Art by Scott M. Fischer
This is a 540, sol-ring-but-no-power-9 environment with one central goal: letting drafters play Magic the way that they want to play Magic. Of course, no single cube can fully satisfy everyone at once, but this cube is curated toward providing that "Oh man, I sure like this deck!" feeling to as many players as possible. This means the inclusion of a handful of cards that are more fun than they are good, as well as a focus on cards that perform well across archetypes for a wide range of possible "playable" decks. Most slot-hungry archetypes have been cut (looking at you, storm). Expect 80% of the list to be your "standard vintage unpowered" list, with 20% personality.
If you want to read more about my design philosophy, you can check out this CubeCobra article, or browse the other articles I've written.
Table of Contents:
- Global Archetypes
- Cube Environment & "House Rules"
- History
- Primer (START HERE if you're relatively new to cube drafting!)
Global Archetypes:
Note: These archetypes are staples of cubes everywhere. SEE THE PRIMER further down this page if you are not familiar with how these classic archetypes tend to play out in the draft and on the table.
- Aggro: White Weenies, RDW
- Midrange:
/x Tempo, 
/
Aristocrats & Stax, 
/
Ramp - Control: It's cube. There are
control cards (sorry, ). Go wild. - "Combo": Kiki/Twin,
Cheaty, Reanimate
Fringe-playable archetypes for those who seek to draft them:
- Artifacts (e.g. 1 2 3 4 5),
Spells-matters (e.g. 1 2 3 4 5), /x Pod (value, not combo, e.g. 1 2 3 4 5), Wildfire decks, 
Flicker (e.g. 1 2 3 4 5), Lodestone Myr + the cards he breaks, "Lands," aka break cards like these guys by utilizing cards like these guys
Cube Environment & "House Rules":
Cube Size vs. Pod Size vs. Pack Size:
This cube is curated for 6-person pods. It likes to be drafted with 8 people, and works with 4, but 6 is the target.
There are two ways that I usually draft this cube: one for "more experienced" pods, and one for "less experienced pods." I absolutely love bringing people into the cube community who may not be as invested in Magic as the average cube player, and as a result of this, I have different methodologies for drafting with different groups.
- The Enfranchised Draft: 3 packs of 15 cards each. This is how most players are used to drafting, and this is how as-fan ratios for this cube are skewed (for things such as land visibility, archetype signaling, redundant-effect visibility, etc.)
- The Outreach Draft: 5 packs of 9 cards each if drafting in a pod of 6 people (still 45 cards/person total), or 4 packs of 11 cards each if drafting in a pod of 8 people (44 cards/person). Why, you may ask? Analysis Paralysis. Do you remember your first time drafting a cube? Mine went something like "Pack one looks sick... Wait is that a card worth $100 ohhhhh damn these are all insane... Oh, oh wait, oh no, everyone's already picked a card I'm the only one left, so I guess I just take the card I know is banned in Commander?" By drafting 5 packs of 9 cards each, you give new drafters a much less stressful environment in which to make their first decisions. Yes, you have less information throughout the draft. But that's fine when you're trying to get people to make it through their first cube draft. Trust me; it's fun.
House Rules:
- You can look at all of your picks during the draft (unless everyone agrees not to beforehand). Some people need the memory space taken up by those cards, and I find that 99% of drafters are fine with this as long as they know beforehand.
- If you draft Pod/Vannifar, you can take a picture of your deck before playing and reference it in-game at any time. It actually speeds games up, not slows games down, since you can check for targets while your opponent is thinking. Plus, it eliminates those real feels-bad moments where you whiff. It's fine to whiff when you brainfart and Tinker while you're already holding your only fatty, but for Pod decks it's different. They struggle enough as it is; don't beat a dead horse.
- Booster Tutor always gets you a random 15 cards from the un-drafted section of the cube, regardless of what draft format you used that day.
- If you miss your Pact or Pact trigger, you lose the game. Triggers, people. Mind them. It's a learning experience. That being said, I still always let any new player get a free pass, since they're already trying to learn a mile a minute during their first draft.
- Not a house rule, but a common comment I get: I do not like cards with Monarch. Palace Jailer and Custodi Lich are powerful cards, true, but I do not like the playstyles that Monarch cultivates, however, so they are out.
History:
This cube was born in the summer of 2015. My friend group at Whitman College had just finished formulating a "Tabletop Club" the semester prior (shoutout to Jeffrey for getting the ball rolling), and we were looking for more types of games to bring people into the fold. Most of our club activities focused on more traditional board/card/party games, such as 7 Wonders, Dominion, Betrayal at House on the Hill, Dixit, One Night Ultimate Werewolf, etc. etc.
I, however, wanted to find a way to bring a fun MTG draft environment to this newly-founded club. Like many college students in their first year on campus, I had initially not brought any of my high school Magic cards with me, assuming that there might not be a community for me to play with. Lo and behold, I was wrong. Soon I discovered many kindred spirits who were itching to not only continue, but expand, their Magic horizons. However, it was hard to get anyone to actually play with any regularity, because these new friends' backgrounds in Magic were all across the board. Vorthos had two kitchen table decks, Jenny had five Standard decks from two rotations prior, Spike had a single EDH deck that cost more than a month's tuition, etc. etc. So I set out into my first summer break with the goal of making a format that we could all play, together, regardless of our individual collections. A cube, if you will. Except I didn't know what a cube was.
Queue the rabbit hole.
What started as a crappy compilation of my unused "EDH staples," binder chaff, and over-powered nonsense (Lord, forgive me, for I have sinned) has grown over the years into a slightly less-crappy draft environment.
Now for the real fun:
Buckle Up, Buttercup, It's Time for a PRIMER
So you want to draft a cube (obligatory). Well, you'd better go into your first cube draft with some idea of what you can actually, ah, draft. This primer is oriented toward getting you familiar with the types of decks you are most likely to encounter in this cube and others like it.
Note: If you don't actually know what a "draft" is yet, read this first. Conversely, if you already know why cards like Porcelain Legionnaire, Heir of Falkenrath, and Looter il-Kor are in the same draft environment as Blightsteel Colossus and Jace, the Mind Sculptor, then you don't really need this primer. Go poke around with some bot drafts and show what you know. If you're interested in making your own cube primer, check out my CubeCobra article on the subject.
Now that the old farts are gone, let's talk shop.
To be overly derivative, Cube is about drafting decks, not cards. Have you heard of "BREAD"? Doesn't matter; we're not using it here. Almost every card in the cube looks "good" at face value, so just drafting good cards will not leave you with a deck on-par with the other decks that drafters are building.
So how do you draft a deck? You look for archetypes.
- ar·che·type | \ ˈär-ki-ˌtīp
NOUN: the original pattern or model of which all things of the same type are representations or copies. (Merriam-Webster)
Thank you, Mr. Dictionary. I've learned a smart word but am still draft dumb.
- ar·che·type (Magic: the Gathering edition)
NOUN: A general game-plan for victory that one emulates by combining cards which further said game-plan, often to synergistic effect.
That is to say, an archetype is not just about the words on your cards. It's a way of life It's a way of piloting a deck—a way of building a deck—a way of (you guessed it) drafting a deck. Below, I will be outlining not just the types of cards that fall into each of the cube's major archetypes, but also how each of those decks wants to be drafted and played.
"I came here for the pretty pictures," you are no doubt saying right now. Well then:
The Pretty Pictures:Fun cube fact: you don't actually have to like aggro. It's just nice when the option's there, like that bottle of salad dressing in your fridge that you haven't touched since 2019. Aggro is essentially the same from format to format, since most creatures that can do 2 damage for 1 mana are comparable to one another. It keeps the other degenerate stuff in balance, because if you can die on turn 4 if you don't develop your board then you're kind of encouraged to develop your board.
"Red Deck Wins" (RDW for short) and White Weenies both run a similar creature-based shell of low-to-the-ground creatures that have haste or fun twists or above-rate stats. You usually want to aim for three-drops that go wide, and your deck will taper off at about four mana.
Much of the difference in flavor of RDW and Weenies lies in the two-drop spot. White tends to have more of an emphasis on hatebears (e.g. 1 2 3), whereas red tends to be more spells-y ((e.g. 1 2 3))
But how do I draft RDW or White Weenies? As it turns out, you can actually sit down at the table and tell everyone before the draft starts: "Yo, I'm going ham with aggro tonight." No one will contest it. I promise you.
Conversely, if you've taken a few generically good picks in the first pack and think, "Haven't there been a lot of dinky little dudes passing around the table? Yessirree, there have been! Perhaps I should gather them all into one place." Then you start picking them up. Based on the color of weenies you're grabbing, you'll also want to lean into burn spells if you're in red, and be on the lookout for good two-drops if you're in white. Keep in mind: if you notice that other people are picking up the removal spells in your color, don't worry too much, since those cards can go into a wide number of decks. However, if you notice that someone else is taking the central cards to your deck (the little guys), then you might want to lean into a slightly different variety so as not to get pinched out. For example:
What spicy options are there in aggro? If you eat your vegetables by drafting multicolored lands, then you can splash multicolor! As you may have guessed, Boros aggro works very well as long as you have the mana base to support the colors. Sometimes, though, all a red deck needs to grind out a victory is some delicious Rakdos or Gruul spice (1 2 3 4), and your White Weenies deck could use a silver bullet or two if you can support them.
Good and Bad Matchups: Aggressive decks fail when they face a deck that can stabilize the board. If you're playing an aggressive deck, you are going to be dropping a lot of fast, cheap threats. If your opponent can reliably clear the board, or gain life, you're in trouble. This means that aggro isn't great against cheap boardwipes, or cheap creatures that slow you down while also giving your opponent card advantage.
Conversely, RDW is killer against decks that need little guys to succeed, since your access to direct damage can blow them up fast. Similarly, decks that flood the board with small threats often overwhelm decks that revolve around a few large bombs, since these bombs may be scary but they usually can't stop the flood on their own.
Example Deck: Quick-n'-Dirty Boros. Vomit your hand onto the battlefield for a quick win, and use cards like Sulfuric Vortex to grind out longer games.
Ah, yes, the BDSM decks. Hurt yourself for your own pleasure and for the displeasure of your opponents, unless they're into that stuff, in which case your opponent may just be a member of Wizards' R&D department.
Aristocrats is an ancient MtG archetype that found its titular moniker in the aristocrats of Innistrad block. This archetype turns downsides into upsides by pairing sacrifice "enablers" (cards that let you sacrifice creatures) with sacrifice "payoffs" (cards that benefit you when creatures die) and sacrifice "fodder" (creatures that you don't mind losing, either because they come back from the dead or are dinky tokens). So Enablers + Fodder + Payoffs = Profit. Usually your payoffs are some combination of direct damage, life-drain effects, or card draw.
"Stax" is a similar, yet different, flavor of masochism. Named after the iconic Urza's Saga artifact, this archetype found a home with the OG Braids, who has recently been joined by the mostly-superior Master of Prankles. Stax is arguably more of a sub-archetype to Aristocrats because it is hard to pull off on its own. Since stax-effects rely on the same recursive creatures, dinky tokens, and death-triggers as the aristocrats deck, it's much more realistic for Stax to build out of an Aristocrats shell than for it to flourish on its own.
How do I draft it? If your idea of living the highlife is killing small things, then look for recursive threats early in the draft. These staples are crucial to get any Aristocrat or Stax deck off the ground, yet they don't pigeonhole you into the deck the way that cards like Braids herself does. Once you have a skeleton of small threats you can start seeking out the fun stuff that will reward you for those creatures dying. I like to start out with versatile picks that could go into a wide number of decks, like Ophiomancer, Daretti, Smol Chandra, Ally Gideon, or Lingering Souls. These cards can all do well in an Aristocrat or Stax deck, but can also develop into really any deck that runs those colors.
Spice: Throw in some aggro or control to go over or under your opponents as needed. This is where your sideboard will shine, since both Aristocrats and Stax can easily board in wraths against faster decks and direct damage against slower decks.
Good and Bad Matchups: Aristocrat decks are very versatile, since they can block aggro decks with their plentiful small creatures, but also out-value slow opponents with their grindy payoffs. However, they are vulnerable to midrange-y cards that get around blockers, gain opponents life, or worse, shut down your abilities.
Stax decks do well against opponents that can't keep up with the sacrifice effects, but struggle against decks with planeswalkers that produce tokens, or decks that are like you in that they don't really care if their creatures die. Watch out for the one silver bullet against Stax, too. Keep a removal spell handy if you see Tamiyo in game one.
Example Deck: Rakdos Aristocrats. Oh boy are Daretti and Chandra fun in this deck. Don't overlook Skullclamp if you haven't played with it much. Throw it on your "free" tokens for insane card draw.
Ramp decks are all about beating mana parity to cast big spells early in the game. Ramp spells are easy to recognize: you have your ubiquitous one-drop elves, your other creature-based ramp, your land-based ramp, and your artifact ramp.
There are two ways to play ramp decks: all-in hyper ramp, and what I will call "tempo ramp." These two approaches both attempt to answer the same classic problem: that all your impressive mana means nothing to you if you can't spend it on something.
- Hyper ramp is all about high-risk, high-reward plays that can blow out your opponent on turn 3 or 4. Dropping a hand full of mana dorks in the first few turns puts you at a huge risk of eating a boardwipe to the face, but it also leads to games where your Control opponent can do nothing against a turn 3 T-Rex and your Aggro opponent loses one of their two lands to a tree.
- "Tempo ramp" is about incremental value, not balls-to-the-walls piles of elves. These decks focus on the 4-drop and 5-drop slot, aiming to get them out just one or two turns ahead of curve. These decks can be brutal when you sideboard in some 3-5 cost answers to your opponent's strategy and play them before your opponent can really get off the ground. Ramping out a Thragtusk against aggressive decks, or Thrun, the Last Troll against control, or any long-term value engine against opponents with spotty removal will just end games.
How do I draft it? In a draft, look for the cards that ramp you first, not the flashy fatties that you can ramp into. Given the concentration of big boys and girls in the cube (just wait for the next archetype), it's almost guaranteed that you'll be able to pick up a few fatties later in the draft, especially in green, since by then you've already pinched the pool of ramp spells.
Spice: This probably sounds familiar by now, but draft some LANDS and lean into multicolor. Guess what? Simic cards like ramp. Guess what? So do Gruul cards. Guess what? So do Golgari and Selesnya cards. Who'd a thunk. It's like Green tends to do well with ramp.
Good and Bad Matchups: Ramp decks are vulnerable to early removal. If you can't keep your dorks alive, then you're just playing a deck that does nothing until turn 8 when you try to cast Big-Ass Pigs and it gets noped. On the flip side, ramp decks are good against other tempo-oriented decks, where your 2-for-1 cards gain exponential value. Honestly, just going from a turn 1 elf into a turn 2 Rec Sage that blows up their mana rock can be all that a "ramp" deck needs to do to run away with a game.
Example Deck: Almost-Mono-Green Ramp. If you manage to pick up a ton of mana dorks in the draft, try mono- with just a splash of something else (here , literally just for Hydroid Krasis.
Welcome to the archetype for people who want to cheat but don't want to lose friends by actually cheating.
As evidenced by the name, "cheaty" is all about breaking the fundamental rule of magic that spells have mana costs and that mana costs supposedly mean anything? Or something like that, because Cheaty decks skip the middleman of this "mana" you speak of by sneaking Spaghetti Monster MK.3 into play on turn 2 or 3.
Some folks will tell you that Cheaty is just the better version of ramp, and they're not entirely wrong. Cheaty is the more efficient version of ramp. It skips multi-card ramping with single-card effects like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, and Spy. Cheaty is often quite vulnerable to early countermagic, since ramp decks don't lose their mana cache if a fatty is countered, whereas a Cheaty deck may only contain two copies of Sneak & Show for getting out those game-ending threats.
Teach me to commit mana crimes. Like with ramp, you want to draft the enablers before the monstrosities. Spaghooter Moonster Mk.1 does literally nothing if you can't cheat her into play, so pick your Through the Breeches before your Elesh Norns.
On that note, try to match your bombs with your cheats. Much of Norn's power comes from her static abilities, making her a great card to keep around, but not to die immediately to Through the Breeches' end-of-turn sacrifice effect. On the flip side, many cards (e.g. 1 2 3) get a lot of immediate value out regardless of whether they survive the turn, so go nuts with Sneak Attack.
Spice: Throw some fair Magic into your unfair Magic! In an ironic, yet classic, twist, many Magic decks that fold to counterspells actually do quite well when they run a few counterspells themselves. Tit for tat. Or, you can double down on degeneracy with the next archetype, Reanimator, and get some helpful redundancy in by bringing back any bombs that end up in the 'yard.
Good and Bad Matchups: As mentioned multiple times already, Cheaty decks don't like it when your opponent tries to call you out for cheating. If your card gets bounced to your hand, you need a way to replay it. Then there is the fail-case of your opponent stealing your fatty, or even worse, **yoinking it out of your gorram library**. This is why I mentioned that your Cheaty deck may want to run a few counterspells itself.
Cheaty decks do great against most deck that wants to play fairly, however. Cards that give haste like Through the Breach and Sneak Attack get around board wipes, and cards that let you keep your Eldrazi in play will steamroll any dinky midrange decks.
Example Deck: Sneak & Show, base Blue, with some Red and Black. This deck filters through your library for the cards you need using guys like Looter il-Kor, and can sneakily reanimate fatties that end up in the graveyard.
Fun Fact: AC/DC actually wrote "Back in Black" as a tribute to the Reanimator archetype in Magic: the Gathering.
I've been livin' like a star 'cause it's gettin' me high
Forget the hearse, 'cause I never die
I got nine lives, cat's eyes
Using every one of them and runnin' wildBut enough fake history. Reanimator is one of my favorite archetypes because it turns your graveyard into a morbid playground. Who doesn't like having two hands?
Reanimator is all about getting creatures into your graveyard who don't stay there long. Some cards let you discard for free, while any number of reanimation effects let you resurrect the spooky creatures that you just binned. You can go for a fast, cheeky win by quickly reanimating a Grislebrand or a Titan, OR you can go more for a grindy Jund-style deck with using repeatable discard, late-game threats, and small creatures in the early game that just keep coming back.
Don't think that Reanimator has to be mono-black! Despite my AC/DC reference, Reanimator works great with and cards as well. Both colors have discard effects, ways to get your reanimation spells back from the 'yard, and amazing reanimation targets. Plus, as mentioned in the previous section, you can get double value out of your bombs if you cheat them into play FIRST and THEN reanimate them.
How do I draft Reanimator? Drafting a Reanimator deck is similar to drafting its close cousin, Cheaty, and its slightly more distant cousins, Ramp and Aristocrats. If you're going for the boom-or-bust style deck, you have to grab those Reanimates and Exhumes and Entombs early on. If you're going more for a grindy recursive deck, you instead need to focus early on the cards that can bounce back and forth between your graveyard and the battlefield (e.g. 1 2 3). You can pick up fatties later in the draft, because they don't even need to be on-color half the time.
Spice: Rakdos reanimate decks are historically viable, but my spicy tech that (actually only very occasionally) always wins games is a more tempo-oriented Dimir deck that incidentally gains recursive value from cards like Living Death or this version of Liliana. Sure, you have the top-end powerhouse that is the Scarab God, but adding also gives you access to a bunch of annoying little goobers that disrupt your opponent while still hitting pretty hard. The card manipulation with blue can be bonkers, and it also gives you access to one of my favorite cube cards of all time.
Good and Bad Matchups: Reanimate decks hate white, because dear God why does it exile everything. It also fears this unassuming little Containment Priest, who completely hoses it (yes, that card also hoses Cheaty, as well as some decks in the next archetype, Combo). That being said, Reanimate decks are otherwise some of the most resilient and versatile decks out there, because it doesn't really matter if your spells countered or your creatures destroyed, since they'll probably come back for seconds eventually.
Example Deck: Golgari Reanimator. This deck is super fun because, unlike classic 
and versions of Reanimator, this one can also just ramp out a 6-drop on turn 4 and go the midrange stompy route.
Combo is hard.
I don't mean that it's hard to understand. Sure, if you have Wiki Tiki out and resolve a Pestermite, you probably win the game on the spot. But combo is hard to do correctly, both in drafting it and building a deck around it. Hell, it's hardest to handle when you're trying to build a cube with combo elements, and I do not even remotely pretend that my cube is a perfectly balanced environment for combo. Half of the time, it's busted as hell. Half of the time, it fizzles completely. The third half of the time, only half of the combo ever shows up in the draft packs and the fourth half of the time you accidentally combo off without thinking that you had a combo in your deck haha whoops hello there infinite self-targeted ETB triggers before that got errata'd.
Point is, all you really need for a combo is two-ish cards that go infinite off of one another, like Heliod & Walking Balista (give the Balista lifelink with Heliod and ping infinitely), or the original Saheeli and her standard-banned pet, Felidar Guardian (the cat gets copied by Saheeli's (-2) and flickers her, creating infinite haste-y creatures). Ideally, you'd have some redundant effects, and sprinkle in a few tutors, whether they be the off-color but perfect-find tutors, or any number of the more specific finders ("One, Two, Three, Ah-Ah-Ah!")
Then you choose whether you want to run a control shell that stabilizes until you combo off, or a threat-heavy deck that draws out removal preemptively, or a sideboard-focused toolbox deck that switches things around to best protect your combo from each matchup's different threats. Pick your poison.
How do I draft it? I'll say it again: Combo is hard. There is no single "correct" way to draft combo, because like combo games themselves, a combo draft is likely to boom or bust. If you overly focus on grabbing the combo cards early, you'll miss out on the highly-contested mana-fixing and tutors that smooth things out. Then there's the chance that you take half of a combo but the other half never shows up. Worst of all, maybe you saw two halves of a combo, but after the packs wheel once and you grab that first card you notice that the cards are being drafted from inside the house someone else at the table has stolen the other half of the combo! Now you're in hot water.
The "correct" way to draft combo, in my very biased mind, is to just go for it if the cards tickle your fancy and you see them early in pack one. Do you want to guarantee that you'll be able to "spike" the draft, draft the hard way, and come out with a polished deck? Congratulations! You're probably not the sort of drafter who is looking to go into combo. If you are the rare breed that likes drafting combo but doesn't like risky drafts (note: combo decks in Constructed formats are entirely different beasts), then that means you've already got some inkling of a game-plan brewing for how you want to draft, whether that be all-out combo or more reserved picking and choosing.
Spice: You want the spice for a cube's combos? Literally just ask the cube's designer and watch in horror as they ramble for two hours. Oh what's that? You want to know about the combos in MY cube? Well... all I'll say here is that I don't like running the entire Persist "package" in my cube, but I do have one or two lines of play that the occasional, driven, lucky drafter can stumble upon. I'll link you these three cards and mention that Aristocrats is the place to be.
Good and Bad Matchups: Combos are fragile to targeted disruption. Most notably, they are extremely vulnerable to early hand disruption (e.g. 1 2 3 4 5) and free counterspells. What's that you say? You remember that Cheaty decks work well when they preemptively run similar cards? You're right, Bobby, they do. Feel free to draft some of these cards yourself, whether to use them defensively or to keep others from using them against you. Besides, taps forehead, it doesn't matter if you lose the game next turn if there won't BE a next turn.
Combo decks destroy decks that think they're safe behind a wall of tokens or because they just Tinkered out a game-ending threat last turn. None of that matters if you can hit them out of nowhere with an infinite number of American Black-Friday shoppers on the hunt for cheap socks at Fred Meyer. Just beware: don't accidentally kill yourself when you forget to read the full text of your opponent's Rampaging Ferocidon
Example Deck: Pile-o'-Combo. This deck looks like a mess, but plays much smoother than it looks. It uses a ton of library-digging effects (e.g. 1 2 3 4) to find either combo pieces or the specific removal you need.
"What's that you say? You like playing fair magic? In a cube?"
Midrange can sometimes get a bad rap in the cube community. In many cubes, midrange decks fold to the hyper-fast and hyper-slow archetypes like RDW and Boardwipe Tribal. In others, midrange is "too good" because there aren't enough well-defined archetypes and everyone just plays goodstuff piles. My cube started as a "goodstuff pile"-type of cube, and has shifted toward the defined archetype end of the spectrum now, but that does not mean that midrange is dead. To bash on midrange is to overly-simplify the matter, and to skirt around this issue I will now proceed to simplify the matter even further:
To find a midrange deck, look at the multicolor section of the cube. Boom. Guild-colored cards that cost between 3 and 5 mana abound. Where do most of these cards fit? Some kind of midrange deck.
This is actually an issue that many cube designers have with multicolor slots in cubes. They tend to be... generically good cards, sure, but they sometimes fail to fit into the sleek, archetypal gameplans that most cube curators seek to curate. Often they fit the B, R, and E of "BREAD", which as I already said, we often throw out in cube drafts. Still, I like a lot of these midrange-y cards, and I enjoy the games they play in, so they remain in my cube for now. Are they always great picks? No. Should you sometimes draft generically good cards anyways? Sure, if you want to. Midrange is as midrange does. If you want to draft a deck that just curves out and makes value plays, go for it. You might not end up with the most competitive deck, but I've found that these decks can be remarkably fun to draft and play from time to time.
Spice: Midrange is the spice. Sprinkle it liberally.
Good and Bad Matchups: Midrange is good in the the aggro matchups where it can stabilize, and bad in the ones where it can't. Midrange is good in the control matchups where it can out-value your opponent, and bad in the ones where it can't. Midrange is a myth, my dudes, or at least in the sense that it's not really an archetype. It's is much harder to accurately classify into good-and-bad matchups as a result. It teaches you how to sideboard effectively, though, since you'll have to lean faster or slower depending on who you're up against.
Example Deck: Sometimes you just want to go Naya.
Oh and why not have another Example Deck: Artifacts. This one is more of a case study in drafting. Sometimes you start off the night by drafting half of a Tinker deck, but it goes in a different direction when you hit a ton of artifact ramp instead of Tinker itself.
The best way to play Magic is to keep others from playing. Forget taking your ball and going home (conceding). Instead, take their ball and go home (playing control).
You probably don't actually need a primer on control. Do you know what a board wipe is? Cool. Have you countered someone's spell and/or had one of your own spells countered? Cool. You know the drill.
How do I draft Control, though? I'm only going to tell you three things here:
The whole point of a control deck is that you keep your opponent down until you use some weird card to close out the game. Since you KNOW that you're going to be facing a faster deck than you, you absolutely cannot afford to get color-screwed. Just look at these three classic control cards. What do you notice? Double pips. (pips are Since you won't be doing quite as much in the first few turns of the game, you're fine with a few lands coming down tapped, but you're not fine with being short a color for that boardwipe that you need to cast on turn 4 before you die. these little dudes)
The only other thing I'll say is to make sure you have a few ways to close out a game, like Aetherling. A good "finisher," as we like to call them, is a a card that comes out late in the game, can damage your opponent, and is resilient to removal. Aetherling is a perfect example. Read it again. At first, it doesn't look like much. It's not enormous, and it only costs $0.25, so it can't be that good, right? Wrong. In a control deck, it ticks all three boxes for a finisher: You play it on turn eight or so, when you have mana to spare, it can become unblockable for guaranteed damage, and it's first ability is a one-mana ability that you can use repeatedly and at instant speed to avoid removal spells. Hell, since it returns Aetherling to the battlefield at the end of the turn, not immediately, it even gets around boardwipes. All I'm saying is: choose your finishers wisely. Some are flashier than Aetherling, but they don't really need to be flashy as long as they can get the job done, and your opponent dead.
Spice: Honestly? Red control. It works, but it's easy to sleep on. People tend to overlook red in favor of Esper () control variants, and you'd be surprised how open /x control can be in a draft.
Good and Bad Matchups: Control, like Midrange, is not really an archetype so much as it is a blanket term. If you drafted a boardwipe-heavy control deck, you'll struggle against combo decks and reanimate decks. If you drafted a counterspell-heavy control deck, you'll struggle against RDW and White Weenies. Conversely, counterspells are great against combo decks and boardwiped are great against aggressive decks.
Example Deck: Dimir Control. Counter things, kill things, make your opponent cry. A classic.
Another Example Deck: Wildfire! Wildfire decks are fun. Use mana rocks to blow out your opponent on turn 4 by using Wildfire or its sibling to wipe the board and destroy your opponent's mana base.
And that's all for now, folks.
To copy and paste a chunk from earlier, if you have survived this primer then you may want to peruse the following fringe archetypes/sub-themes.
- Artifacts (e.g. 1 2 3 4 5), Spells-matters (e.g. 1 2 3 4 5), /x Pod (value, not combo, e.g. 1 2 3 4 5), Wildfire decks, Flicker (e.g. 1 2 3 4 5), Lodestone Myr + the cards he breaks, "Lands," aka break cards like these guys by utilizing cards like these guys
Go look at the cube list and see what you can see. Go take it for a drive with a bot draft. If you know me personally, wait until COVID is over and then please for the love of God I am dying to draft in paper again.
"Gold-Bordered cards are wonderful things,"
Maramas (on Reddit as u/JuliusVinaigrette)