By: Jason Waddell

Some days you’re just not in the mood to play Magic. Cube owners don’t really have the luxury of backing out at the last minute, especially after the weekly ritual of sorting out the attendee list. This week’s ritual was par the course, with several players bailing on the day of the draft, and a couple unannounced regulars joining at the door.

“In terms of like, instant relief, canceling plans is like heroin.”
– John Mulaney

In the end we found ourselves with 7, which as far as odd numbers of players go isn’t the worst. At 9 players I have to turn someone away or sit out. At 5 we struggle to find a format worth playing, and a three-player Magic gathering makes each participant wish they were doing something else. With 7 we simply pretend it’s an 8-man and deal with it and watch the byes get passed on down the bracket.

On days when I’m not in the mood to draft adventurously, I have the habit of preordaining a pair of archetypes I’m in the mood to play and forcing one of them based on the first pack’s contents. I’ve been nursing a theory that one of the stronger decks in the format is a GB Primeval Titan and Volrath’s Stronghold inevitability engine. I’ve 3 – 0’d with the archetype once before with a supporting cast that included Green Sun’s Zenith, Demonic Tutor, Thragtusk and Vorapede.

The other deck I had in mind is my all-time favorite UWR American Tempo (or Russian Tempo, if Yevgeny is around). Red-White-Blue tempo decks are my Magic equivalent of comfort food, and are my go-to when I don’t feel like thinking about the nuances of other archetypes. My first pack gave me a strong push in that direction with a P1P1 Ral Zarek. After four picks I had grabbed the following:

The deck came together quite well, and I sleeved up this concoction:

(click to enlarge)

It’s perhaps the most beautiful curve I’ve ever presented, with a rather pristine mana base to boot, including:
Hallowed Fountain
Steam Vents
Sacred Foundry
Scalding Tarn
Scalding Tarn
Polluted Delta

I’d also add that Moorland Haunt and Umezawa’s Jitte are a ridiculously strong pairing. Overpowered equipment and small evasive bodies have long been a winning formula, and I think the entire Magic community should be thankful that Stoneforge Mystic and Moorland Haunt never occupied the same standard environment.

Halimar Depths into Fetchland is the undisputed best durdle opening.

To the matches!

Round 1, Hannes, Naya Aggro Pod (?)

Hannes sleeved a three-color aggro deck with six colorless lands.

1 – 0 (2 – 0)

Round 2, Tom, GW Landfall

Tom mulliganned to 5 and kept a 1-lander with Undiscovered Paradise as his only land. He hit a Turn 2 Lotus Cobra and nearly won the game. Nearly.

2 – 0 (4 – 0)

Finals, Tobi, Jund Karn Advantage

My games against Tobi were some of the most fun and intricate I have played in a while. I watched parts of Tobi’s earlier matches and his deck was capable of some really strong lines, despite looking like a turd pile.

(click to enlarge)

Observed highlights of Tobi’s deck:
– Winning after cascading Bloodbraid Elf into Green Sun’s Zenith for 0, fetching Dryad Arbor.

– Playing a pre-combat Zealous Conscripts to steal his opponents Vendilion Clique. His opponent let it resolve then tapped down the army with Cryptic Command. Post combat Tobi sacrificed two Eldrazi spawn tokens and tapped his remaining 5 lands for Karn.

– Phyrexian Arena in play. Draw Karn and Zealous Conscripts. Play Conscripts stealing Sword of Feast and Famine. Equip. Swing. Untap all lands. Karn advantage.

Game 1

On the draw I open with a Turn 2 Augur of Bolas. Tobi plays a Turn 3 Call of the Herd. I rip a Stonecloaker off the top to exile Call of the Herd and return Augur of Bolas to my hand.

Tobi plays a Falkenrath Aristocrat and swing. I block.

“Is elephant a human?”

This may or may not have been a jab at another player asking for the Oracle creature-types of Nekrataal during the previous round, hoping against hope that it might be a Wizard for Riptide Laboratory (hey, that’s the name of the show).

Falkenrath survives. I announce “play of the day”, and call the table’s attention to my impending Thundermaw Hellkite. Oops, only one red mana. I suppose Gideon will do.

Tobi starts to mount a comeback, and I am still sitting on a single red source. I defend my Gideon with a Moorland Haunt token, and before damage cast Path to Exile on the spirit token to fetch up a mountain.

Thundermaw finally hits the board. Tobi then steals it with Zealous Conscripts, and kills my Gideon. After combat Tobi taps Gaea’s Cradle for three mana and casts Consuming Vapors targeting himself, with two untapped lands left. Evasive Action provides the blowout with a timely Mana Leak impression. Thundermaw swings for exactly lethal the next turn.

Game 2

Tobi has a decent draw, but after some dancing I eventually get there with Geist of Saint Traft, Eiganjo Castle and Umezawa’s Jitte.

3 – 0 (6 – 0)

UWR delivers again. Old faithful.

Discuss this article in our forums.

By: Jason Waddell

My article recording a second draft of my paper cube went online today. This was a draft I had quite a bit of trouble with. I mentioned in the article the difficulty of recording games as a control player and still finding the best lines, but I think that was only part of the issue.

(click to enlarge)

The deck felt very outdated. This sort of control deck would have easily run the cube tables a couple years ago, but times have gotten faster. I’ve given the aggro decks the power boost that they so desperately needed, and slow control decks are naturally one of the casualties. That said, I wasn’t even facing aggressive decks in this draft.

Let’s compare to another cube deck of mine that did go undefeated.

(click to enlarge)

These two decks have a lot of cards in common, but the Bant deck is much punchier. Deathrite Shaman and Lotus Cobra gave the deck some explosive openings, and our early game threat density is much higher. This Bant deck was loaded with 3-drops that could take over the game, and its 4- and 5-drops hit the table earlier due to acceleration.

I’m still trying to diagnose exactly what went wrong with the draft. Simple play errors? Did I get unlucky? Did failing to secure mana for the green splash cripple the deck? Are there cards missing from my environment that slower control decks need for a bit of a boost?

How would the UW control deck perform in your cubes?

Thanks for reading, and help me solve this mystery in our forums.

By: Jason Waddell

With Modern Masters already on the shelves, the Magic world’s attention turns to the next big landmark: the new MTGO client Magic 2014. If you’re anything like me, nothing quite tickles your fancy like the prospect of new cards. Now, I’m not personally one to dig through the slop of spoiler pages to find the gems in the rough. I let others do the dirty work for me. For my dollar, there’s no better resource than the MTGS Cube “New Card Discussion” forum. There, users have culled the spoilers down to only those deserving of discussion. And at a quick glance, the ruling is clear. The fans are wild about the upcoming Elvish Mystic. Its thread has two-to-three times the number of posts of most other cards. So let’s check out this hot new commodity!

Hmm… that can’t be right. All I’m finding are old cards.

So I dug a little deeper.

Aha! There it is!

Now whenever a new card is printed, a common evaluation tool is to compare the new thing to existing known quantities. Due to its casting cost, activated ability, power, toughness, creature type, and second creature type, I’m sure there are those out there that will draw the inevitable comparisons to mana elves of days past. But there are some real substantive differences that should not be overlooked.

Let’s start (and end) with the names. Now, Elvish Mystic is the latest in a long line of cards in Wizards quest to strip the flavor from preexisting cards. Why use evocative names like Kodama, Llanowar and Fyndhorn when we can just slot in words from the English vocabulary? But don’t take that as a dig. While Elvish Mystic’s name may be instantly forgettable, it does evoke a strong pedigree:

Cards with the word “Mystic” in them have been restricted and banned from Magic’s most powerful formats! How can the other mana dorks possibly hope to match?

They can’t. But Rofellos is a pretty cool chap to be waving the banner for your clan. But I have to say, if that’s Llanowar “Reborn”, I’d hate to see how shabby it was in its original state.

Alas, House Fyndhorn. The above image actually captures all six cards ever printed with the word “Fyndhorn” in their title. Quite a ragtag crew, the Fyndhorns. Their bows are among the most inefficient in the land, and their elders look like Elvish incarnations of Steve Buscemi. Tack on the fact that “Fyndhorn Brownie” sounds like a Dominarian sex act (Fyndhorn Pollen lady knows what I’m talking about), and I think we’ve found our winner.

If you only run one functional reprint this summer, run Fyndhorn Elves.

Discuss this article in our forums.

By: Jason Waddell

Today my latest ChannelFireball Cube Design article went online, covering a subject that is neither near or dear to my heart: card classification. Far too much ink has been spilled on this topic already, along with other perennial favorites like “why a draft environment should have aggressive cards”. Classification discussions have never been of great interest to me. In the early days of our now decrepit Google Groups page, Eric Chan started a thread on multicolor card classification that I didn’t have a whole lot to contribute to.

Ultimately my ideas on card classification are simply an extension of the Poison Principle. Drafting at its core is a competitive resource acquisition exercise, and to tune this dynamic you need to be acutely aware of the degree of competition that exists for various cards and effects in your environment. Sometimes the right card for the job is a narrower card that is sure to reach the drafter who needs it most. But by and large the bulk of any draft should be filled with cards that are useful to more than one drafter.

The task of tuning the demand for cards in your draft set is of course nuanced with no single right answer. When evaluating my own cube, I look for moments when I intentionally let the card I want most wheel over the cards I think other drafters will want. Am I consistently picking monocolored cards and letting gold cards wheel? Are there cards supporting a certain archetype that nobody else actually wants? If so, how many? Is the entire archetype mechanically isolated from the rest of my set?

This method of evaluation is a useful diagnostic for figuring out where the proportions or dynamics aren’t working as intended. Why is it important? Simple. If your packs are filled with cards that only you want, that means your packs are loaded with “dead cards” for the other drafters. I touched on this briefly in the article, but the corollary to ensuring that there are enough drafters competing for a given card is ensuring that there are enough cards for you the drafter to choose from. Drafting isn’t much fun when you have so few choices that the deck can be built on autopilot.

It’s for this reason that I railed against strongly promoting monocolor strategies in an environment filled with such a high density of multicolor support. To take some numbers, if we had a “core set” style draft with almost all monocolor cards, we would have about 70 cards from each color in a 360 card draft, and even then the standard is for players to build two-color decks. Cubes run in the ballpark of 50 monocolor cards per color. A monored aggro player, for example, has a few artifacts like Tangel Wire and Bonesplitter that they might be interested in, but also have no use for red control cards like Pyroclasm and Slagstorm. The pickings are pretty slim for such a drafter, not to mention the fact that their deck completely falls apart if other players are strongly in their colors.

Why would we promote monored aggro as a Tier 1 strategy in a set with the full ten guilds worth of gold cards. Imagine if one of full-block Ravnica’s top draft strategies was monored aggro. This would be an utter failure in design. As we’ve come to expect, these design flaws are at their most potent in various iterations of the MODO cube. All of which is a source of great frustration, considering how solidly Wizards’ retail draft sets are built. Normally I’d be content to take the easy-going approach and say “it’s fine, I don’t really play much online anyways”, but comically enough the MODO cube has had measurable impact on my paper cube. I’ve asked various local players to join in on the cubing action, only to be categorically denied, with players citing “horrible experiences with the Wizards’ cube” as reason not to join in on the festivities.

Discuss this article in our forums.