By: Jason Waddell

80 days.

80 days until the Modern Grand Prix in my current city of residence, Antwerpen, Belgium. Although almost the entirety of my Magic time is spent on the cube format, lately I’ve had the constructed itch. I haven’t played constructed in any real capacity since the Stoneforge Mystic banning, but have had my eye on Magic’s non-rotating formats for some time.

As previously discussed, my favorite archetype is UWR Tempo with a heavy serving of burn. Fortunately, UWR decks sit firmly in the top tier of Modern’s metagame. Last weekend’s 2013 Player’s Championship was taken by Shahar Shenhar, member of MTGmadness.com, Riptide Lab’s site sponsor. He defeated Reid Duke’s Hexproof deck in the finals with the following:

The UWR decks, despite using a relatively stable list of format staples, is exceptionally customizable, and Shenhar’s list is perhaps the most middle-of-the-road in terms of tempo. Prior to the Player’s Championship, the most common UWR decks in the online metagame followed the mold of Brandon Nelson’s GP Kansas City Top 8 deck.

My personal tastes tend towards the aggressive, and I am quite fond of the more aggressive version that maxes out on burn spells and Geist of Saint Traft.

Although this list did win a pair of back-to-back online PTQs in January, the Geists appear to have fallen out of favor in the current metagame.

I’m not sure where my deck will land on the aggression spectrum, but look forward to the testing process and the opportunity to attend my first Grand Prix. Congratulations once again to Shahar Shenhar on his Player’s Championship victory, and for pushing my favorite archetype one step further.

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By: Jason Waddell

For some time, I’ve had a theory that one of the most powerful things you can do in my cube involves the following two-card combination:

The archetype is basically a Golgari Timmy deck, that wants to ramp out powerful cards and recur them for value until you trample over the opponent for lethal. I’ve won with this archetype before, but when I last played if my cube was sporting the Recurring Nightmare engine, which is no longer in my list. Those who have followed or played my cube will know that ramp isn’t a very central focus of the design, and can be a dangerous prospect given the powerful aggro decks running around and the plentiful Wasteland effects in the format.

In last night’s draft, I dove into the archetype straight away with the following two picks:

Unfortunately, this would the last relevant land-based fixing I would see in the packs. Two seats to my right, an ambitious second-time drafter was amassing a very color intensive BUG deck. The first time he drafted our cube, he made the rookie mistake of drafting a fixing-free two-color aggro list that stumbled on mana and never managed to hit the ground running. This week he took things to the polar opposite extreme by picking fixing in seven of his first ten picks. Needless to say the Bayous and Overgrown Tombs never made it to my end of the table.

The deck was very resilient, and had multiple ways to get its engine online.

Primal Command was exactly what this sort of deck was looking for. I brought in Primal Command in place of Plow Under in the Gravecrawler update, and have been impressed with its versatility and impact. Over the course of the night I tutored up Deathrite Shaman, a land (off Demonic Tutor), Vampire Nighthawk and Primeval Titan. The 7 life had huge impacts on the race math, and the tutors gave me a sense of control over the games that I don’t always feel when piloting a ramp deck.

Most interestingly, I never wanted to tutor up Grave Titan. Sure, Grave Titan is a great threat, but Primeval Titan gives you a game-long engine and the mana to use it.

Even if your Primeval Titan is killed or exile, the deck was perfectly content to bring back Skinrenders and Wolfir Silverhearts from the graveyard.

Further, the deck had some fairly effective sideboard cards, including:
Pernicious Deed
Awakening Zone
Hymn to Tourach
Kozilek’s Predator
Wall of Roots
Innocent Blood

Keeping Pernicious Deed in the sideboard feels like a crime, but with my decks reliance on 1-drop elves it felt like a losing proposition. The other three drops were absolutely vital to our acceleration and board stabilization plans, and were far more vital to the deck.

Ultimately the deck 3 – 0’d, but not without some punts and scares along the way.

In the finals I beat the following deck piloted by forum member Hannes:

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By: Jason Waddell

Nearly every time I visit the cubing subreddit, the place is plastered with questions from aspiring cubers looking for advice on how to build a set or block cube. Invariably, they get bombarded with a mix of conflicting suggestions and numbers, and I can’t help but wonder if they walk away feeling more confused than helped.

As has always been my mantra, there’s no one right way to do design. Today’s ChannelFireball article, however, should provide some clarity on the topic. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of set design is how great an impact your “pack creation” method has on the number of cards you need in your set cube. One can achieve nearly identical results using a mere 400 cards or by using nearly 1000 cards.

The topic of set cubes likely isn’t of tremendous interest to cubing veterans, but I think they serve as a great opportunity for giving beginning designers an accessible hands-on way to start learning lessons about cube and game design. What happens when you tweak this variable? How are the different aspects of the design connected? Can we make the set more fun than Wizards’ set when gameplay is our only focus?

On a personal note, it was nice to write an article that lived in the intersection between my professional life (statistics) and one of my hobbies (cube design).

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by: Jason Waddell

My Magic 2014 cube set review is online over at ChannelFireball. Have a read, then chime in with your thoughts in our forums.

By: Jason Waddell

There’s a new zombie in town.

Lifebane Zombie is quite the shadowy figure. Let’s say a Zombie came to my house and murdered my pet baloth, I would not be able to pick the guy out of a line-up. Not unless he was still carrying around his two-handed axe. Some interesting artistic choices here. Maybe Min Yum simply isn’t a fan of drawing faces? For all I know he skipped out on face day of art school, and has since been relegated to drawing shadowy figures.

Where’s the light source here? I see some light emanating from behind his ghastly physique, and a single spot of light illuminating his chest. There’s been recent discussion by MJ Scott over at GatheringMagic about the visual portrayal of women on Magic cards. I don’t think we’ve seen that last of cleavage windows or Nin, the Pain Artist style aesthetics from Wizards of the Coast, but maybe this is their way of attempting to level the conversation? I mean, it’s not as overt as the Hawken prank, but as I’m standing there in the police station on the wrong side of town, how am I to pick out the baloth slaughterer? “Have them take off their shirts, I need to see which one has the gnarly pecs.”

Oh, Lifebane Zombie is a Magic card too.

Let’s start with the obvious. He’s a Zombie, the most relevant creature type in my cube. Any card that can help bring Gravecrawlers back online is at least worth consideration. Further, he’s a black three drop. This is perhaps the weakest spot on the curve in all of cubing, so the bar for admission to the cube league is absurdly low. As long as you get to the ball, right Mr. Lifebane? I mean, if I were interested in competing in the UEFA World Cup qualifiers, I’d start by applying for citizenship to the Faroe Islands. Well played Señor Zombie, you found the path of least resistance.

Lifebane Zombie’s stats are passable, considering the fact that Intimidate is functionally Unblockable in most cube games.

Last and possibly least is his enter the battlefield trigger. Lifebane Zombie continues a long heritage of enemy-color hate cards, and as far as effects go, the “exile a creature” clause is far more interesting than something like Protection. Not that since he exiles the card from the hand and not from the battlefield, you don’t gain any tempo the way you might with a hate card like Devout Lightcaster. But, when you’re trying to hold back cards like Thragtusk and Vorapede, a preemptive strike is perhaps the best course of action.

Just how narrow is the trigger? My 360 cube is host to 74 white or green creatures, or about 20.5% of all cards. Of course, many of those creatures will have already hit the board by the time you reach 1BB mana. I expect the trigger to be situationally relevant, but if prodded to name the colors that need extra hate in my current environment, neither white nor green would be at the top of that list.

All in all, Lifebane Zombie looks like one of those marginal cube cards that will enter a list only to be inevitably replaced in the ensuing 12 months. I’ll test Lifebane Zombie, but I don’t expect him to stick around for long.

M14 Previews:
– Garruk, Caller of Beasts
– Archangel of Thune
– Shadowborn Demon
– Elvish Mystic
– Young Pyromancer
– Dark Prophecy

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