Commander is the worst format of Magic that there is and it reinforces my belief that there is nothing that a Magic player hates more than having to play fun, fair, interactive Magic as Richard Garfield intended. Everything about it is awful and its neat rules are there just to hide the fact that it's Thermonuclear Chaos Vintage. Even the community is the worst that there is.
There are numerous reasons why I hate it. Let's start with the format itself:
1.) Having to shuffle 100 cards is an abomination. I just kind of pretend that my minimal shuffling is sufficient and everyone else also seems to have mutually agreed.
2.) It's 4 players, so what happens in the game is irrelevant. Only politics matter. But everyone will get angry with you if you openly team up with someone or kingmake even though that's politics.
The format should be 2v2.
3.) Commander damage requires an entire spread sheet. Why? It's not like you're going to make is past turn 4.
4.) Because everyone has 40 life and there are 3 other players at the table, playing fun, fair, interactive Magic becomes impossible and the only reasonably effective way of killing other players is to play some sort of broken combo. Another issue with players having 40 life is that your life total is absolutely meaningless, so **** it, why not Necro for 39?
Players should have 20 or less life.
5.) You should be able to kill, exile, tuck, etc. a Commander. If players had to actively work to keep their commander safe it would be better.
In general, Magic players want the easiest, low effort way of winning the game possible. Any card with any degree of risk or downside associated with it is immediately shunned. This attitude is why Shroud was replaced with Hexproof and why having your commander die comes with little consequence. Having to manage risk is good game design, Bumper Bowling isn't.
Let's talk about what cards are allowed in the format:
1.) Why are Sundering Titan or Armageddon or Sway of the Stars seen as bad but not Wheel of Fortune? Man, I sure do love having the most important decision I will make all game (mulligan) rendered meaningless. Wow, I got a no land hand off of this Wheel on turn two before I could do anything, what fun! In half of the dozen or so games of Commander that I've played, I end up not being able to plan on having any of the cards currently in my hand. If they're going to ban cards because they're not fun, then they should go ahead and ban a lot more things.
2.) Why bother playing 100 card singleton if you're allowed to have 16 copies of each card because you're playing the original card + 15 tutors? Plus, your commander. So all of this 100 card nonsense is just a charade, after your lands and autoinclude mana (birds of paradise, mana elves, sol ring, mana crypt, mox diamond, etc.) and tutors you're really only playing with a 20-30 card deck.
They should ban everything that tutors for non-lands. Yes, everything. There will be some collateral damage, but it will be worth it. Then maybe these non-interactive combo decks won't be consistent.
3.) Why bother playing anything that's not an infinite combo? They should ban all of those too.
Combo doesn't actually count as Magic. All combo decks without exception* are merely accidents as a result of this game being around for 27 years with 20,000 unique cards in it. Kiki Jiki was not designed with Pestermite in mind, it was just a value card. Dark Depths was designed to require actually paying 30 mana over the course of multiple turns to summon a huge monster, it was not intended that you could instead just slap down Vampire Hexmage. Tinker was not designed with Blightseel Colossus in mind. Protean Hulk was not intended to work with Flash. Nomads en-Kor is a 1 mana 1/1 with, "fixed banding" on it, it was not designed as combo enabler.
This is just blatant fact. Through the Breach was from the COK Block, from 2005. Emrakul is from Rise of the Eldrazi, from 2012 I believe. They were never intended to work with one another.
*To be fair, Hidetsugu and Hidetsugu's Second Rite were in the same set. So it's not as if combo is absolutely never intended, it's just kind of rare and harder to pull off when it is. Maybe I'm wrong about this, I've only been playing magic for 2 years but that's how combo seems to me - 95% mistakes - because all of the notable ones and even a bunch of the ones in Pauper use weird cards made years apart that were never designed with each other in mind.
Now let's get to the playerbase. Yes, that's awful too.
1.) It's the least balanced, most rapacious format that exists but it has the most casuals playing it. So instead of playing a fair format and having fun games, casuals would rather play the most broken format possible and then get mad at your when you play a deck that's actually good. They hate the player instead of the game. If you've ever read Ender's Game, all casual commander players are Bonzo Madrid.
2.) There are three types of Commander players:
a.) Casuals who want to play dumb ***** and jack up the price of random cards like Forest Bears or Three Visits. Yes, let's spend a ton of money just to lose every single game with Squirrel Tribal, neat. They've correctly determined that top tier decks are awful but they refuse to ensconce what they want the format to be into any sort of actual change to the rules. When something is broken in Legacy or Standard or Modern or Pauper and people don't want it ruining the game anymore, they want it banned. They don't shame people for playing the overpowered deck in question. Players of every other constructed format in Magic hate the game, not the player.
b.) Spikes who play the top tier decks because they're legal but their libertarianism/aspergers prevents them from acknowledging that the game would be better without unfun things that ruin the game, instead preferring a laissez-faire free-for-all where anything goes (as long as it's flash hulk) and the only viable deck is Flash Hulk because god forbid we ever ban cards. I died on turn 4, I had to shuffle my entire 100 card deck 1.5 times a turn because I have all 10 fetches and 15 tutors, I spent more time shuffling than I actually did playing. I tried to go off with my Flash Hulk on turn 3 but everyone else Force of Willed me and then someone else Flash Hulked a turn later. Yay! What an, "interactive" game!
c.) People who play with group A and purport to hate CEDH players and infinite combo, but then assemble an infinite combo and kill everyone anyways. I was going to insult group C, but then I realized that the wildly fluctuating power level expectations of everyone that plays this format (in lieu of just changing what's legal, like literally every other format of Magic does) make it impossible to have a deck that's aligned with everyone else's power level. Group C players are just a result of this format's awful playerbase and wild west nature.
3.) The format is sold as this fun intro format... despite being the least balanced, most chaotic, biggest money pit imaginable. It's the worst introduction to Magic I could possibly think of. Buy this $40 precon so I can rip off your head and ***** down your neck with my $243 copy of Mana Crypt that I got from an out of print book that I purchased over 20 years ago!!! Awesome!
Group A commander players just want to control what everyone else can and cannot play (which is what cube is all about) so they can play some stupid gimmick. Group B just wants to play with broken cards that ruin the game. Group C wants neither or is somewhere in-between. All three of these groups I think would enjoy playing/curating their own cube far more than commander.
Group A can put Squirrel Tribal and 300 other silly gimmick cards into their cube, Group B can build the MTGO Vintage cube.
But because commander has become so popular, it's choking out other forms of non-competition Magic. That's a shame. Even commander players I think would enjoy cube more than commander.
My view on pet cards is that since it's not sanctioned play, it doesn't matter. Run the cards you enjoy, that's the whole purpose of cube. Min maxing everything is for constructed, cube is for playing the cards you like playing.
My overall view on cube balance is that the act of drafting inherently balances things out, so unless something is egregiously broken it should be fine.
And if a card is genuinely unplayable garbage, it's okay because it doesn't really effect the draft all that much. Having a dead card in your cube is equivalent to playing with 359 cards. At that point it's not a balance question, it's more of a, "How many slots do you want to waste on blank cards as opposed to interesting cards that may actually see play" question.
I've noticed that people give equal weight to criticism of bad cards and cards that are too good. That's wrong IMO. Ebony Horse is a bad card but it's not ruining any drafts.
If not everything has to be a good card, it's hard to communicate with you effectively. Especially when the tradeoff for good isnt even to be interesting.
I am not in denial about a 5 mana 5/5 being unplayable in cu/be.
My question was about at what point does the Delve cost become prohibitive and these cards stop becoming autoincludes. I get that everything that's not Mulldrifter, flametounge kavu, sprout swarm, and pack rat is considered "literally unplayable garbage" but that's not my question. I don't care about how good a card is, I cut Thraben Inspector for Shield Bearer.
I'll just stick with 11B for now. Well, 10BB since I've been lying this whole time and the card I'm actually concerned about is Tombstalker. I figure Gurmag and Cruise are reasonable facsimiles.
You can reasonably get 5-6 cards in the yard moderately early, and if you're playing some synergies you get rewarded for it with a BB 5/5 flier. Seemingly it should be 5-6-7~ mana creature on average, which is what I want a 5/5 flier to cost. I want Juzam Djinn to be equally as pickable as Tombstalker.
IMO the state of Pauper is garbage now and the only people still playing it are those that are delusional enough to think it's fine.
In my 4-5 years of playing X-Wing and my 1.5 years of playing Pauper, there is always a vocal group of players that enjoys abusing degeneracy and not having to obey any of the core rules of the game. They dig their heels in and after a while they make up the majority of people that are still playing.
When I played X-Wing, certain things would have upwards of 60% meta shares and people still would still refuse to acknowledge that there was a problem.
Wizards did the right thing by banning Gush/Probe/Daze, but they didn't go far enough and hit Ghostly Flicker/Displace. And then they threw gasoline on the fire (twice!) with Ephemerate & Astrolabe, and Mystic Sanctuary.
The double flicker cards are too abusive.
Mystic Sanctuary, even without flickers, is probably still too good with deprive.
Astrolabe in and of itself isn't broken, and I agree that just because it's played in everything doesn't mean it's ruining the game, however because of it the best Pauper deck will always be a 5 color good stuff pile. No matter what they ban, the best deck in pauper will always be: 20~ lands, 4 astrolabes, maybe 4 prophetic prisms, and whatever the best 8 cards in Pauper are.
A whole format distilled down to 8-9 cards. That's not an increase in format diversity, that's a reduction. One of the defining characteristics of Pauper was that you were generally limited to 1-2 colors. Now you just play whatever you want which means that, for example, every removal spell that's not Skred or Lightning Bolt is now unplayable garbage. Every creature that's not Seeker of the Way or Kor Skyfisher is garbage. Every fog that's not Prismatic Strands is garbage. Etc.
Also, I don't put much weight on the few dozen people that play this format online. No one really takes this format seriously and you can get pretty far with a fair deck facing others who also have mistakenly played fair decks. So it doesn't really mean much to me that MBC or whatever occasionally places high. It's still playing second fiddle to these abusive flicker decks.
I use cube tutor exclusively. It's a website that functions on my windows phone which is something that gets more rare over time.
The website is fine, I see zero need for its competitors. People say its outdated but that's because they just want a flashier, less functional website because it's 2019, not because there is anything actually wrong with cubetutor. Same reason why the electric can opener exists, not because it actually needs to, but just because people are idiots and like new things even if they're not improvements/actual downgrades.
It's been down for me as well these past few days. I've been able to occasionally get through and log some changes but it's been spotty. Been considering donating to it to become a "member" or whatever it's called.
This used to be a pauper cube. I'm dropping commons only to play better cards. For example, I like Splice Onto Arcane but there aren't many good ones at common, so playing rare or uncommon Arcane cards allowed me to cut some of the unplayable arcane cards and replace them with playable ones. Pauper doesn't really have any big mana creature payoffs beyond Ulamog's Crusher either.
What are some good cards that scale with power level? I'm not looking for bombs really. Symmetrical effects like wraths seem fine. Shahrazad seems fine with a bunch of Pauper creatures.
After dedicating a lot of time to my old border cube, I've decided to return to my pauper cube and give it an overhaul. I'm selling off most of my collection (besides my cubes and constructed decks) and hope to get some good store credit. I want to use the credit to bling out my Pauper cube as much as possible. It's hard to do a search for specifically common premium cards online, unless i dredge the archives of FNM promos and go through them one by one. What are people's favorite promo/premium cards for pauper? How far have people gotten in their attempts to fully bling their cube? Are there certain cards that have promo versions that you think people just don't know about?
Best,
CatParty
I have a promo foil Quirion Ranger and foil Gush I made a bunch of trades at the FLGS for. That's the hardest I've blinged out.
I have most of my cube foiled out.
Scryfall is the best way to search for all the different arts of certain cards. I'm pretty sure that in the advanced search menu, there is a pull-down menu called 'criteria' and there is a promo option there.
Finally validation of what I was trying to get across. Its a great day today.
Fathom Seer is a strict downgrade and much slower and less flexible. It takes 3 mana to cast and has to be played on the opponents main phase. I'm glad Gush is gone.
Same for the other two as well. Now when blue keeps showing up maybe they will think about a Delver, Augur or Brainstorm/Ponder/Preordain ban as well. I shouldn't get greedy, I am ecstatic at this announcement.
Firstly, do you know how Morph cards work? You play 3 generic mana to morph them in as a 2/2 facedown. Then to flip them over you have to pay their morph cost, which in Fathom Seer's case is the "cost" of returning two islands to your hand. After it resolves you flip it at any time you could pay the cost to unmorph, not just on your opponent's main phase.
Fathom Seer, while overall a worse card, is NOT a strict downgrade.
It's a Gush that Ninja can pick up. It's a Gush that Flicker effects can double dip with.
I play it in my pauper cube. In a limited environment at least it's just as good if not better than Gush, as are a lot of "______ on a stick" creature versions of spells.
This is all purely academic though, it's not as if Tron gives a ***** about what most/all other decks do.
420 is my cube size. I had 375 to support booster tutor at the full 8 players, then realized that 45+375 is 420 lol.
What's a battlebox? I like drafting, what got me into cube was drafting a vintage cube after the Pauper game night. I didn't really like the cards themselves, but the drafting process is cool.
I also have plenty of constructed Pauper decks, like 10-15 put together at any one time.
I like Cube, mine just doesn't have to have any dumb bombs in it. To me, the express purpose of cube is to play with cards you like and want to play with, not include X card because X card is a Pauper staple. I like quirky interactions and fun, fair, interactive Magic.
So when I swing with a creature, Oasis it to save it, and then my opponent taps Gravel Slinger to kill it in response, that's exciting to me.
So far I've been told by four different people that:
1.) The cube has too much removal. My ASFAN for removal is 2.875 btw.
2.) Big dumb Gruul Beaters might be too good and you're not going to be able to get to play Kjeldoran Skycaptain or other overcosted creatures.
3.) Banding buffs defending too much, when defending already grants you an inherent advantage.
4.) Blue is underpowered. Meanwhile another player is beating my face in with Mulldrifter and Nimbus Naiad and Peregrine Drake.
So it seems to me that it's fairly balanced, lol.
My cube games are weird. It's a 360 sized cube, but most of my drafts are only with 4 people. So even if something is OP you only get to see half the cube.
My issue with Ghostly Flicker is that it utterly ruins constructed Pauper. Any sort of fun, fair, interactive midrange deck in Pauper gets absolutely crushed by infinite flicker loops. It loops infinitely with Mnemonic Wall and Pulse of Murasa and Haunted Fengraf and Moment's Peace and Mystical Teachings and Mulldrifter and whatever other already superb cards and breaks the game. Despite what the online tournament data tells you, Tron is the best deck in Pauper. Nothing stops it besides for super fast aggro and even then it's only a 60/40 at best. With Fire & Ice being downshifted in UMA Tron may even have the advantage now. I just don't want it in my cube. Mulldrifter is already worth first pick hate drafting, so I don't see the need to buff it any further.
To be frank, Tron players and Combo players don't actually like playing Magic, just getting free wins and playing uninteractive solitaire with godmode enabled. That's been my experience with X-Wing Miniatures and Magic has been no different. I prefer to instead play fun, fair, interactive Magic and I want my cube to reflect that.
For example, the last time I drafted my opponent morphed a creature in, and I had just added in a bunch more Morph creatures to the cube. I knew he had Ruthless Ripper, but I was struggling to remember what the others could be. So I used a Ray of Command on it so that I could look at it and it was a Haunted Cadaver, which would have blown me out. This knowledge allowed me to play around it. Eventually I lost to a Voltaic Servant with Vulshok Gauntlets and Nimbus Naiad.
That's extremely cool and is much more fun than getting flicker looped.
Your thoughts on Rot Wolf echo mine, that it prevents smaller creatures from attacking, it's a decent Voltron, and it can be used to wither bigger creatures in a pinch. With Green's access to ramp, they can afford to pay 3 mana for a 2/2 with some decent abilities. Even in a 1 for 1 trade it replaces itself, so if you trade it with another 2/2 it's a "one for zero". I've had success making it huge and playing a fight card with it.
I get some resistance for putting what I would consider to be "okay" cards in my cube but that's kind of the point. I want the games to be longer and more interesting and interactive. The fact that your opponent can interact with Dash Hopes and that they get to make the decision is the whole reason it's in the cube, that's fun.
Many people seem to view cube as a showcase of Magic's most powerful cards, which is a non-sequitur. I think that cube should instead be the showcase of the most fun Magic cards.
1
Commander is the worst format of Magic that there is and it reinforces my belief that there is nothing that a Magic player hates more than having to play fun, fair, interactive Magic as Richard Garfield intended. Everything about it is awful and its neat rules are there just to hide the fact that it's Thermonuclear Chaos Vintage. Even the community is the worst that there is.
There are numerous reasons why I hate it. Let's start with the format itself:
1.) Having to shuffle 100 cards is an abomination. I just kind of pretend that my minimal shuffling is sufficient and everyone else also seems to have mutually agreed.
2.) It's 4 players, so what happens in the game is irrelevant. Only politics matter. But everyone will get angry with you if you openly team up with someone or kingmake even though that's politics.
The format should be 2v2.
3.) Commander damage requires an entire spread sheet. Why? It's not like you're going to make is past turn 4.
4.) Because everyone has 40 life and there are 3 other players at the table, playing fun, fair, interactive Magic becomes impossible and the only reasonably effective way of killing other players is to play some sort of broken combo. Another issue with players having 40 life is that your life total is absolutely meaningless, so **** it, why not Necro for 39?
Players should have 20 or less life.
5.) You should be able to kill, exile, tuck, etc. a Commander. If players had to actively work to keep their commander safe it would be better.
In general, Magic players want the easiest, low effort way of winning the game possible. Any card with any degree of risk or downside associated with it is immediately shunned. This attitude is why Shroud was replaced with Hexproof and why having your commander die comes with little consequence. Having to manage risk is good game design, Bumper Bowling isn't.
Let's talk about what cards are allowed in the format:
1.) Why are Sundering Titan or Armageddon or Sway of the Stars seen as bad but not Wheel of Fortune? Man, I sure do love having the most important decision I will make all game (mulligan) rendered meaningless. Wow, I got a no land hand off of this Wheel on turn two before I could do anything, what fun! In half of the dozen or so games of Commander that I've played, I end up not being able to plan on having any of the cards currently in my hand. If they're going to ban cards because they're not fun, then they should go ahead and ban a lot more things.
2.) Why bother playing 100 card singleton if you're allowed to have 16 copies of each card because you're playing the original card + 15 tutors? Plus, your commander. So all of this 100 card nonsense is just a charade, after your lands and autoinclude mana (birds of paradise, mana elves, sol ring, mana crypt, mox diamond, etc.) and tutors you're really only playing with a 20-30 card deck.
They should ban everything that tutors for non-lands. Yes, everything. There will be some collateral damage, but it will be worth it. Then maybe these non-interactive combo decks won't be consistent.
3.) Why bother playing anything that's not an infinite combo? They should ban all of those too.
Combo doesn't actually count as Magic. All combo decks without exception* are merely accidents as a result of this game being around for 27 years with 20,000 unique cards in it. Kiki Jiki was not designed with Pestermite in mind, it was just a value card. Dark Depths was designed to require actually paying 30 mana over the course of multiple turns to summon a huge monster, it was not intended that you could instead just slap down Vampire Hexmage. Tinker was not designed with Blightseel Colossus in mind. Protean Hulk was not intended to work with Flash. Nomads en-Kor is a 1 mana 1/1 with, "fixed banding" on it, it was not designed as combo enabler.
This is just blatant fact. Through the Breach was from the COK Block, from 2005. Emrakul is from Rise of the Eldrazi, from 2012 I believe. They were never intended to work with one another.
*To be fair, Hidetsugu and Hidetsugu's Second Rite were in the same set. So it's not as if combo is absolutely never intended, it's just kind of rare and harder to pull off when it is. Maybe I'm wrong about this, I've only been playing magic for 2 years but that's how combo seems to me - 95% mistakes - because all of the notable ones and even a bunch of the ones in Pauper use weird cards made years apart that were never designed with each other in mind.
Now let's get to the playerbase. Yes, that's awful too.
1.) It's the least balanced, most rapacious format that exists but it has the most casuals playing it. So instead of playing a fair format and having fun games, casuals would rather play the most broken format possible and then get mad at your when you play a deck that's actually good. They hate the player instead of the game. If you've ever read Ender's Game, all casual commander players are Bonzo Madrid.
2.) There are three types of Commander players:
a.) Casuals who want to play dumb ***** and jack up the price of random cards like Forest Bears or Three Visits. Yes, let's spend a ton of money just to lose every single game with Squirrel Tribal, neat. They've correctly determined that top tier decks are awful but they refuse to ensconce what they want the format to be into any sort of actual change to the rules. When something is broken in Legacy or Standard or Modern or Pauper and people don't want it ruining the game anymore, they want it banned. They don't shame people for playing the overpowered deck in question. Players of every other constructed format in Magic hate the game, not the player.
b.) Spikes who play the top tier decks because they're legal but their libertarianism/aspergers prevents them from acknowledging that the game would be better without unfun things that ruin the game, instead preferring a laissez-faire free-for-all where anything goes (as long as it's flash hulk) and the only viable deck is Flash Hulk because god forbid we ever ban cards. I died on turn 4, I had to shuffle my entire 100 card deck 1.5 times a turn because I have all 10 fetches and 15 tutors, I spent more time shuffling than I actually did playing. I tried to go off with my Flash Hulk on turn 3 but everyone else Force of Willed me and then someone else Flash Hulked a turn later. Yay! What an, "interactive" game!
c.) People who play with group A and purport to hate CEDH players and infinite combo, but then assemble an infinite combo and kill everyone anyways. I was going to insult group C, but then I realized that the wildly fluctuating power level expectations of everyone that plays this format (in lieu of just changing what's legal, like literally every other format of Magic does) make it impossible to have a deck that's aligned with everyone else's power level. Group C players are just a result of this format's awful playerbase and wild west nature.
3.) The format is sold as this fun intro format... despite being the least balanced, most chaotic, biggest money pit imaginable. It's the worst introduction to Magic I could possibly think of. Buy this $40 precon so I can rip off your head and ***** down your neck with my $243 copy of Mana Crypt that I got from an out of print book that I purchased over 20 years ago!!! Awesome!
______________________________________________________________________________
Group A commander players just want to control what everyone else can and cannot play (which is what cube is all about) so they can play some stupid gimmick. Group B just wants to play with broken cards that ruin the game. Group C wants neither or is somewhere in-between. All three of these groups I think would enjoy playing/curating their own cube far more than commander.
Group A can put Squirrel Tribal and 300 other silly gimmick cards into their cube, Group B can build the MTGO Vintage cube.
But because commander has become so popular, it's choking out other forms of non-competition Magic. That's a shame. Even commander players I think would enjoy cube more than commander.
1
My overall view on cube balance is that the act of drafting inherently balances things out, so unless something is egregiously broken it should be fine.
And if a card is genuinely unplayable garbage, it's okay because it doesn't really effect the draft all that much. Having a dead card in your cube is equivalent to playing with 359 cards. At that point it's not a balance question, it's more of a, "How many slots do you want to waste on blank cards as opposed to interesting cards that may actually see play" question.
I've noticed that people give equal weight to criticism of bad cards and cards that are too good. That's wrong IMO. Ebony Horse is a bad card but it's not ruining any drafts.
1
My question was about at what point does the Delve cost become prohibitive and these cards stop becoming autoincludes. I get that everything that's not Mulldrifter, flametounge kavu, sprout swarm, and pack rat is considered "literally unplayable garbage" but that's not my question. I don't care about how good a card is, I cut Thraben Inspector for Shield Bearer.
I'll just stick with 11B for now. Well, 10BB since I've been lying this whole time and the card I'm actually concerned about is Tombstalker. I figure Gurmag and Cruise are reasonable facsimiles.
You can reasonably get 5-6 cards in the yard moderately early, and if you're playing some synergies you get rewarded for it with a BB 5/5 flier. Seemingly it should be 5-6-7~ mana creature on average, which is what I want a 5/5 flier to cost. I want Juzam Djinn to be equally as pickable as Tombstalker.
1
In my 4-5 years of playing X-Wing and my 1.5 years of playing Pauper, there is always a vocal group of players that enjoys abusing degeneracy and not having to obey any of the core rules of the game. They dig their heels in and after a while they make up the majority of people that are still playing.
When I played X-Wing, certain things would have upwards of 60% meta shares and people still would still refuse to acknowledge that there was a problem.
Wizards did the right thing by banning Gush/Probe/Daze, but they didn't go far enough and hit Ghostly Flicker/Displace. And then they threw gasoline on the fire (twice!) with Ephemerate & Astrolabe, and Mystic Sanctuary.
The double flicker cards are too abusive.
Mystic Sanctuary, even without flickers, is probably still too good with deprive.
Astrolabe in and of itself isn't broken, and I agree that just because it's played in everything doesn't mean it's ruining the game, however because of it the best Pauper deck will always be a 5 color good stuff pile. No matter what they ban, the best deck in pauper will always be: 20~ lands, 4 astrolabes, maybe 4 prophetic prisms, and whatever the best 8 cards in Pauper are.
A whole format distilled down to 8-9 cards. That's not an increase in format diversity, that's a reduction. One of the defining characteristics of Pauper was that you were generally limited to 1-2 colors. Now you just play whatever you want which means that, for example, every removal spell that's not Skred or Lightning Bolt is now unplayable garbage. Every creature that's not Seeker of the Way or Kor Skyfisher is garbage. Every fog that's not Prismatic Strands is garbage. Etc.
Also, I don't put much weight on the few dozen people that play this format online. No one really takes this format seriously and you can get pretty far with a fair deck facing others who also have mistakenly played fair decks. So it doesn't really mean much to me that MBC or whatever occasionally places high. It's still playing second fiddle to these abusive flicker decks.
1
The website is fine, I see zero need for its competitors. People say its outdated but that's because they just want a flashier, less functional website because it's 2019, not because there is anything actually wrong with cubetutor. Same reason why the electric can opener exists, not because it actually needs to, but just because people are idiots and like new things even if they're not improvements/actual downgrades.
It's been down for me as well these past few days. I've been able to occasionally get through and log some changes but it's been spotty. Been considering donating to it to become a "member" or whatever it's called.
1
This used to be a pauper cube. I'm dropping commons only to play better cards. For example, I like Splice Onto Arcane but there aren't many good ones at common, so playing rare or uncommon Arcane cards allowed me to cut some of the unplayable arcane cards and replace them with playable ones. Pauper doesn't really have any big mana creature payoffs beyond Ulamog's Crusher either.
What are some good cards that scale with power level? I'm not looking for bombs really. Symmetrical effects like wraths seem fine. Shahrazad seems fine with a bunch of Pauper creatures.
1
I have a promo foil Quirion Ranger and foil Gush I made a bunch of trades at the FLGS for. That's the hardest I've blinged out.
I have most of my cube foiled out.
Scryfall is the best way to search for all the different arts of certain cards. I'm pretty sure that in the advanced search menu, there is a pull-down menu called 'criteria' and there is a promo option there.
1
Firstly, do you know how Morph cards work? You play 3 generic mana to morph them in as a 2/2 facedown. Then to flip them over you have to pay their morph cost, which in Fathom Seer's case is the "cost" of returning two islands to your hand. After it resolves you flip it at any time you could pay the cost to unmorph, not just on your opponent's main phase.
Fathom Seer, while overall a worse card, is NOT a strict downgrade.
It's a Gush that Ninja can pick up. It's a Gush that Flicker effects can double dip with.
Perhaps someone will figure out a viable Delver Arcane package and play Veil of Secrecy and Consuming Vortex and Eye of nowhere and go to town bouncing everything.
I play it in my pauper cube. In a limited environment at least it's just as good if not better than Gush, as are a lot of "______ on a stick" creature versions of spells.
This is all purely academic though, it's not as if Tron gives a ***** about what most/all other decks do.
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What's a battlebox? I like drafting, what got me into cube was drafting a vintage cube after the Pauper game night. I didn't really like the cards themselves, but the drafting process is cool.
I also have plenty of constructed Pauper decks, like 10-15 put together at any one time.
I like Cube, mine just doesn't have to have any dumb bombs in it. To me, the express purpose of cube is to play with cards you like and want to play with, not include X card because X card is a Pauper staple. I like quirky interactions and fun, fair, interactive Magic.
So when I swing with a creature, Oasis it to save it, and then my opponent taps Gravel Slinger to kill it in response, that's exciting to me.
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1.) The cube has too much removal. My ASFAN for removal is 2.875 btw.
2.) Big dumb Gruul Beaters might be too good and you're not going to be able to get to play Kjeldoran Skycaptain or other overcosted creatures.
3.) Banding buffs defending too much, when defending already grants you an inherent advantage.
4.) Blue is underpowered. Meanwhile another player is beating my face in with Mulldrifter and Nimbus Naiad and Peregrine Drake.
So it seems to me that it's fairly balanced, lol.
My cube games are weird. It's a 360 sized cube, but most of my drafts are only with 4 people. So even if something is OP you only get to see half the cube.
My issue with Ghostly Flicker is that it utterly ruins constructed Pauper. Any sort of fun, fair, interactive midrange deck in Pauper gets absolutely crushed by infinite flicker loops. It loops infinitely with Mnemonic Wall and Pulse of Murasa and Haunted Fengraf and Moment's Peace and Mystical Teachings and Mulldrifter and whatever other already superb cards and breaks the game. Despite what the online tournament data tells you, Tron is the best deck in Pauper. Nothing stops it besides for super fast aggro and even then it's only a 60/40 at best. With Fire & Ice being downshifted in UMA Tron may even have the advantage now. I just don't want it in my cube. Mulldrifter is already worth first pick hate drafting, so I don't see the need to buff it any further.
To be frank, Tron players and Combo players don't actually like playing Magic, just getting free wins and playing uninteractive solitaire with godmode enabled. That's been my experience with X-Wing Miniatures and Magic has been no different. I prefer to instead play fun, fair, interactive Magic and I want my cube to reflect that.
For example, the last time I drafted my opponent morphed a creature in, and I had just added in a bunch more Morph creatures to the cube. I knew he had Ruthless Ripper, but I was struggling to remember what the others could be. So I used a Ray of Command on it so that I could look at it and it was a Haunted Cadaver, which would have blown me out. This knowledge allowed me to play around it. Eventually I lost to a Voltaic Servant with Vulshok Gauntlets and Nimbus Naiad.
That's extremely cool and is much more fun than getting flicker looped.
Your thoughts on Rot Wolf echo mine, that it prevents smaller creatures from attacking, it's a decent Voltron, and it can be used to wither bigger creatures in a pinch. With Green's access to ramp, they can afford to pay 3 mana for a 2/2 with some decent abilities. Even in a 1 for 1 trade it replaces itself, so if you trade it with another 2/2 it's a "one for zero". I've had success making it huge and playing a fight card with it.
I get some resistance for putting what I would consider to be "okay" cards in my cube but that's kind of the point. I want the games to be longer and more interesting and interactive. The fact that your opponent can interact with Dash Hopes and that they get to make the decision is the whole reason it's in the cube, that's fun.
Many people seem to view cube as a showcase of Magic's most powerful cards, which is a non-sequitur. I think that cube should instead be the showcase of the most fun Magic cards.