An Introduction to the Degenerate Micro Cube

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.
Even a turn one Flash or Channel has a variety of potential answers, but once you have an empty library, winning with any one of these cards can only be disrupted with countermagic. Wheel of Fortune always draws your whole deck in this format, but sometimes that’s only two or three cards. With no mill as a win condition, Brain Freeze is useless, and why jump through hoops to cast a big Empty the Warrens when you could just Flash in a Worldspine Wurm instead, and use all those other cards to protect your combo? To get a high enough storm count for a lethal Tendrils, storm decks need almost all of their non-land cards to be cantrips, rituals, or key enablers like wheel effects or Yawgmoth’s Will. ” While you can definitely compose a 15 card storm deck that can reliably threaten turn one wins, drafting that deck and, more importantly, winning through disruption, proved much more challenging. I have long dreamt of a cube where storm is consistently viable and has even matchups against other draftable decks.
This environment, more than any other I’ve played, rewards familiarity with the list and knowledge of how the cards interact with one another. Games between decks drafted from the Degenerate Micro Cube are a uniquely brain-bending experience. 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.

• 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.
• The resulting decks are very powerful and have many sideboard options, but both features are on theme for the cube.
• There is substantial overlap between the cheat strategies, and this fact, in conjunction with their prevalence, makes their component cards less committal picks than they would be in a tradtional cube.
• 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.
• It would provide redundancy for Lion’s Eye Diamond in Bomberman combo, and Lotus does actually cost you a card.
• 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.

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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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.
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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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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If you take Mishra’s Workshop pack one, pick one, but then don’t see any spheres, it’s better to audible into an alternative strategy than try to play a shops deck that is missing key components. It’s important to remember that though you only get twenty picks, you only need roughly ten non-land cards to construct your deck. Many matches are won and lost in the draft, not in the games themselves. They also open up more creative deckbuilding and sideboarding options, as players who have prioritized fixing have the opportunity to splash for spells in different colors to shore up bad matchups.
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.
Your deck/inventory consists of pieces, which are scattered around a grid at the start of every turn. Well, by throwing enough soldiers, ninjas, slimes, alchemists, and hackers, of course! As with other roguelite deckbuilders, you’ll be travelling along a map, choosing which path to take to the end, fighting off increasingly tougher encounters and improving your deck bit by bit. There is some backstory if you check the Hunter Record and give the villagers items, but you don’t have to engage with it and it’s not really important in the long run. You play as a hunter who goes out on a quest for his village to kill the Demon Lord that’s eroding the land, while also bringing back resources to provide for your home. So, let’s see if I’m lucky enough to review this or if this is just a slog.
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• 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.
• As with other roguelite deckbuilders, you’ll be travelling along a map, choosing which path to take to the end, fighting off increasingly tougher encounters and improving your deck bit by bit.
• 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.
• Late picks in a traditional cube are often useless, but in the Degenerate Micro Cube, every pick matters because cards can be easily sideboarded.
• With greater consistency comes greater control, and greater control rewards skillful, careful play.
• 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.

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.

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. Maybe more relevantly, that same small deck size means the Strip Mine player has reliable access to it. Conspiracies and silver border cards have been excluded, even though some of them are strong enough to warrant inclusion on the basis of power level. 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. There are a lot of good blue and black cards here; why didn’t you include Veil of Summer?

Minimum Deck Size

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).
That said, the same complexity that makes the cube inhospitable to some is its greatest appeal to others. With greater consistency comes greater control, and greater control rewards skillful, careful play. They choose their line based on limited information, and play towards a range of potential outcomes. Marit Lage can’t kill you if it’s forced to chump block a Blightsteel Colossus on two consecutive turns.
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To put it another way, in constructed formats, the power of storm decks is partially in the explosive card advantage they can generate. The line from your draft and gameplay decisions to the outcome of the game is short — all your choices really matter and you can feel it. The social aspect of in-person games that paper Magic offers has always been important to me, but digital Magic is better than no Magic, so my Cube drafts moved from in-person to online.
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.
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.