OTJ Prerelease -
Yesterday I went to an OTJ pre-release and it was a lot of fun! I ended up coming in second place because I opened
Oko, which is almost impossible to kill. It was not killed once in the games I played him, and I didn’t lose a single game where I played him.
In the 3rd round, I kept 1 land hands during both the first and second games, because Oko was in my hand. I still won.
Anyways, I ended up opening/trading for pretty much all the cards I wanted to test in my cube, so I’ll be slotting them in soon.
Which are,
Nurturing Pixie,
Aven Interrupter,
Phantom Interference,
Three Steps Ahead,
Forsaken Miner,
Stingerback Terror,
Slickshot Show-Off and even
Slick Sequence.
Slick Sequence was a very fun card to play in my games, as the base of 2 mana for 2 damage, is good enough, and trying to sequence everything correctly to get to draw a card was fun, although I’m not sure if this card would be better for my environment than either of my other Izzet cards.
I think my favorite moment from my games was when I plotted
Loan Shark, and then on the next turn cast
Loan Shark and holding priority casting
Slick Sequence to get the cards from both of them.
I went with a couple of other people from the Magic Club at my college, and all 5 of us ended up placing in the top 10, with two of us being in the top 3.
4 Color Bombs 6-2
Overall, I really enjoyed the pre-release and thought that the set played really well.
Updates -
I have updated the Overview page on my
CubeCobra, and I’m planning on updating the first post in this thread soon.
With this upgrade, I focused on cutting cards that were not being drafted, cards that were too strong, and some at higher mana values.
I ended up cutting a good number of Un and playtest cards since they weren’t getting drafted.
I also ended up cutting
Wildfire, as it was never drafted, and when it was run, it didn’t really work.
Since I cut
Wildfire from red, I also cut all of my
Mana Rocks and added some cool artifacts to replace them.
With my changes to red, I ended up adding a lot more support for a spells/prowess archetype, which is looking pretty fun.
No one was drafting the ninjas, so I ended up cutting all of the ninjas and their direct support cards and added more
Cantrips to blue, and more
Removal in black.
Overall, I’ve been working on lowering the power level, but I find it difficult to figure out what the strongest cards in my cube are, but I’m slowly making progress.
Draft Report
The day before the OTJ pre-release we only had 6 people come to play my cube, so we did team-sealed, instead of a draft.
My Team
Rakdos Aggro 3-0
This was my deck, and playing aggro was a lot of fun.
I think the biggest problem with this deck is the lack of burn spells, because the Izzet Tempo Player on my team ended up with most of them.
I only lost one game which was because the control deck managed to draw
Seeker of the Way which walled my deck pretty hard, and with no burn spells I didn’t really have a way to deal with it.
Izzet Temp 1-2
My favorite moment from this deck was casting
Dig Through Time with
Chrome host Seedshark in play, and making an 8/8.
Abzan Good Stuff 1-1
This person only had time to play two matches.
The Other Team
Azorius Control + Rhino 0-2
This deck was really cool, but it didn't get to do all to much as the two games it played were against Aggro and Izzet Tempo.
Golgari Graveyard 1-2
This deck was really cool, it played like a GB aggro deck, with some graveyard support.
My favorite moment in this deck was when I alpha swung at them, and got them down to 3 life, when on their turn they hard card Vengevine, and struck back, bringing me down to 2 life, with
Bob in play. On my upkeep, there was probably a 50% chance I would just die, but I ended up revealing a
Gingerbrute and winning that game. It was a very tense situation but a lot of fun.
I forgot to take a picture of the last deck, but it was an Izzet Aggressive deck that went 2-1
Future Updates -
For future updates I want to try and add more spells that can be used at multiple points across the game, for example
Into the Roil, which is a solid tempo removal spell in blue, but also can cantrip later on in the game. I’m going to try and add more cards with Kicker, X costs, Flashback, and other mechanics to try and have cards that are good both early and late during the games.
Since I want to add more cards with flashback, I might try and add
Burning Vengence, since I think its a really cool card, and is a card that I think exemplifies some of my goals with the cube along with being a card that could work well in some of the themes I’m working on.
Its a pretty solid piece to run in a graveyard based deck with enough
flashback and
Gravecrawlers, and also likes the cards that are useable during later game with
flashback.
I have a whole
list of
burn spells that I think are really
cool, but dont have updated
rules text, so I don’t really want to run them, because it confuse newer players.
For example last night someone
Emblemed Koth of the Hammer, which dosn’t have updated rules text either, and didn’t realize that their mountains could shoot his opponents
Elspeth, Knight Errant.
I see three options with this,
1. I proxy versions of these cards with updated rules text, which I’m not completely against but would prefer doing.
2. I just run them anyways, which would confuse newer players more.
3. I cut all the planeswalkers from my cube, because then the rules text would accurately say what the legal targets in my cube are.
I’m currently leaning towards option 3 because I don’t think cutting Planeswalkers from my cube would be a bad thing, but I really like
Liliana of the Veil as I love old Jund decks with Lili and Goyf. I also don’t want to cut
Koth of the Hammer as it was in the very first deck I ever owned and played.
I’ll keep thinking about it and make a decision somewhere down the line.
Tokens -
I have infinitokens, but people don't normally use them.
One of the members of our playgroup has a big stack of ~100 tokens that they bring to all our events and people are willing to look through it for tokens.
I might try to get the actual tokens since it seems like my playgroup is willing to use them.
There are 43 unique tokens in my cube, so it could get them somewhat easily.
Removal -
With the last few sets I’ve been adding the cool new removal, so my white removal right now is
Fateful Absence,
Get Lost and some similar cards, but thats also a lot stronger than my
Nameless Inversion removal in black, so I’m going to try to set a baseline on how strong removal can be at each mv.
1mv removal spells should kill creatures with 2 toughness, or 3 toughness if its conditional. Examples -
Shock,
Disfigure,
Elsepth’s Smite
2mv removal spells should kill creatures with 3 toughness or more if its conditional.
Examples -
Lightning Strike,
Nameless Inversion,
Not on My Watch,
Soul Partition,
Into the Roil,
Bitter Triumph
3mv removal spells should be able to kill all creatures, and potentially other permanent types, or very conditional boardwipes
Examples -
Murderous Rider,
Council’s Judgment,
Oblivion Ring,
Radiant Flames
4mv conditional boardwipes and 5mv unconditional boardwipes
Examples -
By Invitation Only,
Night Incarnate,
Fiery Confluence
Elspeth’s Smite might be a little too strong as theres only ~33 creatures in my cube that it can’t kill out of 194 creatures, so I might want to run
Righteous Blow or
Slash of Talons instead.
