MTG Salvation

Quote from Hicham »

A while ago we had I was thinking about the next upgrade of our cube. As always it was a difficult balance between archetype support, power level and keeping enough redundancy for aggro. Sadly this meant not being able to include a couple of really cool cards and archetype.

The simple way to solve this would be to increase ourcube size. But this would would force to add more reduncdancy and lower the power level of the cube. Another problem was that aggro has not been doing stellar this last year. Increasing the size would hurt aggro more then midrange and control, so I kept looking for a different solution.

Then I thought, why not add more cards to a booster, but keeping the number of drafted cards the same. We do 8 man Rochester, so this would mean having boosters bigger then 15 cards and then discarding the left over cards. But this could just as well work for regular booster draft. Draft your normal 15 (or 12) cards, then put the cards that were not chosen aside.

Doing this with one card extra will make a small difference, but you could go to boosters of 20 cards if you dare. Depending on how many extra cards you put in the pool, the effect on the balance of your cube will be bigger. If you don't add cards to your cube, you can reduce redundancy as you see a lot more cards. This could mean reducing the number of fixers, one drops, archtype specific cards,... These cards can be replaced by more narrow cards if prefered. Or pet cards you have been dying to include. Or you could include a test package.

We went for a different approach. We are about to add around 40 cards to our 450 cube. But we will have 18 cards boosters. This will result in seeing more cards with no need to change redundancy levels. There is a slight increase in variance, not so much in seeing a card or not, but you have a slightly higher change of having more of 'your' cards in the same booster. In a way you put a bigger cube inside a smaller one. Or a small one inside a bigger one if you prefer.Hence the Russian Doll/Babushka name I came up with. So we will have a 470 cube with a 40 card archetype expansion. Or a 510 cube with a 470 core cube if you prefer. The difference is mainly semantical.

For us this meant that we could suddenly add support for Blink, green aggro, zoo aggro, zombie tribal, big red, infinite mana combo and human tribal. This without lowerig support for the archetypes we currently support. We can increase overlap in archetypes, increase synergies all around without having to worry too much about the narrowness of certain cards. We increase the size of our cube, add more options, but with the same (or even higher) power level. We kept it rather sober, but you could go for 25 card boosters and this would totally change how you construct your cube. I have the feeling that there are a myriad of possibilities that this system opens up.

Chances are I am not the first to come up with this idea, but I haven't heard of people really pushing this in the design of their cube.

If anyone has a better idea for a name, don't be shy.