Introduction
Cubing on Magic Online has some important advantages over cardboard play: there’s no need to invest the time and money to get a Cube together; MTGO handles the logistics of shuffling, creating boosters and drafting itself automatically; and there are no schedule conflicts that make it difficult to get a nice number of people together for a draft.
There are also some clear disadvantages: MTGO Cube drafts cost money, one way or another; and the option to endlessly tinker with your very own Cube list is gone. The latter problem is made all the more serious because the MTGO Cube list is, to put it mildly, suboptimal. Many people on these boards are of the opinion that the list is simply unacceptable for a non-free product.
This article aims to improve the MTGO Cube list through a series of changes. It’s mainly a thought exercise, but I expect there might be some interesting to learn that apply to one’s own Cube (and who knows, maybe it even helps to get the actual list changed for the better…).
The MTGO Cube
Before starting to suggest changes, I think it’s important to first study the list as it is now. The people who put together this list clearly had some goals in mind, and it’s not much use proposing changes that go against these goals. This process is, unfortunately, made harder by the fact that WOTC has made few, if any, of their goals public. I recall a few short explanatory articles accompanying changes to earlier versions of the Cube, but as of late, changes are usually made without much comment at all. Still, just by looking at the list and applying some common sense, several of WOTC’s goals with the MTGO Cube list should become clear.
The first thing to note is that this is a large Cube, at 720 cards. No doubt this choice was made to ensure that drafts remain varied for a longer time. After all, the MTGO Cube is drafted hundreds or even thousands of times per day when it’s available.
The second important thing is that this Cube is unpowered. That means that the traditional Power 9, the broken fast mana (Sol Ring, Mana Crypt, Mana Vault) and a couple of other cards (Library of Alexandria, Mana Drain, Mind Twist) are excluded based on power level. In itself, this is an understandable choice, especially since there exists a second list, the “Holiday Cube”, which is available only a couple of weeks per year, and which does include all the broken cards (it’s also smaller, at 540 cards). It makes sense for WOTC to want to keep the Holiday list feel special, in order to increase interest for it when it runs. However, what’s not so clear is on which basis cards are “banned” from the regular Cube. For instance, Moat, The Abyss and Nether Void are in the Holiday Cube, but not in the regular Cube. On the other hand, cards like Balance, Demonic Tutor, Wheel of Fortune, Channel and Strip Mine are apparently fair game in both formats. Whatever WOTC’s reasoning behind this is, I think it’s best to just accept these choices. After all, in Cube, any line that’s drawn between “broken” and “powerful, but fair” will be somewhat arbitrary.
A final important point is the Cube’s target audience. This is a tricky point, since as far as I’m aware, there haven’t been any public statements by WOTC about this. However, we can make an educated guess. While a couple of high-profile tournaments have used the Cube, it is for the most part a casual format. The prize support is meagre to non-existent (in the Swiss drafts), and the MTGO Cube cannot be used to prepare for paper, for-money tournaments. WOTC probably intends the format as a place for any MTGO user, from tournament shark to casual player, to have fun every once in a while. It’s entirely possible that WOTC thinks its target audience will enjoy the Cube more (and thus pay more for the privilege of playing with it) if the format is slightly slower, leans more towards the “Dragon Cube” side (more clunky but splashy effects) and contains more “bad cards”, so that reaching 22-24 playables is sometimes a struggle. This is an important point to keep in mind when making changes to the list.
Mana
A very important factor in any Magic format is the mana that is available.
In the MTGO Cube, 88 lands fix mana. There are full cycles of the original dual lands, the Ravnica shock lands, the Onslaught/Zendikar fetchlands, the Ice Age/Apocalypse pain lands, the M10/Innistrad buddy lands, the Shadowmoor filter lands, the Ravnica bounce lands (10 cards each), the Mirage fetchlands, the Zendikar manlands, and the Shards of Alara tri-lands (5 cards each). Apart from the cycles, there’s (only) City of Brass, Reflecting Pool, and Murmuring Bosk. 88 mana fixing lands is a relatively high number for a 720 list, a good bit higher than the rule of thumb of 10%.
Conversely, there is very little artifact mana. No Signets and no Talismans leaves only around 10 mana rocks, which for the most part don’t fix mana (with Mox Diamond, Coalition Relic and Gilded Lotus being the only permanent sources of 5 colors of mana). The choice to exclude the Signets, in particular, was explained a couple of years ago in an article by a WOTC representative claiming that their inclusion would put aggro decks and green decks at too much of a disadvantage (presumably compared with control decks and blue decks).
As you would expect, in addition to lands and artifacts, there’s also a variety of Green cards that fix mana, accelerate, or both.
Personally, I’m of the opinion that a draft format, and especially a Cube list, is best when there’s plenty of mana fixing, but not so much that there’s rarely any pressure to draft a fixer over a good card in your color and/or archetype. From playing with the Cube quite a lot, I feel that the mana situation is pretty reasonable, and since I consider this to be a conscious design choice by WOTC, I won’t make sweeping changes here. However, due to the inclusion of some allied-color-only cycles (or shard-only, in one case), there’s an imbalance in the mana situation of the guilds: allied guilds have 9 duals each, while enemy guilds only have 7. This should be fixed, as there’s no good reason to disadvantage some color combinations like this (the enemy-allied color dynamic is mostly a relic of Magic’s past, anyway).
Another point that ties into this is the imbalance between the number of cards in each guild (and even each shard). Dimir, Rakdos, Simic, Golgari and Boros each have 5 cards, while Azorius has 8 and Gruul has a whopping 10. This is caused by WOTC classifying cards that are technically monocolored, but that play as guild cards (e.g. Loam Lion, Orcish Lumberjack, Lingering Souls), as monocolored instead of guild-aligned.
Archetype Support
Delving a little bit deeper into the list, we start to notice some specific archetypes that appear to be supported. Speaking very generally, Cube cards fall into one of two categories: universally playable cards and archetype support cards. If you look at a well-designed Cube list, each card is either a universal playable (i.e. will be good in all or most decks of its color(s)), or is part of one (or more!) supported archetype, presumably meaning that there are other “archetype support” cards for that same archetype. The practical implications of this are very important. Ideally, if you play a Cube for the first time without having studied the list, and you find a card that only makes sense in a specific deck, you should be able to pick that card and count on the fact that more cards that are good in that specific deck will be available in later packs. If your Cube fail that test, you betray the reasonable expectations of your drafters, which leads to players with very bad decks and poor experiences.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that your list should reward blindly picking the cards for a specific archetype, without regard for what’s being passed. If two people try to draft Combo Reanimator, for example, it should be expected that they both end up with poor decks unless they change course once they see that their initial archetype isn’t open.
Storm
This brings us to one of the most hotly debated issues with the MTGO Cube: it includes Storm cards and specific support cards that are unplayable in non-Storm decks (Lion’s Eye Diamond, to name the most obvious one). Now, common wisdom on these boards dictates that Storm is difficult to support in a smaller Cube, and downright impossible in a 720 list. Experience seems to corroborate this: forcing a Storm deck in the MTGO Cube just because your first pack has an Empty the Warrens or a Time Spiral or a Yawgmoth’s Will will end in disaster more often than not. This doesn’t mean it’s impossible; sometimes the right cards are opened in the right order and an excellent Storm deck comes together. I’ve both drafted and played against successful Storm decks, but I wouldn’t recommend them if your only goal was to win consistently.
I suspect that for a subset of MTGO Cube drafters, this represents a challenge: they know (or suspect) that Storm is bad or at the very least unreliable, but they try to make it happen anyway, and the fun they have when the deck comes together makes up for the frustrating experience when it doesn’t. I obviously don’t know this for sure, but I imagine that WOTC’s market research shows something similar and that’s why they keep supporting Storm in their list.
The easy way to approach this exercise would be to just cut all the Storm and Storm support cards. I’m choosing to take the other route, i.e. to actually increase the archetype support a little bit, in as far as possible by including some broadly playable cards that happen to be good in Storm, while cutting some cards that are useless outside of the archetype. In addition, the Spells Matter archetype, which has natural synergy with Storm and which is already present in Blue, will be expanded into Red. This will by no means be enough to make Storm a viable archetype in the sense that it can be forced every draft, but it will give the people who want to try a better shot.
Other archetypes
There are a few other archetypes quite heavily supported in the MTGO Cube that aren’t necessarily supported in other Cubes, the main ones being Mono Black (with cards like Phyrexian Obliterator and Corrupt) and Eldrazi Ramp / Cheat (with, well, the Eldrazi and various ways to get them on the battlefield). For each of those archetypes, I’ll try to keep and where possible increase the support, because they form part of the Cube’s identity and uniqueness (and incidentally, they’re pretty good!).
Morph
The current MTGO Cube has 14 creatures with the Morph mechanic. The power level of many of these is at the very least questionable. However, the nature of the Morph mechanic makes it so that every Morph creature you remove from the list makes each of the others weaker, since it becomes easier to deduce what your opponent’s Morph is and play accordingly. Because the mechanic adds an interesting dynamic and flavor to the games, I’ll try to keep a critical mass of Morphs in the list.
C13 and JOU
The MTGO Cube doesn’t currently have any Commander 2013 or Journey into Nyx cards. Both sets contain some very good Cube cards that will probably be included in later iterations anwyay, so I’ve chosen to incorporate them already.
The Good
It’s quite clear that Cube is very popular on MTGO. Drafts fill very fast and people seem to have a lot of fun (in as far as you can tell online). WOTC is also increasing the frequency of the periods the Cube is available, which they clearly wouldn’t do if it wasn’t a (financial) success for them.
A wide variety of decks are capable of doing well, with no archetype dominating to the extent of reducing the enjoyment of the format.
The games itself feel like a good combination of occasional, but not too frequent, blowouts due to an unanswered broken play (it is Cube after all!), and closely fought matches with a lot of back-and-forth. Of course, bad draws and mana screw do happen, and players are often harshly punished for them, but this problem certainly isn’t worse than in other formats (Limited and Constructed both). One area where I think there is room for improvement is creature combat. As is the case with most Cubes, the MTGO Cube contains very few cards that can be used to influence the outcome of combat. This takes away an important area for decision-making and excitement during games.
All of this is, naturally, quite subjective (e.g. how “fast” should a format be to be maximally enjoyable?), and there will be those that will argue that the success of the MTGO Cube is due to the strengths of Cube as a format in itself and is more in spite of, rather than thanks to, the particular list in use.
The Bad
Now, there are some real problems with the MTGO Cube.
Blue vs aggro
The most important one: Blue is too good and aggro is too weak. Those two problems are obviously related. There may be a lot of things to say about the conventional wisdom (on these boards) that aggro beats control, control beats midrange and midrange beats aggro, but in very general terms I agree with the principle.
In itself, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with Blue being the best color in the MTGO Cube, since it is the best color in any Eternal format, and draft has the big advantage that it is self-correcting (if Blue is drafted by too many players, each of their decks gets worse and the non-Blue decks get better). Moreover, in my opinion, intentionally de-powering a color in the interest of balance goes against the spirit of the format.
What we can do is increase the number, consistency and power level of the aggro decks. Aggro is currently supported in 3.5 colors. The .5 is Green, which can act as a support color for aggro decks with some good multicolored options, but which can’t be used as a main color for lack of sufficient aggressive 1-drops and aggro support spells.
Now, I don’t think we need to go so far as to strive for a perfectly even distribution between the three theatres (aggro, midrange and control). I suspect that many casual MTGO Cube drafters think of Cube as a format where “everything is possible” or want to do “the most broken stuff possible”, and that this subset of players doesn’t think attacking for 2 on turn 2 is a very exciting plan in a Cube draft (after all, they can do that in many other formats already). This is more or less the inverse of what I said about Storm earlier. In addition, there probably is an upper limit on how good aggro can be in Cube of this size. There’s only so many non-embarrassing 2/1’s for 1, and only so many quality support cards for aggressive strategies.
Still, the current MTGO Cube leaves much room for improvement in this area, so I will focus on this in particular, cutting some durdly 3+ mana cards and adding small creatures and other aggro cards. Green aggro will also receive an upgrade, without necessarily being elevated to one of the main aggro colors.
The cream of the crap
The second problem lies in the fact that there are quite some cards that are more or less unplayable. This can be for a number of reasons: some of them belong in archetypes that are not supported (maybe most notoriously Phantasmal Bear), some of them require a very specific mana commitment for insufficient pay-off (Esper Charm), some of them are sideboard-only cards (Red Elemental Blast) or try to be answers for very specific problems (Manriki-Gusari), and some of them are just plain bad (Priest of Urabrask, anyone?). Since there are plenty of strong cards currently not in the Cube, this is a relatively easy thing to fix.
A specific category are cards which according to conventional wisdom are very good, even format-defining, but which lack sufficient targets. The main offenders here are Tinker, Stoneforge Mystic, and (to a lesser extent) Natural Order. Depending on how you count, they have 3, 5 and 6 reasonable targets, respectively, which is just not enough in a 720 card list, especially because their targets are some of the best cards in the format and are therefore never available as late picks. Of course, this is also a pretty easy thing to fix.
Changes by section
Now, with all this talk out of the way, let’s finally see what improvements we can actually make to the list, shall we? Please keep in mind that it’s impossible to be completely objective in an exercise like this; some personal preferences of archetypes or individual cards over others will inevitably be in play. The most important thing is that, taken as a whole, the additions form a significant improvement over the cuts.
A fairly comprehensive section overhaul to start with. A few pretty embarrassing cards (Jötun Grunt is a very bad Keldon Marauders; Aven Mindcensor is sometimes a blowout but mostly a bad Wind Drake; and Academy Rector has about 3 truly exciting targets in the entire Cube, none of which are in White) can go, together with narrow or temporary enchantment and creature removal, the weakest 4-drops and a couple of redundant high-end cards.
The 2-drop slot is improved in both numbers and quality, and extra support for the Tokens deck is included. Since more than half of the White creatures at 4 mana and below are Humans, Champion of the Parish is a welcome extra 1-drop. The shadow 2-drops (Soltari Priest & friends) remain on the bench, both to respect the original design choice made by WOTC and because they’re slightly one-dimensional and possibly frustrating to play against. Soltari Champion is, however, less replaceable and joins Looter il-Kor as the second shadow creature in the list.
A fairly bad Planeswalker, a sideboard card and some suboptimal removal are replaced by much better removal, combat tricks and Tokens support. Not much more to discuss here.
Cursecatcher and Phantasmal Bear are, frankly, only in the list to fill some imaginary quota of 1-drops. There’s no support for a Blue aggro deck, so these can be safely cut. To be honest, Delver of Secrets is also questionable, but at least this update will add quite some extra support for the Blue/Red Spells Matter deck, in which it is at least acceptable (plus it is a much more iconic card than the others, which does count for something). The other cuts are some clunky card drawers and the worst of the high-end cards.
In their stead come Deceiver Exarch and Pestermite, which form half of the Twin Combo package and which serve as pretty decent (combat) tricks in their own right. True-Name Nemesis is a hotly debated card, because it’s non-interactive and oppressive to some forms of aggro, but it certainly deserves a slot based on power level. Finally, there’s a general-purpose draw-smoother and combo enabler (particularly good in Reanimator) and a sorely needed Tinker target.
In its spells department, Blue loses some sideboard cards and some clunky and/or narrow answer cards. There are also some cheap interactive cards that go, but they’re replaced by more powerful and versatile ones. Future Sight is probably better than Dream Halls in a vacuum, but the latter supports Storm and Big Ramp / Cheat decks better. The other additions are a powerful Planeswalker and a strong artifact to build around, and some spells for Storm and Spells Matter decks.
Black has a very high number of discard effects in the current list, and they suffer from diminishing returns, so it won’t hurt to cut the weaker ones. The other cuts serve to make room for better cards with (on average) a lower curve. I’m sure some of these are debatable, so feel free to suggest improvements!
The additions are some recent printings that bolster Black aggro, as well as support for the Mono Black theme that was already present and the Pox archetype that’s being introduced in this update. Finally, one strong Reanimator target replaces two weaker 6-drops.
Some of the most frequent 15th picks are in this group of cuts. Some are just too low impact for their cost (Sorin’s Thirst) and others are too hard to use (Spinning Darkness, Skeletal Scrying, Death Cloud). The other cuts are redundant versions of effects Black already has plenty of. I’m personally sad to see Lake of the Dead go, because I’ve had some good results with it in the Mono Black deck, but objectively speaking it’s probably not good enough.
The replacements are some more cards for the Mono Black archetype with the introduction of the Pox sub-archetype, an extra tutor that’s important for Storm specifically, an extra reanimation spell, and some generally good cards with wide applicability. Special mention goes to Whip of Erebos, which provides some much needed mass lifegain for Black decks. After all, no less than 23 of the Black cards in the final list damage the caster in some way.
Red 1-drops are a real problem area for Cubes of this size. The worst two are cut and are replaced by three new ones. Each of them has its own problems, however. Vexing Devil in particular will no doubt be a controversial addition, but since many of the Red decks in Cube play as Burn decks rather than Sligh/RDW decks, starting the game with 4 damage to the face isn’t the worst thing. At least it’s a better draw in the late game than most of the other 1-drops. Either way, some new printings would be very welcome here.
The other cuts are hate cards for things that don’t require any hate (Cunning Sparkmage for Tokens; Magus of the Moon and Ravenous Baboons for nonbasics), just plain bad (Ember Hauler, Priest of Urabrask), or slow and clunky (even though that’s a funny thing to say of creatures with haste). In their place come combo support (Spells Matter and Twin Combo) and ways for Red to gain card advantage, one of which doubles as a combat trick.
A major overhaul of the 2nd-tier burn spells is one of the most important changes in this update, and in my opinion the one that would bring the most immediate improvement in the playability of the MTGO Cube. A bunch of cards that are only playable in the Red Aggro/Burn archetype (or simply unplayable even in that deck) are replaced by cards that are just as good in that archetype (and mostly even better), but can also be played in any other Red deck. Other additions include a powerful Planeswalker and some support cards for the Tokens deck. Past in Flames is a 2nd copy of what is probably the best card in the Storm deck. I’m fine with having a card be a probable 15th pick for 3 drafts, if it becomes the best card in one player’s deck in the 4th.
The Green creature section gets some extra high-end options to ramp into and to use with Natural Order specifically. There’s also some creatures to use in aggro decks and some combat tricks. The other changes are pretty much one-for-one upgrades.
The cuts in this section are very much a question of trimming the fat. I don’t think Green needs 3 instant speed disenchants, or 4 really expensive creature tutors, or 5 clunky 5-mana sorceries. In addition, the weakest and hardest to use ramp spells can go. In their place come a versatile and deceptively powerful regrowth variant, an efficient creature tutor, a solid ramp spell, a fun build-around card that’s also a potential tool for the Eldrazi Ramp decks, and a strong aggro support card.
The guilds will be balanced, both in the lands department and in the spells department.
Each allied guild will get 8 duals and each enemy guild will get 7, with the Shards of Alara tri-lands counting as the 8th. This is a fairly balanced solution because, while the Alara lands will sometimes be stolen by the allied guilds that can use them, the enemy guilds will sometimes be able to use the Mirage fetchlands in return. For a perfectly even solution we’ll have to wait until one more 10-card cycle of playable duals is printed.
The Ravnica bounce lands will be cut, because they’re not all that powerful, they disadvantage aggro decks, and they create feel-bad moments when destroyed or bounced. The fact that they have nice interactions every now and then (Land Tax, Balance, Urza Block “free” spells, Garruk 1.0) is not worth it. In fact, most often it’s correct to not draft them or leave them in the sideboard even when you’re in the appropriate colors. I don’t think the Cube needs “trap” cards like that, and certainly not in slots that could be used for actually useful mana-fixing.
As for the spells, each guild will get 6, according to the “modern” classification, meaning that hybrids, off-color activation, kicker, or flashback costs, or the requirement of playing a specific basic land type will all cause a card to be put into its respective guild instead of its monocolor section.
The shard cards will all be cut, because frankly they’re bad and I don’t think anyone will miss them (except maybe Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker, but even then more for the coolness factor than for actual power level).
Finally, Progenitus can stay because it’s almost as cool as Nicol Bolas and it can at least be cheated into play in various ways.
Daxos and Court Hussar are both fine cards, but additional 3-drops are about the last thing this color combination needs. Venser is a strong Planeswalker and a flagship card for the Blink archetype.
I have no idea why Dimir Charm is in the Cube, Undermine is not really better than the 3-mana mono-Blue counterspells, and Nightveil Specter has actually positively surprised me a couple of times, but can safely be taken out for cards that are more crucial to specific decks (respectively Combo, Control/Reanimator, Tempo and Artifacts).
Not much to say here. A small change in the land base to better fit into the color combination’s aggressive nature, and the best guild card that’s not in the list yet.
A bunch of relatively easy cuts, the same adjustment to the lands as in Rakdos, and then two difficult and possibly controversial changes. Huntmaster is clearly a great card, but Sarkhan is as well. Personal bias may be at work here. Manamorphose is not such a great card, but it’s a nice way of including a Storm / Spells Matter support card that doubles as usable fixing for the Naya Zoo deck, and as a bonus is pretty neat under an Isochron Scepter.
I assume Horizon Canopy isn’t in the Cube because WOTC uses full cycles of the dual lands, which is a fine choice to make, but Canopy is a big enough upgrade to depart from that principle. Dryad Militant is one of the best (or at least most important) cards not yet in the list, and Knight of Reliquary is more of a personal choice, in this case to support the Loam / Crucible mini-archetype a bit more.
Shrieking Grotesque and Merciless Eviction are worse versions of mono-colored cards that aren’t in the list (Liliana’s Specter and Austere Command, respectively) and are incredibly easy cuts. Obzedat is powerful, but even more difficult to cast than most multicolored cards. Gerrard’s Verdict is the best Orzhov card that’s not already in the list.
A much more efficient reanimation spell, one of the better enablers for that same archetype and a cheaper removal option. Pretty easy and clear upgrades in this guild. Deathrite Shaman and Vraska the Unseen are certainly options to replace Putrid Leech, but I chose to keep the more aggressive card.
As explained earlier, these cards are either plain bad, or too difficult to cast for too little pay-off. Murmuring Bosk is a neat land and could probably stay based on power level, but it would slightly disturb the newly balanced mana fixing by color pair, so I chose to cut it, too.
The first three cuts are cards that have no business being in the list, the next two are specific hate cards for things that don’t need to be hated that badly, the mana rock has an upgrade available, and Thawing Glaciers is veeeeery slooooow (which is appropriate given the name, I suppose).
Perilous Myr is a very unassuming card, but it does a ton of different things quite well. Blightsteel Colossus is almost the exact opposite; I particularly like its ability to be a one-shot kill with Sneak Attack. There are 3 important cards for aggro decks (Black Vise, Ankh of Mishra and Grafted Wargear). I was wondering if the Vise was excluded on purpose for being both very old and potentially too good, but it’s not in the Holiday Cube either, so it should be fair game here. There are also 3 cool build-around cards (Isochron Scepter, Mimic Vat and Erratic Portal), and Mindslaver as an extra splashy effect that’s not that good, but probably fun to pull off every now and then.
The fact that two of the Swords are missing from the list was actually explained in an article on the Mothership some time ago (I can’t seem to find it now, though). The basic idea was that Black aggro decks can never beat a Sword that grants pro-Black and that SoLaS and SoFaF had to be removed for that reason. Yes, really. Black clearly has no targeted and random discard to get rid of a Sword before it hits play, nor any instant speed creature removal spells to prevent the Sword from ever being equipped, nor any fliers that can finish the opponent of in the air. Furthermore, it is apparently somehow against the rules for Black decks to splash other colors for artifact removal. As you can tell from my sarcasm, I think this explanation is completely bogus. It’s of course true that an active Sword is very hard for a Black deck to beat, but the same is true for the other colors. The Swords are, after all, some of the best cards in the format. Given that many 360 lists play all 5 Swords, there’s no reason to think that having all the Swords in a 720 list will somehow lead to a higher density of overpowered equipment than the format can handle.
Finally, since I cut 6 mana-fixing lands in the multicolored section, 6 new ones are added here. It’s quite nice that 3 of them are better in aggro and combo decks and the other 3 are better in slower decks. Overall, this update increases the amount of mana-fixing in the list by a small amount, but I certainly don’t think this increase will will suddenly cause the format to devolve into a slugfest between 3- or 5-color “good stuff” decks.
Conclusion
As I said before, Cube drafts are a lot of fun with the current list, as evidenced by the bunch of Cube Draft Walktrough videos that are available online. I truly believe that implementing some of these changes to the MTGO Cube list will make the format even more fun, by including more support for archetypes that need it, and by getting rid of cards that are almost always last-picked and very seldomly played.
If you have any suggestions for further improvements, please leave a comment!
This article will probably take me the entire day to read, but I want to thank you in advance. It looks awesome. I'm glad someone finally took the time to lay everything out instead of just saying "the MTGO cube sucks".
This was a very good read and it's awesome you took the time, and care, to do it. Having a 720 card cube myself, I don't agree 100% with all your cuts/adds but in general I think they were well chosen, specially since you took the care to respect the original design decisions of the MTGO cube. Really good job, kudos.
This article will probably take me the entire day to read, but I want to thank you in advance. It looks awesome. I'm glad someone finally took the time to lay everything out instead of just saying "the MTGO cube sucks".
That was what I was aiming for. There's quite some articles online complaining about the MTGO Cube list, but many of them seem to come down to "Look at these 3-4 bad cards in the list, the format must be terrible" or "I can't beat deck X, it's too good", which are pretty myopic ways of looking at things, in my opinion. I'm curious to your comments once you've read the entire thing.
This was a very good read and it's awesome you took the time, and care, to do it. Having a 720 card cube myself, I don't agree 100% with all your cuts/adds but in general I think they were well chosen, specially since you took the care to respect the original design decisions of the MTGO cube. Really good job, kudos.
Thanks for the nice words. Of course, opinions are going to differ quite a bit when an exercise like this is undertaken. After all, there's easily 100 cards of which one could make the argument they should be included instead of both the current cards and my suggested improvements. I would gladly participate in a discussion about specific card choices, even though such a discussion will probably be inconclusive.
I'll be reading all of this as the day goes on, but for now I'm going to chime in and say that Priest of Urubrask is a storm card, which is why it is included.
I recently did an analysis of this online Cube, and I'm curious to see how much our findings coincide.
Awesome article! Thanks for taking the time to do it. I am certain that these changed would be a massive upgrade to the MTGO Cube and I for one would be much more inclined to draft it (even more). I just wish we could get this to WotC's attention..
I do have to say that your list butchers Storm pretty comprehensively, cutting Future Sight, Heartbeat of Spring, Restock, Nostalgic Dreams, etc... I think the Storm cards you added are good additions, but you definitely need to keep all these if you want it to be draftable and (occasionally) good.
This is technically an upgrade, since an unplayable got replaced by something that's actually quite good in some matchups. More aggro hate was certainly not what the Cube needed, though.
This is a really bad change. Ajani is exactly the kind of card this Cube has too much of already (powerful, but slow and clunky midrange cards) and Voice was a good two-drop and one of the few (relatively mild) control hate cards in the list.
Of course the addition of the Scarhide is an important improvement, but I hate the Graverobber cut. It's a pretty serviceable two-drop in aggro, is extremely strong if you can flip it and the game goes long, and it doubles as graveyard hate (which is not strictly needed, but nice to have nonetheless). As explained in the article, there are a lot of expendable black cards in the list that should have been cut before this.
Overall, these changes are too few in number to fundamentally change how the Cube plays, so my criticism and suggestions remain valid. Let's hope that in a future iteration of the Cube a more comprehensive round of changes is implemented.
Quote from "Magic-Jiffen" »
How would your rank Mox Diamond in the MTGO cube? I often see it fairly underdrafted.
My experience with it has been fairly negative. It's a quirky card, since it accelerates, but doesn't really ramp (meaning, it's useful to get out a 2- or 3-drop a turn earlier, but most of the time it doesn't let you reach 5+ mana any earlier, because you have discarded the last land needed to get there). It also takes up a spell slot in your deck, while being a very bad topdeck. With a bit of hyperbole, I'd say it's excellent in Naya Zoo decks (fixing + low curve) and in Crucible/Loam/Armageddon decks (for obvious reasons), and unplayable anywhere else.
Quote from "Fires" »
I do have to say that your list butchers Storm pretty comprehensively, cutting Future Sight, Heartbeat of Spring, Restock, Nostalgic Dreams, etc... I think the Storm cards you added are good additions, but you definitely need to keep all these if you want it to be draftable and (occasionally) good.
I see your point, but I wasn't trying to support Storm in green. If you include Storm support in four different colors, it makes the Storm player grab mana fixing highly in addition to the many different pieces he needs.
I'm going to chime in and echo mrbrightside's comment. I don't like the changes you've made 100%, but ~95% goes a long way to when you're changing 20% of a cube. Your analysis and suggestions complete two goals well: improve the raw quality of the cube, and retain the essence of what the cube was originally designed for (via deduction, of course). This is the kind of cube content I love to read or hear about.
An article on the MTGO Cube appeared today on the WOTC site. For the first time in years, Wizards gives some insight in what their goals for the MTGO Cube are, and how these goals have guided their re-design process. And a re-design it is, as no less than 68 cards were removed and the same number were added.
First things first: taken as a whole, the changes are a huge net positive and will result in a significant improvement in the online Cubing experience.
I will go over the changes color by color further below, but first let's have a look at the broader ideas that WOTC mentions in the article.
1) Mono Red Aggro was too good
In my previous article, I mentioned that Blue was too good and aggro too weak. WOTC seems to think differently, almost the opposite. Now, I would certainly agree that Mono Red Aggro (MRA) is/was very good (I've 3-0'd several drafts with the deck myself), and without a doubt the best of the aggro decks (which incidentally speaks volumes over the state of affairs in the other aggro colors...). WOTC obviously has access to data like all 3-0 Cube decks and the colors used in them, so if they're saying Red was winning more than its fair share of games, there's no reason to doubt that. What's less obvious is the cause of Red's alleged dominance: is the color just naturally too good in the list, or was it just systematically underdrafted because of biases shared by much of the player pool? In my previous article, I conjectured that since Cube is a casual format, with an "anything is possible" reputation, many players are less interested in "boring" archetypes like MRA than they should be based on the archetype's strength.
When drafting myself, I would always keep an eye open for late-pick Red aggro cards, and I've 3-0'd multiple drafts with MRA decks after not taking a Red card for any of my first ten picks. There's two ways to look at this. Is it a good thing that I was rewarded for reading the draft correctly and jumping into an open archetype? Or is it a bad thing that Red is so overpowered and deep that I could afford to waste ten picks and still have a great deck? I'm leaning towards the former: draft is inherently self-correcting (meaning that the strength of a color or archetype decreases as more people draft it), and if people see MRA win time and again and still refuse to draft it, that's on them. However, I understand the opposite viewpoint as well. If people are not interested in drafting MRA, there's not much point in forcing them (on pain of losing) to do so. Cube is first and foremost a casual, just-for-fun format, after all.
This is awesome. As I explained in the previous article, bouncelands were bad and the manafixing was on the plentiful side.
Quote from WOTC »
We felt like nonbasic lands were at their most interesting when you have to decide between a land that fits into your deck and a non-land you can also fit into your deck.
I agree 100%; this in a great change.
3) "Trap" cards are gone
Quote from WOTC »
In general, a trap is a card that looks powerful and fun, but is not supported by the rest of the cards in the Cube. I previously stated that one of the goals for the Magic Online Cube is to provide avenues of synergy from across Magic’s history. Unless we actually include the cards that provide the cool interactions, the card will fail. Lots of individual cards suffered due to a lack of support around them, including Goblin Welder, Deadbridge Chant, and Etched Oracle.
Has WOTC read my article? Probably not, but all the same I'm happy they realized some of the problems their list had in this area (even though the example cards they give are poorly chosen: Etched Oracle is not a "trap" by the definition given above, it's just a terrible Cube card, same for Deadbridge Chant). Unfortunately, there are still some cards that I would consider "traps" in the list, but this update is a major step in the right direction.
I think it would be useful for WOTC to be a little bit more explicit in their choices on which archetypes they want to support in their Cube (and even rotate them over time, possibly), but this update does a pretty good job to include some build-around and/or archetype support cards, instead of just generally good ones.
4) Storm is gone
And good riddance.
I personally will miss trying to get the deck together from time to time, but for the overall health and enjoyability of the format, I'm glad WOTC didn't go the route I suggested in my previous article (i.e. increase Storm support and keep it around as a "challenge").
Not that many changes in White, and all the non-M15 cards (which didn't exist at the time) that are added were on my "IN" list as well. It's a pity trash like Gideon, Champion of Justice is still around while e.g. Council's Judgment stays on the sidelines, and I personally would have kept one of the 5-mana Wrath effects, but overall a good improvement.
A bit of a missed opportunity here. None of the cards that are removed will be missed too much, but I don't really see the point of removing two irrelevant one-drops in a color without aggro support and then replacing them by two others (albeit slightly better ones) that will be 15th picks just as often. Jalira is a goofy card that I'm afraid will share the same fate. Frost Titan is IMO better than both the new Soul and Keiga (which was in the list and remains there), but ultimately which 6-drop finisher for control decks is included makes almost no difference for the quality of the format. Chasm Skulker is an addition I support wholeheartedly, and both bounce spells are perfectly acceptable as well.
Yawgmoth's Will's removal along with the Storm archetype is a bit heavy-handed, since it remains a very potent late-game spell, and cutting Stupor, keeping Mesmeric Fiend and adding Brain Maggot seems like insanity to me, but overall this is a huge improvement. Even the terrible Nezumi Graverobber cut of the previous update was reversed! Black was the weakest color in the previous list, and this update should go a long way towards making it more competitive.
The biggest set of changes contains the single biggest error as well. Replacing Inferno Titan with Soul of Shandalar is only explainable by a grotesque bias in favor of new cards, or a gross underestimation of the Titan (which is in the Top-5 of 6+ drops in the entire Cube). Other than that, it seems pretty illogical to cut Hellspark Elemental but keep the equally one-dimensional (but less powerful) Hell's Thunder, and the Mogis's Warhound > Ash Zealot decision also smells like intentionally depowering an archetype, which is something I'm firmly against. For the Wheel of Fortune cut, see my comment on Yawgmoth's Will above. The other changes are good and should help to make a Red a more versatile color.
I have to ask though, why is Priest of Urabrask still in the list? It's raison d'être was supposedly Storm, and it should have been the first victim of that package's removal, since it's worse than terrible anywhere else.
None of the cards that are cut will be missed (4 of the 7 cuts were advocated by me), and some much-needed high-end Natural Order targets were included. I'm not stoked about the Broodmother and Overrun, but at least they're objectively powerful cards, so I'm fine with taking them for a test run (besides, the person who wrote the article claims Palinchron is his favorite Cube card, so including a couple more mana sinks makes sense - this is the type of personal choices that makes each Cube unique and interesting).
Great cuts all around. Basically, none of these cards had any business being in the list, and the bouncelands had an actively bad effect on the Cube experience.
The additions are mostly solid too, although I question Athreos and especially Uril. There is exactly one beneficialy Aura in the entire list (Rancor), and surely WOTC doesn't consider a 5/5 hexproof for 5 mana among 3 different colors to be a respectable Cube card, right? We would have been better off keeping the Thoctar.
It is a pity that the problem with technically-monocolored-but-multicolored-in-practice cards was not fixed, and that the imbalance in mana-fixing between allied and enemy colors persisted as well. Stuff like Tin-Street Hooligan and Dismantling Blow can easily be replaced by monocolored options at a similar powerlevel, so there's no reason to penalize Red and White with less cards than the other colors (Red has 97, Blue has 103, which is a small but significant difference).
The cuts should be uncontroversial, apart from the City of Brass one. I would have liked to see Mana Confluence added alongside the City, but since WOTC has now made it clear they wanted to reduce the manafixing, I can live with that.
* Conspiracy cards seem to be excluded intentionally (I don't see any reason for this, except maybe that the re-design took a long time, during which Conspiracy was printed).
Conclusion
The MTGO Cube remains, just like any other Cube, an imperfect work in progress. However, this re-design is undoubtedly a huge step forward. I can only hope that WOTC continues to devote some time and effort to improving the list (and therefore the MTGO Cube experience). I also hope the article explaining some of their design choices is the beginning of a trend away from secrecy and inscrutability and towards more open discussion of the MTGO list and Cube as a format.
The final list can be viewed in CubeTutor format here.
The MTGO Cube will be available for drafting Sept 17 - Oct 1st.
I'd add City of Brass at the very top of the list of the worst omissions from the new list.
BTW, fantastic write-ups. Thanks for detailing the new changes. I agree that it's an overall improvement and it looks like the MTGO cube is heading in a brighter direction.
Some of the cuts are stupid, but most of the cuts are good. Big thumbs up for finally cutting the storm cards. Most of the inclusions are fine, too. Three steps forward, one step back, I guess. At least they are moving in the right direction.
Thanks for the overview! I saw the article yesterday, but haven't read it yet. Your analysis of the swaps is appreciated.
Cubing on Magic Online has some important advantages over cardboard play: there’s no need to invest the time and money to get a Cube together; MTGO handles the logistics of shuffling, creating boosters and drafting itself automatically; and there are no schedule conflicts that make it difficult to get a nice number of people together for a draft.
There are also some clear disadvantages: MTGO Cube drafts cost money, one way or another; and the option to endlessly tinker with your very own Cube list is gone. The latter problem is made all the more serious because the MTGO Cube list is, to put it mildly, suboptimal. Many people on these boards are of the opinion that the list is simply unacceptable for a non-free product.
This article aims to improve the MTGO Cube list through a series of changes. It’s mainly a thought exercise, but I expect there might be some interesting to learn that apply to one’s own Cube (and who knows, maybe it even helps to get the actual list changed for the better…).
The MTGO Cube
Before starting to suggest changes, I think it’s important to first study the list as it is now. The people who put together this list clearly had some goals in mind, and it’s not much use proposing changes that go against these goals. This process is, unfortunately, made harder by the fact that WOTC has made few, if any, of their goals public. I recall a few short explanatory articles accompanying changes to earlier versions of the Cube, but as of late, changes are usually made without much comment at all. Still, just by looking at the list and applying some common sense, several of WOTC’s goals with the MTGO Cube list should become clear.
The list is here (CubeTutor format).
The first thing to note is that this is a large Cube, at 720 cards. No doubt this choice was made to ensure that drafts remain varied for a longer time. After all, the MTGO Cube is drafted hundreds or even thousands of times per day when it’s available.
The second important thing is that this Cube is unpowered. That means that the traditional Power 9, the broken fast mana (Sol Ring, Mana Crypt, Mana Vault) and a couple of other cards (Library of Alexandria, Mana Drain, Mind Twist) are excluded based on power level. In itself, this is an understandable choice, especially since there exists a second list, the “Holiday Cube”, which is available only a couple of weeks per year, and which does include all the broken cards (it’s also smaller, at 540 cards). It makes sense for WOTC to want to keep the Holiday list feel special, in order to increase interest for it when it runs. However, what’s not so clear is on which basis cards are “banned” from the regular Cube. For instance, Moat, The Abyss and Nether Void are in the Holiday Cube, but not in the regular Cube. On the other hand, cards like Balance, Demonic Tutor, Wheel of Fortune, Channel and Strip Mine are apparently fair game in both formats. Whatever WOTC’s reasoning behind this is, I think it’s best to just accept these choices. After all, in Cube, any line that’s drawn between “broken” and “powerful, but fair” will be somewhat arbitrary.
A final important point is the Cube’s target audience. This is a tricky point, since as far as I’m aware, there haven’t been any public statements by WOTC about this. However, we can make an educated guess. While a couple of high-profile tournaments have used the Cube, it is for the most part a casual format. The prize support is meagre to non-existent (in the Swiss drafts), and the MTGO Cube cannot be used to prepare for paper, for-money tournaments. WOTC probably intends the format as a place for any MTGO user, from tournament shark to casual player, to have fun every once in a while. It’s entirely possible that WOTC thinks its target audience will enjoy the Cube more (and thus pay more for the privilege of playing with it) if the format is slightly slower, leans more towards the “Dragon Cube” side (more clunky but splashy effects) and contains more “bad cards”, so that reaching 22-24 playables is sometimes a struggle. This is an important point to keep in mind when making changes to the list.
Mana
A very important factor in any Magic format is the mana that is available.
In the MTGO Cube, 88 lands fix mana. There are full cycles of the original dual lands, the Ravnica shock lands, the Onslaught/Zendikar fetchlands, the Ice Age/Apocalypse pain lands, the M10/Innistrad buddy lands, the Shadowmoor filter lands, the Ravnica bounce lands (10 cards each), the Mirage fetchlands, the Zendikar manlands, and the Shards of Alara tri-lands (5 cards each). Apart from the cycles, there’s (only) City of Brass, Reflecting Pool, and Murmuring Bosk. 88 mana fixing lands is a relatively high number for a 720 list, a good bit higher than the rule of thumb of 10%.
Conversely, there is very little artifact mana. No Signets and no Talismans leaves only around 10 mana rocks, which for the most part don’t fix mana (with Mox Diamond, Coalition Relic and Gilded Lotus being the only permanent sources of 5 colors of mana). The choice to exclude the Signets, in particular, was explained a couple of years ago in an article by a WOTC representative claiming that their inclusion would put aggro decks and green decks at too much of a disadvantage (presumably compared with control decks and blue decks).
As you would expect, in addition to lands and artifacts, there’s also a variety of Green cards that fix mana, accelerate, or both.
Personally, I’m of the opinion that a draft format, and especially a Cube list, is best when there’s plenty of mana fixing, but not so much that there’s rarely any pressure to draft a fixer over a good card in your color and/or archetype. From playing with the Cube quite a lot, I feel that the mana situation is pretty reasonable, and since I consider this to be a conscious design choice by WOTC, I won’t make sweeping changes here. However, due to the inclusion of some allied-color-only cycles (or shard-only, in one case), there’s an imbalance in the mana situation of the guilds: allied guilds have 9 duals each, while enemy guilds only have 7. This should be fixed, as there’s no good reason to disadvantage some color combinations like this (the enemy-allied color dynamic is mostly a relic of Magic’s past, anyway).
Another point that ties into this is the imbalance between the number of cards in each guild (and even each shard). Dimir, Rakdos, Simic, Golgari and Boros each have 5 cards, while Azorius has 8 and Gruul has a whopping 10. This is caused by WOTC classifying cards that are technically monocolored, but that play as guild cards (e.g. Loam Lion, Orcish Lumberjack, Lingering Souls), as monocolored instead of guild-aligned.
Archetype Support
Delving a little bit deeper into the list, we start to notice some specific archetypes that appear to be supported. Speaking very generally, Cube cards fall into one of two categories: universally playable cards and archetype support cards. If you look at a well-designed Cube list, each card is either a universal playable (i.e. will be good in all or most decks of its color(s)), or is part of one (or more!) supported archetype, presumably meaning that there are other “archetype support” cards for that same archetype. The practical implications of this are very important. Ideally, if you play a Cube for the first time without having studied the list, and you find a card that only makes sense in a specific deck, you should be able to pick that card and count on the fact that more cards that are good in that specific deck will be available in later packs. If your Cube fail that test, you betray the reasonable expectations of your drafters, which leads to players with very bad decks and poor experiences.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that your list should reward blindly picking the cards for a specific archetype, without regard for what’s being passed. If two people try to draft Combo Reanimator, for example, it should be expected that they both end up with poor decks unless they change course once they see that their initial archetype isn’t open.
Storm
This brings us to one of the most hotly debated issues with the MTGO Cube: it includes Storm cards and specific support cards that are unplayable in non-Storm decks (Lion’s Eye Diamond, to name the most obvious one). Now, common wisdom on these boards dictates that Storm is difficult to support in a smaller Cube, and downright impossible in a 720 list. Experience seems to corroborate this: forcing a Storm deck in the MTGO Cube just because your first pack has an Empty the Warrens or a Time Spiral or a Yawgmoth’s Will will end in disaster more often than not. This doesn’t mean it’s impossible; sometimes the right cards are opened in the right order and an excellent Storm deck comes together. I’ve both drafted and played against successful Storm decks, but I wouldn’t recommend them if your only goal was to win consistently.
I suspect that for a subset of MTGO Cube drafters, this represents a challenge: they know (or suspect) that Storm is bad or at the very least unreliable, but they try to make it happen anyway, and the fun they have when the deck comes together makes up for the frustrating experience when it doesn’t. I obviously don’t know this for sure, but I imagine that WOTC’s market research shows something similar and that’s why they keep supporting Storm in their list.
The easy way to approach this exercise would be to just cut all the Storm and Storm support cards. I’m choosing to take the other route, i.e. to actually increase the archetype support a little bit, in as far as possible by including some broadly playable cards that happen to be good in Storm, while cutting some cards that are useless outside of the archetype. In addition, the Spells Matter archetype, which has natural synergy with Storm and which is already present in Blue, will be expanded into Red. This will by no means be enough to make Storm a viable archetype in the sense that it can be forced every draft, but it will give the people who want to try a better shot.
Other archetypes
There are a few other archetypes quite heavily supported in the MTGO Cube that aren’t necessarily supported in other Cubes, the main ones being Mono Black (with cards like Phyrexian Obliterator and Corrupt) and Eldrazi Ramp / Cheat (with, well, the Eldrazi and various ways to get them on the battlefield). For each of those archetypes, I’ll try to keep and where possible increase the support, because they form part of the Cube’s identity and uniqueness (and incidentally, they’re pretty good!).
Morph
The current MTGO Cube has 14 creatures with the Morph mechanic. The power level of many of these is at the very least questionable. However, the nature of the Morph mechanic makes it so that every Morph creature you remove from the list makes each of the others weaker, since it becomes easier to deduce what your opponent’s Morph is and play accordingly. Because the mechanic adds an interesting dynamic and flavor to the games, I’ll try to keep a critical mass of Morphs in the list.
C13 and JOU
The MTGO Cube doesn’t currently have any Commander 2013 or Journey into Nyx cards. Both sets contain some very good Cube cards that will probably be included in later iterations anwyay, so I’ve chosen to incorporate them already.
The Good
It’s quite clear that Cube is very popular on MTGO. Drafts fill very fast and people seem to have a lot of fun (in as far as you can tell online). WOTC is also increasing the frequency of the periods the Cube is available, which they clearly wouldn’t do if it wasn’t a (financial) success for them.
A wide variety of decks are capable of doing well, with no archetype dominating to the extent of reducing the enjoyment of the format.
The games itself feel like a good combination of occasional, but not too frequent, blowouts due to an unanswered broken play (it is Cube after all!), and closely fought matches with a lot of back-and-forth. Of course, bad draws and mana screw do happen, and players are often harshly punished for them, but this problem certainly isn’t worse than in other formats (Limited and Constructed both). One area where I think there is room for improvement is creature combat. As is the case with most Cubes, the MTGO Cube contains very few cards that can be used to influence the outcome of combat. This takes away an important area for decision-making and excitement during games.
All of this is, naturally, quite subjective (e.g. how “fast” should a format be to be maximally enjoyable?), and there will be those that will argue that the success of the MTGO Cube is due to the strengths of Cube as a format in itself and is more in spite of, rather than thanks to, the particular list in use.
The Bad
Now, there are some real problems with the MTGO Cube.
Blue vs aggro
The most important one: Blue is too good and aggro is too weak. Those two problems are obviously related. There may be a lot of things to say about the conventional wisdom (on these boards) that aggro beats control, control beats midrange and midrange beats aggro, but in very general terms I agree with the principle.
In itself, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with Blue being the best color in the MTGO Cube, since it is the best color in any Eternal format, and draft has the big advantage that it is self-correcting (if Blue is drafted by too many players, each of their decks gets worse and the non-Blue decks get better). Moreover, in my opinion, intentionally de-powering a color in the interest of balance goes against the spirit of the format.
What we can do is increase the number, consistency and power level of the aggro decks. Aggro is currently supported in 3.5 colors. The .5 is Green, which can act as a support color for aggro decks with some good multicolored options, but which can’t be used as a main color for lack of sufficient aggressive 1-drops and aggro support spells.
Now, I don’t think we need to go so far as to strive for a perfectly even distribution between the three theatres (aggro, midrange and control). I suspect that many casual MTGO Cube drafters think of Cube as a format where “everything is possible” or want to do “the most broken stuff possible”, and that this subset of players doesn’t think attacking for 2 on turn 2 is a very exciting plan in a Cube draft (after all, they can do that in many other formats already). This is more or less the inverse of what I said about Storm earlier. In addition, there probably is an upper limit on how good aggro can be in Cube of this size. There’s only so many non-embarrassing 2/1’s for 1, and only so many quality support cards for aggressive strategies.
Still, the current MTGO Cube leaves much room for improvement in this area, so I will focus on this in particular, cutting some durdly 3+ mana cards and adding small creatures and other aggro cards. Green aggro will also receive an upgrade, without necessarily being elevated to one of the main aggro colors.
The cream of the crap
The second problem lies in the fact that there are quite some cards that are more or less unplayable. This can be for a number of reasons: some of them belong in archetypes that are not supported (maybe most notoriously Phantasmal Bear), some of them require a very specific mana commitment for insufficient pay-off (Esper Charm), some of them are sideboard-only cards (Red Elemental Blast) or try to be answers for very specific problems (Manriki-Gusari), and some of them are just plain bad (Priest of Urabrask, anyone?). Since there are plenty of strong cards currently not in the Cube, this is a relatively easy thing to fix.
A specific category are cards which according to conventional wisdom are very good, even format-defining, but which lack sufficient targets. The main offenders here are Tinker, Stoneforge Mystic, and (to a lesser extent) Natural Order. Depending on how you count, they have 3, 5 and 6 reasonable targets, respectively, which is just not enough in a 720 card list, especially because their targets are some of the best cards in the format and are therefore never available as late picks. Of course, this is also a pretty easy thing to fix.
Changes by section
Now, with all this talk out of the way, let’s finally see what improvements we can actually make to the list, shall we? Please keep in mind that it’s impossible to be completely objective in an exercise like this; some personal preferences of archetypes or individual cards over others will inevitably be in play. The most important thing is that, taken as a whole, the additions form a significant improvement over the cuts.
IN
The 2-drop slot is improved in both numbers and quality, and extra support for the Tokens deck is included. Since more than half of the White creatures at 4 mana and below are Humans, Champion of the Parish is a welcome extra 1-drop. The shadow 2-drops (Soltari Priest & friends) remain on the bench, both to respect the original design choice made by WOTC and because they’re slightly one-dimensional and possibly frustrating to play against. Soltari Champion is, however, less replaceable and joins Looter il-Kor as the second shadow creature in the list.
IN
IN
In their stead come Deceiver Exarch and Pestermite, which form half of the Twin Combo package and which serve as pretty decent (combat) tricks in their own right. True-Name Nemesis is a hotly debated card, because it’s non-interactive and oppressive to some forms of aggro, but it certainly deserves a slot based on power level. Finally, there’s a general-purpose draw-smoother and combo enabler (particularly good in Reanimator) and a sorely needed Tinker target.
IN
IN
The additions are some recent printings that bolster Black aggro, as well as support for the Mono Black theme that was already present and the Pox archetype that’s being introduced in this update. Finally, one strong Reanimator target replaces two weaker 6-drops.
IN
The replacements are some more cards for the Mono Black archetype with the introduction of the Pox sub-archetype, an extra tutor that’s important for Storm specifically, an extra reanimation spell, and some generally good cards with wide applicability. Special mention goes to Whip of Erebos, which provides some much needed mass lifegain for Black decks. After all, no less than 23 of the Black cards in the final list damage the caster in some way.
IN
The other cuts are hate cards for things that don’t require any hate (Cunning Sparkmage for Tokens; Magus of the Moon and Ravenous Baboons for nonbasics), just plain bad (Ember Hauler, Priest of Urabrask), or slow and clunky (even though that’s a funny thing to say of creatures with haste). In their place come combo support (Spells Matter and Twin Combo) and ways for Red to gain card advantage, one of which doubles as a combat trick.
IN
IN
IN
Each allied guild will get 8 duals and each enemy guild will get 7, with the Shards of Alara tri-lands counting as the 8th. This is a fairly balanced solution because, while the Alara lands will sometimes be stolen by the allied guilds that can use them, the enemy guilds will sometimes be able to use the Mirage fetchlands in return. For a perfectly even solution we’ll have to wait until one more 10-card cycle of playable duals is printed.
The Ravnica bounce lands will be cut, because they’re not all that powerful, they disadvantage aggro decks, and they create feel-bad moments when destroyed or bounced. The fact that they have nice interactions every now and then (Land Tax, Balance, Urza Block “free” spells, Garruk 1.0) is not worth it. In fact, most often it’s correct to not draft them or leave them in the sideboard even when you’re in the appropriate colors. I don’t think the Cube needs “trap” cards like that, and certainly not in slots that could be used for actually useful mana-fixing.
As for the spells, each guild will get 6, according to the “modern” classification, meaning that hybrids, off-color activation, kicker, or flashback costs, or the requirement of playing a specific basic land type will all cause a card to be put into its respective guild instead of its monocolor section.
The shard cards will all be cut, because frankly they’re bad and I don’t think anyone will miss them (except maybe Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker, but even then more for the coolness factor than for actual power level).
Finally, Progenitus can stay because it’s almost as cool as Nicol Bolas and it can at least be cheated into play in various ways.
IN
IN
- Disciple of Deceit
- Psychatog
- Duskmantle Seer
- Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas
I have no idea why Dimir Charm is in the Cube, Undermine is not really better than the 3-mana mono-Blue counterspells, and Nightveil Specter has actually positively surprised me a couple of times, but can safely be taken out for cards that are more crucial to specific decks (respectively Combo, Control/Reanimator, Tempo and Artifacts).IN
- Blackcleave Cliffs
- Murderous Redcap
Not much to say here. A small change in the land base to better fit into the color combination’s aggressive nature, and the best guild card that’s not in the list yet.IN
- Copperline Gorge
- Manamorphose
- Sarkhan Vol
A bunch of relatively easy cuts, the same adjustment to the lands as in Rakdos, and then two difficult and possibly controversial changes. Huntmaster is clearly a great card, but Sarkhan is as well. Personal bias may be at work here. Manamorphose is not such a great card, but it’s a nice way of including a Storm / Spells Matter support card that doubles as usable fixing for the Naya Zoo deck, and as a bonus is pretty neat under an Isochron Scepter.IN
- Horizon Canopy
- Dryad Militant
- Knight of the Reliquary
I assume Horizon Canopy isn’t in the Cube because WOTC uses full cycles of the dual lands, which is a fine choice to make, but Canopy is a big enough upgrade to depart from that principle. Dryad Militant is one of the best (or at least most important) cards not yet in the list, and Knight of Reliquary is more of a personal choice, in this case to support the Loam / Crucible mini-archetype a bit more.IN
- Temple of Silence
- Gerrard’s Verdict
Shrieking Grotesque and Merciless Eviction are worse versions of mono-colored cards that aren’t in the list (Liliana’s Specter and Austere Command, respectively) and are incredibly easy cuts. Obzedat is powerful, but even more difficult to cast than most multicolored cards. Gerrard’s Verdict is the best Orzhov card that’s not already in the list.IN
- Temple of Malady
- Life // Death
- Lotleth Troll
- Abrupt Decay
A much more efficient reanimation spell, one of the better enablers for that same archetype and a cheaper removal option. Pretty easy and clear upgrades in this guild. Deathrite Shaman and Vraska the Unseen are certainly options to replace Putrid Leech, but I chose to keep the more aggressive card.- Temple of Mystery
- Trygon Predator
Not many will disagree that Trygon Predator is the best card that was missing from this guild.IN
- Temple of Epiphany
- Fire // Ice
Another very easy guild. One Gamble-like spell is plenty, and Fire // Ice is unmatched in its versatility and efficiency.IN
Aurelia’s Fury is OK, but both new cards do more unique things, and more importantly, do them much more efficiently.
As explained earlier, these cards are either plain bad, or too difficult to cast for too little pay-off. Murmuring Bosk is a neat land and could probably stay based on power level, but it would slightly disturb the newly balanced mana fixing by color pair, so I chose to cut it, too.
IN
Perilous Myr is a very unassuming card, but it does a ton of different things quite well. Blightsteel Colossus is almost the exact opposite; I particularly like its ability to be a one-shot kill with Sneak Attack. There are 3 important cards for aggro decks (Black Vise, Ankh of Mishra and Grafted Wargear). I was wondering if the Vise was excluded on purpose for being both very old and potentially too good, but it’s not in the Holiday Cube either, so it should be fair game here. There are also 3 cool build-around cards (Isochron Scepter, Mimic Vat and Erratic Portal), and Mindslaver as an extra splashy effect that’s not that good, but probably fun to pull off every now and then.
The fact that two of the Swords are missing from the list was actually explained in an article on the Mothership some time ago (I can’t seem to find it now, though). The basic idea was that Black aggro decks can never beat a Sword that grants pro-Black and that SoLaS and SoFaF had to be removed for that reason. Yes, really. Black clearly has no targeted and random discard to get rid of a Sword before it hits play, nor any instant speed creature removal spells to prevent the Sword from ever being equipped, nor any fliers that can finish the opponent of in the air. Furthermore, it is apparently somehow against the rules for Black decks to splash other colors for artifact removal. As you can tell from my sarcasm, I think this explanation is completely bogus. It’s of course true that an active Sword is very hard for a Black deck to beat, but the same is true for the other colors. The Swords are, after all, some of the best cards in the format. Given that many 360 lists play all 5 Swords, there’s no reason to think that having all the Swords in a 720 list will somehow lead to a higher density of overpowered equipment than the format can handle.
Finally, since I cut 6 mana-fixing lands in the multicolored section, 6 new ones are added here. It’s quite nice that 3 of them are better in aggro and combo decks and the other 3 are better in slower decks. Overall, this update increases the amount of mana-fixing in the list by a small amount, but I certainly don’t think this increase will will suddenly cause the format to devolve into a slugfest between 3- or 5-color “good stuff” decks.
The final list is here (CubeTutor).
Conclusion
As I said before, Cube drafts are a lot of fun with the current list, as evidenced by the bunch of Cube Draft Walktrough videos that are available online. I truly believe that implementing some of these changes to the MTGO Cube list will make the format even more fun, by including more support for archetypes that need it, and by getting rid of cards that are almost always last-picked and very seldomly played.
If you have any suggestions for further improvements, please leave a comment!
A Comprehensive list of Cube Archetypes
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That was what I was aiming for. There's quite some articles online complaining about the MTGO Cube list, but many of them seem to come down to "Look at these 3-4 bad cards in the list, the format must be terrible" or "I can't beat deck X, it's too good", which are pretty myopic ways of looking at things, in my opinion. I'm curious to your comments once you've read the entire thing.
Thanks, means a lot coming from you.
Thanks for the nice words. Of course, opinions are going to differ quite a bit when an exercise like this is undertaken. After all, there's easily 100 cards of which one could make the argument they should be included instead of both the current cards and my suggested improvements. I would gladly participate in a discussion about specific card choices, even though such a discussion will probably be inconclusive.
A Comprehensive list of Cube Archetypes
I recently did an analysis of this online Cube, and I'm curious to see how much our findings coincide.
-AA
I use descriptive language. Assume that I'm being nice and respectful. (I'll tell you when I'm not.)
My Cube: http://cubetutor.com/viewcube/9029
I do have to say that your list butchers Storm pretty comprehensively, cutting Future Sight, Heartbeat of Spring, Restock, Nostalgic Dreams, etc... I think the Storm cards you added are good additions, but you definitely need to keep all these if you want it to be draftable and (occasionally) good.
Jötun Grunt was replaced by Nyx-Fleece Ram.
This is technically an upgrade, since an unplayable got replaced by something that's actually quite good in some matchups. More aggro hate was certainly not what the Cube needed, though.
Goblin Cadets > Prophetic Flamespeaker
Good change (and one step closer to "my" list, yay).
Pattern of Rebirth > All Suns' Dawn
Eh. Both cards are marginal in their respective archetypes (Fatty Cheat and 5-color control/Storm). It won't make a big difference either way.
Voice of Resurgence > Ajani, Mentor of Heroes
This is a really bad change. Ajani is exactly the kind of card this Cube has too much of already (powerful, but slow and clunky midrange cards) and Voice was a good two-drop and one of the few (relatively mild) control hate cards in the list.
Steam Augury > Keranos, God of Storms
I guess this is ok. I'm not the biggest fan of either of those cards, and I can see it going both ways.
Nezumi Graverobber > Gnarled Scarhide
Of course the addition of the Scarhide is an important improvement, but I hate the Graverobber cut. It's a pretty serviceable two-drop in aggro, is extremely strong if you can flip it and the game goes long, and it doubles as graveyard hate (which is not strictly needed, but nice to have nonetheless). As explained in the article, there are a lot of expendable black cards in the list that should have been cut before this.
Overall, these changes are too few in number to fundamentally change how the Cube plays, so my criticism and suggestions remain valid. Let's hope that in a future iteration of the Cube a more comprehensive round of changes is implemented.
My experience with it has been fairly negative. It's a quirky card, since it accelerates, but doesn't really ramp (meaning, it's useful to get out a 2- or 3-drop a turn earlier, but most of the time it doesn't let you reach 5+ mana any earlier, because you have discarded the last land needed to get there). It also takes up a spell slot in your deck, while being a very bad topdeck. With a bit of hyperbole, I'd say it's excellent in Naya Zoo decks (fixing + low curve) and in Crucible/Loam/Armageddon decks (for obvious reasons), and unplayable anywhere else.
I see your point, but I wasn't trying to support Storm in green. If you include Storm support in four different colors, it makes the Storm player grab mana fixing highly in addition to the many different pieces he needs.
A Comprehensive list of Cube Archetypes
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An article on the MTGO Cube appeared today on the WOTC site. For the first time in years, Wizards gives some insight in what their goals for the MTGO Cube are, and how these goals have guided their re-design process. And a re-design it is, as no less than 68 cards were removed and the same number were added.
First things first: taken as a whole, the changes are a huge net positive and will result in a significant improvement in the online Cubing experience.
I will go over the changes color by color further below, but first let's have a look at the broader ideas that WOTC mentions in the article.
1) Mono Red Aggro was too good
In my previous article, I mentioned that Blue was too good and aggro too weak. WOTC seems to think differently, almost the opposite. Now, I would certainly agree that Mono Red Aggro (MRA) is/was very good (I've 3-0'd several drafts with the deck myself), and without a doubt the best of the aggro decks (which incidentally speaks volumes over the state of affairs in the other aggro colors...). WOTC obviously has access to data like all 3-0 Cube decks and the colors used in them, so if they're saying Red was winning more than its fair share of games, there's no reason to doubt that. What's less obvious is the cause of Red's alleged dominance: is the color just naturally too good in the list, or was it just systematically underdrafted because of biases shared by much of the player pool? In my previous article, I conjectured that since Cube is a casual format, with an "anything is possible" reputation, many players are less interested in "boring" archetypes like MRA than they should be based on the archetype's strength.
When drafting myself, I would always keep an eye open for late-pick Red aggro cards, and I've 3-0'd multiple drafts with MRA decks after not taking a Red card for any of my first ten picks. There's two ways to look at this. Is it a good thing that I was rewarded for reading the draft correctly and jumping into an open archetype? Or is it a bad thing that Red is so overpowered and deep that I could afford to waste ten picks and still have a great deck? I'm leaning towards the former: draft is inherently self-correcting (meaning that the strength of a color or archetype decreases as more people draft it), and if people see MRA win time and again and still refuse to draft it, that's on them. However, I understand the opposite viewpoint as well. If people are not interested in drafting MRA, there's not much point in forcing them (on pain of losing) to do so. Cube is first and foremost a casual, just-for-fun format, after all.
All that being said, I don't think that the changes that are being made to the list will actually do much to address the problem WOTC identified. Some MRA-only cards were removed (Shrine of Burning Rage, Fireblast, Ash Zealot, Hellspark Elemental, Ball Lightning), but some of them stayed (Skullcrack, Searing Blaze), and other cards that are very good in the archetype were added (Incinerate, Searing Spear, Mogis's Warhound). In the end, I expect nothing much will change on the MRA front, which is (IMO) a good thing.
2) Bounce lands are gone (and are not replaced)
This is awesome. As I explained in the previous article, bouncelands were bad and the manafixing was on the plentiful side.
I agree 100%; this in a great change.
3) "Trap" cards are gone
Has WOTC read my article? Probably not, but all the same I'm happy they realized some of the problems their list had in this area (even though the example cards they give are poorly chosen: Etched Oracle is not a "trap" by the definition given above, it's just a terrible Cube card, same for Deadbridge Chant). Unfortunately, there are still some cards that I would consider "traps" in the list, but this update is a major step in the right direction.
I think it would be useful for WOTC to be a little bit more explicit in their choices on which archetypes they want to support in their Cube (and even rotate them over time, possibly), but this update does a pretty good job to include some build-around and/or archetype support cards, instead of just generally good ones.
4) Storm is gone
And good riddance.
I personally will miss trying to get the deck together from time to time, but for the overall health and enjoyability of the format, I'm glad WOTC didn't go the route I suggested in my previous article (i.e. increase Storm support and keep it around as a "challenge").
Changes - White
OUT
Calciderm
Hallowed Burial
Rout
Flagstones of Trokair
IN
Spirit Bonds
Banishing Light
Dictate of Heliod
Karmic Guide
Precinct Captain
Unexpectedly Absent
Not that many changes in White, and all the non-M15 cards (which didn't exist at the time) that are added were on my "IN" list as well. It's a pity trash like Gideon, Champion of Justice is still around while e.g. Council's Judgment stays on the sidelines, and I personally would have kept one of the 5-mana Wrath effects, but overall a good improvement.
Changes - Blue
OUT
Fathom Seer
Turnabout
Frost Titan
Brain Freeze
Phantasmal Bear
Cursecatcher
Mind's Desire
IN
Chasm Skulker
Jalira, Master Polymorphist
Soul of Ravnica
Aether Adept
Cloudfin Raptor
Hypnotic Siren
Repulse
A bit of a missed opportunity here. None of the cards that are removed will be missed too much, but I don't really see the point of removing two irrelevant one-drops in a color without aggro support and then replacing them by two others (albeit slightly better ones) that will be 15th picks just as often. Jalira is a goofy card that I'm afraid will share the same fate. Frost Titan is IMO better than both the new Soul and Keiga (which was in the list and remains there), but ultimately which 6-drop finisher for control decks is included makes almost no difference for the quality of the format. Chasm Skulker is an addition I support wholeheartedly, and both bounce spells are perfectly acceptable as well.
Changes - Black
OUT
Yawgmoth's Will
Spinning Darkness
Headhunter
Stupor
Lake of the Dead
Liliana's Reaver
Tendrils of Agony
Persecute
Plague Sliver
Tainted Pact
IN
Bad Moon
Brain Maggot
Diabolic Edict
Dictate of Erebos
Master of the Feast
Nezumi Graverobber
Ophiomancer
Profane Command
Silence the Believers
Tormented Hero
Toxic Deluge
Yawgmoth's Will's removal along with the Storm archetype is a bit heavy-handed, since it remains a very potent late-game spell, and cutting Stupor, keeping Mesmeric Fiend and adding Brain Maggot seems like insanity to me, but overall this is a huge improvement. Even the terrible Nezumi Graverobber cut of the previous update was reversed! Black was the weakest color in the previous list, and this update should go a long way towards making it more competitive.
Changes - Red
OUT
Genju of the Spires
Zo-Zu the Punisher
Inferno Titan
Wheel of Fortune
Firestorm
Empty the Warrens
Shrine of Burning Rage
Reckless Charge
Fireblast
Hellspark Elemental
Barbarian Ring
Ball Lightning
Gamble
Ash Zealot
Goblin Welder
IN
Generator Servant
Goblin Rabblemaster
Soul of Shandalar
Chandra Nalaar
Form of the Dragon
Guttersnipe
Hammer of Purphoros
Incinerate
Magma Spray
Manic Vandal
Mogg Fanatic
Mogis's Warhound
Searing Spear
Stormbreath Dragon
Young Pyromancer
The biggest set of changes contains the single biggest error as well. Replacing Inferno Titan with Soul of Shandalar is only explainable by a grotesque bias in favor of new cards, or a gross underestimation of the Titan (which is in the Top-5 of 6+ drops in the entire Cube). Other than that, it seems pretty illogical to cut Hellspark Elemental but keep the equally one-dimensional (but less powerful) Hell's Thunder, and the Mogis's Warhound > Ash Zealot decision also smells like intentionally depowering an archetype, which is something I'm firmly against. For the Wheel of Fortune cut, see my comment on Yawgmoth's Will above. The other changes are good and should help to make a Red a more versatile color.
I have to ask though, why is Priest of Urabrask still in the list? It's raison d'être was supposedly Storm, and it should have been the first victim of that package's removal, since it's worse than terrible anywhere else.
Changes - Green
OUT
Genesis
Brooding Saurian
Thelonite Hermit
Mold Shambler
Exploration
Nostalgic Dreams
Restock
IN
Genesis Hydra
Hornet Queen
Reclamation Sage
Craterhoof Behemoth
Hydra Broodmaster
Overrun
Setessan Tactics
Nissa, Worldwaker
None of the cards that are cut will be missed (4 of the 7 cuts were advocated by me), and some much-needed high-end Natural Order targets were included. I'm not stoked about the Broodmother and Overrun, but at least they're objectively powerful cards, so I'm fine with taking them for a test run (besides, the person who wrote the article claims Palinchron is his favorite Cube card, so including a couple more mana sinks makes sense - this is the type of personal choices that makes each Cube unique and interesting).
(Part 2 to follow...)
A Comprehensive list of Cube Archetypes
Changes - Multicolor
OUT
Putrefy
Shrieking Grotesque
Nightscape Familiar
Deadbridge Chant
Thunderscape Battlemage
Loam Lion
Woolly Thoctar
---
Azorius Chancery
Dimir Aqueduct
Rakdos Carnarium
Gruul Turf
Selesnya Sanctuary
Orzhov Basilica
Golgari Rot Farm
Simic Growth Chamber
Izzet Boilerworks
Boros Garrison
Murmuring Bosk
IN
Garruk, Apex Predator
Abrupt Decay
Assemble the Legion
Athreos, God of Passage
Fire // Ice
Far // Away
Ghor-Clan Rampager
Lotleth Troll
Murderous Redcap
Trygon Predator
Uril, the Miststalker
Venser, the Sojourner
Voice of Resurgence
Great cuts all around. Basically, none of these cards had any business being in the list, and the bouncelands had an actively bad effect on the Cube experience.
The additions are mostly solid too, although I question Athreos and especially Uril. There is exactly one beneficialy Aura in the entire list (Rancor), and surely WOTC doesn't consider a 5/5 hexproof for 5 mana among 3 different colors to be a respectable Cube card, right? We would have been better off keeping the Thoctar.
It is a pity that the problem with technically-monocolored-but-multicolored-in-practice cards was not fixed, and that the imbalance in mana-fixing between allied and enemy colors persisted as well. Stuff like Tin-Street Hooligan and Dismantling Blow can easily be replaced by monocolored options at a similar powerlevel, so there's no reason to penalize Red and White with less cards than the other colors (Red has 97, Blue has 103, which is a small but significant difference).
Changes - Colorless
OUT
Pentad Prism
Manriki-Gusari
Etched Oracle
City of Brass
Lion's Eye Diamond
Lotus Bloom
Palladium Myr
IN
Duplicant
Grafted Wargear
Hall of Triumph
Isochron Scepter
Mana Confluence
Mimic Vat
Mindslaver
Triskelion
The cuts should be uncontroversial, apart from the City of Brass one. I would have liked to see Mana Confluence added alongside the City, but since WOTC has now made it clear they wanted to reduce the manafixing, I can live with that.
Some very nice additions here as well (Isochron Scepter! Mimic Vat! Grafted Wargear!), and some high-end stuff as sorely needed Tinker targets. I question the choices of Mindslaver and Duplicant over for example the new Scuttling Doom Engine, but it's an improvement nonetheless. A much more serious mistake is the continued exclusion of Sword of Feast and Famine and Sword of Light and Shadow. I pointed out why I disagree with this in the previous article, and that criticism remains valid.
TOP 10 - Worst cards in the new list
Gideon, Champion of Justice
Jalira, Master Polymorphist
Skeletal Scrying
Priest of Urabrask
All Suns' Dawn
Dimir Charm
Merciless Eviction
Uril, the Miststalker
Aether Vial
Elixir of Immortality
TOP 10 - Worst omissions from the new list
Council's Judgment*
Memory Lapse
Pack Rat
Inferno Titan
Kalonian Hydra
Dryad Militant
Dack Fayden*
Grenzo, Dungeon Warden*
Sword of Feast and Famine
Sword of LIght and Shadow
* Conspiracy cards seem to be excluded intentionally (I don't see any reason for this, except maybe that the re-design took a long time, during which Conspiracy was printed).
Conclusion
The MTGO Cube remains, just like any other Cube, an imperfect work in progress. However, this re-design is undoubtedly a huge step forward. I can only hope that WOTC continues to devote some time and effort to improving the list (and therefore the MTGO Cube experience). I also hope the article explaining some of their design choices is the beginning of a trend away from secrecy and inscrutability and towards more open discussion of the MTGO list and Cube as a format.
The final list can be viewed in CubeTutor format here.
The MTGO Cube will be available for drafting Sept 17 - Oct 1st.
A Comprehensive list of Cube Archetypes
BTW, fantastic write-ups. Thanks for detailing the new changes. I agree that it's an overall improvement and it looks like the MTGO cube is heading in a brighter direction.
My 630 Card Powered Cube
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My 50th Set (P)review - Discusses my top 20 Cube cards from OTJ!
Thanks for the overview! I saw the article yesterday, but haven't read it yet. Your analysis of the swaps is appreciated.
Uril, the Miststalker RGW -- Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre C -- Vhati il-Dal BG -- Jor Kadeen, the Prevailer RW -- Animar, Soul of Elements URG
Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker R -- Maga, Traitor to Mortals B -- Ghave, Guru of Spores BGW -- Sliver Hivelord WUBRG