Recent content by dbs

Fastbond Gush Mystic Sanctuary Lion's Eye Diamond Urza's Saga

These decklists look sick - they ooze character.

I find Reanimate in particular a very powerful, flexible, and efficient midrange card. There are lots of cute ways to use it, including stealing your opponent's guys. Reanimating your cyclers to get typically 4+/4+ power and toughness for 1 mana is very efficient. I'm strongly considering...

Had a chance to do 1v1 testing with deck sketches I brewed up. These are all meant to be roughly representative of the kind of deck that can be drafted in our 4 player setup. Got some useful feedback going into our in-person draft next week. The decks were Ones 1 Solitude 1 Mental Misstep 1...

I'm back to cubing for a bit! Hoping to grow our playgroup by recruiting some incoming grad students, but in the meantime we're getting the old group back together. https://cubecobra.com/cube/overview/xi7 I made an update with a laser focus on consistency. I don't want the various combos decks...

Getting the dedicated combo versus dedicated disruption match-up right is extremely hard. I think it ends up converging to higher and higher power. On the one hand, to avoid lines like "you just lose to Drowned Secrets" you need some super high quality disruption - whatever it may be, Nature's...

Yeah, I "banned" it and then ended up un-banning it once my power-level had advanced by enough. It's an absolute bomb, but in my format that's what you should expect at 5 mana. You need to meet certain land/creature ramp criteria to make a 5 drop playable once the speed gets high enough - in...

I ran it for a draft or two but never really gave it a chance because it didn't get picked. I think part of the issue is that UR spells decks are usually all 0/1/2 mana and you don't really want to play a 3 drop that draws you cards. This includes the UR decks that want to do something like...

Right now I like having Bridge as a fun-of in my list, but I can see cutting it. It requires that you (1) can fill your yard (2) can sacrifice your creatures. That's a relatively narrow criterion (there's not many types of decks that do both of these). But these are criterion you might...

Honestly, a lot of the cards you mention are super playable at a very high power level OR lower power level. The big difference is with singleton, you need to stretch farther afield for consistency (to make GR madness a thing for example), and so the final product ends up being most natural at a...

I couldn't find an obvious Madness thread, so I'm going to post here. I'm toying with the following colorless discard package for high-powered. Containment Construct Containment Construct Lion's Eye Diamond Lion's Eye Diamond Hollow One Hollow One Bazaar of Baghdad Bazaar of Baghdad I'm...

I love Underworld Breach as an enchantment. The possible disruption mid-combo has been super relevant for us. I also like that it works with permanent recursion. But anyway, the flavor on Breach as a permanent that disappears at end of turn is so good. It's a literal underworld breach that...

Finally got around to doing another in-person draft after several delays (busy schedules and omicron). This time we finally tested the spell velocity update which I outlined here. At least two of the decks were heavily focused on casting as many spells as possible and I think they both nicely...

I think you want to envision the type of decks that would be playing these cards. Then you can ask: how many copies of this effect would these decks need to function? Fortunately, I think the answer is usually "not many." Life from the Loam works great as a 1-of in a green midrange deck that...

(to the theme of let's get down to business): let's go off the deep end Ones 1 Memnite 1 Mox Sapphire 1 Mox Ruby 2 Mental Misstep 1 Lion's Eye Diamond 2 Lotus Petal 1 Mishra's Bauble Twos 1 Noble Hierarch 1 Emry, Lurker of the Loch 1 Hope of Ghirapur 2 Asmoranomardicadaistinaculdacar 1...