MTG Salvation

Pretty disappointing for a remastered set, tbh. We usually get at least a couple sweet ones in these sets and here we get basically nothing.

At least I'm getting some more old border foils.

Pteramander
Light Up the Stage
Guttersnipe
Lightning Helix

That's about it, though.

Quote from Al_Z_Heimer »

Boros Elite and Judge's Familiar were recently downshifted to common, so I'm considering them for my pauper cube.

I wanted to ask if anyone had any experience with these in their peasant cube? The Familiar is probably very solid, but I have super hard time evaluating the Elite. Is it worth it or a trap?

I believe Boros Elite used to be a fine card to run in peasant, see our Evaluate Everything thread. Good in aggro, works with tokens. Simply outclassed for us nowadays with so many Elite Vanguards with upside, but I would try it in pauper for sure.

Quote from calibretto »

Pretty disappointing for a remastered set, tbh. We usually get at least a couple sweet ones in these sets and here we get basically nothing.

At least I'm getting some more old border foils.

Pteramander
Light Up the Stage
Guttersnipe
Lightning Helix

That's about it, though.

Pretty good old-bordering for me:

- Cloudfin Raptor
- Crackling Drake
- Condenm
- Experiment One
- Frilled Mystic
- Guttersnipe
- Lightning Helix
- Light Up the Stage
- Mayhem Devil
- Pteramander
- Rhythm of the Wild
- Utopia Sprawl
- Wilderness Reclamation

Quote from A_WasherDryer »

On a different note, what sort of physical set up do you all use for managing lands and tokens during deck construction and game play? Do you keep everything in the cube box? A separate box? Does anyone have a land station like this one? Do you just pass stacks of lands / tokens around and let people take what they need?

I have recently switched to this system: I have 2 different kinds of 1/1 grounded tokens, 2 different kinds of 1/1 flying tokens, and then one of everything else. It's pretty rare for there to be multiple things on the same side of the board makings larger tokens, and I having two of the 1/1 varieties means that something like sever the bloodline or cloudgoat ranger can keep track.

Quote from A_WasherDryer »

On a different note, what sort of physical set up do you all use for managing lands and tokens during deck construction and game play? Do you keep everything in the cube box? A separate box? Does anyone have a land station like this one? Do you just pass stacks of lands / tokens around and let people take what they need?

I completely missed this post.

For lands, I have that very land station. It's a tad pricey, but I got mine at my LGS on store credit. I keep three cubes' worth of basics in it pretty comfy.


For my tokens, having multiple cubes, the BCW box started to get full, so I picked up this thing at Harbor Freight for about 10 bucks or so. The tokens box gets passed around quite a bit on cube night. This really helps to keep things organized.

I might have to make a trip to harbor freight soon. Thank you for sharing your set up.

Three slow, unpopular cards I've been thinking about for a few weeks:
Tor Wauki the Younger
Upside after upside, after having Taigam, sidisi's hand run a ton of games I think there's more room for 5 drops that just need to untap and have outsized impacts on games.

Sword Coast Serpent
Adventure spells have been doing so well for me, and I'm such a sucker for cards that work in any stage of the game. Mirrorshell Crab is an unfair comparison, but you do get to draw a late-game fatty in exchange for having a worse spell attached.

Sylvok Battle-Chair
Roar of the wurm is something of a fair comparison? Pulling a 6/6 on 4 out of your yard never came up as commonly as anyone hoped with the sorcery, and the chair might be unbeatable in a topdeck war?

Anyone have experience with Centaur Glade?

I recently watched an episode of Shuffle Up and Play where they played Emma Partlow's Peasant Cube. That same cube was featured at CubeCon.

Glade looked pretty strong in Emma's mono green ramp deck and she described it as a card that no one respects until they lose to it, and then they first pick it next time. The card has been around forever but I've never tried it. Looks like only 6 people in the 2023 average cube were running it. Anyone here used to/still play it?

Centaur glade was a decent card during the Obama administration, maybe even scary, but I would have a string of questions for the cube owner about their environment if it was still scary in 2024. Someone in a discord recently mentioned this cube as if they were a known entity, and after seeing their cube I can say she and I are building environments with very little in common.

The card can work, but you'd probably need to have a cube as far away from mine as possible: She has are defenders matter cards in here, no blue 1 drops, multiple eldrazi, 80 gold cards, etc.

I second Leelue. About 10-12 years Centaur Glade was pretty strong, but you have to build a specific environment to make it shine now:
- It needs an environment in which you can spend two whole turns making a single 3/3 and not lose on the spot from the tempo disadvantage. This means downgrading aggro considerably.
- It also needs an environment where making 1 or 2 3/3 vanilla bodies each turn without doing much else must actually make up for the tempo disadvantage so again no aggro.
- Lastly, you need a limited amount of enchantment hate and even that is more difficult now-a-days. In 2013 you had Oblivion Ring as the only catch-all removal card. Now you have like 8-9 different options in that regard that I wouldn't think are out of place in a peasant cube.

What percentage of everyone's cubes are multicolored? (preferably not counting hybrids but anything you would generally play with both colors). Oh, this is including dual lands.

I just added a third spell per color so I'm up to 9%.

~5,5% when not counting lands.
~14% when counting dual lands as well.
~16,5% when counting tricolored lands as well.

I like my fixing.

I'm at 12%: 6 cards per guilds, plus a bounceland for every guild (so 7 per guild if you count duals). Oh and a 540 cube.

In my 512-card Cube, I run 6 spells and 3 lands per guild, putting me at 17.6% (90/512).
There are another 33 fixing lands that are not guild specific, which gives me 63 fixing lands out of 512 cards, for a 12.3% number. I like this number a lot since this is roughly what powered Vintage cubes run. (Fixing lands in the three most popular CubeCobra Vintage Cubes are about 12.7%.)

I like a lot of fixing because it helps make draft decks more consistent without sacrificing on playables, since all the spells should be roughly playable.
It’s also nice for 1v1 drafting, because it makes it just a little easier to have a coherent deck at the end.

Cube size: 405
Multicolor: 60 (14.8%)
Lands (all mana-fixing): 33 (8.1%)
Multicolor + Lands: 93 (22.9%)

I've never had a shortage of playables when it came time to assemble a deck from the draft pulls, so I've expanded to 6 slots per guild to allow for more archetype signposts. The assumption of increasing my guild slots is that drafters will see them sooner and more often but won't suffer from a few more dead cards once they lock in their colors.

I've also never had a shortage of usable mana-fixing, as I don't run inflexible duals. My land selections prioritize flexibility and being useful to the most players possible.
-A specific gate/dual only matches 10% of possible 2-color decks and will often be useless to 90% of drafters.
-A triland matches 30% of possible 2-color decks.
-A thriving land matches 40% of possible 2-color decks.
-Ash Barrens/Evolving/Terramorphic/etc. match 100% of possible 2-color decks (and 3-color+).
This has served my drafters well, minimizing dead land slots in packs, and we've had anything from mono-color to five-color decks (had one friend who regularly built 4-color). I find that the lands become legitimate picks because more players can use them, so they are less likely to circle the table repeatedly.

I'm at 11.11% (20/180, 2 per guild). There are currently only 5c lands in the cube (10).

4 cards per pair in 460 ~= 8.7%.
20 2-color lands ~= 4.3%
10 3-color lands ~= 2.2%
12 5-color lands ~= 2.6%


I feel like this is a good spot for both gold cards and fixing. We don't usually have many (if any) dead gold picks, and having a good amount of fixing means players can actually cast their spells. I'm also a proponent of being able to actually play 2-color aggro, so my duals are pains and pathways. I recently swapped pathways in for checklands, since, along with triomes, they were making 4-5 color nonsense a little too easy, and I have been happy with the results.

For me it's not about having dead gold cards. It's about having gold cards that make up for the fact that they are not useful for the large majority of players and are artificially making the packs they're in smaller. If the value a gold card adds to a deck/cube is approximately the same as a monocolored card, then it should probably just be a monocolored slot.
That's why I didn't go up to a third spell for years and why I was an early adopter of not playing cards like terminate.

But it hardly feels like they make gold commons and uncommons stronger than their monocolored counterparts these days unless they're downshifts. Strong ones are often some set-parasitic nonsense like Disturb-matters or Heroic tribal.

Cube size: 480
Multicolored Spells: 60
Dual, Tri, and Fetch Lands: 30
Rainbow Lands: 8
Multicolored Percentage: 12.5%
Multicolored Percentage (With dual and tri Lands): 20.8%



I know I'm much higher on this than most cubes for two reasons. My drafts love two things: Drafting 3+ color decks and prefer that Gold cards be the last picked cards often. The first is pretty simple to explain, my drafter I draft with love Khans and Alara Drafts and love making multicolored drafts a thing so I support thier endeavors as much as able without eliminating mono or dual colors decks.


The second point is more complicated but it has become something that my drafters have noted that they like how powerful multicolored cards are in peasant but often like to use the gold cards that exist in the last 4 picks to help dictate what color pairs might be open in the draft. While its not a perfect signal my drafters love it and who am I to snub thier fun.

My UW blink deck has too many three drops and I need to spread it out over more mana costs.

List

I think maybe I should cut reflector mage for the 4 or 5 mana pay offs, Cloudblazer or Elite Guardmage. Kor Hookmaster seems weak compared to the blue frost trickster maybe I should move it or is Flickerwhisp finally out classed?

Flickerwisp is still doing work in my cube.

Kor Hookmaster seems like an easy cut for Wall of Omens, Resolute Reinforcements or Raffine's Informant.

In blue you also have Riftwing Cloudskate and Watcher for Tomorrow as notable omissions.

Oji, the exquisite blade has been performing pretty well since I added it recently. Flickerwisp's statline is good and probably will remain good for a while. For Kor hookmaster, besides Wall of omens may I interest you in a Rescuer Chwinga or a Githzerai Monk?

Oh, Unless you're omitting Universes Beyond cards, Sicarian Infiltrator is one of the best cards printed for us in the last couple years.

Seconded Oji, its a payoff and enabler all in one. Honestly I cut Soulherder recently for being just a bit too high on power level and enabling some real durdlefests, so I'd probably make that swap.

Regarding your earlier comment Leelue, I actually have my own solution to mitigate issues with pickable cards. We've all had experiences where you pick up a pack only to see it has 6 cards of a color you're not in. This means you have 2 throwaway picks this round and that feels pretty awful. In order to get around this, I headed over to the as-fan calculator to see:

a) What the average number of cards of each category (white, blue, black, red, green, gold, colorless, land) is in each pack (as-fan).
b) What the average number of cards of each category is in the entire draft (as-draft).

I then do a little math, I will use your cube as an example (2 packs x 20 cards).

1. Take the integer part of each number from part a) above and seed those into each pack. This means each pack is guaranteed to have at least: 3 each WUBRG and 1 each gold, colorless, and land.
2. Multiply the number of seeded cards by the total number of packs and subtract it from the as-draft. For WUBRG, this gives us: 51.78 - (3*2*8) = 3.78. Similarly, we have 5.57 extra gold, 4.13 extra colorless, and 3.42 extra land.
3. Figure out how many extra cards we actually need, since you can't put fractions of a card in a pack. Each pack currently has 18/20 seeded cards, so we need 2*2*8 = 32 extra cards.
4. Jiggle numbers so they work. In this case it's pretty easy: If we take 4 extra each for WUBRG, that leaves us needing 12 more, which is exactly the sum of the integer parts of the remaining categories (5 + 4 + 3).
5. Take these extra cards (5 each WUBRG, 5 gold, 4 colorless, 3 land), shuffle them all together, and randomly distribute 2 to each pack.

I can't recommend this process to everyone since it is a little convoluted, and is quite a bit of extra work, both at the start of the draft and at the end when you have to separate everything back out, but I have to say both my players and I have been pleased with the results. Each pack is guaranteed to have choices for every drafter, but there is still a little randomness. Now this does make signals much easier to read, so obviously it's a no-go if that part of drafting is important to you, but I have found that with players of mixed skill-level, it leads to an all-around higher power-level of decks and higher overall enjoyment of the experience.

Quote from Leelue »

Oji, the exquisite blade has been performing pretty well since I added it recently.

Quote from cVantez »

Seconded Oji, its a payoff and enabler all in one.

I seem to have completely missed Oji whenever it first came out. Though I'll admit I've kind of overlooked most of the "second spell" cards because I didn't know how reliable they would be. The only other one I really remember getting much discussion was Clarion Spirit. So I'm wondering how often have people been able to get these to trigger?

I'm tempted to try Oji, but it really hinges for me on whether I can regularly get the second ability to trigger. Gain 2 Scry 2 is worse than Cloudblazer's Gain 2 Draw 2 or maybe even Elite Guardmage's Gain 3 Draw 1; also it lacks the flying of the other two.

Being both a payoff and enabler, though, does seem to make it a fantastic signpost card.

I already asked Arbor this question, but I'm curious:
If you could be as accurate as you're willing to be, what fraction of the time do you think your Abrades are used in shatter mode?