Intro

This is a low-powered cube built around 3-color themes and is designed to be drafted by 4-6 people using 4 packs of 11 cards. It's trying to achieve more tempo-oriented gameplay by limiting the number and power of value engines such as planeswalkers, by limiting card advantage to be primarily achieved through combat, and by emphasizing the strengths of pump spells.

Draft Guide

Typical Amount of Colors: 2-3
Speed: Moderately Fast
Typical Land Count: 15-17
Removal Density: High (relative to retail draft)

Primary Themes - Artifact Aggro

A synergistic aggro deck that can be resilient to removal.

- Blitz Combo

A prowess-style aggro deck that uses pump spells to win using a single combat step.

- Tiny Reanimator

A midrange deck that turns the graveyard into a toolbox after chump blocking and milling in the early game.

- Control

Just a classic control deck with removal and card draw that wins with a big finisher.

- Ninjas

A tempo deck that uses evasive creatures and ninjas to push its advantage. Green provides pump spells to give the deck options even when its creatures are blocked.

Secondary Themes - Midrange

- Control

- Disruptive Aggro

- Rock

- Stompy

Subthemes Rx Wildfire

A red-based control deck that uses signets to ramp out Wildfire, sometimes with only 2 or 3 lands in play to break the symmetry. The fixing from mana rocks also means this deck can play 4 or 5 colors.

UG Flash

A tempo deck that operates primarily at instant speed. Looks to play a control plan early, but then turns the corner very quickly with one of it's finishers.

Designer Notes

If you're just a player then ignore this section, it's more for the other cube curators. Actually who am I kidding it's mostly for me.

Sources of Card Advantage

Right now the main two sources of card advantage are ninjas (such as Ninja of the Deep Hour), and the reanimation part of abzan (such as Sun Titan). For ninjas this isn't a design issue since it either requires another creature to provide evasion for ninjutsu, or you need put effort into clearing away blockers. The reanimation cards, however, do pose some balance issues given that most of them come with another body in addition to whatever you're reanimating. To compensate, blue and red have been tuned up in some ways that hopefully have less of an impact in other matchups.

Red has been given access to various split damage cards like Forked Bolt, which tends to work well against the bodies that get reanimated. In the past these haven't been oppressive against more aggressive decks because they're typically the ones drafting these, and additionally they rely more on strong two-drops rather than the 2/1s seen in most cubes. Currently, they're even less of a problem now that the artifact deck is the premier aggro deck as they often have built in death synergies and resilience to removal in the form of mechanics like reconfigure and modular.

Blue, on the other hand, has efficient counterspells to out tempo the larger plays that abzan uses to stabilize. The only other matchup where the tempo hit would be relevant would be against the control decks, but since the cube already has a high density of removal this has actually helped balance that matchup, rather than sway it against control.

The other sources of card advantage that don't require combat tend to come at a tempo loss like with Foresee. A few cards do break this, one of which is Tamiyo, Field Researcher, who's shown to be healthy as a reason to play bant, and as a method for midrange decks to have a more even matchup against control. Another is Narset of the Ancient Way, who's getting tested as the reason to play jeskai, but is also on thin ice.

High Multi Color Count

That's how I'm choosing to use the other half of my cube. Mono-colored decks aren't a thing I feel the need to support, aggro decks still exist as multicolored aggro, and players are still needing to cut 2-5 playable cards after draft so this hasn't caused any problems.

Free Spells

At the current power level, free answers such as Force of Will and Snuff Out aren't necessary, and can instead lead to unexpected blowouts with pump spells which I'm trying to promote. That said, the blitz deck is dependent on having some free spells to be viable, so I have included some proactive free spells like Gitaxian Probe and Noxious Revival. Mine Collapse is also in as a way for that deck to clear blockers, with the idea that limiting the free part of the spell to sorcery speed will prevent blowouts from happening, but I'm keeping my eye out to see if this is actually how it plays (After playtesting, players are consistently missing "if it's your turn". Once corrected then Mine Collapse does appear to have a healthy effect on the cube, but given how unintuitive the card has ended up being that's cause to take it out. If a similar card is printed in the future as a sorcery, as opposed to an instant with timing restriction on the free mode, then I'll likely play that). If the deck struggles then some free protection spells could be warranted like Mutagenic Growth and Daze, but those could lead the opposite problem as free answers so I'm leaving them out until they're shown to be necessary(the blitz deck is currently performing well, so free protection is not necessary).