Exactly. I know we can sometimes look down on the power max community, but we aren't being fair or honest about things when we do that. I'm not saying we shouldn't be exploring lower powered cubes because I think they have a lot to offer and the power max community is largely ignoring them, but powered Magic is also fun. And while not really balanced, singleton helps to mitigate a lot of that variance. As long as you are packing a lot of answers to things and avoiding some of the true polarizing "I win" conditions (Time Vault combo let's say), you should have a lot more fun games than bad ones. I've seen virtually every "unwinable" situation end a way you didn't expect. T2 Inkwell has been beaten and that's a great story when it happens. It's also really hard to get T2 inkwell even with all the pieces in your cube. To some extent, difficulty in assembling and then drawing things like that have a way of balancing things because truly degenerate early game scenarios like this cannot be recreated at will in a limited drafting environment.
One time I had a hand with Island Mox Mox Tinker. I had only one Tinker target in my deck which was Sundering Titan (so it goes when you're drafting, believe me I would've taken anything else) and on the draw guess what the first thing I draw is? Sundering Titan. It would've been insane there even only destroying one land, and instead we had a pretty balanced and fair game.
In terms of balance or excluding from a powered cube, there's only three categories I explicitly exclude:
1) Ante cards, as I don't like errata-ing cards even though Contract From Below is insane and would be a top pick if I played Ante.
2) Conspiracy cards, as I like to draft my cube on xmage when possible and they aren't compatible there, even though some Conspiracies are on power-level.
3) Time vault combo, as it's really boring and can take forever to combo off and assembling it is fairly mindless.
Otherwise, it's all fair game. To tie this into why we 'ignore' lower power cubes, there are a few points to address there.
1) When discussing cards, it's a lot easier to be on the same page than it is to make exceptions for every card and why someone is making an argument without having to go 'I run this type of cube and...' There have been instances where people have gotten into spats defending cards that everyone in the argument knows has no business in a powered cube for a variety of reasons, and then they say 'Please note that my cube is a such and such cube and therefore...' and then everyone either feels dumb or like they wasted time arguing shit there was no point in arguing. I think it's fun to see where certain cards fit when they can't fit into an unpowered/powered cube. If I'm trying to debate why I'm running a card vs not running it and we are talking about entirely different environments, then the debate carries less weight and you have to add a bunch of caveats. Some people like that, and that's great, but when Im specifically discussing power cubes I want to specifically be discussing them. It would be like debating on a BMW forum by saying 'well, my Jaguar...' which is adding almost nothing to what it an overall specific subject. And yes, there is a time and a place for those arguments, and there are connections that can be made there, but it's just easier to think powered/unpowered than it is to conceive every possible cube environment out there when discussing a card.
2) That being said, I really don't think lower powered cubes are ignored so much that their exposure is SO MUCH LESS than an unpowered/powered cube. If the majority of people's main experience is the unpowered/powered environment (which it is, and thank MODO for that), then the majority of debate and discussion will pertain to those cubes. This is less an opinion and more fact, so while I don't love the MODO cubes it's hard to ignore not only how many people are playing them but how few other cubes they play.
3) People who run powered cubes want to do broken things, and that's typically not what lower powered cubes are designed for. Like, you don't throw lotus and sol ring into your cube because you want an environment where explosive things can't happen. And frankly, people who play these cubes and continue to find them cool! Like, I think it's great when T2 Inkwell Leviathan happens, or someone draws a million cards off of Library, or s0meone goes infinite off Time Walk + Witness + Crystal Shard. I can't and won't speak for anyone else, but these types of games are FUN to me as I like the really broken degenerate shit. The stuff I don't like? Mana screw. Mana flood. i.e. the variance that occurs at all power levels of limited.
So yeah, bit of a book there, but I think there's less of an 'ignoring' or 'looking down' aspect from power cubers than implied and more so a 'I know what I like' frame of mind that is really only achieved from running a powered cube.
