Art by Mark BrillListen to my Aetherdrift 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:
- The last 8 years of limited sets, constantly rotating.
- Cards must be available to play both on Arena and in paper, at peasant rarity (at the moment, it's drafted primarily on Arena).
- Cards must have been released in a set designed to be drafted (no commander or jumpstart products)
- No "masters" or "remastered" reprint sets.
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: April 22nd, AKH. 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.
: Flyers
: Go-Wide Attrition / Sacrifice
: Go-Wide Aggro
: +1/+1 Counters
- : Spells Attrition
- : Noncreature Types Matter
- : Big mana
- : (Artifact) Sacrifice
- : Self-Mill / Graveyard Recursion
- : Large Monsters / 4 Power Matters
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:
- : Artifacts (primary in UR and RB, but playable everywhere)
- : Fetch / Duals
- : 5-color / Domain
- : Artifact (Land) Animation
- : Equipment
- : Draw Matters Check out my Draw Matters guide on Reddit
- : Steal and Sac
- : Looptiloops (No decking)
- : Tokens
- : Lifegain
- : Reanimator
- : Spellslinger
- : Food Check out my Food walkthrough on Reddit
- : Noncreatue Recursion
- : Fish
- : "Heroic" Tricks
- : Deserts
- : Discard / Looting
Black is the best color. It's been the best color basically since the inception of the cube. It's dominance has waxed and waned, but it's always been the best, and recent stat-keeping has made it more clear than ever.
Think the primary issue is that black's cards just ask the least of you...put it a different way, if you randomly select 10 black cards from the cube, the cards are more likely to "just work" and "just work together" than if you randomly select 10 cards of any other color. Think this is a difficult problem to solve, because WOTC doesn't really give black much cube playable stuff that isn't kill spells, recursion, discard, or sacrifice, and all that stuff just mostly "works".
My strategy with this update is to remove some of the generically good, "goes anywhere" black cards in favor of cards that ask a bit more of you. I don't want this to simply be nerf to black, but changes that increase the upside in black's synergy potential. Adding in Unable to Scream as well, since removing the 3 black doom blades reduces the amount of cards in the cube that can cleanly deal with creatures.