Listen to my Tarkir: Dragonstorm Peasant review and my 2024 Peasant Cube Awards episode with Jank Diver Gaming
We draft this cube often during retail set off-seasons in Chord_O_Calls Limited Level Ups discord. Join us!
Welcome to my Peasant All-Stars cube, where the best of the best limited cards from Magic's recent history battle it out for dominance.
Card Pool:
Why? Because restriction breeds creativity, and because the original purpose of this cube was to be a celebration of modern limited. My drafters comment that this cube feels more like modern limited than any other they've played. Next Rotation: July 8th, HOU. Link to the mostly correct full card pool on scryfall.
Curation and Size: 17lands.com data was heavily (though not solely) relied upon to establish a card's suitability for the cube. Therefore, expensive cards need to have large impacts and not be weak to removal. Almost universally, cards are either extremely efficient, make multiple objects, or draw cards, but this is not goodcards.cube...since all the cards are good, the decks that synergize the best tend to do the best. The cube is at 540 cards, as I think this forces me as the curator to prioritize pockets of synergy and emergent drafting over hyper-linear archetypes.
Balance: As much as possible, cards are not excluded for power level reasons...this is a "power max" cube, though power is still restricted by the size and scope of the card pool. No attempt is made to balance rarities, so naturally there are more uncommons than commons.
Fixing and Gold Cards: Each 2-color pair has 5 dual lands, and there are 14 additional multi-color fixers, for a total of about 1.75 fixing lands per pack. The gold section of this cube is larger than most peasant cubes, and that combined with the plethora of fixing encourages midrange and attrition strategies to splash powerful gold cards.
The cube was designed first to support classic, broad, easily supportable themes as the "level 1" drafting that the vast majority of drafters will be familiar and comfortable with.
But in addition to these primary themes, there are a host of synergy packages to explore, and more being added all the time. Just know that since this cube is 540, you can't rely on any of these cards getting opened. But, be on the lookout for emergent synergies as you build your pool:
3 artifact changes in addition to the 5 other colorless cards leaving the cube (see previous updates). In general I continue to be on the search for colorless cards that actually make maindecks, and these three at least have applications in specific strategies (food, draw/discard, gravebreak).
For lands, I'm bringing in the TDM tri-lands as they're now available in my pool. Since I don't have a full cycle, and these support enemy colors better than allied colors, I'm bringing in a 2nd copy of allied dual-type lands from DMU. I'm adding these as opposed to deserts or artifact lands, as I'm happy with the density of those, and would appreciate more dual-typed lands to enhance the LTR landcyclers, which have fallen off a bit in recent seasons.