Midway cube
(480 Card Cube)
Midway cube
Cube ID
Art by Mark TedinArt by Mark Tedin
480 Card Cube2 followers
Designed by Minway
Owned
$299
Buy
$927
Purchase
Mana Pool$1138.85

Ever have a draft where the deck builds itself? Where you hard force an archetype that you know is good and have know you'll win because you got all the pieces? Well midway cube is not that kind of cube. The cube is full of traps and risks and it challenges the drafter to be both creative and strict with themselves. Get too greedy and your pile will get run over, pick too much good stuff and you may lose to raw synergy. Cards are high variance and high word count with lots of edges to work with. The cube is designed to for 3 color drafts, but not necessarily decks. There are many build-arounds, but at 480 you might not see the pieces that'll make it work. Similarly, anchoring on an early strategy can be very risky. On the other-hand, trying to avoid risk by picking land or removal can mean never getting anything strong enough to actually win with. Midway cube challenges the drafter to run the middle line, pick up things that catch your eye, pick cards that'll go good with multiple engines you have an eye on, and be ready and willing to improvise or pivot as you draft.

What to not to expect:
-super strong fixing, we've got 1 set (10) of triomes, 1 set (5) of 1 cmc landcyclers as the closest thing to fetches, 4 sets of dual lands (40) half of them typed and the other half check. That's not a lot by many standards.
-the strongest cards, there's a lot of good cards, many of them are seen as very strong, but the context of the cube matters, cards like orcish bowmasters is a lot less playable here than usual, similarly cards are cut for being "too good" in the cube as well as "too bad"
-complete cycles or balanced colors, I pick things based off the context of the cube, seeing one card does not imply its mates are in the cube
-card draw, there's a lot of card advantage in the cube, but very little of it is pure card draw. If you see a source of card draw, value it higher, it's rarer than you might be used to.
-"complete archetypes", a given color set is not supposed to necessarily play the same way every time. WR does not have to be the early aggro color, by nature of the game there will be some trends, but don't let it trump the actual pool you have
-strong focus on GY, mill, or card sacrifice, nothing wrong with it, I just feel like you get it plenty in other places. There is a reanimator theme, but it's nowhere near as strong and focuses on <3 cmc.

Things to expect:
-there's 1 board-wipe in each color
-value removal highly, else you'll have games where you lose to one card unanswered
-expect to get blown out by unexpected protection to your answers

As for the actual content of the cube, I try to have multiple axises for cards to synergize off of, keep on the lookout for these:
-casting from exile (various)
-discard payoffs (madness, hellbent, cycling, looting)
-self tap synergy (crew, survival, untap)
-changeling/tribal (scarecrow, cat, dog, rat, ninja, lhurgoyf, knight)
-artifact (various)
-tokens:
-creature
-utility artifact
-copies
-modifications (equipment, auras, and ability counters)
-flicker/recast (ninjas, etbs, limited recursion)
-creature targeting (heroic, valiant, auras, fights, combat tricks, mutate)

So go out there, pick some cards, and build a deck that wins, whether or not the strategy makes sense.

Mainboard Changelist+480, -480
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