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Max Nowaz Author of Get Rich or Get Lucky

Chinese don’t typically gift for this festival, but give lai-see packets (money in lucky red paper envelopes) to children. It’s on the spenny side, but it’s a treat you won’t regret. Actually, I think it’s one of the most delicious restaurants in London (Giles Coren is on record saying it’s the best Chinese restaurant in the world). I’m Hong Kong Chinese by birth, and to celebrate the Year of the Fire Horse (17th February), the following restaurants are some of my favourites. Where noted, the magic find bonus is only active while under the effect of a boon.

Not Losing to Drawing from an Empty Library

In the Degenerate Micro Cube, you’re likely to lose every single game of a bad matchup. All the mana fixing in the Degenerate Micro Cube fixes for any color and comes into play untapped. One of the most reliable and repeatable ways to recycle your resources is to combine one of the three Eldrazi titans with any discard outlet. Some of them, like Goblin Welder and Auriok Salvagers, are also components of fast combos, lucky max while others simply reset your library, like Serene Remembrance, Feldon’s Cane, or Memory’s Journey. That was their only answer to my combo, so it would be a mistake for them to keep a hand without it on the draw.
Some players lacking recursion have opted to go above the minimum deck size to delay running out of cards, trading consistency for a deeper late-game. I have omitted these cards because they provide a win-condition for blue-based control decks that is exceedingly hard to interact with. However, when it became clear that the cube had depth and real, non-meme potential, I decided to exclude cards that would be played in every deck and provide a sizable advantage at no real cost. One match in an early draft was decided with two spells cast total between the two players (Flash both times, once in each game).

Series by Max Nowaz

In a 15 card deck, you have a 47% chance of having a given card in your opening hand, compared to a 40% chance in a 60 card deck running a full playset of the card in question, or a 17% chance in a typical, 40 card, singleton cube deck. Since my goal is to emulate powerful constructed combos, this allows singleton decks to mimic the proportions of their 60 card equivalents. With small decks and short games, those mistakes are often easier to spot. Instead of thinking about card advantage or tempo or who’s the beatdown, players must determine which cards and interactions matter in the matchup and play accordingly. In the Degenerate Micro Cube, however, that range is greatly reduced, enough so that it is almost always correct to plan in terms of specific, singular cards in yours and your opponent’s decks.

Turbo Channel

It would provide redundancy for Lion’s Eye Diamond in Bomberman combo, and Lotus does actually cost you a card. In truth, I have come quite close to playing just Black Lotus and may still do so in the future. In truth, if the cube had played out how I anticipated it would, I probably would have YOLO’d them in just for the hell of it. Given the global pandemic, I don’t know when I will ever be able to draft it in person, but even if it’s not for years, I am grateful to have it as a token of all the work that I put into this project over the past nine months. Similarly, Channel, Sol Ring, and Time Walk, other cards I was initially afraid would be overpowered, turned out to be perfectly fine.

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I am a strong proponent of Mark Rosewater’s advice to game designers that they make the optimal decisions also the fun decisions, so Vault-Key got the axe. It was cut because of how narrow the components of the deck and the requisite answers to it are. Time Vault Combo — Time Vault, in combination with Manifold or Voltaic Key, is arguably the best combo in Magic.

  • Drafts and games harshly punish inexperience with the primary strategies, and with games often decided by one or two spells, there is no such thing as a “small” mistake.
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  • While fast mana is one of the most powerful and sought-after classes of cards in the cube, it is not without costs.
  • This overlap is what keeps the drafts of the Degenerate Micro Cube from feeling on rails, and Vault-Key combo has no such leeway.
  • Smaller deck size and potent, narrow answers mean that a Degenerate Micro Cube deck can be radically transformed by sideboarding.
  • After seeing a Strip Mine in game one, it felt correct to sideboard above the minimum deck size and pack 2-3 additional lands, but even that couldn’t guarantee that you’d get to cast your spells.
  • Don’t forget, one answer to your opponent’s combo is simply to have a better combo.

I thought the cube would be the Magic equivalent of taking turns shooting sawn-off shortguns at eachother at point blank range. The concept behind the Singularity Cube wedged it’s way into a corner of my brain when I first read about it in 2017. With so few picks and dramatically fewer wheels, there is much less time to find the open lane at the table. With such small libraries, if winning through mill were possible, I believe it would be a meta-warping and possibly dominant strategy.
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The acute impact of sideboarding has a profound effect on otherwise dead draft picks. Smaller deck size and potent, narrow answers mean that a Degenerate Micro Cube deck can be radically transformed by sideboarding. In the Degenerate Micro Cube, even more so than in typical cube, you’re always looking for a hand with a focused plan — ideally one that is advantaged against your opponent’s strategy. I make boneheaded punts at a higher frequency in this format than in any other I’ve played. Mistakes are inevitable, and they’re often more noticeable than they would be in a typical game of limited.
Like the 15 card deck size, I do not know why the rules were modified in the Singularity Cube to remove losing to drawing from an empty library. For this reason, constructed decks are much better models for what can work in the Degenerate Micro Cube than heuristics derived from traditional cubes. However, more likely still isn’t very likely — in our many hundreds of playtest games we had four draws, two due to Ensnaring Bridge and two due to a locked up board where neither player could profitably attack. Games are more likely to end in a draw in the Degenerate Micro Cube because players don’t lose to drawing from an empty library.
For just two cards and four generic mana, which can be paid in installments over two turns, you can take infinite turns and win easily. While it was a controversial decision at the time, even some of the players that were opposed to cutting it have since conceded that it is not missed. Second, and more importantly, Shelldock proved one of the most polarizing cards in the cube. Shelldock Isle — Shelldock Isle was in the cube for a long time, from the first iteration through months of playtesting. Counterspells and discard spells are useful against many cards and are excellent maindeck inclusions, but the 5-10 land removal spells needed to keep Karakas and Maze of Ith in check would mostly clog up sideboards.

While Ensnaring Bridge or Balance are similarly strong answers to the cheat decks, they can be countered or discarded — Karakas and Maze of Ith cannot. I want resource denial to be a viable strategy in the cube, but Strip Mine allowed any deck to also be a resource denial deck at the cost of only a single card. During its tenure, it was aggressively drafted by any variety of deck and it often more-or-less locked the opponent out of the game even when it wasn’t used in tandem with some recursion, which it often was. Strip Mine — Strip Mine is an amazing card in every format in which its legal, and in the Degenerate Micro Cube it even gets an additional buff from the fact that decks, and therefore land counts, are so small. But, there are a number of cards that lead to play patterns that I don’t think are healthy for the environment or would require narrow answers to keep them appropriately in check. Veil would sometimes be a full-on blank, and unless it is determined in the future that green needs this kind of narrow disruption to be viable, I am against running pure sideboard cards.

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In a format where everyone is playing 15 card decks, the storm deck is relatively much worse off, as it’s super power has been limited more harshly than other strategies. With a reduced, 15 card minimum deck size, I saw an opportunity to play combo decks I would never consider viable in a typical cube, like Oath of Druids, Flash, Bomberman, and Dark Depths. New players can often be heard muttering “hold on, let me check my decklist” within the first few turns of their inaugural game, as they realize their potential draws are very much a known quantity relative to typical cube games. 40 card singleton decks are too large and varied to predict precisely when a given card will be drawn, so players largely rely on abstract gameplay heuristics.

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  • Hatebears whose ability is not relevant are still bodies that can attack and block, cards like Pithing Needle and Sorcerous Spyglass can almost always find a target, Scrabbling Claws cycles in a pinch, etc.
  • Many people’s first inclinations are to build “the counterspell deck” or “the discard deck”, but counterspells line up poorly against fairer decks, like hate bears, and discard spells can’t stop a topdecking opponent.
  • Even the best storm decks we crafted were glass cannons that scooped to a counterspell or, if on the draw, a turn one Thoughtseize.
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If you do have a narrow removal spell for your opponent’s Shelldock, their win condition is now stranded in exile. First, discard spells are dead against it, as you can’t discard the Shelldock itself, and the target is plucked from your opponent’s library and never in their hand to begin with. Topdeck manipulation in the form of Brainstorm, Sensei’s Divining Top, or Sphinx of Foresight was key to making it work reliably.
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When the stars align, game-winning combos are usually too much for opponents playing a fair deck to handle, but in most games, you’re playing a compromised deck in order to support a combo that you won’t often draw. One might expect they would be less complicated than games between typical cube decks, as each has fewer unique cards and therefore fewer possible opening lines, threats, and answers. As demonstrated in the “cheat matrix” at the beginning of this article, all of the creature cheat combo decks have a swath of overlapping cards, so “supporting” Sneak Attack or Show and Tell is just a matter of adding them to the cube. I don’t think any cards in existence are too powerful for the cube in the sense that they would be overly dominant, result in unbalanced win-percentages, or push other decks out of viability.
Late picks in a traditional cube are often useless, but in the Degenerate Micro Cube, every pick matters because cards can be easily sideboarded. Whereas sideboarding in a more typical, 40 card cube deck is more about making marginal improvements, your post sideboard deck in the Degenerate Micro Cube may employ an entirely new strategy. What’s more, you’ll see a given sideboard card in your opening hand in almost half your games. When playing against a discard heavy opponent, it may be best to mulligan to a “bad” hand that doesn’t contain your most important spells. This complexity makes the Degenerate Micro Cube less approachable and a hard sell to anyone but fairly enfranchised Magic players, and I consider it one of the cube’s biggest weaknesses.

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