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.