September 14, 2025 | cubecobra.com/c/pink | cards mentioned
Pink Sleeves was featured at Untap TO and fired two eight-seat pods. My immediate takeaway on the day was, “jeez, I have no idea how games played out.” As deck pics and comments came in on Discord I was able to piece together a better idea, and I want to collate some of that experiential data. I was fortunate to get several thousand words of feedback over the next week, and I’m incredibly grateful that almost everyone who drafted the cube talked to me in person or afterward. Quotes are… pretty direct but not exact.
My goal is to capture some of the experiences and conversations to inform future changes, but also as a time capsule of this era of the cube, as I have some interest in making some larger scale changes over the next phase of Pink Sleeve’s life.
I took a heavy hand and wrote the below prompt, and tagged everyone (as far as I knew) that drafted the cube.
For folks who drafted Pink Sleeves at Untap, some prompts:
What moments, lines, or interactions stand out in your memory?
What did games feel like they made you focus on?
Were there any cards that felt like they didn't belong here? Especially if it wasn't because of power level
Was there anything that felt out of line with your expectations? For good or bad?
Why did you rank this cube?
You're welcome to talk about power balance, but I'm much more interested in hearing about how it felt to play. You also don't owe me anything! I hope you had fun!
🏆 Devin’s 3-0 Busy Izzet Mage
This comes with an asterisk, because this table didn’t realize that How to Keep an Izzet Mage Busy is a sorcery. Reading the card… uh, says what the card is, but this is still a sweet deck and if no one realized then I guess that’s what happens.
Devin: “I was effectively a combo deck, so I was staying alive and slowly growing my creatures and answering important threats until I dug to HTKAIMB and enough lands. I loved the vibes of the packs I’d seen and wanted to play cubes I hadn’t gotten to.”
It’s hard to imagine ever cutting HTKAIMB, but it has the unpleasant dynamic where your opponent only sees it when it’s providing value. They don’t see it if it’s rotting in your hand. Koby gave the solid suggestion of Flame Jab as a more fair alternative, but I agree with Gray that the novelty is a lot of the appeal.
Nat: “I think it’s the type of card that’s good in good decks more than anything else. It’s basically Tendrils of Agony, but in this environment if you take it reasonably early you’re bound to stumble into ways to make it good. Guttersnipe is not a particularly great card that becomes good with this one, but also if your opponent kills all your things it literally does nothing.
Devin: “Yeah, I usually hate Guttersnipe but was excited to have it in this deck. Lack of evasion made Kiln Fiend extremely mediocre even in this deck that was very good at triggering it.”
Koby: “[Kiln Fiend] is very narrow and risky. There are better or more flexible cards. I would sooner play Thermo-Alchemist because even in non-spellslinger aggro it represents 1 damage per turn, and in the current meta of creating tokens Kiln Fiend is getting chumped for days. Thermo-Alchemist also procs Harmonic Prodigy.”
Bill: “I got slapped by HTKAIMB.”
🏆 Dom Harvey’s 3-0 Bant Blink
Dom commented that Soulherder was an enjoyable part of a fun deck, but asked about the perception of it being a disliked card, as it’s “too blunt a push for a repetitive archetype.” I hadn’t given that much thought. The card has been a staple in the cube since its early days [I checked; June 2020, about eight months after it was first drafted], but I can definitely see that.
The positives I see are that it’s a simple, clear signpost that depends on the cards around it. The repetition and being a much better blocker than attacker are negatives, and it’s certainly contributing to big games, with Eternal Witness, Mulldrifter, Whirler Rogue, Bramble Sovereign, Thragtusk, Sun Titan, and Esika’s Chariot all being targets that can inflate hands and board states. I’m very open to cutting it in the next phase of Pink Sleeves.
Parallax Wave and Esika’s Chariot continue to be pillars of power.
The Cool Thing Not Working
Brent: “I went 0-3 with truly brainless monogreen. I tried to build into lands matter and then mostly ate shit into the average removal card. Had a great time though. I did get Managorger Hydra on board with Evolution Sage at one point and cast Crop Rotation into Prismatic Vista. That was cool. George get big… but my threats were almost always answered with efficient removal.”
Pav ran into problems with WB Reanimator. “I had zero guidance from my early picks, so I figured I could grab some reanimation spells and worry about picking up bombs later. It never happened. I found very few necessary pieces to make it flow.” I think the reanimator deck is awkwardly supported. I’ve deliberately put it together to rely on lucky draws in order to really go off - creatures aren’t binning themselves, there’s no Entomb, etc, and I think I need to re-think that. Living Death and Exhume is a deck I absolutely want to support, but I don’t want to trap players with visions of reliable turn 2 cheat that take multiple pieces aligning.
As Koby put it, “holding up countermagic and pecking away with birds and spirits is boring to a lot of people, they’d rather do a cool Jegantha pile or something.”
Flying Tokens, Reach, Big Games, and Removal
Emphasizing the power of 1/1 flying tokens, Enzo praised Noose Constrictor: “I mostly picked it up as a discard outlet, but it saved my ass against Jeskai flyers.”
Kirin said, “ultimately it was spirit token spam that won me games. My opponents had very few fliers or reachers.”
I don’t want to revamp my removal, but it deserves to be thought about. While Brent’s deck got picked apart by efficient removal, Kirin’s board states ballooned with a lack of removal and his own token spam. Nat attributed one match win to an opponent not having removal.
Piloting a WB Aristocrats Control hybrid, Ryan said, “at no point did I feel games were completely unwinnable, and I felt like I had outs to most board states.” I love to hear that, but we’re seeing that it wasn't a universal experience.
Chris had trouble interacting with opponents, but “I think the interaction is just weird packs breaking, Swords to Plowshares is in the cube, and there’s plenty of good black removal, I just got Disfigure, Liliana of the Veil, Primal Might (banger by the way), and Voracious Hydra. Beast Within seems like a cruel trick and seeing that when I needed removal felt sad. A 3/3 is so much to give to someone and casting it on your own stuff is a big ask. Maybe Song of Dryads as similar broad targeting removal?” I’m interested in making that swap, and am thinking about Ulvenwald Tracker, which is more repetitive than I like, but would put downward pressure on board states, including flyers.
It would be easy to group all of this feedback together and say that I need more, less efficient removal. That might be true, but I don’t think so. It would also be easy to say that this is just an artifact of how packs broke and how different players prioritized interaction. That’s probably a little true.
The idea I want to explore is adding more removal that hits multiple targets, or otherwise shrinks the board beyond 1-for-1’s. Arc Lightning has been amazing, and I think that some less efficient but more powerful removal would do the list some good.
Are Typal and Threshold Things?
Devin asked about creature types and Threshold, based on seeing Heirloom Blade and Mindwhisker. Heirloom Blade (as any Usman Jamil will tell you) is just really good, but does specifically support Humans here, but can also hit plenty of Soldiers, Wizards, Elementals, and Constructs. It’s almost always a card, and I’m not worried about this as a mis-interpretable signpost, but I am leaning towards cutting it just for having so many words..
Threshold is less specific, but it plays nicely with Sultai self-mill strategies, whether that’s blue spell recursion, black reanimation, green lands, or Laboratory Maniac. I’m torn on whether this is a trap. I have been very happy with the Threshold cards (Shoreline Looter is the other), both in my own decks and seeing them played by others, and I think I would lean further into it rather than cutting it. There are also a couple Delirium cards that are adjacent.
Dom commented that Hedron Crab felt like a cool, legit threat, but, “Ashiok, Dream Render was the main headscratcher for me. When Rob played it against me it felt like the game was immediately about that and nothing else. It’s a very polarized and polarizing card. At the other extreme it would do nothing versus the Boros decks except randomly screw someone who drew their one Prismatic Vista.”
What I’ve seen previously is Ashiok enabling Lab Man and Living Death. In that role, and because the static comes up less in a fetchless environment, I’ve liked it, but that’s obviously too narrow a view to take, and I think it should go.
Field of the Dead and Parsing Lands
Brent: “Mono-Green lands was fun to draft, but despite consistently finding cards that I thought were shoe-ins for a lands-based deck, the top-end of trying to get Field of the Dead online really didn’t come together until much too late in the games.
The AFR showcase printings of Evolving Wilds and Hive of the Eye Tyrant also mixed up a drafter, and I think the easiest patch is to replace or cut that Evolving Wilds, which I’ve been planning to do anyway.
The creature lands in general were a challenge. Chris had multiple landfolk and Aidan said, “the variety of different options of blocks he could make, ways he could spend his mana, etc. was a bit overwhelming and difficult to keep track of, and led me to make some unforced errors.” Aidan attributed some of this to his own abilities, which is probably accurate, but doesn’t discount the sentiment at all. That just makes him my target audience. On top of that Chris and Nat pointed out the potential (but not observed) feel-bads of surprise Mishra’s Factory and Blinkmoth Nexus blocks.
Worse than any of the above, my “playtest” proxies of shocklands slipped in their sleeves. This caused frustration to multiple players as they miscounted lands, especially but not only with Field of the Dead in play. This is a basic and embarrassing error that I will 100% be fixing as soon as possible. Sorry Ryan!
Speaking of Field of the Dead, Chris asks how reasonable it is since I switched to triple shocks? I never truly saw it go off even before the change, so it’s probably time to swap it out. It’s passed into trap territory.
Contested Colours and Signals
I made the executive decision to include a Cogwork Librarian in every Pack 1 after I saw that none of the other cubes at Untap had any rules modifications except the lone desert cube. I knew that was probably bad for the tables, but I wanted to inject some novelty into the event and people have fun with them. They can be like candy for breakfast. I heard positive things about them, people were excited to talk about how many copies drafters were able to hoard, and they give the feeling that you can force a synergistic deck, but they also really mess up signals.
In the first draft, Aidan and Ryan both ended up in WB, while Enzo and Chris were both in different densities of Abzan colors. Devin, Bill, and Cameron were in subsets of Jeskai colours, and only Tim found an open lane with Dimir. The second draft had Rob and Dom (the 3-0) in Bant plus Logan in Sultai, and Nat and Kirin both got 2-1’s with WR. People struggled to divide into lanes, and this was a strong group of drafters: four of the names I’ve mentioned in this paragraph finished in the top 8, and two more were just outside.
As Enzo put it, “some key things wheeled for me, others didn’t. Mind you, we had Cogworks, so I didn’t really expect anything, and was pleased and reassured I found my seat because things wheeled and I was getting the pieces I had hoped for.” Then what happened? “Both times,” (let me come back to that), “I was surprised there was another Golgari player at the table.” Both times, because this wasn’t even Enzo’s first time finding himself drafting Abzan at a table with another Abzan drafter. “Perhaps there’s too much support for this archetype if it supported two players. Are there any noticeable underdrafted archetypes over the last few runs of Pink Sleeves?”
Well that’s a great question.
Since August 2024 (when I made a large set of changes), Pink Sleeves has been drafted 14 times. Important to note that this data includes a variety of pod sizes, only sometimes had Cogwork Librarians, and once had an extra 90 cards added to the cube for a 10-player draft, which was Enzo’s previous experience. Depending on how you want to count (or not count) three-colour decks, WU and RW are the most commonly paired, and RG and GU the least. Before I counted, I was entirely open to the theory that Golgari and Abzan were overly attractive colour combinations. I’m still sympathetic to it, but it’s not obviously backed up by the data. I’m not trying to capture which decks are good, I want to know which colour combos draw in drafters, and it seems more likely this is a signalling problem than a BG problem.
You can also look at the percentage of drafts with at least one deck for each colour combination. That approach sees RW and BR show up the most often, and RG show up the least. That doesn’t tell me a lot, but it at least doesn't identify BG as exceptional.
Koby pointed out Fallaji Archaeologist as an upgrade on Augur of Bolas, which I’m pretty happy swapping. Similarly, the misleadingly-flavoured Self-Destruct over Fling.
Embercleave and Balance were both mentioned as draws to the cube.
General positivity from people about Parallax Wave. Aidan praised it as a generically good card “that makes for very interesting games,” but also appreciated that the proxy draws attention to the fact that it’s not that complicated.
I was glad to hear Kirin mention that he “was happy to maindeck Dryad Militant and Containment Priest. I would have loved another hatebear type effect.” That’s a texture I’d like to lean into more, but it’s tough to balance the vibes. Thalia, Heretic Cathar is a perfect speed bump, but Thalia, Guardian of Thraben leads to people needing to roll back, or realizing they forgot about the effect two turns ago, which I hate to see happen. It’s just such an unfortunate feeling. Doorkeeper Thrull might be in the sweet spot.
The potential for interesting downticks with Saheeli, Sublime Artificer was highlighted by Rob (who duplicated Hedron Crab), as well as Chris and Dom.
Containment Construct is cool, but Nat cast it as a Goblin Piker. Goldhound raised some eyebrows, and pretty much any 2/1 for R would’ve been preferred.
Maybe too much green top end, says Chris.
From the sidelines, Koby says, “Goblin Bombardment is a crazy outlier that’s difficult to interact with.” I agree, but it’s an outlier that I want to be an outlier. I am interested in more answers for enchantments (and to a lesser extent artifacts). The game is just more engaging when you have to decide whether you want to die to Goblin Bombardment or Sulfuric Vortex.
And finally, here’s the blurb for the back cover, courtesy of Chris:
“A lot of my games focused on the board, attacking and blocking, but they were interesting to navigate without being overwhelming, which is honestly refreshing. This cube feels great every time I draft it, super sweet stuff going on, and a ton of cards I love.”
A major factor in my approach and decision-making for Pink Sleeves has always been, “what if this is the only way I get to play Magic?” but my big takeaway from Untap (as a player) was that even if I do get to play other Magic, Pink Sleeves still has a texture that I value, and that I’m not guaranteed to get elsewhere. I will be making substantial changes, but I’ve also learned a lot about what I want to preserve.
