![]() ![]() I'm also increasingly inclined toward very broken cards that open up new strategies on their own, like Aluren or Doomsday. Likewise, the most recent version puts a heavy emphasis on multiple copies of workhorse cards that many drafters will want two Chromatic Star, two Faithless Looting, two Abundant Harvest, two Preordain, three copies of Lightning Bolt etc. Now decks are faster and more sharply-tuned, and so I've dramatically increased the volume and quantity of one- and zero-mana interaction available to keep the games tense. The second set of animating principles are a blueprint for my preferred style of archetype design: (a) high quality theme-adjacent glue cards, (b) stretching the themes across four or five colors, (c) some very high-power narrow cards encouraging specialization, and (d) cross-pollination across themes.Īs a result of building on these principles, some things have changed radically. The first set of animating principles focus on the individual engine components that I find so enjoyable in storm decks: (1) mana generation, (2) card advantage, and (3) pay-offs. But based on the experience hinted at above, now I've arrived at a set of animating principles that make the cube simultaneously more flexible for the deck-builder but also more streamlined in execution. Marionette Master needs the Dark Rituals and Chromatic Stars to be good, but it's casting the rituals and baubles that makes the game play enjoyable, not an instant kill by nugging them for 4 with each sacrificed artifact.Īs before, my new design still avoids midrange good-stuff piles, aggro is replaced by aggro-combo (no Goblin Guide or Savannah Lions), and control either needs a proactive plan or a prison lock (no Counterspell, no Jace). ![]() Fortunately, I've found that it's really the cheap, generically-strong cards that make a lot of the explosive spell-velocity game play possible anyway. The introduction of aggro-combo made cards like Marionnete Master even less viable and increased the demand for cheap removal. This style of deck typically had very low curve and a natural solution was to hybridize them into aggro-combo decks with the addition of a few more threats and powerful equipment like Umezawa's Jitte and Embercleave. I also found that some pure combo decks were a bit too durdle-y (even with the more clunky individual cards removed) - especially the eggs-y Red/White sacrifice and/or artifact decks. After sitting on two copies of Force of Will for a while and finding that zero-mana countermagic always felt fun in the environment, my stance on efficient removal changed. I quickly found myself aggressively cutting from the bottom of the power band and slowly but surely increasing the level of disruption to guarantee interactive games. It turns out that maintaining both Penny-Pincher-style expensive engines and explosive plays ([like Seething Song into Timetwister) created a fun but uneven gameplay experience. I envisioned creature decks winning without doing combat damage, so there was Kyren Negotiations and Intruder Alarm but no aggressive or midrange threats. Likewise, I wanted exciting expensive cards to have place to excel, which meant limiting the efficient disruption and removal. I wanted the control decks to try to lock the game out, so there was Lantern of Insight and Counterbalance but no Counterspell. These included Esper Eggs with Marionnette Master, Chromatic Star, Vedalken Archmage, and Second Sunrise Jund Elves with Glimpse of Nature and Llanowar Elves, but also Sneak Attack, Essence of the Wild, Yahenni, Undying Partisan, and Blood Artist and Artifact Madness with Dream Halls, double Circular Logic, Mycosynth Lattice, Reclamation Sage, and Memnarch. Before I had put together an actual list, I started with a handful of deck sketches. At a deeper level, the first list was built largely on Penny-Pincher principles with a pauper-inspired focus on slow and complicated engine assembly. At a surface level, whereas the original list had two of each of the OG moxen, now each player gets two moxen of their choice at the end of the draft. The implementation details have drifted considerably since the original thread. I've built the mission statement by example: I want a smooth, low-variance environment but subject to the constraint that you should still be able to draw 10 cards off Paradoxical Outcome to win game 1, draw 10 cards off Glimpse of Nature in game 2, but narrowly lose and go on to game 3. The environment is about explosive and velocity-centric gameplay - casting a lot of spells and drawing a lot of cards - with fast mana and a heavy emphasis on flexibility and creativity in deckbuilding. The big-picture goals have remained the same. I'm pushing a new version number of the Mox Cube. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |