MTG Salvation

I would probably up the number of duals by one. I like to run 1:100 cards and it's safer to round up on this. You definetly want more artifacts. They are the glue that holds your draft together and allow people to draft more relevant cards when their pack is light on a color. My cubes tend to tick better when artifacts are roughly the size of a normal color section.

I often see people start off lists with a desire to make a neat archetype for each of the guilds. My advice is not too. When wotc did their biggest multicolored blocks, they never attempt to do all ten pairs in one set. It's just too much to jam into a set. And they have the advantage of having multiples of commons.

Think of it like this. You are running 360 cards in your cube. Subtract duals, subtract artifacts. In your list you would be left with 310 cards. (you should probably run more artifacts too) After that you are going to need your general good stuff cards. Removal, ramp, card draw, what have you. That should be about half of your remaining cards. You are down to ~160 cards. Divide that among the ten guilds and you get 16 cards per guild. Which means you will have 4 multicolored cards, 6 green and 6 blue cards to support your simic ramp strategy. I know you do get to cheat and have some of your white +1/+1 counter cards can be good in your UW blink deck. But there isn't going to be nearly as much of that as you think there will be.

In general this will lead to on the rails drafting where once you pick an archetype most of your decisions are made for you. So why don't you just make a larger cube? Cube size is really irrelevant to this discussion. In any one draft you will still only have the above ratios of cards.

So what do I suggest for people who want to build archetype focused cubes instead of concentrating on the 3-4 major pillars (Control, agro, midrange and if you like it combo) of Magic? Take a note from Alara or Tarkir and concentrate on only 5 shards/wedges. In this system in any random 360 card draft selection you will still have ~160 cards dedicated to your archetypes like before. But now you will have roughly 32 cards dedicated to each shard. Also with five shards instead of 10 guilds you really get to concentrate on what you are doing. You get to plan out how the cards can work in multiple archetypes much easier since your white cards are only in 3 shards vs 4 guilds.

If you decide to stick to your 10 guild strategy, you really need to make sure every single one of your cards is wanted by at least one of your strategies. Compare your red 1-drop creatures with your 4 red based strategies. Spells(control), Tokens, Sacrifice, Pump

Goblin GLory Chaser
Jackal Pup
Monastery Swiftspear
Reckless Waif
Scorched Rusalka

Goblin Glory Chaser has psuedo evasion so I guess the pump deck might want it, but that deck would probably be better off with one of the two heroic 1 drops Satyr Hoplite or Akoran Crusader.
Jackal Pup: This card does nothing to any of the three archetypes. You don't have a sligh style deck in the bunch.
Monastery Swiftspear: Good in two archetypes (pump and spells matter) though you have your UR spell deck listed as a control deck, and you don't really want aggressive creatures in that strategy.
Reckless Waif: It doesn't create tokens, it generates no advantage by being sacrificed and doesn't recur itself, It tells you to not play spells which is bad for both the pump and the UR deck.
Scorched Rusalka: Works in your sacrifice deck

And this trend continues throughout the cube. I'm not saying it's impossible to build a 10-guild cube. But it's really difficult and I question the value in doing so. If you are wanting to build your decks for your players to that extent, why not just make a set of 10 dual decks balanced to play against one another? I approach cube as something I can pull off the shelf and play like a board game so a set of 10 dual decks does scratch that itch too.

Earthshaker Giant would be an all star in a "simplified magic" cube.

I'm slowly working on building a 32 deck gauntlet and I had Karn Vehicle tribal deck planned for my colorless deck. Though I was going to call it "Karn's Used Car Lot". I really don't have anything constructive to add, but I will be looking at this list when I get around to building my copy of the deck.

Quote from wtwlf123 »

Seems like a good 2-power 1-drop. This is comparable to Dragon Hunter, depending on whether or not your Knight count is higher than your Dragon count, lol.

I think even if your dragon count is higher, this is still better. A white based agro deck is more likely to have other knights in your own deck. Thus you will see the interaction more often than an opponent playing a dragon.

WWhite
Giver of Runes
Serra the Benevolent (if I expand)

UBlue
Urza

B
Yawg

R
None

G
Deranged Hermit 2
Hexdrinker

C
Sword of BR
Sword of UW
Talismans (if I expand)

Multicolor
Wren and Six
Nature's Chant

Lands
Prismatic Vista
5x Canopy Lands

I've wanted to make a deck based around Psychic Corrosion and Looter type effects for years. But most of these effects target a single player and there is not enough redundancy to make such a deck work. I recently started reading the Sandman comics and I've dabbled with custom cards in the past. I thought Morpheus would be a terrific choice for a custom commander so I designed this and set out to build a deck based around it.



Morpheus of the Dreaming 2UU
Legendary Enchantment Creature - Spirit (M)
Indestructible
Whenever you draw or discard a card, you may have each opponent put the top card of their library into their graveyard.
When Morpheus blocks a creature, that creature does not untap during it’s controllers next untap step.
0/2



I want this deck to feel like one of the commander preconstructs. It contains 2 Mythics, 23 rares, 21 uncommons, and 25 commons also. For reference the Saheeli preconstruct contains 4 mythics and 32 rares.

According to the professor each of the 2017 commander preconstructs would have cost $130-$150 to buy the singles for at the time of it's release. My deck would cost $157.53 as of today according to MTGgoldfish (without the general of course). Most of the value of the deck comes from a few cards. Rhystic Study, Propaganda, and Cyclonic Rift are the only cards that are at or above the $10 mark. So I think this is within the realm of what a preconstructed deck would contain. Though they might try to spread the value of Rhystic Study and Cyclonic Rift out a little.

I tried to stick with the Command Zone deck template. 10 Card Draw cards (Have that in spades), 10 Mana Rocks, 5 Board Wipes, 5 Spot Removal Spells. I think games would be interactive but I guess I really can't know until I build the deck.

How do you think this deck would fair. Would you argue if someone pulled a custom commander out against you? If no, would you argue with this specific commander?

No. I would check it out. But I'm not really looking for another cube. I already have 3.

I have a group of friends who use to play MTG. I'm looking to build a gauntlet of commander decks that we can all use when we have a game night. Has anyone built a gauntlet of decks that aren't too over powered? We want something better designed than pre-construct decks. I've tried searching google but have come up short handed.

I'm not a fan of cards that are opening hand or bust. Is anyone really excited about getting a free land drop on turn 4?

Quote from wtwlf123 »

No worries man, I know you're just trying to help. But no, I don't really have the time nor the inclination to go back and fix 540+ cube pictures. It only bothers me a little bit that the light balance isn't ideal and that all the pictures aren't super consistent. But I try to keep it freshly updated and to make the pictures look as good as I can, so it is what it is.

Fair enough, if you would upload them yourself I could do the color fixing for you. I can just batch download the images from your cube tutor visual spoiler Press "Ctrl+Shift+L" then "Ctrl+S" and then "enter" and I'm done. I could have your cube done in 25 mins probably.

This is the kind of card you have to design your cube with. You can't just throw in a ball lightning in cube and expect it to see play. I feel like in most cube decks this will just sit in your sideboard since no single mode is enough to get me to want to play mono/nearly-mono blue. Especially since blue is normally the color that most people want to be in.

I probably could have worded what I said better.

Wtwlf, do you have access to Photoshop? Because you have an amazingly pimp cube and it's obvious you take a ton of pride in it. But the pictures of your cube on cubetutor are terrible. The colors of everything look awful and it would be so easy to fix it.

Quote from wtwlf123 »

So I either: A) cut monocolored cards for hybrids to preserve gold slots (which reduces overall playability), B) try to build a "balanced" hybrid section (which either forces in bad cards or excludes good ones), or C) I classify them in their guilds and get to remove narrower gold cards to make room for more playable hybrid cards. I choose C because I think it's the clear winner of all the options.

The discussion on this card is really less of a discussion on Nature's Chant and more of a discussion of the future of hybrid.

I disagree with your reasoning on C.

I disagree that a cube would be better if (in a perfect universe) we ran only hybrid cards and no traditional multicolored gold spells. It's like saying that cube would be better if instead of having colored mana everything was colorless. Gold cards give players a reward for going down into multiple colors and allow us to have more powerful spells at their CMC. This is a net benefit to the diversity of the game.

I think this is a card I'll let other people test. My gut leans to it not being good enough but I wouldn't be surprised if I was wrong.

In comparing this to Declaration in stone. Just remember

(1) Your opponent still has to pay 2 to draw that card.
(2) Even if you consider a card drawn better than a land search, About 40% of the time they will still draw a land. And a land in hand is much weaker than a land in play. And Winds lets them easily get a splash color.