The playgroup for this cube plays only once a year (subsets more often). The playgroup stopped playing with the new card frame so the goals are:

• Players should preferable be familiar with the cards.
• Since it is not used often, and some are beginners, it should not have many mechanics.
• It should have enough depth to be challenging and non-repetitive.
• I do not want to spend a lot of time creating/balancing the cube.

Hence a block cube. In the old days there were a few mechanics in the first set which would be expanded upon in the second and third.
The goal of the cube is to get decks close to the feel of the good old drafting/sealed/precon days. It is non-singleton and has only cards from the urza block.

Additional rules one CAN use are:

• Sadly, there is not much fixing in the card pool. To mitigate this we came up with the following: After the draft/sealed portion players can choose up to 4 cycling lands, but not more than 2 of each.
• To avoid non-games the mulligan rule is london mulligan with one freebie.
• In the old days there was not much card filtering. This can lead to games where one gets screwed by drawing mostly lands or mostly non-lands. This can be mitigated by adjusting the draw of the draw step with scry 1, then draw.
• The cards were designed when combat damage was on the stack. Morphling and expendable troops are significantly weaker without. We play with combat damage on the stack.
• There is echo and there are lands that make multiple mana. We play with mana burn, but I have yet to encounter when it really makes a difference in the outcome of a game.

A few pointers on the cards of the old days: non-creatures are more powerful so be prepared to bash heads with bad creatures! The pace of the game is a lot slower than now. Cards rarely require an immediate answer.

If you have improvements for the cube, please let me know.