Are there enough cards that care about high-CMC effects to make it a workable archetype?
Other sub-archetypes like the spells matters deck only require you to cast spells in order to make them good. So the opportunity cost to attempt to break Monastery Mentor is really low. Cards that work on the high-CMC angle require that you saturate your deck with lots of expensive cards, which really changes the way the deck plays, and can be particularly punishing when the enablers are dealt with. I can imagine this archetype suffering a bit because of that dynamic.
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wtwlf123 posted a message on CMC Matters BurnPosted in: Cube Card and Archetype Discussion - To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
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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.
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Swans of Bryn Argoll is a... 'respectable' finisher for a white deck, a fun blocker if you support mill, but most importantly part of a couple of sweet wins if you're in Izzet, Boros or Jeskai- think Pyroclasm/Earthquake effects or my favourite; Chain of Plasma. It's been maindecked a -lot- in my cube, over cards like Meloku, Exalted Angel, Karmic Guide and once even a Restoration Angel (Though that was a mistake rectified after round one).
The other is Evershrike. It's a -lot- worse on its own and you absolutely need a density of playable auras to use it. As I run Enchantress as a control deck across Abzan, with a self-mill approach (Commune with the Gods, Kruphix's Insight, Benefaction of Rhonas), Evershrike is a really nice recursive threat. It gets nasty with a Rancor, Fallen Ideal, Spirit Loop, Glistening Oil - any of the auras that have recursion themselves.
These are definitely not for every cube, but they do what I want my gold and hybrid cards to do: Signpost that something interesting can happen in this colour combination. Having someone see a Swans in a pack and watching them start to imagine why they might want to pick it is really cool.
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The cheaper cards like Vial Smasher and Sin Prodder were snapped up by a RG deck which did in fact use them with the Wurms to great effect, but the Gearhulk and Undying Flames did a lot of work in a RUG combo deck built with them in mind.
Scroll Rack set up Undying Flames off the top with a Melek in play, a Double Stroke naming the Flames was revealed and the RUG player sat back to watch the rest of the game as he cast three Undying Flames a turn. Sadly, they died shortly after to the aforementioned aggro deck, and the game was won a turn later by a UB control deck dropping and repeatedly activating Demon of Dark Schemes, the resulting triggers and responses taking out two players and the combat step removing the third. Meanwhile, a Resto-Kiki combo deck sat and durdled, getting nowhere all game, and the GW token/enchantress deck had only just gotten back into a decent position before the Demon dropped and wiped their (and the Resto-Kiki players) board.
All in all, the RUG deck did a solid job and came together like a smooth engine, with cards like Sage of Epityr, Courser of Kruphix and Vizier of the Menagerie clearing the way for Melek, Rashmi and the CMC matters stuff to have their maximum impact. Roar of the Wurm flashback'd on turn 4 with a Rashmi and Scroll Rack in play was dirty.
Still, not sure how much I can recommend it. It required a lot of incidental support in multiple colours, and I don't run a powered cube so there's obviously a very real power level concern. Personally I think the effort was worth it as it felt fresh and caused a far few cool moments, and RG and UG decks don't seem to have suffered from the addition.
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Sin Prodder
Explosive Revelation
Heretic's Punishment
Kaboom!
Riddle of Lightning
Combustible Gearhulk
Sorin, Grim Nemesis
Undying Flames
Pyromancy
Blast of Genius
Bosh, Iron Golem (More like a Fling for Artifacts)
Most care about what's on top of your deck, so that seemed like a good place to start messing about (Plus, I already have a "top of deck matters" thing going on in UG). Some of them are even playable on their own, like Sin Prodder and... Okay, just Sin Prodder.
I was kinda hoping that there would be ways to lower that opportunity cost while still keeping the deck 'playable'. Split cards, Delve cards, stuff with alternate costs or cost reduction effects, all of them being independently playable while also being decent ammo for throwing at faces.
I'm not thinking about running a Draco just for that sweet 16 damage Kaboom!, but a Blasphemous Act or a Turn // Burn can be a roleplayer in the deck while also doing respectable damage off a Gearhulk (It is in fact, Blast of Genius pitching Blasphemous Acts, Temporal Masteries and Turn // Burns back in Inn/RTR standard that first got me thinking about this in other formats.)
I think there are few ways to 'cheat' high CMC cards into a cube without ruining it, and I have plenty of topdeck manipulation already available, but I don't know if there's a way to have the proportions be right without the deck turning into a clunky mess (Just wait 'til I have my Scroll Rack and my Brainstorm on a stick and my Heretic's Punishment and a Blasphemous Act and Dead Drop!)
Now you mention it, you're entirely right about the archetype really suffering if it's enablers are blanked and the more I think about that the more I realize how difficult that is to overcome. Sin Prodder and Gearhulk, the most playable of the bunch, are a: vulnerable creatures and b: give the choice to your opponent, so they're very unlikely to get the win on their own, and the rest are parasitic and/or bad even in a deck built to use them.
It's difficult to fit redundancy in while keeping the parasitic payoff cards out, and I don't want to warp my red section too much - One 'Build Around' Erratic Explosion is fine, but I don't want to run all the explosions -and- Riddle of Lightning in 360. The archetype might need access to repeatable cards like Heretic's Punishment to have any shot at working, and that means drafting and drawing a specific card - I don't mind running Astral Slide, because I also have Drake Haven, Archfiend of Ifnir and Spirit Cairn as 'backup' payoff cards, all of which also go well with the madness/discard stuff I've got in the cube as well as the cycling, but all the decent payoff effects for this are in Red and only work for this deck. Shame these guys can't go face.
I've found room in the cube for the more aggressive cards in this vein, and am just waiting for a shot to test it out. There are nowhere near as many of them, but at least they all naturally slide into aggro decks so some will probably see play.