Oh dear, was that my cue?
I currently reside in northern Virginia, not too far from DC. I first played cube as a side event at a Super Smash Bros. tournament in the area and it was a blast. I remember imprinting
Austere Command and
Fireblast on a
Panoptic Mirror, losing badly to a
Karn Liberated, and playing seven games of aggro mirror before the
Reveillark combo player finished his first game. The people next to me had a game in which someone killed his
Abyssal Persecutor with
Damnation. When I played against the person who had made the cube, he started pointing out my mistakes, which actually set me on the road to becoming a much more serious Magic player. Of course, I don't think I could have beaten his
Reveillark engine even if I had known what tight play looked like. Something like
Body Double,
Eternal Witness,
Viscera Seer,
Time Warp? The kind of ridiculous concoction you can only put together when you're a tournament caliber player and everyone else is a dirty casual.
The next time he brought the cube to a tourney I played again and built a focused UB control deck that was supposed to be able to beat combo;
Force of Will,
Thoughtseize, the works. The cube architect was playing a reanimator deck and I punted badly every game, one time getting blown out by
Sundering Titan after picking it with the
Despise I should have never cast. To be fair I was thoroughly sleep deprived at the time and, as is traditional for Smash events, I had eaten only KFC for the previous eight hours. My control deck lost horribly to everyone else's aggro because all I could do was counter their stuff. It was a fantastic learning experience, or would have been if I could remember any other specifics.
I had been playing a very bad limited format known loosely as my entire collection every few weeks for over a year when I realized I could make a cube instead. It seemed like too much work at first but the idea wouldn't leave me alone. Eventually I sunk a solid week into finding cards in my collection that would be fun in a cube and then another week whittling that ~2000 card list down to 800. The first time I drafted my own cube I built a
Living End Jokulhaups deck chock full of fiddly synergies. I lost first round to a BUG ramp deck who cast
Glimpse the Unthinkable on himself the turn before my
Living End went off, binning 23 power worth of bombs. I was able to go off in two games: once by suspending
Living End, casting
Jokulhaups on the next turn with
Darksteel Ingot in play, then playing
Withered Wretch and nuking my opponent's graveyard before the
Living End came off; the other time by sacrificing all my stuff to
Goblin Bombardment right before
Living End hit. The deck was tremendous fun to play but was completely nonviable. The harsh lessons of cube design~
The second time I drafted my own cube I was a WU control deck. The same guy who made the Glimpse play before got to do something far more ridiculous this time, piloting a BR midrange deck. At the end of a long and intricate game, I had cast
Pacifism on his
Evil Eye of Urborg and was expecting an easy win despite my 5 life. He drew
Strands of Night and played it. He proceeded to repeatedly pay life and sacrifice swamps to recur his
Keldon Marauders and killed me with damage triggers over the course of many turns, winning the race with 1 life left.
So along came Modo Cube and suddenly the internet is aflutter with laughter, videos, and criticism. In trying to understand what people did and didn't like about that experience (myself having never played it, as paying money to play someone's cube when you own one yourself is a sucker's game), I found myself reading more and more articles about generalized cube design. Mostly people had disgusting things to say. Some of my favorites were, "If your cube does not contain
Jackal Pup, you have built your cube incorrectly," and "Every cube must include every Jace to be a real cube." Seriously? I cut
Jackal Pup the day I saw that first comment and I've never looked back. Articles stopped being appealing to me because of their universally negative attitude, not to mention the ridiculous closed-mindedness of their card evaluations. So I stopped looking for them.
Some enormous length of time later a friend of mine who had given me some good feedback about my cube linked me to an article on Channel Fireball about alternative two-player draft formats, and that article linked to the Riptide Lab mailing list. Therein I discovered people doubting that
Wurmcoil Engine was good for their environment. The spark of hope once again shined within my heart. It was frankly hilarious to read a preamble to a cube description that said something like, "I don't want to play with all the strongest cards, so there are some cube staples I've left out," followed by a list containing cards like
Grave Titan,
Elspeth, Knight-Errant,
Skullclamp, and
Umezawa's Jitte. I found that one advantage of the power maximization philosophy is that it gives everyone the same target, facilitating the spread of information about that one cube. With my significantly lower power level, however, there was basically no advice anyone was giving about cube that was directly relevant to my construction choices. Even the Riptiders were discussing environments as different from mine as they were to Urza's block draft.
But over time more general principles were uncovered, not all of which I can claim to have independently ascertained, and there came to be real value for me in the little mailing list that could. I ended up cutting more and more otherwise-rad shroud and hexproof cards and grudgingly including more fixing than just a cycle of vivids. It's only a matter of time before my cube has
Wildfire and
Pox archetypes.
So here we are in the future of cube building the future future of cube. It's a marvelous thing. Let us shake hands upon the precipice.
