A little loved build around me card on these forums but with the push to put in more of these types of cards I thought I'd start a thread to discuss one of the most powerful options. Fastbond can be useful on it's own allowing you to get a quicker start if it's in your opening hand but it's main role is to be abused. So here are some enablers:
Upheaval: This is the best one, Upheaval into Fastbond is an exceptionally powerful play allowing you to recover almost instantly against your opponent who now has no permanents.
Future Sight: Ever play Future Sight and wish you didn't have land on top of your library shutting down your draw engine? With Fastbond this is no longer an issue as any lands can simply be played giving you more mana to cast more spells.
Yawgmoth's Will: With Fastbond you can play all the land in your graveyard which gives you more mana to play spells from your graveyard. (thanks go to wtwlf for this one)
Draw spells: Drawing lots of cards is great with Fastbond since you'll be drawing land so Fastbond can ramp you which in turn lets you cast all the spells you're drawing. The best ones for this are the draw 7s. Memory Jar in particular becomes quite potent but Wheel of Fortune and Time Spiral are also good options. Skullclamp, Edric Spymaster of Trest and Consecrated Sphinx are other cards that come to mind since they draw a steady stream of cards.
Karoo lands: Nothing overpowering here but land, Fastbond, Karoo land, land is a pretty powerful start.
Now there are some things to note about this list (which is probably missing some things). First is that this is a pretty small list making Fastbond particularly narrow so this is not a very good choice for Winston or Sealed since it's more difficult to get enough enablers. Second is that all the enablers are quite powerful on their own meaning you're not having to run suboptimal cards just to get Fastbond to work in your deck. You want to play these cards anyways. Third is that many of the enablers are either blue or colorless. This means that Fastbond is generally best in a U/G deck possibly splashing (or running) more colors. Lastly is that many of these interactions are extremely powerful so it's worth putting in the extra effort during draft to break Fastbond.
To further support the turbo land archetype that Fastbond enables there is also Exploration and Oracle of Mul Daya to fill similar roles if you're looking for additional options.
So now that I've talked about some of the upsides of Fastbond I should discuss some of the downsides as well:
1. This card is really narrow meaning it will often be left in the sideboard due to not having enough support in the draft. Also this means it is not very good in smaller groups due to drafting a smaller portion of the cube. These issues are both compounded by the fact that many of the Fastbond support cards are already high picks.
2. This can be one of the worst cards to topdeck if you don't have support as it will typically do nothing until you draw a support card.
3. Fastbond is a wildly swingy card. It tends to do either very little in a game or do something very powerful with very little in between. Some groups shy away from these types of cards preferring to run less powerful cards with lower variance.
4. It's really not as good turn 1 as it appears at first glance. It certainly can fuel extremely powerful turn 1 plays but often it will ramp a little and sit there until you get a support card. I think it's better to look at the card as a build around me card that will randomly win you the game on turn 1.
5. It can be a trap card. This card has a reputation for being powerful in Vintage but it was powerful in Vintage because people can build a whole deck around it which is not the case for cube. This can lead to the assumption that the card is like Mind Twist and you can just throw it in your deck and expect amazing results which will often lead to the card performing poorly.
When I first got into cubing, I couldn't believe no one was running Fastbond, so I decided to put it in my list, along with all the ennablers that you've listed and some others as well.
It turned out really poorly. Most of the time, Fastbond is just -1 Card Disadvantage. Occasionally it will accelerate you into a four drop on turn 2. Other times you'll get to do something moderately broken with it.
That being said, if it were a "regular" ramp card, or another semi-broken card, I probably would have preferred it in almost every scenario. We cut it and never really looked back.
I always wonder why this is how it works out for a lot of people. Perhaps inexperience with cube or playing with a small group was the cause? I ended up having to ban the card for being too broken so I'm really at a loss as to why it doesn't work out for some people. I believe kojiro also bans the card and Darkmindtone doesn't run it for power concerns so I don't think I'm alone here. Notably all 3 of us run Exploration which is a neutered version of Fastbond.
Fastbond might be the only card I don't run for fun reasons. I tell myself it is because the card is so inconsistent (and it is) but the card is bonkers turn one. I group it with Channel in the "I'm not really interested in playing these no matter how good they are".
I don't think it's very good at all. Unless it's specifically combined with one of the 2 or 3 cards it's really broken with, it was always underwhelming. In the 4-land opening hand with Fastbond and two other immediately castable business spells it can be good, but even there, it wasn't that dominating. And that's pretty much its BCS.
I don't think it's very good at all. Unless it's specifically combined with one of the 2 or 3 cards it's really broken with, it was always underwhelming. In the 4-land opening hand with Fastbond and two other immediately castable business spells it can be good, but even there, it wasn't that dominating. And that's pretty much its BCS.
Yeah, it's not very good in Winston/Sealed due to the difficulty of getting enough enablers. And didn't I mention you needed to combine it with other cards? As a stand alone card that you just throw in a deck it's pretty bad unless you have it in your opening hand.
EDIT: And BCS for this card is completely broken. Land, Fastbond, Land, Land, Land, Wheel of Fortune kind of stuff.
I don't think it's a bad card; it certainly has its merits and uses. But it was always pretty unimpressive for us.
I'll talk with my playgroup and see if they feel different. If Berserk fails to impress, I may be able to try this out again.
I'm really glad you're keeping an open mind about it. Few things feel better in cube than Upheaval into Fastbond.:)
I know you said your group expanded a bit recently which is awesome so perhaps this go around it will work better if you're able to free up a slot. I will say that in my limited experience (no pun intended) with it in Winston draft it's borderline unplayable just because, like you said, you HAVE to have the cards to make it work or it will just end up being this wildly swingy card. It also makes for a horrendous topdeck if you don't have support.
@Donald: thanks for the first post, it could be used as an example to anyone wanting to start an [SCD] thread.
I have the card in my cube at the moment; I put it back in when I got a "free" black-bordered version in my CE set. It's going to come out, though, as nobody seems interested in playing it. Even when it was run in a UG ramp deck running Upheaval and Future Sight it felt underwhelming. If the Upheaval deck was able to go off, it was usually able to do fine even without the Fastbond (it did have sol ring and two mox).
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@Donald: thanks for the first post, it could be used as an example to anyone wanting to start an [SCD] thread.
Thanks.:)
I have the card in my cube at the moment; I put it back in when I got a "free" black-bordered version in my CE set. It's going to come out, though, as nobody seems interested in playing it. Even when it was run in a UG ramp deck running Upheaval and Future Sight it felt underwhelming. If the Upheaval deck was able to go off, it was usually able to do fine even without the Fastbond (it did have sol ring and two mox).
It's not for everyone and I fully expect there to be groups out there that don't like it. It took my own group a very long time before we got comfortable using it. It's really swingy which can sometimes make for bad first impressions and it also requires careful deck construction to make it work properly which again can make it seem bad to people that haven't seen it in action a lot since they're putting it in the wrong deck. I am surprised that you were underwhelmed when pairing it with Upheaval and Future Sight though, those interactions always felt very powerful to me. It's not like Upheaval needs any help winning of course but if nothing else Fastbond helps you Upheaval your opponent into oblivion much sooner than you'd normally be able to limiting the chance they'll find an out.
EDIT: Also just to clarify I don't want to come across like I'm saying this card is always amazing and my group is drafting all these super powerful Fastbond decks. I'm well aware of all the drawbacks of the card, some of which are major. It's been left in the sideboard many times here because it got picked up too late or the person who picked it didn't see enough support cards and there have been many times where I topdecked it or had it in my opening 7 and wished it was a card that actually did something. I just found that the upsides were good enough and my group liked it enough that I played it for many years before they requested that I ban it when I implemented my banlist. Makes for some good stories too, one of the most broken things I've ever seen in cube involved Fastbond, Crucible of Worlds, Zuran Orb, turn 3 and a Stroke of Genius.
EDIT 2: I went ahead and updated the first post with notable downsides. Probably easier to convince people to give it a shot if I don't ignore the drawbacks the card has.
I may be trying this out again when I move up to 500. I need to see if I can find room for both it and Future Sight at the same time though, because I want to give this card all the tools it needs to be broken. I run pretty much all the other cards it's broken with.
And then obviously it has smaller synergies with a lot of other cards, but are those all the main ones?
Oracle of Mul Daya not only works similar to Fastbond (making them good in the same kind of deck), but she also works with Fastbond: Even if you have a land clump on top of your deck, you can play them all now and make sure that your will draw an actual spell next turn. Including as many Ravnica Karoos as possible (maybe even all ten?) seems like a must, since they become full blown ramp cards with Fastbond out. I guess you can also do some neat landfall tricks with Trade Routes, a card I once ran in my cube, but which may not be powerful enough.
Speaking of landfall, I can't get the Grazing Gladehart combo out of my head, now that Leelue has mentioned it. It is quite a modular combo - the only cards that you need are Fastbond and Gladehart (and even Gladehart can be substituted with Zuran Orb + Crucible of Worlds). The rest of the combo is your choice of:
- any Karoo
- Meloku the Clouded Mirror (or even Trade Routes, if you run it)
- a fetchland and Crucible
Those who are cubing with or planning to cube with Fastbond, would you only include that one card or the whole package (Fastbond + Exploration + Oracle of Mul Daya)?
I plan on only including Fastbond. At face value, I don't like the effect. What interests me are the potential broken combos that go along with it. Exploration + Oracle are played for face value. Fastbond also has the potential to dump a bunch of lands on the board on T1 and play a decent threat right off. The other cards don't do that for me. Particularly not the Oracle.
Land Tax into Fastbond can be pretty unfair but you need both cards early. Anything that repeatedly draws cards (Edric or Skullclamp type stuff) is also really stronge but that's about it. Yawgmoth's Will is pretty cool, I've never seen it paired with Fastbond but you can definitely do some broken stuff with it. I'll add it to the OP.
Oracle of Mul Daya is a different type of card than Fastbond even though they have similar effects. You can throw Oracle into your ramp deck and she'll do just fine but Fastbond requires some more effort. Exploration is a much better comparison as a fixed Fastbond that still lets you do some powerful stuff but nothing too broken.
The karoos are good with Fastbond but I wouldn't add them just to make Fastbond less narrow, they really need to stand on their own. I believe Simic Growth Chamber does this but the rest of the G/X ones aren't good enough. Fastbond is best in a U/G shell anyways though so as long as you have Growth Chamber you're karoo land needs should be covered. If you REALLY want to play another karoo land I'd go with Selesnya Sanctuary but I don't like that card very much for typical G/W decks.
You sir, are completely incorrect. Please reflect on how silly you are. Turn 1 fast bond and lots of land plus big bomb card or even something small like 2 or 3 drop that puts you ahead... THAT IS MASSIVE IN ANY FORMAT!
I am curious to hear what you think of Fastbond now, since many of you were testing it a year ago.
It's pretty narrow, so I would only recommend it if you were routinely 8 man drafting AND had plenty of cards that support it.
It will sit in sideboards the majority of drafts (assuming people play well), But in the right deck fast bond is a broken magic card that creates a lot of cool stories/situations.
With battle of zendikar (landfall redux) on the horizon, my mouth is salivating for a couple more powerful landfall type cards to push fastbond over the edge. It's constantly between my on deck binder and "soon to cut list" of my cube.. would like to keep it as a staple.
I hope we get enough cards in the next block to make this card good in the cube. It's been miserably bad outside of the corner-cases where it pairs with the couple of cards that really break it.
For those who don't know how to draft fastbond, I was killing time on cube tutor and without forcing it, came together nicely. 1st pick recall, 2nd pick ewitness, 3rd pick ravages of war (not much in blue/green), 4th pick fastbond (with life from the loam in the pack as a potential wheel), then built around it from there.
I'm changing my cube from being only "good stuff" cards to include more build arounds, and Fastbond is one I'm interested in. I'm hoping to make a land-based deck possible, but not too good.
Here are the cards I'm including that seem like key cards for the deck:
I'm also including a second set of the 10 fetch lands, so there will be 2x of each.
I'm hoping the lands deck will be good, but fair. Something along the lines of reanimator. I'm encouraged to read that people don't think Fastbond is too strong.
Aside from power level, I also like that it gives UGr something interesting to do. Almost all the cards are playable on their own. The one I'm most curious about is Horn of Greed.
Fastbond
A little loved build around me card on these forums but with the push to put in more of these types of cards I thought I'd start a thread to discuss one of the most powerful options. Fastbond can be useful on it's own allowing you to get a quicker start if it's in your opening hand but it's main role is to be abused. So here are some enablers:
Upheaval: This is the best one, Upheaval into Fastbond is an exceptionally powerful play allowing you to recover almost instantly against your opponent who now has no permanents.
Meloku, the Clouded Mirror: Turns Meloku into a super Bitterblossom. Pay X life make X tokens. This also applies to other things that bounce your own land such as Gush.
Future Sight: Ever play Future Sight and wish you didn't have land on top of your library shutting down your draw engine? With Fastbond this is no longer an issue as any lands can simply be played giving you more mana to cast more spells.
Crucible of Worlds: The main interaction here is with Fetchlands allowing you to turbo land out of your deck at a cost of 2 life per land. You also have Strip Mine which will Armageddon your opponent, to a lesser extent Wasteland strips them of nonbasics. Zuran Orb + Crucible of Worlds + Fastbond is infinite life and mana. Armageddon effects + Crucible of Worlds is not very fair for your opponent.
Yawgmoth's Will: With Fastbond you can play all the land in your graveyard which gives you more mana to play spells from your graveyard. (thanks go to wtwlf for this one)
Land Tax: Land Tax gets you a bunch of land. Fastbond lets you play a bunch of land. To a lesser extent Life from the Loam can also get you a lot of land.
Draw spells: Drawing lots of cards is great with Fastbond since you'll be drawing land so Fastbond can ramp you which in turn lets you cast all the spells you're drawing. The best ones for this are the draw 7s. Memory Jar in particular becomes quite potent but Wheel of Fortune and Time Spiral are also good options. Skullclamp, Edric Spymaster of Trest and Consecrated Sphinx are other cards that come to mind since they draw a steady stream of cards.
Karoo lands: Nothing overpowering here but land, Fastbond, Karoo land, land is a pretty powerful start.
Now there are some things to note about this list (which is probably missing some things). First is that this is a pretty small list making Fastbond particularly narrow so this is not a very good choice for Winston or Sealed since it's more difficult to get enough enablers. Second is that all the enablers are quite powerful on their own meaning you're not having to run suboptimal cards just to get Fastbond to work in your deck. You want to play these cards anyways. Third is that many of the enablers are either blue or colorless. This means that Fastbond is generally best in a U/G deck possibly splashing (or running) more colors. Lastly is that many of these interactions are extremely powerful so it's worth putting in the extra effort during draft to break Fastbond.
To further support the turbo land archetype that Fastbond enables there is also Exploration and Oracle of Mul Daya to fill similar roles if you're looking for additional options.
So now that I've talked about some of the upsides of Fastbond I should discuss some of the downsides as well:
1. This card is really narrow meaning it will often be left in the sideboard due to not having enough support in the draft. Also this means it is not very good in smaller groups due to drafting a smaller portion of the cube. These issues are both compounded by the fact that many of the Fastbond support cards are already high picks.
2. This can be one of the worst cards to topdeck if you don't have support as it will typically do nothing until you draw a support card.
3. Fastbond is a wildly swingy card. It tends to do either very little in a game or do something very powerful with very little in between. Some groups shy away from these types of cards preferring to run less powerful cards with lower variance.
4. It's really not as good turn 1 as it appears at first glance. It certainly can fuel extremely powerful turn 1 plays but often it will ramp a little and sit there until you get a support card. I think it's better to look at the card as a build around me card that will randomly win you the game on turn 1.
5. It can be a trap card. This card has a reputation for being powerful in Vintage but it was powerful in Vintage because people can build a whole deck around it which is not the case for cube. This can lead to the assumption that the card is like Mind Twist and you can just throw it in your deck and expect amazing results which will often lead to the card performing poorly.
It turned out really poorly. Most of the time, Fastbond is just -1 Card Disadvantage. Occasionally it will accelerate you into a four drop on turn 2. Other times you'll get to do something moderately broken with it.
That being said, if it were a "regular" ramp card, or another semi-broken card, I probably would have preferred it in almost every scenario. We cut it and never really looked back.
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Yeah, it's not very good in Winston/Sealed due to the difficulty of getting enough enablers. And didn't I mention you needed to combine it with other cards? As a stand alone card that you just throw in a deck it's pretty bad unless you have it in your opening hand.
EDIT: And BCS for this card is completely broken. Land, Fastbond, Land, Land, Land, Wheel of Fortune kind of stuff.
Even if is is in your opening hand, it's often times really bad.
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Agreed which is why the only mention I made of it's potential in the opening 7 in the first post was this one:
I'll talk with my playgroup and see if they feel different. If Berserk fails to impress, I may be able to try this out again.
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I'm really glad you're keeping an open mind about it. Few things feel better in cube than Upheaval into Fastbond.:)
I know you said your group expanded a bit recently which is awesome so perhaps this go around it will work better if you're able to free up a slot. I will say that in my limited experience (no pun intended) with it in Winston draft it's borderline unplayable just because, like you said, you HAVE to have the cards to make it work or it will just end up being this wildly swingy card. It also makes for a horrendous topdeck if you don't have support.
I have the card in my cube at the moment; I put it back in when I got a "free" black-bordered version in my CE set. It's going to come out, though, as nobody seems interested in playing it. Even when it was run in a UG ramp deck running Upheaval and Future Sight it felt underwhelming. If the Upheaval deck was able to go off, it was usually able to do fine even without the Fastbond (it did have sol ring and two mox).
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It's not for everyone and I fully expect there to be groups out there that don't like it. It took my own group a very long time before we got comfortable using it. It's really swingy which can sometimes make for bad first impressions and it also requires careful deck construction to make it work properly which again can make it seem bad to people that haven't seen it in action a lot since they're putting it in the wrong deck. I am surprised that you were underwhelmed when pairing it with Upheaval and Future Sight though, those interactions always felt very powerful to me. It's not like Upheaval needs any help winning of course but if nothing else Fastbond helps you Upheaval your opponent into oblivion much sooner than you'd normally be able to limiting the chance they'll find an out.
EDIT: Also just to clarify I don't want to come across like I'm saying this card is always amazing and my group is drafting all these super powerful Fastbond decks. I'm well aware of all the drawbacks of the card, some of which are major. It's been left in the sideboard many times here because it got picked up too late or the person who picked it didn't see enough support cards and there have been many times where I topdecked it or had it in my opening 7 and wished it was a card that actually did something. I just found that the upsides were good enough and my group liked it enough that I played it for many years before they requested that I ban it when I implemented my banlist. Makes for some good stories too, one of the most broken things I've ever seen in cube involved Fastbond, Crucible of Worlds, Zuran Orb, turn 3 and a Stroke of Genius.
EDIT 2: I went ahead and updated the first post with notable downsides. Probably easier to convince people to give it a shot if I don't ignore the drawbacks the card has.
What are the cards it's really broken with?
Upheaval
Meloku the Clouded Mirror
Future Sight
Timetwister
Time Spiral
Wheel of Fortune
Memory Jar
Crucible of Worlds (+ land sac/death effects)
Life From the Loam (+ land sac/death effects)
Yawgmoth's Will (+ land sac/death effects)
And then obviously it has smaller synergies with a lot of other cards, but are those all the main ones?
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Oracle of Mul Daya not only works similar to Fastbond (making them good in the same kind of deck), but she also works with Fastbond: Even if you have a land clump on top of your deck, you can play them all now and make sure that your will draw an actual spell next turn. Including as many Ravnica Karoos as possible (maybe even all ten?) seems like a must, since they become full blown ramp cards with Fastbond out. I guess you can also do some neat landfall tricks with Trade Routes, a card I once ran in my cube, but which may not be powerful enough.
Speaking of landfall, I can't get the Grazing Gladehart combo out of my head, now that Leelue has mentioned it. It is quite a modular combo - the only cards that you need are Fastbond and Gladehart (and even Gladehart can be substituted with Zuran Orb + Crucible of Worlds). The rest of the combo is your choice of:
- any Karoo
- Meloku the Clouded Mirror (or even Trade Routes, if you run it)
- a fetchland and Crucible
Those who are cubing with or planning to cube with Fastbond, would you only include that one card or the whole package (Fastbond + Exploration + Oracle of Mul Daya)?
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Oracle of Mul Daya is a different type of card than Fastbond even though they have similar effects. You can throw Oracle into your ramp deck and she'll do just fine but Fastbond requires some more effort. Exploration is a much better comparison as a fixed Fastbond that still lets you do some powerful stuff but nothing too broken.
The karoos are good with Fastbond but I wouldn't add them just to make Fastbond less narrow, they really need to stand on their own. I believe Simic Growth Chamber does this but the rest of the G/X ones aren't good enough. Fastbond is best in a U/G shell anyways though so as long as you have Growth Chamber you're karoo land needs should be covered. If you REALLY want to play another karoo land I'd go with Selesnya Sanctuary but I don't like that card very much for typical G/W decks.
It's pretty narrow, so I would only recommend it if you were routinely 8 man drafting AND had plenty of cards that support it.
It will sit in sideboards the majority of drafts (assuming people play well), But in the right deck fast bond is a broken magic card that creates a lot of cool stories/situations.
With battle of zendikar (landfall redux) on the horizon, my mouth is salivating for a couple more powerful landfall type cards to push fastbond over the edge. It's constantly between my on deck binder and "soon to cut list" of my cube.. would like to keep it as a staple.
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Here are the cards I'm including that seem like key cards for the deck:
EDIT: also Future Sight, maybe Magus of the Future
I'm also including a second set of the 10 fetch lands, so there will be 2x of each.
I'm hoping the lands deck will be good, but fair. Something along the lines of reanimator. I'm encouraged to read that people don't think Fastbond is too strong.
Aside from power level, I also like that it gives UGr something interesting to do. Almost all the cards are playable on their own. The one I'm most curious about is Horn of Greed.
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