The Optimal Multiplayer Cube - 2014
Contents
- Introduction
- White
- Blue
- Black
- Red
- Green
- Gold
- Colourless
- Non-Basic Land
- Optimal Multiplayer Cube 2014
- Budget Version
- Legacy-Legal Version
- Conclusion
Colourless
The colourless vote was completed on November 3rd 2014.
The Top 24
The colourless section in a 360-card cube is 30 cards in size. As we are listing the top 80% we are after the top 24 cards in our power rankings for colourless. In order, these were:
- Nevinyrral's Disk (16.4)
- Sol Ring (16.2)
- Skullclamp (16.0)
- All is Dust (14.0)
- Umezawa's Jitte (13.8)
- Emrakul, the Aeons Torn (12.4)
- Wurmcoil Engine (11.8)
- Black Lotus (10.8)
- Sword of Fire and Ice (9.8)
- Ensnaring Bridge (8.8)
- Blightsteel Colossus (7.6)
- Mimic Vat (7.4)
- Mox Emerald (6.8)
- Mox Jet (6.8)
- Mox Pearl (6.8)
- Mox Ruby (6.8)
- Mox Sapphire (6.8)
- Sword of Feast and Famine (6.0)
- Sword of War and Peace (6.0)
- Oblivion Stone (5.6)
- Perilous Vault (5.4)
- Mind's Eye (5.2)
- Sword of Body and Mind (5.0)
- Batterskull (5.0)
The Curve
Okay, the problems with the initial curve...
- We're trying to keep our resets to a minimum, and colourless resets are particularly powerful, as they go in any deck. We currently have four here, and should probably be ditching the bottom two (O-Stone and Perilous Vault), as they kind of duplicate Nevinyrral's Disk anyway.
- There usually aren't too many colourless creatures, but it's good to at least make sure you have an OK number (from memory, my own cube runs about 25% creatures in here), so we want at least six of the 24. We're currently at three, and they're all gorillas.
- The curve is currently at 6-2-1-7-2-2-4. Colourless is usually quite hard to balance, as it normally has a big blip at CC0 for the fast mana, another at CC3 for the Swords, and another at CC6+ for the finishers, so what we have actually isn't too bad. All the same, it would be nice to try and even it out a little bit if we can... perhaps even if we just keep an eye on it as we address the other two problems.
Fixing the Holes
Fixing the Resets
Right, let's see if we can start fixing the number of creatures at the same time as dropping resets. As stated above, we want to drop the bottom two resets, so over they go.
-1 Oblivion Stone
-1 Perilous Vault
The next two creatures in the votes? Two more gorillas!
+1 Sundering Titan
+1 Memnarch
Yeesh! Oh, well... that will do for the moment. I guess.
Fixing the Creature Balance
Okay, before we think about our curve, we want to add one more creature. So we'll drop Card #24 in our list, which was Batterskull.
-1 Batterskull
And the next creature in the votes?
+1 Steel Hellkite
Another finisher? You're kidding me...
Fixing the Curve
The good news is that we now have six creatures. The bad news is that they're all CC6+!
So let's take all those nice shiny creatures we just added, and throw them overboard for some that are nicer to cast.
-1 Sundering Titan
-1 Memnarch
-1 Steel Hellkite
If we look down our vote list for creatures under CC6, we get the following:
+1 Metalworker
+1 Solemn Simulacrum
+1 Spellskite
Solid! That gives us a curve of 6-2-3-6-2-1-4, which is not too bad really. Let's stick with that, before we make a bigger mess.
Budget Constraints
Now for the part where we throw all of this out and start again!
- Black Lotus ($3950.00)
- Emrakul, the Aeons Torn ($34.99)
- Ensnaring Bridge ($20.68)
- Metalworker ($27.04)
- Mox Emerald ($1247.94)
- Mox Jet ($924.66)
- Mox Pearl ($999.99)
- Mox Ruby ($902.49)
- Mox Sapphire ($2757.18)
- Sword of Fire and Ice ($39.78)
- Umezawa's Jitte ($36.92)
A surprisingly small amount get pitched off this year, considering that the three newer Swords are all now well under $20, as are Wurmcoil Engine and Blightsteel Colossus. This is definitely one of the more expensive sections to piece together, though.
Last year, we replaced the Lotus and Moxen with Lotus Petal and the allied Signets, which is about as good as we'll get, to be honest. We'll do that again this year.
Lightning Greaves was just outside of the initial 24 this year, and makes a fine budget CC2 equipment to replace the Jitte.
Similarly, we find Loxodon Warhammer just a little further down the list, which is itching to replace Sword of Fire and Ice.
Emrakul can be replaced by the first fattie we dropped above, which was Sundering Titan.
There's no replacing Metalworker, really. We can't find another mana-producer that efficient, and we've no creatures left in our vote that were less than 6CC. If we head back to 2013, the next one down that was less than 6CC was Psychosis Crawler, who ticks the fun, draftable and budget boxes just fine.
To make up for the fact we've lost such a fine mana source, we'll swap Ensnaring Bridge with Chromatic Lantern, which is the same CC, and has been just outside the 24 for two years running.
-1 Black Lotus
-5 Moxen
-1 Umezawa's Jitte
-1 Sword of Fire and Ice
-1 Emrakul, the Aeons Torn
-1 Metalworker
-1 Ensnaring Bridge
+1 Lotus Petal
+5 Allied Signets
+1 Lightning Greaves
+1 Loxodon Warhammer
+1 Sundering Titan
+1 Psychosis Crawler
+1 Chromatic Lantern
Archetypes to Add
As we did for gold, it's usually best to throw in colourless cards that either synergize really nicely with the other guild cards, or things that work with the archetypes you already have in. We'll be adding our final six when we've added our other archetypes and we've pieced together the rest of our optimal cube. Which is soon!
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