Fixing Golgari In Cube | #93

In this episode of Powerful Nothing we take a look at how we can fix Golgari in Cube, how we can focus the general graveyard deck into something more focused and consistent, and look at a bunch of different decks you could run in your cube if the graveyard isn't your thing.

Card Gallery: https://moxfield.com/decks/S9bBROuLukCeUfgoQqoFug

Timecodes:
0:44 - Main Topic
6:08 - Chain of smog combos
14:29 - No. of things in graveyard matters
22:53 - Cards leaving your graveyard matters
27:57 - Different things in your graveyard matters (Delerium)
36:56 - Golgari Aggro
40:34 - Golgari Midrange
44:43 - Other Combos
46:52 - Lands
50:08 - Rec/Sur/Pod
56:38 - What are we running

Video Version: https://youtu.be/AdxyHIpx16U

A Comprehensive List of Cube Archetypes: https://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/the-game/the-cube-forum/articles-podcasts-and-guides/573818-a-comprehensive-list-of-cube-archetypes

My Cube: https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/sweet
The Treat Yourself Cube: https://cubecobra.com/cube/overview/treatyourself
James Cube: https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/ba642a54-a6c7-4587-b97e-1d95429c59b5
MTGO Vintage Cube: https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/modovintage

Social Links: https://linktr.ee/toosweetmtg

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Transcript

0:02

Hello everyone. Welcome back to Powerful Nothing and Magic The Gathering Q podcast. I'm your host, Dan, and as always, I'm joined by James. James. How are you doing this week? Yeah, I'm doing pretty well. I'm doing well. How are you? I'm doing all right. Thanks. We got a fun episode for everyone today. Today we're going to be looking at how to fix Go Gallery and Cube. Now, recently, we did an episode on how to fix a Lesniak, and I think we can all agree Celestia has more problems, but we got a lovely comment asking to do go going next and I thought I love go Gary. That's a great idea. Let's do that next. So before we get into that down in the show notes, there will be a card gallery, along with time codes. While you're down there, please consider giving the podcast a five star review. Thumbs up. All that goodness greatly helps us out. So with today, we are going to be focusing on how you can fix issues that generally come up with a Go Gallery section in high power level cubes. The stereotype is everyone. Everyone's first draft is you end up in a gold gallery jacket because you take your removal, you take your ramp. These are the things that we're told as magic players you need to focus on when you're drafting. But then we end up going 032A bunch of people playing blue cards or because it's 2026 mean if you're playing Boris cards. But like James, it's kind of like from a high level point of view. Kind of like why does go going mid-range tend to not work in like higher power in like higher power level cubes? Yeah, I mean, that's sort of mid-range stack. People often just prioritize three and four mana squares with lots of words, some of them, right, because they look like the best cards in magic. Exactly. Exactly where to make our level. And, people are coming at it with the mindset of limited right. And these look like classic limited bombs and people take them. And the problem is you're not you're not quick enough to go under the, the blue decks and you don't have enough card advantage to have enough late game to, to play a long game against them. And you end up just having a very poor matchup there. And theoretically, that means, okay, you should do better against for smaller decks, for more aggressive decks. But in reality, like the power stacks of the well. So bypass in general have have staying power and for late game as well. So it's not like you're even necessarily beating up on those stacks and you kind of end up in this awkward middle ground where you're playing the lame game to a late game that you can't win. And, you end up in a very tough spot. Yeah, exactly. And then kind of as we kind of come down the power level, where in theory, like where mid-range is better go, Gary can still struggle here as well. And it often comes down to like effectively like how we're building our graveyard deck because like Gregor decks I've seen from a from a lot of cubelet stats just do lack focus like that. There's this idea of like we throw in a stitch as a player, we start in a spider spawning and some of the graveyard Matters cards, and then kind of like we call it a deck, but kind of like from my experience anyway, kind of those also tend to not work as well. I'm kind of. James, what's your experience with? I'm like, go Gary, graveyard soup section. Is that kind of you've played in like lower power level cubes? Yeah. It's really easy to be coming up with a list of archetypes and say, okay, well, God, Gary is going to be graveyards. Great. So then what I'm going to do is I'm going to look at all my favorite track formats, which all have a gold Gary graveyard deck, and I'm going to pick out my favorite vases and uncommon smaller foes. And those are going in my gold slot. And that's what Michael Gary Deck is doing. And the problem is that the gold Gary graveyard decks and all these trap formats wanted slightly different things, right? Some of them maybe wanted you to have specifically creatures in your graveyard. Some of them wants you to get specific cards, you know, graveyard to recover and flash back some of them just wanted a big number of cards in your graveyard so you could delve from away. And while some amount of generic self mail is going to enable all of that stuff, you actually need specific cards and you need your graveyard cards to work together. It is not generally just a case of I'm if I have eight cards of my graveyard and all of these cards are going to be brilliant, like take a card like Spider Spalding for example, it's very easy to build a really good self mil deck for can put off this deck in its graveyard by ten six, but it only has like ten creatures say by the spawning still sucks. And if you're trying to support spider spawning, that's fine, but you need to really prioritize self mil cards for, creatures. You need to enable the gold card. We get to get to that creature, count. That might not play so well with some of the other graveyard themes or with cards that, you know, exact mechanics like delver, things like scavenge, which sometimes crop up in this great fail section that actually exile cards from your grave as part of a cast. You can only spot so many of those without impacting your other graveyard mass cards. So you need to think about how all of these graveyard mass cards again, to actually mesh and play together and come together for a coherent plan. If some of them are leaning very aggressive and some of them are much more grindy, again, there's a little bit of tension there. It's not for these graveyard decks complex, but as a cube designer, you need to be thinking a little bit more deeply than just God. Garvey is going to be doing a graveyard thing. Yeah, exactly. So the plan for today is we're going to break down a bunch of different archetypes in a bunch of different ways. You can kind of lean your go GA section to make it more focused, and to give it the best chance of putting up the numbers that you want from a deck in your cube. We're going to try and give you those ideas. Yet, as I just what I was, I want to focus them around what you want to do. Probably about half of these will be graveyard related strategies, but but half of them are not. There is other things you can do and go, Gary, that is cool and good and we will try and touch on as many as possible in the next hour or so. So let's actually start off with the package that is kind of leading the charge and power cube in terms of what go, Gary. What like what a what a got Gary deck can be built towards. And that's the chain of smoke combo. Now I'm not gonna spend too much time on this as we did kind of touch on it recently as it was brought up in the in our conversations of recent updates to the mic Go Vintage Cube. But I'll rate Chain of Smoke because it's an old one, but a good one. Chain of smoke is one of the black for sorcery. Target player discards two cards. That player may copy the spell and may choose a new target for that copy. James. How are we combo going off with this innocuous sorcery from onslaught? Yes, the trick with this card is that whilst it is an okay as a soul of mind, what with downside is itself how it was. Imagine fight for two mana. And that's fine. You can play it like that. But as a combo card. What I'm actually looking to do here is target ourselves with chain of Smoke. We just got two cards. Not a great deal. That then gives us the choice to what's left. We want to copy it, and we can copy it, and we can target ourselves again. And it doesn't matter if we don't have cards in hand. We can just keep keep copying it, keep targeting ourselves. And basically, if we have anything that is triggering our first copying that spell, we can go infinite with that. So the premier option here is with a bloom offenses. This is a green, a black for two to from original strict seven as mage craft. So whenever you cast or copy a spell each finally loses one life and you gain one life. So that's actually a really nice clean two card for mana combo, right? Generally, two card combos cost a lot more than that to assemble a total, you don't have to untap with any creatures, anything like that. Pretty nice, pretty clean. We like it. That being said, this combo has a lot of this attached. There's a reason that I like it is powerful, and I think it does earn a spot in these high power level cubes. But it is it is not that often that you actually see a play being played off. A big issue is that if your opponent has creature removal, it's not just like, oh, my combo didn't work. I'll keep playing the game because if you cast your with Liam Francis, you cast your chain of smoke, you target yourself. Your opponent doesn't have to respond at that point. Your opponent can then let you discard two cards. If you set cards in hand, they can let you just got two more cards until you have no cards left, and then they can kill with Liam Francis. And at that point the game is kind of over and you have lost, so if I'm playing this combo, I rarely value hand disruption or any even just a way to see my opponent's hand. Like a good taxing probe goes a long way here, because you really can't just be jamming this into open mana most of the time. It is very high risk, but it's super efficient when it works. It's really good. No, exactly. So, so this is kind of I'm not going to call it a deck because the the Mega man just doesn't really work with like archetypes. It's more like a bunch of good cards and then some cool packages to kind of make a deck. That's kind of what Chain of Smoke is. It's chain of smoke with the Bloom Apprentice. And what's the other one? It doesn't it doesn't win the game straight away, but it does. Yeah. Sedgemoor, which is the, the one you see as the sort of back up with a bloom, Francis. A lot of the time, the other side of sexual, which is a much better card on its own. It's a free man of free to and maybe has a board cost and mage craft to make A11 past. So kind of a legit card on its own. Way worse as a combo piece, because you give your opponent the chance to untap. But it is nice that there is some redundancy in the deck, like nothing replaces chain of smoke. But on the other half we do have, we do have, two bits. I kind of like if you wanted to support this package in your cube panel, but as James, I seem touch on things like hand attack which which you will generally see in the black section anyway, but just making sure you have it there. So this deck so this deck can protect itself. But also I'm assuming James because it's a combo. Things like demonic Tutor or other ways of searching cards from your deck are going to be things you want to run to make this deck actually come together. Yeah for sure. But, it's a yeah, even you'll like for lower tier tutors like Imperial Seals and whatnot when you have a very efficient two card combo like this face card saw fairly justify that place in a way which they wouldn't otherwise. Another interesting thing I've been able to do before with this combo is that if you have exactly spell seeker in your deck, then all of a sudden your creature chooser stuff can set up all of this combo. So you can like buffing part into the whole combo, which is quite cool, but which is maybe a little banished, but like does does come up, you know, yeah, I think this can be. Yeah, it if you have a ways to make it consistent and you have the right description, this can be pretty nice. I will say, though, it very much doesn't need to be in a straight green black deck. I'd say probably the most common place. You see, this is like, you know, splashing it in blue, black or even blue green. Just having the SIM card selection out of blue goes a long way in this sort of combo deck. No, it makes sense. I kind of like when we've talked about this before, I think that my judgment of this package is judged on the fact that it's in the go. Vintage cube. I personally think about power level point of view. It's not a it's not meant to go vintage power level, if that makes sense, compared to a lot of the other things that you see in that cube. But it is something unique that go gallery colors and go gallery splashes can do which is which is why I think it's there isn't an extra two card combo. And and in the Boris madness world we're in now, just having more combos that are playable is nice. James, what power level of cube do you think can support the chain of small combos? Like like do you, do you like it in the Mega Vintage cube or do you like it somewhere a bit lower power level? Like do you see it potentially showing up in a more like mid-range or budget environment? Because like, I think, Chain of Smoke is about a tenner, but I can't imagine any of the other pieces any other, any of the major craft pieces are too expensive. I wouldn't put it in like a budget cube, because I think it's just not the same experience that you sign up for with that sort of cube. Like, I'm going to have drafted my, like, janky bunch of cards advantage nonsense, and my opponent is going to kill me on set free. You know, and, generally in that sort of cube, you just don't have that option, right? It's not that it would necessarily be like the best card in the cube, but it's I think in most of those cubes, it's not the play experience you're going for. In the vintage cube. I don't mind it. I think it is sort of at the lower end of the power level of cards in that cube. But something has to be on the lower end, and I'm kind of here for having more stuff like that was often more mediocre features that attack and block, you know, that's kind of enough of it. So it's a my main experience of it was in my unpowered vintage cube, where I didn't really like it that much, but I can see a world where just having like my, my own potential, you doesn't have to monitor you turn it. I can see a world which is having more just like super vision shooter because like, it's a thing of like you take demonic shooter early because it's good and great, and then you see chain smoke later because it can wail and stuff. I can see a world where kind of like, you can come into this deck and like, you can have a good control deck and then that that's your win con. That's kind of the point of trying to smoke. There is more of a package. Yeah, yeah. But to me that it is one for higher I level cubes. But there is probably a world where it would be okay in like not budget, but kind of like in cubes where there are other combos and you're looking for something for the gallery to do, but you don't have like the full on tutor or like fast manner to really kind of like make this consistently a turn 2 or 3 win. That might be a nice place for it. Yeah, I see that for sure. All right. Let's keep it going. Let's move on to some of the graveyard decks. Probably the meat and veg of this episode in terms of just like what go gory is like the amount of sets. Well, that's what's called are we doing graveyard marvelous. But let's actually dive into that and actually kind of we split it down into three different decks, three different graveyard decks. The first thing we can break it down to is number of creatures in your graveyard. Now some cards do care about permanents, but the majority of graveyard matters cards for a long time anyway. Carry out the number of creatures. So that's the kind of the first one we're going to be looking at. We will be looking at things, leaving your graveyard and delirium in a little bit, but this is specifically number of creatures in your graveyard. This is the spider spawning style deck. I'll read spiders hunting for those unaware. Spiders spawning is fauna green for a sorcery. It reads create A12 green spider creature token with reach for each feature card in your graveyard, and it has flashback for six and a black. So why? This is great. Integrated. Our deck is we fill our deck full of self, no cards, we mellow all of our stuff and then even if we mill the spider spawning, we can still make a big, army of tokens. But there's a bunch of other cards that do a similar thing. Like basically, if you go to any kind of of the old industry assets, you'll see some cards that do this. But we have a card like Jared Go Gary Lich Lord Jared is black, black, green, green for a tutu, living creature, zombie, elf. It gets a it gets plus one plus one for each creature card in your graveyard. And it has pay one a black and a green to sacrifice another creature. Each opponent misses life equal to sacrifice creature's power. And you can sacrifice a swamp in a forest or return it from your grave up to your hand. These are kind of like signpost standard pay offs for this deck. They are either cards that make us creatures equal number creatures in a graveyard. All that cause they get bigger, equal to number of creatures. In our graveyard. We're combining these with cards like, say, to Wayfinder and Stitch supplier. These are cheap creatures. They are 1 or 2 mana that come down and put some cards from our deck into our graveyard. That's kind of how we are making the deck work. Some other nice payoffs for this type of deck is a card like Living Death. This gets better if you have ways of returning it from the graveyard in case you kill it. But living death basically, it's sort of a board wipe. If you just mill a bunch of stuff into your bin, it basically resets. It basically swaps the board with your grave up there. It basically swaps both players boards with their graveyard. So you cause living death with a stocked graveyard, and you probably then win the game. Change from your experience, how have you, how have you seen these these upper decks play out? Yeah, these can work quite well. And the nice thing here is there's a pretty big range of payoffs depending on, sort of what power level you're going for. You're not going to run out of them. There's loads of them. And then a few of us are, is only a thousand dies. This one I quite like. That's a nice. Yeah. Six minus two freedom. But at each of these, make one bonds equal to the number of cards in graveyard. Number of creatures in graveyard. And you can play go and sack a creature to get in life and work hard cards quite strong. These generally play out is very grindy. You're going to pay a bunch of little dudes you kind of block with, then you're going to stock up your graveyard. And then from sort of ten, five, ten, six, you're going to start playing these haymakers. That actually start paying you off. It's generally not for like Turbo Mill myself. I throw you out with things. For Kaplan, it's more, it's more playing that long game. But it can certainly combine with some more aggressive tools to find sportsman like finish line or whatever. You know, that can be a very aggressive card. But, yeah, in general it's going to be a grind deck with things like for enablers. I'll take I think Stitcher Survive is very overrated for this sort of deck. Like unless you're very, very rarely all in. I'd much rather have like a two mana one that gets me a card back than the one mana just Melfi, but I'm just kind of down the card because my one one isn't really a card. Yeah, yeah, I think I'd agree with that. It's it's why why? I think it's why I could see play. It's because it is specifically a creature. Like I like it more than just like in this build. Anyway, I like it more than just a an enchantment that Mills or something like that. But but but like I think it's I say this is what I would consider to be the stock graveyard. Go, go like someone saying we don't talk about graveyard. This is what I'm thinking of. And this can see play in most power level of cubes. It probably doesn't get like spiders warnings specifically. I think it's too slow for a for a lot of cubes, but the kind of just cards that cause they get better for having things in your grave, like there's so many there's that there's like the, planeswalker grist, for example, that has a win con, like, that's how smells that that self melds you and also has an ultimate that wins you the game. Basically, if you have a big graveyard, like there are so many different ones to suit any power level, which is probably why it is the stock archetype. Like it's there's pauper versions of this, there's peasant versions of this, there's budget versions of this, there's expensive versions of this. This is the stock stock version, but it does have some pitfalls. And that kind of what we want to focus on in this episode is that, as James touched on earlier, like, like if I really don't think you should have have a spider spawning deck with a gun mag angler in a cube because they want different things, like, like you can't have cards that care about how many things you have in your graveyard, and then also things that eat your graveyard. I'll read Guy mag angler. For those unaware, it's, six in a black for A55 with delve. So that means you can remove a card from your graveyard and use that to cut and use that to reduce the casting cost of your Mega angler. You can't have it both ways. You kind of either need to go. You're using your graveyard as a resource to eat and power these dealt spells, or you want your payoffs with things like spider spawning. They don't really go together. That's it's called a non bow. I played a Q recently where the go go is this is graveyard masses and the, the two like face cards on that have a page for that where spider spawning and look got I was like I will I will jump through a lot of hoops to face that spot. But these cards are not the same. You have a zero amount of eight eight and like make five spiders on ten six or something, you know, let's bounce up high levels and, yeah, if you're trying to make something like spider spotting work, you have to not be consuming that graveyard for other purposes, for plenty of graveyard pay payoffs where you get paid for having stuff in your graveyard without getting rid of that stuff in the graveyard. Yeah. And we're not saying, like, the odd thing can't come out. Like I'm still going to run a reanimating a spider spawning debt, for example. But like, specifically stuff that's eating my graveyard, those don't go together. And like when you're building the stack, I think you need to pick do I want. Yeah. Hogarth is a better Hogarth like better than going back it. But like that is a better example of of choosing the line. What do you want basically. There are some other things to keep in mind with this deck as well. Is that I don't think it works as well. When you just play it like a combo deck, you have to interact with your opponent. This is not vintage dredge. You can't just ignore what your opponent is doing and just try and turbo it out. You can't just mill you going to spend the first 4 or 5 turns of the game milling, ignoring your opponent's board, and then play your spider spawning because is that going to be good enough if they've played two drop 3.4 drop five drop, and you just been milling and made a bunch of one twos, is that going to win you the game? Do you not need something else? Do you need to dread return a creator who's back as well? Like like think about these things like like James Wood. What do you think about that? Yeah, I would generally not assume I'm going to be the quickest deck at the table with this stuff. I would assume that I'm going to have to interact fairly to stay in the game. The kind of a good news is that, if we of a people's plan is to attack you on the ground, blocking is interacting. And blocking works very well with our plan because it puts our creatures into a graveyard. But yes, you certainly do need to have some removal, have a bit of hand attacks to slow down whatever synergistic things your opponent is doing. No. Make sense? And hopefully with those a little bit of tips. If you have a graveyard section and you'll keep that is just carrying about the number of things, that's something that can help you. Let's move on to our next one, which is more of a newer way. They're taking it. And this is things leaving your graveyard matters. So what this what this deck is trying to do is mail yourself or put or put things into your game about a little bit, and then you get rewarded when they move zones. The signpost card is insidious. Roots. This is a black and a green for each ant it says creature tokens you control have tap to add one manner of any color, and then whenever one or more creature cards leave your graveyard, create A01 green plant creature token with a plus one is on counter on each plant you control. Now this is a which is an awesome card, but here you see it doesn't care about how many cards are in your grave or just that something has left your graveyard. So if we combine that with a card like Tortured Existence, that's a single black for the chocolate. It has black two and discard the creature card, return target creature card from your graveyard to your hand. So with that, with the creature in our graveyard and the creature in our hand for a black manor, we just swap zones. Something's left our graveyard. And we trigger insidious roots. And we can do that a bunch of times. Depending on the black manor that we have. It does not need a big graveyard. It needs more specific pieces. And there's a bunch of other options, like they are printing more and more cards that reward us for this. There's like chalk outline for the skeleton crew table, the balance scale, and so on for the grim. Like there's a bunch of other ones, but those are some good ones. But basically, basically they all do a similar thing of when a card leaves our graveyard or when a creature leaves our graveyard, we make a token or we're rewarded. James, what do you think about like, this kind of archetype? Because know your big insidious roots fan actually, as are we all. But yeah, I think this I think this is really cool. It's it can be a. Well, the good thing is we're getting more tendency for it. Right? The issue initially was that there was only one of the city streets. Chalk outline was way worse. That's a bit tough, but yeah. So we're getting more like quite a quite a good, quite a good right now. It's not that difficult to enable, I would say with cards like Tortured Existence specifically. That card is so efficient at enabling this that it can almost end up feeling more like a true card combo at times. If you have to cheat existence and and a root saw or something else that cards in your deck, which is fine. You can obviously build that. But if you're at a slightly lower power level or sometimes it's just kind of more fun to make people do a bit more work for it. You know? Like, to me it is more fun to be like, okay, I've got like a blood gas and a sack out there and I'm gonna like keep having land back and getting multiple triggers a turn as that comes in and out, that's kind of cooler than just, I have, I have some I have found my tortured existence. Now I want, you know, I think make them both work. I think this UX type is cool and pretty different. And, also doesn't have to be like the whole thing. Your code section is doing it. No. A lot of the cards you can use to support this are good. And the other graveyard decks, you do need some self-portraits in your yard. We like creatures leaving our yard generally anyway, because it means they're going to other places where they might impact the game sites. So, you can often take this on as a little bit of a sub site, and that can work very well, is I feel like this is the deck where you can run the game like angler, because like with delve, you without you will only ever make one token, I believe, because obviously within city routes. But but but other cards are where they're differently. But like this is where you can run the I'm going to eat my graveyard cards because it actually works with what the deck is trying to do. This is a difference to the previous deck we talked about. Previous one was number of creatures. This is cares about things. Leaving and using your grab it as a resource with things like delve is that is doing that yeah yeah to dangerous I mentioned like aggressive black creatures that fight recursive black which is they're also great in this, having ways of looping those around and yeah, I do agree on, on this. And like that's probably the top tier of this of this deck. But like insidious roots is an uncommon like a second raid isn't uncommon. A bunch of the other options are uncommon. So there is definitely a lower powered version of this. There's a like a this one probably stops around peasant, but there's peasant, there's budget, there's a lot of power level ones. And like there's a world where I try, I like it. I have insidious roots in my main queue because it's the James Andrew Invitational card for winning five. What was it ten out of that was for when you won ten, but like maybe max update we got torches resistance because it probably could put up numbers there or at a worst will train wreck you for the future. That's ultimately the goal of everything I do. I can train back for myself in back queue. I don't need to help. No hundreds, okay? It just shows there. Kind of like it is a flexible, it's a flexible deck that is also getting a bunch more bits. But talking of let's move on to our next strategy that, is also getting more bits. And that's delirium. So, so the plan for Delirium Deck is different to the other two. It's not trying to put as many of a thing in the graveyard as possible. It's trying to get a variety of things. So we use delirium as the shorthand for saying different types in the graveyard. So like delirium specifically rewards you when you have four or more types. But we also include things like, hieroglyphs in our Barrow glyphs in here that's want different things. So you have payoffs, things like Grim Flayer or like balustrade worm. They both have the word, but they both have. They both have the word delirium on them. They are delirium pay offs that they get better if we have different things in our graveyard. But also you have a kind of like their sign monstrosity or barigo phantasmagoria. In a lot of other cubes. These get better when you have a variety of things in your graveyard, but that's how these get better. And also the, it's it's we're saying upfront that this can be a bit more of a gen, the archetype, because red does give us some important things, things like looting, things like just additional payoffs. Things like Bitter reunion might not seem like the most broken card, but in a delirium deck, it's a one to red for an enchantment that when it enter the battlefield, you may discard a card. If you do draw two cards, and you can sacrifice it for a single colorless to give you up, which is haste. So effectively, this is a looter that's putting things in your graveyard and then puts itself in the graveyard. You you get a lot of those kind of looting effects from read along with some cool delirium, which is themselves things like Dragon rage, channeler, kind of like, James says as an archetype, like, how have you found game? This is this is also something that because a version of this is in the government YouTube right now, and I think we quite like it. I quite like it. Anyway. Yes. I mean for version when we say this is in the maker vintage cube. It's sort of is fairly, fairly. What's going on is for hieroglyphs, a messed up card paragraph is a messed up card. We might do a little bit of synergy stuff on top of that. Yeah, but if we don't have either of those cards, we're not drafting a delirium deck, you know? And the claim of hieroglyph deck is a delirium deck is maybe, I mean, not a lie, but it's not that. It's maybe 100% stretch. Yeah, yeah. And to be honest, there's a lot of if, if you get to if you, if you get to have your pogo stick around, there's quite a few ways to come with that. Like, phantasmal images almost universally like full on a paragraph, which is cool. But I think this translates really well, slightly lower down the power level scale. There's some pretty cool play payoffs. For delirium stuff. And it's a nice little, deck building quest, isn't it? I like it, it makes you keep track of different stuff. It's not just. Oh, I need to build myself. I just need to put creatures in the graveyard. It's like. Yeah. So often if you care about delirium, you're making picks mid draft and you're like, oh, well, this instant speed removal spell is slightly better. But I have like five instance in my deck already. And I only have one sorcery. So to enable a better mix of types I should take for sorcery stuff like that. And that's just, that's a little bit more texture for a draft, right? Which is cool. There's some interesting payoff stuff like traverse dueling world becomes very powerful. Shooter shifting woodland is a card I'm pretty high on in general. That's the land where if you pay for mana, if you have delirium, it becomes a copy of a permanent graveyard. So obviously, if you're milling yourself, you're giving yourself more options. That and then it can become very, very powerful, like game. And even, you know, things like, fear of missing out if I can kill people very rapidly, if you, if you have once you have delirium going and even there's even like some, some slightly lower power level, slightly less efficient stuff that does work quite well in the bright cube. Convert to slime is a card I think we've rarely talked about. I'm not sure when it came out, but it's, five mana sorcery. Three and for, you know, creating a black for destroy up to one target artifacts, up to one target creature and up to one target enchantment base, you have delirium. You then create an ex screen, use wax. The total mana value of pendants destroyed this way. Actually kind of before. Yeah, it was in the command to set. We do our best. I refused to read the command sets. To be honest, I. I don't. It's someone that's helping me. The cards are good when they're not making any, but, one thing I like about this strategy as well as, like you mentioned, that it's a nice deck building construction when you're drafting, but I like it from a it's also a very cool cube building construction because it kind of like rewards. Like, I like going quite deep on this because I'm a bit of a so I have a coupon podcast. That's how much I like cube. And kind of getting into the nitty gritty, but like, but like basically things like fetch lamps are great in these deck because it puts a land into the graveyard. Things like the baubles we like. But going deep is running like a blood fountain. It's a discard. It creates blood tokens which discard, but it pours itself into the graveyard. We've mentioned a bit of union, but also running a card like Bitter Blossom might not be the most obvious card to run in a graveyard deck, but it is a kindred type, which is a kindred type and an enchantment. There's two types in your graveyard that makes you a grim player. Turn on quicker, makes your Paraguay's the bigger. And it also makes you focus on cause it on multiple types. So like in my in my cube where I have a version of this deck, I run Dried Arbor as a manor dog because it is a land and a creature, and you can also do the thing where you find it off of green sands, which is quite fun, but also I'm going as deep as like I'm running Brain Maggot, which is like a cavern bat effect. Older people will know Brain Maggot, but like I basically it's a one, one the black one one enchantment creature. When it enters target, palm reveals that the hand and you choose a non non card from it and you excite until brain maggot leech. So it's a hand attack spell that that we probably want anyway. But it's also an enchantment creature. So that's two types for White Delirium deck. You can go that deep and I find it to be quite rewarding. And one thing that yeah, we've touched on that's cool is that I think this also works in, in a variety of power levels, like like in the higher power level ones. Yeah. You can it works really nicely with like the survival of the fittest venge vine type stuff. You can, you can go as deep as the root wall as, as you want. But you don't have to go that hand. You can go more grim fire balustrades, balustrade, worm, that kind of stuff. And it's like a cool synergy deck that kind of like, gets better when you do the when you do the thing. And I quite like that. Yeah. I think it's, I think it's an interesting space to play around. And there's, there's lots of potential. Depending on how committed you are, I would, I think it's good to have some stuff if you're going as deep as playing, you know, the kindreds and whatnot. You do want to try and have some payoffs that care about total number of types, rather than just guessing to fall for delirium, because, you know, you can get to for for delirium perfectly well without kin to it and whatnot. You know. No. And it's not when I've gone as deep as kindred. I'm not running bad ones like by that. I'm running Bitter Blossom and, what's the goblin shock? Tar fire? I'm like. Like I would run a shock. Any. I would run a version of shock at it. Synergize with something that's not like. That's not like that's a fine level of synergy to run. Basically, I'm going to run some red removal spells. Might as well run this to make my tomahawk set that big, bigger. And yeah, I know Tomahawk 15 power crap out of the highest power level of cubes, but in most budget and mid-range cubes. While to actually say Tomahawk is a budget card now, but time ago, if it's going to be a great card in more mid-range, more like starter cubes, where I think this is like like it's a great payoff, there for this kind of attack. Like, I'm I'm very high on delirium, but but it does just show that kind of if you just add like graveyard cards to a cube that do different things, the deck isn't going to come together. You need that focus. Like, like like the three decks we've gone over. The number of creature cards in graveyard wants different cards to the cards. Leaving my graveyard deck, which one's different cards to the number of type cards in my day? Like like. This is a massive mistake I see in commander, but this is not a commander podcast. This is a cube podcast. And we can help you fix them. Like like follow the things that we've said. And you, your graveyard decks will be more focused and they will just they will start putting up numbers that little bit better. Basically. So we're going to I'm going to say we're going to I was gonna say we're leaving the graveyard. But in go go the graveyard is always sort of there. But we are going to move on to less specifically all in Graveyard Decks. Let's touch on to one that I really love. And it is one for a up out of a cubes and it's, go GA aggro. This is kind of like a less powerful version of delirium because we don't have, like, the huge power outliers of, like, the Barrow guy from the pirate, like that kind of stuff. But what this deck is doing is it's basically it's an aggro deck that uses recursive creatures to keep going back from your graveyard. So this is nowhere as explosive as like Boris. But it's good in a world where you are getting to like the mid game, in the late game consistently and like by that I mean it's like like it where, where games are taking a bit longer, where this deck is good is because effectively all your threats have the ability to come back from the graveyard. So your opponent can't one for one you, they can't trade off in combat as much. They can't use that removal spell. Just kill your creature because it's kind of come back. So we've gone over some good recursive creatures already with things like Blood Ghost, but you also have like on Earth creatures. You have, like, gutted bones. You have all the vast swathes of recursive black one drops and two drops. These all kind of can get into this deck. And then on top of that, you can just run real good cards, like things like rotting regice or like Hex Trinket. These are aggressive, slanted cards in these cards that go quite nicely. Like like we're probably not getting like the power of one of you. This isn't going in in a cube with psychic cub, but like that would be a great, like just generically aggressive card in here. And like, I think this is a very solid archetype for like a lower power level or a budget cube. James, what do you think of like go, go go go again? Not like that. Not normally what God Gallery is known for, but it is something that if if you're looking for something a bit different in your energy, I was gonna say you're listening to this episode and you're like, I've hated. I hate graveyard decks. When are we going to talk about something else? This is something you can do. I'm not sure I believe in this phone class, much to be honest. Like, the black aggro with a cheap, aggressive creature. Sure. If you have enough ways to punch through a can, it can get it done, I guess. I'm not really sure what green is bringing to a party here a lot of time, but James, have you not heard of Dread Mangler? One one black green for three, three with haste and scavenge? I hasn't heard of Troutman proper magic. Carter, James. And what about putrid Leech James? That's also a bang. A magic card, black and a green for two. Two where you can pay to life and it gets plus two plus two until end of term. Dice and a magic cards. You could fly. I get I am not saying for higher power level cubes. I think for a lower power level and budget cubes. This is a cool way of taking Gary. Okay. That's fair. I like a Rakshasa death dealer. Can we get one of those? There we go. This? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That's a rare good. Yes. Well done. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that kind of thing. Go. Gary can be punchy or like, basically the green gives you access to, like over it. Like beat it. Cool. Because effectively it's kind of like a we're going to run like like the curve will probably stop around like three ish. But like, say we run like a man a gorgeous hydra or a Jade like Rangers are top end, but then the unearths can bring it back. That kind of thing. Yeah, that's kind of cool, I guess. Yeah. Like the sign monstrosity would be really good to have. I get a bit of south smell going. It gets giant. Sure. I got I can get behind that again. Yeah. This is not going to be one for like for a large number of cubes by. It is a cool different thing you can do with it. If you are looking for something that isn't like a graveyard deck, I think it's really worth touching on now. Like we touched on it at the start, the generic Go Gary mid-range deck. We all know what it looks like. It's you've drafted all your removal, you drafted some ramp and yeah, and you lose to blue decks in a high power level cube. But in a lower power level cube, it is a solid archetype. But you do need to keep some things in mind. Kind of like if you are going to go Gary is going to be mid-range. Make sure you have some rewards for your players. I'm thinking like things like things like Abrupt decay in your go Gary section. Things like pernicious need maybe some good value grindy planeswalker. It's like there's a really good, braska and Relic seeker, for black and a green six starting loyalty plus to create a two to pirate token with menace minus three destroy target artifact, create your enchantment, create a colorless treasure token and a minus ten of target players total becomes one. If you're going mid-range, actually go mid-range. This is kind of why it doesn't work at higher power level, cuz because it's just it's it's not a mid-range deck. It's just the best cards you could get from green and green and black in an environment where mid-range doesn't exist. But in a world where mid-range does exist, you have those cards, but you also want to lean into it, actually make it work, like make it signpost it. Kind of like go, Gary is going big and going, oh, it's going a bit bigger, a bit slower. You can grind your opponents out and like I think things like Big Pines because like, like the, the Rasco or maybe a card like Liliana Dread or General, another six man, all got it. Just really good at grinding. So if you want that mid-range deck to exist, good. But lean into it is what I'm saying. Yeah. I think the thing you've always got to be careful about with these mid-range tax rate is people. Just the people just going a bit bigger, going over the top of you, because you're often not going to be able to kill them quickly enough to, stop that. The things you want to prioritize to get around that is interaction. That is not just kill your feature once it's in play. Very want to be be looking at some hands, attack, maybe even a bit of manners. This option can go a very long way. The it. I think the reason people sometimes fall into this trap fight is that when you come from piece to draft, most action pieces to draft, whilst they have a bunch of synergies going on within this, they are ultimately mostly piles of creatures and removal spells with maybe a bit of cards on that. And most cubes will have some decks which aren't just that, some decks will be automating on a slightly different axis, and they will have a way to go over the top of you, which you can't solve with a removal spell. Right? Yeah. Like take a storm deck. Like, like, what does your doom blade do against the deck with no creatures? Yeah. Oh, even just like, you know, a vamp deck that's casting some, like, super ten traps, right? It's, You mean it's not going to get it done? And that's fine if you're an aggressive back because you're trying to kill them before they do that thing. You've run the risk. If you're a mid-range deck of being too slow to get underneath, but don't have the interaction to stop them like a blue deck would. So yeah, I think the hand attack is super, super important for that reason. But outside of that, yeah, this, this can work. It can do quite well sometimes. Beating up on the slightly smaller aggro decks fight because your creatures are just bigger. You can you can get a little bit. They can. Then that's a nice place to be. I think another good way of explaining where this deck can work is if there are other mid-range decks, if you're doing mid-range in other decks, or if if mid-range exists in your cube already, then this can be a nice complement to it. It being the only mid-range deck is probably a sign that maybe mid-range doesn't really work in your cube. But yeah, I think it's a fair way putting it all right, but let's keep going. We have a couple more to get through today. Another thing you can do, and I'll go like we've touched on one combo already with chain of more combos, but there are other creature combos. We'll keep this one a little brief because we had done a whole episode on things like possessed. But Dakari is a great base for a bunch of creature combos. Things like these, like possessed. We've gone over in the past and I will put a link to it down to that. That's it. In the show notes below. There's also a bunch of other combos as like great cool a combo combos. There's food based combos. They all fit really well in the in the gold GA spectrum, because Gari has things like sickle sacrifice outlets in black, it has creature shooters in green. It's quite it's quite solid at putting these different pieces together. Kind of like what's your experience with creature combos, James and like, where do you like them? Yeah, please come play out. Well, you've got to prioritize both ways to set it up. You want to prioritize a little bit of destruction. Like, again, hand attack. Huge hand. Because feature combos can be generally be disrupted by removal spells. And often in a way that works out very poorly for you. As far as for combo player. So you want a way to get out ahead of that. And of these know what your opponent's working with in terms of removal. But yeah, we've seen a lot of interesting new cards in this space, right? Stuff like one soul trader is really good for this sort of creature combo pack. Yeah. All the food stuff works very well, and generally you're not like a pure combo attack, right? You often have a bit of beat down stuff or a little bit of aristocrat stuff, because a lot of these companies are like sacrifice based. But then you also have a combo kill that can finish them off in the right spot. No, exactly. And one of the things I quite like about these kind of combos in the Gold Gallery range is that it's not just like, it's not just all the combo cards are in one color, and the other one is like the support was nice. Is it kind of like we get like a bunch of possessed creatures in black, but then you get the things that put counters on them, generally in green. What's nice about the food combos is that, a bunch of a bunch of their like, card draw and payoff cards are in green, but the actual combo enabler. But the combo enabler is is a black card like it? What's nice is kind of it's not just like it's nice that both colors bring something to the party here, but which I quite like. Yeah for sure. Yeah, I'm keeping the ball rolling. We have two more to get to before we go, but before we finish up for today. Another cool way you can take your yoga gallery deck or yoga section is focusing on lands like a card, like Squandered Resources and the Get real, get both awesome cards. Let me read squandered resources. One of the resources is a black and a green for an enchantment. Sacrifice a land. Add to your manor pool one manor of any type. The secondaries Lanka produced. Play this ability as a mana source. Can you tell that scry for this down and I'm reading the version that I have from Vox field. And the get rogue monster obviously draws your cards whenever a land goes to your graveyard. That one I'm doing from memory, but I'm pretty sure that's right. So Gary and John lands is definitely thing that kind of people play a lot of in commander, but but but there's a bunch of cool things you can do with it in Q like what's your been what's your experience with this type of deck then? Yeah, I think this could work pretty well. We're gonna do a whole episode on Lancer at some point. So, more details to be added, but I think Calgary can be a nice home for it. I think there's a slightly more graveyard centric version of the land stack that exists. Yeah. Cause like when harvest. Really good. Here. Just dump all your lands. All your all your lands into your graveyard. That's why I make a bunch of dudes. There's also cause, like aftermath. Unless for them to turn all your lands from your graveyard, you get value as all your cards change. So we like all of that stuff, really into, like, vein of health is a very powerful, mana generation engine here as well. Yeah. You can do a lot of stuff in this space. And we are getting new cards for, a card like Luann from the, from the recent stats is pretty powerful. Has like two mana, one females. You want to answer some fan? You can tap it to cast worm Harvest for the, for five factor. That's pretty powerful. Get five effects repeatedly. Is is pretty good. Nice. Yeah. And then and also like Calgary is a nice kind of home further like to tie in your deck as well to tie it like the five mana one that, brings a land back. But then whenever you cycle land, you make, is it a five, three, five for. Yeah, I like that in a deck with tutors that you get from black and some removal seems pretty good like that. Seems like a great way of kind of like, like you kind of you mid-range. You kind of like you one for one them, and then you turn all your lands into five threes and mush them. Yes. Like home for that. Yeah, yeah, yeah for sure. The Titan near combo stuff is just super powerful all round. It's obviously better in the land stack, right? Because Titan as a standalone card is good. And land stack, where it isn't. And, and just a generic mobile adventure deck. But the combination of Titan Neo with something like seven orb or something like Sylvan safekeeping, any way to sacrifice your lands is just a super powerful A plus B combo that will when you for game most of the time. And doesn't have to be in a dedicated land stacks to support it. But yes, certainly better. One is yeah, this is a good one. And yeah, an episode coming on that soon. The last one we're going to touch on is one for the boomers out there. I include myself in this. I'm only 36. Don't worry about it. This is like Rex, pods is kind of what it's labeled as, like there is a phenomenal cube article. I think it's on. I think it's on MTG salvation, which is like what I started using when I started building cubes. And it was basically it went through it's like from like 2012 or something like that, but it's going through all of the cube archetypes that are sustainable. It's got like O.G. storm in that, like if you been playing, I'll try and find it and put a link down to it because it is like a blast in the past. If you see that, it's like. It's like what? Like the vintage cube used to be like ten, 15 years ago. It's a it's a very good read and it's a basis to, to a lot of the stuff that I've done in the past. This is a great article, but it has rec support in it. What that is, is this is the the ultimate grind value deck. It's combining recurring nightmare. That's the rec survival of the fittest. That's the and but I think pod is the pod. You are combining these three slow, slow engines to get the ultimate value. So like, recurring nightmare is a way of repeatedly getting creatures back from the graveyard for value. Survival of the fittest to toss them out of your deck and also put stuff into your graveyard. And then birthing pod is another way of sacrificing stuff of value. So when you get this engine together, you're kind of getting bigger and better, like it's generally you're using like ETB effects to kind of build this kind of awesome value engine. Like you're probably going to be. What's the card at the time? Probably a shriek. More is going to be in here an eternal witness. Maybe a bone shredder. All of like the good, all of the go gory goodness. That's kind of it's kind of combining these into a cool deck. And what's nice is like, this has got some bits over the last couple of years, like Californian Nightmare is a cool recurring nightmare variant from the last Modern Horizons. That's good with smaller creatures, we've got a bunch of survival of the fittest effects. Like most recently, formidable speaker is a nice one of effect. And then actually, like where I've actually seen this deck actually still pull up numbers in more recent cubes is when you combine it with a card like graph triplets. Graph triplets is six mana for A33 sata warrior with trample when it enters the battlefield. If it isn't a token, create two tokens that are copies of it. When it dies, but a number of plus one count is equal to the number of equal to its power on each creature you control, named graph triplets. So how this works is when it dies, you get two copies of it. Then when they die, you get another one, and kind of you keep it's gets really powerful when you're when you're stacking it and recurring at every turn. It's very, very fun. This deck is cool, but slow. James, what do you think of this? Yeah, this deck is great. Love all of this. It's so much fun when you have survival going heartache. I kind of think a phone nightmare is more fun than survival because it's that. That that one mana cheaper just makes it this much cheaper. And the issue with survival is sometimes when you have a really good survival tech, you're looking at like you get this gristle brand or something, and then you're like, it makes sense for me. Just pump blood gristle found in my deck. And then I had to mate for some random win, and he's like, that's fine. But what I want to do because what's cooler to me is, is is getting back into channel wetness. You know, I get that pretty fast, that thing, you know, I want I want to do the grind thing and not the, not that just like, oops, I have an off I win thing. And it's cool. But I think that caffeine in nightmare puts that restriction on the, you know. Yeah, this is a deck I'm, I don't want to say I'm going to build another cube to make it work because I can't do that financially. I'm I'm already ruined James notionally. But like, emotionally, I don't have the time. I know I'm I owe people I should I need to finish off building a bar cube on stream as well as the modern one, blah blah blah blah. This is awesome. Like like like, I mean, these are all birthing pot isn't like all of these cards. The one that I think has shown its age the most is birthing pot. But like, you can still do something with recurring nightmare and survival of the fittest. Like I have them in my unpowered bench cube like it's it's it's recurring nightmare still in the mega vintage cube or only a nightmare. They go in and out. I think they're in of the moment like they're not very good, but they're bad, you know, but I, I would mine is probably too fast for this. But like I think they still get in from vibes. But like one thing is like like these cards are kind of expensive like recurring nightmare survival if it is not cheap magic cards. But if you're doing a lot of amid a mid powered cube or low power level cube where, you're proxying it if you're just building a cube, just, based on cards that you like. I think this is phenomenal. I, I'm saying this and like, this is kind of like this big. The thing is, like this, this deck here became the one we started the episode on telling people to avoid in powered cube. This is the grinding midrange deck. The fact that like this was in a from a time where recurring nightmare and survival were like the most broken cards and like survival was banned in a bunch of formats. It still is banned in a bunch of formats. But like. This is just cool. This is vibes. I like looking at these cards and I like that. Like playing with them, like unban recurring nightmare in command so I can play with it. Then I get my my toys. But yeah, I would like this deck. I would like to play it more basically. Yes. For sure. I think this deck is really cool. You could get this. I think you could make this deck work and and not not treat yourself as good for treat yourself. It's not like it is effectively in my main cube. Like the only card in here that isn't in that cube is its birthing pot. Like I had like in the rebuilt. I have only a nightmare, I have recurring nightmare, I have survival, I have, formidable speaker. I don't think I have. There's the two mana. One I think has been just cut from a power level point of view. Like the traumatic ritual, repeatable one. But, like, yeah, I think there's a, like, a version of this will be fine, I think. Yeah, I think so. I don't think you need to build another cube to play. This will make it work. We will make it work. If my wife is listening to this, it's going to be okay. All right. But I think yeah, I think that's where we're going to call this part of the episode to end. I hope people have got some ideas for things they can do with their cubes. If you're struggling on on what to do with called gari or if you have one is archetypes how you can kind of tailor it to kind of fine tune it. That is a bit more kind of like do the but how you can focus it on the things that are important. I think one thing we do want to do before we get out of it is just touch on what we have in our own cubes, because, as I've just said, we've gone over. We have a lot of cubes. So my main cube I do have like so I have the pieces for the Rex minus pod deck, but generally I'm doing the delirium there. That's mainly what I'm focusing on. I have, I'm trying to fill up my graveyard with different types of things. As I said, I've got I, I, I have cut it back to be as deep on the bitter blossom toffee type of effects, but I am running things like Bitter Reunion. I am running things like I'm running a card like Seal of Fire as a removal spell, as a single red for an enchantment seal. Sacrifice it or to damage a target creature or player. That's kind of what I'm doing with it. Like, so. So for me, I am going. My goal is I don't just set a red card, but my dog is more trying to get different types of things because it's my cube is powerful enough to have a pirate glyph in it, and it to be a good power level there. That's kind of where I'm with it. James, you have a I have a couple, your dual command to keep. For example, what's dog are we doing that? Yes. I solve a couple of things. Really? Because, it's more of a three color focus type of cube. But, the big things we're doing, variance for land stuff. And I've seen that graveyard land that come together really nicely here. There was a Get Folk monster commander deck doing some absolutely revolting stuff where you just sack all your land that far less than back you sacks. And again, you're throwing so many cards, you're making so much mana. That's come together very nicely. And you have seen a classic white of the reliquary loot and also part that really nicely. And then it's doing, more combo stuff as well. With, these goodies, setting up these, these graveyard combos pretty nicely. And we have stuff like hijackers as options as well. But yeah, they think things like fiend, assassin setting up for creature combos. This works quite well. Nice. And then the other cube that I kind of I play most is my, treat yourself one, which is a bit different because, it's based on like tri color archetypes. So but specifically in, Amazon, I'm doing the food deck. Food Fight is a lot of fun. Links to all these will be down in the comments below. And then but in salt I it is the full on, it is labeled as graveyard shenanigans, but it is the insidious treats deck. It's specifically putting things into our graveyard and moving them around zones and profit. That's what the deck is doing. Like travel. The balance skeleton. Incredible card here. So it is roots like that is really what it is trying to do. Yeah. With all that being said, I hope people have found that out. For what? I hope people have enjoyed us talking about the goodness that is going, Gary, I'm always here to talk about it. James. Pleasure, man. Thank you. That was really good. Yeah. Always a pleasure. Nice one. All right. This is me to thank you all very much for listening. Do make sure you like, share, subscribe. All that good. All that good stuff. Good. The book has a five star review. Tell a friend. We'd love to have them here, but until next time, it's goodbye for me. It's goodbye from James and we'll see you all soon. We'll take a goodbye.