1 Parallax Wave Copyright 2020 Star City Games. Keep in mind that Underworld Breach was cut from the Cube so you are looking for explicitly Yawgmoths Will. Burn: This is the most generic element of the deck. The Vintage Cube is here for fun. It is powerful on occasion, though if youre not winning the turn you cast it with something like Thousand-Year Storm, its more likely than you might think that your opponent will just annihilate you with some Eldrazi. Here are some of the big ones you should look out for: Planeswalkers have been a part of Magics history more than they havent lately, and there certainly have been some powerful ones printed into existence. Unique Vintage Cube Archetypes 2021 Posters designed and sold by artists. You may have already heard, but in case you havent, Im here to let you know that Vintage Cube is returning to Magic Online (MTGO) for three weeks starting today! The most common splash color is blue for card draw spells like Compulsive Research, or for Counterspells or for Opposition which is its own lock-out win condition. Some of the best and most powerful mana rocks are also included. max-width:100%; Next down comes Jace, Architect of Thought. And for your amusement, here is my misadventures in playing White / Black Disruptive Aggro: Match 1, Game 1: I drop a Turn 1 Soldier of the Pantheon. That wraps up my guide on my favorite Cube, the Vintage Cube! Grim Monolith is definitely behind those effects, though a lot of draws from most decks will fold to a resolved six-drop on Turn 3. Ive seen many disappointing Dreadhorde Arcanists in 540-card Cubes and zero good ones, so good riddance there. This can work, sometimes you just end up having no direction and manage to 2-1, but that isnt reliable. Bribery and Treachery will similarly often result in well worth the value of tapping five lands. If you're the only one in it, you are going to have a formiable machine. See what's going where! An easier way to end up with a solid black deck is to build around Recurring Nightmare. The decks your players will draft and build need to have the tools to be successful decks. I dont plan on picking Storm the Festival highly or maindecking it in all of my ramp decks. The big winner with these lands is, of course, Niv-Mizzet Reborn, so I suppose theyll be fan favorites as well. You pay two more mana upfront but you get six more mana worth of effect from your Consecrated Sphinx token. Black Lotus | Illustration by Christopher Rush. Id be remiss if I didnt mention Balance and Armageddon, as I know a lot of folks are really big on these cards. Ill see you in the queues. Im pretty big on drafting an early Metalworker for the same reasons that I like Mishras Workshop. Id recommend staying away from Storm in the first one or two weeks of the Cube. All of these cards account for huge swings that far exceed the mana invested. If youre familiar with the history of the Vintage Constructed format, then youll know some pretty embarrassing cards (looking at you, Slash Panther) have been propped up significantly by Mishras Workshop and other fast mana. And yet through no merits except for raw speed, especially based on its ability to punish slow starts, (and occasionally induce them), Mono Red is a viable Vintage Cube deck. For my money the other Moxen are more or less colorless sources that sometimes fix your mana, while Mox Sapphire is a tremendous boon for blue interactive decks. If you do manage to get the nuts, then congratulations! The removal of Legions Landing is a blow to those aggressive decks, both in reducing the total number of one-mana threats and it being in the upper half of those on power level. Strip Mine hanging out to push back on the opponents mana development is also huge, and is much more welcome than more fours or getting into any five-mana spells. Izzet tempo is one of the best general archetypes you can look to get into early thanks to the power of blues cards and the synergies with red. Smoldering Egg is worth playing in controlling decks or even in Storm, but isnt one that I expect to be valued highly at the table and is a card that I would hope to wheel if I were interested in it. I hope you Birthing Pod fans are happy! Chandra eats our Vampire token and thier Phyrexian Metamorph copies our Ophiomancer. This is an incredibly low cost way to please a lot of players, and kudos to Carmen for doing so. Check out every card revealed so far from Lorcana's The First Chapter. 18 Lands is too many, but we're short on playables, forcing us to play some very dubious cards like Chandra, Flamecaller, Lightning Greaves, and Guttersnipe with only 3 cards to trigger its damage. Theres also the infamous pairing of Narset, Parter of Veils and a wheel effect like Wheel of Fortune. Simic relies on greens mana ramp but gives great payoffs in Hydroid Krasis, Oko, Thief of Crowns, and Hornet Queen. Power Fours: Koth of the Hammer and Hellrider are excellent. The copyright for Magic: the Gathering and all associated card names and card images is held by Wizards of the Coast. To get things out of the way early, this is going to be my last set cube update for Magic Online . Land Destruction: You are the deck that wants Strip Mine, Wasteland and occasionally even Rishadan Port. You're not a Thundermaw Hellkite deck. Some packs just arent exciting, though not every 3-0 starts with a Black Lotus. It really improves your win rate against slow fair decks like mono green or control whereas Izzet tempo would be more pressured to be the aggressor. We go Soldier of the Pantheon into Thalia, Guardian of Thraben, Tidehollow Sculler, revealing Mountain, Fauna Shaman, Primeval Titan and Thundermaw Hellkite. I wasnt positive that wed see Vintage Cube between the releases of the two Innistrad sets this year with the releases being so close together, but Im happy to see the format go live one more time between now and its inevitable return towards the end of the year. Non-combo green midrange decks are one of the few directionless decks that can hold their own. Mono-Green Ramp might be my most-drafted archetype in Vintage Cube. If you must Storm though, and I cant blame you, here are a couple of pointers on pick order. A Dutch artist worked with former plantation employees to create a "white cube" that they hope will one day display works returned from European museums. z-index:1; The most important thing in Vintage Cube is getting set up early, so I value these slowlands lower than fastlands, but I would also value all of the cards being cut lower than fastlands. These are specific to Vintage Cube, but some, like Mono Green or White Weenie, are pretty much the same in Legacy or Modern Cube as well. We allow some wiggle room to account for sheer complexity, but you are still expected to assemble your 60 card list in a reasonable timeframe. Dack Fayden can often just end the game when you steal an early Signet or Mox by both reducing your opponents mana production and increasing your own, and thats to say nothing of stealing something like a Wurmcoil Engine. Cube has long been one of my favorite ways to play Magic. Planar Bridge (The Cube) | Illustration by Alexandre Leoni. Two simple ways, actually. Green Suns Zenith is among the more important cards for this archetype, and the difference between a green deck with or without Craterhoof Behemoth is night and day. Realizing they have no recourse for my Sword of Body and Mind, they concede. I Strip Mine their Island. Magic continues to be Hasbro's top performer. text-align: center; The nice thing about them is youll often be the only green drafter, which means you can get your best cards like Gaeas Cradle and Natural Order late in the draft due to their niche nature. In general, avoid midrange "fair" cards in the Vintage Cube except as a sideboard strategy. When I venture into black its most commonly for Leovold, Emissary of Trest or to try to play Storm. No, that did not come up. Next they find Dragonlord Ojutai. But since there are 9 green one-drop accelerants plus 5 more green 2-drop accelerants, plus, of course, colorless accelerants like the Signets, Grim Monolith, Thran Dynamo, and Coalition Relic, you should always have enough if you prioritize them. Ive been a long-time fan of the Cube and I make sure to save up my Play Points for when it eventually comes around. First is that you force it. Not over a one-mana accelerator, but over most everything else. The big takeaway that I want to offer today is that Vintage Cube is much less about figuring out which archetype is best and much more about understanding how to navigate a format with absurd mana generation. We trade resources. Speaking of which, I wonder why Disrupt isn't in any cube. Much like my notes on drafting blue, you should worry about win conditions later. #thumbwrap { vertical-align:bottom; First, let's start in the most logical place: Blue decks. The best cards in the Cube will be highly contested and you cant do anything about the presence of some cards that youll never want to play, but if Huntmaster of the Fells makes your deck, try your best to make it because you were shy on playables and not because you tricked yourself into believing it could hang. Fractured Identity is a little expensive as just a removal spell, but youll often be exiling expensive permanents in Vintage Cube. Chase Carroll recaps their favorite cards from each Secret Lair in the Spring Superdrop. visibility:visible; To top things off you can get a very consistent deck if you manage to pick up some of the tutors in black like Imperial Seal, Demonic Tutor, or Vampiric Tutor. Phyrexian Revoker, Reclamation Sage, and Acidic Slime are good to have around to slow the opponent down in the early-game and something like Woodfall Primus or Terastodon can slam the door once you get them online (preferably assisted by a discard outlet like Jace, Vryns Prodigy). Personally I have much more fun with Ancestral Recall, though I do currently take Oko over everything else. Avalanche Riders is serviceable. Rofellos, Llanowar Emissary and other cheap green mana creatures present a clear path to a deck that generates a lot of mana, though these decks tend to be more vulnerable to creature removal than other decks. Mox Diamond doesnt hold a candle to the real thing, but its all the same when youre resolving cards like Jace, the Mind Sculptor and Wheel of Fortune. The first is that the Mono-White Aggro archetype is basically always open, and if all you care about is drafting a coherent deck it will always be there for you. left:37px; When it comes to utility lands, youre presented with an equally powerful choice of cards. Tolarian Academy, while more difficult to use, can offer copious amounts of mana to the right artifact deck, more than even mono-green could generate. This is more of a general drafting tip, but its especially important to recognize due to the fact that it becomes incredibly tempting given what cards youre looking at in each pack. Go into it if see Sulfuric Vortex or Goblin Guide late. If Im going to spend that much mana on something that isnt a sure thing, I at least want it to give me looks at Craterhoof Behemoth. The Twin/Kiki deck, while sharing a lot of cards with the non-combo Izzet tempo deck, is still different enough to be a separate archetype. But you've already got a Lightning Bolt, there's an empty pack for you, and what do you know, an eighth pick Koth of the Hammer. In my experience, once you have Yawgmoths Will, if anybody at the table opens Lions Eye Diamond it will come to you, which is the easiest two-card combo for making a lethal Storm turn happen. One important tip is to look at how your dual lands, tri-lands, and fetch lands interact. Here's a less-than-ideal Mono Red deck I recently drafted: So much is wrong with this deck. Sometimes to skew your mana base away from green to accommodate these powerful off-color cards ends up compromising your main strategy to the extent that it isn't worth it. I could see why they might think this would work in theory. I fetch my Sword of Body and Mind with Stoneforge Mystic and swing with Mutavault. height:252px; .article-footer-ad a{ Beyond that, cards like Sulfuric Vortex, Mother of Runes, Entomb, Mana Leak, or anything that provides some identity to your deck are fine places to start. It includes the Power 9, all original dual lands, and some of the best creatures and planeswalkers out there. Tovolars Huntmaster is actually better than Primeval Titan in the current build of the Cube absent Field of the Dead and Dark Depths combo, so I have no qualms with its addition. Bouncing two creatures and countering a spell is a pretty common way to swing a game against a more aggressive deck, and both the counterspell and the bounce ability play quite well against most of the combo decks in the Cube with so much of the Cube being dedicated to putting some large creature on the battlefield. Ill take a solid Dimir () midrange deck with incredible synergies and control payoffs over a collection of the best cards in each pack. I Tidehollow Sculler their last card and play my sword. They play Splinter Twin. }. Personally, I have also been known to miscount on more than one occasion. The fives are mostly interchangeable, though Nissa, Who Shakes the World is probably the best and both Elder Gargaroth and Vivien, Monsters Advocate are two cards that I will actively try not to play given how much worse they are than the other fives. Sanctum Prelate made it into the Cube in a very odd patch while the last run of Vintage Cube was live over Brimaz, King of Oreskos, and is one that I wont miss. No, the Vintage Cube is not free on MTGO. Sheldon Menery is adding over 70 of its cards to his decks. And while some may think that's a good strategy, I tend to find them to be overrated that I am content with 1 or 2 in most decks and will always take the real win conditions, tutors, and fixing, especially true dual lands and fetchlands over the Signets. In Pack 1 I was thinking I would end up as a Dimir deck, though the only good black card I got the entire draft was Fallen Shinobi and I didnt see any good fixing. On the other end, the best cards to ramp into are: Craterhoof Behemoth, Ulamog, The Ceaseless Hunger, Primeval Titan and Terastodon. When you try to force Storm sometimes your deck just doesnt actually do anything and sometimes even when it does it can be impossibly hard to play. } .thumb:hover { Once you have Craterhoof you dont have to worry about having other top-end or having awkward mana ramp effects to bridge you to casting a bunch of stuff that casts seven or more; you just need to put some bodies on the table and summon the extremely lethal Beast as quickly as possible. As Pro Tour March of the Machine approaches, qualifier Dom Harvey offers observations on Standard and Limited, the viewer experience, and star-making. When Jake isn't at his LGS he can be found on MTG Arena where he's usually forcing blue in draft. Just fill out your deck with any burn spells you draft. I will say that not everyone is going to value Mox Sapphire the same way that I do. And the actual cards in your deck are so narrowly aggressive that they don't really slot well into anyone else's strategy. Creature-Lands: Mutavault and Mishra's Factory fit great in your strategy and can live through sweepers. width:700px; } You can find her writeup on the most recent update here. Nissa, Who Shakes the World is the consensus best five-mana planeswalker for Vintage Cube, though Vivien Reid is markedly better than whatever the next best option is. Why do I want to care if I can make a 2/2 every turn if my opponent is playing Channel into Eldrazi or Tinker into Blightsteel Colossus. I play Parallax Wave, target Griselbrand and hope for a miracle. Signets are great because theyre mana acceleration, and I more commonly pick off-color Signets to fill out my mana curve than I do for any kind of mana fixing. Whenever I start a draft, I hope to open one of these cards. Borrowed Time wasnt printed as a replacement for Oblivion Ring; its another data point in the fact that the passage of time has made Oblivion Ring much less exciting. Tier 2 Archetypes: # 1 Green X Ramp. Match 2, Game 2: They go Forest-Forest-Rishkar, Peema Renegade. .scgtour-ad { Sol Ring pairs great with powerful value cards like Jace, the Mind Sculptor while Mana Crypt generally pushes you in a more aggressive direction. I dont much care if its off basic lands. Youve got access to about as good of a mana base as you could dream of, and that allows you to stay open longer and have a much more consistent strategy in each given game. We'll take whatever we can get with this deck. There's one more hidden advantage to drafting mono-Red as well: no one else wants your cards. While I believe that Bloodbraid Elf is considerably more powerful than Arlinn, the Packs Hope, I also dont really want to play with any of these cards ever. They play Looter Il-Kor. Ah, Storm, a classic archetype thats as fun as it is difficult to pull off. Your email address will not be published. Maybe Mono Red saves your draft. Costing zero is really nice, but if you play Mana Crypt long enough youll lose to the coin flips some of the time. The most powerful cards are too much better than the next-best options for me to pick lands as highly as other players do. Golgari (), Simic (), and Gruul () each offer a strong midrange playstyle through some great interaction and powerful creatures. If you can draft at least 4 of these 7, that makes your odds of having a one-drop in your starting hand very high. Blue has a lot of power for bullying opponents and stuff like Opposition and Deceiver Exarch combo will end up leading to less consistent and less powerful decks than just drafting busted mana and busted individual cards about as often as theyll pay off in my experience. They have Manglehorn for my signet, making me happy I didn't play out my sword. *Lands were not submitted with this deck, so Iread the recap, added the lands that were missing, and just went from there! The following is my ranking for the sorts of cards Im looking to first-pick. width: 700px; Wheel of Misfortune has popped out and now back into the Cube relating to a bug.Its more fun than good, but its plenty fun. Cards like Black Lotus can make 4-drops on turn 1 a reality. White actually does have some interaction in this Cube in the form of Mana Tithe, both Swords to Plowshares and Path to Exile, and Ive even been rolled by an early Armageddon. Our Grixis deck ended up winning with the card Sneak Attack. We find our Sword of Body and Mind with Stoneforge Mystic but they have endless snakes. position:absolute; Even two-color decks do want some multicolor lands so theres obviously some nuance here, though my personal bias in a format as swingy as Vintage Cube is to make sure I have the sort of spells and mana acceleration that put my opponent on the back foot before I worry about how Im casting them. Pair these two with Giver of Runes or Mother of Runes and you have some of the best early creatures, period. We play Seeker of the Way. Vintage Cube is on Magic Online usually twice a year, once in the summer around July and then again in December for the holidays. The Moxen are also great in just about any deck, even if theyre not on-color. Always always always bias your picks in favor of efficiency and do everything in your power to not end up with uninteractive midrange cards in your pool. Assuming you have the mana to cast your cards, its also important to efficiently generate card advantage, and nobody does it better than Ancestral Recall. . The current curve for the Cube is very heavy on four- and five-mana stuff, and you generally only care about getting two or three cards that are this expensive if you want a competitive red deck in a broken environment. All you really need to get started is a strong reanimation or entomb spell, like Reanimate or Entomb. . These provide ample ways to ramp out and often fix your mana. Fallen Shinobi probably sticks out here, but I really never see that card hit without ending the game. I don't mine either in the sideboard, but remember that your power is in speed not in splashing mythic rares. Like mono red, you want to load up on one drops. Balance is simultaneously not good enough to consistently perform in Vintage Cube while being too good for any other environment. } Its far more important to have a solid direction with synergies between your cards than a pile of great cards with no connections. Previously known as the Holiday Cube because it was only available in December, its more recently been made available a second time in June or July. It was easy to justify putting Agadeems Awakening in a deck with the opportunity cost being so low, but I rarely saw doing so amount to much in Vintage Cube. There are 540 cards in the MTGO Vintage Cube. Opponent goes Turn 2 Chart a Course, discard Griselbrand into Exhume. This category is a bit broader, and my list here is by no means exhaustive. Reanimator is, in my experience, almost always open. Howdy, gamers! Lots of pink. Need more proof March of the Machine is a Commander player's dream? Because no one else wants them. Bloodthirsty Adversary is plainly awesome, and while I would have preferred to see it take the place of a five-mana creature lets call it Siege-Gang Commander its still really nice to have a red threat thats good on Turn 2 and has the ability to scale into the late-game as a topdeck.

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