articles/cube-design-the-poison-principle/ ]. In general, the lack of fixing in the MTGO Cube engenders a lot of non-games and throttles options for multicolor aggro, which brings me to the next card.
— Kalastria Highborn is an amazing card, but there’s only one of them, and it’s not worth it with such a small amount of Vampires.
The bigger issue is that the Legacy Cube is, well, big — 600 cards is a lot fewer than 720, and I commend Randy for slimming it down, but it is still a lot. I understand that the MTGO Cube is drafted hundreds of times as often as any other Cube, and thus requires some variability in the card pool to promote replay value. But adding an artificial theme that will rarely make “the Vampire deck” (with few variations) and will more often than not go undrafted will not promote replay value
With a 600-card singleton Cube, there will never be enough strong Vampires to make a worthwhile theme, yet the theme will be too large and will stoop to include weak cards to artificially support itself — Guul Draz Vampire isn’t better in the abstract than Sarcomancy. This will ensure Black aggro continues to be weak, which will make Black continue to be weak, which is undesirable for all the reasons I covered at the beginning.
—
So: what next? When I built my Cube, in 2012, it cleaved to conventional design notions; reading my article on TCGPlayer [link to
http://magic.tcgplayer.com/db/article.asp?ID=10397 ] from a few years ago, I see how radical I thought my solutions to conventional Cube design were, and how implementing these solutions amounted to more or less the same thing. This is my criticism of every MTGO Cube redesign; we get basically the same product every time. Vampires are the latest in a long line of weak themes or weak cards. Maybe this is because you can only do so much with the constraints the MTGO Cube has set for itself.
When designing our own Cubes, we do not have to care about those constraints. It was only when I acquired higher-powered fixing, fetches and duals, did I begin moving towards what I have now. There are infinite ways to build a singleton 720, but there are certain design problems that cannot be solved without drastically slimming down the Cube or breaking singleton, likely both. One of them is supporting multi-colored aggro. Having aggro is absolutely vital, and most of my design choices in my own Cube — more fetches and duals to fix and fix untapped, a smaller size, a lower curve — flow from this axiom; I feel is my greatest success as a Cube designer. Another one of them is the problem of Black aggro. That Black aggro is broadly supported when Blue aggro is widely seen as a joke is, I think, mostly due to inertia and accepted convention, yet for some reason there are Vampires in the MTGO Cube and I am writing a polemic about it.
I have drafted a lot of large singleton Cubes, and it is my experience they support aggro through having the control decks either draw too many 4-drops or color-screwing themselves. (It is also funny to me how Cube power-maxers claim that “the decks should do powerful things” when the average deck will just implode pretty often — a natural result of having an environment with a Limited-style curve [link to
http://www.channelfireball.com/articles/cuberhauss-please-try-this-at-home-part-2/ ] with a Constructed-style power level.) Anyway, this
does technically balance the Cube by bridging the power gap between “Scorched Rusalka” and “JTMS,” but leads to rote drafting and lots of horrible games. I also think few would consider playing big singleton Cubes were Cubes with good mana and low curves and difficult decisions — i.e., Cubes far more like
actual Legacy — popularized first.
Yet it is easy to rip something apart without doing any better myself. I will propose several solutions:
— Best: Let everyone make their own Cubes on MTGO and draft them free of charge. Even if they could, they wouldn’t.
— Better: Offer multiple Cubes.
— Good:
Actual redesign of the Legacy Cube with multiple Gravecrawlers, Bloodghasts, and so on.
— Realistic: If the constraints on my solution are what I think they are, I would cut all the weaker Vampires and add the strongest Black spells, regardless of function, you can find (excepting Necropotence).
Here’s a little of the ol’ in-out, in-out:
OUT
anowon, the ruin sage
ascendant evincar
bloodlord of vaasgoth
bloodthrone vampire
captivating vampire
guul draz vampire
kalastria highborn
malakir bloodwitch
necropolis regent
pain seer
sangromancer
vampire hexmage
vampire interloper
vampire lacerator
vampire nocturnus
stromkirk captain
rakish heir
bloodcrazed neonate
IN
flesh carver
lifebane zombie
tasigur, the golden fang
brutal hordechief
abyssal persecutor
archfiend of depravity
darkblast
tragic slip
vampiric tutor
demonic tutor
expunge
consume the meek
innocent blood
victimize
makeshift mannequin
murderous redcap
lightning berserker
zurgo bellringer
—
In previous iterations of the (unpowered) MTGO Cube, a handful of slots have been devoted to Storm — a incredibly linear mechanic that overlaps with, well, pretty much nothing else. The Storm deck came together once in a blue moon, usually because one drafter wheeled the Lion’s Eye Diamond and the Brain Freeze or whatever — cards he desperately needed to wheel, and that none of the other drafters had any interest in taking, especially if they were, you know, trying to win.
Vampires are the new Storm — in with one unpopular and balmy theme; out with another. (I sort of wonder if these decks would be easier to draft if you got everyone’s last pick — maybe adding Canal Dredger to the MTGO Cube is the solution we’ve been looking for.) Maybe the egregious failure of Vampires will inspire the Cube design team to take a hard look at other design choices that have failed; maybe it will end up being a good thing. If not, Cube designers can enjoy the great luxury of learning from other people’s mistakes.
In the last few years since I assembled my Cube, I have implemented dozens of impractical themes. I support experimentation in Cube. I have tried more cards and themes in my Cube than just about anyone. I also have a lot of radical ideas for Cube, including lowering the power level to open up a wider variety of cards, a broader and less explored design space. Design is iterative: I find maybe one idea in twenty worth trying and know it is worth the time spent. But I still throw out the other nineteen — and Vampires was one of those nineteen I didn’t give a second thought to, until I read the MTGO Cube announcement.
There have been a lot of bad cards in my Cube, and there are still a lot of bad cards. I’m not arguing that no one should try Vampires — I have tried Vampires. Rather, I am arguing that, in the context of a 600-card singleton Cube with conventional design choices and a standard power level, Vampires will not solve any design problems, and will not have a net desirable effect on the drafting or gameplay experiences. The MTGO Cube’s great popularity carries an equally great obligation for its team to learn from its previous mistakes, and to test its updates before making them live. It is hard to believe the team, in this case, fulfilled its obligations.
