Rough Drafts: Modern Cube
Hey everyone, it's time for another edition of Rough Drafts! We're in a weird place on Magic Online at the moment, with the release of Ixalan being just over a week away and the other Standard-legal sets being essentially dead as far as limited is concerned. Thankfully, Magic Online fills these dead spaces with unique limited formats. This time around, it's Modern Cube. While Modern Cube isn't my favorite of the Magic Online cubes (that would be Vintage Cube), it does offer its own unique play style that is overloaded on planeswalkers, good value creatures, and the best (Modern-legal) removal, so we'll be looking to slog our way through this midrange battlefield by out-grinding our opponents! So get ready, it's going to be a long one! If you want to see all the cards in the Modern Cube, you can find the list here, along with pricing and prizes. Anyway, let's get to the videos!
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Rough Drafts: Modern Cube (Drafting)
Rough Drafts: Modern Cube (Round 1)
Rough Drafts: Modern Cube (Round 2)
Rough Drafts: Modern Cube (Round 3)
Discussion
I don't have a ton to say—our matches were incredibly grindy, but out deck did a good job of out-valuing our opponents (also, Mana Tithe was awesome, like usual). All in all, this version of the Modern Cube is strange. While it's fun to play, the most recent update to the cube took out a ton of Modern cards and replaced them with (often worse) Standard cards, which feels like a weird choice for the "Modern" Cube. While Standard cards are technically Modern legal, our games felt more akin to a midrange Standard slog than anything that resembles Modern.
Probably the biggest reason for our deck's success was that we managed to get a lot of removal that not only dealt with creatures but also planeswalkers, which was huge, since every deck we played against was using planeswalkers as one of their primary threats (which seems fairly typical of this cube). Because of this, the value of anything that can kill both a creature and a planeswalker goes way, way up. I'm pretty sure we had a game where our opponent played Gideon Jura into Karn Liberated, which would beat a lot of decks (especially considering we had a near-empty board), but we had the ability to Anguish Unmaking the first planeswalker, Hero's Downfall the second planeswalker, and stabilize. Basically, if you are going to play the Modern Cube, make sure you have a plan to deal with your opponent's planeswalkers, whether that be killing your opponent quickly (which is tough, since the Mono-Red deck got a huge downgrade for this run of the cube) or just killing them outright.
The other big takeaway is that you probably want to focus on value creatures. Our biggest mistake of this draft was not running Gonti, Lord of Luxury in the main deck. Every deck we played was absolutely overloaded with removal, which made some of the cards we thought would be our best threats (like Baneslayer Angel) pretty bad but creatures like Gonti, Lord of Luxury (which get value right away) very good.
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today. We'll be back with another Rough Drafts in a couple of weeks, featuring the brand-new Ixalan limited format! Until then, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and suggestions in the comments, and you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.
