Cube Draft Reports - September 2025

The draft reports roll ever forward, with quite a bit of cube this month! I missed a Wednesday cube night in San Jose, but made up for it by taking not one but two trips up to San Francisco to join in on some of their weekly weekend cube events^[1], including a special edition for testing their California Cube Championship cubes. Speaking of which, look out for my A(n) Cube there if you’ll be attending (no link because its already sold out), and come say hi to me! If not, look forward to a special edition of this draft report from there. As always, the caveat 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.

Melancholy Cube (September 6, 2025)

I had to miss the first Wednesday cube night of the month due to part of our usual venue being closed and us not realizing until last-minute, so when my D&D game was moved to Sunday and there was a call for both a hero twelfth player and another cube for the San Francisco cubeternoon on Saturday, I decided to make the trek up. I dropped A(n) Cube off at the other pod (which actually had seven, because we got up to thirteen people somewhere along the way) and sat down for a 6-player draft of The Melancholy Cube. I vaguely remembered from hanging out on the Golden Gate Cube Group discord server that the cube was relatively new (like, around a month old maybe?), it didn’t have any special rules, and one of the peak concerns of the designer was that during the first playtest pretty much all the decks were midrange soup, and that’s about all I knew before we cracked into the packs.

Looking at pack 1 I immediately thought “wow, this is a graveyard-heavy cube.” I think almost every non-land card I looked at had something to do with the graveyard: discard, delirium, and even dredge were all represented. Naturally, I decided to ignore all of that and pick Fanatic of Rhonas, a card I knew was very good from a brief stint in my cube and let me dodge dealing with the graveyard, which is not my preferred thing to do in Magic. I expanded out to white by picking up the new Dyadrine, Synthesis Amalgam and figured some sort of classic +1/+1 counters big stuff was on the table, and also dipped my toe further into white with a potential blink thing with Spirited Companion and Ephemerate^[2]. However, by then green was feeling very open and I leaned further into that, only reinforced when in pack 2, a pack came back around to me with seven green cards. Knowing I was probably the only person in green let me take picks with the expectation of wheeling really easily, like grabbing a Solemn Simulacrum first pick of pack 3 knowing I’d wheel the Primeval Titan also in the pack. The main synergies in green seemed to be landfall, ramp, and +1/+1 counters, and I leaned into that mostly by virtue of nabbing every green card I saw.

Deckbuilding confirmed I was the only person in green, while it turned out three players down the other end had fought over red. Deckbuilding was pretty easy: I kept only the best white cards in the form of protection from Giver of Runes and the Selesyna counters/card advantage package of Dyadrine, Synthesis Amalgam, and jammed the rest full of all the good green cards I had. I felt like I had had a completely different draft than the rest of the pod: there was a lot of talk about fighting over artifacts and key discard/sacrifice pieces, and a curve low enough to run 16 lands, while the draft felt relatively self-contained to me as I rocked 18 lands. The one thing we all agreed on, though, was feeling a slight lack of removal.

I started my first match keeping a hand that can only be described as “bad”, featuring 6 lands (one of them being one of my triomes to cycle, at the very very least) and Fanatic of Rhonas. Naturally, I was rewarded for my terrible decision by drawing Sazh’s Chocobo turn 2. My opponent mostly durdled with Sensei’s Divining Top, giving me time to play my lands and get Sazh’s Chocobo up to 4 power just in time to use Fanatic of Rhonas’s extra-mana ability to Awaken the Woods for X=7, to which my opponent promptly scooped it up in the face of my impendingly massive bird. In game 2 I got Sazh’s Chocobo down turn 1 this time, and ate the Thalia, Guardian of Thraben tax on my opponent’s side for both a Hardened Scales to accelerate my big bird plan and The Ozolith for a failsafe. The latter meant that when my opponent got a chance to remove Sazh’s Chocobo with Eaten Alive, I simply moved the seven accumulated +1/+1 counters (plus a bonus eighth thanks to Hardened Scales) over to the Icetill Explorer that had been making sure I didn’t miss a land drop, and my opponent called it there.

We were theoretically playing in teams, mostly as a way to facilitate easy match pairing. One of the other matches had also ended in a quick 2-0 victory, so while the last match was entering game 3 we decided to just swap in between the finished pairs to get started on our matches, and plan to pause when the final match from round 1 finished so they wouldn’t be sitting around awkwardly. My opponent was on a base-blue artifact draw-2 deck, but what stood out to me was the bunch of cheap flyers: Spyglass Siren, Ledger Shredder, and Emrakul’s Messenger to name just some, that I simply could not deal with, and there were enough chump blockers that my attempts to race was only going okay. I realized on my last turn I had six mana and dumped four of it into the final level of Hunter’s Talent to try and draw into who-knows-what, given I had already used my one instant-speed removal spell in Ram Through, when I should have used it for Awaken the Woods for X=4 to create enough creature tokens for my Toby, Beastie Befriender to give them all flying, and hopefully act as chump blockers to give me another turn. Oops. I made up for it in the next game, where my opponent tried to Galvanic Blast my 4/4 Beast token granted by Toby, Beastie Befriender that I had targeted with Hunter’s Talent’s second ability to make it a 5/4 with trample. I cast Ram Through and picked off a Thopter granted by Barbed Spike that was one of their three artifacts, letting me blank the removal spell, get rid of a problematic flyer, and get in for 9 damage via the Ram Through trample-over damage and the attack itself, all in one spell. That was enough a swing that I was able to close out the game pretty easily from there. At this point, the remaining match from the first round had just wrapped up, so we put a pause on game three, to be resumed after our third match.

My last opponent was also on Grixis artifacts, but with a strong sacrifice bent. In the first game, I kept my hand based solely off of Sazh’s Chocobo, so when it got removed by Grim Bauble I stared at the Hunter’s Talent and Innkeeper’s Talent with very little to do until I died. The second game was closer, mostly because we both got stuck on 3 lands for a good period of time, but it unsurprisingly became clear I definitely needed the extra lands way more. We managed to claw our way into a board stall, but I eventually perished to the combination of Warren Soultrader, Marionette Apprentice, and Cult Conscript. My opponent did a great job navigating the triggers, ending up at 1 life from paying for Warren Soultrader’s ability when I died. I had an Overprotect that with the benefit of hindsight I should’ve used to get in some extra damage to prevent that, but: a) it was my only source of trample damage at the time, b) I thought the protection would be more useful because if the opponent removed my Dyadrine, Synthesis Amalgam I would be both out of the card advantage I was getting from it plus Innkeeper’s Talent and very vulnerable to my opponent just swinging out at me, and c) I was at 14 life and thought myself relatively safe and didn’t want to do the math to prove it. C’est la vie.

With that it was time to finish out match 2 with game 3, with an acknowledgement that my opponent and I had both taken a pause to get trounced in our final match before returning to this one. It felt a little bit shaky at first: I missed my third land drop for a turn, but I used Hunter’s Talent to pick off a Spyglass Siren I couldn’t deal with while Giver of Runes was doing spectacular work to hold down the rest of the ground-based fort. I managed to nab a third land to play Toby, Beastie Befriender and stabilize, then a combination of Overprotect, Ram Through, and that Hunter’s Talent let me clear both of my opponent’s creatures and get through a lot of damage (Ram Through’s trample clause has never been more relevant). My opponent went wide with an Emrakul’s Messenger and a Whirler Rogue, but Giver of Runes let me ignore most of the potential chump blockers (shout out to Emrakul’s Messenger being Devoid), and finally getting to six lands let me slam Primeval Titan and ensure I won the race.

Drafting in such an open lane was really really fun! Maybe that should be a lesson to me about staying open and finding your lane instead of hard-committing to your first or second pick as I usually do. We’ll see if it’s a lesson I take to heart.

West Coast Cube (September 10, 2025)

Back to Wednesday cube night, and we were playing the West Coast Cube; it’s low-curving, aggressive, and makes use of custom and errated cards for lowering complexity, and is coincidentally the first cube I did a write-up of in one of these draft reports. We were a pod of six this time, with one new player of the cube, so we ran through the opening spiel and got started.

My first pick I snapped up Wrath of God; I will pretty much never turn down a wrath in a fairer environment, especially one like this that’s generally combat-centric. From there I picked up several black aristocrats payoffs in the form of Esper Extractor (a custom Universes Within Al Bhed Salvagers), Bastion of Remembrance, and Marionette Apprentice. Aristocrats/tokens shenanigans is something I love personally and is my general favorite strategy, so I was more than happy to continue down this path. My last card of pack 1 was Greymond, Avacyn’s Stalwart though, a card I remembered for shaping my deck but never seeing in the last playthrough of the cube^[3] but thought could fit well in this deck too, especially given all the aristocrats I had so far were Humans or made Human tokens. Pack 2 I focused on white token-related cards; I picked up some value engines in Caretaker’s Talent and Staff of the Storyteller, and got some incidental human token generators in Toby, Beastie Befriender, Thraben Inspector, and the absolutely incredible Resolute Reinforcements that had been errated to make a Human token instead of a Soldier token. However, I saw two Thalia’s Lieutenants in pack 2 that I thought would wheel but didn’t, so I didn’t lean super heavily into the Humans plan, instead picking up what I could that could incidentally fit with the token aristocrats plan.

The final pack definitely punished me for not picking up fixing highly in the previous packs; the cube is quite fixing-heavy in general boasting what I describe as a “approximately a million” (20ish, if I recall) copies of Prismatic Vista plus three cycles of various flavors of duals, so I de-prioritized it quite a lot as I am wont to do. But in pack 3 I saw a bunch of good red tokens related cards, including Roar of Resistance, Determined Iteration, Butcher of the Horde, and the card I was most sad to not fit in, Warleader’s Call. But with a single Prismatic Vista to my name I didn’t feel confident going three colors, so relegated those to the sideboard and my deck coalesced around quickly the Orzhov aristocrat/tokens with accidental Humans plan. Once again, a bit unusually, I chose to run 17 lands in my deck when this is often a 16-land deck kind of cube^[4], because my curve was definitely a bit higher^[5] and I felt like double-spelling would be best to get both a support piece and token generator out.

My first match was against the cube owner, who happened to be the only player of the six in green at the table, mirroring my position from the draft the previous Saturday. I was a little concerned because one of the things token strategies are not very good against is trample, and his deck full of +1/+1 counter synergies had a good number of trample creatures to load up with extra power and toughness and run me over. Both games played out very similarly. I churned through my deck with Caretaker’s Talent while assembling a pile of little guys, ate a huge trample attack to the face in one turn (I believe it was 12 damage game 1 and 13 damage game 2), and then the turn after cast Greymond, Avacyn’s Stalwart to swing back with an army suited up with lifelink and vigilance to gain regain all that lost life plus a bit extra. In the first game my opponent managed to remove Greymond, but Starry-Eyed Skyrider let my tokens take to the skies and swing over a potential board stall for the win, while in the second game the inability to remove Greymond, Avacyn’s Stalwart was enough to close it out.

My second match was against an Izzet spells list^[6] packed with flyers, another potentially concerning matchup for a tokens deck. The first game I assembled enough Humans for Greymond, Avacyn’s Stalwart in short order (Resolute Reinforcements bringing two Humans and thus only needing one more eases the process significantly), which was too much for my opponent to handle. The second game I was under a bit more pressure by an early Faerie Mastermind and Mischievous Mystic from my opponent as I assembled a sadly ground-based army of tokens, but the damage was manageable. I got to recur my previously countered Grim Bauble with Recommission to pick off my opponent’s High Fae Trickster that was threatening the most damage, and had time to get out both Esper Extractor and Marionette Apprentice. I took advantage of the fact both of my aristocrats triggered off of artifacts to crack my Chromatic Star and Clue from Thraben Inspector to drain my opponent and leave them with impossible blocks to my army of 1/1 tokens to seal up the game.

My final match was against an Esper control deck where I frankly got pummelled by a combination of flooding out on my end (Magic: the Gathering!) and getting caught by counterspells when I didn’t have enough spells to try and double-spell and land a threat. In the first I had a cool play where I flashed in Cemetery Protector to exile my opponent’s Infernal Vessel before it could come back, but I didn’t have any creature spells to ride that momentum and my opponent Journey to Nowhered it. A Sphinx’s Revelation from my opponent let them stay healthy on cards and bring out a Kiora, the Rising Tide with threshold active, and my Thraben Charm to kill it got Spell Snared. I cast Wrath of God out of desperation, but a Flashback’ed Sevinne’s Reclamation from my opponent meant I was in just as dire of a position as I was before it and I died pretty quickly. The second game, having not learned my lesson about flooding, I kept a land-heavy hand off the back of Dust Animus which got Spell Snared for my troubles, and I had no answer to an early threshold-active Kiora, the Rising Tide. My only creature on board was the Beast token from Toby, Beastie Befriender, and my opponent systematically picked off any other creature I managed to get on board to make sure the Beast couldn’t block and I succumbed to the Kraken token again.

Turns out, Greymond, Avacyn’s Stalwart is a really good magic card. Did you know that it gives the keywords to all Humans (including itself) even if you don’t have 4 Humans and its only the +2/+2 buff that requires 4? Wild stuff.

World Championship Museum: The Gold Border Cube (September 13, 2025)

On Saturday, I once again made it up to San Francisco for their California Cube Champs testing day, featuring the three cubes from their group that were going to be featured at that event and 20+ people there to test them. I played the World Championship Museum, an all gold-border cube comprised of cards from world championship top 4 decks from 1996 to 2004. My knowledge of Magic in this era is currently sparse at best^[7] and fully from hearsay rather than experience, and I have never played an “old-fashioned Magic” style cube and thus knew even less about what to expect than usual, so was extra interested to learn what it was like. We were told to do three packs of 20 for the eight of us. Apparently we were also supposed to do two picks from each pack (which someone did ask about during the draft), but that didn’t make the opening spiel from the cube owner before they went off to play a different cube, so we did one pick instead.

My first pack there were a lot of clear deck possibilities, and the ones that interested me most were Hymn to Tourach, Balance, and Astral Slide. However, all of those possibilities seemed concerningly hard and think-y to build, so instead I fell back on an easier pathway for a card I remembered hearing was very good in the era: Blastoderm. From there I went down a mono-green stompy/ramp plan, picking up Ancient Tomb and also a Cloudpost. I prioritized mana and ramp over some ramp targets, but didn’t end up getting back most of the bigger creatures like Symbiotic Wurm and Verdant Force (turns out there were two reanimator decks that snapped those up). I managed to wheel the Hymn to Tourach, so I picked it up for fun over the Llanowar Wastes I would almost certainly need if I wanted to cast it, and started speculating into black cards. The 20-card pack size meant I wheeled Llanowar Wastes again anyways, but uhh I picked Phyrexian Negator over it because it seemed fun.

Between pack 1 and 2 there was a discussion about Parallax Wave and Parallax Tide, both widely agreed to be good. I already recalled the first was good, so when I saw it in pack 2 pack 1 I snapped it up and committed to fitting in some white. This new green/white plan coalesced first when I grabbed Mirari’s Wake, and then when I saw a pack with both Astral Slide and Eternal Witness. Some time in pack 1 I had passed an Eternal Witness, and then while waiting for packs I idly started reading the top of the stack of World Championship deck info cards we had been handed as part of the primer as a potential guide to use them for drafting. The stack was in reverse chronological order, so the top one was for 2004, and the first was about the champion Julien Nujiten’s deck, “a green-white Astral Slide deck that gains tremendous card advantage from Eternal Witness.” Knowing I had passed that Astral Slide in my first pack, I regretted that Eternal Witness pass from pack 1 as a potential deck. This time, I grabbed the Eternal Witness and managed to wheel the Astral Slide, giving my deck another plan.

Last pack I took a million cycling lands in green (Tranquil Thicket) and white (Secluded Steppe) for Astral Slide, as the packs of 20 meant I didn’t particularly need more non-lands to fill out my deck. I wanted removal, but didn’t see much of it. I had, at this point, also picked up four Cloudposts, and had exactly zero things to do with that much colorless mana. I saw a Mishra’s Helix and figured that might be a thing to do with it, so picked it up. My deck assembled itself around those three vaguely overlapping plans and not having much else to do in green and white.

My first match was against an Abzan reanimator deck, where the white mana was quite possibly just for Swords to Plowshares^[8]. The first game I died in extremely short order to a combination of Survival of the Fittest finding and discarding Verdant Force and a Dance of the Dead bringing it back. I did my classic deck re-balancing dance after game 1, adding in another Forest. The second game I managed to race my opponent with Call of the Herd providing a solid source of damage and using Parallax Wave to pick off my opponent’s blockers to swing in for the win. My opening hand including both Eternal Dragon and my solitary basic Plains also reminded me to swap in an extra Plains in place of the extra Forest I had brought in previously. The third game my very tapped mana base of cycling lands came back to haunt me, as I didn’t manage to get a threat down before Plow Under sent me back to the stone age while Spiritmonger killed me real dead.

My second match was against a Jeskai affinity deck. My opponent got on the board quickly with two Arcbound Workers and an Arcbound Ravager, but Anurid Brushhopper and Blastoderm gave me solid statlines to block as we slowly chipped in damage on one another before both getting low enough (me at around 9, my opponent at 3) that we retreated into a board stall, to the point I Eternal Witnessed for my Birds of Paradise for a chump blocker against a Covetous Dragon that was looking to break the board stall rather than holding on for one of my more valuable creatures (like my soon to be faded Blastoderm). My opponent then got out a Myr Incubator that I knew was definitely going to be able to generate enough Myr to murder me if they managed to untap to activate it. It was then I top-decked Giant Growth, and with four creatures to my opponent’s untapped three I swung out and got to Giant Growth my Birds of Paradise for lethal. The second game was a little brutal for my opponent, who got stuck on 1 land for a few turns, giving me time to cast Anurid Brushhopper, then Mirari’s Wake into Rancor and Wax // Wane (so as to not waste the extra green). After that I got out both Glory and Blastoderm as my opponent got a second land, and dumped a bunch of mana rocks. It turns out I dodged a potential Wildfire thanks to the buff from Mirari’s Wake for my Anurid Brushhopper, and my board presence proved insurmountable for my opponent to come back from.

My third match was against another reanimator deck, this one Dimir. This one had snapped up the Recurring Nightmares my first opponent was looking for, and quickly murdered me by dumping Spirit of the Night into the graveyard with Attunement and resurrecting it with a Recurring Nightmare. There had been a lull in action between match 2 and 3, and I idly looked through my sideboard during that time and remembered that it was in fact, not all useless, and there was a Scrabbling Claws that would have been very useful against my first opponent. I sided it in here though and kept my turn 1 hand off the back of it, and it stymied my opponent as I managed to get down Mirari’s Wake and slam in with big creatures like Blastoderm and Call of the Herd tokens. I didn’t realize the targetted form of graveyard hate on Scrabbling Claws cost mana though, which means I did have to contend with another resurrected Spirit of the Night when I fully tapped out. Oops. Still, my aggression proved fruitful enough fast enough to secure the win. The third game I once again got Mirari’s Wake down early, plus three Cloudposts and an Astral Slide, but had approximately nothing to do with the fistfuls of mana I could create. Meanwhile, my opponent had resurrected a Symbiotic Wurm. I could keep recurring and cycling the Eternal Dragon in my graveyard for no more lands to blink out the Symbiotic Wurm and hang on for dear life, but my opponent had gotten Wonder in the graveyard via Buried Alive so I was slowly dying to flying chip damage from Doomed Necromancer and Waterfront Bouncer that my Wall of Blossoms and Wall of Roots couldn’t shield me from. I managed to draw a Tranquil Thicket on the last turn before I was dead on board, but failed to live the dream of chaining into more cyclers to blink out enough stuff to live and instead drew Eternal Witness, a bit of salt in the wound as something that could have accrued me a ton of value had I drawn it earlier. Tragic.

I enjoyed my jaunt into old-school magic; I can see why people have a nostalgia for it even if I don’t have any of my own, and I’m proud I managed to assemble a deck that did things.

A(n) Cube (September 17, 2025)

My cube was up for Wednesday cube night, in what would be its final outing before California Cube Championship. We were rocking a pod of 6, so I opted for four packs of 11. Everyone in the pod had played the cube before, so I did an extremely abbreviated form of my spiel (basically just saying no infinite combos, for realsies, I cut Arcane Savant for Cali Cube Champs). We decided to team draft since we were at six to ease pairings, which was definitely something everyone knew we were doing during the draft (minus the two players who showed up last) and something everyone definitely remembered and took into account while drafting (minus the other four of us, including the player who suggested the team draft).

There were jokes from the player to my right about drafting mono-blue because the pre-draft discussion was about how I think mono-color decks are underappreciated in general and I think any of them could work well in this cube, with the exception of maybe mono-blue. So, naturally, I decided to eschew my default Orzhov token nonsense in the form of my beloved Bastion of Remembrance in favor of a blue card that roundly crushed me the last time I played my cube: Faerie Artisans. I followed it up with a Phantasmal Image and a tentative plan of, if all else fails, just play my opponent’s creatures. I did start exploring other colors though because, as stated earlier, I didn’t really want to be in mono-blue^[9]. My main thought was black for a controlling plan, including a fancy speculative pick-up of Kroxa, Titan of Death’s Hunger, but black dried up pretty quickly after.^[10] Instead I moved into red, which seemed somewhat open, and started assembling a truly sick spellslingers tokens deck featuring Young Pyromancer, Otterball Antics, and Talrand, Sky Summoner, plus a draw-two sub-theme for my beloved, Irencrag Pyromancer. I was unsure whether my deck was more spellslinger or more tokens, but eventually leaned towards the latter and thus cut Electrostatic Infantry for Roar of Resistance. The latter was a card I added a few iterations ago after suggesting it for West Coast Cube at some point, and I wanted to see how it played here.

My first match was against a Boros aggro deck, and in the first game Roar of Resistance proved to be an absolute beating in my deck. I played Young Pyromancer into Otterball Antics and the haste on all my tokens was invaluable for chipping in early damage, and the attack bonus ability was great for putting the pressure on when I did an incredibly risky full send swing when I had several draw two plus cards available (specifically a Plan the Heist and a Contact Other Plane in hand and a Deep Analysis in the bin) and probably would’ve won the long game. Still, it paid off^[11] when my opponent didn’t have any spells to bolster damage and left me at 1 on the crackback, letting me secure the game. The second game was Irencrag Pyromancer’s time to shine. My opponent stumbled on mana initially, and Irencrag Pyromancer let me pick off the threats they were able to play and accrue value with my multitude of ways to draw two, including via Arcane Denial on a Gandalf, White Rider that likely could’ve gotten my opponent back into the game. The Irencrag Pyromancer value meant I didn’t even feel bad about rolling a natural 1 for Contact Other Plane^[12], and through it all I was pretty freely able to take over and win that game and the match.

My team, it turns out, had swept the first round of matches, so I was up against an opponent that had gone 1-2 in reportedly quite close games with a mono-black Esper^[13] token/aristocrats list, but decided to sideboard before our match into mono-black Abzan tokens to bring in a few cards, with the highlight being Jenova, Ancient Calamity. Our first game Roar of Resistance shone once again to give my tokens haste to run my opponent over; I was a little concerned by the Phrexian Obliterator they managed to land on turn 4, but flying Drake tokens supplied by Talrand, Sky Summoner help me get around that problem. Talrand, Sky Summoner was even protected by Svyelun of Sea and Sky, which is one of the first times the Merfolk synergy on the latter card has mattered. Copying the Phyrexian Obliterator with Phantasmal Image was the icing on the cake. The second game my opponent mull’ed to 5 and fully admitted they had forgotten how sketchy 3-color decks were in this cube (which, admittedly, I had omitted from the spiel since everyone had played it at some point, but the time elapsed varied). My Dragon’s Rage Channeler and Samurai’s Katana Hero chipped in a good amount of damage, but were eventually swept up by a Rankle’s Prank with all three modes chosen, including having my opponent pitch their last two cards. For my part, I discarded two cards with Flashback in Otterball Antics and Deep Analysis, and followed that up on my turn with the previously surveilled-to-the-top Manaform Hellkite. Manaform Hellkite caring about the amount of mana spent to cast the spell enabled me to get a 4/4 flying haste Dragon Illusion when I Flashback’ed Otterball Antics, and my opponent conceded from there.

Good on me for finding the best card of my deck, Roar of Resistance, during deckbuilding instead of during the first match. Not without some hesitance on my part and it being a last-minute include, but still. Less good on me for spiking my own cube but. It happens. Other highlights from other matches/decks: tapping Phyrexian Arena to Command Bridge, and seeing both modes active on Soul Transfer for the first time, also thanks to Phyrexian Arena.

Cards that Make Me Feel Something (September 24, 2025)

We were planning on a crew of 6 for this Wednesday night, and the cube on deck was Cards That Make Me Feel Something, a Legacy power level cube jam-packed with combo potential. The plan was to do 4 packs of 15, to both have fun with juiced decks and so we didn’t have to remember what wasn’t in the pool for combo purposes, but when one person couldn’t make it we proceeded but with with 4 packs of 15 but only 5 players instead. The last 45 cards proved Tendrils of Agony storm was off the table, plus a good number of the single cycle of fetchlands were out, but any other deck was probably fair game.

We had been talking before the draft about one of the players consistently trying to draft Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker/Splinter Twin combo in this cube, to mixed but increasingly positive success, and I am easily influencable, so when I saw Splinter Twin in my first pack I snapped it up over more familiar hits like Blood Artist and Brimaz, King of Oreskos. The pre-draft discussion posited that the best way to build the deck was to go base-blue Grixis, but that was for an all-in combo deck. Instead, I second-picked Agatha’s Soul Cauldron, a potential combo piece, graveyard hate, and aggressive boon all in one, and went the direction of an Izzet spellslinger aggro deck packed with cards like Monastery Swiftspear, Sprite Dragon, Stormcatch Mentor, and an Embercleave finisher, just with an incidental combo. I picked up Pestermite and Deceiver Exarch easily, so I thought I could double wheel the Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker and picked up a Whirler Rogue on the first wheel instead. I didn’t, in fact, get the Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker back, which definitely made the combo package feel a lot worse. But! I refused to cut it because it seemed fun, so. Overall, cuts were hard with such a big card pool, with lots of jokes about running 60 card decks instead, but I managed to trim it down and slapped in 16 lands.

My first match was against an Orzhov aggro deck. The best thing I can say about this match was that in the first game, I Mental Misstepped my opponent’s turn 1 Skullclamp, and used Agatha’s Soul Cauldron in response to Kitchen Finks’s Persist trigger, which was neat. But in both games I got severely flooded out, seeing I think 9 of my 16 lands both games, and got run over for my stumbles. My opponent had turn 1 Skullclamp again game 2, too, for good measure. Magic: The Gathering!

My second match was against a 4-color lands deck. The first game I once again flooded out. The slower pace of the lands deck meant I saw 10 of my 16 lands this time, before Bolas’s Citadel flipped into Time Warp then Titania, Protector of Argoth and the Squandered Resources already on board sealed my fate. The second game my aggressive plan finally came together, as Goblin Rabblemaster built up enough bodies quickly enough for Embercleave to deal the finishing blow. The last game was absolutely wild. It reached a point where my opponent had Fastbond, Druid Class, Squandered Resources and Crucible of Worlds, and could tutor out all their lands via Urza’s Cave and make infinite mana, but I had earlier Counterspelled their Bolas’s Citadel to prevent them from churning through their deck more. I managed to evoke Subtlety on their Courser of Kruphix spell to prevent them from gaining infinite life through playing all their lands as well, leaving them out of cards and stuck precariously at 4 life. They leveled up Druid Class to get a hasty huge land with all my creatures tapped, but I flashed in a Deceiver Exarch to tap it down before combat. They passed back to me, where I had enough creatures, mostly Young Pyromancer Elemental tokens, to swing back through their single blocker and a Maze of Ith to put them to 1, but didn’t top deck any of my many potential options to close out the game^[14]. Instead, I passed back to my opponent, who dug through their deck to bring out a Titania, Protector of Argoth to threaten to close the game next turn, and find Courser of Kruphix again to reduce my potential top deck outs to just Splinter Twin. I did not, in fact, top deck Splinter Twin, and thus once again perished to a bunch of Titania, Protector of Argoth elementals.

My last match was against an Esper reanimator control deck. The first game I mulliganed away a 6-land hand because I had had enough of that in the first match, thanks, into a hand with 4 lands, Pestermite, and Splinter Twin. The game of Magic: the Gathering is easy, actually, and I swept up that game with the combo on turn 4^[15]. The second game I kept my hand off the back of Agatha’s Soul Cauldron, but Reflector Mage bounced my only threat, followed by Restoration Angel letting Reflector Mage bounce my only threat again into a Lingering Souls that was immediately Flashback’ed without a window for me to do anything about it. The Spell Pierce I drew after was salt in the wound as I was left behind on tempo with no real answers to the swarm of flyers and died pretty quickly from there. The last game I again kept my hand due to Agatha’s Soul Cauldron, but this time with 2 (two) whole aggressive threats in the form of Sprite Dragon and Stormcatch Mentor. One got picked off with Dismember that I should’ve exiled with Agatha’s Soul Cauldron instead of a creature, as my other threat was also picked off next turn by Dismember via an unexpected Snapcaster Mage. My opponent’s turn 5 brought yet another Lingering Souls that was immediately Flashback’ed for flying Spirits I struggled to deal with. At one point I flashed in Deceiver Exarch just to save me a point of damage. Whirler Rogue thankfully brought some flying Thopters of my own to stalemate the board, as Agatha’s Soul Cauldron gave a +1/+1 counter to to let one of my Thopters potentially eat the Spirits. I was topdecking at this point, but not entirely sure what I was looking for. An earlier Gitaxian Probe on my end meant I knew my opponent was holding up Snuff Out, so Splinter Twin was a no-go without some sort of counterspell backup or somehow reducing my opponent’s life total from a healthy 13 to the point that it wasn’t viable. A Tidehollow Sculler had previously exiled my Embercleave, which would’ve been my main way to shove through damage in such a board state. I eventually drew a Counterspell, but spent it on a Ravenous Chupacabra that threatened to break the board stall, so the Splinter Twin I drew a turn or two later was rough. I think my plan at this point was to find Wild Slash for the Tidehollow Sculler to try and get Embercleave back and use Whirler Rogue unblockable to sneak a bunch of damage through, but my topdecking went poorly (especially given I wasn’t entirely sure what I was looking for, if there even was anything), my opponent found Reflector Mage for my Thopter, and I died to a bunch of Spirits.

My deck was sick in concept; I wish it had popped off more. Being in mostly losing situations all night but pretty much always having an out in the form of topdecking Splinter Twin was fascinating. I also wish I would’ve found something cool to do with Agatha’s Soul Cauldron, I think my only activated ability in my deck was Pteramander, which is an active non-bo with Agatha’s Soul Cauldron because you need a +1/+1 counter on a creature for it to gain activated abilities, but Adapt won’t let you put counters on if there already on some.

Footnotes