It's been a little while for me. Historic is in a weird place and Modern is the hotness so I haven't opened up Arena for the last few weeks. I also haven't played a ton of Modern on Modo though, either. Instead, I've been working on a custom cube and just finished it recently. This will be a pretty big departure from the normal content here, but I think it's interesting, at least.
This is the cube. It contains some real cards and some cards that I came up with on the program Magic Set Editor. It was really fun but also a lot of work, but I think it came out okay.
I think that here is where I clarify that I don't own any of the art on these cards and the original artists are listed on the artist line of the card. I'm not making any money off of this, it's purely for fun.
Every year my friends and I have a cube party for my birthday. In the past I've slid in copies of some of my own creations to the cube, but this time I kind of designed it from the ground up and then included the real cards that I thought would work well in it.
The format is set up so that players are incentivized to play the two-color combinations that I feel best complement each other, UW, UR, RG, GB, and BW. The mechanics of these color pairs complement each other pretty nicely, and also there are more dual lands and gold cards in those colors. However, you're not entirely confined to those colors. Mono color, three color or more, and the other five color pairs are totally fine but might be tougher to build.
White's primary mechanic in the set is Battalion. There are lots of early aggressive white creatures to go along with some stuff like this card, Dual Wielder. Also, Blue and Black are colors that excel at putting tokens into play to enable Battalion creatures, Black with its Uncover ability and Blue with Rebirth ability.
My hope was that lots of the cards that were homemade were cards that were pretty easy to get your head around, both on a micro and a macro scale. Dual Wielder is a grizzly bear with a small upside, so you don't have to spend a lot of time reading it if it's your first time seeing it, and also it's not too hard to conceptualize what kind of deck is going to want it. That's key for when players haven't seen the cards before (since they aren't real).
Blue's primary mechanic is Rebirth, which is kind of like Flashback except it just makes a 1/1 flying token. All of the colors have some Rebirth cards, but it's most present in Blue. It can be on any kind of card, not just creatures. The idea here is that the Rebirth tokens help out White's ability to turn on Battaltion, and Red's self-mill effects help you put Rebirth cards right into your graveyard.
Rebirth is an effect that's kind of playing with fire as far as a design goes, because it's repetitive and it turns the game into board stalls. It also has the potential to be very good, since you're just getting a lot of cardboard out of your spells. Not that there was really any development to this cube, but I would say that this was kind of fixed in development by adding in cards that happen to be good against 1/1 creatures. Stuff like Maelstrom Pulse and Goblin Chainwhirler can take out all the spirit tokens, and there are creatures with Menace and Protection from White and stuff to work around them. Rebirth also gave me the ability to amp up the power on some one-toughness creatures, like some great red and white 1 drops.
Black's primary mechanic is Uncover. It's a mechanic that I hoped would feel pretty black, as in you have to throw away resources to get a small board advantage. It's certainly aggressive and can lead to some busted starts, but it's not too breakable since it isn't repeatable and you're only discarding lands. It's not like you can pitch Griselbrand for value and then Reanimate it. Uncover helps out White by enabling Battalion, but also helps out Green by helping enable Threshold.
I think Uncover might be little underpowered, but I'm not sure anyone has totally figured it out, at least not during the two cube drafts I did this weekend. It certainly changes the way you have to play, when you have Uncover cards in your deck, and also changes how to build your deck. It requires you to have an aggressive slant to make use of the pressure the Zombie lays on, but it also requires you to have a high land count to make sure you can both cast your spells and get your Uncover bonus. But you also have this problem where you don't want to play any lands past your fourth or whatever, and so you aren't going to want to have a high curve, which makes your high land count a little weaker. It's definitely a tough nut to crack, but the potential is there.
Red's mechanic is self-mill creatures. It's not really for any reason for the creatures themselves, but rather it's kind of a more interesting way of flipping a coin and seeing if you get a bonus on attack. There's a little bit more you can do with the ability, like scrying to ensure you flip a land, or playing a high land count to help maximize your chances. The self mill is good at enabling Threshold and for flipping over Blue's Rebirth cards.
Similarly to Uncover, it makes you have to re-think how to build your land, like if you have seven of these creatures in your deck, are you supposed to go up to 19 or 20 land in your deck to maximize your chances of getting the bonus?
Green has cards with Threshold. It's a pretty simple concept, but the issue in execution for me was that most of the cards are cheap creatures that gain a small power and toughness boost. That makes it so that a real graveyard deck doesn't exist in the Threshold space, since it's not like you can spend your early turns casting Mulch and stuff and then win because your Grizzly Bears are 4/4s on turn 10 or whatever. Instead, you kind of need to find some sort of synergy with Green's partner colors Red and Black to fill up your graveyard while keeping pressure on.
I also threw in some special utility lands for Green, although there are lots of utility lands. The idea was that Uncover in Black and self-mill creatures in Red are asking you to have a higher land count, so getting some value out of those lands becomes a lot more necessary in those colors. I'll talk about changes I am thinking about making later, but adding a Tranquil Thicket might make sense.
The idea behind all of this is to make drafting a more interesting experience. Cube drafting in general has this problem, in my mind anyway, where some cards are only good in one deck and other cards are busted in every deck. Take, for instance, Brain Freeze. There's only one deck you can draft in a cube that's actually looking for Brain Freeze, so there's not a lot of tension there. If you're the only Storm drafter, you'll get it if it's opened. If there were more decks in the cube that utilized Brain Freeze, like a mill deck or a Dredge deck, then Brain Freeze would be a lot more interesting. Instead, it's a role player that goes in just one deck.
This cube has a lot of cards that are role players but go into multiple decks. That means that there's some tension whether or not you're going to pick up the role player cards you need, like Lizard Warrior would be perfect in your Blue/Red deck with lots of Rebirth, but another drafter might want it for their Red/Green Threshold deck, or even a plain old mono-red deck, so you have to weigh that differently than normal. Otherwise, we may as well just be handing out the High Tides and Brain Freezes to player A and the Reanimates and Griselbrands to player B and so on.
The other thing that makes this happen is that the role player cards are mostly just good, solid, workmanlike cards. Cheap-to-medium creatures, utility spells, card draw spells. These are cards that decks relying on synergy or just plain decks are going to be rounding out their builds with. Divination with Rebirth might not be the most busted thing in your cube deck, but it's going to be perfectly playable for lots of people, so they might snatch it up.
There are some other things that I added in to clean up the experience. For one, I added in a lot of ability to fix your draws. There are lots of cards that scry or can tutor up a land, there's lots of dual lands to fix your colors, and also you're kind of incentivized to play fewer colors and cheaper cards anyways. I also decided to be relatively safe with the power level of some of the homemade stuff. I put in some stuff like Ragavan and Jace the Mind Sculptor, so I think the best cards in the cube are not made by me. I don't think anything was totally busted.
Having said that, there are some changes I would make. First, I think Carnage Tyrant, Blood Baron of Vizkopa, and some other non-interactive stuff was not a ton of fun. I think I want to have some powerful high-drops like that are great when they resolve but are at least able to be interacted with. Hexproof and Shroud create a pretty helpless feeling, which isn't great when the goal is to have fun anyways.
I think we also need just a few more utility cards to deal with some problematic stuff. One or two more cards that deal with Planeswalkers, artifacts, enchantments. I also think that the green decks really weren't that good, so maybe some extra Threshold payoffs and utility lands would be nice, like Tranquil Thicket. And then maybe beyond that, one more good Burn spell that rounds out both the Red aggro decks and the control decks with red in them. Also, an extra graveyard hate card might be worth it, just in case it's needed.
What's nice is that if there's an effect I want but can't find the right card for it, I can just make it. Like, the first thing that comes to mind to replace Carnage Tyrant is just making a green Grave Titan, maybe it makes Wolves instead of Zombies but still has Deathtouch. That's still be pretty strong, maybe even moreso than Tyrant, but at least it's more fun than Tyrant, and accomplishes the goal I want for the cube.
This experience was really fun and led to some good times had by me and my friends. I'm excited to keep tinkering with it to try and make it as much fun as possible over time, now that the brunt of the work has been done. I'd suggest trying this for yourself, but it was actually a ton of work and if I wasn't a Magic player for 20 years and a game designer already, it might not have been that fruitful. But, if you listen to a bunch of Patrick Sullivan's monologues and rants, you have a pretty good head start on card design.
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Now that the cube experiment is over, I can focus on Modern in earnest. So far, I have a shell that I like, but I'm waiting to see where the format shakes out before I can do anything concrete. Right now, it's kind of the wild west. I'll be planning on streaming, blogging, and videoing when I get some time and am comfortable with a build. Thanks for reading.
