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.
An Introduction to the Degenerate Micro Cube
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- It would provide redundancy for Lion’s Eye Diamond in Bomberman combo, and Lotus does actually cost you a card.
- What’s more, you’ll see a given sideboard card in your opening hand in almost half your games.
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- You also might mill them out while they have Serene Remembrance, Conjurer’s Bauble, or Memory’s Journey in hand, allowing them to actually improve their draws and benefit from it.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
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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.
By the time they realize they aren’t getting there, it’s much too late to pivot. A common beginner’s mistake is to take a combo piece early and commit to the deck, assuming that no one else will take the other half of the combo. 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.
I expected we’d get a few laughs from playing broken cards and appeasing our latent Timmy/Tammy urges, but ultimately I didn’t think the cube would have much replay value. Each player ends up drafting a rather large pool of cards, but due to the constraints of the draft format — picking an entire row or column at a time — many of those picks are incidental. The nature of this cube, which is full of narrow combo cards, also precludes drafting with a smaller number of people. However, because other aspects of the game are unchanged, like starting hand size, decks in the Degenerate Micro Cube are more consistent than a 60-card deck with playsets of each card would be. Despite the sky-high power level and abundance of swingy plays, almost every loss is attributable to some draft, deckbuilding, or gameplay mistake rather than bad luck or variance. Bomberman and Welder/Emry decks, for example, have many moving parts, and truthfully I myself have struggled to draft and play them properly — others players in our online playtesting group have had more success with them than I have.
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At any given time I have a number of speculative cube lists, but I had no plans to build the Degenerate Micro Cube in paper and never expected to actually draft it. I find this leads to polarizing gameplay, where the result is determined more by luck rather than careful play from both players. The resulting decks are very powerful and have many sideboard options, but both features are on theme for the cube. Removing mill as a win condition actually brings this environment more in line with typical Magic, as decks are forced to win on more recognizable axes.
Five-color fixing lands are played in any deck with more than one color, and allow drafters to make choices about how much they want to prioritize fixing instead of just rewarding them for the luck of getting passed the right dual land. An early version of the cube included the more typical cycle of original duals, but decks are so small that they don’t really adhere to typical “two-color” models. Under these circumstances, the 15 card minimum deck size becomes a liability, and you need ways to recycle your cards or otherwise assemble some kind of inevitability. However, sometimes unstoppable combos run up against immovable disruption and the game grinds to a halt. With so much free disruption in the cube, players must assume even their tapped-out opponents have interaction and sequence their plays accordingly.
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.
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- It’s more like Dark Ritual on steroids, which has more play to it than a Mox or Crypt, which is basically just an upgraded land.
- However, if the match does turn into a battle of attrition, decks with a plan for that contingency are better equipped to go long.
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Siding in a single card changes ~10 percent of your non-land cards, the rough equivalent of bringing in four copies of a card in constructed. Recursion cards like Elixir of Immortality or Serene Remembrance are best if they’re the last card you draw, so you’re happy to bottom them on a mull to six. If you’re playing Oath or Tinker, you may choose to mulligan a good opening seven to explicitly bottom your cheat target. Playing to your outs in the Degenerate Micro Cube means mulliganing, scrying, and playing strategically so you deploy all of your threats at the right moments and have access to your answers when you need them. Playing to your outs in normal limited often means throwing up a hail mary, making sacrifices to give yourself one extra 4% chance to draw the single card you need to win. Decks with a diverse toolbox of interaction fared best in playtesting, and drafting the right balance is a challenge.
Trading card advantage for tempo is one of the strategic axes that must be navigated with care and consideration. The present macro-archetypes are better described as combo, stax/prison, and control, rather than the more prevalent aggro, midrange, and control. Fast combos are inconsistent, powerful strategies like Shops suffer from a lack of redundancy, and the quality of both threats and disruption fall off sharply in singleton. In 2014, MacFarlane released his first-ever Christmas album, “Holiday for Swing,” that debuted at #1 on the iTunes holiday album charts.
The presence of these decks is a defining feature of the Degenerate Micro Cube — if you’re not drafting one yourself, you’d better have an answer to a turn one channelled Eldrazi Titan. The following effects can be combined to help maximize magic find. Please ensure you meet all legal and regulatory requirements based on your country before playing at any casino listed on this site.
Discussion of potential cards and archetypes was near constant, and we drafted the cube every weekend for months. I was fascinated by the novel constraints, radical recontextualization of cards and effects, and the idea of playing Magic with dramatically increased consistency. Not including all of the cards in a given draft risks splitting up combos, potentially torpedoing someone’s draft by pure chance. While I don’t think the draft format is ideal, it hasn’t kept us from having fun with the cube and drafting functional decks. The draft, which consists of 2 packs of 10 cards, is the aspect of the cube I am least happy with.
Playing the Degenerate Micro Cube
I’ve never really played an auto-battler before, preferring to be active in my decision-making, but there’s a first time for everything. This overlap is what keeps the drafts of the Degenerate Micro Cube from feeling on rails, and Vault-Key combo has no such leeway. We ran a couple drafts with a full Vault-Key package, and while it was definitely one of the premier combos, I’m not convinced it was overpowered, per se. This meant that experienced players knew better than to build a ”Shelldock Deck” and would instead only play it in combination with other, more reliable methods of cheating a creature into play. Karakas and Maze of Ith — Both Karakas and Maze of Ith are potent tools to combat creature cheat decks, which run rampant in this environment.
Lucky Hunter is an auto-battle roguelite deckbuilder developed by solo indie team 159 Studio and published by indienova. And of course, I want to formally acknowledge Corey Murphy and Max Hero for the original cube that directly inspired the Degenerate Micro Cube. Their criticism and feedback made the cube better and, I hope, made me a better designer. The Degenerate Micro Cube would not be what it is today without the playtesting and input of my friends, whose enthusiasm kept me going during the long, tedious, and ongoing months of the COVID-19 lockdown.
The small deck size means that Shelldock Isle is always “turned on” and allows you to cast any spell in your deck, at instant speed, as early as turn lucky max two. While it might be possible to play enough Sinkholes and Ghost Quarters to make these lands reliably answerable, almost all land destruction is very narrow. Once we started to seriously consider adding Tomik to the cube I knew Strip Mine had to go. The final nail in the coffin for Strip Mine is that it’s a land and therefore is basically impossible to interact with. In addition to being a card I loathe, Veil is strictly a sideboard card. You might mill them out then just die the next turn to a combo they already had in their hand.
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Because they are so situationally powerful and relatively easy to guarantee in your opener, they would completely shut out certain decks and demand enchantment removal or else lose on turn 0. However, because of the small deck size, they can easily be mulled to and therefore play out more like conspiracies. They are actually much stronger because they negate methods of recurring the milled cards, and would be oppressive in my opinion. The relevant Ashioks, Dream Render and Nightmare Weaver, which exile cards from your opponent’s library, are excluded for similar reasons to mill cards. I don’t like the idea of such wildly variable cards, whose variance is largely out of the control of the caster. On the other hand, you might flip half their combo into the yard and win on the spot by pure chance.
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.
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.
