Hear ye, hear ye! Make way for the huge Gatecrash update! 35 changes!
This update has four major purposes:
Fix the Gatecrash guilds, most of which were horrible.
Bring in the five Titans.
Bring in the five Swords.
Rebalance the cube (currently -3 gold, +3 nonbasic land, and the guilds were out too)
There were three too many non-basic land. 37 of the 43 are part of cycles that we don't want to part with, so we need to lop out three of the six utility lands we pack in here (yeah, one day I'll lump them in with their actual colours instead... natch). Unholy Grotto and Sunhome, Fortress of the Legion are too good to drop. Grove of the Guardian has just been added, and has been useful in the play it's seen.
Therefore... Tolarian Academy, Shimmering Grotto and Shivan Gorge out: Grotto and Gorge were obvious choices - they're the lowest power level of the six. The Academy was place-holding, and probably only works in powered cubes. In our testing, it's too slow here.
Esper has one too many cards (a carry-over from our RtR update). We're actually piffing both of the two Esper cards, as you'll see later, so let's just remove the worst of the two for now. Zur, the Enchanter out: Don't worry, Esper gets love later.
Finally, Selesnya has one too many cards. Risen Sanctuary out: So we'll remove the French vanilla.
That's five cards out. Our five Gatecrash guilds are all a card short in comparison to their RtR equivalents, so they get a free add further down. This now leaves gold balanced, and the guilds balanced to boot (six cards each for the allied guilds, five for the enemy guilds, one for each tri-colour shard).
This involved a fair few GTC cards, and a hefty voting system amongst our playgroup. And maybe an awesome trade or two.
Only one add here. Treasury Thrull in: About the best thing we could add from GTC. One of these days, we'll get Sorin and Vindicate in.
Again, only one add here. Spitting Image in: A popular choice. This is going to be insane next to populate. We could've gone something from GTC here, but not much stood out for this cube. Fathom Mage was close, but that was it.
I've been sitting on four of the five Swords for ages, and just needed the fifth to bring the whole set in at once. Finally! Helm, Shield and Sword of Kaldra out: The Kaldras can be replaced here. No-one's actually managed to get Kaldra himself out, and the Helm by itself is pretty useless. Fodder Cannon and Hornet Cannon out: These two were the worst two artifacts in the cube. Fodder was an expensive sac outlet, Hornet was just in for the cute combo with Grave Pact. Sword of Fire and Ice, Light and Shadow, War and Peace, Feast and Famine, and Body and Mind in: Yay!
Again, I'd been sitting on four of the five for ages, waiting on the fifth to bring the set in as a whole. And now we can.
Sun Titan in for Cloudgoat Ranger: Cloudgoat is good, but was right on the edge of our power level now. Sun Titan is going to be awesome.
Grave Titan in for Netherborn Phalanx: The Phalanx was only in for its tutoring ability, really... and no-one ever used it for that. Let's swap it for power.
Primeval Titan in for Grazing Gladehart: Green was loaded at 3CC and tight at 6+, so we decided to throw the worst 3CC guy overboard. Gladehart is good, but there are much better cards.
Some final obvious changes thanks to decks falling apart or good trades.
Enlightened Tutor in for Condemn: Brought in the tutor to find all those Swords. White was loaded for removal, with Swords and Path to Exile also at 1CC. Condemn was the worst of the three (and we still have Crib Swap, Unmake and co. above that...).
Deadeye Navigator in for Serra Sphinx: More French vanilla leaves the cube for something that could well be very, very broken.
Grim Lavamancer in for Rock Hydra: There's still plenty of deadwood amongst the red creatures. This removes the worst of them.
Steel Hellkite in for Molten-Tail Masticore: My playgroup just doesn't like the card disadvantage of the Masticores anymore. Steel Hellkite is absolutely fantastic in multiplayer, and should be a hit. It's the colourless finisher we've been missing until now.
Tezzeret the Seeker in for Temporal Cascade: Blue spells had a card at the top of the curve that nobody played. This needs to be Blatant Thievery long-term, but Tezz is a fine add, especially given all those Swords going in with him.
Phew! That was all fun to trade for or purchase!
Let me know what you think! The power level of the cube definitely seems to have gone up a notch according to my playtest drafts! Can't wait to see it in paper!
Looks like so much fun. Mad props. I think your Gruul changes are marvellous. I wouldn't worry about Dragonlair Spider - it's an ultra-solid multiplayer card and it's a sexy foil to boot.
I like Predatory Advantage over Rubblehulk. However, I have only seen Predatory Advantage in regular, 5 person, multiplayer. Isn't Rubblehulk mostly just an, admittedly uncounterable, game ending burn spell that is tied to combat?
Like the spider, multiple guys for one card is quite good. Obviously, they both have trouble with the "terminate test." However, P. A. "lives" through most sweepers. If you end up keeping Rubblehulk, but cutting the spider, consider putting P.A. back.
I like Predatory Advantage over Rubblehulk. However, I have only seen Predatory Advantage in regular, 5 person, multiplayer. Isn't Rubblehulk mostly just an, admittedly uncounterable, game ending burn spell that is tied to combat?
Like the spider, multiple guys for one card is quite good. Obviously, they both have trouble with the "terminate test." However, P. A. "lives" through most sweepers. If you end up keeping Rubblehulk, but cutting the spider, consider putting P.A. back.
Yeah, I'm in complete agreement with you there - I turned the Gruul section over to my group to vote on, and a couple had had good enough times with Rubblehulk in the GTC pre-release that they wanted to see it in.
And surprisingly, nobody plays Predatory Advantage in my group. I have no idea why... I'm trying to source a full playset to break my multiplayer meta with, as I'm sure it should go to town. Just not seen it a) drafted highly, or b) main-decked. I guess no-one's had the balls to give it a try. Admittedly, if it was 4CC instead of 5CC, I have a feeling I'd be seeing it everywhere.
I too suspect Rubblehulk is nothing more than a wide body plus a potential one-shot kill, but I'm happy to have the 3+ guys in my group who are vouching for it try and prove it to me otherwise before I piff it!
We've been playing a lot with the new multiplayer cube quite a lot and we got the feeling that blue was a bit lacking in terms of power when compared expecially to white and black, what would you suggest to counteract this?
Blue has always been a delicate balance for me - at its core, it wants to counter and control, but those things generally make for slow and unfun games (hi there, Stasis!). My blue section has gone heavily into artifact-based strategies, and that seems to be working quite well - it's a very strong draft archetype for one. Tinker, Fabricate, Inkwell Leviathan, Etherium Sculptor and Vedalken Archmage all help make this work (as well as the just-added Tezzeret the Seeker). The rest of my blue section is more about the control core, and I think I've got the balance just right with it at the moment - I certainly wouldn't want it having much more power than what it has. At the moment, it has just enough to grind a game out with.
If you wanted to really power it up, you'd look at all the hated blue multiplayer cards - Stasis, Propaganda, Erayo, Lighthouse Chronologist...
Btw Assemble the Legion has been an amazing card so far. Enchantments survive a lot of stuff even in multiplayer and this card is very good against the Wrathdeck for example.
Thanks for the feedback! I'm really looking forward to testing it out too!
I've traded for or purchased about 30 of the 35 cards in the GTC update, and they're all still filtering back to me, so we haven't been able to actually cube it yet. I'm checking the mailbox each day like a giggling schoolgirl!
Finally, the GTC changes are all in. Waiting for them to turn up was like waiting for a baby to be delivered.
We had five players, so we dished out four boosters each for the draft, meaning we had 300 of the 400 cards in circulation.
Amazingly none of the five of us drafted green. I don't know how that came to be, but it resulted in bomb green cards like Thragtusk and Garruk Wildspeaker being close to last-picks. Don't think we'll see that again in a hurry.
Four of the five Swords were first-picked (with Sword of Body and Mind being a second pick, passed over only for Grave Titan). Surprisingly, most of the Lorwyn Five were mid-round drafts. I saw all of them go past apart from Jace (who apparently was still not a first-pick himself).
In the end, we had:
Player 1: Br control, mostly focusing on the good black control creatures in the cube, but with enough red to splash for Chandra and a little burn.
Player 2: BU control
Player 3: U artifact
Player 4: BW Knights with Swords
Player 5 (me!): RW Post-ramp
Bear in mind that my cube carries four Cloudposts and four Glimmerposts. I picked up late in the first draft round that no-one else was picking them up, and had two Cloudposts and a Glimmerpost by the end of Round 1. People kept letting them slide from there - hence 7-Post.
The general aim was to ramp with Posts and mana stones into burn and mana-intensive beatsticks like Transcendent Master, Shivan Dragon, Steel Hellkite and Hateflayer. In practise, the Knights deck next to me started too fast, and I didn't draw any of my ramp pieces in time (hooray for a single Post and no mana stones for the entire match). My deck was the first to fall.
The other decks all fired evenly. It was quite pretty to watch it unfold while I was being smashed.
Player 1 teamed up Grave Titan and Phyrexian Plaguelord for good crowd control (swing with the Titan, produce zombies, throw them overboard to the Plaguelord to clear the path). He had Undertaker as well to recur them should they leave the table (and given Plaguelord is an instant sacrifice effect, even attempts to exile them failed). He really went to town once he landed Grave Betrayal alongside this... everything he blew off the table with the Plaguelord started appearing on his side of the board!
Player 2 managed to control things heading in his direction long enough to hit 10 mana. And then he dropped Consuming Aberration followed by Whispersilk Cloak! Game-winning creature on the board, gentlemen!
Player 3 was stuck with tiny creatures (Etherium Sculptor, Invisible Stalker, wolf tokens), but he was turning them into gorillas - he had Fireshrieker, Sword of War and Peace and a copy of my Sword of Body and Mind to play with, and was milling people for 20 with a single connect to the face.
Player 4 managed to almost completely draft the Knights with Swords archetype, and got Knight Exemplar, Kinsbaile Cavalier, Knight of Meadowgrain, Ajani Goldmane and Sword of Feast and Famine all on the board in double-quick time. By the time Ajani started throwing his +1/+1 counters on top of all those indestructible, double-striking Knights, it was real. He took me out pretty quickly before I was able to ramp into anything completely damaging.
Player 1 could control everything except the Aberration, and that's what Player 2 took him out with. Meanwhile, Player 3 had milled Player 4 down to a four-card library with a well-equipped Stalker. This set up a Mexican standoff between the final three players.
Player 2 could take out either of the players, but was going to die to the other one (Player 3 could hit with Sword of War and Peace double-striked for lethal, Player 4 could get the Knights through for lethal).
Player 3 could mill Player 4 to death, but couldn't deal with the Aberration.
Player 4 could kill Player 2 with the Knights, but would die to mill before he could cope with Player 3.
They sat there for a while figuring it out, but Player 4 had his hand forced by his lack of library. He scalped Player 2 with his Knights, only to get milled out by Player 3 (who amazingly won the game despite having played a grand total of two 1-power creatures off his own bat).
The four of them were all in positions to win, and all had to make hard decisions as to which player to aim for - a great sign for the relative balance of the cube, given that we all seemed to draft decks about the same power level (mine would have hung with the others late - it just didn't fire, and you get nights like that).
I knew from my test drafting that it would feel like the cube had gone up a power level - adding five Titans, five Swords and three Planeswalkers will do that. It led to some wonderfully swingy plays, and a lot of agreement from the other players when it came to the power level increase.
Still getting loving comments over email from the group this morning. Ah, success!
Dumped virtually the entire cube out and decided to play sealed with each player getting four 16-card boosters (this got 384 of the 400 cards out in the wild).
We ended up with the following:
Player 1: BGW reanimator, featuring Chainer and Jarad.
Player 2: GW equipment (packing Stoneforge and two of the Swords).
Player 3: UB control with Consuming Aberration for a good time.
Player 4: BGW beatdown (with Recurring Nightmare and the Titans in each of the colours).
Player 5: BW "let's throw all my good cards in a pile and cross my fingers" (his words, essentially, not mine! He was trying to recurse with Reveillark, amongst other things)
Player 6 (Me!): BR Zombie/Elemental tribal reanimator.
I managed to end up with some half-decent Zombie and Elemental themes here, along with Conspiracy, which I could set to either depending on the situation. Plus, I had some nice recursion, throwing things out there with Soulstoke and Sneak Attack, only to retrieve them with Graverobber and Tortured Existence as needs.
Game One was a six-player free-for-all. I begin by dropping Nezumi Graverobber and flipping it on Turn 3 (taking someone's lonely used Terramorphic Expanse for the flip).
And of course, Player 2 then suits up his Birds of Paradise with Sword of Body and Mind and begins the mill pain with me.
Two turns later, I'm down to six cards in my library, Player 1 is having his wicked way with the contents of my graveyard thanks to Chainer, and then Player 3 drops her Consuming Aberration! Oh bollocks!
Thankfully, her only other defense is Corrosive Mentor, she's on 14 life, and I have 15 power on the table (Dread, the flipped Graverobber and a couple of handyzombies). Plus, I have five land and an Inferno Titan in hand. I top-deck, and it's.... land #6! Oh happy day! I drop the Titan, piff the Mentor and swing for lethal, which naturally opens the game right up and starts toppling the dominos.
Player 1 promptly steals my Doomgape with Chainer, and then proceeds to throw it overboard to Jarad for a very evil play. This knocks out Player 2, who's had a couple of incidental dings to the face in the last couple of turns, and leaves the rest of us well and truly in single digits.
Player 4 saw this coming, and dropped Stuffy Doll targetting Player 1. After the Jarad play, it comes around to his turn, and he promptly detains Jarad and blows Chainer off the board, leaving him defenseless and on 19. He swings for 12, and sends Stuffy Doll at me so I can block it with Inferno Titan for 6 more, leaving him on 1.
Player 5 is madly trying to do something with his game, and resolves Vish Kal, Blood Arbiter, which is all sorts of bad for me (his first target is my flipped Graverobber, which gets deep-sixed).
It comes around to my turn and I topdeck Breath of Darigaaz. It's a shame I'm on 4! I cast it unkicked to take out Player 1, drop Flametongue Kavu and swing with the Titan to take out Vish Kal. He's already thrown a creature or two overboard thanks to the Breath, so Vish is able to take out the Titan on the way out (yes, bad play by me... I blame sleep deprivation!).
So Player 5 is left undefended on 6 life, and I am on 3. It's back to Player 4's turn (he's on 5 life himself!)... he's got Recurring Nightmare and Sun Titan now, and essentially pays 4BB to blink Stuffy Doll and retarget it to me. He sends Sun Titan at Player 6 and wipes him off the map. And then drops Prime Time for good measure and passes.
My turn again, and I'm down to two cards. Ack. I draw Sword of Feast and Famine, which doesn't help. I can't get through Stuffy Doll - I'm left with three creatures (the two zombies and FTK), and he's got the Titans and Stuffy Doll. If I swing, I connect with Stuffy Doll one way or another and die before I can deal the face damage I need to. I pass. He passes and waits to see if I have an answer with my last card.
It's a mountain. I scoop.
So another grandstand finish for the rejigged cube!
We followed that up with Game Two, a 3-on-3 team game.
This pitted Player 1, Player 5 and myself against Players 2, 3 and 4.
Player 1 and I smile about the fact that we're both essentially playing reanimator decks that seemed to riff off each other pretty nicely in the previous game. The two teams trade blows for the first seven turns.
And then Player 1 drops Exhume. And then I follow it with Insurrection. Game over.
The night ended with the following quotes:
"The cube has really taken off in popularity, hasn't it?"
"It's a lot more aggro and balanced now with the new cards in."
"It's down to the wire every time we play it now!"
Happy, happy days.
I should add that Player 1 actually managed to drop Jarad, Golgari Lich Lord on Turn 4. He's officially off the watch list now, methinks!
Also, a temporary change, given that the Grave Pact seems to have disappeared somewhere from the cube (we've all looked, and no-one can find it... good thing I can trust all my guys. It's probably shuffled in somewhere). Leyline of the Void in for Grave Pact: This is, unfortunately, about the best thing I have available at 4CC. It probably wants to be Barter in Blood or another Grave Pact long-term, but this will do for now. Fun reanimator hosing, at the least.
We're also discussing dropping Naturalize for Seal of Primordium (given we want to push Enchantress in long-term, and the Seal will recur with Sun Titan). That one will probably happen.
When you draft for FFA, do you still only use 3x 15 card packs and make 40 card decks?
Do the games ever go long enough so people start running out of cards, even without getting milled?
Yep, still at 3x 15 with 40 card decks.
The only times people have gone close to running out of cards are either via mill as you suspect (especially via Consuming Abberation or Sword of Body and Mind), or by accelerated card draw (we had one guy almost deck out via Font of Mythos and Overbeing of Myth, and another who almost decked himself with Rhystic Study). Generally speaking, the cube is thankfully aggro enough that people aren't getting down to the last couple of cards in their decks now without a little extra-curricular activity.
Some small changes made for now. My group is finally getting around to our GTC prerelease tourney (our first lot of boxes disappeared somewhere between the US and Australia... booo...), so there will be more coming, but for now...
Force an Enchantress Archetype
Yes, yes, Enchantress never works, does it? Your creatures get two-for-oned all the time, you lose all your auras, rah, rah, rah... but it's still such fun! Enchantress remains a very popular archetype in my playgroup, and I've pulled my old, unloved version of the deck apart to stick some of the pieces in the cube. It had enough auras in it already to make it somewhat viable. Now we give it a real push.
Verduran Enchantress in for Fierce Empath: We bring in the lady that started it all for a creature tutor that isn't going to be missed. The Empath generally tutors for only one or two cards in your deck, and wasn't often maindecked.
Enchantress's Presence in for Blanchwood Armor: The Presence comes in for a double dose of Enchantress action (and provides an option a lot less likely to be removed). While it's an aura, the Armor has proven decent once and once only. We're adding better auras anyway, so this one can go.
Aspect of Mongoose in for Crop Rotation: Dropping a spell no-one wanted to maindeck for a useful recursive aura. Crop Rotation is a good card, but I suspect it would've seen more play if the cube was packing something along the lines of Life from the Loam / Crucible of Worlds... it needs to be part of a useful archetype to see play in my meta. The Aspect is sneaky-good in my experience. I suspect it's going to end up protecting quite a few bomb creatures down the track.
Sterling Grove in for Juniper Order Ranger: Ranger was fun, but was very much the last card in Selesnya (and was running out of Persist creatures to work with). The Grove is the ultimate enchantment protector and tutor for this archetype.
Seal of Primordium in for Naturalize: Naturalize was necessary for balance, but no-one wanted to maindeck a one-shot. The Seal triggers the Enchantresses and can be recurred by Sun Titan.
A Couple of Other Small Black Changes
Blood Scrivener in for Undertaker: The forum suggested this one after I was lucky enough to pull one, and my meta heartily agreed. Scriv is now officially in for testing.
Pack Rat in for Disciple of the Vault: The Disciple was busy meekly holding his "Look at me, I'm a black 1-drop" flag and trying to be ignored. In reality, he had nothing much to work with. I don't think he's ever dished out pain in any form in this cube. Over he goes for a card that really should have been in a lot sooner - it's a cheap drop, a discard outlet, and a sneaky blowout generator.
The first touch of extortion hits my cube. Thrull Parasite in for Pulse Tracker: The Tracker was fairly efficient, but probably only got three swings in max each time. Thrull Parasite is going to cause the same amount of bleeding without even needing to swing. And there will be more Extort coming. Oh yes there will.
Four-player drafts are great fun with this cube - the drafting happens quickly, and we can get in a fair number of games with our decks. We drafted the following:
Player 1: White Knights with a splash of green.
Player 2: Naya.
Player 3: Grixis.
Player 4 (me!): Dimir reanimator built around Consuming Aberration.
We played a four-player free-for-all, followed by three 2HG games (using all three possible pairings in the process for fun).
Yes, 42 cards. You should see some of the stuff I had to leave off this list.
I resolved Consuming Aberration once, and he lasted a turn. Would have loved to have landed Aberration and Deepchannel Mentor next to each other, but it wasn't to be.
Still, this deck did quite well. It singlehandedly won a 2HG game by resolving Steel Hellkite on Turn 5 and keeping the board clean on the other side while it connected. It also managed to foil a Wild Ricocheted Clan Defiance in another 2HG game by having Rhystic Study activate on the Ricochet and top-decking Arcane Denial to stop the original Clan Defiance. Two for one! Pack Rat also turned out to be a game winner. From a fairly impossible position, I resolved Pack Rat and immediately began dumping to it. We were absorbing a bit of pain, but I kept throwing out my draws to it, and eventually wound up with six copies for lethal. It's now firmly in my "Better than even I thought" camp.
The Grixis deck was a fun concoction, relying on Havengul Lich and Chandra Nalaar for heavy lifting and Chromatic Lantern for mana fixing (and let me tell you, the Lich loves having the Lantern sitting around). Inferno Titan also made a couple of game-winning appearances, controlling the field well.
The Naya deck showed us that Clan Defiance is indeed a bomb card (it resolved for lethal once, and almost carried a second game away if not for the topdeck mentioned above). It also dropped the first surprise Rubblehulk bloodrush for double-figures damage. It carried a couple of other nice cards along for the ride, including Adarkar Valkyrie, Assemble the Legion and Emeria Angel.
All four decks were well-balanced against each other, and we all saw some measure of success on the night. Still need to improve red's creature options a little, particularly around the 2CC mark, but we all knew that (welcome to one of the banes of a multiplayer cube, anyway... it's a universal problem).
Sorin, Lord of Innistrad in for Vish Kal, Blood Arbiter: Sorin! One of the two big-ticket cards my Orzhov section was missing (with Vindicate being the other one). I put the cut to a vote, and was expecting it to be Death Grasp that got the axe, as Vish had been useful in his appearances, but my Orzhov section is pretty top-heavy (we're also running Angel of Despair and Treasury Thrull), so Vish got the nod. Quite a lot of my group are looking forward to seeing Sorin go to work.
Pontiff of Blight in for Scythe Specter: Getting some more extort into the cube slowly. The Specter is quite sneaky-good in a multiplayer setting, but it's one of those cards where people go "Wait, it does what? It's dead". The Pontiff is the guy that will make Extort a bonafide archetype. Just need a couple more of the little guys in, along with Crypt Ghast, and it should be a draftable strategy. Until then, it remains a nice sideshow wincon in black.
A grand night - the biggest draft we've had in a while. With an uneven number, and a large table, we decided against trying to play a 4hr-long free-for-all, and instead played two Grand Melee games (attack left, defend right, spell range of one player each side - we switched attack/defend directions for Game 2).
Player 1: GW Enchantress
Player 2: Jund
Player 3: UWB Equipment
Player 4: WRB Knights, splashing black for Sorin
Player 5 (me!): Jund
Player 6: Jund
Player 7: UG artifact / clone
As you can see by that, three Jund decks out of seven, including two of us next to each other. Strangely, it worked out - I drafted hard reanimator/recursion strategy, while Player 6 next to me went hard Zombie tribal with the other two colours in support. Player 2 across the table probably had the weakest of the three Jund decks.
Player 1's deck won the first game in spectactular fashion. He managed to draft a large chunk of the Enchantress archetype, along with a couple of good targets for things. At one point, he had the brutal combo of Primeval Titan, Emeria Angel and Skullclamp on the table (basically reading "When Primeval Titan attacks, get two land, pay 2 and draw four cards"). Once Armadillo Cloak got onto Prime Time, things started getting ugly. Once Celestial Mantle landed on it too, it was time to scoop. He finished on 258 life.
We didn't see a lot of Player 2's deck, but it was heavy on damage and removal, and Brother Grim did a lot of work in both games.
Player 3 drafted both Stoneforge Mystic and Stonehewer Giant, some good equipment, and Treasury Thrull to return them when they got axed. He had fun throwing about Sword of Body and Mind and Gorgon Flail (and had Light and Shadow too, but never drew it). Unfortunately, he was simply unable to cope with Player 1's PrimeTime in Game 1, and Player 4's Knights in Game 2.
Player 4 decided to draft around whichever planeswalkers he landed. He was promptly handed Ajani Goldmane, Ajani Vengeant, Chandra NalaarandSorin, Lord of Innistrad! Superfriends! He was aiming to just take whatever else was good in those colours, and lucked into Knights, getting Knight Exemplar and Mirran Crusader along with a fair few of the backup Knights. He landed both of his key Knights in both games, and once they started getting buffed by Goldmane or Sorin, things turned ugly. His was one of the strongest decks at the table, and he took his fair share of scalps with his concoction.
My Jund deck was aiming to recurse from the start - lots of 187 creatures (like Bone Shredder and Shriekmaw), Magma Phoenix and Tortured Existence for recursion, Pack Rat for a surprise discard outlet, Thragtusk, red burn as a backup plan... I just lucked into only the BG section of my deck in Game 1, only to have Player 4 next to me drop Mirran Crusader on Turn 3. Not much I could do about that. I almost Pack Ratted him out of the game in Game 2, but the kicked Rite from Player 7 took me out just as I was building enough steam (where "enough" equals seven Pack Rats).
Player 6 managed to do some nice things with her deck too - Undead Warchief into Lightning Reaver in Game 1 caused a lot of headaches for people, as did Inferno Titan wearing Fireshrieker. She was last to fall prey to the rampaging PrimeTime in Game 1, and simply couldn't stop the angry Inkwell in Game 2.
The Bombs: There will be a bit of discussion about Tinker after this - it was very, very good. If you have the targets for it, and you're able to recurse it, bad things follow. It had a most excellent deck behind it, though.
I was also overjoyed to see the Enchantress archetype win a game (and not just win, but do so with ease). It's clearly strong enough despite the levels of removal in the Cube. And I didn't even see Ancestral Mask hit the board. The card advantage alone from the Enchantress drove that deck to a strong victory. Good signs. Grim Lavamancer, Lightning Reaver, Memnarch, Pack Rat and Mirran Crusader also showed up strongly.
The Last-Picks: A lot of Signets, Wild Ricochet (which I was very happy to see handed last to me, playing Jund), Invisibility, Tidehollow Strix. Invisibility was really the only one that bothered me - the rest is stuff that just fell through the cracks on the night.
Following on from the game, I prompted a discussion about the size of the Cube. It continually drives me bonkers that there are cards left in the box as we draft. The Cube is currently at 400, as it was built off Evan Erwin's original size recommendation back in the day. I've finally come to the final conclusion that Evan, bless his soul, was mad to suggest such a silly number. 400 is in absolutely no way divisible by 45 (which is three 15-card boosters). We always have stuff that doesn't make it into boosters. And it drives me mad in the middle of a draft, I could be attempting to draft a particular archetype while I am running the risk of one of its key components being back in the box and unavailable.
This fact was highlighted tonight by my Knights player. As much as he lucked into drafting the archetype, Kinsbaile Cavalier (a card that would have really pushed him over the top) was back in the box, undrafted. That type of thing curls my toes.
And so, we've made the tough call. We will drop the Cube to 360.
I'm lopping five cards out of each section (each colour, gold, artifact, land). I suspect it shouldn't be too hard to find the 40 most lineball cards in the Cube, but it's still tricky to do. I suspect this will have a hand in taking the Posts out of the land section for one. This is also immediately puts my Cube's most-hated placeholder card on the chopping block straight up. Blazing Effigy, be gone.
I'll update with the cuts over the coming week or two.
I copied your current list over on TappedOut as an idea to start with, hope you don't mind
Go for your life!
I hope to have our proposed cull to 360 done by the end of the week (we've agreed on the changes to blue, black and red so far, and gold won't be hard), so it might be worth checking back then. I'll update the TappedOut list once I physically pull the 40 losers out of the cube itself.
I have been looking to convert my cube to multiplayer for some time now, and have looked to your cube and another guy's EDH cube as my primary sources.
Okay, it's time.
We think we've nailed our forty cuts as a playgroup. Admittedly, most of it wasn't too hard. I probably had somewhere in the league of 370 good cards in the cube, and the last 30 were placeholders or dross that fitted the curve.
So, without further ado...
Angelic Chorus: Fun to play, but there's a fair bit of life-gain in the cube now, as well as a fair few enchantments, and this was generally ranked at the bottom. I haven't seen it main-decked in quite a while.
Momentary Blink: Hands down the weakest card white had. It's a good effect, but it really needs to be repeatable to have value in multiplayer. I saw this last-picked once or twice in the last six months. Venser needs to come in long-term instead of persisting with this card.
Reya Dawnbringer: I love her still, but she was the weakest card at the top of white's curve, and extremely hard to cast at triple-white. At that cost, it's Avacyn or bust nowadays. When Reya made it out, she was a house, of course, but that's only happened once in the last year.
Veteran of the Depths: The weakest creature left, and a holdout from Merfolk tribal that managed to hang around due to its also being a Soldier. It's still a pretty handy creature, but the Cube is getting tight to the point now (especially in white) that its lack of evasion killed it.
Wall of Omens: Another good card that is now being outclassed by the power we have in white. This was getting main-decked simply due to it being white card draw, but I don't think anyone was ever happy to draw it. You usually top-decked it late-game while you were searching for a solution.
Martial Law is Card #6 here, but earns a stay of execution while it's waiting for Angelic Destiny to swallow its slot long-term.
Conundrum Sphinx: This was filling a slot in the curve, nothing more. We ended its dream. I don't believe anyone was main-decking it.
Enclave Cryptologist: The sole remaining blue one-drop in the cube (well, on the creature side, anyway). It was simply too slow. People glossed over this and dropped Rhystic Study on Turn 3 instead (which is waaaay faster).
Invisibility: Was last-picked a week ago. These last three cards are blue auras, and we're trying to move away from auras in blue now that we have a green/white Enchantress archetype in the cube. It helps that there's no Bruna or Sovereigns here to push the archetype into blue, though, so let's not confuse people's drafting by bleeding it into three colours. Invisibility itself had the potential to be fun, but was out of colour, really. We're bringing Rogue's Passage in lower down, so we don't lose this ability completely.
Pemmin's Aura: As per Invisibility. Too blue-heavy to execute properly, especially given blue doesn't have too many beaters you can stick this on in the first place.
Zephid's Embrace: Same again. As per recent discussion on Kira in the C&AD forum, shroud really hurts blue, as you're usually looking to throw awesome equipment on your creatures and play tempo (especially given blue plays with artifacts so nicely - it's pretty much a dedicated archetype in this cube).
Tinker stays in, as I'm fairly convinced its explosiveness in our last flight was simply due to it being a part of a very, very good deck built around it (one that managed to draft Inky, Memnarch, Eternal Witness and a bunch of cheap artifacts, and then roll to perfection in-game). I don't think that's going to happen again too soon - Inky and Memnarch are really two of just three decent Tinker targets in the entire cube (with Steel Hellkite being the third). Getting two of the three, along with Tinker and some means of recursing it? Solid, solid deck.
Magus of the Jar is the only other card on blue's watch list. It no longer has Megrim to play with in this cube. I'm just of the opinion that we're due for a decent blue five-drop again shortly - he should be pretty easy to replace. Surely.
Blood Seeker: Still a good card, but getting outclassed by Extort. An opponent can play around Blood Seeker. They can't play around Thrull Parasite quite so much.
Leyline of the Void: Was placeholding in the curve, nothing more. Don't think I'd seen it main-decked.
Sign in Blood: Voted out to my surprise, as it wasn't in my bottom five, but it is a one-shot spell in multiplayer, and we do have Yawgmoth's Bargain and Blood Scrivener in black to keep up the card advantage.
Unearth: Running out of little creatures in the cube that are worth resurrecting. There's a fair bit of reanimation in black already, so this isn't a big loss. It was beginning to get too conditional to be worth running just so you could cycle it when you were unable to play it.
Vampire Hexmage: Again, too conditional. People didn't want to waste a slot on Hexmage just to handle opponents' planeswalkers when they could simply be dropping bombs instead.
Howling Banshee remains simply because it's about to get replaced by Crypt Ghast at the first available opportunity. Ill-Gotten Gains remains on black's watch list, but is a card that can still create some fun situations. Someone will run it and break a game open with it at some point, I'd imagine.
Red was easy. It had some dogs.
Blazing Effigy: Probably Card #400 in the cube. Last-picked often. First overboard.
Ghitu Fire-Eater: Poor excuse for FTK #2. It was simply holding a slot in the curve. Over it goes.
Kyren Negotiations: The biggest dog in my perennially underpowered 4CC slot. I've seen it work once, and that was about a year ago.
Wall of Razors: Too fragile and too defensive for a colour that wants to lay waste to the board. Has been a last-pick.
Winds of Change: A card no-one played. I've seen this last-picked too.
Red still has some marginal cards, but it's much more solid without these five.
Green was a lot harder. It's been a very solid colour for quite a while now, and this was probably the last set of five we came to agreement on.
Bloom Tender: Earned the ire of people once they realized you had to have coloured permanents on the table already before it became useful (by which stage you've already got the mana colours you're chasing, right?)... its reputation fell off a cliff after that.
Brawn: Not a bad card, but underpowered compared to a lot of the rest of green. We've got Garruk and Ezuri to hand out blanket trample in green already, and Brawn only played well if you drafted Golgari (and started finding discard or sacrifice outlets for it).
Hurricane: The very last of the blanket damage spells in the cube (we've long since lost Earthquake and its cousins). People were just too frightened to play it. I saw it resolved for the first time in a long time last week, and that was only as the player committed hari-kiri on the way out of the game.
Mana Reflection: I like this card a fair bit, but you really want to be playing threats on Turn 6 in this cube, not doubling your mana. I should probably be finding room for Doubling Cube in the artifact section if we really want to be doing this type of thing. People were generally running Primeval Titan over this, with good reason.
Quirion Ranger: He's wonderful utility, but that alone won't get you over the line in green when you're a one-drop these days. That, plus there's no Stasis for it to play around, and not too many Elves you actually want to be untapping.
Quirion Ranger was very nearly Party Troll, but I don't think he's been given too fair a shake just yet. No-one's been game enough to play the dredge game with him yet. It'll be fun to watch when someone tries.
Darksteel Juggernaut: Its forced attack was too often a drawback, and it didn't often get huge. Believe it or not, we even had a situation where its indestructibility became a drawback once (a player with Nullmage Shepherd, Hateflayer and tokens kept aiming the Nullmage's ability at it to tap Hateflayer, and then untapped it to give someone five to the head... rinse, repeat...).
Hex Parasite: Same problem as Vampire Hexmage above in black. People just didn't want to invest in something that solely dealt with planeswalkers.
Karn, Silver Golem: A good card that simply didn't have enough targets. Tezzeret the Seeker is in the cube now anyway, and does this same ability better.
Pithing Needle: One of the guys in my playgroup put this best - unless you're already getting reamed by something, you're not playing it. And if you see it early, you're pretty much guessing if you put it on the board. And so it sits in your hand. And sits in your hand. And sits in your hand.
Voltaic Key: Another card that has simply become underpowered. And Tezzeret the Seeker does this effect pretty well too. It was pretty much only ever untapping Mana Vault, anyway.
This one was simple. We just ended the dream for tri-colour cards in the cube. We had one for each shard, and we axed the lot. Sphinx of the Steel Wind is the only one I'll miss (but even he hadn't been resolved in a while... might've only been Tinkerable).
The other four were mediocre Invasion dragons - Crosis, Darigaaz, Rith and Treva. Treva was one of the biggest dogs in the cube, and Rith was the only one that had done anything close to spectacular in the last year.
Another easy one. The Posts are gone.
We were running four Cloudposts and four Glimmerposts, just to give someone the chance of playing 8-Post. What ended up happening was that no-one drafted them, because they were afraid someone else was picking the rest up across the table, meaning they'd be wasting 3-4 decently high picks just to try and draft an 8-Post strategy. And even when you managed to draft it, it didn't always work.
Given we're only needing to cut five here, this leaves us with three empty slots. Coming in are:
Evolving Wilds: One day I'll get ten fetches in here (one day... when I'm much richer... :rolleyes:)... until then, I'm content with running four Terramorphic Expanses and one of these. I'd like to drop to a single Terramorphic at some point, just to get the cube back to being entirely singletons, and this is a step in the right direction towards it.
Kessig Wolf Run: A good finisher utility land (and yes, I lump lands like this in my land section, rather than my multicolour section). People are excited to see this in.
Rogue's Passage: Another good finisher (and one that is hard to remove). A couple of people asked for this one.
I will update the OP once I've physically made the changes in the cube itself. For now, running test drafts shows a lot less dross in the last few picks. I like it already.
Would you have cut anything different? Hit me up!
While we're doing the cuts to 360, I have two decent blue cards falling out of a deck that will be right at home in the cube. Passed these two by the group last night, and was met with much approval.
Body Double in for Magus of the Jar: Magus was probably left around card #358-360 after our cuts, and I was actively looking to replace him with something better over time (he hasn't had a Megrim-style effect to play with for quite a while, and even that was a two-card, two-colour combo). Having Body Double become available made my decision easy. Good enough on its own, but also has Reveillark to combo with. Someone may break it some day.
Consecrated Sphinx in for Deepchannel Mentor: I won't lie, I'm fond of Deepchannel, but it needs some blue beaters next to it to be a true win condition. And we haven't got many. And need to get more in. So it became fairly clear that while the Mentor was taking up a bomb finisher's slot, there weren't going to be enough bomb finishers for it to work with. We've just added Rogue's Passage, anyway. I'm sure blue will cope (now it's got all this horrid card advantage).
Changes now made physically, and the list on TappedOut has been updated - give it a test draft and marvel at the fact your last three picks in each booster are now no longer rubbish!
Had a test drive with five players last night and had a cracking night. I drafted Dimir, and was handed Fabricate as a last-pick. Almost main-decked it (would have if my artifact strategy was a little stronger). Nice when your last-picks are potential maindecks.
We also made six cube changes last night - I had a whole pile of decent cards fall out of decks, and had them on hand last night for the group to make decisions on. The changes:
Luminarch Ascension in for Spirit Loop: This card is incredible in multiplayer, but it's high-risk, high-reward. It has the potential to be spitting out 4/4 angels by Turn 3, but enough of us suspect that the rest of the cube is probably at an OK power level to cope with it or race it. It's in, but it's on the watch list for now.
Comet Storm in for Fireball: Comet Storm is what Fireball wants to be - easier to split, and instant. Wonderful burn spell.
Rolling Thunder in for Breath of Darigaaz: Again, adding some good red burn. Rolling Thunder is another excellent splittable fireball. It's very good at removing creature swarms. Breath was a global damager that people rarely maindecked.
Always sweet to add a build around card especially one as broken as Nightmare.
Also tried your cube out via tappedout, and ended with a sweet one!
http://tappedout.net/mtg-draft-simulator/draft/816046/
My 450ish 1vs1 cube
This update has four major purposes:
There were three too many non-basic land. 37 of the 43 are part of cycles that we don't want to part with, so we need to lop out three of the six utility lands we pack in here (yeah, one day I'll lump them in with their actual colours instead... natch).
Unholy Grotto and Sunhome, Fortress of the Legion are too good to drop. Grove of the Guardian has just been added, and has been useful in the play it's seen.
Therefore...
Tolarian Academy, Shimmering Grotto and Shivan Gorge out: Grotto and Gorge were obvious choices - they're the lowest power level of the six. The Academy was place-holding, and probably only works in powered cubes. In our testing, it's too slow here.
Esper has one too many cards (a carry-over from our RtR update). We're actually piffing both of the two Esper cards, as you'll see later, so let's just remove the worst of the two for now.
Zur, the Enchanter out: Don't worry, Esper gets love later.
Finally, Selesnya has one too many cards.
Risen Sanctuary out: So we'll remove the French vanilla.
That's five cards out. Our five Gatecrash guilds are all a card short in comparison to their RtR equivalents, so they get a free add further down. This now leaves gold balanced, and the guilds balanced to boot (six cards each for the allied guilds, five for the enemy guilds, one for each tri-colour shard).
This involved a fair few GTC cards, and a hefty voting system amongst our playgroup. And maybe an awesome trade or two.
Boros was a particularly weak guild.
Flame-Kin Zealot, Basandra, Battle Seraph and Spitemare out: Flame-Kin has been a last-pick forever, Basandra gets outclassed by Firemane Avenger, and Spitemare was just unlucky.
Ajani Vengeant, Assemble the Legion, Boros Charm and Firemane Avenger in: Not too much argument over Firemane and Ajani. The playgroup wants to test out the Charm and Assemble the Legion.
The only Boros card with a stay of execution is Brion Stoutarm.
Nearly as much carnage here.
Ghastlord of Fugue and Recoil out: Ghastlord gets replaced by Consuming Aberration (which is just miles better than Ghastlord in Multiplayer). Recoil was a low, low power level.
Consuming Aberration, Shadowmage Infiltrator and Havengul Lich in: A really good mix comes in - a finisher, some evasion and some combo. It was close between the Lich and Nightveil Specter.
Staying in are Wrexial, Barrin's Spite and Tidehollow Strix. I suspect over time, Mind Grind might get a look in here though.
Gruul was a mess. No-one played it. They sure will now.
Wild Cantor, Wreak Havoc, Exploding Borders, Ulasht, the Hate Seed and Predatory Advantage out: Let's purge the entire guild! Most of this is pretty low-power and mostly useless. Cantor in particular was a popular last-pick.
Sarkhan Vol, Clan Defiance, Fires of Yavimaya, Rubblehulk, Mage Slayer and Dragonlair Spider in: This looks a lot more fun. Sarkhan in particular was a good trade pickup. I'm a bit concerned by Dragonlair's casting cost, but he was a popular inclusion, so we'll see.
Only one add here.
Treasury Thrull in: About the best thing we could add from GTC. One of these days, we'll get Sorin and Vindicate in.
Again, only one add here.
Spitting Image in: A popular choice. This is going to be insane next to populate. We could've gone something from GTC here, but not much stood out for this cube. Fathom Mage was close, but that was it.
I've been sitting on four of the five Swords for ages, and just needed the fifth to bring the whole set in at once. Finally!
Helm, Shield and Sword of Kaldra out: The Kaldras can be replaced here. No-one's actually managed to get Kaldra himself out, and the Helm by itself is pretty useless.
Fodder Cannon and Hornet Cannon out: These two were the worst two artifacts in the cube. Fodder was an expensive sac outlet, Hornet was just in for the cute combo with Grave Pact.
Sword of Fire and Ice, Light and Shadow, War and Peace, Feast and Famine, and Body and Mind in: Yay!
Again, I'd been sitting on four of the five for ages, waiting on the fifth to bring the set in as a whole. And now we can.
Some final obvious changes thanks to decks falling apart or good trades.
Phew! That was all fun to trade for or purchase!
Let me know what you think! The power level of the cube definitely seems to have gone up a notch according to my playtest drafts! Can't wait to see it in paper!
My Stupidly Large Number of Current Decks
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On spoiled card wishlisting and 'should-have-had'-isms:
Like the spider, multiple guys for one card is quite good. Obviously, they both have trouble with the "terminate test." However, P. A. "lives" through most sweepers. If you end up keeping Rubblehulk, but cutting the spider, consider putting P.A. back.
Yeah, I'm in complete agreement with you there - I turned the Gruul section over to my group to vote on, and a couple had had good enough times with Rubblehulk in the GTC pre-release that they wanted to see it in.
And surprisingly, nobody plays Predatory Advantage in my group. I have no idea why... I'm trying to source a full playset to break my multiplayer meta with, as I'm sure it should go to town. Just not seen it a) drafted highly, or b) main-decked. I guess no-one's had the balls to give it a try. Admittedly, if it was 4CC instead of 5CC, I have a feeling I'd be seeing it everywhere.
I too suspect Rubblehulk is nothing more than a wide body plus a potential one-shot kill, but I'm happy to have the 3+ guys in my group who are vouching for it try and prove it to me otherwise before I piff it!
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Blue has always been a delicate balance for me - at its core, it wants to counter and control, but those things generally make for slow and unfun games (hi there, Stasis!). My blue section has gone heavily into artifact-based strategies, and that seems to be working quite well - it's a very strong draft archetype for one. Tinker, Fabricate, Inkwell Leviathan, Etherium Sculptor and Vedalken Archmage all help make this work (as well as the just-added Tezzeret the Seeker). The rest of my blue section is more about the control core, and I think I've got the balance just right with it at the moment - I certainly wouldn't want it having much more power than what it has. At the moment, it has just enough to grind a game out with.
If you wanted to really power it up, you'd look at all the hated blue multiplayer cards - Stasis, Propaganda, Erayo, Lighthouse Chronologist...
My Stupidly Large Number of Current Decks
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Cube: the Gittening (My Multiplayer Cube) - MTGS Cube List | @ CubeTutor
The N00b Cube (Peasant cube for new players) - MTGS Cube List | @ CubeTutor
Thanks for the feedback! I'm really looking forward to testing it out too!
I've traded for or purchased about 30 of the 35 cards in the GTC update, and they're all still filtering back to me, so we haven't been able to actually cube it yet. I'm checking the mailbox each day like a giggling schoolgirl!
My Stupidly Large Number of Current Decks
PucaTrade with me!
The Multiplayer Power Rankings
Cube: the Gittening (My Multiplayer Cube) - MTGS Cube List | @ CubeTutor
The N00b Cube (Peasant cube for new players) - MTGS Cube List | @ CubeTutor
Finally, the GTC changes are all in. Waiting for them to turn up was like waiting for a baby to be delivered.
We had five players, so we dished out four boosters each for the draft, meaning we had 300 of the 400 cards in circulation.
Amazingly none of the five of us drafted green. I don't know how that came to be, but it resulted in bomb green cards like Thragtusk and Garruk Wildspeaker being close to last-picks. Don't think we'll see that again in a hurry.
Four of the five Swords were first-picked (with Sword of Body and Mind being a second pick, passed over only for Grave Titan). Surprisingly, most of the Lorwyn Five were mid-round drafts. I saw all of them go past apart from Jace (who apparently was still not a first-pick himself).
In the end, we had:
Player 1: Br control, mostly focusing on the good black control creatures in the cube, but with enough red to splash for Chandra and a little burn.
Player 2: BU control
Player 3: U artifact
Player 4: BW Knights with Swords
Player 5 (me!): RW Post-ramp
1 Flamekin Harbinger
1 Ashling the Pilgrim
1 Cryptborn Horror
1 Lavafume Invoker
1 Transcendent Master
1 Reveillark
1 Shivan Dragon
1 Steel Hellkite
1 Sun Titan
1 Hateflayer
1 Red Sun's Zenith
1 Fireball
1 Swords to Plowshares
1 Boros Signet
1 Chromatic Lantern
1 Jalum Tome
1 Mimic Vat
1 Sword of Body and Mind
1 Ajani Vengeant
1 Assemble the Legion
1 Gilded Lotus
1 Miraculous Recovery
1 Urza's Blueprints
4 Cloudpost
3 Glimmerpost
1 Clifftop Retreat
1 Vivid Meadow
4 Mountain
4 Plains
Bear in mind that my cube carries four Cloudposts and four Glimmerposts. I picked up late in the first draft round that no-one else was picking them up, and had two Cloudposts and a Glimmerpost by the end of Round 1. People kept letting them slide from there - hence 7-Post.
The general aim was to ramp with Posts and mana stones into burn and mana-intensive beatsticks like Transcendent Master, Shivan Dragon, Steel Hellkite and Hateflayer. In practise, the Knights deck next to me started too fast, and I didn't draw any of my ramp pieces in time (hooray for a single Post and no mana stones for the entire match). My deck was the first to fall.
The other decks all fired evenly. It was quite pretty to watch it unfold while I was being smashed.
Player 1 teamed up Grave Titan and Phyrexian Plaguelord for good crowd control (swing with the Titan, produce zombies, throw them overboard to the Plaguelord to clear the path). He had Undertaker as well to recur them should they leave the table (and given Plaguelord is an instant sacrifice effect, even attempts to exile them failed). He really went to town once he landed Grave Betrayal alongside this... everything he blew off the table with the Plaguelord started appearing on his side of the board!
Player 2 managed to control things heading in his direction long enough to hit 10 mana. And then he dropped Consuming Aberration followed by Whispersilk Cloak! Game-winning creature on the board, gentlemen!
Player 3 was stuck with tiny creatures (Etherium Sculptor, Invisible Stalker, wolf tokens), but he was turning them into gorillas - he had Fireshrieker, Sword of War and Peace and a copy of my Sword of Body and Mind to play with, and was milling people for 20 with a single connect to the face.
Player 4 managed to almost completely draft the Knights with Swords archetype, and got Knight Exemplar, Kinsbaile Cavalier, Knight of Meadowgrain, Ajani Goldmane and Sword of Feast and Famine all on the board in double-quick time. By the time Ajani started throwing his +1/+1 counters on top of all those indestructible, double-striking Knights, it was real. He took me out pretty quickly before I was able to ramp into anything completely damaging.
Player 1 could control everything except the Aberration, and that's what Player 2 took him out with. Meanwhile, Player 3 had milled Player 4 down to a four-card library with a well-equipped Stalker. This set up a Mexican standoff between the final three players.
Player 2 could take out either of the players, but was going to die to the other one (Player 3 could hit with Sword of War and Peace double-striked for lethal, Player 4 could get the Knights through for lethal).
Player 3 could mill Player 4 to death, but couldn't deal with the Aberration.
Player 4 could kill Player 2 with the Knights, but would die to mill before he could cope with Player 3.
They sat there for a while figuring it out, but Player 4 had his hand forced by his lack of library. He scalped Player 2 with his Knights, only to get milled out by Player 3 (who amazingly won the game despite having played a grand total of two 1-power creatures off his own bat).
The four of them were all in positions to win, and all had to make hard decisions as to which player to aim for - a great sign for the relative balance of the cube, given that we all seemed to draft decks about the same power level (mine would have hung with the others late - it just didn't fire, and you get nights like that).
I knew from my test drafting that it would feel like the cube had gone up a power level - adding five Titans, five Swords and three Planeswalkers will do that. It led to some wonderfully swingy plays, and a lot of agreement from the other players when it came to the power level increase.
Still getting loving comments over email from the group this morning. Ah, success!
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Dumped virtually the entire cube out and decided to play sealed with each player getting four 16-card boosters (this got 384 of the 400 cards out in the wild).
We ended up with the following:
Player 1: BGW reanimator, featuring Chainer and Jarad.
Player 2: GW equipment (packing Stoneforge and two of the Swords).
Player 3: UB control with Consuming Aberration for a good time.
Player 4: BGW beatdown (with Recurring Nightmare and the Titans in each of the colours).
Player 5: BW "let's throw all my good cards in a pile and cross my fingers" (his words, essentially, not mine! He was trying to recurse with Reveillark, amongst other things)
Player 6 (Me!): BR Zombie/Elemental tribal reanimator.
1 Death Baron
1 Doomgape
1 Dragonmaster Outcast
1 Dread
1 Flametongue Kavu
1 Incandescent Soulstoke
1 Inferno Titan
1 Lightning Reaver
1 Murderous Redcap
1 Nezumi Graverobber
1 Smokebraider
1 Undead Warchief
1 Urborg Syphon-Mage
1 Breath of Darigaaz
1 Chromatic Lantern
1 Conspiracy
1 Insurrection
1 Mimic Vat
1 Mox Diamond
1 Sneak Attack
1 Sword of Feast and Famine
1 Tortured Existence
1 Urza's Blueprints
9 Mountain
8 Swamp
I managed to end up with some half-decent Zombie and Elemental themes here, along with Conspiracy, which I could set to either depending on the situation. Plus, I had some nice recursion, throwing things out there with Soulstoke and Sneak Attack, only to retrieve them with Graverobber and Tortured Existence as needs.
Game One was a six-player free-for-all. I begin by dropping Nezumi Graverobber and flipping it on Turn 3 (taking someone's lonely used Terramorphic Expanse for the flip).
And of course, Player 2 then suits up his Birds of Paradise with Sword of Body and Mind and begins the mill pain with me.
Two turns later, I'm down to six cards in my library, Player 1 is having his wicked way with the contents of my graveyard thanks to Chainer, and then Player 3 drops her Consuming Aberration! Oh bollocks!
Thankfully, her only other defense is Corrosive Mentor, she's on 14 life, and I have 15 power on the table (Dread, the flipped Graverobber and a couple of handy zombies). Plus, I have five land and an Inferno Titan in hand. I top-deck, and it's.... land #6! Oh happy day! I drop the Titan, piff the Mentor and swing for lethal, which naturally opens the game right up and starts toppling the dominos.
Player 1 promptly steals my Doomgape with Chainer, and then proceeds to throw it overboard to Jarad for a very evil play. This knocks out Player 2, who's had a couple of incidental dings to the face in the last couple of turns, and leaves the rest of us well and truly in single digits.
Player 4 saw this coming, and dropped Stuffy Doll targetting Player 1. After the Jarad play, it comes around to his turn, and he promptly detains Jarad and blows Chainer off the board, leaving him defenseless and on 19. He swings for 12, and sends Stuffy Doll at me so I can block it with Inferno Titan for 6 more, leaving him on 1.
Player 5 is madly trying to do something with his game, and resolves Vish Kal, Blood Arbiter, which is all sorts of bad for me (his first target is my flipped Graverobber, which gets deep-sixed).
It comes around to my turn and I topdeck Breath of Darigaaz. It's a shame I'm on 4! I cast it unkicked to take out Player 1, drop Flametongue Kavu and swing with the Titan to take out Vish Kal. He's already thrown a creature or two overboard thanks to the Breath, so Vish is able to take out the Titan on the way out (yes, bad play by me... I blame sleep deprivation!).
So Player 5 is left undefended on 6 life, and I am on 3. It's back to Player 4's turn (he's on 5 life himself!)... he's got Recurring Nightmare and Sun Titan now, and essentially pays 4BB to blink Stuffy Doll and retarget it to me. He sends Sun Titan at Player 6 and wipes him off the map. And then drops Prime Time for good measure and passes.
My turn again, and I'm down to two cards. Ack. I draw Sword of Feast and Famine, which doesn't help. I can't get through Stuffy Doll - I'm left with three creatures (the two zombies and FTK), and he's got the Titans and Stuffy Doll. If I swing, I connect with Stuffy Doll one way or another and die before I can deal the face damage I need to. I pass. He passes and waits to see if I have an answer with my last card.
It's a mountain. I scoop.
So another grandstand finish for the rejigged cube!
We followed that up with Game Two, a 3-on-3 team game.
This pitted Player 1, Player 5 and myself against Players 2, 3 and 4.
Player 1 and I smile about the fact that we're both essentially playing reanimator decks that seemed to riff off each other pretty nicely in the previous game. The two teams trade blows for the first seven turns.
And then Player 1 drops Exhume. And then I follow it with Insurrection. Game over.
The night ended with the following quotes:
"The cube has really taken off in popularity, hasn't it?"
"It's a lot more aggro and balanced now with the new cards in."
"It's down to the wire every time we play it now!"
Happy, happy days.
I should add that Player 1 actually managed to drop Jarad, Golgari Lich Lord on Turn 4. He's officially off the watch list now, methinks!
Also, a temporary change, given that the Grave Pact seems to have disappeared somewhere from the cube (we've all looked, and no-one can find it... good thing I can trust all my guys. It's probably shuffled in somewhere).
Leyline of the Void in for Grave Pact: This is, unfortunately, about the best thing I have available at 4CC. It probably wants to be Barter in Blood or another Grave Pact long-term, but this will do for now. Fun reanimator hosing, at the least.
We're also discussing dropping Naturalize for Seal of Primordium (given we want to push Enchantress in long-term, and the Seal will recur with Sun Titan). That one will probably happen.
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Do the games ever go long enough so people start running out of cards, even without getting milled?
Thread | Draft
Yep, still at 3x 15 with 40 card decks.
The only times people have gone close to running out of cards are either via mill as you suspect (especially via Consuming Abberation or Sword of Body and Mind), or by accelerated card draw (we had one guy almost deck out via Font of Mythos and Overbeing of Myth, and another who almost decked himself with Rhystic Study). Generally speaking, the cube is thankfully aggro enough that people aren't getting down to the last couple of cards in their decks now without a little extra-curricular activity.
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Force an Enchantress Archetype
Yes, yes, Enchantress never works, does it? Your creatures get two-for-oned all the time, you lose all your auras, rah, rah, rah... but it's still such fun! Enchantress remains a very popular archetype in my playgroup, and I've pulled my old, unloved version of the deck apart to stick some of the pieces in the cube. It had enough auras in it already to make it somewhat viable. Now we give it a real push.
A Couple of Other Small Black Changes
I'll eventually bring in Angelic Destiny for Martial Law to further bolster Enchantress, too.
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Thrull Parasite in for Pulse Tracker: The Tracker was fairly efficient, but probably only got three swings in max each time. Thrull Parasite is going to cause the same amount of bleeding without even needing to swing. And there will be more Extort coming. Oh yes there will.
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Four-player drafts are great fun with this cube - the drafting happens quickly, and we can get in a fair number of games with our decks. We drafted the following:
Player 1: White Knights with a splash of green.
Player 2: Naya.
Player 3: Grixis.
Player 4 (me!): Dimir reanimator built around Consuming Aberration.
We played a four-player free-for-all, followed by three 2HG games (using all three possible pairings in the process for fun).
1 Coffin Queen
1 Consuming Aberration
1 Deepchannel Mentor
1 Doomgape
1 Jace's Archivist
1 Kira, Great Glass-Spinner
1 Mulldrifter
1 Pack Rat
1 Shriekmaw
1 Steel Hellkite
1 Stuffy Doll
1 Arcane Denial
1 Diabolic Tutor
1 Dimir Signet
1 Dissipate
1 Expedition Map
1 Grave Betrayal
1 Jalum Tome
1 Panoptic Mirror
1 Recurring Nightmare
1 Rhystic Study
1 Spitting Image
1 Tezzeret the Seeker
1 Tortured Existence
1 Terramorphic Expanse
9 Swamp
8 Island
Yes, 42 cards. You should see some of the stuff I had to leave off this list.
I resolved Consuming Aberration once, and he lasted a turn. Would have loved to have landed Aberration and Deepchannel Mentor next to each other, but it wasn't to be.
Still, this deck did quite well. It singlehandedly won a 2HG game by resolving Steel Hellkite on Turn 5 and keeping the board clean on the other side while it connected. It also managed to foil a Wild Ricocheted Clan Defiance in another 2HG game by having Rhystic Study activate on the Ricochet and top-decking Arcane Denial to stop the original Clan Defiance. Two for one!
Pack Rat also turned out to be a game winner. From a fairly impossible position, I resolved Pack Rat and immediately began dumping to it. We were absorbing a bit of pain, but I kept throwing out my draws to it, and eventually wound up with six copies for lethal. It's now firmly in my "Better than even I thought" camp.
The Knights deck was almost completely mono-white (it splashed a little bit of green... I saw Sundering Growth, but I think that was about it!). Stonehewer Giant supplied Swords for Knight Exemplar, Mirran Crusader, Paladin en-Vec, Knight of Meadowgrain, and, of course, the Love Chaplain (who can't help but get involved in these things).
It had good control with Intrepid Hero, Erratic Portal and Wrath of God, and managed to connect with Sword of War and Peace for lethal at least once.
The Grixis deck was a fun concoction, relying on Havengul Lich and Chandra Nalaar for heavy lifting and Chromatic Lantern for mana fixing (and let me tell you, the Lich loves having the Lantern sitting around).
Inferno Titan also made a couple of game-winning appearances, controlling the field well.
The Naya deck showed us that Clan Defiance is indeed a bomb card (it resolved for lethal once, and almost carried a second game away if not for the topdeck mentioned above). It also dropped the first surprise Rubblehulk bloodrush for double-figures damage. It carried a couple of other nice cards along for the ride, including Adarkar Valkyrie, Assemble the Legion and Emeria Angel.
All four decks were well-balanced against each other, and we all saw some measure of success on the night. Still need to improve red's creature options a little, particularly around the 2CC mark, but we all knew that (welcome to one of the banes of a multiplayer cube, anyway... it's a universal problem).
I should also add the incredible pack that I opened in the middle of the draft.
It's the start of Round 2, and my first two picks in Round 1 were Consuming Aberration and Deepchannel Mentor, committing me to Dimir.
I open the pack for Round 2, and I see Recurring Nightmare, Sword of War and Peace, Yawgmoth's Bargain, Havengul Lich, Adarkar Valkyrie, Dimir Signet, Dissipate, Red Sun's Zenith... that booster made a lot of people cry. I had to pick RN and pass it weeping. Havengul and the Sword didn't make it back around for Pick 5.
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A grand night - the biggest draft we've had in a while. With an uneven number, and a large table, we decided against trying to play a 4hr-long free-for-all, and instead played two Grand Melee games (attack left, defend right, spell range of one player each side - we switched attack/defend directions for Game 2).
Player 1: GW Enchantress
Player 2: Jund
Player 3: UWB Equipment
Player 4: WRB Knights, splashing black for Sorin
Player 5 (me!): Jund
Player 6: Jund
Player 7: UG artifact / clone
As you can see by that, three Jund decks out of seven, including two of us next to each other. Strangely, it worked out - I drafted hard reanimator/recursion strategy, while Player 6 next to me went hard Zombie tribal with the other two colours in support. Player 2 across the table probably had the weakest of the three Jund decks.
Player 1's deck won the first game in spectactular fashion. He managed to draft a large chunk of the Enchantress archetype, along with a couple of good targets for things. At one point, he had the brutal combo of Primeval Titan, Emeria Angel and Skullclamp on the table (basically reading "When Primeval Titan attacks, get two land, pay 2 and draw four cards"). Once Armadillo Cloak got onto Prime Time, things started getting ugly. Once Celestial Mantle landed on it too, it was time to scoop. He finished on 258 life.
Player 7 won the second game thanks to the joy of Tinker.
Turn 2: Dimir Signet
Turn 5: Tinker for Inkwell Leviathan
Turn 6: Eternal Witness for Tinker
Turn 7: Simic Signet. Tinker for Memnarch
Turn 8: Imperious Perfect
Turn 9: Steal Warstorm Surge and Mana Reflection from opponents with Memnarch.
Turn 10: Rite of Replication kicked on Imperious Perfect. Stick five 7/7 Perfects on the table, dish out 35 points of love, kill two players. Create a 7/7 Elf token with the original Perfect to kill a third player.
Turn 11: Swing for the win.
He now considers Tinker potentially too broken for the Cube after pulling that off.
We didn't see a lot of Player 2's deck, but it was heavy on damage and removal, and Brother Grim did a lot of work in both games.
Player 3 drafted both Stoneforge Mystic and Stonehewer Giant, some good equipment, and Treasury Thrull to return them when they got axed. He had fun throwing about Sword of Body and Mind and Gorgon Flail (and had Light and Shadow too, but never drew it). Unfortunately, he was simply unable to cope with Player 1's PrimeTime in Game 1, and Player 4's Knights in Game 2.
Player 4 decided to draft around whichever planeswalkers he landed. He was promptly handed Ajani Goldmane, Ajani Vengeant, Chandra Nalaar and Sorin, Lord of Innistrad! Superfriends! He was aiming to just take whatever else was good in those colours, and lucked into Knights, getting Knight Exemplar and Mirran Crusader along with a fair few of the backup Knights. He landed both of his key Knights in both games, and once they started getting buffed by Goldmane or Sorin, things turned ugly. His was one of the strongest decks at the table, and he took his fair share of scalps with his concoction.
My Jund deck was aiming to recurse from the start - lots of 187 creatures (like Bone Shredder and Shriekmaw), Magma Phoenix and Tortured Existence for recursion, Pack Rat for a surprise discard outlet, Thragtusk, red burn as a backup plan... I just lucked into only the BG section of my deck in Game 1, only to have Player 4 next to me drop Mirran Crusader on Turn 3. Not much I could do about that. I almost Pack Ratted him out of the game in Game 2, but the kicked Rite from Player 7 took me out just as I was building enough steam (where "enough" equals seven Pack Rats).
Player 6 managed to do some nice things with her deck too - Undead Warchief into Lightning Reaver in Game 1 caused a lot of headaches for people, as did Inferno Titan wearing Fireshrieker. She was last to fall prey to the rampaging PrimeTime in Game 1, and simply couldn't stop the angry Inkwell in Game 2.
The Bombs: There will be a bit of discussion about Tinker after this - it was very, very good. If you have the targets for it, and you're able to recurse it, bad things follow. It had a most excellent deck behind it, though.
I was also overjoyed to see the Enchantress archetype win a game (and not just win, but do so with ease). It's clearly strong enough despite the levels of removal in the Cube. And I didn't even see Ancestral Mask hit the board. The card advantage alone from the Enchantress drove that deck to a strong victory. Good signs.
Grim Lavamancer, Lightning Reaver, Memnarch, Pack Rat and Mirran Crusader also showed up strongly.
The Last-Picks: A lot of Signets, Wild Ricochet (which I was very happy to see handed last to me, playing Jund), Invisibility, Tidehollow Strix. Invisibility was really the only one that bothered me - the rest is stuff that just fell through the cracks on the night.
Following on from the game, I prompted a discussion about the size of the Cube. It continually drives me bonkers that there are cards left in the box as we draft. The Cube is currently at 400, as it was built off Evan Erwin's original size recommendation back in the day. I've finally come to the final conclusion that Evan, bless his soul, was mad to suggest such a silly number. 400 is in absolutely no way divisible by 45 (which is three 15-card boosters). We always have stuff that doesn't make it into boosters. And it drives me mad in the middle of a draft, I could be attempting to draft a particular archetype while I am running the risk of one of its key components being back in the box and unavailable.
This fact was highlighted tonight by my Knights player. As much as he lucked into drafting the archetype, Kinsbaile Cavalier (a card that would have really pushed him over the top) was back in the box, undrafted. That type of thing curls my toes.
And so, we've made the tough call. We will drop the Cube to 360.
I'm lopping five cards out of each section (each colour, gold, artifact, land). I suspect it shouldn't be too hard to find the 40 most lineball cards in the Cube, but it's still tricky to do. I suspect this will have a hand in taking the Posts out of the land section for one. This is also immediately puts my Cube's most-hated placeholder card on the chopping block straight up. Blazing Effigy, be gone.
I'll update with the cuts over the coming week or two.
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I copied your current list over on TappedOut as an idea to start with, hope you don't mind
Go for your life!
I hope to have our proposed cull to 360 done by the end of the week (we've agreed on the changes to blue, black and red so far, and gold won't be hard), so it might be worth checking back then. I'll update the TappedOut list once I physically pull the 40 losers out of the cube itself.
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I have been looking to convert my cube to multiplayer for some time now, and have looked to your cube and another guy's EDH cube as my primary sources.
Cheers!
We think we've nailed our forty cuts as a playgroup. Admittedly, most of it wasn't too hard. I probably had somewhere in the league of 370 good cards in the cube, and the last 30 were placeholders or dross that fitted the curve.
So, without further ado...
Tinker stays in, as I'm fairly convinced its explosiveness in our last flight was simply due to it being a part of a very, very good deck built around it (one that managed to draft Inky, Memnarch, Eternal Witness and a bunch of cheap artifacts, and then roll to perfection in-game). I don't think that's going to happen again too soon - Inky and Memnarch are really two of just three decent Tinker targets in the entire cube (with Steel Hellkite being the third). Getting two of the three, along with Tinker and some means of recursing it? Solid, solid deck.
Magus of the Jar is the only other card on blue's watch list. It no longer has Megrim to play with in this cube. I'm just of the opinion that we're due for a decent blue five-drop again shortly - he should be pretty easy to replace. Surely.
Howling Banshee remains simply because it's about to get replaced by Crypt Ghast at the first available opportunity.
Ill-Gotten Gains remains on black's watch list, but is a card that can still create some fun situations. Someone will run it and break a game open with it at some point, I'd imagine.
Red was easy. It had some dogs.
Red still has some marginal cards, but it's much more solid without these five.
Green was a lot harder. It's been a very solid colour for quite a while now, and this was probably the last set of five we came to agreement on.
Quirion Ranger was very nearly Party Troll, but I don't think he's been given too fair a shake just yet. No-one's been game enough to play the dredge game with him yet. It'll be fun to watch when someone tries.
This one was simple. We just ended the dream for tri-colour cards in the cube. We had one for each shard, and we axed the lot. Sphinx of the Steel Wind is the only one I'll miss (but even he hadn't been resolved in a while... might've only been Tinkerable).
The other four were mediocre Invasion dragons - Crosis, Darigaaz, Rith and Treva. Treva was one of the biggest dogs in the cube, and Rith was the only one that had done anything close to spectacular in the last year.
Another easy one. The Posts are gone.
We were running four Cloudposts and four Glimmerposts, just to give someone the chance of playing 8-Post. What ended up happening was that no-one drafted them, because they were afraid someone else was picking the rest up across the table, meaning they'd be wasting 3-4 decently high picks just to try and draft an 8-Post strategy. And even when you managed to draft it, it didn't always work.
Given we're only needing to cut five here, this leaves us with three empty slots. Coming in are:
I will update the OP once I've physically made the changes in the cube itself. For now, running test drafts shows a lot less dross in the last few picks. I like it already.
Would you have cut anything different? Hit me up!
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Had to try it out, and I got a very nice aggressive Bant deck:
http://tappedout.net/mtg-draft-simulator/draft/1049151/ (seat 6).
Looks like you guys are in for a treat!
My 450ish 1vs1 cube
Also seen last night:
We also made six cube changes last night - I had a whole pile of decent cards fall out of decks, and had them on hand last night for the group to make decisions on. The changes:
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