With Thanksgiving breaking up school and work, we had time to play through the collaborative cube again! Thank you to Derek for hosting, and to Nick, Noah, Jason, Kyle, Alan, and John for attending and playing. Let’s look at the results!
Congratulations to Alan for winning first place! Alan went 3-0 with a nearly mono-red () aggro deck. While the deck could certainly apply pressure quickly and consistently, it could also kill out of nowhere. The highlight must have been when he dealt 16 damage out of nowhere using Goblin Lightning (Goblin Legionnaire in the list, 4 mana red instant) + Devious Calormencor (Kami of False Hope in our list, a Boros 4-mana play) + Incendiary Exposition (Kaijin of the Vanishing Touch in our list, one mana red instant) to cast Goblin Lightning, copy it with the Calormencor, then sacrifice the two goblins and two other creatures to Exposition (or just have two more lands to tap) to cast and copy Goblin Lightning once more. We hadn’t seen this explosive combo before, and we’re looking forward to what else Alan can show us.

Jason finished 2-1 with his Gruul () midrange deck, which was good enough for second. He highlighted cards like Hoarding Ogre, Pontificate Action (Scour in our list, under Gruul), and Sylvan Sentinel (Blademane Baku in our list, one mana green creature) as ways to apply pressure while getting value at the same time. It felt like Jason’s deck was well-oiled with all the treasures (from Ogre, Beamtown Beatstick, or Power Facilitator [Power of fire in the list]) fueling a constant stream of threats. He lost only to the overall winner, Alan, and hopefully feels good about his results.

Nick finished 3-1 with an Orzhov () control/combo deck, which was good enough to secure third. Since Jason beat Nick in the head-to-head matchup, it didn’t feel right to have Nick place over Jason just by virtue of getting a fourth game. He described his deck as “trudging through mud; sometimes you get somewhere, and sometimes you don’t.” I imagine his opponents felt similarly. His deck had only one card that cost less than three mana (Zulaport Cutthroat), so it was very susceptible to early aggression, but once his various engines were set up, it was nearly unstoppable. While he made decent use of the Ice Goblin Tunnel (Ice Tunnel in our list, 5 mana colorless artifact) tokens to stall games and get value from cards like Imperious Shadowlord (Child of Thorns in the list, 3 mana black creature) or Bastion of Remembrance, his most notable combo involved recurring an evoked Shriekmaw using Veinwitch Coven triggering off of the aforementioned Bastion of Remembrance or Zulaport Cutthroat. In the last game against Noah, he managed to gun down three giant green creatures in one turn just by recurring evoked Shriekmaws!

Derek finished in fourth place with his UB() mill deck, going 2-2 on the night. Derek has only played the cube twice, and each time, he has played UB mill. And, frankly, it’s worked pretty well for him. Unlike some of our more disorganized mill decks from previous weeks, Derek had all the heavy hitters: Folio of Fancies, Ruin Crab, Fractured Sanity, and Maddening Cacophony supported by counterspells like Essence Scatter and Neutralize. Just like last time, his deck had the ability to mill an opponent out in a snap, and he managed to gather a few wins and some very tense losses. Oh, and he also got to play with Black Lotus; lucky guy!

Kyle went 1-2 and finished in fifth place with an Abzan () value deck. He played Emissary’s Ploy and a suite of quality two-mana creatures like Cardinal of Autumn (Blessing of Leeches in the list, 2 mana white creature) or Blightland Scavenger (Ink-eyes, Servant of Oni in the list, 2 mana black creature) to accrue value. However, his deck really popped when he managed to put together cards like Vivacious Docent (Silverstorm Samurai, 4 mana Selesnya creature) and Tree Fox of Lumina (Soratami Mindsweeper in the list, 2 mana green creature) for a positive feedback loop of lifegain, card-draw, and token creatures, Embodiment of Solidarity (Grizzly Bears in the list, 4 mana green creature), for value and protection/disruption, and Vicious Inevitable (Kodama of the Center Tree in the list, one mana artifact creature) as a huge beater that scales well as he draws the games out. Ultimately, it was mana issues and unlucky pairings that led to Kyle’s downfall. But it’s nice to see him get his first win of the season!

John, another new player, went 1-2 with an interesting UR () deck. His deck included quite a few small combos, including Deadeye Navigator with a slew of creatures with valuable enters-the-battlefield effects and Narset, Parter of Veils with ‘symmetric’ draw effects that only John got to use. I also recall seeing Geist of Otherworldly Visions (Geist of the Lonely Vigil in the list, under Jeskai) creating a ton of fever tokens across the games. That will certainly put the game to a feverish pace!

Poor Noah continued a rough season with a disappointing 1-3, picking up his lone win on the bye. I don’t think Noah’s Gr () deck was particularly bad; this may have just been variance. Noah tried to relive his previous trophy with a nearly mono-green deck centered around ramp like Rampant Growth or Rofellos, Llanowar Emissary into huge monsters like Warden of the Wilds (Blinding Powder in our list, six mana green creature), Cultivator Colossus, or Roar of the Wurm ahead of schedule to pummel the opponent. Unfortunately, he had a few too many games wherein he was all mana, no plays. All ramped up with nowhere to go is a rough place to be, and hopefully Noah can rebound with his next event.

This means that Alan gets four changes, Jason gets two changes, and Nick gets one change. A “change” in our cube is a one-for-one swap of cards or editing/errata’ing two cards currently in the cube. Remember that each of these top-three finishers also gets a free land change in keeping with our season two theme: they can each swap-in a land for any card without needing to use on of their other changes for it. Moreover, since Garrett did not use his land change from last time, and Miller did not use any of his changes from last time, those pass to the winner of that session: Nick. Thus, he will get an additional two land changes and two general changes to be used before the next playthrough.

Oddly enough, after mono-color decks dominated the first five playthroughs of the cube, they had nearly disappeared from the recent sessions. The old specter reared its head again today as Alan won with the only mono-color deck in the field. While mono-color decks may not be as prevalent as once they were (since we removed/toned-down the payoffs, improved the fixing, or got better at drafting together? Who knows!), I suppose my adage from after session five is still true: if you want to win, find and play the open mono-color deck.

There was one other thing to point out from this session that may be worth watching in the near future. As of this writing, 143 out of 540 (about 26.5%) cards in our cube are custom cards (you can see these highlighted in orange when you look at the cube list). However, of cards the players deemed especially noteworthy (that I highlighted in the writeup), 16 of the 36 highlighted cards were custom cards. It doesn’t take a statistician to tell you that that is disproportionate (but if you want a statistician to tell you, at least 16 of the 36 highlighted cards being custom cards has a p-value of .0151), which means that the cards being highlighted as noteworthy are not being selected at random from the cube. In other words, custom cards are overrepresented among the cards driving the decks and dictating the games. Have we pushed our designs too far relative to the rest of the ‘traditional’ cards in the cube? And is that something we care about fixing? Food for thought. Until next time, bye for now!