Written by Hi, Welcome back! I took a Diablo III break from writing articles. It’s a fantastic game, but I think I have it out of my system now.
When we last left off, we were discussing the top 10 Johnny traps in the Magic Online Cube.
Number Five
Skithiryx, the Blight Dragon
This is one of my favorite cards to come out in years. I built a Commander deck for it. The art is incredible and so is the power level. Infect is similar to doublestrike in execution if you focus your deck on it. This badboy can regenerate and often attacks the turn it enters the battlefield. What’s not to love?
Well, in this cube, it is one of the only cards with poison. Often, you will play this card and have it killed by the efficient removal in cube quite quickly. It has no immediate impact unless you can save the mana for the haste activation.
Worse yet, your opponent may wait to kill it until they have 8 or 9 poison counters and let you waste turns trying to kill them with it. There are hardly any other ways in the cube to increase poison counters besides Skithiryx.
You either have to abandon your poison game plan altogether, or you have to find a way to cast Skithiryx again and hope it isn’t killed once more. Neither option is ideal.
On top of that, Black is already a disjointed color in the cube already without adding in poison as another fork in Black’s convoluted, unfocused card pool.
These considerations pain me to talk about because I love the card. This is just not the format for it.
Number Four
Tendrils of Agony
I could have chosen any of the other Storm spells here, including Mind’s Desire, or Empty the Warrens.
The designers of the cube admitted that these cards were thrown in at the last minute because they tried to make room for an artifact deck in the cube, but cut it at the last minute.
Instead, they left us with an unplayable archetype with multiple cards slotted to it. It seems to me to be a poor decision to make.
I don’t support Reanimator as a complete archetype in my cube. Furthermore, I don’t tempt my players to make it by putting cards like Buried Alive or Entomb in my cube either. I want every card to be of use in the cube. I don’t design traps on purpose.
The few cards useful for the archetype are also pretty terrible cube picks. Priest of Urabrask is an example.
This archetype would be mildly playable if you were very lucky and opened multiple moxen, Mox Sapphire. However, the Magic Online cube is relatively unpowered. Those cards are not even available.
I expect to see the Storm cards rotated out for the next cube draft season.
Number Three – *Tie
Tinker and Natural Order
I lumped these two together because they work similarly. I tried for a long time to make Tinker work in my cube. It is one of the all-time powerhouse cards in MAGIC. It is a tutor, a mana accelerator, an attacker, an engine, and a win condition, among others, all wrapped into one.
It just requires too much setup to be reliable in cube, as does Natural Order. You have to have the stars align for either of these cards to be useful.
1. You have to alter your draft picks for one card. This is similar to the Isochron Scepter problem.
2. The cube has to have cards in it just to support the archetype of these singular cards. Often, they are unplayable without it: Progenitus or Blightsteel Colossus.
3. You need a cheap artifact or a cheap green creature and a good target in your deck.
4. Also, you sacrifice the permanent whether it is countered or not. It’s a two-for-one for the opponent in that situation.
5. The card you bring into play has to survive removal itself, or it’s a three-for-one for your opponent.
Cube cards are a precious commodity. There is only so much space in each one for playables. There is little reason to waste that limited resource for trick decks that will work very infrequently.
I am tailoring my cube to target Spikes. They will get the most enjoyment out of it. Tinker evokes epicness to long-time players. It is such a disappointment in the cube environment and will not live up to it’s Vintage performance.
Number Two
Æther Vial
Cubers have been talking about how terrible this card has performed for a while. If you draw it late, it does nothing. If you manage to get it early, you might be able to cheat a creature or two into play, but this is pretty rare.
In the early days of my cube, people would use it to be sneaky and flash in blockers against their opponents. I can remember winning with it and Kokusho, the Evening Star during one of my matches. Illusionary Mask was used for similar shenanigans.
The few epic plays were remembered. Most of the time, a Wild Draw Four from Uno would have been a more helpful card to have in your hand.
Æther Vial is too slow for aggro and not helpful enough for control. It is merely mediocre in cube, and that’s not what were looking for in cube construction or gameplay.
Æther Vial suffers from the singleton format of cube. It is a powerhouse in regular constructed formats where you can play 4 of them. It is even banned in Mirrodin Block format.
It’s a good card, but so is Arcbound Ravager from the same set. Neither is cubable because the cards needed around them to be amazing are not available.
Number One
Yawgmoth’s Will
This is another card that is disheartening to talk poorly about. I had it in my own cube since its inception.
It is a juggernaut among cards, banned in every format imaginable, the stuff of legends.
We used to argue that Evan Erwin was insane for cutting this card. It was often first picked and was played heavily in the early Cube days. It was Yawgmoth’s Win for crap’s sake!
We came to realize, slower than I’d like to admit, how poorly it played in the Cube. It was useful for replaying dead Moxen from the graveyard and playing an extra fetch land, but without the fine-tuned lists of Vintage, it was pretty lackluster.
The online cube has no power and limited access to mana acceleration spells, Dark Ritual to make it useful. Yawgmoth’s Will is a bad Raise Dead or Farseek most of the time.
It’s reputation precedes it, and it is drafted quite often by power-hungry drafters. They will eventually learn their lesson as we did.
We’ve learned that reputation in constructed formats tends to skew player’s ideals about card quality. It happened to me a lot in my earlier cube design days. I hope my warnings are heeded for future designers.
Cube is a limited format, no matter how close to constructed it may feel at times. Being able to recreate decks from the past is a great feeling. Some old favorite decks are unable to translate, however. It’s a slight weakness on what is otherwise my favorite MAGIC format of all time.
Join me next time when I talk about Planechase 2012 and Magic 2013 Core Set additions.
Take care,
DJ
cuberdj@gmail.com
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Inbred cat is not amused.