Howdy, gamers! I hope you like Black Lotus, because we’re going to be drafting a lot of those on Magic Online (MTGO) this week! Vintage Cube Supreme Draft returns today, and not the Vintage Constructed-esque version that yours truly secured the trophy lead in, but the version where every pack comes from its own Cube and you can potentially open up to eighteen copies of a single card. It’s among the more chaotic ways to play Magic I can think of, and has some of my friends very excited.
The list we’ll be drafting is the same one that’s been in place since the “polish update”, so familiarizing yourself with that list is a good place to start.
I was really looking forward to writing about the other form of Supreme Draft this week and maybe defending my title, though I want to start my breakdown of this version of the format by stating that you lose a lot of control over your win percentage when your opponent might have two or three copies of Black Lotus as compared to zero or one. I’ll definitely be in the queues this week, but I’m preparing myself less for a trophy run, and more for some of the most brutal beats of my life.
Two Key Warnings
Pick orders for Supreme Draft are similar to those of just regularly drafting the Vintage Cube, but your pet cards and personal preferences are going to punish you rather than reward you here. You just can’t get scrappy when everyone’s deck is busted, and abstract power level beats all. In general, you’ll want to draft every piece of power you can get your hands on and try to find the fastest possible way to win from packs that don’t have those cards.
It’s critical to remember that all of the off-color Moxen, Sol Rings, and Mana Crypts will make it comparatively difficult to play multiple colors, even if you can afford to spend many picks on mana-fixing lands, and you’ll always want to be blue. I’ll break the Cube down by color, but knowing the best blue cards while keeping non-blue pips to a minimum and maybe playing up to three colors will be the path to the most consistent success here. The cards that I highlight in the other colors will be nearly exhaustive lists of cards that you’ll reasonably want to play.
White
White’s prospects here are pretty bleak. Swords to Plowshares and Solitude aren’t completely unplayable, though it’s important to note that more of your opponents will be creatureless or near-creatureless than usual. The most significant creatures, Hullbreacher and Orcish Bowmasters, also die to Lightning Bolt, and with Underworld Breach being more powerful than any white card, it is quite difficult to justify white decks in this environment. I do still like Palace Jailer a decent amount for the one-sided Howling Mine that the monarch offers, but the card is definitely much weaker in Supreme Draft than it usually is.
There are some gold cards worth noting, with Teferi, Time Raveler and Lurrus of the Dream-Den being real reasons to play white. Teferi plus Displacer Kitten combo is actually one of the more appealing combos in this environment, given the way that Teferi both serves as a great Force of Will check and potential answer to opposing Tinkers.
Tucking Tinker targets is also the big thing that Unexpectedly Absent does, while serving as an answer to problematic creatures as well. Things like Cathar Commando and other Disenchants are fine too, but much less desirable. There will be games where you can tag a Mox and be happy about it, but they will be rarer than games where your opponent comes out of the gates and quickly makes the game about something more threatening.
Monastery Mentor is restricted in Vintage for a reason, and is one of the cheapest and best ways to convert a Time Walk or two into a win. Only having one white pip is a pretty big selling point as well. I won’t be drafting white much this week, but Mentor is arguably the biggest draw to the color, which is a significant departure from regular Vintage Cube Drafts.
Other value-generating cards like Gideon, Ally of Zendikar aren’t outright embarrassing, but they are considerably worse than normal in this format. The best decks will go from zero to winning the game, and you should prioritize incremental advantages that don’t come with any form of interaction much lower than you usually might.
Blue
Adding Paradoxical Outcome was a long con for this week all along! The card has not felt like a great fit in the Cube to me, but it will definitely perform when your deck is full of Moxen! It is among the most-improved cards for Supreme Draft, along with Monastery Mentor.
Force of Will also improves considerably here, and is already a pretty high pick in normal drafts! You’ll just lose some games because you lost the coin flip with this much fast mana around, and Force of Will is the best way to try to break serve on that front. Keeping your blue card count high to pitch is another reason why you want to bias heavily towards blue.
Time Walk has risen to the ranks to become the most powerful piece of power in regular Vintage Cube Drafts, and that’s going to hold here. If you’re lucky enough to open three pieces of power in the same pack, you’ll definitely want to take the Time Walk along with one of the other two.
Brain Freeze is one of the least interactable win conditions for this format, and assembling Underworld Breach alongside it will be much easier in Supreme Draft. Some of your opponents might try to get cute with an Eldrazi, and for that reason I would try to pick up a Thassa’s Oracle; Jace, Wielder of Mysteries; or at least some kind of burn spell you can convert into lethal damage for when this comes up.
Kappa Cannoneer is kind of a funny one, because the reason I’m calling it out is as a Tinker target! Bolas’s Citadel and Blightsteel Colossus will be the ideal finds, but sometimes you don’t get those, and sometimes you want to play around interaction. This role used to be filled by Inkwell Leviathan, but ward 4 is basically hexproof, so the Cannoneer isn’t too far off. Also, if you didn’t know, for whatever reason, the Cannoneer triggers itself, so it immediately becomes a 5/5 when it enters.
On that note, you’ll rarely want to pass Tinker, and it’s likely to be one of the most common game-winning spells this week. I don’t generally value Brainstorm very highly in Supreme Draft, given that I don’t tend to end up with many fetchlands, but Brainstorm does go up significantly in value once you already have Tinker to make sure you don’t get stuck with your Tinker target in hand.
I was already against Hullbreacher’s return to the Cube, though this week is when it will really make its presence known. A fun piece of trivia is that Hullbreacher was first introduced to the MTGO Vintage Cube leading up to the first run of this form of Supreme Draft, and it was cut before it got a shot in a normal run, due in no small part to how awful that experience was! You need a very good reason to pass this card, given the way it hates on all of your opponent’s card draw while also offering a backbreaking combo with draw-sevens. Narset is also good, but the “gotcha” that Hullbreacher offers with flash as well as the mana boost from the Treasures put it way, way over.
Black
I’m possibly being over-generous to Dark Confidant here, especially considering that Orcish Bowmasters will be out in force, but Bob has always been a nice Turn 1 play off a Mox and I don’t know how to quit him. Discard and tutors are the big draw here, and you are going to see some messed-up Storm decks this week. Beseech the Mirror hasn’t been too impactful in regular drafts, but when you can more reliably sacrifice a Mox to find Yawgmoth’s Will, it gets much better. Bolas’s Citadel was already the premier Tinker target, but it also gets much better in an environment where you’ll be playing more Moxen and fewer lands. You might even be able to play a second copy of Tendrils of Agony so you can keep going when you find the first too early with your Citadel!
Where Storm combo gets much better, Reanimator actually gets much worse. Once everyone is just doing something sort of combo-y and valuing Force of Will highly, Reanimator goes from cheating heavily on mana to just working harder than everyone else to get something that might not even be as good as what the opposition has. Do you want to activate a Griselbrand and have your draw-seven eaten by a Hullbreacher?
Black is pretty convincingly the second-best color in Vintage Cube Supreme Draft, with many of its best cards scaling wonderfully into the environment while also not requiring you to play any of the color’s weaker cards, given the nature of only playing first picks.
Red
As a rule, I wouldn’t even think about trying to draft any form of traditional aggro deck this week. Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer gets a pass because, like Dark Confidant, there is some real upside to the card, but it does get much weaker in Supreme Draft outside of the times when you mise into opposing power. To be fair, that is more likely to happen the more power your opponent has!
Lightning Bolt is desirable specifically because of Hullbreacher and Orcish Bowmasters, and if not for Underworld Breach, it might not even be worth calling out. Whether you draft a full-on Brain Freeze deck or just use Breach to recast some number of Ancestrals and Time Walks, it is easily one of the most powerful cards in the format. There are some nice gold cards in red, too, though Underworld Breach should generally be the card that pushes you into red.
Green
I’m having a lot of difficulty finding a mono-green card that I would endorse playing here…
There’s some gold stuff, but as a rule, almost every good green effect gets much weaker once players start playing with a ton of broken artifact mana. Birds of Paradise has nothing on Sol Ring, and once the mana creatures are weak, Gaea’s Cradle suffers, too. Running fewer lands also leaves less to do with Fastbond, so I wouldn’t go down that road, either.
Some of the high-impact green gold cards in Wrenn and Six and Minsc and Boo also lose a lot of punch merely for being two non-blue colors. If you’re playing red and you can cast Minsc easily off a Lotus, it’s worth playing, but the cost of playing it is noticeably higher than it is in traditional drafts.
You won’t have to go too far out of your way to not draft green this week, but even if I had to, I still would.
Gold
Unsurprisingly, this is a list of almost all blue cards, and all cards that are looking to get paired with a lot of fast mana! I see players putting Lurrus in their maindeck with some regularity in regular Vintage Cube, but the best Lurrus decks this week are going to be Black Lotus decks with Lurrus as a companion. It’s a pretty nice one to have along with Brain Freeze and Underworld Breach! Being able to Brain Freeze yourself more proactively and then use Lurrus from the companion zone to get your Breach back is completely bonkers.
Sail into the West gets the nod here because you’ll want draw-sevens to force some action on the play, but it’s very likely just much weaker than Paradoxical Outcome, if nothing else for being green. Tamiyo is also pretty nice for going off with Time Walk, but it’s a similarly low-priority option.
Colorless
Blightsteel Colossus may not be what it once was, but it is still one of the go-to “win this turn” finds with Tinker that gets a lot more powerful in these more extremely powerful formats where you just need to win quickly. Portal to Phyrexia has been considered generally more desirable in regular drafts, but it’s just not remotely as effective here.
The card that I think stands out here that I want to draw attention to is Aetherflux Reservoir. It’s mostly an okay Storm card normally that gets way better when you have Bolas’s Citadel, but the bigger reason I’m calling it out here is to pair with Paradoxical Outcome. That’s not a remotely realistic way to win in a normal draft, but you can definitely pull it off here.
Lands
I have nothing to say to you if you think you’re too good for Library of Alexandria, and it and Urza’s Saga will be the lands most responsible for pulling off easy wins through Force of Will checks. Strip Mine and Wasteland become important cards for this very reason.
Tolarian Academy is probably the most improved land, but Otawara, Soaring City is the most relevantly improved land, going from a card that you’ll take and play if you can get it to one that you’ll generally be pretty happy to have a copy of. It mostly does what Unexpectedly Absent does while being blue and hiding in your manabase, which is pretty excellent here.
You’ll want some dual lands if you venture into non-blue colors, but I would err on the side of getting the spells that you want to cast first and then grabbing the lands to cast them if you need them. Taking blue fetches from weaker packs to hedge towards splashing makes sense to me, but you can see a lot of success with mono-blue in this environment, to the extent that I would err on the side of keeping things to the one color.
While I do wish we were playing the other form of Supreme Draft this week, there are some new toys to experiment with in this environment that I’m excited to try. And who knows, maybe I’ll end up feeling more in control of my own fate than it looks when I get to playing the games! I only hope that Hullbreacher doesn’t spoil too much of the fun.
