MTG Salvation

I’d be curious what constitutes “midrange” in this discussion. I’m guessing green midrange decks often have Hexdrinker and red midrange has Ragavan and dragons at 5cc. But that makes definitions wonky because we’ve had great “long game” 1-drops printed recently which makes decks that like to attack with 1-drops more like midrange decks instead of “put all my 2-power 1-drops that can’t block on the board and hope they get there.” I remember when every third Cube card was some jank common/uncommon with decent P/T and a defensive drawback. Couple this creature trend with 3cc walker bombs taking the previously held throne of the 4cc Walker.

In general my claim is that midrange decks have gotten more aggressive which has made hard aggro less prominent, and that has been great for Cube.

Sidenote: our experience with “tempo” is quite different. Ux tempo is always one of the best ways to compete for a 3-0 in our Cube.

Quote from steve_man »

The smaller the cube is, the better chances that combo / control / midrange will be able to keep up with aggro's consistency.

That is a statement I will strongly agree with.

Quote from Patrunkenphat7 »

I’d be curious what constitutes “midrange” in this discussion. I’m guessing green midrange decks often have Hexdrinker and red midrange has Ragavan and dragons at 5cc. But that makes definitions wonky because we’ve had great “long game” 1-drops printed recently which makes decks that like to attack with 1-drops more like midrange decks instead of “put all my 2-power 1-drops that can’t block on the board and hope they get there.” I remember when every third Cube card was some jank common/uncommon with decent P/T and a defensive drawback. Couple this creature trend with 3cc walker bombs taking the previously held throne of the 4cc Walker.

In general my claim is that midrange decks have gotten more aggressive which has made hard aggro less prominent, and that has been great for Cube.

Sidenote: our experience with “tempo” is quite different. Ux tempo is always one of the best ways to compete for a 3-0 in our Cube.

This I also agree with - I might be incorrect in my definition of aggro, found I found being aggressive in the meta right now is the better approach as there are a lot of these Dark Confidant/ Rabblemaster/ Scavenging Ooze style creatures printed recently that gain card/ tempo advantage the sooner they're put onto the battlefield.

We had a discussion last night where someone pointed out the gap between these two cards in terms of P/T and tempo Ascendant Packleader and Ulvenwald Oddity isn't as big as you would think - Packleader would normally grow to 3/2 or even 4/3 creature with 4 drops/ early stats buff around turn 4 - the turn Ulvewal comes into play. (Kinda crazy that a 1 drop and 4 drop are not THAT different in power level on turn 4?)

We felt we were reaching a point similar to the UR Treasure Cruise Delver vs Shardless matchup in Legacy 2015 where aggressive tempo decks backed by tempo based card advantage such as Treasure Cruise/ Chandra etc. were able to out value the card advantage generated by attrition based decks attempting to cast 4-5 drops to pull ahead.

I also made a list of playables at each CMC and found that for black/ red 2 CMC for example is completely over saturated while 4-5 CMC are often scrambling for playables.

It was a bit late last night and I just wanted to put my thoughts down, but this is how I feel myself and other drafters should approach cube design:

- The "normal" cube deck should no longer be expected midrange deck of majority 2-3 CMC costs, with 3-4 4 CMC costs and curve into 1-2 6-7 bombs. It should be more lower curved with roughly 0.5 CMC decrease and a cut of high CMC spells unless there is sufficient fast mana/ cheat etc.

- Flexible cards such as Earthquakes, evoke, alternate cost should be valued higher as they can provide early points of interaction/ late card advantage

- We should move away from the days of curve into 6 drop grave titan etc. and move to more undercosted threats. (Not sure if Karn, Thran Dynamo, Glided Lotus etc are on the their last days).

- Mainboard sweepers out of ocmbo decks would be much more potent - especially earthquake variants, thus increasing the density of strong playables in their decks

I agree with a lot of that for sure. I don’t think I’d go as far as to say 4-drops are scarce for my drafters, but they are healthily less common than a few years ago when there was a glut of 4cc bombs relative to 1,2,3. My group still likes some of the more grindy middle of the curve stuff that I don’t see in some other lists (thinking about Rekindling Phoenix as an example), but we also have more cheap sweepers than other lists (especially in red).

Quote from Breathe1234 »

It was a bit late last night and I just wanted to put my thoughts down, but this is how I feel myself and other drafters should approach cube design:

- The "normal" cube deck should no longer be expected midrange deck of majority 2-3 CMC costs, with 3-4 4 CMC costs and curve into 1-2 6-7 bombs. It should be more lower curved with roughly 0.5 CMC decrease and a cut of high CMC spells unless there is sufficient fast mana/ cheat etc.

- We should move away from the days of curve into 6 drop grave titan etc. and move to more undercosted threats. (Not sure if Karn, Thran Dynamo, Glided Lotus etc are on the their last days).

I think this may be a difference of environment but this does not match what I experience as normal at all. I think maybe that we have reached a point where 360 is a completely different animal to any other size. Aggro is struggling because the potency of of 3/4 mana threats being so completely absurd now. Even with the much stronger level of aggro creature midrange powerhouses like 3 mana daretti, Grist, and Oko have made it hard for aggro to keep up. Even without wraths there are so many threats that stabilize a board while being a massive value engine is just making it very hard for aggro that doesn't have all the goodies.

As a result of the middle of the curve being so strong and so good at stabilizing over the top threats are starting to go at a premium for control and "unfair" win conditions are hotly contested. Sneak attack, reanimate, storm, channel/super ramp, and stax are all super viable and perform better against aggro than I'd like but I'm also not going to intentionally weaken strong and fun archetypes I like.

The only thing I could do to dilute this power is to force aggro support in more heavily but at 360 it would mean cutting archetypes I want to support. If I want non graveyard recursive black aggro I would need to cut either stax or reanimator support and I'm not willing to do that. If I want to support green aggro it would mean cutting super ramp which I am interested in but at such a small size I would be downgrading an already weak color.

I don't have comprehensive stats I can look to but I do know that the best performers have consistently been whichever lane is open at the table. Which more than balance across different plans is an indicator of health to me.

I personally would play Daretti, Grist, Oko in aggressive decks (Daretti because I support Black-Red Aristocrats Aggro and he's removal/ token generator).

I found that aggressive decks in 2022 have gotten out of hand recently because of a general shift in strategy in modern, legacy and standard.

- UR Delver Cruise/ Legacy Delver
- GDS Modern Death Shadow
- Ramnup Red from 2017 Standard
- GB Aristocrats from 2016 Standard

These aggressive decks are no longer the 20 lands - 12-14 1-drops with a few 2-3 drops that rely on Sulfuric Vortex / Fireblast for reach. But these decks are more 7-8 1 drops curving into nightmare 4 drops (Hazoret, Armageddon), backed by card advantage engines (Skulllclamp, Treasure Cruise), often with planeswalkers that dodge sweepers/ provide anthems/ remove (Oko, Grist, Daretti), occasionally they have cheap hand disruption, counter spells, removal etc.

They can play the 1 drop into 2 drop into 3 drop game (not as consistent as before) or they can leverage their tempo advantage while applying pressure.

I wasn't a fan of aggressive decks for the longest time, but after watching Ramnup Red, GW Aristocrats, UR Cruise Delver, i was hocked - https://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/the-game/the-cube-forum/articles-podcasts-and-guides/824490-match-up-analysis

I guess that just highlights the spectrum thing to me if you go from 7-8 1 drops and transfer 3-4 of those to 2 drops but everything else the same that is a just a midrange deck. Also this might just be my playgroup but that was never how aggro decks were built in my cohort. We always had curves and not just piles of one drops. Mostly because I didn't build the cube in a way where you could just play only one drops unless no one else was aggro and you played 2 colors.

Also I think it's clear to me this is just a difference in classification between us. I never considered the 2016 aristocrats deck aggro and I definitely didn't consider death's shadow in modern aggro (at least back in the Kommand days, it has evolved since then). Disruptive counterspell and discard aggro is one of my favorite archetypes to play but is so hard to support in cube because it is much more about the cheap disruption than the threats themselves. We recently had an Esper deck 3-0 that had Brimaz and Adeleline as it's main win cons backed up by a ton of disruption and card draw. I don't know how you're supposed to classify a deck like that. Is it control with a cheap finisher? Is it midrange because that's where it's curve sat? Or is it aggro because it played protect the threat? I don't have the exact list but it had Lotus, a mox, 2 1 mana discard spells, mana drain, forces of will and negatioin, JVP, snapcaster, preordain, baleful strix, and night's whisper. It's a sweet deck but I'm still not sure how I'd classify it.

I model my cube archetypes/ decks based on theories developed in Modern/ Legacy/ Standard. I felt there's a lot we can learn about how to correctly build certain archetypes by visiting successful decks in constructed. Shifting from Green hyper ramp to Unga Bunga was one such example.

Overall, All-in Red/ White just haven't performed well at all for the reasons you describe. I felt the existing strategy of attempting to go underneath cheap 3-4 CMC threats has been a very bad and I felt aggressive decks should shift into the 24 lands, curve into 4 drop haymakers such as Armageddon, Hazoret, Kroxa, Skullclamp to match the opponent's 3-4 drops while leveraging their tempo advantage was the best approach. This became my new overall definition of aggro - Which is inline with legacy/ standard/ modern.

360 seems like a totally different beast than 720 at this point. Aggro benefits from the redundancy of creatures at larger sizes. All those 3-mana powerhouses are twice as likely to appear at 360 while the aggro curve is only marginally better.