An Introduction to the Degenerate Micro Cube

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An Introduction to the Degenerate Micro Cube
Lucky Max

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.
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.
Don’t forget, one answer to your opponent’s combo is simply to have a better combo. Whether protecting your own combo or answering an opponent’s, a range of answers is essential, ideally with options to sideboard into depending on the matchup. With such compact win-conditions, most of your picks will be spent on interaction. A willingness to stay open and spend a few speculative picks on varied combo pieces is key to success in the Degenerate Micro Cube. With only twenty picks across two packs, a draft of the Degenerate Micro Cube moves quickly, and each pick is critical.

Utility & Ramp Lands

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.
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.

Magic Find

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, 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.
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  • 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.
  • 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.
  • That said, the same complexity that makes the cube inhospitable to some is its greatest appeal to others.
  • It too offers a tempo advantage but (usually) in exchange for card disadvantage, an even steeper cost in this environment given the small deck size.
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Multicolored Cards

The majority of the combo decks in the Degnerate Micro Cube win by cheating the biggest, baddest threats from Magic’s history into play. After you deposit to your new account at Lucky Max Casino, you can visit the casino’s lobby to start playing your favourite casino games. The combo and additional instant-speed answers required many slots, the deck doesn’t feel interesting to draft, and it was one of the best strategies in the cube. Moreover, it’s one of the only combos that reliably lets you win the game without passing the turn, which means all the sorcery speed answers are blanks against it. If you would like to understand just how powerful Strip Mine is, I recommend playing a deck that gets to play it every single game. While it might seem like we are already playing a number of cards that fit this definition, they all have much more reasonable floors.
In a typical limited match between two 40 card decks, even if your deck is considerably worse than your opponent’s, you can still steal a win with a bit of luck. The consistency in gameplay imparted by the small minimum deck size imbues the draft with extra importance. Fast mana is a strategic choice to speed up certain combos and interaction when necessary, but some decks would rather keep their threat and answer densities high than play a turn or two ahead of curve. With only 15 cards in your deck, each slot that’s not occupied by a win condition or piece of disruption must be carefully considered.

Five-Color Mana Fixing

Preordain and Ponder, cards I assumed quite strong given their revered status in constructed Magic, were total duds. Instead, our first draft and the reactions of my playgroup blew me away. For a little over a year I tinkered with it on and off, drafting against bots (which are especially bad at drafting this cube), and occasionally discussing it in various online cube communities. 10 card packs at an 8 player table means that you only get a single pick from three quarters of the packs in each direction. I am sure a cube built under these conditions could be engaging, skill-testing, and dynamic, but it’s not what I was interested in exploring. These draws were also somewhat attributable to mistakes on the part of one of the players.
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  • All you have to do is make the right choices in making your deck better, or else your enemies will outpace you.
  • 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.
  • The track was also on the Dream Within a Dream Tour (2001–02), where Spears emerged from the middle of a giant music box on the stage as a ballerina, to perform the song in a medley with “Born to Make You Happy” and “Sometimes”, right after the performance of “Overprotected”.
  • 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.
  • 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.

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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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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.
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 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 lucky max 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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With only twenty picks in the draft, I want them all to have strategic signifigance, and slamming a Lotus or Mox Sapphire is a no-brainer. I actually think Lotus, Crypt, and all five Moxen could safely be added to the cube without disrupting things much. You said this was supposed to be degenerate, so why not just play Black Lotus, Mana Crypt, and the true Moxen? Instead, Ancestral Recall, a card I assumed too powerful, is actually just right. I was initially skeptical that Goblin Welder was good enough, until it was proven to be a unique combination of toolbox, inevitability, and creature cheat that is potent if drafted properly.
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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