Cube Cobra

Mythe posted to Mythe's 360 Peasant Cube - 2 years ago

Man, I missed drafting cube. This was a blast. A lot of the new playgroup had never played a cube before and the ones that had drafted ones before either played with proxied cubes or had never seen so many cards pimped out. Always feel fuzzy inside whenever people compliment my cube because this thing truly is a labor of love.

Unfortunately, not everything was perfect as our 8th had something come up and we couldn't find a replacement in time. So yeah, we had to fire off the cube with just 7 players. After checking which 45 cards were missing from the draft, there were some role-players like Goblin Bombardment or a few signets that didn't make it in. So some of my suspect tests didn't really pan out. Well, it's hard enough getting at least 6 players together for a cube let alone 8, so I'd say this was still a resounding success.

As for the decks that were drafted, my cube had recently undergone a revamp of sorts, removing a lot of "too" efficient removals and some two or even three for ones to let other strategies have a chance. And I think it definitely showed as there were three bonafide aggro decks drafted and piloted to varying levels of success. Although the third one just had some random seven-drops in it since that particular drafter just wanted to play some cool stuff and isn't well versed in playing Magic just yet. But the important thing is everyone involved had fun and there wasn't any games where things felt overwhelmingly terrible for the opponent except in a few instances.

And that brings us to those instances - So with the release of Dominaria Remastered, a lot of cards in my cube got some upgraded foil treatment which was great, but there was one other addition to my cube that I kind of put in with great trepidation. Man. Spiritmonger. What a creature. I was kind of undecided on whether or not I would put it in my cube but I decided, hey lets just try it out. Granted, the person that drafted it had a very solid Golgari deck, he and his opponents said that whenever Spiritmonger hit the board it just felt like an unlosable position. So for now, Spiritmonger will sit in the sidelines.

As for the other suspect tests, I think a few more games need to be played before reaching a verdict.

Anyways, lets get to the decks played.
I personally went with a Grixis deck that made tokens using Saheeli, Sublime Artificer and made use of those tokens with Hobblefiend, Legion Vanguard, Fallen Angel and a few more sac outlets and of course other token generators. Lagomos, Hand of Hatred was a card that just kept providing a lot of value that felt fair most of the time. When behind, it was pretty lackluster since the opponent would just take the 2 from the token and just run over my poor 1/3 and that would be my only complaint with the card. I also wanted to test out Gut, True Soul Zealot but had to pass it up to grab some fixing for my deck. Ironically, my first opponent had it in his deck and soundly defeated me 2-0 with Gruul Stompy. Funnily enough, because his deck wasn't built around sacrificing for value, he mostly just used Gut as a Gray Ogre with the threat of possibly getting more value. But hey, when your opponent is at 2 life with no blockers left, a Gray Ogre is just fine. Gut will need more testing in a deck that would work well with it before any conclusions can be drawn here.

So yeah, my opponent in the first round was that Gruul Stompy deck. First game, he was on the play and I was pretty creature light pre-sideboard so he soundly trounced me. After sideboard though, I was getting in to a good groove, but I hit a pocket of land and was defeated. Of course, that wasn't the only factor. On turn 3 where I was resolving my Saheeli, my opponent took that opportunity to resolve a uncontested Rhythm of the Wild, and while I did have the lead for a little bit through the value of my planeswalkers (I also had a Tibalt), I had 2 dead counterspells in my hand so I eventually lost. I was pleasantly surprised with the performance of Halana, Kessig Ranger however. When I added this card in, I thought that the statline of being 1 more power than a Giant Spider was pretty acceptable, but the effect might be too slow. Boy was I wrong. Sure on curve, it's just a 3/4 getting in or keeping fliers at bay, but once the game gets to a standstill, it starts opening up holes that the player can then exploit. Another thing I was happy to see was vehicles doing good. General consensus to the cube community I think is that "yes, vehicles are pretty great" but I hadn't seen it in a cube setting just yet for myself. Well, my Gruul friend here just happened to have both Renegade Freighter and an Untethered Express. Needless to say, both trains ran me over pretty handily. All in all, I lost that round, but both players had a blast so everything is good. We only played two games, but surprisingly our games went long compared to the other matches so I wasn't able to take a look at how the other players were doing except for maybe a few glances to the game happening next to me.

But hey, we got 7 players and that means someone gets the bye. I rolled dice with the other player that went 0-2 and I won the bye for the round. I wanted to play more Magic sure, but I own the cube. I'll have more chances to play whenever. The other players getting more chances to play with my cube leaves me satisfied. Also now, I get to look at the other games to see how the others drafted their decks. Gruul Stompy was playing against the player that had the previous bye and they were using an Azorius Midrange deck and the man was curving out in to some well timed counter spells and had managed to draft both Swords to Plowshares and Path to Exile. Gruul lost to Azorius in the first game but rallied around a pair of trains that ran the Azorius guy over. In the end however, the Azorius player won 2-1. Great showing from both players however. One thing I was keeping an eye on though in this match was the effectiveness of Icy Manipulator. Don't get me wrong, I love the card, but sometimes the Icy Manip may just be a bit too oppressive for aggressive decks. I was thinking about switching it out for something like Pacification Array instead as the Rishadan Port mode for Icy Manip isn't used very often and when it is used, it just feels bad for everyone involved. Those vehicles however seemed to combat the Icy pretty well and is what helped the Gruul player squeeze out a win even with the pressure from the tapping machine.

Right next to them, there was a Bant Aggro and an Abzan Midrangy-Aggro-token thing going at it. Bant Aggro was probably the one I was paying attention to more as they had a fantastic Selesnya shell with some cards I recently added in, namely Good-Fortune Unicorn. And that unicorn did seem to provide some fantastic fortune as I think he curved out with the Unicorn in every game. That card was absolutely disgusting but honestly curving out like that every game is also pretty disgusting too if your opponent is missing land drops or flooding. The Bant player was also taking advantage of some blink strategies with the likes of Ephemerate and Soulherder and man. Value. Bant won pretty handily with a 2-1 record. His one loss was because he amusingly, didn't RTFC and just looked at the pretty art. He thought one of the creatures on his opponent's side had flying when in reality it didn't and just took free hits from it and when he had realized, it was too late. Unfortunately I don't know which card in question he was taking hits from for free as they had already shuffled up and started a new game and neither told me the name of the card.

The 3rd game in round 2 was between the Golgari Graveyard matters deck using Spiritmonger and a Jund deck that suspiciously looked like the Jund decks of old during the Alara/Zendikar Type 2 format. Got that Bloodbraid Elf in to Lightning Bolt or Vampire Nighthawk action going on. The Golgari player used some new cards I added in to great effect like Bone Shards to discard things like Spiritmonger then reanimated them with Necromancy or brought them back to the hand with the adventure side of Order of Midnight. As previously stated, whenever Spritmonger hit the board, it immediately took over. Fortunately for the Jund player, while missing a few rares and mythic rares, the constructed Jund deck is pretty powerful so he grinded out two wins with one loss and took the round. That one loss had a pretty early Spiritmonger that just ate him alive so yeah.

Round three. Another bye. The Abzan player is supposed receive the buy this round, but the Bant player has to leave early and takes the bye instead letting the Abzan player play another game. U/W Midrange plays against the Jund player and that leaves Gruul Stompy vs Spiritmonger.dec. Unfortunately, my games didn't feel very impactful as I had hoped because every game had some form of mana screw or mana flood for either player. I won in the end going 2-1. The other player assured me that he had fun, but man still feels bad. Also he had a lot of x/1 tokens and creatures. Mayhem Devil was pretty ridiculous in the game where he tried to put up a resistance. The Jund deck outvalued the Azorius Midrange deck and won the entire draft and Spiritmonger stepped on Gruul Stompy pretty badly.

In conclusion, everyone said they loved the cube and had a blast. I'm pretty happy with the results and it was almost unanimous that Spiritmonger should get the axe. In the meantime, I'm putting back in Catacomb Sifter but I want to eventually replace it with something that fits what I want Golgari to do a bit more.