Don't put in too many X spells however. I think about 1/10th of the colour is about the max number of Blaze effects you would want, or else every second drafter has one.
Exactly. Include as many red spells/creatures that affect each player/creature as possible. I didn't realize the cube in question was predominantly multiplayer - red would have a significant disadvantage there.
You could maybe include a few of the strange enchantments that have global effects (such as something that says, "creatures can't block"), which wouldn't normally make it into a 1v1 cube.
Agreed, red is weak in multiplayer. Sweepers become better, however, as do cards with repeatable effects (e.g. Kumano, Master Yamabushi) or a few other niche cards (e.g. Taurean Mauler). My favourite multiplayer global enchantment is Furnace of Rath: 6 damage Lightning Bolts for the win.
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less." -Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
Dropping a Cave-In immediately after a Furnace results in 20 damage to the opponent if they control 2 creatures. Lava Dart and Fireblast are good there too.
Konfusius
I think not playing color-shifted or “off colour” cards is fine as long as its a choice you are happy with, although it does weaken the cube, since any decision made not to include the most powerful option does and will weaken the cube. Just like my decision to go unpowered.
Goodking
Wow thats a sick combo. I think both repercusssion and furnace are good in red multiplayer games.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
I am petitioning for the end of: the Mythic rarity, the Planeswalker card type, the post-8th edition card faces, the 2010 rule changes, colorless cards that aren't artifacts or lands, the Legendary supertype, the stack, auras, multicolor cards, artifact creatures, tokens, goblins, merfolk, elves, sorceries, instants, and permanents. Basically, I just want to play with purple contraptions.
Copy this sig to join the cause. Cuz, ya know, Wizards makes decisions based on sigs.
I guess that does work, but it seems more like using a solution that doesn't address the underlying problem, so to speak.
Agreed. People play "colors" just fine here, even with the signets and bouncelands in the cube. In fact, they have a pretty small impact overall on the draft scheme. They're played in decks that are already in their corresponding colors, but they're not powerful enough to force people into colors they weren't previously playing. If 4 and 5 color control decks are crushing aggro in every draft, bouncelands and signets are the least of the cube's problems ...and should be the last of the cards removed to try and remedy them anyways.
Note that I have no intention of doing what I'm saying in the long-run.
I've decided to try my cube without signets as LaPille has done, to see if his claim that a signetless+bouncelandless cube is good by doing 5 signet-free drafts. Doing just 1 or 2 is a really small sample size and I figure 5 should give a decent amount of information.
I did one cube draft where I replaced the signets with 10 hybrid cards (ones that I cut from my cube. I used the hybrids because they're playable pretty easily and I happened to have the cycle on hand.) and a time recently when I put in 10 artifacts (putting Mind Stone, Prismatic Lens and Everflowing Chalice to give some 2 drop artifact accel as part of the 10, as well as some other things. Not really sure what though.) I also made sure to tell people in the draft (most of which have drafted my cube plenty of times) that the cube was without signets so that they would not be caught off-guard and that they could adjust their strategies accordingly.
The result?
Not really that different, so far. I did see mono-white go 3-0 tonight (and someone went 2-0 with mono-blue control in the first signet-less free cube. It was only 2-0 because he was taking long enough so that people didn't really want to do another round of games) but aside from that, the only thing that changed is that if someone auto-pilots to going into 4/5CC, they end up losing (even with signets, I've found that those who force 4/5CC don't do all that well in my cube) and that the "metagame" is pretty similar with aggro, midrange and control all being present and represented pretty well.
I think that with regards to removing bouncelands/signets, the manafixing is more of a "season to taste" thing in that I don't think the individual cycles are a bad thing, but that they may be part of an overall problem of having too much fixing (which I find is definitely a common pitfall with cube design.) It'd be like saying "don't put soy sauce in recipes" because soy sauce is salty and can make something too salty, but the problem isn't necessarily that soy sauce is salty, but that the recipe itself had too much salt in it (ie the problem isn't with the signets/bouncelands in and of themselves, but that there's too much fixing in the cube in question.)
If anything, I've found that signets provide a good barometer to what fixing should be. For example, I don't run farseek because, for the most part, signets do the job better, but that doesn't make green worse. It just means that green should have better fixing/accel than Farseek (which it has) and that those options should be run. While signets certainly perform a task that's commonly associated with green, they by no means invalidate the themes in green.
Note that I have no intention of doing what I'm saying in the long-run.
I've decided to try my cube without signets as LaPille has done, to see if his claim that a signetless+bouncelandless cube is good by doing 5 signet-free drafts. Doing just 1 or 2 is a really small sample size and I figure 5 should give a decent amount of information.
I did one cube draft where I replaced the signets with 10 hybrid cards (ones that I cut from my cube. I used the hybrids because they're playable pretty easily and I happened to have the cycle on hand.) and a time recently when I put in 10 artifacts (putting Mind Stone, Prismatic Lens and Everflowing Chalice to give some 2 drop artifact accel as part of the 10, as well as some other things. Not really sure what though.) I also made sure to tell people in the draft (most of which have drafted my cube plenty of times) that the cube was without signets so that they would not be caught off-guard and that they could adjust their strategies accordingly.
The result?
Not really that different, so far. I did see mono-white go 3-0 tonight (and someone went 2-0 with mono-blue control in the first signet-less free cube. It was only 2-0 because he was taking long enough so that people didn't really want to do another round of games) but aside from that, the only thing that changed is that if someone auto-pilots to going into 4/5CC, they end up losing (even with signets, I've found that those who force 4/5CC don't do all that well in my cube) and that the "metagame" is pretty similar with aggro, midrange and control all being present and represented pretty well.
I think that with regards to removing bouncelands/signets, the manafixing is more of a "season to taste" thing in that I don't think the individual cycles are a bad thing, but that they may be part of an overall problem of having too much fixing (which I find is definitely a common pitfall with cube design.) It'd be like saying "don't put soy sauce in recipes" because soy sauce is salty and can make something too salty, but the problem isn't necessarily that soy sauce is salty, but that the recipe itself had too much salt in it (ie the problem isn't with the signets/bouncelands in and of themselves, but that there's too much fixing in the cube in question.)
If anything, I've found that signets provide a good barometer to what fixing should be. For example, I don't run farseek because, for the most part, signets do the job better, but that doesn't make green worse. It just means that green should have better fixing/accel than Farseek (which it has) and that those options should be run. While signets certainly perform a task that's commonly associated with green, they by no means invalidate the themes in green.
It's not just a question of too much fixing, it's also a question of overall cube balance and player mindset as well as played formats. The other people in my cube often end up with heavily multicolored decks but adding in the signets isn't really that related to it. What does cause it is that we're usually playing multiplayer which makes getting greedy a more reasonable strategy and that my aggro isn't very good. 5 color or full on 3 color or what not is again a lot better when they're isn't aggro to punish them for stumbling. And I don't have much LD to take out there mana bases. But I rarely end up more than 2 colors both because I don't like the unstable mana bases and I often try for gimmicky decks like Blue/Artifact decks or Mana Flare that don't want to split off into as many colors.
Agreed. Multiplayer is really only fun for all colors if you make constructed decks with multiplayer in mind.
I don't like that multiplayer free for alls discount entire archetypes.
I feel like red gets much weaker and white gets much much stronger in free-for-all
Designing a multiplayer cube wouldn't be my idea of fun at all.
Recent discussions here and elsewhere have made it clear that there seems to be a group of players who consider blue and control synonymous, as if they somehow started playing a game with four identical and "bad" colors that do nothing interesting because they just "turn men sideways" and then true, glorious blue, the only thinking person's color.
EDH decks
Marath, Will of the Wild
Sygg, River Cutthroat
Slobad, Goblin Tinkerer
Marchesa, the Black Rose
I agree with some of your complaints, but it's sometimes uncontrollable. I much prefer playing multiplayer than making someone sit out. I like what we did the other night, where we had 5 players, so we had one multiplayer free for all game and one head on head match, then the winners of each faced off in the duel and the remaining three played in the free for all. Interestingly somehow I managed to avoid the three player game all four times. Randomly drawn into the duel in both drafts and won my first match there both times. So my decks didn't really need to be as flexible as everyone's else did.
So I haven't been able to cube much but I did 4 drafts (intended to do 5) where I took the signets and replaced them with 10 other artifacts: Mind Stone, Everflowing Chalice, Prismatic Lens and 7 other non-mana producing artifacts.
Did it really change things?
Not really. The one interesting thing was that in 3 out of the 4, someone went mono-color and that those who tried to force 5CC did abysmally, but I didn't notice control decks becoming worse or anything like that or that attack decks were more relevant, it made cards like Lens/Stone/Chalice gain value because they were the only 2 drop artifact accel in town but I don't think that it dramatically changed the environment by that much.
I think that accel/fixing may be more of a "general" thing than a set-in-stone "do not run so and so because your cube will be so much better if you do not" because I didn't find that to be the case at all. I think that manafixing in particular is something to watch because if there indeed is too much, people can just grab all of the fixing that they can and force 5CC and win, which I think is the litmus test to whether there's too much mana fixing.
Oh and the reason I didn't make it to 5? I was getting pretty sick of it.
I think if it is a situation like this the signets are not the problem. I think mono-color just needs(maybe not "needs") to be pushed more.
...that's pretty much the point of what I said in my post, that taking out signets isn't the be-all-end-all of making attack decks more relevant and the like that LaPille was making it out to be and that manafixing is more a function of a cube's size than something like "take signets out."
As far as needing to push mono-color, I don't think that's the issue here and don't think it needs to be pushed.
I did, however, gain a good amount of respect for Everflowing Chalice, decent as a 2 drop accelerant, but pretty nutty if cast for 4 or 6. Yesterday I had it remanded when cast for 4 (later cast for 8) and it was very useful.
I think with all the signes in the cube, I'd much rather run Thran Dynamo than Everflowing Chalice. I know the flexibility is decent, but I don't really want Sisay's Ring, a 6 cost, colorless mana producing Gilded Lotus or a strictly worse Mind Stone in the cube. I think cubes under 720 can comfortably cube without the Chalice... especially if running all the signets and under 550 cards.
Granted I don't run power in my cube so the judgment scale on artifact mana for my cube is a little more lax than yours, but both Thran Dynamo and Everflowing Chalice see a ton of play. Chalice has been bashed to no end on this forum, so it's not like minds are going to change, but it's been very good for us Usman.
I think its flexibility is good, even though it's cast pretty frequently as a 2 drop accelerant, its by no means strictly worse than a Mind Stone/Thran Dynamo because of its flexibility (Burst Lightning is worse than Lightning Bolt and Lightning Blast at their respective modes, but its flexibility is what makes it a great card.)
But I don't really plan on using it anytime soon, as I've got barely any room as is and even though this exercise has shown to me that "no signets = good" isn't a good barometer to use, keeping an eye on fixing/accel is a good idea.
Agreed. Multiplayer is really only fun for all colors if you make constructed decks with multiplayer in mind.
I don't like that multiplayer free for alls discount entire archetypes.
I feel like red gets much weaker and white gets much much stronger in free-for-all
Designing a multiplayer cube wouldn't be my idea of fun at all.
We've come across a sort of solution for multiplayer: the Rumble Rule.
One of my group got the idea from a Wizards article but the rule is as follows:
For every 20 total points of damage dealt to and points of life lost by your opponents by effects you control, you may choose and set aside a card that you did not put into your deck—that is, a card currently in your sideboard—then cast that card anytime you would normally be allowed to cast it without having to pay its mana cost. For spells that have additional costs to cast, like sacrificing a permanent or kicker, or spells that have an X in their cost, you pay those additional costs or X values as normal.
The first time we played with this rule, we basically drafted as normal and had a bit of fun with it, and it helped move the game along. The second time we played, I and another guy drafted with the rule in mind: he had balls to the wall aggro, I had loads of burn and both of us had uncastable bombs for the sideboard. I had a nice turn 5 Earthquake dealing exactly 20 damage to my opponents, allowing me to slam an Inkwell Leviathan into play. This approach was only moderately effective, as the guy running the white based aggro deck persuaded the other players to let him get unblocked attacks in so he could hit me with a Cruel Ultimatum to whack my Leviathan, again played off the Rumble Rule.
I don't suppose it will be to everyone's taste, but I would suggest giving it a go if you are finding the aggro portion of your cube is not getting much love in multiplayer. Oh, and it makes Kokusho even more of a first pick than normal.
Sorry if this is horribly off topic. BK, I await my punishment like the bad egg that I am.
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less." -Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
I like those rules, we don't play multiplayer much with our cube so I don't think we will use it, but it sounds really fun!
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Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
I am petitioning for the end of: the Mythic rarity, the Planeswalker card type, the post-8th edition card faces, the 2010 rule changes, colorless cards that aren't artifacts or lands, the Legendary supertype, the stack, auras, multicolor cards, artifact creatures, tokens, goblins, merfolk, elves, sorceries, instants, and permanents. Basically, I just want to play with purple contraptions.
Copy this sig to join the cause. Cuz, ya know, Wizards makes decisions based on sigs.
i haven't read this whole thread but i just want to say that i prefer adding answers to removing the problem because if a card is good i want to play it. the best artifact and land removal happens to be in the best colors for aggro. if lands and artifacts are a problem for aggro then you're running the wrong cards.
When I see Healing Salve, I'm often like "Oh girl, I wish I could turn every card into this." Thanks they removed the gain life part, otherwise this would have been broken.
Signets have proven themselves multiple times. I however, have been pleased with the removal of bounce lands from my cube. As said before I saw too many people become frustrated by the double timewalk that resulted from land destruction. LD is already good, it simply didnt need that boost.
i don't understand why he can suggest major changes to a cube like removal of signets and bouncelands, but isn't allowed to post a list. that just doesn't make sense to me. is wotc only concerned about what he says about new cards or something?
When I see Healing Salve, I'm often like "Oh girl, I wish I could turn every card into this." Thanks they removed the gain life part, otherwise this would have been broken.
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Agreed, red is weak in multiplayer. Sweepers become better, however, as do cards with repeatable effects (e.g. Kumano, Master Yamabushi) or a few other niche cards (e.g. Taurean Mauler). My favourite multiplayer global enchantment is Furnace of Rath: 6 damage Lightning Bolts for the win.
My 380 Beginners’ Cube on Cube Tutor
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less." -Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
Wouldn't it be an extra 4 damage? 2 damage to the stuffy doll, then the stuffy doll deals 4 to the opponent?
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Dropping a Cave-In immediately after a Furnace results in 20 damage to the opponent if they control 2 creatures. Lava Dart and Fireblast are good there too.
On spoiled card wishlisting and 'should-have-had'-isms:
I think not playing color-shifted or “off colour” cards is fine as long as its a choice you are happy with, although it does weaken the cube, since any decision made not to include the most powerful option does and will weaken the cube. Just like my decision to go unpowered.
Goodking
Wow thats a sick combo. I think both repercusssion and furnace are good in red multiplayer games.
Copy this sig to join the cause. Cuz, ya know, Wizards makes decisions based on sigs.
Yes, it would be four
I guess that does work, but it seems more like using a solution that doesn't address the underlying problem, so to speak.
I used to write cube articles on StarCityGames, now for GatheringMagic and podcast about cube (w/Antknee42.)
Agreed. People play "colors" just fine here, even with the signets and bouncelands in the cube. In fact, they have a pretty small impact overall on the draft scheme. They're played in decks that are already in their corresponding colors, but they're not powerful enough to force people into colors they weren't previously playing. If 4 and 5 color control decks are crushing aggro in every draft, bouncelands and signets are the least of the cube's problems ...and should be the last of the cards removed to try and remedy them anyways.
My 630 Card Powered Cube
My Article - "Cube Design Philosophy"
My Article - "Mana Short: A study in limited resource management."
My 50th Set (P)review - Discusses my top 20 Cube cards from OTJ!
I've decided to try my cube without signets as LaPille has done, to see if his claim that a signetless+bouncelandless cube is good by doing 5 signet-free drafts. Doing just 1 or 2 is a really small sample size and I figure 5 should give a decent amount of information.
I did one cube draft where I replaced the signets with 10 hybrid cards (ones that I cut from my cube. I used the hybrids because they're playable pretty easily and I happened to have the cycle on hand.) and a time recently when I put in 10 artifacts (putting Mind Stone, Prismatic Lens and Everflowing Chalice to give some 2 drop artifact accel as part of the 10, as well as some other things. Not really sure what though.) I also made sure to tell people in the draft (most of which have drafted my cube plenty of times) that the cube was without signets so that they would not be caught off-guard and that they could adjust their strategies accordingly.
The result?
Not really that different, so far. I did see mono-white go 3-0 tonight (and someone went 2-0 with mono-blue control in the first signet-less free cube. It was only 2-0 because he was taking long enough so that people didn't really want to do another round of games) but aside from that, the only thing that changed is that if someone auto-pilots to going into 4/5CC, they end up losing (even with signets, I've found that those who force 4/5CC don't do all that well in my cube) and that the "metagame" is pretty similar with aggro, midrange and control all being present and represented pretty well.
I think that with regards to removing bouncelands/signets, the manafixing is more of a "season to taste" thing in that I don't think the individual cycles are a bad thing, but that they may be part of an overall problem of having too much fixing (which I find is definitely a common pitfall with cube design.) It'd be like saying "don't put soy sauce in recipes" because soy sauce is salty and can make something too salty, but the problem isn't necessarily that soy sauce is salty, but that the recipe itself had too much salt in it (ie the problem isn't with the signets/bouncelands in and of themselves, but that there's too much fixing in the cube in question.)
If anything, I've found that signets provide a good barometer to what fixing should be. For example, I don't run farseek because, for the most part, signets do the job better, but that doesn't make green worse. It just means that green should have better fixing/accel than Farseek (which it has) and that those options should be run. While signets certainly perform a task that's commonly associated with green, they by no means invalidate the themes in green.
I used to write cube articles on StarCityGames, now for GatheringMagic and podcast about cube (w/Antknee42.)
It's not just a question of too much fixing, it's also a question of overall cube balance and player mindset as well as played formats. The other people in my cube often end up with heavily multicolored decks but adding in the signets isn't really that related to it. What does cause it is that we're usually playing multiplayer which makes getting greedy a more reasonable strategy and that my aggro isn't very good. 5 color or full on 3 color or what not is again a lot better when they're isn't aggro to punish them for stumbling. And I don't have much LD to take out there mana bases. But I rarely end up more than 2 colors both because I don't like the unstable mana bases and I often try for gimmicky decks like Blue/Artifact decks or Mana Flare that don't want to split off into as many colors.
Agreed. Multiplayer is really only fun for all colors if you make constructed decks with multiplayer in mind.
I don't like that multiplayer free for alls discount entire archetypes.
I feel like red gets much weaker and white gets much much stronger in free-for-all
Designing a multiplayer cube wouldn't be my idea of fun at all.
http://stat.rumandmonkey.com/tests/1/6/5261/20801.jpg
EDH decks
Marath, Will of the Wild
Sygg, River Cutthroat
Slobad, Goblin Tinkerer
Marchesa, the Black Rose
Did it really change things?
Not really. The one interesting thing was that in 3 out of the 4, someone went mono-color and that those who tried to force 5CC did abysmally, but I didn't notice control decks becoming worse or anything like that or that attack decks were more relevant, it made cards like Lens/Stone/Chalice gain value because they were the only 2 drop artifact accel in town but I don't think that it dramatically changed the environment by that much.
I think that accel/fixing may be more of a "general" thing than a set-in-stone "do not run so and so because your cube will be so much better if you do not" because I didn't find that to be the case at all. I think that manafixing in particular is something to watch because if there indeed is too much, people can just grab all of the fixing that they can and force 5CC and win, which I think is the litmus test to whether there's too much mana fixing.
Oh and the reason I didn't make it to 5? I was getting pretty sick of it.
I used to write cube articles on StarCityGames, now for GatheringMagic and podcast about cube (w/Antknee42.)
I think if it is a situation like this the signets are not the problem. I think mono-color just needs(maybe not "needs") to be pushed more.
Decks
RW Blessed Destruction
BR Goblin Cult
G Elven Multiplayer
G Elven Explosion
G Can-o'-Wurms
UW Merfolk Paradise
UR Space Dragon
U Internet Lockdown
B Multiplayer Zombie Aggro
UB The Mill
EDH
WUBRG Slivers
Under Contruction
BR Kaervek's Domination
...that's pretty much the point of what I said in my post, that taking out signets isn't the be-all-end-all of making attack decks more relevant and the like that LaPille was making it out to be and that manafixing is more a function of a cube's size than something like "take signets out."
As far as needing to push mono-color, I don't think that's the issue here and don't think it needs to be pushed.
I did, however, gain a good amount of respect for Everflowing Chalice, decent as a 2 drop accelerant, but pretty nutty if cast for 4 or 6. Yesterday I had it remanded when cast for 4 (later cast for 8) and it was very useful.
I used to write cube articles on StarCityGames, now for GatheringMagic and podcast about cube (w/Antknee42.)
My 630 Card Powered Cube
My Article - "Cube Design Philosophy"
My Article - "Mana Short: A study in limited resource management."
My 50th Set (P)review - Discusses my top 20 Cube cards from OTJ!
(list not current)
My Cube Google Docs Spreadsheet: https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AibgWfz0ukmOdDNhOHlucjcxUi1wVy00NDhLbDUtUlE&hl=en_US#gid=8
(list is always current)
I just can't find room in my cube (and I'm not really looking) because I feel like I've got more than enough (better) artifact mana at the moment.
My 630 Card Powered Cube
My Article - "Cube Design Philosophy"
My Article - "Mana Short: A study in limited resource management."
My 50th Set (P)review - Discusses my top 20 Cube cards from OTJ!
But I don't really plan on using it anytime soon, as I've got barely any room as is and even though this exercise has shown to me that "no signets = good" isn't a good barometer to use, keeping an eye on fixing/accel is a good idea.
I used to write cube articles on StarCityGames, now for GatheringMagic and podcast about cube (w/Antknee42.)
We've come across a sort of solution for multiplayer: the Rumble Rule.
One of my group got the idea from a Wizards article but the rule is as follows:
For every 20 total points of damage dealt to and points of life lost by your opponents by effects you control, you may choose and set aside a card that you did not put into your deck—that is, a card currently in your sideboard—then cast that card anytime you would normally be allowed to cast it without having to pay its mana cost. For spells that have additional costs to cast, like sacrificing a permanent or kicker, or spells that have an X in their cost, you pay those additional costs or X values as normal.
The first time we played with this rule, we basically drafted as normal and had a bit of fun with it, and it helped move the game along. The second time we played, I and another guy drafted with the rule in mind: he had balls to the wall aggro, I had loads of burn and both of us had uncastable bombs for the sideboard. I had a nice turn 5 Earthquake dealing exactly 20 damage to my opponents, allowing me to slam an Inkwell Leviathan into play. This approach was only moderately effective, as the guy running the white based aggro deck persuaded the other players to let him get unblocked attacks in so he could hit me with a Cruel Ultimatum to whack my Leviathan, again played off the Rumble Rule.
I don't suppose it will be to everyone's taste, but I would suggest giving it a go if you are finding the aggro portion of your cube is not getting much love in multiplayer. Oh, and it makes Kokusho even more of a first pick than normal.
Sorry if this is horribly off topic. BK, I await my punishment like the bad egg that I am.
My 380 Beginners’ Cube on Cube Tutor
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less." -Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
Copy this sig to join the cause. Cuz, ya know, Wizards makes decisions based on sigs.
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