So I hope everyone had a fun weekend playing in their M11 Pre-Release and Release events. I personally played two days myself, had great success the first day playing a White-Blue aggro deck packed with fliers and light countermagic that let me take down first, as well as playing a Black-Green Rock deck that I split first for the prize. Then day two I was piloting a rather shaky White-Blue control deck that used milling as a win condition (I had almost no really good finishers in my entire pool) and then after a not very impressive 1-1 start, I mixed it up a bit into a Blue-Green-Splash White deck that felt a little bit more stable, but unfortunately I was still one win short at the end of the day to make the Top 8, although I did still have a lot of fun.

But after all of that magic on the weekend, I came back to my apartment and my roommates and I broke out probably my favorite format in all of Magic: Cube Drafting. What is Cube Drafting you say? Well, it plays out like a normal draft, but it is packed full of some of the best cards in Magic! While this may not seem all that exciting at first, imagine you lay out your first pack in the draft from your Cube, and you see the following choices:


What do you pick from there?? Pretty much every single card in this pack has been easily a first pick bomb back in its day, and suddenly you have to choose from between all of them! I’ll give you a hint, here are the best three picks from this pack (in order): Sol Ring, Library of Alexandria, and then Ancestral Recall. I promise you guys this is going to be only time I’m going to tell you that Umezawa’s Jitte is not even in the top THREE picks of a pack, but it is certainly true in this case.


The list above is the cube I play with! As you can see, this one is not powered (meaning it doesn't have the Power 9, like the Moxes, Black Lotus, Ancestral Recall, Time Walk, and Time Twister), and is lacking some of the cards in the first pack that I listed. My friends and I have thought about it long and hard, and decided we didn’t like the boost in the Cube, and preferred to keep it a little simpler. As it is now, it’s still a blast to draft. Its fun, it’s silly, and it really brings back memories of some of the older cards and archetypes that I used to play with, such as UG Tempo, UW Control, and my personal favorite, Red Deck Wins!

Let me take you through some of the archetypes that I really enjoy playing when I draft and the process in which I draft those decks. First off, let’s take a look at the breakdown of my favorite: Red Deck Wins.

So as you can see, the way that I really like to draft this deck is just as absolutely fast as I can. If you look at my main deck picks, nothing costs above three mana except for Flametongue Kavu and Blistering Firecat, and those are only because they are exceptionally amazing. The idea is that everything in your deck is build to simply vomit damage at your opponent, as in the cube, once your opponent gets to the mid to late game, their cards are simply going to be so amazing that there is nothing you are going to be able to do to win.

Against other aggro decks, such as White Weenie or G/R/x based variants, I really like to try to pick up some of the sweepers, such as Slice and Dice, Pyroclasm, and Earthquake. Since all of your really good creatures die at end of turn anyway, you can just wipe the board whenever it gets too cluttered for you. Additionally, you can bring in Ensnaring Bridge and your opponents will simply be unable to touch you while you throw burn spell after burn spell at their face. Against Control, on the other hand, I bring in some of the slightly more long game cards, such as Sulfuric Vortex, Hammer of Bogardan and Banefire. While these are certainly not going to win me the game outright, I’m hoping that they will give me the reach into the late game to overwhelm my opponent as he tries to gain control and deal with my earlier threats.


Another deck that I enjoy trying to put together in the Cube is the artifact deck. Here are some of the top picks for that one:

As you can see, this deck has much less of a defined pick order than RDW. The concept behind it, however, is usually so use mana artifacts to dump out something huge very very quickly, such as a Darksteel Colossus or a Sundering Titan. Tinker into Darksteel Colossus is another quick combo that can win games. Depending on what colors the deck is splashing, it can also pick up large creatures from other colors, such as Keiga, the Tide Star or Bogardan Hellkite. If those don’t work, then it is always game at whipping giant Comet Storms at the opponent to finish the game. Finally, the nail in the coffin is the Mindslaver + Academy Ruins combo that is generally the reason the deck tries to run so many tutors, so that it can find those, and hit the 12 mana + Ruins needed to lock your opponent out of the game.

While those are just two of my favorite decks to draft, there is a huge array or decks, ranging from White Weenie, to 5 Color Junk, to Hardcore Mono U Control! Cube drafting is one of the more diverse and entertaining formats I have ever played, and I would encourage anyone who can get a chance to play to give it a shot. For more information on cube drafting, I highly recommend that you check out Evan Erwin’s website: http://www.cubedrafting.com his site has a lot of information on Cube Drafting, ranging from how to play, to how to start building your own cube. There are also discussions on different theme cubes and different things you can do to mix up the format. Until next week!

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