Hello, and welcome to The Sharpie Cube! A powerful, fast-paced, and EXTREMELY custom draft format made with all the great taste of the Magic cards you know and love plus a dash of personal spice for flavor. Because I am very smart and right and my taste is immaculate.
If you haven't caught on to what the gimmick is already, The Sharpie Cube is so-named because it contains several cards of which I have "adjusted" the text box with the help of my preferred brand of permanent marker. I've mostly used this power for good, (mostly) giving retro favorites that were showing their age like Hypnotic Specter the facelift they needed to compete with the likes of modern Magic's heaviest hitters. Look for a big yellow dot and exclamation point by the card's name to indicate I've been up to shenanigans.
The Sharpie Cube is a (mostly) singleton environment meant to be drafted in a pod of 8, though it can support up to 11 (as a 540 that needs packs left over for Summon the Pack, and actually maybe 10 is safer, are you sure Kevin really wanted to come??)
40-card decks, 20 life, two-player games. You know, "real" magic.
The land station has snow-basics of every type, including Wastes. You may NOT choose to play non-snow basic lands.
A NON-EXHAUSTIVE LIST OF SAMPLE ARCHETYPES FOR FOLKS WHO'RE INTO THAT SORT OF THING:
Eldrazi ! A new archetype courtesy of MH3! There are four copies of Eldrazi Temple to help you jump the curve on casting some big monsters.
Mono-Colored Aggro in white, black, red, and even green!
Control: usually blue for good counterspells, and either white or black for wraths
Green Ramp
Black/X Reanimator
Blue/Red Combo: Tinker/Goblin Welder, Through the Breach/Sneak Attack/Show and Tell
Blue/Black "Combo:" Inverter of Truth/Tainted Pact/Doomsday + Thassa's Oracle/Jace, Wielder of Mysteries/Laboratory Maniac. I have never seen this deck not also function as a control deck before it "goes off."
Lands: Sakura-Tribe Elder and friends now search for whatever land you want, allowing you to release Marit Lage from its slumber, make enormous, trampling Inkmoth Nexuses, or even just Strip Mine your opponent into the stone age. Good clean fun.
Wheelin' N' Dealin': Cast some draw-7's with Narset, Leovold, or Hullbreacher in play to make your opponents' lives miserable - or why not Orcish Bowmasters or Sheoldred, the Apocalypse to just kill them?
Black/Red Aristocrats Aggro: Falkenrath Aristocrat and Judith, the Scourge Diva still fucking rule. Turn them sideways until the opponent dies.
"Atarka Red:" the perhaps oddly-named Green-based aggressive archetype often adds red for Temur Battlerage or Fling to pair with high-power creatures and pump spells for blazingly-fast kills seemingly out of nowhere. Green aggro might also just be "Oops all Goyfs."
Persist/Undying Combo: "Persist or Undying" creatures enter with your choice upon resolution. If that creature would enter again in the same game, it enters with the same ability as the first time. Grab Melira, Sylvok Outcast and machine-gun people with happy little Murderous Redcaps. Rec-Sur is definitely also a thing, and might include these kinds of combos or not, but either way tutors are extremely important for you.
There's much more to be discovered in there, some I know about and hopefully even more that I don't! But those are a few ideas for strategies to have on your radar to get started.
If you are about to draft The Sharpie Cube for the first time and would like some fun surprises, I invite you to stop reading here.
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If, however, you'd like to peer into the deranged inner workings of my mind to know why I made the changes I did, allow me to explain. (And if you're a real sicko who absolutely must know every card that was changed and how, use the visual spoiler and look for cards with the "adjusted" tag)
But what KIND of changes have I made to my poor, innocent cardboard rectangles, you may ask? Read on...
REMOVING THE EMERGENCY BRAKE
The first impulse that lead to the cube’s creation. Every card in this group could be its poster child because I memorably had the same experience again and again with all of them: a friend sends me a link, a spoiler of a card, and reading down its text box for the first time, think, “Sweet. SWEET. Oh fuck off.” This cube then, could have been appropriately named the
Vraan, Executioner Thane cube, though it could also just as easily have been called the
Sidisi, Brood Tyrant Cube, or the
Harsh Mentor Cube. This is where Wizards tacked an annoying safety valve onto the back of an otherwise sweet card lest it should be too good and ostensibly ruin its own format in both pack-cracking-limited and standard constructed. Sidisi and company will have to stop tying one arm behind their backs if we want them to hold their own against some of the most powerful cards in magic.
TIME TO STOP SEEING COLOR
One of the strangest safety valves Wizards has employed over the years, that has never made much sense to me from either a gameplay or flavor standpoint is their long-built-in contingency plan for “What if black creatures get too good?” I’ve never understood what anyone was thinking with the design of Doom Blade. Why can’t it destroy black creatures? I don’t know, so now it does. A fun result of this is you now get to hear the phrase "Doom Blade your Dark Confidant" and the whole room gets a little chuckle while you weep and place Bob in the bin.
REMOVING LIMITING WORDS
This is one of my more out-there ideas, as my desire to crank the power level of formerly ho-hum cards to eleven gets into possibly-scary territory once we're looking at green. Not only are some of these cards much more powerful than they once were, their function has changed the most dramatically. Obviously
Kodama’s Reach becomes more powerful if you remove the word “basic” from its text box, but it also changes from being "just" ramp, color-fixing, and card advantage to also being a tutor for
Strip Mine,
Academy Ruins, and
Kessig Wolf Run.
Limiting words were also removed from the (reminder text!) of the Level Up ability on Joraga Treespeaker, Student of Warfare, and Kargan Dragonlord, in a strange way changing what the Level Up ability actually DID on these cards (though I did write a little note re-reminding you that Hexdrinker should only be activated as a sorcery because there are limits even to my mania).
CARDS THAT NEEDED TO GET BEEFIER
Some cards with fun effects feel just not quiiiiite good enough to make the cut in a powerful cube environment. For this reason,
Bloodbraid Elf,
Greenwheel Liberator, and
Rix Maadi Reveler have been given +1/+1. In addition, a change was made that my dear friend Ryan Saxe (the man, the myth, the legend of all things limited MTG and
@rcsaxe on twitter) oft lamented he couldn't make to his own cubes - that he wished he could just have a
Blood Artist with two power. While he dreamed of Wizards printing such a card, I decided to live his dream for him, and that change has been made.
CARDS THAT DIDN'T "DO" ENOUGH
(and were granted exciting new abilities)
Many cards have been given a small (or incredibly large) nudge toward playability with the addition of abilities like Haste, First Strike, and Ward. Creatures don't get to have all of the fun in this category though, because
Become Immense now grants trample in addition to +6/+6 and
Pillar of Flame gains the ability to hit planeswalkers with the addition of the word “any” and the removal of more choice words to now deal 2 damage to any target. It also essentially gains the keyword “flash,” along with
Deep Analysis, as both become instants instead of sorceries. Deep Analysis has also had its mana cost cut by one to 2U, which brings us to…
CARDS NOW ON SALE!!
These were more sweet cards that needed a slightly bigger shot in the arm to compete in the environment. Most saw a reduction in one generic mana, but more drastic methods were employed with the Planeshift battlemages, who go from unplayable
Gray Ogres with sweet kicker abilities, to exciting and aggressive Isamaarus who also still have sweet kicker abilities.
Force Spike loses one from its single-blue mana cost and now can be paid with Phyrexian blue mana, an idea shamelessly lifted whole-cloth from Jay Dragon’s Magpie cube:
https://possumcreek.medium.com/the-magpies-cube-54eac20f36fd
THE UNDEAD PROJECT
An idea from still a different cube article I’d read years ago lamenting the sorry state of black in the cube world suggested combining zombies and vampires into a single creature type, allowing for twice as many tribal payoffs in the color that actually cared about each other, and thus making the entire color stronger. (Unlike the Magpie Cube I read this fascinating idea for the first time too long ago to remember to whom to properly attribute it, my apologies.) I liked that idea and have adopted the change. Cards that refer to vampires or zombies now say “undead” instead, and vampire and zombie creatures eschew their old lineages from their type line and all adopt the same shared moniker.
PERSISTENT LITTLE GUYS
Another one of the flashier kinds of weirdo changes we can make to cards when no grown-ups are around to tell us not to, cards with the Persist or Undying ability now have your choice of either, which you declare as the creature comes into play. This both allows room for a
Yawgmoth combo that otherwise wouldn’t have enough pieces and increases the power of persist creatures as you can now make them come into play one bigger (but can still choose not to if you have
Goblin Bombardment and
Melira, Sylvok Outcast in play). For nerds who want real-MTG-card compatible rules text, it would read as follows: As (Card Name) enters the battlefield, if it is entering for the first time this game, choose Persist or Undying. (Card Name) has that ability. If it would enter the battlefield again this game, it enters with the previously-chosen ability. ...Or something like that, I don't know, you get it.
And that's it! If you've read this far I am surprised and concerned for you and your seeming lack of time-management skills. You could have called your mom, she WANTS to hear from you. Still, if you'd prefer to give me a shout - if you have any burning questions, suggestions for cards you'd love to see get a makeover, or want me to know what your favorite dinosaur is, harass me on twitter @AndProsser. Also look for me and The Sharpie Cube on the Cube Heads youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4E0URL4vXhY&t=3s
So long and happy markering,
-Prosser
EPILOGUE:
MIZZIUM MORTARS HAS DICKS ON IT NOW
While not a change that makes a gameplay difference, it felt wrong not to include in the Sharpie Cube one of my first cards to ever see itself improved with a permanent marker, albeit not by me, but in the skilled hands of artist Cynthia Sheppard, who, bored in the middle of a Modern GP while most attendees were too busy playing the main event to visit her, decided to have some fun with her table-neighbor, putting up a sign which read “I will draw dicks on Noah Bradley cards.” I took her up on her offer and the Sharpie Cube is incredibly pleased with her contribution. Thank you, Cynthia. (@SheppardArts on twitter)