Brage

Sultai Emissary and [[Bayou Groff]] have really good synergy. The Groff is a great manifest target and it can sac the emissary if you play it normally, but I don't quite see how I can make this work as a deck. It seems most people tend to want to abuse manifest by manifesting something huge and flickering it, but I feel that that line of play is a little bit too convoluted to be worth it, although it is nice that [[Soul Summons]] and [[Ephemerate]] are both white.

I think the trick to playing the Emissary is to have a decent volume of OK manifest targets in the deck, some sac value stuff and not overthinking it too much beyond that.

[[Scythe Tiger]] and [[Rogue Elephant]] are also good value manifest target, but their ETB effects are not so nice if you have them in hand. Perhaps in a sacrifice oriented deck they could be worthwhile if you just sac them as they ETB to trigger something like [[Mortician Beetle]]? Flipping a manifested Tiger in response to a removal spell is quite sexy, though.

I definitely agree with your reasoning about commander. It can become so tedious. The problem with Cube is that the draft portion can take ages, as well, and players who don't know all the cards can feel exhausted after the draft and have low motivation for building a deck and playing.

I guess I really appreciate 60-card magic for its simplicity, in a way. Your deck has a game plan that you can fairly consistently pull off, the number of different cards is lower and it's all in all a tighter gameplay loop that still offers plenty of complexity. The huge disadvantage is that it is extremely hard to have a balanced and fair metagame on a budget in nearly any 60-card format. The second someone starts buying singles or netdecking the arms race begins and many casual players will be left in the dust.

True, commander is very popular for a reason. It does most of the cool and fun things in magic and can be played on a budget. I think Commander will become our main format and I'll provide loaner decks so that people don't feel pressured to buy one outright.

I see. I agree that the "strong uncommon" is a fun power level to play with.

Would you say the main problem is that it gets stale?

Thanks for the recommend! That sounds like a very nice way to play a fat stack type format since you don't have the tedium of finding lands.

I couldn't find the original article about it, but this page explains the basics well enough.

And, people don’t need to redraft every single session, you can keepmthe decks around for a few nights at a time if that’s what people want.

That's actually a neat idea, I hadn't thought of that. Thanks for the tip!

I think I want to make a cube and ideally support draft, fat stack and sealed. That way we can change it up as we see fit.

Do you think cubes work best when they replicate a realistic draft experience (e.g. just sleeve up a bunch of packs or maintain a certain card rarity ratio), or when they contain a broad mix of hand picked unique one-of cards? I find myself drawn to the notion of making a more "true to real life" card pool where you can get multiples of the same card and you mostly get commons and uncommons.

I have tried to build a one-of-each-card cube with powerful and interesting cards in the past but I think it came across as quite overwhelming. Every single card in every single pack you draft is unique and all the cards your opponent plays are unique. Kinda exhausting to read and understand to many different cards and mechanics for people who don't have a lot of card knowledge. I think those types of cubes are mostly good to keep veteran players intrigued and engaged.

I think Cube + Constructed commander is all we really need as a playgroup, maybe. Cube for fairness and variety, Commander for fun deck building and using your cards in pet decks (I suspect that some will enjoy that). I can lend out EDH decks to those that don't have their own and help them with proxies to build their own if they wish.

I see. There's probably some caching for the search function that doesn't contain absolutely everything at any given time (since that is rather intensive).

That's a cool flavour win!

Searching for [!mtg@lemmy.ml](/c/mtg@lemmy.ml) yields no results

Well, then.. I guess I got pranked when I found that comment by searching for [!chat@beehaw.org](/c/chat@beehaw.org)

Tolarian Community College did a video listing the most powerful commander cards in LTR and Bats was the top card. It has a huge edge over Blood Artist and the like since it drains life with treasure tokens (twice!), and token generation in general is very common in many decks. It's a must-answer card that slots into a ton of decks, not just sacrifice engine decks.