The Decline of "Sticky" Creatures

In this article we are going to have a look at "sticky minions" which is a term from Hearthstone that refers to a creature that needs killing twice. Magic being more complicated that Hearthstone means that there are a much wider range of cards that could be considered "sticky". While these various forms will have different mechanisms at play and different synergies to exploit they do all share a couple of key elements. Sticky minions are all harder to deal with! Either they require specific removal cards or they require sinking significant resources to deal with them. They are great for maintaining a board presence or for extending with greater safety. They can often represent a big tempo swing too based on the context in which they are used. While you can get bigger tempo for your mana by using normal creatures like Baneslayer Angel, Goblin Guide and Tarmogoyf these are simply looking at tempo per mana in isolation. If you are under pressure having something that gets to block and trade twice over two turns is a huge tempo recovery. The humble Strangleroot Geist is going to be a safer defensive tool than a Goyf in a lot of situations as they cannot just Doom Blade it out of the way and carry on swinging. On the flip side if you are applying pressure and you are ahead you would far rather play a sticky minion than a normal one as mass removal will still leave you with a board. Not only does the tempo from sticky minions tend to wind up better over a number of turns than normal ones but they also tend to generate more value.

There are three broad categories I would break down the Hearthstone term sticky minion to for Magic. Those are replacement, recursive and resilient. Replacement dorks are those which automatically put something(s) onto the battlefield when they leave it or die. The two defining features of this group are that they don't require you to do anything extra to replace themselves and they only do it once. This group includes all the persist and undying creatures and then it includes things that leave token creatures behind when they die. This group is the most comparable to the Hearthstone sticky minions overall.

Recursive dorks is a more commonly used magic term that often includes the replacement dorks but not the resilient ones. In this article I wish to be a bit more specific about recursive dorks and exclude the replacement ones from it. This leaves the creatures that are able to get themselves back to the hand or battlefield in some capacity for some cost or met condition. Many recursive dorks can repeatedly bounce back into play while others only get to do it once (embalm, eternalize etc) and so you could further break down this group. It is not all that important, the first recursion is the significant one for the most part and the cost to do so is the more defining feature. Another relevant overlap in this group is that they all have synergy with discard and self mill effects. The tempo side of this group is widely varied. Some cards are decent enough tempo plays when used normally. These tend to be the more linear cards. Some can be huge tempo plays if you manage to cheat them in with synergies. Some are more about the value or even the inevitability and are less impressive tempo regardless of how you get them into play. A more relevant extension of this group would be the cards like Misthollow Griffin and the few other cards that can be played from exile. These have many similarities but don't share all the same synergies. Mostly they are interesting from a combo perspective with Food Chain! They are few enough and uninteresting enough that we can broadly ignore these for the sake of space and time. Recursive dorks, even without the persist style cards or the from exile cards is still the largest group of the three with old cards as well as new ones filling up the ranks.

The last group is the resilient dorks. You could argue they are different enough in function to the other two groups that you shouldn't be having them under the same umbrella term. In cube I think that they do wind up fulfilling many of the same roles and providing the same kinds of advantages as the cards in the other two groups. What I consider resilient dorks to be are those that are particularly hard to remove and require very specific answers. This would include such cards as True-Name Nemesis, Aetherling, Thrun, and even things like Fleecemane Lion and Falkenrath Aristocrat. The key thing about these cards is that once they are dealt with that is it, they are entirely gone and are not coming back without some external help. The reasons they feel like they belong in this group are as follows; most of the removal you can use to remove resilient dorks is the same as the removal that most effectively answers the other two groups. All three groups tax your opponent's resources in the same kind of way. The next reason is that you get to use them in the same way. If your opponent's out to your board is a mass removal spell then you drop down the dork you have that is impervious to their kinds of mass removal. If they are ahead and rely on spot removal to clear a path then a dork that has hexproof is going to be a real chore for them. The resilient dorks are a little less flexible than the replacement or the recursive ones (those that can block at least!) in which contexts they will help you out in however they are typically a lot more brutal for your opponent when they hit the right situation.

You could argue the case for a much wider range of dorks than I am considering resilient for this essay. You could call anything with regenerate or a random protection from a colour or even card type as a resilient dork. You could even call something with very high toughness to be resilient and that wouldn't be entirely inaccurate, it would be pretty true against red players! There is very much a sliding scale and I have arbitrarily cut it off at quite a high up point. Colour protection is narrow and more of a sideboard thing or gravy on an otherwise playable card. Regenerate is increasingly rare in cube and the combination of mana costs and effects that bypass it make it fairly low impact. The main things I am considering for this group are indestructible, hexproof and shroud, cheap flicker effects and broad protection mechanisms. I am also only really looking at reasonably well statted dorks for the mana that you aim to play. Obviously Progenitus and Emrakul and Ulamog and those cards are pretty resilient but they are deck defining cards you build around. They are not things you put in your deck to improve your curve and aspects of your deck!

So until fairly recently creatures that were sticky were all pretty nuts in cube. They ruined control decks for a long time and were generically good in a huge array of archetypes. Their ability to provide both value and tempo combined with their ability to proactively punish people all helped contribute to them being a fairly defining aspect of cube. A lot of the most desirable cards were the sticky ones. This is still true to a degree but the fairer or more linear options have fallen off a lot in value of late. The bombs are still bombs but the rest are far less special now. They are all a lot more counterable or beatable than they used to be. So what has changed? Why are these types of creature not holding their value? I am not suggesting they are no longer good, I am merely saying they are not as good as they where and shouldn't necessarily be picked with the same priority.

As with most things in magic I would say it is a combination of factors that has lead to the declining value of sticky dorks. Removal options have become deeper and wider. Threats have also become better. Five years plus ago there were only a handful of good cards that dealt well with something like a Kitchen Finks and it was also one of the more aggressive threats you could play. Now neither of those things hold true. Threats have also become even more diverse. More threatening lands exist, a far deeper range of planeswalkers are on offer. We now have vehicles, gods and the ability to steal and play loads of things from our opponent's deck too! There is also just a lot more on offer in the way of sticky dorks which rather reduces the demand on the fairer ones.

The largest contributor to the decline out of these factors feels like the power creep in the threats on offer. Tempo is increasingly more relevant in cube regardless of your archetype. Sticky minions are effectively back loaded. They only go above and beyond after they die (or would have). If you make a Kitchen Finks or a True Name Nemesis and they just entirely ignore it killing you with evasive threats and direct damage then your card has performed terribly. No one is playing a 3/2 that gains 2 life for 3 mana. It is not until they cast a Pyroclasm or something that you get any real tempo or value out of either of these two cards. While I asserted earlier that these cards were ultimately tempo that is exactly the problem. No one is trying to claim Ancestral Visions is better than Ancestral Recall. Having to wait four turns for your effect rather curtails its power. If the game is decided within that time frame then your card did nothing useful. The comparison is probably better between Search for Azcanta and a lot of sticky creatures. You do get something right away but it is typically not great until you get more than just the first part of the card. If your opponent can bypass or ignore your sticky minion then you have conceded tempo by playing the sticky minion over a front loaded alternative. Even if your opponent can just delay you getting much out of your sticky creature then they will be mitigating the effect that card has on the game.

Front loaded cards are more vulnerable than sticky minions but they can still offer value and they can do so without relying on their opponent to cash in. They also give the tempo right there and then when it has most value. Bloodbraid is the classic example and remains one of the premium cards for offering value and tempo simultaneously. Newer cards like Rabblemaster and Pia Nalar also act as front loaded tempo and value cards. Sure, your value is only a 1/1 token should they kill the main body but it is enough to make these cards fairly strong. While they are worse against mass removal than sticky minions this is far less of a concern than trying to maximize your tempo. There are enough non-creature threats kicking about so as to greatly reduce the value of mass removal. It is still needed but it is far less effective than you might hope. I would rather have high threat and tempo dorks in my creatures slots and have things like planeswalkers in the slots I previously may have tried to fill out more with sticky creatures.

Another element of this is simply the level of threat any given card poses. A Kitchen Finks is not all that threatening. It has no evasion, it doesn't do something every turn it stays in play nor does it represent that frightening of a clock. This makes it a whole lot easier to ignore and thus reduce the value of the persist. More dangerous cards command reactions from your opponent and quickly. If you let someone untap with a Chandra flipwalker there is a very real chance they are just going to kill you. 20 to 0 is a real possibility now too with Insult. Even cards like Thermo Alchemist represent a higher threat level in most cases than a Kitchen Finks. If I can force you to blow removal on my two drop and forgo playing what you wanted to play on your turn that is quite a big win. This is usually the case even if it is a straight one for one trade. Threats are better than answers in the cube and a lot more numerous.

Tireless Tracker is another great example of a threatening threat. It both generates card advantage over time and grows in size and as such generally needs killing. The player with an unkilled Tracker in play is the heavy favourite in any longer game. Cards like these tax your opponents answers and their game plan far more than sticky dorks. They also have the advantage of winning the game quickly when compared to the sticky minions. The faster you are winning the less chance you give your opponents to turn it around. Rampaging Ferocidon is another new example. You can easily 1 for 1 it with a Doom Blade or most other average 2 CMC+ spot removal. In my old school way of thinking this makes it a bit of a risk. The thing is, when they don't kill it the card is a complete beating. It has some evasion, it disrupts and it does direct damage. It threatens in multiple ways and it does so well. It really does feel like you either need an immediate answer to it or you needed to be extremely ahead before it came down to beat it. The main thing that has changed and makes my old school risk assessment of this card off is that there are just so many high threat level cheap cards in the cube now. If you have more than your opponent has good answers for then the one that sticks will win the game. We are well past the critical mass of good stand alone threats that you don't need to try and grind out value with safer more resilient dorks.

I did state that there was more removal which was one of the reasons sticky dorks were getting worse. Then I also said that threats were better and more numerous than answers in cube which may have come across as a contradiction. Certainly red and black have gained some exile effects which help a lot against the sticky minions. White has also greatly filled its ranks with more good exile removal, including two that don't target! Yes, a Pillar of Flame is a perfect Answer to a Kitchen Finks and an Arc Trail is the perfect answer to a Pia Nalaar and yes, in theory you could have a deck with more removal than the number of threats likely to be played against you. This is overlooking when you have the Arc Trail when they have the Finks, when you have the Pillar when they have the Pia, when they have either and you have neither or indeed when you have both and they have nothing. In all those other situations you are behind or at best, doing nothing to get ahead. This is fundamentally why threats are better than removal. I'm not saying don't play removal, I am just trying to illustrate why tempo is so important in cube and why good threats are the best way to get it.

One final but minor point is that there is also more in the way of things to protect your dorks or get them back. White has a bunch of new tools to make their things indestructible and green and black have way more in the way of recursive effects on otherwise good cards. The increased abundance of these kinds of effects further improve the value of cheap effective threat cards and reduce the value of sticky dorks.

Sticky minions are still great and still see lots of play. They are just coming down in power level to quite a nice healthy place. They don't define the goings on in the cube meta as they used to and are just nice things to supplement decks with here and there. My plan is to follow this article with three top X lists for the three various kinds of sticky minions presently in the cube, the recursive, the resilient and the replacement. That should hopefully show where those cards sit and how good they are in the present state of cube.

Card Spotlight: Adanto Vanguard

I didn't know exactly where to place this on initial reviews as it has a lot going for it but is also very awkward. It is also somewhat of a filler dork akin to a Porcelain Legionnaire, Loyal Cathar or Daring Skyjek! There are lots of such cards and you just use them to pad out your deck with suitable cheap spells. Vanguard is all sorts of awkward in that he offers no human synergy, is a lame crewman for vehicles and a lame blocker for much the same reasons. He is also yet another one toughness dork that increases your vulnerability to -X/-X effects and to some degree ping effects as well. I was a little concerned that this inconveniences would stop this filler level card getting much play. Turns out however that you really don't care. This is all about being an indestructible two drop that attacks in a relevant way. I initially thought you would need to be heavily aggressive to really play this as well as four life is uncomfortable in slower decks and the card is generally a lot worse on the defensive. Wrong again! While this certainly isn't a control card I am very happy running it in a number of places other than very aggressive white decks.

I think my average life paid with this card is around ten per game in which I play it. It has been oppressive in much the same way as True Name Nemesis is. Obviously you can block this and you can interact with it much more with spells, that mostly just makes it better designed! Technically you don't have infinite life to pay to keep this indestructible either. In practice I have found that you are pulling so far ahead on the board every time you use the ability that games are won before you can do yourself critical damage. I had a situation where I was just an aggressive white deck and I had this beating down with a Declaration in Stone in Hand. My opponent just made a Flesh Carver which for most other dorks in play would have been enough to bait the Declaration so that I might keep up the pressure. I reasoned I was better off in the situation allowing him to chump and conserve my other non-life resources. While allowing him to save 6 life is a much bigger deal than paying 8 myself it not only saved my removal but more critically my mana. This let me further develop my board. Slightly later in the game my opponent made what appeared to be a big swing with a fully cast Lingering Souls. It probably would have won the game had I not been able to remove them all for two mana and continue the aggression with my developed board.

True Name is a very hard card to deal with but it is three mana for the same attacking stats and more colour intense. It is also vulnerable to much more mass removal than Vanguard. True Name is good when you are threat light but if you are looking to go at all wide then it falls off a lot in value. Vanguard scales in the other direction. Both are really good for getting a very sticky cheap dork on the board and both are even better when you have equipment. It was a recent UW tempo control deck I built in which the power of Vanguard really stood out. The combination of it being so cheap and so hard to get off the board makes it a perfect thing to slap equipment on. While it might lack some synergy with some things white likes to do this matter little as it is the perfect counter to things white hate. It lets you abuse equipment with greater safety and it also lets you go wide with greater safety and they are your two main plans and an aggressive white player. If you ever stick a turn one Mother of Runes and follow it with Vanguard you have a more resilient threat than True Name! All in all Adanto Vanguard is a pretty big addition to white. It is a premium two drop threat for any aggressive strategy where white is a main colour but it also has application in other archetypes which very few other white two drops have achieved. This puts it in the same camp as Selfless Spirit and Stoneforge Mystic which is pretty impressive stuff. White cares so little for life, it has nothing much to spend it on and it great at generating it should it wish. If this were a black card, even with the more relevant tribe, it would be a whole lot weaker. Life is a more precious resource in black and they have rather more in the way of sticky dorks than don't block so well! So yeah, play this in your white decks and pay life to keep it alive often and without fear and you will do well. Put a Jitte on it and people will loath you...

Cards that are much better in constructed and why

Now I talk about cards that are overrated a lot in cube, two of the main ones are Tarmogoyf and Jace, the Mind Sculptor. While both are still good cards neither has anywhere near the strength they do in constructed. Being someone who almost entirely looks at Magic from the perspective of a cube player I generally think people overrate a lot of things like Jace. In reality constructed is a bigger part of the Magic scene than cube and as such I am the minority. If we are talking about all formats combined then I am very much the one who underrates Jace and Goyf! It is pretty understandable when people play cube they translate from what they know. If they know a world where Jace is the best planeswalker by a long way they are more include to assume that would be the case for cube. It is quite an odd one as planeswalkers in general are far better in cube yet Jace isn't anywhere near as far ahead of the pack, they all get better but for some reason Jace does not, or at least not by the same proportion.

I have recently been watching a lot of Channel Fireball videos for a wide array of constructed decks. Mostly legacy and some modern but with a smattering of standard and vintage too. I usually stay interested long enough to watch a game or two. I always love to see innovative deck ideas and the reasoning behind subtle choices in refined tier one meta defining lists too. While watching such games it became vividly clear why Jace and Goyf and some other big names earn their reputation. It was clear and obvious in the context of each individual game why Jace was so powerful but it was less clear to me why this was a general case. There must be some fundamental difference between cube and constructed that make these cards change in potency. Obviously there are many differences between the two formats and they are generally pretty obvious. The issue is trying to find a mechanism which logically explains why it is happening. I want to understand what aspects of the formats lead to this change in power of cards.

To probe at a mechanism I needed to get a broader picture of which cards perform better or worse in cube than constructed. That would in turn allow me to get a better idea of the kinds of card, the sort of attributes they have, that makes them either better or worse. I looked through my cube and "the average 720 cube" and marked out all the cards that are far better in cube and those that are stronger in constructed. Obviously knowing cube better and doing it from the cards in my cube I mostly found cards that are better in cube. To even up the scales I started looking through constructed decks across many formats and did the same. With lots of cards to look at you start to get a feel for what the various attributes are that have bias either way. It is well known that synergy cards perform a lot better in constructed. I was trying to look beyond that as much as possible.

Some of the biggest offenders presently are Death's Shadow, Gurmag Angler and Tarmogoyf. All of which benefit from synergies quite heavily and all of which are far better in constructed than cube. Shadow in particular is weak in cube as it is the only card that really works with low life (already my mind is plotting some cube sillyness with Argual's Blood Fast...) and so it isn't worth building around. The other two are certainly both very playable in cube and easy enough to support. You see a lot more 7/8 and 8/9 Goyfs in cube than you do in constructed even if the average size is lower. These three cards are very alike in that they are all just vanilla dorks with an extreme cost to stats ratio. Looking past the synergies for these cards you can see that constructed magic values linear efficiency significantly more than cube. A fat vanilla dork is rarely impressive in cube. Zoo is the only deck that really wants dorks that just offer good cost to stats ratios in cube. All the others want a bit more card value, utility or action on their cards.

Jace is also nothing like these cards and by far and away the biggest anomaly. Jace isn't linear nor is he cheap. It kind of blew my mind how much he was getting played in legacy given that he is so clunky to play. There is a very different reason as to why Jace is so potent in constructed. There are in fact loads of reasons but one main one. It ultimately does come down to the same reasoning behind the Anglers and Goyfs as well. Unsurprisingly it also derives from the nature of constructed formats in that they allow upto 4 copies of a card and have to make up a total of sixty. I am not even really going to look at access to cards, which is generally restricted in cube due to mostly being drafted in some way or another. I am pretty much comparing constructed 40 card singleton cube decks to 60 card constructed decks and how that affects the scaling of certain cards.

Constructed decks on the whole are far more direct and narrow than cube decks. They do their thing and they aim to do it as quickly and efficiently as possible. They are also significantly more aware of what they will need to combat in the meta and how damaging those cards are to their strategy. Constructed decks typically run about 12 distinct spells, obviously this is an average. Some 28 land constructed decks can go as low as 8 different spells while some exotic vintage decks are packing well over 40 unique spells. The norm tends towards lower numbers for much the same reasons that you don't exceed your minimum card limit for decks. Twelve is also a nice number to estimate at because it is exactly half of what you play in your typical cube deck which is an average of 24 unique spells per deck and with a far far smaller range. By this logic you can roughly assert that a cube deck will be half as consistent as a constructed one in terms of being able to follow a plan. You can also say that you will have to deal with more unusual and unexpected stuff in cube than in constructed.

Constructed decks being able to do their things more consistently gives them incentive to be even more linear. If their thing wins and they can do it quickly then they only need to worry about exactly the the things that stop their thing or that can win faster. This combined with knowing a bit better of what to expect from archetypes and the meta in general means constructed decks tend to be more polar. They will often wind up with some cards that are super hard for them to beat main deck and a bunch of main deck cards that will wind up dead in some matchups. Cards all have a specific purpose in constructed be that disrupting the scary things or working towards your own end game plan.

Constructed decks can often feel like they have been built as a 50ish card deck and a 25ish card sideboard with the most generally applicable sideboard cards run main. Only the most proactive decks in the meta can be all cards towards their own goal. Despite the meta and matchup based pre sideboarding aspect of constructed decks the remaining cards are typically much more on theme than is achievable in cube. I talk about being on and off theme quite a lot in cube where it is more important to have every card in the deck as being on theme however the remit of said theme will be significantly broader in cube. Constructed decks having more synergy based plans and better access to those cards means their theme cards are typically of a narrow range of cards that have a very specific game plan in mind. The theme for a cube deck will be substantially more vague and thus allow for many more kinds of cards to work in that archetype.

So, what does all this mean? The one fundamental thing I was noticing about constructed when compared to cube is how many games were won or lost based on running out of gas. People ran out of gas that much quicker  in constructed with a higher number of dead cards in their main decks and a generally lower curve. The preside boarding aspect of constructed also means lots of cheap one for one removal being used which also hastens the rate at which players run out of gas. If one player ran out of action and the other did not then they lost. In cube it is super rare to run out of action. Most games are won or lost while both players still have stuff going on. Even when you don't have any gas in hand there is a wealth of things to be getting on with in cube. You will be able to level up a dork, activate a utility land, flashback something in the bin, cash in a bunch of clues, etc. It is for this reason I value tempo so highly in cube and have found cards like Fact or Fiction and other high end pure value cards to be hard to use and far weaker than in other formats. If mostly you are dying with things still to do then you don't really need more cards, you need to be doing more sooner! Constructed decks typically can't do more sooner, they are already finely tuned to be as quick as possible at doing their thing.

When individual cards matter more as they do in constructed the value of seeing more of them increases. A big part of what makes Jace so good is that you get to see three more cards a turn if you wish. If you have shuffle effects he also negates any dead cards you might have drawn. The extra physical card is better in constructed and so is the ability to go three deep into your deck. More on Jace later as we are going to return to the efficient fatties.

In a format where you are often trading one for one and it can often wind up as last man standing you really want that last man to be able to end the game quickly. By winning quickly you reduce the draw steps your opponent gets. Obviously this applies in all formats but it is far more significant in constructed. Both because of the polar nature of potential draws and because resources are consumed that much faster. In cube you are looking for the reliability of the threat more than the raw speed of it. Cube threats tend to be more tenacious. They often go wide or go over or go through, they are often hard to remove or generate ongoing value. This is because cube is far more cluttered than constructed. A Tarmogoyf is fairly unreliable threat in cube because there will be things to block it most of the time. It doesn't quickly close out a game which is why you play the card in constructed.

A friend argued that Goyf was basically a combo card these days when used with black one mana discard. Inquisition and Thoughtsieze are incredibly potent turn one plays that heavily disrupt the opponent but that fall off in value as the game goes on (in any format). If you follow either of those with a Goyf you can try and end the game while the effects of your discard still resonate hard.

Back now to another major part of what makes Jace the best planeswalker outside of cube. When you are facing down a single vanilla fatty, regardless of size, the -1 to bounce it is immensely effective. In cube you are lucky to be able to make that sort of play without instantly losing the Jace to their board, perhaps a man land, or just some haste dork. Jace can buy you that extra turn in constructed which will then let you see four extra cards on that turn and with all your mana active. In those four you can either find the answer to their threat and win from the value and control of the Jace or just find the things your deck does and win with those things!

Other more subtle elements also factor in to the strength of Jace in constructed. Things like Abrupt Decay and Lightning Bolt (if you +2 to avoid it) and other premium removal simply don't deal with it. The +2 is also a lot more powerful on a deck with polar draws and potentially out of gas as well. Yet another factor in the performance of Jace in constructed is that you only see him when he is the right card for the deck. In cube it it such a potent card you see it rammed into loads of places where it isn't so optimal. While this doesn't make the card any less good it does hurt its performance.

In cube the raw power of the effects on a planeswalker are not quite so important, you are just playing a planeswalker to be a good all round card. Either it will get value over time or it will trade with something and stall out your opponent. Most also have the perk of being able to win the game either through their ultimate or through generating dorks or even doing direct damage. While Jace is still a great card in the cube he does fall down a little when compared with some of the alternatives. Take Ob Nixilus Reignited for example, a decidedly average walker but a pretty classic template of gain a card or deal with a dork, much like Jace. Both go to 2 loyalty when they deal with a dork but Ob actually kills it and so when you invariably lose your two loyalty walker to a shock or something the Ob has gone one for one and bought you time while Jace has gone zero for one. When you use the card draw mode Ob goes to a healthy 6 loyalty while Jace sticks on 3. Yes, a Brainstorm is wildly better than draw a card and lose a life but you are using them in much the same way and in much the same situations. You are probably winning or desperate. Being able to grow in loyalty and become both safer and more threatening is a much bigger win when you are able to hit the value button. It is essentially doing multiple things and not just one thing. Greater safety, immediate value or the ability to do two things at once such as the plus one on Ob are the hallmarks of a good cube walker. Jace is just a little less well suited to cube than he is constructed. His raw power carries him and keeps him in the tier one bracket but he doesn't stand out from the crowd.

So that is basically it! My key finding was that people run out of things to do in constructed far quicker than in cube. The greater redundancy and consistency from fewer distinct spells empowers synergies which speed up the format and in turn make archetypes more linear. That in turn demands more focused disruption which of course also has to be cheap. This means draws are more polar and resources are depleted much quicker. Cube has such a motley assortment of cards that you never know what you are going to have to deal with. Decks need to be more rounded and capable. As cube is a slower format and decks cannot rely on synergies as much to empower them the range of cards they can ignore is much smaller. I find it pretty fascinating how a few differences in the nature of construction provide a cascade of effects which result in significant differences to power levels of cards. Although some things are obvious a number of them are much more subtle and only become significant when combined with the many other subtle changes. It does seem that all of the differences favour Jace, the Mind Sculptor when going from cube to constructed which explains why he is such a bomb in constructed and just good in cube, at least to my satisfaction!

The Buck Cube - update

I have updated the Buck Cube list for Ixalan, the intervening sets and based on testing results. The current recommended list can be found here;

http://www.cubetutor.com/viewcube/84936

I am very impressed with how it plays in general. It is as expected a cross between my unpowered cube and booster draft. It is slower pace game but it is still highly involved, diverse and interactive. It keeps all the things that make magic good and cube the best format and it lets you enjoy it a bit longer! Much is the same for the buck cube as with the conventional cubes with a pretty significant overlap of cards. The archetypes are much the same, just slower and less powerful. It was awsome fun getting to play with great cards that don't compete anymore in the conventional builds of cube. I got to smash face with a Spiritmonger! I got to appreciate more classically good cards, just a big flier or something with hexproof or regenerate is quite a big deal again! It felt very balanced and generally just a whole lot fairer. I would highly advocate it as a format for a whole load of different reasons. I got to sac a changeling that I was given from a Crib Swap to a Skeletal Vampire to make more bats! Many cube firsts in the buck cube.

The only issue I was having with the format is consistency stemming from the mana. All the dual lands come in tapped and there just are not huge numbers of them. Also, the more you pile on extra EtB tapped lands the weaker they and your deck become. Three colour decks are risky and rare. Mono colour decks have a noticeable two fold advantage too. They have all untapped lands and no chance of colour screw from fewer duals. Colour intense spells were very unappealing inclusions in two colour decks as well. Many of my refinements reflect these findings. I have cut a lot of the spells with double of a coloured mana symbol. I also added pain lands, they are sorely needed, more ideally, and they are the most budget option. There are plenty of ways to address and solve this mana consistency issue. One of which is reduced size, I advocate around a 480 cube for this format if possible so as to increase the effective number of lands. I also advocate deviating from the buck build idea on a few planeswalkers and a lot of lands.

It is way to early days to be calling the buck cube the best magic format or anything like that. I am obviously immensely biased and given that I think cube is the best magic format by a significant margin it is no shock I think formats within that group are going to shine. I will say it seems wildly better than pauper or peasant formats. I would also say it is the most magic you can get on a budget. You can spend a couple of hundred pounds and never run out of magic fun. You will get far more longevity from it than a boardgame, more than for twice your investments worth of boardgames! You cannot really play any constructed format, certainly not in an ongoing capacity, for anywhere near that amount of money. Constructed magic is very expensive and limited adds up quickly. You can just get a couple of dual decks or something and that is a cheaper way to play magic from nothing but that has nothing like the longevity of the other magic options. If you are someone who wants to play magic anything from several times a week to once every couple of months and want to find the way that maximises all of value for money, fun and longevity then the buck cube crushes the competition.

Energy (non-Aetherworks) .dec

With all the recent success of Temur energy decks in standard at the moment I thought it was high time to design a cube version of the deck. I have used energy mechanics in cube before but in an Aetherworks Marvel build. While it was some of the most fun I have had playing cube I did get rather stomped. Marvel is too demanding and too narrow of a combo for cube. While you can get it just about workable it is very low tier and likely just a directly worse deck than multiple alternate combo options. While the non-combo energy cards are a whole lot fairer and less abusive than Marvel they are at least more redundant and work better with non-energy cards. Just having decent cards with an energy theme is likely the best way to use energy in cube. Most block mechanics fail in cube due to the lack of depth. I think the general high power level and reasonable stand alone ability of the cards in the energy deck give it a better chance than most. It certainly won't be an affinity but I expect it to be competitive. If you could run multiple Whirler Virtuoso and Longtusk Cube I think the deck would actually start to look good. They are clearly the best energy payoff cards being cheap, proactive, decent stand alone deals and able to spend energy at instant speed. I have tried to compensate for a scarcity in these cards as you shall see in the list.


25 Spells

Attune with Aether
Greenbelt Rampager
Thriving Turtle
Cloudfin Raptor

Birds of Paradise
Lightning Bolt

Harnessed Lightning
Longtusk Cub
Servant of the Conduit
Voltaic Brawler

Thriving Grubs
Aether Chaser
Fire / Ice (or Coiling Oracle)

Shardless Agent
Aethersphere Harvester
Rogue Refiner
Whirler Virtuoso

Nissa, Voice of Zendikar
Volt Charge
Aethertorch Renegade / Architect of the Untamed
Rishkar, Peema Renegade

Bristling Hydra
Glimmer of Genius
Bloodbraid Elf
Tezzeret's Gambit

15 Lands

Aether Hub
Island
Mountain
Forest
11 More non-basic duals!


I opted for a land light build as this deck has little in the way of mana sinks. Flooding out is going to be more damaging than being low on mana. There are certainly some cards you could add in that would improve your situation when flooding. Walking Ballista is an obvious example but there are many more. I looked at some of the energy Module cards as potentials but they are only good when you have excess mana, they are pretty weak prior to that point.

The cascade cards are an easy include for this deck which I would class as a tempo midrange deck. You don't have to hurt your build much to include them. You don't really want countermagic any way. They will often cascade into energy cards and feel like synergy plays. They do make pump spells worse which in turn makes a couple of things like Electrostatic Pummeler less interesting. Given that the cascade dorks are some of the best cards in magic I don't think we will miss the silly Pummeler which is more of a combo thing anyway.

The thing that felt like it tied this deck together was the proliferate! It is cute that it gives you energy if you have one already but far more relevantly it pumps all your dorks with +1/+1 counters on them which is rather a lot of them. I was rather short on good energy playables, the deck was already a little bit mixed with cards like Voltaic Brawler and Glimmer of Genius. Adding in more energy cards was just going to turn into a random pile of cards with no direction. Just having "energy" on the card doesn't give you direction, you need to have a plan on your route to victory and your cards all need to work towards that goal. By filling out the last part of the deck with a couple of proliferate cards and a couple of good stand alone +1/+1 counter dorks I was able to keep a higher overall power level, keep the synergy between the cards looking impressive and all without going off theme from a midrange tempo build.

I did get a little bit excited with the proliferate idea to start with and was looking at Thrumming Bird and Hardened Scales! While this are very powerful synergy cards they both stink on their own and that is well worth avoiding where possible. This deck looks like it has enough to carry its own weight without having to lean on getting specific abusive card pairings on the go. Throne of Geth would be one of the most efficient proliferators on offer if you did want to go more down that route as you have a number of servos easily generated. Aether Swooper would very much come in if that was your plan.

Even with the good and on theme energy, +1/+1 counter and proliferate cards this deck was still a little bit short. I just padded it out with some generic gold "good anywhere" cards and some premium one drops. They help a little with the curve and power level and are fairly replaceable. I have offered up the best cards in those couple of slots but any of the less good one mana burn and ramp would be OK to. Ideally I would have more synergy cards I could use but it is rare to have many of those in the low CMC end.

One of my concerns for this deck is ability to close the game. It is fine when it just rolls people as it will with good draws or against bad ones as is that case with any tempo deck. The issue is when you get into longer games. As discussed, this deck already suffers from land being less use late game. This can be compensated for with creature and utility lands to some extent but it will hurt your speed or your consistency to do so and is especially dangerous to do so heavily in a 15 land deck. Fliers or a single dork getting excessively big are the ways this deck wins once the game goes longer. While these can and will get the job done some of the time they will also fall short sometimes too. Wrath effects will punish this list fairly hard. Having the bigger flier or an endless supply of chumps also fairly well counters this deck's win mechanisms in the mid and late game. Aethertide Whale is a really solid card to give you a lot of extra reach and game closing potential. It is super safe but it is also a six drop. To include it I would make this more of a slower value midrange deck and go upto 16 lands.

Aethertorch Renegade and Architect of the Untamed were presented as an option on either. These are my concessions to lacking a good finisher and to having too few Cubs and Virtuoso. I really wanted to throw in Den Protector style cards and Traverse the Ulvenwald simply to increase the time I would have access to such cards! Any way, both Aethertorch Renegade and Architect of the Untamed are rather unknown quantities, I have never played with or against either nor ever seen them being used. One is bigger, the other provides more energy right away. One has more early utility, the other more late game utility and value. I suspect the Renegade is the more useful overall despite being smaller and ultimately less value. While 6/6s are all big and fat they are not really solving any problems. Six in the face is reach and it is planeswalker control. Seems a bit weak but it also seems like it is probably what you need more. One issue is simply a lack of sufficient energy generation. Getting 8 or even 16 energy is not going to be an easy thing. It will be slow and take a lot of the utility away from your other energy cards. You could play more things like Puzzleknots and Empyreal Voyager but then you are putting in weak stand alone cards again. Perhaps Architect of the Untamed will be better in practice as it can generate a lot of energy over a long enough time.

The draw spells in the deck are a little out of place given that this is supposed to be a tempo deck. Glimmer simply seems too powerful to not play when we are short on energy cards. Gambit is also pretty cheap and could be a massive tempo swing should you have sufficient countered up dorks! Having draw effects does make up a little bit for lacking mana sinks. Perhaps more contained cards like Dack Fayden would be better. I shall certainly leave a comment once I get round to playing with this deck highlighting the stinkers and the bombs. I look forward to playing with it, lots of interesting cards which I have had very little experience with and that offer a wealth of options sounds like a lot of fun.

New Donate

Following on from my last article of trying to find combo decks that my particular friend might enjoy we have this little number. Rather than be a combo deck housed in a midrange deck this is one housed in a control deck. While it does still rely on winning with the combo in almost all cases this is not a problem in the same way as it is with speed based combo decks. Most combo decks try and win quickly and when they don't they are typically dead in the water. They often have no means of recovering bad situations. The combo control decks, of which there are a surprisingly large number, can recover games. They can play from behind and they can deal with things. You replace the conventional control win conditions like Aetherling with your combo and you have a fairly similar deck. The advantage of doing this is winning out of nowhere, you can win quickly or just before you die should your opponent let their guard down. It costs you a little in consistency but it gives you a big edge in a lot of matchups. Other examples of combos that can easily be worked into control shells are Splinter Twin and Erratic Explosion.

Illusions Donate was a bad cube combo. It had very little redundancy, it had useless individual cards and the combo was very slow and vulnerable. It also really struggled against people who manage to gain life as the combo didn't then win the game. All in all it was one of the weakest cube translations of a successful constructed combo deck. Fast forward a couple of decades and we have some new tools that feel like they propel the archetype into the realms of Splinter Twin quality. Harmless Offering is another Donate giving us a healthy amount of redundancy for half of our combo.

The more important new card is Demonic Pact. This works as another Illusions of Granedur except it is a far better stand alone card and a more reliable win. Donate being a weak card on its own is hugely mitigated by doubling the things it works with. Demonic Pact is actually a good control card in a lot of ways. I did a bit of experimenting with it when it first came out using it with flicker effects and in Replenish builds. The most success I had was in a pretty standard control deck with a few ways to bounce it. If you are not basically dead on the turn you pass having made Pact you will be pulling really far ahead over the next 3 turns. Having to make a 4 mana card and then wait three more whole turns before completing your combo is only something you can hope to do in a control deck. Illusions on the other hand doesn't do as much as you might think to protect you. Twenty life is nice but you have to pay upkeep for it next turn meaning your combo is either a nine mana total combo or a seven mana in one turn combo. It also doesn't kill them until they can't pay the upkeep. I have lost a number of games after Donating an Illusions away simply because they had a massive board able to attack me down from my massive life total over the few turns they had while able to afford the upkeep.

The addition of red for Offering means a three colour deck but red does help you out against cheeky players who manage to get just above 20 life. You can keep it to a light splash and you can also benefit from some nice high powered gold cards to aid you along the way. This is a Grixis control shell that uses four threat and top end slots for the four combo cards. The only other real change is a slight bent towards card draw, filtering and dig. Obviously more of such things shouldn't hinder the control plan, they should in fact help it. They will certainly help the combo element in a big way.  Any way, I am pretty sure my friend will be into this combo deck more than most as it was his idea and suggestion. He can just win with Creeping Tar Pit as his backup should that need arise!


24 Spells

Serum Visions
Preordain
Duress
Fatal Push

Vampiric Tutor

Remand
Arncane Denial
Impulse
Fire / Ice

Into the Roil
Baleful Strix
Dreadbore
Jace, Vryn's Prodigy / Snapcaster

Talisman of Dominance

Donate
Harmless Offering
Toxic Deluge
Kolaghan's Command

Dack Fayden / Daretti, Ingenious Iconoclast

Demonic Pact
Illusions of Grandeur
Damnation
Cryptic Command

Force of Will


16 Lands


The deck is pretty standard. You stay alive, ideally you make a Pact, then you stay alive a bit longer and a bit easier. Then you Donate away the Pact when it has only the bad option left forcing your opponent to lose in their upkeep or should you fail to have found such a card, simply bounce it back to your hand and start again! There are tonnes and tonnes of options for this deck. Any removal, countermagic, draw or other control staples are easy to throw in. I would like to have some mechanism to recur my things from the bin but sadly there are not many good on theme options in these colours. Elixir of Immortality is very low value and very imprecise. This list doesn't have the mana to abuse things like Yawgmoth's Will and the various Time Twister effects are risky as well as pricey.

The Force of Will is a bit iffy in this list. Much as it is exactly what you want in control and combo decks I fear it lacks this to pitch. This list has more cards you don't want to exile than most control decks and less blue cards than most as well. This list is also a little light on big ways to refill compared to control. Short of the draw on Demonic Pact you have no cards that do much to increase your hand size. While not a big issue for the way the deck is planning to work it is more of an issue for the viability of the Force of Will. I am reluctant to cut it as free countermagic is super important if you are trying to combo off on curve with Illusions into Donate. You can't wait due to the cumulative upkeep and so you have no mana spare. Pact of Negation isn't a good option either as you are not winning on the spot. Thwart might be one of the better options! Hopefully either this or the Vizier list will appeal to my friend and let him enjoy the wonders of combo magic!

Vizier CoCo

A friend of mine revealed to me that he didn't like combo decks. He likes playing good card not loads of dead and narrow stuff. Given that he is the only person to have ever build a "value" Aluren deck I should have worked it out... I love me a combo deck and feel like he is missing out. As such I have devised a more palatable kind of combo deck for him to have a go with. I do somewhat see where he is coming from, in a singleton format with lots of exile effects able to hit cards anywhere in the game a combo deck can be a bit dicey. He doesn't want to just pick up his cards because Ashiok/Gonti hit one of a couple of things in his deck.

There are numerous types of combo deck and most focus entirely on the combo (assuming it is a game winning or infinite one, otherwise it is just synergy in my books) with just a smattering of interaction and protection.  Lots of combo decks have a backup plan, either a worse version of their main combo or another different combo with some useful overlaps in the deck. For a number however the backup plan is simply being a deck and attacking with dorks. Melira Pod and all the versions and evolutions of that deck in modern is a good example of such a deck. When translated into the cube however that kind of deck (which recently did a deck tech on) has so many options and combos that you run out of space very quickly. You certainly can win on beatdowns but your dorks are mostly awkward combo ones and you have so many combo wins that your beat down backup plan is plan D or something.

This list cuts all bar one of the combos from the Melira Pod list making it super space efficient. It fits neatly into a Bant CoCo shell and leaves loads of room for high power stand alone cards many of which aid the combo indirectly. This list has disruption, value, high power level, good stand alone cards and a very good chance of winning by turning sideways should the combo be off the table. This deck will stand up to aggressive decks in a longer game better than most other combo decks. It will also threaten control decks conventionally and with the combo potential making it super hard to play around.

For those unfamiliar with the modern deck the idea is to get an active Devoted Druid into play alongside a Vizier of Remedies. That interaction provides infinite green mana as the Druid never kills himself in his devotion. You then use this mana to make a sufficiently lethal Walking Ballista. Duskwatch Recruiter is a good way to go and find it should you not have it. Here is my cube list for the deck;


24 Spells

Avacyn's Pilgrim
Birds of Paradise
Noble Hierarch
Mother of Runes

Swords to Plowshares

Vizier of Remedies
Devoted Druid
Walking Ballista
Duskwatch Recruiter

Fauna Shaman
Qasali Pridemage
Scavenging Ooze
Selfless Spirit

Coiling Oracle

Kitchen Finks
Spell Queller
Tireless Tracker
Eternal Witness

Recruiter of the Guard
Vendilion Clique
Champion of Wits
Nissa, Vastwood Seer

Reflector Mage

Collected Company

16 Lands (including Gavony Township)




There are lots of options for this deck, it turns out Bant has a wealth of tasty creatures for three or less mana. For generically high powered things you have True-Name, Courser of Kruphix, Rishkar, Thalias and so on. No shortage on options for power! The thing is this deck is restricted by the desire to play Collected Company. As such you want mostly 3CMC dorks or less giving you far less range than usual. Preordains, Remands and spot removal all sounds lovely but all decrease the value of the CoCo. It is only one card so you don't want to gimp yourself too much by pandering to it. The trick is simply to play a range of creatures that will help out with your problems. Clique is hand disruption, Spell Queller a counterspell, Reflector Mage a removal spell and so forth. This desire to have useful and diverse effects on dorks leaves less space for the generically good things. Once you have a tool box of utility and solution dorks the various ways to tutor and dig for creatures in your list gain in value.

One of the main issues with keeping the deck as mainly cheap dorks is that it becomes quite hard to push through. You can stay in the game and even pull ahead but actually sealing the deal with these kinds of dorks is hard to do. The lands can help out loads in this area. Colonnade is a total bomb regardless of what Azorius deck you put it in. Gavony Township is equally dangerous in this deck and both are pretty free inclusions. Other man lands are fine too. Even Westvale Abbey could serve as an alternative to Gavony, or even as well as if you are happy with your ability to cast things. Less free inclusions would be something like a Venser, the Sojourner. He doesn't help the combo nor does he work with the CoCo. He is however a good value tool in a deck like this and a card very well able to break stalemates and even just win on the spot. Elspeth, Knight-Errant is a better and less narrow all round card that would do much the same sorts of things in the deck but this is the ideal Venser deck so it feels like a missed opportunity not playing him!

Plenty of other good support card exist, tutors like Chord of Calling are played heavily in modern lists now. Spellskite and Sylvan Safekeeper are further protection options for your stuff. Renegade Rallier is a nice way to get back discarded or destroyed things. Fiend Hunter style cards give extra removal options for dorks. The aim of this list was keeping it streamlined and minimizing the weak cards so that it can function like a good midrange deck as well as a combo deck. All the cards I mention here go a little deep on the combo, you are starting to become narrow or sacrifice power and utility by playing too many. I considered a light splash into black for Viscera Seer and ideally also a Deathrite Shaman but this is the combo player in me pulling me away from the task at hand!

I did play Fauna Shaman and Recruiter of the Guard which are both low power level cards that are of great help in assembling the combo. You need some dedicated support in finding the combo and these two are the least painful inclusions. They work with the CoCo and your suite of rounded utility dorks and they are not the worst tempo plays.While my friend may turn his nose up at these tutoring dorks I think there is little point in running the combo if you strip out any more of the support for it. You could certainly replace either of these dorks with a Chord of Calling or an Eladamri's Call but not for something unrelated to the combo. The CoCo is plenty good enough in the list I proposed and so you can afford to weaken it slightly. Only the Swords and the Walking Ballista and the lands fail to be (usefully) found by it presently! The Nissa and the Tracker are the most easily cut from this list. Neither server any specific purpose, they are just high power level, good value cards.