IMPORTANT! You may only vote for 3 cubes. Voting lasts for a week. For further information, see the contest thread
The contest yielded a lot of results (twice as many as last time)! Hopefully the participants found it a challenging endeavour. The amount of diversity was unexpected, as it was last time (so how unexpected is it really). It’s obvious there are a lot of routes to take. I’m honestly thrilled to take a stab at this myself.
Please feel free to share your own thoughts and celebrate each others’ cubes down below! This poll will close sunday evening, so be sure to have voted by then.
- 72 Card Naya Landfall - @Rylar
3-color cube revolving around playing and returning lands - Purgatory - @Mown
manipulate graveyards and libraries, sultai-style - Everything costs less - @Dicewi
there’s mana reduction on every card - Blue Nanocube - @Nanonox
da ba dee da ba die - TCB micro cube - @Quelephant404
inspired by the three card blind format - Nanocube Challenge - @Watermelon
who needs red? - Kashi Good Friends - @descolada
92 combos in 72 cards - Contest Micro Cube - @Parallel
“X” marks the costs - Tiny Leaders NanoCube - @RedShirtDown
Small decks have small leaders - Nano Doom Cube - @ohsonae
What if you started a game with Doomsday on the stack? - Gotta Go Fast(ing) - @LadyMapi
everyone gets a copy of Fasting - The Shops Experience - @haganbmj
a Simic shops experience - The "Rakdos" Nano Cube - @TheLameSauce
everything is trying to kill you - Nano No man land - @Zerdan
winning without creatures - NanoThopters - @Akiba47
100 Ornithopters but less of them - Death and Taxes Microcube - @TrainmasterGT
72 cards that prevent you playing the others
- the Eldrazi-Post Nano-72 Cube - @vennythekid
slow enough for Trading Post to be a core engine
I have examined each cube, and drafted it (al least) once. Each entry got a tip (point of improvement), a top (best part of the cube), and my favorite card (highly subjective).
72 Card Naya Landfall - @Rylar
3-color cube revolving around playing and returning lands
Top: This is a very focussed cube! You made very intelligent additions to let the landfall theme shine. The bounce lands are awesome, as are the Kor Skyfisher variants. The diversity of your theme in both slow and fast strategies shines through nicely.
Tip: You could’ve spread out the theme a little more. For example, you have 30(!) cards with landfall, which is enough to create 3 landfall decks. If you’d added a few land recursion cards, a whole new archetype would develop that still contributes to the landfall theme. This would also tighten the power band.
Favorite card: Path to Exile is already a different beast in the 15-card format, but with the added landfall shenanigans it leads a whole different life.
Purgatory - @Mown
manipulate graveyards and libraries, sultai-style
Top: The cube plays a lot with libraries, graveyards, hands and even exile. It’s a good direction to go for a 15-card format. On top of that, you managed to really give each color a distinct identity. The whole feels very old-school.
Tip: You’ve chosen to go non-singleton, which in a 72-card cube really cuts in the diversity of cards. That’s not a negative per se, but I don’t think the cards you’ve doubled up on are equally interesting: multiple Sound the Calls are interesting in this particular environment; Utopia Vow doesn’t feel like it deserves to be in here twice.
Favorite card: Riftsweeper is an awesome card that I’ve never seen work. It could really work here. I especially like how it invites combining it with either blue or black exile effects. Very cool addition.
Everything costs less - @Dicewi
there’s mana reduction on every card
Top: It’s awesome that you chose a theme this… weird and stuck with it. What’s even more absurd is how synergistic it feels, even though the reductions mostly have different conditions. There’s a lot of connections to be made here.
Tip: This cube would need some playtesting to really shine, as there’s a power discrepancy here. God-Eternal Kefnet, for example, isn’t on the same level as Krosan Drover. I think most medallions are a trap in a 15-card environment, especially if the cube supports all 5 colors.
Favorite card: Torch Breath, although I like most of the color-hate. In an environment like this, crafting a flexible sideboard can be as important as creating a mainboard. And it fits seamlessly in the theme!
Blue Nanocube - @Nanonox
da ba dee da ba die
Top: Monocolored is awesome. Blue is a challenge, but I’m very happy to see that you’ve added plenty of tempo to the color. I also applaud (most of) your land choices, as the addition of colorless lands brings a color-screw risk, but the overall power of those lands makes up for that.
Tip: I think you overestimate the power of card draw. I see you’ve added a “draw 2” theme, but can tell from experience it’s a trap. It’s very likely you’ll draw your entire deck during most games, so the fact that you’ll get them a turn or two earlier isn’t worth whatever price you pay for it.
Favorite card: Cloudpost is a good example of the colorless lands I was talking about earlier, but the main reason I like them here is that they bring their own minigame: if anyone takes them, should you do as well?
TCB micro cube - @Quelephant404
inspired by the three card blind format
Top: There’s a lot of different things to like here. In a 15-card cube, a single card could be an archetype, and you bring that philosophy home. There’s a lot of dreams here, and a lot of them impact the game in such a way that the game ends quickly.
Tip: There’s some real power discrepancy here, and few ways to answer big power outliers. I think cards like Hexdrinker and Treetop Snarespinner shouldn’t be in the same cube. If you cube a bit from both ends of the power band, I think the aforementioned dreams have a better chance of being realized.
Favorite card: Scion of Draco single-handedly makes drafting a 4 or 5 color deck appealing, which nicely mirrors the monocolored support you’ve got going on.
Nanocube Challenge - @Watermelon
who needs red?
Top: You seem to have a grasp on the 15-card format. Standstill would be an absolute power outlier in any other cube, but here it’s… fine. Devious Cover-Up is quite bad, even in limited, but here it’s awesome. You’ve seeded signals that monocolor decks are supported, and two-color signals for the strategies of those color pairs. I really feel that I grasp this cube just by looking at it.
Tip: I’d welcome more spice in the cube. There’s nothing I haven’t seen before, and while you use the 15-card format effectively for power-level, I don’t feel like you play with it too much.
Favorite card: Tainted Strike is the spice I’d like to see more of! A dream, which I’m not sure how to fulfill. But dammit if I wouldn’t try!
Kashi Good Friends - @descolada
92 combos in 72 cards
Top: I’m too dumb for this cube haha. There’s so much going on! Instead of color combinations you force drafters to choose their combo-combinations (combonations?). It’s an interesting change of pace, especially for spikier players. I really liked your writeup, which indicates the amount of thought (and testing?) you put in this cube.
Tip: Due to the focus on combo, the strength of interaction increases. A control deck seems difficult to beat. The cube seems like it would benefit from a way to counter this, either by introducing a few cards with fast clocks or by getting rid of the “lose by decking” role.
Favorite card: Unwanted Remake for every reason you mentioned.
Contest Micro Cube - @Parallel
“X” marks the costs
Top: Another awesome theme! I especially like how it kind of synergizes with itself: a lot of additions make mana, which is good for following X spells. There’re also a lot of mentions of mana value, which becomes another interesting thing with X spells. Even your land choices supplement the theme extremely well.
Tip: Some cards were picked without too much consideration for the 15-card format. Tiny decks mean that card draw becomes bad. Pull from Tomorrow won’t do too much, especially since this cube won’t be too fast. Animist’s Awakening is in a similar boat. These cards are traps, and there are more in your list.
Favorite card: Condescend BY FAR. The addition of this one card makes every spell you cast vs a blue mage with mana open a quandary: “Do they have it? How much extra can they make me pay?”. The scry is just the cherry on top.
Tiny Leaders NanoCube - @RedShirtDown
Small decks have small leaders
Top: I ignored the tiny leader rules, but I think it still gives a nice identity to the cube. Higher mana values are harder to pull off anyway, as most decks would only have 5 or 6 lands anyway. The legendary theme is a nice texture throughout the colors, while each color also has its own focus.
Tip: There’s nothing broad I can point to without playtests, as this is a really solid cube. The shackles of the tiny leaders format do show through, and make the cube feel a little split in intention. Red Sun’s Zenith is an addition for the 15-card format, while Mox Amber is mostly a Tiny Leaders thing. Picking either would improve the focus of the draft and make the format easier to parse.
Favorite card: Kethis, the Hidden Hand does multiple things I like: recursion is really important in this format; it incentivises a 3-color deck; it plays nicely with the legendary themes you’ve got going on..
Nano Doom Cube - @ohsonae
What if you started a game with Doomsday on the stack?
Top: Weaponizing the size of the library into the main win con is an effective take. I like how you went all in by skewing the cube heavily towards blue. The cube cards have a sort-of natural dance with each other: milling, reshuffling, reanimating. There’s a really narrow power band where I could not really find an outlier either way. Well done!
Tip: There’s a few individual cards that I cannot see performing well in your environment. Sazacap’s Brew, for example, is a really hard sell. It’s not exciting enough to let me dream of breaking it somehow. I wonder about the replayability because of this.
Favorite card: Ghost Quarter is such a good example of a card whose context has shifted due to the format. It plays really well in the card denying strategies employed in the cube.
Gotta Go Fast(ing) - @LadyMapi
everyone gets a copy of Fasting
Top: Hahaha, Fasting. What a stupid card. Perfect for the challenge though; nice find. I’m happy you added some cards to spice it up a little, including ways to remove it that become strangely main deckable. It’s hard to truly evaluate this cube though because I think a lot of the oomph will result from its unique gameplay (even for this challenge!).
Tip: You specified how the cube should be drafted, but I think not grid-drafting it is a mistake: you end up with sooo many playables. I could probably build three 15-card decks after my mock draft. I think you missed an opportunity to add even more weird cards or just a ton of utility lands to keep some tension during the draft.
Favorite card: Oblation, because its interaction with Fasting is so stupid I love it.
The Shops Experience - @haganbmj
a Simic shops experience
Top: I’m not too familiar with playing these kinds of cubes/decks, so my opinion should probably be taken with a grain of salt. I like how the cube has absurd enabling cards, but the cards being enabled are nothing to write home about. You made the right choice by omitting Wurmcoil Engine and its ilk. This might also be the only cube where card draw has some power, because hands empty so quickly.
Tip: This cube is more starting-hand dependent than the others of this contest (which is ironic due to its lack of leyline-like effects). The small deck sizes will make magical Christmas land happen more often than not. That’s an acquired taste.
Favorite card: Phyrexian Dreadnought is a personal dream of mine. It might be too fragile for the environment but I DON’T CARE.
The "Rakdos" Nano Cube - @TheLameSauce
everything is trying to kill you
Top: A cube where everyone starts at virtually 15 life. I lost life just by looking at the card list. My favorite part is that you do allow for the opportunity to play with other colors (talismans support that too), although each multicolored card is playable with just red or black as well.
Tip: I don’t think power imbalance is a problem per se, but the way it’s implemented here means that every drafter is pushed towards playing red/black. This is the premise of the cube of course, however, why include the other colors at all? It’s more effective to put the power outliers in the other 3 colors and create the decision on if they are worth splashing for.
Favorite card: Smolder Initiate is fun because it triggers off both your own and your opponent’s cards. With the fast life loss on both sides, the pings of this elemental might cause your opponent to reconsider their cast.
Nano No man land - @Zerdan
winning without creatures
Top: The lack of creatures gives a broad range of alternative win directions. Honestly, a lot of them would work nicely in a creature cube as well. There’s a lot of diversity win cons here, with a solid amount of overlap as well.
Tip: Deck in the cube generally “do their thing”. You’re not the only one to have designed in this direction. The format lends itself nicely for it. Here, however, it feels like the strategies of decks don’t really interact with each other. I think that’s fine for 2-player drafts, but would become repetitive in 4-player ones.
Favorite card: Jinxed Idol made me laugh. It’s a perfect card if you think or know that you have more creatures in your deck than your opponent does. Nice 1-card archetype.
NanoThopters - @Akiba47
100 Ornithopters but less of them
Top: I think this cube has some advantages over its big brother, in that games are resolved quicker. The dreaded topdeck matches aren’t really a thing at 15 cards. You also completely ignored all card-draw engines, which I certainly think is the right choice. But what is the right amount of thopters to take?
Tip: You challenged yourself by practically reducing the amount of cards in your cube to 48. On top of that, you added a few very parasitic archetypes (aura’s primarily) that need so much support that you smother the diversity in the cube a little.
Favorite card: Ornithopter .
Death and Taxes Microcube - @TrainmasterGT
72 cards that prevent you playing the others
Top: It’s a whole other mode of play. Most matches will feel like a mirror match, but I really like how you’ve still diversified the lanes of victory. Eldrazi were an unexpected, but welcome, addition. I like your choices for the “off-color” cards, as they feel like solid reasons to go for a multicolored approach.
Tip: This is the cube with the biggest potential for stalemates. It feels like there’s as much removal as there are threats. This is the cube’s concept of course, but I’m not sure how it’ll pan out in practise.
Favorite card: Chalice of the Void is a cool buildaround. It might be too strong in gameplay, but I adore its potential for deckbuilding.
72 Card Naya Landfall - @Rylar
3-color cube revolving around playing and returning lands
Top: This is a very focussed cube! You made very intelligent additions to let the landfall theme shine. The bounce lands are awesome, as are the Kor Skyfisher variants. The diversity of your theme in both slow and fast strategies shines through nicely.
Tip: You could’ve spread out the theme a little more. For example, you have 30(!) cards with landfall, which is enough to create 3 landfall decks. If you’d added a few land recursion cards, a whole new archetype would develop that still contributes to the landfall theme. This would also tighten the power band.
Favorite card: Path to Exile is already a different beast in the 15-card format, but with the added landfall shenanigans it leads a whole different life.
Purgatory - @Mown
manipulate graveyards and libraries, sultai-style
Top: The cube plays a lot with libraries, graveyards, hands and even exile. It’s a good direction to go for a 15-card format. On top of that, you managed to really give each color a distinct identity. The whole feels very old-school.
Tip: You’ve chosen to go non-singleton, which in a 72-card cube really cuts in the diversity of cards. That’s not a negative per se, but I don’t think the cards you’ve doubled up on are equally interesting: multiple Sound the Calls are interesting in this particular environment; Utopia Vow doesn’t feel like it deserves to be in here twice.
Favorite card: Riftsweeper is an awesome card that I’ve never seen work. It could really work here. I especially like how it invites combining it with either blue or black exile effects. Very cool addition.
Everything costs less - @Dicewi
there’s mana reduction on every card
Top: It’s awesome that you chose a theme this… weird and stuck with it. What’s even more absurd is how synergistic it feels, even though the reductions mostly have different conditions. There’s a lot of connections to be made here.
Tip: This cube would need some playtesting to really shine, as there’s a power discrepancy here. God-Eternal Kefnet, for example, isn’t on the same level as Krosan Drover. I think most medallions are a trap in a 15-card environment, especially if the cube supports all 5 colors.
Favorite card: Torch Breath, although I like most of the color-hate. In an environment like this, crafting a flexible sideboard can be as important as creating a mainboard. And it fits seamlessly in the theme!
Blue Nanocube - @Nanonox
da ba dee da ba die
Top: Monocolored is awesome. Blue is a challenge, but I’m very happy to see that you’ve added plenty of tempo to the color. I also applaud (most of) your land choices, as the addition of colorless lands brings a color-screw risk, but the overall power of those lands makes up for that.
Tip: I think you overestimate the power of card draw. I see you’ve added a “draw 2” theme, but can tell from experience it’s a trap. It’s very likely you’ll draw your entire deck during most games, so the fact that you’ll get them a turn or two earlier isn’t worth whatever price you pay for it.
Favorite card: Cloudpost is a good example of the colorless lands I was talking about earlier, but the main reason I like them here is that they bring their own minigame: if anyone takes them, should you do as well?
TCB micro cube - @Quelephant404
inspired by the three card blind format
Top: There’s a lot of different things to like here. In a 15-card cube, a single card could be an archetype, and you bring that philosophy home. There’s a lot of dreams here, and a lot of them impact the game in such a way that the game ends quickly.
Tip: There’s some real power discrepancy here, and few ways to answer big power outliers. I think cards like Hexdrinker and Treetop Snarespinner shouldn’t be in the same cube. If you cube a bit from both ends of the power band, I think the aforementioned dreams have a better chance of being realized.
Favorite card: Scion of Draco single-handedly makes drafting a 4 or 5 color deck appealing, which nicely mirrors the monocolored support you’ve got going on.
Nanocube Challenge - @Watermelon
who needs red?
Top: You seem to have a grasp on the 15-card format. Standstill would be an absolute power outlier in any other cube, but here it’s… fine. Devious Cover-Up is quite bad, even in limited, but here it’s awesome. You’ve seeded signals that monocolor decks are supported, and two-color signals for the strategies of those color pairs. I really feel that I grasp this cube just by looking at it.
Tip: I’d welcome more spice in the cube. There’s nothing I haven’t seen before, and while you use the 15-card format effectively for power-level, I don’t feel like you play with it too much.
Favorite card: Tainted Strike is the spice I’d like to see more of! A dream, which I’m not sure how to fulfill. But dammit if I wouldn’t try!
Kashi Good Friends - @descolada
92 combos in 72 cards
Top: I’m too dumb for this cube haha. There’s so much going on! Instead of color combinations you force drafters to choose their combo-combinations (combonations?). It’s an interesting change of pace, especially for spikier players. I really liked your writeup, which indicates the amount of thought (and testing?) you put in this cube.
Tip: Due to the focus on combo, the strength of interaction increases. A control deck seems difficult to beat. The cube seems like it would benefit from a way to counter this, either by introducing a few cards with fast clocks or by getting rid of the “lose by decking” role.
Favorite card: Unwanted Remake for every reason you mentioned.
Contest Micro Cube - @Parallel
“X” marks the costs
Top: Another awesome theme! I especially like how it kind of synergizes with itself: a lot of additions make mana, which is good for following X spells. There’re also a lot of mentions of mana value, which becomes another interesting thing with X spells. Even your land choices supplement the theme extremely well.
Tip: Some cards were picked without too much consideration for the 15-card format. Tiny decks mean that card draw becomes bad. Pull from Tomorrow won’t do too much, especially since this cube won’t be too fast. Animist’s Awakening is in a similar boat. These cards are traps, and there are more in your list.
Favorite card: Condescend BY FAR. The addition of this one card makes every spell you cast vs a blue mage with mana open a quandary: “Do they have it? How much extra can they make me pay?”. The scry is just the cherry on top.
Tiny Leaders NanoCube - @RedShirtDown
Small decks have small leaders
Top: I ignored the tiny leader rules, but I think it still gives a nice identity to the cube. Higher mana values are harder to pull off anyway, as most decks would only have 5 or 6 lands anyway. The legendary theme is a nice texture throughout the colors, while each color also has its own focus.
Tip: There’s nothing broad I can point to without playtests, as this is a really solid cube. The shackles of the tiny leaders format do show through, and make the cube feel a little split in intention. Red Sun’s Zenith is an addition for the 15-card format, while Mox Amber is mostly a Tiny Leaders thing. Picking either would improve the focus of the draft and make the format easier to parse.
Favorite card: Kethis, the Hidden Hand does multiple things I like: recursion is really important in this format; it incentivises a 3-color deck; it plays nicely with the legendary themes you’ve got going on..
Nano Doom Cube - @ohsonae
What if you started a game with Doomsday on the stack?
Top: Weaponizing the size of the library into the main win con is an effective take. I like how you went all in by skewing the cube heavily towards blue. The cube cards have a sort-of natural dance with each other: milling, reshuffling, reanimating. There’s a really narrow power band where I could not really find an outlier either way. Well done!
Tip: There’s a few individual cards that I cannot see performing well in your environment. Sazacap’s Brew, for example, is a really hard sell. It’s not exciting enough to let me dream of breaking it somehow. I wonder about the replayability because of this.
Favorite card: Ghost Quarter is such a good example of a card whose context has shifted due to the format. It plays really well in the card denying strategies employed in the cube.
Gotta Go Fast(ing) - @LadyMapi
everyone gets a copy of Fasting
Top: Hahaha, Fasting. What a stupid card. Perfect for the challenge though; nice find. I’m happy you added some cards to spice it up a little, including ways to remove it that become strangely main deckable. It’s hard to truly evaluate this cube though because I think a lot of the oomph will result from its unique gameplay (even for this challenge!).
Tip: You specified how the cube should be drafted, but I think not grid-drafting it is a mistake: you end up with sooo many playables. I could probably build three 15-card decks after my mock draft. I think you missed an opportunity to add even more weird cards or just a ton of utility lands to keep some tension during the draft.
Favorite card: Oblation, because its interaction with Fasting is so stupid I love it.
The Shops Experience - @haganbmj
a Simic shops experience
Top: I’m not too familiar with playing these kinds of cubes/decks, so my opinion should probably be taken with a grain of salt. I like how the cube has absurd enabling cards, but the cards being enabled are nothing to write home about. You made the right choice by omitting Wurmcoil Engine and its ilk. This might also be the only cube where card draw has some power, because hands empty so quickly.
Tip: This cube is more starting-hand dependent than the others of this contest (which is ironic due to its lack of leyline-like effects). The small deck sizes will make magical Christmas land happen more often than not. That’s an acquired taste.
Favorite card: Phyrexian Dreadnought is a personal dream of mine. It might be too fragile for the environment but I DON’T CARE.
The "Rakdos" Nano Cube - @TheLameSauce
everything is trying to kill you
Top: A cube where everyone starts at virtually 15 life. I lost life just by looking at the card list. My favorite part is that you do allow for the opportunity to play with other colors (talismans support that too), although each multicolored card is playable with just red or black as well.
Tip: I don’t think power imbalance is a problem per se, but the way it’s implemented here means that every drafter is pushed towards playing red/black. This is the premise of the cube of course, however, why include the other colors at all? It’s more effective to put the power outliers in the other 3 colors and create the decision on if they are worth splashing for.
Favorite card: Smolder Initiate is fun because it triggers off both your own and your opponent’s cards. With the fast life loss on both sides, the pings of this elemental might cause your opponent to reconsider their cast.
Nano No man land - @Zerdan
winning without creatures
Top: The lack of creatures gives a broad range of alternative win directions. Honestly, a lot of them would work nicely in a creature cube as well. There’s a lot of diversity win cons here, with a solid amount of overlap as well.
Tip: Deck in the cube generally “do their thing”. You’re not the only one to have designed in this direction. The format lends itself nicely for it. Here, however, it feels like the strategies of decks don’t really interact with each other. I think that’s fine for 2-player drafts, but would become repetitive in 4-player ones.
Favorite card: Jinxed Idol made me laugh. It’s a perfect card if you think or know that you have more creatures in your deck than your opponent does. Nice 1-card archetype.
NanoThopters - @Akiba47
100 Ornithopters but less of them
Top: I think this cube has some advantages over its big brother, in that games are resolved quicker. The dreaded topdeck matches aren’t really a thing at 15 cards. You also completely ignored all card-draw engines, which I certainly think is the right choice. But what is the right amount of thopters to take?
Tip: You challenged yourself by practically reducing the amount of cards in your cube to 48. On top of that, you added a few very parasitic archetypes (aura’s primarily) that need so much support that you smother the diversity in the cube a little.
Favorite card: Ornithopter
.Death and Taxes Microcube - @TrainmasterGT
72 cards that prevent you playing the others
Top: It’s a whole other mode of play. Most matches will feel like a mirror match, but I really like how you’ve still diversified the lanes of victory. Eldrazi were an unexpected, but welcome, addition. I like your choices for the “off-color” cards, as they feel like solid reasons to go for a multicolored approach.
Tip: This is the cube with the biggest potential for stalemates. It feels like there’s as much removal as there are threats. This is the cube’s concept of course, but I’m not sure how it’ll pan out in practise.
Favorite card: Chalice of the Void is a cool buildaround. It might be too strong in gameplay, but I adore its potential for deckbuilding.
@descolada, @Watermelon and @RedShirtDown are my personal favorites. They felt like the most complete out-of-the-box experiences with a lot of replayability and small one-card archetypes. Honestly though, it was a difficult decision. The variety of cubes was so widespread that comparing them felt disingenuous.
The contest yielded a lot of results (twice as many as last time)! Hopefully the participants found it a challenging endeavour. The amount of diversity was unexpected, as it was last time (so how unexpected is it really). It’s obvious there are a lot of routes to take. I’m honestly thrilled to take a stab at this myself.
Please feel free to share your own thoughts and celebrate each others’ cubes down below! This poll will close sunday evening, so be sure to have voted by then.
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