I think this is a sweet card. Honestly would run in a low power level or peasant cube instead of like, Terramorphic Expanse/Evolving Wilds/Ash Barrens or whatever despite the etb tax.
You get to use cool gate synergy stuff like Crackling Perimeter and Gates Ablaze which are -incredible- if supported, (Though its awful with Circuitous Route which saddens me), you could have a bunch of these in the pool and a single copy of each Urza's land and a Cloudpost as a reason to do Workshop/Academy style decks without breaking peasant for a Workshop or Academy. Instant Domain. And its so easy to tutor so you will get to do those cool things in games, all with the cost of "I am running generic fixing lands in my cube".
Sure, I'd prefer if it came in untapped or didn't have the tax, but even so it's cool enough that I want to restart my abortive attempt at a battlecruiser-style peasant cube around 8 copies of this.
I hate this card so much. It's strong, extremely random in a completely uncontrollable way, eternal-legal and thematically mismatched.
Mangolassi is right on the money. The sheer amount of crap it throws at the opponent, the fact that none of it feels like a coherent idea either mechanically or as a dog in space, the fact that you don't get to play the game you just have to ask "what that dog doin?" as if the meme was reason enough, the fact that the WCS of recurring 2-drops would actually be a sweet-ass ability to have on a Boros 'walker and now we won't be seeing that design space used well.
I used to like unsets as a fun aside, and have nothing against their inclusion in cube - I happen to run Crow Storm and Blast from the Past - but even at their weirdest they still felt like a celebration of Magic the Gathering. The only appealing element (Yay space puppy isn't he cute awwww) is made worse by the presence of a rules dense random-ass Magic card, that incidentally has weird templating and some unintuitive nonsense about how and when loyalty counters go onto it that will inevitably blindside some poor sod trying to have fun, all for the sake of "But you get to roll dice!"
(Consider: Fry, and how that would play out differently if this just had a +2 ability)
I like Laika and Cosmo the Space Dog and miniature giant space hamsters and 40k but none of them are improved by MTG and MTG isn't improved by any of them. I know there's the "If you don't like it it wasn't designed for you", but who was this designed for? I don't know who this card is meant to appeal to. Lolrandom EDH players? I know three people who run Krark's Thumb coinflip chaos decks in EDH and none of them like this card.
The worst part is they've done this stuff right. The Godzilla cards were perfect, they were basically wizards-sanctioned alters. The acorn holofoil stamp replacing the silver border to signify format-legality is great, and I wish I had un-cards from older sets like that. Why is this neither of those?
The second problem I've found is without in-depth theory crafting, a lot of players (including myself) would play too many high CMC spells and games are more often won based on land drops, hitting sweepers on curve etc. rather than tight play compared to constructed.
I think that's just a 'feature' of draft - you don't get to minimize variance through deck construction as much in limited as you do in constructed, so the best way to post consistent results (without getting deep into learning the format and the players at the table) can often be "slam the relevant threat/answer as early as you can, hope the haymaker closes it out". There's a reason new drafters are taught BREAD.
I have absolutely had limited experiences where through consistent play with the same group of motivated players you get to the same need for tight play as you do in formats like Legacy and Australian/Canadian Highlander, but that's happened three times in my life - Innistrad retail, RTR/GTC retail, and GRN/RNA retail. On top of that it took two to three drafts a week with the same pool of 6-8 players (who also play constructed formats with reasonable proficiency) for several months before the format was 'solved' enough that the basic lines of "be the most aggressive deck", "have more evasive threats" or "have enough removal and a difficult/impossible to answer top end" weren't enough to guarantee the 3-0.
(Incidentally I don't think it's a coincidence that these lined up with playgroups that were just out of university, just into first well-paying job, not yet committed to mortgage/kids/other adult responsibilities and therefore had the freedom and mental energy to commit to learning a format, as compared to where we're at in life now and where Cube is a way to play Magic -without- that financial and mental commitment/upkeep required by retail limited or constructed)
This might just be desire to include the limited aspects of cube - play with a variety of singletons, playing with powerful cards while also keeping the tight play from constructed.
I totally agree (Although change powerful to beloved in my case), but it seems so contingent on the rest of the table and I can't see a way to force it that doesn't seem, well, forced? I have that same itch - sit at the top table with spectators from the previous rounds, navigating every meaningful turn, knowing every mistake is a weapon in the hands of a competent opponent, only to find the perfect line to close out a game or exploit the key mistake to open it back up, and then win or lose walk away from the table going "Did you -see- that play". If you find a way, keep me posted
Much less thought went into this part but it responds to the other half of your post, so here it is:
I also really want to see archetype based discussion touch on things like matchups, curve and consistency, but not in the way I think you mean. As read, I think all of that knowledge is already out there in other spaces and its just a matter of looking outside the cube forum. Even drafting consistent decks, spotting signals, recognizing what decks other players are putting together, lots has been written about that for retail formats and it applies as-is to cube. There's at least one article over on the Mothership on drafting OG Innistrad that was all about spotting what other players were drafting and picking the underplayed chaff that beats it, for example. For cube specific advice though, you'd have to cut deeper. Like, a part of matchup is knowing how to recognize that the decks you lose to aren't being drafted. Part of consistency is knowing how valued a card or cards is/are by other archetypes in the cube, the likelihood of those archetypes being drafted at the same time as the deck you're going for, and how likely you are to see it (and that's assuming it was in the pool at all if you're at 450+). There's other stuff like gaps in peoples picks you can take advantage of to tweak the version of the deck you're playing to the draft you're experiencing right now, cards you should be wary of if you -don't- see them wheel because that means someone valued it highly and that implies they're in a certain deck that beats yours or competes with you for picks, and then on -top- of that thoughts and advice on how to include an archetype to facilitate that interesting draft experience. All of that, again, sounds so specific to the specifics of a cube - its size, the archetypes present, the cross-pollination between those archetypes. Anything less than that already exists elsewhere in writings on Constructed or on retail Limited.
As an example of this kind of discussion:
Astral Slide in my cube folds hard to Humans and Fish, so I'm happier to commit to a Slide deck if I've seen a Champion of the Parish wheel. If I think someone might be starting to go into Humans, I'll try to steal some of the good ETB humans out from under them or pass otherwise pickable white or green cards to encourage them to pivot towards White Weenie or RG aggro (both of which fold to Slide). If I've passed two strong Merfolk back to back, I might start evaluating Miscalculation and clones higher than I otherwise would to discourage that deck from coming together, changing the speed and goals of my deck but hopefully shutting down a bad matchup without compromising on Astral Slide control shennanigans. If I passed an early Lightning Rift hoping to wheel it and that didn't work out, I might pick some Cycling cards a little more readily to push the other player back out of a Cycling deck or maybe just cut my losses and switch to like, UW flash (If I already grabbed Resto) or Enchantress (If I have that Enlightened Tutor and the white removal it can grab). Maybe I'm looking at Slide and Life from the Loam and grab the Loam, knowing that I'm more likely to wheel the Slide, there's an Astral Drift and Lightning Rift in the cube as backup anyway, and there is -no way- Loam makes it back to me due to it's sheer versatility.
That's the sort of conversation that would be really cool to have in an "[MCD] Cycling" thread, but is it so specific as to be unusable? I don't think anyone reading that learned anything they'll apply to their cube, and the general principles behind the specifics that are already written about elsehwere are more than sufficient. Again, it feels like taking a 9.5 to a 10, with all the same downsides.
They'd be fun conversations to have and to watch, but I don't know how well they'd actually prompt -conversing- compared to:
"Hey it turns out card has underperformed in my cube"
"No card is the best thing printed since other card"
"But missed clause due to overly wordy text box"
"Oh I misread that, yeah it's bad and cut"
(Not a slight against those conversations, they're enjoyable enough to read and engage in to return time and time again to this forum)
While I understand and to some extent agree with your points, cube is a fundamentally different format because of the draft portion of the game and how that affects stuff like complexity fatigue when drafting, making sure it's possible to salvage decks that have gone off the rails, the fun of competing over cards so you have to think and not just draft on rails, etc, etc. That affects how people build and draft and play even if it's not acknowledged. I also disagree that anyone's decision regarding inclusions or cuts in their cube are ever problems*
Like, specific example: I have two archetypes in my main cube that have constructed equivalents which play Aether Vial (three if you count "Humans" but I wouldn't).
It's certainly powerful enough in those decks. It absolutely would be a useful piece for them. I would love to slam it and relive some of my favourite Vial plays from constructed. On the other hand it's terrible outside them, and terrible off-curve in them. The boost they'd get from its inclusion is incredibly marginal compared to the ability of something like Top or Bonesplitter to help basically any deck in any combination of colours playing in that or an adjacent theatre. It's not first pick, set-the-course-of-the-draft archetype-defining either, which can totally be used to justify the inclusion of narrow cards. As a result, it's not fun to draft. It's not a first pick, because it's not so necessary to any one archetype that by picking it it'd prevent others from drafting it, and it's not versatile enough to make up for that. If someone at the table was already drafting the appropriate deck and they saw a Vial, they'd pass it for a 5/10 roleplayer - No one else would need it so its a safe wheel, and they get to take something more in demand that they also want and still get their Vial. If they saw a Bonesplitter and a solid 5/10 roleplayer though, now there's a choice. What are the colours of their neighbours? Have they passed a lot of Savannah Lions? Are they on leaning towards the 'creature' part of 'disruptive creature deck' or the 'disruptive' part? Maybe they pass it and take the other 'okay' card, and now some midrange deck ends feeling okay about picking it up. Bonesplitter makes a decent inclusion in their deck too, maybe they run it, it smacks face and does something. That's more interesting than Aether Vial which would be either being passed because no one wants it this week, wheeling until the last second before getting picked by the one guy at the table who cares about it, or lamest of all getting a late hate draft and sitting on the sidelines.
If I was playing any of those decks in constructed I'd never include a Bonesplitter. Even the ones that already run equipment. I'm not playing constructed. Does that mean I'm undervaluing Vial (Or CoCo, or whatever), or does that imply a totally different set of criteria on which I'm evaluating cards?
I know I've not answered your main point. Hell I even agree with your point that there's a gap in conveying the precise and delicate interplay of cards in high power deck-building in constructed formats and how that can be applied to cube building/drafting. I'm just trying to highlight the underlying assumptions about the applicability of constructed experience to draft. Sometimes (Port) that knowledge and relevance will port (heh) 1 to 1 due to objective power level and broad utility. Sometimes it won't. I think the forum already does a really good job at filtering card recommendations on that basis already.
I also think that the discussion in cube forums tends towards "Hey where does card rate so I know if I should test it, does it go in this archetype, is it weak, am I missing anything?" - helping people reliably get a 7/10 experience out of their cube so they and their players want to keep going and improving and having fun on their own.
Parts of this sort of conversation seems much more geared towards taking a cube that's already at a 9.5, with a dedicated playgroup that has lots of reps with it and who want to improve their drafting and their play, and taking it to a 10/10. If you're at that point, surely deck techs by professional players would do the job? That's how I learned how to play Astral Slide however many years ago, and there's no way anyone in the cube forum here would have been drawn into that conversation regardless of how many times I cycle an Ash Barrens to flicker my morphed Exalted Angel mid-combat when my opponent has a Lightning Rift and yes I do run all of those cards stop judging me.
That being said, if there was a cube forum for this sort of discussion, this is the place - it's got the veterans and the consistency between cube lists to maximize the relevance of conversations of this sort.
* To expand, Urza being underplayed due to a lack of understanding might be a reason to bring drafters up to speed so everyone's able to have fun with him, or a reason to cut Urza and have fun without him. Both are totally fine. Might even be a reason to shrug and go "Well Pete is just really good at drafting Urza decks, time to sleeve up Gorilla Shaman" or whatever. My reason for not including Urza is that the bucks-to-fun ratio of Urza compared to better Duals was heavily weighted towards the Duals and that's fine too. All of them are relevant considerations when thinking about including Urza in a cube, we just all weigh them differently and therefore come to different conclusions.
I don't know if I'm a fan of this in Reanimator but I'll be running it anyway.
I'm sure people will target it with Animate Deads and Necromancies and Recurring Nightmares and it'll be fine if confusing (and probably chumped by 1/1 spirits for days), but I'll be including it for Mass Polymorph and the Manifest -> Astral Slide/Drift deck I support. Both of those are already in blue for me anyway, and both run non-creature permanents that are sweet to copy:
The biggest thing for me over a clone here is the flash. I and my drafters love the Bant flash deck I try to keep supported in my cube, and there are a surprising number of on-curve threats in my list that this can get value off of.
I think this can lead to some more interesting decisions than a lot of Flash dudes which always guarantee their effect and therefore have very obvious lines of play, and I can even think of cases in games 2 or 3 where this could be something important to play around in a combo vs control matchup.
On top of that basically all of the aggro decks I support rely on ETB's so I like that it could act as a speedbump that encourages a turn spent casting removal (Through Ward 2 no less) or otherwise discourages mindlessly curving out.
If that ends up being the case I think it will be cool enough to keep, but on the other hand if in practice it's only ever a bad clone with a timing restriction I don't know if the flash blocker alternate mode is enough to keep it around.
I'm kind of happy with where red is at with walkers - there's a lot of variety in walkers available to support a bunch of fun red archetypes at a few different power levels.
Koth is a solid enough top end for red aggro and sick in Wildfire and Big Red, Daretti for welder decks, Big Chandra for Big Red, CToD for Medium Red or Wildfire, Baby Chandra for aristocrats or Izzet spells, Lukka if you want polymorph. If you really want to support aristocrats or Fires, even Zariel is fine.
White walkers on the other hand are samey token making midrange value engines that either buff your dudes or kill theirs, or a Gideon that turns sideways. Or both.
Would love to see a decent white walker that does something else - taxes people or flickers creatures or is anything other than a safe generic "Yeah this'll fit in my Wx midrange deck" pick. I see a Daretti I'm like "Hell yeah Welder is in this cube!". I see an Elspeth or a Gideon and the reaction is more "Oh I guess White is in this cube." I'd love to see a white walker that has that same power as a signpost card or does something in a different design space.
White Superfriends Walker 3WW
Whenever an opponent draws a card, put a loyalty counter on each planeswalker you control.
{0}: Until the end of your next turn, only one creature may attack and block each combat.
{-2}: Up to one target creature gains Vigilance end of turn. Up to one target creature doesn't untap during it's controllers next untap step.
{-7}: You get an emblem with "Noncreature, nonland permanents you control have Exalted."
{4}
That all said, would be cool to see a cheap red Walker that replaces the usual 1/1 Devil "When ~ dies deal 1 to any target" with a "Sacrifice ~, discard a card: Draw a card" token.
Red Madness Walker 1RR
Whenever you discard a creature card, you may exile it with a Dementia counter on it.
{+1}: Create a 1/1 black and red Nightmare Horror creature token with "Sacrifice ~, discard a card: Draw a card".
{0}: Discard up to two cards. If you do, draw that many cards.
{-5}: You may cast any number of creature cards with Dementia counters on them from exile without paying their mana costs. They become Nightmare Horrors and gain "Sacrifice this at end of turn"
{3}
Seems like it'd work in a few different shells.
While reworking my cube I'm really feeling the lack of good repeatable discard outlets in red at 1 or 2 cmc.
Merfolk Looter but it's a Red Goblin that Rummages (Seriously why hasn't this been printed already) 1R
Creature - Goblin Wizard
Tap: Discard a card, then draw a card.
2/1
Recently cut it from my janky-ass Unpowered cube and felt real bad about it.
I want a discard outlet in red at 1 or 2 cmc to help out the Madness decks and Reanimator and on paper this seemed okay, but in practice was never even a consideration for those decks.
Even for the slower decks it seemed it was always being picked as a confidence booster - existing to 'confirm' you were drafting medium or big red, or Rx control and then... doesn't make it into the deck. The decks where it did were ones really hurting for playables and it wasn't helping them perform either - Its almost good enough in so many ways, but the versatility didn't make up for how slow it is.
I'd also have a look at other reasons Storm wasn't working before adding another card that only works in one specific deck - lack of redundancy in other areas (More tutors? Rituals? Ways to cast from the gy? Card selection? Anything else that goes in more than just Storm) or overabundance of other things that beat the deck.
That all being said I have my cube's storm archetype built around Sentinel Tower and Aetherflux Reservoir rather than Rituals and Tendrils and my only 'traditional' storm experience is Modern and EDH so I could be way off here.
I stopped curating the online list for it a while ago but I'll try get it up to date sometime this week if work allows.
It really was mostly a matter of picking archetypes that have a lot of cross-pollination, and cards with a lot of interactions. For my cube Madness and Cycling were the core, because I love Basking Rootwalla/Wild Mongrel and Astral Slide. If I'm running cycling cards, cycling creatures are great to pick up with a Living Death, and cycling lands love a Life from the Loam (Plus, cycling duals and tris go great with Eternal Dragon to double dip on those sweet on-cycle triggers). Now I have a reason to run self mill, and a self mill enabler in green... and I'm running Astral Slide, Spirit Cairn and friends. Welp, lets run Commune with the Gods, Kruphix's Insight and Benefaction of Rhonas. Sure, they're weaker cards but they are perfectly acceptable at the pace of my cube. This was basically the mindset, Archetype A leads to B and C, B and C lead to D, E, F, G, etc, etc.
Even stupid stuff can work without skewing the cube too much. Splicers and Precursor Golem like getting flickered with Astral Slide/Drift, Precursor Golem works in some combo shenanigans, Hollow One is there for the madness decks regardless of colour. I was already running Adaptive Automaton and Metallic Mimic because there's a pretty high density of Elves, Zombies, Merfolk, Humans, Spirits and Goblins anyway. Now I've lost a game to a janky Golem tribal deck because they just made a ton of 3/3 tokens, swung in, and flashed in an aggressive Ancient Stone Idol so my wrath wasn't enough to keep me alive the following turn.
Is ancient stone idol a great card? No, but it has killed me in more than one way. Reanimated turn 2 is decent, hitting a 1/1 spirit with a Proteus Staff was cool, but Sylvan Library setting up Erratic Explosion? That's a painful way to lose. Fringe card, four different decks doing different things at different stages of the game, between them using every colour in the cube. To me, that justifies the inclusion.
I really dislike this in draft formats, so this is why my cube is built the way it is. The draft takes up a fair portion of the night, so it should have as many interesting decisions and be as much of a game as the matches themselves.
I don't have a cube built for power, so this advice may not work for you, but hey.
Core cards in my cube are the ones that have the most different ways of caring about them. Fetches are a well known example of this - Land that every deck wants, fixes mana, fills the graveyard, shuffles the deck. Delve cards are happy to see a fetch. Brainstorm loves a fetch. Aggro decks that can't afford to stumble on coloured mana love a fetch. People fight over fetches, and while they are generically good, they also want them for subtly different reasons. Everyone knows this. Ideally, the same would be true of a lot of cards: Good so everyone is trying to pick them, but versatile so that people want them for different decks, and ideally want them for different reasons so the play pattern is different too. Frantic Search, already pointed out in this thread, is another card in my cube that a lot of decks want to play. U/G madness wants it, Reanimator wants it, my weird artifact based Storm archetype wants it, the enchantress ramp deck wants it, even mono-U aggro or Bant Flash will take it as a playable. These cards obviously aren't great examples because they're incredibly strong and known to be, but there are weaker examples too. Blade Splicer will happily sit in a G/W human tribal deck one week, join Porcelain Legionnaire in artifact aggro the week after, and then provide a very blinkable body alongside Resto the week after that. An archetype defining card like Living Death becomes more in demand the more ways there are to fill your graveyard or empty your opponents, or (In the case of my slower cube) just be a 5 mana wrath, instead of being just for 'The living death deck'. Are the Triomes going to mana fix for some greedy 5c control monstrosity, are they going to let Astral Slide pop off with the various land-cyclers, or will they be brought back with Loam for extra (inefficient) card draw? Are they going to do all three in the one deck? Doing this across the whole cube did require dropping the power level by a lot and had the side effect of increasing the complexity by a lot, as not only do individual cards have more interactions you have to care about but also tend towards having more text. I personally have found the trade off worth it, as it's meant curating a 360 cube rather than going up to a larger cube size and only using part of it to get that same variance between drafts (Which for me also reduces feel-bads). We know what's in the cube week to week, we can rely on seeing the cards we're drafting towards. No starting a draft only to find you never had a shot at the combo piece that wasn't in the pool this week, it just got drafted by someone else for a totally different reason.
Inspired by the comments preceding and around the current power level rankings, an ongoing desire to revive and update the "A Comprehensive List of Cube Archetypes" thread, and a few other posts I've seen here and on Reddit, I decided to share my thoughts on card selection and curation for cubes on a different axis. Much of this will already be known to cube enthusiasts, and I have no illusions about the fact I'm not saying anything new, but I want to consolidate a few concepts and resources into one location and provide a different type of resource for people new to cube or after a different type of custom draft experience. I'm aware MTGsal is not the target audience for this, and it might be recieved better elsewhere like Reddit or Riptide, but I kinda want to throw this idea into a real crucible and see if it survives.
I know my experiences won't cleanly translate to everyone, so I figured I'd focus on the facet that I care most about and feel will have the most relevance, something I have dubbed Buffalo Cards.
There are all sorts of animal 'totems' cards get sorted under. "Rattlesnake" cards are ones that warn other players away from targeting you, I've heard cheap, recursive threats referred to as "Cockroaches" and it is a fact universally acknowledged that "Bears" are 2/2s for 2. What then, is a "Buffalo"?
In the same way we are told that native Americans used 'every part of the buffalo', so too can we use 'every part of the card'. The ideal Buffalo card is one where every part of its text leads is relevant or meaningful, or leads to neat interactions, decisions or discoveries. Ideally, this is also a diverse set of interactions that are relevant at different stages of the game so as to increase how attractive it is to each player during the draft. Is every Buffalo card good in every deck? Hell, is every Buffalo card "powerful"? No, but that's not the goal. The goal is to reduce the linearity of drafts and encourage players to fight over cards so the draft portion of your night is as interesting and interactive as the games. Ideally this will also be making the games themselves more interesting and interactive as well, by increasing the number of decisions made, the options available for those decisions, and allowing for new discoveries or "Aha!" moments. In order for this to happen the cards do have to be good enough to consider playing for power level reasons alone, but as cube power levels vary wildly I'm not going to consider that axis when listing examples later on.
There is a ten* (Eleven? Thirteen? Eighteen?) card cycle in Magic that are the archetypal ideal of the Buffalo card. Almost every word in their text box has the opportunity to be relevant in a game of Magic, and each of those words matters differently to different decks at different stages of the game. They're also at a power level that leads players to actively fight over them during the draft regardless of archetype. In fact they're so good they may be in your cube already. Yes, you guessed it: Fetchlands.
Let's have a look at the text box of a generic fetchland and see just how much room there is for interaction.
[CARDNAME]
Land.
(T), Sacrifice [CARDNAME]: Search your library
for a (land that meets condition), put it onto
the battlefield, then shuffle your library.
Ignoring the super obvious ("They fix your mana!"), there are a lot of potent effects taking place at a very competitive cost here, all at instant speed. You likely know all of this already, but for those who want or need it I'll deploy the ugly nested spoiler.
"Pay 1 life"
Okay, we start on the weakest. Maybe you care about this, maybe you cube with Death's Shadow or Font of Agonies or... uuuuh... Gonti's Machinations? Maybe you find being Stasis-locked fun too, I don't want to kinkshame. You do you.
Sacrifice {CARDNAME}
Here we go! We're putting something in the 'yard for free! A land at that! This triggers Revolt, fuels Delve, turns on Threshold, adds a type for'Goyf and Delirium, gives you a target for Deathrite Shaman, Grim Lavamancer and Life from the Loam, pumps Knight of the Reliquary and Centaur Vinecrasher, lets you ramp with Crucible, Ramunap Excavator and Sun Titan, does nasty things with Titania. Gorgeous.
Search your library
Uuuh... Panglacial Wurm is a card? Maybe you want to "Gotcha!" opponents who fetch with Archive Trap? Maybe a Winter Orb on the other side of the table fills you with delight too, you beautiful disaster of a Magic player.
for a (land that meets condition)
The meat of the card, you know why this is good. Whatever you want to do you need mana to do it, and this gets the right colour, right away. And hey, if you're running that Gonti's Machinations you can get a shockland and get a *~second trigger~*... if you wait a turn to crack it. what value.
put it onto the battlefield,
Bloodghast! Courser of Kruphix! Evolution Sage! Okay, I'm just listing Landfall creatures here. Yes it doesn't say tapped. Yes we all know that's very good. That's a power level thing much more than a Buffalo thing, so I'm going to stop passive-aggressively talking about it now.
then shuffle your library.
Brainstorm! Top! JtMS! (On either side of the table, at that!). Don't draw that irrelevant crap you left on top, shuffle it away!
In this list we've seen cheap threats, turbo ramp cards, midrange and control creatures, value engines and card draw, running the gamut of archetypes and hitting every colour. Every drafter at your table is at least considering picking a fetch, and none of them will be unhappy to have it in their pool when it comes time for deckbuilding, even if it only hits one of their colours. This is why we want Buffaloes.
From a power standpoint, you get all of this at the very very competitive cost of
A draft pick
Including a land in your deck, and
Playing that land.
I don't know if you've noticed this, but these are all things that players have to do anyway. This obviously adds to the appeal, as for cards to be considered on the basis of versatility they need to reach the minimum standards of playability (for your cube).
There are two real reasons I consider Buffalo desirable, and both relate to archetypes in cube. The third is a personal benefit I've found that you may consider relevant
The more players have to fight over cards during a draft, the more variance there will be between individual instances of the same 'deck' or 'archetype'. This solves an unfortunate element of overtuning towards archetypes, that of "choosing a lane" or "drafting on rails" - see Ixalan retail limited for why this is undesirable. Reducing the linearity of the drafting process while still encouraging decks to have a specific game plan is pretty high on my list of priorities
The more interactions a card can have during a game, the more decisions that will need to be made and the wider the possibility space for a deck that can use all the parts of the Buffalo. On a personal level, I also find that this makes that decision making process more rewarding, choosing (or discovering) 'the play' from a broader list of options is more enjoyable to me than jamming a powerful effect and this holds true for a (narrow) majority of my playgroup. This won't be true for everyone and there isn't a 'right' way here, so don't feel attacked if that's not your preference.
A side-effect of choosing to build via Buffalo rather than or in addition to via Archetype is the -designer- getting a chance to discover interactions in games rather than in curation. An example that happened to me was taking 10 through my defensive board when my opponent Hail-Mary'd Faithless Looting into a Liliana's Caress, then activated their Magus of the Wheel. I put all of those cards in the cube, I decided I wanted graveyard synergies and madness cards and cycling synergies and hand attack to all feature, yet I didn't specifically include that interaction as a "combo" for people to play. It's not an amazing combo by any stretch, but it's an out that particular deck had against me that particular game, it came up, and both I and my opponent found it pretty cool. In that very same draft, I was playing a grindy Green/Black aggro enchantress after my draft went a bit wrong, and Kruphix's Insight drawing Sarcomancy, Rancor and Boon Satyr while also binning a Gravecrawler felt pretty good. That's another 'archetype' that I did not deliberately build into the cube but was a way to rescue my draft thanks to the decision to choose cards for possibility space over power. Not every one of those cards is a Buffalo in my cube, but those that are enabled those that aren't.
We want to maximize interactions, so is a wall of text desirable? More words = more opportunities for them to be relevant, right? Well, no. Dance of the Dead is pretty wordy but in the end it doesn't have many more interactions than the (/slightly/ less wordy) Animate Dead or Necromancy. Unless you build your cube to take advantage of the difference in card type, none of them do meaningfully more than any other Reanimate effect either, or may even do less.
Modal spells all have to be Buffalo right? They do all sorts of things!
Well, Chaos Charm may do three things, but I doubt you care all that much about any of its modes in any given board state - after all how often do you /need/ to destroy target Wall? Honestly, Forked Bolt is a better modal spell than Chaos Charm. It can kill a bird, it can kill a bear, it can push damage, it can be a 2-for-1 in control decks and a burn spell in aggro ones.
Does that make Forked Bolt a Buffalo then? Well, not for those reasons - that's just a versatile card. All of that versatility and possibility space comes from one line of text. Doesn't mean it can't -be- a Buffalo though, as it's pretty contingent on the design space your cube occupies - if you have a "Spells Matter" deck, or a "Bloodthirst" deck, or a "CMC = 1 Matters" deck or whatever, you now have more parts of Forked Bolt to care about, more ways for it to do things - a Buffalo. If you don't, it's 'just' a very solid spell.
What are the main traits we care about here? Well, pretty much anything, as long as you consistently pay attention to the same characteristics and provide payoffs for them. Most commonly I care about the following:
(Super and Sub)Types
Zones it interacts with
Other permanents or effects it interacts with
Characteristics of other permanents or effects it interacts with
Lets take a card at random from Gatherer to see if it has the potential to be a Buffalo.
Types -
Creature: Pretty good, they do things I hear.
Homunculus: Oh well, we can't have everything.
Effects -
1U, Tap: Well, we aren't getting the effect cheaply, nor are we getting it straight away, but these are concerns for power level reasons than the breadth of possibility space. Maybe you care about the creature tapping - Umbral Mantle exists I guess?
Create a 2/2 blue Homunculus creature token: Ooh, we get a creature, and it's a bear! This is good.
Then sacrifice a creature: Even better! This fills the graveyard, triggers Morbid and Revolt, etc.
At the end of this exercise, we have a card with a universally relevant type, that makes something with a universally relevant type, that does things for two zones (the battlefield and the graveyard), interacts with itself in interesting ways (1/2 that can block and leave behind a 2/2? Even better, as long as you keep it around it gives you a free block every turn by sacrificing a chump and making a new one for next turn!) and has the potential to interact with other cards that care about the same zones or are triggered by it's ability. Seems like a Buffalo to me, at least in the context of Innistrad limited with its Morbid effects and its Gnaw to the Bones.
Should you jam it in your cube? That depends on whether you care about what it does and the costs at which it does them, which is why you need to be able to recognise Buffalo for yourself. If you're running Homunculus Tribal (in a cube where that's powerful enough to be an archetype), this is probably pretty far up there on your list of "cards with relevant interactions". On the other hand, if this card is competing with Thing in the Ice backed up by Snap and Snappy in a blue section stocked with instant and sorcery enablers and payoffs it's probably not going to pull its weight, as even irrespective of power level concerns it's just not doing anything in the same space as your other effects in blue.
Some examples of Buffalo from my cube:
1WW for a 2/2 lifelinking flier is okay at my cube's power level, certainly not embarrassing. It goes in both aggressive and defensive Enchantress builds thanks to the evasion and lifelink, while also pumping/triggering key effects. Its tutorable and recurrable in mono-W too, which is a nice benefit. It's also super sweet in decks that want to cheat things into play. It adds to the 'creature density' of a polymorph deck without adding a creature card so you can hit your fatties more reliably in the same way some token makers do. If you have any topdeck manipulation or tutoring, any flicker effect will cheat things into play that way too. Then we get to the super fringe - if the 2/2 dies, that's two cards in the yard for the price of one. Efficient? No. Relevant? Well, yeah actually. Delve is a hungry beast, so is Grim Lavamancer. An evasive creature that heals you is relevant in both control and aggro, as mentioned, so it's not unusual to see this paired with one of the above. The only part of that textbox I don't have a use for is the fact that the Manifest is colourless, but there are cards out that that could care about this if that's a route someone wanted to take.
I like this guy a lot. Okay, as a creature he's not great, but he's an option and there will be boards where you just need a decent body. He cycles, which has a whole host of interactions in my list - I run a fair few "whenever a player cycles/discards a card" effects. He puts himself in the 'yard, for the things that care about that - Living Death, Nemesis of Mortals, whatever. Here's where it gets less relevant to most people: He's 7 mana. I run a suite of cards that care about high CMC, but you can't just jam exclusively 7-11 mana spells and hope you don't die. A 7 mana "hit" for Combustible Gearhulk that also performs double-duty as an uncounterable cantrip that helps you -cast- those expensive spells should you need to is exactly what that deck needs - so much so that I also run Shefet Monitor and Elvish Aberration.
I was going to do a whole write-up on these, but there's nothing I wanted to say that hadn't already been said over in the "Comprehensive List of Cube Archetypes" Multi-Archetype All Stars section. For the two whole people who haven't checked that thread out, give it a read.
Limitations of Buffalo
There are some limitations to this approach, and I've run headlong into all of them in my ever-ongoing attempts to further tune my 360. The three major ones that have come up time and time again are:
Any increase in the amount or complexity of decisions in your game demands an increase in attentiveness, which isn't ideal for all players. I have had drafts where a player or players were tired, and the complexity of a draft where so many cards interact in so many ways with so many other cards was just too much for them. In iterations of the cube where I've had obvious and linear draft strategies present ("Humans" or "Gx Midrange") this hasn't been a problem, those players have opted-out of that level of attentiveness and still been involved in a draft where they have a stake and a decent deck at the end. In iterations where I'd gone overboard on complexity (or the draft hadn't aligned), and those linear strategies were either non-obvious or not present. If your cube drafts go long or late, there's also the possibility of previously attentive and engaged players to become less so should they reach a critical mass of complexity in their deck or gameplan. Anecdotally, this is solved by having clearly signposted linear strategies available, and seems to decrease as familiarity with Magic or the specifics of the cube increases - once players have a rote awareness of cards and aren't actively reading them every time they see them, this decreases. Having a "draft strategies", "list of archetypes" or "common combos" sheet may help, I've certainly tried the 'list of archetypes' before.
Once the complexity of a decision reaches a certain threshold, either because of the range of options available or the potential for unforeseen consequences, some players will deem it "too complicated" and opt out of making a decision at all. This seems to come from a fear of making the wrong decision. Decision paralysis may manifest in refusing to play a card until well after it was relevant, or in refusing to draft a card that has too many possible uses. In my experience it's always a negative for the player in question, leads to a bad feeling associated with drafting or cubing and should always be avoided. This one I don't have advice on. I've had a player relatively new to Magic draft my cube and just cast "Living Death" as a "Weird board wipe" that's gotten them there, and I've had an experienced drafter stare at the comparatively simple "Life from the Loam" and then just give up and pass it despite being in a green self mill deck that featured cycling lands. People are odd. Again, rote awareness seems to help.
The more complex the cube, the more unforeseen interactions that may arise, and the more room for those interactions, once discovered, to be oppressive. You may even be -aware- of an interaction and underrate its strength - this has happened to me more than once, sometimes bringing a niche interaction up to the standard of 'actual archetype", sometimes pushing something from 'not a deck' to 'how do I beat this?'. Unless something has gotten really wacky, just run broad enough answers. Answers don't have to be Buffalo. In fact, they probably shouldn't be. Sure, I run Ichor Slick and Complicate because they do cool things in the right deck. I also run Malicious Affliction and Counterspell because they do the job. They aren't oppressively powerful and mechanically dull cards, they're just simple and effective ways of dealing with things.
Well, that's about it for this nascent theory of mine. It's been a useful way to think about cards for me, and a way of breaking out of linear archetypes in my cube, and as such I wanted to share. Even if you don't take this approach (And I don't expect people to), I hope that it sparks new thought about card analysis on a different axis - ambitious, admittedly.
Thanks for reading
At the start of this post I mentioned not wanting to cube cards on the basis of power yet multiple times now have I commented on how cards need to be powerful enough to justify their inclusion. How do I reconcile these statements? Well, card power doesn't exist in a vacuum. It exists in the context of other cards. Cube started as a way of playing with all of the best cards in magic, but has evolved to encompass every custom draft experience imaginable and I think we're much richer for it. I am of the opinion that if you picked the 360 objectively "most powerful" cards in Magic, you would end up with a pretty awful cube. My assumption is that Blue cards and Artifacts would be disproportionately represented, Red and White would be both shallow and narrow and the density of different effects, enablers, payoffs and mana costs would be all out of whack, with a heavy weighting towards payoffs and nowhere near enough set up or enablers. As a result, a lot of very powerful cards would not be in a position to show off the full extent of their power, and some may be stone cold duds in this hypothetical format. You would have assembled a list of powerful cards, sure, but would you have powerful feeling games? Probably not.
Yet, cubes that are designed around power level exist and are fun to draft. Their designers and curators have made /concessions/ on power level to show off power level; by including enough Savannah Lions they make Armageddon and Ravages of War both back-breaking and game ending; by including token makers they allow Opposition to be oppressive; in running second-string discard outlets they make turn 2 Griselbrand a real possibility. Even on a more fundamental level, just having a hard number of cards per colour is a restriction that prevents the inclusion of just "the best" 360 cards - after all what are the odds that, of "the best" 360, exactly 60 or so are Blue? So then, those who design around power make concessions for a playable draft environment.
I say that designing from the perspective of maximising power level is too harsh a limitation - if you have powerful feeling magic by excluding a subset "the most powerful cards", why can't you have powerful feeling magic regardless of that constraint at all? Why not build from the perspective of "What is the most interesting draft environment for my players", with the power level concern not being "how do I turn it up to 11" but instead "How do I level the playing field for as many decks as I can meaningfully support?", bringing power down not to show off how frustrating Jitte is in creature-based matchups, but instead to allow as many different decks and games as possible in your tiny box of wizard cards.
TBC
TBC
EDIT: My tags went all wonky, the post got very ugly, and I couldn't get the floats, links and boxes to work the way they were in the preview. Resorted to spoilers (And nested spoilers), hope it still reads well enough.
Squadron Hawk coming in playsets, or Avarax/Accumulated Knowledge/Muscle Burst, etc, has all definitely been done, and people have talked about the benefits and pitfalls here before. My takeaway, as someone who has never 'squadroned' cards, is that there are consequences you may not have foreseen. Getting a triple or quadruple pick lets you take riskier other picks, maybe messing up signals or archetypes for neighbouring drafters. The cards themselves are often traps, with the "burst" cards (Muscle Burst and friends), Ripple cards and self-tutors being over costed for their initial impact. Net result, the drafter who picks the squadron and their neighbours all end up with worse decks.
If you're doing this, ask yourself why it matters that you're doing it. My example would be Squadron Hawk in standard caw-blade, and why that card was worth including in the deck - it was a decent impression of an actual recursive threat, sure, but it also let you turn Jace's Brainstorm into an Ancestral Recall and carried equipment like a champ. If you're jamming Renowned Weaponsmith and associates because the act of tutoring those two cards opens up interesting interactions and new possibility space, while also being of an appropriate power level for the rest of your cube, awesome, that's ideal. If you're jamming the Renowned Weaponsmith and his squad because 'it'll be cool I promise", it probably won't be.
I've never taken part in one of these before, mostly because I'm more of a lurker, but as someone with a janky, non-traditional cube who largely talks to curators of other janky and/or non-traditional cubes both in person and online, I don't feel like my input would be valid or useful with a "power level" list. I don't run Power, I don't run Moxen, and I don't run cards just because they're straight gas, so how do I know whether Land Tax or Monastery Mentor is a better "15th best white card" in that environment?
That said, MTGSalvation seems to have a pretty strong lean towards the power-level cube, where "but is it -strong-" is the most relevant criteria for inclusion, so I don't want to hate on the idea of a power level list here.
OTOH, if you want a list of "top 20 white cards that fit in a bunch of decks", or "top 20 white cards that lead to interactive games" or "top 20 white cards that make for meaningful decisions during the draft", now I'm happy to vote as my experiences are relevant to that. To have a list of straight power is only considering one axis of cube design, an axis that is being edged out as cube is getting more popular and people are wanting to do their own thing. From my own experiences, the 10-cards list of multi archetype all-stars and the descriptions of cards within was -way- more influential to my cube and how I consider cards for inclusion than every single one of the power rankings lists on this forum, and that post and approach to archetype-based design seems to have been abandoned in discussions here.
Still, just one voice, and there are room for many. For what it's worth, I agree with hoodwink and wtwlf on colour identity even if my own cube has Lingering Souls as a white card (forgive me)
You get to use cool gate synergy stuff like Crackling Perimeter and Gates Ablaze which are -incredible- if supported, (Though its awful with Circuitous Route which saddens me), you could have a bunch of these in the pool and a single copy of each Urza's land and a Cloudpost as a reason to do Workshop/Academy style decks without breaking peasant for a Workshop or Academy. Instant Domain. And its so easy to tutor so you will get to do those cool things in games, all with the cost of "I am running generic fixing lands in my cube".
Sure, I'd prefer if it came in untapped or didn't have the tax, but even so it's cool enough that I want to restart my abortive attempt at a battlecruiser-style peasant cube around 8 copies of this.
Mangolassi is right on the money. The sheer amount of crap it throws at the opponent, the fact that none of it feels like a coherent idea either mechanically or as a dog in space, the fact that you don't get to play the game you just have to ask "what that dog doin?" as if the meme was reason enough, the fact that the WCS of recurring 2-drops would actually be a sweet-ass ability to have on a Boros 'walker and now we won't be seeing that design space used well.
Its like this card exists to remind me of everything I've loathed about magic over the past couple of years embodied.
Thematic whiff.
Way too much power on a planeswalker with way too much loyalty.
Playable in eternal formats for some godforsaken reason.
Limited print run, with minimal chances for reprints
I used to like unsets as a fun aside, and have nothing against their inclusion in cube - I happen to run Crow Storm and Blast from the Past - but even at their weirdest they still felt like a celebration of Magic the Gathering. The only appealing element (Yay space puppy isn't he cute awwww) is made worse by the presence of a rules dense random-ass Magic card, that incidentally has weird templating and some unintuitive nonsense about how and when loyalty counters go onto it that will inevitably blindside some poor sod trying to have fun, all for the sake of "But you get to roll dice!"
(Consider: Fry, and how that would play out differently if this just had a +2 ability)
I like Laika and Cosmo the Space Dog and miniature giant space hamsters and 40k but none of them are improved by MTG and MTG isn't improved by any of them. I know there's the "If you don't like it it wasn't designed for you", but who was this designed for? I don't know who this card is meant to appeal to. Lolrandom EDH players? I know three people who run Krark's Thumb coinflip chaos decks in EDH and none of them like this card.
The worst part is they've done this stuff right. The Godzilla cards were perfect, they were basically wizards-sanctioned alters. The acorn holofoil stamp replacing the silver border to signify format-legality is great, and I wish I had un-cards from older sets like that. Why is this neither of those?
I think that's just a 'feature' of draft - you don't get to minimize variance through deck construction as much in limited as you do in constructed, so the best way to post consistent results (without getting deep into learning the format and the players at the table) can often be "slam the relevant threat/answer as early as you can, hope the haymaker closes it out". There's a reason new drafters are taught BREAD.
I have absolutely had limited experiences where through consistent play with the same group of motivated players you get to the same need for tight play as you do in formats like Legacy and Australian/Canadian Highlander, but that's happened three times in my life - Innistrad retail, RTR/GTC retail, and GRN/RNA retail. On top of that it took two to three drafts a week with the same pool of 6-8 players (who also play constructed formats with reasonable proficiency) for several months before the format was 'solved' enough that the basic lines of "be the most aggressive deck", "have more evasive threats" or "have enough removal and a difficult/impossible to answer top end" weren't enough to guarantee the 3-0.
(Incidentally I don't think it's a coincidence that these lined up with playgroups that were just out of university, just into first well-paying job, not yet committed to mortgage/kids/other adult responsibilities and therefore had the freedom and mental energy to commit to learning a format, as compared to where we're at in life now and where Cube is a way to play Magic -without- that financial and mental commitment/upkeep required by retail limited or constructed)
I totally agree (Although change powerful to beloved in my case), but it seems so contingent on the rest of the table and I can't see a way to force it that doesn't seem, well, forced? I have that same itch - sit at the top table with spectators from the previous rounds, navigating every meaningful turn, knowing every mistake is a weapon in the hands of a competent opponent, only to find the perfect line to close out a game or exploit the key mistake to open it back up, and then win or lose walk away from the table going "Did you -see- that play". If you find a way, keep me posted
As an example of this kind of discussion:
Astral Slide in my cube folds hard to Humans and Fish, so I'm happier to commit to a Slide deck if I've seen a Champion of the Parish wheel. If I think someone might be starting to go into Humans, I'll try to steal some of the good ETB humans out from under them or pass otherwise pickable white or green cards to encourage them to pivot towards White Weenie or RG aggro (both of which fold to Slide). If I've passed two strong Merfolk back to back, I might start evaluating Miscalculation and clones higher than I otherwise would to discourage that deck from coming together, changing the speed and goals of my deck but hopefully shutting down a bad matchup without compromising on Astral Slide control shennanigans. If I passed an early Lightning Rift hoping to wheel it and that didn't work out, I might pick some Cycling cards a little more readily to push the other player back out of a Cycling deck or maybe just cut my losses and switch to like, UW flash (If I already grabbed Resto) or Enchantress (If I have that Enlightened Tutor and the white removal it can grab). Maybe I'm looking at Slide and Life from the Loam and grab the Loam, knowing that I'm more likely to wheel the Slide, there's an Astral Drift and Lightning Rift in the cube as backup anyway, and there is -no way- Loam makes it back to me due to it's sheer versatility.
That's the sort of conversation that would be really cool to have in an "[MCD] Cycling" thread, but is it so specific as to be unusable? I don't think anyone reading that learned anything they'll apply to their cube, and the general principles behind the specifics that are already written about elsehwere are more than sufficient. Again, it feels like taking a 9.5 to a 10, with all the same downsides.
They'd be fun conversations to have and to watch, but I don't know how well they'd actually prompt -conversing- compared to:
"Hey it turns out card has underperformed in my cube"
"No card is the best thing printed since other card"
"But missed clause due to overly wordy text box"
"Oh I misread that, yeah it's bad and cut"
(Not a slight against those conversations, they're enjoyable enough to read and engage in to return time and time again to this forum)
Like, specific example: I have two archetypes in my main cube that have constructed equivalents which play Aether Vial (three if you count "Humans" but I wouldn't).
I will never include Aether Vial in my main cube.
It's certainly powerful enough in those decks. It absolutely would be a useful piece for them. I would love to slam it and relive some of my favourite Vial plays from constructed. On the other hand it's terrible outside them, and terrible off-curve in them. The boost they'd get from its inclusion is incredibly marginal compared to the ability of something like Top or Bonesplitter to help basically any deck in any combination of colours playing in that or an adjacent theatre. It's not first pick, set-the-course-of-the-draft archetype-defining either, which can totally be used to justify the inclusion of narrow cards. As a result, it's not fun to draft. It's not a first pick, because it's not so necessary to any one archetype that by picking it it'd prevent others from drafting it, and it's not versatile enough to make up for that. If someone at the table was already drafting the appropriate deck and they saw a Vial, they'd pass it for a 5/10 roleplayer - No one else would need it so its a safe wheel, and they get to take something more in demand that they also want and still get their Vial. If they saw a Bonesplitter and a solid 5/10 roleplayer though, now there's a choice. What are the colours of their neighbours? Have they passed a lot of Savannah Lions? Are they on leaning towards the 'creature' part of 'disruptive creature deck' or the 'disruptive' part? Maybe they pass it and take the other 'okay' card, and now some midrange deck ends feeling okay about picking it up. Bonesplitter makes a decent inclusion in their deck too, maybe they run it, it smacks face and does something. That's more interesting than Aether Vial which would be either being passed because no one wants it this week, wheeling until the last second before getting picked by the one guy at the table who cares about it, or lamest of all getting a late hate draft and sitting on the sidelines.
If I was playing any of those decks in constructed I'd never include a Bonesplitter. Even the ones that already run equipment. I'm not playing constructed. Does that mean I'm undervaluing Vial (Or CoCo, or whatever), or does that imply a totally different set of criteria on which I'm evaluating cards?
I know I've not answered your main point. Hell I even agree with your point that there's a gap in conveying the precise and delicate interplay of cards in high power deck-building in constructed formats and how that can be applied to cube building/drafting. I'm just trying to highlight the underlying assumptions about the applicability of constructed experience to draft. Sometimes (Port) that knowledge and relevance will port (heh) 1 to 1 due to objective power level and broad utility. Sometimes it won't. I think the forum already does a really good job at filtering card recommendations on that basis already.
I also think that the discussion in cube forums tends towards "Hey where does card rate so I know if I should test it, does it go in this archetype, is it weak, am I missing anything?" - helping people reliably get a 7/10 experience out of their cube so they and their players want to keep going and improving and having fun on their own.
Parts of this sort of conversation seems much more geared towards taking a cube that's already at a 9.5, with a dedicated playgroup that has lots of reps with it and who want to improve their drafting and their play, and taking it to a 10/10. If you're at that point, surely deck techs by professional players would do the job? That's how I learned how to play Astral Slide however many years ago, and there's no way anyone in the cube forum here would have been drawn into that conversation regardless of how many times I cycle an Ash Barrens to flicker my morphed Exalted Angel mid-combat when my opponent has a Lightning Rift and yes I do run all of those cards stop judging me.
That being said, if there was a cube forum for this sort of discussion, this is the place - it's got the veterans and the consistency between cube lists to maximize the relevance of conversations of this sort.
* To expand, Urza being underplayed due to a lack of understanding might be a reason to bring drafters up to speed so everyone's able to have fun with him, or a reason to cut Urza and have fun without him. Both are totally fine. Might even be a reason to shrug and go "Well Pete is just really good at drafting Urza decks, time to sleeve up Gorilla Shaman" or whatever. My reason for not including Urza is that the bucks-to-fun ratio of Urza compared to better Duals was heavily weighted towards the Duals and that's fine too. All of them are relevant considerations when thinking about including Urza in a cube, we just all weigh them differently and therefore come to different conclusions.
I'm sure people will target it with Animate Deads and Necromancies and Recurring Nightmares and it'll be fine if confusing (and probably chumped by 1/1 spirits for days), but I'll be including it for Mass Polymorph and the Manifest -> Astral Slide/Drift deck I support. Both of those are already in blue for me anyway, and both run non-creature permanents that are sweet to copy:
All that and the name even tells you how to use it. Too perfect.
For me.
In my cube.
Dunno about you guys tho, seems pretty meh outside those specific use cases. I'll give it 7/11
I think this can lead to some more interesting decisions than a lot of Flash dudes which always guarantee their effect and therefore have very obvious lines of play, and I can even think of cases in games 2 or 3 where this could be something important to play around in a combo vs control matchup.
On top of that basically all of the aggro decks I support rely on ETB's so I like that it could act as a speedbump that encourages a turn spent casting removal (Through Ward 2 no less) or otherwise discourages mindlessly curving out.
If that ends up being the case I think it will be cool enough to keep, but on the other hand if in practice it's only ever a bad clone with a timing restriction I don't know if the flash blocker alternate mode is enough to keep it around.
Koth is a solid enough top end for red aggro and sick in Wildfire and Big Red, Daretti for welder decks, Big Chandra for Big Red, CToD for Medium Red or Wildfire, Baby Chandra for aristocrats or Izzet spells, Lukka if you want polymorph. If you really want to support aristocrats or Fires, even Zariel is fine.
White walkers on the other hand are samey token making midrange value engines that either buff your dudes or kill theirs, or a Gideon that turns sideways. Or both.
Would love to see a decent white walker that does something else - taxes people or flickers creatures or is anything other than a safe generic "Yeah this'll fit in my Wx midrange deck" pick. I see a Daretti I'm like "Hell yeah Welder is in this cube!". I see an Elspeth or a Gideon and the reaction is more "Oh I guess White is in this cube." I'd love to see a white walker that has that same power as a signpost card or does something in a different design space.
3WW
Whenever an opponent draws a card, put a loyalty counter on each planeswalker you control.
{0}: Until the end of your next turn, only one creature may attack and block each combat.
{-2}: Up to one target creature gains Vigilance end of turn. Up to one target creature doesn't untap during it's controllers next untap step.
{-7}: You get an emblem with "Noncreature, nonland permanents you control have Exalted."
{4}
That all said, would be cool to see a cheap red Walker that replaces the usual 1/1 Devil "When ~ dies deal 1 to any target" with a "Sacrifice ~, discard a card: Draw a card" token.
1RR
Whenever you discard a creature card, you may exile it with a Dementia counter on it.
{+1}: Create a 1/1 black and red Nightmare Horror creature token with "Sacrifice ~, discard a card: Draw a card".
{0}: Discard up to two cards. If you do, draw that many cards.
{-5}: You may cast any number of creature cards with Dementia counters on them from exile without paying their mana costs. They become Nightmare Horrors and gain "Sacrifice this at end of turn"
{3}
Seems like it'd work in a few different shells.
While reworking my cube I'm really feeling the lack of good repeatable discard outlets in red at 1 or 2 cmc.
1R
Creature - Goblin Wizard
Tap: Discard a card, then draw a card.
2/1
Seriously Wizards I'm crying over here
I want a discard outlet in red at 1 or 2 cmc to help out the Madness decks and Reanimator and on paper this seemed okay, but in practice was never even a consideration for those decks.
Even for the slower decks it seemed it was always being picked as a confidence booster - existing to 'confirm' you were drafting medium or big red, or Rx control and then... doesn't make it into the deck. The decks where it did were ones really hurting for playables and it wasn't helping them perform either - Its almost good enough in so many ways, but the versatility didn't make up for how slow it is.
Would rather have a 2 cmc Rummaging Goblin or Putrid Imp than this, and if I need another discard outlet in red I'll include Insolent Neonate or Conspiracy Theorist before this.
That all being said I have my cube's storm archetype built around Sentinel Tower and Aetherflux Reservoir rather than Rituals and Tendrils and my only 'traditional' storm experience is Modern and EDH so I could be way off here.
It really was mostly a matter of picking archetypes that have a lot of cross-pollination, and cards with a lot of interactions. For my cube Madness and Cycling were the core, because I love Basking Rootwalla/Wild Mongrel and Astral Slide. If I'm running cycling cards, cycling creatures are great to pick up with a Living Death, and cycling lands love a Life from the Loam (Plus, cycling duals and tris go great with Eternal Dragon to double dip on those sweet on-cycle triggers). Now I have a reason to run self mill, and a self mill enabler in green... and I'm running Astral Slide, Spirit Cairn and friends. Welp, lets run Commune with the Gods, Kruphix's Insight and Benefaction of Rhonas. Sure, they're weaker cards but they are perfectly acceptable at the pace of my cube. This was basically the mindset, Archetype A leads to B and C, B and C lead to D, E, F, G, etc, etc.
Even stupid stuff can work without skewing the cube too much. Splicers and Precursor Golem like getting flickered with Astral Slide/Drift, Precursor Golem works in some combo shenanigans, Hollow One is there for the madness decks regardless of colour. I was already running Adaptive Automaton and Metallic Mimic because there's a pretty high density of Elves, Zombies, Merfolk, Humans, Spirits and Goblins anyway. Now I've lost a game to a janky Golem tribal deck because they just made a ton of 3/3 tokens, swung in, and flashed in an aggressive Ancient Stone Idol so my wrath wasn't enough to keep me alive the following turn.
Is ancient stone idol a great card? No, but it has killed me in more than one way. Reanimated turn 2 is decent, hitting a 1/1 spirit with a Proteus Staff was cool, but Sylvan Library setting up Erratic Explosion? That's a painful way to lose. Fringe card, four different decks doing different things at different stages of the game, between them using every colour in the cube. To me, that justifies the inclusion.
I don't have a cube built for power, so this advice may not work for you, but hey.
Core cards in my cube are the ones that have the most different ways of caring about them. Fetches are a well known example of this - Land that every deck wants, fixes mana, fills the graveyard, shuffles the deck. Delve cards are happy to see a fetch. Brainstorm loves a fetch. Aggro decks that can't afford to stumble on coloured mana love a fetch. People fight over fetches, and while they are generically good, they also want them for subtly different reasons. Everyone knows this. Ideally, the same would be true of a lot of cards: Good so everyone is trying to pick them, but versatile so that people want them for different decks, and ideally want them for different reasons so the play pattern is different too. Frantic Search, already pointed out in this thread, is another card in my cube that a lot of decks want to play. U/G madness wants it, Reanimator wants it, my weird artifact based Storm archetype wants it, the enchantress ramp deck wants it, even mono-U aggro or Bant Flash will take it as a playable. These cards obviously aren't great examples because they're incredibly strong and known to be, but there are weaker examples too. Blade Splicer will happily sit in a G/W human tribal deck one week, join Porcelain Legionnaire in artifact aggro the week after, and then provide a very blinkable body alongside Resto the week after that. An archetype defining card like Living Death becomes more in demand the more ways there are to fill your graveyard or empty your opponents, or (In the case of my slower cube) just be a 5 mana wrath, instead of being just for 'The living death deck'. Are the Triomes going to mana fix for some greedy 5c control monstrosity, are they going to let Astral Slide pop off with the various land-cyclers, or will they be brought back with Loam for extra (inefficient) card draw? Are they going to do all three in the one deck? Doing this across the whole cube did require dropping the power level by a lot and had the side effect of increasing the complexity by a lot, as not only do individual cards have more interactions you have to care about but also tend towards having more text. I personally have found the trade off worth it, as it's meant curating a 360 cube rather than going up to a larger cube size and only using part of it to get that same variance between drafts (Which for me also reduces feel-bads). We know what's in the cube week to week, we can rely on seeing the cards we're drafting towards. No starting a draft only to find you never had a shot at the combo piece that wasn't in the pool this week, it just got drafted by someone else for a totally different reason.
I know my experiences won't cleanly translate to everyone, so I figured I'd focus on the facet that I care most about and feel will have the most relevance, something I have dubbed Buffalo Cards.
In the same way we are told that native Americans used 'every part of the buffalo', so too can we use 'every part of the card'. The ideal Buffalo card is one where every part of its text leads is relevant or meaningful, or leads to neat interactions, decisions or discoveries. Ideally, this is also a diverse set of interactions that are relevant at different stages of the game so as to increase how attractive it is to each player during the draft. Is every Buffalo card good in every deck? Hell, is every Buffalo card "powerful"? No, but that's not the goal. The goal is to reduce the linearity of drafts and encourage players to fight over cards so the draft portion of your night is as interesting and interactive as the games. Ideally this will also be making the games themselves more interesting and interactive as well, by increasing the number of decisions made, the options available for those decisions, and allowing for new discoveries or "Aha!" moments. In order for this to happen the cards do have to be good enough to consider playing for power level reasons alone, but as cube power levels vary wildly I'm not going to consider that axis when listing examples later on.
Let's have a look at the text box of a generic fetchland and see just how much room there is for interaction.
Land.
(T), Sacrifice [CARDNAME]: Search your library
for a (land that meets condition), put it onto
the battlefield, then shuffle your library.
Ignoring the super obvious ("They fix your mana!"), there are a lot of potent effects taking place at a very competitive cost here, all at instant speed. You likely know all of this already, but for those who want or need it I'll deploy the ugly nested spoiler.
Sacrifice {CARDNAME}
Search your library
for a (land that meets condition)
put it onto the battlefield,
then shuffle your library.
From a power standpoint, you get all of this at the very very competitive cost of
- A draft pick
- Including a land in your deck, and
- Playing that land.
I don't know if you've noticed this, but these are all things that players have to do anyway. This obviously adds to the appeal, as for cards to be considered on the basis of versatility they need to reach the minimum standards of playability (for your cube).Modal spells all have to be Buffalo right? They do all sorts of things!
Well, Chaos Charm may do three things, but I doubt you care all that much about any of its modes in any given board state - after all how often do you /need/ to destroy target Wall? Honestly, Forked Bolt is a better modal spell than Chaos Charm. It can kill a bird, it can kill a bear, it can push damage, it can be a 2-for-1 in control decks and a burn spell in aggro ones.
Does that make Forked Bolt a Buffalo then? Well, not for those reasons - that's just a versatile card. All of that versatility and possibility space comes from one line of text. Doesn't mean it can't -be- a Buffalo though, as it's pretty contingent on the design space your cube occupies - if you have a "Spells Matter" deck, or a "Bloodthirst" deck, or a "CMC = 1 Matters" deck or whatever, you now have more parts of Forked Bolt to care about, more ways for it to do things - a Buffalo. If you don't, it's 'just' a very solid spell.
What are the main traits we care about here? Well, pretty much anything, as long as you consistently pay attention to the same characteristics and provide payoffs for them. Most commonly I care about the following:
(Super and Sub)Types
Zones it interacts with
Other permanents or effects it interacts with
Characteristics of other permanents or effects it interacts with
Lets take a card at random from Gatherer to see if it has the potential to be a Buffalo.
Types -
Creature: Pretty good, they do things I hear.
Homunculus: Oh well, we can't have everything.
Effects -
1U, Tap: Well, we aren't getting the effect cheaply, nor are we getting it straight away, but these are concerns for power level reasons than the breadth of possibility space. Maybe you care about the creature tapping - Umbral Mantle exists I guess?
Create a 2/2 blue Homunculus creature token: Ooh, we get a creature, and it's a bear! This is good.
Then sacrifice a creature: Even better! This fills the graveyard, triggers Morbid and Revolt, etc.
At the end of this exercise, we have a card with a universally relevant type, that makes something with a universally relevant type, that does things for two zones (the battlefield and the graveyard), interacts with itself in interesting ways (1/2 that can block and leave behind a 2/2? Even better, as long as you keep it around it gives you a free block every turn by sacrificing a chump and making a new one for next turn!) and has the potential to interact with other cards that care about the same zones or are triggered by it's ability. Seems like a Buffalo to me, at least in the context of Innistrad limited with its Morbid effects and its Gnaw to the Bones.
Should you jam it in your cube? That depends on whether you care about what it does and the costs at which it does them, which is why you need to be able to recognise Buffalo for yourself. If you're running Homunculus Tribal (in a cube where that's powerful enough to be an archetype), this is probably pretty far up there on your list of "cards with relevant interactions". On the other hand, if this card is competing with Thing in the Ice backed up by Snap and Snappy in a blue section stocked with instant and sorcery enablers and payoffs it's probably not going to pull its weight, as even irrespective of power level concerns it's just not doing anything in the same space as your other effects in blue.
Some examples of Buffalo from my cube:
1WW for a 2/2 lifelinking flier is okay at my cube's power level, certainly not embarrassing. It goes in both aggressive and defensive Enchantress builds thanks to the evasion and lifelink, while also pumping/triggering key effects. Its tutorable and recurrable in mono-W too, which is a nice benefit. It's also super sweet in decks that want to cheat things into play. It adds to the 'creature density' of a polymorph deck without adding a creature card so you can hit your fatties more reliably in the same way some token makers do. If you have any topdeck manipulation or tutoring, any flicker effect will cheat things into play that way too. Then we get to the super fringe - if the 2/2 dies, that's two cards in the yard for the price of one. Efficient? No. Relevant? Well, yeah actually. Delve is a hungry beast, so is Grim Lavamancer. An evasive creature that heals you is relevant in both control and aggro, as mentioned, so it's not unusual to see this paired with one of the above. The only part of that textbox I don't have a use for is the fact that the Manifest is colourless, but there are cards out that that could care about this if that's a route someone wanted to take.
I like this guy a lot. Okay, as a creature he's not great, but he's an option and there will be boards where you just need a decent body. He cycles, which has a whole host of interactions in my list - I run a fair few "whenever a player cycles/discards a card" effects. He puts himself in the 'yard, for the things that care about that - Living Death, Nemesis of Mortals, whatever. Here's where it gets less relevant to most people: He's 7 mana. I run a suite of cards that care about high CMC, but you can't just jam exclusively 7-11 mana spells and hope you don't die. A 7 mana "hit" for Combustible Gearhulk that also performs double-duty as an uncounterable cantrip that helps you -cast- those expensive spells should you need to is exactly what that deck needs - so much so that I also run Shefet Monitor and Elvish Aberration.
I was going to do a whole write-up on these, but there's nothing I wanted to say that hadn't already been said over in the "Comprehensive List of Cube Archetypes" Multi-Archetype All Stars section. For the two whole people who haven't checked that thread out, give it a read.
Limitations of Buffalo
There are some limitations to this approach, and I've run headlong into all of them in my ever-ongoing attempts to further tune my 360. The three major ones that have come up time and time again are:
Any increase in the amount or complexity of decisions in your game demands an increase in attentiveness, which isn't ideal for all players. I have had drafts where a player or players were tired, and the complexity of a draft where so many cards interact in so many ways with so many other cards was just too much for them. In iterations of the cube where I've had obvious and linear draft strategies present ("Humans" or "Gx Midrange") this hasn't been a problem, those players have opted-out of that level of attentiveness and still been involved in a draft where they have a stake and a decent deck at the end. In iterations where I'd gone overboard on complexity (or the draft hadn't aligned), and those linear strategies were either non-obvious or not present. If your cube drafts go long or late, there's also the possibility of previously attentive and engaged players to become less so should they reach a critical mass of complexity in their deck or gameplan. Anecdotally, this is solved by having clearly signposted linear strategies available, and seems to decrease as familiarity with Magic or the specifics of the cube increases - once players have a rote awareness of cards and aren't actively reading them every time they see them, this decreases. Having a "draft strategies", "list of archetypes" or "common combos" sheet may help, I've certainly tried the 'list of archetypes' before.
Once the complexity of a decision reaches a certain threshold, either because of the range of options available or the potential for unforeseen consequences, some players will deem it "too complicated" and opt out of making a decision at all. This seems to come from a fear of making the wrong decision. Decision paralysis may manifest in refusing to play a card until well after it was relevant, or in refusing to draft a card that has too many possible uses. In my experience it's always a negative for the player in question, leads to a bad feeling associated with drafting or cubing and should always be avoided. This one I don't have advice on. I've had a player relatively new to Magic draft my cube and just cast "Living Death" as a "Weird board wipe" that's gotten them there, and I've had an experienced drafter stare at the comparatively simple "Life from the Loam" and then just give up and pass it despite being in a green self mill deck that featured cycling lands. People are odd. Again, rote awareness seems to help.
The more complex the cube, the more unforeseen interactions that may arise, and the more room for those interactions, once discovered, to be oppressive. You may even be -aware- of an interaction and underrate its strength - this has happened to me more than once, sometimes bringing a niche interaction up to the standard of 'actual archetype", sometimes pushing something from 'not a deck' to 'how do I beat this?'. Unless something has gotten really wacky, just run broad enough answers. Answers don't have to be Buffalo. In fact, they probably shouldn't be. Sure, I run Ichor Slick and Complicate because they do cool things in the right deck. I also run Malicious Affliction and Counterspell because they do the job. They aren't oppressively powerful and mechanically dull cards, they're just simple and effective ways of dealing with things.
Well, that's about it for this nascent theory of mine. It's been a useful way to think about cards for me, and a way of breaking out of linear archetypes in my cube, and as such I wanted to share. Even if you don't take this approach (And I don't expect people to), I hope that it sparks new thought about card analysis on a different axis - ambitious, admittedly.
Thanks for reading
Yet, cubes that are designed around power level exist and are fun to draft. Their designers and curators have made /concessions/ on power level to show off power level; by including enough Savannah Lions they make Armageddon and Ravages of War both back-breaking and game ending; by including token makers they allow Opposition to be oppressive; in running second-string discard outlets they make turn 2 Griselbrand a real possibility. Even on a more fundamental level, just having a hard number of cards per colour is a restriction that prevents the inclusion of just "the best" 360 cards - after all what are the odds that, of "the best" 360, exactly 60 or so are Blue? So then, those who design around power make concessions for a playable draft environment.
I say that designing from the perspective of maximising power level is too harsh a limitation - if you have powerful feeling magic by excluding a subset "the most powerful cards", why can't you have powerful feeling magic regardless of that constraint at all? Why not build from the perspective of "What is the most interesting draft environment for my players", with the power level concern not being "how do I turn it up to 11" but instead "How do I level the playing field for as many decks as I can meaningfully support?", bringing power down not to show off how frustrating Jitte is in creature-based matchups, but instead to allow as many different decks and games as possible in your tiny box of wizard cards.
TBC
TBC
EDIT: My tags went all wonky, the post got very ugly, and I couldn't get the floats, links and boxes to work the way they were in the preview. Resorted to spoilers (And nested spoilers), hope it still reads well enough.
If you're doing this, ask yourself why it matters that you're doing it. My example would be Squadron Hawk in standard caw-blade, and why that card was worth including in the deck - it was a decent impression of an actual recursive threat, sure, but it also let you turn Jace's Brainstorm into an Ancestral Recall and carried equipment like a champ. If you're jamming Renowned Weaponsmith and associates because the act of tutoring those two cards opens up interesting interactions and new possibility space, while also being of an appropriate power level for the rest of your cube, awesome, that's ideal. If you're jamming the Renowned Weaponsmith and his squad because 'it'll be cool I promise", it probably won't be.
That said, MTGSalvation seems to have a pretty strong lean towards the power-level cube, where "but is it -strong-" is the most relevant criteria for inclusion, so I don't want to hate on the idea of a power level list here.
OTOH, if you want a list of "top 20 white cards that fit in a bunch of decks", or "top 20 white cards that lead to interactive games" or "top 20 white cards that make for meaningful decisions during the draft", now I'm happy to vote as my experiences are relevant to that. To have a list of straight power is only considering one axis of cube design, an axis that is being edged out as cube is getting more popular and people are wanting to do their own thing. From my own experiences, the 10-cards list of multi archetype all-stars and the descriptions of cards within was -way- more influential to my cube and how I consider cards for inclusion than every single one of the power rankings lists on this forum, and that post and approach to archetype-based design seems to have been abandoned in discussions here.
Still, just one voice, and there are room for many. For what it's worth, I agree with hoodwink and wtwlf on colour identity even if my own cube has Lingering Souls as a white card (forgive me)