Preface

Hey everyone, welcome to another Cube Cobra article! Today, I'd like to talk about a new way to play cube that I've been working on during the quarantine. Without further ado, let's get into it!

The Idea

One of my favorite things to do after a few games of commander with my friends is to whip out the Plane cards from MTG's Planechase Anthologies and end the night with a plane-hopping game of EDH. It adds some variety, causes some funny situations, and is all in all a nice way to end the night.

With my playgroup unable to meet up for the past year or so (thanks to the pandemic), a focus of my cube construction hobby has been finding new, fun ways to cube when we get back together in the future. This has resulted in my building multiple cubes of various power levels and with a variety of restrictions but none showed as much promise as the idea of applying planechase to cube. To me, it seemed like the perfect way marry two of my favorite ways to play MTG.

Adapting planechase to cube ended up being a little more rough than I initially imagined. The two formats really weren't meant to be combined like this (at least, not without modifications). In the end, however, I came to what I believe is a really cool (and simple) way to spice up a cube session.

How It Works

1. Roll a d20 on the below table to chose the plane that the draft will take place on. The passive ability on the plane you land on will be a constant for the rest of the draft (ignore the planar die rolling)

2. Draft the cube with the chosen plane in mind

3. Play your matches as normal... but with the chosen plane's passive acting as a permanent emblem!

**- Mill 3 instead of 7
***- Remove color restriction

Example

Let's say I roll a 7 on the Available Planes table. This means the plane we'll be drafting on is Truga Jungle. The passive effect of this plane (which you can see by clicking the link in the above table) is "All lands have : Add one mana of any color." So, for all the games played in this cube draft, all lands will tap for any color! Knowing this, you'll have to draft differently than you would otherwise!

Or maybe we roll a 12 to get Otaria. That plane gives all instant and sorcery cards flashback so, during the draft, it would be important to prioritize any spell-slinging synergy cards and powerful instant and/or sorcery cards.

As you can see, every draft would end up being completely different and the decks would probably make no sense outside of the specific scenario the were drafted under. My hope is that this idea breathes some new, weird life into the drafting portion of cube nights.

Conclusion

This is a pretty short article as I think the above concept is fairly simple. I'd like everyone to remember that if they don't like how I have this set up, they can change it! The planes I chose (and modified) are chosen because I felt like their effects best translated to a 2 player game of Magic but there are a lot of other planes you could adjust to make work.

To everyone reading, thank you for your time. I hope this brings you fun times and interesting drafts!