Introduction

Get a Clue.

What is a Clue? It's an artifact. It's a token. You can sacrifice it. And by sacrificing it you draw a card. These are the mechanical pillars of Nick's Noir Horror Mini-Cube, all wrapped up in the aesthetics of classic horror-mystery.

Each card in this cube is a custom-designed, custom-made card, although some may bear a striking resemblance to "real" cards you may know. With Clues running rampant, card advantage for is easy to come by, so the format rides on the wave of tempo, synergy, and intelligent deck construction.

Mechanical Distribution

There aren't "archetypes" for decks like in modern limited sets, but there are certain mechanics divvied up along the color pie that should help inform you about what the colors care about. However, don't expect to be able to shove every card with a single mechanic in it into a deck and call it done; there's a lot more too it than that.

Investigate - Found amply across , and a smattering of cards in each color call out Clues directly, though the most are in .

Historic - Called out in , and once in , this is a way for decks to care about Legendaries and artifacts (i.e. Clues) in one go, as and especially have a very high legend density.

Sacrifice - Many spells have a "sacrifice a nonland permanent" kicker, and Clues sacrifice themselves naturally, so the colors that care about sacrifice or death ( primarily) have an affinity for those effects and will play nicely with them.

Delirium - Found across all colors, although with a higher density in and . uses self-mill to enable it, and uses sacrificing permanents and having a higher than average artifact density. Delirium isn't meant to be easy to turn on quickly, but rather a reward for getting to the late game.

Prowess - in and , though primarily on low mana-value red creatures.

Horrors - the only hint of typal payoffs in the cube is Horror typal, found in and . Most Horrors come in the form of 1/1 tokens.

Tokens Matter - There are a lot of tokens running around the set, although most are Clues or Horrors. and both generally have an affinity for creating tokens or controlling tokens, creature or otherwise.

Drawing Cards - Some cards care about if you've drawn two or more cards in a turn, generally in and but also in . The difficulty and scale of reward is tied to how easily that specific color should be able to trigger the effect.

Curves are also very low, and fixing doesn't come easy, so aiming for a 2-color, 16-land deck is likely a good idea for your first draft.

Good luck!

Author's Note: This cube is 110% inspired by the fantastic creator @Malar and their "Connect the Clues" cube, which I saw one afternoon when it was linked on the custom card subreddit after they asked to use one of my custom card designs. I was immediately head-over-design-heels and blacked out before making this cube. Go check out their stuff! It even uses real cards.