Art by Grzegorz Rutkowski
Quick summary: A 192 card, 4-player colorless-only cube built at a Vintage power level. Includes well-known combos, broken fast mana, massive payoffs, and a few non-legal cards from supplemental products to break stuff even more!
Ramp quickly to cast huge artifacts to devastate your opponent or pilot a horde of aggressive creatures that use +1/+1 counters and powerful equipment! Of course, you’ll also have access to tons of broken combos, efficient disruption, and some of the best utility lands ever printed. Witness pure colorless at its strongest!
Now featuring Eldrazi!
Rules this cube follows:
- All cards must be colorless and not have a colored mana cost anywhere on the card. (Cards may add colored mana, like Tolarian Academy.)
- No Universes Beyond/D&D cards.
- Provided basics must be Wastes.
- No cards that are specifically designed to counter colorless strategies. (i.e. Void Mirror, Null Rod, and, sadly, Karn, the Great Creator.)
General Strategy
Drafting Karnfrontation! can be tricky due to the unusual cards and variety of combos. Below are simple steps you can follow for a successful draft of Karnfrontation!.
Step 1: Fast Mana
All strategies/archetypes in Karnfrontation! benefit massively from fast mana. Therefore, picking fast mana is always highly valuable and should be prioritized.
Fast mana includes:
- Lands that tap for more than 1 mana
- Artifacts that tap for more mana than they cost to cast
- Artifacts that untap other artifacts (dependent on your other fast mana)
- Basalt Monolith (sometimes)
While getting access to the most powerful fast mana during the draft is somewhat luck-based, there’s about 8 pieces of fast mana, so during the 4-player draft you’ll almost always get about 2. But if you come across way more or way fewer fast mana cards than you’d expect, you'll have to adapt your strategy a bit.
Step 2: Picking your Archetype
Archetypes in Karnfrontation! are slightly different compared to other Magic cubes since they’re not separated by color. This means that every player can draft and use cards from any archetype to either improve their deck or remove a piece from an opponent’s deck. Learn more about those archetypes below!
Aggro
Kill your opponent with an army of synergistic artifact creatures before they’re able to stabilize. Hit fast and hard with evasive creatures and useful equipment. Take advantage of +1/+1 counter synergies to keep the damage coming even after your creatures die.
Midrange
Utilize the most efficient threats in the cube to monopolize the battlefield. Enjoy a flexible game plan of interaction, aggression, defense, and graveyard shenanigans. Whittle down your opponent's resources, then go in for an easy win.
Turbo Ramp
Aggressively mulligan for the fastest mana possible to cast large threats early. Overwhelm your opponent with massive artifact creatures they have no time to answer. Once you’re out of cards, use your nonbasic lands and other resources to refill your hand.
Step 3: Utility Lands
A unique aspect of Karnfrontation! is how many utility lands you have access to in the draft and during deck building. Because the cube is completely colorless, you can always play every utility land you draft, making them highly desirable.
Utility lands can:
- Draw cards
- Destroy opponents’ lands
- Interact with your opponent's board
- Temporarily become creatures
Be sure to have a plethora of utility lands by the end of the draft!
Step 4: DisruptionOne you’ve settled on your game plan and have some utility lands, you’ll want to grab some cards that disrupt your opponent’s game plan. Since this cube doesn’t run instants and sorceries, these disruptive pieces are reusable but visible to your opponent.
Disruptive cards include:
- Pithing Needle effects
- Touchstone effects
- Boom Box effects
- Strip Mine effects
A good deck can become a great deck when having access to or a sideboard full of cards like these. Don’t skimp out on the most efficient versions of these
pieces!
Notable Combos
Untapped Basalt with either Rings (+2 mana) or Monument makes infinite mana! If you have both Rings and Monument, you can replace Basalt with Grim Monolith.
Goes infinite with various cards throughout the cube. Take a look at some of those combos here.
(Kind of) permanently taps artifacts you don’t control. Also works with Unwinding Clock.
Makes infinite mana if you have at least 3 artifacts in hand. Once you have that infinite mana, you can use Staff’s abilities infinitely to draw & cast your entire deck!
Activate the Greaves’ equip ability infinite times (between two of your creatures) to give Crackdown infinite power & haste. Crackdown also works great with Basalt Monolith!
Activate Stage targeting Depths to immediately sacrifice Stage and make Marit Lage! This combo also works with Mirage Mirror instead of Stage.
Introducing Urza's Expanse and Cloudposting
Redeem these Vouchers after the draft to add all the listed cards to your draft pool to build the pinnacle of Tron and Locuses! Be sure to keep an eye out for Planar Nexus, Urza's Saga, Urza's Fun House, and Urza's Cave during the draft as well.
Overview last updated: 11/12/2024
Did a grid draft with my dad and got creamed (2-1 but it didn’t feel close). I drafted Power Play, Backup Plan, Mishra’s Workshop, & the Urza’s Expansion voucher and still lost to Tolarian Academy casting Cityscape Leveler. Leveler continues to be the most successful card in the cube. Removal is insane!
Regardless, I’m making a few small changes since I picked up some new stuff and got some experience with others:
- I played with Rift and it made my opening hands much worse than I thought. It’s also not fun to forget about the pre-game effect. Good riddance.
- Neither of us drafted Pithing Spyglass, but I literally don’t know how it works and it’s not an imperative inclusion.
- Nevinyrral’s Disk is probably useful somewhere, but it’s incredibly awkward elsewhere. Calamity of the Titans will hopefully be similar in intended utility but much more reasonable to mainboard.