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Quick Summary

This is a 360 card cube that does not include much in the way of combo or other ways of winning the game extremely early. A good aggro deck should be able to win by turn 4 or 5, but most games should go longer than that. This cube looks to have fun, interactive games that never feel unwinnable for any player while still giving players a large range of options of what to draft and play.

Who This Primer Is For

This primer is aimed towards players who are familiar with Magic in general and understand the basics of how to draft, but are not necessarily familiar with this particular cube or the cards in it. If you’re already familiar with this cube, you’re not really the audience for this. Additionally, if you’re really new to Magic and haven’t really drafted before, some of this will probably go over your head. With that out of the way, let’s get going.

A Focus On Archetypes

This cube isn’t just about drafting “good” cards, but rather about building a cohesive deck. Theoretically, a winning deck won’t just be a pile of the strongest cards in the cube, but will instead have a focused game plan, like “kill the opponent as quickly as possible with a bunch of cheap creatures” or “get extra mana early to cast expensive spells faster than normal and overwhelm the opponent.” These game plans are often referred to as archetypes, and I will provide summaries of some of the available archetypes in the cube below.

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Archetypes

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Aggro

Aggro generally refers to decks that try to win the game as quickly as possible by playing a large number of cheap creatures. In this cube, aggro generally appears as some combination of white, black, and/or red. While all three colors are capable of killing their opponent quickly with these aggressive creatures, there is some variation in how the three colors do so. Red provides direct damage spells that can kill the opponent if the creatures fail to get there on their own. White’s creatures tend to be disruptive, slowing the opponent down enough for the little aggressive creatures to get the kill. Black has the best ability to win in the long game, being able to get creatures back from the graveyard to keep applying pressure. These decks usually function best as monocolor decks to maintain consistency, but splashing a color or going full two colors can work, just don’t forget to draft your lands.

Aristocrats/Stax

The Aristocrats archetype is all about killing your own creatures for fun and profit. Your creatures dying is normally not what you want, but aristocrats throws that concept out the window. By combining sacrifice “outlets” (cards that let you sacrifice other cards) with sacrifice “payoffs” (cards that do stuff when your things die) and sacrifice “fodder” (things you don’t mind dying, like tokens or creatures with death triggers), you turn a downside into an upside that can win you the game. This archetype is found primarily in black. It is often combined with red for a more aggressive bend, or with white for a more grindy plan.

Aristocrats also has a sub-archetype of sorts in Stax. Stax is named after its namesake card Smokestack and usually also includes Braids and Doom Foretold. While Aristocrats aims to kill your own stuff for profit, Stax aims to kill everything for profit and win a slow game of attrition. If you win with nothing but Braids on the field after attacking over the course of ten turns while your opponent has literally nothing, you still win, right? What do you mean, you “like having friends?” Sounds like quitter talk to me. Stax decks in this cube are effectively always Aristocrats decks that also have Smokestack and Braids, and are usually of the white and black version of the deck.

Cheat

Paying for your spells is all well and good, but what if you could get a steep discount? There are a small number of cheaty cards in this cube, concentrated in Black and Green. They’re few enough that I’ll briefly describe each of them. I’m not generally a fan of games being decided in the first couple turns by an unanswerable threat, so the cheaty options in this cube are pretty limited. In Black we have Zombify, Dread Return, Diabolic Servitude, and Unburial Rites. These all put a creature from a graveyard onto the battlefield under your control. All of these are four or five mana, so they don’t provide much of a discount unless you get a really expensive creature, and they give your opponent some time to set up, so they don’t get destroyed for not having a removal spell in their opening hand. These often end up in grindy midrange decks or in control decks as a way to get a good creature in play to finish out the game. In other words, they’re often used fairly, but they can be used for cheating, it’s just not the normal use case. In Green we have Champion of Rhonas, Oath of Druids, and Pattern of Rebirth. Champion of Rhonas is pretty straightforward, it lets you cheat a creature into play on turn five, or sooner with ramp. Pattern of Rebirth lets you play something for free when the creature it’s on is killed, so it pairs well with the sacrifice outlets in black and red. Oath of Druids provides an interesting deck building restriction, where you really only want expensive creatures to make it more consistent.

Control

Control is basically the opposite of an aggro deck. Aggro aims to kill their opponent before they get set up, Control aims to survive their opponent’s initial onslaught and win in the long game. They achieve this through such things as killing individual creatures, killing everything on the field, countering spells, drawing cards to keep going in the late game, and eventually playing a big scary thing to put the poor aggro player out of their misery. There are a wide variety of options for control decks in this cube; white, black, and red offer board wipes and kill spells to keep you alive, blue offers card draw and counterspells, and all offer ways to win the game long term. Any combination of these colors is viable to some degree as a control deck. (We even had a RW Control deck win a game one time, it was cool) Just don’t forget to draft your lands if you are going to do a multicolor control deck.

Persist Combo

There is exactly one combo in this cube that I know of (Saheeli Rai will be cut in the next update to remove her combo with Felidar Guardian), and that is the persist combo. The goal of this combo is to get at least one each of the following: a creature with persist, something that puts +1/+1 counters on creatures, and a sacrifice outlet. If you have all of these, you can sacrifice the creature with persist. It will return with a -1/-1 counter on it because of persist. Something puts a +1/+1 counter on it, cancelling out the -1/-1 counter, allowing you to sacrifice it again. This gets you infinite enter-the-battlefield triggers and death triggers. Combine this with a card that deals damage when a creature enters the battlefield or dies, and you have a win. Pieces of this combo are spread throughout White, Black, Red, and Green, allowing a number of options on how to assemble the deck. The combo occasionally shows up in other decks, such as White Green Midrange decks or White Black Aristocrats decks.

Ramp

I haven’t talked about green much so far, and that’s for good reason. I don’t like green. Green is kind of doing its own thing in this cube, and that thing is ramping. Ramping refers to getting access to more mana faster. Green does this in a number of ways in this cube; playing creatures that tap for mana, getting extra lands on the field, making your lands tap for extra mana, untapping your lands, etc. These ramp decks generally fall into one of two categories; super ramp decks, and midrange ramp decks. Super ramp decks are looking to play really expensive cards ASAP. The hope is that playing one of these huge spells will be enough to get a win on their own. Midrange ramp decks, on the other hand, look to play haymaker after haymaker turn after turn starting on turn two or three, hitting hard early and never letting up the pressure. Never underestimate the power of a 3/3 elephant hitting the field on turn two. While I have described this as primarily a green archetype, that is because the ramp is (almost) all in green. That isn’t to say that other colors can’t contribute of course. A base-green ramp deck will happily borrow good creatures from other colors; a turn two Krenko is a nightmare, as is a turn four Vilis.

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Conclusion

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Thank you for reading this far! I hope you got something out of this, and I'll gladly answer any questions you might have.