Sorry to dredge up this old topic but I was reading through the forum and this is a topic that I have spent a lot of time thinking about. I posted a thread about it in r/mtgcube a while back too and i would like to chime in (late:)) with my 2 cents.
A few months ago i did a major overhaul of my black section primarily to remove it as a primary color for aggro. To me, white and red have superior aggro packages. So I asked myself, how many colors do i need to support aggro? At that point i realized that, as a cube designer, i don't want 5 color aggro support. White and red do it up right. Why not let the other colors respective strengths shine? I kep black as a support color for aggro but removed all of the 1 drops that didn't serve another purpose. In a 720 cube, i kept Bloodsoaked champion, gravecrawler and carrion feeder. Everything else went to support mid-range, reanimator or control.
Going this way, in an 8 person draft, there is enough to support at least 2 aggro decks, 3 if enough of the cards show up, which allows it to see plenty of play and keeps the control and durdle shenanigans in check. It also makes B/x control, reanimator and mid-range a little stronger.
I made exactly this decision about a year ago - meeting a few other guys who ditched black aggro helped me shore out what black can do better. I ended up crafting my black section to be pretty similar to this dude's.
Oh, I'm not saying that Black's aggro is bad, I just think White and Red's are better and I don't think I need 3 dedicated aggro colors out of 5. I would rather have 2 with a third as support and let Black focus more on Mid-Range, Reanimator, Stax and Control.
I think to have aggro be a full 1/3 of the field, 3-4 colors need to support it. If having a balanced field isn't important, then removing black aggro makes sense. I also think black does aggro extremely well.
I also think that having 3 dedicated aggro colors rather than just 2 is very important for the health of the format. Really opens the options for the aggro drafters and makes it easier to support multiple aggro decks on the table at once. And instead of just mono-R, Boros and Wx aggro (mono-W aggro is just bad), you double the amount of available aggro decks just by adding black aggro support.
It always blows my mind when I hear people talking about black aggro and how weak it is. I've been playing black as an aggro color and doing will with it since I was introduced to Carnophage and Hatred back in Exodus (that's 1998 for you young'uns). Black is my favorite aggro color in the cube because the archetype tends to also be slightly controlling. White wants to overwhelm with an army, red just wants to keep punching you until you're dead, but with black there's a lot of really cool interactions and you win through oppression. Your guys are recursive and between discard and removal your disruption can deal with basically anything. Mono black aggro Pox is easily my favorite deck to build and play in a draft.
I also agree that you really need more than two colors with dedicated aggro packages to truly support a balanced field. Red and white are certainly really good at aggro, but I feel like you need more than just three aggro decks available in the cube for it to really work in a draft. Orzhov and Rakdos aggro are both decks that we see regularly here and can perform well. I'm also a a big fan of playing the black aggro guys in a Dimir deck and going more tempo with it.
I think to have aggro be a full 1/3 of the field, 3-4 colors need to support it. If having a balanced field isn't important, then removing black aggro makes sense. I also think black does aggro extremely well.
If we are going to rehash the whole aggro/midrange/control discussion again, I do think you guys should better define what "aggro" is before you argue how much you are actually supporting it. Because otherwise this conversation is going to go nowhere like the last one. I already see the party lines being drawn and an imminent 4+ pages of people talking past each other.
To me, anything that wants to win the game early is "aggro". That would include blue tempo style decks and even slightly slower denial type decks (which black does well). Basically anything with good game up front and a lackluster late game in my mind fills the role of "aggro". 2 power 1 drop turn-stuff-sideways decks are a very specific flavor of that and in my mind should make up just part of what aggro encompasses.
So it seems completely reasonable to me that you can remove the carnophaghes and still support aggressive decks in black. Sacrifice and recursive themes are a natural fit in black and you can build pretty aggressive varieties of those. That's what I've been doing lately and it's been popular.
It always blows my mind when I hear people talking about black aggro and how weak it is. I've been playing black as an aggro color and doing will with it since I was introduced to Carnophage and Hatred back in Exodus (that's 1998 for you young'uns). Black is my favorite aggro color in the cube because the archetype tends to also be slightly controlling. White wants to overwhelm with an army, red just wants to keep punching you until you're dead, but with black there's a lot of really cool interactions and you win through oppression. Your guys are recursive and between discard and removal your disruption can deal with basically anything. Mono black aggro Pox is easily my favorite deck to build and play in a draft.
I also agree that you really need more than two colors with dedicated aggro packages to truly support a balanced field. Red and white are certainly really good at aggro, but I feel like you need more than just three aggro decks available in the cube for it to really work in a draft. Orzhov and Rakdos aggro are both decks that we see regularly here and can perform well. I'm also a a big fan of playing the black aggro guys in a Dimir deck and going more tempo with it.
I do support Orzhov and Rakdos aggro, just not with Black as the primary color. My black section has a lot of aggro cards but and a few cards that will work in either aggro, mid-range, stax or reanimator. I agree that Black should have aggro support, I just don't feel like it needs to be a dedicated primary color for the strategy. My cube supports mono-red aggro, mono-white aggro, white-red aggro, white-black aggro, and red-black aggro along with White-Blue tempo (which does a pretty good impression of aggro) along with some pretty aggressive G/x mid-range decks. I feel like that is plenty of support for an aggro strategy if you want to play it while still leaving the field open to other interesting decks.
I could definitely see an argument for cutting White from a dedicated aggro color and moving black back into one but white never felt awkward like Black did for me. Whenever I tried to draft Black based aggro, I almost always ended up either in primary Red or White because of the overall quality of the available options. Because of this, Black aggro just felt like a trap stategy to me which meant that a lot of black's one-drops just stopped getting drafted, making for a lot of dead cards in the draft.
I'm glad this got bumped, I've been thinking about this more again lately. As you've read the thread, my stance on this was clear. I cut most of blaggro from my cube. As many in here have said, black can do aggro, and can midrange, and can control...this has always been tough for me to figure out how to balance. It has been for others to find the right balance too, I've read (rude criticisms aside).
However, I've since added some black aggro back in, because I was tired of Wx or Rx (usually just RW) being the aggro. Don't get me wrong, those decks were always good...but I wanted to try & encourage some diversity. I think my cube (and opinion) is very much like the dude posted above me. I have significant W and R agg support, and black (and green) has about half as much agg support as R and W now. This way, you can easily draft a white or red based aggro deck that is supported by black or green. I kinda like where agg is in my cube now that I've tilted green and black to support aggro a little. I'd be okay if I could squeeze just another 1 or 2 black and green cards...if I could just find room.
Antknee & Usman discussed how the boundaries between agg&midrange have started to blur slightly, and midrange&control is a little blurred too. The gist that I got from their discussion from the podcast is that you can make a 25 card agg deck full or 1 & 2 drops (and a couple 3s + 'geddon), and it'll do just fine...but sometimes an agg deck wants 24 cards and an extra 4cc and mayyybe even a 5cc card in for reach (thundermaw or cloudgoat?) since the cube has just gotten so much stronger in the last 3 years. And control might need to dip into some midrange to try and stabilize a little sooner. This resonated with me, and with a few tweaks have broadened the variety of decks in our cube. You now see raw aggro, agg/midrange, midrange, control, and combo...with black (and green) being a key player in each of those.
The biggest problem, IMHO, is that when you fill black with a sufficient number of all the well-advertised reanimation enablers, Stax support, control support/finishers, tutors, discard and removal (all of which black is so good at), it's tough to find still room to make 40% of a black section "aggro". Fortunately some cards (bloodghast, champion, bitterblossom) can do double duty.
Personnaly, I really don't want to label or categorise any color in the cube into one specific side of the rock-paper-scissor system. Stuff like : «Red and White are the aggro colors and should be the only ones cube focus on. They do better, etc.» sounds pretty false to me. I rather want all my color to be able to play any kind of strategies. This makes the cube much more unpredictable, none-recursive and FUN. Drag your red and white section into aggro, your blue section into control and your green and black section into midrange is the worst thing you could actually do to your cube IMO.
Personnaly, I really don't want to label or categorise any color in the cube into one specific side of the rock-paper-scissor system. Stuff like : «Red and White are the aggro colors and should be the only ones cube focus on. They do better, etc.» sounds pretty false to me. I rather want all my color to be able to play any kind of strategies. This makes the cube much more unpredictable, none-recursive and FUN. Drag your red and white section into aggro, your blue section into control and your green and black section into midrange is the worst thing you could actually do to your cube IMO.
I agree with the principle of this. But there's probably a middle ground somewhere. You can take this too far both ways. Like forcing bad cards just so that "aggro" or whatever is equally represented in a color. Example would be in blue where to make a 2 power 1 drop type of aggro deck, it's going to be janky as hell and just suck against other decks in most cubes. Same is true for green.
My 2 cents is try to be organic about it. If you manage each color to an aggressive curve but choose cards that are strong and represent what the color does best, you will wind up with a very diverse and interesting meta - much of which might surprise you. Black has great recursive threats (crawler, champion), very effective targeted discard at 1 CC, graveyard effects like entomb and what not. You have to cut some of that if you are going to toss in all the generic 2 power 1 drop beaters. It's a personal choice on how you want to develop your black section and both can work and both can contribute to aggressive strategies in different ways. There's no one-size-fits-all cube design. A lot of this has to be figured out with your playgroup too since it's often group dependent. If everyone loves and drafts all in aggro, more support will probably make your drafts better. If players don't, you wind up with more dead cards that always wheel. Adjust accordingly.
Example would be in blue where to make a 2 power 1 drop type of aggro deck, it's going to be janky as hell and just suck against other decks in most cubes. Same is true for green.
I don't see why if Blue could bring us some more powerful 1-drop and 2-drop we couldn't try to craft it as a better aggro support section. Those creatures simply doesn't exist or, at least, there's just a few of them.
Green aggro is a thing though. And it is the case mainly because there is now enough powerful 1-drop. Thanks to Warden of the First Tree, Wolfbitten Captive, Dryad Militant and Experiment One (a one that I don't run, but should). Lotus Cobra is the sweetest 2-drop for green aggro but I agree that more of them could be welcome. Thanks to green-touching guild cards and Collected Company.
In my cube (540 semi-powered), black's two main archetypes are sac-for-value and the usual reanimator package, with enough aggro cards to support RB or WB aggro decks nicely (and with enough luck, you could pull off mono black aggro as well). And as always, black is a strong second color for any control deck.
For the sac theme, we've included the usual sac/pox suspects along with a few unconventional selections: Soldevi Adnate, Undercity Informer, Attrition, and Trading Post. Also currently testing Stronghold Assassin and Carnage Altar, so we'll see how they do (the Altar has been quite solid, while the Assassin has not yet been cast). Soldevi Adnate has been interesting so far... he's made some pretty fun things happen, most recently "sacrifice Scuttling Doom Engine, you take six damage... make six black mana, Villainous Wealth you for x=14." Anyway, my players have enjoyed it.
icculushfb42 if you are happy with this change it's ok.
My question is, how can you possibly have the right redundancy of aggro 1-drops if you cut an entire aggro color?
Our group runs a 465 unpowered cube and we cut green from the aggro section because there are not many players of that strategy among us, but cutting almost another entire session would mean keeping space for just one aggro draft in a table.
Beside that I agree that at the moment we've found boros to be the best combination because of some cards (boros charm, helix, figure of destiny) and the fact that black aggro is too much suicide.
It hasn't been a problem so far. The ideas is, you draft the one drops in your primary color since that is the color of mana that you are most likely to have on turn 1. When using that strategy, it hasn't been an issue. It may not work for other groups but it works for me.
Unless your mana is butt, you should reliably have access to both colors on turn 1. Unless your second color is a super light splash of only a couple of cards.
Unless your mana is butt, you should reliably have access to both colors on turn 1. Unless your second color is a super light splash of only a couple of cards.
In 720, it's a little harder to guarantee consistent mana. So, maybe that's where our major difference comes from. In my 720, the way I'm doing it works really well but maybe in your smaller 540, it's easier to get a more consistent mana base.
In 720, it's a little harder to guarantee consistent mana. So, maybe that's where our major difference comes from. In my 720, the way I'm doing it works really well but maybe in your smaller 540, it's easier to get a more consistent mana base.
Just double up on the good lands. There's no real benefit to having a weak mana base in your cube. It's net negative across the board. I get guys not wanting to break singleton, but it's totally worth doing on your mana producing lands. At 720, I'd run double fetch and triple fetchable duals (in whatever combination you want), plus probably two more cycles on top of that (so 7 total).
EDIT: I just checked my list and I'm running 6 cycles at 450. So I'd run even more than 7 at 720. 9 maybe? But I want a more constructed level mana base in my cube. You may not.
Unless your mana is butt, you should reliably have access to both colors on turn 1. Unless your second color is a super light splash of only a couple of cards.
In 720, it's a little harder to guarantee consistent mana. So, maybe that's where our major difference comes from. In my 720, the way I'm doing it works really well but maybe in your smaller 540, it's easier to get a more consistent mana base.
Bigger cubes have fine mana. If you have 1 fixing land in your final 40, you can create a 10/8 manabase, which will give you a 75+% chance of having access to colored mana of both colors in your opening hand.
A few months ago i did a major overhaul of my black section primarily to remove it as a primary color for aggro. To me, white and red have superior aggro packages. So I asked myself, how many colors do i need to support aggro? At that point i realized that, as a cube designer, i don't want 5 color aggro support. White and red do it up right. Why not let the other colors respective strengths shine? I kep black as a support color for aggro but removed all of the 1 drops that didn't serve another purpose. In a 720 cube, i kept Bloodsoaked champion, gravecrawler and carrion feeder. Everything else went to support mid-range, reanimator or control.
Going this way, in an 8 person draft, there is enough to support at least 2 aggro decks, 3 if enough of the cards show up, which allows it to see plenty of play and keeps the control and durdle shenanigans in check. It also makes B/x control, reanimator and mid-range a little stronger.
My 540 Powered CubeTutor Page
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!
Cheers,
rant
My Cube
CubeCobra: https://cubecobra.com/cube/overview/5f5d0310ed602310515d4c32
Cube Tutor: http://cubetutor.com/viewcube/1963
Uril, the Miststalker RGW -- Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre C -- Vhati il-Dal BG -- Jor Kadeen, the Prevailer RW -- Animar, Soul of Elements URG
Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker R -- Maga, Traitor to Mortals B -- Ghave, Guru of Spores BGW -- Sliver Hivelord WUBRG
I also agree that you really need more than two colors with dedicated aggro packages to truly support a balanced field. Red and white are certainly really good at aggro, but I feel like you need more than just three aggro decks available in the cube for it to really work in a draft. Orzhov and Rakdos aggro are both decks that we see regularly here and can perform well. I'm also a a big fan of playing the black aggro guys in a Dimir deck and going more tempo with it.
MTGS Average Peasant Cube 2023 Edition
Follow me. I tweet.
Yup. Every last bit of this.
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!
To me, anything that wants to win the game early is "aggro". That would include blue tempo style decks and even slightly slower denial type decks (which black does well). Basically anything with good game up front and a lackluster late game in my mind fills the role of "aggro". 2 power 1 drop turn-stuff-sideways decks are a very specific flavor of that and in my mind should make up just part of what aggro encompasses.
So it seems completely reasonable to me that you can remove the carnophaghes and still support aggressive decks in black. Sacrifice and recursive themes are a natural fit in black and you can build pretty aggressive varieties of those. That's what I've been doing lately and it's been popular.
http://riptidelab.com/forum/threads/modular-cube-5-colors.800/
Retro combo cube thread
http://riptidelab.com/forum/threads/retro-combo-cube.1454/
I do support Orzhov and Rakdos aggro, just not with Black as the primary color. My black section has a lot of aggro cards but and a few cards that will work in either aggro, mid-range, stax or reanimator. I agree that Black should have aggro support, I just don't feel like it needs to be a dedicated primary color for the strategy. My cube supports mono-red aggro, mono-white aggro, white-red aggro, white-black aggro, and red-black aggro along with White-Blue tempo (which does a pretty good impression of aggro) along with some pretty aggressive G/x mid-range decks. I feel like that is plenty of support for an aggro strategy if you want to play it while still leaving the field open to other interesting decks.
I could definitely see an argument for cutting White from a dedicated aggro color and moving black back into one but white never felt awkward like Black did for me. Whenever I tried to draft Black based aggro, I almost always ended up either in primary Red or White because of the overall quality of the available options. Because of this, Black aggro just felt like a trap stategy to me which meant that a lot of black's one-drops just stopped getting drafted, making for a lot of dead cards in the draft.
However, I've since added some black aggro back in, because I was tired of Wx or Rx (usually just RW) being the aggro. Don't get me wrong, those decks were always good...but I wanted to try & encourage some diversity. I think my cube (and opinion) is very much like the dude posted above me. I have significant W and R agg support, and black (and green) has about half as much agg support as R and W now. This way, you can easily draft a white or red based aggro deck that is supported by black or green. I kinda like where agg is in my cube now that I've tilted green and black to support aggro a little. I'd be okay if I could squeeze just another 1 or 2 black and green cards...if I could just find room.
Antknee & Usman discussed how the boundaries between agg&midrange have started to blur slightly, and midrange&control is a little blurred too. The gist that I got from their discussion from the podcast is that you can make a 25 card agg deck full or 1 & 2 drops (and a couple 3s + 'geddon), and it'll do just fine...but sometimes an agg deck wants 24 cards and an extra 4cc and mayyybe even a 5cc card in for reach (thundermaw or cloudgoat?) since the cube has just gotten so much stronger in the last 3 years. And control might need to dip into some midrange to try and stabilize a little sooner. This resonated with me, and with a few tweaks have broadened the variety of decks in our cube. You now see raw aggro, agg/midrange, midrange, control, and combo...with black (and green) being a key player in each of those.
The biggest problem, IMHO, is that when you fill black with a sufficient number of all the well-advertised reanimation enablers, Stax support, control support/finishers, tutors, discard and removal (all of which black is so good at), it's tough to find still room to make 40% of a black section "aggro". Fortunately some cards (bloodghast, champion, bitterblossom) can do double duty.
Old school group, sometimes more beer than cards. Revised thru Tempest block (and a little of Urza), sorry if I don't know all the new cards
Ye' Olde Schoole Casual Decks: BUReanimate -- GRAggro -- BWPestilence -- G10-land Stompy -- GRElfball -- GWEnchantress -- RAnkh Sligh -- BDiscard -- MUC "Draw-go" -- BRSuicide -- UWSkies -- UHigh Tide Mill -- WWeenie -- UMutated Bombers -- URThe great land-toss -- UB Molasass
Zetsu's Cube on CubeTutor.com
Zetsu's Ebay MTG Online Store
Zetsu's Poker Draft Method
I agree with the principle of this. But there's probably a middle ground somewhere. You can take this too far both ways. Like forcing bad cards just so that "aggro" or whatever is equally represented in a color. Example would be in blue where to make a 2 power 1 drop type of aggro deck, it's going to be janky as hell and just suck against other decks in most cubes. Same is true for green.
My 2 cents is try to be organic about it. If you manage each color to an aggressive curve but choose cards that are strong and represent what the color does best, you will wind up with a very diverse and interesting meta - much of which might surprise you. Black has great recursive threats (crawler, champion), very effective targeted discard at 1 CC, graveyard effects like entomb and what not. You have to cut some of that if you are going to toss in all the generic 2 power 1 drop beaters. It's a personal choice on how you want to develop your black section and both can work and both can contribute to aggressive strategies in different ways. There's no one-size-fits-all cube design. A lot of this has to be figured out with your playgroup too since it's often group dependent. If everyone loves and drafts all in aggro, more support will probably make your drafts better. If players don't, you wind up with more dead cards that always wheel. Adjust accordingly.
http://riptidelab.com/forum/threads/modular-cube-5-colors.800/
Retro combo cube thread
http://riptidelab.com/forum/threads/retro-combo-cube.1454/
I don't see why if Blue could bring us some more powerful 1-drop and 2-drop we couldn't try to craft it as a better aggro support section. Those creatures simply doesn't exist or, at least, there's just a few of them.
Green aggro is a thing though. And it is the case mainly because there is now enough powerful 1-drop. Thanks to Warden of the First Tree, Wolfbitten Captive, Dryad Militant and Experiment One (a one that I don't run, but should). Lotus Cobra is the sweetest 2-drop for green aggro but I agree that more of them could be welcome. Thanks to green-touching guild cards and Collected Company.
Zetsu's Cube on CubeTutor.com
Zetsu's Ebay MTG Online Store
Zetsu's Poker Draft Method
For the sac theme, we've included the usual sac/pox suspects along with a few unconventional selections: Soldevi Adnate, Undercity Informer, Attrition, and Trading Post. Also currently testing Stronghold Assassin and Carnage Altar, so we'll see how they do (the Altar has been quite solid, while the Assassin has not yet been cast). Soldevi Adnate has been interesting so far... he's made some pretty fun things happen, most recently "sacrifice Scuttling Doom Engine, you take six damage... make six black mana, Villainous Wealth you for x=14." Anyway, my players have enjoyed it.
It hasn't been a problem so far. The ideas is, you draft the one drops in your primary color since that is the color of mana that you are most likely to have on turn 1. When using that strategy, it hasn't been an issue. It may not work for other groups but it works for me.
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!
In 720, it's a little harder to guarantee consistent mana. So, maybe that's where our major difference comes from. In my 720, the way I'm doing it works really well but maybe in your smaller 540, it's easier to get a more consistent mana base.
Just double up on the good lands. There's no real benefit to having a weak mana base in your cube. It's net negative across the board. I get guys not wanting to break singleton, but it's totally worth doing on your mana producing lands. At 720, I'd run double fetch and triple fetchable duals (in whatever combination you want), plus probably two more cycles on top of that (so 7 total).
EDIT: I just checked my list and I'm running 6 cycles at 450. So I'd run even more than 7 at 720. 9 maybe? But I want a more constructed level mana base in my cube. You may not.
http://riptidelab.com/forum/threads/modular-cube-5-colors.800/
Retro combo cube thread
http://riptidelab.com/forum/threads/retro-combo-cube.1454/
Bigger cubes have fine mana. If you have 1 fixing land in your final 40, you can create a 10/8 manabase, which will give you a 75+% chance of having access to colored mana of both colors in your opening hand.
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!