This draft walkthrough features the unpowered iteration of the Magic Online Cube with Theros.

Draft

I ended up in U/W instead of Esper mainly because my mana fixing wasn’t very good with Glacial Fortress being my only nonbasic land. Keeping my deck two colors as opposed to three helped my ability to hit the crucial mana for cards like Cryptic Command and Angel of Serenity, which wouldn’t have been possible if there were Swamps in the mix. The ability to go for Entombing Iona, Shield of Emeria was sacrificed, but the overall deck was much better. In retrospect, I would have liked to have had Animate Dead in the deck because I had so many value creatures like Reveillark, Sun Titan, and Phantasmal Image, but I was still quite happy with how the deck turned out.

Round 1

Due to the opponent being a tapout midrange green deck, I tried to keep countermagic mana up whenever I could even if I didn’t have one in hand, and Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir helped with that. There were some sequencing errors in game 2, mainly with not casting Phantasmal Image when I was able to get it back with Sun Titan and taking the wrong pile with Fact or Fiction, but the recursion and card advantage inherent in the deck was able to overcome that. Since the opponent was a tapout midrange deck, I likely would have had time to hard cast Iona, and the opponent seemed to have few ways of dealing with her.

Round 2

Against this opponent with U/G, I kept to my strategy of trying to gain card advantage, cloning the opponent’s threats, and winning through attrition. Because of this, I brought in the Urborg and Volrath’s Stronghold combo since the big haymaker threats and clones were going to be the deciding factor and I’d likely have time to assemble the combo through either cloning a Primeval Titan or drawing it naturally with a card like Sphinx’s Revelation.

Although it didn’t end up coming to fruition in game 2 (and had my opponent tapped my Plains instead of Island, fetching it with the cloned Primeval Titan would have really stung me), it still was a nice piece of technology that would likely have worked out had the circumstances and my draws been different. Like in first round, I likely could have brought in Iona, Shield of Emeria since it could fight Simic Sky Swallower and lock out the threat of more creatures (as I’d probably have named green).

Also, as it turns out per rule 702.33 of the Comprehensive Rules, Flashback is a static ability, not an activated ability, but my unintentional bluff still worked out.

Round 3

In game 1, the cracking of Bloodstained Mire into basic Mountain made me think that the opponent was Mono-Red Aggro, and I went into the usual mode of turtling up and playing reactively to try to take advantage of my mass removal. The opponent had a slow start, with their first play being an unkicked Goblin Ruinblaster. Because of this, in game 2 I sideboarded in Parallax Wave, which probably should have been maindecked the whole time, along with Nevinyrral’s Disk. It turned out that the opponent was more midrangey than the typical Mono-Red Aggro deck, with more four- and five-mana cards than one- and two-mana cards. That said, I got to employ the same strategy, and I was able to get there thanks to another sideboarded card that worked hard in Pristine Angel.