My Easter draft deck!

Last weekend we drafted my fully powered cube, it almost didn’t happen but it came together at the last moment as many things do.

As a rule I’ve decided to draft Agro decks for as long as I think they still need more support. It’s a way of proving to my self that I’ve supported it well enough.

So I set out for Red x Agro and got a pretty brutal Rakdos deck. Here is what I had in my deck.

creatures
Grim lavamancer, magus of the scroll, mortarpod, stormblood berserker, keldon marauders, viashino heretic, countryside crusher, pyre zombie, chandra’s Phoenix, spitebellows, vampire nighthawk, nekrataal, faceless butcher, keldon champion.

Lots of aggressive creatures and reach gave me faster clicks than my more mid range/ control opponents and the nekrataal, butcher and bellows gave me some creature controll allong the perminant controll of viashino heritic.

Spells
Firebolt, chain lightning, dead/gone, rift bolt, red sun’s zenith, flame burstx4, chain of plasma, nameless inversion, diabolic servitude, sulfuric vortex, flame javelin.

Holly burn batman! 14 sources of removal or burn gives this deck allot of reach and puts allot of pressure on my opponents.

You may notice 4x flame burst that’s from a piece of cube errata that causes 4x to be drafted when you pick one, the same is true for rune snag, beacon hawk, accumulated knowledge, korlash and others.

Several games ended after only one attack followed by sulphuric vortex, and Chain of plasma discarding my whole hand, passing the turn and killing with vortex. Longer games came down to careful use of black removal and saving burn for the opponents face. My final record was 4-0.

My mana also helped allot with badlands, arid Mesa, scalding tarn, reflecting pool and lotus blossom.

This allowed for a few games starting with Mesa into badlands, lotus blossom, play keldon marauders. The true strength of this play lies in activating stormblood berserkers’ blood thirst on the following turns after another land drop and setting you up for turn 4 Necrataal/Butcher to trump any threats or roadblocks.

Overall a successful draft and more proof that red is strong and agro is healthy in my cube.

Until next time!

Hello World Sealed

Hey as my first official post and a break from trying to plan out the rest of the blog I thought I’d post a sample sealed pool from my powered cube! (sealed pools are from 5 packs randomly generated)

I’ve done all the sorting so I’ll post a card list by colour.

White: Akroma’s Vengeance, Calciderm, Elish Norn, Enlightened Tutor, Genju of the fields, Kor Sanctifiers, Mirror Entity, Mobilization, Prison Term, Ranger of Eos, Swords to Plowshares, Wrath of God.

Black: Booster Tutor, Funeral Charm, Grasp of Darkness, Ink-Eyes, Inquisition of Kozilek, Kokusho, Mutilate, Necromancy, Shade’s form, Sorin Markov, Withered Wretch, Xiahou Dun.

Blue: Ancestral Recall, Capsize, Consecrated Sphinx, Crystal Shard, Fact of Fiction, Phyrexian Metamorph, Serendib Efreet, Vedalken Shackles.

Red: Blast from the Past, Bogardn Hellkite, Countryside Crusher, Chaos Warp, Firebolt, Jackal Pup, Keldon Marauders, Kargan Dragonlord, Magus of the Scroll, Rolling Earthquake, Stormblood Berserker, Searing Blaze, Sting Scourger.

Green:Bear Umbra, Beast Within, Garruk the Relentless, Mayor of Avabruck, Mirri-Cat Warrior, Viridian Shaman, Wall of Blossoms.

Artifacts: Batterskull, Lotus Bloom, Mimic Vat, Mox Diamond, Myr Battlesphere, Nevinyrral’s Disk, Nuisance Engine, Signal Pest, Solemn Simulacrum.

Gold: Goblin Legionnaire, Izzet Guildmage, Jilt, Kitchen Finks, Mortify, Plaxmanta, WhoWhatWhenWhereWhy.

Land:Ancient Tomb, Blood Crypt, Flooded Strand, Krosan Verge, Over Grown Tomb, Undergrownd Sea, Yavimaya Hollow.

Ok so now we have our pool of cards… looks interesting we have 3 colours where most of the cards are concentrated, 2 colours with almost no cards and a mix of lands and gold cards to support a couple of configurations.

I’m going to discuss my strategy going forward. Personally I subscribe to the 15, 15 10 school of limited deck construction. I like to have 15 lands, 15 creatures and 10 other spells in most of my decks so lets start with that.

I like black white in this pool: it gives me 11 creatures including, Mobilization and Genju (enchantments) and Kitchen Finks in gold and a good mix of 13 spells (note: I cut Elish Norn due to mana constraints). However we need more creatures and maybe access to better mana.

For this I’ll head over to Artifacts for Batterskull, and Solemn Simulacrum. We also get Lotus Bloom and Mox Diamond to fix and accelerate us along side our sad robot.

Now We have 15 creatures. Next we work on spells.

As it stands we have 13 non creature creating spells we’ll cut Sorin Markov, and Akroma’s Vengeance since we have lots of curve toppers already and Vengeance messes up our enchantments and artifact mana. Personally I  like cutting Inquisition of Kozilek.

Normally that would be enough but looking deeper on our creatures I see Ranger of Eos has 0 targets and our mana fixing is limited to artifacts. I’m not a fan of this….

Looking at Kitchen Finks and my lands I see that finks is green as well as white and I have an overgrown Tomb and a Krosan Verge for colour fixing so I’ll take out Mutilate, Kokusho, Ink Eyes, and Ranger of Eos and add in Garruk, Mayor of Avabruck, Viridian Shaman and Miri Cat Warrior. 

Here’s the final List I’d start with.

Creatures: Mayor of Avabruck, Gengu of the Fields, Withered Wretch, Mirri, Viridian Shaman, Kitchen Finks, Mirror Entity, Mobilization, Kor Sanctifiers, Calciderm, Xiahou Dun, Solemn SImulacrum, Garruk and Batter Skull.

Spells: Booster Tutor, Funeral Charm , Swords to Plowshares, Enlightened Tutor, Grasp of Darkness, Prison Term, Necromancy, Mortify, Wrath of God.

Fixing: Mox Diamond, Lotus Bloom, Krosan Verge, Overgrown Tomb, Ancient Tomb, 5 Swamps, 4 Plains, 3 Forests

 

The sideboard for this deck contains: Kokusho, Battlesphere, Nevinyrral’s Disk, Akroma’s Vengeance, Sorin Markov, Nuisance Engine, Beast Within, Inquisition of Kozilek, Mutilate, Ink Eyes, Yavimaya Hollow and 5Ws.

The thing I find interesting about this exercise is that we have a lot of other options in this pool. We could have gone blue and control instead of green and mid range for our splash, or Red which was really deep with removal and aggressive creatures. Looking over the red green and blue there could have been an interesting tempo/agro deck.

I’ll be doing a few more of these Just to get my flow and format down. Thank you for reading and feel free to comment on any changes you might make.

A Brief History of Me

Hey there my name is Human Fighter and welcome to the Ace of Cubes, which is not only my new Cube blog but also my first blog about anything ever. So I apologize in advance if anything I do seems odd, or off topic, or ranty… I’ll try to improve as I go along.

Who Is Human Fighter:

I’m from eastern Canada, I have a BA in Political Science and a Post Grad Certificate in Conflict Resolution and Mediation. I hold a regular every day retail job. I enjoy board games in general but mostly MTG and especially Cube Draft.

My History with MTG

In late 1995 just after the launch of Ice Age I was introduced to MTG by my cousin and his wonky store made mono black and mono green “precons” from ice age, alliances, fallen empires and homelands. I didn’t once suspect untill 1998 (when I quit for the first time), that there was any such thing as “competitive Magic”.

In 2002 I was on university campus walking through the Student Union Building Lounge and heard someone declare an attack… I walked over and saw two students playing magic. We became fast friends and with a couple of weeks of re-learning the rules I was back at it. We traded some cards and I built up a casual basilisk deck and played around with it against things like ehrnam-geddon, terravore stompy and astral-slide.

I was told that soon Mirrodin would be coming out and that I should buy a box to build up my collection. In my first box of Mirrodin I opened 5 arc sloggers, 2 glimmervoids, 2 broodstars and some other random stuff. I built affinity and some wonky 4 piece combo deck around megatog, dross scorpion, disciple of the vault and myr retriever. Within a month we had FNM going at our FLGS, I went on to attend the 5th dawn release event, and place 8th in our regionals 2 years later which was Invasion->Ravnica extended (I think). I played a Green,White, Black deck I called 187 Rock (187 being the police code for homicide).

Shortly after our groups newest member Ryan introduced us to the Cube we put a bunch of cards we weren’t using into a pile and drafted many times… we never really got it refined down to anything resembling a good list though. Soon with the moving of one of the major card owners in our group we lost a chunk of the cube and never spoke of it again. Shortly after I quit magic a second time.

In 2010 My friend Mitch introduced me to his friend Rob. The first words out of his mouth were “hey man want to cube draft at my place?”. We went out and drafted that night and I was introduced to Cube drafting with a real and relatively tuned, partially powered cube. From that point on I was resolved to build my own cube as a way of staying engaged with the game of magic in a relatively affordable way.