MTG Salvation

My full list on Cubetutor: www.cubetutor.com/viewcube/72

Hello out there in Cube Land! I have been working on putting a Peasant Cube together for the past couple months, and now that I've finally gotten it to a place that I'm happy with I wanted to share it with the world.

This cube draws heavily from whydirt's cube, so mad props to him for sharing some thoughts on his cube's design and helping me get started. Similar to whydirt, I play with a lot of players that are either relatively new to the game or new to cube drafting, so I have tried to minimize the number of cards with more complicated mechanics (suspend, echo, flip cards, double-faced cards, morph). I also want to encourage games that are interactive, so I am purposefully minimizing the number of cards with protection from whatever, shroud, and hexproof. That being said, I have still tried to strike a balance between cards that are straightforward and easy to understand for the newer players, and cards that provide more interesting deckbuilding and gameplay choices for the more experienced players in my group.

The power level/uninteractive bans are Sol Ring, Library of Alexandria, Mana Drain, Maze of Ith, Loxodon Warhammer, Ghostly Prison, Propaganda, and Timely Reinforcements.

In addition to the base 360 cards, I also have 10 additional gold cards, one for each guild, that I have in there as sort of a testing/pet card section, so my total card count is currently 370. These will probably rotate in and out as I get a better feel for how they play. Currently, these 10 cards are the following:
I welcome any and all thoughts and suggestions you might have and would be happy to answer any questions about cards I have chosen to include/not include. Thanks for reading, and happy cubing!

Update 12/13/2013: Behemoth Sledge has been unbanned! Green/white has been underperforming, so I wanted to give it a boost. I do not think that this will have a detrimental effect on the cube experience because it can't just be slammed into any deck like Warhammer or Skullclamp can be.

Update 1/21/2014: Effective immediately, I am breaking the Peasant rule of commons and uncommons only to include the Ice Age/Apocalypse painlands. This should make fixing for aggressive decks better, which most Peasant cube owners have identified as an ongoing issue. I am dubbing this variant of Peasant Cube which allows for the inclusion of a handful of rares of appropriate power level "Peasant+".

Update 2/5/2014: Loxodon Warhammer has been unbanned! A somewhat sudden change of heart to be sure, but I've come to believe that the current world of Peasant cube can handle a card like this. The removal is so good and the ETB creatures so efficient that taking two whole turns to cast and equip this may be slow enough to balance out its obvious power level. Will monitor and adjust as needed.

Update 2/24/2014: Loxodon Warhammer has been banned! Even with taking two turns to cast and equip, this card is still too powerful. One or two hits is generally enough to swing the game irreversibly in your favor.
Additionally, I will be including one rare per pack in all future drafts of 6+ people to increase the variety of cards and decks that are available to play in those circumstances.

Yay for posting your thread!

Your additional gold section looks cool. All of the cards are good or fun, so I hope they work for you. Four cards per guild at 370 is pretty much on the target of 1 per 100 cards, so I don't think you're going overboard at all.

I'll admit that I don't understand the fascination with Maw of the Obzedat. The art is awesome but the sac ability doesn't seem to make up for only having a a 3/3 body on a 5-drop. As my testing guinea pig, please let me know how it plays out in practice.

Maw is in there specifically because I don't know how good it is and want to find out. It obviously plays well with things like Reassembling Skeleton, but I don't yet know if there is enough other support for it to make up for the unimpressive base stats.

If you have at least 2 other creatures, having maw in play *should* mean that any reasonably interactive combat steps will be skewed heavily in your favor.

So now that we have the full Modern Masters spoiler, the cards that I want to find room for are:

• Epochrasite
  
• Masked Admirers
  
• Reach of Branches
  
• Feudkiller's Verdict
  

The question then is, what to take out to make room for them? For Epochrasite, I'm thinking maybe Contagion Clasp, Palladium Myr, or Wall of Tanglecord. The only reason I say the wall is in contention is because both it and Epochrasite play more defensively, and I want to be careful about how many defensive-minded cards I have available to every color.

Centaur Glade comes right out for Reach of Branches, no problem there.

I'm actually thinking Cenn's Enlistment might be the one to get benched for Feudkiller's Verdict. They don't play exactly the same role, but I don't want to cut a good aggro card for the Verdict, so this might have to do. Not super happy about it, though.

Masked Admirers is the one I'm having most difficulty thinking of a cut for. The green four-drop spot is totally stacked as it is. The weakest of the bunch that I'm currently playing is probably Cudgel Troll, but even he's kind of a beating. Maybe a 3-drop gets cut? Imperious Perfect, maybe? Or perhaps the somewhat unexciting five-drop Village Survivors?

Would definitely appreciate any and all thoughts you guys have for me on this.

I feel like Village Survivors might be the cut here.

And I don't know if Centaur Garden and Reach of Brambles is an automatic swap.

I'd take a cold-hard look at cudgel troll, survivors, and imperious perfect and simply choose the one that has the least consistency.

Also I don't count Cudgel troll as a 4 drop, since I try to never cast it without regen mana up.

I don't play any of those 3 cards anymore.

I still prefer Beast Attack to reach of branches and Centaur glade.

I made a couple minor tweaks today (+Sea Drake -Latch Seeker, +Goldnight Commander -Celestial Crusader), which you can read more about on my Cubetutor page.

I'm now leaning towards cutting Wall of Tanglecord to make room for Epochrasite. My thought there is that Wall does one thing very well, play defense. Epochrasite also does that job fairly well, but also does many other jobs too.

You guys are making me rethink adding Reach of Branches, and I can definitely see why.

but but but... I love the wall haha

I also try to stay away from an abundance of defense-only creatures, but Wall of Tanglecord is an exception I'm willing to make. It's got enough toughness to matter against both aggro and midrange decks and it is vulnerable to both creature and artifact removal.

FWIW, I'm probably swapping out Palladium Myr or Contagion Clasp for Epochrasite.

I'd go with the Myr.

I hear you guys on the wall. I'm just not excited by cards that only play defense, but I know that it's necessary to have cards that do that, so I'll keep thinking about it.

One other thing that came up as I was looking through my cube today was green two-mana ramp spells. I currently have Rampant Growth, Farseek, Scorned Villager, Nest Invader, and Sakura-Tribe Elder. I want to add Edge of Autumn, but I'm torn on what to cut for it. Farseek is probably the weakest of the bunch, but Scorned Villager isn't particularly exciting, either. How would you guys rank them?

I'd say either Farseek or Villager is fine - I'd cut Villager since I'm avoiding DFC. I'm thinking about cutting Rampant Growth as well for Wild Growth. It can come down on T1, which is sweet, is effectively free to cast after T1, and it has neat interactions with Arbor Elf.

How are you playing rampant growth and not edge if autumn

Make that swap first, then try and make a cut for rampant growth out of the rest.

Epochrasite isn't a great defensive creature. Not really.

Another small update posted to cubetutor today. I settled on just making a couple changes for Modern Masters, and made room for Edge of Autumn:
+Epochrasite, -Palladium Myr
+Masked Admirers, -Cudgel Troll
+Edge of Autumn, -Scorned Villager

The Admirers for Troll switch was probably the hardest choice to make (other candidates for the cut were Imperious Perfect and Trusted Forcemage), but in the end Troll seemed to be the card that promoted the least interesting gameplay, so that's why it got the axe. I wouldn't be surprised to see it make its way back in some time in the future, though.

Yeah, I like the idea of Wild Growth a lot. As soon as I can scoop up a copy I'll try and find room for it.

On another note, it's my bachelor party this weekend and we're planning on cubing at least once, so as long as I can remember what happened I'll be sure to give you guys results early next week.

Posted an update to Cubetutor yesterday, making a couple M14 changes, a couple changes inspired by a buddy of mine, and a couple due to cards not working out as well as hoped in the drafts we've done. I'm excited to try some of these cards out when we draft in a couple weeks.
http://cubetutor.com/cubeblog/72

Made a couple changes after the Theros prerelease on Saturday:
+Nessian Asp, -Village Survivors
+Spellheart Chimera, -Izzet Staticaster
+Horizon Chimera, -Elusive Krasis

I'm still considering Omenspeaker, but I'm still not sure if my cube wants it more than Augur of Bolas. I'd also like to find room for Read the Bones and Gray Merchant of Asphodel, but I haven't thought enough about what they might go in for yet.

Also, we did a 6-man team draft after making these changes. The Spellheart Chimera ended up in my deck and worked out well, usually coming down as a 2/3 or 3/3, which is pretty good for the mana cost. The U/R deck is usually very spell-heavy, so it works very well in that deck. We only had one green drafter at the table, and he was playing aggro, so Nessian Asp didn't get played. The Horizon Chimera got added after the draft, so no experience with that one yet either.

As for the team draft in general, it was really awesome. We have a couple members of our group that aren't great deckbuilders, so being able to help give them some guidance worked out really well. For gameplay, I made it clear that each player would have to play their own games, so that our better players couldn't give advice on plays during games. The teams ended up really well balanced - each round ended 2-1, with the whole draft coming down to game 3 of the last match in round 3. Nobody 3-0'd or 0-3'd, which was awesome. I'd highly recommend trying out a team draft the next time you have 6 people.

How do you run the team drafts? Does each player on the team draft their own pool or are they shared?

The draft runs like normal - everyone drafts the cards for their own decks. Afterwards, you can get input from your teammates on how to build your deck.

Finally got around to posting the Theros changes to Cubetutor, plus one:
+Read the Bones, -Sinkhole

Sinkhole was a bit of an experiment that was more or less a failure. It suffers from the problem of either being gamebreaking or terrible. Read the Bones digs really well and I think it's just an excellent all-around card that decks of all kinds will like.

Two more Theros related updates have been posted to Cubetutor:
+Pharika's Mender, -Golgari Charm
+Omenspeaker, -Augur of Bolas

Mender is just solid value that most green/black decks will want, and I'm going with consistency over theoretical power level with Omenspeaker over Augur. You can read some more detailed thoughts on my cube's Cubetutor page.

I have a few cards coming in the mail in a few days, so keep your eyes peeled for another update in the near future!

Another update has been posted to Cubetutor! This one incorporates my Commander 2013 changes as well as a few other tweaks:
www.cubetutor.com/cubeblog/72

404 not found ma dude

Fixed, thanks.