MTG Salvation

Just saying thanks to all y'all for doing so much with peasant, just getting into it myself and everything on this forum has been invaluable.

- I haven't tried more guild slots. We went with 1 per guild and stuck with it. I think you can safely go up to 20. We tend to have enough playables every time so a couple extra cards that are undesirable for a drafter shouldn't make the format that much worse. I've thought about trying it myself more than once and might go that route as well. At the moment I have enough trouble cutting mono colored cards as is, so it's going to be rough if I do.

- Note that we count the hybrids as 'colorless' in this cube. In a slightly lower powered cube I'd love to run more of them because they are so flexible.

- The mana feels alright. I'd rather have some of the untapped multilands like City or Gemstone Mine instead of Evolving Wilds, but since the cube only runs cards that have an uncommon printing in the new frame they're out. Thriving/Vivid cycles instead of duplicates should work like a charm. The biggest reason we went with multiple Wilds is that they also work Brainstorm and Mayhem Devil. Also, they give me a couple of flexible slots to work with should I need to make room for something, whereas running a whole cycle feels more set in stone.

- I took out Skullclamp for power level reasons. Even though every deck should have some answers to it, the card is just too overpowering. It basically invalidated all other cards in a pack as one of the few autopicks in the cube. Sprout Swarm, Mother of Runes and Palace Jailer are on my watch list. They have a tendency to take over the game when not answered quickly. Isochron Scepter is very powerful as well, but needs a certain deck style and needs to be built around. Other cards I've cut are Sensei's Divining Top and Aether Vial, both for being powerful but inconsistent. I think they're fine to run, but have gotten some OMG BROKEN reactions from players as well. Top went very well with the fetchland package though.
If you're looking at a non-modern frame cube, the obvious ban is Sol Ring. I'd advise you to be careful with lands like Maze of Ith and Library of Alexandria (most cubes ban this one) as they are super powerful, are hard to interact with and can lead to bad experience. On the other hand, a small cube is easier to balance because you see more cards out of the cube. Running Wasteland, Strip Mine, Pillage, Acidic Slime, and maybe 1 or 2 more goes a long way towards giving each deck at least 1 or 2 outs to such a powerful land.
In the end, it's up to you where you want the powerlevel to end up. We went with quite a high power level for this one, so more cards are acceptable. I wouldn't fault anyone to cut down a bit and cut the abovementioned cards, along with the Curses, Warhammer, Bombardment, Grafted Wargear and such.

- I prefer 'Minneapolis draft' for 2 players, something Ryan Overturf seems to have thought up (he's also the Twobert guy, he basically made 180 cubes popular over the last year). It's 8 packs of 7 and you pick 1, pick 2, pick 2, burn 2. It's fast and you don't table as much with 2 players.
We don't draft with 4 as much, but when we do we just draft 3x15. We've also done 3x15 with 2 players and burn a random card in between picks to emulate a 3rd and 4th player.

Edit: 180 lends itself very well to themed cubes. I made a very fun artifact matters cube last year that has plenty of cool cards that are too narrow to make it into regular peasant cubes but work well as a collection.

Quote from CrownsOnTheGround »

Any of y'all done anything with an 180 card peasant cube? Considering rebuilding at that #, just so rarely have more than 4 players.

I tried to build a small cube a long time ago, but the problem is that you can't get the density of cards needed for archetypes. For example aggro needs good one drops to work, but you if you add 5-6 aggro one drops in white you run out of cube space quickly @180. I believe it's not possible to build a proper cube at that size, unless you create one that is just full of generic midrange/goodstuff cards, which is rather boring from my pov.

I also only play with four people usually and I strongly recommend using a different draft method instead of a smaller cube. We for example have 'burn draft' system. A pack has 15 cards like usual. First you pick one and burn one (to avoid that a lucky players gets two bombs immediately), then pick two, burn two until only five cards are left and then pick two, burn three. Six packs per player for a total of 360 cards and each player ends up with 42 cards, which are of higher quality than the 45 you get from a regular draft. This works really well with my 405 cube.

If you support blink in any capacity Clocknapper can be the highest ceiling blue finisher. We ran a silver border package for a while and it was utterly absurd, was a top 10 blue card in my opinion. Even without blink support it's still good though no where near as absurd. Stealing your opponents untap, upkeep, and draw is very good.

Without Kiki combo I don't like Guardian at all.

Quote from CrownsOnTheGround »

I'd rank Maelstrom the lowest of those, tough to decide between the other two.

Finalizing Azorius for a mid-power budget cube (combo pretty much axed):
Reflector Mage vs Geist of Saint Traft
Soulherder vs Brago, King Eternal
Dream Trawler vs Ethereal Valkyrie

Geist >= Reflector Mage (just because Teferi, Time Raveler outclasses Mage while Geist is more unique)
Soulherder > Brago
Trawler > Valkyrie

because why not?
I refer to it for years now, so i made a dreamcard of it.


and while im at it

One of my frequent drafters thought that Renegade Reaper, the 2/3 flier for 2B that self-mills 4 on ETB was worth thinking about.
I think that would be slightly better than Gorging Vulture, which is currently a fringe CUbe card.

A lot of people believe that snow mana will be a mechanic in the main Kaldheim set, which should be a great mechanic for us, since those cards are balanced for limited based on having limited snow lands available, whereas we can play all snow basics.

Quote from CrownsOnTheGround »

How quickly do folks usually pick up new stuff around here? Kangee, Sky Warden seems super solid to me, but currently well behind the other flying lords.

It looks like the Commander Legends cards with the highest adoption rate are in 13-15 cubes right now. I'm also curious if this is due to slow adoption or actual card choice.

As for Kangee, Sky Warden, it's in a very competitive guild and in a very competitive slot. How many flying-matters lords or signpost cards do we have now? I'm running Empyrean Eagle at three mana but not Thunderclap Wyvern, Watcher of the Spheres, Kangee's Lieutenant, Windstorm Drake, Siani, Eye of the Storm, Sprite Noble, Jubilant Skybonder, or the parasitic Favorable Winds. I think five mana hurts Kangee quite a bit here. I'd run Wyvern over Kangee, and I dropped that for Eagle. I'd be curious if we polled peasant cube players to directly compare all of these cards and see how they were ranked with no concern for actual slots or support in a cube.

Quote from CrownsOnTheGround »

@Funky

Mana Drain/Hymn to Tourach look kinda like bans to me.

If I could afford a Mana Drain, it would be in a Commander deck. I haven't banned it from my cube and would run it if I owned it. Hymn to Tourach I've never actually considered for my cube, though I used to run it in mono-black 60-card decks. Is it really that good in peasant? With double black pips, it often won't be cast until turn 3-4, at which point the randomness isn't as devastating. I also don't have a discard theme, but I could consider it as a stand-alone.

Acolyte > Relief Captain > Kongming > Rhox Veteran > Crusader > Commander

In my 360 I'm running Acolyte and Kongming currently, with Kor Sanctifiers and Palace Jailer rounding out the four drops. I cut Captain for Acolyte because I wanted to keep Kongming in for and extended test, but I think Captain is the better card.

At least in my cube 9 mana is one hell of a lot to cast even for a green ramp deck. I rarely play Artisan in such a deck and I never play it in a deck that is not ramp or reanimator. It's mostly a reanimator target in my cube. Sure, you lose a bit of functionality, but if you resurrect it on turn 3 or 4 and your opponent doesn't remove it before you can attack it's game over anyway, so who cares?

I very much dislike that it can get removed by unconditional removal even at sorcery speed without having any impact at all and I usually avoid high cmc cards like that, but for one big, colorless Eldrazi like that there has to be room in my cube.

Personally I wouldn't play it if I wouldn't support reanimator unless I had some kind of super ramp archetype with cards like Basalt Monolith, Thran Dynamo and the like. I have a lot of 'normal' ramp cards in green and the highest cmc targets I consider playable cost 7 mana. When you think about it that is already a lot. If you play 2 ramp cards and 5 lands you won't be able to cast any of these before turn 6 on average. And that's with a near perfect hand in a deck that sacrifices reliability for mana, so most of the time it's probably more like turn 7-8.