Secret Project

[dbs]

The Mox Cube has recently undergone enormous turmoil: I increased the power level significantly, and now I'm strengthening the overall quality of the disruption correspondingly. As a result, the most recent decks have been a bit shaky, but hopefully it will settle down in a "Riptide Vintage Cube" groove. I'll update that blog as we continue to draft and refine the more high-powered list. BUT...

In the meantime, I started on another little project which won't be ready to see the light of day for a couple months. The title, "Secret Project," is what I jokingly called this list to my players, so it stuck. The goal was to reconnect with lower-power combo roots: a cube with a huge amount of card draw and mana production but with pay-offs and power-level more reminiscent of a Grillo format (the bouncelands were the first 10 cards I added to the empty cube list). Perhaps it would be better to call it a "Velocity" cube rather than a "Combo" cube - with inspiration from the Mox Cube, Troel's cube, the Alchemist's Crucible, the Penny Pincher 2, and the absolutely brilliant Future Cycle cubes.

The project is not 100% serious per se... I'm not even sure that this will even finalize and get sleeved up - but at the very least, I thought of a fun experiment. As I build the initial skeleton, I will sketch out 10 different "Storm" decks, one in each color pair and post them in this thread.

To start, here are my first drafts of GB and RW:

GB Grave Storm

RW Treasure Storm

Well it's a fuckin' fun exercise at least. Maybe I'll sleeve these up and give them a whirl to see how they play - it's not a design point I'm used to, so the decks look a bit rough. The other 8 guilds will slowly trickle in as I do more work on the list. I have a busy couple months coming up, but it's such a delightful experiment I'm sure I'll find time for it.

 

[Erik Twice]

Squandered Resources? Love that card, I would love to see if you can make it work in cube!

 

[Kirblinx]

This is the kind of cube I have been trying to theorycraft after the retirement of my wobbly cube. If it isn't too much to ask, I would like to throw some ideas at the wall and see how you like them. I was theorycrafting what I would think UW would look like and I came up with 3 different options depending on which way the cube is built. A lot of the cards overlap (Thraben Inspector is just a great card), as they are all individually good cards that can bleed into the other decks. It is the main 'engine' cards that change along with some support to make them work.

I also noticed that your decks in the first post had like 27 cards in the deck so i have tried to make a similar stab at the same number to get a feel of what the decks could look like. After building the decks I just realised that there is one for each of Aggro Control and Combo, so I guess it decides which way you want UW to go.

Control:

UW Cycle Storm

Aggro:

UW Kitty Storm

Combo:

UW Egg Storm

With your decks in the first post, there is a lot of 1-drops in each of those lists. I don't know if that was intentional or not, but geez is it hard to find playable, thematic 1-drops. Thank god for Thraben Inspector to fill out the gap.

I think I like the eggs deck the most, as it seems the most like my playstyle and could explode out of nowhere, but each of the decks have their merit and I had a fun time putting them together.

 

[dbs]

omg <3

These lists are exactly what I'm going for. I think Stonecloaker and Eternal Dragon are the literal only creatures with more than 2 power. Love it. I'll contribute my initial stream of consciousness thoughts - I love your inclusion of:



What a fantastic way to cheat mana and draw cards while doing stone nothing on its own. The three primary objective of decks I want to see, lol. Maybe even add Clear the Mind or Time Spiral or both to chew through the deck multiple times. The Auramancer direction is also cute.



is both value, plus protection for when your Astral Slide or Drake Haven inevitably get blown up. I can imagine adding some dumb extra angle like:



From what you sketcked out a blue/white get lands + loot theme is pretty natural with something like:



Outside of the card draw, I'm not sure how many unique directions there are for UW to build bursts of mana. Obviously Frantic Search, Cloud of Faeries, Helm of Awakening, the Familiars are one direction. You also have counters mana:



In white it's much harder to scheme something up. I guess Cost Reduction can be the main mana generation element for White. It gives the color a unique "flavor" of storming which can be mixed and matched with the forms of mana generation the other colors have to offer. I'll have to think more about UW storm later.

------------------------------------------------------------
EDIT:
very dumb white mana generation: doubling tokens



------------------------------------------------------------

I'm going to do Gruul next. I'll do 3 lists with simultaneously overlapping and diverging directions just like you laid out above.

 

[dbs]

Alright, I sketched 3 decklists for GR storm decks. I drew from an umbrella of GR themes, and tried to have at least 2-3 present in each list to make sure there's a lot of depth of drafting directions available. The umbrella list roughly includes:

Noncreature spells,
Lands
Counters
Tokens
Flashback
Discard
Sacrifice
Artifacts
Graveyard-to-Hand Recursion

The first storm deck is based on generating creatures that you sacrifice. This includes a go-wide direction with tokens that produce mana and cards with Song of Freyalise / Fecundity, but also creatures that grow vertically with counters + proliferate that build mana with Gyre Sage or draw cards (while sacrificing) with Greater Good. The rest of the mana generation for storming is either attached to creatures like Jungle Patrol or is generated by having creatures like Battle Hymn. The win condition comes from creatures with +1/+1 counters, driven by the furious sacrifice -> mana + cards engine.

GR Sacrifice Storm

Next up is a deck that still overlaps with counters and proliferation, but adds a Lands theme instead of a creature theme. Now we're abusing cards like Rude Awakening, and Dictate of Karametra. This time we're proliferating a Walking Ballista for board control or a Pentad Prism for mana. The deck is more explosive but a bit lighter on card draw - Manamorphose, Reforge the Soul, and a ramped out Staff of Nin for example.

GR Land Storm

Finally, a dedicated noncreature version that focuses on a very heavy graveyard recursion theme. For this list, almost none of the card advantage comes from explicitly drawing cards, but rather from rapidly stocking the yard and then playing from there with Flashback (Moment's Peace, Past in Flames, etc) or by going back to hand with Regrowth and Wildest Dreams. Mana generation comes from cost reduction like Ruby Medallion and Helm of Awakening, plus recurred Seething Song and Pirate's Pillages. The main mana sinks to push the storm into gear are Mirari, Pyromancer's Goggles and Finale of Promise, Wildest Dreams.

GR Flashback Storm

I love that every color pair has a ton of different directions to go. Of the three lists above, I'm most concerned with the +1/+1 counters stuff. Big creatures can attack and end the game which is sorta antithetical to the whole project. Maybe I'll go back to the first two lists and switch all the proliferate stuff to only non-+1/+1 targets. Anyway, this exercise remains extremely fun, I'll be back with a new combination in a few weeks.

 

[Alfonzo Bonzo]

I love you and your cubes, but sometimes I do find it hard to follow what you're trying to do! Your power levels are all over the place and really throw me off! Orcish Lumberjack for instance is nuts! (Though, have you thought about Timber Wall).

It does feel alien to me, but I'm enjoying it a lot. If you can explain a bit more as you go through for simpletons like me, I'd appreciate it! I like the side of proliferate. You can't really remove the +1/+1 theme, as a lot of the velocity pay offs are there. I think it's an interesting dynamic, and could almost be the aggro deck of the format?

Have you thought about



For your mana/proliferate engine?

 

[Kirblinx]

Ok, so I guess it was my turn to do the next lot of deck? If you told me I would have not taken almost a year.
So, what do we have left? UB, BR, GW, UR, BW, GU. Hmm, I guess I do Dimir then we have completed 2 of each colour.

So what were the colours already doing?
Black: Creatures in graveyard
Blue: Cycling, Flicker, Artifacts
Not really enough to go on at this point... But one of these seems pretty good, I'll get to that in a bit.

Dimir is one of the classic storm pairings (the other being UR obviously), as black has access to fast mana and blue card draw. So let's see how that looks... Depowered...

First up, I took a lot of the inspiration from the Fishelbrand deck that emerged last year in pauper. It tries to fill its graveyard quickly to turbo out a delve creature then use cards that abuse high CMC to burn through your deck.

UB Delve Storm

It was fun trying to find non-common options that could fit in the deck. I didn't even know Morbid Curiosity was a card until scryfall told me otherwise. Vexing Scuttler was also a pretty decent find. I really like the look of this deck and seems very apt for this colour pair.

Next is based off of my UW cycling deck from before. UB have a lot of draw/discard effects and payoffs, so lets see were that ends up.

UB Discard Storm

I think I went a bit too hard on the discard theme, but Shadow of the Grave seems like a good way to get card advantage in this colour pair. Also, when going hard on cycling creatures it makes Songs of the Damned pretty decent. Should lead to a fun fuelled turn dumping turning all cards in hand into drakes with Skirge Familiar.

I could try and think of a third deck, but I feel like that is enough for one night. Let's add another post in 6 months time!

 

[dbs]

Ok, so I guess it was my turn to do the next lot of deck? If you told me I would have not taken almost a year.

No, I was totally gonna do Orzhov but July was about the time when my workload approximately doubled and it's been pretty rough to find time/energy since then. But I guess now at the end of the world it feels reasonable to revisit. Besides these two decklists are super inspiring.

In the first list I really like the angle of board-based mana and card generation. It reminds me of using Glare of Subdual and Ghirapur Aether Grid with tokens as a control strategy based on building resources on board. But instead of you're using:



which is totally genius. Your mana-generation + delve can let you ramp out a high CMC creature which then feeds back into the resource generation plan. I've never seen this pauper deck before but it sounds brilliant for cube!

Re the second decklist the core explosive cards:



look quite fun. This looks like a good opportunity for a recursive creature-based control engine with something like Bone Shredder - to go back and re-borrow some old Penny-Pincher strategies. Overall, this second decklist highlights some of my key balance goals: keeping the ability to play fast high, but keeping the ability to kill fast low in order to bring out more interaction. In this case that balance has to be struck between killing them with Drake Haven and Faith of the Devoted versus the degree of ways of interacting with the opponents board.

If the win conditions are tuned to be weak, maybe we need tools to prevent milling out? Or maybe that should be rare so as to create an additional axis players regularly need to keep in mind? Recently we had these two cards (which I played in virtually every one of my standard decks on Arena):



and there are always good colorless options



Anyway, great post Kirb, I'll go work on Orzhov.

 

[Kirblinx]

No, I was totally gonna do Orzhov but July was about the time when my workload approximately doubled and it's been pretty rough to find time/energy since then. But I guess now at the end of the world it feels reasonable to revisit. Besides these two decklists are super inspiring.

...

Anyway, great post Kirb, I'll go work on Orzhov.

I was just toying around. I love this thread and didn't want to see it die. I've been thinking of doing UB for probably the same amount of time, but only just found the effort to actually think of decks and press post.

Looking forward to Orzhov. Once you post that I might do BR or GW, as I want to see what you have up your sleeve for blue, as I have done the only blue decks so far.

 

[dbs]

Okay I put together two Orzhov lists (I decided not to aggressively cut down to 23 cards to leave more potential includes for building the starting cube list). At the bottom I'll put some other cards I'm considering. There's probably room for a great combo sacrifice deck, but that's been explored a lot so I decided not to sketch out a deck and we'll see how that particular theme evolves organically later on. To start, I explored recursion. I aimed to mix several themes together including: ETB, lifegain, filling and recurring from the yard, and a heavy token theme.

WB ETB

For the second decklist, I took



and built from there:

WB Swamps

Finally some other cards I thought looked interesting:

Spoiler

Any card or theme suggestions for Orzhov?

 

[Kirblinx]

WB is known for life, and you know a card that converts life to cards and mana?


Let's not go with obvious Broken Options:


Other possibly less broken options:


Fun cards to use with them:


I like this combo that you have in your interesting pile:

 

[dbs]

I made three very dumb blue decks:

UG TurboLand

You can make a lot of mana and draw a lot of cards and then just not kill them. The perfect deck lol. I need some mana sinks to give the player something to do with all that mana generation which doesn't just win the game. Something like Staff of Domination? Gonna have to find some bad-ish but interesting cards along those lines.

Then I built this "Ophidian" deck where you try to get Curiosity + Pinger and then untap it a bunch of times to draw a bunch of cards.

UG 'Ophidian'

Again massive mana generation and card draw but in this case you probably kill them with pinging and with a ton of small dudes which sounds awesome. I like this one a lot.

Inspired by Curiosity I then tried to put together an Sram deck mixing various themes together.

UW

Hopefully I'm getting close to a functional ("functional") first version of the cube that I can test with my playgroup in the coming weeks.

 

[inscho]

Ahhhh....now i HAVE to add pingers to my cube.

EDIT: Don't forget...

 

[dbs]

Ahhhh....now i HAVE to add pingers to my cube.

EDIT: Don't forget...

Also works with:


or go off with:

 

[Alfonzo Bonzo]

Savage!

 

[Rasmus Källqvist]

It's like a DIY version of Niv-Mizzet, Dracogenius!

 

[TrainmasterGT]

Okay I put together two Orzhov lists (I decided not to aggressively cut down to 23 cards to leave more potential includes for building the starting cube list). At the bottom I'll put some other cards I'm considering. There's probably room for a great combo sacrifice deck, but that's been explored a lot so I decided not to sketch out a deck and we'll see how that particular theme evolves organically later on. To start, I explored recursion. I aimed to mix several themes together including: ETB, lifegain, filling and recurring from the yard, and a heavy token theme.

Any card or theme suggestions for Orzhov?

Well, I like the idea of Recursion for Orzhov. Both black and white have a lot of cards that excel at pulling creatures out of the graveyard.

Of course, the strongest reason for including this deck is soon to be released in Ikoria:

Lurrus is borderline broken in vintage power level environments, but I think he could be both an interesting combo piece and a good enabler for ago in a lower-powered synergy focused cube. Consider the following friends for this guy:



These all play well with a "bring small things out of the yard" deck. Now combine them with the following:



...And you've got a pretty good value engine going. Sure, some of the cards that work well with this deck don't play with Lurrus as a companion, but they do all signal the same archetype. You don't not play Lurrus in your 40 just because you can't use him as your companion in this deck.

Plus, the Aristocrats pieces in this deck can be used to support Persist Combo.


If you go really deep on the persist stuff, there's even the meme cards:

 

[dbs]

This looks like exactly where I would start for a typical black white synergy section in a riptidean cube. But that's not the feel I wanted this particular list to go - I love Lurrus, but it's not quite right for this project. He's a 3 power lifelinker for 3 with an ability that doesn't feel... intricate in the way I was hoping to accomplish with this dumb extra cube. BUT it's a definite include for the Mox Cube where I put a high priority on ways of refetching your engine pieces out of the yard if they get answered, and I already support various persist and sac combo decks.

In fact, I'm hoping to avoid pretty much any "good" creatures, be they aggressive, midrange-y, or bomb-y creature. With this list I imagine a typical creature suite looking like:


You know, durdle in the most complicated way possible, make 30 mana in a turn, but still barely win by decking them 10 minutes later... or something like that

Edit: Maybe Kirb put it best. Think



instead of

 

[dbs]

Alright, I have a starting sketch:

https://www.cubetutor.com/viewcube/142165

I've intentionally not tried to wrench it down to something really tight while still in the early stages. I'll be doing a remote draft this weekend to get some preliminary data on how it plays. Meanwhile, competition: who can draft the jankiest combo deck? Give yourself 4 packs w/ 8 bots just to have more options and show off what you can concoct!

My first attempt is a ramp deck where you use mana-doublers + untap effects to make a lot of mana, and try to kill them with Faith of the Devoted and discard:

Land Discard Combo from CubeTutor.com

Second attempt turned out way sweeter. Lifegain control deck with a heavy enchantment and ETB life gain + Cloud of Faeries / Peregrine Drake / High Tide. Deadeye Navigator and Equilibrium both looking solid, plus looks hard to die to all these aggro decks people are drafting in the CubeTutor

High Tide Life-Gain Control from CubeTutor.com

 

[Nanonox]

Going in blind, I ended up in Orzhov:

BW ETB from CubeTutor.com

I have a couple of infinite combos:

1. Teshar, Ancestor's Apostle + Myr Retriever + Perilous Myr + Corpse Knight + Heartless Summoning

A tight little 5 card combo, where you loop the Myrs for free and drain the opponent.

2. I think the next one works, but I kind of got lost going deep here:

Carnival of Souls + Soldevi Adnate + Cathodian + Staff of Domination in play -> Sac Cathodian (33) -> Use Staff to untap the Adnate and untap Staff (2) -> Cast Myr Retriever (1 from Carnival) -> sac Myr for mana (3) and return Cathodian -> Cast Cathodian (1 from Carnival) and repeat sequence.

You lose 2 life and add 1 per circuit. If you have Daxos, Blessed by the Sun in play, you actually gain 4 life to offset the loss. That way, you generate infinite mana and use staff to draw your deck. Eventually you drop Corpse Knight and win from there.

So 5 card combo that allows you to draw into the 6th missing piece...

The Kor Skyfisher and Stonecloaker do a bunch of work alongside Heartless Summoning/Carnival of Souls and Mentor of the Meek/Bygone Bishop to dig me into the right pieces to go off.

I have a bunch of goodies in the SB, but don't know how to best build the deck. Very fun

 

[japahn]

BRG Grind from CubeTutor.com

Did the "good-stuff" test: entered blind, just picking the best cards and renouncing synergy.

Result: this is definitely a synergy cube.

My deck is a pile of removal, card advantage, and control. It's pretty hard to win without Sprout Swarm, but Phyrexian Reclamation and Masked Admirers should also help with inevitability. I think this deck eats anything aggro-ish easily, or creature-based combo, but would suffer vs counterspells or non-creature based combo.

Nice cube!

 

[Kirblinx]

I have done 3 drafts, but when I drafted this one I had to stop, as I don't know if I can do any better:

5C New Perspective Lands from CubeTutor.com

It is sort of similar to dbs's first deck he posted, the BG land discard deck, but just goes to the extreme. I feel like any deck with Bone Miser + Skirge Familiar should be able to do something unfair in a quick amount of time. Trade routes probably helps there as well to keep the cards flowing.