A Study in Harmony

Posted on Nov 11, 2025

By Matt Grenier

The final entry in our Season of the Cube comes from the victor of the vote among the grandest gathering of Cube aficionados on the planet – CubeCon! Held annually in Madison, Wisconsin, CubeCon takes participants’ Cube submissions and turns them into a massive in-person tournament, with the Magic Online Vintage Cube built live and reserved for the Top 8 to play. 

You can take this Cube for a spin following Wednesday’s downtime until next Tuesday, November 18 at 10 a.m. PT (18:00 UTC). It’s a short window, so be sure to study up here and jump into the League! 

Now, presenting the creator of A Study in Harmony, a true MTGO Vintage Cube end boss … 

Howdy, 

I’m Matt Grenier: former Vintage Cube trophy grinder now on-and-off sometimes-grumpy-sometimes-ecstatic cube streamer. With the support of the good voters of CubeCon 2025, I’m lucky enough to get the chance to present my cube to the wider Magic Online audience. 

You may be familiar with me from some of my more unusual Vintage Cube card evaluations, but most of my focus in the world of cube is more related to design. I’ve spent the last fifteen years thinking about the possibilities of the format as a whole, wondering what’s special about it, what its boundaries are, and how we can move beyond its accepted models and limitations. In the process of doing this, I’ve created more cubes than I can remember, but the one I’m here to talk about today is the culmination of all of these investigations: A Study in Harmony.  

Synergy At Its Core 

While I’m typically a Boring Jund Gamer if I’m ever actually competing, I’ve always been drawn to the more intricate decks of the game when I have the opportunity to dream of having more fun. I long for the Painters, Riddlers, Enchantresses, and Aristocrats that have all been run off from our magical plane by the droning invasion of prosaic Titans and Kavus. These patterns of play, most frequently labeled as synergistic, are so frequently minimized in the game — and particularly in cube — in favor of the more classical triad of Aggro, Combo, and Control.  

But shouldn’t Magic be sweet? Shouldn’t the cards I play combine to create some radical effect? Shouldn’t Magic be as thrilling as a skateboarding mix-tape, with its breathtaking highs (and calamitous lows)? After all, synergy is one of the defining traits of the game and one of the main elements that made it so revolutionary upon its release. Without it, we lose one of the core things that makes Magic magic.  

This cube restores synergy to its rightful place of importance, taking up equal space with the other pillars of the game: combat and interaction. Throughout it, you’ll find classic strategies that are the backbone of our understanding of the Johnny psychotype. Here the Enchanters and Artificers and Aristocrats return, and they’ll ask you to imagine a machine, its components, and its purpose (don’t think too hard, it’s probably to deal damage or draw cards). In the process, you may even find yourself blending these things together, uniting disparate styles in a cohesive whole.  

But while we can celebrate the return of this missing synergistic magic, it doesn’t reign supreme. You will still be attacking and blocking. You will still be destroying creatures and countering spells. These things are just as important in creating a great game of Magic. Balancing all these elements is at the heart of this cube and critical to avoiding the solipsistic gameplay typically associated with synergy and combo decks. In the end, you’ll be building this machine in front of another player, and you’ll probably want to break theirs before they break yours.  

Navigating the Cube 

As you’ll be called upon to explore a variety of synergistic options, understanding the basic synergy systems of the cube is important to navigating the draft. Thankfully, the greater systems found here revolve around the basics of Magic, so they’ll be familiar. The major themes are artifacts, enchantments, lands, creatures (often sacrificing them), and the graveyard. Every creature in the cube plays into one of these themes. As limited decks are almost always focused around creatures, any deck you make in this cube will by default focus on one of them as well.  

This may sound daunting, as maybe you’re not familiar with building a more intricate synergy deck. But think of it as a failsafe: even if you feel a bit lost, your creatures will help you out in pulling things together. All of these themes are robustly supported in the cube, and you should feel confident in diving in to any of them in your draft. Additionally, there are no “punishers” for any of these themes – no Shatterstorms, no Tranquilities, no Leylines of the Void – so you won’t be punished for experimenting. The one exception is creature sweepers: consider that card type to be fair game for mass removal.  

These themes are spread throughout the color pie and it’s entirely possible to play any of them in any color combination. Want to try an Izzet enchantment deck? There’s a way here. An Orzhov Landfall deck? Another option for sure. But if you’re looking for a place to start your thought process on making sense of it all, you can broadly consider the archetypes to be Jeskai Artifacts, Sultai Graveyard/Mill, Mardu Sacrifice/Tokens, Abzan Enchantments, and Temur Lands. Below I’ll go over some of the basic elements of these groupings, then some ways to weave more intricate constructions.  

Basic Harmony 

These are the core concepts of the cube and the building blocks of any deck in it. If you just know these, you’ll be in a good place to start drafting.   

Artifacts – Base: Jeskai 

Artifact-focused decks can run the gamut: from aggressive Affinity-style beatdown machines, to piles centering around Equipment reminiscent of Hammer Time, to crafty Welder value loops, to more true-combo decks trying to play their entire contents in one turn. Many creatures and interactive spells are incidentally artifacts, so make sure to look for those throughout the draft to fill out your deck if you don’t see any specific power players.  

An important note on Tinker: While there are a few expensive top-end cards to Tinker out in the cube, Tinker functions much more as a toolbox card in this environment. You won’t be cheating Blightsteel Colossus or Portal to Phyrexiainto play, but with a little ingenuity you can find that Mystic Forge to pair with Sensei’s Diving Top and set off some fireworks. 

Graveyard – Base: Sultai 

One of the first lessons a player learns when they really lock in to learning Magic is that the graveyard is a resource, and this cube lets you run wild with it! You can mill yourself to find Gravecrawler and Bloodghast or flashback spells. Alternatively, you can remove cards from your graveyard to trigger Tormod, the Desecrator or Insidious Roots. If you’re feeling a bit more antagonistic, you can even turn these powers against your opponent and mill them out instead: after all, draft decks generally only have 40 cards. These decks tend to trade early game action for late game power, so make sure to have a plan to get to that point so your deck can really sing.  

While there are many reanimation spells in this cube and some fairly powerful expensive creatures, the graveyard-focused decks will trend more along the lines detailed above than the classical Reanimator archetype. So be prepared to keep fighting after that Animate Dead resolves.   

Sacrifice/Tokens – Base: Mardu 

Creatures are the bread and butter of Magic. They’re also the most vulnerable card type in the game, subject to a wide variety of threats, sometimes even their controller. Many decks in this cube will revolve around creating a large number of creatures — frequently, but not always, tokens — and then either sending them into the red zone or into their own graveyard.  

• Some cards, like Purphoros, God of the Forge, will watch creatures come into play.
• Some cards like Priest of the Forgotten Gods, will remove those creatures from play.
• Other cards, like Elas Il-Kor, Sadistic Pilgrim, will watch them die.  

Because this strategy focuses so much on the creature card type itself, it’s the most likely one to be aggressive. But there are plenty of ways to play a more true-combo based approach (consider combining Juri, Master of the Revue with Goblin Bombardment). While many of its cards are individually weaker, this strategy makes it challenging for your opponent to destroy your creatures by beating them to the punch.  

Enchantments – Base: Abzan 

In many ways, enchantments are the forgotten card type of Magic. But with multiple enchantment-focused sets and a broader use of enchantment creatures, strategies featuring this starry-bordered type have had a resurgence.  

The core enchantment strategy remains the classic Enchantress one: play a creature that draws cards when you cast enchantments and proceed to draw your entire deck. There are many of these creatures throughout this cube, so feel emboldened to relive those old days of cantripping off Wild Growth.   

Along the way, you may also annihilate your opponent’s board with a pile of Doomwake Giant triggers. While many of the decks focusing on enchantments will be more passive in nature, focusing on continual growth, these decks can also produce some of the largest individual threats in the cube with powerful auras such as Giant Inheritance and Ethereal Armor.   

Lands – Base: Temur 

While they may be the most innocuous card type, lands provide some of the most powerful options available. Scapeshift alone can kill your opponent in a myriad of ways: lethal volcanic eruption, invasion of a horde of zombies, or monstrously powerful cats and hellhounds just to name a few. Lands decks seek to combine an abundance of land plays with landfall cards, which can provide anything from aggressive options to value options to true combo kills. Like decks more focused on the graveyard, lands decks can be a bit slower to establish board presence, so be prepared to protect yourself as you expand your domain.  

A quick note on bouncelands such as Simic Growth Chamber: these lands can provide you with single-card repeated landfall triggers by returning themselves to your hand when played. This can be important to ensure that you have a constant supply of land drops throughout the game. As such, you might consider holding onto these cards for this purpose rather than playing them for mana development earlier in the game. Once they’re on the table, there’s few ways to get them back in your hand. 

Advanced Harmony   

You may have noticed that many of the cards listed above in one category could reasonably fit in another: Hedron Crab could go in a lands deck, Archon of Sun’s Grace could go in a sacrifice deck, Valakut Exploration could go in an enchantment deck. The key to building a consistent and resilient deck in this cube is to find ways to combine these various fields of synergy.  

Maybe you’re using an engine of enchantments to find a continuous source of lands to play for your lands deck. Maybe you’re using your token generators to fuel Undercity Informer to mill them out. Maybe you’re milling yourself to gain access to more artifacts to bring into play with Goblin Welder. This variety in strategy will help you in both the draft portion by making sure you can’t be cut out of your lane and in the gameplay by making it so you’re not presenting a single point of weakness to your opponent.  

There are three major ways to accomplish this: identifying useful card types, finding cards that crossover synergies, and understanding minor mechanical themes. Many cards in this cube have multiple types, and frequently just being an artifact is an easy way for a card to bind together two strategies. So be sure to be thinking about if you can make use of a removal spell that’s also an enchantment, for instance.  

The second method, and really the core of A Study in Harmony, is finding cards that can be used in multiple different synergy groupings. What if you used Zellix, Sanity Flayer to convert your milling into ammunition for your Goblin Bombardment? Or what if you used Greater Gargadon to sacrifice lands and grow your Slogurk, the Overslime to lethal proportions? Finding these combinations is much of the fun of this environment.  

Finally, you can combine different synergy groupings by linking them through some of the many minor subthemes. +1/+1 counters, lifegain, food, proliferate, sagas, and historic can all help meld together seemingly disparate themes. You could use Evolution Sage to turn your landfall triggers into additional story counters on your sagas. Keep an eye out for these small connections as you draft and build your deck.  

Counterplay 

As fun as it is to dream up these machinations, Magic is a game that involves two or more players. There can only be one winner, so it’s in your best interest to find a way to throw a wrench in your opponent’s gears so you can cross the finish line first. Like every other game, interactive spells will be your means of doing so here.  

While it may not look like it, the roots of this cube are in Vintage Cube, so the interactive suite is quite strong. Some of the best pieces have been pulled over time – no Force of Will or Fury anymore – but hall of famers like Swords to Plowshares, Counterspell, Thoughtseize, and Lightning Bolt all appear in the cube.  

Having a good interactive package in your deck is critical to winning, but having too much in your deck could be detrimental. The major ways to get card advantage in the cube are all tied to synergistic means, so having too much one-for-one interaction can leave you down in cards. Because of this, decks that are modeled after classical control concepts may run out of gas and find themselves struggling to cross the finish line. Because of this, you may find it beneficial to play slightly weaker interaction if it fits into the machinery of your deck and gives you better access to card advantage. Finding the right mix of all of these elements can be challenging but rewarding.  

VS

Keep in mind that your opponent will likely be putting an equal effort into breaking up your machine as well, so it may be a good idea to find a way to work failsafes or alternate plans into your deck. You don’t want to be in the position where a single Firebolt leaves your deck in ruins. A great deck can adapt to interaction and still find ways to keep running smoothly, even if it isn’t in the direction you initially anticipated.  

Coda

At its core, A Study in Harmony is a celebration of two of Magic’s strongest qualities: its ability to allow for self-expression and its ability to share that self with another. What initially sprung from frustration surrounding the question “how do I make Green and Blue playable in Vintage Cube?” about four years ago has now morphed into this wildly different final product, shedding some pieces of power along the way and finally stabilizing on this buzzing hive of synergy.  

In many ways, it’s the finale of what I’ve been trying to construct in a variety of cubes for over a decade now: a world where all the parts of Magic matter and the players create the power. It’s a sandbox in which you’ll set out to build one thing, only to find yourself with another you’ve never imagined. I hope you have fun building these castles (and knocking your opponent’s over).  

Happy Drafting!  

P.S. 

If you’re still finding yourself short of some answers that you want after reading all of this, come track me down on Twitch where I’ll be streaming the cube when it’s live and we can chat about it there. Or leave an angry screed on my Twitter or Bluesky, whatever works for you. 

Twitter: @matt_grenier
Bluesky: @matt-grenier.bsky.social
Twitch: twitch.com/matt_grenier

Card List: A Study in Harmony