RIX for Cube

These were the cards from Rivals of Ixalan that I added to my Garbage Cube.

Blazing Hope
Cherished Hatchling
Dinosaur Hunter
River Darter
Reckless Rage
Unknown Shores

Of these, I suppose Reckless Rage is the best worst. Doing damage to your own creatures when your creatures are bad seems bad. However, doing 4 damage to an opponent's creature at instant for R is pretty good. I might have to keep my eye on that one: my hope is that the drawback is bad enough in the format I've created that it's a legitimate issue.

Cherished Hatchling, Dinosaur Hunter and River Darter all fall into the same category: Cards that are utterly useless when removed from their native environment. There aren't enough dinosaurs for any of those cards to be truly useful.

Blazing Hope is so weird. I had to include it just because of that.

And Unknown Shores, though a reprint, is good for a set like mine that wants a lot of mana fixing.

More For The Cube

Once again, back to the Garbage Cube. Updated additions are as follows:

From Hour of Devastation-
Fervent Paincaster
Tragic Lesson
Lethal Sting
Ambuscade
God-Pharaoh's Faithful
Graven Abomination

Some of these are pretty obvious: glass-jaw creatures, overcosted effects, but in the case of Lethal Sting, I have an effect that doesn't play nice with the rest of the cube.

From Ixalan-
Sailor of Means
Dive Down
Ancient Brontodon
Emergent Growth
Glorifier of Dusk
Bright Reprisal
Spreading Rot
Blight Keeper
Trove of Temptation
Rowdy Crew
Elaborate Firecannon

Some of these cards aren't as obvious and I think it's coming from, in part, the improvement of the quality of cards. Sure, I haven't heard raves about Ixalan as a draft set, but that doesn't mean the card quality hasn't improved, just that the synergies in this set aren't as robust as Llorwyn, another tribal set, was. (Personal theory: 4 creature types isn't enough to make it work and even then, tribal generally works best in constructed).

Other cards, like Trove of Temptation, are clearly just awful and need workarounds to be good.

I may have to shift some of these cards; evaluation isn't my strongest suit. But for now, this is what I'm adding. 

The Garbage Cube & Amonkhet Selections

OK, sorry everyone but after coming back from California, I just haven't had the opportunity to get many games in.

So instead, let's talk about what I'll be adding to my Cube.

Here's a link to the latest Garbage Cube list.

For those of you who don't know; my cube is an attempt to assemble the worst Magic cards from every set I own, Highlander style (so one card from each color) and make a playable Cube.

This is offset by a ton of mana fixing, which is also bad but those are the cards where I break my "one-of" rule. The other spot is that in big sets, I usually add in an extra card in order to keep the creature ratio high.

In the sets that are highest rated for limited play, Ravnica, Rise of the Eldrazi or Innistrad, for example, the creature density was higher than sets like Mirage or Invasion. I needed more creatures and the bigger sets are the best place to find them.

While the card is supposed to be bad, it's supposed to be bad because it's a crappy Magic card, not because it's got an inherent disadvantage. For example; Break Open, while a crappy card, is completely unplayable in my Cube as there are no targets. That's not what I want.

Nath's Buffoon, however, that works juuuust fine. So does Phytotitan.

So what from Amonkhet should go in?

White's offerings are Sparring Mummy, Rhet-Crop Spearmaster, Winged Shepherd and Compulsory Rest are my candidates. Compulsory Rest is a definite winner because it gives the opponent something.

The creatures are trickier as they all suck for different reasons. The Mummy has a one-and-done ability, the Shepherd is expensive (but cycles so that's a ding against it) and the Spearmaster has Exert, which is a lame ability, made lamer by what exerting the Spearmaster does.

So I think it's Rhet-Crop.

For Blue, Floodwaters makes a strong case, despite being cycleable, as does Lay Claim. The creatures I'm considering are Tah-Crop Skirmisher and River Serpent.

While River Serpent is bad, it's bad in a very traditionally Blue way: overcosted dude who doesn't so what you want unless a condition is met. I've got a lot of those already. Whereas the Skirmisher is overcosted in a way that actually allows for early plays. In order to try and give Blue that sometimes-turn two play, the Skirmisher wins. Similarly, Lay Claim is an effect that isn't in the Cube much, so for seven mana, I think I'll let this one in.

Black is next and it's a bit more difficult. Final Reward is expensive for what it does and so is Blighted Bat. Dune Beetle could provide some interesting options for the color, defensively and it's a vanilla creature on top of that.

I think Final Reward and Dune Beetle make the cut here, though.

Red has Consuming Fervor, which isn't terrible but does have a relevant downside. Warfire Javelineer could have some interesting interactions without being overpowered and Ahn-Crop Crasher is another exert creature that sucks.

In the end I went with the Crasher and, in a surprise move, By Force is going to get a shot. Red should have some mass artifact destruction and this isn't as efficient as many others so I'm sleeving it up.

Green's offerings are easier: Oashra Cultivator is an easy include. 4 mana for a basic land that enters tapped? Yeah, that's the kind of suck I want to see. Picking a spell is a little more difficult. Stinging Shot is calling out, due to the narrowness of uses but so is Dissenter's Deliverance.

Because of the artifact density of my cube, the Deliverance will get the nod. I may have to swap it out, but for now I think it's OK.

The gold and artifact cards are all just too good. I thought about the Monuments for their cost reduction affect but no, the added ability on each makes them too strong.

Cradle of the Accursed looks like a good addition: 4 mana for a 2/2 is a bad deal.

That's what I picked-should I have done something else?

When In Doubt, Cube

stonethorn sits across from me in this picture, with Kaebel on the left and we are using stonethorn's cube to do crazy things.

Kaebel told me after the fact that he almost took all three Liliana planeswalkers and I told him he should have. You might as well go all in...

As it stood, multiplayer drafted cube is pretty rad. I went for an Ancestral Recall as my first pick but then dove right into red when I noticed around the second pass that it was being overlooked.

At first I thought I'd be making a U/R deck, as I also got an early Young Pyromancer but it quickly became obvious that green was the other color being overlooked-Kaebel going heavy WB-artifacts and stonethorn doing more White/Blue/Black. I got a few blue cards but nothing spectacular.

So green it was! Still, R/G/u is not a bad way to go, especially if you can pull any mana fixing, which I was able to cobble together via a couple lands and a Rampant Growth.

We pulled off two games, both humdingers. Nobody was able to take a commanding lead, everyone had a shot and the games didn't feel decided until the finish line.

I made two errors early in game one, when I used a Control Magic on stonethorn's Liliana, that didn't leave me with an Island to cast the Ancestral Recall in my hand before casting an Eidolon of the Great Revel. The Control Magic was a mistake because once Liliana, Heretical Healer becomes a Planeswalker, I lose control of her.

The failure to retain a blue mana keeping me from casting the Ancestral Recall was just...so dumb. I made that mistake because I was so focused on using a Black Lotus to cast the Control Magic on the correct target.

Kinda blew it on both counts, right? I lost that game, but was able to make up for it in game two, where I was able to take advantage of an early Young Pyromancer and the pressure that Kaebel put on the board via Sulfuric Vortex. Since my spells allowed me to create creatures to do damage, I was able to hold back on casting my creatures.

One board wipe later (although I forget by whom), I had the ability to come back in hand, while my opponents had to dig for their new answers.

But, good news! I have a computer that will let me play online again, so I should be able to wrap up my focus on Overkill soon.

Cube

After a loooooong gestation period, I have continued to build a cube. I think I started picking cards for this in September of last year and then just let them sit for awhile. It's time to get this set going though.

Don't worry, don't worry: I haven't left One Shot At Glory in the dust, I just haven't had a moment to play that deck since the Legacy event, with the Conspiracy drafting and the Commander play. I'll get on that deck again this weekend, if all goes well and will have the final post about it on Tuesday.

But the cube: I decided I would pull the worst (but still potentially playable) card I could find from every color, from every set I owned. The card had to be bad (or boring) but it couldn't be bad and unplayable; think Flowering Lumberknot as an example for something that is bad and unplayable in the cube I'm building. About halfway through (Mercadian Masques, I think) I realized that I probably wanted to pull two bad cards from each color from the larger sets, just to ensure that I would have enough cards and creatures to make it work!

Shortly after that, I recognized that I was putting in a ton of really expensive, difficult to cast cards, so I started to ramp up the artifact mana fixing, just to make it playable. I want people to play shitty cards; if they can't then I'm going against my purpose.

In the meantime, I've started to make a spreadsheet for the cube, so I can see what's in there and what is needed. It's not finished yet but I should have all the entries done in a few days. I can see which large blocks I only have one card from (Ice Age through Urza's Saga being the most likely) and that might allow me to add in some cards that will give the cube some balance.

White, for example, has a ton of instants; probably too much and I can easily see that's an issue, so it can be tweaked to add more card types. In a set like Innistrad (one which many drafters consider to be one of the best draft sets ever) the number of creatures in a 249 card set is approximately 133, and this is without counting spells that make tokens. So it seems like I want to have a little over half my cards to be creatures in this cube. The spreadsheet will hopefully make managing all the information a task I can actually accomplish.