Autumn Cube
I am back to bore you! So, what's new? I love Cube! That's not really new. But I hate my process of Cube-building. I often find myself deeply in the vicious circle of: having a new Cube idea --> jotting down a 360-card list --> starting to make changes over and over --> never playing it, never playtesting it --> abandoning the idea 2 days or 3 months later --> having a new Cube idea. So, I have to change something.
Years ago a friend suggested me to build a Cube in one year, starting from January 1st, adding a card to the Cube each day (maybe without even looking at the card list, just writing it somewhere and then looking at the list only at the end of the year). It is a very fun idea, but I know myself, I would stop at day 3. One year feels to long for doing something like this.
But then I had an idea: what about one season? Picking four cards a day for 90 days feels more doable than picking one card a day for 360 days. And moreover, the season allows me to have also a "theme" for the Cube. Namely, since it is Autumn, I can have a more spooky Cube, which is also something I really like, a lot of my "likes" on CubeCobra are graveyard Cubes or Cubes centered on madness and flashback. Also my last Cube idea, that you may find a couple of posts above this, had the same gimmick in mind.
So, here are the rules. Four cards a day, I cannot change them afterwards. The cards do not need to be all Autumn-based, but obviously there should be a recurring theme in the Cube. No Summer Bloom, I would say. Also, I usually prefer cards with the pre-M15 border. I do not know why I despise the new border so much, but they really do not feel as Magic as the previous ones. Or maybe I am just nostalgic. And then, clearly, I want a synergy Cube, not a power-max (I am on RiptideLab, no?). Without rarity restrictions, just cards I like and that play together nicely.
Just a comment on power-max Cubes: a friend of mine lately designed and proxied a 540-card Cube with all the most broken cards ever,
Gleemax,
Hymn of the Wilds,
Backup Plan,
Contract from Below etc. I drafted it with him and other friends, went 2-1, and hated it. Like, sure, my deck was very strong (I won 2-0 2-0 the first two matches and then lost 0-2 to the Cube owner in the finals) but there was literally no deckbuilding involved. Just pick the strongest card in each pack and go. I forced him to add
Knight of the Reliquary (one of my favourite cards ever) in the Cube, I drafted it, and never drew it in six games. But it was in my deck just as a beater, since it really had nothing to synergise with.
So, now 15 days have passed since the start of Autumn, thus here is the Cube so far. I put the following sentence in boldface so people maybe read it even if they skim through the post and not read my boring personal anecdotes.
I am very open to suggestions! Both regarding single cards and archetypes!
Day One (23/09)
I think most people when they think of Autumn they think of Halloween, and when they think of Halloween in
Magic they think of Innistrad. I still remember when in 2011 I was eleven and I read the article on the DailyMTG announcing Innistrad as a new expansion. I was very thrilled. But also, I never really loved Innistrad, I am more a Ravnica/Lorwyn/Kamigawa kind of guy. But still, flashback is one of the best mechanics of all time.
Snapcaster Mage is great, and I think nobody would argue regarding the other cards being at place in an Autumn Cube.
Day Two (24/09)
Maybe the second day is early to lock into archetypes, but I remember the token decks with
Lingering Souls and
Intangible Virtue from the old T2. Also, my previous experience with graveyard-based Cubes is that white really needs some non-graveyard-y archetypes, and tokens is very nice because there are a lot of cards to support it with mechanics like flashback and madness. Also, regarding madness: I clearly want madness in the Cube, but I do not like the fact that lately they moved madness to BR. Madness is GU with
Wild Mongrel and
Circular Logic, come on! So I started by adding these two support cards. Also,
Careful Study is just a better
Faithless Looting, that trades flashback for the upside of being blue.
Day Three (25/09)
Frantic Search continues the list of support cards for madness that are also good in general, with flashback cards and graveyard synergies. I also wonder whether UR should be some kind of non-creature spell support, like with
Young Pyromancer and things like that. Also, I have a very nice foil copy that I bought years ago before the rise of PreModern made all prices of old cards skyrocket.
Deep Analysis is just a good card with flashback, I don't think each of them needs an explanation. I also added some more support for the tokens archetype in white. Most of the white tokens so far are Spirits, there could be also a typal sub-archetype with a couple of Spirit support cards?
EDIT: brr, is there a way for the preview to show the card in the original printing instead of the Avatar reprint?
Day Four (26/09)
Travel Preparations was a great card in Innistrad limited and I think it can be so also here, with all the flying tokens in white. The others are classic madness/threshold staples from Odyssey block. I love Odyssey block, and I think that GU madness is one of the most fun deck archetypes of all time to play, so I really need it here.
Day Five (27/09)
Three of the four cards are obviously there still for the GU madness deck.
Momentary Blink is a fun one -- I do not remember why I added it in this precise day. I guess I thought that blink might become a thing in the Cube? This is also supported by other cards I added later, but not so far yet. If I remember well the drafts I had of the great Penny Pincher Cube by Grillo Parlante, blink and returning creatures to hand in general is very fun and you can build much more synergy than you usually think, even without a structured "blink" deck. But I still plan to add something more, for sure
Ghostly Flicker is going in and maybe also
Snap.
Day Six (28/09)
Waterfront Bouncer is a card I love, it feels like a fair
Tradewind Rider, it is nice because you can play it both aggressively on the opponent's creatures but also for making value on your own creatures. It kinda stonewalls the token deck, but I guess the token deck will be strong enough to beat a two-mana 1/1 that makes card disadvantage, right? I also added a couple of red cards; I still have no idea what the red should look like so far (so far, the only things that are true are that probably Wx is tokens and GU is madness) but these cards look fine anyways. I am fine with red having a couple of madness cards, but it shouldn't be the main madness colour.
Day Seven (29/09)
Again, a couple of support cards for madness in green and red, and some good flashback cards in general. Flashback is going to be a five-colour mechanic in the Cube, since there are SO MANY good cards with it. It is a great mechanic. Intrinsic card advantage, replayability, makes it so that it is hard to go to a topdeck war since players often have something to do with their graveyards. Oh, yeah, one small comment: I do not want to overload this Cube with mechanics. I want it to be playable and draftable also by people that do not know 1000+ old cards, so for now I am keeping the number of named mechanics, and of cards that do crazy things, very low. So far, at day seven, there are only flashback and madness as named mechanics, and threshold as an ability word that kinda works like a mechanic.
Day Eight (30/09)
If someone was wondering whether the Cube was gonna have black in it, now they have an answer. I was waiting to add black cards to the Cube because it is very easy to find spooky cards in black, so I did not want to overload the Cube with black cards from the start. But here I decided to finally add some because I had an idea for an archetype (probably centered in WB): aristocrats! It feels perfect, because it plays very nice with tokens, and also with cards going to the graveyard, for death triggers and stuff like that. I put in also
Fiend Hunter, which is first of all a good card in general, second it is an Innistrad card, third and fourth it works VERY well with sacrifice outlets and with blink spells, because it is worded "the old way" so if you sacrifice it or blink it in response to the ETB trigger, the creature never returns. And I love that!
Day Nine (01/10)
Mesmeric Fiend does the same trick as the
Fiend Hunter of the previous day. The other three are personal favourite cards that go well with the theme: Bob is "dark", Thalia is from Innistrad, and KotR plays well with lands in the graveyard. I guess that "lands in the graveyard" could be another theme, maybe more centered into green, with stuff like
Life from the Loam,
Crop Rotation and
Countryside Crusher.
Day Ten (02/10)
After starting to add black cards, now I cannot stop! No, jokes aside, I added
Putrid Imp as a good enabler for whatever thing the player would like to do, and the two flashback spells as flashback spells that double down as sacrifice outlets. I do not plan to add
Griselbrand or big things like that in the Cube, so I guess that reanimation spells like
Dread Return are fine? Maybe I will add something like
Woodfall Primus as a reanimation target, but I would not like to have reanimator as a main draftable archetype. I prefer a BG deck to be based on stuff like
Spider Spawning and maybe even hardcasting
Golgari Grave-Troll as a 16/16.
Champion of the Parish is there since I noticed that a lot of creatures I added are Humans, and if I have a small Spirits typal subtheme I can also have a small Humans typal subtheme. Maybe when I dive deeper into black I could see myself adding also some Zombie or Vampire support?
Day Eleven (03/10)
All good cards.
Gravecrawler is great with
Carrion Feeder but is also great alone, if there are enough Zombies in the Cube. I am pretty sure that there will be even if I forget about them. The two flashback spells continue a great succession of good flashback spells added to the Cube.
Eternal Witness is recursion from the graveyard, that feels very on-theme with everything. Furthermore, I have a nice foil copy. This is a good enough reason for adding a card, in my personal humble opinion.
Day Twelve (04/10)
I went deeper into the WB aristocrats package.
Diregraf Ghoul is just a one-drop but it is nice with
Gravecrawler and hits hard. I like having some aggro decks in my Cube and I think black may be kinda aggressive here? I do not know yet. The
Mentor of the Meek may be too strong with all the tokens going around, but we will see. The other two cards maybe have a slightly lower power level but they feel very at ease in a deck centered around sacrificing creatures and making tokens, so they are good here. I do not know if I should add more support for aristocrats or if for now it is enough for a 360-card Cube.
Day Thirteen (05/10)
So, here I added two pairs of cards. The first two are persist creatures. I was not sure whether I wanted persist in the Cube, because probably it meant no undying (maybe? or maybe it is fine to have both?) and it is another named mechanic, which is the third in the Cube so far -- if we do not count threshold. But at the end I decided for, because I felt that Shadowmoor/Eventide had a lot of cards that felt in place in this Cube, and these are so iconic and nostalgic that I felt bad to exclude them. Still, I will not include any type of Melira-kind card, so no infinite combos with these guys here. Only played fairly! The other two cards are support for a UR deck that centers into playing stuff from the graveyard, with flashback and things like that. Probably a deck will need some other way to close out the game, other than
Burning Vengeance, but still it is a nice card that I think gives the drafter a clear direction in which to go. And can be even played in a BR or RG deck.
Day Fourteen (06/10)
Yesterday I started looking at the Dark Ascension visual spoiler and found a lot of cards that felt at place in the Cube. Between ETB effects to blink, tokens, Humans, and Spirits, I think that these encapsulate well the direction in which I want white to go. I am also considering stuff like
Blade Splicer (and the Splicers in general) -- which is a Human and makes a token and is blinkable -- or else also something like
Sandsower -- which is a Spirit and works very well with tokens. I also know that I have not added any Spirit typal support to the Cube yet, so "being a Spirit" is not really a thing. And my Humans support is just
Champion of the Parish. But I will add something more? Maybe?
Day Fifteen (07/10)
Today I felt like I was a bit abandoning green, so I added something more. I finally decided that some token support can be in green even (so, "tokens" can be GW and "aristocrats" WB, even though I really do not like to have fixed archetypes for colour combinations... it really makes drafting too much on rails... so I prefer saying stuff like: there is token support mainly in white, but secondarily in green and black... there is madness support mainly in blue and green, but secondarily in red... and so on). The other two cards are nice. Also, I am considering
Glare of Subdual as another Selesnya multicoloured card, but maybe it is too much oppressive? Surely
Opposition is out of consideration, but maybe Glare is at the right power level for this Cube. There are still a lot of cards that I want to add! But again, I am very open to suggestions!
