Art by Victor Adame MinguezThis is a Slice (half a cube!). It's intended to be drafted among four people, in 5 packs of 9 cards each.
It’s color-restricted to blue, red, and green, and it’s designed around casting a bunch of spells!
I designed a couple main game plans in each color pair, but there’s significant enough overlap between all of them that it’s reasonable to start out just taking good cards and figure out a plan later. Every blue deck wants Ponder, etc.
FixingFixing is plentiful and strong, but there are strong low-curve decks that can punish greedy mana. You should expect to be in two colors, and you should probably prioritize fixing or card selection to hit your colors effectively.
It’s certainly possible to play all 3 colors, generally in a green ramp deck.
SpeedThere will be at least a few players at the table looking to curve out starting turn 1 or 2. It’s possible to play a longer game, but you have to plan around interacting early: if you want to cast Maelstrom Wanderer, you can’t let the Kiln Fiend deck go off.
Here's what you can expect for each color pair:
blue/red is all about getting triggers from casting spells, or looking for spells in your graveyard. There's support for:
- Aggro (Kiln Fiend, Thermo-Alchemist, Dragon's Rage Channeler)
- Tempo (Delver of Secrets, Crackling Drake)
- Tokens (Young Pyromancer, Saheeli, Sublime Artificer)
red/green is all about building a resource advantage. There's support for:
- Wildfire Ramp (there’s a nonzero amount of land destruction)
- 3-color Ramp
- Tokens: grind them into the Chitterspitter, overrun with Garruk Wildspeaker, use them to grow a Champion of Lambholt
- green/blue is all about extracting extra value out of your spells and permanents. There's support for:
- Kicker (exactly what it sounds like! Get extra effects out of your spells, or even copy them with Verazol, the Split Current)
- Flicker Combo (Peregrine Drake + Ghostly Flicker + Archaeomancer)
- Self-mill (flash back big token-makers and exercise your right to bear arms)
Not much to note here that the changeset doesn't already cover; I'm removing some underperforming cards and trying some new ones. The MDFC lands I think are going to be great, particularly Pinnacle Monk, which can be played as a land and still contribute to your flicker loops since Ghostly Flicker can target lands.
Next time my group drafts this in paper, I'm going to float the idea of pulling the rest of the flicker cards. at this point, removing even one kills the whole deck, and I'm not sure most of them are really justifying their place in the cube.