The MagicHouse Cube: Introduction

Finally.

This is just a short general introduction to the MagicHouse Cube. Most of the actual discussion of card choices -- and lists of the cards in the Cube itself -- will be in separate posts for each color/multicolor/artifact/land.

To those unfamiliar with the concept of a Magic Cube, it is a set of cards -- usually somewhere between 550 and 800, in order to facilitate 8-man drafts -- with chosen singletons of cards throughout Magic's history.

Cubes often (if not always) have an overarching theme governing the cards chosen to be included. The most common theme -- popularized initially by now-Wizards employee Tom LaPille -- is the "best hits of Constructed". This means including ridiculous cards that have dominated past Constucted formats, as well as the staples that defined those same formats. This meant that you would often be presented with absurd draft choices -- Umezawa's Jitte versus Treachery, for example. This created an interesting and novel Limited/Constructed hybrid feeling to Cube drafting that made the format extremely popular around last Fall.

During this period of Cube popularity, Ben Peebles-Mundy, Steve Nagy, Kevin Ng and I decided to attempt to cobble together an exact duplicate of Tom's Cube for our own use. It involved a large number of proxies, as we didn't have a good collection of older cards, but it was a pretty impressive effort. The Cube sucked us all in for quite a while, leading to us favoring it over regular drafting when the format of the moment (Lorwyn) became stagnant.

This led to us questioning a number of Tom's inclusion, and a general desire to reduce the size of the Cube so as to make the experience more consistent (and get rid of a bunch of cards we deemed unnecessary or awful). We shaved off almost a hundred cards that we could agree no one particularly liked.

As such, the Cube format itself became stagnant. Ben and Steve in particular ended up drafting the same archetype every single time (G/B/x Rock and U/x control, respectively). I myself began to favor the Equipment-heavy Red and White aggro decks, mostly because the cards would always be there. It quickly became very predictable and boring.

Steve's Cube (it was considered his, as the majority of the cards in it were his) fell out of favor when Extended season came about, as it was pilfered for cards for our decks. By the time the season ended, Steve was graduating and moving away, and so I purchased the Cube from him, replacing most of his cards with my own copies and buying almost all the rest that were in the Cube.

As such, I became the owner of the now-monikered MagicHouse Cube, named after Ben, Kevin and I's residence last year, which housed five Magic players overall (Aaron Vanderbeek and Mike Patnik being the other two) and had Steve as a regular visitor.

My own opinion of the Cube is somewhat complex. I believe there are too many carbon-copies of Tom's Cube out there, and as such I wanted to give it a different spin. Steve had always been somewhat adverse to diverging too far from Tom's design, but I had no such reservations.

I saw my problems with Tom's Cube as follows:

• Little to no cohesion among a color's themes.
• Little to no balance consideration, especially with regards to redundancy.
• Very little support for some of Constructed's most popular decks (Suicide Black and black aggro in particular).
• Lack of support for Combo in general, from Reanimator to other two- or three-card combinations.
  
• Not enough color-combination "signals" through multicolored cards.

I decided to focus most on the first and last issues.

While I'm sure Tom put a good deal of thought into what cards to include, his criteria seemed to be more based on a card's history rather than its place among the rest of the cards in the Cube. Cards like Empyrial Armor were very good in their time, but in the context of the Cube are massively underwhelming and didn't really promote any interesting decks or combinations.

In addition, I thought Tom wasn't using his Multicolored slots well. I see the Multicolored cards as a way to define the strengths and weaknesses of a particular color combination. So U/W would have mostly controlling cards, while W/R would have almost exclusively aggressive cards. There are many color combinations -- G/B, B/R, U/G -- that could function as aggro or control, and so the cards for those combinations were the ones that could fit in either type of deck.

I also believed the colors were wildly imbalanced. White's cards were too evenly divided among aggro and control, Green was an unfocused mess, and Blue was simply absurd. The reason for Blue's dominance was that too many of its cards did the exact same things, and powerful things at that -- counterspelling, card drawing, card stealing. I decided to remove some of this redundancy and include other cards, especially creatures, that would fit into Blue's tendency towards control while simultaneously reducing its ridiculous consistency and creating the possibility of aggro decks with Blue as a support color (U/G and U/B in particular). White and Green still have major issues, which I will address in their particular sections, but hopefully I make some progress towards making them better.

Finally, I made a somewhat radical move to support Combo better -- the Snoopy card. Inspired when Mike Patnik sent me a utilities check with a sleeved Snoopy card, it allows the drafter to replace it with a single card from outside the pool of drafted cards. In a sense, it is a replacement for the Wishes, most of which have been major Constructed players, without the clunkiness of having to look through the Cube for a particular card every time a Wish is cast.

I think Snoopy is balanced for a number of reasons. First, it only allows the drafter to get a card from outside the pool of drafted cards -- so if you wanted to get Vedalken Shackles but someone had drafted it, you couldn't, even if it was just sitting in their sideboard. So, if you open Snoopy with a ridiculous bomb (such as the aformentioned Shackles), it becomes a huge risk to take it, as you're not 100% sure you'll get the card you're planning to.

Because of this restriction, I think that Snoopy serves more as a Combo catch-all rather than a general wild-card. Oftentimes a drafter will pick up half or a third of a powerful combo, of which many are incidentally in the Cube (among the most recent formats, Reveillark, Mirror Entity, Body Double, and Mulldrifter/Venser/Riftwing Cloudskate are all in there).

As a result of these changes, instead of a general "Best of Constructed" theme, I basically manifested the MagicHouse Cube as a "Best Archetypes of Constructed" theme. I also decided to personalize the Cube a little further, including some of my own favorite cards, that are certainly good cards but probably not quite the cards most would look at to include in the Cube.

So that's a general overview of the MagicHouse Cube. I'd post a list of the cards in it, but I haven't completely documented the current incarnation of the Cube, and I haven't had the opportunity to update the Cube for Eventide yet. I'll make these updates as I document and post the individual colors in the days to come, along with the idea behind each color's card choices and their place in the context of the Cube.

I'll start with White tomorrow, and hopefully get through the colors -- if not the whole Cube -- before Alara's release and the subsequent posts regarding the new Limited format.

~Andres

Return, and the sad state of StarCity.

It's been a hectic month, between moving into my new place in Pittsburgh, starting school, and a couple of other unexpected personal entanglements.

Now that things have settled down a bit, I'm getting back to focusing more on Magic and, subsequently, updating here.

Plans for the near future include finally writing up the MagicHouse Cube, some general Limited theory articles, and the formal introduction of my drafting blog, using Ben Peebles-Mundy's powerful new draft converter tool.

Speaking of Ben's draft converter, it has had a profound impact on the nature of Limited writing on StarCityGames.com, the subject of my last post -- and not really in a positive way.

First, the popular "Drafting with Rich" articles, where Rich Hoaen posts MODO draft walkthroughs with some minor commentary, returned after being eliminated due to a lack of a MODO 3.0 draft recorder/converter tool. This was an expected change, and at least put some Limited content on the website every day, even if Rich never likes talking about his drafts too much.

Citing the public's preference for learning about Limited through draft walkthroughs than articles, Craig Stevenson (editor of SCG) used his own conversion magicks to change the sole weekly Limited article -- Nick Eisel's "Limited Lessons" -- into a second "Drafting with..." daily article. The real reason behind this change is unclear; there's been a long-standing dissatisfaction with the quality of Nick's articles among the community, which I assume is due to his own lack of playing Magic since he moved away from Pittsburgh last fall. My personal opinion of the articles aside, it seems that this may have been the real reason behind the change, rather than a general dislike of Limited articles, especially since Ben's article on SSE Mono-Red this week was quite well-received.

This change has, however, catalyzed a number of interesting changes in the SCG Limited discourse.My initial hope for Drafting with Nick was that he would exemplify a different viewpoint than Rich.

One of the things I find most infuriating about SCG's Limited writing is that Rich Hoaen's decisions are almost never questioned. This absolute deference to Pro writers is more of a general problem with SCG readers, but it shows up more in Hoaen's forums than anywhere else.

Let's make this clear. Rich Hoaen is clearly very good at Magic (moreso in the past than now), almost certainly moreso than myself (reservations made only because I've never met or played against him, but certainly in terms of achievements he's way ahead).

However, this IN NO WAY limits my ability to disagree with and criticize his thoughts and picks in an objective fashion. Anyone who ever has so much deference to a Pro that they ignore their own thoughts is doing themselves a grand disservice. I'll go so far as to say that anyone who does such a thing is absolutely barring themselves from reaching the level of those they deify.

Rich Hoaen is not always right. He doesn't know some terrible secret that the common Magic lay-player is unaware of. His decisions can be analyzed just as easily as anyone's. Limited, unlike Constructed, is rarely predicated on subtle interactions and the metagame; draft picks are what they seem to be and pros should not escape scrutiny for their decisions in Limited merely BECAUSE they're pros.

Given this opinion, I was hoping that these two well-known drafters would clash in terms of style and philosophy.

Rich generally values consistency above all else; he took Karoos absurdly high in Ravnica block draft, and in the current format values cards like Silkbind Faerie -- which are always playable, and have a very low range of impact on the game (meaning not that it has little impact, but that its significant impact rarely varies from game to game) -- over incredibly strong, but inconsistent, cards.

Nick, on the other hand, is often willing to take risky cards to create a powerful deck. He drafts with the final product in mind much more so than Rich (and most drafters in general). He's very good at picking up small synergies among cards and crafting cohesive decks that most people wouldn't even consider, which is why he's been responsible for "creating" a number of Limited archetypes in past formats. On the negative side, though, he often takes "bad" cards over "good" cards, which I saw as a potential problem for his daily-walkthrough reception.

Instead, Nick's drafts have been simply awful. Perhaps it's his lack of having a real-life Magic group to play with on a consistent basis, or perhaps he's just playing a lot less Magic overall, but his first two weeks have resulted in drafts that are nothing short of baffling and embarassing. Instead of presenting a cohesive draft philosophy opposed to Rich's, he seems to waver between schools of thought within the drafts themselves. In one particular draft, he took Scuttlemutt over Ashenmoor Gouger -- a very Rich pick, as Scuttlemutt is a consistent card that will almost always make one's deck -- then takes Ember Gale third, citing his extreme preference for Red in the format.

If you value Red so highly and are willing to take Red cards over superior cards of other colors, why wouldn't you take one of the best possible cards for a Red deck over a completely marginal card in a Red deck (i.e. Scuttlemutt, whose mana acceleration is basically irrelevant in Red and whose size/cost ratio is subpar?)

It's decisions like these that have led to Nick being flamed (somewhat validly) in the forums. While there's always some idiot in those forums who doesn't understand what's going on and attempts to call Nick out on something he actually did right, there's been an immense amount of spot-on criticism in his forums.

Most infuriating about this whole situation, though, is that now Rich is basically a deity on the site and can do no wrong. The direct comparisons drawn between his drafts and Nick's on a daily basis have made even those willing to criticize him in the past genuflect before him in his own forums.

There's very little that can be done, unfortunately. Hopefully Nick gets more comfortable with the format or the nature of the drafts he should submit to SCG, and the field becomes a little more even and perhaps will even result in some valid discourse and comparison.

On the other hand, it makes me wish even more that there was someone -- anyone -- on the website writing about Limited theory, as there's now so much content on the site to analyze and no one taking advantage of it.

Next time -- since we're in the September lull, I'll take this opportunity to finally make posts on the MagicHouse Cube.