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.