I've been thinking it might be interesting if, in addition to basic lands, there were basic spells of each color that were usable by all players in a cube draft in the same way: things like
Grizzly Bears,
Divination, and
Shock. This would fundamentally change both the drafting experience, and the way in which the cube should be designed; it would free up tons of cube slots and draft picks for fun, deck defining cards, allow for an increase in the number of supported archetypes, and give drafters more incentive to try and go all in on a particular plan, since less overall picks are needed to make a coherent deck.
On the other hand, there's also way less tension in the draft, since you can pretty much biff the entire thing and still construct a functioning mono-red deck entirely out of basics or whatever. Perhaps there could be a limit to the total number of 'basics' you can include in your deck?
I don't necessarily think this is a good idea, but i think the discussion is worth having. It seems to me that cubing lies somewhere along the spectrum from "True limited", where not even basic lands are provided, to "True constructed", where every card in the format is at your fingertips. I'm curious what happens when you move that slider a bit more towards constructed. If i had to guess, I would say the sweet spot is right where we have it now, but who's to say a drastically different cube design might want that slider in a different place?
One other stupid idea. I have a cube. My friend has a cube. They are of wildly different power levels, and they play very differently. We love to draft them both.... but i want to draft/play them together
... How??? Some kind of Two headed giant nonsense? (They have different sleeves as well, and we intend to keep it that way, so shuffling cards from both cubes together is sort of..... clunky, shall we say)