what size group do you draft with? do members of your group (including you) favor any particular strategies?
Typically 6-8 people. I'm one of the only people who will draft an extreme aggro deck, though I won't force it if it's not there. My playgroup tends to take red cards to support their R/G beatdown or X/R midrange decks. If I see the red flowing, though, I like to draft the super aggressive red decks whose curve tops out at 4, the ones where I start asking for my opponent's life total once they're below 13 or 14.
Do you feel this card is better in smaller groups, or larger groups?
Playing 1-drops that can contribute to group attacks, accumulate damage over time and take advantage of pump/anthems/equipment are critical to the deck. In the early game, I want my 1-drops to stick around and build up incremental damage. In the late game I want my burn spells to function as reach.
Hmmm. We'll have to agree to disagree, then. I actually am not a fan of anthem effects or even equipment in my aggressive red decks. White weenie, or green midrange? Sure, I'll load up on Swords and Glorious Anthems. But when I draft red, I want and expect every single card in my deck to function as a burn spell. Goblin Guide is just a cheaper version of Char to me, and the much vaunted board presence is meaningless. I could care less if my opponent has "stabilized" with a Wurmcoil Engine to my nothing, if I can nug him two more times to the face for lethal.
But I can see how our different playstyles contribute to our different evalations of this card. It may well be true that Vexing Devil is not a good fit for the majority of cubes, I will grant you that. In cubes that support hyper aggressive burn, though - *raises hand* - he feels like a perfect fit.
I wouldn't give up a card and my first turn to have my opponent start at 16. Like I said before, casting a burn spell at my opponent's face on T1 isn't what I typically want my red decks to be doing in the cube.
Hmmm. You wouldn't? If I was playing R or R/x aggro, I would happily start at 6 cards and give up my first turn to have my opponent be at 16. When I draft heavy red aggro, most of my creatures are pretty transient, anyways - your Hellspark Elementals and Keldon Marauders and such - that I don't really value board presence that much. It's a totally different ballgame than when I draft white weenie, where I want anthem effects, equipment, removal, the works. In red? I just want to watch the world burn.
As far as opportunity cost goes, one card for four damage is a fantastic rate, even setting aside the mana cost for a second. You start out with seven cards in hand, so imagine if every non-land card in your hand dealt four. That'd be way, waaaay busted. I think the Philosophy of Fire goes something like each card is worth 2 damage, on average. This card is a fair bit above that.
Now, it could be that your cube (and probably most people's cubes on this thread) draft red aggro in a more traditional way. Actual bodies that stick around, get pumped, and go the distance. I find that in my cube, though, red decks switch from attacking to "burn mode" fairly quickly - sometimes when the opponent is as high as 10 or even 12 life. For those decks, Vexing Devil is a shoe-in.
Vexing Devil should not be thought of as a 1-drop creature, but a 4 damage lava spike with a significant drawback. And I do mean significant. Even mono red decks in cube don't usually bolt their opponent on turn one, so you probably don't want to be casting this then. You expect a 4 damage spell to kill your opponent when they are on 4 life, and this one never does that. Once you are in "burn mode" (your opponent has board control), this becomes close to a blank, and that is not where you want a lava spike to be. Fireblast is amazing because it allows you to win games as they are becoming unwinnable, and this card doesn't do that.
I think this is the best analysis of Vexing Devil so far. I see it as reading "Turns 1-3, burn your opponent for 4; Turns 4+, put a 4/3 into play". It's definitely not a traditional creature, nor is it a straight up burn spell, either.
On the other hand, the opportunity cost is so low - 1 mana! - that I think it's a worthwhile addition for cubes looking for more red aggro effects. It's not the card you'll play on turn 1 if you have anything remotely worth casting, but for those keeps where you're otherwise stuck with a glut of two drops, it's not the worst thing you could cast turn 1, either. It's also a fair bit better than Browbeat, if only because the two mana discount lets you squeeze him in on any turn that's convenient.
I know, I know, punisher cards traditionally look incredible, and then play out poorly in practice. But this one's so dang cheap that I'm forced to sit up and take notice.
I mostly found that with my blue decks, I much preferred to leave mana up for my counterspells, or at the very least to bluff counterspells. So I never got the dream scenario of leveling her up multiple times, and occasionally not even the first time. I think, more than any other colour, leveling being sorcery speed hurts blue the most. I actually even have trouble finding good spots to level Coralhelm Commander, and he's only half the cost to power up.
This problem doesn't apply as much to levelers like Kargan Dragonlord, where your deck has a much more straightforward plan of "bash some guy's head in". But I find that blue decks reward holding back information and keeping mana available, especially in the early game. It feels like my group agrees with this philosophy, as I've observed them pass over Enclave Cryptologist time and again.
Agreed. This was a great poll, with three valid choices, and no extraneous ones. I really liked seeing the results. It's great that not everyone who chimed in with a post still voted, as it shows that people who might not have a strong enough opinion to post an argument still have their vote counted.
I'm going to play devil's advocate, and root against Enclave Cryptologist. I had her in my cube for about six months, and she was never that impressive. Blue control decks aren't that hard up for card quality, when blue tends to have the strongest card pool overall, so it tended to table over and over again. Even when I did draft it, it usually wouldn't make the cut - it wasn't difficult to find 23 other cards better than a looter. I think Merfolk Looter is a borderline cube card, anyways, and Cryptologist is just a sideways option, and not the pure upgrade that some are spinning it out to be. It's definitely not like Joraga Treespeaker, who at level 1, blows Llanowar Elves out of the water.
I noticed you put Spellstutter Sprite on your list of blue creatures. This is another one I tried, and was never very impressed with. It's very difficult to actually trap someone with its counterspell ability, with so few Faeries in the cube. I love me some flash on my creatures, but I found that a 1/1 for 2 didn't cut the mustard, when it couldn't reliably snag something on the way down. I've like to hear how it works for you, though, as you may come up with different results.
I kind of have the same issue that you originally brought up, as well. I run a Modern cube, so I don't have access to Serendib Efreet. In looking for replacements, I came across Stitched Drake and Vexing Sphinx. I haven't tested them, but they look ok, if not stellar. Would anyone be able to chime in on the merits of each?
Yes, glorious anthem effects are useless without any creatures on the board. So are equipment. But they are both very powerful effects in most games of magic because they help you win combat so much. Anthem effects are high picks in regular draft because they're really strong.
As for lava spike, some of the red decks that are basically all burn spells are considered to be kind of combo decks.
And as for spider spawning, yes it wins through attacking with creatures, but a lot of its game plan involves filling up its graveyard and leveraging that zone to its advantage, which isn't something most decks do. How you actually win isn't relevant. Storming into Goblin Warrens actually kills you through turning men sideways, but it's still definitely a combo deck.
See, this is where it feels like the definition of combo is getting too liberal. What I'm hearing is that combo is any archetype that uses any number of unlikely, often underpowered, cards, and combines them such that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. I wouldn't call that a combo deck, though. That's just an archetype. Or a rogue deck, if you're talking about particularly unusual card choices.
"Filling up your own graveyard" on its own doesn't classify a deck as a combo deck. That's just the theme of Innistrad block, especially in limited. Like landfall was the theme of Zendikar, but running 18 lands and three Plated Geopedes wouldn't mean your draft deck was a combo deck. Again, saying it's unusual, or it's something that most decks don't do, doesn't immediately make a deck a combo deck. In constructed, UB control runs Nephalia Drownyard so that it can mill itself for more juice (along with milling the control opponent out in the mirror). But it's still a control deck through and through, even if no one else is running the self mill angle.
First off those cards are good on their own. And secondly those cards attack the game in the same way most decks do, combat. If your definition of combo is only something like Pestermite + Kiki-Jiki, is storm not a combo deck?
Cards like Glorious Anthem and Honor of the Pure are not good on their own. Pros have referred to them time and again as "half a card", because they don't do anything on their own, and do very little with only a single creature being buffed. Global buffs are actually card disadvantage, and only pass mustard when you have a sizable army to boost.
To use another example, Lava Spike is not a good card. However, when combined with many similar cards, the result is a deck that can win its fair share of games. It doesn't use the combat zone. If minimal usage of the combat zone is your definition of combo, is Lava Spike then a combo card?
To follow that point, why, then, would Spider Spawning considered a combo deck? The deck makes ample use of the combat zone. Armored Skaab and Fortress Crab hold down the ground, and 1/2 tokens later take over the field. It has some non-combat spells, but then, what deck doesn't?
They're very much combo decks. They function by taking a whole bunch of cards that don't do that much individually and weaving them together to make a cohesive deck.
By that definition, Honor of the Pure, Glorious Anthem, and a bunch of small white creatures is a combo deck. None of these cards are very good on their own. But putting them together sure makes for a cohesive deck.
We're probably getting caught up in semantics here. It feels like people are using the word "combo" to be synonymous with "archetype" and "synergy". While I don't want to turn this into a nitpicky back and forth over definitions, you'll note that the original author of this thread was talking specifically about two and three card combos - your Pestermites and such, not your archetype-enabling Glorious Anthems. It's certainly more than possible to enable archetypes and syngeries in cube, but I don't think I could recommend seeding any actual combos in a cube, unless it was a rotisserie draft.
I'm not sure if I would define any of those as combo decks. Archetypes, definitely, and the cards invite people to build around their themes. But I haven't heard anyone refer to their U/G self-mill Spider Spawning deck as combo. They are really just control decks with lots of Horned Turtles to gum up the ground, and a powerful end game win condition. Burning Vengeance, maybe there could be a case made for that, but those decks still have to play a real game of Magic.
When I think combo, mostly I think of non-interactive decks that largely ignore the board state, focusing instead on a sculpting a combination of cards that will either win the game on the spot, or put the game largely out of reach. I would say that combo decks operate more like solitaire than normal back and forth games of Magic. The kind of raw power and consistency to execute that kind of combo is difficult to achieve in draft.
I also run a Modern cube, and find that neither reanimator nor combo are really possible. For reanimator, the zombify effects are decent in Modern, but what you're missing is the equivalent of Entomb or Survival. The discard outlets, and maybe more importantly the tutors, just aren't there to enable the archetype. As for combo, consider actual Limited formats - when has combo ever been a draftable deck? Combo decks require consistency more than any other archetype, which usually means four copies of all the key cards, and that goes against the very nature of drafting a cube.
As eidolon mentions, there should be midrange strategies available in your cube, like tokens or good stuff ramp. If you've set it up, tempo can be a powerful option as well - Snapcaster Mage + Lightning Bolt decks can be a house. These archetypes are easier to support than reanimator or combo, and the payoff is well worth the effort.
I think you may find that 100 lands in a 540 card cube means that you see a lot of lands in your packs. If 18.5% of your overall cards are lands, that means you'll open 2.8 lands per pack, and you'll open 8.3 lands over the course of your three packs. As other posters have already mentioned, this hurts aggro decks more than anything, as a fast, streamlined deck needs lots of cheap, consistent threats. Seeing a whole slew of lands will benefit multi-colour control decks, but it only serves to dilute the density of aggro decks.
Most standard cubes support a decent amount of multi-colour already, and that they don't need to be stretched a whole lot to accommodate your goals. The Vivid lands and Shard tri-lands would help encourage people to splash an additional colour, but beyond that, I don't think you need to go to extreme lengths to accomplish what you're trying to do. I'd also advise you to take the nature of your playgroup into account. Some players who are greedy will always force 3, 4, or even 5 colours, without any assistance from the cube designer. Other players gravitate towards sleek aggro decks with only a light splash of a second colour. If you have both kinds of players among your group, a standard cube tends to have enough variety to satisfy both ends of the spectrum. On the other hand, if you're sure all your friends love gaudy, rainbow coloured control, then there could be merit in going overboard with the land count.
Ya, I don't think doubles is for everyone. And the identity of green is tough to nail down in Modern. One of the biggest problems is that green is supposed to be the creature colour. But, sadly, its fatties are among the worst. Black leads the way with Grave Titan, Kokusho, and Sheoldred, white has hits like Sun Titan, Yosei, and Elesh Norn, and blue holds up its end of the bargain with Frost Titan and Consecrated Sphinx. Heck, even colorless gets Wurmcoil Engine, Myr Battlesphere, and Karn. Green gets.. Avenger of Zendikar? For a colour that specializes in ramp, it offers very little payoff. I've tried making green the secondary token colour, behind white, but it still falls laughingly short of black in that department.
Please post up your list when you're done with it - I've love to see another Modern list!
Mostly through trial and error. We drafted the cube a couple times, and unfortunately for green, it was seriously lacking punch. Green aggro is a non-starter in Modern, and the colour is also missing vital build-around-me cards like Survival or even Rancor that would normally pull people into it. To give green more kick, I felt it necessary to boost its ramp and general utility, so there are doubles of cards like Birds of Paradise, Noble Hierarch, and Acidic Slime.
For other colours, it's less a matter of power level, and more about the themes I want to push. I want blue to stand out for its counterspells and bounce, but Modern counterspells suck hard. So I doubled up on Mana Leak, when I realized Rune Snag in cube is just a lame Mana Leak anyways. I also took curve considerations into effect. While the cube is bursting at the seams with 4, 5, and 6-drops, it's hard up on the one mana critters that are so vital to an aggro deck's success. So it doesn't feel out of line to include an extra Steppe Lynx or Diregraf Ghoul.
I'm pretty conscious not to add doubles of overpowering cards, cause that's just not fun. I'd never subject my players to multiple Elspeth, Knight Errant or Wurmcoil Engine. In fact, I kind of go the other way on functional reprints. I don't feel that Cultivate is good enough to warrant two copies of it in a cube, so I exclude Kodama's Reach. Same with Wrath of God - white getting two Day of Judgment feels like a little much. Basically, I'm not letting Wizards' functional reprint policy get in the way of making a balanced, functional cube.
Most of my players are actually against the idea of doubles. And I can't fault them for it. But overall cube balance has improved since I started adding them, and green now holds its own with the best of them, while aggro decks are more likely to curve out with 1-drop, 2-drop, 3-drop. So I don't have any intention of removing them. Plus, it's my cube, so I get the final word.
I'm building a Modern cube myself, and I can't recommend it enough. It may not have all the busted cards of Magic's early days, but the power level is still surprisingly high. There's never any shortage of "wow" moments.
What I did was start with my current collection, which at the time ranged from Shards of Alara through to Mirrodin Besieged. As new sets come out, I add them as they go. But I'm also going back and acquiring older block cards, adding one block every four or five months. Right now, my cube spans Ravnica to Dark Ascension, so I'm slowly working my way back towards Mirrodin and 8th Ed. I find this gradual approach makes building the cube more manageable, and lets me enjoy the fruits of my labour immediately. After all, people want to draft right now! However, your collection may be more vast, and you might want to go full hog right out of the gate.
You can find my list here. I break a few cube tenets, which is why I don't bother posting the list on this forum, but you might glean something useful from the list anyways.
Typically 6-8 people. I'm one of the only people who will draft an extreme aggro deck, though I won't force it if it's not there. My playgroup tends to take red cards to support their R/G beatdown or X/R midrange decks. If I see the red flowing, though, I like to draft the super aggressive red decks whose curve tops out at 4, the ones where I start asking for my opponent's life total once they're below 13 or 14.
Do you feel this card is better in smaller groups, or larger groups?
Hmmm. We'll have to agree to disagree, then. I actually am not a fan of anthem effects or even equipment in my aggressive red decks. White weenie, or green midrange? Sure, I'll load up on Swords and Glorious Anthems. But when I draft red, I want and expect every single card in my deck to function as a burn spell. Goblin Guide is just a cheaper version of Char to me, and the much vaunted board presence is meaningless. I could care less if my opponent has "stabilized" with a Wurmcoil Engine to my nothing, if I can nug him two more times to the face for lethal.
But I can see how our different playstyles contribute to our different evalations of this card. It may well be true that Vexing Devil is not a good fit for the majority of cubes, I will grant you that. In cubes that support hyper aggressive burn, though - *raises hand* - he feels like a perfect fit.
Hmmm. You wouldn't? If I was playing R or R/x aggro, I would happily start at 6 cards and give up my first turn to have my opponent be at 16. When I draft heavy red aggro, most of my creatures are pretty transient, anyways - your Hellspark Elementals and Keldon Marauders and such - that I don't really value board presence that much. It's a totally different ballgame than when I draft white weenie, where I want anthem effects, equipment, removal, the works. In red? I just want to watch the world burn.
As far as opportunity cost goes, one card for four damage is a fantastic rate, even setting aside the mana cost for a second. You start out with seven cards in hand, so imagine if every non-land card in your hand dealt four. That'd be way, waaaay busted. I think the Philosophy of Fire goes something like each card is worth 2 damage, on average. This card is a fair bit above that.
Now, it could be that your cube (and probably most people's cubes on this thread) draft red aggro in a more traditional way. Actual bodies that stick around, get pumped, and go the distance. I find that in my cube, though, red decks switch from attacking to "burn mode" fairly quickly - sometimes when the opponent is as high as 10 or even 12 life. For those decks, Vexing Devil is a shoe-in.
I think this is the best analysis of Vexing Devil so far. I see it as reading "Turns 1-3, burn your opponent for 4; Turns 4+, put a 4/3 into play". It's definitely not a traditional creature, nor is it a straight up burn spell, either.
On the other hand, the opportunity cost is so low - 1 mana! - that I think it's a worthwhile addition for cubes looking for more red aggro effects. It's not the card you'll play on turn 1 if you have anything remotely worth casting, but for those keeps where you're otherwise stuck with a glut of two drops, it's not the worst thing you could cast turn 1, either. It's also a fair bit better than Browbeat, if only because the two mana discount lets you squeeze him in on any turn that's convenient.
I know, I know, punisher cards traditionally look incredible, and then play out poorly in practice. But this one's so dang cheap that I'm forced to sit up and take notice.
This problem doesn't apply as much to levelers like Kargan Dragonlord, where your deck has a much more straightforward plan of "bash some guy's head in". But I find that blue decks reward holding back information and keeping mana available, especially in the early game. It feels like my group agrees with this philosophy, as I've observed them pass over Enclave Cryptologist time and again.
I hope you do more of these!
I noticed you put Spellstutter Sprite on your list of blue creatures. This is another one I tried, and was never very impressed with. It's very difficult to actually trap someone with its counterspell ability, with so few Faeries in the cube. I love me some flash on my creatures, but I found that a 1/1 for 2 didn't cut the mustard, when it couldn't reliably snag something on the way down. I've like to hear how it works for you, though, as you may come up with different results.
I kind of have the same issue that you originally brought up, as well. I run a Modern cube, so I don't have access to Serendib Efreet. In looking for replacements, I came across Stitched Drake and Vexing Sphinx. I haven't tested them, but they look ok, if not stellar. Would anyone be able to chime in on the merits of each?
See, this is where it feels like the definition of combo is getting too liberal. What I'm hearing is that combo is any archetype that uses any number of unlikely, often underpowered, cards, and combines them such that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. I wouldn't call that a combo deck, though. That's just an archetype. Or a rogue deck, if you're talking about particularly unusual card choices.
"Filling up your own graveyard" on its own doesn't classify a deck as a combo deck. That's just the theme of Innistrad block, especially in limited. Like landfall was the theme of Zendikar, but running 18 lands and three Plated Geopedes wouldn't mean your draft deck was a combo deck. Again, saying it's unusual, or it's something that most decks don't do, doesn't immediately make a deck a combo deck. In constructed, UB control runs Nephalia Drownyard so that it can mill itself for more juice (along with milling the control opponent out in the mirror). But it's still a control deck through and through, even if no one else is running the self mill angle.
Cards like Glorious Anthem and Honor of the Pure are not good on their own. Pros have referred to them time and again as "half a card", because they don't do anything on their own, and do very little with only a single creature being buffed. Global buffs are actually card disadvantage, and only pass mustard when you have a sizable army to boost.
To use another example, Lava Spike is not a good card. However, when combined with many similar cards, the result is a deck that can win its fair share of games. It doesn't use the combat zone. If minimal usage of the combat zone is your definition of combo, is Lava Spike then a combo card?
To follow that point, why, then, would Spider Spawning considered a combo deck? The deck makes ample use of the combat zone. Armored Skaab and Fortress Crab hold down the ground, and 1/2 tokens later take over the field. It has some non-combat spells, but then, what deck doesn't?
By that definition, Honor of the Pure, Glorious Anthem, and a bunch of small white creatures is a combo deck. None of these cards are very good on their own. But putting them together sure makes for a cohesive deck.
We're probably getting caught up in semantics here. It feels like people are using the word "combo" to be synonymous with "archetype" and "synergy". While I don't want to turn this into a nitpicky back and forth over definitions, you'll note that the original author of this thread was talking specifically about two and three card combos - your Pestermites and such, not your archetype-enabling Glorious Anthems. It's certainly more than possible to enable archetypes and syngeries in cube, but I don't think I could recommend seeding any actual combos in a cube, unless it was a rotisserie draft.
I'm not sure if I would define any of those as combo decks. Archetypes, definitely, and the cards invite people to build around their themes. But I haven't heard anyone refer to their U/G self-mill Spider Spawning deck as combo. They are really just control decks with lots of Horned Turtles to gum up the ground, and a powerful end game win condition. Burning Vengeance, maybe there could be a case made for that, but those decks still have to play a real game of Magic.
When I think combo, mostly I think of non-interactive decks that largely ignore the board state, focusing instead on a sculpting a combination of cards that will either win the game on the spot, or put the game largely out of reach. I would say that combo decks operate more like solitaire than normal back and forth games of Magic. The kind of raw power and consistency to execute that kind of combo is difficult to achieve in draft.
As eidolon mentions, there should be midrange strategies available in your cube, like tokens or good stuff ramp. If you've set it up, tempo can be a powerful option as well - Snapcaster Mage + Lightning Bolt decks can be a house. These archetypes are easier to support than reanimator or combo, and the payoff is well worth the effort.
Most standard cubes support a decent amount of multi-colour already, and that they don't need to be stretched a whole lot to accommodate your goals. The Vivid lands and Shard tri-lands would help encourage people to splash an additional colour, but beyond that, I don't think you need to go to extreme lengths to accomplish what you're trying to do. I'd also advise you to take the nature of your playgroup into account. Some players who are greedy will always force 3, 4, or even 5 colours, without any assistance from the cube designer. Other players gravitate towards sleek aggro decks with only a light splash of a second colour. If you have both kinds of players among your group, a standard cube tends to have enough variety to satisfy both ends of the spectrum. On the other hand, if you're sure all your friends love gaudy, rainbow coloured control, then there could be merit in going overboard with the land count.
Please post up your list when you're done with it - I've love to see another Modern list!
For other colours, it's less a matter of power level, and more about the themes I want to push. I want blue to stand out for its counterspells and bounce, but Modern counterspells suck hard. So I doubled up on Mana Leak, when I realized Rune Snag in cube is just a lame Mana Leak anyways. I also took curve considerations into effect. While the cube is bursting at the seams with 4, 5, and 6-drops, it's hard up on the one mana critters that are so vital to an aggro deck's success. So it doesn't feel out of line to include an extra Steppe Lynx or Diregraf Ghoul.
I'm pretty conscious not to add doubles of overpowering cards, cause that's just not fun. I'd never subject my players to multiple Elspeth, Knight Errant or Wurmcoil Engine. In fact, I kind of go the other way on functional reprints. I don't feel that Cultivate is good enough to warrant two copies of it in a cube, so I exclude Kodama's Reach. Same with Wrath of God - white getting two Day of Judgment feels like a little much. Basically, I'm not letting Wizards' functional reprint policy get in the way of making a balanced, functional cube.
Most of my players are actually against the idea of doubles. And I can't fault them for it. But overall cube balance has improved since I started adding them, and green now holds its own with the best of them, while aggro decks are more likely to curve out with 1-drop, 2-drop, 3-drop. So I don't have any intention of removing them. Plus, it's my cube, so I get the final word.
What I did was start with my current collection, which at the time ranged from Shards of Alara through to Mirrodin Besieged. As new sets come out, I add them as they go. But I'm also going back and acquiring older block cards, adding one block every four or five months. Right now, my cube spans Ravnica to Dark Ascension, so I'm slowly working my way back towards Mirrodin and 8th Ed. I find this gradual approach makes building the cube more manageable, and lets me enjoy the fruits of my labour immediately. After all, people want to draft right now! However, your collection may be more vast, and you might want to go full hog right out of the gate.
You can find my list here. I break a few cube tenets, which is why I don't bother posting the list on this forum, but you might glean something useful from the list anyways.
http://tappedout.net/mtg-cube-drafts/platypuscube/