Cube Goals, History, and Overview:
This cube is a love letter to one of my favorite cube archetypes of all time: Aristocrats. The goal of the cube is to promote gameplay that involves sacrificing things for value and profit.

This cube was initially envisioned as a 3-color 180 Twobert (Mardu colors), but I decided to expand into green and upped the card count after getting feedback on additional themes that I thought would play well in this environment and have played well since (Persist Combo, Artifact Aggro, KCI Shenanigans). The cube is base black (and red as a secondary color) due to the nature of Aristocrats, and fixing in the cube is more prominent for black-based strategies. There is no blue section (my playgroup plays enough blue in all of our other Magic endeavors).

I want players to be able to have a variety of decisions and options and be able to find synergies between cards that impact the game in interesting, unique, and fun ways. I want small decisions (sequencing, timing, etc.) to matter. I am OK with and expect a number of 3-4 card game ending combos in this cube.

The cube is sized in order to give some variation between drafts. There are very niche cards here, but I want players to be incentivized to look for build arounds early in the draft and explore the interactions, synergies, and combos that stem from those early picks.

As with any good Aristocrat deck, there are a number of small value recursion engines that use the graveyard. To combat this and make sure that these engines don't immediately overwhelm the game, I've included some graveyard hate to "break up" loops or combos in every color, and hopefully the cube contains interaction in this realm without feeling overly plentiful or punishing. Lion Sash, Scavenging Ooze, and Deathrite Shaman are included as repeatable effects of this ilk but I like that these cards are in the "off colors" of the cube. There is a substantial amount of exile based removal to give decks additional ways to break up graveyard engines. I might change the amount of this type of removal after enough testing, but my gut reaction after playing this cube a decent amount is that the permanent's controller often sacrifices the target in response to removal.

Since many games get quickly gummed up on the board I've decided to stray away from most planeswalkers, except for one specific archetype enabler right now (Wrenn and Six). To combat board stalls, there are a number of sweepers in the cube now (some of these are focused on wiping tokens and small dudes while others are on theme like Living Death). Along with being able to break through a board stall, I want to make sure that sweepers don't feel rare enough that they feel like "gotcha" cards when they are cast. I want players always considering them as a possibility when deciding on their lines of play.

Themes/Types of Cards that are Included:

• Sacrifice Bodies
• Recursive Threat
• Sacrifice Outlets
• Goblin and Zombie Tribal with Sacrifice Theme
• Stax Effects
• Artifact Theme (Modular, Treasures, Thopters, Clues, Etc.)
• Exile Effects
• Combos that Require Sacrificing (Eggs, KCI Shenanigans, Persist Combo)

Self Restricted Limitations:

• Limited Planeswalkers
• Limited double faced cards for ease of drafting experience (Willing to break this only for the perfect cards)

Drafting:
This cube is designed mainly for 2-4 person play. The default method of drafting for 2 players is grid drafting a larger number of packs (~20) or doing some style of burn draft to see more cards and synergies. I want a 4-6 player draft to be an option with this cube and in these scenarios we will draft 5 packs of 9 for 4 players and 3 packs of 15 for 6.