The Antiquarian Cube is my primary personal cube. Over the past five years of curation my goal has been to create an complex value-driven environment where interaction is good, but not clearly the best thing to be doing. The cube skews towards my personal card preferences, with the art or flavor sometimes being a major reason for inclusion/exclusion.

Some general notes about the cube

• Fixing: Mana fixing is good, but not so good that you shouldn't worry about picking it up. First picking a fetchland is a pretty common choice.
• No clearly-defined archetypes: Most colors will have several overlapping synergies with cards in other colors. This means it's relatively easy to find cool interactions, regardless of what or how you draft. In this way the cube can be forgiving in newer players, despite the high complexity of the cube overall.
• Graveyard adjacent strategies: both thematically and mechanically many of my favorite cards interact with the graveyard. As such, the most common synergy overlap in the cube is the graveyard, followed by discard, and to a lesser extent, artifacts.
• Overall I want each player's decisions to matter and gameplay to be skill testing, leading to a fairly flat power level with the two following caveats:
  • The least "fair" aspects of the cube are a handful of two-card combos: Thopter Foundry & Sword of the Meek, Tortured Existence & Insidious Roots or Desecrated Tomb. These combos are some of the stronger plays in the cube but each component can also play well on their own (with this being the lease true for Sword of the Meek).
  • Mental magic and adjacent cards: Perhaps the least new-player friendly part of the cube, cards like Richard Garfield, PHD and Standard Procedure are included because I love the wracking my brain for the perfect card for the situation. In the right hands these are some of the most powerful cards in the cube. Emporium Thopterist, Jund em' out, Time Sidewalk, and Oracle of the Alpha fall into a similar category, allowing one to play with cards that can dramatically change how the game plays out, even of their power level is much more debatable.