I've had a cube for a little over a year and it is pretty sweet! I've got all the ABU Duals, fetches and working on all the shocks so i understand how important fixing is.
Before I had all those lands in the cube i had all of the signets and we took them as high as the dual lands because we just needed fixing. They made for just awesome games that felt like common/uncommon speed with more powerful spells.
After I added all the duals the signets were being wheeled and wheeled and wheeled... so i just took them out.
Now i have been watching some MTGO cube streams and Jonnymagic was actually talking about taking an izzet signet p1p1! He later admitted that he was forcing storm so that made more sense. But p1p1??
One other thing... when you are picking your 23 cards how many signets/mana rocks do you let take up those slots before you start going to 16 land. Assuming all things are equal ie. you have a normal curve and arent mono 1&2 drop agro or 17 land + library control
Thanks i am oddly excited to see the responses to this post... (cube newbie nerd)
They're pretty good, but they're not overly powerful, and they're not cube staples. I think three of the four blue ones are good, but I'm not a fan of the rest.
Signets are good. As Wtwfl says, some are better then others. Which are better depends on which archetypes you support in your colours.
The thing you should be looking for is the correct number of mana rocks your cube needs. This depends on the number of archetypes that need mana rocks you support (wildfire, artifact.dec, non-green ramp,...) and on how you draft (Rochester, Booster, Sealed,...). Do not forget the non-signet mana rocks, which might be better for your cube.
This balance is important to have the right mix of aggro, midrange, control and fringe archetype decks. Too many mana rocks and your aggro might suffer, too little and certain decks will just stop working. It is sad to draft let's say a Wildfire deck and at the end of the draft only having one or two mana rocks. Your cool deck now is a slow,lumbering giant that is too top heavy.
Your question about how many mana rocks you need to go down to 16 land, is not easily answered. It really depends on the rest of the deck. How many 6+ drops do you run, how many Ponder-style cards do you have, does your deck run mana elves,how is your curve distributed,... I have had decks with 17 land and 5-6 mana rocks. This looks too much, but it allows you to really cast those fatties fast all the time. Once in a while you will get a dead draw with too little fuel and too much ramp.
I dislike the signets personally because it makes 3, 4, 5 color decks too prevalent. I like forcing people to make a choice in colors and archetype.
That said, I think at 2 signets you could cut a land? I'd rather just play the extra land though to increase my chances of hitting drops every turn, especially early. 2 mana rocks are much different from 0 and 1 mana artifacts in regards to replacing lands
Before I had all those lands in the cube i had all of the signets and we took them as high as the dual lands because we just needed fixing. They made for just awesome games that felt like common/uncommon speed with more powerful spells.
After I added all the duals the signets were being wheeled and wheeled and wheeled... so i just took them out.
This echoes my own experience with the signets in my pauper cube. They were high picks at first but declined in value as I acquired more mana-fixing lands. The lands were cheaper sources of fixing than the signets, and the mana acceleration isn't quite as valuable in pauper as it is in normal cubes simply because we have fewer high-cost bombs to ramp into. So they got cut to make room for the guildgates.
One other thing... when you are picking your 23 cards how many signets/mana rocks do you let take up those slots before you start going to 16 land. Assuming all things are equal ie. you have a normal curve and arent mono 1&2 drop agro or 17 land + library control
I've heard "2 mana rocks = 1 land" suggested as a rule of thumb.
They're pretty good, but they're not overly powerful, and they're not cube staples. I think three of the four blue ones are good, but I'm not a fan of the rest.
I personally run the cycle, but the decks that want signets really want them, so if you choose to go the "blue, but none others" route to open up your guild section, it is important to add in some of the rocks you might not be playing to pick up some of the slack.
IMO only Simic, Azorius and Dimir are playable. I like the idea to make mana rocks "colorless", though.
I find dimir, azorious, and izzet to be the playable ones, there is just so much ramp in green that you don't need to waste the simic slot on another mana rock.
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I personally run the cycle, but the decks that want signets really want them, so if you choose to go the "blue, but none others" route to open up your guild section, it is important to add in some of the rocks you might not be playing to pick up some of the slack.
That's what I did. I run more generic mana rocks, and less Signets.
that's a point of view I haven't considered. A lot of the cube guides I've read seem to warn against colour imbalance because it means that one or two colours become dominant choices for drafting (or am i just mis-interpreting them?)
How would you decide how to distribute signets and such?
Play the ones that are the best for your playgroup. I'd classify them in the guild section along with the other cards that support the color combination in question. Azorius Signet, for example, can go alongside your WU cards. But in the GW section, you can run something the guild may want more than the Signet.
Not all cards in the cycles are created equally. They're not balanced against each other when they're designed. Therefore, the shouldn't be selected equally when including them in the cube. We don't have to play Spawning Pool just because we want Treetop Village in the cube. You can choose a different black aligned land instead. We don't have to play Healing Salve and Giant Growth just because we want to play Dark Ritual, Ancestral Recall and Lightning Bolt. We don't want Incendiary Command in our cubes just because we play Cryptic Command and Profane Command. And so on.
Hell, I don't even run complete cycles of fixing lands (except for the amazing ones). Some colors like their fixing in different ways than others (aggro doesn't mind painlands, and control can afford ETBT fixing, etc).
Pick and choose the individual cards you want to run in the cube. You don't have to run full cycles to satisfy balance, because the cycles aren't balanced when they're designed.
For the record, I wasn't advocating that complete cycles should be used in all cases, just when it comes to mana fixing, but I do hear and understand what you are saying.
Just like other cycles though, not all cycles are created equal. One color combination might really love a Signet or Bounceland, whereas another one might not play a signet at all and might prefer a different kind of fixing.
I run the same number of land cards and non-land cards in each guild section, but I don't force complete cycles of anything.
I agree with wtwlf123 and others, SOME of the signets are really good, and some are eh at best and probably should be something else. I currently have Azorious, Izzet, Dimir and Orzhov signets in my cube and they all see play regularly. I originally thought they should all be used but have seen through experience that the more aggro colors don't have time for rocks that aren't at least Grim Monolith level.
For the record, I wasn't advocating that complete cycles should be used in all cases, just when it comes to mana fixing, but I do hear and understand what you are saying.
Even with fixing, it's often a bad idea to force complete cycles; Boros Garrison, for example, is infamous for being extremely bad in almost any WR cube deck. Similarly, in my experience signets in aggro colors (WR, GR, etc.) really only help slower decks splashing one of the colors (i.e. a Boros Signet in an Esper deck to help splash Fireball or something). You want a roughly equal amount of fixing available among each archetypes, but it'd be better to put in Battlefield Forge or something rather than try to force the Ravnica karoo cycle, for example. I have a peasant cube, where good fixing is hard to come by, and I just decided to fill the signet slots in aggro colors with more multicolored spells. In a regular cube, where more fixing is available, it'd probably be a good idea to just put in a different kind of fixing.
More on the original topic, I think that the blue signets are worth keeping in the cube (although the usual role of ramp in green makes Simic Signet worse than the others). And I usually count two signets (or other mana rocks) as a land in slower decks.
I am currently running the full set of ten in my Multiplayer cube.
As mentioned earlier, they encourage multi-colour decks and promote colour-fixing, which is exactly what I need in Multiplayer (where the decks are slower, the bombs need a lot of coloured mana, and colour-fixing is at a premium).
That said, my eyes are straying. Ten slots is a lot of space to devote in your artifact section.
Wtwlf, what did you drop the Signets for, out of morbid interest?
Why run a cycle of 10 fixers that are not only unplayable in aggro decks, but are specifically good against aggro decks. They can't be used by aggro, and they accelerate the fundamental turn for non-aggro decks.
Because if there are no mana rocks, some archetypes will just not work and be overrun by aggro. Artifact decks without manarocks, Widlfire decks without acceleration, non-green ramp decks. These decks will be way to slow to compete with aggro without mana rocks. I would say that a large number of midrange decks in our cube will just be too slow if we removed mana rocks.
I am not saying that the cube wouldn't work, just that the decks would have to change. Midrange would need to lower their curve a bit, we would have to include more cards like Pyroclasm to give slower decks a way to survive against fast aggro.
Note that we don't run 10 Signets though, but we do have 16 mana rocks (no counting ABU Moxen).
Signets are really terrible for the balance of your cube. They are fixing, true, but exclusively non-aggro fixing. I think all cubes that are trying to allow for aggro decks would be better off by replacing all signets with lands. The signets are some of the biggest contributors to the poor balance of the Wizards cube. Why run a cycle of 10 fixers that are not only unplayable in aggro decks, but are specifically good against aggro decks. They can't be used by aggro, and they accelerate the fundamental turn for non-aggro decks.
True, Signets don't work in aggro decks. They are good fixing + accleration only for slower decks. However, that does not mean that their presence in a cube harms the performance of aggro decks. If you support aggro well enough, the opposite is true, as Hicham noted: Without the possibility to cast a turn three Wrath or get your fatty out a turn earlier, slower decks are easy prey for a good aggro deck. Usman tested his cube with and without Signets and found that they don't suppress aggro decks at all.
I've been running all 10 Signets for five years now and we still love them. Some will see less play than others, but the difference is not that huge. Smaller cubes may get away with running less or with replacing them with other mana rocks (or even Moxen in a powered cube), but at 500+ cards, running all 10 doesn't seem excessive. I will keep running all 10 until a better alternative for the same cost comes along.
Signets are really terrible for the balance of your cube. They are fixing, true, but exclusively non-aggro fixing. I think all cubes that are trying to allow for aggro decks would be better off by replacing all signets with lands. The signets are some of the biggest contributors to the poor balance of the Wizards cube. Why run a cycle of 10 fixers that are not only unplayable in aggro decks, but are specifically good against aggro decks. They can't be used by aggro, and they accelerate the fundamental turn for non-aggro decks.
People really need to stop asking "is this card good in my cube" and start asking "is this card good for my cube". You're designing a limited environment. Take it to the extreme. Something like a 0-mana moat would perform well too, but that doesn't mean you should include it.
I run 0 signets, and find the environment to be so much better for it. Run Scars lands, run filter lands, run pain lands. Find fixing that all your decks want. Make more overlap between the archetypes. Make multi-color aggro much more accessible.
The reason people talk so much about the mono-red deck in the MTGO cube is because that cube doesn't (or, at least didn't, in earlier incarnations) have enough density of aggro fixing to support good multicolor aggro decks. Yes, it happens, but not as often as it should, and the metagame suffers.
Think of an environment where there's no fast fixing. Say, constructed Pauper. Yes, you get multicolor decks, but they're all control (excluding the broken mechanic affinity deck). They run off signets, off gates, of bouncelands. All the aggro decks are mono-color, because without the fast fixing, multicolor aggro isn't fast enough or consistent enough to keep up with the powerful stabilizing spells the control decks cast later in the game.
The MTGO cube originally didn't run the signets. They thought that the signets were too powerful. I read the Star City Article "Cube Holistic Wisdom" from a couple of week ago. The person tested his cube without bouncelands and signets in the deck. He found a good cube supports aggro even with the inclusion of these cards. His friends cubes could support aggro just fine with or without the signets and bouncelands. The MTGO cube didn't support aggro and that was the problem. The MTGO has some questionable cards that probably could be taken out of the cube and replaced.
They updated the MTGO for the holidays. I noticed they added the Power 9. They also added those signets and bouncelands. I read the press release.They made it sound like having bouncelands could push multiple people to draft multicolored midranged decks in the same draft and that could be unfun. They originally made the MTGO cube unpowered. They left the signets and Bouncelands out. I don't see how signets or bouncelands could be considered to be powerful? How can you compare them to cards like Moxes, Time Walk, Mana Drain, Moat, The Abyss, Nether Void, Mind Twist and Sol Ring?
Good question. I have no idea why the big unpowered version of the MTGO cube thought that Signets and bouncelands were too good, yet refused to give aggro all the tools it needs to win and the cube was light on disruption. And even the new cube list is excluding a lot of cards that could help combat the power-level of decks jammed with Moxen and Signets. I can't figure out what they're doing.
I think that in a world without signets and in a cube that supports aggro, the control decks become very hard to come by. It turns into what the MTGO pre holiday cube was, which was basically a derth of mono red decks + green ramp decks. Blue was generally the worst color (which isn't exactly a bad thing) and red/green were generally the best colors. I just think that as long as you keep in mind that you need to give the tools to each deck, you can have signets and still make sure that nasty 3 color control decks don't just ranch the aggro decks.
My cube has all the bounce lands and all the signets + full power and artifact mana and yet the best decks are still mono red aggro and some for of wildfire/armageddon aggro (and i don't even play the portal variants).
I can't find the Izzet pick, but just look at this booster:
Orzhov Signet is among only 3 potential cards that you can first pick (the others being Winter Orb for aggro and the fetch land to stay open), even if you are not forcing Storm.
The next pack is a lot more interesting
Here, Simic Signet is clearly not the pick if you are open to drafting other archetypes, but as a Storm player, there are only 3 other cards that might end up in your deck: a dual in the least interesting color combination and two filler cards in the form of Bolt and a bounce spell, both of which don't help you with your plan A, but only try to keep you alive for an additional turn, while the Signet helps you win faster and interacts favorably with the other cards in your deck.
Unless I decided to openly force something before the draft started, neither Signet would be anywhere near my top picks from either pack.
I've had a cube for a little over a year and it is pretty sweet! I've got all the ABU Duals, fetches and working on all the shocks so i understand how important fixing is.
Before I had all those lands in the cube i had all of the signets and we took them as high as the dual lands because we just needed fixing. They made for just awesome games that felt like common/uncommon speed with more powerful spells.
After I added all the duals the signets were being wheeled and wheeled and wheeled... so i just took them out.
Now i have been watching some MTGO cube streams and Jonnymagic was actually talking about taking an izzet signet p1p1! He later admitted that he was forcing storm so that made more sense. But p1p1??
One other thing... when you are picking your 23 cards how many signets/mana rocks do you let take up those slots before you start going to 16 land. Assuming all things are equal ie. you have a normal curve and arent mono 1&2 drop agro or 17 land + library control
Thanks i am oddly excited to see the responses to this post... (cube newbie nerd)
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The thing you should be looking for is the correct number of mana rocks your cube needs. This depends on the number of archetypes that need mana rocks you support (wildfire, artifact.dec, non-green ramp,...) and on how you draft (Rochester, Booster, Sealed,...). Do not forget the non-signet mana rocks, which might be better for your cube.
This balance is important to have the right mix of aggro, midrange, control and fringe archetype decks. Too many mana rocks and your aggro might suffer, too little and certain decks will just stop working. It is sad to draft let's say a Wildfire deck and at the end of the draft only having one or two mana rocks. Your cool deck now is a slow,lumbering giant that is too top heavy.
Your question about how many mana rocks you need to go down to 16 land, is not easily answered. It really depends on the rest of the deck. How many 6+ drops do you run, how many Ponder-style cards do you have, does your deck run mana elves,how is your curve distributed,... I have had decks with 17 land and 5-6 mana rocks. This looks too much, but it allows you to really cast those fatties fast all the time. Once in a while you will get a dead draw with too little fuel and too much ramp.
I feel compelled to repeat everything I hear
That said, I think at 2 signets you could cut a land? I'd rather just play the extra land though to increase my chances of hitting drops every turn, especially early. 2 mana rocks are much different from 0 and 1 mana artifacts in regards to replacing lands
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This echoes my own experience with the signets in my pauper cube. They were high picks at first but declined in value as I acquired more mana-fixing lands. The lands were cheaper sources of fixing than the signets, and the mana acceleration isn't quite as valuable in pauper as it is in normal cubes simply because we have fewer high-cost bombs to ramp into. So they got cut to make room for the guildgates.
I've heard "2 mana rocks = 1 land" suggested as a rule of thumb.
I personally run the cycle, but the decks that want signets really want them, so if you choose to go the "blue, but none others" route to open up your guild section, it is important to add in some of the rocks you might not be playing to pick up some of the slack.
I find dimir, azorious, and izzet to be the playable ones, there is just so much ramp in green that you don't need to waste the simic slot on another mana rock.
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That's what I did. I run more generic mana rocks, and less Signets.
I think Simic is the worst blue one. I think Izzet, Azorius and Dimir are the three good ones.
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My pauper cube uses them all, which I think is fine.
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No you don't. This isn't even remotely the case.
In fact, the opposite is true. Forcing complete cycles creates imbalance.
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Play the ones that are the best for your playgroup. I'd classify them in the guild section along with the other cards that support the color combination in question. Azorius Signet, for example, can go alongside your WU cards. But in the GW section, you can run something the guild may want more than the Signet.
Not all cards in the cycles are created equally. They're not balanced against each other when they're designed. Therefore, the shouldn't be selected equally when including them in the cube. We don't have to play Spawning Pool just because we want Treetop Village in the cube. You can choose a different black aligned land instead. We don't have to play Healing Salve and Giant Growth just because we want to play Dark Ritual, Ancestral Recall and Lightning Bolt. We don't want Incendiary Command in our cubes just because we play Cryptic Command and Profane Command. And so on.
Hell, I don't even run complete cycles of fixing lands (except for the amazing ones). Some colors like their fixing in different ways than others (aggro doesn't mind painlands, and control can afford ETBT fixing, etc).
Pick and choose the individual cards you want to run in the cube. You don't have to run full cycles to satisfy balance, because the cycles aren't balanced when they're designed.
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Just like other cycles though, not all cycles are created equal. One color combination might really love a Signet or Bounceland, whereas another one might not play a signet at all and might prefer a different kind of fixing.
I run the same number of land cards and non-land cards in each guild section, but I don't force complete cycles of anything.
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Even with fixing, it's often a bad idea to force complete cycles; Boros Garrison, for example, is infamous for being extremely bad in almost any WR cube deck. Similarly, in my experience signets in aggro colors (WR, GR, etc.) really only help slower decks splashing one of the colors (i.e. a Boros Signet in an Esper deck to help splash Fireball or something). You want a roughly equal amount of fixing available among each archetypes, but it'd be better to put in Battlefield Forge or something rather than try to force the Ravnica karoo cycle, for example. I have a peasant cube, where good fixing is hard to come by, and I just decided to fill the signet slots in aggro colors with more multicolored spells. In a regular cube, where more fixing is available, it'd probably be a good idea to just put in a different kind of fixing.
More on the original topic, I think that the blue signets are worth keeping in the cube (although the usual role of ramp in green makes Simic Signet worse than the others). And I usually count two signets (or other mana rocks) as a land in slower decks.
As mentioned earlier, they encourage multi-colour decks and promote colour-fixing, which is exactly what I need in Multiplayer (where the decks are slower, the bombs need a lot of coloured mana, and colour-fixing is at a premium).
That said, my eyes are straying. Ten slots is a lot of space to devote in your artifact section.
Wtwlf, what did you drop the Signets for, out of morbid interest?
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Because if there are no mana rocks, some archetypes will just not work and be overrun by aggro. Artifact decks without manarocks, Widlfire decks without acceleration, non-green ramp decks. These decks will be way to slow to compete with aggro without mana rocks. I would say that a large number of midrange decks in our cube will just be too slow if we removed mana rocks.
I am not saying that the cube wouldn't work, just that the decks would have to change. Midrange would need to lower their curve a bit, we would have to include more cards like Pyroclasm to give slower decks a way to survive against fast aggro.
Note that we don't run 10 Signets though, but we do have 16 mana rocks (no counting ABU Moxen).
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True, Signets don't work in aggro decks. They are good fixing + accleration only for slower decks. However, that does not mean that their presence in a cube harms the performance of aggro decks. If you support aggro well enough, the opposite is true, as Hicham noted: Without the possibility to cast a turn three Wrath or get your fatty out a turn earlier, slower decks are easy prey for a good aggro deck. Usman tested his cube with and without Signets and found that they don't suppress aggro decks at all.
I've been running all 10 Signets for five years now and we still love them. Some will see less play than others, but the difference is not that huge. Smaller cubes may get away with running less or with replacing them with other mana rocks (or even Moxen in a powered cube), but at 500+ cards, running all 10 doesn't seem excessive. I will keep running all 10 until a better alternative for the same cost comes along.
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They updated the MTGO for the holidays. I noticed they added the Power 9. They also added those signets and bouncelands. I read the press release.They made it sound like having bouncelands could push multiple people to draft multicolored midranged decks in the same draft and that could be unfun. They originally made the MTGO cube unpowered. They left the signets and Bouncelands out. I don't see how signets or bouncelands could be considered to be powerful? How can you compare them to cards like Moxes, Time Walk, Mana Drain, Moat, The Abyss, Nether Void, Mind Twist and Sol Ring?
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My cube has all the bounce lands and all the signets + full power and artifact mana and yet the best decks are still mono red aggro and some for of wildfire/armageddon aggro (and i don't even play the portal variants).
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Unless I decided to openly force something before the draft started, neither Signet would be anywhere near my top picks from either pack.
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Agreed; I see jitte and abandon every other archetype I may have wanted to force, unless that archetype is "play with creatures".
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Jitte would have gone great with my P1P1 of Figure of Destiny. Or even Remand.
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