Brewing a Battle cube - ideas welcome.

[CleanBelwas]

Hi all,

I'm brewing a new cube to play with my playgroup based around the new Battle card type.

The idea is as follows:

It will be a 180 card cube designed to be drafted by my playgroup that typically has 3 or 4 players for a given draft.

Games will be multiplayer, like commander, but 20 starting life.

Before each game, we will randomly choose 9 of the 20 uncommon battles and put them on the battlefield.

Anyone can attack or defend any battle. For the purposes of cards that care about ownership, battles are everyones and no ones at all times. For example, if you played an Etched Host Doombringer, you could decide either option for the second ability for any one battle.

The themes of the cube are:
 - counter manipulation (e.g. Quarry Hauler, Clockspinning)
 - proliferation
 - messing with combat (e.g. tappers, Wing Shards, that kind of thing)
 - evasion at a cost (e.g. Daring Saboteur, Key to the City)
 - Battle specific synergies (e.g. Portent tracker, Volcanic Spite)
 - Poison

White - messes with plans. Taps attackers before they can attack, prevents damage.
Blue - sneaks through damage, proliferation to slow opponents plans
Black - kill stuff, remove counters without direct damage
Red - kill it with fire
Green - stomp stomp


To incentivise going for battles instead of just ignoring them, when a player defeats a battle, they get both sides of the effect. They get to do the initial ETB AND whatever the battle flips in to.

Additionally, a player can win the game by defeating a majority of the available battles (currently 5 with the basis of 9 battles flipped at the start, but this number could change with play testing).

Essentially, the idea is for games to have multiple avenues to victory. Kill your opponents, win a majority of the available battles, poison, might add in some mill too.

I've stuck some card ideas in a deck shown below. It's not exhaustive, but should give an idea of the sort of thing I want to achieve.

https://deckstats.net/decks/132604/3013832-battle-cube-wip

I want to avoid too many one shot cards (like Vampire Hexmage) and there will be absolutely no Aether Snap (even though I have a pack foil Darksteel version where the art really pops) but I feel that balancing across the colours might be an issue (white and green seem the least impactful from my initial scans of cards that can interact in interesting ways with counters and/or battles).

So, with all that in mind, what kinds of things would you like to see for this kind of cube? Are there any cards that scream out to you to be a good fit for this kind of thing? Any mechanics that would be good that I might have overlooked?

[robort]

Great concept to start with These are just suggestions white I came across Martyr for the Cause because it be great to defend battles and when it dies it could proliferate the battles after it dies. Red Kaleidoscorch does only 2 damage max but the flashback cost could do up to 5 damage if somehow someone is playing in all colors. Blue instant speed Frost Breath which taps 2 creatures and keeps them tapped for 1 turn.   Green Maulfist Revolutionary when it enters or dies it puts a counter on things. Ohhh boy just found this nice blue card Skyship Plunderer because it has evasion in flying, becomes an attacker (chipping at life totals) and will put a counter on a battle after combat.  These are for starters.. my belief that it is your cube because I could sit here all day sifting through skryfall just seeing what may or may not be cool/good for your cube.

[robort]

Don't know how much proliferate cards you are interested in but doing a skryfall search with the word proliferate that  ends up with 76 cards where the text includes “proliferate” and (the card is available on Paper).  Cards from MOM as well Etched Host Doombringer, Protocol Knight, Thrashing Frontliner, War-Trained Slasher, Portent Tracker, Rampaging Geoderm, Render Inert, Beamtown Beatstick, Lithomantic Barrage, Rankle and Torbran, Volcanic Spite, Nahiri's Warcrafting, Ayara, Widow of the Realm, Deeproot Wayfinder, and Kami of Whispered Hopes.

[WWolfe]

I think the proliferation portion is what would interest me most. Curious to see how this ends up.

Good luck!

[CleanBelwas]

Had the first go of the battle cube over the weekend. Reporting back with my initial findings.

- Concept was very fun.
- Battles always felt worth going for.
- Was interesting to have another axis to win on outside of combat damage.

Some observations and improvements I'm looking to make ahead of next time.

- Originally worked on the idea that winning 5 battles out of 9 was a victory. Quickly realised that was easy to make mathematically impossible so dropped it down to 4.

- Originally started the 9 battles on their normal starting counters. Next time will start them a little higher (probably base +2) and make it more difficult to add counters on (especially across multiple battles at a time) to help balance cards like Render Inert. One player played Render Inert on turn three and immediately claimed one "victory point" (the colloquial name we gave to winning a battle, 4 "victory points" = a win) and had a Serra Angel ready to go on turn 4. Partly this is because winning 4 battles is roughly the equivalent to doing 20 damage (as most start around 5) but unlike attacking life points directly, you get a tremendous amount of advantage for winning a battle compared to doing 5 or so damage to an opponent. This was somewhat negated by the nature of multiplayer, but starting the battles a little higher should help too. Which leads me on to:

- Needs more incentive to attack life totals too. Winning a battle or doing 5 to an opponent are basically the same for the attacker (short of the potential for more blockers), but the outcome is hugely different to the game state. Going to add in the cycle of curses that promote attacking opponents for upside (Curse of Disturbance et al) and add in some more effects that drain life totals when things happen. My life total was the only one that got into single figures (thanks to Prickle Faeries) and only then did people consider attacking me rather than battles. More incidental life loss could put in work.

- Burn was VERY strong. Need to limit this to less efficient burn spells. Probably just the ones that reference battles specifically.

- Proliferate was good. Repeatable proliferate on a stick where the only cost was mana was too good. Very easy to put battles out of reach. Will be limiting proliferate to one shot effects from spells or things where the cost is steep such as Plaguemaw Beast.

- Less gimmick creatures. I had originally included 4 copies of things like Medicine Runner and Quarry Hauler. These are fine, especially when I sure up whites Blink theme, but actually some decent utility creatures or just big dumb idiots with trample would probably be preferable. Colossal Dreadmaw can attack a battle pretty effectively and over the course of a game, is going to be more impactful than the one counter Quarry Hauler manipulated. I got too cute. Need to get less cute.

- More synergy with the back sides of the battles. One of the battles that was randomly selected cared about Transformed permanents. One card about creatures sharing creature types. These two got no interest what so ever. One that wasn't selected but could have been cares about number of artifacts, of which there weren't that many. Going back to the previous point, it's far more important to create synergies rather than cuteness. Deeper themes across the colours to ensure all battles have the potential to be good.


All of these take aways are fairly minor (and things I probably would have smoothed out better had I had more time before we had chance to try it the first time). The draft and gameplay was still super fun. It was really interesting to have a different axis to play the game on. Might even add in a few more axis like Mill and Poison if I can work them in without compromising the above points.

Once I've made the tweaks I want to make, I'll put together a proper list and share it here for those who are interested to take a look at and maybe suggest some ideas. If you like cubes / drafting, I'd recommend this "Battle cube" format. It was a lot of fun.

[robort]

If you are interested in keeping opponents to attack each other then how about just goad? For instance simple things like Komainu Battle Armor and Bloodthirsty Blade. They both do similar things but Komainu would force an opponents team to attack opponents instead of a battle and Bloodthirsty focuses on just a single creature to attack an opponent,

[robort]

I don't know if you want to use this but it is mana intensive but however if it isn't dealt with it could take over your battle cube. That card is Drakuseth, Maw of Flames. That is going to be a lot of damage to any targets.