Art by Paolo ParenteBefore FIRE design was even a smoldering spark, there was the realm of Premodern. Creatures were bad, spells were powerful, and fixing was atrocious.
This 540 cube is mostly a singleton format (see below) of Premodern cards - 4th Edition to Scourge. It's a love letter to when I started playing Magic. There's also one special rule:
Damage uses the Stack
ie after blockers are assigned, the damage is put on the stack for all creatures. Players may do things like activate sacrifice abilities a la Mogg Fanatic or Phyrexian Plaguelord, and the creatures will still deal damage normally despite not being on the battlefield_***
(Yes, WOTC changed this rule because it is not intuitive, but this rule alone makes Morphling Superman - you can pump its toughness after damage is on the stack so it effectively attacks and blocks as a 5/5).
Note that if you are familiar with Premodern constructed (https://premodernmagic.com), I don't strictly adhere to that banned list -- this is cube, after all, we can do more powerful things less consistently and less oppressively than constructed.
What's that Mostly Singleton About?Each color includes one 4x card that gets better in multiples.
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Noble Templar - A useful cycling enabler and on theme for white.
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Accumulated Knowledge - aka why this rule exists, an excellent source of card advantage
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Dark Ritual - Explosiveness and redundancy all in one place, enabling a lot of powerful things out of black.
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Kindle - As burn, this scales up from perfectly serviceable removal to genuinely a finisher.
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Harrow - It's flexible, it ramps, it fuels thresholds, it enables domain, all in one simple card.
If you didn't play circa 2000, this format will feel very different. There are no planeswalkers, which means accruing repeated advantage is much more difficult. This means card advantage is even more important. Cards like Jayemdae Tome, woefully too slow for today's standards, are legitimately fantastic cards because they are repeated card advantage.
Creatures are also a lot worse. Masticore is hands down a windmill slam first-pickable card precisely because all of the creatures are so much smaller and it can easily mow down an army of the smaller creatures.
Bounce effects are also a lot stronger than they are in current Magic because a lot fewer creatures possess ETB effects.
Spells are also much stronger. This format includes powerful effects like Show and Tell, Reanimate, Sneak Attack, Yawgmoth's Bargain, and Tinker - and yet, while these powerful effects are undeniably strong, without the decades of busted enablers they come off as relatively much more "fair".
Archetype Overview
- UW can go a few different ways. One direction is Replenish built with cards like Frantic Search, Attunement, Parallax Wave, and Opalescence. You could also, alternatively, load up on Wrath of God, Counterspell, and play traditional draw-go control.
- UB is one of the most flexible color pairs. If you have multiple copies of Dark Ritual you can play a fast uB suicide black tempo deck, ramping out Hidden Horror, Phyrexian Negator, or others while protecting yourself with tempo spells like Memory Lapse. Alternatively, you could play a slower control deck with Psychatog as a finisher and a suite of countermagic and discard to take the teeth out of whatever your opponent is doing. Lastly, you could take the Reanimate or Living Death route, using various looting effects to stock the graveyard with juicy monsters and cheating them out. Just remember, these reanimation targets aren't Atraxa or Griselbrand - Spirit of the Night and Verdant Force are legitimately great reanimation targets.
This is one of the grindiest of decks in the format that uses the plethora of black and red removal to trade up, and using ETB creatures alongside Phyrexian Plaguelord, Corpse Dance, and Volrath's Stronghold to recur them often. It honestly places closes to contemporary Jund.
- This is an archetype built around Fires of Yavimaya, where you play a bunch of token generators and ramp out greens significantly beefier monsters. Blastoderm is legitimately a house.
- This deck is built around the threshold mechanic. Play value creatures like Wall of Blossoms, Wall of Mulch, and other defensive creatures to stall the board. Use your sweepers and such to trade up, and then drop big threshold monsters that you ramped into to turn the corner.
- Cycling. An archetype built around Astral Slide. Blink value creatures and get in there for damage. In addition, because it has so much cycling the deck can be a redundant and effective low(er) to the ground aggro deck. - Tempo Burn. This is a relatively familiar archetype. You want to smack with cheap aggressive creatures, use bounce spells and countermagic to protect them, and then switch to burn spells to the face if the board stalls to finish people off.
Token Ramp. Use token producers to help generate a lot of mana. A card like Opposition also opens the door to a more prison strategy. Even if you don't have that avenue, you can still ramp into big cards like Time Warp, Time Stretch, and ways to recur them. Just don't leave your wincons at home!
Value Reanimator. Using cards like Survival of the Fittest and Living Death, you can set up big turns with the reanimation effects. You also get the benefit of Green's ramp to potentially cast some beefy midrange threats like Spiritmonger ahead of curve.
Bargain. Cards like Academy Rector and sacrifice effects let you cheat out powerful cards like Yawgmoth's Bargain and go nuts. Don't forget Skirge Familiar to turn all those cards into mana!
- There is a light domain theme for anyone feeling particularly brave.