Hogaak in Cube in 2026

 

All my current favourite cube decks are somewhat graveyard focused. I am loving Izzet and blue decks that fill up the bin with instants and sorcery cards, Rakdos ones simply profiting from the act of discard itself, and the Golgari leaning builds which tend to be more about creatures in the bin. While the Golgari builds have not gained many new payoffs since Hogaak, they have gained a lot in the support camp, and it turns out that is where they needed it most. Hogaak is comfortably the best of graveyard payoffs already, you don't need too much more. You even find him with relative consistency thanks to all the self mill. What has pushed this kind of deck are the Malevolent Rumbles, Overlords of Balemurk, and Town Greeters, all giving consistent and powerful means to fill up the bin. There are good cards I no longer run in the cube because there is sufficient and higher power redundancy. 

We have also had a wealth of useful one drops arrive that work nicely with the archetype. Classic ramp dorks and discard spells have historically been the one drops of choice for black and green, and while you can run some of these things in a self mill deck and have them be fine, they offer less to you than they would more traditional builds and suffer diminishing returns a lot quicker. It is cards like Stalactite Stalker, Nethergoyf, Boneshards, that are rounding out the edges of the deck while retaining a really high power level. You get to replace your 2nd and 3rd discard spell and ramp dork with meaningful threats and removal and it is delightful.

Unlike most cube archetypes, Hogaak is one that really all hinges on the namesake. Without the guy you might as well do something else, it simply isn't worth the setup cards. Once you have the big fella it is off to the races and you can build in a wide array of directions. You pack some self mill, some good cheap cards ideally including a smattering of interaction and most of the stuff that does something from the graveyard and off we go. It is comic how consistent a singleton deck can be. If you open with Supplier and a Satyr Wayfinder you will mill 7 cards in addition to the minimum 8 you will have seen through normal draws. Toss in a sec land and we are looking at 40% of the deck seen, meaning a shockingly frequent instance of turn two Hogaak. It seems like it should be one of those out there silly god draws but comically the least likely part is having the Supplier! With such a wealth of good two drop mill you can be pretty sure of consistently firing those off on cue. And then we can consider that a turn two Hogaak isn't even the ceiling, it is doing that with a Vengevine accomplice or more that really seems unfair! 

As most of the viable self mill effects in Golgari as two mana we need to be very effective with our one slot. Lots of premium cards and ideally a bunch of things you would often find in the two slow. One mana removal and interaction is premium, as are the few (single) good mill tools. Beyond navigating this little bottleneck the archetype has a huge array of options. You can go super aggro, you can go more control, and of course there is midrange bridging the gap. you can go all in on the graveyard and mill synergies or you can touch upon them and pad out the deck with good high powered cards. One of the most effective things I have found to be doing with the list recently is dipping a toe into an aristocrats/Blood Artist theme. There is significant overlap in the support and it provides a dangerous alternate means of attack.

One of the main vulnerabilities of the archetype is that you lean so heavily on your namesake Hogaak. Winning is easy when you have access to him. Without and it gets a lot harder. This is where a Blood Artist can suddently go a really long way. You have tools to get things back out of the bin and so assembling a little engine when required is a lot easier than you might think. Because you naturally have so much self mill and recursion your deck becomes very consistent. That means a couple of Blood Artist effects and a couple of sac outlets and you can consistently just be doing that if you need to. A huge advantage to having cards like Woe Strider and Carrion Feeder in your list regardless of any Blood Artists is that you can use them to dodge the wrong kind of removal. Putting a Vengevine or a Hogaak in the bin does relatively little. Exiling them is brutal. One of many useful overlaps.

Ebondeath Dracolich keeps making the cut in my lists lately too. This is not because the card is very good, it is pretty mid. It is because it is about as good a backup win condition you can find in a single card. Easy to find and get back, cheap enough to be easily cast most games, and big and evasive enough to actually threaten to end a game. Short of anything else I'll even lean on cards like Hexdrinker to offer additional lines of threat. Certainly I have a preference for the various scaling and mana sinking one drops that be actual late game threats to any of the pricier options beynd Ebondeath. Below is an example list of the archetype that is pretty close to optimal, all be it a touch light on interaction. Being so brutally fast and powerful you can afford to go leaner than most;

25 Spells

Stitcher's Supplier

Deathrite Shaman

Boneshards

Nethergoyf

Carrion Feeder

Gravecrawler

Moonshadow

Elves of Deepshadow

Stalactite Stalker

Thoughtsieze

Pick Your Poison

Overlord of the Balemurk

Malevolent Rumble 

Town Greeter

Satyr Wayfinder

Blood Artist

Dogged Detective

Bloodghast

Smuggler's Copter

Woe Strider

Yawgmoth, Thran Physician

Vengevine

Ebondeath, Dracolich

Fell the Profane

Hogaak, Arisen Necropolis

15 Lands

Dogged Detective is an unsung hero of this list being one of few cards that work both ends of the synergy. A little bit of selective mill when you make him greases the wheels nicely. He comes back quick and often in cube where everybody loves to draw cards and simply does a fine job of cheaply adding consistency and gas to the list. An oddly good defensive tool as well being able to somewhat profitably block where a lot of your deck cannot. 

There are a couple of general considerations you want to take into account when building this archetype and those are keeping a high creature count and having good mana. You are a quick deck that loses a lot of potential advantage if it is being held back by the wrong coloured lands or ones that come in tapped. Good lands over most other picks. Sac lands are also better than usual for all those delve and escape goodies, a few specific cards like Deathrite Shaman (and the comically good Deeproot Wayfinder!), and simply thinning your list so as to have a higher dork density. We are looking to have high dork density so that things like Vengevine are easier to trigger, so we have two dorks in play to convoke a Hogaak at the drop of a hat, to ensure we do not wiff on things like Overlord of the Balemurk triggers etc. etc.

Good mana is so important it is the main consideration for a splash. Red and blue both offer absolutely fantastic tools to this list. Some powerful payoffs to bolster Hogaak as well as some premium one mana enablers and interaction. All well and good but if you cannot cast these things as and when you want they are hurting a lot more than helping. I am talking multiple untapped dual lands for all three colour pairings, including at least one untapped fetchable for each pair and at least two sac lands. That is the minimum I would be happy running a third colour with. Once you can fulfil that entry requirement you can look out for these premium reasons to step outside of Golgari;

The Red Splash

Faithless Looting

Dragons Rage Channeler (Fear of Missing Out)

Detective's Phoenix

The Blue Splash

Careful Study

Hedron Crab

Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath

Psychic Frog

There are of course plenty of other good and fine cards you can pad out your list with, a spot of burn to bolster your one mana interactive counts is fine. A lovely little Thoughtscour is almost imposible to argue against etc. but it is really about the top tier one mana graveyard enablers and the best payoff cards. Even with perfect mana you will hurt the list a bit if you start to go three colour even split. Red and blue creatures convoke out a Hogaak a lot less effectively! Red and blue also typically do a lot more of their work through spells and not creatures, or they want you to have delirium, and this can weaken the core creature count synergies. I have found that Detective's Phoenix is really naughty, in most lists, but especially this one. I think this is one card you can afford to splash even if it is with poorer mana. The Phoenix is useful late so isn't crippling if you can't use early. The rest ideally want to be deployable on turn one and lose too much of their value if you cannot do so consistently.

Absolutely a tier one deck. It comes out fast and consistently and hits like a train. It is just one of those decks where their viability depends on a few key cards. 

Below is a list of the various good cards I am more than happy to play in the archetype performing their various roles. Plenty of generically god cards here.

Bitter Triumph

Tear Asunder 

Lethal Scheme

Bastion of Remembrance

Skyclave Shade

Deeproot Wayfinder

Emperor of Bones

Grist, the Hungertide

Liliana of the Veil

Lilian, the Last Hope

Skullclamp

Fatal Push 

Cling to Dust

Concealed Curtain

Hexdrinker

Orcish Bowmasters

Springheart Nantuko

Lastly here is a list of less commonly seen cube curds that do quite well suit the archetype, or commonly seen cube cards that are unexpectedly effective in this kind of a deck. Also some cute Golgari one drop support tools given that that is the main bottleneck, all be it very low power one drops that are pretty unplayable outside of this deck. 

Winding Way

Grapple With the Past

Witherbloom Command

Cache Grab

Mulch

Dredger's Insight

Patchwork Beastie

Crop Sigil

Molt Tender

Cenote Scout

Faerie Dreamthief

Seed of Hope

Tenacious Underdog

Gorex, the Tombshell

Death Tyrant

Huskburster Swarm

Moulderhulk 

Stubborn Barrowfiend

Wight of the Reliquary

Barrowgoyf

Ichorid

Scrapheap Scrounger

Card Spotlight: Spawning Pit

 

If you support Blood Artist/Aristocrat synergies in your cube and Spawning Pit isn't on your radar, then it very much should be. Allow me to try and persuade you of that. The more I play with and against this tool the more it seems to be one of the clear premium sac outlets available alongside Carrion Feeder and Goblin Bombardment, despite never having had a breakout performance in any constructed setting. Spawning Pit is free and convenient to sac, cheap to deploy and good returns all being key factors in why it is good. Colourless is a nice perk allowing you to play it anywhere although in practice I am not often playing this outside of a black deck. As such this marks it a little above Bombardment for playability but not Feeder. On the flip side, it is a non creature card making it more resilient to removal, and is thus more consistently able to perform its role for you. Better than Feeder but not Bombardment on that metric. Note that while it is sharing floors, it is exceeding ceilings in these comparisons. Always a strong start.

Another noteworthy thing to consider when comparing Carrion Feeder and Goblin Bombardment is that they scale in power in an inverse way. Feeder is best early when it can be a growing threat and it is mostly just a sac outlet late. Goblin Bombardment on the other hand, is a phenomenal finisher late and a bit low tempo and low impact early on. Both do at least retain use throughout the game hence why they are such premium cards in a strong archetype. Spawning Pit on the other hand retains a much flatter performance line over the course of a game with a greater area underneath it (better average power level). As with Carrion Feeder, sacrifices translate into stats on the board which is pressure and tempo. This means earlier sacrifices hurt your board position a lot less. Yes, with Bombardment you will typically take out their board and so it might seem like a more equal trade but this type of deck wants to develop a board rather than trade off for one. Stagnant or growing are the states to be in.

Now, stats are great. They win combats and apply damage to face. The more you have the more you are typically winning. I said Spawning Pit and Carrion Feeder are both better earlier sac outlets as they do a better job of conserving stats but this is barely scratching the surface. Pit is so vastly superior to Feeder in this aspect that I remain surprised that the Pit has not broken out into common knowledge sooner. Firstly, the stats afforded you from Pit can block. This is pretty significant. Doubly so for a deck looking to clog up the board. Next, the stats from Pit are in convenient discrete 2/2 chunks. Going wide is generally better than going tall and it absolutely is when you are wanting to trigger things like Blood Artist. You cannot lose all your stats to a single spot removal spell when you are going wide either. They are easier to get damage through with. The only real advantage of going tall on one dork is being able to win combat. Not even close to outweighing the many things on the other side of the scale. 

There is also the ability that Pit has to deploy bodies to the board at instant speed. It allows you to recover very quickly in the face of mass removal and generally be annoying when it comes to playing around your opponents sorcery speed actions. It feels a bit like a Currency Converter when it is chucking out 2/2s at the end of turn. The real hidden power of the Spawning Pit is however something I have saved until last. It is not at all impossible that until now you have considered the Feeder and the Pit equivalent in terms of return for a sac; that being a total of +1/+1. The pit however is self fuelling. Every dork it makes it can then sacrifice again and reuse to make another dork. So your sac is worth +1.5/+1.5 each. But hang on, that second dork you make from sacrificing the first, that can also be reused and so we are now looking at +1.75/+1.75 stats yield from a single initial set of sacrifices. You can in theory carry this series on indefinitely but in practice you are only getting more than a couple of generations deep with some of your sacrifices. An assumed average of close to +1.5/+1.5 is probably pretty reasonable. Even so, it is lots of bodies and lots of stats. Lots more than you think. And this is exactly what you want.

Envisage a board where you have two Blood Artist effects and three other creatures. Lay a Pit into that with three or more mana spare and you can deal over 10 damage before you even need to touch either of the Blood Artists, you even find yourself with a counter left on the Pit so assuming they can trigger themselves and you have a mana more the damage can continue on to potentially 14. That will stun opponents when it happens. They will want to recount the damage because it doesn't seem plausible or correct!

I did earlier mention that I wouldn't likely be playing the Pit outside of a Blood Artist style deck however the more I thought on this the more I would be happy playing this card in any creature heavy deck that found itself facing a relatively wide selection of problems to which it could help. I might have a white weenie deck that really struggled to have a good way to play around mass removal. I might proactively play it in a white weenie deck if I had enough cards that buff and are triggered by the making of creature tokens. I may well find myself playing the card as a means to prevent Jitte counters. I might even play it in a deck vulnerable to exile based removal that really wants to ensure your dorks can only die as far as the graveyard, be that for on death triggers or as a place to return them to action from. It didn't take me long at all to think of an impressive chunk of reasons that I might want to play this powerful and versatile card. I hope I have persuaded you that you should give it a whirl yourself.

Mono Blue Tempo

 

I love mono blue tempo however it has never been a great cube archetype. While it does pray on combo decks and the clunkier of opponents, it also tends to roll over dead against most aggressive decks with their actual proper creatures. Overall the deck has historically had a below average win percentage, lower still in an unpowered cube. I still love to play it because it is super option rich and you always feel like you really earned it when you win. You get a lot of game out of the deck, win or lose. Typically you will improve the build a lot with the addition of a second colour for a bit of actual removal, some juicy gold and powerful cards, and some half reasonable dorks! While usually better you do need the fixing, blue is colour intensive at the best of times and tempo decks tend to roll over dead if they have mana issues. So, if the mana doesn't support it you can raw dog your tempo and run it mono. I also just love the purity and challenge of a mono blue iteration. 

Back at the dawn of cube the mono blue tempo list was a kind of skies deck that had a pitiful couple of threats and would try and get you with cheap and free counters. Over time the routes to winning as a blue tempo mage have evolved. These days the most success I have had is with a "instants and sorceries in the graveyard" strategy. It isn't purely self mill nor is it prowess. It is a mix of the two strategies where you cast a lot of cantrips, loot a bunch more away, mill some, and then cast very large and very cheap dorks. While somewhat of a glass cannon archetype, it is about as consistent a deck as you can get. There is a lot of redundancy in the parts for one. A bunch of generic counter magic and a nice pile of cheap cantrips all look much the same. Then you get to look at most of your deck with a variety of looting, scry, and draw. Just so long as you get enough of the appropriate threats you should be able to cobble together the rest and be good to go. Below is the most recent list I cobbled together from a sealed pool.

25 Spells

Delver of Secrets 

Mental Note

Brainstorm

Gitaxian Probe

Consider

Preordain

Sleight of Hand

Unable to Scream

Spell Pierce

Silent Hallcreeper

Chart a Course

Memory Lapse

Suspicious Stowaway

Dress Down

Jace, Reawakened

Falliji Archeologist

Floodpits Drowner

Brazen Borrower

Repulse

Cryptic Coat

Time Warp

Sublime Epiphany

Tolarian Terror

Sailor's Bane

Murktide Regent

15 Islands

While you will play most of the cheap cantrip cards that come your way there is a surprising preference for instant speed stuff. Even if your turn is just a Consider, being able to leave up that mana in their turn will get you a lot of free tempo. You are blue, you are known to be a tempo deck with cheap disruption. People hate running into things like Force Spike, Mana Leak and that sort of thing. You will tend to find leaving up mana worthwhile and thus the various non-disruptive elements of your deck; the card quality and the threats, do better for you if they have flash. I'll take and Opt over a Ponder in this list every day. Malcom is my favourite looter thanks to that flash etc.

This list was a long way from perfect but it had the core bits in place without missing anything. I had a nice spread of answers, both to stuff in play and to stuff on the stack. Not the best of the options but the appropriate areas all covered. I also had pretty premium support tools ensuring I would get off the ground in most games. Lastly I had sufficient depth of threat payoff. It can get a bit scary if you are thin in this department and want to loot threats away early, mill a couple too many, or just eat a lot of removal. So while the deck isn't perfect there are not many clear cuts, just upgrades. Jace, Reawakened is very much a clear cut, not just from the deck but also from the cube. This was me testing the card and it is insufficient. Certainly quite cute and fun when it works but mostly I'll take any two mana looter in preference here, perhaps even OG Merfolk Looter... The other cut is the Cryptic Coat. There are builds of this where you might want such a card. It is evasive and persistent which are good attributes for a threat. However it is also mana intensive and offers no real synergy in this build. Show me a Proft's Eidetic Memory and I start to get more into this kind of card.  If you want access to delirium or artifact synergies for some reason then this is certainly a pretty playable one. I could even see running Enduring Curiosity or Grazliaxx, Illithid Scholar in some settings where I have enough smaller evasive dorks, all be it more fun than good! That direction is more towards the old school skies route of having cheap low quality evasive stuff that you can empower to do some real work.

Time to take a look at the archetype in general and the sorts of cards you want to be packing, and in what sort of ratios. Due to how the cards key off each other in this archetype there are far fewer general rules to follow and lots of little tweaks and interactions to pay attention to in this archetype. I group the cards in to four main camps; threats, support, disruption, and filler. The filler is a bit different to usual. What I would normally consider filler is the actual support side of the deck you need for it to function. Padding might be a better term for it just to differentiate. Regardless, all shall be more clear when we look at the cards in each group.

Threats

Threats come in three main camps, cheap, mid, and payoff. Cheap are one or two mana to deploy, and can be deployed on the first or second turn consistently, even if they are not immediately very threatening. The good ones of these are great and I would play all that I can get my hands on but they are pretty limited in number. The mid stuff is typically 3 or 4 mana to deploy and is usually packing some extra utility to work with. There is lots of choice and power here but it is important to be sparing and play relatively few in this group, ideally those with flash or alternative utility beyond being just a threat. Lastly the payoff stuff that looks like your top end can be cheap as chips to deploy but they need to be setup by filling up the bin.

Generally speaking these threats are in two caps, utility dorks with some evasion, and very over statted beaters (evasion here is still great if it can be found). You want some of both, probably about 50/50 although I tend to end up with slightly more utility stuff because there is a bit more of a bottleneck on the good blue beaters. You also obviously want a spread of the cheap, mid and payoff cards for curving reasons. you also need to consider the means in which your cards consume the payoff. You cannot play too many delve cards. Two or three at most, to include the Oculus. You certainly don't want to waste precious delve spots on cards like Treasure Cruise. You want to convert that resource into game ending power not value. 

Delver of Secrets

Pteramander

Ledger Shredder

Silent Hallcreeper

Astrologian's Planisphere

Wan Shi Tong, Librarian

Malcom, Alluring Scoundrel

Suspicious Stowaway

(I guess manlands go here)

True-Name Nemesis

Cryptic Coat

Kiora, the Rising Tide

Brazen Borrower

Vendillion Clique

Kitesail Larcenist

Whirler Rogue

Quantum Riddler

Abhorrent Oculus

Ethereal Forager

Eddymurk Crab

Tolarian Terror

Sailor's Bane

Murktide Regent

Support

This is the simplest category as it is basically any instant or sorcery that cheaply and easily gets itself and/or more things into the bin. Some come with card quality, some with a bit of utility. Play a lot of these cards, a good third of your nonland cards want to be in this group. I also toss the looters that dont have evasion into this group.

Thoughtscour

Mental Note

Consider

Gitaxian Probe

Brainstorm

Opt

Peek

Careful Study

Preordain

Sleight of Hand

Serum Visions

Censor

Lorien Revealed

Chart a Course

Jace, Vryn's Prodigy

Kitsa, Otterball Elite

Fallaji Archeologist

Picklock Prankster (Free the Fea)

Occult Epiphany

Disruption

Disruption comes in a couple of guises. Mostly in blue we have bounce things and counter things. We do also now have a couple of "make things useless" effects which round out the colour fairly well and leave it able to deal with most kinds of threat it will face, at least in a round about way. This was always a critical weakness of blue as a card like Grim Lavamancer would be too cheap to counter and bounce profitably while it would just wreck you while sat in play. Much as I don't love putting things in my deck that are not instants and sorceries there are some threats that bounce isn't an answer to. Having a smattering of these transform and turn off types of cards can go a long old way. It has made the deck a whole lot more robust to the likes of Blood Artist. While none of these cards are great cards they do a lot of great work in giving blue access to such an important tool. I am pretty happy with a couple of these cards in any of my lists.

Unable to Scream

Dress Down

Fresh Start

Floodpits Drowner

Kitesail Larcenist

Then there is of course the bounce. Nice versatile high tempo trickery. Play a bit but not too much. Play a range too, there is convenient bounce, cheap bounce, and big bounce. The more you spread your bounce types around the more you can usefully fit in. There are a few big name bounce cards I would typically avoid. Things like Venser are just a bit clunky and slow. You have no real use for a 2/2 dork with no evasion and so the extra cost is just a burden. Equally, Cyclonic Rift is merely fine. You can play it and sometimes you will even get to overload mana and win with it. The thing is it is mostly too slow or low value against your weaker matchups and really strong against your good ones. Overkill in the wrong place.  There are some other pretty big spells on this bounce list and I stand by them. I am happy running two such things in my lists. Being able to do some large scale trickery can be really swingy. These cards can both help you get back into a game or actually close one out. They give you the control your big vanilla threats fail to so that you can manoeuvre into a win.

Into the Floodmaw

(or indeed Aether Spellbomb, Silent Departure, or really any one mana Unsummon effect)

Brazen Borrower

Sink into Stupor

Repulse

Cryptic Command

Mystic Confluence

Sublime Epiphany

Counter magic comes in the free, the cheap, and the meaty varieties. The meaty stuff  that can counter is stuff I would play is mostly already to be found on the bounce list. I actually try and play low countermagic counts in this kind of deck. You never want to get stranded with too much of it in hand. You are also playing some fat top end that is dead weight until you fill up the bin. As such you cannot afford to have much else dead weight in hand. This makes the counters that are other things a lot more viable includes. The modal stuff, the cycling and MDFC things, all very welcome places to slap a bit of stack disruption! Also part of the reason that those big modal counter/bounce effects are so welcome here. When it comes to the more pure "this is a counterspell and that is all this does" cards, I want two or three at most, and ideally ones on the cheaper side of things. In cube, blue is also pretty spoiled for good counters so these are not the most important pickups. 

The Cheap

Force Spike 

Spell Pierce

Stern Scolding

Remand

Mana Leak

Memory Lapse

Counterspell

Arcane Denial

Jwari Disruption

The Free

Daze

Flare of Denial  

Force of Negation (and Will...)

Subtlety

The Meaty

Archmages Charm

Cryptic Command

Mystic Confluence

Sublime Epiphany

Filler

Lastly we have the filler. Some of these cards are more dork based cantrips. They typically give a bit of board presence at low cost such that you dont get over run by weenie decks. They are pretty free inclusions and can help a curve very nicely. They don't really empower your synergies but they are low cost inclusions that help buffer the deck nicely in most situations. They can get in a bit of chip damage, fuel a Flare of Denial, sacrifice themselves to win a race, just nice utility. There are also a couple of cantrip cards that can do nothing and can win the game. These are your win more cards and while you rarely want to be playing many of these sorts of thing, this deck can both afford to and quite wants to. Equipment and vehicles exist in this realm too. You do not have quite the depth of dorks to reliably power such things and so they are best kept to a minimum. The recursion tools, Snappy, Tamiyo, Forager, and JVP love having access to a Time Walk. Really the card should sit in the same camp as the meaty bounce/counter effects but they are very much disruptive while a Time Walk isn't. Recursion effects in general are good in a deck with a lot of cheap targets and a lot of self mill! They are good card quality and give a lot of legs. They are just not great tempo so do need to not be overdone. The filler group is the one group you can afford to have nothing from. It is useful for tuning, tweaking, and patching over holes in your list. It can offer some nice utility but you really need to have a reason to play cards from this category. I think I would probably toss all equipment, vehicles, and planeswalkers into this group of cards as well.

Snapcaster Mage

Stormchaser's Talent

Spyglass Siren

Watcher for Tomorrow

Hard Evidence

Tamiyo, Inquisitive Student

Time Warp

Proft's Eidetic Memory

There are not that many cards not already in my cube that I would want to add. This is just one of those decks that loves good generic blue cards and can consequently play a whole heap of premium cards and have them be appropriate. Tossing in lower powered or real narrow cards isn't going to do much to help this deck and it is going to do plenty to worsen the cube overall. Really this deck is now only in the market for power upgrades on the kinds of thing it already has good access too. A couple more fat dorks with cost reduction effects in line would be nice. Tolarian Terror is a pretty bad card all told, just a necessary evil for a singleton synergy deck in a limited format! Temporal Trespass and Wash Out are the only things I might like to try in this although pretty sure threats is where I want any delve going!

You might note a lack of planeswalkers in the list too. You can play a few. Original Jace is one of the best because of the bounce. Walkers are just real risky in this kind of deck. They don't do enough when you are behind and when you are ahead you should really try and turn that into a win rather than establishing a walker. So there you have it, all the good cube cards for a great fun old school archetype that is having a nice surge in potency.

Rakdos Discard

I have been trying to get a discard themed deck working in the cube for as long as I can remember. Madness has always been under supported, both in terms of cards that use the mechanic, and in cube playable ways you can discard those cards. Even in constructed settings the madness decks I built for cube would fail due to low card quality, insufficient interaction, and being quite easy to pick apart themselves. We have had a dash more of the madness cards and a pile more that supports them in recent years, much like everything else! Not to mention generic good graveyard cards and mechanics. There presently isn't even that much in the way of cards in the cube for a discard deck that shouldn't be.  Regardless, I finally got a sealed pool with a sufficient seeming mass of cards to build a discard based deck and it did not disappoint. So much so that I feel I may legitimately be able to bring back some of the narrower cards to further support the archetype. We might have finally hit that critical mass turning point where I am no longer trying to push or force and archtype and instead move to just naturally supporting it.

My list was about two thirds discard synergy stuff and about a third generic good stuff. I would say I managed to get most of the key low cost cards in my pool resulting in it feeling like it was all much more synergic than it was. There are at least enough discard themed cards in the cube that I could run to make it a fully themed deck in the unlikely event that I got everything in a sealed or draft setting. I also splashed white rather ruining the aesthetic of a nice pure example list. My lands were a bit too good not to include teh white, it felt free and I had a couple of very powerful well suited things to bring in. My ideal list however would be straight Rakdos. Below is what I played, everything marked with an * is something I would cut from the "Platonic" or example version of this archetype, be it for being off colour or just not discard themed.  

24 Spells

Marauding Mako

Asmoranaculdicarcaisdar

Stalactite Stalker

Deathrite Shaman

Dragon's Rage Channeler

Nethergoyf 

Faithless Looting

Currency Converter

Underworld Cookbook

Skullclamp*

Flametongue Yearling*

Scrapwork Mutt

Invasion of Tarkir*

Inti, Seneschal of the Sun  

Phlage*

Lingering Souls*

Bastion of Remembrance*

Tersa, Lightshatter

Fable of the Mirrorbreaker

Liliana of the Veil

Broadside Bombardiers*

Sheoldred*

Lethal Scheme  

Rankle, Prankster

16 Lands

Ash Barrens

Marsh Flats

Godless Shrine

Plateau

Elegant Parlour 

Sacred Foundry

Badlands

Blood Crypt

5 Swamp

3 Mountain

You may note that the cards with an * are often role fillers. A lot of them are removal as that is where there is the most deficiency in synergy and support discard tools. I have tried somewhat to supplement the deck with a range of different types as there are delirium components. Mako is a premium one drop that does exactly what you are looking to do and is provided some lower power redundancy from Stalker. Then we have the generically good DRC, DRS, and Nethergoyf who all tie in to the game plan delightfully well with top end power right where you need it on the curve. Asmo and the Cookbook are the cards that perhaps do not deserve a cube slot and are my present  nod to trying to force this archetype. Cookbook has actually done some good work by itself but this is the first time Asmo has performed in cube, even if she has been played once or twice beforehand. These one drops are broadly the most important cards to have a good mass off and what this list did so well. All the missing things where thankfully not from this group and why the deck was so potent.

The best one drop by far however is the Currency Converter. This really makes the whole deck tick along. It turns all your discards into extra value while offering utility at the same time. You can even just use it as a looter itself if you get really stuck for things to do! It really feels like a one mana artifact you can tap to make a Treasure or a 2/2 token each turn in this deck. Perhaps not quite the consistency and burst of a Sol Ring but certainly outclassing it in overall power and utility. The next best card in the list, in no small part thanks to how well it pairs with the Converter is Ash Barrens. It is a cheap, instant speed, card neutral, discard trigger. It is also fixing obviously. Further to that it is a land that discards to get a land which allows for mana production with DRS and Treasure production with converter. It lets you have and play lands comfortably while stocking the discards with lands at the same time. Certainly a higher ceiling than a sac land in the deck, presumably better overall as well. I didn't have any of the LotR land cycling dorks which are also pretty cute if being a little way off as potent as Ash Barrens. You are rarely casting teh top end so it is mostly just an EtB tapped land with a discard trigger and a bit of yard fuel, mostly useful for collecting evidence. This deck is all about tempo and EtB tapped lands are a big cost, I would try and keep them to a minimum. The real trick with this deck is not to get too carried away with big powerful top end stuff and rely on the fact that your early stuff is able to carry pretty hard compared to normal. I was pretty happy with my curve. You get a bit more flexibility than most archetypes as you will have a bunch of looting and discard to toss away unwanted stuff but that doesn't give you licence to be sloppy in deck design.

The deck works much like the various high tempo decks that use synergies or the graveyard to get a little extra out of their cards. Most of the cards are decent in their own right while also supporting each other in both power and utility. You get lots of options while packing a pretty good punch. It doesn't lean so hard on the synergy like old Madness decks that it can be shut down with a little disruption. Even though the curve is low I prefer a slightly higher land count as discarding lands is something you actively want to be able to do early on and flooding out late is a little less likely. Another quirk of the deck is that you get to really vary how much you want out of a card. Sometimes you simply want to toss something in the bin to get some counters on some dorks, perhaps turn on delirium or threshold etc. Other times you hold the card to cast it. You can afford to toss away top end because your one drops can become game ending threats. You can afford to have cards in your hand just being a +1/+1 counter worth of value as you have novel ways to obtain extra value. On the flip side of all this, the deck does not mulligan well. You really want those cards ust as bits of cardboard. Another reason to play a bit land heavier and ensure you have a strong mana base.

Below is the list of cube cards you will often find in most cubes that I would consider good synergy options for this archetype. The kinds of cards I would like to replace the * cards with so as to move towards a purer synergy build. Each with their own pros, cons, and specific synergies that they perform best with. 

Bomat Courier

Lava Dart / Firebolt

Voldaren Epicure

Bloodtithe Harvester  

Ivora, Insatiable Heir

Fear of Missing Out

Collective Brutality

Phyrexian Dragon Engine

Seasoned Pyromancer

Detective's Phoenix

Smuggler's Copter

Bitter Triumph

Bone Shards

Troll of Kazadum

Oliphant

Vengevine 

Bloodghast

Unearth

Reanimate

Urza's Saga (probably, if you got Converter in your pool!)

And here is a list of cards which are not commonly found in cubes that are especially good in this kind of deck that I will now be considering for a trail (re)run in cube. Of which I am only really expecting the first three to have any real hope. The others are really too narrow and look like they are not going to offset that with payoff. The first three are convenient and/or powerful enough that they can make a meaningful impact to the archetype and perhaps see some play outside of it too. 

Hobgoblin, Mantled Marauder

Blazing Rootwalla (and I guess Basking...)

Burning Inquiry 

Goblin Lore 

Hollow One

Ovalchase Daredevil

Squee, Goblin Nabob

Fiery Temper

Street Wraith

Flameblade Adept

Finally, here is my realistic idea of roughly what I'll be aiming at for this archetype within my cube when drafting it next;

Marauding Mako

Asmoranaculdicarcaisdar

Stalactite Stalker  

Deathrite Shaman

Dragon's Rage Channeler

Nethergoyf

Faithless Looting

Currency Converter

Underworld Cookbook

Bone Shards

Unearth

Scrapwork Mutt

Inti, Seneschal of the Sun

Bitter Triumph

Bloodtithe Harvester  

Ivora, Insatiable Heir

Fear of Missing Out

Smuggler's Copter

Tersa, Lightshatter

Fable of the Mirrorbreaker

Liliana of the Veil

Detective Phoenix

Lethal Scheme

Rankle, Prankster  

16 Lands

Ash Barrens

The Figure of Destiny Enigma

 

Cube is a relatively static format compared to most. The tinkerings of their curators doing far more to change the meta than the release of new cards ever does. The one thing that does change with some consistency are the creatures of choice. We get a new staple spell now and again but mostly once a spell is in the cube it stays in the cube. Creatures on the other hand arrive, stick around for a bit, and then get power crept out. They have a limit lifespan and a shockingly short one on average. Obviously this is more down to the curator and how keen they are but I am pretty sure that the average time a new creature added to the cube from the last ten years lasts about six months for somewhat active curators. The only creatures that have ever retained an ongoing space since arriving are utility creatures. The green mana dorks, Mother of Runes, Grim Lavamancer, that sort of thing. That sort of thing and Figure of Destiny apparently... Cube and power creep are most brutal upon the beaters of the game. But somehow the little kithkin is unscathed. He is to cube what Giant Spider is to sealed deck limited!

Figure of Destiny is a threat, a beater, and nothing more. No value offered beyond combat. It is now an incredibly old card, ancient and alone as far as such pure beaters go. The only cards that come close to it in terms of age and role are Siege Gang Commander, Flickerwisp, and Bloodbraid Elf, most of which only really feature in cubes for nostalgia these days, and all of which are absolutely more in the utility/value camp than pure beater. 

Not only has Figure of Destiny outlasted all other threats in cube it has done so without ever really being that overbearing or top tier. It has played alongside Savannah Lions and Mogg Fanatics all the way to Ocelot Pride and Ragavan, all the while never feeling too out of place. The card has always just been a solid role filler. By far and away the three most commonly played aggressive colours played in cube are mono red, mono white, and Boros, for which Figure is a perfect one drop and mana sink. Indeed, just having the card greatly increases the consistency of your Boros beatdown deck. Being able to use any colour of mana to develop your board lets you play the spells in your hand you want without being mana inefficient. Having it effectively turns one of your lands into a dual land when you are Boros. Being a reasonable mana sink is a nice perk for consistency too whatever colour you are.

Being able to level the card at instant speed makes it a very safe way to invest mana allowing you to dodge the worst tempo swinging of answers. It is pseudo flash on all bar the first and safest mana and it is also options. All be it just how and when to use it but it is still far more option rich than almost every other pure beater threat card going. You can go all in on a Figure, you can be safe, or fast and lose, mana efficient, card efficient, or max damage! The card is never the best on any one axis but it performs so consistently on so many while remaining direct. It can afford to perform worse than you average red or white one drop beater and still retain a place by being playable in so many more places than most cards. All places that want what it has to offer.

Cute new things keep popping up and working with Figure. Need a white card that is a red permanent to buff your MHIII Ajani? Need a way to sink that Firebending mana? Slow and steady really does win the race here. It is comical to me that time has shown the best beater in magic to be a one mana 1/1, a two mana 2/2, a five mana 4/4 or an 11 mana 6/6 flyer....  This should really drive home the notion that consistency really is king when it comes to magic. It is like the exact opposite of Ragavan. The legendary monkey has a ceiling so far above Figure it is comical, orders of magnitude better, but it is an infrequent ceiling. Critically, almost every other situation you could find yourself in the Figure is outperforming Ragavan, all be it, usually not by all that much. It is hard to say Ragavan is a weaker card, it clearly isn't. Neither is it weaker on average but Figure still puts in more work. Figure will show up in more places and contribute more. You can output more with a lower average simply by being there more of the time and that is how Figure gets it done. Strength without power.   

An Ode to Mishra's Factory

 

Mishra's Factory is pretty iconic. It was the first card to do what it does and remains remarkably reasonable at doing it. A kind of benchmark for what a manland or creature land can or should be. What is most remarkable to me is quite how viable this card has remained over the years. This is especially the case given that creatures are the main focus of power creep over the years. A Grisly Bear might have not been laughable in the nineties but in more recent times such things don't hold much water. How is the simple notion of being able to hide as a land able to transform a 2/2 vanilla dork into a relevant asset? And perhaps more vexingly, how has this first iteration manage to keep up with newer cards that hide better dorks or offer better lands?

The strength of the land one can animate is well appreciated. Land is pretty hard to interact with affording you a safe place to keep a threat. Having a mana sink on a land is a great pairing of early and late complimentary utility pairings. It is a very low cost inclusion to a deck letting you cram in extra value to you deck. 

Aggro decks of old couldn't pass up on those resilient extra threats and the control decks couldn't pass up on the free value on mana sources. Magic in the early years was rife with the Factory. Then after 5th Edition I think it was they stopped printing it for a while and we got a smattering of other animatable lands to play with from the Treetop Village cycle to Blinkmoth Nexus to Mutavault and eventually the duals in the first Zendikar, upon finishing and adding to that style of cycle we are now beyond spoiled for choice on lands that can attack. All of these historic cards were good and all got play, and all of the newer ones would have if they came before the glut, however none have properly unseated Mishra's Factory. Throughout that period the Factory has mostly been in the cube and been getting enough play and activations to be a worthwhile inclusion.  

A couple of factors are I think at play helping the Factory to compete in a world of ever increasing creature power and utility land variety. The introduction of planeswalkers helped to increase the relevance of anything you could do to boost an attack with on an immediate basis. Simply having a land sat in play you can animate greatly changes an opponents ability to deploy a planeswalker. This applies to all manlands as well as creatures with haste and things like vehicles. What specifically about Factory lets it still compete in this wide field? Simply put, it is the cheapest on offer. On all fronts. All colours can play it. It is a single mana to animate and there is no tempo cost to deploying the Factory, it comes in untapped. Assuming you can stomach the colourless mana it has no other real cost. 

You then only have to pay an effective two (colourless) mana to get in two extra power of attack at any future attack. Not only is that one of the cheapest you can get an attack in with a land but it is also still one of the most efficient damage output per mana invested. The strength of the land that attacks is being able to attack when needed and do so efficiently and Factory is still absolutely one of the best in the business for that. It isn't so much about sustained threat, it is about being able to have that extra couple of point of damage or have that extra body to go wide with on that key turn. No utility land is efficient when activated over and over again, it is about being able to do so when it matters and Factory is just a card that is there for you more than most. Sure, Mutavault has those same key traits and is a very comparable card but artifact synergy in cube has been vastly more relevant in cube than tribal synergy. We haven't even touched on the 3rd ability that Mishra's Factory has. It is the least relevant of the three but it is still a good one, and enough to carry it about Mutavault by itself, even in singleton. Factory can pump itself to block as a 3/3 when not summoning sick, or it can use a cheeky untap effect to attack harder or be a surprise combat trick. It can even pump Mutavault if it really wants to rub it in!

Over the years I have done a lot of cube style constructed events too, usually epic rotisserie affairs allowing any cards to be picked. Suffice it to say I have played a lot of 40 card singleton affinity decks. Yes, the flying on Inkmoth and Blinkmoth Nexus make them the best utility lands in the deck. But no, that doesn't take away too much from the fact that Factory is still a really top rate card in that archetype. Able to turn on and power things up without attacking, able to hold modular counters like a legend, or just be another piece of sacrificial fodder. Hard to go wrong with Factory in affinity. Not many other cards have played alongside Cranial Plating and Arcbound Ravager on the one hand and Counterspell and Wrath of God on the other!

Few cards have such a historied resume, let alone such a broad, diverse, and active one. Yes, in the early years you could make a case that the card was over powered. But then, lots of cards were. And you could equally make the case that creatures were underpowered in 1994 and the power level pegging of Factory was pretty on point for a mover averaged notion of power level across magic. Indeed that is how I view things and in that light you find one of the very best designed cards of all time. A card that is playable in multiple different archetypes and formats over multiple decades is already an impressive feat. Doing all that without ever really being that oppressive or broken elevates you to a pretty special tier of card. As far as design accolades can get, I think few can be more deserving than Factory. It is very likely up there in the leader boards of cards I have won or effectively won games because of as well, not because of power but because of that seemingly omnipresent quality it has, just there to tip the scales in your favour.