Multicolor

Breathless Knight has a whole bunch of words on it, but the key here is it’s a Wind Drake plus a bit extra. While you’re unlikely to trigger it’s ability more than a few times, but that’s just gravy. This isn’t Vampire Nighthawk but it’s a step or two closer to that, and Final Payment was just a kinda wonky removal spell that (sometimes literally) hurt to use.

Oh look here, this is a removal spell that feeds the color pair’s archetype. Captured by Lagacs was almost universally loved in polling and the Centaur is just a remnant of the past at this point.

Putrid Leech is a great card, don’t get us wrong. This change is more about signalling what the color pair is looking to do (a recursive oriented midrange deck) rather than just a rawly good card. This is another I’m very excited to see what shenanigans it can lead to in the cube.

Anarchomancer is a great card. It’s a dork that doesn’t tap and if you’re casting more than one spell “adds” multiple mana, on top of just being a bear. Great option for the gold slot and Savage Smash just wasn’t preforming as well as originally hoped.

Feeling of Dread has lingered in the cube for a while. It was there from back in the day and over the years the color pair has become a more focused Flicker/ETB deck. Silver Drake lets you rebuy your creatures for more ETB fun, better signalling for the color pair and making it a bit more solid.

A classic card from back in the day, Spring does require 2 colors of mana, but here we’re taking that as a plus. Snakeform was super splashable in blue decks and as a result a card that was taking up a slot for a Green/X deck was easily played elsewhere. We’re swapping to this as an attempt to limit what decks get to run the gold Simic cards.

We touched on this in the Q&A, this is the will of the people. While the committee ourselves were not huge fans of this even after discussions, we’re giving it a shot to see how it does and eagerly await to see where folks are on it in a few months

Land

Warped Landscape has come up a few times, and for ages the answer was just “well there’s not a great replacement”. Now we’ve got Shimmerdrift which is some amalgam of the Evolving Wilds/Terramorphic Expanse effect with the Thriving land cycle. While one fewer untapped land can feel rough, Landscape just wasn’t cutting it any more.

Discord and Polling Check in

Polling the Discord, while non-scientific to be sure has proved super helpful for finding out group consensus opinions on the cards both currently in the cube and those we’re considering. If you want to help contribute your opinions this is the best way to do so. We’ve gone through a few polling techniques, starting in discord and slowly moving to use Google forms to automate it, and we’re slowly working through a large number of commons, at this point having collected almost 25,000 votes on various cards!

The Next Steps

If you haven’t joined the Pauper Cube Discord you’re missing out: So many unique discussions around cards, themes, and archetypes happen daily. But better than that, it’s home to a wonderful community of supportive cube enthusiasts who offer great feedback for anyone’s ideas. The Pauper Cube wouldn’t be here without this community, and we’re thrilled you’re here with us.