On April 29, we had our second playthrough of the Collaborative Cube! Thanks to Jason, Noah, Nick, Chris, Sean, and Kyle for playing, and special thanks to Kyle for creating a custom travelling box for the cube! After a long draft period (to be fair, a lot of these cards were brand new to most people), we had another three-round tournament. Was it fun? I sincerely hope that everyone had a good time, but there were certainly a fair share of decks that must have been frustrating to play against!

Kyle (3-0) won first place with a mostly blue (splashing white) control deck. After seeing that blue was practically undrafted in the first draft (and through most of the first pack of this draft!), Kyle decided to move in on the color and reaped dividends for it. I heard a lot of counter spells coming from his side of the battlefield; has he finally embraced the evil ways of blue?

Nick (2-1) won second place with an attempted mono-black deck. For the second straight session, Nick attempted a mono-color deck only to fail to meet the necessary number of playables in his color. This time, he was forced to splash four white cards. Despite this, he managed to use the heavy-black cards like Hunter of Bones (Fumiko the Lowblood in our cube list) and Blighted Thoroughfare (Patron of the Kitsune in our list) in conjunction with two Gray Merchant of Asphodels to secure second place.

The rest of our finishers went 1-2, and the order is determined on tie-breaks. I determined them by win percent in games among the 1-2 finishers.

Sean (1-2) secured third place by going 1-0 against Noah and 0-2 against Kyle and Nick. Sean was the only RG drafter of the night and produced a deck that would drop massive creatures (with flying in RG?!) such as Balor or Argathya, Progenitor of Dragons (Phatom Wings in our list) consistently to pressure the opponent. Sean lost multiple games against opponents at less than 5 life, and his record very well could have been better had one or two draws of the top been kinder to him.

Noah (1-2) lost vs. Sean but beat Jason to secure fourth. He played a five-color Sovereign’s Realm deck, which marks the second consecutive session that someone played that deck. Unlike Chris’ deck last time that used a variety of top-of-the-library manipulation cards, Noah’s deck relied on cards like Azor’s Elocutors and Tree Fox of Lumina (Sortami Mindsweeper in our list) to pressure the opponent indirectly while dropping a litany of bombs. Even if it isn’t winning at an above-average clip, Sovereign’s Realm has headlined a deck both weeks.

Jason (1-2) finished fifth on tiebreakers, losing to Noah but beating Chris to secure the .500 within-tier win rate. Jason played an interesting U/B deck predicated on stalling things out with Fog Bank or Guard Gomazoa, then milling the opponent out with cards like Fractured Sanity or Startled Awake. When the deck worked, it was truly terrifying for anyone that couldn’t pressure through it or counter the mill. Unfortunately for Jason, the deck was rather inconsistent for him tonight. We’ll see if his next deck is more cooperative for him.

Chris (1-2) finished sixth by losing his one within-tier match against Jason. Chris drafted his own mono-black deck. That’s right, two drafters at the same table (sitting right next to each other) decided to draft mono-black! Chris said he noticed a lot of powerful black cards going late in the pack (Nick was trying to wheel them) and moved in midway through pack one. Unlike Nick’s mono-black deck focused on creatures dying, Chris’ deck focused a little more on punisher effects and card draw, including things like Maze’s End with a few gates, Baldur’s Gate to filter the off-color gates into black mana, Trading Post and Underworld Connections for a great deal of sustain, and, of course, his own Gray Merchant of Asphodel. Despite finishing 1-2, he did establish his superiority as the mono-black pilot by beating Nick in a mirror match, including winning game three by dealing 10 points of non-combat damage in a single turn by combining the Gray Merchant trigger with an Ob Nixilis, the Hate-Twisted downtick. Funnily enough, he also ran a Legion of the Faithful (Ribbons of the Reikai in our list) off an Unexpected Potential. A card truly was unexpected in his mono-black deck!

As a result of these finishes, Kyle will swap four cards, Nick will swap three cards, Sean will swap two cards, and Noah, Jason, and Chris will each swap one card from the cube. We’ll detail those in the next blogpost.

Speaking of swaps, how did the previous swaps affect the drafting and gameplay? Honestly, not very much. I saw Better Demolish in Sean’s sideboard, but I didn’t see or hear it get played. Nick did maindeck the Phyrexian Reclamation that Greg added last time to give his grindy black deck some recursion, and it was certainly better for him that Unspeakable Symbol would have been, so nice addition by Greg! Most of the other changes weren’t in the draft, so we’ll need to wait and see how well they play out.

Finally, how do the colors look? The breakdown for the colors this session (excluding Noah’s cards in his 5-color deck) were:

With Jason playing UB, Kyle playing Uw, Nick playing Bw, Chris playing mono-black (actual mono-black, unlike Nick), and Sean playing RG. Like last time, Black was the most drafted color, and Red was once again among the least popular colors. The results may be messed up by two players attempting to go mono-black. Of course, it may also say something about the quality of the black cards compared to other cards in the cube that two separate drafters were able to attempt mono-black and end up with reasonable decks while a third drafter also grabbed some cards. Two points is too early to tell, but we’ll see if this trend of black excellence continues.

The next blog post will detail the changes that our competitors have chosen to make to the cube. We’ll see you then!