MTG Salvation

Strangely enough, I do not think this archetype is very good, for my cube, at least. I just find a lot of the main archetype cards that support sacrificing (Nantuko Husk, Goblin Bombardment) are just under-powered compared to what the rest of my cube is doing. People are correct that a lot of the support for the deck is also good elsewhere, usually in tokens, but I would rather lean into that theme more than dilute it with the sacrifice cards.

A lot of this might be because my cube tends to be more powerful than the average Peasant cuber's, but I would rather not play those archetype specific sacrifice cards unless they had other purposes (playing Threaten effects or maybe supporting Unearth creatures or creatures with strong leave-the-battlefield effects like Sultai Emissary).

modern peasent means no bonbardment so that really weakens the need for red. I have Catacomb sifter that pushes it into green but it is kind of black based splashing any one of the other colours for fuel. Blue is the weakest but I have had someone contruct a blue black artifact based sac deck and have it work. Its part of my cube just being a million 1/1 tokens everywhere.

Speaking of red black
Bituminous Blast

Apperently this a super powerful and iconic card. Clearly my issue is I didn't play magic during alara and I can't wrap my head around casade and adding 4 mana to a card (flame slash) and it being amazing.

Bituminous Blast is also an instant, unlike Flame Slash. That makes the mana cost added less than 4; maybe more like 3. Then you start thinking of the average value you gain from cascading and the thing that you cast will have an average converted mana cost somewhere between 2 and 3 but going up to 4. Thus, you would more or less mitigate the difference on average, and it also gives flash to any creature being brought in, enabling more value plays (and occasionally, a counterspell).

If I were not playing Crypt Champion as my second Rakdos card in a two-card section for the poop and chuckles, I would definitely include the Blast.

"Draw a card" typically is fairly costed as 2 (e.g. Grizzly Bears v Striped Bears).

So Flame Slash + draw a card could be prized at 2R. So you could argue that with Bituminous Blast you pay an extra 2 for instant speed + making sure the card you draw is non-land + casting the card straight away.

As long as your deck doesn't carry duds (counterspells, doom blade vs a black deck, etc) Bit Blast is almost always getting you a ton of value. Take everything from Bloodbraid Elf's cascade that's positive, and add 1 and instant speed. In a format that can be grindy like Peasant, getting both a creature from your opponent and a spell from your own deck for 5 mana at instant speed is a ton of value, and can be a ton more depending on what you cascade into.

Yeah Bit Blast is pretty great, almost always a pretty backbreaking two for one, pretty comparable to Ribbons of Night I would say.

Vari, I see that you only use two card multicolor sections. And in general looking at people's cubes they only have 2-3 multicolor cards per guild usually. What is the reasoning for this, just not enough good cards in the guilds that you want to play? I get that for some of them, but other guilds there are just such valuable cards that even choosing just four cards can be challenging.

Quote from DJRedLantern »

Vari, I see that you only use two card multicolor sections. And in general looking at people's cubes they only have 2-3 multicolor cards per guild usually. What is the reasoning for this, just not enough good cards in the guilds that you want to play? I get that for some of them, but other guilds there are just such valuable cards that even choosing just four cards can be challenging.

You pretty much nail it. In addition, fixing is worse in peasant, so you can't mitigate the unplayableness of a gold card by making it splashable as easily. Having to cut cards because of smaller sections is a good problem to have, as more gold cards is generally bad for any cubes.

Why would you say multicolor cards are generally bad for cube, just too restrictive?

Quote from DJRedLantern »

Why would you say multicolor cards are generally bad for cube, just too restrictive?

Too restrictive, this is why you want to either lean towards hybrid cards or a lower number of multicolored cards. Like, if I have an Izzet Charm in the pack, and no one is UR or can make UR mana, then it's a dead card. It's good enough to run in the cube, definitely, but in cube I want to eliminate the number of 'dead cards' and multicolored cards tend to be the most dead outside of really narrow archetype support cards or SB only cards. This allows for more deck permutations and more options for more decks, and the cog-pieces have more space when you aren't running narrow multicolored cards. I'm not saying 'run zero' or anything close, but one the classic cube builder mistakes is to think gold inherently means better while ignoring the cost of including gold cards.

That's a really good point, especially when doing drafts with 2 or 4 people, which is what I do most often. I guess I will go down to three for now, what do I cut out of Momentary Blink, Reflector Mage, Migratory Route, Thunderclap Wyvern though? I'm leaning toward cutting blink, but it's so iconic.

Quote from DJRedLantern »

That's a really good point, especially when doing drafts with 2 or 4 people, which is what I do most often. I guess I will go down to three for now, what do I cut out of Momentary Blink, Reflector Mage, Migratory Route, Thunderscape Wyvern though? I'm leaning toward cutting blink, but it's so iconic.

I'd prob cut the Blink or Wyvern, unless iconic=/=heavily played for you guys then it's an easy Blink cut. The Wyvern seems the most narrow but also really great in that deck, whereas while Blink isn't incredible it's still nice for value. What happens more, UW fliers or UW blink? The answer to that is probably what's going to determine your cut.

On a power-level standpoint, the other two are prob uncuttable. At the end of the day, though, it's your cube and you decide what stays and goes and none of them are embarrassingly bad by any means.

I do not necessarily agree with the point that a larger multi-colored sections is bad cube design. But of course I would say that, given as I have pretty large guild sections (7 spells per color pair, counting hybrid, Signets, off-color flashbacks, and basic land referencing spells as guild spells).

I will state the thing I personally like about having larger guild sections is that the power level of decks tends to increase. Ideally for Cube decks, it is easy to have more than enough reasonable playables, so bringing that down a little bit for decks to have a little more power is something I enjoy. That is definitely a Cube philosophy preference on my end, so it does not apply to everyone, nor would it apply if most of your drafting is with 4 people or fewer, as the possibility for color pairs to be unrepresented goes much higher.

Playgroup size is definitely a factor. Perhaps there's confirmation bias, but in my experience most cube groups are 4 or less players, at least the ones that regularly meet. I know that a number of posters on here are lucky to consistently get more than that, and it'll always be 8 if you're online. But yeah, the more of the cube you see, the less these issues surface in the long run.

That being said, you can add 2 cards to each monocolor section for every 1 you reduce in your guilds. That's a pretty big swing in the number of cards that fall into any decks that have at least just that color vs decks that need exclusively that guild's colors. Like, you can add cards that support multiple guilds in those spots vs having specific cards, and I think that's a bit more powerful overall for your cube and its playability, or at least in terms of supporting everything you want to. If you wanted to support tokens in both BR and BW, cutting a cycle of guild cards to add token supporters to all three of those colors does a lot more to support all three of those guilds than those three guild-specific cards would. It allows you to add 6 total cards to that archetype if you choose to, along with whatever you're supporting in the other two colors.

I constantly flip-flop on this issue and haven't found a solid balancing point yet.

On the one hand, I feel more multicolored cards does have a net negative impact on drafting. More cards go unwanted in each pack, and if you're in the colors of a multicolor card passed your way, the decision to take it generally isn't hard or interesting. Having a higher % of single-color cards leads to more interesting navigation of the draft, especially in the early parts.

On the other hand, I agree with rancoredmalone that increasing multicolor cards likely does increase average deck power. If you're in Simic, the 4th-best Simic card is likely to make the cut over the 50th-best green or blue card every time. There is a discrepancy with some guilds that are far more shallow than others, but overall I think it holds true that an average two- or three-color deck is more powerful if it gets to run more gold cards in its colors.

With guild cards you make the trade off of playables for powerlevel/unique effects. I find that it's easy to get more than enough playables, so I have a significantly larger guild section than most people. I remember doing the math and I think it was about 3 more playables comparing 3 guild slots with more artifacts and monocolour to 6 guild slots with extra land, though I don't recall the exact numbers. I tend to get at least 4-5 extra playables despite that, and I barely care about my 28th playable in the first place. Guild cards do get dead easily, but drafting 3 packs of 14 still makes a good deck.

If you can keep powerlevel, archetype support, and uniqueness while cutting a guild slot then 100% do it, but the chance of that happening is pretty slim. You can replace Momentary Blink with flicker support, but something like Cloudshift doesn't fill the shoes of Blink.

Gold cards do come at a cost, but saying they're generally bad for any cube is completely ridiculous. It's bad design to go over a certain point, but that point is dependent on what kind of experience you want to have.

I have lots of great gold cards just constantly wheeling because people just aren't that colour combination or they had two critical cards they needed in the same pack. Perhaps it is me having archetype based gold cards, although I have started cutting that, so you have three archtype stables in the pack and you don't pick the gold card. Then you also have the "filler" gold cards, that are just good utility cards and they also don't get picked and almost always wheel because people take the power picka over it.

So more gold, even if they are great cards, means you have more trash packs with nothing you want.

I am trying to cheese the gold cards by using lots of flashback, split and hybrid. I feel like my fixing is alright and it's really easy to get a splash colour just randomly in your lands that you can flashback an off colour card or cast the other half of a split card. I am picking lingering souls in a UW or WR deck 80% of the time then just going to find a random triland or two to flash it back.

If there was abundant fixing, it would be one thing. But you really do get more options, and I think that is something that doesn't show up strictly in how many extra options you have in your final 45 as you provide your drafters that many more choices per pack per draft. If you're not keeping cards out of your monocolored sections because you have too many choices, then it doesn't really matter, but I'd rather be supporting what the monocolored sections want to do vs having more options of cards that only fit into those specific color combinations.

You can mitigate a *lot* of those concerns with what you run in those multicolored sections--hybrids, cards where you don't need to immediately get the flashback part going, split cards, cards with colorless cycling costs--but I feel much better about excluding a couple multicolored cards from each section if it means I get that much more sandbox space in the monocolored or colorless sections.

"On the other hand, I agree with rancoredmalone that increasing multicolor cards likely does increase average deck power. If you're in Simic, the 4th-best Simic card is likely to make the cut over the 50th-best green or blue card every time"

But this is still at the expense of every other deck that wasnt simic.

There is a balancing point, and it's probably got something to do with the proportion of decks it doesn't get cut from.

The case that the simic card makes the simic deck better still has to contend with the fact that the monocolored card it replaced isn't around to make the other 3 guilds it could be in better. So izzet, azorius, and dimir all get worse while simic gets better.

Now you might say "but leelue, when I put in a card for each of those guilds, they get better too and it's all a wash". But that's a fallacy. If you add 10 guild cards, each individual guild is losing 4 monocolored cards but only gaining 1 guild card to compensate.

So the guild cards probably have to be roughly four times more likely to contribute to winning for the guy who drafted it purposely than the worst monocolored cards they replaced.

That is probably less work than it seems?
I know the least popular white cards in my cube for example (like shelter) get decked way less than half the time. So an... Orzhov card like tidehollow sculler that makes BW decks more often and ups the winrate by a decent clip is better for the cube in theory. But you need 9 more gold cards to balance, which means you need 9 more monocolored cards that are around as rarely used as shelter to go with 9 more tidehollow sculler-level gold cards.

You can fudge the numbers a bit to keep things even. Maybe only 8 monocolor cards are bad but you drop 2 more for the greater good. But the cost is there.

I run 3 cards per guild, but that includes lands

Also I am not messing with my mana base to flashback lingering souls. If that triland is better for my deck than the card I drafted it over then fine. But if I picked it up just to flashback lingering souls then my deck is worse every game that I draw either card without the other.

I recently got back into the world of strictly peasant after a brief venture into peasant+. I decided on a 360 list because, let's be honest, the card quality for C/U card starts decreasing quickly after you get past that 360 mark. Anyway, for my gold section, I decided to go with three per guild. Some sections were hard to cut down to three (Selesnya) while others were tough to even find three (Simic). I think at 360 2-3 per guild is "correct" but that could vary depending on your group's affinity to multicolor cards and how deep you want to go there. Again, though, at peasant rarities gold card quality can sometimes start really high and then drop off abruptly.

I'm running four guild cards at 405 cards. I wouldn't recommend more than four, but I think four is still fine.

Quote from Leelue »

So the guild cards probably have to be roughly four times more likely to contribute to winning for the guy who drafted it purposely than the worst monocolored cards they replaced.

If we say that the average play rate of the cards being cut is about 40% then the gold card should only need to be ~2.5x (presuming 100% playrate) better than the combined value of the replaced cards in comparison to the 23rd card if we're just looking at deck power, since the non-played cards don't help you win. I would imagine most guild cards until ~4 slots can probably pass that mark, though after that it probably varies depending on the guild.

I would be surprised if anyone has the play rate for all the cards and comparing values of cards precisely is practically impossible, so it's not super practical, but for the first few guild slots it seems pretty applicable.

Let's take Leelue's example to the maximum extreme. I think from memory my 360 cube has something like 58 cards per colour, 3 guild cards per colour pair, with about 40 colorless / land cards. Essentially this gives you 119 coloured cards that fit a colour pair.

The vast majority of decks are 2 colour, so you could argue that "2 colour cards are more powerful, why don't I just cube all gold cards!". If you keep 40 colorless cards, you only end up with 32 cards available per colour pair instead of 119.

I don't know if that exercise is actually USEFUL, but I think it demonstrates that the more gold cards you have, the less flexibility you have with deck construction. I wonder what the 32nd best Boros card looks like...

Probably looks like a Plains.

Just started randomly thinking about what the 32nd best Boros card really is. After doing a Gatherer search, If I had to gueas, it's one of these random two-drops, like a Cautery Sliver or a Cerodon Yearling.