The Buildaround Cube

This cube is about creating decks built around particular synergies and, well, "buildaround cards"! It is meant to be the perfect playground for the johnny-spike psychographic because the best thing to do is to creatively compose decks that are more than the sum of their parts!

Overcoming Design Issues

Designing a cube like this has some problems. Many decks that function on synergy require a density of effects. This means successfully supporting them would yield a cube without much archetypal diversity. It could also force the draft to feel like an "on rails" experience once you solidify into your respective archetype.

Furthermore, having the cube be comprised mostly of buildarounds to try and diversify the viable strategies would compromise the environment because so many cards would be hard to use, and then the density of effects wouldn't be there for people to draft good decks.

This is a large design issue, and I approach solving it in three ways.

The First Solution: "Synergistic Overlap"

This is a solution that isn't specific to this cube, but rather a design principal that I recommend to any cube designer. In order to provide density of effects to support different archetypes and synergies without yielding an "on rails" experience and maintaining a semblance of "archetypal diversity", you need to focus on having the "glue" for each deck have significant overlap.

In retail Limited, this is something like having a +1/+1 counters deck and a 4-power matters deck. The former helps turn on the latter synergies, and provides an easy suite of cards that do double duty. This cube has very large themes of discard, graveyard, and casting multiple spells in a single turn. All three of these macro synergies have components that overlap, and cards that can enable all three (e.g. Faithless Looting).

The Second Solution: "a Mystical Archive"

While this cube is of size 450, it actually functions as a 400 size cube. You see, This cube is compromised of a "base cube" of 376 cards, and a "mystical archive" of 74 cards. When the cube is drafted, 14 cards in the pack are sampled from the base cube (cards from this portion of the cube appear in 90% of drafts) and 1 card in the pack is sampled as a rare from the mystical archive (cards from this portion of the cube appear in 32.5% of drafts).

This gives me agency to balance the environment and cater the right experience. The "base cube" can be chock-full of glue referenced in the above section, and the "mystical archive" can inject narrow buildarounds and powerful cards to make each draft have unique paths and incentives without compromising the draft.

The Third Solution: "Cogwork Librarian"

This cube is meant to be drafted such that each player starts with a copy of Cogwork Librarian in their pool. While this isn't necessary for the cube, I find it really helps smooth out some concepts during the drafting portion.

1. It helps incentivize players to dive into a concept by picking up two cards that go well together.
2. Later in the pack, there will be copies of Cogwork Librarian that other players put back. This means that later packs are rarely dead for players, since they can basically defer that pick to a better one later on.
3. It helps the experience be less "on rails" because having access to double picks at the right junctions makes pivoting and experimenting with different synergies a much more realistic part of the experience.

Things You Should Know Before Your First Draft

There are some things that have tripped people up about this cube, so I think it's important to mention them directly.

This Cube Does Not Have Training Wheels

This draft environment is curated under the assumption that the drafters are familiar with the list and skilled at drafting. Everything you see is supported, but the way it is supported may not be what you expect if you are not familiar with the list.

As an example, many people will see Thespian Stage and assume Dark Depths combo is a reliable deck to draft. But Dark Depths is a rare. This means that Thespian Stage is in 90% of drafts, while Dark Depths is in 30% of drafts -> that combo will only exist together in 12% of drafts! Thespian Stage's main purpose is to copy Bounce Lands and cards like Lotus Field, with the upside of enabling Dark Depths when it is opened.

I strongly recommend doing some practice drafts and going over the list

Pile of Good Cards is Bad

Look, I welcome all challenges and criticism to this. If somebody at CubeCon disagrees and thinks they can crush by taking lands and "good cards", by all means, prove me wrong. But so far, everybody who has attempted to draft a non-synergistic deck has performed poorly.

This isn't to say Multi-Color piles don't exist, they do. But generally you are pushing extra colors to maximize your synergies, not to squeeze in all the generic good cards. A big reason for this is that there simply are very few "generic good cards", so you kind of have to try and maximize the way your cards pair together because most (not all) of the best cards in the cube don't stand alone.

Archetypes

Unlike many cubes of this ilk, there are not clear-cut archetypes per color combination. There may very well be 20+ ways to draft each color pair depending on the buildarounds you pursue! Of course, there are archetypes, such as discard, storm, dredge, cycling, and more. However, all of those archetypes have many different emergent ways to draft them, and can be seen across a variety of different color combinations.

... detailed archetypal writeup coming soon ...