Day 18 - Share Your Black 1 Drops

I’m all dug out from the blizzard here in Connecticut, there’s a foot and a half of snow in my yard, a veritable winter wonderland, and we’re back for Day 18! If you want more info on this series, please refer to the original post. Yesterday we discussed Izzet cards. Today we’re talking Black 1 drops. Here’s what I run in my Legacy+ cube, 438 cards (on my way to 450), 7 or 8 on the Strix scale, basically no planeswalkers, and purposely powered-down lands:

[[Cecil, Dark Knight]] is fine, which is how I would describe every card in this section. That said, he’s becoming ubiquitous in cube for his value, which is obviously good. Flip him or not, he’s generally impactful, and trades well with deathtouch. That’s about the best you can ask for from a black 1 drop in cube right now at the higher levels.

[[Concealing Curtains]] is such a unique design that it’s likely never leaving my cube. Black needs all the hand disruption it can get at the top Strix levels. Curtains combines interaction with a cheap blocker early and a then Menace threat later. This card has ended up in a ton of my cube decks.

[[Moonshadow]] I finally purchased last Sunday night while sipping bourbon and buying way too many cards on TCG for my cube and the Old School decks I’m building with a buddy (sacrificing a pile of Revised artifacts to [[Atog]] again feels soooooo good, to say nothing of Dark Ritualing out a [[Hypnotic Specter]] like I’m back in 4^(th) grade). I’m a tad skeptical of this card’s consistency in a limited environment. But I’m trying to support Rakdos sacrifice and Golgari self-mill, and, as always, I’m happy to be proven wrong by a card. Also: each time I think about this card, the Cat Stevens song of the same name, which we used to sing around the campfire by the lake at Jewish summer camp in the middle-of-fucking-nowhere New Hampshire, gets stuck in my head.

[[Nethergoyf]] is good not great. Fine little stats monster in Black. Like Cecil, it’s a typical cube card nowadays because Black 1s are so thin.

Notable exceptions: I cut Gravecrawler and his friends a while ago now, because that strategy seemingly always underperformed. Either those guys weren’t drafted, or they were taken by the person who went 0-3.

What are you all running?

Tomorrow we will discuss White 3 Drops