MTG - UB Mill in my Cube

The dreaded mill deck.  Frustrating to play against for the most part and sometimes you just feel dirty for winning with it.  Mostly because it's such a passive deck for the most part.  You don't need to attack your opponent's life total in any way to win with this style of deck.

UB can sometimes also be built as a control deck where you eliminate your opponent's threats until you can drop your own and win, but I'll focus on the milling aspect of the two colours for this deck.

The following are the cards you want to look for and draft

• Millstone
• Thought Scour
• Mind Sculpt
• Dream Twist
• Psychic Spiral
• Nephalia Drownyard
• Selhoff Occultist
• Vedalken Entrancer
• Belltower Sphinx
• Undercity Informer
• Oona, Queen of the Fae
• Psychic Strike
• Coerced Confession
• Pilfered Plans
• Codex Shredder

These are the main milling cards in the cube and if you can grab a few of them (especially the recurring ones) you can easily mill your opponent out as the decks are usually only 40 cards (And of those 40 cards you only need to mill away around 30 or so).

In addition to the actual milling cards it helps to pick up some defensive creatures like Wall of Frost, Fog Bank and Mnemonic Wall so you can stall your opponent.  Some kill cards like Doom Blade or Murder are also useful for taking care of things your walls can't stop.

There are a few cards that may not seem like they would fit but are actually really good for the deck.  Jace's Archivist and Prosperity can help you achieve your goal of milling your opponent.  Jace's Archivist may not seem useful but if you are milling your opponent they most likely will not have as many lands as you so their hand will be fairly large.  The added cards will usually be more beneficial to you than it will be to your opponent.  Similarly Prosperity can force your opponent to draw more cards than he intended and bring him closer to being milled while at the same time filling your hand with more useful spells.

Of course if you can't mill your opponent to death, you do have the option to go on the beatdown, especially if you can land a few large creatures like Oona, Queen of the Fae, Frost Titan or Lazav, Dimir Mastermind.  If you've milled your opponent early enough it will be easier to drop one of these bombs and just take over the game.  This alternate strategy is also advisable after game 1 where your opponent might side in more cards to make his deck bigger and harder to mill so for your own sideboard you might want to add some unblockable creatures like Keymaster Rogue and Deathcult Rogue to your sideboard and switch strategies between games.  These creatures also work well if Trepanation Blade is already in your card pool.

Like the other decks I looked at it is a fun deck to play, especially if you like frustrating your opponents.

MTG - BR Aggro in my Cube

Another aggro archetype I wanted to support in the cube was BR.  This time moving away from white and going the more aggressive and risky but in my opinion better able to close out games due to the direct damage capabilities of red and removal of black.

Black, much like white, is blessed to have an abundance of aggressive creatures but they tend to have drawbacks.  Compare say Elite Vanguard to Vampire Lacerator.  Both are 2 power creatures for 1 mana, but the Vampire Lacerator can potentially kill you (the tradeoff is that it has 1 extra toughness over Elite Vanguard).  Similarly Diregraf Ghoul is also a 2/2 creature for 1 but comes into play tapped.  Not as big of a drawback as the 1 life per turn but useless late game if you need a blocker right away.

Red also has a lot of efficient creatures like Firedrinker Satyr and Reckless Waif.  These ones don't have as big of a drawback as the black ones so they are easier to use.  The amount of cheap creatures gives the deck a plethora of early plays so you can guarantee some early damage from creatures early on as most decks don't want to trade their early creatures (either because they help ramp or are their main source of damage in the case of another aggressive deck)

The better early creatures you would want, aside from the ones mentioned above, are:

• Rakdos Cackler
• Rakdos Shred-Freak
• Foundry Street Denizen
• Stonewright
• Skitter of Lizards
• Knight of Infamy
• Spike Jester

The downside of the deck is that since all the creatures so small if the game persists to mid-game or late-game you lose a lot of power as they can be easily outclasses by the larger creatures available in the cube.  At this point, the removal power of both red and black make their presence known.

Adding cards like

• Lightning Bolt
• Go for the Throat
• Dismember
• Murder
• Brimstone Volley - very effective with Tymaret, the Murder King
• Volt Charge - combines well with Unleash creatures

gives the deck ways to clear away troublesome creatures and force through more damage.  The red cards also do double duty in that they can be pointed at your opponent's head to finish them off.

Alternatively there are some larger aggressive creatures in both colours that can be added to give the deck some more mid-game punch.  Things like

• Bloodgift Demon
• Bloodfray Giant
• Exava, Rakdos Blood Witch
• Underworld Cerberus
• Tymaret, the Murder King
• Carnage Gladiator

provide the deck more power in the mid-game and some extra reach.  Tymaret, the Murder King makes your small creatures useful again as fodder to throw at your opponent and Carnage Gladiator can make blocking your attackers a dangerous prospect especially when combined with the zombie king.

BR aggro is definitely an all-in balls-to-the-wall deck that rewards aggression.  In my experiences, the archetype tends to win big (especially if it curves out properly) or lose big (when it can't curve out properly).

MTG - Wx Aggro in my Cube

This was perhaps the hardest archetype to try and include in my cube.  Mostly because Wx aggro decks tend to be composed of a bunch of small creatures and these small creatures tend not to be that cool looking at first glance.  Think of say Elite Vanguard vs a dragon like Moltensteel Dragon.  One card is a vanilla 2/1 creature while the other is a 4/4 flying fire-breathing monstrosity.  For a newish player, who isn't familiar with all the MTG archetypes, the choice tends to lean towards the dragon.

So a good majority of the good aggro cards would not get picked up because my cube contained a lot of dragons and other large creatures.  That's partly my fault though as my first cube incarnation was very Timmy focused.  I've since moved away from that and have started to put some more support for fast aggro.

With that said, my cube can support Wx aggro quite easily now I think.  There are a number of fairly efficient white creatures like

• Soldier of the Pantheon
• Phalanx Leader
• Kor Skyfisher
• Accorder Paladin
• Fencing Ace
• White Knight
• Blade Splicer
• Fabled Hero
• Porcelain Legionnaire

and a lot of support cards like

• Spear of Heliod
• Griffin Guide
• Armored Ascension
• Apostle's Blessing
• Emerge Unscathed
• Darksteel Axe
• Silver-Inlaid Dagger

Many of the white creatures also come packed with Heroic abilities so auras and combat tricks are doubly effective.  With that as your core you just need to fill it out with either more white creatures or pair it up with another colour.

I don't think there is a best partner as each colour provides a unique quality to the aggro deck but here are few cards I would look for in each of the possible colour pairings with white.

MTG - Tokens in my Cube

Tokens decks I've found are always fun decks to play.  Making a huge horde of creatures and then just overrunning your opponent always appealed to me so I made a concerted effort to include enough token generators and token helpers to make Tokens a viable archetype in my cube.

To start, you'd need token generators like the following.

• Master Splicer
• Blade Splicer
• Attended Knight
• Scion of Vitu-Ghazi
• Captain of the Watch
• Courser's Accord
• Midnight Haunting
• Knight Watch
• Trostani's Summoner

With cards like that it provides a good base of token creatures as well as some support (the Splicers bonus abilities make the golem tokens better and Captain of the Watch makes the soldiers better).

To make the deck better it needs some good support cards.  Usually things that globally pump creatures or make more tokens.  Once the core token producer cards have been taken, support cards like the following are drafted next

• Spear of Heliod
• Phantom General
• Victory's Herald
• Collective Blessing
• Rootborn Defenses
• Wayfaring Temple
• Trostani's Judgment

This gives the deck a lot of punch as the Spear of Heliod, Phantom General and Collective Blessing make each token scarier.  Those 1/1 birds suddenly don't look so tiny with pump effects like that in play.

At some point though you need something to bust through so a few finisher cards are necessary.  That's part of the reason to grab a card like Victory's Herald that can make all your tokens flying.  Similarly a card like Predatory Rampage can be enough to force through enough tokens for the kill.

This archetype is fairly obvious but for some reason no one but me seems to draft it whenever we draft the cube.  Tokens is a lot of fun and if allowed to grow their army, hard to stop.

MTG - Bx Reanimator in my cube

Second deck I wanted to focus on was my attempt to incorporate a reanimator deck.

So the basic idea for a reanimator deck is to dump giant creatures into the graveyard and cheat them out with spells.  To facilitate this you need cards like:

• Forbidden Alchemy
• Erebos's Emissary
• Thought Scour

These cards help you dig through your deck for the pieces or chuck the giant creatures into the graveyard or both.

The follow up to chucking big things into your graveyard are some reanimator spells like:

• Rise from the Grave
• Rescue from the Underworld
• Obzedat's Aid
• Miraculous Recovery
• Unburial Rites

These will bring things back from the dead and generally faster than hard casting them.

So what makes a good reanimator target?  Well basically anything that is big and bomby.  Some of the better ones in my cube are:

• Nefarox, Overlord of Grixis
• Sepulchral Primordial /Artisan of Kozilek- these have the added benefit of bringing something else along when they come out.
• Myr Battlesphere
• Shipbreaker Kraken
• Sphinx of Uthuun
• Captain of the Watch
• Victory's Herald
• Moldgraf Monstrosity
• Pelakka Wurm
• Ulamog's Crusher
• Dragons

These creatures are all from different colours so reanimator decks tend to be  at least 2 colours and most likely 3 and maybe even 4.  Some of the better combinations are Black/Blue cause blue gives you lots of card draw and some large creatures as well as the most options of throwing stuff into your graveyard.  Black/White gives you lots of reanimation options and lots of good early stuff to keep you alive.  It does lack in ways to dump stuff into the graveyard though.  Black/Green gives you ways to abuse your graveyard even more.  Cards like Jarad's Orders, Jarad, Golgari Lich Lord, Varolz, the Scar-Striped and the scavenge creatures provide more things to do with the stuff in your graveyard in addition to reanimation.  Not to mention green provides a lot of mana fixing so you can easily go 3 or 4 colour reanimator.

The biggest drawback to a deck like this is that the early game tends to be slow and there is a great danger to just flat out dying before you can get the deck going.  This makes removal spells and resilient creatures a high priority.

This deck is not an obvious choice to make but it's quite fun cheating out giant creatures and smashing face.

MTG - UR Izzet Blitz in my Main Cube

When I updated my cube I made a more conscious effort to include specific archetypes in the cube.  Before the update there weren't many archetypes that saw play.  I think I saw tokens (which I almost always played as those cards always got passed), mono-red burn (only because one player would always force this) and mill the most often.  Everyone else kind of just had a hodgepodge mix of whatever they could draft.  All good, but no real synergy.

With this latest update I've hopefully added more archetypes into my cube so everyone can have a decent deck to play with rather than a hodgepodge of spells.

The first archetype I wanted to focus on was the UR Izzet Blitz deck that is possible.  Alternatively this could be called the Spells Matter archetype (or the Kiln Fiend deck as Kiln Fiend kind of popularized this style of play a few years back as well as on the MTGO Pauper scene) as it depends on getting enough instant and sorcery spells to power the creatures that kind of depend on it.

The main idea behind this deck is to draft the following creatures (hopefully most, if not all of them):

• Kiln Fiend
• Nivix Cyclops
• Spellheart Chimera
• Guttersnipe

and then enough instant and sorcery cards to support them.

I figured flashback and rebound cards would be useful as they are effectively two for one spells and they can activate the creatures abilities twice.  So you would want spells like:

• Nightbird's Clutches
• Geistflame
• Distortion Strike
• Staggershock

After that, the rest of the deck should be filled with more bounce, counters and removal and maybe some cards that recycle spells like Archaeomancer or Mnemonic Wall.

The basic plan then is you want to clear the way for your creature(s) with spells (which incidentally makes your creatures bigger), then attack and burst your opponent down with your big creatures.

If that fails, you can hope to draw into a big finisher like an overloaded Dragonshift or Teleportal or just constantly ping them to death with a Guttersnipe or Fire Servant fueled burn spells.

This archetype isn't as obvious though for new players so it might not see play but I think it would be fun and I will probably try to force it next time my group plays just to see if it will work.