2008 Standard Dimir Faeries and Cube

Ryan Overturf takes a look back at blue/black Faeries from 2008, how that deck shaped his perception of Magic, and how Faeries offers concrete examples of different categories of cards that can inform Cube design.

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Antti Malin's 2008 World Championship winning Faeries deck

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What's up, gamers? Welcome back to 180 MTG. My name is Ryan Overturf, and this week I'm gonna be talking about 2008 Standard Demir Fairies, taking a little bit of a trip down memory lane here, talking about a really iconic historic constructed deck, my experience with that deck, and the things that I learned playing with and against that deck all the way back in 2008, and how I believe that this deck can teach us some things about cube design. This is piggybacking a little bit off a recent episode I did about constructed magic and cube design and just general principles there. And also an episode I did a while back about the standard Agatha Soul Cauldron Vivi Ornateer combo deck and breaking that down and how there's some fun to be found there for cube that people seem to like. And I think there's a deep well of different constructed decks and different lessons that they can teach us about design that I would have experience with, either more recent or further back. I'm going almost 20 years back, reaching for fairies here, but it's a wildly impactful deck. It's certainly a deck that left its mark on magic, whether you're aware of it or not. I think it's definitely part of the reason that we did not go back to Lorwin for so long. An aspect was definitely limited, but the fairies deck had some very negative aspects on constructed. And I want to do more of these episodes where I take a look at a specific constructed deck, be it be it old or new. I've had it in my mind that I want to talk about standard Bloodbraid Elf Jund on the podcast here and how that deck offers a lot of insights about deck design and cube design. But in thinking about that deck and how to explain what that deck was and how it existed at the time, my mind went to Blue Black Fairies. I'm not going to immediately do the Jund episode next week. It's something that I have a pin in. I will come back to it, but uh look out for that in the future. I won't say when, but mostly what I'm saying is that I think that blue black fairies is a little bit more foundational, can offer some more fundamental building blocks when it comes to deck design and cube design. It is a deck that has some really allowed aspects that I want to break down today. I think blue black fairies from 2008 can be broken down into really clear lines of categories of cards that you can use to inform deck design, which then informs cube design. So there's a lot that's really meaty to unpack here. And for the purpose of today's episode, I'm going to talk about one specific fairies deck list. There's going to be a number of differences. This was a deck that was dominant in standard and block constructed, showed up in legacy and extended. But for the purpose of today, for the ease of digestibility, I'm specifically going to be referencing Auntie Mollin's 2008 World Championship winning decklist and the cards that existed in that deck to break down these categories. Before I get into that, I want to call attention to the link I'm gonna have in the show notes once again to some Minnesota-based mutual aid organizations. The first of the month is coming up, rent is coming due again, so I will personally be contributing to some local rent relief funds, some food assistance programs, really important to keep your neighbors housed and fed. It's a really difficult time in the country and the world, there's a lot of bad going on, a lot of powerful people invested in making the world a worse place. But there are more good and kind and generous people than there are bad people. The power dynamics are pretty scuffed. Things are bad right now, but that does not mean that we don't have power. Individually and collectively, we do, we can and will make the world a better place, but that does involve us taking some steps on the regular to make that the case. So if you have the funds to spare, mutual aid is one of the quickest and easiest ways that you have to help improve the world around you, and altogether we can work to make this world a better place than the way that we found it. Alright, now back to magic, back to 2008, back to Demir Fairies. At the time, this deck was very much the boogeyman of multiple PTQ formats. It was the deck to beat in many tournaments that I played in. When it came to actually preparing for these tournaments, I've always been somebody who likes to brew my own decks, and a lot of people that I played with. I think that that was also just kind of more common back then, largely because information was harder to get a hold of. When I think about Magic in 2008, it would be years before I even heard the words sideboard guide. Just uh it was a lot harder to come across a good decklist, and you had to do more work on your own to have good plans for playing that deck. It wasn't like logging into Arena today and everybody having a good deck said a decent idea of how to play them. Mostly people had bad decks, no idea how to play them, and not a prayer to defeat Demir Fairies in a tournament. But uh one thing that I always did for the playgroup, it's really important to play against the best deck, and personally, I learn a lot playing with the best deck. So I was always the guy playing fairies in our playtest group, never registered in a tournament. I've rarely been one to register the best deck in a tournament, but fairies, so this aspects of this deck really spoke to me. It was this deck that kind of oscillated between being controlling and aggressive. It was a typo deck, many of the cards were fairies, and you won games by attacking with fairy creatures, but you did a lot of controlling games with really powerful control cards, and you would oscillate between being the beatdown, being the aggressor, or being in the control role. So kind of a tempo deck in that way. And I learned a lot about how the deck ticked playing it in play testing all the way back then, and I think that there's a lot going on in the fairies deck in terms of design. A funny memory that I have is that people would register fairies for tournaments back then, and when you just fill out a deck registration sheet, you would really write your deck name, deck archetype, and there'd be a spot for a deck designer, and people would write in the Morning Tide design team when it came to Fairies. Just a lot of individually powerful cards that anchored this deck up and made it the monster that it was. And an interesting piece of the history is that Fairies was a more dominant deck than many decks in recent memory that have suffered even multiple bans, but no cards in the Fairies deck were ever banned. It just was allowed to be dominant across multiple formats for a sustained period of time. And it kind of started to go away after like the seventh consecutive set where they printed a card that was expressly supposed to be good against fairies. This is when they started printing a lot of cards that couldn't be countered. Maybe he had protection from black or blue, great sable stag kind of does all of that. Volcanic Fallout was a sweeper that couldn't be countered that killed most of the fairy creatures. They just kept printing more cards to explicitly hate out fairies, but fairies continued to just be strong for a long time. So kind of a fun piece of the history there. But back to that idea of this deck being just copy paste from the Morning Tide design team, there are some pretty loud and I'll say obvious synergies. The deck played the cards that by and large you were quote unquote supposed to play. But there's more going on there. So, like I said, I'm gonna break this down into categories of cards, and this is going to be really an aspect of how players approach drafting cube, which then naturally will inform how we can design cubes. So I'm going to identify a few different categories of cards. I'm going to talk about the marquee cards from Auntie Malin's fairy deck, how they fell into these categories for that deck, and then peel that back and talk about some examples from Cube and how we can translate these categories into cube design and what that means for our own environments that we're curating. The first category I want to talk about is individually powerful cards. These are cards that are just strong on rate, that are the best at what they do regardless what they're doing. As you kind of look over a format, you identify just something that is the most powerful, you get the most out of your mana for casting them. That's what I'm talking about when it comes to individually powerful cards, are not reliant on any synergies. They're just cards that you were happy to play because they are strong. So in the Fairies deck, the two standouts for individually powerful cards are Thought Seas and Cryptic Command. Thoughtsei is still to this day a best in class, one mana discard effect. Cryptic Command, a really powerful modal card, reactive card, as it's floored. You have a four mana counter spell that draws a card, a dismiss, so just kind of a two for one. But then a card that because you choose two of four modes, can just play in so many different contexts. It can swing a damage race, it can bounce a problematic permanent, and then a second cryptic command can counter it on the way down. The way that they chain was a really big deal for constructed formats. These two cards saw a ton of play. Thoughtsey is to this day continues to see play in every format that it's legal in. It's still just an individually powerful card, power level outlier for constructed. I think it's a little bit weaker in cube than constructed. Some of that is because you can play four copies in constructed. Um, that's I think a topic worth exploring someday, just cards that are stronger or weaker in 40 card versus 60 card decks. But anyway, I don't have to tell you that Totsy is a strong. Cryptic Command, definitely still strong. Uh, just not one that really shows up too much in Magic and Constructed anymore these days, but it's still a strong cube card, can very much hang even in powered cube environments. And in 2008, even the five color decks were playing cryptic command. A blue blue-blue card was played in the five color decks. Now, granted, the mana was a little bit cheaty. They were playing vivid lands and reflecting pools, so you had a really high access to five colors of mana, but they were never gonna look away from that blue, blue, blue casting cost. This was a card that any deck that could realistically cast it was playing. So that's what I'm talking about when I talk about individually powerful cards. And these individually powerful cards, these are gonna be your bread and butter for power maxing environments, things like vintage cube, powered cube. I talked about cryptic commands still being able to be a card that can hang and be strong in powered cube. So that's what you're looking for for individually powerful cards. And the more you want players to explore synergies, the more you want to highlight synergy in environment, the lighter touch you want to use with this kind of thing. You can have a thought seize, you can have a cryptic command, and that might entice somebody to move in on a color, but then you'll have other synergistic cards that will shine that players can explore once they move in on the power level, powerful individual card. But if it's all cryptic commands all the way down, then they won't really be incentivized to explore those synergies. There's just going to be a stack of strong cards. So a lot of these are going to be an aspect of any power maxing environment. Of course, Black Lotus, uh incestral recall. These are individually powerful cards. But the more you want to incentivize synergies, the less of the stuff that you're going to want so that players will actually explore your synergistic packages. And it just so happens that with Thoughts using Cryptic Command, these are both interactive cards. There's nothing about individually powerful cards as a category that means they have to be interactive. That's just the way that the fairy's deck broke down. Everything else in the threat department at least is a fairy, so it at least touches on synergy in some aspect. So I wouldn't just highlight any of the fairy creatures as just individually powerful cards, though some of them I think fall closer to this category than others. But a card like Tarmagoyf, uh, when you're talking about 2008 Magic, I think is a good example. That card was just in so many decks. There were mono blue decks, splashing Tarmagoyf. There were Murfolk decks that played Parmagoif, like Legacy Murfolk just played Tarmagoyf, at least some pilots did back then. So that's an example of an individually powerful card that would just be like a threat. So it's not only interactive cards, it's just the interaction was where fairies had its just cards you would play no matter what, cards at any deck would be happy to play your individually powerful cards. I mentioned that fairies did not suffer any bans while it was legal in standard or block constructed, but I think that if you were to go back applying today's sensibilities, kind of the wisdom of how magic formats are handled today, you could make an argument that Thoughtseize could have and maybe should have been banned both times that it was legal in standard. It's just kind of the most context agnostic card, the card that most disincentivizes trying to build a deck to do something cool, just generically strips apart the best card in your opponent's hand, and Thoughtseize was a lot stronger in 2008 because there's a much wider delta between your strongest card and your weakest card. So Thoughtsei is a huge aspect of what allowed Fairies to maintain its dominance, and that's why you want to use a lighter touch if you want to push players to explore synergies in your cube. I'm not even talking about Thoughtseize, it's just the more you have lightning bolts and cards that just will be played in any deck, the less you're going to be even reading the cards that rely on synergies to show up in the first place. You know, these cards being interactive, that's an aspect of it. Thought sees cryptic command lightning bolt, they break up synergies, but even just having really strong threats. If all your creatures do something when they enter the battlefield, if you had a deck full of flametongue kavus and mold drifters and planeswalkers, there's not much incentive for you to explore synergies. And you can explore space like blink, but I don't even know how much I would call Ephemerate a synergy card. You do have to control a creature to cast Ephemerate, but it's just so strong, and the boxes it asks you to check are just so minimum. It's really easy to play that in most any deck. Kind of like I wouldn't call Smuggler's Copter a synergy card because you have to control the creature. The creature only needs one power that just makes it so really easy to check the boxes of putting that card in your cube. A card that people talk about a lot is not being a synergy card is Fable of the Mirrorbreaker because on raid it's just so powerful. And there's there's stuff you can explore. There's like decks and environments where I think you can make an argument that Fable of the Mirrorbreaker can be a synergistic card, but the box that it mostly checks is just being an individually powerful card. And the more fables, captures, lightning bolts, thought seizes that are in your environment, the less players are going to be paying any mind to any synergies that you wish to be explored instead. The next category I want to talk about is individually powerful synergy cards. These are cards that are just strong enough to play on rate, but they don't see the widespread adoption that you see of cards like Cryptic Command and Thought Seas. These are not best in class, these cards are just strong, and then ultimately something happens within the texture of the deck that puts them over and allows one or a smaller range of decks to capitalize on these powerful cards. So in the Fairy's deck, I'm talking about Bitter Blossom, Muta Vault, Vendillion Click. Certainly when it comes to Mutavault and Vendillion Click, like this is just one of the strongest lands ever printed. It definitely was a huge standout both times, and it was legal in standard. Vindilian Click, when it was printed, one of the strongest to maybe the strongest blue creature printed at the time. It certainly has been outclassed in a number of ways. But these cards showed up in fairies specifically because Mutavault, by virtue of having Changeling, was a fairy. Vendillion Click, of course, is a fairy. There's synergies happening there, even though you could play games where individually, on their own power level, by virtue of their own rate, these cards could win the game without capitalizing on synergies. That said, Mutavault wasn't showing up in the five color decks. Vendillion Click wasn't in every deck that could generate blue mana. Not every blue deck was interested in a creature, the same way every blue deck was interested in Cryptic Command. Bitter Blossom did show up in some other decks. There was some tokens decks that came in and out, but for the most part, Bitter Blossom being a kindred fairy was the big reason that the card saw play. It was massively powerful, but it was still a synergy card on some level. The five color decks also weren't playing Bitter Blossom, for example. So the way I think about individually powerful synergy cards is they are cards that you are just happy to play when you're working on a deck. They're cards that are probably going to be on your short list of cards that you want to play, and you'll play them largely on rate, but they will push you to explore some synergies. So all of these cards will play well with fairies and then Muta Vault, be by virtue of being a changeling, will kind of push you in any kind of type or direction. But Bedillion Click, Bitter Blossom, once you've already convinced yourself that these are strong cards to play, then it makes a lot of sense to look at cards that do synergize with their creature types or anything else going on with the card. When it comes to Cube, these are cards that players will draft highly because they are individually powerful, but then they will also go on to inform the kinds of synergies that a player might want to explore in drafting. These cards are important for archetype definition in high power environments. If you want players to do something more than just play all the powerful cards, adding a little bit more texture, getting some stuff on the high side of the power band that is synergistic on some level goes a long way into defining those fire environments. And as you move away from power maxing into more synergy-driven environments, these are the more ideal cards at the top of your power band. A good example of a card that's a synergistic, individually powerful card is fear of missing out. Two mana two three enchantment creature, when it enters, you discard a card and then draw a card. And if you have delirium, when it attacks, you can untap a creature and you get a second combat step. So just on rate, you got a two mana two three with some card filtering. Also, if your hand is empty, you do just draw a card. That's above rate when it comes to red cards. You can just play this in whatever deck, likely gonna show up in more aggressive decks than controlling decks, but then you start looking at playing this as a synergy card if you have madness or any kind of discard matters in the environment. If there's delirium going on, you can push that as a way to really leverage the body here to get really aggressive and deal a ton of damage. It's not just a card that you would play in any red deck, but it's a card that is pretty strong on rate and will get more powerful the more stuff that you have that speaks to the synergies that it can enable or synergize with. Current card design is very long on these kinds of cards for any kind of synergy you're looking to explore. Oftentimes with cards that can branch into multiple archetypes, even take Bristly Bill's Spine Zower, for example, uh two mana, two two with landfall to put a plus one plus one counter on a creature, and you can pay five mana to double counters on creatures. That's just a strong aggressive creature. But then it also scales with counter synergies, landfall. If you're going up to power maxing environments, bristly bill is just a full-on combo with Nadu Winged Wisdom. You can really go off with that, keep making landfall triggers, drawing more cards and putting more lands on the battlefield with the Nadu triggers. And that's really the beauty of this category of individually powerful synergy cards, is that they can show up and be appealing at a wide range of power levels. They do enough just to make decks abstractly, and if you work for it, they can contribute to really powerful engines if that's what you want to do. I'd be remiss if I didn't shout out Monastery Swift Spear here as well. Swift Spear is just a great one drop for any aggressive deck. One power and haste, you'll play this in a red beatdown deck, but where it's really going to shine is in decks that can consistently trigger prowess, especially in decks that have access to a lot of creatures with prowess, you can kind of scale up that way. So Monastery Swift Spear is just a card that if you are playing a red aggressive deck, you're happy to take it. Maybe it even is a card that you'll value highly because you know it's one of the stronger red one drops. But then if the environment is really reinforcing playing non-creature spells in an aggressive deck, if there's more prowess payoffs, this can be a really strong synergistic part of a larger engine. Individually powerful synergy cards are the category that I feel is most important for developing synergy-driven environments when it comes to my more synergistic cube environments. This is the category I tend to use the heaviest touch with. These are cards that players are happy to pick up early and will regularly make decks, whether the synergies come together or not, so people can at least play games, but they will incentivize players to explore synergies, which is really what you're trying to do when you design a synergy-driven environment. So individually powerful synergy cards, really important, at least when it comes to my sensibilities, and that's going to be for higher power level synergistic environments, admittedly, but not power maxing. You're still going to be exploring synergies just with cards that players can more comfortably latch on to with first picks. The cards like Bitter Blossom, which are just strong, but will push you in a specific direction. Which brings us to the category of individually weak synergy cards. These are cards that are generally not going to be exciting as individual pieces of cardboard are going to be more reliant on other cards to sometimes play at all, but generally to be worth the mana and the card that you invest in them. So the two examples that I want to talk about in Demir Fairies here are Spellstutter Sprite and Mistbind Click. Spellstutter Sprite is a two-mana creature. When it enters, you can counter a spell with mana value X or less, where X is the number of fairies you control. So costing two, and as a baseline, if the Spell Stutter Sprite is still alive when its trigger resolves, you can counter a one mana spell. So you're trading down on mana there. That's tough. You're not going to catch your opponent's one mana creature their turn one play. With your spellstorder sprite, you just won't have the mana to do that. So you want to make sure you're getting a good clip of fairies so you can actually counter something meaningful as the game progresses. Really important interaction in the fairies deck was having Bitter Blossom on turn two, which would give you a stream of fairies. You can spell stutter sprite something as the game goes along. The lower mana value of Your cube, Spell Shutter Spike could play more as the game progresses. There's just going to be more one mana spells being cast, but for the most part, it's not a very exciting just individual card. I did have it in the tempo tube for a while. That's a cube that has a good amount of zero and one mana stuff. A lot more one than zero, but anyway, even still, it was a card where you spent two mana on it. Sure, it's a counter spell, but it didn't really feel great as an individual card. Kind of need more stuff going on with it. And to be clear, playing a bunch of fairies is not the only way to leverage a spell stutter sprite. It's a creature that's carried a lot of Umazawa's JTAs in its time. Putting a Sword of Fire and Ice, just strong equipment with a 1-1 flash flyer, that can be real, but it's just not the most exciting body. There's often going to be stronger individual creatures to play, is kind of the point of trying to get across here. And then when it comes to Mistbind Click, this is a card that you just can't put in a deck on its own. It has an ability called Champion, where when it enters, you have to champion a creature for it to stay in play, otherwise, you have to sacrifice it. When you do champion a fairy with Mistbind Click, it's a 4-4 flash flyer for four. And when you champion a fairy, you get to tap all lands your opponent controls. And this was a really powerful card in standard. The reason that you're regularly not going to see it in Cube is because having a high enough volume for fairies is a pretty tall order, it's very parasitic, but it's very strong once you check the right boxes. Mistbind Click was one of the stronger cards in the deck, but it's individually weak because you can't just put Mistbind Click in a deck. To the extent that you can cast Spell Stutter Sprite as your only fairy, you just can't do that when Mistbind Click actually just requires a second fairy to function at all. So that's why it's individually weak, even though it is a powerful synergy card. If you have the right deck, Mistbind Click is very strong. And it does highlight something that I do want to highlight about individually weak synergy cards is that Mistbind Click was part of what really made Fairies a dominant deck. It's something that was referred to as the squeeze with Cryptic Command and Mistpine Click. If your Fairy's opponent had access to four mana, they could have Mistbind Click or Cryptic Command at any time. That could mean in your upkeep, they're tapping your Lance down, that could mean in combat they're flashing any 4-4 blocker, that could mean at the end step they're flashing in a 4-4 attacker, they could counter any spell, bounce any permanent, tap all of your creatures, and that's just so much stuff that you have to consider when they just sit with four mana up, and that was one of the real strengths of the Fairy's deck. And so what I'm highlighting there is when it comes to individually weak synergy cards, they can really shine if they properly subsidize individually powerful cards. If they are on the level of the strongest cards abstractly, or sometimes even stronger, it can be ideal if you're going for a synergy driven environment to really make it so your synergies, your A plus B, is stronger than the sum of the parts, then that's where these cards can really shine. These cards won't make every deck. There's games where you withdraw them and they won't really play at all. But when they do their thing, these cards are really going to shine and reward players for exploring synergies. Another thing worth discussing here is there's a pretty big difference between playing four copies of whatever card you want in Constructed and drafting a singleton cube is that the well runs dry pretty quickly for these uh individually weak synergy cards, the ones that can really reward you for exploring a synergy. In constructed, you load up on four spellshetter sprite, you load up on four mistbind click, and these cards are going to be strong in a lot of your games, so you just need to draw the right combinations of cards. When it comes to a singleton cube, then you start having to add more fairies. You just need a lot of fairies for mistbind click to play at all, for spellsutter sprite to be effective against more expensive spells, and you start playing cards like Cloud Sprite, one mana, one one flyer can't block non-flying creatures. That card is never going to reward you as an individual card for exploring the synergy. If you draft that, you don't see spellslutter sprite, you just are playing this evasive creature with a blocking destriction. Maybe you can put an equipment on it, it can still play with some of the stuff that spellsutter sprite plays with, but it's just a very weak card. Its sealing is about the sealing of any other one mana evasive creature, and having the blocking restriction, that's just downside there. Even if you have just a one-mana, one-one flyer with the right creature type, like you'll play that in a deck where you have some payoffs, but it's gonna have a very low floor, same as these other cards that can function as payoffs, but it's only those payoff cards that can actually realize a higher seeing. The cloud sprites are not really gonna put your deck over on their own. And that's what a lot of the cards are going to look like as you get into more niche and parasitic space when it comes to cubes, certainly for singleton cubes. It is totally fine for a cube to go long on these individually weak cards, but the more of that cloud sprite kind of stuff that you have, the more you have cards that don't amount to much on their own, the even lighter touch you're going to want to have with the individually powerful cards. You can go still kind of long on the powerful synergy cards because they will push players to be more incentivized to play the individually weak synergy cards. But Bitter Blossom, for example, actually doesn't ask you to play Cloud Sprite the way that Spellsutter Sprite and Mistbind Click do. So I think the longer you go on the image individually weak synergy cards, you do have to be even more mindful of the individually powerful synergy cards as well. Just kind of the more weak stuff, especially when you get into the territory of the cards that can contribute to the sealing of a different card, but just are kind of individually weak and don't have a pipe dream that they can contribute on their own, the more you have to be mindful of the stuff at the top of the power band if you expect or you want players to play these cards at all. A good example of an individually weak synergy card that contributes to a lot of the right decks in Cube is Mishra's Bobble. Zero mana artifact, sacrifice it, look at the top card of target player's deck. At the beginning of the next upkeep, you draw a card. Now, this card, if it's in your opening hand, it just kind of mucks up what your keep looks like. You don't know if it's going to be a land, you don't know if it's going to be a seven drop, you know, depending on the context of your deck. It just kind of reduces your information when it comes to keep or mulligan. When you top deck it, that slow candrip means you are waiting a turn to actually draw your card for turn. But with some synergies, Mishra's Bobble can really get put over in a lot of ways. Kind of the most common one is Bishop's Bobble and a Fetchland. This is why Mishra's Bobble is a constructed staple in non-rotating formats. You can look at the top card of your deck with Mishra's Bobble before deciding if you want to crack a fetch land. Really, any shuffle effect plays here. At the top card of your deck, isn't what you want. You can shuffle before you get to draw that card at your next upkeep. So you can get another look at a random card and get some card selection for your zero mana artifact there. Can also be a thing that triggers prowess or flurry for Cory Steel Cutter. It is a card that helps enable delirium, really easy artifact to get into the graveyard, like a fear of missing out, plays really well with Mishra's Bobble. And also just emptying your hand, being an artifact for Affinity or just any artifact matters. Lot of reasons you would play Mishra's Bobble, but if you're just playing a deck like if any retail limited environment, if you put Mishra's Bobble into a core set, it's not strong in your Grizzly Bears deck. It's just not going to do anything alongside just generic creatures and removal spells. It's a pretty weak card, but with the right package, it has a ceiling that can get pretty strong. And on the topic of individually weak synergy cards, I do want to highlight a couple reactive options as well. On the topic of facilitating delirium, deadweight, pyrite spell bomb, removal spell that is an enchantment, removal spell that is an artifact. If you're going for artifacts matter, it's another way that pyrite spell bomb can shine there. Just having stuff that maybe is a little bit inefficient, you know, pyrite spell bomb, you are spending more mana, you are getting less than you do out of the card lightning bolt. But if you are exploring artifact synergies, there's a lot of ways that you can leverage pyrite spell bomb in ways that you couldn't leverage lightning bolt. Deadweight is not the best black removal spell. If you're just trying to kill, I don't know, a three toughness, one mana creature, fatal push is going to be much stronger against a number of creatures, but deadweight is going to be a card that's very good at enabling delirium. Maybe you have some enchantment matter package. There are other ways to take advantage of the card, and removal spells that cue into a theme, I think, are a really good nuts and bolts way to add some definition to archetypes and environment to get players to draft cards that are just generally interactive, but then also do support synergies as well. Individually weak synergy cards can offer a lot of definition to archetypes and play environments, but they can be very specific and parasitic, and I personally try to employ them with a light touch. With this category, it's more important to find the right cards that offer enough flexibility or enough of exactly what one or more archetypes in an environment need. Otherwise, you risk seeing a lot of individually weak synergy cards in sideboards or decks that are long and weak cards, which can lead to disinteresting games. And to be fair, you could be interested in just lower power games, lower power environments. If that's your thing, then by all means, you are going to want to go longer on individually weak synergy cards, where I personally prefer to have more individually powerful synergy cards. Reversing that for a lower power environment, that makes a lot of sense. I am mostly speaking to my own personal sensibilities. And that brings us to the last category of card I want to talk about that I think that Demir Fairies from 2008 Standard can inform for Cube Design. And I'm just going to refer to these as on-curve cards. These are cards that are just right on rate for the amount of mana that you play them. They can be placeholders. When you look at an individual deck, when you talk about a constructed environment, these are not the power outliers, these are not the strongest cards, these are not the synergistic cards. These are the cards that you play because they're the next best options that will round out a deck. You play them and you hope that something better is printed in the next set. If we're talking about in a draft, these are cards that you are happy to put in unless you see a power outlier in the next pack that maybe don't synergize but generally play in games. As a cube designer, I actually employ a lot of on-curve cards as placeholder slots in a design. If I have a card that's too weak or too strong and I want to cut it, I can always sub out just an on curve, just a rate card that I know will play fine and be worth the mana a player plays for it, but it's not exciting. These are just cards that make decks and play fine. So the two examples from fairies here are gonna be Agony Warp and Broken Ambitions. You have a two mana removal spell and a two plus mana, X mana counter spell, where if Mana Leak enters the format, yeah, you're gonna play Mana Leak over Broken Ambitions. The Fairy's deck isn't trying to mill you, it's not going to try to win clashes, it's really not what's happening in any of the games, almost never. Mana Leak is just a more efficient counter spell. Um you play your one, you have the one terror in Auntie Malin's Fairy's deck because you do play against a decent clip of black cards. So Agony Warp will answer many of the threats, but if you were to introduce some more generically powerful removal spell for the environment, it would not be difficult for the fairies deck to move off of Agony Warp because it's not one of the strongest cards in the deck, and it doesn't contribute to the synergies in any way whatsoever. And while the rate cards in fairies are a couple interactive options, this can also be creatures, like when it comes to cube draft. It's pretty common. I'll play a 2 mana 3-2 with some text in any deck, but it's often the kind of thing that I'm looking to replace with something more synergistic, something a little bit more powerful, but a 2 mana 3 power creature is a card that can close a lot of games of magic. You're just trying to deal 20 damage. It's also something that can block, it can pressure planeswalkers, so cheap creatures or just creatures that give you your mana's worth without synergizing, or easily something you can just kind of fit into any deck because they just play in games of magic. Card selection can be something that is very commonly just an on-curve kind of card. Really funny aspect of Auntie Malin's fairy deck. There's one ponder in the sideboard. Um, this is a really fun, antiquated aspect of where magic deck building was at that time. When Ponder was first printed, we did not appreciate what we had. And you know, some of it is that there weren't fetch lands, it was harder to really leverage Ponder where you could keep one of the top three and shuffle the rest. If you weren't looking for a very specific thing, Ponder wasn't the best way to do it without any kind of shuffle effects necessarily. But that said, we also weren't playing as many ponders as we should have been in Legacy. So the one of sideboard Ponder is very amusing, but is a good example. Uh card selection can be an on-curve card. Now, to be clear, Ponder is maybe more of a standout individually powerful card, certainly a card that you're happy to have in any combo deck, but card selection stuff maybe in the more impulse space is more replaceable, but you will just play it in any deck because it plays fine and you generally get your mana's worth on it. When it comes to on-curve cards and cube design, the more synergistic you want the environment to be, these tend to be cards that I phase out of my cubes. Maybe when I'm just looking for a black card, I need one more black card to make my cube the minimum number of cards to play, I'll add some generic Doomblade effect. But then the more I play the environment, if there's specific synergies or archetypes I'm looking to reinforce, I really want to turn that Doomblade into a dead weight. Uh, if I'm trying to enforce fairies, make fairies playable and more interested in a card like Pepper Smoke, which draws a card if you control the fairy, even though it's kind of a weaker removal spell, it at least signals something that's going on that I would want players to explore by being a kindred fairy card and telling you, hey, fairies are supported here. Um but there's nothing wrong with just playing on-curved cards. In fact, the original recipe tubert is kind of all on curve cards all the way down. There are power outliers in that cube. Some cards are stronger than either others, but for the most part, I'm not really doing archetypes, I'm not supporting many explicit synergies. The original recipe tubert was largely just an exercise and seeing what a playable 180-card cube environment looked like. And a lot of that did involve just trying to have all the pieces being broadly on some level interchangeable. And so if you just care about an environment being playable on curve cards, maybe that's your ideal play experience. I mean, I think that the original Recipe Tubird is a very fun cube. I still cube it from time to time, even though I have many other cubes to choose from, with more specific uh things that I enjoy about magic, more specific archetypes and synergies. But I think that for a lot of people in the cube space, they really want to do something more specific. They really want to drive synergistic archetypes. Synergy is such a commonly used word by cube designers. So on-curve cards can be cards that you use to just get the requisite number of playables. They can be placeholders as you phase out something that's too weak or too strong and wait to find something that is a better fit for your environment. These are cards that will allow you to play games. Uh, they get on base, they make decks. These are kind of nuts and bolts stuff that you can easily slot in the environment, and the more specific you want your environment to be, the more you will phase cards like this out for either individually weak or even powerful synergy cards to push players and environments in specific directions. And that's gonna do it for my look at 2008 Standard Demir Fairies regarding what this deck taught me about magic. What I believe about this deck can be applied to cube design, my breakdown of individually powerful cards, individually powerful synergistic cards, individually weak synergistic cards, and just on-curve nuts and bolts cards, and how these four categories matter to players, drafters, and cube designers, and how you can modulate those knobs in your own design. I largely offered insights on my own sensibilities, but I did try to uh paint this in a way where you can apply what you like more or less. If you're power maxing, you go for the powerful cards, of course. If you are trying to get into more synergistic environments, depending on the power level you want, you can lean more into the individually powerful synergy cards or the individually weaker synergy cards. And really, no matter what you're doing, those on-curve cards they can be placeholders, they can be permanent fixtures of your environment. It is just good to have cards that make decks that people will more or less happily play in any kind of play environment. So thank you for listening today. I'm enjoying going down these weirder, really specific lanes when it comes to forming my thoughts and my perception on cube design. I think that it can be really unapproachable to get into really deep abstract theory. So finding something concrete to latch onto, I think, is really useful in terms of both solidifying my own thoughts and then trying to share those with others. So thanks again for listening. Definitely let me know what you think of this one. I do intend to do more episodes in this space. I personally think that this is good, so hopefully you all like it as well. Maybe there's a specific kind of deck you're interested in, insights on. I do know Bloodbraid Elf Junt, it's definitely on the list. I'm gonna do that at some point. I think that that deck does offer some really specific things to the world of magic and did shape the game moving forward from that time period. So it's gonna be a cool one to look back on. But for now, thanks again for listening, for doing whatever you do to support the podcast, for taking the time to like, comment, review, share, subscribe, all that jazz. Take care of yourself, look out for your neighbors, be well, be good, and I will be back next week talking more cube. Later, gamers.