Sweet and powerful decks in cube, Part 4: Spice up your Mono G/Simic ramp section.

I am always looking into meta breakdown posts of eternal formats such as modern, pioneer and also historic to get ideas for new archetypes for cube. One archetype which I always liked is Mono G including a lot of colorless cards. Colorless cards, mostly artifacts, are generally awesome to enable Mono colored decks in cube because they increase the number of potential includes for your deck in the draft pool. Especially Mono G should benefit from numerous ramp artifacts such as Signets, Talismans and Monoliths, right?

My problem with the most conventional Mono G decks is the fact that they lack variety and consistency. I admit it, I love me some Mono G deck with Craterhoof Behemoth and/or End-Raze Forerunners at the top end. However, playing that deck numerous times in my life made playing the deck repetitive. In addition, I felt that the deck is very inconsistent without including lots of tutors, which I am not a fan of in singleton formats. The other problem with these Craterhoof decks is that I generally don't want huge manarocks in my deck. Optimally, every card in my deck is a manadork because I want as many bodies as possible for the big game-ending play. However, manadorks are easily interacted with and even if all my dorks stick on the battlefield, I have to draw Craterhoof/Forerunners in the exact moment. Don't get me wrong, manadorks are very powerful and most midrange decks are maybe even happy if their bird takes a bolt. But for Craterhoof decks, losing a manadork is devastating because you heavily rely on every single one. Another problem is the fact that manadorks are high picks for nearly any Gx deck. Hence, getting even the minimal amount of manadorks can be tough.

I want to support a Mono G archetype that is firstly more consistent and secondly more resilient, meaning that it does neither rely on the Hoofs nor on tutors. The inspiration for this deck comes from Pioneer and Modern, namely Mono G planeswalkers and Tron. Now please hold on before you stop reading. It may sound very contradicting to want to play a consistent deck and then mentioning Tron as an example. But, it all makes sense in the end. Probably the main inspiration drawn from both these constructed decks is to shift the major threats from CMC 7+ creatures to big (5 CMC+) planeswalkers such as Nissas, Viviens, Garruks, Ugins and Karns. 

Mono G PWs is a mono green midrange deck that plays PWs as the main threats, not huge 7+ CMC creatures. A few PWs in that deck are also good in cube, the most powerful one being Nissa, who shakes the World. Karn the Great Creator is a card that I will try out in the future, but it seems to need a really strong prison theme with cards such as Ensnaring Bridge, Trinisphere, etc. to really be worth it in cube. However, we have a replacement in Karn, Scion of Urza. Other good midrange walkers that I am currently playing are Nissa, Voice of Zendikar, Vivien, Monster's Advocate and Garruk Wildspeaker. Most importantly, this deck needs PWs that can generate tokens because our PWs are our main threats. Because we don't need as many manadorks as for the usual Mono G Hoof-variant, we can safely include lots of manarocks in our deck to naturally curve out with a potential turn 1 manadork into a turn 2 signet/talisman into a turn 3 PW. Making these manarocks more playable in Green has huge consequences for the draft. Namely, the Mono G deck can also be played without getting all the dorks and comes together more frequently.

Interestingly, the possible inclusion of manarocks can also go another way, namely from the midrange to the ramp route. With PWs such as Ugin, the Spirit Dragon and Karn Liberated, we have immensely strong ramp payoffs which can be played very rapidly with manarocks such as Worn Powerstone, Basalt Monolith, etc. I noticed that I like a lot of rather expensive artifacts in such decks like Solemn Simulacrum, Skycovereign, Consul Flagship and Golos, Tireless Pilgrim. Especially the inclusion of Golos lead me to another idea: What if we include the Tron lands in our cube? The tron lands would be another payoff for being mono colored with a lot of colorless spells. Modern shows us how powerful Tronlands can be in combination with Karn Liberated, Ugin, etc. However, how do we enable these tron lands? The Modern version plays each Tronland four times and plays a lot of tutors and cantrips. However, we don't want the Tron-cube deck to get full Tron every game on turn 3.

The solution that worked for me is to dedicate one spot in the cube to Urza's Tower. The player who picks Urza's Tower gets the other two pieces in addition. However, there are not multiple Tron lands in the draft pool. You get each one only once. Luckily, I already have some Land tutors in my cube because of a unique land package, which I briefly described in this article, where I explain how to make Mystic Sanctuary work in cube. And for the Tron lands, it is not different. The opportunity cost to play the Tron lands in a mono-colored heavy artifact deck is very low and the payoff can be immense. With cards such as Expedition map and land tutors in G (Sylvan Scrying, Crop Rotation, etc.), getting to the full three Tron lands happens relatively often (more often than one would expect). To my surprise, the Tron lands also help mono-blue and mono-red decks. The Tron lands work especially well in the mono-blue artifact decks together with Mind Slaver and Academy Ruins, which can also be tutored.

I should mention that I am a huge fan of including cards in cube that are not played every draft. I also run Dark Depths + Thespian Stage which really does not come together often. However, I want to draft because I want to experience a huge variety of decks. I often have plenty of playable cards in my pool after drafting a typical cube. Therefore, I am a huge fan of including cards in cube that are not really worth a slot. For example, I also play Flagstone of Trokair because it is really good together with a few other cards in my cube (Armageddon, Elish Reclaimer + Crucible of Worlds, Crop Rotation, Cleaning Wildfire, Smallpox, etc.). I don't think that it is objectively worth a cube slot, but it can really increase the powerlevel of the Naya landfall and the Orzhov Stax deck, which I am both currently running in my cube. This does not align with the beliefs of many other cube builders and that is fine. Everybody cubes for different reasons. Some people want to minimize variance and want every card in their cube to be an almost always playable card. This tron-package is probably not something that appeals to such cubes.

Back to Mono G. Other cards that really help this Tron land package are land enchantments like Wild Growth, Fertile Ground, etc. In addition to those, cards like Chromatic Star/Sphere are good to fix your mana (mostly from colorless to green or blue). The inclusion of these eggs in my cube even let me to include a Second Runrise/ Faith's Reward package in my cube which I am currently testing.

I found that his artifact heavy/tron style Mono G deck can easily splash for another color because of the fixing provided by eggs, dorks, land tutors and rocks. I found that this deck mainly wants to splash for U to have access to card draw and powerful Simic cards. One card which fits perfectly in this deck is Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy. Kinnan rewards you for playing Manadorks and Manarocks, which is exactly the point of this deck. Not only that, but Kinnan also doubles the mana obtained by cards such as Chromatic Star/Sphere, Arcum's Astrolabe, etc. Although we do not activate Kinnan's ability a lot because we are actually not playing that many creatures, Kinnan's mana doubling ability is powerful enough on its own. It becomes especially degenerate with Treasure generators such as Treasure Map, because Kinnan doubles their mana output too. Other powerful inclusions are generally good Simic cards with only one U in their mana cost like Hydroid Krasis, Growth Spiral, etc. If Oko wouldn't be insanely busted in every deck, I would be especially excited to play him in this kind of deck because of the artifact density. Maybe with the "balanced Oko" coming out in MTGA, I will play the balanced version (of course only if they really balance Oko).

Another powerful inclusion which offers the splashing of U is the access to Extra turn spells which work beautifully with the G PWs because of their token generation. I am currently running a Simic Extra turns archetype in my cube with Wheels, Fastbond, Wilderness Relamation, etc. I will write on this archetype in my next article and will provide a sample deck which worked very well.

Here are two example decks:

1) Mono G with high artifact density and Tron lands

- Three land tutors (Expedition Map, Crop Rotation, Golos)

- Two colorless lategame win conditions (Small and big Ugin)

- Only three manadorks and one manrock

2) Mono G splashing U for Kinnan and Extraturn spells

- Nine cards (only five manadorks and gout manarocks) that synergies with Kinnan

- Two Extraturn spells (Time Warp, Nexus of Fate)

- Two colorless lategame winconditions (Boat and Karn)

- Tolarian Academy for the nutdraws (land tutor would have been nice for that)

I hope you enjoy the read and mostly importantly I hope you get inspired to try something in your own cube.