Size: 360
Type: Pauper- all cards common at one point
Proxies: No
Un: Yes
ME: No
Functional Reprints: No
Size: 360
Nice round number, easier to control archetypes and test specific cards, at least until I have more experience with this sort of thing.
Type: Pauper- all cards common at one point, If it was printed in any paper expansion as a common, if only once, then it is fair game for the cube.
Proxies: No most quality proxies would cost more than the cards they represent. The only things I'm really missing are chain lightning and sinkhole, and I don't even think I would put sinkhole in unless I supported it with more land destruction.
Un: Yes
Only Frazzled Editor, so far, but I'm not excluding them prima facie.
Maters Edition: No
Nothing I know of in it excites me much, and also since the list is on paper, and It might be more likely that a ME card would be costly should I come to need it, so in the interest of being cheep i've decided to limit myself to paper/only commons
Functional Reprints: No
What's one of the restrictions of cube building? Only one of each card in the cube.
What basis do they use for functional reprints? Flavor, mechanical? They are really inconsistent. This is just cheating. If I really though the cube would be better with 2 Llanowar Elves then I could add Fyndhorn Elves, but if the cube would be better with 2 wild mongrel then I'm SOL? That just seems stupid to me. This also lets me have more variety in the cube, which I am a fan of.
e.g. Merfolk looter reprinted as a non-folk in Fifth Dawn, Goldmeadow Harrier reprinted as a non-kithkin, Kodama's Reach reprinted as non-arcane.
Archetypes Supported:
I haven't been at this long enough to know how to do this, but I'd like to support the most archetypes if I could, but if this means curtailing the power level, then I might have to find a good balance. For you who have been at this for a while LMK what's worked for you, how much support does each archetype need, etc.
Right now I'm explicitly not supporting blue aggro, I'd prefer to support blue/x tempo, which I think suits the color's strengths better. Recently they've been printing some acceptable 1-drops for blue, so I might give it a try soon.
Cards banned for power/fun reasons: No
Power is really not much of an issue for pauper, but in theory I'd want all the good cards to get played, If one strategy got too dominent, I'd probably allocate slots that support that strategy to slots that support other strategies rather than ban the flashy cards.
Land destruction is only un-fun when you keep a land light hand against someone who has it, or your decks curve starts at 3. Counterspells are un-fun when you play your best cards into them one a turn. I summary, being a bad player makes these cards un-fun, try not to be a bad player.
logistically I may want to stray away from gotcha! cards, because explaining a complicated board state to your opponent without triggering a Number Crunch seems like it would slow the draft down a lot.
Balance: Each color has the same number, each multicolor pair has the same amount. The creature to spell balance is not strictly kept, as colors like blue and green want more spells and more creatures, respectively. Also the average cmc is not consistent in each color because some colors are better when top heavy and other better quick.
Curve: each card's cost is where I would put it on my curve when deck building, so morphs i want to play face down cost 3, spells I want to buyback have their buyback cost included, x spells are in there own league, and I consider sprout swarm to be an x spell because it can cost between 0 and 5 mana, and ideally I'd cast it as many times a turn as I can.
Color: Some cards have multiple possible color classifications, I consider a mono colored card with off-color kicker, or activated ability multicolored if I would only normally put it in the multicolored deck. Cards that can be cast without colored mana: Phybrid, Gathan Raiders colorless if I would want to play them in a deck that couldn't cast it for colored mana, and colored if I only want them in that color's deck. Hybrid are in their guild sections, even if I would play them in decks with only one of their colors, Unless it proves to be a problem then I won't worry too much about balancing hybrid amongst multicolor. All my shard cards are playable in two-color decks, but I may cut them entirely, cause some are just better than others.
the cube's spreadsheet is uploaded, but here's all the info anyway.
here are some pictures for those of you who are visual learners, but be warned the quality isn't very good, and cube changes will not be reflected in the pics each time the list changes
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It was a cold april morning and dew was frozen to the ground like tiny beads of glass, I was interneting like I am sometimes inclined to do, when I googled mtg cube. The resulting search yielded an unexpected event that would change the course of the rest of my day. Near the top of the page was a sexy blue hyperlink, illuminated by the warm glow of my monitor: so-and-so's Pauper Cube List.
A quick scan of the list surprised me. I owned upwards of 90% of the cards, and they were all in a dual VCR/DVD player box under my bed. Posthaste I procured the box and began assembling the necessary cards. Wild Mongrel, obv. Lightning Bolt, duh. Pestilence, wait that's a common? Aeolipile, wtf is that?
Never having built a cube before I set out to copy the list verbatim, this dogma would suffice for now, but I knew that I'd want to make improvements, or as people less certain of themselves like to say, changes. Missing a few cards, mostly from before I started playing, and after I stopped buying product, I had to make substitutions, but I was a few dollars away from procuring all the cards I needed, and a few more dollars away from the critical mass of sleevage I needed.
The list, wanting for much improvement, needed to change. It was then that my old pal google pointed me in the right direction. This time I was directed to the pauper cube evaluation here on MTGSalvation. I read the entirety of the thread, probably threefold, and came up with a base list for the cube, which is more or less its current state. It was much ameliorated, but there would need to be adjustment to accommodate myself and my play group.
nothing yet
Red has too many four drops and its curve is too high, I'm gonna fix this.
Also I think there are too many fireball variants, I'd like to make one of them a chain lighting
M12 and Innistrad have quality green removal, so I'd like to fix the creature to spell ratio in green.
Innistrad has some very nice blue creatures, maybe I could shore up that deficit too
Right now I have 4 of each multicolored card, not including fixing, I'd like to someday go to 5 of each multicolored including signets and/or karoos, which will push karoos out of aggro colors, etc. this will add flexibility and let me put more cards in each colored section.
comments and criticism welcome.
Innistrad and m12 not added as of yet.
1) random boosters (or half-boosters) given to everyone after X time
A booster from the cube seems like a lot all at once, but we could randomly give a "booster tutor" (one of my favorite cube cards) to the winner of a game, open a (half)pack and pick one card from it to add to your pool.
2) have players fight over recieving new cards sometimes, rather than always just for ante. I.E. duel to claim a mox from the pool.
I like the concept of setting aside "bomby" cards before the pools are distributed and then using them as prizes: decks will get better as bombs are phased in, more random, less likely for someone to have most of the good cards at the start, etc.
so the new dice ante could be:
1 then the current ante goes back into the cube and ante again.
2 do nothing
3 each player ante an additional card from deck and or sideboard
4 put a random card from the cube into the current ante.
5 winner booster tutors
6 Get one of the "prizes," or get any card of choice from the cube not currently owned by anyone else.
Another concept for new card acquisition is a point system, Everyone starts with 100 points winning gives you +15 points, loosing gets you -10 points. Points can be traded among players in exchange for cards, and the bombiest cards can be bought from the bank for lottsa points. You loose if you run out of points, and when all the cards are owned, the league is over and the one with the most points wins. I'd have to go through the whole cube and assign points to every card, which would be tedious, as is the whole number system, and I think I like the random aspect of ante better than buying cards with points, but its more food for thought.
3) some kind of dungeoning/questing mechanic against a special "DM" player. Again the DM puts up some particularly valuble card or cards rather than a normal ante. Maybe do an archenemy vs. several players. Like in PnP the "DM" should generally lose but still put up an entertaining game against the competition. Maybe focus on building fun and flavorful fortress-style decks without any card restrictions, instead of the best thing possible from a limited set like the players are.
While this seems like a fun activity to do every now and again, it doesn't seem very league friendly, and requires everyone to be together at once and if we can all do that often enough we'd probably just draft instead. lets say the group wins the archenemy game, how do we divide the loot (e.g. who gets the sol ring and who is stuck with something far less spectacular)? The archenemy deck could ante separately with everyone, but this doesn't guarantee that everyone gets boss quality loot, which is the point of bosses.
The Archenemy could be someone who isn't in the league, lets say someone visiting me at school for the weekend. He wasn't around at the start of the league, so he doesn't have a pool. We could give him all the cards left in the cube and have him make a deck from that, including all the bombs, then he could be the archenemy and he could be that boss. I'd like to stay away from the boss idea, as it seems more like a linear video game than what I was thinking. Seems like writing a scenario and hoping the game goes as planned.
I really just wanted to make a cube league that wasn't draft intensive, but still allowed for players' decks to change over time, I've seen this work in Shandalar, so I used that as the basis, but it doesn't have to be a slave to the Shandalar theme.
I wanted to make an interesting cube league that didn't just involve normal drafting, as my play-group seems unable to get together for drafts, but can play a few games every now and again. My idea was to make it like Shandalar, an old PC game where you started off with a precon-like deck and played for ante to improve your pool. So we'd start with a cube and either draft or sealed to make the starting pools, then anyone could play anyone else, with ante, at each players' convenience, until a predetermined time (winner is the one with most cards at this time/ or we have a playoff-like single elimination tourney with our pools to determine the winner), or until it got boring, or someone just kept winning and taking all the cards (this person would be the winner). That's my idea in its simplest form, i'd like some suggestions as to what I could do to improve it.
while simplicity is important further rules could make it more interesting; so i'll put some ideas/ concerns down to mull over. I think this could be a really fun experience, anyone who's ever played Shandalar knows how addicting it can be. My cube is a 360 card pauper cube, not all suggestions have to be geared towards my cube (but bear this in mind if I give an example, though I'll try to use regular cube examples too, though I have less experience), i'd like for all cubers to try this out, maybe someday specialty cubes will be made with this league format in mind (I can dream). My suggestions will be wordy and some may overlap/contradict each other, but I'd like to get them all out to help fine tune this idea (probably tl;dr). I want the league to be hard fought, with lots of back-and-forth card exchanging, decks evolving and changing based on new cards; what I don't want is the best deck to just win the first few rounds and leave all the bad decks even worse than before, till there's no contest anymore.
The biggest concern: If the cube is split into pools that need to be kept by each individual, you cant actually draft the cube proper without breaking up everyones pools. Relying on memory to reconstruct each person's pool would be difficult with cards trading hands often. Keeping records of the pools would be very tedious, perhaps there is a program that could keep track of the pools. This is almost a non-issue for me, cause my play group doesn't draft often, but might be a concern for cubes that actually get drafted.
Also everyone playing at their convenience means everyone keeps their own pools, so they can play pick up games without needing to see me to get their decks. I have no problems loaning my pauper cube to my close friends, but if I were using an expensive cube with people I only see at my local card shop I'd be unwilling to let them hang-on to the cards. You could organize a league-night where you all show up at some place at a scheduled time and the cube owner would bring the cube and be able to have all the cards back to him when the night is over.
Modified Ante: if the card you ante is a basic land, put it back into the deck and ante again, everyone has as many basics as they want so losing/wining a basic does nothing.
You could make the ante's more random: after you ante someone rolls a D6 and then cool stuff could happen with the ante
1 then the current ante goes back into the cube and ante again.
2 do nothing
3 do nothing
4 do nothing
5 each player ante an additional card from deck and or sideboard
6 put a random card from the cube into the current ante.
the do nothings could be replaced with other ideas, but I could only think of 3 so far, i'll take suggestions if you guys can think of anything.
Sealed or draft? I'd prefer sealed for this because awkward sealed pools can give you multiple bad decks, and the cards you win/lose in ante will determine what good deck you build out of your pool, whereas draft allows someone to force their favorite archetype. Also some draft strategies would be awkward for this league: for cubes that support high risk/high reward archetypes like reanimator, there is a disincentive to draft those archetypes. In a regular draft if you try and draft it, but it doesn't quite come together, then you have a bad couple of rounds, and that's it, but with this if you try and fail at a tough archetype, then your stuck with that failed deck for the entirety of the league, which would suck. Also If you draft a really streamlined deck, like mono-red beatdown, the cards you win from ante probably won't change your deck, unless they were cards you should have drafted anyway. Drafts were certain archetypes, normally supported by the cube, are much less attractive don't seem fun.
Should there be re-drafting within the league: if the player with the best pool just keeps winning how do we shake things up and give the others a chance? Larger cubes could just have a second draft with the cards not dealt out from the initial pool-making, or each player could choose a number of cards in their pool (e.g. 15) and shuffle the rest into the cube and then do a mini draft to try and build a new deck, just to keep things interesting, change archetypes, give good drafters with bad pools a chance to redeem themselves. I think it would be a fun little mini-game to keep the right cards and risk the others being drafted. This would reset the number of cards that everybody has, which might be bad as it punishes the winners and helps the losers, but I
Since the games would usually be games, not matches, there could be pre-sidebording allowed. It's be like the edh rules where you get a minute or two to sideboard before the game starts. Or you could just do matches, where the best 2/3 gets all the ante cards from the match, but one shot games fits the Shandalar better
Hoarding: If I have a UB control deck and I know someone else has a RG aggro deck, then very few, if any cards from our main decks would ever help the other's deck, so there would be no reason for us to play each other, since we could hurt our decks by loosing, but we can't gain anything. If we ante from sideboard, in addition to, or with the dice method, then we could have more interesting matches between otherwise incompatible decks that don't want to play each other. Also if I have some heavy black bomb, like Pestilence, but my pool does not allow for a heavy black deck, unless I win enough ante to make that deck, an otherwise powerful card will rot in my sideboard, since no one could win it from my ante and I can't use it. If we anted from sideboard this could help here.
This could also help in this very niche example: Say I have a good deck and happen to have sol ring, soon there after i win enough cards that my deck is still the best, even without sol ring. If I put sol ring in my sideboard then no one could take it via ante. The only way I foresee myself loosing my foothold is anteing sol ring and loosing to mana screw, suddenly making an opponent's deck a contender/ giving his deck an unbeatable draw, whereas loosing any other card would not cause such a dramatic shift in power, and your deck would still be favored absent of luck and variance. The question is, do I want to enable hoarding as a strategic move (it would be very tough to know when this is actually beneficial and not suicidal), or prevent this as a non-interactive abuse of power. If the league gets to this point, then it may be time to declare a winner and start over anyway, but it is a concern to look out for.
Anyone have any ideas as how to make this better? Does this sound cool, or stupid? I'm gonna talk it over with my playgroup when I get back to school, and see how/if they want to do this. I hope others will test this out with their groups and let me know how it goes.
I enjoy candle-lit dinners and long walks on the beach...
I got started around when judgement came out, My friend Minwen taught me how to play, and my brother learned how to play the exact same day by his friend Pat. My bro's quit, but i've been playing constantly since then, but stopped buying cards around lorwyn block.
I started at TJ Collectables, playing casual 1.5 (now called Legacy) which was mostly a everybody plays with cards they like, with a few actual decks appearing, Goblins mostly. Haven't been there in 2 years
I qualified for JSS nationals twice, and made day 2 on both occasions, but otherwise not much in terms of competition.
Been playing EDH since lorwyn came out.
I enjoy playing video games and dabble in art and music
Golem-skin Gauntlets
Vulshok Gauntlets - more gauntlets to go with those of power
Grappling Hook
Blazing Torch - Deku Sticks
Pariah's shield - looks like MM mirror shield
Scrabbling Claws - floormaster
Emerald Medallion
Ruby Medallion
Sapphire Medallion
Hurricane - Faeore's wind?
Wild Mongrel - wolflike thing?
Perigrine Masks - looks like Bremen's mask
Explorer's scope - WW telescope thingy
Hammer of ruin - more hammers
Bull whip - SS's whip thing
Ant Queen (Ghoma)
Phantom Centaur - (phantom Gannon) he does ride a horse
any bugs would work for oot bugs/TP golden bugs
Ezuri's brigade - King Bulbin
Krosan tusker - just bulbin's pig
Bottle of Suleiman
Spitting gourma - deku scrubs
Flock of rabid sheep - cucco attack??
Any chicken from unglued
Orochi eggwalker - you incubate a couple of eggs in oot
Sasaya, oroch ascendent - zelda, and after 7 lands (years) she flips to become sheik???
Protean hulk is banned, but its like that frog in TP water temple
Reassebling skeleton - not green but - they are a classic zelda enemy
Link is a "Twilight shepherd"
vastwood gorger
any of the vastwood cards work, really
Type: Pauper- all cards common at one point
Proxies: No
Un: Yes
ME: No
Functional Reprints: No
Size: 360
Nice round number, easier to control archetypes and test specific cards, at least until I have more experience with this sort of thing.
Type: Pauper- all cards common at one point, If it was printed in any paper expansion as a common, if only once, then it is fair game for the cube.
Proxies: No most quality proxies would cost more than the cards they represent. The only things I'm really missing are chain lightning and sinkhole, and I don't even think I would put sinkhole in unless I supported it with more land destruction.
Un: Yes
Only Frazzled Editor, so far, but I'm not excluding them prima facie.
Maters Edition: No
Nothing I know of in it excites me much, and also since the list is on paper, and It might be more likely that a ME card would be costly should I come to need it, so in the interest of being cheep i've decided to limit myself to paper/only commons
Functional Reprints: No
What's one of the restrictions of cube building? Only one of each card in the cube.
What basis do they use for functional reprints? Flavor, mechanical? They are really inconsistent. This is just cheating. If I really though the cube would be better with 2 Llanowar Elves then I could add Fyndhorn Elves, but if the cube would be better with 2 wild mongrel then I'm SOL? That just seems stupid to me. This also lets me have more variety in the cube, which I am a fan of.
e.g. Merfolk looter reprinted as a non-folk in Fifth Dawn, Goldmeadow Harrier reprinted as a non-kithkin, Kodama's Reach reprinted as non-arcane.
Archetypes Supported:
I haven't been at this long enough to know how to do this, but I'd like to support the most archetypes if I could, but if this means curtailing the power level, then I might have to find a good balance. For you who have been at this for a while LMK what's worked for you, how much support does each archetype need, etc.
Right now I'm explicitly not supporting blue aggro, I'd prefer to support blue/x tempo, which I think suits the color's strengths better. Recently they've been printing some acceptable 1-drops for blue, so I might give it a try soon.
Cards banned for power/fun reasons: No
Power is really not much of an issue for pauper, but in theory I'd want all the good cards to get played, If one strategy got too dominent, I'd probably allocate slots that support that strategy to slots that support other strategies rather than ban the flashy cards.
Land destruction is only un-fun when you keep a land light hand against someone who has it, or your decks curve starts at 3. Counterspells are un-fun when you play your best cards into them one a turn. I summary, being a bad player makes these cards un-fun, try not to be a bad player.
logistically I may want to stray away from gotcha! cards, because explaining a complicated board state to your opponent without triggering a Number Crunch seems like it would slow the draft down a lot.
Balance: Each color has the same number, each multicolor pair has the same amount. The creature to spell balance is not strictly kept, as colors like blue and green want more spells and more creatures, respectively. Also the average cmc is not consistent in each color because some colors are better when top heavy and other better quick.
Curve: each card's cost is where I would put it on my curve when deck building, so morphs i want to play face down cost 3, spells I want to buyback have their buyback cost included, x spells are in there own league, and I consider sprout swarm to be an x spell because it can cost between 0 and 5 mana, and ideally I'd cast it as many times a turn as I can.
Color: Some cards have multiple possible color classifications, I consider a mono colored card with off-color kicker, or activated ability multicolored if I would only normally put it in the multicolored deck. Cards that can be cast without colored mana: Phybrid, Gathan Raiders colorless if I would want to play them in a deck that couldn't cast it for colored mana, and colored if I only want them in that color's deck. Hybrid are in their guild sections, even if I would play them in decks with only one of their colors, Unless it proves to be a problem then I won't worry too much about balancing hybrid amongst multicolor. All my shard cards are playable in two-color decks, but I may cut them entirely, cause some are just better than others.
cc 1
cc 2
cc 3
cc 4
cc 5
cc 6
Avg cost 2.84
cc 1
cc 2
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cc 4
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cc 3
cc 4
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cc 6
Avg cost 3.30
cc 0-1
cc 2
cc 3
cc 4
cc 6
cc x
cc 1
cc 2
cc 3
cc 4
cc 5
cc 6
Avg cost 2.86
cc 1
cc 2
cc 3
cc 4
cc 5
cc x
cc 1
cc 2
cc 3
cc 4
cc 5
cc 6
cc 7
Avg cost 3.03
cc 1
cc 2
cc 3
cc 4
cc 5
cc 6
cc x
cc 1
cc 2
cc 3
cc 4
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cc 6
cc 7
cc x
Avg cost 3.03
cc 1
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cc 3
here are some pictures for those of you who are visual learners, but be warned the quality isn't very good, and cube changes will not be reflected in the pics each time the list changes
It was a cold april morning and dew was frozen to the ground like tiny beads of glass, I was interneting like I am sometimes inclined to do, when I googled mtg cube. The resulting search yielded an unexpected event that would change the course of the rest of my day. Near the top of the page was a sexy blue hyperlink, illuminated by the warm glow of my monitor: so-and-so's Pauper Cube List.
A quick scan of the list surprised me. I owned upwards of 90% of the cards, and they were all in a dual VCR/DVD player box under my bed. Posthaste I procured the box and began assembling the necessary cards. Wild Mongrel, obv. Lightning Bolt, duh. Pestilence, wait that's a common? Aeolipile, wtf is that?
Never having built a cube before I set out to copy the list verbatim, this dogma would suffice for now, but I knew that I'd want to make improvements, or as people less certain of themselves like to say, changes. Missing a few cards, mostly from before I started playing, and after I stopped buying product, I had to make substitutions, but I was a few dollars away from procuring all the cards I needed, and a few more dollars away from the critical mass of sleevage I needed.
The list, wanting for much improvement, needed to change. It was then that my old pal google pointed me in the right direction. This time I was directed to the pauper cube evaluation here on MTGSalvation. I read the entirety of the thread, probably threefold, and came up with a base list for the cube, which is more or less its current state. It was much ameliorated, but there would need to be adjustment to accommodate myself and my play group.
nothing yet
Red has too many four drops and its curve is too high, I'm gonna fix this.
Also I think there are too many fireball variants, I'd like to make one of them a chain lighting
M12 and Innistrad have quality green removal, so I'd like to fix the creature to spell ratio in green.
Innistrad has some very nice blue creatures, maybe I could shore up that deficit too
Right now I have 4 of each multicolored card, not including fixing, I'd like to someday go to 5 of each multicolored including signets and/or karoos, which will push karoos out of aggro colors, etc. this will add flexibility and let me put more cards in each colored section.
Innistrad and m12 not added as of yet.
The counter could be skipped if R etc. is used, but that is copyrighted and intricate. (not that yawg can't handle it)
If I can get more Kiras i'll do Misa and Mikami et al
A booster from the cube seems like a lot all at once, but we could randomly give a "booster tutor" (one of my favorite cube cards) to the winner of a game, open a (half)pack and pick one card from it to add to your pool.
I like the concept of setting aside "bomby" cards before the pools are distributed and then using them as prizes: decks will get better as bombs are phased in, more random, less likely for someone to have most of the good cards at the start, etc.
so the new dice ante could be:
1 then the current ante goes back into the cube and ante again.
2 do nothing
3 each player ante an additional card from deck and or sideboard
4 put a random card from the cube into the current ante.
5 winner booster tutors
6 Get one of the "prizes," or get any card of choice from the cube not currently owned by anyone else.
Another concept for new card acquisition is a point system, Everyone starts with 100 points winning gives you +15 points, loosing gets you -10 points. Points can be traded among players in exchange for cards, and the bombiest cards can be bought from the bank for lottsa points. You loose if you run out of points, and when all the cards are owned, the league is over and the one with the most points wins. I'd have to go through the whole cube and assign points to every card, which would be tedious, as is the whole number system, and I think I like the random aspect of ante better than buying cards with points, but its more food for thought.
While this seems like a fun activity to do every now and again, it doesn't seem very league friendly, and requires everyone to be together at once and if we can all do that often enough we'd probably just draft instead. lets say the group wins the archenemy game, how do we divide the loot (e.g. who gets the sol ring and who is stuck with something far less spectacular)? The archenemy deck could ante separately with everyone, but this doesn't guarantee that everyone gets boss quality loot, which is the point of bosses.
The Archenemy could be someone who isn't in the league, lets say someone visiting me at school for the weekend. He wasn't around at the start of the league, so he doesn't have a pool. We could give him all the cards left in the cube and have him make a deck from that, including all the bombs, then he could be the archenemy and he could be that boss. I'd like to stay away from the boss idea, as it seems more like a linear video game than what I was thinking. Seems like writing a scenario and hoping the game goes as planned.
I really just wanted to make a cube league that wasn't draft intensive, but still allowed for players' decks to change over time, I've seen this work in Shandalar, so I used that as the basis, but it doesn't have to be a slave to the Shandalar theme.
while simplicity is important further rules could make it more interesting; so i'll put some ideas/ concerns down to mull over. I think this could be a really fun experience, anyone who's ever played Shandalar knows how addicting it can be. My cube is a 360 card pauper cube, not all suggestions have to be geared towards my cube (but bear this in mind if I give an example, though I'll try to use regular cube examples too, though I have less experience), i'd like for all cubers to try this out, maybe someday specialty cubes will be made with this league format in mind (I can dream). My suggestions will be wordy and some may overlap/contradict each other, but I'd like to get them all out to help fine tune this idea (probably tl;dr). I want the league to be hard fought, with lots of back-and-forth card exchanging, decks evolving and changing based on new cards; what I don't want is the best deck to just win the first few rounds and leave all the bad decks even worse than before, till there's no contest anymore.
The biggest concern: If the cube is split into pools that need to be kept by each individual, you cant actually draft the cube proper without breaking up everyones pools. Relying on memory to reconstruct each person's pool would be difficult with cards trading hands often. Keeping records of the pools would be very tedious, perhaps there is a program that could keep track of the pools. This is almost a non-issue for me, cause my play group doesn't draft often, but might be a concern for cubes that actually get drafted.
Also everyone playing at their convenience means everyone keeps their own pools, so they can play pick up games without needing to see me to get their decks. I have no problems loaning my pauper cube to my close friends, but if I were using an expensive cube with people I only see at my local card shop I'd be unwilling to let them hang-on to the cards. You could organize a league-night where you all show up at some place at a scheduled time and the cube owner would bring the cube and be able to have all the cards back to him when the night is over.
Modified Ante: if the card you ante is a basic land, put it back into the deck and ante again, everyone has as many basics as they want so losing/wining a basic does nothing.
You could make the ante's more random: after you ante someone rolls a D6 and then cool stuff could happen with the ante
1 then the current ante goes back into the cube and ante again.
2 do nothing
3 do nothing
4 do nothing
5 each player ante an additional card from deck and or sideboard
6 put a random card from the cube into the current ante.
the do nothings could be replaced with other ideas, but I could only think of 3 so far, i'll take suggestions if you guys can think of anything.
Sealed or draft? I'd prefer sealed for this because awkward sealed pools can give you multiple bad decks, and the cards you win/lose in ante will determine what good deck you build out of your pool, whereas draft allows someone to force their favorite archetype. Also some draft strategies would be awkward for this league: for cubes that support high risk/high reward archetypes like reanimator, there is a disincentive to draft those archetypes. In a regular draft if you try and draft it, but it doesn't quite come together, then you have a bad couple of rounds, and that's it, but with this if you try and fail at a tough archetype, then your stuck with that failed deck for the entirety of the league, which would suck. Also If you draft a really streamlined deck, like mono-red beatdown, the cards you win from ante probably won't change your deck, unless they were cards you should have drafted anyway. Drafts were certain archetypes, normally supported by the cube, are much less attractive don't seem fun.
Should there be re-drafting within the league: if the player with the best pool just keeps winning how do we shake things up and give the others a chance? Larger cubes could just have a second draft with the cards not dealt out from the initial pool-making, or each player could choose a number of cards in their pool (e.g. 15) and shuffle the rest into the cube and then do a mini draft to try and build a new deck, just to keep things interesting, change archetypes, give good drafters with bad pools a chance to redeem themselves. I think it would be a fun little mini-game to keep the right cards and risk the others being drafted. This would reset the number of cards that everybody has, which might be bad as it punishes the winners and helps the losers, but I
Since the games would usually be games, not matches, there could be pre-sidebording allowed. It's be like the edh rules where you get a minute or two to sideboard before the game starts. Or you could just do matches, where the best 2/3 gets all the ante cards from the match, but one shot games fits the Shandalar better
Hoarding: If I have a UB control deck and I know someone else has a RG aggro deck, then very few, if any cards from our main decks would ever help the other's deck, so there would be no reason for us to play each other, since we could hurt our decks by loosing, but we can't gain anything. If we ante from sideboard, in addition to, or with the dice method, then we could have more interesting matches between otherwise incompatible decks that don't want to play each other. Also if I have some heavy black bomb, like Pestilence, but my pool does not allow for a heavy black deck, unless I win enough ante to make that deck, an otherwise powerful card will rot in my sideboard, since no one could win it from my ante and I can't use it. If we anted from sideboard this could help here.
This could also help in this very niche example: Say I have a good deck and happen to have sol ring, soon there after i win enough cards that my deck is still the best, even without sol ring. If I put sol ring in my sideboard then no one could take it via ante. The only way I foresee myself loosing my foothold is anteing sol ring and loosing to mana screw, suddenly making an opponent's deck a contender/ giving his deck an unbeatable draw, whereas loosing any other card would not cause such a dramatic shift in power, and your deck would still be favored absent of luck and variance. The question is, do I want to enable hoarding as a strategic move (it would be very tough to know when this is actually beneficial and not suicidal), or prevent this as a non-interactive abuse of power. If the league gets to this point, then it may be time to declare a winner and start over anyway, but it is a concern to look out for.
Anyone have any ideas as how to make this better? Does this sound cool, or stupid? I'm gonna talk it over with my playgroup when I get back to school, and see how/if they want to do this. I hope others will test this out with their groups and let me know how it goes.
edit: Better Picture
Edit: Better Picture
I enjoy candle-lit dinners and long walks on the beach...
I got started around when judgement came out, My friend Minwen taught me how to play, and my brother learned how to play the exact same day by his friend Pat. My bro's quit, but i've been playing constantly since then, but stopped buying cards around lorwyn block.
I started at TJ Collectables, playing casual 1.5 (now called Legacy) which was mostly a everybody plays with cards they like, with a few actual decks appearing, Goblins mostly. Haven't been there in 2 years
I qualified for JSS nationals twice, and made day 2 on both occasions, but otherwise not much in terms of competition.
Been playing EDH since lorwyn came out.
I enjoy playing video games and dabble in art and music
Vulshok Gauntlets - more gauntlets to go with those of power
Grappling Hook
Blazing Torch - Deku Sticks
Pariah's shield - looks like MM mirror shield
Scrabbling Claws - floormaster
Emerald Medallion
Ruby Medallion
Sapphire Medallion
Hurricane - Faeore's wind?
Wild Mongrel - wolflike thing?
Perigrine Masks - looks like Bremen's mask
Explorer's scope - WW telescope thingy
Hammer of ruin - more hammers
Bull whip - SS's whip thing
Ant Queen (Ghoma)
Phantom Centaur - (phantom Gannon) he does ride a horse
any bugs would work for oot bugs/TP golden bugs
Ezuri's brigade - King Bulbin
Krosan tusker - just bulbin's pig
Bottle of Suleiman
Spitting gourma - deku scrubs
Flock of rabid sheep - cucco attack??
Any chicken from unglued
Orochi eggwalker - you incubate a couple of eggs in oot
Sasaya, oroch ascendent - zelda, and after 7 lands (years) she flips to become sheik???
Protean hulk is banned, but its like that frog in TP water temple
Reassebling skeleton - not green but - they are a classic zelda enemy
Link is a "Twilight shepherd"