Color-Based Archetypes in Twobert Design

Ryan Overturf breaks down how to design a 180-card environment along color lines, seeding five explicit archetypal lanes for four-player drafts. 

Transcript

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What's up gamers? Welcome back to 180MTG. My name is Ryan Overturf, and this week I'm going to be talking about how you can use color-based archetypes to design tuberts, 180 card cubes. Specifically, I'm focusing on using archetypal lines on color pairs or individual colors to support archetypes in that cube environment, and how you can draw on these color lines to support a number of archetypes for four-player drafts. I've put out a number of pieces to this point talking about using a macro archetype for tuberts, which is to say that every card in the cube falls into one generalized archetype. For the original recipe, tuberts, that's just a mid-range cube where all of the cards you would justifiably put in a mid-range deck, you could skew more aggressively or more controlling. But generally every card in that environment kind of plays in the same space. Because I know that if you make a 180-card environment, about one thing, you can construct a play environment where all the cards are appealing, and that environment will be replayable, at least partly because any of the cards play well with any of the other cards, and this makes the draft lanes flexible, which gives players a lot of agency from draft to draft. So even though you don't see decks in the same environment doing radically different things, you're not going to have combo archetypes that come out of the blue. There's less emergent synergy in this kind of environment. But since all the cards play with all the other cards, the decks and play experience will still vary pretty wildly from draft to draft, game to game, because you have a lot of agency in both drafting and sideboarding and deck construction, just a lot of moving parts that keeps the format fresh, but it is a bit different from what a lot of designers and players are used to for when it comes to example 540 card cubes, which tend to jam a lot more archetypes into the spread. And depending on your baseline using even macro archetypes, you can see more extreme different kinds of decks within a cube. You know, the original recipe tubert, yeah, that's like a lot of mid-range stuff going up and down the curve. But if you look at the artifact tubert as an example, this is a cube that largely is just based on every pack having a very high representation of artifacts and a lot of artifact synergies. This enables you to explore very aggressive arcbound ravager kind of modular decks, affinity decks, but then also leave space for things like Correct Clan Ironworks combo. So you can use different macro archetypes to have a broader range of micro archetypes within an environment, but today I'm talking about something a little bit different than that. Today I want to talk about using individual colors and color combinations as ways to explore seeding 5 explicit archetypes in an 180-card cube environment. First, let's set the scene a little bit, look at the landscape for both Retail Limited and a lot of the history and mainstream thoughts about Cube. If you're a fan of Retail Limited, you know that very commonly when a new set comes out, you'll get your breakdown of the seeded archetypes. In recent years, you would get every two-color pair, so ten different archetypes, which makes a lot of sense for an eight-player draft, a little bit of wiggle room, some different space to explore there. And in fact, this kind of breakdown is how the digital cubes are still communicated to players. They will talk about the different archetypes seeded into environment, very commonly broken down on those color lines. The blue-white deck, for example, would be a blink kind of thing, red-black will be sacrifice, whatever the archetype is, it's very common where cubes are communicated to players the same way as retail limited, where there are very explicit archetypes, often divided on color lines. And some of the math of that is that if you have eight different players and ten possible archetypes kind of at a minimum, there's usually more going on. I mean, there's always more going on than just the explicit color pairs and those archetypes, just kind of by the way that magic works, but at least having that minimum kind of guarantees there's this much space to explore. And on that note, I've always been a little archetype radical in my designs. I remember when I pitched the Grixis cube for Magic Online, there was concern expressed over whether a three-color cube could have enough archetypes to support an eight-player draft, where my perspective, I mean, this was just a cube that I was already playing regularly. If all of the cards are playable and you give players the ability to play them and they're interchangeable in some capacity and they're appealing without being too parasitic, you don't actually have to think about archetypes too much because players will just happily assemble a stack of cards, and some decks will be stronger or weaker than others. The more focused a player is, the stronger their deck tends to be. But as long as the cards are appealing and serve some kind of function, I've never really lost sleep over making sure that I had enough archetypes explicitly seated in my cubes. That said, seated archetypes are the way a lot of players engage with different draft environments. It's an easy way to make sense of an environment, and when you are designing a cube, it is a very useful tool to break things down, even if you're not saying, alright, what is my blue-white archetype? At least saying, Do my blue-white cards play together and how do they play together? Which you can be more loose or more rigid depending on your preferences, but at least thinking on what a two-color deck looks like, whether it's a very explicit archetype or not, is a useful way to think about a cube. And when it's come to tuberts, my 180 card cube environments, I'm often asked about what the archetypes are, and so that's kind of put some pressure on me to kind of define this framework of macro archetypes, but you still get people approaching something like the original recipe tubert and asking about 10 different archetypes. What do all the different two-color pairs do? And there is texture there. If you look at the blue-white gold cards, No More Lies, Supreme Verdict, Teferi Hero of Dominaria, you're going to be happy to play all of these cards in a blue-white control style deck. So you could say blue-white control is the archetype here, but that's actually not my design goal or intent, or really what this cube is about at all. When it comes to drafting for two players, and today I'm focusing a lot more on four players, it is really difficult to seed ten archetypes if you want to do an archetype for every two-color pair, unless there is a tremendous amount of overlap that is going to be something where you just have parasitic parts or things that don't appeal from draft to draft, things that line up the same way from draft to draft. 10 archetypes is just too many to explicitly seed for four players. So my focus in the original SOP Tube, while I have mana fixing and my intentions with the design, I generally find that this cube supports players playing three-color decks, but that's not broken down by the gold cards or two-color archetypes. It's actually largely informed by that design principle where I designed every individual color like a 23 card deck. So all the white cards play very well with all the white cards. And while it's always been true, recently I've come to better understand that the archetypal lines in the original Recipe Two Bert are actually just drawn along those five monocolor decks. Base white is an archetype, base blue is an archetype, base black, base red, base green. Every color is sort of doing something a little bit more in its own space. The color pie and just choosing cards that do what these colors do really heavily informs that. White largely plays to the battlefield. It doesn't have the most efficient options at every point of the curve, but it's kind of a jack of all trades, which lets it blend really well with the other colors. Blue has heavily permissive elements and card selection. Black is kind of the classic tap out control deck, but then it also does have some very efficient rates for being aggressive there as well, some cheap cards that can get you going early. Red has burn as kind of the chief thing in its area of the color pie. Green has some mana acceleration, it's the only color with a seven drop. So every color is doing something kind of specific, and there is a little bit of wiggle room. The colors get to do kind of a wider range of things, and in the areas where they have their greatest strengths, blue is going to have these counter spells, no other color has counter spells, but white has a good selection of flash things, and that naturally allows them to overlap. No more lies is going to play really well, subsidize with what both blue and white are doing. Blue and white can leverage the sweeper with Supreme Verdict, but this is not the intention there to draft a blue-white deck. I'm not trying to give you ten archetypes for four players. There's really five archetypes here, and then the overlap of how the colors can play together is where players are allowed to explore, and having five archetypes just translates much better to four players drafting than trying to explicitly have ten archetypes. And some of the color pairs are louder than others in the original recipe tuber. If you look at Simic, I think this is kind of the most prescriptive gross spiral hydroid crisis. This is telling you accelerate your mana, be a mana ramp style deck. But blue-green mana ramp does have sort of an explicit weakness where you have a lot of difficulty interacting on the battlefield. Little bit of bounce going on in blue, a little bit of fight going on in green, but you'll often want to go into a third color for some kind of removal, or just to have the best options to ramp into. So even where it does get more prescriptive, there's still a lot to explore as a player in ironing out what you want your deck to do in an individual draft. And in some other spots, I use hybrid mana or other ways that aren't fully gold to allow even more flexibility. For example, in Celestnia, two of the three green white gold cards are just hybrid cards, figure of fable and kitchen finx. You can play these in mono white, mono green, you can play these in decks that are only playing one of those two colors. Figure of Fable can take advantage of mana acceleration, kitchen finx is a nice card to block for planeswalkers, or you can often use it as a sideboard card against aggressive decks. But kind of what I'm getting at though, there's definitely not an explicit Celestnia deck. Nothing about this cube tells you, alright, here's what a green-white deck looks like. This is what you want to do when you're drafting green and white. There's just more flexible options there. Really like damn here in the Orzob section. It can be black, black, destroy target creature, it can be white-white to destroy all creatures. And I didn't want to just put Wrath of God in the white column because white plays so many creatures. Oftentimes it's kind of awkward to put Wrath of God in your white deck, but it is kind of strong in this environment. It's useful to have that around. Sometimes the battlefields can get very wide. There's decks that are going to want that kind of effect, and this is more of a card that it will be specifically at its strongest in an Orzov deck where you have options for both modes, but this is largely there as just a day of judgment, just a sweeper effect that sometimes you can just play as damn, and then of course it's at its best when you can use both modes, but it's not an Orzov card, it's not telling you to draft black-white. There just isn't room for 10 two-color archetypes for four-player drafts, and having some stuff that's kind of flexible, either being two colors that incentivizes or asks you to play a third color, or just using gold slots for more flexible things, stuff in the hybrid mana space, where it's kind of more mono-colored and if it can play in both colors in different ways, that is pretty appealing as well, and very useful for making four-player drafts different from draft to draft game to game. And looking at all five colors in the original Recipe Tube as sort of decks has always been the found one of the foundational aspects of that design, but it's only recently that I've really started to think about those as being archetypal lines, which was really firmed by reading Corey Bowen's thoughts on the design work for Marvel Spider-Man. It really kind of firmed a lot of my thoughts here, and I think will allow me to communicate this to more different kinds of designs in the Two Bird space. Setting aside everything else about the set, Spider-Man was designed for four-player pick two drafts. That's the idea of this small set here, and one of the ways that they facilitate this being a draftable and approachable environment for four players is there were five seeded archetypes on two color aligns. So every allied color pair was one of the five seeded archetypes, so there was a higher representation of two color cards for the allied colors versus the enemy colors that did not have very much. And then there's a mana fixing land at common for all of the allied colors, and the idea is there's kind of five archetypes there for four players to approach. Spider-Man, of course, not the first set to ever do allied colors to ever do five color pairs, but it is the first set that was specifically designed with four-player drafts in mind, and there are a few things worth highlighting that the set did well. Uh heavy use of hybrid mana. I was just talking about how that's really useful in the original recipe tubert. Having hybrid mana allows you to play a little bit more with color, even though there's five two-color pairs, you do get a little bit of ability to explore a little bit more. I'm not saying that Spider-Man specifically was the most flexible draft environment. Uh, it's one that I played probably more than most people, and yeah, you do run and run out of steam with it. You are largely playing these two-color archetypes, but hybrid mana as a tool was definitely they were on the right track with that. And when it comes to our own cube designs, we can take the ball and run even further with that. And something that I also think was very cool and did lend what replayability and room to explore the Spider-Man set had was despite having five explicit two-color themes, it was also both one five-color card and a cycle of enemy color rares. One of them was kind of a dud. The blue-green rare in the set was not, it was kind of a non-starter for limited, but the Orzov rare, uh, the spot is just like this five mana kind of removal spell, kind of recursive spell stapled to a creature. If you opened the black-white rare, there were strong incentives to explore drafting Orzov, even though it's a two-color set. And that is kind of similar to something I have going on in the original recipe tuberc. When you open Teferi Hero of Dominaria, it's a really strong blue-white card. You're gonna be forced to draft blue-white, and a lot of the cube is about exploring individual colors and how they combine. So a gold card, I I often actually value a lot of the gold cards just lower than monocolored cards in the environment and mana fixing lands higher than gold cards. But importantly, even though the lanes are driven on monocolors, the gold cards can give you something that you can attach to. If you see them early, you can definitely plan around being in that lane. And even though it's not a cube that is trying to push 10 two-color pairs, there are tools and signals that'll say this is a really strong thing to anchor you to something that is not the most direct, explicitly supported archetypes. So it's a monocolor-driven environment. But that said, the gold cards are still tools, they are still options to anchor you to something, even though the support for that is not as strong. And because it's just something that is present but not super pushed, that is something that's going to be different draft to draft because you open them earlier or later in the draft, you have different signals, and that allows a lot more fluidity from draft to draft or player to player. And right now, with the standard magic releases, drafting with four-player drafts, pick two drafts in mind is very much the direction that they're going here. Spider-Man and TMNT very explicitly for this purpose, but then also with Lorwin Eclipsed, that was a set that used five color combinations and strongly seeded five archetypes. And Lorwin is a set that did get drafted with eight players a lot. It was a larger set, so unlike Spider-Man and TMNT, it was more amenable to being drafted with eight players. And again, we have seen five color combinations supported throughout a lot of the history of magic. Most sets just kind of had allied colors going on if they did gold at all for a very long time. And even it just with general magic, you can argue that a lot of magic sets are doing the every mono color is doing its own thing as well for many of magic sets. But then Lorewin has these five explicit archetypes, and I think it ran into some trouble with eight-player drafts, but it wasn't any fault of doing five two-color pairs. Again, that's a lot of the history of magic. I think there was a lot of parasitic stuff happening with Lorwin. I never drafted the set, but I have heard that black-green elves is kind of the strongest thing going on. Typal sets do suffer a lot where typal cards play specifically with other typo cards, and if you don't have the synergy, some of the strongest cards do fall pretty flat. And so it's maybe not the best example of why five two-color pairs is something worth exploring because of how parasitic typal sets can be. Actually, it reminds me of a project that I worked on for a little bit and ended up scrapping one of the early tubert designs I sketched out. I wanted to do elves versus goblins, kind of like a dual deck thing, and see how that could play out for a draft environment for two players. And the issue is that cards that play well in elf decks don't play well in goblin decks, and vice versa. And there's some space you can explore. There's stuff like changelings that can support elves or goblins, and mask wood Nexus that really loudly does that by making all of your creatures every creature type, or a card like Conspiracy that makes all your creatures in every zone every creature type. But even then, it kind of works out that the strong payoffs are still just one of those creature types. Muxis is a goblin that cares about goblins, and so there's not a lot of incentive to do anything but the most straightforward, most parasitic thing. So that's something where Typal suffers, it's something where Lorwin suffers. But I am certain that Strixhaven, the return to Strixhaven coming up here, is gonna be broken up on the five school lines, where you're going to have the five enemy color pairs representing the five schools of magic on Strixhaven. And that's something that did work for the eight-player draft the last time we went to Strixhaven, and I think that that's gonna work better for eight-player drafts and is going to work very well for four-player drafts. I'm sure they're going to do one of those draft night products that is enough boosters for a four-player pick two draft with Strixhaven and the five two-color enemy color driven archetypes there. If you're interested in four-player retail draft environments, again, not knowing the cards, the set's not out yet. My expectations for that being a fun and replayable four-player draft environment are pretty high. So now with a significant background established, I want to talk about the different ways on color lines you can break a tubert down into five color-driven archetypes, be they individual colors or color pairs, and how that can work, what the challenges are and what the rewards are for exploring five color-based archetypes in this way. The one I've already talked about, the original recipe tubert, is using every mono color as sort of a base for archetypes that gives you five colors to explore for four players, a lot of wiggle room. This one works great. This has been the template for me for 180 card cube designs. The tempo tubert very much plays in the same space where every individual color is doing something kind of specific. Red is kind of a prowess slant, white is a little bit more grindy on the battlefield, blue gives you a lot of card selection. Every car, every color is kind of doing something specific, and then you can choose how you want to mix and match the five colors in a draft. And if you play magic at all, you're already intimately familiar with the five colors. There's nothing that really needs to be communicated here. You can use gold cards either in that hybrid space to be very flexible. You can even have a small sampling of very loud gold cards that while you are not specifically pushing a lot of two-color archetypes, will give players something to latch onto in a two-color space. And it's really easy to go up to three colors with some decent mana fixing in the spread. The monocolor base, it is just really easy to approach and understand. That is one of the strongest aspects of the original recipe tubert, and really why I do endorse the five monocolor design with whatever your idea is, as long as it touches on all five colors. This is a really good baseline for designing a two and four player draft environment. So the monocolor base, it is something that does just work very well and it really does not require very hard work on your end. The next step up is using two-color pairs as a base, which is a little bit more challenging. It can require additional communication. If you want to focus in on five two-color pairs and kind of run with that using five archetypes for four players, that will often mean using allied or enemy colors. Those are very clear lines, they have the right overlap where you can easily end up in a three color pair because we know about wedge or shard mana. You can combine Gruel and Celestnia, and you just have the same number of overlaps for every two color pair if you stick to enemy and ally. If you just want to pick and choose five of your favorite two color pairs, you can do that as well. But that's going to require more communication, enemy ally, that's things that most players will be familiar with or can understand pretty easily. But then if you're going to pick and choose your own two-color pairs, it can get a little bit more messy. Not say it's impossible, but it's just more difficult. There's also some issues just generally with curation. If you focus on five two-color pairs, what do you want to do with the unsupported two-color pairs? Are you going to have the same amount of mana fixing? Are you going to have gold colors in the unrepresented two-color pairs? I think that it is appealing and it can add some replayability, some space to explore to do things like Spider-Man does to have a really strong card in the under or less supported two-color pairs, but it's something that you do want to be mindful of how you curate that if you go down that road. And I want to be clear that I'm not saying doing all ten two-color pairs is a full non-starter. I do just think that you're going to have a lot of cards that are just totally unappealing from draft to draft. Unless you have very strong mana fixing, that means you're kind of not doing a two-color thing anyway. You're moving into the three, four, five-color space. But if you want to loudly have archetypes in all ten two-color pairs, you definitely need to be looking at overlaps just so more of the cards theoretically play in more of the drafts. There's some very straightforward ways to do this in magic. I think that Mardu really naturally, all three of the two color combinations there naturally play well together in a lot of cube space. Red, black, and black-white are both very strong sacrifice support color pairs, but and white-red can be like go-wide tokens. It always tends to be creature-based, or very commonly, Boros is creature-based, so it naturally plays decently in the sacrifice space just by virtue of giving you creatures to sacrifice, and sacrifice decks being kind of aggressively slanted and creature focused. The closest thing that I have to a 180 card environment that touches on every two-color pair is the tundra. I do have a firmly gold card and three copies of that for every two-color pair. That's my environment that breaks singleton as three or six copies of every card. And with the exception of Sedge Sliver, every gold card in the Tundra is true gold. There's no hybrid there. And Sedge Sliver also is kind of weak if you don't control the swamp. It's just a gray ogre if you don't control the swamp. So it is pretty firmly a Rakdos card as well. And there's two things that I do to finesse having the 10 two-color pairs here. The first is that some of these are just strong two-color cards. Detention sphere, Maelstrom Pulse, those are just strong removal spells. They don't say anything other than, hey, here's a strong card, you need two colors to cast it. They're not really pushing you in the direction of an archetype. So having strong gold cards that push you into a color pair that is kind of just like, here's a good removal spell, and especially if it can play in a controlling or an aggressive deck, or in some context, a combo deck as well, just having strong interaction in gold can be a fine way to have kind of softer two-color archetype things or pushing you towards one of the two color pairs in a way where maybe you're more incentivized to splash, or it's not fully an archetype, so it's less parasitic. And then overlap is another really important thing going on here. I talked about Mardu being a great shard for some overlap, and in the Tundra, four of my different two-color pairs are just energy cards. I have Voltaic Brawler, Roller Virtuoso, Conduit Goblin, Rogue Refiner. These cards can play in different kinds of decks. It's pretty unlikely you're going to be a four-color deck, so like the Conduit Goblin and the Rogue Refiners are very unlikely to be in the same deck, but they all play in similar space, and so there's kind of a macro archetype that while there are strong incentives to be some two-color pair or to be able to cast a gold card in a two-color pair, there is overlap available if you end up in a three-color space, and so the cards can play well together. For my sensibilities as a cube curator and drafter, the monocolor base is a lot more flexible than the two-color base. But by all means, if there is something that you want to express or explore in the two-color base, there's absolutely room here, especially if you're playing a little bit safe in the allied or enemy color space there. You do want to be mindful that two colors with four players, you're very commonly going to see players going into three colors, and that is something you can already kind of incentivize with the monocolor base. So just be mindful with what you're doing if you want to really push two color archetypes. It's very much possible, it is just more challenging than the monocolor base, in my experience. Then if you're an Alara, Tarkir, or Nuka Penna fan, you can look at a three-color base. Every three-color set in Magic's history has been broken down on wedge or shard lines. These are firmly enemy and ally color pairs. The way any three-color combination works, you're gonna have two ally colors and one enemy color, or two enemy colors and one ally color, and they fully follow those lines. So Naya, for example, is an allied shard because red and green are allies, white and green and allies, but then red and white are enemies. So the combination of two friendly, one enemy is what makes it allied, two enemy, one friendly. Soltai, for example, would be enemy because blue and black are allies, but black and green and green and blue are both enemies. Much like with two colors, I'm sure you could mix and match your favorite wedge and shard, but honestly, it gives me a little bit of a headache to even think about that. But your cube, your rules, whatever you want to do. Personally, if I see a Sol Tyland and a Nia land in the same pack, I'm assuming this is a five-color environment, and I'm not going to think about it too much. And that is kind of where you start to run into trouble, or maybe not trouble, it's just what you want to do. Once you have a three-color base, it's really difficult to do explicit three-color without just having a five-color environment. And this is more true the more you use actually fully gold three-color cards. Siege Rhino is of course going to play in an absan deck, but if I give you fetches and fetchable duels, if I give you lands that tap for three colors, if I give you five color lands, what's the incentive to actually stop at Ab San? And that's part of why I do like keeping it two, five, three-color pairs here, either wedges or shards. If you want to do five color, great. If you want to have three color gold cards, three and four five color lands, and have players play three, four, five colors, more often four and five colors, by all means, you can certainly do that. We're just not talking about a five archetype base anymore. We're talking about a one archetype base of five color. Once you go down the three-color route, I think there's actually a lot of pressure to have a good sampling of mono color cards and for your monocolor cards to support synergies that move into your three-color lanes. Because when you have the fully three-colored cards, they're only going to play in a specific three-color deck if you're going to keep it to three colors, or they are just strong options if they're individually powerful for four and five color decks. And then you can look at two color cards if you're trying to latch onto three-color. But the more two-color cards you have, the more you're going to end up in space, even if you keep it to all allies. If I have Celestia cards and those are going to feed you into either Bant or Naya, there's also Demir cards that can feed you into Esper or Grixis, but the Demir cards and the Celestia cards can't go in the same deck, right? So we're already looking at four color, maybe just five color, because why not? And there's certainly nothing wrong with a five-color environment. I'm just saying if you're doing three color, if you want players to draft three-color decks, doing five of the ten three-color pairs, I think focusing on wedge or shard, and then really emphasizing a lot of what your design is about in mono-color cards, I think goes a long way. And then the more you do that, you can also see players draft two colors some of the time. The more even two-color goal cards you have if you're pushing for three colors, the more you're going to see players play those four and five colored decks. But if you have a lot of strong monocolor cards, you can use a card like Jungle Shrine, a red, green, white triland, to play a Boros deck or a Celestnia deck if you have strong enough monocolor options. And you can have a small peppering of gold options and even splashing the third color, I think, is where a lot of the cooler three-color decks come into play, at least from my perspective. You know, for a lot of folks, just doing the four and five color stuff is the fun for them, but you're expressing less in a specific space when it is just five-color play the best cards. That's at least my opinion of that kind of thing. And if you want to really see a Grixis deck in action, if you want to see an Esper deck in action, and you want to design an environment where wedges and shards are three-color decks on three-color decks, once again, a lot of it does come down to the monocolor cards and allowing players to explore the colors that they want to explore instead of just the incentives being play all the mana fixing, play all the strongest cards, which will often be gold cards. And I'll expand a little bit there because uh something that you might interpret that last statement as is okay, make the monocolor card stronger than the gold cards, but you do want the gold cards to be strong, otherwise, why are you playing gold if gold isn't strong to do? It's harder to do. So the gold card should be strong and exciting, but you want to use a light touch, finesse it a little bit if you want to see a three-color deck. You can have your siege rhinos, you can have cards stronger than siege rhino. They make a lot of those now, but just keep a lot of appealing monocolor options so there is more to explore with two and three-color pairs, and there's less pressure to be in a four and a five color, all of the best cards, all of the best mana fixing deck. And one last note on using the three color base. I want to shout out a land cycle that I think is the best at trying to enable players to play three colors and keep things largely the three colors, and this is going to be the landscape cycle from Modern Horizons 3. All of these cards, they use the word landscape in the name. They are lands that tap for colorless, or you can sacrifice them to search for one of three different basic lands. So foreboding landscape is the Soul Tie option, taps for colorless, or you can sacrifice it to search your deck for a basic swamp, basic forest, or basic island, and put that in the battlefield tapped, and then also cycles for black, green, blue. So this is much more modest than a triome. You'll only be able to fetch up one of those three colors and have only one permanent source of one of those three colors once you use the land, or it taps for colorless, which doesn't fix at all if you have not yet sacrificed it, and the cycling ability is much more restrictive as well. Rather than just being able to cycle it for three generic mana, you actually need to make all three of the colors that it can find. These can be parts of four and five color decks. They tend to work a little bit better in four-color decks and five-color decks, but they play really reasonably in two-color decks. They're basically just an evolving wild that can sometimes tap for colorless if you want it in a two-color decks, given that two-color decks tend to have a little bit more in the generic mana space. Once you get into three color, you end up with a lot of pips in your cards. Certainly for casting a three-color spell, you naturally have to have at least three pips to do that. So the colorless mana does play a little bit more in the two-color decks, and these landscapes, they're pretty modest, but they are strong, and they can get you to three colors, and these lands do play quite well. I'm a pretty big fan of these. They're even slightly more modest in terms of trying to get you into three-color versus four color than original trilands, because they only give you the one permanent source of one color of those three. So I like these ones a lot. They are definitely lands that I would look at if I wanted to get players to play three color, sometimes four color, sometimes two color. And then the final way you can seed five archetypes for a four-color draft environment using color lines for archetype definition is four color, which I don't know of anybody who does this. I really don't know why you would do this, but it is a technically possible lane to explore mathematically. So instead of that monocolor base of white, blue, black, red, green, you would have a base of not white, not blue, not black, not red, not green. Like it's difficult to think about a white, black, red, green deck as being a white, red, black, red, green deck. It's really more of a not blue deck. At least that's always how it feels in my experience when I play four colors, which there are kind of a lot of times I do end up playing four color decks in certain cube environments. The Tempo Tubert I've actually played four color a decent amount of the time because of the nature of the mana fixing that cube. It has fetch lands and fetchable type duels, but there's no triombs, and all the spells are cheap. A lot of the cube costs one and two mana, but it's really difficult to justify playing a five-color deck with those parameters, cheap spells, and all the lands are two colors, there's no three-color lands. It usually means you're going to be fighting at least somebody on the best cards in at least one color. You know, sometimes you'll like open a power outlier in a fourth color, you'll be in a three-color shell already. And with fetches and typed duels, you can fetch up, you can get to four colors. And when I find myself in that kind of lane, I'm thinking, okay, do I have the mana to play four colors? At that point, I'm kind of passing no mana fixing lands in this spread and trying to make it happen. And I do think of my deck as not being the color that I'm not playing, which very often in that cube it's going to be blue, black, red, green. So I'm drafting not white is kind of how it comes to pass. A lot of the white cards tend to be the most parasitic, parasitic in that cube. Every other color is a little bit more in the spell-based kind of environment. So the white gets more stuff in that space. I just know offhand I've drafted a decent clip of not white decks in the Tempo Tubert, but it's really an expression of a negation. I'm not drafting that blue, black, red, green deck. I am playing the strongest cards in the four colors that I can cast, which makes it really weird space to explore as far as seeding archetypes. It's kind of the antithesis of what I was talking about seeding monocolor archetypes or even two-color archetypes, where you're trying to make a deck about something, and four color very often is making a deck about the thing that it's not, which is which is strange, but not impossible. There's two really big challenges to designing around four color. The first is that kind of lack of definition for any combination of four colors. All of the three color combinations, there is some resonance in terms of aesthetic, there is worlds that we've been to, there are characters we identify with these three-color pairs, and there's mechanical resonance there as well. When it comes to four color cards, there are at least two options for every set of four color combinations. There's Nephilims, and then there's a commander deck that has one legend for every four-color combination, and it was like Commander 2016, and then not red gains seven mana traxa, and not black has by far the most options for four-color cards. There's actually six cards, uh, entries into the not black four-color card column. But kind of thing about this is that all of these cards are really just strong. They're maybe strong in different ways, strong in more specific rays from combination to combination. But looking at the four-color cards, the way I would justify putting them in a deck is I get what I paid for. They are strong cards. The incentive is to play a lot of colors and to play strong cards in a lot of colors. So it's hard looking at these cards to think about them as being four color, more than them being a four-color card that I'm going to put into a five-color deck. And this compounds with the other issue with trying to support four colors. They don't make four color lands in magic, it's just weird space. I hope that they never do it. Honestly, I think we've also kind of gone too far with three-color mana fixing because it tends to just lead to powerful five-color decks. And I think even if you want to do four color, once you add triombs, then it becomes a little bit too easy to end up just playing a five-color deck. You're not really doing four color, you're doing five color with some four-color cards. Now you can do this a little bit, you can do kind of what I'm describing in the tempo tube. If you have fetch lands and fetchable duels that are just two-type duels instead of triomb, once you can fetch out triombs, it's trivial to be a five-color deck, but you can limit it a little bit, maybe have some entries into those cycles and exclude others and try to make it so the incentives line up so players will commonly end up in four colors. I think it's a lot of work. I think it's really weird space, but I don't want to discourage anybody from doing what they want to do. And honestly, I'm incredibly curious if you or someone you know has a kind of four-color focused environment. Uh truly, I would love to see it. This is something that would kind of expand my knowledge of what cube is and what cube can be. Uh, it's something that I see a lot of difficulty with, something that I think comes up organically, uh, similar to three color. I think a monocolor base will kind of lead you down any road that you want to go down, but there is an infinite number of ways to do it, and I'd be excited to see stuff in the four-color space if somebody has something cool to point me to. But for now, that's gonna do it for my breakdown of how to use color lines to seed archetypes for four-player draft environments, and just kind of makes sense to do five archetypes for four players. Gives you a little bit of legal room. It's the same percentages as having 10 archetypes for eight players. Having five archetypes for four players is going to allow every player to find a specifically supported color or color combination while having an extra archetype there to wiggle around in and for players to explore and to go into more or fewer colors, kind of depending on what you're trying to do there. And it's just the same percentage breakdown when it comes to eight player drafts. If you have 10, 2 color archetypes for 8 players, or you have five archetypes on whatever lines for 4 players, you have 20% of extra color expression for players to play in. And that's of course is a very basic way to think about it. It ends up being a lot more space to play in because as you combine the different color combinations, you end up with a lot more than just five lanes, certainly playing in monocolor space. If you have the mana fixing for three colors, if you get into four and five colors, there's a ton of different things you can do. It's just kind of as a baseline, uh, because so much of cube communication, certainly the mainstream cubes, is talking about having ten archetypes for two for two color pairs, it becomes useful to communicate within that framework, but it is much deeper than that. There's a lot more going on, even if you stick to a lot of monocolor incentives. And I kind of inadvertently today ended up singing the praise of having appealing monocolor options and lanes in Cube. I think that even if you are trying to incentivize players playing two, three, four, five colors, monocolors cards can do a lot of heavy lifting while allowing a lot of flexibility. And I want to be clear that gold cards are some of the coolest cards in magic history. I personally enjoy playing with some of my favorite mana fixing lands. I really enjoy playing with shock lands, a lot of dual lands, fetch lands even. I'm a fetch land apologist, I don't mind the extra shuffling, but even when you are playing in heavily gold space, uh, it's something I ended up talking about a lot today, is that mono color cards really are an essential fundamental building block, even if you are playing heavily in gold spaces. Which is not to say you can't do an all gold card cube. They're weird. I've played them before, but that can be a fun thing to do too as a sometimes food. But that's it for me for now. Thank you so much for listening, for doing whatever you do to support the podcast, liking, commenting, reviewing, sharing, subscribing, all that jazz, and I'll be back next week talking more cube. Later, gamers.