As we've been discussing a blue mana denial strategy, featuring cards like Parallax Tide, Rising Waters, Mana Vortex, Land Equilibrium and Opposition, I thought that it would be appropriate to start one of these threads for general discussion. Thanks to users in bondafong's Mana Vortex thread who helped come up with all of these cards.
Firstly, I hope we can identify some new cards that could be considered for blue tempo/aggro in the context of this mana denial strategy, or synergies that take advantage of it. Any land destruction and bounce is great, but there may be other things we can work out. Having a trawl through gatherer, I found a couple of cards that are potentially quite savage: Mana Breach and Overburden. I've added those to the list.
Anyway, I'm trialing a few of these in my own cube. No results to report, yet!
Back in September I created an SCD for Overburden. The consensus was that people would rather be playing Propaganda as a stall effect. Given the card's limitations, I suspect that's the proper evaluation. Mana Breach, on the other hand, seems much more exciting.
Opposition is great because it can disrupt their mana and their board. Blue tempo decks are really good without dedicating a bunch of anti-land cards to them. I think they're unnecessary slots dedicated to a single blue strategy that takes away slots from flexible blue cards that can be played in a variety of decks.
I really feel with the idea of pushing a more aggressive blue-based tempo strategy with cards like Duskmantle Seer at the centre that some of these mana denial cards could be extremely powerful.
Opposition is almost ubiquitously played, but if you were to include 1-2 more of these cards how would you rank them? Personally I see them in order:
1. Opposition
2. Mana Vortex
3. Parallax Tide
4. Land Equilibrium
5. Rising Waters (though we already have the much better Winter Orb)
6. Mana Breach
7. Overburden
I would not be opposed to trying one or two of these out and see what happens. It would be nice to give another facet to the blue section of the cube.
Although I've always taken the same point of view as wtwlf, that it is better to include Blue cards which are strong in multiple archetypes, some of these actually do something quite unique and can open up new archetypes in the same way pox can for Black. It offers something quite different. For example you could also combine artifact and creature mana to break many of these cards' symmetries wide open. It's not quite the case of removing cards that are good in control and aggro for cards that are good in aggro only. They could lead to some nice creative drafting.
Back in September I created an SCD for Overburden. The consensus was that people would rather be playing Propaganda as a stall effect. Given the card's limitations, I suspect that's the proper evaluation. Mana Breach, on the other hand, seems much more exciting.
That's a misevaluation imo. I would play Propaganda in control decks to stall. I would play Overburden in an aggro/tempo deck in order to hinder my midrange or control opponent's development and make them choose between playing creatures or increasing their land on board. They're completely different cards. I've not played either of them, mind you. Or Mana Breach :-p
Wow, didn't even know Rising Waters existed. Second Winter Orb seems like a pretty good reason to go blue tempo.
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I tried Parallax Tide, and loved it. Its probably not good enough for 450 or below most times. But when I go back up to 500-540, I'll be running it again.
I don't think Delver is very good at all but most regular blue creatures costing 4 or less are fine or even at their best (V. Clique!) in this archetype.
Wow, didn't even know Rising Waters existed. Second Winter Orb seems like a pretty good reason to go blue tempo.
Doubling the mana cost kills the effect. The reason why Orb is so good is because A) you can play an answer plus the Orb when they're tapped out and seal a win, B) you can play a better threat and the Orb when they're tapped out and seal a win and C) you can play it in every color combination that wants to be aggressive. You can't do any of those things with Rising Waters.
this is a very interesting thread to me. recently, i've "aggro'd up" my cube (by that I mean i added green aggro, which makes every colour have a solid aggro section except blue), as I have been meaning to explore the potential of blue as an aggro supporter or colour.
along with the land denial package, is it possible to expand the creature suite of blue to support a tempo/aggro strategy? i know vendillion clique's been mentioned - how about other cards like coralhelm commander or cloudfin raptor? I feel like with some strong support, blue can become another off-aggro colour (like green and black).
Blue tempo decks are some of the most often drafted and most competitive decktypes in the cube. And you don't have to add in any dedicated support to make it work.
The cards you add don't have to be exclusive to blue tempo, nor does every card you run have to be good in every deck. Like I demonstrated, some of these could give some very creative deckbuilding based around artifact or creature mana.
I'm not cutting every aggro creature or Wildfire in red for burn that goes in every deck. I wouldn't cut Pox and friends to run yet another kill spell that goes in every deck. Nor would I cut life from the Loam and Crucible for yet more ramp spells or green filler cards that go in every deck. I think that having a few cards to support specific decks is healthy to the interest of a cube group and for drafting.
It wouldn't take many extra cards to do that, maybe 3 or 4, in place of some of the more expendable blue spells that have duplicate effects for these more unique effects.
along with the land denial package, is it possible to expand the creature suite of blue to support a tempo/aggro strategy? i know vendillion clique's been mentioned - how about other cards like coralhelm commander or cloudfin raptor? I feel like with some strong support, blue can become another off-aggro colour (like green and black).
I wouldn't advocate just including creatures that are poor copies of another colour's ones, like Raptor or Coralhelm. At 360, I would not include those creatures if they were black or white, my main aggro colours. I like some of these suggested cards because they're unique effects. Blue doesn't actually need any support to be an excellent aggro colour and most of its creatures are really good in tempo decks. But that's actually not the point of this discussion. The cards in the OP are different to what other colours offer and could lead to new drafting strategies.
You can already do that with better cards though. That's my argument. Before I'd include any of these cards (except Opposition) I think that blue tempo adds would be better served by cards like Daze, Standstill, Equilibrium or additional tempo creatures rather than the anti-land cards. I think there are higher quality tempo-support cards in blue rather than the package presented here. Assuming that you even feel that tempo-only cards are necessary in the first place.
The difference between cutting Wildfire and Pox for generic cards and cutting universal blue cards for tempo exclusive spells in blue is that the blue tempo decks are already competitive and already work without them. Pox decks don't work without Pox effects, and Wildfire decks don't work without Wildfires. It's comparing apples and oranges.
You can already do that with better cards though. That's my argument. Before I'd include any of these cards (except Opposition) I think that blue tempo adds would be better served by cards like Daze, Standstill, Equilibrium or additional tempo creatures rather than the anti-land cards. I think there are higher quality tempo-support cards in blue rather than the package presented here. Assuming that you even feel that tempo-only cards are necessary in the first place.
The difference between cutting Wildfire and Pox for generic cards and cutting universal blue cards for tempo exclusive spells in blue is that the blue tempo decks are already competitive and already work without them. Pox decks don't work without Pox effects, and Wildfire decks don't work without Wildfires. It's comparing apples and oranges.
We can call it something other than tempo decks if you like.
We can also call Wildfire decks 'big red' or red control. We can call Pox stax, or Prison. These decks actually function without Wildfire and Pox, respectively. That point is just a matter of semantics. Red control is also competitive without Wildfire. You don't need Pox to draft that deck either. We call it a Wildfire or Pox deck anyway. No more than if we call these Land Equilibrium decks, they will need Land Equilibrium. They will function without it. It's not exactly a tempo deck, as I will illustrate.
If you're suggesting that you actually need Pox to play Pox, then no-one should be running that archetype, being drafting around a lone card is ludicrous. So you must concede that the name of a deck is nothing more than something we've attributed to it, and is entirely arbitrary. I think that you're illustrating my own point better than I did. Which is that some archetype support is a good thing.
Which brings me neatly onto my second point. Daze and Equilibrium are fine cards that I considered adding to the OP. But I didn't add them strictly because I didn't want a discussion about traditional blue tempo. The land-themed cards fit into that 'tempo' deck nicely, but they also have multiple other synergies that I hoped we could explore without devolving the thread. I've tried to get people started by talking about artifact mana and the like. Daze and Equilibrium have totally different synergies and it's a different discussion entirely. In as polite a way as I can say this, I think you're missing the entire point of the thread a bit.
If you want to consider strict blue tempo, I would cut a few cards for Equilibrium and Daze. That's not what this thread is for, hence the title which contains many words that aren't 'tempo'
We just want a discussion of how these could work if you included them in a cube. They are new effects to have available to drafters, and that's an exciting prospect to some of us. They are also potentially very powerful, and the question is if a cube owner is willing to cut 3-5 of the weakest or duplicated effects from his/her blue section in order to accommodate an entirely different package. That could even be alongside you tempo cards like Daze.
If not, there's nothing wrong with that at all (in fact that is my very own traditional approach to blue!), I don't want to put users off suggesting synergies or furthering the archetype because their favourite cuber or whatever came in and posted a couple lines about it being a pointless archetype. If you have totally understood what I'm trying to with this thread and still think it's crap that's fine. Maybe it is, I haven't tested any of it and I'm not trying to sell it to anybody. I haven't bought every copy of Mana Vortex on the secondary market or anything. I'm just not quite sure you understood the intention that this isn't just a tempo package. If you did, sorry. Hope that's cool.
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Wildfire decks don't function without Wildfire. Wildfire and red control aren't the same thing. Stax decks can work without Pox, but Pox decks don't. Blue tempo/aggro, whatever you want to call it, works really well without the dedicated support cards for it. If you want to run a blue land denial package exclusively, that's a different story. My question is why, though. Wildfire and Pox decks are unique, powerful and provide an identity/archetype for a color that can otherwise struggle to compete. Blue doesn't have this problem. I'm not saying that a blue land denial package wouldn't work, only that it won't do anything better than blue was doing without it.
Wildfire decks don't function without Wildfire. Wildfire and red control aren't the same thing. Stax decks can work without Pox, but Pox decks don't. Blue tempo/aggro, whatever you want to call it, works really well without the dedicated support cards for it. If you want to run a blue land denial package exclusively, that's a different story. My question is why, though. Wildfire and Pox decks are unique, powerful and provide an identity/archetype for a color that can otherwise struggle to compete. Blue doesn't have this problem. I'm not saying that a blue land denial package wouldn't work, only that it won't do anything better than blue was doing without it.
Red and black are fine here without those archetypes.
I don't support them for lack of desire in our group, but rather than they both have issues for Winston drafting owing to the scarcity of Wildfire support cards and the horrible mana cost of Pox. I don't consider there to be any support issues in those colours really. Black has card advantage, disruption, lots of aggro-only cards and a smattering of reanimator and control only cards. Red has burn, lots of aggro-only cards, a bunch of midrange and high-end support, and some niche players like Welder. Maybe that increases my inclination to get more draftable archetypes because I don't have access to the former. You be the judge.
Maybe blue wouldn't benefit from having a new archetype available, but it's certainly fun finding out. This one meshes also very well with the present artifact archetype that many cubers support. I think you could make a similar case for not supporting artifact.dec, many of whose cards are perhaps more insular. Sure you can fit that archetype into control, like you can fit land package into aggro or tempo (or artifacts). Whether the overall power level of the cube benefits is pretty hit or miss for each group. I don't think these cards are quite as narrow as you say, which is part and parcel of this thread - to elucidate the interactions.
Like I keep saying, I don't know if any of this will work, but surely the fun of cubing is in trying this stuff.
I hope it all works out for you. I'm not saying that the deck won't work. I'm suggesting that even if it does, it might not improve the way the color plays in the cube. Whereas with black and red, while certainly good without supporting the archetypes, got noticeably better when they were added in. I don't anticipate this being the case for blue in the cube, because of how much of a sought after color it is.
I completely get that, and you are quite possibly totally correct. Even if the overall power level is every so slightly lessened though, I'd consider that a fair trade for a draftable archetype with a few different forms which are possible to build. If it can perform in my cube then all the better, it'll be worth it. If the decks struggle, then obviously it's better off left to constructed.
I have to side with Goodking on this one, and actually support some of the aforementioned cards in my own cube. One of the reasons is because U/x decks can become so linear with the prototypical suit of counters, bounces, and big flyers to end games that something as simple as land denial can become exciting in a color that is very unexciting at times.
I like some of the interactions some of these cards would have with red (Zo-Zu the Punisher, Avalanche Riders), and could also do some neat things with white as well (Ghostly Prison). Theres nothing wrong with changing things up a bit
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See, we already have a ton of variety in our blue decks, playing aggro (tempo), mid-range and control regularly, and supporting a bounce subtheme, the artifact.dec and big mana ramp/cheat strategies. Removing cards to add in another archetype would provide an extra avenue for blue decks to pursue, but at the cost of tools that are needed for an already diverse suite of blue decks that get played. Removing cards that are valuable to all of those strategies and replacing them with cards that only go into one of those theaters will benefit potentially one blue deck at the table while simultaneously removing tools from all the other ones. Because the color functions so well already (it's the most powerful color in the cube) I don't see the benefit outweighing the costs in that color (unlike what more powerful but narrow strategies provide to the other colors).
I got a first look at some of these cards yesterday in a U/B/r deck topped with Parallax Tide and Duskmantle Seer (and, yes, Stifle was in there somewhere). I was splashing red for a bit of burn, Lightning Mauler, Avalanche Riders and Stone Rain. The other cards I drafted from this list were Mana Vortex and Mana Breach. My first impressions:
Parallax Tide: Double Sinkhole for 3 turns is pretty devastating. That should be enough to win for most aggressive decks. You can deny an opponent at least one colour entirely as well with this strategy. This one will definitely stay in I think.
Mana Vortex: I'm not sure about this one yet. Firstly, the double blue cost at 3 CMC was a bit tricky with the manabase I had. It did win me a game after I dropped a random 2 and 3 drop and then the Vortex. Not much coming back from a slow Armageddon. Secondly, having to sacrifice first isn't a problem - unless they hit it with a disenchant during your turn. That hurts a lot, but on the other hand still gives you a good tempo boost (the opponent will have already sacked a land and skipped a turn with mana up for the disenchant). I need more time with this one.
Mana Breach: This one I liked a lot. Unlike Vortex, it's more splashable, and also asymmetrical in MY favour. My opponent was running midrange and had a total nightmare with this card. If you end the curve (more or less) with it, everything your opponent plays from then on sets them back a turn in developing their mana base. Considering I was running a fair amount of other LD, this gives a serious mana headache. It basically stops you playing anything for a while if you want to get to 5+ mana. I'm a fan so far, but not yet 100%.
I've been looking at Sunder as a possible replacment for something, does anyone have experience? What about Planar Overlay as a mini, splashable Sunder - it should always return two lands at least, and can be 'set up for' in some situations.
Well, I'm running a few. The advantage of having played for a while at various sizes including 700+, 450, and 300 is that you get an idea of what effects and cards are expendable. There's very few cards I miss or need since going up to the slightly larger size, and that gives me some leeway to play around with this idea. I see no reason why I couldn't test some at a larger size. Not sure where wtwlf's cube comes into it.
I'm only just getting a first look at some of these cards. Parallax Tide is a lot better than Rising Waters for sure. The latter hasn't showed up in a draft yet, but it has some advantages over Winter Orb - it's much harder to remove, and in any case I rarely play Winter Orb so early anyway. That said, it's possibly one of the weaker ones but I will wait for it to show up, obviously. Tide is pretty brutal. It's very good.
Mana Vortex is an issue for that reason, although you will nearly always want to cast the card when an opponent is tapped out. That ensures they lose a land. The mana cost is actually more of a drawback. I would normally want to play this on curve or +1. Even if you lose 2 lands to 1, that's a 3 for 2 CD but a good tempo boost. I just won with this in one of the games where it wasn't answered so it has potential. I'm not convinced by it yet, although it is savage when it gets working.
Mana breach was really good in our draft. It's really painful for mana greedy midrange and control decks as even casting a manafact or creature will set them back. Casting two or more spells a turn is pretty much impossible. I like the mana cost too. Combining it with the LD from black and red yielded positive results. If my opponent saves mana for a six drop then that's potentially a few turns where they do nothing but draw cards. Seeing as I should be ahead when I play it, that's great. No idea how it will play in the aggro mirror. I could use it to boost a Lotus Cobra or Steppe Lynx perhaps. Anyway, it's decent so far.
I don't have any results with anything else, but I'm quite pleased so far. It's weird to see a blue card now and again that actively draws me towards aggro, and I'm going to try and force the artifact-heavy U/B build this week to abuse some of the symmetry of the land denial effects. Should be fun!
Parallax Tide even has a weird ramp combo you can do with your own lands. Play it turn 4, then on turn 5 during your main phase tap all your lands, remove them from the game with parallax tide and when the last fade counter is removed you get all your lands back untapped (so you can tap them again for double mana). With 5 lands, you could power out Inkwell. Not too shabby, though I'm not sure it it would be worth the one turn to setup.
As we've been discussing a blue mana denial strategy, featuring cards like Parallax Tide, Rising Waters, Mana Vortex, Land Equilibrium and Opposition, I thought that it would be appropriate to start one of these threads for general discussion. Thanks to users in bondafong's Mana Vortex thread who helped come up with all of these cards.
Firstly, I hope we can identify some new cards that could be considered for blue tempo/aggro in the context of this mana denial strategy, or synergies that take advantage of it. Any land destruction and bounce is great, but there may be other things we can work out. Having a trawl through gatherer, I found a couple of cards that are potentially quite savage: Mana Breach and Overburden. I've added those to the list.
Anyway, I'm trialing a few of these in my own cube. No results to report, yet!
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Opposition is almost ubiquitously played, but if you were to include 1-2 more of these cards how would you rank them? Personally I see them in order:
1. Opposition
2. Mana Vortex
3. Parallax Tide
4. Land Equilibrium
5. Rising Waters (though we already have the much better Winter Orb)
6. Mana Breach
7. Overburden
I would not be opposed to trying one or two of these out and see what happens. It would be nice to give another facet to the blue section of the cube.
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That's a misevaluation imo. I would play Propaganda in control decks to stall. I would play Overburden in an aggro/tempo deck in order to hinder my midrange or control opponent's development and make them choose between playing creatures or increasing their land on board. They're completely different cards. I've not played either of them, mind you. Or Mana Breach :-p
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Doubling the mana cost kills the effect. The reason why Orb is so good is because A) you can play an answer plus the Orb when they're tapped out and seal a win, B) you can play a better threat and the Orb when they're tapped out and seal a win and C) you can play it in every color combination that wants to be aggressive. You can't do any of those things with Rising Waters.
Parallax Tide I would consider, alongside some other tempo cards that are unrelated to lands like Standstill and Equilibrium.
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along with the land denial package, is it possible to expand the creature suite of blue to support a tempo/aggro strategy? i know vendillion clique's been mentioned - how about other cards like coralhelm commander or cloudfin raptor? I feel like with some strong support, blue can become another off-aggro colour (like green and black).
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I'm not cutting every aggro creature or Wildfire in red for burn that goes in every deck. I wouldn't cut Pox and friends to run yet another kill spell that goes in every deck. Nor would I cut life from the Loam and Crucible for yet more ramp spells or green filler cards that go in every deck. I think that having a few cards to support specific decks is healthy to the interest of a cube group and for drafting.
It wouldn't take many extra cards to do that, maybe 3 or 4, in place of some of the more expendable blue spells that have duplicate effects for these more unique effects.
I wouldn't advocate just including creatures that are poor copies of another colour's ones, like Raptor or Coralhelm. At 360, I would not include those creatures if they were black or white, my main aggro colours. I like some of these suggested cards because they're unique effects. Blue doesn't actually need any support to be an excellent aggro colour and most of its creatures are really good in tempo decks. But that's actually not the point of this discussion. The cards in the OP are different to what other colours offer and could lead to new drafting strategies.
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The difference between cutting Wildfire and Pox for generic cards and cutting universal blue cards for tempo exclusive spells in blue is that the blue tempo decks are already competitive and already work without them. Pox decks don't work without Pox effects, and Wildfire decks don't work without Wildfires. It's comparing apples and oranges.
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We can call it something other than tempo decks if you like.
We can also call Wildfire decks 'big red' or red control. We can call Pox stax, or Prison. These decks actually function without Wildfire and Pox, respectively. That point is just a matter of semantics. Red control is also competitive without Wildfire. You don't need Pox to draft that deck either. We call it a Wildfire or Pox deck anyway. No more than if we call these Land Equilibrium decks, they will need Land Equilibrium. They will function without it. It's not exactly a tempo deck, as I will illustrate.
If you're suggesting that you actually need Pox to play Pox, then no-one should be running that archetype, being drafting around a lone card is ludicrous. So you must concede that the name of a deck is nothing more than something we've attributed to it, and is entirely arbitrary. I think that you're illustrating my own point better than I did. Which is that some archetype support is a good thing.
Which brings me neatly onto my second point. Daze and Equilibrium are fine cards that I considered adding to the OP. But I didn't add them strictly because I didn't want a discussion about traditional blue tempo. The land-themed cards fit into that 'tempo' deck nicely, but they also have multiple other synergies that I hoped we could explore without devolving the thread. I've tried to get people started by talking about artifact mana and the like. Daze and Equilibrium have totally different synergies and it's a different discussion entirely. In as polite a way as I can say this, I think you're missing the entire point of the thread a bit.
If you want to consider strict blue tempo, I would cut a few cards for Equilibrium and Daze. That's not what this thread is for, hence the title which contains many words that aren't 'tempo'
We just want a discussion of how these could work if you included them in a cube. They are new effects to have available to drafters, and that's an exciting prospect to some of us. They are also potentially very powerful, and the question is if a cube owner is willing to cut 3-5 of the weakest or duplicated effects from his/her blue section in order to accommodate an entirely different package. That could even be alongside you tempo cards like Daze.
If not, there's nothing wrong with that at all (in fact that is my very own traditional approach to blue!), I don't want to put users off suggesting synergies or furthering the archetype because their favourite cuber or whatever came in and posted a couple lines about it being a pointless archetype. If you have totally understood what I'm trying to with this thread and still think it's crap that's fine. Maybe it is, I haven't tested any of it and I'm not trying to sell it to anybody. I haven't bought every copy of Mana Vortex on the secondary market or anything. I'm just not quite sure you understood the intention that this isn't just a tempo package. If you did, sorry. Hope that's cool.
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Red and black are fine here without those archetypes.
I don't support them for lack of desire in our group, but rather than they both have issues for Winston drafting owing to the scarcity of Wildfire support cards and the horrible mana cost of Pox. I don't consider there to be any support issues in those colours really. Black has card advantage, disruption, lots of aggro-only cards and a smattering of reanimator and control only cards. Red has burn, lots of aggro-only cards, a bunch of midrange and high-end support, and some niche players like Welder. Maybe that increases my inclination to get more draftable archetypes because I don't have access to the former. You be the judge.
Maybe blue wouldn't benefit from having a new archetype available, but it's certainly fun finding out. This one meshes also very well with the present artifact archetype that many cubers support. I think you could make a similar case for not supporting artifact.dec, many of whose cards are perhaps more insular. Sure you can fit that archetype into control, like you can fit land package into aggro or tempo (or artifacts). Whether the overall power level of the cube benefits is pretty hit or miss for each group. I don't think these cards are quite as narrow as you say, which is part and parcel of this thread - to elucidate the interactions.
Like I keep saying, I don't know if any of this will work, but surely the fun of cubing is in trying this stuff.
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I like some of the interactions some of these cards would have with red (Zo-Zu the Punisher, Avalanche Riders), and could also do some neat things with white as well (Ghostly Prison). Theres nothing wrong with changing things up a bit
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Parallax Tide: Double Sinkhole for 3 turns is pretty devastating. That should be enough to win for most aggressive decks. You can deny an opponent at least one colour entirely as well with this strategy. This one will definitely stay in I think.
Mana Vortex: I'm not sure about this one yet. Firstly, the double blue cost at 3 CMC was a bit tricky with the manabase I had. It did win me a game after I dropped a random 2 and 3 drop and then the Vortex. Not much coming back from a slow Armageddon. Secondly, having to sacrifice first isn't a problem - unless they hit it with a disenchant during your turn. That hurts a lot, but on the other hand still gives you a good tempo boost (the opponent will have already sacked a land and skipped a turn with mana up for the disenchant). I need more time with this one.
Mana Breach: This one I liked a lot. Unlike Vortex, it's more splashable, and also asymmetrical in MY favour. My opponent was running midrange and had a total nightmare with this card. If you end the curve (more or less) with it, everything your opponent plays from then on sets them back a turn in developing their mana base. Considering I was running a fair amount of other LD, this gives a serious mana headache. It basically stops you playing anything for a while if you want to get to 5+ mana. I'm a fan so far, but not yet 100%.
I've been looking at Sunder as a possible replacment for something, does anyone have experience? What about Planar Overlay as a mini, splashable Sunder - it should always return two lands at least, and can be 'set up for' in some situations.
On spoiled card wishlisting and 'should-have-had'-isms:
I'm only just getting a first look at some of these cards. Parallax Tide is a lot better than Rising Waters for sure. The latter hasn't showed up in a draft yet, but it has some advantages over Winter Orb - it's much harder to remove, and in any case I rarely play Winter Orb so early anyway. That said, it's possibly one of the weaker ones but I will wait for it to show up, obviously. Tide is pretty brutal. It's very good.
Mana Vortex is an issue for that reason, although you will nearly always want to cast the card when an opponent is tapped out. That ensures they lose a land. The mana cost is actually more of a drawback. I would normally want to play this on curve or +1. Even if you lose 2 lands to 1, that's a 3 for 2 CD but a good tempo boost. I just won with this in one of the games where it wasn't answered so it has potential. I'm not convinced by it yet, although it is savage when it gets working.
Mana breach was really good in our draft. It's really painful for mana greedy midrange and control decks as even casting a manafact or creature will set them back. Casting two or more spells a turn is pretty much impossible. I like the mana cost too. Combining it with the LD from black and red yielded positive results. If my opponent saves mana for a six drop then that's potentially a few turns where they do nothing but draw cards. Seeing as I should be ahead when I play it, that's great. No idea how it will play in the aggro mirror. I could use it to boost a Lotus Cobra or Steppe Lynx perhaps. Anyway, it's decent so far.
I don't have any results with anything else, but I'm quite pleased so far. It's weird to see a blue card now and again that actively draws me towards aggro, and I'm going to try and force the artifact-heavy U/B build this week to abuse some of the symmetry of the land denial effects. Should be fun!
On spoiled card wishlisting and 'should-have-had'-isms:
Parallax Tide even has a weird ramp combo you can do with your own lands. Play it turn 4, then on turn 5 during your main phase tap all your lands, remove them from the game with parallax tide and when the last fade counter is removed you get all your lands back untapped (so you can tap them again for double mana). With 5 lands, you could power out Inkwell. Not too shabby, though I'm not sure it it would be worth the one turn to setup.
Anymore experiences with these?
http://riptidelab.com/forum/threads/modular-cube-5-colors.800/
Retro combo cube thread
http://riptidelab.com/forum/threads/retro-combo-cube.1454/