Here's another entirely different approach. Draft as normal, but every 15th pick is kept separate from the rest of that player's pool. Each player then has three 15th picks, presumably cards that no one wanted.
Each of them then gets "improved" in some fashion, and then shuffled back into the cube for the next draft. That way, whatever the least popular/useful cards in your cube are, they're constantly getting better.
The problem, to me, with what's being described, is that it's fundamentally not very interesting to just find every card with a drawback and remove the drawback. The "Sharpie"-ing in that case is obvious and requires no creativity. I think there's a much wider world of possibility if you say "hmm, I got this card 15th because no one wanted it... how can I improve it to make it playable but hopefully not busted next draft?", and then of course next draft your opening pack has two newly modified cards and suddenly you have to on-the-fly evaluate how good they are now.
At first pass the majority of cards i set aside were of the Pouncing Jaguar variety as in cards that get much better but not very interesting when Sharpied. But when i dug deeper i found many more interesting cards that should add complexity and strategy to the cube. Cards that have the text "Play this only as a sorcery" tend to become much more interesting when you sharpie out that text.
Anyway all the chatter aside i have put together a stack of cards and will be trying a draft or two tonight. Some observations about the cube as it stands (ie no mods).
Red is the strongest color. Fitting with reds flavor there are loads of aggressive cheap cards with drawbacks. Out of the gate you should be able to draft a decent red deck. The one thing possibly keeping it in check is the fair number of good defenders out there.
White is tricky. There are very few cards with a pure drawback so you'll have to get tricky and change blink things into pseudo removal.
Lands can get real good. Karoo (including actual Karoo) can become very very good. If you watched the most recent PT you'll know that in a deck full of painless Ancient Tomb variants it doesn't matter what threats you are putting out there. A few of these lands could overcome some mediocre threats in your deck.
Blue can get aggressive. There are a fair number of cheap evasive creatures and some counterspells available. As per what you would expect there are some excellent card draw spells available.
Other than that i dont really know how its going to work out. I'll post back tonight or tomorrow.
I rushed to get the cube built on time but i don't have a proper list. It was a six player draft with new and old people alike. As most of the cards were fringe or unplayable there was quite a lot of reading (and questions about banding as a mechanic).
The Decks were
UR Tempo (undefeated)
BW Good Stuff (2-1, loads of removal)
GW Garbage (1-2, with an insane conspiracy and a couple solid beaters)
GW Aggro (2-1, with a defender sub-theme somehow)
UBr control (0-2, light on threats, couldnt seal games)
Jeskai Control (??, the deck was terrible.)
The White Cards ended up having the highest base power which is likely due to few white cards having real downside. There are lots of Oblivion Ring style cards that are just good on their own. As such white was in 4 of the 6 decks and was pretty solid.
Green and Red had good creatures that got buffed up. Blue had some goodies go around and ended up with some nice upgrades. Black was the only color that didn't pan out this draft. There were a few potential cards like Hecatomb but in the end it just wasn't deep enough and a bunch of the cards required you to be deep on black to work.
I drafted Blue Red with a few cheap 3/3 defenders to hold the ground and some fliers to finish off the game. I modded Final Fortune, Scorched Ruins, and Thirst for Knowledge which gave the deck some serious power. Razormane Masticore was my first pick overall and was obviously very powerful. Once i got to Turn 2 the Masticore off my Scorched Ruins, though it was quickly Condemned The deck played like a classic blue red aggro control deck with some good fliers and Memory Lapse and a couple other counters to stop key threats. The games were actually all pretty close and very interesting. The one game i lost i mistakenly let a Harrow resolve (when i could have lapsed it). I also stole a game with a timely top-deck of Final Fortune to put my opponent to 1 with a Fledgling Djinn in play. He couldn't event get rid of it because he had a sharpied Inner Sanctum keeping the Djinn alive.
*** The cards are modded as printed. Some mods like Lightning Cloud dont work with oracle wording but work with printed wording. ***
Final Fortune
Take an extra turn after this one. At the beginning of that turn's end step, you lose the game.
Scorched Ruins If Scorched Ruins would enter the battlefield, sacrifice two untapped lands instead. If you do, put Scorched Ruins onto the battlefield. If you don't, put it into its owner's graveyard.
T: Add CCCC to your mana pool.
Thirst for Knowledge
Draw three cards. Then discard two cards unless you discard an artifact card.
Teferi's Isle Phasing (This phases in or out before you untap during each of your untap steps. While it's phased out, it's treated as though it doesn't exist.)
Teferi's Isle enters the battlefield tapped.
T: Add UUto your mana pool.
Lightning Cloud R: Deal 1 damage to target creature or player. Use this ability only when a red spell is successfully cast and only once for each such spell.
Inner Sanctum Cumulative upkeep—Pay 2 life. (At the beginning of your upkeep, put an age counter on this permanent, then sacrifice it unless you pay its upkeep cost for each age counter on it.)
Prevent all damage that would be dealt to creatures you control.
Waterspout Djinn
Flying At the beginning of your upkeep, sacrifice Waterspout Djinn unless you return an untapped Island you control to its owner's hand.
Vedalken Engineer
T: Add two mana of any one color to your mana pool. Spend this mana only to cast artifact spells or activate abilities of artifacts.
Rogue Elephant When Rogue Elephant enters the battlefield, sacrifice it unless you sacrifice a Forest.
Lord of Tresserhorn When Lord of Tresserhorn enters the battlefield, you lose 2 life, you sacrifice two creatures, and target opponent draws two cards.
B: Regenerate Lord of Tresserhorn.
Phantom Centaur
Protection from black
Phantom Centaur enters the battlefield with three +1/+1 counters on it.
If damage would be dealt to Phantom Centaur, prevent that damage. Remove a +1/+1 counter from Phantom Centaur.
Sheltering Ancient
Trample Cumulative upkeep—Put a +1/+1 counter on a creature an opponent controls. (At the beginning of your upkeep, put an age counter on this permanent, then sacrifice it unless you pay its upkeep cost for each age counter on it.)
Embolden
Prevent the next 4 damage that would be dealt this turn to any number of target creatures and/or players, divided as you choose.
Flashback 1W (You may cast this card from your graveyard for its flashback cost. Then exile it.)
Everglades
Everglades enters the battlefield tapped. When Everglades enters the battlefield, sacrifice it unless you return an untapped Swamp you control to its owner's hand.
T: Add CB to your mana pool.
Dust Elemental
Flash (You may cast this spell any time you could cast an instant.)
Flying; fear (This creature can't be blocked except by artifact creatures and/or black creatures.) When Dust Elemental enters the battlefield, return three creatures you control to their owner's hand.
It now reads
Gaea's Balance 3G
Sorcery
Search your library for a land card of each basic land type and put them onto the battlefield. Then shuffle your library.
Interesting card as its obviously very powerful but it leads you down a risky draft path. If you were able to get a Harrow and a Karoo or two you could have a pretty strong ramp deck. You would also have the advantage of running more high power modded cards. Of course it could all blow up in your face and you have a greedy 3-5 color deck that gets run down by Rogue Elephants.
But the colorlessness of it is a significant drawback. There were a couple games where i had double red and double blue in hand and the ruins held me back. But there was also a turn 2 Razormane Masticore... which got promptly condemned.
It's not really a significant drawback as it taps for four mana with literal zero drawback other than that being colorless. That's absurd. In a powered environment, there are few cards I would take over that.
I'd like to suggest that you can put your markings on the inner sleeve, so as not to permanently deface your cards.
Other than that, a great concept! And a great use of all those crappy cards lying around.
I crunched the numbers and the cost of sleeving the cube is more than running a few dozen bulk rares and throwaway commons/uncommons. There would also be the issue of the text lining up properly.
But it is great to use otherwise forgotten or unplayable cards being used.
We ran a second draft with this cube last night with six people. I put one modded card per pack to try and even it out. I took the bait and went with Force of Nature minus the upkeep first overall. While i ended up with a solid curve and even a Final Fortune the deck fell flat. Uktabi Drake is pretty saucy now though.
My favorite deck of the night was mono blue beats that had Scorched Ruins (now skyrocketing in value) Teferi's Isle and Coral Atoll (all without drawbacks) The deck did have a weakness in lots of Illusions that die when targeted. He lost to a Heart of Yavimaya which is now a particularly strong card.
There was also a black white Embolden control deck that was very sneaky. Waylay now just gives you 3 knights and combined with Dust Elemental (sans bouncing your own guys)Basically he could sit back and if his opponent attacked him he had some kind of BS surprise. Also Spined Fluke is now a 3 mana twisted abobo.
Anyway i didn't take detailed notes this time around but it is proving to be a very fun cube. There are a small number of cards that are at a power level several orders of magnitude over others, but nothing has proven to be truly unbalanced (even Scorched Ruins). The big joy of this project is you still have to win with a bunch of sub par cards. So the best decks are the ones that work with the weakensses of the unaltered cards and don't need to rely on crazy bombs to win.
This kind of project really only appeals to a niche bunch of cube folks, but if you have a sizable collection of bulk random old cards this might be an easy (and very cheap) project.
Ok i'll take some notes next time. The winning deck was a black green beatdown deck loaded with raw Carnophage and the like. I think it got lucky to beat the big blue deck but a tight aggressive deck always has the ability to capitalize on clunky decks.
At first pass the majority of cards i set aside were of the Pouncing Jaguar variety as in cards that get much better but not very interesting when Sharpied. But when i dug deeper i found many more interesting cards that should add complexity and strategy to the cube. Cards that have the text "Play this only as a sorcery" tend to become much more interesting when you sharpie out that text.
Anyway all the chatter aside i have put together a stack of cards and will be trying a draft or two tonight. Some observations about the cube as it stands (ie no mods).
Red is the strongest color. Fitting with reds flavor there are loads of aggressive cheap cards with drawbacks. Out of the gate you should be able to draft a decent red deck. The one thing possibly keeping it in check is the fair number of good defenders out there.
White is tricky. There are very few cards with a pure drawback so you'll have to get tricky and change blink things into pseudo removal.
Lands can get real good. Karoo (including actual Karoo) can become very very good. If you watched the most recent PT you'll know that in a deck full of painless Ancient Tomb variants it doesn't matter what threats you are putting out there. A few of these lands could overcome some mediocre threats in your deck.
Blue can get aggressive. There are a fair number of cheap evasive creatures and some counterspells available. As per what you would expect there are some excellent card draw spells available.
Other than that i dont really know how its going to work out. I'll post back tonight or tomorrow.
In Progress
GBIshkanah, Grafwidow ~ BWGRTymna the Weaver & Tana, the Bloodsower ~ UGRashmi, Eternities Crafter ~ RGAtarka, World Render
I rushed to get the cube built on time but i don't have a proper list. It was a six player draft with new and old people alike. As most of the cards were fringe or unplayable there was quite a lot of reading (and questions about banding as a mechanic).
The Decks were
UR Tempo (undefeated)
BW Good Stuff (2-1, loads of removal)
GW Garbage (1-2, with an insane conspiracy and a couple solid beaters)
GW Aggro (2-1, with a defender sub-theme somehow)
UBr control (0-2, light on threats, couldnt seal games)
Jeskai Control (??, the deck was terrible.)
The White Cards ended up having the highest base power which is likely due to few white cards having real downside. There are lots of Oblivion Ring style cards that are just good on their own. As such white was in 4 of the 6 decks and was pretty solid.
Green and Red had good creatures that got buffed up. Blue had some goodies go around and ended up with some nice upgrades. Black was the only color that didn't pan out this draft. There were a few potential cards like Hecatomb but in the end it just wasn't deep enough and a bunch of the cards required you to be deep on black to work.
I drafted Blue Red with a few cheap 3/3 defenders to hold the ground and some fliers to finish off the game. I modded Final Fortune, Scorched Ruins, and Thirst for Knowledge which gave the deck some serious power. Razormane Masticore was my first pick overall and was obviously very powerful. Once i got to Turn 2 the Masticore off my Scorched Ruins, though it was quickly Condemned The deck played like a classic blue red aggro control deck with some good fliers and Memory Lapse and a couple other counters to stop key threats. The games were actually all pretty close and very interesting. The one game i lost i mistakenly let a Harrow resolve (when i could have lapsed it). I also stole a game with a timely top-deck of Final Fortune to put my opponent to 1 with a Fledgling Djinn in play. He couldn't event get rid of it because he had a sharpied Inner Sanctum keeping the Djinn alive.
Here are some other cards that were modded
In Progress
GBIshkanah, Grafwidow ~ BWGRTymna the Weaver & Tana, the Bloodsower ~ UGRashmi, Eternities Crafter ~ RGAtarka, World Render
Also, follow us on twitter! @TurnOneMagic
Final Fortune
Take an extra turn after this one.
At the beginning of that turn's end step, you lose the game.Scorched Ruins
If Scorched Ruins would enter the battlefield, sacrifice two untapped lands instead. If you do, put Scorched Ruins onto the battlefield. If you don't, put it into its owner's graveyard.T: Add CCCC to your mana pool.
Thirst for Knowledge
Draw three cards.
Then discard two cards unless you discard an artifact card.Teferi's Isle
Phasing (This phases in or out before you untap during each of your untap steps. While it's phased out, it's treated as though it doesn't exist.)Teferi's Isle enters the battlefield tapped.
T: Add UUto your mana pool.
Lightning Cloud
R: Deal 1 damage to target creature or player.
Use this ability only when a red spell is successfully cast and only once for each such spell.Inner Sanctum
Cumulative upkeep—Pay 2 life. (At the beginning of your upkeep, put an age counter on this permanent, then sacrifice it unless you pay its upkeep cost for each age counter on it.)Prevent all damage that would be dealt to creatures you control.
Waterspout Djinn
Flying
At the beginning of your upkeep, sacrifice Waterspout Djinn unless you return an untapped Island you control to its owner's hand.Vedalken Engineer
T: Add two mana of any one color to your mana pool.
Spend this mana only to cast artifact spells or activate abilities of artifacts.Rogue Elephant
When Rogue Elephant enters the battlefield, sacrifice it unless you sacrifice a Forest.Lord of Tresserhorn
When Lord of Tresserhorn enters the battlefield, you lose 2 life, you sacrifice two creatures, and target opponent draws two cards.B: Regenerate Lord of Tresserhorn.
Phantom Centaur
Protection from black
Phantom Centaur enters the battlefield with three +1/+1 counters on it.
If damage would be dealt to Phantom Centaur, prevent that damage.
Remove a +1/+1 counter from Phantom Centaur.Sheltering Ancient
Trample
Cumulative upkeep—Put a +1/+1 counter on a creature an opponent controls. (At the beginning of your upkeep, put an age counter on this permanent, then sacrifice it unless you pay its upkeep cost for each age counter on it.)
Embolden
Prevent the next 4 damage that would be dealt this turn to any number of target creatures and/or players, divided as you choose.
Flashback 1W (You may cast this card from your graveyard for its flashback cost.
Then exile it.)Everglades
Everglades enters the battlefield tapped.
When Everglades enters the battlefield, sacrifice it unless you return an untapped Swamp you control to its owner's hand.T: Add CB to your mana pool.
Dust Elemental
Flash (You may cast this spell any time you could cast an instant.)
Flying; fear (This creature can't be blocked except by artifact creatures and/or black creatures.)
When Dust Elemental enters the battlefield, return three creatures you control to their owner's hand.In Progress
GBIshkanah, Grafwidow ~ BWGRTymna the Weaver & Tana, the Bloodsower ~ UGRashmi, Eternities Crafter ~ RGAtarka, World Render
Gaea's Balance
It now reads
Gaea's Balance
3G
Sorcery
Search your library for a land card of each basic land type and put them onto the battlefield. Then shuffle your library.
Interesting card as its obviously very powerful but it leads you down a risky draft path. If you were able to get a Harrow and a Karoo or two you could have a pretty strong ramp deck. You would also have the advantage of running more high power modded cards. Of course it could all blow up in your face and you have a greedy 3-5 color deck that gets run down by Rogue Elephants.
In Progress
GBIshkanah, Grafwidow ~ BWGRTymna the Weaver & Tana, the Bloodsower ~ UGRashmi, Eternities Crafter ~ RGAtarka, World Render
Also, follow us on twitter! @TurnOneMagic
But the colorlessness of it is a significant drawback. There were a couple games where i had double red and double blue in hand and the ruins held me back. But there was also a turn 2 Razormane Masticore... which got promptly condemned.
In Progress
GBIshkanah, Grafwidow ~ BWGRTymna the Weaver & Tana, the Bloodsower ~ UGRashmi, Eternities Crafter ~ RGAtarka, World Render
Also, follow us on twitter! @TurnOneMagic
In Progress
GBIshkanah, Grafwidow ~ BWGRTymna the Weaver & Tana, the Bloodsower ~ UGRashmi, Eternities Crafter ~ RGAtarka, World Render
In Progress
GBIshkanah, Grafwidow ~ BWGRTymna the Weaver & Tana, the Bloodsower ~ UGRashmi, Eternities Crafter ~ RGAtarka, World Render
Other than that, a great concept! And a great use of all those crappy cards lying around.
But it is great to use otherwise forgotten or unplayable cards being used.
In Progress
GBIshkanah, Grafwidow ~ BWGRTymna the Weaver & Tana, the Bloodsower ~ UGRashmi, Eternities Crafter ~ RGAtarka, World Render
My favorite deck of the night was mono blue beats that had Scorched Ruins (now skyrocketing in value) Teferi's Isle and Coral Atoll (all without drawbacks) The deck did have a weakness in lots of Illusions that die when targeted. He lost to a Heart of Yavimaya which is now a particularly strong card.
There was also a black white Embolden control deck that was very sneaky. Waylay now just gives you 3 knights and combined with Dust Elemental (sans bouncing your own guys)Basically he could sit back and if his opponent attacked him he had some kind of BS surprise. Also Spined Fluke is now a 3 mana twisted abobo.
Anyway i didn't take detailed notes this time around but it is proving to be a very fun cube. There are a small number of cards that are at a power level several orders of magnitude over others, but nothing has proven to be truly unbalanced (even Scorched Ruins). The big joy of this project is you still have to win with a bunch of sub par cards. So the best decks are the ones that work with the weakensses of the unaltered cards and don't need to rely on crazy bombs to win.
This kind of project really only appeals to a niche bunch of cube folks, but if you have a sizable collection of bulk random old cards this might be an easy (and very cheap) project.
In Progress
GBIshkanah, Grafwidow ~ BWGRTymna the Weaver & Tana, the Bloodsower ~ UGRashmi, Eternities Crafter ~ RGAtarka, World Render
Also, follow us on twitter! @TurnOneMagic
In Progress
GBIshkanah, Grafwidow ~ BWGRTymna the Weaver & Tana, the Bloodsower ~ UGRashmi, Eternities Crafter ~ RGAtarka, World Render
The Scorched Ruins was sharpied when it was worth $2.
In Progress
GBIshkanah, Grafwidow ~ BWGRTymna the Weaver & Tana, the Bloodsower ~ UGRashmi, Eternities Crafter ~ RGAtarka, World Render