Fixing, Tricks, and Domain

I had a chance to make some pretty comprehensive changes to the cube, though I haven't finalized the changes completely. Even after cutting some multicolor fat, less-than-stellar artifacts, some mana fixing, and some inferior lands the cube still felt clunky.

More specifically, there is still a little too much mana fixing and too few creatures. While I love things like Seal of Cleansing and Smash, the fact is these effects can be better served by having these effects (or at least similar ones) attached to a creatures (see Ronom Unicorn, Tin Street Hooligan, et al.). The obelisk cycle from Shards of Alara is fair for mana fixing, but when the cube is already saturated with effective, more efficient alternatives there is little reason to keep these slower, clunkier sources of fixing in. In all I expect to trim 10-15 cards more then swap in as many creatures that have relvant effects attached.

In other examinations, I'm looking hard at domain cards. While they are a house playing Stack, they are, generally speaking, only powerful when paired with a domain focused deck. That is to say that either these cards will be skipped frequently or will force players to draft domain. I'm not a fan of either, but nothing sayd "Play a ton of colors!" better than a five-color focus. I was frustrated for awhile until I realized that I was wrong; there is one mechanic that demands as many colors as possible: slivers. There are two upsides to switching slivers into the cube for the domain mechanic:

1. Slivers are creatures. There are a lot more slivers than creatures with domain (and by "a lot" I mean "a shitload more") and creatures are something my cube needs.
2. Slivers are fun. There have been plenty of attempts to make competetive sliver decks but, ultimately, slivers were more dominant in Limited environments. In the ultimate Limited environment of a cube, and one that is pushing multicolor as a theme as well, slivers look to be both a draft strategy and color-pushing theme players actually enjoy.

I've got a long way to go and this journey starts a few cards at a time. Once I've made a second round of changes I'll update my lists and test even more.

"We need Megazord power now!"

Aside from cliched cultural references to mid-nineties kids shows, I have been working assiduously on improvements to the PMC. There are two things that are greatly improving what I'm working with:

1. My local Magic scene is populated with players who are, thankfully, much better than me. These players offer (for free, even!) insight and advice for me to work through. They aren't calling the shots, but being issued a blunt challenge to improve the power, interactivity, and cohesion of the cube is both expected and exciting.
2. I opened a box of Urza's Saga and Urza's Legacy. While those of you without an addictive habit will be scratching your heads going "Why?" I gleefully committed more money than I should have on old cards that are, generally speaking, irrelevant to most formats. I did pick up a few beauties (Gaea's Cradle, two Grim Monolith and two Goblin Welder, and foils of Sick and Tired, Swat, and Unearth, and other miscellaneous stuff) but, more importantly, I shored up access to a wide selection of phenomenal cards.

With some tweaks, additional cuts, and ordering a few cards I don't have I feel confident that the next iteration of the cube will be significantly tightened and appreciably increased in power level.

On Fatties and Tricks

I've been reviewing the availability of fatties (using the polished release of the new Gatherer at the Wizards of the Coast website) at the common level and I must say that, well, there isn't a lot of "true fat" in anything other than green and multicolor (generally requiring green mana anyway, making the multicolor either already included or a moot point). I consider "true fat" to be at the 5/5 level or above and general fat to be creatures at least 3/2 and larger.

While there are a few interesting options I have struggled to properly identify which of these options makes the most sense. Do I go with some hybrid creatures that have a landwalk ability tacked on, or do I go a more traditional route to grab evasive beaters and large dudes with a drawback? With trying to keep the monocolor choices so tight the hybrid seem like a fair compromise, but there is real fat available in monocolor picks. I was considering cutting hybrid already; would swapping in these slightly evasive beaters be enough?

The problem is two fold: green has a fair monopoly on the fat already in the cube (not counting the queued up Scaled Wurm that I have set aside) and black (with an exception of a card or two in white) has the monopoly on cards that can outright kill big, dumb fatties. A few cards that should be added, like Radiant's Judgment or Pendrell Flux, will help alleviate some of the issue but having general access to fatties across all colors, though not necessarily equally, is important as well.

More thought, and some better player's opinions, will be required to effectively sort this out.

Initial Testing; Initial Reponse

I was able to snake getting a four-man draft off this weekend and it was to mixed, but positive, results.

Mana fixing is plenty and decent which yielded decks that were all running at least three colors, one with a fourth as a splash, and having access to all five colors was easy (at least for the deck that dropped a 5/5 Skyreach Manta all the time). The downsides were that it felt a little "trick heavy" and light on creatures, two interrelated problems that will be corrected as adjustments are made.

Ultimately, as I make additional changes (like some sexy additions I mention in the forum thread over at MTGSalvation) and cuts (most likely starting with some more hybrid cards and touching on artifacts again) this will be tightened up and become significantly more fun: fun being the one other things that everyone agreed this was.

The Cube is Online!

The initial draft of the cube is now posted at MTGSalvation, in this forum thread.

Additional updates to come next week as I work to generate an Excel file which will detail so much more information. Any comments, questions, and suggestions are more then welcome!

Revised Totals: The PMC is Assembled for Testing

In my quest to include as much multicolor goodness in the cube, a little too much got in. After looking over some of my initial selections I found 5 gold and 5 hybrid cards that were very suspect inclusions and, along with a few artifacts and lands, I was able to cut back before finalizing the monocolor choices. Here is the general breakdown of the cube:

• 100 Gold
• 40 Hybrid
• 64 Artifact
• 41 Land
• 35 Each Color

This yields a final cube total of 420. While I don't have a stoner joke for you (though I wish I did) I will say that the cube needs some serious play testing in changes. Each color takes it's core element to a hard extreme:

• White has a lot of creatures that either tap other creatures or are very efficient in combat (first strike, flying, vigilence, protection, etc)
• Blue has a lot of card draw, bounce, and counter spells (most of which are cantrips in of themselves)
• Black has a lot of removal and graveyard recursion effects
• Red has a lot of burn and artifact destruction
• Green has land fetching spells and several "big, dumb creatures"

What worries me is that in order to prevent temptation to run an effectively monocolor deck with a small splash on the side I pushed the monocolor concepts too far and haven't included enough creatures overall. That said, protection is a very strong keyword that White has a lot of, Blue looks like it will be drawing and extra card every turn or so, Black doesn't have any significant creatures but an alarming selection of removal (at least 10 or so out of 35 cards) and Red has a similar situation with burn (again, around 10 or so), and Green really has the biggest creatures by far.

Will these concepts work well together? Will the abundance of removal and burn encourage more splashes of Red and Black or allow an absurd Black/Red deck with an overabundance of spells that punish their opponent's creatures? Is protection, despite being included for every color atleast through the two cycles from Invasion and Conflux, too much to handle? Are big, dumb creatures too much for Blue, Red, or White to handle properly?

I'll have a link to the cube posted next as well as a spreadsheet documenting every card and providing some concise breakdowns.

Preliminary Totals

105 Gold Cards
45 Hybrid Cards
67 Artifacts
43 Lands

The non-monocolor total is 260. Clearly, this presents a problem since I was originally looking at a total of 40 for each color, yielding 200 monocolored cards which in turn would create a cube of 460 cards. While 460 isn't a bad number to get to, it is significantly more than my target of 400 cards. This leaves me with only a few options:

• Cut the monocolored target down from 40 to 30
• Cut some of the cards currently pulled from non-monocolored selections
• Buy more sleeves for my cube

While just sleeving up for cards may be the easiest that fact that I'm overbooked in multicolor and hybrid cards leads me to believe I can cut from the 150 I have, as well as cut some from the artifact and lands totals.

I'll take a look at some of the more questionable selections and come back fresh at this later.

Multicolor Playables

I finished weeding through all of the multicolor commons Magic has to offer and found a disheartening fact slam home: Red and Blue, the color pair, has the worst selection of cards available and many don't really register on the scale of playable cards. While older cards, like Quicksilver Dagger and Razorfin Hunter, make excellent picks, newer cards simply don't fall into greatness. And off-color abilities, like the kicker on Jilt and activated ability on Torch Drake, make up for some of this shortfall of useful Red and Blue interaction they don't replace a multicolor color by any stretch.

Hybrid Red/Blue doesn't look very promising either.

However, there is an abundance of great gold cards in Green and Black, and Black and White. It was very strange to look at cards and see that I couldn't fit them all in without putting into the cube some truly terrible picks.

All said, I squeezed off a multicolor card total of 105. If I can fill in 15 or 20 hybrid cards I feel confident that I'll have adequate color variety.

The Pauper Multicolor Cube Challenge

Welcome to the PMC Challenge, soon to be serving the greater Washington D.C. Metro Area. A brief introduction would be in order here:

I'm a mostly unsuccessful Magic: The Gathering player with a penchant for creating self-defeating deck concepts. I've tried my hand (read: experienced directly) at tournament, Limited , casual, and multiplayer formats. I've created far too many decks that were completely forgettable. Currently, I focus my efforts at writing about Magic as well as learning more about the finer workings of game as a whole.

Here is where this blog comes into play. After experiencing two great cubes I decided to work at creating one myself. While the astute (and spiteful) would be quick to quip "You're not qualified to create a cube if you aren't successful at Magic now." I must impress upon you that the process of creating a cube invariably involves the input and play testing of various players; the better the players the better the cube becomes.

I've noticed that "Powered/Unpowered Cubes" are far and away the most popular. This is perfectly sensible since so few of us have experienced the entire breadth of Magic's history and powerful cards. Themed cubes, like Tribal, "Peasant" (restricted to commons and uncommons), and "French" (pure democratic voting on cube changes, leading to surges/collapses in the power of certain strategies) make up the bulk of what else is out there. Two concepts jump at me when I create decks: Pauper (decks created strictly from all common cards) and multicolor (as well as it's bastard step-cousin Hybrid). Naturally, after seeing and experiencing the fun of cubes it crossed my mind to create on myself using these two pet concepts.

The Pauper Multicolor Cube Challenge was born in February 2009.

While the release of Conflux may have kicked my brain into motion I realized very quickly that my dream was a false hope. There wasn't enough true multicolor depth to warrant it as the central focus of a cube. Invasion, Ravnica, Shadowmoor, and Alara blocks give a lot of tools but it wasn't until Alara Reborn was released that the power, range, and availability of gold cards reached what I felt was a critical mass.

It would be pretty easy, and lame, to just grab every gold common, matching commons from the aforementioned blocks, a few other artifacts and lands, and roll them up into a cube. I stopped myself from doing this and began to sift through some data from other cubes. The local "commons/uncommons" cube provided great insight into commons that work at a greater power level than one would anticipate. Pure, unadulterated Limited play should be the primary tuning goal for a pauper cube; without broken rares and the support of broken and more effective uncommons, commons naturally lend themselves for Limited (the environment they see the most and are designed for) and it was something I wanted to get better at. I can't afford multiple drafts per week, but if my obsession for keeping play sets of cards could supplement this instead I would be just as pleased.

While multicolor is an obvious theme many people can easily get on board with, the pauper aspect is the obvious question mark. Commons are generally cheaper then uncommons and rares (even for straight up foil pimp commons) and I have bucket loads of them. Scraping up the 400+ commons needed for a cube would be both possible and practical from my time and wallet's points of view.

So where do I go from here? Right now, I'm pulling together everything I can (in a list in no particular order):

• Card box and sleeves for upwards of 500 cards
• Foil versions of cards that are going into the initial build (that I own or can trade for)
• Developing my version of a "Design Handoff Document" outlining the cube in a neat package
  
• A test crew to work through a draft or two, providing feedback and criticism

I have the card box and sleeves. I have most of my foils (a platry amount) pulled and sleeved already. I have the document in a rough draft to be finalized as the cube is assembled and tested. And once the cube is assembled, I just need to get a test crew to try it out.

But first, and foremost, I need to assmble the cube. Once done, this all becomes much more interesting.