Played against both Vial Smasher and Crawler in last weekend's draft, both were amazing.
Vial Smasher has huge damage potential and only needs to survive a turn or two before you're basically dead. The turn after my opponent dropped it he played Shriekmaw on me. So yeah, that hurt.
Crystalline Crawler was ramped out to be a 5/5 on turn 3. Forest + Birds + Swamp + Hierarch I believe? He didn't have a follow up to use the mana with, but honestly he didn't need it. I just couldn't keep up at that point. And if he did have a ramp target, it could have been anything in the cube with that kind of mana.
Haven't seen Ash Barrens in action yet, but no reason to think it will be anything other than great. Especially since we're still supporting colorless.
It's only signatures, but we rarely get events out here, so I was super excited to get these. And I admit.. I was fangirling a bit meeting RKF. Here are the highlights:
Regrowth and Eternal Witness are enough of the effect of getting a single card back for my cube. I would rather play Greenwarden of Murasa if I regularly found myself needing two cards back, which I don't really. It's always just the one card that I need, more than one is just win-more.
I've devised a method of drafting with my cube that allows me to add cards as I feel like adding them, basically ignoring the 90-card breakpoints. Two caveats though, there's usually a fractional pack at the end and the pool size fluctuates within 5 cards or so of 45, which hasn't turned out to be a problem (and I actually prefer that to leaving key cards out of the draft or having to add filler cards to hit one of those breakpoints).
Basically, what we do is divide the cube up evenly between all the players. If the amount of cards that each gets is too high of a pool, we add a burn count. It works really well.
The full formula/code:
Pack size = 15
Pack count = Cube size / Pack size
Cards per player = Cube size / Number of players
Burn count = 0
Pool = Cards per player / (1 + burn count)
If Pool is too large, increment Burn count and recalculate Pool
Good in powered cubes where every deck can be an artifact deck, but our RB decks are usually pretty light on artifacts outside of the big artifact creatures in Sneak Attack, in which case generic reanimation spells do the job just as well (and go into more decks).
Interesting card, and I'm glad they're mixing it up with PW abilities, but this one is just the wrong colors for what decks are usually trying to do in my cube.
I don't keep a hard cap on planeswalkers, but definitely a soft cap. It's the same kind of balancing you should do for any other card type. Simply adding every new good planeswalker without discretion would quickly lead to overpopulation of them compared to non-planeswalker cards at the rate they are being printed (at least one per set now). Especially so if your cube size never increases.
It's definitely interesting data as a cube manager and for your spikier players, but may be overwhelming for the average drafter who is just looking to sit down and play. There is also some data I'm not sure I would want out there either. A list of card rankings would be fine to let newbies know what cards they should be looking for, but deck win percentages I'd rather keep hidden. Not to take advantage of or anything, but to allow people to play what they want and find fun, as well as to encourage experimentation without them feeling bad for not drafting UW control.
I tried for awhile to record all the data I could from actual drafts, but it ended up being too much work during the time I wanted to simply enjoy myself cubing. It would get pretty obnoxious real quick both for me and my drafters if I interviewed them all afterwards, made them fill out a form, or whatever. It would take a lot of this data collecting to be able to do anything meaningful with it and besides, most of the problems will make themselves known anyway. People will let you know they think a card is OP or if it sucks and doesn't belong (or you'll just notice it won't show up in games and is a consistent last pick).
If we had automatic access to MTGO cube levels of data on our cubes, that would be amazingly useful and interesting. But the process of manually collecting it is too much administration work, in my opinion. It is fun sometimes to take a formulaic approach to cube to try to perfect it to an extent, but at some point it can definitely become overkill.
I just don't have anything left that's worth sending, I've Puca'd it all away. From now on for me, the site is basically just for trading my prerelease pool for whatever standard foils I need for my cube. Which for that purpose, the site still seems great. It's just the older stuff that is hard to get a hold of, I'm guessing since Pucatrade has already moved those cards into the hands of people who want them for keeps.
Listening to MerfolkMagic rave about Shardless Agent on his cast moved me to try it out and I have to say, I've been converted. RUG cascade is my new favorite deck.
I think it deserves its slot right now, but by itself it isn't the most outright powerful card ever. But even though it might be correct to cut it after a couple more Edric level cards are printed, I will probably keep it around because cascade as a mechanic is just so dang fun.
Dark Ritual has been fine for us as an unpowered card. The explosive potential is insane, but as just a one-of fast mana, it doesn't happen frequently enough that it becomes a problem. Also, it's balanced in that it is basically dead late game. I really love those one off cards that give colors access to powerful effects they normally don't get while still keeping thematically in line with the color like Dark Ritual, Mana Tithe, and Gamble.
As for the art, I run a beta, which is sweet, but if there existed an old frame (foil? ) black bordered Clint Langley art, I'd be all over that.
Vial Smasher has huge damage potential and only needs to survive a turn or two before you're basically dead. The turn after my opponent dropped it he played Shriekmaw on me. So yeah, that hurt.
Crystalline Crawler was ramped out to be a 5/5 on turn 3. Forest + Birds + Swamp + Hierarch I believe? He didn't have a follow up to use the mana with, but honestly he didn't need it. I just couldn't keep up at that point. And if he did have a ramp target, it could have been anything in the cube with that kind of mana.
Haven't seen Ash Barrens in action yet, but no reason to think it will be anything other than great. Especially since we're still supporting colorless.
2. Excluded
3. Excluded
4. Excluded
Scrapheap Scrounger
Chandra, Torch of Defiance
And testing Filigree Familiar, but he almost definitely won't make the cut. Sad, he's so cute.
Basically, what we do is divide the cube up evenly between all the players. If the amount of cards that each gets is too high of a pool, we add a burn count. It works really well.
The full formula/code:
Pack size = 15
Pack count = Cube size / Pack size
Cards per player = Cube size / Number of players
Burn count = 0
Pool = Cards per player / (1 + burn count)
If Pool is too large, increment Burn count and recalculate Pool
Interesting card, and I'm glad they're mixing it up with PW abilities, but this one is just the wrong colors for what decks are usually trying to do in my cube.
If we had automatic access to MTGO cube levels of data on our cubes, that would be amazingly useful and interesting. But the process of manually collecting it is too much administration work, in my opinion. It is fun sometimes to take a formulaic approach to cube to try to perfect it to an extent, but at some point it can definitely become overkill.
I think it deserves its slot right now, but by itself it isn't the most outright powerful card ever. But even though it might be correct to cut it after a couple more Edric level cards are printed, I will probably keep it around because cascade as a mechanic is just so dang fun.
As for the art, I run a beta, which is sweet, but if there existed an old frame (foil?