Art by Mark TedinFirst draft of khans themed cube.
Themes are enemy color pairs and shards.
Abzan: primary mechanic is scavenge, late-game archetype, low power high tougness, incidental lifegain
Mardu: primary mechanic is raid, attacking matters, posterchild for the go-wide aggro deck
Jeskai: primary mechanic is prowess, noncreature matters, typically a midrange deck with card filtering and combat tricks
Temur: primary mechanic is ferocious, 4 power matters, temporary boosts through pump spells and firebreating, etc.
Sultai: primary mechanic is exploit, dies triggers, hand disruption, graveyard recursion
BW - warriors
RW - small flyers
UR - card selection, x can't block, can't be blocked
UG - morph matters
GB - graveyard matters
The plan right now is as follows:
450 card cube
Enemy pairs - 10 cards each
Wedges - 10 cards each
Morphs - 43 dedicated morphs
Fixing - 40 total
Colorless non-fixing - 10
Monocolored cards to flesh out the cube - 50 each
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More lands please! The floor on playables is high enough that players will tend to have plenty of playables and not enough lands to consistently make their colors work.
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Sagu mauler might be too big considering the lack of board wipes. Might end up with some amount of sacrifice removal to be sideboarded against hexproof things.
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Initial thought was that there might not be enough removal for early flying creatures, will collect more data on this. What this might translate to is a higher number of reach creatures for the abzan deck, perhaps some number of plummets.
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If the intention is meant to be a 3-color slugfest, it's possible that the aggro decks (rw and bw) are overtuned. The fix for this would be to either tweak the 3-cmc removal in the cube or something.
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Temur may not have enough top end cards. Additionally, enslave was probably too cute. Gonna look to cut it for some other top end more distinctly sultai-leaning.
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Planning to trim on combat tricks for more lands and sideboardables.
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White removal is over-tuned in this iteration.
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Mardu is exceptionally deep in this iteration. We found that there were like 4 drafters in the mardu colors, all of whom ended up with very solid decks. This is a super good thing :)