I'm new to the forum but I've read it for a long time. Sorry for my bad English, I'm from Italy
I've finally decided to build my own cube. It was difficult for me to choose which kind of cube I wanted, pauper or not, with powerful cards or not, synergy driven and archetype based or good stuff, and so on. I've written a long list of cube lists, with cards I own or I don't, from the little 180 cubes to big 720s.
About one month ago, I began looking at cubes that are not made by people but just by jamming 4x each common, 2x each uncommon and 1x each rare of a given set. I thought that making this with some powerful set like Modern Masters would be fun, for recreating the draft environment that I liked a lot of time ago. But it didn't seem what I looked for. The set was stale, the cards were all the same and the non-singleton nature of the cube was really bad for me.
Then I had an intuition: to create a 360-card cube that can remember Modern Masters draft, but has a lot of different cards and some interesting things taken by the original draft environments that were merged into MMA. For example, Kamigawa draft had cards like Teller of Tales and Long-Forgotten Gohei that were really good in the Dampen Thought deck, and Lorwyn had some powerful faeries in Mistbind Clique and Sower of Temptation.
But, I have to make some restrictions. It's too easy to say "yeah recreate the environment" and make some cube that seems similar to Modern Masters but has nothing to do with it. So, the restrictions I thought are really severe, but I love the "restriction breeds creativity" motto so... what I decided is: the cards in the cube can be only from the temporal window from which Modern Masters took the cards, so [8ED, ARB]. Every common and uncommon card from Modern Masters has to be in the cube. Rares and mythics are removed from the cube only if they are bad in cube (Extirpate, Demigod of Revenge) or they were originally in it just for sake of constructed (Blood Moon). I don't like planeswalkers either, so they went out. I don't know whether to keep Tarmogoyf and Dark Confidant, but I like those cards so they could probably be kept.
So this leaves us with about 220 cards in the cube, and about 140 free slots for which we can make every decision we want. I already did a version of this cube, but I'm not entirely satisfacted with it. I think that starting again could be the best idea.
Some things are set to stone and I don't want to change them, but everything else is free. For example, in Modern Masters there is a WB rebel archetype. But in Time block, the rebel archetype was mainly mono-white: in fact there were a lot of mono-white matters cards (for example, also Ivory Giant, that is still in Modern Masters). So the WB rebels archetype could become something in between of a mono-W and a WB, so that people could draft it either way. In one case, they should pick Gaze of Justice over Blightspeaker, and vice versa.
Other things, the artifact archetype can easily dip into three or four colors: there is already Shrapnel Blast, we could add Atog and Disciple of the Vault and some other black stuff from Alara block. Since I love Dampen Thought, I want it to be a good archetype, so people could draft both a "standard" UR arcane deck and a dampen thought deck. The dampen thought deck should be more towards UW than UR, with Ethereal Haze and Candles' Glow.
So, I want to keep that "mix-and-match archetypes" feeling from Modern Masters, but if they have more colors or are more flexible... that should be a good thing, shouldn't it?
The problem is that I don't know where to start. By looking at each individual archetype, search a lot of cards that could help it, and add them? Or something more holistic? I hope that you can help me, and I hope I didn't put this topic in the wrong section
I'm new to the forum but I've read it for a long time. Sorry for my bad English, I'm from Italy
I've finally decided to build my own cube. It was difficult for me to choose which kind of cube I wanted, pauper or not, with powerful cards or not, synergy driven and archetype based or good stuff, and so on. I've written a long list of cube lists, with cards I own or I don't, from the little 180 cubes to big 720s.
About one month ago, I began looking at cubes that are not made by people but just by jamming 4x each common, 2x each uncommon and 1x each rare of a given set. I thought that making this with some powerful set like Modern Masters would be fun, for recreating the draft environment that I liked a lot of time ago. But it didn't seem what I looked for. The set was stale, the cards were all the same and the non-singleton nature of the cube was really bad for me.
Then I had an intuition: to create a 360-card cube that can remember Modern Masters draft, but has a lot of different cards and some interesting things taken by the original draft environments that were merged into MMA. For example, Kamigawa draft had cards like Teller of Tales and Long-Forgotten Gohei that were really good in the Dampen Thought deck, and Lorwyn had some powerful faeries in Mistbind Clique and Sower of Temptation.
But, I have to make some restrictions. It's too easy to say "yeah recreate the environment" and make some cube that seems similar to Modern Masters but has nothing to do with it. So, the restrictions I thought are really severe, but I love the "restriction breeds creativity" motto so... what I decided is: the cards in the cube can be only from the temporal window from which Modern Masters took the cards, so [8ED, ARB]. Every common and uncommon card from Modern Masters has to be in the cube. Rares and mythics are removed from the cube only if they are bad in cube (Extirpate, Demigod of Revenge) or they were originally in it just for sake of constructed (Blood Moon). I don't like planeswalkers either, so they went out. I don't know whether to keep Tarmogoyf and Dark Confidant, but I like those cards so they could probably be kept.
So this leaves us with about 220 cards in the cube, and about 140 free slots for which we can make every decision we want. I already did a version of this cube, but I'm not entirely satisfacted with it. I think that starting again could be the best idea.
Some things are set to stone and I don't want to change them, but everything else is free. For example, in Modern Masters there is a WB rebel archetype. But in Time block, the rebel archetype was mainly mono-white: in fact there were a lot of mono-white matters cards (for example, also Ivory Giant, that is still in Modern Masters). So the WB rebels archetype could become something in between of a mono-W and a WB, so that people could draft it either way. In one case, they should pick Gaze of Justice over Blightspeaker, and vice versa.
Other things, the artifact archetype can easily dip into three or four colors: there is already Shrapnel Blast, we could add Atog and Disciple of the Vault and some other black stuff from Alara block. Since I love Dampen Thought, I want it to be a good archetype, so people could draft both a "standard" UR arcane deck and a dampen thought deck. The dampen thought deck should be more towards UW than UR, with Ethereal Haze and Candles' Glow.
So, I want to keep that "mix-and-match archetypes" feeling from Modern Masters, but if they have more colors or are more flexible... that should be a good thing, shouldn't it?
The problem is that I don't know where to start. By looking at each individual archetype, search a lot of cards that could help it, and add them? Or something more holistic? I hope that you can help me, and I hope I didn't put this topic in the wrong section
I hope that you can help me, thanks in advance