like others have said, there’s a ton of dimensions to it, but i find the two generally most useful dimensions are:
1. how FAST will i die in this environment if i do nothing? (turn 3? turn 7?) i would call this “speed.” or whatever, i’m not trying to establish new standard terms here.
2. how many METHODS of killing me are there? (attack with creatures? Splinter Twin? Chain of Smog?) i would call this “fairness.”
if you put these two axes together you can kind of look at cubes in a quadrant.
low fairness low power: this cube includes lots of combo kills, so stack interaction and hand disruption will likely grow in importance relative to doom blades. but the combos may be slow or just inconsistent, leading games to end after several turns instead of in the first few. this environment doesn’t exist in many WOTC-curated environments, but some riptiders have created cool “combo cubes” that would fall into this category.
low power high fairness: this would basically be analogous to a core set retail environment- nearly all wins will be achieved via combat damage in the later turns of a game. even aggro has trouble killing by turn 4. doom blades are valued much more highly than duresses or cancels.
low fairness high power: this would be comparable to a true vintage powered cube, where most wins involve making fast mana to power out a combo kill on the stack. combat matters very little here and kills can come very early in the game, so effects like Grief and Force of Negation are valued much higher than Doom Blade or Day of Judgment.
High power high fairness: this would be comparable to a Brainstorming cube, where the main theater of interaction is the battlefield, but the creatures, planeswalkers, and interaction are extremely powerful for their mana cost. kills will come early (usually via combat) in this format if you do nothing, but you’re not doing nothing because all the cards can be played early, so games tend to go long due to the high density of cheap interaction.
