I've been thinking the same and I've been considering it since seeing the first Double 2 spoilers.
On second thought though I'm kind of still not convinced the payoffa are enough. We have Ainok Bond-kin as well as the two green guys that give Trample, But in order for the archetype to really go off I'd love to see the Flying or Lifelink maker at common. It's not hard to find playable enablers, there is enough stuff that puts +1/+1 counters on stuff after all, but if there's no major payoff you don't get the rewards you're looking for.
I just like clear lines. If I start excluding Monarch and Initiative because they're 'clearly not made for 1v1 Limited' then where do I draw the line to other cards. Will of the Council was also clearly made for multiplayer and Custodi Squire is only as good as it is because its ability balances itself in multiplayer. Arms of Hadar is also clearly meant to be just another take of Eyeblight Massacre for a format where it's unclear which of the two is actually better. And this especially applies to the Thriving lands and new Gates.
They were put into Jumpstart because in that format you literally shuffle together two boosters and if you draw bad mana you die without casting a spell. And they were put into Baldur's Gate because EDH players have very little tolerance for mana screw and for having to do work for your mana to function. We won't see that effect at common in a regular 1v1 limited set... probably ever. We haven't even seen that power level at uncommon. They're easily better than the tri-lands and any other uncommon dual.
So again, where do I draw a clear and easily understandable line? Currently I'd rather keep it clean and just ban the sets rather than making complex and arbitraty bans, but who knows, maybe my take on it will change once I start missing Custodi and the lands too much.
I'm surprised Arms of Hadar isn't getting more attention. Like everyone else I imagine I haven't had the chance to play with a one-sided Infest in Limited yet but in theory I'd be hard-pressed trying to find another black card that is as good as this one in Cube.
I played with the Monarch cards recently but with Initiative being added to those types of effects now I decided to pull the trigger and exclude all sets from my cube that were designed for non-standard Limited play, which is mostly multiplayer draft formats such as Commander Legends. In turn I've created a 30 card expansion to my cube that has Monarch, Initiative, the 5 new gates and the strong board wipes in black and red among other things from those sets which we can shuffle in and add whenever we feel like it. I never did any sort of power-related bans before and I wouldn't consider this decision a ban per se, but the play patterns of Monarch have been met with enough negative feedback from my playgroup that I'm willing to take it out alongside Initiative and any such future ability they might come up with.
That said, I think I like Initiative more than Monarch because it actually advances the board state instead of just creating CA.
Apart from that I like a lot of the Adventure cards from this set. In ELD Ardenvale Tactician seemed like the only one that was at least borderline cubeable but this time around they created some decent Adventure effects paired with serviceable bodies for later. I think I could find a cubeable one for each color in the set.
The two black 2-drops are decent. Dire Mimic is interesting as a colorless 5 mana 5/5 Flash blocker on the front end, not too shabby. Greatsword of Tyr is a little hard to evaluate but seems very potentially powerful.
Overall an insanely powerful set. Not a bad time for me to start excluding those kinds of sets from my core cube, as I think 32 cards that are at least borderline playable are a bit much for one set. Normally there are around up to 10ish cards I get in foil for any new set that comes out and my current buylist for this set is at 32 cards...
Bit late to the discussion, but ramp is generally very weak in Pauper due to the lack of classic payoffs, which are cards that affect the board in a massive way and gve you an insurmountable advantage. If you look at other formats such as regular cube or constructed those payoffs are never just big creatures, they are usually planeswalkers or powerful non-creature spells with the exceprion of green which gets some creatures that have enough abilities printed on them to make it worth ramping into them.
In Pauper we get close to zero expensive cards that are worth giving up card advantage early in the game (by playing less spells in your deck and by drawing expensive stuff before you can cast it) to ramp them out ahead of time. The only real payoffs we have are the buyback spells, the few Hexproof creatures and maybe a few more.
That said, I think the big dude cyclers are a pretty decent ramp payoff as well, simply because they're never dead in the early game. I still play one in each color and 2 or 3 in green. In a topdeck war those creatures will most likely win you the game and you stil get value from them early on.
tl;dr: We're a format where Signets and mana Elves can go last pick sometimes, I don't think this is a format where Lumberjack is great. It's funny how context-dependent ramp is considering the aforementioned cards are first-pickable in vintage cube. At the same time we first pick stuff that would never even make vintage cube to begin with,
The guildgates are already fine cards and the ravnica karoos are effectively that +1 land in your hand. For any borderline playable spell in cube people would realize how incredible they would become if you added 'draw a land from your deck' to their text box, but for some reason people keep missing the fact that the karoos do exactly that and they think they're less great than they are.
Those kinds of cards are where you'll see the difference between a fine limited player and a great one. The latter will not only pick them highly but also put them in the deck when they're only half on color, as Humphrey said. That is with the exception of super aggressive decks with tons of 1 and 2 drop creatures, but that should go without saying.
That blue removal spell that makes you monarch is completely busted by the way. By far and large the best effect the monarch mechanic has been stapled onto so far at common. As some have indicated, you play this on your opponent's only creature and it's basically game. Murder plus draw 2 every turn for the rest of the game and the only way to break it up is easy to play around unless your opponent is on Tokens or a bunch of Flash creatures. It may be 2nd overall pick in blue and likely top5-10 in the entire format.
Just imagine what exactly needs to happen for you to still win the game if your opponent drops this on 3 on the play targeting your 2-drop and only creature in play.
Also, I just assumed it could only enchant your opponent's creatures because of how stupid it is that it gets around its own drawback when you target your own. Turns out you just drop this on your own 2-drop if your opponent didn't play one. How exactly do you not win the game if you cast this on 3? It's a common Palace Jailer. Better than that, actually. I'll take 2U over a 2/2 for 2WW I think.
That's just a different topic you're scratching there, namely that mana ramp is heavily nerfed in Pauper in general because we don't get the same benefits from skipping a CMC slot on the way up our curve as rares do. This is why Signets are top 3 picks in rare cubes and very mediocre cards in Pauper unless you hit both of their colors and actively want them for fixing. This is why I could never understand how some people soft-ban the Signets from their Pauper/Peasant cubes. It's like banning Brainstorm in Pauper because of how good it is in Legacy.
Any ramp card you include in your deck is card disadvantage, because you generally follow the rule that you can cut one land for each two ramp cards you play, but you can't 1-for-1 them. This means that a deck with 4 ramp cards will have 2 less spells to draw mid to late game, putting you at a drastic disadvantage in a format where 1-for-1ing on the board is very efficient and CA is very hard to come by. In an environment with rares it's comically easy to make up for that lost CA by playing 4+ or even 3 drops (mostly pws, quite frankly) ahead of curve which immediately threaten an X-for-1 on the board. In Pauper we just don't get those. If I'm ever cutting the Signets it's because they're actually not good enough any more.
I'm not too scared of red aggro stomping everything right now. That deck will always suffer from the fact that it can't be on the play all the time, and how devastating it is to draw suboptimal openers that don't hit pressure into pressure into pressure on the first few turns. It's a high risk-high reward strategy that kind of balances itself. Reminds me a lot of Chalice decks in Legacy. Seemingly 80% of the decks in Legacy will state that they're scared of Chalice decks the most, yet Chalice decks don't hit an over 50% win rate overall and they don't win any majors. They beat themselves on opening hands, losing die rolls and drawing dysfunctional draws enough to balance out their draws that are nigh unbeatable on the play.
Frankly, I don't think I've put quite as much thought into the creature stats and how exactly 1 drops should be matching up against 2-drops, and those against 3-drops and so on.
I do know and consider the basics and most of the decisions around statlines revolves around the rule that an offensive creature usually wants an extra point of power to be able to trade up in the curve while a defensive creature usually wants an extra point of toughness to live against anything that costs the same or less. Offensive creatures kinda have to trade up on mana because of summoning sickness. This is why for a Haste creature it's generally fine to trade with anything equally costed while it should eat anything lower costed if possible.
In that sense I suppose you're right in that 2-drops always had the ability to trade with at least a decent amount of 3-drops. They don't really trade with any 4-drops though, at least if you keep it fair and consider only creatures whose main function is to be as big as possible. Any creature that costs 4 and has only 3 toughness nowadays has some other selling point, such as abilities. There are more than enough options across all colors at CC4 if your goal is to eat all available 2-drops in combat.
I think nowadays the standard statlines are:
1/1 for 1
2/2 for 2
3/2 or 2/3 for 3
4/3 or 3/4 for 4
And this is a pretty elegant way to do it considering this always creates creatures that are able to trade up on mana, but often trade down on mana as well, and there are those that never trade down, but they don't trade up either. And this is where the concepts of offense and defense are created.
Also, in general it's heavily meta-dependent what stats you're looking for on a given creature. There are formats where a 2/3 for 3 is a huge deal because there's lots of 2/2s for 2 and 3 mana, and there's formats where a 2/3 for 3 sucks because there's 3/1s for 2 and 3/3s or bigger on 4.
when it comes to goodstuff and easy drafts, I think thats part of an upside, because it allows unexperienced drafters to join the fun and not lose completely.
if you want a more challenging environment, my approach kinda is to spread powerlevel between tempo and value. Value ususally loses to tempo, thats why my "Spike" cube heavily focus on that, but its kinda easy to misbuild a deck still. For example Daze is horrible in controldecks. Even if a card is awesome in a vaccuum it can be bad in a certain deck. Like I said once, even Hymn to Tourach is kinda bad in certain shells, because it doesnt affect the board and costs BB. Its often also a value card that loses to tempo. And if you dont play "mediocre" cards like Wall of Runes you will get steamrolled by sligh..
Archetypes are best supported crosscolor/crossarchetype. Like tokens can be W/R or x/G and it interacts well with the sac cards. That allows players to build different decks within the same themes. Lastly I also already mentioned that you dont need to go all-in on the archetypes. Small synergies between 2 cards is often still a strong play and since I (we?) draft the whole cube its guaranteed to come around unless another drafter goes for it.
Goodstuff cubes are definitely easier for beginners, that's true. Part of my ambition to keep goodstuff non-archetype decks viable at all times is exactly that reason. Though I think it also doesn't hurt if a more experienced player's deck will be just that little bit stronger on average. A 60/40 matchup is still nowhere near unwinnable from a beginner's perspective and an experienced player will see more of a reward for being experienced. Again, a matter of balancing which is always very difficult and impossible to do perfectly. I don't want drafting to be meaningless because everything is equally good individually, but I also don't want people drafting preconstructed decks all the time putting beginners at a disadvantage because they don't know those decks in advance.
It's also true that it's desirable to support archetypes across different colors, though I think you shouldn't force yourself to do that if you either have to go too deep on redundancy to make it viable in a third color or of you have to cut too deep into a color's other archetypes to enable it. An example would be tokens, which can be supported in green as well, at least on paper. Though you quickly realize that the green token producers are significantly weaker than red's and white's and green also doesn't have a playable mass pump effect, so I found myself having to cut too deep into green's actual strengths in order to make it viable.
I like your last point about not only supporting archetypes, but also synergies between small subsets of cards. That's an approach I've also been taking with recent updates where I tried to make drafting more interesting by adding more high risk-high reward cards that still have a similar average power level as the other 'goodstuff' cards. Those are usually cards that I had previously cut, sometimes a long time ago, because on average they just weren't quite as strong as something else, but now I reincluded them because they have a much higher ceiling and aren't that far off on average either, which doesn't only reward good synergy awareness in drafting but also makes it possible for less experienced players to get those out-of-the-blue victories and those well-it-was-pretty-busted-this-game moments neither they or their opponents saw coming. Examples are the ping+deathtouch synergies, which is actually an idea I took from your cube, but also things like Sigil of Sleep, Leonin Bola (pseodo-Opposition in Tokens), Ghostly Flicker, Breath of Life + cycling fatties, Spikeshot Goblin, etc.
Let's be honest, it's already easy enough to get 23 playables in Pauper Cube drafts, it really doesn't hurt to have some narrower cards go late sometimes if they are super busted at other times.
This is definitely an interesting topic. I feel like we've kind of been discussing the archetype topic for years and there's never been a definitive way to do it.
If you don't include them at all and go vacuum power level only, you greatly reduce the skill factor in deck construction. You literally can't go wrong just picking two colors early and sticking with them throughout, and chances are your deck won't be much better or worse than anyone else's and games are going to come down to draw luck more than matchups and decision making.
If you support them too heavily you create a boring environment too, because you'll get the same decks every draft. Just like many of the past sets that had a heavy tribal or other archetype support got old pretty quickly.
I think the beauty lies in getting the best of both worlds and trying to support archetypes, but not support them so heavily that goodstuff decks can't compete with them at all. For me this means that I'll still include the most powerful cards for the archetypes, but I'll cut down on their depth making it harder to get a critical mass of enablers, especially with 'goodtuff' decks potentially fighting over the best payoffs like Armadillo Cloak, Battle Screech or whatever.
I'm pretty happy with this approach though I'd never claim that I've found the ultimate perfect balance. But I'm happier now than I was both when I didn't support archetypes at all and when I supported them too much. Honestly, most of the viable archetypes can be supported to the point where they become too powerful for goodstuff decks. Auras is at the top of the list, obviously. RW Tokens routinely attacks for 20ish on turn 5 with a perfect curve too (Raise the Alarm into Hordeling Outburst into Beetleback into +2 power mass pump is 25 points of power spread across 8 bodies...). The self-mill deck casts the Delve spells on turn 3. You can make all archetypes so powerful that none of them is op any more, but then you create the format I mentioned above where you're basically fighting over preconstructed decks in an 8-man draft.
I think a good rule of thumb is: If a well-built midrange/control deck with a high card power level but without any major archetype synergies can still beat the average archetype deck, you're probably in a good spot. If the archetype comes together perfectly and/or you draw your synergistic cards in the right combinations you should win. But if that isn't the case you should lose. This, in theory, creates a format where archetypes are perfectly balanced because they merely provide a higher-risk/higher-reward approach that people can take when they want (and/or are given the chance).
You have to remember: The more redundant archetype enablers/payoffs you include, the more universally and individually powerful cards you're cutting for them. You have to be mindful not to create a format where even below average archetype decks beat the goodstuff decks because the latter had to fill up their 23 with leftover archetype stuff they got late. If the Aura deck gets Empyrial Armor on a Ledgewalker and clocks you for 6 a turn by turn 3 you should lose as a non-archetype deck. But you shouldn't lose to a Gladecover Scout with Spectral Flight on it because you got nothing but Raise the Alarm, Jackal Pup and Threaten effects to defend with, if you know what I mean. Give them a Crocanura and they're fine. Or give them a Brazen Wolves and they'll race you. That kind of thing.
Reach and Cultivate are CA while Harrow is not, though. They're both much better in formats that actively want to ramp and never miss land drops, such as EDH, but they're still good in slower decks.
I think the comparison to Conscripts/Cohort is apt, though I think I like red Lynx better. Those 2 powered one drops are all about turns 2 and 3. After that they get invalidated most of the time anyway, so getting the most damage through until then is crucial. Even in a super low-to-the-ground aggro deck with 15 lands I think you'll still be about as likely to hit your land drops turn 2 and 3 as casting creatures on those two turns. You need 15 creatures for 1 or 2 mana in your deck to have the same odds, and while that's possible they also force you to play your stuff out of order sometimes just to make them attack, such as dropping a creature turn 3 instead of using a removal spell on a blocker which would be more beneficial. Red Lynx only requires the land drop and has the extra toughness on top of that, which is a massive advantage during turns where 2/1 and 2/2 are the baseline p/t.
Think the best card in the set so far is the red Steppe Lynx. For people who don't support 1-drop aggro heavily I guess it's not worth, but it is a functional reprint of a borderline playable white card, and whenever red gets to keep up with white's p/t ratios you kinda have to take notice.
No denying it's a terrible topdeck and all, but it can be expected to attack for 4-6 throughout the first 4 turns of any game in which it'd played on turn 1. Don't think it gets much better than that for red aggro. Even in a 15 land deck you'll make 2-3 more land drops more often than not. You probably don't get to trigger extra Landfalls too often in red aggro, because all the cards that do that are often too much of a tempo bump. At least ever since Harrow doesn't see play any more. That card was gas with Landfall triggers... It's one of those cards I always wanted to put back in my cube, trying to convince myself that the tempo advantage and deck thinning might be better than Cultivate often enough...
Hello power creep... For a long time it's been an interesting decision which of the green value 3 drops was the best out of Civic Wayfinder, Borderland Ranger, Tishana's Wayfinder, etc. But BOOM! F.I.R.E. has you covered with that new one that trumps all of them by a mile. Except this one also trumps pretty much all existing 3 drops across all colors. Exciting stuff.
I've been trying to make red aggro stronger, in particular I also want to make mono red more viable, and I was revising my one-drop section. We all know red's struggling to find good ways to attack for 2 on turn two, and to have a critical mass I think it's necessary to go as far as to play either Mogg Conscripts / Goblin Cohort or Bloodlust Inciter / Goblin Motivator.
advantages Conscripts/Cohort:
- better overall attacks if the freshly cast creature is worse than 2/2 vanilla
- not reliant on the freshly cast creature resolving
- 2/2 blocker instead of a 1/1
- better if the freshly cast creature already has Haste
advantages Inciter/Motivator:
- better overall attacks if the freshly cast creature is better than 2/2 vanilla
- works with tokens created by non-creature spells
- can still attack as a 1/1 if no creature was cast that turn
So which are better overall? Personally I think the latter two's advantages outweigh the former's, but I'm not sure because most of the time they're extremely similar in how they play out...
On second thought though I'm kind of still not convinced the payoffa are enough. We have Ainok Bond-kin as well as the two green guys that give Trample, But in order for the archetype to really go off I'd love to see the Flying or Lifelink maker at common. It's not hard to find playable enablers, there is enough stuff that puts +1/+1 counters on stuff after all, but if there's no major payoff you don't get the rewards you're looking for.
They were put into Jumpstart because in that format you literally shuffle together two boosters and if you draw bad mana you die without casting a spell. And they were put into Baldur's Gate because EDH players have very little tolerance for mana screw and for having to do work for your mana to function. We won't see that effect at common in a regular 1v1 limited set... probably ever. We haven't even seen that power level at uncommon. They're easily better than the tri-lands and any other uncommon dual.
So again, where do I draw a clear and easily understandable line? Currently I'd rather keep it clean and just ban the sets rather than making complex and arbitraty bans, but who knows, maybe my take on it will change once I start missing Custodi and the lands too much.
I'm surprised Arms of Hadar isn't getting more attention. Like everyone else I imagine I haven't had the chance to play with a one-sided Infest in Limited yet but in theory I'd be hard-pressed trying to find another black card that is as good as this one in Cube.
I played with the Monarch cards recently but with Initiative being added to those types of effects now I decided to pull the trigger and exclude all sets from my cube that were designed for non-standard Limited play, which is mostly multiplayer draft formats such as Commander Legends. In turn I've created a 30 card expansion to my cube that has Monarch, Initiative, the 5 new gates and the strong board wipes in black and red among other things from those sets which we can shuffle in and add whenever we feel like it. I never did any sort of power-related bans before and I wouldn't consider this decision a ban per se, but the play patterns of Monarch have been met with enough negative feedback from my playgroup that I'm willing to take it out alongside Initiative and any such future ability they might come up with.
That said, I think I like Initiative more than Monarch because it actually advances the board state instead of just creating CA.
Apart from that I like a lot of the Adventure cards from this set. In ELD Ardenvale Tactician seemed like the only one that was at least borderline cubeable but this time around they created some decent Adventure effects paired with serviceable bodies for later. I think I could find a cubeable one for each color in the set.
The two black 2-drops are decent.
Dire Mimic is interesting as a colorless 5 mana 5/5 Flash blocker on the front end, not too shabby.
Greatsword of Tyr is a little hard to evaluate but seems very potentially powerful.
Overall an insanely powerful set. Not a bad time for me to start excluding those kinds of sets from my core cube, as I think 32 cards that are at least borderline playable are a bit much for one set. Normally there are around up to 10ish cards I get in foil for any new set that comes out and my current buylist for this set is at 32 cards...
In Pauper we get close to zero expensive cards that are worth giving up card advantage early in the game (by playing less spells in your deck and by drawing expensive stuff before you can cast it) to ramp them out ahead of time. The only real payoffs we have are the buyback spells, the few Hexproof creatures and maybe a few more.
That said, I think the big dude cyclers are a pretty decent ramp payoff as well, simply because they're never dead in the early game. I still play one in each color and 2 or 3 in green. In a topdeck war those creatures will most likely win you the game and you stil get value from them early on.
tl;dr: We're a format where Signets and mana Elves can go last pick sometimes, I don't think this is a format where Lumberjack is great. It's funny how context-dependent ramp is considering the aforementioned cards are first-pickable in vintage cube. At the same time we first pick stuff that would never even make vintage cube to begin with,
Those kinds of cards are where you'll see the difference between a fine limited player and a great one. The latter will not only pick them highly but also put them in the deck when they're only half on color, as Humphrey said. That is with the exception of super aggressive decks with tons of 1 and 2 drop creatures, but that should go without saying.
Just imagine what exactly needs to happen for you to still win the game if your opponent drops this on 3 on the play targeting your 2-drop and only creature in play.
Also, I just assumed it could only enchant your opponent's creatures because of how stupid it is that it gets around its own drawback when you target your own. Turns out you just drop this on your own 2-drop if your opponent didn't play one. How exactly do you not win the game if you cast this on 3? It's a common Palace Jailer. Better than that, actually. I'll take 2U over a 2/2 for 2WW I think.
Any ramp card you include in your deck is card disadvantage, because you generally follow the rule that you can cut one land for each two ramp cards you play, but you can't 1-for-1 them. This means that a deck with 4 ramp cards will have 2 less spells to draw mid to late game, putting you at a drastic disadvantage in a format where 1-for-1ing on the board is very efficient and CA is very hard to come by. In an environment with rares it's comically easy to make up for that lost CA by playing 4+ or even 3 drops (mostly pws, quite frankly) ahead of curve which immediately threaten an X-for-1 on the board. In Pauper we just don't get those. If I'm ever cutting the Signets it's because they're actually not good enough any more.
I'm not too scared of red aggro stomping everything right now. That deck will always suffer from the fact that it can't be on the play all the time, and how devastating it is to draw suboptimal openers that don't hit pressure into pressure into pressure on the first few turns. It's a high risk-high reward strategy that kind of balances itself. Reminds me a lot of Chalice decks in Legacy. Seemingly 80% of the decks in Legacy will state that they're scared of Chalice decks the most, yet Chalice decks don't hit an over 50% win rate overall and they don't win any majors. They beat themselves on opening hands, losing die rolls and drawing dysfunctional draws enough to balance out their draws that are nigh unbeatable on the play.
I do know and consider the basics and most of the decisions around statlines revolves around the rule that an offensive creature usually wants an extra point of power to be able to trade up in the curve while a defensive creature usually wants an extra point of toughness to live against anything that costs the same or less. Offensive creatures kinda have to trade up on mana because of summoning sickness. This is why for a Haste creature it's generally fine to trade with anything equally costed while it should eat anything lower costed if possible.
In that sense I suppose you're right in that 2-drops always had the ability to trade with at least a decent amount of 3-drops. They don't really trade with any 4-drops though, at least if you keep it fair and consider only creatures whose main function is to be as big as possible. Any creature that costs 4 and has only 3 toughness nowadays has some other selling point, such as abilities. There are more than enough options across all colors at CC4 if your goal is to eat all available 2-drops in combat.
I think nowadays the standard statlines are:
1/1 for 1
2/2 for 2
3/2 or 2/3 for 3
4/3 or 3/4 for 4
And this is a pretty elegant way to do it considering this always creates creatures that are able to trade up on mana, but often trade down on mana as well, and there are those that never trade down, but they don't trade up either. And this is where the concepts of offense and defense are created.
Also, in general it's heavily meta-dependent what stats you're looking for on a given creature. There are formats where a 2/3 for 3 is a huge deal because there's lots of 2/2s for 2 and 3 mana, and there's formats where a 2/3 for 3 sucks because there's 3/1s for 2 and 3/3s or bigger on 4.
Goodstuff cubes are definitely easier for beginners, that's true. Part of my ambition to keep goodstuff non-archetype decks viable at all times is exactly that reason. Though I think it also doesn't hurt if a more experienced player's deck will be just that little bit stronger on average. A 60/40 matchup is still nowhere near unwinnable from a beginner's perspective and an experienced player will see more of a reward for being experienced. Again, a matter of balancing which is always very difficult and impossible to do perfectly. I don't want drafting to be meaningless because everything is equally good individually, but I also don't want people drafting preconstructed decks all the time putting beginners at a disadvantage because they don't know those decks in advance.
It's also true that it's desirable to support archetypes across different colors, though I think you shouldn't force yourself to do that if you either have to go too deep on redundancy to make it viable in a third color or of you have to cut too deep into a color's other archetypes to enable it. An example would be tokens, which can be supported in green as well, at least on paper. Though you quickly realize that the green token producers are significantly weaker than red's and white's and green also doesn't have a playable mass pump effect, so I found myself having to cut too deep into green's actual strengths in order to make it viable.
I like your last point about not only supporting archetypes, but also synergies between small subsets of cards. That's an approach I've also been taking with recent updates where I tried to make drafting more interesting by adding more high risk-high reward cards that still have a similar average power level as the other 'goodstuff' cards. Those are usually cards that I had previously cut, sometimes a long time ago, because on average they just weren't quite as strong as something else, but now I reincluded them because they have a much higher ceiling and aren't that far off on average either, which doesn't only reward good synergy awareness in drafting but also makes it possible for less experienced players to get those out-of-the-blue victories and those well-it-was-pretty-busted-this-game moments neither they or their opponents saw coming. Examples are the ping+deathtouch synergies, which is actually an idea I took from your cube, but also things like Sigil of Sleep, Leonin Bola (pseodo-Opposition in Tokens), Ghostly Flicker, Breath of Life + cycling fatties, Spikeshot Goblin, etc.
Let's be honest, it's already easy enough to get 23 playables in Pauper Cube drafts, it really doesn't hurt to have some narrower cards go late sometimes if they are super busted at other times.
If you don't include them at all and go vacuum power level only, you greatly reduce the skill factor in deck construction. You literally can't go wrong just picking two colors early and sticking with them throughout, and chances are your deck won't be much better or worse than anyone else's and games are going to come down to draw luck more than matchups and decision making.
If you support them too heavily you create a boring environment too, because you'll get the same decks every draft. Just like many of the past sets that had a heavy tribal or other archetype support got old pretty quickly.
I think the beauty lies in getting the best of both worlds and trying to support archetypes, but not support them so heavily that goodstuff decks can't compete with them at all. For me this means that I'll still include the most powerful cards for the archetypes, but I'll cut down on their depth making it harder to get a critical mass of enablers, especially with 'goodtuff' decks potentially fighting over the best payoffs like Armadillo Cloak, Battle Screech or whatever.
I'm pretty happy with this approach though I'd never claim that I've found the ultimate perfect balance. But I'm happier now than I was both when I didn't support archetypes at all and when I supported them too much. Honestly, most of the viable archetypes can be supported to the point where they become too powerful for goodstuff decks. Auras is at the top of the list, obviously. RW Tokens routinely attacks for 20ish on turn 5 with a perfect curve too (Raise the Alarm into Hordeling Outburst into Beetleback into +2 power mass pump is 25 points of power spread across 8 bodies...). The self-mill deck casts the Delve spells on turn 3. You can make all archetypes so powerful that none of them is op any more, but then you create the format I mentioned above where you're basically fighting over preconstructed decks in an 8-man draft.
I think a good rule of thumb is: If a well-built midrange/control deck with a high card power level but without any major archetype synergies can still beat the average archetype deck, you're probably in a good spot. If the archetype comes together perfectly and/or you draw your synergistic cards in the right combinations you should win. But if that isn't the case you should lose. This, in theory, creates a format where archetypes are perfectly balanced because they merely provide a higher-risk/higher-reward approach that people can take when they want (and/or are given the chance).
You have to remember: The more redundant archetype enablers/payoffs you include, the more universally and individually powerful cards you're cutting for them. You have to be mindful not to create a format where even below average archetype decks beat the goodstuff decks because the latter had to fill up their 23 with leftover archetype stuff they got late. If the Aura deck gets Empyrial Armor on a Ledgewalker and clocks you for 6 a turn by turn 3 you should lose as a non-archetype deck. But you shouldn't lose to a Gladecover Scout with Spectral Flight on it because you got nothing but Raise the Alarm, Jackal Pup and Threaten effects to defend with, if you know what I mean. Give them a Crocanura and they're fine. Or give them a Brazen Wolves and they'll race you. That kind of thing.
I think the comparison to Conscripts/Cohort is apt, though I think I like red Lynx better. Those 2 powered one drops are all about turns 2 and 3. After that they get invalidated most of the time anyway, so getting the most damage through until then is crucial. Even in a super low-to-the-ground aggro deck with 15 lands I think you'll still be about as likely to hit your land drops turn 2 and 3 as casting creatures on those two turns. You need 15 creatures for 1 or 2 mana in your deck to have the same odds, and while that's possible they also force you to play your stuff out of order sometimes just to make them attack, such as dropping a creature turn 3 instead of using a removal spell on a blocker which would be more beneficial. Red Lynx only requires the land drop and has the extra toughness on top of that, which is a massive advantage during turns where 2/1 and 2/2 are the baseline p/t.
No denying it's a terrible topdeck and all, but it can be expected to attack for 4-6 throughout the first 4 turns of any game in which it'd played on turn 1. Don't think it gets much better than that for red aggro. Even in a 15 land deck you'll make 2-3 more land drops more often than not. You probably don't get to trigger extra Landfalls too often in red aggro, because all the cards that do that are often too much of a tempo bump. At least ever since Harrow doesn't see play any more. That card was gas with Landfall triggers... It's one of those cards I always wanted to put back in my cube, trying to convince myself that the tempo advantage and deck thinning might be better than Cultivate often enough...
advantages Conscripts/Cohort:
- better overall attacks if the freshly cast creature is worse than 2/2 vanilla
- not reliant on the freshly cast creature resolving
- 2/2 blocker instead of a 1/1
- better if the freshly cast creature already has Haste
advantages Inciter/Motivator:
- better overall attacks if the freshly cast creature is better than 2/2 vanilla
- works with tokens created by non-creature spells
- can still attack as a 1/1 if no creature was cast that turn
So which are better overall? Personally I think the latter two's advantages outweigh the former's, but I'm not sure because most of the time they're extremely similar in how they play out...