Frogimago's YouTube Channel

Join Weekly Drafts Wednesdays @ 7:30pm ET by joining the Sorcerers at the Core Discord!

How to Draft on TTS Video Tutorial

Welcome to my cube! I intend for this to be the most powerful singleton cube possible. But if specific cards emerge that are un-fun I will consider cutting them. It grew from its original 360 cards to its current 450-card form with the addition of cards from Gothic! I value a diverse draft experience and would prefer this cube grow to 540 cards once the card pool supports it, likely upon the release of the next set.

HOUSE RULES

Second Player Seer – After mulligans, the player going second looks at the top card of their Spellbook or Atlas and may put it on the bottom.
If you draft Adept Illusionist or Brother Knight, you get an additional copy of that card.
If you draft Dragonlord, you may choose ANY Unique Dragon in Sorcery as your "Champion". You DO NOT need to draft the chosen Dragon. You may change your Champion between rounds prior to seeing your opponent’s avatar (load it in from your collection for reference).
Pathfinder can have duplicates in its atlas. Treat it as if the first line in its text box doesn't exist.
ERIK’S CURIOSA instead of being “ripped to pieces” is banished. (I will likely remove this card. It's such a headache to play and keep checking your collection for what to fetch with it, not fun, don't recommend but still testing).

STRATEGY GUIDE:

The cores and mixes are quite good. There are many expensive bombs, getting them out before your opponent develops their board is an easy way to win. With the addition of cards from Gothic, I'm hopeful the curve is more reasonable and aggressive decks have more of a chance than pre-Gothic. Premium removal is needed to stop the many bombs. Keep an eye out for an Avatar that fits with your gameplan, or the generically great ones like Elementalist. Some of the best cards in the cube are the Cores/Philosopher's Stone, Four Waters of Paradise, The Green Knight, Infernal Legion, Ring Of Morrigan.

PICK ORDER SUGGESTION

Premium Avatars

Artifact Ramp

Premium 2-4 Mana Minions

Threshold Fixing

Removal

Game-ending 5+ Mana stuff

COMBOS

The Green Knight + Lady of the Lake

13 Treasures of Britain + Kythera Mechanism

Pnakotic Manuscript + Plague of Frogs

Roots of Ygdrassil + Sinkhole

Kythera Mechanism + Chaoswish + Ring of Morrigan

ELEMENT RANKING

Fire and Water

Earth

Air

ARCHETYPES

MIDRANGE

Everything is some form of midrange. Your average curve will be something like:

1 spell that costs 1

4 spells that cost 2

6 spells that cost 3

5 spells that cost 4

4 spells that cost 5

4 spells that cost 6+

The hardest part is getting the one and two mana spells so be sure to prioritize those. Only prioritize 5 and 6 mana cards that are either great removal or legitimate game enders.

AGGRO

I'm very curious to see how aggro shapes up with the changes from Gothic! Sorcerer is the preferred Avatar.

CONTROL

By control I really mean a midrange deck with a higher than average curve or a deck that has a larger than normal suite of premium removal. Ideally both. I think Archimago has a real shot at being a competitive control Avatar if you amass 10+ good magics to control the game with. Animist is interesting to me as well. I think only one of these two avatars will stand the test of time but leaving in both for now.

WATER CONTROL

A mono-water deck has emerged as a powerful control option. Flooding abilities include Floodplain, Atlantean Fate, Great Old One, but most powerful is Waveshaper. The ability to flood your opponents' sites is important for a few key cards, most importantly, Mariner's Curse. This has been extremely impressive as a repeatable removal spell. And you can force it to trigger using Coy Nixie, Nelly Longarms, and other forced movement options. The powerful game delaying control option in Water pair extremely well with the powerful and difficult to deal with minions such as Great Old One and Mester Stoor Worm. Shapeshift is very good in this deck, especially if you have ways to generate free Frog tokens. Most of your opponents' decks are midrange with 6+ expensive minions, making Waveshaper's tap ability busted, especially if you can use forced movement to bring their threats together.

RAMP

You can watch me draft Earth ramp in this video: {{https://youtu.be/y4G83UzvNZY?si=2y1E4W8z0xRVk2zD}} or this video:

{{https://youtu.be/dLSqqBLDWgw?si=NSrYj2kjRkAkBwaU}}

You want 5+ sources of ramp and 5+ expensive cards to cast (6+ mana). This is the only deck that can use Black Obelisk effectively. I don't think this deck necessarily needs to be Earth but there are some sources of ramp in Earth that help a lot and some of the best things to ramp into are in Earth so it's pretty likely that's where you want to be. Geomancer is the preferred Avatar.

COMBO

you can watch me try to draft Combo in this video: {{https://youtu.be/TSx69NCtN6A?si=Iz7NjJkRGvbDH8s9}}

There's not a ton of combos yet but some of the ones that exist are quite potent. The two combos that draw cards are what I think of when I think of a combo deck (see list of combos above). Seer is the best Avatar to assemble these. If you pick up one half of the 13 Treasures combo, other players are unlikely to draft the other half so you're pretty likely to get it assembled.

CUBE DETAILS

Sites:

There are 3 sites in every pack. I broke singleton for 2 of each of the dual- and double-element sites. You will also find the tri-element castle sites, Colour out of Space, Valley of Delight, and Annual Fair. I still think the most powerful decks are the ones that stick to 2 elements with good threshold fixing. There are many triple and quadruple threshold cards that are very difficult to play if you're in 3 elements. There are 9 utility sites of each element. There are 9 colorless sites for extra utility if you can take the hit to your fixing as well as for players to assemble Roots of Yggdrasil + Sinkhole

Avatars:

I've been very impressed with the effect of the Avatars so far.

Animist: TESTING - Theory is to have a control deck with as many magics as you want. Part of Archimago's weakness is you still need minions to win the game usually, Animist solves that problem.

Archimago: Came together once and was good. Probably need 10+ powerful magics, ideally self-mill effects too.

Avatar of Air: I haven't really seen it played but in theory is very powerful.

Battlemage: I've seen people do the voltron thing and really beat down with it.

Dragonlord: Flexible and powerful. Draco Corvus is borderline oppressive. Ignis Rex trivializes the death blow. Adtonitum is reasonable.

Elementalist: S-Tier forever. Goodstuff.deck

Flamecaller: Mono-fire has been drafted plenty of times, this is a good option for that deck.

Geomancer: This is my pet avatar. Always better than Spellslinger, mana acceleration is important in cube, it's busted with Roots + Sinkhole.

Harbinger: TESTING - Theory is mana acceleration is important so having a discount on your avatar will be strong.

Interrogator: TESTING - Theory is... card advantage? Maybe aggro's good now? Stealth? Airborne? I'm skeptical.

Necromancer: TESTING - Theory is it doesn't require anything of you and you should get more than 1 card of advantage out of the skeletons. There are some combos with it, things that use your tokens well, Zombie Bruiser, etc.

Pathfinder: Was underwhelming pre-Gothic but in theory Pathfinder should be perfect for cube. Mana acceleration + card advantage!? I used to have 2 of each tri-element site and they don't really work with Pathfinder so maybe now that I changed that it has a nice buff.

Savior: TESTING - Theory is wards mean your opponents need additional answers. Putting a ward on a crazy bomb seems pretty good. Only question is can you afford to play off curve.

Seer: Specifically good for assembling combos but I think it's always better than Spellslinger. You'll get a lot of value out of drawing what you need when you need it.

Sorcerer: Pre-Gothic wasn't very good. The curve was much higher and you needed to be playing sites. Now I'm hopeful it becomes a force to be reconned with and polices the format.

Waveshaper: A powerful control deck. See "Water Control" archetype above.

Minions:

The general advice I've heard is you want about 17 minions, 7 non-minions in your Spellbook. That's 70% minions. I applied this benchmark to the entire cube. Currently 63% of spells (non-site, non-avatar cards) are minions. There has been a wonderful infusion of 2-4 mana minions from Gothic which hopefully will shake things up and breed a faster format as a result.

Stats for nerds:

73 spells of each element

28 multicolor spells

11 sites of each element

19 multi-element sites

9 colorless sites

3.0 sites/pack

Average Mana Cost of Minions in Each Element:

Earth: 3.8

Fire: 3.6

Water: 3.8

Air: 3.9

NOTES TO SELF:

Combos currently cut:

Drums of Doom + Druid

Excalibur + King Arthur (W/ Elementalist) or Azuridge Caravan

Link to my archived cube list pre-gothic

Frogimago's Cube

@Frogimago (Mitch)