Triangular Cube Design

By Archytas |

Introduction

In this short article, I'm going to talk about how triangular color archetypes—also known as wedges and shards—can improve your cube by informing your archetype design. This is also meant to be a reference guide to the various ways in which they can be combined. (Be sure to see the album at the bottom of the article!) One preliminary note is that this is mainly geared towards cubes with lower power-levels (around Strix 5 and below), since archetypes (besides the macro-archetypes of aggro, midrange, control, and combo) tend to be too cute for higher-powered cubes.

What are wedges and shards?

For those of you who aren't familiar with the terms "wedge" and "shard", these are ways of referring to three-color combinations. The shards are combinations of two allied-color pairs (e.g., combining wu with wg makes Bant, wug), while the wedges are combinations of enemy-colored pairs.

For the purposes of this article, I'm going to introduce some terminology. First, notice that because of the way shards and wedges are structured, a complete cycle of all five wedges or all five shards will feature all ten color pairs, but five of these pairs will appear once while the other five will appear twice because they are “shared” by two different triangles. I’m going to call the pairs that appear once point pairs and the pairs that appear twice overlap pairs. For example, in the case of the wedges, the point pairs would be wu (Jeskai), ub (Sultai), br (Mardu), rg (Temur), and gw (Abzan), but wb would be an overlap pair because it is shared by both Mardu and Abzan.

Wedges and shards in cube

Many cube designers use wedges or shards to structure their cubes. The main benefit of doing so is that they make it easy to promote cross-synergy between archetypes. Once you've assigned archetypes to the point pairs, the job of the overlap pairs becomes to support both of them. And this in turn makes drafts exciting, since many different decks will want the same cards. This was well done in Core Set 2020: there, wu was flyers and rg was elementals, so ur was flying elementals.

Similarly, MH2 (though not designed exactly in this manner), features many overlapping archetypes, such as br madness, ur delirium, and ub discard, which combine to make Grixis ubr discard.

Perhaps the biggest reason to use triangular archetypes is that they balance between structure and flexibility in draft, something that traditional two-color “guild” archetypes struggle with. If a cube features two-color archetypes that don’t overlap whatsoever, the result is what’s known as “on-rails” drafting, where players simply find an open lane and are restricted to picking cards that narrowly fit their archetype, meaning that they have little agency during draft and that they aren’t competing for cards with other drafters. Similarly, if all the two-color archetypes in a cube overlap, the result is a “good-stuff” cube, where decks largely end up looking the same, meaning that players once again end up feeling like their decisions during draft don’t matter.

In contrast, archetypes solve this problem since the overlap between triangles allow for flexibility and competition during draft at the same time that the fact that not all triangles overlap prevents draft from veering into the territory of homogenous good-stuff. As the user japahn puts it in a seminal RiptideLab thread:

Advantages of triangle archetypes are variety and space for creativity:

Variety. Decks of the pair AB will feel distinct from AC and from BC, and ABC will feel like the most synergistic option, but also least stable in terms of mana. Sometime it is even possible to describe each pair in a distinct way. For example, ubg Graveyard can manifest as ub Reanimator, ug Madness or bg Dredge.

Space for creativity. The much deeper card pool leaves a lot more space for a drafter to do different things with the archetype, and the multiplied possibilities promote decks that are hybrids between archetypes. ubg Graveyard and wbg Counters means that a bg deck can be Graveyard, Counters, both, or neither.

Combining wedges and shards

Most cube designers stick to only using wedges or only using shards. But this can sometimes feel restrictive: after all, what if I want to feature both a Jund sacrifice archetype and an Abzan tokens one (with bg saprolings are their overlap archetype)? Or what if I want Jeskai spellsplinger and Grixis control? Often, squeezing your favorite archetypes into the traditional combination of all wedges or all shards is no easy task.

Luckily, there are ten balanced combinations that mix wedges and shards! Each of these combinations features a "3+2" structure, with either three wedges and two shards or vice versa. I’ve compiled these into an Imgur album. By breaking out of the "all wedges" or "all shards" mentality, you can find creative ways to incorporate your favorite archetypes in your cube while reaping all the benefits of a flexible yet structured draft environment.

Happy cubing!