Final Preview

A random (literally, used random.org) sample hand:

 Pack one, pick one... ?

[Edited: I discovered that I had miscounted and had too many red cards and not enough green cards in the Cube. Warspike Changeling is no longer in. Vulshok Sorcerer (already in) takes in place in the sample hand.]

A Fiery Conclusion

Today we look at the two remaining guilds of Ravnica, both half-red: the soldiers of Boros and the scientists of Izzet.

The Boros Legion

Zealous guardians of justice, the Boros are paradoxically both the guild that left the largest mark on ongoing terminology (you hear about Boros decks in formats long after Ravnica) and the guild with the worst ability word, Radiance. (Effects with "target creature and each other creature that shares a color with it" in them.)

AKA the world's most expensive Pyroclasm.

It's very difficult to figure out exactly how to structure the guild around something other than just "aggressive red white", and I'm honestly still considering restructuring before Sunday if some cards arrive in the mail tomorrow. But one thing that is going on is Battle Cry:

The Izzet League

Brilliantly chaotic mad scientists, the Izzet League is well known to all of you from Mark's pet deck, and that's pretty much what you should expect here. The Izzet keyword is Replicate:

AKA the world's most expensive Fog.

"Instants and sorceries matter" was kind of a broad canvas to paint on, and I'm hoping I didn't go overboard on support cards.

And since I'm not doing a separate artifact spoiler:

Speed Shift

Early (and therefore inexperienced) Cube designers tended to build Cubes where the best deck was 4- or 5-color control. I'm inexperienced, so there's a decent chance that's the case here. (My goal is 3 color decks, because that was largely what full-block Ravnica limited looked like.) So I decided to move two of the more control-ly guilds onto a more aggro footing: witness the Azorius and the Dimir.

The Azorius Senate

Platonic bureaucracy made flesh, the Azorius Senate was given a keyword R&D was very afraid of -- and so only nine cards with it in Dissension: Forecast.

Pride of the Clouds points towards the theme I went with for Azorius: the core-set draft staple archetype of WU fliers.

But don't worry, even in that shell, there's room for some control.

House Dimir 

The guild that doesn't exist, House Dimir was most notable for it's milling theme, which is decidely toned down here. It's keyword, Transmute, allows you to tutor up cards with the same converted mana cost as the card with Transmute.

I took Dimir Infiltrator here as my pattern for the guild: unblockable creatures and creatures with saboteur abilities (ie, bad things happen to the opponent when the creature deal combat damage to them.)

Dimir also a something of a Rogue subtheme:

And a Look at White

This card was the first-pick when R&D did a Lorwyn Rotisserie draft.

Hadou-token!

Tokens were another significant theme of Ravnica. The "Hunted" cycle of rares even gave you undercosted fatties at the expense of giving tokens to your opponent! Two guilds in our Cube, the Selesnya Conclave and the Orzhov Syndicate, are token-themed.




The Selesnya Conclave

A hippy commune masquerading as a guild, the Selesnya Conclave's Ravnica keyword was Convoke. (Each creature you tap while casting this spell reduces its cost by {1} or by one mana of that creature's color.) It basically allows you to use any creature as a Llanowar Elves. Convoke was fueled primarily by Saproling tokens, and it's no different here.

In the first formal attempt at inter-block synergy, Time Spiral, the block following Ravnica, had a lot of Saprolings too. And Cube-Selesnya leans heavily on Time Spiral enablers of the Saproling them.

Most notably, Thallids. Thallids are Fungi that generally have three abilities: one that puts a spore counter on them at the beginning of your upkeep, one that turns three spore counters into a Saproling token, and one that sacrifices Saprolings for an effect. You should expect to see a lot of Thallids.

(Selesnya gets three preview cards because they're my favorite.)

Sprout Swarm was one of the most feared cards in Time Spiral - Planar Chaos - Future Sight drafting. Buyback + convoke is apparently very good. Thelonite Hermit gives the plucky Saprolings a lord of their own.

(Note: each other guild has a two-color legendary creature associated with it. I couldn't find one I liked for Selesnya. I tried to be careful with broken cycles, but this one won't get fixed 'til RtR comes out.)

The Orzhov Syndicate

The Orzhov Syndicate is organized crime posing as organized religion. It's Ravnica keyword, Haunt, is considered in retrospect to have been overly confusing, although I wonder if the "exile" terminology would have helped it out. (The reminder text is different on spells and creatures, but basically haunt cards exile themselves when they hit the graveyard from the battlefield and attach themselves from exile to a creature. When that creatures dies, you either get the creature's enters the battlefield ability or the spell's effect again.)

I made sure that every guild's keyword shows up at least once, but Haunt is definitely not the Orzhov's focus in Cube. To see what is, check out their legend:

Hmmmm... 1/1 white Spirit creature tokens with flying...

Not sure that we've seen enough of those around lately to build a guild around. No sirree.

And a random look at Red

Speaking of tokens with flying...

Significant (En)Counters


+1/+1 counters were a significant part of Ravnica block. Two of the ten guilds keywords revolved around them, and today we take a look at them: the Gruul Clans and the Simic Combine.






The Gruul Clans

Dispossessed, alienated, and disenfranchised. Whatever function the Gruul Clans once had in the Guildpact is long since disappeared, leaving behind a violent, savage, and unruly collection of street gangs. The guild's Bloodthirst keyword recently made a return to M12, and it's certainly in the Cube. (Bloodthirst N: If an opponent was dealt damage this turn, this creature enters the battlefield with N +1/+1 counters on it.)
However, it's not the only focus. About a third of all cards with Bloodthirst share a creature type, so there's a bit of tribal action going on with Gruul. Let me show you my favorite two-card combo with the guild:

Warriors from across the multiverse will be bigger and trample-ier - then even bigger and more trample-ier. Hulk smash! Hulk smash more!
The Simic Combine

A group of biological engineers that just can't leave nature well enough alone (even their own nature), the Simic Combine is known for their keyword Graft. (Graft N: This creature enters the battlefield with N +1/+1 counters on it. Whenever another creature enters the battlefield, you may move a +1/+1 counter from this creature onto it.) 
When you switch from red to blue in a +1/+1 counter centered guild, you get a little less smashy and a little more tricksy, with a range of activated abilities that care about +1/+1 counters, from granting keywords to using them as resources:

Wizards aren't quite the theme to Simic that Warriors are to Gruul, but they are around:

And a Glimpse at Blue

And finally, continuing my theme of choosing my semi-arbitrarily-chosen additional monocolored spoilers from utility cards, I'm curious to see whether this "do nothing" card will actually, well, do something:

Mana Fixing and Golgari

Mana Fixing

For a gold-themed draft environment, understanding what mana-fixing you have available is crucial.

As mentioned yesterday, the Cube has 30 lands and 30 artifacts. All of the lands and about half the artifacts are mana fixers or accelerators.




Lands

The lands come in three ten-card cycles: the common guild lands from Ravnica (sometimes called bouncelands or karoos), the rare cycle from M10 forward for the allied colors and Innistrad for the enemy colors (no nickname that I'm aware of), and the rare cycle of lands last printed in Tenth Edition (the painlands).

I wanted to include some mixture of the ability lands from Innistrad block and the uncommon guild homes from Ravnica block, but I couldn't find room for them. Maybe we'll try bumping the Cube up 45 or 90 cards at some point...

Other Mana Fixing

Continuing with cycles, the allied colors have Alara Reborn's Borderpost cycle while the enemy colors have their Signets from Ravnica block. (The signets are actually controversial in Cube-world. Because they fix and ramp for colorless, many people feel they're overpowered and damaging to Green's role in the Cube. I thought we'd try using half of them for now and see how they feel.)

And of course, Green's not going to let the artifacts have all of the fun:

 And the Guild-of-the-Day (two Guilds-of-the-Day starting tomorrow):

The Golgari Swarm

A living incarnation of green-black's circle of life and death (and unlife and undeath), the Golgari are graveyard-focused and are infamous for their Ravnica keyword: Dredge. "If you would draw a card, instead you may put exactly N cards from the top of your library into your graveyard. If you do, return this card from your graveyard to your hand. Otherwise, draw a card."

Dredge presents the opportunity to re-use a card again and again at the cost of milling yourself -- and having just played Innistrad block, we know that isn't always a cost. Dredge is bogeyman in all the formats it's a part of; it's sometime accused of not being Magic. (And considering that something called "Landless Dredge" is a thing, that might be actually fair.)

I said yesterday that one of the characteristics of this Cube is "modern card face", and Golgari gives me an opportunity to show why:

Golgari Grave-Troll is banned in Modern. Apparently, Dredge 6 was too good for the Dredge deck to have access to. And now we'll get to see it for ourselves.

Meanwhile: 

Skullbriar is a Commander card and was never legal in Modern. He's not going to be as easy to bring back again and again and again as he would be as a Commander, but there just might be a few ways to give his counters a repeat performance. 

Announcing... The Cube!

What is The Cube? 

The Cube is a custom singleton limited format for Magic the Gathering. In other words, someone takes single copies of whichever Magic cards strike their fancy, crafting them into a set for drafting, sealed, etc. See here for Evan Erwin's take and here for the MTGS forum's introduction to cubing.

The Cube was invented by Spikes who had played Magic since beginning, so their original idea of what would be fun to draft was "all of the best Magic cards ever". Moxes. Necropotence. Time Walk. Etc. And most Cubes are still done this way -- although obviously not everyone includes the Power 9. As you know, I'm not terribly Spike-y, and our play-group is mostly new-ish players, so a traditional Cube wasn't something I was interested in.

So what does this Cube look like?

360 cards, modern card face, Ravnica-themed. (See here and here and here for information about Ravnica.)

20 cards associated with each of the ten guilds, eight gold or hybrid and twelve mono-color. An additional 100 mono-colored cards, chosen so that across the guild-associated cards and the additions, there's an equal number for each color. 30 artifacts. 30 non-basic lands.

 Overall, the Cube pulls from two themes from the original Ravnica block: multicolor and tokens/counters. (The links are illustrative; neither of those cards are in the Cube. Yet.) While being Ravnica-themed, the cards come throughout the universe of modern-faced cards, which leads to our first preview card:

It's probably a sideboard card, but between the token-heavy Selesnya and Orzhov and the +1/+1 counter heavy Simic and Gruul, there just might be enough tokens and counters around to main-deck it.

I don't want to ruin your sense of exploration, but I think it's a good idea for you to have a sense of what each guild is up to in this cube. To that end, over the course of this week, I'll be doing a series of previews. First up:

Guild Preview: The Cult of Rakdos

A group of thrill-seeking sado-masochists following their demon-lord Rakdos, the black/red Cult was known in the original Ravnica for its ability word Hellbent: "If you have no cards in hand, [effect]". This encouraged a fast-and-loose approach to the game that represented the Cult well. While Hellbent is not the primary theme of the Rakdos in this Cube, that spirit lives on in their guild-colored legend:

A 6/6 flier for 6 that costs you your hand but might cost them their board, Grixis's Malfegor feels right at home amongst the Rakdos -- although given the flavor text, Rakdos himself might objection to the new demon in town.

So if the Cube's Rakdos aren't primarily trying to empty their hand, what they trying to do?

Empty yours:

An infamous creature from the early days of Magic (when Dark Ritual made it a potential turn one play), Hyponotic Specter and its friends in this Cube's Rakdos are out to make that flavor text come to life as they strip your hand and your dreams.