I was wondering if the 10 mana limit actually ends up mattering. Would it even out the mana and make things even more cast-able if it was 15 land in the mana cache? I was thinking of 5 basics + all 10 guild gates. This would also allow someone to get up to 5 of a single colour of mana available in a turn.
My plan is to make a DR with just 25 cent bulk rares. Starting with the more recent sets as my opponents are more likely to see familiar faces that way. Moving back in time until an appropriate array of cards is represented. Then go into playing and tweaking.
In my experience, 1v1 games tend to end around turn 10, give or take a couple turns. Multiplayer games often go much longer, so hitting turn 15 in that context wouldn't be rare at all. I have thought about adding the other 5 guildgates myself, but I've been hesitant to increase my land count for a couple reasons:
1: With 5 basics and 5 guildgates the decision of what land to play is actually very important. If you go aggressive and play a bunch of basics early on and your opponents do the opposite, you have an early turn advantage, but once you run out of basics you can effectively set yourself back a turn mana wise and be at a disadvantage later on. I feel like adding 5 more guildgates would muddy this decision a little bit. Also, 5 basics and 5 non-basics just feels good. I'm sure Rosewater has a game design term for it... I just like the symmetry.
2: Color limitations. With my current set up you can make a maximum of 3 of any type of colored mana. While I don't include any CCC cards, I have many CC cards thus making it impossible to play two CC cards of the same color on any given turn. Also, it takes a lot of prior planning to get CCC early in the game so there is a real cost benefit situation when ordering your land drops. Adding 5 more guildgates would make it possible to create CCCCC by the end of game, which could remove the color scarcity element of the DR that I love so much.
3: 10 mana is a lot, but it still forces you to make smart decisions when playing cards as opposed to just dumping your hand. You can't cast two 6cmc bombs on the same turn, ect. I like this element as well.
Ultimately I think it would be harmful to my DR as I've built it to increase the land count. If you build your DR with 15 lands in mind, i.e. add more expensive cards, slow down the format a bit, and put in some powerful CCC+ cards in, I could see 15 lands being a good thing. As it stands I'm happy with my set up and likely wont be changing it. But if you decide to go for it, let me know how it goes.
Also, general shout out to anyone who has built a DR. How is it going? What cards have been good for you? How/why did you design your stack the way you did? Lets get some discussion going here!
EDIT 2: So a few friends and I gave this a go. We kept things vanilla and did the 5 basics and 5 allied taps. No scry. We assembled the various card types (sweepers, removal, creatures, etc.,) and gave it a go.
It was cool that there was never any issue with mana. That works. And we had big creatures and spells going all over the place. We played three games, each took about an hour, and went to turns 14, 16 and 17. We didn't really feel the need to have more than 10 mana.
Among my friends there's a great appreciation for themes and how that works in the colour pie. Danger Room basically removes that and say 'Guess what? You're playing five colour." This was a big let down for two of the players and they've largely convinced me as well. There's something about making a black deck and having tons of demons and vampires or a gruul deck of big aggressive creatures.
I really, really like the lack of prep after the DR is built as the game doesn't have a draft stage, five colour hands really kill the enjoyment for a couple of the players. It's a cool format if you want to feel like a do-everything sort of archmage, but not great for those who like the more focused spellcasters.
I think the next thing we're going to check out will be the Commie Box format. It's a lot like Danger Room and we'll probably incorporate some elements we like about DR.
Thanks for the feedback man. You are spot on about themes and the color pie. DR definitely isn't for everyone in that respect. I love it and so does my playgroup... be we also were the 5c players in our EDH days we love being able to do everything. I've never heard of Commie Box, do you have a link to where I could read about it? I'm always interested in casual self contained formats.
------------------
Spoilers from BNG:
1. Archetype creatures: With Blue, White, and Green spoiled so far I'm officially stoked and will be including all three in my DR. They are strong, fairly costed, and I absolutely love the effects. I hope Black gives intimidate and Red grants haste!
2. Fellhide Spiritbinder: This guy has a big enough butt that he can expect to attack frequently. SUPER cool ability.
3. Herald of Torment: Not sure if this card is going into my cube or if he'll end up in the DR, either way I'm stoked to play him. The kind of flexibility he offers is really powerful in this kind of environment, but I think the lifeloss clause will be enough of a cost that he won't be OP.
4. Pheres-Band Raiders: The body is good and the ability to make babies is also good. I just don't know if it's interesting enough. He'll be dirt cheap so I'll likely pick one up. I like the upside of being able to drop him, apply pressure, and develop your field WITHOUT having to expend additional cards from your hand.
So far this is looking like an interesting set! Keep it coming Wizards!
Commie Box is basically like danger room but you separate the deck into 5 libraries by colour and you pre make your mana cache with whatever 12 lands you want. When you draw a card, you pick by colour.
Danger Room was a good stop on the way to making a board game like cube where you don't have to spend time drafting first and get to dive right in and not get screwed or flooded. It's literally everything I want except the colour pie becomes irrelevant. So some sort of Danger Room/Commie Box/M2.0 hybrid monstrosity is where I'm heading next.
I like this idea quite a bit. Keep me posted with what you come up with! I'm going to do some thinking on ways to combine Commie-Box and DR as well. I could definitely see the fun in being color restricted... but I like gold cards too much to axe them altogether. If there was a way to keep things simple It'd be cool to have 2 color gold libraries as well. That way if you are playing Izzet you could reliably draw and cast Izzet cards. I see a lot of possibilities here!
I like gold cards too much as well. I've been brainstorming ideas, but since my game is going to be Ravnica themed it's definitely a priority.
Commie Box is pretty much incompatible with gold cards, so I'll definitely have to figure something out. Right now my top two ideas are: 1) a sixth library of artifacts, gold, hybrid and split cards. You declare a guild and draw until you hit either a gold card of that guild, an artifact or a hybrid or split card with atleast one colour in the guild you declared. The rest of the cards go somewhere. 2) Everyone declares a guild and gets a small deck of guild cards that only they can draw from.
But that's with starting with Commie Box rather than Danger Room as a jumping off point. What I'm really interested in is if anyone has any idea of how to take a Danger Room stack and somehow get people playing in guild/colour/wedge/whatever?
The only thing I can think of is to have the game start with people claiming a guild (or wedge or whatever is appropriate to the cards that are in the DR). They can only cast cards of those colours. before the 1st main phase, a player may offer trades. He doesn't reveal the card, he just says what colour it is and what he's looking for. Only trades involving the active player can occur during a given turn. The trades don't have to be 1 for 1. This is pretty much right out of Settlers of Catan.
Player in Dimir draws a green card from the DR.
1:"I've got a green card I'd trade for a blue or black."
2:"I have a black card, but it's too good to trade for just one green card. Throw in a second or maybe an artifact and it's a deal."
1:"No way. Anyone else?"
3:"Blue for green?"
1:"Sure, here you go."
Three colour groupings would probably make for more trading and more trading partners than guilds though.
This would probably also require an adjustment to the mana cache as well to ensure more on-colour mana is available.
Trading seems like an interesting mechanic and I could see it being a lot of fun. I don't know what I think of picking a guild/wedge before the game starts... and I have a couple ideas on that front. I'll get into them:
Last night a member of my cube/DR group and I did some serious brainstorming about building a DR/Commie Box format. I'll give a general outline of what we are thinking and then get into some of the applications we are considering:
Basics:
-11 decks (a lot I know, but I think it could be manageable) 1 for each guild, one for artifacts.
-The "realm" is shared and there are no limits to the number of basic lands you can play of one color, HOWEVER
-You are capped at 7 lands (I'll explain how we got to this number)
-You can only draw from libraries that you have "unlocked" by playing a land that shares one of it's colors (similar to color identity).
-Each deck has a mix of gold cards, and mono cards of the two colors. So if you are drawing from the Izzet library you could get a red card, a blue card or a RU gold/hybrid card.
Details:
-Deck construction: For the initial build, we are thinking each deck would have 10 gold cards and 20 of each mono color, for a total of 50 cards. We didn't talk much about the brown deck, but size/composition wouldn't matter as much as the deck would consist entirely of artifacts.
-Decks themselves would be highlander, BUT there could be repeats BETWEEN decks. For example you could draw a Lightning Bolt from the Izzet deck or the Rakdos deck.
-The mono color cards in each deck would be carefully selected to play well with that guild. So you could expect to draw a Savannah Lions from the Boros Deck, and a Wall of Omens from the Azorious deck.
-Cards would have to be carefully selected with color commitment in mind in order to create a risk/reward situation when deciding what lands to play. This is the element that could take the most testing/trial and error to get right. For example, in the Gruul deck you could draw Grizzly Bears, or Kalonian Tusker. Tusker is obviously stronger, but it costs CC. The goal behind this is to encourage people to commit to a specific theme when playing lands. I'll actually talk about lands for a second before I get back to color commitments.
-We chose 7 lands as opposed to 10 or 12 because of the typical way Wizards costs cards. If you are going to play a 3 drop, 2G is going to be weaker than 1GG, which is going to be weaker than GGG. With a 7 land cap you can only reach CCC in two colors and splash a third, or hit CCC in one color and CC in two others. Or if you are super ambitious you can get CC in three colors and C in one other. When building decks we want there to be enough CCC cards to reward you for committing to that color, but not so many that you wouldn't draw from the deck if you only can produce CC. We also want to include enough C cards to make it a worthwile risk to draw from a deck that you can only make C of one of the colors, but also not so many C cards so that it's a no brainer. For example, I just dropped my seventh land and have three Swamps, three Plains, and an Island. I can draw from every deck except Gruul, but I won't draw from Rakdos or Selesnya for example because I can't produce G or R. Obviously I'd draw most of my cards from the Orzhov deck as I can play every card I draw, but on occasion I may want to draw from Azorious or Dimir in hopes that I'll draw a low U commitment card and be able to cast it. Note that at the beginning of the game you have no lands in play so you can go in any direction you want. We really like the idea of being able to "work your way around the color wheel". The direction you chose would likely be influenced by the cards you draw in your opening hand. How do you draw your opening hand?
-We have a couple ideas here. One is that you draw your opening 7 (or 5 or 8 whatever testing shows works the best) from different stacks, you cannot draw two cards from the same stack. This may produce opening hands that are too inconsistent, but as guild decks have both gold and mono cards, chances are you'd come out of it with a somewhat clear path forward. Another idea we thought of is that you can look at each card you draw for your opener before deciding where to draw your next card from. Or you could draw from anywhere you want... there is a lot of room to figure out what works best for the starting hand.
So basically the idea is to reward players for sticking to two or three colors, and allow them to play to a specific theme. We really like the idea of having the guild decks be heavily influenced by Ravnica. Wizards did a really good job of having the guilds play well with each other in both Ravnica limited environments, so building our decks around the Ravnica guilds could yield good results.
We also spent some time discussing how to incorporate tri color cards, but I'm out of time so more on that later. I typed this up really fast and didn't spend a lot of time organizing... hopefully you can follow along. Let me know what you think of our ideas!
So I was thinking I'd get some craft foam and make little coloured platforms for the decks to sit on. I was just going to cut a 4.5x3.5 rectangle of out each colour. I'll definitely have left over if I want to make the deck pads out of two colours of foam (2x 2.25x3.5 strips). Maybe I'll use that non-slip shelf liner stuff on the bottom as something to glue to. I noticed that the Commie box people just use coloured beads to mark the decks, but I think I'd want it to be even more obvious.
The 7 land cap seems alright. From what I understand, the RTR block draft format ended most often in turns 7 and 8 anyway. I think a Danger Room style mana cacehe picking of land, including guild gates is probably better than a Commie Box realm draw approach. So you can play 7 lands, and each time you want to take one of your lands from your DR mana cache, it can be anything, guild gates coming in tapped, but once you're done with 7, those are your colours until the rest of the game.
I like the unlocking by playing lands. It's a simple solution to focus draws on a few colours while allowing going 5 colour for those who want to.
I don't think guildgates could be a part of the land cache. With seven lands you can play 3 colors fairly well if all of them are basic. CCC CC and CC. Adding guildgates to the mana cache would allow people to play 5 color every game. However I DO think they need to be in the game. Maybe just one or two in each guild deck so you can draw them, and if you draw them early enough you can have a more flexible mana base and commit to more colors. If you draw a guildgate after you've already played your 7 you could have it replace one of your basics.
It really is awesome. I love the art with a returned without its mask.
I got my craft foam and some non-slip shelf liner to act as the base and I'm going to be making a foldable playmat for Danger Room/Commie Box hybirds using the rules you suggested. I need to get a new card reader to get my digital camera working again, but hopefully by the time I'm done making my board game version of this, I'll snap some pictures.
I use a simple spreadsheet that calculates average mana costs, double mana symbols, card functions like kill, artifact removal, ld, etc. It would work for any large deck variant like Danger Room. I can post a clean template if people are interested.
@ NathanIW, sounds like you got a cool board in the works. I ended up laminating a Publisher print out of 5 colored squares. Looks a lot nicer than the beads. I'll have to update my site.
@ noshadowkick, I think I had a coworker tell me about Danger Room. Did you hold a session at a recent con or something? (Pax maybe?)
As for the gold decks, I think you guys are onto something. I like the deck "unlock" idea a lot!
@ludd_gang: I'd love to check our your spreadsheet. I haven't been to any recent conventions, so your coworker likely didn't hear it from me. There are a few other danger room lists floating around on the interwebs though so it easily could have been someone else.
I've done some preliminary deckbuilding for the 10 gold deck commie box, danger room thing. It's going to be a lot of work to put together so I'm not sure when I'll have time to actually make it happen. Hopefully soon!
I definitely took the lazy route. I just took RTR block and went with all the commons, uncommons and a smattering of bulk rares for each guild. I get that designing cubes or Danger Room stacks are part of the fun, but I don't quite consider myself there yet in terms of building a format using cards across the entire history of magic.
I still haven't gotten to actually play DR yet (either the normal one or the gold card mixed breed version) as someone in the gaming group just got the board game Terra Mystica. So yeah.
Hey that works, get it up and running quickly then tinker with the lists once you have some playtest data. My group doesn't get to play often so I tend to spend more time tinkering and designing than actually playing. We are also trying to keep the power level at the common-uncommon-dollar rare bombs for financial reasons, but it's also nice to play with underused cards. We decided to go beyond Ravnica a bit, right now it's looking like we are going to use most/all of the Lorwyn-Eventide block Avatars that are CCCCC hybrids. They typically fit well with the Ravnica guild strategies, and are the perfect cost for gold decks. I'll post individual decklists as I get them together on paper.
Aslo, I think at this point we could probably get away with a new thread. This is very different from Danger Room, and I intend to keep updating my Danger Room along with this new format (Commie Danger Box?), so I'd like to keep the discussions separate so things don't get confusing. I'll post a new thread sometime over the next couple days.
Spoiler season is upon us once again! So far I see several cards that I find intruiging:
Definite Includes: Ajani's Presence: I've been looking for more tactical ways to give creatures indestructible with the goal of making the inevitable wrath situation more interesting. This is perfect. Dakra Mystic: Great little one drop. The power here is in the choice. I'm sure I can find a durdly 1 drop to cut. Cyclops of Eternal Fury: Haste is awesome in this format, so much so that I had to cut Fires of Yavimaya for being OP. This is just right.
Possible Includes: Sigiled Starfish: I've been experimenting with Scry in this format and so far have been pleased with the result. As both players share a library, an instant speed scry ability like this really plays like "Tap: Scry or Fateseal". I like the flexibility and walls are good in the format. Seems like a win/win to me, but I want to do a little more testing.
Dakra Mystic: Great little one drop. The power here is in the choice. I'm sure I can find a durdly 1 drop to cut. Sigiled Starfish: I've been experimenting with Scry in this format and so far have been pleased with the result. As both players share a library, an instant speed scry ability like this really plays like "Tap: Scry or Fateseal". I like the flexibility and walls are good in the format. Seems like a win/win to me, but I want to do a little more testing.
I've had my eye on these two as well. This set seems to have more interesting cards than usual, considering only 25 are spoiled thus far.
Yea, I think the mechanics in this block just lend themselves well to the format. Bestow, inspired, and now strive have all produced some really solid cards. Speaking of strive....
New to the thread, happy to discuss Danger Room with you folks. Not new to Danger Room, been playing it for over a year. Started with Brian Demars' first list, played it many times. Very weak list, not bad per se, but overly reliant on getting every incremental advantage possible. A lot of draw, which in a weird twist made it ever better. The best cards you could draw were often card draw cards.
Assembled 95% of his "holodeck" list, and its much stronger. Aggro strategy just almost never worked in the original list without a fireball for turn 10-ish. The new list actually can end before all lands in play, with one player on the back foot most of the game. While not "the point" of DR, I find it acceptable (and a bit refreshing) since the cards used are thus low and add that few points to the winner's victory point total. WRT the point of teaching MTG strategy, aggro is a real thing that players should be able to play, AND learn to play against. Still vast majority of games end due to mana management, board state anlaysis, and combat math. Since (excepting combo-win decks) this accounts for imho the vast majority of magic games, I like this list much better. I'll describe my changes later in this post.
But before that, I need to describe a list one of my friends assembled, he went full-speed. All the best cards, no card is too powerful, although the basic rules of no-ramp and no land destruction are still in effect. For example, he includes Jace 2.0. Curiously, games often still go 20+ turns, and one advantage of his list is it can be a ton of fun to play Consecrated Sphinx or Adarkar Valkyrie and hear your opp say "ugh". We play at most FNMs, each list about half the time.
So back to discussing my current list. Changes are made with one or more of several aims.
1) Value, even extreme value is perfectly acceptable and highly valued for inclusion. ex. Bloodbraid Elf is fine.
2) OP is acceptable only if if does not require an immediate answer (death in 2 or 3 turns).
3) Unfair cards are out. IMHO extra turns, extra draw each turn, doubling your life total/hand size is unfair. Your opp should not have to beat you twice to win.
Repeatable "free" advantage effects and lockout effects are unfair. Tower of Calamities and Huntmaster, along with ALL planeswalkers. The PW discussion I'll save for another post.
4) Brian's holodeck list is too low on artifacts compared to its disenchant effects. Too many value cards that never see their value realized.
5) Teaching players to RTFC is extremely highly valued. Multiple cards with similar but subtly different effects.
ex. Many discard cards in black, Looter/draw cards in blue.
6) No search you library cards. We haven't got all night ya know...
7) Staple cube cards are favorably looked on unless they require deck design strategy. ex. Wing Shards is only Storm card
Some house rules.
1) Max hand size is 10. considering changing this.
2) No mulligans. Period.
3) All hindered and shuffled-in cards are exiled.
4) Multi-player games are discouraged. OMG they can take days. 4 players, pair up.
5) I love the shiny. About a third foiled so far... Time Spiral and 7ED are my favorite sets for this. I realize this isn't a house rule, but oooooo, shiny...
Thanks for reading! Next post is my changes and thoughts on others' changes.
Mind Spring.
"I draw 8, and with my insane grip, find a couple that beat you next turn." Unfair, Out.
Rolling Thunder.
"Here's my combat math, I wreck your board and swing." or... "You have almost half your life... Kill you?" Unfair, Out.
Lumberknot.
Every game it landed, it won. Should change that flavor text to "Do you hear that, Mr. Anderson. That is the sound of inevitability." - Mr. Smith. Out.
OTOH, Quirion Druid is fine.
Forgotten Ancient.
Free, repeatable, permanent, and movable pump counters. What?! Thats's not combat math, might as well be Thermodynamic Partial Differential Quantum Relativity Mechanics... also called cheating. Out.
On Trial, "for each creature in your graveyard" cards. Value is good, but these take it to the next level.
Splinterfright, Spider Spawning, Grim Flowering, Gnaw to the Bone. Of these, Gnaw to the Bone is the least obscene.
OK, so out of Brian Demars' list I've listed some above that were OP for the format.
On to the cards I've added. And it bears mentioning these aren't replacement cards. I dont replace cards, I just add more.
First, the artifact shortage.
Added
Arcbound Slith: Only Modular card in the list.
Blinding Souleater: Phyrexian mana activated ability affecting precombat decisions.
Armored Transport: Combat damage preventing atacker
Anvilwrought Raptor: First Strike Flyer
Esper Stormblade: 3/2 flyer for 2, not a Delver, but very real similarities
Windwright Mage: 2/2 Flying Lifelink for 3
Tower Gargoyle: 4/4 Flyer for 4
Infiltration Lens: Deal damage or draw cards, two of my favorite things to do.
Viridian Longbow: Your guys trade up in combat or you can plink off weenies
Ensnaring Bridge: Hand size management based on board state analysis. Seen this backfire, very funny to watch
Sarpadian Empires, Vol III: Only card in magic I know of with it's Card Title in italics. Plus make a weenie every turn!
All Is Dust: Colorless board wipe
Add from Pre-Theros:
Slith Firewalker: Aggro strategy star
Memory Lapse: Bonkers in this format! Counter your fill-in-the-blank spell I can't deal with, then I'll draw it!
Splatter Thug: 3/3/ FS for 3
Frost Breath: Perhaps too strong for the format. (on Offense)
Theros adds: (many for two reasons, Scry, Monstrosity, and Bestow)
Hopeful, Baleful, and Entropic Eidolons. Nimbus Naiad. Nylea's Emissary
Swan Song'Returned Phalanx
Ill-Powered Cyclops
Magma Jet (All-star in Standard atm)
Sedge Scorpion
Voyage's End: See your opp's next card! Or yours... very useful
Prescient Chimera: scry on a stick!
Artisan's Sorrow, maybe overkill on the disenchant effect, but really like scry 2
Tymaret Burger King: fun playing effects from your gy
Fleecemane Lion. value... just value.
Pharika's Mender: recursion is good
Dimir Charm: so versatile
Shipwreck Singer: breas loose stagnant boards
Haven't really gone through BOTG yet. Maybe look at it tonight if the draft doesn't fire...
Cheers,
-Tosub
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My plan is to make a DR with just 25 cent bulk rares. Starting with the more recent sets as my opponents are more likely to see familiar faces that way. Moving back in time until an appropriate array of cards is represented. Then go into playing and tweaking.
1: With 5 basics and 5 guildgates the decision of what land to play is actually very important. If you go aggressive and play a bunch of basics early on and your opponents do the opposite, you have an early turn advantage, but once you run out of basics you can effectively set yourself back a turn mana wise and be at a disadvantage later on. I feel like adding 5 more guildgates would muddy this decision a little bit. Also, 5 basics and 5 non-basics just feels good. I'm sure Rosewater has a game design term for it... I just like the symmetry.
2: Color limitations. With my current set up you can make a maximum of 3 of any type of colored mana. While I don't include any CCC cards, I have many CC cards thus making it impossible to play two CC cards of the same color on any given turn. Also, it takes a lot of prior planning to get CCC early in the game so there is a real cost benefit situation when ordering your land drops. Adding 5 more guildgates would make it possible to create CCCCC by the end of game, which could remove the color scarcity element of the DR that I love so much.
3: 10 mana is a lot, but it still forces you to make smart decisions when playing cards as opposed to just dumping your hand. You can't cast two 6cmc bombs on the same turn, ect. I like this element as well.
Ultimately I think it would be harmful to my DR as I've built it to increase the land count. If you build your DR with 15 lands in mind, i.e. add more expensive cards, slow down the format a bit, and put in some powerful CCC+ cards in, I could see 15 lands being a good thing. As it stands I'm happy with my set up and likely wont be changing it. But if you decide to go for it, let me know how it goes.
Also, general shout out to anyone who has built a DR. How is it going? What cards have been good for you? How/why did you design your stack the way you did? Lets get some discussion going here!
It was cool that there was never any issue with mana. That works. And we had big creatures and spells going all over the place. We played three games, each took about an hour, and went to turns 14, 16 and 17. We didn't really feel the need to have more than 10 mana.
Among my friends there's a great appreciation for themes and how that works in the colour pie. Danger Room basically removes that and say 'Guess what? You're playing five colour." This was a big let down for two of the players and they've largely convinced me as well. There's something about making a black deck and having tons of demons and vampires or a gruul deck of big aggressive creatures.
I really, really like the lack of prep after the DR is built as the game doesn't have a draft stage, five colour hands really kill the enjoyment for a couple of the players. It's a cool format if you want to feel like a do-everything sort of archmage, but not great for those who like the more focused spellcasters.
I think the next thing we're going to check out will be the Commie Box format. It's a lot like Danger Room and we'll probably incorporate some elements we like about DR.
------------------
Spoilers from BNG:
1. Archetype creatures: With Blue, White, and Green spoiled so far I'm officially stoked and will be including all three in my DR. They are strong, fairly costed, and I absolutely love the effects. I hope Black gives intimidate and Red grants haste!
2. Fellhide Spiritbinder: This guy has a big enough butt that he can expect to attack frequently. SUPER cool ability.
3. Herald of Torment: Not sure if this card is going into my cube or if he'll end up in the DR, either way I'm stoked to play him. The kind of flexibility he offers is really powerful in this kind of environment, but I think the lifeloss clause will be enough of a cost that he won't be OP.
4. Pheres-Band Raiders: The body is good and the ability to make babies is also good. I just don't know if it's interesting enough. He'll be dirt cheap so I'll likely pick one up. I like the upside of being able to drop him, apply pressure, and develop your field WITHOUT having to expend additional cards from your hand.
So far this is looking like an interesting set! Keep it coming Wizards!
http://home.mindspring.com/~helland/
Danger Room was a good stop on the way to making a board game like cube where you don't have to spend time drafting first and get to dive right in and not get screwed or flooded. It's literally everything I want except the colour pie becomes irrelevant. So some sort of Danger Room/Commie Box/M2.0 hybrid monstrosity is where I'm heading next.
Commie Box is pretty much incompatible with gold cards, so I'll definitely have to figure something out. Right now my top two ideas are: 1) a sixth library of artifacts, gold, hybrid and split cards. You declare a guild and draw until you hit either a gold card of that guild, an artifact or a hybrid or split card with atleast one colour in the guild you declared. The rest of the cards go somewhere. 2) Everyone declares a guild and gets a small deck of guild cards that only they can draw from.
But that's with starting with Commie Box rather than Danger Room as a jumping off point. What I'm really interested in is if anyone has any idea of how to take a Danger Room stack and somehow get people playing in guild/colour/wedge/whatever?
The only thing I can think of is to have the game start with people claiming a guild (or wedge or whatever is appropriate to the cards that are in the DR). They can only cast cards of those colours. before the 1st main phase, a player may offer trades. He doesn't reveal the card, he just says what colour it is and what he's looking for. Only trades involving the active player can occur during a given turn. The trades don't have to be 1 for 1. This is pretty much right out of Settlers of Catan.
Player in Dimir draws a green card from the DR.
1:"I've got a green card I'd trade for a blue or black."
2:"I have a black card, but it's too good to trade for just one green card. Throw in a second or maybe an artifact and it's a deal."
1:"No way. Anyone else?"
3:"Blue for green?"
1:"Sure, here you go."
Three colour groupings would probably make for more trading and more trading partners than guilds though.
This would probably also require an adjustment to the mana cache as well to ensure more on-colour mana is available.
Last night a member of my cube/DR group and I did some serious brainstorming about building a DR/Commie Box format. I'll give a general outline of what we are thinking and then get into some of the applications we are considering:
Basics:
-11 decks (a lot I know, but I think it could be manageable) 1 for each guild, one for artifacts.
-The "realm" is shared and there are no limits to the number of basic lands you can play of one color, HOWEVER
-You are capped at 7 lands (I'll explain how we got to this number)
-You can only draw from libraries that you have "unlocked" by playing a land that shares one of it's colors (similar to color identity).
-Each deck has a mix of gold cards, and mono cards of the two colors. So if you are drawing from the Izzet library you could get a red card, a blue card or a RU gold/hybrid card.
Details:
-Deck construction: For the initial build, we are thinking each deck would have 10 gold cards and 20 of each mono color, for a total of 50 cards. We didn't talk much about the brown deck, but size/composition wouldn't matter as much as the deck would consist entirely of artifacts.
-Decks themselves would be highlander, BUT there could be repeats BETWEEN decks. For example you could draw a Lightning Bolt from the Izzet deck or the Rakdos deck.
-The mono color cards in each deck would be carefully selected to play well with that guild. So you could expect to draw a Savannah Lions from the Boros Deck, and a Wall of Omens from the Azorious deck.
-Cards would have to be carefully selected with color commitment in mind in order to create a risk/reward situation when deciding what lands to play. This is the element that could take the most testing/trial and error to get right. For example, in the Gruul deck you could draw Grizzly Bears, or Kalonian Tusker. Tusker is obviously stronger, but it costs CC. The goal behind this is to encourage people to commit to a specific theme when playing lands. I'll actually talk about lands for a second before I get back to color commitments.
-We chose 7 lands as opposed to 10 or 12 because of the typical way Wizards costs cards. If you are going to play a 3 drop, 2G is going to be weaker than 1GG, which is going to be weaker than GGG. With a 7 land cap you can only reach CCC in two colors and splash a third, or hit CCC in one color and CC in two others. Or if you are super ambitious you can get CC in three colors and C in one other. When building decks we want there to be enough CCC cards to reward you for committing to that color, but not so many that you wouldn't draw from the deck if you only can produce CC. We also want to include enough C cards to make it a worthwile risk to draw from a deck that you can only make C of one of the colors, but also not so many C cards so that it's a no brainer. For example, I just dropped my seventh land and have three Swamps, three Plains, and an Island. I can draw from every deck except Gruul, but I won't draw from Rakdos or Selesnya for example because I can't produce G or R. Obviously I'd draw most of my cards from the Orzhov deck as I can play every card I draw, but on occasion I may want to draw from Azorious or Dimir in hopes that I'll draw a low U commitment card and be able to cast it. Note that at the beginning of the game you have no lands in play so you can go in any direction you want. We really like the idea of being able to "work your way around the color wheel". The direction you chose would likely be influenced by the cards you draw in your opening hand. How do you draw your opening hand?
-We have a couple ideas here. One is that you draw your opening 7 (or 5 or 8 whatever testing shows works the best) from different stacks, you cannot draw two cards from the same stack. This may produce opening hands that are too inconsistent, but as guild decks have both gold and mono cards, chances are you'd come out of it with a somewhat clear path forward. Another idea we thought of is that you can look at each card you draw for your opener before deciding where to draw your next card from. Or you could draw from anywhere you want... there is a lot of room to figure out what works best for the starting hand.
So basically the idea is to reward players for sticking to two or three colors, and allow them to play to a specific theme. We really like the idea of having the guild decks be heavily influenced by Ravnica. Wizards did a really good job of having the guilds play well with each other in both Ravnica limited environments, so building our decks around the Ravnica guilds could yield good results.
We also spent some time discussing how to incorporate tri color cards, but I'm out of time so more on that later. I typed this up really fast and didn't spend a lot of time organizing... hopefully you can follow along. Let me know what you think of our ideas!
The 7 land cap seems alright. From what I understand, the RTR block draft format ended most often in turns 7 and 8 anyway. I think a Danger Room style mana cacehe picking of land, including guild gates is probably better than a Commie Box realm draw approach. So you can play 7 lands, and each time you want to take one of your lands from your DR mana cache, it can be anything, guild gates coming in tapped, but once you're done with 7, those are your colours until the rest of the game.
I like the unlocking by playing lands. It's a simple solution to focus draws on a few colours while allowing going 5 colour for those who want to.
SPITEFUL RETURNED = AWESOME.
I got my craft foam and some non-slip shelf liner to act as the base and I'm going to be making a foldable playmat for Danger Room/Commie Box hybirds using the rules you suggested. I need to get a new card reader to get my digital camera working again, but hopefully by the time I'm done making my board game version of this, I'll snap some pictures.
All 5 Archtype creatures. Was hoping for intimidate and haste, but I'll take deathtouch and trample from the black and red duders.
Ehpara's Enlightenment
Siren of the Silent Song
Spiteful Returned
Fellhide Spiritbinder
Hunter's Prowess
Also might add Forgestoker Dragon as we are pretty tired of Hoard Smelter Dragon.
BNG was a great set for Danger Room!
@ NathanIW, sounds like you got a cool board in the works. I ended up laminating a Publisher print out of 5 colored squares. Looks a lot nicer than the beads. I'll have to update my site.
@ noshadowkick, I think I had a coworker tell me about Danger Room. Did you hold a session at a recent con or something? (Pax maybe?)
As for the gold decks, I think you guys are onto something. I like the deck "unlock" idea a lot!
I've done some preliminary deckbuilding for the 10 gold deck commie box, danger room thing. It's going to be a lot of work to put together so I'm not sure when I'll have time to actually make it happen. Hopefully soon!
I still haven't gotten to actually play DR yet (either the normal one or the gold card mixed breed version) as someone in the gaming group just got the board game Terra Mystica. So yeah.
Aslo, I think at this point we could probably get away with a new thread. This is very different from Danger Room, and I intend to keep updating my Danger Room along with this new format (Commie Danger Box?), so I'd like to keep the discussions separate so things don't get confusing. I'll post a new thread sometime over the next couple days.
EDIT: Thread created - http://forums.mtgsalvation.com/showthread.php?t=588756. Guild Wars is a crappy name but it's what I could come up with off the top of my head.
Definite Includes:
Ajani's Presence: I've been looking for more tactical ways to give creatures indestructible with the goal of making the inevitable wrath situation more interesting. This is perfect.
Dakra Mystic: Great little one drop. The power here is in the choice. I'm sure I can find a durdly 1 drop to cut.
Cyclops of Eternal Fury: Haste is awesome in this format, so much so that I had to cut Fires of Yavimaya for being OP. This is just right.
Possible Includes:
Sigiled Starfish: I've been experimenting with Scry in this format and so far have been pleased with the result. As both players share a library, an instant speed scry ability like this really plays like "Tap: Scry or Fateseal". I like the flexibility and walls are good in the format. Seems like a win/win to me, but I want to do a little more testing.
I've had my eye on these two as well. This set seems to have more interesting cards than usual, considering only 25 are spoiled thus far.
Setessan Tactics: Heck yes. This card is RAD.
Assembled 95% of his "holodeck" list, and its much stronger. Aggro strategy just almost never worked in the original list without a fireball for turn 10-ish. The new list actually can end before all lands in play, with one player on the back foot most of the game. While not "the point" of DR, I find it acceptable (and a bit refreshing) since the cards used are thus low and add that few points to the winner's victory point total. WRT the point of teaching MTG strategy, aggro is a real thing that players should be able to play, AND learn to play against. Still vast majority of games end due to mana management, board state anlaysis, and combat math. Since (excepting combo-win decks) this accounts for imho the vast majority of magic games, I like this list much better. I'll describe my changes later in this post.
But before that, I need to describe a list one of my friends assembled, he went full-speed. All the best cards, no card is too powerful, although the basic rules of no-ramp and no land destruction are still in effect. For example, he includes Jace 2.0. Curiously, games often still go 20+ turns, and one advantage of his list is it can be a ton of fun to play Consecrated Sphinx or Adarkar Valkyrie and hear your opp say "ugh". We play at most FNMs, each list about half the time.
So back to discussing my current list. Changes are made with one or more of several aims.
1) Value, even extreme value is perfectly acceptable and highly valued for inclusion. ex. Bloodbraid Elf is fine.
2) OP is acceptable only if if does not require an immediate answer (death in 2 or 3 turns).
3) Unfair cards are out. IMHO extra turns, extra draw each turn, doubling your life total/hand size is unfair. Your opp should not have to beat you twice to win.
Repeatable "free" advantage effects and lockout effects are unfair. Tower of Calamities and Huntmaster, along with ALL planeswalkers. The PW discussion I'll save for another post.
4) Brian's holodeck list is too low on artifacts compared to its disenchant effects. Too many value cards that never see their value realized.
5) Teaching players to RTFC is extremely highly valued. Multiple cards with similar but subtly different effects.
ex. Many discard cards in black, Looter/draw cards in blue.
6) No search you library cards. We haven't got all night ya know...
7) Staple cube cards are favorably looked on unless they require deck design strategy. ex. Wing Shards is only Storm card
Some house rules.
1) Max hand size is 10. considering changing this.
2) No mulligans. Period.
3) All hindered and shuffled-in cards are exiled.
4) Multi-player games are discouraged. OMG they can take days. 4 players, pair up.
5) I love the shiny. About a third foiled so far... Time Spiral and 7ED are my favorite sets for this. I realize this isn't a house rule, but oooooo, shiny...
Thanks for reading! Next post is my changes and thoughts on others' changes.
Tosub
"I draw 8, and with my insane grip, find a couple that beat you next turn." Unfair, Out.
Rolling Thunder.
"Here's my combat math, I wreck your board and swing." or... "You have almost half your life... Kill you?" Unfair, Out.
Lumberknot.
Every game it landed, it won. Should change that flavor text to "Do you hear that, Mr. Anderson. That is the sound of inevitability." - Mr. Smith. Out.
OTOH, Quirion Druid is fine.
Forgotten Ancient.
Free, repeatable, permanent, and movable pump counters. What?! Thats's not combat math, might as well be Thermodynamic Partial Differential Quantum Relativity Mechanics... also called cheating. Out.
On Trial, "for each creature in your graveyard" cards. Value is good, but these take it to the next level.
Splinterfright, Spider Spawning, Grim Flowering, Gnaw to the Bone. Of these, Gnaw to the Bone is the least obscene.
On to the cards I've added. And it bears mentioning these aren't replacement cards. I dont replace cards, I just add more.
First, the artifact shortage.
Added
Arcbound Slith: Only Modular card in the list.
Blinding Souleater: Phyrexian mana activated ability affecting precombat decisions.
Armored Transport: Combat damage preventing atacker
Anvilwrought Raptor: First Strike Flyer
Esper Stormblade: 3/2 flyer for 2, not a Delver, but very real similarities
Windwright Mage: 2/2 Flying Lifelink for 3
Tower Gargoyle: 4/4 Flyer for 4
Infiltration Lens: Deal damage or draw cards, two of my favorite things to do.
Viridian Longbow: Your guys trade up in combat or you can plink off weenies
Ensnaring Bridge: Hand size management based on board state analysis. Seen this backfire, very funny to watch
Sarpadian Empires, Vol III: Only card in magic I know of with it's Card Title in italics. Plus make a weenie every turn!
All Is Dust: Colorless board wipe
Add from Pre-Theros:
Slith Firewalker: Aggro strategy star
Memory Lapse: Bonkers in this format! Counter your fill-in-the-blank spell I can't deal with, then I'll draw it!
Splatter Thug: 3/3/ FS for 3
Frost Breath: Perhaps too strong for the format. (on Offense)
Theros adds: (many for two reasons, Scry, Monstrosity, and Bestow)
Hopeful, Baleful, and Entropic Eidolons. Nimbus Naiad. Nylea's Emissary
Swan Song'Returned Phalanx
Ill-Powered Cyclops
Magma Jet (All-star in Standard atm)
Sedge Scorpion
Voyage's End: See your opp's next card! Or yours... very useful
Prescient Chimera: scry on a stick!
Artisan's Sorrow, maybe overkill on the disenchant effect, but really like scry 2
Tymaret Burger King: fun playing effects from your gy
Fleecemane Lion. value... just value.
Pharika's Mender: recursion is good
Dimir Charm: so versatile
Shipwreck Singer: breas loose stagnant boards
Haven't really gone through BOTG yet. Maybe look at it tonight if the draft doesn't fire...
Cheers,
-Tosub