I’ve been very into the Magic Online vintage cube this season. What on earth is a ‘vintage cube’, you may ask? For the last few weeks it’s been my favourite sub-niche of a niche interest

• Magic the Gathering is the first ever trading card game, in which players build decks of cards to engage in a deadly battle of small integer arithmetic and complex probability management sorcery and magic
• A ‘cube’ is a curated collection of cards from which players take turns picking to build their decks
• ‘Vintage cube’ is the answer to the question “what if we took the best cards, from the over thirty years of Magic history, and played with just those?”

And the answer is, it’s a damn good time. The draft (picking which cards to play) is interesting, as we try to balance incredibly powerful combinations of cards against consistency and ways to interrupt your opponents threats, and then the games are executing on the same ideas. There are a lot of subtle interactions at play between cards, sometimes printed thirty years apart, and when everything is broken, everything feels like fair game.

I didn’t keep track of the winning record for every deck, unfortunately, but I do know that I managed three 3-0 records (trophies) out of 21 drafts, and have ended up with slightly more play points than I started with, so it’s been reasonably successful results-wise. I learnt most of what I know about vintage cube from LSV and Wheeler so you can blame them for any problems with my decks.

These are some of my favourites from this season, in chronological order.

Storm

We started the season off with a bang - Black Lotus, Underworld Breach, and Brain Freeze combine for arguably the cube’s most powerful combo deck in the first draft of the season. Assembling these three cards is enough to win almost any game, and this deck was pretty great at doing that:

This deck had great mana, and with a backup plan of Hullbreacher and one of the draw 7 effects, was very powerful. It fell a little short of going 3-0; it’s a little foggy but I think I got run over by aggro once, so a removal spell or two may have been nice, and I wish I had one of the better tutors, though I do remember Imperial Seal putting the stamp on a couple of games.

Gush is an interesting card; it feels like it should’ve been great here, but I distinctly remember never casting it despite drawing it a few times. But then! It was strong in some of my more controlling decks. The deep mysteries of Magic are shrouded in darkness.

Four Colour Combo (trophy)

My first trophy (3 wins, 0 losses) deck of the season came pretty shortly after:

What if we jam a bunch of incredibly powerful two-card combos into a deck, along with ways to find the pieces? With the draws I saw during this draft, an easy undefeated run was the answer. For those unfamiliar with the combos:

• Witherbloom Apprentice and Chain of Smog wins the game on the spot if the opponent doesn’t have a fairly specific answer
• Sheoldred, the Apocalypse and one of the draw 7 effects deals 14 out of the opponents 20 life in a single effect, whilst gaining 14 life, putting a powerful creature into play, and digging for one of my other combos
• Oath of Druids has a lot of text on it, but basically says ‘if you have a creature, I get one out of my deck for free’. When my creatures are massive monsters, or half of one of the above combos, that tends to be pretty good for me. Show and Tell is another way for me to slam one of my huge monsters

The rest of the deck was ways to find these cards or disrupt my opponent, and it worked out great.

Wet Jund

Descending into the depths of Jund (with special guest, Psychic Frog):

This deck was immensely fair, but had a couple of cool things going on:

• The unholy quadfecta of Duress, Inquisition, Thoughtseize, and Deep-Cavern Bat meant I almost always knew what my opponent was up to
• Loot was surprisingly powerful. I guess putting two pieces of power and Lightning Bolt on a single creature with haste really is enough to make a 5-drop good
• Psychic Frog is incredibly broken, to the point that it’s worth spending picks on blue mana solely for this card (and then maybe splashing something like Loot as a bonus). We’ll be seeing this design mistake pop up again later

Should Pest Infestation have been in the main deck? Maybe, I don’t remember how many artifacts I played against. Should Primeval Titan? Probably not, but I guess I was feeling stompy that day, and I had a couple of bits of mana acceleration.

Dimir Library (trophy)

Sorry, did I say later? Psychic Frog is back again, but this time in a deck mostly dedicated to it:

The lack of an Underground Sea made the mana a bit sketchy at times, but incredible cheap/free interaction and powerful threats combined with Library (which is broken, don’t believe the slander) to make my second 3-0 deck of the season.

Bant Artifacts

This one was just cool because it was a mostly white artifacts deck:

How often do you get to put Tolarian Academy and Gaea’s Cradle in the same, mostly white, deck? Even with both, and Wasteland, I didn’t love Knight of the Reliquary; I bet if it was printed in 2025 it’d have vigilance and/or cost 2 mana. Sowing Mycospawn, on the other hand, is very much a Modern Horizons power level card.

Ugin is a very silly card. I’m pretty sure any big mana deck is extremely happy to play it.

Kitten // Jewel

Continuing to ride the artifact train, we arrive at this sick Time Walk/Displacer Kitten deck:

I’m pretty sure a more experienced player could’ve managed a 3-0 with this deck, but it was my first time playing Kitten (and historically I’ve opened more Lotuses than Time Walks). I did managed to deck myself once after casting Time Spiral, and sideboarded in the Karn just to have another way to win, but man was this deck cool.

Jeskai Zirda

The final stop on the artifact train for this season was this heartbreaking Zirda deck:

In my heart this deck 3-0’d, but in real life I timed out of a game whilst executing the infinite mana combo with Zirda and Grim Monolith on a laggy client (for the third time in the match). This was my first time getting to play with the fox companion, and it was pretty awesome.

I think there was a decent non-companion deck here as well, running Guide of Souls, Third Path Iconoclast, and a few of the other sideboard cards, but the chance to have infinite mana on tap was too tempting with Retrofitter Foundry.

It definitely wouldn’t have been worth playing red just for Vivi, but as I was already playing Forth Eorlingas! I tried it out, and it was decent. Assuming the black mage hangs around for the next iteration, I hope to get to play it in a low curve Izzet deck at some point where it should really shine.

Simic Four Drops

This was my first deck where I really felt how good the one mana green mana creatures are, especially when you have most of them:

Very, very consistently being able to play a powerful four mana threat a turn early, and then another to follow it up, was extremely strong. Nissa, Uro, and Time Warp then took me over the top of pretty much any aggro decks - who even needs removal?

This one 2-1’d, and I made some bad play mistakes in the match I lost. Caleb definitely turned me on to the power of green, and watching Ouroboroid do its thing multiple times warmed my Timmy heart (I strongly suspect that one is getting cut in the next iteration of the cube, unfortunately).

Overlord of the Balemurk is also a very, very strong piece of inevitability in a creature dense deck.

Jund (ft. Oko) (trophy)

And so we reach the end with my last draft, and trophy, of the season:

Really classic Jund stuff - cheap interaction, powerful standalone threats, and just a little bit of reach to close out close games.

• I’m pretty sure Hexdrinker is really, really strong. Does it sometimes eat removal after putting 3-6 mana into it? Yes. Does it win games single handedly as a 1-drop? Also yes, several times in this draft alone
• Oko is worth splashing. I couldn’t cast it one game, but it won me two others pretty much single handedly (and elking a Baloth Prime was very funny)
• How good is Berserk? I don’t know, never had it in my hand - seems mediocre, but memorable

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Overall, this season was a ton of fun for me in the vintage cube queues. I know there’s a bit of an anti-Boros sentiment in some portions of the community, but I didn’t find it too overwhelming. Not pictured are a bunch of Boros/Rakdos/Mardu/Orzhov aggro decks that mostly went 2-1 or sometimes 1-2; I think those decks are probably the most consistent thing to be doing in the current iteration of the cube, but they seem a little tricky to trophy with, as it’s still very possible to go over the top of them with the busted stuff we only get to play with in vintage, and they’re certainly not very memorable.

Long live vintage cube, and the insane shenanigans it makes possible.