This is my cube, and I've been working on it for a bit now, but before I buy the cards I need for it, I want to know if my cube is balanced? This is my first cube, so I don't know if it's balanced or not. It doesn't need to be perfect, but any suggestions would be great!
The beauty of a cube is that it can continue to evolve. Probably the best thing you can do, short of building and iterating on that, is to imagine what sample packs and what different kinds of decks might look like.
You've got archetypes listed on the side, but what do a couple different variations of a Ramp deck look like? What does a lifegain based deck look like it?
Keep in mind that it's unlikely that a player can get every card they want in a draft. Does a Storm deck just fall apart under that assumption?
I'm also a bit curious about what I would call pure hate cards.
You have Coffin Purge, Cremate, Crypt Incursion, Tormod's Crypt, Relic of Progenitus, and Nihil Spellbomb for example. That's a lot of dedicated graveyard hate that I wouldn't consider mainboard. Narrow hate cards like this, I find, create some unfun draft experiences. What drafter is going to want to draft some pure Reanimator deck when they're opponent could just slap down a Relic of Progenitus out of the board and make that strategy feel invalidated?
You don't always need pure hate in Cube. The decks aren't as streamlined as in a constructed format. Having a Swords to Plowshares or a Doom Blade can often be enough to fight a reanimation strategy without resorting to niche cards that I wouldn't want in any other matchup.
You want your drafters to feel encouraged to try for different strategies, not deliberately avoid them after facing such targeted hate.
A cool thing you can do to help you understand how the cube drafts is to import it to http://cubetutor.com and run through some drafts. That'll give you a better idea what packs look like and how attainable certain combos and strategies are. It'll also help you see mana costs and other stats - which it looks like you were calculating in your spreadsheet.
This is my cube, and I've been working on it for a bit now, but before I buy the cards I need for it, I want to know if my cube is balanced? This is my first cube, so I don't know if it's balanced or not. It doesn't need to be perfect, but any suggestions would be great!
You've got archetypes listed on the side, but what do a couple different variations of a Ramp deck look like? What does a lifegain based deck look like it?
Keep in mind that it's unlikely that a player can get every card they want in a draft. Does a Storm deck just fall apart under that assumption?
I'm also a bit curious about what I would call pure hate cards.
You have Coffin Purge, Cremate, Crypt Incursion, Tormod's Crypt, Relic of Progenitus, and Nihil Spellbomb for example. That's a lot of dedicated graveyard hate that I wouldn't consider mainboard. Narrow hate cards like this, I find, create some unfun draft experiences. What drafter is going to want to draft some pure Reanimator deck when they're opponent could just slap down a Relic of Progenitus out of the board and make that strategy feel invalidated?
You don't always need pure hate in Cube. The decks aren't as streamlined as in a constructed format. Having a Swords to Plowshares or a Doom Blade can often be enough to fight a reanimation strategy without resorting to niche cards that I wouldn't want in any other matchup.
You want your drafters to feel encouraged to try for different strategies, not deliberately avoid them after facing such targeted hate.
A cool thing you can do to help you understand how the cube drafts is to import it to http://cubetutor.com and run through some drafts. That'll give you a better idea what packs look like and how attainable certain combos and strategies are. It'll also help you see mana costs and other stats - which it looks like you were calculating in your spreadsheet.
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