Hello and welcome to the Magic Super Cube!

For those who are new, this is the blog series in which I go set by set of Magic sets that were released for the Standard format or would have been in the Standard format had it existed at the time and pick cards from those sets in order to make what is potentially the world’s largest Cube.

Today we are delving into Darksteel, which is a set that at first seems fine when you look at the set, up until you reach the artifacts of the set. This set is infamous in how strong the artifacts were as well as how some of the artifacts were not just banned in Standard, but in other formats as well.

Even though it is a small set of 165 cards, there are a lot of cards to choose from and a lot of hard decisions that I had to make not just with the artifacts of the sets, but also the five colors presented some dilemmas in picking cards.

Let’s get started!

White

White was probably the easiest of the five colors to pick from which is actually saying quite a bit.

This mostly came from the fact that white played very well with artifacts, especially coming from the noncreature spell that ended up choosing. The noncreature spell is a cheap form of artifact recursion that can be useful for developing artifact synergies in white.

This is especially helpful with the creature spells that I have chosen, with one making it easier to attach Equipment, especially if we cheat it in and the other creature can help you tutor an Equipment in a way that is actually repeatable since it does so in a unique way.

My picks for white are Leonin Shikari, Ritual of Restoration, and Steelshaper Apprentice.

Blue

Blue was probably the second easiest of the five colors to choose from, which again is saying a lot because the rest of the three colors were pretty tough.

The creature spell was pretty easy, despite there being some pretty interesting creatures to pick from, with the creature pick being a way to help blue get to cast more artifact spells or use their activated abilities.

The noncreature spells were a bit trickier to pick from, though I do like the ones I picked. One is a way to take control of an Equipment, potentially permanently depending on who your opponents are and way to tutor an artifact into play.

My picks for blue are Carry Away, Reshape, and Vedalken Engineer.

Black

Black is where things started to get a bit more difficult in the picks.

This began with the creature spells because while there were some decent options to choose from, they all didn’t really stand out to me. The one I did end up choosing is a creature that has a slight downside but does have a pretty big upside if you manage to deal combat damage to an opponent.

The noncreature spells had the opposite problem in which there were quite a good number of interesting options to choose from. It ended up being a potentially recursive way to get your opponents to discard cards and a recursive way to give an opponent’s creature a debuff.

My picks for black are Greater Harvester, Pulse of the Dross, and Screams from Within.

Red

Red wasn’t too bad to pick from, but that mostly came from the creature side of things.

While there were plenty of creature spells to pick from, there was one creature spell that I felt like I had to pick, and it is a legendary creature that can help protect your artifacts by sacrificing another artifact.

The noncreature spells again were a bit tricky to pick from, but I decided on a modal burn spell that can target a creature or player or both and a way to redirect the target of a spell, which is an effect that I do personally enjoy.

My picks for red are Barbed Lightning, Shunt, and Slobad, Goblin Tinkerer.

Green

As seems to be the case for green in artifact heavy sets, this was the hardest of the five colors to pick from.

The easiest card to pick was the noncreature spell, and that was a tough choice to pick from. I ended up choosing a modal spell that can either destroy a land or is a land tutor or both if you happen to pay a bit of extra mana.

The creature spells were pretty tough and was one of the more difficult choices I had to make at this point in choosing cards for the Cube, at least until the artifacts. I chose a creature that buffs your other creatures when it attacks and a creature that helps you grow a wide board whenever they play artifact spells.

My picks for green are Fangren Firstborn, Infested Roothold, and Reap and Sow.

Lands

This was by far the easiest of all of the choices to pick from since there were only three options to pick from.

The only choice that I really had to make was whether or not to pick all three or pick one or two in order to have more artifact choices for the Cube. I decided that picking all three land options would make things both interesting in terms of options for the Cube and for me to make tougher cuts for the artifacts.

My picks for the lands are Blinkmoth Nexus, Darksteel Citadel, and Mirrodin’s Core.

Artifacts

Now comes the hardest picks for the Cube from this set, and that is the artifact picks.

While I had a couple more open slots to choose from because of the lack of a land cycle, there were still a lot of tough cuts that I had to make. There were some obvious picks that I had to include, but those took up a lot of space in the Cube, which meant that some of the more niche and weird artifacts had fewer spots to be put in.

At the end of the day I made the tough picks to include a way to cheat creatures in, a strong artifact sacrifice outlet, a massive creature that is hard to deal with, a way to make your artifacts more resilient, a future way to create a lock piece by making everything into an artifact, a way to get a copy of a spell for free, the second part of a three part cycle, a notoriously broken artifact that was a design mistake, a way to potentially cast an instant spell for free, two decently strong Equipment that are part of a massive cycle, and a way to punish cheap spells.

My picks for artifacts are Aether Vial, Arcbound Ravager, Darksteel Colossus, Darksteel Forge, Mycosynth Lattice, Panoptic Mirror, Shield of Kaldra, Skullclamp, Spellbinder, Sword of Fire and Ice, Sword of Light and Shadow, and Trinisphere.

In Conclusion

This was a tough one to pick from overall, with the artifacts being the biggest part of the challenge.

When we return to the Magic Super Cube, we will be finishing Mirrodin block with the last set Fifth Dawn, which for the benefit of the artifact enjoyers of the Cube will be happy to know that there are no lands in the set and that there will be a ton of perfectly fine, safe artifacts that were not banned.

As usual, here is the Moxfield link to keep up with all the cards in the Cube and here is the second part of it Moxfield II!

See you next time!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual

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