Art by Néstor Ossandón LealA celebration of wide board states.
This is a bar cube, so it's intended to be played unsleeved and casually. As such, cards ought to be cheap, to the point where a bit of "water" damage wouldn't be alarming. I don't have a hard cap on this, but if it's more than $1.50, it's probably out, and most cards should be chaff-priced.
Bar cubes in my experience eschew as many of the "extra game pieces" of Magic as possible - your dice and flip cards and dungeons and day/night and... However, bar cubes also cut out a key component of wide board states: tokens. It's understandable, as they can be quite finicky and it's another thing to spill "water" on.
I've addressed this via some careful card selection, and a few choice Sharpie edits. To explain:
- No card in the cube cares about creature types or colours.
- No card in the cube creates artifact or enchantment creature tokens.
With these limitations, any 1/1 flier token is totally interchangeable, so you can simply have a pile of them sitting in the cube box to be grabbed as appropriate. There's a limited menu of these P/T + keyword combinations, which are as follows:
- 1/1
- 1/1 Flying
- 2/2
- 2/2 Vigilance
- 2/2 Flying
- 3/3
- 4/4
There are occasional exceptions, such as Eternalize tokens, but the card itself can be used to avoid memory issues.
Themes:
- Young PZ And The Crew
- Equipment That Brings Friends
- Go Wide. No, Wider. Even Wider. - Temur Landfall Soup, An Old Family Recipe
- Creature Tokens Sweating Nervously at the Karlov House Party - You Say "Corpse", I Say "Fertilizer" - It's Still Reanimator Even If You Don't Have Archon or GristlebrandThese are cards I'm proposing to cut. Some are pretty finalized, some aren't. Reasoning:
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Demon of Catastrophes: This cut has been a long time coming. Big creatures are hard for most decks to deal with, particularly when they have evasion. "Sacrifice a creature" is not a real cost for a 4-mana 6/6 flyer in this environment.
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Martial Coup: This is a wrath that's too slow against aggro and fairly insurmountable against midrange.
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Ovika, Enigma Goliath: Never seen this get played. This is moving over to The Ossuary, where I hope it'll be relevant.
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Muraganda Petroglyphs: Again, I've never seen this get played. I've tried to make it work myself and ended up cutting it from the deck because the main green source of critters, Landfall, was just better to focus on entirely.
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Rabble Rousing: Truly, this pains me, as this card was the inspiration for the entire cube. I knew it was an outlier when I included it, but as I try to take this cube to 2.0, I have to face facts: This card is always worth the splash and you should never pass it. That makes draft less interesting, not to mention the warping factors in gameplay. It will have a spot in Advanced Rectangle Theory, if I ever go back to cleaning up that list.
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Marneus Calgar: Everything I said about Demon of Catastrophes applies to this twice-over. It seems that being 3 colours has not been enough to keep it from being busted and attracting many a complaint.
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Inquisitorial Rosette: "Sigiled Sword but No Blocking Allowed" is pretty gnarly on a colourless artifact.
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Open the Graves, Gideon's Sacrifice, Symbiotic Wurm, Octavia: These don't hit the table.
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Sporemound: This card is just stinky, and that's not because it's made of mold. For 1 more mana, you get to create 4/4s instead with Rampaging Baloths. The rate is just so bad with this thing.
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Hordeling Outburst: Hhhhhhhhh, okay. So, I like this card, but this cube has a problem. In my experience, Jeskai is the best deck but a pretty good margin, but I'm unsure what exactly makes that the case, or what to do about. I've seen this deck pop off with any number of pay-offs: Mistfire Adept, Talrand, Goblinslide, Xerex Strobe-Knight, Balmor, and, of course, Jeskai Ascendency. The problem is, I also 'really like this archetype' and don't want to kill it entirely - I just want it to be a bit less dominant.
I have a couple theories for why this deck is so strong:
- "Noncreature creatures" are pretty prevalent in the cube, both to enable this deck and RW Equipment.
- 14 out of the 44 current mono-blue cards are cantrips that will trigger all your spells-matter stuff. It's gas that draws you to more gas.
The suggestion of cutting Hordeling Outburst is a bit of a stand-in for theory 1. A 3-for-1 in this cube is already great, and several of the spells payoffs like having multiple bodies regardless. This is the cut I'm least sold on, all told.