Hello everyone and welcome to another DailyMatters adventure! To those who care, even though I didn’t have surgery yet, I’m feeling a bit better, at least better enough to play a little magic and write an article for you guys.

(At the time this article is published I will have done my surgery already and will probably drafting until I get better. Not everything has to be bad! )

I wanted to play something different, something innovative and fresh, but something that was new to me. So cube it was! I searched for information on the mtgo cube online but I wasn’t able to find anything relevant, it seems that all the cube information out there is either directed to a particular, personal cube, or general information about cubing. So once again I recurred to reddit.

“Hi! I'm planning on doing some mtgo cube drafts this weekend. Any tips or tricks, or archetypes available in this cube?”



I started with this very simple question… and just left for dinner, hoping for some nice answers after it. And unsurprisingly I had some good stuff right after:

Well, the idea is that we have a pretty durdly cube. But I kept reading:

What?

Ok, so we have some archetypes worth looking at with Mono-red, White-Tokens and UW bounce/flicker catching my eye. We also have the ramp/goodstuff type of deck that we can find almost in every cube.

Seems like we are finding some kind of pattern here. With mono red being on everyone’s radar. So to be sure of what’s happening I opened the mtgo cube list to do a quick check of the cards in it.





After a quick look I found out that both White and Red provide a wide stream of very aggressive creatures and decent removal spells that either allied with each other or with some fast green creatures can punish bigger decks. Black seemed a little unfocused and blue has some nice tempo cards. Mana fixing is everywhere and it seemed really easy to even go 3 or 4 colors if one wanted.



I really didn't want to lose any more time so, I jumped right into a queue, with the thought that I wanted to force an aggro strategy that can punish bigger decks and decks that wanted to achieve something cute. I had 10 tickets and my goal was to figure out as much as I can of this format and play as much as I could.



Later on I had this pool to work with (it’s pretty clear that I forced on some aggro):

Draft went really ok, with a second to last pick Isamaru, hound of konda and a 6th pick (Umezawa’s Jitte) some very nice mana fixing with none other than 4 duals and (Aurelia’s Fury) as a big finisher.





This was the final decklist:

Look at that mana curve! I was indeed very happy with, aggressive creatures, removal and some deal breakers. I’m good.

And when you’re good:

MTGO just went mtgo on me. I was a little disappointed with it I felt that this deck could really do well. But what the hell, better luck next time. Went with a reimbursement request and everything went ok.





After this little first adventure I have the original 10 tickets, plus 2 extra phantom tickets; but most importantly, I had the first experience of drafting this wacky format.



Silverblade Paladin is a monster, and I played Enlightened Tutor just for the Jitte.

Since I had to wait 4 hours for the reimbursement that was day for me.



In day 2 I was more than enthused to draft again. My main plan: Force Aggro, mono red if possible!





I started drafting aggressive white creatures and eventually got passed a Stoneforge Mystic, it was a shame I couldn’t draft any equipment. I got passed two copies of Armageddon, the other being Ravages of War and a full suite of nice white weenies coupled with removal.



My pool and the first draft of my deck was something like this:

Pretty good, Eight-and-a-half-Tails, Linvala, keeper of silence and Mirran Crusader are all very good creatures in this. I decided to cut some of the more complicated cards like Tangle Wire because they can be either very good or very bad, and I wanted to reduce variance as most as I could. So I ended up with this:

Game one I played against a similar concept, UW weenie deck but with some more control and tempo elements. I lost 2 -1, thanks to a well-timed Wrath of God and Daxos of Meletis. Also, Land Tax was pretty useless, and I ended up siding it out every time.

Nothing to cry on here, his deck went better than mine, and he played really tight. So, no chance here.



Game 2 I got paired against a ramp/goodstuff deck and annihilated him, seems like having some random beaters and wipe all the land in the table is pretty good.



Game 3 I got paired against the bye… really unfortunate here because I really wanted to play, but I could not be too sad either because I would have 2 victories and that would guarantee me another draft.



At the end of this draft I was with 18 phantom points, which guaranteed me another draft. It was kind of late but I decided to jump right in, and that proved not be a very good idea as you will see later.

The idea was once again to force some kind of aggro deck, but after a couple picks, I so none of the aggro cards I wanted. But if you check my first couple of picks you can see why my face had a malevolent smile:

I was on my way to live the dream! Natural Order + Progenitus and green creatures!

My final pool and deck we’re this:

Playing this deck was really disappointing, it was too slow, too clunky and the only time I Natural Order into Progenitus it got hit with (Chainer’s Edict) the turn after. Still won a round against an Esper Control (slow as hell) deck, and won it in time. Got my butt handed to my against a perfect mono red aggro deck and a black green midrange build that featured Avatar of Woe and some other goodies.



All in all was a great experience and I’m already planning on drafting a bit more cube as soon as possible. I guess aggro is still a very good choice as it will punish every other deck that is trying to do silly things like reanimating Iona or trying to Natural Order.

I ended up this little challenge with 8 phantom points which are enough too; well; nothing. So I have to think fast on how I will improve my ticket condition. Any ideas?



As a Bonus I also want to talk about that time I did a mirage block draft! It was one of the funniest most frustrating experiences I have ever had while playing this game so I have to share this with you guys.



Some days after Florian Koch published this spectacular article on Mirage block draft:

http://puremtgo.com/articles/drafting-mirage-visions-weatherlight-overview





I decided I wanted to try my hands on it, since it would like being in a time machine in my first days of playing this game more seriously. The draft started ok, with a first pick Dark Banishing and a second pick Ekundu Cyclops, but, as in almost all old formats, things quickly went down the drain! I ended up making some huge mistakes, taking some suboptimal cards for some cards that I should have picked.

My final list was something like this:

The results with this deck were painful, due to a combination of bad luck, and bad luck with some bad luck combined. Games were all pretty tight but I never seemed to be able to finish them in my favour. Needless to say that I went 0 - 3 and went crying to bed. Also got destroyed two rounds in a row to this card:

A card I passed two times to pick cards like Fallen Askari. Not that the Askari is a bad card, it’s definitely not as good as the mask. If I had those masks in my deck things could probably went differently, it’s a slow format and you need the ability to go the late game. Lesson learned!

With all these new experiments I have been enjoying magic to the fullest, I’m more and more invested in upping my limited game, and learning a bunch of cool things with it. So the next weeks will be weeks of more drafting extravaganza, and with Innistrad/Dark Ascension flashback drafts coming, I will have to find time to draft both cube and Innistrad!

Once again I want to thank the guys in reddit that always contribute so much to my articles and are always there to answer my general question as well. Thank you guys!

Until the next time,

Enjoy life!

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