Roto Drafting SamP's Arena Legal Cube Part 4

Welcome back! Let's recap what we have in the deck so far: 

1. Demonic Tutor 2. Currency Converter 3. Mox Opal 4. Deathrite Shaman 5. Lurrus, of the Dream-Den 6. The Meathook Massacre 7. Marionette Apprentice 8. Chthonian Nightmare 9. Bitterblossom 10...

.....Agatha's Soul Cauldron 

We're now in round 10 now of this rotisserie draft. Once you get to the round 21, you get two pics per round. Just something to pay attention to as we move into the next couple of days. 

    I'm having a great time and the cards that I've identified that work well with my strategy are kind of pushing me in certain directions which I think is pretty cool. I'm trying to find the best synergy pieces while also making a functional deck. After Agatha's Soul Cauldron I realized no wouldn't had taken Staff of the Storyteller. Staff is a newer to Arena card and I played with it a bunch, so I know how strong it can be. It obviously plays really well with my first couple of pics. I can just imagine being able to put out a staff and a bitter blossom. That would be amazing. 

 

Right after I took Staff the other card that I was hoping to wheel in the next six pics got taken and so a little bummed about that and that was Voice of Victory. Voice and Staff go really well together and also works really well with my sacrifice plan. So on the way back a lot of people started taking lands and I decided I really needed some good hard interaction. It also worked with my game plan of graveyard and so I ended up taking Bitter Triumph which I feel like is one of the best black removal spells in this environment. It hits creatures or planeswalkers, it's instant speed and it's only two mana. 

    After that it looks like we had some people decide to move into a little bit more into black in the next couple of pics. Someone ended up taking unearth and it looks like they're playing a good Jund game plan. The mono red player decided to start taking some blue cards with Spell Pierce which was really a smart pickup. The mono blue player pretty much has all the answers that he would ever need, but Spell Pierce is a really nice card to have access to versus that kind of a deck. 

    Toxic Deluge got taken, followed by a couple of nice white cards and the mono blue player is kind of sticking with his game plan. There's also a Wrenn and Six / Strip Mine player is pretty much mono green at this point and over the next several pics he gets a lot of really strong payoffs like Rofellos, Nissa, Who Shakes the World and Endurance. That green deck in the mono  blue deck look really good so far. A lot of these decks look fantastic, but I'm just calling out some notable decks that are in the pool right now. 

    After the Bitter Blossom + Staff pick, the person that I'm passing to towards the top end of the draft has two pics. They ended up clearly going into an Aristocrats deck with Yawgmoth, Thran Physician and Priest of Forgotten Gods. I have to be really careful about passing too many Aristocrats type pieces that way. Token makers especially, because I feel pretty confident that they're going to contest some of those cards. 

    After I take Bitter Triumph I started thinking about my fixing and also my Mox Opal is looking a little lonely. I have the Agatha Soul Cauldron but I didn't have much else as far as cheap artifacts to go with it and so I ended up with Chromatic Star to pair with something like Umbral Collar Zealot, which is a new card from Edge of Eternities. It works with my game plan of draining people out with Marionette Apprentice. Chromatic Star says, whenever it leaves the battlefield you draw card, so if I sac it with the Zealot for free, I just get to draw card and I can play it back with Lurrus every turn. If the Zealot gets answered or gets put into the graveyard, I can use ASC to give any of my creatures that same ability which I feel like is just super strong synergy. 

   

After that, I ended up getting my first fetch land and unfortunately the only one left at this point which was Prismatic Vista. I followed up Prismatic Vista with some more cards that work well with Agatha Soul Cauldron and Lurrus; Cathar Commando, Selfless Spirit. I feel like Selfless Spirit  and Bitter Blossom is going to be really really nice. Cathar Commando to be able to deal with my opponents artifacts and enchantments is important. There's a few of the Overlords in the cube, there is Retrofitter Foundry, Smuggler's Copter, Fear of Missing Out, Esika's Chariot just a name a couple. These are the types of syngeries that also advance my game plan. I want to be able to one for 1 or 2 for 1 my opponents, stall the game out and pull ahead with card advantage using Lurrus or land a Bitter Blossom early that continues to pressure even after the dust clears. My threats are cheap, interactive and difficult to remove without graveyard hate(which there isn't as much available after Deathrite and ASC are taken). 

    Okay so my last couple pics I'm looking at the cardpool and some things are drying up. I'm interested in fixing for the most part. I'm also looking at the person next to me who is also in black/white and there's some black cards that are getting contested. I'm thinking about jumping into red for some of the artifacts/sacrifice synergies. There's several cards that I think will be really really good and so I'm going to take I take some fixing here around picks 18 and 19 with Godless Shrine and Talisman of Conviction which is the boros talisman. These are the Talisman is a really boring pic but I think it glues my mox opal pick up. Even though my curve is really low I do have a lot of mana of sinks, especially with currency converter. I do plan on playing cards that scale into the late game. So these are all things that I'm considering right now. I'm also really interested in solidifying the mana base probably taking up some more interaction to go with that bitter Triumph. 

 

 I took some time yesterday and looked at the entire list again. If I do end up getting into red a little bit, there are a lot of good removal spells Mardu colors. There is not a lot of token makers in the Mardu colors that I want per se. So I think my next couple of pics are going to be hanger back walker or Jadar. Jadar is a two drop that makes at 2/2 decayed zombie every turn. Hangerback Walker is another artifact that I can play on turn two or four that dies into thopters so it works really well with my game plan. 

  This format seems super fun to me. I've enjoyed about the cube, thinking about drafting like all day for like a week or two and I'm excited to play this deck. I feel like the deck is going to be super sweet. There's some very strong decks here so that's something. One thing I want to take into consideration is how my deck lines up against certain matchups. I do feel like if I continue to get some more removal my deck can go toe-toe with a lot of the creature based strategies in the queue.

 I'm a little concerned about the mono green and the monoblue player just because of the just because of the fact that they haven't had to take any fixing and they've got just really premium spells all the way up and down their list with a lot of interaction. Also green has a ton of graveyard interaction in the cube. Endurance was a nice pickup. The mono green player has access to Scavenging Ooze and the Bloomborrow one that exiles cards for one mana.