I missed that this was redundancy for Dark Depths, and it's also a cheeky way to get a Phyrexian Dreadnought into play.

MH3 brought some real goodies for this cube, even though I am late in adding them.

I’ve wanted to run Thought-Knot Seer in this cube for ages, but lacked density to make it work alongside the Eldrazi sol lands, but MH3 brought us Sowing Mycospawn, Thief of Existence, and Kozilek's Command which is enough for me to give this a try. I’m excited to see if anyone manages to hardcast one of the Eldrazi titans with this package.

I also have wanted to find room for these for awhile for the Dark Depths package, and their interaction with Eye of Ugin puts me over the top on them. They’ll also just fix for mana in the right deck.

These three interactive spells are actually very exciting to me. Vexing Bauble is a great answer to tons of unfair stuff and bolsters my favorite Bomberman deck. Sink into Stupor is great for all the reasons bounce spells are great here and has the huge upside of being a land that also pitches to force. Consign to Memory is the most exciting of the bunch — important against the new Eldrazi deck, great against the artifact deck, and an awesome stifle for playing against Flash or tons of other relevant abilities.

Been on the cusp of trying the two eldrazi lands for awhile, this is gonna push them over the top.

I suspected this would be the case, but I got my first player confirming as much, so out it goes.

I had a draft of this cube where I managed to draft what was very nearly a perfect version of the Bazaar Aggro deck and it still could not hang. It's not unfair enough to go toe-to-toe with the unfair decks and not disruptive enough to stop them. It probably has some good matchups, like hatebears, but for the most part I think it's just sadly outclassed here.

Time for something new!

I have idly wondered if this could work here for a long time, so it's time to finally give it a go.

Factors working in its favor:

• Like Bomberman, it operates on an axis other than creature cheat, which will provide some depth. It's another deck that can happily maindeck Ensnaring Bridge.
• Essential cards like Scrap Trawler and Myr Retriver are separately very playable in the various artifact decks.
• Many of its important pieces are already included isn’t he list otherwise.
• It can potentially be very fast, especially with Shops.

Factors working against it:

• It's a fiddly combo that requires 3-4 pieces to go off.
• Many people will not know how the various combo lines work and it's too complex to realistically be discovered organically.
• It's susceptible to many kinds of removal, though importantly, not creature removal (for the most part).

It will be very cool if it can do its thing.

I'm also adding Ghost Quarter because of a recent draft where I felt like Wasteland was critical to my deck. Deep-Cavern Bat also getting the nod for being able to snipe any card.

Time to give this a try! I initially overlooked Atraxa because of Griselbrand's notorious underperformance in this cube, but I think there are a few key differences that are worth noting:

• Atraxa works with Flash, Griselbrand does not
• Not having to pay life to draw the cards matters in quite a few matchups
• Atraxa pitches to every color of pitch spell in the cube

I think these points actually matter quite a bit in this environment. I also think she'll allow for some really cool deckbuilding puzzles as you prioritize cards of different types to maximize your draw. Definitely seems possible to me to also have some fast mana and a reanimation spell in your deck so that you can flash her in and then immediately reanimate with Force back up.

Also adding Force of Vigor so there is another Force that Atraxa can pitch to and Hoverstone Pilgrim to see how it plays. Cutting Gyruda, who unfortunately has not worked, and replaceable, cheap cards that hate on the big, splashy decks.

It pains me to say that Cranial Archive or even Thran Foundry might just be better than Feldon's Cane in a Thoracle world.

I’ve been noodling on some big changes for awhile now, primarily motivated by two undesirable play patterns that have been somewhat persistent:

• Muddled good-stuff decks beating focused combo decks fairly reliably
• Some players (especially skilled ones) opting to play decks larger than the minimum of 15 cards

These issues are undeniably related. If sloppy piles are favored then the consistency afforded by smaller decks is not as big of an advantage, so much so that the risk of running out of gas wins out.

Most of these cuts are about trying to curb the good stuff piles, firstly by cutting power outliers that are (mostly) unrelated to any of the combos:

• Solitude
• Dauthi Voidwalker
• Liliana, the Last Hope
• Oko, Thief of Crowns

…as well as some lesser or redundant answers, just to cut down on answers overall and increase the efficacy of all the combos:

• Mana Tithe
• Fateful Absence
• Council’s Judgment
• Disrupting Shoal
• Force Spike
• Steel Sabotage
• Dispel
• Dread Fugue
• Brain Maggot
• Agonizing Remorse
• Judge’s Familiar
• Quandrix Command
• The Filigree Silex

The last two cuts are Sevinne’s Reclamation, which doesn’t have as much of a home with the culling of all the 3-mana planeswalkers, and Null Rod, which has proved to be a potent effect at shutting down some of the coolest, riskiest decks and is redundant with Karn, the Great Creator.

This leaves us a lot of room to play, so here is how I am using that space.

This was a conspicuous omission from the original iteration of this cube. I excluded it for reasons cited in the original primer:

My thinking has changed on one point: with addition of Phyrexian Dreadnought and it’s various combo enablers, there actually are a few answers to Thassa’s Oracle beyond just countermagic:

• Hushbringer
• Dress Down
• Endurance
• Noxious Revival (sometimes)
• Torpor Orb

Plus additional answers I am adding with this edit:

• Stifle
• Defabricate
• Timetwister (only very loosely)
• Memory’s Journey

This is in addition to all the countermagic and discard already running rampant. Almost all of this hate also has the benefit of hitting Flash, which is probably the premier combo deck in the environment. All that said, one of the goals of this update is to bolster the combo decks, so the introduction of Thassa’s Oracle is knowing full well that it’s likely to be excellent. I also really love that it is a card that strongly, strongly encourages you to play the smallest deck possible.

This deck is undoubtedly really cool, but I’ve long been of the opinion that the pieces are too narrow to make for a dynamic draft. But I had the space and I just really want to see how it feels:

• Blazing Rootwalla
• Basking Rootwalla
• Vengevine
• Hollow One

Hollow One may also serve as a shops threat in a pinch and maybe the Rootwallas can be a fair plan B for some reanimator deck? Realistically these are all quite narrow.

Goblin Welder is one of my favorite build-arounds in the cube, so the following cards are primarily aimed at making it better:

• Anger
• Lightning Greaves

Lightning Greaves is also quite good with Channel, and I think Anger will have applications in Bazaar Aggro decks and certain reanimator builds.

I literally decided to give Gyruda a try because I was just paging through my trade binder, saw the cool version I opened at prerelease, and thought “fuck it”. When you start looking around there are a decent number of things that play nicely with it, like Phyrexian Metamorph and the newly added Thassa’s Oracle. It feels like it can be a cheat target itself or actually companioned, and with the tiny decks you can set up almost guaranteed hits. I don't want to introduce additional rules modifications, but Gyruda would really benefit from the original companion rules.

To me, these are a matched pair. They certainly do things on their own, but you can also just drop them in basically any deck and turn it into a deck capable of turn 1 wins. Pretty exciting to have a way to turbocharge any strategy.

As I mentioned, a big part of this change is allowing decks to do their thing more consistently, and these are great ways to protect your combo.

• Ephemerate allows for some scam strategies with Grief and Endurance and also plays really well with Leonin Relic-Warder, Mesmeric Fiend, Gyruda, Doom of Depths, Woodfall Primus, Ashen Rider, and Archon of Cruelty.
• Gush is just way too cool, and with Fastbond and Thassa's Oracle it has a lot of utility as well. I've decided that this is the kind of card I want to be good here, and if Gush is not good, my plan would likely be to cut from the top until Gush is good.
• Unmask is just so much more degenerate than other discard spells like Dread Fugue, even if it's not as good.
• Bone Shards is in as another discard outlet, and I do like the idea of having a little more "fair" removal that actually highlights the resilience of some of the cheat targets.