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The Ultimate Guide to Cube Archetypes: Blue

By / October 10, 2019

In part one, I wrote about evaluating the different types of cards in Cube, and today we get started on archetypes. There’s a lot of nuance here, especially with knowing how to blend Reanimator and Sneak Attack, or big mana blue and Storm, or pivot from one of these to another, but knowing the base decks is a huge upgrade to your Cube skills. These are specific to Vintage Cube, but some, like Mono-Green or W/W, are pretty much the same in Legacy or Modern Cube as well.

First, let’s start in the most logical place: Blue decks. Blue is the best color in Cube, hands down, and the average Cube Draft can support five blue drafters without much trouble. Because Cube has so many playables, you can be cut on blue in both directions and still have a lot of powerful blue cards. Plus, blue gets some of the busted cards like Ancestral Recall, Time Walk, and Mana Drain, so there’s a good reason that it’s the base for multiple different archetypes.

Blue represents a bunch of different decks rolled into one, and is the deck most people think of when they imagine Vintage Cube. This is the deck you end up in when you just take good blue cards, and as such once you learn the core, you can customize it with various win conditions. This is a hard one to learn because of how many ways it branches (drafting mono-green is much simpler, for example), but once you know how to draft a good blue deck you can always have a good fallback plan.

Game Plan: Disrupt the opponent with counterspells, and develop your mana base/find your win conditions using card draw spells.

Key Cards

The core of “the blue deck” are the cards I mentioned in part one—the cheap interactive and flexible cards, plus card draw like Fact or Fiction, Compulsive Research, and Thirst for Knowledge. If you start with these, filling in a win condition isn’t too hard.

This is the baseline on which I start every Cube Draft, at least until I pick up a more specific engine card that pushes me into a theme. This strategy is compatible with all the combo decks, and only doesn’t mesh well with aggro (mono-white and mono-red) and mono-green ramp. If you grow confident in identifying and taking these baseline blue cards, you have a good base to start with that lets you branch into all the decks I’ll be talking about next.

Now that you have generic blue cards on your mind, let’s get more specific.

Big Mana Blue // Artifact Ramp

This deck relies on artifacts, and is the best deck when you have picked up good acceleration. Bonus points if you spike a Sol Ring or Mana Drain, as this uses those cards better than any other deck.

Game Plan: Use artifact ramp to turbo out a finisher and go over the top of whatever the opponent is doing.

Key Cards

This deck is generally blue-red, as Inferno Titan, Wildfire, Wheel of Fortune, Electrolyze, Fire // Ice, Dack Fayden, and Ancient Grudge are exactly what you want to pair with your good blue cards. This deck lives or dies on its artifact ramp, and needs 5+ ways to generate a lot of mana.

Ways to Get Into the Deck

  • Take Upheaval. It’s the number one non-power card in the format for this deck.
  • Pick up 3-4 accelerants in pack one. Once I have a Mana Vault, and Ancient Tomb, and a few Signets, I start looking for big mana sinks and draw 7s.
  • Get a 5/6th pick Tinker after 1-2 artifacts (bonus points if you saw an Inkwell or something, because those often wheel).

Sneak and Breach

The Sneak Attack deck is my pick for the most reliable broken deck in the Cube. It’s a two-card combo, and Sneak is fast, hard to interact with, and combines with a ton of other cards, so the second part of the combo isn’t even very specific. I basically won’t pass Sneak Attack at this point (and I’m sure by writing this I’m making it less likely I see it in the future).

Game Plan: Use Sneak Attack or Through the Breach (or Channel) to turbo out Eldrazi or other giant monsters.

Key Cards

*If you are a Channel deck, move up colorless creatures appropriately.

This deck is usually Grixis, mainly blue-red with a light black splash. It doesn’t mind having some acceleration, but it’s not nearly as critical as in the big mana deck. Part of the beauty of this deck is that the whole Sneak package is very small—the addition of Sneak Attack, Vampiric Tutor, and 2 Eldrazi can make any blue deck into one with a busted endgame. It’s the perfect finisher for decks with good card draw and disruption.

Under no circumstances should you play Show and Tell (and especially not Eureka). There are zero recorded instances of a player casting Show and Tell and winning, so don’t get tricked. Casting Show and Tell and having to wait a turn while also letting the opponent put their best permanent into play is just a recipe for disaster. It is a fine sideboard card against low-curve aggro, but for the love of Jace, don’t take this card early or play it in your main deck.

Ways to Get Into the Deck

Kiki-Twin

This deck uses the combo of Kiki or Twin plus one of Exarch, Pestermite, Zealous Conscripts, or Restoration Angel (note that Twin plus Angel is the only combo that doesn’t work). It is Izzet with a white splash for Restoration Angel or Recruiter of the Guard, and usually plays like a control deck with a combo finish (though some version can be more aggressive, with Geist of Saint Traft and Vendilion Clique as pressure).

Game Plan: Combo the opponent out, with a back-up plan of getting value from Kiki/Twin/Resto on creatures with good ETB effects.

Key Cards

Like the Sneak deck, this deck can be a finishing package for any blue control deck, and as such is a desirable place to be. It even dovetails nicely with Sneak, as Sneak Attack makes the combo very cheap to assemble. I am willing to take Kiki very early as a result, which unsurprisingly is one of the ways to end up in this deck.

Ways to Get into the Deck

  • See an early Kiki or Twin.
  • See a mid-pack creature (Resto, Exarch, etc.)
  • Have a good amount of value creatures, and see Kiki/Twin in pack 2/3.

Storm

Ahh, Storm. This is my favorite deck, though I am in no way saying it’s the best deck (as I’ve stated, I think that honor belongs to a good Sneak Attack deck). I love drafting Storm because of how fun it is to solve the puzzles it presents, and because sometimes you end up winning the game with Corpse Dance plus Siege-Gang Commander.

The upsides of Storm (in terms of winning the game) are that it can be extremely fast, is hard to interact with, and doesn’t care at all about what the opponent is doing. The downsides are that it’s hard to play, requires a lot of very specific cards, and can easily not get there even when you do have a good Storm deck. Now that I’ve sold you on drafting the best archetype, let’s dig into it.

Game Plan: Generate mana with Mana Flare effects or Ritual effects, cast draw 7s or Mind’s Desire, and win via Tendrils of Agony or Brain Freeze (hopefully).

Storm is trickier than most of these decks, so I’m going to approach it a little differently. It’s less about key cards than key combinations, so let’s talk those first:

Key Combinations

These are the main three engines, and you want as many of these as possible in your Storm decks. The key cards for Storm are as follows, roughly in order.

Key Cards

  • Black Lotus – I’m calling this out even though it’s a broken card to note that Lotus is better here than in any other deck, and a reason to slam Storm if you ever see it.
  • Time Spiral – This card is one of the best reasons to be in Storm.
  • Tutors (Demonic, Vamp, Imperial Seal) – These also help make your Storm deck tick, since it’s all about assembling combos. I don’t actually like Grim Tutor much, and think Dark Petition is mediocre unless you have Yawgmoth’s Will or a mana-heavy deck.
  • Draw 7s – As mentioned before, these are super important to get enough cards to hit critical mass.
  • Mind’s Desire – This is essentially a draw-7, though it also has extra combos like letting you get the cast trigger off Eldrazi.
  • Shelldock Isle – This deck untaps lands easily and always hits less than 20 cards quickly.
  • Frantic Search/Turnabout/Palinchron.
  • Card draw – The normal blue card draw and filtering is important here.
  • Mana Flare effects.
  • Artifact Ramp – Signets, Coalition Relic, etc. These are good in the deck, though if you have Mana Flares, Time Spiral, or Yawgmoth’s Will, they become less important.
  • Rituals – These tend to wheel, so I don’t prioritize them very highly. If they aren’t coming back, things could get ugly.

Note on Win Conditions

Tendrils of Agony is the best win condition, followed by Brain Freeze, though you can string together all sorts of crazy ways to win. The trick with Storm isn’t winning the game—it’s generating mana and cards. Once you have infinite mana and all your cards, winning the game isn’t that hard to accomplish (See: above clip with Corpse Dance and Siege-Gang). I don’t prioritize win conditions much, and am happy slotting in any of the combos like Sneak Attack, Kiki-Jiki, or just Eldrazi plus Mind’s Desire to finish the game. I’ve even hard-cast Emrakul off Turnabout and Time Spiral, though my favorite has been Upheaval plus Emrakul, the Promised End in the same turn (I forced them to discard all their lands).

How You Get into the Deck

  • You have a burning desire to enjoy the purest form of Magic (seriously, Storm isn’t usually the best thing to do, but it is awesome).
  • You get an early Time Spiral and wheel mana accelerants.
  • You open Black Lotus.

I love Storm and love how complicated it is. This is not an entry-level deck, so I’d highly recommend the other decks I’ve talked about today before Storm if you are dipping your toes into the format.

That does it for today—I’ll keep trucking on the rest of the decks, so check back this week and next for more!

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