Dom's Rave Yard

[Dom Harvey]

Time to grow up and actually get my main Cube list in a tangible form. What better way than to reinvent it from scratch in public?



I'll be working on the template here and talking through it in this thread. For similar Cubes I've been drawing a lot of ideas from:
- Returning the love to Nanonox and their Cube
- Erik Twice and inscho
- Julien Henry's Compost Cube (I've CubeCobra drafted it an obsessive-ish amount, it's nice!)

For broader context you can check my general thread here (and the OP quoted) but I want this to be a ~complete summary + intro to it. Here's the brief:

Size: In flux but I expect 450+ to be right/required for everything I want

Power level: Mid-high; think Vintage Cube minus the P9/fast mana/top-shelf Commander cards (Minsc & Boo etc)

Fixing: A high quality and quantity of fixing: double fetches + triple typed duals (shocks + OG duals + surveils) + misc XY lands as well as various 5c lands (some generic, some themed), mana rocks/dorks, green ramp, Treasures etc

Complexity: High; this is aimed at experienced and adventurous drafters (with some safer fallbacks for a less hungry crowd). Literal complexity is tolerated to a point; gameplay complexity is encouraged.

Philosophy: The heart of this Cube is Good Cards that are good at their jobs - and you'll build a synergistic engine that makes them more than the sum of their parts. You can put together normal UR Control with some neat flourishes or you can build combo-control UR that looks and feels unique

You'll find a lot of Magic's most iconic staples (Counterspell and STP) and unique build-arounds (Sneak Attack or Greater Good) as well as cards that mean a lot to me personally (if you see something that looks weak or odd, I probably find it cool as hell or miss casting it). I want each card to mean something - even among the bread-and-butter effects, you'll find the classics you never tire of casting alongside the weird ones you want to try and the themed ones that are ideal for your deck. You can pair Lightning Bolt with Galvanic Blast and enjoy a Blast from the Past.

The guardrails are mostly vibes-based. You won't die on T2 to Channel + Emrakul but there is a lot of degenerate nonsense as well as play patterns (mass LD and hard locks) that would make the Commander crowd burn you in effigy. I'm fine with UB stuff that fits in high fantasy and my paper list has a sprinkling of exotic Alchemy stuff.

There is a lot of card filtering and mana sinks abound; most cards have at least some use at most stages of the game. I want games to feel contested and complicated but satisfying.

Themes: There are loosely defined archetypes for colour pairs etc but the important themes are felt throughout the entire Cube. There is a lot of bullshit coming from the titular graveyard and other themes/ideas converge there; every colour wants to reanimate something but red is Welding while green is churning through lands and white is shuffling its pawns around or summoning its enchantments. Every card type matters in this Cube but they all matter there and all the classic archetypes have that inflection - your UR Spellslinger deck is rebuying its best spells or doubling down on triggers with escape, flashback, et al; your RG Madness deck uses those synergies for a fast finish; your combo decks use the GY as a stage for their big show.

There's an explicit historic theme throughout the colour pie; a lot of artifacts and a lot of trinkets. Tokens are supplied; this is not a Bar Cube in any sense.

Notes on archetypes, cards etc to follow

 

[inscho]

Great to see you working on a new list! I see why you're drawn to the Compost Cube.

I've always enjoyed referring to your cubes, because while we have some similar design sensibilities, you tend to prioritize "indiviudally fun/powerful" cards more often than I do. It's a good reminder when I'm lost in the synergy sauce, and all my Inferno Titans have become Combustible Gearhulks, of the value of in-draft highs. Those cards create levity, air, and excitement in a draft. I often feel that my power band is a little too narrow, and the draft feels more tedious/serious as a result. I'm looking forward to seeing what a Dom cube looks like in 2025.

 

[Nanonox]

It's a good reminder when I'm lost in the synergy sauce, and all my Inferno Titans have become Combustible Gearhulks,

Get with the times old man! They should be Overlord of the Boilerbidges for Replenish

 

[shamizy]

Great to see you working on a new list! I see why you're drawn to the Compost Cube.

I've always enjoyed referring to your cubes, because while we have some similar design sensibilities, you tend to prioritize "indiviudally fun/powerful" cards more often than I do. It's a good reminder when I'm lost in the synergy sauce, and all my Inferno Titans have become Combustible Gearhulks, of the value of in-draft highs. Those cards create levity, air, and excitement in a draft. I often feel that my power band is a little too narrow, and the draft feels more tedious/serious as a result. I'm looking forward to seeing what a Dom cube looks like in 2025.

One thing that I've come around to in recent years is that having power outliers is a good thing for most cubes. Flat power bands are fine to explore certain ideas, but Magic at it's core is about variance. You shouldn't have just haymakers duking it out back-and-forth, but clearly best in class cards ala Sheoldred, the Apocalypse or Fable of the Mirror-Breaker are fine inclusions here and there. And the bigger your cube the more flexibility when including these because they won't be in every final 360 card pool. It's no different than in Limited where you get that big rush when you open a pack and see the exact bomb you need to carry your alright U/R draft deck to the finish line.

Swings in gameplay and variance are important to cultivating games of Magic. Synergies and exploiting them are very fun and scale with the experience of your players, which is why I like to have as many "bleeders" across archetypes as I can, but having straight up bombs now and then also leads to memorable gameplay. As such I've gone back and started including cards that were previous boogeymen in the format like Griselbrand or Wurmcoil Engine because in 2025 it's just a different game with creature design and interaction. Incidental graveyard hate more common to find without it being completely narrow and artifacts have cards like Supplex and Flame of Anor with flexibility to keep things in check.

As long as you give your drafters tools to deal with certain cards then it's all good.

 

[inscho]

One thing that I've come around to in recent years is that having power outliers is a good thing for most cubes. Flat power bands are fine to explore certain ideas, but Magic at it's core is about variance. You shouldn't have just haymakers duking it out back-and-forth, but clearly best in class cards ala Sheoldred, the Apocalypse or Fable of the Mirror-Breaker are fine inclusions here and there. And the bigger your cube the more flexibility when including these because they won't be in every final 360 card pool. It's no different than in Limited where you get that big rush when you open a pack and see the exact bomb you need to carry your alright U/R draft deck to the finish line.

Swings in gameplay and variance are important to cultivating games of Magic. Synergies and exploiting them are very fun and scale with the experience of your players, which is why I like to have as many "bleeders" across archetypes as I can, but having straight up bombs now and then also leads to memorable gameplay. As such I've gone back and started including cards that were previous boogeymen in the format like Griselbrand or Wurmcoil Engine because in 2025 it's just a different game with creature design and interaction. Incidental graveyard hate more common to find without it being completely narrow and artifacts have cards like Supplex and Flame of Anor with flexibility to keep things in check.

As long as you give your drafters tools to deal with certain cards then it's all good.

Yeah for sure! My cube has a lot more of those cards than it used to, but that is probably more of a symptom of the general floor of my power level being raised to take advantage of the great new cube cards being released. I usually only include those outliers when they are perfectly in line with my design goals. I really obsess over each card that I include that is fun/good/strong but maybe not a perfect fit. For instance, I finally included Primeval Titan in my cube for the first time in 13 years, and I still can't stop myself from thinking...."maybe it would be more thematically appropriate to run Lumra, Bellower of the Woods instead" lol

 

[Dom Harvey]

To take an extreme example, I think Black Lotus is a much better card to add to a Cube than Moxes even though it's stronger - you're much more excited to see it, it's more unique, it makes you prioritise cards that find/loop it, it leads to better stories (I cast this thing on T1 and/or I beat the T1 thing!) while nobody is excited to tell their friends about drawing a hand with Mox Ruby and going 0.5th

I think cards being pushed versions of an effect can make them more interesting by themselves and let them do more for a Cube overall. Consider these:



Back in the day I flirted with Bident but it felt like blue tempo wasn't there (in part because you didn't have the vast array of flexible + cheap blue creatures you have now so you had to dedicate your blue section to tempo the way the average white or red section was committed to aggro). Curiosity is much stronger of course but it's not just power creep:

- Curiosity being better makes the strategies it's best in easier to embrace; for this deck to be worth it you need an incentive to hook people who aren't dedicated Flying Men or Horsemanship Girls
- A blue tempo deck that didn't quite come together can still make great use of Curiosity while Bident is more conditional on things going well already
- A generic/scrappy blue deck can win games against stronger or more coherent decks with Curiosity + backup which helps less experienced/adventurous drafters
- On its own Curiosity is appealing as a control finisher or a tool in a slower/creature-light Flash deck - I'll gladly scoop it up if I'm UG with Wilderness Reclamation and Nightpack Ambusher - which in turn makes it easier to pivot if I'm in one of those decks but the slower stuff dries up and I see tempo tools coming to me late
- The Enduring mode opens up other synergies I like in blue (blink + self-bounce)

 

[Dom Harvey]

Some general thoughts before starting on archetypes:

- A reminder to myself that I know I have a very bad perfectionist streak at all levels when it comes to Cube: this is an iterative and imperfect process, that's the whole point!
- Especially as the main form of 'feedback' is drafting vs bots on CubeCobra which is better than it was a few years ago but still artificial and skewed
- As I tell newer Cubers trying to design their own, as long as you don't do anything too egregious people will mostly have fun regardless and will not pick up on whatever seemingly horrible flaws are giving you shame
- Drafters tend to have a much less strict idea of how coherent a deck should be or what that looks like than me; they are happy to play small packages or sweet individual cards that go against the grain of most of the deck
- Even given my stricter standards there, it's very rare that I find myself lacking playables in ~any Cube these days and with my explicit focus on cross-pollination, easy fixing etc that's even less likely here; most ideas probably need less support than I think and I should be eager to include high risk high reward cards or more narrow payoffs that can raise the ceiling on a deck

The usual 'each colour pair has an Archetype, here's a rundown' model isn't ideal but you have to start somewhere so I'll post from a few angles: the archetypes, their role in a colour (/pair), what those colours are trying to do, and how they interact with the other archetypes most accessible to them

 

[Nanonox]

The usual 'each colour pair has an Archetype, here's a rundown' model isn't ideal but you have to start somewhere

I had trouble starting a list (at one point I had 4 20o+ card cubes trying to do the same thing) and what I tried was adding cards in packages. So for a cheat package you could add Oath, Tinker and Welder and some of your favourite cheat targets for example. Get enough packages you like and then flesh out the glue cards. Wasn’t perfect but got me through the start of the project.

I’ll be thrilled to draft the list when you have a skeleton and return the many drafts.

 

[inscho]

I've been stuck on a half-finished primer for my cube for years, because I keep trying to find a more contemporary way to communicate my cube's architecture than the guild archetype snapshots. Archetypes exist much more on a spectrum now, and they are not as clearly defined as they used to be. The alternatives I've tried are either too inefficient at delivering information or too abstract. I'm leaning towards something visual like Radar Charts or more organic like a Mind-Map.