Playing broken cards like Balance can be as easy as, well, cramming it into a pile of thirty nine other cards. But, it takes more than just having good cards in your library in order to win when your cube drafting. The cube is full of incredible cards and only incredible cards. So, what can we do to make Balance really stand out? Magic is a game of economics, after all, and playing a card arbitrarily is a waste of resources. Therefore, we have to find a way to break what is already broken.

Balance. Yeah, it’s really good. But in what situation is it insane?

Well first, looking at Balance, you will notice that it only effects lands, cards in hand, and creatures. Therefore, if you can build a deck that is designed to abuse things like planeswalkers, artifacts, and enchantments, you’ll be building a solid home for Balance.

Another point to look at with Balance is the potential to rob your opponent of their cards. For this to work, you have to be able to empty your hand out faster than your opponent. This strategy is really good if you can do something like say, drop land, mox, signet on turn one. Then turn two drop as much of of your hand as possible and then Balance away. Playing stuff like [mtg_card]kitchen finks[/mtg_card] or [mtg_card]strangleroot geist[/mtg_card] before you balance is a lot of fun. If you are going to shoot for turning balance into [mtg_card]mind twist[/mtg_card], you may think about playing cards like [mtg_card]sewer nemesis[/mtg_card] and [mtg_card]animate dead[/mtg_card])

The famous way to go off with Balance in cube is with the GARG. The way this works is pretty obvious but, regardless, I’ll elaborate. First, you suspend the Gargadon and play like you normally would making sure to deal with, you guessed it, planeswalkers, enchantments, and problem artifacts.Then, when you’re ready, you sac a bunch of stuff to the Gargadon and cast Balance.

Most of the time, if you’re doing this right, you’ll be ending up with a Gargadon on an otherwise empty board. Pretty broken…

All in all, this is a pretty fun play, but be careful. You can’t just go in there all willy nilly sacrificing all your lands when you’re playing against open lands. For all you know, your opponent could have a kill spell or a counter. Greater Gargadon is a brutal stomping at 9/7 but, never forget, it dies to everything and gets chump blocked for days.

There are many ways to unbalance a Balance. For the most part, it takes timing. You need to play Balance when the value is maximized. This means that you have to be patient some times. If you don’t have a reason for playing it that sounds something like, “They have to discard their hand” or “It will blow up all the creatures that can deal with my Jace, memory adept” then you may want to reconsider why you are thinking of casting it.

If you have any other interactions with balance that you think are fun or powerful leave them in the comments.