Limited Lessons – ABC: Always Be Cubing

Hi, and welcome to Limited Lessons – my new series catering to anything and everything forty-card deck.

As this is a new series, I figured I’d better start big, and there’s no going bigger than the most powerful limited format around: the Vintage Cube. A lot of you will be pretty familiar with this Cube, as it’s been a beloved staple of the holiday season each year for some time now. However, for the uninitiated, Cube can be complex, intimidating, and even overwhelming! Today’s article will break down the Vintage Cube into bitesize chunks, so by the first time you ever open a pack, you’ll have some idea of where to go. First things first, though; what even is it?

What is a Cube?

Simply put, a Cube is a set of reprints put together to create a ‘set’ of sorts, packs are created by dealing multiples of fifteen cards randomly, and then drafted. Once the draft is done, the cards are re-shuffled up, and are ready to be re-dealt into packs. Cubes are made out of a minimum of 360 cards (twenty-four packs worth), but are regularly made up of some multiple of this number. 540 and 720 cards are common cube sizes, as it ensures that some cards will be left out of a given draft and your drafts will differ from one to the next.

At its core, that’s it. Anyone can make one out of any cards to satisfy any play experience. All common-cube? Sure. Triple Innistrad Cube? Been done. Mono-Green Cube? A bit of a weird one, but why not!

These are all novel ideas, but today we’re looking at the most well known and (arguably) most well-liked Cube – Vintage. The Vintage Cube is a singleton format (there is only one copy of each unique card), and is comprised of all the most busted cards to ever see print. The Vintage Cube is where players go to let their proverbial hair down, and engage in some real nonsense. Unstable may have the claim on out of game silliness, but Vintage has in game silliness on lock. Turn one kills, infinite combos, removing all of your opponents’ permanents; Vintage has it all.

Before I get into the nitty gritty, there are two things about the Vintage Cube that are so totally counter-intuitive to most limited formats I’m going to highlight them here:

 

  • You are not aiming to draft a limited deck, you are aiming to draft a constructed deck

 

What does this even mean? Let me explain.

In most modern limited formats, your aim when you sit down is reasonably simple. For the first few picks, take the best cards – often a rare or two and the top removal – and then try to identify which colours are open in your seat based on what you’re being passed. Once you’ve got this, you settle into a colour combo, then take the best cards out of those colours until the draft ends, bearing in mind your mana curve. Your final deck is going to have a bunch of creatures, a couple of removal spells, and then be filled out with either combat tricks or card draw, depending on whether your deck leans fast or slow. In most recent limited formats, this attitude would do you just fine.

If you do this in Cube, you are doing it wrong. In Cube, every card is powerful, so you’re not looking for a deck that is a sum of its parts as above; your aim is for your deck to have a plan.

You could be a dedicated control deck with only two win conditions, and a bunch of counterspells/removal/card draw/wraths. You could be a focused combo deck, with all of your cards focused on selection/tutoring and the remaining on just keeping you alive until you go off. Maybe you’re an aggro deck, and you have eight one-drops, six two-drops, and twelve burn spells. It doesn’t matter what you go for; what matters is that all of your cards are working towards a cohesive goal.

 

  • The fairer your deck, the worse it is

 

In The Vintage Cube, there are tons of ways to break the rules of Magic. One land per turn?

Only Green gets mana ramp?

Ten drops cost ten mana?

While your opponent is playing a turn two Tinker to fetch up a Blightsteel Colossus, don’t be the guy holding Thrun, the Last Troll and Thragtusk. Be the guy who already won the game by spending turn one casting Entomb and Reanimate off of a Mox Jet into your Griselbrand.

So, these lessons in mind, let’s get down to it. When you crack your first pack of Vintage Cube, what should you be looking for?

Pick Ranking

 

  • ‘Power’

 

When people refer to ‘Power’, they mean the Power Nine themselves; Ancestral Recall, Time Walk, Timetwister, Black Lotus, and the five Moxen. Add to this list Sol Ring, and you have a list of the ten easiest picks out of any pack. Each card offers something that is inherently broken, either in the form of fast mana or huge card advantage at an absurdly undercosted rate. If you open a piece of Power, take it.

 

  • Power Cards

 

Next up we have the most powerful (but not ‘Power’ – I realise this is confusing!) cards in the Cube, and given that cards like Baneslayer Angel are considered nigh-unplayable, this means a lot. Jace, the Mind Sculptor, Opposition, Upheaval, Mana Drain and even occasionally non-Blue cards can be found here. Each card is an engine unto itself, and will increase their controllers’ win percentage something ridiculous if they resolve.

 

  • Fast Mana

 

When everyone’s cards are off-the-charts powerful, it’s less about the small differences in strength between two cards and more about who can deploy them the most efficiently. The mana rocks are all extremely high picks for this reason, and should be taken early and often.

 

  • Dual Lands

 

To continue the theme of the above, casting your cards on time is much more important in Cube than it is in regular limited. If you end a draft, line up all your sick cards, then lay out seventeen basics, you are doing it wrong. A bunch of your best cards will have tricky mana costs, and any stumble is going to be lights out. You should be aiming for a minimum of three-four duals in every multicolour deck, no matter if it’s only two colours.

So, which duals? Fetchlands and duals with basic land types like the Ravnica Shocklands are the most valuable, as they combine so well. A Scalding Tarn can fetch an Island, Mountain, Blood Crypt or Hallowed Fountain, turning a two-colour dual into a four colour dual! First picking a Polluted Delta is not a chore, but a luxury.

 

  • Interaction and Card Draw

 

Thoughtseize. Daze. Remand. Mana Leak. Swords to Plowshares. Ponder. Preordain. Thirst for Knowledge. Fact or Fiction. While every deck you draft should be focused, these cards are so inherently strong that they’ll be great whether you wind up in a combo, control, aggro or ramp suite. Each card your opponent casts is going to either be one of these, mana, or a giant bomb – smoothing your own draw and countering your opponents’ cards is more important here than it is ever. Note, also, that each piece of interaction cost no more than two mana; efficiency is key, so don’t get too excited by Oblivion Ring or Cast Out. When opposing an Woodfall Primus can come down on turn three, O-Ring is not getting you there.

 

  • Combo Pieces

 

This category is actually pretty far reaching, but a common interaction to look out for includes the Kiki/Splinter Twin and Restoration Angel/Pestermite/Deceiver Exarch combo, as it kills the opponent on the spot. Other combos include Sneak Attack and Emrakul, the Aeons Torn or Griselbrand and Show and Tell plus literally any giant thing!

 

  • Fast Green Mana

 

In the Cubes without mana rocks, this category goes way up the list, but when Green doesn’t dominate the mana ramp wedge of the colour pie it gets a lot less exciting. Still, if you find an early Natural Order into a couple of mana dorks, you have a plan on the go. Rofellos is just as insane in Vintage as he is in the Legacy Cube.

 

  • Finishers

 

Grave Titan, Primeval Titan, Consecrated Sphinx – these are all immediate game-ending Magic cards. So why is this category so low down? They’re replaceable. That seems ridiculous, right? They’re insane! Then again, so is Frost Titan. And Karn Liberated. Vraska, Relic Seeker, Torrential Gearhulk, Elspeth, Sun’s Champion, or… you get the idea. Focus on the shell of your deck first, and unless your plan requires a particular win condition (see the various combos mentioned or available), just take whatever is available to you once you’ve run out of the other categories here.

And that’s my general rule of thumb for pick order. Now, this is draft, so everything is fluid, but for the first few picks, you can’t really go wrong with the above.

I mentioned that you’re looking to draft a constructed deck, and not a limited deck. So, what archetypes should you be shooting for? Starting with the most fair and going down to the least fair, let’s take a look!

Deck Ranking

Mono Colour Aggro

To start, we’re going to throw out everything that I’ve said above, and get right on with a deck that’s about as fair as they come – mono-colour aggro, whether Red or White.

Mono-colour aggro aims to punish all of the unfair decks below by going way, way under them, and either burning them out if they stabilise (Lightning Bolt, Chain Lightning) or preventing them from ever stabilising (Thalia, Guardian of Thraben, Leonin Arbiter). The issue with drafting these decks is that they can rarely support more than one drafter at a table, so while they can be extremely powerful, I’d know which signals to look for before diving in. Yes, pick eight Sulfuric Vortex counts.

Artifact Ramp

The key for this one is in the name. Usually Ux and often R, the artifact ramp deck spends a little time disrupting the opponent with countermagic, plays a bunch of mana rocks, then uses them to dump something giant into play like an Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger or an Ugin, the Spirit Dragon. Bonus points if you manage to also fit in some combos like Tinker or Metalworker and Staff of Domination.

Combo

While it’s a bit cute to call ‘combo’ a deck by itself, as there are so many of them, ultimately these combo decks will be built around one or two combos that win the game on the spot. Twin, Sneak Attack, Show and Tell – they all work. The exact shell differs from draft to draft, but expect a lot of disruption and card draw to buy time and find their pieces. Also, expect your combo opponent to win losing games out of nowhere.

Storm

Ah, Storm – the deck that should be drafted players maybe a quarter of the time that players try to force it.

Storm is a very, very finnicky deck. Always U and splashing R, B or both, it needs cantrips and card draw, mana ramp, some interaction and a few specific win conditions. Even when the deck does come together, playing it is quite the test; knowing when the critical turn comes to try and go off is tricky itself, let alone correctly executing the kill. This is where you’ll find the Timetwisters and Memory Jars of the world, as well as every streamer who ever existed.

Reanimator

By no means do I consider Reanimator the best deck in Vintage Cube, not by a longshot – but it’s probably the most unfair. The reason for that is simple; when it works, the execution is simple, and your opponent loses. It turns out that casting an end-step Entomb into a turn two Animate Dead on Griselbrand is a pretty straight-forward sequence!

Reanimator is base B and usually R or U, and needs a few things to work: a couple of giant targets for resurrection, a lot of card filtering, a decent few reanimation spells, and some self-discard. It also requires a shrug and handshake from your opponent when you play a turn one Grave Titan.

This list is by no means exhaustive, and there are plenty of other options out there. How about mono-Green ramp? UW Control? UR Delver?

Summary

And that’s the Vintage Cube, where Magic happens as Garfield intended. Whether you’re an experienced player currently in the middle of resolving a sixteenth copy of Tendrils of Agony or a newbie now geared up to cast Time Walks and Ancestrals with the best of them, I’ll see you on the battlefield.

If you’ve any thoughts or comments, leave them below. As always, good luck!

 

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