The Riptidening—Building my Cube from scratch

[blacksmithy]

Hello again, fellow Riptiders! This thread is about a new Cube that will be born from the ashes of my current Cube.

First, a little history:

Spoiler

My Cube started as a boring peasant cube, then evolved into a budget clone of White Wolf's powermax MTGS cube. After getting fed up with a general lack of interest in budget cubes on MTGS, I came here on a caper, and loved it. Y'all were super helpful in getting my list started down the Riptide path.
However, over time my Cube has gone from a powermaxer to kind of a pile, as I've mostly just shoehorned Riptide concepts into a powermax list and crossed my fingers. That's what this thread is about: completely tearing apart my Cube and starting from scratch with the intent of building a low-powered, super-fun Cube instead of a powermax pile.

The design concepts I'm looking to use in my new Cube are as follows:

• A solid mana base. My starting package is 5 cycles of guild lands: fetches, shocks, duals, manlands, and one not-all-the-same cycle of duals that fit that guild's most common style. Yes this is not a special snowflake mana base, but it is a consistent one, and that's what I want: consistency. (And fetches and manlands. I love fetches and manlands.)
• A low curve. Most colors will "top out" at 6cmc, with the exception of White and Green. White gets Angel of Serenity because that card is super cool, and Green gets a handful of fatty-fats to ramp into. Black might also get Rune-Scarred Demon as a cool reanimator target, but the jury's still out on that. Even so, the colors (possibly excepting Green) will see their mana curve "crest" between 1cmc and 3cmc and start dropping from there.
• There will be no "dumb" aggro cards. Elite Vanguard has no place in this list, but Student of Warfare does. Jackal Pup is not okay, but Firedrinker Satyr is (though just barely). I want there to be aggressive strategies, but I don't want them to be "pick a bunch of 2/x for 1 mana chumps and hope they durdle."
• There will be no "removal check" cards that are simply unbeatable piles of stats. Grave Titan for example is not welcome here. Mikaeus, the Unhallowed is more what we're looking for out of our black 6-drop.
• Combat tricks should be maindeckable. Obviously there are plenty of bad combat tricks out there, but good ones like Titan's Strength, Berserk, and Gods Willing ought not to feel like traps. I don't want a ton of these in the list, but I want a few to make it in and not feel sub-par.
• The cube will use three sideboards: a ULD for obvious reasons, a Draft Construct pack for when we want those drafting dynamics, and a Conspiracy pack for when we want to go ham and play with cheat codes. The ULD will be used all the time; the others by drafter request.
• Other design concepts I'm looking to highlight in the Cube are: flexible casting costs, cantrip-like effects, modal versatility, sequencing decisions, and mana sinks. I want players to have plenty of things to do with their mana both from the hand and on the board.

As far as archetypes, I'm trying to support the following themes in all five colors (in some colors more than others obviously): Counters, Lands, Graveyards, Deathrattle, Creatures, Spells, Enchantments, and Topdecks.

So that's where I'm at on the new Cube list. I would love to get some ideas and suggestions from you all as I work to completely redefine my Cube from the ground up.
The work-in-progress list is here. I'm aiming for a size of 450, with about 60 per mono section, 50 guild cards, 50 duals, 5 tribrids, and 45 artifacts/colorless cards.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

A few questions

1. Could you talk a little bit more about what you didn't like about your other cubes?

2. How large are you planning the cube be?

3. Is your group looking more for:
A. Diverse, casual experience

B. Strategically deep competitive experience​

​

4. How large are the drafts you do?​

​

5. Do you have any guild/wedge/shard themes or mechanical interactions in mind?​

​

 

[blacksmithy]

1. I do like my cube now, but it has a really wide power band. I think this is caused by my attempt to fit riptide themes into the same list as sacred cows like Grave Titan and Baneslayer Angel. That's where the "pile" analogy came in-it felt like my list had a lot of good things going for it, but those good things were prevented from really shining because there was an oligarchy of bombs at the top of the power band. That's why i felt the best way to solve the problem was a bottom-up redesign. You can't feel bad about cutting a triflin' piece of GRBS if it never makes your list in the first place.

2. I'd prefer if the cube fell between 360-450 not counting sideboards.

3. Good question. I can't answer it outright. I have one drafter who's probably a timmy/johnny. He loves WR and splinter twin, and plays burn and vampires in modern. (Thankfully he didnt request vampire tribal.) I have another drafter who's mostly timmy, often plays graveyard decks, and has requested UB skies, naya tokens, and Phyrexian Obliterator. (I'm not going to run obliterator, but we did work out a compromise to make mostly-black decks a thing.) A third drafter is quite new to the game and i would say is a timmy/johnny. My last regular drafter is my wife, who is a johnny/spike.
So having typed all that out, id say they want more of a diverse/casual experience, but not of the powermax variety. They do not like playing against Sol Ring or Jitte, but they do like playing WITH them, etc etc.

4. Usually we have a group of 4-5, but i have some other friends who join occasionally to get us up to the 6-8 range.

5. I have a lot in mind, but first and foremost ill be building around my regular drafters' requests. When i have a chance to post from my computer (on my phone atm) i can update that list and maybe post my big list of personal ideas as well.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

I would suggest setting expectations with your players: some of those themes are going to be harder to impliment than others. Also, coming to a final decision on how large your cube is going to be would be helpful.

Lets slow down here a little bit, there is a lot to talk about even in this white section.

For creatures:



Steppe lynx has a problem in that its an aggro card, goes into a deck with low land counts, and in cube you are likely to have only 2 fetchlands per deck. Clerk is very marginal, fencing ace underpowered, relic seeker and stoneforge crippled by the lack of good equipment in cube, walls of omens hoses aggro, arashin is way too narrow, mentor low power and durdly, while master splicer looks misplaced.

CML wrote a very good article about tribal design here. One of your problems is that the larger the cube becomes, the more diluted your tribal pieces become, making it harder to support the warrior, and possibly golem/soldier tribes you seem to want to support. If you want to run tribal, I would suggest keeping it at 360 if you can, and breaking singleton on key incentive pieces.

Than you want to decide where you want to include generically good cards (like gideon) and cards that push people into a strategy. Otherwise people will just build decks around genertically good cards, because thats easy.

After that, you have a lot of removal balancing that should happen. You have a lot of excellent white removal, living alongside some low power pieces (sunlance?). There also seems to be a high density of it, which might suffocate games. Some of your removal interactions are also very cheap. Does your cube need that level of ubiquitous cheap removal to keep pace with its threats?

Than there is the issue of filler cards: do you need soul snare, abolish, syndic of tithes, relic seeker, divine deflection, and cloudshift because those effects add to the cube? Or are you running mediocre to poor cards in order to achieve effect density.

 

[blacksmithy]

To begin with, what's on CT right now is a super-rough draft... Basically it's everything that i could foresee making it into the final list. So there's a lot of glop in there for sure, but on the other hand there's probably some things i didn't put in the rough list that might get added in as i narrow things down.
Right now, the themes that have been requested by name and might be included in white are: tribal, aggro, lifegain, equipment, lands, enchantments, and tokens. So stuff like soul snare and syndic obviously is low-powered, but fits into the decks my drafters have specifically asked to play. Will they make the final list? I don't know yet. Riptide design is frankly a lot more intimidating than powermax design, and i'm finding it difficult to evaluate cards in the context of a format that hasn't been created yet.

 

[Suicufnoc]

Break singleton and run customs, nothing like more options to make design even more intimidating.
I think lower powered cards are good way to help certain decks wheel narrower cards that are good in that deck. I'm not picking a syndic of tithes over blade splicer even for a life gain deck, but I may wheel syndic anyways.

 

[blacksmithy]

Breaking singleton might happen (precursor golem is the best tribal lord ever), but i avoid customs that cant be made with a sharpie and an existing card.
One im running now is borderland ranger with a strike through the word "basic," and to satiate my drafter who loves mono-Black, i'm probably going to cross out the 2 in the mana cost of Liliana's Shade.
Speaking of black, i am working on a rough pile for the black section, and should be able to post it on CT monday.

 

[Kirblinx]

If you want to get the lifegain theme to work, you may need to break singleton, as this guy is the main payoff card:

Most of the other stuff doesn't really have enough incentive (trust me, I have tried to get Angelic Accord to work in my cube for so long). The new black cards in BFZ might be able to help fill in some of the gaps for that archetype.

So maybe from all the archetypes that people want in white you should try and figure out colour pairs for each of those archetypes, record them for later so you know what you should be adding in the other colour sections so your archetypes are fully supported.
So from what you have said before for the white section, lets see if we can figure out what colours to pair them with:

Tribal
So I guess it depends on what tribe you are trying to support, I can see you have cards so far that mention humans, warriors, golems and soldiers. The easiest is Humans, as more than 50% of whites creatures fit within that type. Humans generally best fit in WB or WG depending on which other support pieces to give it (possibly even both). Warriors are a little bit harder. They can be in either WB or WG due to the other lords, or even in WR due to the prevalence of the creature type there. There aren't as many support cards though and could be a trap for the drafter. Golems are cool because they are just splicers generally and fit the blink theme more than tribal theme. They fit into WU or GW. Then finally soldiers. They are a bit of a problem because they really only live in white. You can use Captain of the Watch as the top end in a blink deck but hopefully it doesn't make your drafters think there are enough soldiers to make a deck around.

Aggro
This could be anything. All it requires you to do is have a low curve with creatures with a good cost:stats ratio (trying to not use the word 'aggressive' when defining aggro is hard ). I wouldn't worry too much about finding things for this as the best cards in other archetypes can be used in this archetypes regardless. This will fit for any colour combination at this point.

Lifegain
As I mentioned before this is probably only really viable in BW (though green can help). Trying to find the support cards for this deck that don't just become 15th pick trash is going to be the hard part.

Equipment
This also falls into the Aggro category, in which it will just sort of happen. The problem with this archetype is that other people will steal the equipment, because they are good in any aggressive deck. You will never see an 'equipment deck' drafted. May be better off with an artifact theme or something instead. But if you really wanted this theme, you should have my favourite buddy:


Lands
I don't think I have ever seen this as a theme in white before. I don't even know what can go in this... Steppe Lynx? Is that it?
Gift of the Estates? This seems like a RG archetype, I don't even know what white can do to support it...

Enchantments
Because of Theros, this could be in anything really. GW is generally the go to, due to that being where the best cards lie. I don't really see that many to support this archetype so far in your current list, one enchantment creature, one thing that actually cares about enchantments. A Eidolon of Countless Battles could be cool, maybe even a Heliod's Pilgrim package or something...

Tokens
This can also go in anything. I've seen this a lot in RW recently but could be GW. A pretty bread and butter archetype that is easy to find decent cards for at every point in the curve. I can see a lot of support for the go wide strategy, but not a real lot that actually produce tokens. No Spectral Procession? No Raise the Alarm? All I can see is Secure the Wastes and the splicers. I demand MOAR TOKENZZZZ.

So white archetypes:
WU: Golem tribal, Aggro?
WB: Human tribal, Life gain, Aggro?
WR: Tokens, Aggro?
WG: Enchantments, Human Tribal?, Golem Tribal?, Tokens?, Aggro?

From what you want so far there seems there could be a lot of bleed support for WG, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. You then get a lot of extra synergies. I also just realised that you didn't say you want control in your white section, yet you have 3 wraths? Would that be a WU archetype?

I know what you had up there was just a rough draft, but it looks like you have started to fall into the same trap as before. It looks like a pile of riptide-esque ideas surrounded by standard powermax cards. eg, Gideon Jura, Swords to Plowshares, Path to Exile, Mirror Entity, etc.

This is probably the exact thing that Grillo just said above, but I thought I would reiterate it a little. To be honest, I am pretty much in the same boat as you... Have a peasant cube that succumbs to the old standard of cube ideologies. I am yet to figure out what direction I want my cube to go in, I'll probably just rip off of one of Grillo's designs considering how much I love drafting the cubes he's made.

 

[blacksmithy]

Okay, here's a question. At what overall cube power level does Ajani's Pridemate become playable? Because while i know AP is the incentive to play a lifegain/drain deck, it just does not excite me. Is there a keyword we could Sharpie on to the pridemate to put him in contention with, say, porcelain legionnaire? Or do i just need to cut a bunch of good cards so pridemate's stock goes up?

 

[Chris Taylor]

The art of the Synergy Based White Bear with synergy upside is a necessary one I think. If Pridemate is as good as Porcelain Legionnaire, he's not going to wheel for the synergy deck, he'll just be played in every white deck, which leads to that deck suffering.

Pridemate specifically I don't have much experience with, but Seeker of the Way and Fencing Ace were cards in my cube in the same vein: Creatures that go from slightly below par to insane depending on what else is in your deck (Brainstorms or Rancors respectively).

These cards will spend sometime being a below average creature, and that sucks sometimes, but that time is necessary so they end up going to the right drafter. I'd focus more on how often they get better than average (The ammount of lifegain effects/noncreature spells/pump spells etc)

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

I've never been a huge fan of AP lifegain aggro either: its a bit too clunky of a mechanic for me, with only one real incentive card that you have to break singleton on.

I like the lifepay theme better as a sort of BWG pairing and more of a controlling or midrange deck, where green and white life gain fuels black interactions.

I really like framing splicers as a sub-theme of a broader UWG blink theme (if you go there), that seems smart. I kind of got this idea of how giants and goblins were interrelated tribes in Lorwayn, and maybe its possible to pull off a similar relationship with humans and splicers?



I feel thats pretty rough, and we're back in a lower powered land, but I kind of like it as a way to buff the splicer lords. Devout chaplain also seems way better than other forms of artifact hate you can run in white.

Stonehewer giant looks sweet, and something I would have a blast with alongside some brutal double strike equipment to power it up.



Again though, lower power land, and maybe something you want a smaller cube for, given how little exciting equipment there is.

If you run equipment though (with a possible artifact theme, we are debating splicers after all), I think the payoff for that is going to be 2 power double strike dudes:



For tokens, I really like raise the alarm, secure the wastes, and midnight haunting, because they double as removal. If you are running an artifact sub theme, master's call is a very good way to up your artifact count.

Lots of cool directions to consider. I think you kind of have to decide what power level you want to have though. Some of your friend's requested themes are going to be much harder to impliment at a higher power level. What power level do they want? What power level does your wallet want?

 

[blacksmithy]

First of all i want to say thanks to all you guys for giving me good, thoughtful feedback.
Second, from what you're saying i think i really need to start posting some more cards on CT, because i may be leading you on in a way by only showing my white considerations.
Let's focus in for a bit on lifegain and enchantments, two of the requested themes. My current plan is to use stuff like Underworld Coinsmith and, more powerfully, Herald of the Pantheon and Courser of Kruphix to give those two themes a lot of cross-synergy, and to center them both in Abzan colors. I really like what Grillo mentioned about using black's pay-life effects to give the theme a quiet payoff.
So with that framework in mind for the lifegain and enchantment themes, would Ajani's Pridemate and/or Syndic of Tithes be playable? What if Syndic had, say, persist? What if pridemate had evasion or some form of hexproof?

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

My general experience with lifegain themes is that they consist of two-sub themes, one focused on life-bleed, and the other focused on life pay. Syndic of tithes is something that goes into a semi-aggressive midrange deck that deals with board stalls and a lack of reach in B/W via life bleed. This makes sense, since extort is a mechanic that encourages mana inefficiency in exchange for a marginal upside. I really don't like these decks, or the extort mechanic, as its pretty durdly, and wants a board presence. I also don't like it being run as part of an AP package, since mana inefficiency is the last thing aggro decks want.

At the opposite end of the spectrum are decks that want large quanities of life to both stay alive and convert into a resource. In pauper these are a lot of the graveyard based tortured existence or gnaw to the bone decks, that use lifegain to both buy extra turns and break symmetry on powerful sweepers that also double as win conditions. In a higher power environment, you're generally using life gain to power black card draw and removal pieces, using it as the oil to make sure black midrange or control engines continue to function.

 

[blacksmithy]

Grillo, I really like the idea of using lifegain to power Black life payments. I think that's what I'm going to go with in this cube. And speaking of Black, the rough pile is up on Cubetutor!
This one is much bigger than the White pile, so there's going to be a lot to (eventually) cut. Also, I've decided that, given the size of my playgroup, I want the cube to end up at 400 or smaller. (Again, not counting sideboards.)

EDIT: I also combed through people's suggestions and added a few that I liked. Thanks y'all!

EDIT EDIT: My regular drafters have all spoken, and i've updated the requested themes list in the OP to match.

 

[blacksmithy]

Okay, big update! All the "rough piles" for the mono-color sections are up. These piles have an insanely wide power band, I know. I'm still hem-hawing about where to set the power level. Do I cut Big Mama Elspeth, a card I love, to open up more decks? Do I cut some of the more fringe decks to be able to keep my favorite bombs? It's a tough balancing act.
However, I do have another rough list—the archetypes. This is the list I'm currently going with, minus incidental tribal synergies, which is how I plan to do all the tribal. ("Incidental" meaning there's at most 2 incentives to draft that tribe. For example, Cemetery Reaper and Gravecrawler would be the only two Zombie incentives.)
Here's the non-tribal themes:
Artifacts
Blink
Butts (in other words guys who survive Wildfire)
Deathrattle (sac/recur stuff probably involving Bloodsoaked Champion or Birthing Pod)
Enchantments
Evasion (by request—the classic skies-style theme with a couple cards that reward making your dudes connect, IDK what I'm actually going to do here)
Graveyards (this encompasses everything from Delve synergy to Reanimator to Lab Maniac nonsense)
Lands (Knight of the Reliquary, say hello to Retreat to Coralhelm)
Larks (search Gatherer for "power 2 or less")
Life-as-resource
Mill-as-control-finisher (NOT blue burn)
Proliferation (Riptide's pitch-to-Force theme, now with -1/-1 counters and loyalty counters and such)
Prowess
Stax/Prison
Swamps-Matter (by request—thank goodness I can put urborg in the ULD)
Tall Attack (double strike, heroic, exalted, Become Immense, etc.)
Topdeck (Abbot of Keral Keep, Brainstorm, Courser of Kruphix, Chasm Skulker, etc)
Wide Attack (tokens, anthems, Purphoros, Battalion, etc).
I honestly don't know whether that's too many or not enough, but it at least gives me a starting point for making cuts.

 

[Kirblinx]

All I have to say is holy moley.

That is a lot of cards and themes. This seems like the 'my whole collection is cube' sort of scenario.
Throwing in everything that seems cool then chopping it down from there. I don't know if this is the ideal way to go about making a refined cube, but it definitely is a way.

My main concern is with the large amount of archetypes, the dilution becomes too real. This is the same problem with storm in the MODO cube. People want it in there but the cards that need to support it are taken up by other decks because they are just good cards (fast mana, cheap card draw). I have a feeling this may occur with the outlay you have so far.

That all being said, I am willing to go through and see if I can group together all the support cards you have for the archetypes so far and see which ones have decent legs to stand on with the archetypes you have defined in the above post.

Also, to support the 'mill as control finisher', wouldn't you just need to add to the ULD:

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

Yeah thats a lot to manage. It might be a good idea to lay out the color pairs and match them with a theme and sub theme. Right now it just looks overehelming.

 

[Chris Taylor]

Eh, not all themes need to be whole draft archetypes. You can have tokens and anthems without the ability to draft a deck made of nothing but tokens, anthems and removal. As you mention Kirb, Mill as a control finisher probably is comprised of like, 5 cards max. (I hear Ashiok is pretty sweet as well)

If I had to guess:

Deck:
Artifacts
Blink
Deathrattle (sac/recur stuff probably involving Bloodsoaked Champion or Birthing Pod)
Enchantments
Graveyards (this encompasses everything from Delve synergy to Reanimator to Lab Maniac nonsense)
Proliferation (Riptide's pitch-to-Force theme, now with -1/-1 counters and loyalty counters and such)
Prowess
Stax/Prison
Tall Attack (double strike, heroic, exalted, Become Immense, etc.)
Wide Attack (tokens, anthems, Purphoros, Battalion, etc).
Incedental Interactions:
Butts (in other words guys who survive Wildfire)
Evasion (by request—the classic skies-style theme with a couple cards that reward making your dudes connect, IDK what I'm actually going to do here)
Lands (Knight of the Reliquary, say hello to Retreat to Coralhelm)
Larks (search Gatherer for "power 2 or less")
Life-as-resource
Mill-as-control-finisher (NOT blue burn)
Swamps-Matter (by request—thank goodness I can put urborg in the ULD)
Topdeck (Abbot of Keral Keep, Brainstorm, Courser of Kruphix, Chasm Skulker, etc)

feel free to correct me though.

 

[blacksmithy]

Yeah, it is a lot—and I agree that not all of these themes will be created equal. Now that I've got that mess up on CT, I'm starting to put thematic packages together on a spreadsheet and culling cards that seem, y'know, bad.
For some reason I've been having the easiest time breaking down the Abzan wedge and themes in my head. It seems to me that the Enchantment and Lifegain packages tie together really nicely, with the enchantments inside the package branching out into other themes—most notably, in black, Whip of Erebos, Animate Dead, and Diabolic Servitude putting us off to a good start on what reanimation is going to look like here. Another thing I've noticed is that White enchantments are often very solid removal cards, which may help me get away from "just run Swords and Path" syndrome in that color.

So here's my "enchantment suite" after some cuts and review:

Spoiler: White

Spoiler: Black

Spoiler: Green

I still want to cut this down a bit, but having this theme fleshed out somewhat gives me hopes that maybe I won't have to lose all my fun bombs—after all, what's Whip of Erebos if not a fun bomb?
I do want to trim these packages a bit more, but they're really giving me a pleasing picture of what my White, Black, and Green sections might look like after the dust settles.

 

[blacksmithy]

Okay, between last night and this morning I came to a revelation. Why am I trying to give every guild, every wedge, every shard, a theme? Why not expand a few broad themes to as many colors as possible? With that in mind, I now have a new archetype list that encompasses pretty much everything that was asked for, plus my own favorites:

WUBRG—proliferation (there will be at least one custom to make this really tick)
UBRG—deathrattle (sac/recursion/death triggers. Blue brings good evokers/murder of crows)
WBRG—wide/tall (tokens/swarm synergy, pump/double strike synergy, and cross-synergy between the two)
WURG—lands (white is mostly in here by the grace of KotR, but BFZ is a big boon also)
WUBG—blink (Undying Evil is totally a blink card, and the best blink targets are green, yeah?)
WUBR—artifacts (another case where black is mostly riding on a gold card, Tezz, but w/e)
WBR—reanimation (similar to deathrattle/GYs but different; UG can't actually reanimate a creature)
URG—topdeck (control the top and profit from it with stuff like Abbot of Keral Keep)
BGW—enchants (this just ate lifegain/pay, as 90% of the good life-as-resource things are enchants)
RWU—prowess (nuff said)
GUB—graveyards (specifically, stuffing your GY for profit via delves/e-witnesses. Red doesn't have either effect)

 

[blacksmithy]

Here we go with Version 2! The cube has been reset once again, and a much leaner White section is now posted. I'm looking to keep all my sections between 50 and 55, and this second draft comes in at a middling 53. Woo!
As a reminder, White's themes are proliferation, wide/tall attacks, lands, blink, artifacts, reanimation, enchants, and prowess. I've ruthlessly culled anything that doesn't fit into those themes in some way.
The next step is to do the same thing with every other color, then do a scan of the list to see which archetypes might need a boost or perhaps could stand to be trimmed. Once the scan and resulting changes are done, I'll add generic staples as filler if needed, and boom! Mono sections will be complete. After that, I can use the gold and colorless sections to bolster archetypes EVEN MORE!

 

[Alfonzo Bonzo]

One of the things that Maro says is that your theme is only a theme if it's at common - ie. if there's enough cards that people will see regularly that they both recognise that it's a theme and that you have enough cards to be able to make it into a deck with that theme as part of it. It's difficult when you're just talking about one colour, but when you've listed some of your themes above, I have to take issue with some of them. Perhaps some of it is about short-hand language and how you're describing the themes, but some of it is about a lack of cards, and I worry that if you think it's a theme you might be deluding yourself a bit!

Proliferation - you don't have any proliferate cards, do you mean +1/+1 counter theme? I can't see any other counter types in white.

Lands - you have two cards I can see that care about lands - steppe lynx with landsfall and gift of estates that get you multiple lands. This isn't a theme. If you're counting the awakening cards, they're only land themed in that you a need a land in play for them. They're more part of the +1/+1 counter theme, and tie in with prowess.

Artifact theme? There's relic seeker and stoneforge mystic that get equipment. Blade splicer that makes an artifact token. Porcelain Legionnaire and Spear of Heliod that are artifacts. How is that a theme?

I think your blink and reanimation themes are a bit short on cards to be considered true themes. Only four of each I think? There are two cards with prowess, and nothing else I can see that cares about non-creature spells. There are two cards that care about enchantments.

So overall, the only things I would consider as true themes in white are attacking wide/tall and +1/+1 counters. This isn't a problem, but if you start telling yourself you have an enchantment them, you and your drafters might be disappointed. It might be that when you flesh out the other colours more then some of your mini themes in white support some of the other colours themes, then that's fine.

 

[blacksmithy]

To answer your concerns:

Proliferate—yes, it's a +1/+1 counter theme, and there will be at least one card with proliferate in every color. I'm adding the keyword to Miraculous Recovery for White and possibly Burst of Strength in Green.
EDIT: The idea is not so much to go crazy with counters all over the place like a Vorel EDH deck, but to easily be able to make the Proliferate cards valuable to the strategy you're already drafting. My aim for this theme is basically this:
A drafter sees Volt Charge, or whatever proliferator you prefer, in their pack. At first they think "meh, that's garbage," then they look at their drafted pool, and the lightbulb comes on. "Wow, this could really give me a big play with all these dudes I already have that get a +1/+1 counter on their own. Oh, and I have a Planeswalker, that's cool too."
Then they pick Volt Charge, and they feel smart and happy. That's really all I'm looking for here.

Lands—This theme is mostly thanks to BFZ. The new set gives us lots of Awaken cards to work with, which bolsters this theme. It's more heavily supported in UGR, but there will be Awaken cards, Lynx, (probably) Gift of Estates, and the real reason to splash White in your lands deck, Knight of the Reliquary.
But honestly I'm not sure how Awaken does not seem like a land-themed mechanic? What's more land-themed than killing your opponent with lands? The fact that Awaken also ties into Proliferate and Prowess is just gravy. (There's also the "other" land deck where you go near-infinite with KotR and Retreat to Coralhelm, btw)

Artifacts—Again, White is one of the lesser colors in this theme, but it's spread across four colors (with Blue and Red being the main ones) so that's okay. Not to mention that when we talk about artifacts, a lot of the cards you want to put in your artifact deck are colorless. You did remind me, though, that Shrine of Loyal Legions should probably get a test run, since it is essentially a White artifact card that I forgot to add to my list.

Blink and reanimation—There are not a lot of blink engines in the list, but there are a lot of ETB creatures that like being blinked. Again, I'm okay with this. I want players to be able to blink their cool dudes, but I don't want ad nauseum blinking going on every game in the blink deck. Getting a few re-entries a game is fine, since the creatures provide decent value up front. Also there is going to be at least one blinker in green, and Venser, and maybe Brago, and you always have the option to use bounce removal on your own guys if the situation calls for it.
On reanimation, there are three white reanimators, one red reanimator (Feldon), six black reanimators, and Alesha. I think that's enough, especially considering several of those enablers are re-usable in themselves. I've never found getting a discard outlet online to be difficult in my Cube so far, and most if not all of my current discard outlets will be staying in the new list.

The other mono sections and the guild sections are added now. Seeing those might ease your fears a bit. Thanks for your feedback!

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

Okay, between last night and this morning I came to a revelation. Why am I trying to give every guild, every wedge, every shard, a theme? Why not expand a few broad themes to as many colors as possible? With that in mind, I now have a new archetype list that encompasses pretty much everything that was asked for, plus my own favorites:

WUBRG—proliferation (there will be at least one custom to make this really tick)
UBRG—deathrattle (sac/recursion/death triggers. Blue brings good evokers/murder of crows)
WBRG—wide/tall (tokens/swarm synergy, pump/double strike synergy, and cross-synergy between the two)
WURG—lands (white is mostly in here by the grace of KotR, but BFZ is a big boon also)
WUBG—blink (Undying Evil is totally a blink card, and the best blink targets are green, yeah?)
WUBR—artifacts (another case where black is mostly riding on a gold card, Tezz, but w/e)
WBR—reanimation (similar to deathrattle/GYs but different; UG can't actually reanimate a creature)
URG—topdeck (control the top and profit from it with stuff like Abbot of Keral Keep)
BGW—enchants (this just ate lifegain/pay, as 90% of the good life-as-resource things are enchants)
RWU—prowess (nuff said)
GUB—graveyards (specifically, stuffing your GY for profit via delves/e-witnesses. Red doesn't have either effect)

I've taken this approach before, and found it problematic. The advantage of the guild theme/subtheme approach is that it makes you think critically about your themes. When I would try the other approach, I would find myself in situations where certain color combinations just weren't being represented, or I had seeded mechanics into colors where they ended up isolated. You don't have to stick slavishly to your initial guild structure (that will adapt as you actually play the cube) its just helpful as a thought experiment, to give yourself an outline, so there is at least a minimim structure, diversity in decks, and their is some semblance of balance across the various guilds. You could take a wedge/shard approach if you wanted as well, but just having the guilds helps. And of course, you don't have to do any of this, its just so much more time efficent to spot these issues before hand, and solve them, rather than building the thing and ending up fixing by trial and error.

Alfonso already pointed out some of the density issues, but there are other issues that will probably crop up as you go forward and into your initial drafts.

Listing the proliferation mechanic in five colors, for example, isn't very helpful. How will those decks look? How will they play? The majority of proliferate cards are in blue, so this is probably going to be a blue focused theme. Are you going to concentrate counters in another color, such as green for example? This could be a sort of U/G tempo deck. There are some incidental proliferate cards, and then their are some engine pieces: how are these going to play into the deck, and how will they dictate card choices. You could run contagion clasp, contagion engine, and inexorable tide for a more controlling U based proliferate deck. Or maybe you want a thrumming bird based U/G deck. If the former is the case, what counters cards help a player control the board, if its the latter case, how will you protect a fragile thrumming bird? The answers to these questions, you'll find, will dictate what you want to run in the colors, and when you go through this process with the other guilds, you'll start to see what the cube really wants.

You may have it listed as a five color theme, but in reality, its likely to show up as a two color deck, and thats what you'll discover in actual play testing. If we spend a little time now thinking about it, maybe we can more smoothly transition into play testing, and avoid having to make some huge patch to meet you and your players' goals.

Its important to have the correct density, but also important to make sure that mechanics are not isolated. Running one proliferate card in a color, for example, dosen't mean you have a proliferate theme in black, it just means you have a mechanically isolated card. I had this issue with artifacts in black, and ended up just cutting all of them to make room for cards that were less marginal.

One thing that I did with the penny cube, was I divided it out like such:
1. Listing the 10 guilds with theme/subtheme: thought experiment to make sure I'm covering all of the minimim color combinations
2. Think of different meta mechanics that I wanted to strew through the cube: tap-untap effects, etc.

Maybe we are entangling two different issues here, and what you're really looking to do is spread a counter mechanic through the cube, and provide some incidental proliferate cards that work with it for value?

I would also encourage you to not feel trapped by some of your players' theme requests. They aren't in a position to be realistic: tribal is really difficult to do well in cube, as are artifact and equipment themes.

This does look much better though, so you're heading in the right direction.

 

[blacksmithy]

Maybe we are entangling two different issues here, and what you're really looking to do is spread a counter mechanic through the cube, and provide some incidental proliferate cards that work with it for value?

^This exactly. My goal is to run lots of cards that, incidentally, use counters for something, whether that's Student of Warfare, or Jace Beleren, or Skinrender, or Shrine of Burning Rage, or Experiment One, or whatever—then, seed in a few proliferate cards across all colors, so players have a cool thing to do with those counters. It's a super-loose theme that can result in a lot of really different decks using the proliferate cards in different ways, which is what I want it to be, because counters of various types are so ubiquitous on cubable cards these days. The new mechanics Renown and Awaken help with this too.

This is similar to what I'm trying to accomplish in the 4-color themes. Take "Deathrattle" for instance. That's a super-loose theme that encompasses everything from Bloodsoaked Champion aggro to Birthing Pod and then some. But it's my theme because every color except White has cards I like that either make creatures die or care about creatures dying. (White even has a few, but by and large I don't care for them.)

It's probably easy to figure out what cards would go into a red, black, or green Deathrattle deck. Blue is a little more challenging, but look closer. You've got a stellar Cube classic in Mulldrifter, whose most common usage is to Evoke—boom! There's your death trigger. Aethersnipe is the same thing, though not as good. You've got Murder of Crows, which is a high-risk play at 5 mana, but it's just asking for someone to go nuts with Goblin Bombardment or Carrion Feeder. You've got Jeskai Sage and Chasm Skulker to slot into your Pod chain, and you've got token-makers (yes, in blue!) like Meloku the Clouded Mirror and Whirler Rogue to give you more sac fodder. So even though Blue will likely be the most shallow color for that 4-color theme, it's got a lot more going on than there might at first seem to be.

These kinds of wide thematic overlap among the colors were part of what prompted me to go for the 4-color categorization, and while it isn't perfect, it's serving my tastes much better than my previous guild/shard/wedge paradigm did.

And I should mention, I don't expect my drafters to be making 4 or 5 color decks. What I'm looking to do here is give drafters the freedom to explore a theme without locking in their colors. I'd spread more of the themes into more of the colors if I thought it were feasible.

Anyway, that's my piece for now, but I do plan to go back over what you and Alfonzo have said when I've got more time to digest it. You both bring up some real issues that I need to have in mind when I'm polishing this design. There are a lot of pitfalls yet to be avoided. I do really appreciate everyone's feedback though, and also people's patience as the CT list fluctuates wildly by the day. I am getting quite close to a play-testable list, though getting the colorless section put together will be a big hurdle.