Magic: The Gathering C/D

Agree that curve is not really what you're thinking about in powered cube. Most often you want to prioritize fast mana. What you do with is it much less important, there's always something. Sol Ring and any power Mox get picked over literally everything. I personally like the high cost planeswalkers eg Karn, Ugin, the 6 mana Elspeth and Chandra as pretty straightforward and reliable game winners that can be brutal if dropped early. Watch out for Upheaval and draw 7s, these can go late and are busto with a lot of mana. Counterspells are much better than removal and cheap cantrip and selection spells to help find your good stuff are great which is why blue rules. There are a number of broken/combo style things to do that usually revolve around getting something huge down early eg sneak, show, channel, tinker, order. Try to identify redundancy if you go this route so you don't rely on drawing a single card to win. But if you do need one card, get tutors!

I think those are some fundamentals but there are tons of other things, powerful interactions and 2/3 card combos to discover, etc. That's a big part of the appeal. Watching cube streams and videos is usually a good time and you'll find out a lot that way.

btw if this is all breaking your head a bit I will say the Stompy decks with Rofellos, Gaea's Cradle, Treespeaker (as Sol Ring), and 4-5 planeswalkers can be nuts, those sort of "mono-green" decks (usually with some splash of U or B) almost always go at least 2-1 for me

Counterspells are much better than removal

this is definitely true but I think most people figured that out - Bolt/Doom Blade type stuff winds up going very late. but having some good catch-all removal stuff is always key - Banishing Light/O-Ring/Vindicate/that thing that turns permanents into forests. every deck's gonna have a couple planeswalkers and those are just as likely to dominate the game as some big honkin' fattie.

yep counterspells > removal that hits walkers > creature removal that exiles > creature removal that kills. much like KLD the enchantment removal is a little softer here than eg in non-powered cube because there's so much incentive to main artifact removal that often incidentally kills enchantments.

also because there's so little instant speed removal in decks and so few creatures on board, swords that give you card advantage or just win (u/g, u/r, b/g) are even more bomby than usual. fair magic equipment like jitte and batterskull are actually a little worse. I keep getting passed the u/g sword like 6-7th pick, which is absurd. (I also really like playing sfm decks.)

yeah those swords are great, the two colors of protection is often very relevant. I'd also throw Lightning Greaves on that list, not giving your opponent a chance to prepare for something big is huge

one other thing - as tempting as it is, avoid the storm deck, since the cards that make that deck work are the same that everyone else wants, and it's all too easy to Empty the Warrens for 20 and lose anyway. even Brain Freeze doesn't work sometimes since the Elradzi instantly shuffle back. on the other hand it is by far the most fun deck to play and Cube is pretty -EV in general so

the u/g sword wheels! some of the cards ppl don't take, i literally have no idea.

"i have trinket mage, manic vandal, clique and glen elendra as creatures. guess i will take this 2nd last pick sword of body and mind"

I don't think storm is a trap, you just have to be careful about diving into it because if it turns out not to be open you've wasted a lot of picks on unplayables. when it is open you get the lane to yourself, similar to mono red, and you can pick all the ramp and fixing while LED wheels. when it is good it's one of the best decks and it's probably the most rewarding to draft and play. but you really need to know what you're doing.

I had a really annoying draft the other day where I had sapphire/jet/ruby/recall plus led/will/bargain but my storm deck still sucked cause either the key storm win cons were scooped up early by someone who switched out of storm or just weren't in the packs. brain freeze is just so much easier to win with than the other win cons, seeing an early brain freeze is one thing that might make me go into storm. opening a p1p1 lotus or crypt or something like that also makes me more willing to consider it.

I will say, though I generally don't care much about pods vs. league in general, in Cube it's kind of jarring seeing the same power cards in 3 straight matches

btw that totally sucks iatee, Cube is frustrating that way, you're always like 1 or 2 cards short of the perfect deck

Ok so on my second attempt I natural ordered for a progenitus on turn 3 which was kind of fun (for me anyway). 1-2 again, but I thought my deck had a bit more going for it this time.

I drafted a pretty horrible deck and went 3-0 with it, then turned around and 0-3'd what I thought was a pretty good Esper control deck, though in my defense I was constantly playing against opponents with 2-3 power 9 cards who drew them every single game. Though there's a ton of skill involved in this the variance is off the charts.

yeah the 'lose to fast power / channel / snt' openings are unfortunately just losses you have to suck up. one year the last cube I did involved me losing to black lotus -> tnn on the draw, so for a second there was nothing but a huge TNN on the battlefield. I was like 'I think I'm done with this for a while'. incidentally, I actually had those two cards in my deck last night but never got that start.

TNN is slightly underrated in cube, the least fair fair card. not really a p1 or p2 or worth forcing your draft around, but I don't think it should ever wheel.

yeah "protection from target player" has got to be the most obnoxious ability ever printed on a creature

thus far my favorite match came vs. a reanimator deck, where both games I used Puppeteer Clique to kill him with his own creatures, and one game I cast Necromancy in response to his own in other to prevent him from getting his Grieselbrand

my legacy deck (death and taxes) is notoriously weak to the card and I think it's one of the dumbest things to ever be printed. I think the protection should have been templated as an ETB trigger...that would allow your opponent exactly one moment to deal with it, similar to mother of runes.

my favorite match was me playing storm, opponent plays lotus t2 tamiyo and keeps upticking. he vamps (presumably for force of will) and yawg wills his lotus back the turn after. I have a frozen magus of the will that I dark ritualed onto the table. he's tapped out with a lotus. I cast wheel of fortune with two mana untapped. he begrudingly force of wills (turn away from having infinite fows) - I force spike - he's not willing to crack his lotus again to pay, since he at least wants infinite lotuses next turn. I draw into a land and time walk, get an extra turn and now have magus of the will unfrozen, yawg will my yard up and win.

also had a wildfire/upheaval deck where this was my t2:

http://i.imgur.com/xiXyTqF.jpg

I too often get starts like that where my one PW/creature gets killed or countered and then I topdeck lands forever. Hopefully you topdecked some 13cc artifact on turn 3

yeah I drew into Batterskull and Upheavaled after he Treacheried my germ, then playing 2 Batterskulls to an empty board

these new legendary artifacts seem busted, would like them both to be put in the holiday cube immediately.

Paradox Engine doesn't seem quite as ridiculous as Jeskai Ascendancy, but could do some interesting stuff. Planar Bridge is very expensive, but we definitely needed more ways to cheat Emrakuls into play.

Planar Bridge seems like it would fit in Tron pretty well.

does replacing 1 or more of your threats with a card that lets you find specific threats really improve the deck? You still have to find your Planar Bridge to make this work. Does Tron even really care which threat you have, pretty much any big card ends the game quickly. Planar Bridge takes 2 turns to be effective, 1 to cast and 1 to activate. I'd rather just have my Karn or Ugin in hand.

that planar bridge can find and dump a new threat every turn is the thing that makes it interesting. maybe overkill but an interesting wrinkle all the same.

the fact that paradox engine untaps everything but lands is surely going to give it way more application/potential then jeskai ascendancy.

5 mana is a lot for a combo card

planar bridge is at the very least *playable* in tron, though I think what the deck plays as finishers doesn't 'really matter'

also - I hate tron so much

fetch Omniscience, go to town

really happy with AER previews so far, looks like an impactful set for constructed

New mechanics seem like they'll make the Puzzleknots a lot better in Limited, at least

Inspirational Monuments seems potentially broken, considering it functions as a mana rock itself it seems better than it looks. Guessing they won't let themselves get burned like they did with Affinity but at least we got Ornothopter!

ooh I like this card a lot

http://mythicspoiler.com/aer/cards/rishkarsexpertise.html

Mechanized Production seems really cool - I missed at first that the "8 copies" condition could apply to any artifact, not just the one enchanted. So it could be Servos or Clues or Eldrazi Spawn or whatever.

seems totally broken w/ servos. i guess blue not a servo colour and card is not really a splash.

spawn/scions are not artifacts tho

idk about 'totally broken' but that seems like the most easily doable alternate win in limited since Azor's Elocutors

well i was initially just surprised that they would put it in a set with servos but on the one hand it's blue like i said and on the other it actually isn't really in a super heavy servo set because AER looks to have far fewer kicking about. in triple KLD tho it would be p trivial to build around this to get 8 servos in play.

you can just remove the servo its on though, plenty of 'counterplay'

no talk about black lighting bolt? will it revolutionize modern / see some play / basically change nothing?

1 mana instant kill for goyf thru tks seems like it will have some application?

for this limited otoh it could really be a common

xp if you mean fatal push, then yeah it's clearly a constructed staple in all formats. seems like it has the biggest potential impact on modern.

in the current race-to-the-bottom modern metagame it's really close to a path to exile without the downside

2 more days worth of previews and they're still all great wtf is going on

wow @ Gifted Aetherborn, that's a pretty powerful uncommon

the cards seem strong in general and also kind of all over the place. lots going on

yeah the part i like is they're all narrow effects, theres no smugglers copter here that's obviously going to step on the toes of everything else

the blue Expertise is worrying though, that's the sort of card that could invalidate a lot of stuff if it ends up being good in standard

dunno if it's in the same league as Copter but Aethersphere Harvester seems really good

I could see that Expertise being pretty sweet in my Panharmonicon deck

yeah harvester is quite good

I dig the "you may play a card costing X or less from your hand" mechanic a lot, seems like a fixed version of the Urza's Saga "free" spells

i think about half of the currently previewed cards ought to see standard play, which is an incredible rate.

severely disappointed in them reprinting Atog but not calling it Atog

on the other hand, a legendary pirate that produces a monkey token

geist of saint traft has fallen on hard times