(This cube is no longer being actively updated. Check out my current project, Modern Vintage.)

A Study in Harmony is a cube that creates highly interactive and powerful gameplay that marries synergy and power and greatly rewards situational awareness and technical play. It's an evolution of my long-running powered cube, Modern Vintage, which itself was an outgrowth of the classic Vintage Cube concept. This cube incorporates technical innovations of the contemporary age of Magic to create an environment that fosters games that are simultaneously explosive and drawn out, with meaningful plays and tempo swings occurring from turn one to turn ten. I regularly run drafts of this cube on MTGO, and if you're interested in playing in any of these, come join us in my Discord at https://discord.gg/92kHwgusCk.

It would be accurate to label this cube as a synergy cube as the general community defines the term, but approaching it as a player with the focused approach that tends to go along with that term will lead to middling results. The cardpool has been carefully curated to make sure that the vast majority of cards play double -- if not triple -- duty with respect to their place in the synergy groupings in the cube. Understanding how these synergy groupings can be intertwined will lead to more powerful and resilient decks. This is all to say that you should not be hesitant to embrace the gameplay mechanics presented to you as a drafter, as they are amply supported and lead to powerful, winning decks. Additionally, I've removed the hate cards from the format that heavily punish these kinds of decks. You can draft enchantments without living in fear of Pest Infestation, artifacts without living in fear of Fiery Confluence, etc.

The resultant format of this direction is one that easily falls into the Expert-Level domain. Drafting is difficult, deckbuilding is difficult, and gameplay is difficult. I say this not to scare players away -- I think the gameplay that this environment creates is extremely dynamic and fun -- but just to set expectations at a reasonable level. You'll frequently find your draft pools have equally powerful but quite different game one builds, leaving you to decide which one you think may be better suited against the draft pod. You'll also frequently be faced with decisions regarding how many additional packages of value to include in your deck, weighing the power of the synergy packages against the consistency of a lower-powered deck.

As a drafter, being aware of the mechanical/synergistic packages in the cube will help you improvise and pivot when necessary during the draft to avoid being cut. There's overlap in almost every synergy package, and decks can easily support multiple. A great deck will likely be strong on three axes -- it is cube drafting after all -- a classic midrange curve of threats, removal, and card advantage, and two interweaving synergy areas.

The basic geography of the cube is as follows.

Jeskai Artifacts - The artifact card type plays a prominent role in this cube, particularly through the presence of the variety of artifact tokens. White, Red, and Blue will provide drafters with tools to maximize the power of artifacts. Each color contains strong value engines in this theme, such as Digsite Engineer, Sai, Master Thopterist, and Breya’s Apprentice. White largely uses artifacts to supplement its aggressive gameplan. Blue seeks to use artifacts to enable powerful combos, such as Tinkering Cyberdrive Awakener into play for a surprise kill, milling the opponent out with Grinding Station, or simply generating large amounts of mana with Urza, Lord Artificer or Krark-Clan Ironworks to take over the game. Finally Red aims to sacrifice artifacts for profit and strongly leverages Treasure tokens. Goblin Welder and his descendants are all strongly supported in this setting and are powerful cards worth building around. Looking at the archetype in color pairs, Boros focuses on equipment, Azorius creates recursive artifact loops, and Izzet tends to go wide with artifact tokens.

Abzan Enchantments – A fan-favorite archetype, enchantment themed gameplay received significant improvements in the world of cube with the Saga card type, particularly the sagas from Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty. While each color has more than the average number of enchantments in this cube, White, Green, and Black are the centers of power for enchantments. While the most obvious implementation of this archetype involves the classical Enchantress cards -- Argothian queen among them -- the enchantment sphere contains a wide spectrum of deckbuilding possibilities, including +1/+1 counter themes, lifegain themes, and some aura themes.

Sultai Self-Mill/Graveyard - Blue, Black, and Green all have access to abilities that leverage the graveyard and milling oneself, including Escape, Eternalize, Delve, and Unearth. In addition to its traditional reanimation spells, Black has a wide variety of recursive Bloodghast style creatures that can provide incidental value. Blue has both Thassa’s Oracle and Jace, Wielder of Mysteries - which are enabled by both Doomsday and Inverter of Truths - to provide more combo-kill options for Blue. Green pairs together with both of these colors to offer powerful self-mill cards as well as payoffs such as Hogaak and Uro, Titan of Nature’s Wrath.

Mardu Sacrifice - As an archetype, sacrifice decks have been more and more common over the last five or so years in cube design. While many of the cards that have become associated with the archetype are too weak for high power cubes -- most notably Blood Artist -- the basic strategy of an aggressive deck that's resilient versus removal remains a powerful one. In this color group, black and red are the primary colors that provide value through sacrificing while white can provide an efficient method to create objects to sacrifice. The most powerful cards in this archetype are Yawgmoth, Thran Physician and Mayhem Devil, though there are a wide variety of other incidental payoffs for sacrificing. Ultimately, these are still aggressive decks rather than creature combo decks: it's unlikely, though not impossible, that you'll line up a one turn kill with sacrificing wide boards with a death trigger card in play.

Temur Lands - Probably the most pure combo archetype and the archetype with the highest power cap is the lands decks. Lands primarily leverages the extra land plays provided by Exploration, Oracle of Mul Daya, and company to attain lots of mana, draw lots of cards with big card advantage spells, and trigger landfall effects high numbers of times in a single turn. If you're drafting this archetype, you must understand the role of the bouncelands, which are critical combo pieces. The ability to always have a land to fill each of your additional land drops will put cards like Field of the Dead, Evolution Sage, and Tatyova, Steward of Tides over the top. In addition to the more combo oriented approach, there are cheap landfall creatures and domain creatures that can provide an aggressive alternative build to this strategy.

While these five enemy wedge archetypes cover the basic architecture of the cube, it's just the beginning of understanding the possibilities. Card color should not necessarily be considered a hard boundary here. It's not inconceivable to end up in a Jund enchantress deck, or a Selesnya artifact deck. Finding unique ways to mix and match all of the given archetypes will lead to a higher degree of success when drafting and playing. There's a lot to pick up on in this list, and the more you look at it the more you'll see.