Welcome to the Graveyard Cube! Whether you like putting things in your graveyard, taking them out, or just counting all the things you've sent there, you're bound to find some new and exciting way to interact with everybody's favourite zone. Maybe you want to fill it up with creatures and make huge Boneyard Wurms and Nighthowlers. Perhaps you want to generate a swarm of tokens and throw them in your opponent's face whilst cackling to yourself. Or maybe, just maybe, all you've ever wanted is to put Seance in a deck.
Drawing on the design of Odyssey, Time Spiral, and both Innistrad blocks, as well as graveyard centric and graveyard adjacent constructed decks through the years, the Graveyard Cube aims to make you think in a different way about Magic and what’s important within each game. The design is centred around the various different card types and colours, and how they interact with the graveyard. Some are more fairly straightforward - Black obviously cares most about creatures, both how many you've managed to stuff into your graveyard and killing off those that managed to claw their way out. Others are a little more subtle - figuring out the puzzle of how to maximise Red's artifact tools or regrow lands for Green might take a bit more thought.
The various combinations of colours open up all the traditional theatres of aggro, midrange, combo, tempo and control, but the results are decidedly non-traditional. Aggro decks can rely on constant recursion of various threats, going wide with tokens; control might involve managing the board with Red's various mass removal spells before flashing back a flurry of spells to land the killing blow with Burning Vengeance. Combo is the most exciting part of the cube - with so many moving parts all focusing on the same area, you can pull together two or three cards you've never have thought of for a big payoff. I've never cast Scapeshift with both Atog and Tireless Tracker in play, but I know I want to try.
So why is this a good choice for Magic Online? Well, as it turns out, a format where both players care about both graveyards, and different aspects of both graveyards, at virtually all times, is kind of a nightmare to play in paper Magic. Luckily, on MTGO you can just pop out both graveyards (highly recommended) and have everything laid out in front of you. Things like delirium, threshold and most notoriously Tarmogoyf size are tracked automatically, and flashback cards are highlighted for ease of reference.
Thank you for taking the time to consider my submission, and I hope you have even half as much fun reviewing it as I had designing it.
