u/Dux89

Hello Spikes, your friendly neighborhood only-plays-green mage here with good tidings. The card that made green good again after a year in the dumpster has been banned, but hope is not lost! We still have some good cards and, more importantly, we have each other. Together we can come up with strategies to survive the post-Cub-ban world.

I decided to make this thread to brainstorm ideas for overcoming the hole WotC has put us in as green mages by banning our best enabler and also weakening Prowess, which makes our worst matchups (control decks) better. For starters, I think Landfall will actually still be fine. Bristly Bill and Tifa are good cards and unlike the Offense/Hulk/Roid deck, Landfall didn't really *need* Cub to be dangerous thanks to its explosiveness.

But more importantly, I also think the Offense/Hulk/Roid deck is NOT dead. I say this as someone who was piloting an extremely similar deck to really good results before Cub existed (dig through my post history and you'll see how much fun I was having pairing Ouroboroid and Brightglass Gearhulk before Avatar came out). Losing Cub sucks, but the fact is, our worst matchups were killing at least one mana dork the vast majority of the time, which meant that Cub was often little better than any other two-drop mana dork. I know that sounds insane given how powerful it is unchecked, but how often was it really left unchecked in a meta where literally every color has a one-mana answer?

I say all this to point out that Tender Wildguide (my personal favorite), Spider Manifestation, and Great Divide Guide all get the job done of helping ensure we get to four mana four the bombs that are Roid/Hulk/Leatherhead. Gene Pollinator is way worse in a post-Cub meta but still might be viable with enough good two drops.

Don't believe me? That's okay: Here's my very-small-sample size success story from the past few hours of playing. I'm 6-1 in the top 100 of Mythic so far with a retooled build that has 8 mana dorks instead of 7 and one more land compared to the norm prior to the ban.

Will our deck be as good without Cub? No. Will we still win a lot of games with turn 4 bombs, especially if we have sweeper protection? Yes absolutely. Hope is not lost! Share your other ideas here!