Cubes, Decks And Blocks

Hi,

So after a bit of a break from the blog I thought I would run through what my current magic projects are. I've had a pretty unsuccessful run at FNM's recently with my last one resulting in a 2-2 7^th place finish with a poor man's R/B stensia hall. Think the Ken Adam's build from the invitational without batterskull(!!) And include a pristine talisman. Oh Dear.

From this, as much as I enjoyed playing this, I found myself just wanting to play blue, specifically the blue white builds. I really feel that it's the place to be at the moment, and with strong cards such as Snapcaster mage, Phantasmal Image and Delver of secrets in Blue alone, with the strong splashable white I can't see any reason not to be there.

Now as much as it pains me to admit, I'm not much of a deck builder. I do enjoy playing decks, testing and trying to figure out what is good and bad, and what doesn't perform overly well in the metagame that I play in. I would love to have more time to actively do this with some friends round a kitchen table, and discuss. University does not really allow me to do this, so I have to resort to the "Net – deck" and basically do Live testing at Friday night magics. This is not optimal but hey ho better than nothing I guess.

Next week back to playing the UW "Illusions" build. I do feel a bit cheap calling it Illusions as It plays something like a total of 7 illusions across the 75, but I think it plays like a blue agro J.

*Aside*

I think I'll be changing the format of the blog so that instead of having a breakdown of what I did every day of the week to more of a general overview. This seems to be a bit of a more general blog layout and one that I don't have a problem with myself. Also with having the BlogSpot app on my phone now I may be able to kind of live blog/tweet shorter and sweet updates. Keep the content on the rise.

*End Aside*

Cubes

 
To the main content of the post:

I have decided to build a cube! Now I'm not going to assume that everyone knows what a cube is I'd like to point you in this direction. There are a few tabs on there that explain what a cube is and I believe also a couple of videos. So I've talked about having a cube for a little while but could never really decided how I wanted to approach it, until I stumbled across A one drop cube. I read the article and found it interesting, a cube that is designed for a smaller playgroup(2-4 players) and can be played relatively quickly. Looking over the list I decided to make a couple of decisions;

• Set a budget for the cards – I have not settled on a maximum of £12 a card. This may seem a little expensive and should cover most cards, but there is a certain Ancestral Recall on this list – and on certain sites this card alone is £300+
  
• For the cards that are a little expensive make alterations
  
• Include Unhinged and Unglued cards! – Not overly conventional but it could add an element of randomness and a bit of fun.
  
• There is no real time limit to get this together – As a student I live on a budget, but I don't really do too much so I can spare the odd bit of spare cash that I can start picking up some of the things on a list that I've now edited. I've been able to do this as I'm in a position that I'm relatively happy with my standard collection.
  

After a fair few hours of setting up an excel spread sheet of tracking what the cards I have and need to obtain are, I started the process of sorting through cards that I own. At the end of the weekend, and picking up an additional 6 cards at a FNM, my cube currently sits at a total of 67 of 180 cards. Slow progress is better than no progress!


 

Blocks

I'm going to keep this short and sweet. I own a MTGO account that I very rarely use, but after reading a few different articles, decided to pick up a few of the decks here as they are relatively cheap to acquire (I sold some of the cards I already had so effectively cost me nothing aside from my original investment). Now as they are block they develop with the inclusion of new expansions, so I'm looking forward to Dark Ascension and see where the two decks I have built develop with the community.

I'm going to set myself a challenge. It's fairly simple but I intend to pilot one of these decks to a standard FNM and see how well I can perform with it.

I won't reveal which one it is until I've played it.

Until next week, which I believe should involve a draft at FNM,


 
Adam - P.S I picked up a Twitter exlusive to this blog: 

@weekinmtg

the email address to this is also weekinmtg@gmail.com