Homemade Cube: Solving Problems With Card Design

Long have I been trying to improve the cube meta by adding in cards that I think will best help whatever problem is at hand. Usually this has less than the desired impact because the cards I am using to try and solve problems are inherently low powered cards relative to the cube, else they would likely already be in the cube! When making your own cards for the same situation you can rather more force the issue by making more powerful cards if you so desire. This seems like a bit of a risky endeavour and likely to result in more overall work. I have found a few things I would like to improve in my homemade cube and I have designed a bunch of cards to assist with that. I have not pushed the power but I have tried to ensure the cards will see play, meaning I think they are all above the average power level of the played cards in my homemade cube. 

So what problems am I trying to fix? Planeswalkers were over powered in early testing. Almost all of the ones I designed I have nerfed a little. Further to that I have three direct design strategies aimed at reducing the dominance of planeswalkers, and an indirect general aim that should also help calm them down. The first is simply more evasive cards, especially lower on the curve. Both evasive dorks and those that are already in play make the life of planeswalkers a little trickier.

Next up is simply more direct removal. Removal isn't the best answer to a walker in general as they will have always had one activation out of it making it almost always a two for one in their favour. Sure, you will often net a couple of mana but you would much rather be able to kill the walker in combat. That all being said, you would much rather eat that 2 for 1 and have the walker alive just one turn than lose to it over five turns... As such I designed rather more removal capable of hitting walkers. Removal is great at self balancing and so having a little too much is no bad thing, as it presently stands I think the pricier removal that can hit walkers is going to win out over the cheaper creature only stuff but they may not be the case once the other tweaks take effect.

lastly on the targetted planeswalker containment I have a few "sparkhunter" dorks which are absolutely the most directed of all the solutions. They may well be a little too narrow in that they are little more than fine filler when not facing walkers, but become quite impressive when they are. This polarity might make them unplayable, it might instead just have a poor play pattern. Over this kind of solution feels a little too "on the nose" and is an experiment I am somewhat expecting to see fail, or at least not perform in all the required ways to be fully fit for purpose. Returning to my analogy of Magic metagames as eco-systems, a card like this feels like introducing a foreign and ultimately invasive species to tackle a problem. 

Next up is a pretty simply problem with an even easier fix. I didn't make enough top end. A cube or format is always going to have a bottleneck. A place either lacking in sufficient numbers or power that creates a kind of false demand on those types of card above and beyond what you would expect for any given power level. Essentially it means things like playing Boreal Elf despite it being pretty rubbish, just because there are not enough 1 drop mana dorks in the format. While I complain about Modern Horizons a lot in various ways, they did at least solve the mana dork bottleneck! As for my homemade cube the bottleneck is at the top end, I simply didn't produce enough meaty cards. Almost all the decent on colour cards at four mana and up get played in almost every event as it stands and this means that not only is there clearly a bottleneck there, but quite a severe one. As such I have made quite a lot of bonus top end meat. As with removal, it is absolutely better to overshoot this kind of problem and then trim back. Indeed you will be better informed overall by doing so.

In a tangential issue we have game length. Not only is my homemade cube lacking in top end power it is deficient in game closing reach. I love a long game but I don't want mostly long games. I also want to win within about three turns of feeling like I am winning. It often is the case that I feel like I am winning and then it takes five or more turns to convert that into an actual win. Just removing the bottleneck on top end meat, threats, and power will do a lot to solve this situation. There is however a type of card that is good at converting advantage into reach or closing power. A card like Overrun for example. These are hard to balance as they have a steep incline from being too narrow to being too generally powerful. Overrun for example wins a lot of games on the spot on the one hand while sitting in hand doing nothing a lot of the time on the other. You want a card less polar in performance than Overrun while retaining its other qualities. And, you want this to be the sort of thing open to all the colours and archetypes. Overrun is both incredibly green and entirely creature focused. That is not a tool we can reasonably use for our blue white control deck! Below is my take on a black card that can do a good job of closing out a game fast when you have established a lead without being a dud when on the back foot. 

Next up we have another simple problem. Mono coloured decks are underperforming. Not a big problem but something I would like to address a little. The more overall balance the better as far as I am concerned and so I would like a mono deck to perform comparably to a 2 or 3 colour one. To give the more single colour based decks a boost I designed two cycles of cards that scale up in potency the more you focus cards and basics from one colour. I think these cards will be playable in relatively even split two colour decks but unexciting. They seem outright bad for 3 or more colours, while importantly, seeming incredibly strong in mono colour decks. Perhaps too strong sadly but this is why we experiment and test! We have a little cycle of cost reducers inspired by the allied colour ones from Invasion block. 

Then we have the meatier four drop cycle of creatures inspired by Vernal Bloom that greatly empower mana production. My suspicion is that these cards will be problematic. Utterly broken when you have a mono coloured deck and the mana sinks to pair with it, but really impotent without both. 

In a calmer attempt to incentivize stacking on type of basic land in a deck I had a cycle of EtB effect four drop dorks that scale in a very colour pie appropriate way.

As far as mono coloured incentives go, you can produce cards that scale with the quantity of cards in that colour or the corresponding lands as have shown in the last few concepts. You can also just make really powerful cards with a really high intensity of coloured mana pips. We are talking Benalish Marsh, Necropotence, Cryptic Command, and Goblin Chain-Whirler. These sorts of cards are well above the curve power wise but cannot just be played. You need to be mono or heavily in that colour. It works but I am not a huge fan. It is prohibitive design, you are just printing narrow cards, balanced with over the top power. It is hard to make those fun for all players. And with cards being narrow you cannot have many at all in a cube before problems arise. I have no more than one per colour in my main cube and I would prefer less for my homemade cube if at all possible! As such I leant on the adamant mechanic and produced cards that were playable without adamant, but really quite good with. I used some design tricks to try and keep this disparity in check. Generally I supplemented tempo with value or value with tempo so as to not overload on one aspect. I also produced more reactive answer cards, which tend to be far less oppressive when a little over tuned. Speaking of over tuned, here is the red adamant card that should perhaps not target players or only investigate. 

Lastly I tried to solve an age old issue in all of magic. Indeed (said smugly), in my homemade cube it seems like far less of an issue than in other formats! That is the advantage gained by going first. You can do a bit to address it with card design but it is somewhat fundamental to the way the game works. As such I went for a more mechanically based approach. I am intrigued to see how it works out but in practice I think the idea is too cumbersome to be a realistic and practical means of improving the game. For my cube and my playgroups, sure, perhaps it will work out and be a good thing but overall it is not a serious suggestion. I do not like the way it breaks the illusion of the game by referring to out of game things. I also don't like how generally wordy these cards are. Certainly worth a little experiment but I am anticipating these not quite being the ticket. I had two main groups, a bunch of cars that get a mana reduction.

Then there is also a cycle of mana producers that enter untapped when you trigger your catch-up. 

That really is just a little teaser. It turns out that I sped up in creativity once the first batch was sent to the printers and then started to actually get tested. An experimentally backed up deficit or problem apparently gets my creativity fired up! There was a little design focus on mana sinks, a focus on some bigger spells, some more cycling just because it is so great, some more disenchant effects, a whole load of playing around with adventures and fortifications, a whole pile of your basic green ramp, red burn, blue counters etc, some bigger energy payoff and supply cards, and just a pile of random stuff made along the way! The bulk is actually just top end meaty threat cards to ease that bottleneck. I have now over 200 new cards ready to send of to the printers along with about the same again in reprints of existing cards for one reason or another. Given how close the alpha test was to what I was aiming at I have fairly high hopes for the resulting format. I was a little worried the format might be way too imbalanced or just dull and not fun to play before we properly started playing it. Now that is not a concern and I am all in on trying to improve and optimize it. The only downside of all this is I haven't even read the spoilers for the latest Ixalan set, nor that Dr Who stuff. I am just having more fun, while retaining more control, doing the homemade stuff. I'll get the full spoilers for the new cards up at some point soon and then try and figure out a good way to get a cube list presented. I think I can do it in cube cobra with custom card art but it might be a chore not worth embarking upon (yet).