General Fight Club

[James Stevenson]

I want more white wraths. I pushed white aggro so much for a while, and now it's been ages since I saw a control deck with white.

 

[Alfonzo Bonzo]

I haven't moved away from white wraths completely, only two now but it does feel like a real mismatch for the colour. White has a serious identity crisis ATM IMO.

 

[Eric Chan]

Yeah, I played a UW control deck this week, and having only two sweepers in my deck wasn't close to enough. The way the packs broke in our six man, only two of the four in the cube were in the card pool, and I would've loved at least one more.

On the bright side, I found good uses for Unexpectedly Absent, which finally shone in its intended home in a control deck. It was great for buying time and temporarily shelving mid-game threats, especially hasty ones.

 

[CML]

I think you need to be careful with Wraths in lower-powered environments, it is still draft, after all. Same way Crux of Fate is appropriate for this Standard season but Supreme Verdict wouldn't be.

I should clarify that I mean environments with lower-powered decks, Wraths are usually overpowered in regular power-maxed Power Cubes because the decks are so god-awful that what is the mono-Red guy gonna do, not overcommit?

In environments like the Wadds and CML Cubes aggro is good enough that (as in Constructed) the control players should have some amount of Wraths and the aggro players can play around them or not as they see fit. Always an interesting dynamic in every format.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

I haven't moved away from white wraths completely, only two now but it does feel like a real mismatch for the colour. White has a serious identity crisis ATM IMO.

I don't see how supporting both aggro and control in white constitutes an identity crisis. Every color has cards that one deck in that color will want to pick up, while the other won't. The key is finding stuff that multiple themes might want to play, like Parallax Wave, Seeker of the Way and Blade Splicer in this case.

 

[Chris Taylor]

I'm with bootman here. Cube would be a far worse place if each color had one strategy I think.

The real measure is how many different strategies exist, not which colors do those strategies, but variety is nice

 

[FlowerSunRain]

We had a black/white control deck last night that was pretty awesome, I'll type up the list later. It might have beat the goblin deck too if Sanguine Bond had been any card but sanguine bond, turns out that card is a completely useless even in lists where its a legitimate win-con. I'm taking the blame for that one: I should have realized that a do nothing useless card with enough "casual appeal" to get two reprints wasn't worth cubing.

 

[Chris Taylor]

At least the other half of the combo is a legitimate ammount of lifegain.
I don't think anyone's playing whip of erabos for the lifelink alone, but whatitcalled does randomly gain you life when they fetch or use a painland or untap a shock

 

[FlowerSunRain]

Its basically a black lava axe. Once in a while, it'll do 10+ damage (Zuran Orb, Trading Post, Whip), but even in those games any other wincon probably works because you just gained 10 life. When you don't have those cards and you draw it, its just so bad.

 

[FlowerSunRain]

2-1 Black white control



The Warden was a little on the cute side of things, but I really liked this list. Wispmare was in the sideboard too which just wrecked my poor Jund enchantress deck.

 

[GenericZero]

Sanguine Bond. Another case of "this would be better on a stick".

Especially when Lifegain also suddenly becomes Double Strike. Make it a 3/4 or something for 5 maybe?

 

[Dom Harvey]

vs.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

Thrill of the Hunt vs. Travel Preparations

Thrill is best used for saving creatures from (combat or spell-based) damage, Preparations plays nice with +1/+1 counter theme and allows a GW player to apply more pressure. They each have their uses, but I think I like Travel Preparations best because it allows you to be more proactive.

 

[GenericZero]

I gotta say Travel Preparations. It's just too sweet to ignore. The pump is permanent and has more synergies. For me, it's not even a contest.

 

[Lucre]

Travel prep I awkz because it's really for only one deck that already does one thing, who's cards already do it pretty well.
Travel prep feels way better in a pez cube to me.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

Thrill of the hunt has a lot more play to it, while Travel preparations is much more narrow.

My vote is for thrill.

 

[Jason Waddell]

Travel Prep lets your Kitchen Finks live forever.

 

[spicewitch]

Can instant-speed graveyard hate counter persist/undying things?

 

[Onderzeeboot]

Can instant-speed graveyard hate counter persist/undying things?

Yes. Both are triggered abilities that go on the stack as soon as the creature hits the graveyard. Since it's in the graveyard at that time, you can exile it before the trigger resolves.

 

[Lucre]

Yeah cremate is a decent cantrip that had the happy coincidence of fucking with pod trickery.

 

[spicewitch]

Are any of these worth cubing? Some of them have EtB effects that make it seem plausible to cast them even without the right color combos, but some seem they woulda been better off as honest gold cards.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

I would consider all of these gold cards. It's sad that all of these are miserable blink and reanimator targets.

 

[Eric Chan]

Court Hussar is fine, except that Sea Gate Oracle does almost the same thing and is much easier to cast. I agree that none of these really do enough without the second colour, and it's not really worth wasting a gold slot on small value creatures when space is so tight.

 

[spicewitch]

Hm, I was thinking you'd say Plaxmanta was the only one worth casting.

 

[Eric Chan]

Ehhh... it's hard to justify keeping mana up for conditional counterspells, and cards like Turn Aside have never been very good, even at .