For just two cards and four generic mana, which can be paid in installments over two turns, you can take infinite turns and win easily. While it was a controversial decision at the time, even some of the players that were opposed to cutting it have since conceded that it is not missed. Second, and more importantly, Shelldock proved one of the most polarizing cards in the cube. Shelldock Isle — Shelldock Isle was in the cube for a long time, from the first iteration through months of playtesting. Counterspells and discard spells are useful against many cards and are excellent maindeck inclusions, but the 5-10 land removal spells needed to keep Karakas and Maze of Ith in check would mostly clog up sideboards.
Colorless Cards
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Because they are so situationally powerful and relatively easy to guarantee in your opener, they would completely shut out certain decks and demand enchantment removal or else lose on turn 0. However, because of the small deck size, they can easily be mulled to and therefore play out more like conspiracies. They are actually much stronger because they negate methods of recurring the milled cards, and would be oppressive in my opinion. The relevant Ashioks, Dream Render and Nightmare Weaver, which exile cards from your opponent’s library, are excluded for similar reasons to mill cards. I don’t like the idea of such wildly variable cards, whose variance is largely out of the control of the caster. On the other hand, you might flip half their combo into the yard and win on the spot by pure chance.
I am a strong proponent of Mark Rosewater’s advice to game designers that they make the optimal decisions also the fun decisions, so Vault-Key got the axe. It was cut because of how narrow the components of the deck and the requisite answers to it are. Time Vault Combo — Time Vault, in combination with Manifold or Voltaic Key, is arguably the best combo in Magic.
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That said, the same complexity that makes the cube inhospitable to some is its greatest appeal to others. With greater consistency comes greater control, and greater control rewards skillful, careful play. They choose their line based on limited information, and play towards a range of potential outcomes. Marit Lage can’t kill you if it’s forced to chump block a Blightsteel Colossus on two consecutive turns.
Minimum Deck Size
Like the 15 card deck size, I do not know why the rules were modified in the Singularity Cube to remove losing to drawing from an empty library. For this reason, constructed decks are much better models for what can work in the Degenerate Micro Cube than heuristics derived from traditional cubes. However, more likely still isn’t very likely — in our many hundreds of playtest games we had four draws, two due to Ensnaring Bridge and two due to a locked up board where neither player could profitably attack. Games are more likely to end in a draw in the Degenerate Micro Cube because players don’t lose to drawing from an empty library.
Five-color fixing lands are played in any deck with more than one color, and allow drafters to make choices about how much they want to prioritize fixing instead of just rewarding them for the luck of getting passed the right dual land. An early version of the cube included the more typical cycle of original duals, but decks are so small that they don’t really adhere to typical “two-color” models. Under these circumstances, the 15 card minimum deck size becomes a liability, and you need ways to recycle your cards or otherwise assemble some kind of inevitability. However, sometimes unstoppable combos run up against immovable disruption and the game grinds to a halt. With so much free disruption in the cube, players must assume even their tapped-out opponents have interaction and sequence their plays accordingly.
Utility & Ramp Lands
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- There are a lot of good blue and black cards here; why didn’t you include Veil of Summer?
- Fast combos are inconsistent, powerful strategies like Shops suffer from a lack of redundancy, and the quality of both threats and disruption fall off sharply in singleton.
- The present macro-archetypes are better described as combo, stax/prison, and control, rather than the more prevalent aggro, midrange, and control.
- With only twenty picks across two packs, a draft of the Degenerate Micro Cube moves quickly, and each pick is critical.
- And of course, I want to formally acknowledge Corey Murphy and Max Hero for the original cube that directly inspired the Degenerate Micro Cube.
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While Ensnaring Bridge or Balance are similarly strong answers to the cheat decks, they can be countered or discarded — Karakas and Maze of Ith cannot. I want resource denial to be a viable strategy in the cube, but Strip Mine allowed any deck to also be a resource denial deck at the cost of only a single card. During its tenure, it was aggressively drafted by any variety of deck and it often more-or-less locked the opponent out of the game even when it wasn’t used in tandem with some recursion, which it often was. Strip Mine — Strip Mine is an amazing card in every format in which its legal, and in the Degenerate Micro Cube it even gets an additional buff from the fact that decks, and therefore land counts, are so small. But, there are a number of cards that lead to play patterns that I don’t think are healthy for the environment or would require narrow answers to keep them appropriately in check. Veil would sometimes be a full-on blank, and unless it is determined in the future that green needs this kind of narrow disruption to be viable, I am against running pure sideboard cards.
The majority of the combo decks in the Degnerate Micro Cube win by cheating the biggest, baddest threats from Magic’s history into play. After you deposit to your new account at Lucky Max Casino, you can visit the casino’s lobby to start playing your favourite casino games. The combo and additional instant-speed answers required many slots, the deck doesn’t feel interesting to draft, and it was one of the best strategies in the cube. Moreover, it’s one of the only combos that reliably lets you win the game without passing the turn, which means all the sorcery speed answers are blanks against it. If you would like to understand just how powerful Strip Mine is, I recommend playing a deck that gets to play it every single game. While it might seem like we are already playing a number of cards that fit this definition, they all have much more reasonable floors.
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- Moreover, it’s one of the only combos that reliably lets you win the game without passing the turn, which means all the sorcery speed answers are blanks against it.
- The nature of this cube, which is full of narrow combo cards, also precludes drafting with a smaller number of people.
- Hey, maybe the unlikeliest of combos can become the most broken of all, like slimes and ninjas.
- You might mill them out then just die the next turn to a combo they already had in their hand.
In the Degenerate Micro Cube, you’re likely to lose every single game of a bad matchup. All the mana fixing in the Degenerate Micro Cube fixes for any color and comes into play untapped. One of the most reliable and repeatable ways to recycle your resources is to combine one of the three Eldrazi titans with any discard outlet. Some of them, like Goblin Welder and Auriok Salvagers, are also components of fast combos, while others simply reset your library, like Serene Remembrance, Feldon’s Cane, or Memory’s Journey. That was their only answer to my combo, so it would be a mistake for them to keep a hand without it on the draw.
Discussion of potential cards and archetypes was near constant, and we drafted the cube every weekend for months. I was fascinated by the novel constraints, radical recontextualization of cards and effects, and the idea of playing Magic with dramatically increased consistency. Not including all of the cards in a given draft risks splitting up combos, potentially torpedoing someone’s draft by pure chance. While I don’t think the draft format is ideal, it hasn’t kept us from having fun with the cube and drafting functional decks. The draft, which consists of 2 packs of 10 cards, is the aspect of the cube I am least happy with.
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Even a turn one Flash or Channel has a variety of potential answers, but once you have an empty library, winning with any one of these cards can only be disrupted with countermagic. Wheel of Fortune always draws your whole deck in this format, but sometimes that’s only two or three cards. With no mill as a win condition, Brain Freeze is useless, and why jump through hoops to cast a big Empty the Warrens when you could just Flash in a Worldspine Wurm instead, and use all those other cards to protect your combo? To get a high enough storm count for a lethal Tendrils, storm decks need almost all of their non-land cards to be cantrips, rituals, or key enablers like wheel effects or Yawgmoth’s Will. ” While you can definitely compose a 15 card storm deck that can reliably threaten turn one wins, drafting that deck and, more importantly, winning through disruption, proved much more challenging. I have long dreamt of a cube where storm is consistently viable and has even matchups against other draftable decks.
Cards like Lotus Petal, Dark Ritual, and Simian Spirit Guide enable combo decks to effectively win on turn one. In defiance of some people’s assumptions, combo decks in the Degenerate Micro Cube take many forms — drafting them does not feel the least bit “on rails”. But what if there was a way to draft decks that play like constructed Vintage decks?
I love to play and I get along with all the other pups in the house. I hid a few times under the Bulldog stuff table because I was getting a little overwhelmed. I’d love one who will play and snuggle with me, too. When it came time to add to their family, they decided not just one, but two Bulldogs in need would join their home.
Preordain and Ponder, cards I assumed quite strong given their revered status in constructed Magic, were total duds. Instead, our first draft and the reactions of my playgroup blew me away. For a little over a year I tinkered with it on and off, drafting against bots (which are especially bad at drafting this cube), and occasionally discussing it in various online cube communities. 10 card packs at an 8 player table means that you only get a single pick from three quarters of the packs in each direction. I am sure a cube built under these conditions could be engaging, skill-testing, and dynamic, but it’s not what I was interested in exploring. These draws were also somewhat lucky max attributable to mistakes on the part of one of the players.
I expected we’d get a few laughs from playing broken cards and appeasing our latent Timmy/Tammy urges, but ultimately I didn’t think the cube would have much replay value. Each player ends up drafting a rather large pool of cards, but due to the constraints of the draft format — picking an entire row or column at a time — many of those picks are incidental. The nature of this cube, which is full of narrow combo cards, also precludes drafting with a smaller number of people. However, because other aspects of the game are unchanged, like starting hand size, decks in the Degenerate Micro Cube are more consistent than a 60-card deck with playsets of each card would be. Despite the sky-high power level and abundance of swingy plays, almost every loss is attributable to some draft, deckbuilding, or gameplay mistake rather than bad luck or variance. Bomberman and Welder/Emry decks, for example, have many moving parts, and truthfully I myself have struggled to draft and play them properly — others players in our online playtesting group have had more success with them than I have.
Some players lacking recursion have opted to go above the minimum deck size to delay running out of cards, trading consistency for a deeper late-game. I have omitted these cards because they provide a win-condition for blue-based control decks that is exceedingly hard to interact with. However, when it became clear that the cube had depth and real, non-meme potential, I decided to exclude cards that would be played in every deck and provide a sizable advantage at no real cost. One match in an early draft was decided with two spells cast total between the two players (Flash both times, once in each game).