Lands in Cube
Limited forum
Posted on May 12, 2016, 12:08 p.m. by Sai
Hi all
I have 25 Lands in my 360 Peasant cube.
I was thinking that it'd be an interesting idea to remove all the land cards from a cube and replace them with playable cards; and then after the drafting is complete, players could choose the lands they need for their deck.
For example, I would have a seperate pool where I'd have all the cubeable land cards Wizards have ever printed, and then players could rotassaire draft the lands they need.
It doesn't have to be rotassaire draft, it could be some other way.
What do you guys think of this
insertcleverid says... #3
Yeah, I can see a situation where 4 players draft 3-5 color control decks, then none of them get the mana base they need. If you keep the lands in the cube then they have a chance to read the signals and back off.
May 12, 2016 12:39 p.m.
It's not necessarily a bad idea, but you want to think about the implications before you pull the trigger.
Lands encourage multicolor builds which favor card synergy. Spell cubes lock players into specific color segments. Say your cube has a UW blink archetype; if you have a lot of mana fixing, players will regularly build a UW(x) deck, and you might see six or seven variations after a dozen drafts. No land means players are more likely to play it pure UW. There might be two, or perhaps three variations at most.
Lands in a cube reduce the effectiveness of sideboards. The logic is pretty simple; your decks will have a set ratio of lands to spells, so adding a land effectively takes a spell out of the sideboard because that land counts toward your land total, not your spell total. Granted, it's kinda unusual for cubes to produce functional sideboards, but if that's something you want, drop the lands.
Am I reading your post correctly that you intend to have a main draft for spells and a rotisserie draft for lands? That's an interesting idea. It increases the complexity of running the cube, but not unbearably so, and will probably work, but there's no reason to limit yourself to pre-designed mechanics.
My next cube will be an achievement commander cube; players get achievement points they can use the next time they play; you bid on commanders and walkers between packs with your achievement point pool (50 if you've not played before). Achievements are also picked to be hard to do, so players have goals to shoot for besides just winning the game, and will probably want to keep their decks together for a few game days to grind for achievements rather than break them down and redraft every time.
May 12, 2016 5:33 p.m.
@Egann, Yeah, you read correctly.
Well, when making cubes, I often feel like have to suppress the land count to have only the necessities, meaning that it feels like lands are fillers, but of course, I realized that they're not.
So if the lands were in a secondary draft pool, this way you wouldn't have to stress about what lands to cut when you could have them all there. But then again, you could think the same way about your main draft pool aswell.
And also, it would mean that you could reduce the number of cards in the main draft pool (e.g. 360 cube to 280-300 cards).
So, I suppose having two drafts would probably make things unnecessarily complicated pretty fast.
But yeah, ty for the comments. You have a good logic in your thoughts Egann. The achievement commander cube seems intriguing.
EmblemMan says... #2
I prefer just drafting them because its important to know when to pick a card and a land for your deck. Plus then everyone will have insane mana bases.
May 12, 2016 12:14 p.m.