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The Graveyard Shift

360 CardsPublic

This cube is mechanics focused on graveyard interactions and graveyard adjacent mechanics. You will make heavy use of mechanics such as, reanimator, self-mill, cycling, dredge, flashback, draw/discard, land matters, madness, sacrifice, and pod archetypes. Synergy rules over raw power here and will allow drafters to build a machine with cards that are included to work with each other.

sultaiubggraveyardsacrificereanimatortokenslandsself-millmadnessflashbackpodsammich

The Graveyard Shift

641 words4 min read Last updated 50 days ago

Welcome to The Graveyard Shift!


Welcome to my {b}{u}{g} cube! This cube is made of cards that represent many of my favorite ways to play magic using what I consider to be the best colors in magic! This cube is a celebration of the strengths and themes of this part of the color pie. Some main points for this cube:

  • All archetypes are related in some way to the graveyard.
  • Cards are useful in many of the different archetypes, it may be tough to get some cards to wheel in a draft.
  • Cards were chosen for their synergy over raw power. The goal is to build a synergistic deck with a theme in mind.
  • The Cube is singleton except for; double shocklands, triple fetchlands, double triome, and double landscape.
  • No two card combos exist in the cube, there are some three plus card combos with several prerequisites, I am keeping an eye on them.
  • Planeswalkers have been intentionally omitted.
  • Some cards have been removed or never added for power level reasons i.e., Phyrexian Altar, Stinkweed Imp, Strip Mine, Thassa's Oracle and Reanimate.

    See below for examples of some of the included archetypes:

Self Mill - Utilize dredge spells to draw and discard to churn through your library as quickly as possible and try to win with the Laboratory Maniac, this archetype plays well with the many delve spells in the cube (i.e.,Hogaak, Arisen Necropolis, Tasigur, the Golden Fang, and Murktide Regent).

Sacrifice Matters - Utilize small recursive utility creatures or creature tokens to create extra value through their ETB and LTB effects.

Discard value - The cube has many discard outlets that allow you to take advantage of cards with Cycling, Madness, Flashback, Scavenge, Retrace, Embalm, Eternalize and Dredge to create extra value over the course of the game.

Pod - Create tons of value by drafting decks with pod chains of creatures with ETBs. This archetype plays very well with re-animator and sacrifice decks as it helps to fill the graveyard with targets and triggers LTB and ETB effects.

Re-Animator - Put a large threat into your yard and use one of several dedicated reanimation spells to bring it back. For the health of this cube, I did slow down the reanimation spells, spells like Reanimate and Recurring Nightmare are too fast and powerful for a cube at this flatter power level. I decided to use threats that could put themselves in the yard as a way to make this archetype more appealing while keeping the power level lower.

Lands Matter - This archetype uses putting lands into play from both hand and graveyard to generate value over the course of the game.

Hate Cards - Normally I would not include specific hate cards, in this case for the graveyard, but I felt it was needed to make some of the decks a little uncomfortable but still be able to function. Most of the graveyard hate removes cards one at at time with the with the best one being Endurance as it's an ETB but it doesn't exile the yard.

Please feel free to comment with feedback and constructive criticism. The cube is constantly being updated and re-worked as we draft it. Thanks for reading!!

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