Dom's Stream of Consciousness

[Dom Harvey]

DRAFT REPORT - MAY 2026

Another packed house and pod of 10 - for this one I tried giving everyone a Cogwork Librarian to start since I've enjoyed that in other Cubes and it makes a lot of sense in a heavy synergy format. I'm a bit frustrated with myself for not carving out time to actually update the paper list properly; my CubeCobra bot drafts were a bit disorienting since my decks seemed so much less coherent than the decks from paper drafts but when I checked the bots' decks they were surprisingly good and well-defined so maybe I'm just being brutally draftmogged by AI

Anyhow, some cool decks:



The tricksy GW deck that has been a staple of my Cube since the first post in this thread 10 years ago plus some nice Nadu limit breaks. I really want to highlight Practiced Offense - this wasn't on my radar at all during spoiler season but it's the best Limited card in the set and I've had a great time building around in Standard. It's obscenely powerful in any kind of creature deck, rewards going wide and going tall at once and 'flashback spell that puts counters on things' keys off so many synergies. Easy to imagine a WR deck with a ton of Looting etc or a blue Prowess deck using this as the coup de grace, or a WB deck going super wide and digging with Umbral Collar Zealot to find it (or just Entombing it directly!) etc



I 3-0ed again with my usual fare (intended to branch out but used my Cogwork P1P1 on Frog + Animate Dead and was off to the races) but I was pleased to see the small splashes worked so well - Abundant Countryside was as good as hoped here! Got to do some nice Animate Dead -> Yorion loops and it was great to see Reveillark still pulling its weight in the grindy matchups. Collector's Vault continued to be a solid workhorse here

This pod managed to support three very solid Ux Control decks with varying levels of purity:



A solid illustration of the URx deck that controls the game until it swiftly transitions to Big Spells or some two card combo. Opening Ceremony is Booster Tutor meets Mind's Desire - against me he hit Metamorphosis Fanatic + Chromatic Star to cast it and bring back a lifelinking Pyrogoyf!



I had to win a tough match against this at 2-0 for the pod and was quite impressed



Fairly conventional UW deck here but wanted an excuse to show off Hydro-Man, a bizarre but very fun and strong card if you don't mind the X-Men of it all

Coolest deck of the pod from the same guy who drafted the Lurrus sac/creature combo deck last time:



This can go off via Saffi + Retainers (+ Meathook/Roots etc) but has so many tutors and build-arounds that it will find a way to do something sweet all the time

 

[Dom Harvey]

MARVEL

This first (of many!) batch of Marvel releases has so many cards that you'd expect some to be interesting but there's a decent haul here even given that baseline. Aesthetically every character being a Named Legend is quite jarring but that's not categorically different from many normal sets these days and the lack of 'worldbuilding' references to guacamole pizza or whatever actually rescues it a bit here, and there's the usual Evil Killer Robots tribe that unites all the Universes Beyond and the in-universe high-tech stuff too.

Pic dump of cards that caught my eye for whatever reason:

Spoiler

Random thoughts:

Brawn, Amadeus Cho - Good riffs on Elvish Visionary are in surprisingly short supply and hybrid makes this the perfect glue card; I like that the mana sink -> more power option means you're not just idly spending mana drawing cards indefinitely and power-up makes you care about the timing (/rewards you drawing this later)

Kimoyo Beads - Probably not enough for the power level I usually target but I have a soft spot for these (Saga-like?) sequential value cards where you get a bit of everything over time and it's neither the same thing over and over nor a big pile of value slop; if you have too many they all blur together but in moderation these are good flavouring

The Fantasticar - Perhaps far too much for any power level (it's already engaged in a lethal hit-and-run on both Legacy and Vintage) but a much more reasonable and delightful subquest for Cube

Doctor Doom - I always wished The Hourglass Coven was real as competition for Grave Titan and this is the closest thing yet

Return of the Mole-Man - Love the input and output here, don't think this is great on rate necessarily but fills a specific niche well

Mole-Man, Moloid Master - I'm lower on Ramunap Excavator et al. than my love of lands would suggest and wouldn't want that effect on its own but Icetill Explorer showed how you can combine various lands rewards to be more than the sum of their parts and the Springheart Nantuko baseline of lands -> tokens is something I'm always happy to have

The Immortal Weapons - It's striking how few good Anarchist-likes there are 20 years on; Archaeomancer is fine for paupers and peasants, Saiba Syphoner is great if you stomach it, Pinnacle Monk only gets in the door as a DFC. This thing is a good, unapologetic version of that

Victor Timely, Wily Tycoon - The Halo Forager, Torrential Gearhulk etc category is much bigger but this one hits a unique sweet spot of broad coverage + decent cost. This + the broken Bilbo we've seen from the Hobbit set make me think the artifact + instant + sorcery batching might be a standard thing (at least in other universes) which is intriguing

Iron Man Armor - Always liked Maul of the Skyclaves/Celestial Armor and this is a more universal version that's also a legitimately great payoff for the Artifact Deck

Gert and Old Lace, Runaways - This could legit be an all-time general Cube staple if it wasn't called Gert and Old Lace, Runaways

Okoye, Mighty and Adored - The power-max crowd finally get their #1 GW card but this is a much more tolerable headliner than Minsc & Boo, Forth Eorlingas etc

Call Damage Control - I used to love Grim Discovery (I still do but I used to as well) and this is a suitably mid-2020s update in the right colour

 

[Dom Harvey]

DRAFT REPORT - JUNE 2026

Our monthly all-day Cube-a-thon gave me another chance to draft, this time a pod of 7 with a lot of first-timers:

5c Lurrus Control
Gr Ramp (me)
UB Mid
GW Survival
WB Sac/Reanimator
BR Mid
UWR Prowess/Control



This won the pod and was a delight to watch. Notes:

-- Yet another unique deck comes together around Lurrus!
-- I keep vacillating on the Triomes but certainly they are clutch for making decks like this possible
-- Booster Tutor was reliably extremely fun and powerful at once which is all you can ask for; pickups included T2 Psychic Frog (which beat me by itself), Counterspell, Sun Titan, Dig Through Time
-- Great Hall was all I hoped it would be here; I like the idea of using the conditional 5c lands (this, Plaza of Heroes, Spire of Industry, Abundant Countryside, maybe Castle Doom) to enable 5c decks while giving them a distinct identity (though I think the worries about 5c slop are generally overblown)



A good blend of the Prowess and Control stuff in Jeskai with a ton of card flow



A sweet mashup that fell just short - pilot really wanted a Blood Artist effect (Meathook/Sephiroth) or a Living Death style card to dig for (requested Rally the Ancestors specifically, which I love but think is still too narrow), and some of their key pieces were grabbed by others (e.g. Lingering Souls by the Lurrus deck). This would be a great home for Practiced Offense (including as an Entomb target!)



(~whole pool, usually cut 2-3 cards per match)

Touched grass again for this one, the draft was very tricky and I had a lot of tough choices re. secondary colours/splashes, speculating on combo pieces like Titania and enablers like Birthing Ritual etc.

Ba Sing Se was great vs the Lurrus deck and earned a spot I would say

The BR deck was notable too - a guy doing his first ever Cube draft who consciously ignored synergy and tried to build a mostly familiar midrange deck but ended up with a ton of playables and a lot of incidental synergy anyway (and seemed happy with his deck!), which is encouraging