Last Major Update:

---

Cube Breakdown by Year

Credit to JoeDonkey on MTG Cube Talk Discord

---

Table of Contents:

1. Differences from Traditional
2. Balance and Play Experience Considerations
3. Micro-Archetypes
4. Recent Winning Decks
5. Issues
6. The Banned List
7. Archive

---

Current main differences from traditional

NEW: Custom Spellbook Cards: It turns it that I am not even satisfied with adding Digital-Only cards, I also need to upgrade some of them. Arms Scavenger is a very cool card that is only let down by the choice of cards in the spellbook. I have fixed that. Yay for an extremely unique card.
Arms Scavenger Spellbook:
Bonesplitter
Basilisk Collar
Flayer Husk
Shadowspear
Mortarpod
Mask of Memory
Sword of the Animist
Gavel of the Righteous
Sword of Light and Shadow
Sword of Truth and Justice
Sword of Sinew and Steel
Batterskull

Digital-Only Cards: I refuse to let Wizards tell me where I can and can't play certain magic card! Alchemy has an incredible number of cards that are great for cube. Some designs are very easy to port to paper. Others require many game pieces (like Spellbook). For myself, I am more than willing to use many game pieces if it means I get to play with sweet cards I like.
Draft Packages: Exploring design space for draft package cards. In general, you pick one card in the draft and it gives two or more cards. An example is a pick that gives you 3x Squadron Hawk.
Arena Rebalances: Wizards rebalances cards on Magic Arena. The main draw for including these cards as cube possibilities is being able to cast Oko, Thief of Crowns, but I expect more exciting rebalances in the future.
Unset, Heroes of the Realm & Playtest Cards: Currently there is some amount of these cards in the game, all of which are mechanically reasonable for cube. An example of each are Booster Tutor, The Legend of Arena and Tibalt the Chaotic.
Learn: The cube features Professor of Symbology and Divide by Zero which have the mechanic. It have access to all 20 lesson that are in the land box. You may cast one of each lesson per game. The Professor itself is worth it.
Snow Basics: Each basic in the land box is snow. Most of the time this doesn't matter, but there are some cards, such as Arcum's Astrolabe and Reidane, God of the Worthy that care.
Triple Fetchlands: Being able to cast spells is great. Fetchlands are superb mana fixing and an increase in the number of them changes the playability of some cards, such as Tombstalker and Knight of the Reliquary.

Heavy considerations taken for balancing colours, strategies and play experiences

Avoiding complete blowout cards, such as Upheaval, Channel, Natural Order. These cards are usually not very interactive and don't result in good games of magic.

No signets. Green kind of struggles with identity, especially when every colour can ramp. Trimming down on the numbers and quality
of colourless ramp means that if people want good ramp, they have to play green.

1MV mana dorks trimmed and moved to 2MV cards. UPDATE: 1MV dorks made even worse. No more Birds of Paradise/Noble Hierarch level cards, only Llanowar Elves level.

With the exception of aggro cards, cards are generally chosen to work in more than one deck. Cards like Inkwell Leviathan or Zulaport Cutthroat are too narrow.

No obvious 2 or 3 card combos. Getting combo'd isn't fun, not getting the second half of your combo isn't fun.

2-colour cards should be exciting to play/draft. Eg, Baleful Strix is a VERY good UB card, but it isn't exciting. I would play it in my UB deck, but it isn't going to push me to want to play UB. A removal spell like Dreadbore is a good card, but it isn't exciting.
2-colour cards should also feel like you have been rewarded for being in those colours when they get passed to you. Being the most typical GR deck (GR ramp/midrange) and getting passed a Grumgully, the Generous means that the GR card is just a waste for you.

Planeswalkers are consciously cut/trimmed down all the time. They are the easiest cards to get excited about in spoiler season, but at one stage it became obvious that there was too many walkers (and also not enough answers to them). Answers were upped, walkers (such as the 2nd and 3rd BW Sorin) were cut.

No real combo deck support. There used to be a reanimator combo deck supported, but that has recently changed as it was clogging the draft up with narrow cards. There are cards to reanimate a turn 2 Griselbrand, but there is not enough support for a consistent reanimator deck.

Fast mana that is too good has been removed. Eg, Sol Ring, Chrome Mox, Fastbond proved to create either uninteresting draft choices or uninteresting games of magic.

To try and stem power creep, a 'Power Level Anchor' was identified in the form of Angel of Invention. The idea was that the cube not become a power level where this card is not good enough. I believe this worked in slowing down creep, but with the amount of good cards that are getting printed these days we are still rapidly approaching that point. The new anchor is 'Standard Power Level.' If a card is impressive or even just playable in Standard, then it should be an option for the cube (unless it is only good for a narrow reason).

Micro-Archetypes

NEW: Small White Grind /X:

Inspired by watching Warden of the Inner Sky gameplay in constructed, aggressive white is moving towards a more grindy and fiddly gameplay style built out of small creatures.

NEW: Board Presence Green /X:

Inspired by cards like Sentinel of the Nameless City, green is trimming a lot of the fat / fillers and moving to cards that provide large board presence at all points on the curve. The ramp deck's ramp will be moving to creature-based ramp like Biophagus instead of cards like Farseek.
I'm hoping this won't cause too much issue for the aggro decks in the format, as it feels like a natural foil to their plan. I think red aggro will suffer the most as it struggles to deal with x/4 creatures.

Flash :

Flash threats combine with blue's suite of counterspells to keep your opponent on their toes!

5 Colour :

Niv-Mizzet headlines a deck with excellent fixing with acccess to all the strongest cards in the cube!

Spells /X:

Cantrips, counterspells and removal spells combine forces to trigger Prowess and other spells-matter effects.

Graveyard/Discard:

The graveyard is just another resource, and this cube takes advantage of that. An example is repeatable discard effects pairing with cards like Master of Death or Kroxa, Titan of Death's Hunger for maximum grind potential.

Lands:

Triple fetchlands along with utility lands, such as Strip Mine,Wasteland,Field of the Dead and Urza's Saga allow for decks built around finding and recurring lands for powerful effects.

Examples of Recent Winning Decklists

UR Spells
Jund Midrange
UW Creatures
UB Control

Current Issues

Nil

The Banned List

There is a large amount of cards not included in this list to either being too powerful or causing play patterns that are not welcome in this cube.

White
Mother of Runes
Seasoned Dungeoneer
White Plume Adventurer
Blue
Ancestral Recall
Arcane Savant
Clocknapper
Daze
Force of Negation
Force of Will
Mana Drain
Narset, Parter of Veils
Subtlety
Time Walk
Tinker
Topsy Turvy
Treachery
True-Name Nemesis
Upheaval
Black
Contract from Below
Dark Ritual
Hymn to Tourach
Mind Twist
Red
Caves of Chaos Adventurer
Fury
Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer
Forked Bolt
Green
Birds of Paradise
Channel
Euroakus
Fastbond
Ignoble Hierarch
Natural Order
Noble Hierarch
Rofellos, Llanowar Emissary
Undermountain Adventurer
Utopia Sprawl
Wild Growth
Multicoloured
Chaos Defiler
Deathrite Shaman
Forth Eorlingas!
Fractured Identity
Inzerva, Master of Insights
Minsc & Boo, Timeless Heroes
Oko, Thief of Crowns
Teferi, Time Raveler
Colourless
Black Lotus
Blacker Lotus
Chrome Mox
Conspiracies (likely all)
Grim Monolith
Jack-in-the-Mox
Jewelled Amulet
Library of Alexandria
Lotus Petal
Mana Crypt
Mana Vault
Mox Diamond
Mox Emerald
Mox Jet
Mox Pearl
Mox Ruby
Mox Sapphire
Sol Ring

Archive

Old rules, old archetypes, etc.

Cards that care about boosters: Booster Tutor and Myntasha, Honored One use the same pack size as used in the draft. Ie, if 6 packs of 9 were drafted, then the booster tutored or created will have 9 cards.