Okay everyone, I've got a bit of a crazy idea here that MIGHT just be good. Based on the performance (mostly to my surprise) of the Standard "Guildgates" deck I felt inspired to take a look at trying to support the archetype here in Peasant Cube. My thoughts where that it may be one of those "all-or-nothing" archetypes (where you either get all of the good cards for the deck, or you get less than all of them and your deck is unplayable), that it may be a bit parasitic (this part is true, but less so if you're willing to put in a bit of work at retooling your Cube's manabase), or lastly and arguably most importantly that the archetype requires too many cards being added or retooled to make the archetype worthwhile. While the previous concerns are all true (some more so than others), I do think that the solutions I've come up with can be the beginnings of a discussion on whether the archetype could be supported by Peasant Cube Curators who are feeling a bit adventurous.
So, now that I've listed the problems, I'd like to take a moment to show what the archetype has to offer that makes the "extra work" (retooling your Cube's mana base, and a few cards) offered in my "solutions" worthwhile. These are all of the cards that I deem playable or as payoffs for this archetype (which is by no means an exhaustive list):
My solution to the problems listed above is a simple one that requires a retooling of your Cube's manabase, but will enable the archetype rather well: include four copies of each individual Guildgate. There are even four distinct arts available, so for aesthetic purposes you can still have your Cube include four "different" copies of each Guildgate. If you include all of the above listed cards and utilize this solution you would have access to 41 Guildgates in your Cube, and the Guildgates would be plentiful enough to allow the "Gates deck" to flourish while still allowing for other drafters to pick them for their own fixing.
While I'm not sure if anyone else would consider this solution enough to retool their manabases, and/or be willing to put in some cards that are parasitic (not as much if you utilize my proposed solution, but still parasitic in nature), I do believe that the idea is worth discussing. Worst case scenario it's something to keep in mind for the future for if Wizards keeps pushing Gates cards into Standard sets. However, for an adventurous Cube Curator this idea may have legs. Please feel free to respond and let me know what you think. My last radical idea post(using Surveil as the Dimir mechanic that gives Dimir a true identity in Cube) has been performing moderately well in my Cube, so I figured that this one was worthwhile to post and get others' thoughts and opinions.
The cards are all fine in isolation if you have a good number of gates, but the ideal gate deck looks significantly worse than most other idealized archetypes in a higher power level C/Ube. There's not much synergy between the cards and you're paying a real cost for having half your mana base etbt. At best, the deck is overly dependent on Guild Summit or Gates Ablaze imo, as the rest of the payoffs are just big bodies with no built in protection.
It's hard to justify an incredibly parasitic archetype (you need 5+ gates/searchers to justify most of these) that requires retooling your entire mana base when it's not incredibly powerful.
If you want to try it, I would recommend just letting drafters take however many gates they want, rather than putting them in the cube or changing the mana base. It's pretty common that on colour etbt lands are cut when you have more than a couple.
If you want to try it, I would recommend just letting drafters take however many gates they want, rather than putting them in the cube or changing the mana base.
Interesting idea, but wouldn't that mean that the gate deck would always have ... well.. as many gates as they want? If I was a gate deck and successfully snagged up all the gate-specific cards, I'd just throw in 12-15 gates and call it a day. Seems weird.
I finally got 8 people together to run my cube :).
But I played stipulation draft variant which obviously warped the draft a bit but it still seemed like most people ended up with reasonable decks just because cube power is so high that even if you are forced to take sub-optimal cards they are still good cards.
The only real change I saw was more people were playing more three colour decks than usual which meant things were quite mid rangey.
Pretty much all my recent editions from the Rav sets saw effective play which was good. Rhymth of the wild is dumb, surprise its pelakka wurm with haste.
I am happy that I am not getting any extensive board stalls which is an issue for peasant cubing sometimes
For the record, I would take voltaic brawler, but I find voltaic brawler, rampager, and the new sunder shaman to be all extremely close in power level. I actually came here today just to complain that I only have 2 slots for gruul and I wish I could fit sunder shaman in over brawler.
Brawler is nearly just a 4/3 trample straight up for 2 mana. The limited usage isn't a big deal when it only comes up on his third attack (at which point the 8 damage you already got in for has paid for itself). Rampager's creature mode is merely good. And 2 mana for a +4/+4 and trample combat trick that can't even be cast to dodge burn is also just merely "good".
So I'm taking the upside + need for twos over the flexibility.
What is the consensus on Undead Gladiator ? It looks super versatile (could be used for reanimator, card filtering, or as a recursive threat), but probably won't be amazing in most situations. At the very least, it looks like it would be really fun in grindy decks.
Brawler is ridiculous. I've gotten quite a few t4-5 kills off Experiment One -> Brawler. For slower Gruul decks it's close to Rampager, but Brawler is Bloodrage Brawler without the discard and an added trample in aggro.
Promise is about as clunky as whatever it's supporting. It's been okay to good for me, but most of the time a different token spell would've been just as good.
Forced upkeep discard kills Gladiator. It makes looting too difficult in addition to the cost. Often any form of card advantage makes it irrelevant, as you can't afford to pay the 2 mana upkeep cost and the 2 mana cycling.
Found this recently on the forums. Has anyone given any thought to vouchers in a peasant environment? Could be useful to support more combo strategies or specific archetypes.
Maybe with wording similar to the draft matters cards out of conspiracy sets where a player would draft the voucher face up, flip it during the draft, burn picks to 'redeem' the voucher etc. would offer some interesting choices in CUbe.
Found this recently on the forums. Has anyone given any thought to vouchers in a peasant environment? Could be useful to support more combo strategies or specific archetypes.
Maybe with wording similar to the draft matters cards out of conspiracy sets where a player would draft the voucher face up, flip it during the draft, burn picks to 'redeem' the voucher etc. would offer some interesting choices in CUbe.
Voucher Draft picks could be interesting if you had a separate pool of Voucher picks. Vouchers could be labeled as split colors so you can redeem for a White or Colorless card or a different one of Red or blue ect. From there you have some options to what you can include. Good options could be:
Narrow Answer cards: Tormod's Crypt, artifact or enchantment hate, ect
It could be a cool thing to implement but balancing the voucher/wildcard cards could be tricky as you would need to make sure the wildcards are less powerful than the cube picks as the variety of the wildcards should be better than the true power of the card pickable.
Found this recently on the forums. Has anyone given any thought to vouchers in a peasant environment? Could be useful to support more combo strategies or specific archetypes.
Maybe with wording similar to the draft matters cards out of conspiracy sets where a player would draft the voucher face up, flip it during the draft, burn picks to 'redeem' the voucher etc. would offer some interesting choices in CUbe.
I don't have a voucher system in my main (non-Peasant) cube, but I do have something vaguely similar - Lore Seeker.
I basically have a separate 15-card pack that I change without notice. It's gone through iterations where it was "all triple-colour CC cards", "Eldrazi" (including the Eye and the Temple), and is currently "Equipment" (featuring Jitte and Batterskull).
What makes this concept awesome is that I am free to change the 15 cards in that pack at any given moment without notice.
I probably need to do it again soon... my playgroup have currently become comfortable with the idea that Lore Broker = Jitte ATM... must be time for 15 Persistent Petitioners or something...
How would I do this for Peasant? Ideally, you'd want its contents spread across the colours, or you begin to favour people drafting a particular colour... but I like to fill it with certain archetypes that aren't currently present in the cube. The Gates discussion above would be an interesting one to try, for instance.
Awful shame that Lore Seeker is not Peasant-legal, in the strictest sense.
I guess you could sub using Booster Tutor...
Peasant Cube on a Budget - Green
I struggled with a really random thing this time around...
... what sort of half-decent finishing non-creature spell should I be running in green? Overrun was obvious, but it was crickets after that.
I settled on Grizzly Fate, mostly for lulz.
What does everyone else run here, if anything?
I was thinking somewhere along the lines of Animus of Predation where for the case of tron/artifact lands/etc. It could read:
Draft ~ face up.
As you draft a card, you may remove it from the draft face up.
At the end of the draft, for every land card you removed you may add [tron land, artifact land, etc.] to your deck.
Then, if someone wanted to draft tron, they would first get the voucher and then "burn" three more picks to guarantee they got the three lands.
Bloom, Perhaps the new 6 drop that drops +1/+1 counters on things then doubles the counters.
Biogenic Upgrade? Yeah, it did cross my mind, that one. I was a bit worried that I didn't have enough payoffs for it elsewhere, though... not too many things in the list that dealt with +1/+1 counters, I don't think. But yeah, the fact we're leaning on a brand-new card here shows how empty those slots are...
But ultimately, why reach for a noncreature card in particular
Oh, absolutely. I'm only enforcing a balance to give people a starting point. Believe me, the point will be made heavily at the end of the series that you can throw all the rules out if it means getting better cards into the 360 (and this is clearly a place where that holds).
I was thinking somewhere along the lines of Animus of Predation where for the case of tron/artifact lands/etc. It could read:
Draft ~ face up.
As you draft a card, you may remove it from the draft face up.
At the end of the draft, for every land card you removed you may add [tron land, artifact land, etc.] to your deck.
Then, if someone wanted to draft tron, they would first get the voucher and then "burn" three more picks to guarantee they got the three lands.
Another potential option, yeah.
I've seen Wishes used the same way out in normal cubes, as well as Mastermind's Acquisition (all of which obviously come with Not Peasant-Legal disclaimers, unfortunately).
Peasant Cube on a Budget - Green
I struggled with a really random thing this time around...
... what sort of half-decent finishing non-creature spell should I be running in green? Overrun was obvious, but it was crickets after that.
I settled on Grizzly Fate, mostly for lulz.
What does everyone else run here, if anything?
What about Centaur Glade? I'm at 360 now, so I don't currently run it, but it always felt like a powerful mana sink for big mana green decks that wasn't just another big fat creature. Cranking out a 3/3 every turn, even at four mana per dude, always felt kinda planeswalker-y.
Hurricane is a fun card while it may not be for everyone if you run support for the Skies Archetype as I find Skies in unanswerable by green otherwise.
Constant mists is mostly because fog effects are a thing I find are unrated and while not the cheapest thing in the world, the repeat-ability of mists is too good to pass up. It could be subed for by Moment's Peace.
What about Centaur Glade? I'm at 360 now, so I don't currently run it, but it always felt like a powerful mana sink for big mana green decks that wasn't just another big fat creature. Cranking out a 3/3 every turn, even at four mana per dude, always felt kinda planeswalker-y.
I actually run this in my own peasant cube ATM (and I've just managed to foil it out, too!)... it's really underrated. Probably the card I would have put in if I hadn't gone with Grizzly Fate.
Hurricane is a fun card while it may not be for everyone if you run support for the Skies Archetype as I find Skies in unanswerable by green otherwise.
Constant mists is mostly because fog effects are a thing I find are unrated and while not the cheapest thing in the world, the repeat-ability of mists is too good to pass up. It could be subed for by Moment's Peace.
Constant Mists was out of the running due to budget, but if it had been available for under $3, I'd have put it in like a shot. The games I have fogged out with that thing... Hurricane had exactly the problem you mention - it was right on the bubble of cards played in people's cubes, but it turns into a weird high-risk, high-reward card in green. When I have the opportunity to draft it, it always feels like I'm drafting a suicide card that really wants to be in a red or black deck.
Pretty sure it's Commander that's driving that. It's great in Muldrotha and The Gitrog Monster, though oddly it didn't really spike until July of 2018 - three months after Muldrotha was released. Not sure why - maybe because Crucible of Worlds was reprinted (and finally became semi-affordable) in Core Set 2019?
Anyway, the card is stupid good but a bit unfair against decks that require combat to win. Moment's Peace seems like a much more fair version - two fogs are often enough - and it's a fraction of the price.
What about Centaur Glade? I'm at 360 now, so I don't currently run it, but it always felt like a powerful mana sink for big mana green decks that wasn't just another big fat creature. Cranking out a 3/3 every turn, even at four mana per dude, always felt kinda planeswalker-y.
I actually run this in my own peasant cube ATM (and I've just managed to foil it out, too!)... it's really underrated. Probably the card I would have put in if I hadn't gone with Grizzly Fate.
Hurricane is a fun card while it may not be for everyone if you run support for the Skies Archetype as I find Skies in unanswerable by green otherwise.
Constant mists is mostly because fog effects are a thing I find are unrated and while not the cheapest thing in the world, the repeat-ability of mists is too good to pass up. It could be subed for by Moment's Peace.
Constant Mists was out of the running due to budget, but if it had been available for under $3, I'd have put it in like a shot. The games I have fogged out with that thing... Hurricane had exactly the problem you mention - it was right on the bubble of cards played in people's cubes, but it turns into a weird high-risk, high-reward card in green. When I have the opportunity to draft it, it always feels like I'm drafting a suicide card that really wants to be in a red or black deck.
Yea Hurricane is a really weird card to evaluate but I found in atleast my cube with a lot of my lifegain found in Green/X that often it plays really well as you are almost always at a higher lifetotal but again I only found that this balanced in my cube after doing a lot of testing.
So, now that I've listed the problems, I'd like to take a moment to show what the archetype has to offer that makes the "extra work" (retooling your Cube's mana base, and a few cards) offered in my "solutions" worthwhile. These are all of the cards that I deem playable or as payoffs for this archetype (which is by no means an exhaustive list):
While I'm not sure if anyone else would consider this solution enough to retool their manabases, and/or be willing to put in some cards that are parasitic (not as much if you utilize my proposed solution, but still parasitic in nature), I do believe that the idea is worth discussing. Worst case scenario it's something to keep in mind for the future for if Wizards keeps pushing Gates cards into Standard sets. However, for an adventurous Cube Curator this idea may have legs. Please feel free to respond and let me know what you think. My last radical idea post(using Surveil as the Dimir mechanic that gives Dimir a true identity in Cube) has been performing moderately well in my Cube, so I figured that this one was worthwhile to post and get others' thoughts and opinions.
six life and a mediocre creature at an overpriced cost
A card or two,
two cards for 5 mana, then another card later
An expensive Pyroclasm
A Civic Wayfinder
a gate card
An Explosive Vegetation for gates
A Rupture Spire
The only two that I can see working out/worth the time from that list (which is not exhaustive, i understand) are the colossus and maybe the ram .
Too many hoops to jump through, and the potential for the deck to not work out would be sad for that 8th person that night.
The cards are all fine in isolation if you have a good number of gates, but the ideal gate deck looks significantly worse than most other idealized archetypes in a higher power level C/Ube. There's not much synergy between the cards and you're paying a real cost for having half your mana base etbt. At best, the deck is overly dependent on Guild Summit or Gates Ablaze imo, as the rest of the payoffs are just big bodies with no built in protection.
It's hard to justify an incredibly parasitic archetype (you need 5+ gates/searchers to justify most of these) that requires retooling your entire mana base when it's not incredibly powerful.
If you want to try it, I would recommend just letting drafters take however many gates they want, rather than putting them in the cube or changing the mana base. It's pretty common that on colour etbt lands are cut when you have more than a couple.
But I played stipulation draft variant which obviously warped the draft a bit but it still seemed like most people ended up with reasonable decks just because cube power is so high that even if you are forced to take sub-optimal cards they are still good cards.
The only real change I saw was more people were playing more three colour decks than usual which meant things were quite mid rangey.
Pretty much all my recent editions from the Rav sets saw effective play which was good. Rhymth of the wild is dumb, surprise its pelakka wurm with haste.
I am happy that I am not getting any extensive board stalls which is an issue for peasant cubing sometimes
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
Brawler is nearly just a 4/3 trample straight up for 2 mana. The limited usage isn't a big deal when it only comes up on his third attack (at which point the 8 damage you already got in for has paid for itself). Rampager's creature mode is merely good. And 2 mana for a +4/+4 and trample combat trick that can't even be cast to dodge burn is also just merely "good".
So I'm taking the upside + need for twos over the flexibility.
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
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
Promise is about as clunky as whatever it's supporting. It's been okay to good for me, but most of the time a different token spell would've been just as good.
Forced upkeep discard kills Gladiator. It makes looting too difficult in addition to the cost. Often any form of card advantage makes it irrelevant, as you can't afford to pay the 2 mana upkeep cost and the 2 mana cycling.
Maybe with wording similar to the draft matters cards out of conspiracy sets where a player would draft the voucher face up, flip it during the draft, burn picks to 'redeem' the voucher etc. would offer some interesting choices in CUbe.
Voucher Draft picks could be interesting if you had a separate pool of Voucher picks. Vouchers could be labeled as split colors so you can redeem for a White or Colorless card or a different one of Red or blue ect. From there you have some options to what you can include. Good options could be:
Cards that require multiples such as: Squadron Hawk, Tron Lands, Rune Snag, Arachnus Spinner and their Arachnus Web, BogBrew Witch and the newt and Cauldron would make for strong voucher card .
Narrow Answer cards: Tormod's Crypt, artifact or enchantment hate, ect
It could be a cool thing to implement but balancing the voucher/wildcard cards could be tricky as you would need to make sure the wildcards are less powerful than the cube picks as the variety of the wildcards should be better than the true power of the card pickable.
That's my 2 cents on it.
I don't have a voucher system in my main (non-Peasant) cube, but I do have something vaguely similar - Lore Seeker.
I basically have a separate 15-card pack that I change without notice. It's gone through iterations where it was "all triple-colour CC cards", "Eldrazi" (including the Eye and the Temple), and is currently "Equipment" (featuring Jitte and Batterskull).
What makes this concept awesome is that I am free to change the 15 cards in that pack at any given moment without notice.
I probably need to do it again soon... my playgroup have currently become comfortable with the idea that Lore Broker = Jitte ATM... must be time for 15 Persistent Petitioners or something...
How would I do this for Peasant? Ideally, you'd want its contents spread across the colours, or you begin to favour people drafting a particular colour... but I like to fill it with certain archetypes that aren't currently present in the cube. The Gates discussion above would be an interesting one to try, for instance.
Awful shame that Lore Seeker is not Peasant-legal, in the strictest sense.
I guess you could sub using Booster Tutor...
My Stupidly Large Number of Current Decks
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Cube: the Gittening (My Multiplayer Cube) - MTGS Cube List | @ CubeTutor
The N00b Cube (Peasant cube for new players) - MTGS Cube List | @ CubeTutor
I struggled with a really random thing this time around...
... what sort of half-decent finishing non-creature spell should I be running in green? Overrun was obvious, but it was crickets after that.
I settled on Grizzly Fate, mostly for lulz.
What does everyone else run here, if anything?
My Stupidly Large Number of Current Decks
PucaTrade with me!
The Multiplayer Power Rankings
Cube: the Gittening (My Multiplayer Cube) - MTGS Cube List | @ CubeTutor
The N00b Cube (Peasant cube for new players) - MTGS Cube List | @ CubeTutor
Draft ~ face up.
As you draft a card, you may remove it from the draft face up.
At the end of the draft, for every land card you removed you may add [tron land, artifact land, etc.] to your deck.
Then, if someone wanted to draft tron, they would first get the voucher and then "burn" three more picks to guarantee they got the three lands.
But ultimately, why reach for a noncreature card in particular
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
Biogenic Upgrade? Yeah, it did cross my mind, that one. I was a bit worried that I didn't have enough payoffs for it elsewhere, though... not too many things in the list that dealt with +1/+1 counters, I don't think. But yeah, the fact we're leaning on a brand-new card here shows how empty those slots are...
Oh, absolutely. I'm only enforcing a balance to give people a starting point. Believe me, the point will be made heavily at the end of the series that you can throw all the rules out if it means getting better cards into the 360 (and this is clearly a place where that holds).
My Stupidly Large Number of Current Decks
PucaTrade with me!
The Multiplayer Power Rankings
Cube: the Gittening (My Multiplayer Cube) - MTGS Cube List | @ CubeTutor
The N00b Cube (Peasant cube for new players) - MTGS Cube List | @ CubeTutor
Another potential option, yeah.
I've seen Wishes used the same way out in normal cubes, as well as Mastermind's Acquisition (all of which obviously come with Not Peasant-Legal disclaimers, unfortunately).
My Stupidly Large Number of Current Decks
PucaTrade with me!
The Multiplayer Power Rankings
Cube: the Gittening (My Multiplayer Cube) - MTGS Cube List | @ CubeTutor
The N00b Cube (Peasant cube for new players) - MTGS Cube List | @ CubeTutor
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
What about Centaur Glade? I'm at 360 now, so I don't currently run it, but it always felt like a powerful mana sink for big mana green decks that wasn't just another big fat creature. Cranking out a 3/3 every turn, even at four mana per dude, always felt kinda planeswalker-y.
MTGS Average Peasant Cube 2023 Edition
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Hurricane and Constant Mists
Hurricane is a fun card while it may not be for everyone if you run support for the Skies Archetype as I find Skies in unanswerable by green otherwise.
Constant mists is mostly because fog effects are a thing I find are unrated and while not the cheapest thing in the world, the repeat-ability of mists is too good to pass up. It could be subed for by Moment's Peace.
I actually run this in my own peasant cube ATM (and I've just managed to foil it out, too!)... it's really underrated. Probably the card I would have put in if I hadn't gone with Grizzly Fate.
Constant Mists was out of the running due to budget, but if it had been available for under $3, I'd have put it in like a shot. The games I have fogged out with that thing...
Hurricane had exactly the problem you mention - it was right on the bubble of cards played in people's cubes, but it turns into a weird high-risk, high-reward card in green. When I have the opportunity to draft it, it always feels like I'm drafting a suicide card that really wants to be in a red or black deck.
My Stupidly Large Number of Current Decks
PucaTrade with me!
The Multiplayer Power Rankings
Cube: the Gittening (My Multiplayer Cube) - MTGS Cube List | @ CubeTutor
The N00b Cube (Peasant cube for new players) - MTGS Cube List | @ CubeTutor
What the heck, this thing is nine dollars?
Cubetutor Peasant'ish-Funbox
Project: Khans of Tarkir Cube (cubetutor)
Anyway, the card is stupid good but a bit unfair against decks that require combat to win. Moment's Peace seems like a much more fair version - two fogs are often enough - and it's a fraction of the price.
2023 Average Peasant Cube|and Discussion
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Yea Hurricane is a really weird card to evaluate but I found in atleast my cube with a lot of my lifegain found in Green/X that often it plays really well as you are almost always at a higher lifetotal but again I only found that this balanced in my cube after doing a lot of testing.