Blast From the Past

I'm not talking about the Unhinged card, but instead Chain Lightning for a very good price - half off. Sure, it's beat to hell but as wtwlf123 quickly pointed out: "The missing corner on that Chain Lightning is awesome! You just know that card has killed its fair share of 3-toughness creatures in its day."

Indeed. And it will continue to nuke creatures for some time to come.

In not-quite-as-awesome-but-still-important news, I'm looking to add creatures with morph to my cube. Having more morphs ensures there is both less certainty about what morph a creature could be in a given deck as well as providing "colorless" creatures to help any deck that's a little light on them.

Gathan Raiders is a great card because of the colorless morph cost, so I'm anticipating that the original great take on a morph with colorless cost, Zombie Cutthroat, will find it's way into some surprising decks. Echo Tracer and Patron of the Wild are in-color effects or blue and green, respectively, that feed the subtheme of those colors similar to Skinthinner's inclusion in black.

White is where I struggle to find a reasonable morph. My personally leading candidate is Lumithread Field since it can either swing as a 2/2, or give me the +0/+1 half of Glorious Anthem for a very reasonable cost, morphing or not. This might seem pretty weak but against a deck with pingers it becomes highly relevant. Those pingers are really good.

Choices, choices.

Data Driven Dynamics

With the influx of new posters to MTGSalvation we've had quite a few new cubers start commenting, post their cubes, and provide links to new resources, like the deck analysis tool at magic-decks.de. There's both an English and German version, and either language options supports card names from both languages. It will fix minor card errors, list cards it did not recognize (i.e. you misspelled so horribly that it couldn't recognize it), and provide a graphical output of the color distribution, mana costs, and card types in the deck. It's very spiffy! While it won't replace my spreadsheet (and the quick and dirty analytics I have in it) it will provide a quick way for others to see the breakdown in a pretty and graphical way.

The current version of the PMC Analytics Online is available here but the link will change as the cube changes. It would be great to have a static link to overwrite with it isn't available.

I should be getting cards in a few days which will both increase the foil count significantly as well as provide me with five more cards to throw into the mix. We'll cross that bridge when we get there.

More of the Same

Now that the cube feels fairly tight, plays well, and has accrued some use I can focus on finer points with more clarity than before. The first thing I've done is cut the allied color gold card count by one.

Cuts:
Vedalken Outlander, Etherium Abomination, Singe-Mind Ogre, Nacatl Outlander, Sigil of the Nayan Gods

These are all fair cut in terms of either lack of support (Sigil), redundancy (Outlanders), or inefficiency (Abomination and Ogre). This gave me room to add in more monocolored cards:

White: Cage of Hands - reusable removal is good, buffs control
Blue: Impulse - card filtering that should never have been cut to begin with
Black: Tortured Existence - recycling creatures is always good
Red: Martyr of Ashes - pseudo board sweeper in a cube that needs board sweepers
Green: Phantom Tiger - hard to kill critter

I've also tightened and adjusted in other ways:

Red-Green:
Rip-Clan Crasher, Exploding Borders - OUT
Deadshot Minotaur, Branching Bolt - IN

Switching up to include more cards that can generate a two-for-one card advantage, especially against fliers in the two colors lacking them.

Blue:
Confound - OUT
Arcane Denial - IN

There was a great discussion about Arcane Denial and, realizing that it is a common, decided to give it a try. We'll see if giving your opponent "Draw two cards." isn't as bas as it seems at first glance.

I'm looking forward to Zendikar for more opportunities to expand high quality cards into the cube. There's a white card that was revealed at GenCon that looks to be an auto-include for most cubes. I won't spoiler it here but you can read up on all of the previewed and spoiled Zendikar cards that may be cube-worthy in the 'Zendikar Cube Discussion' thread here.

Outside of the new fall release, there are other cards that feel like a great fit:

White: Soltari Visionary - evasive beater that is a Demystify on a stick
Blue: Carnivorous Death-Parrot - a 2/2 flying for two without a "drawback"
Black: Gravedigger - mmmm... brains (and card advantage) are good
Red: Vithian Stinger - pingers are really good in this cube
Green: Nantuko Vigilante - morph + Naturalize effect is good

I'm also going to retool each of the multicolor sections, individually, looking to improve overall quality to maintain as high counts as possible. It just wouldn't be the PMC without the 'M'!

The beast! It grows! THE HORROR!

I've been pouring over other cube lists, specifically pauper cube lists, and working through feedback on the cubes after the massive changes hit.

The Good:
Draft, sealed, and multiplayer play is so much better than before that I'm extremely disappointed that I didn't understand the depth of Klug's "Cut the junk." advice sooner.

The Bad:
Control is a weak archetype and something that will take more work to push to the forefront. While I'm not looking for Control_Cube.dec to necessarily be the best archetype, having a deck that plays counters, pings your dudes, and generally buries you in card advantage seems like a respectable deck type I want to see.

Here are the latest changes:

RED:
Out: Fire Imp for not being a common
In: Fire Ambush for being awesome

GREEN:
Out: Wild Elephant for players not being too wild about it
In: Elephant Ambush for being surprisingly good

Cube Expansion:

White: Plover Knights - control and aggro friendly white beef with evasion
Blue: Brainstorm - stupid good
Black: Shade's Form - black card advantage and/or insurance policy
Red: Vulshok Sorcerer - pingers are awesome
Green: Giant Dustwasp - green evasion, fair size

If you've missed out on the discussion so far, head on over to the Cube Forum at MTGSalvation and check out the PMC v2.0 Thread!

Version 2.0 Release

I've finally finished updating and cross-referencing every change I've made in overhauling the cube! You can see the updated list, as well as the breakdown of the recent changes, at the official PMC thread at MTGSalvation.

Ramosian Sergeant, Ramosian Lieutenant, Defender of Law OUT.
Soltari Foot Soldier, Soltari Lancer, Order of Leitbur IN.

By taking out the two searching Rebels that really don't stand alone (leaving the two more aggressive or evasive searching Rebels) I made room for more Shadow evasion. Leitbur feels more relevant (and useful later in the game) than the Defender.

Wei Scout, Fledgling Djinn, Expunge OUT.
Prickly Boggart, Foul Imp, Skinthinner IN.

Boggart and Imp are upgrades to Scout and Djinn respectively. I thought long and hard about what to cut for Skinthinner. Leaving behind the more flexible removal makes more sense than a Dark Banishing with cycling tacked on: when would I ever cycle this? Skinthinner is either a 2/1 two drop or a great morph flip, both serving some of the purpose that Expunge served while giving aggro a boost too. Feels okay but there may have been something I missed.

Temple Acolyte, Undo, Cuombajj Witches, Sparksmith, River Boa IN.

These bring my total cube to 360 (perfect for an 8-man draft) as well as boosts the number of picks that a control deck would want. Acolyte is an improved Bottle Gnomes, Undo is a great tempo card, Witches are a pinger in black, Sparksmith is looking to combo with Dragon Fodder/Empty the Warrens, and the Boa is just a great creature.

I think that covered this round of changes!

Getting the Job Done

After culling a hefty stack of cards from the cube (70 cards to be exact!) and working through some of the mana curves the colors present I've been upgrading and pimping everything I can. White, blue, and black have all been updated heavily with more changes coming but not nearly as dramatic as has already been done. You can see the updated cube for these colors and it becomes apparent that this cube is getting significantly tighter.

Thursday I had the pleasure of drafting with three very sharp Magic players, one of which was Klug himself. I forced a black/red aggro-burn deck that had both the red bounce spells (Stingscourger and the Gone side of Dead//Gone), plenty of burn, and a bevy of removal (like the incredible Ashes to Ashes). While I was a little on the lighter side for creatures I was able to nuke opposing critters and swing with the few that consistently dropped. Klug, however, drafted a sick green/white aggro deck backed up by a strong curve of green-white critters and Shield of the Oversoul. He also splashed for just Fireball - wow. While my deck had the bounce and exile power to deal with the shield I never saw any of it.

Some burn and a few creatures just don't hold the fort against a pure curve of aggro beatdown.

I'll try to grab decklists next-time. The feeling we came away with was that control, via traditional blue/black or blue/white pairing, just wasn't tenable. Blue/red counterburn might have been stronger if all the burn I had been grabbing had instead flowed a little better. The other deck also used blue but it was very underwhelming. I think blue may need the most work of all the colors: aggro feels like the best way to go, and aggro in blue is the pits. As Klug puts it "It seems like drafting the best aggro is the way to go. I don't know if control can really work with so many creatures around."

I've got the challenge laid down. For perspective on how I'm looking at blue I've taken out card filtering and replaced it with more creatures and distruption. The idea I'm working towards is that blue, paired with whatever color you want to match up, would weather the first wave of aggression, disrupting and countering spells, then push back with raw card draw and evasive creatures. With red or black the deck would gain removal and with white or green the deck would gain sifficiently strong creatures to reinforce and attack with.

We'll see how the next round goes.