I know Leelue often draft with 2 players, and I'm curious to hear which decisions others have made to improve the experience for 2 players.
My wife and I started with peasant cube about 3 (4?) years ago. We started with a 360 modern border peasant cube called "draft all stars". We used Winchester draft and had fun, but 2 colour decks never came together. With 60 guild cards, 20 dual lands and 10 trilands, there were too many dead cards.
The cube has developed over time, and what we did were the following steps:
1. Cut guild section to 40 cards, then 20 cards.
2. Implement the hybrid system
3. Cut dual lands
4. Reduce the cubesize to 180, cut trilands and reduce guild section to 10.
5. Implement new drafting system. This allowed us to increase cube size to 200 by including trilands and 10 guild cards for signaling.
We also changed our drafting method to improve the decks we end up with. Each player gets 15 packs of 5 cards. Pick 1 card, pass the remaining 4. Then pick 1 of the 4 and discard the remaining. Each player also gets 5 tokens that can be used to pick another card from a pack. We end up with a draft pool of 35 cards. This way we use 150 of the 200 cards in the cube, increasing the probability that a strategy will come together.
I see people talk about how there are too many dead cards in 1 on 1, and this really help alleviate that issue. When there are cards that neither player want, they just end up getting naturally burned, so I find that you don't need to change your cube really at all for this. Also I think the power level in pancake drafting is generally more comparable to a proper draft than something like rochester.
The only two player drafting I've done used Grid Drafting. It's very interactive, and I really enjoyed it. (Did this with my Peasant Cube, btw)
Here's an article with a description and example images of how it works (scroll down to the Grid Drafting header).
Grid drafting is a two-player format that works as follows:
• Start with 18 packs of 9 cards.
• For each pack, lay it out in a 3×3 grid face up (just lay them out in order, don’t look at the cards and decide where each one should go).
• The first player takes a row or column.
• The second player takes a remaining row or column. Discard the undrafted cards (which will be 3 or 4 cards per pack).
• Alternate who goes first each pack.
By the numbers, each player will end up drafting between 45 and 54 cards from the total 162-card pool.
Grid drafting, first and foremost, is an interactive hate-drafting format. Every pick requires you to balance maximizing your own deck’s power while minimizing the potential power of your opponent’s deck. With each pack you look to take a slice out of the grid that leaves your opponent without favorable options.
I see people talk about how there are too many dead cards in 1 on 1, and this really help alleviate that issue. When there are cards that neither player want, they just end up getting naturally burned, so I find that you don't need to change your cube really at all for this. Also I think the power level in pancake drafting is generally more comparable to a proper draft than something like rochester.
Thanks, we haven't tested this one and I will try to introduce it. She tends to prefer the drafts that are quick, but she also like hate drafting so I'm hopeful.
We have also tried grid drafting, but I didn't like that we had perfect information.
Edit: I didn't like that she had perfect information. It was a bit too easy for her to hate draft :-P
for 2 player id rather sealed and keep the duals tbh
I'd rather not ever see a dual land again. I'd rather a list of differently valuable gold lands that eat up fewer slots.
(EDIT: I do like the manlands though.)
//
Whenever I can convince someone to do a 1v1 draft, I... do something that sounds very complicated. It's a quilt draft that I've frankensteined the rules of.
Explanation of a quilt. Skip to the next bold line if you know what it is.
A quilt draft involves making a grid of cards and having only a few cards able to be selectable at a time. My quilts are 6x6.
The way you lay the cards out is what makes this work. They are dropped together in a sort of woven patten, like below
- | - | - |
| - | - | -
- | - | - |
| - | - | -
- | - | - |
| - | - | -
The reason why it's set up this way is because you can only choose a card if its narrow edge is exposed. As you draft, the narrow edges of more and more cards are exposed and so we work our way deeper and deeper into the quilt. You may be tempted to do larger quilts, as per the way I first read of this method, but big quilts have two problems. The first is information overload, which for anyone who doesn't have fluency with your cube is already almost a problem at 6x6. The other issue is that cards nearer the center become near impossible to choose.
After each player has chosen 10 cards, we drop the quilt and start a new one. 4 quilts are just enough. And we don't alternate who goes first like some kind of pleb, but instead go 1221.
Leelue's extra bastardizations of the format
If you do enough quilts, there's an annoying strategical problem that comes up.
Let's say lingering souls is locked behind some card nobody wants. Well, taking the random off color filler will immediately clue your opponent in on your plan and they will take lingering souls from you. Or you could have a perfectly reasonable C tier card that you want, but taking it could open a Curse of Predation. In both of these cases, everyone realizes this and none of those cards (neither the locked card nor the blocking one) get meaningfully taken by anyone. Good cards remain permanently locked.
The way I got around this was to institute a system that lets you pick more than one card at a time at a cost.
Extra picks
If you want to take more than one card on your turn, each extra card counts double for your pick limit for the round. Since you only get 40 cards in the first place, it really does mean that you can't just burn your way through a round without possibly running short on playables in the end. Also, if you spend picks on these extra cards, it leaves your opponent with several picks all alone at the end of a round.
Blind picks
I feel the pain Eldamir had over perfect information. So at the start of every round, each player gets a pack of seven cards to chose from. They make a pick like it's pick one of any normal draft, shuffle the remaining six cards, and then lay out those six cards as one of the two center rows of the quilt. This way, there are four cards in your pool the enemy doesn't know about.
In case it's not clear, this means that the center two rows of the quilt are each comprised of the remaining cards from those packs, and the outer four rows are built out of the random cards in the cube.
I've been using this method for years. It is not nearly as complicated as it sounds, but it isn't short.
The pancake draft idea is very similar to what the traditional cube people wee calling a blink draft. In fact, it's almost exactly the same as my iteration of the blink draft.
This version is probably better than mine, but I would still want to tinker with it based on my experience.
First: Larger pack sizes. Larger pack sizes make more of the decisions more meaningful. Change those 11 card packs into 15s.
Second: Instead of burning the last couple cards from each pile, pass them back to your opponent for their pool.
Third: Make only 6 packs per player instead of 9.
Each player will get 9 cards out of each round, with about 5-6 of them likely to be things that have a good chance at being contenders for the deck. Cards like combat tricks and nonbasics for nongreedy decks tend to be the stragglers in the packs by the end, and these reasonable playables might as well not go to waste by being burned at the end.
I recommend this sort of method very highly.
//
2man drafts care the most about dead cards and perfect information. The cube itself should mitigate the first as much as possible (gold cards) and the draft formats could do well to try and make sure you can surprise your opponent somehow.
The impulse draft is in the same family as the one above.
The modified version I described is what I played with yesterday. It went so well and so quickly that my friend asked me repeatedly to remind him of the instructions so he could use it with his own cubes when I'm not around. That's a good sign.
Looking at our latest drafts, there is a tendency that green decks end up loosing. White decks tend to win. I would probably rate the colours in my cube: W, B, R, U, G.
A few months ago I listened to an episode of Solely Singleton, where peasant cube was discussed. They pointed out that most of the spot removal was on the level of powered/unpowered cubes (path to exile, swords to plowshares, oblivion ring, lightning bolt, shriekmaw, go for the throat...).
The same cannot be said for green creatures, especially CMC 4+. I have attempted changes to my green section, but it doesn't seem to be enough. In a draft with 6+ players, this might balance out as more players might prefer the strongest colours. This sort of self balancing is hard with 2 players.
I guess my conclusion is that to help green, I have to depower my removal spells, including creatures like Shriekmaw and my favorite creature from school, Flametongue Kavu.
Looking at Leelue's list, it seems that he has already done exactly this. I couldn't find any green cards that seem to have been cut from his list due to power level...
Although Leelue seems to have it in his cube, the only green card I can see people cut for power reasons is Curse of Predation.
Agreed. I've seen users comment that Leelue tries to have an even power level in his cube. If we assume that is the case, it proves that in a powered peasant cube environment, green is the worst colour as he has cut powerful cards from all other colours:
Agreed. I've seen users comment that Leelue tries to have an even power level in his cube. If we assume that is the case, it proves that in a powered peasant cube environment, green is the worst colour as he has cut powerful cards from all other colours:
[/card]
Green
None?
As I run most of these in a 200 card cube, it's not surprising that W and B might be the strongest colours.
Almost all of these cards are removal, so while obviously it's a bit about power level it's more about the power of removal and not overall card power. I don't run Sol Ring, Skullclamp, Loxodon Warhammer, Curse of Predation and a lot of other cards for power level reasons, but I like fast removal and I don't mind a resonable 2 for 1 removal either. I haven't seen someone win solely or mainly because he had Swords to Plowshares or Go for the Throat.
Removal can be problematic if there is too much quantity, but if your cube is properly balanced around it (higher cmc creatures with either strong etb effects or resilience) it's not a problem if there is only quality removal. Even in low powered (compared to CU/be) limited environments we get cards like Cast Down or Go for the Throat - but at uncommon, not at common.
Looking at your specific cube I can say there is way too much removal. You run almost the same amount of removal as I do and my cube has 405 cards. This is where many people go wrong at first, especially in CU/be, where a lot of high quality cards are removal. I know I did this. It leads to games where player A plays a creature, player B kills it, player A plays another one, player B kills it again and so on and then player B wins because he plays a 2 for 1 eventually. But if that's how your cube plays depowering removal doesn't make games more exciting or less one-sided.
If you allow people to fill half their deck with Go for the Throat, Doom Blade, Cast Down, Fatal Push and everything else there is then aggressive and generally creature based decks will have a hard time. But if your opponent only has 3-4 removal spells in his decks, only draws 1-2 during a game and then has to decide whether he wants to remove your Llanowar Elf now or your Arborback Stomper later then green decks don't have a problem and then Swords to Plowshares isn't a source of ultimate power. In fact it would be unfair if your opponent had to play crappy 3 mana sorcery speed removal instead.
Looking at your specific cube I can say there is way too much removal.
Thanks for the reality check, I will reduce the amount of removal.
When I redesigned my cube, I based it off the average MTGsalvation peasant cube 2018, and included the top cards. It makes sense that the top removal spells are more common between cubes. Balancing the amount of removal didn't come to mind...
Also, to add my own drafting method to the list of possibilities: we usually play my 405 card cube with four players and we draft 6 packs of 15 cards. For each pack first you pick 1 and burn 1, then you pick 2 and burn 2 until only 5 cards are left, in which case you pick 2 and burn 3. That means you end up with 7 cards for your draft pool and 42 total cards once all 6 packs have been drafted.
The first pick 1 burn 1 is to prevent lucky people from picking too many highest power level cards (eg if you have Control Magic and Flametongue Kavu in a new pack you can't pick them both) and to control power level a bit as you can burn powerful cards before your opponent can get them.
I generally like hate/burn draft as it further controls the outcome of the draft and amount of removal. If you play an aggro token deck you will burn every kind of mass removal or pinger you see. If you play a ramp deck you will burn unconditional spot removal. And so on.
In our case we draft 360 of 405 cards, which gives us a bit of variance, but it still allows drafting archetypes. In your case you'd draft 180 of 200 cards, which would also be great. I can only recommend it. And once you know all the cards it doesn't take that long either.
Not gonna lie it's kinda nice to be used as a template for multiple discussions. I really have to update my list so I can feel like I am taking my position in the community more seriously. I promise to do so once my m21 and jumpstart cards come in.
Phitt is right when he says I have depowered removal more than anything else, but that is partly because it's hard to have a diverse, interesting suite of removal spells without many of them just being worse versions of one another if you include the best of the best. Once upon a time we frequently ran Journey to nowhere alongside Swords to plowshares. Of course, there are better cards and worse cards in magic. But there was something that just felt... distasteful for how there is no situation where if somehow I had to choose between journey and Swords that I would pick journey. So I sorta landed on a B- to B+ tier of power level for my removal spells and tried to balance them around that.
Nobody noticed, but I am also missing mulldrifter from my list for this reason. Mulldrifer is a card I frequently want to add back in, but then it sorta "invalidates" a card like opportunity or the new shipwreck dowser. By removing mulldrifter, it frees up space for a lot of options to not just be bad mulldrifters.
Oh, also, I don't run shriekmaw and most other black removal spells because I reaaaally hate referencing the color of my opponent's cards. It feels unbearably arbitrary.
Curse of Predation is a card that I can imagine being banned, but it has lost enough games somehow (A hiccup like a bad hand or running into a removal spell makes it much much worse.) In limited viewing, I think Song of Freyalise has even given it a run for its money such that I can imagine a deck taking the song over it in "pack 3", which is pretty remarkable.
I run into a little trouble with effects that really need redundancy for entire decktypes to work (aggro creatures overlap a bunch, as do our 6-7 drops) but I do what I can.
TL:DR
I want as many cards as possible to be competitive with as many other cards as possible, so long as I don't sacrifice too much by the way of interesting effects or cripple an archetype. I don't exactly love the idea that I don't play with CGR or FTK, but I don't exactly miss them either.
I recently increased my cube size to 240 cards. With a 2 year old and a 3 month old baby in the house, playing has been limited. When we have played, we have divided the cube in two and built 2 decks each from our pool of 120 cards. Quick, forces us to test more colours, and the larger pool helps power level/synergy for the decks we build. I vastly prefer this to just 90 card pools.
With a baby on the arm, shuffling the decks are impossible. None of us like the downtime from searching the libraries. With the addition of Thriving lands, Evolving Wilds and terramorphic expanse feel strictly worse. My wife do not like Gemstone mine and Ash barrens also forces us to search our libraries. I think I will update my land section to 5 Vivid lands, 5 Thriving lands and 5 City of Brass. 5 City of Brass should also help aggro. The only shuffling effect I might keep is Demonic Tutor.
When it comes to the green section, it still strugles, but have had some better results after I reduced the amount of removal in other colours. Thank you Phitt77 for pointing this out! I'm a bit worried that cutting all cards that search for basic lands will hurt green...
Another observation I've made is that hitting a critical mass of 1 drops i a single colour is impossible. I'm considering just cutting all 1 drops... Especially red 1 drops feel underwhelming. I also remember LSV saying that 1 drops are usually a trap in sealed, although a pool of 120 cube cards should be stronger than 90 from a standard/masters set. 5 City of Brass in the pool should help colour fixing for aggro decks, so I'm will postpone this change.
My wife and I started with peasant cube about 3 (4?) years ago. We started with a 360 modern border peasant cube called "draft all stars". We used Winchester draft and had fun, but 2 colour decks never came together. With 60 guild cards, 20 dual lands and 10 trilands, there were too many dead cards.
The cube has developed over time, and what we did were the following steps:
1. Cut guild section to 40 cards, then 20 cards.
2. Implement the hybrid system
3. Cut dual lands
4. Reduce the cubesize to 180, cut trilands and reduce guild section to 10.
5. Implement new drafting system. This allowed us to increase cube size to 200 by including trilands and 10 guild cards for signaling.
We also changed our drafting method to improve the decks we end up with. Each player gets 15 packs of 5 cards. Pick 1 card, pass the remaining 4. Then pick 1 of the 4 and discard the remaining. Each player also gets 5 tokens that can be used to pick another card from a pack. We end up with a draft pool of 35 cards. This way we use 150 of the 200 cards in the cube, increasing the probability that a strategy will come together.
https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/5edbb58ed65648101a043535
powpercube Johnny https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/37t
https://joost.vunderink.net/blog/2013/03/21/pancake-draft-cube-draft-for-two-players/
I see people talk about how there are too many dead cards in 1 on 1, and this really help alleviate that issue. When there are cards that neither player want, they just end up getting naturally burned, so I find that you don't need to change your cube really at all for this. Also I think the power level in pancake drafting is generally more comparable to a proper draft than something like rochester.
https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/djredpeasant
We also did quite a bit of sealed in the beginning, but both of us prefer to draft. Drafting also makes it easier to create a more streamlined deck.
Here's an article with a description and example images of how it works (scroll down to the Grid Drafting header).
2023 Average Peasant Cube|and Discussion
Because I have more decks than fit in a signature
Useful Resources:
MTGSalvation tags
EDHREC
ManabaseCrafter
Thanks, we haven't tested this one and I will try to introduce it. She tends to prefer the drafts that are quick, but she also like hate drafting so I'm hopeful.
We have also tried grid drafting, but I didn't like that we had perfect information.
Edit: I didn't like that she had perfect information. It was a bit too easy for her to hate draft :-P
2023 Average Peasant Cube|and Discussion
Because I have more decks than fit in a signature
Useful Resources:
MTGSalvation tags
EDHREC
ManabaseCrafter
I'd rather not ever see a dual land again. I'd rather a list of differently valuable gold lands that eat up fewer slots.
(EDIT: I do like the manlands though.)
//
Whenever I can convince someone to do a 1v1 draft, I... do something that sounds very complicated. It's a quilt draft that I've frankensteined the rules of.
Explanation of a quilt. Skip to the next bold line if you know what it is.
A quilt draft involves making a grid of cards and having only a few cards able to be selectable at a time. My quilts are 6x6.
The way you lay the cards out is what makes this work. They are dropped together in a sort of woven patten, like below
- | - | - |
| - | - | -
- | - | - |
| - | - | -
- | - | - |
| - | - | -
The reason why it's set up this way is because you can only choose a card if its narrow edge is exposed. As you draft, the narrow edges of more and more cards are exposed and so we work our way deeper and deeper into the quilt. You may be tempted to do larger quilts, as per the way I first read of this method, but big quilts have two problems. The first is information overload, which for anyone who doesn't have fluency with your cube is already almost a problem at 6x6. The other issue is that cards nearer the center become near impossible to choose.
After each player has chosen 10 cards, we drop the quilt and start a new one. 4 quilts are just enough. And we don't alternate who goes first like some kind of pleb, but instead go 1221.
Leelue's extra bastardizations of the format
If you do enough quilts, there's an annoying strategical problem that comes up.
Let's say lingering souls is locked behind some card nobody wants. Well, taking the random off color filler will immediately clue your opponent in on your plan and they will take lingering souls from you. Or you could have a perfectly reasonable C tier card that you want, but taking it could open a Curse of Predation. In both of these cases, everyone realizes this and none of those cards (neither the locked card nor the blocking one) get meaningfully taken by anyone. Good cards remain permanently locked.
The way I got around this was to institute a system that lets you pick more than one card at a time at a cost.
Extra picks
If you want to take more than one card on your turn, each extra card counts double for your pick limit for the round. Since you only get 40 cards in the first place, it really does mean that you can't just burn your way through a round without possibly running short on playables in the end. Also, if you spend picks on these extra cards, it leaves your opponent with several picks all alone at the end of a round.
Blind picks
I feel the pain Eldamir had over perfect information. So at the start of every round, each player gets a pack of seven cards to chose from. They make a pick like it's pick one of any normal draft, shuffle the remaining six cards, and then lay out those six cards as one of the two center rows of the quilt. This way, there are four cards in your pool the enemy doesn't know about.
In case it's not clear, this means that the center two rows of the quilt are each comprised of the remaining cards from those packs, and the outer four rows are built out of the random cards in the cube.
I've been using this method for years. It is not nearly as complicated as it sounds, but it isn't short.
My CubeCobra (draft 20 card packs, 2 packs.)
430, Peasant, Very Unpowered
Why you should take your hybrids out of your gold section
Manamath Article
This version is probably better than mine, but I would still want to tinker with it based on my experience.
First: Larger pack sizes. Larger pack sizes make more of the decisions more meaningful. Change those 11 card packs into 15s.
Second: Instead of burning the last couple cards from each pile, pass them back to your opponent for their pool.
Third: Make only 6 packs per player instead of 9.
Each player will get 9 cards out of each round, with about 5-6 of them likely to be things that have a good chance at being contenders for the deck. Cards like combat tricks and nonbasics for nongreedy decks tend to be the stragglers in the packs by the end, and these reasonable playables might as well not go to waste by being burned at the end.
I recommend this sort of method very highly.
//
2man drafts care the most about dead cards and perfect information. The cube itself should mitigate the first as much as possible (gold cards) and the draft formats could do well to try and make sure you can surprise your opponent somehow.
My CubeCobra (draft 20 card packs, 2 packs.)
430, Peasant, Very Unpowered
Why you should take your hybrids out of your gold section
Manamath Article
My Peasant Cube: @ mtgsalvation---- @ cubecobra
The modified version I described is what I played with yesterday. It went so well and so quickly that my friend asked me repeatedly to remind him of the instructions so he could use it with his own cubes when I'm not around. That's a good sign.
My CubeCobra (draft 20 card packs, 2 packs.)
430, Peasant, Very Unpowered
Why you should take your hybrids out of your gold section
Manamath Article
A few months ago I listened to an episode of Solely Singleton, where peasant cube was discussed. They pointed out that most of the spot removal was on the level of powered/unpowered cubes (path to exile, swords to plowshares, oblivion ring, lightning bolt, shriekmaw, go for the throat...).
The same cannot be said for green creatures, especially CMC 4+. I have attempted changes to my green section, but it doesn't seem to be enough. In a draft with 6+ players, this might balance out as more players might prefer the strongest colours. This sort of self balancing is hard with 2 players.
I guess my conclusion is that to help green, I have to depower my removal spells, including creatures like Shriekmaw and my favorite creature from school, Flametongue Kavu.
Looking at Leelue's list, it seems that he has already done exactly this. I couldn't find any green cards that seem to have been cut from his list due to power level...
My C/Ube on Cube Cobra
Agreed. I've seen users comment that Leelue tries to have an even power level in his cube. If we assume that is the case, it proves that in a powered peasant cube environment, green is the worst colour as he has cut powerful cards from all other colours:
White
Mother of Runes
Path to Exile
Swords to Plowshares
Oblivion Ring
Bannishing Light
Blue
Control Magic
Black
Ravenous Chupacabra
Nekrataal
Skinrender
Shriekmaw
Cast down and friends
Red
Lightning bolt
Flametongue Kavu
Green
None?
As I run most of these in a 200 card cube, it's not surprising that W and B might be the strongest colours.
Almost all of these cards are removal, so while obviously it's a bit about power level it's more about the power of removal and not overall card power. I don't run Sol Ring, Skullclamp, Loxodon Warhammer, Curse of Predation and a lot of other cards for power level reasons, but I like fast removal and I don't mind a resonable 2 for 1 removal either. I haven't seen someone win solely or mainly because he had Swords to Plowshares or Go for the Throat.
Removal can be problematic if there is too much quantity, but if your cube is properly balanced around it (higher cmc creatures with either strong etb effects or resilience) it's not a problem if there is only quality removal. Even in low powered (compared to CU/be) limited environments we get cards like Cast Down or Go for the Throat - but at uncommon, not at common.
Looking at your specific cube I can say there is way too much removal. You run almost the same amount of removal as I do and my cube has 405 cards. This is where many people go wrong at first, especially in CU/be, where a lot of high quality cards are removal. I know I did this. It leads to games where player A plays a creature, player B kills it, player A plays another one, player B kills it again and so on and then player B wins because he plays a 2 for 1 eventually. But if that's how your cube plays depowering removal doesn't make games more exciting or less one-sided.
If you allow people to fill half their deck with Go for the Throat, Doom Blade, Cast Down, Fatal Push and everything else there is then aggressive and generally creature based decks will have a hard time. But if your opponent only has 3-4 removal spells in his decks, only draws 1-2 during a game and then has to decide whether he wants to remove your Llanowar Elf now or your Arborback Stomper later then green decks don't have a problem and then Swords to Plowshares isn't a source of ultimate power. In fact it would be unfair if your opponent had to play crappy 3 mana sorcery speed removal instead.
My Old School Battlebox
My Premodern Battlebox
Thanks for the reality check, I will reduce the amount of removal.
When I redesigned my cube, I based it off the average MTGsalvation peasant cube 2018, and included the top cards. It makes sense that the top removal spells are more common between cubes. Balancing the amount of removal didn't come to mind...
The first pick 1 burn 1 is to prevent lucky people from picking too many highest power level cards (eg if you have Control Magic and Flametongue Kavu in a new pack you can't pick them both) and to control power level a bit as you can burn powerful cards before your opponent can get them.
I generally like hate/burn draft as it further controls the outcome of the draft and amount of removal. If you play an aggro token deck you will burn every kind of mass removal or pinger you see. If you play a ramp deck you will burn unconditional spot removal. And so on.
In our case we draft 360 of 405 cards, which gives us a bit of variance, but it still allows drafting archetypes. In your case you'd draft 180 of 200 cards, which would also be great. I can only recommend it. And once you know all the cards it doesn't take that long either.
My Old School Battlebox
My Premodern Battlebox
Phitt is right when he says I have depowered removal more than anything else, but that is partly because it's hard to have a diverse, interesting suite of removal spells without many of them just being worse versions of one another if you include the best of the best. Once upon a time we frequently ran Journey to nowhere alongside Swords to plowshares. Of course, there are better cards and worse cards in magic. But there was something that just felt... distasteful for how there is no situation where if somehow I had to choose between journey and Swords that I would pick journey. So I sorta landed on a B- to B+ tier of power level for my removal spells and tried to balance them around that.
Nobody noticed, but I am also missing mulldrifter from my list for this reason. Mulldrifer is a card I frequently want to add back in, but then it sorta "invalidates" a card like opportunity or the new shipwreck dowser. By removing mulldrifter, it frees up space for a lot of options to not just be bad mulldrifters.
Oh, also, I don't run shriekmaw and most other black removal spells because I reaaaally hate referencing the color of my opponent's cards. It feels unbearably arbitrary.
Curse of Predation is a card that I can imagine being banned, but it has lost enough games somehow (A hiccup like a bad hand or running into a removal spell makes it much much worse.) In limited viewing, I think Song of Freyalise has even given it a run for its money such that I can imagine a deck taking the song over it in "pack 3", which is pretty remarkable.
I run into a little trouble with effects that really need redundancy for entire decktypes to work (aggro creatures overlap a bunch, as do our 6-7 drops) but I do what I can.
TL:DR
I want as many cards as possible to be competitive with as many other cards as possible, so long as I don't sacrifice too much by the way of interesting effects or cripple an archetype. I don't exactly love the idea that I don't play with CGR or FTK, but I don't exactly miss them either.
My CubeCobra (draft 20 card packs, 2 packs.)
430, Peasant, Very Unpowered
Why you should take your hybrids out of your gold section
Manamath Article
With a baby on the arm, shuffling the decks are impossible. None of us like the downtime from searching the libraries. With the addition of Thriving lands, Evolving Wilds and terramorphic expanse feel strictly worse. My wife do not like Gemstone mine and Ash barrens also forces us to search our libraries. I think I will update my land section to 5 Vivid lands, 5 Thriving lands and 5 City of Brass. 5 City of Brass should also help aggro. The only shuffling effect I might keep is Demonic Tutor.
When it comes to the green section, it still strugles, but have had some better results after I reduced the amount of removal in other colours. Thank you Phitt77 for pointing this out! I'm a bit worried that cutting all cards that search for basic lands will hurt green...
Another observation I've made is that hitting a critical mass of 1 drops i a single colour is impossible. I'm considering just cutting all 1 drops... Especially red 1 drops feel underwhelming. I also remember LSV saying that 1 drops are usually a trap in sealed, although a pool of 120 cube cards should be stronger than 90 from a standard/masters set. 5 City of Brass in the pool should help colour fixing for aggro decks, so I'm will postpone this change.