Welder's Workshop

[StrionicAdventurer]

Welder's Workshop

I've been working on a cube inspired by my favorite commander deck for a couple of years, and I was just about to post about it on the cube subreddit when the invisible hand of late-stage capitalism cast its shadow across cyberspace. But it's just as well, because a forum blog thread actually feels like a much better venue for talking about a cube, anyway.

This cube is likely to get played about two or three times per year, but updated about two or three times per day during periods of hyperfocus. Despite this fact, I am sincere about making it playable and trying to get good games out of it. My primary goal is to allow players to build big, midrangey, value-engine decks with very live graveyards and a lot of fun synergies. I want the cube to play equally well as a Commander cube or as a regular 3-packs-of-15, 17-lands, 23 spells type of experience. To this end, the cube is separated into two lists: The Cube Itself, and the Commander Module, which is a separate list of pseudo-rare legendary creatures, which can be included at varying rates in packs depending on the vibe of the evening. So, if the card count looks crazy, just remember that every card with the purple Commander tag lives in its own pocket dimension where it can't wreak havoc on my precious mana curve.

When someone asks me to describe the cube, I tell them it's an "artifact-heavy graveyard recursion cube, plus tokens." That pretty much sums it up. If they want to really get into the weeds, I start telling them about how I'm always looking for new on-theme discard outlets, or how much I wish we had more really GOOD cards with Populate. And how come all the cards that create Powerstones cost like half a mana too much? Is the whole cube just an illusion, and the correct choice is always the most abusive Reanimator deck you can make? When are they going to reprint Otherworldly Gaze so I can have a copy that just says "Surveil 3, Flashback 1"?

How come there's so many cards in this cube? Basically, because I initially thought I would only be able to build this cube at a tight 360, but then I started getting into it, and then 2022-23 happened and just CRANKED out fun cards in the design space where I'm playing. So now, the main limiting factor is the shuffle-feel of my sleeves. I have 1,000 Dragon Shield Matte Petrols from the same production batch, and that's the hard limit. Otherwise, I'm here to say YES to cards. YES YES YES. Unless they're really bad for gameplay. Then I have to say MAYBE.

MAYBE MAYBE MAYBE.

 

[StrionicAdventurer]

A Brief History of the Cube

2014: WotC produces the Built to Last commander precon deck as part of Commander 2014. This deck massively expands the options for my favorite color in the game and features the first appearance of my favorite commander: Feldon of the Third Path. However, although I really love playing the deck, the best way to upgrade it seems to be cutting as many red cards as possible to replace them with colorless artifacts.

2015-2020: Over the next several years, essential tools for the deck keep appearing, such as Cathartic Reunion, Pia and Kiran Nalaar, Combustible Gearhulk, and Goblin Engineer. Over time, the deck becomes more and more a true Red Deck, rather than just an Artifact Deck with some red cards in it. Tuning and retooling this deck becomes the main thing I enjoy during spoiler season, but every so often a card appears in another color that I wish I could add, like Emry, Lurker of the Loch.

2020: Everything is closed. Perhaps we will never sling spells over the tabletop again. I personally don't find digital Magic very engaging. In search of a project and an excuse to spend money at my LGS, I start learning how to design a cube with a budget-friendly Peasant project, Multivalent.

2021: Having derived a huge amount of satisfaction out of building my Peasant cube, I start thinking about a more unique project that will feel a little bit more focused around my personal favorite mechanical interactions, without as much concern for budget or avoiding card complexity. At the same time, my Feldon commander deck has been through so many changes, I can practically build a second, completely unique and very functional deck using only cards I've already cut from the main deck. After considering a novelty mono-red cube where every player starts every game with a copy of Feldon in the command zone, I remember a bunch of non-red cards I always wished I could play Commander with, such as Birthing Pod and Sharding Sphinx. On top of all this, Commander 2021 gives us Osgir, the Reconstructor, and I realize there's no point in owning this deck and my Feldon deck at the same time. Maybe there's enough of a card pool to build a whole cube like this?

2021-2023: WotC seems to think this is a fun idea, too. Practically every set released in the last 3 years has been packed with new cards that fit into my mechanical space, making huge improvements to Green's ability to play proactively with artifacts. Instead of a tight 360-card cube, I find myself stacking up hundreds of cards I want to play, and after watching a few drafts of the Live the Dream cube, I decide to lean into the project as a "low-discipline, high-excitement" type of environment.

RIGHT NOW: The cube is "complete" and playable in paper. Though it's only been played a couple times, it's shaping up to be the kind of cube I want to play: big, weird, complicated, and stuffed with pet cards that don't belong anywhere else.

 

[TrainmasterGT]

A Brief History of the Cube

This is where I'd post the history of the cube, if I'd written it yet.

But it's just as well, because a forum blog thread actually feels like a much better venue for talking about a cube, anyway.

100% True

 

[StrionicAdventurer]

Battle Report: Minesweeper Draft

The cube's inaugural outing: a minesweeper grid draft with 3 friends, with the goal of playing a 4-player Commander game after deckbuilding.

Minesweeper draft is basically a grid draft where the cards are dealt out face-down, with alternating cards on the outermost border of the grid turned face-up. The card in the center of the grid is also turned face-up. Players can then draft any card they want from the grid (whether it's face-up or not), and when a card is drafted, all facedown cards adjacent to it are turned face-up. I like this variant, especially for a group of people who haven't drafted the cube at all, because it gives everyone more information and allows them to get a feel for the cube and what they can expect in terms of power level, combo potential, etc.

The Draft: For the purposes of a Commander draft, I like to start the first grid with the outer border comprised entirely of legendary creatures so players can draft some commander options early. We drafted 3 grids of 90-something cards, with commanders available only during Grid 1.

The draft took a surprisingly long amount of time! My playgroup are all seasoned gamespersons who can boil down mechanics and rules pretty quickly, and they're all familiar with Magic's rules, but 90-something cards is a shitload of info, even if the majority of them are facedown. in the future I'll probably do more grids with fewer cards.

The minesweeper variant has a lot of potential for fun moments when new cards get flipped over and everyone starts chatting about which face-up cards they want the most, or they get quiet and cagey trying to pretend they don't want that new Fetchland that just flipped. Sometimes you flip over the perfect card for your deck and miraculously nobody else picks it for a full round, or you take a card that strongly signals your potential deck's strategy and everyone goes "oh, shit."

Deckbuilding: We build 60-card decks with 1 Commander in the command zone and no color-identity restrictions. I think color-identity is interesting and useful for constructed Commander, but brings very little to limited Commander. While Wizards R&D have to jump through a bunch of hoops for this rule, there's no reason for cube designers to do it.

My players built their decks a lot faster than we drafted them, and all of us have more experience with building a 60-card deck than a 40-card deck, so I actually think that made things easier for us. Way fewer agonizing cuts.

I did not write down decklists, but I remember everyone was excited about what they built. The friends I invited are all seasoned players, but they don't spend as much time trawling through spoilers and set lists as me, so I had the pleasure of hearing a lot of excitement about new cards people had not seen before, or hadn't seen in a long time.

The Game: We then sat down to a 4-player Commander game with our new decks. Right away, the gameplay was pretty much exactly what I wanted: lots of big splashy plays that seemed unbeatable but were then equaled or exceeded by the next player's big splashy play. One player was cruising to an early lead with a lot of Treasure synergies, but some well-placed board wipes put us all back to square one. However, instead of an interminable series of turns in topdecking mode, the recursion tools in the cube let everyone rebuild quickly.

Unfortunately, because the draft took so much longer than we expected, it was soon very late at night and we were getting pretty mentally exhausted. After two players were eliminated, the other two players ended up in a gigantic slugfest of huge creature tokens who all had lifelink. Every turn was a lethal swing, followed by interminable combat math and re-written life totals. Eventually an inevitable bookkeeping error led to a sort of stalemate where we couldn't figure out how to actually resolve the game.

Everyone had fun, but the conclusion was not very satisfying.

Lessons:

1:In future minesweeper/grid drafts, consider much smaller grids. Info overload is already a risk in a cube where every card has approximately 8 lines of text.

2: Consider smaller deck sizes, if for no other reason than it would require fewer cards in everyone's pool, thus facilitating a smaller card pool in general.

3: More board wipes. I was initially worried that board wipes would stifle the fun synergies I built into the cube, but in reality the most exciting turns came during and after a huge spree of board wipes and the race to rebuild. Board wipes are the only effective control valve on the huge value engines possible in this environment.

4: LESS lifelink. Experienced cube designers could probably have told me this one already, but lifelink is not that fun in this sort of game. In my opinion, cards that have lifelink native on their text box are not a huge problem, but cards that GRANT lifelink are where things get out of hand.

Changes:

Cut several lifelink-granting cards such as Whip of Erebos and Basilisk Collar for more board wipes, then made some adjustments to clean up the mana curve afterwards.

 

[StrionicAdventurer]

Battle Report: Commander Mega-Sealed

A few years ago I read an article about a group of people at a con playing a mini-tournament of "Booster Box Sealed," with boxes of Modern Horizons, or some equally expensive "premium" limited set. It's pretty much exactly what it sounds like: you buy a whole-ass box of the set and build your deck out of whatever you open. I don't have the disposable income for this sort of thing, but I admired the decadence of the exercise (and the decklists were cool, too).

So I decided to see if I could do something like this with my cube, since I have some cool cardboard boxes (about the size of fat-pack boxes) that I thought would make fun analogs to a booster box. Into each box I packed the following:

-136 regular cards from The Cube Itself
-36 legendary creatures from the Commander Module
-A "commander's toolkit" full of about 8 staple commander cards, most prominently Command Tower, Arcane Signet, and Lightning Greaves.
-8 of each basic land.

I played 1-v-1 with a friend of mine who's always down to beta-test a half-baked idea like this. It was a lot of fun, and I learned a good deal about my cube in the process.

Deckbuilding:

There are no real records of our decks. My buddy built Grixis artifacts with Urza, Lord High Artificer as his commander (I don't enforce color identity restrictions during deck construction in this environment), and I built Jeskai welder with Narset, Enlightened Exile. Deck construction took a fair amount of time, and one thing I realized pretty quickly was that I should probably cut about half the legends from my Commander Module. It has been a lot of fun finding this big pile of legends whose abilities fit my mechanical space, but when you look at 36 of them side-by-side during deckbuilding, some of them just aren't that exciting. Another thing about this whole concept that became clear during deckbuilding: I would only recommend this to deeply entrenched players. This particular friend and I are pathologically invested in this game, which I think is the only reason we were able to boil 172 singleton cards down to a deck's worth of playables. Objectively, this is an insane thing to do.

The Game:

We ended up only playing one game, and it was quite fun. I kept a very stupid hand and ended up severely mana screwed for most of the game, but was able to leverage an early Retrofitter Foundry to stay relevant on the board. Once my opponent got Urza on the battlefield I got in trouble quickly, because he also had an Oni-Cult Anvil and some kind of sacrifice outlet. I did not take good notes. Suffice it to say that both decks were doing the kind of bonkers value-machine stuff that I like, but I was doing it while missing a shitload of land drops, and he was doing it with about 5 extra blue mana every turn. Eventually this became a real problem, and I died. Keeping a better hand would have helped a lot.

Lessons:

Urza, Lord High Artificer perfectly represents my problem with the Commander Module as it currently stands: the power delta here is just too damn high, and there are a few cards that make the rest of the options look a bit stupid by comparison. I've replaced Urza with a less-pushed blue artifact-enjoyer, and I'm planning to make a big cut to the whole Commander Module soon.

The Commander Toolkit that I included with the sealed pool was too big. There were like 8 cards in it, and it made deckbuilding less fun. I would cut this whole thing down to just the Command Tower.

Retrofitter Foundry is a really good card! Everyone already knows this, but it was my first time actually playing this thing, and it's sweet.

Is cube mega-sealed a fun idea? I think it can work, but perhaps not with this particular cube. I have elected to ignore "card wordiness" as a concern while designing this environment, which means looking at 136 cards from Welder's Workshop at the same time is a bit like reading a very experimental novella. It's a lot of text, even if you're somewhat familiar with the cards. However, I want to replicate the sheer excess of buying a whole fucking booster box as a sealed pool. That's 504 cards, for god's sake! So, maybe the feeling of having "too many cards" is part of the experience. Further testing (as usual) is required.

 

[StrionicAdventurer]

The Big 720 Jump!
I recently expanded the cube to 720 cards (actually 776 if you count the Commander Module), thanks to Ixalan 2 and Hat Ravnica providing me with some tasty new 1-drops. I'm typing up a quick blog post about my thought process for this expansion and what it means for my cube going forward.

My main goal is to maintain the midrangey, engine-based, commander-compatible gameplay and draft experience while maxing out the size of the cube. I don't want any of the core themes to become too diluted. I want the cube to draft reasonably well, but also playable as a "sealed" experience. So there's a certain amount of redundancy among card effects that I think a lot of Cubespersons would usually try to avoid.

My secondary goal is to use this expansion to grow the bottom-end of the mana curve throughout the environment by focusing new additions in the 1-mana to 3-mana range, while also adjusting the balance of permanents to non-permanents. Just coaxing out a bit more textural balance to the whole structure. My cube will never be the atomic-level decision matrix of a Bun Magic style environment, and I'm not really interested in supporting super-fast aggro strategies. The game should be about generating value over time while strategically disrupting your opponent.

The Tasty New One-Drops in Question

Just look at all these delicious on-theme one-drop creatures! Since the beginning of the cube, Black and Green have been stuck with a few one-drops that were just generically good cards, but not really synergistic with the rest of the environment. Evolved Sleeper and Hexdrinker were the biggest offenders here, since they were also quite complex. It was nice to cut them.

Some Equally Tasty Old One-Drops

These cards have been lurking in the Maybeboard for a long time, and there's finally enough space to include them!

Cards I'm Including Specifically Because of Riptide Posts

While tinkering with this expansion, I read some very enthusiastic posts about both these cards that made me give them a second look. Vesperlark was here for an early version of the cube but got cut. I've decided to put it back after checking how many 1-power creatures are in the environment. It's more than I thought! Meanwhile Loamcrafter Faun gives green some unique recursion tools and plays well with all the incidental land recovery I'm running. Green's 3-drop section was getting a little clogged with trinket-token creators, so this will be a nice new flavor.

Improving the Lands
Very excited to cut the Triomes for the Hat Ravnica Surveil duals. Fetchable duals that fuel the graveyard are fantastic here, and I still haven't forgiven WotC for breaking the flavor scheme of the Triomes in such an ugly way. Ketria Triome and Ziatora's Proving Ground should never, ever have been part of the same cycle. How hideous that we will never have Jund Triome, but instead this pile of unmarked crates in a fucking warehouse. Yuck! Anyway, I also added a bunch of creature-lands from Eldraine, Ixalan, and Forgotten Realms.

So, Now What!?
I've been indiscriminately adding cards to this list for the better part of three years. Now that I've hit my size cap, I'll have to actually CUT cards if I want new toys. So how will I know when to betray one of my precious rectangles, and when to stay my hand? Here are a couple guidelines I'm working with:
-Removing Universes Restored Proxies
As much as I enjoy making Universes Restored cards out of other corporations' ad space, it's kind of a hassle to get these printed to the standard I desire. With so much new material coming out, I can pretty much avoid these things entirely (even though there's a lot of real heartbreakers in that Fallout set. My kingdom for Junk tokens on real Magic cards!). Anyway, I think within the next year or so I'll be able to eliminate all these cards with minimal sacrifice.
-Keep Smoothing Out the Mana Curve
The weird artifacts I'm running place some demands on the curve that I'd like to minimize, particularly with non-permanent spells. Things like Mishra's Onslaught are on the chopping block here. I like it a lot, but it's 4 mana!
-Maybe Consider Making Some of These Cards a Little Less Wordy
Broadly speaking I do not subscribe to the conventional cubist's wisdom that simpler/cleaner designs are always an improvement over wordy/complicated cards. In fact, it's part of this cube's ethos to make the board state weird and complex. That's fun for me, and luckily my playgroup is enfranchised enough to handle it. (And I have another cube for less experienced spellslingers). But it's definitely time to start thinking about complexity equity and where I spend it. For example:
vs.
Does the Theorist technically "do more" than the Wanderglyph? Yes. But how much more does he do, really? Aren't these cards almost equally relevant and cool in the cube? I haven't decided to make this switch yet, but this is the kind of thing I'm watching out for. Places where a card switch compromises almost nothing of the game states I want, but cuts a lot of text. If the ratios are favorable, I'm likely to start making these changes. (But if they ever do a Magic version of Assaultron Dominator, you can forget everything I just said here, lol).