Hello everyone! This is my first attempt at building a non-singleton, low-power cube. I've designed this as a peasant cube (commons/ uncommons only) as a way to help me think outside of the box as well as to spotlight lesser known cards and the interesting/ goofy archetypes they can spawn.
Link to Cube on Cubetutor (It's called the Kindergartener Cube because working with only commons/uncommons made me feel like I was working with little versions of familiar cards)
Background
This cube's design went through what I felt were 3 different phases, with the 3rd being the most important and where the entire thing clicked for me. I've outlined each phase below so you can all see how I got there.
Phase I: After spending a few months on this forum and being exposed to a bunch of different ideas and cubes, I began to want to build a cube that was was different from cubes I had worked on before. I wanted a cube that resembled the Penny Pincher cube rather than something that resembled wtwlf123's cube. At this point I decided I would focus on designing a peasant cube in order to help me think outside of the box as well as to expose myself to cards that I had never seen before.
To start off, I incorporated things from other cubes that I admired like the double bounceland mana base, the UB Ninjas archetype, and the WG Splicers archetype from the Penny Pincher cube as well as things that I thought were interesting like double vivid lands and a cycling archetype. Some of these things ended up surviving to the end while others did not.
Things were rolling along until I hit a snag. I really wanted cycling to be a thing with Astral Slide and Lightning Rift being real cards. I quickly discovered that even with singleton breaking, there just weren't enough playable cyclers to make a cohesive archetype viable. I wasn't ready to make custom cards just yet and with Amonkhet around the corner I decided to shelve the project until the new set released.
Phase II: Amonkhet came and went and we got a bunch of neat cyclers. I added a bunch of them to the cube and the end result was pretty underwhelming. It felt like I was building a generic 360 peasant cube with a bunch of cyclers. I desperately searched for something to guide me and worked through some pretty terrible ideas. Even though Modern Masters did it, Boros Giants wasn't going to be the creative spark I needed to salvage this project.
Phase III: Even though I was discouraged, I pressed on and continued working on the cube. I was having difficulties finding a Simic archetype as all of the options available to me seemed either too boring (+1/+1 counters) or too vague (tempo?) One day after looking through older sets for inspiration, I found it in this innocuous looking card Champions of Kamigawa:
I found it really neat that this card could basically spit out 3 cmc Mana Leaks every turn but the cost of returning a land to your hand every turn seemed brutal. It was even worse with some of the other moonfolk; Soratami Mirror-Mage returns 3 lands to your hand! Even though the moonfolk abilities had a seemingly brutal drawback, I had become enamored with the creature type and sought a solution which I had also found in Kamigawa Block.
I don't know if these two cards were designed with each other in mind but I had felt that I had found my Simic archetype and decided that I found that I loved the interaction so much that I was willing to warp design my cube around it.
Impact of Phase III On Cube Design
After deciding to build this cube around what essentially equated to Moonfolk and cards that let you put extra lands into play tribal, I came away with these three points.
I. If Moonfolk Tribal is going to be viable, I'll have to cull most ETB effects from the format. Soratami Mirror-Mage has a repeatable ability but it'll still look dumb next to Man-o'-War.
II. This Moonfolk + Extra Lands thing seems like a super cool late game engine. I should try to abandon the idea of archetypes falling into aggro-midrange-control-combo and focus on finding neat late game engines that generate some kind of kind of advantage that can slot into a lot of different decks, whether the advantage be in board control, mana superiority, or 2-for-1s.
III. For cards like Sakura-Tribe Scout to be playable outside of the Moonfolk deck, the green's ramp cards are going to have to be way different.
Archetypes
- Solar Flare
- Ninjas
- Madness/ Cycling/ Discard Aggro
- Loam
- Splicers
- Aristocrats
- Recursion Midrange
- Moonfolk
- Surreal Memoir Control
- Eggs/ Kuldotha Boros (Artifact Shenanigans)
These are the archetypes I went out of my way to support but this list is far from the end all be all list of archetypes. Due to the nature of the card pool, overlap in archetypes, and nature of the mana base, a lot of these archetypes can appear similar on the surface but draw from different parts of the card pool to create decks that resemble each other on the surface but focus on different things.
A really good example of this is the WB aristocrats deck. Depending on what gets drafted, you can end up with the deck focusing on different aspects of the card pool.
Some of the archetypes above are kind of vague so I'll go into them deeper at another time
Other Design Considerations
Mana Fixing
The mana fixing in this cube is very good,maybe to the point of being too good So the vivids ended up being too good and got replaced by the sac lands. I like them in theory so we'll see how they play out. The mana base consists of the following:
20 bouncelands, 10 gainlands, and 10 sac lands. This creates a really colorful format that allows decks that are based in two colors to splash for an extra color or two. The hope is for less lines like Cryptic Command into Cloudthresher into Cruel Ultimatum and more of Jeskai decks getting full value out of Mystical Teachings and Esper Artifact decks splashing for Welding Sparks
A Very Eggy Format
Tied into mana fixing is the abundance of eggs in this format. There's a bunch of eggs in this format that serve a lot of important roles. Some like Conjurer's Bauble and Elixir of Immortality allow for decks to reprogram themselves in the late game while some simply just fix mana like Chromatic Sphere and Prophetic Prism. Some have neat spell effects attached like Aether Spellbomb and some have neat synergies when sacrificed for value like Chromatic Star and Mycosynth Spellbomb. Best of all, most of these eggs fix mana and draw cards. They seem playable in most archetypes and add a lot of wrinkles to the format.
Green Ramp
For Sakura-Tribe Scout to be good, green ramp looks like this
instead of this
The Ravnica bouncelands should thrive with this setup as they not only give you extra lands to play, they also generate a bunch of extra mana when untapped. To supplement this, cards like Fertile Growth are included as the last tool in green's ramp toolbox.
Blue Cantrips
Ponder, Preordain, Brainstorm, and Serum Visions are all commons but I'm playing stuff like Vessel of Nascency and Tormenting Voice instead. Careful Study is sweet though so I'm playing two of those.
Storm
I'm "supporting storm" by havingTemporal Fissure and Empty the Warrens serve as win conditions of the Esper Familiaresque Combo decks that I've decided to support. Reaping the Graves and Sprouting Vines have the storm mechanic but they're more value based. Temporal Fissure was too good.
Working With What You Have
This was one of my favorite aspects of working on this cube. Some effects like Life From the Loam and Seismic Assault don't exist in easily recognizable forms at Common or Uncommon. I really wanted a loamish deck so I turned to the tools that were available to me.
Conclusion
I ended up writing a lot without really going into much depth about the archetypes that I'm supporting s that'll come at a later time. I went into a lot of detail about the design of this cube and hopefully it was enough to help others understand my thought processes. Suggestions are always welcome! I'm super excited about this cube and would love to hear any and all feedback. Since the value of this cube is only around $160, I'll hopefully be able to acquire it pretty quickly and get some real drafts in.
One final link to the Kindergartener Cube in case anyone missed it
Also, special thanks to Grillo's Penny Pincher cube project as well as any others that contributed to it as that was a major source of information and inspiration for this project.
Grillo's Penny Pincher Cube
Link to Cube on Cubetutor (It's called the Kindergartener Cube because working with only commons/uncommons made me feel like I was working with little versions of familiar cards)
Background
This cube's design went through what I felt were 3 different phases, with the 3rd being the most important and where the entire thing clicked for me. I've outlined each phase below so you can all see how I got there.
Phase I: After spending a few months on this forum and being exposed to a bunch of different ideas and cubes, I began to want to build a cube that was was different from cubes I had worked on before. I wanted a cube that resembled the Penny Pincher cube rather than something that resembled wtwlf123's cube. At this point I decided I would focus on designing a peasant cube in order to help me think outside of the box as well as to expose myself to cards that I had never seen before.
To start off, I incorporated things from other cubes that I admired like the double bounceland mana base, the UB Ninjas archetype, and the WG Splicers archetype from the Penny Pincher cube as well as things that I thought were interesting like double vivid lands and a cycling archetype. Some of these things ended up surviving to the end while others did not.
Things were rolling along until I hit a snag. I really wanted cycling to be a thing with Astral Slide and Lightning Rift being real cards. I quickly discovered that even with singleton breaking, there just weren't enough playable cyclers to make a cohesive archetype viable. I wasn't ready to make custom cards just yet and with Amonkhet around the corner I decided to shelve the project until the new set released.
Phase II: Amonkhet came and went and we got a bunch of neat cyclers. I added a bunch of them to the cube and the end result was pretty underwhelming. It felt like I was building a generic 360 peasant cube with a bunch of cyclers. I desperately searched for something to guide me and worked through some pretty terrible ideas. Even though Modern Masters did it, Boros Giants wasn't going to be the creative spark I needed to salvage this project.
Phase III: Even though I was discouraged, I pressed on and continued working on the cube. I was having difficulties finding a Simic archetype as all of the options available to me seemed either too boring (+1/+1 counters) or too vague (tempo?) One day after looking through older sets for inspiration, I found it in this innocuous looking card Champions of Kamigawa:
I found it really neat that this card could basically spit out 3 cmc Mana Leaks every turn but the cost of returning a land to your hand every turn seemed brutal. It was even worse with some of the other moonfolk; Soratami Mirror-Mage returns 3 lands to your hand! Even though the moonfolk abilities had a seemingly brutal drawback, I had become enamored with the creature type and sought a solution which I had also found in Kamigawa Block.
I don't know if these two cards were designed with each other in mind but I had felt that I had found my Simic archetype and decided that I found that I loved the interaction so much that I was willing to warp design my cube around it.
Impact of Phase III On Cube Design
After deciding to build this cube around what essentially equated to Moonfolk and cards that let you put extra lands into play tribal, I came away with these three points.
I. If Moonfolk Tribal is going to be viable, I'll have to cull most ETB effects from the format. Soratami Mirror-Mage has a repeatable ability but it'll still look dumb next to Man-o'-War.
II. This Moonfolk + Extra Lands thing seems like a super cool late game engine. I should try to abandon the idea of archetypes falling into aggro-midrange-control-combo and focus on finding neat late game engines that generate some kind of kind of advantage that can slot into a lot of different decks, whether the advantage be in board control, mana superiority, or 2-for-1s.
III. For cards like Sakura-Tribe Scout to be playable outside of the Moonfolk deck, the green's ramp cards are going to have to be way different.
Archetypes
- Solar Flare - Ninjas - Madness/ Cycling/ Discard Aggro - Loam - Splicers - Aristocrats - Recursion Midrange - Moonfolk - Surreal Memoir Control - Eggs/ Kuldotha Boros (Artifact Shenanigans)These are the archetypes I went out of my way to support but this list is far from the end all be all list of archetypes. Due to the nature of the card pool, overlap in archetypes, and nature of the mana base, a lot of these archetypes can appear similar on the surface but draw from different parts of the card pool to create decks that resemble each other on the surface but focus on different things.
A really good example of this is the WB aristocrats deck. Depending on what gets drafted, you can end up with the deck focusing on different aspects of the card pool.
Some of the archetypes above are kind of vague so I'll go into them deeper at another time
Other Design Considerations
Mana Fixing
The mana fixing in this cube is very good,
20 bouncelands, 10 gainlands, and 10 sac lands. This creates a really colorful format that allows decks that are based in two colors to splash for an extra color or two. The hope is for less lines like Cryptic Command into Cloudthresher into Cruel Ultimatum and more of Jeskai decks getting full value out of Mystical Teachings and Esper Artifact decks splashing for Welding Sparks
A Very Eggy Format
Tied into mana fixing is the abundance of eggs in this format. There's a bunch of eggs in this format that serve a lot of important roles. Some like Conjurer's Bauble and Elixir of Immortality allow for decks to reprogram themselves in the late game while some simply just fix mana like Chromatic Sphere and Prophetic Prism. Some have neat spell effects attached like Aether Spellbomb and some have neat synergies when sacrificed for value like Chromatic Star and Mycosynth Spellbomb. Best of all, most of these eggs fix mana and draw cards. They seem playable in most archetypes and add a lot of wrinkles to the format.
Green Ramp
For Sakura-Tribe Scout to be good, green ramp looks like this
instead of this
The Ravnica bouncelands should thrive with this setup as they not only give you extra lands to play, they also generate a bunch of extra mana when untapped. To supplement this, cards like Fertile Growth are included as the last tool in green's ramp toolbox.
Blue Cantrips
Ponder, Preordain, Brainstorm, and Serum Visions are all commons but I'm playing stuff like Vessel of Nascency and Tormenting Voice instead. Careful Study is sweet though so I'm playing two of those.
Storm
I'm "supporting storm" by having
Working With What You Have
This was one of my favorite aspects of working on this cube. Some effects like Life From the Loam and Seismic Assault don't exist in easily recognizable forms at Common or Uncommon. I really wanted a loamish deck so I turned to the tools that were available to me.
Conclusion
I ended up writing a lot without really going into much depth about the archetypes that I'm supporting s that'll come at a later time. I went into a lot of detail about the design of this cube and hopefully it was enough to help others understand my thought processes. Suggestions are always welcome! I'm super excited about this cube and would love to hear any and all feedback. Since the value of this cube is only around $160, I'll hopefully be able to acquire it pretty quickly and get some real drafts in.
One final link to the Kindergartener Cube in case anyone missed it
Also, special thanks to Grillo's Penny Pincher cube project as well as any others that contributed to it as that was a major source of information and inspiration for this project.
Grillo's Penny Pincher Cube
