So I've got a cube I'm pretty happy with. It's got some great niche archetypes and you can draft all sorts of cool decks. Lately, though, things have been getting pretty durdly, so I doubled down on red aggro and made burn good again after years of trimming burn spells here and there. Now we pretty regularly have a mono red or close to it drafter keeping people honest.
The problem, though, is that red is the only color I can get people to do that in. Isamaru and friends are almost always last picks. White has a lot of tokens tools, but also a lot of good aggro tools too, and I think the tools for aggro are available, although maybe I'm wrong. It's just that my playgroup prefers to play midrange. Black aggro cards only get played when someone goes into pox.
So what to do? Keep fighting human nature and try to find ways to make people play white weenie and black aggro? Give up entirely and make the few aggro drafters we have who can't be as regular as everyone else less interested in coming? Find some way to entice people into aggro decks?
We're a spikey bunch of legacy players, so aggro doesn't really exist in our format of choice. How can I convince people it's good here, or should I just give up?
^ This is the opposite of most arguments on this board, which say that winning with a particular decktype will motivate people to play with it more, not less.
1. Encourage people to draft aggro by making it stronger. I would focus on just a few types of aggro, cut some weaker aggro themes to bolster a select few. Red goes without saying, and I think white weenie or stompy would be good. And as legacy players you might as a group appreciate a large amount of fish creatures to make a cool aggro control deck. I wouldn't worry about supporting things like mono black aggro.
2. Don't worry about supporting aggro. If everyone in your group prefers midrange and control strategies, then you can make your cube be about that, it's totally fine. It's your cube and you can do what you want with it.
^ This is the opposite of most arguments on this board, which say that winning with a particular decktype will motivate people to play with it more, not less.
That was the opposite of what we experienced. Midrange heavy cubes tend to be dominated by control decks. When players are tired of building midrange because it loses to control, they can either build control themselves, or try to topple the dominant decktype. Our drafters tend to gravitate towards the latter. So aggro gets more heavily drafted, which encourages people to play midrange decks to beat aggro, and the cycle flows on. There's only so much control to go around. So looking for an underdrafted avenue to beat control is a more winning strategy than playing from a diluted control pool yourself.
Now when the goal is to show players that an underdrafted card/strategy can be viable when they think it stinks, piloting it to victory over and over is the best way to teach the lesson. Maybe that's what you meant and I just misunderstood.
The problem, though, is that red is the only color I can get people to do that in. Isamaru and friends are almost always last picks. White has a lot of tokens tools, but also a lot of good aggro tools too, and I think the tools for aggro are available, although maybe I'm wrong. It's just that my playgroup prefers to play midrange. Black aggro cards only get played when someone goes into pox.
So what to do? Keep fighting human nature and try to find ways to make people play white weenie and black aggro? Give up entirely and make the few aggro drafters we have who can't be as regular as everyone else less interested in coming? Find some way to entice people into aggro decks?
We're a spikey bunch of legacy players, so aggro doesn't really exist in our format of choice. How can I convince people it's good here, or should I just give up?
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1. Encourage people to draft aggro by making it stronger. I would focus on just a few types of aggro, cut some weaker aggro themes to bolster a select few. Red goes without saying, and I think white weenie or stompy would be good. And as legacy players you might as a group appreciate a large amount of fish creatures to make a cool aggro control deck. I wouldn't worry about supporting things like mono black aggro.
2. Don't worry about supporting aggro. If everyone in your group prefers midrange and control strategies, then you can make your cube be about that, it's totally fine. It's your cube and you can do what you want with it.
That was the opposite of what we experienced. Midrange heavy cubes tend to be dominated by control decks. When players are tired of building midrange because it loses to control, they can either build control themselves, or try to topple the dominant decktype. Our drafters tend to gravitate towards the latter. So aggro gets more heavily drafted, which encourages people to play midrange decks to beat aggro, and the cycle flows on. There's only so much control to go around. So looking for an underdrafted avenue to beat control is a more winning strategy than playing from a diluted control pool yourself.
Now when the goal is to show players that an underdrafted card/strategy can be viable when they think it stinks, piloting it to victory over and over is the best way to teach the lesson. Maybe that's what you meant and I just misunderstood.
My 630 Card Powered Cube
My Article - "Cube Design Philosophy"
My Article - "Mana Short: A study in limited resource management."
My 50th Set (P)review - Discusses my top 20 Cube cards from OTJ!