Hello and welcome to the Magic Super Cube!

This is where I take a look at sets that have been released throughout Magic’s history that were Standard legal or would have been Standard legal had the format existed and choose cards from each of those sets to make what could possibly be the largest Cube in the world.

We come back from our detour from Seventh Edition and finish off Invasion block by looking at Apocalypse, a smaller set of 143 cards, and I have to say that compared to some of the previous sets, this was actually one of the easier sets of this era to pick cards fom.

Multicolored cards are back, and while it made some things difficult in previous sets, this wasn’t so much the case in this set. Artifacts were pretty narrow in terms of options, so I could expand the multicolor picks a bit more while not sacrificing land picks.

Let’s get started!

White

As we get back to the bevy of options, we are back to three options per color, but it wasn’t bad overall.

The creatures for all of the pick had a pretty easy fall back option and I decided to use it to make sure that I maintained at least one creature pick for each color, as per the rules. This cycle helps a particular typal deck, and the one in white is one I don’t think we have much of, but can definitely help develop as the Cube goes on.

The noncreature spells in white were pretty interesting, with one of the cards being a nice way to redirect card effects to another creature we control to help protect some of our stronger things and the other pick is something that helps us provide some more protection against colors that white doesn’t often have too much protection against.

My picks for white are Coalition Flag, Enlistment Officer, and Shield of Duty and Reason.

Blue

One pattern that I noticed among all the colors was that there were a lot of interesting options among all the colors, and while blue was a bit weaker in that department, there were still some solid choices.

I did leave the one creature spell to be the option that helps a typal strategy, but this was an instance where there were other options that I wanted to choose from instead and had to make the hard choice on whether or not to stick to a particular theme for the typal creatures.

The noncreature spell definitely made up for up because there was a card that allows a lot of control over the next few draws that you can have and a counter spell that gives you a benefit from playing a lot of basic land types.

My picks for blue are Evasive Action, Index, and Tidal Courier.

Black

Of the five colors, black was back to being the easiest of the five to choose from.

This started with the creature spells since one of the choices was one of the typal creatures that benefit that particular creature type and the other is a solid creature that provides a bit of card advantage at a minor cost.

The noncreature spell was probably the easiest of them to pick because it is a card that is very iconic for black and while it has made its appearance in a pretty recent set, it still is a really good card not just for black but for the Cube in general.

My picks for black are Grave Defiler, Phyrexian Arena, and Phyrexian Rager.

Red

Red provided some of the most interesting picks among the five colors, and was probably the most difficult of the five to choose from, though only by a slim margin.

The creature spell was easy, as it followed the same cycle that I have been doing the entire time for this set and has really made me think of how I should handle these sort of cycles in the future, whether I can only include one, a couple, or should include all of them.

The noncreature spells are very interesting, with one being an enchantment that provides an interesting sacrifice outlet that also happens to deal a bit of damage, and a fairly unique tutor for red in that it allows you to tutor for enchantments or instants, with the caveat that a card is randomly discarded which is very red.

My picks for red are Bloodfire Infusion, Goblin Ringleader, and Wild Research.

Green

Green was solidly in the middle in terms of how easy it was to pick cards for, though again this was all by the slimmest of margins.

The noncreature spell was pretty interesting because while it does have you sacrifice a ton of lands, it also happens to let you search your library for a lot of lands, provided they are lands that have each of the basic land types, which is a very niche but not difficult archetype to build around in a Cube of this size.

The creature spells added a bit more variety, and not including the typal creature that completes the whole cycle, I decided that having a mana dork that can tap for three different colors would work well, especially since it helps provide a bit of color fixing.

My picks for green are Gaea’s Balance, Sylvan Messenger, and Urborg Elf.

Artifacts and Lands

As I said earlier, the artifact choices were a bit on the slim side so I decided to combine them with the lands.

The lands do happen to be part of a cycle of lands, and while there are a couple of opportunities to choose them later down the line, I think that choosing this cycle of lands now would open up choices down the line as the Cube goes on.

The artifact picks are pretty interesting in my opinion because while the picking were slim, there were still some solid choices overall. I decided on a card that could exile other permanents and has some recursion, an artifact that helps you cheat out specific creatures into play, and an artifact that punishes people for playing too many basic land types.

My picks for artifacts are Dragon Arch, Legacy Weapon, and Mask of Intolerance. My picks for lands are Caves of Koilos, Shivan Reef, Llanowar Wastes, Battlefield Forge, and Yavimaya Coast.

Multicolor

Last but not least are the multicolor cards, and since I had a bit of extra space I had a couple more picks for multicolor.

There were quite a number of cards to choose from, and they all were cards that were the enemy color combination, which was not very common for sets to do at this point in time.

Of the picks I had made there was an iconic removal spell, an iconic split card, a flexible removal spell that can deal with a lot of potential threats, a way to protect yourself from being attacked in an unconventional color combination, a creature that also doubles as a counter spell, a five color creature with many potential abilities, and a cards that cared about the number of certain basic lands you had in order to have bigger and bigger effects.

My picks for multicolor are Vindicate, Fire//Ice, Pernicious Deed, Powerstone Minefield, Mystic Snake, Cromat, and Last Stand.

In Conclusion

As opposed to its preceding members of the block and its namesake, Apocalypse was actually pretty easy to pick cards from.

When we come back to the Magic Super Cube, we will be starting a new block with the first set of that block being Odyssey, which is a large set of 350 cards and plays around with graveyard mechanics, and I hope it’s pretty easy to pick cards for the set.

As usual, here is the Moxfield link to keep up with all the cards in the Cube!

See you next time!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual

Socials

Bluesky: @jmcasualnerd.bsky.social

Ko-Fi: ko-fi.com/jmcasual

YouTube: youtube.com/@jmcasualguy

Twitch: twitch.tv/jmcasual