WG Denial

After a glut of lists for red decks in the cube I feel I must do a non red list. This style of deck has been around for ages, the earliest version I can recall is Erhnageddon yet all those that follow are based on a similar principle; some solid threats, some non-land mana sources, a dash of cheap removal and some serious mana disruption. Other than goblins, elves and to a lesser extent red deck wins, this was one of the only early cube viable heavy creature decks. Even white weenie didn't really have the power to beat control and combo decks and the best it could hope to do was be a weaker version of this style of deck. The WG denial deck is still viable in cube but it is seen less often as so many other forms of deck have been discovered or become viable as well. Here is a fairly standard and upto date version of the deck which hasn't changed all that much over the years beyond upgrading the quality of the dorks it packs.




22 Spells

Mox Diamond

Bird of Paradise
Joroga Treespeaker
Noble Hierarch
Quirion Ranger

Swords to Plowshares

Life from the Loam
Qasali Pridemage
Thalia, Guardian of Threben
Winter Orb

Talisman of Unity
Tarmogoyf
Wall of Roots
Sylvan Library

Kitchen Finks
Eternal Witness
Knight of the Reliquary
Beast Within

Ohran Viper

Garruk Wildspeaker
Cataclysm
Armageddon

18 Lands

Tranquil Thicket
Secluded Steppe
Flagstones of Trokair
Stirring Wildwood
Windswept Heath
Selesnya Sanctuary
Temple Garden
Savannah
Brushlands
Stirling Grove
Treetop Village
Horizon Canopy
4 Forest
2 Plains








Your three key spells in this list are Armageddon, Cataclysm and Winter Orb, you are however relatively spoiled for choice with Ravages of War, Tangle Wire, Balance, Smokestack and even Catastohpe and a push to choose from. Smokestack is rather slow and you have little to abuse it with and so it is the weakest of the bunch. Balance is the most powerful but is too hard to set up in this deck, it is more of a control or combo card. WG doesn't have the card draw or quality to find and support things like Zuran Orb comfortably which is the sort of card you need to make Balance abusive. With all the simpler options available I tend to avoid using Balance in this archetype. Catastrophe costs 50% more than you want it to just for some utility which goes against what you are trying to do (have mana dorks in play) and should really only be a last resort. This deck doesn't tend to get to 6 mana very often and is usually a sign things are going a bit wrong when it does. Tangle Wire is great and lets you get set up around counter magic however it is rather short lived and with your deck being slow won't let you kill them in time. You need to follow it up with another mana denial card to give you the time to finish them off. As I mentioned, this deck can't support too many cards that lose you card advantage.


Armageddon and Ravages of War are the staple used to wipe out all lands, they are reliable and you are set to recover well after casting them. I tend to only play one and have Cataclysm in the place of the other. The reason for this is to round the deck off as much as possible, you are already very powerful against any deck that needs to have a decent number of lands in play. You are however quite weak against decks that can run off just a couple of land such as a variety of weenie decks and the artifact ramp decks. Cataclysm is very kind to you as you have a good spread of things you are able to keep, and will cripple artifact and weenie decks savagely while still being nearly as effective as Armageddon against the control decks. Cataclysm also deals with planes walkers which can be difficult to deal with if cast due to the relatively low tempo of this deck. Winter Orb is a sustained dampener on your opponent and generally doesn't affect you too much however it is a card that needs using with care as there are both situations and match ups where it can harm you more than your opponent. There isn't really room in the deck for something like Relic Barrier or Icy Manipulator so as to turn the Orb off for your turn and with your mana critters and artifacts plus the low curve it doesn't add all that much any way. Playing the 3rd 4 mana Armageddon effect might be more powerful but it will give you some very clunky draws and so I favour the variety of the Winter Orb.


Thalia is a quirky little addition that gives you some presence on the board and hinders your opponent... hopefully. Like Winter Orb, Thalia's effectiveness entirely depends on what you are facing and unlike Winter Orb she is quite detrimental to the working of your deck and so caution must be employed when casting her. Life from the Loam allows you to have a bit of card advantage in combination with the cycling lands and Horizon Canopy while also aiding a swift recovery from Armageddon. It is a mana intensive engine and so shouldn't be used that many times per game, this is doubly the cast as the deck has no graveyard reshuffle effects and relatively few threats. Perhaps a Mistveil Plains is worth playing!

The rest of the deck is about getting the right ratios of removal, alternate mana sources and threats while cramming as much power as possible into the mix. Sadly there is not much space left for removal and although you would a few more there are not many places you can trim the fat to make some room. Neither white or green have any creature removal that doubles up as something else as well such as a Skinrender which leaves you very light in this regard. Ohran Viper is about the best you can do as a removal creature... I have been highly unimpressed with Fiend Hunter and would just rather play an Oblivion Ring or a Selesnya Charm or really anything instead of it! Being able to pack other utility on your guys is nice and does make up for this shortfall to some extent but creature removal is the most important kind to have in some abundance and is therefore the biggest weakness of the deck. Generally against decks with serious threats like a Titan you just have to keep them off the key mana they need to flop it out.

Guttersnipe.dec

This deck was a bit of a joke deck thrown together for a laugh by a mate of mine. After it had impressively dispatched the other decks kicking about it was clear Guttersnipe was not such a joke after all. This is a very odd deck as it is part combo, part control and part agro. The prsmise is pretty simple, deal some free damage with any dorks you might have sparingly using removal to get it through and stay alive. Then find and cast either Guttersnipe or his weaker substitute Gelectrode and combo off for the win. The combo is an engine comprised of the afore mentioned dorks and then lots of free or cheap cards to trigger them while either cantripping or dealing yet more damage. If you are playing against this deck Guttersnipe is a must kill on or counter on sight, if they have any cards in hand and 3 to 4 mana up you are probably dead. The damage output of this deck always comes as a surprise. One game I recall I was against this and playing elves. I had over ten life and over twelve toughness on the board ready to block and was feeling as safe as you liked mistakenly playing as if I were facing red deck wins. When I passed the turn all he had was 5 lands, a Gelectrode and an Electromancer. They proceeded to untap, lay a Guttersnipe and kill not just me but also my entire team just because he could... This deck style has now been done three times as it is really fun and new, each time with subtle changes and this list is an averaging of the three to proceed it and not one that has actually been played.

25 Spells

Lava Dart
Gitaxian Probe
Preordain
Gut Shot

Grim Lavamancer
Goblin Guide
Delver of Secrets
Stromkirk Noble

Vapour Snag
Lightning Bolt
Chain Lightning
Faithless Looting

Phantasmal Bear
Firebolt
Ancestral Visions
Burst Lightning

Fire / Ice
Snapcaster Mage
Goblin Electromancer
Incinerate

Think Twice
Searing Spear

Guttersnipe
Gelectrode

Fireblast

15 Lands

Steam Vents
Volcanic Island
Scalding Tarn
Shivan Reef

Shelldock Isle
Faerie Conclave
Cascade Bluffs
Sulphur Falls

Barbarian Ring
Island
5 Mountains









There are very few threats in the deck as you need to pack a high count of instants and sorceries and so one of the biggest weaknesses of the deck is doing nothing in the early game. This means your three drop combo dorks are much more precious and have to do a lot more work. It also means you are more likely to draw your dorks later on when they are of least use. The other big drawback of this deck is that it is based around a card that is hard to find and play and vulnerable if you do. You simply don't have the gas to completely burn someone out unless you have Guttersnipe support or have managed to apply good pressure with your few dorks.


The best cards in the deck are Lava Dart and Gitaxian Probe as they are cheap and either cantrip or a second cast almost freely available. These are the kinds of cards you want to be following your Guttersnipe and Gelectrode. The rest of the deck is basically just weaker versions of Probe and Dart. I tried a version greedily using Gush and Fireblast but frequently didn't have two islands (even with a well tailored mana base) to return. The weakest cards in this deck is probably Goblin Electromancer who doesn't reduce that many spells in cost and tends not to deal much damage either. Snapcaster is also not at his best in this deck as the extra two mana to recast a spell is very restrictive and the 2/1 body left behind is hardly exciting. Think Twice is very weak without the Electromancer however as it is very expensive for a card that does less than Gitaxian Probe per cast. Ancestral Visions is one of the the best things you could hope for on turn one however later on in the game it is a bad do nothing draw. Having not played the deck enough it might transpire that Frantic Search is more the kind of draw you want after Probes and Preordains rather than the riskier Think Twice and Ancestral Visions. The Faithless Looting is of course outstanding in this deck and lets you get away with packing a few riskier cards while also providing lots of fuel for your combo engines.


Despite his impressive performance in this kind of deck I can't bring myself to give Guttersnipe an A cube slot as he is so so narrow. A pure storm combo deck could be built around him but I can't see how that is in any way an improvement for any of those deck styles. This deck is very nearly tier 1, probably a 1.5 and is well worth playing for its entertainment value if nothing else. For almost any metagame I can imagine you would be better off with either a storm deck, a counter-burn control deck or red deck wins which is what this deck is trying to be a compilation of. Perhaps someone will optimise the build and have a tier one deck but I am not that hopeful. Relying on one card in a deck wanting to use redundancy in order to win is a bit of a fools quest, at least fools have the most fun!

Medium Red

I was hungering to try something a bit different and came up with this deck. It is a copy of the deck "Big Red" got its name from. In Mirrodin block people were slinging Fireballs and dropping Arc Sloggers into play with their mono red mid-range decks. For some reason it was called big red however the cube deck by the same name was much more alike a deck Kai Budde played, this list for which is on this page. So given that the name this deck should be called has been taken I have dubbed it Medium Red as it is somewhere in the middle of the two viable mono red decks, those being the afore Big Red and Red Deck Wins of course. The idea behind the deck is to try and merge the idea of high power level and more serious threats from Big Red with the idea of redundancy and efficiency from Red Deck Wins. Big Red draws inconsistently and can either draw only ramp or only expensive action cards, Red Deck Wins can be forced to endlessly trade two for one to deal with opponents more powerful cards and both of these drawbacks are where most of their games are lost. The name Medium Red is appropriate is this is as mid range a deck as you could imagine, this means it should naturally have a good match up against any dedicated agro deck. The concern for the mid range deck is that it will draw expensive cards early and cheap ones late, which is much the same problem as Big Red faces although it is much more severe for Big Red. Even so the mid range deck is more at the mercy of the draw than most deck types and will suffer worst in a mana flood or screw. Red is a little luckier in this regard as even cheap burn scales pretty well into the late game. To reinforce this ability to draw consistently I played a vast land count, when you can't afford to risk it and are not intending to win the card advantage war, simply the tempo and card quality one then going a bit overboard on lands is wise. If you want to reliably be hitting your 4th land in most games it is surprising what ratio of lands you need to be playing. The last way in securing against the downfall of mid range employed in this deck is having lots of outlets to spend mana if you do suffer from getting too much on thing like fire breathing, flashback and level up dorks.


22 Spells

Faithless Looting
Lightning Bolt
Grim Lavamancer
Chain Lightning

Firebolt
Burst Lightning

Ash Zealot
Kargan Dragonlord
Arc Trail
Mizzium Mortars

Spawning Breath

Manic Vandal
Chandra's Phoenix
Slagstorm
Seething Song

Chandra, the Firebrand
Hound of Griselbrand
Flametongue Kavu

Siege-Gang Commander
Thundermaw Hellkite

Inferno Titan

Devil's Play

18 Lands

Mishra's Factory
Forgotten Cave
16 Mountains


This is the first deck I found Faithless Looting to be weak in, this is because almost all of your cards are valuable throughout the game. You want to continually make your land drops so it is very rare you will have dead cards like red deck wins. You simply cannot afford the card disadvantage to support it even with a little bit of flashback and recursion synergy. There are a number of cards vying for the slot such as Pillage for a bit more all round utility removal and security or a cheaper yet significant threat such as Stromkirk Noble or Slith Firewalker. I would probably also cut the Seething Song as it is also card disadvantage and didn't seem to often add much to your tempo, it did offer some options and unexpected trickery but these were never used in my games as they were not worth the lost card and I had drawn the Looting to convert it into something better. Spawning Breath however I really quite liked as it gave some extra value, all be it not very much it still helps you burn things down when used with other damage spells and if you didn't need the ramp for anything useful you still have a chump blocker lying about. It is however the least powerful card in the deck by a long way which was something I was trying to avoid but I feel the hole it plugs a little and the way in which it does it is worth this lowering of power. Plus its always fun to dig terrible cards out of the C cube and put them to good use.


This was the first outing for three new cards, Hound of Griselbrand, Mizzium Mortars and Ash Zealot. I was excited most about trying out the Hound as it is a powerful card that I couldn't concieve of any decent homes  to play it in until this idea came along for which he is the perfect fit. Sadly however I didn't see him much and on the occasions I did he was instantly plowed. The Ash Zealot was fantastic, he fits an agressive or defensive role as you need which is well suited to mid range decks and rare from a red dork. The ability is far more liable to do you damage than anyone else with a high flashback count in the deck but it is still well worth playing for the cheap solid body. Mizzium Mortars was also pretty decent, having the ability to take out a 4 toughness dork for just two mana was really nice, I am used to accepting a two for one or having to pay at least 4 mana, usually 5, for that  priviledge in red. Having the option to save it and try and get value also added some juicy choices to the mix which is always the best thing to have with your cube cards.


Most of the rest of the cards speak for themselves, things are there because of their high power level, raw efficiency or their value in card terms. Manic Vandal, Flametongue Kavu, Arc Trail, Slagstorm, Devil's Play, Seige-Gange, Inferno Ttian, Hellkite, Chandra, her Phoenix, Hound of Griselbrand, Mizzium Mortars, Firebolt and Grim Lavamancer are all easy to get 2 for 1s or better. Many of them are also high powered cards. The thing I liked most about how the deck played was that it shifted from control to agro incredibly well and was able to apply a lot of pressure very rapidly from out of nowhere. The fork effect on Chandra is particularly brutal in this deck with some high output burns spells. Overall however this deck is more of a tier 2 deck, it will give a good fight against the tier one metagame and destroy a few matchups but overall its likely win percentages will be 40-45% I expect. Being mono, and red at that, is is very vulnerable and relatively inflexible. Quick decks can get away with this as they don't give opponents the chance to exploit their vulnerabilities however the medium red deck allows more time to cast it and more chances to draw whatever it is.

Simple RG Beats

I think I have some unfounded mystical pedestal upon which I place the red green deck. It has always seemed viable or close to in every format, limited or constructed. It is generally quite an easy deck to play although cube versions are always going to be well above the level of the infamous Fires of Yavimaya deck. If anyone cares at all, the first deck I ever built was a simple RG deck with Orcish Lumberjacks, Elves, Tinder Walls, Ernham Djins, Lightning Bolts, Kird Apes and for some reason Thallids... This is a list of my most recent cube RG beats deck. It had a theme of haste creatures so as to make it harder to play against and provide good tempo, the latter of which is the main strength of the RG deck. Cheap red removal combined with efficient green beaters and a touch of ramp combine to be one of the best tempo packages an agro deck can offer. While some acceleration is nice it is very easy to go overboard and dilute your deck to much, you need to always be applying pressure and running out of gas by turn four because most of your hand was ramp and not gas is a good way to lose, usually slowly and painfully. Not only could the four ramp creatures I played all attack, I also included a decent number of other cards such as Overrun to compensate for having weak monsters in play. For the same reason as with the mana creatures you don't want to go to heavy on the burn as you need to have proactive cards in the early game. On top of needing to apply pressure and have a continued supply of threats you will have very little card advantage in the deck compared to most other cube archetypes and have to make up for this with high quality creatures.

23 Spells


Llanowar Elf
Fyndhorn Elf
Orcish Lumberjack
Grim Lavamancer

Kird Ape
Faithless Looting
Lightning Bolt
Chain Lightning

Lotus Cobra
Scavenging Ooze
Tarmogoyf
Strangleroot Geist

Arc Trail
(Impending Disaster)

Boggart Ram-Gang
Chandra's Phoenix


Flametongue Kavu
Garruk Wildspeaker
Vengevine
Bloodbraid Elf

Overrun
Wolfir Silverheart
Thundermaw Hellkite

17 Lands

Raging Ravine
Treetop Village
Taiga
Stomping Ground

Karplusan Forest
Wooded Foothills
Fire-Lit Thicket
Rootbound Crag

Windswept Heath
Misty Rainforest
4 Forests
3 Mountains












I have placed Impending Disaster in brackets as it shouldn't be in this deck at all, I had recently acquired one and didn't really know how to evaluate it or how to incorporate it into a deck. It seemed like it might work in this kind of deck but it is too unreliable and is yet another card that isn't applying the right kind of pressure. I would have much preferred either a Goblin Guide, a Devil's Play for the even more classic feel, or a Sulphuric Vortex. Seventeen land is highly advisable even without Impending Disaster as you never want to hiccough on lands and throw away valuable tempo. The cards are most effective when cast on or before the curve and the decks curve goes all the way up to 5, which is very rare for a non blue agro cube deck, and means you need to have high lands counts to make the most of all the spells. The man lands are a way to compensate for light card advantage but do mean you have a number of land that comes in to play tapped. Having more land gives you better options about when to drop your come into play tapped lands.


Faithless Looting is just an incredible card that will enhance almost any deck even without any synergies. It is so cheap and will smooth your curving early game while increasing your card power late game. There are some mild synergies with it in this deck but it would be good without those because of your high land count and mana dorks. Flametongue Kavu doesn't often see play as he is too expensive for most of the deck that might want him and a bit of a liability against decks with minimal creature counts which do still exist. In this deck he is at his best as he allows you to have removal and a beefy threat in one card and you have the ramp to reduce his clunkyness. Flametongue is one of the creatures that can offer the biggest tempo swings for his mana range which is exactly what the RG beats deck is trying to do.

Orcish Lumberjacks are generally called the Lotus Orcs by our group and still hold their cube slot despite having basically no other homes outside of this archetype. In this archetype however they are a brutally dangerous card that gives enough of a power bump to the deck to keep it tier one. Lotus Cobra is a little like a free ramp dork in the way that Flametongue is a free removal spell although not so consistently as it is so flimsy you often can't swing with it, either because it will needlessly die or because you need to have it for mana too much to risk its easy death. Even if you don't swing with it much it still counts for your Overrun effects and is a powerful ramp card with all your sac lands.


Thundermaw Hellkite was a card that I ended up playing mostly as it is still quite new and hasn't had that much play time yet. He performed the best he has to date as greatly impressed. Typically RG beats lacks evasion on its guys and relies on out meating their opponents to force through damage. This is not always viable in the cube where people can clog up the board incredibly fast doing broken things of their own. Hellkite will almost always do a neat 5 to the dome immediately often ending the game or take out a planeswalker and leave you with a big evasive threat.

Kird Ape may seem odd, especially over Goblin Guide however he is better in this deck than he seems. In cube 2/3 is the first golden size for a dork to be as it kills most other early dorks in combat without dying while being much more resilient to removal. Although this deck is all about tempo there are those decks which pack most of their threats in the one and two slot such as white weenie or agro black which also has the capability to burst out of the gates with Dark Ritual and the like, these decks with some cheap disruption and threats can put you on the back foot then finish you off with an equipment or a planewalker you can't get through to kill. Kird Ape stops a lot of that nonsense and will give you a good board presence early in the game. He is at his best against the other cheap agro decks but he is still decent against control and midrange decks where the utility creatures won't be able to trade with him and more removal will miss him.

The choice of burn to go in this deck was quite easy. You can phaff around with Grove of the Burnwillows and Punishing Fire but without ways to find them they are generally just weak cards in your deck and are far from quick at doing anything when you do get them. (It does make Kavu Predator more appealing and it is a really great card to have any way and sadly didn't fit into this list) What you want is cheap, high damage burn, for which lightning in the form of Chains and Bolts are the best contenders. Arc Trail is another attempt to get two cards in one, this time it is two burn spells rather than a threat and an effect. It is also a card that is very good at taking the early tempo which as I might have mentioned, is something you are keen to be doing with this deck. Compared to red deck wins you are going to be using your burn more to clear the way for attacks and slow down your opponent and less to finish them off. Arc Trail is weaker than the alternatives as burn to the dome but is stronger overall at killing creatures and so fits the bill for what we need.

The rest of the deck sort of speaks for itself, it has big efficient dorks that have an emphasis on size and aggression. The deck has little in the way of fiddling around cards, Fauna Shaman is not at all good in this deck as it is a poor beater and slows you down if you try to abuse with things like Vengevine and the Phoenix more often than just casting and attacking would do. Skullclamp is another card that might seem to be good for giving you extra gas and reducing the issue of many small dorks however it also tends to slow you down in your quest to smashing face with big monster. Huntsmaster of the Fells is high power but I feel he is not exactly what the deck is after. To make him into a serious threat you have to flip him at least once which can slow your curve. He is vulnerable and doesn't provide as big a tempo swing as the other 4 drops in the deck.

Rakdos Deck Wins

I have been rigorously building decks using Deathrite Shaman so as to find his most suitable homes and confirm my suspicions about his vast power levels. Thus far the most impressive he has been is within a red deck wins style deck incorporating black. We have now had this new "Rakdos Deck Wins" built around 4 times each occasion taking a different slant on the idea. Some have had just a dash of black for the few very best cards such as Dark Confidant and some of the gold cards. Some have gone much heavier into black to make use of the intense black mana spells, one has had a zombie theme in it and made use of Geralf's Messengers. Another was using Chocking Sands and Sinkhole and another decided to forgo Sulphuric Vortex in favour of Necropotence. One of the best things black offers a red deck wins style deck is a bunch of solid one drop, two power beaters and so just splashing black seems less worth the effort. Regardless of the one drops the addition of black makes the deck much more robust with card advantage and removal that can deal with high toughness dorks efficiently. The Deathrite Shaman alone offers a cheap way to get through unblockable damage as well as a huge tempo boost when used as an early mana critter and is comparable to Confidant in his value in the deck. Part of this is because Confidant has bad synergy with Fireblast and Sulphuric Vortex which are two of reds best cards and not because the Shaman is a more powerful card. This list is not one that has actually been built but a midrange representation of what this sort of deck should look like. It has no particular emphasis in terms of land destruction and while it has some synergy in the discard and the zombies it is only a mild inclusion and has no cards that are weak in isolation just to support the synergy. This is a cheap list as well, one of the temptations when adding black is throwing in lots of powerful cards like Olivia Voldaren however I think this is the wrong way to go unless a specific meta choice. The deck is still based on red deck wins despite having many more tempting options and still wants both redundancy and the ability to play at near full capacity off just two lands.


24 Spells

Lightning Bolt
Chain Lightning
Goblin Guide
Diregraf Ghoul

Grim Lavamancer
Deathrite Shaman
Gravecrawler
Faithless Looting

Burst Lightning
Sarcomancy
Rakdos Cackler
Firebolt

Stromkirk Noble

Dark Confidant
Incinerate
Plated Geopede
Bloodghast

Dauthi Horror
Rakdos Charm
Dreadbore
Searing Blaze

Arc Trail

Sulphuric Vortex
Liliana of the Veil

16 Lands

Badlands
Blood Crypt
Sulphurous Springs
Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth

Wooded Foothills
Verdant Catacombs
Taiga
Bayou

Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
Teetering Peeks
Graven Cairns
Blackcleave Cliffs

Swamp
3 Mountains




Liliana is the most controversial card in this deck despite featuring in all the Rakdos deck wins built barring the black splash. In this list she has least synergy and is a lot of mana for a card that deals no damage. Unless you go the Necropotence route and have abundant card advantage I don't think you can afford to play discard spells as they become dead draws in the late game and are a slight tempo loss even when they are best in the early game. Discard is still a good sideboard solution to anything you are struggling against and not the worst filler however in ideal situations you want to follow the general rule of including only cards that deal damage. Returning to Liliana (that poor literary tangent was supposed to illustrate that without targetted discard Liliana is a little weaker), although she is a bit late to work brilliantly with the Bloodghast and Gravecrawler and doesn't follow the general rule of dealing damage she works well with the deck. Cheap burn to clear away small critters makes her edict ability much more potent and the cheap nature of the deck makes the discard ability rather one sided, not to mention filling up graveyards for Lavamancer and Deathrite Shaman. She is a difficult to deal with threat that will slowly win the game verses certain decks, a little like Vortex, and so merits one of the few top end slots.

Speaking of Vortex, it is a restrictive card in this deck as it many black spells cause you pain. Both Confidant and Vortex are a little weaker in this deck than they can be in others however they are still fine if you take them into account while building and forgo things like Fireblast (which is weaker with lower mountain counts any way) and Carnophage. Although this deck does reduce two of the most powerful cards potency a little it makes up for this by increasing the average card power level and is a rounded deck as a result.

Dreadbore is another card that doesn't deal damage yet comfortably merits its slot. It kills things much cheaper in both cards and mana. If someone gets an Elspeth online or a Baneslayer Angel before they are in direct burn range you will do whatever it takes to get them gone before they do irreparable damage. This can often mean putting most of your lands and hand in the bin and is therefore usually too much damage anyway. Dreadbore not only cleanly deals with these problem cards but also allows you a bit of spare mana to continue pulling away with the tempo. Zoo and Boros decks frequently pack Path to Exile even though it can be dead in certain matchups for much the same reason Dreadbore is a staple in this deck and one of the main reasons it is durable and rounded.


Another big contributor to the well rounded nature of this deck is Rakdos Charm. I have been highly impressed with this new Charm and place it comfortably in the top two gold charms of all time and this deck is one of the best homes for it. In the cube main deck artifact removal is always a good thing as the majority of decks contain them and many of those you will face are brutal and game ending and are much easy to play against when in the graveyard. A card like Smash to Smithereens would seem outstanding in this deck or other agro red burn decks however it is a mixed blessing. When Smash is good it is outstanding but when it is bad it does nothing which is unacceptable in a deck that requires redundancy and consistency while lacking much in the way of card quality and draw. A card was the same in all other ways to Smash to Smithereens that said "Destroy target artifact OR deal 3 damage to target player" would be vastly better in the main deck. As a sideboard card Smash is again better but I avoid putting cards into the cube that are specifically for sideboards. As a result of the inconsistency of Smash to Smithereens it will typically be replaced by much more reliable yet far lower power cards like Torch Fiend.


Rakdos Charm almost is this more maindeckable version of Smash to Smithereens and takes the slot of lower powered cards thus upping your decks overall power. Charm might not be quite as predictable as my imaginary Smash, nor as easy to cast, but it offers quite a bit more overall. The graveyard disruption is not to be underestimated in cube where many strategies try to abuse them and gives you something against some of the less interactive decks such as Reanimator. Lastly, the damage aspect can often be quite small or even nothing but it is still a damage dealer and one that every now and again will be a truly stupid amount for the mana and will lead to surprise wins out of nowhere. Any card that does something useful and and has a damage alternative is worth a look for this kind of deck. Dark Confidant, Dreadbore and Rakdos Charm are your main reasons to dip into black with your agro red deck.

Bloodghast is quite nice but this is not really the best deck for him, the double black is a touch awkward, you have no synergies with Skullclamp or sacrifice effects nor any real way to pump him. You do have a few ways to discard him profitably which is nice and the haste is fairly easy to activate which again starts to make him look pretty good. The recursion is all a bit slow however and occurs less that you might expect. He is one of those cards that will shine in some matchups and be basically irrelevant in others. A cool card and very playable but far from essential in the deck, and without good support cards, one that gets less and less good.

Dauthi Horror is the opposite end of the spectrum to Bloodghast in that it is quite weak against some matchups but very strong in others but always to different ones. They compliment each other quite nicely in this regard and allow you to keep a rounded deck even with "spikier" creatures. Horror gives you reach in an area red has nothing really going for it and is a decent tool to have at your disposal.

After goblin guide red lacks much in the way of good one mana, two power beaters. This has always been the main strength of adding white into the deck but now black has a comparable collection of one mana, two power dorks and offers other things that white does not. Diregraf Ghoul, Sarcomancy and Gravecrawler all have negligible drawbacks and give great redundancy and tempo to the deck. Gravecrawler has additional synergy with discard and any other zombies you have but like the Bloodghast these are pretty minor, in Gravecrawlers case he would still be playable in the deck as just a 2/1 that couldn't block and would be the worst of the one drop creatures. As it stands Rakdos Cackler is the weakest dork as it has no frills and offers no synergy. The only reason it is being played is because he is so consistent, having both hybrids you can always make him with any lands.


Presently this is the deck to beat in the cube, it will roll over anything silly and has good matchups across the board against the sensible decks. It can even hold out very well and go close to even against decks dedicated to beating this kind of strategy. It is harder to draft a good version of the deck as your mana base is so important however you have a much greater depth of coloured cards to chose from so you can compensate as required. It is also harder to build as you have tempting cards and synergies leading you astray while also having more cards and more viable build directions at your disposal. By using black you do make a lot of cards that are normally great in red deck wins quite a bit weaker. Sulphuric Vortex is a good example but is still suitably powerful to merit a slot. Cards like Kargan Dragonlord, Koth of the Hammer (who I think is pretty awful anyway), Figure of Destiny, Ball Lightning and Fireblast are weakened to the point of not really wanting them. Deathrite Shaman is the MVP in this deck and makes near equal use of his abilities. The early mana boost is grossly unfair when coupled with loads of cheap dorks and removal as you can get really far ahead. The later game unstoppable 2 damage per turn makes him a must kill threat who typically has more fuel than Grim Lavamancer with which to deal damage. The cheap disruption he can provide against loads of cards has also been frequently turning games, being able to exile the Kitchen Finks before it returns to play or eat up the target for Snapcaster Mage. It not only hoses these powerful cards but also entire archetypes such as the previously mentioned Reanimator which is not something red decks are used to having on tap and is proving to be a real aid in their quest in living up to their namesake - Red Deck Wins.

Top 10 Lands

Lands have some of the most broken effects, this is unsurprising as they are quite hard to balance as they each have the same "cost" as it were. Subtle changes to balancing drawbacks can drastically effect how good it is. There are a few broad categories of lands, those for fixing, those for ramping and those for utility. The latter category brakes down further into card advantage, removal and threats. It was hard to decide what constituted a cycle of lands and which should be viewed individually. The various dual lands are identical except for the colour production and so are reasonable to treat as a single kind of card. Except for the man land duals I have treated cycles which differ by more than just colour as individual cards. The reason for grouping the dual man lands together is because they would clog up too much of the list with most of them being contenders for slots.


14. Karakas
13. Treetop Village
12. Lake of the Dead
11. The Artifact Lands
10. Ancient Tomb
9.   Wastelands
8.   The Shock Lands
7.   The Dual Man Lands
6.   The Original Duals
5.   (Mishra's Workshop)
4.   The Sac Lands
3.   (Strip Mine)
2.   (Library of Alexandria)
1.   (Tolarian Academy)





Poor old Gaea's Cradle not making the cut, it turns out mass removal is just too brutal making it unreliable and/or far slower. The other notable omission is City of Traitors, lands that can tap for more than one mana are instant eyebrow raisers always worthy of much consideration. Tolarian Academy is one of the easiest lands to use that can get you more than one mana. Not only will it often tap for more than one early it starts to tap for vast amounts of mana a little further into the game. It was beyond unfair with the power still in the cube and wasn't hampered much by removing it. Mana might be the most important thing in magic but it is closely followed by cards for which Library of Alexandria is one of the most effective at getting lots of. Drawing double every turn will win you most games, even at a tempo cost which on Library is optional. Most games where you start with this in your opening hand are won by it.

Stripmine is very powerful but not quite as broken as the Library or the Academy, even Workshop for that matter. It is banned mostly because it wins games in a very tedious and un skillful manner. It is very hard to disrupt or play around and leads to more fun games when sat on the sidelines. The cycle of sac lands are the outright best dual lands in the cube, much of which is down to the existence of the other duals with the basic land types. They do still thin decks, fill up graveyards. shuffle libraries and offer countless other synergies. It is rare that any sac lands are left unplayed in a given cube session.

Mishra's Workshop is kind of a fairer version of Tolarian Academy. It only works well in artifact heavy decks but doesn't scale quite as well nor offer the most useful form of mana. Even so, 3 on one land is absurd and leads to really swingy openers. Without other unfair cards like Black Lotus, Sol Ring and an abundance of moxen Workshop is left alone as an easy and overpowered ramp land and is less unfair than when a cube is powered. As such I think it needs to be grouped with the power and only included in a cube if the rest is.



The original dual lands have no drawback other than to certain hosers which don't really have a place in cubes any ways. There is not much to say about them as they are so plain and simple. Appreciating how good these cards are is down to understanding the importance of being able to cast what is in your hand, it goes to a basic understanding of the magic mechanics. Rather than being good themselves dual lands make all your other cards better and they do this without costing you a card slot. The original duals don't even cost you life or tempo.


The dual man lands are not great duals as they go, nor are they the most exciting of threats however they are both of these things, and as previously mentioned, they do this without costing you any card slots at all. This cycle has almost single handedly made sorcery speed removal un-viable to be relied on for the control player. The shock lands are the backup for the original duals, the cost is very minor and often avoidable due to the kind optional nature of the cards. They are clearly worse but not by a significant amount. Wastelands is the fair version of Stripmine that only punishes those who are greedy with their lands and colours. It suffers some of the same problems as Stripmine but is far easier to play around.

Ancient Tomb is a fair land within the cube, it taps for two which is fantastic and just what some decks need yet the drawback keeps it in check. It is reliable and explosive but scales down in power as the game progresses rather than Academy which goes up or Workshop which stays the same roughly. The artifact lands are fantastic enablers working with affinity, metalcraft, Tinker, Goblin Welder, Trinket Mage and many other good things. They are slightly more vulnerable than normal lands but otherwise have no typical drawbacks for lands with bonuses. They wind up in a lot of decks serving a lot of different purposes. Lake of the Dead is one of my personal favourite ramp lands and is one of the more powerful cube cards to still be under the radar as it were.  You can get 5 mana on turn two without anything more fancy than another swamp! The cost of this mana boost is steep but easily recoverable in black. The set back is also less damaging than you might imagine, should you lay it on turn three and use it every turn there after and compare that to someone just making swamps and using all their mana every turn it would take till turn 8 before the swamp only player had made more mana.

Treetop Village is the best man land being robust, powerful and cheap to use. Faerie Conclave is decent but a little vulnerable and slow and the rest of the cycle are pretty weak.Village is not however a mana fixer as well and so is still weaker than the average dual man land. Karakas is a card I used to have banned as it reads "bounce a legend" which was rather over powered against lands making things like Pendlehaven and Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth unplayable, it also made it very hard to kill as it could bounce itself. Using the oracle rules to only bounce legendary dorks makes it much fairer but still powerful to the point of making legends very weak in the cube (compounded by the blue clone effects). While it can do nothing for you it is still a coloured land with no real drawbacks beyond a vulnerability to Wastelands.

Top 10 Gold Cards

This list has been one of the hardest to do thus far as it includes lots of new cards that have not been fully tested. It also contains lots of cards that never get played in the same decks at all and are really hard to compare in many ways beyond abstract power and amount played. The last two slots were also incredibly close, more so than any other group, and could have included almost any of the following; Bloodbraid Elf, Qasali Pridemage, Rakdos Charm (which has been performing incredibly well so far), Izzet Charm, Sphinx of the Steel Wind, Olivia Voldaren, Lotleth Troll, Edric Spymaster of Trest, Lightning Helix, Shardless Agent or Geist of Saint Traft all of which are so similar in their power. Another thing that has made this list very hard is the combination of gold cards and hybrid/split cards, the former being a drawback and the latter being a boost to the playability of the spells.





11. Figure of Destiny
10. Knight of the Reliquary
9.   Abrupt Decay
8.   Dreadbore
7.   Baleful Strix
6.   (Lingering Souls)
5.   Kitchen Finks
4.   Deathrite Shaman
3.   Pernicious Deed
2.   Vindicate
1.   Fire / Ice







I am at least very content with my top 3 in this list which have been in my cube since the beginning. Fire / Ice is beyond all round good, it has everything and is never dead. For a supposedly subtle card like Brainstorm it can have some seriously impactive uses that pretty much end the game which on a two mana utility card feels a little gross. Vindicate is a little more reliable removal than basically any other spell but it clunkier than Fire / Ice and harder to fit into decks. They are both of a power level that ensures you auto include them if your of the right colours and have the option to play them. Pernicious Deed has remained strong despite an inability to kill planeswalkers. It is also still one of the quickest and cheapest ways to employ mass removal in magic with the added bonus of having control enough to have the result being one sided in your favour. One of the best control cards ever printed.



Deathrite Shaman is so new it is quite hard to tell how close to the mark this mighty 4th position is. The mana aspect has been less reliable than Bird of Paradise and is closer to Arbour Elf however the other abilities have been winning games in a wide array of decks. Kitchen Finks is the epitome of a solid monster, it gives loads of board position, loads of tempo and is easy to include in decks. It is so solid that it would be in the top 10 list of control dorks and in the top 10 of agro dorks. Lingering Souls is to Call of the Herd as Tarmogoyf is to Ernham Djinn. It is versatile, good value and difficult to deal with in a way that keeps you ahead in cards and tempo. I consider it a gold card rather than a white one however it is playable in both mono white and mono black decks that have just a small amount of ability to produce the other colour from something like a Mox Diamond.


Baleful Strix is the ultimate in speed bumps where before the crown lay with Wall of Omens/Blossoms and Sakura-Tribe Elder. When you compare these cards you begin to appreciate the power of the Strix which not only provides a cheap, self-replacing body like the others but trades with almost any monster it blocks and is able to block fliers. It is also able to go on the offensive effectively with evasion and power and offers good synergy with artifact style decks. Strix is the complete package and nothing will make you feel safer as a two drop when you are the control player. Dreadbore is a bit of a Vindicate, it never goes better than one for one and can't be used in a tricky way as it isn't an instant. It makes up for this by being very fairly cost, versatile and totally unconditional. Planeswalkers and creatures are two of the most common threats in the cube and killing your choice of either, dead without question, for the same cost as a Doom Blade or an Incinerate  is a bargain.

Compared to Dreadbore Abrupt Decay trades some reliability for some versatility and trickery. It deals with most things you need and is a great early tempo removal spell. As it doesn't hit most of the most serious problem cards it is not quite the auto include that Dreadbore is however it will cause greater swings in games when it is good. Knight of the Reliquary combines a cheap powerful beater with a great utility card. You either lay it as a 4/4 or a 5/5 and beat the face in of your opponent or you use it to accelerate, colour fix and tutor up tricky lands as you need. Should you opt to use it in the latter capacity you will still have a fat beater at the end of it!

Should you not accept Lingering Souls as a gold card then the final spot on the list goes to Figure of Destiny. As a pure one drop beater it is comparable to Pouncing Jaguar as it consumes a chunk of mana, obviously it is way better but you get the idea as to why Isamru is going to better when you have a good curve out draw. Figure shines when you get flooded or when you rip him in the late game in your weenie deck full of bad late game draws. He is an acceptable one drop beater that doubles up as a serious threat without any of the drawbacks of damaging your early draws. Being playable in both red and white decks is also a great boost to the playability of the card as both of those colours employ the weenie strategy effectively.