First Playtest

Last weekend we finally got to play the cube for the first time with my brother. We played two separate Minesweeper drafts playing a match with each of the decks. While we had a fun time playing the games there are some problems that I think need to be addressed and I'll get to those a bit later but first I want to discuss the decks we ended up playing.

First Draft

In the first draft my brother ended up winning with his Jeskai Tempo deck beating my Golgari Midrange deck after a close match.

For the Jeskai Tempo deck Hazoret the Fervent was an absolute powerhouse in this match, while Price of Progress and Young Pyromancer both seemed a surprisingly underwhelming and I will have to consider what should be done with these cards. On a similar note Hypnotic Sprite and Hope-Ender Coatl felt too similar and unnecessarily redundant, so my consideration is to maybe leave only one of those.

With my Golgari Midrange I struggled to find enough value and card advantage to push my deck to win. Deck was certainly lacking in top-end threats with Shifting Ceratops being the only big beater in the deck. Baleful Mastery and Dismember both are incredibly powerful removal spells, while both Vindicate and Maelstrom Pulse may need to be locked at as they seemed underpowered due to their cost and color restrictions.

Overall the games were interesting, very grindy midrange games, exactly what this environment is supposed to be so I have to be very satisfied with that result at the very least.

Second Draft

In the second draft I was able to edge out a close win with my Rakdos Aggro deck against my brother's Sultai Midrange. Overall the card pool in this draft felt less powerful and synergistic than in the first one, which was a shame. Both decks were quite fun to play with and against, but certainly lacked some power.

Goblin Guide ended up stealing a game for me, while Lurrus of the Dream-Den and Bonecrusher Giant were certainly the all-stars of the deck. Once again Young Pyromancer was quite underwhelming, only making one or two tokens before biting a bullet, but to be fair the deck was also maybe not optimal for it.

Sultai Midrange my brother played certainly was able to gain value but struggled to finish games after stabilizing. Rankle, Master of Pranks was often unable to find good attacks without risking a lethal crackback and therefore wasn't able to find any of the value it can provide. While my brother put Emrakul, the World Anew in his deck mostly as a joke, it certainly provided some laughs when he stole a game by dumping it with Rankle and then reanimating with Blood for Bones. Honestly speaking in the current iteration this environment is probably completely not suited for the new Emrakul but I might just keep it for the laughs, at least for a while.

Even though these decks were not quite as powerful and synergistic as the first two, we certainly had a good time which is ultimately the best metric of success.

Afterthoughts

Overall I think the cube is in a reasonably good spot and can provide the kind of grindy games I am looking for, but there are few things that need adjustments.

Breaking board stalls

This is probably my main concern for now. Most of the games board would stall up and only profitable choice was to not attack. This is something does not align with my goals as I want combat decisions to be interesting and at times difficult. I have yet to come with a good solution for this issue, but I keep looking and trying I find some sort of answer.

Finishers and aggro creatures

Partially connected with the first issue is the lack of good top-end finishers as well as proactive aggressive creatures. For cheap aggressive creatures the easiest solution is to probably increase the density and favor the more aggressively suited over the more value-oriented ones, especially at 1-2 mana. As for the finishers, density is probably a partial solution, but I also maybe need to find more finishers that have some built-in inevitability or evasion in order to close games a bit faster. Adding more evasion may also be a partial solution to board stalls.

Manabases

To lot of people, myself included it might sound crazy but I am not sure if I actually like fetchlands in this environment. While fetchlands provide incredibly good fixing among other things (fueling Treasure Cruise for example) they might not be otherwise suited for the environment. The nature of two-player drafts means that not every card is seen in every draft, so the difference of finding on-color fetches and duals compared to not finding them is so huge it creates unfun power-level differences between decks. Therefore I am considering a bit slower mana bases more similar to Standard/Pioneer. In addition to fetches going out I'll probably cut the original duals as well (that are proxied anyway). I am not quite sure which cycles I am going to include, but I'll do a follow-up post with all the changes a bit later.

Other changes

In addition to the issues I've highlighted I have a bunch of new cards I want to pick up for the cube. I am intending to try to trim down the cube more closer to 180 cards so in between trimming, changing and adding new cards there is lot of changes ahead so stay tuned for those.