Card/Deck blue black

[tibbelsandbitts]

Is there anything you can do with ub thats not reanimator or mill
I feel mill is too strong in a limited environment.
And reanimator is fine. But currently i wanna go another route something more interesting.

How does ub work in your cubes?

 

[ahadabans]

I've been experimenting with a self-mill dredge mechanic that is working pretty well. It might not translate to higher power environments though. Essentially, it's a control shell with things like Stinkweed Imp, Hedron Crab, Dakra Mystic, Darkblast, lots of card draw (Frantic Search rocks here like super hard) and some removal. Once you get cards in the yard, that powers delve cards (black/blue have a ton - Tasigur is custom build for this deck) and it can power graveyard recursion. Haakon works good here. Dread Return is great because if it gets dredged the flashback can be triggered - really nice later in the game when crab, mystic and imp can all be sacrificed for a big nasty finisher. Skaab Ruinator is just the right power level for this too. He's strong but exiling three creatures is a lot and you will only be able to recur him a couple times typically. He also dies to a lot of black removal so can be dealt with by your opponent. But if he can't be killed, a 5/6 flyer does a ton of damage.

This pairs nice with green for the regrowth style effects. Genesis in particular since you want it in the yard anyway and it gives you another path to get cards back from the yard other than reanimation effects.

I did not like milling my opponent. It's not a fun mechanic because it's either too good or not good enough and just pointless. But self mill is a different animal entirely because there is a lot you can do with it and you always feel like you are building towards a goal each time you mill yourself. To some extent it's like a lottery too… ooooh, what did I just dredge?!.

 

[FlowerSunRain]

Blue/Black in my cube can do hard control, heroic and aggro-control. It can also do weird stuff with graveyard dumping into Skaab Ruinator, Delve Fatties, Oversold Cemetery or some such, though those decks can be hard to draft and are often fragile. I've found that its more often seen as part of three color lists then by itself, but even though its one of the least commonly drafted 2 color combos (the least drafted?) it gets played often enough.

 

[Rasmus Källqvist]

Personally I'm a big fan of defining color pairs by taking one game-mechanical aspect of each color and mixing them together. The classical UB one would be control, where blue card advantage and counterspell pairs up with black removal and hand disruption. I'd like to talk some about how much we can or need to tinker with our cubes to make UB control something that comes together and feels like s drafted deck and not just happenstance or a good-stuff deck.

Blue looting and black graveyard recurring also works pretty nicely with each other!

-Edited for clarity-

 

[James Stevenson]

The best deck I ever saw in my cube was a UB tempo deck (gasp! tempo!) - was a lot of disruption: removal, discard (including nezumi shortfang every turn, which was killer), counterspells, and just a few threats that were super resilient: Wydwen, the Biting Gale, for one. I don't remember what else. But that was awesome, and I'd never seen an attacking UB deck before or since. Probably also ran things like Fettergeist, Serendib Efreet, Kira, Great Glass-Spinner, and especially Vendilion Clique.

 

[GenericZero]

I think it'd be possible to run a fairly interesting U/B deck if you run some of the DTK Exploit dudes. I thought Exploit was pretty fun and well done, honestly.

 

[ahadabans]

I card I keep trying to get guys to draft is Duskmantle Seer. No matter what I do though, he just won't become a thing. It's certainly powerful enough, but UB tempo just doesn't ever happen and you need too much top of library manipulation to reliably run that in a control deck without it wrecking you. He also doesn't play nice with delve cards. So yeah, I get why I can't ever make it happen. But maybe other groups have had more luck?

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

U/B is really well positioned right now, with great tutors to collect from a toolbox of removal, great mass removal friendly discard, and creatures, as well as impactful discard.

Combine that with recursive pieces to grind the long game, powerful draw smoothing spells, and the modern draw go package.

Outside of the higher power, delve based, tempo creatures, you also have the option of combining the already mass removal friendly cantrip/discard creatures with the old school package for generating tempo and card advantage.

On top of that you have more exhilarating combo options with mass reanimation cards like living death, or haste based combo-reanimation with discard outlets and cards like apprentice necromancer or shallow grave.

Its just a really rich and deep color combination, that you can tool for whatever your power level, format speed, or price range is.

 

[ahadabans]

Man, I think we've gone too far with the card link renaming thing. That was a really hard post to read. I'm starting to do this a lot too, and now I'm going to dial that back a bit.

 

[tibbelsandbitts]

I like the tempo idea but seems likeit may be hard to pull off.

The self mill is also interesting and could work with other archtypes.

I've had some time to think, some things that came to mind were a wizards theme, and maybe instead of reanimator you could cheat guys in play with polymorph effects or braids (not show and tell i aint on board for that)

Self mill value will win out for me i feel though its similar to reanimator

 

[Eric Chan]

Man, I think we've gone too far with the card link renaming thing. That was a really hard post to read. I'm starting to do this a lot too, and now I'm going to dial that back a bit.

I dunno, I think it's fine. I've never had a problem.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

The best deck I ever saw in my cube was a UB tempo deck (gasp! tempo!) - was a lot of disruption: removal, discard (including nezumi shortfang every turn, which was killer), counterspells, and just a few threats that were super resilient: Wydwen, the Biting Gale, for one. I don't remember what else. But that was awesome, and I'd never seen an attacking UB deck before or since. Probably also ran things like Fettergeist, Serendib Efreet, Kira, Great Glass-Spinner, and especially Vendilion Clique.

This deck won the first cube session ever I organized, somewhere over a year ago. UB Tempo is glorious when it works!

UB Tempo

I had a Shriekmaw in the sideboard too, what's up with that? I still remember the two highlights of this deck, because they felt awesome to pull off (though not necessarily opponent-friendly).

1. Contagion Clasp killing into Tangle Wire into Phyrexian Metamorph (copy the Tanglewire) into small dudes overwhelming a tapped out opponent.
2. Ultimate Tamiyo with Withdraw and Venser in hand. Evil

 

[Rasmus Källqvist]

Is there an overlap in making ub an interesting color pair as a tempo/control player by looking at black's capabilities as a control color? I'm considering moving somethings over into different sections of the color pie in my cube, and making blue and black more stand alone control colors (ie you can draft them almost mono and get a good deck). Right now, and I think this is true in a lot of our cubes, control decks tend to be X/yz decks (Esper or Jeskai?) and I'd like there to be more focused decks that don't need to stretch so much to get its personality.

 

[tibbelsandbitts]

U/B is really well positioned right now, with great tutors to collect from a toolbox of removal, great mass removal friendly discard, and creatures, as well as impactful discard.

Combine that with recursive pieces to grind the long game, powerful draw smoothing spells, and the modern draw go package.

Outside of the higher power, delve based, tempo creatures, you also have the option of combining the already mass removal friendly cantrip/discard creatures with the old school package for generating tempo and card advantage.

On top of that you have more exhilarating combo options with mass reanimation cards like living death, or haste based combo-reanimation with discard outlets and cards like apprentice necromancer or shallow grave.

Its just a really rich and deep color combination, that you can tool for whatever your power level, format speed, or price range is.

Sir I want to say how much i appreciate how detailed you are in your responses. Its not only informative, its helpful.

 

[Kirblinx]

The deck I seem to draft in my peasant cube more than any other is B/U Aggro Tempo, or what I generally just call 'Ninjas'.

B/u Aggro from CubeTutor.com

I have no idea why I draft this deck so many times. Maybe I need to keep beating people down with Curse of the Shallow Graves until people stop passing it to me. Having the black aggro shell of cheap evasive dudes backed up by ways to produce card advantage while beating down is just too fun for me to pass up.

Plus, as you can see from the deck above, the amount of EtB effects in UB is rather staggering. So you can even have a UB 'Blink' style deck by using blues various bounce spells or blacks reanimation spells to get the advantage from those triggers. Or you could just use the best creature type ever printed to get the value.

ps. Don't ever leave me. I love you so much.

 

[blacksmithy]

Something I want to try in a Riptidey cube is a UB morbid theme. You've got Evoke critters, you've got Blood Artist, and you can run stuff like Murder of Crows and Tragic Slip too. And Sylvok Lifestaff, and Mortarpod, and Mimic Vat...
I feel like I had a list of cards to get this started somewhere, but I may have deleted it. Oh, and if you wanna go more aggro with it, run Phantasmal stuff to make the death triggers easier to proc.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

My favorite UB control card:



I feel so fine every time I cast this card. Removal, life gain and card advantage in one sweet Ravnican package! If they ever reprint this without that ridiculous flavor text, I'm using the reprint though!

 

[CML]

My favorite UB control card:



I feel so fine every time I cast this card. Removal, life gain and card advantage in one sweet Ravnican package! If they ever reprint this without that ridiculous flavor text, I'm using the reprint though!

 

[Chris Taylor]

I dunno, I think it's fine. I've never had a problem.

Jeez, and none of those are brushwagg?
For Shame!

 

[Aston]

 

[Chris Taylor]

Upheval is one of those cards that wins games, but doesn't really involve a lot of decision making.
Also psychatog is just bad thesedays. in the 99% of other cases where he isn't the only permanent in play, he's downright aweful, and post upheval usually something as pedestrian as riftwing cloudscate is enough to finish the game, let alone playing alegbra with your opponent's life total

 

[ahadabans]

I don't even think Upheaval is all the great because you need a ton of mana. Powered cubes can abuse it way easier than unpowered. The only thing I've ever seen anyone do with Upheaval is make the game go another 45 minutes.

Agreed on Pychatog. It's a sacred cow and I finally cut it only just recently. It only ever did anything in broken reanimator, and that deck has been gutted.

 

[Alfonzo Bonzo]

Upheaval is certainly powerful, but I've cut it as I don't think it leads to fun games (in the same way like I've cut Armageddon).

I haven't run psychatog for a while either. The math can be irritating and it's probably a little outclassed creature-wise nowadays but there is an argument to run it if you are pushing strong graveyard themes as it gives you a discard outlet. Certainly a decent gold 'signal'.

 

[ahadabans]

OK, I'm going to defend Armageddon (in the blue/black thread no less - vintage Riptide move right there).

I love armageddon style effects. I run four of them (Armageddon, Cataclysm, Catastrophe, and Desolation Angel). I like what they do to the game because they really reward building a board presence early (or controlling early and building late). These cards are anti-durdle IMO. And because you only have one copy of them, it really doesn't feel broken to me. Sure, you get that deck which curves like a boss and seals victory on T4 with the geddon, but that doesn't happen that often (in my meta at least).

The curve of cube keeps doing down and because of that, every deck has ample time to do things before T4. If you just durdled and did nothing about your opponents board presence (hoping to just goodstuff your way to victory in the later turns), you deserve to lose. On the opposite end of the spectrum, if you are the tempo player and you still haven't gotten it done by the time your oppenent has 3WWBB for deso angel (and you can't race it with what you have on the board), well that's on you man (or give credit to your opponent for all the solid plays he did all game to neutralize you and put you in this situation).

Either way, this to me is the polar opposite of Upheaval. Upheaval says (let me just stall long enough to where I can reset the game and make us all do this again). I hate that card. Geddon effects end games. Upheaval (outside combo), just makes the game longer in my experience.

 

[blacksmithy]

I was gonna post some support for ahadabans' defense of land wipes, but I'd rather just like his post since he said it best.
On topic, I've always wondered if there were some way to play up the tutor-y aspect of UB in cube in a fun way. You've got (at varying power levels)

...The list goes on. If only there were a reward card for drafting lots of tutors!