Whew, I finally pumped out that ~500 word blurb. I've already gotten some feedback about refining my intro, but I won't be able to to get to it till after work (maybe I can work on it at lunch?). Regardless, I'm still just gonna toss out the blurb in case anyone has a chance to read / review. More opinions are always nice. And who knows, maybe the intro is fine and the other people were off.
I own a 600 card legacyish power level cube. It has its quirks, but it doesn’t particularly stand out. I wanted to design a more differentiated experience for MTGO. Cube’s biggest letdown, for me, is that combat tends to be more scripted because there’s a lower density of combat tricks. Thus, I set out to create an environment more akin to limited. To this end, I sought to incentivize combat tricks and depower removal.
Theros sets a great model for this. On the trick side, permanent effects (such as +1/+1 counters and flash auras) and protection effects offer the most upside. On the creature side, great beneficiaries include heroic, double striking and “spells matter” creatures. These foundational pillars iterated on themselves. As I intertwined more protection effects, creatures that benefit from boosts, and situational removal spells, auras became more appealing. Both beneficial and debilitating auras fit snuggly in the space I carved out. And so, +1/+1 counters and enchantments became the non-creature themes of my format.
In searching for a creature theme, I wanted something in the same “build up synergy” spirit. Another aspect of magic that many enjoy, but gets crowded out in traditional cubes happens to be tribal! Tribal shines in a format with fewer sweepers and a lot of temporary spot removal. However, as evidenced by Lorwyn, tribal walks a very thin line between too on-rails boring and too open-endedly complex. Here, I am least confident. Had I not built this from scratch in the past three weeks, I would have had more time to test and tune. Instead, I hope to look to Wizards R&D for help balancing this. As a starting point, I opted towards open ended. I included fewer narrow payoffs and enablers compared to other tribal cube I’ve referenced. I envision this being less of a tribe focused cube and more of high powered limited feeling cube that happens to have heavy tribal synergy.
Finally, I sprinkled in a smattering of other themes that fit well. Token, sacrifice, graveyard, and spells matter synergies are common amongst cubes and play particularly well with my core pillars. Unique subthemes include defenders and evasion/saboteur. Defenders play well as a form of situational removal that provides sideways value and can act a secret “tribe.” Emphasizing evasion and providing saboteur payoffs helps involve blue in combat and serves as a foil and necessary counter-play to the synergistic build up I’m encouraging.
Closing notes:
Major tribe synergies include: humans, soldiers, spirits, wizards, zombies, warriors, goblins, shamans, and elves. With cameos from: rogues, giants, treefolk, and allies.
The land offerings are completely subject to change. Unlike the rest of the cube, it is currently non singleton. I aimed to provide a selection that supports for good two color mana bases, reasonable splashes, and specialized four to five color tribal decks, while limiting full 3-4 color good stuff decks.
(Also, thank you StormEntity for the draft and feedback. It reminded my that I forgot about a pretty nifty green payoff in
Quirion Dryad 
. I agree it is complex. I think it suffers from that naturally due to having a lot of open ended tribalness, in the same way that Lorwyn was very complicated. My hope is that there is a level 0 of drafting it just like limited that most people can grasp and do ok with. Dudes, removal, and combat tricks is a classic limited recipe. Certainly there is more synergy to be had, but I aimed to make them mostly self contained, such most the time you won't need a critical mass of something to make your deck function. There's no stacking of lords a la merfolk. Most the lords function well by themselves. For example, Imperious Perfect or Cemetery Reaper. And other pay off cards usually work reasonably well even with a only a few synergy pieces. It's mostly just the few Goblin Ringleader style cards that are critical mass payoffs. So in theory, you can draft bits of synergy and do well. You're not punished for not figuring out to go all in on a certain thing. In practice, I'm not sure. So I'm just gonna cross my fingers at this point, as bad as that sounds. Also, I think it will be easier on modo where you can more readily review and organize your picks.)
