I finally got around to swapping in/out the cards from the last few updates. Since I had made the swap decisions, I ended wanting to keep a couple Green cards out of the cube for now so I could use them in Standard, so I am swapping them back out. I also ended up deciding to keep all of my LTR cards out of the cube for now because I've been very interested in LTR casual constructed, so Improvised Club is coming back out, but it may return in the future. Lastly, I got a few Black cards from MH3 limited that seem fun so I decided to bring them in while I was making swaps anyway.

In this update I aim to cut some pet cards (e.g. Zur's Weirding) that I had hoped would be played because they were interesting even if they weren't particularly powerful, as well as some "archetype cards" that enable a certain deck but are too low power to compete with the rest of the environment.

This is the first real cube update since 2023 and follows the first cube draft since then as well. The most recent draft was a three player Solomon draft and saw each player on three colors (Esper Control, Naya Aggro, Mardu Midrange). I believe this is more reflective of the draft format than this cube's mana base enabling greedy decks. The winner of this event was the same as the last draft, this time with Naya Aggro. During the last update I did make an effort to improve red and white for aggressive decks since the first two cube drafts were won by 5C good stuff and then UB control, so I was glad to see it in action. This update will be similarly large (~60 cards changed) and I think will further improve aggro.

This interim cube update is being made to accommodate my return to playing Standard. I last played Standard during the summer of 2019 when War of the Spark was the current set. I had just returned to playing Magic and made my first foray into organized play with the Mono Red Aggro Challenger Deck. Once the deck rotated I bought into Modern (also mono red) and never played Standard again. My local store stopped hosting Modern, so I decided to try to get a deck together for Standard. Since I didn't want to spend money on a deck that is going to expire with rotation, I built a new Mono Red deck for Standard of almost entirely cards I scrounged from my local game store's box of draft chaff, with the addition of some cards I had hanging around. One of those is my 4th copy of Play With Fire which was here in my cube. I am replacing it with a copy of Lightning Bolt I also found in the chaff box. Since I don't want to have the strictly worse Lightning Strike next to Lightning Bolt, I'm replacing Strike with Stoke the Flames.

The play ground greatly enjoyed grid drafting. It is more social, everyone gets more time to read cards they are not familiar with, and goes by much quicker than traditional drafting. It does come at the cost of being more difficult to construct a synergistic deck.

A lot of cards were included to support deck archetypes (e.g. Courage in Crisis for GW +1/+1 counter aggro, Disciple of the Vault for BR artifact sacrifice). This major update cuts a lot of their archetype support cards in favor good-stuff cards. I have always been somewhat wary of designing this cube around deck archetypes for fear of stifling player creativity. I hopeful that including more good-stuff will allow players to find their own interactions between cards while I design around broad archetypes (control, aggro, etc) instead of specific decks (WU flyers, GU flash, etc).