My Teammates will hate me for writing this Lurrus guide!

Hi, it’s Terribad, also known as Karl.

A while ago I posted a Vintage Cube tier list on Twitter and I have gotten a lot of love from the community on it. Even as the Cube has gotten new updates, people still refer back to it and let me know that they are often using it to determine what cards to pick.

The one card on which I have gotten the most feedback is Lurrus of the Dream-Den as I have it as the best multicolored card in the Cube. It is widely known that Lurrus is one of the best Magic cards ever printed. The original version was banned in Vintage for power level reasons which is completely unheard of and even in the current nerfed form it’s the companion of the most popular Vintage deck. It is also banned in Pioneer, Modern and Legacy. Clearly this card is very strong. Now the question is how to draft around it in the Vintage Cube?

(For reference I am using the Magic Online Vintage Cube because it’s probably the most popular cube in the world and it would be amazing if someone who reads this article ends up flying to Vegas for the live Vintage Cube draft for keeps!).

Who's the Beatdown? Not Lurrus!

I think if your goal is to just get a quick takeaway from this article, then what I would say is that Lurrus is one of the (if not the) actual very best card advantage engines in the entire Vintage Cube. And as such, just like in Vintage, the best way to utilize Lurrus is maybe slightly unintuitive - it is to draft a control deck. Yes, this card that only lets us play 1-drops and 2-drops is not an aggro card!? I believe that once you give up any notion of trying to finish games fast with Lurrus companion the whole draft becomes more intuitive. 

The Power: Cards you always draft no matter what | Lurrus in Vintage Cube

Here you can see how I value the ten best cards in Vintage Cube within the context of Lurrus. While naturally I have Ancestral Recall over Black Lotus, the incredible synergy with our Companion pushes Lotus to the top spot. Ancestral Recall is still an amazing card and goes perfectly with our preferred strategy, that’s why I take it over both Sol Ring and Time Walk. 

Many people regard Time Walk as the best card in Vintage Cube - I am not one of those, but I would also like to highlight that a lot of the cards that have really powerful synergies with it (outside of Lurrus itself), can not be played in our deck hence why I have the early game mana advantage of Sol Ring just very slightly above the Walk. 

All the Moxen are sorted in color preference, red simply has too much of its power in the cube consecrated around the 3-drop slot and thus it goes the worst with Lurrus. Although there are certainly cards in any color that can fit into our deck.

The Good Expensive Cards | Lurrus in Vintage Cube

This category is critical for a good Lurrus deck. They are that important because there are no other mana sinks available. If you can get 2 to 3 of the cards from the Tier 1 in this category, your deck will end up being amazing.

I have broken it down to two categories, the Tier 1 and Tier 2 expensive cards.

In this category you can see the most amazing expensive cards in the Cube. I prioritize taking these even more higher than I would in a draft without Lurrus. 

Forth Eorlingas! is actually the only card that I would pack 1 pick 1 over Lurrus! That is how powerful of a finisher that card is, very splashable and always ends the game if you have made it to the late game and have plenty of mana to spend.

What are these lands doing here - they are not expensive, one might ask? Yes, but I see all of them as grindy cards. Karakas can generate value with Lurrus itself but also with other cheap legendary creatures like Ajani, Nacatl Pariah or Samwise the Stouthearted - and while being able to do that, it also functions as a cheap interaction card vs. other legends. It is amazing and you should not pass Karakas, especially if you have the cat companion already!

Urza’s Saga is a very interesting card and I have found that it can often be misplayed. Even if my deck has a Mox to search for. I often still find myself keeping it for the late game. Once I have emptied out my hand, then is the time I am ready to start spending mana on creating constructs. There are also a lot of cards that go very well with Lurrus that can be found with Urza’s Saga’s third chapter. The  most obvious option is of course Black Lotus, but to name some cards that can be picked up later, Aether Spellbomb, Lotus Petal,  Soul-Guide Lantern, Haywire Mite and the like get supercharged if their effect can be used not once per game but once per turn cycle.

Moving on are two incredibly flexible card draw spells. Lorien Revealed and Mystic Confluence. I believe in the current version of the Cube, the designers have removed a lot of card draw spells like Fact or Fiction or Treasure Cruise that used to go in the middle of the pack or even wheel. That lack of card advantage has pushed me to be even more high on the good card advantage that is still available to draft. I value Confluence just slightly above Lorien, mostly because of how powerful it is at closing the game when you have achieved the position of being ahead. Lorien is an incredible card as well, especially because most of these Lurrus decks I am referring to like to be 3 or 4 colors - I am taking this card over fetchlands!

Fractured Identity and Sunfall are there to deal with any threat that cheap removal struggles with, I think especially the value of Fractured is very high in a Lurrus deck because of its flexibility and mana advantage that it provides. In most decks the value of Fractured has gone down over the past few years, but it still remains at around the peak levels it had in a Lurrus deck. 

Mind Twist and Pest Infestation are just great mana sinks and provide effects that are not easy to find in the cube. The value of Mind Twist especially depends on how much ramp we have found and Pest Infestation is the best green card for this style of deck, it along with Hexdrinker is basically the reason to take green dual lands on the wheel.

Tier 2 for this section is mostly made up of board sweepers and the rest of the card advantage left in the cube. A lot of these cards are also great at bringing Lurrus back from the graveyard to keep our engines running. Sometimes Underworld Breach or Yawgmoth's Will can also provide a combo finish to our deck (and if that is available I would recommend it). Being able to dominate aggro decks with sweepers but also be able to end games fast against the broken decks of Vintage Cube is an amazing spot to be in.

Talking about sweepers, the value depends on what you have. Sunfall and Toxic Deluge are the best, but overall a good control deck wants two sweepers main deck. I would also like to point out that in my experience, in the current iteration of the Cube with the uplifting of green, sweepers have simply become amazing and they are good in almost every round.

Dig Through Time is a card I have found myself picking for almost all of my Lurrus decks because it always wheels and like I mentioned previously, the card advantage simply is that lacking right now.

Escape to the Wilds and Fiery Confluence are both very powerful effects, but unfortunately the mana costs don’t go with the basic strategy. If you have found the lands for them, they are something to pay attention to. 

Retrofitter Foundry is not amazing on its own, although it can dominate games against control decks. But the value of it goes through the roof if you have found yourself with Tolarian Academy or Gaea’s Cradle.

Some cards I would also like to mention are all the Wheel effects and Upheaval. I don’t really like these cards in a controlling strategy unless I got lucky with a lot of fast mana or was pushed into a spot where I got Fastbond and Exploration to exploit them. There are of course a lot of combo decks in cube that can abuse Lurrus as well; let’s call that next level, because otherwise I would have to write a book instead of an article.

Mana Ramp - good or bad? | Lurrus in Vintage Cube

Even Lion’s Eye Diamond can have great synergy with Lurrus and can be played in the deck as a fair card over 19th land. Cards like Talismans or Pentad Prism can also provide necessary fixing for our multicolored mana base.

As I said, I have found Lurrus decks to be very mana hungry even as the average mana cost is trending low and because of that reason I am happy to play 19 or 20 mana sources in my deck. Again keep in mind card advantage and card filtering becomes even more important to support this to avoid flooding out.

The Good Cheap Cards | Lurrus in Vintage Cube

The cheap cards are what make up the core of your deck. I believe in interaction over threats not only in Lurrus but as a core strategy of the Cube. My goal is to draft a deck that has no weaknesses and I believe there are many more ways to shore up creature matchups than there are to be solid against combo and control. That pushes me towards valuing hand and stack interaction especially highly.

I would also like to note that if you often find yourself in spots where your opponent did something powerful like turn 1 Black Lotus or Sol Ring and you get steamrolled, in my opinion that is the fault of draft strategy and it happens because you drafted an uninteractive deck.

Here is a top 30 of the best interactive cards for a Lurrus strategy. 

Strip Mine is on the list because Karakas is a real pain for our legendary companion and also because Tolarian Academy is very pushed in the Cube right now. I would say Wasteland is close to the bottom of this rating.

As you can see I want to answer hard to deal with permanents with countering or discarding them and other than that I simply like cheap removal spells. Balance especially is incredible with Lurrus, it is fairly trivial to set up scenarios where you get to empty your hand make them discard theirs and then next turn follow up with adding Lurrus to hand to take over the game.

Daze in Lurrus plays out worse than in decks with expensive threats; otherwise, I would have it higher. I would also like to note that do not prioritize the red removal spells too highly because the threats in that color don’t go well with our companion depending on how the draft is going. Cards like Bitter Triumph might be stronger as a result.

The Cheap Threats | Lurrus in Vintage Cube

As you can see among the top 30 threats for Lurrus, I have chosen basically no aggressive cards. They are all with the purpose of closing the game on their own or causing a snowball effect that takes over the game. 

Animate Dead and Reanimate are often misunderstood cards - my recommendation is pick them highly and play them in any deck. You don’t need to have expensive creatures to win the game with them. You do want to combine them with discard effects like Hymn to Tourach or Thoughtseize or hard removal like Sheoldred’s Edict, but in this deck there is also an additional value of getting back your Lurrus. 

Also would like to shout out Snapcaster Mage and Phantasmal Image which are simply incredible cards in Lurrus decks and you should reach highly for them. Of course the Cube still has many more cheap threats available and you do want to play them to fill in your curve. I just wanted to highlight that aggressive cards like Guide of Souls or Luminarch Aspirant are simply not a priority.

Mana Fixing | Lurrus in Vintage Cube

As you might have already noticed, my Lurrus control decks tend to be 3 or 4 colors. Thus fixing is important. Firstly, I would like to point out that for early draft, the color preference goes: Blue > Black > White > Green > Red.

In pack 1 I tend to prioritize fixing highly to give myself the flexibility to take good cards of any color in later boosters, it is important to be set up so that you can always take Fractured Identity or Forth Eorlingas!.

There is one caveat to this - prioritization does not apply to taplands. You want to go high on fetchlands and untapped dual lands. We can use most of the taplands in our deck, yet don’t want to end with too many. I usually spend picks 9-15 collecting the taplands that come on the wheel, basically almost any Triome or surveil land or creature land works because of how often we end up being four colors. 

Also important to note that picking up late creature lands is great, they serve as the best choise for our 18th or 19th land and there is no shame in playing 19 lands in a Lurrus companion deck, making sure you make land drops 4-5-6 on curve while being able to use all the mana always. Worst case is we spend our third turn adding our Companion to hand after all!

Would you give up Lurrus for something like Flash or Tinker?

In short the answer is: it depends. So let’s list a few scenarios that might be common.

Flash - This is a powerful card but I think it is not good enough to give up Lurrus. 

Tinker - Here it gets really close already. Tinker is one of my favorite cards in Cube, if I have Tinker and a good target like Portal to Phyrexia, then I am no longer moving into Lurrus for example.

The One Ring - This is also an amazing card that provides a very similar role to Lurrus, I think one more powerful card like Fury or Solitude that doesn’t work with Lurrus and you can see me giving up the companion. 

A cool side note for when you have drafted Lurrus but have decided for example that your Tinker or reanimator plan is too powerful for the Companion: Look for Displacer Kitten, it is a really cool way to go infinite with Lurrus! Few examples would be Lotus Petal + Kitten + Lurrus for infinite mana or Mishra’s Bauble + Kitten + Lurrus to draw your entire deck.

Have Faith and Stick to the Plan!

Overall, I think Lurrus is an amazing card. In my current tier list I have it as the 12th best pack 1 pick 1 (power 10, Forth Eorlingas! and Tolarian Academy above it). I also have a strong belief that you need to trust the cat and not get caught between two minds. If you let even just a few important pieces pass by you can not recover, because Lurrus is a very demanding but rewarding build around!

Good luck, have fun, and see you in Vegas!