Thanks to the Commander 2013 reprints, Sol Ring is cheaper than it's been since some of the younger players here were in diapers. I'm still trying to up the overall power level of my cube, so as soon as I got a hold of one I jammed one into my cube without thinking twice. The first time I got the chance to draft one, I did and won pretty easily of a T2 Koth of the Hammer. There's no question that it's powerful enough for cube, but I've seen a couple of posts recently suggesting that it shouldn't be in an unpowered cube it has an unbalancing effect, or that there should be other fast mana artifacts as well like Mana Crypt. Should I be worried about this?
Is Sol Ring too powerful for an unpowered cube?
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It's way too powerful imo. I consider Sol Ring to be the most powerful overall card in this format that we love so much. It's just too game warping, and the fact that you're NOT playing with other accelerents like Moxen or Lotus makes it even more of a windmill slam over anything else ESPECIALLY in a budget cube.
LSV had a stream of a POWERED cube a couple months back, and Sol Ring was in his first pack. He went into great length about how no other turn 1 play will consistently win you more games than Sol Ring. No one is hating on busted effects like Ancestral or Lotus, but jumping ahead two mana from the get go... you will just plain bury your opponent all day. T2 Koth sounds fun, how about T2 Jace the Mind Sculptor or T2 Elspeth Knight Errant? How about I enter my scoop phase..
It's funny how Timetwister is technically part of the Power 9, but unless a particular cube has a combo/storm aspect Timetwister is generally a sub par cube card. Sol Ring on the other hand definitely deserves the slot.
If Sol Ring is the only "Cube Power" in your list, then it is far and away the best card in the format, and it will lead to a lot of one-sided games. Having only one player have access to that kind of power seems like a bad idea.
Here is a way to simulate running Sol Ring as the only power card in a cube:
During each cube draft, randomly pick one player. For the rest of the evening, that player rolls a d6 before drawing his starting hand in every game. Whenever he rolls a 6, his chances of winning that game go up by 50%.
Does this sound like fun? Randomly giving one player each draft the ability to crush his opponents if he gets lucky with his starting hand? Doesn't sound like fun to me.
Total side note but I like how people are discussing running this over itself.
Well, it has to be said that Kolaghan is clearly better than Kolaghan. Considering what BR decks usually want and how stiff the competition in this guild is, there is no way that I would run Kolaghan over Kolaghan! Kolaghan might make it in as the sixth guild card or so. Kolaghan on the other hand ranks several places below that.
It was so funny to me when they described this as a downgrade to the original Zurgo during the Pax East panel. I was thinking if this is a downgrade, they should really "downgrade" all legendary creatures. Haha.
My deck designing is quite concise at this point:
1. Come up with deck idea
2. Realize this idea is somehow fundamentally similar to another deck I have or that is commonly played in my group
3. Decide I don't want to disassemble one of my existing decks
4. Give up and do nothing
I don't see the point of this new shroud mechanic. It's strictly worse than Hexproof. Threshold is pretty bad too, Delirium is a much better mechanic and probably easier to activate.
Otherwise this card is a pretty neat guy. Dodges removal and grows into a Primal Huntbeast. 3/5
Here is a way to simulate running Sol Ring as the only power card in a cube:
During each cube draft, randomly pick one player. For the rest of the evening, that player rolls a d6 before drawing his starting hand in every game. Whenever he rolls a 6, his chances of winning that game go up by 50%.
Does this sound like fun? Randomly giving one player each draft the ability to crush his opponents if he gets lucky with his starting hand? Doesn't sound like fun to me.
What that sounds like is misleading. Let's add some more outcomes to this theoretical d6 roll: On a 1, that player is more likely to topdeck a colorless land instead of a nonland card; on a 2, that player is more likely to not have any cards with 2 in their mana cost when they cast Sol Ring; on a 3, that player is more likely to unearth Rotting Rats because their card got answered; on a 4, that player is more likely to cast Rite of Flame because their card got answered after one activation; and on a 5, that player is more likely to draw one less card because their Ring got answered by an ETB ability before it even got used.
Reducing a card's interactions to a dice roll is an oversimplification. One that Sol Ring doesn't need - there are plenty of good arguments against it.
It was a simplification to bring a point across. Your model is way more complicated and actually less accurate. It distracts from the main point: Roughly 5/6 of the time, you either won't have Sol Ring early or it gets answered immediately or it doesn't matter. Roughly 1/6 of the time, you have it in your opening hand and get a gigantic and unfair advantage from that card.
While there will always be "best cards," I dislike cards that are just auto-first picks like Sol Ring. I can understand how people enjoy playing with power, but for me, I feel like these cards lead to strategic collapse, where you just pick them every time. I also dislike cards with a highly variable power level. Sol Ring is both of these. You first pick it every time, and if it's in your opening 7 you are a huge favorite, while if it's your t5-6 draw, it's pretty much just a land.
I think whether you run it or not depends on the kind of experience you want to have. For me, I want the draft to be guided by drafting an archetype or synergies, not just raw power. I want a tension between aggro, midrange, control, and ramp/combo. I want games to feel interactive and each player to feel "in it" until the last couple of turns. I can understand how people like the broken plays of having power. It's fun to do big things, but I come from more of a Johnny perspective rather than Timmy, and so cards like Sol Ring tend to detract from the environment I like to play.
No way. Brokenness comes more often from fast mana powered starts than the powered cards like Twist or Recall or Time Walk. Remove the latter group but not the former group, and the disparity will become huge whenever you get a fast start enabled by Moxen or Ring.
You can go three ways: Fully powered with fast mana and broken spells; semi-powered with more-or-less everything but fast mana; or unpowered, with fast mana restricted and the 'power' spells removed, often alongside Jitte, LoA and their ilk. Having fast mana but not the broken spells I think would be too warped in favour of those with the fast mana, unless perhaps you crammed a ton of cheap artifact answers.
Sol Ring is one of two cards, along with Channel, that in my mind never do anything fun, sometimes do nothing, and often do something stupid and broken. In a powered cube where you're aiming to do the most broken things possible, go hog wild (although I still think that Channel shouldn't be played as it's a card that I dont' think EVER leads to an interactive or interesting game of magic). BUt in an unpowered, Sol Ring is just going to lead to uninteractive, unfun games.
Yes. It's more powerful than the power 9 in the cube, so I see no reason to ban those but allow this.
The only reason I could think is if you were being cheap -- if you had a 'powered' cube with no power yet, because power is expensos. But even then, I'd just wait until it was powered up.
Creates unfair advantages in unpowered games, is a NON-decision first pick in virtually any pack and for almost all decks, and is arguably the best card in ANY cube (alongside Library of Alexandria).
No reason to include it, even with the reduced price tag.
Thanks for the quick responses, everyone's made a lot of good points. Sol Ring is definitely a lot less fair when only one person in the game can possibly have access to it, and it's 4 times faster than the next fastest mana rocks in my cube (Signets + Mind Stone) and twice as fast as mana elves with even less drawback.
The only reason I could think is if you were being cheap -- if you had a 'powered' cube with no power yet, because power is expensos.
This is exactly right. My cube is unpowered by default, not by design. If I could get reprints of moxen, Time Walk, Library of Alexandria, etc. for $4.50 TCG mid I'd be happy to try them out. But that's all too rich for my blood, and I don't want proxies in my cube. Sol Ring is the one piece of power that comes at a reasonable price, so it's really tempting, but it probably doesn't belong by itself.
Maybe if you had multiple copies...?
Nah, I'm not going down that road. There's plenty of ramp available in my cube, it'll just take a little more investment of resources to get two turns ahead. Sol Ring will come out in my next update - the first card I'm cutting for being too good.
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465 card Unpowered cube thread. Draft it here and I'll be happy to return the favor.
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I am running Sol Ring along with Grim Monolith and Mana Vault without running any other power. Some games can be explosive but we run a good amount of artifact hate and everyone is smart enough to maindeck it so it has never been a problem. There might be one or two unfair starts per draft but it doesn't always show up early enough to matter and people have answers. Also, the card is cheap enough to get if you are on the fence and will always have some worth somewhere in case you decide it isn't for you.
Count how often those explosive games happen with Sol Ring compared to how memorable they are and how much they stick out in your mind as fun or unfun. I really don't think Sol Ring is a problem in an unpowered cube but it varies from person to person.
For all intents and purposes is just another broken card and should be in the Power 9 (as far as Cube is concerned anyway). Unpowered for cube most often means no Power 9 (maybe except timetwister) no , no , and there are others that I'm probably missing. That seems to be the standing philosophy though.
EDIT: Basically no auto-pick cards if you are going unpowered.
Basically no auto-pick cards if you are going unpowered.
I have yet to see an unpowered list without "auto-pick" cards in it. In fact, I've found that the next "tier" of broken cube cards is even more problematic (for lack of a better word) in unpowered environments.
There aren't any auto-pick cards in powered cubes either, really. The 3 best cards in the cube are outside the power 9. And most of the top-tier power stuff is held in equal regard to the insane stuff that people leave in their unpowered cubes anyways. It's just that once it's unpowered, there's even less stuff to compete with them in packs, making the "auto-pick" scenarios even more common.
There aren't any auto-pick cards in powered cubes either, really. The 3 best cards in the cube are outside the power 9. And most of the top-tier power stuff is held in equal regard to the insane stuff that people leave in their unpowered cubes anyways. It's just that once it's unpowered, there's even less stuff to compete with them in packs, making the "auto-pick" scenarios even more common.
Ya you're probably right. I've never had an unpowered cube before so I guess I'm not aware of this issue. Playing a powered cube though I have though about unpowering it just based on the fact that Ancestral Recall, Black Lotus, Time Walk, Sol Ring, etc. are auto picks in most scenarios and can make an ok deck into an amazing deck with just their own power.
Same is said for most of the other disgusting cards in the cube, like Jitte, Clamp, Balance, Mind Twist, Nightmare, SoFI, Upheaval, etc, etc. A random Mox isn't an auto-pick with those kinds of cards floating around. But those cards certainly become more "auto-pick" without the other powered stuff competing against them. Just my $0.02, YYMV, etc...
Same is said for most of the other disgusting cards in the cube, like Jitte, Clamp, Balance, Mind Twist, Nightmare, SoFI, Upheaval, etc, etc. A random Mox isn't an auto-pick with those kinds of cards floating around. But those cards certainly become more "auto-pick" without the other powered stuff competing against them. Just my $0.02, YYMV, etc...
I think you have a point that there will always be auto-pick P1P1s. Almost every limited format has best cards in best archetypes. I am more concerned with auto-picks later on. If I have a creature-light U/x control deck, I'm going to think about whether I want Jitte or something less powerful but more in my game plan. I'm never letting Sol Ring go. In the end, it's all about what's fun for us and our groups, so I don't claim to have any objective criteria or anything. I just dislike fast mana and select offenders (Library, Mind Twist, Recall, Time Walk, etc.) so I don't play with them.
I don't even get how sol ring is better in an unpowered cube. In a powered cube its just as likely for me to respond to a sol ring with a mox, as it is for my opponent to play sol ring, mox, land, thing turn 1. (ok, not exactly the same, but still)
Sol Ringers have 4 mana on turn 2 with it and a second land, 5 mana if you have a 2-mana rock. Your opponent will have at most 3 mana, and that's with an elf or 'disadvantage' Mox.
Jumping ahead multiple turns in mana development from the beginning of the game is a HUGE advantage in unpowered Cube.
Same is said for most of the other disgusting cards in the cube, like Jitte, Clamp, Balance, Mind Twist, Nightmare, SoFI, Upheaval, etc, etc. A random Mox isn't an auto-pick with those kinds of cards floating around. But those cards certainly become more "auto-pick" without the other powered stuff competing against them. Just my $0.02, YYMV, etc...
The quality that makes fast mana more of an auto-pick for me is that it goes in pretty much any deck. This may or may not be relevant, but at least for us, people will not always pick the most powerful card in a pack. Some just don't like to play Recurring Nightmare decks or prefer creature-light control decks where equipment is not what you're looking for. Even for those players, fast mana is an auto-pick unless they have to decide between fast mana and a key power card for their strategy.
Thanks to the Commander 2013 reprints, Sol Ring is cheaper than it's been since some of the younger players here were in diapers. I'm still trying to up the overall power level of my cube, so as soon as I got a hold of one I jammed one into my cube without thinking twice. The first time I got the chance to draft one, I did and won pretty easily of a T2 Koth of the Hammer. There's no question that it's powerful enough for cube, but I've seen a couple of posts recently suggesting that it shouldn't be in an unpowered cube it has an unbalancing effect, or that there should be other fast mana artifacts as well like Mana Crypt. Should I be worried about this?
Is Sol Ring too powerful for an unpowered cube?
450 card Peasant cube thread. Draft it here.
LSV had a stream of a POWERED cube a couple months back, and Sol Ring was in his first pack. He went into great length about how no other turn 1 play will consistently win you more games than Sol Ring. No one is hating on busted effects like Ancestral or Lotus, but jumping ahead two mana from the get go... you will just plain bury your opponent all day. T2 Koth sounds fun, how about T2 Jace the Mind Sculptor or T2 Elspeth Knight Errant? How about I enter my scoop phase..
It's funny how Timetwister is technically part of the Power 9, but unless a particular cube has a combo/storm aspect Timetwister is generally a sub par cube card. Sol Ring on the other hand definitely deserves the slot.
If Sol Ring is the only "Cube Power" in your list, then it is far and away the best card in the format, and it will lead to a lot of one-sided games. Having only one player have access to that kind of power seems like a bad idea.
For reference, what I consider Cube Power are Black Lotus, Sol Ring, Mana Crypt, Mana Vault, 5 Moxen, Library of Alexandria, Ancestral Recall, Time Walk and Mind Twist.
You should run either all or none of these cards, in my opinion.
A Comprehensive list of Cube Archetypes
During each cube draft, randomly pick one player. For the rest of the evening, that player rolls a d6 before drawing his starting hand in every game. Whenever he rolls a 6, his chances of winning that game go up by 50%.
Does this sound like fun? Randomly giving one player each draft the ability to crush his opponents if he gets lucky with his starting hand? Doesn't sound like fun to me.
Uril, the Miststalker RGW -- Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre C -- Vhati il-Dal BG -- Jor Kadeen, the Prevailer RW -- Animar, Soul of Elements URG
Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker R -- Maga, Traitor to Mortals B -- Ghave, Guru of Spores BGW -- Sliver Hivelord WUBRG
What that sounds like is misleading. Let's add some more outcomes to this theoretical d6 roll: On a 1, that player is more likely to topdeck a colorless land instead of a nonland card; on a 2, that player is more likely to not have any cards with 2 in their mana cost when they cast Sol Ring; on a 3, that player is more likely to unearth Rotting Rats because their card got answered; on a 4, that player is more likely to cast Rite of Flame because their card got answered after one activation; and on a 5, that player is more likely to draw one less card because their Ring got answered by an ETB ability before it even got used.
Reducing a card's interactions to a dice roll is an oversimplification. One that Sol Ring doesn't need - there are plenty of good arguments against it.
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Uril, the Miststalker RGW -- Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre C -- Vhati il-Dal BG -- Jor Kadeen, the Prevailer RW -- Animar, Soul of Elements URG
Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker R -- Maga, Traitor to Mortals B -- Ghave, Guru of Spores BGW -- Sliver Hivelord WUBRG
I think whether you run it or not depends on the kind of experience you want to have. For me, I want the draft to be guided by drafting an archetype or synergies, not just raw power. I want a tension between aggro, midrange, control, and ramp/combo. I want games to feel interactive and each player to feel "in it" until the last couple of turns. I can understand how people like the broken plays of having power. It's fun to do big things, but I come from more of a Johnny perspective rather than Timmy, and so cards like Sol Ring tend to detract from the environment I like to play.
You can go three ways: Fully powered with fast mana and broken spells; semi-powered with more-or-less everything but fast mana; or unpowered, with fast mana restricted and the 'power' spells removed, often alongside Jitte, LoA and their ilk. Having fast mana but not the broken spells I think would be too warped in favour of those with the fast mana, unless perhaps you crammed a ton of cheap artifact answers.
On spoiled card wishlisting and 'should-have-had'-isms:
Yes. It's more powerful than the power 9 in the cube, so I see no reason to ban those but allow this.
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My Article - "Cube Design Philosophy"
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The only reason I could think is if you were being cheap -- if you had a 'powered' cube with no power yet, because power is expensos. But even then, I'd just wait until it was powered up.
Maybe if you had multiple copies...?
No reason to include it, even with the reduced price tag.
-AA
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This is exactly right. My cube is unpowered by default, not by design. If I could get reprints of moxen, Time Walk, Library of Alexandria, etc. for $4.50 TCG mid I'd be happy to try them out. But that's all too rich for my blood, and I don't want proxies in my cube. Sol Ring is the one piece of power that comes at a reasonable price, so it's really tempting, but it probably doesn't belong by itself.
Nah, I'm not going down that road. There's plenty of ramp available in my cube, it'll just take a little more investment of resources to get two turns ahead. Sol Ring will come out in my next update - the first card I'm cutting for being too good.
450 card Peasant cube thread. Draft it here.
Count how often those explosive games happen with Sol Ring compared to how memorable they are and how much they stick out in your mind as fun or unfun. I really don't think Sol Ring is a problem in an unpowered cube but it varies from person to person.
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EDIT: Basically no auto-pick cards if you are going unpowered.
I have yet to see an unpowered list without "auto-pick" cards in it. In fact, I've found that the next "tier" of broken cube cards is even more problematic (for lack of a better word) in unpowered environments.
There aren't any auto-pick cards in powered cubes either, really. The 3 best cards in the cube are outside the power 9. And most of the top-tier power stuff is held in equal regard to the insane stuff that people leave in their unpowered cubes anyways. It's just that once it's unpowered, there's even less stuff to compete with them in packs, making the "auto-pick" scenarios even more common.
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!
Ya you're probably right. I've never had an unpowered cube before so I guess I'm not aware of this issue. Playing a powered cube though I have though about unpowering it just based on the fact that Ancestral Recall, Black Lotus, Time Walk, Sol Ring, etc. are auto picks in most scenarios and can make an ok deck into an amazing deck with just their own power.
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!
I think you have a point that there will always be auto-pick P1P1s. Almost every limited format has best cards in best archetypes. I am more concerned with auto-picks later on. If I have a creature-light U/x control deck, I'm going to think about whether I want Jitte or something less powerful but more in my game plan. I'm never letting Sol Ring go. In the end, it's all about what's fun for us and our groups, so I don't claim to have any objective criteria or anything. I just dislike fast mana and select offenders (Library, Mind Twist, Recall, Time Walk, etc.) so I don't play with them.
thats my cube
Sol Ringers have 4 mana on turn 2 with it and a second land, 5 mana if you have a 2-mana rock. Your opponent will have at most 3 mana, and that's with an elf or 'disadvantage' Mox.
Jumping ahead multiple turns in mana development from the beginning of the game is a HUGE advantage in unpowered Cube.
-AA
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My Cube: http://cubetutor.com/viewcube/9029
It gets left out of hard aggro lists about as often as Jitte gets left out of creature-light control decks. At least in our drafts it does.
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!
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