Hey it's my area of expertise! My cube is based around an almost entirely Desert manabase. I'm several months in now, the development has sort of gone like this:
First drafts of the cube, I am running a very low power level with a Desert configuration featuring 3 each of the sac Deserts, 10+ Painted Bluffs as the only land fixing, a few Dunes of the Dead and Cradle of the Accursed, and 3 each of the cycling Deserts. At this stage Deserts are extremely important as games uniformly run very long and having the free 'spells' in your land section was a major advantage. However, at such a low power level the decks were a bit simple, with a lack of splashy moments and the games were lasting past their welcome. This was the most holistic vision of the cube, with land recursion and selfmill/mill being central themes, and mitigating the poor fixing was quite important. There was also a feeling of degradation in the late game, as you sacced large quantities of your lands in the late game as options waned in your hand. One deck, which I consider the highlight of that era, was a UG Mill deck that used Moment of Peace, tapping and Dunes of the Dead (sacced by Ipnu Rivulet, recurred by Ramunap Excavator or similar) to blank damage until the could mill the opponent out. Or a WG tokens deck that repeatedly sacced Dunes of the Dead for an ever growing and pumped army. Ultimately though the power level was not allowing a host of interesting creatures, and being stuck running large quantities of NWO commons was not where I wanted to be. Changes were needed to improve gameplay, and spice up the cube.
Power level crept up, but still wasn't enough. I experimented with the 3-color morphs from Khan's limited, but most of these ended up being do-nothings and were rarely drafted by people other than me. There was at a point a cool Temur control deck splashing reanimation such as Torrent of Souls and running a Desert engine based around Hour of Promise, as well as the Temur morph, Sneak Attack and gravepulses. Other than this though, the cooler aspects of the color dilemmas Deserts pose failed to manifest in gameplay.
Eventually I was fed up with the gameplay issues of such poor fixing, and decided to add 20+ Ash Batrrens, figuratively sharpied to have Desert written on them. My drafters... continued to be less than enthusiastic about fixing, and Ash Barrens to this day are underdrafted, despite being clearly powerful fixing. At least 3+ color decks were possible now, if unpopular. The greater impact on gameplay proved to be the attendant power increase I made. The curious thing was, with all these subthemes and such, the greater themes such as land recursion often got lost in the muck. Perhaps tapping was now a thing, or so it seemed so when Icy Manipulator and Time of Ice came together, to be promptly blown out by a Scryb Ranger. Or maybe there were goblin payoffs with Goblin Barrage? These microinteractions were cool for the experienced drafters such as me and a couple other friends, but the major archetypes, feelings of the cube were being obscured. Deserts faded more and more into the background as more powerful nonlands and faster games made their abilities weaker in comparison. The -1/-1 theme in particular, felt like the kind of thing that pops up every five drafts than an important part of black's color identity. And no one had assembled an Tinker deck in forever. I experimented with Vivid lands to incentivize splashes and proliferate, but made Deserts even more obsolete. I errata'd those into Deserts too but it didn't hide the underlying problem: I had strayed too far away from the core principles of the cube's first iterations (including the lost Time Cycle cube which I foolishly deleted from cubetutor one day, and had Eldrazi spawn, storm, pod, and energy decks I very much wish I could check out again). Also, the upgrade of creature power level meant that a lot of the neat older cards from Time Spiral and such were being replaced by ugly modern ones, which me and a couple of my aesthetically-minded drafters have not enjoyed. Perhaps closer in terms of gameplay, but holistically even farther from my goal.
So now: a new age dawns! I am going to completely remake the cube... for the 5th or 6th time... trying to create a version that takes the original ideas, color dynamics, etc of the original vision and modernizes it, trying to add cool interactions in a way that does not compromise the original pillars of the design.
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I think I just vomited a cube blog post into your lovely new thread, and without card tags no less! Please excuse me... Here, let me make a much neater bulleted list of things I've learned about Deserts:
-Ipnu Rivulet is not a dead card, not in a cube with a mill or self mill theme! It's an extra wincon for super slow control decks, and milling 12 cards over 3-4 turns is a perfectly good way to close out a limited game. A spell effect on a land is always worth a pick, if not a high one.
-Ifnir Deadlands is very good! An easy pick for any Bx midrange or control deck, and even cooler with proliferate and Amonkhet or Shadowmoor block payoffs.
-Hashep Oasis creates a Gx tempo deck very focused on evasion and trample, but unfortunately also quite focused on green, which is sad when you want to splash a green pump theme into your RW Berserkers deck...
-Ramunap Ruins is nice reach. That's about it, hasn't been too exciting over here but definitely a nice tool for aggro.
-Shefet Dunes is actually in my opinion the weakest Desert. Pay four mana, lose a land, pump a few creatures by a mediocre amount? And if you want the white mana earlier, it costs you life,, and a draft pick. I would consider errata'ing the pump effect to +2/+1.
-Your format needs to be incredibly slow to consider many Cradle of the Accursed. It was only a solid pick in the first versions of my cube, and now I may cut it altogether. It's only really worth it in the control mirror or control v. midrange, e.g. very slow games are required. Just compare it to Hostile Desert...
-Grasping Dunes and Hostile Desert, on the other hand, are fantastic in midrange or control decks, lending themselves to multiple themes.
-Dunes of the Dead requires you to be heavy on Deserts and recursion to be worth both a pick and spot. Also low enough power for a 2/2 to matter. However it can establish some really neat recursive engines in the right situation.
-I've never played Endless Sands or the OG Desert, but I would probably stay away, Endless Sands seems prohibitively slow and I agree that actual Desert is potentially annoying and a bit meh.
-The cycling Deserts have been quite underwhelming, overall they were barely strong enough to see play in my first iterations. If you are coupling them with Multani, Titans and such I very much doubt their viability. I would just stick to the Onslaught lands, which also have the upper hand in aesthetics imo.
-And the big takeaway: Deserts require a huge focus, an extensive ULD, or my BTP-possesed Land Maindraft idea to have a worthwhile impact on a format. They need a lot of space to do their thing both in cube slots and power level/game speed. So imho, they are not a good addition to an existing format. They are a rigid structure, with power level and attendant themes making it extremely likely there is a near-perfect 'Desert-based cube' that exploits them to their full potential. I may have to take rests at truck stops along the way, but I hope I'm on the road... Whatever you choose to do, good luck!
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If you made it through the slog, I award you an internet cookie. Terrible things summer vacation does to the mind...
