Hey all! I've been working on a battle of wits deck. This is intended to be a casual deck rather than a competitive one, but at the same time have a chance at winning at least at the kitchen table. There are lots of decks out there, but most of them rely heavily on combos and tutors. I'm cool with combos, but I want the deck to be able to win in other ways because that's more interesting and more fun (especially if you're on the other side of the table, or if you're playing some casual multiplayer format).
With respect to tutors, this deck will be in paper and shuffling 240 cards is not fun. So, I settled on wanting to make what amounts to a 240-card midrange good-stuff deck that can also randomly slam battle of wits or combo out of nowhere. I want the deck to have no tutors (including fetchlands), with an exception made for "1-card combos" that potentially just win (so for example primeval titan tutoring for dark depths/thespian's stage combo. Putting all the 1-card combo tutors in the deck filled too many slots, so I decided to instead put them in a wishboard, and only devote a dozen or so slots to the tutorable combo pieces.
Looking for constructive criticism. It should be obvious that I'm not trying to be hyper-competitive or perfectly optimized with this decklist, but at the same time there are probably other/more interesting 1-card combos I am forgetting, or creatures/removal that would be better. Also suspect the manabase could be better, but damn it's hard to make a 5-color manabase without fetches. I need white for unburial rites and both white and red for nahiri, the harbinger. If I can get a couple other interesting combos in sultai colors I could eliminate the need for those colors and probably make the manabase a lot more efficient.
As written the card has a triggered ability that gives its equipped creature a bonus with no stated duration, rather than have a static ability itself that grants the bonus for as long as it's attached to the creature - which is, of course, the reason you should use proper formatting and wording and check to see if your card does what you want it to.
Hmmm... To take an example from oracle text of another equipment: Lightning Greaves
Equipped creature has haste and shroud
Equip: 0
I think we all agree Lighting Greaves cannot be used to permanently give haste and shroud to all your dudes in a single turn. It is unclear to me how my wording implies the equipment bonus is somehow permanent. Yes, you could equip all your guys, who would then all end up tipsy, drunk, or wasted at the end of the turn, but only the equipped one keeps the bonus. And yes, you could re-equip the same dude a thousand times, but they wouldn't get +2000/+2000. If that were true, you could equip Bonesplitter twice and get +4/+0. Beer Wizard Staff probably COULD go infinite with some "whenever this becomes equipped" trigger on another creature (Offhand, I don't believe I have any such card in the cube, and given it's a powered cube with a couple combos already, that infinite combo would be ok with me).
Regardless, if you feel my wording is flawed then I am open to other wording. I'd like to know how you would write it correctly so it would act as described above.
I feel like I've got the flavor right, I just am not sure if this the right power level that people will want to play it. Context: a 624 card fully-powered cube. The cube will have, at most 2 or 3 custom cards.
A variation on this statement is that maybe you only need a couple of duals. Playing delver entirely with shocks is insane, but with a single copy of each blue dual, it'd be very playable. A mana base of 1 of each blue dual, 1 of each blue shock, however many blue fetches, 3 or 4 of your choice of M10 "checklands" and/or "fastlands," to prevent naturally drawing too many shocks will keep your mana pretty smooth and painless. Still expensive, but 1 or 2 duals is a whole lot cheaper than 4 or 7.
On a separate note, I tend to agree with those who are saying several of the conspiracies (backup plan, double stroke, hymn of the wilds in particular) are extremely, absurdly powerful. It is actually why I did not include them, because I feel even in a cube with black lotus, show and tell, ect, (or perhaps especially in such a cube) those effects are too powerful. Even power play may be too powerful. The other two are basically mana fixing and come with disadvantages that I think will make them reasonable, but I may be proven wrong even there.
Of the non-insane-power-level conspiracies, they just don't seem that interesting.
This is the only one you've mentioned that isn't ridiculously powerful, as in more unbalancing than the Power 9 ridiculously powerful.
You are seriously underrating the value of an effect that costs 0, is always in your opening hand, and cannot be countered. Requiring a discard of the card of the players choice doesn't do nearly enough to mitigate these.
Before you draw your opening hand, you may search your deck for a basic land and put it onto the battlefield tapped.
This is a cantripping mox that's the color of your choice and is always in your opening hand.
Discard a card, exile this conspiracy: counter target spell.
Begin the game with Force of Will in your hand in addition to your opening 7, only instead of needing to pitch a blue card, pitch anything. Unlike FoW, this is also a discard outlet and won't even cost any life.
Discard a card, exile this conspiracy: exile target creature.
Begin the game with a mana-free Swords to Plowshares in your hand instead of your worst card, only the creature's controller won't even gain life.
Need I continue?
Before you add these to your cube, make sure you talk to your playgroup about it to make sure that they're interested in custom cards and custom conspiracies. If you haven't already, I'd also recommend actually trying some of the original conspiracy cards in your cube before you start upping the power level on your own custom-made conspiracies. I ran several of the best conspiracies from the original Conspiracy set for about a year after they were released, and I thought they were fun for a while, but they were also quite unbalancing. A lot of they people I played with didn't enjoy them as much as I did, and some people whose first experiences with cube were my cube were completely turned off to the whole experience as a result. Ultimately, I wound up cutting them due to complaints from multiple players that they were uninteractive and they they felt more like Un-cards than real cards.
If you want to try conspiracies, I'd rank the most powerful from the original set as:
Because of the harsh reactions to the original conspiracies, I never bothered trying any from Conspiracy 2.
You make some fair points. I was thinking at the time that the discard, in addition to the fact that the opponent sees it coming and may be able to play around it, would be enough to balance it, but upon greater thought I believe you are correct. I still like the mechanics, but the cost needs to be revisited. What cost might be appropriate? Discard plus a mana cost such as 2 colorless (I do not want these to require colored mana)? Or would even that not be enough?
I like the idea of the conspiracies, but feel most of them are very non-cube-worthy. The only ones I really like are worldknit, power play, and sovereign's realm.
I've been thinking about making some custom conspiracies that could be used in either my powered proxy cube or my peasant cube. I was thinking rather than put them in the cube, I'd have like a dozen or so, and each person would get one at random. Not something for every draft, just something to shake things up a bit and to make interesting alternate initial conditions, as well as giving something to build around. Here are some of the designs I have thought up:
- Your starting life total is 25.
- Before you draw your opening hand, you may search your deck for a basic land and put it onto the battlefield tapped.
- Discard a card, exile this conspiracy: counter target spell.
- Discard a card, exile this conspiracy: exile target creature.
- Discard a card, exile this conspiracy: copy target spell you control. You choose a new target or targets for the copy.
- Discard a card, exile this conspiracy: choose a creature you control. Put a token onto the battlefield that is a copy of that creature.
- After all mulligans have been taken, you may scry 2. If you have taken a mulligan, you may scry 3 instead.
- After all mulligans have been taken, you may put a 2/1 colorless human token with haste onto the battlefield. your starting hand size is 6.
Do any of these seem crazy over/under powered? What other ideas do you guys have? I'm trying to make cards that are good, but not format warping.
I'm a stickler for having 45 card pools, so I wouldn't want to stretch the draft at all. Just move up to 405 or 450.
Well, sure. I am in the process of constructing a 180-card "expansion" for the 360 powered proxy cube so it can accommodate 12 if needed, but such projects take time. Meanwhile, I am attempting to build and grow a cube group. I don't really expect more than 8 to show, but I'd hate to turn someone away if we randomly had 9 or 10 (or, god help me, 11) people randomly show up one day.
I go to an annual event where I could even see more than 12 people want to join, but there would never, ever be a reason for me to go past 540 outside that event. For that, I figure the 540 could accommodate 14 or maaaaybe 16.
This thread amuses me. I have a powered cube, but it's all proxies, so zero value. I do however, have a peasant cube made of real cards (at a total cost of ~$300ish... I skipped all the absurd inclusions such as mana drain, library of alexandria, and imperial recruiter). Top 5 are probably, in no particular order:
Lets say you have a 360 cube and more than 8 people show up. How many extras do you think could draft before the process breaks down and starts to suck?
I figure in sanctioned booster draft there are 2 dead cards (basic + token) in every pack anyway, so your pool is 39 rather than 45. By that logic, you could certainly do 9 players (probably would use 4x 10-card packs, 40 cards each), or 10 players (4x 9-card packs, 36 cards each). With the power level of the cards, it should be no big deal to have a pool of 36 instead of 39.
If you had 10, would it make sense to break up the group into two 5-man draft pods, so people at least get to see a 2nd pick from each pack? Or would this run too much risk of having one pod that is, by chance, much more powerful, or breaks up combo peices or whatever? Would the answer be different if you're drafting a peasant cube with no combo?
How far do you think you could stretch? 11 people is 32 cards/player, 12 is 30 per player. Has anyone tried to stretch that far?
Not sure there's a strong argument for that. Of the current Tier 1 decks listed here, only 3 (death's shadow jund, Abzan/junk, and grixis death's shadow) are packing those cards in meaningful quantities.
I feel like modern right now is more of a rock paper scissors between hyper aggro beating ramp, ramp beating midrange, and midrange beating hyper aggro. To be sure it's more complicated than that, since there are very playable combo, control, fringe, and meta decks out there that break the mold and have good or bad matchups that don't fit this, but I feel like the major ones are aggro/midrange/ramp.
Oh, and what's the consensus/general opinion on Liliana of the veil? is it worth it as a one of? Wasn't interested in the card before, but I just opened one in a MM2017 draft yesterday, and now I'm definitely interested in trying the card. From what I can gather from memory of what I read on the card and a strong "Judge a book by the cover"-type opinion:
Pros:
-Discard effect is more detrimental to our opponent then to us, seeing as we can discard excess lands, as well as Lingering Souls for potential value.
-Sacrifice effect is some nice protection/removal, that also gives us an edge agains aggro decks that likes having one big creature instead of many little ones. I can see this being killer against Infect and Boggle.
-Ultimate is game winning. Like if you come back form this, you deserve to win.
-At the very worst, she looks like a fine decoy to diverge the attention of our opponent from our life points/other planeswalker.
-At best? We have plenty of tokens to protect her, and I'm pretty sure resolving a Sorin or Gideon alongside her has to be at least backbreaking.
Cons:
-Two black man in the cost can be meh. This could make it not come out on turn 3 sometimes (Which, admitingly, I'm not sure we necessarily want). Mana base could be adapted, but then Spectral Procession becomes the problem. I don't want to cast this for 4, even if it's really not that bad doing so.
-Also Yeah, it costs 3 mana. Conflictin a bit with our 3-drop spots which is already home to most of our beloved token generators.
-Not gonna lie, I don't see myself pull off an ultimate on this card against any serious deck. Except maybe for slow control decks.
-I really can't see it being that good of a card in the mirror.
-Pretty sure 8-rack, dredge and Living end start laughing when you play the card.
Again, Very, VERY premature opinion here. If you want to shill/shun the card to me, now is the time. And it would be very appreciated.
I think the feeling is that Lili is really a board card for most BW tokens lists. If you can resolve it early, it's good against hard control lists that we might struggle against if they survive our initial onslaught. It can slow down scapeshift enough that we have a better chance of killing them as well as killing titan, and helps vs. other combo decks as well, since you've got a decent shot at stripping a key card from their hand with Turn 1 discard. Unfortunately, she's not really any good vs. most creature matchups, nor vs. burn.
I have a hard time reading the cards and they dont look like magic cards at all.
This. I mean, I don't really understand why people spend a bunch of money on foil cards or japanese/russian cards, and I've occasionally run into people who use those awful near-porn anime lands. I don't like them or get them, but at least I can identify them. Even the foreign cards, if you play a lot you probably know most of them by the art (and the context of the deck). These things though... I can barely read the text and the alternate art means I can't identify it by anything else either. It would be a huge distraction if someone had a bunch of these in a deck.
My hope is that they sit in store display cases not being sold, and Wizards gets the message.
I think there's a fair number of mid-range and control decks that could afford to run the cycle duals as a 1-of... decks with 26 lands maybe even 2 copies. 90% of the time, you're going to draw it late and cycle it. I doubt there are many decks that could run more than that.
Even if you reprint those cards (esp Moat) vendors will snatch them up immediately and sell the for close to the current price, the power level is up there that even new printing will demand a premium. The only saving grace there is that they're not auto stables in decks.
ehhh, maybe. They'd be artificially inflated for sure, but how much depends a lot on numbers. An arabian nights city of brass can command $100+ because there were only about 20,000 total copies printed and it's a fair bet that over half of those are lost, destroyed, graded, or sitting in a display case, and probably 90%+ of the remainder are owned by people uninterested in selling. There are literally only, at any given time, a few hundred (sometimes only a few dozen) copies in the entire world for sale. The same is true of a handful of the crazy-priced cards of that era like moat, candelabra, void, the abyss, ect. The numbers for sale are just staggeringly small (and in those cases, they weren't even reprinted).
Print runs (even "limited" ones) today are bigger, and even a tiny run would increase liquidity enormously. I'm not saying new copies of Moat would be $10, but it would be under $100.
ABUR dual lands are an exception. Instead of 20k copies, there are 350k copies, and a hell of a lot more of them were retained, since by the time revised came out MTG was a thing. On top of that, duals are needed everywhere, where most RL cards aren't. You could print a lot of new duals and they'd still be expensive.
With respect to tutors, this deck will be in paper and shuffling 240 cards is not fun. So, I settled on wanting to make what amounts to a 240-card midrange good-stuff deck that can also randomly slam battle of wits or combo out of nowhere. I want the deck to have no tutors (including fetchlands), with an exception made for "1-card combos" that potentially just win (so for example primeval titan tutoring for dark depths/thespian's stage combo. Putting all the 1-card combo tutors in the deck filled too many slots, so I decided to instead put them in a wishboard, and only devote a dozen or so slots to the tutorable combo pieces.
This is what I came up with:
Looking for constructive criticism. It should be obvious that I'm not trying to be hyper-competitive or perfectly optimized with this decklist, but at the same time there are probably other/more interesting 1-card combos I am forgetting, or creatures/removal that would be better. Also suspect the manabase could be better, but damn it's hard to make a 5-color manabase without fetches. I need white for unburial rites and both white and red for nahiri, the harbinger. If I can get a couple other interesting combos in sultai colors I could eliminate the need for those colors and probably make the manabase a lot more efficient.
Thoughts?
Hmmm... To take an example from oracle text of another equipment:
Lightning Greaves
Equipped creature has haste and shroud
Equip: 0
I think we all agree Lighting Greaves cannot be used to permanently give haste and shroud to all your dudes in a single turn. It is unclear to me how my wording implies the equipment bonus is somehow permanent. Yes, you could equip all your guys, who would then all end up tipsy, drunk, or wasted at the end of the turn, but only the equipped one keeps the bonus. And yes, you could re-equip the same dude a thousand times, but they wouldn't get +2000/+2000. If that were true, you could equip Bonesplitter twice and get +4/+0. Beer Wizard Staff probably COULD go infinite with some "whenever this becomes equipped" trigger on another creature (Offhand, I don't believe I have any such card in the cube, and given it's a powered cube with a couple combos already, that infinite combo would be ok with me).
Regardless, if you feel my wording is flawed then I am open to other wording. I'd like to know how you would write it correctly so it would act as described above.
Of the non-insane-power-level conspiracies, they just don't seem that interesting.
You make some fair points. I was thinking at the time that the discard, in addition to the fact that the opponent sees it coming and may be able to play around it, would be enough to balance it, but upon greater thought I believe you are correct. I still like the mechanics, but the cost needs to be revisited. What cost might be appropriate? Discard plus a mana cost such as 2 colorless (I do not want these to require colored mana)? Or would even that not be enough?
I like the idea of the conspiracies, but feel most of them are very non-cube-worthy. The only ones I really like are worldknit, power play, and sovereign's realm.
I've been thinking about making some custom conspiracies that could be used in either my powered proxy cube or my peasant cube. I was thinking rather than put them in the cube, I'd have like a dozen or so, and each person would get one at random. Not something for every draft, just something to shake things up a bit and to make interesting alternate initial conditions, as well as giving something to build around. Here are some of the designs I have thought up:
- Your starting life total is 25.
- Before you draw your opening hand, you may search your deck for a basic land and put it onto the battlefield tapped.
- Discard a card, exile this conspiracy: counter target spell.
- Discard a card, exile this conspiracy: exile target creature.
- Discard a card, exile this conspiracy: copy target spell you control. You choose a new target or targets for the copy.
- Discard a card, exile this conspiracy: choose a creature you control. Put a token onto the battlefield that is a copy of that creature.
- After all mulligans have been taken, you may scry 2. If you have taken a mulligan, you may scry 3 instead.
- After all mulligans have been taken, you may put a 2/1 colorless human token with haste onto the battlefield. your starting hand size is 6.
Do any of these seem crazy over/under powered? What other ideas do you guys have? I'm trying to make cards that are good, but not format warping.
Well, sure. I am in the process of constructing a 180-card "expansion" for the 360 powered proxy cube so it can accommodate 12 if needed, but such projects take time. Meanwhile, I am attempting to build and grow a cube group. I don't really expect more than 8 to show, but I'd hate to turn someone away if we randomly had 9 or 10 (or, god help me, 11) people randomly show up one day.
I go to an annual event where I could even see more than 12 people want to join, but there would never, ever be a reason for me to go past 540 outside that event. For that, I figure the 540 could accommodate 14 or maaaaybe 16.
I figure in sanctioned booster draft there are 2 dead cards (basic + token) in every pack anyway, so your pool is 39 rather than 45. By that logic, you could certainly do 9 players (probably would use 4x 10-card packs, 40 cards each), or 10 players (4x 9-card packs, 36 cards each). With the power level of the cards, it should be no big deal to have a pool of 36 instead of 39.
If you had 10, would it make sense to break up the group into two 5-man draft pods, so people at least get to see a 2nd pick from each pack? Or would this run too much risk of having one pod that is, by chance, much more powerful, or breaks up combo peices or whatever? Would the answer be different if you're drafting a peasant cube with no combo?
How far do you think you could stretch? 11 people is 32 cards/player, 12 is 30 per player. Has anyone tried to stretch that far?
I feel like modern right now is more of a rock paper scissors between hyper aggro beating ramp, ramp beating midrange, and midrange beating hyper aggro. To be sure it's more complicated than that, since there are very playable combo, control, fringe, and meta decks out there that break the mold and have good or bad matchups that don't fit this, but I feel like the major ones are aggro/midrange/ramp.
I think the feeling is that Lili is really a board card for most BW tokens lists. If you can resolve it early, it's good against hard control lists that we might struggle against if they survive our initial onslaught. It can slow down scapeshift enough that we have a better chance of killing them as well as killing titan, and helps vs. other combo decks as well, since you've got a decent shot at stripping a key card from their hand with Turn 1 discard. Unfortunately, she's not really any good vs. most creature matchups, nor vs. burn.
This. I mean, I don't really understand why people spend a bunch of money on foil cards or japanese/russian cards, and I've occasionally run into people who use those awful near-porn anime lands. I don't like them or get them, but at least I can identify them. Even the foreign cards, if you play a lot you probably know most of them by the art (and the context of the deck). These things though... I can barely read the text and the alternate art means I can't identify it by anything else either. It would be a huge distraction if someone had a bunch of these in a deck.
My hope is that they sit in store display cases not being sold, and Wizards gets the message.
ehhh, maybe. They'd be artificially inflated for sure, but how much depends a lot on numbers. An arabian nights city of brass can command $100+ because there were only about 20,000 total copies printed and it's a fair bet that over half of those are lost, destroyed, graded, or sitting in a display case, and probably 90%+ of the remainder are owned by people uninterested in selling. There are literally only, at any given time, a few hundred (sometimes only a few dozen) copies in the entire world for sale. The same is true of a handful of the crazy-priced cards of that era like moat, candelabra, void, the abyss, ect. The numbers for sale are just staggeringly small (and in those cases, they weren't even reprinted).
Print runs (even "limited" ones) today are bigger, and even a tiny run would increase liquidity enormously. I'm not saying new copies of Moat would be $10, but it would be under $100.
ABUR dual lands are an exception. Instead of 20k copies, there are 350k copies, and a hell of a lot more of them were retained, since by the time revised came out MTG was a thing. On top of that, duals are needed everywhere, where most RL cards aren't. You could print a lot of new duals and they'd still be expensive.