Conspiracy: Take the Crown for Cube
Conspiracy is an interesting release when it comes to cube. As with any release that will bypass modern and standard formats the design scope is a lot more open allowing for some very high power level cards to crop up. The set is also designed with the intent to be played multiplayer meaning a lot of the cards will function differently in a one v one game of magic. Often they will be less powerful but certainly not all of them! Mechanics like Goad have weaker utility in a traditional game, but nevertheless still have some useful functions.
Then there are the cards that interact with the draft in some manner, a feature unique to Conspiracy sets. Many of these are very powerful, however they only function if you exclusively booster draft your cube. If like me, you play a wide selection of formats with your cube then the addition of these booster draft only cards will just mean loads of taking cards in and out of the cube depending on what you are doing. This is something I expect to get tedious pretty quickly and so I expect to rarely use those cards despite their potential. If you predominantly draft however, it may be worthwhile testing a few out in your cube.
The conspiracies themselves are not exactly draft only cards but they certainly are most balanced in that setting. With the cube being singleton many of the conspiracies that only affect one card are simply far too low powered to be worth including in a cube however the ones that have a more general effect typically seem over powered in a cube setting. Either they offer way too much value for free or they are a build around that is a little on the narrow side but incredibly powerful. I think the conspiracies are a great way to spice up the cube for a bit here and there, nice for a change but they are a little too polar and unbalanced for me to want them as an ongoing feature in my cube. All of them are playable as they are generally open to abuse. Even the lowest power narrow ones have things they work especially well with and could be incorporated into a viable cube deck.
Lastly, we have the Monarch which is entirely new to Take the Crown. Although perhaps more dynamic and exciting in multiplayer the mechanism still works in one on one play and makes for some very interesting choices. It is a powerful effect to have and easily worth 3 mana should you be confident that you can protect it well. Compared to something like a Phyrexian Arena it draws you cards quicker and with less pain. The monarch means even more things affecting your combat choices. When I started magic it was pretty much the case of attacking for damage. Hypnotic Specter was the only thing that you had an affect from, and that had flying anyway so could always attack pretty freely! These days you have planeswalkers to attack. Loads of triggers on cards like Looter il-Kor and the Sword cycle, from creatures dealing combat damage to players to consider. With the monarch there is now the possibility of trying to steal it away from each other to really complicate the combat choices. What is attacking what? What is the priority, is it killing a planeswalker or taking back the monarchy? What can you afford to attack with sacrificially so as to force through some damage? These are all things that make me like the new mechanic. What makes me a little more wary of it is quite how win more it seems to be. If you are ahead it will be incredibly easy to retain the monarchy and as such the game. If you are behind you really risk giving it away and losing as a result of a card you played. Win more cards are hard to justify playing in your deck, particularly ones with high risks associated with them. I would like to be able to include some monarch cards in the cube but only a few of the most suitable ones.
Due to how the set is designed I am going to look at three different groups of cards. One group will be just the good old normal magic cards that work in a normal setting without any complication or design imbalance. Another group will be the cards that only work in a booster draft but offer sufficient power to tangle in the cube. The other group will be the exotic stuff like the conspiracies themselves that you can make work in other non-draft formats but like the Wish cycle, will likely need some stipulations as to how they can be used exactly.
The Good Draft Only Stuff
This is probably one of the most powerful cards in the set when put into a cube. I don’t much like the card as it will encourage bad drafting behaviour but it could easily be the green True-Name Nemesis. In cube it is not too hard to find indestructible and hexproof things to make this near unkillable. Then add in a dash of haste and lifelink, perhaps some double strike and evasion and you have a cheap dork you can’t race and can’t kill. Certainly you will need to make some hard choices about when to waste picks buffing one card and because of this the card itself isn’t totally broken however that won’t matter at all when it is played, it will always feel really unfair and dull.
A build your own lord card. This is a great design that gives you some hard choices about which tribes to buff and which card to do it with. Too early and you lose something you might want to play and too late you might miss all together. A two mana 2/2 lord is top rate but not over powered. At just a single white the card is very splashable allowing him to lord for non-white tribes and making him highly playable compared to most other tribal cards.
Much like the Cogwork Librarian from the original Conspiracy set. This is a slightly more playable body but is slightly more costly to use for a double pick. With cube having such high powered cards and relatively high variance on actual picks within packs this is still an extremely good pickup at any point in the first two packs. You will happily take this over a mediocre playable with no intention of playing it in your mono red deck just so when you do see that pack with two cards you really want you can have your cake and eat it.
This is another great card design. Not only is it quite a good removal spell it will also provide some information as to what the players either side of you are drafting. Early on in a draft this may even be worth picking it without any real intention to play it just to be able to avoid your neighbours colours. Purely picked as a removal spell it competes very well with the best black has to offer. It is instant and one mana which puts it in a really good spot. It can kill any size of creature thus giving it good late game scaling. The restriction on targets might leave it dead in one or two matchups and likely only able to kill half the things in a couple of others but this is a price worth paying for such a potent tempo card. Most black removal spells have some target restriction. Regicide is really good in that it has such a different range on targets to other black removal that means it will overlap well with any others you might have.
The Exotic Stuff
This is my favourite of the new conspiracies as it seems the most balanced all round for cube use. Targeting two of your cards means it is very likely to trigger and get you a free card. It also has some very interesting choices as to which dorks to pair up. You ideally want ones that work well together but are both cheap as well. You do not want to have a pricey one sat in hand unable to be cast and then draw the thing it is bonded to. A free pre-chosen Eladamri’s Call bolted onto the first of two cards in your deck is a great deal but it isn’t quite over powered. One of the main reasons I like this more than most of the the other conspiracies in this set is that you can get it late in pack 3 and still have it be a good card in your deck. The others all need you to somewhat draft around them.
Frankly this is quite silly. For one it is really broken with Fastbond to the point of not being fun at all. Get this relatively early in a draft and you can make a really overpowered deck that never ever screws or floods and that has access to literally all the most powerful cards in the game. Get this late however and it is pretty much a double mulligan for you. Cards that are this swingy and have this level of build around on them don’t improve the game. In a draft this is too narrow a lot of the time and in other formats it is has the capacity to be far far too good.
This has almost all the same problems associated with Sovereign Realm and a bonus one all of its own. While this makes a lot of dorks you can draft better it also makes a lot weaker. To actually get an advantage out of this card you have to greatly limit your in drat options. In more constructed style cube formats this is likely just far too good. Tireless Tribe for the easy turn two kill doesn’t sound much fun.
Much like Weight Advantage this card offers quite a lot of potential power but limits your options in doing so. This is too narrow for a cube draft because from about pick five on wards it will be too late to make use of and be a dead card. For more constructed cube events this could be quite fun as it leads to some unique deck design challenges. It is powerful and able to be taken advantage of well but it isn’t a free advantage and it isn’t exploitable in a way that isn’t fun like with Weight Advantage and Tireless Tribe.
Easily powerful enough for cubes but not a card I really want to play with. There are some similarities with this and Animus of Predation in that when you get the perfect things the power level is through the roof to the point of it not being fun. Cruel Ultimatum is brutal enough, it does not need to come with a 3/3, be in two fewer colours and cost two less mana! Arcane Savant is a little more random as there are fewer playable game breaking instants and sorceries in the cube than there are creatures with powerful keyword abilities. The problem with this card in any given cube format is that when he is good he is way too good.
The Normal Stuff
One of the most interesting planeswalkers printed to date. As she only depletes and refreshes loyalty rather than gaining it the choices surrounding what you do with her and how safe you want her to be will be great. She also has one of the best self protection mechanisms of any planeswalker ever printed complete with synergistic and powerful other abilities. The two point life drain is minor but does allow her to be a threat and also recovers life lost through using the zero ability. The -2 ability is incredibly powerful and will cause most decks a headache. While exciting and clearly powerful I have my concerns as to her cube viability. I will certainly get one and try her our but she is competing with a lot of other very strong walkers as a white and black four drop. Her second big issue is that she doesn’t permanently affect the board in any way making her a really weak tempo play most of the time. You have to be in specific colours and have a deck than can stomach the tempo loss before you can play her. She has enough power to be in the cube but I fear she is very narrow.
This little walker however is a different story to Kaya. Nothing comparable competes with Daretti for deck slots and he certainly can affect the board! Not that you need to so much when you are a three mana planeswalker. Daretti is one of the best cards from the set for the cube, he is powerful but designed sufficiently well that he isn’t tedious. Daretti has the best ability to protect himself of any three mana planeswalker with a 1/1 blocker and a gain in loyalty. His second ability is incredibly powerful and greatly rewards people who have expendable artifacts while still being decent for those without because of the +1. Destroying a creature or an artifact for a single loyalty and a sacrificed artifact is top notch. Ob Nixilis spends 3 loyalty as a five mana planeswalker to kill a creature and he can’t hit artifacts either to give an idea of the value of Daretti’s -1. If you are relying on the +1 ability to fuel the -1 ability then Daretti is much slower to do his work but should still be able to a lot of the time. When you make him early and get to stockpile a load of 1/1 artifact defenders then you are almost certainly going to win. Currently it is only Ashiok that gets really out of hand when made on curve and isn’t put under enough pressure but I suspect Daretti will be comparable. Obviously Daretti is better against creature based decks while Ashiok is actually best against more control style decks.
Daretti can lock someone out of a game if they were planning to use creatures but if you don’t have decent targets for the ultimate ability Daretti isn’t a threat. For most decks playing him this will be the norm. There are not that many good artifact threats in the cube and very few decks indeed have several. Best case scenario, you make three Wurmcoil Engine tokens, worst and expected case you have a blank ultimate. Dack Fayden is the only planeswalker who normally isn’t himself a threat. This means if a control player plans to kill you with a Celestial Colonnade they can literally ignore your Daretti and it won’t do much of much. Powerful three mana walkers don’t need to be threats as well to be good and Daretti is certainly that. The fringe cases where he can be ignored won’t make a dent in the number of games he utterly owns by stopping your opponent having any useful permanents.
A toughness based white rework of Imperial Recruiter. This is a useful card and will crop up as a good tutor effect for certain things. Merlia Pod and Aluren decks will love this as I’m sure will many more. This is a great combo tool but unless your cube supports those combo decks this isn’t a good value card and it isn’t even that much of a utility card. It might have a space in some hate bears style decks but in some generic aggressive deck this doesn’t get anything that powerful and isn’t at all powerful itself. The old 3 mana 1/1 is not a tempo play. Imperial Recruiter only saw play in Splinter Twin really and while the recruiter of the Guard has a slightly broader scope it is still a very narrow card. I will not be adding this to my drafting cube although I expect it to see a fair amount of play in the more constructed cube formats.
A card that is cheap and playable and powerful make this one of the most exciting cards from the set. There are some comparisons to be made with this and Edric, Spymaster of Trest, but Grenzo is far superior. As a single colour 2 mana 2/2 Grenzo is an acceptable aggressive body himself and starts from a much more independently playable position. Unlike cards such as Precinct Captain he does not need to do the work himself either so you have the best of all the worlds. You can just have Grenzo getting in on his own and doing work or you can have him safely sat back watching while your other dorks get bonus work done. Grenzo has immediate impact on a game where you have any other dorks as they suddenly all increase in their threat level.
While the weaker of the options, goad is still flexible and useful. It can force someone into an unfavourable race, it can be used to get more things through unblocked and gain further Grenzo triggers or it can be used to force creatures to chump attack to their doom. The second of the abilities has several applications. Firstly it is just good value being able to randomly cast things that don’t cost you a card. You can’t make lands you hit with it so it is not that equivalent to drawing a card but it is still potentially a lot of value and card advantage. While relatively minor it does add a whole new dimension to your deck. Presumably you are an aggressive red deck if you are playing Grenzo and as such you have very little beyond small dorks and burn. Having access to their Necropotence or their Disenchant might well be your best course to victory. Lastly and probably most relevant on this effect is the exiling of their cards. Very few cube decks are happy about having cards in their deck removed from the game. Some combo and control decks can just fold if you hit the wrong card or two. The cube has lots of card quality and tutor effects with many midrange decks relying on having specific answers they can find and reuse. Random exile can really hurt these decks too. It is only the really aggressive and redundant decks that don’t care much at all about the exile effect and at least with those you will find lots of cheap and playable cards to play for value.
This subtle little common is a big win for cube. This will see lots of play in quite a wide array of decks and will be used for many different functions as it were. Borderland Explorer is a discard outlet, it is a shuffle effect, it is a cheap solution to a mana screw, it is an aggressive body that works well on both offense or defense. It isn’t even bad in a flood as you can simply throw away a land to get a land and at least thin your deck. In any deck that actively wants a discard outlet this will be one of the very first cards they look to. It is the complete package for Recurring Nightmare. It doesn’t even cost you a card when you use it as a discard outlet! You don’t need to be reanimating massive dorks or playing out aggressive free dorks from the bin like Bloodghast and Vengevine for this to be good synergy. Just getting delirium or powering up delve can be very powerful. Playing this kind of card will make decks more consistent which will allow you in turn to pack them full of more power. While certainly not the most powerful card in the set my money is on this one being the most played. I should note that it does help your opponent out a little on occasion. This is fairly minor and won’t bring the card down too much in power. You are using it when you want which means the symmetry in the effect will highly favour you. Mostly it will just make you think about more about when you chose to use it.
I think this card is a bit of a trap and likely too underwhelming for most cube use. It is a bit of a broad sweep Meddling Mage effect but it comes on a Gray Ogre body making it a very poor tempo play. As a potential sideboard card it will utterly wreak some decks and will keep some people very honest just with its existence. This could well do good work in eternal constructed formats but in cube draft it will not be a good solution to anything much and won’t buy enough time to be worth the cost of playing a Grey Ogre in your deck.
This is a bit clunky and bit risky, but overall I think it is probably powerful enough that it merits cube inclusion. Much like with the monarch mechanic the risk with this card is that you give your opponents the option to draw cards. There is some counter synergy there as well as she is a ramp card you want to play early. Making this on curve is the highest risk way of giving your opponents cards. That being said this is so powerful I think that even if you immediately give away a card you will be quite easily able to recover that and more as the green player. There is a lot of synergy with having mana, making big stuff and drawing cards so as to repeat the cycle just with more mana and bigger stuff! The reason this is quite playable is that if you make this on curve and your opponent makes a three or greater power creature to draw a card what they haven’t done is kill your Selvala. As people who play a lot of cube know, cards like Rofellos are not cards you can leave in play and expect to win. Selvala should be good against creature decks for her mana output potential and she will be brutal against creature light decks because she will have you several cards up as well.
Lastly we come to the monarch cards that seem most suitable for the cube. Whilst blue and green had some acceptable cards that made you the monarch, neither colour seems well suited to the effect. Neither colour has removal, blue has few creatures and mostly small ones and green struggles to stop fliers. Neither is really that desperate for card advantage. Red is reasonably well placed to be the monarch but the cards offering it were too pricey to be interesting. Only the Skyline Despot had enough power to be a cube consideration in red. Black has removal and can retain the monarch fairly well but doesn’t really need the card advantage. Black has plenty of its own risky ways to draw cards! White is the obvious home for the monarch with the best defensive dorks, the best cheap dorks and the best removal complete with a total lack of card advantage tools. This is why a Pillarfield Ox that makes you the monarch is one of the most exciting cube card with the mechanic. The body is decent at protecting your monarchy and the cost is very reasonable, call it two and a half mana for the card draw effect and one and a half for the 2/4.
For a slightly greater commitment to white and a two toughness reduction you can have quite a potent removal effect bolted on to your Phyrexian Arena ! Unlike Banisher Priest the small body is not an issue as that isn’t the return clause for the card exiled. They have to take the monarchy to get their dork back which is obviously a lot harder to do now you have one extra guy and they have one less. There is an element of Sower of Temptation about this card however the Jailer offers more ongoing advantage and is far less dependent on keeping a 2/2 alive. This is easily one of the biggest blowouts you can do in the cube, make a guy, kill a guy, draw a card and threaten to draw double there after. While a touch situational and risky this kind of power is too good to turn down.
While I don’t think black needs to mess around with the monarch with its tool set this card is just a bit too good to ignore. It has the same lovely synergy Palace Jailer has with the monarch in that it is also a two creature swing so as to aid in the protection of it. An Edict as an enter the battlefield trigger is something black quite wants in the cube. The card is playable on its own but also has some really good synergies with things like Recurring Nightmare which cards like Gatekeeper of Malakir don’t offer. Like the Palace Jailer again the Custodi Lich is fairly weak to a lot of small creatures and tokens however it is incredibly punishing against medium and larger dorks. Often enough the initial Flame Tongue Kavu swing backed up by card draw will be too much to recover and a fight over the monarchy will not be a problem. Not quite up to Shriekmaw levels but certainly rivaling Skinrender as second best black Nekrataal effect for cube.
Are there any cards you think i have overlooked, underrated or perhaps overrated? Let me know in the comments below.
