MTG Salvation

This cube is designed to provide an exciting draft environment, with games being tight due to the relatively flat power level. It's meant to showcase powerful and iconic cards from Magic's past within a singleton framework.Comments and suggestions are welcome. Thanks for stopping by!
BetweenWalls

Banner art by hameed, section art by WotC artists. As long as you credit this page, feel free to use any of the section headers here or even the formatting here for your own thread.

Having hybrid cards in both colors' section and their own section is very confusing. Also why is halimar deths blue bu faerie conclave a land? I would recomend placing cards in sections based on color identity (the guild system).

Cards I wouldn't run:

I agree that the layout of your cube is very confusing. You dont need to count hybrid cards as half a normal card, as most of the time, you wouldn't play a hybrid card unless you played both of it's colors.

Quote from citynoise

Having hybrid cards in both colors' section and their own section is very confusing. Also why is halimar deths blue bu faerie conclave a land? I would recomend placing cards in sections based on color identity (the guild system).

• Knight of the Holy Nimbus
  
• Village Bellringer
  
• Plumeveil
  
• Wilt-Leaf Cavaliers
  
• Totem-Guide Hartebeast
  
• Hyena Umbra
  
• Enlightened Tutor
  
• Carom
  
• Sundering Growth
  
• Archaeomancer
  
• Elgaud Shieldmate
  
• Halimar Depths
  
• Brainstorm
  
• Jace's Ingenuity
  
• Blood Seeker
  
• Gatekeeper of Malakir
  
• Skeleton Shard
  
• Ashmouth Hound
  
• Hinterland Hermit
  
• Reckless Abandon
  
• Fire Whip
  
• Artillerize
  
• Rock Slide
  
• Grazing Gladeheart
  
• Groundswell
  
• Hunger of the Howlpack
  
• Utopia Sprawl
  
• Worldly Tutor
  
• Snake Umbra
  
• Overgrowth
  
• Duplicant (is a rare)
  
• Trepenation Blade
  
• Zuran Orb
  
• Elixir of Immortality
  
• Dismantling Blow
  
• Deft Duelist
  
• Branching Bolt
  
• Fires of Yavimaya
  
• Armadillo Cloak
  
• Travel Preparations
  
• Gerrard's Verdict
  
• Necrogenesis
  
• Goblin Electromancer
  
• Granger Guildmage
  
• Nightscape Familiar
  
• Thornscape Battlemage
  
• Sunscape Battlemage

Thanks for the feedback - I like some of your card suggestions but am confused about a number of them. After I skim the list, I'll take another look at those I'm less certain about.

As for the guild system, the cube is organized by how cards are played rather than their cost and many of those hybrids are useable in either. Some of them however, wouldn't be played without both colors, so I'll try reorganizing them. Is the layout that difficult to follow as is? I feel like one could either ignore the hybrids in their colored sections or in the multicolor section depending on which system they prefer.

Quote from DeusofCalamity

I agree that the layout of your cube is very confusing. You dont need to count hybrid cards as half a normal card, as most of the time, you wouldn't play a hybrid card unless you played both of it's colors.

How about the rest of the formatting - is that easy to navigate? Here are the hybrids I'm considering for the guild sections:

3 colored mana symbols

• Plumeveil
  
• Boggart Ram-Gang
  
• Wilt-Leaf Cavaliers
  
• Hearthfire Hobgoblin

all effects only function with both colors

• Cankerous Thirst
  
• Firespout

Rakdos Shred-Freak & Sundering Growth are the only others that I could see being played mostly with both colors.

I'd like to include a lot of multicolored cards, as many of them are very interesting. Would 4 of each guild be too much? 5? Could I possibly run 2 of each shard? (Thornscape Battlemage, Slave of Bolas, Hit // Run, Esper Charm, Rhox War Monk)

Bad 2-5 color cards just take up space in drafts and never really see play. They are basically just blank pieces of card stock.

Everybody loves the cool multicolor cards but making conisistent, solid, decks in a cube over-saturated with unplayable gold cards is very hard.

I would literally never play Etherwrought Page. Ever.

Quote from citynoise

Everybody loves the cool multicolor cards but making conisistent, solid, decks in a cube over-saturated with unplayable gold cards is very hard.

I would literally never play Etherwrought Page. Ever.

I replaced that particular card above with Esper Charm, but I agree with you after giving it some more thought, at least at 360. I still have hope that once I near 450, it'll be a possibility.

I have the list hovering around 400 now, so it seems I'll have to make some cuts. My pauper cube ran very few lands and worked fine, so I may attempt to replicate that here. Here's the plan for going down to 360:

54 each color, 35 colorless (~10 lands), 55 multicolor (10 lands)


I'm debating whether I want to include functional and near-functional duplicate cards. At some point, certain card types may need to be represented multiple times, (i.e. Llanowar Elves, aggro creatures) though that certainly isn't the case for everything.

Examples:

• Cultivate
  
• Galvanic Juggernaut
  
• Keening Banshee
  
• Pacifism
  
• Rift Bolt

Hey, I really love your lay out for the cube contents colour sections... Mind if I use it in my thread?

Go for it! As long as credit is given, I'd love to have my work being used elsewhere.

I couldn't find many easy cuts for 360, so I've decided to begin at 404 cards instead. (har har) Less work for me, more interesting drafts. Perhaps after the RTR block is complete, I'll go through and skim to 360.

I've been considering the effects of walls in here, as well as mill. Leaning toward keeping the walls in for testing before I make a decision. As for mill, there really aren't many good mill cards at the common rarity; each one is near useless in a non-mill deck. (Memory Sluice, Dream Twist, Mind Sculpt, etc) As for uncommons, we have:

• Brain Freeze (storm - looks promising)
  
• Mind Funeral (removes lands)
  
• Hedron Crab
  
• Misinformation (yikes!)
  
• Trepanation Blade
  
• Millstone
  
• Mindcrank
  
• Belltower Sphinx
  
• Psychic Drain
  
• Flint Golem
  
• Bamboozle
  
• Psychic Spiral (works well with self-mill)
  
• Dampen Thought (how many arcane spells could I use?)
  
• Chill of Foreboding
  
• Stern Mentor
  
• Codex Shredder
  
• Duskmantle, House of Shadow

Trepanation Blade is already in the cube, so I'll try adding Brain Freeze and Psychic Spiral as they don't seem to require much dedicated space. These cards will need to be useable on either player to be most effective, which means I also need to support the re-animator archetype. Hedron Crab could work, as could Darkblast and Stinkweed Imp. The new Doorkeeper is an idea. Anyone know of other cards that would fit, or if an existing peasant list supports mill/re-animator?

EDIT: Some cards I'm considering to help enable reanimator:

• Buried Alive
  
• Forbidden Alchemy

I hate walls. They aren't a proactive strategy, they can't win the game, they keep aggro down. If aggro is dominating drafts, adding some walls/lifegain dudes is fine but I wouldn't do that unless control is getting pushed out of the metagame.

I also don't like mill. It is highly parasitic and I firmly believe parasitic mechanics don't belong in cube. If you have a deck with only 5 creatures you can still easily win the game. Get 1 mill creature and 3 spells. Good luck. Also mill invalidates all the damage you do and vice versa. It only makes colors weaker, packs worse, and tricks people into drafting bad decks. Also a lot of those mill cards you listed are just literal unplayables.

Darkblast/Stinkweed Imp are fine cards.

Quote from DeusofCalamity

I agree that the layout of your cube is very confusing. You dont need to count hybrid cards as half a normal card, as most of the time, you wouldn't play a hybrid card unless you played both of it's colors.

This is extremely card dependent, and that's why I do everything on a card-by-card basis.

Boggart ram gang - Only played in gruul

Murderous redcap - Played in any R or B deck, barring the rarest exceptions

rakdos guildmage - Have to play and see if it gets played in red without black or vise versa

And so on

Quote from citynoise

I hate walls. They aren't a proactive strategy, they can't win the game, they keep aggro down. If aggro is dominating drafts, adding some walls/lifegain dudes is fine but I wouldn't do that unless control is getting pushed out of the metagame.

I love walls. Not dying is just like winning the game to me and it lets me build decks in funny ways. Playing Wall of tanglecord into pyroclasm is not the same as playing terror into pyroclasm. I don't care if they are good against aggro because aggro doesn't have a hard time in my cube. They are better against midrange anyway.



Galvanic Juggernaut plays completely differently than Juggernaut. Completely.


Mill is a bad strategy because you can't win without having enough of them and they are useless without that critical mass. Scrap the whole idea. Seriously.

Darkblast is a great card though.

I don't think walls are unplayable. I love walls with a bonus like Wall of Tanglecord or Wall of Hope or ahmagawd Wall of Omens, but it just isn't what my environment needs at the moment. I am down to the best walls only (ramps/cantrips/denial).

Quote from Leelue

Mill is a bad strategy because you can't win without having enough of them and they are useless without that critical mass. Scrap the whole idea. Seriously.

Darkblast is a great card though.

My original idea was that it might be viable if games were to last long enough. At some point, using even a single mill card could put the opponent on a clock. The number of mill cards that would be able to effectively achieve this assuming reasonable game lengths however, is extremely low, as I saw when looking through the available cards at common/uncommon rarities. Trepanation Blade, Mind Funeral, Psychic Spiral, Doorkeeper Hedron Crab & Brain Freeze seem like the only real options, but even most of those are limited strictly to a mill strategy... making them parasitic, as citynoise mentioned.

Here's hoping that WotC recognizes that they'll have to make more well-rounded mill cards if they're to be played outside of dedicated mill decks. While I'm at it, let's hope they recognize how awful their land destruction cards have been lately.
In any case, I think I will try to fit Darkblast in.

As for walls, I currently have these:

• Mnemonic Wall (graveyard-cantrip)
  
• Carven Caryatid (cantrip)
  
• Wall of Blossoms (cantrip)
  
• Wall of Denial
  
• Wall of Tanglecord
  
• Jungle Barrier (cantrip)

Our first draft won't be til the weekend after this upcoming one, so I have plenty of time to fine-tune this. I may remove Wall of Tanglecord & add Overgrown Battlement. Wall of Hope is a consideration as well.

Yeah all those walls you mentioned are sweet. They either ramp or get value.

For me to play a one-of mill card it would have to be like:

2UUUBBB
Sorcery
Each opponent puts the top X cards of their libraries into their graveyards where X is any number you damn well please.

Slaming 1 Mindsculpt into your deck is beyond embarassing in a cube. Also why are games stalling out? That isn't healthy. Games shouldn't take forever. If your cube plays out such that you wish your decks had a random Tome Scour I would say agro isn't good enough in that environment.

The only one of those walls I'm not playing is mnemonic. But it's a decent card.
I also play steel wall and lust for war's best friend

Honestly, wall of tanglecord is a blue card more than a green card. Just slide it over into the colorless section (:

I made some proxies earlier today for the cards I'm still missing, and don't plan on making more, so I'll have to keep any final changes to the cube before this Saturday restricted to those cards I already have. Some things I'm thinking about as I consider these potential changes:

• Color/Multicolor/Colorless Balance
• Color Archetypes
• Guild Section & Incomplete Card Cycles

I've removed quite a few colorless cards since beginning and am a little concerned about how it may affect drafting - with less colorless, players may commit to colors earlier, which might not be a good thing, considering the range of skill among my players.

It wasn't too relevant with pauper, but I haven't given much thought at all to color archetypes yet. Besides the basics of red = burn/aggro, blue = control, etc. I'm sure there are strategies I'll be able to focus on that will make the cubing experience more unique and enjoyable. Anyone know of any resources for this kind of thing?

After adding the complete signet cycle back in and looking at other cubes using the guild system, I began wondering which colors would actually want the extra ramp/mana-fixing and whether that should be a major consideration for adjusting cards in that section. As the signets and bounce-lands can often be used by either color quite easily and to good effect, I'm thinking that they should almost be counted as 'half cards' rather than guild cards. Is that a terrible idea?

Looking forward to our first peasant draft!

Glimmerpoint Stag is a must-have IMO.

Glimmerpoint is very very good. A near staple if not so.
I don't often see bouncelands in decks that cant run both colors. signets... those I see all over the place and I really need to track their playtime more.

Our first draft was great! We had 8 players, and there were numerous positive comments about the cube, and cubing in general. (some players had never cubed before) I drafted cautiously and grabbed good cards from many colors, planning to push the limits of the available color-fixing. It was accidentally disassembled before I could record it, but it used Worldly Tutor, Enlightened Tutor, and Demonic Tutor to react and counter whatever my opponent was up to. It had some major lifegain in the form of Pelakka Wurm, Faith's Fetters, Behemoth Sledge, & Loxodon Warhammer. My all-stars were Guardian of the Guildpact, Chimeric Idol, and to a lesser extent, Jetting Glasskite. Things went smoothly until my 2nd match, where my opponent was playing dimir control. The first game was slow, but not incredibly close. In the second game, however, she ran me out of gas with Hymn to Tourach, Stupor, and Okiba-Gang Shinobi. Fortunately, I was doing quite well in our 3rd game, but it went to time. I was matched against the best player among us in my final match (playing gruul aggro) and fought against Porcelain Legionnaire twice, while having mana difficulties. The match did not end well. Having never played with it, I was quite intrigued with Shardless Agent and so fetched it multiple times. Had I gone for Guardian of the Guildpact like I had before, my last match might have gone differently.

Because there were were 44 cards more than necessary, we changed each pack to 16 cards and tossed the final card from each. This only required 384 total cards, so the remaining 20 were simply never handled. There's certainly a lot to think about after this first draft, but the main impressions I had from the other players was that the mana curve was a little low and that Capsize is not fun. Though I agree about Capsize, I thought the curve was fair. (taking data from the other cubes here) Still, I'll look into beefier spells for them. If nothing else, it will be fun to create something that I won't have as much reference material for.

Sounds about right

This is the first major change since DGM:

• Removal of 'feel-bad' cards (mostly aggro cards)
• Added an additional slot for each guild
• Multiple cards 'banned'
• Moving toward a 450 card cube

While we typically have 8 or fewer players, I'd like to be able to support 10 if necessary. This would also have the benefit of allowing us to draft with 'extras' even with 8 players. (boosters of 16/17, last 1/2 cards are discarded) Signets have moved back and forth a few times now, but I'm going to try to give each color a firmer identity now. Green gets the most ramp. Aggro may be hurt pretty badly without a lot of these cards, but we never really played them, so I'm looking for alternatives. I'm certainly okay with games being a little longer than they would be in an optimized cube, though.

Our next draft will probably be in a fortnight, so I'll have time to determine if we'll need the full 450, or if I can leave it floating around 405 til afterward. Regardless, I'll try to get some ideas for what I can add with those ~45 new cards. The first post managed to hit 75,000 characters due to some features I just added, so I finally have to move the changelog to the second post.

Have you considered Withdraw? I recently added it to my cube, and it's similar to Undo in a lot of cases but can also rebuy one of your guys when you can't bounce another one of their dudes off of it.

I didn't like withdraw because sometimes... you only wanna bounce one guy right now. Or playing a UU unsummon just isn't worthwhile sometimes.
Wasn't consistent, despite being awesome sometimes near kitchen finks.

I'm sorry for writing this in all caps. but
DRYAD MILITANT IS NOT STRICTLY BETTER THAN ELITE VANGUARD
It imposes a restriction on your own deck. Yes you can try and avoid that and turn the symmetry on its side but a lot of good cards, Flame jab, cenns enlistment, lingering souls, firebolt, etc, suddenly become bad when you have it out. Cards that often want to be in the same deck as a 2/1 white creature.

What happened to Forbid?

Moving shrine to red is proper.

I think every cipher card is downright terrible in cu/be.

Those warping cards... yeah 100% agree.

What does "lost" mean? Like, you actually lost the card?