In the last two weeks, I’ve made some changes to my cube to improve green. It’s been the weakest color in my cube from the start, so I pulled in some advice from people who are happier with the color. So far, the changes seem great — but that’s not actually what this column is about.
My concern with green got me thinking about color balance in the cube, and what you can do to improve it when the cards that Wizards prints aren’t really helping. Specifically, I’m going to talk about the imbalance in terms of planeswalkers for the cube and how that led me limit the number of walkers per color.
I’m going to argue that, right now, running every good planeswalker drastically favors the colors that are already strong in the cube, at the expense of the others. My restriction of having one of each color isn’t a permanent thing, but is meant to help protect the color balance. Let’s look at the current pool of possible planeswalkers for the cube, by color:
White
Ajani Goldmane
Elspeth, Knight-Errant
Gideon Jura
Elspeth Tirel
White has, by far, the most depth in terms of quality and versatility. Ajani Goldmane is the only one that’s significantly skewed towards an archetype, but he’s also likely the weakest of the four.
As an aside, I think this section is an interesting indicator of how hard it can be to evaluate planeswalkers. Elspeth, Knight-Errant was initially underrated since her abilities don’t translate to playable cards. I think the Magic community as a whole has a better understanding of what makes a good planeswalker now, but I know I initially thought that Gideon was much more narrow than he is. When I saw him, I thought he’d be very specific to control decks — but in reality, he has a relevant effect in nearly every situation.
Blue
Jace Beleren
Tezzeret the Seeker
Jace, the Mind Sculptor
Both Jaces deserve a spot in the cube, and I’ve seen Tezzeret in some lists that support an artifact subtheme or favor build-around cards. Again, all of the printed cards are reasonable for the cube, though I personally think that Tezz is a bit narrow.
Black
Three colors in, and we still haven’t hit a planeswalker that’s ludicrous for the cube — go, go, Wizards. But this is where the problem of imbalance starts to appear. We only have two options; neither are cheap in terms of mana, and neither approaches the blue or white walkers in terms of power level. But even planeswalkers that don’t measure up to Jace or Elspeth can still be cube-playable, which says something about how good planeswalkers are as a card type — even when matched against the best cards in Magic’s history.
Red
Chandra Nalaar
Chandra Ablaze
Koth of the Hammer
Thanks to Koth, red is now doing better than black in the planeswalker department. Chandra Ablaze isn’t good enough for the cube, but Chandra Nalaar is very good, if not an especially inspired fit for aggressive red decks. Koth fixes that problem handily and gives red a needed boost in power level as well. I’d happily run both Chandra and Koth in my cube, if it weren’t for the lagging section…
Green
Garruk Wildspeaker
Nissa Revane
In the cube, as in last year’s Standard, Garruk is something of an unsung hero. He does pretty much everything a green deck wants, and he’s one of the green cards that I’m most reluctant to pass in a draft.
Nissa, on the other hand, doesn’t work at all in the cube without serious hacks. Some groups play her (as if you draft Nissa, you get four Chosen), but I’m not a big fan of that kind of arrangement. To me, that’s along the same line as running cards from Un-sets, adding your own errata to the cards you want to run. It’s a change that might create an interesting format, but I don’t think it fits into the definition of the cube as a Draft format using the best cards ever printed.
Seriously, though, Wizards, doesn’t Scars block seem like the right time for a new, versatile green walker?
Multicolor
Ajani Vengeant
Sarkhan Vol
Nicol Bolas
Sarkhan the Mad
Venser, the Sojourner
All these guys are between playable and excellent in the cube.
Sarkhan the Mad doesn’t make the cut in some cubes. While he’s powerful, his abilities are more conditional than those of most other cube-quality planeswalkers. Venser falls into the same camp. I don’t run Nicol Bolas because I like Thraximundar a lot, and he’s easier to cheat into play.
Regardless of specific inclusions and exclusions, however, this section proves how strong planeswalkers are in general in the cube — nearly everyone is good enough to run.
That brings us to the question of why exactly planeswalkers are so good in the cube. After all, they’re competing with some of the best cards ever. As I see it, there are three mains reasons:
Removal for planeswalkers is hard to come by.
This is mainly an artifact of the fact that planeswalkers are a new card type. Vindicate and Oblivion Stone get the job done, but other, supposedly universal removal spells like Akroma’s Vengeance and Creeping Mold do not. It’s true that Maelstrom Pulse won’t ever rotate out, but we don’t get to run four copies either. As in normal Limited, planeswalkers largely have to be dealt with via creatures.
Power creep is more significant for creatures than for removal.
I’m not completely sure how much of an impact this has, but I think it’s worth mentioning. Creatures right now have to be extremely good to be playable in Standard. For example, there are numerous four-power fliers for four that just aren’t good enough. In the cube, we can use the same creatures but still have access to the best removal ever. It’s relatively easy to protect your planeswalkers in the cube.
The cube is ultimately still a Limited format, despite the power level.
That’s not the obvious statement it seems to be. I’ve heard it claimed many times that the cube is more like Constructed than Limited. It’s true that the cards you play are largely Constructed-quality, but you still lack the consistency (and often the speed) of Constructed decks.
Probably only aggressive white decks, where one two-power creature for one mana is largely the same as another, can really begin to approximate a Constructed deck. In a more controlling or midrange build, you really feel the difference between having one copy of a card and having multiples.
A ramification of the fact that the cube basically plays like Limited is that lots of games come down to being a turn or a card ahead. More games are decided in this way than by “your deck is a good matchup for my deck” because archetypes are more flexible and the specific sequence of draws in a deck is more variable.
This gets really important when you consider that planeswalkers practically, by definition, put you ahead in cards with their abilities or in turns by their fog effect. Planeswalkers are so strongly related to card advantage that they have a big impact on games in the cube. I don’t intend to be alarmist — I like having planeswalkers in the cube, and I enjoy the fact that they create interesting decisions for both players — and as a part of the game, they should absolutely be represented in the cube.
Overall, I think that planeswalkers are stronger in the cube than in Constructed, though not as game-breaking as in normal Limited. I don’t think that is intrinsically a problem, but as I’ve said before in this column, I don’t want to win or lose games on the back of one card. I’d rather have planeswalkers be special, an unusual challenge for your opponent. I definitely wouldn’t want to mold my cube into one where nearly every deck had a planeswalker.
As I talked about earlier, part of that is because the current planeswalkers are strongly skewed toward white and blue and are relatively weak in green and black. This is especially a problem with white because it’s also the best at dealing with opposing planeswalkers and protecting the one it has because of the potent combination of versatile removal, like Faith’s Fetters, and efficient mass and spot removal.
Since white is already extremely strong in the cube, probably second only to blue, I don’t want to shift my cube towards supporting white at the expense of other colors even further. Having more planeswalkers in the cube might power up Tarmogoyf, but it’s not doing any favors for green as a whole.
Finally, even if you disagree with my argument so far, I think it’s important to think about what you’ll do about planeswalkers in the long term. Since Lorwyn block, Wizards has been printing about four planeswalkers per year that are worthy of inclusion in the cube. Planeswalkers don’t cleanly replace other spells or creatures in the cube, so how do you include them in greater and greater numbers without producing a fundamental shift in how your cube plays?
Ultimately, all cube designers are going to need to address this issue. I’ve chosen to do so by limiting planeswalkers to the number that each color can comfortably support. Another option is to find the number of planeswalkers that your cube can comfortably support, and then stay at that number by only including new planeswalkers by replacing others.
The cube is a format with the most powerful cards ever, but in the last few years, I’ve learned that planeswalkers are still among the best. That means that they deserve a spot, but also warrant careful thought.