Art by Richard LuongInspired by phutrick's Reasonable Cube, this is an attempt to foster a powerful, but largely fair draft environment full of interesting and diverse strategies. Fast mana such as Grim Monolith and Chrome Mox are absent as are the overly fast cheaty cards such as Show and Tell, Reanimate, and Natural Order. The purpose of this is not to discourage combo players, but to decrease the number of non-games and facilitate more involved, back-and-forth gameplay. Combo fiends are invited to indulge in some of the high-power/high-synergy build-around cards in the cube.
Major archetypes or themes:
Blue control decks embody inevitability. Their top-end features such haymakers as Grave Titan and Jace, the Mind Sculptor, so if the game goes on long enough, they'll win. Which means the entire purpose of the rest of the deck is to make sure the game goes long. Snatch spells off the stack with Counterspell and Mana Leak, peal apart hands with Thoughtseize and scour the battlefield of opposing creatures with Go for the Throat, Swords to Plowshares, and Abrade. Things getting a little too hairy? Beefy spells like Cryptic Command and Wrath of God have you covered. Survive long enough to thrive.
Don't like math? Big numbers scare you? Draft angry little dorks! Math is for blockers and big numbers don't stay big for long when you're swinging in with Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer and Kari Zev, Skyship Raider backed up by a fistful of Lightning Bolts and Fireblasts. Or maybe you'd prefer Champion of the Parish and Seasoned Hallowblade buffed by Thalia's Lieutenant? Oh, or how about endless Gutterbones and Skyclave Shade strapped with Bonesplitter and Grafted Wargear? Efficient, streamlined, and ruthless; these are the decks that shark-people in business suits relate to on a spiritual level.
Midrange is an archetype that spans most colors and defines itself largely by its ability to shift-gears based on the situation. Fighting a big, mean control deck? Get lower to the ground and eat all their card advantage with Duress then cave their face in with Gideon, Ally of Zendikar. Staving off the bloodthirsty advances of aggro? Bulk up and pick off their little dorks with Incinerate before taking over the battlefield with Thragtusk. Or just ramp Birds of Paradise into Goblin Rabblemaster into Arc Trail+ Cast Down. Midrange decks are full of flexible and powerful cards that let it switch roles on the fly and handle whatever the opponent has on tap.
Hey, 1-drop into 3-drop is cool and all, I hear you say, but what if I want a mana curve that resembles a horseshoe? Gobble up every single mana dork in sight and use them to puke a rainbow-colored pile of all the most terrifying and uncastable threats known to humankind. Noble Hierarch, Rofellos, Llanowar Emissary, and Nissa, Who Shakes the World will have you casting monstrous threats such as Hornet Queen, Noxious Gearhulk, and Elspeth, Sun's Champion while your opponents are still figuring out how to get their mana to allow them to double spell on turn four.
But what of the ramp mages who live in perpetual fear of Lightning Bolt and Toxic Deluge? How can they go about casting their 14-drops? Just draft a pile of 2 and 3-cost mana rocks to accelerate out Wurmcoil Engine to crush your opponents hopes. Or maybe you dream of a slightly more intricate payoff. How about the endless value of Daretti, Ingenious Iconoclast? Or how about you float a bunch of mana, flip the table with Upheaval, and then replay your entire board before passing turn. Mana rocks are good and decks that play them are good too.
Sometimes you wanna cast powerful blue spells without dragging the game out 37 turns. For those days, there's tempo. Wring every bit of value out of your deck by playing disruptive, mana efficient spells such as Vendilion Clique and Memory Lapse to put opponents on the back foot and keep them there until your army of 3/1's kill them. Splash black for infinite disruption, white for aggressive creatures, red for reach, or green for bulky flash creatures.
Build Arounds:One of life's greatest struggles is delayed gratification. Suffer a bit now so that you may enjoy ever greater pleasures later. That's a bit what it's like trying to draft a Pod deck. During the draft process, you have to keep a fairly meticulous eye on your curve, lest you slam a Birthing Pod onto the table with no one way to chain up for value. If you get it right, however...well, there's a reason that a legion of diehard nerds still pine over the bygone days of Pod decks in Modern. Playing a good Pod deck is a uniquely satisfying experience. Plus, the new Fiend Artisan not only adds another redundant effect, but also helps further bridge the gap between this build around and the next one.
Survival of the Fittest gave the world a Legacy metagame in which every conceivable color combination and pace of play could be accommodated...as long as you ran Survival. The amount of value and control this card gives you is so high that an immeasurably worse version of Survival, Fauna Shaman, is still a good card. And if Survival is chocolate, than Recurring Nightmare is peanut butter. Pitch Grave Titan with Survival to tutor up Ravenous Chupacabra. Kill something with the Chupathingy so you can sacrifice said Chupathingy to get back Grave Titan with Recurring Nightmare. Even before you start repeating the loop, I think you've generated a literally 4000-for-1 worth of value and fun.
Do you like playing good value creatures? Wanna do it again? This is less a build around than the rest. In fact, to my mind, it's the exact opposite of a build around. It's more a very powerful payoff for doing something already powerful. You don't need to build around Soulherder to be good. Just draft a GW value deck full of Briarbridge Trackers, Jadelight Rangers, and Skyclave Apparitions and then splash blue for a one card value engine. Or play a UG tempo deck and splash white for Ephemerate and Restoration Angel. Welcome, to the Circus of Value!
Like aggressively putting opponents' life total to zero, but tired of running out of gas? Recycle your crappy old Goblin Guides with Blood Artist! Clog up the board with Lingering Souls and Pia and Kiran Nalaar, then jam a Zulaport Cutthroat and suicide everyone into the trenches. Explode your opponents brain after they spend 30 minutes doing combat math on how to best survive by smashing a Goblin Bombardment onto the table on your second main phase. Rip someone's heart out inch-by-inch by looping a single Dread Wanderer through said Bombardment after your opponent hopes they've stabilized.
Boring. Boros. Boros. Boring. They even sound alike. A classic cube conundrum: How do you make Boros interesting? Meet Oscar the Grouch. He likes value and so should you. Chromatic Star is cool, make two of them. Tangle Wire was fun the first time around, let's do it again. How about Ichor Wellspring? Pyrite Spellbomb? Boros even has a Birthing Pod at home! Boring, no more!
Is your personality often deemed "unpleasant"? Do you say things like "Magic is a zero sum game"? Is your favorite flavor of ice cream War Crimes? Then my God, do I have a strategy for you. This deck is a puzzle you need to solve more than a deck you need to draft. Is green open? Snatch up those dorks to ramp out your namesake enchantment and then use that mana advantage to keep your opponent from ever casting anything bigger than a 2-drop. Is black open? Find Bitterblossom and Ophiomancer and grind the board to a halt until you have enough fliers to pulp your opponent. Is nothing really open? Better snatch up all the cheap dorks and token production you can find and find the fixing to string it all together. This is the deck for people who know there's a way to make your opponent have less fun before telling them your win condition is their concession.
Sometimes you just wanna see the light in someone's eyes die. Sometimes it's your opponent as they sit around with no lands, no creatures, and no hope and sometimes it's your own as you continually drop lock pieces a turn too slow to keep up. The important thing is that you're playing Magic the way Richard Garfield intended: hatefully.
Hearthstone has made a lucrative "card" game out of cutting the mana system out of Magic, so the only logical thing for Magic cubes to do is to steer into the skid and make an entire archetype built around lands! Golos, Tireless Pilgrim + Field of the Dead is the inevitability engine that broke multiple constructed formats. Fetchlands are already some of the most powerful cards in Magic, so let's make them stronger, huh? Wanna turn a basic forest into Lair of the Hydra? Elvish Reclaimer does too. Anyone who thinks drafting lands is the most boring part of Cube needs to jam The Gitrog Monster and strap in.
This card looks really fun and worth experimenting with. There are two different ways I'm interested in playing with it. One is pretty typical: Cast the card and grab 15 cards from the undrafted portion of the cube and pick a cool one. My concern with that is that my cube is sized at 405 cards because I sometimes only have three people and three people can Glimpse Draft the entire 405 cards. Yeah, it's easy to dig through the burned cards, but that line of thought led me to a different thought. What if I crafted a 16 card pack that only plays with Booster Tutor? Cast Tutor and check out a pack full of cards that aren't quite as strong as the cards in the cube proper, but give a wide array of options for every color combination. My Booster Tutor pack has it's own Cube Cobra page if anyone wants to check it out: http://cubecobra.com/cube/list/mostlyfairbooster
Play Bolas. Bolas demands it.
There are a few build around cards or archetypes that are on my radar, but, for one reason or another, are not currently in the cube.
- Wildfire: This one hurt. I really like the card Wildfire. It does a lot of interested things that are unusual in the era of Modern Magic Design. And that's part of the reason it's getting cut. Wildfire decks are a style of Magic that Wizards just doesn't support anymore. I don't mind being at odds with Wizards, but sooner or later, I've had to admit that the support for all the other deck styles in this cube have surpassed Wildfire. It's a tough deck to bring together and then, when you do, it just doesn't hum like the rest of the cube does. It's fine. It's not terrible. It might come back someday. But for now, I mourn the passing of one of scorched earth Magic.
- Reanimator: Reanimator violates the spirit of "Fair Magic" instead living on the "Mostly" clause. I'm okay with it existing in this environment because it's high risk/high reward and it doesn't completely shut down any kind of back and forth gameplay with most of the available reanimate targets. This archetype was in the original iteration of the cube, but it never ended up coming together properly. People either fought over some of the key pieces or they just didn't get enough of them to pull the deck together. I cut it to make room for other things, but now that Entomb has a little redundancy via Unmarked Grave, I might consider bringing it back.
- Splinter Twin combo: I cut this because I knew it was very powerful and wanted room to test some other things that I was less sure of. Having put some distance between myself and the combo, I'm happy to leave it sidelined for awhile. The problem it presents is that it narrows the entire game down to one moment. When someone moves to go off: Do you have the removal or not? If you do, great, you've moved a little bit ahead. If you don't? Well, then nothing either of you have done for the entire game matters anymore.
- Naya Persist Combo: Selesnya and Boros are often cited as the two most one-note color combinations in cube. So, I'm looking into just mashing them all together and letting Naya be a big player in the combo game. Good-Fortune Unicorn, Metallic Mimic, and Rhythm of the Wild team up to endlessly loop Persist creatures such as Kitchen Finks and Murderous Redcap(or Woodfall Primus if you're feeling frisky) when combined with a free sacrifice outlet such as Goblin Bombardment, Greater Gargadon, and even Carrion Feeder if you'd prefer a black splash. Some of the individual combo cards are a bit weak on their own, but this should hopefully be offset by the deck's ability to function as a midrange beatdown deck when the combo doesn't show up. I'm also considering adding in Druid combo in the future. Devoted Druid+Vizier of Remedies gives infinite mana to pour into Walking Ballista, Finale of Devastation, or Rhonas the Indomitable.
- [WiP] Big Red Cheater. One of the chief complaints I've come across in cube is that certain colors are one-note. Red, for instance, is often just seen as the hyper-aggro color. I've done a couple things to try and change this up, but one that I'm not sure there's space for at the moment is to flesh out the promise that Sneak Attack offers. Through the Breach and Purphoros, Bronze-Blooded offer redundant effects, complete with a one-use, self-sacrifice clause. Ilharg, the Raze-Boar is a slower, but less all-in version of the effect. Even Fires of Invention offers Red a way to do more than beat people to death.
Cards Intentionally Excluded
- Teferi, Time Raveler: While I may not hate this card like so many others do, I also don't hold any affection for it. It's a sledgehammer designed to shatter an entire axis the game works on while generating card advantage and sitting in the colors best suited to protect him. Not particularly interesting, not particularly fun, and just not worth the fuss for me.
- Oko, Thief of Crowns: Just busted. This card does too much for too little and does so while racking up an astonishingly high loyalty level. If you ever untap with Oko, you're probably favored to win. This goes doubly for a Cube designed largely around fair and interactive Magic. Oko's major weakness of being a 3-mana do-nothing against linear combo decks disappears when those decks don't really exist.
- True-Name Nemesis: This card just kinda sucks to play against. It's a removal check card that requires a fairly specific type of removal spell. Those kinds of spells are present in this cube, but I don't want to add more and require people to have them. Adding this card would probably cause more feel bads than anything fun.