Art by Yusuke KatekariThe Kinda Budget Alt Art Cube uses showcase, borderless, and secret lair cards for a highly aesthetic drafting experience. The pricetag may not say budget, but outside the lands (we use proxies), most of the cards are one dollar or less. There are a few exceptions for cards that fit really well with what the cube is trying to do, but even then we're typically talking two to three bucks.
This cube has been through a lot of iterations, and it has become substantially easier to construct over the last year. There's less awkwardness, less multicolor, more staple spells. The cube is constructed to be relatively fast-paced, creature focused, with a mostly flat power curve. The experience of drafting it should feel similar to what official sets feel like today.
Our card pool has also expanded enough at this point that we can really start reinforcing color pair themes and even provide some bridge cards between them.
Archetypes:
WU - weenie tempo
WB - life gain
WR - legends aggro
WG - tokens
UB - flicker control
UR - spells
UG - ramp
BR - sacrifice
BG - graveyard matters
RG - midrange beatdown
huge updates!
We've got enough new stuff that we can clean out the 3 color junk. We've got good removal across 3 colors. We've got interesting and supported color pairs. We've got stuff for doing big things. We got stuff for doing fast things.
We have a new archetype: WB has gone from small creature recursion to life gain. I think life gain is a more fun archetype, and I think people enjoy playing both with and against it. We just haven't had quite enough cards to support it before now. Recursion felt samey and didn't stand apart from the other archetypes, most the WB decks were WR decks that also had black.
overall, pretty happy where the cube is at right now. We are missing some important cards still. Farmer Cotton, Bonecrusher Giant, Reflector Mage are some of the big ones but they'll remain on the buy list and we'll get to them one day.
One major potential change that I have been considering is adding a control deck. I don't want this to be in the typical UB or WU pairs because I really like where those archetypes are at. The most likely candidate is probably BR. Sacrifice is such a hard archetype for this cube because either they don't make alt arts of the kinda chaff we need to sacrifice or cards with good and cheap recursion tend to be expensive dollars wise. Both of these are major hindrances, but unfortunately I don't think we're quite there on being able to switch yet.
With the loss of a bunch of multicolor, I would like to shore up the colorless section of cube because it's very bad. That's probably not something that's gonna improve dramatically or quickly, but it's a long term goal.
Hopefully we'll get a cube update after Thunder Junction, but it depends on how much there is to add. Historically the horizons sets have been very good for the cube, but it has tended to take awhile for the prices to come down for the alt arts. They get there eventually. Which is all to say next update either soon or awhile.