With CawBlade in its recent incarnations gone the metagame is seemingly wide open.  Any number of archetypes can claim to be the new top dog, and the viability of many cards goes up without the fear of a Jace making them irrelevant or a turn three Batterskull attacking too quickly for them to come online.  Until some tournament results come in to fill in the gaps any talk about the new metagame will be little more than an educated guess, but we can still know questions need to be answered.

10 Magic players of superior skill enter a single team cube draft. How do you handle the volume without taking up an entire day? Anthony has the clever, and fun, solution of Survivor Draft!

The fairest deck of them all has Geoff serving up the quick beats. Tapping mountains from molehills is the plan of the day, and Geoff breaks down some flavors of burn you might want to avoid, or even try!

Mike Lanigan discusses the impact of the cards of New Phyrexia on Standard’s Vampire archetype.

With a new format becoming available for the first time Friday, it’s time to take a quick look at what’s available. For the most part, these will be aggro or combo decks, since control decks need to be built towards the metagame. As it stands, Caw-Blade is the premiere control deck in the format, and it can be played as-is with the mere addition of Batterskull.

Seeing the results from the National Qualifiers and thinking back on the article I wrote on Vampires, I was led back to that deck. I really love this Vampire deck and what it is capable of, I play it well, and I have had more success with it than any other deck this season. With all those things being true, how could I not play it again?

Gregory teams up with Jay Schneider to bring you an exciting and potentially format-crushing deck at the last minute!

In the fifth part of his ongoing series, Usman gives us a SWOT on green in cubes!

You’ll be seeing red this week as Usman runs through part 4 of his Cube SWOT series!

This week, Usman continues his series of SWOT articles for each color in cube, examining the strengths, weaknesses and what each color brings to its archetype. This week’s SWOT analysis is on blue.