By Carmen Handy. On balance these swaps dont do much to alter the positioning of red decks in the Cube, but Bloodthirsty Adversary offers the most for being a cheap threat that can be a big swingy play when it needs to be. Which do you want: more forests for Rofellos? Heres a look at a 3-0 mono-green deck: Much like with white and red, there tends to be too many cards at the top of the curves of these decks in the Cube. 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. I believe that the colors Blue, Red and Black are miles better than Green and White in the Vintage Cube since they unlock so many unique and powerful win conditions. The following is my ranking for the sorts of cards Im looking to first-pick. Sometimes you back into it to save your draft. The first book by the reclusive inventor of the world's most iconic puzzle, the Rubik's Cube. We swing back for 8 and grab our sword with Stoneforge Mystic. 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. Bouncing two creatures and countering a spell is a pretty common way to swing a game against a more aggressive deck, and both the counterspell and the bounce ability play quite well against most of the combo decks in the Cube with so much of the Cube being dedicated to putting some large creature on the battlefield. I play Parallax Wave, target Griselbrand and hope for a miracle. Karmic Guide is generally at its best alongside Reveillark, so its something of an odd substitution. You can combine all sorts of stuff together and make really weird decks. How am I 2-0? The manlands are also viable win conditions for midrange and control decks that shouldnt be overlooked. 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. Heres an example of one Lizs 3-0 builds: Obviously having Black Lotus isnt hurting anything, though that came Pack 2, Pick 1. 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. High quality Vintage Cube Archetypes 2021-inspired gifts and merchandise. Pair these two with Giver of Runes or Mother of Runes and you have some of the best early creatures, period. Ive been a long-time fan of the Cube and I make sure to save up my Play Points for when it eventually comes around. The Scarab God and Fallen Shinobi are some of the best creature threats out there. Ramping cards like these out, especially ones with protection, are the easiest way to win the game on turn 1 or 2. 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). A way to keep the cards flowing as well as clear lands off the top of your deck is most welcome in green decks, and I have nothing but good things to say about the Augur. Holiday Vintage Cube 2022 | Magic: The Gathering Online Its limited availability on MTGO helps underscore its important and localized demand for when its actually available, which also helps reduce queue time and make it more of an event. While theres occasionally a two- to three-week period where the Vintage Cube is available in the Spring, that isnt always guaranteed. But in reality this often results in you having mana issues, missing out on any kind of coherent strategy, and being entirely dependent on drawing the right cards in a matchup. They Unburial Rites their Griselbrand, but I have Anguished Unmaking. Cry. This can work, sometimes you just end up having no direction and manage to 2-1, but that isnt reliable. All you can hope to do is race. Its usually safe to run 12-14 mountains and 2-4 colorless utility lands. 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. Ill first-pick a Griselbrand out of some packs, though more commonly my Vampiric Tutors are tracking down Tinker in my mostly blue deck. As Pro Tour March of the Machine approaches, qualifier Dom Harvey offers observations on Standard and Limited, the viewer experience, and star-making. Ryan Overturf analyzes the latest changes so you can make the most of the three-week Limited MTG experience. The most common splash color is blue for card draw spells like Compulsive Research, or for Counterspells or for Opposition which is its own lock-out win condition. 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. Cheap and efficient cards that are interactive and/or have clearly defined roles/archetypes are where you want to be. 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. }, Lorcana shows off demo decks, new cards, and more at the GAMA Expo, Dusk Till Dawn introduces Prism, Advent of Thrones as well as new Shadow Runeblade hero. The cards you want to look out for are essentially any high-tier blue or red cards. This is most commonly going to mean Azorius Control. Erno Rubik inspires us with what he's learned in a lifetime of creating, curiosity and discovery . Because I assume I'm going to be Grixis. Ah, Storm, a classic archetype thats as fun as it is difficult to pull off. Land Destruction: You are the deck that wants Strip Mine, Wasteland and occasionally even Rishadan Port. Ignore the 4 and 5 drops. Then on their Turn 4, they Frantic Search into Liliana of the Veil? 140. The way you get into a green ramp deck is to take early one of the busted green cards or some of the best of the cards that are replaceable but are the best at what they do. Dack Fayden can often just end the game when you steal an early Signet or Mox by both reducing your opponents mana production and increasing your own, and thats to say nothing of stealing something like a Wurmcoil Engine. The play patterns are just horrendous, and Adeline more or less returns to form in a lateral substitution over Brimaz. Mono Red is a strange bird. 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. Vintage Cube Archetypes 2021 Gifts & Merchandise for Sale Mono white: The archetype I would recommend the most. This site is Draftsim.com. 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. It just doesn't happen unless you pick them over everything, picks 1-4 out of every pack. Why do I want to care if I can make a 2/2 every turn if my opponent is playing Channel into Eldrazi or Tinker into Blightsteel Colossus. Planar Bridge (The Cube) | Illustration by Alexandre Leoni. The Ultimate Guide to Cube Archetypes: Blue - ChannelFireball The important notes here are the high volume of one- and two-drops with a sprinkling of threes and fours. Maybe Mono Red saves your draft. I could see why they might think this would work in theory. .thumb span { This is perhaps deserved after the huge upgrade that white recently got with Palace Jailer being reintroduced to the Cube along with the addition of Solitude, though I will still miss the Landing. Cathar Commando and Intrepid Adversary both cracked my Top 10 Cube Cards for Midnight Hunt and are the most significant additions with this update. If you must Storm though, and I cant blame you, here are a couple of pointers on pick order. To get things out of the way early, this is going to be my last set cube update for Magic Online . An easier way to end up with a solid black deck is to build around Recurring Nightmare. Generally, the white based decks come in three varieties: Mono White Aggro, which is typically worse than the best Mono Red Aggro decks; Blue-White Tempo, which seeks to stick a hard to touch threat like Geist of Saint Traft and them keep the opponent from sticking anything relevant; or White-Black Disruption Aggro, which also is most often a token deck. Then I play Gideon, Ally of Zendikar, making an Ally token. My friend and co-SCG Baltimore Team Open champion Liz Lynn enjoys forcing white and believes it to actually just be the best archetype. See what's going where! We're now locked out of playing white spells. But if that's your idea of fun, keep doing it. In the same vein, I always maindeck Manic Vandal since killing a signet is the same as killing a land. Compare it to using Oblivion Ring on Consecrated Sphinx. It includes the Power 9, all original dual lands, and some of the best creatures and planeswalkers out there. They drop a Chandra, Pyromaster. There's one more hidden advantage to drafting mono-Red as well: no one else wants your cards. First, let's start in the most logical place: Blue decks. With a New Museum, African Workers Take Control of Their Destiny 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! Today Id like to do a bit of a deep dive into my personal favorite cube: the Vintage Cube! Whenever I start a draft, I hope to open one of these cards. Sol Ring pairs great with powerful value cards like Jace, the Mind Sculptor while Mana Crypt generally pushes you in a more aggressive direction. Beyond that, Jaces Ingenuity would make a lot of my blue decks even in Vintage Cube and thats the floor of Mystic Confluence. And the actual cards in your deck are so narrowly aggressive that they don't really slot well into anyone else's strategy. Yawgmoth's Win - Tumblr Infinity Faeries. 1 Gideon, Ally of Zendikar, Lands* The Vintage Cube has returned to Magic Online. Chase Carroll recaps their favorite cards from each Secret Lair in the Spring Superdrop. Especially in League. Bad choice. 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. 1 cards No, the Vintage Cube is not free on MTGO. 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. They play (Selesyna Signet) into Reclamation Sage, destroying my creature. Here's the downside to Grixis: in general, you should expect that when you draft the powerful blue, black and red cards that your fellow drafters will also know this is the optimal strategy. 2023 Wizards. Need more proof March of the Machine is a Commander player's dream? Dont forget about interaction. See what I mean? Im really looking for Goblin Bombardment and some other cheap support before I give that one a close look. Simic relies on greens mana ramp but gives great payoffs in Hydroid Krasis, Oko, Thief of Crowns, and Hornet Queen. 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. They swing but forget to give Putrid Imp flying, taking us to 1. Strip Mine hanging out to push back on the opponents mana development is also huge, and is much more welcome than more fours or getting into any five-mana spells. Gaea's Cradle? 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. *Lands were not submitted with this deck, so Iread the recap, added the lands that were missing, and just went from there! Theres not a lot changing in blue this time around, which shouldnt be surprising. The mono-Red player isn't doing anything inherently broken. Blue is the most powerful color in the Cube and there are also just more blue cards than the other colors. Theyre almost always worth drafting early thanks to the inclusion of Pestermite, Deceiver Exarch, and Zealous Conscripts. There are 540 cards in the MTGO Vintage Cube. These work wonders for your mana base, making 3- and 4-color mana bases incredibly easy to assemble and produce reliable mana. position:relative; Match 1, Game 3: They mulligan to 6, but have a Turn 1 Imperial Seal. Before we look at ways to mitigate parasitism, let's take some time to examine a parasitic deck in greater detail and see if we can spot some common pitfalls. They end-of-turn Thirst for Knowledge, discarding Grave Titan and Iona, Shield of Emeria. You dont want to try to draft a good stuff deck where you have a pile of cards that are fine when broken is possible. The Vintage Cube is a high-power cube developed by Wizards that includes some of the most powerful and popular cards from Magics entire history. Where blue has the most cards in the Cube, red for some reason has the fewest. For my money the other Moxen are more or less colorless sources that sometimes fix your mana, while Mox Sapphire is a tremendous boon for blue interactive decks. They're just not as high picks as the critters. 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. The two most busted Green cards in the whole Vintage Cube are Channel and Natural Order. It really improves your win rate against slow fair decks like mono green or control whereas Izzet tempo would be more pressured to be the aggressor. #thumbwrap { Mana Crypt is close enough to Sol Ring to fit in here, but theres some give and take. Ancestral Recall and Time Walk are always included in your deck, even as a splash. We'll take whatever we can get with this deck. Cube has long been one of my favorite ways to play Magic. Sheldon Menery is adding over 70 of its cards to his decks. I imagine this is because, unlike Bribery, its not directly responsible for winning the game, but it is far more flexible and is generally worth well more than the five mana that it costs. Today Ill be going over the updates to the Cube to get you in fighting shape, but first I always like to link my inaugural Vintage Cube article here on Star City Games. Its always a lot of fun whether youre watching or drafting yourself, and I cant recommend it enough! Lots of pink. I completely understand not wanting to play with Oko, though hes one of the easiest routes to free wins. 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. } We'll take a punt. 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. Sheldon Menery is adding over 70 of its cards to his decks. We go Soldier of the Pantheon into Thalia, Guardian of Thraben, Tidehollow Sculler, revealing Mountain, Fauna Shaman, Primeval Titan and Thundermaw Hellkite. The threes and fours are broadly interchangeable and you more want to get as many of the efficient ones and twos as you can. 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. Its imperative to make sure that you end up in a deck that does some combination of efficiently leveraging your mana while having some ability to curb your opponents ability to do so. All Rights Reserved. Black Lotus | Illustration by Christopher Rush. Some of these tiers will be exhaustive lists, while others will be a sampling of the nature of that tier, which I will make explicit in my thoughts on each category. position:absolute; They play a Master of the Wild Hunt. Just fill out your deck with any burn spells you draft. Personally, Im an Ancestral Recall man. Ryan Overturf analyzes the latest changes so you can make the most of the three-week Limited MTG experience. Channel and Tinker turn a very small amount of mana into stuff like Myr Battlesphere and Emrakul, the Aeons Torn. The Cube is incredibly expensive to put together unless proxied, which makes it a rare occurrence to see in paper.
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