Sweet and powerful decks in cube, Part 3: Mono Blue Artifact control, Sultai Uro, Izzet Mystical Teaching Sharkturns

Unfortunately, I could not play as much cube lately as I would have liked. Because of the current situation, drafting in a group is not possible. This lead me to the belief that playing cube is not possible. However me and a friend found a solution to play cube, albeit only with other people who have a cube of preferably the same powerlevel. Namely, we both just play sealed with our own cubes and play each other via Spelltable. This work surprisingly well and also solved the question "whose cube are we gonna draft today". Both players get to try out their own cube. I thought that this would not lead to good decks, but I was wrong. Playing sealed with 100 cards lead to this synergistic deck for example:

Mono Blue Artifact Control

This is a mono blue artifact based control deck. We play cheap artifacts in the form of Mishra´s Bauble, Lotus Petal and Astrolabe to synergizes with cards like Emry, Little Karn and especially Tinker. I got my favourite Tinker target in God Pharao´s Gift but never drew Tinker so I can´t say how good it was. Note that in my cube, there aren't any insanely great Tinker payoffs like Sundering Titan, Blightsteel, etc. I don't even run Wormcoil Engine. The rest of the deck is counterspells, card draw and planeswalkers. Narset is particularly interesting because it can fetch up Artifacts. 

I will list a few cards which impressed me:

Emry is a great card. It carried a few games on its own drawing a card each turn with Mishra´s Bauble or getting additional mana each turn with Lotus petal. Also bringing back a Retrofitter foundry was good.

Talking about Retrofitter Foundry, this card impresses me more the more I play it. It is obviously good in Aristocrat and Stax decks. However, I did not think about it in combination with Counterspells because you can always use it if you don´t want to counter something and deploy a body instead.

Glen Elendra is still very good especially because the cube of my opponent has a higher powerlevel. Noncreature spells still carry a lot of decks, especially slower ones, and Glen Elendra just shuts down these strategies completely. If you happen to run a more midrangey cube, I can see her getting worse with the influx of effective creatures with high stats.

To end up with the card that impressed me the most: Academy Ruins. I never got to play with it before because I added it to the cube just recently and this seems like the perfect deck for it. Recycling value artifacts over and over again is just very hard to beat especially if you do it with Torrential Gearhulk.

The deck felt very good but looking at it again, it might have a bad matchup against aggro. My opponent only played midrange and control, so I can´t really tell. 

Sultai Uro

I always liked the idea of adding Uro to my cube. Yes, Uro is a very powerful Magic card. No, it is not as good in cube as in constructed for several reasons: Firstly, you don´t have four of them. If your Uro is exiled, it is gone. Secondly, you don´t have as many fetchlands and cheap cantrips as in constructed formats which makes filling the graveyard fast and more importantly consistently throughout games hard. Lastly, you don´t have very good fixing so running three colors with Uro is sketchy but definitely doable as seen here. 

This deck is a Sultai Midrange/Ramp deck which uses Uro very well. We have several methods to mill and discard cards with Careful Study, Grisly Salvage and Discovery. In addition, we have a card I immediately put into the cube in addition to Uro: Gifts Ungiven. Inspired from Modern (this was written before the Uro ban in modern), Gifts and Uro are best friends and work very well together. The other Gifts target in Eternal Witness also helped to get maximal value out of Gifts. Our curvetoppers are general goodstuff in Grave Titan, Nissa and Ugin.

It was very funny as my opponent assembled a Simic Ramp deck, so the games were just value wars. One game was decided by me decking myself out because of Uro. Uro was very good and definitely helped me to understand why the constructed decks are called Uro piles. It is the center piece of the deck and glues everything together. I helps you survive the early game and let's you draw gas in addition to ramping you and provides lategame value. However, you have to be very careful with your Uro because once it is exiled, it is gone. In addition, you can´t bring Uro back every turn. You will run out of cards in your graveyards more rapidly then in constructed because of the previously mentioned lack of cheap spells and fetchlands.

I was impressed with the GB Nissa from Zendikar. She is good at pressuring opposing PWs and her second ability is really great if she survives one turn. Playing a turn 6 Nissa into a fetchland and bringing back a Grave Titan from your graveyard or hand (!) is awesome . She also benefitted from Uro who granted more Landdrops. Nissa is really hard to kill because she just gains free Loyalty every turn. I was also impressed by Titania although there weren´t that many synergies in the deck but just bringing back a fetchland and getting 10/6 stats over two bodies felt like good enough. Obviously she has a much higher ceiling with cards like Zuran Orb and Squandered Resources.

Cards that impressed me too were good old Hero´s Downfall and Eat to Extinction. There are so many good PWs nowadays and just killing them without any restriction at Instant speed felt good. I forgot how good an unconditional kill spell is. Of course, against aggro, these removal spells do not tend to perform as well.

Generally, this deck was a lot of fun especially because of Gifts + Uro.

Izzet Mystical Teaching Sharkturns

Ending with a banger. The deck is a spellslinger/control deck that utilizes good control elements, so nothing really fancy except the topend which consists of Nexus of Fate and Shark Typhoon and these two are a match made in heaven. Two out of three games, I won because of a hardcasted Shark Typhoon followed by a Nexus of Fate at my opponents end step resulting in a metric ton of gigantic, flying sharks that could attack over two turns.

Mystical Teachings impressed me together with Nexus of Fate, because once you have enough mana you have a lot of freedom with it and can get you necessary pieces for the "combo kill". It is unfortunate however that Teaching can't search for Shark Typhoon.

The rest of the deck consists of counterspells, draw and burnspells. I was really impressed with Shatterskull Smashing. The card is just insanely flexible and has a very low opportunity cost. Playing Mystical teachings to tutor up Deprive to counter their spell and get a Shatterskull Smashing from my lands back to my hand to kill both my opponents blockers on my next turn to swing for game felt really good.

I initially included Deprive in my cube to combo with Mystic Sanctuary but the MDFCs of Zendikar provide another interesting axis to Deprive.

I have a bunch of other decks which I played recently but did not find the time and motivation to write them down. Expect more frequent decks posted here in the coming weeks!