Impressions on the Magic Arena 'Chromatic' Cube
So back in April I wrote about the 'main' Magic Arena cube; now, as we enter another lull in between major set releases, the 'Chromatic Cube' variant is available, and I've played a few drafts of that.
The Chromatic Cube is described as being:
- Aspirational: The Chromatic Cube heavily showcases cards with a dream. They create unique gameplay moments, have quests to make them stronger, or just have big, splashy effects!
- Moderate speed: Most Chromatic Cube draft decks will play a number of expensive spells, but this isn't a slow format. You can't afford to do nothing during the first four turns of the game. In this format, you want to accelerate your mana, find your colors early, and interact with your opponent, or you'll fall behind.
I don't... really think this is how the format plays out in practice. I think what this format is about is mainly counterspells, and specifically powerful counterspells that have strong secondary effects; cards like Spell Swindle and Sublime Epiphany.
The card pool of the chromatic cube is somewhat denuded of strong early game interaction. For example, Black doesn't get a single two-mana spell that destroys a creature of any size, having to make do with Drown in Ichor. It makes some sense that in a cube intended to showcase powerful 'aspirational' cards, there's not as much interaction as there would be in a typical cube.
But in practice, many of those powerful cards are powerful exactly because they interact positively with removal; cards like Sun Titan and Jeskai Revelation are already quite good against most forms of interaction.
This is not a cube where the few removal spells that are there feel particularly strong, because they struggle to keep up with the availability of ramp and powerful value cards. However, the interaction that does feel powerful, and the publicly-available draft data bears this out, are counterspells. While Black doesn't get Go for the Throat, Blue does get Remand, and Remand is one of the winningest cards in the format.
When most decks are trying to resolve a big spell, suddenly cards like Kindred Denial go from being marginal to being quite powerful. As a result, there's just a huge push to go into blue, resulting in a format where the most played decks are a sort of green-blue ramp-control mush.
Right now 17lands reports that Izzet is being played an order of magnitude more often than Rakdos, for example. There's one decent cluster of more aggressive cards around white-red, but that aggressive deck is bigger and more midrangey than normal and doesn't really get in under counterspells nearly as much; this cube has hardly any one-drops in it, and even putting together a decent Limited-style creature curve with enough two-drops is challenging depending on how the packs break.
This is compounded by the fact that many of the 'aspirational' cards don't aspire to anything beyond "get a lot of mana", which is easy to do due to the prevalence of ramp, mana fixing, and the slowness of the format. Jeskai Revelation and Villainous Wealth can easily be shoved into the same deck together, alongside other staple big-mana noncreature finishers like Doppelgang and Rite of Replication.
As a result, it's very possible to play a lot of matches in a row that are permission mirrors which revolve around which player was able to resolve their big spell or their Spell Swindle. In these games, not much on-board interaction happens at all, as games are decided by interaction on the stack and resolving big sorceries.
I don't think staring contests between two players holding a five-mana counterspell are riveting gameplay. Overall the experience feels trampled by variance and guessing; did my opponent draw the counterspells? Did they get what they wanted out of the various powerful high-variance Alchemy cards?
It's possible to somewhat try to avert this by drafting outside the blue-green blob, but you then run into the issue that card quality just isn't as good for those other decks. A lot of creature-based strategies, for example, feel like just worse versions of the blue-green ramp decks or are lacking in truly pushed effects.
As an example, there's clearly an intended 'three-animator' theme of bringing back value creatures from the graveyard, complete with Abhorrent Oculus. But there's no Unearth or similar effects in the cube; rather, there are cards like Sun Titan. As a result, these decks don't really get to escape the gravity of the ramp/big-mana strategy that dominates the cube.
Overall, I think the Chromatic Cube should be either pretty thoroughly rethought or just retired. I think the idea is not really workable; the concept of 'aspirational' cards encompasses a wide range of power levels, and the format ends up being very skewed towards the good aspirational cards, and those are the cards that ask very little of you and benefit from the environment with a lot of mana fixing and ramp.