My cube supports five tribal mono archetypes: Humans (based on white), Wizards (blue), Zombies (black), Goblins (red) and Elves (green). They are not necessarily intended to be drafted as monocolored decks, but the second color is meant to serve as support. Most of the time it doesn’t provide creatures of that type, but spells and other creatures to fill the spots that couldn’t be filled by the tribe. Humans have a lot of bleeding, and Wizards have a bit, but Goblin are almost all in red.
Tribal archetypes in cube are known to be tricky to include. How many Goblins does the cube need to have for the deck to not be a trap? To normalize the answer to cube size, let’s ask instead “how many goblins need to be opened in a draft pod?” The answer is still “it depends”. But I’m not going to completely cop out, I’ll at least say that “it depends on these factors”:
- Overall power level of the cube (which, if high, requires the deck to be much more consistent to be worth it)
- How generically good the Goblins are. Goblins that are good in any deck make the deck at the same time better and worse. Better because the deck runs better cards, and worse because everyone else gets interested in them.
- The payoffs. Each payoff has a curve indicating how good it is with 0, 1, 2, 3… enablers. Payoffs that aren’t good until you have a bunch of goblins, like Goblin King, require more density. Payoffs that scale less drastically, like Siege-Gang Commander, require less density.
For my cube, I believe I need about 17 Goblins in a draft to be worth playing the deck, so considering 90% of the core is in a draft, and there are quite a few Goblins in occasionals, 17 or 18 goblins in the core module should be enough.
Do tokens count? Does Beetleback Chief count as 1? 3? The payoffs determine that. For payoffs like Goblin Trashmaster, it makes sense to count token makers should count as how many of the creature type you expect them to crank out. If my payoffs were more like Draconic Roar, I’d count it as 1. In my cube, the payoffs scale as well with token count as with the card count (Icon of Ancestry‘s activation is the only payoff that doesn’t). Therefore, I count it as 3. Still, I’m about 2 goblins short of 18.
That shows one the strengths of Beetleback Chief: cheating on density. A deck could run like 8 Goblins/Goblin makers, but when that includes Beetleback Chief, Hordeling Outburst and Mogg War Marshal, that makes Goblin Trashmaster look a lot better.
Another strength of Beetleback Chief is… well, also cheating on density, but on density of archetypes. Tokens, wide and sacrifice are really close together, and you could make a decent case that it’s the same archetype, but any flavor is happy to run Beetleback. Then, there’s of course Goblins. The archetype that is least obvious is blink, where it’s a really good target to Ephemerate.
What I don’t like
Like many token makers, this is kind of bland. Don’t get me wrong, it feels great to go Adaptive Automaton into Beetleback Chief, but at the end of the day you are just getting vanilla creatures.
Desolate Lighthouse - MTG Cube Theory 