When I first started cubing, I aimed for an Extended-like environment, but I found a lot of issues that aren't evident at first glance:
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The card pool is small: We already struggle to find playable black 2-drops, that problem worsens significantly with
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Enemy colour pairs weren't supported: This one has a larger effect than it seems.
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There are fewer crossover support cards: For example, there are fewer token makers.
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Creatures were bad: Creatures used to be bad for most of the game's history. And they were not bad in comparison to each other, but in comparison to the inherent mechanics of the game. The creates you remember are a very small subset of the creatures that existed back then and you are going to struggle in cube to replicate the experience. I mean, Zoo was good. But Zoo played 4 Kird Apes, 4 Wild Nacatl, 4 Watchwolf and had 20 non-basics. You are not going to see a similar deck in your cube.
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The powerful spells are the same: Other than planeswalkers, all the powerful engines are old. Recurring Nightmare, Oppossition, Wildfire, Survival of the Fittest, Armaggeddon...these are all old cards. There are fewer modern build-arounds of this sort so you end up with the same powerful pieces with much weaker creatures around them. And all burn and removal is exactly the same, with some minor differences.
Keep in mind that decks just had more spells back then. I've looked at Zoo lists and they packed 15-18 spells. Red Deck Wins played a similar number while now it plays less than 10.
In the end I decided to include modern cards with a wrinkle of history here and there. Here's what I've learned:
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Speed is not directly correlated with power level: Legacy has a much higher power level than Modern, but Modern is faster. Why? Because there's more disruption available. Vintage used to be much faster than it is now. I played Death Wish Storm and you just raced people. Then it started to get slower, as racing become less reliable. Combo moved into a control shell, control started using engines like Counterbalance and Gifts Ungiven and the format was slower and more fun.
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Free Engines vs Recurring cost: For me the biggest difference in how the game plays is how much effort you have to put into keeping the ball rolling. Compare these two cards:
Life from the Loam requires effort. It requires effort in deckbuilding, effort in play and it's never free. As much as it can be a recurring draw spell, it's a draw spell you have to pay for. This need to pay costs over and over to gain an advantage provides choices in play: Do I push for the advantage now? Can I make the opponent stumble? Am I safe? This is interesting.
Teferi requires effort once, and he's gravy from then on. You play it, draw a card and it even protects himself. If he dies, you are already ahead because he replaced himself and it only costed you three mana. That is, his worse-case scenario is that he cycles for three. And from then on, it's a free card and two more mana every single turn. Or 5-mana Unexpectedly Absent. I don't think it's a card that requires you to make many strategic choices and, on the opponent's side, the choice is to deal with it or die.
Here's another example: I like Blink in my cube because it requires constant effort to keep the table under control. None of its cards are powerful enough to win on their own and they are all one-shot effects. Hence, you need to keep working and spending cards and tempo to keep the deck rolling. And, if you do, you have powerful stuff. You have Gilded Drake, you draw cards with Thraben Inspector and so on.
It's important to keep in mind that "cost" can come in many ways. Soulblade Paladin is very good on its own, but it shines only when you have equipment ready for it. Waterfront Bouncer is always good tempo, but it's less questionable if you have ways of using the discard.
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The draw problem: Magic has some rather weak design elements, one of which is the draw system. One card per turn is not a lot and 40% of the time, it's not even a real card, but mana. Left to its own devices, the game stalls because players spend cards much faster than the game can provide them. Worse of all, every action in the game requires you to have cards. Without cards, you can't do anything.
I think having stuff to do is the reason why I'm enjoying Theros Beyond Death so much, while I find the recent Ravnica sets to be so dull. I always have things to do in Theros. I choose between which cards to play because I have several options. There's a lot of card advantage baked into the format, yet it's also slow enough for you to use it. In Ravnica I find I go down into topdeck mode a lot, which is boring.
We can easily try to adress this through the usual suspects: Flashback, recursion, modal spells, looter effects, etc.
Anyways, this is just theorycrafting. I'm not the best at actually putting this into practice. My cube is just ok. But I hope it helps.
