MTG Salvation

So it turns out that somehow there isn't a thread purely dedicated to the idea of a Conspiracy Module. So here it is. Not sure how we managed that (there's a CNS2 Includes thread, and a "Now that CNS2 is out, what CNS1 cards are we running?" thread, but not one that pulls the whole thing together). Given the vast majority of people who run conspiracies do so in a separate Conspiracy Module, I thought this a worthwhile exercise.

For those new to the idea, Conspiracy and Conspiracy: Take the Crown brought us a bunch of conspiracies, draft-matters cards and Monarch cards. Given that these play around with the draft, the deck-building process and the game state at the start of the game, not all playgroups want these in the cube every time out. It appears that most cubes running Conspiracy-related cards have a separate module on the side that gets added in to the cube draft on a given night.
The Pros: Draft-matters cards like Regicide turn the draft on its head for multiple players, conspiracies like Worldknit completely alter the way you approach your own draft and deck construction. In other words, these cards jazz up what can sometimes be the quietest, most automatic part of cube. The Monarch mechanic is adorable fun, particularly in 3+ player games, and often forces more aggressive game play.
The Cons: People who have tried out conspiracies often complain that some are simply too powerful and game-winning. Backup Plan and Worldknit are often cited as cards that almost guarantee a win in some environments when picked. And Arcane Savant is capable of going infinite with Time Walk effects.

My Plan
I'm currently in the process of adding a 15-card Conspiracy Module to the side of my 360 Multiplayer cube. I've already got Lore Seeker in my main 360 for some shenanigans. The plan is to either have this module picked up as the Lore Seeker booster on a given night, add it to the draft as one of the usual boosters, or simply distribute the cards into the main cube for the night. We'll see how the playgroup wants to treat it on a nightly basis. I suspect the second option is going to be the long-term one.
I have a playgroup who love draft-matters cards like Lore Seeker and Arcane Savant, and got a real kick out of the Monarch mechanic when we drafted a CNS2 box. Given that I am starting this following the release of two Conspiracy sets, here's what I'm doing to play catch-up - the 15 cards are to be split into three sets of five. Five conspiracies, five draft-matters cards, five Monarch cards. We'll start with all the broken things available, and if we hate anything too much, we'll replace it. There's only one problem with this current plan - in trying to evenly split the cards across the colours, white absolutely sucks when it comes to draft-matters and Monarch cards. We had to be creative, and we've ended up with six Monarch cards and only four draft-matters cards. Sorry white, we hope future Conspiracy sets help you out!

I will initially be running:
Conspiracies

• Backup Plan. Perhaps not as broken in my playgroup as elsewhere - we have free mulligans to an extent. That doesn't mean this isn't still busted, though.
• Worldknit. Frequently cited as the other completely busted conspiracy from the first set.
• Double Stroke. Very highly rated. I've seen people talk of picking this over the first two if they come across them all later in the draft, and they've got a great instant or sorcery in their deck already.
• Sovereign's Realm. A slightly more fixed Worldknit. The plan is to let people hit up the cube's land box when playing with this.
• Hymn of the Wilds. A first-turn mox in decks with no instants and sorceries. What could possibly go wrong?

Draft-Matters Cards

• Arcane Savant. I purposely do not have spells that grant extra turns in my cube. I still think this is broken, though.
• Caller of the Untamed. Potentially up there with Mimic Vat. Will encourage people to draft off-colour bombs and then produce tokens in-game with Caller.
• Regicide. An absolute bomb if drafted early, close to a one-mana Go for the Throat in this environment.
• Volatile Chimera. The red equivalent of the Caller. There is already a tale of this producing a Turn 2 Inferno Titan.

Monarch Cards

• Queen Marchesa. Pretty much the Monarch headliner. I'm wary of her Mardu casting cost, but she's probably good enough that it doesn't matter.
• Throne of the High City. Decent land, splashable into any deck to help out with Monarch, and aids the Eldrazi decks to boot by producing colourless mana.
• Skyline Despot. Complete first-pick in CNS2 Limited, will be good enough in Multiplayer too.
• Regal Behemoth. See Despot, Skyline.
• Custodi Lich. Has a decent effect on the board in Multiplayer. Good enough for us to test out.
• Keeper of Keys. Likewise. I expect this will be pretty good in 2HG / 3HG in particular, where it will be protected more. If it lives, it has the potential to break up clogged boards and end games.

Here are the relevant previous threads:

• Original Conspiracy Draft-Matters Cards
• [CNS2] Conspiracy 2: Includes and Testing

There should be SCDs for most of the individual cards as well.

So, have I got my 15 right? What has worked for you? How do you add your module to the draft?

I have a conspiracy module for my cube. But, my cube isn't set for multiplayer, so I have a slightly different focus. My conspiracy module is built to cover all cards that aren't Vintage-legal and/or only work in traditional draft. Those are the only cards I "ban" from my main cube, so they're the ones we like to introduce when we play the conspiracy module. So monarch as a mechanic is actually in the main cube.

My current Conspiracy Module features the following cards:

I cant recommend conspiracies and the draft matters cards highly enough (I run them in my main cube though), though I think they need some thought based on your environment too as some are a bit too powerful to drop into any cube. Double stroke for example can be game game breaking on a lot of spells, even more so the stronger the environment.

Weight Advantage can be a lot of fun without being too broken, it adds another dimension to making your deck as you try take full advantage whilst deciding what creatures to still play even if they are slightly downgraded. First time i seen it in action I was being beat in the face with a 4/4 corsair whilst his 4/4 wall of omens was on the defense.

I don't bother putting conspiracies in a separate module. The existence of synergies between cards that are already the game's most powerful means that you need to take steps to disrupt players' ability to appraise cards.

1. Contract from Below can remove cards from a player's draft pool even after the games start. It degrades the quality of a player's pool and can remove key archetype-support cards mid-tourney.
2. Sovereign's Realm, Worldknit, Emissary's Ploy, and Volatile Chimera prevent players from having reliable access to archetypes. They destroy draft "signals" to further cloud appraisal.
3. Double Stroke and Hymn of the Wilds greatly modify the power level of cards. This helps to screw up "signals" as well as to make it difficult to anticipate others' plays.

Everyone talks about "archetypes" like they're a good thing. If you want predictable games, go play Standard. To people who like playing a different game every time, I recommend Contract from Below and the draft-bending conspiracies. Remember that cube-drafting is always "for ante:" the house always wins all of the cards after the last match is played regardless of who drafted them. "Ante" is the only mechanism MtG provides for change of ownership that results from games ending.

I don't agree that archetypes are a bad thing or that they lead to predictable games, but Contract from Below is absolutely killer if you decide to play for ante/ignore the ante clause.

I also don't agree that archetypes are bad, nor that they lead to predictable cube events. I think that generic theater play and flexibility in the types of decks is really important, but being able to build streamlined archetypes is also part of a healthy metagame.

And yes, Contract From Below is an absolutely absurd card if you're willing to ignore the ante requirement and house-rule it into playability.

We currently only run 11 cards in our Conspiracy Module between both Conspiracy 1 & 2. This is for a few reasons. First, my group (myself included) weren't big fans of the conspiracies that referenced one specific card in your draft. This meant cards like Double Stroke and Brago's Favor weren't really appealing to us. Adding weird abilities to existing cards just feels weird to me for some reason. And we have actual free (don't you ******* abuse it or you won't be invited back) mulligans, so Backup Plan didn't really do much except keep us from shuffling as much. We also opted not to include any Un cards in this module. The is probably mostly on me because, other than the sweet lands, I hated the Un sets. We did start the module off with all of the draft altering constructs, but after a while of drafting them and seeing most of them go unpicked, we removed all but four and there's probably one or two of those that can come out as well.

What we decided to go with were the cards that we thought added something we wanted to the draft and game play experience. A few in my group search for Worldknit each draft and slam it whenever they see it. I hope Sovereign's Realm ends up doing something similarly fun, but so far opinions have been lackluster. Hymn of the Wilds, on the other hand, is my own bread and butter. I love that effect and love building my decks around it. Lore Seeker is probably the most picked construct, followed by Cogwork Librarian. Aether Searcher and Canal Dredger are still there, but don't get picked that highly or even that often, so they are likely to go. I may keep one just to keep the module at ten cards. Paliano, the High City is just a sweet fixing land. We've found that it's unlikely that it won't fix two colors for you. Maybe my group just sucks at picking the colors for it, though. Regicide has been similarly powerful. Finally, both Arcane Savant and Volatile Chimera have been pretty broken. Savant is really sweet, but I might just give the power level nod to Chimera. The last time we drafted with the module in, my friend got Chimera with new Emrakul, Elesh Norn, and Sheoldred under it. He was a Gruul midrange deck. It was ridiculous.

Other than that, we do run Regal Behemoth and Custodi Lich in the main cube. Both of them have been solid cards even if you lose monarch the next turn. It also hasn't always been that difficult to get the monarch status back. They aren't staples by any means, but I'm not looking to cut them any time soon.

I think the conspiracies bring so much to the table that every play group should at least test before they decide whether or not they want to omit them from the majority of drafts. They are incredible for this format.

i do a module, similar to the others. i agree with calibretto on the conspiracies that only reference one card in your pool to make it more powerful. i also have cards in this group that i don't think are strong enough for my main cube, but i let frequent cubers put one card each of their choice into the board. this module creates additional rules and odd situations to a game that is already very complicated, so i wouldn't want these cards in my main cube. but sometimes my usual group wants to do bizarre or busted things, so the sideboard lets us tweak the game just enough. my cube sideboard is:

I should come back in here to report on the one wild game I had with Volatile Chimera...
Went hard at red, exiled the three fattest things that didn't make my 40, which ended up being Stormbreath Dragon, Utvara Hellkite and Skyline Despot.
Resolved Chimera, and was aiming to turn it into the Hellkite to generate a lot of large dragons, but kept ending up with a Stormbreath.
So, being Multiplayer, I had time, so I hung around until Turn 7, made it monstrous, re-activated, got a Stormbreath again. Turn 8, rinse, repeat...

Also worthy of mention is the effort posted in the "Only in Cube Draft..." thread in the last 24 hours...
... Turn 1 Double Stroked Dark Ritual, casting Braids, Cabal Minion and Bloodghast. Mad props!

I'm not sure why you would think the Chimera stops being monstrous if it becomes a copy of Stormbreath again. It does keep the +1/+1 counters when it becomes something else, so that is useful.

Initial impressions of card-referencing conspiracies may seem lackluster but the ones from CNS1 keep creeping up in pick order. Muzzio's + Glen Elendra is odd the charts.

Quote from djkensai »

Muzzio's + Glen Elendra is odd the charts.

Get yourself a sac outlet + finks/redcap and you effectively have a two card combo.

Bouncing this thread to report on Arcane Savant starting to get on my playgroup's "might be too busted" radar.
We knew it was good, but in the past two months we've had the following:

• Me exiling Balance with it in a 1vs1 budget cube and leaving a trail of messy control destruction in its wake.
• One of my buddies resolving it on Turn 3 thanks to Sol Ring in my Multiplayer cube... after it had exiled Army of the Damned...

It's now officially on the "things I should hate-draft or maindeck countermagic for" list, alongside Deadeye Navigator and a few other game-degenerating things in my Multiplayer cube.
If you have a Conspiracy section, and you haven't banned Arcane Savant yet, you should be running it. It's as good as advertised.

Also of note out of my Conspiracy section in recent times:

• Hymn of the Wilds has been very popular, and is great fun to build around. One of my buddies drafted Animar out of my EDH Generals section along with the Hymn, and built an absolutely epic all-fatties deck.
• Caller of the Untamed finally saw some play last night for me. I'm waiting for someone to achieve something degenerate with it like we've already seen with Arcane Savant and Volatile Chimera, but it hasn't happened yet. That doesn't mean it's fairer, it just means no-one's completely broken it yet.
• Regicide continues to be an incredible removal spell. Someone inadvertently had one set to Jund last night in mid-draft after someone across the table had gone hard at those exact colours.