Not cards to flash in, but Rhystic Study and Mystic Remora seem extra mandatory in this deck.
Giving any piece of a combo win-condition flash is awesome. Almost too many to name though, and I don't know if that's the direction you want to take anyway.
I don't know if flashing Planeswalkers is actually that awesome. You activate them once on your main phase or you flash them in and... activate them once on your main phase. Maybe something with a really impactful effect, like Teferi, Temporal Archmage.
Arcanis is a dope suggestion.
I actually had to sit and think about it for a minute, but I don't think I would.
For mono-Red, or Boros, maybe. Maaaaaaaybe. But I think I would be more inclined to play Kiki+Conscripts. I know it's a 2-card combo versus a one-card combo, but... I think Kiki and Conscripts are just better cards. And by a large margin, too.
If you asked me whether or not I would play either of these cards, individually, in a deck, my answer would probably be "hell no." I do remember a day when using Godo to fetch 'clamp or Swords was good enough, but I haven't seen that in a while. Helm by itself seems real bad.
Kiki and Conscripts aren't like, mad auto includes by themselves either. But they at least do something. Godo does something, too, but Helm does mad nothing.
Once you start branching out of mono-Red or Boros, the options just start getting so much better.
It's a pretty valuable thing to keep in mind though. There aren't a lot of true one-card win-conditions.
The combo also (kind-of) bricks if you draw the helm. You can lay it early, yeah, but then it's vulnerable to at least a whole extra turn of removal (or costs considerably more mana).
On the same note, I'd also assume that they mulligan heavily to get to a playable hand. Multiplayer mulligan rules are fairly generous - you basically get 3 shots at a solid starting hand (starting hand, free mull to 7, and mull to 6 with a scry + draw on turn 1). Odds of seeing a good starting hand under those conditions are high. It would be stranger if you rarely had to mulligan a hand.
100% this. The biggest mistake I see people make in Commander at ANY level is not taking advantage of their mulligan. Sure, you will lose some percent of games to mulliganing into oblivion, and I understand that people hate when that happens because sitting out of a long Commander game really, really sucks. But you will lose a much larger percentage of games by keeping "safe" hands that actually just do nothing.
When the OP says that there are only 5 or 6 good pieces of artifact mana that get played, okay. So you've got every so slightly over a 5% chance of drawing one of those cards in one draw. You get seven draws in an opener. If you mulligan hard (and going down to six with a draw and a scry isn't that "hard") you get three chances to roll those dice. I'm not going to throw out numbers because it would just be napkin probability and everyone's an expert, but the odds are better than you think.
3) When I watch youtube game play and read threads, and watch other matches, I cannot help but ask, "Does nobody play with insant speed spot removal and answers?"
I noticed when people talked about how nast Narset is. I read primers and saw videos where Narset would land a fast mana rock or two so she could be cast on turn two or three, and then by turn four the game was locked up with the attack step and chaining turns and free spells. I jut thought... she is tapped out, unless she has Force of Will, someone just needed some targeted spot removal and that would have been dealt with. How did nobody at a 4 or 5 player game have an answer? Also, how often is she getting one or both of those mana rocks... like... really? I never see that kind of consistancy.
I really don't want to be that guy, but Narset has hexproof. I know there's probably a bunch of other examples of what you're talking about, and that your point is bigger than just this one example, and you could have just as easily said "a counterspell" instead of "spot removal," but... it's hard to believe part of the problem isn't user error when you just obviously didn't read a card in this example that you chose.
I'm interested where you're getting your lists from, and if you're copying them exactly. Obviously, the math of "5 good mana rocks" is gonna change if you can't afford a Mana Crypt. Cards that seem like they don't matter, especially cheap early draw or card filtering, are really the backbone of decks that play a low land count. If you're editing the lists by dropping these, you're sealing your own fate.
I don't know where people get this idea that cEDH decks aren't built to be consistent. They are. Decks would look very different if people were only concerned with going off as fast as possible. You should have seen the piles that were running around when Partial Paris was still a thing. But even those piles had some degree of consistency because, again, of the mulligan... I'd be just as leery of anyone bragging about 70+% winrates in 4-player games, but I honestly don't see anyone I respect in the cEDH community doing that.
I will agree that a lot of these U/x decks feel very... dicey when you're just looking at opening hands of a couple lands and some cantrips. And I don't know your life, but I think if you spent a good deal of time playing those hands out you'd find yourself becoming more comfortable with them.
Hey, personally, that's the reason I play a lot of G/x decks instead of like, 4-color Storm. I like having access to like, 5 one-mana dorks that help fix my hands.
Chain of Vapor is a card that's very good in very specific decks that hasn't become widely popular. I get that it has a "downside," but I'm still surprised that people haven't gotten excited about it as a political card. There's a bunch of ways to break it by targeting your own things, and sometimes it still saves your life for one mana.
Bounce in general is pretty underrated. I get that you have to play around ETBs, but a lot of times the tempo can still be worth it.
Tatyova wouldn't work with The Great Aurora, since she wouldn't see the lands come out.
It's not that Tatyova draws you a million cards off The Great Aurora.
It's that Tatyova, by nature of her ability, makes sure that the number of things in play + the number of cards in hand is very high for you, compared to your opponents, because all your lands and ramp spells go +1 at minimum.
Anyhow, I was also extremely excited about Tatyova when she was first spoiled but now after thinking about a deck for her I think that she will get removed pretty often, no?
Players who get to 5 mana and immediately play Tatyova will get punished. Play her like Angry Omnath, wait until you have some extra lands to drop or fetches to crack before you play her. Playing lands doesn't use the stack so if she resolves, you're pretty sure to at least get one card.
It always sucks if your Commander gets removed but if you can manage to get a couple cards before she does, it sucks a lot less. The deck should ramp enough that re-casting her is also less of a problem than it is for other decks.
Threw together a deck with just every ramp spell in my c/u box and I'm already liking it enough to put some effort into it. Fetches are obviously really strong, so in go Crucible and LFtL. Anything that gives extra land drops, Burgeoning. I hadn't thought of Manabond but it may be a serious consideration.
As far as winning the game goes, I just threw in some extra turn spells and let it work itself out, and it did. It's a pretty generic U/G deck, you can probably put whatever you want at the top end and it'll work fine. Really depends on what you want to be playing (and the kind of people you play with), but anything from Lab Man to infinite turns to Dramatic/Scepter to just green beats seems achievable.
My personal takeaway was that The Great Aurora is awesome in this deck. With every ramp spell getting you twice as many cards that count for Aurora as usual, my number was a good bit more than double my opponents' when I cast it. I'm confident it's not optimal by any means, but I love that card and I'm sure someone out there will love it in this deck too.
The initial events of Dominaria have mostly been sealed, yes? so even slower than a normal limited environment. Probably too slow for us, but I don't think it's an objectively bad card and G/U has always had like one card worth of wiggle room if you want to try it.
What do we think is the best Threaten effect available to us? I really wanted to like Keldon Overseer and I think the reason is I'm not playing any threatens right now, just infinite "can't block" effects. I remember trying Frenzied Fugue and feeling kind of meh about it, and it seems like one of the better ones. Maybe I should give it another go.
As a note, since the set is Legendary-matters to some degree, I would be very surprised if every single legend was at rare or higher. I know they're doing that weird thing seeding one into every pack to fix the asfan issue, so there's a chance that they are, but having looked at the release notes many seem so incredibly simple that I would be floored to see them at rare.
I wouldn't discount them right off the bat is all I'm saying.
I don't personally keep notes but you absolutely could. It wouldn't be hard, I think, to jot down with each draft what decks got played (color combo and aggro, midrange, or control) and their record. Even without writing it down I think you would notice over multiple drafts if B/x control or R/x aggro was consistently going 3-0. As far as specific cards go, as you draft, you will notice what cards tend to stay in the packs until the very end. Then you have to figure whether they're not good enough or if your drafters just aren't evaluating them well.
Beyond that, yes, just talking to people about their experience is going to give you a lot to go on. If you play with the same people consistently, cubing can be a very personal thing. You'll likely find that your players love some less-than-optimal cards, and dislike some cards that the internet would tell you are absolutely fine. People tend to be vocal when they have a particularly good or bad experience so you shouldn't have to like, have in-depth psychotherapy with your drafters to get the picture.
I don't expect that you would get much mileage out of it as a random one-of. We don't get extra land drops in Peasant so it seems hard to break the symmetry. It's good if you start to tempo out your opponent, but it's not really good in a deck full of cheap cards either (as playing more than one spell a turn is just going to limit your resources more). It doesn't seem like a natural fit in anything unless you have a lot of other cards floating around that support a peasant version of Stax, which would be very new to me.
Why do you guys keep bringing up Sol Ring when the OP already says that he never included it in the first place? It makes me think that y'all didn't even look at his c/ube before posting. I get that the power level discussion is important to you but it's not really relevant to this situation to keep bringing up a card that is so obviously too good that it was never on the table at all.
As to the OP, I don't want you to get the wrong impression based on the couple of posters who have taken the time to reply to you so far - it is not the general consensus that using cards like Library/Drain will ruin your c/ube. Far from it.
Not saying including the power cards is wrong, you can do that of course. If you want an archetype driven cube, the powered cards are likely to get into the way of the archetypes though, because there is not as much of a reason to turn to the archetype cards if you can just run the broken cards.
Are you saying this based on experience or are you just making an assumption? Based on how you seem to feel about high-power level cards, it seems unlikely to me that you have ever tried them in your own c/ube. I don't really see how a card being good enough to go into any deck is going to push players away from archetypes.
Coming from the other direction, I would adivse the OP to not go too hard on narrow, archetype-specific cards. The most powerful ones will naturally stand out and be high picks on their own, but after a certain point decks will start to feel very same-ey if you include too many cards that only one deck wants.
That's why I say that powerful cards don't hurt archetypes at all. If you pick a Skullclamp early, you can still go in any direction. If you pick up Guttersnipe or a +1/+1 counter lord, your draft is pretty much planned out for you from the get go.
Should I just reference the archetype list and kind of go from there? Or take my 540 and cut down (is 540 ok or should I cut down? I've heard that bigger cubes are much harder to manage).
The archetype list is a good start and I would first look for strong signal/payoff cards. Beyond that look for support that exists in cards that you would consider playing anyway.
As for c/ube size, the key is variance. How many drafters do you expect to have? If you draft a 360 with 8 players you'll see the whole c/ube every time, and I think you'll find that the "archetype" decks end up looking pretty similar each time they're drafted. Personally, I like to have some portion of my c/ube that doesn't get drafted, so if you have 8 players 540 is good, if you expect to get less then you can have a good amount of variance out of 360.
I'd say if you want to be hesitant of cards it's the ones that are really efficient in not letting your opponent play out their strategy and are hard to deal with (Propaganda, Maze of Ith, Wall of Denial) or heavy resource denial that can randomly screw someone over (Hymn to Tourach, Strip Mine).
Squirrely is absolutely right. I think cards like Land Tax, Mana Drain, and Library lose a lot of their power in Peasant because the cards surrounding them are not as good. A deck playing one mana down to Library can get run over much more easily because the comeback mechanics in Peasant are weaker. Mana Drain can be brutal but the things it powers out are weaker and more vulnerable to Peasant-level removal (which tends to be way, way stronger than the creatures unless you're building your c/ube deliberately away from that). Honestly, the most problematic card the OP is currently playing is probably Loxodon Warhammer, as it's nearly impossible for aggro decks to race and represents a hard counter.
The cards that Squirrely listed are far more problematic than the other cards that people have been complaining about so far. And the OP isn't playing Propaganda or Wall of Denial.
Now, if you are playing some of these more powerful cards, you absolutely should increase the asfan of artifact/enchantment removal in your c/ube so that your players feel as though there is counterplay available to them.
The best advice I can give the OP is just to draft the c/ube. The #1 way to get a feel for the environment and what is good/bad is to see it in action. Maybe you'll discover that you don't like the stronger cards once you play in this environment with or against them, who knows. The c/ube is an evolving thing. If you play with it once and your drafters don't love it, that doesn't mean that you have to be done with it forever. Listen to their feedback and make changes. The same goes for making cuts and additions - as you play you'll start to notice how decks come together, what cards tend to be low picks, etc.
I'm not trying to argue whether or not taking one free with Partial Paris is correct, rules-wise, simply offering an explanation as to why people assumed that, even when the Commander rules didn't specifically spell it out. If people had played other multiplayer formats before Commander, they may have been familiar with 103.4c ("In a multiplayer game, the first time a player takes a mulligan, he or she draws a new hand
of as many cards as he or she had before. Subsequent hands decrease by one card as normal"), which was the same in 2013 as it is today, and I assume a fair amount of time before that, and I'm guessing they assumed that was the case for Commander as well.
I'm also guessing, although I'm not positive, that before Wizards released any Commander product, they didn't have anything relating to Commander in the CR, so all people had to go on was that generic multiplayer rule.
Incidentally back when the commander rules recommended a Partial Paris mulligan, they did not allow for a free one, so why so many playgroups used to allow it I don't really understand.
It's actually in the CR that the first mulligan is free in multiplayer. It's super silly with Partial but that's why people do it, I suppose.
We've done away with Partial and we're all happier for it.
I'm not sure if "combo" is even really part of the conversation - even most combo decks would mull hard for acceleration. I think most of it boils down to Sol Ring and Mana Crypt. Even very casual decks can create lopsided games if they get to mull hard for Sol Ring and sculpt the rest of their hand.
Honestly, the (heavy air quotes) "recommended" mulligan of Vancouver, first free, no shuffling creates bonkers starts more often than not. It's still a lot of selection. I can't remember the last time I had to go below 6 to find something playable. So I don't think Paris has any benefits over the current mulligan rule, even assuming people aren't sculpting dramatic hands with it.
Also how about that Standard ban list uodate? There's 7 cards banned in standard right now
I don't play Standard, — haven't for a long time — but from a layperson's perspective, I honestly have no idea what Wizards is doing. Like, it isn't that I don't think the bans are justified. I have no idea if that's the case or not. I'm just thinking to myself, "what happened?" Why are so many cards suddenly being banned now? Standard never used to be like this, and from a distant perspective like mine, nothing seems to have overtly changed, so I have no idea why things are like the way they are now.
They've made a change in their philosophy towards banning things in Standard. It used to be, like, "only use in case of emergencies." But now they'll do it any time they think it'll make a format better. It's not that they've suddenly made a ton of mistakes and now Standard is worse than it's ever been. If they had the same banning philosophy in past standard environments, we'd have seen bans there too.
My favorite card has always been Counterbalance. I just love that it turns deck-manipulation spells, like Brainstorm or Telling Time, into counterspells. I just like building around it. I'm a Blue mage at heart.
Giving any piece of a combo win-condition flash is awesome. Almost too many to name though, and I don't know if that's the direction you want to take anyway.
I don't know if flashing Planeswalkers is actually that awesome. You activate them once on your main phase or you flash them in and... activate them once on your main phase. Maybe something with a really impactful effect, like Teferi, Temporal Archmage.
Arcanis is a dope suggestion.
For mono-Red, or Boros, maybe. Maaaaaaaybe. But I think I would be more inclined to play Kiki+Conscripts. I know it's a 2-card combo versus a one-card combo, but... I think Kiki and Conscripts are just better cards. And by a large margin, too.
If you asked me whether or not I would play either of these cards, individually, in a deck, my answer would probably be "hell no." I do remember a day when using Godo to fetch 'clamp or Swords was good enough, but I haven't seen that in a while. Helm by itself seems real bad.
Kiki and Conscripts aren't like, mad auto includes by themselves either. But they at least do something. Godo does something, too, but Helm does mad nothing.
Once you start branching out of mono-Red or Boros, the options just start getting so much better.
It's a pretty valuable thing to keep in mind though. There aren't a lot of true one-card win-conditions.
The combo also (kind-of) bricks if you draw the helm. You can lay it early, yeah, but then it's vulnerable to at least a whole extra turn of removal (or costs considerably more mana).
100% this. The biggest mistake I see people make in Commander at ANY level is not taking advantage of their mulligan. Sure, you will lose some percent of games to mulliganing into oblivion, and I understand that people hate when that happens because sitting out of a long Commander game really, really sucks. But you will lose a much larger percentage of games by keeping "safe" hands that actually just do nothing.
When the OP says that there are only 5 or 6 good pieces of artifact mana that get played, okay. So you've got every so slightly over a 5% chance of drawing one of those cards in one draw. You get seven draws in an opener. If you mulligan hard (and going down to six with a draw and a scry isn't that "hard") you get three chances to roll those dice. I'm not going to throw out numbers because it would just be napkin probability and everyone's an expert, but the odds are better than you think.
I really don't want to be that guy, but Narset has hexproof. I know there's probably a bunch of other examples of what you're talking about, and that your point is bigger than just this one example, and you could have just as easily said "a counterspell" instead of "spot removal," but... it's hard to believe part of the problem isn't user error when you just obviously didn't read a card in this example that you chose.
Just as something else that stuck out to me, you say that hand with two lands and Mox Diamond is "a joke," but it's not. If that hand has Dark Confidant, Jace, Vryn's Prodigy, Wheel of Fortune, Impulse, Windfall, Lim-Dul's Vault, Night's Whisper, Demonic Tutor, Ponder, Preordain, Brainstorm, Enlightened Tutor, Mystical Tutor, Mystic Remora, Faithless Looting, Gamble, Sylvan Library, Sensei's Divining Top or Merchant Scroll in it (just off the top of my head), I'd totally play that hand.
I'm interested where you're getting your lists from, and if you're copying them exactly. Obviously, the math of "5 good mana rocks" is gonna change if you can't afford a Mana Crypt. Cards that seem like they don't matter, especially cheap early draw or card filtering, are really the backbone of decks that play a low land count. If you're editing the lists by dropping these, you're sealing your own fate.
I don't know where people get this idea that cEDH decks aren't built to be consistent. They are. Decks would look very different if people were only concerned with going off as fast as possible. You should have seen the piles that were running around when Partial Paris was still a thing. But even those piles had some degree of consistency because, again, of the mulligan... I'd be just as leery of anyone bragging about 70+% winrates in 4-player games, but I honestly don't see anyone I respect in the cEDH community doing that.
I will agree that a lot of these U/x decks feel very... dicey when you're just looking at opening hands of a couple lands and some cantrips. And I don't know your life, but I think if you spent a good deal of time playing those hands out you'd find yourself becoming more comfortable with them.
Hey, personally, that's the reason I play a lot of G/x decks instead of like, 4-color Storm. I like having access to like, 5 one-mana dorks that help fix my hands.
Bounce in general is pretty underrated. I get that you have to play around ETBs, but a lot of times the tempo can still be worth it.
It's not that Tatyova draws you a million cards off The Great Aurora.
It's that Tatyova, by nature of her ability, makes sure that the number of things in play + the number of cards in hand is very high for you, compared to your opponents, because all your lands and ramp spells go +1 at minimum.
Players who get to 5 mana and immediately play Tatyova will get punished. Play her like Angry Omnath, wait until you have some extra lands to drop or fetches to crack before you play her. Playing lands doesn't use the stack so if she resolves, you're pretty sure to at least get one card.
It always sucks if your Commander gets removed but if you can manage to get a couple cards before she does, it sucks a lot less. The deck should ramp enough that re-casting her is also less of a problem than it is for other decks.
As far as winning the game goes, I just threw in some extra turn spells and let it work itself out, and it did. It's a pretty generic U/G deck, you can probably put whatever you want at the top end and it'll work fine. Really depends on what you want to be playing (and the kind of people you play with), but anything from Lab Man to infinite turns to Dramatic/Scepter to just green beats seems achievable.
My personal takeaway was that The Great Aurora is awesome in this deck. With every ramp spell getting you twice as many cards that count for Aurora as usual, my number was a good bit more than double my opponents' when I cast it. I'm confident it's not optimal by any means, but I love that card and I'm sure someone out there will love it in this deck too.
I wouldn't discount them right off the bat is all I'm saying.
Beyond that, yes, just talking to people about their experience is going to give you a lot to go on. If you play with the same people consistently, cubing can be a very personal thing. You'll likely find that your players love some less-than-optimal cards, and dislike some cards that the internet would tell you are absolutely fine. People tend to be vocal when they have a particularly good or bad experience so you shouldn't have to like, have in-depth psychotherapy with your drafters to get the picture.
As to the OP, I don't want you to get the wrong impression based on the couple of posters who have taken the time to reply to you so far - it is not the general consensus that using cards like Library/Drain will ruin your c/ube. Far from it.
Are you saying this based on experience or are you just making an assumption? Based on how you seem to feel about high-power level cards, it seems unlikely to me that you have ever tried them in your own c/ube. I don't really see how a card being good enough to go into any deck is going to push players away from archetypes.
Coming from the other direction, I would adivse the OP to not go too hard on narrow, archetype-specific cards. The most powerful ones will naturally stand out and be high picks on their own, but after a certain point decks will start to feel very same-ey if you include too many cards that only one deck wants.
That's why I say that powerful cards don't hurt archetypes at all. If you pick a Skullclamp early, you can still go in any direction. If you pick up Guttersnipe or a +1/+1 counter lord, your draft is pretty much planned out for you from the get go.
The archetype list is a good start and I would first look for strong signal/payoff cards. Beyond that look for support that exists in cards that you would consider playing anyway.
As for c/ube size, the key is variance. How many drafters do you expect to have? If you draft a 360 with 8 players you'll see the whole c/ube every time, and I think you'll find that the "archetype" decks end up looking pretty similar each time they're drafted. Personally, I like to have some portion of my c/ube that doesn't get drafted, so if you have 8 players 540 is good, if you expect to get less then you can have a good amount of variance out of 360.
Squirrely is absolutely right. I think cards like Land Tax, Mana Drain, and Library lose a lot of their power in Peasant because the cards surrounding them are not as good. A deck playing one mana down to Library can get run over much more easily because the comeback mechanics in Peasant are weaker. Mana Drain can be brutal but the things it powers out are weaker and more vulnerable to Peasant-level removal (which tends to be way, way stronger than the creatures unless you're building your c/ube deliberately away from that). Honestly, the most problematic card the OP is currently playing is probably Loxodon Warhammer, as it's nearly impossible for aggro decks to race and represents a hard counter.
The cards that Squirrely listed are far more problematic than the other cards that people have been complaining about so far. And the OP isn't playing Propaganda or Wall of Denial.
Now, if you are playing some of these more powerful cards, you absolutely should increase the asfan of artifact/enchantment removal in your c/ube so that your players feel as though there is counterplay available to them.
The best advice I can give the OP is just to draft the c/ube. The #1 way to get a feel for the environment and what is good/bad is to see it in action. Maybe you'll discover that you don't like the stronger cards once you play in this environment with or against them, who knows. The c/ube is an evolving thing. If you play with it once and your drafters don't love it, that doesn't mean that you have to be done with it forever. Listen to their feedback and make changes. The same goes for making cuts and additions - as you play you'll start to notice how decks come together, what cards tend to be low picks, etc.
of as many cards as he or she had before. Subsequent hands decrease by one card as normal"), which was the same in 2013 as it is today, and I assume a fair amount of time before that, and I'm guessing they assumed that was the case for Commander as well.
I'm also guessing, although I'm not positive, that before Wizards released any Commander product, they didn't have anything relating to Commander in the CR, so all people had to go on was that generic multiplayer rule.
It's actually in the CR that the first mulligan is free in multiplayer. It's super silly with Partial but that's why people do it, I suppose.
We've done away with Partial and we're all happier for it.
I'm not sure if "combo" is even really part of the conversation - even most combo decks would mull hard for acceleration. I think most of it boils down to Sol Ring and Mana Crypt. Even very casual decks can create lopsided games if they get to mull hard for Sol Ring and sculpt the rest of their hand.
Honestly, the (heavy air quotes) "recommended" mulligan of Vancouver, first free, no shuffling creates bonkers starts more often than not. It's still a lot of selection. I can't remember the last time I had to go below 6 to find something playable. So I don't think Paris has any benefits over the current mulligan rule, even assuming people aren't sculpting dramatic hands with it.
They've made a change in their philosophy towards banning things in Standard. It used to be, like, "only use in case of emergencies." But now they'll do it any time they think it'll make a format better. It's not that they've suddenly made a ton of mistakes and now Standard is worse than it's ever been. If they had the same banning philosophy in past standard environments, we'd have seen bans there too.