Improv guru, theater founder, noted Orson Welles beard double, and my mentor twenty times removed Del Close had a saying: Follow the fear. Whatever you can't handle? That's what you delve into, to find the richest veins of craft and emotion.

Looking for a new project after El Classico, I decided to follow the fear. What do I fear? As one of God's honest midrange Booster Draft players, I fear games that end turn 2. I fear combo outs that come from nowhere. I fear stack battles when my opponent is tapped out.

Or, to distill it to a word: I fear when stuff is free.

Welcome to The Free Cube.

Core Tenets:

• You play with and against free cards: The obvious north star. Design started by taking the first three Modern Horizons' "free" cycles (the Forces, the Incarnations, and the Flares) and building a shell of cards around them. I then added a bunch of other cards that embody the idea of "free", like Manamorphose, Shardless Agent, and Frogmite. Not every card is free. I don't think that's possible, and it's definitely not sustainable. But wherever a game is decided in victory or defeat, there will be a card that has the final say, and someone has paid jack shit for that card.
• Archetypes are for Mark Rosewater and people who vape: I'm not going to relitigate the arguments for and against archetypes/themes assigned to color pairs. But there aren't any in this one.
• Bringing the hits of the nineties, and today: El Classico is a cross between a charity baseball game and a retirement home. The Free Cube is an Olympic exhibition.
• Conflict goes on the stack: An obvious result of having three Force of Will-likes in your bedrock. Expect to counter their counterspell often.
• No intentional two-card combos quite yet: I'm allowed to be a little bit of a scaredy-cat bitch, as a treat.