Tournament Report - Uber Bear Cubeathon (27 Apr 2024)

by Kapernaumov

tl;dr:  The UberCube Cubeathon was an awesome Cube event. I managed to nab 2nd place overall! Really hoping the organizers put it on again next year.

Some Background

Some background, before we begin–I’ve been playing Magic since approximately OG Mirrodin, playing Limited since Zendikar, and designing and playing cubes since 2016. These days, I mostly just Cube. In my opinion, Cube takes the most stimulating elements of Limited, amps them up with a series of environments that are never truly “solved”, and attracts my favorite kind of player–players who are temperamental Spikes, but care more about fun and interesting gameplay than about winning. I attended CubeCon 2022 and CubeCon 2023, and managed to make top 64 at the latter. This was the first Magic tournament I’ve participated in where there were cash prizes on the line (or functional equivalents like extremely rare event cards for top 8).

With all that said, let’s dive in!

The Event

Anthony and the rest of the Uber Bear team put on an amazing event. The cubes were fun, the players, organizers, and judges were friendly and welcoming, and the venue could not have been cooler. The result was the kind of day that reminds you why you still play Magic after all these years. And while I’ve never put on a Magic tournament of that size before, having organized large events of similar size before and knowing how hard it is to get just 8 Magic players in a room to fire a Cube pod, the success of the event is truly a testament to the hard work of the Uber Bear team, the judging staff, and the staff of The Gathering Place. Head Judge Jack made wrangling 50ish players seem totally effortless.  And as I’ve come to expect at Cube tournaments, the players were amazing–both extremely focused on playing great Magic AND on being friendly to and genuinely having a good time with their opponents and podmates.

The Gathering Place

The Cubeathon was held at The Gathering Place in Chapel Hill, NC. I’d never been before, but I quickly discovered that it’s both a super cool Magic store and a great bar. And don’t just take that from me–two friends who are not Magic players stopped in midway through the tournament to grab a beer and say hello, and both remarked on the chill vibes, good community, and great beer selection. The Gathering Place was lively with people who weren’t there for the Cube tournament playing games all throughout the day, and the dimming of the lights and transition to karaoke midway through the final match of the tournament only sealed it as a sweet spot. The staff were incredibly friendly and the beer was excellent, with a wide variety of styles on tap. The espresso left a little to be desired, but the beer I had over the day was excellent (3.5/5 for Kayak Kolsch from Deep River and 4.25/5 for A Green Million Miles by Wye Hill).

The Gameplay

Morning Round

Round 1 I was assigned to UberBear’s Artifact Cube.  I hadn’t personally played the Cube before, but had talked to people who had played it at CubeCon, and the general sense I’d gotten was that the artifact hate strategies were particularly powerful. One of the very first cards I noticed in pack 1 was Glissa, the Traitor.  I didn’t really consider it–three pips is not where I want to be on my first pick–but it caught my eye because it’s a beater that can generate a lot of value in this kind of environment.  Flipping through the pack I realized I had opened Manglehorn. I grabbed that and locked in to the artifact hate strategy from there on out.

Here’s the deck I ended up building:

All-star cards: Tireless Tracker, Grafted Wargear, Wurmcoil Engine

Didn’t get there: The Great Henge

Never saw them: Utopia Sprawl, Swords

The Great Henge was definitely wrong to include–it’s the definition of a win-more card, and just not really where my deck wanted to be on top of that. Not sure what I was thinking by including it. I ended up siding it out game 2 in every match.

I was completely convinced my artifact hate strategy was going to stomp–but then I met my round 1 opponent. He had clearly had the same idea that artifact hate was going to be problematic, and solved that problem by simply avoiding playing artifacts altogether. He’d picked up the Glissa I’d passed in P1P1 and was playing cards that were on average better rate than anything I was running. My Loren, Manglehorn, and Knight of Autumn looked much less interesting when the ETB didn’t do anything, and mostly rotted in my hand.

Rounds 2 and 3, however, were running the much more standard (artifact-heavy) fare, and I was able to grab two wins for the pod to secure a place in tournament round 2.

Afternoon Round

After grabbing a bite to eat in the 30 minutes between rounds (shout out to Wheat on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill, who serve a very respectable scallion oil noodle), I learned that I would be drafting the Pockets of Synergy Cube. This Cube was described as not being a “full” synergy cube–but having small synergistic elements that players would have to stitch together to eke out value. This is definitely what it felt like to draft this Cube. During the draft, I really had no idea what direction I was supposed to be going or what exactly I was doing. Midway through pack 2, another player at the table made the joke that they were “elbow deep in the pocket and they still hadn’t found the synergy”, and that sentiment definitely resonated with me.

Once I turned to deckbuilding, however, the synergy seemed to become clearer. There was clearly something of a ‘manipulate the top of my deck’ flavor to the cards I’d picked up. I was sad to not have seen Field of the Dead (and I learned while checking the list during deckbuilding that it wasn’t in the cube), as I’d picked up 3 fetches and something like 9 other nonbasic lands. And during game play, the designer’s intent became more evident, as it quickly became clear that a substantial portion of success in a game was generating small bits of value here and there. Overall, this was a very interesting experience, as I typically enjoy the draft portion of a Cube draft more than the game play, but in this case, I found the draft rather frustrating, but the gameplay ended up being very complex, requiring a higher than average number of decisions for a cube of this power level.

Went 3-0 in this Cube. Most challenging matches (foreshadowing things to come) were against a very durdly deck by a local player named Tyler.

All-star cards: Courser, Polukranos, and Tyvar’s Stand.

Didn’t get there: Commence the Endgame–ended up dead in my hand every time I drew it.

Never saw them: I actually “saw” basically every card in this deck, since it dumped a lot of cards to the GY. But I never drew Fact or Fiction.

Top 8

Top 8 Cube was the Uber Bear Power Cube, a (largely) powermaxed vintage Cube. Before we began, Head Judge Jack informed the players that we would have the option of splitting the prize pool, with each player getting a $200 payout. However, all eight players would have to agree to this. I thought it was a good idea–I was just happy walking out cash positive from an awesome day of cubing, and liked the idea of not having to worry as much about being spikey and just getting to draft something fun. Several other players verbally expressed similar sentiments. However, before we began drafting, the judge informed us that one player had approached them and not agreed to a split. So games would be for all the marbles–the $450 top prize was back on the table!

This fact was top of mind as I made my P1P1. The two standout cards in the pack were Forth Eorlingas! and Timetwister. If we had been splitting, I would have picked the Twister (and I think I would have been rewarded for this–throughout the first two packs I ended up passing Lion’s Eye Diamond, Echo of Eons, Yawgmoth’s Will, and Emry), because it enables a very fun durdly deck. However, given that there was $350 on the line (the difference between 1st prize and washing out 5th through 8th place), the obvious choice in my mind was to take the Forth and force Boros Aggro. Boros Aggro tends to overperform in many powermaxed vintage lists. In my opinion, this is not least because it is relatively easy to pilot, but that factor was even more of a reason to lean in to it after 10 straight hours of cubing. Also, it was already past 7pm by the time we got started drafting, so the idea of pushing out some rounds quickly with an aggro deck was very appealing.

If I’m being honest, the draft was kind of on rails from that point on. I grabbed every red and white card I could–most importantly, the white Initiative cards, the Evoke elementals, and Laelia. The hardest choice came in Pack 3, Pick 1, where I had to choose between Ragavan and Fury (and I think Lightning Bolt may have also been in that pack?). I went with Fury–which I’m almost certain is the right choice 90% of the time, and probably still the right choice here, but I was very low on 1 drops and was deeply tempted to take Ragavan.

All-star cards: INITIATIVE, Evoke Elementals, Mother/Giver of Runes, Gitaxian Probe, Forth Eorlingas!

Didn’t get there: Intrepid Adversary, Bloodthirsty Adversary

Never saw them: Chandra, Adeline (honorable mention to Ephemerate, which I did draw once, but (a) never got to use, and (b) got used against me off of a Fallen Shinobi hit)

Round 1 opponent was on some kind of artifact deck. He had Grim and Basalt Monolith, Goblin Welder, Daretti, and Ancient Stone Idol (that I saw). Unfortunately, he seemed to not have much removal (or not much that he drew), and his deck had difficulty not falling immediately behind to my aggro build. He did manage to welder/daretti out an Ancient Stone Idol in one game, but I was able to immediately Solitude it and then punch through the resulting 12 points of lifegain in short order. 2-0 to head into the semifinals.

Semifinals opponent had been on the opposite side of the table from me, so we hadn’t seen each others signals in draft, but we quickly realized we had both built Boros Aggro. His build was more red skewed and he had more burn (and Black Lotus), but overall, my assessment was the quality of my cards was on average better. The Initiative cards and Evoke elementals really are egregious power outliers. We had two very fun games that actually played out with a lot of board stall (neither of us had incentive to attack in many instances, and we just flooded the board with small creatures staring each other down), but I was able to cinch the win. 2-0 again, and on to the finals.

In the finals, I was surprised to be matched with Tyler, who I’d played three extremely grindy but very fun games against in the Pocket of Synergy cube. I’d won the match to the sudden death rule when we went to turns, which was kind of unfair for Tyler, as I had 2 cards in library at that time, and no clear way to take the rest of his life down in time even if we had ignored the 5 turn limit and kept playing. So the finals match was a very fitting chance for some revenge!

A slight digression is warranted here to discuss the sudden death rules of this tournament. Rather than just going to turns when time was called and leaving games at a draw at turn 5 if they haven’t resolved by then, the organizers decided to use sudden death rules: At the end of turn 5, if neither player had won, whichever player had the higher life total won.

While I understand that the organizers wanted to avoid draws to simplify tournament ranking, this approach is, in my view, problematic for a number of gameplay reasons (e.g., it disincentivizes strategies that are orthogonal to life total, such as mill or stax). It also has significant effects on event timing, as it incentivizes slow play. Slow play is already an issue when rounds go to turns, as the clock is off and players want to make sure they are not making any misplays that could lose them the game in the seventh inning. With sudden death rules, the incentives to tank get even stronger, as it’s not just a question of making sure you either win or don’t lose before turn 5, but also of having to very carefully manage your life total, because one player is guaranteed to win on the basis of it (assuming the game doesn’t end before then). The result is rounds that get dragged out very long, usually because just one match is taking 10+ minutes to execute 5 turns. Many players I spoke with at the event expressed dissatisfaction with the sudden death rules, and I would encourage the organizers to reconsider them if the event is held again next year.

Back to the finals: Tyler was on a truly nasty Esper control build. Game 1 was over very quickly. He flashed in a Brazen Borrower turn 3, smashed me with a Fallen Shinobi turn 4, got two cards from my deck (can’t even remember what they were), and followed up with a Parallax Wave on turn 5 to smash with Shinobi again. Ouch.

Game two of the finals

Game two was extremely grindy. He again got in with the Fallen Shinobi and followed it up with Parallax Wave. I somehow managed to fight through this, and was able to squeak out a victory with the help of Forth Eorlingas! (I actually could have won a turn earlier than I did, but I wasn’t sure what counters he was running so I left up a mana on my Forth cast rather than maxing out the X, in case he had a Mana Tithe or Daze.)

Game three was, unfortunately, a bit of a non-game. Turn 1 he played Scrubland into Sol Ring. I had sided out artifact hate because I hadn’t seen a single artifact from him the first two games. Ok, this is going to be tough with him on 4 mana turn 2, but maybe he floods and I can fight through it. On my turn I Gitaxian Probe and he reveals Toxic Deluge, Treachery, Fractured Identity, and two lands. GG.

Digging for answers in game three of the finals.

I did my best to put up a valiant fight, but even digging deep for any kind of answer with Faithless Looting+Flashback, I didn’t hit any gas (and ended up seeing something like 12 or 13 lands by turn 6). Tyler was able to take the win and enjoy an extremely well deserved victory!

Final Thoughts

This event was a blast. The vibe was intimate and even more chill than CubeCon–I think due to a mix of the size, the venue (and ability to grab a beer between rounds), and most of the players being from the Triangle area–so in many ways it offered a better entry point to tournament cubing than CubeCon. I am definitely planning to attend again if it’s held in the future. The community is great, the venue is amazing, and the event was a lot of fun (plus, having attended college in NC, any trip back feels like going home). Fingers crossed the organizers saw it as a success and put it on again!