Frank Lepore's Horror Cube Returns

Posted on Oct 09, 2024

Boy, how time flies …

It feels like just yesterday my initial Innistrad Horror Cube went up on Magic Online during the 2023 Halloween season.

Well, if you were a fan of the Cube, I’ve got some good news! This year, it’s going to be running again, and I’ve made some substantial changes to it - 76 to be exact! Thirty-four of those changes are directly from Duskmourn: House of Horror, and four more are from Duskmourn Commander.

For those not familiar, the Cube originated from the observation that Innistrad likely had more sets based around it than any other plane in Magic: Innistrad, Dark Ascension, Avacyn Restored, Shadows Over Innistrad, Eldritch Moon, Innistrad: Midnight Hunt, and Innistrad: Crimson Vow, plus the Commander releases that accompanied those last two. So, technically, Innistrad has had nine sets based around it. I felt like that was more than enough to build a cool, spooky Cube, and Innistrad was already a fan favorite as far as planes go.

You can find me discussing things a little more in depth about the construction of the Cube in last year’s article that accompanied the Cube here.

While spooky in nature, the Cube’s primary focus is the creature types. This is definitely a kindred Cube at heart. For a recap, the main creature types we’re looking at are as follows:

• Angels
• Demons
• Eldrazi
• Horrors
• Humans
• Spirits
• Vampires
• Werewolves
• Zombies

There are a smattering of smaller thematic types, like Spiders and Devils, but these are the main creatures to build around.

What Did We Learn?

I feel like the Innistrad Horror Cube was pretty successful last time, and the data had shown as much. But there were a few things that made me unhappy:

Too Many Lords

Lords felt like they would be great in the Cube because they were the perfect build-arounds and they often had unique abilities to go along with their lordship. But there were too many. The Cube had seven Vampire lords in it, and that was just too many. For this edition, I narrowed these down quite a bit, leaving no more than four lords per creature type, and also leaving in the more restrictive lords that had conditions.

Death Baron, for example, was just too good, so it had to go on merit alone. The Cube is very combat-centric, and giving presumably a good portion of your creatures deathtouch often felt a little overpowered.

Poor Fits

There were a few cards in the Cube that weren’t good fits.

Seraph of the Scales is a cool card with a lot of value, but neither Angels nor Spirits were found in B/W. So you’d be forced to either splash for this in U/W Spirits or U/G Angels, or you’d just play this as a value creature in your B/W deck. This isn’t the end of the world, but with limited slots in the Cube, I’d rather have a card that fits more flavorfully. Obzedat, Ghost Council encountered the same issue.

Another card in this boat was Polukranos Unchained. While this is a cool Zombie Hydra, B/G isn’t a Zombie color combination - but it is the delirium combination. Pairing the escape mechanic with delirium forced a player into competing goals.

Too Powerful

There were a couple cards that just felt game-breaking whenever they got going. Spirit Bonds was the first one that comes to mind. Being an enchantment means that this was quite hard to deal with, unlike a creature with a similar effect. The indestructibility could also be unbeatable when coupled with free 1/1 fliers.

The Cube also has a lot of cards that tend to focus on both black creatures and the black creature types, like Zombies or Vampires, simply because of their high quantity. While some cards like Slayer of the Wicked are reasonable answers, there were two that felt a bit strong: the repeatable Undead Slayer, and the pro-black Devout Lightcaster. Being able to kill your opponent's best creature every turn for one mana is brutal, and protection coupled with exiling any black permanent felt a little too versatile.

Olivia Voldaren also just felt too strong and could run away with games if you didn’t have removal for her. Considering she got bigger every time her ability was activated, she was often quickly out of range of a lot of damage-based removal.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

A problem I was running into was that, while vampires on Innistrad were primarily black/red, there are also a ton of great vampires in Ixalan that are white/black. They’re also very closely tied in with Demons, which was great: the more overlap between creature types, the deeper and more versatile certain cards and strategies become.

Then Duskmourn released last month. This set is absolutely perfect for a Horror Cube, but it has nothing to do with the traditional Innistrad fare. There are very few of the standard tropes you’d expect, like vampires or werewolves or zombies.

Instead, you just have a bunch of scary nonsense like Abhorrent Oculus and Twitching Doll.

So we decided to move the Horror Cube away from its Innistrad roots and focus more on the “Horror” of it all. This meant diving a lot deeper into the Horror creature type. Where before there were only a couple of Horrors that just happened to be creepy, cool cards, this time there are 28 creatures that are either Horrors or can become them. We even have a couple of lord-adjacent Horrors in Captain N'ghathrod and Ancient Cellarspawn.

Sets released since last Halloween have made contributions as well. Modern Horizons 3 added seven new cards, including two Eldrazi, a Spirit, and a Demon that interacts favorably with both Vampires and Angels. Thanks to The Lost Caverns of Ixalan, we have a handful of cards that either are or make Vampire Demons, so that’s another nice bonus.

Archetypes

So where do all these changes leave us for strategies in this year’s Horror Cube?

As far as archetypes go, there isn’t much change from last year, and the cards I added in this year are meant to supplement those existing archetypes.

• Blue/Black: Horrors, Self Mill, Zombies

New Star: Abhorrent Oculus is a great addition to pay off your self-milling.

This year the Horror theme has been buffed a good deal. U/B is the primary Horror combination, but red and green also have their fair share of horrors.

• Black/White: Demons, Tokens, Vampires

New Stars: Vito, Fanatic of Aclazotz, Sorin of House Markov covers all the bases, but this combo has a deep bench of options.

• Black/Red: Madness, Vampires

New Stars: Chainsaw, Ancient Cellarspawn

• Red/Green: Werewolves

New Star: Hollowhenge Overlord

Lean into those sweet canine synergies while Magic Online handles the complicated differences between how Day/Night and Daybound/Nightbound work.

• Green/White: Angels, Humans, Tokens

New Star: Angelic Aberration is one of my favorites - it goes really well with all the 1/1 tokens G/W can produce, including humans and spirits.

• Blue/White: Spirits

New Stars: Ghostly Dancers, Phantom Interference

• Black/Green and Sultai: Graveyard Matters, Delirium

New Stars: Broodspinner and Drag to the Roots

• Blue/Green: Graveyard Matters, Investigate

New Stars: Kozilek’s Unsealing, Mirror Room//Fractured Realm

• Red/White: Aggro

As is typical on Innistrad, this color combo wants to just turn sideways.

• Blue/Red: Spells Matter

New Stars: Charred Foyer // Warped Space and Cursed Recording

I’m looking forward to trying them out and seeing how they perform. I can’t wait to get some games in against everyone, so if we happen to get paired up, feel free to say hi!

Challenge Accepted

As a bonus, we have a couple of challenges for you. If you manage to do any of the following in a Horror Cube game over the next two weeks and take a screenshot that demonstrates it, you’ll be rewarded with 120 Play Points so you can draft again (make sure the Game ID at the top of the Duel Scene is visible)! Just tweet the image to @MagicOnline with the hashtag #MTGOHorrorCubeChallenge, along with telling us about the situation:

• You win via the Liliana’s Contract trigger.
• You win via decking yourself while Laboratory Maniac in play.
• You meld Gisela, the Broken Blade with Bruna, the Fading Light.
• You meld Hanweir Battlements with Hanweir Garrison
• Your opponent loses the game via Triskaidekaphobia.
• Your opponent loses the game via Sinner’s Judgment (the back half of Faithbound Judge).
• Your opponent loses the game after you Harmless Offering them Demonic Pact

If you have any feedback or just want to share your thoughts or suggestions about the Cube and my card choices, you can reach me most easily on Twitter/X, Twitch, or YouTube. Thanks a ton for giving it a try, and I hope you have a blast!

Frank Lepore's Horror Cube Cardlist