The Khans thread got me thinking we should probably have a separate discussion about this.
For me, it looks like this:
Best U big gap G R = B W Worst
My powered 360 cube is combo heavy, with a lot of storm support. Blue is the obvious giant standout, but some people may be surprised to see green as our next best color. Not only is it extremely good in combo decks (most of the mana-doublers like Dictate of Karametra, Mirari's Wake, Heartbeat of Spring, etc are green), but it has one of the best decks in the super-ramp archetype which can be exceptional in our drafts.
White is a great aggro and control color, but really lacks a lot of the raw power the other colors have access to. Our white decks can have giant problems with crazy big plays that the opponent throw out, whether it's Flash -> Worldspine Wurm, or ritual->ritual->past in flames or yawg will->tutor->storm spell, etc. It doesn't help that the white aggressive decks are only on par with the red and black ones.
How do you rank the power level of each of the colors in your cube, and why?
Blue is the best color. It has the deepest shelf of the best cards. Counters are powerful in the cube, bounce and draw are universally valuable, and there's excellent creatures and creature theft spells that push it over the top.
I think White is next best. Its top-tier cards are deeper and more powerful than the remaining colors, and it has a strong suite of game-ending spells. The creature quality is through the roof, and it has the best removal suite out of any of the colors.
The other three colors are probably all tied. They're all good and have their advantages and disadvantages over each other. But I'll rank them with my closest guess if I had to put one over the next.
Black has a really strong set of top cards; some of the best in the cube. But once the shelf starts to drop, it drops pretty fast. There's great disruption, solid removal, and a handful of really nasty creatures to draft. And a bunch of cards that are excellent P1P1-quality cards, which helps spark interest in drafting the color.
Red doesn't have a ton of P1P1 bombs, but it does have a lot of cards that are really good picks, even early. Red is likely the best aggro color, and it also plays well in control and can build interesting and fun Wildfire type decks that make a grip of symmetrical effects asymmetrical in your favor. Burn is universally valuable as removal, reach and planeswalker bullets, so red's has potential to contribute to any and all winning decks, regardless of theater.
Green is the best midrange color. It has a wealth of good ramp and mana-fixing cards and a strong midgame with powerful medium costed creatures and spells. It probably has the smallest number of cards that I'd really be happy taking P1P1 though (albeit it's close to red in that category), and usually plays more of a support role for any color it's paired with. Still a great color and contributes to a lot of draft-winning decks, but I think it's probably the worst of the colors if I had to pick one. Perhaps it's that green doesn't perform well against blue, and blue is the color to beat in the cube. That may impact how people view it. Maybe the mentality is: "If I can't beat blue, I'm gonna be playing blue" ...or something like that. Funny how green pairs so wonderfully with blue though; UG midrange is one of the best decks out there.
Blue is clearly the most powerful. It has the most brokenly good cards (Recall, Time Walk, Tinker, Mana Drain, great Planeswalkers), many of them splashable too. It is the cornerstone of one of the most powerful archetypes in our cube: UW control. And it also does great work in many other archetypes: artifact, tempo, counter-burn, or just as a splash for crazy good cards in any deck. Really, the only "problem" of blue is that often too many player get pulled into it by great early picks, and then the power is divided among them. You are rarely alone drafting blue.
White is second, for pretty much the same reasons. It has great cards measured by raw power (Balance, Armageddon, and the best spot and mass removal, great Planeswalkers) and it does different archetypes really well. It's amazing in control and aggro, and good in midrange too.
The rest is not so clear cut anymore. Next is probably black.
Black also has some of the most powerful cards (Mind Twist, Recurring Nightmare, and tutors) but we somehow often don't manage to build really strong archetypes with black. The best are reanimator (with Tinker, Sneak Attack or Ramp as a backup plan) and Pox/Stack/Braids. But black aggro never really works well for us, I find it much worse than red or white in that role. And a bit surprisingly, black is also not as good in control as blue or white are.
Green is solid but unexciting. Lots of good cards for midrange good stuff decks, but it lacks game winning cards (just Survival of the Fittest and the Garruks maybe). Ramp works, but usually not as well as cheat-into-play decks (Tinker/Reanimate). Green aggro is only half-baked in our cube, it it has no place in control.
Red is really strong in aggro, but sadly doesn't do so much else in our cube. It only plays a support role in control. The problem of red is that there are very few cards that actually make me want to play it, besides the aggro all-stars Vortex and Guide. There's Sneak Attack and Wildfire, but both suffer from not having much redundancy (we have yet to get a Burning of Xinye - yay for the reprint!)
Under the context of my cube it goes U > W >>> B > G > R.
360 unpowered with no fetches or swords so I imagine aggressive strategies suffer because of that. Mana fixing comes in two cycles (M10 and Innistrad taplands, Shocks).
Blue fits into just about everything and even without things like Time Walk or Ancestral Recall, it's still the strongest color here. My playgroup just naturally gravitates towards control play as well so there is some bias here.
White is nearly as flexible and has strong cards in just about everything. Absurd creature selection at all parts of the curve and the best removal.
Black has a lot of cards people like to P1P1 but the depth of the color isn't nearly as good as white's or blue's.
Green often has a problem where people draw the wrong half of their deck. Ramping sometimes goes nowhere. Interestingly enough, it seems like green creatures aren't that impressive which is strange since green is supposed to be the color of good creatures.
Red is my cube is pretty linear and as mentioned before, probably loses some effectiveness in this environment since it is a primarily aggressive strategy. My playgroup also seems pretty bad at drafting and playing aggressive decks in general. Balancing the cube is still a work in progress here.
My Cube runs closer to wtwlf's. I'd likely rate it something like this
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Except the gap between and is rather small, followed by a large drop before you reach , and then another moderate sized gap between and . and are pretty much in the same spot, with being just a little better defined.
I feel like W and U can do whatever they want and BRG are limited to only doing specific things. I'd like to see at least Green become a lot more defined in upcoming sets and seeing Black get more of a true identity would be better, too.
For me, it looks like this:
Best
U
big gap
G
R = B
W
Worst
My powered 360 cube is combo heavy, with a lot of storm support. Blue is the obvious giant standout, but some people may be surprised to see green as our next best color. Not only is it extremely good in combo decks (most of the mana-doublers like Dictate of Karametra, Mirari's Wake, Heartbeat of Spring, etc are green), but it has one of the best decks in the super-ramp archetype which can be exceptional in our drafts.
White is a great aggro and control color, but really lacks a lot of the raw power the other colors have access to. Our white decks can have giant problems with crazy big plays that the opponent throw out, whether it's Flash -> Worldspine Wurm, or ritual->ritual->past in flames or yawg will->tutor->storm spell, etc. It doesn't help that the white aggressive decks are only on par with the red and black ones.
How do you rank the power level of each of the colors in your cube, and why?
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B
W ~= R
But that's because it's an EDH Cube, and that's very much how the colors play out in EDH.
Currently Playing:
Legacy: Something U/W Controlish
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2 W
5 B
5 R
5 G
Blue is the best color. It has the deepest shelf of the best cards. Counters are powerful in the cube, bounce and draw are universally valuable, and there's excellent creatures and creature theft spells that push it over the top.
I think White is next best. Its top-tier cards are deeper and more powerful than the remaining colors, and it has a strong suite of game-ending spells. The creature quality is through the roof, and it has the best removal suite out of any of the colors.
The other three colors are probably all tied. They're all good and have their advantages and disadvantages over each other. But I'll rank them with my closest guess if I had to put one over the next.
Black has a really strong set of top cards; some of the best in the cube. But once the shelf starts to drop, it drops pretty fast. There's great disruption, solid removal, and a handful of really nasty creatures to draft. And a bunch of cards that are excellent P1P1-quality cards, which helps spark interest in drafting the color.
Red doesn't have a ton of P1P1 bombs, but it does have a lot of cards that are really good picks, even early. Red is likely the best aggro color, and it also plays well in control and can build interesting and fun Wildfire type decks that make a grip of symmetrical effects asymmetrical in your favor. Burn is universally valuable as removal, reach and planeswalker bullets, so red's has potential to contribute to any and all winning decks, regardless of theater.
Green is the best midrange color. It has a wealth of good ramp and mana-fixing cards and a strong midgame with powerful medium costed creatures and spells. It probably has the smallest number of cards that I'd really be happy taking P1P1 though (albeit it's close to red in that category), and usually plays more of a support role for any color it's paired with. Still a great color and contributes to a lot of draft-winning decks, but I think it's probably the worst of the colors if I had to pick one. Perhaps it's that green doesn't perform well against blue, and blue is the color to beat in the cube. That may impact how people view it. Maybe the mentality is: "If I can't beat blue, I'm gonna be playing blue" ...or something like that. Funny how green pairs so wonderfully with blue though; UG midrange is one of the best decks out there.
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In our cube the colors look like this:
Blue is clearly the most powerful. It has the most brokenly good cards (Recall, Time Walk, Tinker, Mana Drain, great Planeswalkers), many of them splashable too. It is the cornerstone of one of the most powerful archetypes in our cube: UW control. And it also does great work in many other archetypes: artifact, tempo, counter-burn, or just as a splash for crazy good cards in any deck. Really, the only "problem" of blue is that often too many player get pulled into it by great early picks, and then the power is divided among them. You are rarely alone drafting blue.
White is second, for pretty much the same reasons. It has great cards measured by raw power (Balance, Armageddon, and the best spot and mass removal, great Planeswalkers) and it does different archetypes really well. It's amazing in control and aggro, and good in midrange too.
The rest is not so clear cut anymore. Next is probably black.
Black also has some of the most powerful cards (Mind Twist, Recurring Nightmare, and tutors) but we somehow often don't manage to build really strong archetypes with black. The best are reanimator (with Tinker, Sneak Attack or Ramp as a backup plan) and Pox/Stack/Braids. But black aggro never really works well for us, I find it much worse than red or white in that role. And a bit surprisingly, black is also not as good in control as blue or white are.
Green is solid but unexciting. Lots of good cards for midrange good stuff decks, but it lacks game winning cards (just Survival of the Fittest and the Garruks maybe). Ramp works, but usually not as well as cheat-into-play decks (Tinker/Reanimate). Green aggro is only half-baked in our cube, it it has no place in control.
Red is really strong in aggro, but sadly doesn't do so much else in our cube. It only plays a support role in control. The problem of red is that there are very few cards that actually make me want to play it, besides the aggro all-stars Vortex and Guide. There's Sneak Attack and Wildfire, but both suffer from not having much redundancy (we have yet to get a Burning of Xinye - yay for the reprint!)
360 unpowered with no fetches or swords so I imagine aggressive strategies suffer because of that. Mana fixing comes in two cycles (M10 and Innistrad taplands, Shocks).
Blue fits into just about everything and even without things like Time Walk or Ancestral Recall, it's still the strongest color here. My playgroup just naturally gravitates towards control play as well so there is some bias here.
White is nearly as flexible and has strong cards in just about everything. Absurd creature selection at all parts of the curve and the best removal.
Black has a lot of cards people like to P1P1 but the depth of the color isn't nearly as good as white's or blue's.
Green often has a problem where people draw the wrong half of their deck. Ramping sometimes goes nowhere. Interestingly enough, it seems like green creatures aren't that impressive which is strange since green is supposed to be the color of good creatures.
Red is my cube is pretty linear and as mentioned before, probably loses some effectiveness in this environment since it is a primarily aggressive strategy. My playgroup also seems pretty bad at drafting and playing aggressive decks in general. Balancing the cube is still a work in progress here.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Except the gap between and is rather small, followed by a large drop before you reach , and then another moderate sized gap between and . and are pretty much in the same spot, with being just a little better defined.
I feel like W and U can do whatever they want and BRG are limited to only doing specific things. I'd like to see at least Green become a lot more defined in upcoming sets and seeing Black get more of a true identity would be better, too.