I probably should have explained - I the brute card advantage of FoF I find works very well with the others.
But then again, I find your list doesn't have Cruise, Dig, Uro, Welder, Wreen etc.
I got a few questions about your list:
- Why Thassa's Oracle without the Inverter half of the combo?
- How is Outpost Siege?
Yeah we don't have a huge excess of cards that want a critical mass in your graveyard. We have a lot of twists and the decks that do care about the graveyard either already have their exile spell in Breach or want it to stick around in the case of Stax. My cube is in a very weird spot right now where it's just kind of the archetypes I personally enjoy.
Oracle is my primary storm win condition these days. It takes Underworld Breach decks to another level and gets around Eldrazi saving opponents from brain freeze.
Outpost siege is pretty mediocre. It's a pet card of mine but it's time is running out. It's a survivor of the days of midrange goodstuff being the best deck and it was pretty sweet in that window of time. Just haven't brought myself to cut it yet but once I finally cut Burning and Wildfire it's next on the chopping block. Edit: Siege was primarily used as a grindy card advantage engine but the Aristrocrats mode was definitely used a non zero amount of times to close out the last few points of damage.
What synergy does FoF have with Lili or Dack? It puts cards in the bin like they do but they don't benefit from that in any particular way.
As for the other cards you listed they're just very different cards. This is a brute force card advantage engine. Apart from the discard 1 mode of thirst those are all card selection cards. Well and Narset but she's gold and competes in a very different group as a result. One thing I've noticed in my cube is that blue actually has very little burst draw at the moment. I have Ancestral, Twister, Time Spiral, FoF, Jace TMS, Mulldrifter, and Mystic Confluence (though it is usually used as a bounce and counter). The Twist spells barely count for this exercise and Ancestral is among the slam dunkiest of slam dunks and as a result I've noticed that blue decks can end up a little light on card draw and had been considering this to supplement my actual card advantage spells. I don't think it's quite good enough but I don't think it's far off either. I've been toying with trying it out over on of the mind control effects as an experiment because it's just so sweet in standard. Thirst, Impulse, Champion, and Stowaway are great card selection cards but they just don't give that boost of cards in hand that I sometimes want.
It should be easy to understand from someone who created a keyword (in Enforcer) to prove that other 'thought to be impossible to balance keywords' (ex. banding) could/do have creative solutions to them.
Shroud is important to cut back on interactivity 'externally' so that the card can do more 'internally' at this cost.
Banding's problem isn't that it's hard to balance. It's that it's miserably complex and leads to boring and confusing board states. It's perfectly easy to balance but it's unfun. Shroud is different and they've iterated on it so much (Shourd and Protection > Hexproof and Hexproof from > to ward) because it's hard to balance. And in this case I don't see what shroud offers over hexproof or a high mana ward cost. They are similarly hard to interact with. But more importantly I personally think it's kind of bad design for the anti counter spell knight to be an anti removal spell knight as well but that's not a big criticism. Just a difference of design philosophy.
Some might want to argue that scry 1 doesn't offer enough capability because it involves a guessing challenge, where they lose out when they deck the semi-useful top card that they peek with scry, and then get shafted on the blind draw of the next card. Simply put—that is the beauty of it actually. We want to preserve as much aspect of challenge as possible. That is one of the core-elements where the fun of the game lies. Player's simply need to be more concise with their choices, rather than have overbearing options to indulge lazily in the lap of luxury.
I've never heard anyone argue that scry 1 is a weak ability before. It's pretty universally acknowledged as quite strong. For example the temples were widely regarded as the strongest tapland cycle before the printing of the Triomes.
Cycling is there on Holy Phalanx because it's legendary and can't be stacked. This provides an outlet option for players running full playsets to do something with additional copies they draw. The effect also starts out very subtle, so that at the cost it has, furthermore facing a resource demand to get better, it is reasonably balanced at the cost that it has.
I think you and I just have very different opinions on if it's okay for cards to be situationally bad. You seem to design with the goal that every card be useful in some way at every stage of the game which is just a foreign concept to me.
I really like both of these designs and think that the Knight is a cool avenue to explore for card draw in white but just the flourishes around the edges are hard for me to wrap my head around.
I don't know if this is me but I've never been interested in any card that is essentially 3+ mana for 2 cards. If someone is willing to go this far down on tempo for a 2 for 1, then I would recommend they take the draw for slower, card economy matchups.
For eternal formats, I sometimes take the draw for Control mirrors and went +1 Spell Pierce in my sideboard and went -1 for Grindy finisher.
I personally would opt for these cards over this:
- Ancestral Visions
- Fact or Fiction
- Mystic Confluence/ Jace's Ingenuity - 5 mana instant speed 3 for 1.
Interesting that your group FoF in that because in my experience it's most common mode is taking 2 out of 5. Which is why this garnered some attention. You're getting the 2 best of 1 less card which is reasonably close to FoF. I haven't tested it because I've barely cubed since the new set but I'd definitely try it before Jace's Ingenuity I think. I don't expect this to make my list but it's pretty close to FoF against an opponent playing optimally.
Consider a landfall that blights your opponent while one-upping yourself. That was the essence of the Praetors.
Maybe it blights your opponent's lands (turns then into Wastes), while it gives yours all land types, or another interesting type effect (artifact, creature).
A 5/5 that can come down on turn 1 and shock, loot, or discard an opponents card (and I think do multiple if you play a dual land) is pretty strong. I'd happily I'd go down to 10 life on turn 1 to make a 5/5 and follow it up with a watery grave to loot and make the opponent discard. Seems pretty incredible to me.
Also consider it as a commander pay 10 life on turn 1 and then play a swamp. You're still at 30 and took a card out of each opponent's hand. Pretty insane.
Holy Phalanx is powerful but will be a miserable card to keep straight on the battlefield. Why the cycling though? Feels quite tacked on and unrelated to the flavor. Otherwise I like it. Anthems are cool and I like this one. I can't speak to if it's worded correctly under WotC lingo but it gets the intent across.
I like the knight. I get why you threw Shroud on it but A it's an extinct mechanic and B I'm not sure the anti-counterspell card should be resistant to removal as well. Hate cards like that are at their best when they're impactful in their good match ups and underwhelming elsewhere. But I really like the overall concept!
I haven't found your theory to be the case with aggro's success but that maybe come down to different cube structures. In my cube aggro's strength is directly tied to the power of it's early drop creatures. The down grade from Luminarch to Anafenza in a boros deck is absolutely massive given the WW cost and weaker body. If for your playgroup it's all been decided by the curve toppers then this change makes a ton of sense to try to solve your drafting on rails problems, but for us the curve toppers have been too slow if they don't have a strong curve backing them up.
Vengevine is my favorite card ever and it's been on the outside looking in of my cube for a long time. It is so much worse than the other green 4's unless you are getting it for free. The other problem is green is so often narrowly focused on ramp and fatties that there just isn't much support for an aggressive midrange creature. I have seen a ton of cubes with just Questing Beast and Oracle of Mul Daya as 4 drops.
If your green section is trending away from that the competition is still stiff and you have to trigger the graveyard ability to get value which isn't always easy. Without synergies Polokranos is better. In a go wide deck Toski has a higher ceiling. Against control Thrun can be more reliable. I love it but it's needs to be part of a creature based graveyard deck. Which is a hard archetype to support because most of the best graveyard support cards don't involve casting (Skyclave Shade and Gravecrawler being the big exceptions).
Westvale abbey competing in a land slot makes it a bit different. Just a completely different opportunity cost to make a deck and I like having lot's of utility lands available.
If you are ending up with too many playables then this sort of experiment makes sense for your play group. The filler type cards definitely don't make sense in that situation. In my smaller cube we have a high density of lands and moxen (360 powered) so we usually aren't flush with extra playables so unplayable archetype cards in your colors are killer when you're short on playables. But again we are talking about very different environments so my experience isn't that comparable to yours.
Taking another look at your cube you seem to have a much higher density of 3 drops creatures than I do so CoCo makes more sense there but I'm still skeptical because it was very bad when I tested it years back. I hope it works for your group!
I'm curious as to how your efforts go but I think in a 720 powered cube those "knife to a gun fight" moments are going to be unavoidable. Going with more archetype support as opposed to multi archetype filler will definite raise the power of the archetype decks. My concern would be in a cube with that high of draft to draft variance you are going to have more unplayable piles after drafting. But I have absolutely zero experience with a cube that size so I could be way off base.
With a deck rounded out with cards like Heartless Act and Cultivate you're always going to be functional if often outclassed. If you have a green ramp deck (that isn't lands focused) and are staring down summer bloom and CoCo for playable 23 you're going to be in for a bad time too. Very curious to see how this feels for your playgroup.
If you support blink in any capacity Clocknapper can be the highest ceiling blue finisher. We ran a silver border package for a while and it was utterly absurd, was a top 10 blue card in my opinion. Even without blink support it's still good though no where near as absurd. Stealing your opponents untap, upkeep, and draw is very good.
Going to be frank I didn't realize Yu-Gi-Oh even had factions/colors. I thought it was just entirely factionless and deckbuilding was entirely unrestricted in any formal way. That is kind of cool even if I've never heard it held up as a paragon of good design before.
And how many of them are made by the same guy, who just keeps making the same mistakes over and over.
None? Hearthstone, Eternal, and Storybook Brawl as examples all have different creative teams behind them. As far as I can tell the newly released and quite popular Legends of Runeterra also has factions with wildly different abilities and a different creative team. Going into different style of games Starcraft is famously balanced but the three factions play entirely differently and have access to quite different abilities. In mainline Pokemon video games restricted access to moves and abilties is a huge balancing factor. In MoBA's different roles are balanced by their access to different parts of toolkits. ADC's don't have AoE hard CC and supports (usually) lack consistent dps. I'm just drawing blanks on games I've played where every faction has access to every mode of attack and it's balanced/interesting. RTS games are the closest but in Age Of Empires 2 for example the factions basically feel identical to a layperson.
Yeah the Arlinn story was really solid (by the standards of an MTG story) but the Ritual wasn't because Crimson Vow was coming and we knew Olivia was going to interfere and it wasn't written in a particularly compelling or character driven way.
Yeah we don't have a huge excess of cards that want a critical mass in your graveyard. We have a lot of twists and the decks that do care about the graveyard either already have their exile spell in Breach or want it to stick around in the case of Stax. My cube is in a very weird spot right now where it's just kind of the archetypes I personally enjoy.
Oracle is my primary storm win condition these days. It takes Underworld Breach decks to another level and gets around Eldrazi saving opponents from brain freeze.
Outpost siege is pretty mediocre. It's a pet card of mine but it's time is running out. It's a survivor of the days of midrange goodstuff being the best deck and it was pretty sweet in that window of time. Just haven't brought myself to cut it yet but once I finally cut Burning and Wildfire it's next on the chopping block. Edit: Siege was primarily used as a grindy card advantage engine but the Aristrocrats mode was definitely used a non zero amount of times to close out the last few points of damage.
As for the other cards you listed they're just very different cards. This is a brute force card advantage engine. Apart from the discard 1 mode of thirst those are all card selection cards. Well and Narset but she's gold and competes in a very different group as a result. One thing I've noticed in my cube is that blue actually has very little burst draw at the moment. I have Ancestral, Twister, Time Spiral, FoF, Jace TMS, Mulldrifter, and Mystic Confluence (though it is usually used as a bounce and counter). The Twist spells barely count for this exercise and Ancestral is among the slam dunkiest of slam dunks and as a result I've noticed that blue decks can end up a little light on card draw and had been considering this to supplement my actual card advantage spells. I don't think it's quite good enough but I don't think it's far off either. I've been toying with trying it out over on of the mind control effects as an experiment because it's just so sweet in standard. Thirst, Impulse, Champion, and Stowaway are great card selection cards but they just don't give that boost of cards in hand that I sometimes want.
Banding's problem isn't that it's hard to balance. It's that it's miserably complex and leads to boring and confusing board states. It's perfectly easy to balance but it's unfun. Shroud is different and they've iterated on it so much (Shourd and Protection > Hexproof and Hexproof from > to ward) because it's hard to balance. And in this case I don't see what shroud offers over hexproof or a high mana ward cost. They are similarly hard to interact with. But more importantly I personally think it's kind of bad design for the anti counter spell knight to be an anti removal spell knight as well but that's not a big criticism. Just a difference of design philosophy.
I've never heard anyone argue that scry 1 is a weak ability before. It's pretty universally acknowledged as quite strong. For example the temples were widely regarded as the strongest tapland cycle before the printing of the Triomes.
I think you and I just have very different opinions on if it's okay for cards to be situationally bad. You seem to design with the goal that every card be useful in some way at every stage of the game which is just a foreign concept to me.
I really like both of these designs and think that the Knight is a cool avenue to explore for card draw in white but just the flourishes around the edges are hard for me to wrap my head around.
Interesting that your group FoF in that because in my experience it's most common mode is taking 2 out of 5. Which is why this garnered some attention. You're getting the 2 best of 1 less card which is reasonably close to FoF. I haven't tested it because I've barely cubed since the new set but I'd definitely try it before Jace's Ingenuity I think. I don't expect this to make my list but it's pretty close to FoF against an opponent playing optimally.
A 5/5 that can come down on turn 1 and shock, loot, or discard an opponents card (and I think do multiple if you play a dual land) is pretty strong. I'd happily I'd go down to 10 life on turn 1 to make a 5/5 and follow it up with a watery grave to loot and make the opponent discard. Seems pretty incredible to me.
Also consider it as a commander pay 10 life on turn 1 and then play a swamp. You're still at 30 and took a card out of each opponent's hand. Pretty insane.
I like the knight. I get why you threw Shroud on it but A it's an extinct mechanic and B I'm not sure the anti-counterspell card should be resistant to removal as well. Hate cards like that are at their best when they're impactful in their good match ups and underwhelming elsewhere. But I really like the overall concept!
If your green section is trending away from that the competition is still stiff and you have to trigger the graveyard ability to get value which isn't always easy. Without synergies Polokranos is better. In a go wide deck Toski has a higher ceiling. Against control Thrun can be more reliable. I love it but it's needs to be part of a creature based graveyard deck. Which is a hard archetype to support because most of the best graveyard support cards don't involve casting (Skyclave Shade and Gravecrawler being the big exceptions).
If you are ending up with too many playables then this sort of experiment makes sense for your play group. The filler type cards definitely don't make sense in that situation. In my smaller cube we have a high density of lands and moxen (360 powered) so we usually aren't flush with extra playables so unplayable archetype cards in your colors are killer when you're short on playables. But again we are talking about very different environments so my experience isn't that comparable to yours.
Taking another look at your cube you seem to have a much higher density of 3 drops creatures than I do so CoCo makes more sense there but I'm still skeptical because it was very bad when I tested it years back. I hope it works for your group!
With a deck rounded out with cards like Heartless Act and Cultivate you're always going to be functional if often outclassed. If you have a green ramp deck (that isn't lands focused) and are staring down summer bloom and CoCo for playable 23 you're going to be in for a bad time too. Very curious to see how this feels for your playgroup.
Without Kiki combo I don't like Guardian at all.
None? Hearthstone, Eternal, and Storybook Brawl as examples all have different creative teams behind them. As far as I can tell the newly released and quite popular Legends of Runeterra also has factions with wildly different abilities and a different creative team. Going into different style of games Starcraft is famously balanced but the three factions play entirely differently and have access to quite different abilities. In mainline Pokemon video games restricted access to moves and abilties is a huge balancing factor. In MoBA's different roles are balanced by their access to different parts of toolkits. ADC's don't have AoE hard CC and supports (usually) lack consistent dps. I'm just drawing blanks on games I've played where every faction has access to every mode of attack and it's balanced/interesting. RTS games are the closest but in Age Of Empires 2 for example the factions basically feel identical to a layperson.