solemn.website

Analyzing the Cubecon Results and Planning an Update

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

After a brief break and a lot of procrastination, I’ve successfully entered the CubeCon deck and match data for my cube and done some basic stats and analysis! It’s been interesting to see how my theories and goals hold up to actual play. Before I share any data, three caveats:

Experience and feel are much more important to me than picture perfect balance.
This data is from exactly 3 drafts from a very specific subset of players (CubeCon attendees interested in nostalgia cubes), and any analysis should keep these factors in mind.
My spreadsheet expertise and the dataset both have some serious limitations. Where decklists weren’t provided (pleaseeeee post decklists to Hedron Network), I constructed the deck for analysis myself based on the pool photos.

Source data

Card level analysis

Given that I have just Maindeck% and MW%, I wanted to mainly focus on a groupings of cards that might give me some good indications of pain points or uninspiring cards. I settled on the following:

Unplayed cards: these cards never saw a maindeck
Trap cards: these cards were played at every opportunity, but did poorly
Outliers: these cards with multiple drafts of data did very well or very poorly

Unplayed Cards

First off, an honorable mention to Saffi, who saw play just once despite having 2 copies in each of 3 drafts. I’ll get more into Project X later, but nobody seemed especially interested. Some of these cards are more sideboardy (like Muse Vessel) or appear that way if you underestimate the density of targets (like Trygon Predator), and I’m not going to sweat those. Others are part of archetypes that didn’t come together that frequently (Saffi for Project X, Flame-Kin Zealot for tokens/dredge, the weaker blink cards, and a slew of the UR tempo cards), which I’d like to keep an eye on when tuning. Finally, we have generalist cards that might just be a little too weak (Pongify, Utopia Sprawl). It’s worth thinking about whether these are unappealing, bad, or both and considering cutting them accordingly.

Trap Cards

These cards were played in every draft but averaged a 1-2 record or worse. I’m not going to read too much into the lands (I’m not worried about the performance of Azorius Chancery), but the other cards are all very much in the red oriented aggro/tokens camps, which will show up a lot in the big losers and I’ll discuss at length in the archetype analysis.

Win Rate Outliers

For these categories, I looked for a win rate >= 5/6 or <= 1/6 while being played at least 2/3 of the time. There’s pretty obvious trends on both winners and losers - UG midrange/omnichord type cards did consistently well, and the BR aggro/tokens/madness and The Rack themes did not. Individual cards that surprised me are Stonecloaker as a winner (has a lot of tricks, but is not especially powerful) and Beacon of Unrest as a loser (at its best getting something huge early, but should give decks a lot of grind game if they play any number of top end creatures). I do want to try and replace the gold Rakdos cards with more powerful stuff in those individual colors, while leaving the on theme cards that underperformed.

Archetype level analysis

Here’s the draft results breakdown:

On a high level, I’m pretty happy with this. No one archetype (aggro/control/midrange/combo) failed to make it to the top half. The big hole is in the token strategies - we see some wider use of tokens, but the more focused token/sac decks had a very bad time. We also had strong UGx performances, which is period accurate at a minimum, though I’ll keep my eyes open for ways to make other blue decks more appealing.

As far as color balance goes, there were a lot of U and B decks which underperformed, and a relative lack of W and G decks which overperformed in turn. I’ll get more into the UBx situation later, but I think a pileup of these decks in the Prequel draft is a reasonable illustration of a potential cause. Conversely, in spite of a large number of aggro decks in Drafts 1 and 3, these decks had relatively good results. This is a great relief after hearing from some players that aggro was undertuned - there’s obviously still enough room for these decks to perform, but I will pay attention to see if they continue to excel.

UBx

My somewhat heavy handed nerfs to UBx appear to have succeeded! As I mentioned before Cubecon, my goal was to make UBx draftable but not sufficiently powerful to be dominant when contested. My theory on why this deck is drafted so much despite performing fairly poorly is that the control cards have a very easy appeal, despite the landscape of control differing quite a bit due to the lack of planeswalkers and single card win conditions. This means if a player sees something like a Terror late in a pack, they might think a controlling Black deck is more open than it really is. I might walk back some of the black changes in particular a little, since removal is overly sparse, but the poor rate on hard counterspells in blue appears to have resulted in blue decks with more definition performing better across the board than do-nothing control which does make me happy.

BR sac/token aggro

No bones about it, this is certainly my biggest disappointment with how the Cubecon drafts went. The sac and token aggro decks are some of my favorites, and put a lot of effort in the last updates into giving them a good dose of juice. The difficult part about just working off results and not seeing gameplay is that I’m not certain where these decks are falling short. The additional cards I’ve added that were less played at the time like Nantuko Husk and Fallen Ideal have been pretty disappointing, and a lot of the nice to have elements like burn and standalone creatures are contested by other aggro decks. It’s also possible the extent of board wipes in the cube goes a bit too far, but without seeing the losses it’s hard to make any strong conclusions.

I’ve considered a few different options, such as improving density of the appropriate cards (though I’m running out of good options at this point), looking for gameplay and power level appropriate signposts from outside this time period, and looking at ways to add the damage on the stack-like effects via custom cards. It’s also possible this was just a weird coincidence, so I do want to get some first hand data before doing anything drastic. The other potential thought is that the amount of go wide hate available to sideboards is a little excessive, and I’ll probably clip at least one of those.

Damage on the stack

I’ve had it suggested more than a few times that this cube should be played with damage on the stack, as this meta was played contemporarily. I’m sympathetic to this idea, especially given how helpful it is for a deck built around sacrificing their permanents. That said, I see some significant issues:

Damage on the stack has not been in the rules for over 15 years now. Most Magic players have never played with it, and the players who grew up in this era are more confident in their memory of the rules than maybe they should be (myself included).
Other rules about combat damage have changed as well during this time! Deathtouch, lifelink, and assigning damage to blockers have all changed in this time period, and some of the interactions of these with damage using the stack are edge cases most players likely won’t be able to interpret on the fly.
The effects aren’t just limited to RB sac - blink gets a whole lot stronger to the point where I’d be a little concerned. Card evalution gets an unintuitive twist across the board, and

I’ll probably try and play at least one draft under damage on the stack rules I’ll formalize, but I think it’s wisest to not make this cube any harder to approach than it already can be.

Tarmorack

This is a very cool deck to me, but didn’t come together in any real sense during the event. The goal is to put your opponent in a bind early, playing discard spells to feed your goyfs, with Bob and GY benefits helping you grind. Ideally, this is a deck that should be pretty playable without The Rack, but a lot of players of this strategy gravitated towards a Korlash midrange shell rather than the discard centric one. I’ll keep my eyes on this deck, as 2 slots is a bit intense for something not seeing play, but I do think it has potential.

Blink/Touch

Blink was generally successful at this event, having very good synergies with the UGx core. Something that hasn’t had the same level of success has been the second-line blink cards: Voyager Staff, Ghostway, and Peel from Reality went unplayed in maindecks, so Aethermage’s Touch has proved difficult, since the density of both Touches and big creatures are harder to get right in limited. The US Nats blink-touch list had 6 “great” targets for touch (the dragons), 13 “good” ones (adding Venser and Cloudskate), and 20 “anything” ones, giving it odds of 35% “great”, 63% “good”, and 80% “anything”. In limited, that would equate to ~4, ~9, and ~10, with that middle number seeming the hardest to reach. Including 1 Touch in the cube is pretty low cost, so I’m inclined to let it ride, but I do want to see if it can be successfully used in the Chordless blink strategies. I’ll do some more digging for cards with sick ETBs that won’t primarily bolster UGx.

UR Aggro + the Dragonstorm problem

As I mentioned in my last post, I was punting on storm to give me a less tense situation to try and “walk the tightrope between trap archetype and overpowered combo deck”. The replacement I opted for was a UR tempo or Magnivore slant, with some different options like Gossamer Phantasm and Wee Dragonauts. This completely failed to connect, and given the lack of historical presence of this style of deck post-Time Spiral, I’m going to scrap that and take another look at storm. My goal is to minimize the number of cards that are only for storm while making it something that can be achieved when the stars align. A knock on requirement is making sure “failed” storm decks can still function - so far the outcome has been slightly awkward ramp decks that hardcast Bogardan Hellkite, but I hope to do better. I’ll be looking to Time Spiral Remastered for examples on how this might work.

Dredge + Reanimator

Because of the similar problems faced by Bridge Dredge to Dragonstorm, I tried to move a lot of the dredge support into madness/Solar Flare during cube creation. Neither really succeeded, despite a good amount of slots devoted to reanimation, looting, and fatties. That said, someone attempted this baller deck, 1-2d, and left me a recommendation - let’s give it a shot! In general, I’d like to have more cards with use in the graveyard, so these decks have some additional benefits.

Project X

Project X is also on my list of favorite archetypes, but I do somewhat understand why it wouldn’t see a lot of play. I think Saffi is reasonable enough to have at two even if that’s excessive ignoring this deck, and if I do add Bridge that’s another weird out for the combo. It makes sense that the fiddliness and color requirements would make this deck rare, so I’m mostly planning on letting it be for the moment.

Wrap-up and next steps

This is certainly more than enough to have written, so I’ll spend a few days tinkering on the update and then publish an article explaining my thought process. Here’s my starting thoughts:

Unplayed/trap/poor performers - Cut stuff that is both bad AND unappealing that’s not archetype based.
Even out lands - Utility lands into the general land slots and put in the missing pains.
UBx - Find room for another removal spell, see if some of the nerdier threats can come out.
Blink/touch - Cut some poor blink cards for more blink targets.
Tarmorack - Cut some boring discard spells for more beef for the remainder of the gameplan.
RB sac - Look for ways to make this deck stand out, including replacing some of the underperforming gold cards with monocolor options. Take a quick look at well-fitting but out of format cards here.
Dredge/reanimator - Add Bridge from Below, think about other potentially useful tools and flashback cards.
URx aggro/tempo - Out the dang cube, leaving some slots for other UR stuff.
Storm - Explore ways to build this out with good failure cases.

Madison Bound! (completing revisions on this version of the RAV-TSP Cube)

Thu, 02 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve finalized the cube list for CubeCon and wanted to get some thoughts down about the process. First, I want to check back in with the goals of the cube as described, and how that’s motivated changes:

Capture the gameplay feeling of this era (big question: what does this even mean?)
Healthy balance between accessiblity to players who have never seen the cards and rewarding format knowledge
Decks line up in a way representing the archetype diversity of the format

After some reflection, I think a big element of the gameplay feeling that I wanted to capture was the scrappy feeling of the decks, and I think that’s reflected well in the card selection and gameplay. However, some additional duplicates have really rounded out a lot of places, and I hope I’ve found a good balance point between the two.
I do think the accessiblity has improved a bit version to version - the more complex decks aren’t getting drafted a ton, but more of the interesting interactions are showing up in play. I had an opponent Chord of Calling for Blazing Archon (ow) and have seen a few different takes on the Korlash deck. I’ll get more into it later, but I’m working to make the combo/synergy routes more apparent to players.
Archetype diversity has been my biggest concern thus far, and I’m hoping I’ve addressed it sufficiently with my last update before CubeCon. Control has consistently overperformed, and in the last draft we had 3 UBx drafters, with only one really ending up squeezed out for lack of options. Value is certainly part of the play patterns of this format, but it should mainly involve playing to the board in rather than just playing control until your big threat can end the game. In response, I’m shrinking the number of very good mono-color effects in UB and tamping down on control-centric 2 for 1s. This should help some with this particular issue, but I think a lot of the answer to this problem will be making the “correct” decks in other archetypes easier to find and build.

Aggro was very powerful at the time in spite of using a large number of very understatted creatures (especially relative to today). The successful aggro decks at US Nats 2007 (my benchmark event for this cube) are either using Greater Gargadon to cash out their little guys into meaningful pressure or ramping out large pump spells onto hexproof creatures to evade interaction. I’ve doubled down on Gargadon and Keldon Marauders to help these decks succeed and to make the deck more apparent, and am including Fallen Ideal as more of a signpost than a card I expect to see played every draft. Combo has been basically nonpresent, and I’m not sure how much of that comes down to knowledge vs opportunity vs actual power. Chord and the single copies of combo creatures present some chokepoints, and if any of them end up unplayed, the associated decks are more or less dead. I’ve added Loaming Shaman to try and shore this up already, and in the final update duplicated Saffi, Vesuvan Shapeshifter, and Wall of Roots. Dragonstorm has disappointed, generally not coming together while multiple players have tried to play cards like Seething Song and Lotus Bloom in decks that aren’t well suited. I want to revisit this at some point in the future because of how iconic the storm decks are, but walking the tightrope between trap archetype and overpowered spell combo deck is a bit too scary to try and solve for CubeCon. I’m aiming to ramp up a Magnivore spells archetype to fill this void a little and encourage some more competition over the blue resources with the UB value pile - this is what I’m most nervous about with the current list, but hopefully it works out!

Playtesting and refining has definitely given me a greater awareness of the discursive nature of cube. I’m trying to share my experience of a format and the things I find cool about it through a cube list, and the players (who if I’m lucky might have skimmed the writeup) are seeing packs and making their own evaluations based on a completely different set of heuristics - all I can do is try and maximize the odds that they connect with some of what I’m putting out there. On a related note, I enjoyed chatting with Joe (creator of the Saga Cube) and reading his document discussing various families of design for cubes modelled after constucted formats. By these standards this cube would be a “Nostalgia Cube”, and a lot of this description rings true. I’m aiming to evoke the feeling of the format over creating games accurately reflecting it, and hearing that most cubes of this ilk trend towards a wider period explains why some areas feel difficult to fill out. You want a monored 3 drop? Here’s 20% of the options, hope that helps.

Selfishly, I’m really looking forward to getting the results and feedback from the CubeCon. Some of the weirder cards (Wee Dragonauts, self-LD support in Flagstones, Fallen Ideal) seem like they could be really cool, but only if they connect and make decks sometimes. I’m planning on doing a wrap-up update sometime this year, and then will be moving on to a cube inspired by fighting games. Of course, I’m also hoping to spend more time on non-Magic pursuits like music and the Jankgiver (supporting a beloved Netrunner format called Janksgiving), so we’ll see if I can jam that all in somewhere.

Goals for Iterating on the RAV-TSP Cube

Mon, 23 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We did it! The RAV-TSP Standard Cube has been voted into CubeCon 2025, and now the process of refining it begins in earnest. I’ve been consuming a lot of cube media lately, and one thing that gets consistently emphasized is knowing your audience and your goals. I’ve certainly thought a lot about my goals, but haven’t ever written them down or referred back to them while working. So! To start the revision process, I want to explicitly state my goals and think a little about where I’m at with regards to them.

Goals of the cube (ranked):

Capture the gameplay feeling of this era (big question: what does this even mean?)
Healthy balance between accessiblity to players who have never seen the cards and rewarding format knowledge
Decks line up in a way representing the archetype diversity of the format

Capture the gameplay feeling

My most critical goal being something I can’t readily define is a little concerning, especially given how powerful nostalgia can be. The stuff that quickly comes to mind is like a laundry list of boomer Magic player whining: individual cards are less game deciding, decks run out of resources more easily, upfront or self-protecting value requires a larger investment. But beyond that, there’s an element that I can identify if I can’t yet define, and going forward I’d like to work better to identify where the cube’s succeeding or failing.

Balance rewarding format knowledge with generic evaluation

With this format having a bit of a midrange bent to it, it’s a little easier for people to come in and take “good cards” in an openish color and do well, but I do want 3-0s to more often than not include some iconic interaction - Compulsive Research + Body Double, Goyf + Rack, Gargodon + Mogg War Marshal, etc. That said, I don’t want weird interactions to be the deciding factor. This is part of why I’m using modern rules rather than damage on the stack, and I want to keep my eyes open for weird nonsense that is more of a trivia test than emergent fun.

Archetype diversity within a draft and between winners

This one is a little odd, because it to some extent one could ask: doesn’t everyone want archetype diversity? But to me, a defining quality of the format in my memory was a “wide open” feeling - the powerful cards and interactions tended to be consistent, but a variety of decks could do well both across and within . To some extent, this was due to Magic being very different back in the day, with less data, fewer large events, and more difficult card acquisition. However, even year-to-year in this era, we see a very different picture in 2007.

Draft builds in its own self-balancing as far as specific color combos and tools, but I do want to make sure the meta-archetypes are well balanced against each other. Especially when players aren’t leveraging the synergies in midrange and aggressive decks or assembling combos, there’s a real risk of players with a pile of good fixing and interaction steamrolling the table.

How’s it going?

Capture the gameplay feeling

Other than not being able to define what I’m after, I’m pretty happy with where things have appeared to be. There’s freedom to experiment, but the decks that have done best have created interesting gameplay and back and forth games. Hopefully as I get better at putting my goals to words and watch more games played, I’ll know better how to pursue this goal.

Balance rewarding format knowledge with generic evaluation

This has been a little bit of a struggle so far - generic value (such as it exists here) and hard control with a few splashy wincons have overperformed relative to the synergy decks for the most part. I was very happy to see a GW deck with some aura/hexproof shenanigans go the distance in my first paper playtest, but creature combo and the sacrifice deck haven’t really happened yet. I’ve bumped up some counts for the sac deck, and will see if I can find ways to encourage the creature combo decks without overdiluting the more generic value.

One thing I’m a little worried about at the moment is the presence of “trap” archetypes. Other than the titular card in Dragonstorm, there’s not too much dead weight and people so far have correctly read it as a “live the dream” type deck. In constast, some of the slivers that played an important role in the format were played purely for their built in value at the time, which has lead to some confusion about the existence of slivers as a designed archetype. Other than calling it out in the primer, I’m trying to add a little more support for a small sliver package, but I’m not sure if that’s making the problem better or worse. Sliversmith looks to me like a cute token generator with some incidental reanimation synergies, but it may trick others into trying to hard commit to a sliver deck that isn’t really there.

Archetype diversity within a draft and between winners

This has probably been the largest success so far: finals have involved aggro, midrange, and control. If that can stay relatively stable with more testing across a wider group, I’ll be delighted.

RAV-TSP Standard Cube

Wed, 18 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

https://cubecobra.com/cube/overview/RAVTSPStandard

This is the first (and to this date, only) cube I’ve created, designed to convert my RAV-TSP Standard gauntlet into something more accessible. I’ve submitted it for CubeCon 2025, mostly as an excuse to complete a testing cycle with it and make a half decent writeup. The primary goal is immersing people in the cards and strategies of my first “real” Standard format, which covered a wide range of macro-archetypes and utilized both staples and archetype specialist cards.

For the most part, during this meta I was locked into aggressive decks for budget reasons. I moved slowly between red aggro decks, selling off any spare parts for the core and slowly building the rest. I got lucky around the time of Planar Chaos’s release and barely scraped into the top 8 of a twelve person Magic Scholarship series event at 1-2-1. Hot draws into slower decks took me through to the finals, where I lost to the same Boros deck but with fewer janky budget substitutions. Second place earned me a $500 scholarship and an invite to the MSS championship in Baltimore, where I played a Jund aggro deck with Dark Confidant, Hit//Run, and as many Tarmogoyfs as I could borrow. While the players at my local events were generally restricted in the same ways I was, at this event I saw deck after deck I was enamored with, the pinnacle of which was the Jeskai Blink-Touch deck. Its ability to quickly snap from a midrange board-control plan to sending 15 points at your opponent’s face upended a lot of what I thought I understood about Magic and the metagame clock. These fair decks with a combo plan (and combo decks with a fair plan) made up a significant portion of the meta (with OmniChord and Project X both putting up results), but straightforward aggro decks, hard control, and pure midrange were all totally playable as well. If that ideal can be communicated via cube is far from certain, but I gotta try!

The initial stab I made at this cube (back in 2018 oop) was extremely structured, trying to spreadsheet out card slots and archetypes in a very traditional way (as I did not yet know that if you use slots when designing a cube you are a big dumb doodoo person). I was immediately struck with awful analysis paralysis, and any kind of potential disruption to the slots made it worse. After a few weeks of abortive attempts to progress, I ended up shelving the concept for years. Then on a random weekday night in February, I deduped 20ish decklists from the era, added the result to CubeCobra, and cut it down to 360 cards. It needed a lot of work, but getting it draftable made the cube so much easier to iterate on. My main concern with this cube is if the ‘correct’ avenues are things people will naturally be drawn down. In my first playtest with the cube, players felt left afloat, and while they made competent decks and the gameplay was fun, they were mostly building the type of decks you would expect to see in a generic cube made of Ravnica and Time Spiral cards. Each big revision seems to increase the number of “signpost” type cards, and my second playtest had a lot more success along these lines, but it’s very easy to overestimate how much knowledge players will have of these ancient combos and archetypes. The ultimate goal is balancing the emergent properties of cube draft with the historical reenactment element (aka the JNCO factor). The diversity within powerful cards of this era is a great tool for that, but if the players can’t reach that point without a full 2007 immersion program, I’ll need to do more work.

I mention this in my CubeCobra writeup, but shoutout to the (long defunct) blog killing a goldfish for these incredible articles about Ravnica and Time Spiral blocks. The Ravnica article captures a lot of what I loved about this era of Standard, and offers some explanations of how this state was reached. The Time Spiral article draws an excellent distinction between nostalgic media and media that critically reflects on itself and its past, as well as diving into some of the same frustrations I feel about Magic and the way card and product design have worked in the time since the block’s release.

kill reviews: ravnica block
kill reviews: time spiral

mix 20250222

Sat, 22 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

My first attempt at creating a music mix. I did some light work on transitions, a lil trombone playing to see how well my headset mic worked, and some cutting up of stems from the underscores song for use in the transition.

0:00 Injury Reserve - Bad Boys 3
2:21 Lip Critic - Bork Pelly
5:16 Snooper - Xerox
6:25 Machine Girl - Vainglorious Chorus
11:19 Floating Points - Fast Forward
18:50 Guerilla Toss - Retreat
21:24 Goat Girl - Play It Down
25:02 Nilufer Yanya - Keep On Dancing
27:10 underscores - Kinko’s field trip 2006

a stirring

Sun, 05 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Guarded, placid, calm
Scant ripples across the surface
Peaceful lake, a blessed balm
For those coolly bearing witness

But then the rains fall
But then the wind blows
But then the waves swell

No matter how desperately we hold fast
Our being longs for motion

The beginning echoes through us all