The Submission

Arguably one of the most broken cards know to magic-playing part of mankind, wouldn’t you say? Busted beyond belief in the constructed formats where it would be legal if it wasn’t banned in 5 formats and restricted in 2 others.

The remaining two … let’s just say they are slightly underplayed.
This is a good thing though! A copy of tinker is quite cheap, just four dollar at MTG Madness.

Tinker is quite notorious for what it enables. Turn 2 or 3 Blightsteel Colossus attacks being the most recent. It’s a play that’s strong enough to win many a Top 8 in Vintage, and yet some of us allow it to exist in out cubes. These are not the tinkers we’re looking for.

A tinker deck can be a fun, interesting and “enabling” archetype. Tinker is a scaling card. Many cards are like this, Snapcaster being a prime example. It’s only as good as the spells available in the card pool (and then just a wee bit better) the same goes for tutors, recursion, and most of the “specific” card-advantage mechanics. Tinker is one of these. It’s power is limited by the strongest Artifact in your cube. From here, I’ll start by disassembeling my own cube, and explaining the place the Tinker archetype has in that cube.

First and foremost, I support a wildfire archetype. It plans to drop a hefty critter like Hellkite Igniter, Pentavus or Thopter Assembly into play and resolve a wildfire afterwards. It plays many Mana-stones , and occasionally even splashes blue for control. Jhoira of the Ghitu, poster child for Tinker, is also often seen in this U/R version of the deck. A good primer on wildfire can be found here.

Tinker is a perfect fit for the deck. The abundance of fast artifact mana and fat artifact creatures makes it possible to tutor up a threat quickly and clean the field quickly afterwards. Tinker’s reasonable mana cost makes sure you can put it on the stack even after you cast a wildfire, make the deck quite flexible in a position where it normally would feel pressurized without a threat. The more often than not splash for blue makes it even more worth the effort.

Pod, as a four-of opens up a really interesting archetype. Tinker Pod. Tinker fetches your Pod, Pod fetches your creatures. Tinkering your Pod away can get you your ultimate artifact creature and push the game in the players favor in a desperate but strong way, right away. The deck can be a normal Blue/Green pod deck apart from the tinkers, and the artifact beater at the top of the cmc-chain and some manarocks down below, and is really easy to implement. (4 pods, 10-odd creatures and 2 tinkers)

Control is often in need of early mana in the form of rocks, but can just as often get sanded down when it starts drawing lands it needs to do so in rapid concession. As a result it loses options in hand, and eventually can get overthrown, losing your grip on the fight. A card-advantage machine combined with inevitabilitymakes such a deck increasingly more consistent, and generally stronger and more flexible. Enter Staff of Nin, a very nice card in any deck that doesn’t stay at Mach 2 fighting speed for the entirety of their planned 5 rounds of playing. It can almost slot into any deck tinker can slot into, making it an even greater card in combination.

A dash of uncertainty.

There are many, many fun combinations to be made around Tinker, and around its targets.

Stoneforge a Withengar, be a cool kid.
Tinker a Withengar, be a Hero
Dominate Withengar Unbound and become a God.

Jason’s Critique

The observation that Tinker is a card that scales to its environment. One of the major challenges in including a card like Tinker is finding targets that are sufficiently powerful to be included in decks when hardcast, yet not overwhelmingly broken when cheated into play. I usually cringe at the site of Tinker combos in cube, and as argued in The Cube Fallacy, the “big cheats” style of cards often provide the least satisfying gameplay when explicitly power maximized.

Tinker’s efficacy as a card is primarily dictated by the combination of the following:
– The quality of the targets
– The speed (power) level of your environment
– The density of artifacts in the draft
– The specific array of Tinker targets

This entry did a good job covering the first bullet point, I didn’t get a great sense of the others. Cards like Myr Battlesphere and Pentavus are wildly different in power level, and I don’t know that a cube that could handle a third turn Battlesphere would ever be interested in casting Pentavus.

Further I like to see some competing demand for cards. The touch of using Stoneforge Mystic and Tinker as layered support for a card like Elbrus is smart. Maybe we could go a step further and include some blue unblockable creatures?

Lastly, it’d be neat to see “Value Tinker” as a playable route. Maybe some artifacts that want to be sacrificed?

On the whole, I like the idea of building an environment that makes the most (design wise, not power wise) of Tinker, and it’s a concept I’ve discussed before. It’s a fun idea in abstract, and one that requires significant tweaking and development to execute properly in a real cube.

Eric’s Critique

So. Tinker, huh? This is positively frightening and exciting at the same time. Tinker is only one of the most broken Big Cheat-type cards of all time, but I’ll always keep my ears open as to how it can be incorporated into an environment in a fair and fun way.

Jason outlined the four parameters that control how well Tinker plays out, and I wish the author had explored each of these areas a bit further. Right away, Myr Battlesphere makes me a little nervous. This is a card that can get out of hand pretty easily, and I don’t see that being able to consistently Tinker into it turn three or four being a positive for net fun.

I’d like to hear more about the overlap of Tinker with the Wildfire archetype, as this seems like a natural place for mana rocks to reside. For the Wildfire archetype to have any chance at viability, a cube often needs to have double digits’ worth of signets and other mana rocks, to ensure that there’s enough to go around between that and the control decks. Is this what the author had in mind? Would the abundance of mana rocks skew the environment in favour of control, and slow down the pace of the cube overall? How would this affect the player going deep on Tinker? As someone who doesn’t have much experience with either deck type, I would’ve liked to hear more firsthand accounts of how this plays out in practice.

Tinker unquestionably holds the among the most promise for cards worth doubling up on, and this entry is one that gets the gears turning. But what’s on offer here is just a skeleton, and it needs some fleshing out before a cube could adopt it with some level of confidence.

Return to contest entries.

The Submission

Cube archetypes are reliant upon two different types of cards, the flashy spotlight cards, such as Exhume or Reanimate in a reanimation archetype, and the supporting cast, which act to drive multiple archetypes forward, such as the large creatures which represent reanimation targets. These large creatures are not added expressly to support reanimation, and they can also act as ramp targets, finishers in control decks, curve-toppers in mid-range decks, etc. These multi-purpose support cards come in many forms, but a particular support card that simply begs to be featured in multiples, and indeed to have the rest of the cube shaped around it, is Scuttlemutt.

Now that you are back after reading Scuttlemutt‘s text and trying to figure out exactly what it does, and why you would ever want it in a cube, let’s lay out the basics:

• It is a colourless creature which taps for any colour of mana.
• It taps to change the colour of creatures.

Now, the use of the first should be pretty obvious. Ramp is great, and mana fixing is great, especially with no colour requirements, but it is the second ability that is the truly interesting part of the card. Changing the colours of a creature is normally pretty worthless in a regular cube, with the exception of the occasional creature with Fear or Intimidate that needs blocking. That said, many effects and abilities throughout Magic’s history reference the colours of a card, and adding the ability to change a creature’s colours with decent regularity allows for the construction of a cube based around a simple concept, ‘Colour-Matters’.

Whilst Scuttlemutt could be as simple as a vulnerable mana-rock which occasionally transforms an otherwise sideboard card such as Celestial Purge into maindeck removal, this article is going to go the way of Shadowmoor, and make colour a central component to the cube. It is here that multiple Scuttlemutts allows cards which otherwise wouldn’t have a chance of making a cube to become true powerhouses.

As mentioned, Scuttlemutt’s colour changing allows Celestial Purge to become a much stronger card, as well as boosting Deathmark and Combust from the same cycle. Now, with the addition of the Theros ‘self-hate’ cycle, there is now a wide selection of removal which is colour dependent. Celestial Purge, Combust and Deathmark are joined by Glare of Heresy and Dark Betrayal, which when combined with colour changing options, such as Scuttlemutt, and a greater inclusion of hybrid cards (discussed below), have the potential to become premium removal options.

In order for this type of beneficial colour-changing to be anything more than an occasional fortuitous occurrence, supplementary colour changing options are required. Focusing on the playable (and believe me, there are unplayable ones…) options, we have Cloudchaser Kestrel, the more frequently seen Eight-and-a-Half-Tails, Govern the Guildless and Blind Seer (Who I assume works of the principle of “I can’t see which colour this is. I am going to assume it is red.”). Multiple copies of some of these cards, in combination with Scuttlemutt, allows for colour-changing to become a more consistent drafting strategy.

There are a large number of cards which care about the colour of a creature for more than just killing them, such as the cycle of ‘colour-lords’ from the Shadowmoor block, such as Wilt-Leaf Liege and Glen Elendra Liege. These are all very powerful cards, although they usually miss the call up to cube (often because of the Hybrid/Gold card classification issue, which is only an issue if you let it be one). When these cards can become flexible in the creatures that they buff, they become much more palatable than simply relying on the 1-2 other green/white creatures in the cube. Scuttlemutt gives this flexibility, but these cards do still rely upon a critical mass of multi-coloured a hybrid permanents to be worthwhile. (Aside: Civic Saber)
Of course, adding an increased number of cards which rely upon certain and indeed multiple colours to a cube requires a expanded multi-colour section, which in turn requires good mana-fixing, so the land section must be adjusted to accommodate. Slower lands such as the Alara tri-lands and lands such as Rupture Spire suddenly begin to look more acceptable, and suddenly the initially obvious colour-fixing utility of Scuttlemutt becomes important again.

After having gone through all of the excitement of trying to break colour changing effects, it feels a little mundane to discuss a creature type. Nevertheless, Scuttlemutt has a creature type. It is Scarecrow. If only there was some sort of card that cared about Scarecrows…

Reaper King. Reaper King cares about scarecrows (Apparently to throw at other permanents, but who are we to judge?). In addition, it is a multi-colour creature for all of the above shenanigans. Reaper King acts as the anchor card for something of a scarecrow mini-archetype, and the whole cycle of Skulkins are scarecrows who act to support the colour-matters archetypes established previously (It is almost as if the Shadowmoor block designers meant it this way…).

While there are a number of ways you can take this initial sketch of a cube shaped by Scuttlemutt (For instance, how Shadowmoor’s wither plays really nicely with Proliferate and other counter-manipulation, which in turn plays beautifully with Sunburst, which just loops us back to the multi-color concept… Or how anyone paying attention to Standard lately knows just how good hybrid mana symbols are for devotion…), at that point I am taking the focus away from Scuttlemutt and instead designing an entire cube, which was not the point of this article. Scuttlemutt is a unique card that is functional in a vacuum as nothing more than a ramp and fixing effect, yet the effects of colour-changing transform it into a card which has the potential to be a powerful player in many archetypes, if you can just design the perfect cube for it.

Addendum

One of the primary reasons why I chose to focus upon Scuttlemutt is that it is one of very few cards that affect colour, yet is playable even if you only treat that as an unlikely bonus. Color changing is an effect which was much more popular early in Magic’s history, and the power disparity of cards from that era is nearly unforgivable from a game design standpoint. You have to be going really really deep to play something like Lifelace in any conceivable environment.

When brainstorming for this idea, I saw the colour changing affects to be something of a U/W concept in this Cube (With blue having a ‘meddling’ feel, with colour-changing and counter-manipulation). Scuttlemutt is however designed as a somewhat universal support card, buoyed in part by the fact that it is colourless. It fixes colour for the enlarged multi-colour section, as well as improving Sunburst (which was the cross-over point between the counter-manipulation theme (Which focused on charge counters on artifacts) and the multi-colour themes).

The above article chose to focus upon the colour-related sections, as they more directly relate to the role of Scuttlemutt in that Cube. Supporting the colour-changing archetype are Cloudchaser Kestrel (probably two copies) and Eight-and-a-Half-Tails in White, and Govern the Guildless (Again, probably two copies) and Blind Seer (Who I cannot help but imagine works on the principle of ‘They all look the same colour to me.’).

At some point I was digging pretty deep, and was considering Painter’s Servant, Glamerdye, and Swirl the Mists to increase the range of colour-targeting spells (and including cards such as Gainsay and Flashfreeze). It must be said, Painter’s Servant and indeed Swirl the Mists can become pretty broken pretty quickly with Llawan, Cephalid Empress in the Cube.

I will update the initial post to further expand the supporting colour-change cards. As for how many Scuttlemutts? Well, it feels strange to ever say more than 4 of a card, but assuming we are building this cube to resemble a booster draft environment, that number could be higher. It seems like sacrilege to say so though, so 4.

Jason’s Critique

This idea is pretty imaginative, and I think there’s potential in building an off-beat cube where some of these themes can thrive. Color matters is a theme that hasn’t been explored much in Magic’s history, and part of my worry is that the changes listed here haven’t quite gone deep enough. Scuttlemutt is at its most interesting when it can affect the board in interesting ways. Maybe you’re turning off your opponents enchantments or messing with various protection effects on their side or your side of the board.

Although it is true that something like Celestial Purge becomes more viable, how many color changing effects do you need in your deck before such a card becomes maindeckable? Are we going to have a greater gold and hybrid density in the set to make these cards less narrow? Unless the removal options are incredibly sparse, I can’t imagine turning to Dark Betrayal without a high density of color changing effects in my deck. If I have a high density of these cards, chances are others don’t. Is there competing demand for a card like Dark Betrayal?

And how many players at the table will really want these cards in their decks? My worry is that we begin to jam our environment with narrow cards that are only of interest if heavily committed to a given deck.

All said, I think there are some great ideas, including the astute find Civic Saber and the various color lords. I would direct my attention away from the super narrow effects and more towards finding a web of cards and mechanics that Scuttlemutt can interact with that aren’t useless in the absence of a color-changing effect. There’s some real potential here, and with some work you could build a fleshed out environment along the lines of something like the Eldrazi Domain cube.

Eric’s Critique

I have to admit, I didn’t know what a Scuttlemutt was. I had to read the card. Then I had to read it again. Huh. Innnnnnteresting. I’m immediately reminded of the time that people tried to get Liquimetal Coating to work in Standard, by pairing it with a heap of Tuktuk Scrappers. Suddenly all your Shatters were Vindicates, and your Scrappers were Flametongues.

My first thoughts are that this isn’t a card you can just jam multiples of into any ol’ cube, but rather, Scuttlemutt would be optimal in a cube that is built around the color matters theme, as Jason mentioned. I have to admit I’m a little skeptical as to how deep this theme could go, though, and am more than a little worried that the best color hosers haven’t been historically distributed evenly across the colors (assuming we’re ignoring the mass color hosers that were a staple of early Magic). Celestial Purge and Eight-and-a-Half-Tails give white a lot of space to play around with in this theme, but what about poor green? Stuff like Autumn’s Veil is hard to salvage, even with creative uses of Scuttlemutt. Even the good color hosers have the same problem that commonly used protection creatures, like Mirran Crusader, have in cube: they can be all-stars in some matches, and duds in others, and it’s randomly determined by which colors your opponent happened to draft. That Crusader or Deathmark might completely dominate in one matchup, and then be decidedly mediocre (or useless!) in other, without any interesting or meaningful decisions on either your or your opponent’s parts. Not everybody is always going to have a Scuttlemutt handy, and the situations where people don’t should still provide for good interaction.

Like Jason, I think there’s an interesting concept here, but without seeing this idea fully developed, I worry that there isn’t enough meat here to sustain hungry cube drafters. And while I love the idea of Scuttlemutt being an all-star in some cube out there, it requires too much warping of a non-themed cube for most people to commit to.

Return to contest entries.

The Submission

I have a cube that is still in the building stages, where I am going to run Accumulated Knowledge and Kindle as four of, which could be very interesting, seeing as how both are easily splashable, and can go in a lot of different decks.

Jason’s Critique

This submissions operates on many designer’s base instincts when thinking of ways to break singleton within a cube environment. Start with the question “what cards go well in multiples in a deck”, and take that idea to the cube level. The same type of thinking leads to designers turning to cards like Rune Snag and Squadron Hawk. Even multiples of Birthing Pod arguably come from the same concept.

One litmus test when looking to break singleton with a card is “would I play this card if I only had one copy of it in my deck?”. Cards like Steppe Lynx, Gravecrawler and Rune Snag are sufficiently playable on their own, but improve in multiples.

By contrast, Accumulated Knowledge is pretty terrible when cast for the first time. Compare to random value cantrips like Gitaxian Probe, Quicken and Twisted Image. We don’t start to yield value from it until casting it for a second time in the game, meaning, realistically, we likely need at least three of the four copies in our deck before it’s worthwhile to run them (this may change with cube power level, of course). Even in Pauper constructed, Think Twice often gets the nod over Accumulated Knowledge anyways. The result is that we don’t really have competing demand for the card. There’s no use to having only one or two, so if I don’t get my hands on one in Pack 1, the only reason I would select them later in the draft is for the sake of hate drafting.

Is this an interesting drafting mechanic? Maybe. I suppose it could be fun to play a 40 card deck with 4 Accumulated Knowledges, but I don’t know that it warrants the design space you’d have to allocate to it to pull the concept off.

Kindle needs to be cast a third time before gaining a power edge on the already marginal Searing Spear.

Eric’s Critique

As someone who runs a playset of Rune Snag, I fully agree with Jason’s assessment that the first copy of the card needs to not be embarrassing. Rune Snag passes that test, if only barely. People in my cube sometimes run the only copy that they nab, and while it won’t win any awards for efficiency, sometimes you have to make them pay 2.

My biggest problem with Kindle is that Magic has printed a lot – a lot – of interesting burn spells over the years, but a two-mana Shock variant isn’t one of them. Shock itself isn’t playable in most people’s cubes, so the power level of a cube would have to be pretty low before a drafter is interested in ponying up an additional mana for it.

With blue, the issue again is I feel like there’s a lot of cheap drawing and sifting cards for one or two mana, most of which do something interesting. The other problem is that as a cube designer, you can’t waste too much space with do-nothing durdly draw spells, and four Accumulated Knowledges eats up nearly all of the room you would normally allot for such an effect. I think this one is more defensible than Kindle, but as a drafter, I wouldn’t be particularly excited to start accumulating (ahem) them.

Return to contest entries.

The Submission

THE MOST FUN I HAVE PLAYING MAGIC

1. History

In barbarian times competitive Magic was dominated by more Tutors than an East-Coast city a week before the SAT, and creatures were as uncompetitive as a poor applicant to Harvard. Then the power of Tutors, which (as anyone who has spent time at rich-kid circle-jerks, like EDH games or Ivy-League colleges) in excess homogenize and impoverish experience, began to wane; thus the snap-bannable Demonic Consultation turned into the bannable Mystical Tutor, which turned into the totally unbannable Survival of the Fittest; by the time Eladamri’s Call hit stores, social Darwinism was fighting, toe-to-toe, with Mirage-era scholasticism.

Now it is 2013 and Darwinism has won. Gone is the fire-and-brimstone medievalism of Demonic Tutor. In this place we have cards like Idyllic Tutor, for which the competitive player reserves his most damning of epithets: EDH staple.

But if Demonic Tutor is a bad design choice, and Idyllic Tutor is just a bad card, where does this leave the Tutor-inclined Cube designer? Assume that the author likes creatures and durdling. Justify your answer in 3,500 words or less.

2. Biology

The one unambiguous design success of New World Order has been to make creatures competitive; I’d also argue that NWO has made creatures competitive in a more interesting way than ever before. The primitive tribal designs of Onslaught and its inferior successor Lorwyn are fading into memory, compelling Cube and set designer alike to make more interesting, less linear design choices than ‘lol let’s put in some Faeries!!!’ Now you can build creature decks around curve and synergy and lifegain, and a score of other cross-pollinating criteria; you can build Birthing Pod decks and Veteran Explorer decks and decks with Shardless Agent and Bloodbraid Elf. Now Llanowar Elves and Wild Nacatl are both having their day; now Gaddock Teeg and Tarmogoyf stand, side-by-side, as bros (if not equals).

Green is now not only competitive, it is skill-testing. It might even be cerebral. Green is too hard to play for masters, and too easy for morons. Green is Greenwich Village in 2000, the Pearl District in 2007, and Eastern Europe for the rest of the century. Green isn’t the new Blue — Blue is the old Green.

At my Cube, half the players are high on Green — some are so high, they even first-pick the Greens! Magic is attracting greenhorns at greenback-garnering rates when they visit the local greengrocer; there are now more Green mages playing Magic than there are members of the Green party. Green is making the White players whitewashed, the Red players see red, and the Blue and Black players Black and Blue in mood and bruise. Green is making everyone from the green thumbs to the Green Berets Green. How?

In Modern, Green is the best color because all the good cards are banned of Birthing Pod. Birthing Pod is a card I am far too dumb to play when sober, and too smart to play when I am drunk. I am indebted to Jason for pioneering Birthing Pod designs in Cube; I have been happy to throw three in my Cube. But I love Green far more than Jason, and I want to double up on two cards I love more than Birthing Pod.

The first of these cards is, along with Stoneforge Mystic, one of the strongest tutors printed since Tinker. It perfectly uses the intrinsic brokenness of tutors to buff Green dudes, and it uses the fairness of Green dudes to ‘unbreak’ tutors. In Cube, as in Constructed, it leads to dizzying arrays of deckbuilding and gameplay decisions. Glory be to Green! Through this card, both the coolest of the old tutors and the NWO triumph of creatures, realize their design potential — as instigators of tough decisions and ‘every game being different,’ not the opposite.

3. Meteorology

As a tutor, GSZ is broken; as a tutor that puts onto the battlefield, it is twice broken. However, as a tutor that gets only creatures, it is fair; as a tutor that gets only green creatures, it is twice fair.

In Legacy, GSZ is known for creating a handful of archetypes (Maverick, Nic Fit) while revitalizing others (Elves, the rage-inducing Enchantress). There its raw power is brought fully out by the massive card pool. GSZ is, like King Azaz the Unabridged, the Alpha and the Omega; from Aboroth to Zuo Ci, the Mocking Sage, you can grab anything under the Sun — the Green Sun. But there are more Green creatures in Magic history than in my Cube. Just as large card pools break tutors, a careful Cube design can ‘unbreak’ them. In my Cube specifically, there are a hair under 70 targets; this is few enough that there will not be Craterhoofs for 40 on turn three, but enough that you can do all this fun stuff!:

    

For the cost of a single Green mana, GSZ fetches color-intensive cards. GSZ synergizes with the new Devotion themes of Purphoros, God of the Forge, Erebos, God of the Dead, and Nylea, God of the Hunt. GSZ mitigates the issue of color screw, that has ruined innumerably more games of Cube than that straw man in the corner drafting ‘five-color good stuff.’

 

I dislike Power Cube for many reasons, but the main one is that its threats far stronger than its answers; are you gonna crack that Lotus to power out a t1 Jace, the Mind Sculptor, or are you gonna use that triple-Blue to hold up Cryptic Command? In Power Cube, the games are too often EDH-style slugfests, with a minimum of interaction, therefore psychology, therefore the things that make MTG so much fun.

The bias towards questions over answers is, I think, connected to a limitation of singleton formats: with singleton, you can’t help but underrepresent certain types of cards, and those cards are usually answers. In my Cube, with both a powerful Reanimator and Gravecrawler theme, I knew that I wanted a critical mass of answers to the graveyard. However, I felt ridiculous adding cards, like Withered Wretch or Loaming Shaman, that were not main-deckable; that kind of card would always fall to 14th pick, would always be boarded in when it hosed, and would otherwise not see the light of day. This is a bad dynamic for drafting, sideboarding, and playing — nearly as lazy as throwing Vulshok Refugee in the Great Furnace Modo Cube!

So instead of digging deep in fallow earth, I doubled up on Deathrites and Scoozes, either of which you can grab with a Zenith. (The mana production of Deathrite Shaman also powers out on-curve GSZs.)

  

I wanted an extra piece of main-deckable artifact-and-enchantment removal, too, but I didn’t want to add a second Wickerbough Elder (for aesthetics and curve), nor a first Viridian Zealot (for lack of power).

       

At any point on the curve, GSZ is your best card — you just have to draft the GSZs, draft the creatures, and remember what’s in your deck.

  

Legacy aficionados will love the little complexity of GSZ’s shuffle effect. The doubled-up fetches do double duty with GSZ to really give the three Brainstorms a big boost, while turning Deathrite Shaman into a reliable mana dork.

   

As in Legacy, GSZ can’t work well with everything — otherwise, it’d go in everything. As is, the anti-synergies between GSZ and Pod and Cascade help situate GSZ in a nice spot in between that ‘going in everything’ (dat Batterskull) and ‘going only in one deck’. The way GSZ, Pod, and Cascade act as competing engines also adds extra diversity to decks and archetypes. Which kind of Green deck do you want to build?

Mana dorks are another card underrepresented in Cube, but here the utility land draft both alleviates this lack of t1 acceleration, and grants an enormous boon to GSZ. When GSZ was in Standard, the extra mana made it at times clumsy, but in Legacy you can just cast GSZ for X=0, find your Dryad Arbor, and have that extra mana to cast your second GSZ.

4. Double Header

But wait! There’s more. My utility land section (drafted with two lands per person, twice in each draft) inspired me to double up on my double trouble. I am a double agent writing a double feature on double lives. I do not dislike double negatives. I  I have been known to order double drinks at the bar, then double up in a double bed. My favorite item at In-N-Out is the Double-Double.

Double, double, Toil // Trouble;

Fire burn, and cauldron bubble;

Disclose a babe of Brawn and hooters,

Who beats and taps and sacs and tutors …

Maverick, the original Legacy GSZ deck, played four of this strong, beautiful woman. Brian Kibler, himself a looker, called her (and I paraphrase) ‘the sweetest card in Magic,’ and surely it is. Why does KotR arouse the passions of old-school Magic players, to an even greater degree than ‘anything that moves’?

Just as NWO’s signature design success is balancing the creature and the spell, its signature design failure is its wholesale slaughter of on-board complexity. Anyone who has played a game of Standard the last couple of years knows what I mean. NWO games are too often boring. I know why. The whole point of Cube is for good players to screw up — Cube is like EDH, for thinking players — and what gives them a bigger chance to screw up than activated abilities? Activated abilities that tutor, of course! (And, after picking up The Name of the Rose this weekend, I wonder if ‘Reliquary’ is a reference to medieval attitudes on tutoring …)

So what does Kibler’s girl have to teach us?

If the new, completely terrible legend rule won’t let clones light up legends, the classic Legends legendary land will light up legends.

 

Lovers of older formats will also enjoy recurring dudes, and nuking their opponents’ graveyards when they try to do the same. This ‘dynamic equilibrium’ finds the right balance between questions and answers. (I try to build my Cube with the design successes of Legacy in mind; the tension between Wasteland + Stifle and fetch + dual, or Force of Will and broken strategies, is the biggest reason why that format works.) In my Cube, KotR teams up with GSZ, DRS, and Scooze to create a fun, fighting dynamic between Green and graveyard strategies.

    

KotR can also make bodies, draw cards, pump our team, or give an alpha-striking aggro deck a very ghastly surprise.

In my fixing-saturated Cube, Nykthos provides an incentive for decks to stick to a primary color, tapping for huge amounts of mana once you’ve fetched that Deus of Calamity with GSZ.

 

KotR’s ability to ramp (sacrificing a turn of blocking by not activating at the end of the opponent’s turn) is buffed by these powerful cards with drawbacks …

 

… While her body is buffed to Cube-worthy proportions by the twenty fetchlands in my 450-card list …

 

… And these balanced answers to the ancient lands her archaeology unearths.

 

Between GSZ and KotR activations, the shuffles, tutors, and cantrips in my Cube maximize decision points in drafting, deckbuilding, and gameplay, lifting it above the vulgarity of ‘RDW in the Modo Cube,’ and synthesizing cards old and new — the tutor and the creature — for a flavorful, interactive, and challenging experience.

Add growlers, daggers, and Legacy side games to taste!

5. Rhetoric

Travis Woo is fond of saying ‘to add a card you must cut a card.’ Peddlers of MTGS-style Powered 720s miss that this is as true in Cube as it is in Constructed. All design choices come with opportunity costs, so here are some arguments for not doubling up on GSZ and KotR, (as well as my doubling-down, double-negative arguments against those arguments):

-Green is already the easiest color to design in Cube. Though my idolatry of Green is profuse and well-documented, even the most hardened Blue-worshipping philistines can’t help but marvel at Green’s embarrassment of riches in Cube. Between its mana dorks, on-curve beaters, fixing and fatties, there are about 30 Green cards I want in my Cube that aren’t in there; so why spend two precious slots on a second GSZ and KotR? I’d answer that these cards make the existing cards in the Cube more playable in more situations, so by doubling up on them, on balance, my drafters see a greater diversity of cards.

–Selesnya too is not lacking in options. I share Jason’s contempt for precise color-balance; I see it as maybe the fifteenth-most important thing you can do with your Cube, while more pedantic ‘designers’ fetishize it as a means of ignoring fundamentally rotten design. GW has way more Cube-worthy cards than UR or UG, so there are more GW cards than UR or UG cards in my Cube. (As compensation, U gets more mono-colored cards.) However, there are some more GW cards I’d like to slot in. Though a second KotR is unquestionably cooler than a first Loxodon Smiter, some designers might not judge it sweeter than a Glare of Subdual or, at the same spot in the curve, a Dauntless Escort. But I do!

–Midrange is already strong enough. There is a ‘five-color good-stuff’ fallacy. It is popular among the rote Cube community. It states that Cubes with a sad sparseness of fixing are somehow supposed to make oppressively powerful ‘five-color midrange’ decks. This is dumb for several reasons. A big one is that anyone who’s played Constructed will remember how bad directionless midrange decks were, even in the mono-dual mana-bases of RTR Standard. It is true, though, that midrange decks do tend to be strong in non-power Cubes. This is especially true for riptidelab.com Cubes, where we de-emphasize sweepers and love Green, maybe taking both a little too far. I’d answer that the competing Green ‘engines’ of Birthing Pod and Cascade are more restrictively midrange, while GSZ fits in aggro and ramp too — and that Knight is just ‘the sweetest card inMagic,’ anytime, anywhere.

-Everything costs 3. This is related to the last argument, and is especially true for gold cards; 88 out of 381 = 23.1% of my Cube’s spells have CMC 3, while 25 of 75 = 33.3% of its gold cards cost 3. Anyone who has looked at Matthew Watkins’s excellent articles on new Limited formats, or the article of Andy’s I linked above, knows how extremely sensitive Limited environments are to slight changes in curve. Three is a CMC Cube designers should actively be looking to quell, though it is nowhere near as bad as having everything cost 4. (Aside: I’m sure that conventional Cubes’ having curves that very closely approximate released draft sets, while having the power of Constructed cards, is a design failure that explains a great deal of my disregard for them.) Anyway, I’d answer that GSZ can cost anything from 1 to 9 mana, and the two KotR slots are worth it in spite of both costing 3.

–Green Sun’s Zenith is not as customizable in 40-card decks. At some point in my Cube games, with my Cube’s twenty fetchlands and four utility lands per person, someone will fail to find off a fetch and it will feel awful. Similarly, with GSZ in a forty-card deck, you can just run out of bullets; maybe that extra GSZ should therefore be another bullet. I’d answer that the fetches and Birthing Pod design choices are worth it anyway; finding something cheaper than the value of X off GSZ isn’t so bad. Plus, curbing GSZ’s power a little is something I’m down with; I love GSZ, but the card is banned in Modern for a reason. (I have, however, thought about mandating 45-card decks …)

–Dryad Arbor sucks without GSZ. This is a ‘poison-principle’ argument — anyone who’s topdecked a copy during a tight game of Legacy knows that Dryad Arbor is a weak card, whose application is overwhelmingly accelerating off a GSZ on turn one. I’d answer that I’ve strived to give it a few other uses — e.g., KotR’s ability to tutor it, finding a surprise blocker off a fetchland, and serving as fodder for the sacrifice theme — and also that Dryad Arbor isn’t in the main Cube. The utility-land draft is for cards you want to put in your deck, that aren’t worth the opportunity cost of a designer’s slot and a drafter’s pick; that’s the whole point!

6. Game Theory

The great deckbuilders give huge amounts of attention to individual card choices; for this reason, I value the perspicacious Legacy articles of Josh Ravitz, whose descriptions of brewing approximate my experiences at April’s Seattle Legacy Open. There I could have lost in the quarterfinals because of a single poor card choice in the sideboard. Why, then, do Cube designers, especially the ones who are accomplished competitive players, not obsess over their Cube’s card choices? You could answer ‘because in competitive Magic there’s money at stake,’ but nobody plays Magic for money — a professional Magic player is simply someone who is unaware of this. We’re all doing this for fun; fun is the most important thing.

To this end, I am now going to tell a story that will illustrate why I think Cube is more important than competitive Magic.

A couple months ago, our playgroup’s most dedicated player went off to Dublin for the Pro Tour. After bumming around Europe for a month, he returned, determined to never play a round of competitive Magic again: ‘I don’t want to be anything like these people,’ he explained. That Thursday he came over for Cube and, by the time he’d blithely Podded Erebos, God of the Dead into a Gray Merchant of Asphodel for 17, he was in great spirits. ‘This is the most fun I have playing Magic,’ he commented, in a rare display of sozzled sentimentality … That Saturday, he came to the PTQ, and, though we all scrubbed out, we realized it was no excuse for not enjoying the mojitos and Cubing thereafter, as we love Magic not because of the way competitive play is set up, but in spite of it.

Some weekends I will not feel like going to PTQs; some weekends I will go to PTQs and not enjoy myself; on balance, I get some fun out of it, but I keep going because I love my Magic friends, more than I hate the early reveilles and bush-league backbiting and atrociously high vigorish of the PTQ and GP circuit. But I’ll always try to get Cube together, every week, as there is no way I am not going to have a huge amount of fun designing or drafting or playing my Cube; it is so fun that the pointless suffering of the outside culture and the very bad Limited sets this culture has fed become, for several hours, immaterial. What the daggers and drinking and gossip outside the game, and the interaction and decision trees and dialectics and tensions and hand-reading and tutoring and designing, drafting, deckbuilding, and playing within the game ought to remind you of is that, at its best, MTG is a game about people. For all my criticism of WotC, I am glad they’ve been able to accommodate idiots who like giant Green dudes, like me, alongside the tutor-mongering legacies of yore.

Jason’s Critique

There’s a lot to unpack here. I’ll start by saying that, currently in my cube, Green Sun’s Zenith does not seem to be valued very highly by my drafters. Mistake? Perhaps. I have long touted the idea that Primeval Titan engine decks are the most fun green decks my cube produces, via a combination of the Utility Land Draft and the fact that you get to pilot a deck with a legitimate, cool, non-broken interactive gameplan rather than drawing off the top. For this reason I’ve heralded cards like Primal Command as ways to enable such decks.

Green Sun’s Zenith does similar enabling. And if we’re doubling up on the Zenith, do we double up on Dryad Arbor in the utility pile? Zenith significantly improves with a zero-drop to fetch, and, should the two copies get split, do we want one of the two to be a bit of a dud? It’s certainly a question worth considering. I hadn’t considered the connection to blue with Brainstorm, and as someone currently in the process of upping my Brainstorm count this does seem appealing.

Further, I consider giving decks a good decision density an integral part of cube design, and as an X spell, Zenith certainly has no shortage of play to it.

A second copy of Knight of the Reliquary could be useful, but I do feel that limiting gold density in cubes is important design wise, by virtue of the higher competing demand for monocolor cards. You’re right, to add a card I need to cut a card. What’s my line?

Both of the above cards are fairly integral to my cube’s design (Voice single-handedly makes Pod decks more viable), and Qasali is a rare maindeckable piece of artifact and enchantment hate. I’m not entirely against adding a fourth Selesnya card, but I don’t know that I’m sold on a second copy of Knight of the Reliquary. Certainly anybody doubling fetches and using the Utility Land Draft should be running at least one copy, though.

Eric’s Critique

Anybody wanna take a guess at who wrote this submission? Yeah, no, I’m pretty stumped here, too. It could have been just about anyone.

So, right off the bat, suggesting that people include more than a singleton copy of Green Sun’s Zenith sets off alarm bells. It’s probably more of a personal bias than anything else, but I feel like cards that vastly increase the consistency of decks – tutors especially – make cube less interesting. It’s one thing to need to draft a very specific curve in order to fully unlock the potential of Birthing Pod; it’s another to just draft Good Green Creatures and know that you’ll be able to treat your library as an extension of your hand. I think that Zenith is actually a decent bit closer to Demonic Tutor than, say, a Worldly Tutor, and Demonic Tutor trips the smoke detector in the same way. Maybe this is all moot if Dryad Arbor isn’t in your particular deck packing multiple Zeniths, but I’d still be very wary of including more than one copy of a generically powerful, flexible spell such as this (especially when it reshuffles itself back into the library to act as marginally more copies).

After having pooh-poohed all over that idea, I will say that I’m fascinated by the idea of a second Knight of the Reliquary. This beloved three-drop brings an often under-appreciated part of the deck – its manabase – right to the forefront, and allows for any manner of subtle and not-so-subtle shenanigans, while still inviting interaction from the opponent. With just one copy in a deck, it’s hard to really build around her ability, and expect to be able to harness the full power of your utility lands. A second copy would give a drafter more motivation to stock up on fetchlands, play sufficient numbers of Forests and Plains, craft a game plan around activating Gavony Township in a creature mirror, and run any number of silver bullet lands to handle any imaginable scenario. Other than amassing an army of dudes, I find that GW decks often lack direction in cube. Knight of the Reliquary is perhaps just the gal to bring the colour pair together.

It’s true that gold sections are very tight in cubes as is, and Selesnya as a color pair isn’t lacking for options. I think that Knight is unique enough to warrant taking a good, hard look at doing everything you can to squeeze in another copy. Move over, Baneslayer – the Queen of Midrange has arrived.

Return to contest entries.

The Submission

This contest is meant to highlight cards that can be ‘built around’ in Cube design when included in multiples. Often this requires – and incentivizes – a top-down redesign of the Cube to enable the card to work properly; one entrant, for instance, said they originally considered Astral Slide. It’s an interesting card, with a lot of nostalgia value for people who played it in Constructed (which also acts as a source of ideas for exploiting it), but it can’t just be slotted into your Cube without further thought – most Cubes have a single-digit number of cycling cards, so clearly more support is needed for it to be realistic. We might look for cards in which cycling is stapled on to a regular effect and include them in place of cards that usually play that role – Starstorm and Akroma’s Vengeance over some other red and white sweepers. We also want ways to recur our cyclers, so Loam and Disentomb effects rise in value (at which point we branch out into other cards that work well with these, such as those that can sacrifice themselves). With this many ways of drawing a card at instant-speed, Miracles now look more appealing and we could use more effects that let us manipulate the top of the deck. We can also add cards that are good against cycling, such as Notion Thief.

Typically, an experiment like that is ‘successful’ if it’s able to become a noticeably important part of the Cube without encroaching on other things. That’s a hard balance to strike, though, and you can only properly support one or two of these cards at a time. It’s also not a relevant idea if you’re not in the market for that sort of commitment, so few people will get to try it for themselves. For my entry I wanted to do something different. This card doesn’t require a complete restructuring of the Cube to be good; in fact, I’d say that with no other changes, almost any Cube will be improved by adding an extra copy of this card:

Universal applicability

No matter what stance you take on power maximization as a Cube philosophy, Metamorph will make decks and games better. If your goal with Cube is to do the most crazy, powerful, and memorable things, Metamorph is just what you need. Copying haymakers like Thundermaw Hellkite, Baneslayer Angel, or Grave Titan– from either side – at a discount lets you steamroll over opponents or turn lost games around in dramatic fashion. Alternatively, you might be aiming to promote synergy over raw power. Metamorph can act as a second copy of a key piece of the puzzle, increasing the payoff when an interaction comes together.

Perhaps you want games to be longer and contain more complex decisions; in that case, Metamorph has your back. Whether it’s deciding when to pull the trigger on an opponent’s play or figuring out how to bait removal to maximize the chance of copying your best card, having a good sense of timing is crucial. Cubes with a focus on ‘grindy’ cards – typically with some inbuilt card advantage mechanism, such as Ghitu Slinger or Sphinx of Lost Truths – are more conducive to this type of gameplay, and these cards conveniently interact well with Metamorph.

It also works well with many ‘build-around-me’ cards (likely including some featured in this contest!). If your deck is built around milking a card for all its worth, doubling up on it can only help. One Young Pyromancer is respectable; two Young Pyromancers can snowball out of control very quickly. Even if your deck is more ‘normal’, it probably contains cards that get disproportionately better in multiples. Hellrider is a scary card by itself; two Hellriders is even worse. It’s easy to feel like you’ve ‘unlocked an achievement’ with Metamorph, beyond the usual sense of satisfaction that Clones can provide.

Metamorph certainly can be the linchpin of a strategy – more on that in a little bit – but its primary use is as a strong and interesting tactical play that all colours and decks have access to. When opened in a pack it doesn’t stand out as a card that challenges you to take a risk on it; rather, it’s a solid card that you’re always happy to pick and play. It’s never going to end up circling the table at the end of a pack or lying rejected in a sideboard, and it’s rarely a dead card in-game. For the purposes of this contest it might not be the most flashy card, but it frees you up to try cards that are flashy by shoring up the ‘regular’ part of the Cube in a clear way.

Effect on games

Beyond its obvious and specific interactions with certain cards, it’s worth thinking about how Metamorph affects games in general. It’s costed at the sweet spot to remain fair even when it’s used for unfair things – 3 mana and 2 life is just right (cf. Phantasmal Image, which feels undercosted at times, or 4-mana Clones, which are mostly unplayable). It’s a great way of restoring balance in games where you’re behind: one easy way to lose is for you to stumble when the opponent plays a threat that can’t be dealt with by normal removal, like Titans or ‘army-in-a-can’ cards, and Metamorph is one of the few cards that can restore parity there. It enables some awesome comebacks (going from being manascrewed and having my board wiped by Inferno Titan to getting my own Titan and killing his, in a recent draft) out of nowhere, and has an element of surprise: you expect a black deck to Doom Blade your guy, but you don’t expect a white deck to get a copy of it.

This lack of a colour requirement is what makes it so flexible and fun. There are some understandable objections to cards like Dismember existing, on the grounds that they do unnecessary violence to the colour pie; Metamorph gives every colour access to an effect that’s always been reserved for blue, but because it’s often a reactive card it feels much less offensive. It adds a whole new dimension to games in a way that few other cards can, without blurring the identity of each colour: your green deck gets to play with Archangel of Thune, but Archangel remains a quintessentially white card.

It also has wider implications for Cube design, and not in the obvious way suggested by the more ambitious contest entries. We have to consider not just how cards fit together when played, but whether the tools are there for opponents to keep them in check: in the Zombie theme headlined by Gravecrawlers, cards like Pillar of Flame ensure that the usual threats vs. answers dynamic is maintained. Often, this can feel a little forced – if I’m playing a control deck I might be pleased to have Pillar when the situation arises but still wish it was a Firebolt instead, since I have to play other matchups too.

Why does this matter? Well, Metamorph by itself prompts an evaluation of cards from another perspective. As designers, we can stack the Cube with cards that create an interesting dynamic when controlled by both players. Whip of Erebos caught many people’s attention as a curious and fun card in its own right; when both players have a Whip, some truly epic board states can occur. The changes to the legend rule gave Metamorph a new functionality: rather than acting as a Vindicate, it can now match whatever benefit a legend is having on the other side. It was nice for your green deck to have an answer to Meloku, but it’s a lot more fun for your green deck to conscript its own Meloku and face off in the skies. As anyone who played Standard a few years ago can testify, Metamorphing an opposing Consecrated Sphinx leads to good times all around. Metamorph doesn’t need any help to create this excitement – it feeds off of cards that you would be including anyway.

Ways to exploit it

Most Cubes have a large number of creatures that work well with blink effects, from Wall of Omens to Flametongue Kavu, and copying them is just as good. Those effects also go nicely with Metamorph, allowing you to reset Metamorph when needed. Fiend Hunter and the champion mechanic can ‘protect’ a Metamorph, as can Relic-Warder (which can also go infinite if you have effect that triggers on a creature entering/leaving play).

Copying a persist/undying creature with Metamorph gives you a second barrel to fire later in the game when there are more appealing targets on the other side, and the opponent always has to be wary of killing the Metamorphed guy for fear of it turning into something bigger and better. With a sac outlet, you can pull off some ridiculous tricks at instant speed.

Metamorph’s ability to copy artifacts gives you a manual reset option when combined with these cards. Duelling Batterskulls leads to some incredibly intricate games.

Anything that gives a bonus to your team gets much better in multiples, and so Metamorph is in especially high demand in any kind of tribal deck. Some, like Captain, only make the cut if you’re pushing a tribal theme, but the likes of Mayor and Hermit stand on their own merits.

If you’re one of those wise souls that supports a devotion theme, Metamorph is great both in advance to increase your devotion count and as a follow-up to your devotion card. It’s truly excellent with Master of Waves (as most things are).

If you have more refined tastes and prefer to cast 11-drops on turn 5, Metamorph does that too!

Phyrexian Metamorph has added a lot of depth to Mishra’s Workshop decks in Vintage, and its applications there can be replicated to good effect in Cube. If you’re pushing a heavy artifact theme, you can also set up loops with Goblin Welder or Trading Post or turbo-charge your draws with Etherium Sculptor. Grand Architect is basically the perfect card with Metamorph, letting you play it for free most of the time and acting as another copy-able anthem.

As you can see, there are a lot of cool things you can do with Metamorph, and since it demands nothing of you there’s no reason not to try doubling up on it. Give it a try!

Jason’s Critique

Phyrexian Metamorph brings an interesting angle to the contest, as it’s not a card that explicitly supports any given strategy, but is full of subtle interactions and gameplay decisions to be made. I personally don’t even run a single copy, even though it certainly qualifies on the basis of power level considerations.

I’m all for cards that increase the decision density of games, and Metamorph certainly brings that to the table. This entry made a compelling case for me to consider re-including a copy of Metamorph, but I wish it had done more to argue the merits of a second. I suppose the argument boils down to “one is good, more is better”. Would a second Metamorph increase the net fun of my cube? Quite possibly. Does it open up or bolster archetypes that were previously underpowered or unfeasible? Unlikely. But it is a card that many different decks can use in diverse ways, and one that produces its fair share of great gameplay stories. The question is, does that warrant a second slot?

Eric’s Critique

First of all, I should note my obvious biases when it comes to a card like Phyrexian Metamorph. Undercosted artifacts? Not a fan. Cards that can slot into any deck, and thus are high picks during the draft, but don’t require any commitment? Yuck. A card that doesn’t take much skill to harness its considerable power? Check, and check.

Having said all that, I can’t deny the satisfaction that comes from copying a gigantic threat – I’ve answered an opponent’s Consecrated Sphinx with a Metamorph, and it was a hoot. And while Metamorph is juicy even in the hands of a beginner, there’s no doubt that skilled players can squeeze even more value out of cloning persist bodies or hard-to-answer artifacts. A cube with multiple Metamorphs wouldn’t lack for excitement.

Ultimately, though, the same argument could be made for any generically strong colorless card that fits into most any deck, aggro, midrange, or control. Multiple Metamorphs will provide for more varied situations than simply jamming multiple Wurmcoils or Jittes, but if everyone is always on the Metamorph plan, I could conceivably see things getting stale after a period of time. “Cast Grave Titan. No counters? Oh, you have the clone, then. A-yup.” I don’t see that Metamorph pushes any particular archetype to the forefront, a la Jason’s Gravecrawler theme, and I find it hard to get behind a Universal Creature For All Archetypes. Again, a cube with a whole bunch of clone effects would always let people come from behind with giant haymakers. But something that takes a little bit more effort and synergy before its potential is unlocked makes for better a build-around, and would be more satisfying when drafting the archetype in question, as well as during gameplay.

Return to contest entries.