Homemade Cube Part 3

 

Broadly speaking when designing my cards I was aiming at the power level my cube currently sits at. The average power level at least. I was trying to avoid any of the cards that I would consider bombs and as such was looking to hit mostly between what I would rank anywhere between a 7/10 and an 8/10 in my preliminary reviews. I am pretty sure there will end up being a bunch of sixes and a few 8.5/10 that slip through the cracks. Largely I am aiming to land cards within this range for convenience. I know what a 7/10 and an 8/10 card looks like and that will help me a lot when it comes to balancing. I think I would have more open design space if I significantly shifted the power level of the cards in either direction from what it is now.

That all being said, as I touched upon in the first part of this series, I wanted to tinker with a couple of elements. Magic is much more of an ecosystem than a single solid thing. You do not have to alter the whole, you can tweak areas of it. Broadly this is what Wizards have done themselves over the years. Spells have tended towards losing power since the dawn of magic while creatures have absolutely gained it. Even within spells this is not strictly true as removal has had to gain a lot of power just to keep pace with creatures. 

Anywho, the areas I wanted to tune a little differently were card draw, card selection, life gain, and top end threats. I wanted to make the first three things generally more powerful and abundant while I wanted to rein in the latter a touch. Each had slightly different reasons behind my doing so and as such I shall cover each in turn. 

Life is probably easiest to cover and so we shall start there. Simply put, the power creep in creatures makes it feel like you want a little more starting life. A kind of buffer so as to have time to respond and not just wind up dead to all the powerful dorks. To achieve this, to give the air of actually starting the game on 24 or 25 life I smattered life gain across a lot of the cards, a little free bit here and there. This certainly means some decks will feel like they still start at 20 and others more like 30 just from random variation in the inclusion of these "free life" cards. To ease this variance a little I tuned the power level of a  number of cards down by giving them life concessions to the opponent. Now some of your bonus life would, on average, be coming from the opponents deck and not just your own! I used it quite a lot on dual lands which will help ensure they are commonly played. Luckily this was also a pretty large pool of open design space. Milking over 30 land designs out of the inspired Grove of the Burnwillows!

Next up is card quality. This is something any long time reader will have seen me go on about no end. Basically I like my magic to be a game where choices matter and where random elements play a more minimal aspect in the game. I like random elements to contribute to game variation and not win percentages. Games where you win thanks to a screw or a flood are not good games. Not for either player as far as I am concerned. This has always been one of the things I have liked most about cube. You have a lot of scope to ensure consistency in games as a curator without having to compromise on variety. Legacy is pretty consistent but it isn't all that varied, and the reverse feels like it starts to become the case as you reduce the power level on the format. Claiming that I am increasing the power of card quality is a little misleading as there is nothing at Brainstorm level in my homemade cube. Preordain is more the level stuff has been aimed at which is apparently potent enough to command a ban in modern! I am not sure that would still be required in this day and age but that is another discussion. Cube has quite a spread of card quality from dubious cards like Portent all the way upto Brainstorm. None of the top end stuff (Ponder/Brainstorm) is anywhere near as potent in cube as it is in constructed, with less in the way of high synergy and combo decks and wildly more restricted access to sac lands and other means to abuse them present in my cube. Preordain and Consider are actually two of the best in cube and that is the bar I have been aiming at. Having more of the blue card quality at that level of power and having more card quality in other colours could be considered as a buff to the power of card quality. 

Further to that however I have tried to add a healthy dose of card quality effects to the non-blue colours. These are somewhat more buffed as the other colours tend to get less in this department, both power and quantity. It was a little harder adding in card quality effects to non-blue colours while retaining a good degree of colour pie integrity. The result of this was a heavier use of keywords like scry and landcycling effects all of which help to improve consistency in the right kinds of way. In a fairly limited setting like a cube draft you can afford to slap a little more on things that do not provide card advantage or affect the board. This fact alone let me get away with putting a little bit more love onto the card quality stuff. 

Card draw next and all the same things I said about card quality apply here too. A scry for 2 is equivalent to a draw 2 if you are trying to hit a land drop etc. More access to card draw leads to more consistent games. But that isn't the whole story. When playing with a 40 card deck the value of card draw is surprisingly capped. You simply can't run anywhere near as much as you can afford to in a 60 card deck else you will risk decking. You have to cut things to add in card draw and reasonably this tends to be shaved a little off everything. This includes ways to win. Sure, you can stop playing your card draw spells and avoid decking yourself but then you have a lack of threats and a bunch of dead cards. Very little raw card draw is played in my cube anymore. All the stuff that does see play is either just a cantrip or it is bolted on to some otherwise powerful threat. Psuedo card advatage is typically preferred. Cards that generate more threat or value without consuming physical card real estate. Gonti, Lord of Luxury is a premium example of this but you could argue a case for loads of stuff in cube doing this kind of thing from Glorybringer to The Scarab God to Elesh Norn Mother of Machines. With this in mind I have given a reasonable push to things I would consider more classical "Divination" style card advantage cards so as to try and get them some actual play. I imagine some of my designs have been pushed what would be too far for 60 card constructed but in a cube setting none strike me as all that impressive. While I have powered it up a little I have not made all that much of it as  it has that tendency to scale poorly with itself. Further to that I have added a fair smattering of effects that put cards from the graveyard back into libraries. This has been hard to do as it is not something anyone is really paying anything for so you need to find places to slot it in for free. Even so, hopefully that will allow for some more indulgent drawing, for as we all know, drawing cards is one of the best things in life. 

Lastly we have top end threats. Most things at five or more mana now seem to be really swingy or pushy. These cards win games very fast if not handled quickly and appropriately. I can see the appeal and in many cases the necessity. On the one hand the massive push on creature power creep combined with the nature of card worth as you go up the curve ensures there is a fairly large area of dead design space in the game. At higher costs there isn't really enough you can slap on a card to make it playable, it can say "win the game" and still be a no go. As power has crept the point on the curve this deadzone starts at lowers and squashes everything else down below it. This means cards need to do more and more at lower and lower costs else they simply won't see play. 

On the other hand, it is probably beneficial for the online market and some of the physical game as well to have a built in game timer so to speak. Long games can be really fun but they can be impractical and a turn off for plenty of players. Reducing their frequency likely assists these online platforms and helps broaden the overall player base of the game. I however love a long game where both players see their whole decks and it comes down to the last. In those you know choices mattered. Both players choices, all the way back to individual picks and deck construction. With that in mind I made my top end threats a little less pushy. Either they win slower or less reliably than the kinds of cards you see in cube these days. As I said in my introduction, I tried to take things back to pre Throne of Eldraine / Modern Horizons 1 for my five drops and upwards. Power wise that might be so but in terms of reach I would say it actually goes back further, Perhaps all the way to M11. Reach is different to power in the way I am using it to describe top end threats. Reach is certainly significantly affected by card power but it is a lot to do with how quickly and reliably that power can be brought to bear. A Verdant Force has a lot of power but it is pretty slow to take over the game. It is old school power with rather limited reach. Front loading the power as with Glorybringer ensures it is all there to be used right away and thus does a good job of swinging the game in your favour. Adding in recursion or protection assists the other element in reach which is more about inevitability. I have been careful with the latter while generally avoiding the former. And certainly I have tried to avoid putting those two things together at all on anything that could be called top of the curve. 

(Balduvian Dragon is tuned according to Thundermaw Hellkite but was an attempt to modernize the classic Shivan Dragon)

It is also worth discussing combat tricks. While I have not intentionally powered these up the result of my aiming them at cube is exactly that. Combat tricks are just very hard to find space for in cube being situational cards that are not strictly removal or threats. Sure, they have a very high ceiling but you cannot afford to play them that often. It is typically the broader ones that see play. Even so, in an attempt to make the few tricks I have designed playable they have received quite the injection of power. 

There we have it, a brief overview of the things I expect to lie outside the normal realms of current cube and magic power levels and balances. Hopefully these few minor tweaks will have the desired affects and not utterly collapse the ecosystem of cube play as I understand it! I am looking forward to learning about the impact of these changes and how well I manage to hit the mark with them.