Art by Forrest Imel
DISCLAIMER: this is a fork of Ezuba's Peasantish Cube @ezuba, so I give credit to him for having developed the core structure of this cube.
The cube began as a common and uncommon only environment that has slowly relaxed this restriction to a select pool of rare cards. The rare cards included help define-archetypes, offer exciting-build-arounds, fill-holes unavailable at lower rarity, and strengthen mana bases to allow for creative deck building while still maintaining complexity and powerlevel just slightly above that of a typical unrestricted peasant cube.
The goal of the environment is relatively fast, creature-centric gameplay with synergistic strategies that cross pollinate well with one another. The open-ended archetypes and strategies should allow flexibility while drafting and, to encourage this, the bulk of the cards in the cube are chosen because they can fill multiple roles in different strategies. The most aggressive strategies supported in red, white, and black can close out a game as early as turn 4 or 5 if left unchecked so slower strategies need to have early game interaction and a plan to slow down the advance. Combo strategies are only lightly supported but include reanimator and persist-creature-combo.
White's themes include white-weenies, blink, tokens, flyers, +1/+1 counters, and humans. The color's primary theaters are aggro and midrange but it has access to some of the most versatile-removal and board-wipes making it a great support color for control decks.
Blue's themes include flyers, ninjas, self-mill, and spell-slinger. The aggressive decks tend to be tempo based relying on early creatures backed up by counterspell protection and cheap interaction. Blue provides card-filtering, card-draw, and a wide-array of counterspells that when paired with another color for removal and board wipes can form a potent control deck.
Black's themes include aristocrats, recursion, reanimation, and graveyard matters. Black supports aggro, midrange, control, and combo all of which primarily revolve around using the graveyard as a resource. It also has a variety of forms of hand-hate, creature-removal, and board-wipes.
Red's themes include aggro-burn, sacrifice, spell-slinger, & Wildfire. Aggro, midrange, and control are supported but, with the exception of wildfire decks or as a support color, red is primarily aggressive slanting. The color has a wide-array of burn-spells at its disposal as either creature kill or finishers.
Green's themes include ramp, +1/+1 counters, graveyard-matters, multi-color, and tokens. Green operates primarily in midrange but can support, both, more aggressive-creature decks and full Llanowar Elves style ramp decks with the ability to splash two or more colors for powerful-effects.
Blink, Flyers
Ninjas, Reanimator
Sacrifice, Recursion
Stompy, Ramp
+1/+1 Counters, Tokens
Aristocrats, Tokens
Spell-Slinger
Graveyard Matters, Ramp Reanimator
Tempo, Ramp
Go-Wide Aggro
Persist Combo
How this infinite combo works is not entirely intuitive if you have not seen it so I want to highlight how it works and the cards involved. Persist is a keyword that reads:
When this creature is put into a graveyard from
play, if it had no -1/-1 counters on it, return
it to the battlefield with a -1/-1 counter on it.
When combined with a card that gives the creature a +1/+1 counter when entering the battlefield the 2 counters cancel and the creature then has no counters on it. Here's how it works..
The Murderous Redcap is sacrificed by the Carrion Feeder which then returns to the battlefield from the persist trigger but the -1/-1 counter from persist is cancelled by Good-Fortune Unicorn's +1/+1 counter effect and then you can repeat the process infinitely dealing damage each time to your opponent. Redcap can be replaced with Kitchen Finks to create infinite life, Renata can be replaced by Good-Fortune Unicorn, and Feeder can be replaced by Goblin Bombardment or Nantuko Husk.
Birthing Pod
Birthing Pod and Prime Speaker Vannifar are build around effects for a base green deck that each have an ability that reads:
Sacrifice a creature: Search your library for a creature
card with mana value equal to 1 plus the sacrificed
creature's mana value, put that card onto the battlefield,
then shuffle. Activate only as a sorcery.
A deck built around Birthing Pod hopes to take advantage of a toolbox-arsenal of creatures with enter the battlefield or exit the battlefield abilities that can be searched up at will. Turn by turn the deck can accrue-value while addressing-oncoming-threats and building up an army of its own.
When building around Birthing Pod the deck must be drafted with a particular mana curve in mind. The goal is that multiple chains of creature upgrades are possible without running out of things to search for all along the mana curve. Assuming a deck size of 40 with 16-17 lands and 23-24 spells a deck might have a mana curve something like this:
Creatures: 18-22 Total
- 1 Mana = 4-5
- 2 Mana = 4-5
- 3 Mana = 4-5
- 4 Mana = 2-4
- 5 Mana = 2-3
- 6 Mana = 0-2
- 7 Mana = 0-1
Non-Creatures: 2-5 Total
Example Decklists: Blink Pod
The deck's ability to trigger ETB effects and sacrifice creatures means it cross-pollinates well with Blink strategies, in white or blue, or graveyard-matters strategies in black. The tutor toolbox nature of Birthing Pod also makes it a great place to fit in a Persist Combo. An additional note is that token creatures are zero mana value so can be sacrificed to search for a one mana creature. This makes token-creators great in the deck to refresh new pod chains.
The deck can be a challenge to draft and pilot but quite rewarding if executed well. The logistics of searching for another card each turn can take some time in practice. There is no shame in and I would fully recommend anyone playing a deck based around Birthing Pod to take a snapshot of their decklist before play starts so you have a reference for what you could be searching to help alleviate some of the time constraints of making this work.
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