MTG Salvation

Hi,

I have this idea to make a cube where everything costs 6 mana or more. I want a large percentage of the cube to be lands. There would be manlands, lands that make tokens, storage lands (ramp), mana fixing lands, and lands with interesting activated abilities.

I would have cards with suspend, delve, morph, alternate casting costs, cost reduction, etc, but everything would have CMC 6 or more. I am not sure how I chose 6, but I like it, since 5+ would force me to get Force of Will. It is not intended to be a powerful cube, but to lead to unique drafting strategies. For example, a strategy could be to get creatures with Cycling to power out Avatar of Woe, Karador, Ghost Chieftain, Nemesis of Mortals and delve cards as early as possible. I want another strategy to be 38 lands, Primeval Titan and Collective Blessing, where the lands are manlands and things like Springjack Pasture and Kher Keep.

I have started working on it, but I would really appreciate any resources that could help me design this. I can't find any such cubes online. Can anybody link something similar?

Some questions I have, based on your experience and instincts:
- Should the strategies be restricted to specific color combinations? I feel that with so many lands, and such a high curve, there would not be much stopping people from playing 5 colors all the time. I don't know if people would be happy or unhappy with this.
- Would you be interested in playing such a cube? Do you think it would get boring quickly?
- What classical archetypes would you like to be able to draft? Mill, Control, reanimator, burn, combo? I will have some unique archetypes as the main feature, but I want to accommodate people's preferred strategies.

This is definintely an interesting idea. I think CMC 6 is "particularly high" and very much restricts your card pool.

Restrition is not necessarily a bad thing, in fact, designers (particularly MaRo, I think?) have suggested that restriction makes things more interesting! Now, the restriction you're imposing is ultimately strictly on you as the cube designer (and those that help you work on the cube, like the community here) more than it is a restriction on your players. Whether or not your format is engaging will ultimately depend on the results of your efforts as a designer. (It'll also depend on your players to a pretty large extent, but the "play" will not exist without the cube.)

My suggestion is to look into cards at CMC 6+ with alternate casting costs and/or from-hand abilities (like Cycling and Transmute) and/or morph. See how many cards "like that" you find and consider how big your cube is going to be. You might find you only have ~3-6 cards "worth anything" for each color. If that's the case, maybe you should look into including cards at CMC 5. Again, maybe you'll then find you want to also include cards at CMC 4.

Assuming you make it all the way to CMC 4, I think you'll be at a happy medium between your "obtuse" idea (and, again, there's nothing wrong with the idea, it's just a big restriction) and kitchen table Magic.

I like the idea, but like Ennex said, I dunno how good of an idea it is until I see what it looks like in practice!

I think you're making a fundamental mistake by stating that setting your CMC restriction at 5 requires you to get Force of Will. It's your cube. The minimum CMC can and should be set based on your idea of what will make a fun format. I literally wouldn't even start this project until you get over this Force of Will roadblock that you set for yourself. As others have said, see what's out there first and the let available card pool dictate the parameters to you.

I can't imagine a player saying to you, "Well this $100 card (which isn't even bonkers in cube) isn't in your pool, so this cube stinks."

All of that soapboxing aside, I think the idea is really cool and I'd love to hear about how it turns out. Have you thought about how to handle split cards? (That is, would you include them based on the rule that their converted mana cost is X+Y as far as effects like Dark Confidant is concerned, or exclude them because they typically contain spells that can be hardcast for less than 6 mana?)

Quote from DSF »

I think you're making a fundamental mistake by stating that setting your CMC restriction at 5 requires you to get Force of Will. It's your cube. The minimum CMC can and should be set based on your idea of what will make a fun format. I literally wouldn't even start this project until you get over this Force of Will roadblock that you set for yourself. As others have said, see what's out there first and the let available card pool dictate the parameters to you.

I can't imagine a player saying to you, "Well this $100 card (which isn't even bonkers in cube) isn't in your pool, so this cube stinks."

All of that soapboxing aside, I think the idea is really cool and I'd love to hear about how it turns out. Have you thought about how to handle split cards? (That is, would you include them based on the rule that their converted mana cost is X+Y as far as effects like Dark Confidant is concerned, or exclude them because they typically contain spells that can be hardcast for less than 6 mana?)

I don't remember why I chose 6, but I've been compiling a list of cards to work with it and running some test drafts online to get a feel for it. I mentioned Force more as a joke reason not to go to 5. Split cards are a good question. For the moment, I am steering clear of them.

My initial tests suggested the following strategies, if you are interested (note that I have not been able to compare the power levels, I am just trying to have the right proportions of cards):
- a 30 land deck with Primeval Titan, Borborygmos Enraged and Rampaging Baloths. Manlands and Dark Depths + Thespian's Stage seem to make the deck pretty fun. I need to determine if the strategy is too powerful, as it is easy to build (pick lands and a few key cards).
- BR burn, splashing Blue or White. Melek, Izzet Paragon is a one-shot with Sorin's Vengeance or Searing Wind. This deck actually seems too efficient, but I am hoping to bring the others up to speed.
- Suspend + Jokulhaups and storm cards. This is actually very fun to pull off. Not very many storm cards at 6CMC+, but if you can cast a card with suspend and follow up with Dragonstorm, it could be fun. I need to play with the numbers to make this work better.
- Bant Auras - Turns out all those expensive creatures that can cheat Eldrazi Conscription and friends into play cost 6 or more. I'm looking to add some more Auras to make this easier to pull off.
- Dragons or Goodstuff: There are a lot of dragons, and there are a lot of good creatures. I want to push people towards making unique decks over goodstuff, so I think I need to cut back on good cards that do not contribute specifically to any strategies.
- Control: I don't know if I want a separate control strategy, but this seems to overlap a lot with the suspend + Jokulhaps strategy. There are a lot of boardwipes, which I think is necessary.
- Polymorph: So, there are two polymorph cards I found, and with the right lands, I can see a turn 4 Emrakul as a viable strategy. The shell is a control shell, so I like that there are different possible control decks with cool win conditions.

Now, I have a mess on my hands with the graveyard based decks. There are a lot of white cards that want to cheat artifacts and enchantments into play from the graveyard, but I am finding almost zero ways to enable this. There are only a handful of ways to put things into your graveyard that cost 6 or more... basically, Abomination of Gudul is good, Tasigur, the Golden Fang, and Deadbridge Chant... and then a few cards that allow you to discard creatures for a benefit.

I don't want a mill strategy, so I have to be careful... but Thassa's Bounty might make the cube to enable non-creature reanimator strategies. Right now, all of my graveyard decks are competing for the same resources.

Storage lands are better than I imagined, even the really old bad ones. I think the correct number of lands will be about 20 (excepting the lands deck), plus a few landcyclers.


I will be tuning the online version I've been working on, and I'll post a link when I get a better idea of what needs to be fixed. For now, I could see there being a problem if two people decided on a similar strategy, as there isn't enough redundancy for some of the strategies.


I don't think I want to go to 5 mana, or less, but I will look at the cards that would be gained to see if it could help my current problems. Just looking through the cards starting with A on gatherer, I have seen 2 cards that may help my graveyard woes.

Quote from hopefulhawkeye »

Don't games just become about who hits lands and ramps up faster? No aggro at all, just fatties all around, and at least 70% fewer cards to select from. I definitely think this is an original approach, but perhaps not the most practical.

Thank you for your question. I really don't want it to boil down to who can slam down the most fatties.
Aggro strategies would include man-lands, morphs and pitch spells. The polymorph deck is interesting, as you can push out a turn 5 Emrakul. The idea would be to create a unique drafting and deckbuilding experience. By limiting the number of powerful fatties and focusing on synergy, it won't be all about playing as many fatties as possible. That's the idea anyway. I've hit a bit of a wall as a bunch of my desired strategies prioritize the same cards. I need to spend a lot of time on this, but I don't quite have the time right now.

My big problem right now is finding ways to put cards into your graveyard. My restrictions are: It can't only put creatures in the yard; it can't mill your opponents effectively.

I have started perusing the 5CMC cards to see if there are any cards that solve the problem.

What you call aggro strategy for this cube, will have to be balanced carefully. I think the cheaper cards will be so important, so powerful that they will unbalance the cube. Don't underestimate how slow 6 mana is. You need to draw enough lands and you need to go through five turns of 'land, go'.

I hope this works out for you. Keep us up to date.

What about X spells? It's cheating to an extent, but I think it'd give your cube more ways to balance/be interactive for the first several turns while not entirely going against the spirit of the cube.

Quote from Leelue »

What about X spells? It's cheating to an extent, but I think it'd give your cube more ways to balance/be interactive for the first several turns while not entirely going against the spirit of the cube.

A good question that I thought about. I think for things like X spells and split spells, it will be something I can add in later to balance the cube. I wouldn't want a lot of these spells so it would help to know which strategies need more powerful cards.

Why don't you just have every player start with six basic lands in play of their choosing?
Then it's not just always six turns of land-go.

Quote from Volcanon »

Why don't you just have every player start with six basic lands in play of their choosing?
Then it's not just always six turns of land-go.

Because I want different strategies that go off in different ways. I don't want people going land-go for 5 turns. I want people attacking with Mutavault and suspending fatties and playing morphs and paying alternate costs. I want storage lands to power out creatures early and people polymorphing Kobold tokens into Emrakuls on turn 5.

Ideally, every deck will have things to do before turn 6, and if you draft synergistically, you can hopefully do some powerful things.