Ice Cube

I've got around a month to myself and am considering building a second cube as a project. My first cube has been gathering dust since the pandemic, getting 8 players together has proved to be an issue. The new cube would hopefully be meaningfully different from my existing one, and easily accommodate a smaller number of players.

I've been a fan of gimmicky cubes for a while and even started acquiring cards for a bunch of them (looking at you, 60 Chromatic Stars). The Desert Cubes have been one of my favourite. However, replayability is important to me.

In the spirit of the winter solstice, I've been wanting to build a 4-6 player Snow Cube that would be Desert-Cube like. People would draft their lands, and there _could_ be a colour skew. I'd be severely breaking singleton. A similar thing has been made here (Frostbite Cube, apparently another Ice Cube), and I think I've seen a few more. I've skimmed these in the past, I wonder if I want to explore my own a bit before going back, to not skew the direction this goes in.

I have some meta-preferences:
- No DFC
- No un-Cards
- Relatively budget (the budget will already by high with even basics costing over $1)
- Slight preference for cards that were released "closer to Standard". MH1 cards basically skip this being one of the few sets with some snow theme. But commander only cards, or cards that were never legal in standard are less appealing to me.
- I'm unsure how much Aesthetic trumps Gameplay, I think I should either decide this early, or prototype quickly to be able to shift before I'm very far in.

For the actual cube/gameplay, I have some preliminary thoughts, but nothing super set in stone:
- I want snow mana to be at least somewhat special. It shouldn't be too easy to make it, and I'd like there to be a distinction between Snow Basics and regular Basics (which should both be present).
- I like colourless focused cubes. I'll probably end up wanting many copies of multiple of the colourless identity snow cards. I assume artifacts to be very prevalent.
- I would like the gameplay to actually resemble higher power magic than my other cube. The existence of a Icehide Golem, Arcum's Astrolabe already skews towards something that may look like legacy lite, or at least away from midrange standard magic. I picture land/artifact destruction being relatively common.
- Between the above and the lands being part of the draft, mana will be an important component to gameplay. I expect that I want to include a vast number of lands of various power levels so that even if someone doesn't focus on high power lands they can get to play, but not without being punished a bit. I hope that you can cut people off colours/snow mana rather than cutting them off mana entirely. High number of colourless cards, and non-snow costs allows this to be a spectrum rather than a binary thing. Faceless Haven, for example, shouldn't be easy to activate unless you've put efforts towards building a deck that can.

I assume the best way to do this is to start with a base set of cards (such as the ones I've mentioned above, and Snow Cards) and build onto them with an attitude resembling "what can be interesting, given the existence of [this many] of [these cards] in this cube".

Dark Depth is out of my price range for a single card, but I picked up four Scrying Sheets when I first considered the idea before they jumped because of Kaldheim.

I also, as I was about to post this, realised that I have an old text file with a lot of information from the last time I tried to do this. Neat.

I plan to do much of the discussion on discord, but post the big details, or results of said discussion here.

Cheers!
 
I really like the dea flavor wise. Would you strive to have the nonlands cards to fit into the flavor (even if they're non-snow) or don't you mind that? And do you already have a list or something concrete by now?
 
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