How to draft UMA-Inspired Cube

Hello, everyone! Tomorrow I’m going on a big journey that will take me to both CubeCon this week and Magic 30 the following week. So, in the spirit of that journey, I want to use this week to write a brief introduction to my featured cube at CubeCon, the awkwardly named UMA-inspired cube I built earlier this year.

overview

This cube is inspired by Ultimate Masters, as its name so gently suggests. I loved this Limited format and aim to recreate much of the feel of this awesome Limited environment in this cube (with a few spins and a slightly higher power level). It contains 540 cards, meaning you’ll see two-thirds of them in an eight-person draft There is no guarantee that a specific card will appear. However, it breaks singleton. This means that there are multiple copies of different key cards, such as three copies).

If you only knew one thing about the UMA-inspired Cube, it would be this. The Cube is synergy driven and built around four pillars: Insanity, Artifacts, Spells and the Graveyard. Each has plenty of overlap with the others, allowing you to delve deeply into a very specific archetype, or to meld one or more of them together – but yourself will they need to keep in mind how they define all. There is no single-color aggro, single-color ramp, or multicolor planeswalker control deck – each deck relies on a combination of spells, insanity, artifacts, and the graveyard to function. So let’s talk a little bit about these four pillars.

1. The Cemetery

This is the largest and most central pillar of the cube. The majority of drafters should use the graveyard at least lightly, if not heavily. Being the largest macro archetype, it offers the most directions to go in.

You can fill up your Graveyard to cast spells like Spider Spawning and Seize the Storm. You can consume your graveyard with effects like Gurmag Angler or Grim Lavamancer. You can generate value through Flashback, recursive spells like Ghoulsteed, recursion engines like Second Sunrise and Scrap Trawler, and reanimation spells like Late for Dinner, Dance of the Manse, and Diregraf Rebirth (just don’t expect something as powerful as an Archon of Cruelty or grizzly fire). You can even use (the small number of) recycles like Junktroller to turn your Graveyard into a Tutor, or Laboratory Maniac’s to win the game straight.

In short, there are many ways to use the graveyard, although each goes in a slightly different direction:

White generates value through recursion.

Blue fills the graveyard and tends to reward spells there.

Black does a little bit of everything (black is the all-rounder of this die).

Green uses the graveyard more than any other color – it fills it up, eats it up for value, and especially loves having creatures in it.

Red relies the least on the graveyard. It generally wants to contain spells or achieve delirium.

Hopefully this general guide will give you a feel for the Cube’s approach to archetypes. There are few strict archetypes where two colors explicitly and exclusively support a theme. Sure, each suit has quirks and unique cards, but each suit can support at least every main theme.

Finally, let’s talk a little bit about cemetery hatred. You won’t find anything like RIP here that would disable entire decks by itself, but there are cards that disrupt your opponents’ graveyards (some of which double as ways to manipulate your own). You might want to give a card like Scrabbling Claws, Burn Away, or Serene Remembrance a much higher priority than you normally would.

2. Madness

Insanity is a cute, if somewhat awkward, mechanic. It generates both a card advantage and a mana advantage if you can leap through the combination of madness cards with discard opportunities. This cube has both in abundance, so you shouldn’t have too much of a problem with that – as long as there isn’t too much competition.

However, four of the five colors have ample support for it, although each goes in a slightly different direction:

Blue is great at enabling insanity through looting.

Black, like everyone in the cube, is flexible. It can support all other Madness archetypes, but isn’t specialized in any particular strategy.

Red can be spell-focused with blue, aggressive with black, or large creature-focused with green.

Green is creature-centric. It can be combined particularly well with red.

3. Spell

Instants and Sorceries-Matter is a classic blue and red theme, and perhaps unsurprisingly focuses on those colors. It’s the smallest pillar of the cube, although it’s still supported at a much higher volume than mini-archetypes built around specific maps like Dark Depths and Krark-Clan Ironworks. For the most part, Spells are an insanity deck supported by cards like Monastery Mentor, Thermo-Alchemist, and Codie, Loud Codex that don’t care about insanity.

Blue and red are the core colors of Spells. They reward you for casting instants and sorceries and filling your graveyard with them.

White and Black are decently good at engines, spells, and discards, but they need a lot of blue or red cards for this to be anything more than a Madness deck with a few spells.

Green is the most creature-focused color in the cube, and has few contributions to this deck.

4. Artifacts

Finally, there are artifacts. This is a fundamental archetype of Masters sets (Modern Masters 2013, Modern Masters 2015, and Modern Horizons 2 gave it a starring role). It’s also the biggest departure from Ultimate Masters, which had Heroic as its primary aggressive archetype. I appreciate how much better artifacts synergize with the themes of the Cube than Heroic, plus there are way, way more cards to build from than the limited pool of good Heroic cards that UMA has mostly covered already.

artifacts can be an aggressive deck built around cheap colorless trinkets and big affinity creatures like Sojourner’s Companion, but each color can add its own texture:

White is the color most focused on artifacts. It can be aggressive (especially in combination with red), value-oriented with blue or black), or even be a combo deck with Second Sunrise and Faith’s Reward.

Blue offers powerful engines and finishers for slower, artifact-focused decks.

Black is a bit of a wild card here, as it has a bunch of new Warhammer 40K cards. It can be aggressive or gnashing.

Red artifacts are aggro artifacts. They have the cheapest artifacts to enable go-wide and affinity strategies.

Green doesn’t play with artifacts much, just like it doesn’t play with spells.

I could talk about my cube for hours, but I feel like the best introduction to a cube is to play with it, and we’ve covered all the key points. We’re hoping at least a few people enjoy playing it this week in Madison. I’m really looking forward to seeing what types of decklists come out of this, like what turns out to be the most popular, whether an archetype consistently outperforms, and what pain points there are (like, is Dark Depths too good or too easy disturb? ).

But I’m also not worried about it being perfect – it’s not, but then again I don’t think so any dice or any game is. It is good enough for people to play with and will never be something I don’t have to tinker with. This is always true in game design and is one of the many great lessons a Cube owner or enthusiast can teach.

Zachary Barash is a New Yorker City-based game enSignatory and final commissioner of the Team Draft League. He designs for Kingdom Death: Monster, has a Game Design MFA from NYU Game Center, and is a freelance game designer. When the stars align, he’ll stream Magic (but the stars align a lot less often than he’d like).