Art by Dave DormanMore and more, this quote has been uttered during cube nights at my lgs. Players are exhausted by complexity creep in card design, defaulting to classics over newer releases even if it means building a weaker deck. Powerhouses like Currency Converter and Retrofitter Foundry would be met with apathy in draft and in game, leading to a net negative experience despite fitting within the environment.
This influenced how I designed my own cubes, shaving out cards that were objectively powerful but took time to parse if you weren't already familiar with how they worked.
Taking this philosophy to its logical endpoint resulted in the TL;DR cube. Inclusions and archetypes are relatively straightforward, with the added caveat that every card in the cube must have, at most, five lines of rules text.
This guarantees that every card is easy to parse, whether it's a classic like Bolt or an addition from the latest Standard set. Moreover, many cards often only have one printing that can legally fit the cube, which led to some interesting discoveries. Did you know that the only printing of Faerie Conclave with five lines of rules text is the nonfoil variant from tenth edition? Well now you do.
Archetypes at a Glance
The core tenet of the TL;DR Cube is to encourage an environment where individual cards are simplistic in design, relying on players to use them in novel applications. Archetypes aren't set in 2-color pairings, more often consisting of small packages or general themes that want you to splash another color. Players will be rewarded for identifying the core cards of an archetype, then finding possible synergies that aren't explicitly supported. Below are some examples of cores you might expect to see in draft, aside from the stereotypical Ux Control, Rx Aggro, Gx Ramp, and the like.
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Delney
One of my favorite breakout archetypes. Delney is a powerful, straightforward card that rewards players who draft with it in mind without being overly parasitic. I've seen Wizard shells featuring harmonic prodigy for redundancy, aristocrats that crank blood artist triggers to an 11, and blink shells that abuse eternal witness. All in all a very cool aggressive/midrange strat.
/ "Junk" Midrange feat. Tinker
Tinker is de-fanged in this cube compared to more contemporary powered environments. Rather than ending the game as soon as possible with a blightsteel colossus or similar wincon, Tinker serves a role much closer to eldritch evolution; e.g. as a toolbox card that tutors up whatever most suits the current game-state. You'll be fueling Tinker with artifact tokens to get Meteor Golem, Phyrexian fleshgorger, Phyrexian metamorph, etc as a means to fulfill a larger midrange or control gameplan.
/ Aristocrats, "Smol Reanimator"
A classic package in many cubes. There is a lot of room to build with a Sacrifice theme in mind. This cube also features a sub-archetype that specializes in reanimating smaller bodies when you run out of cousins creatures. Speaking of which...
/ Creature Combo/Mike + Trike
Step 1: Find your cousin combo piece.
Step 2: Get your cousin combo piece in the cannon.
Step 3: Find another opponent.
"Madness"/Spells
A tempo/midrange style of deck using discard-related synergies and disruptive tools to grind its opponent out of the game. This is one of the most generic archetypes in the cube and doesn't necessarily have "core" cards required to function, but is a draft favorite nonetheless.
/ Kiki-Combo
This strategy misses a few typical inclusions like deceiver exarch, but is alive and well nonetheless. The combo is still an excellent finisher for control shells, but also fits nicely into Delney variants owing to the statlines of cards that make their way into Kiki decks.
Thanks for reading, take a look at the list when you get the chance. And when in doubt...
