Welcome back to another article discussing the specific card choices when building a cube - part 5 of a 10 part series - marathoners, you are halfway through! Today we are looking at the Chaos domain.
Chaos Legends
Each Legend you include provides direction for that domain. Chaos Legends are a bit of a nightmare because of how diverse they are:
- , , and want low cost combat tricks - easy enough
- Miss Fortune, , and want big units - but use them in different ways
- wants to hold more than any other deck, relying on Hidden spells to get ahead
- wants movement tricks and payoffs, which Chaos can definitely do
- usually wants to swarm with small units, playing cards from trash to Empower
While there is some overlap, Chaos is appropriately the most chaotic domain. Note that none of these Legends particularly care about Equipment, putting cards in hand from trash, or discarding cards - all of which Chaos has incidentally. The 55 slots for Chaos are quite crowded and it was difficult to find a balance between all these disparate legends. This article series is in alphabetical order, but I always update Chaos last when doing my physical cube due to the complex nature of the domain.
Chaos Cards
Out of 55 cards, we have a split of 33 units, 16 spells and 6 gear. This seems a bit low for how many spell-centric Legends there are, but Chaos has many ways to re-play cards multiple times so I think clever drafters will make it work.
Unit Choices
I would recommend no less than five 2-drops per color, and generally 6+ is ideal. Chaos has a whopping eight 2-drops, the most of any domain, even more than swarmy Order. Several of them are better beyond turn 1, such as or .
While many domains struggle with lots of power-costing units, putting pressure on your rune economy, Chaos has a large amount of great units that just cost Energy. , , , and , Prophet are excellent Chosen Champions for on-curve plays that help define the goals of your deck.
Chaos is often defined by its movement tricks, and , , and provide payoffs for bouncing around. Chaos has a few ways to score points from nowhere with and to upend the point tempo of games.
With (and if you are lucky), cards like , , and provide repeated value to edge ahead of your opponents.
, like in Body, can benefit from several double-power costing cards like , , and to eke out extra power when needed.
Non-Unit Choices
More than any other domain, Chaos is stuffed with Hidden cards. This mainly supports Vex and Kennen, but of course hidden cards are great in any deck. Due to the singleton nature of cube, a face-down card is truly a puzzle - it could be one of dozens of cards, but is the one I am afraid of the most.
Chaos is already a strong domain, so I wanted to emphasize one of their weaknesses - bouncing over destroying. over , for example. It was a conscious choice to have no , , , or . I want the domains to feel unique, with distinct trade-offs. A heavy Chaos deck should struggle to actually remove things - it's up to the other domains to solve those problems for you.
Even though Chaos is not a gear-centric domain, all 6 serve specific purposes. helps hold, splashes into any deck that can’t hold, provides a card draw engine to combat decks, to empower , and so on.
Spicy Picks
These are a few cards that you could replace - every cube has a bit of flavor that the designer just happens to like, these are my pet cards. If you have a better idea for the card slot, go ahead and swap them out.
and raise eyebrows sometimes - after all, they are banned in Constructed. I find in a singleton draft environment, one copy isn’t breaking the format like in competitive play. For many new players, they have only heard of these cards in hushed whispers, so I wanted to include them when possible. If you happen to get and - good for you!
I cut several Spells that return units from trash to your hand, but opted to keep . Since it comes down in the late game you are far more likely to have targets in the trash. Unlike , Soulgorger plays directly from trash - which Empowers .
While not super spicy, I was conscious of including Empowered cards when possible to support the newly added . or could be other cards, but I erred on the side of Empowered units until we get more in the Body/Order domains.
Notable Exclusions:
For all colors I opted not to have Seals or Decrees. Seals are a bit too swingy - if you get them early they can be extremely powerful, but they are dead draws late game and most decks have no way to discard/draw them away. I didn’t want to include too many “hate” cards that warp matchups after sideboarding, and just personally I am not a fan of Decrees and their power level.
and really any discard-me type card like are cut simply because I didn’t include many ways to discard cards in the first place. Jinx is not an available legend, and most decks aren’t looking to discard their own cards. I didn’t want players to pick something like this early in a pack, only to find out by the end of pack 4 that they are nearly impossible to rely on.
was recently cut (see below) for similar reasons - games are fast and there are not enough ways to fill your trash to rely on him. too - without many ways to peek at your deck, he ends up stuck in your hand too often.
One mechanic that appears often in Chaos is “can be played on an open battlefield”. Chaos already does so much, I decided to just cut and to limit the scope of what Chaos can do - especially since no legend benefits from them - but these could be added back in the future.
Changelog: Vendetta v2
Changes from the initial Vendetta list:
- Diana, No Longer Human
- Rhasa the Sunderer
- Morbid Return
- Shadows of the Past
- Downwell
- Scryer’s Bloom
- Blast Cone
- Evelynn, Entrancing
- Sivir, Mercenary
- Zed, Without a Sound
- Baron Nashor
- Pack of Wonders
- Spirit Wheel
- Edge of Night
The goal of these changes is to remove a lot of trash-centric cards that weren’t pulling their weight and add a few more “engine” style effects to the domain.
and just weren’t cutting it. Even with a spell to play in combat, a 4e1p Ambusher with 5 Might was pretty underwhelming, especially with only 3 Might to hold. Needing 2+ spells to impress was, well, unimpressive. You don’t have as many cards in the trash as you might expect, especially with all the ways to banish, Flow, or return units from your trash. A 5e1p 6 Might vanilla unit was rarely worth it, so both are gone. In their place we get and , who are a bit more reliable and flexible.
Similarly, and felt like too big of a tempo loss, especially since most Chaos legends are trying to establish board presence. Cards like and are good enough, we don’t need 5+ “play from trash” effects given that only Kennen’s Legend benefits from it. was only good when paired with Calm cards, so it has been swapped for who functions as a turn-1 play or a surprise “charm”.
The domain gets and as potential build-around engines. Pack is a classic galaxy-brain card, with countless synergies across all domains. I am excited to see what players discover when drafting with it. Spirit Wheel has a higher upside than , and works with pretty much any combat-focused deck. Edge of Night provides more solid Equipment for token- and gear-based strategies, while also adding more depth to the “what could that hidden card be” puzzle.
Chaos has a mini-board wipe in the form of Angler Beast, so Downwell felt unnecessary and also a bit of a trap. You often played and still lost, so that expensive slot goes to the infamous . I originally feared Baron would be too strong, too hard to defeat. After watching several draft games, I no longer worry that 12 Might is too strong to overcome for Fury or Body decks. Also, as fast as Cube Draft games are, Baron does not stop a solid hold at 7-points, and exhausting all your runes to play him gives your opponent one clean shot to defeat him.