I think Time Spiral is the right cut. It's powerful, but you want a like-for-like testing card and there's really not a lot of better options, if any, for a testing cut.
Well, I think you are crazy for cutting Time Spiral :p. The only reason I can see is that it is less good is the format and group size you have most of the time. In our 450, 8-man Rochester cube it has always been a high pick. But testing is important, so sometimes you have to temporarily kill one your darlings.
That's more of the responses I was expecting. But it's getting harder and harder to find decks that want expensive spells that aren't already loaded with more fitting ones for their particular strategy. I mentioned that the two decks that wanted it the most aren't supported at this size anymore, and playing smaller player formats certainly has an impact on it. I think it's a fantastic spell, and I'm certainly not convinced without a doubt that it's the perfect cut. But I think for testing purposes, Dig will be a formidable end-of-curve draw spell that will functionally fit in more decks because it doesn't have a high concrete casting cost. Only time will tell if it's the "right" cut or not, but it seemed like the best cut for testing because they have similar effects.
It seems like 95% of the time you don't want to cast it before you have at least 6 mana.
Not at all. There are blue tempo decks that don't plan on reaching 6 mana, and 'Twister is better in all of them. It's a complete house in tempo decks and counterburn, in addition to ramp decks and stuff. In decks that intend on reaching 6+ mana in every game, Spiral is better. But costing half as much mana makes it playable in a lot more decks. And in a lot more windows, which can be quite important for draw-7 effects, I've found.
Trinket Mage didn't stay long. What are your thoughts on him?
I like it, but I feel like I need a few more bullet targets for it in order to hack it at 375. Another sick X artifact and 1-2 more 1cc artifact answer cards will make it a lot better. Mainly because we play with <8 players a lot of the time, where tracking down perfect pairings is much harder.
Timetwister is also better at creating early advantage with mana rocks. Mox-Mox-Land-Timetwister is one of the best turn 1 plays you can do on the play. Your opponent might get a completely unkeepable 7, sure, but even if they don't, you just went up two cards because of your moxes.
I think Time Spiral is almost always better in decks that want both cards, but some decks want Timetwister and not Time Spiral, if that makes sense.
It makes total sense. And they do slightly different things. Timetwister is better at setting up situational card advantage plays, because it usually goes into decks with lower curves and resolves earlier in the game when the opponent is more likely to still have several cards in hand. But Time Spiral is better at orchestrating a long game win because you get the first crack at the fresh set of seven. In decks that can play both, Time Spiral is typically the better card. But not every deck can play 6cc sorceries consistently.
And don't forget splashability. I have had timetwister in many decks that were mostly red or black that used it like a wheel of fortune. Dump hand, then refill, or after an opponent sets up a top deck
I have an adaptation of this format that we've been experimenting with. We call it "Glimpse Drafting" (based on Glimpse the Future) and it's essentially a hybrid between my old 9x9 drafting variant and Colby's Burnfour draft.
Each player makes 9 packs of 15. You draft a card and burn 2 cards rather than 4 before you pass the pack to your opponent (the OP advises against this, but we found it much more satisfying). Each player will get 5 cards per pack, and you wind up with 45 cards at the end of the draft. It fixed the three main problems we had with Burnfour when we experimented with the format, and was actually quite a lot of fun.
The three main differences were:
1) The quality of the 2nd and 3rd picks are substantially better, and made them more important to your deck construction. Instead of having the player that opens the pack taking the best card and ripping the next 4 best cards (removing the top 33% of the pack) you have to pass packs with 12 remaining cards in them, only allowing for the top 20% at best to be axed.
2) You still wind up with 45 cards in your pool, like a regular draft. This made drafting fixing lands, utility lands and other cards that replace basics less impactful on your draft (about the same as a normal draft) and it also gave more tools to aggro. A lot of the 4th and 5th picks in the packs are great filler cards for aggro decks, and we found it much easier to draft better manabases and better aggro decks during our Glimpse Drafts.
3) The decisions were harder. When faced with the decision between removing the two most broken cards or the two most functionally important cards for a specific strategy from the pack, you're forced to pass one of the two. We found that in Burnfour we could take what we want and eliminate pretty much every important/broken card that we were afraid of seeing on the other side of the table. Only being able to eliminate two of those cards before passing the pack made it a lot harder to prohibit the opponent from seeing certain cards, and as a result, archetypes became easier to draft.
Less information is hidden this way, but we actually found that to be an upside. It made signaling a thing, and reading what the opponent is doing is more important in a format where they'll be collecting more cards from each individual pack.
Both formats were fun, and I thank Colby for sharing this variant here. I combined what I liked from this format and what I liked from the 9x9 format we'd been experimenting with and came to something we're pretty happy with.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
My Moderator Helpdesk
Currently Playing:
Legacy: Something U/W Controlish EDH Cube
Hypercube! A New EDH Deck Every Week(ish)!
Each player makes 9 packs of 15. You draft a card and burn 2 cards rather than 4 before you pass the pack to your opponent (the OP advises against this, but we found it much more satisfying). Each player will get 5 cards per pack, and you wind up with 45 cards at the end of the draft. It fixed the three main problems we had with Burnfour when we experimented with the format, and was actually quite a lot of fun.
Is this a typo or am I missing something? You open a 15-card pack, draft a card, burn 2, and pass 12 cards to your opponent. Your opponent picks a card, burns 2, and passes 9 cards back to you. You draft 1, burn 2, and pass 6. Your opponent drafts 1, burns 2 and passes 3. You pick 1 and burn the remaining 2.
So you get 3 cards from each pack you open and 2 from each pack your opponent opens. At 9 packs per player this is indeed 9x3 + 9x2 = 45 cards in your draft pool.
Will try this soon and would like to get it right!
Each player makes 9 packs of 15. You draft a card and burn 2 cards rather than 4 before you pass the pack to your opponent (the OP advises against this, but we found it much more satisfying). Each player will get 5 cards per pack, and you wind up with 45 cards at the end of the draft. It fixed the three main problems we had with Burnfour when we experimented with the format, and was actually quite a lot of fun.
Is this a typo or am I missing something? You open a 15-card pack, draft a card, burn 2, and pass 12 cards to your opponent. Your opponent picks a card, burns 2, and passes 9 cards back to you. You draft 1, burn 2, and pass 6. Your opponent drafts 1, burns 2 and passes 3. You pick 1 and burn the remaining 2.
So you get 3 cards from each pack you open and 2 from each pack your opponent opens. At 9 packs per player this is indeed 9x3 + 9x2 = 45 cards in your draft pool.
Will try this soon and would like to get it right!
OK, I guess when you play both players open a pack simultaneously, while I was assuming you'd take turns opening packs. Comes to the same thing, but your way is quicker.
Yes, both players are opening packs and making drafting decisions simultaneously. You don't have 18 separate draft rounds, only 9, with 2 open packs at the same time.
We drafted twice again today, and I played WUR decks both times. I'll see if I can post pictures of the decklists...
Here was the first draft (a 3-player standard 3x15 draft):
A nut Patriot Wildfire deck ...this went undefeated.
..........
The second draft was a Glimpse Draft:
It went 2-3 in a best of 5 ...lost to Baneslayer and Jitte off the back of bad mulliganing decisions and poor O-Ring target choices. Oh well, there's always next time. 2 of the 3 loses were 1 turn short of winning the game off Purphoros damage but they were able to stabilize off the back of Baneslayer and Jitte life-gain.
CUBE TOP 10 - Help us vote for the best cards in cube
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 feel compelled to repeat everything I hear
It seems like 95% of the time you don't want to cast it before you have at least 6 mana.
A Comprehensive list of Cube Archetypes
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!
Not at all. There are blue tempo decks that don't plan on reaching 6 mana, and 'Twister is better in all of them. It's a complete house in tempo decks and counterburn, in addition to ramp decks and stuff. In decks that intend on reaching 6+ mana in every game, Spiral is better. But costing half as much mana makes it playable in a lot more decks. And in a lot more windows, which can be quite important for draw-7 effects, I've found.
Decks like this, for example, which we play all the time in pretty much every color combination: http://cubetutor.com/cubedeck/194081 ...
I like it, but I feel like I need a few more bullet targets for it in order to hack it at 375. Another sick X artifact and 1-2 more 1cc artifact answer cards will make it a lot better. Mainly because we play with <8 players a lot of the time, where tracking down perfect pairings is much harder.
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 Time Spiral is almost always better in decks that want both cards, but some decks want Timetwister and not Time Spiral, if that makes sense.
CUBE TOP 10 - Help us vote for the best cards in cube
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!
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!
Deckbox tradelist/for sale
Draft my cube on cubetutor!
Check out my blog on Cube Archetypes!
CUBE TOP 10 - Help us vote for the best cards in cube
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!
Currently Playing:
Legacy: Something U/W Controlish
EDH Cube
Hypercube! A New EDH Deck Every Week(ish)!
Is this a typo or am I missing something? You open a 15-card pack, draft a card, burn 2, and pass 12 cards to your opponent. Your opponent picks a card, burns 2, and passes 9 cards back to you. You draft 1, burn 2, and pass 6. Your opponent drafts 1, burns 2 and passes 3. You pick 1 and burn the remaining 2.
So you get 3 cards from each pack you open and 2 from each pack your opponent opens. At 9 packs per player this is indeed 9x3 + 9x2 = 45 cards in your draft pool.
Will try this soon and would like to get it right!
A Comprehensive list of Cube Archetypes
Is this a typo or am I missing something? You open a 15-card pack, draft a card, burn 2, and pass 12 cards to your opponent. Your opponent picks a card, burns 2, and passes 9 cards back to you. You draft 1, burn 2, and pass 6. Your opponent drafts 1, burns 2 and passes 3. You pick 1 and burn the remaining 2.
So you get 3 cards from each pack you open and 2 from each pack your opponent opens. At 9 packs per player this is indeed 9x3 + 9x2 = 45 cards in your draft pool.
Will try this soon and would like to get it right!
A Comprehensive list of Cube Archetypes
Currently Playing:
Legacy: Something U/W Controlish
EDH Cube
Hypercube! A New EDH Deck Every Week(ish)!
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!
CUBE TOP 10 - Help us vote for the best cards in cube
A Comprehensive list of Cube Archetypes
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!
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!
We drafted twice again today, and I played WUR decks both times. I'll see if I can post pictures of the decklists...
Here was the first draft (a 3-player standard 3x15 draft):
A nut Patriot Wildfire deck ...this went undefeated.
..........
The second draft was a Glimpse Draft:
It went 2-3 in a best of 5 ...lost to Baneslayer and Jitte off the back of bad mulliganing decisions and poor O-Ring target choices. Oh well, there's always next time. 2 of the 3 loses were 1 turn short of winning the game off Purphoros damage but they were able to stabilize off the back of Baneslayer and Jitte life-gain.
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!