Tonight's draft was a small group of 3 where we conducted a Housman draft. Some of the new cards got to shine, and it definitely pointed out some of the less good cards.
I won, going 2-0 with the following deck plus 2 of each: Forest, Swamp, Mountain:
Ignoble Hierarch
Kutzil, Malamet Exemplar
Minsc & Boo, Timeless Heroes
Thrashing Brontodon
Raucous Theater
Phyrexian Delver
Tear Asunder
Savai Triome
Ziatora's Proving Ground
Prismatic Vista
Cut Down
Polluted Delta
Satyr Wayfinder
Elves of Deep Shadow
Scalding Tarn
Overgrown Tomb
Cavalier of Night
Promising Vein
Ob Nixilis, the Adversary
Anax, Hardened in the Forge
Triarch Praetorian
Archfiend of Sorrows
Temple Garden
Timeless Witness
Pack Rat
Stomping Ground
Woodfall Primus
Titania, Protector of Argoth
Grim Flayer
Keldon Champion
Zagoth Triome
Gala Greeters
Pest Infestation
I literally woke up in the middle of the night and thought I should make this a Wizard’s Tower, not a cube! I’m making adjustments now!
I love artifacts. I love abusing them, I love breaking them, and I love rebuilding them. After I built my last cube The Sludee Cubee, I had the thought of building a theme cube. I initially thought about doing an artifact cube, and that didn't seem to quite scratch the itch.
But then I remembered: Atog in all his glory. A menace of pauper so nefarious that it received the ban. What better place to play with them again than in a cube?
My initial thoughts for "The Atog Cube" (name is a work in progress, I promise) are a little scattered:
Some initial thoughts on cards/effects to include in the cube:
I think there will be plenty of archetypes to play with, the real problem is going to be keep things balanced.
This is just a first pass of cards I think could be interesting/good. Next, I want to look to some of the EDH precons that card about artifacts for some neat-o cards.
Draft 1 went pretty well! It was a five person pod, and we drafted 5 packs of 9 cards with the following decks represented:
The deck went 3-0! It was a pretty sweet build that put Hidden Stockpile and Vito, Fanatic of Aclazotz to great use -- it was quite resilient with an Elspeth Conquers Death to solve any problem!
As for the swaps I've made, these are all cards that I had, and I hope they will help even out the power a little bit more. The only card of concern is the Minsc & Boo, Timeless Heroes, but hey -- aren't we here for a good time?!
Winning deck list from Max:
Condemn
Giant Killer
Dismember
Gideon's Lawkeeper
Fatal Push
Recruitment Officer
Village Rites
Hidden Stockpile
Gust Walker
Shepherd of the Flock
Dusk Legion Duelist
Seasoned Hallowblade
Horn of Gondor
Flaming Fist Officer
Ministrant of Obligation
Devoted Crop-Mate
Woe-Strider
Rankle, Master of Pranks
Elspeth Tirel
Vito, Fanatic of Aclazotz
Syr Konrad, the Grim
Elspeth Conquers Death
Ok - I'm going to give this the ol' college try. I've flirted with the idea of a cube for a long time, but I've really only ever based my cube ideas on other cubes and not actually tried to make my own.
I came across this article from Lucky Paper Radio a while back, and I want to build a cube from my current collection without buying any more cards. Once I build it and play it, I can work on some upgrades.
My ADHD brain likes clear rules to work within, so here are some that I will follow:
I will keep it simple for now and build up to a 360 card cube - 54 each of , 30 multicolored cards (which means 3 of each color pair), 30
, and 30 lands. UPDATE: after a conversation with @couchlife, I decided to cut back the
cards from 30 to 15 and bump my fixing lands up to 45.
I'm going to keep each of the colors simple for now and go with really basic overarching themes for each color to base themselves in that I enjoy playing to give me some direction as I look through all of my cards. I'm thinking:
: Aggro
: Tempo/Control
: Sacrifice/Discard
: Burn/Aggro
: Creature-based Midrange
No double faced cards; I think it's more than I want to offer drafters at the moment, and I think it adds to the length of the actual draft.
I'll update the blog as I filter through my collection and add about a section a day or so. Finished on 5/4/24!
This was the previous overview for the cube, but I'm logging it as a blog post and will be working on the updated overview to give an introduction to "The Sludee Cubee".
I broke apart a couple of manabases from commander decks to make this happen. Technically the Polluted Delta is a proxy... but I'll make some trades to get a real one.
10 Fetches
10 Shocks
10 Triomes
10 Conditional Lands
5 Special Lands
I wanted to encourage players to splash a third color when possible with some good mana, and I had to support the sweet angel Titania, Protector of Argoth.
This section was probably the most fun - here are the archetypes that I want to signal:
So... I cut this section in half to offer more color-fixing lands. I wanted to include all of the triomes to encourage going for the easy three-color include/splash.
All of these cards are good, but I don't think they're anything too wild, and they may help fill a gap that a deck may have.
Well... green's gonna green...
I really struggled with how best to fill out this section. I think the identity in this cube is just elf-ball? But seriously, it just wants to ramp into something like Gruff Triplets or Nissa, Ascended Animist as quickly as possible. I've tried to include a lot of support for +1/+1 counters, and there may or may not be some infinite combo potentials... oops. I don't want any combos less than 3 pieces just to avoid A + B = Win. Instead, I just hope there are some really good synergies.
This section is where things got pretty tricky actually. Here was my thought process for thinking about some interactions with other colors:
Hopefully there's a good balance of things, but I think leaning into discard could be a sweet direction to take things, enable madness, reanimation, etc. Just gotta find an eventual slot for Careful Study, a personal favorite.