Hi my name is Matt, and I'm a huge fan of graveyard mechanics, so that's my cube. This cube highlights the smorgasbord of flavors that using the graveyard brings to magic in a bunch of fun and exciting ways.
The power level of this cube is well above masters sets like Ultimate Masters, but I’ve tried to avoid power outliers so the synergies can shine.
Basically, I want to make sure discard matters can hang with everything else.
The overlapping graveyard mechanics make it really important to have a plan as you build your deck. You can jam together powerful cards and they will work together, but your deck might get stomped by a deck that honed in on a specific game plan. I’m hoping that writing a more detailed cube primer will make it easier for folks to find and draft a sweet deck.
Here’s a guide to some of the big themes and mechanics that make up the cube. (This is still in progress a bit!)
If you want to dive into the details a bit more, I wrote a slightly more in-depth cheat sheet that gives a few suggestions for each color pair.
While discard is available across all colors in the cube, it primarily pays off in Grixis colors. All three colors include metric ton of looting, rummaging and discard outlets. The payoff with Madness, Flashback, and other cards that get more powerful from the graveyard.
Enablers
Payoffs
Subtheme: Cycling
Adding White to the mix with Blue or Red, gives you access to some key cycling-specific and Draw 2 payoffs. Prioritizing Flourishing Fox, Astral Slide, and Faerie Vandal along with the strong cycling cards in all three colors.
Subtheme: Delirium / Undergrowth
Discard in green with black generally enables you to get Dredge cards going or get more creature cards in your graveyard for fun and profit.
Self-Mill is centered in Blue, Black, and Green. These colors fill up your graveyard quickly and it’s up to you to figure out what to do with all the bodies. Laboratory Maniac? Murktide Regent? Living Death? It’s up to you.
Enablers
Payoffs
Sacrifice outlets are strewn across Black, Red, and Green, but they each have very distinct flavors and can be combined in a number of different ways. Maybe I should call this death matters?
Enablers
Payoffs
Subtheme: Aristocrats (Abzan)
Black has the most powerful sacrifice payoffs and recursive creatures like Gravecrawler, but white and red both provide a lot of tokens. White also brings the goods for mass recursion with Faith's Reward. This deck can be tricky to build, but with the right ingredients it’s super fun.
Subtheme: Academy Manufactor stuff (Colorless)
I've started adding a lot more support for Clues/Food/Treasure. Continuing to evaluate whether or not this is going to work out.
Subtheme: Lands
Land sacrifice is based in Naya colors and has all the pieces for a powerful deck. Titania, Protector of Argoth is important here along with Crucible of Worlds to get them right back.
Since you've got a lot of stuff going into the graveyard in the other archetypes, it just makes sense to figure out a way to get things out again.
Cast your spells (again!)
Reanimate some artifacts
Let's just bring everything back one-at-a-time
Wait, tokens aren’t graveyard themed!? Well, one of the flipsides of needing lots of tokens for sacrifice is that you have a lot of them running around, and I’ve included support for going both wide and tall with tokens in case those sacrifice outlets don’t line up for you.
Enablers
Payoffs
Even though I'm not super into Aetherdrifts flavor, I've been a big fan of its limited environment and I've been forcing UR discard all the time because I'm curious to see how it similarly it plays to my cube. (Also it's fun)
There are a lot of great cycling cards in this set, a couple of great cycling matters cards, especially Monument to Endurance.
Still need to track down a copy of Abhorrent Oculus!