whydirt's Combo-ish Cube

whydirt

whydirt

My old OP is out of date, so please jump to the end of the thread for recent content about this cube. Will work on updating this when I can. Thanks!

Here's the current list: http://www.cubetutor.com/viewcube/82201
Old OP here for reference and history

I'm finally done with grad school and am getting back on the wagon. I'll be working on getting a more formalized write-up over the next week or so, but I wanted to get the list out into the open for discussion and feedback sooner than later. In simplest terms, this cube is focused on the cards and Magic that I like. I like rewarding good sequencing and strategies that use synergy without being completely linear.


To jumpstart discussion, here is a non-exhaustive assortment of bullet points about my design decisions that went into this list:
  • Temple scry duals, cycling, and trinkets are all used to help with smoothing mana and reducing non-games. (My riptide heresy is that I'm just not super into bouncelands.)
  • Most mana rocks can fix color or ramp, but not at the same time. The exception to this is the mana myr cycle, which as creatures are easier to interact with than traditional signet style fixers.
  • While there are a handful of 1-drops, aggro decks are assumed to be okay even in games where they start on turn 2.
  • Similarly, while there are some sweepers in the cube, they shouldn't be necessary to draft a viable control deck.
  • The most powerful cards should require some combination of time and setup cost to achieve their full potential - Warfire Javelineer is this cube's FTK and Ogre Battledriver/Goldnight Commander + Elemental Mastery is its Splinter Twin combo.
  • A good number of conditional tutors are included to smooth out these synergy plays a bit without making things overly monotonous.
  • Ideally there's a variety of removal across the board: a few generically powerful answers that will be high picks, a few that are powerful but narrow in some fashion, and some that are just less efficient.
  • For the most part, the explicit graveyard strategies are light. I've grown to dislike delve as a mechanic the longer I've been exposed to it, so it only currently appears on Logic Knot.
  • I've stolen lots of ideas and individual card choices from everyone here in the community, so if you see your part card here, there's a good chance that you directly influenced me :)
That's probably enough to get things started. I'll probably be tinkering with the list as I order cards and (hopefully) get to start a new playgroup. My goal is to finalize the list somewhere between 390 and 420 cards as I think that's the sweet spot for me in terms of consistency and variety.

Feel free to kick the tires and do some drafts! Constructed criticism is certainly welcome, especially as this is all theorycraft at the moment.
 
whydirt

whydirt

A short cube blog for Saturday! I've made quite a lot of changes even since I made the OP of this thread, so as always please feel free to look through the list or do a couple drafts!

Dual Lands

I think I've settled on 2x temple, 3x shockland as my preferred mana base to balance the needs of fast and slower decks. For now, duals are the only place I'm breaking singleton, but I want mana to get out of the way in terms of reducing the mental load during the draft and play. It should be easy to splash a third color but more challenging to go up to fully three+ colors.

Themes & Archetypes

The goal is to have enough synergy to reward smart drafting over just filling out your curve. Color pairs are nudged in certain directions, with some having louder themes (U/R spells) than others (R/G midrange). Here are the intended primary archetypes in each pair.

WU - Fliers based tempo, blink
UB - Traditional control
BR - Dash/heckbent aggro
RG - Ferocious, midrange/ramp
GW - Enchantment midrange

WB - Extort, aristocrats, enchantment tapout control
UR - Spells matter
BG - Attritrion midrange/control
RW - Going wide aggro
GU - Ramp, 3+ colors value
 
whydirt

whydirt

Let's talk about the storm deck I posted in CBS:

RUG Storm from CubeTutor.com












As this deck demonstrates, storm's home is in Temur colors. In the right draft, I'm sure it could work with just two of the three colors with or without a splash from white or black.

My intent is that storm cards can be played as highly synergistic value spells instead of all-or-nothing finishers. Specifically, my assumption that most storm spells will be cast with a storm count of 2-4. Getting a higher count is certainly possible, but getting 6-10 goblins (or 3-5 crows/beasts) should be enough to compete in most games. Since the storm player can't really go-off until turn 5 or 6, beatdown decks don't have to have 1-drops to realistically pressure the combo opponent.

Some notes on specific cards in this deck:
  • Other than Empty the Warrens itself, none of the cards here exclusively go in the storm deck.
  • Epic Experiment is my Mind's Desire replacement. I believe the slightly lower floor of only hitting instants and sorceries is outweighed by the ease of hitting 5-7 cards off your library compared to building an equivalent storm count.
  • The two main mana engines for this deck are Cloudstone Curio and Flameshadow Conjuring. Both play well with the "free" creatures and eldrazi spawn and treasure creators to give you access to the burst of temporary mana you need to combo off without permanently ramping you.
  • More or Less on Thermo-Alchemist to double the pinging damage or Talrand to make 3/2 drakes seems good. I think it's a first-pickable spell.
  • While none of them show up here, the surge cards of Jori-En, Pyromancer's Assault, and Tyrant of Valakut give storm drafters a decent backup plan to get value from their free spells.
  • I've since removed the duplicate of Empty since I think there are enough other finishers and it was the only non-land double in the cube.
  • The singleton swamp is there to help ensure I could hit converge of 4 on Bring to Light.
I like using specific drafts as jumping off points for my thoughts, so expect more of these in the future!
 
whydirt

whydirt

Other creatures entering the battlefield is a broad theme across Naya. I've been using the label Arrivals to mentally categorize it, but there might be another name floating out there I'm not aware of.





As you noted, all of these play really well with token making spells, but I also intend for them to combo off with white's gating creature suite (Kor Skyfisher and friends) since they can bounce themselves to cycle out multiple triggers. With Oketra's Monument out, you can have Skyfisher bounce itself to get a Warrior token and trigger an arrival effect from one of the above cards for {W} per loop. This loop also triggers revolt, although I have yet to really take advantage of that angle. Kor Skyfisher is sorcery speed, but you can also use Whitemane Lion or Stonecloaker as repeatable combat tricks in this fashion.

For the storm cards, I liken them to Spider Spawning in original INN draft. You could play the card in almost any typical midrangey draft BG deck and likely cast it for 2-4 spiders and feel like you got your card's worth, since you could then flash it back for 2-4 more the following turn. But as the format matured, people soon realized you could build a combo-feeling self-mill deck that could get you 6+ spiders at a time. So for this cube, I think it's fine if people use them as mid-rangey value token generators, but I also think it's possible to go all-in and set up your deck with the mana and spell engines to get a real combo feel out of them. Even in this case I'm still picturing a soft cap of 5-6 on the storm count barring ways to go infinite, which I think can happen but takes 3 card combos not including the storm card itself.
 
whydirt

whydirt

No single reason, but a combination of things. Red already has a lot of mana sinks with the dash creatures, Flameshadow Conjuring, Frenzied Goblin, etc. Being a tap ability instead of mana-only also gives the opponent some time to react and increases the value of haste granting abilities. The second toughness will probably matter on occasion against tokens or against things like Flame Jab.
 
Alfonzo Bonzo

Alfonzo Bonzo

Some of the things I like:

* Low number of 1CC creatures
* A certain density of extort to take advantage of spell velocity
* Lots of go wide and go tall (though I saw you've taken out some of the double strikers)
* The monuments and medallions (though I think you've taken out black and green which I think is right)
* Suspend spells and storm
* Lots of self bounce creatures in lots of interesting ways (would consider some more 'arrival' cards maybe)
* The three echoing cards are just cool
* The small power matters theme


So, for the arrivals, have you considered impact tremors? It feels a lot better than Kruin Striker.

Some other cards you might have not considered:



If you get the chance to write up, I'd love to hear some thinking around some of the design.
 
Alfonzo Bonzo

Alfonzo Bonzo

I wanted to talk about this deck I drafted which I thought was super cool.


r/g spell burn from CubeTutor.com












One of the problems I think, with the spells matter deck is how it is stuck in izzet. I picked up thermo-alchemist and ended up in red green as I tried to do something a little different.

I like how you can use the creature tutor spells to fetch the alchemist and guttersnipe, and blossoming defence and sudden reclamation to protect and get them back giving you consistency.

I also like how mizzix's mastery gives you a kind of spell reanimator with your discard spells and hunting pack or feral incarnation. Casting either of these on turn three or four seems pretty savage.

Having anarchist here I think helps the deck exist more away from blue as well. I wish I had a couple more three or four drops that I would be happy to sacrifice to eldritch evolution to fetch it more consistently but it's still pretty cool. (Sudden reclaimation, get anarchist, get reclaimation, go again).

Looks really fun.
 
whydirt

whydirt

Thanks for all the drafts and your comments! I appreciate them both very much!

In my mind, the most interestingly designed cubes have built-in constraints. What you don't care about is just as if not more important than what you do care about. Selecting cards for a cube can be difficult, so setting up some constraints helps me avoid choice paralysis. My original cube was peasant, not just for budgetary reasons, but because it gave me some handy built-in constraints so I wasn't starting with the entire card pool of Magic.

So for this cube, I made the decision early on to exclude both artifacts (aside from trinkets) and lands as things to care about. Excluding artifacts as a major theme helps makes it easier to maintain the cube's internal color pie. It also means that I can get away with very minimal artifact destruction - I'm actually looking at cutting Scrap because I just see very few matches where it will matter. If you go through my artifact section, almost every card is there because there's no colored equivalent or because it is a cheap utility card to smooth out mana and draws.

I decided to ignore landfall and other land themes because they're most often based in green and I have more than enough themes I wanted to prioritize there (power matters, enchantments, storm, self-mill, arrivals) that are more interesting to me. Similarly, you might also notice that I run no utility lands at all. I decided to make that a rule for this cube to free up design space for other things as well as have one way to reduce board complexity for newer players. Other than their ETB effects, lands in this cube can only produce mana.

edit: I'll get back to you about those specific cards you listed when I get more time.
 
whydirt

whydirt

I had it in for a moment when I was running a cycle of three color cards, but like you said it's in an awkward color combination.
 
safra

safra

James Stevenson said:
What about Jeskai Ascendancy for storm? It would be great with green ramp guys, but then you need 4 colors...
Click to expand...

I run a successful Ascendancy archetype. Key roleplayers:


Other cards that go nuts in the archetype:


It usually plays out as an aggro-combo list but sometimes goes bigger and just plays a value ascendancy 'oops i win' game. There was also briefly a way to go infinite in my cube with it, albeit a very tortured and difficult one. Bloom Tender + Mystic Speculation (with buyback) + ascendancy turns any creature into a game winning threat.

Infinite Jeskai Ascendancy from CubeTutor.com










 
safra

safra

James Stevenson said:
I've never liked the look of mentor, it's just so powerful. Thoughts?
Click to expand...
I think it scales to your format quite nicely. Without moxen it's a strong buildaround but not an unfair one, I think. I ran no mentor 2 YP for a long time, and it was good, but my cube's current iteration runs 2 YP 1 Mentor. haven't drafted it IRL yet but i'll keep an eye on mentor's performance. I played it in an esper Legacy shell for a while, and it shone there but wasn't dumb like it gets in Vintage.









 
sigh

sigh

I like mentor. It's very hard to break in a fair format, and gives something quite unique to white.

I run a Jeskai archetype round-about just like laid out above, and its quite fun. Great in gy formats with flashback and other spells-matter stuff that cares about the yard. I still run that combo :).
 
James Stevenson

James Stevenson

Steamflogger Boss
Staff member
Rasmus Källqvist said:
I'm not going to be able to give any particular input, but I think this cube looks fucking bangers fun.
Click to expand...

Totally agree!

I've been trying to redesign my cube, and one thing I did was go through this list and put everything I liked into mine. It's not a great strategy but I might get somewhere some day...
 
Chris Taylor

Chris Taylor

Contributor
2 yp 1 Mentor is my configuration and he works fine. Honestly I think yp is the stronger card.

A boss play is to unearth your mentor after they kill it
 
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