For more info on this dynamic (also called "rock-paper-scissors") and how it relates to cube design, check out this thread. The whole thread's really long, but Monkey D Luffy's post at the beginning highlights the key points very well.
Stopped in and read most of the first page, and my cube will try to follow the mainstream format of a "rock-paper-scissors" cube. I've accepted the necessity of aggro.
Also, on your Cube Tutor page I recommend changing the colour profile of your fixing lands lands to match their color identity. You can do that on the "Edit List" page. It makes it a lot easier to see what fixing you have for each color combination, both for yourself, and for other
people discussing your cube with you.
All my lands are now matched to thier color identity.
I've noticed that you've been adding cards to your cube without cutting other cards to replace them, so your cube has grown by almost 100 cards since we started discussing it with you. Unless you're trying to support 12-man drafts (with 630 cards), that's probably not a good idea. Ideally, it's a good idea to decide on the maximum number of drafters you expect for your cube, then have 45 cards per player as your limit. My cube is built to support a 10-player draft, so I built a 450 card cube (+15 cards to support Lore Seeker). When your cube is much bigger than necessary, a lot of cards will be left out of the draft, so combos will have no chance of coming together in some of your drafts.
When I started asking for advice on this forum I had 600 cards in my cube. I figured rather foolishly that my cube was near completion. My "plan" was to post my newly made cube on these forums and get some advice on it. I figured you would all look at my awesome new cube and just be blown away at how well built it was. Than maybe tell me some things just didn't work and we would wittle it down to around 580 or so. Instead I came to find out that my cube was sorely lacking in some areas *cough*aggro*cough*. Which meant adding to my already large cube a large number of cards.
Since then I've been trying to balance it to the best of my abilities. But while finding new spells to add to the cube has been great fun, cutting cards that I was excited to put into my cube is like pulling teeth. At the time of typing this I've gotten my cube down to 630 cards. I think I'm completely done messing with my multi color set. My current goal is to just get the mono colors down to around 80 each. Red's already there and is to my mind also completely done. White and green are close at 86 and 82 respectively. With black and blue being my problem children at 92 and 90. Once they're all at 80 my cube will once again be at 600 cards. After that I'll start looking at my colorless and see if there's any wiggle room there. But honestly I think colorless is if anything missing cards, and it's going to be hard to find anything I don't want in my cube. At this point I feel like cutting my cube to be under 600 will be impossible without running into some serious balancing issues.
Now DSF:
It was mostly meant to explain the need for a high number, not to criticize your current selections.
As with anything in cube, I think it's important to recognize that what's "right" is what's fun for your playgroup. If nobody wants to play aggro and people want to have long and/or swingy EDH-style games there's no need for aggro 1-drops. If you want to have a rock-paper-scissors type environment the way most mainstream cubes are structured, those early drops are critical.
Don't worry I didn't take offence I just wanted to be sure I understood before I made any changes. At this point I am trying to make a mainstream cube of rock-paper-scissors. The change of adding aggro has just been a challenge so far.
In that vein I might sprinkle in just a few more cheap aggressive creatures if I were designing your cube. For example, your white section has essentially the same number of actual aggressive creatures as my cube even though you are about 40% larger. Something like Steppe Lynx might be good, especially if you add fetchlands in. On that note, you clearly have some amount of budget to work with or you're willing to proxy, since I see cards like ABU duals, filter lands and Goblin Guide. I would definitely get all 10 fetchlands into your cube and all 10 Ravnica shocklands. That fetch-dual-shock interaction is just the best mana-fixing you can possibly get for a cube. The rule of thumb touted by some people on here like wtwlf123 is to have roughly 10% of your cube be land/mana-fixing, which gives you about 60-65 slots to work with. Most likely that's 5-6 cycles or partial cycles of lands you like, plus some singletons like City of Brass, Maze of Ith, Treetop Village, etc.
Tiny little thing: You have Flooded Grove misclassified in Golgari.
I've re added Steppe Lynx, and Flooded Grove is now classified as Simic. Those were easy changes to make. What gives me pause though is adding in another 15+ lands. I have reservations for a few of reaons. The first is covered pretty well in my earlier response to Spike, I.E. too many cards already. Second I just checked and I currently have 72 lands in my cube. Which is more than you suggest I have, and that brings me to reason three. If I add more mana fixing lands, then I need to make some serious cuts to my flavor lands like Maze of Ith and City of Brass. Is that right or do I have some mana fixing lands that aren't as good that I should replace?
My plan for actually building the physical cube is to just take my finished list to some local game stores to buy everything on the list that's under a dollar. The rest I'm just going to proxy. I figured after that I could start play testing it for a month or two and see what changes need to be made. Than every other month or so throw another $100 at my cube until I've bought everything under five dollars and call it done. I figure having any cards worth more than that in the cube would just be asking for trouble.
Thank you for the insight DSF. Could you clarify something for me though. The first part of your post dealing with aggro was meant to reassure me only right? Or are you of the opinion that I still don't have enough aggro? It was a slightly ambiguous.
On the flipside, control decks don't really care what their finisher is as long as they get a couple good ones. Their plan to is stabilize against the faster decks first and then draw or tutor into something difficult to deal with to close the game out. Control decks wouldn't run six or seven 6+ CMC creatures even if they had access to them, so adding too many to your cube ends up bogging it down.
You are refering only to blue right? Because my white block only has 4 creatures with 6+ cmc with one having a chance to be a 2 cost. And none of the other colors are control.
Is there any reason why you have different numbers of cards in each guild? That does make some color pairs stronger than others. For example, in Golgari you have 7, while in Izzet you only have 3.
No not really. The multicolor section was just the one I found to be the most confusing when looking at other cubes. Most cubes I looked at had lands and even monocolored cards with a different color cost ability. I kinda just wanted the room to take away and add once I got more feedback. I figured something I left in would be substandard or wrong or that I would get some recommendations. I've evened it up now.
Good, but I only see one complete cycle of mana fixing lands (the Shards/KTK tri-color taplands), so recommend finding room for quite a bit more. I've just added a post to Noratora's guide to new players that explains what kinds of lands and how much you should run here.
I checked out your post, it was really helpful. I added full set's of ABU dual lands, filter lands, and fetch lands. brought my lands up to 11.5%. Which is kind of on the low end of your 10-15% but does meet it. My AMC including lands is now 2.8 Which I think means I've solved my mana problem.
I'd get rid of Norin the Wary and maybe Goblin Bushwhacker, though, and run Jackal Pup and Firedrinker Satyr instead. Your black 2-drop spot is looking a bit weak, but you have a great number of 2-drops in other colors. The black 2-drop slot is notoriously hard to fill with aggro creatures, but I'm a fan of Dark Confidant, Asylum Visitor, Oona's Prowler, and Pack Rat. Pain Seer and Blood Scrivener are decent as budget replacements for Confidant.
I took your advice and made the changes to red and added Asylum Visitor, Blood Scrivener, Oona's Prowler, and Pack Rat to black. bringing my black aggro 2 drops count up to 11. which seems a little excessive.
Another thing that suggested multiplayer to me is that you're running a lot of 4+CMC enchantments that do not have any immediate impact on the board like Lurking Predators, Debtor's Knell, and Martyr's Bond. These usually work well in slower multiplayer environments but are too slow for most dueling formats. I'd trim most of these since you're drafting for duels.
One last thing, I'd like to invite you to post in the "Draft the Above Person's Cube" thread. It's a really fun way to check out some of the different cubes that people around here have designed, as well as see what kinds of decks people can build from your cube and collect Cube Tutor data.
Drafted your cube and one others. I made a pretty cool graveyard deck out of yours. I posted the results in that thread. Thanks for all the help.
So I read the articles you guys linked me (wtwlf123 was pretty good reading btw)and made some sweeping changes too my cube. Once I was done.
First I cut a lot of my multi color bringing it down to 9.4% overall. Then I added eight more mana producers. I also looked into my Multiplayer issue and cut the Blade of Selves cause Pellanor was right it didn't do anything 1V1. I looked for anything else that might be useless in 1V1 and couldn't find anything though. I still think the council cards have value outside of multiplayer. Am I wrong about that? And are there any other Multiplayer cards that you saw? You only mentioned the one card but both of you made a fuss about my cube being multiplayer.
I then made what to me seemed like an obscene amount of cuts to my higher costs to support the large amount of arrgo I had added. So I'm pretty convinced that my aggro is now more than up to snuff, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong though.
I put a lot of effort into balancing my curve. Not too sure I succeeded there though. If I'm reading it right my average mana cost is now 3.2. You kinda made it seem like anything higher than 2 was bad, but honestly I don't know. It seems good to me, I know it did earlier too. But I made a lot of changes and it seems to better fall in line with wtwlf123's guidelines.
Thanks for taking a look and for the reply Pellanor. I don't have a set goal per say for the cube. I know that there are cubes that do specific things like token generation or are all one color etc. but I didn't want to make a specialty cube. I wanted it to be a new experience every time I sat down to a draft. So while I do have certain soft tactics in mind as a guide for the five main colors (some admittedly more fleshed out than others) I don't have an overarching goal in mind for the whole cube. I made the cube by following the advice of a youtuber called the professor. In his video he suggested that a beginner should look at another cube and use it as a base or a guideline and I choose Ben's cube as a guideline and tried to get it to semi resemble his while giving it my own spin.
I definitely see what your getting at about my mana curve, and I had looked at it before. But I didn't think that I had too many high cost cards, but you are right I definitely peak again at six. In that same vein I may have too many seven cost cards but I think eight and up look alright.
I thought I had covered mana generation pretty well though with my artifacts. While there are more color generators than colorless I didn't think that would be necessarily a bad thing. After all even if I'm not playing red I'd still pick up a mox ruby if it came up.
As for my multiplayer issue I think you might be referring to the council cards? If so than maybe I misunderstood those cards because I thought they worked better 1V1. I.E. if I play Council's Judgment (I don't know how to link cards sorry) I still get rid of a card because if the other player chooses a different card than he looses two because than the votes would be tied and Coercive Portal is a free draw every upkeep if tied.
Hello I recently got back into magic sometime in 2014 after not having played since I was in grade school(I'm 32 now). One of the things I was most excited about was all the new formats, and I found my self intrigued by cube in particular. It just made the game seem more balanced if everyone had to pick from the same cards as everyone else. Anyway I decided out of the blue to actually make a cube and I've kinda finished (I think). But still being semi new to the game, even if I am a quick study, I'm sure that while I think it's good it might actually be crap. So I'd love to get some feedback. I think I'm not allowed to list my cube here so here's a link to my cube on cubetutor http://www.cubetutor.com/viewcube/51541 hopefully that's not against forum rules. Thanks and sorry if this thread is in the wrong place.
Stopped in and read most of the first page, and my cube will try to follow the mainstream format of a "rock-paper-scissors" cube. I've accepted the necessity of aggro.
All my lands are now matched to thier color identity.
When I started asking for advice on this forum I had 600 cards in my cube. I figured rather foolishly that my cube was near completion. My "plan" was to post my newly made cube on these forums and get some advice on it. I figured you would all look at my awesome new cube and just be blown away at how well built it was. Than maybe tell me some things just didn't work and we would wittle it down to around 580 or so. Instead I came to find out that my cube was sorely lacking in some areas *cough*aggro*cough*. Which meant adding to my already large cube a large number of cards.
Since then I've been trying to balance it to the best of my abilities. But while finding new spells to add to the cube has been great fun, cutting cards that I was excited to put into my cube is like pulling teeth. At the time of typing this I've gotten my cube down to 630 cards. I think I'm completely done messing with my multi color set. My current goal is to just get the mono colors down to around 80 each. Red's already there and is to my mind also completely done. White and green are close at 86 and 82 respectively. With black and blue being my problem children at 92 and 90. Once they're all at 80 my cube will once again be at 600 cards. After that I'll start looking at my colorless and see if there's any wiggle room there. But honestly I think colorless is if anything missing cards, and it's going to be hard to find anything I don't want in my cube. At this point I feel like cutting my cube to be under 600 will be impossible without running into some serious balancing issues.
Now DSF:
Don't worry I didn't take offence I just wanted to be sure I understood before I made any changes. At this point I am trying to make a mainstream cube of rock-paper-scissors. The change of adding aggro has just been a challenge so far.
I've re added Steppe Lynx, and Flooded Grove is now classified as Simic. Those were easy changes to make. What gives me pause though is adding in another 15+ lands. I have reservations for a few of reaons. The first is covered pretty well in my earlier response to Spike, I.E. too many cards already. Second I just checked and I currently have 72 lands in my cube. Which is more than you suggest I have, and that brings me to reason three. If I add more mana fixing lands, then I need to make some serious cuts to my flavor lands like Maze of Ith and City of Brass. Is that right or do I have some mana fixing lands that aren't as good that I should replace?
My plan for actually building the physical cube is to just take my finished list to some local game stores to buy everything on the list that's under a dollar. The rest I'm just going to proxy. I figured after that I could start play testing it for a month or two and see what changes need to be made. Than every other month or so throw another $100 at my cube until I've bought everything under five dollars and call it done. I figure having any cards worth more than that in the cube would just be asking for trouble.
Whew long post. Thanks for all the advice guys.
You are refering only to blue right? Because my white block only has 4 creatures with 6+ cmc with one having a chance to be a 2 cost. And none of the other colors are control.
No not really. The multicolor section was just the one I found to be the most confusing when looking at other cubes. Most cubes I looked at had lands and even monocolored cards with a different color cost ability. I kinda just wanted the room to take away and add once I got more feedback. I figured something I left in would be substandard or wrong or that I would get some recommendations. I've evened it up now.
I checked out your post, it was really helpful. I added full set's of ABU dual lands, filter lands, and fetch lands. brought my lands up to 11.5%. Which is kind of on the low end of your 10-15% but does meet it. My AMC including lands is now 2.8 Which I think means I've solved my mana problem.
I took your advice and made the changes to red and added Asylum Visitor, Blood Scrivener, Oona's Prowler, and Pack Rat to black. bringing my black aggro 2 drops count up to 11. which seems a little excessive.
Went ahead and got rid of the three you suggested along with five others. Dictate of Erebos, Death Pits of Rath, Palace Siege, Infinite Reflection, Aluren. Having second thoughts about Aluren and Debtor's Knell though. Not because I think you're wrong but because I personally like them.
Drafted your cube and one others. I made a pretty cool graveyard deck out of yours. I posted the results in that thread. Thanks for all the help.
First I cut a lot of my multi color bringing it down to 9.4% overall. Then I added eight more mana producers. I also looked into my Multiplayer issue and cut the Blade of Selves cause Pellanor was right it didn't do anything 1V1. I looked for anything else that might be useless in 1V1 and couldn't find anything though. I still think the council cards have value outside of multiplayer. Am I wrong about that? And are there any other Multiplayer cards that you saw? You only mentioned the one card but both of you made a fuss about my cube being multiplayer.
I then made what to me seemed like an obscene amount of cuts to my higher costs to support the large amount of arrgo I had added. So I'm pretty convinced that my aggro is now more than up to snuff, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong though.
I put a lot of effort into balancing my curve. Not too sure I succeeded there though. If I'm reading it right my average mana cost is now 3.2. You kinda made it seem like anything higher than 2 was bad, but honestly I don't know. It seems good to me, I know it did earlier too. But I made a lot of changes and it seems to better fall in line with wtwlf123's guidelines.
What do you think? http://www.cubetutor.com/viewcube/51541
I definitely see what your getting at about my mana curve, and I had looked at it before. But I didn't think that I had too many high cost cards, but you are right I definitely peak again at six. In that same vein I may have too many seven cost cards but I think eight and up look alright.
I thought I had covered mana generation pretty well though with my artifacts. While there are more color generators than colorless I didn't think that would be necessarily a bad thing. After all even if I'm not playing red I'd still pick up a mox ruby if it came up.
As for my multiplayer issue I think you might be referring to the council cards? If so than maybe I misunderstood those cards because I thought they worked better 1V1. I.E. if I play Council's Judgment (I don't know how to link cards sorry) I still get rid of a card because if the other player chooses a different card than he looses two because than the votes would be tied and Coercive Portal is a free draw every upkeep if tied.
Thoughts?