To put it another way, in constructed formats, the power of storm decks is partially in the explosive card advantage they can generate. The line from your draft and gameplay decisions to the outcome of the game is short — all your choices really matter and you can feel it. The social aspect of in-person games that paper Magic offers has always been important to me, but digital Magic is better than no Magic, so my Cube drafts moved from in-person to online.
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.
Magic Find
In a 15 card deck, you have a 47% chance of having a given card in your opening hand, compared to a 40% chance in a 60 card deck running a full playset of the card in question, or a 17% chance in a typical, 40 card, singleton cube deck. Since my goal is to emulate powerful constructed combos, this allows singleton decks to mimic the proportions of their 60 card equivalents. With small decks and short games, those mistakes are often easier to spot. Instead of thinking about card advantage or tempo or who’s the beatdown, players must determine which cards and interactions matter in the matchup and play accordingly. In the Degenerate Micro Cube, however, that range is greatly reduced, enough so that it is almost always correct to plan in terms of specific, singular cards in yours and your opponent’s decks.
With only twenty picks in the draft, I want them all to have strategic signifigance, and slamming a Lotus or Mox Sapphire is a no-brainer. I actually think Lotus, Crypt, and all five Moxen could safely be added to the cube without disrupting things much. You said this was supposed to be degenerate, so why not just play Black Lotus, Mana Crypt, and the true Moxen? Instead, Ancestral Recall, a card I assumed too powerful, is actually just right. I was initially skeptical that Goblin Welder was good enough, until it was proven to be a unique combination of toolbox, inevitability, and creature cheat that is potent if drafted properly.
Don’t forget, one answer to your opponent’s combo is simply to have a better combo. Whether protecting your own combo or answering an opponent’s, a range of answers is essential, ideally with options to sideboard into depending on the matchup. With such compact win-conditions, most of your picks will be spent on interaction. A willingness to stay open and spend a few speculative picks on varied combo pieces is key to success in the Degenerate Micro Cube. With only twenty picks across two packs, a draft of the Degenerate Micro Cube moves quickly, and each pick is critical.
An Introduction to the Degenerate Micro Cube
Late picks in a traditional cube are often useless, but in the Degenerate Micro Cube, every pick matters because cards can be easily sideboarded. Whereas sideboarding in a more typical, 40 card cube deck is more about making marginal improvements, your post sideboard deck in the Degenerate Micro Cube may employ an entirely new strategy. What’s more, you’ll see a given sideboard card in your opening hand in almost half your games. When playing against a discard heavy opponent, it may be best to mulligan to a “bad” hand that doesn’t contain your most important spells. This complexity makes the Degenerate Micro Cube less approachable and a hard sell to anyone but fairly enfranchised Magic players, and I consider it one of the cube’s biggest weaknesses.
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.
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- Like swimming with sharks or eating a Ghost pepper, playing the Degenerate Micro Cube is not for everyone.
- To challenge other players and claim rewards from the prize pool, Lucky Max offers regular tournaments with cash prizes and free spins.
- One match in an early draft was decided with two spells cast total between the two players (Flash both times, once in each game).
- The social aspect of in-person games that paper Magic offers has always been important to me, but digital Magic is better than no Magic, so my Cube drafts moved from in-person to online.
- The small deck size means that Shelldock Isle is always “turned on” and allows you to cast any spell in your deck, at instant speed, as early as turn two.
- I was initially skeptical that Goblin Welder was good enough, until it was proven to be a unique combination of toolbox, inevitability, and creature cheat that is potent if drafted properly.
If you do have a narrow removal spell for your opponent’s Shelldock, their win condition is now stranded in exile. First, discard spells are dead against it, as you can’t discard lucky max the Shelldock itself, and the target is plucked from your opponent’s library and never in their hand to begin with. Topdeck manipulation in the form of Brainstorm, Sensei’s Divining Top, or Sphinx of Foresight was key to making it work reliably.
Chinese don’t typically gift for this festival, but give lai-see packets (money in lucky red paper envelopes) to children. It’s on the spenny side, but it’s a treat you won’t regret. Actually, I think it’s one of the most delicious restaurants in London (Giles Coren is on record saying it’s the best Chinese restaurant in the world). I’m Hong Kong Chinese by birth, and to celebrate the Year of the Fire Horse (17th February), the following restaurants are some of my favourites. Where noted, the magic find bonus is only active while under the effect of a boon.
- Drafts and games harshly punish inexperience with the primary strategies, and with games often decided by one or two spells, there is no such thing as a “small” mistake.
- Don’t forget, one answer to your opponent’s combo is simply to have a better combo.
- Smaller deck size and potent, narrow answers mean that a Degenerate Micro Cube deck can be radically transformed by sideboarding.
- Instead, I waited a few turns and sequenced Thoughtseize, into Duress, into Channel all in one turn, which taxed my opponent’s answers just enough that I was able to resolve my Channel and win the game.
- 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.
Apple Wallet
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.
The song’s narrative follows the story of the eponymous famous actress, who, despite seemingly having it all – celebrity, wealth, beauty – is truly lonely and ambivalent on the inside. After meeting with producers Max Martin and Rami Yacoub in Sweden, the singer recorded numerous songs for the album, including “Lucky”. “Lucky” is a song by American singer Britney Spears from her second studio album, Oops! A Memorial Gathering will be held at Max A. Sass & Sons-Mission Hills Chapel (8910 W. Drexel Ave., Franklin) on Friday, February 13th starting at 4PM until time of the Memorial Service at 7PM. You’re now following this obituary
Fixing Lands
After seeing a Strip Mine in game one, it felt correct to sideboard above the minimum deck size and pack 2-3 additional lands, but even that couldn’t guarantee that you’d get to cast your spells. Maybe more relevantly, that same small deck size means the Strip Mine player has reliable access to it. Conspiracies and silver border cards have been excluded, even though some of them are strong enough to warrant inclusion on the basis of power level. Hatebears whose ability is not relevant are still bodies that can attack and block, cards like Pithing Needle and Sorcerous Spyglass can almost always find a target, Scrabbling Claws cycles in a pinch, etc. There are a lot of good blue and black cards here; why didn’t you include Veil of Summer?
When the stars align, game-winning combos are usually too much for opponents playing a fair deck to handle, but in most games, you’re playing a compromised deck in order to support a combo that you won’t often draw. One might expect they would be less complicated than games between typical cube decks, as each has fewer unique cards and therefore fewer possible opening lines, threats, and answers. As demonstrated in the “cheat matrix” at the beginning of this article, all of the creature cheat combo decks have a swath of overlapping cards, so “supporting” Sneak Attack or Show and Tell is just a matter of adding them to the cube. I don’t think any cards in existence are too powerful for the cube in the sense that they would be overly dominant, result in unbalanced win-percentages, or push other decks out of viability.
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).
They considered the song Spears’ version of “Where Did It All Go Wrong?” by English rock band Oasis, and went to describe it as “a heart-rending tale of life at the top of the teen pop tree, transformed into an anthem for dramatic, moody 12-year-old girls everywhere by Max Martin’s scary talent for teenybop lyrics”. After meeting with Max Martin and Rami Yacoub in Sweden, Spears recorded several songs for the album, including “Lucky”, which was co-written and co-produced by Martin and Rami, with additional co-writing from Alexander Kronlund. In the United Kingdom, the song peaked at number five, and is Spears’s tenth best-selling single in the country, having sold over 225,000 copies.
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.
Weekly charts
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.
By the time they realize they aren’t getting there, it’s much too late to pivot. A common beginner’s mistake is to take a combo piece early and commit to the deck, assuming that no one else will take the other half of the combo. Drafts and games harshly punish inexperience with the primary strategies, and with games often decided by one or two spells, there is no such thing as a “small” mistake.
Moreover, with the rules change that you no longer lose the game when drawing from an empty library, the inherent risk of these win-conditions is eliminated. Timetwister or Yawgmoth’s Will are powerful because they draw you tons of cards, and with all your mana-positive spells, you can actually use all of them, often in the same turn. Even the best storm decks we crafted were glass cannons that scooped to a counterspell or, if on the draw, a turn one Thoughtseize. Successful combos in the Degenerate Micro Cube are extremely compact, which means the rest of your deck can be any combination of your own disruption, fast mana, or recursion.
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.
