Changes to the Cube II

Out

Lightening Greaves
Mortarpod

Chainers Edict
Smother

Intuition
Deep Analysis
Treasure Mage

Volcanic Fallout
Chandra Nalaar

Inkmoth Nexus

Call of the Herd
Sylvan Safekeeper
Vorapede
Garruk Relentless

Revoke Existence


In


Green Sun's Zenith
Explore


Ball Lightening

Innocent Blood
Contagion
Entomb
Exhume
Reanimate

Tranquil Thicket
Lonely Sandbar
Secluded Steppe
Barren Moor
Forgotten Cave

Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite
Spectral Lynx

Myr Retriever

In addition to these changes to the cube I have had a chance to play a good amount with a number of the Dark Ascension cards and can offer a more accurate rating for the cube.

Lingering Souls 3.5 - I gave this 1.5 initially however I was very wrong on it based on how easy and painless it is to splash in white weenie. A very powerful and flexible card that is good enough to consider splashes in various heavy white or black decks.

Geralf's Messengers 2.0 - Initially I condemned this to the B cube for costing triple black . There are enough different mono black decks in which he sees play and is a good value dork with lots of synergy throughout black.

Gravecrawler 3.5 - My over excitement for this card was a little over the top, it turns out there are very few non-terrible zombies to be able to make use of this card in more than two archetypes at a push.

Faithless Looting 4.0 - I got this horribly wrong too giving a mere 2.5 rating to begin with. It turns out that good cheap card quality and utility in colours not used to such things is amazing. It has been incredibly powerful in every single deck with red in it I have played so far. Best card in the set for cub by a long way.

Tragic Slip 3.5 - From the C cube to a 3.5 rating is the biggest swing and so technically the card I got most wrong but mostly I just overlooked it because it is not all that exciting. Every time I have drawn it I have compared it to Disfigure and it is coming up better over 50% of the time. Even so, a very similar card and not too exciting.

Huntsmaster of the Fells / Ravager of the Fells 2.0 - I was harsh on this guy for just being slow and droky and gold. He is pretty extreme and good value even if a little narrow. Especially good to Birthing Pod into it turns out as well.A slight bump in rating here.

Sorin, Lord of Innistrad 3.0 - Another card to lose half a rating point. He is just no Elspeth, the emblem is not nearly as good as pumping and evasion regardless of the loyalty costs. Gold on top of this makes Sorin just an OK planeswalker and always second choice to Elspeth unless very heavy black.

Black Cat 2.5 - I have been highly impressed with this little zombie. Deterring attacks and being a great value sacrificial dork that is easy to cast and fulfils a role lacking in black.

Torch Fiend 2.0 - Not exciting but proved useful and deserving of a half rating point bump.

Heads Up Cube Deck Analysis: Cad Bloom

I have been missing the prevalence of combo decks in the cube of late. Partly this is the lack of combo engines being printed alongside the increase in power to aggressive decks but also it is my fault for removing a lot of the narrower cards integral to various combo decks into the B cube or lower. Cad Bloom is not the best combo deck in the cube and is significantly weaker without Fastbond or the artifact mana power, Black Lotus in particular. The last time I built it was when Baneslayer Angel was basically the best card in the cube and no cards were banned. It was rather disappointing as I won every game by flopping down the Angel which I only played as I was a card short in the build and fancied an alternate win condition. Not wanting to repeat the last time and fail to win using the combo, the lack of the power cards and the fragility of the archetype were all set to make this a challenging deck to make and play.

There are two main ways to go with Cadaverous Bloom, either the Pros Bloom builds which use lots of blue draw and card quality to go off with the Bloom or replacing blue with white and using Oath of Druids and Academy Rector to set up the combo with Yawgmoth's Bargain as the draw engine. As most combo decks involve blue I was keen to build the latter version of the deck for a bit of a change. After playing the deck I would likely make a few changes however the deck was one of the most complicated to play out of any deck I have had in any format, certainly top five hardest to play, and as such I don't yet have a clear picture of exactly what I want and need to be doing. Here is the list for what I built:

23 Spells

Mox Diamond

Exploration
Sensei's Divining Top
Vampiric Tutor
Dark Ritual
Cabal Therapy

Scroll Rack
Demonic Tutor
Squandered Resources
Life from the Loam
Balance
Explore
Oath of Druids

Solitary Confinement
Eternal Witness

Replenish
Academy Rector
Natural Balance

Primal Command
Cadaverous Bloom

Yagmoth's Bargain
Death Grasp

17 Lands

Barren Moor
Secluded Steppe
Windswept Heath
Verdant Catacombs
Marsh Flats
Overgrown Tomb
Temple Garden
Godless Shrine
Savannah
Bayou
Scrubland
Golgari Rot Farm
Twilight Mire
Llanowar Wastes
Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
City of Brass
Forbidden Orchard

Other Considered Cards

Vindicate
Pernicious Deed
Overgrown Estate
Emrakul, the Eons Torn
Burgeoning
Stirring Wildwood
Chromatic Star
Holistic Wisdom
Yawgmoth's Will
Sylvan Library

The reason the deck is so hard to play is that it never goes off in the same way, nor is going off a guaranteed win. You can either use the ramp and the tutors to find and cast a Cadaverous Bloom to go off or you can drop an Oath of Druids which does a mixture of two things. The Oath can fill up your graveyard with the spells you are after allowing you to either Witness back a combo piece or Replenish all of them to try and win. Alternatively the Oath can hit the Rector and also hopefully the Cabal Therapy allowing you to cheat into play one of the big enchantments left in your deck. The Oath is somewhat random although the cards you have in hand do give you some information to set up with accordingly. This inconsistency with Oath is the main reason for playing Scroll Rack as it is the only way to put cards from your hand back into your library in these colours.

Once you have the Cadaverous Bloom and the Yawgmoth's Bargain in play you have to find the Death Grasp and get enough cards in hand to pitch for a lethal Grasp. Often you either lack the life or the cards left in library to do this which is where Primal Command comes in. I considered a lot of other cards that could also help with these two requirements but as I was pretty tight on space I went for the one that helped with both. Overgrown Estate is very powerful and is better than Zuran Orb in the deck for the ability to get it off a Replenish and the extra life. In hindsight the Estate would have been better than Solitary Confinement in the build, both Balance and Natural Balance are far less useful without the ability to sacrifice your lands before casting. Emrakul was one of the options for graveyard reshuffling however the deck has few ways to put him in the bin and can be ruinous when dredging back Life from the Loam. Although it is quite possible to hard cast an Emrakul in the deck it felt a lot like I would just repeat my last encounter with the build and win every time with an Oathed up big dork which isn't nearly as much fun and makes most of the rest of the deck pointless.

The cards that I would happily remove are Dark Ritual, Sensei's Divining Top, Explore, Balance, Solitary Confinement and Natural Balance. I would also 100% for sure replace the Death Grasp with a simple Drain Life as Cadaverous Bloom does not give you white mana which was a bit awkward. Dark Ritual and Natural Balance can be outstanding but are quite situational as ramp goes. Burgeoning feels like it is probably better than Explore as the deck has few one drops. Swapping a two drop for a one drop would make me happier to replace top with Sylvan Library, especially if the Estates is played as then it becomes quite a reasonable card draw engine. By adding a Chromatic Star the Dark Ritual becomes more useful and gives extra ways to make a turn one Oath. It also makes the white cards much better when starting to go off with Bloom.





23 Spells

Mox Diamond

Exploration
Burgeoning*
Vampiric Tutor
Dark Ritual
Cabal Therapy
Chromatic Star*

Scroll Rack
Demonic Tutor
Squandered Resources
Life from the Loam
Balance
Sylvan Library*
Oath of Druids

Overgrown Estate*
Eternal Witness

Replenish
Academy Rector

Primal Command
Cadaverous Bloom

Yagmoth's Bargain
Drain Life*

17 Lands

Barren Moor
Tranquil Thicket*
Windswept Heath
Verdant Catacombs
Marsh Flats
Overgrown Tomb
Temple Garden
Godless Shrine
Savannah
Bayou
Scrubland
Golgari Rot Farm
Twilight Mire
Llanowar Wastes
Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
City of Brass
Forbidden Orchard

This list is still very vulnerable to a lot of different effects in the cube. Counter magic, enchantment removal, graveyard removal and even the humble Meddling Mage give this deck some real problems. I was facing RG beats and UW agro caw blade (sortof, you could possibly call it UW fish instead). As such I knew it was more important to go fast and be consistent than it would be to pack lots of outs and make the deck robust. If I were facing UW control and the rock I would likely have lost things like Dark Ritual and played Thoughtseize and other solid cards like Vindicate. In both of my lists the only answers cards or outs you have are Cabal Therapy, Primal Command, Balance and your kill spell. This motley collection of cards are quite hard to use to solve your problems and make it pretty interesting trying to go off around something awkward.

If different and interesting is what you are after then I recommend decks like these. If you prefer not to destroy your brain in the name of entertainment then perhaps it is not worth the effort. My opponent was kind and didn't pack much in the way of cards I really struggle to beat even though they wouldn't overly harm their decks for the other match up. I also got my entire pick of what I wanted for the deck as I am trying to feature varied and interesting decks while also revitalising combo. All the games were pretty close and I managed a 1-1 losing to the speed of the RG assault which considering the leniency I was afforded does highlight the difficulties faced by combo.

Heads Up Cube: Reanimator

Reanimator is the longest running combo deck in the cube and may be built in lots of vastly different ways. The simple premise is cheating a big dork into play really fast and winning the game with it. Strictly speaking reanimate decks do so from the graveyard but due to convenient synergies they often play Show and Tell, Tinker, Sneak Attack or even Oath of Druids to cheat in the big dorks as well. Reanimators power has been waning for quite a quite a while in cube as it was getting harder to recover should they deal with your first threat and more likely that they would do so. I built this deck with the aim of having continued power after making an early threat so as to combat the problems the archetype is facing. My list is below however I was definitely wrong not to play Tinker which should have replaced the Intuition that was over-costed and un-required in the deck. There were other reasonable changes I could make to the list but that is the major one. Otherwise I was very impressed with the way this deck performed and was able to continue to apply overwhelming pressure. This was fortunate as I played a pitifully low disruption count in the deck which is always a scary thing to do.

25 Spells

Mox Diamond
Mana Crypt

Goblin Welder
Enclave Cryptologist
Sensei's Divining Top
Chromatic Star
Faithless Looting
Dark Ritual
Reanimate
Entomb
Brainstorm

Demonic Tutor
Exhume
Spellskite
Snapcaster Mage
Fire / Ice
Lat-Nam's Legacy

Frantic Search
Intuition
Wheel of Fortune
Liliana of the Veil
Recurring Nightmare

Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite
Myr Battlesphere
Wurmcoil Engine

15 Lands

Bloodstained Mire
Polluted Delta
Scalding Tarn
Volcanic Island
Badlands
Underground Sea
Great Furnace
Seat of the Synod
Vault of Whispers
Shivan Reef
Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
Watery Grave
Graven Cairns
Swamp
Island

Other Considered Cards:

Living Death
Tinker
Thirst for Knowledge
Negate / Spell Pierce
Squee, Goblin Nabob
Into the Roil
Duress

Typically I play blue black reanimate decks, a few quirky builds have also made use of green. Red was similar to green in having a few cards that had application in non-standard builds and saw infrequent play however with the release of Faithless Looting red has a lot more to offer. Faithless Looting really impressed me in this deck and could easily make the standard build UBR instead of just UB in the future.

I cut all the tutor effects such as Vampiric Tutor that cause card disadvantage to enhance the later game performance of the deck. To compensate for this I played a lot more card quality spells than I usually would to keep the consistency of the deck as high as possible without the tutors. I also played both Goblin Welder and Recurring Nightmare for their repeat use at reanimating. Both required me to build the deck differently to how I would without. The Welder requires a high artifact count along with the reanimate targets being artifacts. The Recurring Nightmare requires that I have a reliable number of creatures to sacrifice in order to work. The Myr Battlesphere and to a lesser extent the Wurmcoil engine are both good to weld out or sac to a Nightmare as the have come into play and leaves play effects. So although neither are so powerful they are likely to win games on their own they do offer a lot more longevity and synergy than more standard reanimate targets such as Sphinx of the Steel Wind, Akroma or Inkwell Leviathan. Sadly being three colours made Sundering Titan highly unappealing as it would be damaging me far more than them, he does have good synergy with the Goblin Welder and the Recurring Nightmare (Tinker too if I was clever enough to play it).



40 card reanimate decks should have three or four targets depending on lots of subtleties such as ratio of discard outlets to Entomb effects. Often more are played as they can act as out cards as well as win conditions such as Terrastadon. I was planning to win by continuing to apply pressure rather than off the back of one guy they can't deal with. This meant I didn't really need answer guys or really difficult to deal with guys. Battlesphere and Wurmcoil are just all round good and fit the requirements of my deck. Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite however was more of a luxury card. I recently picked up a copy and wanted to test it was the main reason to include it. The second reason to play Elesh was that Sphinx of the Steel Wind would have been the obvious choice and I was up against red and green decks for which the Sphinx is really impossible to beat and offers dull games. Elesh was pretty good despite not being an artifact, most of the time I would get a very fast Battlesphere stabilising the game with me in a strong position only to follow it with Elesh for pretty much the instant win. On her own she stabilises well but doesn't win very fast and as a result is probably not very good in the builds which aim to make only one threat to win with.

I played a small package of acceleration which is always useful. It allows you to keep up with fast aggressive decks when you don't just draw your combo pieces and it enables you to play around counter magic very effectively in the early stages of the game. Not all acceleration works well in reanimate decks however, things like Talismans can often be a little slow unless you have the appropriate lands (Ancient Tomb / City of Traitors) which I felt I could not support in a three colour build. The 2 mana colourless lands help with certain aspects of the deck but also deny you access to valuable coloured mana and so you need to be very careful building around them. Grim Monolith and Mana Vault tend to offer too much burst mana of which you can't always make use of. Mana Crypt is more convenient and more manageable than Monolith or Vault and was about as much free colourless mana as I could make good use of. The single Chromatic Star helps a great deal with using all the mana from Crypt as well as smoothing out draws and having good synergy with Welder.

The most noticeable difference with this build and more standard ones is the number of small creatures in this build combined with a huge lack of disruption. Ordinarily the small guys would all be things like Duress, Force Spike etc. Having not built the deck since the arrival of Snapcaster Mage I cannot really call him a staple yet but he is outstanding and would be so in any build you could do. Spellskite and Enclave Cryptologist were added to give Recurring Nightmare some extra fuel while also offering some utility in the deck. The Skite also works for Welder and acts as both a speed bump and protection against their disruption. Cryptologist is a little slow and vulnerable and would probably have just been a Careful Study without the Nightmare, having said this I was never unhappy to draw him and was impressed with his performance when cast. Fire / Ice was basically my only disruption card which is bold but as a stand alone card it is one of the best working well against aggressive decks, not hurting your card advantage and pretty handy against control to tap down their mana. If I have both red and blue mana I will happily play Fire / Ice and this deck is no exception.

The three mana spells were generally the last cards added and least important cards in the deck. Frantic Search is amazing in this deck but doesn't really count as a three drop and the Nightmare was a big part of the deck design. The other cards however, Wheel of Fortune, Liliana and Intuition were all fine but not necessary. Many of the other suggested three drops would have worked just as well and had similarly low impact on the deck. They are all just adding redundancy to the deck which, despite the power of the cards, is a bit expensive compared to other spells that do the same effect for cheaper. Liliana is both a discard outlet and removal but for three mana you would probably be better of playing a cheaper card that does one or the other. Wheel of Fortune is huge card draw and a discard outlet but hard to set up as such and so Thirst for Knowledge is also probably the better and more consistent card. I might also have previously mentioned that Intuition was the weakest card and should have been a Tinker. For this reason I also would not be playing Buried Alive, it is just too slow at being Entomb and offers no extra utility like Intuition.

The rest of the deck is the core cards, the reanimate effects, the discard outlets, the tutors and the card quality which are pretty similar in all versions of the deck. This build was lots of experiments in all one; testing red as a main colour, testing Elesh Norn, testing out a sever lack of disruption and testing Recurring Nightmare. All of which were a success although Elash may be too narrow not just for the cube but for reanimator specifically, it just so happened she worked out well in this build. While running no counter magic, bounce or targetted discard scared me in construction it was never an issue in play and made my deck faster and more consistent, something I would happily consider doing again.

Heads Up Cube Deck Analysis: Necro

Good old Necro. A deck I love but don't do very often as the build doesn't vary all that much. I dug a few classic cards out of the B cube for this version and had a few others from the B cube I wanted to play such as Contagion and Unmask as free spells are the best when you have near unlimited card draw. Having only one copy of the key card Necropotence I played Dark Confidant as well which made me reluctant to play low impact high mana spells and so left the pitch spells out. Necropotence is a deck that cares about its life total far more than any other deck as each point is a far more valuable resource. Every life you lose is one less card you can draw. This makes Confidant quite an inefficient tool to obtain card advantage in Necro and not a card I would always play by any means. In this particular build he fits quite well due to the low curve and decent life gain. I am a fan of cards in black that will effectively cycle for one or two mana as black has a hard time playing the right amount of lands and consistently hitting the ones it needs early while avoiding too many floods.

24 spells

Crome Mox
Zuran Orb

Dark Ritual
Vampiric Tutor
Tragic Slip
Duress
Inquisition of Kozilek
Cabal Therapy
Ivory Tower

Hymn to Tourach
Sinkhole
Demonic Tutor
Doomblade

Vampire Hexmage
Dark Confidant
Black Cat
Nantuko Shade

Necropotence
Yawgmoth's Will
Liliana of the Veil
Vampire Nighthawk

Nevinyrral's Disk
Abyssal Persecutor
Death Cloud

16 land

Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
Lake of the Dead
Volrath's Stronghold
Barren Moor
12 Swamp

Other considered cards:

Contagion
Unmask
Bitterblossom
Smallpox
Bloodghast
Mishra's Factory
Hypnotic Specter
Mind Twist
Innocent Blood
Damnation


Necro is a deck that is not always appreciated for how it should play. While it is not as misunderstood as red deck wins it is also far less played, both in competitive magic and the cube, meaning people on the whole are less familiar with it. Necro is not a quick deck despite the very low curve. Necro itself gives all your draws a kind of summoning sickness by giving you them at the end of your turn which makes you very slow to respond to things. The curve is kept low so that when you are in necro mode you are able to take full advantage of the ability to draw lots of cards fast. If you continue to curve out after a Necropotence is down you would be better off with Phyrexian Arena. Assuming you play one land and one card a turn thus getting through a total of two cards the Arena will cost you less life, is easier to cast and gets you your cards sooner than a Necro would. Cheap cards allows you to play multiples every turn and then usefully draw three or four new cards and repeat next turn.

The components of a Necro deck are cheap threats that can be effective on their own, life gain, answer cards and cheap disruption. The selection of spells are often counter intuitive such as both land destruction and hand destruction or life gain and cheap threats. Necro is all about efficiency but of all different kinds at once. It is an opportunists deck that will be able to take advantage of situations easily. It can snatch the early tempo from a player due to cheap threats and disruption combined with some acceleration. Other times it will play like a draw go control deck keeping the situation calm with answer spells waiting for the right time to pounce. Necro has to be able to retain the tempo as it cannot afford the life loss that is likely to come with losing it. It prefers to not extend too much in any area so as to avoid losing too much all at once. This can be OK with Necro in play but if not then it is ruinous. Generally a necro deck will lay very few guys down, generally just one and try to use removal and disruption to keep the tempo.

I was playing against blue white control and red deck wins, the latter of which is a scary match up and the former makes relying on Necropotence resolving a difficult strategy. I didn't do much however in the way of solving these problems or playing cards that are really good against either match up. Three life gain effects is quite a lot but Nighthawk doesn't often count as one against red deck wins as it is killed on sight and Ivory Tower (from the B cube) generally needs you to throw tempo in the toilet or have a Necropotence in play to be effective. Zuran Orb I pretty much always use to accompany Necropotence, its the best life gain spell for starts, beyond that it is cheap as with most of your spells and so using it isn't as damaging as it is for many decks.

To help resolve my Necropotence, which is basically game over for a blue white control deck, I played three targetted discard spells and two tutor effects. Thoughtseize is not any good against red deck wins and the two life cost in general equates to two less cards later so it did not make the cut however Vampiric Tutor I felt did warrant the life cost. If you don't have a Necropotence the two life is pretty irrelevant, I also figured I would definitely still want to play Necropotence even if  I had to Vampiric to get it. I also had a Yawgmoth's Will as a kind of security, primarily for the Necropotence but also many of the important effects I would otherwise have only one use of in the course of a game. Will is very much a late game card in this deck and a likely Mox target in opening hands. The burst mana from Lake of the Dead and Dark Ritual combined with a very cheap curve make the already powerful card too good to not play despite offering some redundancy on your effects.


Lake of the Dead was rather a high risk luxury card that, other than Death Cloud, had nothing to ramp in to. I wanted the ability to have really powerful turns that could totally swing the game which Lake offers but only effectively in the mid to late game. Essentially I was playing Lake as a Dark Ritual that is of little or no use early in the game. Without Will it is completely unplayable in this build and possibly not worth it any way, lots of fun though!

Nevinyrral's Disk is a classic Necro card used for its ability to basically reset the board, deal with the permanent types black cannot other cope with and remove the Necropotence from play to resume a draw step after having refilled your had. Disk is a bit slow and expensive and has become worse since the arrival of planeswalkers but it is necessary in this deck in which it is at its best.

I never made use of Volrath's Stronghold and would have preferred a man land in hindsight. Playing even one colourless land can be real pain with both double and triple black cards you want to be casting and so the basic swamp might have been optimal. While it didn't help me it also didn't screw me which was something at least.

I have not done a proper Necro deck since Liliana donned a Veil and became good. She seems to fit the theme of the deck as a cheap threat that hits creatures or hands and was pretty decent. Thinking on it now she probably took the slot normally filled by Mind Twist (another card the makes Lake of the Dead lots better). While Mind Twist will outright win games here and there it will also be a dead draw too, it does just one thing that is done well too by other cards in the deck. Liliana is a much more robust card that can be just as game winning despite being a lot slower and faced with that choice again it will be pretty easy.


Nantuko Shade was another B cube card I brought back for this deck. The card is not the power house it once was nor is it much good against red deck wins but it fits the bill where so many others fail. Cheap good black monsters that have impact late game are hard to come by. Black also has trouble efficiently making use of all its available mana from turn to turn. The Shade is a fantastic mana dump, a late game finisher and an early game speed bump. At two mana or less it is Shade, Nezumi Graverobber or the weak attempts at black levelling monsters for filling these roles. Shade is both the most powerful (being a mono black deck) and the coolest.

The other dorks I played but have not mentioned were the speed bump disruption cards; Black Cat and Vampire Hexmage and the pure finisher Abyssal Persecutor. Without some stand alone big guy there was every chance I would never get round to killing people and would let them back into the game after gaining complete control and card advantage. In terms of bigness to cheapness without life loss penalties the Persecutor is the best going and was very good in the games I played. Black Cat has continued to impress since its recent addition to the cube and was good in both match ups. Black has very few monsters that can block but that you don't want to kill. Often Solemn Simulacrum is recruited to fulfil this useful speed bump role but at 4 mana he is a bit unpleasant for this deck. The cat provides excellent Cabal Therapy fodder and nasty trades for their early attackers. Vampire Hexmage is the fourth 2 mana dork with one toughness which are pretty bad, particularly against red decks however there is redundancy in vulnerability too. I can only eat so many Fire (/Ice) or Arc Trails before monsters start to stick around and get good trades. Black doesn't have much else to offer in the two slot that is tough and good so we accept this and carry on as best we can. Assuming it dodges the Lava Darts etc Hexmage is the best blocker I have in the deck at two or less.  His disruption is useful here and there but primarily he was in the deck as planewalker removal as I don't have a huge creature presence nor any other way to deal with planeswalkers once being cast.

I find it hard to play black decks without Death Cloud cause it is just so good. It doesn't have the best synergy with Necro but not the worst either however I felt the deck lacked much actual power. Death Cloud can bring you back into a game you are stupidly far behind in, far more so than Disk can, but it can also decisively end games which can be tricky in a threat light cheap deck.

I did have another deck along side this but I spend so long working out what this deck needed to round it out perfectly, which turned out to be the Barren Moor, that I threw my second deck together really quickly. Consequently it was ugly and bad and an example only of how decks should not be. It was a four colour Opposition deck that will not be getting a feature, or even a list.

Red Deck Wins

Rather than doing an analysis of a deck I have built I am going to just going to give an example of the deck off the top of my head and then discuss the merits of specific cards and certain builds. This will allow me to give a pure deck list unadulterated by meta choices. Red deck wins or RDW is my favourite deck as it is just so elegant. RDW is the epitome of redundancy and allows you to do a lot more calculations and statistical analysis as a result. RDW was a tier one deck when the cube was fully powered despite never playing anything that has been banned other than Mox Ruby and Strip Mine. As you might expect RDW remains one of the most fierce decks to beat . On top of this RDW wins unlike most other decks making building specifically against it is damaging to your other match ups more so than other archetypes.

RDW is one of the most misunderstood decks in magic despite incarnations of it existing in basically every format. It is an aggressive deck but it is not a quick deck nor does it need to be, RDW claims victory through inevitability rather than a burst of speed. On average RDW will have to spend one mana per card which will do 2 damage (including lands that is, the spells alone have a slightly higher mana cost and average damage output but it is easier to work in whole numbers and so the inclusion of the lands makes it so near to 2 damage for 1 mana you can forget the fractions). This means you should be able to goldfish on turn four as you will have spent 10 mana by that point. This is not often how games play out as your burn doubles up as removal and disruption to prolong the game. RDW despite being an aggressive deck is much happier in the long game as it basically has no dead spells where as other decks will have plenty of spells that achieve very little against you. As time goes on you will have ground out a win as a result of the consistency, dedication to one purpose and redundancy of your deck.


The classic match up is any kind of draw go control deck against RDW in which the control deck is forced into being the aggressor and having to end the game as quickly as they reasonably can. If it does not it will generally run out of gas and either deck itself or just have no more threats or answers. Most of the time counterspell is less use than a Healing Salve would be.

Cube RDW:

Goblin Guide
Grim Lavamancer
Mogg Fanatic
Stromkirk Noble

Lightening Bolt
Chain Lightening
Burst Lightening
Lava Dart

Reckless Charge
Cursed Scroll
Seal of Fire
Reckless Waif

Torch Fiend
Hellspark Elemental
Keldon Marauders
Ember Hauler

Kargan Dragonlord
Incinerate
Arc Trail
Searing Blaze

Sulphuric Vortex
Brimstone Volley
Fireblast
Chandra's Phoenix

Teetering Peaks
Barbarian Ring
14 Mountains

Other good RDW cards:

Goblin Bushwhacker
Spikeshot Elder
Koth of the Hammer
Chandra, the Firebrand
Wheel of Fortune
Sac lands
Wasteland
Boggart Ram-Gang
Figure of Destiny
Manic Vandals
Bonesplitter
Tanglewire
Chaos Warp
Slagstorm


(from the B cube)

Stigma Lasher
Magus of the Scroll
Firebolt
Jackal Pup
Shrine of Burning Rage
Ball Lightening
Gorilla Shaman
Plated Geopede
Black Vice


The core framework of the deck is built around the following few cards;

Lightening Bolt
Chain Lightening
Burst Lightening
Goblin Guide
Grim Lavamancer
Stromkirk Noble
Arc Trail
Keldon Marauders
Incinerate


After these auto include RDW cards you want to build up the rest of the deck focusing in keeping the mana curve low. After this you want to consider what cards you most need to beat what you expect to be facing and what cards offer the best synergy with what you are adding. Certain cards get better as your creature count increases which are all fairly obvious. Beyond this the synergies are subtle and tend to only involve a few cards, for example Chandra's Phoenix improves Lava Dart, the few creature pump effects improve Spikeshot Elder, Mogg Fanatic and other creature sacrifice effects improve Brimstone Volley and the things that give haste work really well with Keldon Marauders. As RDW contains lots of similar spells and guys the more of these small synergies you can build into the deck the better.


This inclusion of synergy within your deck needs to be done alongside working in things you need to have the best chance against your match ups. Often you won't know exactly what you will be facing but in those situations this still serves as useful information for side boarding and the drafting of one. Sulphuric Vortex is amazing any way but against decks with life gain it is your best card. Life gain is the bane of RDW and what your opponents will be filling up on to face you with. Stigma Lasher offers some weak redundancy for Vortex when specifically using it for the anti life gain, Lasher is much better with effects that can give it haste if you are forced into playing it. Vortex is also very useful against decks with lots of creature removal as is Cursed Scroll as they are persistent threats that are much harder to decks to cope with. Occasionally you will be fearful of artifacts and play as many spells that deal with them that also offer redundancy to the deck as you can. Even less often you will fear an enchantment and resort to playing Chaos Warp however I hate doing this in RDW and tend to prefer risking the chance of facing that one card to retain high card quality in my deck.


mana base I will err on the side of caution and play at least 16 lands of which I never include more than one colourless land and one land that comes into play tapped. All your spells are so cheap that too many lands like Teetering Peaks and Wasteland will mean you are unable to play several spells you could have in the early turns. Most of the lands don't do anything beyond producing mana and so lower your average damage output significantly. This reason combined with lots of cheap spells may tempt people into being land light or filling up on utility land but in my experience this is not worth it. While you don't need to win fast it is a lot easier to do so. With all your spells so cheap it is quite easy to get very far ahead in the first few turns, this in turn puts so much pressure on your opponent that they are forced into playing very differently which will often still gift you the game later on. Losing the ability to easily force inefficient play through tempo alone is not worth a greedy mana base, in addition to this there are now many cards that act as good mana dumps for when you are getting flooded such as Spikeshot Elder and Kargan Dragon Lord. Teetering Peaks and Barbarian Ring as head and shoulders above any other lands after mountains you could play, Wastelands hurts you far more and tends to only be a meta choice.

As for sac lands I tend not to bother very often. This is not because it is wrong to play them but because I play so much cube I get fed up pissing around shuffling all day long, plus they make the deck look uglier along with Ram-Gang and Figure... What the sac lands offer you if you can be bothered with all the shuffling and changing of life totals is a reduced chance to draw further lands, an extra boost towards threshold and fuel for your Lavamancer (if you are playing Geopede you should obviously play every sac land you can get to the point of playing things like Badlands and Blood Crypt simply to use off colour sac lands but this seems a little over the top for one card). Reducing the chances of drawing lands are quite a mixed blessing in the cube which is not a format bereft of things that destroy lands or keep them tapped. While RDW copes better with the screw than most decks it is no reason to invite it.

I tend not to play planeswalkers or Wheel of Fortune in RDW as they cost too much mana, I also tend not to play Chaos Warp or Tangle Wire as they don't deal damage and can wind up as dead cards too often. I will only ever play a couple of cards that are not lands, cheap burn or cheap creatures. In the list I gave Reckless Charge is the only card that fits into none of those categories. It is a little like Searing Blaze in that it can very infrequently be dead but when it isn't it is one of your most powerful cards.

The simplicity of the decks aim combined with lots of different options due to lots of cheap spells enables you to improve your game. You are simply trying to maximise damage which is quite simple in itself which means when you get it wrong it is a lot more quantifiable and obvious thus allowing you to learn from that mistake more easily. The multitude of options, all of which are pretty comparable, allows you to think in great detail about them in all their subtleties. Which combination of burns spells to use on that monster? Which generic 2 power beater should I cast? RDW certainly can go into auto-pilot mode however most of the time it forces lots of very difficult choices. Difficult in their ability to be distinguishable rather than due to wildly different effects the will have on the state of the game.

The general game plan of RDW is to make a few quick threats without over extending and directing burn at their early guys to clear a path for your dorks to maximise their damage. There is generally a crunch point at which their board position is too far ahead of yours and you cannot attack sensibly into it or use burn to resolve. This is the final push stage where you will make a really inefficient alpha strike with all your guys simply to push through a few damage while directing all your burn to their head. Often this final push takes two turns for you to have enough mana to empty your hand into their face. That is the game against any other creature deck, against combo you are often simply goldfishing unless they are using utility guys as part of their combo in which case they are probably hopelessly dead. Against control decks you have a very small window in which to force through some significant damage that they cannot deal with. You may make 2 or even 3 early guys as this will be worthwhile damage even if they Wrath at first chance. After this you will be grinding out your win using cards as efficiently as you can, generally just having one or two things able to attack with the rest backed up in hand awaiting their time.

This article only looks at mono red versions of the deck but you can do any two colour option you like. Three colours is too inconsistent early on and requires too much red mana for all the burn to be viable unless the lightest of splashes. Black and white offer many more useful one drop monsters for creature heavier builds. If you use discard the deck is a very different deck but you can use the card advantage in black as well as the one drops to compliment the deck. Blue also offers card advantage and makes for an interesting deck but with few cards to offer at all blue is never more than a splash. Green has been used for a few things such as Tin-Street Hooligan, Rancor, Kessig, Wolf Run and a Punishing Fire engine but like blue tends also to remain as a splash.

Electrocuting and burning people and things is one of the great things about magic and so I am glad that RDW is viable and fun as RDW is burn at its best.

Heads up cube deck analysis: Part 2 - BW pox

 This is a deck I build to test as many of the Dark Ascension cards as I could cram into a single Archetype. It is also a reasonable example of how the black based pox style decks look. I mention this archetype lots as it is highly versatile, powerful, fun and different to play. When the archetype first reared its head in constructed it was known as Pox as that was the main card in the deck. Pox is still powerful but also very hard to engineer compared to the alternatives and now resides in the B cube. Death Cloud has taken the spotlight for being the most powerful disruption effect in these decks and so they should probably be called cloud decks even though they work more like the Pox decks of old than the new Cloud decks in modern.






The aim of the deck is to stop the other deck from getting going with a small amount of early disruption which is then followed up with powerful symmetrical sacrifice effects to try and lock your opponent out of the game while you make threats that cope well with the sacrificing. Generally it is a combination of cards that are good to discard, produce multiple permanents, accelerate mana, cost very little or offer effects when sacrificed. With disparate threats and many of your spells also damaging your decks ability to do much it is a slow deck that grinds down an opponent while slowly pulling ahead. Here is my list;

25 Spells

Chrome Mox
Mana Crypt

Diregraf Ghoul
Sarcomancy
Carrion Feeder
Carnophage
Gravecrawler
Tragic Slip
Cabal Therapy
Inquisition of Kozilek
Skullclamp

Bloodghast
Smallpox
Stoneforge Mystic
Doom Blade
Black Cat
Orzhov Signet

Loxodon Warhammer
Lingering Souls
Vindicate
Liliana of the Veil
Geralf's Messenger

Sorin, Lord of Innistrad
Braids, Cabal Minion
Smokestack

Death Cloud

15 Land

8 Swamp
Godless Shrine
Marsh Flats
Scrubland
Caves of Koilos
Orzhov Basilica
Flagstones of Trokair
Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth

Other Considerd Cards

Sinkhole
Tidehollow Sculler
Skinrender
Dark Ritual + Yawgmoth's Will
Bitterblossom

The main card I was testing was Gravecrawler as I felt it had the most potential to become a cube mainstay and allow new archetypes to evolve. For this reason I threw in a whole bunch of one mana zombies as they are cheap threats and good sacrificial permanents as well as triggering the Crawler. Carrion Feeder is fantastic with Crawler and Bloodghast, and Sarcomancy is one mana for two permanents, albeit you are only able to sacrifice one of them to all the effects bar Smokestack. Going in this direction rather than heavier discard or more ramp is consistent and offers better early tempo but will reduce the late game power of the build. Not being able to play many expensive cards anyway this is not a big price etc pay as the late game options are not vast for these decks.

Tragic Slip impressed me on its first outing and seems to be comparable to Disfigure in usefulness. Most of the time the two cards would have done the same thing, once the Slip required a suboptimal play to become useful and once it killed a Titan pleasing me greatly. The Black Cat also impressed me and will likely remain an A cube option for black. Being a zombie is a nice bonus, as is the synergy with sacrifice effects. As a defensive monster is where the Cat was most impressive as it really disrupted both early and mid-game attacks. Lingering Souls was outstanding but not quite in the way I expect. I thought I would be pitching the card for efficient flashback costs but I always found myself wanting to cast it twice and have a load of flying men to win me the game. This makes it more of a gold card but still seemingly of enough  power to retain its A cube slot.

Geralf's Messenger is harder to assess the strength of. His coming into play tapped is really significant and greatly reduces his power. Casting him was no problem in this deck but it still an issue with the card and means even if he is good when he is played that won't happen all that much. Once in play he was never the target of removal or really even blocked which meant he did lots of damage but didn't impact the game much beyond that. It is much clearer now that this card can only be used in aggressive strategies or as a sacrificial body for which it is a bit on the pricey side. Typically I never saw Sorin or the Crawler so cannot really offer any feedback on them. At least I am still confident enough in both of their power levels to be able to not worry about them taking up space in the cube.

While still building the deck I felt I needed a little more life gain and a little more card advantage so as to be able to survive the sacrificing effects. I already had included Skullclamp in the build but basically nothing else on either front excepting Sorin. Having already splashed white for Sorin, Vindicate and Lingering Souls I was pretty happy to include a Stoneforge Mystic to increase the redundancy on my Clamp. This also made it much better to run a life gaining equipment as it enhances the use of the Mystic, solved another concern for my deck and also turned my weak threats into much more significant ones. It is a bit clunky but Loxodon Warhammer fit the bill in the absence of Jitte.

The Orzhov Signet was the worst card in the deck by a mile and was a real pain in how it provided its mana. Although I didn't have mana issues it should almost certainly just been another land. I generally feel these decks need some targetted discard to be viable as it really enhances the power of your sacrifice and non-targetted discard effects and gets you through the scary early turns much better than generic 2/2 monsters will. I played a minimal package of Therapy and Inquisition which would have been much bigger without the high zombie count.

There were many cards I wanted to play but could not find room for once the core of the deck was in place and I had added the cards I wanted to test and plugged the remaining holes. Sinkhole is just fantastic synergy with the sacrifice effects and adds some redundancy to Smallpox. It compliments them much like the targetted discard compliments Liliana. Against decks without alternate mana sources the Sinkhole is too good not to include but against Zoo and Big Red with mana critters and artifact mana respectively it felt like Sinkhole would not be buying me enough time to warrant a slot. Sknirender and Tidehollow sculler are both just reasonably good all round monsters that have reasonable synergy with what the deck is doing in addition to both being the cherished zombie type. With these both being filler cards and the deck tight on space I was not distraught leaving them out. Bitterblossom has great synergy but is just too slow really and the life loss can start to be a problem for the deck. Lingering Souls seems better in the deck despite only taking the Bitterblossom's slot on this occasion for being new.

Dark Ritual and Yawmoth's Will add a lot of extra oomph to the deck but reduce the consistency. It felt like I had to chose between the Will and associated cards or the Stoneforge and her package. The latter solved more of the decks issues and seems the better choice in the creature heavy builds. The deck worked fine and went 1-1 being able to defeat Zoo in the way the deck should operate but not having enough speed to deny Big Red the chance to make fearsome threats for which the deck did not have enough power or late game cards to recover from. The deck may be build or tuned in a number of different ways so as to be able to beat a wide selection of match ups, typically however it struggles against any deck heavily using artifacts and decks playing lots of burn. Tuning the deck to cope with those strategies is less effective, although not pointless, and will tend to be more harmful to the decks success in other match ups. Cards like Nevinyrral's Disk start to look useful despite being really slow and clunky, or Zuran Orb which is near dead against most control and combo decks.

Mostly the article is to show the kind of deck I mean when I talk about Pox style decks or Death Cloud decks as I so often do, rather than to show off a great example of deck building or a really exciting new build. The opportunity to evaluate some of the new cards was also good from which I would say Black Cat, Tragic Slip and Lingering Souls all deserve a small bump up to the ratings I offered them in my initial set review. While I did not draw the Gravecrawler I was able to appreciate how much I wanted to draw him in the context of a deck built to showcase him well in one of the two main archetypes in which he might feature. Outside of starting hands he was not a card I was ever desperate to draw and suspect his rating may slightly slip to a 3.5 but the jury is still out for now.

Heads up cube deck analysis: Part 1 - Elves

I am trying to cover as much as possible and, still having not finished the rather culled A cube reviews I am trying to play some classic decks that are based around B cube cards. This will allow me to touch upon some of the most powerful cards in magic that only really fit into one deck. These cards are worth of mention but if I ever get round to reviewing them it will be a long way off. Seeing them in context tends to be more useful any way. So, with that in mind and having done goblins previously I did elves as one of my two decks in this heads up gentleman's cube. I also quite wanted to try out Edric, Spymaster of Trest as he has seemed powerful thus far in less well suited decks.



Elves has been around since the dawn of my cube and is unlike any other deck really. It is somewhere between agro and combo and may be built with an emphasis on either aspect. Without disruption elves is one of the most powerful creature decks as it snowballs out of control very fast. While not as fast as affinity it will quickly out power the agro artifact decks. It is still a very fast deck and highly consistent on top of this. Elves does have some major Achilles heals, mainly that it suffers savagely to mass removal, particularly red mass removal. Elves also typically struggle with fliers as the various archer type elf cards are way to weak and narrow to include in most elf decks. The mass removal is such a problem with only green and blue lacking it in their colours. Most elves are cheap and make mana or more elves, all of which die and leave you with nothing in hand or play to a single mass removal effect. Not only does mass removal kill all your threats they kill most of your mana too. Without haste or burn elves cannot do much to affect the other player, even if they have held back cards, after mass removal. Elves is also an auto loss to goblins or any deck that plays a Goblin Sharp Shooter, although the two classic tribal titans have not crossed paths since Beast Within has arrived for green.

A weakness to mass removal is a necessary balance on elves which tend to auto win against unprepared decks due to their insane power left unchecked. Elves may be built to reasonably have a chance against mass removal which leaves a fairly balanced deck although best when not scouted or known. The version I have built is not especially standard as I was testing several new cards and ended up building a very midrange elf deck that was neither pure agro or pure combo. My match ups were to be big red and zoo. Here is the list;



25 Spells

Wirewood Symbiote
Llanowar Elves
Fyndhorn Elves
Jogara Treespeaker
Arbour Elf
Heritage Druid
Quirion Ranger

Wirewood Hivemaster
Priest of Titania
Rofellos, Llanowar Emissary
Elvish Visionary
Wirewood Herald
Viridian Emissary

Viridian Shaman
Caller of the Claw
Wood Elves
Elvish Archdruid
Edric, Spymaster of Trest

Birthing Pod
Garruk Wildspeaker
Sylvan Messenger

Overrun
Deranged Hermit
Green Sun's Zenith
Chancellor of the Tangle

15 Land

9 Forest
Treetop Village
Tropical Island
Misty Rainforest
Breeding Pool
Pendelhaven
Gaea's Cradle

Other Considered Cards

Ezuri, Renegade Leader
Beast Within
Elvish Scrapper
Primal Command
Opposition
Dryad Arbor

I misconstructed my deck and should have played Ezuri for sure as I frequently found myself wanting any overrun effect to win the game on the spot and neither of my other two were tutorable. I should probably also have played more in the way of answer cards as I really struggled against certain cards, most notably Inferno Titan. Beast Within would have been fine, as would opposition. Primal Command doesn't deal with the Titan but it deals with many other problem cards and serves some additional functions in the deck adding a great deal to your longevity. While some of these changes would add a lot to the late game they would seriously hamper early game consistency. Playing against a big red deck I was certain to be facing cheap mass removal and thus early consistency is not as important as late game action. I should have cut Viridian Shaman and two of either a low impact one or two drop elf or a land and played Primal Command and Beast Within instead to cover me better against big red and Eruzi to give the deck some extra punch. Opposition is a bit double blue and I wanted to maximise my forest count for Rofellos and Arbour Elf.

On top of trying out the new Edric I also wanted to see Birthing Pod and Green Sun's Zenith in elves. While Pod has proven its self for the A cube the Zenith has never impressed and elves seems like a place it will be better than most other decks. Because of Birthing Pod I played Sylvan Messenger which is a very weak card, particularly without any recruiter effect that goblins enjoy. The only other interesting four drop for elves is Chameleon Colossus who is far more powerful than Messengers but offers no synergy. Both Pod and Zenith were excellent in the deck but both was a little greedy as there are subtle counter synergies. Edric was far better than Regal Force, particularly with the Pod, but this doesn't come as much of a surprise as Edric is balanced for multi-player formats. The 'may' option to draw is handy too as 40 card elves is not unknown to deck itself to death. I am sure Edric will stay in the A cube as he has performed very well in all showings.

The general idea of the deck is to make a mana elf on turn one followed up by some more serious mana producers so that you have the option of making you whole hand on turn three. A god draw can Overrun for the win on turn three but turn four is far more likely and only then if not disrupted. Serious card advantage is required to power through disruption and this comes in the form of Edric and the various comes into play effect creatures come in to play. Sometimes elf decks make us of Skullclamp for this but unless you have lots of token generation you do not always want to be clamping off your elves. Recycle also saw a lot of play before Regal Force came along but was a little risky. While the card advantage monsters don't offer all that much or even very cost efficiently they are elves and therefore buff the other creatures. They also allow for repeat uses in combination with Wirewood Symbiote, which is the best creature in the elf deck. While he is pretty narrow he is incredibly powerful in the right deck allowing you to ramp your mana production, recur effects and protect your guys from removal. The Symbiote should basically always be the first target for a removal spell.

Wirewood Herald and Caller of the Claw offered me some protection against mass removal, as do a few of the bigger threats which will either bypass the removal like Garruk, or Chancellor against red, or can be held in hand to quickly recover such as Deranged Hermit. Treetop Village is also a help here but not quite as significant. Wirewood Hivemaster is a bit of a luxury who helps power up Gaea's Cradle and Overrun effects but gets in the way of your curving out well. He tends to bait some removal which is nice but unless you suspect the removal it is generally not right to cast him before mana producing elves in the early stages of the game. Tokens are nice to Pod into Symbiote too.

Heritage Druid is also a bit of a luxury card and is infrequently useful due to being so cumbersome to make effective. He does offer a very vague form of haste to your guys but only in mana production, which is best in combo versions but far less appealing for aggressive decks. Having a decent number of one mana 1/1 elves is very useful in the early turns to ramp up most effectively as they may be cast with spare mana to enhance your other mana producing effects. For this reason the one mana luxury and utility elves are far more appealing than those costing more mana.

The weakest cards in the deck were in no particular order Heritage Druid, Viridian Emissary and Shaman, Wirewood Symbiote and probably one of the forests. Predictably elves lost to big red and beat zoo but was good fun to play and informative as to how new cards can feature in various builds.