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Latest Cube Update
Finally, the latest update and expansion of the cube has arrived. It now sits, proudly sleeved, in its box on my shelf, all ordered alphabetically and by colour, ready to be drafted.
So what changes have I made? I will be writing a few short posts about each colour specifically in the near future but there have been some sweeping changes across the board which I will talk about here.
In With The New
The most major change is the addition of forty five cards to expand it from a 405-card 8-person playable cube to a 450-card 10-person playable cube (for those who are, rightly, confused by those numbers: see below) as well as nearly as many substitutions across all colours. This means roughly twenty percent of the cube is completely new.
This update brings some notable new inclusions, two of the higher profile cards being Æther Vial and Sylvan Library. These two power houses should give a boost to weenie decks and green decks respectively. With a lot of countermagic in the cube, giving weenie decks a way to get uncounterable threats onto the battlefield at instant speed is a massive boon to those decks. It is also a cheap artifact that the control decks are unlikely to draft for themselves should they see it in the packs first. Sylvan Library gives green decks some much needed card draw outside of Harmonize. Green already has plenty of card advantage, but it lacks pure draw which is something Library brings in bucket loads.
But this update isn’t just about adding more, and more powerful, cards. It was also an opportunity to strengthen themes both within individual colours and across colour pairs. I’ve started to push a creature token theme in Red-White and an Aura theme in White-Green. Blue-Black still has its control elements, but there is also a slight self-mill-into-reanimation theme which may rear its head every few drafts. White-Black still has a weenie overlap however I’ve started to make a push towards an attrition based deck with plenty of removal, card advantage, and bleeding. These of course are not set in stone. If a player plays a certain colour combination they are not just building a predesigned deck. Even though White-Blue is classically a control deck, there is no reason a player cannot build an aggressive deck with cheap white creatures backed up by blue bounce and counters. Likewise, a Red-White player could build a control deck with removal, sweepers, and haymakers. The role of the themes is not to dictate what a player builds, but to give them suggestions and ideas to spark their creativity.
Mistakes Of The Past
Overhauling the cube gives me a chance not only to add new things, but fix old mistakes and oversights. The biggest of these was having too many non-basic lands. Like I said before, I started with a 405-card 8-person cube. However if you do the maths, 405 should be enough cards to make 27 boosters. The problem I had was that early on I miscalculated how many artifacts and land a 9-person cube should need.
It seems obvious now that, if I want one land card in each booster I would need a total of 27 lands. If I want two of each of the five colours, two artifacts, and two multicoloured cards, I would need 54 of each. (54×7)+27=405. However for some reason I thought I needed 40 lands. I also had 65 multicoloured cards; three gold and three hybrid for each colour pair, and 5 gold split cards. This means that I only had three hundred cards to split between the colours and artifacts. 405-40-65=300. Thats just fifty cards per colour. 300/6=50. When you compare that to the 40 lands, its obvious that something wasn’t right.
This isn’t a new revelation. In fact it became readily apparent with the first draft we did with the cube. However as there was only eight of us drafting it wasn’t a problem. Now that I have expanded to a 450-card cube the “correct” numbers should be 60 of each colour, 60 multicolour, 60 artifacts, and 30 lands. Instead I have kept all 40 lands and gone down to 50 artifacts. Or kept 50 artifacts depending on how you look at it. I’ve also gone down to 60 multicoloured cards, losing the five split cards. This means that when we draft I shuffle the artifacts and lands together and add three cards from this new pile onto the boosters. Sometimes a booster will contain two artifacts and one land, and others will contain one artifact and two lands (and occasionally three of one and none of the other). I think this distribution allows me to have the average power and ‘interesting cardness’ higher, as adding ten more artifacts would result in less exciting cards replacing more interesting lands cards.
Another oversight on my part was reanimation in black. While black reanimator decks in other formats have access to all kinds of demons and things to bring back, these are always rare. When originally building the cube, I didn’t come across a huge amount of exciting fatties in black and so I didn’t add any to the cube, instead opting for cheap aggressive creatures and medium sized, utility creatures. This would have been fine if it wasn’t for the reanimation not having anything substantial to target. There were quite a few large creatures in green, but this meant you had to be in Black-Green in order to play reanimation and this isn’t what I wanted. To make sure reanimation was viable in any colour combination – or even just mono-black – I have added a few good targets in black with Maalfeld Twins and Skeletal Wurm and also some more ways to fill the graveyard. Twisted Abomination achieves both of these by being a good reanimation target that can get itself into the graveyard. I have also added two colourless Eldrazi; Artisan of Kozilek, and Ulamog’s Crusher, which can be played in any coloured reanimation deck. They also make a turn two Channel a lot better.
The last mistake I fixed was to remove Call of the Herd which has never been printed as a common or uncommon!
Looking Forward
This update to the cube made a lot of changes and fixed a lot of issues, but there is still a lot of work to do. I’m still not completely happy with Red. It has a lot of sweepers and point removal which makes it great as a control colour but it needs some testing to make sure it can be aggressive enough. Otherwise, the control decks will take all the Lightning Bolts, Pyroclasms, and Dragons, leaving the Jackal Pups and Slith Firewalkers in the dust.
I also want to review the White-Green subtheme of Auras. I think that including cards like Bramble Elemental, Auratouched Mage, and Pollenbright Wings, which are strong in the archetype but unappealing outside of it, might stand out too much and look like I’m pushing the archetype. There is a reason I haven’t included Intangible Virtue in the cube, despite having a token theme in White-Red. I wonder if I would be better off adding more cards which work outside of the archetype like Dowsing Shaman which was added in this update but can be equally as good in another deck getting back Soul Snare, Animate Dead, or Seal of Fire.
To achieve this, I could include other cards which get a bonus from enchantments and auras being on the battlefield. The most obvious would be a Rabid Wombat or Aura Gnarlid type card although I suspect this is no better than Bramble Elemental in terms of subtlety. Alternatively there is Gatherer of Graces or Yavimaya Enchantress, both of which get benefited by any aura you control. (Gatherer of Graces needs to be enchanted to get the +1/+1 but can eat any aura to regenerate.) Or I could get the enchantments to do the work for me such as Ethereal Armor. Ultimately, I think I want a viable Green-White aggro deck with tricky-to-kill creatures like River Boa and Knight of the Holy Nimbus getting powered up by auras and gaining free value along the way, rather than a shoe-horned “aura” deck full of cards like Sterling Grove or Totem-Guide Hartebeest.
Another colour-pair I want to revisit is White-Black. While I don’t think it needs as much work as Green-White, I really like the idea of an attrition deck full of removal, discard, lifegain, etc. and engines to slowly bleed the opponent to death. There’s already a little bit of this with cards like Diabolic Servitude, Pestilence (which combos nicely with White Knight), and Phyrexian Reclamation (which combos nicely with Aven Riftwatcher). In white, there is Cenn’s Enlistment but not much else. I’m not sure what is out there, but I really want to make sure this archetype is viable every now and then as there is currently nothing like it in the cube.
Finally, I’m going to overhaul the hybrid cards by removing most of the guildmages. A few will stay, such as the Boros, Izzet, and Selesnya, but most will be removed and replaced by something else. The Rakdos Guildmage will be usurped by Rakdos Cackler and the Azorius Guildmage will become a Plumeveil.
I have already had a look at the hybrid cards with this update, and a few have already been superseded. I have also replaced some hybrid cards with split cards. I thought about it for a while, and I don’t see how Life and Death is all that different to Cankerous Thirst, how Fire and Ice is all that different to Nucklavee, or how any of them are really that different to a guildmage. After all, in a White-Red deck, you can only use half of a Night and Day in the same way you can only use half of a Selesnya Guildmage.
My Cube Online
I’ve made the Google Doc I use to keep tracks of the cube, and also my notes on potential updates, open to the public. You can not only view the cube, you can also leave comments on it and talk in the discussion tab at the side. This is an ever evolving document which is updated with each new card added to the cube.
I have also uploaded the cube to CubeTutor.com. Here you can see recent changes, view the whole cube on a single page with mouse-over card names, check out a breakdown of stats, and even draft the cube in a simulated draft!
By signing up for an account on Cube Tutor, not only can you add and curate your own cube, you can go to deck building mode after the simulated draft and then save it. Be sure to send me an email, a tweet, or post in the comments below, with a link to the draft deck so I can see what you built.
Draft Lennox’s Cube on Cube Tutor
Let me know in the comments what you think of the latest update/overhaul of my cube. Or if you have any suggestions on the changes I’m looking to make, as any help is appreciated.
-Lennox
@mtg_lennox
The First Iteration of Lennox’s Cube
I have finally formatted the spreadsheet that I use on Google Docs to keep track of my cube into something that I would be happy to share with other people. It has been colour coded and sorted by converted mana cost. I have also added a Stats sheet which I will be using to keep track of interesting statistics of the makeup of the cube.
This is only the first iteration of the cube. The sheet will be updated with the many changes and tweaks I make throughout the life of the cube as I play with it, find out what isn’t balanced enough, what isn’t fun etc etc. Also, any cards that I think will be more interesting and fun to play with will be added, replacing old, less fun cards.
So here it is, my cube, a work in progress.
The Peasant Cube 