Howdy gamers! In my last article, I teased that I’d be talking about poison in Cube more this week, and the time has come! Phyrexia: All Will Be One has a few assorted goodies for Cubes of all shapes and sizes, but it offers by far the most and most useful new tools for players interested in poisoning their opponents.
It just so happens that I am one such player! I’ve taken a look at poison for some manner of Twobert more than once, though prior to Phyrexia: All Will Be One I couldn’t fine a way to make the Draft lanes and gameplay look satisfying on paper. Leaning in on proliferate and using other counters like energy fills out some of the list, and there’s a lot of overlap between Infect and Heroic decks’ scaffolding, but any attempt at combining these archetypes in a Cube looked more like bad Constructed than good Limited. Then they printed a bunch of new poison and proliferate cards, and now I’m singing a completely different tune!
Getting to 180
Once the full card list for Phyrexia: All Will Be One was in my hands, I started mapping out a Cube with every comparably powerful card that interacts with poison counters, being overly generous just to see if it was possible to get to 180 cards without having to do much exploration of any other themes. To my pleasant surprise, such a Cube looked not only possible, but really novel and interesting. I had to stretch a little to give the nod to cards like Swamp Mosquito and Virulent Sliver, but you know what, they’re charming.
The End of Red
The biggest issue that I ran into early on was that there was no way that red could contribute to this environment without forcing the exploration of decks that generally won with regular damage or fleshing out a red column with almost zero creatures or planeswalkers. I could abide some Flame Slashes and Brute Forces, but there’s really not much there that would be uniquely red. Proliferate with Runaway Steam-Kin and Electrostatic Infantry is exciting to me, but it doesn’t match my vision for this particular project.
For as much as I adore Razor Swine, this project really started to take shape when I decided to eschew red as a color. This had the added benefit of Atraxa, Praetors’ Voice fitting more cleanly into the Cube list as a card that represented all four supported colors in the Cube.
You can find my current list for this project on Cube Cobra. Whether the goal is to use poison as a win condition in a control deck, chunk away with toxic creatures, or go for a combo-esque kill with infect, poison is the name of the game here! The Cube also leans heavily on using your life total as a resource, facilitated in a very aesthetically satisfying way by Phyrexian mana and made all the more interesting by toxic creatures also dealing regular combat damage. With these general ideas in mind, let’s take a look at the Cube by color.
White
White is sort of a jack of all trades in the Toxic Twobert, with reasonable options in terms of cards with toxic, infect, and proliferate. I’m a big Lost Leonin fan, but the well here isn’t as deep as it is in the other three colors, requiring white to explore additional territory. Generic removal spells help, but that doesn’t get us all the way.
A lot of this space was filled with +1/+1 counters as useful things to proliferate. Not to mention that permanent pumps go a long way with so many infect creatures running around. The Cube is also a little long on Ajanis, which offer some of the more likely ways for a player to win through regular combat damage in the Cube by making your toxic creatures massive.
Parallax Wave is another hit that isn’t exactly on theme, yet is really busted in an environment full of ways to proliferate the fade counters. The hidden gem that I’m most proud of, though, is Harm’s Way. I loved the card when it was first printed, though it’s just not that strong in most Cubes. When the damage that you’re redirecting deals poison counters, though, it’s a huge deal! You could reach for Shining Shoal for a really brutal version of this effect, though I do worry that that one would be a game-ender a little too often.
Blue
Blue doesn’t get much in the way of toxic or infect creatures, but it does offer a ton of ways to proliferate! Thrummingbird also looks a lot scarier in this environment, with Prologue to Phyresis around to give the opponent the first poison counter.
Blue really opens up the options for control decks with some interaction and card advantage spells that will look to end the game by proliferating. Midnight Clock is a really fun option for these decks, and The Mirari Conjecture is another lore-driven gem that can result in a massive amount of spell-based poison distribution.
Force of Will is a minor nod to the “life as a resource” theme, but is more to address just how quickly and efficiently the best infect decks can close the game, and is a nice pairing to Contagion, which offers some counters and a tremendously flavorful name.
Lastly, for blue, Mindlink Mech is a delight in this environment. It might be more cool than good to dream of crewing it with Glistener Elf, but I must say that doing so is really cool. The four-power flying body can also just make playing things too fast and loose with your life total scary, which is another nice perk.
Black
Black has a lot of great tools for all of the Cube’s themes, and also offers the necessary interaction to make the games interesting. Infect, toxic, proliferate, and other ways to poison the opponent outside of combat are all present. Black is the color that is by far the easiest to expand for this environment.
Black has to pick up a lot of the slack for red in the spot removal department, which it’s more than capable of doing. Whisper of the Dross and Drown in Ichor excite me far more than Fatal Push and Infernal Grasp, but ultimately you just want a lot of interaction in a Cube that technically offers some Turn 2 and 3 kills with infect creatures.
Green
Green is all about combat in this Cube, though proliferate and Venerated Rotpriest do offer some ways to get the lethal poison counter without attacking. All the life loss in the Cube also makes it pretty realistic for Become Immense to deal lethal combat damage, too, and Bloated Contaminator is a powerful force on that front even without any pump spells.
Unfortunately, there are only so many cheap toxic and infect creatures, and the options start to get really glutted once you start spending three or more mana. Cystbearer and Rot Wolf are some old favorites, but I definitely wouldn’t ever play one over Evolution Sage. Maybe over Adaptive Sporesinger, but I like that Sporesinger can be a free poison counter or a meaningful pump on an infect creature.
The green decks in Toxic Twobert force you to play into your opponent far more than any other color, which is why I felt it important to go long on protection spells as well as making sure to include both Hierarchs so that green could jockey for a meaningful mana advantage. It’s a little goofy that Ignoble Hierarch taps for red in a Cube without red spells, but giving green powerful early plays was important enough that I was willing to set aesthetics aside for this one.
Gold
I kept the gold sections for this Cube very small, largely because Azorius isn’t giving you really anything that meaningfully contributes to the Cube. Raff, Weatherlight Stalwart is a pretty cool option to pair with either the pump or removal spells in the Cube, but the next-best card that I found for the Cube was a glorified Negate, so I capped things at two.
Some color pairs offer two great cards, with Selesnya and Dimir both having two great options that deal directly with poison. There’s nothing too exciting here otherwise, with Hapatra, Vizier of Poisons being a cheeky entry that I really liked that also motivated the Grind // Dust pick for Orzhov.
At one point I looked at including a card for each three-color combination in the Cube, given that I’m featuring a four-color card, but the options just weren’t satisfying. I did like the idea of Raffine, Scheming Seer, but the drop-off after that is steep.
Artifacts
The colorless column is full of creatures that deal poison, ways to modify power and toughness, proliferate, and even Everflowing Chalice and Astral Cornucopia if you want to try to draft a deck that generates obscene quantities of mana. This is also where I sorted most of the Phyrexian mana spells, as they’ll largely be going in decks of any color.
A card that didn’t quite cut it for me is Grafted Exoskeleton. It just seemed too inefficient, though giving infect to toxic creatures was otherwise appealing. I was happy to offer a home to Staff of Compleation, though, as a means to use your life total as a resource and to potentially give the opponent several poison counters outside of combat!
Lands
As soon as I started working on this Cube, I really liked the idea of using painlands, fetchlands, and shocklands to really highlight the life as a resource theme. This spread is simply too aesthetically perfect. Of course, once I cut red, there was some incentive to add some more fixing, and I went with Triomes largely because they’ll the best option to make sure that Atraxa is actually castable. They’re my least favorite lands in the Cube and any Cube, but I do at least like them a lot better in color-restricted Cubes where you’re more likely to be playing all of their colors than I do elsewhere.
Black and White and Blue and Green, and Red All Over
My favorite aspect of the Toxic Twobert is that, despite eschewing red, there’s still a lot going on here that feels like burn. Proliferate and spells that give opponents poison counters come up a lot as sort of lethal burn spells, and a Cube that offers every color the reach to end games that we typically see in red without featuring any red cards itself makes me incredibly happy. The gameplay here is distinct from other Cubes in a way that I find fascinating.
While Phyrexia: All Will Be One doesn’t represent any radical shifts for the world of Cube broadly, the many new ways to deal out poison counters completely have taken poison from something of a frustrating Cube pipe dream to a possible and exciting mechanic to explore. My favorite Cubes are ones that offer a play experience that you can’t really get anywhere else, and the Toxic Twobert does just that.
