Drafting Control and Ramp in Cube: Winning the Long Game

Aggro tries to end the game before your best cards matter. Control and ramp are built around making sure they do. In Cube, where the strongest late-game cards in Magic are often in the box, a well-drafted slow deck can be the strongest deck at the table.

It is also the deck new drafters most often build badly: a pile of expensive cards that dies on turn six. This lesson is about drafting it properly.

Control: three piles in balance

Think of a control deck as three piles.

Answers. Removal, counterspells, and cards that deal with several threats at once. These keep you alive. Most control decks want eight or more good answers, including some that handle a creature of any size.

Card advantage. Cards that draw extra cards, or answer two threats with one card. These let you outlast the opponent. Two to four is a common range. Our piece on card advantage in Cube shows the engines that do it best.

Finishers. The few cards that actually win. Control needs fewer than you think, often three to five, but each should end the game quickly once it lands and should be hard to answer.

If one pile is empty, the deck fails in a predictable way. All answers and no finishers: you survive and never win. All finishers and no answers: you die before casting them.

Early defense matters

The most common control loss is to a fast start. A control deck needs cheap plays that slow the opponent:

• Cheap removal for one- and two-drops.
• Creatures that block well early, or that give value as they trade.
• At least a few plays at two mana.

Count them. If your deck does nothing before turn three, aggro decks will beat it most games.

Counterspells in Cube

Blue control decks often run counterspells, which stop a spell as it is cast. They are strong in Cube because the threats are strong. But they ask you to keep mana open on the opponent’s turn, which slows your own development. A good rule: a counterspell that costs two or less is easy to hold up; three or more needs a deck that is happy to pass the turn.

Ramp: skip the middle

Ramp is a different kind of slow deck. Instead of surviving the early game, it accelerates past it. Creatures and artifacts that make mana, and spells that fetch lands, let a ramp deck cast five- and six-mana threats on turn three or four.

A ramp deck needs:

• Acceleration, usually six or more cards that make extra mana or fetch lands.
• Payoffs, the big threats the acceleration is for. Five or six is plenty.
• A little interaction, so a fast opponent does not run it over.

The trap is drafting all payoffs and too little acceleration, or the reverse. Six creatures that make mana with nothing big to cast is a weak creature deck. Ten big spells with two mana creatures is a weak control deck.

Ramp is often green, since green holds most of the creatures that make mana in many Cubes. Our piece on fast mana in Cube covers the artifacts and creatures that power it, and which ones change the game most.

Land count for slow decks

Slow decks play 17 lands, and some play 18 when the curve is high and the deck has ways to use extra mana. The mana lesson showed that 18 lands raise the chance of three lands by turn three to about 88%. Mana creatures and artifacts in a ramp deck count toward your mana, but they are easier to kill than lands.

Reading the lane

Control and ramp both lean on scarce cards: sweepers, card draw, and acceleration. Watch whether they come late.

• A strong card-draw spell or sweeper at pick five or later suggests the slow lane is open.
• Counterspells and card draw going early suggest a blue drafter upstream.

Slow decks also benefit from cards other drafters undervalue. Lands that make two colors, for example, help a slow deck play its strongest spells from several colors.

Playing the long game

Two habits help most:

• Count your answers against their threats. Know which threats you can still handle, and save your best answers for the ones you cannot handle any other way.
• Win when you can. Control players sometimes wait too long. Once you have answers in hand and a finisher on board, end the game.