There were already a few things I had to address. Blue was overpowered, so I toned down its counterspells considerably. Black had too many kill spells (it may still have too many) and Green had too much Ramp.
Draft it if you want, but you don't have to. What I want to know is this:
Does each color have a good balance of creature and spell effects?
Does each guild pair have a clear, draftable archetype? I didn't have specific "draft around me" strategies in mind; I just mean do the color pairs have a general game plan (or two).
Are there any bombs/stinkers that should be replaced?
I only had a quick glance at it. You still have way too much ramp. There's a total of about four creatures you really want to ramp into and get them out as soon as you can cast them. I'm not sure I would bother with any ramp at all with such a low curve to the cube. Fixing, sure. You also have so much premium removal that ramping is a really dodgy strategy as whatever you ramp into can be easily removed for 2 mana by your opponent.
I also think you have too many multicolour cards for a 360 card cube. I'd go for three from each colour pairing and make sure they are relevant. A lot of the multicolour cards you are running can easily be replaced with spells from one of the paired colours. An example being Pit Fight, sure it is an instant, but you can get plenty of fight cards in green which you have already included. I also wouldn't bother drafting any of them as there is so much premium removal available in other colours.
Four of the five cards you have in Rakdos are removal with only one aggro creature.
There are plenty of card dumping spells in green and golgari, but about the only cards that really benefit are a couple of delve creatures and the odd gravedigging black creature.
There are sideboard only cards like Naturalize. I would include creatures that have the option to be sacrificed instead, as at least they can be main-decked and used as a creature.
Three of the Gruul spells are pretty pants. Gruul has loads of awesome value creatures you can play and that give you targets to ramp into. Streetbreaker Wurm, Gorger Wurm, Ruination Wurm, Zhur-Taa Swine, Ember Weaver, Horned Kavu, and Rhox Brute to name a few.
There also appear to be quite a few weak cards in the cube that don't appear to have any great supported synergies that would make them worth picking. Things like Gladecover Scout, Trinket Mage, Akroan Crusader.
Green seems weak overall, it is dominated by mana ramping and mana fixing with only a few real meaty creatures and way too many sorceries. If people need removal they will look to black, red, or white. Just put a load more green creatures in. There is a *****load of fixing overall, there are 45 cards that will fix any colour of mana you need, that is every eighth card. This will allow people to simply pick the best card in every pack and just run multi-colour decks without any real disadvantage.
181 creatures in a 360 card cube seems like way too few. Only half your cube is creatures.
There are affinity for artifact creatures and spells but no real way anyone is going to play them due to their low power level and setup costs with sub-par cards. There are several destroy artifact sideboard cards yet Whispersilk Cloak is about the only artifact in the cube I would feel compelled to sideboard artifact removal in for. I'm really stretching to include some archetypes in my own cube and affinity and artifacts simply aren't viable at the current power level. You would have to seriously water down the entire cube to make it a viable drafting strategy.
Decide if you want to start out with a powered cube and build it accordingly by consulting the evaluate everything thread or look at some of the powered cubes in people's sigs on the forums. Alternatively, check out the archetype pauper threads to get some ideas for the key cards you need to include to support certain archetypes. If you go down this route you then need to start tweaking your cube so that going out on a limb to build a certain archetype is a sensible choice. This often involves shaving the top end off some aspects of the cube such as the amount of removal or how premium the removal is that you include in your cube. You also need to weigh up how effective an archetype supporting card is outside of the particular deck you expect to see it. Unless it can at least perform an average job in another deck it should probably be left out, unless it provides a super pay-off for a certain archetype. An example is something like Undergrowth Scavenger. That card is straight up terrible in virtually every deck when compared to other four drops in the typical cube. It really only shines in a graveyard deck that is looking to dump cards and trade creatures. Having said that, I'm currently trying it in my cube.
Thanks for the input so far. I'll take a look at the Green and multicolor sections.
Forgive me, as I couldn't find the answer to this anywhere, but what does a "Powered" Pauper Cube mean? I know what a Powered Cube is, but given that the Power 9 are all Rares, I have no idea what this means here. Is there a "Power 9" for Pauper? Or is this just a reference to the banlist? Because as is the cube doesn't have any cards on the Pauper banlist in it.
A 'Powered' Pauper Cube is a Pauper Cube in which the cards are included based on flat-power only criteria.
You simply include the most powerful cards on their own with no regards to synergies, influence on archetypes, etc.
Of course those criteria can enter the equation when your powered cube is big enough and you have to decide between 2 equally good-on-their-own cards.
For example, Crow of Dark Tidings is a card that, while not bad on itself (2/1 flying for 3 is ok), is not 'powered' on its own. You put it in your cube if you want to push delirium, flashback, gravedigger effects, etc. but in terms of powerlevel a card like Dauthi Marauder or Liliana's Specter is way better.
I see. It seems like there isn't an objective criterion by which to differentiate the two.
This brings up a good question for an archetype-centric small cube: how many cards does an archetype need to support it? I was thinking somewhere around 15 to 20 per archetype, with "goodstuff" cards that work in multiple archetypes, of power relative to the other cards.
This is a great thread that explains some more specific archetypes. Keep in mind that many of these archetypes are not particularly powerful, but if you combine a few cards in a deck you can get some nice synergies combined with a more regular deck consisting of powerful cards with a good curve.
Swarm and Auras are viable even in a powered cube with the right cards. Graveyard matters sort of works in a powered cube but becomes a lot more well rounded if you water your cube down a wee bit.
Some archetypes only need a few cards included to give drafters the option for some interesting combos. The main thing to consider when including less powerful cards is evaluating how many archetypes the card would work in. An example of a few super useful creatures that fit into multiple archetypes:
Satyr Wayfinder - Unexciting to look at but he fixes mana, fills your graveyard, supports landfall, is a great target for sacrifice decks, and can simply be used as a chump block to save a few points of damage. Conditional mana fixing is useful in most decks and he also has uses in three other archetypes.
Felidar Cub - A 2/2 for 2 isn't exciting, but acceptable and this guy allows you to destroy enchantments and is a beast, which does have some potential synergies.
Emrakul's Hatcher - Another very average creature at first glance. However, with the three spawn tokens he creates you now have a card that fits into control decks as all the tokens can block damage, they can also be used to ramp into the big scary creatures in the cube, they can be used in a swarm deck looking to go wide and pumped with some of the various mass pump spells on offer, they can be used in a sacrifice deck to pump other creatures, they can easily trigger morbid for morbid creatures as well. Once again we see a card that is very average at face value but fits into an awful lot of decks where it can be very useful.
Unless you are just going to copy paste another cube you need to put a lot of time into your card selection and get cubing with your mates to see how it goes. You will eventually get your cube how you want it and will only need to worry about tinkering with a few cards when a new set comes out.
Your cube looks like a typical beginners cube to me. There is no real focus on archetypes and you run a lot of bad cards that will never be played in 8-man drafts. One of the common mistakes you make is running Crypt Rats and Pestilence in a black section thats basically pure aggro. To be really good those cards need a black control support. I agree with Poly, that your gold section is excessive. Your ramp is borderline and you should run signets and myr before other mana-artifacts and probably cut a set of duals. Creature count is ok, being 50% and your curve also looks quite good.
I ran a cube like this when I started and tweaked it through playtesting because I didnt want to copy someones cube. Its fun and you will learn a lot about creating metagames.
But if you want to copy or get some idea about the difference between power and archetype cubes, check mine. Although there are certain archetypes in powered cubes as well.
An archetype centric cube needs cross-color cross-synergy support to function best. Like swarm and sacrifice interact really well.
I dont agree with Poly that swarm is a supportable archetype in powered cubes, because it takes way too many slots and most of the cards are pretty borderline on their own.
Thanks for your input, everyone! I've read the article that Polycotton linked and I've gone about making a second cube that's archetypal. By complete coincidence, many of my archetypes are on there. I'm still fine-tuning it with CastleAI bots and I'm not ready to post it yet, but I do have a few specific questions.
Should an unpowered/archetypal cube have NO bombs whatsoever, or just a minimal amount of it?
Similarly, do they require some amount of "goodstuff" that work in any of the color's archetypes? I would imagine that if yes, their power level would have to be lower than the synergies gained from the archetype cards.
Are there any archetypes for Rakdos besides Goblins? For some reason I don't like making one guild tribal and the rest not. I tried for a vague theme of creatures that can't block and cards that prevent your opponents from blocking, but I'm not sure how well it turned out...
At the very least, the cube right now consistently has the CastleAI bots draft dual-colored decks (unlike my first attempt...), but sometimes two of them will draft the same guild in the same draft. Is this... unusual? If so, is it the fault of the cube's design or the bots themselves?
There are way more experienced cubers than myself on here. I'll have a go at answering your questions though. Even in an archetype cube the majority of the cards could be lifted straight from a powered cube. At a rough estimate around 60%-70% of the cards in my cube would still be present in a powered cube. As I understand it, powered cubes make a lot of archetypes too slow or ineffective primarily because the curve is so low in a powered cube and all the cards are so good that outside of traditional control decks it is really hard to play any archetype that falls outside of aggro/midrange value without putting yourself at a disadvantage as you try and set up your combos. Your opponent will just curve you out with efficient creatures and removal.
It's kind of hard to sum up how you balance all these factors to make archetypes more viable. One important thing to remember is that some archetypes only need a few cards and it will never be an amazing deck, it just adds a bit more flavour and synergy to a deck whilst other archetypes can be quite strong and a whole deck can be built around the cards involved.
I made slower archetypes more viable by removing all the 2 mana (largely unconditional) removal and a couple of high value blue counter spells. I made some of the other removal conditional on archetype support as well which meant that it couldn't be put in any deck and be super efficient. Green and Black didn't have as many aggro 1-2 drops whilst simultaneously having a few more counters to aggro decks. I also removed hexproof creatures and shadow creatures for the most part. Decks that focus on those two rules just seem to roll over decks that don't happen to have anything to counter them and are uninteractive. I've made successful aggro decks, swarm decks, graveyard decks, and efficient best card decks with my current cube and come out on top with them.
The reason I like having more creatures in a cube is that at least in my playgroup, when I was playing a straight up powered cube; I kept finding myself cutting really good removal whilst sometimes not having enough creatures on curve. In general I was cutting great cards from my deck which made me think an archetype cube might be more my cup of tea. You can still build the super efficient best card decks, it just requires a bit more thought and meanwhile you are passing the average archetype cards around to the players that want those.
I guess Humphrey is right on swarm, there are some great token generator cards that are good in their own right. I guess it is the mass pump spells that aren't of much use outside of swarm that you are putting into the cube instead of something more universally powerful.
its the critical mass of token generators you need for that archetype. and slots in powered cubes are way too tight.
my approach for a balanced and interesting archetype cube is to ban all cards that i already run in my powered cube. and i have the space to fit in all the fun and smaller archetyoes like madness, blink, ramp, +1+1 matters
my powered cube runs 90% cards that are considered staples or cubable and fills the other 10% with archetype relevant cards that will emerge when you throw the goodstuff together. its also balanced around the aggro/midragen/control scheme.
Here's the list.
There were already a few things I had to address. Blue was overpowered, so I toned down its counterspells considerably. Black had too many kill spells (it may still have too many) and Green had too much Ramp.
Draft it if you want, but you don't have to. What I want to know is this:
I also think you have too many multicolour cards for a 360 card cube. I'd go for three from each colour pairing and make sure they are relevant. A lot of the multicolour cards you are running can easily be replaced with spells from one of the paired colours. An example being Pit Fight, sure it is an instant, but you can get plenty of fight cards in green which you have already included. I also wouldn't bother drafting any of them as there is so much premium removal available in other colours.
Four of the five cards you have in Rakdos are removal with only one aggro creature.
There are plenty of card dumping spells in green and golgari, but about the only cards that really benefit are a couple of delve creatures and the odd gravedigging black creature.
There are sideboard only cards like Naturalize. I would include creatures that have the option to be sacrificed instead, as at least they can be main-decked and used as a creature.
Three of the Gruul spells are pretty pants. Gruul has loads of awesome value creatures you can play and that give you targets to ramp into. Streetbreaker Wurm, Gorger Wurm, Ruination Wurm, Zhur-Taa Swine, Ember Weaver, Horned Kavu, and Rhox Brute to name a few.
There also appear to be quite a few weak cards in the cube that don't appear to have any great supported synergies that would make them worth picking. Things like Gladecover Scout, Trinket Mage, Akroan Crusader.
Green seems weak overall, it is dominated by mana ramping and mana fixing with only a few real meaty creatures and way too many sorceries. If people need removal they will look to black, red, or white. Just put a load more green creatures in. There is a *****load of fixing overall, there are 45 cards that will fix any colour of mana you need, that is every eighth card. This will allow people to simply pick the best card in every pack and just run multi-colour decks without any real disadvantage.
181 creatures in a 360 card cube seems like way too few. Only half your cube is creatures.
There are affinity for artifact creatures and spells but no real way anyone is going to play them due to their low power level and setup costs with sub-par cards. There are several destroy artifact sideboard cards yet Whispersilk Cloak is about the only artifact in the cube I would feel compelled to sideboard artifact removal in for. I'm really stretching to include some archetypes in my own cube and affinity and artifacts simply aren't viable at the current power level. You would have to seriously water down the entire cube to make it a viable drafting strategy.
Decide if you want to start out with a powered cube and build it accordingly by consulting the evaluate everything thread or look at some of the powered cubes in people's sigs on the forums. Alternatively, check out the archetype pauper threads to get some ideas for the key cards you need to include to support certain archetypes. If you go down this route you then need to start tweaking your cube so that going out on a limb to build a certain archetype is a sensible choice. This often involves shaving the top end off some aspects of the cube such as the amount of removal or how premium the removal is that you include in your cube. You also need to weigh up how effective an archetype supporting card is outside of the particular deck you expect to see it. Unless it can at least perform an average job in another deck it should probably be left out, unless it provides a super pay-off for a certain archetype. An example is something like Undergrowth Scavenger. That card is straight up terrible in virtually every deck when compared to other four drops in the typical cube. It really only shines in a graveyard deck that is looking to dump cards and trade creatures. Having said that, I'm currently trying it in my cube.
My singleton Masters Cube
Forgive me, as I couldn't find the answer to this anywhere, but what does a "Powered" Pauper Cube mean? I know what a Powered Cube is, but given that the Power 9 are all Rares, I have no idea what this means here. Is there a "Power 9" for Pauper? Or is this just a reference to the banlist? Because as is the cube doesn't have any cards on the Pauper banlist in it.
You simply include the most powerful cards on their own with no regards to synergies, influence on archetypes, etc.
Of course those criteria can enter the equation when your powered cube is big enough and you have to decide between 2 equally good-on-their-own cards.
For example, Crow of Dark Tidings is a card that, while not bad on itself (2/1 flying for 3 is ok), is not 'powered' on its own. You put it in your cube if you want to push delirium, flashback, gravedigger effects, etc. but in terms of powerlevel a card like Dauthi Marauder or Liliana's Specter is way better.
My 490 Pauper Cube
Modern frame only- Common on paper only - no functional copies, no strictly-betters - no subtype-matters
This brings up a good question for an archetype-centric small cube: how many cards does an archetype need to support it? I was thinking somewhere around 15 to 20 per archetype, with "goodstuff" cards that work in multiple archetypes, of power relative to the other cards.
http://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/the-game/the-cube-forum/articles-podcasts-and-guides/623913-pauper-archetype-vs-power-level-does-it-matter
Swarm and Auras are viable even in a powered cube with the right cards. Graveyard matters sort of works in a powered cube but becomes a lot more well rounded if you water your cube down a wee bit.
Some archetypes only need a few cards included to give drafters the option for some interesting combos. The main thing to consider when including less powerful cards is evaluating how many archetypes the card would work in. An example of a few super useful creatures that fit into multiple archetypes:
Satyr Wayfinder - Unexciting to look at but he fixes mana, fills your graveyard, supports landfall, is a great target for sacrifice decks, and can simply be used as a chump block to save a few points of damage. Conditional mana fixing is useful in most decks and he also has uses in three other archetypes.
Felidar Cub - A 2/2 for 2 isn't exciting, but acceptable and this guy allows you to destroy enchantments and is a beast, which does have some potential synergies.
Emrakul's Hatcher - Another very average creature at first glance. However, with the three spawn tokens he creates you now have a card that fits into control decks as all the tokens can block damage, they can also be used to ramp into the big scary creatures in the cube, they can be used in a swarm deck looking to go wide and pumped with some of the various mass pump spells on offer, they can be used in a sacrifice deck to pump other creatures, they can easily trigger morbid for morbid creatures as well. Once again we see a card that is very average at face value but fits into an awful lot of decks where it can be very useful.
Unless you are just going to copy paste another cube you need to put a lot of time into your card selection and get cubing with your mates to see how it goes. You will eventually get your cube how you want it and will only need to worry about tinkering with a few cards when a new set comes out.
My singleton Masters Cube
I ran a cube like this when I started and tweaked it through playtesting because I didnt want to copy someones cube. Its fun and you will learn a lot about creating metagames.
But if you want to copy or get some idea about the difference between power and archetype cubes, check mine. Although there are certain archetypes in powered cubes as well.
An archetype centric cube needs cross-color cross-synergy support to function best. Like swarm and sacrifice interact really well.
I dont agree with Poly that swarm is a supportable archetype in powered cubes, because it takes way too many slots and most of the cards are pretty borderline on their own.
T2 powpercube Value https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/37t
It's kind of hard to sum up how you balance all these factors to make archetypes more viable. One important thing to remember is that some archetypes only need a few cards and it will never be an amazing deck, it just adds a bit more flavour and synergy to a deck whilst other archetypes can be quite strong and a whole deck can be built around the cards involved.
I made slower archetypes more viable by removing all the 2 mana (largely unconditional) removal and a couple of high value blue counter spells. I made some of the other removal conditional on archetype support as well which meant that it couldn't be put in any deck and be super efficient. Green and Black didn't have as many aggro 1-2 drops whilst simultaneously having a few more counters to aggro decks. I also removed hexproof creatures and shadow creatures for the most part. Decks that focus on those two rules just seem to roll over decks that don't happen to have anything to counter them and are uninteractive. I've made successful aggro decks, swarm decks, graveyard decks, and efficient best card decks with my current cube and come out on top with them.
The reason I like having more creatures in a cube is that at least in my playgroup, when I was playing a straight up powered cube; I kept finding myself cutting really good removal whilst sometimes not having enough creatures on curve. In general I was cutting great cards from my deck which made me think an archetype cube might be more my cup of tea. You can still build the super efficient best card decks, it just requires a bit more thought and meanwhile you are passing the average archetype cards around to the players that want those.
I guess Humphrey is right on swarm, there are some great token generator cards that are good in their own right. I guess it is the mass pump spells that aren't of much use outside of swarm that you are putting into the cube instead of something more universally powerful.
My singleton Masters Cube
my approach for a balanced and interesting archetype cube is to ban all cards that i already run in my powered cube. and i have the space to fit in all the fun and smaller archetyoes like madness, blink, ramp, +1+1 matters
my powered cube runs 90% cards that are considered staples or cubable and fills the other 10% with archetype relevant cards that will emerge when you throw the goodstuff together. its also balanced around the aggro/midragen/control scheme.
T2 powpercube Value https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/37t