Cube Draft Reports - August 2025

Another edition! Quite a bit slimmer than last month because I had family visiting in the middle of the month and I’m heading out of town at the end (hence why this is coming out a good bit before the end of the month). See the first edition aka last month’s edition for a sappy spiel of why, but as for some relevant bullet points:

• I purposely don’t look at cube lists before drafting. The mystery and surprise of it all and having to piece together the puzzle on the spot is one of the main draws of Magic for me, and some of that is spoiled by knowing the shape of what is there in advance. I only really go in knowing what the cube owner says in their pre-draft setup spiel, and any loose memories knocking around from previous drafts.
• These draft reports are first and foremost for me, but format and level of detail about certain aspects are something I’m interested in experimenting with. If you want to hear more about say, my thoughts during the draft or my feelings about XYZ, let me know and I will almost certainly take it into account, even if I don’t seem to actively do anything about it.

Need for Speed (August 6, 2025)

The Need for Speed cube originated as a clone of the Eiganjo Drift cube but has since diverged to the tune of roughly 20% of the cards differing.^[1] The thematic hook of the cube is it is all about vehicles, but the practical change that I felt dominated the pre-game spiel, the draft, and the gameplay, was that everyone starts with a Mech Hangar in play. The main things I noticed related to it:

• Any single-pipped Vehicle or Pilot is essentially colorless, and dual-pipped Vehicles and Pilots can be flexibly mono-colored if need be for a certain deck. This was emphasized in the pre-game spiel, and I made a decision to semi-ignore it because I knew it would make the draft super overwhelming for me.^[2]
• Going first versus second is actually a strategic choice, as was mentioned in the pre-game spiel. For the first player the Mech Hangar starts tapped, so the second player can cast a two-drop on their first turn. Given I had a dearth of one-drops and a plethora of two-drops, I pretty much always chose to go second when I had the chance and always felt good about it, but I heard other players with more one-drops happy to go first too.
• Given you start with a land, we were recommended to play 15-ish lands during deckbuilding. 15 is exactly the number I went with, given I was a pseudo-ramp deck and wanted to play big drops, but I did feel like I probably could have gone down a land. Plus, some land-heavy, admittedly already sketchy keeps of mine became far worse. I never saw a one-land hand, but others said they kept them to great effect during games.
• Minor, but there were a bunch of slow lands (e.g. Shattered Sanctum) that I dismissed during the draft because I didn’t really process how much better they were when you start with a land and essentially only need one other land to have them enter untapped. Only when I saw them during gameplay did I realize “oh, I definitely should have valued these higher.”

The draft was fun, if definitely a lot for me. As I mentioned, I chose to semi-ignore the fact that single-pipped vehicles/pilots are colorless. I first picked Skyseer’s Chariot because flyers seemed valuable and the tax effect on Crew seemed potentially useful, and narrowed in on white cards as my base (again, ignoring the fact a good chunk of them were theoretically colorless). I dithered on another color, speculating into green, red, and a touch of black. Near the end of pack 1 red seemed decently open, and I almost certainly should have pivoted into that, but I could see strong mechanical hooks for other color pairs (historic matters in UW, pirates in URB, artifact aristocrats in WB), whereas the red/white cards I were seeing were just generically fine so I was unsure if red/white was actually open.

On the other hand, I picked up a Giant Ox and an Argothian Opportunist and figured some sort of big-mana/big crew ramp plan could be on the table. I didn’t really know the WG plan either, but by that point my deck had skewed a bit higher curve-wise relative to the number of 1 and 2 drops I saw cruising around the table. I figured one way to take “advantage” (or at least, not compound the disadvantage) of ignoring Mech Hangar’s mana fixing was to focus on double-spelling and other bigger mana things that might be hard on the mana base for other decks. I then grabbed a Colossal Plow that crystallized that loose ramp plan around 1 (one) main goal: crew the plow with the ox.

During deckbuilding, my deck was very heavily white, but I definitely needed a second color to fill out the deck, and my lack of fixing meant I really shouldn’t be splashing two extra colors. I could have picked red or green, but the green cards at least fit the mana plan to try and cast and crew things like Detention Chariot, whereas the red cards like Thopter Engineer and Road Rage seemed a bit scattershot or more oriented towards an aggro plan I didn’t have, so I just cut all the red cards, had to add back in my earlier cut Roadside Assistance to get up to 25 crds, and called it a day. It was at this point I realized the person to my left had also drafted green/white, with a strong +1/+1 counters theme. Theirs was admittedly very much base-green in the way mine was very much base-white, but considering they were to my left and I acknowledge I didn’t know what theme there was in WG, I was definitely more at fault for missing the signals. Oopsies.

My first match was against one of the cube owner’s two children, who they had brought to round out the draft pod to 8 and had thus played the cube previously. They were on what appeared to be a UB control deck. I managed to execute the ramp plan to surprising success. The very first game I made Giant Ox plus Colossal Plow happen to give me the mana to cast Clown Car for X=7 while my opponent was stuck on two lands. In the next, Cloudspire Coordinator gave me enough pilots to crew the Colossal Plow, and combat tricks in the form of Touch the Spirit Realm and Fertilid’s Favor let me keep the Colossal Plow alive through double blocks as a Roadside Assistance on it gave me an insurmountable amount of life. Meanwhile, Rip, Spawn Hunter let me accrue enough extra cards that all my eggs weren’t in the plow-basket. After, we played a for-funsies game that I got fully counterspelled out of: first by Spectral Interference on my Detention Chariot and then Steel Sabotage on my Clown Car, both of which were extremely brutal mana-wise and the fact I lacked any other big drops and just kinda durdled after they were removed. Notably, we finished exceptionally quickly. We had decided to play cross-pod for the first round and then just jam whatever games we could after, but even with the for-fun game it took probably another half-hour for another pair to finish.

My next match was against the cube owner on Grixis pirates. The first game I kept a hand that I should not have kept with 5 lands, Colossal Plow, and a removal-ish spell in Caught in the Brights. My first opponent’s deck was control-oriented and durdly enough I figured removing anything truly dire and gaining life via crewing the Colossal Plow in Mech Hangar might be enough to stabilize, even with so many lands in hand and one in play already. I was promptly ran over for my hubris and out-valued for good measure courtesy of Adéwalé, Breaker of Chains, Fearless Swashbuckler, and The Omenkeel. The second game was marginally better (if still a touch land-heavy), but I screwed up and did a terrible scry via Spotcycle Scouter in the face of the on-board The Omenkeel on my opponent’s board, and promptly got all my best ramp targets exiled, aka Detention Chariot and Clown Car. My one potentially saving grace was my opponent didn’t grab a land from me that they were still short on, but I had some dud draws while another The Omenkeel hit solved my opponent’s land problems and their deck really started coming together. From there I drew some more useful options like Weatherlight and Gearshift Ace, but a Daring Thief meant I just got them stolen. My loss was pretty inevitable from the first The Omenkeel hit, but that was really the nail in the coffin.

As that match finished up, the other half of the table had just finished their match 1 and one of them had to leave for the night. Since I had already played two rounds, I opted to take the bye and let the cube owner and their kids (the other three players with two matches under their belt) keep playing. Watching the other games definitely further exposed how linear my plan was; there were a lot more larger and smaller synergies playing on the vehicle theme and intresting navigation of complicated board states than went on during my matches. I mostly watched the game between the cube owner and a Greasefang deck, but the matches were dynamic and drawn-out enough there wasn’t time for more.

Something something vehicles, something something not reading signals, make your own joke.

Cards That Make Me Feel Something (August 20, 2025)

The Cards That Make Me Feel Something cube is actually the first cube I played upon joining my regular group in San Jose, and thus the first cube I ever played in paper. The name is self-descriptive: during the draft someone mentioned that every pack they got passed they felt like they were in the wrong colors because they would see a card that made them sad they couldn’t pick it. I would call it probably the most powerful of the cubes in the current regular rotation in the group so far at Legacy-esque in power level^[3], even though power-max’ing is definitely not the driving design goal of the cube. I would describe it as Legacy-esque in power level, with little fast mana but lots of combo (at least two of the following generally pop up as decks in the pod: storm, Birthing Pod, reanimator, Pestermite + Kiki-Jiki / Splinter Twin). It also has a general bent towards I would say towards 2010’s era Magic, though there are definitely newer cards in the mix (but no Universes Beyond).

We were at 6 players today, so after packs were distributed the cube owner went through the remainder of the cards and noted any combo pieces so we knew not to expect to see them in the draft, including Griselbrand, Wasteland, Glacial Chasm, Kiki-Jiki, and a bunch of storm cards, both mana-makers and payoffs.

I generally shy away from combo because I don’t really know how to put it together, but I was in the mood to challenge myself and this is definitely the cube to do it. Plus, after seeing everything not in the draft, there were jokes flying about everyone going midrange, so I felt like combo could be open. That plus a “screw it” attitude are pretty much the only justifications I have for my pack 1 pick 1 being Emrakul, the Promised End. It felt like a stroke of genius when my second pick was Reanimate, even though it is quite a lot of life to pay. Green felt decently open so I drifted into that as my second color, with the big turning point being picking a Questing Beast over Goryo’s Vengeance. I figured if I got the latter to wheel it would be so good with Questing Beast, but Questing Beast also just acted as a game plan of its own.

Pack 2 I speculated on a Fastbond and from there started putting together a lands package to augment the reanimator which seemed to have dried up a little, given I didn’t see the Goryo’s Vengeance wheel. I was a bit skeptical of going lands before then because we saw Glacial Chasm wasn’t in the draft and I was reminded that Wasteland wasn’t either later on. Plus I remembered from previous plays of the cube that it is a bit land-light, especially for a cube of this kind, with just 41 fixing lands^[4] in the full 360. That had played out in the first packs, where I saw very little in the way of lands. Still, the lands-matter pieces came exceptionally easily, picking up Titania, Protector of Argoth mid pack 2 (though that tragically meant I couldn’t grab the Prismatic Vista in the same pack), plus hits like Courser of Cruphix and Tireless Provisioner, before wheeling a Squandered Resources to last pick of the pack. I was still going for the reanimation plan though, picking up Thragtusk and Massacre Wurm as fairer options I could potentially just ramp into with this new lands plan, plus Karmic Guide and Unburial Rites as reanimation options. The potential splash into white for the last two led me to pick up Knight of the Reliquary to go alongside my Wight of the Reliquary. However I knew I needed a fetchland to make my game plan work and probably some more fixing if I wanted to play white. It paid off when pack 3 I managed to open Verdant Catacombs^[5], and picked up a Windswept Heath later to round it out.

It took building my deck to realize: oh, I thought I was assembling a base-black reanimator deck with a green lands package. What I had, in fact, assembled, was a base-green lands deck with a black reanimator package. I trimmed the white cards and some of the more reanimator heavy cards like Buried Alive, went up to 18 lands given I was a lands/ramp-y kind of deck, and decided that would do.

My first match was against a blue/red control deck. I quickly proved that I was, in fact, primarily, a green lands deck by dropping Fastbond on turn 1 and quickly assembling it plus Ramunap Excavator and Titania, Protector of Argoth, but had no lands in the graveyard to get any value and no fetchland in sight to set up making a whole bunch of Elementals at will. After a few turns with all that on board but dead draws of just basic lands, while my opponent dug through their deck with Jace, the Mind Sculptor, my opponent revealed their wincon of Pestermite and Splinter Twin. I cleaned up my deck during sideboarding, cutting a land down to 17 and my not super interesting for this matchup Massacre Wurm to bring in Crop Rotation as a way to get a land in the bin and a fetchland into the game, plus Squandered Resources. The latter was probably one of my best cards all night^[6] and quickly proved its worth. It took a bit of work via a Recurring Nightmare to get Titania, Protector of Argoth into play through the counterspells, but from there I sacrified all my lands to Squandered Resources only my opponent’s end step for enough 5/3 Elementals for the win. In the last game, my hand was a bit sketchy with only Swamps but three black spells: Liliana’s Triumph to pick something off, Collective Brutality to pick off counterspells and discard to get something in the bin for Reanimate. I didn’t have any good reanimator targets in hand though and Rishadan Dockhand was cramping my removal. I picked up some green mana to land some some road bumps, but a Subtlety was slowly murdering me in the air. Eventually I somewhat stabilized at 4 life using Courser of Cruphix and Fastbond to roll through my deck (Crop Rotation and the fetches to shuffle my library proved extremely useful) and gain a smidgen of life to offset the Subtlety before eventually revealing an Emrakul, the Promised End on the top. I could easily hard-cast it on my next turn with lands to spare at this point, especially with the discount. When I passed to my opponent with Emrakul on top of my library, though, they played a True-Name Nemesis, so I joyously spent my Emrakul, the Promised End stolen turn looking at my opponent’s hand and contemplating how very dead I was to this True-Name Nemesis without anything to do about it.

The second match was against a mono-white hate bears/aggro deck. The first game I did the Titania, Protector of Argoth plus Squandered Resources thing on turn 5, and felt very smart sacrificing my only Forest for the extra green I needed for Titania, Protector of Argoth to just bring it back with her trigger. The second game I kept my hand off the back of Fastbond plus Courser of Cruphix, but ran into a glut of unimpactful cards like Sylvan Caryatid and Azusa, Lost but Seeking (my vote for least impactful card in the deck) off the top while I got run over by History of Benalia tokens with Grafted Wargear making them ginormous, plus Coercive Portal keeping my opponent’s hand nice and full. It was after this game I remembered hey, you remembered last match when you sided out Massacre Wurm? You know what would be good against this army of X/1’s and X/2’s? It immediately paid dividends when I drew it in my opener, though with only one swamp and a bunch of forests in hand I was a little concerned about casting it. However, Vinelasher Kudzu held down the fort against both Thalia, Guardian of Thraben and Thalia, Heretic Cathar while I slowly fixed up my mana, and slammed Massacre Wurm turn 6. It naturally got Mana Tithed for my troubles (which I had seen the first game, so its definitely my fault) as they flashed in a Restoration Angel and played a Porcelain Legionnaire, but I had a Reanimate and the resurrected Massacre Wurm cleaned up most of their board while making them lose 6 life to boot. Liliana’s Triumph picked off the Restoration Angel to let me swing in with my now 8/8 Vinelasher Kudzu and knock them down to from 20 to 6 in a single turn. They had a Conclave Tribunal for the Massacre Wurm and a Knight of the Holy Nimbus for chumping, but the Toxic Deluge I had been holding back in case the Massacre Wurm plan went sideways easily picked off their blocker while leaving Vinelasher Kudzu enough power for me to swing for the win.

We were kind of wrapping up by this point; the cube owner often leaves after round 2 of other cube nights to wake up extremely early for work, so I mostly anticipated it. But another match between my round 1 Izzet control opponent and a similarly grindy Orzhov aristocrats deck was just finishing up a super intense (and long) first game, so the cube owner asked if I wanted to jam a best-of-one while they played out the rest of their match.

The cube owner also tried to go for the reanimator plan during the draft with a Drakuseth, Maw of Flames to prove it^[7], but when that dried up ended in a more fair base-blue Grixis deck. They very nicely let me take a free mulligan after I showed my no-land hand; I had taken my deck picture right before because I wasn’t sure if I’d be playing another game and did a not-great quick shuffle. The mulligan drew me into my best hand all night; I think that would’ve been true even if I had gone down to 6. I had a turn 2 Lotus Cobra, and then some turn 3 plans I quickly discarded in favor of the Questing Beast I drew. My opponent killed it with a top-decked Bitter Triumph, but I barely cared given my plan for turn 4. I played Tireless Provisioner, then played one of my fetchlands to make a green mana off of Lotus Cobra and a Treasure off of Tireless Provisioner. I spent both immediately to bestow Springheart Nantuko on Tireless Provisioner, cracked my fetchland for my Underground Mortuary, and stacked my triggers to spend my generated mana + Treasure from the land entering to make a copy of Tireless Provisioner before surveiling a Toxic Deluge to the bin to round out the turn; the board wipe seemed not great given how wide I was going while my opponent had little besides a Dreadhorde Invasion that was going tall and also slowly killing them. A Chain Lightning put an end to my copy shenanigans, but getting two Insects and two Food from my other fetchland off of what I had left with still felt pretty good. I opted for the Food given I had top-decked Squandered Resources, and figured mana was unlikely to be an obstacle. This proved correct by drawing Emrakul, the Promised End the turn after, and only needing to sac two lands to Squandered Resources thanks to the 4-mana discount to cast it. My opponent had nothing useful in his hand both for me to cast on his stolen turn nor to get them out of the situation, and I rounded out the night with a bonus win.

Between this and my experience playing Hella Cube last month, I’m really contemplating putting Titania, Protector of Argoth in A(n) Cube. I dismissed it given so few fetches (though actually the number and type is the same as in Hella Cube, now that I think about it, but there’s so little other fixing that they are particularly prized in my cube) and basically no other way to get lands into the bin from the battlefield. Maybe with Aftermath Analyst? Is Ancient Greenwarden good enough? Maybe I should look into a lands package in general; I have thought some of the green midrange and bigger threats either too good and/or relatively uninteresting (looking at you, Omnath, Locus of Mana), so some land stuff would give it some direction, at least, if be a little odd with how I emphasize how light the fixing is in the cube.

Footnotes