Some archetypes (other than the ones you listed) that are relatively easy to implement off the top of my head would be +1/+1 counters (WGR), sacrifice (WBR), skies (WU), graveyard matters (BGU) and blink/bounce (WU in combination with every other color).
This may be a silly question, but is there a max(or recommended) number of archetypes you can support based on your cube size? I assume if you try to go too deep supporting a ton of archetypes, the cube could get very awkward to draft?
This may be a silly question, but is there a max(or recommended) number of archetypes you can support based on your cube size? I assume if you try to go too deep supporting a ton of archetypes, the cube could get very awkward to draft?
I don't know if there's an actual number/calculation, but I guess the general thing is that you want to support archetypes that overlap, with some exceptions for linearity. You'll do less of the latter, especially if those archetypes are similar to storm packages you'd find in rare cubes as for the most part it's tough to support most linear strategies at peasant without including cards that only fall in those decks.
In addition, some archetypes will naturally show up when the best cards in a color support that style. There is no peasant cube that isn't running Cloudgoat Ranger (outside of maybe power level reasons) and a number of token-makers in white, so cards that support that style of play (read: anthem style effects, cards that reward you for going wide with a number ox X/1s like skullclamp (if you're a sick **** like that to run skullclamp )) might get a closer look as their power level is relative entirely to the token deck's power.
The thing with cubes is that archetypes naturally form when you're running good cards for all three theatres. We don't have to worry about making decks full of 1 and 2 drops exist and work when we want to include those cards, the same way we don't have to worry about control decks existing (to a degree) when we are including the peasant-legal sweepers/abundance of removal/counterspells/card draw/etc. While that is less of an 'archetype', those will surface within those theatres. Blue-based control decks might turn into spells matters when you run Rise from the Tides; midrange black decks might feature a number of reanimation and recursion effects and grind out games with that type of attrition i.e. 'pox' decks; green decks might lean towards +1+1 counters for their decks, and might naturally pair with a number of colors for that reason, or they might be green ramp decks that are trying to pump out an Ulamog's Crusher the same way that black deck might be trying to reanimate it. These are just a few examples of the many natural archetypes that come from just including good cards and trying to build sections around those, after days/weeks/months/years of cubing you'll find more and as they print more cards we will get more options.
I would reccomend sticking to 0-1 archetypes per guild. Including more than that requires devoting a lot of slots to more narrow cards that may not be that good in most decks.
Some guilds (simic) are pretty hard to add a competitive archetype to so don't force it.
I'd recommend thinking in shards and wedges rather than guilds. Pick a theme for each three-color pair (say reanimator control for Grixis, spells matter for Jeskai, Naya +1/+1 tokens,...) and you'll get overlapping archetypes in your guilds automatically while not shoehorning your guilds into being narrow one-trick ponies.
My cube is actually rather strongly archetype based but I don't think you end up railroaded.
When I first made it I had this super rigid organised cube with all these archetypes perfectly planned. But I quickly realised I didn't have the space to properly do all the archetypes I wanted
I typically still have this idea of what an aggro, midrange and control/ramp variants are of each colour combo should look like, sometimes they are full archetypes sometimes they are just larger versions of other archetypes. I feel like control and ramp decks actually look similar, low number of powerful win cons and lots of spells and mana sinks.
I try to make sure my multicoloured card point strongly in the archetype direction, they are typically low picks anyway (no matter how good they are) so you can have them be narrow but powerful in their archetype. For example for UW thunderclap wyvern and mistmeadow witch point towards skys and blink respectively.
Then I found I needed lots of overlap of archetypes, I want cards that play well in multiple archetypes and at multiple deck speeds. For example Mist raven is great in flyiers and blink decks but it is also good as top end in aggro, perfect mid range card and in a control deck you can just set up a lock with something like crystal shard. I needed to also have cross synergies for archetypes in the same colours. example red black wraths plays a lot of -2/-2 or pyroclasm effects, so I added creatures like gifted aetherborn, wanted scoundrels, bloodrage brawler, Keldon marauders that won't die to those effects.
Mana breach is an amazing card if you support lockout control in your cube. From cards like Crystal Shard, Icy Manipulator, Ghostly prison or Propaganda, and thier ilk when paired with Mana breach leads to a very strong control suite. I however did remove it when I tried to de-power my control/lockout decks as they were 3/0ing when we played.
I don't expect that you would get much mileage out of it as a random one-of. We don't get extra land drops in Peasant so it seems hard to break the symmetry. It's good if you start to tempo out your opponent, but it's not really good in a deck full of cheap cards either (as playing more than one spell a turn is just going to limit your resources more). It doesn't seem like a natural fit in anything unless you have a lot of other cards floating around that support a peasant version of Stax, which would be very new to me.
I tried and cut it. Too many "nice nine mana investment, idiot" or "nice Durkwood Boars, idiot" moments and we have great new stuff like Arborback Stomper and Ridgescale Tusker as competition. I also always felt I'd rather have the flashback on Beast Attack available than the ability on Bane.
I didn't try it, but didn't really see a need for it. It can certainly be powerful in the right games, and was great in both of its previous limited environments, but removal is just so prevalent in cube that I don't think even a five mana straight up 8/8 would be good enough without something extra.
I'm guessing 2R vanilla 2/1 is when they have something like a Centaur Courser on board and you can't zap 'em dead with Fire Imp.
I can understand that reasoning. I guess I'm okay with the first two cases because i'm willing to wait it out until there is something to zap. For the 3rd case, I probably would attack with an appropriately sized creature at the appropriate time* into the larger creature and play mind games.
If you block, then you're down a guy, and if you don't, I get in 2 dmg, given that I don't need the attacking creature to block later*.
There is Blisterstick Shaman as a similar alternative that I used to run before I discovered Fire Imp who wouldn't have the problem being stuck in your hand, but perhaps being a tad underwhelming.
Not too often that a turn 3 fire imp doesn't have a target. I can only imagine cutting it or demoting it if I started supporting more creature light decks on purpose and I don't see that happening.
If I wanted to swap like-for-like with Shaman, I'd probably go with Ghitu Slinger. You get the effect you want, it can come down on curve, and it can still be abused with blink/bounce/recursion shenanigans.
To Leelue's point, it's definitely not often that a turn three Fire Imp doesn't have a target. When my red aggro decks curve into Imp, kill a blocker, and get in for damage, that's when I really like him. If you draw him late in aggro, that's not a big deal because drawing anything late in aggro is bad. But when you're not in that aggro deck and you've got him in a Grixis value deck or something, the games tend to go longer. He's still a great turn three option, but when you draw him on turn six or seven and your opponent has a 3/3 or bigger out or nothing at all, it's just miserable.
In a vacuum the card isn't bad and I wouldn't fault someone else from including it, but I've just had a lot of negative experience with it. I also feel like the card hasn't aged well. In today's power creep world I feel like he should definitely hit players as well or have haste or be a 2/3 or just something else.
Just a quick question for all of you. I was looking up some lists to give me ideas on how to shake up my cube a bit and I saw that a lot of people were also considering rarity of cards on MTGO only releases (ex: Soltari Champion, Pianna, Nomad Captain, Serendib Efreet). I'm kind of a purist and usually stick to paper releases when it comes to the rarity of the cards in my cube. How many of you consider MTGO and paper sets when considering rarity?
If you don't feel comfortable with considering online uncommons, don't run them. Personally I'm just asking myself the question "do these online uncommons make my cube more fun?". A lot of them do (for me and my group, yours might differ) and that's why I run them.
I only run cards which are available as non-rares on paper - and only the versions which are. However, as Phitt mentioned, cards from some old sets are contested ground even then. I run U2 cards such as Old Man of the Sea even if they are retroactively classified as rares in Gatherer. As people have been saying, any restrictions you decide to abide by are ultimately arbitrary. There is no inherent value in them. I like my variant as a principled way of keeping all my cards as explicitly non-rares: no gold symbols are present anywhere. In MTGO, if I did the same, I would only include the cards which are available as non-rares online, as I consider the physical format and the digital format two separate iterations of the same base game (with a lot of overlap but no perfect correspondence).
After drafting a powered cube, I'm wondering if peasant cant be made to have clear archetypes as well?
So far my 540 (based off the average) seems to support UR spells, tokens, and reanimator, but I'm wondering what else can be put in?
LegacyUBRDelverRBU
Thank you both! That link is also exactly what I'm looking for!
LegacyUBRDelverRBU
LegacyUBRDelverRBU
I don't know if there's an actual number/calculation, but I guess the general thing is that you want to support archetypes that overlap, with some exceptions for linearity. You'll do less of the latter, especially if those archetypes are similar to storm packages you'd find in rare cubes as for the most part it's tough to support most linear strategies at peasant without including cards that only fall in those decks.
In addition, some archetypes will naturally show up when the best cards in a color support that style. There is no peasant cube that isn't running Cloudgoat Ranger (outside of maybe power level reasons) and a number of token-makers in white, so cards that support that style of play (read: anthem style effects, cards that reward you for going wide with a number ox X/1s like skullclamp (if you're a sick **** like that to run skullclamp
The thing with cubes is that archetypes naturally form when you're running good cards for all three theatres. We don't have to worry about making decks full of 1 and 2 drops exist and work when we want to include those cards, the same way we don't have to worry about control decks existing (to a degree) when we are including the peasant-legal sweepers/abundance of removal/counterspells/card draw/etc. While that is less of an 'archetype', those will surface within those theatres. Blue-based control decks might turn into spells matters when you run Rise from the Tides; midrange black decks might feature a number of reanimation and recursion effects and grind out games with that type of attrition i.e. 'pox' decks; green decks might lean towards +1+1 counters for their decks, and might naturally pair with a number of colors for that reason, or they might be green ramp decks that are trying to pump out an Ulamog's Crusher the same way that black deck might be trying to reanimate it. These are just a few examples of the many natural archetypes that come from just including good cards and trying to build sections around those, after days/weeks/months/years of cubing you'll find more and as they print more cards we will get more options.
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Some guilds (simic) are pretty hard to add a competitive archetype to so don't force it.
Draft it on Cubetutor here, and CubeCobra here.
Treasure Cruise did nothing wrong.
When I first made it I had this super rigid organised cube with all these archetypes perfectly planned. But I quickly realised I didn't have the space to properly do all the archetypes I wanted
I typically still have this idea of what an aggro, midrange and control/ramp variants are of each colour combo should look like, sometimes they are full archetypes sometimes they are just larger versions of other archetypes. I feel like control and ramp decks actually look similar, low number of powerful win cons and lots of spells and mana sinks.
I try to make sure my multicoloured card point strongly in the archetype direction, they are typically low picks anyway (no matter how good they are) so you can have them be narrow but powerful in their archetype. For example for UW thunderclap wyvern and mistmeadow witch point towards skys and blink respectively.
Then I found I needed lots of overlap of archetypes, I want cards that play well in multiple archetypes and at multiple deck speeds. For example Mist raven is great in flyiers and blink decks but it is also good as top end in aggro, perfect mid range card and in a control deck you can just set up a lock with something like crystal shard. I needed to also have cross synergies for archetypes in the same colours. example red black wraths plays a lot of -2/-2 or pyroclasm effects, so I added creatures like gifted aetherborn, wanted scoundrels, bloodrage brawler, Keldon marauders that won't die to those effects.
Cube link: http://www.cubetutor.com/viewcube/51100
Pioneer:UR Pheonix
Modern:U Mono U Tron
EDH
GB Glissa, the traitor: Army of Cans
UW Dragonlord Ojutai: Dragonlord NOjutai
UWGDerevi, Empyrial Tactician "you cannot fight the storm"
R Zirilan of the claw. The solution to every problem is dragons
UB Etrata, the Silencer Cloning assassination
Peasant cube: Cards I own
Cubetutor Peasant'ish-Funbox
Project: Khans of Tarkir Cube (cubetutor)
Draft my Peasant Cube.
My C/Ube on Cube Cobra
I didn't try it, but didn't really see a need for it. It can certainly be powerful in the right games, and was great in both of its previous limited environments, but removal is just so prevalent in cube that I don't think even a five mana straight up 8/8 would be good enough without something extra.
MTGS Average Peasant Cube 2023 Edition
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What makes you not like him?
Fire Imp has three modes:
1. Sweet 2-for-1 dude. Love that guy.
2. Stuck in my hand because there are literally zero targets and he just dies on impact.
3. 2R vanilla 2/1
Only one of these things is worth it and it just seemed like the other two happened more often than not.
MTGS Average Peasant Cube 2023 Edition
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I can understand that reasoning. I guess I'm okay with the first two cases because i'm willing to wait it out until there is something to zap. For the 3rd case, I probably would attack with an appropriately sized creature at the appropriate time* into the larger creature and play mind games.
If you block, then you're down a guy, and if you don't, I get in 2 dmg, given that I don't need the attacking creature to block later*.
There is Blisterstick Shaman as a similar alternative that I used to run before I discovered Fire Imp who wouldn't have the problem being stuck in your hand, but perhaps being a tad underwhelming.
My CubeCobra (draft 20 card packs, 2 packs.)
430, Peasant, Very Unpowered
Why you should take your hybrids out of your gold section
Manamath Article
To Leelue's point, it's definitely not often that a turn three Fire Imp doesn't have a target. When my red aggro decks curve into Imp, kill a blocker, and get in for damage, that's when I really like him. If you draw him late in aggro, that's not a big deal because drawing anything late in aggro is bad. But when you're not in that aggro deck and you've got him in a Grixis value deck or something, the games tend to go longer. He's still a great turn three option, but when you draw him on turn six or seven and your opponent has a 3/3 or bigger out or nothing at all, it's just miserable.
In a vacuum the card isn't bad and I wouldn't fault someone else from including it, but I've just had a lot of negative experience with it. I also feel like the card hasn't aged well. In today's power creep world I feel like he should definitely hit players as well or have haste or be a 2/3 or just something else.
MTGS Average Peasant Cube 2023 Edition
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