This is the same reason, for example, I find the "Brown" deck to be undesirable: if we're all fighting over signets, drafting a deck that relies on a critical mass of artifacts to unlock its artifact payoffs, cards like Tolarian Academy, Mishra's Workshop, Tezzeret the Seeker and Wildfire just tends to fall short. Most of them are clearly much worse than the best 30 or so cards, and some of them I hope I never have to register in any of my decks. Forest, go. They're just not as high picks as the critters. Infinity Faeries. If you open poorly in Pack 1, then it makes sense to develop a manabase and hope to open something better in Pack 2, but you get passed very few of the most powerful cards in a given draft. Do what feels fun to you. If you're the only one in it, you are going to have a formiable machine. Let's watch the world burn!" This just goes to show that if you complain loudly enough, you can have Niv-Mizzet Reborn in any Cube! Tier 2 Archetypes: # 1 Green X Ramp. Infernal Grasp, on the other hand, is a nice get. I would love to see Oko, Thief of Crowns cut from every Cube. We counter with Stoneforge Mystic, fetching our Sword of Body and Mind. This is more of a general drafting tip, but its especially important to recognize due to the fact that it becomes incredibly tempting given what cards youre looking at in each pack. It offers an extra card per turn if you manage to play your hand right and can easily offer up enough card advantage to come out of any situation. While we have a Hail Mary sideboard plan, the deck overall is a train wreck. I Tidehollow Sculler their last card and play my sword. width:700px; I get to see their whole deck and they never recover. Once we get past the most broken fast mana and the cheapest and most efficient effects, we start looking at cards that require a little bit more investment but correlate very strongly with winning the game. Much like my notes on drafting blue, you should worry about win conditions later. Cards like Lightning Bolt can be useful to give control decks an edge against aggressive decks as well. Lots of pink. We could win this game! Theres also the infamous pairing of Narset, Parter of Veils and a wheel effect like Wheel of Fortune. You still want to pick up the strong tempo cards like Counterspell, Expressive Iteration, and Dack Fayden, but theres a much bigger focus around the combo. All orders are custom made and most ship worldwide within 24 hours. Tovolars Huntmaster is actually better than Primeval Titan in the current build of the Cube absent Field of the Dead and Dark Depths combo, so I have no qualms with its addition. When I sit down to draft vintage cube, I have about 7 decks in mind that I will choose between depending on my first several picks. Nobody else wants Tendrils of Agony so you should try to wheel it, and if it doesnt come back around your deck isnt going to work out anyway. Im actually a bit miffed that Arcane Artisan, a card that I was generally happy to pick early, was cut from the Cube while Show and Tell and Eureka remained in despite their massive downsides. Chase Carroll recaps their favorite cards from each Secret Lair in the Spring Superdrop. I guess there is a sliver of hope. Losing a one-drop is more significant for those strategies than upgrading the two-drops, so on balance Id say white got slightly worse here. They find a Nature's Claim for Sword. Sometimes to skew your mana base away from green to accommodate these powerful off-color cards ends up compromising your main strategy to the extent that it isn't worth it. There are also just a ton of artifacts that I will play in basically every deck that Ill look to draft early that can overperform in Metalworker/Workshop decks. We're now locked out of playing white spells. I play Legion's Landing and Mishra's Factory. Shutting off or copying fast mana sources is powerful, and shutting off or copying payoffs is even better. Vintage Cube features a wide range of viable archetypes, and even the most successful drafters will offer different insights on what they believe the best archetypes to be. Black Lotus | Illustration by Christopher Rush. There are some truly incredible non-basic lands to be looking out for in the cube. Sometimes its wide open. This strategy plays very similarly to any green ramp deck you mightve piloted before. The decks your players will draft and build need to have the tools to be successful decks. Have you tried the Vintage Cube? } Vorinclex has higher potential to do nutty things with planeswalkers as well as some other cards like Walking Ballista than Tovolars Huntmaster does so I dont love that substitution, but the Huntmaster is one I expect to play. How am I 2-0? We saw Portent added to Legacy Cube recently by Carmen and I loved seeing it there and its nice to see here as well. What do you think? These are specific to Vintage Cube, but some, like Mono-Green or W/W, are pretty much the same in Legacy or Modern Cube as well. They swing but forget to give Putrid Imp flying, taking us to 1. Its over a year old at this point so its slightly dated, but the fundamentals are good. Ramping cards like these out, especially ones with protection, are the easiest way to win the game on turn 1 or 2. Expect gorgeous art, a heartstring-tugging dog, and pink. Match 2, Game 3: I play Porcelain Legionnaire into Orzhov Signet and Honor of the Pure. Aggro decks are fun, especially mono-red, but honestly, your cards are so much weaker than your opponents. Blue is the best color in Cube, hands down, and the average Cube Draft can support five blue drafters without much trouble. Sneak Attack is among the easiest cards that take a player from no battlefield presence to winning, and red offers a handful of rituals and other effective cards for the Storm decks. float:relative; /* must be floated for same cross browser position of larger image */ As an archetype, Mono Red tends to be underdrafted because many cube aficionados consider it boring. To get things out of the way early, this is going to be my last set cube update for Magic Online . #thumbwrap { Sometimes the stars align and the cheap red cards are opened in the draft and I dont open a Tier 0 card, but it doesnt happen nearly as often as I would like. 1 cards My Parallax Wave gets Cryptic Commanded but at least I take out Jace #2 on their attack.The ending is not that eventful: Dragonlord Ojutai finishes me off. There are some other cards that enter into the conversation, though these are what I consider to be definitively the most powerful cards in terms of raw efficiency and power. Mono-green is fully supported in the Cube with the long list of mana dorks backing it up. Sol Ring pairs great with powerful value cards like Jace, the Mind Sculptor while Mana Crypt generally pushes you in a more aggressive direction. This is similar to how Double Masters sets are drafted, except the two-pick rule is enabled for every single pick. Black is in this awkward spot where it has great card selection in the most powerful tutor effects ever printed, though very few of the cards that youd be interested in tutoring for. Your email address will not be published. Smoldering Egg is worth playing in controlling decks or even in Storm, but isnt one that I expect to be valued highly at the table and is a card that I would hope to wheel if I were interested in it. Avalanche Riders is serviceable. I expect Wrenn and Sevens time in Vintage Cube to be forgettable, though it remains to be seen whether it ends up being short. Cards like Containment Priest that turn off some of the most broken cards are also dramatically better than creatures that only attack and block. Its far more important to have a solid direction with synergies between your cards than a pile of great cards with no connections. Some players have advocated Oko as their overall Pack 1, Pick 1, which I believe to be a defensible position. You never know whether the opposition is hitting you with Containment Priest or Griselbrand, and a couple of catch-all removal spells go a long way in Vintage Cube. And for your amusement, here is my misadventures in playing White / Black Disruptive Aggro: Match 1, Game 1: I drop a Turn 1 Soldier of the Pantheon. Sulfuric Vortex and Fireblast: You're the only one who wants them and they are irreplaceable. Youll greatly benefit if you can use their extra mana to ramp out threats early. I could also see Mind Twist, Tolarian Academy, Timetwister, Library of Alexandria, and Strip Mine entering the conversation here as cards that are plainly absurdly above rate and are all excellent at getting more mana worth of effects than your opponent. Happy drafting, gamers! The Cube is incredibly expensive to put together unless proxied, which makes it a rare occurrence to see in paper. Chandra eats our Vampire token and thier Phyrexian Metamorph copies our Ophiomancer. Copyright 2020 Star City Games. I will say that Gideon, Ally of Zendikar is the best four and is a hell of a thing to Black Lotus in, but the average draw more commonly curving a one-drop into two one-drops is a much bigger difference-maker in a large sampling of games. Personally, Im an Ancestral Recall man. .article-footer-ad a{ Fireblast is a free spell that shortens your goldfish time to win by a turn and Sulfuric Vortex is a relentless way to both ensure damage and stop the one sideboard strategy to beat you in lifegain. If your opponent is playing a lot of fast mana and you answer all of their payoffs, then you generate a technical sort of card advantage when all of that mana has nothing to cast. In my experience, once you have Yawgmoths Will, if anybody at the table opens Lions Eye Diamond it will come to you, which is the easiest two-card combo for making a lethal Storm turn happen. This site is Draftsim.com. I Mind Twist away their remaining four cards. Phyrexian Revoker, Reclamation Sage, and Acidic Slime are good to have around to slow the opponent down in the early-game and something like Woodfall Primus or Terastodon can slam the door once you get them online (preferably assisted by a discard outlet like Jace, Vryns Prodigy). Sheldon Menery is adding over 70 of its cards to his decks. Primeval Titan, Craterhoof Behemoth, Rofellos, Channel are top picks. Free mana is always good, unless youve drafted some weird list with practically no colorless pips. When you miss on the best fast mana, you just have to make do with Llanowar Elves. Match 3, Game 1: They play Turn one Island, Black Lotus, pass. To top things off you can get a very consistent deck if you manage to pick up some of the tutors in black like Imperial Seal, Demonic Tutor, or Vampiric Tutor. Now, Im a big Storm fan, though its not for everybody and I dont recommend it if youre not willing to embarrass yourself. If youre playing a Simic () deck and have Arid Mesa and Spara's Headquarters or Savannah, then that otherwise off-color fetch can suddenly be on-color! Check out every card revealed so far from Lorcana's The First Chapter. Then on their Turn 4, they Frantic Search into Liliana of the Veil? text-align: center; This category is a bit broader, and my list here is by no means exhaustive. Must be nice. You may have already heard, but in case you havent, Im here to let you know that Vintage Cube is returning to Magic Online (MTGO) for three weeks starting today! Inside macy*s at Crystal Mall during June 2020. Beyond that, card selection and card draw are very important, and Storm is the one archetype that I regularly draft where I believe you have to take lands highly because you will lose to your manabase otherwise. Equipment: I tend not to prioritize equipment, but you can play a Sword or Umezawa's Jitte. I play Spectral Procession. Admittedly, Teferi, Time Raveler and Monastery Mentor are very noteworthy cards, though it would not be difficult to drum up a reasonable sampling of cards in any other color or even just a couple of artifacts that would have yielded a comparable deck. Vintage Cube is all about efficiently leveraging your mana. Cards like Counterspell and Thoughtseize are efficient enough to be reasonable against basically any opponent and tend to overperform in Vintage Cube. Personally, I hate this kind of deck in the Vintage Cube because its far too "fair" for my liking. When I venture into black its most commonly for Leovold, Emissary of Trest or to try to play Storm. Since Cube has so . Blue is the most powerful color in the Cube and there are also just more blue cards than the other colors. Sometimes you back into it to save your draft. border:0; /* IE6 needs this to show large image */ I dont much care if its off basic lands. On the other end, the best cards to ramp into are: Craterhoof Behemoth, Ulamog, The Ceaseless Hunger, Primeval Titan and Terastodon. These are specific to Vintage Cube, but some, like Mono Green or White Weenie, are pretty much the same in Legacy or Modern Cube as well. We play Knight of the White Orchid and accelerate up to 4 lands. Shop affordable wall art to hang in dorms, bedrooms, offices, or anywhere blank walls aren't welcome. They have Manglehorn for my signet, making me happy I didn't play out my sword. The most important pieces will be Tolarian Academy, as many Signets as you can pick up, and any other instances of fast mana in the form of an artifact like Mana Vault, Mana Crypt, and Sol Ring. First, let's start in the most logical place: Blue decks. 2021 Updated April 22, 2021. The play patterns are just horrendous, and Adeline more or less returns to form in a lateral substitution over Brimaz. Next down comes Jace, Architect of Thought. It provides a unique style of gameplay unlike any other strategy and lets you play around with the most powerful cards in the game. There are plenty of other effects for consistency like Putrid Imp, Oona's Prowler, Shallow Grave, Corpse Dance, Makeshift Mannequin, Exhume, Animate Dead, and Necromancy. It's enough. It just doesn't happen unless you pick them over everything, picks 1-4 out of every pack. The base lesson from this history is that you dont have to work very hard to win with Black Lotus. Wrenns +1 and -3 are fine, but their impacts on the battlefield are minimal relative to the format and we have to dream bigger than that. Ryan Overturf analyzes the latest changes so you can make the most of the three-week Limited MTG experience. position:absolute; Here's what you're looking for when you draft Mono-Red: All the One Drops: Goblin Guide is the best, followed by Firedrinker Satyr, Grim Lavamancer, Zurgo Bellstriker, Falkenrath Gorger, Monastery Swiftspear and Jackal Pup. And yet as a deck it is much more powerful than the sum of its parts. I wouldnt take it over a counterspell or a cheaper card selection spell, but I also expect it to overwhelmingly make my deck when I do draft it. If it could be said that blue has a weakness in Vintage Cube, it would be that there are probably too many win conditions. A great red aggressive deck in Vintage Cube usually implies the presence of Mox Ruby, Black Lotus, and/or Strip Mine, but the most important thing is that you get a lot of one-drops and a good amount of two-drops. Its so much more popular then and its harder to draft a strong deck when so many more players are going for it. If your opponent has brought something fair to the table, then the classic combo of Nightmare and Deranged Hermit can just be lights-out, though I like to make sure I end up with some creatures that can destroy mana sources in the mix. Not approved/endorsed by Wizards. Fiery Confluence is the best non-creature spell. The big takeaway that I want to offer today is that Vintage Cube is much less about figuring out which archetype is best and much more about understanding how to navigate a format with absurd mana generation. .article-footer-ad img { Dont forget about interaction. Lots of pink. And while some may think that's a good strategy, I tend to find them to be overrated that I am content with 1 or 2 in most decks and will always take the real win conditions, tutors, and fixing, especially true dual lands and fetchlands over the Signets. Theoretically, there is also a White-Green Hatebears deck, but I've yet to see it in practice. . The biggest pitfall in blue is the card Show and Tell. } No, that did not come up. There have been iterations of the Cube where I would more happily force red, though I believe currently there just arent enough one-drops for me to happily endorse this. Personally I have much more fun with Ancestral Recall, though I do currently take Oko over everything else. I fetch my Sword of Body and Mind with Stoneforge Mystic and swing with Mutavault. Unconditional removal that exiles is great against Reanimator strategies and really just anybody putting creatures on the table. When you try to force Storm sometimes your deck just doesnt actually do anything and sometimes even when it does it can be impossibly hard to play. I think that Jadar falls flat in the way that the two cuts did, though Im always in favor of lowering the curve. While I believe that Bloodbraid Elf is considerably more powerful than Arlinn, the Packs Hope, I also dont really want to play with any of these cards ever. Its updated semi-regularly by the Cube team, and has a few cards swapped out every time its made available on Magic Online. The fives are mostly interchangeable, though Nissa, Who Shakes the World is probably the best and both Elder Gargaroth and Vivien, Monsters Advocate are two cards that I will actively try not to play given how much worse they are than the other fives. Our Privacy Policy. Red does serve an important role in a couple of non-aggressive archetypes though. Vintage Cube is on Magic Online usually twice a year, once in the summer around July and then again in December for the holidays. High quality Vintage Cube Archetypes 2021-inspired gifts and merchandise. All you really need to get started is a strong reanimation or entomb spell, like Reanimate or Entomb. They loot another Island, play a Sol Ring, and a Memory Jar. Ugh. Urza's Saga, Urza, Lord High Artificer, and other expensive artifact threats like Wurmcoil Engine or Myr Battlesphere are your finishers here. Regardless, the Power 9 are about as impactful as youd assume. Scoop. Your original strategy dries up. Maybe the best they can boast is a sick three drop on turn-2 off of a Mox Ruby, like Sulfuric Vortex. Storm is the textbook of example of a parasitic archetype, and below I've included a sample decklist from a January 2021 Vintage Cube draft by Caleb Gannon. It used to only be available to players in December and was known as the Holiday Cube, but its popularity and increased demand allowed it to have a more periodic release. We all know "the big four" cube archetypes: green ramp ( Rofellos -types into Eldrazi-types) red aggro ( Goblin Guide and friends into bolts and Sulfuric Vortex) reanimator ( Entomb and looting into Necromancy and such) blue-white "superfriends" (draw, counters, removal, and planeswalkers) (Honorable mentions go to Storm and White Tokens, which . There are more than a few cards that are half of a game-winning or infinite combo in the Cube, and knowing what they are can help you know when to pick them up or when to pass them. The mono-Red player isn't doing anything inherently broken. You pay two more mana upfront but you get six more mana worth of effect from your Consecrated Sphinx token. They drop a Chandra, Pyromaster. Usually it shouldn't be your Plan A since there is no individual cards that are so strong that they are the "correct" picks in your pack 1 picks 1-4, but its a deck that the sum is a lot better than the parts. We go Soldier of the Pantheon into Thalia, Guardian of Thraben, Tidehollow Sculler, revealing Mountain, Fauna Shaman, Primeval Titan and Thundermaw Hellkite. First, let's start in the most logical place - blue decks. Rofellos, Llanowar Emissary and Gaeas Cradle are two of the most powerful cards in the mono-green decks, and they dont really play well with other colors. 1 Legion's Landing Go into it if see Sulfuric Vortex or Goblin Guide late. Gaea's Cradle? I play Parallax Wave, target Griselbrand and hope for a miracle. margin:0px; If no one is in Mono Red, its not uncommon at all to see cards like Goblin Guide, Sulfuric Vortex or Hellrider with 3 cards left in a pack. The other way you get into Mono Red is that you backdoor in. Required fields are marked *. If you can draft at least 4 of these 7, that makes your odds of having a one-drop in your starting hand very high. T-shirts, posters, stickers, home decor, and more, designed and sold by independent artists around the world. I personally first-pick Mishras Workshop frequently, though it goes into a very specific deck that relies on drafting a high volume of artifacts, which can be very difficult as Signets tend to be great in the majority of Vintage Cube decks and I could see other players being much colder on it. Mono Red is good like that. They play Splinter Twin. When it comes to utility lands, youre presented with an equally powerful choice of cards. This can work, sometimes you just end up having no direction and manage to 2-1, but that isnt reliable. font-style: italic; Some packs just arent exciting, though not every 3-0 starts with a Black Lotus. Vintage Cube typically sticks around for the entire month its made available. Grim Monolith is definitely behind those effects, though a lot of draws from most decks will fold to a resolved six-drop on Turn 3. Lightning Bolt is great, but honestly its not much different than Searing Spear or Char. Maybe Mono Red saves your draft. Assuming you have the mana to cast your cards, its also important to efficiently generate card advantage, and nobody does it better than Ancestral Recall. Bennie Smith gives in to this awesome urge with Etali, Primal Conqueror, his Commander Deck of the Week. If Im going to spend that much mana on something that isnt a sure thing, I at least want it to give me looks at Craterhoof Behemoth. Planeswalker Our Grixis deck ended up winning with the card Sneak Attack. There are 540 cards in the MTGO Vintage Cube. If thats your thing, thats cool, and ultimately the cost of featuring Niv in the Cube is one slot and a lot of these gold slots are replacement-level anyway. My conclusion: Don't play fair decks. Tutors are never good. Toss a Mox or a Black Lotus in the mix and these decks are definitely capable of a 3-0. Memory Deluge is going to be a much bigger deal for formats like Arena Cube, but its a serious card advantage spell that offers a good amount of selection for the price. Deck-building for the Vintage Constructed Cube is likely the most difficult part of drafting it. Ah, Storm, a classic archetype thats as fun as it is difficult to pull off. Bribery and Treachery will similarly often result in well worth the value of tapping five lands. Youve got access to about as good of a mana base as you could dream of, and that allows you to stay open longer and have a much more consistent strategy in each given game. Is Vintage Cube Free on MTGO? Because I assume I'm going to be Grixis. But suppose you don't want to fight over Grixis. Simic relies on greens mana ramp but gives great payoffs in Hydroid Krasis, Oko, Thief of Crowns, and Hornet Queen. But I decided to go for it, to see how we could do. We'll take whatever we can get with this deck. See what's going where! That wraps up my guide on my favorite Cube, the Vintage Cube! Sometimes, a Commander player just wants to stomp with a big, angry Dino. I equip my sword, swing and mill 10. The pick order outlined above offers a lot of direction for how to navigate the early part of the draft, though an understanding of each colors strengths and weaknesses is imperative to navigate from there. They play Fauna Shaman and swing for 5. It is powerful on occasion, though if youre not winning the turn you cast it with something like Thousand-Year Storm, its more likely than you might think that your opponent will just annihilate you with some Eldrazi. Non-combo green midrange decks are one of the few directionless decks that can hold their own. Land Destruction: You are the deck that wants Strip Mine, Wasteland and occasionally even Rishadan Port. As such, side boarding has always taken a back seat. Next they find Dragonlord Ojutai. And yet through no merits except for raw speed, especially based on its ability to punish slow starts, (and occasionally induce them), Mono Red is a viable Vintage Cube deck. Drop your thoughts in a comment below or head over to the official Draftsim Discord to chat about it there. width: 700px; The former Jordan Marsh, which opened with the mall in 1984 until 1996, was a throwback until its last days from department stores of its vintage: wood adornments, smoked mirrors, artificial flourscent skylit partitions and other garish, recessed lighting elements. As somebody who has had one of my own Cubes run on MTGO, Im here to impart some wisdom on how to best enjoy your Vintage Cube experience and how to best navigate one of the most volatile Limited environments imaginable. Heres an example of one Lizs 3-0 builds: Obviously having Black Lotus isnt hurting anything, though that came Pack 2, Pick 1. In general, avoid midrange "fair" cards in the Vintage Cube except as a sideboard strategy. .thumb:hover span { The removal of Legions Landing is a blow to those aggressive decks, both in reducing the total number of one-mana threats and it being in the upper half of those on power level. They play out their dragon and swing. Sometimes drafting a Tier 2 deck, especially when you can read the draft to know your strategy is wide open, is absolutely the right thing to do. Black Lotus can have the highest ceiling while Sol Ring most consistently does its thing. This is arguably the best card in the Cube thanks to its versatility and power level, often providing more value than weaker power pieces like Timetwister or off-color Moxen. Sol Ring, Ancestral Recall, and Black Lotus were for a long time the consensus best three cards in Magic, though there is some disagreement on which is the overall best Pack 1, Pick 1. Planar Bridge (The Cube) | Illustration by Alexandre Leoni.