Homemade Cube: Adding Combo Update

It has been over a year since I did any updates on the Homemade Cube. Some of this is because such articles are not my most popular. Much of it however is because things have been quite chaotic and subject to change at any moment with it. I have certainly been avidly still at work on the Homemade Cube project. So what have I been doing with it over the last year and a bit? And do we think the title gives anything away?

Obviously my brain sees the finish line of a project in sight and is like "no, we need more hurdles". And quite what a hurdle designing cards for combo is proving to be. Not really a surprise given everything. Typically combo elements do not improve a cube in my experience, not at least from a technical point of view. You get more parasitic cards, more un-interactive games, less consistency, all the things I criticise in real Magic. Combo is different and fun and somewhat baked in if you are running a powered cube. I think it is a great part of Magic, I just typically want smaller portions of it spread about my cube experience. Combo exacerbates the issues that are fundamental to magic and so unless I specifically want to be playing combo I tend to prefer formats where it isn't really an option, or are at least decidedly tier two. This is why my bread and butter of cube for the past decade and a half had been unpowered cube without combo.

Knowing this, and that combo is going to be a lot more awkward of a design prospect I didn't look to include any combo in the Homemade Cube. I put the odd generic support card in the original set of 720 cards in the very first print run, tutors and the like, mostly as a nod to those things being a core part of Magic. I figured they might be useful if a random combo deck did emerge unplanned and was also accidentally quite fun. Such things didn't materialize and most, if not all, of the nod to combo support cards, even the fairly well pushed tutor effects, got cut. 

Jump forwards a couple of years to spring of 2025. The homemade cube has been improving steadily but it is still long and dry compared to my conventional cube, and while I have been making improvements on that front it is slow progress. It is still very much the chess of Magic. This is fine for every now and again but I am trying to make something I want to play as much or more than real Magic. It seemed wise to start experimenting with combo, what with the usual negatives of having combo in a cube format likely being a push in the right direction for once! I like combo and so this had win win potential. Being able to have a cube with a combo option while being an improvement rather than an impediment was an exciting prospect, but a daunting one. The homemade cube had somewhat devolved into everything being somewhat of a midrange affair, and combo is the antidote to midrange dominance. It seemed like the path was clearly set out ahead of me.

As such I tentatively starting messing around with designs. Scratching that itch to try my hand at more design. Combo felt like an organic accident in real Magic and making intentional two card combos that broke the rules felt a bit risky and against the grain. With that in mind I tried to build iterations of the various engine combo archetypes. Storm and Reanimate first (in the 4th or 5th printrun, but they then just sat in a box for a long time untouched), a dice factory/KCI artifact style thing (in the 6th printrun), which was when I added those combo cards and the pre existing support cards for them back into the cube. While they were in I had sufficiently under supplied and underpowered the cards that the intended decks were not showing up. Then in the 7th printrun I added a bunch more support for those initial combo plans and a sort of lands matters combo affair with a mish mash of angles and ideas. In the 7th print run I also tried to focus on making some exotic combo leaning cards that could be built around in fun ways or do fun things rather than other actual or intentional combos. I was trying to seed the ground for more two and three card combos to emerge rather than the more planned out engine decks. A few have emerged but they are all embedded ones within broader engine decks. 

Unsurprisingly it is taking a long time to get the balance right. Simply put I had not managed to get over the critical mass of support tools prior to the 7th print run and so combo decks were not really draftable or openable in sealed. The 7th print run solved this and was a good time. It gave a lot of useful information quickly and sparked one of my most creative periods since the start of the whole thing three and a half years ago. That became the 8th printrun which had loads of everything in it and we are still in the early stages of testing for that. I expect to be able to chisel out a good format from the present oversized mess of cards eventually! I am starting to get the shape of what some of the archetypes will look like but am yet to really have any notion of balance. Combo being so easy to move the needle on with card additions and teaks will just dominate suddenly where before it was unplayable with a couple of cards less. It is going to be a long and bumpy ride getting it right. And even if I do, there is no assurance that it will be an improvement. It was good at being a "chess" cube, it just turned out that isn't what I wanted. Perhaps some do. Improvement is a pretty subjective term. Especially as I have changed my objectives within the course of the project. I started out wanting a balanced and fair format but when I got that I realized I wanted a fun one. To that end the move towards a combo cube has and is making it a better cube for what I want, even if that isn't the case in relation to the original goals. 

Despite all my anticipated difficulties I am pleased to say that the  events we have done so far with all the latest iteration of the combo cube in the 7th and 8th printruns have gone rather well. Certainly plenty of room to improve still but kicking off from a much higher place than I dared hope. Most shockingly there have been multiple storm games that are interactive back and forth affairs. Fun for both players...! Decks have become more interesting and varied, as have the games. The combo stuff is still the minority with your classic aggro, control, and still even midrange lists getting more play. I would love to be able to make a format where all four main archetypes could co-exist in relatively equal proportion but one step at a time. Nothing too clear has emerged. A reanimate strategy using white blink cards bubbled to the top of the meta at one point but it quickly fell back in line with a slight trimming of its tools. The best bits have been the random decks doing wild things but not specifically combo things. Just half decks with some cool ideas winging it. You couldn't call them combo but you couldn't call them anything else either. By adding in cards that have big enticing effects but no purpose or specific support I have managed to get a little bit of that organic development of ideas. I have dumped a fair chunk of Time Twister / Wheel of Fortune effects into the mix - people do love drawing cards after all. These kinds of cards have managed to bleed across the archetypes and see a good dose of play all over the shop. The same is somewhat true of the Tutor effects new and old.

All the cards shown here are first printrun nods to the notion of combo I made over three years ago, many of which are only now becoming useful. Those poor early support cards which had nothing that they were actually supporting! I shall eventually this with more articles containing the various cards I have designed and printed to support combo in the more recent print runs. I have held of doing so thus far due to the chaos. I don't think I will be able to comment to usefully on the various cards and changes until I have a much healthier dose of hindsight and playtesting under the belt. Testing is taking a lot longer for a couple of reasons. Prior to the combo is was pretty easy to know what you were looking for and as such it was easy to appraise cards within those defined aggro, midrange, and control roles. The combo stuff is much more hidden and unknown, you simply have to tweak the conditions and see if something emerges. I feel like I am sat on the tuning knob of a radio slowly moving it and listening to try and find clear signals. Hunting blind. Further to that I now have a pretty hefty pool of homemade cube cards I am happy running. It turns out the best way to go about the project (or so I found at least), is to print an oversupply of all the various elements you are looking for and then chisel away the excess. Like sculpting, and interestingly, the exact opposite way I advocate for deck building. When building a format you need enough material to see the form in. If you don't have enough supply for a thing then that thing will never happen and so you can't work on it and give it good definition. I have at least 1800 unique cards now, and of those I am happy with the design of at least 1500. I am running a large 680ish card cube and doing a lot of rotating things in and out of roles. This helps maximizes the chances of getting to see stuff emerge but it is a whole lot slower than early testing was for the project. I am hoping to provide a list of the new cards and the various changes to older ones since this transition to a combo cube started, along with an update to my preferred 540 to 720 starters but I do not anticipate this happening quickly, nor would I be surprised if there were multiple more printruns in the meantime! 

The Chapin.dec

 

I have found myself watching The Reseleevables  much of late.

(https://www.youtube.com/@TheResleevables/featured)

It is really hitting exactly the right spot for my particular interests in the game right now. There are aspects of Magic in which I really was not expecting to gain further insight and yet here we find ourselves. This is a tale of one such new insight. Excluding concessions, cards that explicitly state a player wins or loses, and quirky rules for special game types like commander damage, I was firmly under the impression that there were exactly three ways to win a game. Those three ways being; decking someone, reducing their life total to zero, or giving them ten poison counters. Not so, as the master magical technician and evil warlock - Patrick Chapin, would go on to inform me. You can go one step more extreme than merely beating your opponent. You can entirely unmake their efforts. You can annul the whole concept of the game. 

So much was the gap between Chapin and his poor opponents in those primordial magical days of the early nineties that merely beating them no longer satisfied the man and new more cruel fates were devised. Chapin would build decks using cards that predominantly returned things to their owner's library and then combine that with power so as to have an ongoing mana and card advantage such that slowly he would return you to your starting situation. Count yourself lucky if that is your starting situation post having drawn your initial hand. There are the tools available such that you can be reduced to nothing but a library. A fully next level master stroke that absolutely needs recreating in cube.

Threats and outs have come a long way since Chapin was out there finding extra curricular activities to beat people with. And those people have gained a great deal of base level understanding. All this is to say that I don't think there will be many settings where you have an equal footing and any sort of reasonable chance of doing this sort of thing consistently. I think if you are wanting to pull a Chapin win on someone you are going to have to eat a lot of losers pie in the process. That at least should make any victories that much sweeter whence they finally arrive. 

Here is my best effort to make an unpowered cube iteration of a deck designed to inflict the Chapin win on someone. There seem like a couple of ways to go with this one from creatureless to Wilderness Reclamation slants however there are not loads of these "back into library" effects in the game (thankfully) and so we are mostly building upon the same core cards. Given how low to the ground things feel in my cube at present I went with this build that is as generically high powered as possible and leans a bit more on creatures to support its plan. You seem somewhat locked into Bant based on where these sorts of cards are printed. While you could drop the white you then lose the ability to handle creatures very well and wind up playing some very low rate cards and running the kinds of deck that roll over a die if you make a two power one drop. Black has some lovely tools that have good synergy like Misinformation but sadly it can't answer creatures effectively in the way the archetype wants and so it is no substitute for white. You could play it as well but at four colours we are starting to ask rather too much of the deck.

24 Spells

Oust

Noxious Revival

Birds of Paradise

Noble Hierarch

Condemn

Brainstorm

Memory Lapse

Disempower

Unexpectedly Absent

Sunscape Familiar 

Temporal Spring

Fallow Earth

Time Twister

Eternal Witness

Narset, Parter of Veils

Commit Memory

Jace, the Mind Sculptor

Cryptic Command   

Teferi, Hero of Dominaria

Stunted Resources

Plow Under

Primal Command

Vanishment

Terminus 

Nexus of Fate

16 Lands

Mystic Sanctuary

Island

Forest

Plains

Savannah

Tropical Island

Tundra

Spara's Headquarters

Breeding Pool

Hallowed Fountain

Mystic Gate

Yavimaya Coast

Windswept Heath

Misty Rainforest

Flooded Strand

Meticulous Archive

 

And of course a list of the cards I was considering;

Ephemerate

Coiling Oracle

Wall of Blossoms

Ancestral Visions

Set Adrift

Lapse of Certainty

Wilderness Reclamation

Spurnmage Advocate

Remand

Roil Spout

This is absolutely the kind of deck that will get bodied by any sort of high tempo, low cost strategy that involves turning creatures sideways. You have some god draws that can beat them but in general their stuff is so much more cost effective and powerful that they are just going to get under your disruption. This is a deck where you have to want it enough to eat a bunch of free losses. On the flip side to you being a soft target for most of the field there are decks that will have kittens facing this. Clunkier decks are so vulnerable and can have a really miserable time. And truly, if you are packing a deck like this, other peoples miserable times is a big part of why. And while your odds of winning are low against the other decks, they will also absolutely have a miserable time when you do beat them. I think the main counter to this deck is not beating it with cheap aggression, but bypassing it by concession. If you don't get fully de-permanented the deck didn't do its thing. As such I think when playing this deck you need to have some side bet on that prevents them from conceding in some way and ensures that if you win you get to do the full horror on them. That is the point of all this after all.

My most memorable story of having all my permanents destroyed was by a Tooth and Nail player in Mirrodin block constructed tournament. They simply spent the first three turns throwing every Oxidize, Viridian Shaman and Tel-Jilad Justice at my stuff, which was primarily artifact lands. They had lands and dorks and I had literal nothing in play and yet affinity was so stupid they still lost. I found a way to eventually getting out a Somber Hoverguard and the silly green player folded to a flying threat they couldn't Shatter. This is why one for one artifact removal isn't an answer to affinity. Especially at the cost of doing your own powerful things. This deck looks exactly like the kind of deck that can go on to lose after having de-permanented an opponent.... It is absolutely a good thing that decks like this have a below 50% win rate and much as this might read like lamentations for things lost to time and power creep, they are not so. Merely my tone when plugging a deck that isn't strictly viable. 

 

Happy hunting!

White Decks Don't Jump

 

White decks do something no other colour does, or rather they don't. All the other colours relish a bit more mana, it is just fuel for the fire. White, not so much. Now I am not for one minute suggesting white don't need mana. White still absolutely wishes to curve out with a fresh juicy Plains each turn for the first portion of the game, be that just three or four lands in modern or five or six in slower formats. What I mean is that white has no interest in spending time, cards, or mana upfront, in developing their mana beyond this one land a turn. This obviously excludes Pearl Mox with it being a potential boost in mana at no real cost or risk. However, even the likes of Chrome Mox and Mox Diamond are not lock in cards for a white aggressive deck and will need concessions or otherwise appropriate lists to get the nod. This is something I find interesting and wish to probe.

Intuitively it doesn't make that much sense that a strategy that uses speed and tempo to its advantage eschews ramp and burst mana options. Generally speaking we understand more mana to be synonymous with more tempo, and if that is how you are winning then that sounds great. I always sort of assumed that it was lack of card advantage, and to some extend good mana sinks, that meant white didn't go for ramp. In my homemade cube however there is significantly greater access for all colours to high quality card advantage. Even with all the cards white could ever want, and some really quite tasty options to boost mana, the white builds still seemed to just want to pay normal prices for things and develop at the one land per turn rate. The mystery was becoming more interesting and I had more information to try and solve it with!

Black and blue simply draw cards in order to spend any extra mana they might find them selves in possession of. Both are very mana hungry colours. Red being red, and so direct, just seems to win a bit quicker, at minor consistency cost, when afforded ramp tools. Green will invest in high impact, high threat cards, so as to put extra mana to effective work. White and green are effectively opposite in this regard.

I now think whites aversion to investing in ramp comes from two factors working in tandem. The first of those is efficiency. If you can use Sword to Plowshares to kill something then you are probably pulling quite a significant mana advantage from that. To compliament whites incredibly efficient removal tools white also has some of the most effective cheap threats. Whites dorks might get rather more lacklustre as you go up the curve relative to to other colours but it is hard to compete with what they got in the low end. Why waste time and consistency on ramping when you could just be getting on with deploying your cards that are already above rate at that point in the game. Simply put, it is better casting a Savannah Lion on turn one and another two on turn two than it is to ramp on turn one and then dump out all three "Lions" on turn two. You are a card down and an attack for two damage worse off, not to mention the consistency cost if you take the ramp path.

The second factor is how white aggro decks tend to win. It isn't that explosive flurry in which a red deck ends it but much more a slowly ratcheted end, akin to how a boa constrictor defeats prey. Each little threat is part of a web of threats that lock you in place and secure the kill. It might be that Suntail Hawk equivalent that gets in the final points of damage but it was that Luminarch Aspirant that made it sufficiently threatening, and that Giver of Runes that protected both of them from spot removal, and the Selfless Spirit that protected everything from the mass removal, the Voice of Victory that allowed them to resolve etc. etc. White just has this kindof inherent self synergy where the various tools all empower each other a little towards the same end goal. If your goal is inevitable victory from a thousand small cuts then you are better off with more cuts than quicker cuts. Ramping out your threats in white simply means you will wind up with fewer or less well supported threats. Green will put their eggs in few baskets but those baskets will be huge. White likes to present every egg in a basket of its own and thus has no need of big baskets. 

Curves Like Modern

 

My go-to bog-standard format for playing cube with just two players is a large sealed pool where we each make two decks and then play each matchup for a total of four best of three games. Normally I showcase just one deck when I play such events but in this case we are getting both of the decks that I built. This is to demonstrate curve in the current era of cube. I would class these decks as below average in most senses. They are a bit thin on the synergy pieces that make these archetypes powerful nor do they have a high density of those stand alone bomb cards. There is a bit of a lack of focus and some less than ideal mana bases. This was the kind of pool where I was patching over holes and making the best out of the situation. These are the opposite sort of decks to those that I normally showcase. There is one thing both of these decks do correctly however and that is their mana curves. I managed to cobble together enough cards within two colours, that work towards roughly the same ends, while costing two or less mana, that the end results were impressive. I didn't drop a match with either deck and I thought that exemplifies the value of a low mana curve. 

Most games and sports have a strategy that is used by underdogs to defeat more powerful opponents. In cube it is what I did with these decks. Essentially going as low as you can with decks posing questions. This gives opponents least time and mana with which to find their better cards. In constructed Magic a player might elect to run an aggressive deck so as to minimize choices for both players and mitigate a skill difference that way. In constructed Magic there is no difference in the power level of your pool of cards so player skill is the only thing we might look to compensate for. Going as low as possible with your curve in cube actually gives you a greater chance to outplay someone as you will greatly increase your depth of options by reducing the cost of your cards. Going as low to the ground as possible in cube can help mitigate a poor pool, it will not help much with a skill difference. Cube is not a kind environment to beginners and there are not many things you can do to mitigate a skill gap. If anything it is the opposite of going low to the ground. The easiest deck to pilot is likely a green ramp kind of a build which will have some of the highest curves in the whole meta. We were not looking for easy, we were looking to maximize our chances and so I presented a black base half Hogaak, half aristocrats deck, and an Izzet discard spells deck that are cheap and poor all at once!

Hogaak / Aristocrats    

Stalactite Stalker

Concealing Curtain

Bone Shards

Bloodchief's Thirst

Stitcher's Supplier

Gravecrawler

Forsaken Miner

Carrion Feeder

Evolved Sleeper 

Haywire Mite

Emperor of Bones

Orcish Bowmaster

Overlord of the Balemurk

Blood Artist

Priest of the Forgotten Gods

Satyr Wayfinder

Caustic Bronco

Smuggler's Copter

Tear Asunder

Deeproot Wayfinder  

Grist, The Hunger Tide

Midnight Reaper

Bastion of Remembrance

Hogaak, Arisen Necropolis

16 Lands

6 Swamps

3 Forest 

Bayou

BG Tri-land

B Sac Land

Lair of the Hydra

Boseiju, Who Endures

Fell the Profane

Hagra Mauling

This Golgari list is the weaker of the two decks being split across two different synergies. While I did have Hogaak, who is by far and away the best payoff for such builds, I had little else of note coming from the bin, and was a little thin on support. The mana base is really shoddy too. This is one of the most pressing issues when going so low on curve. You can ill afford having the wrong balance of lands as you have such a high colour intensity in your spells. You undo a lot of the good your high option density can do if you are struggling to play the sequence of spells you want to. I played a bit more lands, filtering, and value than I might normally do in these kinds of deck so that I wouldn't suffer as much from the bad mana. Mostly what I am trying to say here is that you should be predominantly lead by your lands if you are looking to go low and all in on a two colour deck. My Izzet fixing was decent, the Golgari was still one of my better supported pairs but it was much in need of some assistance. Having so many lands in a deck with such a low curve and not an endless means of good ways to convert excess lands into something useful I went pretty ham on utility lands and tossed in any suitable mana sinks I had. 

If you assume the MDFC are lands, and that Hogaak costs zero mana, and we always impend our Overlords, then this deck comes in under one mana average CMC and 1.625 average cost excluding the lands thanks to its curve topping out at three three drops. Yes, cards like Concealing Curtain and Evolved Sleeper are not great without further mana investment but that isn't really the point here. They are infact part of what lets you go so all in on low cost cards.

The Izzet list comes in even cheaper with a 1.54 average CMC across the nonlands with a smidge more free spells and fewer three drops. I found that I was casting Epiphay for X = 1 or 2 most commonly and so have counted that and the Eddymurk as costing 2.5 mana each. This list is generally fine. The mana base is OK and it has all the right sorts of things. It is a little muddled with some prowess stuff, some flurry things, and a selection of somewhat uncoordinated threats. It is not a very robust list but it is not found wanting in any area really. It is just a little underpowered compared to what I am looking for when I build a deck like this. While both of these decks are some degree under par in terms of power level, they are also both noticeably cheaper than what I might consider an ideal list, and that allows them to perform a little closer than you might expect. 

Izzet Discard Spells

24 Spells

Mishra's Bauble  

Careful Study

Faithless Looting

Lightning Bolt

Lava Dart

Opt

Ponder

Gitaxian Probe   

Spell Pierce

Marauding Mako  

Pteramander

Grim Lavamancer

Abrade

Fire / Ice

Inti, Seneschal of the Sun

Electrostatic Infantry

Occult Epiphany

Cori Steel Cutter

Suspicious Stowaway

Hobgoblin, Mantled Marauder

Tersa Lightshatter

Abhorrent Occulus

Eddymurk Crab   

Ethereal Forager

16 Lands

4 Mountains

5 Islands

Spikefield Hazard

Hall of the Storm Giants

Ash Barrens

Volcanic Island

Shivan Reef

Thundering Falls

Spirebluff Canal

Optimal looking curves in cube naturally fluctuate up and down over time as people adapt and alter the meta. Things typically get cheaper and faster to a point then everyone starts to pack as much Arc Trail type cards as possible which really prey on low curve decks and it goes the other way for a bit. Once someone flops out an Ugin and wins with it on the spot it will start to swing the other way again! Very much like natural undulations in population levels of predator/prey relationships in the wild. This natural tidal change is brought about by the players responding and adapting and is unique to each different player base. There is also a slower and more subtle underlying trend in cube mana curves and to no ones surprise that it downward. The more cards we get access to and the more powerful they are the more it forces things down. What prompted me to write this article was noting that both my decks had curves below the average of what I would expect from modern constructed decks. I think the ideal cube curves are at that crossover point for the first time ever with modern decks and that is interesting. Probably not useful or meaningful, but at least interesting! Really all we have to say here is that three drops are the new curve toppers. Keep those curves low and if your deck still looks shit, go lower.

Chumping with a Bollock

 

All we really have in life are a series of choices. We don't control what life throws at us, only how to respond to it. That is where games offer their best lessons. If you make good choices you will win more at games. Now, we don't "win" in life in quite the same way as we do in games, but you can absolutely make the best out of life and get more of what you want from it with good decision making. I have been gaming my whole life so I don't know if I was good at making choices so naturally became more attracted to games, or if I simply liked games and by playing them lots they helped me to be a better decision maker. It it likely some of both, but I do pile the majority of the credit for my ease at making decisions in life upon Magic the Gathering. This is however not really about Magic.

Nearly four years ago I was diagnosed with testicular cancer. While mindlessly rummaging around in my pants one day, as any boy in private with idle hands often finds themselves doing, I noticed a difference. One of the nuts was rather less grape shaped than I recalled and had gone a bit more kidney bean. Not very significant in size or shape but certainly the first decision point. Not a hard one at that. It is either nothing or something and you can either check it out or ignore it. Two choices with four possible outcomes. This really felt like having a Shock land in your opener and some reactive card like a Fatal Push. The greedy line is hoping you don't need to use the Push on turn one, laying your land tapped and saving that two life. If however they curve out at you and you don't have access to that turn one removal the game can so easily spiral away from you. You end up missing out on your turn two play to Push the thing you should have had access to Push on the previous turn, and before you know it, it is all she wrote. I hate doing much of much, I certainly hate admin, appointments, talking to strangers, and all things associated with going to the doctor. I am not sure paying two life for an untapped land is quite the comparison most would go with but it feels apt. I almost always translate my life choices into Magic terms as a little means of sanity checking them. Suffice it to say I was not about to punt this best of one game by greedily laying my lands tapped. And so I called the doctor. 

This next little bit is mostly reassurance to any fellow UK residents. We have the National Health Service, which is a great institution. Notoriously however it has been hard and slow to see a doctor since the pandemic. I rang my surgery and asked to make an appointment. The tone of the receptionist was professional but very much had the air of  "I'll bet you would like to see a doctor, you and everyone else mate". When however she asked what the appointment was for and I said "I found a lump on my testicle" the mood immediately changed. It was as if I had announced I was the king of all England. All very much yes sir, no sir, whatever we can do for you sir. I was given an appointment on the next working day simply by asking politely and providing the information asked for. They made it as little hassle for me as possible. Suffice it to say the doctor had a rummage and was like, yeah, that is indeed a lump, lets get an ultrasound. A couple of days later and I am at my ultrasound appointment and some poor young lass of a doctor is having to ultrasound my bollock. I felt worse for her than I did for myself at that point! There was a brief moment upon seeing her (she wasn't an ugly lady) that I was concerned I might disgrace myself but it transpires that the general subject of cancer is powerfully unerotic and no such danger was anywhere near the vicinity. It was when she kindly said "I would just like to get a second opinion from the senior doctor" that I knew we had a positive result. I knew that paying the 2 for that early interaction was coming good. I think many would be hit hard by that moment but somehow I was mostly just pleased with myself for making the right call in the first place. Like the satisfaction of running into the problem card you suspected your opponent might have and that you played around accordingly.

Within about two weeks of that scan I was having an appointment with an oncology specialist. They were like "yeah, very likely cancer". We can do a biopsy to be sure or we can just whip it out. The biopsy sounded more invasive and tedious than the orchidectomy (the whipping it out technical term) itself, not to mention more time consuming, and so I sent that bollock out to chump block the cancer!  We had already used some decision matrices, now we were using some probability to direct our choices. I had the operation in less than two weeks from that appointment meaning it was almost exactly a month from when I discovered the lump to when it was removed. That is some impressive pace. The NHS do not mess about when it comes to these sorts of things and for that I am very grateful. 

I was in and out of hospital on the same day. I was mostly recovered and back to playing sport in about three weeks and back to playing at full intensity in about six. I had my appendix removed when I was about eighteen years old and that was a longer recovery and a more serious operation. I have noticed zero side effects since the orchidectomy. I was offered a prosthetic option but given I'm mid forties, am still with the same girl I was with when the appendix went, nor have never been one to use the aesthetics of my groin to achieve anything, it seemed like such things would be a waste of time. You wouldn't even really notice unless you were able to get a good look! The NHS have been checking up on me pretty diligently since too with regular blood tests and CT scans. Coming up four years and so far so good. 

One thing that really stuck with me was the general concern the NHS staff had over the post op findings of the pathology labs. They would be testing the offending nut once removed and generally the staff seemed concerned about how I would react to those results. One doctor tentatively asked "How would you feel about the results coming back as not having been cancer once removed?" This would mean no chance of it spreading elsewhere and so seemed obviously like the very best outcome to me. It had been my choice not to bother with the biopsy. The Magic analogy here is looking at the top of your deck once you have made the call to mulligan. We all know it is about making the right call at the appropriate time and that future events don't change whether a historical call was "correct" or not. The hospital were clearly very scared I would get all litigious should they remove a healthy bollock despite it being the best outcome at the end of a string of correct decisions. I think this simply shone a light on how useful gaming can be on framing decisions in life. Not just in making good ones but also how you feel about those choices. Or how bias and emotions can get the better of us and cloud our choices or make us act badly. Every single doctor looked shocked when I revealed that I thought that I would be glad if the pathology labs came back with a clear result. This means most people clearly wouldn't react that way. This in turn makes me think we should do more to encourage people to play and engage with games. I would love to see it on curriculums one day. 

Equally, I entirely encourage all the boys having frequent private rummages, checking what is going on down there and taking it to the professionals as soon as there is anything unexpected. Fighting cancer is a tempo game in Magic terms, so always give yourself the best chance to stay ahead. Feel free to ask any questions in the comments. I think people are generally more scared of this sort of thing than they need to be and a lot of that is due to the unknown factors. On the physical side of things I have had multiple appointments with the dentists that have been worse! Obviously things went as well for me as they could have and that helps a lot. The emotional toll mostly stemmed from it being a load of unknowns. That in tern is likely because it is all a bit stigmatized. Cancer is general is not a good time conversation topic and it does certainly seem the case that us men are pretty rubbish at talking about things like this. I have had significantly more words of support from the appropriate whatsapp group about a dicky knee that is keeping me off that regular football game than I did when I was off with this. People just seem pretty in the dark about how to approach talking about such things and revert to simply not doing so. One of the most helpful things to me was talking with an old university friend who had had the same thing a few years prior. He said many of the things I have said here and they made me calm and confident going forwards with everything. One of the starting principles of this blog was to "help" people be better at, and enjoy cubing more. While not magic related I have a little platform here and if I can get one person to check themselves out, or to call the doctor, or even just to be less worried about engaging with the process then I will have managed to be a lot more helpful than all my other articles combined.

What Makes a Format Good?

There are several things that go into making a format a fun thing to play in. In short, these are having fun cards, having decent balance between the cards and archetypes, and having a good depth of options. These apply to all formats but they do so in different measure if we are looking at constructed or limited. Most of the formats are predetermined for us by Wizards, they design the cards then say which ones are allowed in which places. As such it is not very important for the average magic player to understand how to make a format good. These are game design skills rather than game play skills. It is a skill that comes in handy as a cube curator but even then you only have control over which cards to include. You can use simple metrics to determine what is worthy and it is simply a binary yes/no on each card. If you open the door to the individual card design in terms of creating a format then the possibilities literally become infinite. In trying to completely design my own cube from the ground up I have learned a lot about how to make a format good and hopefully I can use those skills to be a better cube curator across the board. 

Individually fun cards is the hardest part to design, but luckily Wizards are pretty good at that. There are plenty out there to chose from. The key is that you can't all be front men or strikers (insert some NFL reference here, would it be the quarterback for yall?), you need drummers and defenders to make the band/team perform. Omnath might be the fun thing your deck is built around but you are leaning on those dull Farseeks really hard. The most fun cube doesn't just have as many fun cards as it can ram in, it has as many fun cards in it as it can suitably support with your more standard cards. A fun card is only fun if you get to use it and you need those foundational cards, the Shocks, Preordains, and that sort of jazz are what will lead to you getting to cast and use the fun stuff. 

Balance is important to a point but in some lights it just looks like the third category - options. More cards that are suitably powerful means more playable stuff and hence more option rich format. There is also a strong point for not over balancing too much. A bit of variety is no bad thing. If it is all too flat in power level things can get a bit generic card soup and games can become a slow grindy trudge. Balance between archetypes is more important than between individual cards. Ideally all cards within a format should be playable in some circumstances, ideally more than one. Equally you don't want any card being an auto-include if you can help it. If your cards sit within that range then great. Even if they don't it is still fine, you are just reducing your options a bit and having some dead space. Dead wood is worst for limited formats where cards of little power or use get in the way and lower consistency. You can just ignore them in constructed settings where they are just background noise.

Depth of options is the area that a cube curator or designer has most scope to improve their format. A healthy format should look like a healthy ecosystem. There should be lots of interconnecting and crisscross synergies. Balance is all well and good but if your cube supports eight archetypes but there is no overlap between them then the draft portion is far less fun and relevant. Everyone just gets in their lane and has far fewer meaningful choices. If those eight archetypes all share cards they want with various others then the draft gets a whole lot more interesting. Building and playing decks also gets more fun if your cards have lots of little synergies between them. This is where the dead wood in a cube harms you most as it really reduces your synergy density. The higher the synergy density the more interconnecting interactions your cards have the better the format. You get more control over the direction your deck and draft go in, more interactions with your opponents at all stages, and just have more cool and quirky little interactions popping up and giving novel and cool experiences. 

The Fourth Resource

 

We are all very familiar with Magic's three main resources; mana, cards, and life. The fourth however we are taught to ignore and perceive as more of a rounding error in our various draw probabilities. The resource of "cards" really means "cards in hand and/or in play", those that we have immediate access to use. Those that have already been drawn or had resources spent to get them in some way. Cards however also exist in other zones and have implications as a resource in those zones. Most notably this is ones from the graveyard where they can be recurred or simply used as currency to perform another action such as escape or delve. Cards in the library also are themselves a resource of sorts. There are some cards like Arc Slogger and Orcish Librarian which directly consume the library although these are uncommon in magic, likely down to the difficulty of balancing them across formats of different deck sizes. There is also the notion that cards in library are a kind of life total. You start with some and that is all spare and good, but when you run out it is game over. We are taught that the first 19 life don't matter and that they are a resource that you should spend to get ahead and the same is essentially true of your library. So long as it never runs out too fast it is there to exploit. When not feeding ones library to an Arc Slogger you are either trying to draw a lot of cards from it to use against your opponent, or milling it into the bin because you have cards that will let you emulate card draw that way.

There is of course tension in considering ones library a resource. Unlike you starting life total which is set, you get to choose how large your library is. A larger library lets you draw and mill harder and longer without the danger of overdoing it and killing yourself. It also just inherently gives you the ability to play a longer game. It happens in every format I have played in, where two slow decks have a really close game and the eventual winner is the one who has taken fewer cards out of their library, be that from card draw or mill or sac lands or whatever. One deck runs out of time to kill the other. In these matchups a larger deck is typically an advantage. It was really noticeable that control builds of Yorion decks in cube would generally beat 40 card control lists simply because they could be far more liberal with their card resources. Drawing and milling more and not needing to use them once obtained for quite the same amount of return. 

Now we all know it not worth making your deck over the minimum size in almost every situation because of how it negatively effects your optimal draw odds and draw consistency. We all have had it drilled into us that the smallest deck is the optimal deck and in all but the most corner of cases this is very much the case. It is however becoming less the case over time. Obviously the smaller deck sizes feel it the most. Constructed and commander have quite the buffer over those 40 card decks and are substantially less sensitive to it to the point of it being irrelevant. Fifteen card highlander on the other hand is so sensitive to it that it needs a huge helping hand with bannings and different rules for decking oneself to even be a format, and it is still a format where cards that draw more cards are typically bad!  Limited magic has always been 40 card deck sizes though and that is a place where I am starting to notice the dwindlign size of my deck more and more. It is the ever increasing number of cards with more wild and wonderful abilities along with power creep and consistency creep that has resulted in more games being concerned about cards as a total quantity. Especially in cube. Hearthstone was also rather like 15 card highlander in that you tended to want cards that generated value over cards that drew more cards in your slower decks as it was just exposing yourself against slower matchups. Magic is at least very tempo focused at present and so the control decks, certainly those in cube, just fail to keep up most of the time. As such it is only really infrequently and in corner cases where we see deck size matter too much. I have had a bunch of Hogaak lists where I need to stop attacking with my Overlord or not cast a Malevolent Rumble etc because I'll deck myself before I win if I do. This tends not to be too much of a problem because the archetype can close out a game so quickly. 

It is of course the homemade cube where this has become an issue I have really felt. With cards pretty even on the power level and games super tight, plenty of midrange games, let alone the control ones, have been getting decided by deck size. I have had to forcibly increase the threat and tempo of cards and toss in a bit more randomness to get games ending in good order for the health of that format. Having a player at a huge advantage because they played less card draw or had a reshuffle mechanic felt a bit of an anticlimax. Boarding in your playables just to bulk out is also something I really want to avoid being anything other than an extremely fringe tactic. I was pretty well on my way to achieving those ends but fully solved the issue by introducing combo archetypes to the mix. For real magic I don't think there is too much to worry about. There would need to be a huge swing from tempo towards value that I just can't see happening before deck size in cube, powered, combo, or otherwise, becomes problematic. If you do happen to find yourself in a rare control on control cube mirror and you do have some bulk playables in your sideboard, going up in deck size a tad is probably no bad thing. It is likely that slower self mill strategies will self limit in cube, or already have, and that will be about the extent of this aspect of the game. I do find it fascinating none the less that there is this whole resource hidden in plain sight we rarely ever consider as such (reasonable as it may be given its general relevance), however with a couple of small tweaks to the meta it can fully rear up and be a prominent and visible bottleneck effecting deck and card design alike! One can start to draw parallels between cards like Yawgmoth's Bargain and Necropotence that turn life into card advantage and Thoughtscour and Stitcher's Supplier which turn library into useable mulch, be that of escape, delve, or other flavour. I think it is good to understand library size as a resource, even if we wish to minimize it most of the time. I love how we have a game resource we set ourselves outside of the game and that comes with its own unique cost of consistency. A fully self balancing and uniquely unintuitive mechanic. We work in game to draw cards and develop mana. We are set at 20 life and work to protect some of ours while depleting all of theirs and we must do all this within the timeframe we have given ourselves based on our deck size and contents! You want better contents or more time? Mostly we don't need the latter, but it is well remembered in these terms none the less.