Background
I built several cubes these past few years, but rarely play them with more than 3 players. This is problemetic for color competition during the draft, where one of us generally has a whole color to themselves. The common ways to mitigate this (like burning cards throughout the draft) slow the drafting process down too much, so instead I decided to exclude two colors from the cube. We'd have an increased chance of color overlap and more cutthroat drafting as a result.
And it works!
I'm not a competative player or experienced cube builder. I also draft the cube less that I'd want, but update it generally after ~3 plays. If you find cards in the list that lie far outside of its power band, that's probably why. Drafting is fun, and I'd like to streamline it as much as I can, which is in part why I've joined this forum. If you find the time, let me know what you think!
Design Principles
- Budget: I like to keep the cube affordable by having a loose rule of every cards costing less than €2,00 (yeah I'm Dutch so euros it is). This way my friends don't have to be too careful with my cards.
- Medium Power: Not only because of the budget, as I feel lower power also gives more potential cards. Both high-power (un)commons and low-power rares are welcome. Combos are avoided, so a general aggro-midrange-control triangle keeps the balance.
- Non-Parasitic: The cube is small, so every card has a place in multiple decks. All themes are broad, and present are represented in all 3 colors to provide opportunities for cross-pollination and each color to interact differently with that theme. Synergies strengthen the interaction between cards but shouldn't be necessary to make them playable.
- Unambiguous: The boardstate should be clear, which is mostly relevant for counters and tokens. The Jeskai Cube has only +1/+1 counters for creatures, and tries to avoid two kinds of counters on the same permanent. The cube also aims to avoid token creep and contains a few different ones. In addition to that, creature types don't matter (except for Golems), so many tokens are interchangable.
- Color Combinations: Fewer colors means fewer color combinations means fewer deck possibilities. Although this is inevidable with fewer cards, it can be mitigated by making mono-colored decks viable. Seven color combinations (White, Blue, Red, Azorius, Izzet, Boros, Jeskai) would provide plenty of replayability.
- Aesthetics: All cards have a modern border (preferably m15+). No promo's or weird card frames. Card frames with weird orientations like flip cards, double-faced cards, Aftermath cards or split cards are excluded too
Themes
Aggro is often seen as the deck that keeps a cube in check. Because of the size of mine, I'd like most of my aggro payoffs to be roleplayers in other kinds of decks as well. Giant Slayer and Faerie Guidemother, for example, have an adventure side to them as well, but still fit in an aggro shell. This does make aggro decks slower than norma, but I feel like that's a necessary sacrifice to make in a 180 cube. Blue can support this with evasive threats like Spectral Sailor, while read can bring some damage through Electrodominance ETB is supported by blinking creatures and returning them from your graveyard. In a way, this can also help an aggro deck get a little more resilience. White has a few army-in-a-can threats like Blade Splicer that can be utilized by aggro, ETB, or both. These kinds of cards can also be found in Blue and Red. Flash is a nice theme to support because it leads to more reaction and insteraction. Half of the Blue section consists of instant spells, with some additional creatures with flash to boot. Both Red and White have similar, although less extreme, setups. Add Cycling or Clues to that mix and a Blue player has a broad ray of opportunities to do stuff during their opponents' turns. Rewind might be my favourite kind of synergy with this strategy, as it's solely useful if you have something to follow the untapping of your lans. Drawing cards is useful regardless, and gaining additional benifits when doing it makes you feel even more powerful. While there's a few ways to add payoffs to a cube, my favorite (recent) kind of payoff is the "draw two cards a turn" as can be found in Ethereal Investigator or Faerie Vandal. It makes cards like Witching Well fell like enablers. Especially red has a lot of enablers here; see Faithless Looting. White lacks a little in carddraw to contribute much. Artifacts are amazing, and Red likes to both sacrifice and revive them. Goblin Welder has left my cube with this update, but I try to keep his kind of effect active. Goblin Engineer or Daretti, Scrap Savant give similar vibes, but bring something unique to the table too. It gives Red an opportunity to create all kinds of incremental value engines. White and Blue house some artifacts to help support this theme in their color as well. Discard goes hand in hand (heh) with carddraw. Cycling is a good example of this, but looting effects in general are quite present throughout the cube. This also combines quite nicely with the artifact (graveyard) strategies Red has. In general this theme is bolstered by the abundance of looting effect Red has received, which is nice. Blue supports this with most of its carddraw shenanigans. Underfortunately White is a little lacking here as well, although cards like Seasoned Hallowblade support it a little. Golems are brought by Azorius, which has some overlap with the ETB strategies in White and artifact strategies in general. I've added a lot of creature that are apparently Golems, like Gingerbrute and Guardian Idol. They also work with the Modular theme in Boros. Spell Velocity is best summarized through Sprite Dragon. It's a very soft theme because the synergies between Blue and Red are already quite strong through their shared looting-related themes, which coincidentally support that spell velocity deck quite well. Modular in general is a very interesting mechanic to build around, as it works with artifacts, recursion and +1/+1 counters. There's a lot of opportunities for overlapping strategies and multifunctional cards there.Changelog
24-06-2021: Today I reduced the cube from 250 to 180 cards. I have a plan for a few changes down the road, for which I have to order a few cards in. Generally my main aim right now is to clean up any unplayable cards and tighten up the power band. I assume there's one or two pet cards that really shouldn't be here, or a theme that's barely supported but I cut yet.
06-12-2021: Today I homogenized the landbase to make the battlefield easier and draft a little simpler. The tiny difference between lands currently adds little but confusion. I broke singleton for Ash Barrens and Hall of Oracles; each has 5 copies in the cube noew. Fixing is different in 3-color cubes with 2-4 players, and this is my way of testing a mana fixing variant. Ihope to simplify the cube even further in the next update
05-03-2022: I updated the themes of this cube.
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