December is cube month in Magic: the Gathering. We end the year with a break from serious competition, get together with old friends, and build silly decks with giant piles of powerful cards. This December I am too busy to play much Magic, so instead I’m thinking about the cards I wish I were drafting during these hypothetical cube sessions.
The point of cube is to engage in silliness. It will probably be more fun if you win, but cube is a great outlet for celebrating zany losses as well. Flipping Emrakul, the Aeons Torn to your Dark Confidant. Getting your Blue Sun’s Zenith countered when you’re casting it for zero to save yourself from decking. Dying to Fireblast with your Channel-fed spell on the stack. Those are amazing experiences. You want them to happen when you don’t care if you lose.
With that in mind, here are six cards I wish I could be drafting in online Vintage Cube leagues this month. Maybe I’ll find the time to hop in for one or two. But even if I don’t, I can at least savor the idea of silliness that these cards help cubers embrace.
The original Cryptic Command! If I don’t make an effort to draft something else, I always end up with a Simic deck in cube. Mystic Snake is nothing special, but it’s a ton of fun for a mediocre filler four drop. Attacking ten times for the win never gets old, and it’s likely you have better options if they waste a card or two getting misty with the snake. It’s a good default card to end up playing without trying too hard.
This is how you draft a storm deck in Cube. Spread out that value. Cast spells every turn. Don’t worry that you’ll fizzle. Just keep making monks. Play some recursion to get Monastery Mentor out of your graveyard after it dies. What more could you want? Sensei’s Divining Top? Yeah, you can have one of those. Probably not two of them, but I bet there’s a way. Always have goals.
Bribery and Treachery are fun and all, but why not really go to town? Ashiok, Nightmare Weaver is one of those weird planeswalkers that doesn’t seem like it actually does anything, but in Cube you can be pretty sure that Ashiok does something good. Either your opponent has sweet cards to steal or you’ll get value out of them trying to get it off the board. And if your opponent has a creatureless deck that can’t interact, it’s probably a combo deck and you can run them out of cards. At worst, you’ll see what nonsense they have. Who knows? You might tilt them off when you exile their Tendrils of Agony.
Who needs Moxes when you can turn all your lands into Moxes? Fastbond is bah-roken and stupid, and you basically can’t ever play with it. Every so often you might draw the one restricted copy in your Vintage deck, if you have a Vintage deck. Or you can build a crazy multi-Fastbond Casual deck and play your friends once or twice before they get sick of it. Vintage Cube lets you do that without the hassle of finding an actual Vintage deck or persuading your friends to let you do it. Cube is a format of general consent to be broken. Fastbond is a fun way to do that.
The least loved Titan is my favorite. Sure, there are a lot of interchangeable finishers and big bombs in Vintage Cube. Maybe your red decks want to be all-in aggro burn. Maybe this thing is just a big dumb beater. But it sure is fun to put Inferno Titan on the battlefield, and it’s even more fun to attack with it. Flames of the Firebrand all around, every turn until you win—which is probably only one or two, but it will be sweet if the game lasts longer. Firebreathing is also nice. Tap a lot of lands, make a lot of red, get down tonight!
I don’t care what anyone says about junk like Sol Ring and Black Lotus. Coalition Relic is the best mana rock in Cube bar none. When you want to have fun and engage in many rounds of shenanigans, this little artifact is number one with a charge counter. Looking to overindulge for the holidays? Coalition Relic is like having four stomachs. You can always go back for more. You never need to get up from the table. If you die, just shuffle up and deal again. You will always get one mana of any color from this thing; but when you really need it, you can get two. Double fist with style.
Happy cubing!
Carrie O’Hara is Editor-in-Chief of Hipsters of the Coast.