A little back story:
I've played on and off since Mirage.
I've played every format and always had the worst luck... between theft, house fires, random bannings, my collection would grow and then become useless. I'd eventually rebuild and start again and again.
The price of cards nowadays is higher than ever and I'll never be able to recreate the collections I've lost.
Back in the day I used to play a format called "5-color" for ante. This format required massive 300 card decks, 40 duals, 20 fetches, power, contract from below,chaos orb, absolutely ridiculous rules council killed this format dead with absurd bans. This was by far the most competitively cutthroat format ever to exist and never again will such an opulent and elitist situation occur within the MTG community.
Briefly thereafter was a format called "Centurion" that was originally designed by Shaun C******* in Colorado. To my knowledge, this format was only popular in a few regions especially around Northern California like Superstars in Cupertino (later known as Channel Fireball in San Jose) and Eudaimonia in Berkeley. The greater bay area. The few people who were there might remember this format as the most accessible, customizable, and addictive ever. The rules were simple enough but at the time word of mouth only went so far (social media as we know it today did not exist, we had MySpace and like instant messaging)
Eventually my play group broke this format wide open and the meta ate itself.
Why was that so long winded? Idk, oldtimeritus?
Nowadays, I only play limited, commander, and cube. I've bought every commander precon, I've built a particularly nasty EDH that people do not like to sit across from, and I've been winning drafts now at a rate I've never achieved in all my years. I'm conditioned to crazy plays, dodging silver bullets, and miseing all the tings. I'd say that I'm in my prime today as far as play goes.
A few problems plague my joy:
I can't spend on cards like I used to.
I play way better than my wife and many locals.
My favorite cards are too old.
My favorite formats are extinct.
My collection is small, and growing slower than any other period in my life.
My goals for this new cube:
To create a unique experience cheaply
To teach more people how to play casually
To utilize my favorite cards
To offer a challenge to players at all skill levels
The competitive inner spike ruined Centurion. The price to enter ruined 5-color. The small card pools bore me in constructed.
Here's the gimmick:
No lands.
Like the Centurion rules, every deck will be 5-color, and all land are removed from the environment.
On your turn, during your main phase if the stack is clear; as a special action, you may play any card in your hand as a land. Any land taps for one mana of any of its colors.
At no time is a card in any zone except for the battlefield considered a land card. No fetching, etc
Monocolored cards are considered to be basic lands of whatever type produces that color. This is often relevant for domain effects and several other silly reasons.
Gold cards are considered to be nonbasic lands with no type.
For the purposes of Snow mana, affinity, and the new cards that care about colorless cards you play as lands that are snow, artifacts, or devoid will have those properties/super types.
Cards like Goblin Charbelcher
obviously banned.
After you draft this cube, there doesn't need to be any deck construction. Every card will automatically be playable.
Cramming many gold cards means never having to prioritize fixing, you can always just take the card you like and automatically be able to cast it in any deck.
Cards you'll finally get to play in your deck:
Nephilim (worst case scenario great lands)
Other reject rares likeAtogatog
Synergies that you have collecting dust like all those one of Slivers from random packs over the years
Sunburst jank
Domain jank
Converge jank
Really lots of stuff becomes great.
Here's a sample pack from my first version of this cube, I'll have a full list up soon.
I built my first version of this cube using only cards I have on hand that I can't really use anyplace else.
There's a few cards that I know that I want to acquire. Some of my favorites like Chaos Orb and Yet Another Aether Vortex plus a lot of stuff that could be useful maybe but could just be 3,4, or 5 color lands likeCromat and some awesome split cards I'm missing like Hit//Run.
I think that this cube will be very random, fun, but also skill intensive. I want every thing to give lots of options like charms and I want the format to have a lot of nuance like playing a huge creature as a land early, sacrificing it later to reanimate, or bouncing a huge spell back to your hand to cast it in the late game.
Let me know if this is something you would be interested in trying. Maybe tell me what you'd first pick from the sample pack.
The only advice I can give comes from my experience playing Mental Magic (similar rules, with the lands), and a big issue is the lack of motivation to play high cost cards. Imagine being able to play aggro and never draw a 5th land? Slower decks are going to need serious motivation to compete with such consistency.
Yeah, my cube will definitely support aggro as the premier wincon, especially with the inclusion of Armageddon and Ravages of War but I think we are underestimating the power of control when you always hit your land drops, always have access to spot removal, always have access to the best counters, and sweepers in every color. Plus any draw spells. Goblin Guide is good, but won't go the distance in a format with missteps, deed, etc. If you turn one goblin guide, but your opponent turn 1 innocent blood, or turn two watchwolf even, but you have spellsnare I mean, I expect every match up will be as back and forth as it gets. Something to consider is every deck has access to Goblin Guide, or Figure of Destiny, or Black Vise, or Ivory tower, or Swords to plowshares, or lightning bolt. So yes, first person to stick a threat will get ahead, but if you only draft low cmc dudes you will lose to a savage twister and a fusion elemental.
Iirc mental magic makes every land a 5 color land. This will be a little less efficient than that.
So of course you can play 1 dude, then 2, and maybe burn a blocker, and maybe equip a sword, but they can Orim's Thunder or whatever and immediately catch up.
When my project is complete I don't expect threat, answer, threat, answer to be enough. It'll come down to tempo, 2:1, tempo, 2:1. Which is a much more interesting dynamic.
I've been playing a lot of cube lately and shaping this format from that and I feel like drafting say, the holiday mtgo cube or more recently the legacy cube waiting for the new standard you see disciplined picks leading to the WU control, or the Splinter twin set up, or the Reanimate a Gristlebrand, or the sneak /show an eldrazi.
The difference here, is that any deck could literally pack all the tricks, and it boils down to what you waste as a land each turn, and how you with your favorite cards answer
, any particular board state.
I think you're overestimating the degree to which you will "always" have counters, spot removal, etc.
If I understand your cube correctly everyone will still have to go through the draft process, so even though you can choose each turn which card to dump as a land, you still have decide which cards are going to make your pool. It think there's at least a little bit of the potential for the opposite problem - you will draft 45 cards and only be able to cut 5, which means that decks are going to be inherently less focused. Your "control" deck will end up with some random aggro 1-drops that tabled, or some combo card that you're missing the other pieces for. On the flip side, your Mardu aggro deck will be stuck with a copy of Gigantoplasm or somesuch, which not only doesn't fit the deck's plan, it also doesn't tap for a color mana that's of any use to the aggro deck. It's essentially an auto-mulligan.
I actually think aggro being the premier wincon is not going to pan out. It's going to become a more midrange-to-control 5C slugfest, kind of like the Magic Online Legendary Cube. That's fine if it's what you want, but that cube turned out to have pretty low replay value. It was basically EDH with less focused decks.
I can see this format being a lot of fun, but I don't think it's something I would want as my main cube. I do think it will bring up interesting interactions that you don't often see in any other format.
I thought the pick was soulfire master and hope to table ignite memories, but I happen to know how much burn there is. You're right though, I need to get this on cubetutor.
I feel there's never a need to Mulligan unless you lucked out with some combo, because to say the blue card doesn't fit the aggro deck's plan is forgetting about all the fine blue aggressive creatures. I see the issue, as grindy games grind on my control decks will be depending on increasingly more narrow counters, restricive removal, or unpopular modes of 3 color charms, but all the aggro player has to stick is a boggle with a sword, or an invisible stalker with an armadillo cloak.
I appreciate the input so far, but I am slacking by not getting this list up for people to test with or critique in its entirety.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
I've played on and off since Mirage.
I've played every format and always had the worst luck... between theft, house fires, random bannings, my collection would grow and then become useless. I'd eventually rebuild and start again and again.
The price of cards nowadays is higher than ever and I'll never be able to recreate the collections I've lost.
Back in the day I used to play a format called "5-color" for ante. This format required massive 300 card decks, 40 duals, 20 fetches, power, contract from below,chaos orb, absolutely ridiculous rules council killed this format dead with absurd bans. This was by far the most competitively cutthroat format ever to exist and never again will such an opulent and elitist situation occur within the MTG community.
Briefly thereafter was a format called "Centurion" that was originally designed by Shaun C******* in Colorado. To my knowledge, this format was only popular in a few regions especially around Northern California like Superstars in Cupertino (later known as Channel Fireball in San Jose) and Eudaimonia in Berkeley. The greater bay area. The few people who were there might remember this format as the most accessible, customizable, and addictive ever. The rules were simple enough but at the time word of mouth only went so far (social media as we know it today did not exist, we had MySpace and like instant messaging)
Eventually my play group broke this format wide open and the meta ate itself.
Why was that so long winded? Idk, oldtimeritus?
Nowadays, I only play limited, commander, and cube. I've bought every commander precon, I've built a particularly nasty EDH that people do not like to sit across from, and I've been winning drafts now at a rate I've never achieved in all my years. I'm conditioned to crazy plays, dodging silver bullets, and miseing all the tings. I'd say that I'm in my prime today as far as play goes.
A few problems plague my joy:
I can't spend on cards like I used to.
I play way better than my wife and many locals.
My favorite cards are too old.
My favorite formats are extinct.
My collection is small, and growing slower than any other period in my life.
My goals for this new cube:
To create a unique experience cheaply
To teach more people how to play casually
To utilize my favorite cards
To offer a challenge to players at all skill levels
The competitive inner spike ruined Centurion. The price to enter ruined 5-color. The small card pools bore me in constructed.
Here's the gimmick:
No lands.
Like the Centurion rules, every deck will be 5-color, and all land are removed from the environment.
On your turn, during your main phase if the stack is clear; as a special action, you may play any card in your hand as a land. Any land taps for one mana of any of its colors.
At no time is a card in any zone except for the battlefield considered a land card. No fetching, etc
Monocolored cards are considered to be basic lands of whatever type produces that color. This is often relevant for domain effects and several other silly reasons.
Gold cards are considered to be nonbasic lands with no type.
For the purposes of Snow mana, affinity, and the new cards that care about colorless cards you play as lands that are snow, artifacts, or devoid will have those properties/super types.
Cards like Goblin Charbelcher
obviously banned.
After you draft this cube, there doesn't need to be any deck construction. Every card will automatically be playable.
Cramming many gold cards means never having to prioritize fixing, you can always just take the card you like and automatically be able to cast it in any deck.
Cards you'll finally get to play in your deck:
Nephilim (worst case scenario great lands)
Other reject rares likeAtogatog
Synergies that you have collecting dust like all those one of Slivers from random packs over the years
Sunburst jank
Domain jank
Converge jank
Really lots of stuff becomes great.
Here's a sample pack from my first version of this cube, I'll have a full list up soon.
I built my first version of this cube using only cards I have on hand that I can't really use anyplace else.
There's a few cards that I know that I want to acquire. Some of my favorites like Chaos Orb and Yet Another Aether Vortex plus a lot of stuff that could be useful maybe but could just be 3,4, or 5 color lands likeCromat and some awesome split cards I'm missing like Hit//Run.
I think that this cube will be very random, fun, but also skill intensive. I want every thing to give lots of options like charms and I want the format to have a lot of nuance like playing a huge creature as a land early, sacrificing it later to reanimate, or bouncing a huge spell back to your hand to cast it in the late game.
Let me know if this is something you would be interested in trying. Maybe tell me what you'd first pick from the sample pack.
Oh, and goblin guide is ridiculous
My CubeCobra (draft 20 card packs, 2 packs.)
430, Peasant, Very Unpowered
Why you should take your hybrids out of your gold section
Manamath Article
Iirc mental magic makes every land a 5 color land. This will be a little less efficient than that.
So of course you can play 1 dude, then 2, and maybe burn a blocker, and maybe equip a sword, but they can Orim's Thunder or whatever and immediately catch up.
When my project is complete I don't expect threat, answer, threat, answer to be enough. It'll come down to tempo, 2:1, tempo, 2:1. Which is a much more interesting dynamic.
I've been playing a lot of cube lately and shaping this format from that and I feel like drafting say, the holiday mtgo cube or more recently the legacy cube waiting for the new standard you see disciplined picks leading to the WU control, or the Splinter twin set up, or the Reanimate a Gristlebrand, or the sneak /show an eldrazi.
The difference here, is that any deck could literally pack all the tricks, and it boils down to what you waste as a land each turn, and how you with your favorite cards answer
, any particular board state.
Also, the pick there is pretty obviously Cruel Ultimatum, because value.
(450 unpowered, MMA-style archetypes in each color pair)
Commander:
Far too many to count...
If I understand your cube correctly everyone will still have to go through the draft process, so even though you can choose each turn which card to dump as a land, you still have decide which cards are going to make your pool. It think there's at least a little bit of the potential for the opposite problem - you will draft 45 cards and only be able to cut 5, which means that decks are going to be inherently less focused. Your "control" deck will end up with some random aggro 1-drops that tabled, or some combo card that you're missing the other pieces for. On the flip side, your Mardu aggro deck will be stuck with a copy of Gigantoplasm or somesuch, which not only doesn't fit the deck's plan, it also doesn't tap for a color mana that's of any use to the aggro deck. It's essentially an auto-mulligan.
I actually think aggro being the premier wincon is not going to pan out. It's going to become a more midrange-to-control 5C slugfest, kind of like the Magic Online Legendary Cube. That's fine if it's what you want, but that cube turned out to have pretty low replay value. It was basically EDH with less focused decks.
I can see this format being a lot of fun, but I don't think it's something I would want as my main cube. I do think it will bring up interesting interactions that you don't often see in any other format.
I feel there's never a need to Mulligan unless you lucked out with some combo, because to say the blue card doesn't fit the aggro deck's plan is forgetting about all the fine blue aggressive creatures. I see the issue, as grindy games grind on my control decks will be depending on increasingly more narrow counters, restricive removal, or unpopular modes of 3 color charms, but all the aggro player has to stick is a boggle with a sword, or an invisible stalker with an armadillo cloak.
I appreciate the input so far, but I am slacking by not getting this list up for people to test with or critique in its entirety.