This is the story of how I came to own Magic cards again after 15 years, a design guide from a first-time cube builder, and a memoir of all of my nostalgia and stories around Invasion Block cards during the coming-of-age of Team TOGIT & its youngest member. The primary audience is either my fellow Magic dinosaurs or my future grandchildren who will be forced to play this cube with me.
Table of Contents
Genesis
I should own some physical Magic cards to play with
I don't see old Magic friends often, but it's always been a little sad not having any cards to play with.
I first started playing Magic around Exodus and then stopped keeping a collection after the exodus of Mirrodin. The collection has long since been iteratively sold down to zero. Even with this spark, I'm not at all interested in starting to maintain an active collection again, and I have no interest in Eternal formats. (I briefly considered moving in on a few "Premodern" decks --
these example decks are exactly my everything -- but the card prices were far too off-putting, not to mention regret-inducing on those past collection sales).
So I guess I should make a cube
Limited has always and will always be better than Constructed, after all.
I would have expected that I'd love cubes. In my heyday, before cubes were ubiquitous, the idea of cubes and the downwind glory I had heard about "broken draft" and CMU's cube sounded like the stuff of legends. My first dozen cube drafts were fun, but the novelty wore off really quickly. I found that the nuance and balance of regular Limited environments were my preferred experience. And if I'm going to design and own something personally, assembling the traditional cube of my own feeble non-riff on Magic's greatest hits didn't sound fun.
What I was drawn to most was simply permanently capturing a Limited environment that I grew up with, one that I would enjoy playing and sharing with old friends & new friends alike for the rest of my life. A snapshot-in-time cube that will never evolve.
Fry and his anchovies -- that'll be me, sharing the draft format I love with the people I like. (Also, we'll watch some Futurama together afterwards.)
Now I'm getting hyped. Designing and assembling this might be as close as I get to a mid-life crisis. I'm in for it.
My cube will be a rarity-weighted (~11 commons, 3 uncommons, 1 rare per pack) "remaster" of a favorite classic Limited environment
I want a real Limited environment experience, and packs full of rares isn't it.
I found
Tempest Remastered on MODO to be good play value and still perfectly nostalgic, so I figured I'd pick a classic draft format, keep all the favorites and do a bunch of rarity shifts to make it playable.
For me, there were only three blocks in consideration:
Honorable Mention: Triple
Khans of Tarkir, an all-time excellent format from the wrong era. If I ever build a second cube, it'll probably be that.
- Masques block, the first block within my life as a regular drafter and where I began to learn Limited strategy. But, who am I kidding, this block is a disaster when it comes to design and play experience. It will take someone more talented than me to successfully develop Mercadia Remasquetered into an acceptable and fun environment, and it would just be worse for my goals than other options in the end.
- Odyssey block, the actual pinnacle of my career, but fewer personal nostalgic pulls for some reason (maybe the wonder was already fading, to mix blocks and metaphors) and possibly too quirky, though beloved, of a strategic environment onto which to onboard new players.
- Invasion block, a not-close high watermark of Limited environments for multiple years on either side of its release, oozing with classic cards, overflowing in personal nostalgia, and readily remasterable to solve its glaring play experience hole of insufficient mana fixing. Yep, this.
IPA is the Link to the Past of multicolor draft environments to Ravnica's Ocarina of Time; ignored/underrated but actually the most fun replay, establishing & nearly nailing the execution of the larger foundation of critical design elements.
To take you back to
the year 2000...
- Magic Context: After a deliberate drought of printing ANY multicolor cards, Invasion introduces Magic's first multicolor block. The omnipresence of multicolor cards today is representative of the evergreen popularity of multicolor as a mechanic, and at the time, players were even more starved and hungry for it, and the block delivered on every axis. The world's first exposure to Invasion was one of the bigger early Magic leaks: a low-res photo of a foil common sheet mysteriously appeared on eBay.
- Story Context: Mike Turian is famously quoted as not having realized that Invasion was about an invasion. Yep, hard same. Some of the cards have Phyrexians and the Weatherlight crew on it, and they're cool.
- Personal Context: I've just entered high school, TOGIT has just moved to its second-but-not-final location -- the one with the iguana tanks & the pizza shop with the 3/$1 garlic knots which would routinely be traded for rares to hungry friends -- and the nascent legends of Team TOGIT are approaching their era of prominence on the US Magic scene but aren't quite yet good enough to avoid dropping games at FNM drafts to this kid 4-6 years their junior. (This would change drastically by the time Invasion rotates out of Standard.) This is also the last block where I would spend money on packs and crack them, which is perhaps the biggest milestone in the birth of a lifelong drafter.
- Musical Context: Recommended background music for playing this cube: Eminem, Destiny's Child, Mystikal, 3 Doors Down. Not recommended but inevitable on the radio: Creed, Ricky Martin, Shaggy, Crazy Town.
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Design
As I set out on the design, it occurs to me at this point that plenty of other people on the internet have probably designed IPA cubes before and that there are probably resources on cube design, but I decide to channel my insufferable ex-academic side and undertake the journey of figuring it all out from scratch. Perhaps I've found interesting things for other designers to use, or perhaps I've missed the obvious, or perhaps this is all just a bunch of stories I'm recording mostly for myself.
The Remaster
Immediately it's clear that there's a design tension between
playable manabases and
gameplay feeling like IPA, where awful manabases were borderline-inevitable and game-defining. I pretty quickly settled on deciding to make a significant increase in mana fixing & to trust the nostalgia of the strategies and cards to carry the feel of actual IPA drafts. People need a fair shot at liking these anchovies.
IPA's mana fixing was absurdly poor, to the extent where it would take multiple iterations of future multicolor blocks before Magic reached the right balance for normal draft decks to cast their spells on time. Full-block IPA draft, where only the allied colors/triads were represented in the first two packs & only the enemy colors in the final pack, made it nearly hopeless to play a strict two-color strategy. 6-6-6 and 7-6-5 manabases were common, and even weak mana fixers were important, such as this famous
Arcum's Astrolabe variant.
The obvious remaster to fix this is the one I stuck with:
adopting the modern multicolor set approach of putting one nonbasic land in every pack. This runs the risk of removing one of the core identities of Green in the format -- mana fixing -- but the unified packs with Invasion and Apocalypse cards together should also allow for a natural mix of strict two-color decks and greedier decks with splashes, likely relying on Green.
While I stayed open to the idea of further rarity shifts to balance colors, I was surprised to find that IPA offered very few needs around this. I was able to achieve what I believe will be a well-balanced environment with no rarity shifts for cards other than these nonbasic lands.
The other implied remaster of any curated environment is how many fringe or unplayable cards to include. IPA is very much of the era where many, many decks would have to scrape hard for playables. It simply doesn't seem fun to include any high density of unplayables, and I looked for interesting sideboard cards when possible, but for the most part decks won't have trouble making playables. Instead, this should allow drafters opportunities to stay open for longer and be able to pivot colors based on how the flow of powerful multicolor cards or the density of mana fixing happens to develop in-draft.
Invasion is a block where color is tough to pin down. Some kicker cards need both colors, some don't, e.g.
Assault/Battery is good on either half. In my design spreadsheet, I laid out both "primary" and "secondary" colors for every card and set out to roughly balance the
colors with a lesser goal of balancing the
color identities. At common, I was able to achieve perfect parity, but uncommons and rares are tolerably looser.
Card Counts
Even though it's probably more likely than not that I will die before I ever assemble a full 8-person draft, I want to be ready for it should the time come. This means I needed at least 240 total common cards, 72 uncommons, 24 rares & 24 lands. Color balance led to 26 different lands. I initially tried picking 80 unique commons to include 3x of each but found that I had to make too many omissions of beloved cards, so I settled on 2x of each of 120 unique commons. This also puts the rate at which any given common appears in a pack at 8.3%, versus 9-10% for a modern set.
All 72 uncommons are unique (each appears in a pack 4.2% of the time, vs 3.7% for a modern set). For rares, I wanted to bias towards including almost everything powerful and nostalgic while keeping the % of first-pickable rares in a reasonable place, as after all, real IPA draft had TONS of blanks; a total of 67 rares ended up achieving
a MTGWAR-level bomb rate (h/t Ari Lax) while also roughly matching modern sets for the rate any given rare appears.
Preparation
Here's the method I developed to reset the cube into 24 packs:
- Separate all cards by rarity, with nonbasic lands in a separate pile.
- Separate commons by color and put the two copies of each next to each other.
- Deal out this sorted stack of commons into 6 stacks of 40, switching the order of the deal as you go.
- Shuffle each stack of 40, then deal out 4 packs of 10 from each stack. This results in packs with no duplicates & a slightly de-varianced color balance from shuffling up the full 240 commons.
- Shuffle all of the uncommons and deal 3 onto each pack.
- Shuffle all of the rares and deal 1 onto each pack.
- Shuffle all of the nonbasic lands and deal 1 onto each pack.
In my first few games, I've tried
Grid drafts and
Winchester drafts and found them both to be fun heads-up formats that work well. The cube also supports 4-person Sealed which I think should also be fine, though I'm eager to bust out an old-school 2v2 draft with scrappy, trainwrecky decks as soon as the opportunity presents itself.
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Card List & Grades
The full card list with approximate card power grades as well as a tab of aggregate stats is available in
this spreadsheet, which I used to design, modify, and balance the different card choices. Thanks to
Scryfall as always for providing a great card export starting point for building this & for making it easy to buy the cards.
You can also view the cube in a friendlier-but-less-statistics-y format
on CubeCobra here.
Lands
(Click on any card image to Gaea's Might it.)
The classic taplands each appear twice on the land sheet; in line with the color balance of the original block's packs, the cube is proportioned roughly 2:1 in favor of allied color pairs over enemy color pairs.
These taplands were groundbreaking and genuinely felt pushed at the time. There is no Gate or Khans land that will ever come anywhere near the look and feel of these. On my first night with the cube, I drew an opening hand containing both a Coastal Tower and a Salt Marsh and was immediately overcome by the warmest of warm nostalgia vibes.
Also groundbreaking at the time, really the first time lands allowed enemy-color play without an absurd penalty. We leaned
hard on
Cities of Brass until then. These are also an aesthetic triumph over the look of the Ice Age allied painlands, though shout out to that little Foglio demon relaxing in the
Sulfurous Springs.
The lairs were slam dunk first picks in the Planeshift pack even when off-color, because who knows what the Apocalypse pack would bring. Looking back, the rare bit of
foresight of the non-Lair clause is praiseworthy design. We could have used you on Kaladesh.
These are partly a safety valve of thinking that a dual land in
every pack might be slightly too much, but also interesting fringe playables for kicker cards. I rocked these hard in constructed. I took a Blue/Red Counter-Burn deck with
Glacial Walls through a field of Fires decks to a JSS Qualifier Top 8 and used a few Ancient Springs to kick
Urza's Rages or power up sideboarded
Emblazoned Golems. These lands also enabled
the Balancing Tings deck after Odyssey's release, which I built immediately after attending its breakout tournament in Edison.
I still contend that moraines would have fit fine
on Innistrad and I do not accept its apology. This card is hugely resonant for me for no particular reason. I mention it in this case and will omit the same sentiment on many (but not all) other cards. This is a fine just-above-replacement boost for Domain-focused decks which other decks won't want.
Some absolute all-time greats among the Invasion basics. The John Avons are A+ and plenty of the other ones are classic, too. Many of these basic lands were more expensive per card than
Urza's Rage and
Spiritmonger when I purchased this cube, so, that's a twist I wouldn't have foreseen.
Basic lands also have a storied pedigree in Pro Tour history from this particular Block Constructed format. Shout out to Dan Bock for
a story of surprising tech that's always stuck with me.
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Commons
Welcome back to the time of on-board tricks. White's leading the charge on those and has way more cards to lock up the battlefield than would ever be seen again. It's notably weak on depth of actual creatures for brawling compared to what one might expect.
BTW, quick vanilla test adjustment anchor, the following are actively good creature sizes in this format: 4-mana 2/2 flying, 3-mana 3/2 or 2/3, 4-mana 3/3, 2-mana 2/2.
White is almost certainly the weakest color in the cube due to its relatively weak multicolor cards across almost all of its pairs, especially its enemy pairs, mitigated slightly by it having 2nd-strongest set of commons in a vacuum.
Notables
- Sunscape Apprentice - The Apprentices are fully cycled out to add to that pre-New World Order complexity of on-board gameplay and to give early drop options to support the common multicolored "gating" creatures. This one, like most Green/White cards in the block, is on the weaker side of the cycle.
- Dega Disciple - The Disciples aren't fully cycled out because they're weaker, but Dega Disciple made the cut as the strongest one and to shore up some much-needed support for Red/White and Black/White. It's quite good in either pair, and while there was never really a Dega* deck in IPA due to Apocalypse being the last pack, I am hopeful that it can be a thing here.
- (*We are obviously not saying "Mardu" or "Esper" or "Gruul" anywhere near this cube. Get with the times. Style guide for enemy wedges: Dega, Rug, Bug, America, and Junk.)
- Pollen Remedy - Classic playable with high blowout potential. This card might have the biggest disparity between its power level and how it reads to a new player. They don't print cards like this anymore.
- Benalish Trapper - Tappers (this along with the Green and Blue Apprentices) are very strong and the biggest common pull into White outside of bombs.
- Manacles of Decay - More soft-Dega bolstering.
- Crimson Acolyte & Obsidian Acolyte - The most powerful common color hosers of all time, I believe. Strong enough to usually maindeck.
- Samite Pilgrim - It doesn't take much of a board beyond this to fully lock down combat.
- Sunscape Familiar - The Familiars are fully cycled out and are awesome and iconic. Blue spells are the best ones to make cheaper both in Limited and Constructed.
- Dismantling Blow - I don't think this is maindeckable, but it should be a great sideboard option. The JSS Qualifier I won with U/W control in Planeshift Standard got to maindeck this to crush Fires' Saproling Bursts and cycle it on one's own Tsabo's Webs against other decks 🥰
- Helionaut - Necessary-evil pack 3 lifesaver for actual-IPA 7-6-5s. Less necessary here but still available as an enabler for greedy decks to fly too close to the sun.
- Aurora Griffin - The ability is most useful in Black/White (Demise a Black creature, Dead Ringers any creatures, Phyrexian Bloodstock any creature), but can also block the casting of some opponents' gating creatures.
- Coalition Honor Guard - Mythic common, blanks tons of stuff. (Style guide: "Coalition Anand Guard")
Notable Omissions
- Aura Blast - I went with Dismantling Blow for nostalgia & flexibility.
- Orim's Thunder - There ended up being an argument for this over Dismantling Blow to try and boost W/R a little but I don't think Thunder would end up being played quite enough.
- Standard Bearer - So many other 2-drops anyway, and perhaps both Flagbearers would be too much "fun" for some tastes,
- Disciple of Kangee - Partly for color identity balance, and maybe it's fun enough to warrant it anyway, but a lot of that depends on one's "fun" tastes around its pairing with Slingshot Goblin.
- Glimmering Angel - Cut in favor of other 4-mana 2/2 fliers.
Welcome back to the time of overpowered 2-for-1s. Lesser-known than the deliberate multicolor card drought leading into Invasion was that there was also drought of cantrips, and Invasion brought them back perhaps a little too loudly, resulting in many of my favorite cards of all time.
On the back of crushing card advantage and a solid set of fliers, Blue's commons are the most powerful in the cube.
Notables
- Opt - I loved this card from the moment I saw it and jammed it in most of my Blue decks. I can't help but think in retrospect that the rest of the world underrated cards like this until Preordain proved itself busted, so maybe I was on to something. I also definitely had a foil playset of these and, among many other strong nominees, Foil Opt definitely wins the "Largest Unexpected Price Increase Since 2001" award.
- Stormscape Apprentice - Zvi's PT Tokyo win with "The Solution" in Block Constructed remains my favorite tournament of all time, even though I was nowhere near attending. The way this deck sliced through the field gave us all something to dream for in our brewing and metagaming. I loved the deck so much that I tried to make it work in Block Constructed after Apocalypse, which was pretty fruitless. This oral history of the event with Zvi and BDM is my favorite Magic podcast episode of all time and I highly recommend it.
- Tidal Visionary - See Aurora Griffin above, and also superpowers your protection-from-color creatures while blanking theirs.
- Confound - In a world of 2-for-1s, this is the 2-for-1 counter of 2-for-1s. I just got shivers remembering what it feels like to Confound a kicked Magma Burst.
- Dream Thrush - If the biggest disparity between perceived and actual power level for new players isn't Pollen Remedy, it's Dream Thrush. Blue mana fixing was critical in actual-IPA and should be useful here, and add in the ability to "Port" the opponent's colors on their upkeep and this effect is too flexible and occasionally oppressive.
- Coastal Drake - Swingy and hateful, made more reasonable without damage on the stack, but still a game-winning achievement with Flametongue Kavu.
- Exclude - Limited common hall of fame, lifelong favorite card, 2nd-best common in the cube after Magma Burst.
- Repulse - Limited common hall of fame runner up, lifelong favorite card. Style guide: Pronounced incorrectly as "RE-pulse", for, like, well into my adult life before learning what the word actually means.
- Rushing River - Not quite Repulse, but strong, probably stronger than it reads.
- Jilt - Can you believe they let me have all 4 of these cards at common? With damage on the stack, this was a complete debacle of a common. I remember they were running triple-Apocalypse drafts at the Prerelease and I was able to force Blue/Red every time in them because, well, I guess I was the only one who looked at the spoiler even a little bit.
- Faerie Squadron - To extend the vanilla test adjustments above, 5-mana 3/3 flying is excellent and a happy first pick.
- Hunting Drake - Oppressively good, with quite a few "hard lock" combos at common. If I didn't love doing this so much, I'd be clear-eyed enough of a designer to not put this in the cube.
- Probe - Incredible power. I understand that Gitaxian Probe went on to be a broken and influential card deserving of the "Probe" nickname, but give me this one every time.
Notable Omissions
- Reef Shaman & Sea Snidd - Explicit cuts to protect Green's color identity of being the best at multicolor fixing and to achieve the tasteful balance of Dream Thrush effects.
- Sisay's Ingenuity - Neat often-playable that probably won't make the cut often enough with the chaff left out of the cube.
- Arctic Merfolk - Does occasionally do some cool things.
Welcome back to the time of strong removal. I didn't remember how super grindy & top-heavy on the mana curve Black was in IPA until I set out on the design of this cube. The card advantage flows here if you have time to find it, and there's much less support for aggressive decks than in a modern set's Black lineup.
Black has good reasons to pair with any other color, though Black/White's power is coming almost entirely from its rares. Avoiding mana curve clogs will take active consideration during a draft.
Notables
- Phyrexian Battleflies - Phyrexian Baddleflies. But sometimes you need to trade with 2/2 flyers and this can actually be tempo-positive when it works out.
- Mourning - Style guide: Good Mourning!
- Nightscape Familiar - The best Familiar. Green decks aren't really equipped to beat regenerators.
- Ravenous Rats - Iconic. Originally printed in Urza's Destiny and, perhaps surprisingly, a Constructed staple for a while. Great to recur here.
- Phyrexian Rager - A creature that would be a strong rate today should set off alarm bells. This is great and a huge value engine.
- Agonizing Demise - At the time, Agonizing Demise versus Exclude was seen as close as a first pick. I think it was just Exclude.
- Death Bomb - As horrendous as this looks, remember, you'll have plenty of horrendous creatures, and you still need to kill the few good creatures.
- Dead Ringers - Famously confusing text that, to humblebrag, always made sense to me.
- Duskwalker - Ended up being pretty close to Faerie Squadron.
- Phyrexian Bloodstock - Pays you off if you pursue some shenanigans.
- Urborg Uprising - What a weird common. I didn't expect to include both Recover and Urborg Uprising, but there weren't other good choices, so, your creatures won't stay dead.
Notable Omissions
- Sinister Strength - In actual-IPA, our trainwrecks would sometimes morph into bad aggro. The format was not accomodating. I'd have given it a chance to shine here if Black wasn't so skewed away from beatdown in the rest of the card selection.
- Phyrexian Reaper & Zombie Boa - Both fun, but did you see that 5-drop clog?
- Volcano Imp & Soul Burn - The depth of R/B color identity cards really surprised me. There are straight-up more of them than the other allied pairs and few are weak. I wouldn't have thought room was needed here but these fairly nostalgic cards simply don't make the cut against other R/B cards.
Welcome back to the time of... a wide spread of power level across Red commons (or perhaps we never left). The Red creature suite is illustrative of how color identities didn't really come across in creature sizes. Here, like in other colors, lots of
Scathe Zombies running around. Red's lighter on 2-for-1s and leans on the strength and flexibility of its powerful removal.
Red has the weakest set of commons in the cube even when accounting for the complete absurdity that is
Magma Burst. Red's weak commons are balanced out by it having some of the best cards in the cube at higher rarities.
Notables
- Bloodfire Dwarf - Doesn't have much of a place, but, needed to slot in some weak ones here.
- Singe - Counters Black removal spells.
- Maniacal Rage - Not really a thing in Repulse.format.
- Rogue Kavu - Style guide: Winning a game through repeated hits with this is "the touchdown"
- Tribal Flames - Bad Shocks are great with these creature sizes and the upside here is big and attainable. I'm expecting a tension in drafts where Red's concentrated power cards are all appealing splashes for the Harrow deck but, that's what you get for having Flametongue Kavu.
- Kavu Scout - A 4-power creature can be more of a payoff than it seems if you're trading up.
- Kavu Aggressor - This reads like trinket text kicker but a 4/3 is pretty big.
- Slingshot Goblin - What a common. Completely out of hand when it's good. Iconic target for the omitted Sisay's Ingenuity.
- Zap - Not well-positioned.
- Ancient Kavu - Reminder: this size is actively good.
- Bloodfire Infusion - Fringe swingy common that was a begrudging playable in many unfit real IPA decks often. I'm not sure where it will sort out here, but it's certainly a card worth playing around when possible.
- Magma Burst - Limited common hall of fame, entirely unreasonable, best common in the block and among the best cards in the cube.
Notable Omissions
Welcome back to the time when Green simply did not get removal...
Prey Upon is over a decade away. Green offers a critical depth of multicolor mana fixing that should allow it to be a pull for decks which pick up bombs across multiple colors. There isn't too much going on here.
Nonetheless, the big creatures here, while small by modern standards, are still big for the format, and there are even a few 2-for-1s here, too.
Notables
- Thornscape Apprentice - One of few actual Green/White payoffs.
- Aggressive Urge - Compared to its recent Ixalan block reprint, here, +1/+1 is much more likely to swing a combat.
- Nomadic Elf - Cornerstone of multicolor beatdown. I watched Mike Turian play one match of Limited with his patented bear + pump spell strategy and it completely opened my eyes about bluffing combat tricks.
- Fertile Ground, Quirion Explorer & Quirion Elves - This isn't even all of the common 2-mana ramp available in IPA block. 3 is enough here, especially because...
- Root Greevil - ...can you believe that the only common Green 4-drops in the entire IPA block are this plus two double-cost squires of Quirion Trailblazer and Pygmy Kavu? So much 2-mana ramp and no 4-mana creatures. Imagine how much better Green would be with a 4/3 for 2GG (I did consider the Rooting Kavu rarity downshift...)
- Harrow - Powerful key to splashing & ramping up Domain.
- Pincer Spider - Lines up excellently, strong common.
- Kavu Climber - This is what you ramp to, and it's good, though at some point your 20 mana source deck chokes on its lack of mana sinks after your cantrips.
- Savage Gorilla - I handwaved the color identity balance a little -- half of Green's ramp can incidentally get off-colors etc. -- to give Green an additional strong card to ramp into & add power to Green/Blue.
- Stone Kavu - Style guide: Morphling.
Notable Omissions
- Explosive Growth - I spent a lot of time debating the 3rd pump spell or not. I want Turian-style bears + pumps to be a thing that happens at least sometimes. I think it still will be even without this, and I'd rather have the extra mana fixing slots.
- Ana Disciple - Including this and Savage Gorilla was too much for color balance and it turns out GB was strong enough on power without this.
Lots of power sits in the multicolor slot. The "protection bear" cycle is likely stronger than it may look & should serve as a solid pull towards 8/8/X manabases. The cycle of "gating" creatures presents some of the biggest creatures and best rates in the format, giving reasons to prioritize some of the weaker 1-drops as well as 187 ("ETB" nowadays) creatures. Each allied color pair also gets one other spell, the power levels of which vary from some real sticks (beatsticks, = good) to some real sticks (sticks, = bad, just go with it).
Notables
- Armadillo Cloak - The
first second (shout out Empyrial Armor) powerful creature enchantment ever printed. It's badly held down by the bounce and removal of the format but sticking it and hoping, or adding a little help from Obsidian Acolyte or Coalition Honor Guard, is still a strong approach.
- Steel Leaf Paladin - A fairly humiliating rate compared to the others, and Green/White could have really used the boost of even making this cost 3GW, but a 4/4 first strike is basically The Abyss, so it's something to ramp into.
- Silver Drake - Biggest pull towards Blue being the best color to pair with White. Riding a few reasonable-rate fliers to victory is absolutely a great strategy in IPA.
- Cavern Harpy - Imagine this with damage on the stack, among all of the value recursion opportunities. It was a bit out of hand.
- Recoil - I remember this being the first card spoiled from Invasion in an issue of The Duelist. Brilliant, simple, and brutal design. Huge fan.
- Terminate - So classic.
Notable Omissions
- Daring Leap - Maybe more playable than Wings of Hope?
- Plague Spores - If not for Terminate being an autoinclude on nostalgia, Plague Spores would be the better fill of the slot for color balance.
- Gerrard's Command - If I were willing to break color count at common, I'd have definitely given G/W the extra card in this.
The enemy color pairs also have a "bear"-ish cycle of high-powered two-drops and, again, one other spell, with tremendous disparities in power level between colors.
Notables
- Soul Link - No other card in the cube caused me quite so much consternation. I think this is strictly unplayable and it really put me to the test on how much I cared about color balance at common. After fiddling with counting Dega Disciple and Manacles of Hope as each "half Black/White, half Red/Black" I broke on the side of aesthetics. Maybe it'll end up on a Plague Spitter someday.
- Squee's Embrace - Another pretty poor playable. Black/White gets bailed out by a density of powerful rares while Red/White unfortunately has a lower available density.
- Goblin Legionnaire - Another design tweak I considered was having 3x of each multicolored common instead of 2x. I'd love if there were Red/White decks that had a shot of putting together an aggressive curve, but I'm not even sure if that would be enough, so I didn't bother.
- Gaea's Skyfolk - Groundbreaking design (not sarcastic, I get that there's some suspension of disbelief here, just trust me). I loved this card and worked on it a ton in Block Constructed.
- Temporal Spring - Turn 2 Gaea's Skyfolk, Turn 3 Temporal Spring your land is a mood.
- Razorfin Hunter - Prodigal Sorcerer was overpowered on rate already in a world of small creatures.
- Quicksilver Dagger - This doesn't hit creatures, and I know most Blue/Red cards in this block are overpowered, but come on.
- Consume Strength - The Green/Black Magma Burst.
Notable Omissions
- None; this is literally all of the strictly-multicolor cards in enemy colors.
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Uncommons
Notables
- Haunted Angel - Like Armadillo Cloak, high-risk high-reward in the wrong format for it unless you can protect it. To this day, I still have no idea of this card's power level.
- Lashknife Barrier - Ruins all combats forever, and I'm pretty sure this is a shout out to Lin Sivvi for some reason.
- Voice of All - Good, clean fun. There are a few double-colored cards at Uncommon that should help push towards heavier-color manabases.
- Sunscape Battlemage - Full cycle of Battlemages for sure. Powerful, flexible, actual payoff-level mana sink in a format with few others, and pulling the format to one of its only pillars of synergy pockets (187s + gating or value recursion). The addition of Planeshift helped give decks a lot of definition versus triple-Invasion.
Notable Omissions
- Spirit Weaver - All of the Weavers got benched as none ended up being interesting for strategic depth or color balance.
- Diversionary Tactics - I did this pretty often when short on playables, but suspect it was never good enough.
- Enlistment Officer - I faced a dilemma in that some creatures have since been errataed to be Soldiers. I could have just said "play as printed" but instead just cut this and the Zombie tribal cards. Only mildly regretful.
Notables
- Metathran Transport - I wanted to give Blue a little more color-changing, and I also appreciate that this card is a functional reprint of a card that already existed. If you too can name that card, I'm proud of you.
- Fact or Fiction - EOTFOFULOSE. Love at first sight. Unique, skill-testing and overpowered in all of the resonant ways for the format. They let me cast this card in Junior Super Series tournaments. It was carnage. I'll never tire of this card.
- Wash Out - For some reason we all thought this card would be a constructed staple, probably because we had just come off of a Block Constructed format of Monoblue Skies vs. Monowhite Rebels. All of us tried to make this card happen for far longer than was wise.
- Allied Strategies - Why have them split a Fact or Fiction pile when you can have them all?
Notable Omissions
- Disrupt - I can't believe I didn't put this in. I have more fond memories of specific Disrupts than I do of specific kisses, though that may have been a lifestyle thing. I had a Korean Weatherlight one and would often free up a sideboard slot for it in Constructed just to make a stock list different & try and get people. Actually, maybe the only better feeling than officially putting the Disrupt in my cube and mising people with it is publicly saying it's NOT in the cube, actually subbing it in over Metathran Transport, and nailing people with it even more by surprise... Hmm...
Notables
- Annihilate - P1P1 Ace of Spades, at least among nonrares. I mean, there were some better cards, but when you saw a Black card starting with A in the uncommon slot, you were hoping it wasn't Addle.
- Phyrexian Gargantua - In a format of 2-for-1s, the 3-for-1 4/4 that dodges most removal turns out to be great.
Notable Omissions
- Addle - Super plausible sideboard card, might pop this in over Urborg Shambler.
- Reckless Spite - Power level omission, but maybe with more focused decks and with Black being so slow the tempo tension would be interesting.
- Goham Djinn - Closest call, but Black was too top-heavy already.
Notables
- Flametongue Kavu - (Style guide: "Hot Karl") (Style guide: "The Upper Decker") One of the first good creatures ever printed, of a truly scatological power level befitting its nicknames; but what the pros fail to realize is that Flametongue Kavu is only good against decks with creatures.
- Dwarven Patrol - Combo, sort of, with Quicksilver Dagger, sort of. Looking forward to reliving this awkwardness.
Notable Omissions
- Strafe - Power level / color balance omission.
- Breath of Darigaaz - Tougher but necessary power level / color balance omission.
- Raka Sanctuary - Strong build-around but I needed to cut both quantity and quality from the Jeskai shard. Arguably should sub out Illuminate for this which also helps lower Red's overall power spike at uncommon.
Notables
- Thornscape Battlemage - This card, even moreso than Disrupt, is the mascot for my contrarian aimless overbrewing; in the same Disney Wide World of Sports convention hall in Orlando in 2001 where Eugene Harvey broke onto the scene by grinding in with Team TOGIT's Fires deck and making the US National team, I was playing in the 2001 Junior Super Series Championship with a Fires deck with way too many creative tweaks off of stock. Stock Fires was good. It's clear you wanted to be on stock Fires. I moved several cards off of stock. I definitely had some Thornscape Battlemages, Wax/Wanes and Cities of Brass, all ostensibly for "the mirror" but surely at the dilution of consistency. Though I remember the winner having Thornscape *Familiars* in his Fires deck which seemed even worse to me. In my only JSS Championship, I lost to Paul Rietzl's Rebels deck (accompanied by a clear level of technical play I had never seen before) in the final round to pick up the mincash, which, upon reviewing the final standings, was apparently the same as Ike Haxton, with Justin Bonomo bubbling. Fellow local JSS boss Bryn Kenney had a rough tournament and I remember being near him at the lower tables at some point. All of these people turned out fine, is my point.
Notable Omissions
Notables
- Charging Troll - Just to call it out explicitly: there aren't "signpost" rails for color pair archetypes at uncommon like a modern set. Green/White multicolored cards here don't have some synergistic theme like "go-wide Saprolings Matters Convoke". Instead, Green/White multicolored cards are "This card has both regeneration (Green) & vigilance (White)!" and, you know what? It was really cool at the time. So please appreciate what cards like this are doing.
- Wax/Wane - Flexing as a Green/White slot even though it's highly Green and mostly just boring. At least it has Constructed resonance. Unlike my JSS deck, not all half-splashed Wax/Wanes were bad. Maybe I was just overinspired by PT Chicago, a star-studded Top 8 and the only Standard Pro Tour a few years in either direction (weird, huh?). I loved Kai's, Kibler's and Kamiel's decks and put in tons of reps with each of them in Invasion Standard. I don't have a direct recollection of how much Flametongue Kavu was to blame for moving me off of Counter-Rebel when Planeshift was printed or if Fires was the better deck already.
- Sawtooth Loon - Fancy play enabler. Can I hear the loon again too?
- Smoldering Tar - One of the guys in my school friend group who was into Magic a little, but not as much as the rest of us, was DQ'd from the Planeshift prerelease for "opening" a pool with 3 copies of Smoldering Tar out of a single Invasion tournament pack. He never went on to admit that he cheated. I don't know what motivated him, especially to cheat in such a bizarre way.
- Fires of Yavimaya - I won my first JSS Qualifier with a pretty stock (still some Wax/Wanes and Brushlands) Fires list in Invasion Standard. Team TOGIT's Fires deck in Planeshift Standard was named the $42 ticket after a laughably small fine Osyp received for being caught speeding en route to a PTQ, if memory serves. It was the most dominant and ubiquitous Standard deck during my heyday. There was something fun about a Fires mirror, at least in hindsight, but this is probably just highly selective nostalgia for what was probably a super coin-flippy mess.
Notable Omissions
Notables
- Gerrard's Verdict - Sweet card. I wonder if this rate would be too pushed for a current Standard-legal set. It probably wouldn't happen due to not wanting powerful discard.
- Life/Death - Life is just Fireball and is a great Green card.
- Fire/Ice - One of the few Invasion Block cards in our 2002 US Nationals Squirrel Opposition deck, so, we're fitting the story in. This deck took Eugene to the title and me to a 4-0 start converting into a 7-5 finish in my only Nationals. The mana was horrendous, but if it didn't fall apart, it had tons of game against Psychatog. I remember losing Round 5 due to keeping a near-nut hand that just needed one Forest to get rolling and missing. In Round 6, I had fellow NJer Roger Sorino with no outs other than Firebolt but he dramatically peeled it on the final turn, sending me to 4-2 and into a day of drafting full Odyssey Block against a lineup that I feel pretty proud to have split the matches against: Noah Weil, Jon Sonne (I perfect-perfected him with Infectious Rage triggers and had a lovely time doing it), Matt Rubin, Antonino De Rosa, Darwin Kastle, and Roger Sorino in the final round, against whom I avenged myself. Being there to watch Eugene's win was incredible.
Notable Omissions
- Oh the third-best enemy gold uncommons are largely atrocious, I can assure you. Maybe Flowstone Charger could get in and Order/Chaos could steal a monocolored slot to bolster Red/White density.
- Perfect cards, right in the sweet spot, great design for the time, all strong pulls to 3-color except for the two Green/White ones, whoops.
Notables
- Dodecapod - Black has a ton of discard. I hope everyone gets to enjoy the experiences of both ends of this trigger.
- Emblazoned Golem - This is overstatted at every kicker cost, and I think I was the only one at TOGIT to realize that this was one of the strongest creatures in the format.
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Rares
Notables
- Spectral Lynx - Handwaving this a bit into a White slot, as it is genuinely good without the activated ability and also helps bolster the weakness of Black/White with another rare slot.
- Samite Elder - High payoff for the few color-changing creatures and, like the Acolytes, almost certainly good enough to maindeck in a vacuum.
- Sunscape Master - The Masters are fully cycled-out and are all bomby. I'm hoping these act as pulls towards mana bases that support CCDD as a contrast to the heavy splashing that the dual lands and most of the other high-powered cards enable.
- Degavolver - All 5 Volvers are here, too, looking to make some enemy wedge decks happen. Highly varied power levels, but even the bad ones are great and provide fun reasons to half-splash their other color.
- Global Ruin - I'm unsure where the power level of this will sort out in this format, but I'm eager to try it.
Notable Omissions
- Dominaria's Judgment - Interesting sideboard card that just didn't make the cut.
- Gerrard Capashen - I'd have to be a much bigger story nerd to want him represented here, but I suppose I'm enough of one to hate what a disservice of a card this is.
Notables
- Blind Seer - Fun story fact: this is Urza! He's disguising himself in his physical appearance and in his sheer underwhelmingness of power level.
- Collective Restraint - Not what I would have guessed as the most pricy card in the cube. I suppose that's a Commander thing. This was a staple of Block Constructed after Apocalypse, which was a format that I don't believe any premier events used, but which PTQs definitely did.
- Sunken Hope - Should be fringe. Blue/Black has the most value to enable. Ruin a day with Hunting Drake.
- Distorting Wake - It may or may not be interesting to have a mediocre CCC card in the mix, but hey, when you get commons as good as Blue does, the rares need to tone it down.
Notables
- Phyrexian Scuta - The hottest card at the Planeshift prerelease. Juzam Djinn was the stuff of legends and look at this guy! We'd all fall for this with the next few Juzam Djinn riffs. I remember opening one in my prize packs in my basement after the Planeshift prerelease and everyone wanting to trade for it.
- Yawgmoth's Agenda - The ol' Day Planner. Fond memories of powerful but reasonable play patterns in Limited and as a value-finisher in Constructed.
- Desolation Angel - Another iconic Dromar Control finisher. Plausible but risky in a deck that can't kick it, so hand-waved into a Black slot to further provide reasons to go Black/White.
Notable Omissions
Notables
- Ghitu Fire - Possible best card in the cube. I think Flametongue Kavu edges it out. Its name became the textbook shorthand for a splashable Limited bomb. We hadn't had Fireballs in a while prior to this and wouldn't get them for a while after.
- Urza's Rage - This was such a huge chase rare for months and months after it proved to be merely a medium+ role-player. Big numbers, I guess. It also features some sort of mech suit for some reason, which I remember thinking was cool.
- Kavu Monarch - I think it's a real build-around at the density of Kavu available, and, unlike Soldiers and Zombies, there is no current or foreseeable errata that would change the Kavu-ness of any cards.
Notable Omissions
- Tahngarth, Talruum Hero - Ah, the rare in Planeshift's vertical cycle of "bonkers Red cards". Strict power level cut as the play patterns aren't even particularly fun or interesting. I think it would be the best card in the cube.. and Red already has those anyway.
- Obliterate - Shout out for the good times with Nether Spirit.
Notables
- Quirion Dryad - Miracle Gro was one of the coolest decks of all time and one of the few Extended decks that I bothered to proxy up. Groundbreaking stuff. In Limited, go ahead and go off with a Horned Kavu.
- Kavu Titan - It took us so long to trim these out of our Fires decks. We moved to the Two-Headed Dragon slot after Zvi's "My Fires" proved it out.
Notable Omissions
- Blurred Mongoose - Honorable mention for how often we played this in Constructed. It sure looks weak in retrospect.
- Verdeloth the Ancient - Green needed the power level boost of Nemata over this, but maybe it should have both.
- Restock - Another interesting non-bomb slot if there were room.
- Kavu Lair - I suspect this wouldn't happen.
Notables
- Noble Panther - I played this a lot in Constructed, weirdly. There was a Green/White deck early on with Armageddons that was kind of a thing until it proved out as mostly a lower-power Fires or Red Zone, though Armadillo Cloaking a Panther was a great way to beat a Fires deck.
- Armored Guardian - Bomby, in that classic turn-of-the-century on-board complexity way, :chef's kiss:
- Teferi's Moat - UW Teferi stuff was locking out entire classes of cards much earlier than 2019.
- Doomsday Specter - Another Planeshift card we thought was incredible upon printing, until realizing that it was basically just Flametongue Kavu that's incredible.
- Pyre Zombie - The "Red/Black Rares" deck was the first deck we all (notably, Patrick Sullivan in his first departure from Islands) built before Fires became established. Pyre Zombie was the most appealing card to us, as anything that looked like Hammer of Bogardan seemed incredible. It could almost sort of manage certain Blastoderm draws, or at least it was an interesting grind. This sort of deck ("Machine Head") would go on to play a small part in the Fires metagame later in the format, but without the Pyre Zombies. Later in the format, Patrick would move to monored Firebrand Ranger + Rage Weaver beatdown decks and complete his transformation to Red mage.
- Blazing Specter & Questing Phelddagrif - These two reasons to step outside of color balance end up balancing each other's colors out nicely; Questing Phelddagrif is a unique, fun and very powerful card in colors that need it, but the rest of the allied shard cycle from Planeshift mostly stinks, and Blazing Specter, along with Void, all were autoincludes for me for the nostalgia value of that Red/Black Rares deck.
- Meteor Storm - Bomb, and usually plenty of time to just activate it five times for the win.
Notable Omissions
- Absorb - An absolute all-time personal favorite card, and possibly the only reason my Blue/White control deck in Planeshift Standard could beat Fires, but I didn't have the space to include it just to have it sit in the sideboard in most games.
- Meddling Mage - Same. Sorry, Chris.
- Phyrexian Infiltrator - Quite fun and grindy, but U/B has enough of that going on and needed higher-power-level cards.
- Spinal Embrace - ... but not this high power level. Maybe this over Stalking Assassin someday.
- Eladamri's Call & Ancient Spider - The two cards I considered most for rarity shifting to fill the G/W uncommon gap, along with Noble Panther & Sabertooth Nishoba themselves.
Notables
- Vindicate - Art hall of fame, text box hall of fame.
- Desolation Giant - This Desolation creature, on the other hand, is definitely not a single-color card, but along with Goblin Trenches, these absolute bomb rares give among the only reasons to pursue Red/White.
- Mystic Snake - Love at first sight. Anchored my Green/Blue deck in Block Constructed. Jon Sonne would go on to win States and define the early Odyssey metagame with what would today be disgustingly called "Temur Tempo" (it's awful even typing that) but can only be properly called "Snake Tongue" or, to us, "The Sonne Deck". That deck was a work of art and a precision instrument, though upon current review, 24 lands seems like a mistake.
- Prophetic Bolt - Love at first sight, cornerstone of my Counter-Burn deck.
- Pernicious Deed & Spiritmonger - These chase rares partnered up with fellow $20 bill Shadowmage Infiltrator to cornerstone the "Million Dollar Man" deck in Torment Standard, which I took to 7-0-2 at 2002 Regionals at Neutral Ground in what was my single best tournament performance, qualifying me for Eugene's 2002 US Nationals. The first Google hit for the deck name is a sample hand generator which is a great way to experience the deck. Llanowar Elves -> Darkwater Catacombs -> Shadowmage Infiltrator -> $$$. The deck could outcard the dominant Psychatog decks and hold its own against the range of nonsense that people were brewing with. My favorite memory of this deck was either in the 5-0 or 6-0 bracket of Regionals where I'm playing a post-sideboard game against an unknown opponent with another Green-based deck. He played a Gurzigost, a new card I was intimately familiar with from Limited but had never considered in Constructed, and somehow it was lining up pretty well. He had found some tech, and it was going to beat me this game. I draw, do something, pass back. He untaps, draws, and I immediately assertively drop my finger on the Gurzigost, say "that's dead", and the crowd goes wild. Don Lim makes me sweat the Round 9 ID but I'm off to Orlando.
Notable Omissions
- Raging Kavu - I'm amused by how underwhelming this reads today relative to how it was at the time. This was one of the biggest early hype cards and led to a lot of Red/Green non-Fires and post-Fires beatdown brews.
Notables
- The Dragons - The canonical bombs of the format and the first cycle of splashy, big creatures ever (I guess omitting their spiritual successors from Legends). Most of these dragons broke into Constructed as the headliners of iconic decks as well: Kibler's Red Zone as the first time a little kid strategy of putting an Aura on a Dragon was actually good, Go-Mar in Block Constructed as the birth of now-nearly-evergreen UWB Control, and Crosis as a go-to Reanimation target for a while.
- Lightning Angel - The reason I'm bothering with this otherwise-quirky enemy wedge cycle. The angel headlined "Star Spangled Slaughter" tempo decks which featured many of my favorites. A decade and a half later I would draft 3 consecutive copies of its little sister Mantis Rider in Grand Prix Baltimore.
Notables
- Draco - Most famous for simply costing 16 mana, this and its fellow stack of non-first-pickable rares mostly serve to be non-first-pickable rares and give some payoffs and borderline-reasonable dreams for Domain decks.
Notable Omissions
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Deck Screenshots
My very first deck from the cube, a Winchester draft that flowed smoothly in balancing color-fixing and being able to pick up bombs. I didn't expect the mana to be good enough to run the
Legacy Weapon until deck construction, but it worked out well and was legitimately good, creating some interesting interplay for opposing land destruction as a way to shut it off.
Deck #2, from a Grid draft that managed to luck into an unreasonable percentage of Block Constructed-level Dromar Control bombs. It had some tight, resource-managey/value-grindy wins against a strong Red/Green deck. It's everything I ever wanted.
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