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• : Control

• : Graveyard / Control

• : Sacrifice Aggro

• : Sacrifice Midrange

• : Monsters Midrange / Kicker

• : Aggro tokens

• : Go wide

• : Spellslinging / Wizards

• : The Rock / Midrange

• : Lands / Ramp

• : Legends matter

• : Mono-White Aggro

• : Mono-Blue Artifacts

• : Mono-Black Control

• : Mono-Red Goblins

• : Mono-Green Ramp

Oddball decks

• Lich's Mastery
• Sneak Attack / Worldgorger Dragon
• Storm

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CONTROL

Control decks avoid racing and attempt to slow the game down by executing an attrition plan, outlasting the opponent with counterspells and removal spells. As the game progresses, control decks are able to take advantage of their slower, more powerful, cards.

The primary strength of control decks is their ability to devalue the opponent's cards. These decks typically get their edge through card advantage, then win the game by doing something more powerful than the opponent.

 

GRAVEYARD

Death is not an end but a new beginning. Use your graveyard for sweet recursive value. In this deck, you are setting up an engine to grind out a long game, or dumping things in the yard to use as your second hand.

This deck is good at not running out of resources. How? By utilizing the graveyard to keep getting back the resources. The opponent can kill your creatures, but you can reanimate them. The opponent can stop your spells but you can retrieve them. No matter what answers your opponent has, this archetype keeps bringing back threats.

 

SACRIFICE AGGRO

“Aggrostocrats” decks seek to sacrifice their own creatures, especially many low-cost and/or token creatures, to accumulate game-winning benefits. Here, you want to win fast, attack, and ping your opponent with everything you have, even if it means your creatures die in the process!

This archetype uses a combination of sacrifice outlets and cards that trigger when your creatures enter and/or leave the battlefield.

 

SACRIFICE MIDRANGE

This deck has a lot of overlap with the Red-Black version but it's not as fast, a little more controlling, and somewhat reactive. White provides lots of creature tokens while black brings removal, reanimation, and strong mid-range threats.

 

MONSTER MIDRANGE

If you like smashing face, then Gruul Midrange is the deck for you! This is a creature based red and green deck that uses bigger, ahead-of-the-curve creatures to overrun your opponents quickly rather than going wide with smaller creatures.

Ramp your mana on your first turns to cast big threats as soon as possible. You may also opt to be a little bit more aggressive by playing cheap red creatures, cleaning the board for your beaters, and dealing those last points of damage to the face with burn spells. There is a small kicker subtheme in this deck as a lot of extra mana can be generated.

 

AGGRO TOKENS

A token deck focuses on token-producing cards that can create a large number of creatures for a low cost to overwhelm your opponent. This version of the strategy takes the form of an aggro deck, using a high density of creatures, commonly paired with effects that increase their power, to defeat the enemy with combat damage. Because of it's access to red it is able to utilise early game removal to clear the board and get damage in during the early turns of the game.

Once you have assembled a large number of tokens, you commonly use effects that will make your tokens more powerful in combat often with ‘anthems’ (cards that provide a power and toughness boost to each creature).

 

GO WIDE

This strategy is similar to the above token strategy in that the goal is to make a large number of creature tokens to overwhelm the opponent. This version of the deck opts to use green to access larger anthem effects which usually give permanent buffs such as +1/+1 counters, rather than temporary buffs.

 

WIZARDS/SPELLSLINGER

‘Spellslinger’ is a term for decks that focus primarily on instant and sorceries. They often contain a mix of low-cost spells that may be cast in quick succession as well as high-cost, powerful spells that many other archetypes may find difficult to cast. Spellslinger decks often contain similarities to control strategies, though they are not a prerequisite for this archetype and this cube contains cards which allow for both aggressive and controlling strategies depending on how you want to construct your deck.

Cantrips, as well as other card draw spells, help your deck maintain a steady influx of instants and sorceries that will produce consistent synergy with other cards in the deck, such as cards with abilities that trigger when instants and sorceries are cast.

Moreover, there is a subtheme of the Wizards tribe in this cube, and many of the strong spellslinging cards overlap with wizards. These strategies play well together, but it is important to bear in mind which strategy you are primarily relying on, and to build your deck accordingly.

 

: The Rock / Midrange

A midrange deck at heart, the traditional Rock style deck plays a lot of disruption alongside solid removal. The cube includes Regrowth effects, sweepers, and card draw to allow the deck to deal with any and all threats. Once the game is under control, the player can close out a game quickly with some of the many strong creature options in green. This deck has access to cards which are good early and late to be able to deal with both aggressive and control strategies and be able to pivot into whatever role you need to finish off your opponent.

 

LANDS / RAMP

This deck aims to cast spells that put additional lands into play, or play creatures/artifacts that tap for mana to cast big creature spells. This deck differs from the above gruul deck in that it is able to take advantage of the late game more with access to blue for powerful draw spells, which can be very helpful after ramping heavily.

 

LEGENDS MATTER

There are many, many legendary creatures in this cube. Although this deck is mana intensive, it may be possible to put together a mana base which is able to harness the strength of all the most powerful cards in the cube!

 

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Although not heavily supported, there may be times where you can draft a very strong mono colour deck. These are some of the themes and signpost cards to look out for:
 

This is a classic cube archetype. The deck focusses on trying to curve out as quickly as possible to go under the opponent.

There are a number of very strong payoffs in blue for playing artifacts. Blue card draw can help with digging for key pieces to turbo out strong artifacts.

This deck seeks to use Black's abundance of removal and recursive effects to grind out the game.

There are a number of strong goblins in the cube which can make a very powerful package in a mono red aggro deck.

Very straightforward deck. Aims to ramp out big green creatures as quickly as possible. My favourite little combo here is Blanchwood armor + Awaken the Woods! Make sure to pick lots of creatures with trample!

 

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I wanted to have a section to explain a few of the fun build-around cards in this cube. This isn't meant to be exhaustive, but just a selection to show how many of the cards in Dominaria have been so unique and interesting. I hope some people attempt these in the draft!

A very fun build around! For this deck to work you want to make as many tokens as possible and play as many life-gain cards as you can! It is a powerful effect, but requires a lot of set up.

This can be a devastating deck. Once the player has Sneak Attack in play they can activate it multiple times to put creatures into play, the last one being Worldgorger Dragon. The enter the battlefield triggers of the initial creatures happen, then Worldgorger enters the battlefield and exiles all permanents. To top it all off, at the end of the turn all the creatures which were originally snuck out come back to the battlefield and stick around without needing to be sacrificed! Draft plenty of creatures with strong enter the battlefield triggers and this is sure to be a fun deck!

This is a common archetype in many powered Cubes. The goal of any Storm deck is to generate a high storm count as quickly as possible, then cast spells with storm. Dominaria Remastered printed a number of these cards, and they have been added to this cube!

 
 
 
 

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