Sligh

This is a deck that at a glance looks a lot like RDW and could also be confused as a Ponza style deck. Sligh probably isn't the best name for it but at least if differentiates it from the other two very similar decks in which this sits somewhere neatly between the two in styles. RDW wins with either tempo or inevatibility as all its cards deal damage in some way yet do little else. Ponza is a little more midrange and has far fewer threats than either RDW or Sligh, instead aiming to disrupt mana bases heavily. Ponza is a tier two deck at best and has some very one sided matchups. This listing of Sligh does disrupt mana but not in an attempt to lock them out of the game as Ponza loves to do, it is more a case of drawing out the game and making it all awkward and slow for your opponent. The mana denial and retarding of the game scale very well with several of the threats in the deck, those being the growing creatures and the cards like Ankh and Sulphuric Vortex. It also helps give you an additional edge against top heavy or colour heavy decks. The trade off for this is that you will be far weaker against decks like white weenie who will have too many threats to cope with and more card advantage while really not worrying to much about the mana disruption. Sligh has far more balanced and generally better matchups than Ponza and unless you want to go big and cast Wildfire etc is probably the only viable way to go in the cube with mono red for land destruction.

Sligh is a more challenging deck to play than RDW as you are frequently faced with the choice of applying more pressure or reducing the mana options for your opponent. You have few ways of generating card advantage and also your threats have low power as well as there being a low number of them. If you apply no pressure you will not be able to hold your opponent off getting to do stuff eventually and in all likelihood it will be better than what you can do. Sligh is far more tempo focused than RDW even though it is a couple of turns slower. With cards like Chrome Mox and Tanglewire you have less redundancy in your damage output and therefore need to make your cards like Goblin Guide and Stromkirk Noble do that bit more. You need to carefully assess what cards most wreak you and make your threats in windows where they can't make them and then use your disruption to hold off the problem cards until it is too late.




24 Spells

Chrome Mox

Goblin Guide
Stromkirk Noble
Grim Lavamancer
Faithless Looting

Lightning Bolt
Chain Lightning
Black Vice
Mogg Fanatic

Cursed Scroll
Galvanic Blast
Bone Splitter
Reckless Waif


Ankh of Mishra
Slith Firewalker
Shrapnel Blast
Arc Trail

Dwarven Blastminer
Incinerate

Tanglewire
Sulphuric Vortex
Molten Rain
Zo-Zu, the Punisher

Wheel of Fortune


16 Lands

Wastelands
Rishidan Port
Teetering Peeks
Great Furnace

Mishra's Factory
11 Mountians











I need to do an updated RDW list as my first version is a pretty bad one in hindsight, in part because of the Reckless Waif in it which has not been played since that deck until this one. The Waif is still a terrible card in cube even if it is at its best in this list. It is too easy to flip it back and quite hard to flip in in the first place even with things like Wastelands and Rishidan Port to spend your mana early potentially without casting spells and making it less likely things will be cast against you. This deck wants cheap threats that can be fairly powerful on their own. Stromkirk Noble and Slith Firewalker are in the deck to offer this cheap yet powerful single threat feel. Neither need any further mana investment once played like a Kargan Dragonlord does to become serious and can easily put the game out of reach on their own if backed up with mana denial. Reckless Waif is not in the same league as the growing dorks but as red has so few options for cheap hefty threats we make do. Slith Firewalker is pretty awful too to be honest and is not really cube quality any more but like the Waif is perfectly suited to this kind of deck and has the added perk of being nostalgic!


The deck utilizes a lot of artifacts and as such can run both Galvanic and Shrapnel Blasts which are two of the highest output cheap burn spells going. Galvanic Blast is rarely hitting for four in this deck but is still better than Burst Lightning would be, you are always happy with it just being a Shock. The Shrapnel Blast however is a real bonus to this kind of deck giving you vast reach and security against things like Elspth, Knight-Errant and Baneslayer Angels. Red deck wins would love to be able to play Shrapnel Blast but this list only just has enough artifacts to make it work, a RDW list can't get close to enough and still look sensible.

Black Vice is another card that is not cube worthy overall but is at its best in this kind of deck. It is a cheap threat that scales very well with a retarded, low resource game while being an artifact to support the Blasts. It also has good synergy with Goblin Guide and Wheel of Fortune all of which make it playable but unexciting. On the draw you would almost always take it out of the deck as it is also one of those cards that has a huge swing in power level between being on the play and on the draw. The Wheel of Fortune is perhaps the most luxurious and superfluous card in the list. While it does recover you much need cards and theoretically gives you more advantage than your opponent, based on the theory you have cast more stuff as your stuff is cheap and much of it reduces their mana output, it neither acts as a threat nor denies any mana, if anything it will give more mana options to your opponent. Without the Black Vice I probably would have cut this as it is risky investing any mana in doing anything not relating to tempo but wasn't disappointed with the cards performance at all. It is easy to forget or even just miss quite how brutally Wheel of Fortune can wreak your opponents game plan which is a very unusual sort of tempo and disruption.

Bonesplitter helps to make your various small threats a bit more significant and boost your artifact count. It helps you spend your mana and advance your board position very efficiently but does suffer a little from a light creature count. Despite this I think you need something of this nature to make up for your monsters all being very small and not being able to afford to go two for one against anything slightly fat that slips into play. Dwarven Blastminer is yet another B/C cube card that works well in this list, he can single handedly lock out a fair number of cube decks and is devastating for lots if not answered quickly. Against most mono decks he is your worst card but at least is still a body. Magus of the Moon performs a similar role however stops much of what you want to do with your lands and only really affects colour, not raw quantity of mana, meaning you can still easily get wamped by a Wurmcoil Engine.

The Ankh of Mishra and Zo-Zu make up the core aspect of the deck supplemented by Sulphuric Vortex and Black Vice to offer ongoing damage output. This makes the deck brutal against any deck with a high curve or that is slow or that has loads of colours. Decks like Zoo which are one of the most effective at taking tempo leads are so reliant on sac and dual lands that they don't have a  great matchup against Sligh while they do against red deck wins. It also makes Sligh far more effective against various UG style combo decks that try to take lots of turns and go off in some way. Again, RDW doesn't have much disruption against those decks and is too slow to goldfish to kill them. RDW is the more consistent deck and has more even matchups across the board. Sligh should be used as a meta choice as it is much more capable against the right field but struggles with the other common top tier mono decks like white weenie.