Turning off Sneak Attack or Reanimate can completely stop some opponents from playing the game. See what I mean? 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. Holiday Vintage Cube season's back, and I'm here for the last time to provide y'all with an update of what to expect this season. 1 Gideon, Ally of Zendikar, Lands* Azorius () also has some power cards to have some fun with. .article-footer-ad .footer-ad-text{ Neither is a terribly high pick in Vintage Cube with Mono-White Aggro and Azorius Control being the best white archetypes, but if I had to choose to include one I would go with the Guide. Look out for Fractured Identity, Teferi, Hero of Dominaria, and Teferi, Time Raveler. Cube Questions: Lightning Strike and Tarmogoyf Its almost always open, has more than enough supporting cards to get off the ground in pack one, and easily steals games from slow fair decks that didnt draft enough removal. 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. Ugh. Fortunately, the make an ill-advised attack, trading off Manglehorn for Wolf token and walk their Master of the Wild Hunt into my animated Shambling Vent. }. We swing with everything but Ophiomancer to flip Legion's Landing. 2021 Updated April 22, 2021. I personally first-pick Mishras Workshop frequently, though it goes into a very specific deck that relies on drafting a high volume of artifacts, which can be very difficult as Signets tend to be great in the majority of Vintage Cube decks and I could see other players being much colder on it. In the white beatdown deck Ill take something that deals damage over Armageddon every day, and I personally beat Balance more than I lose to it. Vintage Cube is all about efficiently leveraging your mana. A weak build of mono-green isnt going to be anything to write home about, but a strong build of mono-green rewards you for playing a manabase of all Forests with consistently explosive draws. Its really easy to assemble these combos and make incredibly strong mana bases early on. Gulp. } On balance these swaps dont do much to alter the positioning of red decks in the Cube, but Bloodthirsty Adversary offers the most for being a cheap threat that can be a big swingy play when it needs to be. They play Bazaar of Baghdad, discarding Grave Titan and play Living Death. Ill take a solid Dimir () midrange deck with incredible synergies and control payoffs over a collection of the best cards in each pack. The Six Decks Im Considering For The SCG Invitational At SCG CON. 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. In case you havent heard, the Vintage Cube is back on Magic Online (MTGO) for the month of July. Match 2, Game 1: On the draw, we Inquisition of Kozilek revealing Rishkar, Peema Renegade, Kitchen Finks, (Hazoret, the Fervent), Thragtusk, Master of the Wild Hunt and Mountain with currently only a Mountain in play. We'll take a punt. I swing back for 5 and break their signet with an Anguished Unmaking to keep them off mana. I love casting Mystic Confluence on Turn 4. 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. And the actual cards in your deck are so narrowly aggressive that they don't really slot well into anyone else's strategy. Check out every card revealed so far from Lorcana's The First Chapter. 1 Scrubland We all know "the big four" cube archetypes: green ramp ( Rofellos -types into Eldrazi-types) red aggro ( Goblin Guide and friends into bolts and Sulfuric Vortex) reanimator ( Entomb and looting into Necromancy and such) blue-white "superfriends" (draw, counters, removal, and planeswalkers) (Honorable mentions go to Storm and White Tokens, which . Bribery and Treachery will similarly often result in well worth the value of tapping five lands. I equip my sword, swing and mill 10. I Parallax Wave the two fatties, swing into a zombie token, and play a Mirran Crusader. Tutors are never good. width:252px; When I venture into black its most commonly for Leovold, Emissary of Trest or to try to play Storm. 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. We're now locked out of playing white spells. The copyright for Magic: the Gathering and all associated card names and card images is held by Wizards of the Coast. Wizards Posted The MTGO Vintage Cube List today 7-20-21. https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/magic-online/magic-online-announcements-july-20-2021 Here Are the 35 Cuts and Additions in an easier way to read from what the have posted. Just like the general pick order, youre going to value fast mana most highly. All you really need to get started is a strong reanimation or entomb spell, like Reanimate or Entomb. Heres a look at a 3-0 mono-green deck: Much like with white and red, there tends to be too many cards at the top of the curves of these decks in the Cube. Expect gorgeous art, a heartstring-tugging dog, and pink. 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. Magic continues to be Hasbro's top performer. Check out every card revealed so far from Lorcana's The First Chapter. All orders are custom made and most ship worldwide within 24 hours. I dont much care if its off basic lands. The Cube is incredibly expensive to put together unless proxied, which makes it a rare occurrence to see in paper. Planeswalker Wizards of the Coast maintains a complete list here. The important notes here are the high volume of one- and two-drops with a sprinkling of threes and fours. 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. Everything I Know About Vintage Cube On Magic Online 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. A secondary note: this kind of deck is one of the few homes one could justify odd duck cards like Braids, Cabal Minion or Smokestackce you are flooding the board with tokens. 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. We win a game? The Moxen are also great in just about any deck, even if theyre not on-color. Here's what you're looking for when you draft Mono-Red: All the One Drops: Goblin Guide is the best, followed by Firedrinker Satyr, Grim Lavamancer, Zurgo Bellstriker, Falkenrath Gorger, Monastery Swiftspear and Jackal Pup. 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. Go into it if see Sulfuric Vortex or Goblin Guide late. It includes the Power 9, all original dual lands, and some of the best creatures and planeswalkers out there. The primary nature of the October 2021 changes is with regard to the release of Innistrad: Midnight Hunt, though we are also seeing the addition of older cards as Carmen Handy grows into her role of curating the digital Cubes. Mono-white aggro is my choice for the third tier 1 deck. We'll take whatever we can get with this deck. We find our Sword of Body and Mind with Stoneforge Mystic but they have endless snakes. With the exception of Primal Command, all of the green cuts are cards that I happily maindeck. 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. 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. Vintage Cube typically sticks around for the entire month its made available. Mono-Green Ramp might be my most-drafted archetype in Vintage Cube. 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. 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. Land Destruction: You are the deck that wants Strip Mine, Wasteland and occasionally even Rishadan Port. Balance is simultaneously not good enough to consistently perform in Vintage Cube while being too good for any other environment. Sometimes drafting a Tier 2 deck, especially when you can read the draft to know your strategy is wide open, is absolutely the right thing to do. I imagine this is because, unlike Bribery, its not directly responsible for winning the game, but it is far more flexible and is generally worth well more than the five mana that it costs. }, Lorcana shows off demo decks, new cards, and more at the GAMA Expo, Dusk Till Dawn introduces Prism, Advent of Thrones as well as new Shadow Runeblade hero. To get things out of the way early, this is going to be my last set cube update for Magic Online . 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. height:252px; Chandra eats our Vampire token and thier Phyrexian Metamorph copies our Ophiomancer. It used to only be available to players in December and was known as the Holiday Cube, but its popularity and increased demand allowed it to have a more periodic release. 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. I play Legion's Landing and Mishra's Factory. I hope the information provided here is helpful for those of you looking to tighten your skills in high-power environments. Which do you want: more forests for Rofellos? There have been iterations of the Cube where I would more happily force red, though I believe currently there just arent enough one-drops for me to happily endorse this. Experience is the best teacher, but Ill do my best to facilitate some good lessons. Bad choice. Its pretty odd to me to add Storm the Festival in the update that removes Whisperwood Elemental because you really want some kind of sweeper protection if all youre doing is flooding the battlefield with cheaper threats. I may be slightly ahead on board, but I'm way behind on cards. There are three other decks you can play in this Vintage Cube that are well-supported, deep in the colors, and powerful enough to win, even if most consider them inferior to the Tier 1 Grixis strategies. Now, without further ado, Ill break down the changes to the Cube by color and what this means to you as a drafter. We play Knight of the White Orchid and accelerate up to 4 lands. } Ryan Overturf is sharing his secrets to Vintage Cube on Magic Online! 140. position:relative; The complete Power 9 are included in the Cube, but theres an extra card many consider to be the 10th member: Sol Ring. For instance, Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker or Splinter Twin are both one half of the Izzet ()-based Twin deck (one of the best archetypes). Chase Carroll recaps their favorite cards from each Secret Lair in the Spring Superdrop. All rights reserved. Drop your thoughts in a comment below or head over to the official Draftsim Discord to chat about it there. Blue is the best color in Cube, hands down, and the average Cube Draft can support five blue drafters without much trouble. Cathar Commando and Intrepid Adversary both cracked my Top 10 Cube Cards for Midnight Hunt and are the most significant additions with this update. Oko invalidates stuff like Blightsteel Colossus and Reanimator strategies entirely, while being completely unreasonable against most honest strategies as well. Reviewing The Most Recent Changes To The Magic Online Vintage Cube Blue is the best color in Cube, hands down, and the average Cube draft can support five blue drafters without much trouble. Lightning Bolt is great, but honestly its not much different than Searing Spear or Char. The removal of Oblivion Ring might seem odd, seeing as its one of those cards that does enough without costing too much to maindeck, but it tends to be the case that the more near-identical versions of a card theyre willing to print, the less essential they are for powerful Cube environments. Today Id like to do a bit of a deep dive into my personal favorite cube: the Vintage Cube! The two most busted Green cards in the whole Vintage Cube are Channel and Natural Order. Unique Vintage Cube Archetypes 2021 Posters designed and sold by artists. And yet as a deck it is much more powerful than the sum of its parts. This is arguably the best card in the Cube thanks to its versatility and power level, often providing more value than weaker power pieces like Timetwister or off-color Moxen. 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. Fallen Shinobi probably sticks out here, but I really never see that card hit without ending the game. Its so much more popular then and its harder to draft a strong deck when so many more players are going for it. You can find her writeup on the most recent update here. Entomb into Reanimate is great, and if you are able to load up on great card selection you can make it happen consistently, but cards like Buried Alive and Oonas Prowler are typically too inefficient to be competitive and it generally makes more sense to me to play good creatures that are at least somewhat castable and try to do that in an deck with Signets and other, better forms of fast mana. Supreme Vintage Cube is a slightly altered version of Vintage Cube where you pick two cards each pick of every pack. Its far more important to have a solid direction with synergies between your cards than a pile of great cards with no connections. Usually it shouldn't be your Plan A since there is no individual cards that are so strong that they are the "correct" picks in your pack 1 picks 1-4, but its a deck that the sum is a lot better than the parts. Sol Ring pairs great with powerful value cards like Jace, the Mind Sculptor while Mana Crypt generally pushes you in a more aggressive direction. 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). They Unburial Rites their Griselbrand, but I have Anguished Unmaking. You still want to pick up the strong tempo cards like Counterspell, Expressive Iteration, and Dack Fayden, but theres a much bigger focus around the combo. float:relative; /* must be floated for same cross browser position of larger image */ I fetch my Sword of Body and Mind with Stoneforge Mystic and swing with Mutavault. Its a very straightforward and sometimes boring strategy, and you can easily pick up the most important pieces for this archetype in your first pack. The Ultimate Guide to March of the Machine Sealed, The Ultimate March of the Machine Limited Set Review, The 30 Most Expensive and Must-Have Cards in March of the Machine, Background in MTG: Rules, History, and Best Cards, The Best 6 Budget Commander Decks You Can Build for Cheap, The Ultimate Guide to MTG Arena Jump In! Sungold Sentinel is also totally playable, but is on the replacement-level side of two-mana creatures for aggressive decks, whereas Cathar Commando is just solid for any white deck and Intrepid Adversary is in contention for the best two-drop for white aggressive decks. Where blue has the most cards in the Cube, red for some reason has the fewest. Its a phantom Draft, which means it costs less and you keep none of the cards, but it still costs either 10 TIX or 100 Play Points to enter. Your original strategy dries up. As such, side boarding has always taken a back seat. The Vintage Cube has returned to Magic Online. They Frantic Search, loot, crack the Memory Jar, play LED, Rakdos Signet, and Grim Tutor for Living Death. Whether its a high-powered Cube or a Pauper Cube, drafting those pre-made packs always offers a fun experience that just isnt quite matched by conventional packs. Its usually safe to run 12-14 mountains and 2-4 colorless utility lands. Sideboarding Rules Change. Today I discuss an important aspect of building a successful cube: archetype support. 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. Do you like having the chance to play with all of those crazy cards, or is it a little stale after a while? 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. This is Vintage Cube. The two most busted Green cards in the whole Vintage Cube are Channel and Natural Order. But if that's your idea of fun, keep doing it. CUTS "35 cards" Birthing Pod Burning of Xinye Casualties of War Cosima, God of the Voyage Day of Judgment They have Manglehorn for my signet, making me happy I didn't play out my sword. When Jake isn't at his LGS he can be found on MTG Arena where he's usually forcing blue in draft. All the time, for example, I might go P1 P1 Mana Drain into P1 P2 Badlands. Cheap and efficient cards that are interactive and/or have clearly defined roles/archetypes are where you want to be. Cards like Black Lotus can make 4-drops on turn 1 a reality. We trade resources. Forest, go. If you must Storm though, and I cant blame you, here are a couple of pointers on pick order. This is similar to how Double Masters sets are drafted, except the two-pick rule is enabled for every single pick. Then I play Gideon, Ally of Zendikar, making an Ally token. I attack them down to 6. The Vintage Cube is here for fun. They find a Nature's Claim for Sword. Necromancy | Illustration by Pete Venters. I will say that not everyone is going to value Mox Sapphire the same way that I do. Red decks will miss Mizzium Mortars when facing down Courser of Kruphix specifically, but not much otherwise. They're going to default to pick the best cards too. The mono-Red player isn't doing anything inherently broken. There are some great hatebears in the Cube too in the form of Thalia, Guardian of Thraben and Esper Sentinel. When it comes to utility lands, youre presented with an equally powerful choice of cards. This site is Draftsim.com. The best green accelerants are: Mox Emerald, Rofellos, Llanowar Emissary, Joraga Treespeaker, Birds of Paradise and Noble Hierarch. 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. So my Grixis strategy is to take the fixing, take the tutors, take the irreplaceable power cards and win conditions, like Tinker, Sneak Attack and Emrakul, the Aeons Torn, and then just trust that by the end of the draft your win conditions will come together. Losing a one-drop is more significant for those strategies than upgrading the two-drops, so on balance Id say white got slightly worse here. Augur of Autumn is the major update here, and one that I will draft highly for all of my green decks. Red has gone through many different iterations in the history of the MTGO Vintage Cube, and in the last couple of runs I just have not seen the volume of cards necessary to draft Mono-Red Aggro in most of the drafts that Ive done. 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. top:37px; But suppose you don't want to fight over Grixis. These work wonders for your mana base, making 3- and 4-color mana bases incredibly easy to assemble and produce reliable mana. left:37px; The simple fact is that the very best cards in Vintage Cube are foolish to pass and the very worst cards are foolish to pick. Have you tried the Vintage Cube? Until next time, stay safe and stay healthy! These are specific to Vintage Cube, but some, like Mono-Green or W/W, are pretty much the same in Legacy or Modern Cube as well. Match 2, Game 2: They go Forest-Forest-Rishkar, Peema Renegade. Because no one else wants them. 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. There are more than a few cards that are half of a game-winning or infinite combo in the Cube, and knowing what they are can help you know when to pick them up or when to pass them. What to avoid: 5s and 6s. If your opponent has brought something fair to the table, then the classic combo of Nightmare and Deranged Hermit can just be lights-out, though I like to make sure I end up with some creatures that can destroy mana sources in the mix. We equip our sword and swing back. Maybe the best they can boast is a sick three drop on turn-2 off of a Mox Ruby, like Sulfuric Vortex. Memory Deluge is going to be a much bigger deal for formats like Arena Cube, but its a serious card advantage spell that offers a good amount of selection for the price. Cube has long been one of my favorite ways to play Magic. The most important pieces will be Tolarian Academy, as many Signets as you can pick up, and any other instances of fast mana in the form of an artifact like Mana Vault, Mana Crypt, and Sol Ring. A lot of countermagic costs multiple blue mana, and when many of your opponents will be using fast mana to cast expensive spells, counterspells become one of the most powerful forms of interaction. Pair these two with Giver of Runes or Mother of Runes and you have some of the best early creatures, period. 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. visibility:visible; Before we look at ways to mitigate parasitism, let's take some time to examine a parasitic deck in greater detail and see if we can spot some common pitfalls. Or off-color mana sources? Ryan Overturf analyzes the latest changes so you can make the most of the three-week Limited MTG experience. Personally, I have also been known to miscount on more than one occasion. Lots of decks will have multiples of these in them. My friend and co-SCG Baltimore Team Open champion Liz Lynn enjoys forcing white and believes it to actually just be the best archetype. Go for it. Lots of pink. 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. Were talking about the sorts of cards that would be easy first picks in the absence of power, and a few cards that are generally considered too good for those environments. position:absolute; Howdy, gamers! 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. Avalanche Riders is serviceable. T-shirts, posters, stickers, home decor, and more, designed and sold by independent artists around the world. 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. Ancient Grudge is by far the most powerful card on the outs here, but playing with red and green mana isnt free. I will say that Gideon, Ally of Zendikar is the best four and is a hell of a thing to Black Lotus in, but the average draw more commonly curving a one-drop into two one-drops is a much bigger difference-maker in a large sampling of games. The pick order outlined above offers a lot of direction for how to navigate the early part of the draft, though an understanding of each colors strengths and weaknesses is imperative to navigate from there. I dont plan on picking Storm the Festival highly or maindecking it in all of my ramp decks. Im really looking for Goblin Bombardment and some other cheap support before I give that one a close look. Dont forget about interaction. All of these cards account for huge swings that far exceed the mana invested. We saw Portent added to Legacy Cube recently by Carmen and I loved seeing it there and its nice to see here as well. A stack of interaction, an Upheaval, and an Urza, Lord High Artificer are really all you need to actually close a game, and Id prefer the rest of my cards to look like Force of Will rather than half-combos that cant get it done on their own. Getting into Vintage Cube is a pretty daunting endeavor, which tends to be truer the newer to competitive Magic you are. If youre first-picking one of the listed cards in these two categories, youre starting things off in great shape. Ive seen many disappointing Dreadhorde Arcanists in 540-card Cubes and zero good ones, so good riddance there. Mono Red is a strange bird. All Rights Reserved. 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. Regardless, the Power 9 are about as impactful as youd assume. 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.
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