/* ------------- CSS Popup Image ------------- */ They swing, discarding Island, playing Izzet Signet and Chart a Course only to draw 2. 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. font-style: italic; This is similar to how Double Masters sets are drafted, except the two-pick rule is enabled for every single pick. .article-footer-ad a{ There are some great hatebears in the Cube too in the form of Thalia, Guardian of Thraben and Esper Sentinel. Especially in League. You get to cast the spells you hit for free, and one good spell or two fine ones will very commonly put a game away. Nobody else wants Tendrils of Agony so you should try to wheel it, and if it doesnt come back around your deck isnt going to work out anyway. 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. Cry. Generally, the white based decks come in three varieties: Mono White Aggro, which is typically worse than the best Mono Red Aggro decks; Blue-White Tempo, which seeks to stick a hard to touch threat like Geist of Saint Traft and them keep the opponent from sticking anything relevant; or White-Black Disruption Aggro, which also is most often a token deck. We saw Portent added to Legacy Cube recently by Carmen and I loved seeing it there and its nice to see here as well. The Vintage Cube can be played on Magic Online once or twice yearly when its made available. .article-footer-ad { They Unburial Rites their Griselbrand, but I have Anguished Unmaking. In my experience, these cards are about equally likely to be great as they are to be mulligans. Vintage Cube features a wide range of viable archetypes, and even the most successful drafters will offer different insights on what they believe the best archetypes to be. Sheldon Menery is adding over 70 of its cards to his decks. I put these cards very slightly behind my list, but theyre all excellent first picks. How am I 2-0? The following is my ranking for the sorts of cards Im looking to first-pick. I love casting Mystic Confluence on Turn 4. Blue is plainly the most powerful color in Vintage Cube (evidenced by the fact that the only nonartifact card in this tier is a blue card) and there are also the most blue cards in the Cube list as compared to the other colors. Primeval Titan, Craterhoof Behemoth, Rofellos, Channel are top picks. 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. Its so much more popular then and its harder to draft a strong deck when so many more players are going for it. Do you like having the chance to play with all of those crazy cards, or is it a little stale after a while? Its updated semi-regularly by the Cube team, and has a few cards swapped out every time its made available on Magic Online. Match 1, Game 3: They mulligan to 6, but have a Turn 1 Imperial Seal. My conclusion: Don't play fair decks. See what's going where! 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. Mono-green is fully supported in the Cube with the long list of mana dorks backing it up. 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 play Legion's Landing, swing, play an Ophiomancer, and Strip Mine their Swamp to keep them off tutor mana. As such, side boarding has always taken a back seat. Required fields are marked *. This is Vintage Cube. Shelldock Isle is also very easy to trigger. 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. The play patterns are just horrendous, and Adeline more or less returns to form in a lateral substitution over Brimaz. We find our Sword of Body and Mind with Stoneforge Mystic but they have endless snakes. Lightning Bolt is great, but honestly its not much different than Searing Spear or Char. All you can hope to do is race. left:37px; That said, here are some guidelines of things that you could do. Heres what to look out for if youre trying to get the ball rolling: The artifacts deck, while often difficult to put together completely, is still one of my favorite archetypes in the Cube. Match 3, Game 1: They play Turn one Island, Black Lotus, pass. There are a total of 540 cards in the Vintage Cube, which are always subject to change. 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 Strip Mine their Island. Speaking of which, I wonder why Disrupt isn't in any cube. 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. But if that's your idea of fun, keep doing it. By Carmen Handy. 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. Make sure its worth it to splash. 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. He started off playing in his store's Journey into Nyx league, and his favorite formats are draft and commander! Ancient Grudge is by far the most powerful card on the outs here, but playing with red and green mana isnt free. 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. Deck-building for the Vintage Constructed Cube is likely the most difficult part of drafting it. Now, Im a big Storm fan, though its not for everybody and I dont recommend it if youre not willing to embarrass yourself. Today I discuss an important aspect of building a successful cube: archetype support. Lots of pink. 1 Parallax Wave LSV and Marshall Sutcliffe of Limited Resources recently addressed the MTGO Vintage Cube by saying, "Not having cheap cards is expensive . Red decks will miss Mizzium Mortars when facing down Courser of Kruphix specifically, but not much otherwise. Sideboarding Rules Change. Personally, Im an Ancestral Recall man. Planeswalker If your opponent is playing a lot of fast mana and you answer all of their payoffs, then you generate a technical sort of card advantage when all of that mana has nothing to cast. 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. 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. Go for it. Let's watch the world burn!" Because I assume I'm going to be Grixis. 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. These provide ample ways to ramp out and often fix your mana. None of the others are high picks. Ancestral Recall and Time Walk are always included in your deck, even as a splash. Here's a less-than-ideal Mono Red deck I recently drafted: So much is wrong with this deck. 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. . Erno Rubik, who invented the Rubik's Cube, wrote . White also just presents some of the best planeswalkers in the Cube, with Teferi, Time Raveler and Teferi, Hero of Dominaria both being very high picks. 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. Ignore the 4 and 5 drops. 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. 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. Some players have advocated Oko as their overall Pack 1, Pick 1, which I believe to be a defensible position. If no one is in Mono Red, its not uncommon at all to see cards like Goblin Guide, Sulfuric Vortex or Hellrider with 3 cards left in a pack. All the time, for example, I might go P1 P1 Mana Drain into P1 P2 Badlands. Magic continues to be Hasbro's top performer. Drop your thoughts in a comment below or head over to the official Draftsim Discord to chat about it there. Im actually a bit miffed that Arcane Artisan, a card that I was generally happy to pick early, was cut from the Cube while Show and Tell and Eureka remained in despite their massive downsides. Vintage Cube features a wide range of viable archetypes, and even the most successful drafters will offer different insights on what they believe the best archetypes to be. On the other end, the best cards to ramp into are: Craterhoof Behemoth, Ulamog, The Ceaseless Hunger, Primeval Titan and Terastodon. As Pro Tour March of the Machine approaches, qualifier Dom Harvey offers observations on Standard and Limited, the viewer experience, and star-making. 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. I wouldnt take it over a counterspell or a cheaper card selection spell, but I also expect it to overwhelmingly make my deck when I do draft it. I think that Jadar falls flat in the way that the two cuts did, though Im always in favor of lowering the curve. Its far more important to have a solid direction with synergies between your cards than a pile of great cards with no connections. Unique Vintage Cube Archetypes 2021 Posters designed and sold by artists. display: block; This site is Draftsim.com. Supreme Vintage Cube is a slightly altered version of Vintage Cube where you pick two cards each pick of every pack. They play Fauna Shaman and swing for 5. The biggest pitfall in blue is the card Show and Tell. If it could be said that blue has a weakness in Vintage Cube, it would be that there are probably too many win conditions. Urza's Saga, Urza, Lord High Artificer, and other expensive artifact threats like Wurmcoil Engine or Myr Battlesphere are your finishers here. Ill first-pick a Griselbrand out of some packs, though more commonly my Vampiric Tutors are tracking down Tinker in my mostly blue deck. Nor are you an Inferno Titan. All Rights Reserved. width:252px; Ive 3-0ed plenty of Vintage Cubes staying mono-blue, and blue is most commonly my primary color in any two or more color decks. If you do manage to get the nuts, then congratulations! Or off-color mana sources? 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. The decks your players will draft and build need to have the tools to be successful decks. Keep in mind that Underworld Breach was cut from the Cube so you are looking for explicitly Yawgmoths Will. None of its cards are so strong that they are correct to first pick them. Sometimes its wide open. They end-of-turn Thirst for Knowledge, discarding Grave Titan and Iona, Shield of Emeria. But the payoffs are fairly limited, and they boil down to essentially either locking your opponent out through a bunch of creatures and Opposition, or hitting a Craterhoof Behemoth off of Natural Order. 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 and equip a Sword of Light and Shadow to the dragon and swing for lethal. Storm is the textbook of example of a parasitic archetype, and below I've included a sample decklist from a January 2021 Vintage Cube draft by Caleb Gannon. And the actual cards in your deck are so narrowly aggressive that they don't really slot well into anyone else's strategy. We win a game? } 2023 Wizards. .thumb { 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. Once we get past the most broken fast mana and the cheapest and most efficient effects, we start looking at cards that require a little bit more investment but correlate very strongly with winning the game. I guess there is a sliver of hope. They play Bazaar of Baghdad, discarding Grave Titan and play Living Death. 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. Some of the best and most powerful mana rocks are also included. I recently started a draft with Mox Pearl into Mind Twist, so for the sake of posterity, here's an example of a White-Black Disruptive Aggro deck: Enchantment We play Seeker of the Way. Tier 2 Archetypes: # 1 Green X Ramp. It just doesn't happen unless you pick them over everything, picks 1-4 out of every pack. Sneak Attack is among the easiest cards that take a player from no battlefield presence to winning, and red offers a handful of rituals and other effective cards for the Storm decks. .thumb:hover span { Not over a one-mana accelerator, but over most everything else. Do what feels fun to you. position:absolute; Pair these two with Giver of Runes or Mother of Runes and you have some of the best early creatures, period. Azorius () also has some power cards to have some fun with. They play Splinter Twin. If you must Storm though, and I cant blame you, here are a couple of pointers on pick order. It provides a unique style of gameplay unlike any other strategy and lets you play around with the most powerful cards in the game. The other thing white does well is providing solid interaction for controlling strategies. The former Jordan Marsh, which opened with the mall in 1984 until 1996, was a throwback until its last days from department stores of its vintage: wood adornments, smoked mirrors, artificial flourscent skylit partitions and other garish, recessed lighting elements. It gives you a way to win once the board is clear and youre holding up strictly interaction. Personally, I have also been known to miscount on more than one occasion. Free mana is always good, unless youve drafted some weird list with practically no colorless pips. All rights reserved. Sometimes the stars align and the cheap red cards are opened in the draft and I dont open a Tier 0 card, but it doesnt happen nearly as often as I would like. They're going to default to pick the best cards too. If your first three to five picks dont move your draft in this direction, youre probably already in trouble. I fetch my Sword of Body and Mind with Stoneforge Mystic and swing with Mutavault. } But I decided to go for it, to see how we could do. I get to see their whole deck and they never recover. Theyre also very heavy direction-setting cards. Then I play Gideon, Ally of Zendikar, making an Ally token. 1 Gideon, Ally of Zendikar, Lands* I dont plan on picking Storm the Festival highly or maindecking it in all of my ramp decks. Black Lotus can have the highest ceiling while Sol Ring most consistently does its thing. Lots of decks will have multiples of these in them. The important notes here are the high volume of one- and two-drops with a sprinkling of threes and fours. The first book by the reclusive inventor of the world's most iconic puzzle, the Rubik's Cube. text-align:center; Very uncommon. 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. 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. I could see an argument for valuing Time Walk more highly than Mana Crypt, though you wont encounter a lot of packs that cause you to pick between my top six cards and another Tier 0 option. 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. This just goes to show that if you complain loudly enough, you can have Niv-Mizzet Reborn in any Cube! We counter with Stoneforge Mystic, fetching our Sword of Body and Mind. Whats more important than the list is understanding the common thread. Ill see you in the queues. .article-footer-ad .footer-ad-text{ 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. You want a healthy amount of one- and two-mana creatures, preferably ones that generate mana, and then just enough stuff at four or more to ramp into. Gaea's Cradle? 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. 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. 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. 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. Its over a year old at this point so its slightly dated, but the fundamentals are good. You can combine all sorts of stuff together and make really weird decks. Having the Twin combo in the deck adds a certain level of consistency to actually being able to close out games. Spot removal is much less maindeckable here than other environments, which is also much to the detriment of black. This is what happens sometimes when your original deck dries up, you backdoor into Mono Red, and the quality is there, but you still end up about 4 solid playables short of a deck. They play out their dragon and swing. Some of these tiers will be exhaustive lists, while others will be a sampling of the nature of that tier, which I will make explicit in my thoughts on each category. I equip my sword, swing and mill 10. 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. Vintage cube is a lot less archetype-based than other drafting environments, just because the individual cards are so powerful. I tend to be down on Chandra, Pyromaster, but its decent out of the sideboard against green and white x/1s and to stop blocking. I hope the information provided here is helpful for those of you looking to tighten your skills in high-power environments. Inside macy*s at Crystal Mall during June 2020. Our Privacy Policy. Look out for Fractured Identity, Teferi, Hero of Dominaria, and Teferi, Time Raveler. Vintage Cube is on Magic Online usually twice a year, once in the summer around July and then again in December for the holidays. Last week I covered two of the best decks and win conditions in the Vintage Cube: Reanimator and Grixis Goodstuff. Toss a Mox or a Black Lotus in the mix and these decks are definitely capable of a 3-0. You never know whether the opposition is hitting you with Containment Priest or Griselbrand, and a couple of catch-all removal spells go a long way in Vintage Cube. Its always a lot of fun whether youre watching or drafting yourself, and I cant recommend it enough! The manlands are also viable win conditions for midrange and control decks that shouldnt be overlooked. The challenge of splashing for double blue cards like Opposition or Jace, The Mind Sculptor is that enough need enough sources of the secondary color. Looter il-Kor gets the obvious upgrade to Suspicious Stowaway, and Impulse gets the boot it probably should have gotten years ago. 140. Channel and Tinker turn a very small amount of mana into stuff like Myr Battlesphere and Emrakul, the Aeons Torn. Check out every card revealed so far from Lorcana's The First Chapter. Storm specifically is more interested in Dark Ritual than most, and you should pick Yawgmoths Will on the level of a Tier 0 card. I don't mine either in the sideboard, but remember that your power is in speed not in splashing mythic rares. Just like the general pick order, youre going to value fast mana most highly. 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. They drop a Chandra, Pyromaster. Its actually pretty rare that youd see anything fundamentally shift in a Cube this powerful, though the relative strength of individual colors and archetypes are constantly in flux with these updates. width:700px; Ryan Overturf analyzes the latest changes so you can make the most of the three-week Limited MTG experience. max-width:100%; These work wonders for your mana base, making 3- and 4-color mana bases incredibly easy to assemble and produce reliable mana. Vorinclex has higher potential to do nutty things with planeswalkers as well as some other cards like Walking Ballista than Tovolars Huntmaster does so I dont love that substitution, but the Huntmaster is one I expect to play. These two can provide some of the most instantaneous leads out of any card, refilling your hand or giving you the chance to out-tempo your opponent. In the coming weeks Ill be putting out articles looking at interesting draft picks as I come across them on MTGO, which should help to build on the groundwork Ive laid here. Infinity Faeries. If youre looking to get into Gruul then youre basically hoping to build around Huntmaster of the Fells, Avalanche Riders, and Questing Beast.
