Champions of Kamigawa limited (CHK block, 2004) was made in a style quickly judged impossible to repeat.

The alien feel of the game’s first top-down design met a difficult reception. Parasitic mechanics worked with themselves, not with existing decks or the wider ecosystem. Creature stats would soon be increased, shortening game lengths and rendering once-premium creatures, such as Order of the Sacred Bell, puzzling. Eventually, R&D would come to make tight limited environments with clearer gameplans, signposts for drafters, and better support for ambitious build-arounds.

thesixthroc's Ancient Kamigawa is a modded limited environment of contemporary quality that leans into the weirdness of the block. It has extensive playtesting in 6-player booster draft, 2-player triple sealed, and closed-system play with ante.

Game design-wise, the two distinctive features of CHK block are long games and the agglutinative Spirit/Arcane system in all 5 colors. The three subsidiary themes are mechanics associated to creatures types across one or two colors, Wisdom (hand-size matters), and — despite the presence of a vanilla 1/1 in the Nash equilibrium — huge spells.

Splice onto Arcane encourages players to wait until they accrue Arcane cards, then use them together for card advantage. Soulshift returns Spirits from the graveyard to hand, and notably supports recurring a tower of mediocre creatures for value in Black–Green. Both mechanics are rare mana sinks in the environment.

Flip cards were the final shot at a mechanic representing transformation before double-faced cards were introduced in 2011.

Each Samurai in the block has bushido, each Moonfolk (excepting Erayo) has the moonfolk ability, each Ninja has ninjutsu, and whilst goblins and snakes are more varied, many snakes have typal payoffs or an unnamed venom–flavored ability.

After a few years of only Wizards cards, we now embrace errata. The primary aims are to make cards feel more like themselves or to allow the environment to support wild effects in a balanced way.

There are a couple of inclusions from outside CHK–BOK–SOK, interpreted as 'reprints' onto the plane. These play supporting roles, aiming not to take center stage without good reason, with the exceptions of Gluttonous Slug serving as a foe for samurai to battle and Gaze of Justice as a build-around for small creatures in white, solving white’s identity crisis.

A few reprints mimic original themes, such as Arc Blade mimic Epic (and Suspend was in fact designed originally for SOK.)

Almost all CHK-BOK-SOK horizontal cycles appear as partial cycles of 2-4 cards. Deprecated mechanics like Fear and Regenerate are generally removed, though show up occasionally for old’s times sake, along with rares that bring back mana burn or damage on the stack.

To support the big spells theme, counterspells are dialed back, especially taxing ones. Aggro is also dialed back, with the counterweight to 'big long game' decks being 'small long game' cards like Smallpox or a tweaked Ore Gorger. Hate cards are skipped since we don't support constructed, and artifact removal is excluded to widen the gap between artifacts and enchantments.

Since CHK’s tribes tend to stick to one color, without much criss-crossing between draft lanes, this format is better for sealed than draft.

Despite excluding some more problematic cards in SOK, such as those with frequent graveyard checking, large parts of SOK are kept which was unusual for a CHK cube as late as 2021. SOK's 'all hell breaks loose' theme made some players quit Magic, but here some mild hell breaks loose.

Cornerstones of this format include that Devoted Retainer is strong, fixing is moderately difficult, aggro is suppressed, and blue card draw isn’t tied to Ninja of the Deep Hours.

This cube was largely developed in 2019–2022 during the pandemic. If you make a physical copy of it, please DM me (reddit.com/r/thesixthroc) so I can keep a tally. If you’ve read this far, please follow the cube :)

Optional House Rules

I claim these improve the game. Wizards doesn’t adopt them for various reasons.

• Free mulligans on 0/1/6/7–land hands.
• Minimum deck size of 36.
• No max hand size.